TAKASHI MIIKE'S BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL: LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2017: 1

This is apparently Takashi Miike's 100^th feature film, and as such made its London debut as the Gala show  of the 'Thrill' Strand of the London Film Festival yesterday. It's an epic swordsman movie, with supernatural overtones, and like most of Miike's work, based on other sources, in this case a manga series by Hiroaki Samura. It's very different from Miike's last LFF entry, Yakuza Apocalypse, in 2015. Like that film, which I discussed on our late, lamented Americarnage podcast, but about which I didn't write, there's a serious theme behind the over the top treatment of violence. Apocalypse was somewhat derivative of blaxploitation and early vampire tropes, everything from Solomon Kane to Kolchak. 

But the basic theme, equating the Yakuza with vampires, was a thread that tried to hold the whole thing together, at least until the face of the ultimate apocalypse, a giant soft frog, appeared. To music that sounded like Ennio Morricone scoring the Teletubbies. I found my screening notes, and I'd actually scrawled 'some weird shit coming out of nowhere', which is a good description of Miike's work.

For someone who works so quickly, Miike can make some incredibly artful cinema. Blade Of The Immortal opens in black and white, a homage of sorts to the 50s. Manji (the name echoes Clint Eastwood's 'Joe Manco', The Man With No Name') is a samurai who is tracking down his sister, who's lost her senses after seeing her husband killed by Manji, under orders from his master. The kidnappers kill her, in a scene echoing The Wild Bunch, before Manji literally disposes of the entire bunch, somewhere between 70-100 (I lost count). He is dying, but a witch feeds him 'bloodworms' which heal his wounds, rejoin his severed hand to his body, and basically render him immortal.

Fifty years later, and in a fine, cold-toned colour, he meets a young girl (Hana Sugasaki, shown right with Miike)  whose parents (her father is a samurai sensei) have been murdered by a group of swordsmen, the Itto-ryu, who eschew the honourable tactics of samurai, insisting on winning at all costs. He eventually agrees to avenge them on her behalf.

What follows is interesting, but to be honest it's a bit boring. I wrote that after yet another one man against dozens fight. Despite the set-up, which would augur some internal, as well as external battling, Blade Of The Immortal really becomes a kind of Kill Bill, or Kill Lots More Bill. The presence of Kazuki Kitamura here does little to avoid one making that connection. But seriously, there doesn't seem to be any substantial difference between the Itto-ryu and other fighters, particularly those from the government, and there is no real examination of the samurai code. Nor, despite the strains of facing an immortal life thanks to witchy worms, does Manji appear to try to figure much out. It's superficial compared to some of the work of Beat Takeshi, where existential questions of samurai loyalty and life's meaning often haunt the story, or even to Miike's own 13 Assassins, a film which draws quite heavily on westerns (my review is here) or Yakuza Apocalypse.

Takuya Kimura is fine as Manji, but the show is mostly stolen by Sugisaka as the young girl he eventually equates with his long-gone sister. The villains are all impressive, especially Sota Fukushi as the androgynous head of the Itto-ryu, particularly when he gets the tables turned on him by sneaky Imperial bureaucrats. Miike presents the Tarantino-like anachronistic costumes, and there is a good bit of his trademark dark humour. But one wishes Miike would have done more to condense the story into its main lines: graphic novels are told quickly, although series do meander. But I get the feeling that for number 100, Miike was looking to go full Tarantino.

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AT WEMBLEY: BORN TO RUN

Sunday night I went to see The Boss at Wembley. It was about as nice a night as London allows, beautiful weather, easy access, and with 80 some odd thousand like-minded people (actually, many far more single-mindedly Bossy than I was) it was an excellent time. It helped I was with three of the Americarnage Gang of Four, Gnat Coombs and Hollywood Dan Louw (literally just in from the Stockholm marathon and proudly exposing his blisters to the crowd) and muchas gracias Senor Gnat for the tickets.

