Harry’s Place Arts

If, like me, you can’t get enough of US Civl War-era photographs, you’ll appreciate this selection of ambrotype and tintype photos donated to the Library of Congress on the eve of the war’s sesquicentennial year.

Fans of Hunter Thompson’s terrific book “Hell’s Angels” will appreciate this collection of photos by Billy Ray for Life magazine. The pictures never appeared in the magazine because the managing editor “thought they looked like a smelly bunch of bastards.”

You can listen to Ray’s account of hanging out and riding with the Angels here.

Is it possible to be intrigued by the Hell’s Angels’ subculture without romanticizing them? I hope so.

Watching The Illusionist is like stepping into a marvellously  illustrated story book, and wandering through the pictures for an hour and a half.  This film is a hand-drawn animation feature by Sylvain Chomet, based on a script by Jacques Tati and it‘s enchanting.  Critics have called it a love-letter to Scotland, and he does love the country’s finest features, which he reproduces minutely and tenderly.  He loves the shadows that the clouds cast on the hills and moors, he loves how a loch or the sea can look like a mirror one minute, be torn to shreds by wind and storm the next.  He loves the magical quality of Edinburgh, the grand buildings and the backstreet squalor.  He imagines the city in the late fifties and early sixties when its principal street wasn’t  full of dull chain shops like any street in Britain and when the people were stiffer and more stylish.  He loves the rain and the light.


He loves the place as a foreigner does, and as a foreigner he has to include quaint Highlanders, sheep and flapping kilts – yes, he does fall into tweeness.

If this film was not so beautifully drawn, if you could not freeze each frame and look at it with delight to catch each tiny detail, as in a medieval Book of Hours, it would be insufferably mawkish.  The story is  sentimental, full of elegiac pathos.  A magician with a fading career in the music halls heads to Scotland and ends up doing a gig in a pub in the Western Isles.  A downtrodden girl who works there follows him like a stray dog to Edinburgh.  He adopts her and treats her like a little Princess daughter, plying his craft to buy her some pretty things.  But his kind of entertainment is being ousted by raucous rock and roll, and he sinks lower and lower in the entertainment scale.  Imagine that tale told in Hollywood terms, with Dustin Hoffmann wet-eyed as the has-been entertainer with a cute moppet at his heels.  So I wasn’t much taken by the story but delighted by how it looked.  The narrative drive that normally keeps you in your seat at a film was replaced by a willingness to be charmed by Chomet’s  passion – the passion for the particular beauty of Scotland and Edinburgh, and the passion for the craft of the animator.

Trailer
[Can't put video straight into post for some reason, though I can do that on other sites with WordPress.]

Dead at 84.

See part of her great performance in “Hud” (with Paul Newman) starting at about 5:30.

The NPR program “On the Media” features a report on how the 1950s British TV series “The Adventures of Robin Hood”– popular both in the UK and the US– employed blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters writing under assumed names.

The 1987 John McTiernan action flick Predator, now has a worthy successor: Predators. It is an enjoyable popcorn fest, which repeats the jungle theme of the first film, but with a smörgåsbord of dangerous human protagonists. A Russian (who is obviously modelled on the Heavy from Team Fortress 2), an African death squad member, a US special forces member (played by a unfeasibly muscular Adrian Brody), a Yakuza,  a drug cartel enforcer from Mexico, a serial rapist murderer, and an unfortunate unarmed doctor.

Oh, and there’s a beautiful CIA Black Ops assassin sniper who learnt her trade in the Israel Defence Force, who is the moral conscience of the film. Prize for the first person to call this Zionist propaganda.

Reminds me of a bad day in the Harry’s Place comments.

The great “Simpsons” character Troy McClure was discontinued after Phil Hartman, the actor who voiced him, was tragically murdered in 1998.

Troy, a washed-up actor, would frequently appear as the host of an informerical or an educational or corporate PR film. He always began his spiel: “Hi, I’m Troy McClure. You might remember me from…”

Here’s a compendium of some of the unforgettable films and TV shows we might remember him from.

