Jacob Knowles-Smith on homophobia in elitist liberal comedy and nationalism in polymath documentaries

After the inconvenience of creator Tina Fey’s pregnancy, the new season of 30 Rock (NBC) has finally aired. If there was one impact of her pregnancy on the show it was Fey’s slightly fuller face – which, I should say, was only noticeable when compared to Alec Baldwin’s now deflated head and less-substantial figure. At first I feared a slimmer model Jack Donaghy might lessen his comic presence, but, after watching the first episode twice and the second episode, I was too busy listening out for the rapid-fire dialogue which makes a second viewing a must when it comes to 30 Rock. One question, however, still remains, who now will spearhead the campaign for weightier, middle-aged men to be considered as sex symbols?

Gay fans of 30 Rock who haven’t already switched off because of Tracy Morgan’s homophobic comments last summer, might well be dissuaded by Jack – though he’s still very much a ‘daddy’ – no longer being so much of a ‘bear’. Furthermore, I’m not sure Tracy Morgan’s character, Tracy Jordan, having his own homophobic controversy will draw back the LGBT audience, but I’m sure he regrets his comments and it’s a pretty good stab at a public apology.

As ever, the show’s subplots remain inventive and anarchic – from hayseed zealot Kenneth’s disappointment over the Rapture failing to transpire, to Kelsey Grammer reprising his role as conman-extraordinaire. There’s also an ever-welcome slap in the face to Simon Cowell in the form of Jack’s new reality TV vehicle: America’s Kids Got Singing. I leave the only comment that needs to be said about such ‘talent contests’ to panel judge D’Fwan: “You need to remember reality television is formulaic.”

When the Republican candidates vituperate their inflamed rhetoric against the ‘elitist liberal media’, one can only assume that 30 Rock is high on their lists of targets. Of course, in reality (somewhere far from the primaries), those targets are a pretty narrow field – the vast majority of America media products – from TV to newspapers – do have an underlying message of the primacy of family values, patriotism and Christianity. 30 Rock, however, is heretical because it dares to suggest that all America is equally, well, American. There is no bucolic heartland that remains sheltered from tendrils of the east and west coasts, and New York and Los Angeles are not completely peopled by cosmopolitan hipsters and pro-choice heathens. But there is a reason the presidential hopefuls are required to expound on this cultural divide – to distract people from remembering that that the Gingriches and Romneys are also part of the elite.

Another oft-presumed elitist, Jonathan Meades, returned to BBC4 this week with Jonathan Meades on France. Not that you’d really know about it because, though his previous documentary series about Scotland, Off-Kilter, was widely reviewed and praised in the press, a wordy-overachiever talking about France is clearly a step too far. Susan Sontag described a polymath as someone who is interested in everything and nothing else. This might be a fair description of Meades, but, as Jonathan Miller once pointed out, ‘polymath’ is more usually a slur in Britain, as if being interested in more than one thing is catholic indulgence.

Nevertheless, BBC4 is the welcoming home of people who are interested in things – even multiple things – and Meades’s first-of-three films about France was as diverse in content as a week’s schedule for that channel. All the subjects were things beginning with V; Valise, Vedette, Voltaire; and if there was a loose thread running throughout – but not all of them – it was the OAS, the far-right nationalist terrorist group that tried to prevent Algerian independence in the 60s. Meades seems to have mixed-feelings about the group and, if not sympathy, understanding of their aims. He has, however, no understanding – certainly no sympathy – with nationalism, and this is a theme throughout many of his earlier films. Illustrated overtly in documentaries about Nazi and Stalinist architecture and more subtly in ones about British culture, the message Meades tries to convey, and rightly so, is that identifying too closely with where one comes from stymies progression of culture and diminishes us as individuals. Modernism, for example, has no ‘nationalist etiquette’ attached to it and was thusly despised by the far right; fascism allows its subjects no identity other than homogeneity. This might sound unpatriotic, but people (those Republican candidates especially) should consider whether they’d rather be defined by their background or by their talents and individuality.

On France has a much more personal perspective than Meades’s other documentaries; the country – where he now lives – became his, he says, in 1962, when the OAS declared their war. At that time, the architecture of France also inspired ‘wonder and delight’ in his fifteen-year old self – he didn’t make the connections then that he describes for us now, but he has tried to make a career out of making us wonder about things, and, for me at least, that is a constant delight.

Reviewed by Declan Tan

Steve McQueen’s second feature is a visually arresting, thematically dense piece of cinema, that may, and probably will, prove to be an important film in years to come. That is, if enough people get to see it. Having been cursed with a NC-17 rating in the US and a limited release in the UK, it seems those it may have been intended for will be largely unaware of its arrival.

From the opening frames it becomes clear there is again, after Hunger (2008), a meticulous method at work, both in front and behind the camera; McQueen’s fine arts training fixes every image immaculately, as if leafing through a glossy (yet depraved) coffee table book, a look which works as irony for its subject matter, and the extension of McQueen’s intention to interrogate his audience.

Then there is Fassbender as Brandon, a long-time sex-addicted New Yorker running the hamster wheel of untameable urges and the subsequent self-loathing, his demeanour and quiet menace recalling fellow-pointy-face Christian Bale in American Psycho, only less cartoonish and more sinister.

Brandon’s condition worsens when his younger, ever-vulnerable and needy lounge-singing sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), comes to visit. The pressure of her presence and her constant encroachments on his territory adds to the strain he already feels. Her re-appearance twists him in new ways, not helped by her dalliances with his boss, Dave (James Badge Dale). Brandon gradually crumbles into himself.

And there is much to admire in its telling. Shame is something of an orchestral symphony, all of the components coming together to form a cohesive and remarkable whole, made from the music, and the visuals, and (most of) the acting. One notable sore spot, however, is the mildly irritating dinner scene, in which Sissy performs a heart-wrenching number in front of her brother and Dave. The camera trained on Mulligan’s quivering face, the film’s flow is interrupted. A long long shot of just too much supplicatory ‘acting’. We are made fully aware that what we are witnessing is an actor’s attempt to state her claim as being ‘the brightest young thing’, the scene far too drawn-out to leave any sympathy remaining in this particular instance. That is not to say Mulligan won’t be praised. She surely will be; it is the kind of thing that critics go for, this false attempt at intensity behind a look of painful worldliness.

