| Wildcards make it for 'X-Factor' final Gamu Nhengu was not among the four 'X-Factor' acts had their hopes of pop stardom revived tonight when they were revealed as wildcards for the final. feeds.breakingnews.ie |
Commission Us: Sex and grass in Onibaba You asked us to review the Japanese film-maker's Devil Woman, a sensual nightmare based on a Buddhist parable. Here goes ...It's a pleasure to take this commission from tomkun: "Could u review Onibaba, or Devil Woman (1964) directed by Kaneto Shindo? My Dad never stops going on about it."It surfaces rarely here, though I, along with many other reviewers, drew attention to Onibaba when it was scheduled at London's BFI Southbank in 2008, as part of its "Wild Japan" season. "Wild" is right.Onibaba is a chilling movie, a waking nightmare shot in icy monochrome, and filmed in a colossal and eerily beautiful wilderness: a Japanese susuki field, or pampas-grass field — the movie was shot in the north-western section of the Inba swamp in Japan's Chiba prefecture. The nearest British equivalent is possibly the East Anglian fenland, or possibly the Kent marshes from which Dickens imagined the terrifying Magwitch emerging in Great Expectations — though I think neither approximates the featureless, yet menacing quality of the landscape that comes across on screen here, and of course the extraordinary height of the grasses which, significantly, allow people to hide themselves.Shindo, took as his starting point a Shin Buddhist parable that he heard as a child: an old woman is furious with her daughter-in-law for continually neglecting household chores to go off to the temple and pray. She hides in the bushes along the path and when the younger woman comes along, she jumps out wearing a demon mask, terrifying her. Buddha punishes the old woman for her dishonesty and impiety by sticking the mask to her face. The old woman desperately claws and scrabbles at the grotesque mask but she can't get it off; eventually she prays to Buddha to let her remove it and Buddha mercifully agrees, but his gentle mercy reveals itself as something quite different when the woman wrenches it off and takes the flesh of her face with it.Shindo's transformation of the tale into an erotic noir tale of psychological horror is brilliantly subversive, and yet in its way intuitive and faithful. His secularised version preserves the fear while removing Buddha; there is no God up there in the vast endless sky above this wasteland, but Buddha's ferocious vengefulness, the cause-and-effect pattern of crime and punishment is transferred to the arena of paranoid human wrongdoing: and in fact Shindo does appear to strike a supernatural chord in the movie's final movement.The setting is now war-torn 14th-century Japan. The menfolk have been taken away as soldiers and now two women are left alone in the swampland, an older woman and her daughter-in-law, played by Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura. They are murdering scavengers who creep up in the long grass on fugitive Samurai deserters or simply soldiers who are lost, kill them, strip the bodies of valuable armour and adornments to be sold to a local fence, and tip the corpses down a secret pit, the bottom of which is becoming a grotesque tomb. One day, out of nowhere, a wily local known to them both suddenly appears: Hachi (Kei Sato). With much insensitive grinning, he reveals that he has deserted the army and that Kichi (that is, their husband/son) has been killed in battle; then, with a natural criminal's instinctive nose for a lucrative scam, he wants to know what they are up to.Hachi's appearance, and his news, triggers an explosive mixture of erotic tension and suspicion in the two women. He clearly lusts after the younger woman, and Kichi's widow now wakes up to the fact that she has been without a man for years. The older woman suspects that they will become a couple, pursue the robbing-murdering game on their own and do without her — leave her to starve or perhaps just murder her. In an attempt to compete with her daughter-in-law for this man's attention, to undermine their alliance, or perhaps because she, too, has had a sensual longing newly awoken in herself, she makes her own sexual offer — and it should be remembered that this woman is not ancient in the sense we might think. The actor, Nobuko Otowa, was 39 at the time of filming and is not made up to look particularly older than that. Jitsuko Yoshimura was 19. She becomes infuriated at the younger woman creeping off to Hachi's hut to have sex with him (as opposed to going off to the temple to pray) and so the terrifying demon mask enters the story.Shindo unfolds the tense, taut drama in a compelling atmosphere of amoral horror: the older woman resents the younger's lack of grief at her son's death and fears its implications; the