Tuesday did not start auspiciously. I had done a lot less of yesterday’s review than I thought, so I didn’t manage to do the second and third read-through that I prefer, to limit how much of an idiot I appear (like leaving in a whole lot of question-marks where I had intended to go back and look up names); and then I dashed down to the bus-stop, only to be told by a passing cab-driver that the busses were on strike; and then I somehow managed to leave my Snapper card in the cab, which made it a pretty expensive ride. Thank goodness I enjoyed Teenage Papparazzo, or I’d be in a pretty bad mood now.
I haven’t seen Entourage, so the resonance between Adrian Grenier’s role and his life wasn’t as striking for me, but he was engaging and likeable. In fact, all the celebrities that were interviewed came across well, particularly Paris Hilton… she didn’t appear to be particularly insightful or anything, but she seemed perfectly pleasant. Of course, it’s tempting to wonder how much of that is in the editing – Charlie Brooker’s excellent Screenwipe underlined how much narrative can be created in the editing booth, and Grenier would be crazy to alienate people on either side of the paparazzi divide – but the fact that Grenier shows and admits to his mistakes gives him some slack.
You could see Austin, the kid paparazzo, progressing from someone who is exhilarated about what he’s doing to someone who is a bit of a self-absorbed dick; how much of that is the transition from tweens to teens, how much is him getting used to (and thus blasé about) the presence of Grenier, and how much of it was the fame… it’s hard to say. But one of the better bits of the film was when Austin and his mother were shown an early cut of the film, and we got their reactions; and then when Grenier went back a year later.
There was also a lot of meat in the rest of the film – the aggressive defensiveness of the paparazzi, the obvious adrenaline rush from chasing people, the talk about how they get lauded for breaking rules to get the shot, for example… some of their attitudes reminded me of the Stanford prison experiment, though not directly. Or Alec Baldwin pointing out the the same group that owns the company that makes his movie also owns the show that he goes on to promote his movie, and the channel that tears down both him and his movie. Or the academics that appeared, talking about parasocial relationships, and the way that everyone was celebrity when we lived in tribes, and how gossip was generally less about the subject of the gossip, and more about affirming social bonds.
(There was also a suggestion that the modern world makes people very conscious of themselves, because there is so much media around, and it’s the nature of media to address you directly, in a way that a natural object, like a tree, doesn’t.)
I think that there’s something interesting going on about the star actor/character actor divide, and I wonder whether things will change as stars are shown to have less of an effect on the box-office than they have in the past. I’m also aware that I have an ambiguous relationship to celebrity gossip; I dislike that sort of women’s magazine, but I’ll occasionally visit Go Fug Yourself, and I went to (and enjoyed) the Joan Rivers movie. Eh, I’m out of time; I’ll think about this more later.
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A Prophet, at the Embassy, was a pretty straight-up prison story – guy with no skills goes into prison for a minor offence, ends up a hardened criminal organising drug smuggling and killing people. The interplay of the different nationalities was interesting, but nothing particularly surprising happened, apart from the main character having some minor visions (seeing the first guy he killed, and deer running away). That’s not to say it was bad; everything that needed to happen, happened. It was just pretty good.
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If I was going to sum up The Wind Journeys, I think it would be: deliberate pacing. Not slow, precisely, but deliberate. Also, accordion-based rap battles, where the current champion is winning because of a sorcerous talisman… but all in a low-key way. (Nothing overtly supernatural happens.)
It’s the story of a travelling musician who has just buried his wife, and is going back to his master to return his accordion, a great black beast with horns on the front. A boy, who may or may not be his son, stubbornly follows him out of the village and joins him on his quest.
It was quite stylized, with lots of set pieces where weathered men sit or stand, eyeing each other up. And quite a bit of music, too. I think you’d have to be in the right mood to see it, but I quite enjoyed it.
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Wah Do Dem wasn’t quite what I was expecting, possibly because I expected most of it. A hipster wins a cruise to Jamaica, but his girlfriend pulls out two days before they’re meant to leave. He drifts through the middle-aged and elderly crowds like a tousled refugee, and then makes a number of mistakes that are either dumb or fortuitous, depending on how his life turns out after the movie ends. The review on the Film Festival website called it “unpredictable”, but I don’t know whether that’s quite what I’d call it… while there are a few times where things could go multiple ways, but when a bus breaks down and you go off to play soccer, it’ll leave without you – that’s just the way things work.
I liked it, but didn’t love it; it was fine.
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