BOOK: Picnic at Hanging Rock
My two favourite films of all time are “The Proposition” written by Nick Cave and Directed by John Hillcoat and “Picnic at Hanging Rock” Directed by Peter Weir and based on the book of the same name by Joan Lindsey. This second film captures what I think the eeriness and mysteriousness of the Australian outback would be like and creates a bizarre tension out of very little. So when I saw Joan Lindsey’s book staring at me from the Shelf at Scorpio books in Christchurch I thought if there was ever a time to read this book and more importantly buy it, now was the moment. My interest was superficial, I wanted to see how the movie came from the book, meaning, could words on paper give you the same uneven feeling as the film. To answer my own question, yes, but differently. Lindsey uses quiet and subtle juxtaposition along with a unique style of character development to build the tension and a general sense of bewilderment. This of course doesn’t tell you anything about the story which is a small gem in the annuals of the Australian outback mystery, and really there would be no benefit in me trying to generalise the plot or themes, just better if you read the book and then watch the film.
FILM: Four Lions
Well the Film Festival has just been on in my neck of the woods as I may have mentioned and I was lucky enough to go along to some pretty good films, my humble opinion of course. One film that I felt would be good to mention, is one that should hopefully appeal to a slightly wider group of people than the majority of films I typically enjoy. It is called “Four Lions” and was made by British Comedian Chris Morris (if you don’t know who he is, you should). It centers around three young British Pakistani men and one British man all of which are mildly religious and mostly full of shit, and they decide to create a terrorist cell in the typically hideous small English town they live in. The farce is superb and the mocking is of everyone. The four wannabe Jihadists are so comical they are believable and endearing, with their horrid English accents (which as a viewer who speaks English modestly take half an hour to get a grip on understanding them) they baffle and bumble their way through what they think is that best way to disrupt the Western capitalist system, which involves metaphors to Simba the Lion King, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, Tupac, and a dead Wookie. It is seriously laugh out loud inappropriately funny. I haven’t a comedy bone in my body to try and give it credit, so watch the trailer and then watch the film:
MUSIC: Jónsi - Go Do
I like Icelandic wailers, so when Sigur-Ros frontman Jónsi put out a solo album i was into it. I’m not sure I can do much good in describing what he does and the sounds he makes. Some people have said he sounds like Whales Humping, if that’s right, they sound better than humans and in particular cats. Whilst the album doesn’t go in any new or fresh direction it is beautiful and will soothe a melancholy mood or play as inspiration for the day, after all he did invent “Hopelandic”, his own English/Icelandic/Jibber-Jabber language. Watch this:
ITEM: Wristwatch
You should be into having a watch on your wrist. I’m a bit itchy, in fact I am scratch reactor so for some time I have been anti-wristwatch, I was purely an “asker”. Then I was a mobile phoner and to an extent I still am, but now it has its accomplice. The most important thing with the wristwatch is not anything ordinary like convenience or practicality, it is the gesture! It is the moment that your arm, my left arm, flies up and out like a released barbecue tong, and on the end just before your hand, shifting out of your sleeve is a bizarre body-less set of arms that tell you the time! Get excited and get a wristwatch and get a greedy and ridiculous style. The way you tell the time means everything, use your wrist like your hips, or rather like Prince uses his hips!
PERSON: Ilich Ramirez Sanchez aka Carlos (The Jackal)
One of the films I saw at the recent Film Festival was a back to back to back 6 hour masterpiece about Carlos who is perhaps the world’s most notorious individual terrorist prior to Osama Bin Laden. One of the most wanted men for several decades he was known as an intelligent, skillful, daring terrorist for hire. Born to a Marxist lawyer in Venezuala he then studied in Moscow and trained with the pro military Palestinian groups in Jordan where Ilich became known as Carlos the Jackal. He kicked off his career in terrorism shooting (not fatally) the Jewish head of Marks and Spencer in 1972 in retaliation to Israeli Special Service attacks on Palestinians which were retaliations to the Munich Olympic Hostage crisis which I’m sure was in retaliation to something else. He went on to organise and carry out a number of small but effective missions from his base in Paris and under the umbrella of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He gained most notoriety for his role in leading a small band PFLP soldiers in storming the 1975 OPEC conference in Austria where they took 75 hostages and then commandeered a jet which took them to Algeria. After this attack he was expelled from the PFLP for not killing the hostages and for the celebrity he had grown. He then went rogue, building his own group which performed numerous acts of terrorism and were given credit for many others they may have never been involved in. The film gave quite a personal story and portrayed Carlos as a daring, handsome and suave man with a cool blooded ruthlessness. He was the template for the western idea of a terrorist as he was like a Bond styled figure who cavorted relentlessly with woman, booze and danger.
Although the film did a good job not to take sides it certainly made him look like the coolest man alive, and able to seduce women with firearms and use them in foreplay whilst drinking heavily and conducting seriously dangerous terrorist activities. But in the end the age of crime fighting came where rogues like Carlos were caught up with and all of a sudden the leather jacket wearing chiseled Marxist with dark glasses who spoke the sex in numerous languages was fat with severe testicular pains and living in the Sudan. Which is where he was eventually caught and then taken to France to be trialled and sentenced. So don’t be into terrorism, but watch the movie, it takes you on a callous journey through a time which shaped and shook the world and who’s ramifications are evident now and most probably for some time in the future.
