For the Love of Film returns once again – as promised!
Blog Page 2087
The Prodigy – Invaders Must Die
Invaders Must Die begins with a mangled sample: ‘We are the Prodigy’. It’s helpful; the first track owes so much to Justice’s metal-dance stomping you could be forgiven for making the mistake. But then, arguably, Liam Howlett’s dance collective has been in identity crisis for over a decade, ever since the release of the seminal Fat of the Land in 1997.
Back then, the Prodigy were heroes. Unique in their ability to make listenable the mind-numbingly repetitive music of the underground rave scene, the great British public lapped them up, swooning to their inventive breakbeat and Keith Flint’s horned hair-dos. For a while, every Prodigy release was awaited breathlessly by legions of straight pop fans, pill-heads and the odd impressionable youth, like me.
Leaving teary-eyed nostalgia to one side, it’s hard to say whether this is a good album or not. Howlett’s samples/lyrics are awful certainly, with ‘The world’s on fire/it’s about to expire’ a particular lowlight. But then they were always rubbish, even if Breathe’s ‘Psycho-somatic addict insane’ did sound pretty badass to my twelve-year-old ears.
The real problem with the album is that it’s so obvious that this is a purposeful rehash of Fat of the Land, with the occasional subconscious nod in the direction of Daft Punk and Justice. It all sounds as though Howlett’s bed of money has become a little less fluffy of late, and he’s gone about getting some more in the easiest way possible.
‘Omen’, deemed by the band to be worth a reprise at the end of the album, is a decent stab at re-writing ‘Out of Space’, while ‘Warrior’s Dance’s female vocalist does OK in her attempt to dilute the barrels of nervous testosterone that fuel the rest of the album.
If you think ‘Firestarter’ represents a rebellious call-to-arms to a disillusioned generation Y, buy this album because you will love it. Otherwise, don’t bother. Liam ‘dance visionary’ Howlett should be trying harder than this.
In a pit of despair?
Michael Angelakos is a pretty complicated character. Passion Pit, the band he formed just two years ago, are widely tipped for ‘big things’ this year, and yet he could hardly seem less happy. Moody and hirsute, he shuffles around the backstage area of the Bullingdon Arms before the gig, looking pretty out of place. He is something of an anomaly in this environment, failing to fulfil the typical stereotype of the touring musician. In his own words, ‘I don’t want to party man, I wish I did! Some guy just offered us MDMA? I just want to go back to the bus and sleep before the show.’
Passion Pit’s debut EP Chunk of Change grew out of six songs recorded in 2007 while Angelakos was in college in Boston, and was originally conceived as a Valentine’s Day present for his girlfriend. The music became popular among the student community and prompted Angelakos to take it more seriously. Though the music was born out of something
romantic, he is keen to underline that it is actually a pretty dark record.
It was the product of an unhappy time and he is fascinated by the manner in which the lyrical content of the album goes unnoticed by listeners, who assume it to be an exercise in sentimentality. ‘People listened to the last record and thought, oh sure, it’s pop music, it’s a love album. If you read the lyrics, this person is talking about how much of an asshole he is, and how much he wishes he could love his girlfriend as much as she loves him.’
He believes that the best pop music exhibits this dichotomy of light and dark. ‘Beautiful pop music invades your skull, it’s a powerful vehicle. A lot of the time we’re dealing with heavy subjects; thematically our music is dark. But because the vessel is sugar-coated pop music, people don’t understand what they’re receiving.’
It’s a phenomenon that Angelakos has obviously spent time thinking about; he is absorbed completely by his love of pop music, and seems to enjoy analysing what it is that’s effective about pop music in order to apply the theories to his own. It is a very scientific approach to music. ‘The idea of producing electronic music made sense to me because it’s so mathematical.’ Angelakos is known to be something of a perfectionist and has spent months in the studio trying to locate the right formulae for the band’s music. The early signs are that he has come close to success.