Despite this, what co-screenwriters McQueen and Abi Morgan have managed is to make real, living, breathing humans of Brandon and Sissy. You may not like them; one is an arrogant bully, the other a needy liberty-taker, but somehow you reach some state of empathy.

Of course, as you may have heard, a lot of the film is sex. That almost goes without saying. (It is like the filmed memoirs of Dan Fante.) But the way McQueen has worked it disconnects the viewer from the sex, even from the sex in other films, this sex for gratification, the cold relief sold as ‘love’. It is the same with Brandon, and we arrive again at empathy. He cannot resist his urges to abominate himself, using hookers, masturbating at work, spending the in-between watching internet pornography, sat with a beer as if looking at a football game, completely on automatic. While, at work, his computer is confiscated as a result of the material found on it.

As he goes on, Brandon has more and more emotionally numbing sex, his pursuit leading him eventually to physical injury and homosexuality (with an odd and subtle implication that homosexuality is rock bottom, if we are to go by the music and intended drama. But it is little trips like these* that make you realise this film was actually ‘made’, that it didn’t just fabricate to teach our society a lesson.)

Shame seems not only about sex addiction as a distancing affliction, but also about alienation in general, though it does too hint at familial problems, sexual or otherwise, as the root cause of the siblings’ troubles. But McQueen is less interested in working the psychological aspects, opting instead to document, not explain: Here is a man who is of no value to himself. He has lost touch with any sense of worthiness, any purpose, other than fleeting and momentary gratification. What is he worth, if he is nothing even to himself? This is why it seems as if this is an “important” film (in quotation marks as how important a film can get has its obvious limitations), and completely of this era of commodified sex. An issue of the times.

Quickly the glossy sex becomes abhorrent to watch, because we are with Brandon, and it’s as equally degrading to the viewer as the participant, made most obvious in the clips of porn flickering on Brandon’s screen. McQueen merely shows this to the audience, does not tell it, by taking us from our awareness of his commercial-like images, which open the story, to the grimy opposite, but filmed in the same style, while simultaneously the world that Brandon inhabits becomes as glossed over and false as the sex and pornography that clouds him.

“These days it is not realistic to limit yourself to one partner”, Brandon says at one point during a date with a girl from work in which he also expresses his pessimistic view of long-term relationships, that one becomes bored with the other. It is clear that he is constantly reaching for the now, the instant gratification. This is what makes this film of our time. It sounds like social commentary, and it probably is. Fassbender’s Brandon is an icon of modern man, a symbol, while the final effect of Shame has some kind of reverb with Tarkovsky’s (disappearing) idea of having a film hopefully make the viewer turn to ‘good’. Shame is the sound and sight of an artist speaking and moving, yet without didacticism or lame solutions. And by the end, we are given a sense of hope, of man resisting himself, gaining control. Shame that a lot of people probably won’t even get a chance to experience it.

[*How many times can the distorted reflection of a protagonist be used as a metaphor in film, without someone piping up and saying something?]

With the Christmas schedule now safely out of the way, viewers can settle into shows designed to ward off the effects ‘the lull’ and winter blues that come without an enforced sense of Christmas cheer. This year Charles Dickens, the codifier of our Christmas traditions, was more prominent in our minds than ever. Several documentaries and a sleek adaptation of Great Expectations (BBC One) are all very well, but none of this can really compete with The Muppet Christmas Carol. All we can hope from any adaptation of Dickens’s work is that people deduce from what they are watching on the screen that this might actually be a good book worth reading – rather than just a Great Book, gathering dust on a shelf.

The festive line up wasn’t, by any stretch, all bad but the sound of sleigh bells in the background eventually takes a Pavlovian toll that renders one unable to resist shoving a fifth mince pie into a mouth already aching from over-use. The standout Christmas special for me was ITV’s annual adventure with Poirot: The Clocks had a slightly audacious plot, stuffed full of red herrings but it wouldn’t be Christmas without David Suchet with a waxed moustache.

As we passed into the New Year, thoughts of Poirot turned to another detective, Sherlock Holmes. BBC One’s modern adaptation, Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, doesn’t need more praise heaped on it than necessary here but I did find it interesting that the charge of sexism was levied against it. It was questioned whether – to say nothing of the nudity – the portrayal of the episode’s female antagonist was sexist because her plot was based on sexuality rather than intellect. We can reasonably assert that no woman should try to use her sexuality to get ahead in everyday life, but surely it’s perfectly natural for a villain to use any method to confound their adversary, especially as one would assume that in order to qualify as a villain at all they must have at least one variety of antisocial personality disorder. All sociopaths and narcissists use their sexuality as readily as any other attribute to achieve their goals, so this is really an effort to create needless controversy.

The Story of Musicals (BBC Four), innocuous as that title sounds, showed how sometimes controversy is very much necessary. This documentary series describes how British musicals took hold of global of the theatre industry. Putting aside for now the question of whether that was a good thing or not, it also portrayed how they challenged censorship, conventions and the establishment. Musicals seem to have supported the anti-war movement, through shows such Oh, What a Lovely War!, more than many of the rock and roll musicians who came to prominence subsequently. This latter group clearly influenced productions such as Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar – the first rock opera – but it was musicals that resulted in the Lord Chamberlain having his powers of censorship revoked and even predated The Beatles in leading the ‘British Invasion’ in the United States.

Leading the charge Stateside, and putting us at the mercy of Dickens’s once again, was Oliver!, Lionel Bart’s response to the sensational West Side Story. Oliver!, though, however much of a good knees-up it is, is a poor Dickens adaptation which strips all of the danger away from the real pivot of the story, Fagin. For commercial reasons, this is forgivable. Had they portrayed Fagin as the true bastard he is, the show would never have played well in New York and inevitable charges of anti-Semitism would have followed. (Indeed, Dickens himself fell short of describing all of the acts an actual Fagin character would’ve had his urchins engage in.)

