Category Archives: movies

Yesterday

Yesterday, I went and saw Yesterday with Mum. It’s a high concept film, which means the audience is invited to walk through one great impossibility in order to play around with a giant What If. In this case: What if you were the only person on earth who remembered the Beatles? What if every last trace of the band’s existence was wiped out in a 15-second cosmic glitch, leaving you, a struggling musician, with the memory of their entire back-catalogue? You could, perhaps, sing Yesterday and let everyone think you wrote it yourself.

Yesterday is a family-friendly rom-com that satisfyingly reaches a heart-warming and highly ethical conclusion. It is almost ridiculously wholesome. Watching this film about twenty-somethings communing with the pop music of their grandparents’ generation, it’s hard to believe that anything about the Beatles was once considered edgy. The playlist leans towards McCartney (“Yesterday”, “Let it Be”) over Lennon (there’s no “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” or “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”). In this movie, there’s actually a first kiss in which the girl says, “Oh! You’ve touched my bottom!”

While Yesterday is strictly feel good, it does push the envelope in its own way. Himesh Patel, a South Asian actor, is cast as the romantic lead, and this is presented as entirely unremarkable. There’s no explaining it, no tracing of origin or identity, no making anything of it at all. Jack Malik (Patel’s character) is just one of a group of twenty-something friends. While it’s no big deal in the movie, in the real world it is of course a big deal. The number of South Asian romantic leads in mainstream English movies might even be as low as one: Patel himself, in this one.

Patel’s presence – his unremarked but undeniable difference – gives the Beatles story a revivifying angle and some much-needed gravity. At the same time, Patel delivers an effortlessly believable, perfectly understated performance. A bit of a miracle happens: the over-familiar Beatles songs really do come back to life.

Just a word about The Girl. Jack’s love interest, Ellie (Lily James), never gets to be more than The Girl. That said, I still found aspects of their relationship interesting. Let’s not forget that the Beatles once wrote a song called “Run for Your Life”: I’d rather see you dead little girl/Than see you with another man little girl. While men and women have had valuable friendships since forever, it’s not something you see much in popular culture. But here, fifty years after “Run for Your Life”, we see Jack and Ellie in a serious discussion prior to imminent sexual activity. They’re talking about how they’re going to shake off that brother and sister feeling that results from having been friends for so long. We may have a pussy-grabbing leader of the free world, we may have a long way to go, but it’s also true that millions of young people really are working at treating each other respectfully. But as this is a rom com and as feminism has not quite played out in the way we might have anticipated back in the 80s, we must still return to a climax of wedded bliss, complete with a montage of adorable future children and dancing in the marketplace. Obla di la da.

So back to that what if. What if the Beatles had never existed, and a  young singer/songwriter – the sort who hones his craft in his bedroom replaying YouTube clips, not in bands in sweaty pubs – came along today who could write like Lennon and McCartney? There he’d be, uploading “Hey Jude” and “The Long and Winding Road” to Soundcloud and updating his insta. Would anyone notice? How much do works of art rely on their context, and how much can they stand on their own two feet? Maybe the answer is right there in that contorted metaphor. Maybe without a supporting context, a work of art can’t stand up at all.

The very existence of the Beatles themselves requires the confluence of countless facts and flukes: human evolution out of the primeval swamp, the history of Western Europe, industrialisation, the history of Liverpool, slavery, the invention of the radio, black music, Paul McCartney’s parents meeting each other and having children; Paul McCartney meeting with John Lennon at a fete in 1957, the particular skills of producer George Martin. “Eleanor Rigby” was sent out into the world on the crest of the wave that was the Beatles, a wave that only took that particular shape because of the (fleeting) world that created it and held it. Yes, it’s brilliant. But so are, and were, other songs. It was Eleanor Rigby that was able to reach out, lending her particular flavour to the idea of loneliness in our culture, because she had a spot on the crest of that particular, unrepeatable wave.

It makes me think of a discussion over dinner at the Varuna Writers Centre earlier this year. One of the poets told how someone had sent out a chapter of a Patrick White novel to a list of Australian publishers, without letting on the writer’s identity. The work, surprise surprise, was universally rejected. How disappointing that our publishers can no longer recognise genius! On the other hand, we also said, reading White today, knowing the context in which he wrote, would be very different to reading the same words if actually written today. If they were written today, you might think the work was strangely caught in the preoccupations of an earlier time, strangely unaware of its twenty first century audience. You might recognise beautifully crafted sentences but finally put the work to one side, regretfully, thinking that perhaps the time for this sort of thing had passed.

