WATCHING BLACK MASS

Has Hollywood given up on drama? Film-makers there seem to be going for spectacle and elegy, recently with Spectre and now with Black Mass, a slow-paced narrative, the most memorable element of which is the strings-based soundtrack by Junkie XL (as Tom Holkenborg).

The film seems 'old'. It feels like this type of gangster/cop rivalry and collusion drama has been handled better in films like Good Fellas, Scarface, Donnie Brasco and many others.

It's not clear if Jimmy 'Whitey' Bulger, played by Johnny Depp, is the protagonist or the victim. Bulger never seems to set against anyone or anything. The FBI and policing services are his allies, not antagonists. The Italian Mafia are the enemy but are never seen close to the action, apart from a killing in which mixed ethnic messages are given by a motorcycle with Italian (Moto Guzzi) and British branding (Triumph).

Johnny Depp is mis-cast, though it may simply be the problem of being The Johnny Depp. A sense that his mask and hair line could ping off at any time persists. Slick though it obviously is, that it doesn't ever become ruffled creates a vivid impression and a mystery.

There are no African Americans in the film, except perhaps in street scenes or far back in an office scene. Was South Boston so homogeneously white through Whitey's reign? This adds to the sense that the film is 'old', dated rather than historic.

Women are secured to the kitchen sink. Bulger dotes on his aged mother. He and his crew help a little old lady with her shopping. Young women are mothers or victims. Marianne Connolly rages that her husband could bring Bulger and his associates into their home for beers and barbecue. She screams that they shouldn't be in her kitchen. She later endures a murderously sexual groping from Bulger, one of the more chilling scenes in the film.

It is chilling because it is not blatant or predictable, as the many back-of-the head gun shootings or the strangulations are. They are not chilling. In a world full of images of beheadings and killings by drone-delivered weaponry, Bulger's atrocities are disengaging. Instead of feelings of shock and horror, discomfort and outrage, feelings of boredom and disconnection prevail.

If Johnny Depp is miscast, Kevin Bacon, FBI officer Charles Maguire, and Benedict Cumberbatch, as Jimmy's politician brother Billy, have very little to work with. There's a scene of a spat in the FBI office when Charles Maguire seems on the verge of uncovering the duplicity of his star investigator, John Connolly, played very well by Joel Edgerton. It has the low-energy huffiness of a faux-fight among Ivy League dorm mates, pretending to be 'street'.

The elegy rolls along as a series of voiced-over testimonies by individuals involved in the story, told in a time-line manner which grounds the storytelling in a slow-staccato 'and then and then' rhythm, to produce a downbeat biopic and, ultimately, a sense of 'so what'.

There never appears to be anything at stake for Bulger, the bent cops and agents or for the people of South Boston. The first character with agency and urgency is Fred Wysack, the late-arriving DA, played by Corey Stoll, who's actions begin the ending of the film.

Perhaps the film-makers reliance on narrative rather than drama comes from the book. Perhaps they sought to cleave firmly to it and the film suffers from a reliance on the ordinariness of the grim actions of Bulger and Connolly, without managing to require audiences to engage beyond thinking 'right, that's what happened'.

Mystic River, (Clint Eastwood, 2003) is set in South Boston and involves vicious gangsters and cops caught between collusion and conviction to much better effect. It is based on a book. A novel not a history. Thus it gives us an affecting drama, not an underwhelming bio-pic. Like Black Mass.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1355683/?ref_=nv_sr_1

http://www.junkiexl.com

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DENIS STAUNTON FINDS NOSTALGIA IN ENGLAND

Denis Staunton, a columnist with The Irish Times, finds nostalgia at the heart of two recent films in his column on 20.11.2015. The latest James Bond film, Spectre, is set in a globalised England. The Alan Bennett bio-pic, The Lady in the Van, is set in Camden and Yorkshire, urban and rural bi-poles of England. Denis Staunton writes that the films take us deep into political values there.

If you want to drop a plumb line into the soul of England today, you could do worse than to watch the two biggest-grossing films in Britain last weekend – Spectre and The Lady in the Van.

He connects these films with forms of political nostalgia he observes in England.

…. each is soaked through with an idea of England and English values under attack, a nostalgia which is shared on the political left as well as the right.

Denis Staunton situates Spectre on the political right. The dramatic threat is from

a global conspiracy bringing government and business together in a sinister public-private partnership.

He cites a former Conservative Party MP and an MI5 director-general in support of his observation that

What is arresting about Spectre, beyond the killing, car chases and special effects, is the film’s melancholic, almost elegiac mood, as if the spirit that made Britain powerful, democratic, free and tolerant – in a word, great – is smouldering in the ruins of the MI6 building on the Thames.

That's quite a list: powerful, democratic, free and tolerant – in a word, great. Denis Staunton offers them as descriptors of an England that the political right hanker for.

He puts The Lady in the Van on the nostalgic left of the political spectrum.

