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When I recently interviewed Brooklyn pop duo Chairlift about their new album, Something, Patrick Wimberly said that the record was a product of him and lead singer Caroline Polachek being "very in love-- not with each other," and "I Belong in Your Arms" is the pair's most straightforward expression of romance. Polachek's lyrics are both conversational and imbued with the sense of pop timelessness that, as she mentioned in our conversation, "a 10-year-old might hear coming out of the radio and think, 'Yeah! I love this!'"  The song's opening is fleet-footed, with the splashy drum-machine skips giving way to the kind of dreamy melodic structure that melts forever but never quite disappears. It's hard to top falling in love with a great pop song about falling in love.

[from Something; out now on Young Turks/Columbia]

Compliance is evidently a pretty rattling experience and, while writer-director Craig Zobel and his cast have been met with catcalls and hostility from audiences in Park City, the reaction of most critics so far seems to have been to go back to their hotel rooms and write raves. Qualified raves, but still. Time Out New York's David Fear: "Having already started her day off on a bum note due to an employee fuck-up, a fast-food manager (Ann Dowd) is simmering at the lack of respect her crew shows her during a shift. A phone call from a police officer then informs her that a 19-year-old counter girl (Dreama Walker) has stolen money from a customer's purse; his team is going to investigate the matter, but until they get there, could the manager keep the alleged perp locked in the back office? It would be a big help to the cops. Also, she'll need to strip-search the young woman, and… We've already figured out that the smooth talker on the other end of the line isn't a cop, and once our suspicions are confirmed, it's simply a matter of how far this hoax will go. The answer: way too far. The fact that the film's nightmare of sexual abuse and sheeplike behavior is based on an actual 2004 incident at a Kentucky McDonald's only makes everything more nauseating." The LA Weekly's Karina Longworth:

Compliance's genre thrills feel richer when you consider that the context for how obedience could trump basic morality is embedded into every moment of the film. It's not an accident that the prank caller preys on a fast food joint, the province of minimum wage workers supervised by dues-paying lifers. Not only are even those at the top of this food chain unlikely to be well-educated, but everyone from the top to the bottom likely needs their job too much to risk questioning authority. If the workers are united by their paycheck dependence, Zobel creates major rifts between characters based on generation. It's the restaurant's oldest employee who finally calls foul, while Becky, the youngest, is incredibly passive about her victimization…. As exploitative as it may be of an audience's good will, Compliance is not an exploitation film, exactly; it's a more of a procedural, an anatomy of how systemic everyday exploitation is the perfect breeding ground for extraordinary exploitation.

For the AV Club's Noel Murray, "though Pat Healy gives a wonderfully oily performance as the prankster, the even tone of Compliance makes much of it hard to buy, even though just about every major moment is from the police record. That said, the cast here is so terrific that they turn a movie that takes place almost entirely in one dingy room into rich theater, and Zobel wields the same feel for everyday interactions and power relationships that he showed in Great World of Sound [2007]. And Compliance has a hell of an epilogue too, showing a little of the aftermath of the event and how the characters continue to submit to authority, certain that if they’re polite and cooperative, everything will turn out okay." "Yes, this is a film that places the audience in a superior position to its characters, observing these poor ChickWich workers like rats in a particularly menacing maze," writes Anthony Kaufman. "And yes, this is a film that rides on the suspense of the sexual humiliation and domination of an attractive blonde teenage girl. And for these reasons alone you could throw Compliance on the misanthropic trash heap that so many critics and viewers will inevitably do. But a few caveats to these criticisms: Does the film implicate the viewer — a la the work of Michael Haneke, an obvious reference point for this cinema of cruelty — or does the audience get a free pass, somehow getting some kind of sick vicarious pleasure in the proceedings? I'm not sure, but the sheer discomfort in watching the film might suggest the former."

More from Todd Gilchrist (Playlist), Tim Grierson (Screen), Tom Hall (Filmmaker), Harlan Jacobson (Boston Phoenix), Justin Lowe (Hollywood Reporter), Nathan Rabin (AV Club, B+) and Liza Schwarzbaum (Entertainment Weekly). Interviews with Zobel: Bilge Ebiri (Vulture), Eric Kohn (indieWIRE), Todd Gilchrist (Playlist), Scott Macaulay (Filmmaker), Mark Olsen (Los Angeles Times) and Claiborne Smith (Sundance).

