In chaos and riots

"I have great sympathy for the oppressed but I do not expect them to be morally superior to the oppressors. I merely expect them to be oppressed."
Jerome Barkow

A timely post of something that was stuck as a draft for years, now that the argument is being attempted for the use of water cannons in London. So far the Assembly Police and Crime Committee has found there is no case to use them, but with a Tory-led government and Boris as mayor, let's wait and see.
http://www.london.gov.uk/media/assembly-press-releases/2014/02/assembly-says-no-to-case-for-water-cannon

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So, riots and looting.
Lots of people are eager to offer their tuppence worth, "send in the army", "it's because of the cuts, youth workers are losing funding, the EMA is being taken away", "mindless thugs", "take away their benefits and housing".

Once again attempts at identifying the problems, usually in an effort to avoid repetition, are often shouted down as attempts to excuse idiots of their idiotic actions. No, how do people get to the point of thinking that acting idiotically is okay? If you aren't interested in the reasons then you are effectively writing off a whole subsection of people and you may as well just arrest any young people in hooded tops who live in estates, and their children and their children's children and so on. Is it more important to perpetually deal with the symptoms or the illness (or sickness to quote Cameron)?

Panic on the streets of London

As Laurie Penny says in the above article: "Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there."

Laurie mentions watching an NBC report where a man is interviewed, asking if the riots achieved anything.
"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"
"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

Surely not? When was there a march on Scotland Yard of all places, of over 2000 people, just a couple of months ago and surely when marches are prime time, after the student and union marches we've had in the last year? I haven't heard of it, have you?

Smiley Culture march

Smiley Culture was a reggae star. To quote the linked article "The reggae star, real name David Emmanuel, who grew up in Tulse Hill, died of a single stab wound to the heart in the kitchen of his home in Warlingham on March 15.
The 80s star allegedly plunged a carving knife into his chest when he went to make himself a cup of tea during a police drug raid on his home."

A couple of thousand people, mostly Black, went on a protest march to Scotland Yard to demand justice for another suspicious police-related death.

Deaths in police custody

So there have been 193 deaths in the custody of the Metropolitan police (link to Wikipedia, main source is a Houses of Parliament report) from 1993 to 2010, more than 10 a year for 17 years. No one is going to claim that anyone was rioting and looting as a direct result of Mark Duggan's death during an arrest, but it's indicative of a general atmosphere that exists in the places that most people do their best not to think about. The kids who took to the streets did so out of greed, out of anger, and stupidity, and there was obviously no desire to 'make a statement' beyond the usual machismo swagger, but these are the kids who live in a world of gangs and petty crime, of real and imminent fear of violence and police being a threat rather than a source of help.

So many people are speedy to rebuff the explanations involving poverty and deprivation as if the only sign is literally being too poor to eat and that the kids should have been stealing staple foods if it was about poverty. But why has the threat been made to take away the looters' benefits unless it's implicitly accepted that these kids are at the bottom of our society?
When you grow up in a culture of endemic unemployment, surrounded by the relatively easy money of drug crime, in an area like Tottenham (where unemployment in June 2011 runs at 8.3% compared to the London average of 4.2% based on claimants source).

Is their poverty a literal cause of their looting? No, but it's a reason for fostering a state of mind where such behaviour is seen as desirable, let alone tolerable. Many people have questioned how people can attack their own communities - but what is their sense of community? The insane idea of postcode violence and the idea of the boundaries that creates might help to understand how hostile the world could become, especially if your family is barely that, your substitute family is a gang and the police are hostile rather than helpful. Could the Fairy Jobmother Hayley Taylor help these kids?

Revolver

Revolver

Now that the dust has settled, as it were, it’s strange to see that Revolver is worlds away from the epic disaster that the media world labelled it as on its release back in 2005. With the hit Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels launching not only Guy Ritchie’s career but also a swathe of Brit gangster flicks and dovetailing with the rise of lad’s mag subculture, Ritchie was prime for a backlash.

