An interview I did with the director Jonathan Glazer prior to Under the Skin screening at this year’s JDIFF. The film remains, by a distance, my favourite of the year so far.
Month: June 2014
Gimme the Loot (2013)
An appreciation of Adam Leon’s criminally underseen debut feature which I submitted for the IFI’s Pete Walsh Critical Writing Award
There’s a moment about half an hour into Gimme the Loot where Sofia (Tashiana Washington) pauses on the periphery of a pickup basketball game. She’s there on business, but she lingers for a moment at the side of a thin, quiet looking kid with his eyes fixed on the action.
“What up Al?”
He shrugs mutely.
“They letting you play today?” she asks, a hint of a smile on her lips.
He shakes his head resignedly.
She moves on with a roll of the eyes and a final, teasing “Keep your head up kid”.
It’s a great little scene, not just because it’s funny, but because it tells so much about the world of the film with only a few lines of dialogue. We can easily imagine this kid (who’s definitely not a baller) haunting the fringes of the game every day, waiting for his long-awaited chance to show the big boys he’s got what it takes. It’s one of many moments in Adam Leon’s film with an unmistakable ring of truth, a sense of place and character that speaks to a genuinely lived experience.
The luckless Al is an outsider, but so is Sofia. One with a little more clout maybe, a bit more attitude, but still on the edge of things. Sofia has one constant in her life; her graffiti partner Malcolm (Ty Hickson). Malcolm’s an outsider too, not least because he’s teamed up with a girl. He’s a goofy, awkward sort of guy, very much a talker, more comfortable running his mouth about his imagined deeds than actually doing them for real. Malcolm is a low-level drug dealer but we get the sense he doesn’t really have the stomach for it. He’s more at home clambering over the city’s roofs with Sofia, looking for that elusive wall or train car that hasn’t been tagged yet.
Gimme the Loot is not a film of grand gestures in either a cinematic or storytelling sense. The plot, such as it is, revolves around Malcolm and Sofia’s attempt to beg, borrow, or steal the $500 they need to pay off a security guard at the New York Mets’ stadium. Their target is the Home Run Apple, a giant animatronic fruit that rises up from the bowels of the field every time the Mets score a home run, which we’re told is something of a holy grail for the graffiti artists of New York. From the beginning it feels like rather a hopeless quest, but this quixotic mission is just a framework to explore the complexities of Marvin and Sophia’s friendship, and the movie really comes alive when they’re just bantering with each other. They’re a memorable pair – Marvin, the clownish loudmouth, a perennial bullshitter, Sophia, fiery and perpetually exasperated at her partner’s buffoonery.
The pair’s big break comes when Malcolm, having stolen a stash from his former boss Donnie, makes a delivery to Ginnie (Zoë Lescaze), a bored rich girl who spends her days partying and smoking weed in her mother’s vacant apartment. In their first meeting Ginnie senses the opportunity to have a little fun with this street kid. They hangout, smoke, she teases him a little about his lack of worldliness; he cautiously feels his way through this unfamiliar social territory. Ty Hickson is great value in these scenes, his determined attempt to remain cool while he’s simultaneously falling a little for this girl and scoping out her apartment for any valuables is beautifully played. He leaves in a hurry (and without his shoes) after Donnie and one of his goons turn up in search of the stolen weed, but not before he’s spied an enticingly crammed jewellery case and gotten away with a kiss and a phone number.
He goes back to an unimpressed Sofia with a plan and when he receives a text from Ginnie later that night, he returns in what he thinks is triumph, but the atmosphere in the apartment is very different. There’s a drunken, cruel feel in the air, and Ginnie has been joined by a group of friends who mockingly refer to him only as “the drug dealer”. It’s in marked contrast to the hazy, playful vibe of his previous visit, a rude awakening to the realities of the economic and social gulf between him and the object of his affections. The one slightly clumsy moment comes when one of the girls warns the shoeless Malcolm to take off his by now filthy socks as her mother “wouldn’t want you bringing the street in here”. The line underlines the divide inherent in the scene a little too obviously but the rest of it is well played and Malcolm’s genuine hurt and anger at this unexpected reversal is palpable. This painful setback puts into motion the concluding act of the film and it’s also a spur for Malcom to consider his real feelings for Sofia, who, although she struggles to admit it, has been hurt by his sudden abandonment of her for a spoiled penthouse dweller.
As a director, Leon avoids the show-off tendencies that mar a lot of debut features. Apart from a couple of well-executed tracking shots later in the film, there’s little or no cinematic trickery and the editing is leisurely and beholden to the meandering rhythms of the dialogue. He’s a writer first and foremost, and the focus is always on what the characters are saying rather than any visual flourishes. The indoor scenes are almost all shot on handheld camera, the lens pushed up close to the characters, but when we move outdoors our viewpoint often remains at a distance, the lead actors obscured by the passing crowds. It might be a natural consequence of the film’s guerrilla shooting style but as a way of capturing the flavour of the New York streets, ball-courts, and parks that our heroes wander through it’s effective. The audience becomes another face in the crowd, taking in the sights and sounds of a New York summer, eavesdropping on the pair’s conversations as the life of the city goes on around them.
