The Most Scottish Film Ever Made

Living in England, the last few weeks have been interesting; with the news plastered with coverage of Scotland and the Referendum and people talking about little else, I realised two things: 1, I miss Glasgow more than I would my right lung right now and 2, no one in England knows anything about Scottish cinema.

So in honour of Scotland choosing to stay in the Union for another ten years at least, I think it’s high time to talk about the most Scottish film ever made. 

And no, it’s not bloody Braveheart. The Battle of Stirling Bridge could have been good, except it wasn’t on a Bridge, and so was the Battle in a Field Somewhere Less Significant, which doesn’t really carry the same weight. I must have been the only person to watch Braveheart wondering when the English would just get on with it and kill Wallace, if only it meant the film would end at some point soon.

On top of this, it’s an American film directed by an Australian shot in Ireland. How Scottish.

That and Scots stopped wearing wode when the Romans left, which I'm sure they just put in to irritate history nerds at this point

No, not Braveheart. Or Brave, Trainspotting, Local Hero or Whisky Galore (although that film is glorious). Nah, it’s a Gaelic language film with minimal English dialogue, partly funded by Skye College and it’s utterly wonderful.

Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle tells the story of young Angus, orphaned when his parents fall from the Skye mountains, and his relationship with his Grandfather, a man who mourns both his son and his dying culture. Angus’s life is filled with stories and Gaelic culture, but it seems bleak and isolated – it’s telling how exotic and distant places like Glasgow seem in Seachd, as if the idea of speaking anything other than Gaelic ill suits such a wild and ancient land.

Skye looks gorgeous throughout, Ian Dodd’s cinematography perfectly capturing the vastness of landscape whilst picking up on the small human imprints on this natural world. A car here, a cottage there and Agnus’s problems seem simultaneously enormous and insignificant.  It’s as much a film about Gaelic as it is Agnus, his Granddad using old Gaelic stories as metaphors, instructions and sometimes just to cheer up his sullen and lonely grandson.

And what stories they are. With this kind of film, it can be difficult to get across the importance of the message without it consuming the entire narrative, casting the entire thing into the dark world of important, but not very entertaining. Seachd balances the more serious tales of oppression, death and murder with a gentle sense of humour, particularly with the tale of the Spaniard and the McDonald, which is fun, funny and ends with an amazing pun which still makes me smile.

Where Braveheart is cynical and manipulative, Seachd is sincere and hopeful. It’s a film about local history and legend interwoven with a heartbreakingly real family drama and I honestly can’t recommend it enough. It’s lovingly crafted, warm hearted and small enough to feel personal to everyone who watches it whilst being undoubtedly and truly Scottish.  

And Now, The Shipping Forecast

Shipping, for those who have made better life choices than I, is the act of imagining, through art or writing, fictional characters in a romantic relationship for personal satisfaction, experimental purposes, or to annoy Anne Rice.  If two characters have ever existed, someone has probably written a thirty thousand word novella about how they’re getting their rocks off with each other. Some terms should be explained; a sailed ship is one that happens in the original work (Han Solo and Princess Leia, for example), a crack ship is one that could never happen in the original work (like, say, Jean Luc Picard and Elrond) and a slash is a gay pairing (named after the forward slash to show a pairing, such as Kirk/Spock). It’s staggering how many slash pairings there are across the lands of fandom and oh my, does it get weird quickly. If you cast your mind back to when Thor: The Dark World was released and this picture made the rounds on the internet:

     This was used in an actual Shanghai cinema by mistake, and it is even more glorious when you consider that  writing slash fiction is illegal in China

Did you ever stop and think that there’s an entire fandom around these characters having poorly described sex? That it is a robust fandom of art and stories? Were you aware it had a name? (Thorki. It’s called Thorki. I know that because this list is hilarious and ‘Stark Spangled Banner’ is a triumph of ingenuity over sense.) This is made even more puzzling when you consider the vast majority of fanfiction writers are straight American teenage girls; what gives?  

I don’t think there’s an epidemic of teenagers craving incest, if that helps. I think it’s a case that the best and most developed characters in popular fiction are male. Take Molly, from the former best thing on television, Sherlock. As the only female character attracted to Sherlock, you would have assumed that fangirls would have taken her up as an avatar for themselves in their stories. But as a character, she’s not as interesting or complex as John Watson and Sherlock, so she doesn’t grab the viewers’ imagination as much and therefore doesn’t warrant as much attention. Her emotions and feelings are ignored in favour of Sherlock and John’s in the show, so why should she be held as the fan's champion in their own work?

It’s not just teenage girls making boys kiss though; there’s a thing called a Ship War, and this is when groups of fans attack each other over whose ship is better. No, I’m not joking.

