Film Round Up

Blood The Last Vampire

Or, Buffy-san, the half-blood vampire. Bloody buddy movie as Japan meets the US during the Vietnam war on an airbase. Saya, the half-demon Vampire slayer with a backstory that's perhaps more interesting than the main narrative, battles against Onegin (the Dark Mother), the US military and the council that is supposed to protect her, with her side-kick Alice, daughter of the US General. Character development is under-advanced in favour of action, and martial arts action/stunts is under-used in favour of not very good CGI. Still it knocks Twilight into a cocked coffin.

Also features one of my favourite Corrie characters, Gay Ted, as a council elder.

Heathers

Swatches, scrunchies and slushies.

The first subversive teen movie which made room for Buffy, My So Called Life, Donnie Darko, Veronica Mars, and Ghost World (the date rape and Aids line seems to be stolen from Heathers). It's rarely shown on TV – it's a bit too close to the bone with its teen school murder plotline.

Veronica/Winona has found an answer to problem of mean girls Heathers - accidental assassination – but this solution proves worse than the problem when she discovers her badly hair-dyed boyfriend is a bit too much like Harris and Klebold, determined to off everyone who fills the vacuum left by a dead Heather. The likes of Buffy TVS were kinder to their Heathers/Cordelias, when talked into coerced into a sex act with a college boy, we see Heather 1 spitting at herself in the mirror. Cordelia would have spat in his face.

John Waters would have killed to make such a deadly dark camp classic with lines like this: “My teen angst bullshit has a body count”.

Get a gun and kill yr boyfriend

The Human Jungle

Police chief Danforth vows to clean up the mean streets of NYC with zero tolerance, Giuliani style (people are arrested for drawing on bill posters and loitering outside a cafe). The attempt fails when a bystander is shot by a cop, messing with the murder case Danforth's determined to solve by fair means or foul. It's rather like an ep of The Wire in 1954, although it seems 5 or 10 years earlier than this with its focus on moral certainties (Danforth is particularly keen on cracking down on punks and creeps and juvies, despite the real crime being run by aged career criminals) and its paternalistic view of the world.

Although not in the official noir canon, we have double crossing dames and bent cops, with dark alleys and mist giving it a traditional shady feel.

The Lives of Others

When I went to Berlin last year several people told me: Oh you must see The Lives of Others, which led me to conclude that yes, it was a film about spying and involvement/alienation and humanity vs political authority, but that it was also a movie about the city. Which it isn’t. There’s a shot of Karl Marx Allee and the area where Georg and Christa live looks like Friedrichschain, but the wall, the Brandenburg gate and even the TV tower are absent.

 

I was surprised the film had a happy ending; what struck me most was that in the epilogue, it didn’t really matter what had gone on, the tension had gone, the politics no longer mattered. I was also interested in the idea of spying being an end in itself, not a means to an end, the product of a corrupt system. No-one had really lost or won and the only casualty had been the deceitful woman - male film makers have lost the virgin/whore view of women and invented a new trope – either the elfin saviour muse or the betraying woman who is too weak to behave nobly (i.e. like a man).

 

Goodbye Lenin’s darker brother.

 

Film Round Up

Blood The Last Vampire

Or, Buffy-san, the half-blood vampire. Bloody buddy movie as Japan meets the US during the Vietnam war on an airbase. Saya, the half-demon Vampire slayer with a backstory that's perhaps more interesting than the main narrative, battles against Onegin (the Dark Mother), the US military and the council that is supposed to protect her, with her side-kick Alice, daughter of the US General. Character development is under-advanced in favour of action, and martial arts action/stunts is under-used in favour of not very good CGI. Still it knocks Twilight into a cocked coffin.

Also features one of my favourite Corrie characters, Gay Ted, as a council elder.

Heathers

Swatches, scrunchies and slushies.

The first subversive teen movie which made room for Buffy, My So Called Life, Donnie Darko, Veronica Mars, and Ghost World (the date rape and Aids line seems to be stolen from Heathers). It's rarely shown on TV – it's a bit too close to the bone with its teen school murder plotline.

