Rick Caine has been running the gauntlet of controversy across the documentary festival circuit this summer with his latest production Manufacturing Dissent. Sirring the pot first at South By South West and then Toronto’s Hot Docs, it's an acerbic look at the work of Michael Moore. Intended to explore what made a cine idol tick, along this journey Caine and his co-director Debbie Melnyk discovered that behind Moore's everyman malcontent facade lies a ruthless technique of self-creation. One that has left reeling friendships and burnt bridges, never mind a body of work stained by half truths bent for effect and out of context interview splicing. Caine, now based in Toronto where we caught up with him at the recent Hot Doc's Festival, is far from a neo-con detractor. His work is less a critique of Moore's politics than of his method, he simply believes power shaking documentarians must cling to a truth ethic or risk blowing their own foundations, and worse that of those sharing their views.

Do you think the world of documentaries has benefited from phenomenon that was Michael Moore at blockbuster level?

Yes, of course. Documentaries now play side by side with formulaic Hollywood fare in many cities and suburbs right across the world now. Michael Moore has played no small part in this documentary renaissance. His breakthrough documentary Roger & Me was the first time that a documentary was released outside of the traditional "art house" documentary ghetto. Of course wider audiences are interested in these kinds of films, but Hollywood has traditionally had the distribution channel sown up.

How has Hollywood sown up the distribution channel and can documentaries do much to challenge this?

At any given time 92% of the films showing across the world are American Hollywood films. There is of course much yet till to be done to break this monopoly and documentaries have no small role to play in this regard. And for documentaries, as a genre, it is ironically the best of times the worst of times. Michael Moore is amongst those on the best of time side of the equation.

His last film, Fahrenheit 9/11, had a production budget of US$6 million. The film grossed $125 million in the US and about $220 million worldwide. By any objective measure a remarkable and unprecedented accomplishment. But I also say that it is the worst of times because Hollywood still so thoroughly dominates the box office that we are currently in a situation where one can go to film festivals and see remarkable documentaries but all-too-frequently they will not be coming to a theater near you. Instead we will continue seeing Spiderman 3, Shrek 3, and on and on.

So while documentaries are struggling to escape the ghetto, Hollywood continues to fill theaters with entertaining, unchallenging, vacuous fare that audiences can choose to see or not go to the movies. It is still rare where there is any other option. But Michael Moore is among a select group of documentary filmmakers who are making progress in changing this dynamic. And we who believe think that once audiences get a taste of something else out there, that genie won't be put back in that bottle again.

So what is it that documentary making does better than your standard Hollywood fare?

One thing documentary filmmaking does incredibly well is that it can share the human experience of one person with other human beings, bringing us all closer together and strengthening our human bond. From a PR standpoint documentaries are a nightmare because PR is interested in only a one-sided truth, the white lie. Whereas documentary filmmaking aims to expose lies and not make them. But PR and advertising are interested in only the positive spin: Toxic sludge is good for you, light cigarettes don't cause cancer and you can eat almost nothing but bacon and lose weight (the Atkins diet).

And because we live in a world full of these white lies and one-sided truths, fuelled by big budget advertisers and well funded special interests we are all hungry (starved!) for the unvarnished truth. I have a friend that says the truth ain't couth but as we all have heard it can also set you free.

What is it that makes a documentary such a potent political tool as a purveyor of truths?

Immediacy, portability and the power of images. The medium, documentary filmmaking, is inherently powerful. Marshal McLuhan said the medium is the message. We've all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, and this was written before the advent of the moving image. Documentary filmmakers are able to use feature filmmaking techniques to examine the messiness that is humanity, all the while with images trumping words, very powerful stuff. We don't write about the Iraq War, we take you to the front line. We don't describe the suffering of someone who has lot their son in war, we capture and then show you the experience and allow any audience to experience it first hand.

Another reason documentary filmmaking is such a powerful tool is it's portability. Al Gore can only be lecturing about the threat posed by global warming/climate change in one place at one time. But with a film his message is instantly accessible now and forever. And watching a film is a communal experience. Unlike passive Hollywood films that entertain but don't provoke thought or action, documentaries can stir the masses to action. Sometimes when documentaries end the discussion and action is just getting started.

Always bear in mind that no matter how passionately you feel about any given social/political issue your values are not worth selling out just to make a point or to manipulate or mislead your audience into agreeing with you. The end does not justify the means. Do you think it's wrong to lie? Then don't do it. If you think it's important to treat others the way you'd like to be treated? Then don't take interview subjects out of context.

If a filmmaker chooses to tell the truth so many of these other things take care of themselves, including using the power instead of abusing it. It is occasionally painful to adhere to strict compliance with things like decency, fairness and truth but by disregarding these kinds of restraints the filmmaker ultimately does himself, his audience and sometimes his cause a disservice.

So with Michael Moore in mind, what are the consequences of the abuse of this documentarian power?

Part of the contention of our film is that when Michael Moore lies he gives the opposition a club with which they can bash everyone on Moore's side. "See they don't care about the truth. See they don't want honest political debate." If we think that the US president lying to the American public is not the way forward, how can we believe that the solution is having the opposition lie as well. Two wrongs don't make a right.

The title of the movie is a nice play on a Chomsky book title, after this movie will your aim remain on mainstream media shenanigans as it has with Junket Whore's expose of entertainment journalists lick arse relationship to PR and the Citizen Black portrait of media baron Conrad Black's cataclysmic fall?

Our next film is going to be fiction, but still in the same vein. It's about Lester Bangs, co-founder and music critic of Creem Magazine. Now he is the polar opposite of Michael Moore. He couldn't help telling the truth, he had an almost childlike honesty and was hated by many bands because he was so honest about their music. He died of an unintentional drug overdose at age 33.

How did the movie move from being a biography of Moore to a critique?

We always hoped that Michael Moore would cooperate in our look at him. Being political fellow travellers and Canadian and we'd heard thru friends that he liked the channel we'd been commissioned by to take a look at him, CHUM Television. So when Michael Moore's people began giving us such a hard time on a certain level we couldn't believe it. It was about this same time, approximately 4 months into our filming that we really started to struggle with our original concept and we felt we were at a crossroads. We began asking ourselves are we non-fiction (documentary) filmmakers or or we just going to stick with this sort of official biography about Michael Moore?

