A Week In Film #124: Slow

3:10 To Yuma
Remake of Delmer Dave’s 1957 Western by James Mangold (Cop Land, Walk The Line), based n a story by Elmore Leonard, with Christian Bale a downtrodden, one-legged farmer trying to do the right thing. Russell Crowe is the amoral outlaw he is determined to see onto a train to prison. A little too flashy, and not up there with the classic revisionist Westerns, but efficient.

Step Brothers
Meaningless fun fare from the Judd Apatow stable, directed by Adam McKay (Anchorman, The Other Guys etc).

John C Reilly and Will Ferrell as fortysomething idlers forced together when each’s parent (with whom they still live, naturally) get married. Inconsequential, but diverting.

M26. 26 March. March 26. See you on the streets!

Via Deterritorial Support Group.

Useful links:

• FITwatch (includes pics of notorious cops to keep an eye out for)
• Freedom Press (lots of updates, legal advice etc)
• Green & Black Cross
• Legal Defence & Monitoring Group
• London IndyMedia update on blocs & routes

Key messages*:

1. NO COMMENT to all police questions
2. GIVE NO DETAILS IN A STOP & SEARCH and only give them if arrested and in a police station
3. USE A GOOD SOLICITOR eg Bindman’s, Birnberg Pierce, Hodge Jones & Allen

* Per GBC.

Sub Domination #006: Year Of The Dragon

Some ominous words from Michael Cimino’s flawed-but-watchable genre thriller Year Of The Dragon:

Who would dare to attack me here in Chinatown?

They sounded Canadian to me, dude…

…they were sent from Toronto by White Powder Ma.

Told you!

Paris, Bristol, Warsaw: Street art and the art of the cinema poster (Polskim stylu)

I took these pictures a while back, but I lost them on my pootie and only just found them again. They’re of some paint-ups by Paris (I think), one over the old Target Electronics shop on Cherry Lane near St James’ Barton, the other on the back gate of the Full Moon/Eclipse (AKA Attic) over the other side of Stokes Croft/North Street.

Whilst the second one clearly features Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, for me both bring to mind the marvellous creativity of Polish film posters.

If you don’t know what I’m on about, have a read through this fascinating article on the subject from Smashing Magazine. It’s long, detailed, and thoroughly illustrated, so it may take a while to load.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Fifties and the early Sixties mark the Golden Age of the Polish poster. Like everything else, the film industry was controlled by the state. There were two main institutions responsible for commissioning poster designs: Film Polski (Polish Film) and Centrala Wynajmu Filmow – CWF (Movie Rentals Central). They commissioned not graphic designers but artists and as such each one of them brought an individual voice to the designs.

The School of the Polish Poster is therefore not unified but rather diverse in terms of style. It wasn’t until the Mid-Fifities, though, that the school flourished. The fierce Stalinist rule had been lifted, once again leaving room for artistic expression. The classic works were created in the next ten years. Three important remarks must be made. First, at the time the poster was basically the only allowed form of individual artistic expression.

Second, the state wasn’t concerned much with how the posters looked. Third, the fact that the industry was state-controlled turned out to be a blessing in disguise: working outside the commercial constraints of a capitalist economy, the artists could fully express their potential. They had no other choice but to become professional poster designers and that’s why they devoted themselves so thoroughly to this art.

The Polish film poster is artist-driven, not studio-driven. It is more akin to fine art than commercial art. It is painterly rather than graphic. What sets the Polish poster apart from what we’re used to see in the West is a general disregard for the demands of the big studios. The artists requested and received complete artistic freedom and created powerful imagery inspired by the movies without actually showing them: no star headshots, no movie stills, no necessary direct connection to the title.

They are in this regard similar to the work of Saul Bass, a rare example of a Hollywood artist who enjoyed total freedom from the studios. Next to a typical Hollywood film poster with the giant headshots of the latest movie star and the title set in, you guessed it, Trajan Pro, the Polish film poster still looks fresh and inspiring today.

I think my interest in this sort of stuff was first piqued on a visit to Central Europe in the early 1990s. Then I had picked up a few local comics, and was thrilled to discover that, impenetrable language aside, they used exactly the same design grammar that any child who grew up with British comics was familiar with; yet at the same time, the draughtsmanship was almost completely alien to someone raised on DC Thomson and IPC fare – sloppy curves, weird spot colour, disdain for straight lines intermixed with bizarrely angular scratchiness… And I noticed this type of design extended beyond the pages of children’s comics – it was on walls, posters, street corners, even on chocolate bar wrappers (Ama, I seem to remember, was a particularly good example of this odd new visual language).

