Mrs Thatcher's self-awareness

Julian Barnes, discussing Margaret Thatcher's The Downing Street Years:

'She can see, for instance, that she was the most feted and fetishised of modern Prime Ministers but not that she was also the most loathed. She was loathed in a personal as well as in a political way, since her perceived character - domineering, mean-spirited, divisive, unheeding - seemed to inform and infect her policies. That character is amply on display here. She is contemptuous of Tory wets and Tory grandees. She is contemptuous of the Tory tradition that she supplanted, referring at one point to the "thirty-year experiment" of "socialism" in postwar Britain: as far as one can follow her chronology, this clearly includes the Conservative governments of Heath, Douglas-Home, Macmillan, and Eden, and possibly that of Churchill. Special spite is reserved for two of her main adjutants, Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, neither of whom could finally stomach her. Howe's resignation speech prompted a challenge to her leadership, ensuring, to her eyes, that "from this point on [he] would be remembered not for his staunchness as Chancellor, nor for his skillful diplomacy as Foreign Secretary, but for this final act of bile and treachery. The very brilliance with which he wielded the dagger ensured that the character he assassinated was in the end his own". As for the real Opposition, try this for superciliousness: "Mr Kinnock, in all his years as Opposition leader, never let me down. Right to the end, he struck every wrong note".

Monocularity at home, cecity abroad. Alan Clark reports a comment that Mrs Thatcher made to civil servant Frank Cooper two years after she had been made leader of the Opposition. "Must I do all this international stuff?" she asked, and when he replied, "You can't avoid it," she pulled a face. Cooper also recalled that '"during that period she and [Cooper] had met Reagan and Carter, and she was astonished at how stupid they were. "Can they really dispose of all that power?", etc.' She grew to enjoy motorcade acclaim, of course, and the banquets chez Mitterand, while never seeming to suspect that when you are applauded in Eastern Europe it does not necessarily mean more than a public snub to the local leaders. She is sure that "the beliefs and policies which I ... pioneered in Britain" have helped "to remould world affairs". She cannot conceive that the Falklands expedition might be viewed elsewhere not as an early start on the new world order but as the last twitch of an imperial past. She is much happier with distant sheikhs than with European democrats. She imagines that her obstructive, nagging, bullying attitude to Europe was taken as a sign that Britain was walking tall once more. She thinks that if you insult people you gain their respect'.

- Julian Barnes, 'Mrs Thatcher Remembers', from The New Yorker, November 1993, quoted in Barnes, Letters from London, 1995, 227-8.  

See also:
Blog: Thatcher in office, 10 June 2013
Blog: Anticipating the funeral of Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 14 April 2013
Blog: 'This Monty Python, is he one of us?', 8 October 2010

The dearth of movies written about women and for women

In 2013 women constituted just 10 percent of the writers working on the 250 top grossing films. If the remaining 90 percent of working screenwriters are too lazy to write a movie from a woman's perspective, then the result is what we see now: an absolute dearth of movies written about women and for women. Amy Pascal, Sony's then co-chairman, said, 'You're talking about a dozen or so then female-driven comedies that got made over a dozen years, a period when hundreds of male-driven comedies got made. And every one of those female-driven comedies was written or directed or produced by a woman. It's a numbers game - it's about there being enough women writers and enough women with the power to get movies made'.

Not that studios especially want these female-driven movies anyway: they want franchises, and romcoms and female comedies aren't seen as blockbuster material. 'Studio executives think these movies' success is a one-off every time,' Nancy Meyers, who wrote and directed Something's Gotta Give and It's Complicated, said. 'They'll say, "One of the big reasons that worked was because Jack [Nicholson] was in it," or "We hadn't had a comedy for older women in forever". According to Melissa Silverstein, editor of Women and Hollywood, 'Whenever a movie for women is successful, studios credit it to a million factors, and none of those factors is to do with women'.

Romcoms aren't heart surgery, but they - at their best - explore and explain the human heart, and that's why great ones are so great and terrible ones are so very, very terrible. This is also why it feels like such a shame that studios simply think they're not worth their time any more. To be fair, writers as wise and funny and fair as [Nora] Ephron - and Austen for that matter - don't come along every day. But things have reached a pretty pass when film trade publications admit that When Harry Met Sally wouldn't even get made any more.

- Hadley Freeman, Life Moves Pretty Fast, London, 2015, p.110.

See also:
Blog: Highlander vs Ladyhawke, 15 March 2018
Blog: The remarkable impact of My Forgotten Man, 1 May 2016
Blog: 'Hey, did you see the grosses for Gandhi 2?', 3 February 2014

Why so many of us are single

Things we shouldn't have to discuss: How to take a bus

Implementing Wellington's new bus network certainly hasn't been smooth sailing, and there's plenty of work yet to be done to get things running properly. For one thing, the bus companies need to hire the right amount of drivers, pay them fairly, and put the right number of buses on the routes they contracted to deliver. But we Wellingtonians can also do our bit to help things work in the meantime too.

I travel on the Karori buses occasionally, and like many people I've noticed that there are capacity problems, with buses full up when they travel down Lambton Quay, and passengers are being turned away by drivers, which causes real frustration and isn't sustainable for a modern public transport network. This even happens after peak travel time, with some no.2 buses leaving passengers behind on the Quay even after 7pm on weeknights. Perhaps switching the Northland buses so they start at the station and the Wright's Hill buses to go via the University has inadvertently placed too much pressure on the remaining Karori service. Oh well, we have a history of making duff decisions about public transport (Karori losing its tram service in 1954, for starters)

So for whatever reason there's a capacity shortfall on the Karori route. Unfortunately with the no.2 route having all the tunnels (Karori, Mt Vic and Seatoun), using larger capacity double-decker buses isn't an option. One solution to this is to refit the existing buses with fewer seats and more standing area for passengers. This was derided by the usual skeptics at the time it was announced a few months ago, but as short-term measures go it made sense - you can simply fit more people in standing rather than seated.

