Thrown For A Loop By Satirical Genius

There are a number of reasons why Armando Iannucci's feature debut, In The Loop, is automatically one of the best movies to be released this year, at least from this humble blogger's perspective, which is a relief after I went on about it in these two posts. However, there is one super-special personal reason, which I'll get to in a bit. First, a list of things to love about this magnificent movie...

1. It was free.

Yes, I got free tickets from a Sunday Times promotion, and got to see it at the lovely Ritzy in unlovely Brixton. The assembled upper-middle-class white people, perhaps fans of India Knight’s column, or that incredibly ugly typeset, seemed to thoroughly enjoy the movie, and we lower-middle-class white people did too. It was all very congenial, even with the C-word flying out of the screen with alarming regularity.

2. The easy transition to the big screen.

I'm sure the cinéma vérité style of The Thick Of It has its detractors, but whatever your feelings about it, it does make translating the show to a bigger screen fairly easy. No matter how modish the style has become, it's kinetic enough to keep the eye distracted from a film that is basically a bunch of people talking to each other a lot. The swift pace and aggressive performances keep the pace up for almost the entire movie.


Even so, Iannucci has fun with the contrasts between cramped and grey Britain, and the golden glows and grandeur of Washington. Even though the characters are stuck in depressing buildings, you still get the sense that Washington is a far more glamourous place than Whitehall. On top of that is one of the funniest visuals of the year; repeated shots of Malcolm Tucker scuttling around Washington, a sheaf of papers in his hand and mobile phone stuck to his ear as he bellows and shrieks torrents of foul abuse at everyone.

That said, would it pass the Billson test? It’s drab, frenetic, composed with what looks like slap-dash haste (though was probably worked out with great care), and certainly seems more interested in the spoken word than the visual aspect, but this is what the show is. Besides, even if it’s not The Fountain in terms of visual splendour, the script by Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche and Ian Martin is a marvellously complex thing, easily as tight and satisfying as their script for the recent specials (finally available on DVD, staggering-genius fans!). What looks like an unconnected series of sweary set-pieces gels in the final act with great precision. Billson’s criticism of British screenwriters is as angry as her comments about directors, and just as accurate:

A lot of British film-makers assume that screenplay equals dialogue, and because the Brits still haven't caught on to William Goldman's maxim that "Screenplay is structure", we get endless exposition and a plodding procession of scenes unfurling like stage plays. Scene begins, there's some dialogue, scene ends, next scene begins, more dialogue and so on. Lawks-a-mercy, we might as well be watching a Restoration drama at the Old Vic.

In The Loop might feature more dialogue than a dozen movies put together, but at least there is plot there. I once attended a screenwriting discussion headed by a very nice lady from the BBC, who said that drama spec-scripts would usually only attract attention if the plotting was tight. With comedy, however, scripts could be poorly plotted but would be considered a success if they were at least funny, which most comedy scripts sent to the Beeb were not.


In The Loop is that wonderful rarity; a movie that has a funny line almost every thirty seconds, but also works like a narrative machine from beginning to end and, as a bonus, features some of the most fascinating and believable characters of recent times. I’m not saying Iannucci didn’t do a great job as director, because I think he did. What he should be most proud of, though, is that remarkable script. When the film finished I said to Canyon that it was this year’s In Bruges. I can think of no higher praise.

3. The peculiar anti-continuity continuity.

Though I thought it might be baffling to have Chris Addison return as a different character than he played in The Thick Of It, he is pretty much the same arrogant-yet-cowardly loser as before, just with a new name. At first this choice was mystifying, but as In The Loop deals with a different department within the government, new characters are necessary if we're not to waste half of the film explaining why these people have switched jobs, especially when it is going to be seen by many more people who saw the show (at least, I hope so). Having Addison play Toby and not Ollie is, thankfully, no big deal.


He's not the only one. Several cast-members appear as new characters who share similarities and narrative links with their previous incarnations, most notably Olivia Poulet as Toby's girlfriend (she played Ollie's Tory girlfriend in The Thick Of It), Lucinda Raikes as a reporter (though we don't find out if she's working for the Daily Mail as with the parent series), Alex McQueen as an ambassador with the same social ineptitude as his Thick Of It character Julius Nicholson. It's not all the same. James Smith gets a promotion, Joanna Scanlan (as seen below) gets a demotion, and Will Smith (no, not that one...) gets a tiny role that nicely pays off his parallel universe character arc from the recent specials.


