Tag Archives: Cinema

Quarter of a Century

01/16/2012 By in Musings Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Glasgow is a city with a brooding gothic soul. A city I once wrote about regularly, even if it was just the banality of routine. With its violence menace, religious iconography and twee bourgeois sensibility, Glasgow captured my imagination at a particular period in time. Back when I described the insignificant truth of this solitary journey to the cinema on a cold weekday evening. A melancholy love letter so to speak. I had just turned twenty-five. 

Tuesday, 10th January 2006

Moth to a Flame

I go the cinema when I’m bored and lonely. It all begins with an over familiar route through the West End and after several twists and turns I will magically stride through Garnethill down towards the largest cinema building on Planet Earth. The beginning of the journey is arguably the most comfortable upon the eye, it is invariably dark and rectangle shades of affluent light can be seen frozen behind coloured glass. I walk across the Byres Road up towards Great Gibson Street, where mercenary cranes hang over an underdeveloped patch of soil; it is a docile but rapidly changing stretch of road.

The sharp gradient tightens the muscles on both of my legs and I have reached the peak of the road, where in sudden twist of fate I feel compelled to go down the hill towards Gibson Street. I used to live around here, the car park is still a muddy disgrace, littered with crass aluminium shells and alien sized craters. The park dominates the area, it is a spooky place and lit only by a curved silver moon; its iron gates lie open but I dare not enter. I stride past fancy Lebanese and Scottish restaurants, it is an ordinary night but they both appear full of people. I cross over the gentle river, there are no grebes or mallards to be seen and only now do I start to accelerate towards my destination. I twist past two Protestant churches and a cold young fox lying dead in the leaves. The road ahead is empty and without a soul, it appears darker now, the motorway is within walking distance.

I head towards Charing Cross, it is very quiet and all the cars have gone. It is not the right time but I prefer to take to the skies than walk alongside them. I adjust my legs and walk over an arched granite causeway; it elevates me above the carnage of the roads and provides access to the mysterious ways of Garnethill. I am in the city now, there something sinister about this place, something threatening, although my mind is playing tricks on me. It is dark right now and no one is here. The street is awash with neat green lawns and vacancy signs, there are places to stay on my left, while to my right there are scattered bins and graffiti strewn fire exits.

I walk ominously closer and there is a Catholic Church approaching, which is separated by yew, rowan and a piercing iron fence. This secretive place of worship performs mass in Latin and the priest is kept hidden behind a secret silver veil. The church is small but intimidating and I don’t think it likes me at all. I walk on alone and without a God, the winter air is biting my cheeks, my hands are beginning to get cold now.

I walk towards the famous art school and admire its subtle and decorative style, there are no students in the nearby eighties lounge. I am almost there now and feel like a distant stranger, people are on the move down below me, there is a collection of buckfast and vodka sitting alongside a corrugated steel gate. The streets are colliding into one, there are cars passing by me, it is now sparkling with light and the silence has gone.

Dreams of a Life

01/08/2012 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In 2003, the skeleton of 38-year-old Joyce Carol Vincent was discovered in a North London bedsit with the television still on. She had been dead for three years. Her remains were found alongside half-wrapped Christmas presents and the haunting flicker of BBC One. Joyce’s body was so badly decomposed she could only be identified by comparing dental records with an old holiday photograph of her smiling. How she died doesn’t actually matter. What is truly shocking is how someone could remain dead for three years without anybody noticing. In a ghoulish tale of neglect and social dislocation, Dreams of a Life is a story about youth, friendship and missed opportunities. With no family and her four sisters refusing to take part, the docudrama pieces together Joyce Vincent’s anonymous life.

Directed by Carol Morley, the film interviews a handful of former-work colleagues, who reminisce about the water cooler moments and office parties they shared with Joyce in the 1980s. Now in their forties, there was unnerving sense of how our loves and opportunities narrow with each passing year. How meaningful their friendship with Joyce stretched beyond the superficialities of office small talk is questionable. Likewise her ex-flatmates appeared genuine but again unaware of her true character. Nobody it seemed knew Joyce Vincent. A vivacious and charismatic girl in her prime, the former City girl had never been shy of male attention. However, like so many troubled women, men were a shady reference in her life. With her emotional rock coming in the shape of a bird-faced colleague, she drifted in and out of a series of broken relationships and spent her final years in a women’s refuge.