Veronica/Winona has found an answer to problem of mean girls Heathers - accidental assassination – but this solution proves worse than the problem when she discovers her badly hair-dyed boyfriend is a bit too much like Harris and Klebold, determined to off everyone who fills the vacuum left by a dead Heather. The likes of Buffy TVS were kinder to their Heathers/Cordelias, when talked into coerced into a sex act with a college boy, we see Heather 1 spitting at herself in the mirror. Cordelia would have spat in his face.

John Waters would have killed to make such a deadly dark camp classic with lines like this: “My teen angst bullshit has a body count”.

Get a gun and kill yr boyfriend

The Human Jungle

Police chief Danforth vows to clean up the mean streets of NYC with zero tolerance, Giuliani style (people are arrested for drawing on bill posters and loitering outside a cafe). The attempt fails when a bystander is shot by a cop, messing with the murder case Danforth's determined to solve by fair means or foul. It's rather like an ep of The Wire in 1954, although it seems 5 or 10 years earlier than this with its focus on moral certainties (Danforth is particularly keen on cracking down on punks and creeps and juvies, despite the real crime being run by aged career criminals) and its paternalistic view of the world.

Although not in the official noir canon, we have double crossing dames and bent cops, with dark alleys and mist giving it a traditional shady feel.

The Lives of Others

When I went to Berlin last year several people told me: Oh you must see The Lives of Others, which led me to conclude that yes, it was a film about spying and involvement/alienation and humanity vs political authority, but that it was also a movie about the city. Which it isn’t. There’s a shot of Karl Marx Allee and the area where Georg and Christa live looks like Friedrichschain, but the wall, the Brandenburg gate and even the TV tower are absent.

 

I was surprised the film had a happy ending; what struck me most was that in the epilogue, it didn’t really matter what had gone on, the tension had gone, the politics no longer mattered. I was also interested in the idea of spying being an end in itself, not a means to an end, the product of a corrupt system. No-one had really lost or won and the only casualty had been the deceitful woman - male film makers have lost the virgin/whore view of women and invented a new trope – either the elfin saviour muse or the betraying woman who is too weak to behave nobly (i.e. like a man).

 

Goodbye Lenin’s darker brother.

 

A Tale of Two Towns

On Friday, two items in the news struck me, the attempted murder of two children by two children in Edlington, South Yorkshire, where I went to school, and people being very upset about a Banksy graffito being painted over by Hackney Council in Stoke Newington, where I now live. The juxtaposition felt quite disgusting.

I didn't live in Edlington, I grew up in a village about 6 miles, or a world, away. Our tiny town had a duck pond and a castle and a Norman church and a WI and village in bloom competition. Edlington had a closed colliery and a Netto. School-leavers ("Edlo Mafia") who would have once presumably gone down the mine, hung around the gate terrorising the pupils. It's possible those school-leavers have had kids who have had kids by now and there's three generations of people with fuck all to do. If Tesco moved in, it would be welcomed as the majority employer. 

The anarchist group squating the old Vortex bar in Stoke Newington spread rumours that Tesco were interested in acquiring the site as a way of bolstering support for the campaign against the building being sold. When I write about being so lucky to live here, I'm not being disingenuous. It's not as though I would have ever ended up on benefits in Edlington but when younger, a life in Doncaster seemed a possibility, especially when careers classes talked about YTS being the only viable option, despite the school being a mix of middle and working class children of differing abilities (there were only a couple of children from my infant school who went onto to be privately educated). It's probably different now; Harold Wilson have opened the school in 1967 and New Labour may have funded new buildings but they also introduced school selection, allowing middle class families to choose the school rather than the school being chosen by its locality.