It was the third time I've seen Springsteen. The first was still the best, at Tanglewood in the Berkshires in August 1975, just before Born To Run broke, just before I moved to Montreal, and just before Annie's and my brief romance was over. I wrote about it last year (you can find that here) when I dug out an old poem to mark the 40th anniversary of Born To Run. It was the best not just because I thought I was madly in love, and we'd gone spur of the moment, and it was outdoors in the mountains; there was an intimacy among the 1,200 or so people there, who shared a knowledge of something great that most of the country didn't really know about. It's still special, and The Wild The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle may still be my favourite Springsteen album.

The second time I saw him was at Wembley in 1985, on July 3rd. I flew to America on the Fourth of July that year, and I suspect the Fourth would have been a bigger thing and better show, but it was still pretty good. Again, I felt it was far more intimate than a stadium show had the right to be, even though my company was nowhere near as compelling as Annie and Bryan, and the seats, high and to the side, meant you couldn't really see the stage, saw only one and a half screens, and heard everything echoing back as if on tape delay. I pretty much resolved then not to go to any more stadium shows, and for 30 years I didn't.

But this one was much better than 1985. The technology is, I suppose, better, and once you got used to the sound it was fine. We were on the field; lined up on our own 10 yard line with the stage in the opposite end zone, meaning you could see the little figures on stage, but you needed the three screens, like watching a TV in a showroom window from across the street.

What's different is the Boss, at 67, is more frenetic, and in better pumped-up shape (& perhaps a little bit scapel'd), than 30 years ago, and the band is, if anything tighter and more versatile. It's great to have Soozie Tyrell fiddling, though every time she got a closeup I thought of Beverly Sills! Violin has always added a lot of texture to the band; I recall Suki Lahav from the 1975 WMMR/Main Point concert which is one of my all-time favourite records, bootleg and all. And it was funny to see Nils and Steve each going for second place in a Keith Richards look alike contest! And I kept watching Max Weinberg, looking at lyrics on a IPad teleprompter as he pounds the skins, and thinking he doesn't need amplification. Interestingly, I read an interviw with Suki Lahav, who returned to Israel soon after leaving the band, and she said Max didn't like being behind Bruce while drumming, in the drummer's usual position, because he couldn't see/hear the words of the song, and he wanted to see what Bruce was singing because the words influenced the way he drums. So that was a problem  solved by technology.

They sounded great, they interacted with the audience with a spontaneous quality, and they played through a huge catalogue of songs, all of which have a Springsteen similarity but which cover a lot of different textures. And changing contexts: 'Tougher Than The Rest' was played as a tribute to Muhammad Ali, and you can't do much better than that, great one to greatest.

Which is the interesting thing, because this crowd was not just people like me out to see a figure from their past. It was not like watching Duran Duran because you loved them when you were a teen and now you're old and they're old and you're both going through the paces. This crowd was made up of people from their teens to, I dunno, older than me, and they all had their favourites from different eras, and many of them could not have come to the Boss long before the previous decade. When I was 20, there weren't many recording stars from 40 years before we were listening to--people who were hot in 1931. But it's different, and has been since the Sixties, maybe even since the Fifties. Again, technology is part of that, but there is a sort of Golden Age of rock which seems to attract and open new ears in every new generation.

As well as turn the original old generation into kids again. Check out the S.E.G. on Iron Mike in the photo on the right.  Do I look Born In The USA or what?

Of course, we have aged. I started to leave after the first encore ('Jungleland') because I had to get a train home, and it was Sunday in Britain, and the last train leaves earlier, and there was a replacement bus service one of whose drivers had nearly taken his bus into a low railway bridge was I was coming back from the BBC that morning. So I played safe and managed to get home before midnight and walk the dog. But the sax solo in 'Jungleland' started to take me back, maybe because I was out of the crowd, and there is a sense where I find the collective experience overkill, and Jake Clemons wasn't playing his uncle's stuff note for note, but the sense of continuity being the thing that mitigates against time passing struck me strongly.

Then people started coming up to me and shaking my hand, or congratulating me, and I thought they might be NFL fans, but they were saying things like 'Feel The Bern' and I realised it was because of my  T-shirt (not my Terryville, Connecticut Lions Fair hat). Thanks folks.

