Clik here to view.
Madchester inches towards the West End, Ken Loach demonstrates the wonder of socialism, and Kathryn Bigelow can't tell one London bus from another
Rave on stage
Long shot as it may be – and Trash loves a long shot – I hear there are plans to turn Madchester film comedy 24 Hour Party People into a stage musical. The film's director, Michael Winterbottom, told me that he and producer Andrew Eaton have been toying with the idea for several years and that there is even a rough script "floating around". Steve Coogan is apparently interested in reprising his part as the lead. The show would tell the story of Factory Records, its founder, Tony Wilson, and the rise and fall of bands including Joy Division, Buzzcocks, A Certain Ratio and Happy Mondays. I'd personally love to see some genteel West End theatre transformed into a hands-in -the-air, tops-off sweatbox for a while, throbbing to Marshall Jefferson's Move Your Body. But, following the film's soundtrack, the show could also include songs such as Love Will Tear Us Apart, Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've) and Blue Monday. Meanwhile, two alumni from Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, John Simm and Shirley Henderson, are currently starring in Winterbottom's latest cinema release, Everyday, while Coogan and Winterbottom are now at Sundance, promoting their latest collaboration, The Look of Love, about the life of Soho porn king Paul Raymond. Co-starring Imogen Poots, Anna Friel and Tamsin Egerton, it will be released here in April, after also playing at the Berlin film festival next month.
Summon the Spirit
Also at Berlin will be Ken Loach's new documentary, The Spirit of '45, which I have had the stirring pleasure of seeing in advance. It makes an eloquent and poetic case for the nationalisation that went on after the second world war under the socialist Attlee government of 1945-1951. It is in awe of Bevan's creation of the NHS. It warns us now that current society (the film blames Thatcher for destroying and dismantling it all, of course, but also New Labour for being no help) is close to re-creating the poverty of the 1930s. Perhaps most fascinatingly, the film implores the older generation to help energise and educate the betrayed working-class youth of today with their knowledge and experience. Using wonderful archive material and interviews – all conducted by Loach himself – with economists, miners, dockers, nurses and pensioners, the film is passionate and deeply personal but done with Loach's usual humane intelligence as well as a patient elegance of style. It made me cry.
Bigelow bungle
Trash is a big fan of Kathryn Bigelow and her blisteringly intense film Zero Dark Thirty, and my money is easily on Jessica Chastain to win the best actress Oscar. However, the film, a dramatisation of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, has come under heavy fire in the US, with accusations being made that it endorses the use of torture.
Most of the criticism seems bonkers to me. The film doesn't endorse torture, it merely shows that it went on – and shows it as the nasty business it undoubtedly is. Nor does the film glorify the hunt for Osama bin Laden. It leaves the viewer feeling pretty empty and sorrowful about the necessities of war and the obsessions of politics.
However, it is difficult to defend the film's accuracy when one glaring error struck me early on. When Bigelow restages the 7/7 bombings in London, she blows up the wrong bus. The reconstruction is in the right place, in Tavistock Square, but everyone in London knows it was a number 30 bus, not a number 172 as the fillm implies, that was ripped apart. How could she get that wrong? Pictures of that red bus, with "30" visible on its side, are among of the most famous and unsettling images of this century, and 13 people were killed on it. Being embedded in Iraq or talking to top-secret CIA honchos is all very well, but sometimes a glance at Wikipedia wouldn't hurt.