Club Troppo

It’s a strange thing. Film festivals are great things. Yet in my case I see them come, think “I’d like to go to some of those movies” and an awful lot of the time I don’t manage to make it. We have two sectors – the commercial sector that advertises its little head off and serves up dreck and then festivals, which are full of gems, and if they’re not gems there are lots of interesting movies. But they come and go and the movies never get the time to get word of mouth going about them.  And the main alternative source of information is the festival catalogue – which like most marketing may give you information, but they want you to go, so you can’t trust them when they say what a great movie something is.

Now one can go through their catalogue and their timetable and then high-tail it off to Google or Rotten Tomatoes and read film reviews. But is there a better way? At one stage I talked Paul Martin who wrote a great blog on Melbourne films to post on Troppo.  A couple of posts later came this on his site:

In essence, I am finding my own truth, my core self, and understanding how my life experiences have veiled me to that truth. I realise now how deluded and clouded much of my personality has been, including my writing in this medium. My writing will now have a greater personal integrity and be aligned to the Spiritual content and values of whatever I place here whether it be critiquing a movie or chatting to you about the events of my life as this blogger.

Stay tuned – my mentor says actions will speak louder.

And that was the end of that.

So if someone can rustle up a film critic for Troppo that would be just fine.  And would anyone like to make any recommendations of what films I should see in the coming French Film Festival and explain why?

A cool graphic curtesy of McKinsey

Hard to believe we have a share of the global film industry revenue which is about a fifth of the revenue of the US industry. Anyway, it’s a cute graphic.

Tilda and her Very Nasty Offspring wait for expert assistance

I went to see We need to talk about Kevin on Saturday night. It may not be universally well reviewed, but that’s how it’s seemed to me having spent a few minutes hunting down about three reviews all of which positively purred with praise for Tilda Swinton’s virtuosic acting and the film. Well she is a remarkable actor, and her acting in the film was great. In my opinion however the film was pretty much devoid of merit.

In case you’ve been under a rock for the best part of a decade, the book of the same title was written by a middle aged woman wondering what it might be like to bring up a psychopathic mass murderer of the kind that devastated Port Arthur, Columbine High School and more recently Norway. (I think it’s best not to mention such people’s names as doing so may be one of the things they are after when they do things like that – who knows?)

I won’t give you a long film review here, but rather make a point as I’d be interested in what others think.

The film focuses on the mother’s inner and outer torment, both after the child has done the awful deed – and she remains amongst the community where he’s done it (you’re not told why she doesn’t scarper as you’d expect any sane person would). So she gets shunned, spat on and slapped in the face, rendered virtually unemployable and has her house daubed with red paint. She tries to go on with her life. That’s after the awful deed. And before the deed we get, via kaleidoscope of flash-backs and forwards, her trying to bring her Little Monster up, as the Monster displays his stupendous nastiness towards her (he’s a bit nicer to his Dad when he wants to be) and virtually everything around him, blinds his sister in one eye and generally creates mayhem.

If someone holds their head down and then looks up like this - maybe that's not too bad. Everyone does it. But if they do it a lot and have a bit of eye shadow on THEY ARE A PSYCHO KILLER - CALL 911 AT THE EARLIEST (CONVENIENT) OPPORTUNITY (if in the target market. If in Australia ring 000.

The presentation of this is confronting and Tilda is stoical and somewhat Aspergically disconnected from it all, but at the same time thoroughly melancholically traumatised by everything that’s going on and her own inability to do better, and her own doubt as to the extent that she might be responsible for all this.

But except for the compelling nature of Swinton’s acting, and the very spooky and energetic evil of the three Kevins, particularly the last 16 year old one, the film presents virtually no psychological or other (moral?) insight into what’s going on. Even with over half a decade’s blogging here and elsewhere, I am no expert on psychopaths. But I don’t think psychopaths like this kid exist. I think they’re supposed to be pretty normal to meet, not particularly ‘evil’ seeming. They are characterised by a thorough lack of empathy for others and often start by doing nasty things to pets. All the while they are socially very normal to those who are not watching closely. When they’re adult they can be very manipulative and clever and indeed, as a result seem very normal to a lot of people. When they commit their crimes a lot of people who know them socially are shocked because they seemed so normal. Their eventual crimes are often the result of a desire to amp up the excitement in their lives which they don’t seem to be able to get via normal activity (like blogging for instance!).

This may be more your serial killer than your mass murderer, but Kevin in this film is really a kind of Super Baddy. The genre is really Nightmare on Elm St. (Disclosure: I’ve never watched Nightmare on Elm St, but I presume it follows the standard formula where you know someone or something is just Bad, Very Bad, and they eventually go berserk and wreak mayhem and you are scared because you know things are not normal and nasty things can happen any time).

So the central premise of the film is the same melodrama as a horror film. Even if this were the case, it might be possible to give the film some psychological depth by portraying in some thoughtful way how this effects the psychological and moral landscape of the family. But all you get is inchoate misery and doubt. So I thought that amid the virtuosity of Tilda and her three Kevins (aged about 3, 8 and 16-7) the film had nothing much to recommend it.

(And someone obviously thought that using red to prefigure and post figure The Ghastly Deed and it’s Aftermath was very telling. So they did it again and again and again. Even down to the jar of strawberry jam that Kev empties onto his white bread. I don’t think this was particularly clever.)

Anyway, what thinkest though Oh Troppodillians?

