Film

[dino]

I'm an Inter support, i fucking hate milan

[Cat Stevens]

has anyone seen this one? your thoughts?

[owen]

mmm..strange coincidence - i was just looking at an ian curtis site and listening to jd on youtube. (havent seen the film btw...but heard some bad reviews so didnt bother to see it)

[manho]

"Oh, no, no, I've been through this movie before..."

[david]

Control is a very well made movie and there are plenty of good things in it. I had a few quibbles. It's largely based on the widow's book, so there's a lot of stuff in it (such as all the scenes between her and Ian Curtis) that you just have to take her word that it happened that way. If the film had been based on the memoirs of his bandmates, I wonder if she would have been as central (or even anything more than peripheral) to the story. It's also fairly conventionally told, not really going too far away from the Ray/Walk the Line type of movie biography. Actually, the film it reminded me of was Hilary and Jackie (about Jacqueline du Pre), which also tells the story of a succesful but (according to the film) miserable musician and gets its story details from somebody who the main character consistently treated like shit. It's like making a film about John Lennon and telling it from Cynthia's point of view.

Still, it's easy to watch and has a little humour, as well as fine performances and excellent photography where just the look of 1970s Manchester provides enough of a context for the movie that it never needs to be spelled out in dialogue. The music's pretty good too, though I could have done with more of it.

[Cat Stevens]

that's it, thanks Dave.

[Cat Stevens]

Werner Herzog set for 'Piano Tuner'

By Gregg Goldstein and Borys Kit

April 3, 2008

Werner Herzog will write and direct "The Piano Tuner," a lush Victorian-era drama about a Brit's journey to war-torn Burma, for Focus Features. Mandalay Independent Pictures' Cathy Schulman is a producer on the project.

Based on Daniel Mason's 2002 debut novel, the story centers on Edgar Drake, a man sent to a remote village in the late 1800s to repair an eccentric military man's piano. Drake falls in love with a Burmese woman and her country, but as the officer wins over locals through music and medicine, things grow treacherous when his troops begin to suspect him of treason.

"Tuner" is right up the intense helmer's alley. Herzog has directed several films about men venturing into exotic locales ("Rescue Dawn," "Grizzly Man," "Fitzcarraldo"), but this will be his biggest English-language costume drama in more than four decades as a filmmaker.

The original screen adaptation by Peter Buchman is being rewritten by Herzog. Focus Features executives John Lyons and Kahli Small will oversee the project for the studio.

Mason sold "Tuner" and another novel to Knopf in 2001 for $1.2 million. Schulman optioned the novel with her fellow Bull's Eye Entertainment principals Bob Yari and Tom Nunan in 2003, shortly before their bitter separation. Other producers might be added in the coming months as preproduction ramps up.

www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/film/news/e3i281ae2fb9e8cf055436e1e53c9655ed8

[owen]

looks pretty good - joy division doc

www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2v4UwEiO-g

[manho]

Infamy? They've got it

The Carry On films were crass and populated by misfits. And, sadly, they mirrored people's lives

Tanya Gold
The Guardian,
Thursday April 17 2008

It's now 50 years since the first of the Carry On series was shot at Pinewood, and the films haunt the body of British culture like a rotting thong. Whenever I see Barbara Windsor's bra bouncing off in Carry On Camping, I wonder why this is the most successful series of films in British history.

The answer is rather sad. The Carry On films are not funny. They are parables about failure. The typical Carry On hero is an everyman who lives a life of misery, unrequited lust and boredom. They are either ugly and lecherous (Sid James), pretty and foolish (Jim Dale), or obviously repressed gay men (Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey). Either way, they are incompetent and impotent. In a note to the producer Peter Rodgers, one scriptwriter called the Carry On characters "a bunch of screen idiots". And the idiot is always in some form of prosaic peril - in Carry On Nurse, the most successful British film of 1959, the protagonist in is hospital for a bunion operation.

