James Ellroy on Dashiell Hammett:
Hammett’s male-speak is the gab of the grift, the scam, the dime hustle. It’s the poke, the probe, the veiled query, the grab for advantage. It’s the threat, the dim sanction, the offer of friendship cloaked in betrayal. Plot holes pop through Hammett’s stories like speed bumps. The body count accretes with no more horror than pratfalls in farce. It doesn’t matter. The language is always there.
(via The Guardian)
fRINGE Underground was started by me and a friend because we felt that no one had taste anymore. I mean, I understand people who fire on all cylinders all day long who want to shut down the engines and escape with a romance novel or slasher flick. But people were no longer seeing guilty pleasures as anything other than pure pleasure. Crap bands, lousy movies, unwatchable TV shows and boring books were rocketing to popularity because people simply didn’t want to think. Thanks to Coldplay, Adam Sandler, The King of Queens, and Oprah’s book club, people with no taste actually thought that simply because they liked what everyone else liked they were digesting quality.
So we started fRINGE to try and offer alternatives that never got any publicity–art films that died quiet deaths, artists that never sold a record, books that never got a fair shake. We wanted to at least be one voice in the wilderness crying out that you don’t have to listen to John Maher when there’s Elliott Smith, you don’t need to waste time seeing a Matrix sequel when there’s Wes Anderson, and while you were watching Everybody Loves Raymond quality shows like Freaks & Geeks were getting cancelled. And if you need Oprah Winfrey to pick your books for you, the only thing you should be reading is an eye chart.
(from Gothamist, Dec 2006)
It’s the school holidays: that time of the year when this reviewer obviously has to atone for the sins of a previous life by sitting through the candy-coated commercialised detritus that we foist on our kids to keep them off the streets.
Firstly, the worst of the lot: Bratz is as toxic as the chinese-made toys that inspired it, a nakedly cynical hymn to consumption, triviality and shallowness. To be avoided at all costs.
When your correspondent was a nipper back in the early 80s, two of the most prized pirate videos available were the legendary Porky’s and something called Lemon Popsicle – two films about horny teenagers in the 1950s – and illicit copies were precious currency. Now the modern generation gets its own fat Jewish kids trying to get laid in Superbad: a very funny, filthy, comedy spawned fully-formed from the dirty minds of two horny 14 year olds (writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg produced their first draft when they were, in fact, only 14).
High school kids Seth and Evan are desperate to get lucky so they’ll be able to go to college with “experience” and the only way they know to achieve that is to get chicks drunk. With the help of an extremely humorous fake Hawaiian ID and two hilariously easy-going local cops they get pretty close. As you might expect, the perfect audience for this film is about 14 years old, and considering the R16 rating it would only be fitting if they watched it on grainy VHS or wagged school to sneak into the flicks.
I Do is that rare beast: a romantic comedy that works better as a romance than a comedy, largely due to direction from Eric Lartigau that makes a horrible meal of the broad comedy moments and self-effacing performances from leads Charlotte Gainsbourg and Alain Chabat. Chabat plays hen-pecked metrosexual perfume designer Luis Costa, saddled with five sisters, seven nieces and a widowed mother, all of whom are desperate to see him married off. As seems to be the way of things in French cinema recently Costa hires a stranger to pretend to be his fiancée so she can dump him at the alter and the family will get off his back. A matchless plan I’m sure you’ll agree.
Surely it can’t be a coincidence that this film is released in the same week as Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, another film about an emotionally stunted wonder-nose. Perfume is based on the well-loved Patrick Süsskind novel that many (including Stanley Kubrick) considered un-filmable and so it proves. Ben Wishaw plays Jean-Baptiste Grenouille: born into poverty in pre-revolutionary Paris he has a remarkable talent for discerning scent. Unfortunately, as a character he’s not much more than a monkey-boy with a nose and director Tom Tykwer fails to find a satisfactory cinematic representation for the sense of smell which defeats the point somewhat.
I won’t go as far as recommending avoidance as, unlike most films, it is full of memorable moments and will at least provoke a response – its just that mine was negative.
The likeable comedian Steve Carell takes the lead in Evan Almighty, sequel to un-likeable comedian Jim Carrey’s smash-hit Bruce Almighty from 2003. Carell plays politician Evan Baxter who is taught a lesson in humility and ethics by genial practical joker God (Morgan Freeman). Soft-headed, dim-witted but warm-hearted.
Punk came along at just the right time for Joe Strummer. As “Woody” Mellor (after folkie Woody Guthrie) he was a middle-class art school drop-out channelling his energy into women and pub rock until he heard the siren call of punk and made his mark as leader of The Clash. Julien Temple’s moving biography, The Future is Unwritten, is an excellent guide to the punk period but is even better on the personal and artistic resurrection of Strummer’s final years. Highly recommended.
Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 19 September, 2007.
The children of Bougainville, the island that Mr. Jones locates in the vicinity of Papua New Guinea, learn to treat Pip as a mixture of deity, best friend and rock star.
While most of New Zealand’s attention is on France I will also be keeping an eye on South Africa and the first World Twenty20 (or is that 20Twenty?) Championship.
It’s been a long time between internationals for the Black Caps – long enough to almost forget the heartbreak of Kingston in April. Actually I may never get over this particular piece of insanity:
Anyway, we’re on the telly again at often ridiculous hours of the day and playing a fairly ridiculous game. As I like to tell people: if Test Cricket is Shakespeare and One Day Cricket is Chekhov then Twenty20 is “Everybody Loves Raymond” but I’ll be watching all the same.
And Fleming has announced his retirement from the One Day game and accepted his demotion as Captain of the Test side. I have mixed feelings about this (and the Bracewell-factor generally) but I feel confident that Vettori will do well considering the example that Fleming has set for him.
