Monday 8 February 2010

Winter's Bone - The Movie

I'm a great admirer of the American writer Daniel Woodrell and his books about rednecks and criminals in the Ozark mountains. His best book by far and my personal fav is Winter's Bone. It's the story of Ree Dolly, a tough teenager who has to find her missing father, a crystal meth cook, before her family house is repossessed. The language is gnarly poetry and old testament in that American tradition of Faulkner and Cormac McCarty. The characters are vivid and menacing (Uncle Teardrop, is a particularly scary creation) and Ree herself is a perfectly drawn amalgamation of teenage fury and headstrong responsibility. It holds you firmly, like an evangelical preacher's gaze and makes you listen till the sermons through.
I read recently that it has been made into a film , and that the girl playing Ree, ( Jennifer Lawrence) has been getting rave reviews and the film itself won the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film festival last month.
Let's hope that the filmakers win a decent distribution deal over here and we actually get to see it . These US Indies tend to vanish somewhere over the Atlantic before hitting out screens... And hopefully it's as good as they say, so that more people buy the books and appreciate this underrated writer of poetic and gripping modern fiction. Winter's Bone is a great place to start and if you feel like you want more, then go back to Tomato Red, Give Us a Kiss and Woe To Live On ( which was also made in to a great film called Ride With The Devil, hence the different title on Amazon)
Come on, what you waiting for?

Thursday 4 February 2010

Dans Paris

First of all, I have to say that you can now leave comments on all of my posts now, even if you aren't a fellow Blogger. Thank you Fiona!

Over Christmas BBC 4 showed a film called "Dans Paris" I caught it on the I-Player in January and I was really bowled over by it

It's the story of a love lorn photographer who has split up with his girlfriend and comes back to his Parisian family apartment to live with his dad and brother. It's clearly a homage to the Nouvelle Vague and it works brilliantly-owing a huge dept to films like "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg", with hints of Truffaut's playfullness and Godard's surrealism. It is unashamedly and wonderfully French. All the characters smoke, they discuss their sexual and romantic problems with fierce clarity and fervor and they aren't afraid to dance around to dark indie tunes like their lives depend on it.

We Brits could never make a film that is this serious, that has moments of slapstick and has the main characters sing to their ex on the phone ( one of the most moving parts of the film actually) . I think it would be a pretty embarrassing thing if we did. Like the French trying to make a comedy...

It appealed to the teenage francophile in me, the one that watched a Channel Four season of New Wave films one summer in the nineties. The film looks like it was made by someone who, like me was captivated by the freedom and exuberance of those movies, something that just wasn't around in films back then or even now. You can't imagine Godard being asked what his demographic was or if he thought a Chinese granny who lived in London , who then moved to Wigan , would like Weekend? They showed you that you can dream, be pretentious , silly and serious all at once -break rules , anything to get your story across. And smoke alot. Naked.

Watch it. Free your mind, and your derriere will follow.