Clive Davis

MANNERS

A typically thoughtful post by Reihan Salam on the difficulties of blogging and being thin-skinned: "I'm just so convinced (wrongly, perhaps) that I'm a decent guy that I'm genuinely bummed when people electronically conclude that I should be stabbed."

Another etiquette story: a few days before she left for India, my wife rode her usual commuter train from Paddington. In one of the carriages, two heavily-built young black guys were playing a single hip-hop track over and over at deafening volume. People could hear it at the far end of the train. The noise droned on for around half-an-hour until the two amateur DJs got off at their stop. No one intervened or complained. Heads were buried in newspapers. My wife, who arrived home with a mini-migraine, thinks it would have been crazy to have tried anything, knowing the risks. I think I would have got a group of men together to ask for the music to be turned down. Then again, I wasn't travelling home, weary, on a train service that's maddeningly unreliable, with no conductor on board.

BAD NIGHT OUT, GOOD NIGHT OUT

My favourite critic, Terry Teachout, has a grim time at the new Broadway musical The Pirate Queen: "It starts out dumb, then gets dumber." But then the show's from the same people responsible for that tedious mega-spectacle, Les Miz, so what else can you expect? Like Norm, though, Teachout's co-blogger, Our Girl In Chicago, was much more impressed with the much talked-about German film, The Lives of Others:

While it's fantastically illuminating of the endlessly variegated ways of being a loyal or a skeptical subject of the state, its main achievement is a personal portrait of a soul in flux. That portrait sits quietly alongside the sometimes noisy melodrama involving the other characters, a drama in which it's certainly implicated but from which it's essentially separate. I left the movie theatre with E. M. Forster echoing in my head: Only connect.

I haven't seen it yet. Can't wait.

CORRECTION: I originally credited the film review to TT as well. Sorry about that.

THE GREATEST PETER SELLERS CHARACTER OF THEM ALL

I keep this photo framed in my hallway. Fred Kite's happy day. (That's Irene Handl as Mrs Kite, of course.)

At the weekend, clearing out a cupboard, I unearthed my old video of the immortal I'm All Right, Jack, and couldn't resist running through my favourite scene one more time. Fred is in the parlour, trying to introduce naive young Stanley Windrush to the glories of Marx and Lenin, and the mighty achievements of the worker's state. Stanley does his best to sound interested:

WINDRUSH: Have you ever been to Russia, Mister Kite?

KITE:  [SUDDENLY MISTY-EYED] Er, no, not yet. It's the one place I'd like to go to, though. All them cornfields, and ballet in the evening.

BOTH SIDES OF "300"

That new historical blockbuster (on which Victor Davis Hanson served as consultant) tempts critic Andrew Sarris back into the multiplex, bag of popcorn in hand:

  My late mother Themis was a Spartan, as were her two brothers—my uncles—Leonidas and Sophocles. (How much more ancient Greek can one get?) I have neither seen nor reviewed most of the first-week box-office champions in recent years, because, in most instances, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel; and I must report that "300" was as pathetically puerile as I had expected. Yet I can’t say that it wasn’t at least minimally entertaining. Indeed, there was a subtextual strangeness about the spectacle that would have made the ghost of Leni Riefenstahl nod in recognition.

The New Culture Forum's Marc Sidwell had a terrific time: "Freedom, Beauty, Excellence and Reason are all celebrated here..."  His review did not go down well with Sunny Hundal at Pickled Politics: "I've never read so much tripe in my life." As for the Iranian response, an anti-Hollywood petition is being circulated. Global Voices offers a round-up which includes this observation from a blogger:

293 people petitioned for the release of political prisoners in Iran. 4,083 people petitioned for the release of women activists who were recently jailed in Iran. 5,108 people have pushed to release Ahmed Batebi from jail, torture, and death. But of course 6,153 care that a movie based on a comic book demeans their Iranian pride.

Yes, as ever, the movies trump real life.

LENI RIEFENSTAHL - HITLER'S DIRECTOR

Two reviews of two new biographies, two opening sentences...

"Leni Riefenstahl was a liar."  (Charles Matthews in the Washington Post) "Leni Riefenstahl was a slut." (Richard Schickel, doyen of American film writers, in the LA Times. He's talking about her lust for worldly success rather than her carnal appetite.)

