In the Show – 24th November 2009

Hong Kong’s not an easy place for an artist to make a living. UK-born Simon Birch says he came here by accident and managed to make enough money to put on his first exhibition through working in construction. Today he can devote himself full time to his art, but he still has to reach deep into his own pockets to finance some projects.

Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” has been a staple part of the festive season for many ever since it was first published on 19th December 1843. There have been countless adaptations for stage, television and radio. There are almost thirty film versions. The latest, “Disney’s Christmas Carol” is at cinemas this week. Reviewer Gary Pollard tells us more.

From being a film student in love with the films of the French New Wave, Hong Kong born Chinese Mary Stephen went on to become a long time collaborator with one of the movement’s signature directors, Eric Rohmer. She talks to us about working with the legendary director.

And, in our studio, singer Tian Haojiang. Since his Metropolitan Opera debut in the 1991/92 season, Tian, a native of Beijing, has earned worldwide recognition as one of today’s most talented basso cantantes, singing over 1300 performances of 40 operatic roles worldwide. He is currently in Hong Kong to perform as “Poet Li Bai”.He tells us about that, about his stage show “From Mao to the Met” and sings “Some Enchanted Evening” from “South Pacific”. 

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Movie Review – “Disney’s A Christmas Carol”

Reviewed by Gary Pollard (first aired on RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call”)

Since its publication on 19 December 1843, Charles Dickens’ novella “A Christmas Carol” has become a recognised part of the Christmas season. Never out of print since its first publication, it’s been turned into film, opera, and stage versions. There’ve been around thirty different movie adaptations.  It was one of Dickens’ own favourites. He chose it for his first public reading in 1853, read an abbreviated version in performance 127 times, and it was the piece he was reading at his final performance in 1870.

Most of the adaptations have concentrated on the sentiment, the feeling of Christmas bonhomie engendered by Scrooge’s personal transformation. Dickens had more serious intent. He wanted it to attack nineteenth century capitalism, and the way the Industrial Revolution had affected the life of the poor. The idea sprang from a planned political pamphlet called:  ”An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child”. Dickens was writing partly in response to government changes to the Poor Laws, changes which required among other things, welfare applicants to work on treadmills. He himself had experienced poverty as a child when his father had been placed in Marshalsea debtors’ prison for three months and he had been forced to leave school, pawn his books, and work in a shoe blacking factory.

There aren’t many people who don’t know the basic story by now, how the miser Scrooge is visited by the spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come, who show him the error of his niggardly ways. Perhaps the most successful film adaptation is the 1951 British version, which was made on a very low budget and works because of an utterly convincing portrayal of Scrooge by Alastair Sim. Reruns of that film have long been a regular part of Christmas in the UK and America.

So now we have “Disney’s A Christmas Carol”. Not “Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol”. Not even director “Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol”. And of course, we shouldn’t expect it to be as political as Dickens intended the original to be. The bigger disappointment is that although it’s a spectacular showreel for what can be done with motion capture and computers, it so completely misses the point of the story.

What Dickens did superbly in his novella, and what stops it being a mere social tract, was to show the humanity of Scrooge, show the disappointments and setbacks that had turned him from an open child into a misanthropic miser. And then, by presenting his life to him in flashback, give him a chance at redemption. It’s the human that matters. And it’s the human, and human sentiment, that Zemeckis has failed to capture.

That’s more disappointing because at first the movie looks like it’s going to work well, in a scene at the undertakers, where the body of Jacob Marley is being prepared for burial. The undertaker holds his hand out for money, and it is physically difficult for Scrooge to hand over two coins. When he finally does so, he recoups his loss by taking the two pennies from the eyes of the dead man. “Tuppence is tuppence” he says. This scene is not in the original, and it’s a clever addition by Zemeckis. Also impressive is the title sequence that follows, where the camera soars and swoops over a detailed recreation of 19^th century London. It feels thoroughly populated, life happening in every street and every room, a mini-portrait of the society Dickens is describing.

But it’s already beginning to create doubts. It’s technically impressive, but it’s also somehow distancing, as is the motion capture technique itself. And that’s the problem with the rest of the movie.

