Chad Taylor

I can't watch


I had a copy of Blade Runner on VHS. This was 1988, 89 – ? Incept dates. A flatmate of a friend had two machines and could dub copies and he made me one from a rental, with a black and white photocopied cover and I would leave it in the machine at home. I would come home from my day job and make dinner and open a bottle of wine and put on Blade Runner and leave it playing in the lounge while I wrote. I literally can't count the number of times I've seen that movie, in all its incarnations. Personally? The first cut with the voiceover is the best. It was compromised but the whole movie is compromised, like everything, and the voiceover gave it shape. I love the small things in it, like the bad matte painting when Deckard leans over his balcony, or the looping that doesn't match, the stuntwoman whose face is visible when Zhora crashes through the window, or every single moment Sean Young is on screen. The movie was a failure when it was released and criticised by everyone, but everyone got it. It had a ramshackle scope movies don't have now. It felt like a movie. Now movies are perfect they don't feel like movies anymore. They're apologies. This is our point of view but please, if you're offended, the protagonist's father, it was all his fault...

Blade Runner sequel is like the Velvet Underground getting back together. It's too late and there's no point. And you still have the Velvet Underground and you still have Blade Runner. Why would you want anything more?

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Reproductive cycle



Watching Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World (1951). Above: Dr. Carrington attempts to communicate with the monster, with disastrous results; below, in Prometheus (2012), Weyland attempts to communicate with the Engineer, which also ends badly. The Hawks-produced movie based on John W. Campbell's Who Goes There? (1938) is directed by Edward Lasker, or not, depending on who you read. It feels like a Hawks: rammed with characters and jibber-jabber to unintentionally comic effect. There are no close-ups, not even of the alien's disembodied hand which becomes reanimated after it's severed, the surrounding observers (nearly all talking roles) clustered like a Rembrandt:


The movie is more of a western than a sci-fi or horror. The Antarctic base looks like a homestead, there's a posse and a Rio Bravo-like siege. Captain Hendry and his airmen are all guts and thumbs. They use thermite to excavate the frozen spacecraft ("A million years of history are waiting for us in that ice!") which causes it to explode ("Well that's just dandy!"). They attack the alien with kerosene ("Here's where we start cooking!") and set fire to the hut. Hendry opens the door on the thing, closes it fast and everyone shoots at it forgetting they also have men posted on the other side of the wall ("Bob, next time raise the sights a little!"). The movie's Cold War message is not so much clear as embedded: alien invasion or not, our planet is not in good hands.

In between the yammering are the sequences that will inspire the original Alien and John Carpenter's 1982 remake, including a spooky corridor showdown that becomes genuinely dire when Dr Carrington tries to talk the monster down. (Goatee and significantly Russian-looking hat = doomed.) All three movies – the two Things and Alien – take inspiration from HP Lovecraft's equally disastrous trip to the ice At The Mountains of Madness (1931). But how funny to see Ridley Scott's Prometheus in it.

Powder room





School's been blown to pieces


What a great movie. Woody Allen's Irrational Man is small like a Russian short story. Instead of Chekhov's gun it has a pocket torch (although there is a gun, too); in place of the writer-director's often cringemaking sexual reveries the relationships are adult and on-point (although again a scene in which a writer working at home is interrupted by Parker Posey bearing a bottle of whisky is as agreeable a fantasy as one could conjur). Like the mis-en-scene of London finance in Match Point the hermetic world of a New England campus focuses the characters' dilemma. Joaquin Phoenix (paunchy, cold) plays a philosophy professor paralysed between theory and action, Posey (brittle, confident) a scientist with chemistry, and Emma Stone (wide-eyed, smart) a student who learns something. The script lacks the wizardry and magic that spoils every other Woody Allen. There are jokes but the actors ride over them, tamping down the smart-ass observations until they read as self-deprecating mumbling. Phoenix literally kills the humour and the movie soars by staying in the box. It's a solid little masterpiece that locks down its story with broad themes, sly editing and the eloquent style of voiceovers that made Vicky Cristina Barcelona such a good picture to look at.

Moving


The dialogue in Furious 7 is epic to the point of non-sequitur. The rap video T&A is equal opportunity: Rodriguez kicks ass; the Rock wears a singlet in the office. Fights are Hong Kong phooey and the laws of physics pushed out as far as a rocket-propelled coyote on a granite ledge. But the series works because at its heart – and it has a lot of heart – it's about chivalry. The central theme is family – not military. Furious 7 never winks at the audience. For all its stunts, the filmmakers play fair with the viewer: the movie believes in itself, and the audience believes back.

