The best documentary of 2015 nicely sets up a criminally neglected movie classic from 1968.
Best of Enemies a brilliant new documentary showing how the drama of 1960s American politics
and how it's treatment in the news media feeds right back into events today. Both show the central role the media had portraying and reacting to the apparent mass break down in law and order in the United States during the Vietnam era, particularly around the violent confrontations outside the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968.
Best of Enemies covers the red hot political confrontation taking place on TV screens as the two leading thinkers on the left and right of the political divide slowly lose their composure over a series of live televised debates. The documentary commendably stays politically neutral, further illustrating the gulf between debate then and the partisan shouting matches between intellectual pygmies we see today.
Amongst some of the footage shown in Best of Enemies are clips from a contemporary movie, almost a semi-documentary itself, Medium Cool.
Having just seen it Medium Cool has to be the best movie I'd never previously heard of. I don't know what Medium Cool is comparing itself against but from here it looks a lot more than 'medium'.
Beautifully shot against the actual settings and events being reacted to in Best of Enemies it has a great non obtrusive soundtrack played into hyper real locations. This movie is shot on the hoof, actually on location in the middle of history nearly half a century ago and yet still looks like Terence Malik's Days of Heaven (without the glacial pace). It's like standing on the street corners yourself - in fact hold your nose when your cameraman to gets tear gassed at about 1hour35. You will see blood, and it won't be fake.
It features a star performance from a young Robert Forster who I only know from The Black Hole, Jackie Brown and Breaking Bad. After Medium Cool I'm even more amazed he wasn't a major Hollywood star, here he looks like a young Brando. You'll also be able to pick out in the female lead the haunting face of Marianna Hill from her harrowing starring role in High Plans Drifter.
Negatives? If you've seen this era of movie you'll see the ending from a mile off but it oddly compliments similar material rather than detracts.
While I'm on the subject I really should have blogged my experience watching Two Lane Blacktop, a another ancient movie whose startling authenticity similarly blew me away.
You begin to wonder if all that time just watching Easy Rider over and over again was time well spent.
Now we can see Bowie's career from beginning to end it is possible to see how consistent it is. And how chasing critical opinion (1983-87) was nearly the end of it
I was going to review Blackstar over the weekend. It's good, very good, but like The Next Day (covered here) and a lot of Bowie over the course of his life the critical reaction seems ruled by fashionable opinion in the media of the artist.
Then.. this morning.. he's dead. Quite a shock. If there is one contemporary artist who I thought could evolve past that whole tiresome death thing it would be Bowie. Bowie directly inspired almost everything creative I've ever done - and I'm a writer!
God knows how musicians are feeling today.
In the wake of his death I anticipate a mass re-writing of critical history, in which the period he was ridiculed is quietly forgotten.
This is his career as I see it, charted against how fashionable it was to be a fan.
Bowie's career starts unfashionable and laughed at as a novelty Anthony Newly knock-off
David Bowie (1967)
He then catches the zeitgeist and becomes fashionable with Space Oddity
Space Oddity (1969)
and after that goes on a run of incredible creativity perhaps unsurpassed in popular music
The Man Who Sold the World (1970) Hunky Dory (1971) Aladdin Sane (1973) Diamond Dogs (1974) Young Americans (1975) Station to Station (1976) Low (1977) "Heroes" (1977) Lodger (1979)
He is then obviously shocked to the core by the assassination of John Lennon, prompting what I think is his masterpiece
Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980)
After which he seems to panic. Ever present on an adoring media and critically sanctified, he jumps headfirst into chasing popular mainstream acceptance in an execrable pop phase, which (at the time) was critically lauded
Let's Dance (1983) Tonight (1984) Never Let Me Down (1987)
reaching a climax with a film that was hyped in the UK to Star Wars sequel levels by a suffocatingly cozy media
.. and...then the film subsequently vanished from the face of the Earth. Bowie was the only decent thing in this gaudy stinker - hugely ironic as an entire industry in film criticism was built around running down his career as an actor. (Already forgotten in the coverage today).
At the end of the 80s, having over exposed himself to the point of ridicule ('Dancing In The Street') Bowie tries to crawl out back out of the cheesy Saturday Morning kids show his career has become but he's left it too late and has become unfashionable. Attempts to bury himself in Iggy Pop's guitar crew are met with a wide ridicule oddly never applied to Iggy Pop. The fearless drastic career right turn later performed by Radiohead (into KID A) is years away.
Tin Machine (1989) Tin Machine II (1991)
Tin Machine was widely mocked, usually from the Britpop critics otherwise extolling the sophistication of classic (at the time) Oasis albums like Be Here Now. After that for the rest of the decade he was mainly is regarded as a comedy figure producing weird albums, not only unfashionable but also now OLD
Black Tie White Noise (1992) Outside (1995) Earthling (1997) 'Hours...' (1999) Heathen (2002) Reality (2003)
Bowie finally turned critical opinion decisively by turning himself into a hermit just in time for the nostalgia industry to rediscover the talent they claimed he'd lost with The Next Day.
I've spent all weekend listing to BlackStar and like The Next Day it's very good. Is it significantly better than Outside, Earthling, 'Hours...'?
No not really, certainly not better than Outside, but then now, he's fashionable again, so that makes all the difference
It is all forgotten now but there were periods in the 90s when it seemed the only acceptable way to listen to Bowie was the ripped off sample in Ice Ice Baby. I remember disbelief when I explained to people the brilliant soundtrack contributions to David Lynch's Lost Highway, David Finchers Se7en and Paul Verhoeven's classic foreshadowing of the Iraq War, Starship Troopers, were all from Bowie and Eno's Outside.