With the gaps in the narrative proving frustratingly esoteric towards the end, the story of Joyce Vincent’s life remains incomplete. Set in the early 2000s and in the absence of the social networking websites that dominate our lives today, Joyce left this world without even a missed call. It is bad enough turning forty let alone living on your own. As the years slowly become decades, friends will inevitably come and go and a once beautiful, popular woman ended up spending her final moments utterly alone. Like a modern tale from Edgar Allen Poe the bank continued to pay her bills but nobody wrote or called. Invisible transactions kept on flowing all the while a scrambled television poured life into Joyce Vincent’s unvisited tomb.

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The Referees (Les Arbitres)

06/04/2011 By in Sport Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Football refereeing is a thankless task and in the modern era of multiple camera angles, buffoon pundits and Twitter. Anyone wishing to be the man in the middle will already understand that it is not a normal job; it’s a means of venting your frustrations on the rest of society. Offering a quirky and narcissistic insight into the world of football referees, Belgian film-maker Yves Hinant has produced a fascinating documentary about the men in black. With exclusive fly-on-the-wall access at the Euro 2008 finals, the film delves into the referee’s world as they face abuse from angry managers, death threats and scrutiny from a hostile media.

Revealing the mic’d conversations between referees, players and assistants, Swiss referee Massimo Busacca sets the tone early on by protesting to a Greek defender, ‘I am not God. We make also mistakes’. England’s Howard Webb will certainly agree with him. The bald Yorkshireman provides the film with its central character and is determined to referee the final. A man of few words and firm gestures, things don’t go to plan when he gives an offside goal against Poland and is compared to Hitler on YouTube.

Death threats are no laughing matter but there is something highly amusing about the circus that followed Howard Webb’s decision. His family were hounded by angry Polish fans and Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, admitted that he wanted to kill the English referee for his “obvious error”. In the modern game what matters is not the referee’s decision but what they are talking about in the television studio. Male bonding is at the heart of the Howard Webb crisis and the brusque manner in which the officials rally around the English referee shows how seriously they fret over their mistakes.

As the cameras followed the referees posing in their hotel rooms and singing along to Boyzone on their way to the stadium, the officials who are often demonised as being robotic or inhuman appear to be charming, vulnerable and highly sensitive men. Some of the vainer officials are comically entertaining and while refereeing is fervently individualistic by its very nature, they are a persecuted breed and need to stick together.

What is most striking about the film on a technical level is how the referees constantly talk and swear at their assistants. More often than not it is the assistant referee who alerts the referee to incidents of foul play. Their expletive bickering offers a muffled insight into how quickly the decisions are made and the lightning speed in which the referees have to make a decision. As most football fans already know, the referees only get to see it once and this fantastic documentary offers a small window into their private world of imperfection.

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East End Film Festival

04/30/2011 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

As a global audience of billions watched Prince William and Harry arrive at Westminster Abbey dressed up as The Libertines. Spare a thought for the royalist street urchins Pete Doherty and Carl Barat, who as part of the 10th East End Film Festival, will remain forever young in their famous 2001 attire as part of Roger Sargent’s exhibition at Spitalfields Market. Like the well-wishers camping outside Buckingham Palace, The Libertines believed in a poetic vision of Arcadia, a seemingly more innocent age, which in the years and decades to come, many bunting flappers will realise has no grounding in reality. The festival’s opening gala began with the world premiere of ‘There Are No Innocent Bystanders’  inside a 1930’s Art-Deco cinema in Limehouse. This much anticipated documentary explores the mythology driving the group, and their emotional ties with the East End.

