| Wall Street's Gordon Gekko is no longer a monster | Aditya Chakrabortty We may hate the greed-is-good philosophy, but it doesn't shock us any moreAfter a sunny afternoon spent in the local Cineworld, I can assure you that Oliver Stone's new Wall Street film goes down about as well as an auction of Irish government bonds.How could it be otherwise? After all, the lead actor is Shia LaBeouf, a boy-man who never explains to viewers whether he's deliberately trying to be a cheap copy of pensive Ed Norton. Gordon Gekko, AKA Michael Douglas, is relegated to little more than a walk-on, despite the fact that he still gamely sports that Brylcreemed Niagara of a hairstyle. And the script ends neither with a bang nor a whimper, but in a prolonged asthma attack of false endings and attempted reconciliations.Then again, the first Wall Street, released in 1987, wasn't much cop either. Delve deep into your memory and it probably returns a montage of shots of suit lapels large enough to land a plane on, Daryl Hannah defrosting and cheap synth arpeggios. But what gave that film its punch were the bits based on real events from the 80s boom. Stone based the insider stock-trading storyline on a scandal that had only just left the front pages. The film's famous definition of wealth as being not "$450,000 a year, but rich enough to have your own jet" was pure bull-market speak.Finally, there is the part everyone remembers – Gekko's electrifying speech: "The point is, ladies and gentlemen, is greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works." That was inspired by a university address made the year before by corporate raider Ivan Boesky. "I think greed is healthy," he told students at Berkeley, and they cheered.What was shocking about the first Wall Street was how close it came to being a wildlife documentary, with the director bringing us rare footage of the strange new beasts now stalking Gotham City. If the second Wall Street feels flat in comparison, that's because that culture of greed is no longer novel or outrageous; it's almost prosaic. Put another way, Gekko was once a monster; now he's practically the norm.Take pay. In the mid-80s, when Stone and his associates would have been putting together the cast and the finance to make Wall Street, massive bonuses were still comparatively rare. The leading historian of the City of London, David Kynaston, notes that as late as the mid-80s it was not unknown for bank staff to get hampers for Christmas, instead of cash. Skip forward to the end of the 90s, and while the new brashness had reached the Square Mile, it was novel enough for newspapers to put in big fonts.In 1998, when Jeffrey Archer's son, James, and his trader friends, known as the Flaming Ferraris, took a stretch limo to their bank's Christmas party, the Sunday Telegraph could barely contain itself. Yet to look at the headline now is to experience a piercing nostalgia: "City team to get £5m bonus". That's between 16 of them, of course: just over a decade ago, the doling out of £400,000 (as it would be in today's money) apiece to a bunch of hot-shot bankers was all over the press and radio phone-ins. At the end of 2007, by contrast, an estimated 4,500 financiers each took home bonuses of over £1m.But what has changed in business culture isn't only incentives; it's what those incentives are for. When Gekko defended greed, he was also articulating a philosophy of how companies and countries should be run. "Greed," he told shareholders, "will save not only Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA." In just a few minutes, he summed up what economists call the principal-agent argument: the belief that companies should be run solely to secure rewards for their shareholders – and that considerations such as workers' welfare, customer loyalty or doing right by business partners came way way down the agenda."Wall Street's moral blueprint" is how finance anthropologist Karen Ho describes this, and in her recent book Liquidated she shows how it became boardroom orthodoxy too. In 1978, the Business Roundtable of the top 200 chief executives in America put out a communique listing social responsibility as one of the four core functions of any company board of directors. Meeting in the early 80s, the same group downgraded social responsibility somewhat. By 1990, three years after the release of Wall Street, it had dropped off the list entirely. Gekko now ruled.Of course, after the banking crisis, the greed-is-good ideology is once again reviled. The business secretary Vince Cable makes speeches about spivs and charlatans and is applauded in the press. And yet the old ways die hard. When regulators talk about preventing City short-termism, among their preferred solutions is giving the traders more stock in their