Is 'Star Wars' Sci-fi?

I assure you I'm not just arguing semantics when I ask: "is 'Star Wars' a science fiction film?" For years I have argued that it isn't (and I know I'm not alone here, just check on google) and that it is instead primarily a fantasy film.

Science fiction is usually allegorical and always involves some sort of genuine theory on where science may take us. 'Star Wars' does neither thing at all (unless you see it as a bland allegory for "good versus evil"). It doesn't try to make any points, instead it is about some heroic knights rescuing a princess from an evil (dare I say Hidden) fortress. Yes, there are laser guns and spaceships and robots, but I would argue this setting is not necessarily sci-fi. On the other hand, 'Star Trek' is sci-fi. Gene Roddenberry used his 60's TV series to make points about issues of the day, such as racism, as well as taking a look at where humanity may go ('Star Wars' with it's "Galaxy far, far away" disclaimer isn't even proposing that). In 'Star Trek' gadgets are always explained using pseudo-scientific terms, often at great length. 'Star Wars' doesn't care about this kind of thing at all. Sure, since 1977 books have been written that tell you how the Millennium Falcon works etc etc. But the films themselves never concerned themselves with science. In 'Star Wars' it is all about escapism and suspension of disbelief (and for my money this makes 'Star Wars' far better than 'Star Trek' too).



But the reason I get into this discussion is because the genre term of "sci-fi" has become more readily associated with a spacey, futuristic setting than with genuine science fiction. So a film like 'Jurassic Park' (featuring "Mr. DNA", above), which is both about the future of science and a morality tale about the potential perils of man playing god, gets labelled up as something else instead. Maybe that's fine. Maybe this just an acceptable evolution of language and something for etymologists to discuss rather than film critics. But I can't help but feel that the genre is being diluted with the meaning it has appropriated, as sci-fi used to be more complicated then that. Most 1950's science fiction used tales of aliens and spacecraft to talk about the cold war and the spectre of communism, for example.

Anyway, that's my two cents on the matter.

My top five Kurosawa films (you may not have seen)...

This year is Kurosawa's centenary (he posthumously turned 100 back in March). Sight and Sound magazine have celebrated with a really great series of Kurosawa features in their July issue. Really great is the fact that they have re-printed interviews with the man himself, which are amazing to read (at least if your a bit obsessive about his life and work as I am).

I have decided to follow their lead and post clips for a "Top Five Kurosawa Films You Haven't Seen". I was tempted just to do my own "top five" list, but that would be a bit boring as it would include films everyone knows about. The likes of 'Yojimbo', 'Seven Samurai', 'The Hidden Fortress', 'Rashomon', 'Ran' and 'Ikiru' have been excluded from my thinking for this list. Instead, here are five of his films that everyone should seek out if they have the time and the interest:

'High & Low' (1963)
Based on an Ed McBain crime novel, 'High & Low' stars Toshiro Mifune in one of his greatest performances. Here is a really crazy American trailer which tries to sell this slow and talky movie as if it's a piece of Hitchcock:

'Drunken Angel' (1948)
A really overlooked gem. Two years before 'Rashomon' made everyone take notice in Europe, Kurosawa made this amazing film which also marked Kurosawa's first collaboration with Mifune (who steals the show from the equally brilliant Takashi Shimura). A really good, grimy look at post-war Japan and as political as Kurosawa ever got. The final scenes are among the most intense I have ever seen.

'Red Beard' (1965)
This slow, three hour 19th century medical epic was Kurosawa's final film with Mifune. Never a more humanistic movie did Kurosawa make.

'I Live in Fear' (1955)
Again, stars Toshiro Mifune. This time playing a man twice his actual age. The story is great: it concerns a man who dreams of moving his family to Brazil to escape the impending atomic holocaust he fears is coming to Japan. The paranoia and the exasperation of Mifune's old man are priceless. The film also marks the last score by Fumio Hayasaka, as he died of tuberculosis shortly after completing the score. It also has some great alternative titles in the west: 'Record of a Living Being' and 'What the Birds Knew'. Kurosawa would return to this atom bomb paranoia with a short section in 1990's 'Dreams'. I can't find a video clip so here is that mournful score, stained with tragedy:


'Dreams' (1990)
Curiously the only Kurosawa film to be available to stream from X-Box Live, 'Dreams' was part produced by Steven Speilberg (in a similar manner to how Coppola and Lucas helped finance 'Kagemusha' in 1980) and has visual effects from ILM. The film is a series of shorts which represent Kurosawa's own dreams. I'm not going to lie: some of them are a bit rubbish and much of the dialogue is terrible. But the whole film is visually splendid. Below is the entire "Crows" chapter, which stars Martin Scorcese as Vincent Van Gogh. The way Kurosawa turns Van Gogh's paintings into live action is breathtaking.