Angelakos started making the music that would become Passion Pit in 2007 in an attempt to lift himself out of a period of depression. ‘I needed something to help me rejuvenate myself, because I was pretty low.’ Perhaps his obsession with the dark side of music is the result of his own problems with depression; he admits that it colours everything he does. Unlikely many musicians with similar problems, he does not see music as a form of therapy, however. ‘I don’t see music as therapy, therapy is something that makes life easier, and all this just makes things a lot harder.’
Here, Angelakos underlines what makes him something of an enigma. He clearly loves music and always hoped to pursue a career in music, but now his band is really taking off, he seems unsure if he is entirely happy with the situation.
Onstage Passion Pit almost live up to the expectations which have been heaped on them by countless music journalists since the close of last year. The songs are generally excellent, often coming close, and the music throughout features a pulse strong enough to seduce the dancing feet of the most intransigent members of the crowd in the Bullingdon Arms. Angelakos admits before the show, however, that the band has played less than 50 shows together, and at times this is evident. Nonetheless the band’s debut album, released later this year, is likely to be great and should see Passion Pit justify the hype.
Things are looking good for Passion Pit, but is it making Michael Angelakos happy? ‘It’s a good thing,’ he sighs, ‘It is what it is,’ and lifting his hood over his head, he walks back to the bus to sleep before the show.
The Ideas Man by Shed Simove
I’ve always felt that as a Cherwell culture reviewer, it’s been solemnly incumbent on me to safeguard the students of Oxford from corrupting sleaze. Obviously then, I had a duty to review Shed Simove’s Ideas Man – the blurb markets him as a guy who, amongst other things, invented ‘Clitoris Allsorts’ sweets, which instantly set my smut-sense a-tingling.
But I can tell you now that no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t find any trace of sordid sexploitation and unmitigated filth I’d been eagerly anticipating protecting you all from. In fact, I thought I’d opened the wrong book.
Simove doesn’t sound anything like the cynical, witty Channel 4 producer I’d envisioned, but instead sounds boyishly earnest and enthusiastic as he talks about all his wacky product ideas and his attempts at getting them made.
Some of them, like the ‘Control-A-Man/Woman’ gag remote, turned out well. Others less so, like the national fuss over him going undercover as a 16 year-old for a TV documentary. With the occasional photo, sketch and newspaper clipping, it’s a bit like looking at a scrapbook of memories.
They are all pretty amusing memories on the whole, though they stop short of being as ‘hilarious’ as the blurb breathlessly says. Some of the product ideas are cute or gross in a funny way, like the ‘Pubik’s Cube’, or celebrity trading cards, or his idea to trademark the phrase ‘The Trademark Office Has No Sense of Humour’TM, which he did after exasperatedly failing to convince them to register the clitoral sweets.
But because of his rather pedestrian style the prose seldom reaches laugh-out-loud levels. It can even get a little tedious if you read it all at once. Simove gets an idea, works on it, gets rejected, then possibly succeeds. Rinse and repeat. In this sense Ideas Man is marketed as an inspirational story about a guy who never gives up, though I’m not convinced.
It’s certainly more useful than your average self-help book, and great if you want an example of the kind of grit and resourcefulness you need when peddling your ideas to people. But the fact that the ideas are about stuff like ‘Butt Plugs’ undercuts the inspirational potential just a little, I think.
Also Simove’s relentless can-do attitude can grate a little, especially in preachy moments where he talks about a lesson he’s learned or tries to impart some banal motivational wisdom.
Still, Ideas Man is an easy read. If anything, it offers the heartening insight that the sleek machine of mass commercialism isn’t just a capitalist ploy; there actually are people like Simove who are passionate about coming up with ‘Door Nobs’ and ‘Designer Beavers’. Whether that terrifies or inspires is entirely up to you.
Raphaël Zarka – Geometry Improved
French skateboarder/artist Raphaël Zarka’s Formes du Repos found him exploring his curiosity for man-made structures and geometrical forms. He travelled the French countryside photographing unfinished concrete constructions – a lone pylon, an unfinished monorail – describing them as ‘involuntary sculptures’. It represented an artist of genuine substance. His first exhibition in the UK, Geometry Improved therfore comes as a great disappointment.
