Notting Hill and Hollywood Values

What a grim day yesterday was! Blue Monday, apparently, and it lived up to its name here with a dark sky and periodic blizzards, which ‘got’ me more or less every time I was caught between places with no shelter. Umbrellas are useless in Edinburgh. I don’t even know why anyone stocks them in the shops. None could have survived yesterday’s crosswinds.

So, last night after 9pm, I was tired and fed up and in no mood to write or read and there was nothing worth watching on the TV, so I decided I would watch ITV2’s millionth repeat of Notting Hill, Roger Michell‘s 1999 movie starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, partly because I had never before actually watched it through to the end. Here was my chance and I took it with three small bottles of Stella Artois by my side to blunt the edge of the blizzard that made me feel cold even watching it churn the air beyond  the windows.

The plot of Notting Hill is simple. The most famous actress in the world, Anna, (Julia Roberts) goes into a travel bookshop and meets the proprietor, William (Hugh Grant). They fall in love and the movie progresses like any romcom: hurdles present themselves and are overcome, only for yet steeper hurdles to appear. Can an ordinary bloke like Hugh (sic!) and a huge celebrity like Julia find eternal happiness amid the PR personnel and paparazzi fighting for a piece of her? Well, there can only be one answer in a successful, feelgood, Hollywood movie, but that in itself asks difficult questions, which I will come to shortly.

The script is sharp and witty. Grant is his usual bumbling self, the engaging twit who always gets the girl. I found it astonishing that Anna could fall for him, let alone continue to want a relationship with him, but – as a guy – that’s probably how I’m supposed to feel. If she can fall for that twit, well, she could fall for anyone... Roberts delivers the comedy with perfect timing. She convincingly asserts her ordinariness by enjoying an evening over dinner with William’s eccentric family and by appearing in some scenes without any make-up. Or, perhaps, she is made up to look as if she isn’t wearing any make-up, especially when she’s hiding in William’s house from the journalists out for a scoop story, and she does succeed in looking quite average – at least until every time she smiles, which she does frequently. There’s no other smile like Julia Roberts’s smile.

I kept asking myself how much of herself Roberts was putting into the movie. Basically, she is playing someone like herself, the most famous actress in the world at the time. Round the family table, she confesses how she’d been through a series of terrible relationships, had been hounded by journalists reporting her every move, and had been on a strict diet for 10 years. This is Anna, not the real Julia Roberts, but we can apply the principles to many famous Hollywood stars. There’s a longing to be ordinary, contrasted with the fawning adulation she’s subjected to by William’s family all through the meal. They don’t even take her confession too seriously.

But how seriously are we, the audience supposed to take it? Hollywood does this all the time. It presents values to us that it in no way espouses and yet presents them as vital for an authentic life. The most famous quote from the movie comes from Roberts telling Grant, “After all... I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.” But Hollywood cultivates the very opposite ideals. Actors are celebrities, untouchable, privileged, our age’s gods and goddesses. Their disastrous marriages and relationships are picked open in unsparing detail by gossip mags, often from material released by the actors’ own PR people. They advertise beauty products offering ordinary mortals the illusion of comparable, soft-focus beauty, images designed to widen the real gap.

At one point, Roberts says that there will come a time when she will age and her looks will go and Hollywood will dump her with as little conscience as it once celebrated her. I wonder how she felt while performing those lines. Was it just a professional job for her? Or did she sense acutely the disconnect between the values set forward by the film and the reality she was speaking into? How deep is the pool of celebrity depression and unhappiness? There is a fair chance that Julia Roberts would have thought critically about the dialogue she was acting. As it is, Roberts is now 45, still beautiful and still making movies and, it appears, happily married for 11 years - one of the lucky ones, perhaps. The film celebrates the value of love, the vitality of relationships and the emptiness of money without those things, while at the same time raking in $247,000,000 at the box office (from a mere $42,000,000 budget). Just as ‘You’ve Got Mail’ celebrated the small bookshop owner over the corporate chain and yet found time for product placement and grossed over $250,000,000 on commercial release, so the fantasy at the heart of Notting Hill plays on desire just like an average advertisement. We want it to be true, true in our lives, true in the way the world works. But Hollywood itself, with its emphasis on commercial success, big money, celebrity status (even dividing celebrities into A, B and C listers), doesn’t even remotely espouse the values of its own products. The message of Notting Hill is the exact opposite of the message Hollywood gives in the way it goes about more or less everything. 

