MARK O'CONNELL

Writer, Author, Bond Fan

Page 30 of 34

THE REWIND BENEATH MY EWINGS – don’t shoot DALLAS just yet

November 13, 2014 /

dallas

“There’s not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn’t see”

Abba, The Day Before You Came, 1982

I’ve met Lucy Ewing. Oh yes. Her alter-ego Charlene Tilton was strutting like a Texan Babs Windsor to a theatre in Guildford that just happened to be where my mum and I would park for our ‘half-term look around the shops’ treat. For this fan of the Texan Greek tragedy that was Dallas seeing Lucy Ewing was the best half-term holiday anecdote I had for quite a while. I was quickly crushed when friends’ non-interest curtailed that encounter from even being an “anecdote” at all. So when I recently read a few years back ago over breakfast that Dallas was coming back (which was apt as show matriarch Miss Ellie was always receiving bad news over breakfast), I was somewhat guarded. The dying embers of the show’s final seasons saw remaining cast members themselves having to direct, write and set the patio wind machine to “full”, subsequent 1990s TV movies had drowned in the Southfork pool and a movie notion of John Travolta as JR and Shirley Maclaine as Miss Ellie and turning the show that was all about hairspray into some Hairspray II mistake was – unlike that petrol tanker that nearly wiped out Pam Ewing – thankfully avoided.

Beginning in 1978, David Jacobs’ landmark soap was the very definition of riding the moment. Denver rival Dynasty had yet to launch and find its camp feet and the 1980s was ideal for Dallas to ride through bareback with its oil, glamour, wealthy perms and pool parties. If Dynasty was the camp sister-in-law, then Dallas was the masculine ranch-hand flanked by a few drag queens passing off as women. In a time before box-sets and spoilers (the episode reels were flown to Heathrow under armed guard when the UK discovered Who Shot JR ages after America did), Dallas was a weekly treat – a romp of a saga whose heroes and villains would pinball their allegiances at the drop of a Stetson as long as everything ended on a freezeframe cliff-hanger at 50 minutes. But would any of this overcast millarkey ever find new favour in a dusty television landscape of Mad Men, over-concepted sci-fi mysteries and Danish detective heroines in misshapen sweaters?

New show-runner Cynthia Cidre certainly knew her oil. And her TV. Wisely pitching the revival as a continuation rather than a dreaded “reboot”, the new Dallas coyly straddled the worlds of oil and – may Jock Ewing not spin in his grave – renewable energies. Oil is not the quite the story allure it used to be. BP and global warming saw to that (though how delicious would it have been for the new show producers to attribute BP’s woes to a bad JR Ewing deal?). But the greatest renewable energy on show here is easily in the programme’s writing. Whereas the original series – like Bobby Ewing’s famous exit and reappearance – became a bad dream that saw the Ewings petering off to Paris, Moscow and chain gang prison sentences, the new show opted for a smaller family tree with Southfork as hub once again. Death and egos have put many of the original cast at bay, but Cidre’s masterstroke was retrieving Patrick Duffy, Linda Gray and Larry Hagman from the Where Are They Now show circuit. Without balancing the show’s dynamic on the nostalgia casting of this trio (though it was always more interesting when they took centre stage), new Dallas realised that the Ewing kids John-Ross and Christopher are where this show has to now work. Just like Bobby and JR back in the day, John-Ross (Josh Henderson) and Christopher (Jesse Metcalfe) are oil and water, but only so long as the plots allow and their pecs allow. And of course they are rather lovely to look at – with Henderson inching ahead on who this writer would like to wake up to discover having an end-of-season cliffhanger shower in my apartment. Yes, the allegiances and back-stabbings pinball around the plots with scant grace. But wasn’t that – like the windy garden parties, signature canary yellow awnings and revelations around the driveway – the original show’s appeal? Isn’t that why it became a global sensation – because first and foremost it was entertaining?

If anything, this new incarnation was better paced and possibly less ridiculous. It is certainly better directed with Patrick Duffy leaving behind that Texan-mulleted heartthrob nonsense to age into a reassuring patriarchal Jock Ewing figure and the show’s conscience. His new wife and First Lady of Southfork Ann Ewing (played by Brenda Strong) was not only channelling the dignity of Barbara Bel Geddes’s Miss Ellie, she was pitched too with grace, sympathy and a fortunate love of horses. Thankfully Ann Ewing remembered the time-honoured Dallas trope of endlessly brushing horses as everyone else tries to save the family firm. And of course there’s Sue-Ellen’s on/off quaffing of the Bourbon (which even in New Dallas made for some glorious hip-flask clutching cliff-hangers).

And of course there is Larry Hagman, the show’s villain and chief protagonist. Hagman was clearly ailing throughout shooting Season One. But never once did the onscreen results lose that spark, that utter conviction in his character and the show. In an age of unending memes and ugly-fonted wisdom, it was refreshing to get back to the show that invented the putdown, with Hagman still afforded a rich oilfield of one-liners – “Like my Daddy always said – where’s there’s a way, there’s a will”, “You’re just like your Daddy – all hat and no cattle”, “Son, never pass up a good chance to shut up” and “Angry Birds? Honey, I don’t need any more angry birds in my life”. And when he passed on, enter Judith Ryland (Judith Light) – the best TV bitch the small screen has seen since, well, Dallas and Dynasty first came to an end.