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Earlier this week, we posted "Brodermordet", the B-side of a forthcoming Sacred Bones-released single from War, a Danish punk band comprised of Iceage frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt and Sexdrome's Loke Rahbek, who co-runs the label Posh Isolation. War have another single on the way too, The Glass House Etiquette, which is a split release with Sweden's Lust for Youth. Here's War's contribution, "Somme, Maggio"; the thing's coming out on Avant! in March after seeing a limited cassette run last September. (via AwkwardSound)

This is the fourth in an NYRblog series about the fate of democracy in different parts of the world.

Ian Johnson

Chang Ping

Chang Ping is one of China’s best-known commentators on contemporary affairs. Writing under the pen name of Zhang Ping, Chang first made a name for himself in the late 1990s in Guangzhou, where his hard-hitting stories exposed scandals and championed freedom of expression. As censorship has tightened in recent years, Chang’s pleas for openness and accountability have put him under pressure. The 43-year-old is currently living with his wife and daughter in Germany at the former country home of the Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll, which has been converted into a refuge for persecuted writers.

Chang’s travails began in 2001, when he was removed as news director of Southern Weekend, then a daring weekly that had won readers across the country. He became deputy editor of Southern Metropolis Weekly, but was removed in 2008, and subsequently banned from print, after publishing an editorial questioning government censorship of that year’s Tibetan uprising. One year ago, he was finally fired by the newspaper, with an editor saying his work was “inappropriate.” Last March, Chang joined a newly launched Hong Kong-based magazine, iSun Affairs, as chief editor but was denied a visa and has not been allowed into the former British colony.

Ian Johnson: You grew up in the 1970s; did you experience anything of the Cultural Revolution?

Chang Ping: My father was a low-level official in our hometown in Xichong County (in rural Sichuan) and got caught up in the factionalism of the Cultural Revolution. When I was young I attended an elementary school that was located on the side of the road. If you entered or left the village you passed it. I remember one day he was standing outside the window looking in at me. That afternoon I went home and said to my mother: “Dad was very strange. Dad was outside the school window staring at me.” My mother started crying and said, “Dad has gone and we don’t know if he’ll ever return again.” He had fled to a neighboring county to escape violence. We couldn’t visit him but we would get letters from him and my mother would read them to us. I was about eight years old.

Soon after this, reform and opening up started. We studied the Four Modernizations (a project to develop the fields of agriculture, industry, defense, and research and development) and were told that they would be realized by 2000. We wrote so many essays about how to achieve the Four Modernizations. I remember very clearly in 1984, at the 35th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, how the students at Peking University said “Hello Xiaoping!” to Deng Xiaoping when he drove by at a rally. It was on the radio and I was really moved. I thought: China has got such hope, such a bright future.

So you thought everything was great. You heard about the developments in Beijing and were excited.

Yes and I was doing well in school too. When you’re personally successful, you tend to think that things are going well. You’re optimistic. I thought things were going well but in some ways I was an angry youth. There’s no contradiction there. You believe, but you want to improve things. During the 1986 student movement, people like Liu Binyan, Fang Lizhi, and Wang Ruowang criticized the party and Deng Xiaoping. I remember hearing about it on the radio and felt in my heart that they were heroes.

At the time I loved literature. In the 1980s, literature was at a peak. I subscribed to a lot of magazines like Harvest and People’s Literature. I remember reading Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum and thinking, Wow, someone can write like that. I remember vividly that I was sitting outside and was so moved by that story. I didn’t quite understand everything but was influenced by it. Also Yu Hua’s short stories, for example. But you know that at that time I was still a complete believer. The books I wanted to read the most were the original works of Marx and Engels. I wanted to learn German to read them.

I went to college in 1987. Until then I’d been reading the classics of world literature, and contemporary Chinese fiction. But then at Sichuan University (in Chengdu) I read a series of books called “Moving Toward the Future (走向未来丛书). It was an edited series introducing the great thinkers in other fields. This was a start for me and afterwards I read a lot of western literature, philosophy, and history. The series was really influential in the 1980s and if you look at the editorial staff, they all suffered after June 4 (the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre). I guess from today’s point of view you’d say they had intellectual property rights problems—they just translated or cribbed from foreign publications. But for us it opened a world of psychology, sociology, and literature. One book I have to mention is A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. We’d just read these books so fast and share them. Everyone was fascinated by Western philosophy especially. It didn’t matter what your major was, you were interested in Western philosophy, like Heidegger or Sartre.

How did you experience June 4? In Chengdu, you were quite far away from Beijing, the center of it.

A lot was going on in Chengdu. We had protests all the time. People came from Beijing with news and we’d put them up in our dorm rooms and share their information. There were dialogues and demands to negotiate with the government. I helped organize protests.