In Formes du Repos his images contrasted these so called ‘involuntary sculptures’ with the countryside around them. They stand as immovable, indelible marks upon their surroundings, monuments to the ever expanding urban environment. Zarka’s composition in these photographs is particularly effective, framing the shots with barren expanses or, in the case of the three works exhibited at Modern Art Oxford, vibrant greenery.
We get a flavour of this previous work with this current exhibition, including Zarka’s documentary films on the history of skateboarding, which demonstrate his fascination with engagement of public spaces, viewing them not as background but as medium. Sadly, however, these play a merely supporting role to the rather less successful Les Billes de Sharp, the main focus of Geometry Improved.
Les Billes follows much the same ‘found structure’ formula of which the artist is so fond. Zarka has taken one ‘found structure’, oak beams, and carved into them a second, diagrams by British astronomer Abraham Sharp. Although the method remains the same, the substance has all but evaporated. Meanwhile, ‘Les Deductions des Sharp’, a piece of plywood with a series of geometrical shapes cut out of it, flounders in the corner like an unfinished GCSE art project.
Whereas before, Zarka’s work spoke of a sincere fascination with the urban environment, it now lacks both immediacy and depth. Although the astronomical diagrams exhibit a degree of precision and intricacy, and have some aesthetic worth, the exhibit certainly isn’t striking nor does it appear to have any of the philosophical justification we would expect from Zarka’s work; you will find yourself getting bored fairly quickly.
Zarka’s photography demonstrates that he has a solid grasp on the use of space but that skill has not transferred to his installation; the seemingly random arrangement of beams that confronts you when you first enter crosses the line from mystery to meaninglessness – one gets the impression that he has not given his new medium much thought.
You could easily drop in for a brief shufti, but make sure you go to Sainsbury’s for your weekly food shop as well to make the trip worthwhile.
Getting to Know: OUDS
Cherwell talks to Chelsea Walker, the President of the Oxford University Dramatic Society in the second episode of the Getting to Know series.
The Class
An unrelenting reflection of the tensions, trials and tussles of a group of junior school students, Laurence Cantet’s The Class combines a measured account of the social dynamics of the inner-city classroom with a startling loyalty to the reality of the school system.
Set in what the production notes describe as a ‘multi-cultural Parisian school’ (read ‘deprived, with the wider racial tensions of French society imposed on a miniature scale), The Class succeeds, where so many ‘inspirational’ American tales fail, because the students are real students, the parents real parents, even the teacher, played by Francois Begaudeau, is a real teacher (the film having been based on his bestselling auto-biographical novel Entre les Murs). Individuals are not manipulated into plot points; they instead afford the film an unswerving sense of honesty.
In a similar vein, our gaze never veers outside of the school grounds. The only glimpse of the outside world comes when Souleymane, a disruptive pupil whose frustration at school soon takes a turn for the worse, exhibits pictures of his family and friends in front of the class, or when Wei, a Chinese student who finds it difficult to interact with his classmates, reads out his ‘self-portrait.
This is not to say that The Class avoids the social issues that dog any ‘multi-cultural school’, quite the opposite. It expertly forces the audience into an awareness of the socio-political climate that shape the lives of these students, working to distil so much context into a manageable frame without simply reducing any characters into ciphers, or even worse, caricatures. The result is a film that genuinely questions our assumptions about the role of the school in a ‘liberal democracy’, offering a vision of the modern system of education that is, to say the very least, unsettling.
On its release in 1995 the French cabinet commissioned a special screening of La Haine to give them some idea of the crisis that had led to the rioting in the banlieues; likewise, in 2003, immediately after the occupation of Iraq, the Pentagon offered a screening of The Battle of Algiers to any personnel interested in the problem of guerrilla insurgency and ideological conflict. It is this reviewer’s opinion that Ed Balls would do well to take an hour or two out of his busy schedule to watch The Class, it is essential viewing.
