You’re carrying the fire…

I’ve posted before about my favourite novel; Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic The Road. I was aware that John Hillcoat was directing a film version a full 18 months ago; the anticipation has been both amazing and terrible. The repeated delays were worrying; were the studio bosses trying to soften the brutal bleakness of the source material?

Last night I finally saw the film, and while it’s not my favourite film of all time, I never thought it could be: I hold the novel in such high regard. It’s a brilliant, beautiful piece of work, as it overcomes all of my concerns about how the book might have been adapted…

SPOILER ALERT. THE REST OF THIS POST CONTAINS SIGNIFICANT PLOT DETAILS …

The shattered landscapes are astonishing, many filmed around the Mount St Helens area of Washington State. Perhaps the most desolate moment when I read the novel was when the man and his son finally arrive at the coast. This symbol of hope, of potential life has been hanging over the characters since the start of the novel, and in a crushing paragraph McCarthy strips that away. Hillcoat’s revelation of the beach is equally desolate; the sky is leaden, filled with fog and relentless rain. The beach is grey, cold, strewn with debris. Shattered hulls of broken ships lurk in the shallows.

Kodi Smit-McPhee is fantastic as The Boy. In a role as harrowing as any child has had to perform, he’s onscreen in virtually every scene. His character goes through a journey like no other, and experiences terrors noone should have to. He’s silent for much of the film, reacting silently. We can only wonder at how he copes with the horror, but by the end he truly carries the fire for his father, acting as his moral compass and humanity. Viggo Mortensen is also wonderful as The Man, but I almost expected that of him. He delivers brilliantly, but Kodi Smit-McPhee is a revelation.

The soundtrack by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis is perfectly judged. It doesn’t manipulate the viewer, but instead reflects the imagery on screen. The ambient sound of creaking trees, torrents of rain and shivering winds is unsettling, and the silences are dark, allowing the viewer to listen only too clearly to our own internal fears and dread.

The meditative poetry of McCarthy’s prose could never be adequately portrayed onscreen. But the tone of the film is truthful to the source. Some sequences have added adrenalin, but the sense of threat is ever-present and the tension unremitting.

Charlize Theron’s role as The Wife has been extended from the sparse flashbacks of the novel, but not in an intrusive way. I thought this was pretty sensitively handled, and the additional reminders of what we have lost only add to the immediacy of the despair, and help us to marvel at the possibly misguided efforts of The Man to survive. More than once we see evidence of suicides, and more than once we wonder if that actually would be the best course of action. This is not your standard studio fare.

I saw The Road at a wonderful independent cinema, the Wotton-Under-Edge Electric Picture House. It’s a lovely set-up, with easy online booking, cheap snacks and drinks, and friendly, helpful staff who actually seem to like films. Its repertoire of films covers family fare and documentaries. It’s a wonderful antidote to the corporate blandness of the multiplexes.

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Funk-ee…No, funk-eh!

I love discovering films, music, books. I love being in at the start, as I was with The Road, or Scrubs, or In Rainbows. But perhaps even more, I love coming to things late. I love the expectation driven by praise from friends or critics I respect, and the thrill when I realise it turns out to be even better than I might have hoped.

As I rarely go to the cinema any more, this most often occurs with films I catch up with on DVD. The Wire is another example, which seemed to command my viewing for almost half of 2009. More recently, I caught up with a Channel 4 comedy from a few years ago.

Green Wing came recommended by friends, and I’ve subsequently discovered a whole ream of fans of the show. I didn’t know much about it, except it’s set in a hospital and has a strong cast of British comedy actors.

I’m reluctant to go into too much detail, as my experience of discovering Green Wing was a stream of delight and surprises. Broadly, it’s a sitcom unlike most sitcoms. It’s set in a hospital, yet goes out of its way to avoid pretty much all things clinical; patients are reduced to x-rays or anonymous bodies under operating theatre drapes. Instead, it focuses on the human interactions and behavioural oddities amongst the staff.

The ensemble cast are terrific. Every character has grotesque elements of caricature, yet they’re almost all oddly charming in their own way; many are pretty much sociopathic. Almost all of the relationships are spilling over with sexual frustration or tension. The language is fairly explicit, nearly always in an hilarious way. Most of the characters behave like children at least some of the time, throwing tantrums, bickering and joking at each other’s expense with the humour and cruelty of the playground.

Each episode is very loosely structured, with occasional set-piece scenes, most notably when characters visit the psychotic Staff Liaison Officer Sue White – played brilliantly by Michelle Gomez. Scenes are often linked with brief moments of accelerated or slow-motion film, highlighting the body language between people. This quirky style is just another element that makes Green Wing stand out from the crowd.