But I didn’t really join the main student protest committee. Ever since high school I made one of Confucius’s sayings my motto: “The superior man is dignified, but does not wrangle. He is sociable but not a partisan.” So I did not want to join any movement. In high school I was in the Communist Youth League and wanted to leave. They said, you can’t leave; there is no mechanism to leave. But I didn’t join the party. I didn’t want to be a member of anything, so in 1989 I wasn’t in the student committees. Still, I organized protests and was seen as a leader. I got arrested after June 4. However, during the protests many students had been on a hunger strike and I had opposed that. For that I think they let me out of jail earlier. I think some students opposed me for opposing the hunger strike but that was my view: a hunger strike was pointless. I thought it was good to propagate democracy in factories and in the countryside.

So you’re a pragmatist?

Actually, many people think I’m more of an idealist. I still think China needs democracy, that it needs to change. I really oppose several arguments [that are commonly made] about why China can’t have democracy, such as the argument that China is unique—that Chinese people need to wait because their “quality” [a Chinese term, suzhi, that implies everything from educational level to manners] isn’t high enough and other ridiculous things like that. Some people said that democracy wasn’t part of Chinese culture, and then Taiwan became democratic. Then they said that Taiwan was a special case. Now look at Wukan. They had their own elections. People say it’s special, but in fact Wukan is really typically Chinese. It’s a Chinese town but they organized everything. So what argument are you left with? If Wukan can have democracy so can other parts of China.

I’m not saying that China should have western-style democracy. In fact, there’s not a single western model. What do they mean? Germany didn’t copy America and America didn’t copy Britain. The issue isn’t copying. It’s do you or don’t you want democracy? Of course democracy has a lot of problems but it’s a way forward.

Since the 1980s, Chinese have been pragmatic. The question since the Cultural Revolution has been: can it work? This was Deng Xiaoping’s biggest influence on Chinese people. They ask if it’ll work or not. Now China has the world’s second-largest economy and could overtake the US. So in terms of market economics it’s been successful and I support this. What we lack is justice. There is no justice in the current system. It’s a practical issue. We need justice. Democracy is a way to bring justice. This is why democracy is necessary.

The government doesn’t discuss rule of law much anymore. It’s become more and more a hooligan way of ruling. They just arrest people and throw them in jail or mental asylums. So the past decade has seen a hooliganization of the political system. Many of the old virtues are destroyed by this. The virtues of humanism, responsibilities of the government—the bottom line is things are disappearing. That’s why we’ve had these terrible events of recent years, like Yue Yue.

Yue Yue is the little girl who was run over by a van and no one stopped to help her. One recourse to this perceived spiritual vacuum has been that people are getting more and more interested in religion.

Many are interested in it. Scholars hope that this will help develop more virtues in society or provide some moral guidelines. There is a spiritual vacuum. I really respect religion, but I believe in the special importance of democracy, civic spirit, and freedom in politics, society, and culture for solving the spiritual crisis.

What about your new magazine?

It’s run by iSun Cable Television from Hong Kong. Right now we’re a new media organization. We offer on iPad, Android and are planning a Kindle version too. You can also get copies as a pdf. But we are going to print too. We have a staff of twenty. We have 6,000 subscribers on iPad, mostly on the mainland. We also have more than 10,000 who get it as an email. We’ve been able to report on taboo topics in China, such as [jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner] Liu Xiaobo, press controls, and the trend of independent candidates running for office.

Obviously the authorities knew about the project before it started. You haven’t been able to get a visa since you applied last March and Reporters Without Borders sent an open letter to Donald Tsang, chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

According to the Hong Kong authorities’ own rules they should have answered my application within a month, but they haven’t approved or rejected the application. It’s already been nine months, so this is why people are talking about influence from the mainland.

The magazine was one of the first to cover several recent key political events, like the Wukan uprising. You have had by far the most comprehensive coverage of it. But you also have much on culture. Over the past year cultural figures in China have become embroiled in politics. How do you see the role of people like the artist Ai Weiwei?

The original work of the popular and famous artists was all political—many of them were influenced by people like Andy Warhol. They dealt with issues in society. But after a while when they sold so much that they became super rich and didn’t care much for social issues. To be honest, they just repeated themselves a lot. I have respect for Ai Weiwei because he is concerned with society. He is involved and engaged. It’s not his fault that he’s become more and more popular in the West. It’s the same with Liu Xiaobo or Vaclav Havel. This criticism isn’t fair.

What about the writer Han Han’s recent blogposts arguing that democracy may not be well suited to Chinese people? This seems to echo some of the other critics who say that China isn’t read for democracy.