Features fuse like shattered glass


Now I watch movies while saying over and over again, 'They could never make this now.' You couldn't be this clear and cold and dissolute; this adult. Literally: the teenage children of the couple would be enabled as the heroes, their wealth signified by product placement and a contemporary soundtrack. And the heroine would not be wetting the bed.

Reversal of Fortune: Directed by Barbet Schroeder (More, Maitresse). Written by Nicholas Kazan (At Close Range).

Show me the magic


Paul Mazursky's Tempest (1982) is the sort of movie people used to make all the time. It's not huge or important or famous or even a cult classic: it's just good. The screenplay was co-written by Leon Capetanos and that Shakespeare guy. It's a riff on The Tempest and stars John Cassavetes as a disillusioned New York architect (Phillip) and Gena Rowlands (Antonia) as his disillusioned wife. Also starring Molly Ringwald (Miranda), Raul Julia (Kalibanos) and Susan Sarandon (Aretha – but basically, Susan Sarandon). Julia's great. They're all great.

Tempest is a film about personal crisis and love affairs and escape, beautifully acted, with scenes that could have only come together in the editing suite. My favourite moment is Miranda and Aretha washing a sheet in the sea: they raise it; the movie cuts to a long and disruptive flashback, then they lower it again and the story continues. I suppose it's a theatre trick ("We're Segueing Here, Everybody! Segueing!") but it's an example of a moment that would be the first thing to go now, struck out or hammered flat by committee.

Nine years after Tempest Peter Greenaway made Prospero's Books, which had far more cred but a comparison between the two now (do "audiences" even remember Greenaway?) is sobering. Mazursky's Tempest is variously funny and sad, angry and sentimental, disciplined and spontaneous. Rowlands and Cassavetes are amazing. It's a story. It's a movie.

Maybe it's the allure of The Island. Maybe it's because it's medium budget and small scale, or that great idea Shakespeare had. Or the performances. Or maybe I'm simply prone to being charmed by art that's pre-everythingthesedays. But I recommend Tempest to anyone.

To the end


My definition of an artist is someone who gives people permission to do something that they've never done before.

I don't meant the critic's fantasy of violent innovation or breaking ground or breaking the glass ceiling but the tiny shift by degrees that comes from real lovers of the form copying and mimicking their own heroes and repetition (think: the blues) and, as a by product of that, causing the machinery of creation to skip a gear and go slightly out of control.

If the work and the creator survives, everyone else working in the field sees that they can take things a little further, and from that point onwards is faced with the choice of whether or not to develop it.

(There's another very middle-class idea that what makes art great is how much work goes into it. I tend the other way: look how much hasn't.)

Alain Resnais made Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year At Marienbad and after that, film would never be the same. Ever. Ever. Ever.

Bruce


I still love The Big Boss. The film boasts a perfect mise en scène: an ice factory in Thailand. The weather is hot and the men are trying to stay cool, Bruce Lee most of all. After a brief scuffle at the beginning he holds it in for the better part of the film before erupting into, well, Bruce Lee. He's a slow burner, like Clint's Man With No Name. He's imperfect, tested, and prevails.

This is what heroes used to be: stoic, principled, tested -- always to failure -- but coming back at the end when their true self is realised. The storyline is likewise classically simple: starting quiet and driving to a climax. Now movies start big, flounder, panic and distract with gewgaws until arriving at some legal definition of an ending: boxes ticked, pulses never raised.

The Fast And Furious series is the closest thing to a modern equivalent of the Hong Kong martial arts movies. A gallant camaraderie, tight budgets and cheap locations, a cast that can laugh at itself and shonky set pieces that work in spite of their ludicrousness because you're in the heroes' headspace and you want them to prevail. The female characters are equally noble. Maria Yi is the moral compass in The Big Boss just as Gal Gadot is in Fast 6.