Only two characters remain the same: Peter Capaldi as Tucker, and Paul Higgins as Jamie, who is only in the movie for a few minutes but tears his scenes apart with even more feral nastiness than in the original series. His arrival late in the movie was greeted with a murmur of upper middle-class approval from the Sunday Times readers in the audience. There was no response from the audience when a familiar voice announced the start of a conference about fifteen minutes into the film. I could very well be mistaken, but the voice (belonging to an unseen man) sounded a lot like a former Thick Of It cast-member who hasn’t been in the show since before the specials, for very well-publicised reasons. IMDb, not surprisingly, has nothing to say on the matter.

4. The amazing cast.

Having everyone come back for this movie, even in an altered state, is a pure joy. By now they know how to do this hectic, profane comedy in their sleep, and it's a relief to find that the two British additions to the cast, Gina McKee and Tom Hollander, are both wonderful. This is not exactly news, of course. McKee is so good that when it seems like she's dropped out of the movie about twenty minutes in I was gutted (she comes back later, thankfully). Hollander is remarkable as the hapless Simon Foster, his craven vacillating providing much of the comedy and plot movement. Even though I adore Malcolm Tucker, I had feared the movie would overuse him, thus denting his impact. Luckily the rest of the characters are inept and venal enough to become just as fascinating as him.


Some criticism (that I really don’t agree with) has been thrown at the movie for moving the action to America (more on the colossal shitbag who said that below). Expanding the scope of the Thickniverse was a clever move from a financial point of view (hello American viewers who will not know what hit them), as well as in terms of narrative and satirical possibility, but it also meant a new set of actors who have not worked under these conditions before. While the UK actors gambol over their lines with precision borne of years spent working on this show, James Gandolfini and his fellow Americans speak much slower. It takes a while to adjust to the change in pace in America, though this is not a criticism of them. Everyone excels, especially Mimi Kennedy as Assistant Secretary for Diplomacy Karen Clarke, Anna Chlumsky as naive intern Liza Weld, and the great David Rasche as the menacing Linton Barwick, who bangs heads with Malcolm Tucker a couple of times.


Gandolfini is also terrific, playing straight comedy in a way he’s not had a chance to do before. One of the highlights of the movie is the showdown with Malcolm, one of the few moments in the film where the humour pauses. I don’t remember specifics, but I do know I held my breath throughout.

5. Comedy heritage.

This superb cast, most of whom have worked with Iannucci before, either on The Thick Of It or earlier works, reminded me of the repertory of performers that would appear regularly in the films of Preston Sturges, whose hyper-modern comedies still feel fresh even today. While In The Loop has been compared to Yes, Minister (obviously) and old Ealing comedies (I'm not 100% sure about that, but I'll go along with it), I'd say Iannucci has been influenced as much by Sturges as anything else.


The frenetic pace, the irreverence, the seriousness of purpose (for example, Sullivan's Travels and Hail The Conquering Hero are pointed comments on social issues as much as they are kooky knockabout fun), and the beautifully wrought plot and characters, are all reminiscent of Sturges' films. Considering how that great director's work is not as well known in the UK as it should be (at least as far as I can see), it's strange to see someone dabble in the same waters.

6. There's a lot more where this came from.

Apparently a lot more footage was shot than was used. Though the final product is structured so well that a director's cut would probably not work anywhere near as well, we can hope for a lot of deleted scenes in the DVD. Until then, here are some scenes with Jamie being a total scumbag. Navigate within the window for more scenes (the first two are in the movie, but the movie discussion and confrontation with Gina McKee are not).

7. Topicality.

It’s obvious from a look at any synopsis that Iannucci and co. were inspired by the Dodgy Dossier that got us into the Iraq War, but I was unprepared for the level of extra detail he would add. With Tucker standing in for Alastair Campbell, Simon Foster is a movie version of Clare Short, vacillating over whether or not to resign in protest over the push to war. One of the funniest moments in the film comes when Foster convinces himself it would be braver to stay on than it would be to resign, but the depressing thing is that that’s almost a direct transcription of Short’s thinking, as explained far down in this fascinating article by Iannucci about the making of the film. This being a comedy, there is, sadly, no Robin Cook analogue.


