All Slights Deserved

A few years back Matthew Sweet wrote an excellent article about the decline in general awareness of great world cinema in our multi-channel age. It inspired as-yet-unfulfilled fantasy to have a conversation in a chip shop with a girl I'd never met before (or had I?) about Last Year At Marienbad . Were such an encounter to take place I suspect I might fall in love there and then. The movement amorphously defined as European 'art cinema' - particularly its golden era from the mid-fifties to the early seventies - is unquestionably my favourite, so I'll make no apologies for the fact it's going to crop up frequently in this blog. Taken as a whole it's a nexus of ideas and philosophies, yet with a shared conviction that film can, maybe should, be more than vicarious escapism. These are films that challenge your preconceptions; an incitement to thought. Sure, there's plenty of pretension along the way, but pro rata it probably comes out less than the dross Ho...

In R.D. Laing 's classic study of schizophrenia The Divided Self he relates the case of a woman patient suffering with the condition who underwent a remarkable transformation after she became fixated with Federico Fellini 's film La Strada . Through identifying with Giulietta Masina's character and the physical and emotional brutality she suffers at the hands of Anthony Quinn's strongman, the woman was able a process of reassessing her own values and thoughts and begin turning her life around. It's testimony to the heartbreaking performance given by Masina, an actress often content to live in the shadow of her husband Fellini, but occasionally cast in his films to great effect. Such a work is Giulietta degli Spiriti ; a notch or two beneath the maestro's best but ket together by Masina's charismatic turn and with enough trademark flourishes and visual opulence to satisfy fans of the director. Masina plays - fittingly - Giulietta; a middle-aged housew...

One morning when I was at school in Epsom, circa 1989, we had a visit from an avuncular community support policeman who lectured us about the perils of delinquency. I say 'lecture', to be honest it was more of a relaxed chat and by and large we were such straight, middle-class kids there was little danger of us going astray. For my part a shoplifting incident shortly before moving to the area a few months earlier had pretty much made up my mind a criminal career didn't suit me, so he was preaching to the converted. The centrepiece of the officer's talk was a short drama produced for the Metropolitan Police some years earlier for just such educational purposes. He apologised that it was a little dated but I recall thinking even then that it was precisely that which appealed to me. A few years back I appealed on a British cinema website if anybody might help me obtain a copy, to no avail. You can imagine my delight, reader, when I discovered it was being included as ...

Whatever Sofia Coppola may achieve in her career one suspects nepotism will remain the proverbial monkey she'll never get off her back. The memory of the raw young actress plunged in out of her depth as Michael Corleone's ill-fated daughter in The Godfather Part III lingers long; unfairly so as her casting was hardly the film's only failing. To her credit she went away and reinvented herself. Lost in Translation was a considered and lyrical film with an inspired piece of casting, while subsequent work has garnered further acclaim. Yet her directorial debut in 1999 with the adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' novel The Virgin Suicides was less assured. I read the book about ten years ago and was underwhelmed. The story of five adolescent sisters who cast a spell upon the boys in a small-town Michigan community in the mid-seventies and then kill themselves, it's hard to determine whether the tone was meant to be blackly humorous, weird and enigmatic or...

Never mind that she's been dead for 18 years, somewhere in the world they'll be somebody who's just fallen in love in Audrey Hepburn. It's unlikely to be a amorous attraction; Hepburn's allure was always curiously asexual, borne of timeless natural beauty and poise. We're inclined to think of her as the antithesis of the overt eroticism of other fifties icons like Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield and the tendency to pair her with much older leading men (Humphrey Bogart in Sabrina , Fred Astaire in Funny Face ) often felt less of a romantic coupling and more that of girl-woman needing a surrogate father to protect her. Even with her role as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's , as a woman (and mother) now in her thirties, Hepburn couldn't entirely relinquish the persona of the ingenue. As the sixties progressed Hepburn was savvy enough to realise she had to evolve. Charade and My Fair Lady both marked progression and maintained her box office...

A few weeks back I found myself sitting in a pub discussing Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape , a documentary released last year about the absurd furore that preceded the implementation of the Video Recordings Act in 1984. Having been only seven/eight years old at the time of the controversy it had largely passed me by and I was asked how I felt about the subject - and the censorship debate it sparked - retrospectively. Being something of a woolly liberal I instinctively adopt an anti-censorship stance. It's not that I disagree that there can ever be grounds for banning or censoring work, but rather in the vast majority of cases I fail to see what's actually being achieved. Provided that children are protected from extreme material - that responsibility surely lies squarely with the parents/guardians - then mature adults should be trusted to make their own decisions. Isn't that the basis of any democratic society? Yet the subject continues to gnaw a...

Remember the Avalanches' 2001 track 'Frontier Psychiatrist'? Ever wonder where they sampled the intro from? If you were really that curious you probably already knew, but as I discovered today it originated with John Waters' 1981 comedy Polyester . Waters is probably better known nowadays as the writer/director of the original Hairspray (1988) than the excesses of his earlier work (the infamous dog shit-eating of Pink Flamingoes ), but the crossover really began with Polyester . It's an affectionate tribute to the kind of melodramas that Douglas Sirk cranked out during Waters' formative years, camped up to eleven. Waters' longtime muse, drag queen Divine, stars as Francine Fishpaw, a frustrated suburban housewife who resembles an inflated Liz Taylor with a five o' clock shadow. Francine is trapped in a loveless marriage to boorish porno cinema owner Elmer (David Samson), who deserts her for his secretary. On top of that the Fishpaw kids are par...