Perhaps. And yet.

The artist is always striving for work that takes leave of the ground it grew in. Art that comes at you directly, in words or images or sounds or movements so powerful that they seem to defy the normal rules of time and space, so unexpected when they first arrive, so fitting when they do that their creation seems inevitable.

There is the hope that a work of art can be better than, separate to, the miserable artist. Alice belongs in a different dimension, somehow, to the possibly pedophilic Lewis Carrol. Young Elvis is a luminous idea that persists despite the corporeality of Fat Elvis bingeing on hamburgers. It’s a trick, this separation, but it’s the artist’s only trick. Afterwards, the artist will put their name on the work, although this will never feel quite right, because they’ll suspect that they are only a conduit for bigger, longer-lasting, more important forces or perhaps they’re simply fashionable, or well connected. In Yesterday, the combination of joy and misery at having tricked the world is written all over Jack Malik’s face.

Yesterday‘s thesis is that great art can and should take leave of the mere artist; can and should go out into the world across time and space. The songs of the Beatles are so good that they are guaranteed to move people 50 years later, at first hearing, without explanation or back story. Brilliance will be seen, understood, duly rewarded, no matter what. In Yesterday, Jack Malik goes straight to the top. People are soon saying he’s the best songwriter in the whole world.

Interestingly, the original screenplay by Jack Barth starts with the same premise – the cosmic glitch that wipes out all memory of the Beatles – but reaches precisely the opposite conclusion: even the back catalogue of Beatles songs isn’t enough, by itself, to lift a struggling musician into fame and fortune. He’s quoted in The Australian saying: “My view was, even if I woke up and I was the only person to know Star Wars or Harry Potter, I probably wouldn’t be very successful with it because that’s kind of the way things have gone for me.” Once screenwriter Richard Curtis, king of the feel good and rom com (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones’s Diary) got on board, he reversed Barth’s premise, plumping for what he called “optimism”.

***

I was 16, and the year was 1980, before I heard a Beatles song all the way through, at least consciously. It might seem odd that something so culturally prevalent could have failed to reach my own corner of the Western world. We were living in a small town that only had ABC TV and radio, and neither ever played the Beatles, as far as I can remember. Our small collection of 45rpm singles included Creedence Clearwater Revival, Glen Campbell and Tom Jones, but no Beatles. If we went to a barbecue at someone else’s house, it was Middle of the Road’s “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” or perhaps, later at night when parents were drunk, the more soulful “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”. When Countdown arrived in 1975, my preteen sister and I were smitten. We watched every episode between 1975 and 1980 without exception. Skyhooks, ABBA, ACDC, The Clash, Blondie. But never a Beatles song. The Beatles were ancient history; Countdown was now. Maybe it’s not such a big deal that I got to 16 without hearing a Beatles song. We lived in our own niches, even then.

I was standing in the doorway between the living room and Mum and Dad’s bedroom when I heard a kind of organ piping, an intriguing sound and tone that I couldn’t place. I walked over and stood in front of the portable radio/tape player. The music was not like anything I’d heard before (not that I’d heard much, as you can see) and nor were the words.

Let me take you down
‘Cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever

Whoa! Who knew? A little bit of my soul was psychedelic, and this song was making it vibrate.

Context: John Lennon was inspired by the garden at Strawberry Field, the Salvation Army children’s home where he played as a child against the advice of his Aunt Mimi.

Work of Art: This context, this “real” garden, doesn’t for one moment explain the song’s Strawberry Fields, their mysterious, strawberry-coloured, dreamy energy. Context and work of art. Maybe one can pull free of the other.

In the ’80s I binged on the Beatles for a while. But I moved on pretty quickly. There were the share houses that always had Patti Smith’s Horses album in the milk crate beside the record player.

In writing this piece, I’ve been realising something weird. I’d always claimed to be a John girl, if asked (and perhaps something of a George girl). Paul was always considered a bit naff. But now I find I’ve changed my mind or at least opened up the door. I’m thinking about “Eleanor Rigby”, written by Paul with a little help from this friends, the song that Jack strains to remember in Yesterday.