own companies – which is exactly the sort of thinking Gekko would approve of.In his latest book, Injustice, economic geographer Danny Dorling records an radio interview from last year with one of the scriptwriters of the original Wall Street. Could he write the film today, the Today presenter asked. The Hollywood answer was revealing: "In the 1980s greed had been individual [but] in the early years of the current century it had become institutional."And that's the real problem with the new version of Wall Street: what was once evil is now merely banal.PsychologyEconomicsGlobal economyBankingUS economyOliver StoneMichael DouglasAditya Chakraborttyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The Evil Dead, The Living Dead and the dead wrong New DVD celebrates the 80s heyday of video nasties - a genre that didn't quite corrupt the nation's youth … or its dogsHard to believe now, but back in the early 1980s Britain was under attack. A sustained attack from a foe more insidious and corrupting than anything that had assailed our shores before; a demonic force that destroyed our mental health, that could deprave all who came into contact with it. Highly scientific studies proved beyond all doubt the peril we were all in, especially our children and even our pets. This was the menace that came from something called a "Video Nasty".There are two things you should know about that opening paragraph: firstly, everything in it was at one time believed by our leaders of the day (yes, even the bit about pets). And second, they were completely wrong on every count. It was a shameful period in our recent history, but not for the reasons they would have you think. Now, with the release of the incredibly informative and entertaining DVD Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide, for the first time the complete gory story can be told.So what was a video nasty? In a nutshell, it was most likely to be a low-budget horror film, produced in the US or Italy, that exploited the lack of a rigorous regulatory system for how rental video cassettes were circulated in the UK. The home video market had just exploded, almost everyone, in the space of a few years, had a video recorder in their home and as far as retailers and distributors were concerned, it was frontier territory. There was no censorship, classification or regulation. Videos could be bought or rented from almost anywhere: newsagents, garages, even butchers and barbers. They were everywhere, and the most popular (thanks to some incredibly lurid and wonderfully provocative cover artwork), and conspicuous were the horror films.There had been vague murmurings in the press, echoing the ban on children's horror comics in the late 1950s, that these videos, such as I Spit On Your Grave and The Evil Dead, were harmful to children; murmurings based on opinion rather than fact. But it wasn't until well-known busybody and very vocal self-appointed mouthpiece for the moral minority Mary Whitehouse CBE was sent a copy of Cannibal Holocaust ("Eaten Alive! The Ultimate Terror Movie!") that the video nasty ball really started rolling.Whitehouse had previously and largely ineffectively railed against such TV shows as Doctor Who, Benny Hill and the works of the great television dramatist Dennis Potter. Here, however, was a new campaign: on a topic most people knew even less about than she did. "I have never seen a video nasty … I actually don't need to see visually what I know is in that film," she proudly proclaimed to Nick Owen on TV-am. Most people refused to take her seriously, but that was a big mistake. Before long, others had joined Whitehouse's crusade or taken up a similar, self-righteous path. Conservative MP Sir Graham Bright was another key player. Here was a man who said, on camera, "I believe there is research taking place and it will show that these films not only affect young people but I believe they affect dogs as well." It's a statement more shocking and horrifying than anything you'll find in any of the 72 films decreed by the government to be officially "nasty".This was a time when completely spurious figures ("40% of all six-year-olds have seen a video nasty"), were bandied around parliament as fact, alongside emotive words like "evil" and, indeed, "nasty". Soon Bright had a bill pushed through parliament, amending the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 to include movies. The director of public prosecutions and the police got in on the act, seizing and destroying thousands of tapes and ruining countless businesses and lives. Distributor David Hamilton-Grant was given an 18-month sentence for releasing a version of Nightmares In A Damaged Brain that was a few seconds longer than the version passed by the BBFC. It turned everyone who