The Pagan Defense League

I’ve finally decided to come out and say what we’re all thinking.  This country is in a war of religion, and I’m sick of how no-one is doing anything about it.  Our beautiful land of Blighty is being infested by a monotheistic religion from the Middle East, whose followers are causing menace to honest blue-blooded Englanders.  You see them coming over here with a holy book that is absolutely filled with hate and bile and fire and brimstone, when taken mostly out of context.  Enough is enough; Christianity is paving over our home-grown Pagan traditions, and if we don’t act soon they’ll be taking it right into parliament and we’ll end up an entirely Christian nation of sissy choir singers.

Pictured: Immigrant scum

It all started long ago with them bloody Roman immigrants, who came to our country and bred like a plague, building temple after temple to their stupid Geesus, or whatever his name is; they all look the same.  Now, there are entire areas of this country that are populated almost solely by Christians.  When was the last time your local baker had a proper pagan name?  They’ve all got funny Christian names; our banks are staffed by Johns and Marks and Williams.  What kind of stupid bloody name is William? It’s got ‘willy’ in it, enough said.

You see them flocking to our sacred Stone Henge, taking patronising pictures with their camera phones, stealing the soul from our cultural heritage, and pointing and laughing at our traditions like we’re standing here worshipping fucking My Little Pony.  They are defecating all over traditions that date back to the birth of the British Isles themselves, when they were flung from the hallowed vagina of our sacred Mother Nature Divinia in 4,000 b.c. 

What’s more, you know what ‘b.c.’ stands for, right?  See, they even forced their stupid dating system upon us, making us refer to everything in relation to the birth of their stupid prophet Chris.  Even though they can’t even decide when the beardy bastard was born, so they just said it was the same day as the birth of our sacred Sol Invictus.  After that, they wiped their collective Christian arse with our spring fertility ceremonies, kept the bunnies and eggs and called it Easter.  So what you’re telling me, Johnny Bible, is that the day Chris was crucified changes every year in accordance with the coming of the full moon? Come off it, mate. I’m sick of all these Christians taking over Pagan holidays. You can’t even call it Winterfest anymore, it’s Christmas this, Christmas that.  They built a Santa-shop over my sacrificial pyre.  I inherited that pyre from my great-grandfather; it’s got virgin bloodstains on it that are older than Bruce Forsyth.  

Get off my heathen pavement you drunk heretic

Every day in the news we’re reading about Christians committing crimes. Of course, they don’t always say they’re Christian, but you can tell they are from their pasty white faces, knobbly knees and all the disgusting tea stains on their teeth. Christian man Raoul Moat shooting all those people in Cumbria.  Christian leaders going around telling us not to be gay like it’s any of their bloody business who I share my privates with.  Christians wasting trees printing out their phony scripture, as if passing on religious instruction by mouth isn’t good enough for them.  Christians littering our streets with their cigarettes and gum and drunkenly pissing on our pavements at two in the morning as they spill foreign burger lettuce from their fat ugly mouths.  What, you thought hamburgers were English?  Take another look at the word, mate.  Absolute foreign conspiracy in a sesame-seed bun of deception.

I see them coming over here and paving over our stone circles, replacing them with church after church.  I grew up in a tiny village outside of Cambridge, which now boasts three churches for less than four thousand people.  Yet when I tried to pray to my proper pagan British god of Anthwrara, the Lord of Darkness, Shepard of Death and Bringer of Righteous Suffering unto the Aberrant Masses, I managed to get barely five minutes into the Naked Mud Dance of the Triumphant before the Legoland security personnel were escorting me from the premises.  They even confiscated the little foam sword I'd nicked from the souvenir shop, a process which took at least another ten minutes as I had firmly lodged it halfway up my rear English channel, in a gesture of valiant assault against the profanity of sinful expulsions.  The PC brigade is slowly but surely stripping me of my patriotic right to be an utter cunt.

What sissy Prophets do when they're not spinning lies

I’m not saying any of this from a place of ignorance; I’ve skimmed the Wikipedia pages on Christianity and the Bible for enough time to find sentences that support my well-endowed prejudice.  I’ve read article after article from completely reliable anti-Christian propaganda blogs like fuckthemeek.com and shovethatwaferupyourdogmaticarse.blogspot.co.uk.  They all cite sources like the Daily Mail, together with general hearsay they gleamed from their mate down the pub what said this and that, and you’d be mad to tell me you can trust anyone better than your mates from down the pub what said this, or that. They’re your mates, for Anthwrara’s sake.  Thicker than water, they are.