He mentions that people have a “low quality” and that democracy could become a problem because it could lead to violence. This is a view the government has propagated for a long time. It’s like saying you can’t practice swimming until you can swim and you can’t swim because you can’t practice. Also, the arguments aren’t new. Many were made publicly last year, around the time of the centenary of the 1911 revolution.

But he influences a lot of people so his bringing it up is interesting. It shows how restricted China’s political system is. I think that what we’re seeing is the loss of hope by a lot of people in change taking place, so they’re making excuses about why it can’t happen. The decline in morals has lead to an increase in violence—violence against opponents, protesters, and others—not because we’re having a revolution but because we are not.

On February 21, Virginia indie-pop crew Wild Nothing will follow up 2010's Golden Haze EP with a new single, "Nowhere", via Captured Tracks. The below title track features guest vocals from Twin Sister's Andrea Estella, and is the first time Wild Nothing mastermind Jack Tatum has recorded in a proper studio. The single will be backed by another new song, "Wait"; the band's currently working on their follow-up to 2010's Gemini LP with plans to release it this year.

MP3: Wild Nothing: "Nowhere"

~ Posted by Robert Butler, January 27th 2012

In a blog post last week we noted how Michelle Obama's mother, Marian Robinson, was giving mothers-in-law a good name. An example of the opposite can be seen at the movies. Listen to the New Yorker on Vanessa Redgrave's performance as Volumnia in "Coriolanus": "Every mother-in-law joke you've ever heard, along with every Oedipal fantasy, is distilled into this formidable figure..."

Critics have called Vanessa Redgrave's performance "magnificent" and "one of the best of her career", yet she hasn't been nominated for either an Oscar or a Bafta. Volumnia's great scene occurs in Act 5 of the play. It's one of those moments (described in our current Notes on a Voice on Shakespeare) when the playwright pulls off one of his favourite tricks: the 180-degree turn. Redgrave manages to persuade Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus to change his mind and not to sack the city of Rome, even though—if he draws back at this stage—it will probably lead to his own death. Late in the movie, Redgrave plays on Fiennes's mind with great delicacy and force.  read more »

eBay Round Up

eBay has been a bit slim this week, but here are a few auctions for you to consider. Should you want to find more, use our special search links for excellent suits, good suits, and well made footwear.

Suits, sport coats, and blazers

• Dunhill backgammon set
• Flusser and Roetzel books (pictured above)
• Brooks Brothers cashmere scarves

* Many thanks, as always, to Kenn for kindly sharing some of his finds. 

"Walk With Me" is the second track to be let go from soft-focus indie-pop duo Memoryhouse's full-length debut, The Slideshow Effect, February 28 via Sub Pop. The LP follows up last year's re-recorded version of 2010's The Years EP; you might remember checking out fellow Slideshow Effect cut "The Kids Were Wrong" last month.