American culture cannot get its head round the British pantomime. But Dallas is the only pantomime the Americans ever got right, with Bobby as Buttons, a whole carousel of Ugly Sisters and Harris Ryland poised as chief villain. Old characters cameo back and forth to please the purists (go on – give us Katherine Wentworth), but they take no prisoners with backstory. There was scant pandering here to any newcomers in the audience when Ray Ewing (Steve Kanaly), Lucy Ewing (Charlene Tilton), Gary Ewing (Ted Shackleford), Valene Ewing (Joan Van Ark), Cally (Cathy Podewell) and Afton Cooper (Audrey Landers) drop by. You either watched the show before or you didn’t. Yes Cynthia Cidre and her team of writers spray on some brief exposition and allusions to the show’s past – but that is more to reward those that did watch, not those that didn’t.

Whether new Dallas continues is now questionable. Hagman’s passing was not signposted and ratings have lessened. As a television show it survived the loss of JR. That ”riding the moment” luck has maybe not quite happened for the new show. But it doesn’t need it. It pitched itself as a continuation of the show’s original pulse and drives, in which it has wholly succeeded. Just put Lucy Ewing doing that sassy turn to camera back in the opening titles!

BIGGER THAN LIFE – KEN ADAM’S FILM DESIGN exhibition to open in Berlin

November 1, 2014 /

Ken-AdamThe art, craftsmanship and genius of production designer Ken Adam cannot be overlooked. Of course his legacy and links with the Bond films goes without question, but so too does the grip and influence he has to this day on film and public architectural design (London’s Canary Wharf is allegedly modelled on the Ken Adam style).

ken adam 2Opening in December and continuing until May 2015, BIGGER THAN LIFE – KEN ADAM’S FILM DESIGN is a new exhibition housed at Berlin’s Deutsche Kinemathek. In 2012 Adam gave his entire artistic output to the Deutsche Kinemathek – including more than 4000 drawings, personal documents, sketches and designs for such titles as GOLDFINGER, THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and MOONRAKER plus his non-Bond work including BARRY LYNDON, THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE (for which Adam won the Oscar), ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES, DR STRANGELOVE and unused artwork for PLANET OF THE TITANS (which became STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE) and more.

“When you do a scribble and everything seems to work … that is the most exciting part“ – Ken Adam

A full catalogue accompanies the exhibition featuring essays by renowned authors on a diverse range of previously unexamined aspects of Adam’s career – such as the artistic roots of his Gesamtkunstwerk and his influence on art, design and architecture. The catalogue will be available to buy.

BIGGER THAN LIFE – KEN ADAM’S FILM DESIGN

Deutsche Kinemathek / Dec 2014 – April 2015

For more on the Deutsche Kinemathek, click here.

Deutsche Kinemathek
Museum für Film und
Fernsehen
Potsdamer Str. 2
10785 Berlin

SIR_KEN_ADAM_NPG

Reviewing THE SILENT STORM – Neon Films / Eon Productions new drama

October 15, 2014 /

storm 5Balor (Damian Lewis) is an anachronistic reverend, ex-naval officer and turn of the century bible-thumper. Pitched in a post WWII world of revived gender, sexual and even atheist confidence, Balor is a defiant Presbyterian cart-horse charged with keeping afloat the dwindling Christian instincts of an unnamed Scottish island (though shot on the Isle of Mull) in an unnamed year. “To expect happiness in this life is a form of arrogance” says Balor to a life-weary parishioner. Married to Aislin (Andrea Riseborough), Balor is both stranger and religious drill sergeant to his kindly spouse. Recovering from the loss of their child singlehandedly, Aislin is dutiful but privately proud of her resistance to Balor’s sense of a God. Hers is a world of nature and nurture, of quietly ignoring her husband’s sense of Christ and the medieval guilt that comes with it. But such defiance comes at a price – and one Aislin has long assumed is her lot to accept in a world without friends and where leisure time and reading in the bath is heresy.

silent stormEnter Fionn (newcomer Ross Anderson), a strapping, ex-shipyard tyke assigned by mainland naughty-boy wrangler Mr Smith (a far too brief John Sessions) to possibly reform, or at best learn the error of ways he knows were never errors. Respectful and patient himself, the hardworking Fionn admits to sorting contraband for the dockers and shipmen of his orphaned youth whilst learning all about women along the way – an admission that betrays a quietly curious Aislin and her lack of decent male contact, be it physical or emotional.

Pallid and glacial in his emotions, Damian Lewis’s Balor is cut from a similar cloth as Stanley Baker in Zulu or Richard Harris in This Sporting Life – marked by a simmering and very British onscreen masculinity at increasing odds with a femininity and modernity he cannot control. Prone to bouts of [almost] Pythonesque martyrdom (almost because the hyperbole levels are deliberate) and Calvary-inspired physical acts, Lewis creates a crumbling bull of a man at odds with the modern world and the breakdown nailing him to his own cross. A cracking sequence sees Balor singlehandedly haul the contents of his austere chapel onto his own Ark – and one with no dove of peace or chance of salvation.

