Monster mayhem in Manhattan

When I saw the poster for Cloverfield, I thought it was advertising an album by a nu-goth rock band of the same name, what with its iconoclastic decapitation of the Statue of Liberty against a grimy background a reflection of the world-in-turmoil angst the music no doubt conveyed. To my surprise, I bcame apprised of its true nature by a film review. And now I have seen it.
Many people have commented that this is "the 9/11 movie" by which Americans can come to terms with the events of that day. Theses will be written on this film and its social impact, but I may humbly offer my commentary here.
Another common theme emerging from the critics is that everyone is waiting for the monster. It's true. At first we are offered only tantalising glimpses of it as panic-stricken cameramen jerk their cameras all over the place as they would in reality. Because the makers do not overdo it, we always want more of the monster (its spidery underlings are a staple of many a scary movie though). This is one mean, ugly bastard and even David Attenborough or Chris Packham would be hard-pressed to find anything good to say about it. Just as Godzilla was cathartic for the Japanese after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this film does the same. But the dinosaur with the halitosis and king Kong were cuddly in a way. The centaur-like outsized gremlin (which I'm told bears a debt to South Korean flick The Host) is distinctly not likely to be flocking off the shelves in toystores.
The wanton destruction is shocking as well, not because we haven't seen it before, instead because the cameraman is not some silent omnipotent figure overseeing it all, but actually there holding the camcorder, whose video we are now watching after the event. The action is really close-up and not slick half the time either. Like in all good horror movies, the cast are a bunch of unknowns and so we don't know who's next to get bumped off, which adds to its everyman feel.
The U.S. military seems to have convened quite a sizeable force on Manhattan in just a few short hours. If this was San Francisco it would be understandable, but I guess the film-makers are hoping that we also believe in 'secret' army base near New York. Fat lot of good it does the soldiery though since the latest in conventional weaponry seems just to annoy the monster even more. Even bombs from a stealth bomber only have a kinetic impact, flattening the creature, but not harming it. So much for 'full spectrum dominance'. When the nuclear air raid sirens start pitching up towards the end of Cloverfield, it really is the end for Manhattan, perhaps even New York, as one heart begins to quail at the prospect if transplanted to reality.
There are certain glitches. There's a suspicious absence of the F-word, but then it is a fifteen certificate. On plot levels, it takes an age for the human protagonists, taking refuge at a subway station, to realise that they could walk along the tunnels to get to Midtown (where one of them wants to rescue the woman he loves). Okay, so they're in a state of shock, but surely it would click after a few minutes, if not seconds that they could do that, instead of just waiting around. Once in the tunnels, the rats start fleeing along the floor from behind them. If the rats are scared, then they may be bad , but there's something a lot worse behind them. At that point I would start running in the same direction as the rats, but the charcters just get all squeamish. Such an attitude comes back to bite them (for one of them literally).
They get out of the tunnels and get accosted by some taskforce unit. The soldiers take them to an underground field hospital. This is nothing to with September 11, 2001. The East Coast Massacres were well-noted for how few injuries there were; despite doctors and nurses bringing out all the tourneys they could and record numbers of people donating blood (which then had to be poured away since there was nowhere to store it), there was almost no-one to treat. You either died in the Towers, the Pentagon or Flight 93 or you lived (though obviously not in the latter). So maybe the parallels of that fateful day should not be drawn too closely with this film. Another dumb thing was how low the evacuee helicopters were flying. Good for the cameraman to get shots of the creature, then boom, it leaps and smacks the helicopter one. This is just to prolong the dramatic narrative; though I would have liked to seen a Goetterdammerung of the city getting nuked from afar from a helicopter's vantage point, it does have a reason, if only for covering up a script hole. And then finally, we've been treated most of the film to the monster's stomping, roaring and general huge size. Then suddenly it sneaks up on the three who are left without so much the snapping of a dry twig, taking them completely unawares. How did it do that? We are not told.
The abrupt ending brings one up short. It's a clever cinematic conceit, especially considering it's all supposed to be filmed on a camcorder with a limited running-time tape; it leaves you wanting more which I suppose is a good thing. Then the final scene is one bathetic and ironic flourish - another artistic moment where one can feel the touch of Cloverfield's makers a bit too heavily. Watching the credits roll, I know there is a party for one of them going to Japan (one reviewer seeing a nod to Godzilla in that), but there were an awful lot of songs, some barely audible against the hubbub in the foreground as the characters interact.
The monster's imperviousness to whatever is being thrown at it mirrors the sheer, inevitably massive destructive power of the evil that was unleashed on New York on that September morning. An interesting theory among a few hypothesised by the cameraman is that this beast emerged from the Mid-Atlantic ridge, a volcanic line which would explain its toughness. Odd though that it picks New York to descend upon, plenty of landmarks and skyscrapers to demolish there, unlike say, Rhode Island or out in the countryside. Possibly its not just human entrepreneurs drawn to the bright lights of the Big Apple. Disaster and action movies in the 1970s and 1980s tended to be located in California, specifically Los Angeles (e.g. Towering Inferno, Die Hard, Last Boy Scout). That was because New York was in a headlong downward spiral and it wasn't worth destroying much there because in reality it was already being destroyed. John Carpenter reinforced the point with Escape from New York (another movie where at least in the poster the Statue of Liberty is putatively decapitated), where Manhattan had been converted into a prsion island of lawlessness. The much less-successful sequel Escape from L. A. is important because it emphasises the shift that whereas New York is now respectable (and therefore worthy of humbling), Los Angeles is the metropolis tearing itself apart. The film Volcano was a brief departure from this trend, as was a 1970s movies of the dire first King Kong remake or the one of a winged monster that nested in the N. Y.'s Chrysler building. The second King Kong remake, The Day After Tomorrow (obliquely) Batman Begins and others now fling their digital-effects fury at a New York, that, aprt from 2001, had largely rehabilatated itself from tragedy.

