Exciting Aesthetic Experiment
Dear reader, for your edification, I am about to embark upon a thrilling experiment in cinematic aesthetics. Well, thrilling for you, fraught with danger for me. Because I am going to go and see Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives again. This has just been reissued in a clever new digital print, and all the critics are literally ganting for it.Just as they ganted when it first came out, in 1988. Back then, when I was half as old as I am now, my dad was still under the illusion that he should try and mask his contempt for cinema. So he took me and my sister to see it, and we all hated it. There is a five-minute shot of some carpet in Pete Postlethwaite's hall that particularly sticks in my mind, for all the wrong reasons.
But I saw Barton Fink at about the same age, and I was well wrong about that. So have I similarly misjudged Distant Voices, Still Lives? Is it a work of cinematic genius? And did I have any real insight as a teenager? All will be revealed. I am very tempted to open a market for this on Betfair.
Labels: Cut the blue wire
posted by Chairman Peyote @ 11:17 AM
4 Comments:
You are a fine Brother, thank you for saving me from doing that. I thought about it too and wondered if it really was that bad. Unlike "life is cheap but toilet paper is expensive" which I assume you would never revisit. I look forward to finding out what you think.
Here is a sneak preview of what the film was like: fuckin SHITE. Full details appearing here shortly: in the meantime rejoice, for while we were young we were also justified.
The "five minute shot of a carpet" is not from "Distant Voices, Still Lives". It's from another Terence Davies film, "The Long Day Closes". It seems that your memory isn't very good - rather like your critical faculties.
ha ha if having good taste means you like Terence Davies you can keep it.
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