younger resents the older's bullying. But neither has a moral right to resent that or anything at all. They have the blood of countless people on their hands. Thus far, all that has been real to these women has been survival. But now something is real: sex, an overwhelmingly animal, sweaty sensuality.The action of the movie is interspersed with brilliantly composed, almost abstract compositions of the wasteland itself: either long shots of the scarily huge prairie, or painterly close-ups of the grasses themselves: dagger-like blades. At night-time, Shindo picks out the various locations with stark key lighting, as if some Buddha or police unit had shone a searchlight on a crime scene: a stylised effect which makes no attempt whatever to approximate moonlight. Night or day, the swampland looks apocalyptic, like the scene of the end of the world.The films that might be placed, as it were, alongside Onibaba are Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman Of The Dunes (1964), Nagisa Oshima's In The Realm Of The Senses (1976) and Takashi Miike's Audition (1999). The angular stab of horror, combined with frank sexuality, makes arguable sense in this context. Placing Onibaba alongside western movies like Polanski's Knife In The Water (1962) or Henri-Georges Cluzot's Les diaboliques (1955) is a way of critically bringing out the dimension of psychological tension and fear.Either way, Onibaba deserves something more than cult status. There is a handsome DVD edition from Criterion.World cinemaPeter Bradshawguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The Wild Bunch: No 4 Sam Peckinpah, 1969Director Sam Peckinpah was considered a spendthrift, a loose cannon, and a failure by the time he shot The Wild Bunch in 1968. His last feature, Major Dundee, had been an acrimonious experience. It had been released in a brutally truncated and mutilated form to middling reviews. In the interim Peckinpah had regained a measure of respect for his beautiful TV adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter's 1937 novel Noon Wine. It is the least seen of his great works, and demonstrated, at the time, that he was not the madman of recent legend (not that there wasn't plenty of legendary madness to come).Offered the screenplay for The Wild Bunch, he tore it apart with a vengeance, retrofitting it to accommodate his own key concerns and themes: men out of time facing obsolescence and death (it could easily be called No Country for Old Men); violence as a ballet of brutality; and corruption as all-encompassing, with every transaction, be it moral, monetary or sexual, deeply stained by betrayal. By the time The Wild Bunch hit screens and became the most controversial movie of 1969, Peckinpah's erstwhile detractors were elevating him to the pantheon, up there with Stanley Kubrick and John Ford. And there was to be blood. Deafened by the ambient roar of the ever more violent and amoral Vietnam war, which splashed blood across the nation's TV screens nightly, and emboldened by the sanguinary possibilities sanctioned by Bonnie and Clyde's runaway success, Peckinpah packed a wagonload of blood squibs for use on his Mexican locations and forever changed the nature of screen violence with what might be called the first "splatter western". He also revolutionised film editing, shooting his many, violent action set-pieces with multiple cameras and viewpoints, running the cameras at different speeds, from 60 to 120 frames a second, after seeing what editor Lou Lombardo had achieved with similar effects on earlier projects. The results were eye-opening, stretching and collapsing time in each of the movie's many masterfully assembled action set-pieces, particularly the opening robbery. That sequence included the famous credit, "Directed by Sam Peckinpah" hammered on to the screen after Pike Bishop (William Holden) spits out the words: "If they move, kill 'em!" Which immediately told us where the director's sympathies lay – with the doomed and the outcast.Action and adventureJohn Pattersonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Coding patriarchy into IT | Mariam Cook The Facebook movie showed that machismo is thriving in IT. But we exclude women in building information systems at our perilWatching the portrayal of Facebook's story on screen, I saw not just a new venture, an exciting innovation and a few young people making their mark on the world. It was a tale of young men on a quest for dominance, interwoven with lashings of disrespect for women.This wasn't necessarily the surface, nor the only narrative. But the girls on screen were kept in place throughout the film as sidekicks, groupies and nightclub dancers, there only to inspire derision and passion in the geniuses doing the coding. At one point in the movie, when a groupie whines "can we help?", the answer