Having watched the excellent Fire in Babylon documentary on Friday night, we decided to go with another highly rated doco’. We chose Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica. This proved to be a huge mistake.

Fire in Babylon not only documents its subject – the West Indies cricket teams’ rise to dominance as a form of sporting, historical political and social interplay. It does so using facts, subjective interviews, contemporary footage and a consistently immersive soundtrack.

The interviews, with players of the time as well as local groundsmen and personalities such as Bunny Wailer, are pithy, to the point and fitted an understandable and immersive timeline.

The thesis of Helvetica, however, appears to be that ‘Helvetica is used a lot’ or possibly that ‘Helvetica is the perfect san serif font’. Its creator uses over-long sequences of footage showing vans, trucks, lorries, aeroplanes, airports, shop signs, warning signs, more shops signs and on, and on, and on behind which plays a series of ‘choons’ in a mathrock or minimalist douche 8-bit.

The history of Helvetica is explained as an afterthought. The reason for its ubiquity in a commercial sense is equally left well alone; was it well marketed? How did Linotype, Haas or Stemple ensure that it gained wide use?

One interview with Eric Spiekermann (whom we’re told nothing about, as is the case with all the other interviewees, we are you see just supposed ‘to know’) almost brings the viewer to a reason for the success of the typeface: “Most people who use Helvetica use it because it’s ubiquitous. It’s like going to McDonalds instead of thinking about food. Because it’s there, it’s on every street corner. So let’s eat crap, because it’s on the corner.”

The rest of the interviews are solipsistic and vacuous (Manuel Krebs and Dimitri Bruni of Norm, Zurich manage to get an age to say ‘If something is nice, it’s nice’). They reach their nadir both in terms of paucity of information and glut of empty words with the advertising feature (interview) with Michael C. Place “of Build in London”. Place begins disingenuously with, “I don’t know the technical terms like ligature, ascender, descender” before speaking in about how he would like to design some airplane livery. “Go on then mate! Bothy myself and my partner yelled.

What we took away from Helvetica is that:

(a) It’s a typeface created by Max Miedinger with Edüard Hoffmann in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland or “No on really knows”… I bet they fucking well do mate.
(b) People who talk about design to documentary makers tend to be conmen well versed in the Emperor’s New Clothes.
(c) That Massimo Vignelli is an arse.
(d) That Michael Bierut (New York) is a high-pressure salesman with no knowledge of context.

—UPDATE—
I’ve just submitted the following to iTunes in an attempt to help others
If proof be needed that making a great documentary – or even a good one – requires an understandable thesis told in compelling manner that opens a subject up via insightful commentary and interviews, with relevant footage then this is it. Helvetica achieves none of the above mentioned criteria.

Why did Helvetica, the typeface, become so widely used? This is as much of a mystery after watching this self-regarding slab of charmless, insight-free c*nts’n'clips outing as the apparent popularity of the movie itself.

Did Linotype market it in a new way? Was the typeface different from what went before? Did the name change aid the ubiquity? Is it simply because designers are lazy? No one knows. Well, no one who made this.

Slapped in with the vacuous interviews from designers who say things as deeply helpful as, “If things look nice, they are nice looking” or “I would love to design aircraft livery” or “Don’t ask me” or “Helvetica is capitalist” or “Helvetica is socialist” are slabs of footage showing Helvetica being used on trucks, vans, sign-posts, aircraft livery, more trucks.

What isn’t there is any kind of context in the design that preceded it, the economics or logistics of its take-up, the design principles that underpin it.

What you do get are pieces of music that describe nothing nor do they add to the scraps of information that are there but merely serve to lift the viewer out of the experience.

So, if you enjoy talking heads expelling the kind of hot air that would make Emperor’s new clothing salesmen blush, in order to come away out of pocket and possibly less informed than when you went in… this is perfect.

— END UPDATE—
Now, let’s watch a compelling documentary: Fire in Babylon.

David Williamson’s The Club could never been made today.

Forget the fact that it’s about Aussie Rules from the old VFL; that it was actually set and filmed in one of the biggest names in that code, Collingwood. Concentrate on the performances and the script.

Concentrate especially on the downfall of Graham Kennedy’s character, Ted Parker. Or there’s the smug dope smoking scene. Or the ‘intellectual’ sports star Geoff Hayward, hated by his teammates until…

Script excerpts such as the one that follows still resonate – now but think “Asians” instead of “New Australians”:

Jock: A marvellous high mark you took last Saturday. You just seemed to go up and up!
Geoff Hayward: Yeah, I felt like Achilles.
Jock: Yes…[laughs] … Who’s he?
Geoff Hayward: A Greek guy who could really jump.
Jock: Ah, yeah yeah. Well some of these new Australians, you know they could be real champions, if they forget about soccer and just learn to assimilate

The Club shows off David Williamson’s writing as well as The Removalists or Corporate Vibes.

Mostly forget all my blather. Tight script, genuine acting, brilliant performances… oh, and Graham Kennedy. One of Australia’s best-kept secrets.

Following on from my previous post about the fact you can add “…Of Blood!” to nearly anything and come up with a Cult Movie, I’d like to introduce the equally as good “…Of the Damned!’ with this Aussie ‘classic’ from 1975.

The title says most of what you need to know. It’s an inn, it’s for the damned. There’s sex, violence, mystery and, of course given that it’s an Aussie flick made in the 1970s, it’s got John Meillon.