The women belong to three depressing types. They are either stupid and beautiful (Barbara Windsor), bossy and masculine (Hattie Jacques), or ugly and bitter (Joan Sims). Carry On everywoman, personified by Sims, is a loveless harpy, atrophied by loneliness and only able to rage. In comedy after comedy, she begs for love and gets indifference. (The once-beautiful Joan Sims stuffed her face in real life - soon her characters did too). The hero rarely gets the girl he wants and, if he does, she comes at a terrible price. She will either grow a beard after accidentally taking a sex-change drug, as Barbara Windsor does in Carry On Again Doctor. Or she will turn out to be a serial killer who throws his wife into a vat of plastic and turns her into a mannequin, as Fenella Fielding does in Carry On Screaming! Carry On is a world of misery and it knows it. At the end of Carry On Henry, Kenneth Williams actually begs to die, screaming, "Carry on, executioner!"

So why did people like them? Because it was happening to them. Carry On held up a cartoonish mirror to the depressed and repressed Britain of the 1950s and 1960s. The Carry On audience - people like my grandparents - did not have opportunities to travel or do creative jobs. My grandmother left school when she was 14 and worked in a dress shop all her life. She considered herself lucky if she got taken out to dinner twice a year and didn't go abroad until the 1970s. And she loved Carry On. When she heard Kenneth Williams shouting "Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me" in Carry On Cleo, it rang true.

For people like her and millions more, the Carry On films offered a chance to see People Like You, with all your woes, on the big screen. The early films were set in schools, hospitals, police stations and a toilet factory, because everyone has a toilet, especially you. They went further afield later - to the Wild West (Carry On Cowboy), Imperial India (Carry On Up the Khyber) and Africa (Follow That Camel). But it was always a daytrip to Eastbourne with people you know too well. They smell of home movies - the props for Carry On Nurse were borrowed from the Bermondsey Work Group Hospital Management Committee. In Carry On Cleo, a park in Gerrards Cross stands in for ancient Egypt, with the Beaconsfield fire department providing the rain.

And Rodgers chose his screen idiots carefully. Their misery melted out of the screen - they were too good at their jobs. Kenneth Williams died of a barbiturate overdose at 63 and left diaries that despaired of the films. "It is appalling," he wrote of one script, "it is a Carry On." Hattie Jacques died of a heart attack at 58; Sid James on stage at 63. Both Joan Sims and Charles Hawtrey died as alcoholics. The last thing Hawtrey ever did was to throw a vase at a nurse who asked for his autograph; now that's a Carry On ending.

[e-mail]

[david]

Oddly enough, I saw Carry On Camping just last week. The film is awful, but there's one interesting bit where the neighbouring campground is invaded by a bunch of hippies. So you had all the Carry On types lined up along a fence staring at these visitors from some parallel universe. You could call it a perfect metaphor for the Carry Ons and their audience, stuck with their ancient gags while the world was exploding all around them.

[manho]

problem is the hippies were worse than the carry on guys.

[owen]

the modern comedy films are still using the same gags though - sex, women with big tits, double entendres...

the more things change, the more they stay the same

[Cat Stevens]

[david]

It's been done . . .

[manho]

polanski's version was the best:
tinyurl.com/6bfp7w

[Cat Stevens]

GENE HACKMAN - HACKMAN IS FINISHED WITH ACTING


Movie veteran GENE HACKMAN has quit acting for good, insisting he is too old to land appealing roles.
The 78-year-old actor hasn't starred in a film since 2004 comedy Welcome to Mooseport, and although he has never announced his retirement - he couldn't bring himself to return to Hollywood and play "grandfathers".
Hackman says, "I guess you could call it retired. I haven't worked for four years now. And I don't miss the business. I miss the process of being on-set with actors when things get cooking. But there's so much crapola (crap) in order to get there. It's just too painful.
"At my age, they would have me playing grandfathers and great grandfathers. That's not a heck of a lot of fun. I'd rather go back to the theatre, actually. But that's not going to happen. I'm pretty satisfied with my life right now."
Instead, Hackman keeps himself busy and his mind active, writing historical fiction novels with his neighbour Daniel Lenihan.
He adds, "I write every day for at least a couple of hours. I exercise a little bit. And then it's time for the old folks to go to bed."


