'The Leander Street Party'

It was the 5^th of July, afternoon. The atmosphere at no. 174 was tense; ordinarily confident young men worriedly drank beer and tried to distract themselves from their rapidly approaching public appearance.  They valiantly made conversation, feigning interest in the anti-spectacles that are the Tour de France and Formula One, but it was clear that their minds were elsewhere (about 150 yards down the road). I could endure only a few minutes more before I took my leave and stepped out onto the road on its biggest day of the year.

“The Leander Road Street Party”, the signs read. As I made my way down it’s gentle slope past houses 170… 168… 166… I couldn’t help but feel a surge of anticipation. The party was to play host to the debut performance of ‘Fever Family’, a band made up by my good friends and which I ostensibly manage. Admittedly I’d had little to do with arranging this particular gig, or even heard them play before, but I was confident of an excellent show nonetheless. 

But as I passed sign after sign, my excitement was displaced by a general feeling of anxiety. Worry for my friends on their big day? No, I’d take just as much pleasure from a shambolic show as an accomplished one – my fandom knows no bounds. It was something else. “The Leander Road Street Party”…“The Leander Road Street Party.”

This clunky, tautologous piece of nomenclature contained a totally redundant instance of the word ‘Street’, the use of which genuinely threatened to derail my enjoyment of the entire event, but a glance back up the road a few minutes later quickly helped me forget the organisers’ syntactic overindulgence. In the distance, strolling past the bin that straddles no. 128 and 126, I could make out six figures.

Like a low-budget Village People disco tribute act, they came: A woodsman, a sailor, Arnold Schwarzenegger as a boy scout, cat-lady meets Human Traffic, an Irishman on holiday and an artist’s impression of a young man from London.

By the time the group took to the stage they had drawn a not-unenthusiastic crowd of more than thirty despite an impending deluge, no doubt intrigued as to what kind of noises this motley crew of ‘serious people’ would make, and in what order. As the heavens opened, Fever Family started to play.

Truth be told I remember few specifics of the performance itself. On a more general level, I don’t know what kind of music they played.

Michael Mann’s ‘The Insider’ (1999)

Mann’s brilliant corporate thriller ratchets up the pressure on both protagonist and audience, who are treated to a story told with extraordinary restraint by a director who is equally adept at framing the drama in his characters' heads as in court or a newsroom. 

In a slick opening sequence we are introduced to Lowell Bergman (Pacino), producer of the prestigious '60 Minutes' news programme, as he negotiates an interview with a senior Hezzbollah Sheikh. Once an agreement is reached and he's left alone, Bergman pulls off his blindfold, walks to the window and surveys the Lebanese cityscape beneath him - Mann's camera stunningly capturing the bustling urban setting. 

A short time later, Bergman meets with a skittish Jeffrey Wigand (Crowe) in a hotel room boasting a comparable view, this time of the metallic hues of downtown Louisville. Former head of research at Brown & Williamson Tobacco, Wigand agrees to the consultation work Bergman has for him but warns him that according to the terms of his severance package that's as far their discussions can go. It's a detail that he needn't have disclosed, and for that reason it piques Bergman's interest.  

On the face of it, Wigand hardly seems like a man likely to risk his family’s well-being for the sake of blowing the whistle on his behemothic former employers. His daughter requires the medical insurance as yet still entitled to his family and such obligations trump all. Supporting one's family even if it means leaving-be the affairs of Tobacco executives who have perjured themselves in front of Congress, "what could be wrong with that?" Wigand asks Bergman when they meet again. Nothing, they agree. 

But when Michael Gambon's CEO insists he sign a supplement to his confidentiality agreement ("the work we did here was confidential, not for public scrutiny, any more than are one's family matters") the implicit threat helps to illuminate another obligation running somewhere in parallel. As the unsettling threats escalate Wigand increasingly feels "compelled" to speak to '60 Minutes' despite the obvious strain on his family. 

It is in its handling such complicated and at times intangible moral quandaries - the exact nature of which it commendably leaves largely unsaid -  that The Insider succeeds so wonderfully. It is a film buoyed by the lofty ideals and compulsions of its characters, and yet still grounded by a dogged faithfulness to the intricacies of the story which often involve complex legal, bureaucratic and personal notions.  

