Jasper Sharp : BFI

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21
Mar
Movies for a Jilted Generation: StreetDance 2 3D.

“Bigger, better, bolder, back.” The quote by the Sunday Mirror’s Mark Adams prominently emblazoned across the top of the poster for StreetDance 2 3D pretty much tells you all you need to know about the sequel to the surprise hit of 2010, the UK underdog that came from nowhere to gleefully bash such bloated bombs as Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood and Prince of Persia (remember them?) at the box office upon its original theatrical release. Even more revealing is the appearance of the logo for the new BFI Film Fund in the opening credits. This is one of the first titles to receive its lottery funding via the BFI following the abolition of the UK Film Council on 31 March last year (see my original post on this) and, on the surface at least, appears to be pretty much the type of film we all thought David Cameron was crying out for just a few months back – a glossier reprise of a low-budget, high-earning film with mass popular appeal and high export potential. Ken Loach, this ain’t, but it’s a whole lot of fun, nonetheless.

Britain's Got Talent dance troupe Flawless return from the first film for this sequence in Trafalgar Square

Less a sequel than a reboot, the new film clearly has its eye on a bigger market than the UK. Largely eschewing the self-congratulatory back-slapping one would expect from a British film of this nature set in the year of the Olympics (although the London 2012 logo does appear once, in an early dance number set in Trafalgar Square), StreetDance 2 is essentially a tale of two cities, with much of the action ostensibly set in a Paris consisting of smoky bars and underground dance venues, and shabby youth hostel dormitories. There’s only a few choice exteriors to give an indication that even the smallest part of it was actually filmed there, while the vast arena that plays host to the spectacular final tournament is a dazzling, otherworldly CGI creation.

StreetDance 2 star and Will Young looky-likey Falk Hentschel

Not that the British side of things gets very much of a look in, with Nicola Burley’s sassy ‘Sarf’ London cru replaced wholesale by a pan-European posse led by clean-cut American Ash, played by newcomer (and dead ringer for Will Young) Falk Hentschel. Ash’s early-scene humiliation, after challenging London locals Invincible (curiously affecting American accents) to an underground dance-off, sees him ending up flat on his ass and assigned with the sobriquet ‘Popcorn boy’, as well as instilling in him a taste for revenge, fostered through a chance meeting with chirpy chappy Eddie (played by another Britain’s Got Talent alumni, the 2008 winner George Sampson), who offers to manage him. From then on in, it’s a brief hop, skip and jump around the continent as the unlikely pair attempt to put together a team to rescue Ash’s crumpled pride by taking on the arrogant rude boys at the world’s biggest dance competition, Final Clash, to be held in the French capital in but a matter of weeks. Before long the hapless duo are joined by, among others, Tino from Ibiza, Skorpion from the Swiss Alps, a tattooed lass from Amsterdam named Bam-Bam and Terrabyte from Prague, winding up in Paris where they discover the final missing ingredient in the shapely form of sultry salsa-dancing Eva (Sofia Boutella), all black fishnets and booty-shaking action.

Sofia Boutella, a revelation in three dimensions.

Eddie is the first to spot the pouty Parisienne’s potential to add a fiery touch of spice to the urban collective by introducing a more Latin groove to their routine. However, two obstacles stand between Ash’s will-to-power desire for revenge by way of such romantic fusion. The first, Eva’s current partner Lucien, is quickly eliminated, exiting the dance floor with a haughty Gallic shrug after being harangued because he has a girl’s name and his fandango is not quite ‘street’ enough. The second is her fiercely protective Uncle Manu, played by Tom Conti, reprising his Mediterranean shtick from Shirley Valentine (1989). Oh yes, and there’s a third – the chisel-jawed American’s unwillingness to share his moment.

