Gravity (2013)

My friends wouldn't trust me with a twenty pound note so I doubt it would be smart for either Alfonso Cuarón or Warner Bros Pictures to listen to my financial advice, although that's what follows anyway: if Cuarón wanted to hold my attention and childlike sense of awe (and most likely make a lot less money) then he should have 1) cut down what stands as a 91 minute film by at least half an hour, possibly more - anyone who's seen the movie will know this wouldn't cut out anything crucial to the plot, and 2) market it as an "experience" not a movie. Watching Gravity reminded me a lot of a 3D animated short about talking robots I saw at Disneyland when I was a kid (over 10 years ago so red-green glasses 3D) only with a lot of un-needed material turning it from an experience into a film.

Which is a way of saying there's some good movie in here (enough that not seeing Gravity would officially count as "missing out" although not enough to watch it again after that). It's a film so excited in itself - a film of pure visual splendor - that it captures the magical aura of being a kid in Disneyland and being ushered into a dark cinema to view the red-green future of technology. Some images will stick with you: one astronaut tethered to another, pulling the other along; the camera panned back so the tether stretches across the center of the earth, itself now a giant black orb with the seams of sunrise coming over the top. Beautiful. The visuals work so well because the technology, seamless, gives the impression of a film actually filmed in space, not just bringing to life the imagination of some over-fantastical director (like, say, Avatar).

People love to throw the term 'like a roller coaster' at films, cliché as it is it fits Gravity; Cuarón's focus on shooting in unbroken tracking shots giving the feeling of being strapped in. Sit back and enjoy. But roller coasters are moving while the rollercoastee stays static; movies - through process of adaptation - have become something we dissect and try to participate in (it's why people pay for a movie then feel the need to pick out continuity flaws). This is where Gravity fails: in one moment as our lead is trying to repair part of a space station the camera looks from behind so we can see one of her tools, crucial for the job, slowly start to float away without her noticing. I imagine in 3D it floats dangerously far out of her reach. She turns round and strains to grab it just in time. Any pleasures here are purely aesthetic. Gravity works in its grandest moments; extended sections of watching Sandra Bullock do very little feel like padding.

The story is simple: a group of astronauts doing what seems a routine job on some space equipment. A storm hits, killing one crew member and leaving Ryan (Sandra Bullock) - technical expert but pretty unexperienced with the general rules of space survival; and Matt (George Clooney) the laid back safety man. Clooney's presence, frequently annoying, is the warmest thing in space. Things mostly follow Ryan as she tries to make her way to a far off station to get to the escape pods. As I say, there's a lot of good stuff in Gravity, just not enough to make it a great movie (although it should go on the list with Lawrence of Arabia of films to see on a cinema screen).

Results Day

Have you ever said you cared what happened on your results day? Did you ever get their and not care about your results. No and no. Results day is another one of those school ceremonies which when you really think about it, doesn't fit in with the rest of rational reality. Not when school could send you the results straight to your home the minute they got them. But instead I found myself going to school in the middle of the holidays on some early morning so I could sleepily open my results in front of everyone I know and share them out. Then just waddled back on home to my parents who were probably just as built up about the whole thing as I was.

I'll be honest: I hardly even remembered to go to my results day. A few days before, I told my friend the best thing about results day would be I could try pick up girls who were over excited by their good grades; I said this half-jokingly but one of those half jokes where you believe in the other half. Only I turned up late and the only girls left were the ones who'd gotten better grades than me and wanted to stick around, probably to drill their superiority into any other late comers they hadn't snatched up yet.

My results: two Bs, a C and a D. Better than average; nothing to boast about. At first I didn't even know whether to be pleased or not. Two friends grabbed me as I was leaving; one said 'those are really good results' and I just accepted that's what they were. But really results day left me with an empty feeling; I didn't even start thinking about why that was until a few hours later. It wasn't the results, maybe the fact that I would have gotten the same reaction from everybody as long as I didn't fail everything, or maybe it was just the disappointment of still looking at pieces of paper with the same misguided belief as everyone else there that my future will be written on it.

I was talking with a friend about grades the other day, he said 'I wish I had done maths or something, something that would make me seem smart'. I knew what he meant: maths is the only subject taught in schools where good grades seems to easily quantify your intelligence. Or at least seems like it does. Could anyone say I was a smart guy for getting a B in sociology? Or: could you put into words, based on results, the difference between the kid I know who was told he couldn't come back because his grades were too bad and the kid who took five subjects (FIVE!) and got straight As? It does mean something, I'm neither stupid or bitter enough to think it doesn't, it means a lot for universities and immediate jobs; but this media-instilled belief that you can look down at your results and depending on what you got look up 20 years later and be a completely different person is poisonous, and downright stressful.

