14 January 2010
There really isn’t much to add about Billie Jean that wasn’t mentioned in Tom’s excellent piece for Popular, or indeed in this Freaky Trigger & The Lollards Of Pop episode where we heard Jackson’s slightly ramshackle unformed demos of the song. So I will give you the one thing that always made me wary of Billie Jean, bar it being on an album that my family had already dismissed for being “silly”. The name. Who is called “Billie Jean”?
So in lieu of saying anything about Billie Jean, here are some other prominent Billie Jeans, or Billies Jeans.
Billie Jean King: Probably the most famous Billie Jean, and almost certainly the most important female tennis player of all time. But was Michael Jackson a big tennis fan. It would certainly make sense when Mike says she is not his girl though, by 1983 she had been outed. Certainly if Mike chose the name to honour her, he would have been way ahead of the US: she did finally receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama last year. But apparently Quincy Jones (who never liked Billie Jean anyway) wanted to change the name of the song because he though people would think it would be about Billie Jean King.
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Pete Baran in FT • No Comments
8 January 2010
Sherlock Holmes does give the reviewer plenty of options on the Holmes based puns. In probing the homoerotic subtext we even get the Guardian crying about Holmesophobia (nice work – cheers). And all of this is hung on some sort of idea that the film either is, or isn’t, faithful to the source and that this is important. My take on this is as follows:
a) It is not important
b) It is not that faithful
c) It is as faithful as other versions
d) It is very entertaining.
And d) is what matters right? So what has surprised me in reading reviews, particularly British reviews, that fiathfulness to the book be damned. FAITHFULNESS TO LONDON is to be demanded. And whilst much has been said about them capturing a certain kind of grimy historical Victoriana, they lose every humanities brownie point for all of its assaults on geography. more »
Pete Baran in Do You See • 9 Comments
7 January 2010
I vaguely remember Where The Wild Things Are as a kid. I don’t think it was a sanctioned kids book in my house, and there was a very small window for picture books to flourish before I went for the word only hard stuff. But I so remember leafing through it at a friends (clearly being disapproving*) and wondering why there was a boy dressed as a wolf with a crown on playing with these giant creatures. And why didn’t they eat him.
All the way through the film of Where The Wild Things Are I kept wondering, why don’t they eat him. Seriously, he is fucking annoying. Of course the reason they don’t eat him (or indeed eat anything through the film) is they are a bunch of BIG EMO WILD THINGS, too worried about being sad and lonely rather than noshing down on some fine kiddie snack. Max, who is the little bundle of ten year old rage, may not have much good eating in it, but even so the decision to make him their king, rather than dinner, seems perverse. Why only the other day I decided not to eat a bit of fish that looked a bit off. I did not however bow down to it, and make a giant camp cum World War 1 trench system at its behest. Admittedly it wasn’t asking. more »
Pete Baran in Do You See / FT • 4 Comments
4 January 2010
So here’s the last batch, from March onwards where ones new Years Resolutions start drifting away. And rather than great, or bad movies, these are all a bit of both, rather reliable and stolid rather than stuff worth writing about. All films i would recomend people saw without out trying to tell them that they are the best film ever. You know, the bread and butter of the film industry, even if they all potentially offered a lot more.
Watchmen: One of my favourite movie going experiences of 2009, merely because it made good one of my other New Years Resolutions. Namely I saw it with a lot of people. I think about eight of use sat in a prime location in a packed Vue Islington, and enjoyed watching a comic we had all read being turned into a film which was nearly exactly like the comic we had all read. And in retrospect, what more did we want? We all came out with very few complaints, we all agreed that the one significant change (SQUID) made lots of sense and then also agreed that Watchmen is Ok but not the best thing ever anyway. In a year that I would characterise for its excellent credit sequences, Watchmen had one of the best, a masterclass is effortless world building. more »
Pete Baran in Do You See / FT • 9 Comments
28 December 2009
Three more unreviewed. Two good one TERRIBLE. From which I think you are starting to get the view that I really like writing about mediocre films, or films that almost made it. Find me an interesting flaw and I will be all over you like a badger with binbag (full). Make a film I really liked, I want to keep that to myself. Which, as noted regarding Frozen River below, I really shouldn’t do.