The drugs don't work

So a 'shocking' new study says anti-depressants don't work for most people. Well, an optimistic outlook was always the most effective and healthy anti-depressant there is, so those drug company executives marketing their products won't have been cramming pills down their throats. The Verve were right. But there has been a victim in all this. Bart Simpson has been unfairly maligned. Last night on Channel 4, in the episode where Homer has to confront his homophobia and in the end becomes slightly more tolerant, at the start Bart is scribbling his punishment lines on the blackboard. And what are these disciplining Bart for? Bart writes over and over again "I will not hide the teacher's Prozac." This is most unjust - Bart was merely try to show the teacher that Prozac is a placebo and thus wean the unfortunate teacher off it. Yet he gets the authorities bearing down on him instead. What is the world coming to?
If Madonna is queen of that world, then probably to a sticky end. In WHSmith's next to the checkout till is a book entitled "Madonna" with the subtitle "Queen of the World." Queen of Pop, yes, but the world? As it had been remaindered down to 99p, Madonna is more queen of the bargain bin.

When will the misrepresentation end?

The immigration debate is becoming hysterical in the chambers of power now, as well as in public 'discourse' (i.e. what the papers spuriously lead the public on with). Last night, the BBC did vox-pops asking what new immigrants should and shouldn't do and a fair few respondents said that immigrants shouldn't "sponge off the state." Hmm, I wonder it they have actually any credible evidence for this or even first-hand anecdotal evidence, rather than just what they have read in the lie-machines that are also known as the tabloids. The only sponges in this debate are their brains, that soak up any cock-and-bull tales about a section of society who they probably have no meaningful interaction with. The average Briton believes that migrants take all the best housing (when in reality, 95% are crammed into the worst), that 20% of the UK's population has recently come in (4% in truth) and that Britain takes in 25% of the world's immigrants (just 2%). The figures are staggering; not regarding immigrants, but what they reveal of the gullibility and incipient xenophobia of the 'British'. In reality, it is the poorest, least well-equipped countries who have to deal with the biggest migration flows e.g, the 4 million Iraqi refugees in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen. But then, why let facts get in the way of prejudice?
The role of the press is to represent, unless one belongs to the gutter press and then it is to misrepresent and the latter have done a sterling job in that. When discussing the tabloids, it is really hard not to invoke Godwin's Law (the first person to mention the Nazis in comparison loses the argument), but they are bad enough in their own right so it is possible. Xenophobia is xenophobia and racism is racism and on both counts the tabloids (the rabid right-wings ones especially) have racheted up misleading articles that blow the figures out of all proportion. They respond with the typical comeback of a racist "is it racist to discuss important matters?" It is in the manner they do it. There is room for a sensible debate on immigration, but the tabloids sell the most when they generate fear and if fostering racism will bring extra profits then they will continue to do so. Morality for them is anachronistic.
But now the Tories with their vile talk of caps on immigration outside the EU (insignificant cant since most of the migrants come from within the EU) and Labour, with talk of prolonging the granting of citizenship and taxes (tariffs raised for a cash-strapped Treasury?) are reacting to the crisis perpetuated by the press. If one thinks it too bold to accredit the Pied Papers of Wapping with leading the average British person into downright unsavoury views, then why do people always mention the newspapers when evidence for their claims of, for example, 'sponging' is asked for. The inherently anti-foreign spin issuing from these so-called patriotic purveyors of print is leading to a more divided society, but then hypocrisy and fiction have always been their key constituencies. They used to condemn Jews coming into Britain (an island which has always been a hub for migration throughout thousands of years of history), but of course they can't now, otherwise they'd go to prison. So their attention turns to foreigners in general.