There are all sorts of clips available, but in general they don’t do it justice. They don’t enable you to experience the full joy of a full 50 minute episode. However, this one is an out-take from the DVD of Series 1; an extended version of a scene that does make the final cut. It illustrates several of the programme’s key traits; long scenes between two characters allowing the actors to improvise, general hilarity and large amounts of ‘corpsing’ by the cast. Just watch Tamsin Greig trying to hold it together while Stephen Mangan truly goes for it!

Green Wing reminds me at times of The Office, at other times of Spaced. I know that it won’t be to everyone’s taste. It’s shamelessly rude (sometimes excruciatingly so) and massively silly; but I’ve rarely laughed so often during a single programme, or so consistently through a whole series of programmes.

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It’s not going to stop…

Some film directors are predictable. Their name on the poster lets you know what you’re letting yourself in for. Michael Bay gives you bangs, crashes, CGI effects, and (IMHO) mind-rottingly bad spectacles that look and feel like the deafeningly unedited fantasies of a lustful teenager.

Paul Thomas Anderson is predictable only in that he is a truly daring film director. I watched Boogie Nights this week for the first time. How had I let that go so long? In only his second feature he uses dazzling techniques and shots, and tackles an extraordinary canvas with reams of characters. The opening sequence is clearly influenced by Goodfellas, but here Anderson introduces us to many of the key players and indeed their entire world. It’s wonderful.

The film is packed with bravura scenes, extended shots and indeed performances. Mark Wahlberg has never been better as Dirk Diggler, John C Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffmann and Julianne Moore are all terrific, and Burt Reynolds makes the sort of comeback rarely seen outside of a Tarantino picture.

In this way, perhaps it represents all the things you can expect “from the director of There Will Be Blood, Punch Drunk Love, Magnolia, Boogie Nights”…

His ensemble casts are astonishing in both Boogie Nights and Magnolia. He used many actors in both these films; Julianne Moore, William H Macy, Philip Seyour Hoffmann, John C Reilly and others.

Boogie Nights has some of the best extended shots I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t get hold of the opening scene on Youtube, but this party scene features William H Macy, the butt of the joke throughout the film as his wife seems to sleep with anyone but him. Until it goes too far…

And then he does it all again in Magnolia, with this amazingly intricate scene. This makes The West Wing look easy…

His soundtracks and score are exemplary, again something he has in common with Martin Scorsese. Boogie Nights has terrific music, and There Will Be Blood features perhaps my favourite score of any recent film, composed by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead; it’s often brooding and menacing, certainly a character in itself… Magnolia features songs by Aimee Mann, one of which he turns into this stunning sequence, where the disparate characters start to sing along with the lyrics, creating links between themselves and a deeply moving effect.

But perhaps the biggest surprise for me was Punch Drunk Love. I really don’t tend to like Adam Sandler, but he is absolutely fantastic as the lonely, more-than-slightly creepy Barry Egan. Very intimate in scale compared to the previous two films, this isa beautiful love story about two outsiders. It’s very funny and very dark, revealing things slowly and wonderfully to the audience. After an agonising early courtship, Barry finally plucks up courage to pursue Lena to try and tell her how he feels. Again the music is wonderful. Again the camera follows our leading character, focusing on him through the crowds. And I love how the phone box lights up when Lena finally answers the phone…

And now I realise I’m 500 words into this post and have barely mentioned There Will Be Blood. Can I just say it’s fantastic. It thrilled me like nothing I’d seen in ages. The score is terrific. The scale, scope and ambition is breathtaking. Daniel Day Lewis is amazing as Daniel Plainview, and Paul Dano makes a valiant effort to keep up. I even like the final section, despite its jarring change in tone. My favourite elements from this film are also hard to find online, mainly the landscapes and the soundtrack, and the astonishing scene of the oil derrick fire and accident with HW. But most of all the opening, wordless sequence of more than 10 minutes, worth the price of admission on its own.

I recommend all of PT Anderson’s films, and I haven’t seen his opening feature, Hard Eight. They’re not necessarily easy viewing, but they all contain brilliant acting, music, direction and design; in that way they’re predictable, but they’re also all suprising, challenging, in that respect, fantastic.

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It’s Bach, Jim, but not as we know it…

I’m not a great fan of Classic FM. While it has undoubtedly expanded the audience for classical music, I feel it also has a massive tendency to assume the audience can’t or won’t cope with a 40-minute symphony, a string quartet or anything that’s not smoooooooth. It does play ‘complete works’ (gasp!), but tends to tuck them away after 10pm on the schedule, like John Peel on Radio 1 back in the day, for the die-hard fans only.