Dead at 81.

I had anticipated being disappointed by Four Lions, and I was, but not in the way I had expected.  I had guessed it might pussyfoot around the anti-woman, anti-kafir, anti-Jew part of jihadism, but it didn’t.  The jihadists mouthed off in that strain, but then these jihadists were bumbling buffoons and so they just sounded like dimwits rather than malevolent bigots.  It was like hearing Frank Spencer singing BNP songs. You wouldn’t believe he really meant it.  So I was disappointed about how unfunny it was, and also how soft.

Four Lions was written by three of the sharpest satirists in the business, Chris Morris, and his co-writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, who wrote Peep Show, which as well as being hilarious is cold and cruel about human egocentricity and self-delusion.  I would have loved it if they had done something like a Peep Show of the would-be Al-Mujahideen.  But instead we were given this comic heist about a band of guys who try to blow things up, and make a different kind of mess from the one they intended.  Some of the audience laughed.  I didn’t.  It was slapstick aimed at twelve year olds.  (I never found Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em funny either.)

The film is a comic thriller with enough suspense to keep you watching for an hour and forty minutes but the tone is odd.   Like the bombers’ bodies at the end  it is all over the place. There were some amusing moments eg when they make martyrdom videos, but that is pretty standard stuff that any competent sketch writer could knock off in an afternoon.  The other amusing bits were the debates about whether someone is a martyr if they kill  themselves by accident, the inventive swearing in Urdu, sub-titled in English, and a scene of a discussion at an ISOC with a panel of Guardian types being interrupted by a rapping jihadist. However the film didn’t build. It was just one pratfall after another.  Only in the final scenes did it approach actual chilling satire when the devout and blameless brother of one of the jihadists is taken off in a container to Egypt for interrogation.

The writers wanted to make these jihadists “human”, and therefore they didn’t base their characters on the repellent 9/11 bomber Mohammad Atta, or give them the self-righteousness of Mohammad Sidique Khan (that pompous dick lecturing and literally finger wagging at us in his video) or the pontificating Osama Bin Laden.  So we got scenes of Omar, (Riz Ahmed) the ringleader at home, a happy family man with his pretty wife telling stories of martyrdom to his cute son.  Riz Ahmed has that cocky mischievous look Robert Carlyle had in The Full Monty and came across as a likable wide-boy. Barry, the white convert (Nigel Lindsay) was a kind of Ross Kemp, and the others were The Thick One and The Showy Off one out on a lads‘ spree.

According to The Independent:-

Four Lions puts a human face on people who are usually simply demonised – a way, ultimately, of not having to deal with them. It makes us care about Omar and his crew of wannabe martyrs, but does not condone their actions or ideology.

You don’t have to “care” about characters in a film to follow their actions with interest.  You don’t “care” for the characters in The Thick of It, for instance.  Is anyone more “human” than the characters in Spinal Tap, who make arses of themselves and haven‘t a lovable bone in their bodies?  They aren’t “demons” but they aren’t rather sweet nitwits either.

The writers did not want to take the piss out of Muslims in general or Islam, which is fair enough, but they did miss a satirical trick of, say, having the martyrs combing through the Qu’ran and the rest of the Islamic scriptures to find justification for blowing up random civilians.

I can see why families of the 7/7 victims don’t like this.  I wouldn’t if I was them, with murderous bombers presented as hapless clowns in a  caper, Laurel and Hardy further confused by ideology.   I suppose you could make a bitter comedy about suicide bombers, but this isn’t it.

Chris Morris’s next project:-  a jolly jape about delightful ditzy pranksters in the Ku Klux Klan, who keep tripping over their robes and setting their mates’ hoods on fire with their flaming crosses, while they mouth off about Barack Obama being a mud person, Jewish and a Muslim as well. Starring Ben Stiller as the Grand Wizard and Reese Witherspoon as his feisty girlfriend.  The well-loved English comic actor Nick Frost has a cameo appearance as Nick Griffin.