Opening the festival with a retrospective documentary about a by-gone era proved to be a masterstroke in light of the Royal Wedding celebrations. Old Spitalfields Market looked like East Belfast with Union Jacks fluttering on display on every street corner. Cider street parties were all the rage, and the stylish kids descended upon The Water Poet in Norton Folgate, which is a gentrified cobbled area popular with affluent students and RBS bankers. Unruly boys who don’t know how to behave would have been at home in Norton Folgate in the 1700s. Back then it was entirely responsible for its own affairs and thus developed a reputation for debauchery. Petty crime went sky high, travellers were robbed, traitors were hidden and the area became a haven for criminals, prostitutes and drunkards.

Although times have changed and the cobbled hooves of Spitalfields appear to have been scrubbed clean with a gigantic toothbrush. Sordid outbreaks of plaque and decay have not left the East End entirely though. Instead it has spread eastwards towards forgotten districts such as Stepney Green. Deep inside this Stalinist council estate, most visitors are more likely to get stitched up than enjoy a festival screening with foreign subtitles. However, the Genesis Cinema is one of the finest independent theatres in the area. A 1980s throwback with dodgy seats, popcorn and affordable ticket prices, and while it might look a bit rough on the outside, beauty, as you know, lies within.

As Spitfires roared over Britannia’s nostalgic skies, the East End Film Festival celebrates the lives of little people in their little houses. With intelligent foreign titles, British debut features and extraordinary archive footage from the First World War up to the Golden Jubilee. The East End Film Festival thankfully remains a wily celebration of London’s rainbow population in what feels like an increasingly deferential age.

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Jameson Cult Film Club

03/04/2011 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

As rock star queues spiralled around the Royal College of Surgeons to watch Monsters at the Jameson Cult Film Club . Fans wanting to “check in” were unlikely to have been disappointed by the whisky cocktails, gas masks and Q&A session with Gareth Edwards. By embracing the seductive charms of social media, the Jameson brand has tapped into the pop-up cinema movement pioneered by the Secret Cinema. With corporate multiplexes providing an increasingly bland experience, social cinema movements such as the JCFC appear to represent the ‘Big Society’ in action.

Although with unprecedented public demand ensuring a complete sell out, many fans were abandoned outside cursing the pre-event hype and unseasonably cold weather. Drinks vouchers are never going to compensate for previously reliable public services. But fans who were lucky enough to step inside the “infected zone” quickly found themselves surrounded by actors in gas masks and Che Guevara inspired armed guards. Once inside the wooden halls of the Royal College, media savvy fans checked in on Facebook and received a complimentary bag of horror DVDs.

Gareth Edwards budget cult thriller ‘Monsters’ provided the entertainment and on taking your seat inside the old lecture hall, the true power of social cinema really came to light. By huddling together on a creaky floor the JCFC provided a greater sense of warmth and intimacy than you would ever find on the multiplex slopes of Cineworld.

The pop-up screening almost felt like a religious sermon as people sat together in cinematic unison. On stepping aside half-way through the screening, I stood and watched hundreds of faces silently entranced by a dusty green light. It was only then did I feel the emotional power of a shared experience in an increasingly fragmented world. A theme for our times, indeed.

The King’s Speech

01/13/2011 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

The King’s Speech is expected to triumph at the 83rd Academy Awards next month and following the five star reviews from the international press. It is clear the film has managed to strike an emotional cord not just at home but across the world. But while this superbly acted drama produces some fine performances from Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter. The underlying message of the King’s Speech remains one of ceremonial privilege and grovelling deference to the upper crust of society.

Although the essence of the story is of a reluctant king trying to overcome his phobia of public speaking, the film only serves to reinforce Britain’s constitutional monarchy. Despite an outstanding performance from Colin Firth, the film veers towards ordinariness and never rises above the stiff upper lip clichés of old. While it would be foolish to disregard the cinematic elegance and superb casting, the King’s Speech is an essentially ossified picture and follows a predictable narrative of when the upper-classes and commoners collide.

In one of the most poignant and memorable scenes of the King’s Speech, a young Prince Albert (Colin Firth) arrives at Wembley Stadium on the bequest of his father King George V for the 1925 British Empire Exhibition. On approaching the microphone and staring into thousands of expectant faces, anyone who has ever been a nervous best man will recall the horrifying spectre of choking on your words. On being forced to endure this terrifying trauma, the reticent Prince did what most people do in times of stress and reverted to type.

