The Broad and Dreary Sands of Redcar

One of those moments of weird cultural dislocation, or maybe co-location. We have a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun in our bathroom - don't ask, it's just there. Flicking through it idly while, well, while contemplating a bowel movement, I read the following line in his own preface:

And, again, while reproducing the book, on the broad and dreary sands of Redcar,* with the gray German Ocean tumbling in upon me, and the northern blast always howling in my ears, the complete change of scene made these Italian reminiscences shine out so vividly, that I could not find in my heart to cancel them.

Yes, the *asterisk is in the text, there to link to an explanation of what and where 'Redcar' is. I might not know Hawthorne, but I do know Redcar. It's on the north Yorkshire coast, right on the other side of Tees bay from the long breakwater that's known as North Gare. Turns out that Hawthorne spent July to October of 1859 in Redcar, on the 'broad and dreary sands', while he was finishing the book. (He's right about the 'complete change of scene' from Rome, by the way.)

Why didn't I know about this? Goodness knows the north-east doesn't have all that many claims to literary and cultural fame, and certainly doesn't make enough of the ones it does have. London is in the habit of putting up a blue plaque wherever some minor poet happened to stop for a moment to clean some crap off his shoe. So where's the academic paper on the influence of Redcar sands on the literature of Nathaniel Hawthorne?

Kerry Conran and the Raiders of the Genres of Yesterday

So much to write about. Kerry Conran's (and by gum is it his) Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is the best fun you're likely to have at the movies (and by gum is it 'at the movies') this year, if you go into it with the right expectations. It's not great art, but it might be the best genre-fuck you've ever seen.

I've been waiting for it ever since Harry Knowles started doling out a trail of geek-food to ensnare those of us who love such things. It was clear that this was a blue-screen riot. It was clear that it was Conran's baby. Early press talked stupidly about Conran having 'invented a computer program' that allowed him to generate the backgrounds and composite them with live-action actors. Quite apart from the fact that you might 'invent' an algorithm, but you write a computer program, I've not seen anything about this mysterious program since, and for good reason. What started out as a geeky bedroom project involving Conran and his Mac, ended up being just as much of a special-effects-house free-for-all as anything George Lucas might dream up. Though Conran stayed notionally in control, it was as part of a big team.

However, there are still odd traces left of that bedroom project, and the effect they create is that of a film that we see being made in real-time - one which starts out with a few minutes of Conran-in-his-bedroom, then gradually opens out to something wider, acknowledging that the project had grown with the addition of Paramount money and effects workhorses, and finally splashes onto the screen with complete abandon. It's as if we were given the first few minutes of A Grand Day Out, which then morphed (or maybe Morph'ed) into the refined craft and derring-do of A Close Shave.

It's said that the six-minute opening is much as Conran had created it alone, and it shows. There's a stylisation about these few minutes that speaks of limited resources used effectively. The expressionistic angles, simple composition, and dark shadows are exactly the limited palette that defined noir. In many ways this is the film that I'd expected to see. Insofar as the film is disappointing, it's that this very personal expressionism isn't quite followed through. Whether because Conran lost some control due to the massive increase and splintering of effects-work, or whether because he gained more control because of that, the film's style changes as it progresses. It ends in a very different place, with huge, detailed vistas and dazzling colour.

Given Conran's gleeful embrace of blue-screen, there are two opposite approaches. The first - which is basically the Lucas/Star Wars approach - is to use that freedom to imagine massive, unbuildable sets, but then to place the actors within those sets as if they were real. The second - which is where Conran begins - is to layer the actors and the blue-screen sets in a stylised, comic-strip manner, almost highlighting their separation to heighten the unreality of the whole process. Hitchcock, after all, didn't give two hoots about the unreality of much of the projection work he used later in his career. Doesn't need to look real to be a good story.