Director of photography Spinotti crafts moments that beautifully communicate abstract concepts, his cinematography seamlessly aligning itself with plot. In one glorious scene we watch Wigand make his decision; casting his gaze around the scores of police waiting to escort him to the crucial disposition, and then out to sea. So well defined are the film's themes that, following a transfixing sequence of imagery and sound, when he eventually realises "the criteria by which to decide", we realise it too. 

Such moments are played up to just the right degree by Crowe, Pacino and Christopher Plummer, one of a number of supporting characters whose circumstances leave them unable or unwilling to follow the two men as far as they need to go. "I'm running out of heroes, man." says Bergman to Wigand, worried for his friend's deteriorating state of mind. As the stakes rise, others fall away and compromise for money, reputation, safety - as people do. The alluring ideals of the newsman and the wife are often too vulnerable to harsh, real-world considerations, and Plummer's performance as the face of Bergman's show depicts a reality complicated by all manner of internal worries and pressures.  

Mann is a highly proficient filmmaker but The Insider is surely his best work. Ostensibly a bureaucratic thriller, it balances the procedural with the sublime, evoking moments of startling clarity in a messy, caustic world -  helping us see through the smoke and the haze.

Philip Seymour Hoffman: Parts from a Whole

Last Sunday news arrived of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s tragic death from a heroin overdose.  He was an actor whose talent drew universal respect from in and outside the industry, and the news prompted shock and profound regret from all who knew and worked with him. Regrettably, the following days also brought thinly-veiled media conjecture of the inner demons they suspected beset the father of three, helpfully accompanied by images of his grieving relatives and a body-bag being carted into an ambulance. 

The continued and self-serving newspaper analysis would strike us as more of an ethically suspect practice if it weren't for the fact that we have gotten so used to it, and that many in fact have developed rather a taste for it. After all, it really is only the next logical step for us to paw over the minutiae of the hours and days leading up to a man's untimely death when we already think nothing of buying a gossip magazine for an update on the painful divorce of two television personalities. In fact, last week’s event represented something of a perfect storm for reactionary columnists around the globe – the death of a film star, attributed to a hidden drug problem.

At its root, the press' examination of the circumstances surrounding Hoffman's death is at once insulting and depressing. It is insulting that their perception of the public is one of a celeb-obsessed mob, insatiably baying for the nauseating specifics of the case; just how many bags of heroin were found, exactly why wasn't he living with his family, where was he and what was he wearing when was he found?

It is depressing because that perception is probably just about right. Unhealthy fixations with drink and drug abuse and ‘mournography’ have crept into the psyche of ordinary members of the public. To what extent this appetite has been cultivated by the media is up for debate, but a morbid interest undoubtedly exists. Any normal level of curiosity can surely be satisfied by the bare facts, and the intimate details surrounding the man’s death shouldn’t be up for grabs no matter how many hits they generate.

In any case, those who believe these details offer any great insight into what happened to Philip Seymour Hoffman are mistaken. Describe the physical circumstances as fully as you please, and you will gain nothing more than superficial understanding. There is a vast explanatory gap between a description of the event and knowledge of the event itself.

One’s own underlying motives, dispositions and weaknesses are elusive enough even given our uniquely privileged position to introspect. Our thoughts are immediately available to us for self-analysis, yet we struggle to fully interpret and understand our own temporal identity. Several times removed through the filter of the tabloid press, we stand no chance with Hoffman’s. And still this deeply unflattering exercise in futility persists.

The reduction of what must have been an unrelenting internal struggle to a trivial, bite-size news story is utterly unhelpful to anyone looking for an answer to any important question. To look at his work would be to understand a little better. In a startlingly poignant scene from ‘Before the Devil Knows Your Dead’, Hoffman lies in a narcotic haze, spread-eagled on the couch of his apathetic dealer and confesses that his life makes no sense to him. While his accountancy work deals in the tangible, his life’s equation involves no such absolutes. Increasingly he is aware of a terrifying disconnect between expectation and reality; all the things he has acquired fail to neatly cohere and resemble something whole.

Most of us cannot begin to understand the position that Philip Seymour Hoffman found himself in, and neither should we try to by piecing together the wreckage he left behind. It is meaningless to perceive a life by its composite parts, they are not the same thing.

Looper

Rian Johnson’s ‘Looper’ brings us to Kansas City 2042, a part of time and space that has become something of a dumping ground to be used by crime syndicates of the future. The logical choice for future mobsters is now to hire assassins in the past (bear with me), and present them their targets by means of by-then-invented time travel.