Zemeckis seems to have fallen in love with motion capture technology. He also used it for “The Polar Express” and “Beowulf”. But almost since the beginning of his career he’s been rather too easily diverted by the technically dazzling, at least whenever he’s had the resources to do so. I didn’t like “The Polar Express”, but at least the animation there mirrored the illustrations in the real book. And “Beowulf” was myth anyway. But using it for “A Christmas Carol” is a mistake. You end up with neither the freedom of pure animation nor the human engagement of real actors. You often feel the movie would be better with the actors, who include Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Robin Wright Penn, Bob Hoskins and Fionnula Flanagan, than with their motion captured and caricatured equivalents.

Jim Carrey’s Scrooge is a long-nosed, long-chinned creation that owes too much to “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas”. In fact, it’s hard not to think that his casting in that film is the main knee-jerk reason for his casting here. He is not a natural choice for Scrooge, and makes the character even more cartoonish. He also plays the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come.

Also disappointing is that the semi-cartoon, semi-real style is not consistent from character to character. The ghost of Christmas Present in particular seems more cartoon-like than many others.

Worse than all this though is the fact that Zemeckis and Disney think that they need to liven things up for contemporary short-attention-span audiences. They are so determined to make the most of the 3D that they use the computer graphics to give us A Christmas Carol theme park ride. This is most damaging in the sequence with the Ghost of Christmas Present, where the decision is to make half the floor disappear and move from place to place with Scrooge hanging over the scene. The perspectives are often wrong and just plain jarring, and here we should not be thinking about that but about the people in the scenes. In other scenes, Scrooge is chased by jet black horses, menaced by a giant rat, and even shot into space like a rocket. Well whoop-dee-doo. I think Dickens must be turning in his grave. It all gets to look a bit more like a Harry Potter movie, and one of the less good ones at that.

In the end, unfortunately, “Disney’s A Christmas Carol” doesn’t leave you pondering a man’s hardening through the years, or his redemption, or the spirit of Christmas, even though most of the dialogue is reproduced verbatim from Dickens’ original. It leaves you wondering why they wanted to make this film if they did not want to focus on precisely what makes the story so great. It’s tired rehash, glitzed up, made because they can. And, I suppose, because it can rake some cash out of the festive season. And that too is not what Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol is entirely about at all.”

In the Show – 17th November 2009

As we mentioned just three weeks ago, on 18th October Hong Kong lost one of its veteran artists, painter, printmaker, and sculptor Ha Bik-chuen. The Hong Kong Museum of Art is planning a major exhibition of his works for next October. Already though the museum is featuring a smaller retrospective until the 24th January next year. And, at the Artist Commune, more than 20 artists are creating new pieces in remembrance of, and salute to Ha Bik-Chuen. That exhibition runs until 2nd December. Some of them share with us their memories of Ha Bik-chuen.

“North Face” is a German movie about mountain climbing. It’s based on the true story of Toni Kurz and Andreas Hinterstoisser who, in July of 1936, as Nazi Germany was preparing to host the Olympic games, set out to climb the 13,000 ft. north face of the Eiger. In our studio, our very own intrepid cinematic adventurer Gary Pollard tells us that it may be the most impressive mountaineering film ever made.

At the Hong Kong Arts Centre until Sunday, Seoul Auction is presenting the first solo Hong Kong exhibition of renowned Korean sculptor Yi Hwan Kwon. Some of the works on show come from the artist’s private collection, giving viewers a rare opportunity to enter Yi’s distinctive world. It’s a world in which figures may be stretched, squashed, or flattened, almost like optical illusions.

And we end tonight’s show with a brief taster of what audicneces canexpect from the newly formed RTHK quartet, which has its debut performance this Friday.

Movie Review – “North Face”

Reviewed by Gary Pollard (first aired on RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call”)

Well, the choice for me at the cinema this week was between “2012”, a Roland Emmerich film that I knew would leave me not caring that the world was ending, “Amelia”, a lackluster ersatz-feminist romantic biopic, and – more off the beaten track – the German movie “North Face”. It’s about mountain climbing, and mountain climbing movies are often not as good as they ought to be, but I thought that at least it was more likely I’d care about the people in it.

