The Talkies: The Powers That Be

...It would be tedious to go over the plot, a cleverly contrived tale of appalling violence and revenge decorated, after the fashion of this burgeoning genre, with coarse and often quite funny jokes...

...A Keynesian villain...

...But it is the best of its kind, largely because Besson had the guts and the clout to stand up to the money men for the chance to show what a clever Frenchman can do with a Hollywood-sized budget...

...The American Spectator • July 1997 63...

...Nowadays, not even the new Labour government proposes to keep mining coal that nobody wants or needs and that gives horrible diseases to those who spend their lives mining it...

...You wouldn't think it, would you...

...This Sisyphean task may be what lies behind fashionable British despair...

...The main characters, known to everyone in their neighborhood of South Wales as the Lewis twins (Rhys Ifans and Llyr Evans) though they are in fact brothers born three years apart, are car thieves and glue sniffers who live in a trailer with their drunken father, their clueless mother, and their sluttish sister...

...They may be utterly decadent, but they're the best thing your era has got to show...

...This is not, of course, the same thing as saying it is any good...

...James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...

...You can't Brits fail where a Frenchman naturally succeeds...

...This is that, in the sixties, sex and drugs were fun...

...Small wonder that the suicide rate among British males aged zo to 24 increased by 71 percent during the 1980's...

...Everything goes to show that all authority is corrupt or impotent, that aggressive self-indulgence is the only principle of life and that belief in anything beyond or better is pathetic or stupid or vicious or comic...

...Someday, if anyone ever bothers to write the history of Hollywood postmodernism, The Fifth Element will be seen as one of its true classics...

...A substantial portion of the dead probably came out of movies like this one and went straight home to put their heads in the oven...

...His other witty saying is: "Be lucky, and if you can't be lucky, top [i.e., kill] yourself...

...Maybe people who are fetishists of one kind or another themselves—or else who are Japanese calligraphers—would find this picture less boring than I did, but even they, one supposes, must grow impatient with the increasingly improbable story on which a succession of pretty, oriental-style pictures are made to hang...

...But the despair that lies just beneath the surface is unmistakable and obscurely connected with the presumed plight of the provincial Briton...

...Additional reviews ofcurrent movies by Mr...

...A nd sometimes he creates something that is even worth looking at...

...At one point he explains his bad-guy philosophy by saying that "Life...comes from disorder, destruction, chaos," and proceeds to demonstrate by deliberately breaking a tumbler and then watching as a series of specially adapted little robots sweep up the glass, reassemble it into a tumbler, and pour him a drink in it...

...In fact, it ends up being the crudest sort of left-wing propaganda...

...It is a point made by Myers's Dr...

...That title has to go to Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book, a typical Greenaway blend of the bizarre, the disgusting, and the boring...

...In the same way, if the evil death star destroys the earth in the process of making him, Zorg, considerably richer, that just means more work for those who've got to clean up the mess...

...This is a more commercial proposition than Twin Town and has bigger stars (Ewan McGregor, Tara Fitzgerald, Pete Postlethwaite), so that, oddly, it is able to push a more overt political agenda...

...Especially the boring...

...Evil (and who wrote the screenplay), picks up about two and a half...

...Directed by Kevin Allen and executive-produced by Danny Boyle and Andrew MacDonald, who gave the world Shallow Grave and Trains potting, this film has some of the latter's attitude about it and most of its world-view—which can be summed up as nihilism on speed...

...It gives them the illusion of being more knowing than the rest of us, less prone to illusion—which is the greatest illusion of all...

...The playful postmodern who avoids reality altogether may be bor44 In the sixties sex and drugs were fun...

...Danny, the band leader in Brassed Off (Mr...

...The relative scarcity of hallucinogenic drugs in the 1990's is also mentioned, but not so obviously regretted...

...Or so it would seem from watching a contemporary British film like Twin Town...

...Mat is He playin' at...

...The only reminder of a hundred bloody years of hard graft is this bloody band...

...And these are the sympathetic figures...

...It is an image that begins to look like the hallmark of late-twentieth-century British art, and, to give Greenaway his due, it has seldom been more perfectly expressed than it is here in the form of the pelt of a dead homosexual prostitute scribbled over with pseudo-profundities in exquisitely traced ideograms...

...The film is just over two hours long, but it seems like two weeks...

...a straight Hollywood product would have made the bad guy a member of, if not the head of, the government) to get their hands on the stones...

...They have no more innocent enjoyment in sex or drugs, but they continue to indulge themselves with both in a grim and businesslike way, seemingly for their own sake...

...Bowman are available on the TAS web site—http://www.spectator.org...

...Music—in the form of a village brass band—is used for a similar purpose in Brassed Off by Mark Herman...

...E-mail him at 72o56.3226@compuserve.com...

...62 July r 9 9 7 • The American Spectator help thinking that they hate her so much because she offered hope of national renewal, and intellectuals are much more comfy and cozy with their precious despair...