I walked alongside the stadium as they played 'Born To Run', and again the sax solo launched me into reverie, and I stopped and listened. I went back 40 years and 2,600 miles and one old love and one best friend and I don't know how many scratched LPs and awkward record players and Lord knows what else. They started playing Dancing In The Dark and I walked away listening to that, which pushed me back to the 80s again. I missed some more encores, including Tenth Avenue Freeze Out, which I would have pleased Gnat by singing along to. When the changes came uptown, indeed.

DAVID LEAN'S SOUND BARRIER RESTORED

I talked about David Lean's 1952 film The Sound Barrier on last week's Americarnage (you can link to it here; it's episode 211, in the '3 Points' section early on). What I didn't mention was I actually think I'd seen the film before; when I was 7 or 8 years old, at my uncle's summer camp. I can't be sure: I remember Run Silent Run Deep; The Harlem Globetrotters Story; The Jackie Robinson Story and Jim Thorpe: All American more clearly, but as soon as it started I felt a familiarity, a sense I might have seen it (as I did, perhaps a couple of years later, Pork Chop Hill, in the great hall up there in New Hampshire) but the realization came of how strange it must have been, and, now that I have lived in this country nearly 40 years, how strange the film may seem to a younger generation.

The Sound Barrier has just been re-released on DVD, in a version restored by the BFI National Archive and Studiocanal, with funding from the David Lean Foundation. Watching the modest interview which appears as an extra, I learned this was Lean's personal favourite among his films, which might come as a surprise, given his enduring fame for his early adaptations and later epics. But it was a project he put together himself, out of fascination with the story of trying to break the speed of sound, and its concern echo some of his other films.

I thought first of In Which We Serve, another film I think of as an 'anti-epic', in that it tells an epic story by bringing it down to a personal one, and it emphasises sacrifice rather than triumph. That film was Noel Coward's personal project, and he brought Lean in, much as Lean and Alexander Korda brought in Terrence Rattigan to write the screenplay for The Sound Barrier.

 The story's based on the story of Geoffrey DeHavilland, who lost two sons testing his experimental jet, and its early focus is on John Ridgefield, the aircraft manufacturer played by Ralph Richardson, and test pilot Tony Garthwaite, played by Nigel Patrick, who marries Ridgefield's daughter Susan (Ann Todd). Denholm Elliott is the son being pushed to fly, although he's not very good at it, and John Justin is Philip Peel, Tony's wartime buddy who becomes his fellow test pilot.

It's a film about ambition and loss, about obsession and challenge, with the fabric of an almost Learish family dominance about it. Richardson plays that classical motif in a most understated way. He won a BAFTA as best actor, and also the New York Film Critics Award, but became the first actor not to double the New York award at the Oscars. His performance, in its theatricality, puts him at a tangent to the rest of the cast, who are being more natural—but this is English natural in the 1950s, and hence extremely stiff and almost self-conscious, particularly in its concessions to film glamour, particularly the ritual lighting of cigarettes: the contrast makes Richardson's work more powerful. It's a little odd that Joseph Tomelty as Will Sparks, the engineer figure who is the equivalent of Frank Whittle, whose engine design enabled the breaking of the sound barrier, is played with a characteristic Irish comic relief, as if this were a John Ford film.

This is the part of the film modern audiences may not quite get; this stiffness. Justin is like a prototype Peter O'Toole, with none of the animism; Todd, whose marriage to Lean (his third of six) finally broke during this filming, often seems to be suffering more off-stage than on. In contrast, Dinah Sheridan, as Peel's wife Jess, seems the most natural character in the film. There's an odd scene where Patrick takes Todd for lunch in Cairo: it's a travelogue celebrating the wonder of a four-hour trip to Egypt; only after lunch does he remember he has no way to get back to Britain, having delivered the plane he was flying—this leads to a short commercial, as it were, for BOAC. The Cairo scene concludes with Jess (see right) accepting that Peel will soon go back to Britain to join Tony as a test pilot; the flying doesn't seem to have lessened Susan's fear of the air.