‘You go with the information you had…’

I’m probably almost the last person to have seen Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job. But the film is still showing in a few cinemas in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, so it’s worth making a belated recommendation. If only for the Icelandic glacier shots at the beginning, see it on the big screen while you still can.

I had pretty high expectations, but the documentary easily surpassed them. It manages to deliver a devastating indictment of the American financial sector and its accomplices in the government, without leaving itself open to accusations of exaggeration, left-wing bias or peddling conspiracy theory. In short, it was the film Mike Moore couldn’t have made.

It has three particular strengths. One is the structure. On one side, it movingly shows the human consequences of the disaster in the form of of low-income mortgagees heartbroken, workers unemployed, and indeed small countries like Iceland brought to ruin. On the other side, it breaks the catalysm into its constituent parts, focussing on each technical issue in turn: the erosion of the legislative framework, the roles of the mortgage and securitization industries in creating the asset bubble, the scandalously unprincipled behaviour of investment banks like Goldman Sachs who sold assets they were simultaneously gambling against, the indifference of the Federal regulators to uneprecendented and perilous degrees of leverage attained in all of the biggest investment banks, and the outrageously generous bailout offered to the financial terrorists by their former colleagues now working in the Administration and the Federal Reserve. (Continued)

Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged is so popular even Angus & Robertson stock it. And now after years of rumours, it’s finally become a movie. That’s odd because it’s longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace and climaxes with a philosophical speech that runs for 70 pages. Most critics despise it — as Jason Steger told the ABC First Tuesday Book Club: "The writing is unbelievably repetitive, tedious, banal. The ideas in it are crass".

Somehow, the global financial crisis triggered a resurgence in sales of the novel. Nobody knows how many people are actually reading the book, but fans clearly think it’s relevant to the problems of today.

What’s weird about this is that Rand’s philosophy is a kind of inverted Marxism. Without an understanding of Marx, it’s impossible to understand what Rand is on about. In a world where even China’s communist party has converted to free market economics, it’s odd to read a book by a free market evangelist who takes Marx so seriously.

Marx argued that labour was the source of all value. "Capital is dead labour," he insisted. Dead labour "that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." It is labour that creates the capitalist’s machines and once created, the machines drain work of its creativity, skill and purpose.

But for Rand, it is workers who feed off capital. Productivity increases when scientists, inventors and engineers develop new technologies. As her fictional her John Galt puts it: "The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time." Without the benefit of this technology, ordinary labourers would either starve or be forced to live like medieval peasants. As Galt says: "The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains."

Atlas Shrugged is about what happens when the creative minority go on strike.

(Continued)

About to book United Airlines to the United States, I thought I’d let any Troppodillians who don’t know of this video, that it exists, and that it’s fun (and it lopped around $170 million off UA’s market cap according to some factoid crazed journalists). And looking it up, I just discovered the other video, which kind of comes with the territory of any video that’s getting to the 10 mil download limit!

And there’s this one which, for reasons that escape me, refuses to be embedded.

Being in holiday mode, my brain is deeply immersed in trivial thoughts, not least who the Australian selectors could sensibly pick to begin the process of rebuilding a competitive cricket team.

However an even more burning question is this: why are there so many cooking programs on TV?  It can’t just be that they’re much cheaper to make than scripted drama or comedy.  People must actually like watching them.  But why?

There’s certainly a moment of harmless if tacky diversion involved in watching the amply endowed voluptuous Nigella figuratively fellate her audience while whipping up tasty comestibles.

I even confess to once watching a couple of episodes of Gordon Ramsey in horrified fascination, though only to find out just how much bullying and humiliation contestants would tolerate in the hope of fleeting foodie fame (the answer appears to be that there’s no limit, otherwise someone would have punched Ramsey’s teeth down his throat years ago).

But with those exceptions, why would you watch a cooking show?  And if learning the finer points of domestic chores is entertainment, why don’t we see shows like Poh’s Laundry or Nigella’s Mopping and Vacuuming Titbits? Please explain.

I can finally see the point of Twitter. It lets you inflict isolated thoughts on people that are too trivial or even self-indulgent to merit a full blog post but that you need to share.

The Librarians is the best Australian TV sit-com.  Ever.  Discuss.

My ideal final episode:  Oils Aint Oils appear at the Ferntree Gully Hotel and are joined on-stage  by the real Oils including Garrett, but the concert is disrupted by a fire in the ceiling caused by faulty pink batts.  Meanwhile …

HT Three Quarks, I enjoyed this wander around the James Bond genre. How can we take such pleasure from such bad movies. It’s a mystery. I liked the essay and don’t dismiss the author’s principal explanation which is Freudian fantasy for boys. But I’m in the demographic he’s writing for – someone who grew up with Bond and the Beatles, so nostalgia is also part of it.

Once I was in some regional town for several nights – not sure what I was doing there – but I went to a James Bond double each night. I came to love the formula. The previous job gets finished up at the beginning of the movie (though this feature emerged later, enabling a big action sequence to begin the movie), bond is given the assignment, part thriller part mystery.  He then wanders right into the wolf’s lair. Usually he goes and talks with the most meglomaniacal baddie in the world, has a game of golf or poker with them. Then he wanders into their lair, sneaks around. Somehow no-one shoots him and with a barely maintained straight face starts pulling apart the machinery which, until he wanders into the lair was destined for world domination. I never much went for the sex which somehow isn’t sexy.  It was this beguiling and beautiful fantasy world.

Anyway, I wonder what other Troppodillians make of Bond. Oh and the best Bond? Well there’s no question.  You’re looking at him just up to your left.