Through the years I started to gradually pick up more and more of this sort of stuff – completely un-British, un-’Western’, and yet at the same time thoroughly British and thoroughly ‘Western’ (it’s just difficult sometimes to recognise that your own foundations have been built into the earthworks created by someone else…) Public information signage and propaganda posters and commercial art (qv Mucha) were the areas where I found it easiest to see the parallels, the common ground; but it was in the Soviet-era Polish posters for Western movies I found the most pleasing pictures, slick airbrush art discarded in favour of strong, stylised designs focusing on concepts. I mean, if they can make crappy Whoopi Goldberg vehicle Fatal Beauty look worth a watch, anything’s possible…

These days it seems I’m not the only one with a fondness for Polish posters – there are whole websites devoted to them, and articles in UK newspapers like The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph on them too.

My favourite? Michal Ksiazek’s take on Blade Runner, known in Poland as Łowca Androidów (AKA Robot Hunter).

Taking The Fall #009: The Omen

Haven’t rinsed my TTF pic collection for a while, so here’s a classic: the Antichrist’s stepmom Katherine Thorn (Lee Remick) goes for a burton in the excellent horror The Omen (original, natch). Beautifully executed stunt and FX, beautifully edited together, with a beautiful use of tension. Plus it inspired Kubrick (The Shining) and Jim Cameron (Aliens), so kudos to director Richard Donner.

From Here To Shiternity #033: GoldenEye

A Soviet soldier makes the mistake of going number twos when the double-ohs are on the prowl in Pierce Brosnan’s Bond debut GoldenEye…

Mystery Pic #062

Usual rules apply – if you recognise the film, put your answer in the comments.

ETA:

Again with the no answers! It’s Frank Pierson’s interesting-but-not-wholly-successful adaptation of the Le Carré spy novel The Looking Glass War.

NTBCW #003: Keith David & David Keith

Two excellent character actors, same names, different order…

Keith David: 190 roles across 33 years, including The Thing, Platoon, The Quick And The Dead, Dead Presidents, Pitch Black; gap-toothed and dark-skinned.

David Keith: 105 roles across 34 years, including Brubaker, An Officer And A Gentleman, White Of The Eye, Men Of Honor, Behind Enemy Lines; cleft-chinned and pale-skinned.

There, did that help?

A Week In Film #123: Vinyl flooring

Dirty
Two dirty cops (Clifton Collins Jnr and Cuba Gooding Jnr) in a dirty anti-gang unit (led by Keith David and Cole Hauser) get up to gangster naughtiness in a dirty city (LA).

Some flashy, arty touches from director Chris Fisher (who was also responsible for the similarly aim-high-deliver-low Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders) and some decent character actors (Robert LaSardo, Wood Harris) aren’t enough to raise the game beyond watchable. It has no coherence, no backbone, and the few flourishes there are just leave you wondering why nobody thought to tone it up at the script stage.

Seems to be trying to bolt on all the guilt/redemption themes and hallucinatory visuals from Take to the Rampart-style cop scandal of Training Day or Street Kings. This definitely does not work.

Mystery Pic #061

Any takers? My guess would be no, but if anyone out there can identify this film, I will definitely owe them a piwo…

ETA:

My beer is safe – it’s Polish comedy Seksmisja AKA Sexmission.

Zelig #001: Jonathan Stratt

So, new section: Zelig, for those actors who pop up all over the shop, but never really win the curtain calls – here we pay tribute to the journeymen, the character players, the stalwart presences upon our screens…

Here we kick off with Jonathan Stratt, popping up as a building site foreman speaking to Mo (Siobhan Redmond) in third series Between The Lines episode ‘Blooded’, about animal rights activists, big pharma and industrial espionage.

Originally I was going to stick him in YGAS, but then after flicking through his IMDb entry, I realised it wasn’t so much an early bit part before his big break, so much as yet another bit part in a career mostly marked by bit parts; he was recognisable not for what he was soon to do, but by what he has always done: solid background work, a reliable supporting artiste.

Just look through his CV: ten coppers, six cab drivers, two builders, a couple of military types, two robbers, a pair of doormen, a ‘spivvy passenger’, one generic heavy – and in six years of small parts in The Bill alone two Terrys, a Barry, a Dave and a Steve. Can you get any more everyman than that?