The first glimpse of Statham has me thinking that his wig is impressive, it’s odd seeing him with hair and it looks relatively natural. A closer look shortly afterward reveals that his moustache doesn’t give off the same vibe.

There are strange little moments, Statham asking “can I go?” like a child sitting in a hospital gown talking to a nurse; shouting his friend’s name after he’s been shot, more like a mantra than in grief or surprise; “smart as a pair of little boy’s shoes”; a nice little moment where three groups have their tensions rising, intercutting between each despite different time frames; a lovely little animated sequence of the film as a heist plays out; Statham hit by a car in slo-mo straight through the windshield, only for the sequence to reverse all while he delivers a voice over about fate and motive; the final talking head segments of psychologists explaining how the only real enemy we have is our own ego.
Sometimes in criticism ‘interesting’ is a dirty word, but that is what Revolver is, and while it might not quite work it is worlds away from the glossy, empty, cockney gangster bollocks that people evidently prefer. The question is, did Guy Ritchie’s ego instigate Revolver or not?

Raindance Festival 2011

Thoughts on the fest:

Whilst the Apollo is plush and it's nice to be able to see things there without selling a kidney, the festival seems a lot more heavily centered on the industry than the London film fest a couple of weeks later, and when I say industry I mean an ocean of droning, braying media types studded with the odd actor, director and producer. It's unusual in a film festival that I feel an urge to flee the screen as soon as the films is over, after all, I've heard my fair share of odd Q&A sessions at the LFF; it's pretty much just an objection to the people in general.

But to the films themselves:

A Thousand Kisses Deep:

Starts slowly and seems to stumble, looking like an ill thought-through indie that should have died in a twilight spot of a TV schedule, it quickly picks up as it centres around the unquiet life of Mia played by Venus and Attack the Block's Jodie Whittaker, dealing with the impact of a man on her life and thanks to a time-travelling lift, trying to fix the problem's of the past.
Skirting past the risk of mawkish whimsy, the film ably lays out the idea that the root of problems aren't always what they first seem and it could be a lot harder to change the outcome of things than you think. Her mistakes are embodied in the slack-eyed, reptilian menace of jazz loser Ludwig played well by Dougray Scott who succeeds in conjuring a man simultaneously charming and vile.
The denouement is satisfyingly unexpected without being an overtly twisty/turny thriller, indeed the whole film is largely confined to the one apartment building and jazz bar and a small set of characters.
The film has secured distribution and it would be worth checking out once its released

An Act of Godfrey

To script a whole film in rhyming couplets is certainly ambitious, and while there's an inevitably twee, 'luvvie' aspect to the proceedings it’s given a little more weight with the backdrop of a range of characters staying at a hotel while a conference on selling strategies goes ahead. A varied and decent cast evidently enjoy mugging along, there’s a convoluted back story which comes together quite well and lots of neat, clever little touches to the script (though maybe not as clever as it thinks it is).

Skinning

It might be a tad unfair, but after This Is England it's hard to watch a film about a boy getting in too deep with some unsavoury nationalist types with any large degree of optimism of it being as good. In this case our protagonist is a quiet maths genius who has made an unwise friend in a stereotypical bomber jacket and bovver boots skinhead, also seemingly something of a maths whizz. As they spend more time together he gets more and more deeply involved, until things turn violent and he ends up leading the neo nazi gang. Meanwhile we also see things from the police perspective, chiefly involving the corruption and bribery involved in the dealings with skinheads, rival gangsters and gypsy Roma.
Apart from references to the 90s Balkan conflict and the ongoing racial tensions, there's little to set this apart from any other tale set in Europe, until the ending sequence which basically suggests that some people are always going to be evil, there's not much we can do about it and they need to be managed. It's a weird conclusion seeing as there's little that's gone before to distinguish this story from so many others (involvement with the far right stems from an estrangement from family, peer pressure from friends, wanting to impress a girl etc.), but despite this point of difference there's nothing new to add here.