Gregory La Cava and Irene Dunne

"An extraordinary movie is being screened at Anthology Film Archives [today] through Sunday," writes the New Yorker's Richard Brody: "Unfinished Business, a bitterly passionate romantic drama with a relentless comic tone, from 1941, starring Irene Dunne and Robert Montgomery and directed by Gregory La Cava. It's part of the ongoing series Stuck on the Second Tier: Underknown Auteurs, programmed by Miriam Bale, and you can't get it on home video." And it's "a minor masterwork of performance, direction, and screenwriting." Unknown Auteurs is actually a set of series running at various locations in New York, with Anthology focusing on La Cava; the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of the Moving Image, for example, will have other editions soon, but for now, Michael Rawls has an overview of the La Cava selections in Cinespect and David Cairns wrote about Unfinished Business here in the Notebook yesterday. Also in New York, Reverse Shot's See It Big! series rolls on tonight and tomorrow at MoMI with a Woody Allen film from 1979. Justin Stewart: "It's worthwhile to ask why Manhattan looks so beautiful, why Allen went to the trouble (a processing lab had to be built to handle all of the black-and-white 35mm film) for this story and these characters in particular. Does the style suit the subject, or is it just distracting handsome packaging? I think it is a success of contrasts, between the lush visuals and the flawed, mostly mean and cunning characters' words and deeds." San Francisco. "Sickos take note," calls out Cheryl Eddy in the Bay Guardian: "Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is screening an uncut 35mm print of Lucio Fulci's 1981 The House by the Cemetery. HUGE. Within the gore-splattered Fulci canon, House is maybe not as well-known as 1981's The Beyond, 1980's City of the Living Dead, or 1979's Zombie (which made a recent local appearance thanks to Blue Underground, the cult champions also responsible for this showing of House). But it's no less essential or enjoyable than the others, despite suffering from one nearly insurmountable flaw." Which, of course, she gets into. See, too, the Fulci feature at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. Chicago. The Reader's JR Jones rounds up "This week's movie action." In other news. "French filmmaker Georges Franju is to be the subject of one the retrospectives programmed for the 60th San Sebastian Festival to take place from 21-29 September 2012." Awards. The nominations for this year's César Awards are out and Maïwenn's Poliss leads with 13. The Artist follows with ten. Deadline's Nancy Tartaglione has the full list. "In 2012 BAFTA recognizes the extraordinary career of John Hurt with the Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema Award." Obits. "Eiko Ishioka, a designer who brought an eerie, sensual surrealism to film and theater, album covers, the Olympics and Cirque du Soleil, in the process earning an Oscar, a Grammy and a string of other honors, died on Saturday in Tokyo. She was 73." In the New York Times, Margalit Fox notes that her costumes for Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) "included a suit of full body armor for the title character (played by Gary Oldman), whose glistening red color and all-over corrugation made it look like exposed musculature, and a voluminous wedding dress worn by the actress Sadie Frost, with a stiff, round, aggressive lace collar inspired by the ruffs of frill-necked lizards…. Ishioka was closely associated with the director Tarsem Singh, for whom she designed costumes for four films." "Joaquín Martinez, a veteran actor best known for his performance as the Indian character Paints His Shirt Red in Sydney Pollack's 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson, died Jan 3." Mike Barnes in the Hollywood Reporter: "A native of Cozumel, Mexico, Martinez also played the Apache leader in Ulzana's Raid (1972), which also starred Burt Lancaster."

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It's a sequel, of course, to 2 Days in Paris, but Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, introducing an interview with Julie Delpy and Chris Rock, assures us that "it really doesn't matter whether you've seen the earlier movie. Jack, the American boyfriend played by Adam Goldberg in 2 Days in Paris, has evidently moved on (leaving behind a young son), and Delpy's character, Marion, is now shacking up with a Village Voice journalist and radio host named Mingus, who has a daughter of his own. (Rock even says the character is based on the prominent African-American journalists Nelson George and Elvis Mitchell.) Rock gets some decent laugh lines, but he isn't doing improv or stand-up material here — although he does deliver two monologues to a cardboard cutout of Barack Obama." What sets the story in motion is the arrival of Marion's family from Paris for an extended stay. The Boston Globe's Ty Burr: "Dad (Albert Delpy, Julie's own pere) is an old goat, sister Rose (Alexia Landeau, who co-wrote the script) is a tightly-wound nympho, and hanger-on Manu (Alexandre Nahon) is every American's worst idea of a Frenchman, blowing joints in the elevator and borrowing Mingus' toothbrush for unimaginable sexual activities…. Just when you think 2 Days in New York can't get any crazier, Vincent Gallo turns up to buy Marion's soul, and his brief appearance is like a greasy indie benediction to a Sundance that truly needs it. If Woody Allen was a woman and was French — I'm sure he's had dreams about this — and if he loosened up his filmmaking until the comedy started bubbling out of every corner, he might come up with something like this." At the House Next Door, Michał Oleszczyk sees it, too: "Delpy is expert at pushing generic buttons and serving stale jokes as if she has just come up with them between her morning bagel and an afternoon brioche." She's "definitely succeeded in creating a comic persona, the inspiration for which isn't hard to trace. As you watch her (bespectacled, garrulously neurotic, desperately secular and striving to be 'an artist'), you witness a perfect case of spiritual cloning: Delpy has become, to an almost discomfiting extent, a distaff, semi-continental version of Woody Allen at his warmest and most gentrified." "The sequel for any comedy threatens the viewer with the possibility of reheated jokes and a stale premise, leading to a lesser run through comic terrain that has already been covered," writes John Lichman at the Playlist. "But Delpy's film is fresh, vibrant and most of all, disarmingly funny."

More from Liza Foreman (Cineuropa), Anthony Kaufman (Screen), Eric Kohn (indieWIRE, B) and Todd McCarthy (Hollywood Reporter). More interviews with Delpy and Rock: Bridgette Bates (Sundance) and Jada Yuan (Vulture), who asks:

Julie, is the Before Sunrise sequel, is that happening? Delpy: I don't know yet. We'll see if we write it or not. I'm not sure if it's gonna happen. Truly, I have no idea. I mean, really I have no idea. Maybe. I have no idea.