Later on that day me and friends Jack, James and Ross went out drinking to the only pub in town that'll serve us. My dad gave me the beer money for getting good grades. We talked a little about results: James had been worried he'd be joining the RAF by now but he passed pretty well; I hadn't seen Jack worry much but he failed two of three subjects. We talked like it was anything else then forgot it and enjoyed the night. I didn't have the same drink the whole time and by last call I was too pissed to sit down straight. James and Ross left earlier than that and me and Jack congratulated ourselves on being so fun. It took about an hour and a half for the two of us to walk home; we sat along the streets at some points making drunken phone calls to people we don't usually talk to and to a girl I like. He eventually went into his house and I walked the last ten minutes home alone. I walked too far past a hedge bush at one point but in the state I was in decided to just jump over it; it was so big I landed in the middle and had to roll off - I could still feel the nettle stings in my hand the next day. When I got home I sat stumped on the floor drinking tap water in pints (my usual ritual to suppress the inevitable hangover) and on my laptop scrolling through Facebook friends in the belief that I'd be drunk enough to send some girl a message saying all the things I could never say sober but I chickened out in the end.

The reason I'm sharing this: because I'm betting you know more about me from the last paragraph than from the results I gave. And because picking up a girl on results day would have been a good enough consolation had I even failed every subject. And because I'll remember that night long after I've forgotten most of the stuff I was taught this year. If you were someone still young enough to open results this year then I'll guess more than being pleased or disappointed you felt a horrible emptiness; that didn't have to do with your results, more just the horrible feeling of once again being summed up by a few letter decided by structured exams you sat months before.

R.I.P. Robin Williams (1951 - 2014)

I'm well aware that, being 17, I'm not part of the generation that was most attached to Robin Williams. The same generation that has spent the last day outpouring its love for the actor. But that doesn't mean I didn't feel sad over the news of his death; the death of someone who was genuine enough that he felt real despite me only knowing him from my TV screen.

I think the first Robin Williams' movie I ever saw was RV. I would spend odd weekends at my grandparents house and RV was part of small, seemingly well selected list of films that my grandfather would put on for me. Williams plays a dad who takes his family on a cross-country trip, not telling them the trip is really to the location of an important meeting which puts his job at risk. Looking back, this isn't the greatest movie ever, but it had the sort of warm heart to it that Williams brought to everything. There was an expectedly soppy moment at the movie's end, where Williams turns down the job and chooses his family instead; I imagine from most actors, even good comedy actors, a moment like this wouldn't feel remotely genuine, but from Williams it seems so real. His comedy persona: over-active, self-indulgent yet ultimately good natured kid turned adult, wasn't a put on. He could be as wacky as he wanted to be on screen - people believed it - because he really was that wacky.

It's that genuineness that most comedians lack. Most just want laughs; only a comedian as good as Williams would know that the laughs are much better when not ignoring the stuff that isn't funny. Sure, this did give a sentimentality to his films (the ending of Mrs Doubtfire, for example) that put a barrier between him and some adult viewers; but this was what allowed him to act out some truly genuine moments. The one that comes to mind is in Good Will Hunting, my favorite film of his, in which he plays Matt Damon's psychiatrist. Damon's character, uninterested in therapy, tries insulting William's character. He hits on the soft spot of his wife to the point where William's cracks, shouting at his patient, coming close to giving up on him. It's showing this vulnerability that makes his triumph in that movie, finally talking Will Hunting into facing his problems, that much better.

One thing that has surprised me about Williams' death is the response to him having depression. Upon hearing that he had allegedly killed himself I instantly prepared for the usual response to celebrity suicides: people questioning how someone who has all that could be depressed. Another national outcry of how money must be able to solve everybody's problems. The response to Williams' death has been different, in a good way; people talking about the struggle depression can be for anybody. If nothing else, his death will hopefully continue the ongoing awareness of the fact that depression doesn't just affect our tortured artists (or those people you know who are very outgoing about their problems) but can affect anyone, all the way to a man who spent the majority of his career making people laugh (or, conversely, any of those friends of yours who seem to have everything together).

But that's a bigger conversation, and one that will be going on for a long time more; for now my heart goes out to Williams family. A fantastic comedian and one we'll be talking about for a very long time.

