My favourite moment of 2012 has already occurred. This is going to be so much easier than 2011.

From Netribution:

Warning: spoilers (as far as I can spoil the plot of a very famous 8-year-old book for you)

Ah. “We need to talk about Kevin.” The words that the eponymous Kevin (Ezra Miller/Jasper Newell/ Rocky Duer)’s mother Eva (Tilda Swinton) never manages to say to her sweet, blinkered husband Franklin (John C Reilly).

Lynne Ramsay‘s fine adaptation of the very unloveable 2003 novel dispenses with the epistolary form of the original, and is instead structured around Eva’s life post-massacre, with flashes of the past forcing continually pushing to the surface. Kevin’s actions have defined her current situation; the film shows us how.

Eva Khatchadourian is living a hellish life in which people come up to her and insult her, spit at her or slap her in the street. Most days, she cleans off red paint splattered over the front of the house she curiously lives in alone. No one is very keen to employ her.

How did it come to this? The opening scene sets the colour theme for the movie – red – and is the only time that we see a smiling Eva. She is surrounded by people and bathed in red liquid – not blood, but squashed tomatoes, as she is attending the La Tomatina festival in Spain as part of her work as a travel writer.

She once enjoyed her freedom and her ability to escape round the world. We’re not shown how she meets her husband Franklin, or why she marries him, but it is clear that she has settled for, rather than into, suburban family life.

Like the book, the film cannot decide for us whether Kevin was born a monster, or whether Eva’s treatment of him made him one. The answer is likely to be a little from column A, a little from column B.

Even from a young age, Kevin is eerily good at coldly disobeying Eva, while acting like a ray of sunshine the moment his father walks through the door. For instance, while still a toddler, Kevin sprays paint all over a room carefully wallpapered in antique maps by his mother. She said that she had made it “special;” he later tells his father that he was trying to help make it “special.” Are those creepily knowing looks from a tiny boy how things actually were, or how Eva remembers it?

And so the splashes of red all over the film gradually take on a more sinister appearance as we learn more about the mass murder Kevin committed in the gym at his school, days before his 16th birthday. The instances of red are symbolic of the fact that this is very much Eva’s re-interpretation of her memories, her attempt to answer the question of what made him do it, and whether or not she should have seen disaster coming.

Did her possible post-natal depression drive a wedge between them? Was he just born with sociopathic tendencies? Kevin’s much younger sister, Celia, is, in contrast, a very sweet and gentle child; Eva also seems much more capable of mothering her. Is that just down to timing?

Essentially, neither Kevin nor Eva are completely believeable characters, but that is the fault of the source material. We Need to Talk About Kevin works best on the level of philosophy – what makes us, nature or nurture – than in terms of character development. On paper, Kevin is too horror-movie devil-child, Eva is, at times, too shockingly unmotherly, while Franklin is just blithely blind to it all.

Having said that, the lead performances in the film are impressive, particularly Tilda Swinton’s. She lends Eva a vulnerability that is missing in the book, and makes us care for her all the more.

The real power of the story lies in its examination of the aftermath. When a boy in a wheelchair comes up to Eva, we expect a verbal lashing. Instead, this boy – who was paralysed by Kevin during his rampage – asks Eva how she is doing. It is an unforgettably tender moment in a film overflowing with hissed insults and out-and-out hostility. How does it feel to be her? She now occupies a unique, and terrible, space in the imaginations of those around her. She is intensely alone now, but not free, as she was before motherhood.

The last scene shows Eva hugging Kevin in his orange prison jumpsuit. He clearly really needs it. Whether the community she lives in can ever forgive her for her transgressions, real or imagined (was it her nurture or her nature or neither?), is unlikely. And that is, finally, where the audience finds their well of sympathy for Eva.

The London Film Festival is running 12-27 October 2011. For more information, please go to http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/

From Netribution:

Artist/director Steve McQueen’s second feature (following 2008′s Hunger), follows the unravelling New York existence of sex addict Brandon (Michael Fassbender). Living alone, he (seemingly) happily picks up girls in bars, orders prostitutes like takeout and masturbates in the work loos after watching porn on his computer. It’s a tad compulsive, but his outward charm and ability to just about hold it together is keeping people fooled.