So what have I learned from my exhaustive research?  Firstly, Chris was a carpenter.  What kind of almighty Messiah has a day job?  Obviously one who can’t be bothered to commit to his followers full-time without popping off to fix a window for cash-on-hand.  Beyond that, you know what kind of thing he used to bang on about?  He said when someone slaps you, you’re meant to turn the other cheek, like a little bitch or something. Blessed are the meek? They’re inheriting the earth, are they?  It’s like they want to turn our brave and fierce country into a pasture land for complete pussies.  Probably so they can bring more of their kind here to walk all over us while they stamp our history into the dirt. It makes me physically sick.  On top of that, their Bible says he once invited a load of mates to his for some bread and wine, only then telling them it was actually bits from his own blood and body!  God damned cannibal.  God damned sissy cannibal day-jobbing tosspot.  In my humble view, he deserves to be hung up and nailed to a tree or something with thorns stuck in his head and left to die there, see how he likes that shit.

The Britain we all dream of

It’s time to fight fire with fire. The only way to stamp out such an intolerant and misunderstood religion is with our own home-grown brand of proper British intolerance and misunderstanding. Aux armes, citoyens!  Let’s see how well they turn the other cheek when you’ve slapped them hard enough to snap their heretical necks in two.  Then let us piss their remains into the gutter so we can get back to the tolerant and peaceful Britain of the Hovis ads of yore.

Film Review: We Went To War

It is very easy in our current era to become desensitised to warfare.  Through the popularity of the fantasy war epic Game of Thrones, the Oscar success of civil war drama Lincoln, or the startling sales of Call of Duty and other war-themed video games that could bankroll an entire invasion, we are, as ever, transfixed by the majesty and morality of battle. The long term consequences of this bloodthirsty entertainment shouldn’t be of too much concern, as it is far from a new phenomenon; the epics of Homer were just as gruesome as the gunshows of Tarentino.  We can permit ourselves to enjoy them, so long as we can still remind ourselves of the real-life consequences of real-life bloodshed.  Let us be thankful, then, for a documentary like We Went To War, that forces us to reconsider what becomes of the veterans of a senseless conflict nearly forty years past.

Michael Grigsby’s new film is a taciturn tribute to the soldiers of the Vietnam War.  It arrives 43 years on from Grigby’s I Was A Soldier, which followed three men, Dennis, David and Lamar, as they returned from Vietnam and tried to settle back into life at home.  Now, he follows the same three soldiers as they continue living day to day in rural Texas, their scars now aged but still raw and ever-present.  A series of extended still shots of their native countryside, combined with wide tracking takes of cars progressing across the endless landscape, place us into the serene and ostensibly relaxing location.  However, when coupled with the testimony of these men as they still try to recover from the mental wounds of war, together with a soundtrack of pop music from the Vietnam era, an atmosphere of irresolution, unrest and disaffection creeps through the celluloid of empty streets and lonely forests.  We see archive interviews with these men shortly after their return from Vietnam, juxtaposed with more current footage of them as aged relics of American history, and come to see how little has changed: they are still at war in their minds, overcoming flashbacks, alcoholism, and the long term effects of chemical weaponry.

The power of the film lies in its startling modesty; there is no footage of battles or patriotic Presidential speeches, nothing that would relate back to the Hollywood warfare of classic Vietnam films, whose depiction of guns, guts and explosions tend to paradoxically sate our thirst for glorious screen violence as they try to decry its inhumanity.  In its place, we have the real-life aftermath of the real men behind the myth, recalling through candid testimonial what it is like to live everyday with the post-traumatic fear that the enemy is still lying somewhere over the hill.  In addition, we hear from their now grown-up children, to whom they could never properly relate their experience, and see them talk about it with more recent veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The overall effect of watching We Went to War is that of a profound re-sensitisation; it brings the serious consequences of thoughtless ferocity to the forefront, stamping the price of warfare onto your brain like a violent hangover.  In an age where you can download Assassins’ Creed to your smart phone within minutes, this makes for profound and essential viewing.

“We Went To War” is out on general release from the 29th of March. A special preview screening and Q&A with the creators is taking place this Sunday, March 24th, at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts. Details can be found at http://www.ica.org.uk/?lid=36899

We are saddened to report that the director, Michael Grigsby, passed away on the 12th of March, aged 76. Our thoughts go out to his family.