There are also a few simple strategies we could each take to help things work more smoothly. Passengers should continuously move down the aisle to allow the maximum number of people aboard. This is hardly a revolutionary concept, I admit, but people don't seem to be aware that others might need to get on the bus they themselves successfully boarded. This includes standing in the rear door well and in the raised rear aisle over the engine; I agree it's not super-convenient but it's better than fellow travellers being stranded. No-one should be sitting on the aisle seats to preserve a spare window seat for their bag - that's simple good manners. And there are things we can do to speed up the service so it runs on time. If you're sufficiently mobile, you should make the move towards the exit before the bus halts, rather than making everyone wait for you to extract yourself and move down the aisle. And passengers should be asked politely to always exit through the rear doors, to allow passengers to board quickly through the front doors.

On this evening's bus ride home a mother with a pram at the Bowen House stop was refused entry by the driver with a curt, 'No room for you'. She must've wondered what she'd done to offend him. Firstly, obviously bus drivers should be polite to all passengers and particularly parents travelling with babies. Everyone should do their level best to make room for them. On the other hand, when things are crowded it's perfectly legitimate to ask people with prams to fold them up before boarding: this is common on buses in England, which are designed with plenty of room to park the prams. We can do this, Wellington!

Delaney Davidson

Delaney Davidson plays Meow in Wellington on his Shining Day tour, 17 November.

Whistle while you work

Testifying

Jillett's whaling station

Jillett's whaling station at the north end of Kapiti Island, in a 1907 watercolour by Walter Armiger Bowring, after an 1844 sketch by John Alexander Gilfillan. From an exhibition at Pataka in Porirua.

Crusader Kings 2: Stayin' alive

Northern Europe in CK2, 1189AD

I've started playing CK2 again after a long break, and in between bouts of Cities Skylines. Returning to my old save of the Empire of Britannia, I've played another 75 years or so to the year 1189, moving from Emperor Thoraed the Shadow to his son Eadfrith the Black (pesky excommunication, people will make a fuss over nothing), and now Thoraed's grandson, the aging Emperor Osmund, who lacks a cool nickname.

Thoraed managed to live to age 59 but met his end at the fangs of an irritated serpent, which found its way into the royal bed thanks to some unnamed ne'er-do-well. He was lucky to have finally secured a male heir after many years of trying, but it was a close-run thing: his first son Eadfrith only arrived after eight daughters.

Eadfrith, it's fair to say, was something of an opportunist. Not only was he excommunicated by the Pope a couple of times, but he racked up a total of four wives - consecutively, not simultaneously, mind - and to preserve his hold on the throne there was also the small matter of having his cousin Queen Mildrith of Greece assassinated. Well, she was trying to seize the imperial throne in a war of rebellion, so as a strictly impartial observer I think Eadfrith's subjects should just cut him some slack...

As for Osmund, most of his reign was hamstrung by a massive anti-British pact across the Christian kingdoms of Europe so he couldn't wage any perfectly sensible wars against his younger brother, the rebellious King of Scotland. A bigger problem manifested itself early, in that when he was the Crown Prince he and his Italian wife Cecilia only managed four daughters before Cecilia hit the game's age 45 childbirth cut-off. No male heirs, which is serious business in this game. And then to make matters worse the first two daughters died young, with Princess Wulfthryth dying of natural causes in 1175 aged only 28, and the unpronounceable Princess Beorhtflaed, Queen of Poland, dying in childbirth in 1182 aged 32. 

This left young Princess III, otherwise known as Wulfgyth, who was unmarried, as the main heir. Osmund adoped several tactics to address this pesky problem.

First, a matrilineal marriage for Wulfgyth to the unlanded commoner Aethelfrith Byrhtnothson of Werle (a forgettable German county somewhere near Mecklenberg), in the hope of giving her offspring with the 'proper' male chromosomes. Said commoner spouse promptly demanded to run off to devote his life to the Knights Hospitaller, which Osmund had to decline and take a 100 Piety hit. Make heirs not martyrs, Aethelfrith! This marriage eventually helped Osmund's predicament by producing four children in the royal line, including three sons, although one of these was a bastard.

Second, Osmund adopted the Seduction life-path in the hope of siring an bastard to legitimise. After plenty of trial and error, including a failed sally in the bed of the Countess of Slesvig (which was more in the hope of convincing her to become a Brittanic vassal, really), Osmund's long-standing mistress, the beautiful Aelfthryth Cenwulfsdohtor, finally produced a fine, ginger bastard of the male variety, Prince Eadfrith. Sorry, Wulfgyth! You're out of royal luck. Now Osmund has gone all pious and switched to the Religious focus to reap the rewards of the Health bonus, in the hope of staying alive long enough so the little bastard reaches his majority. Eadfrith is currently age 3 and counting, and with plenty of jealous older cousins by his father's mistress to complicate matters should he live long enough to become Emperor!

The ferret, an electrician's best friend

Getting an electrical supply was only one half of the story. Not for nothing did an advertisement for a firm specialising in the installation of electrical equipment for country houses claim that its system 'can be carried out without damage to the fabric of the buildings or to the decorations'. An owner also had to have the building wired - easy enough in the case of a new house, or a major restoration, but not a task to be undertaken lightly if it involved chasing out rococo plasterwork or cutting a channel through a baroque mural. The guides at Stanford Hall in Leicestershire used to tell the story of how in the 1920s Lord and Lady Braye were baffled by the prospect of having to run cables through their long ballroom without wrecking its delicate eighteenth-century stuccowork. Then someone had a bright idea: they prised up a floorboard at one end and dropped a dead rabbit into the void; then they prised up a floorboard at the other end and unleashed a ferret, with a string tied to his collar. When the ferret had managed to negotiate the joists and reach the rabbit, the string was used to pull through a cable and hey presto! the problem was solved.

- Adrian Tinniswood, The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House Between the Wars, London, 2016, p.151-2.

The Cenotaph

Papatoetoe

Rangitoto Rd mural, Papatoetoe

The Grand Vizier o' Kirkaldy

In 1739, the Russians and Turks, who had been at war, met to conclude terms of peace. The commissioners were Marshal Keith for the Russians and the Grand Vizier for the Turks. These two personages met, and carried on their negotiations by means of interpreters. When all was concluded they rose to separate, but just before leaving the Grand Vizier suddenly went to Marshal Keith, and, taking him cordially by the hand, declared in the broadest Scotch dialect that it made him 'unco' happy to meet a countryman in his exalted station'. As might be expected, Keith, who was himself a Scotsman in the service of Russia, stared with astonishment, and was eager for an explanation of the mystery. 'Dinna be surprised,' the Grand Vizier exclaimed; 'I'm o' the same country wi' yoursell, mon! I mind weel seein' you and your brother, when boys, passin' by to the school at Kirkaldy; my father, sir, was bellman o' Kirkaldy'.