18/04/2008 19:14

tinyurl.com/62u7el

[dino]

"And then it's time for the old folks to go to bed."

yeah and same thing should happening with rock music - can you hear it, Bob?

[manho]

The greatest story never told

Is it possible to tell the entire history of pop music? Bob Stanley on the riveting highs and hilarious lows of an epic attempt by one British film-maker
Bob Stanley
Thursday May 1, 2008
Guardian

At the tail end of the 1980s, journalist Nick Kent was on TV holding court on the Smiths. They were a great group, he said, no question. The man who had famously and perfectly described Keith Richards as "elegantly wasted" lounged in a plume of smoke. Then he went one step too far. In years to come, he prophesied, the Smiths would be considered the end of the line - the last great British rock group. Just as he spoke, in an abandoned warehouse in Manchester, the Stone Roses were about to take the stage. Very soon, they would render Morrissey's Manchester a piece of history: the NHS specs, the photo op under the Strangeways road sign, the canalside walks of A Taste of Honey - all would be timelocked in the mid-80s. The Stone Roses turned the contrast up and caused a pop revolution. Kent's quote was quickly forgotten.

For some time, I've wanted to write a history of modern pop, the period that began with rock'n'roll. I have had a few dozen conversations over cold drinks about start points, end points, teen culture, formats, haircuts, the importance of slang in lyrics, the involvement of the military-industrial complex. Most people can't see a clear ending to the saga, and, as time goes by, even the dawn of pop is shrouded in a fizz of shellac crackle. Here's my take: Elvis was the Big Bang, the boulder in the middle of the lake; everything since has been a ripple caused by the initial splash; the Beatles (almost as big); psychedelia (less so); punk (adrenalin shot for the old lady); acid house; and so on. Some may consider the Strokes, White Stripes or Arctic Monkeys to have been the ripples of this decade, which pretty much makes my point.

Pop's musical progression ended at some point in the early 1990s. The dance music scene, which had grown from disco and subsequently into house, thrillingly re-morphed every other month at the turn of that decade; finally it imploded with, on one hand, the endless recycling of happy hardcore hits (coming soon: Let Me Be Your Fantasy 08) and, on the other, Goldie's prog-junglist epic Mother, which ran for 60 minutes and five seconds. On either side of the Atlantic, Britpop and grunge signalled the final surrender: pop had eaten itself. Everything since (and I do think 2008 is proving to be a great pop year, don't get me wrong) has been variations on a theme. Ergo, the classic era is over.

Mostly, I've been talked out of writing this book and, of course, it would be a complete folly. Watching British documentary-maker Tony Palmer's All You Need Is Love (just released on DVD and screening in its entirety tomorrow and Saturday at London's BFI), I'm reminded why. A mammoth 17-part series on the history of popular music, it begins in Africa before moving into ragtime, jazz, blues, swing and so forth. Rock'n'roll doesn't make an appearance until episode 13. All You Need Is Love was screened in 1977. Pal er must have thought he had picked a pretty good time to cover a century's worth of popular music, with pop - and the arts generally - suffering a cultural recession, their own three-day week.

Even then, his timing was awry, and the last episode, entitled Imagine: New Directions, was laughably off the mark. Disco is dismissed in less than a sentence. Kraftwerk are ignored in favour of Tangerine Dream. As for the rest (Black Oak Arkansas, Stomu Yamash'ta, Baker Gurvitz Army), it only seems proper to point out that hindsight is a fine thing. The series ends with a century of music flashing before our eyes to the soundtrack of Mike Oldfield's Ommadawn. When it was first broadcast, the Sex Pistols were simultaneously trashing their record label's offices, and pop was reborn.

On many levels, All You Need Is Love is a powerful brew. Palmer eschews straight narrative, and includes complete performances and extensive interviews rather than clips. And he gets the big names: to see an anonymous-looking man in his early 60s speaking eloquently about Tin Pan Alley, only to realise it is Hoagy Carmichael, is quite something. It makes you want to grab a camera and talk to Carole King, Debbie Harry, Prince, even Goldie, to get their story, to document this whole beautiful noise while we still can.

