Tag: film

Britain’s Got Talent Audition

A boring but interesting day. At least I got to pick up some film-making tips.

After a lot of procrastination I decided that spending up to 12 hours at the Britain’s Got Talent audition would be a good use of my Sunday.

Alex had come over from Amsterdam just before Christmas when I was in the middle of all my building chaos because he’d got an audition for the show. This was a first round audition which I think is fairly easy to get. Auditions were held at various locations around the UK and he’d picked Manchester so he could combine it with a visit to see me. The audition went well and soon afterwards he was called and told he’d got through to the second round. This was before Christmas. He’d not heard anything more so had kind of written it off, but then he was called again on Wednesday and told he needed to be in Manchester on Sunday. A quickly booked flight and a phone call to me and before he knew it, he was on his way over again. He arrived on Saturday and I met him in Manchester after my NUT meeting.

Early breakfast in my kitchen

Sunday morning we were up at 6am. I made sandwiches whilst he did his make-up. By 7.45 we were on the road to the Lowry in Salford Quays ready for the 8.30 appointment. He’d gone to the first audition alone, but as the second round is televised the auditionees (is that a word?) are asked to bring friends and family members with them to make up the audience and provide ‘background crowd’ for the interviews. I was quite interested in going and wanted to be there to give moral support, but hesitated when he was warned that we’d probably be there for 12 hours.

In the end I decided to go as I’ll probably never get another chance to do something like this and I might pick up tips for making films myself or tips to help me as a drama teacher (this is what I spend a large chunk of my time teaching even though I know nothing about the subject and have no dramatic ability myself).

We sat for a few minutes with a few other contestants in the foyer before being called to the registration area upstairs. Registration involved sitting around for a while and then all lining up in front of the registration desk. One by one the contestants went forward to register and be filmed for the first time. The friends, family and other contestants made up the crowd scene backdrop. 

Once registered we were taken to another building across the way. Before we could get out of the doors however, Alex was whisked away to do the first of many interviews and I was escorted alone to the other building. People were just starting to filter in and the crew were buzzing around setting up lights and cameras. One of the crew members ‘Lilly’ spoke to us all and asked us to take coats and scarves off. As the show will be aired in May we needed to look a bit more summery. She also reminded us that cameras were running all the time and so we should look cheerful and alert and definitely not look as though we’d got up at 6am on a Sunday morning!

The holding room

Alex was brought over, but didn’t have much time to tell me about his interview before he was called for another one. This was filmed in the main holding room (see how I know the lingo?) and so I stood alongside and watched. The interviewer was asking questions from a clipboard which obviously held all the information from the long questionnaire he’d had to complete before Christmas. He was coached into answering in full sentences, encompassing the question as he answered. For example, if asked what his favourite colour was, rather than answering ‘blue’, he would have to answer ‘my favourite colour is blue’. Presumably this interview will be edited into a monologue.

Throughout the day Alex was repeatedly taken away by different people to do interviews or to be filmed walking about (including walking slowly round the holding room) or to have stills taken. Each time he was gone, I either sat reading or stared around me. The room had filled up and it was interesting to try to guess what the different acts entailed. Some of the costumes looked great: a dance troupe with black and gold costumes and make-up looked sophisticated and exciting; the dance troupe in the American flag dresses less so. On the whole, the people who were wearing costumes of one type or another looked good, whereas the people who just looked ‘dressed up’ seemed quite tacky: wrong shoes; wrong skirt lengths and styles for their legs: frizzy hair and make-up that looked as though it had been drawn on with crayons.

Finally, late on into the afternoon Alex was called over to the theatre to do his audition. I couldn’t go with him, but was told to wait and I’d be taken over just before he went on stage. It was quite a long wait and I did wonder if I’d been forgotten. I was waiting with and talking to a woman who was there supporting her husband and we’d seen them on and off all day. Her husband had been taken over at the same time as Alex.