So when we hit this fork in the road we felt that morphing the project and going a different direction felt more like the truth than our original concept. So we changed it. But I have to say this is part of what we really love about non-fiction filmmaking. If one sets out in search of a story and it turns out to be something different then you're free to follow it. When we discovered so many skeltons in the closet, we felt we had no other choice than to turn it into an examination or critique of his methods and techniques and what the implications are not just for documentary filmmaking but for society.

We realized that when Michael refused to do an interview we would also have to follow him around to try and get any footage of him and soundbites to use in the film. We didn't expect his team to be bullies. When we realized what they were doing, trying to stop us from doing our film, we thought we should include it in the film because in a way, by showing the behind the scenes of a documentary we were getting at another level of truth. We couldn't believe when we got kicked out of Kent State and we thought others would find it shocking as well. We also felt at a certain point that documentaries should expose lies and not tell them. And if they chose to lie then they are part of the problem and not part of the solution. We regard this as the crucial issue of our time. We all want to live in well functionng democracies. That in turn is dependent upon a well informed electorate. And that depends on media that chooses not to lie and mislead the public. The horrific implications of this are obvious when one looks at how FOX News covered the lead up to the Iraq War. They don't even try to hide it. Roger Ailes was the head of the republican party and then he is runningand then he is running FOX News, doesn't get any more obvious than that. Fair and balanced my ass.

Before seeing this movie people might paint you as a neo-con detractor, didn't Fox News try and use you like this only to get a swift surprise?

FOX News assumed when they read about our film that we were in agreement with their agenda, which we aren't, and they also erroniously assumed that even if we weren't political fellow travellers that they could still use us to expose Michael Moore. For them the equation is really simple: If Michael Moore is wrong then ergo we must be right.

So in the lead up to our film premiering at the SXSW Festival several FOX News shows, both TV and radio, were chasing us insisting on interviews. We didn't want FOX to own the story and so we declined all requests from them. But then once the film had premiered at SXSW and other major media outlets had done interviews with us like CNN and MSNBC we agreed to go on a FOX News show because it had the name "Live" in the title (The Live Desk with Martha McCallum or something like that.) But we were cut off in short order after I starting discussing how some major news organisations, hello FOX, were not telling the American public the full truth and how that was causing problems for democracy and I remember I heard them in the IFB I had in my ear screaming "Get that asshole off the air."

Just after they pulled the plug (we were interviewed remotely and not in their New York studios) the cameraman looked at me and said "They had a five minute segment planned, but I think it run just under two minutes." "That was my fault," I said, "Guess they didn't want to hear what I had to say." From my point of view though this was a good thing. Where the right-wing U. S. media had been all over us now the only right leaning members of the U. S. media who called was because they wanted to argue with me, which I have done on their radio programs and what not.

Labels: Film, Hot Docs, Interviews, Politics

Hot Docs Interview and Review: Punk The Vote

As that post-Seattle wave of protest fades into memory and piss poor re-enactments, one of it's lasting cultural hangovers is the activist flick. One only has to think of the cinematic vision entailed in The Corporation's systemic critique of the profit motive to see the activist flick genre done well, working as both a propagandizing tool for the politics of horizontal practice adopted by social movements in countries as disperse as Bolivia and India it also incubated Utopian hopes for the west.

Punk The Vote is Roach from Eye Steel Films meandering attempt to expose the theatrics of a Montreal political process that cared little for the poverty he experienced in his youth leading him to run in the municipal elections. He presents the audience with a rather strange exposition of anarchist politics, intimately linking them to the punk sub-culture and a youthful rebellion he himself embraced, doing every bit the disservice of a mainstream media pre-summit hatchet job.

Roach's technique is loud and brash, mostly based on the eccentricities of his ego which he constantly pushes to the fore of the movie sacrificing both serious political critique for comic interludes and up front "punk as fuck" antics that rely on a cliched anarchist aesthetic. The movie ends up being a simply executed argument for proportional representation, which Roach confuses with direct democracy.

It is only as Roach is drunk on stage at a DIY show the end of his election run do we uncover that the actual purpose of the movie was to promote the homelessnation.org site, which acts like a brilliant online soap box for the homeless.

So without purpose, the movie ends up being a very apt encapsulation of what happens when activists touch elections - they eventually drift from their original movement concern to play the hodge podge game of media whore-dom. Confusing a drift to the centre of the political spectrum with political maturity all the while insisting on their own radical merit. I expected so much more from this. Anyway, I still managed to catch up with Roach for a short interview about the movie..

Not many people in Europe will have heard of the film Squeegee Punks In Traffic (SPIT) - can you tell me something about it and how you yourself got into film making through it?

Ok... Well SPIT is the film about my life in the street. I met Daniel Cross (director of SPIT) back in 1998. He told me he was looking for a street kid to document this world (he had done "The Street: A film with the homeless" before and I knew he was a filmmaker and what kind of work he was making). So we talked and left for the civil disobedience against the MAI : Multi-lateral agreement on Investments. So I got arrested at this civil disobedience and when I got out of jail, Daniel gave me a Hi-8 camera, that became the ROACHCAM, and told me he was going to teach me film-making.

Daniel is a University teacher in film making. So we started the film around the streets. I was in the process of getting out of drugs and out of the streets and needed a passion to quit all this and find a new life. Daniel gave me this passion through film-making. If I would have never met Daniel and Mila (cameraman of SPIT) I would have been dead.

So SPIT: Squeegee Punks In Traffic, is a documentary about me, as a street junkie who finds a passion in cinema, quits drugs and get off the streets and become a filmmaker.

How does "Punk the Vote" relate to your previous film making efforts?

I don't completely understand this question (don't forget I am francophone) but PUNK THE VOTE is an evolution in my career. I did SPIT as an associate-director, then I did ROACHTRIP my first film as a director. This film was about me traveling across Canada with my friend Smash (who was in SPIT) and it is a kind of road movie/documentary... And now here I am with PTV.

PTV for me is a film that had to be made for me. I am an activist, strongly politicized and fighting against this system since I am 14 years old. So it was just a natural shift I made, but it is also the best film I made in my career. I am really proud of the political experience I had and the result: "Punk The Vote". I think I am getting better and better and it will continue that way with my next film, which is about police harassing people of the streets and the effects of jailing and criminalizing those people.

How did you conceive of the "punk the vote" campaign was it as an excuse to make a movie or was it a political idea in and of itself?

