Ah, the American Dream. Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman about it, Mad Men satirizes it, and millions of cookie-cutter American suburban bungalows (with SUVs to match) confirm it. The latest installment is The Blind Side, which paints a candy-coated picture of it that leaves a sadly saccharine aftertaste, and a predictably one-dimensional picture of American life.

The Blind Side follows the true story of Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a lumbering black teenager from the wrong side of the tracks who achieves, out of charity and a semblance of athletic promise, enrollment at a prestigious private Christian school in Memphis, Tennessee.  Michael is failing his way through his first year when he meets a feisty blonde fireball of a Southern mother, Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock), who takes him into her sprawling home and gives him clothes, an education, and most importantly, a feeling of self-worth. Along the way, Michael wins the love and appreciation of the rest of his adoptive family: a precocious brother, aloof sister, and good-natured father. He is also helped by his well-meaning football coach (Ray McKinnon) and sage private tutor (Kathy Bates). Together they encourage him to reach his potential and ultimate goal of winning a Division I football college scholarship. All of this is achieved in spite of Michael’s drug-addled mother (Adriane Lenox) and gun-riddled upbringing that threaten to drag him back down to the southern slums of Memphis.

Let me just say that the experience of watching this film was strange. I’m half-American, and have lived the majority of my life within US borders, yet somehow seeing The Blind Side on the other side of the pond made a flimsy portrayal of American culture seem all the more stereotypical. To put it bluntly, the white Christian crusaders swooping in to save a black youth from his downtrodden culture and himself, in the name of God and football, is nothing new in American cinema and culture, and makes the premise of the film feel more like a Hallmark made-for-TV movie than an Oscar-worthy production.  

The worst part of all of this is that this story is true: Michael Oher did in fact go on to play professional football with the help of the Tuohy family, which makes me feel a little bit guilty as I write this review. It’s an incredible accomplishment for Michael to have received that kind of recognition and achievement, and the Tuohy’s certainly practiced what their Christian morals preached. However, I couldn’t help feeling that in an attempt to make a feel-good movie feel good, The Blind Side forwent character and plot development for a simple message of charity and hope. This isn’t always a bad thing, and the film is certainly entertaining, compelling, and even inspiring, but the issues of race and religion that are touched upon are left glaringly un-dealt with, robbing the film of the substance it needs to make it truly successful. The Oscar nomination of Sandra Bullock speaks for itself—her performance as the immaculately groomed, morally conscious Mrs. Tuohy is stand-out, and by far the most developed, showing doubt beneath the bleach-blond hair and perfectly arched eyebrows. However, one of the most underrated performances is that of Michael’s mother, whose appearance gives the movie a brief sense of authentic humanity and understanding.

For what it’s worth, every American I’ve spoken to has loved this film. It has the crucial elements: achievement, athletics, and the good ol’ US of A.  But it is the over-saturation of ‘heart’ that makes the Academy’s nomination for best picture so questionable, and leaves this incredible story feeling more insipid than inspiring.

3 stars

To put this into context, the majority of us at the press conference had seen Green Zone about an hour before we found ourselves sitting infront of the two people responsible for giving new meaning to the term ‘action film’. As a pair, Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon have made the last two (and best) installments of the Bourne trilogy, and, I believe, most of us had come out of the screening of their third effort feeling pleasantly surprised that they had built on that track record, without merely replicating it.

Yet this didn’t stop Greengrass from being defensive from the very first question. Asked what he was trying to convey through Green Zone, he felt it immediately necessary to affirm that he did indeed have something to say, and that the film is much more than, as the phrase being tossed around indicates, ‘Bourne in Baghdad.’

I had found before the conference a wonderful quote from Greengrass in Vanity Fair. He said in that interview that he feels “it is never too soon for cinema to engage with events that shape our lives.” That is, as he put it, people watch films for all sorts of reasons: to escape, to laugh, to relate, but also, most importantly, to connect with reality and engage with politics. This last realm, he said, is the hardest for directors to successfully pay testament to, without creating something so niche that the film becomes irrelevant. Yet he retained a belief in the possibility of popular movies of a serious, social nature. Can we honestly say anyone would have a better chance of creating such a film, than the men with the backing of the Bourne fan-base?