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Here's the full version of "Bambi", a new song from Azealia Banks that served as the soundtrack for fashion line Mugler's recent show in Paris. Banks posted on Twitter that the track's beat was produced by Paul Epworth, who has worked with the likes of Adele, Cee Lo Green, and the Rapture, and noted that she will "extend the verse on 'Bambi.'" As we previously reported, she's working with Nicola Formichetti, Lady Gaga's stylist and creative director for Mugler, on a video for "Liquorice".

In his new column, The Music of Science, Oliver Morton looks forward to a new era of exploration on Mars, the only other planet on which people might plausibly live ...   read more »

A couple of months ago I wrote about the British artist Edward Bawden and his posters for Ealing Studios. The other day I stumbled upon this evocative and quite unusual poster for the 1947 Ealing noir It Always Rains on Sunday. Though I know the film I’d never seen the poster before and it started me looking into the story of its artist, one James Boswell. Like Bawden, Boswell not only did a handful of posters for Ealing but he also was stationed in Iraq during World War Two and produced a significant body of work from his time there. Whereas Bawden was an official war artist, however, Boswell, because of his famously left-wing sympathies and anti-war philosophy, was not. In fact, a book of his Iraq and other wartime paintings is called James Boswell: Unofficial War Artist.

Born in New Zealand in 1906, Boswell came to Britain to study painting at the Royal College of Art in 1925. He was becoming a painter of some renown when, in 1932, he joined the Communist Party and gave up painting for the more utilitarian disciplines of illustration and graphic design. From 1934 to 1938 he was art editor and one of the major illustrators for the Left Review, contributing satirical anti-fascist cartoons aimed at the Nazis and their appeasers. At the same time, somewhat incongruously, he was working as Art Director of the Publicity Department of Shell Oil (then known as the Asiatic Petroleum Company). 

In a 2006 article on Boswell’s paintings in the Guardian, William Feaver writes that “while working for Shell by day...and at night for himself, he drew away from the George Grosz idiom to a thoroughly Londoner manner: pinched people in tatty street markets, sly looks exchanged at the entrance to the gents on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and the Charing Cross Road” which evokes a style that can definitely be seen in the poster above.

In 1941 he was called up by the Royal Army Medical Corps to serve in World War II, eventually spending a year in Iraq. During that time he painted desert landscapes, drew observational sketches of the daily drudgery of his fellow soldiers, and made a series of satirically grotesque anti-war drawings. According to Feaver “He let himself go on Daliesque atrocities, drawing a Shaiba of caged souls, tanks and planes crashing through gigantic bodies, stranglings and impalings, eyes thumbed by faceless thugs.”

Back in London after the war he quit Shell and, newly apolitical, became the Art Editor (for “four very crazy drunken years”) of the highly influential Lilliput magazine. It was around this time that the Head of Marketing at Ealing Studios, S. John Woods (see yesterday’s Movie Poster of the Day), commissioned him to design the poster for It Always Rains on Sunday. His design led to a series of paintings called ‘Camden Girls’ (even though the film takes place in Bethnal Green in East London, not Camden Town in the north).

Feaver writes “After Iraq, life in London—for him Kentish Town, Camden Town, Soho—was a joyous restorative of boozers and spivvery, rationing circumvented and, in the offing, a glorious welfare state. Eventually he was to concentrate on painting...but for a time he was a prime fixer of the image of postwar Britain.”

As far as I can tell, Boswell illustrated three other Ealing posters in this period: for the crime thriller The Blue Lamp (1950), and the less well known Pool of London (1951) and The Rainbow Jacket (1953). His first three posters are all of a kind: nocturnal, sinister, mysterious; conjuring up atmosphere rather than representing actors’ likenesses or recreating specific scenes. Boswell was obviously chosen by Woods for Ealing’s grittier outings, their urban thrillers rather than their quaint village-set comedies, but, in another Guardian article, this time about the Sunday poster specifically, Andrew Pulver recounts that, according to Boswell’s daughter Sally, “Ealing’s increasing success got to Boswell—he especially disliked having to illustrate the racing film The Rainbow Jacket in the early 1950s, and the commissions dried up.”

The official James Boswell website, which seems to have been set up for his centenary in 2006 when he was feted with exhibitions all over London (much of his work is in the permanent collection at the Tate), has no mention of the film posters at all, which seem to be a footnote in a varied and prolific career. But I love the story that Sally Boswell tells Pulver: “As a 12-year-old, she recalls, she made her own contribution to the finished design, colouring in some of the torn-paper effects Boswell had drawn for the title placard, plastered on brickwork at the top of the painting. ‘I can see what I did every time I look at it.’” (He also adds that “She would love to still own one of the Camden Girls, not least because the original poster artwork has been lost.”)