All true, I suspect, although I'm slightly surprised that a critic as astute as Schickel isn't willing to separate the woman from the artist:

Why Riefenstahl's work would continue to impress critics — even Sontag, Riefenstahl's most implacable critical enemy, calls them the two greatest documentaries ever made — is a mystery, given the corruption of their origins and the fact that they are visibly not documentaries at all.

Fighting words. Schickel was just as indignant about Bowling For Columbine when I interviewed him some years ago for a feature I was writing on Michael Moore's dubious screen techniques. I agreed with him then. I'm not so sure this time.

As for the quality of the Nazi-era films themselves, Judith Thurman's New Yorker review makes a telling observation. For all their breathtaking imagery and technical innovations, Triumph of the Will and Olympia are very hard to sit through in their entirety:

A seductively exciting surface, such as the morbid spectacle of a mass delusion, may distract from, but cannot insure against, a slack core, and in Riefenstahl’s case a handful of sequences singled out for their formal beauty and a quality that [Susan] Sontag calls "vertigo before power" have achieved an influence disproportionate to their depth or originality. They are played over and over, and many people, even film buffs, seem never to have seen—or are unaware of never having seen—Riefenstahl’s documentaries in their entirety. But "Olympia" (three and a half hours long) and "Triumph of the Will" (two) both have their longueurs: endless scenes of shotputting and pole-vaulting in the former, of ranting and marching in the latter. In both, Riefenstahl relies heavily for her transitions on portentous cutaways to clouds, mist, statuary, foliage, and rooftops. Her reaction shots have a tedious sameness: shining, ecstatic faces—nearly all young and Aryan, except for Hitler’s.

Relentless spectacle, volume masquerading as content... something tells me that if Riefenstahl were alive and young today, her agent would have his pick of Hollywood blockbusters.

The video clip, by the way, comes from Olympia. That diving pool is still there, next to the stadium and the heroic statues. Now that it has been drained of water, it has the feeling of some epic sculpture, too.

THE MINISTRY OF FEAR

As I've said before, there was one film in the Oscars race that sounded really special. After reading John Podhoretz's rave, I'm even more eager to see it:

It's hard to know where to begin in praising "The Lives of Others", the first movie written and directed by a 33-year-old German with the traffic-stopping name of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. "The Lives of Others" joins the Russian film "Burnt by the Sun" on a very short list of motion-picture masterpieces that portray the compromises a totalitarian state demands of those unfortunate enough to live inside a prison-country. And it joins "Citizen Kane", no less, on the very short list of the most impressive debut films in the history of cinema...

Donnersmarck's work is so fresh and so original in part because he is working with a great, rich, infinitely absorbing subject--a subject other filmmakers across the world continue to avoid like the plague. This is strange. Life under communism would seem to be among the least controversial topics one could imagine. After all, who outside of Vladimir Putin's inner circle actually longs for a restoration of the Soviet Empire? But you can count on two hands and a foot the number of major motion pictures made since the dissolution of the Soviet Union that have attempted any kind of reckoning of the human cost of communism in the 20th century.

You can watch the trailer here.

DEAD AT THE BOX OFFICE

So I'm not alone in thinking the Academy Awards seemed even more irrelevant this year. In an LA Times op-ed, film historian Neil Gabler, digs into the technological and psychological roots of Hollywood's crisis:

Today, movies just don't seem to matter in the same way — not to the general public and not to the high culture either... Two years ago, writing in these pages, I described an ever-growing culture of knowingness, especially among young people, in which being regarded as part of an informational elite — an elite that knew which celebrities were dating each other, which had had plastic surgery, who was in rehab, etc. — was more gratifying than the conventional pleasures of moviegoing.

In this culture, the intrinsic value of a movie, or of most conventional entertainments, has diminished. Their job now is essentially to provide stars for People, Us, "Entertainment Tonight" and the supermarket tabloids, which exhibit the new "movies" — the stars' life sagas.

Traditional movies have a very difficult time competing against these real-life stories, whether it is the shenanigans of TomKat or Brangelina, Anna Nicole Smith's death or Britney Spears' latest breakdown.