Riseborough’s Aislin is less clear-cut. Equally pallid yet not the indulgent witch she is painted as, Riseborough plays the God widow with a sympathy that avoids sentiment. With her abilities to cure an ailing ram through herbs rather than prayer, Aislin is at one with the nature of an island she equally loathes. As all her femininity is almost pared away, Riseborough’s wife holds an earthly wisdom and controlled sexuality that grates with husband Balor. Aislin knows that God is not found on the hard wooden pews of a remote chapel but the private herbs, fauna, flora and respect for others she surrounds herself with. Ross Anderson’s Fionn is possibly the soul of the film. Handsome, agile yet still the child who can be scolded, Anderson allows Fionn to become the audience’s entry point to a sad story of a couple that already feels over when the film opens.

Writer/director Corinna McFarlane forever steers the emotions of The Silent Storm (or clear lack of them) to various cliff edges of revelation or despair, but often pulls back from what is expected when telling the tale of such matrimonial decay (a rot that has mostly already set in before the film starts). The burgeoning friendship between Aislin and Fionn is loaded with preconceptions that do not always manifest where moments of reconciliation and hope are often swiped aside. The tonal upshot is ultimately one of emotional honesty and a romance not always dealt the obvious cards by the writing. At times reminiscent of the God/protagonist divide of Peter Mullan’s Orphans, The Silent Storm is never a sermon.

storm 4Cinematographer Ed Rutherford’s stark palette of pastel blues, enamel tea cups, grained chapel pews and ashened skies of course underline the film’s characters and McFarlane’s intent but never over-define it. Just as Aislin’s lot verges on a Dickensian misery, Rutherford and McFarlane refresh proceedings with rich burnt oranges, greenery and beautifully shot flora and fauna. A treasured book of poetry is prized by Fionn because of its contents, but McFarlane’s eye marks it out simply because it is blue in a palette of Calvinistic browns and greys.

Likewise, Sharon Long’s costume work is a sallow wardrobe of braces, reverend bibs, collars and hair ties holding back the emotions within just as long as things look in order to the outside world. Credit too must go to Alistair Caplin’s blustering, Calvinistic roar of a score. At times intrusive and almost too heavenly in its bombast it also reminds – like Riseborough’s Aislin – that God is in every cliff edge, moss-covered tree, cave nook and mountain stream. Providing a more contemporary Celtic sound than the film’s austere visuals, Caplin’s orchestral and choral work (he contributes his own vocals more than once) ably serves the film with a hope and religious scope The Silent Storm needs to work before it can pull it down. Or at least kneel before it with what it knows and wants us to know about the human condition and spirit.

Developed and produced by Barbara Broccoli, Michael G Wilson, Eon Productions and producer Nicky Bentham, The Silent Storm is a sparse but progressively forceful work.

The Silent Storm – a Neon Films production in association with Eon Productions and West End Films.

The film opens in the UK on May 20th 2016.

The Silent Storm’s world premiere was held during the 2014 London Film Festival with Damian Lewis, Andrea Riseborough, Ross Anderson, Corinna McFarlane and Nicky Bentham on hand to introduce the film to the gathered crew, artists, executive producers and at least one James Bond.

Photo © Mark O’Connell / 2014

Photo © Mark O'Connell / 2014

Photo © Mark O’Connell / 2014

Photo © Mark O'Connell / 2014

Photo © Mark O’Connell / 2014

Photo © Mark O'Connell / 2014

Photo © Mark O’Connell / 2014

Photo © Mark O'Connell / 2014

Photo © Mark O’Connell / 2014

EVERYTHING’S COMING UP PEACHES – Wonderground cinema’s Peaches Christ hits UK shores!

September 23, 2014 /

Move over Secret Cinema before someone sabotages you down the stairs of immersive moviegoing!!

“There’s always someone younger and hungrier coming down the stairs after you”, chirps Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon) in Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 – er – ‘classic’ flesh-fest, Showgirls. Well if it’s hunger you need, then San Francisco’s schlock-fest doyenne Peaches Christ is certainly younger and hungrier than most for this film and is bringing that schlock-fest passion to London in October. Teaming up with the Amy Grimehouse and a gathered ensemble of San Francisco queens, kings and no doubt a few British princesses for good measure, Peaches is bringing her volcanic-ally explosive night Showgirls to the Rio Cinema and Bearbarella to Manchester’s Cornerhouse.

This writer was fortunate enough to catch Peaches’ sixteenth Showgirls night at the Castro Theatre. This is what British audiences have in store when a peach bursts your cherry….

Christ’s A Night of a Thousand Showgirls is a now famed event in gay San Francisco – an annual on-stage tribute to the gobbling turkey that is Verhoeven’s critically mauled flick. Recently celebrating its seventeenth slide down the pole of affectionate ridicule, Peaches Christ’s pre-show extravaganza has built up quite a head of steam. Infinitely bolder and cleverer than the film itself – which is only glorious because it knows not of its pitfalls (“you got something wrong with your nipples?”), A Night of a Thousand Showgirls is a must in the Castro’s must-ladened calendar and this Showgirls virgin was luckier than Kyle MacLachlan’s [then] bottom wrangler.