Rating: 5/5

Sex, Lies, and Knights Who Say 'Ni'

Who was Graham Chapman? Let us start simply, with a wiki-light summary of the facts: he was a member of the Monty Python comedy sextet, whose sketches and films popularised and redefined absurdist humour in the 1960s and 70s. He had the starring role in two British comedy classics, The Holy Grail and Life of Brian, films so quotable that they can still turn entire dinner conversations into full-scale line-by-line recaps amongst the cult initiated. He was one of the first outspokenly bisexual public figures, coming out in an era where being gay in private was just newly decriminalised. He had a destructive long-term relationship with alcohol, rising to binges of four pints of gin a day. He studied medicine at Cambridge. He liked rugby and smoking pipes, and died of throat cancer in 1989, aged 48.

With all these facts established, does this mean we now know who Chapman was? Of course not. We have now learned as much about Graham Chapman as a fish can learn of flying; all this information will never convey to us the true essence of the mind behind the Dead Parrot sketch. Conversely, in their new animated film based on Chapman’s book, A Liar’s Autobiography, Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson and Ben Timlett have attempted to go beyond these little factual footnotes in an attempt to give the audience the sensation of what it was to be Graham Chapman.

In an interview with the three creators, they brought across the importance of remaining faithful to Chapman’s personal style, and to present him as he would himself. One important way they serve this purpose is through the film’s narration, which uses archive recordings of Chapman reading from his book shortly before he passed away, intercut with newly recorded dialogue from the surviving members of Monty Python. As Jeff Simpson asserts, “the idea was for Graham to narrate his own life story from beyond the grave”.

Bill Jones continues: “I personally love the idea of bringing him back, and having him tell his own story his own way, rather than having a more contextual and factual approach”. Indeed, Jones and Timlett had already covered the factual approach in their excellent documentary miniseries Monty Python, Almost the Truth: The Lawyers’ Cut, made for the BBC in 2009. Thus, having covered comprehensively the factual history of Python, they were now interested in taking us into the world of its most elusive and mysterious member. Ben asserts: “I don’t think Graham knew who he was himself, so trying to do a documentary on him would be too hard. We spoke to his brother, and his partner, and even they agreed that they weren’t really sure who he was. I think it’s more important to get across how he envisioned himself.”

To this end, the team has remained faithful to the style of Chapman’s book. The film is in essence an animated series of episodes that imitates the irreverent sketch structure of its source. It tells a tale of Chapman replete with a lot of poetic embellishment and a few blatant lies, which when seen together recount something of a greater truth about their protagonist. A sequence showing a chemistry lesson at Cambridge climaxes with Graham violently and literally dissecting his professor; another shows him touring through space in a little pod-craft to pay visits to Elton John and Alan Bennett. In essence, the film diverts from the dull realities of his actuallife to give us a more faithful depiction of Graham’s inner response to the events within it.

Terry Jones and Michael Palin bombard the breeze

In addition, it is the first time the Python team has collaborated on a creative project since Graham’s passing. Throughout the film we hear the voices of John Cleese, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin (Eric Idle was unfortunately unavailable due to scheduling conflicts), as they voice an ensemble of real people from throughout Chapman’s life, as well as various imaginary beings from the world of the book itself. For instance, at various points the Python team reappears as a troupe of CGI monkeys debating within Graham’s mind; we’re a far cry away from a traditional biopic à la Walk the Line.

Despite the involvement of the original Python cast, the creators are adamant that this not be considered solely as a new Python project, as Ben explains: “We were keen on this not being a Python movie; this is a Graham Chapman movie. We followed the book quite closely. Anytime we had a question of what to do, we’d ask ourselves what Graham would do. As such, it follows the sketch style of the Python TV series quite closely, but we’ve updated the formula by using a variety of young animators to make it fresh.”

Indeed, the film’s wide range of young animators (according to Jeff, the average age was 28) is reflected through the vast array of animation styles within the film, from classic hand-drawing to modern 3D rendering to Terry Gilliam-esque cut-and-paste that recalls the bizarre animated segues of classic Python. Bill adds: “Because of the way [Graham] writes about himself, how he keeps switching into different tones and styles of writing, we thought the use of multiple styles of animation was a great way to reflect this.” The result has often been compared to Yellow Submarine for its strange dream-like cartoon imagery, but experiencing it first-hand feels more like Being John Malkovich. In that film, John Cusack discovers a portal that lets him see the world through Malkovich’s eyes for a quarter of an hour at a time; similarly, A Liar’s Autobiography grants its audience ninety minutes inside the dreams of a troubled comic genius.