The story, of course, is fictionalised, and gets around the ultimate problem that it was Chuck Yeager, in America, who broke the sound barrier (you could look at that portion of The Right Stuff as the more overstated yet underplayed version of this film), but Lean solves that problem in style, because it is the personal challenge which is what finally must be overcome, finding the key to controlling the jet airplane. This allows the movie to triumph even if they never actually say the barrier is broken, and reinforces the film's interior epic concerns.

You might think those an awkward fit with Rattigan, but if anything the family drama is more powerful than the aerial challenge. The somewhat unsung hero here is cinematographer Jack Hildyard, who works in different styles, sometimes suggesting film noir, sometimes a deep-focus trapped feeling, sometimes a tumultuous background. Obviously there's a lot of second unit work which is very good, and there one's lovely visual metaphor that goes unremarked: when Peel watches a swallow diving, as if giving him the clue to piloting; I was sure he would credit his feathered friend for the advice.  Malcolm Arnold's score is a mix of sometimes overdone cliché and sometimes wonderful emotional background: there are a number of passages of something sounding like a theremin in which I could hear echoed any number of Sixties British TV dramas.

In Lean's films we are often engrossed by the struggle within being played out on a grander stage, certainly it's the core of Lawrence Of Arabia, Bridge On The River Kwai and Doctor Zhivago, the three epics which took nearly 20 years of his career, where the stage seems to run away with the interior conflicts. In that sense, we might see The Sound Barrier as a bridge between Brief Encounter or the Dickens films and those grander scale movies, and understand well why Lean loved it so much.

DAVID BOWIE: CELEBRATING THE DISPLACED SELF

The outpouring of reaction to David Bowie's death surprised me, though it probably should not have. The papers gave it somewhat less space than George Harrison received (front page stories, full page obits), but if anything far more columnists and feature writers tripped over each other to give their own versions of his universal importance to them. I discussed this briefly on the Americarnage podcast (show 203 at americarnage.co.uk) but it's worth a deeper examination.

It's in the adolescent/teen years that music has its deepest hold on most people, and that music stays with them all their lives. The columnists and other opinion makers now are of a generation that grew up with Bowie, in the Seventies, rather than the Fifties and Sixties music I reference so often, which was the music of the columnists and editors when Harrison died.

But that didn't explain the emotional impact, beyond the media. One friend of mine, who hit her teens in the early seventies, told me yesterday she burst into tears when she heard the news and was crying all through the day-- and this chimed with the response that inspired my first reaction, as I said on Americarnage, which was to consider what made Bowie so meaningful to them, while it was nothing of import to me.

The music I grew up with was directed outward. It was aimed at trying to navigate and solve and fight through the problems kids encountered growing up. Originally much of it was being written by adults aimed at kids. But even as the younger generation took over the production, even at its rebellious peak, it was music aimed at coping with the world outside, and maybe changing it, of coping with the ways it would come down on you.

David Bowie's music was doing something different: it was dealing with equipping the vulnerable self to cope with the vicissitudes of that world by escaping it. Bowie's music encompassed the showmanship of adopting new identities, many of them extra-terrestrial, showing there were ways of creating a new you with whom you might feel more comfortable regardless of what was going on outside your room. It was a way of protecting yourself against the ways the world came down on you. It also suggested freedoms to be different from the world well beyond those of the generation before.

It wasn't the music per se. Many commentators wanted to cast Bowie as a revolutionary or innovator musically, but he really wasn't, and that wasn't where his influence lay. My friend Cynthia Rose, for whom I wrote at City Limits some 30 years ago, dug up an interview with Bowie she did in 1983, and she said in its introduction that 'when he achieved profundity it almost always occurred by accident or as a result of his long, usually misunderstood, relationships with three major sources: Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Robert Fripp.' This is not to minimise his talent (though I'd add Brian Eno to that list of his influences); he made pop songs with catchy hooks and often fantastical themes; as an example of that, he gave Mott the Hoople their best song (the only one I ever paid any attention to); and he had a distinct flair for the dramatic tied to a moment in time. Even his final, darkest record was timed to his own passing. When he did the words for Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays's 'This Is Not America', a song I listen to often, given that I live in Britain, he sung them with his voice that was actually most effective in the lower registers, and gave the song an uncertainty and depth that the lyrics don't immediately suggest, and which Pat Metheny Group's own versions, while often more attractive instrumentally, often lack.