As I said, a sensible debate on how to deal with immigration needs to take place, but the politicians are too scared to rebut the newspapers for fear of losing their support (yet more proof of the influence of the papers). At the moment, it is self-defeating xenophobia that allows the immigrants to cross the EU to reach Britain, as the government is terrified of the biased media reaction should it cross one of it's 'red-lines' and sign up to a common EU immigration policy. Until that happens, the EU states further out can play pass the parcel until the foreign unfortunates 'wash-up' on our shores, whereas being part of a common EU policy would stop that, allowing a more even-handed solution to non-EU migration. Politicians may be reviled, but if newspapermen and women ever got a shot at truly running the country, it really would be doomed.
Further, more than 3 million Britons have left over the last fifteen years, citing climate, taxes and house prices, over 1 million of them skilled graduates. The influx of skilled immigrants from other parts of the EU have filled the breach, otherwise there could have been an acute skills gap. Nothing can be done to prevent this, so the two main parties' tough talk on the issue really is just sophistry. Combined with the hyperbolic, choleric papers, they perfectly illustrate the dangers Plato so criticised democracy for - demagogues leading the people in damaging the very society they claim to defend. There is a point at which any society can absorb successfully an influx of migrants. The Celts in the fifth century AD failed when the Angles and Saxons, forebears of the modern English, overran them and much of the island. Perhaps all the English should be given a "Britishness" test and if they fail it, send them to Germany and Denmark where their ancestors came from. Give the people what they want and they'll rapidly find they don't want it. In today's society, the response to immigration must not be rabble-rousing, but measured and wise talk.

Unpolished broadcasting

Following on from the engineering-kerfuffle-promoted Oscar Peterson jazz in place of the first ten minutes of an edition of Woman's Hour on Radio 4, we got to one of my bugbears last Friday. Roger "3D" del Nido of Massive Attack was being interviewed for a South Bank exhibition just before the morning nine o'clock news on Radio 4, but the whole project was obscured by the mistake that consumed my thought. They opened with a piece from arguably Massive attack's most famous song and I pricked my ears to see if they would make one of the most common and frustrating of musical mistakes. "That was part of Massive Attack's," moment of truth, "Unfinished Symphony." Gah! Don't you have no conception of wordplay. It was probably on the script sheet, but your traditional mores were unable to resonate with that, instead falling back on what you recognise. It's "Unfinished Sympathy."
Mind you, some people have even less excuse. They go "Massive Attack's Unfinished Symphony is my favourite song."
"But," I go, "it's called Unfinished Sympathy."
"No, it's not."
Sigh. And no matter how much you try to convince them of the ingenious working of cultural recognition into something new and powerful of itself, it's nigh impossible to break through their raised mental barriers because... well, it's their favourite song.

Faulty engineering killed the radio star (temporarily)

Yesterday, I had Radio 4 on in the background as I laid resting on my bed, when come 1oam and Woman's Hour, after the news bulletin, that most feared of radio phenomena - dead air - silently made its presence felt; like dark matter, noticeable by the absence of anything else and so the proving of a negative. A nervous presenter came on and made a few bland somnolences. after the second time of failure, we were given Oscar Peterson and his jazz band, which I found far preferable to Woman's Hour. After a few minutes, the audibly wincing presenter returned, hoping for "third time lucky," but after the gathering of a few more seconds of radio dust, the man behind the microphone joked of "the best-laid plans of mice and men," the inability to contact the Woman's Hour studio and suggested we enjoy more of Oscar Peterson. I can just imagine the invective flying as the engineers try to fix the problem. Also, because Woman's Hour is a magazine programme, I wondered what itme would be cut or held over for next week. Whatever, Jenny Murray got off with less work than she expected. Eventually, after a good ten minutes had elapsed following the news (and a second tune required of Oscar, who did rather well out of this fault), the male presenter enjoined us now to enjoy Woman's Hour, but the drama was over - as I was curious as to how long it would last - and caused me to more deeply engage with my pillow.