The joke that got the biggest roar of approval, though, has to be what must have seemed, at the time, to be a throwaway joke about expenses. Even more surprising, after this week's controversy about Damian McBride and the smear-mail cregarding David Cameron , shouty spin-doctors seem even more topical. It goes to show how well the filmmakers understand the thinking of our leaders. Speaking of which...

8. Every time Malcolm Tucker swears, Alastair Campbell winces.

In polite conversation I make no secret of the fact that I think Alastair Campbell is primarily responsible for one of the darkest moments in recent British history, namely the campaign of dishonest bullying aimed at the BBC in order to dodge some awkward questions about the march to war, a series of events catalysed by the dodgy dossier used to such wonderful satirical effect by Iannucci and co. During that period, his embarrassingly brazen avoidance of responsibility, desperately squirming out of danger by setting the easily controlled British press after the BBC, was sickening to watch, especially when the press not only jumped into line like a brainwashed army, but would occasionally comment on how effectively they had been manipulated, as if to pay tribute to Campbell's Macchiavellian genius.


For fuck's sake, all he did was act like a kid trying to escape a bollocking for firing a spitball at teacher by pointing out that Jenkins has a nuddy mag in his desk and is far more deserving of the birch than he is, the difference here being that any Etonian headmaster would ignore such a desperate attempt at diversion and then wallop the living shit out of the kid, instead of letting him off and expelling poor Jenkins who was just holding that copy of Razzle for James "Portly" Fortesque, honest sir!

As if Campbell's despicable and immoral face-saving exercise wasn't bad enough - an exercise which, let's not forget, lead to the death of a renowned scientist and complicated all investigation into the march to war, dragging the conflict out at the cost of many more lives - the BBC has since kept bringing the sociopath back, over and over again, to host shows and participate in interviews and generally act like it's no hard feelings. Well fuck that, there are fucking diamond-hard feelings, and I'll bet there are plenty within the BBC too. His actions have damaged investigative journalism and engaged enquiry in England more than any logistical or financial shortfalls listed in Nick Davies' Flat Earth News, and it's doubtful we'll ever see a restoration of backbone in the fourth estate. Of course that could just be me letting pessimism overtake me, but that's an easy thing to do post-Hutton enquiry. The whole sorry experience damaged my perception of politics and journalism to such an extent that I cannot see my faith ever being restored, especially now Paul Foot has sadly left us.


Of course, it's blatantly obvious that Malcolm Tucker is based on Alastair Campbell. Only an idiot could deny it. An evil idiot at that. Yes, the man himself was invited to see it with "Zoot Suit" Kermode, and was bored by the film. I also like how he criticised Iannucci for not understanding how certain things worked in politics.

Of course, politicians and advisers have their own ambitions. But they have more than that. Some of the scenarios - like a secret meeting being overwhelmed by attendees because its existence has been announced on TV; or Tucker being able to keep out of the papers something a minister said on radio; or the minister being confined to the back row of a meeting while officials take centre stage - would have benefited from advice from someone who has been inside a government loop or two.

What advice? Like this? [From the Iannucci article I'd linked to above]

I'd established contact with a political blogger out in DC who fixed me up with US State Department staffers and Senate workers and Pentagon officials and even a CIA guy, who could brief me on the ins and outs of Washington life. At least two people told me that Condoleezza Rice was a bit rubbish. She got rather star-struck in Washington and never really stood up to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Both of the guys I met said: "And, as a result, people got killed." The CIA guy added: "And that's what really pisses me off!" and as he said it, for the first time in our meeting, he looked rather frightening. He had the look of a man who knows how to empty someone else's bowels out by simply touching a vein.

That sounds like he knew what he was doing, Mr. Campbell. Yes, his hilariously defensive comment piece was the thing that inspired me to write this post (well, that and the sheer awesomeness of the movie) but pretty much everything that I wanted to say about Campbell's snippy response to the movie is summed up in this comment piece by George Pitcher.

Within 24 hours, Campbell had demonstrated exactly why the yobbish In The Loop character, Malcolm Tucker, is so obviously based on him. Humourlessly beat up on a critical journo, then affect nonchalance at your own grim mirror-image the next day. The Guardian's Digested Read feature on Campbell's column today could read: "Honestly, I couldn't care less. Here's 800 words about how I couldn't care less."

