Category Archives: Movies

Moving pictures for snappers

The Krays

Movies, Photographs

English gangsters..

The night club scene of 1960s London was dominated by two gangster brothers, the Kray Twins. Identical twins, Ronnie was seriously insane and Reggie just a tad less so. Each committed murders in public and ended up serving a life sentence in gaol.



Reggie and Ronnie Kray by David Bailey, 1965

While the brothers established a measure of respectability after opening an upper class night club which was a magnet to the knobs and actors of the time, they inevitably returned to their roots of psychotic violence and mayhem, their empire ending once they were incarcerated.

David Bailey’s superb portrait of the pair pulls no punches. They are in your face, the submissive Reggie and the dominant Ronnie looking ready to lay about them with whatever weapon came to hand. Bottle, lead pipe, knife, sword (!), gun. You name it. They were not fussy. Bailey grew up in the same poor East End of London as the Krays so he will have been particularly attuned to their make up. It shows.

Two excellent movies have been made about the Twins. The deeper psychological portrait is to be found in The Krays where the Kemp brothers from the rock group Spandau Ballet deliver insightful performances. The more recent offering, Legend, sees Tom Hardy deliver a tour de force performance, acting both brothers. The script is less nuanced but the movie is worth watching for Hardy alone.

Bailey’s picture haunts me to this day. The other week I was taking some studio portraits of a pair of Welsh Terriers owned by friends and, well, I couldn’t help but plagiarize Bailey’s composition. Buckley, the male at left is clearly submissive, while Tilly, the female is the dominant one of the pair.



Buckley and Tilly, the Welsh Terriers.
Nikon D800, 16-35mm AF-S Nikkor, Novatron strobes.

Welsh Terriers were bred to flush out badgers whose setts (underground homes) would cause foxhunting horses to break legs. You probably should not mess with these boys any more than you would with the Kray Twins.

Ripley

Movies

An orgy of monochrome cinematography.

“There’s no there when you get there”, Gertrude Klein once said of Oakland and when you look into Andrew Scott’s eyes in the new Netflix production of Patricia Highsmith’s eponymous character you have the same reaction. A cold blooded killer singularly interested in material possessions and La Dolce Vita, Tom Ripley has been filmed many times.

There’s the wonderful 1960 version directed by René Clément starring the physically beautiful Alain Delon, in French, named “Purple Moon”. A feast for the eyes.

Then there’s the 1999 Anthony Minghella version “The Talented Mr. Ripley” known to most viewers, with splendid performances from Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, with a thoroughly wooden Ripley by – who else? – Matt Damon. The movie is watchable enough, but a repeat viewing is reminiscent of perusing last year’s tourist brochures for the Riviera. All gloss, no substance with a sadly underused Cate Blanchett.

Then John Malkovich delivered a terse comedic version in Liliana Cavani’s enjoyable 2002 sequel named “Ripley’s Game” where a mature Ripley, now ensconced in worldly luxuries, retains and practices his killer instincts to preserve his luxurious lifestyle funded by theft and mayhem. There’s a fine performance by Dougray Scott as a weak willed frame maker and Ripley tool with the always lovely Lena Headey as the questioning wife. This is actually a remake of a Wim Wenders 1977 movie named The American Friend with Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz, with Wenders exchanging violence for the humor in Cavani’s version. Dark and foreboding.

Now, from the usually low brow production studios of Netflix who mostly seem intent in pouring money into a string of disasters, (check that cure for insomnia “The Irishman” with its truly frightful ‘de-ageing’ technology), comes a new interpretation in eight 45 minute episodes, and it’s highly recommended for aficionados of black and white cinematography. I’m watching it in high definition streaming 4K (if that’s not a contradiction in terms where data compression is the order of the day) and the cinematography of Robert Elswit proves why there’s an Oscar on his mantelpiece.

Here are some stills from the climactic Episode 3 where Ripley whacks the poorly acted Johnny Flynn as Dickie Greenleaf:











These monochrome images are reminiscent of the canvases of René Magritte and the photographs of Ralph Gibson and they are arresting. On several occasions I found I had to pause the movie to luxuriate in its monochrome splendor.

So, Andrew Scott as Ripley apart, you do not come here for the acting which is mediocre to awful (Eliot Sumner in particular should audition for fry cook when his/her/its acting career mercifully ends, which should be any day now), with Dakota Fanning an honorable exception as the Ripley-hating Marge. No. You come here for the cinematography which is very special indeed. Suffice it to say that this is HBO quality from a competing studio not known for its high standards in movie production.

Train movies

Movies

A wonderful genre.

As a kid I well remember taking the Flying Scotsman from London to Dundee to both visit my sister, then a student at St. Andrew’s, and to pick up her gift of a Scottish Terrier. This was in 1960 and the trip inculcated in me a love of all things Scottish – terriers not the least of them – and of steam trains. Yes, you arrived grimy and smelly (my opening the window in a tunnel did not help matters) but the journey was truly greater than the arrival. The Scotsman was finally retired from long distance service in 1963 after a long and distinguished life.


The Flying Scotsman. Power, majesty and beauty.

So it’s little wonder that my burgeoning movie collection contains no less than 29 films where the train is mostly the star:


Train movies.

There are probably more, which I may have missed, but this is a decent start. The other day my son and I watched the latest ‘Mission Impossible” offering, part VII, and on our 123″ screen with a killer sound system it was a thrilling experience. Forget plot and dialog, the stunts and special effects were the best we have seen, with the last 40 minutes or so showcasing a thrilling train disaster.

