Richard Phillips's Blog, page 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKBVB... Shakes: if...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKBVBn-Qzq0

Alabama Shakes: if you don’t know them click on this link to find out what you’re missing. You will not be disappointed.

50) The pathetic little willies of Paris.

Readers of this blog – hopefully I can safely use the plural – all I need is my Auntie Sheila plus one – actually make that two because my Auntie Sheila doesn’t read it - will know that in a previous post (48) I wrote about my indisputable claim to be the world’s grooviest sexagenarian, and, in support of that claim, drew attention to the fact that I was  going to an ‘Alabama Shakes’ gig the following week.  It had been my intention to use this post to report back on the  gig – can’t get enough  of that word – my daughter laughed in my face when I naively called it  a rock concert - as further evidence of my dedication to a lifetime’s relentless pursuit of cool.

But what I didn’t mention in my previous post was that I was going to Paris to attend. That of course should have made it several degrees cooler, but, as it may have dawned on you, I was in Paris to see a gig in the very same week as a lot of other people went to a gig in Paris and were murdered for their trouble.

‘Alabama Shakes’ appeared two days  before ‘Eagle of Death Metal’, at a different venue a couple of miles from the Bataclan, and I had safely Eurostar’d home a day before the moronic maniacs  got to work,.

But the fact of being at a gig in Paris a couple of days before, did, weridly, irrationally, but understandably I think, draw me closer to the events of Friday 13th.  (I wonder, by the way, if it was pure coincidence that the paradise loving nutters chose that particular date. Oddly I haven’t heard anyone on the telly comment on it.) 

I know that we are supposed to carry on as normal and that to alter our behaviour is to cede victory to the lunatics but suddenly the subject of my trendiness seems slightly less important than it did and I  can’t quite bring myself to continue to indulge in my customary facetiousness. Hence, the tone of this post now gets a mite more serious.

I do not have a lot that is useful to say about the unspeakable episode in Paris but you will notice that  I choose not to dignify the perpetrators  by describing them as anything but morons or lunatics or by using other synonyms for mindless prick .  A pretty feeble way of  expressing my revulsion but I don’t want to ascribe an ounce of  importance to the lives of these clowns.

I think the best defence we have is to disarm the strutting wankers of Daish  by laughing at them. No, I take that back. The best defence is to do unto them as we did unto Jihadi John – eviscerate them.  But in the meantime let’s not glorify them by implying they are anything other than what they are: a bunch of pathetic, desperate losers who don’t have the wit to see through the absurd crap they are fed about so called paradise and are so mind-bendingly dumb they are prepared to chuck their own lives away as lightly as they destroy others.

If, in public discourse, we cut them down to their proper tiny size, they will seem a lot less attractive and heroic to the impressionable, pimply faced yoofs they seek to recruit.

There is a precedent for this: I suggest we take as our template a quite brilliant Australian anti-speeding commercial made a couple of years ago in  which young men at the wheel who are seeking to show off by burning rubber do not get the admiring glances  from the girls that they expect. Instead the girls curl their little fingers to indicate that the boys are just trying to compensate for their pathetic little willies. You can see it by clicking here. (If it does nothing else it will cheer you up.)

https://youtu.be/SgV9Oa6z5wY

If Huw Edwards and John Snow and Evan Davies and Emily Maitlis and Fiona Bruce and all the TV journalists all over the world made this same gesture whenever referring to these nihilistic twats, and simultaneously stopped referring to them as jihadis and called them something a bit  less warrior-like – continuing with the pathetic little willie theme, how about ‘jisofties’? -  then those who would follow in their footsteps might find it a less attractive career path to take.

I don’t suppose it is likely to happen but I’d bet a Kalashnikov to a pea-shooter it would, at least partially undermine them. As I said, nothing disarms as effectively as laughter. Except possibly a bullet. And, unlike the pitifully deluded Jeremy Corbyn, I certainly favour the use of those too.

——————————————————————————————-

PS  On the morning after the show last week. which was every bit as gigtastic – or should I say gigtastique - as I’d hoped, I went online to read a bit more about Alabama Shakes and, in the course of so doing, discovered that their upcoming gigs in Brixton, which have been sold out for months were, in fact, not quite as sold out as I’d thought. (Having been too late to buy a ticket for one of these was the reason I went to Paris.)

There were, it seemed, a few tickets available on StubHub, one of these new ticket exchanges where people who’ve bought, but then find they can’t go, can sell their tickets on. (Or at least that’s what the ads claim, but as the seller can ask as much as they like, it seems to me to be not so diffferent from  online ticket toutery.)

Anyway there were two tickets available and I was still so in thrall to Brittany and her mates - if you’re not one of the gigniscenti, she’s the singer - that, there and then, I bought them (£45 a throw as opposed to a face value of £28.50) with the intention of taking the aforementioned daughter with me. I immediately texted her to impart the thrilling news that she would be going to a gig with her ancient father. (If that doesn’t send her street-cred through the roof, what will?)