Bennett’s nostalgia is for the England that created the welfare state, nationalised the railways and introduced comprehensive education, all rolled back by Margaret Thatcher and her successors.

And he connects Bennett's nostalgia with the current leader of The British Labour Party -

Corbyn himself also embodies a very English style of left-wing radicalism.

- without giving us a helpful list of adjectives.

It's not clear which of the two films Denis Staunton likes. Or if he likes either one of them. He appears to be uncomfortable with nostalgia. What does he make of the nostalgia-fest Brooklyn, an emigration drama set in Ireland and New York? Is it the case that simple notions of left and right are not as readily deployed in Ireland and placing a film in that way is not straightforward?

The two films Denis Staunton writes about are not nostalgic. They are different treatments of the same political contest that rages through time, for all time. One of their core elements is 'scale'. Is it to be 'great' or is it to be 'human'? Another is given by the old Cicero line, cui bono? Who benefits? This is the political contest of the past, present and the future.

Would Cameron oversee the

​successful implementation of a global surveillance system?

Would Corbyn?

This is not nostalgia. Cameron is not bringing people backwards. Neither is Corbyn. They are both seeking to drive England, and the world, forward. The questions are 'to where?' and 'how?'

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/james-bond-alan-bennett-and-a-nostalgic-view-of-britain-1.2437039

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FIONOLA MEREDITH IS ANGRY

Fionola Meredith writes an opinion column in The Belfast Telegraph, one of Northern Ireland's leading daily newspapers. In today's edition (20.11.2015), she is angry. She is forceful, polemical and vehement. Writing trenchantly, under the headline

Mealy-mouthed excusers of terror should just shut it

she draws readers in, with an appeal to a shared experience.

You know what people mean when they talk about that Friday feeling.

She, quite rightly, castigates the people who committed the atrocities in Paris and locates the responsibility for the deaths and injuries with them.

The truth is the terrorists who committed last Friday's outrages don't care whether their victims are anarchic old cartoonists or little boys at a rock concert with their mum.

She is right. The actions of the perpetrators are wrong and can be universally named as wrong. Her ire in today's column is directed not at the perpetrators of the atrocities but at people who might, as she sees it, equivocate about them.

Her article highlights a real problem for people living in the Developed North of the world. Events unfolding in Bamako, Mali, where guests and staff at an hotel are being held under threat of violence further underline this problem. In raising the Bamako events here, in the context of the aftermath of the atrocity in Paris, this article may face Fionola Meredith's ire.

but failing to mention Beirut or Syria sees you instantly slapped down as a crass cultural imperialist.

Her most vehement challenge is to

the default recourse to equivocation 






What is the appropriate response then, apart from the unequivocal assertion that they were wrong, to the recent atrocities in Paris, Beirut, Syria, Bamako and elsewhere?

There are language problems here. The use of the term 'we' to imply all-inclusive circumstances is often unfounded. The use of the word 'you' to imply a collective experience of the world is complex, even if by 'you' is meant 'the readership of The Belfast Telegraph, in print and on-line', for it includes people who do not share the experience Fionola Meredith uses to lead us into her column. Her anger heats her language and narrows her assertions.

Later that night 129 of them were cut down by barbarians with Kalashnikovs, and scores more injured. What had they done to deserve this? Nothing, except live a life of liberty in Paris, the first home of free thinking.

The term 'barbarian' poses problems. Certainly the people who did this are cruel, violent and death-dealing. And as human as Fionola Meredith and this writer. There are no monsters out there. Only people.

Who benefits from the use of such language by public writers in the press of a liberal democracy like Northern Ireland? Readers across the world may wonder at the special privileging of Paris as a home for 'free thinking'.

Fionola Meredith has no time for the

awful sanctimonious, supercilious piety which passes for modern liberalism

and wonders, in listing some of the victims,

What reasons could be found for their murders?

Fionola Meredith's appeal is to Reason, in the Enlightenment values of liberty and democracy. She fears 'we' are in danger of 'going under'. One of the problems with many people's experience of these values is that they are not all they claim to be.

Fionola Meredith, towards the end of her column, encounters this problem, but shies away from it. She is not alone in that. It is thoroughly scary and complicated. It is a problem of language and of action.

When are the excuses going to stop? Hand-wringing appeasement or well-meaning attempts at understanding do nothing to restrain nihilistic death cults (neither does a mad blitzkrieg of bombing, but that's another story).

There isn't 'another story'. There are many millions of stories and they are all linked and they are all human and live.

Ironically, on the same web-page as Fionola Meredith's opinion piece, there is an advertisement for no-risk investment opportunities in France. Might this include arms manufacturers? The world goes on and the atrocity in Paris can be used as fuel for the ad-makers.

To end. A small language note for equivocators and, thus, for all people. It's not 'either/or'. It's 'and/all'. Consider the word 'but' and try the word 'and'. As in.

The killings in Paris are wrong. 

And so is the French arms' industry.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/fionola-meredith/paris-attacks-mealymouthed-excusers-of-terror-should-just-shut-it-34217085.html

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