| seen 30th July-5th August : The Simpsons Movie [7/10]; The Seventh Seal (1957) [7/10] |
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| Saturday, 04 August 2007 | |
 THE SIMPSONS MOVIE : [7/10] : US 07 : David SILVERMAN : 87 mins (BBFC) seen at Empire, Newcastle : 2nd August : public show (£6.75) "Crikey," splutters Rupert Murdoch, "you've saved my network!" "Well, it wouldn't be the first time," wisecracks Bart Simpson - an exchange from a 1999's Simpsons episode which prefigures the shadow hanging over The Simpsons Movie. Because no matter how funny the film is - and it's often giddily hilarious, an inventive gagfest from beginning to end - no matter how dazzlingly multi-layered its pop-cultural ingenuity, the joke's ultimately on us. The timing is perfect: the release of the film coincides with Murdoch's ultra-controversial takeover of the Wall Street Journal. As one libertarian blogger put it, WSJ's editorial page "is as far right as they come, but, unlike Fox News, there is a distinction between the news and editorials... The probable outcome ... is that, like Fox News, it will become an organ primarily followed by the true believers and the rest of us will have one less national news source of value." For two full decades, The Simpsons have been the critically-respectable face of FOX - saving Murdoch's financial bacon, giving the network credibility even among those vehemently opposed to the crude right-wing values espoused by Murdoch's outlets. Simpsons creator Matt Groening, it's safe to guess from the programme's scabrously-subversive content, doesn't share those values one iota - which makes it all the more puzzling and disappointing that he's devoted his abilities to for FOX for so long. There's no doubting Groening's talent, or that of his Simpsons collaborators. But how on earth do they sleep at night? "Crikey" indeed. 1.8.07 THE SEVENTH SEAL : [7/10] : Sweden 57 : Ingmar BERGMAN : 92 mins (BBFC) seen at The Tyneside Cinema - Gateshead : 5th August : public show : £5.20 Though not generally regarded as Bergman's best film - most critics prefer Persona, Wild Strawberries, Scenes from a Marriage or Shame - The Seventh Seal, set during the onslaught of the Black Death in mid-14th-century Sweden, is easily his most famous, widely-seen, influential and imitated. Several of its images have long since attained iconic status: the sudden appearance of Death (Bengt Ekerot), white-faced and black-cloaked, on a barren, rocky beach; Death playing chess with the picture's spiritually-tormented protagonist, Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow), a knight just returned from a decade at the Crusades (pedants have pointed out that the last Crusade ended half a century before the plague arrived in Sweden); Death leading the knight and his entourage in a hilltop 'dance' near the film's close (two surprises about this famous 'sequence': it's very brief, and isn't actually the last shot). As is usual with Bergman, philosophical and theological issues are front and centre throughout: as the homebound Block wanders the countryside in the company of his gruff, sardonic squire Jons (Gunnar Bjornstrand), he sees grim evidence of the bubonic plague everywhere, in a world apparently abandoned by God. It seems that Judgement Day - when, according to the Book of Revelation, seven seals will be opened, with dire consequences for all - is at hand, and the populace seeks solace in various forms of superstition, religion or escapism. It's not all doom and gloom, however - a more optimistic future is incarnated in a happy-go-lucky juggler (Nils Poppe), his beautiful wife (Bibi Andersson) and their infant son. But Death is seldom far from the scene... Using minimal resources, The Seventh Seal manages to present a convincing image of a depopulated world on the brink of apocalypse - although the atmosphere of nightmarish foreboding (not for the first or last time, Bergman relishes the tropes of the horror-movie) is somewhat undermined by the picture's stagey talkiness, some rather strenuous and incongruous touches of comic relief, and the fact that all of the young women in the film (even a 'witch' heading for the stake) are conspicuously beautiful for such a poverty-stricken, disease-raddled era. There's something off-puttingly twee, meanwhile, about that juggler and his blandly perfect family - their spotless virtue in unsubtly stark contrast to the drunken, swinishly villainous villagers who so cruelly persecute them. More troubling is the script's confusion about Death and the Devil - Bergman seems to regard the two as identical, a muddle-headed and naive position for a work which so assiduously attempts to intelligently address fundamental questions of human existence. These problems mean that, though in many ways it's still impressive five decades on, the film doesn't hold up quite as well as, say, Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (specifically the 'Pagan Holiday' section), Corman's Masque of the Red Death or Reeves's Witchfinder General - although the influence of The Seventh Seal is, of course, discernible in each, to greater or lesser degrees, just as Bergman himself respectfully "borrowed" from the Dreyer of Day of Wrath, etc. 6.8.07 Ingmar Bergman 1918-2007 Neil Young NB 1. all films seen in the UK, and all timings approximate, unless stated otherwise 2. timings taken from the BBFC website are rounded to the nearest minute (i.e. 100min 29sec = 100min, but 100min 30sec = 101min) 3. an asterisk [*] in the rating indicates that film is not a feature (i.e. 0-39m = short; 40m-63m = medium-length; 64m+ = feature) |
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