It’s based on the true story of Toni Kurz, (played by Benno Furmann), and Andreas Hinterstoisser, (Florian Lukas). In July of 1936, as Nazi Germany was preparing to host the Olympic games and looking for suitably nationalistic heroes, they set out to climb the 13,000 ft. north face of the Eiger, in the Bernese Alps. The previous year, mountaineers Karl Mehringer and Max Sedlmeyer had frozen to death three-quarters of the way up, at a spot that came to be known as ‘Death Bivouac’.

Writer/director Philipp Stolzl’s retelling of the story is possibly the most engaging mountaineering movie to date. At least it would be a toss-up between this and the equally harrowing “Into the Void”

Even with today’s high-tech equipment the North Face of the Eiger is considered a major challenge. When Hinterstoisser and Kurz attempted it, they had woollen socks and gloves, hemp rope, and pitons they had forged themselves. And they had far from unlimited resources. Once they had spent their money on equipment, they had to cycle the 700 kilometres from their Bavarian home town of Berchtesgaden to the base camp in Berne, Switzerland. Their main food in that base camp was barley soup.

Even though the fatherland didn’t give them monetary support, it was keen, for propaganda reasons, for them to succeed. And the movie first introduces them to us via a newspaper office, the Berliner Zeitung. The newspaper has been told to promote a couple of national heroes. As the editors are casting around for suitable subjects Luise Fellner (Johanna Wokalek) reveals she knows rather a lot about the climbing duo. She grew up with them, and even went climbing with them. Although her job so far has consisted mostly of making coffee and acting as a secretary, the editors feel her connections with the climbers will help her get her story. They put a camera in her hands and send her back to her hometown.

At first, it looks as if the climb isn’t going to happen. Toni Kurtz says he climbs for himself, and not out of a spirit of competitiveness, but when Luise and his partner put pressure on him, each in their own way, he gives in.

Once we see the first climbing sequence, which is not on the face of the Eiger, we know that we are in for the real thing. Stolzl knows that for us to care about the situations these characters are in, he needs to capture the physical reality and effort of climbing, not to rely too much on special effects or computer generated graphics.

For some reason 1936 was a year in which many had amibitions to climb the north face of the Eiger. When Andreas and Toni get there, there are already several teams setting up base camps. And there’s a sizeable journalistic contingent staying at a nearby luxury hotel. Among those journalists are Luise, and a colleague of hers named Henry Arau, played by Ulrich Tukur.

While Luise has an emotional connection to the climbers, Arau doesn’t much care whether the story resolves gloriously or tragically. Either will do. Arau is also a keen supporter of the National Socialist party, and looking forward to Germany’s annexation of Austria.

In contrast Andreas and Toni do not care about politics. They just tolerate it. Their only political concern is that a couple of Austrians Willy Angerer and Edi Rainer, played by Simon Schwarz and Georg Friedrich, are also vying with them to get to the top of the Eiger. The two Germans decide to take an untried route up the north face, and make an initial reconnaissance climb to store some of their equipment. At a dinner in the hotel their Austrian rivals learn about their plans and decide to follow close behind. During the climb, the two teams begin as rivals but gradually join forces.

One of the things the film shows well is how spur of the moment decisions can later become life or death factors. When the couple lose their crampons they decide to go on anyway, figuring they can cut steps into the sheer ice fields they have to climb. A decision about whether to leave a rope in place or take it with them becomes crucial when the weather worsens and two of the four climbers are badly injured.

Meanwhile, back at the hotel, onlookers dine on expensive dinners, drink vintage wines, and occasionally walk out onto an observation deck to watch the life or death struggle of the climbers through a telescope.

You may not think you have much interest in a movie about a group of men climbing a mountain, but ”North Face”, at least once they get to the mountain is entirely gripping. And it does not need any awkward plot devices to make it more so. In fact the movie’s weakest point is probably it’s one concession to Hollywood filmmaking, the fictional romantic love affair between Toni and Luise. It stretches belief too far when Luise spends the night out on the cold mountain waiting for her lover.