L to R: Jeff Simpson, Bill Jones and Ben Timlett

Bill Jones agrees with the comparison: “We wanted to embrace the concept of falling into this man’s brain. We tried to make it feel like we’re taking you on a ride. In a funny way, we weren’t worried about people being confused; each scene might start with a bit of confusion, but eventually the audience will get the thread of it”. Indeed, whilst the stylistic structure of the film appears baffling at first, as it progresses one begins to understand its otherworldly internal logic. Jeff adds: “It’s very much that Pythonesque thing, of creating a silly world that at first glance can easily be dismissed as just that, but which nevertheless does adhere to its own internal set of rules.” Bill agrees: “It does have its own sort of twisted, logical base”. According to Ben, there was nevertheless an attempt to structure the episodes in rough chronological order, in contrast to the source material: “We did try to make it somewhat linear in comparison to the book, just to give the audience a chance!”

Overall, the film stands as a wonderfully fitting eulogy to an elusive comic figure. At once comparable to the subconscious-raiding cinema of Charlie Kaufman and David Lynch, it also evokes absurdist character studies from Tristram Shandy to Death of a Salesman. However, unlike the doomed tale of Willy Loman, A Liar’s Autobiography is far from conventional tragedy; the film can be at times very dark, yet even at its most macabre there is a profound comic sensibility at work, seeking mirth within the madness, gleefully farting into the abyss. As such, it is a fine tribute to the man who gave us laughter in the form of a dead parrot. To quote John Cleese, who concludes the film in archive footage from Chapman’s memorial service, “anything for Graham but mindless good taste”.

“A Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman” is out now on DVD and Blu-ray, and also playing in 3D in a limited selection of cinemas. In addition, it is available for download online and as video-on-demand, and on Netflix, so there’s no excuse. For more information, and a very silly survey, visit www.liarsautobiography.com

Three overlooked classic Monty Python Sketches:

The Northern Playwright – A brilliant reversal of cliché, in which Chapman plays a hard-worn celebrity playwright father who laments his son’s decision to pursue an ephemeral and unstable career in coal-mining.

Mrs. Beethoven– in which John Cleese’s Beethoven attempts to compose his dramatic 5th symphony, but is constantly interrupted by Chapman’s fictitious Mrs. Beethoven as she berates him with questions such as where he put the jam spoon.

All England Summarise Proust Competition – Chapman plays one of a group of bumbling academics in a TV game show that challenges them to sum up Marcel Proust’s thousand page meta-epic A la récherche du temps perdu in one minute. As elitist as that sounds, it is actually a hilarious parody of academic jargon that will appeal to anyone who’s ever had to ramble their way through a literature essay.

Film Review: NO

The setting is Chile, the year is 1988.  Finally conceding to international pressure, brutal dictator General Augusto Pinochet is forced to hold a referendum on whether he should remain in power, with the citizens of Chile called to the ballot boxes to vote simply with either yes or no (SI or NO).  In the run up to this plebiscite, there will be an advertising campaign from both sides of the SI/NO divide, with each given a fifteen minute slot every evening to argue their case on international television.

Pablo Larrain’s new film, NO, deals with the concluding chapter of Pinochet’s fifteen year reign of terror, but this is far from a cinematic portrayal of atrocity akin to what we are used to seeing in depictions of dictatorship such as The Last King of Scotland or Downfall.  Instead, Larrain chooses to focus on the light at the end of the tunnel by pushing Pinochet into the background, in his place, bringing us face to face with the people responsible for running the advertising campaign that sought to convince the people of Chile to vote NO.

At the forefront of the campaign is Gael García Bernal’s René, who decides against running a series of negative adverts highlighting the many murders, imprisonments, exiles and mysterious disappearances for which Pinochet was to blame.  In their place, René proposes to pitch the wonders of democracy like it was Coca-Cola, with saturated clips of people dancing and laughing and singing for a better tomorrow.  Bizarrely, this seems to work: the slogans catch on and the future looks bright, but will the entire vote transpire to be a sham? Is René’s life now in danger?  The pen may perhaps be more powerful than the sword, but is it more powerful than an entire army of guns, tanks, and artillery all in furious favour of their fearless leader?

Larrain’s film is shot through an aged filter that makes the entire narrative seem like archive reels from the film’s period setting; with occasional seamless reverts to genuine footage of the era.  This proves to be a very powerful cinematic weapon, with the harsh grainy filmstock and naturalistic lighting making the events far more real and approachable than the glossy over-worked visuals of a typical period fodder, like Pearl Harbor. In addition, the acting is excellent across the board, with García Bernal’s screen presence typically mesmerising; his star quality is of the rare and special kind that is both glamorous and approachable.  Had the NO campaign merely ran footage of his teary baby brown eyes as he fears for his family then one would imagine they could have won overnight.

