One Writing Desk
Dark Waters (book: Exposure, above)
As a filmmaker and writer everything I saw and heard in Dark Waters was pitch perfect for me. Is this the point when an already very, very good filmmaker makes something so significant it and he cannot be ignored? On my one viewing I would say definitely yes. So, how did Todd Haynes, and the cast and crew, not receive any Oscar nominations? The answer to that is unfortunately in the film itself.
Mark Ruffalo is exceptional as the initially unsure advocate (should I, shouldn’t I take this case?) the reluctant hero turning crusading lawyer travelling deeper into the lies and cover up world of Du Pont’s immoral practices, as he takes them on in the courts. The journey is long and far from easy.
Based on the New York Times Magazine’s “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” by Nathaniel Rich, the story is real, the deaths associated with teflon and the poisoned waters from chemical spill run-off are countable, coupled to another important fact—the film narrative is so well managed and un-histrionic in its style and delivery that it makes watching dramatic and very affecting.
The mantra told often to us by lecturers in JD units: ‘a lawyer reads, that’s what a lawyer does’ hit home as I watched the many boxes of incriminating documents and records being wheeled into Mark Ruffalo’s (Rob Bilott’s) law offices.
How was Bilott not removed from his firm? It’s to my relief and all our benefit that he kept his position and kept on fighting the actions. A roomful of long applause for all involved.
Stanley’s say
I recently saw Stanley Tucci’s 1964 Paris set Final Portrait, with Geoffrey Rush playing the lead, artist, painter Alberto Giacometti.
Not much happens in terms of the old story plot nexus but a lot goes on.
Verdict: Wonderful film, brilliantly observed. Great cast and script. Funny ironic tender sad cruel. Bring on more Stanley. 9/10
I’d give it ten out of ten but no films hit that high for me. Music, painting, literature, yes. Films, no. Too many departments, too many hands on deck for something not to go wrong somewhere.
Tuscan Retreat
With Brexit still breathing down Britain’s neck, I wanted to revisit a blog I did some time ago, to celebrate the very best of British production, in my view – the Landrover – and how this journey back (together with the journey down) opened up Europe for me, travelling across France and in to Italy.
So many journeys so many memories, to and from London and our place in Tuscany, Italy. Nostalgia? Absolutely, completely. I feel the need to revisit these memories before the Brexit maniacs get their way and destroy what is beautiful and sustainable in Freedom of Movement. The camping grounds I stopped at in France were extraordinarily well-managed, great facilities, and so reasonable in price. It made driving the long hours an absolute joy.
The first trip back to London took me up through Italy from Tuscany up through Piemonte to Valle d’Aosta, which led me (countless times) to les Alpes, driving up over the Great St Bernard Pass (il Passo del Gran San Bernardo) that first time down into Switzerland in brilliant sunshine, at four on a September afternoon. Around Lake Geneva to Lausanne I went, arriving at Pontarlier in the dark. I found a parking spot just outside the entrance to a Péage, heading to God knows where. I was absolutely exhausted. After a night of waking up, dozing in the front seat of the old beast, I shook myself conscious and crawled on toward Troyes (seeing the periphery), going on, then around in circles late afternoon south-east of Paris struggling to discover a municipal campsite. Finally I did, coming upon Méry-sur-Seine, a tiny hamlet south-east of Paris.
I parked on the grass and walked in to the village, got something to eat – do I remember what I ordered? No, but whatever it was it was very, very good. I know that. I walked back and set up my mattress in the back of the beast, extending out over a table top I had made especially with a trestle to support it. With a tarpaulin attached to the roof rack and reaching down and pegged in to to the ground all around, fresh country air flowed in all around me. I slept the sleep of angels. To this day I can’t recall a sleep so sound (maybe one other). It rained all night and I never felt a drop.
Waking up at six I packed up like a single person army on the march. I was gone in minutes, driving around to find the right route north, until I stopped at a café for breakfast, café au lait, a croissant and advice how to drive en direction de Meaux skirting north-east Paris, on through the northern cities. I reached Calais at four in the afternoon. Crossing the channel by ferry to Dover, I arrived home in east London at around ten at night. My old landrover only did fifty miles an hour.
That voyage in 2006 I will never forget. I have done the same trip many times in the years since then, in two separate Landrovers (old and new). My last defender model (2013), took me via different routes, but the first trip from Tuscany in the battered old Series Three has never ever been bettered.
Lee, JFK and Stephen King
It’s tough being a writer in this organised politically-controlled oligarchic world of ours. Publishing is a strategic asset in a stable of assets essential to a well-tuned oligarchic universe. The message, whatever it is, must be edited. That seems to be the last law of the universe, the one Scientists haven’t yet owned up to.
Try thwarting it and you will be edited out of existence says a footnote on the first page of the Oligarch’s Manual. Try beating the system and your Sun will shine no more.
