Tuesday

Down with Love is one of the most bizarre films I've ever seen. Set as a 1960s comedy romance, it's so overly stylised as to be almost sickening. Every joke and accompanying facial expression is given its own camera movement and music. The characters almost dance across sets, choreographed, rather than walk naturally. It's all very strange. Even the sense of humour is 60s, prudish and puerile, like an episode of I Dream of Jeanie, or Bewitched - people defend it as a 'homage', or a 'satire', but I think they're on weak ground. I don't know who thought this film was a good idea. Somehow it reminds me of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It's off-putting, and, as I said, bizarre. There are a lot of split screen telephone calls, and at one point, with a lot of clever camera work, the main characters appear to have foreplay and then intercourse whilst talking to each other from different apartments. Very strange, but it makes more sense than my description of it does. Anyway, besides all that, I did strangely enjoy it. The ending is inevitable, but the plot has many un-inevitable twists along the way. Some of the puns and wordplay are actually enjoyable. It's a pity there's not much chemistry between Ewan McGregor and Renée Zellweger - if you could change one, I think she's the weaker of the two. So, this is perhaps worth watching, but definitely either sober or only slightly inebriated, as you may think you are hallucinating otherwise.

Monday

Sometimes I feel that British cinema is a genre rather than an industry. This is its weakness, I think. People associate British films with a certain type, rather than an ability to make any type. As you know, my patriotism factor is rather low; I don't need to see British films, or prefer them over anything else (normally the reverse, in fact). At the moment, someone somewhere is trying to promote a 'summer of British film' - the BBC are helping, but I don't think they're alone. Lots of home-grown movies are being shown on TV and in the theatres. Yes, there was a time when we made some excellent films, consistently. But that time has passed. Perhaps they're trying to resurrect it? Later this year we'll see the release of St. Trinian's, made by the famous Ealing Studios. I have a feeling, though, that this isn't going to change anyone's mind about British cinema. All our stars and directors immediately go to America. I don't blame them. That's where the money is to make movies. I don't feel it's necessary to erect national boundaries around art. I'm sure Hollywood probably doesn't qualify as 'America' anyway, with all its immigrant filmmakers. If we wanted, why don't we set up a British film company in America? Everything about it can be British, except that it's in California. We get the dollars we need by being there, and maintain the patriotism factor at the same time. Stupid, or stupendous?

Sunday

A while ago a friend said to me that whilst there were many good films, cinema itself was essentially an empty art form. It didn't have the tradition or the richness of literature. I said that didn't matter, or if it did film borrows intertextuality from literature anyway. After seeing a play last night (containing perhaps a good example of a MacGuffin?), I think the difference my friend was hinting at was more correctly between novels/poems and plays/cinema. You cannot get a first person narrator in plays/cinema. You can have an voice-over, or a soliloquy, but it isn't the same. They are talking to you. When reading a book, you are the actor reading the soliloquy. It's in your voice that you hear the words, interpret and pronounce them. This is why my first ambition is to write a narrative novel in the first personal voice - it's what the medium is best at, I believe, and can't be rivalled in any other art form (poetry gives you the first person, but not narrative anymore). Cinema is always the third person, the camera. And, then, what art form best exploits the second person? I don't know.

Saturday

Last week Alex mentioned that The Lady Vanishes contains a great example of a MacGuffin. I didn't know what this was and so looked it up on Wikipedia - it turns out it's a plot device that motivates the characters but has little or no relevance itself. In the case of the Hitchcock film (who apparently popularised the term) it is the tune the old lady is trying to remember - and indeed I remember thinking whilst watching the movie last week 'it's great how you never know what that means'. However, is it a true MacGuffin? I didn't think so, but I felt it would be a bit presumptuous of me - having only two minutes earlier discovered what it means - to tell Alex he was wrong. You see, a MacGuffin drives the plot forward, but the main characters in The Lady Vanishes only find out about the tune ten minutes from the end. What drives the plot forward is instead trying to find the old lady. Of course, MacGuffin is a vague and not very specific technical term, but it does seem that it is normally something that appears at the beginning of a film and slowly dwindles in importance. The briefcase in Pulp Fiction is perhaps a better example, but the narrative of that film is famously disjointed, so even then it's not clear. A lot of the time you'll have an object which is important to characters, but not important to the plot or the audience - for example there'll be a love story laid over the top which is more interesting - and this happens frequently in James Bond or Indiana Jones. So, our only conclusion can be that a MacGuffin is something of ambivalent, relational value, of importance to some, but none to others.

Friday

As Alex astutely pointed out yesterday, the Western is capable of telling almost every story. Of course, this is true of most genres - that's what's appealing about them - but I do think the development of the Western has seen it express more from its, seemingly narrow, conventions than other types of cinema. When trying to think of ideas for a Western a few weeks ago, I couldn't pin down where to start. The problem is that the genre has evolved over time. At first it was good guys against bad guys. In the article from The Sunday Times, one critic said the Western was thus nostalgic for a time when things were simple. But then the genre evolved. The Indians were no longer always bad, and sometimes the good guys turned out to be greedy, or bloodthirsty, or immoral. James Stewart, famous for always playing wholesome family heroes, even played an ambiguous bounty-hunter in The Naked Spur. Then there's love stories, and civil war stories, stories about the beginning of the West and the end of the West, films that seem like MTV videos (Young Guns), and films that transport the Western into other times and places (Star Wars). For me, the Western expresses the tension of a place that never really existed - a moment of expansion, and freedom, that soon dwindled into lawlessness and violence, until the pacification of technology (the railway and the telegraph) spread over it. I'm not sure what our connection to that might be, but it still seems strong.

Thursday

Apparently we are on the verge of a Western revival. How true is this? I don't know. I read it in the Sunday Times, so perhaps it is just one critic's interpretation of random events. After all, films like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford have been in the pipeline for some time. Westerns are always being made, but are we now seeing a consistent run of them? And will they be successful and influential? There have recently been several TV shows set in the West, and at least five or six films are planned for release later this year and the next. What's happening? Possibly Hollywood is following the dictum of John Ford: 'when in doubt, make a Western'. Are filmmakers, having run out of ideas (comic books, TV series, kids' toys, Disneyland rides etc) turning to their staple diet? Or is it, as the article suggests, indicative of a new way to approach contemporary politics and warfare? Instead of making films directly about events in Iraq, they make a western. The newspaper critic posits several interpretations of what the Western has meant and now represents, and I'll talk about that tomorrow...

Wednesday

The Simpsons Movie is funny. There's no doubting that. The problem was - and this was always going to be extremely hard to surmount - that it just felt like an extended TV episode. In the series, over eighteen years, they've just about done everything possible. One of the many things that was original about it - that they did epic storylines in 30 minutes - has undermined their attempt to do a film. The Simpsons have already caused mass destruction and/or saved the world - several times. So it was always going to be a struggle to create a plot-line that would be a step above what they've done before. The other options were thus either: explain something new about the characters you didn't know before, or have better jokes than you've ever done before. Again, however, after eighteen years, there's not much left you haven't seen/heard. The jokes were good, but no better than your average episode. The one thing about the film that was appealing was something that might be specific to me. The first ever episodes I watched (from season 2) were Bart's mini-golf tournament and his attempt to jump the Springfield gorge on a skateboard. One of those episodes is tied back into the finale, and it made me think perhaps this is what the film should've been - a homage to the series, rather than an attempt to do something new?

In other news, Michelangelo Antonioni died yesterday.