Shallow Grave

Oh what a treat! An evening dedicated to Danny Boyle as part of the “15 British Films” cycle on Film 4! Yes, last night I added two others notches on my bedpost, with “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Shallow Grave”. I shall concentrate on the latter here.

Shallow Grave is a crime thriller inscribed in Boyle’s proud lineage of goofy-crime-thrillers-gone-wrong-with-Ewan-McGregor. In this series I obviously place A Life Less Ordinary (see earlier review), but also Trainspotting for its final psychological battle around the archetypal suitcase full of cash. In fact the three movies can almost form a trilogy, directed as they were in succession during the 1990s.

As usual for Boyle, the characters in Shallow Grave are awesome. What else is there to say about Ewan McGregor? But the main female character is again a stroke of genius. Kerry Fox’s charms can not be hidden for long beneath her desperate Lady-di haircut, impossible collection of patterned cardigans, and totally un-hollywoodian curviness. Like Cameron Diaz in the later A Life Less Ordinary, Fox oozes magnetic sensuality and perversity, her expressive mouth as if made for loving, and yes fellas, we do get a gratuitous shot of her plump breasts – but I digress…

To have a story, you need to make the characters interact. Throwing them together as housemates is one such devices, that can feel totally artificial in lesser chick-flicks like Catch and Release (why on earth would a newly widowed posh girl move in with her late fiance’s batchelor flatmates?). In Shallow Grave, the characters’ incidental relationships and their environment are exploited to their full potential, from the first lengthy exposition of the “interview” of new prospective tenants, to intimist, nearly theatre-like psychological developments, to horror at the mercy of the shy accountant turned voyeurist stalker entrenched in the loft.

The exposition part of the movie, the interview, is not only perfect to establish the characters, but also gorgeous, placing a cast of misfits auditioning for the coveted housematedom on an absurdly grand couch in the shabby chic apartment. Does it matter what colours the doors are painted or what cardigans Fox wears? Yes, because Boyle is a total filmmaker, a master of his art, in all its visual, musical, cinematic, photographic aspects. Everything matters, every scene, every chiselled diamond-like shot, every great song of his soundtracks which are classics in their own right.

Shallow Grave has been compared to Hitchcock’s films noirs. I see in it more the ultraviolence of Stanley Kubrick in a Clockwork Orange, down to the name of the main character, Alex. Do I dare saying that I prefer Danny Boyle to Kubrick? Well, every scene of Boyle’s films fills me with awe and glee, and I just want to watch them again. Not next year, or next month, but tomorrow.

A Life Less Ordinary

I knew Danny Boyle was a genius before knowing who Danny Boyle was. I saw Trainspotting when it came out, and it blew my mind – but that’s a different movie review. The important thing to remember about Trainspotting is not to drag along your mother and her bridge partner to see it. I’ll know in a next life.

Recently, I saw by pure chance “A Life Less Ordinary” on TV. I still didn’t know who Danny Boyle was. The movie was again mind-blowing in its unambitious way. The proof of its unambitiousness is that I subsequently found it in a 3-for-the-price-of-one DVD set alongside two other irrelevant chick-flicks, which will enhance their usefulness as bird scarers in my allotment.

In this goofy kidnapping story, total loser Robert (Ewan McGregor) loses his job as a janitor – what else – to a robot, and ends up more or less accidentally kidnapping the boss’s daughter (Cameron Diaz). Not only do they fall in love, but their love transcends all things including death in the form of a bullet that pierces Robert’s heart but only manages to let the sun shine through his body. Goofy, what?

The characters are perfect. Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz are impossibly good-looking, Ewan in the cartoon character shirt that he wears throughout, while Cameron being the girl would of course change outfits regularly, even though she is held captive in a remote cabin. This is Hollywood after all. Then there is the parallel story of the two bounty hunters who are in fact angels (don’t ask), similarly superb characters.

And then there is The Scene. There would have to be a Joycean scene in a movie I like. The lady bounty hunter is lying in bed reading a trashy romantic novel and carrying on a conversation with her associate at the same time. The way Danny Boyle executes this scene is by alternating the internal reading (her voice reading excerpts of the novel) and the external dialogue, seamlessly. She is obviously more concentrated on the steamy action in the book than on what her interlocutor is saying and by this simple, incidental scene, the Director has established what kind of a person she is. It’s surreal, it’s true, and it’s a flash of genius.

The Scene being sadly not on Youtube, you might watch the ransom scene as a taster.

Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director: a victory for feminism? I disagree.