Kolja Brandt’s cinematography is excellent. Christian Kolonovits’ score is sometimes a little too intrusive, but in key scenes, Stolzl allows the sound of the climb, or of the weather, to dominate. Stolzl is apparently a former music video director. It does not show. He knows that actors and performances are more impressive than visual glitz.

If you don’t know how the attempt ends, try not to find out before you see the movie. There is added tension in not knowing the outcome, just as the characters did not know the outcome. Even if you do know what happened, the film will work anyway. “North Face” is an entirely gripping movie, and one that will make you acutely aware of how fragile human life can be when taking on such feats of endurance and determination.

In the Show – 10th November 2009

It has been nine years since choreographer and dancer Mui Cheuk-yin’s previous entry in her dance diary. Much has happened since then.

“Diary VI – Applause” is the sixth in her solo diary series. On stage are 50 boxes, each representing a year of her life. Mui looks through them, revisiting her past, from her first solo dance, “Awakenings in a Dream” 28 years ago. She reflects on her identity as a dancer, her career, and coping with getting older.

Korean director Park Chan-Wook is a director who forces you to pay attention. His 2002 “Sympathy for Mr Vengeance”, 2003’s “Old Boy”, and 2005’s “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance” were all gruesome updatings of the Jacobean revenge tragedy with a distinctly Korean touch. In his new film “Thirst” Park has tried to take a new look at the vampire mythology, and a frequently oddball look it is.

In 1987, an English musician and illustrator Peter Suart got together with Hong Kong-born violinist Kung Chi-Shing to form the theatrical music ensemble “The Box”.

Last weekend they celebrated their 22nd anniversary with a retrospective concert.

To see a streaming video of the show please click here.

Movie Review: “Thirst”

Reviewed by Gary Pollard (first aired on RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call”)

Korean director Park Chan-Wook is a director who forces you to pay attention. His first film to make much of an impression internationally was “J.S.A.: Joint Security Area”, a detective thriller that pointed up some of the idiocies surrounding border tensions between North and South Korea. It was, mostly, well made, but it was his vengeance trilogy that really got people’s attention. The 2002 “Sympathy for Mr Vengeance”, 2003’s “Old Boy”, and 2005’s “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance” were all gruesome updatings of the Jacobean revenge tragedy with a distinctly Korean touch.

In the West, Park is seen as an auteur, an artist with serious intentions, but the graphic nature of some of the cruelty and violence in his movies leads some, even in Korea, to consider him an exploitation director, if not a wannabe Quentin Tarantino. For me, he’s a much deeper filmmaker than Tarantino.

Thrst, co-written with Jeong Seo-Gyeong, is a vampire movie in which Park has tried to take a new look at the vampire mythology, and a frequently oddball look it is.

It’s about a Catholic priest Sang-hyun (played by familiar Korean actor Song Kang-ho). He provides ministry to terminal patients in a local hospital. Disturbed by the suffering he witnesses, he decides that he wants to make a selfless gesture and volunteer as a guinea pig in a medical experiment. Researchers are trying to find a vaccine for a virus called the Emmanuel Virus, which only affects sexually inactive young men. After he becomes infected with the virus he dies, but soon comes back to life. At some point he has been transfused with the blood of a vampire, and it seems able to keep the virus at bay, at least as long as he nourishes himself with human blood.

As he is the only one of the subjects to recover, many believe he can perform miracles. Sometimes, perhaps, he does, but he believes it’s mostly a psychological effect. He is called to the bedside of a childhood friend Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun) who is dying of cancer. Sang-hyun apparently cures his friend, and is invited to their home, where he finds himself, as his urge to drink blood increases, newly awakened to sexual desire for Kang-woo’s wife Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin).

In a love triangle and murder plot that’s borrowed from Emile Zola’s “Therese Racquin” the couple dispose of her husband, and then find the ghost of her husband coming between them and even interfering in their sex life. Or is it just a product of their consciences?

I think this is the first vampire movie I’ve ever seen where the vampire himself gets haunted.

“Thirst” is almost two and a half hours long, and plenty happens in that two and a half hours. Not only does it have the most explicit sex scenes ever seen in a mainstream Korean film, including frontal male nudity, it also does not shy away from blood and violence. Anyone who remembers the hammer fight in “Old Boy” or the main character chewing on a live octopus, will know how far Park is willing to go. But even more outrageous is probably the way that he keeps playing with the mood, and particularly introducing comedy. There is a vampire suicide and murder here that’s both funny and tragic, and it doesn’t cheat on either of those elements by introducing the other.

