Dredd

Sorry for the delay, been all sorts of busy recently. I have, however, managed to squeeze in a viewing of ‘Dredd 3D’. At first I was pretty reluctant to see it, though a 95% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, coupled with the fact that it was British funded, whet my appetite.

It’s modest budget really makes it worthwhile. Making an action packed comic-book adaptation, set in the future, for $30 million in today’s blockbuster climate of big explosions, and grossly over the top CGI, is no mean feat. And for this, Dredd must be commended…It also stars the lovely Lena Heady, who I’ve only just recently had the pleasure of watching, having spent most of my summer with the Game of Thrones box sets.

The film centres around a day in the life of Judge Dredd. Dredd lives in Mega-City-One a sprawling metropolis of 800 million residents and 17,000 crimes a day. The only force of order is the “Judges”, police force who possess the combined  powers of judge, jury, and executioner. Dredd is given the task of evaluating rookie Judge Cassandra Anderson, who happens to be psychic, and has failed the tests to become a full judge. They make their way to a 200 story-slum tower block, “Peach Tress”, which is run by brutal drug lord Ma-Ma (played by the wonderful Heady). It is in this tower-block, that majority of the film takes place, as we follow Dredd and Anderson fight their way through hordes of Ma-Ma’s men, in order to get a shot at the woman herself. The violence which follows is bombastic, over-the-top, and all together exhilarating. It will remind you of cult classics like Die-Hard, or RoboCop. Adult-orientated blockbuster entertainment, that makes no pretentions of being better than it is.

A few words about the drug du-jour in the film, conveniently called ‘Slo-Mo’. When inhaled ‘Slo-Mo’ gives the user the subjective-experience of seeing the world ground down to a screeching halt. This means, as an audience member with 3-D glasses on, we can see stunning visuals; drops of water suspended in air, globules of blood pirouetting around grotesque wounds, all in ultra-slow motion (by comparison it makes the Matrix’s bullet time, look like Usain Bolt on steroids). It gives the film a rather nice psychedelic texture and, for a genre so associated with pounding narrative and fast-paced action, allows us to sit back, relax and ponder how beautiful (3-D) cinema can be.

Dredd isn’t a life changing film by any stretch of the imagination. But its self-consciousness, die-hard attitude and adult-orientated content makes me hope that its the start of something good. There will be sequels. 

Mise en abyme en abyme en abyme...

Not since Pulp Fiction, has there been a cult film as important as last year's Drive. To actualise my thoughts on it in words is beyond me, and not particularly necessary. If you're interested in some sort of criticism on both the film's depth and shallowness, then please read Mario Bauer's article over at Senses of Cinema. 

Here's a (probably all too long) extract:

It is not about coup de maître, but about par excellence. Is Drive a film, i.e. what is (such) a film today? What is the interest, the singularity of its emptiness? It seems to be more crystalline, more polished, more subtracted, more self-reflexive, more paradigmatic, consciously and conscientiously committed to “the consciousness industry.” Winding Refn is very straightforward: “I am a fetish filmmaker.” Drive is pop, absolute advertising as information, “a complete combinatorial, which is that of the superficial transparency of everything,” a video, where differentiating between art-experimental and commercial appears as mere moralizing; it is a fashion/designer video, which continues to be, and is ever more so, the cultural dominant. To put it in up-to-date terms, Drive is a flickr/tumblr/hypem/vimeo aggregate or an aggregator, (1) to the point where it is completely pertinent to ask whether the film is even meant for reception in cinema theatres or rather via VLC player.

London 2012 Revisited

Now that the Olympics are firmly behinds us, and the Paralympics just moments away, it is worth looking back at one of London 2012’s biggest, and earliest controversies, the logo and its surrounding brand.

After a reported $800,000 investment, Wolff Olnis’ design was unveiled in 2007, and the public responded with almost unanimous derision. Media outlets across the globe reported variously on the scorn:

The striking similarity to cartoon fellatio:

And the possibility of adverse medical side-effects:

However, all this was written a full five years before the identity would be brought to life across wide range of media in the run up to, and during the Games. We should remember that time can be a wonderful healer. What at first seemed confusing, difficult, abhorrent even, could, with the passage of time, unfold and become clearer. Like a delicious fruit or fine wine, certain designs need time to mature and ripen.