Doncaster has a new Mayor from the "UK Democrats" party, presumably some kind of offshoot of UKIP, voted in on what appears to be an anti-PC ticket, he has stopped the funding for the gay pride march and threatened to cut English-as-a-second-language teaching. The (Labour) council has tried hard to move the place from being ex-industrial to call centres and binge drinking to being a shoppers paradise - they lured in Debanhams and Starbucks and (gasp) a bookshop. Stoke Newington would resist a coffee chain but here not only is it welcomed as a sign of aspiration fulfilled, it also keeps the frappuccino slupring teenagers out of the pubs. To resist materialism and consumerism, you first have to have the materials to consume. People without stuff want stuff and the (liberal) people with the stuff want to reject the stuff. The building where I work houses the organic food and veg organisation and a council nursery. The middle class staff of the former cycle to work. The latter, despite being on minimum wage, all drive huge SUVs.

Climate change protesters camped out at Drax power station in order to highlight the ongoing high carbon emissions from coal-fired power but I, despite working for the aforementioned organic organisation, found it quite difficult to support these actions. Monied people from Wiltshire telling people relying on this industry that they should be - what? working for Greenpeace? - sticks in the craw somewhat, just as it did when Jamie Oliver instructed Rotherham mothers not to pass burgers to their kids through the school gates. I know Fatty Short Tongue is right, but it riles me, the mockney Essex boy thinking he knows best, like the lady philanthropists of the 19th century instructing the slum people on how to live. What middle class people always get wrong is that they think working class people want to be like them and only need to be shown how. Middle class people have gone on flights and eaten steak and driven cars for decades, why shouldn't working class people now do the same?

When Doncaster social services had more kids on the at risk register dying than in Haringey the media (until now), weren't that interested. Places like Edlington have been forgotten and it's a lazy cliche, but New Labour has failed them. Labour spent so much energy courting Kent and Essex and middle England that they abandoned their support base and now that support base is biting back - it won't save them in the Tory landslide of 2010. I don't believe that the 19% of Barnsley who voted for the BNP are natural racists, I believe they don't feel that enough is being done to benefit them and I think they're probably right. New Labour has a Milton Friedman-esque vision of the likes of Doncaster and Barnsley - that the market will sort everything out, that call centres and warehouse distribution units will move there because the workforce is cheaper and that workforce will then spend their money on aspirational goods. Everyone's happy. Until recession kicks in, as it tends to every 10 years or so.

Why people in Barnsley would rather vote BNP than Green:

"Are you passionate about taking action on Climate Change in your professional or personal life?

Climate Weekends at Embercombe exist to connect, challenge and nurture the people taking a stand on this issue.

There will be facilitated plenary time, smaller group time and invigorating conversation working outside in the fresh air in the organic garden.

With new Climate initiatives bursting forth daily in the build up to Copenhagen, this weekend will be an opportunity to stop and reflect on your role in achieving the change we seek, make new contacts who can help you and vice versa, discuss strategies and ideas and revitalise your energy reserves in a very beautiful place.

The cost of this weekend is £150 inclusive of accommodation in cosy yurts with your own wood burning stove, hot showers, homemade organic meals using Embercombe ingredients wherever possible.

We are a social enterprise 7 miles from Exeter, on 50 acres overlooking Dartmoor. Our mission is to ‘touch hearts, stimulate minds and inspire committed action for a truly sustainable world’.

If you can’t make it, do consider our Story Telling for Change weekend on 6-8th Nov."


 

A Tale of Two Towns

On Friday, two items in the news struck me, the attempted murder of two children by two children in Edlington, South Yorkshire, where I went to school, and people being very upset about a Banksy graffito being painted over by Hackney Council in Stoke Newington, where I now live. The juxtaposition felt quite disgusting.

I didn't live in Edlington, I grew up in a village about 6 miles, or a world, away. Our tiny town had a duck pond and a castle and a Norman church and a WI and village in bloom competition. Edlington had a closed colliery and a Netto. School-leavers ("Edlo Mafia") who would have once presumably gone down the mine, hung around the gate terrorising the pupils. It's possible those school-leavers have had kids who have had kids by now and there's three generations of people with fuck all to do. If Tesco moved in, it would be welcomed as the majority employer. 