James Settle, in Max Hastings (ed.), The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes, London, 1985, p.153. 

Beauchamp St

The glitter rubs right off & you're nowhere

One of my favourite ever tracks is this George Benson number from his 1978 live album 'Weekend in LA', and for me it sums up the sound of the late '70s. I watched Bob Fosse's All That Jazz for the first time last night, and Benson's version of the song that first became a hit for the Drifters in 1963 is the soundtrack to the superb opening scene. It's masterful filmmaking, dialogue-free but highly successful in introducing the setting of a stressful Broadway audition, illustrating most of the main characters including Roy Scheider's ruthless choreographer Gideon, and placing the film firmly in its New York stage context - one that would be rendered ubiquitous by the success of the film and TV version of Fame a few years later. (There's also an icily splendid live new wave version by Gary Numan from 1979).

Reclaiming Wellington from the motorway

I went to an interesting talk after work this evening at the City Gallery by architectural historian Ben Schrader (author of the award-winning The Big Smoke, a history of New Zealand urbanism), on the role of the Wellington urban motorway and its opponents in shaping the design of the central city. The title of the talk was 'Four lanes to the planes: Yeah, right', flipping 2016 mayoral candidate Jo Coughlan's slogan.

Schrader is a strong advocate for urban heritage and people-centred design, as opposed to car-centric. But the history of the motorway blasting its way through Thorndon in the '60s & '70s and Te Aro in the 2000s until its comeuppance from the Save The Basin campaign in 2014 has me wondering if the current ceasefire of the motorway builders will endure. The next time there's a right-wing mayor and/or council and a National government, will they be trying again to concrete over the central city to allow more traffic through? Unless their transport thinking changes, probably.

All the discussion of CBAs (or BCRs, if you prefer) reminded me that the next time a congestion-driven motorway expansion is planned, Wellingtonians should look to San Francisco and other cities that have successfully removed highways to revitalise their inner cities. If you've visited the Embarcadero in San Francisco you'll know what was once a brutally ugly double-decker highway cordoning off the city from its waterfront is now a tourist Mecca teeming with social & economic life. So my question would be, what if we ripped up the Thorndon and Te Aro motorway and replaced it with, y'know, neighbourhoods for people to live in and shops for them to purchase things in? Stranger things have happened.

Civic Square, after the Schrader talk

The duality of the Victorian libido

What are we faced with in the nineteenth century? An age where woman was sacred; and where you could buy a thirteen-year-old girl for a few pounds - a few shillings, if you wanted her for only an hour or two. Where more churches were built than in the whole history of the country; and where one in sixty houses in London was a brothel (the modern ratio would be nearer one in six thousand). Where the sanctity of marriage (and chastity before marriage) was proclaimed from every pulpit, in every newspaper editorial and public utterance; and where never - or hardly ever - have so many great public figures, from the future king down, led scandalous private lives. Where the penal system was progressively humanised; and flagellation was so rife that a Frenchman set out quite seriously to prove that the Marquis de Sade must have had English ancestry. Where the female body had never been so hidden from view; and where every sculptor was judged by his ability to carve naked women. Where there is not a single novel, play or poem of literary distinction that ever goes beyond the sensuality of a kiss, where Dr Bowdler (the date of whose death, 1825, reminds us that the Victorian ethos was in being long before the strict threshold of the age) was widely considered a public benefactor; and where the output of pornography has never been exceeded. Where the excretory functions were never referred to; and where the sanitation remained - the flushing lavatory came late in the age and remained a luxury well up to 1900 - so primitive that there can have been few houses, and few streets, where one was not constantly reminded of them. Where it was universally maintained that women do not have orgasms; and yet every prostitute was taught to simulate them. Where there was an enormous progress and liberation in every other field of human activity; and nothing but tyranny in the most personal and fundamental.

- John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, 1969, p.258-9. 

Upper Hutt

The presidential art of handshaking

On rare occasions [President James K.] Polk essayed the light touch. Once, for instance, he explained to some people how he handled the problem of handshaking. 'I told them,' he confided to his diary, 'that I had found that there was great art in shaking hands, and that I could shake hands during the whole day without suffering any bad effects from it. They were curious to know what this art was. I told them that if a man surrendered his arm to be shaken, by some horizontally, by others perpendicularly, and by others again with a strong grip, he could not fail to suffer severely from it, but that if he would shake and not be shaken, grip and not be gripped, taking care always to squeeze the hand of his adversary as hard as he squeezed him, that he suffered no inconvenience from it. I told them also that I could generally anticipate when I was to have a strong grip, and that when I observed a strong man approaching I generally took advantage of him by being a little quicker than he was and seizing him by the tip of his fingers, giving him a hearty shake, and thus preventing him from getting a full grip upon me'. Polk's auditors were much amused by his exposition, but Polk ended up being deadly serious about it. There was 'much philosophy,' he decided, in what he had said: 'though I gave my account of the operation playfully, it is all true'.

- James K. Polk (US President 1845-49), quoted in P.F. Boller, Presidential Anecdotes, 1981, p.101.

See also:
Music: They Might Be Giants - James K Polk
Blog: Would Limbaugh be a better president than SpongeBob?, 25 February 2016
TV: American Idol - Reagan, 26 March 2011

Film Festival roundup 2018

Now the 2018 festival's over, it's time to reacquaint ourselves with our homes and sofas, having been long neglected as we've lived our lives in the Embassy and Reading cinemas. It's been a solid year for the New Zealand International Film Festival, with some undoubted classics to savour. Here's the 20 films that I managed to see in Wellington:

In the Aisles (dir. Thomas Stuber, Germany, 2018)
In den Gängen
Gentle, generous observations of life and slowly-budding romance among the supermarket shelves in this German tale featuring an appealing lead performance from the quiet, brooding Franz Rogowski and talented support from Sandra Hüller (Toni Erdmann, NZIFF16), who is fast becoming a must-see German star. Features adroit cinematography and a pleasing array of forklift-based humour for those familiar with the shelf-stacker's creed.