For any Londoner the 2012 Olympic brand became impossible to miss. From tickets to shops to Olympic venues to City roads, to remote boroughs, the identity was everywhere to be found. The purpose, according to locog, was to create a brand environment that ‘extends across every aspect of the Games, from spectator arrival into Heathrow all the way through to the colours and designs of the seats in the venues.’ In this respect, the brand application can’t be faulted. You could hardly step a foot anywhere in London without seeing the jagged lines of that controversial font, the garish hues of that divisive colour scheme, or the hard edges of that logo; there was no mistaking which elements of signage around the city belonged to the Olympics.

The question remains, has it grown on us? Last month the Guardian asked a few experts in the business what their current thoughts were on the eve of the games. Again, opinions were mixed at best, with most conceding that they had grown accustomed to it. But I would like to highlight Dave Annetts’ (Creative Director, Design Bridge) view, as it best articulates my own: “it was always my strong belief that it would grow on people – like an arranged marriage. By September, we'll all love it!”. He goes on to say “It was designed to be used in many different ways and in 2012 we'll really start to see this. A good example of an identity being far more than "the logo".”

Sure the logo was childish, inelegant, and brash but that what made it so perfect for the Games, the Olympics are, after all, exactly that- games. Games should be playful and juvenile, not austere and reverential. I don’t think anyone could have anticipated how much the nation got swept up with an undying, child-like enthusiasm for the events.  Hadley Freeman wrote a witty article on just how different Britain became during the Games, ‘Welcome to Britain 2.0, everyone. It seems like an awfully nice place.’ Gone was the disappointment. Gone was the antipathy. The country was joyous, proud of itself, and excelling at sport like never before! With all this happiness in the air, the 2012 identity captured the atmosphere perfectly. Bright neon colours! A font that looks like it was designed by a hand quivering with excitement! A logo so shameless it has to be happy! It is decidedly non-corporate. Many other Olympic logos are so safe that they have an air of corporate design about them, and with cynics all too quick to ridicule the corporate underbelly of the Olympic Games, it’s no bad thing to have a logo that’s appears a bit zany.

For a world at war, and in dire economic straits, the Olympic fever that swept the nation reminded us of what the Games can achieve for morale. They provided pure escapism. Day in and day out we could watch the beautiful youth of today carve out exemptions from physical laws and make a certain type of genius as carnally discernible as it can ever be. The branding did not reflect the finesse and elegance of world-class athletes in motion, nor was it supposed to. The Olympic identity was there to appeal to the spectator, and it  matched that aggressive fervour and passion perfectly. 

Electro Athletics

All this Olympics action reminded me of some designs I did for a friend's Mixcloud tracks.

Not sure why we decided on a retro-athletics look as it isn't exactly the first thing that comes to mind when you think of electronic music...perhaps we sensed the oncoming games and all the hype they would cause.

Either way, I was pretty happy with the results. 

Amish: A Secret Life

With the global economy getting worse by the day, international conflict never ceasing and Carly Rae Jepsen dominating our airwaves, now seems like no better time than to shun the evils of the modern world and look back to simpler times. Last night's documentary on the Amish by the BBC, certainly makes simple living look  like all kinds of fun. 

Miriam and David Lapp are 'Old Order' Amish. They see electricity as a distraction, and therefore rarely use it. They travel in a horse-drawn buggy, even if it means a trip to the bank takes 3 hours. Miriam thinks it perfectly right for a wife to be submissive to her husband, and also finds that when it comes to disciplining her children, there are few better ways in achieving results than with the 'rod' (A wooden spoon with a smiley face drawn onto it used against her children's bottoms.) 

However the Lapps have a secret. They mingle with excommunicated Amish (a big no-no in the Old Order rule book), and have re-baptized themselves (again, a serious misdemeanor though I'm not entirely sure why), they call themselves Amish-Christian and have chosen a more accepting, evangelical stance to their religion. This is why they agreed to being filmed, as technically the Amish should never be photographed. 

The documentary was fantastically illuminating, and never judgmental. All too often essays (filmed or written) on somewhat extreme approaches to spirituality (especially American spirituality) have a sense of prejudice and bias that belittles the subjects. However, Lynn Alleway and her crew are determinedly respectful of the Lapps and seldom push them into probing corners.  

