Some Came Running

No, shit

Okay, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows isn't THAT bad, as I, um, explain in my review of the film for MSN Movies, but you know how I cannot resist such a terrible joke. 

I noticed something weird watching it, which I didn't get into in the review, because I didn't want to look like I was insane. Here, where I feel more, let us say uninhibited, I can let fly. In Game of Shadows both Holmes and Moriarty reveal themselves to be great aficianados of the classical music, which won't sit well with whoever the heck that dork who does the advice column at The Hairpin is. In any event, one of the film's big set pieces visits the Paris opera, where a really ornate production of Mozart's Don Giovanni is going on. it looks pretty hot, hot enough that I think if Guy Ritchie were to really apply himself, he could come up with a staging of the opera entire that could supplant Zeffirelli's boffo version. So that's pretty cool. And later, during a nasty confrontation scene, Holmes and Moriarty discuss the Schubert lied "The Trout," the strains of which had been heard earlier in the picture. What's weird is that the great American expat director Joseph Losey directed a pretty damn fine motion picture adaptation of the Mozart opera in 1979, then, after doing Boris Gudonov for French television, made a feature called...La Truite, or, The Trout. Nothing to do overtly with the Schubert piece, but hell, don't pretend that Losey (who was what we'd nowadays call a "snob"...didja know he put Davy Graham in The Servant, jeez...) wouldn't have made the mental connection at some point in his process! And as I recollected this I wondered, was this some sorta odd undercurrent Losey tribute, and if so, why. Empirical evidence points to complete coincidence, but it's nice to dream of these connections, maybe. 

"Ask Glenn," slight return

From Elephant, Alan Clarke, 1988

A friend writes,

"Dear Glenn,

I was reading Armond White's review of Fish Tank and I came upon a passage that confused me more than usual. White is of the opinion that Tank director Andrea Arnold's brand of realism lacks compared with that of her forbears, so naturally he brings up her forbears, among them the late great Alan Clarke. Like so: 'Arnold introduces Mia...in a single shot that instantly recalls Alan Clarke's truth-hunting technique in the 1989 film Elephant (about a sullen overweight black girl misunderstood by family and social workers).' Okay, I was with White all the way up to the plot description. Clarke's Elephant depicts a series of separatist killings in Northern Ireland, one by one, without a sullen overweight black girl in sight. So I'm like, 'Well, maybe White is thinking about Gus Van Sant's Elephant.' But that's a Columbine riff; lotsa pretty white teenagers, no sullen black girl. At least for any length of time. Compounding the confusion is the fact that White alludes to Precious...which is about a...well, you know, just before bringing up Clarke and Elephant. I know you're foresworn taking White to task these days, but I have to know: is this just a particularly bad cut-and-paste gaffe, or is something else going on here?

Thanks, Corn-fused"

Dear Corn-fused,

I think White has got Elephant mixed up with R.H.I.N.O.. And no, that's not a bad joke. I mean it is, but not just that. Let me explain. Alan Clarke never made a film about a sullen overweight black girl; white Brit males with violent tendencies was more his speed. One of the most memorable of such types was played by Tim Roth in Clarke's 1982 Made In Britain. Britain was written by David Leland, who would later go on to write and direct Wish You Were Here, which White also believes Fish Tank compares poorly to. And back when Leland wrote Made in Britain for Clarke, he also wrote something of a companion piece to it: R.H.I.N.O./Really Here In Name Only, focusing on a disenfranchised character who's the opposite number of Britain's racist yob: yes, you guessed it, a sullen, overweight black girl misunderstood by family and social workers. It's not as if Precious invented such a characterization, right? Directed by Jane Howell, R.H.I.N.O., which I've never seen, looks to be a pretty inaccessible-in-the-U.S. piece, so I'm impressed that White knows it. Sort of. Any further elucidation on it from readers would be most welcome. 

 

Weird

Remember when Michael Jackson did that movie, and he turned into a Transformer? No, seriously. That was weird, wasn't it?