Lost in the Dream - The War On Drugs

These sure are indecisive times. Eight months in and not one publication seems able to point out 2014's future classics. It doesn't help that most major (highest selling) artists, who critics love to turn to, have been dormant these few months. Which is why Lost in the Dream, an album practically born a sleeper hit, has become the unofficial album of the year; if you're listening to it with the hype in mind - and that's basically the reason we're all listening right? - then that title works against the album more than for it.

The problem with 'album of the year' is that it means, supposedly, this album should answer 2014. Should answer the current state we all find ourselves in. Should answer all our other shitty music. Should be good enough to answer something. Which, regardless of its quality, it doesn't: handing this album out to all your friends in hope of igniting some shared realization is like giving them all printouts of the failed love letters you wrote in high school so they can see how much you've matured. Lost in the Dream looks inward, makes no reaction to any other music, holds no answers - will, if anything, give you more questions.

Apparently inspired by a breakup, the tracks here are long, slushy, barren landscapes. The tracks - hardly distinguishable from each other - are smooth running mood pieces. A dreary mood. Picking out individual tracks just highlights how featureless each one is; best listened all at once, and more than once. The album's greatest asset is the way each individual element of the band blurs together, Adam Granduciel's vocals sound calm, and rendered hollow under the production they don't intrude on the guitars at all, meaning you never feel like your missing anything by not paying attention to the lyrics. One element not here - on all previous TWoD albums - is Kurt Vile's electric guitar, before he left to go solo. It could be argued this is why the album feels more like it's playing with itself than the audience, although you could also counter that it gives the tracks a flowing simplicity. I was more impressed with Lost in the Dream than moved.

There are moments of real fire, though: the first two tracks, the only two I'd be able to pick out of a line-up, are far more lively than the rest. In Red Eye, Granduciel screams and the guitars explode into motion. There's even a pop hook. So maybe this really is an album of the times: a band showing they've got power and talent to burn, only so numbed out they refuse to use any.

Royal Visits and Possible Stabbings: thoughts on my hometown

• I arrived here a few days after I was born (a hospital a few towns over) and have stayed ever since. I don't quite know the rules: am I supposed to wait til I've left this place long enough to feel homesick before I give it a write up? Or is it when I come back and realize there's just not that much to feel homesick about?
• I love all those 'I gotta get outta' this town, it's been keepin' me down too long' clichés - I plan to leave first chance I get. Make it next September. I've left it only infrequently over the last almost-18 years, usually just to bordering towns. Lying in bed I can see one of the plane routes from a nearby airport through my window (all going West so I'm guessing to America); I'll lie down and watch people escaping this place - like some romantic real life mise en scene. 
• I'd call Cramlington a nowhere town but that brings to mind sandy, deserted dust bowl America town, when really it's moderately busy, usually cold and rainy Northern England. Everybody doesn't know everybody. 
• The entirety of my knowledge of "The History of Cramlington": it used to be a mining town and helped, to what extent I don't know, in WW2 - housing a medical center that would become my middle school. 
• During the time as a mining town the coal was thrown onto one huge, main heap - this eventually formed into a hill, Nelson Hill: Cramlington's sole natural beauty. 
• The five main estates (and corresponding stereotypes of anyone who lives there) are as follows: Beacon - the rough neighbourhood, good if you want drugs or stabbings, good anecdotes from everyone there; Northburn - the "posh wankers" with the big houses and fancy cars, the model image of suburbia, "The Burn" river runs through it, hence the name; Parkside - where I live, in the middle of everything, and too small to have any discernible characteristics; East Crammy - a mixed bag, class wise, there's run down neighbourhoods a few streets down from houses I know that house Ferraris; Cragside - where the school, park and football fields are, hence used by everybody too much to be given any bad judgment, although I have seen some drug arrests there.
•  I girl who lived, possibly still lives on my street once told me that one night during a family and friends get together at her house, her dad's friend went out for a smoke and while outside was stabbed by a hoodie walking past. I don't know if this is true, but ever since I've told people that someone was once stabbed on my street. Because, y'know, that's the image I want to send out about my street. 
• ...a further example of my street: I was working the other day, just a patch of grass from the stabbing house, when a door opened, a woman's voice screamed "DON'T" and then a pregnancy test flew out of the door, which then slammed shut. It had a lighter atmosphere to it than it comes out as in writing. 
• I've heard stories about the Queen visiting years ago. She apparently opened our Concordia. My year four English teacher once said when she was younger - I'll take a stab this story dates the 50s or 60s - the Queen went past the school in a fancy car and all the kids ran to the fence to wave at her. I can't think of any reason she'd visit now.
• Everyone I know who lives here, or went to school here, gives this place a much worse rep than it deserves. One of those moderately decent towns - maybe you know the type - that you just want to make seem worse than it is. 
• It always perplexes me a little how adults end up in nowhere towns like this. Kids are stuck where they land; I thought the freedom of adulthood was all that grasping the nettle stuff - finding something in the world. I don't know what is to be found here. 
• I do wonder how I'll write about this place when I'm old and living some place else. I couldn't stay here. Then again, most people can only see what a place is once they've left it.  