That was on Thursday morning. Then came Friday evening and I immediately started to think, do I really feel safe going to  a gig at this time and, even more worryingly, am I being irresponsible in taking my daughter? (Is Brixton likely to be any less vulnerable than Paris?)

So, I admit it, as hard as I try to laugh at these gormless tossers, I am  still afraid of them.

After not too much pondering, I’ve decided that I am going to go and take whatever risk there is – which, in reality, is miniscule. I heard a journalist on the radio say that if you were one of the two million plus in Paris last Friday, the odds of you’re being one of the unlucky were, apparently, 18,000 to 1. And as for my daughter, she is an adult and must make up her own mind whether she wants the kudos of being seen out with me gigging. 

As a neurotic father – as a neurotic everything actually –  there is a large part of me that would prefer she stayed shut in her room and had her meals brought in – after, ideally, they had first been tasted for poison by a Roman slave – and never faced any potential risk at all. Or better still emigrated to some tiny atoll in the South Seas,  so remote that the pathetic little willies aren’t interested in it being part of their caliphate. But I have a feeling she wouldn’t be too keen on that, and I think she will probably risk her reputation and accompany her dear old dad to Brixton.

You will find out if we survived if and when post no.51 appears on this blog. (Touch wood. Please God. Inshallah. I don’t believe in any of it, but any port in a storm.)

Loudon Wainright III, who famously sang,“I’m not afraid of...

Loudon Wainright III, who famously sang,

“I’m not afraid of flying, I’m just afraid of crashing,

 I’m not afraid of dying, I’m just afraid of bleeding”

49) Don’t want to blown up on a plane? How unreasonable can you be?

London, Nov 6th 2015.

As you may have noticed in the news, a passenger plane travelling over the Ukraine was blown out of the sky not that long ago, its demise generally believed to have been the result of a missile being fired at it by one of the combatants in the civil war being waged on the ground below. And, unless you have been completely comatose for the last few days or are a world war II Japanese soldier who until this very moment was still hiding out in the Borneo jungle, you will have caught wind of the fact that last week a Russian passenger plane flying over Sinai in Egypt exploded in mid–air, as a result, it is now widely believed, of  a bomb being placed on it by Isil terrorists operating in that area. You may even have heard that there is a nasty civil war going on in Syria and there is serious bother in Iraq and Yemen too.

I mention these  bits  of non-news because I am about to confirm flights for a pal and myself to and from Bangkok in February and it has crossed my mind that I would prefer not to be blown up by a terrorist. (I don’t think Sue, my pal, would be too keen either.) The booking to Bangkok – the jumping off point for a trip around the northern bit of south east Asia  - is being made through Trailfinders  and they have made provisional reservations on EVA Airways, a Taiwanese airline of which I had not previously heard. I checked them out on-line and found very good reports of their service and that they rank fifth in the world in terms of safety – BA, by the way are below them in sixth place. (www.jacdec.de/airline-safety-ranking-2015/)

However, being the kind of unreasonably  neurotic traveller who wants to live, I called Trailfinders to ask what the EVA flight-paths would be, specifically asking for assurances that  they do not fly over the Ukraine and Sinai. (Yes, I know it wasn’t a missile that brought the Russian plane down and that it is said that Isil do not have missiles capable of reaching the cruising height of an airliner but do you think it is impossible that they could get hold of such weapons and would you put it past them to use them if they could? ) Actually, being a belt and braces kind of a guy I think I would much prefer it if my plane missed Syria, Iraq and  Yemen too.

Ian, the very decent and willing Trailfinders chap who made my booking had the day off, so I had to speak to someone else. Or, to be more accurate, to three people.  And I didn’t get anywhere with any of them.

Frankly, I thought the response to my call was quite astonishing. And not in a good way. But then again maybe it was me. Perhaps they were being eminently reasonable and silly old, rather-be-alive-than-blown-into-a-million-pieces me was the one who was out of line.

I won’t go into all the boring details but here is an approximate synopsis.

No.1 Trailfinders person didn’t know what the answer was, said she would call me back but by  two hours later still hadn’t.

No.2 seemed not to understand the question  and when I finally succeded in explaining what I meant by the word ‘route’, claimed she had never been asked such a question before.

“What?” I expostulated – admittedly I can get to the expostulation stage quite quickly – “even after MH17 went down over Ukraine, no-one ever asked you about the flight path  of a plane they were about to take?”

Apparently not.

So I moved on to no.3, a manager this time, but one who was equally unable to provide me with any kind of reassurance, and seemed to regard my question as just as freakish as no.2 had. (They record all telephone calls and if you ever got to listen, you would, I think, find, that I am not in in any way exaggerating.)

She was able to say that Trailfinders never used airlines that didn’t conform to Civil Aviation Authority and international directives but was unable to tell me what exactly those  directives are.  She also pointed out that the flights changed every day, so I, completely understanding that terrorists don’t always publish schedules of their prospective atrocities in advance, amended my question to simply asking what the position was as of today.

