Spinoza? Chainsaws? Monsters? A CD comprised entirely of early Pulp b-sides?

You'd be a fool not to.

Easily the best band I saw at Supersonic, leaving everything that came in their wake sounding flabby, cumbersome and old. More akin to seeing a techno set than anything, the first band to raise the hairs on my arms through sheer dymnamic invention in a long while.

If we were to try and come up with a canon of Cold World* cinema then Kurosawa’s “Pulse” would certainly have to be included.

Pulse tackles the obligatory social themes of contemporary J-Horror, atomization and hyper-mediation, not to mention Japan’s extravagant suicide rate, via fears over technology as a vehicle for the return of destructive or vengeful spirits and the disease like nature of the curse, expanding them to apocalyptic levels hinted at but not fully revealed at the end of the later Ring.

Ring’s cheerless vision of the family, in which father and son meet each other in the street without acknowledgement, in which both effectively commit suicide (along with the wife/mother) by watching the cursed tape and who must then pass the death-curse on to the father/grandfather in an infinite chain of deferral, is perhaps actually more heartening than Pulses in which not only the family but any kind of compensatory peer group don’t exist at all. Did you have any friends? the heroine asks the nominal hero toward the end as all the energy is drained from the world, Japan implodes in a wave of mass suicides and they try to escape through a monumentally grey and emptied out Tokyo. Maybe one, but she died, comes the reply.

By the film’s end, as the heroine escapes with a few survivors on a ship, it’s obvious that the problem is international, a kind of Global Jonestown. Everywhere else is closed down, but the captain informs us they are still picking up signals from South America, so this is where they decide to head. It’s hard not to chuckle as this brilliant allegory for the depredations of Late Capitalism scans the globe for an alternative and finds it there. Accidental Bolivarianism.



*As an aside, Japanese doom band Corrupted (who sing in Spanish, for some reason) due to play in London and then at The Supersonic festival next week, have released a record called “ El Mundo Frio”.

A thumbprint on the window of a skyscraper.

There’s a two shot sequence in Alexander Payne’s Sideways that’s as good as anything you’re likely to find anywhere. Payne’s work, Election, About Shmidt and Sideways have garnered him a rep as the middlebrow filmmaker’s filmmaker, but this shouldn’t be held against him as the fact is his sheer artfulness is often dizzying.

Sideways is easy to take for granted, it glides pleasantly and intelligently along, beautifully filmed and framed, features stellar performances from its leads, a great script: a superior, more mordant, literary Indy Rom-com and, as befits a film about quiet despair, the incremental daily defeats that swamp lives, the small concessions or acts of kindness that salvage them, Payne’s technique is often unobtrusive. An Autumnal tone-poem in dusky amber and gold Sideways is a buddy-movie in which the two opposed central characters, refreshingly, learn nothing from each other via their week long stint together wine tasting and playing golf in California in the run up to the irresponsible Jack, a kind of ludic Prince of Bad Faith, getting married. Miles, his chaperone, is a depressed would-be-writer struggling to get over his divorce and certain that life has nothing left to offer him. Much of the film’s comedy revolves around the central pairs understandable frustration with each other.

The sequence in question comes about two thirds in, after Jack has had his nose broken by the enraged Stephanie, his latest conquest, who has just discovered he’s due to get married. Nonetheless, Jack proceeds to chat up the plain, overweight waitress in the Steakhouse they’ve fetched up in who has recognized him as an actor from a hospital-set soap, much to Miles’ dismay.

He decides to head to the toilet to escape, a strategy we’ve seen him use disastrously before with Virginia Madsen, when his nerve fails and he misses the moment only to try and claw it back a few minutes later. That sequence is in itself wonderfully done, the way we the camera gets up close to Miles as he urges himself on in the bathroom mirror and then hangs back peeping between its fingers in the doorway as he goes on alone into the kitchen for the rejected kiss.

This time the effect is beautifully comic, gently absurd. Where’s the bathroom? Miles asks and is told - it's over there, past the buffalo-. The buffalo has immediate comic resonance because it emphasises the lowbrow tackiness of the restaurant and Mile’s unexpressed sense of disdain for it as well as accentuating the bovine stupidity of Jack and the girl’s exchange, which continues as Miles disappears off screen, Jack, nose in plaster, grinning in a goofily winning way up at the gullible girl. The next shot, not exactly a matching shot but a kind of visual equivalent of consonance at least, frames the stuffed Buffalo’s face up close, staring out at the audience as Miles strolls laconically down the corridor toward the bathroom. He flicks the tiniest of looks up to camera as he enters, then the camera pulls round to frame the door swinging closed and the sign MEN is held on for a few seconds. It’s a sly and subtle breaching of the fourth wall, this sudden onscreen exclamation, the quick look to camera suggesting we are either in Miles’ mind at that moment as he struggles to contain his disapproval at Jack’s “plight” (his insatiable libido) or the director’s, suddenly puncturing and punctuating the film with this exasperated aside on the audience’s behalf. Either way it’s a bravura moment that partly militates against those where the film almost gets a little too objectively-correlative for its own good (the discussion about why Miles likes Pinot, the bottle of 61 he’s got hanging a round and which is close to spoiling etc).

I’m currently watching and re-watching a lot of films as part of a longer piece I’m writing on British film, so I’ve decided to start blogging some rough pieces on a variety of films, Brit and non-Brit, as I watch. Expect them to be pretty broad.

Here’s the first.

The Essential Elements of a Hip-Hop classic.