Bombay Beach

If California were a country, it would be the eight-largest economy in the world. It is the most populated U.S state, and is the home of Hollywood. Los Angeles houses the super-rich and is often seen as a symbol of Western glamour and decadence, San Francisco is famous for its liberal activism, Silicon Valley is home to the world’s largest technology corporations, and Yosemite National Park is one of the most beautiful in the country, not to mention the world. These are important facts to consider when you watch Alma Har’el’s stunning debut Bombay Beach which documents the inhabitants of one of California’s most poverty stricken and desolate towns. It lies on the banks of Salton Sea, a fetid saline lake created by an accidental flood in 1905, whose salt levels are so great that nothing much can survive. However, a small collection of fascinating people soldier on and live out their lives in this dystopian utopia, which the movie documents. Har’el selects three individuals to focus on who together represent a triptych of manhood in its decisive moments. They are bipolar 7 year-old Benny Parish; CeeJay, an amorous high school football star; and  philosophical octogenarian poet-prophet, Red.

The film’s surrealism seems natural when capturing such a surreal place. Bombay Beach is an hour’s drive away from Palm Springs, yet you would be forgiven in thinking it looks like a nuclear wasteland. The visuals of Har’el’s film bore a striking resemblance to the Fallout video games series. This is unsurprising, considering those games take place in a fictional alternate history where the cold-war nuclear tension of the fifties, sparked a full blown nuclear war, and so the towns that survive are fossilised remnants of forgotten prosperity and hopefulness, much like Salon Sea itself, which was once known as the ‘California Riviera’.

Bombay Beach can easily be compared to Harmony Korine’s Gummo, or David Gordon Green’s George Washington, both focus on the inhabitants of small depressed towns, with an obtuse poetical style. Yet Bombay Beach is all the more fascinating than the other two in that it’s not a work of fiction, the fact these characters exist and breathe in this world makes for a compelling watch. On a final note, something ought to be said for the film’s musical quality. Every now and then the characters break out into choreographed danced while Beirut plays on the soundtrack. My only gripe here is the choice of music. I highly doubt the people of Bombay Beach are regular listeners to Beirut, and when the music plays the gentle poetical realism of the film suddenly breaks down and the whole thing becomes (at the risk of sounding like an arsehole) a little bourgeois. However, this is only a personal complaint, and should not detract from what is a beautiful and captivating 80 minutes of cinema. 

White Ribbon

With Michael Haneke picking up his second Palm d’Or at this year’s Cannes, I thought it about time to watch the film which scooped his first Palm, White Ribbon.

Villages are as organic as the people that constitute them, and like everything else that arises from nature, they can succumb to rot. The fictional Protestant village of Eichwald, which provides the setting for Michael Haneke’s 2009 White Ribbon, certainly has something rotten in its foundations. Malevolence taints the place and courses through the folk like an incurable plague. What at first appear to be a series of random ‘accidents’ begins to look more like calculated crimes, of which anyone, and everyone, could be guilty.

This is a film of which the least said the better, so please forgive me if I seem vague. The events narrated in White Ribbon function as a prologue to the First World War, and thus all the monstrosities the 20th century produced. Haneke suggests that Germany/Euroupe/Earth didn’t necessarily become suddenly awful, through the catalyst of war, but rather it always already had been awful, and this isolated Protestant village in Northen Germany acts as a synecdoche of a universal pollution. The plot has the trajectory of a whodunnit, though lacks the denouement, there is no Poirot. The narrator comes close to working it all out, but his conclusions are so repulsive we might be better off without the answer. Ultimately, the viciousness we see is left open-ended, and the war with which the film concludes seems like a logical progression for a story full of brutality, or you could say the war is a thankful relief-- at last this loathsome village will desist from its crimes. I’m now thinking like Grace at the end of Dogville, and what thoughts she must have been turning when she decided that that township must cease to exist.

White Ribbon is a terrific piece of work. It appears on the screen like some antique artefact, a grim anecdote from history that seems thankfully remote in the distant past. It’s naturalism has the atmosphere of truly great work of literature; we never question the events in a Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky novel because the characters on the page seem so real we forget we are reading. The same can be said for the people on screen in Haneke’s White Ribbon, the mis-en-scene, performances, and positively stunning cinematography makes you feel as though you’ve been spirited away to early 20th century Germany, unfortunately it’s a rather horrid place. I leave below a few screenshots from some of the lingering portraits the film exhibits, they rival Sergio Leone’s best work in their uncanny ability to ooze emotion.