An Education

Hi there folks – a new week, the sun is shining (but it’s making no impact on the snow in my garden, and the car windscreen isn’t going to clear for a while), Buddy Miller is doing his thing on the – what do you call ‘em these days? hi-fi?, a sealed Netflix envelope is preparing for its journey back to wherever sealed Netflix envelopes go (‘Downhill Racer‘, if you’re interested. I’ll post something later in the week. It’s pretty good.  Winning is everything, apparently.), the first cup of coffee has been downed, and I’m cranking up for the day.

The weekend’s plans were curtailed by the winter storm, so my birthday party shrank to the two guests within walking distance; we ate Hungarian Goulash and didn’t talk about ‘Inglourious Basterds’. It was fun. And warm. What better way to spend late Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights than blanketed in front of DVDs. (Hadn’t seen ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ for a while – the intentionally funny one – and boy does it stand up as a gorgeous example of 80s kitsch, and a reminder of the genuine comedic chops of Rick Moranis – a man who can fake naivety and still come across as strong; I wheeled out Herzog’s ‘Bad Lieutenant’ again – second time this week, an endlessly fascinating film that takes crime, punishment, trauma and policing far more seriously than most, and ends up being both more life-affirming than ‘Cagney and Lacey’ and less violent than ‘The Dark Knight’ (and turns out to be hilarious and grave at the same time; it has a profoundly moving last scene too); and then I got around to seeing ‘An Education’, which turns out to be one of those British films that US critics like a lot more than UK ones do, because we actually live there.  Or used to.  (Carey Mulligan’s grand, Alfred Molina’s the perfect-as-usual Alfred Molina, Emma Thompson has three delicious scenes, and director Lone Scherfig captures the reality of British grammar school life in the 1960s, but Nick Hornby’s script veers between profundity and blunt cliche; and at the end of the day, [spoilers ahoy] a film that climaxes with an Oxford University acceptance letter accompanied by swelling strings ends up producing a sense of disappointment that the protagonist has settled for so little.  It’s like ‘Up in the Air’ without the coruscating heaviness of utter despair for the future of the human race.

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‘Ya gots ta move wid’ da times’

Busy times here at TFT – with me in New Zealand and Jett in the Big Sleepy, we’re separated by what Bram Stoker’s Dracula might call ‘oceans of time’ – I’m in tomorrow, he’s in yesterday, and today hasn’t happened yet.  The world is changing…

But we have still strived (striven?  strifd?) to bring you the internet’s most important commodity: CONTENT (I used to call it writing and broadcasting, but ya gots to move with the times, which is the kind of thing you feel duty bound to say when you’ve just watched Robert Altman’s remarkable ‘Popeye’).

And so, herewith, heretofore, hence, and now: The Weekly Roundup of TFT News.

I’ve been blogging the production of ‘The Insatiable Moon’, a low budget NZ film about a homeless man with schizophrenia who believes he’s the second son of God.  It’s been a fascinating privilege to be observing what the DOP Tom Burstyn calls ‘frugal film-making’.  I’ve written about this concept: of making films so cheaply that you make ‘em fast, and maybe better; have touched on the questions of metaphysics and empathy that this film raises; the parallels with the ‘Twilight’ vampires (trust me); and the lead actor, Rawiri Paratene, who’ll be familiar to TFT readers through his performance in ‘Whale Rider’.

Meanwhile, we’ve continued Operation Save The Film Talk with a new offer: a free subscription to Film-maker Magazine – check it out here.  For the first time ever, you can hear some outtakes from our last almost vain attempt at recording the show; we feature the great Brian Cox as an acting teacher; and in Episode 104 we discussed our versions of the best films of the decade.

Jett has only today declared himself to be “on Cloud 9 after just seeing a film which has reinvigorated my love for cinema!  It’s Werner Herzog’s THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS – and friends I’m tellin’ ya it’s the most joyous, life affirming film I’ve seen in years – see it if it comes out near you!”

This week we’ll record our last show of the year, in which we hope to have some special guests talking about the best films of this year; while Jett & I get to focus on ‘Avatar’, which due to the time difference in NZ I will get to see before they’ve even made it.

For now, take care, keep in touch, and watch good movies…

Ok, so I couldn’t wait to see ‘The Room’ tonight at The Belcourt right?  This bad film to end all bad films is supposed to be a riot, with Midnight audiences across the Country and Europe erupting in peals of laughter at its shoddy writing, one-dimensional acting, multiple plot strands that go nowhere and just all around awfulness.

I was all set, planning to be at the Screening promptly at Midnight with my Coke and Junior Mints, ready to be entertained along with what I hoped was a sold out crowd.

But earlier today it hit me:  should I go?  Is it right?  I mean, the Director of ‘The Room’, this guy, this person, this man – Tommy Wiseau – has poured his heart out – years of his life, and, apparently, 6 Million Dollars into this thing.

So I had to ask myself, is it right to laugh at others dreams?

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The Queen of an Imaginary Land

Yesterday was fantastic, a genuine surprise – ‘Superman’ is as close to a perfect version of its particular story as you could imagine; ‘The Black Hole’ looks astonishing and sounds awful – who knows what they were trying to do, but one can certainly imagine Disney not being all that happy with producing movie that ends with the evil genius inside the body of a robot presiding over Hell; ‘It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World’ shocked Jett and I into the realisation that something so insane simply has to be Jett’s new favorite film, and ‘Back to the Future’ turns out to be even more fun that I remember it when I was ten because the jokes make more sense.

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I haven’t seen ‘It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World’, because when it would show up on holiday TV schedules I was usually playing with my new toys or trying to find batteries for them, so I never had three unbroken hours.  But today, Jett and I are going to give our Saturday afternoon over to the pleasures (?) of Stanely Kramer’s 1963 elephant of a movie.  I have avoided reading much about it, and sincerely don’t know what it is – though I have some vague memories of massive (for the time) celebrity cameos, people trying to steal something, and perhaps Spencer Tracy.  So my one sentence preview will have to be limited to the tagline:

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