(c) Mark O'Connell / 2013Located in ideal seats by our Showgirls-savvy friends in the beautiful old paddle steamer of a cinema that is San Francisco’s Castro Theatre, the night’s merriment was already apparent. Audience participation is to be as key as audience enjoyment. This is what the Rocky Horror Picture Show fan movement was before provincial tours starring Blue Peter presenters diluted the naughtiness for midweek audiences. Here is a party where day-glo drag drifts through the aisles, bearded Vegas showgirls mingle with fluorescent leotarded weaklings, a quarterback in oddly becoming stilettoes trots to the Gents, space vixens glitter alongside Gaga reinventionists, girls are boys, boys are girls, boys are boys and the statuesque RuPaul’s Drag Race candidate and drag loyalist Honey Mahogany shows them all how it’s done (“too real”, dismisses host Christ with a wink at Honey, “too real!”).

The thing to remember with San Francisco is that people put in the effort. For scant fiscal returns, this town is bustling with many a creative hustler like Verasphere’s Mrs Vera and Mr Tina, Club Something’s David Glamamore, Honey Mahogany and – in this instance – Peaches Christ (and her alter-ego Joshua Grannell) who push their friends and collaborators’ time and talents to bring out a one-off yearly night that celebrates cinema, cinema-going and the city’s crucial LGBT scene. From an elaborate and hilarious pre-show film written by Christ to on-stage dance numbers and the night’s signature moment (which we will come on to), this is an event that celebrates Verhoeven’s filmic monstrosity but more crucially tips a hat/wig/Michael Myers hockey mask (I’m sure I saw one) to the creative counter-pulse of San Francisco itself. Quite clearly revelling in the support of the current and proven generation on the drag and cabaret circuit – Mahogany, Lady Bear, Cousin Wonderlette and Penny L’eggs – as well as giving a step up to newer creations still finding their feet (and kitten heels), my night with a thousand showgirls soon became so more than a bit of camp filler for an otherwise bad film. And to label anything of this thinking as camp or drag is to miss the point. This is not about expression, not impression. These girls and boys are not aping Showgirls, they are using it as a spot-lit springboard for their own identities however temporary or fleeting. Marshalled by Peaches as – naturally – Gershon’s bi-hi Cristal Connors, this pre-film rollercoaster is a slick affair whose edges are only rough because that makes everything funnier. Life is always going to be a lot more entertaining when you can take the rise out of something so risible as Showgirls. But there is nothing suspect about the cast’s insight into the phenomenon of this movie. Real support players from the 1995 original join the choreographed mayhem, the production values echo the tackier excesses of the Las Vegas settings and part of the momentum to the hilarious chaos is the audience’s familiarity with Christ’s set-up and shtick.

P1050010And this is all before the evening’s signature moment unfurls itself like Nomi Malone spewing forth from a Verhoeven volcano. “Free lap dance with every large popcorn” boasts the posters throughout the Castro. Was there really to be a thousand showgirls filling the rafters in the two-tier Castro Theatre? Well maybe not quite a thousand, but the finale of Christ’s elaborate spectacle is a now infamous tsunami of drag as at least a hundred acts, personas and gender benders tear into the audience searching for prey clutching a box of large popcorn. They just happen to feel like a thousand. This is the moment the night scores its infamy as the drag dial is turned to “Ken Russell” and all manner of faux-hedonistic ribaldry and slap and tickle fun spills into the very suspecting audience. Popcorn ejaculates in all directions, camera flashes make out the dry humping and comedy squats of the writhing figures and – like San Francisco itself – the lines of sexual orientation are fantastically blurred.

P1050009This is also the moment of no return for Showgirls the film. It cannot follow this. But it does, albeit with a slight sadness from this audience member that Peaches herself has not re-shot the whole film with her pals (though the filmed homages over the years are no doubt building up and could one day see no need for Elizabeth Berkeley and her unrehearsed twists to camera). But wait. What is this? Watching Showgirls in this context becomes an utter joy as its’ weird and sometimes brutal twists become total car-crash entertainment, its excruciating dialogue are gems of bad hindsight (“here, wipe your nose”), MacLachlan gets his twin peaks out for the boys and eventually nothing that road kill of a movie vomits up surprises us. The upshot is a totally immersive grand guignol of an experience, all refereed by Peaches Christ’s and her A-grade enthusiasm for the B-movie in us all. And I would put money on the Vegas gambling tables that to do this all over again next time is even more fun. But for now, my Showgirls cherry was not just popped. It was rolled in glue and petrol-blue glitter and stamped on with an eight inch heel. Get yourself to the Rio Cinema in October. Now.

“Aren’t you gonna come here and give me a big kiss?”. Actually, I think I might.

 

peaches 2As part of the BFI’s Days of Fear And Wonder, Peaches Christ’s Bearbarella is at Belfast’s BlackBox on Thursday 9th October as part of Outfest, Glasgow’s Film Theatre on Friday 10th October and Manchester’s Cornerhouse on Saturday 11th October.