is no. No one says "get back in the kitchen". No one says "sit there and be pretty". They don't have to. And when it comes to sexual pleasure, of course, woman are giving, not receiving.If the women found in The Social Network represent the stereotype a progressive society is seeking to get beyond – why are they still there? Why, in this most modern of cyberdramas, are the female characters the same as 18th-century tales, shamed and shaped by the pressure to comfort and be comforted by the men around them, who are doing all the important, exciting stuff?This is not to draw any conclusions around the misogynism of Facebook's founders, nor those who packaged the Hollywood depiction. Those points have been explored elsewhere. Instead, I'd like to throw out a thought or two about the consequences of building social networks, or indeed any information systems, without a balance in gender influence.If, as Cif user antonio96 recently commented, the geek will inherit the earth, how does that sit with female emancipation? As our everyday lives become more and more connected, who is writing the code, building the new world? In the UK only 14.4% of computing professionals are women. In 2009, boys sat more than 90% of A-level computing exams.This means patriarchy is rumbling on, ever more prevalent in the newest, freshest, most powerful end of the labour spectrum. The tragedy of this macho new world is it is coding patriarchy into the way we communicate. When we construct systems every category is a choice, every option is borne of human bias – gender is thus materialised in the tools and techniques developed. Numerous empirical studies have shown how the absence of female input impacts the design and construction of technical artefacts: for example the microwave oven, the telephone, robotics and software agents.To ensure a future with more balance, we need to reduce the deficit between men and women in tomorrow's socio-technical workforce; in the next big internet startup. And to achieve that, IT culture needs to be sexier and safer for women to enter. Sexier, in the sense of substituting the male gaze for a human one – perhaps starting to add to the technical rhetoric of speed and memory – a narrative around the immense possibilities for hardware and software as applications to enhance people's lives.Unfortunately, we tend to portray technology as a non-creative discipline. People often think of technical work as the opposite of anything creative, where weaving textures, sounds and colours together – the sort of things little girls are encouraged to do early on – does not apply. But I have found that when you really take an interest in coding, the opportunities for creativity are infinite. There are so many new shapes, options, structures and ways of organising to play with. But that's not the way we talk about technology – and it might go some way to explaining the lack of allure technical expertise has for female students.There is, of course, attention being given to this problem already (perhaps you can comment with your experience in the field). But I'd like to humbly suggest a few things. It's time to stop throwing around words like "geek" so little girls would rather be using machines to stroke cute little puppies than finding out how they work. It's time to stop mystifying code and hardware and pretending it's way more complicated than it is. It's time for female role models up there on screen as powerful, successful, internet engineers and new media moguls.It was nice to see trousersnake on screen, but it would be have been even nicer to see a powerful female peer up there alongside him, perhaps someone like Christina Aguilera, showing women we can be filthy, dirty, whatever, if they want to be – but who can also be great coders. In this way, we may have a real hope of enticing girls towards a path in which they can construct algorithms and design the systems of the future.InternetFacebookWomenGenderMark ZuckerbergMariam Cookguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The Walkman has gone, and I must move on | Hadley Freeman I have the same problem as Hollywood – too much nostalgia for the 80sNot even a life spent chuffing down 17 packs of Lambert & Butler a day while lying on a sunbed, face slathered in vegetable oil, fresh from a chemical peel, taking occasional breaks only to have one's skin scrubbed with sandpaper, rusty nails and acid will age a person as swiftly as waxing sentimental about objects from their childhood that were, unquestionably, crap. So stand by as I shrivel faster than the evil American Nazi at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade after drinking from the wrong cup. (Note to younger readers: this was like the whole of Benjamin Button, but in reverse and compressed into two minutes as opposed to two hours. Ah, the