Channelblog

Happy? New Year!

While we're all pre-occupied with getting through the winter, let alone the recession, it just seems to be getting worse. With a whole range of Media and Entertainment concerns falling by the wayside, who's going to be left? First the country's largest wholesaler, S.Golds, Woolworths & EUK and now Zavvi. Consequently we, I'm afraid, have been having a hard time sourcing some stock for Rental stores. But we've managed and now look forward to some great releases over the coming months. Having suffered most of the hangover from the writer's strike last year with gaps in quality viewing, it's given the industry a shake up and more indie films have had a look-in.
Rental is on the up again as an alternative form of entertainment when times are hard... especially as we're now offering such great deals!
Happy New Year to everyone, in this, our 20th anniversary year in Biz!      

A little person, somewhere. Synecdoche New York

A New York city street as modeled in a vast theatre, underneath an imprisoning roof of arched steel and flying overhead, an airship. A perfect visual summation of the concoction of Philip K Dick with Kafka weaved by Kaufman in his debut as director.  Not that Kaufman would ever be simply guilty of repeating his influences, his own vision is enough of a creature itself to apprehend. And besides, most of all the movie poster leaves out the central being of this intensely focused film. Caden Cotard is slowly falling apart, and out of the decay is trying to realize his ultimate work. The film becomes an example of its own title, a synecdoche, as his projected play slowly envelops his life and becomes the reality, which supersedes life, or life miming art.
The kind of games, the playful literary technique in Synecdoche NY put this into the seriously enigmatic category, as though Woody Allen did acid before Manhattan. You look at the form, and after Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind this could well be Charlie Kaufman’s Gravity’s Rainbow or Infinite Jest.   It’s a demonstration of a uniquely dense take on the “big themes” and has peerless invention, but it feels rather too concerned with itself as a post-modern exploration than a cinema experience. 
The notes of a soul crying out against the awful, dreary world of ever encroaching death never quite connect in a way that moves, unlike Jon Brion’s song, Little Person, which beats away in the soundtrack like the missing heart of this work. Casting Phillip Seymour  Hoffman should ring out the sadness which is poor Caden’s lot rather than  the showing up the coldness of the design. It doesn’t matter how good you are. I felt for Diane Wiest when she comes to the reins late on, playing a version of Caden, she is given about the most important lines in the entire film and they sound so clunkily explicit, like a writer making his address. 
But there’s easily enough in this to inspire reflection long after you’ve finished the film.  No stranger to playing with time, Kaufman tells his story in a peculiar kind of temporal atrophy. Scenes continually allow the future into the present, and then later in the movie Caden is caught in a terminal rush where death is definitely the next stop, only we never arrive, we wait and see time itself as another lesson in narrative. This is very close in spirit to Beckett. It isn’t going to repeat the success of Eternal Sunshine, but for anyone bothered to make an effort it feels as though it would repay another viewing. Kaufman isn’t the kind of director to imitate, although there’s a distinct Punch-Drunk Love feel in all of this, albeit one which is amped into a very theatrical intelligence. If Adam Sandler and Emily Watson’s romance was about the West Coast promise of happiness in escape,  then Caden’s lonely journey is rooted in an East Coast urban negativism.There is a notion of love in this but it keeps being strangled by a drive towards the darker side of a dreamy version of Caden’s life.  
The story goes awry from the start when his wife walks out on him with their 4 year old daughter. Catherine Keener seems not quite the bitch she played in Being John Malkovich, but decides to leave for the art scene in Germany and entirely cuts off Caden.  Kaufman can’t write anything remotely realistic about a break-up without going into overdrive – this isn’t Blood on the Tracks so much as Torture in A Berlin Sex Club. Just as Being John Malkovich was relaxed, even amused over the quite horrifying, as Malkovich regains his mind so briefly, again in Synecdoche there is a detachment obstructing its more heartfelt claims. Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s tears should be worth something more than this. Kaufman could have learnt much from the sincerity of  Hoffman’s character in Love Liza, nevermind looking at Todd Luiso’s direction for how to make a downward spiralling life seem worth caring about.
The sheer abstraction in the narrative asks for more an effort of exegesis than viewerly pleasure. While in fantasies, the introductory is often the most beguiling here. Kaufman bides his time till he lets us in on the extent of his game with Caden Cotard. Turning mimesis inside out isn’t so original but the way it builds into a cumulative experience, where everything becomes another reflection of a reflection, every wall, every room, another piece to be restaged has at least, a flat out brilliant conceptual design even if steadily Kaufman’s trademark humour is drained from the film.
Perhaps it eclipses everything he’s done before, intellectually it does, but it makes the mortal error of being itself a part of Caden’s terminal drift towards death. There is no will to contrast the solipsistic stage of Caden’s descent. The happiness, as the  Kaufman penned lyrics go, is somewhere, maybe some day far away….