The anarchist group squating the old Vortex bar in Stoke Newington spread rumours that Tesco were interested in acquiring the site as a way of bolstering support for the campaign against the building being sold. When I write about being so lucky to live here, I'm not being disingenuous. It's not as though I would have ever ended up on benefits in Edlington but when younger, a life in Doncaster seemed a possibility, especially when careers classes talked about YTS being the only viable option, despite the school being a mix of middle and working class children of differing abilities (there were only a couple of children from my infant school who went onto to be privately educated). It's probably different now; Harold Wilson have opened the school in 1967 and New Labour may have funded new buildings but they also introduced school selection, allowing middle class families to choose the school rather than the school being chosen by its locality.

Doncaster has a new Mayor from the "UK Democrats" party, presumably some kind of offshoot of UKIP, voted in on what appears to be an anti-PC ticket, he has stopped the funding for the gay pride march and threatened to cut English-as-a-second-language teaching. The (Labour) council has tried hard to move the place from being ex-industrial to call centres and binge drinking to being a shoppers paradise - they lured in Debanhams and Starbucks and (gasp) a bookshop. Stoke Newington would resist a coffee chain but here not only is it welcomed as a sign of aspiration fulfilled, it also keeps the frappuccino slupring teenagers out of the pubs. To resist materialism and consumerism, you first have to have the materials to consume. People without stuff want stuff and the (liberal) people with the stuff want to reject the stuff. The building where I work houses the organic food and veg organisation and a council nursery. The middle class staff of the former cycle to work. The latter, despite being on minimum wage, all drive huge SUVs.

Climate change protesters camped out at Drax power station in order to highlight the ongoing high carbon emissions from coal-fired power but I, despite working for the aforementioned organic organisation, found it quite difficult to support these actions. Monied people from Wiltshire telling people relying on this industry that they should be - what? working for Greenpeace? - sticks in the craw somewhat, just as it did when Jamie Oliver instructed Rotherham mothers not to pass burgers to their kids through the school gates. I know Fatty Short Tongue is right, but it riles me, the mockney Essex boy thinking he knows best, like the lady philanthropists of the 19th century instructing the slum people on how to live. What middle class people always get wrong is that they think working class people want to be like them and only need to be shown how. Middle class people have gone on flights and eaten steak and driven cars for decades, why shouldn't working class people now do the same?

When Doncaster social services had more kids on the at risk register dying than in Haringey the media (until now), weren't that interested. Places like Edlington have been forgotten and it's a lazy cliche, but New Labour has failed them. Labour spent so much energy courting Kent and Essex and middle England that they abandoned their support base and now that support base is biting back - it won't save them in the Tory landslide of 2010. I don't believe that the 19% of Barnsley who voted for the BNP are natural racists, I believe they don't feel that enough is being done to benefit them and I think they're probably right. New Labour has a Milton Friedman-esque vision of the likes of Doncaster and Barnsley - that the market will sort everything out, that call centres and warehouse distribution units will move there because the workforce is cheaper and that workforce will then spend their money on aspirational goods. Everyone's happy. Until recession kicks in, as it tends to every 10 years or so.

Why people in Barnsley would rather vote BNP than Green:

"Are you passionate about taking action on Climate Change in your professional or personal life?

Climate Weekends at Embercombe exist to connect, challenge and nurture the people taking a stand on this issue.

There will be facilitated plenary time, smaller group time and invigorating conversation working outside in the fresh air in the organic garden.

With new Climate initiatives bursting forth daily in the build up to Copenhagen, this weekend will be an opportunity to stop and reflect on your role in achieving the change we seek, make new contacts who can help you and vice versa, discuss strategies and ideas and revitalise your energy reserves in a very beautiful place.

The cost of this weekend is £150 inclusive of accommodation in cosy yurts with your own wood burning stove, hot showers, homemade organic meals using Embercombe ingredients wherever possible.

We are a social enterprise 7 miles from Exeter, on 50 acres overlooking Dartmoor. Our mission is to ‘touch hearts, stimulate minds and inspire committed action for a truly sustainable world’.

If you can’t make it, do consider our Story Telling for Change weekend on 6-8th Nov."