5 stars
Buried Child
Two stars
In the last half-hour of Buried Child, the audience gets to see a ‘symbolic rape’, a character metamorphosing into an ancestor, a man taunted by having his wooden leg stolen, a description of a murder and the exhumation of a decaying corpse, the buried child of the title-all that in about half an hour. As that’s only a third of the play, watching that costs you about £1.67. Surely this can’t fail?
It does. Let’s start with the script of this 1978 play by Sam Shepard, set in a decaying farm in Illinois. It’s certainly visceral, the feeling of an isolated, nerve-prodding family is there in spades, but as dialogue it’s boring: knarled, pretentious, sub-Pinterian prose-poetry. Next, the plot is full of heavy-handed, vaguely ritualistic and alarmingly humourless symbolism, none of which really means anything: a man walks into a yard and finds corn where none has grown in years with whose leves he then covers his sleeping father, his brother loves shaving people against their will, and so on. Strangely, for all the stuff that happens (there’s some incest in there as well), it’s actually quite boring, and chaotically structured: a large chunk of the first act is a dull expository monologue about a character who died years before, who nobody ever really mentions again. So why have the monologue? To spend several minutes telling us that old farmer’s wives in the middle of nowhere can be racist, that some sons are more clever than others, and that some people die young surprisingly and it’s rather sad, it seems. This must be the commentary about the American Dream the Wikipedia article for the play talks about.
The staging is better than the play deserves: Tom Palmer was still reading his lines off a script in the press preview but his and Sam Kennedy’s performances had the right level of constrained anger and good American accents; Anna Popplewell made the best of by far the worst-written part. Sean O’Reilly tried to match his performance to the actors playing his brother and father but an uneven accent hampered his performance. Harriet Madeley as Shelly, an outsider from California entering the tense family home, slyly tailored her acting in a part with dialogue that felt like it came from a different play to feel very different to the other actors.
In short, if you like this play, or think you’d respond to the style of writing, the staging is perfectly competent and it’s certainly not forgettable. Otherwise, think twice.
Confusions
This weekend I went home. This is not surprising really; the end of fourth week always rekindles memories of half-terms spent lazing around, when “fifth week blues”, “collections” and “essay crisis” were still a universe away. Whilst there I went to see a school play, and despite my bias, due to this school being my alma mater, and the main part being played by my sister, I must say that the formidable acting talent on offer from a bunch of 11 to 16 year olds in my generic northern comp far outshone anything I witnessed in Confusions.
As the name perhaps suggests, this is not a conventional five-acter. It is more like five separate plays, with intertwining stories and characters and multiple parts played by the same actors. The venue is the rather odd choice of the St. Hugh’s bar, which admittedly provides the intimacy needed for a play so focussed on the familiar discourse and the comically domestic situations portrayed, yet may struggle in attracting those not thrilled about the trek.
My advice would be, that unless they are your friends, don’t bother. Of the two scenes I was shown, there is little to shout about. A smidgeon of poignancy here, a chuckle every now and then, but otherwise dullness: overarching, joy-sucking dullness. This is the fault of the actors, who deliver lines haphazardly and lazily. In one scene, the anticipation of an affair being revealed and the comedy of lovers trying to hide their tracks dissolve in air polluted by grey monotonous dialogue; I felt I could have been watching Beckett, so hopelessly empty were the silences. And even in the merciful moments when the incessant soullessness of their speaking ceased, clumsy acting still filled the room like a bad smell. One scenario requires abrupt switches between voiced and mimed conversation, and it always made me laugh how previously docile hands and arms would suddenly spring to life, waving emphatically, as if people talking intimately in a restaurant would seriously communicate like air traffic controllers.
The sad thing is that this play by acclaimed playwright Alan Ayckbourne could have achieved so much more. The script is innovative and the direction is not at all bad, with good use of props and space. Yet, as it is, bad acting wins the day, leaving that standing ovation and rapturous school hall merely a warm and distant memory.