In the mid ’50s, and until his death in 1971 at the age of 64, Boswell rededicated himself to painting and especially to abstract art, though in 1964 he returned briefly yet defiantly to graphic design, and to left-wing politics, by designing the campaign that helped bring Harold Wilson and the Labour Party to power.

The quad sized (30" x 40") It Always Rains on Sunday can be purchased for a mere £2,500 from UK dealer Greg Edwards’ Rare Film Posters (the source of the image above), while a smaller (22" x 28") nearly identical but differently rendered version of the Sunday poster, seen below, is only $2000 from Walter Film in Los Angeles.

Footnote: Another century, another Iraq war, another artist: In 2003 Shame director Steve McQueen was appointed the official UK war artist in Iraq though he eventually spent only six days there. Read an article about McQueen’s Iraq sojourn and the resulting artwork here.

It premiered at Cannes (Critics' Week; see Marie-Pierre Duhamel's review), it's screened at Sundance, it was France's horse in the Oscar race (though it didn't make the final round), it's just been nominated for six Césars (Best Picture, Director, Actress, Original Screenplay, Sound and Editing), and we begin this roundup with Karina Longworth in the Voice: "The gorgeously scruffy Juliette (director/co-writer Valérie Donzelli) and Roméo (co-writer Jérémie Elkaïm) — yes, the improbability is noted — move from dive-bar love-at-first-sight to proud parents of a newborn boy in the first few minutes of Declaration of War. Then their 18-month-old son, Adam, is diagnosed with a brain tumor. Shot in the actual hospital where Donzelli and Elkaïm's actual son was treated for cancer, Declaration of War turns autobiography into thrilling expressionist art." The diagnosis "is the point at which most films would start scrupulously wringing every emotional moment for maximum cancersploitation," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "Instead, Donzelli gives Mere and Pere a moment to break down, and then the two steel themselves for a brutal fight. Friends and family circle the wagons; not even France's frustrating health-care system weakens their resolve. The longer Roméo and Juliet endure, the more this medical drama gently brushes aside every anticipated disease-of-the-week cliché…. Parenting relies on stamina as much as compassion, and Donzelli has, against all odds, crafted a genuinely moving ode to both the tenacity of filial love under extreme circumstances and the toll it extracts." Just two out of four stars at Slant, though, from Andrew Schenker: "The surest sign that a filmmaker recognizes the insularity of his or her project is the presence of perfunctory attempts to hint at a wider political context. The clearest indicator that a director understands the insufficiency of his or her investigation into the film's characters/situations/themes is a reliance on seemingly randomly applied aesthetic frippery. Valérie Donzelli's Declaration of War gives strong evidence of both tendencies…. Donzelli's film takes place in a world of hospitals, comfortable apartments, and occasional getaways to the ocean. But a brief snippet of a radio broadcast about the Iraq War and a man sitting on bench plastered with a Vive la Grève (Long Live the Strike) sticker don't so much ground the film in a wider context as point up the narrowness of its concerns." But for the New Yorker's Richard Brody, "the film is both a persuasive brief for the single-payer system and a reverent, grateful exaltation of the high science of modern medicine; other than the grim burden of their child's illness, the couple's biggest problems are emotional ones, involving parents and night life, with nary an insurance form in sight. Donzelli reconciles the grasshopper and the ant of fable."

More from Dennis Harvey (San Francisco Bay Guardian), Stephen Holden (New York Times), Andrew O'Hehir (Salon), Gabe Toro (Playlist, A), Alison Willmore (AV Club, A-) and Stephanie Zacharek (Movieline, 6.5/10). Interviews with Donzelli and Elkaïm: Rachel Dodes (Wall Street Journal), Nigel M Smith (indieWIRE) and Pam Grady (San Francisco Chronicle).

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The first in a recurring series of exciting new things in shop for the spring and summer season is this navy hooded canvas windbreaker by THOM BROWNE. It is available for £715 GBP at DOVER STREET MARKET in London.