In association with The Amy Grimehouse, Peaches Christ’s Showgirls is at London’s Rio Cinema on Friday 17th October.

 

 

And of course Peaches Christ has a great top shelf of a cine-skewed site.

 

The film with the Midas Touch – GOLDFINGER @ 50

September 17, 2014 /

Goldfinger @ 50

 

A Sunday in March, 1964

Auric Goldfinger’s Ford Country Squire station wagon motors its charge along Main Street on a Sunday afternoon, passing the Embassy Picturehouse and pulling up dutifully at the lights. Its Mustang poppy-red and faux wooden panelling is 1960s Ford personified and the car’s wide dimensions spill into neighbouring lanes of traffic.

But this is not America. And the car’s fictional owner Auric Goldfinger is not at the wheel. Nor is his fictional chauffeur, Oddjob. James Bond is not even sat captive on the back seat as he does in Goldfinger.

This is Esher, Surrey. The year is indeed 1964, but Jimmy O’Connell is driving, his wing man is my Uncle Gerald and my dad, John, is sat in the back. The locals frequenting the pubs of Esher – including Jimmy’s much-loved The Bear – are most intrigued by the left-hand drive and Yankie expanse of the Ford …. and how it handles “like a tart’s waterbed on wheels”. Not very James Bond.

(extract from Chapter 8, Catching Bullets – Memoirs of a Bond Fan)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eszhV1M3Dk8

“Like all institutions that must safeguard their survival, the Bond series adapts and adopts. Three films in and we already recognise where the villains, heroes and those in between are positioned. The film’s glossy calling-card of dousing Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton) in gold paint is not just a proficient and nasty way of telling the audience all we need to know about Auric Goldfinger. It tells us what this film series now wants to be – bespoke action adventures, a little bit kinky, a little bit violent, often original, always stylish, yet forever aimed at mass audiences. The Bond films are now in the business of showing their intent rather than telling it.”

(extract from Chapter 8, Catching Bullets – Memoirs of a Bond Fan)

Through the LOOKING glass… HBO’s new gay by the Bay series reviewed

August 12, 2014 / / 0 Comments

LOOKING2From an opening fumble in the cruising bushes of a San Francisco park, HBO’s new series Looking makes great play of not really being another gay show that starts with an opening fumble in the cruising bushes of a San Francisco park. Our main guy Patrick (Jonathan Groff) is already on the phone joking with his nearby pals like friends lost in a zoo no-one visits anymore. Already the path-paving brilliance of Russell T Davies’ Queer As Folk and its American remake cousin with all their nubile young lovelies and their helium heels hauled skywards now somehow seems so turn of the century.

Less a gold lamé baton handed on from the hindsight, camp and shock of Tales of The City, Will and Grace and Queer As Folk respectively, HBO’s Looking is not about running forwards. Like British director Andrew Haigh’s previous [and pitch-perfect] feature Weekend (2011), this is about half-seen exchanges outside busy bars and stolen conversations on various Lower Haight sofas as the work talk and weed pipes get passed round as inconsequentially as the prawn crackers from a Thai takeout (not a euphemism!). “I’m proud of you – you’re a pervert now” dismisses one of Patrick’s friends as Looking quickly proves it is not about coming-out stories, Cher gags, fantasy Madonna dance-offs in the bus queue or bottom licking commotions. This is not Sex And The City but just done with gay men replacing the ladies. We’ve had that. It was called Sex And The City.

Everything the possible detractors will level at Looking is exactly why it works. It is not a peaks and troughs screaming queen of a comedy-drama with sexual pratfalls and verbal grenades. Nor does it wear its politics on its leather/denim/tattooed sleeves. Equal marriage, Prop 8 and DOMA is not its agenda as it is not all of ours either. The show and us are aware of the principles at stake, but how many of us really fuss about it 24/7? When very straight comedies and dramas are tapping gay marriage as a narrative normality, it would be wrong of Looking to be throwing its bouquets out the pram in every episode (a wedding episode obviously touches upon such matters but from Patrick’s perspective of messing life up with his intended plus-one).

The opening story especially is a wilful almost inconsequential slow build – an afternoon-paced overture to these characters lives that may lose some viewers, but please stick with it. Episode Five is a beautifully languid Before Midnight exploration of a day off in Golden Gate Park, the planetarium and the kind of affecting character interplay which only Haigh’s Weekend ever got right in recent times. Yes, Looking is savvy enough to throw in a Golden Girls put-down (what isn’t, Rose?), but its gay pulse is not predicated on them.

Spring-boarding off creator Michael Lannan’s previous short film Lorimer (2011), there is actually an affecting delicacy to the lives and exchanges of games designer Patrick, lost artist Augustin (Frankie J Alvarez) and nearly-forty waiter Dom (Murray Bartlett). Like San Francisco itself, the differences and expressions of everyone’s sexuality is a given. There are no closeted jocks or intimate-shy handmaidens here. Moving too fast is a deliberate fault of some characters sex lives, but never the show’s writing or insight into at least three generations of contemporary gay men. These are [almost] nice people doing their thing – the Augustin character is a deliberate hard sell and carved with such pitfalls of attitude one realises he is totally familiar. The difference here is that for gay audiences – for good or bad – this is our thing now; and as one character astutely notes, “guys are guys”.