Classic FM talks a lot about ‘cross-over’ artists; Katherine Jenkins performing classical works in a ‘populist’ style, or composers of film scores, as though classical music can’t be popular unless it’s presented in 4-minute chunks. But this isn’t a cross-over of genres; it’s not like Bruce Springsteen playing Rodrigo’s Concerto de Aranjuez, or Bryn Terfel singing with AC/DC. It’s simply marketing using labels, and not in a good way.

Gabriela Montero is a wonderful musician. She plays improvisations, in the grand tradition of classical composers from Bach to Mozart, Beethoven and Liszt. Musicians have improvised in the churches and concert halls of Europe for centuries.

But because she has her own website and myspace pages, appears on television playing popular tunes, and brings a flavour of many different musical genres to her performances (not least her Venezuelan roots), she gets labelled as a cross-over artist, and indeed has been nominated for ‘cross-over’ awards in the Grammies. To my mind this belittles her skill and talent.

To even begin to tackle this sort of playing requires an immense technical ability, and a deep awareness and understanding of the music. Live on stage she can and will perform ‘requests’ like the Newsnight clip, but that doesn’t make her a cross-over artist (in fact, I dispute the use of the term…).

Her collection ‘Baroque’ is a terrific CD, a selection of mostly very-well-known classical pieces including Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Pachelbel’s Canon and Albinoni’s Adagio (that theme from Gallipoli!). But her improvisations transform these tunes into beautiful, thrilling and revelatory performances, often coloured with Latin American and jazz rhythms, wonderfully syncopated bass lines or shimmering arpeggios. It’s all terrific, but for me the standout is Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus from The Messiah. In her hands, one of the most famous choral works becomes a joyful calypso. Seek it out: trust me, it’s fantastic.

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The end of Business As Usual…

In 1999, a group of writers declared that “markets are conversations” and, in the style of Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1517, published their own 95 Theses, as a response to what they considered outmoded and archaic thinking at the end of the 20th century.

I first read The Cluetrain Manifesto a few months after its initial publication. I loved its iconoclasm then, even if I perhaps didn’t grasp the full potential and implications of its ideas. I printed it out and kept it in my File of (Probably) Useful Things, and only recently rediscovered it.

It’s still enormously relevant and important (I especially like #28, #75 & #83!). Of course elements didn’t come to pass, and the old ways of Business As Usual have proved remarkably resilient. But broadband technology and the growth of social media in the last 2-3 years is now providing the environment for these conversations to flourish and grow.

Markets are conversations. The original trading posts and barter economies were based around individuals haggling with each other to exchange goods. Information spread through word of mouth, rumours. Wise men kept their ‘ear to the ground’, and those with the best networks could command the best prices and biggest markets.

In recent times these inter-personal conversations were drowned out: new technology and communications media enabled those with money and resources (companies and their brands) to shout louder and for longer. Advertising and marketing campaigns were monologues; broadcast messages from brands that mainly sought to inform and persuade rather than engage or provoke any response besides purchase. They effectively overtook the individual’s ability both to start conversations or to build what economists liked to call ‘perfect information’ about their markets.

Now the technology has developed further, and is giving those abilities back. News spreads fast; review sites and social media enable strangers to recommend or condemn brands and products. In some companies and sectors faster than others, this is and will require a fundamental change of approach.

When I was at Barclaycard at the start of the last decade, we used “BAU” as an everyday term, which seems to imply that the Business was doing everything it could to preserve what had gone before, while everything else seemed “nice-to-do”. The very use of language is conservative and incrementalist, suggesting that change will only come when it arises from the pre-existing models.

That’s no longer good enough, and businesses are changing. But it’s still true that many are clinging to their historic approach to media. They claim to want to engage their consumers more directly and personally, yet they continue to spend a tiny fraction of their time and effort on this. They prefer to spend money advertising online rather than hiring staff or systems to engage in conversations with their customers directly. They still fear the lack of control and certainty that comes from interacting with individuals, rather than the comfortable assumption that we’re all the same. Well, we’re not.

Technology is giving ‘us’ back the ability to engage each other more directly. I recommend marketers and their bosses (re)visit The Cluetrain Manifesto: it’s really easy to read the 95 Theses, and there’s more truth in those 11-year-old declarations than in most marketing reports published last month. But are they brave and honest enough to rise to the challenge?

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