Monk3ys

Alarm bells rang at the start when it purported to be a film delivered to the Metropolitan police and various media outlets, such claims to reality fall apart quite quickly when your actors act like actors.
The opening sequence is of people viewed from POV cameras entering a derelict building and finding people in a grim and bloody mess in a dark sealed room, and in retrospect this glimpse into the future is necessary as starting the film chronologically would see a large proportion of the audience walking out early on.
So a trio of film makers set about filming three people locked in a room for 48 hours, each of whom represent a manifestation of the Id, Ego or Superego. The majority of the film follows the three subjects in the room - an introvert, extrovert and a drunk, via wall mounted and hand-held cameras in chronological order, interspersed with sequences filmed from their interviews and the film makers discussing them/the set-up, running through intros etc.
In the room, things go bad as they realise they're not getting out after 48 hours, and the three descend into violence, rape and murder, as you would fully expect would happen, apart from the fact you wouldn’t.
The problem is not the weak idea, but that this is all done in such a cack-handed way that it struggles to hold the attention.

State of Emergency

This is a lot more like a 'regular' film. Mostly linear, with the well worn story of some sort of man made accident resulting in people becoming infected/undead, getting red eyes and rushing about dispensing violence on the unaffected. A small country town, an every man, a small group of survivors holed up in a defensible building, trying radios and TVs for information, being forced to venture out into danger for supplies - there are a lot of elements that have become genre staples over the years, and yet State of Emergency has a quiet confidence to it that places it apart from dozens of also-ran indie zombie efforts.
Concerning itself more with the relationships and thoughts of the survivors, State of Emergency has numerous moments of quiet and calm as they wait out the crisis, and even the infected are calmer here then elsewhere in the genre, mainly seen quietly standing about or slowly wandering in fields, only succumbing to the usual running and snarling once unaffected humans are spotted.
Beautifully shot, there are a number of moments that make use of the mostly rural setting with vivid colouring even at night, though locations are few the film makes the most of what it does have. My pick of the festival.

A hospital gown, open up the back

There are many studies of ex-cinemas, the grand old picture houses of the 30s and 40s of cinema’s heyday, the time of talkies and newsreels before TV came along. While some were converted into more conventional theatres or bingo halls, many of these buildings were lost and the legacy of local cinema with them.

But I don’t intend to talk so broadly about cinemas, rather I’m focusing on the changes that are happening to this very day.

I first started going to see films regularly when I was around 16 or so. It coincided with a newfound independence and the ability to legally back up my desire to see ‘15’s.
I had taken a year out of school after a bad start at my sixth form, and in the interim before I started my A-levels at a college, I took the opportunity to drink in as much cinema as terrestrial TV could offer.
All day long I would watch films on TV or from videos recorded when I couldn’t catch them, and I took in everything from 40s screwball classics and 50s B pictures to 70s thrillers and 80s blockbusters.

When I started college, I found myself with quite a bit of free time as we only needed to be in college for our lessons, so I made many trips to the Harrow Warner plex to see the latest Hollywood jobs and got the tube central for anything more unusual.
I carried on in this way at University, except unlike college, which I enjoyed, I grew to hate Uni and so would spend an increasing amount of time going to the pictures or collecting videos with my new part-time job’s discount.

Rather than just the films, visiting the cinema itself was part of the experience, and I came to know the differences between cinemas and between screens within the cinemas themselves, making a little mission to visit as many different cinemas as possible, at least in central London.
This aim was a lot more interesting back then, as there were simply more cinemas around. Since the early 90’s I have seen the demise of many a cinema in the West End, some of which I never got the chance to visit.

At some point early in the millennium, Odeon gained ownership of the ABC cinema chain, and began a process of assimilation or destruction.
A number of cinemas, such as Panton Street and Covent Garden survive those times as new Odeon cinemas, but many fell by the wayside.
One most recent loss is the Odeon Wardour Street and ex-ABC Swiss Centre, cunningly located in the building with the tourist-trap clock on the Piccadilly corner of Leicester Square.
Whilst many wouldn’t feel such emotion at the loss of this cinema, owing to the Mezzanine-rivalling ‘front room’ screens, it provided the opportunity to see world cinema and arthouse fare that sometimes weren’t covered elsewhere in London, even with the likes of the ICA, Panton Street and Curzon Soho catering for such tastes.
Despite the relatively small sizes, the screens were still larger than the current monster HD sets and so did at least provide something you couldn’t get at home.
I had managed to see something in each of its four screens before it went, and I have to say I had an affection for the smallest, with the bizarre metal rail between the front row and the screen.