Eventually we were led across to the theatre and told to wait outside. A few minutes later we were ushered in and instructed to sit in aisle seats close to the stage. The audience was quite large, presumably with people who’d applied for audience tickets. Just as we got inside the judges (minus Simon Cowell who’d called in with a sickie) decided to take a break. We sat for quite while with not very much happening. The odd person would walk across the stage and move something, but that was it. Then someone came to us and said the running order had been changed and we’d have to go back to the holding room. Not to worry, we’d be brought over again when the auditionees we were supporting were due to go on.

The stage and the empty judges’ chairs

So we sat, we chatted, we looked at our watches, we waited. Then I saw Alex walk in. He came straight over: ‘Where were you? Why weren’t you in the audience?’

Turns out he’d been on and I hadn’t been there.

He said he’d barely got into the first line of his song when he was buzzed off. They’d said he was singing out of tune. Being a fair sort of bloke he said he had to believe them as he couldn’t hear himself to know if it was true or not. Many of the other acts had been allowed to do a sound check, but he hadn’t, so when he got on stage this was the first time he’d heard the volume at which his backing track was played.

When speaking to him after rejecting him the judges made a big deal about something quite minor he’d mentioned in his application. Throughout the day this had been referred to in interviews as well. He found it quite strange and more than a little annoying that this was what they’d fixated on rather than the many other much more relevant details he’d provided. They’d also asked him if there was anyone in the audience who supported him and thought he should have a second chance. Of course, no-one said anything and so he’d said ‘Anne, where are you?’ but of course I wasn’t there.

We couldn’t go home straight away as he still needed to do another interview and so we needed to wait around for that. As we discussed what had happened, it did seem like a bit of a set-up. Why hadn’t he been allowed to do a sound check? Why had I been taken out of the audience just before his audition? Why had they fixated on this one particular detail from his questionnaire?

Talking about it afterwards, I got the impression that he was glad to have had the experience of taking part and of having got to the second round, but was disappointed to have fallen foul of what seems to have been some hidden agenda.

As for me, it was a boring day but interesting at the same time. It’s not something I’d want to do again, but I am glad I decided to go along today and have the behind-the-scenes experience.

Ozombie

Osama Bin Laden reborn as a zombie.

Imagine if as part of the war on terror the Americans decided to pollute water supplies in Afghanistan with a biological agent that messed with people’s DNA. Imagine if this went wrong and resulted in dead people coming back to life as zombies who feed on other people. It no longer takes polluted water to infect one, now all you need is a zombie bite and bingo! five minutes later you too are a zombie.

Amongst the undead is Osama Bin Laden.

This is the concept for the film ‘Ozombie’.

I hadn’t heard of this film until I spotted the DVD in the supermarket. It sounded pretty stupid but one of the things I like to do is assess how Islam and the Middle East (and the ‘stans) is portrayed in Western media and culture.

I watched it last night. Here’s a brief synopsis of what happens (I won’t give away the ending).

As the zombies multiply, the West, keen to keep the zombification of Afghanistan quiet, withdraw most of their troops, but leave a few crack units behind on zombie blasting duty. It seems that when zombies are shot in the head or have their head chopped off they become really dead. One of these units is tasked with finding a militia base where there is a suspected zombie breeding programme (prisoners are fed to the zombies, thus becoming zombies themselves) in operation. It is also suspected that this is where the undead Bin Laden is being kept.

Enter an American brother and sister duo who both hinder and help one of the special forces units. The brother, Derek Miller, was a firefighter in New York and was the only survivor of his unit on September 11th. He’s on a personal mission to find Bin Laden and ensure he is really dead. He’s manic, likes big guns and is determined to see his mission through. His sister, Dusty, has come to look for him and persuade him to go home. She had obviously been in a hurry to get started on her brother saving mission and hadn’t had time to research the terrain. If she had, she might have worn something more suitable than high-heeled, over the knee boots and bulky fingerless mittens that must surely make it difficult to hold a gun let alone pull the trigger on one.