My own experience with Ship Wars started with the Harry Potter and the bloody, ruthless battles between those who shipped Harry/Hermione, and those who shipped Ron/Hermione in the mid 2000s. Non survived unscathed; daughter against mother, husband against wife, father against son (actually, probably not that last one). It was a dark time for a young Harry Potter fan to be exposed to literary atrocities on the Mugglenet message boards as fans tore each other apart in a desperate bid to prove that theirs was the real One True Ship. It didn’t matter when JK Rowling stepped in and wrote an entire book about who ends up with whom (Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is about 75% shipping), the Harry/Hermione crowd refused to be silenced, rising from the dead earlier this year when JK Rowling said she thought Harry should have ended up with Hermione after all.

I had night terrors for days after this story came out.

And this is why shipping can get in the way of enjoying and discussing the original work. By spending so much time obsessing which fictional characters should rub their privates against each other, shippers ignore other creative outlets and analysis, which stunts wider conversation about the work. When Half Blood Prince did come out, I recall there was very little talk about the Orwellian nightmare occurring outside of Hogwarts, but there was a lot of energy put into why Lupin and Tonks were obviously right for each other from the beginning. This is not important in the real world by any sense, but when you’re trying to engage with a text, develop analytical skills and teach yourself how to think about literature and the media, it’s less than stimulating to find that all anyone else seems to care about is how much worthier their ship is.

Yeah, it’s mostly harmless fun. But if shipping is the only pleasure that can be derived from a TV show, film or book, then it might be time to look at it again and see if it’s worth the time, and perhaps start to ask more from your entertainment. Because, let's face it, the romantic relationship is usually the dullest part of any story, especially when there’s so much more fun you can have with it.

The Armstrong Lie

The Armstrong Lie, 2013, Sony Pictures Classics. Directed by Alex Gibney, starring Lance Armstrong, Reed Albergotti, Frankie Andreu.

Watch it on 4OD

In 2013, Lance Armstrong admitted to sport’s worst kept secret, coming clean about his use of performance enhancing drugs throughout his career. His sponsors fled, his titles were stripped from him and he’s currently being sued for $100 million for fraud. To be sure, being Lance Armstrong now doesn’t seem like fun, but in Alex Gibney’s hastily re-edited documentary, he didn’t seem to mind too much.

Alex Gibney was originally drafted in to film Armstrong’s triumphant comeback to the Tour De France in 2009, after winning it seven times from 1999 to 2005. His story of cancer, heartache and honest hard work was a fairytale – many believed that to be exactly the case. Knowing what we do now, it’s hard to look at the masses of fans cheering Armstrong on as a hero and realise that he lied, cheated and bullied his way to the top. The documentary doesn’t shirk the difficult task of showing Armstrong as a maligned angel to his public and a candid drug user in private; one of his US Postal Service teammates recalled a time when Armstrong openly gave himself a shot of EPO right in their hotel room.

And then there’s Armstrong’s utter refusal to say sorry. The film feels like it’s building to a climax of regret and retribution, but neither is fore coming. Clearly, Armstrong wished he never came back in 2009 (which opened a renewed interest in a second look at his sketchy past) because he got caught out. But he never really said sorry to the people he’d sued and destroyed to protect his reputation. One teammate said of Armstrong’s achievements, ‘Did he win by the rules of the road? Yes. But did he win by the rules? No.’ Armstrong still maintains that he didn’t cheat and that history will say he won the Tour seven times.

This kind of belligerence makes for a difficult subject of what was originally meant to be a soft and inspiring film about Armstrong’s need to cycle ridiculous distances in France. The actual Tour itself looks fun and exciting, and there is a small thrill in hearing the other teams worry themselves over the Sir Bradley Wiggins threat (whose own documentary, A Year in Yellow, was presumably everything this one wanted to be but couldn’t) but it’s still overshadowed by its most well known participant’s blatant drug use. Gibney himself sounds constantly dejected, speaking of when he was caught up in the Armstrong Myth in the 2009 Tour and then immediately reminding his audience that this man still cheated everyone. It goes against every narrative urge for a sports documentary - no one ever beats the odds by cheating, that would be heartbreakingly realistic! The incredible story turned out to be just that, and at times this film feels more like a Werner Herzog piece than anything else.

This film has no villain; Armstrong refuses to see himself as such and Gibney doesn’t push that angle. It’s also strangely structured, leaping back and forth between events and swallowing stories to spit them back out later. Armstrong is cool and collected – his interview after the Oprah interview should have been the point in the narrative where he let his mask slip and shown what he was truly feeling, but there was no sense of a human being with a beating heart in any of his interviews for this film. Ultimately, Armstrong seems like an unpleasant person who won’t say sorry.  The Armstrong Lie is a nihilistic film but it is refreshing in the way that there’s no way a sport can sink any lower than cycling in 2013. And with Team Sky taking on the world, the Tour de France may just have some heroes worth celebrating.

