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Get Carter: No 7 Mike Hodges, 1971At a distance of nearly 40 years, Get Carter has as much value as a piece of social history as it does as a thriller. The Tyneside it portrays isn't one of hen parties in Bigg Market, but of poverty that grinds Newcastle and its inhabitants into an inescapable and unendurable greyness. At times, too, it seems as if Mike Hodges has thrown his actors into real life â the faces of the old men in the pubs and betting shops, and the revellers at the dancehall take the movie into something akin to cinĂ©ma veritĂ©, even as mayhem erupts in the foreground. As a thriller, though, it's colder and more brutal than anything British cinema has produced before or since; its mood so unyielding that the viewer does not even question whether Michael Caine really could be a Geordie hood returning home for his brother's funeral. There's humour, but it's so bleak it causes grimaces more than laughs: when the husband of Carter's lover (played by Britt Ekland) walks in on her having phone sex with Carter, he asks, puzzled: "What's the matter? You got gut trouble or something?" That's entirely fitting with regard to the subject matter, for when Carter investigates his brother's death, he discovers the dead man's daughter has been coerced into porn films by the local crime syndicate, setting Carter off on a trail of vengeance.At the centre of it all is Caine, playing with such chilly authority that even his most geezerish moments â "You're a big man, but you're in bad shape. With me it's a full time job. Now behave yourself" â retain their threat, when a few years later they might have teetered over into self-parody. He's aided by a top-notch supporting cast, with the playwright John Osborne an unlikely but wholly convincing ganglord, and future Coronation Street mainstay Bryan Mosley as the hapless hanger-on Cliff Brumby, who makes one of British cinema's most notable exits, from the upper stories of the Trinity Square car park in Gateshead. Watching Get Carter now is like reading accounts of the first westerners to cross the Gobi desert: did this world ever exist, and in such recent times? It seems wholly remote from 21st-century Britain, even as its themes of coerced sex and utter amorality chime with contemporary fears.CrimeMichael CaineMichael Hannguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The science fiction and fantasy 25: the full list Just the list, no snazzy extras? You've come to the right place1) 2001: A Space Odyssey2) Metropolis3) Blade Runner4) Alien5) The Wizard of Oz6) Solaris7) ET: The Extra-Terrestrial8) Spirited Away9) Star Wars10) King Kong11) Close Encounters of the Third Kind12) The Terminator/Terminator 2: Judgment Day13) The Matrix14) Alphaville15) Back to the Future16) Planet of the Apes17) Brazil18) The Lord of the Rings trilogy19) Dark Star20) The Day the Earth Stood Still21) Edward Scissorhands22) Akira23) The Princess Bride24) Pan's Labyrinth25) Starship TroopersScience fiction and fantasyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Clio Barnard's The Arbor is out of lip-synch with reality A radical experiment in fact-based film-making â in which the real, recorded voices of people from Andrea Dunbar's Bradford estate are mimed by actors â blazes a trail to nowhereIf you want to put real events on screen, you've traditionally had two choices. You can dramatise the whole thing or you can make a documentary. Neither route is wholly satisfactory.Drama enables you to heighten impact by investing your tale with cogent scripting, professional acting and gratifying narrative arc. You'll claim your story conveys the underlying truth, yet you'll have to change some of the actual facts to make your schema work. By the time you've finished, no one will know what's real and what is not. Probably, you won't go out of your way to tell them and they won't really want to know.Documentary confines you to literal fact and lets you present real people recounting their own versions of real experience in real surroundings. Yet the resulting impression of unvarnished veracity masks artifice of a different kind. It's you who chooses what to shoot, what to select from what's shot and how to assemble what's selected. It will be you who's shaped the resulting artefact, and its claim to verisimilitude can be seen as more deceptive than that of its straightforwardly fictionalised counterpart.For decades, film-makers have sought a more transparently honest path between these two approaches. Recently we've been seeing a spasm of such activity, yet nothing's quite matched the radicalism of Clio Barnard's The Arbor.Barnard wanted to tell us what's been happening on the Bradford estate whence teen playwright Andrea Dunbar emerged in 1980 to take the Royal Court by storm, only to die a drink-sodden death a mere decade later. The pickings are rich. It turns out that the largely unimproved Buttershaw estate still harbours some of Dunbar's family and associates. The most noteworthy of these is Lorraine, one of Dunbar's three children by three different men. Lorraine, a former addict, criminal and prostitute, was jailed for killing her own two-year-old son by letting him ingest her methadone. She blames her troubles on her mother.Lorraine's lurid history could have been the stuff of an arresting drama. Alternatively, a fastidious documentary might have sketched Dunbar's Buttershaw legacy. Barnard, however, had other ideas.Her film intercuts bits from old documentaries about Dunbar with bite-sized chunks of the slumdog prodigy's plays staged al fresco on Buttershaw itself. Its principal technique is, however, more startling. Interviews with real people were recorded in sound only. Extracts from these are then lip-synched by actors. If you saw Nick Park's Creature Comforts, you'll get the idea, but this time the effect isn't meant to be comical.Generally, verbatim theatre requires actors to convey what's been recorded or transcribed with their own voices. Asking them to mime instead betokens an ambitious bid for surpassing authenticity. But does it work?The actors handle their unusual task with varying degrees of aplomb. Manjinder Virk, who plays Lorraine, isn't the most successful. From the beginning, attention's therefore drawn to technique at the expense of the content. The archive clips of grizzled and raddled unfortunates highlight the gap between them and the posh, smooth-skinned performers goldfishing the speech of their contemporary counterparts. The effect is to diminish credibility, rather than enhance it.Performance is a different thing from everyday speech. When you switch on your TV, you can tell instantly if a talking head's in a drama or a doc. Actors, including those in The Arbor, use facial expression differently from the rest of us. We expect actors to speak scripted lines; in their mouths, the ramblings of real life are devalued. The Barnard method centre-stages these discrepancies and turns them into an issue.Apparently this is deliberate. Barnard told the Guardian: "I wanted to maintain a sense of people speaking at one remove. Hopefully, it will remind the viewer that, however truthful a documentary attempts to be, it is always subject to the editorial decisions of the film-maker."This is perhaps asking more from the audience than should be expected of it. Tribeca garlanded The Arbor, and the London film festival may follow suit on Wednesday, yet nobody seems to expect this film to attract many cinemagoers. To blame them for their impatience seems unreasonable. The message must surely come to terms with the medium.There are deeper problems. The expropriation of the real participants' faces by those of sleeker performers begins to seem like an insult. If people's speech is not to be trifled with, why should their appearance be? The logic of cinema surely implies that if anything, things should be the other way around. The archive images remind us of what's to be gained from seeing what people really look like. This becomes a further distraction from what's actually being said.Apparently, Lorraine didn't want her face to be shown. Too bad. If this should have been a biopic or radio doc, so be it. As it is, The Arbor's method obscures its subject matter rather than illuminating it.Barnard is to be applauded for showing the courage to try something new, but the trail she's blazed leads nowhere. Conventional dramatisation and conventional documentary may have their limitations; yet the The Arbor serves only to remind us why they've still become fact-based film-makers' tools of choice.DocumentaryDramaDavid Coxguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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