So, I guess even the great Stephen King obeys this largely hidden law of our Oligarchic Universe. (I say great because book sales obviously equate with greatness, right?) It has nothing to do with well-oiled sales machines. Sales = Greatness and vice versa. So, I went, I must say with hope, to read 11.22.63 by the undoubtedly great Stephen King. And what did I find? Well, my mother always said: if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all. But when did I ever listen to my mother?
What on earth was King thinking about?
Not the truth clearly. His novel is fiction, okay I get it. Only he put an awful lot of real people in it as well. Like poor old Lee Harvey. Poor old very dead and much maligned Lee Harvey Oswald. A feckless man and near hopeless rifleman who some people keep saying was guiltier than his own much imagined sin. Lee Harvey Osward with his Carcano Model 91/38 rifle with which he probably couldn’t have hit a barn-door from 100 metres. No, not probably, maybe definitely. The man who somehow reverse-actioned Newtonian physics—with that minor impediment of a tree blocking-out his vision—hitting a moving target from the wrong direction.
From how far was it?
The man who ended in history as being responsible for killing a President. Go figure. Many have tried. I don’t need to debate this anymore. To my mind at least, if Lee were on the sixth floor of the Book Depository that fate-filled day and fated time and was pointing a rifle at the back of the President’s head, he would have had more chance of hitting Parkland Hospital, than as is claimed, he murdered JFK, in the still so far un-investigated—at State Law level—crime of homicide.
The make-believe myth come mystery in Dallas, 22 November 1963.
All now co-signed by bestselling-author Stephen King.
Renovating in Italy
It’s now ten years that we have been in Pitigliano, renovating, holidaying and living. We chose Pitigliano, in the hills of La Maremma, southern Tuscany, for several reasons – the town itself; the hot springs of Saturnia; the wonderful beaches south of Argentario, and the countryside all around. Here are a few photos.
We took up the floors and found old tiles which was a wonderful find, but which now need work again because the ceiling of the magazzino (store room) below is deteriorating affecting the floor above. In truth this work was always going to be done, it was just a matter of when – when arrived in 2012.
I made my own stoneware tiles for the kitchen, following the idea of uncovered – ‘found old marble’.
We found the original painted wall and built it around designs incorporating terracotta wall lamps I made. Not everyone would do this or even like it for his or herself, but for us the architectural point of an old house like this, going back in parts to the 17th century – as it it is for local builders – is that you create and reconfigure old aspects and ‘finds’ into the overall look.
The fireplace was completely excavated, set back and made much larger, and we designed a heavy cast iron grill and had it made at a local foundry, so any fire on it would suck up the air and roar up the chimney.
A wood heater (la stufa), for keeping the house warm when a roaring wood fire would create too much heat.
The roof was redone.
Ceilings and a skylight done.
Shutters (le persiane) put up.
Slowly, modestly we are getting the house in shape.
Narratorial Unreliability
Christian Mihai discusses his ideas on unreliable narrators, something he likes to see writers use, and a technique he says he uses himself. Still, he misses a fundamental point – all narrators, storytellers, dramatists, poets, are unreliable. From Homer, Shakespeare to Sartre, no writer tells, gets close to ‘the truth’, even if he or she is prepared to die in the process of collecting all the observable details of a factually based fiction.
Do we trust Tolstoy’s account of Napoleon in War and Peace? Perhaps… if we are Russian.
Narrator unreliability doesn’t have to be a first person account, though the most obvious modernist exploitations of narrator unreliability in fiction use that form. The best approach – for this writer at least – is when the writer sets out to deceive us, and by convincing us that he or she has told the truth, transfers any doubt on narratorial reliability to a reader’s interpretation of the tale.
NormanLloyd@CANNES
Norman Lloyd’s talk in the Salle Buñuel was a lesson in theatre, film technique, Shakespeare, Renoir, Brecht, Chaplin, Welles, Hitchcock and Kazan, and how to keep your mind a steel trap well into your nineties. I don’t know if he eats nothing but blueberries but he must be doing something right.
In an age when aging (see Haneke’s Amour) is often told in tales of sad decline, this man stands out as an object lesson of hope for all. The session was one of the highlights of Cannes in 2012. Holding his audience spellbound, Lloyd, a 97 year-old veteran of acting, directing and production, took listeners through the best part of the pantheon of cinema (the first 60 years of it). What and who he didn’t know simply wasn’t worth pursuing.
