Pupil Barrister
Reviews, comments and thoughts on films
Chris Pine as Kirk, Zachary Qunto as Spock
Particularly impressed by Chris Pine in Star Trek. Gives it JUST enough Shatner without ever lapsing into Comedy Captain Kirk Mode
and then
Nice contrast between old & young Spock- Quinto all conflicted and tormented; Nimoy SO over all that crap.
What more do you need?
Riot Police at the G20 Protests, London, 1st April 2009. Photo by PublicCCTV.
The police, particularly in London, appear to have forgotten that they police only with our consent. They are not the armed wing of the state. Some reforms are therefore long overdue
Of the suggestions he lists, I have mixed feelings about this pair:
- Just as the storage of DNA from wholly innocent citizens is an outrage, so is the routine video-ing of members of the public by police officers. This must stop.
- In contrast, members of the public must never be prevented from recording the activities of police officers.
I recall a point made by the former pedant Cleanthes, commenting on my Notes for Michael, who cited Robert Peel’s principles for policing:
An agent of the state???? That, Robert, in one succint phrase is the most daming indictment of the damage that has been done to the ethos of the Police over the last few decades.
Read Peel’s Principles here. Especially no.7:Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
Libertarian Ian Parker-Joseph made a similar point in the comments to the CentreRight post.
On the issue of filming, it seems to me we can’t have it both ways. If the police are indeed simply citizens in uniform, then they surely have the same rights to film people in public, as the rest of the citizenry? If we are allowed to film them, surely they should be allowed to film us, no? Placing a different set of restrictions on the police on this issue would violate Peel’s principle.
And before anyone brings up CCTV, Cleanthes and I have already discussed the difference between automated and eyeball policing at The Select Society.
Cycle Mounted Police at the National Theatre.
Moritz Bleibtreu and Franka Potente in ‘Lola Rendt’ (Run Lola Run, 1998)
James Harkin’s essay in The Observer Film Quarterly, adapted from his new book Cyburbia, highlights non-linear storytelling in film-making, and asks what these techniques say about the state of our culture. When Kubrick made The Killing in this fashion, the film was considered to confusing for the audience, and the project was shelved. A generation later, such films were making millions, with Pulp Fiction probably taking credit as the ‘breakthrough’ film. Pictures like Crash, Syriana and Amores Perros weave disparate narratives and characters together, by way of a key event (usually dislocating and disturbing). Others, such as Memento, withhold key events until the end of the film to keep us guessing.
Harkin is right to say that non-linear techniques have become mainstream. I would go further, and suggest that they are in danger of becoming cliché. Any film in need of an extra layer of depth can play about with the timeline in the sure knowledge that a fairly standard plot turn can be transformed into a ‘twist’ if you delay its arrival. Even the one-trick pony that is He’s Just Not That In To You makes claims at complexity, by opting for an interlinked ‘ensemble cast’ of characters who are all one coincidence away from each other.
Its clear that our interpretation of film has been profoundly influenced by the slew of modern, non-linear story-telling. Visual cues and clues that were not in common use a few years ago, are commonplace now. Our visual language, the grammar of film and TV, has evolved, and in a short space of time, too. This was illustrated to me last week, via a second viewing of David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive. I had first seen the film soon after its arrival on DVD, and I remember how confused I found its structure, and lack of revelatory moments. However, watching it again recently, the same scenes are not nearly so confusing. After four years of Lost on our screens every week, the transition between the first and second ‘worlds’ that Naomi Watts’ character inhabits is easy to spot. One might argue that I think this only because I’ve seen it twice, and that someone who saw the film for the first time would be confused, but I don’t think so. The clues in shot and edit which reveal the riddle are easy to pick up on. There is no big revelatory moment, where we are told which of the two worlds is ‘real’ (for Watts’ character) and which is imaginary… but that doesn’t matter. It is enough to discover that the two worlds are a Through the Looking Glass mirror image of one-another. It is merely this interplay between the first and second acts that is the solution to the riddle. Once we’ve worked out what is happening, it doesn’t actually matter that the characters themselves never get that far. (By contrast, The Matrix is told in a completely linear way, despite the fact that the characters have to fundamentally rethink their entire world).
Laura Harring in Mulholland Drive (2001)
Here is the website of The Linguists, a film about the collection and recording of dying languages at the Living Tongues Institute.
This blog has noted before the catastrophe of a lost language, which is a depletion of the sum of human knowledge. Now I’m working for English PEN, which places a high value on translation and in seeking voices who express their thoughts in other languages, I appreciate all the more that the death of languages is a human rights issue. Its linked to racism, oppression, and ethnic cleansing.
One of the last confirmed speakers of Amurdak, Charlie Mangulda
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