“What about homosexuality Tony? Do you like men? Do you like to dress up like a woman?”

Re-watching De Palma’s Scarface (watching it really, I last saw it when I was about fourteen) I was struck immediately by HOW camp it is.

We’d never expect De-Palma to be too far away from the operatic or melodramatic, and the film is essentially a remake of a melodrama anyway, but driven along by Moroder’s cheesily eupeptic synth motifs (tellingly, variations on a theme for both wife and sister) and Scarfioti’s extravagant sets the whole film looks to be set in the kind of revisionist Sirkian non-space that Todd Haynes, for all his gusto, was just too self-conscious to get to in Far From Heaven. The shots alternate between a kind of nostalgic, Fifties soft-focus Edward Hopper and a hyper-bright David Hockney, along with a mawkish, idealised Homesteadery in the domestic scenes with mother and sister and the requisite angelic lighting effects on Mastrantonio’s face*

From the start, with Pacino’s lispy, pouting, alternately unctuous and defiant Tony Montana being predatorily circled by tough-guy crotches ( the neophyte’s first night in the Gay bar ) until a hand strikes in across the side of his face, by his open mouth, fingering his scar, asking him if he got it from “eating pussy”, you know you’re in for a long mince down Queer street. Indeed, it’s hard not to read Pacino’s scar as an emblem not of his tough guy past or his fundamentally flawed character, the outward manifestation of the greed that undoes him, but as a symbol of his repressed gayness, a big pussy if you will, that cuts across his eye. Tony Montana is looking at the world with half a woman’s perspective. Queer eye for the straight guy. The rest of the film is a parade of camp icons, from F. Murray Abraham’s prissy henchmen through to the suavely refined aristocratic Bolivian drug-lord who tells Pacino pointedly and hilariously, twice, that Montana should never try to fuck him. Most significant of all is of course Tony’s friendship with his boy, Manolo, a doe-eyed, hip-swivelling Greaser, who he eventually kills for getting married to his sister.

There’s a couple of extremely protracted close ups, complete with over-zealous rage-motif on the soundtrack, on Tony’s Queer-eye: first when he watches Mastrantonio flirting with a guy and getting her ass grabbed (and loving it!) in the disco, another in the murder of Manny. The standard interpretation is that Manny has broken his word and Tony is obsessed with his sister as a reserve of purity in a corrupt world: not my reading. Both Tony and Manny are singularly asexual in the film, there is no sex scene between Pacino and Pfeiffer, she’s the marriage-of-convenience/trophy wife, nor equally do we ever see Manny getting laid, and his couple of onscreen attempts at picking up broads are singularly unsuccessful. In fact, his pursuit of Tony’s sister is pure Happy Days' wholesomeness, as is the cornball meringue castle they live in, all white and light compared to Montana’s blood red, fur-lined den which actually seems to have been designed to look like a huge Pussy. This could of course represent the womblike safety that Montana yearns for, but given the way the film reads from the start it’s hard not to see it as one more expression of Tony’s femininity, especially when he emerges with his little friend levelled at crotch height to repulse the men trying to invade.

If there is a more exquisitely camp moment than the scene in which Pfeiffer and Pacino marry and the assembled throng skip giddly down to gaze at the three-way symbolic tiger ( taming the beast of American capitalism, melting Pfieffer’s hauteur and burying own illegitimate desire) that Tony has bought and chained up by the lake I’d love to see it**. Montana’s rage at the end and his murder of Manny is only explicable in that he has betrayed him by refusing to live in Queer-limbo as Montana’s unrewarded fag-hag. Equally I take his sister to represent exactly that part of himself that he can not express and that must remain dormant, hence his rage in the club when she disappears off into the men’s toilets (!) to get banged by some louche, cocksure bozo. By the time we get to the film’s infamous finale in which a gang of invading boys get introduced to a shrieking and flouncing Tony’s “little fwiend” before he submits to a bukkake bullet-fest and finally (FINALLY) gets nailed from behind with a big, long, shiny shotgun the film has entered a zone of delirious, hilarious kitsch that in fairness, one should only expect from arch-Queen De-Palma.

After watching the extras, including the Def Jam homage to a Hip-Hop classic (!), I watched the deleted scenes. Yep. They deleted two takes of scene that's an expression of love between Tony and Manny, which stops just short of a kiss and is approvingly watched by an audience of Trannies, in a part of the dorm where Montana just happens to have made his bed. The implication in both scenes is that maybe Manny is a little uncomfortable with Tony’s love for him, in the second that Tony may have been “partying” with the drag queens. Either way it contains the immortal double-entendre, “Assholes drive me crazy, Manny.” There is also a later scene in which Mastrantonio is confused for his wife as he buys her a sexy-but-chaste white dress that he himself is just too short to carry off, and which she changes into in the final scene when she confronts Tony over his desire. He doesn’t want to sleep with you love, he wants to be you!

Tony Montana, a great big faggot, just waiting to get fucked.

* there is I think a kind of bleeding through from Scarface to Blue Velvet to Cronenburg’s A History Of Violence/Eastern Promise which I may well elaborate on later, especially as my post on Lynch is well overdue.

**although the sequence directly after Manny’s murder with Mastrantonio holding his corpse (after the extreme close up on Pacino’s angry face/eye and a slow motion run down the stairs in another floaty white gown for Mastrantonio) in which she tells Pacino, “we just got married yesterday, we were going to tell you today” surely isn’t going to get beaten for mordantly camp bathos anytime soon.

is it the wrong moment to link to this?