However, one main problem with the film lies in its inevitable lack of narrative tension; this is a common issue for all movies that serve as a historical account, whereby the fact that we are already aware from the beginning how it will end distils the potential for edge-of-the-seat suspense.  Furthermore, the film’s fidelity to its story on every level could either be seen as a great relief or its most striking flaw – Larrain refuses, commendably, to overdramatize the account by splitting it up into a typical tale of good vs. bad, or to overindulge the audience with bloody footage of riots and rebellion.  On the one hand, the fact that we are spared of the extent of the violence gives it a much greater impact in the rare occasions when it is shown.  On the other, we are never completely convinced of what is at stake, should Pinochet win the vote; at times the film feels more like an extended episode of Mad Men, or even a campaign for the winner of X-Factor.

All the same, the fascinating nature of the true story itself, that of a Dictator toppled by the sheer power of advertising, is enough to recommend this fitting tribute to democracy to anyone with an interest in politics, history, the power of the media or even just Bernal’s baby browns.

4/5 stars

The Beauty Of The Butterfly Effect

Time travel is a fascinating lie. Not everyone is a fan of science fiction as far as it concerns spaceships and rayguns, but at one stage or another we have all fantasised about travelling in time. Whether it is the desire to return to first year and spend less time in the bar and more time in books, to return to 1970 and use your hindsight powers to ‘discover’ punk before Iggy Pop, or even to zip forward to the 2016 Olympics so you can come back and make a killing at the bookies, we all love to travel time in our minds. As impossible as we know it in our hearts to be, science books like A Brief History Of Time need only suggest that it could happen in order to become instant best sellers, flying off the shelves to sate our imaginations.

Time travel in modern popular culture begins with two classic late nineteenth century novels, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and H.G Well’s The Time Machine. This is convenient because they also represent the two essential time travel groups, respectively: comedies about going back in time, and tragedies of visiting the future.  In Mark Twain’s novel we have a satirical account of a nineteenth century American waking up in Medieval England, wowing the inhabitants of the era with his modern technology and knowledge of ‘future’ events.  Similarly, films in which we travel to the past often hinge on the comic potential within the clash of old and new, and the caricature of historical figures. Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) presented Napoleon as a giggling moron obsessed with puppet shows; Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure(1989) portrays Genghis Khan as a dumb rock-star cliché, surrounded by groupies and susceptible to Twinkies; the Austin Powers (1997-2002) films satirise the free-spirit culture of 1960s Britain by bringing it face-to-face with the ‘boring’ modern values of monogamy and social conservatism.

Conversely, H.G Wells took us into the distant future, where the world was engaged in class-war of tribal feudalism. In the same vein, time travel films about the future most often serve as warnings of what will happen if we don’t set things right. This makes sense – we might as well laugh at the past, as we can’t change it, while we like to visit future dystopias so we know how to avoid them. The Terminator (1984) brings Michael Biehn back in time from a machine-ruled nightmare to try and save a society whose overreliance on technology will have disastrous consequences when the computers start thinking for themselves. Mike Judge’s Idiocracy(2006), though superficially a comedy about a man who wakes up in a future populated by idiots, has at its core the darker assessment that our dumbed-down Kardashian culture is not a far cry from a world where we water our crops with sports drinks and the US president is a pro-wrestler.

This summer’s critically acclaimed Looper (2012) brought us a future where time travel exists but is illegal. In this future world, state security makes it difficult to carry out murder, and so criminal gangs use time travel to send their enemies into the past to be assassinated and disposed of by special assassins there. These assassins are well paid, but they carry out their work knowing that at any point in time their future self may also be sent back for them to terminate. These are people who would literally kill their future selves in exchange for the money to finance their youthful hedonism, who would rather a brief existence of non-stop drinking and partying. Here we are being warned not so much about the future of mankind as a whole, but rather of the life we bestow upon our future selves when thinking only of the instant gratification offered by alcohol, nicotine and narcotics. It follows a long line of time travel films of critical social commentary.

Looper is also just one of many time travel action films that continue a trend begun in the 1980s. Before this, time travel plots had one essential problem: the headache of overcoming the paradoxes that plight any story in which people change the past. Thus, the concept was mostly reserved for low-key philosophical films in the serious Solaris vein of sci-fi, such as Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968), or Chris Marker’s La Jetée(1962). It wasn’t until the success of Back to the Future (1985) and The Terminator in the late 1980s when filmmakers realised that if the story was entertaining enough, the multiplex audience was willing to take the plot-holes with a pinch of salt and a shovelful of popcorn.