Then, his volatile, attention-seeking sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) turns up to stay in his apartment, and things slowly fall apart.

McQueen his co-writer, Abi Morgan, say that the film started out as a love story, and exploration of what drives sexuality. There’s a repetitiveness to the introductory scenes of Brandon’s life that suggests his compulsion isn’t just about fun – it’s trapping him. As he goes about his life, the camera, following his gaze, continually zeroes in on young, attractive women, leaving everything else blurred out in the background.

Then, one evening, Sissy comes to stay, and their sibling relationship brings up a string of red flags. Something happened in their childhood that both cements them together and drives them apart – as Sissy says, “We’re not bad people from a bad place,” but, wow, can they treat each other badly.

Unsurprisingly, as with Hunger, the film is beautifully filmed, with painterly touches. Brandon is almost always wearing royal blue, and is often seen in white sterile environments involving lots of large glass windows. He is willing to be be an exhibitionist in some ways, but he won’t have a proper conversation with his sister. As much as he seeks out sex, he can’t handle intimacy, and he keeps his emotions hidden safely away.

Sissy, in contrast, is often seen wearing gold, or bathed in a golden light. It should complement Brandon’s blue, but it seems to overwhelm him instead. Accordingly, it’s the drama of her inner life that forces Brandon into self-examination.

Shame doesn’t offer any easy answers to the problems of sex addiction or the inability to show love. As McQueen put it, the themes, nudity and sexual acts in the film aren’t there to scandalise, they’re there to reflect life. You do come away from Shame feeling great sympathy for the damaged characters, and hoping that they manage to put themselves back together again.

The London Film Festival is running 12-27 October 2011. For more information, please go to http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/

Prepare to have one of these

In order of most-googled:

chris mellas

christopher mellas [Knox's stepfather]

amanda knox smoking

amanda knox sex list – what even is that?!

foxy knoxy myspace

amanda knox recent photos

pretty amanda knox

amanda knox still guilty

amanda knox myspace entries

amanda knox is beautiful

who is chris mellas

amanda knox at university of washington

young amanda knox

amanda knox recent pictures

chris mellias

edda mellas christopher mellas christopher

amanda knox smokes

daily mail foxy knoxy

how did foxy knoxy get her name?

edda and chris mellas pictures

amanda knox crazy eyes

proof that amanda knox is guilty

photos of amanda knox and rap

amanda knox drunk

mellas chris

pictures of amanda knox and rap

amanda knox back in seattle

amanda knox arrest in seattle for playing loud music

details of amanda knox case

chris mellas perugia lovers

pictures of amanda knox eyes

chris mel as

amanda knox teenager

amanda knox headlines

christoper mellas

Filed under: News, U.K., U.S. Tagged: Amanda Knox, Meredith Kercher, murder, Perugia, Raffaelle Sollecito, trial by media ]]> http://suchandrika.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/things-people-have-googled-about-amanda-knox-this-week/feed/ 0 rikers http://suchandrika.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/lff-opens-with-fernando-meirelles-360/ http://suchandrika.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/lff-opens-with-fernando-meirelles-360/#comments Wed, 12 Oct 2011 23:31:39 +0000 Suchandrika http://suchandrika.wordpress.com/?p=1993 ]]>

From Netribution

The 55th BFI London Film Festival opens tonight!

Oh. Fernando Meirelles. This is no City of God. This isn’t even Love Actually.

It just. Doesn’t. Work. So… there’s sex trafficking, infidelity, infidelity, people meeting on a plane, loooooads of interminable airport scenes, a brilliant bit of Anthony Hopkins in AA (but his character never rings true), pretty brunettes bringing sad guys redemption through their smiles, a thumping and terribly obvious score (we’re with Russian people now, does it sound Russian enough???)…

It never feels as though there is a meaning behind these superficially interconnected lives. And if there was meant to be a main character, well, giving her a bit of voiceover at the start and at the end… that isn’t consistent enough. Sadly.

There are several narrative strands but only one or two will keep you sitting there waiting for more. It’s a shame.

Don’t worry though; the London Film Festival has a lot more to offer. As for Meirelles? Hopefully he’ll get back on form asap.