When one does think of the musicals that started the British response; Oklahoma!, South Pacific, West Side Story, etc; and when one compares them to shows, which will presumably be discussed in the next episode, like Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, it seems that British musicals ultimately had a pernicious effect on the genre, sapping the vitality from Broadway and the West End until all we’re left with is Wicked. At the very least, it confirms that people like Tim Rice or Andrew Lloyd Webber are no Sondheim or Bernstein.

The Rattigan Enigma (BBC Four), another theatrical documentary, neatly bookended British theatre at the other side of the war years. Benedict Cumberbatch was on hand– in rather lacklustre style, it must be said – to take us through the life of playwright Terence Rattigan from his days at Harrow through his struggles with repressed homosexuality and becoming acknowledged as a serious artist. I struggled to figure out what the ‘enigma’ of the title actually was; Rattigan’s life as an artist never quite coming to terms with his sexuality is no unique tale, and I suspect that ‘enigma’ was employed specifically due to Cumberbatch’s presence as presenter. Rattigan, though, deserved his own documentary even if was only to hear lines like “I’m glad we never made the mistake of falling in love with each other.” Few writers came closer to capturing the cold relationships between endured by faded Bright Young Things in the post-20s world.

Those same Bright Young Things came to age in what was, according to Timeshift: The Smoking Years, the golden age of ‘the smoker’. If that was true, then we smokers – there’s no point in hiding bias here – must now be in a stone age. Harried out into the cold streets, smokers of my generation may still remember when old cinemas, though they had banned smoking years since, still had ashtrays fitted in the backs of seats – relicts of a once great smoking civilisation. I’m being glib here, and that’s not entirely intentional, I would never encourage anyone to smoke, but it’s something of a response against militant anti-smokers who suffer from being far too serious. There was a leading anti-smoking campaigner in the documentary, and she managed to summon fond and humorous memories of the years when she did smoke.

One wonders what, now that smokers are banned from polite society, these people who must interfere in other’s lives are actually against. Instead of imposing moral superiority against the individual smoker, surely the bigger targets are the tobacco companies themselves, of course, but also the television and film companies. Where do you draw the line between realism and responsibility? An adolescent watching Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy or Mad Men is bound to find these depictions of smoking more attractive than the crumpled office workers, huddling against the wind, in their local city centre. I don’t mind smoking outside and I don’t think it’s an invasion of civil liberties but everyone minds being harangued because of their peccadilloes – where are the warnings against people who provide dull lectures?

Jacob Knowles-Smith sits down for a TV dinner with Tom Wolfe

Thankfully BBC Four hasn’t been demolished just yet. If it had been, we wouldn’t have had chance to enjoy its recent ‘All American’ season. They say that BBC 2 would absorb the channel’s role, but doubtless this would come with – if not dumbing-down – half as many documentaries as they currently produce. And, indeed, they’ve produced a near-dazzling array of films for this latest season focusing on US culture – but this is no paean to American hegemony, and the more I tried to absorb the schedule, the more I wondered if perhaps Tom Wolfe hadn’t been given some role at the Beeb. The subjects covered over the last couple of weeks have been like a cross-section of that writer’s brain; there’s been high culture, low culture, kitsch culture, surf culture, diners, journalism, nomads, hookers and civil rights. Any fan of Wolfe will no doubt be able to pluck a volume up and thumb through almost all of those subjects in one of his collections, but then I began to wonder, how would Tom Wolfe write a TV review? Well, for starters he probably wouldn’t title it anything nearly as banal as the above, but he might call it something along the lines of…

The Electric Blu-Ray Acid Mind-Bath: America is Over There!

‘Why’s all this paint here?’ You can see Andrew’s mind ticking over and his puppy-dog eyes begin to twinkle with his excitement – Yes! Pollock painted here! And they’ve preserved it, an encrusted monument to that great man’s drips. Great man? You can make up your own mind. Andrew Graham-Dixon has made his up in the Art of America and, as the BBC’s finest regular documentary maker – now that Attenborough stays out of frame, we can cut him a little slack. He deftly traces – with his infectious enthusiasm and never-patronising dulcets – the history of American art from pilgrims to present. All American art is here: Rockwell, Hopper, Warhol, The Simpsons?… and all of it, it seems, is about the loneliness of being one among many in a great big country full of people. After all, can’t Manhattan at rush hour be the loneliest place in the world?

Hopper’s popping up all over the place, and his most famous work – ‘Nighthawks’ – gives us a lead into the next show and the lonely fat-clogged heart of America in Stephen Smith’s America on a Plate: The Story of the Diner. This is where we sit down at that democratic counter and look across into America’s short-order soul… French fries pancakes sausages coffee doughnuts shakes steaks turkey clubs plastic seats – top you off? – cheeseburgers blueberries coffee onion rings eggs over easy – warm you up? – French toast roast beef meatloaf coffee gum chewing waitresses truck stop bacon coffee. What more can you say? What more can anyone ask for!?

Now this cat’s crazy, he’s touched the hem of death after all – or, at least, skirted around the edges – and who wouldn’t be a little spooky kooky cuckoo? James Ellroy’s Feast of Death (BBC 2) – with some strong language! – delves into the murder-centric mind of the author and we meet the embodiment of obsession. Kim Bassinger? She’s alright. But forget the movies – what the fuck good are we to him? Who are we to ask anything of this guy? This modern Beethoven! (Just ask him… why listen to anyone else?) Did the bitch overcook the steak again, James? Nah – It’s sexual power. That’s murder. Right there. If you don’t believe him, then why else do we care about serial killers? Men think about sex more than women, so they kill more. Ellroy is clearly obsessed by his mother’s murder; perhaps he sees himself as a failure – a not-quite-Beethoven – because he couldn’t protect her, but, if that’s not it, then he still has every right to be obsessed because, he says it, closure is bullshit. What’s a dyke bounty?