Scene after scene involves fighting between the unit and the zombies or local militia units and the zombies. It’s all very bloody and surprise, surprise, there’s very little storyline. It did make me jump several times though, so I should give it credit for that. 

As for the impression it gives of Islam and Afghanistan? Well as there’s little more than blood and gore, it could be anywhere in the world and if it had been set in Russia, Vietnam, the Balkans, Nazi Germany or any other ‘us and them’ location, I doubt anyone would have noticed.

Jake Bugg and ideas for film-making in Amsterdam

Feeling inspired by this music video.

This could be my favourite music video ever. It’s basically just a walk round Amsterdam, a city I love and feel I know quite well. I don’t take many photos when I’m there as I feel I’ve taken them all before. However, when I go back at Easter I was thinking of experimenting with my video camera and trying to capture some of the spirit of the city on film. I’m going to be studying this music video pretty closely for tips.

PS The music’s pretty good too.

South of Sanity

A fascinating glimpse at life on an Antarctic base. Don’t think they get that many murders on a regular basis though.

14 souls were left to winter-over on Britain’s largest Antarctic Base.
Nearly six months into their winter, all contact was lost. When a party was sent in to investigate, no one was found alive …

Cut off from the outside world, the small community gradually become fractured and antagonistic. From out of this dark crucible of malcontent, a killer emerges. In the isolated and disparate group, members are picked off one by one, paranoia ensues and no one is safe.

So reads the blurb on the back of this DVD.

The film is entirely set in Antarctica and was written, filmed and produced by a group of over-wintering scientists and support staff at a British base. During the long winter months no-one can get in or out and the base staff are at a minimum. Some of the staff decided to take the concept of making their own entertainment a step further than usual and created an entire feature film.

The resulting horror is predictable and at times the acting is a little wooden. If this was a Hollywood blockbuster I wouldn’t rate it. However, bearing in mind it’s an amateur film, filmed in limiting circumstances (can’t just nip out to the shop to buy another bottle of ketchup when you run out of blood), I think it’s bloody brilliant. Very bloody in fact; the killings get more macabre and by the end I could understand why it is certificate 18.

I also liked the film because I got to see the inside of one of the Antarctic bases. Spending time in Antarctica is one of the things I would really love to do, but may be one of the challenges on my list that I end up doing half-heartedly (a quick visit rather than living there for a while). If I was younger and commitment free I’d be applying for jobs and focusing on making sure I got one. But my current circumstances prevent me from being able to do this and I don’t see it changing in the forseeable future. A film like this, that shows me glimpses of life on a base, keeps the dream ticking over. As far as I know, there aren’t a lot of murders in Antarctica and there are no records of there ever having been a serial killer, so I think I’d be safe on that score.

Here’s a link to the trailer on youtube.

Hockney at the Royal Academy

Wish I’d allowed more than 2hrs to see this fantastic exhibition.

I was lucky enough to get a ticket for the Hockney exhibition whilst I was in London. The online allocation of tickets had long been sold out so I was reliant on buying a ticket once I arrived. The queue for same day tickets was an hour or two long, but for next day tickets it was only 5-10 minutes long. Lucky me.

The following day I turned up and got straight in. It was quite crowded but the timed tickets made sure it wasn’t over-crowded and so it was still easy to get a good look at everything.

The exhibition was much bigger than I’d expected and spanned a period of about fifty years. Many of the paintings depict landscapes, including a series showing the same countryside scene throughout the four seasons.

Not all of the works were paintings however. Several large scales images were actually made up of hundreds of polaroid photos. These photographs were each taken of a tiny part of a huge landscape such as the Grand Canyon and then pieced together jigsaw style to create a whole huge image. The look was really effective and this is something I really must try at some point. I don’t have enough wall space (or enough patience) to do anything on his scale, but even a smaller version would be fun to try.