Professor Tim Luckhurst was on the BBC Ten o'clock News last night. He gave a commanding performance. Alright, I only took interest because it was "Prof Tim Luckhurst, Chair of Journalism, University of Kent." I can't remember what he said, nor what the subject was about, since I was reading a newspaper at the time, but he said it well and it arrested my attention for as long as he was on screen, with a busy news studio behind him. He still had time to pop into his university office though. I know he was being a rent-an-expert, paid to give a few soundbites to encapsulate the arguments of the article, but at least he was deemed worthy of getting a call at all. It was classic television researcher student graduate stuff - present a case for transmission, get a few shots from the day to flesh it out and bump in a reference from an esteemed source. The visual equivalent of a pithy essay.

I also watched the film Van Helsing, known in the trade as an 'action-adventure' flick. It was on ITV, a channel I don't usually watch, but the adverts did allow me to switch over to catch a glimpse of Dame Stella Rimmington's 'insights' into Britain's relations to Russia; I guessed it wouldn't tell me much that I didn't know already and the atmospheric padding - archetypal for a programme with not enough substantive material - confirmed as much.
Van Helsing was a bit of puff-fun, if ludricously overblown; it was more enjoyable than The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which also used figures from Late Victoriana (though Van Helsing was more wide-ranging, using horror characters whose origins range across the nineteenth century). VH was not as linear and the villains essentially don't remain undisturbed in their plans until the final showdown. Van Helsing is supposed to be a paranormal-busting James Bond; he's actually the Archangel Gabriel who for some reason is suffering for memory loss - a plot hole the film never fully covers, but brazenly acknowledges all the same. Maybe if a franchise had been the result we would have been given more hints.
Written by Stephen Sommers who also directed, there are some notorious geographical gaffes. Transylvania in the late 1880s was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not Romania, as the cardinal in charge of a Vatican organisation more opaque than Opus Dei says. If one were to travel to land-locked mountainous Transylvania by sea, as anyone who's seen Nosferatu knows, you would go via the Black Sea before the short overland hop rather than the Adriatic Sea (maybe the producers said, nah, who's going to believe in a horror film that there's such a place as the Black Sea). Moreover, there's a line journey across a map, reminiscent of Indiana Jones' secenarios that would be set fifty years hence; therefore, maps are pretty advanced in the 1880s and one would not cross south over the Carpathian mountains to get directly to Budapest (maybe Sommers confused it with Belgrade, which fits exactly the map location where Budapest is scrawled). Another mistake is that a summer palace is not built where summer would be at its hottest - a winter palace would be built in Budapest and a summer one on the Transylvania plateau, where the air would be cooler taking something away from the savage summer heat, but the multiplex twerps aren't going to know that.
Ironically, for a movie that could amply justify filming within the modern-day frontiers of Romania, most of it seems CGI-driven. there must have been plenty of green acreen acting. Hugh Jackman dons a muscular English accent, since in Hollywood, anyone of any stature before the 'American Century' of the 20th, must be English, suggesting a classical age (unless Sean Connery is cast and then its an Edinburgh dialect). Kate Beckinsale stars in another trash film and puts on her very best Eastern European voice - at least it doesn't sound sub-Russian. She has impossibly good hair throughout, even on the very untypically Christian funeral pyre (I know the dastardly undertaker was taken out mid-way through the film, but still, isn't anyone else good with a shovel?). I wonder what her late thesp dad Richard would have made of her career.
In another irony, in that it has nothing to with the originality of imagination of the movie itself, the classiest moment of the film is the homage to the James Whale's 1930s classic, Frankenstein, with the burning windmill. There were a few intriguing touches, such as Van Helsing's equivalent of 007's Q accompanying the eponymous hero's quest and one of Dracula's brides in human form was dressed much like a Turkish harem dancer, evoking memory of the historical Dracula's wars against the Ottomans. As is the modern way, Dracula can no longer be killed simply with a wooden stake through the heart or exposure to sunlight; no, it takes something grandiose in a stab at originality to finish off the orginal vampire. There is also a very humourously absurd part played by a (completely-CGI?) cow, during an action scene, though one wonders how it looked so well minutes after being thrown through the wooden wall of a building (and would it be contaminated?). I guess Van Helsing didn't do well enough at the box office to merit a sequel (and do computer geeks really get paid so much to create these digital images), but was good, silly fun.