Also, if you want to get into Kurosawa (or if you are a bit of a fan already) you could do worse than to read his own book Something Like an Autobiography (which tells Kurosawa's life story up to the making of 'Rashomon' in 1950) or Donald Richie's brilliant The Films of Akira Kurosawa. The Richie book is an essential: detailed academic essays on every single one of his films. What a great book!

Finally, if you're hungry for even more Kurosawa then check out a short post I did, back in May, on his films being remade. Also, look out (or listen out) for the next Splendor podcast, which will take the form of a Kurosawa love-in.

Stuart Hazeldine 'Exam' interview at OWF, plus top Mexican director in amazing Nike ad shock...

A quick post today to alert your attention to my interview with the BAFTA-nominated director Stuart Hazeldine, whose film 'Exam' has been released on DVD/Blu-ray this week. I am not a fan of these kind of thriller films, but 'Exam' is much better than last year's 'Fermat's Room' (the worst film I have ever seen at the Duke of York's - worse than 'Sex & the City 2' because it wasn't half as fun to talk about afterwards) with which it shares a few similarities in concept and setting.

The film takes place in one room where eight candidates are gathered to sit an exam in the final stage of applying for a job at a mysterious corporation. However, upon starting the test they find that their papers are blank. Before they can give the answer they are forced to work together to discuss: what is the question? Quickly they begin to argue and even resort to violence as they shift between competition and co-operation.

I personally found the film's resolution unsatisfying and the acting (by such actors as Colin Salmon and Jimi Mistry) over the top. The film is also rather too fond of itself and buys into the idea that it's very clever indeed, with many moments of terrible cod philosophy as themes and ideas are superficially explored. But the set design is good and the direction is accomplished for such a low-budget, British thriller.

Anyway, Hazeldine seemed like a jolly nice chap when we spoke on the phone (even if he co-wrote perhaps the worst film I have ever seen ever, 2008's 'Knowing'), so you should read that interview over at OWF.

On an unrelated note, the Mexican New Wave filmmaker, Alejandro González Iñárritu (last seen promoting his latest film 'Biutiful' at Cannes), has done a Terry Gilliam (or a Guy Ritchie even) and pimped out his considerable talent in the name of promoting Nike and football ahead of this summer's World Cup. The result is quite something. Seriously, this is the best advert I have ever seen. It plays on Iñárritu's gift for telling multiple stories (and also features a cameo from Gael Garcia Bernal). You should watch it whether you like football or not:



Finally, my good friend Dave Bierton at IQGamer (who reviewed 'Clash of the Titans' on this blog in April) turned his attention to 'Prince of Persia' the other day. Check it out on his blog.

Many new Splendor Cinema podcasts...

It's been a rollercoaster ride for fans of the Splendor Cinema podcast in recent months. The names has been changed more than once and it has moved home a fair few times to boot. Now things have (hopefully) settled down and we (Jon Barrenechea and I) are back in the very capable (and reliable) hands of Eurogamer's Mr. Craig Munroe. We are back up on iTunes and also available on the Picturehouse website.

A lot of new shows have been uploaded lately, covering a range of topics. We have discussed 'Sex & the City 2' and 'Date Night', the 'Cini Estelli' fundraising project and Alex Cox's 'Walker', upcoming movies and much, much more!

I'll have direct links to all those podcasts on this blog when I have them, as usual.

Also, everyone owes it to themselves to read Jon's really great piece on piracy and the future of cinema distribution.

'The Girl on the Train' review: Téchiné's latest fails to satisfy...