Palmer loves to antagonise, and this makes the whole series worth a look, in spite of its many faults. Episode 1 begins with a looming, distorted, sweaty red face: "This is Jerry Lee Lewis, the king of rock'n' roll." Even in early 1977, with Elvis at his lowest ebb, this was more than contentious. Soon we hear that the musical is America's greatest cultural contribution and that Leon Rosselson, a largely forgotten British singer with a smug, nasal delivery, is "the best of the contemporary troubadours". We are shown endless shots of slaves and dirt-poor southerners to remind us how much pop is stolen from Africa. This is something, according to the producer Jerry Wexler, that a "little white girl from Scarsdale" wouldn't understand as she screams at the Rolling Stones, a group that had "no suggestion of violation or consummation".

Inverted racism, blunt sexism, and simple wrongheadedness aside, Palmer manages to break pop's golden rule over and over: he lets his show get boring. The best episode is on ragtime, probably because it is the straightest tale and the least trodden road. Elsewhere, lengthy footage of some of the greats - Dizzy Gillespie, Johnnie Ray, Chuck Berry - performing with bored-stiff sidekicks in 1976 or 77 is profoundly depressing and misrepresentative. The racial-theft point (white doo-wop act the Diamonds, Paul Whiteman's Broadway take on jazz, Pat Boone singing Tutti Frutti) is overplayed. It also eats up airtime at the expense of Marie Lloyd, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Domino, George Jones, Joe Meek, the Kinks, the Velvet Underground and Marc Bolan, none of whom gets a mention.

Nik Cohn's Pop From the Beginning, published in 1969 (and reprinted since as Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom), showed that encapsulating the whole deal was not impossible. He snuck Frank Sinatra and Johnnie Ray into the intro, felt a little sympathy for unlikely firestarter Bill Haley, then - revving up - eulogised Elvis better than anyone. In just over 200 pages, he nailed it, the first golden era. It worked because Cohn was "hooked on image, on heroics" and always took dumb noise over high art.

It also worked because, though he was thorough and inclusive, he wasn't afraid to get personal - to play up his unlikely heroes (notably PJ Proby) and shoot down the big names. Bob Dylan and Rubber Soul, that was where it all went wrong for Cohn: "Right then, pop began to be something more than simple auto-noise, it developed pretensions, it turned into an art form, a religion even." And he was right. On a CBS television special in 1966, Leonard Bernstein described the Beach Boys' Surf's Up as "poetic, beautiful in its obscurity". Simple moronic noise (Louie Louie, Wild Thing, I Fought the Law, I Wanna Be Your Dog) would all be bypassed in All You Need Is Love, only to be lauded months later by a new wave of rock reductivists.

Many of these could have been found lurking in a Camden Town record shop called Rock On. Originally, in the early 1970s, this had been a couple of stalls, run by a rock'n'roll enthusiast called Ted Carroll. Mostly, the stalls stocked 45s because of space issues. This suited Carroll - the 45 was the perfect format for good, tough, classic pop. When the shop opened in 1975, the records were always cranked up loud and the door was always open, even in deep midwinter, to lure people in with raw noise. Carroll and his staff had broad taste and good contacts. Jon Savage, Shane MacGowan, Phil Lynott, Bobby Gillespie - they were all regulars. The place was an education. Bob Dylan visited once and bought half the stock.

Rock On was a breeding ground for pub rock, then punk rock, and eventually a whole alternative view of pop history. It brought together people who favoured the two-minutes-30 gutbucket thrill of a pop song - whether rockabilly, girl group, R&B, punk or soul - above everything.

Some of the 45s Carroll used to play have just been compiled on an Ace CD (the label grew out of the shop). Few were hits, but Rock On sold as many copies as they could lay their hands on: Amos Milburn's Chicken Shack Boogie, Jerry Byrne's frenetic rocker Lights Out, the Belfast Gypsies' Gloria's Dream, Peter Holsapple's Big Black Truck, the Shangri-Las' Give Him a Great Big Kiss - two dozen records that span decades and, in their way, share and inform pop history just as well as a 17-hour documentary. Each 45 gets your blood pumping, makes you want to dig deeper, makes you want to dance.