The London Film Festival is running 12-27 October 2011. For more information, please go to http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/

Pakistan: Obama tracks Osama Bin Laden down and has him assassinated.

Libya: Gaddafi’s statue defaced as he remains in hiding.

Japan: Suffers earthquake and tsunami.

USA: Beyoncé announces her pregnancy.

England: Amy Winehouse dies. 1983-2011.

Egypt: The fall of Mubarak.

USA: New York legalises gay marriage.

England: Phone hacking and the Murdochs.

England: London riots.

New Zealand: Christchurch earthquakes.

England: Prince William marries Kate Middleton.

PHEW. I will return. And with a few more words.

The interiors of this latest adaptation of John Le Carré’s 1973-set novel look and feel like just like the those of the BBC’s recent drama series, The Hour, set in their 1956 newsroom. Even the plots are alike – there’s a Russian spy in our very English midst, which one is he (it’s never gonna be a she)?

The main clues as to which era we’re in are found outside – the odd black or Asian person popping up in the corner of a frame, a girl in hotpants, the lovely cars. Inside the Circus [the highest level of  British intelligence], though, it’s all closed and brownish and peopled by grey men. The Cold War is still very much on, and this film sets the scene expertly.

In the aftermath of the shooting of a Circus agent, Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong), during a botched Hungarian mission, retired agent George Smiley (Gary Oldman, who uses stillness like a weapon throughout) is brought in to root out a possible Soviet double agent in the Circus ranks. Spies being duplicitous and such, it’s not an easy task ; beware the red herrings.

Tinker, Tailor does feel a little slow in the middle, but it seems churlish to complain, when we’ve already been served with two pre-credits deaths, some heavy breathing from Tom Hardy as renegade agent Ricki Tarr, who falls for the wife of a Moscow centre intelligence officer, and an amazingly unlikeable Colin Firth. Perhaps Smiley’s investigation could have been sped up a little, and more flashbacks could have been added – seeing as the scenes from the botched Hungarian job and its aftermath hold the most important clues.

One more criticism – George’s unfaithful wife, Ann, is a total cipher. For someone who seems to have a pivotal, yet off-stage role, it is genius to not show us her face or let us hear her voice, but perhaps the other characters could fill us in on her a bit? Why does she keep leaving him? Perhaps, though, that’s for later in the trilogy.

The acting is as strong as would be expected from the very impressive cast, with Oldman ably carrying the narrative through potentially confusing twists, and slowly gaining a real malevolence over the course of the film. It’s a useful development for him – he really needs it for the haunting dénouement.

From Netribution

–

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, in cinemas 16th September, has launched a world exclusive featurette that includes interviews with the film’s key cast, director and John le Carré on its official website: http://www.tinker-tailor-soldier-spy.com/

Find the code word on the site, then head to the basement level where you’ll be rewarded with a world exclusive featurette and the opportunity to win tickets to the UK Premiere of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

We’re excited to announce the line-up for this year’s BFI London Film Festival, which will showcase 204 feature films and 110 shorts over 16 days.

In addition to our previously announced opening and closing night films, Fernando Meirelles’ 360 and Terence Davies’  The Deep Blue Sea [pictured above, starring Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston], Gala highlights include George Clooney’s The Ides of March, Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. This year’s Archive Gala title is the BFI National Archive’s restoration of Miles Mander’s The First Born with a new score by Stephen Horne.

Our Film on the Square strand includes highly anticipated new titles such as Roman Polanski’s Carnage, Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Antolia and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights.

New British Cinema provides a platform for original cinematic voices from across the UK. D.R. Hood’s Wreckers, Dexter Fletcher’s directorial debut Wild Bill and Andrew Haigh’s award-winning second feature Weekend will all receive their UK premieres at the festival.

The BFI London Film Festival Awards will return for a third year to recognise excellence from both new and established filmmaking talent. This year’s jurors and full awards shortlists will be announced on 4 October, and the ceremony will take place on 26 October at LSO St Luke’s.

The 55th BFI London Film Festival, in partnership with American Express, will run from 12-27 October.

BFI Members can book festival tickets online from 19 September. Public booking opens 26 September.