Hockney has recently discovered iPads and has been using one for his intial sketches. One exhibition room had a series of iPads showing the sketches he’s done. In one of the main exhibition rooms was a group of primary school children all squatting on the floor with their own iPads copying his paintings. It was fascinating to watch them and seeing the iPads in use – they were getting almost as much attention as Hockney!  

One of the best exhibits was a series of films. Hockney was born in Bradford but has lived in Los Angeles for decades. A few years ago he came back to Yorkshire to spend time with his sick mother and rediscovered his love of the place. He’s painted quite prolifically since then, but also got into film-making pioneering a technique using 18 cameras. The cameras were all loaded onto the front of a landrover at different heights and angles. As he drove slowly up a Yorkshire lane the cameras captured the scene from eighteen different perspectives. These films are shown simultaneously on eighteen joined together screens. There is some overlap which in itself creates an interesting effect, but mostly the perspectives merge well to give the impression of actually moving down the lane yourself. One camera, even with a wide-angle lens, shows such a restricted perspective but it’s only when seeing something like this do you realise how restrictive normal photography and filming is. I really felt like I was there and it seemed more realistic than any 3D film I’ve seen.

I spent about two hours at the exhibition and could easily have stayed longer, but I had to leave to ensure I was on time for my floatation appointment. I would highly recommend this exhibition, but do allow plenty of time.

Beaufort – a film

A film about the Israeli’s withdrawal from Lebanon.

I watched this on iplayer recently. The film is about the final part of the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. Beaufort is an an old Crusader fortress that has been used by the Israelies as a modern day outpost complete with a maze of underground tunnels and lookout posts manned by dummies (to make it look like there are more soldiers than there actually are).

The film follows the daily routines of the soldiers; their hopes, fears and dilemmas. Most of the IDF has already pulled out and the soldiers at Beaufort are living in a temporal no-man’s land not knowing whether today, tomorrow or a day next week, will be their last day in Lebanon. They dream of what they will do when they are home, their families and girlfriends. The boredom is frequently offset by regular Hizbullah attacks. Although it is common knowledge that the Israelies are pulling out, the attacks have been stepped up so Hizbullah can take the credit and say they were responsible for chasing the Israelies out. At least that what the soldiers theorise. Of course the attacks lead to deaths which seem all the more tragic in light of the fact that a few days later the young men would have been home and safe.

It was often hard to remember that these soldiers were indeed young men, most of them being only eighteen. The commander of the outpost was only 22 and yet bore the huge burden of being responsible for the lives and deaths of those under his command. His final task is to supervise the laying of explosives and the complete destruction of Beaufort as they leave.

It was a moving film to watch and it’s no surprise to learn since that it has won plenty of awards. As far as I can make out the main events in the film such as the actual withdrawal are based on fact, but the soldiers themselves are only loosely based on real characters and the incidents that happen to individuals, although representative of real incidents, are fictionalised accounts.

The film is in Hebrew with English subtitles and runs for just over two hours.

Sex and the City 2

The New Yorkers visit the UAE and get into scrapes because of their ignorance and lack of cultural sensitivity.

I’ve never got into watching Sex and the City – I don’t think I’ve actually seen any of the TV episodes. I did watch the first movie a few years ago, but wasn’t impressed. When the second movie came out and was supposedly set in Abu Dhabi I wanted to watch it just to see how the Arab/Muslim/Middle East themes had been dealt with. But as I didn’t expect to enjoy it I certainly didn’t want to pay full price for it.

A couple of weeks ago I found the DVD in a supermarket for £2.99 and so bought it. I was right not to pay full price and right that I wasn’t likely to enjoy it. In fact it actually feels like I’ve wasted over two hours of my life watching it, but I have to remind myself that the reason I wanted to see it wasn’t to spend a relaxing evening watching an enjoyable film but instead was to have my academic head on and critique it. So I suppose I’m glad I’ve seen it.   

