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dir: Gus Van Sant
There is a tremendous irony in this
You would have thought that the acclaimed documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk would have pretty much covered the story of this incandescently flamboyant political icon of the 1970s. But, let’s be honest: unless someone wins an Academy award and fictionalises the fuck out of a story, we don’t really care.

And why have footage of Harvey Milk playing Harvey Milk in a documentary about himself when you can have Sean Penn overacting all over the place instead?

So much better. To be fair, Penn mostly controls himself and delivers what is a stand-out performance in a career defined by stand-out performances, overacting, having been married to Madonna and beating up paparazzi.

I knew plenty of the details surrounding Milk’s death moreso than his life, because of the hilarious manner in which the person who murdered him used one of the most incredible defences in order to beat the rap and reduce his clearly cold-blooded and premeditated crime to an act of junk food-fuelled manslaughter due to diminished capacity. Of course the truth of what was actually argued by his defence team and what has become the pop culture meme of the “twinkie defence” are two completely different things.

dir: Ed Harris
My kid could have painted this, but then it wouldn't be worth tens of millions of dollars, would it?
2000

Only recently did I have the honour of catching Ed Harris’ Pollock on DVD, at a time where it seems I’ve been watching a lot of biopic ‘prestige’ movies. You know the ones: labour of love projects produced, directed by and/or starring relatively Big Name Hollywood personages where they wish to be permanently associated with some famous artist from the recent or distant past and hopefully net themselves critical and Oscar worthy acclaim. I mean films like The Hours (at least the part with Nicole Kidman in it as Virginia Woolf), Frida (where Salma Hayek showed she had at least a little bit more to offer than just her splendid figure, but not that much), and this here pearl cast before us swine.

No, the film isn’t anti-Polish propaganda. It is about the life and times of Jackson Pollock, arguably one of the most important American artists of the last fifty years. Possibly, I don’t know how these things are measured. Especially considering the fact that most people look at his paintings and say shit like “My five year old could do a better finger painting than that!” The fact is that what is considered influential and important art isn’t always accessible to and by the purported ‘public’ that is the rest of us. I know enough about his painting and his life to know the context of his work as an abstract expressionist, but not the nitty gritty aspects of his life that motivated him, that drove him. After watching the film I’m still really left none the wiser.

dir: Bob Fosse
The man, unbroken yet
1974

The film is not about Lenny Kravitz; it’s not about Lenny from The Simpsons. It is about the Lenny who lords over all other Lennys; the Lenny who took on the Establishment and lost. Lenny Bruce was doing his part for free speech and revealing American society’s hypocrisy back when the majority of American comics were still doing mother in law jokes and that gag about “I just flew in from Chicago, and boy are my arms tired”.

dir: Roman Polanski
Not The Penis, The Pianist
"Breathtaking!" "Stunning!" "A Masterpiece!" "Grunties!"

These words are used to describe everything from the most recent Jerry Bruckheimer film to the latest hemorrhoid creams on the market. Superlatives are such an integral part of the marketing hyperbole industry that the words have lost all meaning. Certainly their use, by anyone, especially film critics should be taken not with a grain of salt, but with a quantity of salt not exceeding that available in your average ocean.

That being said, when people you respect (for whatever reason, whether it be their professional credibility or the way they keep handing you lollies until you get into the car with them) start using words like that about a film, you prick up your ears. In this context, some of those words have been applied to The Pianist, and perhaps not without merit. The film has even been honoured at this year's Academy circlejerk, which, whilst not usually an indicator of anything more important than the fact that Hollywood is more insular and inbred than a hillbilly family from the Appalachian mountains (you know, Deliverance country), has for once potentially gotten it right.

dir: Michael Winterbottom
I remember what it used to be like, going to gigs *sigh*
It's like this film was based on a book written by a Kurt Vonnegut born in the sixties who got to see the glorious birth of punk first hand. It's a fractured, glorious shambles of a film. It doesn't always work, and I had major issues with the second half of the film, but, Jesus, what a ride.

Steve Coogan had made a career out of playing a character that Tony Wilson was the template for way before this film was ever conceived of. Anyone who's ever seen any episodes of Knowing Me Knowing
You with Alan Partridge would know the only real difference between Alan Partridge and Tony Wilson is the wig. It seems fittingly appropriate that he end up playing him for real. You have to ask yourself whether the film is about what it purports to be about: Manchester and the incredible importance it played in the growth of two major scenes in contemporary music.

Wilson himself: erudite, arrogant, Cambridge educated, slumming intellectual resorting to being a television reporter, the scenesters's scenester, hedonistic and passionate, and a consummate liar. My biggest laugh and a moment that summarises Wilson completely is when his wife catches him on the receiving end of a
professional blowjob and he says empathically "Lindsay, it's not what it looks like!" Now THAT is a bullshit
artist par excellence.

dir: Patty Jenkins
She read a bad review
This isn’t a story about the redemptive power of love. It isn’t a story where everything will work out all right in the end. It is, in essence, a sad love story all the same.

It would seem to contradict the advertising and many of the reviews already written about the film. Its two main selling points were the fact that Charlize Theron won the Academy award for Best Actress for 2003 in the role, oh, and she happens to play a serial killer. And seeing as it is based on the life and times of Aileen Wuornos, convicted and recently executed killer, you’d think the focus would be more on the killings than any other elements. At its heart, however, it’s about a horribly damaged woman and her desperate attempts at finding some happiness in a world that had guaranteed her thus far a life of ceaseless misery.

For all those people that claim the film excuses her actions and seems to justify them when it attempts to humanise the character that Theron embodies, I have to say, they’re trying really hard to be deliberate fuckwits. I don’t mean people who didn’t like the film itself. I’m never going to criticise a person for not holding the same opinion about a film as myself, that’s just idiotic because film, like everything else in existence, is so subjective. I mean those people that have tut tutted and clucked their tongues because they claim the film is an exercise in apologetics giving justifications and excuses for a person that doesn’t deserve them. I feel like asking them how they manage to read or write anything when their blinkers are strapped on so goddamn tight around their heads. Doesn’t it cut off the circulation?

By humanising her, by making her worthy of our pity it does not imply that we should absolve her for her crimes or her sins. I have nothing to forgive her for, and she certainly doesn’t need my absolution. Perhaps all she is asking for is my understanding, at least a moment’s consideration. That isn’t beyond me, and it certainly isn’t beyond the filmmakers and the performers involved in terms of evoking that remarkably well on the screen. But let’s not forget the apparent crucial facts: she killed seven men, one at least the film clearly imputes was in self-defence, but all the others were what we call “innocent”. We’re under no illusions about her actions, even if she is. We are privy to her choices, her decisions, and we see her for what she is. That doesn’t mean we approve of what she’s does. In fact whilst watching it, despite knowing what I knew about the story, I still desperately hoped at certain points that she wouldn’t do what was clearly inevitable. To watch a person do the unthinkable again and again, and to be okay with it, it’s shocking to any reasonable audience member, which is also why it’s so compelling.

dir: Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini
Hey big splendors
A film about unremarkable people living lives of quietly desperate quiet desperation. It seems almost pointless by definition, doesn’t it? Films are about heroes, winners, the triumphant, usually. They’re not supposed to be about us mediocre types, are they? If these stories were going to genuinely be about people like us then they wouldn’t need to hire people with bleached teeth to play characters in every film and have wealthy screenwriters tell us how much better our simple lives are compared to the lives lived by the people that make these films.

American Splendor is not really based on the comic book of the same name, in that it’s not like Harvey Pekar is a superhero like Batman or She Hulk or Man Thing. But then again, since the comics were all based on Pekar’s life anyway, it kind of is. And maybe Pekar is a superhero in his own way.

The concept of so-called “outsider art” worries me. In an episode of The Simpsons where Homer accidentally becomes an artist when constructing a barbecue that goes horribly wrong, an art scene hag voiced by Isabella Rossellini explains that his work is outsider art. It is art that could have been created by hillbillies, mental patients or chimpanzees.

The essential element there is that outsider art is considered to be of lesser legitimacy because it is created by someone who is not a member of the artistic enclave, of the aesthetic and creative elite. To even have such a term implies this prejudice against the work of those not schooled in the formal arts and those who don’t suckle full time at the breast of pretentiousness.

I say that all that is balderdash and poppycock. Utter crap. Art's worth isn’t defined solely by the name on it, surely, but what you take from it. A great painting, song, film or sexual position is great regardless of whether the person who came up with it is called Picasso, Benny Hill or Chopper Reed. Of course, it's up to individuals to decide whether something reaches out and grabs them by their pink bits, above and beyond any commercial or critical achievement.

Individuals decide whether they are artists producing art or not. The only thing other people decide is whether it's good art or crap. The criterion there is whether it gets ideas or feelings across or not.

Harvey Pekar is as legitimate an artiste as any other hack that puts pen to paper in the service of comic books, cartoons, sitcom scripts or presidential speeches. Sure, he comes across as a bitter psychotic who lives only to complain about the crap hand that life keeps dealing him, but that's no different from all the other neurotic psychotics out there peddling their wares in the artistic market place. These days of course all they do is get livejournals or weblogs and unleash their self-absorption and narkiness in controlled, daily doses. These people didn't have a voice previously, a way to feel like even if just a few shmoes get to hear their rantings that their existence is somehow made more meaningful, more real, if even for a few moments. You know, like people that post movie reviews to usenet.

dir: Laurence Dunmore
Even syphillitic he's still eminently shaggable
Talking directly to the camera, John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, tells us that we will not like him. We won’t like him because he is a thoroughly naughty chap, and he’s up for it all the time, with the ladies and the fellas. He tells us this, talking straight to the camera, forewarning us to be prepared for just how much of a libertine he truly is.

Oh, what a rascal. And he’s played by Johnny Depp. Wearing a wig recalling the heady days of hair metal bands from the 80s. Of course they don’t believe the opening pronouncement, and they don’t really expect us to believe it either.

dir: George Clooney
Edward R. Murrow, where are you when we need you? Oh, that's right. Dead.
The most important aspect that a period piece has to get right is to evoke a sense of place and time. Depending on the time it is set in, an essential part of that is representing just how different that time and place were compared to the present day equivalent. It’s also handy when you can illustrate what hasn’t changed at all, no matter how much time has elapsed between drinks.

Good Night, and Good Luck goes a long way towards setting itself properly just through the use of black and white film. It not only convinces us straight away that we are looking at a slice of the past, but it also ‘colours’ the content, so to speak. Since the film deals with the medium of television as a newborn child, the era itself is defined by its limitations and the remnants we have left of their broadcasts in shades of stark light and dark.

Seeing the images here approximating the broadcasts of the time reminds me of the idea, used in many a sci-fi show, of early tv broadcasts being beamed out into the cosmos, the transmissions crossing the vacuum of space and reaching other worlds, or eventually being bounced back to our earthly realm. It is as if the images from Good Night have crossed the abyss and returned to us, depicting an almost alien world of eloquence and principle in the realm of television journalism when a society was going slowly mad from fear. Where the perceived threat of enemies outside prompted a society to start attacking the people within.

Edward R. Murrow was one of the people, along with producer Fred Friendly and the other former radio journalists at CBS, who midwived, breastfed, coaxed, scolded and long-pantsed broadcast journalism into existence. Even over half a century ago, the commercial, corporate and political interests were in opposition to the journalistic integrity and investigative function Murrow saw as his personal obligation to the people of America. Even back then he had to compete and accede to game shows and celebrity interviews in order to be able to do what he most wanted: tell people what was going on in the world around them.

dir: Sofia Coppola
You're all class, Marie
It’s not often that a film gets more press and probably more viewers because it was booed at the most recent Cannes film festival. People who were eagerly awaiting the next Sofia Coppola film after the success of Lost in Translation were momentarily taken aback by the news of the audience reaction to a film that became notorious overnight as one of the biggest and most redolent cinematic turds of recent memory.

Having just watched Marie Antoinette, I have to wonder what flavour and quality of crack the audience members who acted like boorish slobs were smoking. The film isn’t brilliant, but it is hardly a cinematic atrocity that deserves people booing the flick when the director is sitting in the audience. That’s just rude, even if that same director was also one of the main reasons why people hate Godfather III to this day.

I saw a film with a novel premise: that Marie Antoinette was the Paris Hilton / celebutante of her days and age who lived a decadent life oblivious to the societal circumstances outside until it was way too late. And whilst watching it was a profoundly banal experience, akin to eating a kilo of fairy floss at a carnival, it doesn’t make me want to burn down theatres or effigies of the director.

It’s not a baseless idea. Depending on what you might read Antoinette was either a completely decadent moron or a hesitant but finally noble being whose bright light was cruelly snuffed by the mob, enraged by bad press and those who desired to snatch the reigns of power for themselves.

dir: Dito Montiel
The saints can't help you if you watch this movie. But they will hate you.
This is a film by Dito Montiel, about the life of Dito Montiel, based on the book written by Dito Montiel. Wow, this Dito Montiel is some kind of wonderful guy to want to bring Dito Montiel to the attention of millions, isn’t he?

After all, Dito Montiel won the Nobel Peace prize for solving the Sonny and Cher crisis back in the 70s, and also won the Nobel Physics prize for inventing the tubes that power the internet. He cured all cancer, discovered the clitoris and came up with a tasty breakfast cereal high in fibre but low in sugar to boot.

If it wasn’t for those obviously fabricated highlights of Dito Montiel’s life that I just made up, we wouldn’t have any clue why we’re watching a film about Dito Montiel’s life. Having watched the film, I still have to ask myself why anyone is supposed to give a good goddamn about the fucker.

Dito, played by Shia LaBeouf in the 80s, and Robert Downey Jr in the 2000s, hasn’t really done anything worthy of note that I can figure out apart from write a book about himself and having directed a film about himself. These are achievements, don’t get me wrong, I just can’t for the life of me see what in his life justified such endeavours or why we should be interested.

Dito grows up in Astoria, Queens, surrounded by a lot of morons, Italian-American and otherwise. We know from the start that he eventually escapes his life, because now, in the present, he is being called back due to his father’s illness. We sense his reluctance in returning. This process of returning means telling a lot of the story leading up to his departure in flashback.

Dito has a saintly mother (Dianne Wiest) and a pig-headed father (Chazz Palminteri) who listens to not a word anyone says and babbles constantly. Every time the father opens his mouth, the first word that comes out of his mouth is usually “Antonio”. It’s never explained why the father has such a fixation on this chap, but we sense at least that in Dito’s eyes, maybe Daddy wishes Antonio was his son instead of Dito.