The Revolution will not be televised (it’ll be on catch-up)

There is a war being waged.

It has been waged since the 1950s and is largely a cold war, but, there have been many, many casualties. Both sides have gained and lost ground in this perpetual conflict and in the digital age, there are no signs of it abating. It is of course, the war for your attention and for your money. The combatants, are Cinema and Television.

They say that television is the new film; Television drama has the space to develop story arcs and complex characterisation that film simply hasn’t got the time to. Plus, television drama has gradually appropriated the style and language of cinema, to the extent that many dramas, when cut down to a trailer, can easily pass as a cinema film: as a trailer, recent four-part C4 drama series Southcliffe looked great when I saw it advertised at my local Odeon multiscreen. I didn’t actually watch the series, I couldn’t be arsed for some reason but I would have watched the film though I reckon, had it existed…

Sean Harris adding some glamour to C4’s Southcliffe

But really, the conversation about Film v TV is not as straightforward as it first appears. Because when people talk about TV being “better” than film, they’re really talking about American TV; Game of Thrones for example or the (now) Netflix Breaking Bad. Whether you like or indeed have watched these series, you can’t deny their apparent popularity but there are two “slight” differences between them and your average British drama series; size and the size of their budgets. Southcliffe, in total, is roughly three hours long. By my reckoning, Breaking Bad is 51 hours long. And without checking, I think it would be pretty safe bet that the budget of Game of Thrones is just a teeny bit higher than that of Southcliffe, or any other UK drama you care to mention. It’s perhaps an extreme example, given the genre of Game of Thrones, but it’s a good one to illustrate of the disparity between the UK and America in terms of cash.

And cash is, of course, what’s it’s all about. In America it’s about making as much as you can, while in the UK it’s about spending as little as you can get away with. But the rewards for American drama series can be huge because along TV audiences, come massive Boxset sales. Now, the actual audiences for Game of Thrones are much lower in the US than you might think. The cumulative transmission totals are around thirteen million but the initial, first transmission figures have often been below 5 million. Even the cumulative figure is a surprise to me (Eastenders gets broadcast figures of 6-8 million for heaven’s sake!), and yes, of course, these Series sell all around the world, but it’s the Boxset, at thirty nicker a pop that do the damage to your wallet and become the cash cow and focus of American companies.

Even if they sell as a Boxset, your average British drama isn’t going to come close to that in cost, simply because they’re not long enough, they haven’t got enough episodes. The BBC’s Sherlock, for example, is a series that is just three episodes long! And each episode is only 25 minutes in length! At least, that’s the way it feels…

Benedict Cumberbatch playing a more modern version of Sherlock than audiences are used to. Get used to it Grandad, it’s the future!

No, UK drama isn’t in the same league as the US but that’s actually OK because it’s not just about cash, it’s about a return on your investment. Game of Thrones is roughly $6 million per episode, Sherlock weighs in at around £800,000. Bet your life HBO are gonna pump that mutha! It’s elementary. But the BBC, while selling Sherlock to 180 different territories around the world, don’t have the same kind of pressure. And that allows a little more space for a programme to breathe. It used to anyway.

Crime drama is pretty much the mainstay of British Television, from adaptations of Agatha Christie (which combines with that other British dramatic stalwart: Period) to Dennis Potter and The Singing Detective. It could be part of the reason Brits are so popular as villains in Hollywood, because anybody who’s anybody in the acting world has, at some point in their career, doubtlessly killed someone on camera… But there can be no denying the ongoing popularity of British crime with the British public, and the rest of the world. It’s not all crime of course, but it is a sizeable chunk.

This illustrates not the difference with the US but the common theme: just like the fantasy of Game of Thrones and the SciFi of Battlestar Galactica, crime is a genre. Generic drama is easier to sell and easier to finance. However, recent British SciFi productions haven’t fared quite as well, with the 2010 Outcasts lasting one series and the post-apocalyptic Survivors surviving (geddit?) for two (both are/were BBC). It’s interesting to compare them with the more horror (and comedy) based Being Human which lasted 5 series (and has been remade in the US). I don’t know if In The Flesh will return for a second series, unlike The Walking Dead, the comic franchise that’s currently up to series 4 with 13 episodes per series.