A Million Ways to Die in the West

A Million Ways to Die in the West, 2014, Fuzzy Door Productions. Directed by Seth MacFarlane. Starring Seth MacFarlane, Charlize Theron, Amanda Seyfried, Neil Patrick Harris.

I’m going to be honest, I hated A Million Ways to Die in the West. I hated that I spent just shy of a tenner to watch Seth MacFarlane have everyone tell his character how wonderful and special he was. I hated that he was supposed to be totally flawless, just in need of a confidence boost. I hated how he let us know that the West wasn’t great by just shouting for two minutes, rather than using the medium of film to show it. I hated how his go to punch line was saying ‘Oh shit!’ in case the audience couldn’t follow that the violent slapstick was violent. I hated that Django Unchained used ultra violence to demonstrate the Bad Old Days in better and funnier ways and I could have spent my money on that DVD instead (God, how I hated that).

I hated how Charlize Theron was diminished to a Manic Pixie Dream Girl in a hat in the first two acts and a damsel in distress in the last. I hated how she took an instant dislike to Amanda Seyfried without having a single scene alone with her. I hated that those two characters revolved entirely around Seth MacFarlane. I hated how Sarah Silverman wasn’t in it nearly enough.

I hated how glimpses of a funnier movie were suffocated by a two hour run time. I hated how scenes ran on and on with no end or purpose in sight and I hated that they didn’t have a single joke in them. I hated that the potentially funny jokes were mishandled and had all promise wrangled out of them. I hated how interesting subversive ideas were immediately shied away from and breezed over. I hated that there was a How I met Your Mother joke and it was terrible. I hated how people were dragged in to make cameos that only added to the runtime and nothing else. I hated how the toilet humour was just kind of gross. I hated that the Western genre is a rich field of comedy language, but that was ignored and characters spoke in 2009 slang. I hated that I love American Dad! but instead of that brand of sharp observational satire, I got Family Guy Goes West.

I hated that I expected more from Seth MacFarlane, who is a very talented man but just didn’t seem to know what to do with the genre. I hated that he gathered some excellent people and squandered them. I hated that Neil Patrick Harris defecated in two hats, but didn’t sing the musical number. I hated that I assumed Seth MacFarlane is skilled enough to have created the new Blazing Saddles, but didn’t seem to care that he was making something less funny than athlete’s foot.

The fight in the bar was good though, really funny.

Fossil

Fossil, 2014, Brickwell Films. Directed by Alex Walker. Starring John Sackville, Edith Bukovics, Grant Masters and Carla Juri.

Fossil is the third film and first feature length piece by Alex Walker, who directed the enticing We Dreamed America, an exploration of the Country Music scene in Britain. As that film shows the consequences of two cultures intertwining, so Fossil shows the clash of ideals between the repressed and the carefree, the rich and the... less rich.  

Alex Walker wrote, directed, produced and edited the film and unfortunately it really shows. Any meaning to be gleaned from the artsy title and fartsy symbols is lost under half an hour of story dragged out over ninety minutes. Husband and wife Paul and Camilla are on their jollies in France when two drifters Richard and Julie break in and use their pool. Camilla invites them to stay, Paul objects, Richard flirts, Paul worries and it’s obvious from the first five minutes that someone will end up dead in Chekov’s pool by the end of act two. Massive plot threads are introduced and then promptly dropped, any action taken has no consequence and the film doesn’t really end, it just... stops.

The lack of a coherent story is not helped by the barely-there characters; Paul is writing a book on holiday which he won’t let anyone read (of course), his despicable wife seems to do things just to exasperate him and Richard and Julie are a Manic Pixie Dream Couple, and yes, they are as irritating as that sounds. The script is underwritten and badly needed someone else’s input. Instead, it’s a cliché wrapped in a trope and glaring mistakes shine through for the world to see. For example, the discussion I had after watching the film was not about marriage in a modern world or the strains of sharing a dark secret when you can’t trust your partner, but why in God’s name were they using aerial flip phones in a 2012 set film? And when a baffling prop choice is the most memorable part of your film, something has been lost along the way.

There was potential in Fossil. Shot like a French art house film from the 70s, the sundrenched Southern French landscape is drained of distinctive colours, the lingering shots of the gorgeous countryside given a distant, cold air as our four characters act out their melodrama under the relentless sunshine. Some shots are telling of Walker’s skill behind the camera and he seems to have a knack for finding beautiful, off-kilter angles which makes you wish you had a beard to stroke in deep thought as you wonder what it all means. But, a lousy script is a lousy script and not even the loveliest of scenery can save that. In the nicest possible way, Walker would do well to stick to directing and leave the script writing to someone else. I’d give this one a miss.