Greengrass argued the reason people liked the Bourne trilogy was not only because of its adrenalin and action, but also because of the aura of lying and truth-exposure that dominates all three of the films. The task was thus to bring the same audience across to a film with similar themes, but which was now asking these questions in the context of the real world. Damon said he knew instantly that the WMD-saga was more than sufficiently fertile ground for creating such a film, and both were committed to the belief that Green Zone was one step further than Bourne, and that it would be enough to make people talk.

What was of most interest, however, came solely from Damon. Provoked by a question about how ‘real’ his character was, he explained that in preparation for the film he had spent a lot of time with an American soldier called ‘Monty’ Gonzales. Monty was a leader of the hunt for WMDs, and, in a revelation that brings Green Zone scarily to life, Damon explained that Monty knew from his very first mission that something was wrong. Intelligence passed down from Washington had led his division to a porcelain factory, which they all instinctively knew after raiding it could never have been anything more than just that. Miller starts asking questions after three seemingly phony intelligence reports. The reality is that Gonzales sensed deception from the beginning, and came to believe that through its lies, America lost its moral authority. Damon sees the consequent search for truth to be a noble, legitimate quest.

Looking forward to the future, Damon made it clear he has no intentions of slowing down, and indeed, he has been busy: The Informant, Invictus and Green Zone will have all come out in the space of 6 months. Confessing the reasons for this hyperactivity, Damon says that he wants to direct himself some day. When he’s getting offers left, right and centre to work with Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Paul Greengrass and even, soon, the Coen brothers, he’s clearly not going to pass up the opportunity for on-the-job training from some of the best directors in the world any time soon.

The Cherwell’s online review of Green Zone is available in the film section.

The trailer wasn’t promising. Comprised of car chases, exploding helicopters and multiple reminders that this was another joint project between Damon and Greengrass, it did nothing but fuel a worrying expectation: that Green Zone would be nothing more than a money-spinning continuation of the Bourne saga which we’ve all seen before. Thank God it wasn’t.   

It’s thanks to Greengrass that I can say the following with conviction: I came out of Green Zone feeling rewarded for staying with him. Yes, there is plenty of action. But the action does not feel majestic in the same way the perfectly coordinated New York car chase in The Bourne Ultimatum did. This is manic, messy stuff, set on the streets of hell; and Green Zone really does capture the mayhem of those streets, in a way that makes it feel much more authentic than the desolation implied by The Hurt Locker.

All this is set to the backdrop of a complex, political plot, loosely bound by the findings of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, an excellent piece of investigative journalism that detailed the Iraqi reconstruction project undertaken by the Americans, and reminded us of what a shambles it was. There is an excellent scene that captures the book’s sentiment in the space of three short minutes: the camera swings across the Baghdad skyline from the streets of chaos to the government palaces. In the latter you find Washington bureaucrats, naively planning Iraq’s democratisation and totally oblivious to the looting and futile search for WMDs outside.

It is Paul Miller, played by Matt Damon, who leads this quest, which he becomes increasingly suspicious of when the intelligence proves unfruitful time and time again. At this point we get the predictable characters responding to Miller’s anger: ‘the reasons don’t matter.’ His job is to execute, not to question. And everyone seems to share this sentiment, except for one CIA official (played, excellently, by Brendan Gleeson), who Miller teams up with to try and uncover the truth.

The film follows this line of thought through an enthralling two hours. We meet Freddie, a civilian seemingly alert to the path his country was on under Saddam, yet equally suspicious of the American mob that he hopes will somehow save it. We see the Guantanamo-style conditions under which prisoners were kept. We meet even more of the naive US officials that convince themselves they’re ‘doing a good thing here.’

In short, we are treated to a rich insight into the occupation of Iraq, and are given a thorough reminder of the worrying fragility underlying the justifications for being there in the first place. Admittedly this is accompanied by a healthy dose of action, but the motives for its inclusion are legitimate. This is not Bourne. Miller says more in Green Zone than Bourne says in the entire trilogy. But the dialogue nevertheless retains a sense of efficiency, and this is undoubtedly intentional, for Green Zone is not a psychological analysis into soldiers, nor does it pretend to be. Its actors and their action scenes are a medium for a timely reminder: namely, that we were almost certainly misled. And Greengrass’s other films (cue United 93), are testament to his desire to say this.