Nowadays, cinemas have room for time travel both as food for thought and fuel for comedy or car-chases. It is everywhere, providing the backbone for everything from American teen-comedies (Hot Tub Time Machine(2010)) to Korean existentialist romances (2046 (2004)). Why all the fuss? I would argue that its greatest appeal lies in its affirmation that we are able to control our own destiny; all of that business with butterflies amounts to the wonderfully comforting thought that every action we take, however minor, can and will make a difference in the long term. As sci-fi critic and writer Sean Raymond once beautifully summarised:

“If the modern world is one where the individuals feel alienated and powerless in the face of bureaucratic structures and corporate monopolies, then time travel suggests that Everyman and Everybody is important to shaping history, to making a real and quantifiable difference to the way the world turns out.”

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1 Redmond, Sean (editor). Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader. London: Wallflower Press, 2004.^↩

Why Kurosawa Kicks Ass

This is an article I originally wrote for the 'Director's Cut' series of UCL's 'Pi' magazine, in which each issue features an appraisal of a particular film director.  I went with seminal Japanese badass Akira Kurosawa, but the article that went to print in Pi was edited from what I originally submitted, and in addition I have since gone back and redrafted it. Here it is in its better form.

Kurosawa was one of the first Japanese filmmakers to gain serious attention from Western critics. It began in, 1950 when ‘Rashomon’ won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and introduced art-house admirers to the thrilling exoticism of the land of the rising sun.  It is a film which encapsulates his signature: a simple story often derived from folk tale or tradition, usually in a period setting, told as much as possible through lighting, composition and sound. He may never have been able to draw serious money from Anglophone audiences, but filmmakers obsessed with the search for a ‘pure’ cinema adored him, with many of whom going on to become directors of far more successful films that were heavily influenced by his style.

Akira Kurosawa, or 黒澤 明 to his friends, was born in 1910 in the Oumari district of Tokyo, his early life besot by tragedies both public and private; the youngest of eight children, he bore witness to the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, which took nearly 150,000 lives. His older brother  Heigo committed suicide ten years later.  A decade after that, Hiroshima was destroyed.  It would be no stretch to say that these early horrors brought a dark current of nihilism to Kurosawa’s artistic expression.   All the same, the thematic nastiness of banditry, betrayal, death, madness, corruption, death and death by serious amounts of arrows (note the unforgettable climax to ‘Kumonosu-jō’) was always contrasted with the riveting beauty of the camera work that frames these descents into destruction.  Unsurprisingly, he began his career as an artist, and often chose to frame his shots as if they were paintings.

The importance of Kurosawa’s impact on cinema, aside from the universal truth that samurais are awesome, lies in his emphasis on telling as much of the story as possible through picture and sound alone.  He would use minimal dialogue, preferring to show fear through a sudden jolt of percussion, to show the way characters relate to each other through the way they are placed within the frame.  He also liked using the weather to reflect characters’ emotions - as perhaps expected, several of his films climax in a violent storm.  This style of ‘pure’ reticent film can seem rather tedious at first.  With perseverance, however, there is much to be gained, as his are works that build up gradually to an often incendiary conclusion, like a fallen candle leading to a city-consuming inferno.

The slow-burning style of Kurosawa is a common trait of eastern and particularly Japanese cinema, but what is also interesting is the extent of Western influence on his work.  From Shakespeare, he borrowed from King Lear to make 1985’s Ran, and adapted Macbeth into the aforementioned ‘Kumonosu-jō’ (a.k.a ‘Throne of Blood’, but translated titles are for sissies);  from Dostoevsky, he interpreted ‘The Idiot’ in 1951’s Hakuchi .  His stories also borrow a lot from the Western tradition of John Ford.  This influence from Westerns was reciprocated; it is often repeated that hit 60’s Western ‘The Magnificent Seven’ was a remake of Kurosawa’s 1954 magnum opus ‘Shichinin No Samurai’ (The Seven Samurai).  Similarly, Sergio Leone’s seminal brute western ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ borrowed/stole heavily from Kurosawa’s ‘Yojimbo’, this time unofficially.  Not that it matters much in hindsight, because creative stealing is always better than dull originality, but it is interesting to note the ease with which one can adapt Samurai films into Westerns just by swopping swords for Stetsons and Kabuki flutes for Spanish guitars.  The basic appeal is the same: skilled warriors/gunmen from a bygone era for whom the law is subjective, who can either help fight evil to uphold the common good, or help themselves to what they want and move on.