It was actually an evolution. The film I wanted to do was called: "DIY: the Montreal hardcore-punk scene" but the grants were not coming in and people who funded films in Canada were kind of scared about this film. So when I met Starbuck, he told me he ran in 2 elections and was planning on running in the next federal election (because our government was hit with a sponsorship scandal in Canada and we knew the Liberals were going out and that we were going in election). So a new idea started in my mind and then I wrote this film... I wasn't even suppose to be in front of the camera but when it comes to politics, I just can't shut up. So I went to Astral Media ( a TV broadcaster) and pitch the film, and I just jumped into the unknown world of Canadian politics (because I didn't know shit about how the Canadian electoral system worked).

Were you aware of a similar effort in the United States with quite the few underground punk bands endorsing a campaign called "Punk The Vote" during the recent 2004 election that tried to get young people out to vote?

Yes I was aware, it was called "punk voter" but was not at all inspired by that. It was inspired by Liberal party corruption and the need for electoral change.

A lot of your movies start off as one thing, for instance Punk The Vote starts as a movie about Starbuck and ends up dealing with issues of representative democracy - are you conscious of these evolutions while making the movies or do you only come upon them while editing them?

No it is all natural... It arrives that way while we shoot. Don't forget that it is documentary and not fiction... What you see happened for real. Also the fact that I fought for proportional representation of the votes is also my ideology and I was in front of camera fighting that so of course it is the big fight of the movie, it was my whole program and the film is about campaigning. But things just happened that way.

You seem to associate punk with rebellion and political radicalism, do you think it is more so than other sub-cultures and if so why?

I don't get the question).. but punk is not unknown to provocation, social denunciation and revendicate (is that a word, in French it is). So yes I will always do that and my film will always say that I guess, we are here to demand change!

The film makes plenty use of anarchistic imagery and rhetoric, but ends up as an argument for representative democracy over the traditional anarchist desire for direct democracy - how can you explain this gap between image and idea?

Huh??? I don't get it either.... I am an anarcho-Communist punk, and I believe in the people, not the power or profit. I am no politician, I am a filmmaker and an activist and I will always be there to fight against the injustice. Workers, poor and oppressed should all become one and take over this system. I believe that the working class are the deciders, and we should be the ruling class. I am no anarchist, I believe a lot in communism. That's why I am an anarcho-communist. But I really don't understand your question.

By the end of the movie you seemed quite close to the New Democratic Party, has this relationship not developed further and would the experience of electorally minded social democratic parties like New Labour in the UK and elsewhere not signal the dead end of reformism?

I still don't understand... But I had join the NDP 2 weeks ago, a year after I ran. I will never go with the party line, I will always use my freedom of speech. Even if the leader, Jack Layton tell me to shut up, I won't. We live in a democracy, and a country where freedom of speech is encouraged, so I will keep that freedom. Parties are less democratic than democracy itself. That is why I ran as an independent and that I will resign from the NDP if I am being told to shut up. I will never stop to say what I have to say and to attack my enemies, politicians!

Labels: Film, Hot Docs, Politics, Punk, toronto

# posted by antrophe @ 8:39 PM

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Hot Docs: Indie Cinema Orgy

The annual Hot Docs Festival took place from April 19th to 29th earlier on this year in Toronto, and some version or other of the following material may be familiar to you from coverage published in the latest Totally Dublin...

Before Morgon Spurlock's grease laden death diet and Michael Moore's spot-on vendetta against neo-conservative America were banking the big bucks as blockbusting summer successes, documentaries dealing with the hot topics of contemporary controversy were relegated to the art-house cinema and the rather infrequent silver-screen orgy of the film festival. For fourteen years now the Toronto Hot Docs festival has been setting the pace for the current explosion of socially minded documentaries, ripping through the mold to become one of North America’s largest documentary festivals.

This year it hosted over 129 films on a hectic ten day run, showcasing not just the North American but global documentary film making efforts that will filter down to the indie cinemas over the next year, or at the very least through your home broadband connection. In short, as Sean Farnel the festivals Director of Programming told me, it has “emerged from what was essentially an industry conference to one of the world’s largest documentary events.”

Compared to the quite aficionado only ambiance of most film festivals, Hot Docs is a bustling mess of crowds and queues. With over 70,000 admissions to this years assorted flicks, a "no guaranteed entry" system is compounded by the usual hesitation of buying expensive festival wide tickets. With rush lines stretched well beyond the norm at all weekend screenings, chasing seats became an adrenalinising experience all of its own.

The ground for the festival madness is laid through Toronto's envied year long indie-cinema culture, DIY theatres like the Brunswick screen three left of centre documentaries a day, leading to what Farnel terms "a very engaged, curious and open audience" in the city. Reflecting this mass documentary culture, Ron Koperdraad a coordinator for the festival over saw 250 volunteers who "mostly did it out of a love for documentaries, but also for the social reasons."

The audience award went to War/Dance, directed by Andrea Nix Fine it’s a look inside the lives of three orphans in an Ugandan displacement camp who find expression through the country’s national music and dance festival. Best International Documentary winged its way to Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken’s tale of globalisation's Losers and Winners, a close up of the dismantling of a German smelting plant and its reassembly in China’s growing industrial hubs.

The festival also featured the debut of Morgan Spurlock’s latest look at our modern consumer shopapacyalpse in What Would Jesus Buy? Hooking up with long term icon of the no-brand, counter culture Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, he documents the cack handed Christians attempt to save Christmas from commercialism.

Gary Hustwit's Helvitica, due a Candy Culture Sugar Club screening on June 28th, examines the rise of a typeface as the embodiment of post-war values and their eventual inertia, crippled at the hands of post-modern concerns, creating a social history where no one thought possible.

Film fascination with favella poverty continued in the Made in Brazil programming stream. Kiko Goifman's Acts Of Men delivered a cooly executed jaunt into the criminal economy, with the massacre of 29 people by local death squads in the Baixada Fluminense township setting the background for impulsive interviews with the power players in one neighborhood's deadly games.

This South American concern was furthered in Arturo Perez Torres' Super Amigos, a comic portrayal of the real life super heros emerging from the Mexican popular classes obsession with luche libre, a theatrical wrestling satirized in Jack Black's Nachos Libre. In the social war against crippling poverty, movement heroes like Super Barrio and Super Gay have become unique icons of dissent and community organisation, warding off both landlords and homophobes.