watched or passed around these movies, many horror fans, into criminals. Or did it?Last year it came to light that the bill was never correctly put before the European Commission, effectively negating it. While the situation was quickly rectified, it showed that the law had been ignored by the lawmakers, the very people who were supposed to be protecting us from this stuff.And what of the films themselves? Well, today, the original 1983 list of 72 "nasty" movies put together by the department of public prosecutions (39 of them prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act) provides a handy list of must-see titles for the horror connoisseur, more attractive than any "best of" list from the BFI or AFI.As the films were chosen almost at random, there's a huge variety in terms of quality; in fact it was generally the poor quality, rather than any "shocking" content that prevented film critics standing up to defend video nasties at the time. Today, watching a video nasty can still be a harrowing experience: there are some films you really don't ever need to see. So here's a handy rundown of the essentials, and the ones that are still best avoided.Video nasties: the goodThe Evil Dead Outright classic first movie from the director of Spider-Man, now out on Blu-Ray.The Beyond Probably banned for the scene of a young zombie girl getting shot in the face. Exactly the same thing happens in the AMC TV show The Walking Dead. That's progress!Dead And Buried Smart and stylish zombie movie from the writers of Alien, with bizarre FX by four-times Oscar winner Stan Winston.The Bogey Man Colourful and creepy Halloween rip-off from Ulli Lommel.Tenebrae Slick slasher movie with spectacular set-piece murders. Actress Veronica Lario married Silvio Berlusconi. Who, er, kept this off TV screens.Last House On The Left Wes Craven's first horror. The only video nasty to rip off Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring.The Driller Killer Abel Ferrara directs himself as a tortured NY artist who kills and drills arty poseurs.The Funhouse Great carnival-based horror from Texas Chain Saw's Tobe Hooper.The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue Amazing Spanish/Italian zombie flick shot in the Peak District. It shouldn't work, but it does.Cannibal Holocaust Gave us the "found footage" routine later adopted by The Blair Witch Project.Andy Warhol's Frankenstein One of the finest 3D horrors ever made.Nightmare Maker Well-acted and deeply twisted tale of obsessive love.Possession A highly stylised, gory look at a marriage breakdown as Sam Neil suspects his wife, Isabelle Adjani (who won Best Actress at Cannes for this), is having an affair with a tentacled beastie.Video nasties: the badSnuff From exploitation duo Mike and Roberta Findlay (who also managed legendary New York recording studios Sear Sound, as used by the Strokes, Patti Smith and Sigur Rós) who added very fake gore to an Argentinian dud then paid people to protest the movie. All of that is more interesting than actually watching it.Night Of The Bloody Apes Depends on your tolerance for bad monster masks and genuine footage of open heart surgery.Blood Rites Blood Wrongs, more like. Absurd An open goal of a title, one it lives up to. May have been deemed obscene but at least it doesn't contravene the Trade Descriptions Act.Don't Go In The Woods … Alone! Another easy target title. Don't say they didn't warn you.Mardi Gras Massacre Nudity, sleaze, hookers, gore and Mardi Gras masks. Actually, that doesn't make it sound too bad. Gestapo's Last Orgy, SS Experiment Camp, Love Camp 7 Three films from a genre known as "Nazisploitation". Interesting that such a thing existed. Rather less fascinating to actually sit through.HorrorSam RaimiPhelim O'Neillguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
'This is not criticism in a vacuum' From demolishing Alice in Wonderland to deciphering Macbeth, our young readers bowled over the judges with their witFresh bands, young directors, hot new actors and artists straight out of college are the lifeblood of the arts. And, to ensure that criticism doesn't get stale, it's essential that their generation is represented in our reviewers. The Guardian's annual young critics competition is designed to ensure that arts criticism can reflect the voices of a younger arts audience. That said, youth alone is not enough. These days, it's easier than ever to find a platform on which to voice your opinions – by blogging, tweeting, or posting on comment threads – but with all that competition, it's more essential than ever that you have something worthwhile to say.The entries confirmed that there are 10-18-year-olds out there with perceptive, funny things to convey about subjects ranging from the Selfridges building