Now we’re with shutterbug Rankin in America in Pictures: The Story of Life Magazine. He’s indulging himself in a bit of hero worship – mutual snapshotting of these wily old coots that chronicled America. And, sure, maybe these guys aren’t exactly the man – but they were working for a Luce publication! Think Fortune, think Time. Think middlebrow America. But that’s, perhaps, not entirely fair, Life was, as Rankin’s film describes, a great unifier of the people – all of America could ooooooohhh and aaaaaaahhh at the pretty violent shocking beautiful celebrities/dead soldiers/famine victims but – look over here, America! – you could be looking at those photos next to this fridge, in this new kitchen or on this new lawnmower (in your fourth floor apartment) and, boy, now here’s Rita Hayworth. Call me an elitist or a cynical bum, but Life always seemed pretty cheap.

So, that’s all American, and, if that’s not enough for you, some of the most delightful chocolate chips to be found in this rich cookie came in Old Jews Telling Jokes. It’s pointless to tell the one about the rabbi or the gentile here, but these rascals have their own website and you have a few minutes to spare.

“I was born inside the movie of my life.” That sentence starts off Roger Ebert’s new memoir, Life Itself. The first chapter, ‘Memory’ – which is numbered zero in the table of contents – shows the great arc of his life from the beginning to now. It touches on the essential moments, the essential people, and demonstrates why writing a memoir now at the age of 69 is just the right time. The life Ebert ends up describing, most of it spent as the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, is an extraordinary one, and what makes the memoir so much fun is that it seems like Ebert is just as astounded by it as any chronicler of it would be.

Ebert was an alcoholic when he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, the first film critic to win it. He has lived the last five years with just as much vigor and worked with the same enormous industry as before, despite being unable to speak, eat or drink and thanks to corrective surgery, it is painful for him to stand and hard to walk. And after starting his blog, his voice has been even more powerful. Any of these things could easily make a somber, melancholic memoir just by themselves, but Ebert tells his life story – all those things and more – with no cynicism or anger.

Chicago magazine had a long piece on Ebert several years ago that pointed out that he had lived an extraordinary life without making enemies. One of the most moving chapters in the book is about his rival, who eventually became his great friend, Gene Siskel. Siskel was the film critic at the Chicago Tribune, and was given the job to rival Ebert. They were fiercely competitive with each other and when WTTW wanted them to host a show about the movies, neither of them wanted to do it. The show made them famous, in part because in almost every respect they were the opposite of the other. When Siskel died in 1999, Ebert dedicated a show to him, sitting in his usual spot, while Siskel’s seat stayed empty. In a recent profile by CBS Sunday Morning, Ebert said that he “misses [Siskel] terribly every day.”

Much of the book is pulled from the most personal writing that’s appeared on Ebert’s blog, with some editing. There’s a chapter on the Eyrie Mansion, where he stayed while in London that first appeared in 2010 when it was torn down. His chapter on Russ Meyer includes the tale of Who Killed Bambi, the never-made film that would’ve starred the Sex Pistols. He had posted his original script and retold the story when Malcolm McLaren passed away. His stories about O’Rourke’s, where he would go every night after work when he drank, read poetry, sang songs and interviewed movie stars also first appeared on his blog. Some of the people he interviewed there like John Wayne and Robert Mitchum get their own chapters.

This isn’t a criticism. After all, the best stories are told many times.

Before the surgeries that took his voice, Ebert produced a stunning amount of work: six movie reviews a week for the Sun-Times, a weekly TV show, a Great Movies column and an Answer Man column, to say nothing of the features, interviews and opinion pieces he would do for the Sun-Times and various other places. He still does all of them, albeit he produces the show instead of co-hosts. I’m convinced he’s possessed by the same demon that Studs Terkel said possessed Mike Royko that made him write so much. Those two great Chicagoans get tributes and memories in the book.

The most moving stories he tells are the ones Ebert leaves until last. His memories of Gene Siskel at the end and his tribute to Studs Terkel. He also has a loving tribute to his wife, Chaz, who has saved him from living out the rest of his life alone. He closes with a chapter on his beliefs about religion and another about death. His religion is what Richard Dawkins would call “Einsteinian,” in that the experience of the universe, from the grandness of it to the smallest of intricacies gives him the ecstasy others find in a personal God. And death – which he’s already stared in the face – is nothing to fear.

Publishing details for Roger Ebert’s Life Itself at Grand Central Publishing

After many years of not watching Friends on any of the Channel 4 family of stations, since they flogged it to Comedy Central, I’ve suddenly been spending entire Saturday afternoons watching episode after episode. Now that the show is no longer the running gag of Channel 4’s schedule, it would seem that it’s actually the funniest thing, along with Frasier, on Comedy Central. The performances, the gags, the timing: all of these should make the writers of contemporary sitcoms flinch with shame. Mike & Molly and Two and a Half Men are such new comedies and are, presumably, meant to be big draws for Comedy Central. The problem, of course, is that they aren’t funny. Mike & Molly consists mainly of – and one can glean this from simply watching the promos relentlessly book-ending segments of Friends – racial stereotypes and homophobic slurs combined with a celebration of America’s obesity problem. And whilst there may always be a certain slapstick laugh to be gained from a fat man falling down, you can’t base an entire series around it. Two and a Half Men, however, gets most of its laughs from misogyny – this was never terribly funny with Charlie Sheen at the helm and now, with Ashton Kutcher, it’s just embarrassing.

All of this is merely a prelude to the sigh of relief that must surely have escaped from comedy fans’ lungs when it was announced that a new season of Arrested Development (Fox) would be arriving ahead of a final (?) big screen farewell to the Bluth family. Shunted (as it was in Britain) to the doldrums of late night BBC 2, Arrested Development was not only a classic comedy in its own right, it also paved the way for other ‘higher comedies’, if you will, such as 30 Rock (NBC) and HBO’s Bored to Death. Both shows are undervalued by the wider audience (and more on 30 Rock next year) but Bored to Death with its short-running seasons of eight episodes is almost too easy to miss.