StreetDance 2 lacks the charming naiveté of the first time round, but there’s a spontaneity about these films that makes them, if not hard to criticise, then at least hard to resist. The 3D format almost seems tailor made for its subject, far more so than the sort of macho action spectacles one usually associates it with. Bodies leap and contort rhythmically, in several instances eliciting uniform gasps of amazement from the audience at the screening I attended, while misty swathes of perspiration, dust motes and cigarette smoke accentuate the sense of volumetric space. The path to epic Final Clash might be a familiar one, but it’s exhilarating nonetheless.

Keeping it sexy in StreetDance 2

The portrayal of a new borderless and street-level, multi-ethnic Europe united in a harmonious body politic is also rather fascinating. This is one aimed at the EasyJet rather than the Eurorail generation, with barely a beret in sight, and Tom Conti’s gasping, garlic sausage-guzzling Uncle Manu left as the sole representative of the pre-single currency era. He’s not without a few wise words for the youngsters, too. “Dance with your heart, not with your head”, he advises our headstrong young hero or, translated into their street argot, “Don’t treat your bitch like a ho.” Manu’s role is to sandpaper down the competitive edge off the dancers, reminding them of the central role of passion in performance and exhorting them to temper their more aggressively sexy and confrontational stance with a bit of old-school romanticism – hence the running joke throughout the film of Eva consistently rebuffing Ash’s insistence they share the intimacy of dinner, despite spending hours of practice grinding their thighs together.

StreetDance 2: Beating the Eurovision Song Contest at its own game

The film’s initially conservative-seeming message, of a WASP-ish white boy from the U.S. coming in to rally together the disparate elements of a fragmented Europe with the aid of his British sidekick and lead them unto victory, is turned on its head by the finale. In a film in which the line between text and subtext often seems to strain beneath its gossamer flimsiness, it’s possible to detect a slightly more radical idea, as the pushy outsider effectively learns to subjugate his ego for the good of the collective – in other words, to become more instinctive, and indeed, more European. Now I wonder what David Cameron would make of that?

StreetDance 2 is out in the UK in 2D and 3D on 30 March 2012. For more information, check out the films website www.streetdancethemovie.co.uk.

Posted at 12:39 on 21 March 2012 Filed under news.
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11
Aug
The London Riots and Asian Cinema

You’ve probably heard all about the riots in London. They’ve been rather difficult to ignore, especially if, like me, you live in Peckham. In fact, there are police sirens periodically blaring outside my window as I write this post. It is mainly for this reason I’ve not had a chance to write a little about my experiences at the New Horizons Festival in Wroclaw, which I hope to do over the next few days. I say “mainly”, because actually much of last week was spent either catching up with the huge volume of work that has accumulated over the past few months or recovering from the hellish ordeal of getting back from Poland to London due to staggering ineptitude of LOT Polish Airlines, as those who follow me on either Twitter or Facebook may well know. Anyway, I won’t go into further details. Suffice it to say, I’ve travelled on some pretty shitty airlines on my time, but…

Peckham, the day after the riots

Back to the riots. Well, I don’t intend to add too much to the endless debate and conjecture about what has caused them, who is responsible etc, because this is a subject that has already been knocked about considerably in the nation’s media over the past few days, and it will no doubt dominate the national discourse for the rest of the year, at the very least. Besides, I don’t think I could put things much better than Seumus Milne in yesterday’s ‘These riots reflect a society run on greed and looting’ article in The Guardian, or the ‘Panic on the streets of London’ piece on Penny Red’s blogspot from Tuesday. I include these links mainly to record them for posterity, as something to look back on in the future when we’ve had a chance to get a little more perspective. Personally, my own feelings are whatever the ‘explanations’ for the huge amount of criminal damage that has been caused by the rioters, no one is ever going to convince me as to their justification.