Eleanor Rigby, picks up the rice
In the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face
That she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for

What is this? It’s fucking brilliant. It’s a sad song that can make things better. It deserves a long and decontextualised life.

Leave Matt Damon on Mars

tiny_orchid_chris_marshall

A tiny lily from Peel, near Bathurst. Pic: Chris Marshall.

There’s an awful lot going on, and all of it’s good, all of it’s about participating in Life with a capital L.

A couple of hours ago I got a text message from a nurse at Prof Harnett’s clinic. The entire text message was just two digits: a one and a zero. Ten. Ten! Brilliant! My lucky number relates to my CA125 level, an indicator of possible ovarian cancer activity. High numbers bad, low numbers good. Ten is a lovely low number.
In the run-up to this blood test I kept myself pantingly busy working on the 200 Plants and Animals exhibition which opened last Friday night. We had about 50 people at the launch. The exhibition, whipped into aesthetic line by Cate McCarthy, looked fabulous at about 4pm on Friday evening. Two hours to spare! I even had time to go home and have a shower and put a skirt on.

The exhibition is all about paying attention to where we live. Which is in a planetary system that appears robust but is actually caving, crumbling, subsiding, declining, getting warmer, losing bits of itself. The exhibition (which continues until 5pm next Sunday) explores the bit of the system that we’re inhabiting right here, right now – focusing on non-human living things. A hundred local plants, a hundred local animals all feature in the exhibition. The largest thing is the skull of a horse; the smallest is a tiny, tiny dead beetle. It includes my own bit of amateur biologising: a pressed dandelion from the back yard, and crocheted human brains (humans are included but only as the “one hundreth animal”). There’s a spotted marsh frog painting by the Hazzards; Mum’s pobblebonk; my friend Kirsty Lewin’s black cockatoo mask; lots of photos by Tim Bergen; bright pastels by Johannes Bauer who is both ecologist and artist; Ray Mjadwesch’s specimens including the dried remains of a sugar glider that died after being snarled in barbed wire; our old dog Taro; a glass-art cat with a chain saw. Mostly native animals and plants, but a few introduced species that share this habitat.

Working on this exhibition with the BCCAN committee and others in the team, my sense of this planet as a teeming, rich-in-every-corner thing has grown. I got angry with an ad for Mortein on television the other night. It seemed incredible to me that wholesale scorched-earth policies in private homes are allowed, willy nilly, along with anti-bacterial hand washes. Good to have in hospitals, but the idea of daily life in disinfected spaces now seems a lesser life.
Which brings me to Matt Damon on Mars with his potato plants fertilised by human dung. There he is in a superhuman struggle against the basic facts of life: our bodies were created and are supported by our one and only planet, with its air and water and animals and plants and seasons and sea and earth. And he wins. He works out how to “science the shit out of” his dire situation. The movie brims with an eager love of science, of figuring things out, trying things out, failing and trying again. I enjoyed that. It was also a long paean to NASA. I’m as much a fan of NASA as the next person, or maybe even more, having grown up next to one of the tracking stations that tracked the Gemini and Apollo missions.

But in these days of climate change and environmental destruction, such enthusiasm over humanity’s ability to shuck off the demands of our slow-evolving nature just makes me a little sad for us and for the planet we’re buggering up in the process. There we are, soiling our own nest, just waiting to take flight, get off into outer space, colonise distant planets, all in close-fitting Star Trek suits.

On television a few days later, there was the lame Revenge of the Sith, in which the vibrant world of the original Star Wars movie was oddly reduced to a cross between daytime soap and a computer game for kids. It was all smooth surfaces and whizzing things. Where were these beings growing their food, disposing of their waste? Where was biology in all this? (Okay, just Googled it. Star Wars does have its own biological objects and rules, according to Wookieepedia.) When James Cameron’s Avatar came out, I thought it might have been the beginning of a different type of futurism, one that explored the idea of living sustainably within an ecosystem. But Avatar was a one-off. The future, as imagined by Hollywood, still has a Jetsons quality (it’s the future, and you never see the Earth’s surface, let alone a single tree).I love science as much as the next person, or even more, having so far been saved by modern medical knowledge. But the idea that we can “science the shit out of” our environmental problems, including climate change, will not work on its own. I think it needs to be united with a profound acceptance of – and interest in – the limitations and workings of our own bodies and our own planet.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier – but why?

