Dogwoof Docs in May

I found out about this series of events too late to slot into my May round-up, but Dogwoof, the innovative distributor behind some of my favourite films of recent times (including Dreams of a Life, Tabloid and Being Elmo), have announced an exciting series of documentary screenings at a selection of cinemas around London.

From 6-31 May, across Gate Picturehouse, Notting Hill and Stratford East Picturehouse, four films will be shown, including a director Q&A and exclusive preview ahead of the general release. For tickets & more information, click HERE:

The films, then:

Abendland - a stunning portrait of Europe at night. Sometimes darkness can help us see things more clearly (so they say, allegedly, etc…)

• Sunday 6 May – Gate Picturehouse
• Thursday 10 May – Stratford East Picturehouse

Putin’s KIss, which follows a politically ambitious teenager as she rises to the top of an ultra-nationalist youth organisation, and provides a rare insight into the dark side of Russian democracy “Putin-style”.

• Sunday 13 May – Gate Picturehouse
• Thursday 17 May – Stratford East Picturehouse

Town of Runners (pictured) + Q&As with director Jerry Rothwell. The world’s best long-distance runners hail from one small town in Ethiopia. Town of Runners follows two girls from Bekoji, determined to follow in their heroes’ footsteps.

• Sunday 20 May – Gate Picturehouse
• Thursday 24 May – Stratford East Picturehouse

Revenge of the Electric Car, in which director Chris Paine goes behind the closed doors of Nissan, GM, and the Silicon Valley start-up Tesla Motors to chronicle the story of the global resurgence of electric cars.

• Sunday 27 May – Gate Picturehouse
• Thursday 31 May – Stratford East Picturehouse

Here’s a trailer for Abendland to further whet your appetite:

The Month Ahead: May 2012

Welcome to a new, bright and breezy monthly feature in which Permanent Plastic Helmet picks out some of the film-related treats it’s most looking forward to in the next month.

May is Cannes Film Festival month. Still the most prestigious international film festival going (May 16-27), this year’s ‘In Competition’ line-up features a pretty dazzling (though, sadly, almost exclusively male) array of talent. New films from the likes of David Cronenberg (Cosmopolis - pictured), Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone), Michael Haneke (Amour) and Andrew Dominik (Killing Them Softly) will duke it out for the top prize: the Palme d’Or. You can take a look at the official selection (including Un Certain Regard) here, and full line-ups for the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week here.

There was no place in the programme for Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film The Master (purportedly about Scientology – but who knows?), which makes us wonder if the 56th BFI London Film Festival in October might end up with a pretty mighty premiere on its hands. We can but dream. Sadly, PPH won’t have a presence at Cannes this year, but looks forward nonetheless to hearing all the news and reactions from the Croisette. At least one of our blogging pals will be there, so expect to be pointed in the direction of that site for feedback during the festival.

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The Raid (May 18)

In terms of May’s new cinema releases, we’re hugely excited about Gareth Evans’ The Raid (May 18) – a hyper-violent, Indonesian-set thriller that’s said to draw upon the likes of John Woo’s Hard Boiled for influence. Julie Delpy’s 2 Days In New York (May 18) – the sequel to her earlier 2 Days In Paris – is one that we’d really been anticipating, though are sad to report that it fails to catch fire in the way we’d hoped. That said, it’s definitely worth seeing for Chris Rock’s straight-man performance as Mingus, Delpy’s jazz-and-Obama obsessed boyfriend.

Professional provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen also returns this month with The Dictator (May 16) which, in truth, could go either way. The press campaign leading up to its release has been a touch on the heavy handed side (official statements from his new character, Middle Eatern dictator General Aladeen, no less!), but when Baron Cohen is at his excoriating best, he’s really, really good. So fingers remain crossed. Oh, there is a new Wes Anderson film coming out too (Moonrise Kingdom, May 25), but the oh-so-mannered, almost self-parodic poster alone provoked a near-vomitous reaction in this writer, who will try his darndest to keep an open mind when it hits screens.

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Amongst an ever-eclectic BFI Southbank programme, this month’s African Odysseys screening (May 26) of Ivan Dixon’s super-rare cult film The Spook Who Sat By The Door really stands out. In The Spook…, a black CIA operative returns to Chicago and prepares his brothers for revolution, a conceit which operates both as biting satire and razor-edged provocation in response to the urgency of its socio-politically unstable times. Boasting a highly charged score from Herbie Hancock, it looks pretty much unmissable. The screening will be accompanied by a 2011 documentary, Infiltrating Hollywood – The Rise and Fall of The Spook Who Sat by the Door, which investigates the film’s troubled, fascinating history.