Kurosawa’s more famous fan base may not have always been kind in stealing his ideas, but it certainly helped him in his later career to have such devoted admirers in high places; his producers ran out of money in 1980 filming his epic ‘Kagemusha’ and the project was doomed until George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola agreed to pick up the cheque.  Steven Spielberg had to similarly step in to rescue 1990’s ‘Dreams’ when studios fled in fear following the lukewarm box-office reaction to Ran (1985), at the time the most expensive Japanese film ever made.

Nevertheless, the high cost of Kurosawa’s latter-era epics is understood when they are seen on the big screen in all their majestic glory.  The cast of ‘Ran’, whose 12 million dollar price tag could have barely paid for twenty minutes of one ‘Lord of the Rings’ film, features 1,400 extras all wearing hand-crafted suits of armour created over a period of two years, with 200 of them on horseback.  Colour-film was also a gift to Kurosawa’s aesthetic, with the added emphasis he placed on the symbolism of differently coloured costumes enhanced by his revolutionary lighting techniques. 

                

However, films like ‘Ran’ are not just a tedious index of different apertures, lens filters, foley artistry and advanced mise-en-scène to be mulled over by cinephile anoraks.  Kurosawa himself always talked about his films in very simple terms of the beauty of nature versus the folly of man, and the thrilling appeal of justice, greed, vengeance and retribution in the tales he tells, together with the spectacular way in which they are captured, is universal.

Key films to watch:

Rashoumon – His first big hit, a simple tale of a murdered Samurai told three times from different perspectives.  At only 95 minutes, a good light starter.

Shichinin No Samurai – His most famous and best middle-period work, in which seven Samurai mercenaries are hired by a town to kick seven shades of shit out of the local marauding bandits.  At three and a half hours, a fattening main course.






Ran – His best film from his later colour-era, in which a warlord decides to divide his kingdom among his three sons so that they may unite their strengths.  Instead, this leads to jealousy, betrayal, and one of the best battle scenes ever filmed this side of Middle Earth.  In true mad-genius tradition, Kurosawa storyboarded the entire thing with full-scale colour paintings.


Also worth a look – Chris Marker’s ‘A.K’ – Not actually one of his, but rather a fascinating and enlightening documentary on his life and the filming of ‘Ran’.

The Chris Brown Affair

I hate Chris Brown.  I hate him more than getting my toe stubbed. More than mosquito bites.  More than three day hangovers, having your wallet stolen or the thought of being trapped in a rat-filled metro tunnel wearing a suit made of cheese.  I don’t usually think it’s worth hating celebrities, because we only know what we know of them through bias tabloid gossip reports, of the kind I hate almost as much as Chris Bloody Brown.  It’s not fair to have a bad personal opinion of people you don’t personally know, but there are exceptions.  Such as when there is photographic evidence and well documented proof that that person savagely beat up their then-girlfriend, in his case Rihanna.  Then, in addition to this, when the public reaction to this offense seems to be a brief tut-tutting, a year or so of shame, and then a return to buying his records and appearing at his concerts in droves, like nothing happened.  Something did happen, one of the base vile acts of human unkindness, and for this reason I argue that we as people should stop listening to his music.  But why?   The classic philosophical question raised by this is: should we shy away from art created by an artist at fault?

The instinctive answer of a philosopher, I am sure, would be no.  This, they would conjure, would be falling prey to the ad-hominem fallacy in which an argument is criticised through pointing out a negative belief or characteristic in the arguer.¹ According to this argument, shunning the music of Chris Brown based purely on his home-staged re-enactment of ‘Nil By Mouth’ is as ridiculous a reasoning as ignoring health advice from a doctor because they’re a Twilight fan.  Unfortunately, I’m now going to have to pull out my Beretta and cap this argument’s ass, because Chris Brown is an exceptional case.  To do so, we must consider an example of a great artist whose work stands apart from the alleged absurdity and assholery he upheld in his personal life: Michael Jackson.  I’m here to explain why Chris Brown is as far from Jackson as a turkey twizzler is from the kitchen of a four-star restaurant.

As anyone with fully functioning ears could tell you, Michael Jackson wrote, sang, and danced his way through a series of pop songs so iconic and universally adored that they could soundtrack a video montage of ‘The Human Race – The Best Bits’.  As everyone and their dog and their dog’s unborn babies knows, Jackson also had issues with child abuse allegations.  So why do I not feel guilty grooving my heals to ‘Dirty Diana’ on a Saturday night?²  Firstly, because Jackson was acquitted of these allegations. Whilst no one save for the children themselves will ever know for sure if Jackson genuinely did all the nasty things he was accused of, and we can all agree that he was indeed a tad strange, it is far more likely that he was a ten-year old trapped in an adult’s body, unaware that sleepovers with your friends go from childhood staple to bursting the mercury on the oddness-thermometer as soon as one of the friends is old enough to drive everyone home.³

Secondly, the allegations came at the tail-end of his career, meaning that ninety nine per cent of his work was made and enjoyed in a completely different era unaffiliated with these scandals.  Going back and saying we should deny the joy of ‘Smooth Criminal’ because of a court case that occurred 18 years later seems excessive – hardly anyone believes that Jackson was up to bad business in the era of ‘Bad’, so the creation and enjoyment of the song is surely irrelevant to his later mental issues.  