A key motif of Looking is “being who we think we are”. For the trio of main characters “looking” is indeed key. But looking for what? Maybe some are looking for love, intimacy, a better street to live on, better praise from their peers, better sex from a threesome (or not) or just looking for others who are also dissatisfied with their lot to validate everything (Augustin’s problem). All held together with a solid cast, the show slowly pulls you in. Whilst how Groff’s Patrick really knows Alvarez and Bartlett is perhaps not flagged up enough early on, the friendships are believable with a pleasing short-hand and explanations do arise without surprise.

Likewise Lauren Weedman’s Doris is a savvy, bubble-bursting best mate, Raúl Castillo’s Richie is a hot and kind Mexican and Scott Bakula is an old guard Castro florist with age and hindsight on his side – “we still had sex, but it was friendlier” he notes about the one-night stands of the 1980s and 1990s. Cyber-dating is of course a support app of the show – unavoidably used but not exclusively. Though there will be many a moment when some of us in the audience look to our overpriced brogues with acute embarrassment at the behaviour on show. Patrick and pals research their past and present dalliances and shag-obsessions on the Instagrams, okaycupid.coms and Grindrs of this world. Characters over-worry about the Instagram photos of a dinner date and the successful exes now with their own Wikipedia page. But their real stories are often advanced from chance encounters on the MUNI train, accidental glances through a bar doorway, in an empty sauna and works drinks nights. The relationship between Patrick and Richie is particularly lo-fi, not remotely reliant on new technologies. The politics of “friending” on social media and being “an 82%” match“ is rolled out, but so too are the real-life concerns about what messages Patrick gives his new Brit boss Kevin (Russell Tovey) when working overtime on a Sunday and when exactly does a three-way become a problem or a plus? And just when is it no longer polite to mock the Brits after too many bottles of free Bud?!

But is it identifiable to non-San Franciscan, non-American audiences? Of course it is. In the same way Haigh’s Weekend chimed with Top Ten film lists the world over, Looking is a wholly identifiable show, carved with the same incisiveness of its creators previous work. “If I was embarrassed about it, I wouldn’t do it” is a telling line from content, well-earning sex-worker CJ the adrift artist Augustin desperately wants to be like. Not every piece of dialogue need be a barnstormer. Not every quip requires its own t-shirt. Though “you gave him a winky, smiling face? What are you – a Japanese teenager?might do the rounds. It is never a glib show. Nor is it a dot.com, labels and luxury lifestyle fest. With an easy blend of ages and social backgrounds, Looking is thankfully never about whiny, white rich gays. The basement apartments, corridors and streets of Looking are worn and lived in. Like the characters and their love lives, not everything is new and shiny but all of it is functional. That is what San Francisco affords this series. And that is why it is the vital fourth character. Real-life Castro drag artists Peaches Christ and Honey Mahogany are on well-manicured hand, the Castro Theater cinema is the noble granddame backdrop it always has been, the leather-bound Folsom Street Fair plays itself to great effect mid-way through the series, Dolores Park plays Dolores Park, The Stud bar is a location must and the forever-vintage streets of Mission Dolores, Market, the Castro and their pizza [and men] by-the-slice sidewalks are recognisable to anyone familiar with the worlds of Maupin and Milk. What San Francisco brings to Looking is what the show itself gets very right. It is that sense of community, of a neighbourhood of characters and shared experiences often ticking over through nothing but an inexplicable and shared shorthand.

We may not have had the best timeline of televisual representation over the decades. But what doesn’t always embody us makes us stronger – and all that article-writing jazz (maybe).  The landmark likes of Tales of The City, Queer As Folk, Will And Grace, Angels In America, Beautiful People, Queer As Folk and the queer Carrington boy in Dynasty may have been all we had. But they were still ours. Looking represents a smart new chapter. Season Two has been greenlit and audiences – despite a minority of initial and lazy reactions declaring “it’s boring” (it’s not) – have grown and spiked just as the series and its wise writing has. And in the fun, warm, unexpectedly raw, real and fresh-telling style it has on offer, going through this Looking glass could well bring us to a wonderful wonderland.

 

Looking began in the US on HBO on January 19th 2014 and in the UK on Sky Atlantic on January 27th 2014.

 

Mark O’Connell is on Twitter and the author of 1980s gay childhood memoir, Catching Bullets – Memoirs of Bond Fan. With thanks to Sky Atlantic.

Reviewing SHOOTING 007 – AND OTHER CELLULOID ADVENTURES

July 8, 2014 / / 0 Comments

There is a refreshing honesty to Alec Mills’ writing and it is an honesty predicated on making no bones of not being honest. Part compelled by the books that have emerged from his film industry peers and pals, and part inspired by realising (and believing) his career as one of Britain’s key camera operators and directors of photography will have hold enough anecdotal momentum for the retirement project of penning a book, Shooting 007 And Other Celluloid Adventures pulls a compelling focus on one of the most interesting periods of British mainstream cinema.