‘The Girl on the Train’, a new film directed and co-written by the multi-award-winning André Téchiné, is very much a film of two halves. Apparently loosely based on a real-life event infamous in its native France and set within the context of a wave of anti-Semitic hate crimes, the film follows a young girl named Jeanne who one day tears her clothes, cuts herself and draws swastikas on her body, before claiming to the authorities that some youths attacked her whilst she rode a train. She adds to the recent concern about racist attacks by claiming that she was singled out because she was carrying the business card of a Jewish lawyer, also suggesting that crowds of people on the train saw the incident and did nothing to intervene. The media quickly buy into this lie and run with the story sparking popular outrage across France. Soon Jeanne’s mother is taking calls from the nation’s President expressing his sympathies for the attack. The second half of the film deals with Jeanne telling the lie and its aftermath (much of which is based on reality), whilst the first half is Téchiné’s attempt to understand why she told this lie and deals with the (highly fictionalized) events leading up to it.

If Téchiné is considered one of France’s most significant post-New Wave filmmakers, then it is only fitting that the film does not come without names of top acting pedigree also. The Belgian actress Émilie Dequenne (who won the ‘Best Actress’ prize at Cannes in 1999) heads up a well-respected cast as she plays the titular girl, Jeanne. Her troubled and well-meaning mother, Louise, is played by the Academy Award nominated Catherine Deneuve (a frequent Téchiné collaborator), whilst the Jewish lawyer and hate crime activist, Samuel Bleistein, is played by Michel Blanc (a star of Téchiné’s last film, ‘The Witnesses’). Finally, a rising star, Nicolas Duvauchelle (who was also in last year’s Claire Denis film, ‘White Material’), plays Jeanne’s streetwise boyfriend Franck. It is their love affair which dominates the film’s first half and attempts to go some way to explaining Jeanne’s later actions.



The cast do an able job with the material they are given, however the film feels strangely like a low-budget television drama. There are some nice shots and many scenes (notably those in the sunshine) are pleasantly lit, but it is paced far too slowly and outstays its welcome fairly quickly. There are whole scenes which seem to serve no obvious purpose in advancing Jeanne’s story. For instance, there is a sub-plot (involving a bickering divorced couple who later sleep together and then finally reconcile) which could easily have been excised from the film entirely. When I first saw the film I was unaware of the “true story” element and (not having read a synopsis) did not know that Jeanne was going to stage a racially motivated hate crime by beating herself up. The fact that when she did it came as a huge surprise to me (and seemed to alter the tone of the film so completely) I think counts against the film, as the first half which leads up to the event and is supposed to provide some sort of character motivation and simply fails to do so. I am still none the wiser about Jeanne's motivations.

We are left asking questions, such as: did she do it for attention? But we could have asked those questions had the film only depicted the “true story” events. Téchiné sheds no light on this extraordinary lie and its consequences. He depicts Jeanne watching a holocaust documentary and weeping. He also shows that she has seen the news reports of the previous (genuine) hate crimes against Jewish people. But neither of these moments really add up to pretending you've been persecuted. Perhaps Téchiné is suggesting that she feels marginalised and suspects that the only way she can get her voice heard is by capitalising on this media event. We are left intrigued to find out more about the real-life case, but not especially thrilled by or satisfied with Téchiné’s film.

'The Girl on the Train' is out in the UK now on a limited release, including one showing at Brighton's Duke of York's Picturehouse on July 20th. The film is rated '15' by the BBFC. Jon and I covered it in the latest Splendor Podcast also.

'Sex & the City 2' review: Shameless, tacky and unstoppable...

“Look! Arabic Pringles” says Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) as the camera goes into a shameless extreme close-up on the branded potato snacks. They have been provided by a Middle Eastern airline bringing her, along with her equally vacuous and materialistic friends, to a luxury holiday in Abu Dhabi. “We need to go somewhere rich” says Samantha (Kim Cattrall), when encouraging the “girls” to join her on this all expenses paid trip (their New York penthouses are not considered “rich” enough it would seem). Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) foolishly decides to bring a cultural guide book along and she is rightly derided for this with Carrie derisively asking “Are you moving there?” Indeed. Why would one want to know anything about the country they are visiting? As Samantha so rightly says on the eve of their trip east, “I can hear the decadence calling!” Welcome to the world of ‘Sex & the City 2’.