Thirdly, and most importantly, because the kind of music Jackson was writing did not promote and encourage the sort of personality he was accused of – all his songs that weren’t about dancing, being in love or the alphabet were humanitarian pleas to peace and love.  He is lyrically all-age appropriate.

This distinction is crucial to the argument that an artist’s personal views and actions should be judged separately to their work; if the body of work they make is itself promoting these views and encouraging or defending these actions, this is when the two become inseparable.  We are able to enjoy the paintings of Salvador Dalí despite his apparent support for fascism⁴ because you’d have to take serious critical liberties to say that the melting clocks themselves represent support for Franco, or that a lobster on a telephone was his way of asking the army to please kill more heretics.  Dalí was first and foremost a surrealist, and is remembered as such.  His personal politics are not connected to his paintings.

In the aftermath of Chris Brown’s savage attack on Rihanna, however, he has crafted through his songs a sort of gangsta-lite misogynist persona that rather than apologising for his actions, stands by his distaste for women with typical lyrics of subjugation and self-aggrandisement.  I.e ‘Look at my bling and my bitches and ho’s.’  It didn’t take me long to find an example, from the first song on his latest turd of an album:

‘And no one asked you if you got a man / And do I care? I don't / That's when we started sexing’⁵

Later on in the same song:

‘2 girls I'm watching, no is not an option / lmma be the captain of the ship / They gonna have my motor rocking / Singing to them like Lionel Richie, all night long / Getting these bitches, and play in my song / And switching positions, I got the money so I'm gonna make wishes / I'll be that sugar daddy’

What Chris Brown did happened prior to his serious chart success, and thus each successive purchase of his albums suggests a tolerance and forgiveness of the ignorant and hateful frame of mind his lyrics promote. I’m not here to criticise misogynist rap lyrics as a whole, because that is entirely another argument.  In general, I would say that gangsta speak about bitches and ho’s, within moderation, is tolerable talk to a free-thinking audience because we know not to take it seriously.  If you’re old enough to know that the Death Star isn’t real, you should be mature enough to gauge that rap lyrics of this kind shouldn’t be taken as moral scripture.  But in the case of someone like Chris Colour-of-poo, he is documented as actually practising the kind of mistreatment and subjugation of the fairer sex that he preaches, and this adds a very sinister element. Domestic violence is a serious and inexcusable offense.  This is not like the Straight Outta Compton-rapped philosophies of drug hustling and turf-war, in which people from deprived areas are recounting through song the desperate measures taken to put food on the table and stay alive in a murder capital.⁶  N.W.A gave us genuine cultural insight into how some people live. Chris Brown-pants gave us ‘sexing’ as a verb.

Thus we come to my final argument as to why we should not forgive this clown’s behaviour, and stop funding his fame: he is no musical genius. He is an offensively average peddler of dull dance floor filler, a ten-a-penny r’n’b artist in an oversaturated market.  He is not pushing the envelope musically like Kanye West, he is not wowing us lyrically like Jay-Z, he’s not even making up for his musical blandness with a few funky costumes or a memorable music video.  His songs are sonic porridge.  If all you want is groovy but mindless dance tunes to soundtrack your intoxication, there are plenty of alternatives.  This is why I cry inside at Chris Brown’s continued success.  If Jonathan Ross’s well-established radio career could be killed because he told a dirty joke, than surely this joke of a pop singer should be consigned to shelf-stacking at a Walmart in hell for the rest of his dumbass days.

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1 Bro-fist to Wikipedia for a concise definition^↩
2 Alone in front of a computer screen, ‘natch.^↩
3 http://web.archive.org/web/20080523002355/http:/www.thesmokinggun.com/michaeljackson/0315051jackson_katz1.html">http:/^↩
4 http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/12/06/salvador-dali-fascist//^↩
5 Sexing? Sexing. From the verb ‘to sex’. Like Joyce before him, Chris Brown re-invents language.^↩
6 This argument might seem excessively liberal and defensive of criminal acts, but at the very least it’s one valid and possible interpretation.^↩