It is a soul-less machine. The political equivalent would be David Cameron and Michael Gove telling us that that full equality is the aim, that love is the answer, that small is beautiful, and then carrying on with their current right-wing agenda. It’s just more entertaining when made into a movie like Notting Hill.

From John Tranter to Jennifer Aniston

February always makes me feel tired. It doesn’t matter whether the weather is stormy or simply chill, whether the sky is low and grey or high and blue. There’s just something about the month. It’s so relentless, a winter that lasts and lasts and lasts and has been lasting since last November and may well last until well into April if we’re unlucky.

Last night, I was reading John Tranter’s Selected, Urban Myths: 210 Poems, and was enjoying it, but there came a point when my brain wasn’t taking anything in and I did something I wouldn't have done at all if it had been summer – I switched on the TV, and there was Jennifer Aniston. As usual, she was playing Rachel from Friends, but in a movie about how some bride-to-be (Aniston) suspects that The Graduate had been based on her parents and goes around trying to find out whether the rumour is true or not. Somehow, I watched this for about half an hour. Complete nonsense. It’s hard to believe that so many millions can get poured into rubbish like this while virtually nothing is given to marketing and distributing poetry.

But this is the world and “we’re all in this together,” as Disney and David Cameron tell us, an alliance almost as unholy as the current coalition. Except we’re not in it together. There is plenty of room for opposition, for not playing. I switched off and went to sleep, wondering why it had taken me so long. There are worlds it’s best to have nothing to do with whatsoever.

Review - Gulliver's Travels (2010 Movie)

I took my daughter to see Gulliver’s Travels mainly because I checked the schedule too late to see Animals United, but mistakes of that kind can sometimes be fortuitous. Not this time.

Gulliver, as you can hardly be unaware due to the massive marketing campaign from TV adverts and bus hoardings, is played by Jack Black, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Jack Black plays Jack Black. People call him Gulliver for whatever reason. He plays the generic character from all his movies – a wisecracking loser with a whiff of unpredictability, except that nothing unpredictable ever happens. With a hefty injection of menace, he might angle vaguely towards Jack Nicholson, but ends up more like a Build-a Bear with dodgy battery – ‘cuddly’, ‘limited range’, and ‘annoying’ are phrases which spring to mind.

The Build-a-Bear identity is the only way to explain the attraction between himself and the beautiful, sophisticated Darcy (Emily Blunt) - at least, from her point of view. Darcy works, like Black, for a newspaper but she is a successful travel editor while Black works in the mailroom and has done for the past 10 years. A trainee on his first day at work is promoted above Black. You get the picture. Perhaps Darcy likes the idea of buying Black a new wardrobe and dressing him up each morning. You can buy beds, jewellery and shoes for these teddies, and they are very willing to spend time in the shops, unlike most men. Even Black’s plagiarism of a travel article isn’t enough to put her off. The message of the movie seems to be – ‘Plagiarise from Hollywood! Don’t worry! We’ll forgive you and you will win that gorgeous woman of your dreams you lied to. Women appreciate good liars as long as they can demolish an entire fleet of micro-people with one sneeze.’ Good, wholesome stuff.

Black wisecracks his way through various battles on behalf of Lilliput, despite betrayal from an embittered Lilliputian general. Nothing can hold him back for long. His escape from a giant doll’s house in Brobdingnag is all too easy. He has to wear a doll’s dress, which is of course Jack Black at his hilarious 'best'. As for Swiftian satire, you may as well forget it. There is no hint of a political agenda in this movie. It is a threadbare love story with a few special effects and a pompous baddie with a posh south of England accent, who is, in fact, the only one to see through Black’s lies that he was President back in the far-off land of USA. The baddie gets scant reward for this intelligence and for his genius in building a giant fighting robot that does at least give Black a run for his money.

Does Black ever get out of the mailroom? Well, that would be a spoiler if I told you, but you can probably guess. After fighting villains for much of the movie, he manages to deliver a message on the evils of war, for which we can all be profoundly grateful. ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ ‘Tell lies to get what you want.’ ‘Plagiarise and you will be well rewarded.’ What would Jonathan Swift make of it all?

Chico And Rita - Review

If you demand a tightly-woven plot from any movie, don’t bother with Chico and Rita, because what passes for plot is useful, like a coathanger, but hardly the central attraction. What makes this movie enjoyable (and it is very enjoyable) is the soundtrack and animation.