(Two stars)
On the lash: Drunken Dumbo’s
This guy’s got me pinned up against the wall with one hand, the other’s round my throat. Now, truth be told, I don’t have a macho bone in my body and any minute now I may very well, as mother will have it said, dump a gusher. He’s also happens to be built like a shit house, a symphony of gristle. To top things off, post-bop, he’s dressed as a very well known Disney character. I don’t know if you’ve ever been twatted by Dumbo, but by God it does nothing for your self-esteem. ‘I could fucking kill you’ he says, spitting beer and phlegm in my face. At this point I remember the advice they gave girls in my high school – ‘if ever you find yourself imposed upon by a gentleman of the irascible persuasion, try your very best to vomit on your attacker’. So while I’m trying my best to retch like so many supermodels (tricky at the best of times, even more so when you throw in a Neanderthal death grip), he slurs ‘y’see, I couldn’t lose face, you’d just…you’re not gonna have one up on me’, as he pushes my head against the stone for the second and third times. I should explain at this point that I spilled his drink.
Just five minutes ago Mr. Dumbo had been laughing, joking, a genuine human being; 0 to 4.48 Psychosis in five seconds flat and over what? Spilt milk. Or Tennant’s Special Brew, judging by his breath. Don’t let the dazed expression of the heavy drinker fool you – sure, they’ve got all the emotional depth of a puddle, all the dimensions of a badly drawn cartoon, but by Christ they’re quick with their fists. Perhaps noticing that my face is all too shockingly purple, he leaves off my throat and starts ripping the buttons off my shirt. You can barely hear them pitter patter on the ground in first quod over his frantic, heavy breathing. The next morning in college, as far as he and his friends are concerned, nothing happened. And that’s just it, as soon as there’s a question of culpability, the ‘lash’ steps in as an excuse: ‘Maaaate, I was well wasted last night, I can’t remember a thing.’
The risks of heavy drinking include liver cirrhosis, wet brain dehydration, damage to the nervous system, bowel cancer, low sperm count and shrinking of the genitals – I’m not saying binge drinkers are little pricks, but apparently they have them. In a 2001 study it was found that 40% of those who killed themselves in England and Wales had a history of alcohol abuse. In 40% of violent crimes victims say that the perpetrators were under the influence of alcohol. So why do we do it? We’re being screwed over by the drinks industry and their influence over pubs, clubs and bars. In a recent study, The Glasgow Media Group observed that the UK industry has become dominated by large companies, which own chains of nightclubs, bars and restaurants as well as traditional pubs. Alcohol Concern reports that they spend £227 million a year on advertising their products, while the government spends just £1 million on the treatment and prevention of alcoholism. ‘Vertical Drinking’ is a marketing buzzword – people are more likely to drink if they can’t sit down. We’ll drink even more if flat surfaces are removed and the music makes talking impossible. The drinks industry is obsessed purely with the volume of its sales. As Andrew McNeill of the Institute of Alcohol Studies has observed ‘at one point, one of the biggest owners of pubs was a Japanese bank. Someone in Tokyo is not going to worry about what happens in the British high street.’
The Glasgow Media Group questioned 244 young people in higher education, aged 18 – 23 on their opinions on drinking habits in the U.K. Here is one of their questions:”Do you ever feel pressured to drink alcohol in the sense that he would be left out if you didn’t?” This is potentially difficult for people to answer, especially in a brief questionnaire, since to agree is in a sense an admission of weakness. But as it turned out 31% said yes. So deeply rooted is binge drinking in our culture that we can’t imagine having a good time without it. What have the Romans ever done for us? Well, they did bring us the taberna, which quickly developed into the alehouse. As early as the middle ages binge drinking was being identified as a nuisance, especially among the clergy, leading Bishop Anselm to decree in 1102 “Let no priest go to drinking bouts, nor drink to pegs”. Government funded campaigns don’t seem to be working. But what use are billboards of girls vomming in the streets if these are the same photos that will appear on facebook tomorrow morning? It’s a hard drug that’s surrounded by a warm glow – we boast about how much alcohol we drink and its effects in a way we wouldn’t about heroin. Yet that so called dangerous drug kills very few by comparison with alcohol. We should be focusing on its darker effects, like what happens in alcoholic families. Booze is a class A drug with good public relations.