A stylistic problem with World of Tomorrow is that it's not quite sure which of those approaches it's using. It begins with blue-screen as a stylised noir comic-strip, but finishes with an intent to place the actors convincingly within huge virtual sets. As Lucas has discovered to his cost, by aiming to convince with major virtual sets, the consequence is to invite the audience to notice what's not convincing and be distracted by it. Moreover, the actors are then forced to try to interact convincingly - rather than symbolically - with those sets, and that's just plain hard to do. Not even Lucas's resources have allowed him to conquer that nutty one yet. Conran also falls for this somewhat by the end of the film.

That's really the beginning and end of my problems with World of Tomorrow, though. I'd prefer that it had aimed for stylised blue-screen more often, and convincing blue-screen less often, partly because that's what I'd been expecting, partly because at least at the moment it's a more successful approach to the use of virtual sets, and partly because, well, I think it might have made a good film great. It might also have avoided a bad directorial habit that Conran indulges in more and more as the film shifts into its convincing virtual-set approach. There's a directorial riff that goes like this: characters open door, or burst from jungle into clearing, or somesuch, with us facing them; their jaws slowly drop as they take in something obviously awesome that they can see but we can't; our appetites having been whetted, the camera then swings around so we can see. And it is indeed awesome. But the sequence is just way too showy, too pleased with itself. It's a small child bringing some art project to a parent for praise. It's the moment in Jurassic Park when we see the dinosaurs for the first time. It's about showing off the effects, and not about story-telling. Conran lets himself indulge in this gosh-wow practice too many times for his own good.

Reviews I've seen which claim that World of Tomorrow has no heart ought to win some sort of prize for missing the point. It's overflowing with film-geek heart. The love that matters in the film isn't between characters; it's between Conran and the movies that he's stitched together like some mad genius. There'll be a scouring of the film for references, homages and in-jokes for months to come, and it'll make a hell of a DVD. King Kong and Buck Rogers figure heavily. There's a dash of Things To Come here, and of course the obligatory '1138'. There's even, after the first appearance of Virtual Olivier, a nod to Marathon Man that I can't believe wasn't intentional.

The cast is entirely good enough, and then a little bit more besides. Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow get better and better as the film allows them more time together and they exchange running gags and one-liners like a vaudeville act, never quite believing the lines, but revelling in the bounce and the timing. Angelina Jolie's cameo is good, but should be better. It's about time that she either got the British accent right, or gave up on it. She's far too tight and mannered playing Brits, when she should be loose and campy.

Speaking of Olivier, co-opting his image into the climax is a stroke of amazing daring. What better way to represent a great scientist who's long dead than with a great actor who's long dead. There's enough of him to bring the right sort of gravitas without stretching the point too much.

It's important to remember that this isn't just Conran's first big film, it's his first film of any size at all. Much would be forgiveable because of that, but there really isn't very much to forgive. He gets so much right, and hopefully has a long career of the fantastic ahead of him.

Metal to metal, dust to dust

I think I've worked out what Los Angeles is for. What it does. It struck me the other day as I was driving to work from Santa Monica to East LA. Forget the motion picture capital stuff. That's just a front.

On Lincoln, in Santa Monica, I watched a girl test drive a new Vespa outside of the showroom. She putted gently up and down the pavement, then drove the thing back inside. The saleswoman looked on indulgently. It seemed that it might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Then I hooked myself onto the Santa Monica Freeway and headed with all of the other tin beasts towards downtown. On the way a Greyhound passed in the other direction, bound for heaven knows where. Somewhere appropriately far, I hope. It's all about the journey with those things. They're pure Americana - the America of road movies and wide empty spaces and chrome glinting dazzlingly in the sun.

Daydreaming, I accidentally found myself in the wrong lane approaching downtown and had to take the 110 north, rather than the 10 east. But that was okay too. I came off near to the Music Centre, then headed east on Cesar Chavez, which turns into Mission once you're across the concrete river. Mission is a graveyard for cars. There are some low-rent body shops and windscreen places, but mostly in between the silver fast-food taco vans it's wrecking and scrap yards. It's where cars come to die.