‘Sex & the City 2’, directed and written by Michael Patrick King (providing once and for all the infallibility of auteur theory), is an odd and strangely hypnotic film. I should have hated it to the core. However, not far in to its 146 minute running time I resolved that the film was a satire of its brazenly selfish, hedonistic and superficial protagonists and everything about their there way of life (so obviously hideous is everything they say and do and physically embody). Viewed in this way the film is sort of amusing. For instance, the horrifying cadaver that is Kim Cattrall (who I’m sure the writer thinks is a modern day Mae West) looks and acts exactly like Sam Lowry’s excessively vain mother in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian sci-fi movie ‘Brazil’, always boasting about how many treatments and injections she has endured all with the noble aim of fighting the aging process. “I am fifty-fucking-two and I will rock this dress!” she shouts at a hapless clothes store clerk in the manner of a demented and embarrassing old spinster aunt in a way which the film supposes is some sort of milestone for female empowerment.



Then we have Carrie whose ‘Wonder Years’ style disembodied narration serves as the film’s dubious moral centre. Carrie is a relationship columnist of international renown and acts as a sort of female version of the James Bond wish fulfilment fantasy. At one point she walks into a “wardrobe” bigger than most people’s bedrooms (and full of expensive designer clothes) and I distinctly heard two disparate ladies in the audience say “cool!” ‘Sex & the City’ is to women what ‘XXX’, ‘Fast and Furious’ and Danny Dyer movies are to men, in that they are not really for women at all: just for stupid people. If Samantha is deluded and slightly nauseating, then Carrie is just downright hateful. She makes her husband go out with her to a party, ditches him for her friends and then drags him home when she sees that he is starting to have fun (talking to Penelope “why am I here?” Cruz). For their anniversary her husband buys them both a flat screen television for the bedroom (getting a derisive chuckle from the ladies in the audience) but his intentions are decent and even romantic: he wants to lie with her and watch “old black and white films” in bed. She is indignant and, in the manner of an ungrateful child, says “a piece of jewellery would have been nice”. What a horrible person (but then Bond isn’t much better as a role model for male behaviour). Carrie and her friends feel like the subjects of an MTV reality show.

A bit huffy from television-gate, Carrie decides to spend a few days back at her old apartment. “The last two years haven’t been the best time to sell an apartment” she explains. It makes economic sense for her to keep the place empty and sell it on later and this is all that matters in her universe. Don’t worry about the people who are being forced out of their homes in the wake of global recession: they probably deserved it and in any case they are far too poor for us to care. So Carrie has two places and when she returns to this one after two years away, she finds it as she left it: fully furnished, with a huge, walk-in wardrobe (still full of high fashion clothes). But in this world Carrie isn’t disgusting at all, apparently.



And apparently neither is Charlotte (Kristin Davis) who denies her Jewish surname (Goldenblatt) as soon as they arrive in the Middle East in fear that it might spoil her time drinking cocktails by the pool. These are clearly people of principle. My personal favourite bit saw Carrie talking to one of her butlers in Abu Dhabi about the difficulties of maintaining a marriage. He explains to her that he is Indian and comes to Abu Dhabi to work, only flying back to see his wife when “I have time off work and can afford the plane fare”. But instead of this being a wake-up call to make Carrie see just how easy she and her pals have it (and to how sickeningly bourgeois their existence on this Earth has become) this story is mined for romance, with the manservant explaining that his love for his wife increases in their time apart. The grim economic reality of the poor people who pander to their every whim on the dessert resort (in a modern form of indentured servitude) is mentioned but simultaneously completely ignored.



The film can’t make up its mind what it thinks of the Middle East either. On the one hand we have Samantha gallivanting around the market square thrusting her hips and shouting “I have sex” at the local outraged men, her hands full of condoms (I am not making this up). On the other hand we have Miranda constantly trying to cover Samantha up and apologise for her behaviour. Together the women laugh at a lady in a burqa as she lifts her veil to eat French fries at the next table in a restaurant, but then they also gasp in wonder at the cultural sites they encounter on their trip and befriend a kindly man in the market (“shoes for everyone!”). Overall the cultural and historical morsels Miranda derives from her guide book (in the form of strained exposition) seem to serve as more of a disclaimer than anything else: giving the “girls” the right to say and do whatever grossly insensitive things they want to in this horrible movie. Generally their intolerance of local custom is played for laughs. The film’s crowning insult to the Middle East is in one the final scenes in Abu Dhabi, in which a group of women remove their burqas to reveal that underneath they are wearing similarly “fabulous” clothes to their American counterparts. You go girls! Whether you see this film as an example of cultural imperialism or of female empowerment you surely can not deny that it is unfailingly tacky.