On striking this emotional cord, the future King offered his subjects a truly egalitarian moment of fallibility and set the tone thereafter. Albert’s nervous stammer offered a rare glimpse of royal vulnerability but what followed was frustratingly conservative. The Kings Speech might well have been written, produced and conceived in England but its distribution was almost exclusively geared towards US audiences. It is here where the problem lies and the King’s Speech only serves to reinforce a series of royal stereotypes and deference to the ruling order.

Frustratingly the most electrifying sub-plot of the King’s Speech, the 1936 abdication of King Edward VIII (Guy Pearce) is glossed over. The ambivalent relationship between Prince Albert and the flamboyant Nazi sympathiser would have provided a fascinating insight into the darker elements loitering around Buckingham Palace. Instead King Edward is briefly exposed as an obnoxious bully with a sexually active American mistress. By failing to explore their relationship, the King’s Speech missed a great opportunity and is passed over for a more predictable route to stardom. The fawning press adulation is almost certain to ensure that The King’s Speech is crowned at the Oscars next month, and while deeply moving in places, the linear predictability of this story was never in doubt.

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The Illusionist

08/10/2010 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

After leaving my university town of Glasgow in search of a media career in London, I have often found myself trying to preserve my Scottish identity. While I have always considered nationalism to be deeply unattractive, I remain fiercely aware of my cultural background and feel it’s important that I never forget my rural upbringing. By living and working in a global metropolis such as London, I fear my Scottishness will become so diluted that I won’t know who I am anymore.

Nostalgia can be very misleading but after watching Slyvain’s Chomet’s animation The Illusionist , I immediately knew that I wanted to return to Scotland for the festival season. Chomet’s visual love affair with the Scottish capital is a melancholy fairy tale and offers a romantic throwback to a seemingly more innocent era of steam engines, roast fires, whisky drams, red post boxes and candlelit evenings.

The Illusionist is about an elderly French magician who has become increasingly marginalised and ignored after the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll. Unable to sustain his vaudeville show in France, the magician travels over the English Channel and performs on stage in empty theatres in the far north of Scotland. Such is the remoteness of the Hebrides they represent one of the few remaining indigenous communities in Britain, unaffected by the cultural impact of America in the 1950s.

On a remote Gaelic island, the magician meets a young girl called Alice, who secretly follows him back to Edinburgh. They quickly form a paternal relationship and spend their lives surrounded by eccentric miscreants, loners and forgotten souls. They are the moths of the world with troubled hearts, living beyond their means in a cosy domestic abode. Struggling to communicate in their adopted tongue, the pair slowly drift apart in a sad and beautiful tale of two outsiders trying to find their way in a lonely world.

Slyvain Chomet creates a melancholy vision of Scottish capital and it is set around the death of the British Empire. This fading spectre of imperialism would have been keenly felt in Edinburgh, which even to this day represents a kitsch romantic version of Scotland wrapped in a kilt and colonial union jack. Chomet’s love affair with Scotland explores the green fringes of the city and he takes you on a cinematic journey northwards towards the Forth Railway Bridge and the luminous fields of Fife. While to the south you can marvel at the gentle rolling hills of Lothian, which fades aimlessly into the horizon like an electric green sea.

Edinburgh is a beautiful place and during the summer it is comparable to classic European cities like Paris or Prague, especially when every accent in earshot is almost inevitably from outside of these shores. What is so remarkable about The Illusionist is the grainy imperfection it lends to its adopted landscape. This beautiful animation captures the sensation of walking through the Old Town at night, where it literally feels like you are walking in ink.

Chomet’s elegiac vision of Écosse is tinged with a homely sentimentality and dangerous as this might be, I am looking forward to walking in the Illusionist’s footsteps this summer. The textural grace of the Scottish tongue may be slipping from my grasp but I hope to reacquaint myself with my homeland, while listening to the sound of pneumatic tyres rippling over the cobbles of the past.

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