Grace Park who plays the many variations of Boomer, in Battlestar Galactica. Arguably one of the hottest asian-schizophrenic-killer-organic/cyborg/clones to hit our screens in recent years

The thing about crime is, it’s quite cheap to make in comparison with most other genres. It’s generally contemporary and generally has quite a small cast. And this is the way much of the British film industry works; smaller scale, lower budgets and higher proportionate return. Hopefully. British film doesn’t have the same P&A spend as Hollywood but if you’re budget’s a million and a half, you don’t have to spend as much as World War Z getting the word out in order to make your investors’ money back. It could be argued that the British film industry can take more risks in terms of the films it makes, but, usually, it doesn’t. British films are not more risqué than Hollywood films, more edgy, they’re just weaker on just about every level. And this comes from someone who’d rather watch a British film than an American one 6 out of 7 days of the week.

Grace Park again, but this time without makeup and hair extensions

Now, you may note the use of the word “risqué” in that last paragraph. Risqué implies some kind of sexual element. Television, over the last few years, has become not so much risqué as… less implicit. Its use of sex and of violence is not hinted at, it’s slap bang right before your eyes, in HD. Television, unlike Film, which needs to make its money back in order (for the production executive/production company) to survive, doesn’t rely on resorting to the lowest common denominator and widest audience spread i.e. Television is not infantilised in the same way Film has been. Television, after the nine O’ clock watershed, is for adults, complete with sex, violence and bad language. Film, frequently, will not only edit out adult elements before the camera rolls, but will remove these elements if it can get a wider audience and make more money once the thing’s been edited! Such is the impact of money on Film that it could be accused of selling its soul. Selling itself short, at the very least… Of course there are restrictions, particularly in the UK, concerning the nature of a TV drama’s content but Game of Thrones, compared to the films that doubtlessly spawned its making; Lord of the Rings, is not for kids.

And this, I think, perhaps, maybe, is why TV drama in the UK (whether British made or otherwise) actually is the new film, or at least why it can be called that. The whole stylistic Nordic-creep, Gillian Anderson’s character in The Fall, a heroine that was more disturbing than the killer and overall levels of angst, weirdness and nastiness that film just doesn’t seem to be able to compete with, all make for a medium that offers more than a sanitised PG hour and a half in a cinema can compete with.

For me, at least, TV is currently a darker, adult refuge from the kiddy-friendly cinema of the C21st. And with younger audiences gravitating towards games and short-form internet content that probably involves watching other kids having accidents on skateboards or some form of bullying, older audiences, which I have been led to believe I number amongst, offer a much more reliable market for Television.

Cillian Murphy, cinematically astride a horse, or to pronounce it correctly, “an ‘os”

Birmingham, much prized by filmmakers for its 1920s period locations

But what does the future hold in store? Current BBC drama By Any Means (Hustle but with Police instead of con-men “that’s a grey area” ha ha ha ha ha ha) (ha), with it’s expedited plot lines and strangely Birminghamesque looking exterior shots of London (filmed in Birmingham because of budget presumably) is sub-popcorn. I imagine it will sell abroad, but, it is crap. The heavily styled Peaky Blinders (set in 1919 Birmingham but largely filmed anywhere but, kind of understandably), starring Cillian Murphy and Sam Neill has one eye so firmly fixed on America that you can almost forgive its Birmingham accent-deaf ears (almost). And with the BBC America production of Atlantis (Merlin by another name) hitting our TV screens soon, what will become of more character driven drama outings? Will they be driven out by productions that, along with their budgets, dwarf them? Will the UCOS squad in New Tricks (a favourite with my mom and before he died, my dad) start packing heat and chasing down perps in shiny new (product placed) V8 Mustangs?