The film is set in the 1940s and 1950s and concerns the off-on love affair between Chico, the “best pianist in Havana”, and Rita, a singer, whose voice alone is enough to melt anyone’s heart. She also happens to be uncommonly beautiful. They meet, soon fall in love, but their relationship doesn’t exactly go to plan. So much for plot. The trailer gives most of the story away but, for once, that doesn’t matter.

It’s an animated movie. I’m not up enough on animation styles to be certain of this, but it reminded me of those postcards you see of old detective movies – guys in trenchcoats smoking cigarettes by night on street corners below neon signs. That probably makes no sense to anyone but me! Anyway, the animation is terrific. The shots of Havana give a real sense of what it must have been like, pre-Castro: beautiful, atmospheric, stylish, sleazy and full of extremes of poverty and wealth. Come to think of it, the scenes set in New York City had a pretty similar vibe. The jazz club scenes, which bring to life such famous names as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and the dramatic car chases, are superbly handled. I’m not sure how this movie, which is Spanish, will go down in the USA, as the (white) Americans in it are uniformly small-minded, exploitative and nasty.

It is interesting how animation works to bring warmth and style to a city. Good cinema does that routinely by more conventional means – camera angle, light, soundtrack, colour, period specificity – even a familiar city can be revisioned on screen. A successful movie captures some essence of a place and, once on screen, our experience of that city is transformed. The animation in Chico and Rita, while at an even greater remove than an ordinary camera lens, re-imagines its cities with great intimacy and warmth. How cartoons, which deliberately strive not to look too realistic, manage to give an audience the feeling that – just for a moment – they are there, is just one more demonstration of the magic of cinema.

I remember reading a poem (can't remember who by) on the relationship between a town and a scaled down model of the same town. The model drew fascination from viewers, which the town in itself didn't and couldn't possess. A similar relationship between the physical and imaginary, gritty realism and creative impression, exists between an actual city and its cinematic counterpart, which reveals something of the importance and vitality of the arts.

The music, omnipresent throughout the movie, is just fantastic. Latin jazz, be-bop, ballads sung by the fabulous Rita – a real treat. Just watching and listening to this movie was enough. It could have been about anything and it wouldn’t have mattered. However, there was a romantic narrative, as well as a political undercurrent i.e. the treatment of dark-skinned Cuban musicians in the USA at that time. It occurred to me this morning that there was also heavy irony. Both Chico and Rita routinely suffer discrimination during their stay in the USA. They play the hotels but can’t stay in them. They play the jazz clubs but wouldn’t have been sold a ticket to many of them. Later on, when Chico returns to Cuba just after the revolution, he is told that jazz is out of favour with Castro because it’s the music of the imperialist! When, of course, it was precisely the opposite...

I should mention that the ending made the woman sitting next to me cry, so – as a romance – it obviously succeeded with flying colours. But even if you wouldn’t normally dream of going to see a big-screen romantic movie, make an exception for Chico and Rita, unless you hate music. That’s the only reason you’d find this movie hard to enjoy.

Hidden Door

If you're anywhere near Edinburgh, don't miss Hidden Door at the Roxy Art House this weekend (full programme, details, cost etc. at the link). It's a huge event of genuine cultural significance. I'll be reading a few sets of poems, but I am only a tiny dot among 9 other poets, 10 film-makers, 30 bands, and 40 artists. Should be a fantastic event.

High School Musical

I am taking my daughter to see High School Musical tonight - not the movie, but the stage production at Edinburgh's Playhouse Theatre. Apparently all the kids dress up in HSM gear and sing/scream along to every word. I see no reason why I shouldn't share out my suffering, so:



vs.



Which is the best version?

Paint A Vulgar Picture

Happy 50th Birthday, Morrissey!

(the movie is Ray C. Smallwood's 'Camille' (1921)

StAnza 2009 - 'In Person' And 'Out Of His Head'

I went to the Saturday evening screening of the In Person highlights. It’s a book and DVD produced by Bloodaxe featuring the work of 30 poets. The DVD has over 6 hours of footage, but the big screen version lasts about an hour. Most of the poets are featured reading their work in their own homes. Neil Astley introduced the movie and gave us a few anecdotes on the process of filming.