Of course, even the most humble of onscreen apparitions has their moment of fleeting glory, when face fits the part and character rubs off on the writers enough to toss their scriptmonkey the bone of recurrence, and I would say for Jonathan it would have been Brad Williams in EastEnders. Brad, you may remember, was Den Watts’ cut-out to The Firm, a low-level gangster given the job of acting as messenger between his mob bosses and their semi-tame pub landlord. He was also the one who burned down the Dagmar, and helped Den escape after the higher-ups in the Firm decided he needed to be got rid of and had him kidnapped pending whatever gruesome end they could devise for him – thus securing for Stratt a certain amount of importance in the canon, and nearly three years of occasional appearances as the same character.

Why a solid professional like Jonathan Stratt hasn’t been offered more and meatier parts is perhaps a symptom of the perennial problem facing most actors; those considered too unflashy, too ‘ordinary’, or too working class (except in a to-be-laughed-at-sneeringly fashion) are almost always overlooked in favour of whizz-bang bourgeois types with a pretty smile and an ingratiating wit. A similar fate seems to have befallen the great Frank Harper, though at least Frank has had his occasional big day out (awesome in A Room For Romeo Brass, almost the only decent thing about South West Nine).

If you’re out there, Jonathan, keep on keeping on!

PS If you want to offer kudos to some unsung hero, let me know – post a comment, email me (it’s a test), or drop I a tweet.

Green Scare book – sample chapter now available!

Will Potter has been following with interest and writing about the ‘Green Scare’ – by which governments, police agencies and corporations characterise non-violent environmental direct action as ‘eco-terrorism’ or similar – for several years now, and in April his book about the subject, ‘Green Is The New Red’, will be published.

If you are in the Washington, DC area on either Tuesday 19th or Saturday 23rd April, then you may want to crash a reading event or the launch party – more details on Will’s blog.

For the rest of us, there’s a sample chapter available for free…

If you’re not quite sure what this ‘Green Scare’ really is – or suspect that it’s a hullabaloo about nothing, then you’d be as well to check out Will’s intro to the subject:

“The No. 1 domestic terrorism threat,” says John Lewis, a top FBI official, “is the eco-terrorism, animal-rights movement.”

The animal rights and environmental movements, like every other social movement throughout history, have both legal and illegal elements. There are people who leaflet, write letters, and lobby. There are people who protest and engage in non-violent civil disobedience. And there are people, like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, who go out at night with black masks and break windows, burn SUVs, and release animals from fur farms.

Animal rights and environmental advocates have not flown planes into buildings, taken hostages, or sent Anthrax through the mail. They have never even injured anyone. In fact, the only act of attempted murder in the history of the U.S. animal rights movement was coordinated by corporate provocateurs. Yet the FBI ranks these activists as the top domestic terrorism threat. And the Department of Homeland Security lists them on its roster of national security threats, while ignoring right-wing extremists who have bombed the Oklahoma City federal building, murdered doctors, and admittedly created weapons of mass destruction.

…Fear. It’s all about fear. The point is to protect corporate profits by instilling fear in the mainstream animal rights and environmental movements—and every other social movement paying attention—and make people think twice about using their First Amendment rights.

Industry groups say “this is just the starting gun” for the Green Scare. But this could be the starting gun for activists as well. I’ve talked with hundreds of activists around the country over the years. There’s a lot of fear. But there’s also a lot of rage. And that’s a very good thing.

Because today’s repression may mimic many of the tactics of the Red Scare, but today’s response cannot. It’s not enough to cowardly distance ourselves from anyone branded a communist, I mean, terrorist. Naming names and making loyalty oaths didn’t protect activists then, and it won’t protect activists now.

The only way activists, and the First Amendment, are going to get through this is by coming out and confronting it head-on. That means reaching out to mainstream Americans and telling them that labeling activists as terrorists wastes valuable anti-terrorism resources and is an insult to everyone who died in the twin towers. That means reaching out to other activists and saying loud and clear that these activists are just the canaries in the mine.

Together, we can stop they cycle of history repeating itself.

Neon #002: Batman Returns

Crappy film, Batman Returns, but this is a nice shot of Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer) in her apartment after first becoming Catwoman (hence the cutesy ‘HELLO THERE’ sign being smashed down to the more sinister ‘HELL HERE’).

Piss & Vinegar #068: Generation Kill (E7)

Steady on, old boy! You’re not in Okie no more! A last gush from Generation Kill.

Piss & Vinegar #067: Generation Kill (E2)

These boys just can’t turn off the taps, can they? Yet more wetness from Generation Kill.