Monterey Pop (dir. D.A. Pennebaker, USA, 1968)

The wonderful thing about Monterey Pop, aside from the fact that it helped launch Janis Joplin's solo career and was an amazing document of the raw star power of Otis Redding shortly before his untimely death, is the irony that of its stellar performance roster, arguably the 'pop' material is the least interesting. John Phillips organised the festival so the Mamas and the Papas get two songs intended to bookend the performances - a strong California Dreamin' and a passable Got A Feelin' - but it's the knockout performance by sitarist Ravi Shankar that instead closes the film. Shankar's bravura set is just one of the riveting performances on offer, but the impact on the California crowd is the most completely documented, and suffice it to say the crowd's mind is officially blown, leading to a rapturous standing ovation. This is also the festival at which The Who and Jimi Hendrix struggled to outdo each other with brilliant and hilarious rock excess, with The Who trashing their instruments at the end of their set and Hendrix famously setting his guitar alight. (You can see what's left of it in a Seattle museum). There are fun insights into the performers' reaction to their fellow artists, like Mama Cass' obvious admiration for the huge energy Joplin brought to the stage. And I'd never noticed the sly dig before the Jefferson Airplane set, with a hippie chick decrying 'rock bullshit' immediately beforehand, filmed during another part of the day entirely.

Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable (dir. Sasha Waters Freyer, USA, 2018)

A commendable photography biopic, which performs the usual key service of displaying and discussing some of the photographer's best-known work, but also delves into the interesting dilemmas of his ill-judged and much-criticised Women Are Beautiful book in 1975 (Winogrand could hardly have been described as a feminist) and his work in the years leading up to his untimely death in 1984, when he was shooting pictures at his traditional fearsome pace but not actually printing and editing them. Art critics are still uncertain if the latter archive represents a late-career decline in talent or if it's just that others fail to understand how the photographer would have curated his own work, if he'd ever seen it.

Leave No Trace (dir. Debra Granik, USA, 2018)

A very fine depiction of a close father-daughter relationship, which benefits from accomplished and naturalistic lead performances from Ben Foster and the teenaged Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie who flew half-way across the world from little old Wellington to the Pacific Northwest. The off-the-grid wilderness life the two live out is largely driven by the father's PTSD, but when they are involuntarily returned to life within the bounds of conventional society it becomes increasingly clear that despite their love, father and daughter may not want precisely the same way of life. There are no bad guys here, and it's so pleasing to see an American film that avoids the easy route of establishing an antagonist as a villain to unite against; the social services and random strangers the pair encounter all display the unfailing generosity of spirit that Americans often exhibit. The acting never descends into melodrama or milks what could easily turn into histrionics - rather, the quiet struggle of these very real characters is allowed to evolve organically without showboating. It was a real treat to have director Debra Granik (Winter's Bone) and hometown co-star McKenzie at the Embassy for a film festival Q&A session, in which both offered generous explanations of their film-making process and the spirit of the film. Like recent films Captain Fantastic and Walking Out, Leave No Trace portrays family bonds purified by nature, but while the former two films are solid and appealing portrayals, Leave No Trace is an even more enduring artistic achievement.

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (dir. Alexandra Dean, USA, 2017)

The multiple lives of cinema sex symbol and gifted inventor Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000). Bombshell is a compelling examination of the life of one of Hollywood's greatest screen beauties, whose main contribution to the world was actually her remarkable gift for technological invention. Her 1942 frequency-hopping patent designed with a colleague with the intention of creating unjammable radio-guided torpedoes eventually formed the basis of much of modern telecommunications technology, including wi-fi and Bluetooth. Throughout, you're impressed by the pluck and drive of the glamorous Austrian, who seems to have had to constantly reinvent herself, at great personal risk, to secure her position in life. Unlucky in love, Lamarr chalked up six husbands; perhaps there's an interesting documentary to be made about the lives of Hollywood celebrity mothers because it all sounded impossibly difficult to balance (see also Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words).

And Breathe Normally (dir. Isold Uggadottir, Iceland, 2018)
Andið eðlilega
Like Aki Kaurismaki's The Other Side of Hope, this Icelandic film illustrates the intersection between western society and asylum seekers and migrants, putting a face and a name behind the statistics. While the relationship between the Icelandic solo mum who takes a job as an airport border guard and West African migrant seeking a better life for her family is somewhat far-fetched, the film does a good job of illustrating the plight of would-be migrants (and in this film Babetida Sadjo's character is only passing through Iceland en route to Canada - she's not intending to stay in the country at all). The child actor who plays the border guard's son is very good, particularly his wistful longing to visit a country where people can actually wear shorts.

Three Identical Strangers (dir. Tim Wardle, USA, 2018)

The difficulty in reviewing Three Identical Strangers, which appears to be the breakout star of NZIFF 2018, is that providing a description of the documentary flirts with revealing the premise. And it's a delicate balance to tell a story like this, which - no spoilers - commences with a tremendous fairytale story that soon becomes tainted with dark secrets. It's both chilling and fascinating to watch elderly interviewees tell a decades-old story with a chuckle, as a detective story unfolds. Recommended viewing, particularly for people with twins in the family, but if at all possible avoid trailers or reading the backstory.

Beirut (dir. Brad Anderson, USA, 2018)

Harking back to the '70s espionage genre, this solid and watchable thriller offers few surprises but holds the viewer's attention, particularly thanks to the strong leads of John Hamm as the hard-bitten negotiator and Rosamund Pike as a CIA operative. The film has been fairly criticised for featuring no Lebanese actors, although this may be a function of being filmed in Morocco. Would've been a constructive gesture to cast some, I'd've thought. And as Hollywood revisits the dramatic newsreel of an earlier generation, what are the odds on Grenada: The Movie next?

The King (dir. Eugene Jarecki, USA, 2017)

It's an appealing idea, driving around America in Elvis Presley's old Rolls-Royce Phantom and asking people what the man's music meant to them. Recording musicians playing in the back, charting his cultural impact as the limo crosses the land. Another appealing idea is using Elvis as a metaphor for the American dream, in a modern age in which that concept is increasingly discredited or at least questioned. While The King is an engaging viewing experience, it feels stretched too thin trying to cover both angles and fails to address either comprehensively. The end credits feature intriguing musical performances that cried out for space in the movie itself; talking heads dissect Elvis' career but it's left to archival footage of John Lennon and a few others to try to measure the huge impact he had on 20th century music. It's commendable that eloquent dissenting voices like Chuck D ("Elvis never meant shit to me") are able to dispel the myth of universal adulation, and co-producer Ethan Hawke paints a picture that indie music fans will all be familiar with - that after an incendiary rise to stardom it all started to go horribly wrong, musically speaking.