good ol' days.)Sony announced over the weekend that it has sent out its last shipment of Walkman portable cassette recorders. Now, if you are of a certain age, one that suggests you remember the happy days when the name "Jordan" referred to a Mr Knight as opposed to a Ms Price, your immediate, grief-struck reaction to this news will have been: "Hang on, I can't hear you. Let me turn off my iPod." This will have been swiftly followed by surprise that Walkmen still exist, a brief interlude in which the issue of whether Walkmen is the correct plural of Walkman is hotly debated, a sense of overwhelming sadness that something you haven't thought about since roughly 1991 is no more, and then – having now moved into the sentimentally obsessive phase of grief – an urgent need to run home and order at least three Walkmen off eBay while listening to the 80s Greatest Hits album you just ordered off iTunes. It was a design classic, you know.Now, in defence of this particular 80s sentimentalist, I would like it to be on record – or on cassette, perhaps – that I have often thought how much better life was when one could rewind particular lyrics instead of having to skip to the beginning of the song, as one usually has to do with CDs and downloaded music. This was very useful for those of us who spent about 82% of our teenage lives attempting to fathom precisely what Robert Smith was saying in every single song by the Cure (further note to younger readers: this was in the days before lyrics.com or, indeed, anything.com. If all this evokes for you images as quaint as paintings of hardy pioneers, hands shielding their eyes as they gaze upon their grazing cattle, then I would like to make a initial gesture of protest, before shrugging and conceding that the analogy is fair enough.)It is hard to believe that any generation has been as preoccupied with immediacy and the latest technology while simultaneously being so sentimental about their childhoods as mine, but perhaps that's just me being sentimental. But with all the looking forward and looking backward it's amazing there isn't a whiplash epidemic among thirtysomethings, although it does explain the dizzy stupidity of some of the sentiment. John Cusack's 80s-themed movie Hot Tub Time Machine consisted of plenty of 80s artefacts and absolutely nothing in the way of plot or interest – it was, in fact, the perfect metaphor for 80s sentimentalism.Yet there is a certain irony in the fact that while 80s children and Hollywood might not be able to let the 80s go, as the recent and upcoming remakes of The Karate Kid and Top Gun prove, 80s products, such as floppy disks (discontinued earlier this year – quick, hie thee to eBay!) and, yes, the Walkman (which was invented in 1978 but, like me, came of age in the 80s), know when to bow out.Heck, even the backing soundtrack to my 80s childhood, Sesame Street, moves with the times, with Bert appearing to have finally come out, tweeting that his hair is "more 'mo' than 'hawk'". That Ernie is such a hottie (even in horizontal stripes! Work it, Ernie!), and Bert is such a deserving, upright fellow serves as some consolation for the fact that a Muppet is officially more with it than me, with a Twitter feed and everything. He probably even has an iPhone.Anyway, I can't talk any more. Huey Lewis is on American breakfast TV right now, speaking about the 25th anniversary of Back to the Future, to loud studio applause. Yes, Huey Lewis. Applause. Loud. He was a design classic, you know.Hypocrisy isn't funny You may have noted a strange, tangy smell in the air – strange but not wholly unfamiliar. Base notes of nausea and idiocy, methinks. Ah yes, it is Eau d'Hypocrisie d'Hollywood, a parfum that is not nearly as limited an edition as some might prefer.This time, it wafts from the cast and crew of the upcoming sequel to The Hangover, who have heaved their persons up to the moral high ground and refused to let Mel Gibson guest-star in their movie.Gibson is a flawed fellow, no doubt, and it is pleasing that, for once, a celebrity's offscreen antics do seem to be having an effect on his career. But the Hangover posse's pose might have more heft if they themselves hadn't made a film nearly as racist (Chinese people talk funny! Hilarious!) and misogynistic (all women are shrews, except for strippers, who are awesome) as any of Gibson's deluded rants. Then there's the small point that the guest star in the first film was Mike Tyson, a convicted rapist and ear-muncher.But let's not get all, like, boringly logical here and focus instead on Mel's possible replacement. Maybe they could give Roman Polanski a call. He's got some free time these days, and his accent is hilarious.SonyComedyMel GibsonSesame StreetUS televisionChildren's TVTelevisionHadley Freemanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |