For many reasons, but I’ll just stick to a brief summary. The Edinburgh Napier University student halls, three strip clubs, and the local job centre are lined up next to each other. The castle towers above, watching over the flock. It’s like a life lesson, evolution and all that.
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – a decade on.
22 November, 2010 and this ridiculous … thing came into the world.
For me, it’s the Greatest Album Ever Made. And I find Kanye West nauseating, an attention-seeking baby who needs muzzled. Not the tunes, though. These are simply glorious, the album track-for-track mastery without equal. It’s the production, the melodies, the bombast, the deep thinking at work. Like all art, you can appropriate the material and line it up with something personal.
The (Stranded in) Belgium Odyssey of December 2010. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, but it was all very life-changing and I’ll never forget some of the epic moments. And no one died, which is also great. This album was played quite literally 125 times in 11 days and every track I associate with an image.
Once again:
Filth (2013) – sometimes brilliant, but ultimately disappointing.
This is hilarious at times, black comedy done as it should be. And as an intro to Edinburgh it’s up there with the best of them. The Hamburg scene is off the charts in its accuracy. I’ve been on that messy adventure, believe me. However, I do feel this movie is a bit of a wasted opportunity. There’s not any kind of overarching message that elevates it into something other than a yarn, and the style is painfully nonexistent. One can only imagine what someone like Danny Boyle would have done with the script.
It’s a cracker. But it should be better.
Quality poster, though.
Leith Street – forever under construction.
It’s at the stage now where I can’t remember this roundabout or whatever it is not being an absolute shambles. I don’t know a soul who possesses any notion of what work is being done or why.
It’s just … there. A big fucking mess for all eternity.
The Last of the Mohicans (1992). Wow.
This blew my mind it was so good. On a simple action-adventure level it’s pure Mann, the framing and the cutting all signature style. What further distinguishes it are the connotations, though, the other world beyond the landscape. Mann always does this, always a subtext in the works. He makes deceptively uncomplicated yarns, but look closer and you unearth what he’s getting at.
This is pre-Revolutionary War (1775–1783) sparked by a Boston Tea Party. Get your head around that. The ending is magisterial, a literal crescendo of dimensions. The last shot – old America, current America, future America. It conveys more about American history than thousands of movies.
On a personal aside, I once synced the incredible Trevor Jones score to a panning shot of Edinburgh taken on a VHS-C camera from the top of Hillend. It was fucking pathetic but we can’t all be Michael Mann.
Essential cinema.
A foggy Meadowbank in all its autumn splendour.
A shithole, that is without question. But it’s my kind of toilet and it’s defined the past half decade of my life. I’m in that KFC three days a week. I’ve seen some faces come and go, yet I am the constant. It’s my escape from the office, which is even worse than the actual TV show The Office. I haven’t seen the American version.
Bye for now.
Edinburgh lockdown – week 34. This will never end.
I have changed the slideshow setting. For a week.
The Bourne movies have reached Netflix.
I’ve said on countless occasions to anyone and no one that the Bourne films easily supplant the modern Bonds in terms of a ‘hyper-realism’ because they are the right spy for this era – dodgy government agencies who are an extension of those governments, expendable employees prone to paranoia and literal identity crisis, a globalised landscape with overlapping institutions all out to screw you/each other.
In recent pictures, i.e., the Daniel Craig shit-bombs, Bond has essentially imitated Bourne, jettisoning some of the more ludicrous gadgets of the later Pierce Brosnan entries and going back to basics. Unfortunately, the filmmakers have missed the point and also lost the plot. Bond is Bond. Bourne is Bourne. Skyfall (2012) and the like are so schematic it’s embarrassing.
But enough about 007. What the Bourne movies did so well was capture that post-9/11 zeitgeist – expanded government powers, loss of individual freedoms for reasons of national security (or whatever), the sense that the rule of law is entirely flexible. They are also thrillingly unpredictable. You actually believe the carnage on display, and believe in the character and his mission to remember yet atone. It’s convincing.
The Bourne Supremacy (2004) is the big one for me. It’s the dazzling city-hopping angle of it, the Berlin centrepiece, the unexpected death of a central character which is ruthless but entirely necessary in motivating the protagonist. And that bonkers Moscow car chase.
These movies are more than mere thrillers; they are as much about a bloke’s weary relation to his time and place as they are his mission objectives. Someone once described the pictures to me as ‘existential’.
I think I know what he meant.
Further reading/viewing:
https://orlandoinformer.com/blog/jason-bourne-stuntacular-story-explained/
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 