Centring around a novelist who blunders his way into becoming a private detective, the show is a fine blend, full of witty little literary and crime fiction references, casual drug use and a bromance like no other between the three principal characters. Jonathan Ames, our writer/PI, played by Jason Schwartzman and a fictional version of the show’s creator of the same name, Ray (Zach Galifianakis), a pot smoking comic book artist, and George Christopher, a hodgepodge of American journo-grandees (fore- and surname taken from Plimpton and Hitchens, respectively) played exquisitely by Ted Danson. Innocents all, they manage to navigate an imagined New York City on acid – fine, just New York – with the insouciance of Laurel and Hardy dusting themselves down after the building collapses on them yet again. They rebound pretensions and glib assertions off one another at such a pace that one has to resist the temptation to go back and catch the lines again. If they were simply horrible people, they wouldn’t be able to pull it off but we can forgive them for their self-involvement and living like a “demented god” because the friendship and acceptance between the trio is one that we – men, at least – would all like to have. Who among us doesn’t yearn to smoke pot and spoon with two close friends?

Just as no one seems to be particularly bored in Bored to Death, the women of Wisteria Lane never seem too desperately in need of anything. Indeed, the lives of the characters in Desperate Housewives (ABC) – perhaps, at a guess, the ultimate ideal of female friendship – only seem to be disrupted when the new killer or other bad element moves in to disrupt suburbia – and who’s killing whom this season? Perhaps the series has run too long, but this is the last season and they seem to be giving it a better shot than the last and, more importantly, it’s still entertaining and can easily raise a laugh. Desperate Housewives has always been the highest of guilty pleasures and may ultimately be missed when it’s gone. The show’s main skill is switching with unbelievable pace between the tragic and the comic. This is chiefly achieved through the music: just when the violin strings start tugging the heart strings in the direction of divorce or cancer – cue a jaunty variation of the theme music to herald a bon mot. Despite touching on nearly every subject from class to women’s rights and alcoholism to gay rights, Desperate Housewives has never been a ‘challenging’ drama. It is something more in between farce and black comedy but I’d much rather have it than another episode of the obdurately ‘challenging’ Treme.

A couple of years ago, the BBC ran a set of aggrandising and slightly smug promotions that all carried the slogan “This is what we do” – i.e. so pay your bloody license fee. However, David Attenborough is demonstrating, as usual, exactly what the BBC does and what it does better than any other broadcaster in the world: nature. In his latest documentary series, Frozen Planet, Attenborough shows us that we should be far less worried about James Murdoch being part of the mafia than if the killer whales decided to start taking care of things. Their hunting methods are so calculated and chilling – strike pun – that one is inclined to think that rational thought is at work, rather than a magnificent killer instinct gifted by nature. If the BBC starts hiring them to collect license fees, call me Ishmael.

From Shotgun Stories writer/director comes a second feature on small town America, another portrait of troubled family which despite its flaws, reaffirms Jeff Nichols’ potential to become an independent cinema mainstay.

Michael Shannon is Curtis LaForche, a family man in anytown, Ohio, father to a recently deafened girl, husband to Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and son to an institutionalised mother, Sarah (Kathy Baker). Despite money worries surrounding his daughter’s rising healthcare needs and enrolment in special education, the couple are contented, even happy. The envy of his friends (it is said to his face) and a crew chief for a sand-mining company, everything seems to be under control. Until he starts to have increasingly disturbing visions of an apocalyptic storm coming over the horizon at him, his family and the world as he understands it.

Unsure whether the prophecy in his dreams is coming true, or if his mind is succumbing to inherited mental ills, Curtis begins to build a large underground shelter in his backyard, to the dismay of his family and friends.

By now, we’re already familiar with Shannon’s well-rounded ability to play a man set against society (or vice versa), having seen him play the wild-eyed and obsessive in a number of high- and low-profile roles (Revolutionary Road, Bug, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done), but it’s with these independent pictures and through building a fruitful working relationship with Nichols since the director’s debut, that he is carving out a legacy of memorable performances, and surely lasting work. [Editor’s Note: Shannon is also well-known as Nelson, the compulsive, conflicted and compelling federal agent in Boardwalk Empire.]

His is a slow-burn of a breakdown and, though the audience is treated to the usual dream/reality blur of his visions, Nichols largely deals with it in a robust, humane and relatable way. Curtis is an ‘ordinary’ guy, he tries to understand his own illness by taking books out of the library and testing himself. He visits his ‘schizophrenic’ mother and generally does everything he can to understand what is happening to him. And, at first, he does it alone.

Of course, the central reason for Curtis’ breakdown, his prophetic dreams, also works as a metaphor for a wider anxiety that afflicts those who reach a certain point where there are people and things to protect, certain conditions of living that need to be maintained. But it’s hardly an apologist’s account of the seemingly inevitable slide into conservatism, (though it would be tempting to view it that way). Nichols details the general realisation that much too much is beyond any one man’s control, something Curtis comes to realise by eventually confiding in his wife.

Nichols, with his now-emerging trademark of slow-talking midwestern characters, realises his own anxieties through his creations, all plucked right out of real life and scripted with a style that seems to align his future with that of Terence Malick, while, visually at least, somehow recalling the quiet frenzy in the first half of Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces.

Take Shelter is, however, far from flawless. One glaring weakness is the unsure pace of its repetitive narrative, culminating in a rushed yet ultimately tantalising finale. The film seems to have a trajectory that frequently turns back on itself and, as much as the nightmares are entertaining to watch, they seem to stifle the story rather than advance it. Nichols uses the already-familiar language of dream/reality confusion to almost clichéd effect and, though there’s fun to be had in the making of it (there are some jarring images of displaced furniture and splattering birds), it feels like a tired, even over-simplified way of exploring these ideas with an audience. These are the moments where Take Shelter feels like a very small film not saying much about anything, apart from playing around with some substantial, ponderous issues.