There is so much more to find horrifying in this film. For instance, Liza Minnelli shows up as a singer at a gay wedding doing a version of Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’ which makes you want to erase her entire career (even the stuff with Bob Fosse). There is a really cringe-worthy sub-plot involving a bra-less, Irish nanny and Charlotte’s basic inability to parent her own children: “and I have full-time help!” she says, admitting her own basic inability to function as a competent member of the human race. There is Samantha saying “word” without any trace of irony as well as the concept of an “interfriendshon”. There is a horrid karaoke scene in which the “girls” sing “I Am Woman”, swaying in unison and holding hands, forever uniting in bonds of unquestioning sisterhood. But what would be the point of going on about this obviously critic-proof film for any longer? “That should take the edge off the reviews” says Carrie, referring to Samantha’s admission that she will likely bed the star of a bad film. In the case of ‘Sex & the City 2’ good box-office will not only take the edge off the bad reviews, but will shred them into total and utter irrelevance.

'Sex & the City 2' is out everywhere now (including Brighton's Duke of York's Picturehouse) and is rated '15' by the BBFC.

TV... the new film?

OK, so "no". TV is not the new film and worries about that little box replacing the cinema have proved largely unfounded since they started in the 1950s. Although the availability of moving pictures in living rooms has had a massive impact on attendances and on the target demographic of the movies (with films becoming increasingly aimed at teenagers over the last half decade): the movies remain relevant as an art form and as part of the popular culture.

So why the title of this post? Just because television used to be rubbish. Even the good stuff was of obvious poor quality compared to a movie. But now there are (American) shows which have the production values of a big budget movie for an hour every week. It used to be the case that actors would have trouble breaking into movies from televsion, but now many movie actors readily and regularly accept roles on television (Kiefer Sutherland in '24' (video below), Tim Roth in 'Lie to Me', Glenn Close in 'Damages' and the late Patrick Swayze in 'The Beast', as examples of a growing trend).



What is especially great about these shows is that they are not trying to be movies at all, but that they use the form of television to do something films can not do. A show like 'The Wire' (which follows a Baltimore police teams attempts to bring down a drug king pin in the face of local politics and staggering bureaucracy - although that description doesn't come close to doing it justice) tells a richly detailed story over many hours, all of them essential. You couldn't do that with a film. Not to the same level of journalistic rigour that David Simon and Ed Burns do with that show. They were equally brilliant with the Iraq invasion series 'Generation Kill', really putting you in that place and making you feel (as they did with Baltimore) that you know every inch of that place and every nuance of that scenario.

David Simon and Ed Burns are an example of another encouraging trend in US TV: that of the auteur driven drama series. Aaron Sorkin ('The West Wing', 'Studio 60'), David Chase ('The Sopranos') and Matthew Weiner ('Mad Men') are all writers of intense, detailed and dialogue driven TV shows which are far above the vast majority of what the cinema has to offer in terms of their intelligence. The acting in these shows is often dazzling with 'The West Wing' a good example of the new cross-polination between film and TV in terms of actors, as it stars Hollywood names (Martin Sheen and Rob Lowe) and also created new ones (Allison Janney and Richard Schiff).



Complicating things further is the changing nature of how people view media. In a few years, when both the latest episode of a big budget TV thriller and the latest "blockbuster" Hollywood thriller are available to stream instantly on your laptop or phone whilst you ride the train to work: what will be the difference between the two? Is there a distinction anymore, other than the fact that the "TV" show will likely have between 10-25 sequels ready to download should you want to continue the story?

Anyway, film is not dead and TV will not kill it. But now, more than ever before, television is more than a substitute for the movies: when done properly it is better than film. Yet television is still not really taken seriously in the world of media criticism. It is analysed in terms of news reporting or in terms of its affect on society, but television shows are not afforded the same respect by academics and critics. Is this all about to change? Another decade of TV like the above and it just might.