Commander Travis

London Film Festival

Having had various friends, colleagues and staffers mingling at the recent festival, we'll hopefully be bringing you our own reviews of certain films. Although some of us didn't quite get around to watching many movies, I for one loved the latest Bond movie... surely the best for some time, for all sorts of reasons. Not least because of the slightly darker take and subtleness of the storyline. Daniel Craig (one of our members) is fitting into the part nicely.
    

Subscription Freedom Accounts

It seems some of our shop members are upset that we're about to cancel in-store subscription accounts. So here's why we're doing it...

We don't make money out of them! And they were becoming a conflict to normal members in terms of copy depth. Although many members, past and present, may well use the likes of lovefilm, it should be noted that there're agenda is to aggregate subscribers for next-generation digital delivery and that the business as it stands is still not profitable. Besides the fact that a growing amount of monthly debits we're being returned unpaid (sign of the times!),causing admin headaches.

Anyway, bet you didn't know we have execs of lovefilm who still rent films from our shops! Ask yourself why that should be? Remember people, we give you up to 30% extra if you pre-pay, and many a loving relationship has been struck-up in our shops between customers over the years! So get out there, meet your neighbors, go to the pub for a drink and then go and watch one of our movies together... that way you save more money because you're sharing!    

   

The Dark Knight

Batman has come a long way from his first appearance in Detective Comics.  If ever a film marked a contrast with its forbears then this is it. Tim Burton’s own effort pales against this very contemporary vigilante.  The gothic design, party theatricality and   sing-song Joker are now caught in a 1989 past which is an ornate confection.  Films don’t exactly improve but they certainly revel in their ability to portray a more exciting, realistic version of action. Christopher Nolan’s particular contribution rides over the problems with his first effort and takes the intensity level to ten or thereabouts, not just in its aerial swoops but in it’s intelligence. This must be one of the most auteurist blockbusters ever made. Critics who feel judgement has be qualified by the base material of a big budget Hollywood production should realise this allows Nolan to carry on from Memento rather than somehow restricting his freedom. Genre doesn’t mean dumber, even if the rapturous Fanboys makes it seem so. For many, this is genre defining for 2008 the way James Cameron accomplished with Terminator and Aliens in the 80s, or Fincher with Se7en in the 90s. Bryan Singer’s own Superman rebirth falls to the side, an irrelevancy next to this.

 

As much as the spectacle is impressive, easily eclipsing his first effort, and featuring an inspired turn from Heath Ledger, its ambition ultimately reveals a rather troubled core.  The problem with Christopher Nolan is his need to exercise the most calculated kind of plotting for the sake of throwing his audience into an unexpected turn. For all the critical praise he receives, like Bryan Singer, he is an exemplar of a dubious evolution of narrative. Where the absurdity of the ruse in Vertigo is brilliantly revealed we now find less and less artfully a defined tendency to surprise an audience with a plot turnaround like an addict looking for a fix. The rot set in with David Fincher’s Se7en. It becomes especially striking with the manifest ability of these directors. In the case of Nolan it’s remarkable to find such favourable consensus on his style. Being skilfully hoodwinked only for the plot to unravel in the most drastic fashion suggests a certain pursuit of complexity of form, a balancing act with reality that goes completely askew. 