If one director and film at the festival highlighted the transformative role of the documentary lens it was the formerly homeless street-punk Roach Denis and Punk The Vote. Roach's own life was the subject matter of the Daniel Cross classic Squeege Punks in Traffic. Intertwining biography with a critique of a Conservative governments brutal harassment of a new generation of homeless kids earning a buck cleaning windscreens at intersections, Cross provided Roach with a route out "I was in the process of getting out of drugs and out of the streets and needed a passion to quit all this and find a new life. Daniel gave me this passion through film-making."

Ten years later Roach is a well known filmmaker retaining the conviction he picked up on the streets. "Inspired by Liberal party corruption and the need for electoral change" he examines the theatrics of a Montreal political process that cares little for the poverty he experienced in his youth and runs in the municipal elections leading to " a film that had to be made. I am an activist, strongly politicized and fighting against this system since I was 14 years old. So it was just a natural shift I made, but it is also the best film I made in my career."

Hot Docs is critically minded to the core and a series of festival panel discussions wrenched into the existential heart of the documentary method to explore interviewing technique, political power and directorial responsibility. This tension was exemplified perfectly by the ultimate buzz movie of the festival, Rick Caine's portrayal of Michael Moore in Manufacturing Dissent.

Some selected shorts by young directors featured in the Doc It Showcase are now available for viewing online.

Labels: festival, Film, Hot Docs, toronto

# posted by antrophe @ 5:51 AM

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Monday, June 11, 2007

Chinese Rock and Movies At NXNE

Alongside panel discussions on how bands can grind the best use out of their myspace, the NXNE organisers put on a sequence of movies related to the industry over at the Toronto Film Board Building. Kevin Fritz's Wasted Orient was a quick paced look into disaffected youth in modern China, going on the road with Joyside the director documents the Chinese punk scene in all its drunken apathy as it turns its back on society with anthems like "Johnny Rotten" and "I Want Beer" that celebrate a nihilism born out of a hunger for western culture. Rock and roll as they described it is an "addiction to chaos," most of this hour long flick was spent in pursuit of getting trashed with all the skills of four Chinese Pete Dohertys.

Don Lett's George Clinton: Tales of Dr. Funkenstein used people influenced by the king of funkedelic like Macy Grey, Andre 3000 and some dude from Digital Underground to look at how that mothership of funk landed and a movement grew from barber shop quartets to mass funk freakouts of 70 or more contributers. Reaching well back, the best movie of the sequence had to be Living the Blues - an intimate portrait of a group of elderly blues musicians that remembers the racism and poverty of their depression era youth, the very period when they first got the blues as a "teller of truths."

Labels: festival, Film, Music, NXNE, toronto

# posted by antrophe @ 6:53 PM

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Sunday, May 13, 2007

Film Review: This Is England, This Is Masterful

The first obvious thing to do when reviewing a film or book is to take an interest in the director or author. To interrogate their past and look for associations between their personal life and the hidden message that you feel is contained within their work. More often than not the association is not there but constructed for the sake of pluralizing interpretation. I am usually the first one to declare the death of the author, and try to concentrate on the work itself but for Shane Meadows ‘This is England’ it would be an injustice to do so.

The film is in effect, the autobiography of the director and his coming to age under Thatcher’s regime in the early 80’s. The entire film is based on his own experiences with the UK skinhead movement of the early eighties. The opening scenes immediately depict a riot between workers and police during the Miner’s strike and gradually photograph the depravation within white working class communities in the early 80’s. There are quotes from Thatcher preaching about the need to wage war in the Falklands and brings home the all too familiar war rhetoric used by Blair during the invasion of Iraq. Apparently, Shane Meadows has never been one to shy away from drawing on his own history for his films, rooting all of his work thus far in the white working class English midlands that are his own roots.

Young Thomas Turgoose stars as Shaun – a twelve year old boy raised by his single mother. His father is mysteriously absent and sorely missed. We later realise that his father died during the Falklands war. An awkward child Shaun is teased and bullied by other children over the usual things - the out of style clothing that is all his mother can afford and his absent father, the latter of which provokes him to violence. Shaun lives a solitary life until he is essentially adopted by Woody, an older teen skinhead, and his small group of friends. Though all signs are that Woody has some sort of darker past this particular group are a happy lot, interracial, and mostly just looking to have a good time while providing the loyalty and support that is otherwise entirely lacking from their lives.
The first half an hour is hilarious and contains everything that is great about being young and not giving a fuck. There are side splitting scenes for any working class bloke that can identify with the confused raw aggression of smashing windows and running riot. No malicious intent and too young to realise the right and wrong of the situation. Gadget is the fat whipping boy who feels well pissed over this young lad moving up the hierarchy ahead of him. Each bloke has his place, each level of hierarchy is respected and the leader Woody maintains order and respect amongst the lads. Shaun is coming of age and finds his own identity within this small close knit group of Skins. He shaves his head, buys the doc martins and proudly wears his spotless Ben Sherman in every scene. The mother does not seem too bothered and is happy that her lonely son has found a brother like figure in Woody.

Everything is working well for Shaun until the arrival of Combo; an old friend of Woody's who has just spent three years in jail. The mood of the film immediately changes with the arrival of this older more politically aggressive skinhead. And if Woody represents the happier face of the skinhead movement, more interested in two tone Ska and having a laugh than anything else, then Combo is the grim underbelly, representing all of the negatives that come to mind with the skinhead label. Combo is militantly political and his presence immediately divides the group into those who, like Woody, are simply looking for a bit of craic and comradeship and those who are drawn to the racist element of the movement.

If this were a Hollywood film Shaun would follow Woody and that would be the end of it, but this is based on real life which is seldom so simple. If Woody was a surrogate brother for Shaun then Combo quickly becomes established as a father figure. Shaun simply idolises the man, drawn by his strength and passion and the strength that he offers. Blind to the dark consequences of Combo's beliefs it isn't long before Shaun is mimicking his every move spray painting racist slogans, attending political rallies and issuing threats to Pakistani shop keepers. It all leads to a cruel awakening ... This Is England is a coming of age movie like no other. Beyond simply dealing with his own adolescence Shaun must come to terms with aggression, racism, hatred and violence with absolutely no one to guide him through the process. It is above all else, a depiction of the rise of right wing nationalism amongst the white working class under Thatcher.