I said on Americarnage that Bowie's influence lay in the adoption of identities, and Cynthia made an interesting point, comparing him to dandies and pointing out how the original dandies, who confronted society, mutated into the Noel Coward or Cole Porter versions, 'men who sought to sell the world placebos for its deepest needs...demonstrating that the displaced self could celebrate, rather than solve, its losses.' She pointed out how he was 'merchandising other people's 'explorations of the isolated heart and mind', offering 'conceits of style' because he was, at heart, 'conventional'. And remember, Cynthia wrote that more than 30 years ago.

It chimes with what I said on Americarnage, and the range of Bowie's work, particularly outside the music world, reinforces that. He did telling, though not transcendent, work outside music, in a way moving with the times but also moving on from image-oriented music into fields where he could play with that image and often work against it.

Where Bowie's influence might well have been greatest is in the people who followed and borrowed from him. What is Madonna, after all, if not a David Bowie for the next generation, and there is a major essay to be written on the way she provided girls with a female equivalent of the androgynous male with whom they could identify their angst.  I think of George Clinton, Parliament and Funkadelic, as a sort of ironic parody of this, all Mothership and Garry Shider in diapers, with more than a hint of suggestion to the audience to question the placebo they're being handed. Maybe they were the way my generation could interpret Bowie.

Perhaps it's all just generation gapping in the end, perhaps it's just my being a curmudgeon not getting what the next generation gets instinctively. It's an almost inevitable progression, though, from the adoption of a new form of music to the adoption of new identities on stage, to the acting out of science fiction and the emperor's new clothes on stage. But that's not what he was being mourned for. Maybe combining Iggy Pop and Robert Heinlein was an innovation, but it was his understanding of alienation that lay behind what was covered up by the glitter; that was Bowie's real achievement, and what brought so many people to honest tears when he died.

TYRANT: SOUTH FORK MOVES TO SYRIA

I was on Front Row a couple of weeks back, discussing Tyrant with Kirsty Lang (you can listen to the programme here for another year!). Kirsty's first question was what did I think about Tyrant, and my response was that it was 'all over the place'. And so it is.

The credits say it was 'created' by Gideon Raff, who did the Israeli series that became Homeland in the US. But I suspect Raff came up with the pitch. Homeland took an American, turned him into a Moslem, and then brought him back to America to do the bidding of his terrorist mentor in Islam. Tyrant works the other way around: take a Moslem, in this case the younger son of the ruler of 'Abbudin', turn him into an American, and then bring him home and have him stay to help his brother rule the country when their father dies.

If you consider the concept far-fetched, don't forget that Bashar al-Assad was studying opthamology in England when he was called home after the death of his older brother Basil. But even as you remember that, you need to accept that the concept is far fetched and the execution is fetched to infinity. Because the show seems to have been developed by Howard Gordon (24, Homeland) and Craig Wright (Six Feet Under, Lost, Dirty Sexy Money) and it seems trying desperately to incorporate as much of all those shows as possible. So what you get is a family soap opera but in an opulent fantasy setting, Dallas with revolution in the air, Dynasty without blow-dried hair.

The family saga owes a lot to the Godfather. Bassam Al-Fayeed is the younger brother who wanted out of the family business. He has traumatic reasons buried in his past, and he's trying desperately to hold them in. Which Adam Rayner, a British actor playing this Arab-American, does by holding everything in. He makes doe eyes to show he's struggling within, he makes sad eyes to show he doesn't like what he has to do. If he's Michael Corleone, older brother Jamaal is Sonny Corleone out of Caligula. Ashraf Barhum is a kind of Arab Mark Strong, and the role lets him let everything out, including rape, pillage, and killing. To make it more interesting, his wife Leila (Moran Atias), the Alexis Carrington of this show, all plotting and accessorizing, has 'history' with Bassam, which will eventually, one supposes interfere with Bassam/Barry's American wife. Although Molly is also supposed to be a doctor, Jennifer Finnegan plays the part with the wide-eyed surprise of a guest on Oprah discovering things in her life are not the way they seem.