 

The Joker appears as if from nowhere in The Dark Knight, there is no attempt to explain him; he supersedes the notion of an origin. While this is satisfying, and Nolan’s beloved style of over intricate plotting is absolutely what you should expect from Gotham’s exotic criminality, too much rests on the tragedy of Harvey Dent. The rising star of Gotham’s fight against crime, played to perfection by Aaron Eckhart, is built up with barely a hint of the precipice he walks. Nolan likes to work a sudden reversal even when most of the audience know where Dent is headed. There is a kinship Batman feels for Dent’s crusading work in the court room who also happens to be romancing Rachel Dawes, (now Maggie Gyllenhaal after Kate Holmes oddly turned down this sequel) Bruce Wayne’s former love interest. This is the game of rivals but this time Nolan explores it as a kind of sympathetic contest. When Dent comes out with the memorable line: “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain” its pure Frank Miller, the writer who kick-started it all with his own Dark Knight, before Tim Burton’s Batman.  But the crunch is the transformation from sanity to insanity.  That is the rub.  And here, Dark Knight falls down. 

 

When poor Harvey comes round from his accident we have to deal with a derangement bent on vengeance no matter what the cost. Herein lies a problem. In the genre of the comic book unhinged psychopaths are perfect villain material; dramatic shifts in character add to their colour. But Nolan puts so much of our everyday world into the sensibility of The Dark Knight it presents a challenging paradox not just of Dent’s persona but of how you integrate realism into genre. After the thrills there’s an uncomfortable feeling over how much has been taken from a post 9/11 American psyche and replayed out for kicks. What was present in ‘Batman Begins’ now becomes questionably amplified. The Joker is essentially a cipher for terrorism. Gotham is plunged  just like Iraq into the most violent insecurity replete with videos of hostages being killed,  and a debate on whether Batman, like the US army, is only serving to further inflame the situation. 

 

It’s very bold of Nolan to debate the value of Batman, but drawing such a close analogy to the American role in Iraq is bound for difficulty. Standing in the smoking wreckage of a building, the fire hoses behind him Batman may as well be at Ground Zero. I can understand the need for genre to be reinvented, to be made more contemporary but this is mainlining a very ideological sort of fear. Graphic Novels have explored both the psychological and political but not ventured as far as Nolan. But then, the stakes are so much greater now than when Miller originally created his Dark Knight and Alan Moore wrote The Watchmen. This is an experience attempting to push the action further whilst exploiting the frayed psyche of post 9/11 USA. It wears its intellect a little too obviously at the expense of feeling. For all its authentic darkness, so lacking from Burton’s version  there isn’t one frame of lyricism. A transvestite Joker walking from Gotham General Hospital dressed as a nurse to his getaway school bus is one of a number of inspired images which don’t quite cover for a film full of guile but confused how far to go in questioning a hero who becomes increasingly warped. The stakes are raised, pain of a mental kind is all over this without it ever disturbing the next thrill of the narrative.  Heath Ledger’s Joker is the draw card living up to the hype. He brings a riveting take on The Joker’s murderous games although it must set a new high for sadism in a 12 rated movie.  Next to the protagonist of Memento he seems to be the character who most eloquently allows Nolan to give rein to his strongest impulse to deconstruct identity.  

 

After six films Chris Nolan has most convinced he crafts captivating films with an intellect rarely found in Hollywood. I can think of no clearer case of a director flattering to deceive.