in Birmingham to tattooed LA rockers Buckcherry. What's more, the best of our critics seemed to be predominantly female – of the 14 finalists, only three were male. There were eight categories and two age groups in each: under 14s and 14-to-18s, though not all art forms had enough entries to qualify. Classical music critics aged under 14 are still thin on the ground.The overall winner, 15-year-old Rebecca Grant, won the judges over with her demolition of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which she described as a "beautifully eccentric odyssey" reduced to "disgusting dregs". "She managed to be witheringly critical without sounding as if she was grandstanding," said Liz Forgan, the chair of Arts Council England. Rebecca will win a trip to a film screening with a Guardian film critic, and get the chance to write about it in g2.All runners-up get a £25 book token, and have their review published on guardian.co.uk today. Two were highly commended. Pandora Haydon's review of All My Sons at the Apollo theatre, London, "brilliantly captured the taut physicality of David Suchet's performance", said Andrew Dickson, our online arts editor. Frances Myatt – a winner in the under-14s dance category last year – impressed dance critic Judith Mackrell once again with her review of Mutatis Mutandis at the Macrobert theatre in Stirling.Yinka Shonibare – the artist who put a ship in a bottle on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square – judged the visual art category with the Guardian's chief art critic Adrian Searle. Twelve-year-old Mark Hardy won the under-14s category with a review of Fiona Banner's installation of two fighter jets at Tate Britain. Jo Waugh, 15, won the 14-18 category with a sophisticated review of Recollection Has Not Been Mentioned by Tony Swain. "This is not criticism in a vacuum," Shonibare said. "I like the way the work is contextualised in relation to modernism, surrealism and Kandinsky. He also describes the ambiguity in the art world very well."The winner of our architecture category, India Miller, was also prepared to look beyond the work and discuss its significance in the wider world. Her review of Selfridges in Birmingham impressed architect Amanda Levete, whose practice Future Systems designed it. "She sets the context of a 'city left in tatters', and alludes to the paradox of the democracy of impact that the building has had on Birmingham in becoming symbolic of the city while at the same time representing a 'bubble of wealth'," said Levete.Sasha Millward, 18, won the classical music category with a fluent review of the National Youth Orchestra conducted by Semyon Bychkov at the Royal Albert Hall. Ella McCarthy, 13, won the under-14s theatre category for what the Guardian's Michael Billington termed a "graphic account" of Macbeth in Regent's Park.Two entries stood out in the TV category. Seventeen-year-old Lilith Johnstone's review of Mo "showed good awareness of the context, and of the elements that were generic and original," said critic Mark Lawson. A special mention should go to Nathan Ellis, who was a winner in the same category last year, and whose review was enjoyed by Lawson's fellow judge Fearne Cotton. "He gets straight to the point with his slick, humorous and analytical review. Rounded off nicely with a heartfelt quip, it didn't drag."There was only one winner in the pop category – Fin Murphy, 17, for his Buckcherry review. Michael Hann, the editor of the Guardian's Film&Music section, said it had "a good opening that tricked me into believing I was going to read a string of cliches, then undercut expectations". His fellow judge Tinchy Stryder was moved to check out Buckcherry's music online "in spite of the genre not being my kind of thing" – or the review being all that positive. It was a reminder that reviews can expose you to art you wouldn't otherwise have considered or known about – and that's something valuable whether you're 10 or 80.Pop and rockTinchy StryderTim BurtonDanceArchitectureArtClassical musicAlex Needhamguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Olivier Assayas on the terrorist who became a pop culture icon The Jackal's exploits are soundtracked by Wire and New Order in an epic biopic of a dark-side James Bond who had 'pop star moments'Apparently it's all the Guardian's fault. In 1975, shortly after the international terrorist now known as "Carlos" first gained notoriety by shooting two French detectives and an informer in Paris, Barry Woodhams, boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend of Carlos's, found a bag of weapons belonging to the trigger-happy terrorist in their London apartment. Not trusting the police, he called the Guardian, whose reporter Peter Niesewand came round to inspect, spied a