Amateur psychologist as Campbell is, he must have turned his hobby on himself (which is after all his favourite subject) in today's column. Is it not the reaction of the bullying child in the playground that everyone eventually turns on, pointing and laughing at him, so he has to react with "Bor-ring! Can't you see I don't care?"

Brilliant. I also like Iannucci's response to the criticism:

We should have posters done. They would say: 'A disappointment, Alastair Campbell'.

Of course Campbell cares, though his faux-apathy might really have been triggered because Tucker is shown, at times, to lose track of the multiple deceptions he has created. I have a suspicion that the mad dashing, which often looks panicked, is as far from Campbell's image of himself as you can get. Nevertheless, don't forget that this is the man who raced across London and barged into a Four News broadcast to ladle further heaps of smelly lie-manure all over the acquiescent and terrified BBC. Of course, I'm making a huge assumption that Campbell is concerned with his image, but considering how vanilla his Wikipedia page is, I'm beginning to wonder if he has a hobby. Surely no one else is going to clean it up whenever it gets altered to discuss anything other than his unpleasant-sounding battle with depression, or his support for Leukaemia Research.


Or maybe the world has moved on now, and that page has remained untouched and information-free for years now. How soon we forget. At least we still have Tucker, and the thought of Campbell watching and trying to figure out how to spin the fact that he has been part of the creation of a monster, a hilarious character who nevertheless represents everything that is wrong with the world today, an amoral crocodile-man wrecking the lives of all around him just to accomplish whatever the goal is for that day. In The Loop is a magnificent achievement on a number of levels, but I take special pleasure in the mental image of that man, the one who installed Cynicism 2.0 in my soul, sitting in a screening room with a bequiffed William Friedkin fan, fidgeting in his seat as his personality is filleted with such precision. Thank you, Peter Capaldi, and thank you Iannucci and co. You completed me, somehow.

Adventures In Awesome: Want! Now! (4)

While wasting time farting about on AV Club last night, the subject of Brasseye and The Day Today came up during a discussion of UK comedy, as it usually does. Understandable, considering the massive effect it had on pretty much everyone who saw it and clasped it to their bosom. Even though it was broadcast over a decade ago, I can't think of any other UK comedy that has come close to that level of brilliance except The Thick Of It. Don't get me wrong, I have loved many shows made since then; Father Ted and Black Books, The Office, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, Big Train, and Outnumbered spring to mind immediately, and my DVDs of those shows comprise almost the entirety of my UK TV collection amid swathes of US boxsets. Even so, none of those shows have had the same effect on me as Chris Morris' work. Here is the great man hanging around at CERN, which he apparently visited recently.


During the AV Club chat, I remembered the radio predecessor to The Day Today; On The Hour, four episodes of which had previously been released by the BBC. My cassette copy bit the dust a while back from overuse, leaving me bereft. But now my pain is over. Inspired by that seemingly pointless chat, a quick search revealed that I had been horribly oblivious to Warp Records' release of the complete On The Hour in two CD boxsets (and on iTunes).


My life is a little more complete now. Finally I can find out what happened to Alan Partridge and his zombie wife after all these years (On The Hour was possibly even more willing to indulge in flights of fancy than the TV version, which was hobbled by budget restrictions, obviously). This revelation - which is old news to fans, I'm sure - comes after the recent screening of Armando Iannucci's feature debut, In The Loop, the feature version of The Thick of It, at Sundance.


This is probably the movie I'm most excited about this year (and have already gone on about it at length), a fact made even more remarkable by the fact that it's made by BBC Films, who had seemed to have abandoned their boldness (see their previous support for Lynne Ramsay and Pawel Pawlikowski as a kind of proof) in favour of endless costume dramas and literary navel-gazing. A new version of Brideshead Revisited? An out-of-date adaptation of Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road? The love life of Dylan Thomas? It's been a crummy 2008 for them, especially as the other major film investor in the UK, FilmFour, had returned from financial collapse to bring us In Bruges, Hunger, and Slumdog Millionaire. Yes yes, I might not like that film, but it's way more daring than some turgid, poorly-cast adaptation of The Other Boleyn Girl.