It is the job of the loopers, who count Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) among their number, to execute those who appear in front of them and dispose of the body so as to leave no trace in the future.

But there is a catch; as Gordon-Levitt’s narration informs us, this new technology is so very illegal that said organisations cannot risk their loopers coming back to haunt them, and a time will come where they must execute their thirty-year-older selves. When the time does come for our protagonist to end his own loop and literally face his own mortality he hesitates, facilitating the escape of his older self (Bruce Willis) into a world he should not inhabit.

Now Joe is well aware of the dire consequences of his inaction for himself (and by this I do actually mean himself), and sets about tracking down his 2072 counterpart who also has a grizzly task in mind to put his own house in order.

Johnson provides the audience with a measured glimpse into the lives of 2042’s criminal underbelly – not so much that new and interesting technology is thrust at us indiscriminately, but enough to satisfy us that there is substance, a concreteness, to his futuristic city. On this front it succeeds where the likes of ‘I, Robot’ have failed; scratch beneath the surface and you find just the amount of societal and technological advancements to satisfy the conventions of the genre, such as the eye-drop drugs with which the city is rampant, but no affectations included for their own sake.

Gordon-Levitt’s Joe is a conflicted man; embracing the perks of the life of a small-time mobster whilst also preparing for retirement away from the city. It is testament to his performance, as well as the work of Johnson’s make-up and CGI teams, that his scenes with Willis really induce belief that before you stand two slices of one temporal entity. In particular, one scene in the men’s (or man’s) favourite diner sees Willis’ trademark glare emanate from both sides of the table simultaneously as their diverging motives become clear, throwing up all kinds of philosophical dilemmas in the process. Again, the trick is for the complexity and to impress rather than to overwhelm, and Johnson – no stranger to the complicated narrative after his labyrinthine debut feature ‘Brick’ - gets the balance just right.

The success of the science fiction blockbuster often depends not upon the intelligibility or otherwise of the content, but rather the sincerity with which the material is presented – and ‘Looper’ undoubtedly succeeds on the second count if not necessarily the first. The narrative accelerates violently following Gordon-Levitt’s opening exposition meaning that any metaphysical concern are never more than fleeting, indeed the silence that greets the end credits emphasises what a relentless, twisting ride Johnson has just conducted – this is decidedly action-led story-telling.

Most surprising is that, despite an escalating sci-fi plot that eventually owes as much to ‘Chronicle’ as ‘Twelve Monkeys’, the film nevertheless displays commendable restraint in not allowing its concept to overrun the story. It tempers its visual tricks and cat-and-mouse plot with a creeping moral centrepiece, so that, by the climax, any conceptual troubles you might have experienced are left very much in the past.

The Midnight Beast

The latest part of e4’s continued assault on the perceived ‘alternative comedy’ demographic is ‘The Midnight Beast’ - in which a trio of layabouts do a bit of trying to make their name in South-West London’s music scene, a bit of trying to get off with women and a bit of being wacky and weird. I may as well say now that I didn’t like this programme; I didn’t like any of the characters because they were all morons, I didn’t like any of the jokes because they weren’t particularly funny and I shan’t be watching any more of it.

Its not that I’m against what e4 do; by their nature they will  have their hits and their misses and, for the most part, the former are worth the latter. However, the difference between the fortunes of this and its Monday-night predecessor ‘Cardinal Burns’ is their origins: ‘Cardinal Burns’ – brilliantly strange sketches executed to perfection by their creators, ‘The Midnight Beasts’ – a half-baked comedy written seemingly only so as to include the musical source material which gained a popular following on Youtube.

These might have been aimed broadly at the same audience, but in this case the writers have crossed the very real line between the amusingly bizarre and the downright annoying. They crammed three of their comedy pop songs into one programme, and where ‘Flight of the Conchords’ was elevated by its genuinely catchy musical interludes this had me wincing at the lyrics ‘I kicked a shark in the face.’ That’s about its level.

Take a bit of that and piece it together with some plot about trying to get their songs on a playstation game, a manager doing a decent Liam Gallagher/Super Hans impression and an over-egged Withnail-like desperation for any sustenance (two characters fight over a cherry lip balm) and there you have it – a properly rubbish first episode of what will more than likely be a properly rubbish programme. Get back, The Midnight Beast! Back to the internet from whence you came!