Shoplifters (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 2018)

Manbiki kazoku

Another classic modern drama from Hirokazu Kore-eda, charting a year in the life of an atypical family unit living on the semi-legal fringe of Japanese society - a society that takes great exception to grifters who don't pull their weight. Encountering a charming five-year-old girl, Yuri, who is living with abusive parents, the father Osamu 'adopts' her, taking her into the initially wary but ultimately loving and caring ramshackle household. Yuri's new 'older brother' Shota takes her under his wing and finds an able accomplice in his regular shoplifting forays; these scenes are superbly handled, being both poignant and charming. As Yuri encounters love and affection for the first time she brings the family closer together, but ultimately and invariably, the real world intrudes. Shoplifters bears all the traditional hallmarks of Kore-eda's productions - absolutely winning performances from child actors, a genuinely powerful evocation of familial affection and the power of companionship and kindness, and a wry humour for the challenges of modern life. But in its conclusion Shoplifters takes the examination of family bonds further than in any of his films. With a bravura plot twist he pulls the rug out from what was already a compelling and warm family drama and turns it into a searching and even haunting moral quandary. Like his other films, Shoplifters asks 'what is family?', but this film also asks some troubling questions about society's expectations, surviving modern poverty and the nature of parenthood itself.

Stray (dir. Dustin Feneley, NZ, 2018)

Certainly well-shot in the beautiful wintry South Island, and the lead performances from Kieran Charnock and Arta Dobroshi are commendable, particularly given the minimalist dialogue they have to work with. While Stray is a solid technical achievement, it falls into the well-rehearsed New Zealand film genre of Tortured Miserablism, so there's sadly little fun to be had watching it. Overlong shots amble to their drawn-out conclusion, a wildly implausible sex scene is thrown in, and there's a desperate need for a satisfying ending.

Arctic (dir. Joe Penna, Iceland, 2018)

Go Mads! The wilds of Iceland offer plenty of challenges for this far northern survival-against-the-odds tale, and lead actor Mads Mikkelsen gives a splendid performance as plane-crash survivor Overgard, who is the human embodiment of indefatigability. The script throws every obstacle in the book at the craggy Dane, and the brisk 90 minute runtime fairly races along as everything under the Arctic sun that can go wrong, does. Pity this probably won't be seen by many American viewers, because if there's a performance worthy of an Oscar nomination, both in terms of the quality of the performance and the sheer endurance it must've taken to make the film, Mikkelsen surely deserves it.

First Reformed (dir. Paul Schrader, USA, 2017)

Despite First Reformed's wildly implausible premise, Ethan Hawke delivers a strong and highly watchable performance as a troubled priest whose environmental consciousness becomes awakened by an encounter with an eco-warrior parishioner. Amanda Seyfried provides commendably unshowy support as the eco-warrior's pregnant wife.

Woman at War (dir. Benedikt Erlingsson, Iceland, 2018)
Kona fer í stríð

Benedikt Erlingsson's deft comedy-drama shows his growing skill and confidence as a director, and offers a superb central performance from the very game Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir as unstoppable environmental saboteur Halla and her yoga instructor twin sister Asa. The film benefits from the playful inventiveness of its director, with plenty of tricks to keep the audience guessing, particularly in a masterful Icelandic wilderness chase scene in which the 49-year-old Halla evades her would-be captors using her splendid ingenuity. While I didn't relish it as much as the rest of the audience, Erlingsson's choice to have incidental music provided by an on-screen trio of Icelandic musicians and three Ukrainians folk-singers is suitably quirky. Also featuring the return of the Spanish cycle tourist from Of Horses & Men to provide light comic relief, Woman At War is both a great deal of fun and a successful exemplar of how to depict environmental activism both sympathetically and persuasively.

The Third Murder (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 2017)
Sandome no satsujin
Bringing his talent for characterisation and dialogue to a courtroom drama, Kore-eda starts with a murder and a perpetrator that confesses his guilt, wrong-footing his defence team and the audience from the outset. The truth is hard to pin down though, and his experienced defence lawyer happens to be the son of the judge who sentenced the same man to decades in jail for two killings in the 1980s, which he also confessed to. Playing with the notion of unreliable narrators and a legal mind trained to target success over justice, The Third Murder is strong work and always watchable, if not quite as engrossing as the director's family dramas.

Filmworker (dir. Tony Zierra, USA, 2017)

While the natural curiosity for an insider's tale into the work of film genius Kubrick is what you're signing up for by watching the Leon Vitali biopic Filmworker, what you emerge with after viewing it is a real admiration and sympathy for the dedication and selflessness of the film's actual subject. Vitali was so trusted and giving that he could work for the endlessly demanding and perfectionist Kubrick for decades. It's telling that the film never asks Vitali, 'why didn't you take what you'd learned from Kubrick and make your own films?', presumably the idea would be ludicrous. Why, after all, would you give up the opportunity to work with one of the 20th century's greatest film minds? It's just a pity that Vitali never gained the riches so many other film professionals accrued; perhaps this film will help rectify that in some small way.

Wings of Desire (dir. Wim Wenders, West Germany, 1987)
Der Himmel über Berlin
For many years my favourite film ever made, presented in a sumptuously beautiful 4K restoration. Here's what I wrote about it back in 2012.

Juliet, Naked (dir. Jesse Peretz, USA, 2018)

This enjoyable romantic comedy isn't really a festival film per se but I presume it wouldn't get a New Zealand release outside the festival. Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke have a nice, relaxed chemistry, with reliably amusing support from Chris O'Dowd as the music obsessive loser boyfriend. It naturally has the traditional artfully-chosen soundtrack that all Nick Hornby features must by law possess, and plaudits also to Byrne for her English accent. The only downside for me was that while Ethan Hawke is very watchable in it, it's a bit distracting how much he resembles Bill Oddie.