The Spook Who Sat By The Door (BFI Southbank, May 26)

Other BFI highlights this month include a career overview of one of the renowned stars of French cinema, Jean Gabin: Working Class Hero to Godfather, an extended run of Powell and Pressburger’s much-lauded satire of the English character The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp restored to its full Technicolor glory, part two of the complete Vincente Minnelli retrospective, and the 11th London Sci-Fi Film Festival.

Following its launch with Brief Encounter at the Troxy in February, The Other Cinema returns with a screening of Mathieu Kassovitz’ bracing, brutal and timeless 1995 French film La Haine. The screening (May 4) will feature a live score by the Asian Dub Foundation, and include appearances by local artists. As part of The Other Cinema networks, screenings will also take place at Broadwater Farm Community Centre in Tottenham (May 2) and launch in Paris (May 5). All of the profits from the Troxy screening will pour into the production of the free premiere screening at Broadwater Farm.

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Onto home entertainment, news has broken of the first ever DVD release of a groundbreaking 1986 hip-hop documentary entitled Big Fun In The Big Town (May 21). Directed by the fantastically monikered Dutch filmmaker, journalist and rap fanatic Bram Van Splunteren*, the doc is said to show hip-hop from pretty much every angle, and approach its subjects with a genuine journalistic respect. Highlights include rare live performances, and interviews with a number of key players from the scene’s early days including Russell Simmons, Run-DMC, LL Cool J (interviewed at his grandmother’s house in Queens!), Grandmaster Flash and Biz Markie.

Continuing on a DVD theme, the ever-covetable Criterion collection continues to put out some astonishing stuff, highlights of which include extras-packed, digitally optimized releases of the aforementioned La Haine (May 8), and the welcome return of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich (May 15). Best to have a quiet word with your bank account now to let it know that you’ll be treating it with reckless abandon in the coming weeks.

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Finally, kicking off toward the end of the month is the sixth annual Happy Soul Festival (May 25-June 10), a multi-borough, London-set event which aims to entertain, inform and to engage with black and minority ethnic groups and the wider community to help de-stigmatise mental health issues and promote awareness of wellbeing. Though the festival is multidisciplinary in nature, the programme will feature film strongly, and looks like a really interesting, worthwhile event. To find out more, visit the Happy Soul Festival’s website.

*his name reminded me of this near-forgotten rap-rock gem (yes, they exist!) from 1996.

If there’s an event you’d like to see featured here in next month’s round-up, feel free to drop us a line at pplastichelmet@gmail.com

The best disco song featuring Kevin Kline on vocals you’ll ever hear…

Cristina – ‘Disco Clone’ (ZE records, 1978)

Whatever the long-absent Sophie’s Choice, A Fish Called Wanda and, erm… Wild Wild West actor does next, let’s hope he injects the same level of hammy lugubriousness into it that he did in his little-known appearance on the above “mutant disco” oddity. Oh, and fair warning, it features one of the most irritating, ingratiating choruses of ALL TIME.

"Yes?"

Great collection of ‘Before They Were Famous’ photos

Click HERE for the best set of ‘Before They Were Famous’ snaps I think I’ve ever seen. Not all film stars, but lots in there, including this bunch. Can you guess who they are?

A big hat tip to the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw for this one.

Top 6: Clips from National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1 (that I could find on YouTube)

Why? Because. That’s why.

1. “Shoot him!”

Why it’s great: Because when I bring the subject up at dinner parties, surprisingly few people know that it’s based on this completely fucking outrageous piece of acting from Ice-T in New Jack City.

2. Gratuitous beaver shot

Why it’s great: Because look at Jon Lovitz’ (and everyones’) clothes.

3. “Wilderness Girls!”

Why it’s great: Because just listen to the way Tim Curry says the word “quota”.

4. Leary, Shatner and the fish

Why it’s great: Because of what William Shatner does at the fish tank.

5. Charlie Sheen’s ridiculous cameo

Why it’s great: Because of the line “Got anything larger?”. And look at Emilio Estevez’ hair.

6. “The right! I meant stay to the right!”

Why it’s great: Because the editing is world class.

In conclusion: Absolutely one of the most underrated comedies of the 1990s, in my humble yet almost certainly correct opinion. Also brilliant for the way in which Emilio Estevez unhinged performance pretty much predicted how Mel Gibson would end up in real life. So, so good. They don’t make them like this anymore.

Coffin fit: Karl Markovics’ Breathing (Atmen)

Actor-turned-director Karl Markovics’ debut feature Breathing (Atmen) is a sensitive, beautifully composed drama which focuses on the rehabilitation and growth into manhood of a 19-year-old offender named Roman Kogler (Thomas Schubert), who’s been banged up in an Austrian detention centre for an earlier, initially unspecified crime.