But this criticism is mostly rescued by its performances. Chastain and Shannon are consistently impressive (save for some odd dry heaving), along with the rest of the supporting cast, most noticeably in the film’s turning point, a dinner scene that ends in confrontation and some over-turned tables.

Another of the film’s failings, and possibly its most noticeable flaw, is the distractingly executed visual effects, from the renowned Strause Brothers’ company, Hydraulx. The CGI is too flimsy, too hollow, and not made of the same grit that the rest of the film is covered in so that when they appear, the images pull the viewer right out of Curtis’ nightmare vortex and drops them back in their seat, left staring at a big screen.

Nichols’ film is absorbing regardless of these shortcomings, and is the work of a man honing his style, finding what works, while dealing with his own concerns. His third feature, Mud, will be the next in the Shannon-Nichols collaboration, making it a rough trilogy of small town America, which will also star Matthew McConaughey and Reece Witherspoon. Look for it in 2013.

Steven Spielberg’s big missed opportunity. Reviewed by Robert O’Connor. WARNING: may contain spoilers!

Two goats are sitting on a back lot in Hollywood, chewing on cans of film. One remarks “This is terrible!” and the other one says, “The book is better.”

A few weeks before his death in 1983, Hergé signed the movie rights of his creation Tintin to Steven Spielberg. Spielberg, he believed, was the only director capable of recreating his creation on the big screen. He came to this conclusion after seeing and loving Raiders of the Lost Ark, which the French press compared at the time to a Tintin adventure.

In the late ’80s and ’90s, there was a renaissance of traditional animation in both movies and television. Spielberg was partially responsible for it, producing animated movies that captured the public imagination like An American Tail, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He also produced animated shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs that revived the spirit of the old Warner Brothers cartoons. But he didn’t make a Tintin movie.

Then he saw the motion-capture technology pioneered by WETA studios and its head, Peter Jackson, and saw that as the way to make the Tintin movie. And so he has, almost 30 years later. The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, should be a warning to not sit on an idea until its too late to bring it to fruition.

The movie is a combination of two Tintin stories, The Crab with the Golden Claws and Secret of the Unicorn. I’m not against combining the stories for film adaptations, since the originals were serialized in a Belgian newspaper and, as with most serialized works there would be pacing issues in a faithful movie adaptation.

The movie starts out with a brilliant title sequence by Kuntzel and Deygas, the same team that made the titles for the much better Spielberg movie Catch Me If You Can. The opening scene, with Hergé painting a caricature of Tintin (Jamie Bell), is a nice nod to the character’s creator. John Williams’ music in the opening credits and opening scene are light, but lively, with accordions and pianos dominating. Tintin buys a model of a ship, the Unicorn, and is accosted by two men who demand he sell it to them. One of them is Ivan Sakharine, who shows up later. Sakharine’s men steal it from Tintin’s apartment because of a scroll hidden in the ship’s mast with a cryptic message on it.

In the original story, Sakharine was an antique collector who owned another model of the Unicorn. He is originally a suspect of the theft of Tintin’s model, but his model is stolen as well by the Bird brothers, who own the third model. The Bird brothers own Marlinspike Hall, which is owned by Sakharine in the movie.

Tintin is then knocked out and put on the SS Karaboudjan as a prisoner of Sakharine. It’s here that Tintin meets Captain Archibald Haddock (Andy Serkis), who has a Scottish accent. It makes his famous swearing funnier and while he says all the required curses (“blistering barnacles”, “thundering typhoons”, etc.) he doesn’t use them as often in the movie as in the books. He also tends to growl more than shout. Haddock has been kept drunk by an endless supply of whisky by his first mate Allan, who is an accomplice of Sakharine in the movie, but in the books was a drug smuggler and the main villain of The Crab with the Golden Claws.

It’s here that the movie really starts to sink. The story of Haddock’s ancestor Sir Francis and his battle with Red Rakham in the comics was a thing that kept the story going. But in the movie it’s a way of providing Captain Haddock with “regaining the family honor” arc that isn’t in the spirit of the comics – and doesn’t entirely resolve itself in the movie anyway. And to make Sakharine not only a villain (complete with a falcon that does his evil bidding) but Red Rakham’s descendent, complete with lines about old scores to settle is just idiotic. These stories weren’t grand tales of revenge, or eternal battles fought across lifetimes like in Hindu myths, they were a rollicking good time.

Tintin, Snowy and Haddock escape the boat and capture a seaplane piloted by Sakharine’s men. In the original story, the plane firing on them was suspenseful because the reader didn’t know Allan had sent the pilots. In the movie they know Sakharine sent the plane because the plane is seen on the deck of the Karaboudjan at least twice. The plane is forced to land in the desert due to a storm.

And right here in the movie is a moment that had my mouth hanging open. Well after I left the movie I couldn’t believe this moment happened. Such a moment happened in Spielberg’s last movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, right at the beginning, where Indy hides in a fridge to survive a nuclear bomb. But that was at the beginning, and this moment is in the middle.

The plane is flying through a storm and the Captain is drinking rubbing alcohol – there’s no whisky on the plane. Snowy’s having some too (at least Snowy is in character). Because of the plane’s wild flying, the alcohol floats in the air like in space (physics? what’s that?) and the two of them try to catch it with their mouths. This happens in another Tintin story, Explorers on the Moon, where the characters head to the moon and the rocket loses gravity. It was funny there because they were in space. Here, it just doesn’t make sense.

And then, Tintin suggests pouring the rubbing alcohol in the gas tank to give them extra fuel. And Captain Haddock belches into the tank. And it keeps the engine going. It’s supposed to be funny, but I sat there astounded that such a moment exists. It’s made worse by having Haddock climb out of the plane and get tossed around by the propellers as the plane lands. In the original story he never got out of the plane, which crashed because he tried wrestling the controls away from Tintin while drunk on whisky – the real Captain Haddock never drank rubbing alcohol.

