Frozen Land
I thought that the ICA refused to show movies that weren't completely stinky, but last year I went to see Primer there, which was
good, and this confused me. So today I went down there to have a look at Frozen Land, a Finnish version of Short Cuts, and all I can say is, fucking, fucking Primer. Frozen Land is the worst film I have seen in a long time. No-one smiles throughout the whole movie, and everyone wears retarded grey jumpers. It is essentially about how life is unbearably depressing and how the Finns would probably thank you for landing an atom bomb on Helsinki. Maybe if they could bring themselves to wear even the tiniest bit of beige they might feel better.
I don't mind films like that, but this is boring and stupid. The central genius premise that everyone lives in their own private hell and does their best to pass it on to the next arsehole in line is spelt out at the beginning, reiterated halfway through, and never deviated from. There are two good scenes in the film. # 1 is when two of the characters are doughnuting their stolen car in the motel carpark after getting calamitously wasted, and then the one who's driving hollers "let's wank!". # 2 is the most grim ashes scattering scene you can imagine, so much so that I started sniggering at how awful everyone's life was. You don't feel sympathetic for the people in the film anyway, because they are all morons. I've told you all the good bits now, you don't have to waste 130 minutes of your life on this
shit.
Tzameti (13)
Hello there, I am sorry about the wee career break last week, apparently Dave trod on the internet when he was doing the hoovering in the nude so we had to go without for a while. Still, the distibutors have been voiding their pre-Christmas nuggets upon us, here is a list of all the films that have been released in the last two weeks and their ratings:
Idlewild:
shitThe Guardian:
shitOpen Season:
shitNew Police Story:
shitThe History Boys:
shitFrozen Land:
shitTais Toi!:
shitStick It:
shitThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning:
shitThe Aryan Couple:
shitThe Great Ecstacy of Robert Carmichael:
shitMarie Antoinette:
shitBarnyard:
shitI Saw Ben Barka Get Killed:
shitGypo:
shitThe Last Kiss: really remarkably fucking
shitThe Grudge 2:
shitKZ: might be
good but not a bundle of laughs
Maybe there will be a good one out this week, I live in hope.
Anyway, I have not been slacking off, there are still DVDs to watch. Over the weekend I watched Napoleon Dynamite, twice, once normally and then again with the commentary on. The commentary is fantastic, when you hear it you realise that Napoleon Dynamite is actually a documentary.
And I just finished watching Tzameti, a movie in French by a young Georgian filmmaker. Tzameti means 13 in Georgian. It starts off and you think it is going to be a load of black and white retro-bollocks, because it takes most of its style cues from that Rififi film, but that came out in like 1955, when human beings still spoke in grunts and Raquel Welsh walked the earth in a fur bikini. But it quickly gets pretty nasty and intense and in the end I really enjoyed it, this film is
good but don't watch it with your mum.
Test Site (the slides in Tate Modern)
This is the latest of the big art projects to get installed in the turbine hall of the Tate Modern and unfortunately it's a bit of a clinker. The slides aren't particularly interesting to look at and I would love to tell you what it was like to slide down them, but I can't, because the Tate has adopted a distinctly uncool ticketing policy, and even when you do have a ticket, you still have to queue for half an hour even to go down the rubbish girly ones.
The geezer who put it together, Carsten Höller, says that you can't help but come out with a smile on your face when you go down a slide. Well, when you have a nice raspberry icecream on a hot day that makes you smile as well, but it doesn't mean that raspberry icecream is art. Anyway, Carsten Höller must be a bit of a gufflord because he doesn't even have an entry on Wikipedia! Ha, what a buffoon! Anyway, his art is
shit, not as
shit as the Nauman sound thing but that's not saying much.
However, if you are in the Tate Modern, your day is not wrecked, you don't have to drown your sorrow under ten pints of mild in the Market Porter. Just invest seven quid in the
Fischli and Weiss exhibition (proper artists with a Wikipedia entry, see) and you will have a thoroughly good time. There is the best film I have ever seen in an art gallery in there, The Way Things Go. And there is a series of 80 wee clay sculptures that will make you a) laugh and b) want to have a go at being an artist yourself, because it doesn't look very hard. And there is a load of other stuff that is a bit weird. Anyway it is
good, even though you have to pay money to get in.