Combo, although aggressive and full of hate is also a likeable character. He offers unconditional support to his ‘troops’. He guarantees them security and becomes a replacement for all that is lost in their poverty stricken lives. In a remarkable scene he rallies against the economic policies of Thatcher and the poverty it has created for working class people, only to make the all too familiar conclusion that it is the immigrants who must take the blame. He hates Thatcher and the poverty around him and needs someone to blame. Thus, the film depicts the truth behind most racist mentality and uncompromisingly states the truth behind the support for right wing ideology.

Combo has obvious emotional problems. He almost cries when discussions on family life take place. He is lonely, desiring love and one discerns that he too is a victim of an authoritarian father and poverty. He was bullied by his father and bullies everyone else around him. This is a theme that runs throughout the film. The whipping boy in all the groups finds someone else to become the whipping boy. Thus, there is a Freudian connection between the authoritarian paternalistic instinct and its political results: ring wing nationalism. He wants to father Shaun and Shaun wants a father. The conclusion is obvious, an unhealthy but loving relationship. Combo is the sort of character that would be deathly easy to reduce to a cartoon, the simply minded violently racist thug. And he is those things but he is much more as well and combo easily takes on the complicated psychology of this man. He is a menacing physical presence, a man desperate to be proven strong; fiercely loyal to his friends, as truly protective and caring for Shaun as he can be, and at point’s appalled at his own capacity for violence.

Meadows is to be commended for his treatment of this very difficult material. He tackles the rise of nationalism through an uncompromisingly honest depiction of life in white working class England during the eighties. It also offers a more honest role to the individual personality and the psychological baggage that comes with loss and fear than any structural and theoretical account of fascism. He is also one who remembers that the racist element of the skin movement is actually only a relatively small subset of the group and while he certainly does not gloss over the negatives of that element he gives equal time to other aspects of the movement as well: the camaraderie and sense of family that drove it in its high points not to mention the simple fact that outside of the racist subset it was actually an inter-racial movement.

This is England is a masterful film: vibrant, uncompromising, complex, full of life, remarkably unsentimental and an unflinchingly honest account of how the rise of ring wing nationalism occurred in white working class communities under Thatcher.

This review was first published on Indymedia.ie by Chief.

Labels: Chief, Film, Guest Blogger

# posted by antrophe @ 6:41 AM

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Saturday, April 28, 2007

What the Fuck Is Breakcore?

If you tell people you like breakcore, "what the fuck is it?" is a strong inevitable first reaction. Jason Forrest nicely puts it in the freshly released Notes on Breakcore documentary. "I have the computer, I have some break beats - I can speed them up and make music from them. It's three chords and the truth type stuff." Society Suckers describe it as "music too fucked up for neo-Nazis." That entertains me.

I'd come across the trailer for the documentary last year some time, and the site had promised a torrent release some time back in February - it never emerged. No harm, the thing has been leaked onto the net now and is available on Google video. Watching it seriously makes me realize I haven't been to a good and proper raggle tag night of vicious amen-ism in quite some time now, it also reminded me of the sweat drenched excitement of first going to some of the gigs. Toronto better sort itself out.

As a documentary its an interesting survey of the variations in how breakcore as a cultural movement has been putting down roots through word of mouth and the internet and the artists attempts to resist genre categorization. In a review in Vice magazine, some of the usual digs are thrown in, with one of their commentariat calling it "music for people who hate ears." Make up your own mind.

The DuranDuranDuran photo above was taken way back when at !Kaboogie in the Ice Bar last year.

Labels: Breakcore, Film, Music

# posted by antrophe @ 2:46 AM

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Friday, September 29, 2006

9/11 Conspiracy Nuts: Plane Crazy says Schnews and Cockburn

From a fringe that once made a name for itself distributing truth dollars to now more succesfully pushing viral videos on the youtubed and googled vidiot ciruit, 9-11 conspiracy theories have taken on a fast and furious popular growth in recent months. The successive releases of Loose Change, Terror Storm and a host of less competent productions has seen the 9-11 truth types quickly come to accumulate a louder and louder voice within the international anti-war community.

From a position of being able to ignore these cranks because of their association with Christian fundamentalists like Alex Jones who maintain that successive world leaders secretly signal to each other by making as many 'devil sign' gestures as Temple Bar kids at a Korn gig, sections of the left have recently responded to their crass parasitical attempt to ride on anti-war sentiment. Perhaps this is remains an international problem with little of the effect taking hold here, however there are some murmurings - some examples of this can be seen at the swamp that is the IAWM discussion forum, vandalised as it is with 9-11 conspiracy theory cut and pastes. Many other Indymedias are also lost under the growing signal of noise generated by these paranoics, this online effect obviously has repurcussions for the left.

When conspiracy loons that ignore all hopes of substantiating fact and condense unrelated co-incidences into sequenced pulling of the strings become one of the most visible groups explaining the events of the 'war of terror' it means the room for anti-capitalist arguments that challenge social relationships instead of cabals of devil worshipping elites is harder to hear against the rest of the noise. Thankfully Cockburn provides a useful article that demolishies these conspiracy nuts that share so many left wing themes as engaging in a socialism for the thick, while Schnews takes them on in its own wonderful 'in yer face' style by advising them to 'WAKE UP! IT'S PLANE YER CRAZY...' Let's just hope these nuts don't start infesting our own Indymedia with the same vehemence displayed on this particular thread.

Labels: Film, Indymedia, Internet, Media, Social Movements

# posted by antrophe @ 7:43 PM

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Monday, September 25, 2006

Fascism, Infertility and the smallest violin in the world; Children of Men fails to deliver.

Directed by stylish Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men is is the latest in a series of dystopian visions of a totalitarian society that isn’t actually so far away. It’s a cheap buck that appeals to the “Oh gosh, isn’t George Bush awful?” Banksy appreciating market, but really that market should be bloody well ashamed of itself if it swallows this sort of shite. Children of Men begins with the premise that human beings can no longer reproduce, and since then the world has gone to shit something awful, or as they put it, ‘No children, no future, no hope.’ In the face of a totalitarian state, public loyalty is maintained by the criminalisation of foreigners and the odd bomb-blast. And aren’t we shocked when someone suggest that the bombers may actually be the government in disguise!! So far, so typical.