The movie was actually filmed in Morocco as the producers couldn’t get permission to film in Abu Dhabi or anywhere else in the UAE. No wonder. All the stereotypes are there: opulent hotels, sand dunes and camels, mysogynistic men and beautiful houseboys, women in abayas and niqabs with designer clothes underneath, religious fervour regarding sexuality and the showing of female flesh, and so on and so on. The storyline is very weak (I’m not sure there really is one) and the bits of ‘story’ seem to be there just to provide a link between the stereotypes.

But maybe I’m being too harsh and this blatant demonstration of stereotypes is actual a good thing, as a lot of the Middle East including the Gulf is like this and so the film is showing that a holiday here is not the same as a holiday in the Med or the Caribbean and therefore you shouldn’t expect to act in the way you would in either of these locations or at home. It’s also more of a reflection on Americans than on Arabs or Muslims as it pictures the New Yorkers arriving having done no research and having no idea as to how to behave or dress in an acceptable manner and assuming that it would be fine to blunder on in their usual manner. Well, ok, one of the women had done some research and she tried to educate the others, but these snippets seemed mainly to be for the purpose of setting the scene for what would later go wrong and for keeping the viewer up to speed as to why things were a problem for the girls. This is an assumption that viewers are uneducated in such matters and need them pointing out, which I suppose is justified on the whole.

So maybe I shouldn’t be so critical of the film, after all they haven’t actually depicted anthing ‘wrong’ and if it encourages future visitors to think a bit more about cultural sensitivity before choosing to go there then that can’t be a bad thing. I do wish they’d shown more of the positives to balance it out a bit though.

The Name of the Rose – film

I’ve watched the film, now I just need to read the book.

The Name of the Rose is book number 174 on the BBC Big Read list. I’ve had it on my shelves for a long time but haven’t yet got round to reading it. The book was made into a film in 1986 and stars Sean Connery and Christian Slater. I’ve just watched it for the first time and it’s motivated me to read the book. The film is good, but from past experience I know they’re never usually as good as the book, so I’m glad I’ve seen the film first.


The story is set in a monastery high on an isolated hill in 1300’s Italy. As a Franciscan monk and his novice, played by Connery and Slater, arrive for a debate ahead of their peers, a man is found murdered. Then another one. And another. Connery and Slater turn into medieval sleuths to solve the mysterious crimes and find a secret library in the process. Unfortunately the Inquisition arrives before they can solve the murders and three innocent people find themselves about to be burnt at the stake. It all ends happily however. Well, at least it ends happily for all except the two people who don’t get rescued from the stake in time, the Inquisitor who is killed by his own torture devices, and the library which is destroyed. But apart from that, a happy ending.


I must read the book.

The Bucket List

Bucket lists are getting so popular even Hollywood has jumped on the bandwagon.

I’ve just watched the film ‘The Bucket List’ with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Feeman. The film is about two men, getting on a bit in years, who meet in hospital. They’ve had completely different lives, but now have both been given less than a year to live. They decide to embark on a trip around the world ticking items off a ‘things to do before we kick the bucket’ list. Their list contains a mix of tangible challenges such as seeing the pyramids and skydiving, and more abstract challenges such as laughing until you cry and doing a good turn for a stranger.

A search on google shows that these types of bucket lists have become quite a phenomenon. There are lots of people out there trying to complete 101 things (it often is 101) before they die. Many of the lists appear quite generic which seems a bit strange, as surely this sort of list should be really personal. There are some biggies that I can understand lots of people wanting to do, such as the skydiving and pyramids, but surely the majority of the list should reflect each person’s own interests, likes and dislikes, etc. Although on my own list there are a few challenges that I seem to share with everyone, I’d like to think that most of the items on my list are a true reflection of me and what I want to achieve in my life.

But, back to the film. I spent a fairly enjoyable 93 minutes watching it. This is probably a reasonable length as I don’t think the story is strong enough to hold out for much longer. But for that 93 minutes I was quite engaged and enjoyed the brief snapshots from Africa, France, India and so on. Would I recommend it? Yes, but only if you’re not in the mood for anything even remotely highbrow.