The self-deprecating “young fool” that so many of Mills generation purport to be – the likes of Peter Hunt, Lewis Gilbert, Terence Young, Bryan Forbes and John Glen – are also key participants in some of British and Western cinema’s celluloid landmarks. Born in 1932, Mills’ economically details how his film and television career was a gem-specked array of luck, fortune and hard bloody work. From a clapper loader for John Huston in Moby Dick and Powell and Pressburger’s The Battle of The River Plate (both 1956) to focus pulling for Joseph Losey, Ken Annakin, J Lee Thompson and Michelangelo Antonioni (1966’s Blow Up) and then eventually becoming camera operator on The Saint, Where Eagles Dare, Carry On Cleo, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Gold, Shout At The Devil, Aflie Darling, The Awakening and Eye Of The Needle – Alec Mills has been either partly or wholly responsible for more than his fair share of iconic cinematic imagery. But like all folk fortunate enough to call this world their life, it is the relationships, dramas, learning curves (always check whether a “gelatin filter” has slipped or not) and friendships that mark the successes, not the box office tallies for the suits in Burbank and Wardour Street.

And it is not all Home Counties back-lots and camera dramas by the tea urn. Mills details working for Disney on such “fantasy land” pictures as Swiss Family Robinson (where Mills made the Disney football team under “team manager” John Mills), Greyfriars Bobby and The Prince And The Pauper – an era of photography one could argue is later evident in the rich, bright and near-Technicolor hues of the two Timothy Dalton Bond movies Mills lensed in the 1980s. And of course he was the camera operator on that barely noticed b-movie by the name of Return of the Jedi (1983). Mills uses that particular experience to kindly suggest none of us get on with everyone in life, and just how damning a cold shoulder can be on a film gig that can last for months. Likewise, Mills explores the tempers and “war of words” with director John Guillermin on the set of 1978’s Death on the Nile, only to be curiously called up again by the director in 1986 to lens his doomed King Kong Lives (“was he taking this opportunity to settle an old score and sack me?”).  For some reason the line “Linda Blair arrived from Hollywood to complicate matters” is an intriguing bon mot and indicative of the book’s honesty and swift ease in moving through its subjects.

It is around this point in Shooting 007 that Mills recounts the life luck of Bond director John Glen urging Mills to come out of semi-retirement to camera operate Octopussy in 1982. Having been an operator five times for Eon Productions and the Bond movie-machine, Mills was subsequently invited twice to perform director of photography duties on Timothy Dalton’s Bond bullets, The Living Daylights (1987) and Licence To Kill (1989). It was an invite initially delivered by Ken Adam on the set of King Kong Lives and one Mills proudly notes, “I was lost for words; this had to be the most exciting time since I came into the industry in 1946”.

The encouragement and support of his wife Suzy does not go unnoticed – almost acting as Mill’s very own light meter, checking for a truth and a through-line of narrative. When Mills is in doubt at his own recollections and the need to even discuss close [and not so close] colleagues, a curious interaction between author and his use of stories peppers the writing. There are frequent junctions in Shooting 007 buoyed up by the author questioning why such and such a detail is even necessary. Intentional or not, it makes for an absorbing, almost too apologetic biography. From WWII childhood to dashing from afternoon trips to the pictures to make evensong and that first tea boy / clapper loading apprenticeship at Carlton Hills Studios (where Mills had already joyously worked out his first wage packet represented “twenty one visits to the cinema, sitting in the front seats!”) via an asthma-induced and maybe welcome “discharge” from the Navy in the early 1950s all to a subsequent and timely film industry fortune in the guise of a nine year apprenticeship under famed cameraman Harry Waxman BSC (Father Brown, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone).

And of course it makes an apt requirement that a book about a director of photography should feature a rich array of photographs, with Mills’ metaphorical light meter checking throughout for matching anecdotes and prime conditions to discuss and highlight (including some of his own on-set photographs). From a great early snap of Mills standing in for Octopussy’s Kristina Wayborn with a jokily amorous Roger Moore (complete with Mills clutching the Faberge egg behind his back) to the rich roster of many an unseen Bond-on-set still from the Eon/Danjaq archives, globe-trotting camera gigs for Swiss Family Robinson, candid shots of Peter Sellers perched atop a king’s throne nursing a brandy and having an Aboriginal tracker whip in half a cigarette in Mills mouth whilst shooting Rank’s Robbery Under Arms, Shooting 007 is a personable tour of cinema peppered with what ‘Camera A’ doesn’t see. Or wouldn’t see.

A welcome addition to that generation of post-war film-makers and creatives who possibly bridged the old and the new, the old school way of making pictures versus the world of new technologies, new management structures and story needs, Shooting 007 And Other Celluloid Adventures is a brisk, upfront but detailed read about a very different time of British-based cinema.

Shooting 007 And Other Celluloid Adventures by Alec Mills is published now by The History Press.

Reviewing THE NORMAL HEART

May 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

THE NORMAL HEARTDirector Ryan Murphy clearly has no glee left in him for this thumping, harsh, but selfless adaption of Larry Kramer’s landmark 1985 play, The Normal Heart. Chronicling the part-biographical real life sorrows and fights of Kramer’s own early 1980s world, this ensemble piece drops any pretence of a slow build for a fearsomely frank look at the early impact of HIV/AIDS on the gay communities of New York. The Normal Heart is less about the hedonism hangover of the 1970s and more about the fear of losing the social and political progress (such as it was) to do all of that all over again if needs be without prejudice.

