Music Monday: Children in Need

I love Children in Need. It can be a bit of a to-do (when I have to send my toddler to preschool wearing something spotty, and there’s nothing suitable to be had for love or money), and the sob stories become more and more distressing each year, as my involvement in motherhood deepens (how do you let children, in your own affluent Western country, sink to such misery?), but the show and its aftermath always restore my faith in humankind. This year, the event has raised £26 million, £8 million more than last year, at a time when recession is still biting. I will not despair.

I’m supposed to be too old for boy bands, but One Direction are just too cute and too much fun. (Video’s a bit out of sync, but I’m not nitpicking.)

I don’t care for Gok Wan’s stylistic prowess (I’m still a Trinny & Susannah girl), but he certainly seems to know his stuff when it comes to musical theatre. This performance got even my classically trained husband’s seal of approval, and that’s something.

Music Monday: Peter Gabriel

I don’t particularly like orchestral music, but I love the recent years trend of scoring rock songs for full orchestra. I think I tune out fully instrumental music (which, of course, makes it the ideal sound carpet for writing ventures, like NaNoWriMo – but that’s a story for another day), while an actual song, backed by an orchestra, acquires that extra oomph that makes it exhilarating.

This is why I fell for this piece, and fell hard, as soon as I saw it on the Jools Holland show, only last Friday. Are we looking at the Christmas chart-topper? One can only hope.

Music Monday: Emilie Autumn

I’ve been notified that a new album is on its way. (Insert fangirly squee.) I wonder if she’s moving away from the ‘Victoriandustrial’ look and outlook of the Opheliac era, or if that’s her persona that won’t budge from album to album… Judging by the cult following of the Asylum book (which I still can’t afford *pout*), I suspect the latter. What I’m pretty sure of is she’s going to deliver some more wonderfully bitchy lyrics. Like these.

Music Monday: Queen

Waking up and finding out (on the day’s Google Doodle) that today would have been Freddie Mercury’s 65th birthday instantly decided what the day’s musical feature would be.

This for the recent tone of my life, what with doing away with old, tired perceptions (as well as needing a belly laugh or five):

I first heard this as the music theme for a school uniform advert a few years ago, and it has been my psych-up theme for this time of year ever since:

Paul Rodgers could never replace Freddie, so he didn’t even try. He just did his inspiration justice:

Have a good one, Freddie, wherever you are.

Gangster Paradise, part IV

1. GoodFellas (1990)
Martin Scorsese’s flamboyant gangster film breaks the Mafia code of silence. It’s the real deal, not some bada-bing thing… Capiche?

As far back as he could remember, Martin Scorsese always wanted to be a priest. When he was in grade school in Little Italy, New York he used to go to the seminary after class. He bought into the whole Catholic deal: sin, redemption and the eternal flames of Hell. But what he didn’t do was impress the priests, who threw him out at the end of his first year for mucking about during prayers: ‘They thought I was a thug.’

Priest. Thug. Filmmaker. When he finally discovered the Holy Church of Cinema, Scorcese’s movies became the confession box for New York’s damned. And who better than Father Marty, the intense man with beetling eyebrows, to hear the sins of Johnny Boy, Rupert Pupkin or Travis Bickle?

The story of Henry Hill was different, though. He was a real-life sinner and his crimes had cost him everything. Born in 1943, Hill was a Sicilian-Irish kid seduced into joining the Brooklyn Mafia by the girls, the cars and the money. Hijacking trucks and robbing airports (including the spectacular ’78 Lufthansa heist) brought wealth, yet Hill was just another goombah until his arrest on narcotics charges in 1980. Convinced that he was due to be whacked by his former friends and unwilling to do a long stretch inside, Hill broke the omertà code and rolled over for the Feds.

Henry’s testimony sent a shockwave through the Mafia. He was immortalised in crime reporter Nicholas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family – the most revealing look at the Cosa Nostra since Mario Puzo put pen to paper for The Godfather. When Scorsese, who’d sworn never to do another mob movie, read it during filming on The Color of Money, he rang the author immediately: ‘I’ve been looking for this book for years,’ he explained. The writer shot back: ‘I’ve been waiting for this phone call my entire life.’ The deal was struck. Marty would become Hill’s confessor.