Burning (dir. Lee Chang-dong, South Korea, 2018)
Beoning

It's a delight to see a film devoted to allowing its narrative to develop in such an unhurried yet purposeful way as this Korean drama. I'm so glad I managed to avoid trailers and preview articles because I'm guessing they'd reveal elements of the plot that are better left discovered on the big screen. The investment of time makes the film's conclusion exponentially more powerful and memorable. With skilled direction, unshowy performances, a top score and restrained yet beautiful cinematography, Burning is a subtle gem.

Cold War (dir. Pawel Pawlikowski, Poland, 2018)
Zimna wojna
The musical heart of this Polish drama spanning the late '40s to the mid-60s is as vibrant and engrossing as any cinematic musical, and its depictions of Polish folk music, Parisian jazz in the 1950s and the electric shock of rock 'n' roll are fascinating to watch and a delight to listen to. The Parisian night-club scene featuring Bill Haley's Rock Around The Clock is pure joy to watch. The two Polish leads command the screen and the sumptuous black-and-white cinematography is a stunning achievement. Have a care and cut back on those ciggies though, Wiktor!

See also:

Movies: Film festival roundup 2017

Movies: Film festival roundup 2016 part 1, part 2
Movies: Film festival roundup 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2009

Rainy night in Brooklyn

Flights of fancy

He ducked his head down inside the cockpit. The phosphorescent needles had begun to glow. One after the other he checked the figures and was happy. He felt himself solidly ensconced in this evening sky. He ran a finger along a steel rib and felt the life coursing through it; the metal was not vibrant but alive. The engine's five hundred horse-power had charged the matter with a gentle current, changing its icy deadness into velvet flesh. Once again the pilot in flight experienced neither giddiness not intoxicating thrill, but only the mysterious travail of living flesh.

He had made a world for himself once more. He moved his arms to feel even more at home, then ran his thumb over the electric circuit diagram. He fingered the various switches, shifted his weight, settled back, and sought to find the position best suited for feeling the oscillations of these five tons of metal which a moving night had shouldered. Groping with his fingers, he pushed the emergency lamp into position, let it go, seized hold of it again after making sure it wouldn't slip, then let go to touch each throttle lever and to assure himself that he could reach them without looking - thus training his fingers for a blind man's world. His fingers having taken stock of everything, he switched on a lamp, decking out his cockpit with precision instruments. Attentive to the dial readings, he could now enter the night, like a submarine starting on its dive. There was no trembling, no shaking, no undue vibration; and as his gyroscope, altimeter, and r.p.m. rate remained constant, he stretched his limbs, leaned his head back against the leather seat, and fell into an airborne meditation rich with unfathomable hopes.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight, 1931 (trans. Curtis Cate, 1971)

The peculiar wretchedness one can feel while the wind blows

As a writer, Katherine Mansfield absorbed the Wellington wind as deeply as the Romantics, making it something like her literary accomplice, even if its vehemence often tested the relationship. She wrote, '[I]t moves with an emotion I don't ever understand'. The wind stirs beneath her words, snuffling, as she puts it, around the corners of the page. In 'The Wind Blows' she asks: 'Hasn't anyone written poems to the wind?'...

Wind adds a feather-ruffling frisson to many of her stories. She often uses weather - especially the wind - as a conventional literary device to evoke mood, setting and narrative jumps. In 'Psychology', 'a cold snatch of hateful wind' underlines the anguish of the parting. In 'The Wind Blows' the gale is centre stage, the noisy, lurching main actor. The story 'Revelations' ships the tempest to France where 'un vent insupportable' roils the protagonist: 'the wild wind caught her and floated her across the pavement'. 'The New Baby' gives the breeze a calmer quality, with 'the soft moist breath of the large wind breathing so gently from the boundless sea'.

In her hands, her hometown wind also gains omnipotent powers, sometimes for better, mostly for worse. 'A Birthday' illustrates its impact on the civic mood. A doctor reassures a patient: "'You're jagged by the weather," he said wryly, "nothing else"'. And like most Wellingtonians, Katherine Mansfield was highly sensitised to the breeze: 'To remember the sound of the wind - the peculiar wretchedness one can feel while the wind blows'. 'The Wrong House' evokes the same mood: 'It was a bitter autumn day; the wind ran in the street like a thin dog'. In 'Juliet', she says of the protagonist: 'the wind always hurt her, unsettled her'.

Wellington's is no ordinary wind. 'A Birthday' outs its gales as pitiless, dominating, even bullying: 'A tremendous gust of wind sprang upon the house, seized it, shook it, dropped, only to grip it more tightly'.

- Redmer Yska, A Strange Beautiful Excitement. Katherine Mansfield's Wellington 1888-1903, Dunedin, 2017, p.72-3.

The grooviest place on the planet

A pal sent me this tremendous clip of Soho in July or August '67, which looks fantastic in HD. It looks like the rough footage for a film-magazine piece. The first part is in Carnaby St (above-knee hemlines mandatory), which was probably the trendiest place on the planet at the time, and it goes on to Portobello Rd markets.

Seals wintering at Red Rocks

Getting Welly (and Auckland) moving

I enjoyed listening to a talk by Vancouver's city transport manager Dale Bracewell at the Sustainability Trust here in Wellington last week, and this 9-minute interview by RNZ's Jesse Mulligan is a good summary of the optimistic appraisal Bracewell has of the prospects for expanded transportation options for cycling, walking and public transport in Auckland and Wellington. (And elsewhere, but those were the two New Zealand cities he visited on his Australia-New Zealand tour). I can vouch for the Vancouver Skytrain, having used it last month, but I promise I'm not (yet) advocating building a monorail here, if only because of the Lyle Langley jokes it would spawn.

Interview: 'Transport solutions: Advice from Vancouver's Dale Bracewell', Jesse Mulligan 1-4pm, Radio New Zealand, 9 July 2018

Film Festival 2018 lineup

Another year, another 20 films to savour in this highly promising 2018 Film Festival programme, which begins screening in Wellington on 27 July. Of this brief selection I'm most excited about the two Kore-eda dramas from Japan and the three films set in Iceland. It will also be a real treat to see 4K restorations of Monterey Pop and Wings of Desire on the big screen. Now the only thing to do is avoid all spoilers and trailers until the end of July, and gird myself for the inevitable wrangles with the opening-day ticket booking system!