CLASSIC? Aguirre: the Wrath of God (1972)

(My first CLASSIC? post, where, instead of reviewing movies and albums that have undoubtedly been over-reviewed already, I'll question whether they really are classics from the perspective of someone watching in 2014)

I bet you never thought Apocalypse Now, that symbol of artistic freedom and ambition, was actually just the beefed-up Hollywood counterpart to a much more artistically-pleasing foreign predecessor, did you? Well it is, really. In truth, there's very little connection between Apocalypse Now and Aguirre: Wrath of God, unless, like me, your looking for a metaphor to open a review with to show how great you think Aguirre is (or how sub-par, if not terrible, Apocalypse is).

Aguirre, the better mission-down-a-river movie, is the definition of anti-Hollywood. Herzog doesn't use the trip down the river as an excuse for stopping off at as many exciting incidents as he could think of; instead the trip is the whole of Wrath of God - a film that emphasizes the maxim that the journey is more important than the destination. The journey here concerns an expedition - some knights and people of importance but mostly unimportant droogs - in the 16th century, in search of the much talked of, but never seen in the flesh city of El Dorado. Of course, we as an audience know such a city doesn't exist; Herzog's movie a look into how the promise of greatness - the city of gold, after all - can drive people to disregard everything, even themselves and those they care about.

The title character, played by Klaus Kinski, starts off as a second in command, although through mutiny and the slow toll the environment, and attacking aboriginal tribes, take on the crew, ends up the leader. He's the looniest of the bunch; his wife and daughter both part of the expedition and both carried in separate carriages by less fortunate crew members. It's hard for me to say how good Kinski is in the role having not seen him in any other movie - hard to know completely what is actor and what is character from just one role. But he deserves praise anyway; his performance a great caricature of growing self-grandeur and insanity. Kinski's body is constantly swiveled around, as if he feels the powers of gravity pulling him down greater than anybody else. It makes him look less like a human and more a sneaking Gremlin trying to break free from his own flesh.

It's fun to actually just watch Kinski; in one speech, in which he gives himself the film's moniker, he lays flat his character - we, the audience, need not to do much further analysis. It's a film all about observing. And beautiful stuff to observe too, with such a mysterious quality: fog shrouding around the sides of great mountains; the dream-like quality by which one scene seems to meld into the next; the search for a city we know is complete myth. The way Aguirre is filmed is just so natural; natural in the sense that its world is seamless - realistic looking costumes and locations - and also that everything was filmed for real, no Hollywood wizardry here - which gives the impression that the events of the movie were going to take place no matter what and that Herzog was simply lucky enough to be there to capture them. I have a soft spot for directors who fit their own interests and personalities into films - Herzog shows his interest in nature with extended shots of crashing waves and animals scurrying about. The fact he would become a successful documentary filmmaker is written in code here.

The fact that everything was filmed for real is worth noting, at least the difficulty the crew would have faced filming on the river (not being able to fit sound equipment on the rafts being the only explanation why a German film has an English dub - and by the original actors too). The danger should be noted too: the most famous story surrounding the film is of Herzog pulling a gun on Kinski who was refusing to do a scene due to the conditions. The reality of things gives them a unique quality, too: in one scene a horse, causing a nuisance to the emperor, is ordered overboard. This was filmed for real, you can tell; watching the horse run about in the river with only the front of its face visible above water while it hurries to land. There's obvious ethical problems here but just watching this shot is better food for your eyes than any billion dollar special effects porn.

Herzog's art of "showing" is amazing: in one shot we see the emperor, a pompously dressed caricature of greed, munching on his vast meal while his men fight over rations. This shot needs no follow-up or further story thread; inside this shot is one million arguments and deeper feelings all there if the viewer wants to unpack them herself. That's how one should look at the final shot of Aguirre too: I won't describe it, but that wouldn't spoil anything anyway - where this film arrives is more a feeling, a frame of mind, than any describable location. Some people won't like this, finding it gives no real purpose to the journey that precedes it - although Aguirre is less a progression of events and more just different stylistic choices to stir different moods and feelings. If you get to the end of Aguirre and don't think you've went anywhere then you've missed the point somewhere along the river.