Gangster Paradise, part III

10. Pulp Fiction (1994)
‘Gangster films are sort of parodies of the American Dream,’ explains Quentin Tarantino. ‘They’re a skewed, bizarro world of getting rich in business in America. There always has to be some sort of satire on the American lifestyle.’ So is that why Jules and Vincent go about their business like ordinary schmoes, shooting the shit about burgers and foot massages on their way to make a killing? It’s the hitmen’s very ordinariness that makes them extraordinary though, in a sophomore effort that was both a polished crime anthology and an international phenomenon.
Hats Off: ‘And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger…’

9. Scarface (1983)
Scorsese and De Niro had long wanted to upgrade Howard Hawks’ 1932 crime classic Scarface. They just couldn’t figure out how. Turns out, you had to go all the way. Oliver Stone hung out with gangsters to write the script. Brian De Palma dunked Miami Vice headfirst in blood, cocaine and style. Al Pacino became Michael Corleone’s monstrous id made flesh. Following Cuban refugee Tony Montana’s (Pacino) roaring rise from dishwasher to druglord, Scarface is a terrifying black comedy of lust, wealth, power, destruction and – most of all – excess. Nothing exceeds like it. De Palma’s first ever gangster film combines arty flourishes (watch the darkening colour of Montana’s suits trace the rot of his soul) and berserker violence (even if the motel chainsaw massacre is off screen) in a way even Marty wouldn’t have dared to.
Hats Off: Coke, blood, incestuous rage and our leetle friend… Finales don’t get better.

8. Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Sergio Leone turned down The Godfather to make this epic tale of a Jewish gangster (Robert De Niro) who journeys from ghetto to exile in Prohibition-era New York. The resulting masterpiece, alas, was too much for Warner Bros, who criminally removed 90 minutes from his four-hour version. (‘Such a stupid move,’ sighed co-star James Woods.) Seek out the original, then, to appreciate this elaborate saga, even if it does feature two graphic rape scenes and a persistent opium den motif that convinced some the whole movie is one long, drug-induced hallucination.
Hats Off: For sheer audacity, the opening scene with its endlessly ringing phone.

7. Miller’s Crossing (1990)
Rapid-fire chit-chat and machine-gun violence pepper the Coens’ ’30s-set, Dashiell Hammett-inspired gangster flick, which its DoP Barry Sonnenfeld described as ‘a handsome movie about men in hats’ – no bad pitch for many well-upholstered crime movies. The plot thickens fast, but suffice to say that Gabriel Byrne’s adviser to Albert Finney’s mob boss gets caught up in a lovers’ triangle and a two-way gang tangle over ‘friendship, character and ethics’. The story is pastiche, perhaps, but the directors immaculately tailor the trappings of fast-talking fatalism and sharp-dressed doom.
Hats Off: ‘Look into your heart!’ John Turturro pleads for his life.

6. Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Seventeen years after it first rocked the US indie scene, Tarantino’s energetic, tightly-plotted debut still feels fresher than noughties nostalgia trips like Kill Bill and Death Proof. QT never shows the botched diamond-store heist on which the film hinges – this is all about the fallout, as a gang of colourfully named crims try to root out the mole in their midst. Confidently laying the Tarantino template, Dogs leaves an indelible impression. ‘For some people, the violence isn’t their cup of tea,’ said the director. ‘That’s OK. I wanted it to be disturbing.’
Hats Off: ‘All you can do is pray for a quick death…’ Michael Madsen’s sadistic Mr Blonde goes to work to the sounds of Stealers Wheel.

5. Heat (1995)
Possibly the best cops’n'robbers movie ever made. That’s because in Mann’s world, cops and robbers battle like Gods. The coffee-shop scene between screen deities De Niro and Pacino makes epic drama of tiny silences. Guns sound like thunder. LA becomes a doomy Valhalla. Heat‘s mirror-duel between De Niro’s master robber and Pacino’s brilliant detective holds tight to an emotional inner life as its obsessive anti-heroes lose grip on theirs. Slick and stunning.
Hats Off: That final dying handshake between De Niro and Pacino.