The blond, boyish Kogler begins the film spiky and remote, possessed of a petulant disregard for his sensitive case worker, and crushed under the weight of the dehumanizing rituals of his incarceration. Kogler soon abandons his dreary welding job in a fit of pique, and his prospects look bleak. However, for reasons that are at first unclear, he applies for a new job as a mortuary attendant, responsible for dressing, packaging and delivering corpses to their new resting place. His new employment is of a decidedly macabre nature but, after a period of adjustment, he takes to the work and begins a long journey toward redemption.

The central narrative hook of having Kolger quite literally stare death in the face every day, while not especially subtle, is an intelligent way to frame the character’s need to assuage his own guilt and come to terms with the spectre of mortality. Furthermore, it allows for some gruelling yet sensitively handled sequences which cast fresh light upon a job which is usually kept far from the public eye. Death constantly haunts the frame, and significantly amplifies the melancholy tone of the film.

The film’s content is complemented excellently by its restrained and unfussy visual style, which certainly owes a debt of gratitude to the likes of fellow Austrian director Michael Haneke. A combination of expansive wide shots, long takes, measured editing and a steely, grey-blue palette help to evince the inner mindset of Kogler. Meanwhile, a number of individual shots are simply astonishing and showcase Markovics’ imaginitive flair behind the camera.

While Breathing’s compositional style is certainly remarkable, it would be less effective without a convincing central performance to anchor the material. Luckily, Thomas Schubert, present in almost every scene, is superb as the young inmate. He has a likeable, resolute air in spite of his early inertia, and seems to grow in stature as the film itself grows from small and intimate character study to a wider treatise on life, death and responsibility, like a cross between the films of Carl Dreyer and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. Roman’s development is incremental and utterly believable; slowly but surely, specks of emotion begin to appear on his face and his body language becomes more open as he learns to trust others.

Clearly, there is a political edge to Breathing but Markovics less interested in explicitly investigating the nuts and bolts of Austria’s youth justice system than notions of individual redemption and responsibility, and how young offenders can successfully rehabilitate. With this exceptional debut feature, Markovics has pulled off a real achievement; he’s crafted a gentle, non-didactic film about a tough subject that’s ultimately uplifting rather than depressing. Highly recommended.

Breathing is in cinemas now. This review originally appeared on Brixton Blog.

“Phew for a minute there I lost myself” – an unlikely influence on Ceylan’s Anatolia?

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s extraordinary thriller Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, as Little White Lies’ David Jenkins astutely puts it, “forge[s] a new template for the police procedural”. It’s a dark moral tale about an assorted group of men (comprising police, soldiers, gravediggers, a doctor, and suspects) searching for a corpse on a long, dark night, illuminated by stunning widescreen panoramas of infernally autumnal landscapes, and very occasional nods toward magical realism. To watch the film is to subject yourself to a quite unique sensory and temporal experience; when you leave the cinema, you feel as though you’ve been trapped in there all night; the boredom and frustration experienced by the characters is transposed viscerally – yet paradoxically thrillingly – onto the audience.

Now: a small, perhaps fanciful observation about an amazing piece of work which may or may not have acted as an influence on Ceylan’s film. It took me a little while to put my finger on it, but when I was watching Anatolia the for the first time, there was something nagging me; a haunting memory. When it finally hit, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons. I was thinking of Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant promo video for Radiohead’s 1996 single ‘Karma Police’.

Glazer’s video is a masterpiece of creepy, largely unresolved tension. As the doomy, reverb-heavy acoustic chords of the song begin, the camera, positioned in the front of an empty car and presumably representative of the driver, glares out into the night’s blackness ahead. We hear anonymous footsteps, and the car door opens and shuts. The car starts, a light shines illuminating a long country road framed by half-lit greenery, and Thom Yorke’s vocals begin. Gradually, something becomes visible in the distance; as the car advances, the image sharpens, it’s a man, running away from the car. Periodically, we pan back to a morose-looking Yorke murmuring along to the lyrics, then eventually giving up.

The car pulls closer and closer to the man, who eventually collapses in exhaustion. The car pulls back, as if giving itself a run-up to mow the man down. Switching to the man’s point of view, he, and we, notice that the car has been leaking petrol. Clambering to his feet, the man fumbles for a match, lights it, and tosses it onto the trail. The flame kicks up in an inexorable trail while the driver/camera POV backtracks furiously to no avail. The flames engulf the car, the windscreen cracks, and the stand-off is over. As the ‘Sexy Sadie’-lifting bassline creeps upward and the distortion begins on the record, there’s a final twist: when the camera – now animated and anguished rather than dispassionate for the first time – pans back around, there’s nobody there. Thom Yorke, or the manifestation of Thom Yorke’s conscience, has escaped or vanished. Was there anybody really there in the first place?

What’s the video all about? Well, many of the same themes and troped that run through Ceylan’s film, I’d argue. Morality, retribution, persistence, facing one’s demons, the inscrutability of evil, the elemental struggle between life and death. Both works exist on the frayed, liminal edge of wake and sleep. The video is reportedly based upon a dream experienced by Yorke, while the major narrative pivot in Anatolia occurs when the exhaustion simply becomes too much for the key suspect, and his mind gives way to hallucination in the presence of a beautiful, spectral local village woman.