...77 ing in a different way, but at least he doesn't make you feel like topping yourself...

...If all else fails, try Wales," says a jolly English wag and drugdealer...

...The action, set in the twenty-third century, involves rival attempts by the evil corporate chieftain Zorg (Gary Oldman) and the largely benevolent authorities of planet earth (this is how you know there is a foreign element in the usual Hollywood mix...

...Yet in the world of artists and intellectuals like Mark Herman it still seems a bold and intelligent thing to blame God for Lady Thatcher...

...Mike Myers, who plays the witless hippie agent as well as his nemesis, Dr...

...The beautiful girl is both all powerful (the bad guys fall before her karate kicks and punches) and vulnerable and in need of the help of the tough but tender Dallas...

...Wonderful...

...But in the end he has to chuck it all to make a futile and silly political gesture...

...But this is nothing but a lament for a dying world...

...For it was Keynes ("in the long run we're all dead") who had the idea to employ one lot of people to dig holes which another lot of people are employed to fill in...

...And that isn't even the worst of this spring's crop of awful British pictures...

...But you can also understand why, if this is "reality," the film industry outside of Britain is in full flight from it...

...The Movie of the Month this month, The Fifth Element by Luc Besson, is what every crappy Hollywood po-mo extravaganza would be if it had the wit and the boldness of this Frenchman, author of La Femme Nikita and The Professional...

...That a man could concentrate so exclusively on weird sexual fetishes (in this case, a woman's desire to have her body written on—and then to write on other bodies), naked bodies, dead bodies, blackmail, sexual predation, and other such subjects and somehow manage to make the whole thing a snoozer...

...Or "reality...

...THE TALKIES by James Bowman The Powers That Be I f you were, like the hero of Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery, a British secret agent suddenly transplanted from "swinging" London in the 1960's to the just-vaguely-circling London of the present day, I can't help thinking you'd notice more differences than Powers does...

...And Margaret Bloody Thatcher lives...

...The mods and teddy boys of the 1960's, recalled for us by Austin Powers, brought the thrill of truancy to their vices, and so implied in spite of themselves a better standard...

...now they are hard work...

...You can't treat women like dolly-birds anymore and you can't have quite so much promiscuous sex...

...What music is to Twin Town and Brassed Off, visual sumptuousness is to The Pillow Book—that is, a symbol of ephemeral beauty at the mercy of an appalling and vicious reality...

...Zorg is, of course, a lurid caricature of a greedy and ruthless plutocrat, but he is a caricature done with considerable wit and style...

...JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement That's "reality," mate...

...The characters in Twin Town (as with Trainspotting, the title is a bit of ironic whimsy) have gone way beyond disillusionment...

...Evil in a different way when he gloats that "Freedom failed...

...To be disillusioned with the promise of free love and mind-expanding drugs implies that the old restraints were better...

...Now they are hard work...

...Perhaps the film's most memorable moment comes when one of the brave and good miners, Phil (Stephen Tompkinson), distraught by debts and his father's illness, has an outburst against God who "took John Lennon, and those three lads down t'Ainsley pit, and looks as if He'll be takin' my dad...

...But the Frenchman puts up against him Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis), a cab driver (the cabs look like flying dodgem cars), assisted by the Supreme Being of the Universe, a gorgeous young woman with orange hair called Leeloo (Milla Jovovich...

...Out of these ingredients Myers and Jay Roach, who directed, manage to squeeze a few laughs (though most seem not to depend on Powers's being in the wrong decade), but they miss the essential difference...

...Well, you can see why...

...I could go on at length about the cleverness and the wit with which Besson has imagined his amusingly preposterous future, but you will just have to go see the movie...

...All the salt-of-the-earth Yorkshire miners come off as noble and brave and funny, while the representatives of the National Coal Board and the government are cruel and mendacious...

...The McGuffin is some magic stones which, properly placed in a secret room in an ancient Egyptian tomb, will call down the benevolent forces of the universe and destroy (with the usual laser beams of white light) the evil death star descending on the earth...

...Not in the way that—say—The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or Jules and Jim is good...

...The point is that every postmodern fixture is raised to its highest power...

...This woman is mankind's most precious possession," says Cornelius (Ian Holm), the obligatory priest-interpreter and explainer of the sacred symbols...

...She is the reductio ad absurdum of the Femme Nikita theme...

...Postlethwaite), gives his musicians a lecture on how the band "symbolizes pride" in the town...

...Forget the story...

...The only reminiscence of beauty or goodness here is a traditional Welsh male-voice choir which appears at the very end to sing a stirring version of "Myfanwy...

...You should do so for the same reason that, if you were alive in late-seventeenth-century London you should have gone to see the plays of William Congreve...

...The bad guys are two drug-dealing policemen, Grayo (Dorien Thomas) and Terry (Dougray Scott), and a roofing contractor and underworld boss called Bryn Cartwright (William Thomas...