Charles Maclean

DivX

As we're in the process of integrating the DivX platform into our site, perhaps some of you would like to partake in the live testing phase... Mac and PC. You need to be in the UK and of course have a suitable broadband connection.
All feedback is much appreciated so if you're interested in some Free Movie Rental Downloads over the coming weeks, get back to us using the contact page on the main site.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

After a five year sabbatical, Paul Thomas Anderson returns minus any of his usual ensemble, his rapid editing, the Mamet-like dialogue and relocates to an epic birth of a nation story, intensely focused on a study of an oil prospector, played by Daniel Day Lewis.
In ever so loosely adapting Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! he has remained in California but not so you’d notice. To capture the turn of the century landscape of oil prospecting he went close to Marfa, south-west Texas, where at the very same time his main rivals at the Oscars, the Coens were shooting No Country For Old Men.  At times it feels like it could be adapted from the biblically hewn style of Cormac McCarthy. But this is absolutely a different beast from the Coen’s chase story from hell, and delves deep into a fallen soul and his relationship with his adoptive son.
There’s no edge of the seat tension here, more a stately, reflective visual sense and of course, bestriding it all a performance of such sheer elemental conviction by Daniel Day Lewis you could be almost forgiven for overlooking the complexity of the film overall.
Just as Punch-Drunk Love had a low-key virtuosity, after the full-on excess of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, There Will Be Blood formally at least, reprises its chamber intensity.
Its score by Radiohead guitarist, Johnny Greenwood,  and the cinematography by Robert Elswitt  (who took an Oscar for his efforts) cry out anything but small-scale but the film does its drilling most tellingly as a redefinition of story-telling through the close-up, and dissolves so slow they inhabit another time. Anderson eschews any of the wider socialist critique of Upton Sinclair for an allegorical portrayal where the issue, as in Scorcese’s Color of Money, becomes other than its obvious subject. Only Richard Kelly, and Todd Haynes in American cinema today display close to this ability for skilled dissimulation. It can feel like Adorno said: every time I go to the movies I feel a little bit less intelligent. Thankfully, there are correctives, even though they are sometimes wrongfully received – like Kelly’s Southland Tales. In the case of There Will Be Blood it’s slow, harsh beauty have so much obvious brilliance it seems for many , oddly I think, to have eclipsed his previous work.

There is restraint but ultimately Anderson is too playful a director to resist a joker card. It isn’t so wild as the raining frogs of Magnolia but it’s a curve ball which can’t help but unsettle the viewer – the use of Brahms’ Violin Concerto as the credits roll underlines this strangeness, to an extent folding the drama into itself. You don’t have to worry about a tricksy self-referential Charlie Kaufman-like gambit but it’s sure to stay with you as you leave the film, nagging away.
The grand theatricality of the finish if you look too literally, will leave you underwhelmed; why such a dramatic change of tone, bordering on the absurd?  The long final scene in the mansion of Daniel Planview takes place a good number of years after the story began with him prospecting for silver but finding oil instead and emerging, crawling with a broken leg as though a man come back from hell.  It sets up a menace which the ending refuses to honour, indeed questions its reality. Don't expect laughs but there is a comedy in the rivalry between Plainview and the preacher, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano).  The theological seriousness of Cormac McCarthy (yet to be seen on film) falls under an irreverent gaze.  Part horror villiany, part literary adaptation, part Kubrick homage, part homage to John Huston, this truly maverick creation is more than anything a kind of south of eden story which aims to go past its literary inspiration to a highly nuanced cinema of tainted reflection.   

If this sounds like a disregard for story then I'd refer you back to everything else he's done.  This shouldn't come as any great surprise.  There Will Be Blood is an enigmatic experience - I read that many feel the need to see it again - it pays its debts to 70s film-making but it seeks to hone their influence into a quite original statement.  The realism is overshadowed by an absurd sense of literate horror, an odd blend but mostly compelling.  I found nothing in it like the pay-off of Samuel L. Jackson in Anderson's debut Hard 8, saying, "I know about Atlantic City", or in Boogie Nights, "I like sunsets too, but...sunrises are better" or Magnolia's "And the book says that we may be through with the past but the past ain't through with us."  Still, it's one of the outstanding films of the last ten years.