And perhaps more to the point, what will become of British film? It already struggles and strangely, Brit crime-flics don’t really shine box office wise, so if TV steals the thunder Film doesn’t even possess, what will become of it? Will Film become smaller, more intimate, more, dare I say it, character driven? Will it, as its relatively tiny budgets continue to shrink along with its audiences, become more kinda “arthouse”? Might it even start to become more TV-like in its approach? It’s interesting because while in the US the market might dictate the content, in the UK we’re slowly changing. Whether that’s the TV companies driving the change, or us as consumers driving the change in our supplier, is hard to say, especially as the domestic UK market is no longer, it seems, the be all and end all of British TV executives. Will British TV drama go the way of British film; pale and generally unsuccessful imitations of US peers? British TV has always relied heavily on the quality of its acting and, its inventiveness but if it carries on along a “cinematic” path, then Doctor Who (I know it’s marketed to kids) must be directly comparable with Battlestar Galactica. No matter how good the production values of the current Doctor who are compared with the pre-1989 version, it plain just doesn’t rack up to the rebooted Battlestar in any way.

I don’t know, I don’t know, but as it stands now, in the short term and with colder nights closing in, I think I’d rather pay a licence fee than a tenner per visit to a cinema that, currently, has nothing on offer I really want to see, or at least, pay to see. Thankfully, because we are in a digital age, with things like BBC iPlayer making non-live broadcast programmes available, I don’t have to do either. And that’s the thing about this current stage of the war: even though the stakes are higher than they ever were, there appears to be a lot less money to wage it because if not for free, then people can get their TV and their Film for next to nothing. Yes, Television has always been at war with Film, but elephant-like fact in the room is that actually, there are no Television dramas anymore, and there are no Films either! There is only the fifth columnist, the double agent that uses and plays both sides: Content. It’s a word you hear more and more. The question is, where does it come from, and how much are you willing to pay for it? It’s cheap today, but really, the Sky is the limit.

I’ve seen The Wire on DVD, so has anybody got Game of Thrones series II Boxset I can borrow?

World War Z: Do Your Duty!

Numbers aren’t really my strongpoint. I’m not 87% sure what my strongpoint actually is, but it’s not numbers. So, although I can’t remember what my friend said, it’s mitigated by the fact that I wasn’t really listening, it was a while ago and, that the subject was numbers. Not technically correct, the subject was “World War Z” but the general conversation concerned numbers; specifically, when the film was going to be released and, how much it had gone over budget.

Brad and his missus look that way, while everybody else looks the other way. Symbolic? YOU DECIDE!!!

Time is money as they say and at the very least, money is like time in the sense that it’s relative. My friend shall remain nameless; largely because without checking on Facebook I’m not 62% sure how to spell his name (spelling isn’t my strongpint either) but he did have a connection with World War Z through the company he was working for at the time. Needless to say, when the conversation turned to WWZ, (or as I prefer to call it “WWZed”, doesn’t rhyme with 3), the time he gave in terms of expected delivery was months ago and the cost of re-shooting various scenes is dwarfed by the figures you now see in various articles on the internet. I think he said the cost of reshoots were in the region of $60,000,000 whereas the figures you see in the press now put the film anywhere up to $200million over budget. Like I say, money is relative and to any casual observer, the budgetary figures of WWZed, like those of the banking crisis of 2008, are so huge that they become, in a way, meaningless; $60million is a lot of money, $200million is a lot of money but in terms of what most people know about film budgets, it could easily be $60200million and be just as meaningless. We don’t relate to figures like these, only to figures like £8, the rough-average cost of entry into a local/regional UK cinema.

If the lower over-budget estimation of $60million is true, this means that at the price of £8 per ticket, almost five million extra people must see WWZed in order for it to make that money back. If the figure is closer to $200million, then the amount of people that must go through the door is a staggering 1.634735e+7!

