Let me know what you think of these...

My buddy Kevin Jarvis sent me this movie trailer yesterday. Stelvio Massi's "44 Specialist". From the trailer (and the soundtrack), it looks to be an awesome watch. Special kudos for a Saxon appearance. Any comments will be passed along to Jarvis.

TALES OUT OF SCHOOL

I guess I'm in a British mood lately... actually I guess I'm in an angry young man mood lately. I don't have any idea why. I watched (well, rewatched actually) Alan Clarke's "Made in Britain". The film was originally a BBC teleplay, shown on 2/25/1982 (my wife's 6th borthday!). It's most famous for unleashing a 20-year old Tim Roth onto the world.

The basic gist of the story is simple. Tim Roth plays Trevor, a 16-year old trouble-making racist skinhead. Trevor seems to be bent on self-destruction, stealing cars, sniffing glue, throwing bricks through shop windows and fighting whatever there is to fight. He's on the path to prison and the various social workers who try to help him are met with the sole of his boot. The viewer ends up being witness to the end of a downward spiral of someone who has too much personal conviction to roll over and play dead. By this, he ensures his future existence in prison. I see it as Trevor as someone who refuses to see that the chances he is given by social workers to clean up his act are a "pay now or pay more later" situation. I think Trevor would see his institutionalized future as more of an inevitability, and at least he is going on his own terms.


Trevor is a sharp, smart anarchist who fights whatever is in front of him at any given time. When he first arrives at the halfway house, they bunk him with a young black kid named Errol. Errol points out that Trevor has a swastika tattooed on his forehead. Talk about awkward! Anyway, the introduction turns into a pissing match, with Trevor wanting the bed that Errol is in, then when Errol decides to give it to him, Trevor says he wants the other one. Moments like this are peppered throughout the movie to paint the picture of a kid who is pissed off and slightly sadistic and won't take anything from anybody, no matter how brutal or generous. My favorite quote is from Trevor while talking to one of the social workers at the halfway house, "You can lock me up in here, but you can't take away the hate inside my head. I can still hate you in my head. You don't like that do you?" This kid is pissed off. The Vandals' song, "Anti", actually captures Trevor's spirit quite well:


"always speak my mind
the truth is what i say
i shout it out
in black and white
no smegging shades of gray
you've got to be defiant
that's what i always say
you'll never never hear my silence
but that's the price i'll pay

'cuz i'm anti-antiseptic
i'm anti-antipasto
i'm anti-anticipation
and i'm anti-antichrist..."

And it goes on, but that's boring. There's plenty more story from the movie to tell, but that's also kind of boring. This is a character piece. You just have to see it. Roth's portrayal of Trevor is as fun to watch as it is depressing. Fun because he's so damned convincing. And truthfully, I have fun watching pissed-off anti-establishment kids fight the system. Depressing because you know that he's doomed. You know that he could make himself into something more than a prisoner, but he won't get out of his own way. So his conviction (even though psychotic and racist) is a double-edged sword, without it he's a schlub, and with it he's doomed to a life in prison.


Not unlike "If....", there is lots lost on the American audience in this movie. The whole correctional system in England is not like it is here. Also, lots of cockney slang that will be throwing off people who aren't used to hearing it. Example: "touching a dog's ass", which when you abbreviate = "tda", which = "taking and driving away", which in America translates to "stealing a car". So there are multiple layers of the onion that need to be pulled back to reveal what's being talked about sometimes.

I watched this film the first time on a VHS that was rented from Le Video in San Francisco about 15 years ago. I was amazed enough by it to procure a R2 copy on DVD from London on a trip there a few years back. And surprisingly, Blue Underground came out with an Alan Clarke box set a couple of years ago, so I got that too. I watched the copy from Blue Underground which came in at 1:15:40, and had the ratio of 1.33:1. To be perfectly honest, the image isn't that great, but I think that's due to the source material. I know that on IMDB, it says that the fillm was shot on 35mm, but I think I heard on the commentary from the writer and producer that it was actually 16mm. I could be wrong though, so don't listen to me. In the end, the picture quality doesn't really matter for this one so much. The colors are cold and the stock grainy. The whole film seems to be shot with a steadycam and a slightly short lens right up to the actors' faces. It gives a feel of being a bit claustrophobic, confining and intimate. Clarke was one of the great unsung British directors. It's interesting to see some of his work getting DVD releases (the box set from Blue Underground also includes Scum, Elephant and The Firm), although I don't know how well the set has sold as not many people seem to be interested in neo-realist BBC TV films over on this side of the pond at least. Put this one in your netflix queue. If you like it and want more, move onto Scum.