There are plenty of times when even I think the film goes to far, but at the same time as I’m being almost appalled, I’m also stunned by Park’s energy and range. In one scene, a sexually frustrated vampire punches a lamppost as he walks away. After he takes a few steps it collapses. In another scene a character is playing a white flute, and blood begins spurting from his mouth and through the instrument. Later, vampires find they miss the daylight, and so they set a video camera outside their apartment window to film day scenes of passersby which they then watch back at night. They also hang blue neon lights everywhere, to make the apartment look brighter and a little more like daylight. Even the sex scenes manage to be simultaneously erotic and funny. And there’s a sharp inventiveness to having Sang-hyun reconcile his need for blood with his moral qualms by sucking it through the i/v tube of a comatose patient in a hospital.

The film’s inventiveness and visual flair, for me, never tires.

But at the same time as it’s so stylish on the surface, Park is also examining ironies of the vampire’s existence. As a priest Sang-hyun pretends, when giving communion, to drink Christ’s blood. As a vampire, he’s forced to drink human blood, and he has a moral problem with that. On the other hand, he asks himself whether an act can really be immoral if you are forced into it involuntarily. Park has said that he deliberately chose the figure of a priest at the centre of the film, as he wanted to show a man with moral aspirations, who then finds himself dealing with lust, a thirst for blood, and even murder.

In the relationship between Sang-hyun and Tae-ju, Park is also examining perhaps the ultimate dysfunctional relationship. Tae-ju isn’t exactly the victim she appears to be, or if she is, her victimhood has taught her than when she gets power she should use it to the maximum. While Sang-hyun hs moral qualms, Tae-ju turns out to have none. Even vampires should – suggest Park – be careful about the people they get involved with.

Like many of Park’s more violent films, “Thirst” is a film that some in the audience will absolutely hate, but even in hating it they should realize that they are being manipulated by a master.

Park is a painstaking visual stylist, and he’s aided in this by cameraman Jeong Jeong-hun and his art directors, who place the most brutal domestic massacre in the midst of the most stylized environment. The film also makes mostly excellent use of CGI, again used for humorous effect when Sang-hyun and Tae-ju have a major domestic spat while leaping from rooftop to rooftop.

I’ve been interested in good vampire movies for years, and while it’s not quite as original in all its elements as some seem to think (I’ve even seen the vampire suicide before) it is high-octane, full of ideas, and likely to provide you with more than a few scenes and emotions you will not forget for a long time. Take a look, but if you are squeamish, be careful.

In the Show – 3rd November 2009

Raised in Hong Kong, Dominic Nahr started his career at the South China Morning Post, but left the staff position after a year to become a freelance photographer.Since then, he has covered conflict zones that include East Timor, Gaza, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. His work has been published in Newsweek, Time, Vanity Fair, Spiegel, La Monde, and the New York Times among others.

Virgile Simon Bertrand is a French photographer who has been based in Asia since the late 1990s. His new exhibition in Hong Kong is called “Proxemics” and considers the unspoken rules of human relationships, and the relationship between people and the world around them.

Ken Loach’s new movie “Looking for Eric”, is about a forty-something Manchester postman whose life is falling apart. He left his first wife and child years before. His second wife left him, and he’s now looking after two shiftless adolescent stepsons who don’t have much respect for him and are involved in petty crime. He’s a man on the edge of a breakdown, and things are not made any easier when he has the opportunity to reconnect with his first wife, with whom he is still in love. But he does get a little help from his football idol Eric Cantona. Gary Pollard tells us more.

Georgia’s first professional state dance company, Sukhishvili was founded just after the Second World War, in 1945, by Iliko Sukhishvili and Nino Ramishvili. Trained at the Tibilisi Opera and Ballet Theatre, the duo blended traditional Georgian art with contemporary choreography.

