Whiter than White Star

This is a Festival review of White Star (1983)

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6 October

This is a Festival review of White Star (1983)

You could not call it a Roland Klick* retrospective as such (Cambridge Film Festival did not), because (so I gather) many of his films had not been released in the UK. Not wishing to do a Jos Stelling, I decided on White Star (1983), and then, depending on how it went, maybe Supermarkt (1974).

However, I had, of course, not reckoned on making a mistake (going into Screen 3, rather than Screen 2), so missing the beginning of Leviathan (2013), and ending up with dubbed Klickery in Deadlock (1970), a film not on my list.

A desert, a guy who finds a dressed-up other guy, then takes more interest in his case and its contents, but hesitates – rock held high – to ensure that he does not survive, as if leaving him for dead were better. Second thoughts, going back, but the suited guy is gone, and holds him up. They drive off, arrive somewhere, only for the man with the upper hand to be easily overpowered. A mysterious woman. And so on, but all dubbed.


Did it seem bizarre, as the Festival write-up tells me that some had thought it ? No, not least because the word is overused, but really because it seemed arbitrarily wafer thin (to the point where I sneaked out, having stayed too long – until just after the title, because I had bizarrely thought it to be a preceding short that I had overlooked) who was in control. Hence ‘Deadlock’ ? Maybe, but the dubbing was killing me (even if subtitles were not then the norm) for its way of sucking the life (any of the film’s and mine)…

So Star, with its stark title, no longer seemed such a good choice, but there would be a Q&A with Klick. It, too, was supposed to be strange, but it seemed amazingly one dimensional in the way that Deadlock had threatened to be :

The opening scene is, I think, of Dennis Hopper (as producer Kenneth Barlow) trying to persuade Terrance Robay (as star Moody) to appear on stage in a club full of restless punks – either that, or of him, with his stooge Frank (David Hess), setting up for the latter to smash windows (which will later look as if there has been a riot), and arranging the foment of said punks. Oh, and, in arguing with the club’s owner, Barlow reveals that Moody is his sister’s boy. Nothing else do we need to know, and nothing else of significance emerges save from this starting-point.


Do we know why Moody trusts Barlow to be his producer, or why he goes along with this ‘White Star’ branding (with all its connotations of white supremacy, apart from those of space and of a burst of creation : it certainly is not Moody’s choice, though it is the best that the pair have to offer, even when Moody seeks to collaborate with a female vocalist (Sandra ?? Mascha ??)) ? Quite simply, other than probably having no other hope, no – since the conceit of the film is that Moody lives in Berlin**, the club would have been notorious, and he would never have agreed to try to play his synthesizer there.

The same objection is not dependent on being a denizen of Berlin. Since nothing in the film suggests that Moody is trusting (or, at any rate, trusts Barlow – except disastrously to take unspecified tablets in the back of a dangerously driven car when also ordered to change into his white suit), it hardly seems likely that he would not have objected to the choice of opening gig long before being there.


The only way in which this film works is if it is just a vehicle for a Hoppermonster, and we watch him barge through life like a giant game of PAC-MAN. Klick may not have hired him with that intention, and what he said about Hopper in the Q&A suggested that both that the man whom he had met before he arrived in Berlin, and what other people had said about working with him, had not prepared him for the reality :

Klick told the Festival audience (apparently, a story that he has told before), a coke story about Hopper, that, when he arrived in Berlin, the first thing that he wanted was cocaine, and Klick had to arrange something such that a man arrived with a briefcase every week with Hopper’s fix. The story went on : that Hopper was too high to act for the first part of the day, and too tired later on, but Klick had a clear two hours to get what he wanted from him (and, moreover, Hopper is scarcely off the screen).


Maybe, then, with the roles reversed, the film is a paradigm for making the film itself, with Hopper as the maverick star whom the director struggles to control, versus Hopper as the hell-bent producer, using all means and any to promote ‘White Star’ and ‘The Future’. A model of capitalism gone crazy in search of selling goods, but one that has really very little to say about why Moody goes along with it all and, say, sells the fittings of his studio (and shafts his black colleague) for Barlow to sell them for a song.

