Thursday 29 October 2009

Annie Hall

Woody Allen, 1977

No cows.

Wednesday 28 October 2009

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus

Terry Gilliam, 2009

I suspect Francis Ford Coppola is a bovophobe. Although I estimate that cattle appear in about a third of all movies, there's not a cow to be seen in the entirety of the Godfather trilogy, I don't think there are any in The Conversation, and then in Apocalypse Now there's that cruelly drawn-out scene of the cow being slaughtered. And they did it for real.

Of course, there's a sick irony in ever having happy cows on screen at all, given that movies are shot on film made with gelatin from the boiled bones of animals including cows.

But anyway, as with Apocalypse Now, there are only dead cows in The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. They are banged into by a gondola as they float lifeless in a river.

Tuesday 27 October 2009

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

David Fincher, 2008

Several times during the film Mr Daws, Benjamin's elderly room mate, recounts tales of the seven times he was struck by lightning, visually depicted by scratchy old film of the event.

'Once when I was in the field, just tending to my cows,' he says, and lo, there are some cows who appear unscathed as Mr Daws gets zapped.

I think we'll see a lot more of these reflective, intelligent, meditative films about ageing in the coming years (indeed, I'd say Charlie Kaufman's epic Synedoche New York is already on the list). The 60s and 70s were full of teen culture because of the demographic bulge of baby boomers. Now they're getting old and dealing with very old, senile, gibbering wrecks of parents and realising it's their turn next.

Here's hoping there'll be plenty of nice cows in them.