Night Watch
This is a
shit Russian goth-o-rama about crap vampires in Moscow slugging it out in an epic centuries-old battle between (surprise sur-muthafucking-prise) good and evil. None of the characters have particularly cool powers, and the main crap-vampire hunter can pack them in simply using a torch with a red sweet wrapper held over it. Wankers.
The other thing wrong with this film is, if you have watched more than about six movies in your life, you will know that if there is a slightly freaky looking Malam-child, it will obviously turn out to be the long-lost son of the main hunter dude. So there's no need to have half an hour of flash-back reminding us about something we didn't have to be told in the first place.
It is quite a distinctive-looking film, but none of the imagination that went into the design seems to have carried over into the script. For instance, there is a long sequence where the chief good bloke decides the main dude is a bit rubbish in a swedge and needs to get beefed up a little. So he gives him a stuffed owl which transforms into a real owl which transforms into a helpful lady vampire who hopefully transforms into a Mini Cooper in the next installment. This all takes ages, especially with the flashbacks mixed in. And then what does the helpful lady vampire do? She runs around on rooftops with the useless bloke, and you get to see her tits when she's in the bath, excuse me while I try to stifle my contempt.
The Departed
When I was watching this film, the lady sitting next to me sighed "oh no" when something nasty happened. She said it quite a lot in the last ten minutes. Scorsese has assembled a fantastic cast (with the sad exception of Ray Winstone trying to do an Irish accent - does anyone remember Tom Cruise in Far and Away?), and most of them get butchered. It's the sort of film where, when the thugs catch the police captain on his own, they don't invite him to sit down for a nice game of dominos. "Oh no."
It's a remake of Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs, but it's a better film. The original concentrates a lot on Tony Leung lounging around in a dark suit looking cool; in The Departed, Scorsese uses his tailor's eye to dress everyone as badly as possible - especially Jack Nicholson. The result is a much greater emphasis on characterisation and tough guy dialogue, so the film doesn't just warp your brain by making you keep up with the plot twists. It certainly suits Matt Damon's potato charm, and while I enjoyed Leonardo DiCaprio's performance a lot, there were certain moments where you felt he was in line for an Adam and Joe cuddly toy remake. Mark Wahlberg is also very good - he has the drill sergeant pathological belligerence thing down just fine. And it is a gold-plated fact that
any film is better with a drill sergeant in it.
Oh, and Thelma Schoonmaker does an unbelievable job with the editing, particularly in the opening sequence. She won an Oscar for the Aviator and you can see her getting another here. This film is
good, so much so that Martin Scorsese might just be able to pull off a remake of that international turkey par excellence, Infernal Affairs 2....
The Ice Storm
When this film first came out, fate baulked me in my efforts to see it, on more than one occasion. There was a particularly memorable hour of waiting around at the wrong exit of Mansion House tube station that stands out rather clearly. Now through the wonderful technology of internet DVD rentals one can order these movies up and cringe at Kevin Kline trying to do the straight acting stuff. If you try to mock fate, then fate ends up mocking you, because this film is
shit.
Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait
This is the film which does nothing except follow Zidane around the pitch during a Real Madrid game, to the exclusion of almost everything else. I have been trying to work out if it is
good or
shit but one thing is beyond dispute, it is certainly boring. I reckon they chose Zidane, not because, Dalai Lama-like, he is the current incarnation of the best footballer in the universe, but because he is so unbelievably inscrutable. It is similar to watching Spock play footie, and
disturbingly like going to a Kraftwerk gig. Mind you, one of the blokes who made this also did a video installation piece, called 24 hour Psycho, whereby Psycho was slowed down to 2 frames a second,
so it literally took all day, and then had hairy enough bollocks to call it art.
So that sums up why it's
shit (that, and the way the camera focuses on the crowd, and then pulls focus onto Zidane, about 500 god dam times). Why it's
good is that when he smiles, or gets into a fight, or uses the most amazing skill to set up a goal that even I could score, that moment is stunning. By my count you get about four or five moments like that for the price of admission. But they'd hardly register without all the boring bits. So that just about pushes the whole film into
good territory. With this in mind, I am going to do a video project where you show the old BBC1 testcard for four hours, and then
right at the end the girl stabs the evil clown in the eye with her chalk and its brain squirts out. When it gets shown at Cannes I reckon everyone will run out of the cinema screaming because they will be unable to withstand the intensity of the emotion. And just imagine the extras you could pack on to the 3-dvd special edition!