Which side will you be on?

I decided to go ahead and add some stuff to this blog before I go back to work. Of course as I add to the blog, the name will no longer make sense. But this is something I'm willing to sacrifice in the name of ending my sloth during my time off work.

I watched Lindsay Anderson's "If...." today. Notice an ellipses of 4 periods, not the usual 3, giving you an indication of the anarchism that will ensue over the next 1 hr. 52 min. This film released in 1968, is neatly sandwiched somewhere between Anderson's work on "This Sporting Life" (1963) and "Wham! In China: Foreign Skies" (1984).


Malcolm McDowell plays Mick Travis, a senior student at a private boys school in England. As the film began, it was hard for me to not think of McDowell as Alex from "A Clockwork Orange". This soon passes and I'm able to watch the movie without thinking of droogs cruising along real horrorshow in the Durango 95. Travis is a troublemaker at the stodgy school, which is a nice metaphor for the state of things at that time with its elitist hierarchical structure: there's the school's staff, then the whips (the "hall monitors"), then the senior students, then the junior students. Travis is in constant struggle with the whips, along with his two buddies, Wallace and Johnny. He is poisonous to the order of the school as he is no fan of conformity. They continually try to break him, but can't. He continues to fight and fight. Just when you think that they've beat him into submission, he fights back, along with his buddies, in a way that no film today could.


As the film ends, the line between terrorism and revolution gets blurred. What make one person a terrorist and another a revolutionary? I guess the determining factor is the level of oppression that they experience. In this case, quite a bit. Incidentally, it is said by Mick at the end, "one man can change the world with a bullet in the right place". But it's not a man that shoots that bullet. It's a woman.


The film itself is surprisingly stylish. It starts out very ordinarily, telling a very British story, then (and apparently for no other reason than "just because") the film goes from color to black and white. Back and forth throughout the film, the color and black and white imagery trade off. You look for a reason, whether it's dream sequences or flashbacks, but nothing... there's no reason other than because they wanted to. Apparently, Anderson loved to shoot in black and white, but was required by Paramount to shoot in color so as to ensure that the movie could be played on TV in the future.


Just like any good boys' school movie, there is tons of homosexual imagery throughout the film, none of which really pays off to anything. Most of the homosexual subtext (aside from a shower scene) involves a junior named Bobby Phillips. In the beginning, one of the whips tells him to stop flirting. There is also scene where the whips discuss trading him for another boy from a neighboring school. Just allusions that you are watching a movie made by a gay man.


There are two scenes involving Wallace that step it up though: one in which we gaze with Bobby at Wallace's performing a gymnastics routine, and another where the two have an after hours interlude in the school's armory where they share cigarettes until one of the whips comes to break it up. In these scenes, the homosexuality is not buried in the subtext, but right there on the screen, both times in black and white.

Everything about this movie is so British, even for an Anglophile like myself, I feel that about a third of it is lost on me. Between the borstal-like environment of the school, to the class frustrations, to the vernacular, I occasionally found myself feeling a little left out of the joke. That didn't stop me from enjoying it, although by today's standards the ending comes up a little short. I wanted to see more of the aftermath and felt a little short-changed by it. But I'm sure that's just me and my Hollywood blockbuster sensibilities.

I watched the Criterion DVD of the film which came in at 1:51:37. The 1.75:1 image was clear and free from defects as far as I could tell. The commentary is pretty good. McDowell is not unhappy with his performance which makes for an entertaining listen.

There were two subsequent films, "O Lucky Man!" and "Brittania Hospital" that completed a trilogy of sorts, with Malcolm McDowell reprising his role as Mick Travis. Haven't seen those yet though.