In the Aisles (dir. Thomas Stuber, Germany, 2018)
In den Gängen
Night-stackers in a German supermarket find their own place and even a little love in an uncaring world.

Monterey Pop (dir. D.A. Pennebaker, USA, 1968)

4K restored pop gorgeousness, including astonishing performances from The Who, Jimi Hendrix and the soul colossus Otis Redding.

Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable (dir. Sasha Waters Freyer, USA, 2018)

Biography of the self-destructive genius photographer who died in 1984 and helped to define the photographic style of a generation.

Leave No Trace (dir. Debra Granik, USA, 2018)

Compelling drama depicting a father and daughter whose off-grid life is disrupted by authorities, and how they face the challenges of conventional society; featuring a breakthrough performance by young NZ actor Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie.

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (dir. Alexandra Dean, USA, 2017)

The multiple lives of cinema sex symbol and brilliant mechanical inventor Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000).

And Breathe Normally (dir. Isold Uggadottir, Iceland, 2018)
Andið eðlilega
A single mum retrains as a border guard and crosses paths with a refugee from Guinea-Bissau.

Three Identical Strangers (dir. Tim Wardle, USA, 2018)

Identical triplets separated and raised by different families discover more than they bargained about their heritage. (This is one I'm definitely not watching the trailer for or reading anything about in advance!)

Beirut (dir. Brad Anderson, USA, 2018)

Jon Hamm stars as a jaded ex-diplomat who returns to Beirut in 1982 to negotiate the release of a friend taken hostage.

The King (dir. Eugene Jarecki, USA, 2017)

Driving the backroads of America in Elvis' old '63 Rolls-Royce Phantom V, listening to musicians describe in words and song what Elvis and America means to them.

Shoplifters (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 2018)

Manbiki kazoku
Always a thrill to see another of Kore-eda's lovingly crafted, profoundly humanist family Japanese dramas. This one's about the struggling Shibata family, who adopt and care for an abused child. Won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

Stray (dir. Dustin Feneley, NZ, 2018)

A loner in self-imposed exile in Central Otago encounters a mysterious woman in a dramatic, sumptuously-shot landscape.

Arctic (dir. Joe Penna, Iceland, 2018)

Mads Mikkelsen's plane crashes in Iceland. 'Nuff said.

First Reformed (dir. Paul Schrader, USA, 2017)

Ethan Hawke as a small-town minister whose ebbing faith is tested by his circumstances and the spiralling decline of America (I think).

Woman at War (dir. Benedikt Erlingsson, Iceland, 2018)
Kona fer í stríð
Middle-aged environmental activist Halla makes her own rules in this Icelandic drama.

The Third Murder (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 2017)
Sandome no satsujin
Another Kore-eda film! This one's a steely courtroom drama uses a murder trial as a vehicle for examining Japanese society.

Filmworker (dir. Tony Zierra, USA, 2017)

Biopic of English actor and Stanley Kubrick's personal assistant, Leon Vitali (b.1948).

Wings of Desire (dir. Wim Wenders, West Germany, 1987)
Der Himmel über Berlin
For many years my favourite film ever made. Here's what I wrote about it back in 2012.

Juliet, Naked (dir. Jesse Peretz, USA, 2018)

A woman's frustration with her partner's musical obsession, the lost rocker Tucker Crowe, comes to a head in this adaptation of Nick Hornby's novel.

Burning (dir. Lee Chang-dong, South Korea, 2018)
Beoning
A mysterious love triangle based on a Haruki Murakami short story, which wowed the critics at Cannes. 

Cold War (dir. Pawel Pawlikowski, Poland, 2018)
Zimna wojna
A doomed Eastern Bloc Cold War romance tells the musical and political story of the times.

A Latin lesson with Plum

'Nothing is more curious than the myriad ways in which reaction from an unfortunate love-affair manifests itself in various men. No two males behave in the same way under the spur of female fickleness. Archilochum, for instance, according to the Roman writer, proprio rabies armavit iambo. It is no good pretending out of politeness that you know what that means, so I will translate. Rabies -- his grouch -- armavit -- armed -- Archilochum -- Archilochus -- iambo -- with the iambic -- proprio -- his own invention. In other words, when the poet Archilochus was handed his hat by the lady of his affections, he consoled himself by going off and writing satirical verse about her in a new metre which he had thought up immediately after leaving the house. That was the way the thing affected him'.

- P.G. Wodehouse, The Girl on the Boat, 1922

[The phrase more precisely means something like 'Rage armed Archilochus with his own iambic' [i.e. the poetic device, iambic pentameter]

Brugha's bulwark

On the Irish side Cathal Brugha passed into folklore as the contemporary embodiment of the legendary hero Cuchulain who tied himself to a tree stump during battle so that he would not fall from his wounds. Cuchulain's enemies only approached him when a raven perched on his shoulder, indicating that he was dead. Brugha, a Vice-Commandant whom a former colleague later described as being as brave and as stupid as a bull, received twenty-five wounds. He was defending a barricade erected to guard the Nurses' Home where the Volunteers' leader Eamonn Kent along with William Cosgrave, who later became an Irish Prime Minister, and a small group of rebels were located. He gave his watch to a subordinate to be given to his wife - if the Volunteer ever got out alive.

Then, his own life apparently forfeit, he turned to defend the barricade alone for as long as he could. Inside the Nurses' Home the Volunteers were dispirited and weary. It appeared that the end had come and while waiting for a final attack that they did not expect to survive, they joined Kent in saying a decade of the Rosary. Then from outside the Home they heard Brugha singing God Save Ireland. He had dragged himself into a position with his back to a wall where he could command the barricade and was challenging the British to come over it. Reinvigorated, the rebels shook off their depression, remanned the barricade and kept the British at bay. Incredibly, Brugha survived the Rising - to die six years later in a civil war at the hands of forces commanded by a government which included William Cosgrave.

- Tim Pat Coogan, 1916: The Easter Rising, London, 2001, p.117-8.

See also:
Comedy: The Irish police force, 30 November 2014
Comedy: Every Irish wedding ever, 26 March 2014
Blog: Ireland, 5 June 2010

Stay shiny, Naenae

Naenae, Lower Hutt, viewed from the Te Whiti Riser track, 6 May.

