Breakfast All Day Podcast 2/7/20

Re: Something on Film and Female Parts Within the Industry

Haven’t watched ‘Birds of Prey’ as yet (I’m probably a ‘Ford v. Ferrari’ Le Mans Race kind of cinema go’er). I’ll go to watch ‘The Martian’ or ‘First Man’ or probably anything that is ‘nuts and bolts’ based. However, that doesn’t mean that I have a deaf ear completely when it comes to what is going on, in terms of the lives of other female friends, colleagues etc and what excites them nowadays about what stories are being made for the big screen (or indeed, the little one). The last time that I visited Christy and friend’s conversation here, was too long ago (sorry about that Christy, must have been flat out busy or something). Anyhow, around the last time I was here at Christy Lemire as a regular to the podcast (interesting I’ve been six months or so, a regular listener to a womens’ female fly fishing podcast, and made some contributions to that outdoor activity media). Writing bits of articles and playing around with ideas to do with ‘bad ass’ females who go out and do things like ‘hunt’ for example. Yeah. The point that I’m getting to is the following. Jennifer Anniston at the time I remember was one of the last participants to weigh in to that whole ‘Cinema as a theme park ride’ pitched battle amongst film critics from a while ago. It’s a point that Jennifer made about the subject of film and how to carve out a part as a female actress/producer/story teller within the industry. Simply she offered that she would have liked to have been around in the Meg Ryan era of cinema. What was shocking about that for someone like me listening to Jennifer weigh in – is I think that ‘era’ she mentions – is the one we are still living in. And it’s really not. That was the part that shocked me out of my comfort zone initially. But then, because Jennifer had gone and done that. I could no longer find comfort in this faux reality that I had been living in. I was determined to get one back on Jennifer, sort of ‘tennis’ style. She’d just served a curved ball straight over the net, and it flew past my head at a hundred miles an hour. And it shook me, to my tennis shoes. Here is my ‘come back’ (albeit, the point is already lost, but it’s me doing the McEnroe thing with the umpire). I might even throw off my head band. And bounce a racket off the grass.

Here is the thing about what Jennifer describes as this time in the past, when things were obviously better. Because I was born in one of those decades of the sixties or seventies too. I grew up during similar time frames, as Brad, Jen, Christy, Alonso etc. I remember those times too. I grew up in a city where a movie called ‘The Commitments’ was made (and shock horror, recently a TV show on politics dragged in ‘The Commitments’ as Exhibit ‘A’ and asked a participating audience and panel, if it’s reflection of the female character was okay). Yeah. Is anything sacred, anything? So if I use my time travel vehicle, my Delorian vehicle (again, another thing that came out of Ireland and had no follow up from that era). If I was sitting in the same pub in Dublin with the Commitments, and talking to the band manager (and I’ve sit there, and had those conversations, some of which did end with ‘F### the lot of you’, yeah). Here’s what you would find, if you time traveled back to the time that Jennifer refers to, the Meg Ryan one. You’d find it would be very like the movie ‘The Commitments’. And yeah, we can trawl now through cinema archives and find something like the backing singers climbing down the ladder, and drag that in front of the jury on the politics TV magazine program in Ireland in 2020, and give it ‘the guilty’ verdict now (my pal happens to bring her kid to the same high school now, as the kid of one of ‘The Commitments’ backing singers). But here’s the thing about ‘The Commitments’ that is not given credit to. Kids back in the time of the Meg Ryan era, were multi-media oriented.

That’s why I really do bring up the movie ‘The Commitments’. It wasn’t just that kids were into cinema, and Meg Ryan was on the big screen. And still making fabulous Nora Ephron movies with Tom Hanks. Kids at that time, read things like books. Don’t forget that Jennifer. It wasn’t all about going to see Meg Ryan, or Tom Cruise in the cinema. We didn’t have the ‘internet’ yet, so kids actually did stuff such as learning to play the guitar. They played ‘board games’ (board games are strange, in 2020 they are associated more with old folks homes or ‘the process of aging’). That’s another thing, I listened to Mark Kermode interview Danny Boyle recently again, at the release of ‘Trainspotting 2’. I was shocked to listen to how many times Danny actually used that phrase, ‘the process of aging’. Like it was some kind of deadly virus that modern medicine had only just discovered. That must have transferred from bats to human beings or something. The process of aging. In that era, that Jennifer Anniston is talking about, kids weren’t as easy to ‘pin down’ as we take for granted now (where some entire ‘bork cluster’ of data and terabytes gets used to track and collate the entire universe of ‘likes’ as per age and demographic). Back then, you couldn’t take a risk an assume that only folks between age ‘X’ and ‘Y’ are likely to play ‘Scrabble’ to fight against Alzheimer’s at the Day Care Centre. Back then, kids sometimes did radical things, the kind of stuff that Artificial Intelligence would not even predict nowadays, such as playing Scrabble, or starting garage bands, or hanging around too long at video arcades. It get’s you back into that whole Spielberg nostalgic seventies/eighties childhood thing if one really isn’t careful. But because every kid I see around now, has to look like a ‘cookie cutter’ of the other. Kids nowadays seem to look like they came off a conveyor belt, and in the hands of every conveyor belt kid, is that necessary accessory the ‘smart phone’. Because that is ‘the reality’ what Jennifer, or Christy or any of the Mom’s see around them now, they forget that it wasn’t always like that. We forget how less reliant on media and broadcasting, or internet and likes that kids used to be, at the time they went and watched Meg Ryan acting on the big screen. Unfortunately too, the time that I really get to notice – wow, there are a whole new generation of young people around these days – is when I’m sitting drinking the coffee, outside the ‘Multi-Plex’. And these tribes of young people all texting one another on their phones are around the place (and I’m wondering why are young people so loud?). It’s easy to imagine it was always that way. It wasn’t. That’s my best attempt at throwing a John McEnroe fit. It’s not going to change the result however, and yeah match point still goes to Jen. Well played. Brian

Re: Reference from the Archives – Philipp Stölzl from 2008

By the way, as I’m just here, the movie that shows this best about that idea of revolution concealed beneath a very plain, featureless looking surface on top. The movie that I like most in terms of that was ‘North Face’ (2008), directed by Philipp Stölzl. Brilliant lead role played by actor Benno Fürmann as Toni Kurz. Probably because it was released in December 2008, at the onset of the worst financial crisis ever seen in Europe (it’s timing quite frankly, could not have been worse), . . . no one back at that particular point, wanted to go and witness a movie about two of the brightest and best of their generation, who ‘don’t make it’ out alive. Heck, that seemed all too real if you were living anywhere on the periphery of Europe at that point. Much too real. It’s a way though, that I would like to have seen the story of Harley Quinn and her other friends been developed. The movie ‘North Face’ is all about that. The kids back then literally were on the verges, and had nothing. However, they still found a way to do something that expressed themselves. In a way, ‘The Commitments’ released in 1991 in the depths of a bad recession in both England and in Ireland, was approximately the same story. Told in a different way, and around a different type of activity that brought younger folk together. We don’t have that story though, about this present generation (what or how are they ‘coming together’, what is the common ground that can exist long enough for the metal drum kit guy and the three female vocal backing singers to stand to be in each others’ company for five minutes?). That story has not yet been written, to my knowledge. Brian