Glengarry Glenn Ross (1992), O Lucky Man ! (1973), The Color of Money (1986) – maybe (I don’t know) some of these films could have learnt something from Klick, and it is a helluva show from Hopper, but the ‘terrifying, unhinged performance’ (Festival write-up) is not enough, and Lindsay Anderson is careful to throw Malcolm McDowell into relief.


End-notes

* What sort of name is that ? I knew the phrase Das klickt nicht and the like, but still – perhaps he could develop and print a film for me…

** As we learn later, even if it may be a poor translation, since he is staying in a hotel.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

It ain't worth a thing...

This is a review of The Bling Ring (2013)

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22 July 2013 (revised 7 August 2019)

This is a review of The Bling Ring (2013)

Afterwards, someone was heard describe this film as immoral. It is unlikely that she meant that The Bling Ring (2013) should have been a documentary, but, if she thought that it glorified shameful behaviour ‘inspired by true events’ (as the credits coyly put it), maybe she would have been happier with one : ot might have been less exultant in the burglary / trespass scenes, and, except in a film like The Imposter (2012), could have given greater emphasis to the victims and the sentences delivered…

The Bling Ring did not succeed as an account of matters as a feature film, because there were far too many flaws. For example, people (repeatedly) enter Paris Hilton’s house without her knowledge and, when not scanning through her possessions, smoke cigarettes – whether or not she smokes, is its lingering scent not going to be a strong indication to said Hilton that all is not as it should be, even if care had been taken to dispose of the ash and the butt (somehow unlikely, as this question was not addressed) ?

In another scene involving cigarettes, when Nicki (Nicolette ? played by our own Emma Watson) is in Marc’s (Israel Broussard's) bedroom, hiding a lit one behind her back when the door is opened by his father is not – unless he has no sense of smell – going to conceal anything. She must hide the cigarette because she is not meant to be a smoker or to smoke there, but it makes no credible sense : if someone opens a door into a room where someone else is smoking, it is obvious.

It is as if someone who has no notion of what a cigarette actually is (or of its taint) has observed behaviour and then represents it in the script without knowing what it means. The same is true of how Hilton’s house is depicted. Say 'Aladdin’s Cave', and you would not be far wrong, even down to the guessed means of entry being a substitution for the overheard password – once one is in, one can have and do what one wants, as it is the forty thieves who are the ones looking around…

Hilton, apparently, arranges everything neatly in pairs on racks by colour, no more pairs than there are spaces, and everything else on a hanger and in its place, with a room for this, a room for that. (But no one lives in to maintain this order for these stars, who are without exception methodical and ordered just in this way – apart from having no security, when they look concerned to have everything just so.)

Every other female icon’s house entered is conveniently somewhere we are meant to believe that she lives alone (no live-in staff to prepare that hot meal or snack when she comes in, no alarms, and safes left open), and Hilton even goes off on a trip and leaves her tiny dog behind. Credible, or just a passing resemblance, not thought out beyond how wealthy people might live if really wanting to show these youngsters nosing around and taking a few representative items ?

It’s either insulting to the audience’s intelligence to think that this – although it may be straight from the glossy pages of the celebrity magazines, with which ‘the adventurers’ busy themselves – in either case, is this how these people live their lives or is the film only aimed at those in the audience who would buy into the gang as it invades stars’ homes, but they are none the wiser ?


If so, then Sofia Coppola is too in love with her own vision, and has traded many forms of credibility for the reality that her invaders have nothing much better to say all the time than a wretched O my God !. From this point of view, a film like Spring Breakers (2012) is more honest – here are scantily clad young women doing scandalous things, and there is no moral, but maybe it’s convincing.

In Coppola's film, keys to cars get casually taken, but what happens to the cars themselves (or even the keys) is, as with cigarette smoke and ash, casually ignored. So, early on in Rebecca’s (Katie Chang's) acquaintance with Marc* (whom she certainly chose not for his charms, but to exploit), she asks if he has any friends whose parents are away. On impulse, when they leave that friend’s house, she drives them off in the family car (Car B), with no reference to what happened to the car that she earlier turned up in outside the school to take them there (Car A), both plastered with her fingerprints.

