Hating Prawns

District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp, is the first movie I think I have ever seen set in South Africa. More than that, it’s the first South African movie I’ve ever seen. It’s science fiction, a long way from being my favourite genre. But this was different, something quite special. There are so many cultural and historical references that will be readily understood by people even with only a passing knowledge of the recent history of South Africa, not simply the Apartheid era-though the message here is obvious-but the steadily shifting attitudes towards the continuing migration from Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

It begins in the style of a running news report or documentary being built up from a combination of commentaries and interviews. The setting is Johannesburg, where a large alien craft is stranded, hovering above the city. The travellers are rescued and brought to earth, where they are settled in District 9. Picture a place like Soweto and then you can picture District 9. The aliens themselves are human-sized, or slightly larger, and insect-like in appearance. After the initial curiosity they incur almost universal loathing, being referred to as ‘prawns.’ To me they looked more like cockroaches but when I whispered this to my boyfriend he reminded me of the associations with Rwandan Genocide. Still, I suppose this gives you some understanding of exactly how I perceived them, as creatures I would not chose to see living anywhere near me.

So, responding to general hostility, the government decides to resettle the ‘prawns’ –already subject to forms of unofficial apartheid uniting blacks and whites-away from District 9 to a new settlement to the north of Jo'burg, to what is eventually admitted to be little better than a concentration camp. The task of eviction, carried out with minimum notice and maximum brutality is delegated to an organisation called Multinational United or MNU, a private military contractor. The operation itself is headed by one Wilkus van de Merve, played by Shartlo Copely. It was a great performance from someone I had never heard of before.

In the course of the evictions de Merve inspects the shack of an alien who has been named ‘Christopher’ by the MSU, discovering suspicious materials including a container in which the aliens had previously been shown distilling a mysterious liquid. De Merve accidentally contaminates himself with some of the contents.

It’s from this point that District 9 begins to change gear. The documentary aspect falls away as we focus more and more on de Merve. During the evictions his arm was injured and bandaged. On returning home he falls ill, being taken to hospital that same night. The bandage is taken off and he is found to have developed an alien claw, the beginning of a metamorphosis that continues throughout the movie.

Taken into custody by MNU, now shown to be an unscrupulously wicked organisation, they propose to vivisect him, removing the alien parts which can operate sophisticated weaponry beyond the control of humans. But he escapes and teams up with Christopher. The canister, it turns out, contains a fuel which will enable the hidden alien command module to return to and reactivate the mother ship. In partnership, and in return for Christopher’s promised help in reversing the metamorphosis, they invade MNU headquarters and recover the canister. While there Christopher finds evidence that his people have been subject to vivisection and experimentation.

Having initially felt a vague sense of disgust at the sight-and the habits-of the aliens-my sympathies by this point moved in quite the opposite direction. The ‘insects’ are the humans. Yes, I know, this is one of the great wonders of cinema, the ability to manipulate emotion!

I don’t want to say too much more other than the subsequent adventures of de Merve and Christopher are intercut with more newsreel footage, concentrating on their pursuit and further developments in District 9. There is a happy ending of a sort, at least there is for Christopher if not de Merve. The whole thing kept me engaged throughout, fast-paced, highly dramatic and cleverly directed. It ended simply screaming for a sequel.

You’ve heard of racism; you’ve heard of xenophobia; now District 9 brings you both, combined as species-ism! And if alien ‘asylum seekers’ did arrive from across the universe this is most likely how they would be received, with suspicion turning to dislike turning to contempt turning to hate. I suppose it’s all a question of numbers-one alien is a wonder; a million aliens is a problem.

Inglorious Tarantino

OK, I begin with a confession: I don’t like Quentin Tarantino as a director; I don’t like his movies. Sorry, that’s not quite true: Pulp Fiction was mildly entertaining, though a little incoherent for my taste. It’s not that I don’t appreciate his talent, his love of film-making, his sense of humour and the clever way he intercuts, the visual references he makes. Yes, he’s clever, he has a real fluency with the medium-but, so far as I am concerned, he’s is also shallow, obvious, insincere and far too glib. I simply don’t take him seriously as a film-maker. Most of his stuff bores me. I would have given Inglorious Basterds a miss but my boyfriend was keen; so, off we went.

A word, to begin with, about the title, specifically the spelling of Basterds (I make no mention of Inglourious!) I wasn’t sure quite was going on here, why the words was misspelt. Perhaps it was something to do with residual censorship, with hoardings and advertising on buses? Perhaps it was akin to the swearing in Father Ted, the Irish sitcom, where it was possible to say feck but not f*ck.? Oh, what a difference a vowel makes! The title actually comes from an Italian B-movie made in the early 1970s, though the Italians managed to get the spelling right. It seems the explanation is only to be found in the mind of the director!