4 STARS

It’s been a confusing winter for films. As I write this Avatar is still number one in the UK box office, and why shouldn’t it be? The world that James Cameron has created, if not the dialogue or plot, is ground-breaking. When I left the cinema the real world seemed dull. Yet as I look at the box office charts the film at number two is an entirely different affair, in many ways a blast from the past, a veritable stegosaurus next to Avatar.

Yet The Princess and the Frog is a case of a few steps back and huge leap forward for a company that seemed to have been lost in the modern world. While Disney combinations with Pixar have been well thought, well scripted and well made this cannot be said for the 2D animation. You’ve probably forgotten Treasure Planet, but if you’d been forced to sit through it on DVD with a younger cousin then you too would have it seared forever on your memory. Yet in late 2006 John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer at Disney, announced that the studio would be leaving CGI to Pixar and working exclusively with hand-drawn animations. The first product of the revitalised studio is The Princess and the Frog.

Theis film’s quality was far from assured; Disney proved plenty of times that it’s possible to make a bad hand-drawn animation. But it seems that returning to this more basic style reminded Disney of what it’s meant to be; endearing. Spending painstaking hours on a few seconds of footage makes every moment valuable and The Princess and the Frog has an attention to detail that is unparalleled almost anywhere outside of Studio Ghibli. Indeed Lasseter is in a large way responsible for the huge fan base that films like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke enjoy in the west and the influence of Miyazaki is evident in the glorious backgrounds of New Orleans in the twenties. Choosing such a music-rich setting was putting pressure on a soundtrack to deliver but Randy Newman’s jazz soundtrack proved successful in echoing, if not quite matching in quality, that of The Junglebook.

The plot is a clever reworking of the Grimm Brother’s Frog Prince where rather than returning the frog prince (Bruno Campos) to human form the unsuspecting Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) falls prey to the same Voodoo magic and becomes a frog herself. Some may cry that this runs a bit close to Shrek, but you are forced to forgive because what follows is an original and enchanting story. We dive into the swamps of the Mississippi pursued by a villain, Dr. Facilier (Keith David), as terrifying as any of the studios creations since the Bogeyman in Tim Burton’s stop motion The Nightmare Before Christmas. Throw in a trumpet-playing alligator (Michael-Leon Wooley) and a Cajun firefly (Jim Cummings) and you are on your way to a proper Disney film. Yes it may be predictable at its heart but what films that are essentially aimed at children aren’t?

The Princess and the Frog may not break new ground but it makes good use of a tried and trusted format. Much has been made of Tiana being the first black Disney princess, a fact that is worthy of note as a shocking indictment of another of Disney’s past failings. Hopefully the film will become truly significant for the era that it heralds, a return to the golden ages of the 50’s and 90’s when children’s films were not churned out for the plastic toys of Disney films you found at the bottom of your Happy Meal. It will take up half as much of your money, half as much of your time but it will charm you more than any combination of lanky smurfs ever could.

Nazi Literature in the Americas. Readers confronted by the cover of Bolaño’s recently translated book might already find something incongruous between the title and the author. Those not new to his life story may wonder why he would commit himself to documenting the lives of fascist writers. After all, this is the man who was once a confirmed Trotskyite. This is the man who spied for the resistance against Pinochet. This is the man who was detained in Chile for suspected terrorism.

But isn’t this surprise and disorientation what Bolaño hoped for? He always enjoyed being different. Revolution flowed in his blood, not only in terms of politics, but in literature too. Born into a culture with a celebrated literary tradition, he was not content merely to seek to emulate other eminent South American authors like Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez. Indeed, he actively tried to distinguish himself from them, dismissing the latter as a ‘man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many Presidents and Archbishops’ and claiming that magic realism in general ‘stinks’. Predictably, he made enemies, but his innovation also led to him being heralded as the saviour of Latin American literature.

For much of his life he lived in decadence; it was only when he was diagnosed with liver cancer, just over ten years before his death in 2003, that he was at last able to focus his talent, publishing in quick succession acclaimed works such as The Savage Detectives and By Night in Chile. Nazi Literature in the Americas was published in Spanish in 1996, but has only recently been able to reach, shock and entertain a global public.