Before I go on, I have to disclose that I haven’t seen any of her movies. No, this isn’t laziness: this is Ireland. Only the blockbusters in the Hollywood blockbuster list make it to the big screen or the bins of Xtra vision. I will not comment on her style, but only on the genre of movies she has chosen to direct. And if her directing is truly ground-breaking within the chosen genres, I apologise.

Fighting movies, biker movies, detective movies, and finally war movies, culminating with her award-winning The Hurt Locker. Apparently, there was only a bum note in her action-movie career, her 2000 film The Weight of Water, a portrait of two women trapped in suffocating relationships.

So Kathryn Bigelow can do men flicks, as well or better than men. So film has moved to the stage where women don’t have to take “George Elliot” as their nom de plume to write Victorian novels – sorry, Hollywood blockbusters. It’s good. It’s great, it’s certainly an advance. There are some who might ask “did Katherine Bigelow win the Oscar for Best Director because she was the best, or because she was a woman?” but as I said, having not seen her movies, I am not in a position to comment.

This shows however that film, unlike literature, has not moved beyond the phallocentric Victorian novel. Or at least that mainstream recognition has not yet been given to “feminine writing” in film. By this I don’t mean chick flicks. I mean revolutionising the form of film, like James Joyce revolutionised the novel with "stream-of-consciousness" narrative. As Bigelow said in 2009: “I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about what my aptitude is, and I really think it's to explore and push the medium. It's not about breaking gender roles or genre traditions. ”

e-lit

Funny thing about e-books. I mean there is huge potential there, for a writer that is. But reading an e-book? Not me. I don’t want to read books on a screen. God, this is the last thing I don’t have to read on a screen. I’m in front of a screen all day. I don’t want to bring a screen to bed with me. Reading an e-book? No way. But writing one? Tempting.

E-novels? One struggles to see the point of it. People don’t want video links to tell them how the characters look like, sound like. They want to use their imagination – so they say. Still, they sense that once the technology, the ecological niche, the humus is there, things will grow out of it. From the bottom-up. Vaguely, people understand that it’s not about adapting existing literature. A new literature will emerge.

I know what kind of e-novels will be written. It will be these “experimental” books that writers have struggled, lost their sanity or their lives to bring out. It will be B.S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo. Loose chapters unbound in a box, to be read randomly. A publisher’s, a librarian’s nightmare. But imagine the ease of it in e-book format? Hit the scramble button again: read another book on your return plane journey. Imagine even, further, personalised, unique versions of Albert Angelo. Hit the scramble button once, and not only will chapters arrange themselves in a given order, but all alternative versions will be lost for you, reader lambda. Or, further. A book that will evolve differently, depending on choices you make, or random dice-throwing, at given crisis points.

A bit like life really. The choices you make, for whatever reasons. Good reasons, bad reasons. Because you were angry. Because you were hungry. Or even the minor choices you make, the non-choices, the randomness of life. Getting up five minutes later and meeting your future life mate, or being hit by that bus. And your life is changed forever, alternative versions inaccessible, like parallel universes.

Life: thoughts and action. Film is a better medium than literature for certain things. What’s the point in doing action-lit? So many words to describe what one image can do in a fraction of a second. On the other hand, internal monologue isn’t great on film. It can be transcribed with subtitles, voice-overs, but it doesn’t “sound” natural. Mixing film and book? Film for the action sequences, book for the introspection.

And further again. Writing like one thinks: James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness. Not only do people think in words or in pictures or with all their senses, but thoughts don’t follow a storyline. It is not that thoughts are multidimensional, or web-like: they are still linear, because time is linear. But consciousness jumps from idea to idea, snippets of conversation to impressions, randomly, a bit like following the clicks of an internet surfer. Thoughts might take any route depending on the inclination, what catches one’s fancy or what one sees at any given moment. Imagine Molly Bloom’s soliloquy written in hyperlink blue, the whole 40 pages and eight gargantuan sentences of it, and follow your thoughts.

(Photo by Lonan)

Welcome!

Welcome to my first blog post. I am hoping to share some of my thoughts on writing, film, other media, language, communication in general, womanhood, living in Ireland, among other subjects.

The photo of the Praying mantis was taken in the south of France. These beautiful insects are mostly known for the practice of "sexual cannibalism," whereby the female may start feeding by biting off the male’s head (as with any prey), and if mating had begun, the male’s movements may become even more vigorous in its delivery of sperm.

This is not a mission statement by the way :-)

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