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Movie Review – “Looking for Eric”

Reviewed by Gary Pollard (first aired on RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call”)

One thing I’ve always liked about Ken Loach’s movies is that he never forgets that most of us have to work for a living. In Hollywood films, at least if you’re not a policeman or a spy, jobs are pretty much hobbies.

In Loach’s world, real people have to do real jobs.

In “Looking for Eric”, the main character Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) is a forty-something Manchester postman who worries about getting up for work the next day even when he’s in hospital after having crashed his car during a panic attack. His life and his emotions are in a mess. Years before, he left his young wife, the love of his life. Later he got into a relationship with another woman. She, in turn left him seven years ago, and now he’s living in a house with two layabout stepsons Ryan (Gerard Kearns) and Jess (Stefan Gumbs). He has zero parental control.

He does have good working class friends though, fellow Manchester United fans he knows at work, led by Meatballs (John Henshaw). They make it their mission to cheer him up. They try telling him jokes or sharing self-help books and meditation exercises, in one of which they all choose idols they’d like to channel. He chooses Manchester United football legend Eric Cantona.

One night, while getting high on marijuana to console himself after a run-in with his stepsons, he finds Cantona in the room with him. It’s obviously a figment of his imagination, but they begin talking about what a mess his life is in.

Eric had crashed his car because he had been upset over the idea of facing the wife, Lily (Stephanie Bishop), that he had left many years before. He feels the years have not been as kind to him as they have to her. He doesn’t want to be pitied or, even worse, considered irrelevant.

The reason for his renewed contact with Lily is that their grown daughter, Sam (Lucy-Jo Hudson). needs the two of them to help look after her child as she is studying at college. Cantona begins giving him advice on how to get his life back in order.

Gradually Cantona persuades Eric that he can face the problems in his life, take control of his home, and even – perhaps – restart things with Lily.

This is director Ken Loach’s ninth movie with writer Paul Laverty. Some of their scripts err on the side of the didactic. A committed socialist, Ken Loach has never been afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve. “Looking for Eric” is different. It still has its strong commitment to the working class and the virtues of solidarity and friendship, but – through Cantona – it introduces a magical realist element, and it’s very much a comedy even though it has its dark moments.

The relationship between Eric and his idol is witty as well as meaningful, and even ventures into visual comedy when Cantona starts taking him out to the countryside to get in shape. For all that, the gradual reawakening of Eric’s new relationship with Lily is perhaps the film’s strongest point. Eric tells us about their past: their meeting on the dance floor, where he was an avid rocker, blue suede shoes and all, their first night together, their hasty marriage as a result of her pregnancy, and then how he caved into the pressures that made him leave.

In the present, he’s still racked by guilt over letting her down. What threatens him most is the idea that she may not care at all any more. He’d rather she hate him, and he regards it as a step in the right direction when she does get upset and angry.

Stephanie Bishop is a strong complement to Steve Evets, capturing her character’s assurance and the changes she has gone through to become the somewhat different woman she is today. She, we can sense, would like to give things a second chance but she does have reason to remain suspicious.

All this might seem to going a little too easily, but there’s an added problem in that Eric’s stepsons, particularly Ryan, are involved with a psychopathic thug who thinks nothing of shooting someone for insulting him in a nightclub. He forces the boys to keep the gun in their home under the floorboards. Their initial dismissal of Eric begins to change when they realize how much he cares about the state their lives are in, and when he begins to put his foot down about their behaviour, but he still needs to find a way to deal with the gangster, and he’s neither a particularly brave man nor an action hero. In the end, Cantona’s advice about teammates comes in useful, and the threat is confronted in an essentially humorous way.

For many, this section is the one that’s the least satisfying in the film. Laverty and Loach are shifting moods between Loach’s characteristic social realism, through romantic comedy, into fantasy, and on to a crime thriller. It moves from romance, to darkness, and humour, and back. It’s not Loach at his most socially serious.

On the other hand, that has its value too. “Looking for Eric” is a feel-good movie, and one that has audiences in cinemas, as it did in the Cannes Film Festival, laughing out loud and applauding certain plot developments. For me, it’s always good to see Loach taking a lighter approach to his material.