Gimme the Loot is in every way a small movie. At just 81 minutes it’s shockingly short by the overextended standards of modern Hollywood. There are no shootings, no sudden explosions of violence, no surprising plot twists. It’s a film about youth and friendship, and in Malcolm and Sophia director Adam Leon has created two of the most refreshingly real teenage characters in recent American cinema. The movie ends with a gift refused and a sense that something has changed in the pair’s relationship, but as he does throughout the movie, the director never overplays the drama. It’s a sweet, sad moment that leaves you feeling slightly bereft that your time in the company of these two outsiders is over.
William Simpson interview
Here’s a video interview I conducted with William Simpson, the storyboard artist for HBO’s Game of Thrones, as a promo for his appearance at the Belfast Film Festival. I had a passing familiarity with some of Will’s old work as a comic book artist but my research for the piece led to me discovering his stunning painted art for the 2000AD series War Machine. As well as being an incredibly imaginative and talented guy, Will is a great talker, and I’m only sorry we couldn’t fit some of our wider discussion of his career into the video.
6 Things We Learned From The Confederations Cup
A little piece I did for tnt24.ie after the Confederations Cup last year, which makes for amusing reading in the light of Spain’s (and to a lesser extent Japan’s) humiliating exit at the World Cup. I never claimed to be Nostradamus.
For the football fan starved of regular season action (discounting the rough-hewn charms of the Airtricity league) almost anything with 22 players and a ball will do, but FIFA’s now well-established World Cup rehearsal doesn’t exactly quicken the blood of your average couch-bound soccer addict. Surprisingly enough though, this year’s offering has been a hugely entertaining affair, capped by an exhilarating final at the Maracana last night. Here are a few things we’ve learned.
It’s hot down south
It might technically be winter in the Southern Hemisphere but with matches being played in temperatures of up to 33 degrees, not to mention sapping humidity, the European teams at the World Cup will already be at a significant disadvantage. Spain’s Alvara Arbeloa has called for more of the games to start later in the evening, although FIFA will be reluctant to countenance the drop in TV viewing figures that would entail. For the sake of the players’ health, and for those us of still traumatised by memories of a scarlet, screaming John Aldridge at USA ’94, it’s probably best if Ireland don’t qualify.
Japan should be your new second team
Speaking of Ireland not qualifying, if you’re looking for some loveable underdogs to throw your support behind you could do worse than the Japanese, who’ve already booked their place at next year’s tournament. Led by the cool head of Shinji Kagawa, who looked a different player to the marginalised figure that only sporadically impressed at Old Trafford last season, the Asian champions offered a combination of pace, incisive passing, and skill that made them one of the most attractive teams at the tournament. Their match against Italy was one the Cup‘s highlights, with the madcap closing stages offering entertainment to match anything in the last few years of international football.
Penalty shootouts aren’t all they’re cracked up to be
The two teams had comprehensively canceled each other out over 120 minutes of play and when it came to the shootout in Spain and Italy’s semi-final both sides matched each other kick for kick. The tone was immediately set by Antonio Candreva’s nonchalant panenka and what followed was a master class in dead ball shooting. The sangfroid on display was typified by the magnificently haughty Andrea Pirlo, who seemed to consider the whole business of scoring a goal vaguely beneath a player of his pedigree. Both sets of players were utterly unerring and a helpless Casillas and Buffon were reduced to ball boy duties. Someone had to miss, and the Juventus defender Leonardo Bonucci was the eventual culprit in sudden death, but up to that point both sides offered a magnificent demonstration of one of football’s more underrated skills. Get practicing England.
Brazil aren’t quite the finished article…
Buoyed by an ecstatic crowd in Rio, the selecao put on by far their best performance of the tournament in the final. There’s a callow look to the Brazilian attack at times, with the likes of Hulk (awesome nickname aside) lacking true star quality. A lot will rest on the slight shoulders of Neymar, who has frustrated as often as he as entertained in the last couple of weeks, but a year at Barcelona can only do him good and his stunning showing in the final shows that he can handle the pressure of an expectant public.
… and Spain are still the team to beat
Their humbling in the final recalled Barcelona’s similar pasting at the hands of Bayern Munich in this year’s Champions League, but just as anyone with any sense won’t read too much into that result, it would be foolish to discount Spain on the basis of this game. With established stars Xavi and Iniesta (for my money the player of the tournament) still running things in midfield, and an almost comically overstocked bench (for the final it contained Javi Martinez, David Silva, Cesc Fabregas and Man City’s big money signing Jesus Navas to name but four) the Iberians have a pedigree and strength in depth that’s the envy of all. Anyone who watched the recent European Under-21 Championship will know they have a few handy youngsters coming through as well, so we can look forward to quite a few more years of tiki-taka at the summit of the global game.
Tahiti probably won’t be threatening the big boys anytime soon
Great bunch of lads though
Fuzzy Lamentations 