A crime scene reconstruction in Lego of the Gregg's conflagration by my friend's 8-year old daughter

On my daily walks down Rye Lane in Peckham these past few mornings, I can’t help but think about the sheer pointlessness of the damage, the utterly emptiness of the gesture. If this was an act of defiance from a disenfranchised generation, then it was a pretty pathetic one and aimed in totally the wrong direction. Peckham is hardly the wealthiest community in London. Rye Lane already has its fair share of empty shop premises, with numerous others in the process of holding closing-down or liquidation sales. The street’s most iconic local pub, The Hope, closed a few months back and has now been replaced as a betting shop – oh the irony! The rest of the street mainly consists of privately owned African or Caribbean grocery stores or, in the case of Rye Lane’s major casualty on Monday, an off licence situated next to Gregg’s Bakery, now being demolished after it was completely gutted by fire. The looters were reduced to pilfering from stores such as Poundland, Poundstretchers, Mighty Pound, 99p Stores and Primark. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic, the sheer banality of evil.

Messages of peace and solidarity on the boarded up window of Poundland in Rye Lane, a scene that provoked a surprising emotional response in me

Still, out of the ashes, something positive already seems to be emerging, a more genuine sense of community spirit, a refusal to let the area be destroyed from rogue elements within. I’m certain Peckham will bounce back, although the detour I now have to take through the council estates round the back of Rye Lane while taking my son to his nanny do demonstrate what many have already pointed out in the media – that for all this talk about ‘Big Society’ motivating the government spending cuts, a complete different world seems exists outside of the daily experience of so many of us, where people live in cramped little estates with no money, no education, no jobs, no hope. One wonders how what is allegedly one of the richest countries in the world ever allowed things to come to this.

The sheer randomness of the devastation was brought home to movie fans with the news of the destruction of the Sony/Pias distribution warehouse in Enfield, North London, about which I tweeted news from Gigwise and The Guardian back on Tuesday and Screen Daily the next morning. The warehouse, owned by the UK’s largest independent home entertainment distributor, Pias, was razed to the ground, and with it the entire stock of a large number of DVD labels – and not major labels, but the kind of independent companies that, without which, the UK film market would be a desert: Arrow Films, the British Film Institute, Dogwoof, Artificial Eye, Palisades Tartan…

Sony distribution warehouse fire. Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters

Among these I’d like to offer my particular condolences to Terracotta Distribution and Third Window Films, two tiny labels run by friends of mine, Joey Leung and Adam Torel respectively, without whom the UK film scene would be an infinitely poorer place. These aren’t big companies; these are one man enterprises operating on a lot of love and not a lot of capital, releasing films they believe in and actively engaging with their audiences through events such as the Terracotta Far East Film Festival and East Winds: A Third Window Festival – Joey kindly let us have Terracotta’s Big Tits Zombie 3D for our Zipangu Fest Halloween Schlockfest double bill last year, while Adam gave us Confessions of a Dog for our closing film of the festival. Also Eureka have similarly been a wonderful energising force for me, with their brilliant releases of Japanese classics through their Masters of Cinema label, and Dogwoof too have built up an impressive roster of cutting edge documentaries that have spread beyond their niche markets and enriched the wider political discourse in Britain. And let us not also forget the large number of indie music labels who have similarly suffered immense losses due to this one incident. Let us pray the perpetrator of this arson attack is brought to justice as soon as possible.

Small distribution companies like these already have the odds stacked against them in the UK due to the deeply-ingrained winner-takes-all economic imbalances of the country’s entertainments market, the lack of support from the mainstream media, and the hefty premium required by the BBFC just to get films into distribution in the first place. Regardless of whether the substantial losses of the stock from all of these companies will be covered by their insurance or not, the biggest problem they all face at the moment is one of cashflow. To get a better idea of the problems facing small distributors such as these, check out this post on Third Window’s Facebook page – Basically once their stock that is already in stores across the country or held by online retailers runs out, that’s it – there’s nothing to replace it until they manufacture more units, which in itself is a costly business.

Third Window Film's release of Villain (Akunin) opens at the ICA next week

So I wish to end this post by adding my voice to the chorus of support for these companies, and in particular urge you to go to and see Third Window’s latest release of Villain (Akunin) when it opens in London next Friday at the ICA. There’s a lot more details about all this and how you can help in John Berra’s ‘Support Independent Distributors of Asian Cinema Following UK Riots’ article for VCinemashow and this post on Podcast on Fire, but basically it all boils down to this: show them you care by ordering their films from Amazon, or watching them online on Mubi.com. Don’t let the riots destroy our outlets for quality independent cinema.