Football fans will enjoy the clips showing some of Cantona’s classic goals and passes, although if you are expecting a football movie you will be disappointed. He has a good sense of comic timing, and manages to be both icon and rather more self effacing individual

As I said at the beginning of this review, one of the differences between Loach and Hollywood is that his characters do have to work for a living. Another is that he invariably looks for the authentic in his actors. Steve Everts is an effective Everyman. Eric Cantona may be playing himself, but does so very much as a human being, not as a celebrity. Loach has said that he intended all along to show that celebrities are really just ordinary people after all.

For me, “Looking for Eric” was a strong contrast to Stephen Soderbergh’s “The Informant!” which I saw and reviewed last week. In story “The Informant!” is based on a true story, but even though Matt Damon paunches up and has thinning hair, Soderbergh still can’t get away from the star system. In contrast, Loach is presenting us with a fantasy story, but using actors who are very from stars, who aren’t having to dress down for the role, and are conveying a much more convincing sense of reality. Critics, including me, generally preferred the Ken Loach film, but it’s done less than half as well at the box office, at least so far. As always, I’d have preferred Loach to reach an even bigger audience. This one deserves it. But he’s always resisted the urge to really go Hollywood and lose his touch with ordinary people, and he – I know – is well aware that there is a price to be paid for that.

In the Show – 27th October 2009

Create a picture of a prosperous city in the modern world and it’s likely to be a mess of traffic, crowded streets, and pollution. Once upon a time in China, prosperity looked considerably more picturesque, as “The Prosperous Cities” an exhibition of paintings from China at the Museum of Art until the 22nd November, reveals.

In our regular film review, Gary Pollard talks to us about Stephen Soderbergh’s “The Informant!” in which Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, who works at an agribusiness firm. When he receives reports that someone is  sabotaging their work he’s asked to work with the FBI , but it turns out you can’t quite believe everything Mark Whitacre tells you.

Once, Iranian music was so highly regulated that you could not carry a musical instrument on the streets. In different periods, control over music has relaxed and intensified, but it continues to be a subject of political and religious debate. It is much easier for the musicians of percussion group Zarbang to perform outside Iran than it is in their home country, as they told us during a recent trip to Hong Kong .

In stark contrast to the distrust of sensuality in music exhibited in Iran, South American countries like Argentina and Uruguay do everything they can to celebrate passion and romance in the form of the tango. Both countries have been having a bit of a tiff about where the dance originated, but they did get together recently to propose to the United Nations that the dance be considered one of mankind’s great cultural treasures.

Movie Review – “The Informant!”

Reviewed by Gary Pollard (first aired on RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call”)

Perhaps you should ignore many of the reviews you’ve seen or heard for Stephen Soderbergh’s ”The Informant!”. Except this one of course. Many are a long list of superlatives, many of which – like the movie’s title itself – end with an exclamation mark! Well, in the movie’s title, the exclamation mark means “Buyer Beware”.  For some watching the film, it may well mean the same thing in the reviews.

Despite all the glowing reviews, I watched it in a more than half-empty cinema where three couples walked out in  the first half hour, and the person I was with fell asleep. I could understand that. It was sometimes, even for me, hard going. Something had got people  into the cinema, and yet they clearly weren’t getting what they expected or wanted from the film.  This may have been their own fault. Perhaps they were hoping Matt Damon would be in Jason Bourne mode. Or perhaps the critical enthusiasm surrounding the film had led them to expect more than it could deliver.

One critic described the movie as showing “an excellent performance by a chubbed-out Matt Damon as a Midwestern executive who’s so smart he’s dumb.” Ironically, while “The Informant!” is proud of its own cleverness, the same phrase could in some ways also apply to the movie. It too is perhaps not as clever as it thinks it is.

Based on a true story and a non-fiction book by journalist Kurt Eichenwald, “The Informant!” is mostly set in the 1990s, when the computer screens in the office are still running DOS programs instead of Windows. Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a  Vice-President at Archer Daniels Midland, or ADM, an agribusiness firm that deals in corn products. As he says: “corn goes in one end and profit comes out the other.” The company is having a problem with a virus that’s damaging the lysine manufacturing Mark has pioneered. Things begin to change in his life when he tells others in the management that there’s a mole in the company who is allowing a Japanese competitor to sabotage their output. He also says he has received calls from a Japanese man who has offered to tell him the identity of the mole for $10 million.

