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By James Flanagan ‘Open Range’ – Kevin Costner
Kevin Costner has committed many grievous and serious crimes against the cinema going public. 'The Postman' is still used to extract information in the caves of southern Uzbekistan and Kim Jong Il was said to have been very interested in 'Dragonfly's’ ability to demonstrate the innate bankrupcy of American culture. Even ‘Dances with Wolves’ (his most lauded and awarded film) must surely be seen now as the tedious and overly righteous ego trip it always was. Curious then that in 2002 he should give us the criminally under appreciated ‘Open Range’, the most sublime reexamination of the western since Clint Eastwood's ‘The Unforgiven’. Eastwood's film sought to reinvent the western through naturalistic intensity and gritty realism. His was a film where the weapons of celebrated gunslingers backfired, and cowboys were often more mercenary than heroic. Like all Eastwood's better films, the characters inhabited an expansive, morally complex universe.
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Costner's film goes the other way, looking to par the genre back to it's bare cinematic essentials. Costner and Duvall are two 'freegrazers' whose pastoral utopia is upset by Michael Gambon's bigoted landowner, who slowly draws them into a full frontal confrontation in the town they've tried their best to avoid. At the core of the film is the battle between the classical Fordian archetypes of the old moral west, and Gambon's amoral urban (modern) world |
that completely rejects and alienates these archaic, long deceased values. It's almost as if Costner is suggesting to the audience that the old moral warriors of Classic western cinema have no place in the modern American world. They are destined to wander society's fringes, run out of town when they venture into the modern world. Add the meticulously composed classical photography, Costner's best performance since Bull Durham, and Robert Duvall in fine gruff minimalist form, and you have what should have gone down as one THE American films of the noughties.
‘Control’ - Janet Jackson
1987. Perhaps the last time the Jacksons were unanimously associated with the production of genuinely innovative, dynamic pop music, as opposed to unconventional babysitting techniques and star shaped nipple clamps (and that's to only talk of Michael). Curiously, the inferior Rhythm Nation is traditionally seen as the starting point of Janet Jackson's career. Scant, if any attention
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is ever paid to the three albums preceding that record, largely perceived as forgettable affairs of sub par pseudo Jackson 5 R &B. Why 'Control', Jackson's third album has come to be lumped in with these leaden footed affairs remains a mystery. Teaming up with cutting edge funk producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Jackson at last produced a memorable statement, one of the finest up-tempo albums of the eighties.
Admittedly the first half of the album is stronger than the second, especially the chart-topping opening trifecta of 'Control,' 'Nasty' and 'What Has He Done for You Lately?' where the Jam and Lewis synth funk storm is at its most potent. The dense sonic textures become somewhat more predictable in the second half, although we still get the memorable teen angst of 'He Doesn't Know I'm a Alive.' There's more character and attitude in those four tracks than the combined brethren over the last 15 years. The last great album to come out of the Jackson family. I wouldn't hold your breath for any more.
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‘Tampopo’ – Juzo Itami
Forget Babette's Feast, Big Night, and Like Water for Chocolate. If you're talking food on film, Tampopo is the last word, and to my mind the only film to come close to conveying the creative zeal and innate madness of the gastronomically obsessed members of the species. Owing considerable debt to French director Jacques Tati's Hulot films, director Juzo Itami's anarchic and rambling narrative concerns itself with an ideal, a quest to find and create God's |
most magnificent creation. The perfect noodle soup. In Tampopo the production of this earthly wonder is infused with an almost religious quality as the camera makes us privy to every stage of it's ritualistic creation. Sourcing and choosing ingredients, cutting them, presenting them, talking to them, treating them, remembering them. Like Tati, this simplest of narrative structures allows him to explore human beings in all their magnificent lunacy, obsessiveness and creative genius.
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