Luckily for BBC Films, they now have a roster containing In The Loop, An Education (starring Carey "Sally Sparrow" Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard sans his recent egregious Trigorin beard that he had cultivated for his run in The Seagull), Grant Heslov's directorial debut Men Who Stare At Goats, the Churchill-tastic Into The Storm, Bright Star (yes, a historical drama about literary figures, but it's by Jane Campion so I'm bound to be interested), Martin Campbell's remake of his rightly celebrated Edge of Darkness, and Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, which will hopefully be as good as her excellent feature debut Red Road. Fair to say things are looking up. Those first two movies, Loop and Education, have been shown at Sundance, and according to Storyville editor Nick Fraser and Indie journo Gaynor Flynn, they have been rapturously embraced by audiences. It's rare that I endorse UK culture on this blog, but when it's promising, or distinct, or truly wonderful, it needs to be praised to the highest of high heavens.

Sci Fi Through Space/Time: The Wild Blue Yonder

A shameful admission before begin. The Wild Blue Yonder is the first movie I have seen by Werner Herzog, even though I have Rescue Dawn somewhere in this house, not to mention a Herzog/Kinski boxset that has been touched by me only to move it from house to house. Pitiful. Until I saw this movie, the only experience I had of Herzog was to experience what Klaus Kinski thought of him, as expressed in his demented, perverse, brilliant autobiography. Apologies for the long quote, but really, if you're going to quote Kinski, you have to quote a lot:

Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep...

He should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! A poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs! The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! No panther claws should rip open his throat--that would be much too good for him! Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and his guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Yellow fever! Leprosy! It's no use; the more I wish him the most gruesome deaths, the more he haunts me...

His speech is clumsy, with a toadlike indolence, long winded, pedantic, choppy. The words tumble from his mouth in sentence fragments, which he holds back as much as possible, as if they were earning interest. It takes forever and a day for him to push out a clump of hardened brain snot. Then he writhes in painful ecstasy, as if he had sugar on his rotten teeth. A very slow blab machine. An obsolete model with a non-working switch— it can't be turned off unless you cut off the electric power altogether. So I'd have to smash him in the kisser. No, I'd have to knock him unconscious. But even if he were unconscious he'd keep talking. Even if his vocal cords were sliced through, he'd keep talking like a ventriloquist. Even if his throat were cut and his head were chopped off, speech balloons would still dangle from his mouth like gases emitted by internal decay.

The word on the street is that Kinski's autobiography was full of exaggeration, obfuscation, and insane bullshit, but even so, that's the kind of description that makes an impression on you. For some inexplicable and inexcusable reason I never got to see Herzog's work, but I made an effort for The Wild Blue Yonder, because the idea behind it, of a monologue delivered by an alien played by Brad Dourif, was immensely appealing. Perhaps I should have realised that this was to be one of Herzog's minor works, and an exercise in audience frustration, rather than his larger projects.


While I say minor works, I'm aware that the documentaries made between his major films are highly regarded, and that what might appear to be dashed off are done with intelligence and enthusiasm. At least, that's the impression I got from Wild Blue Yonder, which was simultaneously trivial and fascinating, though perhaps more for what it says about filmmaking and storytelling than I says about its subject matter, which is an amusing but slight satire on modern culture, environmental concerns, and the urge to explore our surroundings, with a possible side order of comment on the sci fi genre and its reliance on spectacle.

Made on a shoestring budget, mostly utilising bits of footage found by or donated to Herzog, Wild Blue Yonder is a long tirade delivered by an alien, relating an alternate history of earth. His race, escaping an ice age on their home planet orbiting Andromeda, arrive on earth with the hope of rebuilding their civilisation but instead fail because, in Dourif's words:

You see aliens as these technologically advanced superbeings who destroy New York city in two minutes flat. Well I hate to say it, but we aliens all suck.

Much of Dourif's tale is told in a rundown Midwestern town, with deserted streets, dilapidated faux-Grecian buildings, and decrepit trailers, standing in for the aliens' hubris-wrecked Babylon. The setting, and the tale told, are reminiscent of Nicolas Roeg's adaptation of Walter Tevis' The Man Who Fell To Earth, but Roeg didn't visualise the alien's arrival on Earth using old stock footage of crashing airplanes.


Herzog's reliance on found footage to relate his galactic tale is both frugal and, for a while, amusing, cleverly linking shots of NASA scientists examining a probe to the next part of his tale, as an Andromedan virus escapes from the Roswell UFO during its examination at Cape Canaveral, and infects the planet.