We step around these mean streets with Clive Owens who slots in as the stereotypical disillusioned former activist, sighing about the awfulness of it all as he sips his coffee and grieves over his long dead son. Michael Caine throws away what little dignity he had left by appearing as a bearded old hippy whose wife has been tortured into catatonia by MI5, for some reason (we assume it’s cos she’s a little bit left). In fact, the first sequence with Caine is what started me hating the whole thing, summing up the political depth of the implied critique by the soundtrack of Radiohead and the Beatles; might as well have namechecked George Monbiot while they were at it....this guest review by Ronan continues at Indymedia.ie

Labels: Film, Guest Blogger, Sci-fi

# posted by antrophe @ 3:19 PM

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Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Art Pointer: No Wave Cinema.

Living beside IMMA is about to bring its own little reward with a bulbous feast of film opening on Friday, September 15th. IMMA's No Wave cinema season promises to be an enthusiastic tour through the gritty world of New York bohemia in the late seventies and early eighties. No Wave was a cinematic vogue that zeroxed the DIY philosophy from its musical new wave contemporaries and applied them to film, leaving behind a series of textured mood laden films to instil the burgeoning American indie cinema movement with its identifiable aesthetic. No Wave was about more than just film, it summouned a terse rejection of commercial structurings and a ruthless rejections of easy aesthetic formulae for the intense experimentation that also characterised the insurgent American Indie scene.

Among the highlights I'm familar with in this film season is the 24 hour surreal biopic of Jean Michel Basquiat Underground 81, which follows the protaganist through the city as he litters it with doom laden scrawls on walls and along the way encounters a bag lady princess played by Debbie Harry. The Blank Generation is an archival document of the NY punk scene, featuring many its definitive bands and artists from Patti Smith, to the Ramones and Richard Hell. Just as lesser known acts proliferate the Basquiat movie with seminal sounds highlighting bohemia's cross fertilisation, the Blank Generation becomes an easy epithet for a scene of extraordinary drive and self creation with an equal dose of self destructive penchants and grandiose egos. I'll bring you reviews of the films as and when I get around to seeing them after an equal dose of coffee, cigeratte, trench coats and sunglasses.

The film festival runs from Friday 15 September through to Sunday 1 October, in the Lecture Room in IMMA. Download programme here and the listings here

Labels: Film, IMMA, Music, New Wave

# posted by antrophe @ 4:23 PM

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Saturday, August 12, 2006

The Omen, Guerilla Advertising and Street Art

All memories of the disaster that was the Psycho remake are seemingly excorcised in the world of big business horror and the intelligence applied by Hollywood to come up with ways to make a quick buck appear seriously to be on the wane. Right minded horror movie fans were probably mostly disappointed with The Omen 666. What a premise - take a classic horror movie and remake it without any real ruptures with the original.

Chiming in with recent cultural trends, the studio must have been busy hiring patsies locally in Dublin to engage in a guerilla marketing of its product. Crudely sprayed stencils of Damien casting an inverted crucifix, with the movies release date popped up all over the city over a forthnight ago. The Wooster Collective took Sony PSP to task over using street art stencils to advertise its merchandise recently, with widespread defacing of the cartoon characters hyping its product occuring in the states. Adidas colour also recently had an ingenius campaign providing blank bill boards for artists to destory, before throwing another pasted bill board sheet with homes in it over the vandalised original to incorporate it into the runner's design.

Fox had originally attempted a revival of the Omen series with a made for TV fourth sequel, a movie that was going to be used as a bridge head to initiate a Friday 13 style sequence of cash ins. With this new movie the studio used all possbile promotional techniques to stir a fuss including manipulating box office numbers to come up with $12,633,666 after the first weekend of screenings. The movie of course was also launched on the 6/6/06. Oh and don't let me ruin the movie in telling you that after the death of Damien's father he is shoved off to become the adopted son of the US president playing nicely into popular themes about the Busy dynasty. FFS.

Labels: Film, Media, Street Art

# posted by antrophe @ 9:53 PM

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Saturday, July 01, 2006

Loach: The Coronation Street Of Class Struggle

Just after returning from watching Ken Loach's Palm D'or reaping drama The Wind That Shakes The Barley and like most feel slightly compelled to add one or two words to the flurry of type and hype that has accompanied the movie's release on these shores. The Wind That Shakes The Barley is a typical Loach movie betraying many of the core techniques developed in his previous outings. Again he relies on plunging a shallowly crafted personal relationship, this time between two brothers, into a set of tragic circumstances. These circumstances provide an emotional cover for an overly didactic political approach to popularising alternative historical mythologies that challenge the authors of a victors' history. This time the contested historicity is an Irish text book rabid nationalism, that sweeps aside socialist and labour based movements in the process of consolidating the free state.

As in the Spanish Civil War epic Land and Freedom, his pastiche of Orwell's experiences in Homage to Catalonia given a romantic streak that nearly ends on two opposite ends of the barriacades outside the Barcelona telephone exchange, he creates his alternative historical narratives brilliantly. Like the Catalan epic he returns to his routine technique of using moments of extended tense political debate to foreground the various shades of the arguments operating within the historical juncture he is focussing on. In Land and Freedom this was deployed around collectivisation of the village as well as militarisation and in Bread and Roses it was used during the discussions on joining a union. Here he pushes an anti-treaty agenda, one based on the social policy of the democratic programme of the first Dail, to the front during arguments in a republican court that challenge the extortionate income charged by a local gombeen man and later again prior to the Treaty vote itself.

Equally a quintessential part of Loach's work is his use of characters that roll across the screen as near archetypes, each representing different political persausions and social back grounds. Its no surprise again to see Loach fall back on the idea of the "sell out". The reformist who takes the uniform of the new state and falls back in line with wealth and elites. In this new film, it's the Cillian Murphy character's brother who takes the bait - while in his Catalan epic, a college educated American communist plays the same role. Another routine stereotype from Irish folk history here is Dan, the Jackeen train driving union man who brings the workshop's and field's socialism of Connolly down to the rural backwater village where the films terse action takes place.

The routinely wheeled out movie critics of the Irish media really managed to display a tremendous historical ignorance in discussions of this movie. Many accused Loach of brushing over IRA thuggery and painting an anti-imperial propaganda piece that leaves the English nation damned. Loach does neither of these things. Despite the 2-d nature of much of his character development there is marked moments of subtlety in painting the black and tans. He makes it apparent they are the shell shocked victims of a British ruling class who have left them "up to their necks in shit, blood and vomit for four years in the trenches." This is a tension that is completely excorcised from the standard nationalist narratives of the war of independence,. The moment where a young British soldier effectively mutinies and frees republican prisoners is a wonderful adage hinting at disaffection among the lower ranking British tommies during WW1 and the popular slogan "mutiny is the conscience of war" painted on trench walls.