Though Glazer’s work is more oblique, I think both are distinctly moral fables. I’ve always read the camera/driver figure of the video to represent somebody easily led into acts of destruction who, at the video’s conclusion, gets his comeuppance, while the dark forces driving him (perhaps embodied by Yorke) get away; this idea, in turn, chimes with Anatolia’s mentally-challenged suspect, who is possibly coerced into committing the heinous crime of murder by his brother.

Perhaps most striking in ‘Karma Police’ are the visual similarities with the first half of Anatolia, which begin with the pastoral nocturnal setting, and the claustrophobic location of the automobile. In the film’s opening sequences, the car is the scene of a long, discursive chat among the officials about – of all things – the differences between cheese and yoghurt. While the officials continue their absurd discussion, Ceylan’s camera dollies – achingly slowly – into the hollowed, inscrutable face of the prime suspect, who, like taciturn backseat driver Yorke, may or may not be responsible for the crime and the chase unfolding henceforth. Both are iconic, unforgettable images, while the car is both is the vessel of investigation, transporting, searching, locating. Furthermore, the foreboding atmosphere created by the video is disarmingly similar to Ceylan’s work: There’s the struggle between light and dark, the crushing claustrophobia in spite of vast natural space, the oblique spatial unknowability of the struggle. The body, like Thom Yorke at the video’s conclusion, could be anywhere.

My imagination continued to run wild with the delicious physical similarities between the runaway target of the “Karma Police” (that is to say Thom Yorke and his driver), and one of Anatolia’s most fascinating characters, the driver Arab Ali (Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan); a doughy figure who is brought to tears in one of the film’s most elliptical, ambiguous scenes, which uses confusing sound bridges and image overlaps to connect the psychological states of two characters.

Even Yorke’s ever-oblique lyrics seem to chime with the film’s themes of crime, punishment and mystery. “Karma police, arrest this man he talks in maths / He buzzes like a fridge / He’s like a detuned radio” sounds like a petulant order from some busybody in a totalitarian state, afraid of that which he does not understand. Naci, the police chief, is worn down by the machine of bureaucracy within which he acts as a small cog, and his quick temper and thirst for retribution echoes Yorke’s darkly intoned mantra “This is what you get… This is what you get when you mess with us”. It’s almost as though Yorke is summoning the dark forces of chance and obfuscation that bear down upon Ceylan’s beleaguered cast of characters.

Now I’m not entirely sure there’s any overarching theory at work here above and beyond the links I’ve mentioned – or if the Turkish auteur is indeed a fan of Oxford’s finest – but I do think that the two pieces complement each other extremely well as morosely effective studies in atmospheric, sweaty, exhausting night terrors. In many ways, ‘Karma Police’ could be an effective subtitle for Once Upon A Time In Anatolia. In a world where films are called things like The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift and The Raid: Redemption, it might not be such a bad idea after all.

Go ahead, watch the video for yourself and see what you think. It’s followed by the Anatolia trailer.

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P.S. In writing this post, all sorts of musical reference points popped into my head, not least of which was Public Image Ltd’s utterly chilling ‘Poptones’, (video here) the lyrics of which read:

“Drive to the forest in a Japanese car
The smell of rubber on country tar
Hindsight does me no good
Standing naked in this back of the woods
The cassette played poptones
I can’t forget the impression you made
You left a hole in the back of my head
I don’t like hiding in this foliage and peat
It’s wet and I’m losing my body heat
The cassette played poptones
This bleeding heart
Looking for bodies
Nearly injured my pride
Praise picnicking in the British countryside
Poptones”

Swap British for Turkish, and you’re pretty much talking about Once Upon A Time In Anatolia. Spooky, eh?

Der Himmel über Berlin – subway support

Back from short Berlin break, feel compelled to post the following, lovely moment from Wim Wenders’ 1987 classic Wings of Desire, or, to furnish it with its grander original language title Der Himmel über Berlin (meaning The Sky Over Berlin). Will return to regular posting soon. Enjoy:

Happy Easter from Permanent Plastic Helmet

To celebrate, here’s a tangentially connected clip from Kevin Smith’s Clerks (eggs, k?) This is PPH signing off for a few days. See you on the other side. Have a good one.

Super committed YouTube guy does 75 years’ worth of Best Supporting Actress impressions

Wow. Click HERE for a staggering vid of one guy rattling through 75 years’ worth of Best Supporting Actress impersonations, from Hattie McDaniel to Anjelica Huston. Credit to blogger The Lost Boy for the spot, and YouTuber THEDOOMSDAYDIARIES for actually pulling this shit off. Hilarious.