A spacecraft orbiting Earth contains the only uninfected humans left, and their fate depends upon leaving Earth's orbit and finding some way to travel across the galaxy to the home planet of the alien refugees, in the hope that they might find some way to build a new life there, with scientists desperately trying to invent methods of faster-than-light travel in order to speed up the journey.


This section of the movie is possibly the most problematic. Using footage of zero-G shenanigans from the STS 34 Space Shuttle mission, a long stretch of the short running time is taken up with mundane shots of astronauts sitting (well, floating) around, doing very little. The narrative grinds to a halt at these points, possibly to mimic the boredom of the astronauts, forced to play a waiting game while trying to leave Earth's orbit, but also, maybe, as a pointed antidote to the grandiosity of much sci fi. Just as exotic fantasies of interesting alien cultures are punctured by Dourif's resolutely unglamorous and self-loathing shlub, the wonder of space travel is presented as a flat, gray, nothing, a life of chores and boredom.


Scattered through these scenes are very entertaining rants from Dourif about the sins of humanity (breeding pigs and climbing mountains. It makes sense in the movie), weird alternate history interludes (Galileo's launch figures in), and occasional breaks for baffling interviews with astrophysicists discussing theoretical intergalactic space travel methods, including one really awesome one from Martin Lo, explaining his Interplanetary Network theory. Nevertheless, these interruptions, delivered with no concessions to layman speak, are so perplexing that I began to suspect Herzog was making a point about mainstream sci fi, replacing the genre's meaningless sub-scientific babble with actual science, in all its impenetrable complexity.


Eventually, using Lo's method of interstellar travel, which he refers to as chaotic transport, the astronauts reach their destination, the ice encrusted planet from which Dourif's ancestors travelled, and Herzog switches to footage of divers swimming under the ice at Murdo Sound, which was given to him by musician Henry Kaiser. With Dourif's narration describing his homeworld as one with a frozen blue sky and bizarre alien creatures, we see divers passing under a thick blue crust of ice, surrounded by unfamiliar underwater flora and fauna. Compared to the eventless middle section, this part of the film is fascinating and, again, playful.


The kicker, delivered in the final moments of the film, is that the astronauts, so isolated and harried by their desperate trip through space, return to Earth with good news about the possible relocation spot, only to find that Earth has been deserted long before, making their journey a useless one. Even worse, the remnants of the human race are now living in space and Earth has become a national park for holidays.


This, in turn, makes the entire film seem like an absurd and futile joke, and makes you wonder what the point of it all is. Is it a treatise on humanity's urge to trivialise the glorious? Some of the photography at the end is so beautiful it seems Herzog might be angered by the thought of his fellow man taking this beauty for granted. Harking back to the start of the film, the aliens' plans for their stay on Earth, which requires building a city featuring a mall, a court room, a Pentagon, in an effort to replicate Washington DC, all fail. It's likely this is a metaphor for the death of the American dream, and the way intelligence or wisdom can be ignored by many. One funny moment, with Dourif describing the alien lifeforms and their incomprehensible languages matches up with an image of a floating aquatic blob as a human language, possibly Farsi, bubbles up through the soundtrack. Is this just a silly joke? A comment on Western attitudes to foreigners, with a hint of war-on-terror criticism thrown in for good measure?


By film's end I was baffled as to what Herzog was aiming for. A lot of the voiceover (and the denouement) is pointedly satirical, especially about humanity's inability to take responsibility for the consequences of its actions. However, it also ends on a flatly ironic note, a Shaggy Dog tale ending that makes the journey as pointless as the one taken by the astronauts. After that, much of the movie seems purposeless. Long stretches of the film pass with little happening, leaving room for contemplation but it has very little (if any) narrative drive. It also makes you wonder if Dourif's alien is nothing more than a crank rambling about his conspiracy theories from the wreckage of his trailer park home, which makes the movie even more absurd, as if the faux-documentary is doubly faux. There are layers and layers of falsehood here, which suits a movie that takes existing footage out of context and creates something new from it.


Of course, trying to assign meaning to a film as blank and mischievous as this one is an exercise in futility. All of these interpretations could be correct, but I could theoretically micro-analyse the movie for years. From where I'm sitting it could either be a prank, a critique of a genre I love, or the most profound movie ever made. Of course, obsessively dissecting this movie might still be missing the point. Herzog might have merely been trying to create a poetic experience, a hypnotic fusion of image and sound, but on a subjective level I'd have to say it fails in that respect as well. The imagery in the final third of the movie is beautiful but grainy, and the mid-section is utterly drab, the only colour provided by many out of context displays of blurry cosmic events.