A while later, they arrive in the fictional Moroccan port of Bagghar, learning that Omar Ben Salaad has the third model of the Unicorn behind a bullet-proof glass case. In The Crab with the Golden Claws, Omar was the leader of the drug cartel Allan was a part of. Captain Haddock retells the story of his ancestor Sir Francis, but in the movie there’s an additional idiotic layer that as he tells the story he “enters the mind” of his ancestor – this is absent in the comic.

Longtime fans of Tintin may have noticed that up until now I haven’t mentioned two staples of Tintin’s adventures, the bumbling detectives Thomson and Thompson. Well, that’s because in the movie they barely appear. They have one good laugh at the beginning when one of them falls down the stairs. In the movie they appear in Bagghar in disguise, as they do in The Crab with the Golden Claws, but in the original they were looking for a murderer. In the movie, they’re just there because the movie decided they hadn’t been in the movie enough.

Another staple of Tintin stories, Professor Cuthbert Calculus, is omitted entirely, which I guess makes sense since he doesn’t appear until Red Rakham’s Treasure, the story that follows The Secret of the Unicorn. Rumor has it that there will be a sequel to the movie with Peter Jackson directing it this time. Maybe he’ll appear then.

The soprano Bianca Castafiore, who appears in none of the stories I’ve mentioned so far, makes her appearance here, performing in a special audience for Omar Ben Salaad. The only explanation I can come up with for her appearing in this thing is so the special effects people can show off how well they can show glass breaking.

The movie uses motion-capture technology for the actors. The problem with this is that the characters are made to look real while keeping their cartoonish looks. Some liberties are taken – Tintin is given big blue eyes instead of the black dots he has in the comic – but big noses and other exaggerated features are kept in the movie. There’s a theory in robotics about the “uncanny valley,” where a robot (or anything made to resemble a human) that sort of looks human is pleasing, but a robot that is too similar to humans is repulsive.

The point I’m driving at is that the people in Tintin are made to look real, but they’re not pleasant to look at. Bianca Castafiore is especially bad in this regard.

One thing I will say about the movie is that the action sequence that follows is really well done. I saw the movie in 2D, and I can only imagine how it might look in 3D. It would have been even more thrilling if during the rest of the movie the camera had been stationary. All throughout the movie the camera moves around like it stole Haddock’s whisky.

Right afterwards is a scene that would never be in any real Tintin story. Sakharine has the three scrolls that lead to Red Rakham’s treasure and gets away. And Tintin gives up. That’s right, the ever-optimistic, ever-resourceful Tintin, who always has a plan up his sleeve, gives up. And he snaps out of it only after Captain Haddock, who in the comics is always ready to quit and go home, makes a speech straight out of a thousand other sappy movies about not letting failure get to you.

At the end of the adventure, Sakharine is carted off to jail after a ludicrous sword fight with Haddock where they refer to each other as Sir Francis and Red Rakham like they’re reincarnations of their ancestors. Captain Haddock gets Marlinspike Hall back after discovering the secret of the unicorn, at least he does in the comic, I’m not sure about the movie. The movie ends when they decide to go after Red Rakham’s treasure at the bottom of the ocean, which they change in the movie to Haddock’s treasure that Red Rakham tried to steal. Also, the secret coordinates of the treasure on the three scrolls in the comics tell of the location of the ship at the bottom of the ocean, not Marlinspike Hall as in the movie.

Why did Spielberg not make the movie in 2D during the animation renaissance? Why did he allow the compromises and bastardizations made when he could’ve used his clout to stay firm and faithful to the classic stories that were just fine as they were? And why does Omar have an Easter Island statue in his courtyard? These are all questions I would like answered.

But on the bright side, maybe newbies will see the movie and want to pick up the comics. Hopefully they come to the conclusion that the comics are much better than the movie.

Two episodes from the 1990s cartoon adaptation of The Adventures of Tintin:
The Crab with the Golden Claws and The Secret of the Unicorn

 Mark Kermode is his same old self in this book. Like your straight-talking granddad balling on about the price of a cinema ticket, it is littered with anti-Hollywood sentiments (which for Kermode, and for film buffs generally, is understandable because of the blockbusterisation of the industry), his judgements on the role of excessive money in film, combined with technophobic attacks on 3D cinema and of the multiplex experience in general (and his reduction of cinema staff to the level of primates), all of which makes this book an absolutely essential read. This may sound cynical but let me explain.
 
If not for his film criticism, then it is essential for the excellent writing and terrier-like doggedness in pursuing the horrifying contemporary experience of multiplex-going with audiences of popcorn-munching, seat-kicking troglodyte-adolescents going to watch the next bunch-of-crap digital instalment from Hollywood. There is an almost scary result of his rigorous cultural assessment, like the fiery rants of Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces, so one cannot help sympathise and root for his cause.   
 
The book begins, in its ‘Prologue’, with a manifesto protesting at the recent historical death of the projectionist and celluloid – and a stark objection to the general removal of the ‘human’ from the mechanised, digitised cinematic process. It then moves on to a humorous and cynical analysis of cinema-going as he provides an account of his trip to the multiplex with his eleven-year-old daughter – and the arguments he finds himself pursuing with various cinema staff while purchasing expensive tickets, the obligatory popcorn and the badly projected screening of a Zac Efron film (who bizarrely, Kermode thinks is great). The engine of the modern multiplex is a “computer programme with no memory of the past, no human interaction, no soul” which replaced the care and craft needed for celluloid with digital and smudgy third-rate 3D glasses.
 
Citing Pearl Harbor, the Saw movies, and many others, and their exorbitant budgets, Kermode explains that in blockbusters, money just seems to lead to even more money without fail. On the whole, I find myself nodding in agreement (even though as I write, I read that monster movie, Creature, has received an all-time awful total box office revenue of just $331,000 after 1,507 screens, even though it is made by a well-known producer).
 
Kermode takes us through a vast range of expensive movies and demonstrates “how infrequently they have failed to turn a profit, regardless of quality”. The failure of blockbuster-makers to entertain and engage comes down to them not wanting to do better and audiences accepting their laziness. And yes, it is we, the audience, who keep paying them. I must have watched nearly all the films Kermode rubbishes, for my sins.
 