4. The Godfather (1972)
‘I felt that I should quit,’ said Steven Spielberg of the first time he saw The Godfather. ‘That there was no reason to continue directing because I would never reach that level of confidence.’ Eve if you’ve never seen Francis Ford Coppola’s blistering gangster epic, forged in the white heat of Silver Age Hollywood, the saga of Don Vito Corleone’s youngest son Michael’s ascent from shiftless Ivy Leaguer to ruthless Capo di Capi is so seared into the public consciousness you’ll think you have. Shot in burnished mahogany tones, it’s an elegant tale of the gentlemanly corruption of old segueing into an age of cruel efficiency. Pick your own superlative: chances are it’ll be bang on.
Hats Off: The ‘Baptism Massacre’, Michael becoming Godfather as the heads of the other families roll…

3. Army in the Shadows (1969)
Between gangster films proper Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge, Jean-Pierre Melville tapped both his history with the Free French and a novel by Joseph Kessel for a subtextual gangster movie about the French Resistance. Key themes are honour, betrayal and revenge. The bottom lines are sacrifice and loyalty, the former being the high price of the latter. But as Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers argues, ‘Melville refuses to truck with myths of heroism and glory,’ instead directing the grandeur and fatalism of gangster convention to the urgent call of grim truth. Quite brilliant.
Hats Off: Death by towel: silent, ruthless vengeance meted out to a snitch.

2. The Godfather: Part II (1974)
Murder, fratricide, damnation: it’s all just business in Francis Ford Coppola’s two-tone sequel. In the past, Vito Corleone (De Niro) rises from anonymous immigrant to Robin Hood hoodlum, while in the present his son Michael (Pacino) broods in darkened backrooms, a troubled conscience the price he pays for the absolute power he possesses. Coppola styles the dynasty’s damnation as epic, operatic tragedy – an Italian-American Dream turned sour. ‘After winning all the battles and overcoming his enemies, I wanted Michael to be a broken man, a condemned man.’
Hats Off: Michael’s kiss of death. ‘I knew it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.’

Jonathan Crocker, Dan Geary, Jamie Graham, Kevin Harley, Richard Jordan, Philip Kemp, Jamie Russell, Neil Smith, Ceri Thomas © Total Film magazine #157, August 2009. All Rights Reserved.

Gangster Paradise, part II

20. White Heat (1949)
The inspiration for this gangster epic’s blisteringly mad and bad lead character Cody Jarret was simple, says writer Ben Roberts: ‘We synthesised Ma Baker down to having one son instead of four and we put the evil of all four into one man.’ The genius move though was squeezing that malevolence into the pint-sized Jimmy Cagney, here making his first gangster flick since 1939′s The Roaring Twenties. As the mom-obsessed psycho bouncing between homicidal wit and shuddering rage, he’s still one of cinema’s most chilling nutjobs.
Hats Off: Hearing that his mum’s dead, Jarret goes berserk in a prison canteen.

19. Sonatine (1993)
Takeshi Kitano’s minimalist hitman-in-hiding movie is a bravely formalist and philosophical break-out from the gang, played for understated but potent poignancy. ‘With Kitano,’ wrote US critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘narrative and plot become wholly secondary to the emotions, moods, and associations his images conjure.’ And what images, foremost among them being Kitano’s stony, deadpan fizzog as Murakawa, a pro-killer dispatched to a job that turns out to be an ambush. His team are forced to lie low by the seaside, where an ensuing idyll sees them resorting to slapstick play – light-hearted repose briefly replacing violence in their lives. ‘Briefly’ is the key, though. As the repressed brutality returns with terrible inevitability, Kitano’s inscrutable features gradually emerge as the prime visual vessel in an elegy for a man who realises too late that he wants out, his career of swift and professionally administered violence having already left him dead inside.
Hats Off: Power of the unseen: a climactic shoot-out shot from outside, shown only as a light show.

18. Casino (1995)
Even bigger and bolder than GoodFellas, Casino might be a bit long, but it has more swearing and a better tailor. It’s the Shakespearean mirror-image to Scorsese’s mob masterwork, telling the giddy rise-and-fall tale of ultra-smooth mafia apparatchik Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein (Robert De Niro), parachuted in as the new boss of Vegas’ Tangiers casino only to be undone by psycho mates (Joe Pesci, inevitably) and slutty wives (Sharon Stone). ‘We wanted to show the end of the old way,’ mused Marty. A chilling portrait of how gangsterism and business are one and the same in Sin City.
Hats Off: Pesci’s pen-stabbing lesson to ‘some motherfucker’ who disrespects Ace.

17. City of God (2002)
Ferociously kinetic, Fernando Meirelles and co-director Kátia Lund’s adap of Paolo Lins’ non-fiction epic is also propelled by a righteous social agenda. ‘I don’t believe in conventional actors,’ Lund argued. ‘I wanted to give the same sensation as the first time I went into a favela. That all of this is going on and no one is doing anything about it.’ City rips through three decades of urban deterioration and criminal expansion in the Rio favelas: starting with a blackly comic catch-that-chicken scene, flipping to the ’60s and then forward to the ’80s via turf wars and the drug-terror territorialism of one mean cat, L’il Ze. Meirelles and Lund spin mood on a dime, orchestrating the action around a moral void. God, you suspect, is dead.
Hats Off: ‘A little bit frightening’: a disco showdown set sans irony to ‘Kung Fu Fighting’.