TV catch-up

It's been an interesting few weeks on the box, but let's start with the footy. England versus Switzerland. It wasn't a vastly taxing match for the nerves, this 2-1 win, with England's profligacy being the main niggle (and almost being made to pay for it by the Swiss in the last minute of second-half injury time). Humour alert! After a tepid opening half hour, in which neither team had opened the scoring, John Motson brought up the curio that Ron Greenwood's first England match in charge was England vs Switzerland and that was a 0-0. At this point, Mark Lawrenson, usually as pleasant as dragging a cheesegrater down a blackboard, chimed in with "Not one of the neetral, then." Very witty, to riff on the political status of the Swiss.

A few oddities elsewhere. Talking about some financial crisis for ordinary people on the BBC Ten o'clock News, we had a right old Colemansballs. The reporter said, quite straight-faced, "I've been across the country talking to people whose lives have been turned upside down, not once, but twice." So surely they should be the right way up now?
Then last night, the last article on Newsnight regarding sustainable fashion was bizarre (or slipshod). There were shocking facts such as last year not only did the British but 2 million tonnes of clothing, but that 1.5 million of that went ot landfill, that 60% of the under 25s don't care where or how their clothing is made and that the textiles industry is as polluting as the chemical industry. But what really stood out for me, is that the researcher for the ambient soundtrack had raided the entire Suede backcatalogue, starting appropriately with a song about fashion, but then taking any of the corkscrew melodies by the band, regardless of relevance.

Finally, David Attenborough's swansong (or maybe, in this case, croak chorus), Life in Cold Blood. The title's suggestiveness, is deconstructed, even obliterated, by Attenborough in the first five minutes, making it apparent that it was coined just to make a splash in the TV scheduling lists. Once again, we have Attenborough, the voyeur, with his nature pornography. He is tasteful in his descriptions, such as 'copulation' and 'union', but it's a relief that he doesn't take anthropomorphism too far. An examination of the social habits is, as unsual, fascinating, such as the duel between the tortoises, but trying to integrate dinosaurs into a contemporary nature programme was a bit of a mistake, especially after Walking with Dinosaurs has covered most of that ground, despite the stunning CGI. One of the most amusing quotes was about these lizards that bake in the sun, and those with the biggest, most heated rock piles attract the females. Attenborough's team remove the rock pile to another spot of a (in Attenborough's words) "sex-starved" lizard. At this point, all the female lizards skedaddle to this new hang-out, to which Attenborough comments "So, the females do indeed go for the males with the hottest rocks." Well, fashionable diamonds are a girl's best friend. The likes of P. Diddy are justified in nature.

Catch up

A whole two weeks has passed since I last blogged on, so I guess I'd better do it now, especially as I've got more free time since giving up Facebook for Lent.
Last weekend, I went to a birthday party for someone's thirtieth. It was by some of the cleaners I work with and so was in Gillingham. This means, for once, I could pleasantly walk home directly and sleep in my own bed, rather than stay overnight in London or Canterbury. I found it no trouble, since I found the directions very clear (top of Canterbury Street, turn right, number 93) but others were less sure. I, myself, thought I had arrived at the wrong address since I couldn't hear a party atmosphere behind the door, but the volume changed once the aunt of Ross, the birthday boy, had left. Walking in, I was hit by a haze, but it was legal smoke rather than cannabis. Still, my clothes stunk afterwards and I was coughing quite a lot after I left - it re-affirmed my support for the smoking ban in pubs and other enclosed areas. The punch was served out of a cleaned, cleaner's bucket and dispensed with a glass gravy boat, but it's taste was superb all the same. I had some Blackthorn cider off my own bat - got it at special price of £1.95 for a four-pack in Somerfield - bargain. Once tongues and limbs were loosened, there were many ready to dance to hackneyed, cheesy classics - that country "Cat man Joe" where you link arms and bound around and around, MC Hammer and so on. I left at 1am, after four hours there, having had a good time.