Here are some links:

Third Window’s Amazon store

Third Window and Terracotta films available online at Mubi.com posted by Martin Cleary at New Korean Cinema.

Right, I’m off to Amazon to pick up my Cold Fish BluRay…

Posted at 15:46 on 11 August 2011 Filed under news.
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19
Jan
Some Blu-Rays and DVDs that have recently caught my eye….

It’s taken me some time to be won over to the Blu-Ray format. Certainly there’s never seemed quite the same necessity to upgrade as there was with VHS to DVD just over 10 years ago, and for those with poor eyesight or without swanky new high-def flatscreens (and equally important, decent speaker systems), it might be hard to detect any tangible improvement over DVD other than that the cases are that little bit smaller so you can stack up more on your shelves. There was also the problem for distributors of what the hell are they were going to fill up all this extra disk space actually with, and the inflated costs of creating an adequate transfer in the first place – all of which meant that there were few niche releases to appeal to more hardcore cinephiles, so unless you were into your big studio productions, there wasn’t much to tempt you over.

The kind of images Blu-Ray was invented for - a shot from Kenneth Anger's 1954 film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Well my mind was certainly changed over the past year. I’ve recently been savouring a number of UK released disks that really benefit from the bright colours and sharp images the format permits – so much so that I’m wondering if I could ever go back to DVD again. The first of these was the BFI’s wonderful release of The Magick Lantern Cycle, the complete works of experimental filmmaker and Aleister Crowley nut Kenneth Anger. Anger might be best known to many for his two wonderful Hollywood Babylon books, which dig the dirt on the various scandals that beset Tinseltown in its early years, but if you’ve never seen such films as The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Scorpio Rising (1963) or Lucifer Rising (1972) then, boy, I suggest you get your hands on this while you can. The RRP is £36.99, but I got mine from Amazon UK for £12.99, and its currently listed at £9.19. These luridly bizarre 16mm occult workouts look startling on Blu-Ray – you can see the very grain and texture of the film stock, its the closest one will ever get to seeing these films as they were meant to be seen, projected from film. Moreover, you also get a nice thick booklet about Anger and his films, and a fascinating feature-length documentary Anger Me (2006) about his fascinating life following in the path of the Beast, working at the Cinémathèque Française during the 1950s, and hobnobbing with such luminaries as Mick Jagger.

Kenneth Anger's homage to Aleister Crowley, Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) - the title alone should be enough to make you want to see this!

It seems to me, as DVD once did, that Blu-Ray is really best suited to experimental film, and top of my want list now is a UK release of the films of Stan Brakhage. Criterion put out their 687 minute release By Brakhage: Anthology 1 & 2, but I assume this must be region 1 coded, so no good for my current set up. Oh well, we can live in hope that the BFI will look into getting this out on the market before the coalition government’s cuts debilitate this hallowed institution too much.

Rage Net (1988), by Stan Brakhage - if anyone wants to put out a Region 2 Blu-Ray of Brakhage's films, I'm with you all the way

In the meantime, I’ll point you to another great BFI release that might have passed you by, which looks similarly impressive on Blu-Ray, which is Winstanley, a real oddity from 1975 co-directed by revered British film historian Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo. Based on an obscure episode in English history shortly after the Civil War, it portrays a renegade group of known as the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, and their attempts to leave the system by claiming a patch of common land to live on and cultivate for themselves – Britain’s earliest Communists, as you might, whose Reclaim-the-Streets / Grow-Your-Own ethos seems particularly appealing in these times of inflated banker’s bonuses, VAT hikes and public sector layoffs. Brownlow and Mollo also made It Happened Here (1964), about a hypothetical Nazi Occupation of England during the war, although this is only available on DVD. My advice though, to film fans and especially filmmakers, Go Watch Winstanley! This is the perfect example of what independent filmmaking should be. The film is an aesthetic masterpiece, with some beautiful English landscapes shot in wonderful high-contrast 16mm monochrome, demonstrating that just because you’ve got no money, it doesn’t mean you can’t make a gorgeous looking film. Secondly, something so many independent filmmakers seem to forget nowadays – this film is actually ABOUT something. It was made because it says something its makers thought needed saying, not because they just wanted to make a film for the sake of making a film, which seems to be the predominant attitude with most wannabe filmmakers at the moment.