Yes, Inglourious Basterds is wonderfully acted and well-scripted. No matter; I hated it, really hated it. It’s a pastiche of the Second World War, of dimensions of that war, perhaps not a thousand miles removed from the likes of Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp With Eva and Adolf at Berchtesgaden. Yes, this was a romp all right, just not that gay. Well…on second thoughts. :-) It was most certainly over the top in every conceivable sense, exuberant to the point where exuberance is close to parody and exhaustion. It could be read as a black comedy, if one was of a mind to, though the comedy for me was strained in the extreme. Operation Kino, the last scene, wasn’t exuberant or comic; it was utterly ridiculous. Oh, and that movie that Nazis were watching would, I suspect, have been too boring even for them!

I’ll be fair; I always try to be fair. The opening chapter was good, the one where the French farmer was interrogated by Christoph Waltz, playing one Hans Landa, an officer in the Sicherheitsdienst, a wonderful performance, sustained throughout, at once charming and persuasive, sinister and deadly. Still, leaping ahead to the final act, I’m completely mystified why he felt compelled to strangle the actress-spy when he himself was on the point of switching loyalties. Perhaps Tarantino just saw it as an opportunity to have a woman strangled for no apparent reason other than the strangulation itself. But that’s getting away from the point. Yes, Waltz kept up a high standard but the movie itself spiraled steadily downwards ever faster with every subsequent act.

Now we are introduced to the basterds, a group of American-Jewish commandos or Special Forces or whatever, headed by Brad Pitt as Lieutenant Aldo Raine. These men are sent to occupied France to kill Nazis or Germans, for there is really no difference between the two. The movie takes a turn towards the spaghetti western, and that’s not my criticism, that’s Tarantino’s intention, as we are presented with an ‘alternate’ history of the final stages of the Second World War. But the Jewish soldiers are sent not just to kill Nazis/Germans; they’re sent to commit atrocities, exactly the same kind of atrocities that the Nazi-Germans (better, I think) carried out extensively in Belorussia and the east, though I don’t believe they actually scalped the people they killed in the fashion of Raine’s ‘Apaches.’ Well, Apaches do brutal things, do they not, a bit like Nazi-Germans, a bit like, well, Jews? For the world has been turned upside down: the Jews have become Nazis. Can you see where this is going; can you see the implications of this? I hope so. Please don’t hate me for making this point. Others will with far less benign motives.

Was there comedy here? Was there some deeper message? If there was I missed it, my failure, no doubt. When I saw a German prisoner having his brains beaten out with a baseball bat by a character called ‘Bear Jew’ for rightly refusing to divulge the position of his comrades I could feel my sympathies switch to the Nazi-Germans, not a comfortable sensation, believe me, though others around me found the scene titillating funny. The soldier who did agree to tell was allowed to live but only after he had a swastika carved on to his forehead, a reference, perhaps, though I’m not sure that the director is aware of this, to the practice of some SS units carving the Star of David on the breasts of rabbis.

The mutilated soldier returns to Berlin. Now Hitler enters the scene, played by Martin Wuttke, the usual laughable manikin. It seems to me to be next to impossible for actors to recreate Hitler as a believable human being. The only one who came close, in my estimation, was Bruno Ganz in Der Untergang.

I can hear the objections, at least some of them: don’t take things so seriously; learn to suspend disbelief, appreciate art at the level of art, entertainment at the level of entertainment. But I can’t, I simply can’t, not with this movie anyway. We are dealing with real things, real people and real events, not a collection of fictitious gangsters in Tarantino’s usual style. This is history post-Schindler’s List, past all seriousness, past all subtlety, past all introspection: it’s fun, killing is fun; it’s history-and I can find no better way of putting this- at the level gamers will understand.

I’ve read a couple of reviews of this movie, not many, and none of them terribly favourable. The comment that resonated most with me comes from a piece by Kate Williams in this week’s Spectator (“We are fast forgetting how to be guilty about the past”), a clever critique of the process by which atrocity is being turned into entertainment. She concludes thus;

If no one is affected and worrying about guilt is passé, then everything is up for revision. What can be next-a film acclaiming Nazi doctors for their work on genetics? Or Brad Pitt as Speer, a sensitive family man battling a brutal system? Now that SS officers are highly profitable Hollywood ‘booty’-as Pitt’s character shouts in Inglourious Basterds-you can bet it’s only a matter of time.

Indeed. Inglourious Basterds is not pulp fiction; it’s just pulp.

Public Enemies, or how I just love John Dillinger!