Unfortunately she was unable to tell me even this, saying that they didn’t have that kind of information and, after apparently checking on her computer, further told me that  it wasn’t available on the EVA website and that I should check with EVA direct. Since  I was  about to make a biggish booking through Trailfinders - biggish for me anyway –  I suggested that she might like to call them  on my behalf, but no, that clearly wasn’t going to happen.

So I rang EVA myself . The first person I spoke to  tried to help but said that they didn’t have the information (at wherever she was based) and that she would call the EVA base  at Heathrow to find out. Half an hour later she called back advising me to look at a website that tracks the flights of all planes in the air, but neither she nor I could find a way to get the website to provide me with any useful information, so she suggested I call EVA at the airport and gave me the number so to do.  This time someone called Debbie answered. I went through my story again, and she said the only way she could give me an answer would be to e-mail head office in Taipei and then report back by tomorrow.

And that is how it stands at the moment.

Five people representing two biggish organisations asked, and, to date,  no answer obtained.

I had thought that Trailfinders were being somewhat insensitive/unhelpful/amateurish – take your pick – but in all honesty, EVA don’t seem to be that much more on the ball.

So maybe it is me. Maybe enquiring about whether  an airline I’ve never heard of might be savvy enough to avoid flying over places where deranged lunatics are fighting wars and have, on at least one occasion, knocked a plane out of the sky, was totally unreasonable, and so far out of left field that no travel agent or airline could possibly be expected to have an answer readily available.

Bloody clients. Who needs them?

Update: London November 7th 2015

Not a word from EVA, so I called my original guy at Trailfinders who was back in today  and asked whether we could switch the flights to BA. He said that we could but for an extra £70 a ticket. I chewed on this. Didn’t seem a lot to pay for the extra peace of mind but £70 is £70. Then, while I chewed, he suddenly announced  he could see a way by which, with a bit of artful travel-agent trickery, he could switch us to BA, get us flying back from Singapore which would apparently work better and save £150 a ticket. No brainer as they say.

So now we are not going by EVA and they have no-one to blame but themseves. That said, they are, as I mentioned earlier, ranked above BA on the airline safety table and I guarantee the food would be better, the legroom greater, and the TV screen bigger.

And you might argue that a BA plane would be a juicier target for terrorists than a Taiwanese plane. So I can’t say that I am a 100% convinced that I have done the right thing. 

But then again, when was I ever?

Five of One in their early days. (Curiously there only seems to...

Five of One in their early days. (Curiously there only seems to have been four of them.) 

48) Where it’s at/where I am. Same difference.

I think it is widely known that I am the epitome of grooviness.  I am the ultimate IT guy – the IT that is bang in the middle of the zeITgeist.

It’s more than having my finger on the pulse. For more years than I care to remember – or, indeed, I can remember - I have had both hands around the neck of  happeningosity and been throttling it.

Of course, there are naysayers. My daughter for one, who insists that my  super trendy orange Nike’s – marvellous for bunion relief -  are a hideously embarrassing mis-step. But what does she know? Like all under 65s she is soaking wet behind the ears of fashion.

You have to have been there and done it, and done it again and again, before you can even begin to understand the true meaning of trendiness. Beatle jackets, flares, platforms, flowery shirts, kipper ties, dungarees,  Ben Sherman, skinny ties, lapels wider than the Mersey, drainpipes, Tommy Nutter, winklepickers, chisel toes, Oxford bags, tank tops, Oswald Boateng, no ties, two ties, shirts in, shirts out – it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that I have been the Lewis Hamilton of  fashion through every twist and turn  since they first put the boot into Chelsea.

And it’s not just fashion. I have jived, twisted, hitch-hiked, locomotioned, pogo’d, disco’d and yes, danced as a dad, but never dad danced. From Qatermass to Narcos,  from the Hippy Hippy Shake  to Alabama Shakes – going to see them gig – love that word!!!-  in Paris next week! - from telegram to Twitter, I’ve been out there in front, in the very V of the vanguard, adopting so early the baby had often barely been conceived.

And fuck,  yes, it has been exhausting. Do you think  there weren’t times when it would have been easier, to put my slippers on without first checking to see if  they were from Prada or Todt and let the world pass me by. But no, my colours have remained firmly pinned to the mast of the new and the now. I may be mutton dressed as lamb,  possibly even old goat got up as young kid but as Shirley Bassey likes to warble, ‘I am what I am’ and what I am and what I will always be is  a trendsetter to the tip of my arthritic toes. As Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders very nearly sang long before Phil Collins got in on the act, ‘Wouldn’t you agree, baby look at me, I’m a groovy kind of guy.’

And yet, trendy as I am, hip as I have been ever since daddio was cool, I still believe I can raise the bar. “Why” KIrsty Young asked Keith Richards on Desert Island Discs last week, “do you keep on performing?” “Because” he answered, “I think we can get better.”