So what is Bolaño playing at in Nazi Literature in the Americas? The first words we encounter claim that ‘the rich seam of Nazi literature has, until now, been sadly under-explored.’ When initially asked by friends which book I was reviewing, I mumbled the title, rather embarrassed and worried that it might be thought that I suddenly had turned to reading right-wing propaganda. But if we dare to look inside, we instantly realise that Bolaño has not suddenly decided to praise fascist literature. Instead, he has dedicated himself to creating one of the most novel, scary and scathing pieces of satire of recent time. He writes an encyclopaedia of the extreme right-wing artists of both Americas. They are vibrant characters. They are prolific writers. They are politically active. And they are completely fictional. Into a real historical landscape – he mentions Hitler, Franco and Perón – and against a literary backdrop which includes references to Ibsen, Dr Johnson and Césaire, amongst others, we see writers who existed in no world other than the fertile environment of Bolaño’s mind.

In a style of writing which shifts between the discourses of literary criticism, political propaganda, thrillers and gossip magazines, Bolaño forms genre difficult to place, to describe, or even fully to understand. The writers are mocked, from their ridiculous names – Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, for example – to their laughable legacies. The biting humour used to refer to poems like I was happy with Hitler – apparently ‘misunderstood’ by everyone – is equalled by the caustic dismissal of the writers’ characters; one of the supposedly great authors is summarised and dismissed as ‘a soccer player and a Futurist’.

Yet the book isn’t just a case of one laugh after another. Bolaño raises deeper political and philosophical questions. Indeed, the most formidable aspect of the book is perhaps the abyss between the words on the page, written by Bolaño – the enthusiastic, ignorant, and racist biographer who fails to see the inconsistencies in his own praise – and the words the true Bolaño intends us to read behind the text. This gap succeeds in condemning both these imaginary authors and those foolish enough to appreciate them and their views. Finally, a lingering concern is implicit in the text: literature is written and remembered by the victors. If fascism had triumphed, would this be the intellectual world which we admire and from which we are supposed to learn? Not a thought to be taken lightly.

This book, then, is a form of literary prank. But like the best of jokes, there is a seriousness behind it which stays with us perhaps even longer than the punch-line.

Walking into the starkly lit first room of Chris Ofili’s retrospective at the Tate is overwhelming to say the least. Huge paintings propped up against the otherwise blank walls clamoured for my attention: knowing where to start was the immediate challenge.

Even when I’d decided on an individual painting, it was difficult to decide where to focus. The sheer content of the paintings is astounding: layer upon layer, media upon media, the clippings, paint, glitter, and, of course, elephant dung. This is what Ofili has come to be known for, and it’s hard to miss. It protrudes from the Holy Virgin Mary, a portrait where a lump of dung forms one of the woman’s nipples. It makes up the entirety of the sculpture Shithead, a lump of dung smiling crookedly with human milk teeth. Immediately revolting, one can’t help but be amused.

Humour pervades Ofili’s early works. Giant portraits such as Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy collage the faces of black icons, stuck on bare female legs, scuttling in and around the picture with that universal ‘celebrity’ grin that is so numbingly familiar. Race, perhaps the only constant throughout the exhibition, is not above parody: the famous black faces are not all good role models: Tiger Woods grins up from the bottom corner, appropriately balanced on a woman’s thighs.

His subject matter is also profoundly serious. No Woman No Cry, which won Ofili the Turner Prize in 1998, is a portrait of a woman crying tears of collaged pictures of Steven Lawrence, whose racially-motivated murder exposed the ‘institutional racism’ of the Metropolitan Police.

The climax of the show, however, comes in the next room. Led through a dark, wooden hallway, I found myself in The Upper Room, containing a series of twelve profile portraits of monkeys looking towards the central ‘mono oro’, in a reenactment of the Last Supper. The disciples are identified with the Hindu monkey god Hanuman, as the guiding pamphlet helpfully instructs, inviting multi-layered religious interpretations. Whatever these may be, this was a highly compelling climax. These fixed, menacing expressions of the monkeys’ provide intense focus. The glitter of Ofili’s early works is no longer brash and playful, it is alluring. The elephant dung becomes a frame, elevating each portrait.