This makes no sense at all on even slight examination : Car B (and where they dispose of it) is a pretty big clue to the home location of the thieves, and to the possibility that the house where it had been parked was burgled first (or, as they say in the States, burglarized !), since it will have been clear that car-keys were used to drive it away.

Unless Rebecca is entitled (by absentee parents) to drive Car A (Marc also magically has a car, though never shown driving before, when he drops her at the airport), the location where it came from also links those who take Car B to it (where Car A is still parked : even if Rebecca had been allowed to drive it, she has abandoned it there, rather than getting Marc to drive it back).

Cozily, it all goes along with Marc the only one who seems to be a bit edgy about what they are doing, although he has his fair share of OMGs, until some injudicious boasting about who has been where (which widens the circle of those in the know), and the initially relatively cautious limit of taking only what might not be noticed missing is abandoned, with paintings lifted from the wall and carried through the gates.

Some star, at last, has invested not in shoe-rack no. 38, but some CCTV, although it seems operated by security staff who think that turning up and apprehending those who have made an entry to their employer’s property is beyond their remit. (The other stars, with as many racks as shoes, must have been in the I-cannot-spot-an-empty-space category, because the outrageous red heels that Marc enjoys sporting (except when his mother is at the door) would scarcely just get overlooked.)

And so it all unravels, and the intermixed Vanity Fair interviews (the media seem to have given the gang its title) leave us uncertain as to what has already happened in the rest of the story. Is the epilogue with Nicky a surprise ? Not really, as the possibility had already presented itself when Marc and Rebecca spoke at the airport, and, by then, the core group of five’s actions were widely known (or even witnessed).


I know little more than anyone brought up on American crime-drama about how plea-bargaining really works and interacts with clear evidence that someone participated more than he or she claims, although any such evidence is going to come from others whom he or she has implicated and who, necessarily, are on the other side of the divide. (Puzzlingly, Rebecca, for all that she seems savvy, waits until the police find stolen items on her before she offers to locate where everything is.)

How who was found guilty of what I do not know, but, cannily, we were spared a court-scene by the expedient of the doors closing and reopening for sentencing. (Presumably a full trial, which would have had to identify these awkward issues.) What does seem apparent was that there was no remand prior to trial, and no prohibition on the gang-members (no doubt for a fee, which would help with restitution) speaking to the press. (For what it is worth, I cannot see the latter being allowed in a case such as this in the UK.)

As to the dialogue, it was not astoundingly bad, but it has to be said that, of all the leaden lines, leadenly delivered, by far the highest percentage came from the mouth of Ms Watson (who also sounded, sometimes, as though she came from The Bronx rather than anywhere near The Bay). She was not, though, helped by the editing, which several times left the ostrich eggs of her utterance exposed in mid-air – to plummet and crash.

The evaluation reportedly made of her performance by Baz Bambagoyne beggars belief, if only on these counts alone. There was nothing that home-grown talent could not have brought to the role of manipulating a home-schooling mother, full of wise saws and inculcating the right image, but incapable of seeing that her adopted daughter, Nicky and their sister were out all hours, snorting coke.

Altogether, never high on the credibility states on many counts, but, as I have already said, those seeking a vicarious thrill of rifling through Hilton’s things – rather than those who have little idea who she might be – could probably and happily have swallowed all the imperfections of what someone doing so inspired.


End-notes

* NB there is not even a whiff of sex between him and any of the four main girls in ‘the ring’, despite copious amounts of dope and of snorting cocaine. Maybe that was something to do with the BBFC certificate that was sought…


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Daniella Westbrook: 'Drugs Have Ruined My Looks' (courtesy of Huffpost)

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1 March

Yes, well, there might be one pose chosen for this story where Daniella resembles an Emma Watson, but - unless I am hopelessly misinformed - she was never awarded the beauty contracts that come the ex-Potter star's way.

Or are we all supposed to be having amnesia and believing that she was some sort of raging beauty in her significant t.v. role in a family of crooks?

To flip the coin, Marilyn was, of course, never comfortable with the attention that came with her looks (and, needless to say, they were enhanced for lenses of all sorts), but it wasn't as if she said that she wished she could be plain once more - why did those Martians have to whisk her away and beautify her one day?

Maybe I'm being mean, but we all knew years back about Daniella and her septum, so why is this news?


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