Meillion gave an absolutely cracking performance as the tragically foolhardy Sir John Kerr in The Dismissal.

So now, Inn of the Damned! “A big picture set in a Big Country”.

I went for my triannual trip to the cinema last night. Went to see Ryan Reynold’s tour de force, Buried. I’ve got one thing to thank Buried for, it reminded me that I needed to get a copy of Russian Ark. Both have intriguing theatrical devices:

Russian Ark is a single Stedicam shot for over an hour as the filmmaker, Alexander Sokurov, helps us explore Russian history from the 17th century via a tour of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

Buried‘s device is a bloke in a box and no other on-screen visible cast members. It stars Ryan Reynolds (Two Guys and a Girl, National Lampoon’s Van Wilder) as ‘simple truck driver who goes to Iraq to make money for his family Everyman guy’ Paul Conroy. Within moments of meeting Paul in his box, I could totally understand why someone, anyone in fact who had met him, would want to incarcerate him, three feet underground, in ‘one of those old wooden coffins’.

Fortunately, EveryPaul has a Blackberry with a good signal, nearly half of its battery left and incredibly quick broadband. He’s also got his anti-anxiety pills, a small flask of spirits, two glow sticks and a torch. Despite apparently being a non-smoker, he’s also got a spectacular Zippo lighter; it’s hard to light but once in action would shame a M2A1-2 flamethrower, which he uses at any given opportunity.

Opportunities include when trying to phone for help – a genuinely savvy move despite one laboured again and again by the “Don’t put me on hold” gag. Yes, for some reason, EveryPaul does not find the light from his Blackberry to be sufficient. He must also use his oxygen-sucking Zippo to illuminate his box when making phone calls.

He calls for help a lot. He calls his wife in the USA, his calls his mother-in-law in the USA. I assume it’s his mother-in-law. He reacts to her in the same way as most old mother-in-law jokes do, but he gets to call her a ‘cunt’ not a ‘battle-axe’ once he’s hung-up in a fit of pique, edgy stuff. He calls the State Department in the USA; he calls his employer (not Blackwater) in the USA; he calls 911 in the USA.

He never gets around to calling his local office in Iraq.

Also, because the people who have put him in the box have taken the one emergency number EveryPaul was given, presumably one in Iraq, he can’t call that. He’s not memorised it. Maybe this is me, but if I was an Everyman truck driver who had gone to Iraq to feed my family, I would have tattooed that number on the inside of my eyelids and the outside of my wrists like an exam cheat with intense purpose.

Paul is not about that kind of thing. Nor is Ryan Reynolds. Ryan is about acting. He acts the shit out of that box. He emotes, he grunts, he insults everybody he calls, sometimes he doesn’t even answer the phone because he’s so fucking angry… Ryan is so fucking acty that once or twice I forgot the screaming, fucking angry voice in my head fucking screaming, “Just fucking die you cunt fuck!”

The edginess is catching, obviously.

Thankfully, the anonymous captor has left EveryPaul’s anti-anxiety pills in the old fashioned coffin, the kind they make from wood.

The kidnapper is voiced in superbly e-e-e-evil style by José Luis García Pérez (8 Dates) because no Iraqi actors were available, anywhere, at any price.

This fact actually tells us more about the evils of occupation than anything in this excruciatingly ham-fisted movie. Fortunately for us and probably for the movie’s ‘acting coach’, Warner Loughlin, Jos√© Luis Garc√≠a reminds EveryPaul to take his pills.

He does so, with a slug of booze and some of the absolute best ‘drinking booze and eating pills’ acting I’ve seen ever, or more accurately heard. Ryan eats the fuck out of those cunt pills and sucks that booze down like a motherfucker, he genuinely makes glugging noises that should at least gain an Academy Award nomination.

The premise though, is a brave one. The Bloke-in-a-Box genre has not been well-served even by the likes of Buried Alive (‘Hell hath no fury like a man buried alive!’). Sure, Uma Thurman in her Kill Bill 2, ‘Chick-in-a-box’ role is the high water mark, but even she didn’t last an entire 16 hour movie.

No, the movie I am calling, “EveryPaul IS Bloke-in-a-Box”, is not 16 hours long, it just feels as if it is.

Director Rodrigo Cort√©s (‘biting satire on consumer society’ The Contestant) and writer Chris Sparling (An Uzi at the Alamo, ‘Every day life has a story. Some just have better subtitles’) got themselves a neat, low budget device and they went with it. Sadly, the idea that could have been claustrophobic to view became laughably constricting. The story of an everyday guy caught up in the vicissitudes of an occupation/liberation turns instead into the phone problems of a dull, spoilt meat-ager who is profiting from that occupation/liberation while kidding himself that he’s a good guy.

Make sure, however, to stay in your seat (or fast forward) for the scene in which HR director of EveryPaul’s employer, Alan Davenport (played by Stephen Tobolowsky), steals the movie.

Oh, and Kevin the CGI snake… now that is high point of hilarity and studio bosses screaming, “Give Ryan some fucking action to fucking act! Ryan needs to fucking act!”.

Anyway, I picked up a copy of Russian Ark today.

2/5 – this indicates that I want those 16 hours back and I will become violent to anybody who even gifts me this as a DVD or Blu-ray.