Threat levels




'Pornography violates the Aesthetic Distance. What does this mean? When we see the scene of simulated sex we can think only of one of two things: 1) Lord, they're really having sex; or 2) No, I can tell they aren't really. Either of the above responses takes us right out of the film. We've been constrained to remove attention from the drama and put it on the stunt.'
-- David Mamet, Make-Believe Town (Little, Brown, 1996)
'I think that one of the functions of Art (both for the artist and for the perceiver, though not necessarily in the same way) is to furnish a false world which is an analogue of at least some of the aspects of the real world and to explore within that new behaviour patterns that might yet be too dangerous or imponderable in a real-life context.'
 -- Brian Eno (Another False World interview by Ian McDonald, NME Dec 3 1977)
'Any sort of upheaval gratified our anarchic instincts. Abnormality we found positively attractive.'
-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life (Libraire Gallimard, 1960)
Been thinking about how many of my favourite things have fallen foul of both official and self-appointed censors. (Including my own work.) Talk is cheap, anger is free and all threats in art are metaphorical.1

Those threats which one believes can pass from the fictional world and into reality to do real harm (computer games, pornography, modern art, hate speech, fight scenes in movies, Miley Cyrus at the VMAs) tends to be dictated by personal taste rather than empirical evidence.

I could be wrong. The only way to find out is to keep talking about it which, unfortunately, also requires one to keep listening, no matter how much you don't like what you hear. Or watch, or log into, or subscribe to, or buy to read every day, over and over...

(Pics: Existenz (David Cronenburg), Maitresse, Once Upon A Time In America, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny tease Reddit for The X-Files 20th anniversary)

  1. I think Eno said this but I can't find the quote just now. I propose a law that after being interviewed for so many years all quotes can be attributed to Brian Eno.

Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this?

Q: Many films based on real-life events are being attacked over accuracy. What responsibility do you have to the facts?

CLOONEY: This is a new thing, by the way. This is all, like, bloggers -- if that existed when Lawrence of Arabia came out, believe me, Lawrence's own autobiography would not hold water. Patton wouldn't. You can go down the list of movies -- Gandhi -- these movies are entertainment. And that's what we have to get back to. A movie like 12 Years a Slave, somebody will go looking for something that doesn't jibe and they'll try to disenfranchise the whole film because of it. Because there's this weird competition thing that's going on now that didn't exist 10 years ago. That happened with us on Argo. It's bullshit because it's got nothing to do with the idea that these are movies. These are not documentaries. You're responsible for basic facts. But who the hell knows what Patton said to his guys in the tent?
-- Actor / writers George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Julie Delpy, Nicole Holofcener, John Ridley, Danny Strong and Jonas Cuaron interviewed by Stephen Galloway and Matthew Belloni The Hollywood Reporter.

The Dark-Haired Girl



'It's like [Eye in the Sky] when actual rescue is right at hand but they can't wake up. Yes, we are always asleep like they are in Eye and we must wake up and see past (through) the dream -- the spurious world with its own time -- to the rescue outside -- outside now, not later.' 
 -- Philip K. Dick quoted in Divine Invasions by Lawrence Sutin (Paladin 1991)

The Excellent Man




'There is only one situation in which the virtue of the good citizen and excellent man are the same, and this is when the citizens are living in a city that is under the ideal regime...'
-- Edward Clayton, Aristotle: Politics (2005)

(REALITi, Mission Impossible, The Prisoner)

Snapshots





Needle and the damage done


Sunday was the wrap for REALITi. Director Jonathan King finished the principal shoot and pickups with a reshoot of the first scene, going in tighter / darker / better. Big ups to actors, crew and our location hosts for the day, Chow Wellington. After thirty non-sequential days of shooting the micro-budget has brought out the best in everyone.

Now all there is to do is the editing, some digital trickery, ADR, sound mix, colour timing, score...

Smoke


The Insider, again. Some days it seems like Michael Mann and Kathryn Bigelow are the only American  directors who matter. Which is wrong, of course, but the modern language of meetings and business, the euphemisms of corporate blandness, the power of the telephone and the text message, the dead cold hand of unfeeling legal procedure -- who else now really gets that? Fincher (Sorkin) in The Social Network, but that was that movie's subject. The Social Network wouldn't exist without the visual vocab that Mann minted: documents, coffee cups, whirring photocopiers, sodium lights, rain on the car windscreen. The Insider depicts the modern urban world where everything's talk but the pictures say it all, wordlessly.

Mann talked to Salon.com about directing the subtext:
There seem to be five things going on in every scene.

I wanted to direct, I tried to direct the subtext. That's where I found the meaning of the scenes. You could write the story of certain scenes in a code that would be completely coherent but have nothing to do with the lines you hear.