copy of Frederick Forsyth's novel The Day Of The Jackal on a bookshelf, and concluded that Carlos had been reading it. The next day, in its front-page world scoop, the Guardian christened Carlos "The Jackal". The rest is history. Except the book didn't belong to Carlos at all; it belonged to Woodhams. Carlos The Jackal had probably never even read the book he was named after.So yes, the Guardian helped build the myth, but fact and fiction have never been easy to separate when it comes to Carlos, The Jackal, whoever he is. He didn't choose the name Carlos either, it turns out. His preferred codename was actually "Johnny". But after that shootout in Paris, the only name the police had to give to the press was Carlos, the name on one of his false passports. His actual name is Illich Ramirez Sánchez; his father was a Venezuelan Marxist and called his other two sons Vladimir and Lenin, just to drive the point home. No wonder the guy got a little confused.Now along comes Olivier Assayas's epic biopic, also entitled Carlos, which adds new layers to both the truth and the myth. Originally made as a three-part series for French TV, it is five-and-a-half hours long in its full form (though a half-length feature is also on release in the UK), exhaustively researched and often exhilarating to watch, as we track the fledgling revolutionary, charmingly portrayed by Venezuelan actor Edgar RamÃrez, through countless countries, attacks, hijackings and escapes, to his eventual arrest in Sudan in 1994.Inevitably, Assayas's movie/miniseries has been accused of making terrorism look glamorous. "In presenting a terrorist as an action hero, it glorifies terrorism as a legitimate path of political action," complained the Huffington Post, for example. Similar things were said about Steven Soderbergh's two-part Che biopic, or Uli Edel's recent Baader-Meinhof Complex, or of the current spate of movies nostalgically recalling the heyday of 1970s terrorist chic. Assayas's Carlos is, it has to be said, a bit of a dude. Despite his supposedly anti-bourgeois leftist causes, he's a snappy dresser with a taste for cigars, luxury hotels, women and phallic firearms. He's like a dark-side version of James Bond. Added to which, Assayas has given him a great playlist. In the past, the director has put Sonic Youth over Maggie Cheung's slinky moves in Irma Vep, and cast Canadian hipsters Metric in his movie Clean. This time, Carlos struts his stuff to a refined post-punk soundtrack including early New Order, Wire, the Dead Boys and the Feelies, all of which gives the movie a sheen of cool.'Carlos would not have the same image in the media if there was not this pop culture element to him. You have to deal with it'"The whole point of the film is showing him as he is at different times, but not shying away from him when he has his pop star moments," says Assayas. "Because that's part of him. He would not have the same image in the media if there was not this pop culture element to him. You have to deal with it."Like Bond, Assayas's Carlos comes across as both dashingly glamorous and a bit of a knob. He's incredibly vain in a slightly cheesy way: admiring himself naked with a gun in the mirror, dressing up in a Che beret and leather jacket for the notorious 1975 Opec hijacking in Vienna, even checking in for liposuction in his love-handled 1980s era. And, like Bond, he's an agent, not a mastermind. He's the man on the ground to get things done, except most of the time, he doesn't get them done very well."The reality of that operation is that he's involved in some geopolitical game he hardly grasps," says Assayas of the Opec incident, which Carlos treated like his big celebrity breakthrough. "He hasn't designed the operation, he executes a decision made by someone else. He's clearly out of his depth. So I don't think it glorifies him, it just shows him exactly where he is."Assayas himself was a (law-abiding) leftist student in Paris at the time of the cop killings that brought Carlos to public attention, he says. They took place in the Latin Quarter, just round the block from where Assayas was studying. "It raised all these questions: why is a Venezuelan helping the Palestinians? How did he shoot those cops? Where did he disappear to? Nobody seemed to be able to catch him or even locate him. Things like that fire the imagination. It's all about the mystery. Of course, once you start to find out the truth – after the end of the cold war – you realise how disconnected the myth is from the reality."'In the 1970s they believed in a better world to come after the revolution. Now, al-Qaida just uses kids who are fed some absurd religious mystical ideas'That didn't stop the mythical Carlos becoming a cultural icon through the cold war and beyond. In Robert Ludlum's