What makes those long narrative-free sequences in the middle bearable is the beautiful soundtrack by German cellist Ernst Reijseger and Senegalese singer Mola Sylla. Recorded prior to making the movie, it lives independently of the film, unlike something like Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, which is as perfect a melding of abstract vision and non-diegetic sound as is possible. Wild Blue Yonder, perhaps intentionally, splits the visual content almost evenly between mundane and strangely beautiful, and not even the haunting soundtrack Herzog has presided over can make the dull half work as well as the other. If the movie sounds like hard going (and it can be), I recommend the soundtrack CD, Requiem For A Dying Planet, which has been stuck to my iPod for months now.


If the movie doesn't fully succeed as story or satire, it does make a strong case for cobbling together a narrative out of things that are available to you. Herzog was lucky enough to get hold of Henry Kaiser's footage (which he also used in his documentary Encounters at the End of the World), and the space shuttle footage, which comprise the majority of the film, and much of the film looks like stock footage from a library, acquired either for free or at least cheaply. The only expenses incurred, other than post-production and research, is getting Brad Dourif into the middle of nowhere for a couple of days, and hiring musicians and studios to record the wonderful soundtrack. For these, Herzog got some funding from Centre National de la Cinématographie, France2 and BBC Films. Well, I say BBC Films, but it was actually Nick Fraser and the Storyville guys, who are currently responsible for 90% of the interesting things coming out of the BBC, including James Marsh's super Man on Wire. I doubt BBC Films proper would never have any interest in funding Wild Blue Yonder now that they've rebranded themselves as The Keira Knightly Period Costume Factory in an effort to emulate the rest of the British Film Industry instead of supporting exciting projects like Morvern Callar and Last Resort [/rant].


As I said recently, the idea of cobbling together the resources to tell a story any way you can and using whatever means necessary to communicate ideas is very alluring. One way, the Michel Gondry way, involves making things and using your imagination to get around problems in a script already written. Herzog's idea (which is not solely his, but merely one he is using here) is to take found footage and construct a narrative out of it. Using free stock footage (available online), it's relatively easy to make a film telling a story you want. As I say, this is not a new idea; within the narrow parameters of my experience I've greatly enjoyed the work of Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci, and Adam Buxton, all of whom have used found footage for comical purposes, and of course Orson Welles' last movie, F For Fake, played with truth and falsehood by manipulating the real and unreal until the audience doesn't know which is which. Herzog has even used this technique before, in his 1992 movie Lessons of Darknesswhich re-edits footage from Operation Desert Storm into a reflection on faith, magic, and madness. Even so, it was not until I saw The Wild Blue Yonder that I realised how easy it could be. It was an exciting moment.


That's beside the point, though. Wild Blue Yonder, as a film, is not a success, being only sporadically entertaining, narratively simplistic, and thematically jumbled. As a reflective space to let your brain wander in, visually it's often too murky or drab, though the leisurely pace certainly helps generate a hypnotic state. It's more successful as a kind of cinematic prank, daring to corral unconnected imagery and playful ranting into a coherent, if ephemeral, whole. Nevertheless, throughout I kept wanting a little bit more; more narrative, more energy, more purpose (or, to make the project more of a joke, less purpose). There's a strong case that Herzog, seeking to confound audience expectation, has deconstructed the sci fi genre, showing the tedium of real space travel and the lies at the heart of the sci fi movie: they have alien worlds created in the heart of a computer, he has an underwater world that is as real as it is alien, but when seen in the context of the movie is as false as the CGI vision. That's possibly the most intriguing critique of the movie, but that means the film only works on an intellectual level. Having to sit and watch it is still an occasionally frustrating experience for this ADD afflicted film buff.


Falling between two stools, one of entertainment and the other transcendental art, Wild Blue Yonder ended up leaving me unsatisfied as a movie, even while it made my brain whir with excitement as a creative template. There's no way I could think ill of it, even if just taking it as a quirky curio starring one of the great character actors of our time in full flow, but I hesitate to recommend it either, simply because even after pondering it for months, I'm not sure what it set out to do or what it achieves. Maybe that was the point of it.