"How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?, an admiring documentary about the British architect Norman Foster, by Norberto López Amado and Carlos Carcas, gives the viewer quite a lot to marvel at, which is, after all, the root meaning of the word 'admire,'" begins AO Scott in the New York Times. "Accompanied by Joan Valent's pulsing, soaring score, the camera swoops over some of Mr Foster's largest and best-known structures and floats through the bright and airy interiors of his skyscrapers. Even before you hear Paul Goldberger (a former architecture critic for The New York Times, currently at The New Yorker) describe Mr Foster as 'the Mozart of Modernism,' you can appreciate the grace and harmony of his compositions in glass, steel and light." For Benjamin Sutton, writing in the L, "what's most remarkable about this documentary," currently at the IFC Center through Tuesday, "is how it highlights Foster's increasingly acute grasp of the social problems shaping his designs," but here's Brian Miller in the Voice: "A working-class Manchester lad, Foster trained at Yale and became a brand name by the late 60s — aided in part by association with his futurist mentor, Buckminster Fuller (who posed this doc's titular question). Now in his mid-70s, Foster runs a large international firm that — detractors will tell you, though not in this movie — has been chasing the mega-project money from China to Dubai to Kazakhstan…. By the time this fawning doc gets to Foster's CG-animated rendering for a $15 billion planned city in Abu Dhabi (a movie within the movie), you realize it's essentially an infomercial for the company he unsuccessfully tried to sell before the 2008 crash."

Also in New York, the series Deutsche Docs: The Contemporary German Documentary opens today at Anthology Film Archives and runs through February 6. BL Hazelwood talks with co-curator Jed Rapfogel for Cinespect: "The challenge was to strike a balance between highlighting the recent work of long-established filmmakers like Rosa von Praunheim, Ulrike Ottinger, Hartmut Bitomsky, Volker Koepp and Harun Farocki (all of whom have continued to make remarkable films) and calling attention to filmmakers who have started making movies more recently and whose films aren't as well known in the US such as Gerhard Benedikt Friedl, Andres Veiel, Philip Scheffner. My own vision of the series is predominantly one of diversity, both in terms of subject matter, sensibility, and cinematic approach." In the works. Vulture's Kyle Buchanan and Claude Brodesser-Akner hear that Kate Winslet and Catherine Keener are likely to join Steve Carell, Jack Black, Nicolas Cage and Kevin Kline in Charlie Kaufman's Frank or Francis, "a very meta musical comedy about a director (Carell) who becomes obsessed with the message board commenter (Black) disparaging his movies on a Hollywood website. And though Kaufman's script is positively scathing when it comes to the Academy Awards (Cage plays a washed-up actor who serves as the emcee of the event), we should note that with the new additions to his cast, he's now got an ensemble that includes three Oscar winners and can boast a bounty of eleven total nominations. Not bad!" Terry Jones will direct John Cleese, Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin in Absolutely Anything, a sci-fi farce combining CGI and live action, reports Dave McNary for Variety. The former Pythons will voice "a group of aliens who endow an earthling with the power to do 'absolutely anything' to see what a mess he'll make of things — which is precisely what happens." Robin Williams will voice a talking dog and Jones hopes to get Eric Idle on board as well. The BBC notes that, in June, "it was announced that Cleese, Gilliam, Palin and Jones would voice a 3D animated film based on the memoirs of the late Graham Chapman, the sixth Python, who died in 1989. However, Idle was not involved in the film, which is expected to be released later this year." Dee Rees (Pariah) is working on a screenplay called Large Print, which she describes as being "about this mid-south, 50-something insurance adjuster, who’s recently divorced and she has to redefine happiness for herself," and, adds Benjamin Wright, she's "also working on a TV series with HBO and Viola Davis." Also at the Playlist, Kevin Jagernauth reports that Julian Fellowes has written the latest adaptation of Romeo & Juliet; Carlo Carlei will direct Douglas Booth and Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) in the lead roles and Paul Giamatti as Friar Lawrence. Obit. Revolver is mourning the loss of Vadim Glowna, "one of the most engaging and multi-faceted German actors and directors." He'd appeared in over 150 films and television shows since the mid-60s when he died on Tuesday at the age of 70.

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Bristolian Matt Elliott is back working under his own name again, after a surprise return to his Third Eye Foundation guise on 2010's The Dark. "Dust Flesh and Bones", from his current album, The Broken Man, is so flushed with timeworn remorse that it feels siphoned from another age. This is a dusty, decrepit type of misery; you can almost hear the bones creaking in Elliott's fingers as he strums the acoustic lament on his guitar. The sooty vocal mannerisms are pitched so low they act like a lead weight crushing every fiber of his being, especially when he croons the central lyrical motif over and over: "This is how it feels to be alone". The nine-minute runtime takes in precision-tooled Leonard Cohen verses and Ennio Morricone-style spaghetti western touches, demonstrating Elliott's mastery at conveying a particularly barren type of sorrow.

[from The Broken Man; out now via Ici d'ailleurs]