In this business, you’re always on the lookout for fresh new cliches. My writer friends Matthew Norman and James Hanning, connoisseurs of cliche, used to play a call-and-response game to entertain the rest of us. (“What do ‘refugees’ do?” – “They clutch pathetic bundles!”; “What do ‘costs’ do?” – “They spiral out of control!”) So in a way it’s exciting for me as a film reviewer to welcome the newest and most tiresome cliche in the cinema: the gunshot-plus-desolate-whine. It used to be that in war movies, with a ghastly shooting incident, you’d just get a gunshot. Bang! And that would be it. Nowadays that’s not good enough. You have to follow the deafening gunshot by suddenly blanking out all background noise except a sustained, ultra-high-pitched earache-inducing whine for a good 10 seconds while the agonised rookie soldier falls down with a silent scream – indicating temporary deafness, of course, but also the poor guy’s numb sense of shock, guilt and horror at collateral damage in wartime. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Every single war movie I see contains the gunshot-plus-desolate-whine, a dog whistle to evoke emotional despair. Can we please go back to just having a gunshot, and get on with the script?
How I’d win it for Miliband
In an attempt to snag first-time buyers, along with discontented Generation Rent voters and perhaps the harassed bank-of-mum-and-dad generation, Ed Miliband has promised to abolish stamp duty for young people getting on the housing ladder. Now, of course, there’s a row about the loss in Treasury income. This is a sore subject for me. It is the only topic on which I have been moved to enter the vexed realm of economic policy. When I bought a flat I became obsessed with the obvious injustice of stamp duty being levied on the buyer and not the seller – who is, after all, the one in receipt of taxable cash and probably realising a profit. Why not simply change the law to make sellers pay the stamp duty? It’s an inducement to first-time buyers and there’s no loss to the Treasury – in fact, by shunting the tax one stage up the chain, the Treasury take increases. Excitedly, I would go up to all the economic journalists in the office and gabble about my super-plan. They merely waved me away. “Please,” they would say, “you’re way out of your depth. Stick to your popcorn-munching, you dilettante.” Huh. All I can say is that if the Labour policy wonks wish to introduce my scheme and make me a life peer, that would be fine.
Finding Oceania’s Proust
To advance my artistic education, I have been to visit the Indigenous Australia exhibition at London’s British Museum: the artworks really are compelling, and the 40,000-year tradition of which they are a part induces awe and a kind of vertigo. Perhaps inevitably, I found myself mesmerised most by the single most famous painting: Yumari (1981) by Uta Uta Tjangala, a wandering figure that represents the mythic history of landscape. Looked at for a length of time, the circles in the design seem to pulse or shimmer or scintillate. Newcomer that I am, I think I understand how the picture goes beyond primitivism and nearer to the idea of transcendental simplicity – although that, too, may not do justice to the complexity and sophistication of the image. As my colleague Jonathan Jones says, the exhibition makes you think again about culture and civilisation. As I wandered around, Saul Bellow’s disputed remark “Where is the Marcel Proust of Papua New Guinea?” floated into my head. It is a wonderful exhibition.
@PeterBradshaw1