16. Bonnie & Clyde (1967)
‘They’re young. They’re in love. And they kill people!’ So proclaimed the tagline to Arthur Penn’s blistering lovers-on-the-lam epic, a sexy, red-blooded riposte to the languid, supercool tales of guns and girls making new waves from across the pond. Watching the film feels like bearing witness to the bitter demise of ’60s idealism, grafted onto the story of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s eponymous natural born killers cheerily pillaging their way across sun-dappled, Depression-era America. A unique fuck-you to the film establishment of the time – with very cool hats.
Hats Off: The bullet-riddled finale – for all its cinematic excess, it’s desperately tragic.

15. Breathless (1960)
Jean-Luc Godard’s crime classic is the quintessential movie of the French New Wave. Jean-Paul Belmondo, a whole new style of movie star with his boxer’s nose and thick lips, is Michel, a petty thief who kills a cop down south and heads for Paris to look up Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American student less naïve than she looks. Michel’s US-gangster pose is lifted straight from Jean-Pierre Melville (who takes a cameo role) but the jump-cuts, hand-held camera, improv jazz score and quirky shifts of pace and mood are all Godard. ‘Modern movies begin here,’ said Roger Ebert.
Hats Off: The long, unbroken tracking shot that follows Belmondo’s stricken Michel down a Parisian cobbled street.

14. Le Samouraï (1961)
Melville’s gangsters stalk the Parisian backstreets in trenchcoats and trilbies, shoulders weighted with existential angst. They’re chic though: even on the run, Alain Delon’s hitman looks like he’s just stepped out of a Paris Match photoshoot. Terser than the director’s earlier hoodlum flicks, it regards criminal activity – like Delon stealing a Citroën in the virtuoso opening – with an obsessive eye for detail. Tarantino’s a fan: ‘Melville’s movies were basically the Warner Brothers Bogart-Cagney films set to this French-Parisian rhythm.’
Hats Off: Delon eluding gendarmes in a dash through the Paris Metro.

13. Salvatore Giuliano (1962)
French critic Michel Ciment reckoned this documentary-tinged portrait of the Sicilian bandit-cum-political terrorist established Francesco Rosi as ‘the greatest political filmmaker of his time’. Dead as the film opens, his subject rarely even appears in the ensuing flashbacks. Rosi scrupulously assembles facts and reports pertaining to Giuliano’s death, but suggests the cover-up renders the truth unknowable. Society, the Mafia and politicos share culpability in Rosi’s crime film-as-political exposé.
Hats Off: An assiduous beginning: Giuliano’s corpse is described in an official report that reveals diddly-squat.

12. Point Blank (1967)
There is no cash – that’s the secret of Point Blank. John Boorman’s stylish, stylized gangster thriller pits Lee Marvin’s ghost-like revenger Walker against the shadowy ‘organisation’ that left him for dead on Alcatraz. He wants his $93,000, but in ultra-modern LA the Mob only deals in cheques or plastic. Boorman exploited the ‘complete loss of nerve by the American studios’ to wrestle total creative control for himself – the resulting movie is a bad trip, with dejà vu flashbacks and jump cuts channelling European style. The first acid-noir gangster flick.
Hats Off: The trippy nightclub scene, with strobe lights punctuating Walker’s violence.

11. Mean Streets (1973)
Scorsese’s paean to the Little Italy of his youth (‘I knew all those guys and many of them are still very close friends’) lacks the polish of his later works but makes up for it with a raw passion and energy embodied in Robert De Niro’s reckless Johnny Boy. The director’s alter ego, though, is Harvey Keitel’s Charlie, the tortured Catholic torn between spirituality and crime. ‘I saw myself in Harvey,’ reveals This Is England helmer and Scorsese fan Shane Meadows. ‘He was part of a circle, but you could see he was looking for a way out.’
Hats Off: ‘I’m a mook? What’s a mook?’

Jonathan Crocker, Dan Geary, Jamie Graham, Kevin Harley, Richard Jordan, Philip Kemp, Jamie Russell, Neil Smith, Ceri Thomas © Total Film magazine #157, August 2009. All Rights Reserved.