Out of this vault, I was back in the light, back in an art gallery, and presented with Ofili’s drawings, my personal favourite episode within this varied retrospective. Lively, sexy, and funny, pencilled mini-Afro heads form lines to make bigger patterns – flowers in Afro Daze – or faces in the series Albinos and Bros with Fros. The pencil outlines of the whitened black faces are almost farcical: the black icon in its photo-negative. On the other side of the wall, the black and white outlines are replaced by the voluptuous untitled watercolour series. Crimson red lips and bright blue eyes seem to protrude from the beautiful shapes of the even, dark skin.

What Ofili loses in texture he replaces with colour in the following, final rooms, yet the mood becomes increasingly sober, even sombre. The vast, powerful canvasses look inwards rather than outwards. Faces are covered, avoiding rather than entreating the viewer. The neon colours are shocking and excluding: the clashing yellows, oranges and greens of Rising of Lazurus complicate and dualize the figures. Ofili’s move to Trindad signals a clear change in his painting. The environment envelopes the individual; expression is no longer centred on the person, but their place within a sensual, mysterious setting.

Ofili’s retrospective is energetic, lively, but deeply moody. Profound changes in his work are sensitively reflected by the gallery’s arrangement. Whilst the final figurative rooms are masterful, my fascination was rooted in the earlier parts: the portraits of black men and women, the alluring fierceness of the monkeys. It was this series that, for me, provided the exhibition’s climax. Although the final pictures did not provide a finishing flourish, I look forward to his next output. Who knows what direction it may take?

Chris Ofili is at Tate Britain until 16th May. Admission £10/8.50

Since meeting in Michaelmas 2008, the St. Catz duo Ro-to-the-Land and The Great Gartini – Roland Lasius and Tom Garton – have gone from strength to strength, rising to fame as the winners of RAG’s 2009 Oxford’s Got Talent competition. The boys unashamedly style themselves as an eclectic fusion of virile guitar riffs that will haunt you for nights, intricate, satirical rap lyricism, and falsetto warbling to put Justin Timberlake to shame. The impossibility of pigeonholing this messy double act into a fixed genre is part of the band’s offensive charm. The ladies love it. Darlings of the JCR/MCR open mic circuit, R2tL&TGr8G are not afraid to insult their audiences’ sensibilities with crass jingles, both glamorising and interrogating the exploits of middle class adventurers.

We interrupted Tom and Roland holed up in their writing zone: much of their dishevelled attire and “bohemian” décor struck us as shameless self-promotion. Regardless, a sincere degree of mystique and paradox shrouds the heart of their oeuvre. Building dreamy spires into the bitches and bling topos of late 90s hip-hop, their material blends two at first seemingly opposed social dimensions. Their lyrical world, peopled by third generation Brasenose Classicists who ‘don’t give a shit if their family’s all fascis’, is as much indebted to the epigrams of Oscar Wilde as to Eazy-E’s 1993 classic ‘Real Compton City G’s’. Pressed further, they baldly claim inspiration from Busta Rhymes, Al Green, and the grime scene – an interesting framework for songs about private healthcare, city jobs and incontinence. Their future plans include ‘more of the same really’ and a myspace page. Rumours of a debut album bubble throughout the Oxford music scene but remain, at present, unconfirmed.

In the murky corridors of St. Anne’s, an electronica revolution is brewing, PRDCTV (pronounced ‘Productive’ for the less vowel averse amongst you) is third year St. Anne’s psychologist Alex Lloyd.

Influenced by seminal 21st century electronic pioneers such as Four Tet and Bonobo, Alex began writing as PRDCTV in the summer of 2008. His tracks are painstakingly sampled and pieced together from bedroom recording sessions, emerging as fluid patchworks of exquisitely lush, organic folktronica. Branded the “Oxford Don” by XFM DJ and cult icon John Kennedy, Alex has been commissioned to do a number of remixes for artists such as Patrick Wolf and These New Puritans. Just before Christmas, PRDCTV signed to Ninja Tune, an independent label which is home to the likes of Bonobo, Mr. Scruff, Roots Manuva and The Cinematic Orchestra to name but a few.

We can look forward to PDRCTV’s first full length offering in early 2011, and, if his debut EP It’s Never Too Late To Have A Happy Childhood is anything to go by, we can expect glitchy samples strung together with verve and panache.
If a full time degree and time consuming solo work were not enough, Alex also runs the Oxford-based electronica label Geometric Records, home of Envelope and Jack Cleverly.