An earlier ABC loss that never made it to Odeon status was the ABC Piccadilly.
Situated on Piccadilly itself, it was opposite the Tower Records/Virgin store and was basically just a small box office at ground level before the descent into the depths were the screens lurked.
The ABC Piccadilly was once a venue for adult movies and in spirit can be seen in the film “An American Werewolf in London”, though that scene was actually based on the Eros cinema that used to be at the site where you’ll now find the Gap shop. It never seemed to lose that seediness, which not only grew from the two screens being literally bisected into four (making for a less than immersive experience) but mainly from the flea bitten state of the place. It has been the only screening that I’ve had to walk out from before the film began because of an unidentifiable but nevertheless rancid odour.
Last time I checked it was still boarded up with the obligatory tourist tat stalls parked outside its doors, long may it rest.

Just down the road from there was the Plaza cinema, a wonderful building with a large lobby and a high ceiling leading to each of the four screens. The Plaza specialised in showing Blockbusters that hadn’t quite completed their run, but had been on release for some weeks, and offered them at budget prices. A sort of grand scale and more expensive Prince Charles cinema, the Plaza provided the opportunity to catch things you may otherwise may have missed, but without the unforgiving scheduling of the PC. Whilst most of the screens were of an average to good quality, the main screen upstairs was beautifully tiered and huge, well worth the asking price.
One day there were flooding problems in the basement and the cinema was closed for refurbishment. It never re-opened, part opening years later as a Tesco Metro and the rest opening later still as the Apollo cinema, a decent cinema itself but amusingly almost the opposite of the Plaza, a luxury cinema for top-dollar prices.

Another recent loss to arthouse venues wasn’t that far from Odeon Wardour Street. The Metro Cinema, which changed names to the Other Cinema a couple of years before its demise, was a lovely little two screen venue which specialised in foreign and indie releases.
Found down the side of the Trocadero on Rupert Street, it had an old-time ‘Ed’s Diner’ feeling to it and it seemed like the only reason it hadn’t been multiplexed to death is due to it being hidden out of sight.
Today it has become a front for yet another theatre ticket box office catering to our theatre-greedy tourist community.

Still more losses are even more obscure – the Odeon Haymarket was a few minutes from the now Cineworld Haymarket but closed not long after I was regularly cinemagoing so I never visited it; likewise an indie cinema of which I have forgotten the name on St. Martin’s Lane, toward Trafalgar Square and opposite from the Duke of York’s Theatre.
I could swear that there used to be a cinema called “The Phoenix” down the side of the Phoenix theatre, off Charing Cross Road, and my memory of a picture house that once stood on Oxford St. at the Tottenham Court Road end is hazier still.

Despite the increasing success of box offices in recent years, I can’t help fear for my cinemas, and I’ve never taken for granted that I have so much choice – I can’t comprehend of what it would be like to live somewhere where you maybe have a choice of a two-screen indie and a multiplex at most, three screens of which are taken up showing the latest blockbuster on rotation.
Whilst I do appreciate some of the positives of the multiplex chains – the usually large screens and generously terraced seating - it has to be said that sometimes the audience just doesn’t actually give as much of a fuck about seeing a film as they do in the West End. Even as you venture out of the centre, to the Odeon Tottenham Court Road or Marble Arch cinemas, the audience become that bit more irritating that much more frequently, where the act of film-going is seen as a social event instead of what it is – sitting in a dark room with strangers and watching a fucking film.

I would go on to discuss the cinemas that remain today, but that is for another time.

Here’s a picture found at this link Golders Green cinema. It closed after screening Eyes Wide Shut, the only cinema within walking distance. Bastards.


Follow these links to find information on London’s lost cinemas, and some pictures here

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