With so many claiming Loach romanticises the irregular movement during the period, it was odd to find myself thinking that the most apt commentater in public yet has been the arts minister John O'Donaghue. O'Donaghue displayed on Newstalk a keen knowledge of the submerged role of socialist ideas and the Connollyite legacy on the anti-treaty side with his argument that Loach was far from a fantasist. On a popular culture level Loach is doing nothing new with this movie. But that noone remembered, Rebel Heart, Ronan Bennet's controversially scripted mini series for RTE back a few years ago is odd and foregrounds the importance of the Loach brand. Dealing with exactly the same theme, of how dreams of a workers republic were betrayed and stunted, the lack of note given to this RTE series is telling in how willing people are to slide back into the myths of Mother Ireland and perhaps explains quite a bit of the muffled response given to Loach's movie by both conservatives and revisionists.

Left wondering why Loach didn't just make a movie on the Limerick Soviet or concentrate on the exploits of Peader O'Donnell or Saor Eire put me in the mind that Loach really is someone who should be placed in the same category as Brecht. These are dramatists of little subtlety, who use their work to foreground a system of exploitation and recuperation that transverses different historical periods. This is a very modernist sense of mass education, popularising the idea of struggle from below and celebrating the undefeated and utterly indefatigable spirit of all under dogs. Mike Leigh summons a darker, microcosmic reflection on the effects of class on people's lives making him sit straddled across the legacy of kitchen sink drama with all the brooding prowess of an Eastenders marriage break up. But Ken Loach's movies are the Coronation Street of class struggle, ordinary everyday good natured folk thrown into moments of severe historical rupture and forced to deal with the constant betrayal of the working class by leaders and elites. That such lessons can be drawn so often, goes some way to explaining the cast iron soap like stereotypes, templates and routines that he resorts to so readily to illustrate them in his work.

Anyone interested in checking out another Loach movie can do worse that headling along to the next fundraiser for the IWU, which is hosting a showing of the excellent Ken Loach film ‘Bread and Roses’ on the struggle for Trade Union rights faced by workers. The night will also include revolutionary music from Ireland and across the globe. The screening is on Friday 28th July, Lloyd’s Bar, Amiens St, Dublin 1. The time was never mentioned on the event listing on this site, so maybe someone out there knows? For the moment I'd say stay tuned to this and someone might add it seeing as I've mentioned the abscene of a time.

Labels: Film, Ken Loach

# posted by antrophe @ 3:35 AM

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Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Sixty Seconds On Film, May 2006.

Okay - so whats the deal? Well the plan is to do some pretty succint reviews of the films I see each month in one post, and then start another similar thread at the end of the next month. Films can be both contemporary, recent and old. Previous Sixty Seconds On Films have been written in April, March, Feb and Jan'06. This month has been very quite over-burdened as I am with work, but here it is..

Night Watch: This is a pure cinematic epic that remixes the mythologies of movies as varied as Highlander and Lord of the Wings. It's no surprise that Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov got his start messing around on music videos, with this piece ransaking the music video vaults of convention to add an extra stunning dimension to action sequences that remain controlled enough to avoid over shadowing a complex and intriguing premise. The vampires as junkies theme is certainly one that should prick up the ears of horror fans left feeling stunted dosing on B-movies that enter into a critical dialogue with their genre that is about as deep as Noddie is multi-cultural. What 28 Days Later did for the Troma movie fan, Night Watch could do just yet for Hammer obsessives.

Dagon: a strange journey into the heart of the Lovecraft watery pantheon here in a horror flick that echoes the tensions of a revived paganism gripping a small island community in a manner that prempted the Wickerman by decades. Well worth a gander, if not a little offbeat.

Tron: for those of us capable of recalling the monochrome glory of a Commodore 64 screen, watching Tron certainly elicits some memories of the delusional optimism of a new world blooming that accompanied that early '80's IT revolution. Anyone of us could have been that hot shot Pong playing kid from War Games that cracked into military hardware and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Tron sees the same idea unfold, the difference between video-gaming and hardcore computer hacking is miniscule, so you enter the game to take on the Master Control Programme, a fascistic device that's wrecking havoc inside the 8 bit world. Spill a load of philosophical drivel straight out of the determinism debate over the characters within the comouter and you've got a movie thats failings really highlight just how remarkable Gibson's early cyber punk visions.

Hostel: all the qualities and atmosphere of a nightmare abound in this intelligent aping of 1980's gore flicks. A duo of jocular Americans screw their way across Europe before heading back to the coal face of study in their Ivy league colleges. But a journey to the East sees these Adam Sandler moments being butt fucked with a broken bottle by the spirit of Japanese horror movies. Eastern Europe has always had a funny part to play in horror and this movie too descends into a strangely cliched imagining of its darker and more gruesome urban myths. But that certain xenophobic overdrive in relation to Eastern Europe is nicely compensated for with its bizarre treatment of the commodifaction of the flesh from prostitution to the more twisted end of the market. This isn't one for the squemish, there are plenty of moments where you feel like a needle is dangling above your eye ball about to poke it out but the gore doesn't drown what is a fairly intelligent movie, that remains griping through out.

Labels: Film

# posted by antrophe @ 9:03 PM

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Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Film Review: V For Vendetta

Note that this is a review inspired more by a thread here than the film itself. When it comes to anarchism in the cinema, its rare the silver screen gives it a fair tossing over. Loach may have been kind in following the Poum and CNT, but films like "The Anarchist Cookbook" do as much to conflate anarchism with fascism and violence as explore its worth as a political philosophy. There's another appaling German one called "What to do in case of fire" about a gang of ex-squatter members of an art collective that models itself stylistically on the RAF. As an art prank they set a bomb in an empty house and twenty years later it goes off, no ones injured but the five are forced to revisit their past in the autonome mileu, facing up to their own sell out and co-option. Of course one has remained pure to heart and watched his movement decay, no surprise by the end he ends up identifying more with the special branch cop who's been trailing him for years than his ex-comrades.