It is 1981 and Ned Weeks (Mark Ruffalo) is travelling to Fire Island for a bout or three of ‘Mighty Real’ no-strings debauchery. Clearly not at total ease with being in love, Weeks is a sexually adrift soul plagued by a small sense of self-loathing and a big of sense of self-righteousness. Within minutes friends begin falling by the wayside as director Murphy puts over the breathless speed and impact of the early 80s AIDS deaths via a clever piece of zeitgeist gay casting proving no-one was exempt. As this devastation takes its cruel hold, Ned is instantly compelled to begin the fight for better mayoral assistance and medical messages in a fiercely homophobic and two-faced world. Immediately, a concerned and already clued-up Dr Emma Brookner (Julia Roberts) is dealing with the now constant stream of patients and a bubbling resentment her Polio-blighted world sees her in a wheelchair as all around her guys are gambling with their very lives for a human contact she has never had. Enter Ned into her initially cold world of pragmatic facts and health budget honesty.

As lesions spread like Rorschach spots testing the psyche of the whole gay community, The Normal Heart throws most of its trailer beats out in the first fifteen minutes. The end result is that you don’t know what the end result is. Exploring the merits or not of “promiscuity” becoming a “political agenda”, the film is partly about sex versus sense as Ned battles his own role in gay society – defying harsh truths posed by his older brother Ben (Alfred Molina, on terrific form) and assuming all past infatuations should become romances. But make no mistake – The Normal Heart is a grenade of a film about a grenade of a plight. Kramer’s adaption of his own play shares the operatic emotions of Tony Kushner’s Angels In America but has none of the fantasy relief. Or even the episodic structure to gather breath. As cold food is left in hospital corridors by medical interns too fearful to feed the dying victims and gay activist friends refuse to ask favours of influential colleagues for fear of outing themselves, the multi-stranded hypocrisy of it all is almost as much of a gut-punch as the very frankly played effects of the virus.

Clearly trying to remember the stage foundations of the original play, Murphy and Kramer let ensemble dialogues unfurl in single rooms before showing the scared panic of lovers hauling their dying partners across town or further (one flashback anecdote from Taylor Kitsch’s Bruce is truly shocking in its telling). Ruffalo is on aggravating form as Ned – possibly becoming too much of an irritant as others are trying to tread more cautiously and sometimes fairly. Dr Brookner suggests his “big mouth” is not an irritant but a “cure”, but Ned does do a lot of shouting. This is a piece where many a central character is afforded a powerful monologue that will just – like the original play – truly floor the audience. Joe Mantello’s Micky has a particularly salient and honest monologue, a volunteer Estelle (Danielle Fernand) wants to do anything to help and details the tragic reasons why and Roberts’ last act lambasting of the bureaucrats required this viewer to have a press of the ‘pause’ button before continuing.

Almost too separately pitched from his campaigning colleagues to make him in any way likeable (and possibly creating the vaguest of faults of the film), Ruffalo’s Ned is however unexpectedly granted a true love in the guise of Matt Bomer’s Felix – a figure he has known before (played out in a nearly fun retro flashback advertising the pitfalls of the bathhouses within faux ads for themselves). By bringing that deliberately beautiful and fresh Clark Kent canvas to the story, Bomer’s Felix is a welcome breath of cute fresh air. But a single tear running down his chiselled cheekbones whilst making love is a chilling coda of Felix’s future. “Men do not naturally not love”, he remarks, “ – they learn not to”. Bomer will get award recognition for this. So will others. Not that awards are why narratives like The Normal Heart need to be told. There is the film’s constant dialogue about equating history turning its back on the gay communities for gay men who blindly do the same with the next casual partner. The film and play both catalogue all facets of the gay condition – its support friendships, contradictions and gay homophobes. But Larry Kramer, Ryan Murphy and The Normal Heart do not make judgments. Judgments don’t help the dying. The Normal Heart is about the search for dignity – in the characters loves, their workplaces, their campaign tactics and ultimately their deaths. The film does have its flaws. It ends far too abruptly and offers scant respite. But that is maybe its point. And Murphy is reportedly prepping a sequel for Ned.

And there are pockets of not-bleak. Jim Parsons’ quick-witted Tommy is the only near-fun figure of the film, becoming a calm and waspish mediator for both the characters and audience. His use of suddenly unneeded Rolodex cards – his “cardboard tombstones” – is particularly affecting, as is the film’s end coda with a choice of music that is almost too much to ever hear again without seeing all those faces that are not here anymore. Tommy serenely observes when pondering now dead colleagues, artists and writers – “all those plays that won’t get written”. Larry Kramer should forever know he did write this and Ryan Murphy’s brutal film creates a new immortality for a vital piece of writing about those who had so such luck.

The Normal Heart airs on HBO in America on Sunday 25th May and on Sky Atlantic in the UK soon.

 

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