District 9: Sometimes there is no point to writing about a film. Usually there is something interesting to say, or at least some sort of critical dialogue, but with a film like District 9 all the interesting angles are really obvious. So Blah blah – apartheid analogy, blah blah alien invasion, blah blah low budget Peter Jackson. Even the interesting stuff I though I was the only one to notice was quickly battered to death by the media. more »
Pete Baran in Do You See / FT • No Comments
24 December 2009
My new years resolution in 2009 was to review every film I saw in the cinema that year. That came to 114 films (so far) of which I managed to say at least something about 97 of them. So over the next few year ending days I will run down the films I did not review, with a general thought, and perhaps an explanation why they ended up being unwritten about. It soon turns out that it wasn’t necessarily due to them being unloved.
So working in reverse order, based on the theory that the most recent films I have had less time to write about… more »
Pete Baran in Do You See / FT • 1 Comment
15 December 2009
Indeed it is a perfectly fine movie, telling a terrific backstage story with a central capture of a young Welles which tells you a hell of a lot more about the man than any trad biopic would. The film comes on like a Woody Allen period piece, with an eye (and ear) for period detail but filmed on a pretty closed set for budget and story reasons. This is a backstage story you can imagine taking place down the street from Bullets Over Broadway, and shares a generous sense of humour with that film, whilst managing to do Orson Welles the kind of justice that a grand biopic couldn’t do. Indeed Citizen Kane contains within it the best reason not to make such a film about Welles, and not just his own talent for self deceits and fakery. And what better way to discover who Welles really was, but with a fake story starring Zac Efron.
Efron does his job well here, he is pretty, he is a proper male lead which allows Christian McKay to do his extremely impressive Welles. Clearly there is some impersonation here, but there is more of a sense of quicksilver wit, of capricity of a very clever man before the world had battered him into submission. Showing that even at his high point what an egomaniac he was, whilst showing why everyone wanted to work with him and even a sense of the man whose last film would be Transformers The Movie. more »
Pete Baran in Do You See / FT • 1 Comment
30 November 2009
You’d think that “Wanna Be Startin Somethin” would be the ideal way to open a movie about Michael Jackson. In This Is It, though — patched together from four or five rehearsals for the 50-concert extravaganza which famously never took place — Jackson just sort of shuffles to it, stiffly, barely dancing, like a Frankenstein parody of Bill Cosby’s own parody of dancing. I wondered if I had wandered into a Kraftwerk concert film by mistake. That hip shake looked seriously Teutonic.
“Good God,” I thought to myself, licking my lips from a shoe-leather and cardboard sandwich gleaned from the Trocadero’s downstairs Subway sandwich stall. Had this all been a terrible mistake? Not just my decision to see what had become of MJ, but MJ’s own decision to find out the same thing. It turned out — not at all. more »
Tracer Hand in Do You See / FT • 1 Comment
Saw New Moon tonight. Survived the emoness of the film, though was disappointed by the halfhearted emo-ness of the soundtrack. Yes Death Cab For Cutie, yes Lykke Li, and how you managed to get proto-emo Thom Yorke on the soundtrack I don’t know. But what they really wanted was a thematic soundtrack by one band only. And there is one band who have already written a soundtrack for this more lupine entry of the Twilight saga. And that band obviously being Duran Duran. So the soundtrack as it should have been:
New Moon On Monday – only totally relevant if you see it on a Monday but New Moon On Sunday also works,
Girls On Film – for when Bella gets her camera as a birthday gift. Its digital but how could Le Bon have predicted that?
Ordinary World – What Edward wishes for Bella when he leaves. more »
Pete Baran in Do You See / FT • 5 Comments
26 November 2009
There is a sequence in Werner Herzog’s Encounters At The End Of The World, where we see the Camp McMurdo safety training procedure. There is a large proportion of it that involves people wearing buckets (which the recruits have painted happy smiling faces on) on their heads to simulate the complete lack of visibility caused by a whiteout, a storm where literally all you can see is snow. Its a well shot sequence, funny without ever losing the edge of danger.
There is a similar sequence in Whiteout, the South pole crime thriller whose trailers pretended it was potentially a horror film. In the Whiteout sequence the camp Doctor gets some newbies to take their jackets off outside, to explain to them how quickly the cold will effect them. There are no happy smiling faces on buckets, just a man vaguely injuring people to tell them how much they would be killed if they were to do something as stupid as what HE TOLD THEM TO DO. It is symptomatic of Whiteout’s stupidity more »
Pete Baran in FT • 1 Comment
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