Writers and documentary-makers should always remember that dumb old pop music must never be taken too seriously, while also remembering that nothing in the world is more important. Nik Cohn knew this; Nick Kent didn't, and nor did Tony Palmer. You have to admire Palmer's ambition, and there are moments when he makes links you would never have thought of, makes sense of the difference between Chicago and New Orleans jazz in a single sentence. All You Need Is Love is vast, riveting, rambling - a life's work, and you will applaud its daring. The one thing it really lacks is love.

· All You Need Is Love is released by Voiceprint on Monday and will be shown in full at BFI Southbank, London SE1, tomorrow and Saturday. Rock On is out now on Ace

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

[david]

I remember watching that series, I guess it was my lasy year of high school. No YouTube then, so this was the first time I'd seen film of many of those guys. One I clearly remember knocking me back was a brief clip of the Byrds, Roger McGuinn in his cool shades, singing All I Really Want To Do.

[manho]

here's one for cripes:

Philip French's screen legends

Philip French
Sunday May 11, 2008
The Observer

No 16, Dean Martin, 1917-95

Born Dino Crocetti, son of an Italian immigrant barber in small-town Ohio, he left school at 15 in the early years of the Depression and the last days of Prohibition to work first as a labourer in a steel mill, then as a bootleg liquor driver and blackjack dealer in speakeasies.

Like his future Italian-American friend, Frank Sinatra, he formed early bonds with the Mob. His warm baritone and relaxed style modelled on Bing Crosby took him into showbusiness, but it wasn't until his 30th year, when he became straight man to zany Jewish comic Jerry Lewis, that success came his way. Greater than the sum of their parts, the duo became America's biggest double act and between 1949 and 1956 had 16 box-office hits before their acrimonious break-up, a breach not repaired until 20 years later.

Critics predicted great things for Lewis and slim pickings for Martin and his first solo movie was a dire failure. But then came an outrageous flexing of agency muscle. In 1957, MCA told Twentieth Century-Fox that unless Martin replaced Tony Randall as the playboy who becomes a model soldier in The Young Lions, it would withdraw Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. Fox gave way, Martin gave a fine performance alongside the two greatest screen actors of his generation and thereafter was in constant demand in Hollywood, Las Vegas, television and the recording studios.

He deliberately developed a reputation as a wise-cracking, heavy-drinking, laidback lothario and this persona was used in a succession of films. He appeared with Sinatra and the Rat Pack in several slack pictures and played the secret agent Matt Helm in a series that jumped on the Bond wagon. But among the routine westerns and sex comedies, he was superb in four classics. In 1958, he starred with Sinatra in Minnelli's Some Came Running, a movie challenging the complacency of the Eisenhower years, playing an itinerant gambler, a role to which Michel Piccoli paid tribute in Godard's Le Mépris. Piccoli keeps his hat on in the bath and smokes a cigar: 'I'm being Dean Martin in Some Came Running.' He went straight into Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo, one of the greatest westerns, as John Wayne's drunken deputy on the road to redemption. He again worked with Minnelli on the undervalued musical Bells Are Ringing (1960) and four years later played a satirical version of himself as Dino, a womanising singer in Billy Wilder's outrageously funny Kiss Me Stupid

Martin was a complex figure, at once intimate and detached, gregarious and solitary, comical and sad, and he ended up a recluse. He's the subject of one of the best star biographies, Dino by Nick Tosches, which for years has been an on-off project for Scorsese to direct and Hanks to star in.

Kevin Spacey on Martin 'There was nobody cooler. The thing about Dean that's always been astounding is that it just seems like it's so effortless.'

Martin on his favourite pastimes 'If you drink, don't drive. Don't even putt.'

Billy Wilder on working with Martin 'I laughed a lot. But there was much more, 90 per cent more, to him than just the jokester. I thought he was the funniest man in Hollywood.'