Tag Archive: Martin Scorsese


A MAGICAL TRIP WITH THE BEATLES

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October 7, 2012

THE BEATLES’ MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR REVISITED  BBC Two.

Fabs MysteryOn this Arena special, it was good to get another chance to see the complete TV film of The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. A  documentary, containing interviews and behind the scenes footage, was also illuminating in helping to put the film in a social and historical context.

The last time I saw the film in its entirety was when it was first broadcast (in black and white) on Boxing Day in 1967. I was just eight  years old at the time so had only a vague memory of it.

I was too young to pick up on all the LSD inspired images but old enough to realise that it had what one of the film’s extras describes as “disconnected shots of weird things”.

What I do vividly recall is the scene with a stripper while The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band are singing Death Cab For Cutie. The sight of bare breasts on a prime time TV slot at Christmas made a big impact on me.  My parents, who were also watching, were less impressed!

This is why I can endorse Ian Macdonald’s view, in his book Revolution In The Head, that: “Magical Mystery Tour marks the breakdown of the cross-generational consensus ………this is where parents began to part company with their sons and daughters over the group, rightly suspecting a drug-induced persuasion setting in” Continue reading →

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TOM PETTY – BIGGING UP A DREAM

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May 17, 2012

220px-runninhomepageAfter more than thirty years in the music business, I don’t begrudge Tom Petty the right to an epic documentary charting his career.

I would, however, challenge the implicit presumption that he is as important a figure as Bob Dylan or George Harrison, both of whom have been subject to similar films directed by Martin Scorsese.

Those movies, No Direction Home and Living In The Material World, lasted 208 minutes which Peter Bogdanovich trumps by thirty minutes.

As any reconstructed male will tell you, size isn’t everything and there is no good reason why Running Down A Dream should be so long. The story of the Heartbreakers’ roots as Mudcrutch and how the bond between musicians has remained so strong could have been told in half the time and would have made a much slicker and more interesting film portrait. Continue reading →

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SILENCE BEATS SEX AT THE OSCARS

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February 22, 2012

I have now seen all nine films nominated for best picture at this year’s Oscars. You can read individual reviews of each of them on this blog and, ahead of the forthcoming razzmatazz of the awards ceremony, here are my final thoughts on the contenders.

The three best movies are by directors who understand the visual grammar of cinema to the point that images speak louder than words.

In the case of The Artist there is no dialogue at all, unless you count the title cards. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is so memorable because of the amazing production design that brings the automaton and Parisian station to life. This supports the pseudo-religious view expressed by the young protagonist that we are all part of one enormous mechanism .

Both movies pay affectionate homage to silent movies in recognition of cinema as a painterly and visionary medium.

The other truly great film on the short list is Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life,. It too is visually stunning but the lack of linear narrative makes it the type of movie that wins more supporters at artier festivals like Venice, Berlin or Cannes.

I personally expect The Artist to triumph but would like to see Scorsese or Malick win as best director. Continue reading →

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REASSESSING THE QUIET BEATLE

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February 7, 2012

GEORGE HARRISON: LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD – a film by Martin Scorsese (2011)

Martin Scorsese’s absorbing documentary made for HBO TV was co-produced by George Harrison’s widow, Olivia. I would suspect that she helped ensure that so much of the film is dedicated to her husband’s spiritual journey rather than getting sidetracked into his marital indiscretions.

Both she and Sir Paul McCartney are very protective/secretive about the sexual adventures of the ‘quiet Beatle’. They each refer to his relations with women in a very cryptic manner. McCartney says that he was a red-blooded male who liked what ‘normal’ men like, while she talks about overcoming “all those other things” that occasionally got in the way of their wedded bliss. She says that he had a special aura that women found irresistible and that when she is asked what the secret of staying married to someone like him is, she always replies “don’t get divorced”.

I wouldn’t want ,or expect, Martin Scorsese to hunt for dark secrets or dig around for some dirt, but in the course of a three hour movie I would have liked a slightly more rounded portrait. Continue reading →

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HUGO : THE INVENTION OF DREAMS

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February 3, 2012

HUGO directed by Martin Scorsese (USA, 2011)

It’s a sign of the times that two films in contention for this year’s Oscars are essentially reminders of the magic of cinema and its power to help us visualise our dreams.

The Artist is a film by a French director in awe of the glamour of Hollywood while Hugo is a film by an American director set in Paris with a predominantly European perspective.

This is Scorsese’s first exploration of 3D and while this enhances its visual impact, the film is essentially an old-fashioned story of finding your place in the world and staying true to your beliefs.

In many ways, it is a celebration of escapism with the moral of the tale being that our fantasies only come true if we work hard to preserve them.

The missing part to a broken robot (automaton) is a heart-shaped key – symbolising that technical precision is nothing without an emotional component.

Scorsese’s Anglophile tendencies are evident from the fact that he has chosen a strong cast of mostly British actors including Asa Butterfield as Hugo, Jude Law as his father, Ben Kingsley as George Méliès and Christopher Lee as the bookshop owner. Chloë Grace Moretz as  Méliès’s god-daughter Isabelle and Michael Stuhbarg as the film historian are the only American actors in leading roles.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s comic turn as Inspector Gustav is like a cross between John Cleese’s Monty Python satires of pompous officials and Peter Sellers’ bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau with a similarly vague grasp of the English language (“are they smelly flowers”).

Intertextuality is always a feature of Scorsese movies and the nods to other movies are numerous in Hugo. The scene of the boy dicing with death by clinging to the hands of the railway station clock is obviously inspired by Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last (1923) which Hugo and Isabelle have seen together after sneaking into a cinema.

The scene perhaps also references the winding of the giant clock in Metropolis; the automaton also reminds you of the android Maschinenmench from Fritz lang’s 1927 movie.

There are also cinematic references to Hitchcock with Rear Window style voyeurism chases up staircases which made me think of Psycho and the bell tower sequences in Vertigo. I’m sure movie buffs will find more connections.

Central to the story is also the appreciation of Méliès visionary films in the early 1900s, particularly Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902). Scorsese’s reverence for the Frenchman’s innovative work is obvious and the biographical details of him are quite accurate.

Alongside the cinematic allusions, there are also literary analogies, mainly to Charles Dickens. Isabelle refers to David Copperfield as one of her favourite books, Ray Winstone is very Dickensian as Hugo’s alcoholic Uncle and the orphans live in constant fear of being taken off to the workhouse.

Isabelle’s love of reading mirrors Hugo’s fascination for cinema. She likes to show off her wide vocabulary and so delights in using words she has learnt like “steadfast”,  “covert” and “panache”.  She has been brought up to find dreams in books while Hugo’s father introduced him to the wonder of movies at an early age.

Scorsese’s movie is based on American author Brian Selznick‘s 2007 illustrated children’s novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret but to think of it just as a kid’s film is misleading and I can’t see it being a major box office hit in these terms.

The Artist and Hugo hark back to the silent era of moviemaking. They remind us that the early cinematic greats were no less inventive and imaginative even though they had none of the modern technical and technological trickery. Both movies evoke a simpler age when the burdens of war, recession, man-made and natural disasters could be borne more easily because of an innate belief that hope and goodness would prevail.

“Come and dream with me” invites George Méliès and he ultimately realises that happy endings don’t just happen in the movies.

I’m not sure I entirely share this optimistic message but it never hurts to dream.

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