PAVEE LACKEEN - a slice of life on the margins

PAVEE LACKEEN is a fascinating low-budget film shot on video by a British film-maker called Perry Ogden. The film focuses on the traveller community living on the outskirts of Dublin, and on one ten-year old girl called Winnie in particular. Winnie is one of ten kids living with their mother and their father is absent: the mother has pawned her wedding ring. The girls can't read or write, or even read a clock. They wash their hair under a stand-pipe across the road from the trailer and put on their make-up in a mirror in a lorry because there is no electricity for the lights in the trailer. Having spent the day getting dolled up, Winnie and her sister totter down the road to the chip shop. They sit on the side of the road eating chips. "Boring, isn't it?" one says to the other. They never even make it to the nightclub.At various points we see Winnie being pulled up by teachers, or helped out by a doctor, or potentially being re-housed by a social worker. The depiction of her life is deeply depressing.

The movie is shot in documentary style and makes very little editorial comment about the social issue on which it focuses. Neither does it attempt to impose a neat narrative arc on the film, although throughout the film there is the threat of eviction. Some have found this lack of clear narrative a reason to criticise the film. But for me, the strength of the movie is that Perry Ogden trusts in his material. I found PAVEE LACKEEN to be a fascinating look at people on the edges of our society - a story that needs to be told. It seems to be that the use of non-professional actors and the meandering structure of the film is perfectly suited to this kind of honest material.

PAVEE LACKEEN played at the London Film Fest 2005 where it won the Satyajit Ray award for Best First Feature. It is currently on limited release in the UK.

WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!

So, this week's Box Office is in, and to my shock and horror, the execrable pile of wank, DATE MOVIE is the new UK number one. Capitalism is about choice, and if people want to hand over 10 hard earned honest British pounds to see this crap what can I do? But, to all you 130,000 people who went to see DATE MOVIE last weekend, let me say this: Dear Lord, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?! You need to go and sit in the corner and think very very carefully about what you have done.

PERFECT CATCH - perfect date movie

The first time I saw FEVER PITCH, marketed in the UK as PERFECT CATCH, I hated it. I thought it was a glossy, vapid, Hollywood chick-flick, lacking intelligence and wit. However, I was WRONG. It wasn't my fault: I had been a complete sucker. The marketing posters had sold me a remake of the British film of the same name, based on the novel by Nick Hornby. So, I had gone into the cinema expecting a movie about a middle-aged teacher struggling to come to terms with life as an adult: balancing his complicated relationship with his father and his first serious relationship with his fanatical devotional to Arsenal football club. Both the novel and the original film were trememdous: they were genuinely funny, and genuinely insightful about modern life and relationships. The movie even looked grey and gritty, and in case we were ever in any doubt, we even had the Hillsborough disaster to ground us. By contrast, the Hollywood remake recasts the story in America and instead of a Gooners fan, we have Jimmy Fallon as a Boston Redsocks fan, falling in love with career woman played by Drew Barrymore.

The key to enjoying the remake is to completely empty your brain of any fragment of the source material: to take it as a stand-alone, original movie. Even better, ignore the marketing campaign that tells you it is a romantic COMEDY. Yes, yes, Drew Barrymore is a decent comedic actress and Jimmy Fallon (TAXI aside) is a decent stand-up comedian, but that is not what this film is about. If you look for belly-laughs you'll be disappointed. But if you adjust your expectations as instructed, what you'll get is a really sweet date movie, perfectly cast, that IS schmaltzy and glossy, but that gives you a nice warm feeling inside. Aaah! I love Asian ultra-violence as much as the next girl but, every now and then, it's lovely to inhabit a world where chicks don't mind when their boyfriends watch Match of the Day, and guys don't care when their girlfriends work late, and your team wins the The Ashes, I mean World Series.

PERFECT CATCH/FEVER PITCH is now available on DVD.

GUY X - what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

There are lots of great films about the absurdity of war that combine black comedy with insightful social comment. GUY X is not one of them. GUY X is what happens when you take all that is wickedly funny, noble and true in M*A*S*H and CATCH-22 and then invert it. The film tells the story of a young soldier in 1979 who is posted to Greenland by mistake. Unable to resolve this clerical error he sets about writing the Base newspaper for the autocractic Colonel Woolrap while romancing Woolrap's chick. The movie fails to create the claustrophic, Kafka-esque atmosphere necessary and has NOT ONE SINGLE funny line or moment. The romance between Jason Biggs and Natasha McElhone is insipid. Worse still, McElhone and Jeremy Northam - two fine British actors - cannot do American accents. The final nail in the coffin is when the director lazily sticks "War (What is it good for?)" by Edwin Starr on the soundtrack. This is a brave move because as every funk fan knows, the response to the question is "absolutely nothing". Cue the inevitable title for my review....

GUY X played a bunch of minor Film Festivals including the oh-so-wittily named RAINDANCE festival in London in autumn 2005. It is currently on limited release in Canada and is available on Region 2 DVD.

McLIBEL - The point being?