And I, in my own chosen field of where-it’s-atness, feel just as Keef does. What’s more, a couple of weeks week ago,  I proved that this wasn’t the deluded dream of a washed up sexagenarian. I hit new heights of near cryogenic cool. On successive nights, I saw Bob Dylan at the Albert Hall and then Five of One at the Hurstpierpoint Community Centre. Not kidding. I really did. First, Robert Zimmerman, and then F.o.O!

Wait a minute, just realised it’s possible that some of you reading this may be so Untrendy that you don’t know who Five of One are. That’s forgivable in mere mortals like yourselves – people, so to speak, forever doomed to ride in the peloton of the race  to be cool – spearcarriers, if you will, in the war on so-last-year!  So I will explain: Five of One are the band who for more than a half a century have succeeded in remaining the best kept secret in rock. Only the mega-uber-hyper-groovy such as myself know anything about them.

So the Hurstpierpoint Community Centre was the perfect place to see them. Hurstpierpoint is a little village in Sussex,  so far off the beaten track that the hurly burly of so called civilisation has passed it by. Its inhabitants (ave.age: 104) still cleave to the old ways – Jeremy Kyle in the mornings, ten pints of Carling and a packet of pork scratchings at night.

If they ever remake ‘Deliverance’ in a British setting, Hurstpierpoint will be  the place they do it in.

I stood admiringly at the back while the Hurpies (as they are lovingly known) dragged their Zimmer frames on to the dance floor and threw their shapes (rather large ones), as the six members of Five of One (yes six, not for them the creative limitations of logic or arithmetic) took us through the history of rock and roll.  

So many great songs, but for me the stand-out was ‘High Heel Sneakers’ and it’s unforgettable line, ‘wear your wig hat on your head’. The breathless crowd – luckily one or two had mobile oxygen cylinders – took F.o.O at their word. They did wear their wig hats on their heads’ and despite all their hyper-energetic mash-potato-ing and wah watoosi-ing, I didn’t see any fall off. All six members of the band performed heroically but the two stand out performers were Alan Taylor on guitar – a man who could teach Bill Wyman a thing or two about understated  stage presence - and Allan Gold on drums who didn’t just hit us with his rhythm sticks, he pulverised us!

I will admit that a small part of my enthusiasm for Five of One, and the musicianship of Messrs. Gold and Taylor in particular, may owe something to the fact that we three all once  attended Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar School. Well do I remember  the young Gold paradiddlying his way through Mr.James’ aka Dim Jim’s fourth year Maths class – desk lid  doubling up as snare. Dim Jim was a bit mutton jeff as I recall, so missed the finer points of his performance.

I am not at all sure F.o.O will thank me for shining the glare of publicity on them in this blog.  They have been under the radar since before radar was invented, since small children were forced to recite that four pecks added up to the bushel under which they’ve been hiding their light. And now, thanks to me, it’s a racing certainty that they will be booked for the legends’ spot at Glastonbury next year. And look out soon for ‘Later with Jules Holland live from the Hurstpierpoint Community Centre.’ You know its only a matter of time.

So, two more notches on my groovy-stick. On one night, paying my respects to the bard of the sixties. On the next, to the band of the sixties. (That is to say the band are all in their sixties.) For the connoisseur of the cutting-edge, a stunning win double.

But it  has just occurred to me that I am not the only one to have been harbouring the secret of Five of One. Others have obviously spotted them – the clue is in the acronym. Take out the full stops from F.o.O. and what do you get? Exactly.

Wikipedia says  the name of one of the world’s biggest bands  is based on a World War II name for UFOs, but clearly  the choice of ‘Foo Fighters[ was  a secret homage to Five Of One.

This is the eponymous ‘Krisha’, the standout movie at the London...

This is the eponymous ‘Krisha’, the standout movie at the London Film Festival  

47) Late,late,late news from the film festival.

As they used to say in the time before polystyrene trays, today’s news wraps tomorrow’s fish and chips. Well, here I am reporting on the end of the London Film Festival 2015 – and that’s not exactly today’s news. Nor yesterday’s, nor even the day before’s. The Festival finished nearly a week ago. So if this post were available in newsprint, goodness only knows what state the fish would be in. 

This is a roundabout way of saying that I have missed my deadline by a country mile. (FYI and very possibly the only useful thing to be learned from reading this post: On a webpage headed ‘English Language and Usage’, it says, ‘The term “country mile” may be by analogy to a nautical mile (one minute of a great circle of the earth; fixed at 6,080 feet, an Irish mile (2,240 yards), a Scottish mile (various, including 1,976 yards), or it may be because the winding character of many country roads requires a long distance to be traversed in order to travel a mile as the crow flies.’ ) 

I make no apologies. As I set my own deadlines, I am free to ignore them if I choose. On the other hand I do feel a little guilty. I have no idea why I should, other than that I am an ethnic – as opposed to religious – Jew, and isn’t feeling guilty supposed to be the default position of all Jews? (Discuss.) 

So, back to, or rather, at long last, finally on to, the Festival. In an earlier post I said that as I had paid £40 for my press delegate’s registration fee, I intended to see at least 41 films so that I would be able to claim that I had paid less than a pound per film. Another target missed. I only made it to 37, so the average entry fee was £1.081recurring. 