For example, in the hotel room scene, Scene 35, when Lowell and Jeffrey first meet: All Lowell knows for sure is that Jeffrey has said "no" to helping him analyze a story about tobacco for "60 Minutes." He doesn't know yet that there's a "yes" hiding behind this "no." There's a whole story going on that's not what anybody's talking about.

If you wrote an alternate speech for Jeffrey, it would go: "I'm here to resurrect some of my dignity, because I've been fired, and that's why I dressed up this way and that's why I have these patrician, corporate-officer attitudes." And you could do the same for Lowell, and have him sitting there and saying, "This man wants to tell me something that is not about why he's meeting me."

Al Pacino just took over Lowell's great reporter's intuition to sit there and laser-scan Jeffrey with his eyes. You know, he looks at him, looks at him, and doesn't move, until, after all the fidgeting and shuffling with the papers, Russell, as Jeffrey, gets to say his great line — "I was a corporate vice president" — with the attitude "Once upon a time, I was a very important person." And that [Mann snaps his fingers] is when Lowell has it.
CBS reporter Mike Wallace criticised the film's dramatisations as "excessive".":
Two-thirds of the film is quite accurate. It was dramatized excessively.

How was it watching Christopher Plummer play you?

Mike Wallace: Listen, I could have been a contender if I was that good-looking. He did a good job, I thought, he got some of my tics. But, the basis of the film was that I had lost my moral compass and had gone along with the company and caved in for fear of a lawsuit or something like that. Also, Don Hewitt, who is the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes, but mainly me. That was utter bullshit. It was done for the drama involved. Then finally, at the end, I found my moral compass again, except it was not true.

In a quote from the movie, your character says, "I'm with Don on this." In other words, "Yeah, we should kill it." You didn't do that?

Mike Wallace: Certainly not. In the broadcast that we did do at that time, I did a mea culpa on behalf of CBS. I negotiated it with the people at CBS, which permitted me to say that for the first time in the history of 60 Minutes, for the first time in the history of CBS News, as I know it, I was told not to do something. We weren't going to broadcast something that I had done for fear of a law suit or something of that nature. God, that happily is not my reputation, and it was a lie. But it made it more dramatic.

Got wood? Ed Wood?


I sat down with Jonathan King to view the first and very rough assembly of Realiti, and it's looking good. We have about three shooting days in total to go, although they include capturing something complex that I dashed off quickly. To paraphrase Harrison Ford, you can type this shit, but you can't film it. But I have faith that Jonathan will. He has so far.

The best thing about the movie so far is the direction and the performances. The actors are nailing it, and the images are lovely.

To date, only one corrupted file (touch wood) which our editor Jonathan (no relation) saved by importing it a frame at a time, and one misbehaving computer (cue Wilhelm scream), now reformatted. My role now is mostly sitting nearby saying, 'I'm sure it'll be alright' and, more than once, 'Why don't you just cut that line completely?... Yeah, that's better.'

In the same month, I finally got my writing desk out of storage. It's been a long time, baby.

Hubcap diamond star halo





Bullitt (1968), Vanishing Point (1971), Christine (1983), Fast and Furious 6 (2013)

Out of the past


This month's movie top box office earners were based on a 1966 TV series, a 1963 comic book and a 1925 novel. And Daft Punk had a number one with their disco single 'Get Lucky', based whole or in part on guitarist Nile Rodgers' work with Chic circa 1976. Nile talked to GQ about recording with the French duo:
Once it got down to specifics — once I had to pick up my instrument, and it was like, Now we've got to translate from concept to reality, we go from nothing to something—I said, Well, this is how we used to do it. And guess what, guys? You're also in the place where I cut my very first record. This is where Chic became Chic. And not only that, I also did INXS here, the biggest record of their careers. And I was here when the studio was built for Hendricks, and I was here before that, when it was a nightclub called Generation, and I played here and hung out here as a teenager. There's a lot of great ghosts in these walls. And at that point, it was like, Okay, the magic is about to commence. I started to deconstruct my parts — I do one pass where I'm playing it, and I take it apart, and do it sort of in single notes and other components. That process seemed to be the way they worked, because they were working with me. They would sing little licks that they'd hear me do, or I'd play something and that would spark an idea.
It's a nice thing as you get older – things come around.

Also announced this week: John Slattery is going to direct a movie version of Pete Dexter's God's Pocket starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christina Hendricks and John Tuturro. I'm a huge fan of Mr Dexter, and this means he gets paid.