So, there was this article, suggesting that frequent referencing of pop culture / contemporary events (I just tried to write ‘contemporanea’, but the internet reliably informs that this is not a word) gives TV shows, and, by extension, other art forms, “a lack of durability.” Are ” ‘footnote shows’,” as the writer Matt Zoller Seitz puts it, “– programs built around references that feel universal and timeless to viewers of a certain age only because it’s what they grew up with,” a thing to worry about?

I’m wading into this debate about 600 internet years late, let’s see if I can even understand what the blazes they’ve been writing about…

So, to Seitz’s original argument. He was watching the Simpsons episode, ‘Krusty Gets Kancelled‘ with his children, and this happened:

Krusty the Klown was on “Springfield Squares,” a game show hosted by moonlighting Springfield newsman Kent Brockman and featuring special guest Rainer Wolfcastle, the action film icon. Brockman introduced Wolfcastle as the star of the new movie, “Help, My Son is a Nerd!”

Wolfcastle: “My son returns from a fancy East Coast college, and I’m horrified to find he’s a nerd.”

Kent Brockman: “Ha, ha, ha! I’m laughing already!”

Rainier Wolfcastle: “It’s not a comedy.”

I laughed at this. My son laughed, too — but after a moment he asked, “Dad, why is that funny?”

I told him it was too complicated to explain, because it was.

[In the article, he does go on to explain, because it really isn't]

Seitz’s explanation in the text is a bit detailed for a seven-year-old, true; I don’t hang out with kids of that age much, but I reckon “the very idea of nerdiness would horrify a gym-muscled dolt like Wolfcastle” – perhaps simplified a bit – would do, coupled with a quick googling of Schwarzenegger for the little guy, because expecting him to spell that is definitely too much.

This is the thing. Googling. Internet search engines. Kids these days [YES I SAID 'KIDS THESE DAYS' I'M NEARLY 28 YOU KNOW] do not have to peruse shelves-full of beautiful leather-bound Encyclopediae Britannicae [is that the plural? I am trying]  to find stuff out, like I did when researching a primary school project on telecommunications in the early ’90s. Good times. They have the online version, or google, or wikipedia, or whatever they want, on the nearest laptop, netbook, iPhone, chip implanted into someone’s brain,* etc. There’s even an imdb for memes, because people are nothing if not servicey, and you need to keep up with which caption is being photoshopped onto what picture of a[n] [in]famous person this week.

That picture is adorable.

Anyway, so, Seitz goes on to admit, “Granted, some of the jokes were inside even for 1992-93 — ‘The Great Gabbo and the Eastern bloc cartoon ‘Worker and Parasite‘, for instance. But most weren’t.”  Well. I was aged 8-10 in that time period, but I doubt that those episodes got to the UK until a fair few years later. I probably didn’t get those things at first, and I didn’t have the internet to ask. I doubt my parents had the relevant pop culture references to hand.

You know what I did? I lived with it. I knew that there’d be another joke to get in a second. These days, the ‘Worker and Parasite’ bit is one of my fave Simpsons things, and Gabbo still creeps me out as much as ever – ventriloquist dummies are never okay [careful, both youtube vids that I'd say are both nsfw].

A houseful of Saddam Hussein lookalikes – part of an intricate Arrested Development injoke

If you clicked on ‘never’ and ‘okay’, you’ll have seen clips from Arrested Development and 30 Rock, two of the most pop-culture-riffing-tastic – and consistently-low-rating-despite-critical-acclaim-tastic – US shows of our times. I love them both. Let’s take a closer look at one of them.

Arrested Development is novelistic in its attention to detail and its capacity to maintain, develop and cross-reference running jokes that originate both within and outside the universe of the show. It’s meme-y. Memesical. Take, for instance, the parodying of Star Wars Kid. George Michael has taped himself playing around with a light saber, and the footage keeps returning to haunt him, giving people even more ammo with which to mock him, much as the real Star Wars Kid must’ve suffered. The footage is funnier each time you see it because it reminds you of the last time GM was embarrassed by its resurfacing, as well as providing fodder for new jokes. It is helpful to know what AD is referencing as you watch these scenes, but I didn’t – I had to google. Then  - I DOUBLED MY LAUGHS!