Furthermore I didn’t see all of them. I walked out of four, one of them, a South African film called ‘Ayanda’, after less than a minute. It probably wasn’t that bad, but I realised that another film , that I reckoned would be better, was due to start in 10 minutes in another theatre in the same complex, so I bolted. My review of ‘Ayanda’ therefore can’t go any further than this: the first minute didn’t augur well for the second and remaining minutes, and I award it only half a star because after one minute how much more could it deserve?  I gave ‘Reuben Guthrie’ an Australian film about an ad guy with a drink problem about ten minutes, lasted about fifteen in ‘Office’, a Baz Luhrmanesque Chinese musical – as ghastly as it sounds - and hung on in ‘Public House’ for half an hour. But I only lasted that long in ‘Public House’, a documentary except that some of it was apparently ‘created’ – a bit like TOWIE you might say except that TOWIE is borderline-watchable shit whereas ‘Public House’ was totally unwatchable shit – because I was rendered immobile by the astonishing realisation that somebody had actually thought this film was worth making. It seemed in the main to feature excruciatingly long takes of exteriors of the pub and a whole series of local losers reciting what they had the effrontery to call poetry.

In common with far too many of the films at the festival, it would be all but impossible to imagine anyone but the director’s mother actually volunteering to sit all the way through ‘Public House’. But then nobody will have to because it will never again be shown by anyone anywhere unless possibly by Isis if they are looking for a new and particularly cruel and inhumane way to torture their prisoners.

One star to ‘Reuben Guthrie’, and to 'Office’ - I’m feeling generous - and minus a couple of galaxies to 'Public House’.

'Measure of a Man’ (French with lefty political message) about a skilled engineering worker with a disabled son forced by circumstances to do a job manifestly beneath him was a bit worthy but not without merit. Ditto ‘Paulina’ (Argentinian with lefty political message) about a judge’s daughter who decides to become a teacher to the chronically under privileged, and ‘Madonna’ (Korean with lefty political message) about a young girl who is beset by every kind of bad luck and ends up as an involuntary organ donor to a super rich dude who needs a bit she has. A grudging three stars to each of those. (I have yet to see a film at the Film Festival in any year which, if it does reveal any political colours, doesn’t choose a shade of red. I have the strong suspicion that if anyone who works for the Festival confessed to voting Conservative they would very soon be found hanging from the nearest lamp post.) 

'Remember’, a Nazi hunting and Alzheimer’s story had an impressive performance from Captain Von Trapp aka Christopher Plummer, but a pretty implausible plot and ‘The Wave’ (Norwegian) was a supposed disaster movie all about trouble in t’fjords but totally predictable, and for the life of me I can’t remember a thing about ‘From Afar’. Two and half stars for ’Remember’ and two for 'The Wave’. One and a half to 'From Afar’ because I don’t think it was so bad that I walked out but it can’t have been much to blog home about if I can remember diddly squat about it.

 I liked ‘The Wait’, a typically stylish piece of Italian film making with the always excellent Juliette Binoche as a mother who can’t face the truth, although it was a tad slow, and more bouquets than brickbats to ‘The New Classmate’, a charming if sentimental Indian film about the struggles of a single mother and her difficult teenage daughter. Three stars to each of those, and two to ‘Take Me To The River’ from America, a movie which centres on the troubles of a gay teenager from California at a family reunion with his country cousins. It took some wonky and deeply unsettling plot turns that made it seem promising for an hour but seemed to go nowhere in the end. The director’s response at the Q&A afterwards that he was happy for anyone to see in it whatever they chose to see, seemed to me to be a total cop-out. 

‘The Cowboys’, a French film about a family’s pursuit of their runaway teenage daughter and her Jihadi lover had its moments, but as it progressed towards its climax, there were scenes that stretched credulity to breaking point and beyond. The Q&A afterwards, usually an excuse for an audience to grovel at the feet of the almighty director, was for once, worth staying for, as there was a right hoo hah when a shouty girl grabbed the mic and told the world the film was both misogynistic and racist. I didn’t particularly agree with her but it’s always fun watching a bit of argy bargy. Two and a half stars. 

'Brand – A Second Coming’, a documentary about Russell Brand seemed to confirm my belief that he is a comedian who is not very funny and a political naïf who is not to be taken seriously. Another documentary, ‘My Scientology Movie’, which featured Louis Theroux, was entertaining and, to a degree, illuminating, and confirmed my belief that Tom Cruise is jolly, jolly strange. I just can’t shake the feeling that documentaries should really be on the small rather than the big screen, but neither was unwatchable so three of these sought after Salmagundi stars to each.