Just got back from seeing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy at the Metro Cinema, Bathurst. For me this was a visual and aural feast. That beautiful, liquid music. That mid-century aesthetic. The stirring burst of the Soviet anthem. The art department’s amazing attention to detail. The scuffedness of things. The wallpaper, the corridors, the types of shoes and socks.  I had a pure nostalgia hit just looking at the swirl of colour on the balloons at the spies’ Christmas party. There’s a photo of me as a tiny child holding a balloon just like that. Do they still make them?

It was nice to be back in the Cold War again – so much more attractive and comprehensible than whatever we’re doing in Iraq or Afghanistan. And nobody ever did a particular type of mid-century aesthetic better than the Soviet sphere of influence.

I loved the slowness. I lapped it up. Nothing like a bit of slowness as an antidote to Hollywood’s blaring cues and cuts. The actors were so instantly inside their characters – all intriguing, deftly differentiated characters – that you forgot all about the acting and went back to enjoying the experience. I loved the frankness about people being old or ugly – Smiley getting his eyes tested, an older woman spy making zero attempt at attractiveness – without making more of it than necessary.

This is a gorgeous, stylish, film and I never stopped enjoying it – in fact I’d happily see it again, listen to that soundtrack again. But there is a problem with it, which is that below its flawless skin, is there actually a beating heart? It feels like there’s a beating heart, but that’s not the same. I watched, knowing that at some point we’d find out which one of these interesting, haunted Englishmen was working for the Other Side. The problem was – it was hard to care or even wonder too much about which one. Maybe that’s the difference between making the film back in the 1970s, when it still all meant something, and doing it now, when it’s about a good wallow in the beauty of another time – because another time always becomes beautiful; nostalgia works like that; the hipster aesthetic works like that. (And I’m as sucked in as the next person.) Or maybe it’s because the art department was ultimately allowed to trump storytelling.

One of the characters actually says this, more or less. Explaining why he became a traitor to his country, he said it was an aesthetic choice, as much as anything. Really? Is an aesthetic sensibility really enough to live or die for? Maybe it is, but if it is, maybe we could have heard more about it.

Speaking of one of the characters speaking – another thing that bothered me was that nobody had a decent conversation in the whole film. What we’d get is a beautiful location, a beautiful set of stairs to go up, a perfect bit of spy-going-upstairs music, the arrival, two words exchanged and then on to the next scene and repeat. There were some exceptions to this rule but I found myself longing for a bit more time at the destination. Arrgh. Why don’t you let people speak once they’ve gone to all that trouble to get up the stairs? And if you’ve gone to so much trouble to evoke a past time, right down to the smoke-fug in every room, why not evoke a little of the conversation of that past time?

I came of age in the last years of the Cold War, when it seemed to stretch back forever and forwards forever. It was a time when you’d arrive on campus straight after high school and be surrounded by people who wanted to talk until three in the morning about socialism, capitalism, feminism, sexuality, utopianism, whether Judaism was a race or a religion, and you read the books and had the discussions and then tried to go out and live according to whatever bracing principles you’d just adopted, because it actually felt like it mattered. And people are still doing similar things today – note the Occupy movement, raving on to each other all night, in tents. Some are even hipsters.

But Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is too stylish to get bogged down in ideas, and too stylish to do more than lightly suggest a story of betrayal and terrifying choice.

Anyway, it’s a beautiful film, worth seeing and hearing – but don’t get fooled into believing it’s more than it actually is.

Why Up In The Air is crap

I would happily enjoy watching George Clooney do just about anything, so I won’t say I didn’t enjoy this film. I loved its early style and clipping pace, the montages of airport life, the two characters having lively conversations about hire cars and air miles. And the corporate scenes were good. Then it just slides away into Hollywood blancmange.

  • Treats us like idiots. For example, the older sister says “this is your one chance to make it up to her” (the younger sister). Yes! We see that! It’s bleeding obvious. You don’t have to spell it out.
  • Horrible conservative message drummed home ie happily married family life as pretty close to the meaning and goal of life. The Clooney character makes the point, early on, that not everyone wants to do the marriage thing. There are different paths in life. He says everyone dies alone, so don’t be with someone just because you don’t want to die alone. But the film offers Stalinism: marriage good, unmarried ba-a-ad. And then piles it on thick at the end with a voice-over actually telling us the moral of the story.

Thank God for the antidote, the Coen Brothers and Tim Burton.