I recently had the pleasure of attending a book launch for the new opus of a very dear friend, at which a great many photographs were taken. Over the next few days, Paul placed loads of them on Instagram, taking the trouble not only to namecheck all the miscreants who’d showed up, but to explain who they were and What Their Thing Was, as used to be said. Here’s his screed for me:
...the creator of the ultimate 3-word description of Donald Trump (and I quote - ‘witless f..king cocksplat’ - Scotland is claiming it, but it was really Tim). He does other stuff too, like writing books.
I think Paul, or the universe, or maybe just my own conscience, is telling me I need to get my arse back into gear with the writing thing, no?
A few nights ago, I was in the edifice that I still insist on calling the National Film Theatre, where I picked up a leaflet claiming to be The Insiders’ Guide to the BFI London Film Festival. It’s produced by Puck, which is apparently “a news brand focused on the inside stories in entertainment, media, finance, politics, politics, artificial intelligence, the businesses of fashion and sports, and the art world”, which is nice. Included in the slim volume is a piece by one Matt Belloni, a founding partner of Puck and one of the brand’s “generationally talented journalists”, listing his “top 10 British films (and some TV) to see before you die”. And here it is.
Well, Matt, it clearly wasn’t impossible, because you did actually deliver a list. And it’s not really “across genres and decades” because there’s a distinct leaning towards Films About Men With Guns, and nothing in black and white or before 1962. But you are, as you said, forgetting some classics: no Ealing comedy or Hammer horror, nothing by Michael Powell or Danny Boyle, not even a Carry On. To be fair, you’ve chosen Guy Ritchie’s best movie, but that’s not exactly a high bar, is it? And you find space for two Bond films? Seriously?
Ultimately such lists can never be objectively right or wrong and exist merely to prompt and provoke discussion. Fine. But this is part of a tie-in with one of the world’s major film festivals. People who attend will probably have an above-average knowledge of film history and some strong opinions to go with that knowledge. And a hell of a lot of them will have seen all of these (before death, presumably) and will be wondering why the hell Matt Belloni presumes to recommend such dull, hackneyed choices as somehow relevant to their cinematic education.
PS: Also from the LFF, the trailer for Elsinore, about Ian Charleson’s (literally) death-defying Hamlet. “Was that Shakespeare?” does not bode well.
Eva Marie Saint has died at the splendid age of 102 and I know I’m not the only person whose immediate thought on hearing the news was not of Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront, but rather the line “She looks like Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront” from Lloyd Cole’s song ‘Rattlesnakes’. And yes, I guess I’m a wee bit nostalgic for the days when a pop songwriter could casually toss in a reference to an actress from a golden age and not expect blank looks. That said, there were only 30 years between the release of On The Waterfront and the release of ‘Rattlesnakes’. If we were to make a similar excursion into the past, we might compare a cool girl to Kelly Macdonald in Trainspotting. Has anyone done that? Ms Saint’s Oscar-winning turn was 70 years ago and if Lloyd were to gaze that far back from the mid-1980s, he may well have been singing the praises of Mae Marsh in The Birth of a Nation, which would be all kinds of awkward, as well as making me feel very tired and old. As Mr Cole also remarked, “are you ready to be heartbroken?”
In common with anyone else too old to seriously contemplate a mid-life crisis, I often find myself grumbling at BBC radio’s faintly risible efforts to lure a younger audience. So it was rather comforting today to hear the Desert Island Discs of Parveen Kumar, whose operatic lollipops (Mascagni, Verdi, Offenbach, Richard Strauss) could have fitted unobtrusively into a Plomley-era show. Even better, over on 6 Music’s Radcliffe and Maconie, there was a spontaneous F.R. Leavis gag. The old farts aren’t dead, we just look that way.
PS: My favourite Leavis quote: “They say I have persecution mania. Comes of being persecuted, you know.”
It’s been many decades since I set foot in a nightclub but this description, from Boy Parts by Eliza Clark, of people dancing to the Smiths sounds painfully familiar:
I know I’m white, but there’s just a lot of white people White People-ing in a very small area, like it’s just some very, very densely packed mayo, you know? Densely packed mayo, jiggling about, doesn’t know what to do with its arms, doesn’t know what to do with its feet, undulating loosely, barely in time to the rhythm.