Which leaves me with just five films to go. ‘Steve Jobs’, Danny Boyle’s latest offering feels, in a way, rather more like a play than a film, confined, as it is, to a succession of interior settings, and made up of three very defined acts. But Michael Fassbinder, who seems never to be off-screen, is riveting as the obsessively driven Steve Jobs and the film does seem to plausibly reveal some of the inner workings that made Jobs tick. In this it does a better job (no obvious pun intended) than ‘The Program’ Stephen Frears’ film about the equally ruthless Lance Armstrong, which, I didn’t think, told me anything about what really makes Armstrong pedal. (And if it couldn’t do that, what was the point of making a fictional movie when a documentary can – and has – given us all the nuts and bolts of the story?) Still it was slickly made and very watchable so it gets three stars. But of the Festival’s 'big’ films that I saw, I thought that 'Steve Jobs’ was comfortably the best, so a well earned four stars for that.

‘Son of Saul’ is a staggering piece of film making but so harrowing to watch I often couldn’t. I certainly wouldn’t want to sit through it again. It creates, in completely believable detail, the hellish inner world of a Nazi Concentration camp and focuses on the lives of the Jewish trusties - and one, Saul, in particular - who were oh so generously given the opportunity to delay their own deaths by shepherding their fellow inmates into the gas chambers,slamming the doors on them, and cleaning up the shit – literally – after they had been dispatched. Not, as you might imagine, a barrel of laughs and although perhaps it the sort of film one should see, one would, quite frankly, have just as soon not. Four stars I suppose for the extraordinarily convincing picture it presents. (Though how did they know that this was what it was really like? Pity the poor researchers for having to find out.) 

'Chevalier’ won the Festival’s biggest doorstop and the president of the Official Competition jury, Pawel Pawlikowski, whose Ida won the LFF Best Film prize in 2013 had this to say about it:
“Chevalier is a study of male antagonism seen though the eyes of a brave and original filmmaker. With great formal rigour and irresistible wit, Athena Rachel Tsangari has managed to make a film that is both a hilarious comedy and a deeply disturbing statement on the condition of western humanity." 

Well, I’m glad he made a point of mentoning that 'statement on the condition of Western humanity’ because I have to say it passed me by entirely. Neither did I find 'Chevalier’ hilariously funny. I thought it was a rather thin if clever idea that was at times passably amusing but at others stultifying dull. Mind you I thought 'Ida’ was pretty over rated too so Pawel and I clearly aren’t on the same wavelength. 

So finally to ‘Krisha’, the one and only new film in the entire festival that really got me singing the words of the great Helen Shapiro, “Whoop ah, oh yeah, yeah.’So excited was I that I actually applauded at the end, and gushed embarrassingly at the Q&A that it was far and away the best thing I’d seen. (It was, but really, there was no excuse for that kind of grovelling - when I see it from other attendees at Q&A’s I want to vomit.)

'Krisha’ was another story of an American family reunion, but done, I thought, so originally and with extraordinary elan. There were sequences in it which positively fizzed, and the acting, the photography, the soundtrack, the dialogue, and the editing were all noticeably brilliant yet no individual element overpowered the rest and the sum still contrived to be greater than the many prodigious parts.

Incredibly, it is the first feature film of the director Trey Edward Shults, and he didn’t just direct it, he wrote and edited it too. And he is only twenty seven. And the whole thing – and there’s a lot of it – was shot in nine days. Nine days! With all those actors and all those scenes. Stupefying.

Afterwards, I read that it won the Grand Prix at the South by Southwest Film Festival. Here it didn’t even win the best First Feature which went to something called 'The Witch’, which I missed. Look out for that when it is on release because it must be sodding brilliant if is better than Krisha. 

So that’s it for another year. According to Claire thingummy the Festival
Director in her final press release, 2015 was a 'stellar year’. At £1.081 recurring per film I found it reassuringly (in)expensive but, with one or two honourable exceptions, from where I sat that was about as stellar as it got.

Finally, to a film that is 63 years old and which provided me with the most memorable moment of the whole event. Even the venue was perfect - National Film Theatre One with it’s gorgeous red and rippling velvet curtain covering the screen until showtime in the old fashioned way, and exquisitely lit from underneath. There, on the afternoon of the middle Sunday, they showed a completely resmastered and renewed 3D version of one the greatest musicals ever written, ‘Kiss Me Kate’. Great singable songs with brilliantly witty lyrics  from Cole Porter -  the wonderful rendition of ‘Brush up Your Shakespeare’ by the two Runyonesque ‘hoods’ is reason enough to see the fim - an ingenious book, and above all dancing on screen the like of which will never  be seen again. The ensemble sequence led by Bob Fosse (later to create ‘Chicago’ and direct ‘Cabaret’ and ‘Sweet Charity’) dancing to Porter’s classic ‘From This Moment On’ is pure Hollywood magic. If your mind needs boggling, see it by clicking here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0UFGOsabJo  

PS I have just added up the films from this year’s festival that I reviewed in previous posts, and there were fourteen. Add those to the twenty two I have I written about here and that makes thirty six. But, as I said earlier, I went into thirty seven. Somehow, a movie has gone missing. My apologies for this omission but I really can not be bothered to pore over the Festival programme, racking my brains to try to recall which one it was.  It can stay missing. I am totally movied out.

47) Late news from the film festival.