Public Enemies, directed with considerable panache by Michael Mann, tells the story-or part of the story-of John Dillinger, a bank-robber of Depression-era America, so notorious that he was labelled ‘public enemy number one’ by J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the emerging FBI. Johnny Depp does a first class job in bringing Dillinger to life as the perfect American anti-hero without, it seems to me, drawing on ‘tough guy’ or gangster stereotypes. Dillinger himself turned into a sort of folk hero when he was alive, because he robbed banks rather than customers, if that makes sense. And, as we all know, it’s so easy to hate banks and bankers!

Setting aside Depp’s performance, and the performance of a number of his co-stars, including our own Stephen Graham as Baby Face Nelson, another iconic figure of the day, Public Enemies appealed to me for another reason: it captures with much attention to detail a particular era in American history, an era on the threshold of change.

Dillinger and his kind represent, if you like, a late flourishing of the old Western outlaws, the freelancers of crime, increasingly an anachronism in their own time, a time when law-enforcement, in the shape of the FBI, was not only acquiring a much more professional and nation-wide significance, but also where crime itself was being professionalised. In the movie Dillinger is shown not just as a threat to public order but an embarrassment to the new-style of crime boss, worried by the impact of the old-style bandit; worried that the new forms of crime-fighting that they occasioned would be bad for a business that was essentially faceless.

OK, yes, the movie does glamorise Dillinger, a man who was, after all, a thief and a killer. Even so, he had a sense of style and a significant degree of personal charm, careful never to completely alienate the American public at large (he refuses to get involved in kidnapping because of the negative perceptions it carried). His charm, the charm of the man, contrasts with contemporary criminals like Bernie Madoff, the magnitude of whose misdemeanours is only exceeded by the scale of his mediocrity-and his appalling dress-sense!

I suppose the chief criticism I have is that Depp, good as he is, never really gets below the surface of Dillinger: there is little in the way of introspection and development. Also, although Mann lovingly creates a sense of time and place (even the newsreels look wooden and authentic!), to me it appeared just a tad too attractive and well-healed, with all those beautiful 1930s fashions! Dillinger, in other words, is a Robin Hood without the suffering peasants; The Grapes of Wrath is clearly being played out somewhere off-screen! Where is the guy who asks buddy for a dime? Still, I enjoyed it tremendously, these quibbles notwithstanding. It was a good story of bad people!

And, yes, I would be Billie Frechette to Depp’s Dillinger any day.

Nosferatu

I like vampire movies but I also like my monsters to be monstrous. The opera-cloaked Christopher Lee and the love-sick Gary Oldman and the sugar sweet romance of Twilight leave me cold. For me it has to be Nosferatu, by far the creepiest incarnation on screen of the Dracula myth, depicted originally by the equally creepy Max Schenk and more recently by Klaus Klinski.

Frost Nixon

I went to see the Frost Nixon movie earlier this year. Have you seen it? Well, I simply can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s not as sweepingly effective as Oliver Stone’s Nixon, but, given the limitations of the structure-a screenplay based on a series of interviews between David Frost and ex-president Richard Nixon-it works terribly well. Essentially if follows a standard Hollywood format, with the ‘good guy’ reeling under the blows of the ‘baddie’, until he finally gets up and delivers a knock-out punch.

The key moment in the whole movie is set during the last of the interviews, that dealing with Watergate, when Nixon effectively says that the President has powers above and beyond the law, the leitmotiv of tyrants throughout history. Michael Sheen is good as David Frost, but not nearly as good as Frank Langella as Richard Nixon. Langella, I suppose, amplifies aspects of Nixon’s character that Anthony Hopkins showed in Stone’s move: the inner vulnerability, the sense of rejection and self-loathing, the great Achilles Heel of a man who in many ways was one of the most intelligent American presidents of the last century.

Thoughts on Valkyrie

I went to see Valkyrie earlier this year. It’s good. Tom Cruise is passable as Claus von Stauffenberg, whatever reservations some people may have had about him taking on the part. It’s good also that some of the people in the German Resistance attain a wider recognition.

But I rather suspect that a new myth is about to emerge, that a government of ‘decent men’ could conceivably have brought the war to an end in 1944 thereby saving many lives. Would the government of 'decent men', one wonders, have included Artur Nebe, executed for his part in the July Plot, who in 1941 had commanded Einsatzgruppe B during the invasion of the Soviet Union?

It was once written that the SS were the 'Alibi of a Nation'. Well, by that measure, the German Resistance has become the 'Conscience of a Nation', proof that there were good Germans who were prepared to act in desperate circumstances.

Now, I should preface what follows by a simple statement that there were people in the resistance who are indeed worthy of admiration, people who opposed Hitler and Nazism from the very outset; people like Sophie Scholl. But there were still others who became 'resisters of occasion', people, in other words, who wanted the Reich, even if they-by 1944, anyway-did not want Hitler.