On V - it was an alright movie, it carried you through for the hour with all the edge of the seat excitment a good action flick should have. There were some substantial jarrings with the original comic that did my head in quite a bit. The updating to a post-911 scenario is really an idiots trick to assuage demands for some form of intellectualism in a generally arid Hollywood. Leaving it intact as a commentary on the fascistic aspects of states inspired by Thatcher would have been far more useful politically. It would have avoided the trap of counterposing a boring and uninspired American liberalism to a fascist state with a figure head as threatening as Dr X from Action Man. I think that at least, was Alan Moore's big problem with the film and why he had his name taken off it.

Another telling way this was just a cash cow with a very subtle political overtone was the amount of action sequences. V gets armed with knives in this, whereas in the comic he twarts his chasers and enemies with tricks and the force of his intellect - the film makers just give us some fancy action sequences for the third class bully boys. Also leaving out Finch's acid trip to get inside V's mind in Larkhill was a strange dumping of what could have been an interesting cinematic sequence. As for the final rebellion and the destruction of parliment - whatever, a nice rushy end to a standard action movie with its deeper political content dumped for a Rage Against The Machine "fuck you I won't clean up my bedroom" climax.

Labels: Film, Politics, Social Movements

# posted by antrophe @ 3:07 AM

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Monday, May 01, 2006

Sixty Seconds On Films: April, 2006.

Okay - so whats the deal? Well the plan is to do some pretty succint reviews of the films I see each month in one post, and then start another similar thread at the start of the next month. Films can be both contemporary, recent and old. Previous Sixty Seconds On Films: March, Feb and Jan'06.

Sky Captain and The World Of Tomorrow: entertaining as hell adventure flick in the vein of Indiana Jones, and coming with all the essential elements of its main characters. So a bunch of iron giants pour out of the sky to rob the world of its resources and an evil genius is bent on its destruction who can stop it all before a dooms day device goes off? Eh, Sky Captain of course in his shitty little bi plane.. Using a cinematic style that tries to recreate the atmosphere of old 1930's sci-fi's, plundering their plot lines and with something of a nod to steam punk - Sky Captain is perfect hangover drivel to leave your brain pigging out to while shoving handfuls of jellies into your gob.

House Party:cliches are as rampant in early 1990's ghettolore as they ever were in Glenroe, this movie slumbers up to the spot with all the regrettable style of hammer time as former rap duo Kid n Play go about getting their kicks on a weekend through organising a house party. If you ever wondered what Will Smith would have been like had he never moved to Bel Air, you'll probably get some idea from this disappointing reminder of just how enamoured we all were with early 90's hp hop culture and anyone with some gimick like wearing your jeans backwards. The film even has a moralistic, didactic approach to drink and sex (drugs don't even get a look in) to rival the Camdens.

Bad Santa: a movie to really match the reality of Christmas, rip roaringly disorderly it drunkenly crashes through the Christmas spirit before getting out to empty its beer full bladder over whatever schmaltz is left. This is a laugh out loud comedy, with your stomach left splitting at all the wrong moments, switched onto the scam of two mismatched small time hoods who score jobs as Santa and dwarf in shopping stores before ripping them off on Xmas eve.

I Heart Huckabees: there are two ways of looking at this one, allow the whimsical existential meanderings to put you right off or relish in the hilarious caricatures sketched out by the deep and darp pessimistic tones of a director who last brought us the cynicsm of Three Kings.

Hackers 2: The Takedown: an overly long excerise in a sleep inducing techno-would be thriller that follows the crackdown on one of California's biggest and baddest hobbyist hackers. Yes and thats right, it is a totally unrelated sequel content wise to a previous film. Cashcow.

Acid House: Irvine Welsh's Acid House paints a dense series of portraits of urban life from drug addled escapism to juggling jobs. This TV adaption manages however to choose four of the worst stories in the collection, cross breeds them with a good dose of the Renford Rejects and slaps them up for a cheap sunday serving minus the carvery. Fucking shameful.

Deuce Bigalow: Part of that genre of Hollywood comedy that immediately summons images of Hawian shirts to mind and is as such generally avoided. Film critic Patrick Goldstein of the LA Times described the sequel as missing out on an Oscar because "nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic." His review of the original was probably every bit as spot on.

Labels: Film

# posted by antrophe @ 2:02 AM

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Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Sixty Seconds On Film: March'06

Okay - so whats the deal? Well the plan is to do some pretty succint reviews of the films I see each month in one post, and then start another similar thread at the start of the next month. Films can be both contemporary, recent and old.
Previous Sixty Seconds On Films: Feb and Jan'06

Oldboy. A fast paced violent thriller that bares all the traces of a RPG video game and is heavily indebted for its style to the manga orginal that spawned it. Alongside The Ring, Oldboy has a lot to be thanked for in popularising the Asia Extreme cinema releases on this side of the globe. Oldboy is ideal for the twist fethists, with them coming at the pace of trains and as sick as a dog after having its biscuits soaked in whiskey.

Munich. Something of a thriller masquerading as a docu-drama from the Speilberg stable over. Using an exploration of the Mossad agents used by the Israeli state to wipe out members of the Black September organisation as a means of exploring both the human psyschology at work amidst the terrrorists and their mirror image in the secret state. There's an unfortunate trend with critics whereby they fall all over themselves, salviating at the mouth using terms like "brave" whenever a mainstream director touches on historical material. Munich is a case in point. Cue tonnes of slow mo flashbacks, close ups of Baners eyes as he struggles with his demons and the suggestions of haunted nights. A classic scene involves Baner trying to shag his wife but his mind remains ravaged with thoughts of the Munich massacre and leads to an inabilty to come. If this is what passes for sensitive treatments then I must be a barbarian. Tawdry stuff indeed.

The Sixth Sense. I'll kill the bastard that told me the ending...

Office Space. Brilliant off beat comedy from Mike Judge, that evocatively brings to life the office culture of the Dilbert cubicle universe and sets its inhabitants off like clock work dolls to entertain you with their wacky ways. Wacky? Now there's a word if spotted in a review should turn you off it straight away, in this case Office Case deserves it. Not just nice, but fucking savage lad.

Crash. Preachy but sharp LA based drama focussing on racial tensions that spiral out of control amongst a screenwriters shipload of archetypes. A movie that dramatically frays at the end with all the put upon outrage of a CSPE class, and something of a resemblence to the fairy tale panoraa of a city's life in Steve Martin's La Story.

Labels: Film

# posted by antrophe @ 1:05 AM

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