How to cope with bullies

In David Mitchell's charming 2006 coming-of-age novel, Black Swan Green, 13-year-old protagonist Jason Taylor is growing up in rural Worcestershire in Falklands-mad 1982. Flirting with clandestine poetry-writing, dogged by a ruthless stutter and beset by school bullies, his lot is not always a happy one. 

In one class, music teacher Mr Kempsey sends Jason on an errand to fetch a school whistle for the teachers' post-class bus duty. (Jason seeks directions to Kempsey's office from another teacher who is reading a notoriously perverse French intellectual novella, L'histoire de l'oeil (The Story of the Eye), but he tells none-the-wiser Jason it's a history of optometrists). 

On Mr Kempsey's desk, underneath the whistle and obviously meant to be discovered, Jason finds a stack of Xeroxed pages, each with the same short note - an epistle to the bullied:

Contrary to popular wisdom, bullies are rarely cowards. 

Bullies come in various shapes and sizes. Observe yours. Gather intelligence. 

Shunning one hopeless battle is not an act of cowardice. 

Hankering for security or popularity makes you weak and vulnerable. 

Which is worse: Scorn earned by informers? Misery endured by victims? 

The brutal may have been molded by a brutality you cannot exceed. 

Let guile be your ally. 

Respect earned by integrity cannot be lost without your consent. 

Don't laugh at what you don't find funny. 

Don't support an opinion you don't hold. 

The independent befriend the independent. 

Adolescence dies in its fourth year. You live to be eighty.

Technicolor fragments from the 1920s

I absolutely love this collection of 'two-strip' Technicolor film snippets from the 1920s, which were discovered recently by the BFI as scrag-ends spliced into other films when they were surplus to requirements. While they're generally very short glimpses, they're also amongst the earliest 'proper' colour film footage ever made, and it's intriguing to see the 1920s in this way when we're used to only viewing it in black and white. The Louise Brooks screen test for the 1926 Famous Players-Lasky film The American Venus, which is otherwise almost completely lost, is a priceless example of this important work.

Pickin' out a mess of blues

I've always been deeply suspicious of the arch-conservative tendencies of country music, but like Whispering Bob Harris always says, it is the Home of the Song, and you often find incredible musicianship there. Witness here the flying fingers of 74-year-old English guitarist Albert Lee, who has performed with everyone under the sun and was in his prime in Emmylou Harris' Hot Band in the late '70s, on this classic, Country Boy. Recorded earlier this year for the Old Grey Whistle Test reunion TV special, which is great viewing.

Putangirua Pinnacles

Rush hour at Petone Beach

The 'suicide club' of the early US Air Mail Service

In August 1918, the [US] post took over airmail operations from the military, and the department's own civilian pilots began to fly its own biplanes, which were either custom-built or remodeled for postal service. (De Havilland's DH-4, which had a more powerful 400-horsepower engine, superseded the Jenny as the fleet's workhorse). Much like the Pony [Express] riders, the aviators were expected to satisfy their employers' obsessions with speed and sticking to the schedule regardless of conditions. They raced their finicky, flimsy, unreliable aircraft through dense fogs, blizzards, and towering mountain ranges, protected mostly by the small planes' responsiveness and slow speeds. Of the 200 pilots who belonged to the service's "suicide club" between 1918 and 1926, 35 died on duty, but many more emerged bloody and battered from crashes.

Somehow, the Air Mail Service managed to complete 90 percent of its flights, although emergency landings were common. Pilot Dean Smith telegraphed a cryptic explanation to headquarters after his engine quit in midair, causing an unusual disaster: "Only place to land on cow. Killed cow. Wrecked plane. Scared me. Smith." While carrying the mail from Elko, Nevada, to Boise, Idaho, Paul Scott was forced to land by a broken oil line; then, followed by a pack of wolves, he walked 27 miles for help. When Henry Boonstra's carburetor froze during a snowstorm, he set the plane down on a 9400-foot-high Utah mountain, grabbed the mail, and stumbled through heavy drifts for 33 hours before reaching a ranch house. The resident shepherd lent him a horse, and the pilot finally reached the nearest village and phone three days later. The aviators accepted such hair-raising risks less for the salary than from the desire to hold one of the few jobs in the world that allowed them to fly. As Smith put it, "Alone in an empty cockpit, there is nothing and everything to see. It was so alive and rich a life that any other conceivable choice seemed dull, prosaic and humdrum".

Thrill-seeking behaviour has a strong genetic component, and the right stuff clearly ran in the family of Katherine Stinson, the first woman authorised to fly the US mail. Her parents operated a flight school in Texas, her sister Marjorie trained combat pilots in World War I, and her brother Eddie founded the Stinson Aircraft Company. The "Flying Schoolgirl" took America by storm with her loop-the-loops and skywriting, to say nothing of her leather garb and trousers, then still a rarity for women. In 1913, she amazed the crowd at the Montana State Fair by dropping mailbags from her sketchy wood-and-fabric plane, then went on to enthrall fans abroad before volunteering to be a combat pilot in 1917. She was rejected because of her sex but helped the cause by flying for pledges that brought $2 million to the Red Cross. In 1918, Stinson signed on as a regular Air Mail Service pilot and, despite a crash landing en route from Chicago to New York, managed to break a record for covering 783 miles in 11 hours. (Around 1920, tuberculosis forced her back to earth; she moved to New Mexico for her health, became a successful architect, and lived to the age of 86).

- Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, New York, 2016, p224-5.

See also:
Blog: From London to Amsterdam, 1922, 20 February 2017
Blog: Seattle Museum of Flight, 25 April 2013
Blog: Le Bourget Air & Space Museum, 18 March 2011

Marlene Dietrich's 1929 screentest for The Blue Angel

Last night's viewing was Emil Jannings & Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). The 1930 film produced in both German and English-language versions made Dietrich a trans-Atlantic star and landed her a hefty Hollywood contract with Paramount, which desperately needed some European glamour to rival MGM's Swedish star, Greta Garbo. And when this is your screen-test - replete with its feisty, unconcealed disdain for the risible material - why wouldn't you get the gig? The 1929 screentest was thought lost for decades until it turned up in Austria in 1992, just before Dietrich died. Unfortunately I can't find a version that will permit embedding, but just follow the link below.
 
Marlene Dietrich's Screen Test for Josef Von Sternberg's The Blue Angel from Justin Bozung on Vimeo.