I also found it curious that Bassam would be called Barry, since America has only one 'Barry' who's also (allegedly) a Moslem in thrall to powers from the world of Islam, and that of course is President Barack 'Barry' Obama. I note only that the show airs on Fox's FX network, for whose audience the default position is fear of the different, unknown, and Islamic, and leave it to you to decide how coincidental that all is.

In case you believe my Dallas anology might be forced, wait for the moment Barry's English-born mother, played by Alice Krieg comes on stage in full Miss Ellie mode. 'Oh Bassam, I know your brother is a sadistic unstable homicidal rapist and abuser of his people, but if he's late for the barbeque at the palace Friday I'll never forgive him!'.

And then there are the kids. This is the part of the show that bears Gordon's heavy touch, as both 24 and Homeland seemed to relish their subplot of obnoxious troubled daughters who exist mostly to create desperate situations for their fathers. You need to remember that the 18-35 market of TV watchers is assumed not only to have zero interest in anyone or anything older than they are, but zero intelligence to comprehend the same. So give them kids to identify with. In Tyrant, the daughter is actually the reasonable one, but Barry's son Sammy is both obnoxious and gay, both of which are dangerous things to be in this kingdom. I really don't want to hang around and see the way that pans out.

It is a shame they killed off the father in the first episode, as the conflict between the brothers could have been milked more effective with his presence, and because Nasser Farris as Khaled is very good; he's a subtle actor, which suits the nature of his character here. There is one major problem, however. Khaled has always favoured older son Jamaal, but after the 'twist' which ends the first episode, you would have thought that he would have recognised something different in his sons. Instead, Bassam becomes Barry. He's lucky he didn't move to Britain, or he would have become Bazza.

Meanwhile there is an actual revolution fomenting, and Barry is tasked with trying to be the reasonable American with good intentions who can just get everyone to be nice to each other, while preserving the status quo. Sounds very familiar? The most interesting character, potentially, is the CIA agent John Tucker (Justin Kirk), who somewhere along the line ought to be shown to be less straightforward and good-intentioned that he was in the first two shows. Or he'll never get a spot as a Fox Contributor on Megan Kelly or Sean Hannity's shows.

Shot in bright light, with little depth or shadow, Tyrant reflects its presentation, but since I did the Front Row segment, FX has commissioned a second series of the 'political' drama, as they call it. It's one of those shows you might feel compelled to watch, just to see what outrage Jamaal will perpetrate, or what horrible plot twists will drive Adam Rayner to have to emote, but it's the Middle East as soap. All that's missing is the Abbudin Oil Barons Club.

STATE OF IRRESISTIBLE NATION: AND A LINK TO AMERICARNAGE

As you may have noticed, IT has gone oddly silent lately. Part of that was due to circumstances beyond our control: I took my son on holiday to New England and stayed part of the time in a place with no communications, and part of the time during a hurricane which meant ditto. And we were busy! Then when I came back the start of the American football season has been busier than usual, as I am doing college on Eurosport (Big 10 and Notre Dame) as well as Channel Four's Sunday Night Football, and I was drafted in to do some basketball on the BBC as well.

There's one new thing that might interest the less-sporty among you: in addition to broadcasting and writing for nfluk.com I am part of Americarnage, a weekly podcast aimed at American sport and pop culture, which you ought to link to here and take a listen. It is rather laddish, so I get to play the wise tribal elder, or something like that. As you might glean from the photo above.

I am intending to get back on track now, with reviews of the new Pelecanos and Connelly novels, a piece on the Three Tinker Tailors, London Film Festival and other movies, Asa Larsson, Tom Franklin and more. I hope most will be shared by outlets in the more, shall we say, commercial sphere, but we shall see. In the meantime, I was so busy I missed one of my own pieces when it appeared in the Independent; filed just before the hurricane struck...