The Kassav’ gig on the last night of Nuits d’Afrique was a stormer – the crowd was so big it overflowed the square into the streets! Fitting for a band that’s celebrating three decades of popularity.
Playlist
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Higher Than the Stars [3:46]
The Mountain Goats – Sax Rohmer #1 [3:42]
Owen Pallett – Hard to Explain (The Strokes cover) [3:10]
Oumou Sangare – Seya [4:12]
Amy Winehouse – Love Is a Losing Game (Demo) [3:43]
Joe Cornish’s homage to 80s movies about kid gangs and/or alien monsters, transposed onto a UK council estate – drugs, guns, race and class tensions, and a vernacular far removed from Spielbergian Americana. The entire movie does indeed take place pretty much within one tenement block, seemingly over the course of a night; obeying the Aristotelian unities means you save money by redressing the same corridor half a dozen times and having people run down it in different ways. Meanwhile, JJ Abrams’ own, more sentimental and self-referencing Spielberg homage – Super 8 – passed through theatres and got comparable plaudits for five times the budget (mind you it looked like ten, so not bad). Both movies are well-trodden stories well-told. Super 8 has a love letter to baby filmmaking on its side; Attack The Block does better at making the “dangers of Othering” message relevant, since it – among other aspects – contains actual black characters, which JJ’s film did not do. It also runs a brisk 88 minutes and has a great bass music soundtrack.
Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010)
The first Chinese film I’ve seen with a native steampunk sensibility, i.e. not just set design trappings. It starts with a Spanish-speaking ambassador in Roman(?! the year is 690AD) garb being given a guided tour of a 60-storey tall mechanical statue of Empress Wu in the guise of Guanyin, and goes on from there. Andy Lau corresponds to my mental image of Dee like RDJ to my mental image of Holmes, i.e. not at all, but I can live with the casting – which, by the way, Tsui Hark clearly watched the Guy Ritchie movie and found no reason why historical Luoyang couldn’t be given the full London Below treatment. Indeed, if you were going to steampunk a Chinese dynasty, you may as well go with the cosmopolitan high-barbarian Tang, with its polo parties and drunken poets and ruthless, powerful noblewomen. It’s probably the only period where you could portray a female official going around investigating a murder and not have anyone even take notice that she’s wearing men’s clothes. The mystery itself’s not awful. Just remember the Chinese fair play rule variant: wuxia falls under improbable, not impossible.
Ip Man: The Legend Is Born (2010)
Arguably better than the second movie, despite absence of Donnie Yen, and increasingly outlandish plots attributed to evil would-be colonialists. I mean, it’s pretty clear which parts must’ve hewn fairly closely to real life, and which were pastede on. Ip Man is such a low-key protagonist (the anti-Bruce Lee in some sense… I really want them to hoist the third movie in the trilogy out of development hell, guys; not the Wong Kar Wai one, that’s a whole other beast) that it’s no bad thing for the movies to be a bit more low-key as well.