[Hat-tip: John Naughton]

But perhaps that means that the grown-ups will be allowed to go back to telling serious stories for serious, non-popcorn audiences. Or am I just starry-eyed?

OSKAR

So Dame Helen got the Academy Award she deserved. Good. Otherwise, I can't remember a year when I was less interested in the big beanfest. That said, I'm eager to catch up with The Lives of Others, the Stasi drama which carried off the Foreign Language prize. Sounds intriguing.  The German blog Atlantic Review has more on the background, along with the trailer and a link to an Economist article about the resurgence of German cinema.

STILL THE REAL JAMES BOND

Walking back to my car yesterday after a fun lunch with Dave Hill  - the first time we've met - I bumped into Sean Connery (well, his photo anyway) at the Getty Gallery. Oh, for the days of Fort Knox, Odd Job and Pussy Galore's Flying Circus. Naturally, one of the first things I did when I got home was to dig out the trailer. Naff compared with modern-day teasers, of course, but the film itself is a lot more interesting than the new Casino Royale.

BAH, SUBTITLES...

Our living room has been playing host to a mini-Steptoe and Son festival lately. I actually wasn't that crazy about the sitcom when I was growing up; now I'm hooked. We're working our way through Series Three at the moment - not as consistently brilliant as the Seventies shows, but there are lots of lovely incidental touches, Albert revealing himself as a fluent French speaker in one episode and acquiring a taste for tailored suits and canes in the programme where he wins the Premium Bonds. The picture comes from Sunday For Seven Days, wherein father and son decide to go out to the flicks. Harold, always the aspiring intellectual, wants to see Fellini's 8 1/2; his Dad is more interested in, er, Nudes of 1964. Of course, the old man gets his way in the end.

At one point, standing in the art-house queue, Harold reminisces about the joys of the monumentally inscrutable Last Year in Marienbad. According to Matthew Sweet (also a Steptoe lover, by the look of it) foreign films of that calibre have all but disappeared from terrestrial TV:

In the past few years, more foreign films have been given away with newspapers than screened by BBC2. The late-night slots on Channel 4 that once were cleared for enormous retrospectives of Tarkovsky or Godard or Eric Rohmer are, this week, the home of The Enforcer - otherwise known as Dirty Harry 3 - and Under Siege, in which Steven Seagal is a ship's cook who uses his martial arts skills to defeat a crack squad of international terrorists. Great if you like watching paunchy men in checked trousers doing kung-fu moves. Not so great if you want to know something about films that you can't find piled up in wire baskets outside petrol stations.

"I got my cinematic education from television," says Nick James, editor of the film journal Sight and Sound. "But it would be hard to imagine anyone doing that now. What you see in the schedules now is an extreme geographical narrowness combined with an extreme lack of memory. On the terrestrial channels, there's really nothing made before 1980 unless it's very famous indeed. Not much, even, from Hollywood's great golden era. And hardly anything that's in a foreign language. It's pathetic and it's parochial."

Similar thoughts from NY Times critic A.O. Scott on the shrinking market for foreign-language movies in the US. Where has the audience gone, he wonders?

I don't mean the mass public — I have never put much stock in the Utopian fantasy that, if only the multiplex chains would see reason, internationally beloved auteurs would become box-office powerhouses — but rather the aesthetically adventurous, intellectually curious segment of the population that has historically been there for foreign films.

The gap between critical approbation and cultural currency has widened, even as the number and variety of critics has expanded. The arguments are perhaps more intense and contentious than ever, but they also seem to take place in a series of echo chambers...

The result is that more difficult movies — movies without a directorial pedigree or a well- known international star — are pushed further to the margins, becoming objects of cultish adoration rather than topics of general discussion. If you have seen "Three Times" or "L'Enfant" — to name two other hits of the 2005 Cannes Festival that came and went here in the blink of an eye last year despite choruses of critical praise — then you can perhaps feel the flush of specialness that comes from belonging to an exclusive coterie.

But ultimately such snobbery is bad for the soul, and for art... The old film culture was based on hierarchical assumptions about taste and quality that have all but vanished, replaced by niches and networks of fans. You like your Romanian hospital movie, I like my Asian horror, and we have our Web sites and DVD rental queues to keep us happy; everything's cool.