As they used to say in the time before polystyrene trays, today’s news wraps tomorrow’s fish and chips. Well, here I am reporting on the end of the London Film Festival 2015 – and that’s not exactly today’s news. Nor yesterday’s, nor even the day before’s. The Festival finished nearly a week ago. So if this post were available in newsprint, goodness only knows what state the fish would be in.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I have missed my deadline by a country mile. (FYI and very possibly the only useful thing to be learned from reading this post: On a webpage headed ‘English Language and Usage’, it says, ‘The term “country mile” may be by analogy to a nautical mile (one minute of a great circle of the earth; fixed at 6,080 feet, an Irish mile (2,240 yards), a Scottish mile (various, including 1,976 yards), or it may be because the winding character of many country roads requires a long distance to be traversed in order to travel a mile as the crow flies.’ )

I make no apologies. As I set my own deadlines, I am free to ignore them if I choose. On the other hand I do feel a little guilty. I have no idea why I should, other than that I am an ethnic – as opposed to religious – Jew, and isn’t feeling guilty supposed to be the default position of all Jews? (Discuss.)

So, back to, or rather, at long last, finally on to, the Festival. In an earlier post I said that as I had paid £40 for my press delegate’s registration fee, I intended to see at least 41 films so that I would be able to claim that I had paid less than a pound per film. Another target missed. I only made it to 37, so the average entry fee was £1.081recurring.

Furthermore I didn’t see all of them. I walked out of four, one of them, a South African film called ‘Ayanda’, after less than a minute. It probably wasn’t that bad, but I realised that another film , that I reckoned would be better, was due to start in 10 minutes in another theatre in the same complex, so I bolted. My review of Ayala therefore can’t go any further than the first minute didn’t augur well for the second and remaining minutes, but after that length of time I really can’t award it more than one star. I gave ‘Reuben Guthrie’ an Australian film about an ad guy with a drink problem about ten minutes, lasted about fifteen in ‘Office’, a Baz Luhrmanesque Chinese musical – as ghastly as it sounds - and hung on in ‘Public House’ for half an hour. But I only lasted that long in ‘Public House’, a documentary except that some of it was apparently ‘created’ – a bit like TOWIE you might say except that TOWIE is borderline-watchable shit whereas ‘Public House’ was totally unwatchable shit – because I was rendered immobile by the astonishing realisation that somebody had actually thought this film was worth making. It seemed in the main to feature excruciatingly long takes of exteriors of the pub and a whole series of local losers reciting what they had the effrontery to call poetry.

In common with far too many of the films at the festival, it would be all but impossible to imagine anyone but the director’s mother actually volunteering to sit all the way through ‘Public House’. But then nobody will have to because it will never again be shown by anyone anywhere unless possibly by Isis if they are looking for a new and particularly cruel and inhumane way to torture their prisoners.

One star to ‘Reuben Guthrie’, and to 'Office’ - I’m feeling generous - and minus a couple of galaxies to 'Public House’

'Measure of a Man’ (French with lefty political message) about a skilled engineering worker with a disabled son forced by circumstances to do a job manifestly beneath him was a bit worthy but not without merit. Ditto ‘Paulina’ (Argentinian with lefty political message) about a judge’s daughter who decides to become a teacher to the chronically under privileged, and ‘Madonna’ (Korean with lefty political message) about a young girl who is beset by every kind of bad luck and ends up as an involuntary organ donor to a super rich dude who needs a bit she has. A grudging three stars to each of those. (I have yet to see a film at the Film Festival in any year which, if it does reveal any political colours, doesn’t choose a shade of red. I have the strong suspicion that if anyone who works for the Festival confessed to voting Conservative they would very soon be found hanging from the nearest lamp post.)

'Remember’, a Nazi hunting and Alzheimer’s story had an impressive performance from Captain Von Trapp aka Christopher Plummer, but a pretty implausible plot and ‘The Wave’ (Norwegian) was a supposed disaster movie all about trouble in t’fjords but totally predictable, and for the life of me I can’t remember a thing about ‘From Afar’. Two and half stars off 'Remember’ and two for 'The Wave’. One and a half to 'From Afar’ because I don’t think it was so bad that I walked out but it can’t have been much cop if I can’t remember diddly squat about it.

I liked ‘The Wait’, a typically stylish piece of Italian film making with the always excellent Juliette Binoche as a mother who can’t face the truth, although it was a tad slow, and more bouquets than brickbats to ‘The New Classmate’, a charming if sentimental Indian film about the struggles of a single mother and her difficult teenage daughter. (Although I am compelled to concede that the fact that the actress playing the mother was, as they don’t say in India, as tasty as tikka, may have had something to do with my favourable reaction.) Three stars to each of those, and two to ‘Take Me To The River’ from America, a movie which centres on the troubles of a gay teenager from California at a family reunion with his country cousins. It took some wonky and deeply unsettling plot turns that made it seem promising for an hour but seemed to go nowhere in the end. The director’s response at the Q&A afterwards that he was happy for anyone to see in it whatever they chose to see, seemed to me to be a total cop-out.

