New Town Killers

At the Q&A session which followed New Town Killers recent premier at the London Film Festival one member of the audience accused director Richard Jobson of making government propaganda and being involved in a romantic tryst with Gordon Brown. Which might sound like the insane ramblings of David Cameron's mum but, having watched the film, it does have some validity. But only because it's a film where the bad guys are hedge fund managers. (Really, if it got more topical you'd have to question whether Jobson was in possession of a time machine. In fact, I get the sneaking suspicion that a news program discussing the current economic crisis, which plays in background during a number of scenes, might have been added after the fact.) Though how a film as pessimistic about society as this could be considered propaganda for a government thats been in power for over a decade I'm not sure.

Structurally New Town Killers is your basic chase movie but with a social conscience, half Eli Roth, half Ken Loach. The action working class oik Sean (James Anthony Pearson) as he is hunted through the streets of Edinburgh by 'ethical finance' employees Alistair (Dougray Scott) and Jamie (Alistair Mackenzie). Sean has been drawn into this deadly cat and mouse game in an attempt to pay off his pregnant sisters debts. It's a film which points a finger at the nihilistic black heart of British society and the contempt which the rich, and many of the not so rich, have for the poor and disenfranchised. At one point our banking villains run through a list of things they hate, including social workers and asylum seekers, which could easily be a list of tabloid headlines.

Working with a small budget it's admirable that Jobson has managed to make a film about social issues in an entertaining manner, a method which is sure to make this film appealing to a much wider audience. He also draws an outstanding performance from Dougray Scott; as usual the best lines go to the devil. However the film feels a little clumsy both in its presentation and its politics. Whilst Jobson condemns upper class contempt for the poor, he does little to dispel it. Sean and his sister are both rather one dimensional characters and their tower block flat is lit in a particularly dingy fashion. Perhaps fittingly, having watched New Town Killers, I went to a talk by Tom Hunter. His photography is a reminder that beauty and social critique need not be antagonistic. He gives his subjects real life, character and nobility. Something that New Town Killers fails to do.





Women Reading Possession Order - Tom Hunter


Jake Garriock

The Good, The Bad and The Weird

Korean cinema is, in my opinion, the template which every other country outside of America should be following. Thats South Korea of course, propaganda films are normally boring crap about how much bread everyone has. In Korea they have a quota system which means that cinemas have to show a certain number of domestic films. It used to be that they had to show domestic films for 146 days of the year but thats now been reduced to 73 days. Still it's better than nothing. Of course some free trade blowhards will say that this protectionism diminishes quality. Thats horseshit for two very good reasons. Firstly, 99 % of the time it's not the best films, however subjective that may be, that do well, but the most expensive. This is mainly because the films with money behind them can afford to spend millions on advertising. The resulting wankfest of newspaper articles, and MTV 'making of...' shows, changes the humble film into an event. Once a film is an 'event' it doesn't matter how abismal the reviews are, your kinda forced to watch it, just to confirm that it's rubbish. Second, films aren't, or shouldn't be, merely products, but cultural artifacts. It's important, I think, that a country has a strong national cinema as a platform for discussing national issues, whatever they may be. If cinemas are flooded with American films, of variable quality, then a national cinema cannot flourish and will struggle to find investment. Having said all this, the film which preciptitated this rant, The Good, The Bad and the Weird, is perhaps not the greatest example of what Korean sytem can produce. As the name suggests it's a parody of the spagetti westerns of Sergi Leone. It's a film which is essentially about nothing. Not about nothing in the 'modern culture is meaningless' way but about nothing in an insane, crazed fantasy world way. The plot revolves around a treasure map which various sharpshooters and nutbags want to get their hands on. Gunfights follow gunfights, which are then followed by long horse/car chases across the dessert with then further gunfights. It's all done in a very stylish, humourous way and the clothes are great. It's like a really amazing fireworks display, but with more guns. It doesn't tell you much about Korea, but it does go to show if you have a thriving film culture you can afford to spend a truckload of money on madcap films like this.

Jake Garriock

The Red Shoes 1948

This is a film, mainly, about ballet. Yeah ballet, what of it ? Think I can't sit alone, with the curtains drawn, and watch a film about ballet ? Well I can. This is supposed to be a classic of British cinema, and, well, it's pretty good. It's basically about a bunch of people who are quite into ballet. They're making a dancing version of Hans Christian Anderson's 'The Red Shoes' in which a ballerina gets some magic shoes that help her dance. Unfortunately the shoes don't let her stop dancing, thus making friends/having a boyfriend pretty tricky. (Imagine having a girlfriend that wouldn't stop dancing, it would get old pretty quick.) Eventually the shoes dance her to death. Bummer. But as the film progresses we realize that star dancer Victoria Page's (Moria Shearer) life is coming to reflect that of the character she's playing. Its like a less creepy David Lynch film, all about obsession with art and the blurring of lines between reality and fiction and that sort of thing. The story is compelling but the real strength of the film comes from its visuals. Directors Powell and Pressburger draw from an impressive range of filming techniques, most powerfully exhibited in a hallucinatory dance sequence, which give the film a poetic subtlety. God I sound like a prick.


Jake Garriock

Burn After Reading and Ghost Town

I got a bit 50's the other day. Went to a diner with my girl, had shakes and a burger, and then went to the cinema for a comedy double bill. Thankfully my girlfriend ain't as frigid as they were in the 50's and doesn't mind if I play the old popcorn trick (see Diner [1982]). She also pays for her half. Actually, most of the time she pays for my half too.
First up was the Coen brothers latest effort Burn After Reading, which has been getting a bit of panning by the critics. Is this just a No Country For Old Men backlash? Well, no. It's not that it isn't funny, there are some laughs to be found, though not in Brad Pitt doing a stupid dance. It's just the cynicism of the thing. The whole plot revolves around Linda Litzke's (Frances McDormand) desire to have plastic surgery. She and fellow gym employee Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) find a CD containing, what they believe to be, secret CIA files. They then try to blackmail CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) for money to pay for said surgery. Things go badly and another couple of A-list stars are thrown into the mix in the shape of Tilda Swinton and George Clooney. What the film seems to be telling us is that society is a vacuous shitheap run by idiots, driving the intelligent to murder and the innocent to the slaughter. It's a world view that I have a lot of sympathy with. The problem is that getting some of the best acting talent around to play dumb, to critique a dumbed down culture, well, it just seems like a bit of an oxymoron to me. (Is it an oxymoron to use the word oxymoron to sound intelligent but use it incorrectly?). It's my opinion that if we want to get out the shit swap that is contemporary celebrity culture it might just be best to stop satirizing it and get on with making art that, kinda, means something . After all it might not take a lot of talent to be Kerry Katona, but it takes even less to take the piss out of her.




Next up, after a short break, and change from salt to sweet popcorn, was Ghost Town, which is basically a totally bullshit film thats had Ricky Gervais surgically grafted onto it. The results are pretty good. If you were a burns victim and this was how the grafting of your new skin went you'd be pretty happy. Not too happy, I mean your still a burns victim, but you get the picture. Gervais plays a misanthropic dentist, Dr Pinkus, who thanks to some bodged colon surgery can 'see dead people' who, luckily, teach him a lesson about loving life and that. Gervais has obviously been given room to improvise and it pays off, there's some great observational comedy here. Gervais also gives Pinkus's loneliness a real tragic depth that almost brought tears to my eyes. However a few jokes do fall flat, one about torture techniques especially. But the beauty of Ghost Town is all the crap can be blamed on Hollywood. It bodes well for Gervais's directorial debut This Side of the Truth, out next year.

Jake Garriock

Johnny Guitar

Francois Trauffat said that if you didn't like Nicholas Ray films then you should stop going to the cinema. Luckily for Francois he lived in France, where, as far as I know, half decent films actually get shown. In Odeon infested Britain if you enjoy Nicholas Ray films I wouldn’t bother going anywhere near a cinema. You’ll probably get a face full of High School Musical 3. Thank fuck then that everyone bought massive widescreen TV’s before the credit crunch hit. I mean, I love the ‘atmosphere’ of the cinema and all, but today I watched this in my pants whilst eating scrambled eggs and bacon. Which, let me assure you, is the good life.
Johnny Guitar is what a proper film critic might call an alt-Western, which is basically a western with less Clinteasterone. It features Joan Crawford as independent business woman and salon owner Vienna, who shares her profits with her employees and has, like, equality in her relationships with men. She’s basically a massive Communist and a Feminist to boot. All this bra burning ( she accidentally burns a flowing white ball gown and is forced to change into cowboy get up at one point) and socialism really gets on the tiny tits of puritanical super-bitch Emma (Mercedes McCambridge). Tension builds, mainly because Emma persuades a bunch of feckless men that lynching someone would be a good laugh, until we have the archetypal western shoot-out at the end. In between we get bank hold-ups, horse chases, sharp dialogue and bucket loads of sexual politics. It’s a pretty awesome, especially if you need to do an essay on ‘Feminism in Hollywood’ or some shit.

Jake Garriock

If you like this, you might like....

Dead Man (1995) Dir Jim Jarmusch

Walker (1987) Dir Alex Cox