I liked the big screen. I’m less sure I’d watch the DVD for any length of time in my home although I suppose I could watch a poem or two whenever I felt like it. The main impact on me was in remembering the range of poets Bloodaxe publishes from throughout the UK and all over the world. I loved some of the poems and appreciated the eclecticism. I wonder whether poets reading over short films interpreting their work (or poems interpreting contemporary silent shorts) might be an intriguing, although no doubt more expensive, use of the DVD format for the future.

From cinema to theatre: on the Sunday afternoon, I watched Kenneth Price’s one-man play, Out of his Head, on the life of W.S. Graham. For the first few minutes, I thought it was going to be overacted and annoying, but then I settled into it. In fact, it was very well done and gave an interesting overview of Graham’s life. It featured several poems, read theatrically – interesting, as it’s rare to see poems being read like that in real life, which is no doubt a good thing. However, this worked in the context of the play where the poems were woven into the biographical content.

Towards High School Musical 3

I haven’t yet seen High School Musical 3: Senior Year, but I’m not going to be able to put it off for much longer. My daughter (6) has the first two movies on DVD, knows all the songs, and now knows there’s a third movie at the cinema.

In some ways, it’s surprising that the movie appeals to tots. It’s set in a High School and the plot centres around the teen romance between Troy (Zac Ephron) and Gabriella (Vanessa Anne Hudgens) – not the kind of thing you’d expect a six-year-old to be interested in. But my daughter and all her friends are obsessed by it.

The plots in the first two movies are virtually identical, and both are full of holes. The dialogue is unreal and packed with cliché. But Disney’s publicity machine knew what they were doing. Gabriella is like the star princess little girls want to be – pretty, sensitive, straight-talking and a great singer and dancer – and Troy is the guy who manages to overcome even his friends’ disapproval for love of his woman – when faced with the choice of leading his team to basketball glory or singing with Gabriella in the school play, he chooses… both. Obvious, really, but not to his friends. Not to him for some time either – he has to overcome huge hurdles, believe me. The girls love him for doing the right thing.

But is Troy tall enough to be a basketball champion? Basketball players all appear to be about 7 ft. tall, but Troy seems about average height – I don’t know, 5 ft 10? And when Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale) makes her move on him in her typically cheesy way, why doesn’t he just tell her to get lost. He seems clueless, but maybe that’s another reason why the girls love him – he’s entirely un-manipulative.

Ryan, Sharpay’s twin brother, was portrayed as an idiot in the first movie, but becomes cool and sharp in the second movie, despite his daft hats. This dramatic change in character is almost as hard to accept as the fact that Gabriella is supposed to be a mathematical genius. She is never, at any time, believable as a genius. Of course, she doesn’t want to be that “weird math girl”, but someone should have told her that no one could have mistaken her for “weird” by any stretch of the imagination. She tells Troy that he makes her feel “just like a girl”, a line every guy wants to hear at least one in his lifetime. Gabriella is full of winning smiles and cute moves. Her voice is practically liquid.

Troy and Gabriella also prove that you don’t have to work too hard at being a star. The first time they meet each other, pulled from obscurity to duet in an end-of-year karaoke, they manage to sing in perfect harmony. Hey, they never realised before that they could sing. Gabriella has sung in a church choir. Troy had sung only in his shower. And yet they wow the crowd in three minutes flat. It’s magical, not something you practice or work at, but a gift. This could be you too, six-year-old! You can see how folk at the X-Factor and American Idol who’ve never sung a note in their lives are prepared to brave the TV cameras and the barbs of the judges – they never know, an unexpectedly angelic voice might just pop out by magic and propel them to stardom, like Troy and Gabriella.

So Troy gets his girl, he wins the audition, he captains the basketball team to the championship and scores the winning point in the last second of the game. What a hero! You couldn't have written the script, could you? Well, actually, you could have guessed it all, but at least you're never going to be disappointed or surprised.

One further reason why the movies have been so successful: most music aimed at primary school children is awful – bleepy electronic crap powered by horrible drum machines which sound like hangovers from the eighties. While High School Musical isn’t the kind of stuff that any self-respecting post-punk adult would listen to out of choice, the music is actually good. Disney must have picked up some very skilled songwriters and arrangers to write the soundtrack. In the first movie, particularly, every melody is strong. It’s not horrible to listen to. At least, it’s not horrible to listen to compared to the alternatives. And if you’re a parent having to listen to it about 20 million times, that counts for a lot. Again, Disney knew what they were doing.