Yet …. all the technology apart, this is far from the best train movie made as none compares with Buster Keaton’s ‘The General’ made in …. 1926. You not only disregard the script – there is none in this silent movie which makes it better than the asinine one in MI Part VII – it’s not widescreen this and seven channel that, but the strength of the story line, the timing of Keaton’s acting and the sheer hilarity of some of the set pieces beats anything made since.


Buster Keaton sacrifies a perfectly good real train.

So encomiums to Mr. Cruise for his death defying stunts but if you want to see the real thing, go no further than The General.

Home theater – final touches

Home theater

The Home Theater was pretty much complete 6 months ago but as I had a couple of old tripods sitting around largely unused it seemed appropriate to add a couple of cameras to go with them.

The 120” screen is flanked by a 1960s Nikon F on a period Linhof S168 tripod at left and a Calumet 4”x5” view camera with a Schneider Symmar lens, on a 1930s English Gandolfi wooden tripod at right. The Nikon F, which brought back so many horrific images of conflict and death from the front did more to end the Viet Nam war than any politician or soldier. This was before the Pentagon learned to keep photographers away from the front lines, so as to sanitize and extend our endless wars. The Calumet view camera was a staple of Hollywood’s glamor photographers, the large 4” x 5” negatives making the retouching of warts and achievement of glossy perfection relatively easy.

Here are snaps of those two cameras:


The Nikon F, with a 50mmf/1.4 Nikkor lens.


The Calumet monorail view camera with more twists and turns than a politician.

Further, on the sofaback, there is one of these:


The Zeiss Ikon Contax camera is similar to the one which photographer Robert Capa took with him when he parachuted in to Omaha Beach with the 82nd Airborne on D Day. The few surviving negatives (the lab ruined most of the film) are amongst the greatest war images made. He lost his life when stepping on a landmine in Indochina a few years later.

These additions, as well as some further light sealing for errant sun rays, largely see the Home Theater project completed.

The Home Theater six months later

Home theater

Some kaizen called for.

Like Toyota I am a huge believer in kaizen:


Kaizen, though I am both ‘top management’
and ‘rank and file’.

Whether with the opposite sex (costly) or with machines (less so) there are few things in life which cannot be improved upon. With my Home Theater, which runs a movie every evening, the focus of kaizen has been on less obvious areas.

You can read about the construction process as follows:

Hardware has been the least of the issues. The LG CineBeam HU715QW has been a winner. While the extremely acute angle at which it projects the image means that alignment of projector and screen is ultra critical, once done with the help of the software tools in the projector, some garage language and an invocation of grievous bodily harm to anyone moving the assembly thereafter, it has been perfection. We are talking Lexus LS400 quality here (the vehicle which defines kaizen) and with a projector-to-seat distance of some 12 feet, the bulb fan is inaudible.

One of the less remarked aspects of this exceptional piece of hardware has been its seamless and unobtrusive upsampling of regular definition content on DVD so that the quality is very close to that of a BluRay disk with its eight times larger file size – 32gB against 4gB. All those old pre-BluRay DVDs on the file server now look better than ever.


The LG HU715QW UST projector.

Equally, the Sonos sound system has been trouble free and if the maker is applying over-the-air updates while I am in the land of nod, I have not noticed and it continues to work seamlessly. I mention this as these updates has been have been the cause of some controversy, but I remain a happy camper.

And as regards data sources, the old Mac Mini with attached HDD boxes works well using a Bluetooth mouse and the Apple TV 4K puck for streamed content is an absolute knockout with its much improved controller. It also uses Bluetooth, meaning no line-of-sight nonsense with remote controls, with all hardware hidden away in the credenza on which the projector sits.

So the hardware side is robust, high quality and troublefree.

But the same cannot be said for the room. While the size is perfect at 20’9″ long, 13’11” wide and 9’2″ high and the reclining seating is a delight for the bottom and back if not for the pocketbook, getting rid of light leaks has been a truly kaizen project. With the theater first installed in the depth of winter, outside light was not an issue. It was pitch dark by the movie hour. But as Daylight Savings Time kicked in (what jerk thought of that concept?) light leaks became abundant. So first it was drapes for the rear facing triple windows:


Drapes installed. A gorgeous Goldberg
1930s era 35mm film reel hangs from the
ceiling next to an antique English GE
‘candlestick’ telephone. The rear surround
sound Sonos speakers are just visible.

Next, the slatted blinds for the west facing side windows proved totally inadequate. I replaced them with silvered/black blackout blinds which proceeded to leak light at the edges, so L-shaped plastic channels were fitted:


Lots of careful work saw to it that the blinds
remain fully functional. I made the rocking dinosaur
for my boy when he was in his first years and
it makes for a lovely display piece.

Then, as the sun got brighter and shone more on the north-east side behind the screen, light shafts proceeded to show through the screen. Nowhere did the Elite Screens specs mention that their screens are partially translucent so the monster 123″ display had to come off the wall, with much help from my son, and black-out material was fitted over those three windows to seal them off for once and for all. A high risk project:


Windows behind the screen blacked out
with hardboard panels and blackout material.
A small uninterruptible power supply is
behind the left Sonos sub-woofer.

Now things were getting properly dark, a hand extended no longer visible with the lights out. And speaking of lights, all the bland ceiling floods were replaced with spotlights to add drama to the illumination of the old movie posters:


A magnificent Bolex H-16 16mm movie camera
at left, a Cecil B. DeMille-era Weston Master
selenium cell exposure meter and an old Bell & Howell
16mm movie projector add a period touch.The
silent refrigerator at right stores the
essentials – ice cream and soda!

So yes, kaizen absolutely works, but don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy. It’s the same reason that Toyota makes the best cars in the world.