For a meme that originates within the show, there is ‘Mr. F‘ (not my fave, but it makes my point). ‘Mr. F’ started off as the possible name of a British agent, then as an acronym on a medical bracelet, then as a reference to Tobias Fünke , then… you really have to watch the series to get how all the permutations are funny in themselves and as callbacks. Herein lies the complexity of AD - it’s too much damn work for most viewers. TV is supposed to be easy!

I’m going to go right ahead and assume that a TV show that was cancelled a few years ago cannot be spoiled. If you disagree, well: SPOILERS AHEAD. Give it a couple of paragraphs.

AD‘s running jokes support a plot that seems meandering but eventually reveals itself to have been tightly and intelligently constructed. The series culminates in a heap of barbed Iraq War references, with the revelation that the Bluth family patriarch, George, has been building houses in Iraq, and so, unwittingly, helping the US intelligence services to gather information. The clues are piling up from the pilot episode onwards, but it takes the genius of the show’s creator, Mitch Hurwitz, to pull it all together and deliver a scathing view of the war.

There was no more important subject for a piece of American TV, art or literature to confront in the years that AD aired (2003-6), and the show did it with belly laughs. This is going beyond pop culture references to a programme assuming historico-political knowledge of a certain era, but it still comes down to the same thing: it’s talking about stuff the viewer either knows about or doesn’t know about. The show’s ideal viewer is an information junkie who’ll take pleasure/pride in getting references and joining dots.

And so, inevitably, to Jane Austen and Edward Saïd:

When Culture and Imperialism was published in 1993, the chapter on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park aroused anger among some critics, because of his discussion of the “dead silence” (Austen’s phrase) that occurs when its heroine, Fanny Price, asks her uncle about the slave trade. The family owns a sugar plantation on Antigua, and Fanny is troubled by this, though to no real narrative purpose (the film in which Harold Pinter plays Fanny’s uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, draws on Said’s discussion to make the point more sharply).

Discussing the novel, Said argues that it is silly “to expect Jane Austen to treat slavery with anything like the passion of an abolitionist or a newly liberated slave”. Said refused to engage in what he termed “the rhetoric of blame”, and attack Austen retrospectively for being “white, insensitive, complicit”. Rather, he criticised card-carrying postcolonial critics for such attacks, and insisted that Austen’s novel is a “rich work” whose “aesthetic intellectual complexity” requires a longer and slower analysis. Austen belonged to a slave-owning society, but we should not therefore jettison her novels as “aesthetic frumpery”.

(Tom Paulin in The Guardian, 25 September 2004)

[sorry if this was tl;dr]

The debate about whether things are reference-y enough or not has always been going on. It’s just that the debate for one medium will use more big words than the debate for another.

So: 3 last points…

1) We all come into life in medias res, so we’re always going to have to ask about old things that we don’t get. This is okay.

2) Works of art/comedy/entertainment always carry hallmarks of the time in which they were made, and will always date to some extent. This is also okay.

3) Some people will get some things, some people won’t, so there is always google, and asking A Real Live Person. Only one of these is okay when completing a crossword, but neither is okay when participating in a pub quiz. You there! Put that iPhone down!

In an internet age, things are only going to get more reference-y and memes-y (just as those hyphens will so soon look old-fashioned) as stuff invented on the internet continues to make its way into other media, and other media continues to be discussed and transformed on the internet.

Plus, it’s not as though everyone watches the same four channels all day every day – people get into different TV shows and films at their own pace, so, these days, there’s no guarantee that you can discuss last night’s TV at the watercooler [is this still a thing? For the UK, please substitute "kettle"]. I mean, I still I haven’t watched The Wire. I know, right?!

Matt Zoller Seitz’s concern for his son is really very sweet. And his worry is as old as the hills, as old as ’90s Simpsons references, as old as you feel right now, after reading this lengthy blog post. Sorry. I’ll wrap it up. Who knows if anything will survive intact, to be understood exactly as it was intended? No one knows, and, no, it probably won’t be. No reason to not keep trying to make stuff, though, or to keep trying to understand it, or to keep trying to share it with your kids.

*For anyone managing to read this in 2021 and beyond [I suppose] [Was I right?].

Saw this on the tube today. Loved it.