McLIBEL is a straightforward documentary about two court cases involving two tree-hugging hippies. Back in 1986 these two helped put together and distribute a leaflet accusing McDonalds of five things: selling food that contributed to cancer and heart disease; deliberately manipulating children with advertising; exploiting their workers through low pay, poor conditions and restrictions on unionisation; damaging the rainforest through intensive cattle-rearing; and cruelty to animals. McDonalds decided to sue the hippies for libel in the UK, a country where the libel laws are notoriously favourable to the plaintiff and the defendants are not eligible for legal aid.

As is know well-known, the judge in the case decided against the hippies and in favour of McDonalds ON BALANCE but only because the hippies didn't have enough cash to fly in witnesses. Indeed, even without cash, they still managed to get the judge to rule that Maccy D did in fact exploit kids, pay low wages and screw over little fluffy bunny rabbits, I mean, cows. So, while Maccy-D won the battle they truly lost the war. Back in the day, the issues of epidemic obesity and environmental damage were not widely discussed in the mainstream media. But during the case, the hippies got free publicity for their cause and donations to find a website. Even better, in February 2005 they successfully took the UK Government to the European Court of Human Rights, where the judges found unanimously that the UK libel laws were an infringeing free speech. So, it really was a case of McDonald's scoring an own goal.

All this is well and good, but one does slightly wonder what the point of this documentary is. The issues raised by these two campaigners are now thoroughly absorbed into the mainstream, so that even to a greedy, capitalist bastard like myself, it seems self-evident that kids should not be exposed to junk food TV commercials. You can barely switch on the radio without hearing of some Government iniative to tackle obesity. I am grateful to these two courageous campaigners for refusing to be intimidated by Big Business, and for standing up for consumer rights. And while this story would make for a great article in Vanity Fair, it does not make for great cinema. Indeed, the director of this piece relies on the strength of the story to mask the fact that she has no understanding of cinema as a medium. Not only are the production values poor, and the re-enactments of the court-room drama ropey, but she relies entirely on bald statements of fact. To use the tired cliche - "a picture paints a thousand words". No scientist boring me with facts about cancer is going to make me forego my Chicken Nuggets as quickly as seeing Morgan Spurlock chunder his quarterpounder out of the window of his car. Evidently, the lard-buying public agrees with me. It is SUPERSIZE ME, not McLIBEL, that got Maccy D to change it's evil ways.

McLIBEL was originally released as a TV doc in 1996 and got a brief cinematic release in spring 2005. It is back on UK screens to coincide with the DVD release.

CROSSING THE BRIDGE: THE SOUNDS OF ISTANBUL

CROSSING THE BRIDGE aims to do two things. First, it wants to show us the range of music being played in the vibrant Turkish music scene. Second, it wants to use this insight as a spring-board to a deeper discussion about Turkish culture and politics. Indeed, it starts off with a quotation from Confucius: "To understand a place you must know the music made there."

Where the film succeeds beyong all expectation is in showcasing the best of Turkish music. This is made possible by German prog-rock guitarist Alexander Hacke's close links with the musical community in Istanbul. This allows him to simply show up with a whole bunch of microphones and record what is happening. We go from progressive rock to hip-hop to traditional Romany and Kurdish music and back again.

We start of with Turkish prog rock played by Baba Zula and Orient Expressions. The music is great, rhythem-led, and sounds rather like the sort of stuff being put out by Sebastian Rochford's jazz fusion outfit, Polar Bear. Next, we move on to Istanbul's grunge rock scene, with bands Duman and Replikas. After that, we move on to the grand-daddy of Turkish rock - Erkin Koray - and lots of hysterical vintage footage of Erkin going Hendrix. Next, on to the hip-hop scene. For me, the music really kicked into gear when we got to the traditional Romany music from Western Turkey, using clarinets and ouds. The musicians Selim Sesler and Brenna MacCrimmon are outstandingly talented and it is a strength of the film that thanks to Alexander Hacke's friendship with Selim, we get a glimpse of traditional Romany jam sessions and weddings. Pure musical bliss.

We head back to Istanbul to meet street musician Siyasiyabend, who criticises people like Erkin Koray for romaticising the street. As one of his colleagues says, when you lay your head on the road to sleep at night you know that concrete is just concrete, nothing more nothing less. And then onto a series of rather poor eighties throw-backs in the shape of movie stars Orhan Gencebay and Sezen Aksu.

Clearly this movie is not for people who have no interest in world music. And, to the extent that the film is basically a series of jam sessions, whether you'll enjoy the film will depend on how much you like each of the acts. While the movie does give us brief glimpses into the socio-politics of Turkey, the comments are never more than superficial and anyone coming to this purely for the politics will be sorely disappointed.

Having said all that, what social commentary there is in the film is rather cheering. In an age of trumped-up inter-civilisational tension, it is nice to know that angry teenagers are singing whiny rubbish lyrics the world over. It is great to see the Americanised Ali G type claiming that he is "keeping it real" despite the fact that he has just spent 15 million lire on rims for his car. I love the fact that we can have flash chavs in Turkey as well as Staines. And, in a rare success for the European Union, it is cool to see that Kurdish musicians now have the right to sing in their own language again.

CROSSING THE BRIDGE premiered at Cannes 2005 and went on release in France, Germany and Austria last summer. It is on limited release in the UK but there is no scheduled release date for the US.