Now, I have no idea, at all, what that figure means, not a clue but I assume it must be huge by virtue of having a letter and a plus sign in it; I’ve never seen one before and can only trust that my iPhone’s calculator isn’t just making it up (debatable considering their tax dealings) but, even though numbers aren’t really my strongpoint, I can quickly calculate on my previous $60million calculation, the number of extra people that’s gotsta sit with p-corn is in the region of 20million.

20million extra pairs of feet that have to make their way through the turnstile for WWZed, not to make a profit, but just recoup the overspend!

Taking into consideration distribution costs, theatrical costs, advertising costs and, not forgetting Orange Wednesday, which of course allows two people to see a film for the price of one, I calculate that for WWZed to make a profit, every man woman and child on the planet must go and see it.

Twice.

The question is, why am I telling you this? Why should you be interested in the cost, the final cost, of essentially, a B-movie? If you can’t relate to the budget, why should you relate to the film? This may take a leap of faith but please, take my hand, close your eyes and forget that you are a thousand feet above ground.

“SMART, SCARY AND TENSION FUELED” And that’s just Brad! Imagine what the film’s like!

Firstly, I have to establish, inform you, that I really like zombie movies. Those who know me think I am little bit art-house obsessed, auteur-y, that I think a film is only ever any good if it tackles social issues of the day and has an audience of half a dozen people. This is sort of true but far from complete. I like films in general, love films, even films that have no strain of inherent emotional truth running through them; even these bad, bad, bad films, I like and indeed will watch if the price is right (free).

I don’t know where my partiality to zombie movies comes from but I do know its roots stem from post-apocalyptic science fiction, derived initially from books like Day of the Triffids, Quatermass and Z for Zachariah as a kid. Which ever way you look at it, a zombie movie is pretty much going to be post-apocalyptic these days and it’s interesting (to me) that the less the post-apocalyptic a film is, the less I’m interested. I don’t know what it says about me psychologically but the simple fact is, I like zombie movies. Then again, I like Waterworld. I even like The Postman. I think Kevin Costner should make more post-apocalyptic box-office-disaster disaster movies. But with zombies.

So, having set my stall, I think we can safely say that I have a slightly partisan viewpoint. This then leads us to you. You may or may not be a zombie fan. You may be male, female, may like Ken Loach or Jerry Bruckheimer, who knows. You may like rom-coms, action films, thrillers, action thrillers, rom-com action thrillers, I don’t know and, it doesn’t matter: you like films. Hey, we all like films! And the better a film is, the more we like it, right? Well of course, you can’t define “better”, just as you can’t define “important”. That would be a ridiculous thing for anybody to suggest because it’s subjective and one person’s better is another’s “I hate zombie movies”.

I agree with exactly half of this caption

But consider this. WWZed is symbolic. It started life as a 2006 book by Max brooks and is a follow up to the 2003 The Zombie Survival Guide. Although it’s not original in terms of subject matter; the 1932 White Zombie is considered the first ever zombie movie (although this Haitian folklore derived film is wildly different from today’s post-apocalyptic style), and Frankenstein could be considered the first zombie book (and if so, a 1910 silent film to go along with it), but WWZed is quite different in terms of concept to many, many films: it is original. It’s not a remake, it’s not a reboot, it’s not a re-imagining, it’s not a sequel, it’s not a prequel, it’s not based on a game, it’s not based on a comic book, and it’s not been around for the last 50, 60, 70 years. It’s not Batman, X-Men, or, Superman, which, in the form of its most recent incarnation, “Man of Steel”, has been remade no less the 12,000 times! (maybe slightly less, numbers aren’t my strong point, remember?)