‘The Cowboys’, a French film about a family’s pursuit of their runaway teenage daughter and her Jihadi lover had its moments, but as it progressed towards its climax, there were scenes that stretched credulity to breaking point and beyond. The Q&A afterwards, usually an excuse for an audience to grovel at the feet of the almighty director, was for once, worth staying for, as there was a right hoo hah when a shouty girl grabbed the mic and told the world the film was both misogynistic and racist. I didn’t particularly agree with her but it’s always fun watching a bit of argy bargy. Two and a half stars.

'Brand – A Second Coming’, a documentary about Russell Brand seemed to confirm my belief that he is a comedian who is not very funny and a political naïf who is not to be taken seriously. Another documentary, ‘My Scientology Movie’, which featured Louis Theroux, was entertaining and, to a degree, illuminating, and confirmed my belief that Tom Cruise is jolly, jolly strange. I just can’t shake the feeling that documentaries should really be on the small rather than the big screen, but neither was unwatchable so three of these sought after Salmagundi stars to each.

Which leaves me with just four films to go. ‘Steve Jobs’, Danny Boyle’s latest offering feels, in a way, rather more like a play than a film, confined, as it is, to a succession of interior settings, and made up of three very defined acts. But Michael Fassbinder, who seems never to be off-screen, is riveting as the obsessively driven Steve Jobs and the film does seem to plausibly reveal some of the inner workings that made Jobs tick. In this it does a better job (no obvious pun intended) than ‘The Program’ - reviewed in an earlier post - Stephen Frears’ film about the equally ruthless Lance Armstrong, which, I didn’t think, told me anything about what really makes Armstrong pedal. (And if it couldn’t do that, what was the point of making a fictional movie when a documentary can – and has – given us all the nuts and bolts of the story?) Of the Festival’s 'big’ films that I saw, I thought that 'Steve Jobs’ was comfortably the best. Four stars.

Son of Saul’ is a staggering piece of film making but so harrowing to watch I often couldn’t. I certainly wouldn’t want to sit through it again. It creates, in completely believable detail, the hellish inner world of a Nazi Concentration camp and focuses on the lives of the Jewish trusties - and one, Saul, in particular - who were oh so generously given the opportunity to delay their own deaths by shepherding their fellow inmates into the gas chambers,slamming the doors on them, and cleaning up the shit – literally – after they had been dispatched. Not, as you might imagine, a barrel of laughs and although perhaps it the sort of film one should see, one would, quite frankly, have just as soon not. Four stars I suppose for the extraordinarily convincing picture it presents. (Though how did they know that this was what it was really like? Pity the poor researchers for having to find out.)

'Chevalier’ won the Festival’s biggest doorstop and the president of the Official Competition jury, Pawel Pawlikowski, whose Ida won the LFF Best Film prize in 2013 had this to say about it:
“Chevalier is a study of male antagonism seen though the eyes of a brave and original filmmaker. With great formal rigour and irresistible wit, Athena Rachel Tsangari has managed to make a film that is both a hilarious comedy and a deeply disturbing statement on the condition of western humanity.”

Well, I’m glad he made a point of that 'statement on the condition of Western humanity’ bit because I have to say it passed me by entirely. Neither did I find 'Chevalier’ hilariously funny. I thought it was a rather thin if clever idea that was at times passably amusing but at others stultifying dull. Mind you I thought 'Ida’ was pretty over rated too so Pawel and I clearly aren’t on the same wavelength.

So finally to ‘Krisha’, the one and only film in the entire festival that really got me singing the words of the great Helen Shapiro, “Whoop ah, oh yeah, yeah.’. So excited was I that I actually applauded at the end, and gushed embarrassingly at the Q&A that it was far and away the best thing I’d seen. (It was, but really, there was no excuse for that kind of grovelling.)

'Krisha’ was another story of an American family reunion, but done, I thought, so originally and with so much elan. There were sequences in it which positively fizzed, and the acting, the photography, the soundtrack, the dialogue, and the editing were all noticeably brilliant yet no individual element overpowered the rest and the sum still contrived to be greater than the many prodigious parts.

Incredibly, it was the first feature film of the director Trey Edward Shults, and he didn’t just direct it, he wrote and edited it too. And he is only twenty seven. And the whole thing – and there’s a lot of it – was shot in nine days. Nine days! With all those actors and all those scenes. Stupefying.

Afterwards, I read that it won the Grand Prix at the South by Souhwest Film Festival. Here it didn’t even win the best First Feature which went to something called 'The Witch’, which I missed. Look out for that when it is on release because it must be sodding brilliant if is better than Krisha.

So that’s it for another year. According to Claire thingummy the Festival
Director in final press release, 2015 was a 'stellar year’. At £1.081 recurring per film I found it reassuringly cheap but with one or two honourable exceptions, from where I sat that was about as stellar as it got.

Memories are made of this, as Perry Como sang. If only I could...

Memories are made of this, as Perry Como sang. If only I could remember what this was.