The true independent spirit - Winstanley (1975)

Another film that looks absolutely beautiful on Blu-Ray is Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007), one of those films that was widely praised by critics when it came out, but now seems to have faded into memory, and it’s only 4 years old – Amazon have also got this at a knockdown price at the moment, at only £7.99. For the record, I think this portrayal of a young man’s attempt to sever himself from the ties of society and completely absorb himself in nature is one of the best films of the past decade. It’s beautifully acted, but the cinematography is the real star here, with the American landscape from the deserts of Arizona to the wilderness of Alaska shot so beautifully they become essentially the main characters in the film. I could happily keep this disk on all the time in my living room, as moving wallpaper.

Sean Penn's astonishing Into The Wild (2007), one of my favourite films of the last decade looking beautiful on Blu-Ray

This film would make an ideal companion piece to Werner Herzog’s masterful documentary, Grizzly Man (2005), one of the five films included on the Encounters in the Natural World Blu-Ray Boxset, alongside the surreal Antarctic antics of the 2007 title film and one of the directors most hypnotically bizarre, White Diamond (2004). Amazon currently have this down from £54.99 to £16.39, and christ, this was easily the best purchase I made last year. Utterly compelling.

Antartica from underneath - one of the least bizarre scenes from Werner Herzog's jaw-dropping Encounters in the Natural World (2007)

Moving on into more whimsical territory, a quick heads-up on a forthcoming Blu-Ray release which you might be interested in, Third Window Film’s upcoming upgrade of Tetsuya Nakashima’s much-loved Memories of Matsuko (2006), one of the best Japanese releases of the last ten years and a film whose eye-popping colours are sure to be well-serviced by the Blu-Ray format. The extra disk space hasn’t been wasted either – one of the special features is me interviewing the composer Gabriele Roberto, in which you can find out how an Italian musician came to be in Tokyo writing soundtracks for Japanese films.

Third Window Films enters the Blu-Ray market, with the upcoming release of Memories of Matsuko, featuring an interview with composer Gabriele Roberto by me

And this takes me finally to a batch of films put out by Eureka last year. I’ve said it many times before, and I’ll say it again, but the Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray-only release of Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods was the home-viewing highpoint of 2010, and probably the previous couple of years too. You can read my review of the film on Midnight Eye for why I think this is, but for I wanted to say that for those who felt left out by this Blu-Ray exclusive, 2011 offers some great news – it’s also coming out on DVD in a couple of weeks.

I can't praise this film enough. Shohei Imamura's Profound Desires of the Gods, on BluRay only last year, now coming to 2010

This is the same story for a number of other Eureka releases too, some of which I will cover in due course either on Midnight Eye or this website. Basically, the Blu-Rays of Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp, FW Murnau’s City Girl, Frank Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow are all coming out on DVD very soon, so if you don’t have a Blu-Ray player yet, you’ll still get a chance to watch them, and if you do – well, take advantage while they’re going cheap on Amazon!

Murnau's City Girl (1930), one of the Nosferatu/Faust/Sunrise/Tabu director's best, according to many of those in the know

By the way, I’d like this site to be as much a forum for discussion about films as me thrusting my own views, opinions and tastes upon you, so if you’ve any DVD or Blu-Ray recommendations of your own, don’t be afraid to chime in.

Posted at 12:36 on 19 January 2011 Filed under news.
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