Yes, WWZed might be a bloated, overproduced, over CGI’d, nonsensical piece of crap that just goes to show how removed from reality Hollywood is and, exemplify a perverted marketing business that means if you spend SO much making these kinds of films, you have to spend even more just to rouse interest in them; you have to crush the competition, you have to be NUMBER ONE! You can’t just be good, or even great! You have to cut through every goddam demographic going, be all things to all men. And women! And kids! And family pets… But at least if you look for World War Z on IMDB, you won’t have to trawl through all the dates ranging from 1920 to the present day to figure out which version you’re looking for, let alone all the suffixes like :Reborn, :Returns, :Resurrection, :Revenge! No, WWZed might not be the most original film on the planet but it’s not the least either and that, really, should be applauded, like Gareth Edwards’ 2010 Monsters for example: the same, but different. Very different. I watched Monsters (and enjoyed it) partly because of the genre and partly because I found the concept and the production process interesting. I also knew that my money, even the paltry percentage filmmakers get on ichTunes (sic), mattered, especially in relation to the budget.

The film business is not a charity but that money mattered, and your money matters too. More than you think.

Uncle Sam (Pitt the Elder) Needs YOU!

Because if you don’t watch WWZed, if you choose not to hand over your readies and it completely flops, the ramifications could be horrendous. Post-apocalyptic even. The Hollywood studios will increasingly withdraw, to films they’ve made before and films they’ve sold before. There will be so many super hero movies in the next decade you’ll be walking down your local high street in a brightly coloured, be-lettered leotard thinking that it’s perfectly normal cos that’s how everybody dresses and besides, a leotard is really practical just in case you’re randomly contaminated by some random unknown chemical and randomly develop the ability to randomly fly whenever the world is put in “danger” by some other random leotard wearing nutter. Do you want that to happen? I mean the leotard, not the flying bit. No! Of course you don’t. And it’s down to you, every £8 matters!

Think of all those Hollywood execs that will lose their jobs. Because heads roll at this kind of thing! It’ll make the Reign of Terror look like a minor mishap at Tony&Guy with a pair of extra sharp scissors and an over zealous stylist with a Van Gogh fixation. Think of their children! Those poor little Hollywood exec children type things called Tommy, or Nancy or Clancy or Whatevery the 3rd junior. Not to mention the pressure on Brad and his production company Plan B. And his kids too. And Angelina, especially now. The best way you can show Angelina your support is with a simple donation of just £8. Come on! You did it for the bankers, now it’s the turn of Paramount!

And lastly, think of me. And think of yourself too. But mainly me. I like zombie movies. I want to watch more of them. If WWZed flops, not only will it be wall to wall remakes and repetitive superhero flics, all vying for that tent pole top spot, but there will likely be less zombies to have their brains splattered all over the silver screen. That means there will be less Colin, less In the Flesh, less The Returned (not seen it, cheers 4OD you useless piece of crap). And if there’s less zombies, there will be less rom-coms, less thrillers, less whatever films you like, less everything!  Less everything except, Superman remakes!

Come on guys, it’s just you and me and millions of other Muppets against a world of endless Marvel makeovers that Hollywood wants us to buy again and again and again. We are that thin red line, and the blue one too, any colour you like. It’s up to us to take up our £8 arms and fight! Fight! Fight! Come on, let’s tell them, let’s show them, they may take our (social) lives but they will never take our freedom! It’s our destiny, our sine qua non, our DUTY! After all, don’t you know there’s a war on? Even if it is only World War Z…

Or see Byzantium by Neil Jordan, director of Mona Lisa, The Crying Game and of course, Company of Wolves. Byzantium cost in the region of £8million and is in cinemas now. Monsters budget was in the region of £500,000 (or a lot less) and is on telly and DVD. World War Z is out on the 21st of June. I assume on the basis of being a world war, that means the UK too.

Related articles

• Jack Bool reviews: Byzantium (archantnorfolk.wordpress.com)
• Byzantium Review (★★★½) (whatnotfilms.wordpress.com)
• Gemma Arterton: Byzantium is not Twilight (contactmusic.com)

The Most Important Film in the World

I’ve just revisited Dirty Pretty Things by Stephen Frears. It’s a 2002 film that, I think, largely failed to take advantage of star Audrey Tautou, fresh out of the 2001 international smash (the Fabuleux Destin de) Amelié (Poulain).