Lloyd, stage and film actor
It wasn’t just that he knew so many of those who were crucial to the development of 20th century cinema, it was he knew what they knew and why they knew it – and above all he could tell us how and why he knew what they knew. He understood their brilliance with exacting modesty, placing himself in the role of pupil to all of them. Yet for all intents and purposes he was their equal in collaboration, a creative confidant in so many ways; he travelled through film history with them not because of them. Lloyd’s contribution to film is real, tangible and deep. When he recounted how Hitchcock – a decidedly unpolitical man – with three words to NBC, “I want him” dissolved the McCarthy blacklist era, the entire audience in the Salle was stilled. Lloyd’s part in McCarthy’s ruination was just one anecdote in many. Politically involved and motivated throughout his career, Lloyd was a close friend to Jean Renoir, Chaplin, Welles and Hitchcock. Lloyd was at the heart of theatre and cinema for nearly fifty years. One of the best moments of the night was his recollection of the lines of Bertolt Brecht: “Since the people are displeased by the government, the people must be replaced.” The sharpness of wit, his breadth of cinematic knowledge was stunning.
Cannes 2012: wet shoes and blurred vision
2012 brought rain, and not so many memorable filmic moments, but there were a few. Cannes at festival time is always unique, with a special experience lurking somewhere even if a downbeat mood hung over the Mediterranean resort as it did for several days. The Cannes festival finds a way to transcend gloom whatever weather blows in.
Still, for all the ability of Cannes to transcend itself, I was left with the impression that this year will not figure among the list of the best festivals. That said, a gentleness hung in the air I liked, replacing the more manic moments I have seen in years gone by.
I was late in arriving and saw Roman Polanski present a reworked Tess on the evening of May 21. It is hard to remember what the original release in 1979 was like, but it doesn’t figure in my memory anywhere near as good as this version. Now the story seemed to make complete sense. Now we saw Hardy’s vision up on the screen. The two great adaptations of Hardy novels I have seen, Far From the Madding Crowd and Tess (of the D’Urbervilles) are epic cinematic experiences for any age and epoch.
Late in applying for accreditation as I was, film badges presented difficulties. Getting into the venues I wanted to be in was not straight-forward. One day I set out to bus from Golfe Juan to get to a screening of On the Road in Cannes. I gave myself ample time but three, then four number 200 buses from Nice went by, all full. Running to the train station I found the train for Cannes La Bocca was cancelled; train workers were on strike. Then I had to wait nearly thirty minutes for a train to Cannes itself. Show time for the film was five o’clock and that time was looming. Finally I was able to take the train as far as Cannes and then tried walking the rest of the way in the rain but had to give up. The film began while I was still two kilometres away from the cinema. There were probably no seats left in any case.
The next re-screening of Jack Kerouac’s era-defining novel was on the last day at 9 am, but as I was at a screening of the Korean, The Taste of Money, up until two am, I missed that screening as well.
I had re-read Kerouac’s novel carefully and really enjoyed it. I was looking forward to the film adaptation of it. However lukewarm the reviews, I wanted to see On the Road more than any other film. I wasn’t the only one.
I did make it to Holy Motors at 11.30 am that next morning, and left thinking, except for a couple of wild scenes, what was all the fuss about? Overall Carax’s style is manufactured shock-treatment, a director setting out to do the impossible in 2012, shock us; you can’t shock anyone in a cinema anymore, only bore or pleasantly surprise audiences. The lead actor was bravura, but as Irreversible did some years back, the film’s attempts to violate left me cold, even colder when it calmed down into quiet film parodies. I left the theatre thinking, we have been down this road before (with David Lynch, perhaps). I didn’t bother with Cosmopolis. Reading DeLillo’s book, seeing the film trailers, convinced me there were no surprises to be had in it. I wasn’t alone on that either. There were better things to do.
I saw the American Mud. Sustained irony might have helped it along, though it was easy on the eye and on the mind, that’s if you’re into 14 year old cute boys, Matthew McConaughey without his shirt, or Reese Witherspoon, if any or all of them float your boat.
I didn’t have tickets for the closing ceremony in the main auditorium, joining journalists in the cinema adjacent. I saw the event in close circuit cinema in row two. Before that I took pix of photographers running from the red carpet to the action inside. They didn’t look pleased to be pixed. Weird, photographers hating having done to them what they do ad infinitum to others.
After the awards were handed out, I stayed second row to see the late Claude Miller’s Thérèse Desqueyroux (something I didn’t regret doing). I felt more at home in that pre-modern space of 1890-1930 set cinema. Miller’s film set in 1928 rural France is beautifully realised, by a master of period cinema, just as is Polanski’s Tess set thirty-seven years earlier across the channel. Both films deal with misunderstood women who suffer injustices. Both are big, slow moving, carefully manicured epics that did nothing to unmake my festival.
Experiment, what experiment?
..handheld shaky cam, found footage, ultra-violence, meta-storylines, etc., all becoming part of the broad pop cultural landscape and assimilated into the commercial marketplace. This translates across all cultural lines – music, art, technology, etc. as the outsiders and untouchables of yesteryear are today’s TV spokesmen and tastemakers..
…experimental film seems to represent more fully the true potential and magic of cinema
…for brief moments in history, think the ‘beats’, the real ground-shakers, the true risk-takers, manage to do something that is life and culture affecting, their minds drafting the future…
Swimanög 