Bourne trilogy, Carlos is Jason Bourne's arch rival, but in the movie of The Bourne Ultimatum, he's renamed "Paz" and, bizarrely, he's played by Assayas's leading man, Edgar RamÃrez. He's the assassin who offs a Guardian journalist at Waterloo station; perhaps that's payback for the Jackal error. Carlos is also immortalised, Warhol-style, in his wraparound shades, on the cover of Black Grape's 1995 album It's Great When You're Straight … Yeah.Fact and fiction collided in a more complex way during the making of Carlos, though, when the real-life Carlos, who's still in prison in France, got wind of Assayas's project. Carlos's lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, who also happens to be his wife (they married in a Muslim ceremony in prison after he converted to Islam), took the film-makers to court to attempt to get access to the screenplay, in order to set the record straight, a move which was "legally absolutely incoherent", says Assayas, especially since Carlos never told the truth about many events anyway, and is supposedly still awaiting trial next year on others. "I was not really concerned. I did not think he had any kind of case."Carlos later got hold of the screenplay, and wrote a long letter to Edgar RamÃrez in which he bizarrely invoked their common ancestor, a conquistador named RamÃrez. Assayas is sure the real Carlos has seen the film, though he hasn't commented on it to the French press. In an interview with a German paper, he said he didn't like the nudity. Carlos might still have powerful friends on the outside, though. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's president, for example, has expressed his admiration, comparing Carlos to Che Guevara. Assayas laughs off any notion of "repercussions". He's only received a few flimsy threats from indistinct "friends of Carlos".There's a scene near the end of the movie, shortly before his arrest, when Carlos is seen educating future terrorists in Sudan on guerrilla tactics, using TE Lawrence as an example. Osama bin Laden would have been in Sudan around the same time. The connection isn't made explicit, but the time of Carlos, the international mercenary, is over, and that of Bin Laden, the theoretician, is just beginning. "I don't think that what terrorism is about has changed much," Assayas concludes. "Terrorism is about a state sending a message to another state. But in the 1970s they were militants; they believed in a better world to come after the revolution. Now, [al-Qaida] just uses kids who are fed some absurd religious mystical ideas where they have access to some kind of paradise in the afterlife. They are not soldiers, they are just 'martyrs'. That's not something Carlos would have considered."Steve Roseguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Leslie Nielsen: Naked fun Comedian Chris Addison salutes his comedy heroEric Morecambe is the first famous person I remember noticing dying. I can still recall the punch in the gut that the 12-year-old me was surprised to feel on learning of his death. I was reminded of that yesterday morning, when I found out that Leslie Nielsen had died.I think the key thing that marks out great comic actors is not some kind of tic or manner of performance or trick that they all have in common; it's the reaction they provoke – glee. Absolute glee. Leslie Nielsen's many turns as Frank Drebin in the short-lived Police Squad series and its highly successful Naked Gun film spin-offs made me squeal with delight and clap my hands. They have given me so very much more pleasure than it's reasonable to expect to be given by another human being you've never met.My best friend and I have many things in common, but one of the most significant moments in the early days of our acquaintanceship was the discovery of a shared love of Drebin and his misadventures. I remember the two of us sitting in the student union watching a double bill of the Naked Gun films; both of us knowing them off by heart, but leaning forward in delighted anticipation of jokes we knew he was about to deliver. That's not an easy effect to achieve, but Nielsen just aced it.Nielsen was most famous for appearing in spoofs, which are generally over-the-top versions of whatever they're aping, but what lifted those spoofs was his glorious ability to play it just straight enough. You will go a long way to find performances of such exquisite deadpan and spot-on timing. Those films will stand as examples of how to do it for many years to come.We lost a proper great on Sunday. Mind you, I can't imagine that his coffin is going to go in the ground without accidentally knocking a mourner in there first. I do hope so. That would be fitting.Leslie NielsenComedyChris Addisonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |