James Harries says…

"Terry son, don't look so shocked. These things happen all the time round my manor. If you've seen Baise Moi, you've got nothing to worry about. Go on, girl!"

Ad and subtract but as a matter of fact, now that you’re gone I still want you back

Here’s an absolute treat, stolen shamelessly from Shadow and Act – a fantastic website dedicated to media from the African diaspora with an emphasis on cinema . The late Sammy Davis Jr. is here in prime Bill-Murray-in-Lost-In-Translation mode in a series of cinema-parodic ads for Japanese whiskey Suntory.

And would you believe it!? Here’s Ray Charles too. Yes indeed!

Abbey Lincoln

The jazz singer and actress Abbey Lincoln, who died on Aug 14, first came to my attention via her song ‘For All We Know’, which played over the opening credits of Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (1989).  I was watching the film (as a 14 year-old, without my mother’s knowledge!) as part of the then pay-per-view Film Four channel’s Drugs for Christmas season in ’99 or ’00, and was struck by how the song perfectly captured the sad, wistful and strangely old-fashioned tone of the film.

R.I.P. Abbey

Abbey Lincoln 1930-2010

Contractual obligation of the day

Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen – clearly thrilled to be there – takes you on a conceptual jazz/rock journey.  Maybe he was going for the ‘sultry’ look. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, and re-visit his bizarrely laid-back contribution to the soundtrack of bonkers 1981 animation Heavy Metal:

Sought after soundtrack album of the day: Freejack

Stadium Rock

Watch out...

Prior to seeing Argentinian thriller The Secret in Their Eyes, all I knew about it was that it had triumphed over Michael Haneke’s spectacularly icy The White Ribbon and Jacques Audiard’s brilliant prison drama A Prophet to collect the Oscar for Best Picture in a Foreign Language at the 2010 awards.

Although the Oscars are far from a reliable barometer of quality, as any sentient individual who has sat through Crash (which, to my mind, still contains some of the most bollock-tighteningly awful individual scenes in cinema history) will attest, it seemed obvious that The Secret… was going to have to exhibit some serious quality to deserve its prize.

And did it? Well, not quite.  Starring Nine Queens’ Ricardo Darin, who resembles no-one so much as a rugged, charismatic and alive Jeremy Beadle, as criminal court investigator Esposito, The Secret in Their Eyes ultimately revealed itself as a smart, engaging and satisfying thriller with nods to 70s Hollywood (The Conversation, The Day of The Jackal) and more recent success stories like Memento (with which it shares a revenge-is-pointless thematic drive) and fellow Oscar-winner The Lives of Others (memories, the passing of time, and typewriter-as- plot point!) although was limited by its occasional recourse to cinematic clichè and a slightly limp third act (enlivened, admittedly, by an unexpected conclusion).

The Secret in Their Eyes, however, will surely be remembered for one sequence in particular – an astonishingly cinematic tour-de-force which towers head and shoulders over the rest of the film in terms of verve and punch, and channels De Palma, Scorsese and Welles in its manic ambition and stunning execution.

Beginning with a high aerial shot over a luminous football stadium, the likes of which we have recently been treated to in the coverage of the World Cup in South Africa, the camera sweeps into the stadium to join a football team at the point of a sweeping counter-attack.  The attack ends with a shot glancing off the crossbar, but the camera continues to travel at speed into the crowd, eventually locating Esposito and his drunken partner Sandoval on the lookout for their target – a rape-murder suspect.  When a goal  is scored, the stadium erupts and the target is spotted, catalysing a riveting, bracingly violent chase sequence that takes us around the interior of the stadium and finally ends on the pitch in one utterly confounding take.

The scene, filmed at Argentine team Huracan’s stadium, apparently took a scarcely believable three months of pre-production, three days of shooting and nine months of post production to complete. It was worth it. So visceral was the sequence, that when it concluded, I was perched on the edge of my seat and literally short of breath. This sequence was pure cinema, and up there with other great one-take treasures – think Children of Men and Touch of Evil.

Also strongly reminiscent in terms of Guy Ritchie’s ‘Smack My Bitch Up’-chanelling Nike commercial, it is worth the price of admission alone. Perhaps the Oscar panel were football fans.

No Safety Zone

Phil Collins in popular culture #5

…in which Collins barks some knuckle-suckingly trite lyrics in a decidedly odd faux-Jamaican accent. In fairness to Big Phil, the song is taken from a 1985 episode of Miami Vice, in which Collins played a ‘roight dodgy geeza orlroight’ by the name of Phil the Shill.

James Harries says…

"Could you please hang fire with that Vuvuzela, young man. Can't you see I'm trying to finish my screenplay?"

Wasted opportunity of the day…

At the Glamour magazine awards, hugely respected actor Patrick Stewart had the chance – the chance that we all dream of – to put the boot into corrosively irritating and ingratiating ubiquity James Corden. But, full of drink, and short on ideas… he died on his arse, slowly enough to allow Corden to wriggle off the hook, and emerge, if not with much credit, then at least on top. Oh, Patrick!