Brian Eno's tribute to Bowie mentions Outside as their one (their last) collaboration which 'fell through the cracks'. I expect it will be top of the list as a rehabilitated classic in the re-written history.
The fluctuations in credibility never seemed to bother him much, in fact you can see him sending himself and the whole circus up in Zoolander.
Fame, Fashion.. he wrote several classic songs about on the subject himself after all.
But it does demonstrate the bitchy incompetence in the critical press. Example : at the time I would have like to have known that Black Tie White Noise was written as a soundtrack to his own wedding (which it was) instead of reading endless pages of yuyuks at Tin Machine and the Laughing Gnome.
As a gauge of how actually in-the-know these clowns in the music press were, the very Britpop bible in the 1990s mocking Bowie's crawl back to respectability was also telling us at the same time that the
emerging 'internet' was a fadand it would be the "CB radio of the 1990s"
Thank you, long extinct SELECT magazine, that one is only going to get funnier with time.
The Haynes workshop manual for the Death Star is impressive as far as it goes, and ordinarily I would say 128 pages is large for a single volume piece of physical documentation - but to cover a subject the size of a small moon this is pitifully inadequate.
The Boeing 747 for example represents a million pages of documentation.
We can assume with this lack of written oversight and planning just building the Death Star is some achievement but lack of decent documentation really makes itself felt in the hands of users, and here we can see the usability issues apparent in flawed planning and conception stages. The Death Star is only successfully used against only one peaceful defenceless planet, and as for it's first disastrous use in actual combat it appears the only people fully documenting the critical exhaust port issues were not part of the intended user group.
We can assume the Empire's Information Governance issues re: Death Star plans will be covered in the forthcoming documentary ROGUE ONE.
In the light of several ongoing issues with similar projects (Death Star II, Starkiller Base) I'm prepared to make myself available to cover legacy issues on such large scale projects going forward. The Galactic Empire and The New Order wouldn't be my first choice but my several stints working for British newspapers show I'm prepared to do a job for a wide moral spectrum of clients where the need arises.
I bought someone Hayne's Millennium Falcon workshop manual for Christmas and he loves it. Reading my own copy again I'm surprised to find FORCE AWAKENS apparently stays consistent with it. That new square radar dish on the Falcon is actually the original civilian equipment for that freighter. The round dish we saw on the Falcon in Star Wars, Empire (and lost by Lando at the end of Jedi) was a military spec mod added by Han and Chewbacca.
I've been waiting years for Radiohead to get asked to write a theme to a Bond film. This was rejected? For Sam Smith?
A really sad reflection of how safe cosy and predictable this film series has become since the knockout Casino Royal. I wonder which Mum's Favourite will be providing the next Bond theme?
Directors cut of Spielberg's 1 9 4 1 is a an unlikely but brilliant movie for Christmas - if you don't have family around.
My Christmas eve set piece movie was 3.5 hour directors cut of Spielberg's underappreciated epic comedy "1 9 4 1", flavoured with a great German cheese and a nice Riesling.
I'd actually forgotten the great directors grand folly is actually set at Christmas in LA and Hollywood (in the panicky aftermath of Pearl Harbour) making it a strangely Californian yuletide movie. I enjoyed myself so much I can't wait to repeat it as a seasonal event next year.
I guess it depends on your sense of humour and state of mind but I find the standard, truncated version of the movie funny anyway, and the extended directors cut is definitely the way to see it. With lots more Dan Ackroyd and John Candy this makes it much more of a continuation of 1970s Saturday Night Live and Animal House and much less of the straight Spielberg film we were all expecting in the aftermath of Close Encounters and the run up to Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
Also in the extra hour of footage are more mad cameos such as John Landis and Sam Fuller (as USAF's equivalent of Battle of Britain's Hugh Dowding, here trying to coordinate an air defense against a non existent Japanese air attack). Outside in Hollywood December 1941 war fever has created civil breakdown while those who should be in charge, like Robert Stack's General Stillwell, in indoors watching the premier of "Dumbo".
"Ladies and gentlemen, every where I look... soldiers are fighting sailors, sailors are fighting Marines! Directly in front of me, I see a flying ...blond... floozy.. Everywhere I look... everywhere, pure pandemonium... pandemonium "
There is also more music, particulary John William's magnificent parody of a jingoistic war movie march, and more of the musical flow which sends it some way towards the ribald bad taste musical it probably should have been written as.
It still has rough edges - there is still too much coked up John Belushi and it is now even less politically correct for modern standards (what old film is?) while probably being far too correct to reflect the actual prejudices of the time.
"I'd like to thank all the GI's for helping make tonight's evening such a... a memorable occasion. Maybe in the future we can have some Negroes come in and we'll stage a race riot... right here. "
If the standard sugary tripe at this time of year is getting to you and you think you can handle something like Dad's Army on 50 mojitos try and find the version of this movie as it should have been released originally. It's a blast.
The rest of my My Hellish Solo Christmas for the benefit of John Lewis's advertising team Chosen theme : Madagascar, all the movies, specials and tv series including new netflix "All Hail King Julien!" Chosen music : new Eagles of Death Metal Album, specifically masterful cover of Save A Prayer For Me Now