It’s is a strange film in some ways, telling the story of Okwe (Chitwell Ejiofor), a Nigerian doctor on the run and Senay (Tautou) a young (Turkish I think) Muslim girl, hounded by British immigration. Both work in a low/mid-range London hotel, both are illegal immigrants, (Senay actually has a visa but is not allowed to work) and both are struggling in a world where because of their non-status, they have no rights.

Audrey Tautou in Dirty Pretty Things and a stolen fur coat

The plot starts to develop when Okwe finds a human heart blocking the toilet in one of the hotel rooms. From this point, we see his relationship with Senay (whose couch he sleeps on) develop, along with pressure from slimy boss Juan (played very nicely by Sergi López) who knows all about the surplus human organs knocking about and blocking up the hotel and who, discovering Okwe’s medical background, wants him to perform the lucrative black market organ transplants he organises. On top of this sits the burgeoning, though tentatively, love story between Okwe and Senay and Senay’s desperation for a better life that leads her to approach Juan with a view to selling one of her organs (presumably not her heart).

The film is nicely shot by Chris Menges on Fuji stock (both things a good sign), the pace of the whole thing sits quite well and the performances are fine and… It’s all a little flat. It’s far from being a bad film, very far but there is something about it that doesn’t quite work. For me, I feel, it’s neither high budget enough or low budget enough; it doesn’t quite have the “edge”, or the gloss. It’s one of those British films that tries to punch slightly above its weight and despite its plucky intentions, fails. Or if you prefer, doesn’t succeed. No, it’s not a bad film and I’d recommend anyone to see it, but it’s not a great film. But, it IS the most important film in the world.

Now this could be considered a grand claim, a wild claim, a completely insane claim, especially when Dirty Pretty Things isn’t, really, that good. No, it’s no Citizen Kane, no Seven Samurai, no The Godfather, all films that could possibly lay claim to my assertion, along with a whole myriad of other classics. They are, of course, all great films and their greatness is in no particular order; they’re just films I could think of at the time, right here right now. They are great films, and important films in their way, but none of them is THE most important film in the world.

It depends of your definition I suppose… The French have an attitude towards film and it manifests itself for example, in the 1989 EU “Television Without Frontiers” directive which limits the amount of non-European films/broadcasts across Europe and promotes homegrown (and in the case of France, French language) products to the detriment of, let’s face it, Hollywood. Many, including American production companies (and if truth be known, commercial advert/revenue driven European/French broadcasters) would argue that this is a bad thing and that it limits the choice of the consumer (or if you will, perhaps, cineaste). I’d argue along with the French government (and doubtlessly French producers who rely on state funding), that America, Hollywood, is too powerful as a cultural force and that left to its own devices, it will steamroller over any native film industry quicker than a grey squirrel. It is the nature of capitalism to talk about diversity but to aim for monopoly and without assistance, European films simply would not exist.

Not to be confused with Audrey Tautou, this, bizarrely, is a Jawa, called Audrey, from Tatooine. True.

This might not be a bad thing, it’s really not for me to say (of course it would be a bloody bad thing!!!). And your perception of it obviously depends on what sort of films you watch, on what basis and how regularly. I could argue that the average Hollywood blockbuster is the equivalent of hi-fructose corn syrup, addictive, damaging. Or I could argue that, like Karl Marx didn’t quite say, Hollywood films are the crack cocaine of the masses. But I won’t. It’s too emotive and relies on metaphors that to be honest, aren’t really my strong point (steam rollering grey squirrels for example).

But consider this: how many films about illegal immigrants, and their stories, can you name? How many films portray these people as, well, people? You know, human beings? Yeah, illegal immigrants crop up in crime dramas (except of course, Midsomer Murders) and on the news; sometimes as bad guys attached to a horror story of death or fraud and just as often, as tragic victims. But rarely, are these people and their legal counterparts given more than a cursory glance. They are, as the characters in Dirty Pretty Things, expediently ignored, forgotten, denied. They have, no story.