If you haven’t seen this (i.e. if you don’t have any kids of the requisite age), here’s a song from the first movie. Sharpay and Ryan have performed their audition for the school show – a cheesy (everything they do is over-the-top), self-obsessed, egotistical rant about how they want to make it to the top by any means necessary. On come Troy and Gabriella to show them how it’s done. The other kids are soon on their feet dancing and applauding, Troy’s disaffected dad and Gabriella’s mum enter and you can just see that look of astonished pride in their eyes. And, of course, the happy couple really mean it. When they look into each other’s eyes, we’re all there with them, recapturing our own youth, our own missed opportunities, thinking, “that could have been me, if only I’d pulled Vanessa Anne Hudgens out on stage and sang my heart out to her at the age of 17.” I’ve heard that kids in the cinemas are passing round the tissues through sections of the new movie, such is the overload of sentiment as Troy makes the hard choice for his future beyond school – singing or basketball? Gabriella or his friends? What will he choose? Have we heard something like this before? Perhaps he will think back to this audition and win over his six-year-old fans yet again…

"Dig the Vacuum"

This clip is from a 1958 B-Movie, ‘High School Confidential’, which features the fascinating and mysterious Phillipa Fallon as a beat poet. Apparently, the guy playing piano is Uncle Fester from The Addams Family. One of the best things about it is the audience reaction. Look at those faces: the laughter, bewilderment, boredom and fizzing jealousy.

The Break-Out

Interesting extract from a conversation between architect, Hans Kollhoff, and filmmaker, Wim Wenders:

WW: All types of planning, by definition, are attempts to impose some kind of homogeneity, whereas for me a ‘city’ means the opposite of that. A city has to embrace contradictions, a city should be an explosive kind of a place.

HK: You have a similar problem in film, don’t you? A film, as I understand it, aspires to some kind of unity, but it also tends to want to burst at the seams.

WW: Yes, agreed. Just like every other kind of expression, a painting or poem or whatever. Everything aspires to that closed form, but excitement only happens when it breaks out, when something slips out of control. If everything is seamlessly whole, there’s no room to experience anything. That’s as true of films as anything else.

HK: Although perhaps unity is more easily achievable, so you need to be more wary of it…

Wenders is right to apply this specifically to poems.

Herring Song

How about a song to start the week? This is poet, Alexander Hutchison, caught on film by Frisian poet and film-maker, Elmar Kuiper, during the StAnza International Poetry Festival this March.

Kuiper made other short films at StAnza too, mainly using poetry, with:

Jim Carruth
Eleanor Livingstone
Brian Turner
Eddie Gibbons
Alexander Hutchison
Rab Wilson
Odveig Klyve

and here’s an experimental short he showed at the Leeuwarden Film Festival.

Future Primitive

Favourite Movies

C. E. Chaffin mischievously tagged me to set out my favourite movies of all time. I usually ignore tags, but thought I’d do this one. But this list is what came to mind today. A good third of it might change by tomorrow as more movies come to mind. I have seen a lot of movies in my life. These are in no particular order – titles and directors.


1. Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder)
2. The Maltese Falcon (John Huston)
3. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
4. Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch)
5. Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe)
6. Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair)
7. Crossing Delancey (Joan Micklin Silver)
8. L’Ora di Religione (Marco Bellocchio)
9. Amarcord (Federico Fellini)
10. L’Ultimo Bacio (Gabriele Muccino)
11. Lost Highway (David Lynch)
12. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch)
13. The Quiet American (Philip Noyce)
14. Abri Los Ojos (Alejandro Amenabar)
15. Cristo si è Fermato à Eboli (Francesco Rosi)
16. La Tregua (Francesco Rosi)
17. Ararat (Atom Egoyan)
18. Naked (Mike Leigh)
19. La Vita è Bella (Roberto Benigni)
20. Crimes and Misdemeanours (Woody Allen)
21. Raining Stones (Ken Loach)
22. Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch)
23. Betty Blue (Jean-Jacque Beineix)
24. True Stories (David Byrne)
25. Faraway, So Close (Wim Wenders)

If you are a David Lynch fan...

...and need poetic inspiration for the Christmas holidays, you could try writing something for a new anthology of poems based on Lynch's movies, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.

I have both movies on DVD and it's been a pleasure watching them again and reflecting on them. Every time I watch Lost Highway, I notice something that escaped my attention before - the number 26, the music playing on the garage radio, Mr Eddy's shift of identity - it's an astonishing conception.

The deadline for poems is 31 December. So not much time.