Charles Maclean

Honeydripper

Honeydripper directed by John Sayles, set in 1950 is the story of a few days in and around the eponymous and fictional blues joint in Harmony, Alabama. The proprietor, veteran bluesman turned club owner Tyrone “Pine Top” Purvis played by Danny Glover is in a whole mess of money trouble. He has Saturday night to make good his litany of debts or lose his club. Fortunately, the cotton harvest is at its height, and the just paid pickers are gonna be thirsty and in need of cutting loose this Saturday night and the soldiers from the local army base will be on leave too.

Tyrone's hopes are pinned on renowned and pioneering electric guitar player Guitar Sam whom Pine Top has booked for Saturday night only and provided he turns up, may just be able to bring in enough money to keep Pine Top in business which is also being lost to the Juke Joint across the way. Aided by his wife Delilah (Lisa Gay Hamilton) who makes the best fried chicken in town; plain or spicy, his trusty lieutenant, Maceo (Charles S. Dutton) and delightful and very credible newcomer Yaya Dacosta as China Doll, his daughter, he might just make it. Throw in guitar toting drifter Sonny (Gary Clark Jr.) and there’s a hope of glory.

Although his film has great merits: sumptuous cinematography and great visual composition, some fine acting talent including the formidable Stacy Keach as the bigoted and morally corrupt sheriff, there are some problems from which the film cannot extricate itself, namely its inability to make up its mind what it is. At times it addresses most eloquently the grinding cruelty of institutional racism, making its case implicitly and so much more potently than if it had tried to lock horns narratively with such a juggernaut of social evil. At other times there was dialogue so stilted and unnatural that it truly detracted from the experience. There were though, some great one-liners: on the Korean war ”black folks killing yellow folks to keep white folks happy.” and of his wife’s cooking one character says it would “gag a maggot.”. Nice touches to be sure.

Some very fine character acting in the generous and comely shape of Devenia McFadden as the not to be scorned Nadine and Dr. Mable John as the dignified local grand dame of song Bertha Mae lends much to a film that struggles at times to seem truthful or real perhaps. There is an established blues mythos which devotees of the music recognise and use to navigate songs and in times of need, life itself. But there are times when the characters in Honeydripper are just cyphers in an internal folklore peculiar to the movie which can make it seem impenetrable and needlessly confusing most notably with the character of Possum (Keb' Mo') the blind guitar player. Also nagging at me is that in trying to conform to such a mythology Sayles gets caught up in some clichéd characterisation, for instance Stacy Keach's sheriff whose character is rarely permitted to be anything more than a hackneyed and one-dimensional ogre.

However the film has some great great music. Check out Delta Guitar Sam: Bo Diddly meets Chuck Berry and Bertha Mae, a kind of fictionalised Bessie Smith. This seductive melodrama is as potent as any kids' sport movie so allow yourself to be transported back the birth of Rhythm and Blues. Crossroads for grown-ups. Great fun.

BL

Location shoots

Our Maida Vale branch being closed for a couple of days this week, we thought we'd explain why... another film shoot and although very secretive, it's apparently a pilot for a new comedy drama for the BBC, set of course in a Video shop!
One of the leads happens to be, purley coincidentally, a past employee of ours at that shop! Forget Clerks, you saw it here first!
We've had numerous film shoots in our shops over the years, including many pop vids... even a number 1 (David Gray) which happens to feature in the soundtrack to In The Land Of Women starring Adam Brody coming out towards the end of the month!
A segment of the current series of Primeval was filmed in our Camden store a few months ago where another all British rom com was filmed a few years back... imagine me and you, directed by Ol Parker which was really quite good. With Valentine's Day approaching perhaps it deserves a look! 

CES

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has recently happened again and is now becoming THE place for launching new techie intiatives, although Steve Jobs would have you think otherwise with Macworld in the shadows. So whether your a gadget junkie or a serious developer you can see all the demos and news here. Or watch Bill Gates keynote speech.
OK, here's Steve Jobs as well... telling you three stories from his life!