What I mean by this is that the conservative elites, especially those in the army and the diplomatic service, wanted to preserve the pre-war borders, Hitler's 'peaceful' conquests, before the country was overrun. It's as well to remember that the action of 1944 was to be based on a military coup, dominated, for the most part, by the resisters of occasion. The chief aim was to kill Hitler: the second aim was to stop Stalin.

So, are we to assume then that the Allies would have left a strong Germany under the control of a Prussian elite, dominating of a good bit of central Europe after years of bloodshed? It does not seem very likely. Just imagine, moreover, how the Soviets would have reacted to a coup, controlled by a military clique, and supported by the western Allies. It would look like a deliberate attempt to deny them the victory and keep them out of central Europe; it would look, in other words, like a new version of the 'Hess Plan' of 1941.

The suggestion that Stalin, whose army was approaching the Vistula, having fought through devastated Russian territory, would somehow have halted his advance because of the 'decent men' is, to be quite frank, a ludicrous conjecture. I cannot conceive of any circumstances in which the Red Army would have halted, not even if the western powers threatened war. And I am sure some people will be aware that an alliance between Britain, the United States and Germany against Russia was one of the fantasies that kept Hitler going in his last days, and why he insisted on the need to maintain a bridgehead in Courland.

Let's look at the issue from a slightly different dimension; let's assume that Hitler was killed, and the opposition took control, and Germany avoided total defeat and occupation, what then would have happened? Why, another myth would have been conveniently nurtured, another 'stab in the back' legend to comfort coming generations of right-wing extremists. Even at the height of the war there is plenty of evidence that Hitler remained popular with ordinary Germans. His sudden removal is likely to have created a sense of loss and betrayal, in much the same fashion as the flight of the Kaiser in 1918. Germany had to be defeated and seen to be defeated. It's as simple, and as brutal, as that.

Summer is a coming in-Loving The Wicker Man

I have said it before, but it is worth repeating: The Wicker Man, the original, not the remake, is the best pagan-themed movie ever made. It's full of drama, sexuality, ritual and song. It ends with the glorious sacrifice of a male virgin in a giant wicker effigy-recalling the fate of the Roman captives after the Battle of the Teutoburger Wald-undisturbed by the sudden appearance of the self-righteous forces of good! Oh, my; to have been on that cliff-head singing Summer is a Coming in, Loudly Sing Cuckoo with all of the others. :-))

Oh, I how hate prigs, puritans and prudes, the Sergeant Howies of this world! Celebrate sex; love it; love life; to hell with all guilt and dissimulation. :-))

The ending, you see, as far as I am concerned is the best part by far. Not all pagan sacrifices were voluntary; oh by no means. I wonder if you have seen the full version, with all of the parts restored before the original commercial release? I have. It was shown on British television a couple of years ago. There are some gorgeous scenes. My favourite is Gently Johnny, when Lord Summerisle offers Ash Buchanan, a male virgin, to Willow. Afterwards, in reverie, he says to himself;

I think I could turn
and live with animals.

They are so placid
and self-contained.

They do not lie awake in the dark
and weep for their sins.

They do not make me sick
discussing their duty to God.

Not one of them kneels to another

or to his own kind that lived thousands of years ago.

Not one of them is... respectable
- or unhappy
all over the earth.

This is cut to a scene with Howie praying by his bedside, while the sounds of Willow’s sexual encounter comes through the walls. Oh, hot love, hot love indeed. :))

Fucking Åmål

I am simply dying to share this.

I saw a Swedish film recently called Show me Love in English. The original title is Fucking Åmål, Åmål being a Swedish provincial town. It’s a love story about two girls, Agnes, shy, unpopular and lesbian, and Elin, popular, vivacious and sought-after. Agnes is in love with Elin, but can find no way to express her feelings. As the film proceeds the two are drawn together, first by their mutual dislike of Åmål, of how boring life is in Åmål, and then by more personal feelings, one for the other.

Bit by bit Elin falls in love with Agnes, though she fights against this simple reality. Finally, in the most wonderful scene of all, Agnes forces Elin to confront the truth, locked together, as they are, in the school lavatory. Elin’s friends gather outside, assuming she is inside with her boyfriend. A teacher appears and demands that the door is opened. Elin finally admits the truth. She opens the door, taking Agnes by the hand, saying that she is her lover and that they are off for a fuck! The expression on the face of their classmates and the teacher is absolutely priceless! I was laughing and crying at one and the same time.

It’s the most life-enhancing, positive movie I think I have ever seen. It’s available on Amazon. Watch it. You must!