As for 3D cinema, Kermode gives an analysis of its failure – designed to “head off movie piracy and force audiences to watch badly made films in overpriced, undermanned multiplexes”. 3D has been consistently rejected by viewers for more than a hundred years. It is now a ploy to feed up money-hungry Hollywood producers. He gives out a pretty heavy 3D-bashing to Clash of the Titans-2010 style as an example of its failure – and on which I couldn’t agree more.  
 
He is unrelenting in his criticism of the Oscars – whose films are hand-picked by “a bunch of unaccountable drunken bozos” or the Hollywood Foreign Press Association – and sweeps aside the critique that the British film industry is in terminal decline and strongly defends its film-making and acting contributions, referring favourably to The King’s Speech and United 93. Kermode asks us to “stop worrying so much about film production, and start worrying a bit more about the support and upkeep of independent UK cinemas that show the kinds of movies (British, foreign language, arthouse, etc.) in which the multiplexes have little or no interest”.
 
In his self-deprecating style, Kermode acknowledges that many do not go by what critics have to say and in many respects they are powerless among audiences but which he accepts – because it is not for the critics to tell audiences what to watch but merely telling audiences what they think about them in an entertaining and engaging way. It is perhaps his ‘insider’ knowledge of the use and manipulation of critics which I found most intriguing about the whole book.
 
Kermode’s protest at this totality of the culture industry, the near-authoritarian output of multiplexes and the blockbuster, the way in which critics feed the very profit-driven producers they seek to criticise, end up bearing a strong resemblance to the film, cultural and music criticism of one of the greatest European cultural (and anti-fascist) critics of all time, Theodor Adorno (1903-1969). In Adorno’s view (Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) and Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life (1951)), the critic becomes a self-incriminating entity and empty criticism is then an almost defunct activity for the messengers of a totally administered society. The ‘absolute’ culture industry encompasses the death of its own counter-arguments. Criticism becomes part of the institution. He argued that the critic is free to make accusations but the despairing will rightly predict that only a number of chat shows and a radio show later, such a “dissident will soon be reconciled” into the totality of the culture industry. Kermode’s explanation of the way in which film critic’s words are used in promotional quotes to sell the films are a perfect example of how this is carried out in the marketing of the modern blockbuster.
 
Theory aside, the critique that Kermode outlines for the modern multiplex, and the cultural whipping he deals out to Sex and the City 2, amongst others, make this a must read for all those interested in the irritating snags and the wider failures of modern cinema.
 
If there is one thing I would have liked to hear more of, it is that Kermode rarely touches on the key issue of ‘choice’. Yes, we should support our independent cinemas, as he suggests, but should we not also take on the uniformity of the multiplexes and ask them, through local campaigns, to screen at least one alternative/offbeat/world cinema category movie so that movie-goers can choose? Choice means letting the gobby, annoying cinema-goers have their 3D and awful dumbed-down Hollywood blockbusters – after all, they are the regular ticket-payers – but we can also have intelligent cinema screenings, showing world cinema movies or at least something more engaging that doesn’t entail crashing helicopters and end with waving US flags and moronic whooping and jeering. All in all, this is a thought-provoking, illuminating, well-informed and humorous book.

Until recently, the promise of Steve Aylett’s £750 foray into feature-length film productions had seemingly been wandering desultorily around the Internet for quite some time, indulging in some shallow vanishing since 2009, popping up here and there on blogs, before triumphantly reappearing for its premiere in Brighton earlier this year. Followed closely by a London screening, it has since been saddled up for a couple more dates, in Northampton (October) and Portland at Bizarro Con 2011 (November).

If you’re not already familiar with Jeff Lint or Steve Aylett, then this paragraph is my opportunity to appear smug. Which is off-putting, isn’t it? If you are already a Lint obsessive then a review for this film is pointless, as the mere realisation that there is a Lint film in existence would mean you have now closed this window and opened a new one, searching for the next screening. Which puts this article in an odd place. Anyway…

In a quoted excerpt for Lint, Aylett’s 2005 book, the reviewer calls the creation a “laugh-out-loud funny mock biography of a pulp fiction writer who only exists in the author’s imagination”. But now, it seems, the character occupies also the minds of an array of esteemed Lintian pundits, who, riffing on the endless possibilities of such a character, clearly relish the chance in Aylett’s debut movie project.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=giBumjfVTUI

Working both as an introduction as well as an extension of the Jeff Lint history, the film mixes in some of the speculation and anecdotes that makes up the original Lint book and its sequel, And Your Point Is? (2006) taking some of these ideas further and giving them worthy airtime. Thankfully they survive the transfer from page to screen and remain full of Aylett’s sly subversions.

Lint was the ultimate non-conformist, to the point of failure. A variable variety of talking faces (the shots are usually that close-up) gladly confirm this. Intercut with archive footage, the faces detail much of the Lint legend: his distrust of waiters, his failed Star Trek and Patton scripts and his ‘magic bullet’ theory. Further highlights include some startlingly demented clips of Lint’s cartoon Catty and the Major and recounted tales from a gravelly Lord Caul Pin, writers Alan Moore, David Harlan Wilson (Codename Prague), Mo Ali and Bill Ectric (Tamper), plus comedians Stewart Lee, Josie Long, Robin Ince, and Aylett himself.

Similarly to its source material, Lint The Movie runs episodically with nugget after golden nugget of supreme absurdity, which often go beyond the simple exposition of Lint’s antics and instead into the realm of something meaningful and satiric (despite Aylett himself noting, “Satire has no effect – a mirror holds no fear for those with no shame”). But exactly what this ‘something’ is is hard to define, making Aylett’s Lint all the less boring and all the more satisfying.

Appropriately disrespectful of power, institution and instruction, Aylett is a writer who makes it look as if he is at play, before cunningly twisting on you with sudden twists of truth which make Lint, in all his forms (man/book/movie), true originals.

Now all we ask for is a full series of Catty and the Major.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=et2ZSHz7Q7Q