I parked in the usual lot, which is a large uncovered area beyond all of the hospitals, down by the railway tracks. I tend to park unconveniently far from the gate, because that means I can park right by the fence and watch the trains go by. There aren't always trains, but usually. They're mostly the monstrous Union Pacific serpents that chug containers marked with faraway names from state to state. The bells clank away happily and the locomotives puff with determination as the containers slowly slide past, like one of those cheesy trick movies in which a seemingly infinite number of people emerge from a car. There's just no end to them. There was a mostly-freight track not far from our house when I was a kid, and I used to love to hear the trains at night when I was in bed. As romantic as trains are during the day, at night there's a magic about them. Auden knew.

So, in all of this movement, you might think that what you're seeing is people using transport to get from place to place, in order to live their lives. I think that's quite backward, though. What you're seeing is people living their lives so that they have to get from place to place. Why would they have to get from place to place? That's easy: so that they'd need to use some means of transport - a Vespa, an Acura, a Greyhound, a Union Pacific train.

And why would they need to use some means of transport? Well, that's my revelation. Here's what Los Angeles is for. Ready? It's a machine for recycling metal. That's it. That's what it does. That Vespa, it'll soon be scrap, and need to take the journey down the Santa Monica Freeway to Mission - just like me that day - to begin a new life as whatever its Vespa karma allows. That Greyhound? It doesn't exist so that it can carry people. It carries people so that it can exist. It's a reason for the movement of metal.

And the Union Pacific train, well, here's the thing. Remember the story about the man who would take wheelbarrows full of dirt across the border night after night, and the border guards couldn't fathom what he was smuggling? Turned out he was smuggling wheelbarrows, of course, and it's the same with the trains. They don't exist so that they can carry loads in containers. They carry loads so that they need containers, which need to be transported from place to place. And by doing so they transport themselves, from their own factory of birth to their own resting, rusting, recycling place.

As for us, we continue to think that we're the ones driving the cars, but it's all about the metal. Around and around it goes.

Norm's and a Lost Girl

It was probably nothing, she's probably just fine, but she couldn't have looked any more lost than she did while I was watching her wander up and down the street on Lincoln. The window at the diner booth I was sitting at might as well have been only one way, so clearly could I see her, so completely did she fail to even consider looking in my direction.

Her clothes were all white - light and airy, with some silver jewellery around her neck. Like a teenage Stevie Nicks. Her long loose skirt was thin enough that I could see her legs through it in the sunshine. The small backpack over her shoulders didn't fit the rest of her. It seemed heavy and practical, whereas she seemed anything except practical. She clutched a cellphone in her right hand, but didn't use it. Her hair, too, was blonde bordering on bleached white; it hung loose and childishly undesigned, well past her shoulders.

She opened up one of the free newspaper boxes, as if she'd never seen one before and wasn't sure how it was supposed to work. She glanced at the headlines, but didn't take one. The she wandered into the entrance of the diner for a moment, only to decide to wander out again. Waiting for someone, probably, though a strange place for that. She looked as if she wasn't quite sure where they'd come, or when. Or if.

He was all smiles, leaning across to her from the driver's seat and beaming at her through the open window as his car pulled up to stop at the light. Sporty car, tanned occupant, conspicuously empty passenger seat. His approach was too knowing, too shameless. She gathered her skirts tightly around her legs as she stood talking to him. Not who she was waiting for, but he was doing his best. Offering a lift, or something far less benign. The clock was ticking, though, and he showed no regrets when the light changed and he zoomed off north in search of the next chance.

And then I turned away, turned back, and she was gone. Not with him, though, and I was glad about that. Hopefully with the right person. Hopefully she would know who the right person was.

A 'friend' for Mr. Tickle?

Found this card in a toilet cubicle at the Westside Pavilion. I think this one goes under 'kink', but who knows. It could be the estate of Roger Hargreaves is planning a Mr. Tickle film franchise.