For any culture, for any people or peoples to have no story, is a tragedy. To have no story is to have no presence, to not matter, to have never existed and even worse than to never have existed, is to not exist now.

As far as Hollywood is concerned, there is only one narrative in the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan and that is USA! USA! The civilian victims of drone attacks don’t matter, are never seen, never tug at your heartstrings with the swell of the orchestra as an emotional indicator. You can’t empathise with these people because they don’t exist. They have no story. There’s the story of the bomb disposal expert (Hurt Locker), or the hunt for Osama (Zero Dark Thirty: not seen it) and there’s the story of the investigation into a compound bombing in Saudi Arabia, which in terms of humanising a Muslim, in the form of Faris Al Ghazi (played by Ashraf Barom in The Kingdom), proves only that as far as Hollywood is concerned that the only good Arab/Muslim, rather like Injuns, is a dead one. Right up till 1950 and Sydney Poitier playing a doctor in No Way Out, I can’t think of a black American in any film aside from slaves, servants or entertainers. The cultural impact of this, through either the reinforcement of a stereotype or the blinkering of a whole nation/rest of the world to not just Afro-Americans in general but their rights as human beings, cannot be underestimated (see Hallelujah! 1929 or the 1925 Body and Soul starring Paul Robeson; there undoubtedly were African-American films but few and far between).

But if you’re English/British, the ramifications go further, or perhaps closer to home. I’d argue that if Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday (technically a TV movie but premiered at Sundance and won a Golden Bear at Berlin), along with Jimmy McGovern’s Sunday, plus McGovern’s Hillsborough (again, actually a TV movie, directed by Charles McDougal) didn’t exist, then our perception of these events and the people involved in them would be very different. It’s almost as if the “fictionalisation” of the stories, the act of telling the story, somehow makes the events more real; we know the stories themselves but also know, through intuition/suspicion, through the campaigning around them and, through the films, that the stories we had previously been spun, by the press, were lies. I wonder, and bless modern British filmmakers’ M&S socks because they do kind of try to make films that are off kilter, sometimes, and it is so hard to make a buck, but I wonder if anyone could make a film today that has the same impact Cathy Come Home had in 1966. Has the UK become too Americanised in its cinematic language? Have British filmmakers got an edge anymore? Integrity? I wonder, given the current economic situation and the British Government’s approach to the poor along with all the spin (propaganda), how will history, constructed from supposed fact, judge them/us in the absence of the emotional truth of film?

Love on the Dole. The book, not the 1941 film

Because make no mistake, Hollywood would not make Cathy Come Home and it would not make Dirty Pretty Things*. It would not tell the story of these illegal immigrants, with or without Audrey Tautou. It simply couldn’t. It hasn’t got the will, the desire or the vocabulary. I’m not saying that all films should be like this, that it should Rain Stones and never a rainbow: I am no mono-culturist. But I am saying, as roller-coastery fun as it is, Star Trek Into Darkness DOESN’T MATTER. Yes, it might be entertaining, yes it might be loud and have great special effects and all that other hi-fructose stuff and hell, yes, I may even watch it myself because I like Star Trek and Sci-Fi in general and if they ever make Star Trek Zombie Apocalypse (well you never know) then I’ll be straight at the head of the queue! But it doesn’t matter, it is not important. And even if it was, it would never be THE most important film in the world.

That accolade is reserved, by me, in complete subjectivity, for a film that tells the story of a people hidden, and exploited, in plain sight: Dirty Pretty Things.

Or possibly Bread and Roses. Or The Road to Guantanamo. Maybe, In This World. Or the 2006 Ghosts. Or perhaps, I’m really not sure anymore, Dawn of the Dead, 2004? Whatever, pass the nachos…

*As far as I know, Dirty pretty Things was distributed by Buena Vista and has some connection with Miramax, but to the best of my knowledge, it was actually produced by the BBC and Celador.

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The towers of Etching Hill