Instead of giving in to the demand, the company calls in the FBI, which decides to tap the home phone on which Mark says he received the calls. But there’s more going on than might appear. Mark has two phones at home, one a company line. The company only wants the FBI to tap one of them. They worry about what might be overheard on the other.

Mark goes along with this at first, but his wife Ginger (Melanie Lynskey) has reservations. Both worry that if the FBI discovers certain things about the company he will be made the fall guy. It’s only when Ginger threatens to speak out to agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) that Mark gives in. He tells the FBI the company is part of a massive international price-fixing scheme involving lysine.

The agency asks him to work undercover. He agrees to wear a wire at work, and carry a portable tape recorder to provide the evidence the government needs. As he travels the world, talking to international company reps, he tries to get them to say outright what they are doing.

Throughout the movie we hear some of what’s going on in Mark’s head through voiceover narration. Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, who also wrote “The Bourne Ultimatum”, shows us he has a strong capacity for self-dramatisation, confuses television and the mass media with reality, and has a strong fantasy life. He’s also a fan of Michael Crichton novels, including “Rising Sun”, which gives us a clue about where the idea of company sabotage came from.

For all that, Mark is no Jason Bourne. Although he labels himself Agent 0014 because he thinks he’s twice as smart as James Bond, he is dangerously inept even with the simple tape recorders he needs to gather evidence.

Alarm bells soon start ringing, earlier for the movie-savvy viewer than for the characters. Soon we start asking ourselves why we don’t see on screen any of the things that Mark says happened. Why are they always reported to us only through him? Gradually Mark’s story begins to fall apart, much to the confusion of his FBI handlers.

He begins to change his story. He tells them that while the company used to fix prices, it no longer does so. He admits there never was a mole in the first place. And other parts of his life story also begin to fall apart. He tells us, and the FBI, that he hopes that once the bad guys at ADM are cleared out, he’ll be the only executive left and he’ll end up running the company. But just in case none of this pans out, it turns out he has been embezzling millions of dollars from the company over the years. And then he is revealed to be suffering from bipolar disorder. The FBI agents become increasingly desperate as they see the credibility of their case unravel before their eyes.

Although “The Informant!” is marketed as a comedy it is rarely laugh out loud funny. Perhaps that’s one reason people were walking out when I saw it. Soderbergh has cast many American comedians in supporting roles, even the Smothers brothers, but they are mostly playing it straight.

Also, even though Soderbergh films in actual locations, including Whitacre’s home of the time,  something doesn’t ring true about the period setting. Why does this movie, set in the 1990s, have such a seventies or even earlier vibe? You keep feeling you are watching a somehow less crisp episode of the TV series “Mad Men”.

The strongest element of the movie is Matt Damon’s performance. He is enjoying playing an inept spy. He’s also enjoying doing a Russell Crowe and putting on the 30 lbs extra weight. Mark Whitacre is convinced all along that he is one o the good guys, and that’s what helps to fool some of those around, in the movie, and in the audience.

But despite Damon’s performance, and although everything I’ve said might convince you that there’s a lot here to make an interesting movie, I think it falls short. Sometimes it looks like it could have been a Coen brothers’ movie, but it lacks both their snap and their darkness. Even David Lynch might have taken a worthwhile crack at it.

There’s a mass of potential in Eichenwald’s more than 600-page book, and in the real-life story of Mark Whitacre. There have even been comaplints that Eichenwald himself is not all he appears to be, which adds another layer of complexity to the story, and whether we can believe what we are seeing. I’m not convinced that Soderbergh and screenwriter Burns bring all the ironies and the ambiguities out. Perhaps that exclamation mark in the title is the key. They are standing back from the material, viewing it ironically, and in the end that irony stops us from getting as close to the depth of these characters, including Whitacre, as we might like. I think you will like “The Informant!” more if you already know more about the true story, so that this is seen as another fragmented reflection of it.

Soderbergh has taken a fascinating true story and tried to turn it into another episode of his Oceans series of movies – “The Big Con – Agribusiness”. It would have benefited from a quite different, and more involved, treatment.