Idiocracy
This is Mike Judge's remake of Sleeper; Mr Average, Luke Wilson, gets put into hibernation and wakes up 500 years later. However, instead of Orgasmatrons and The Orb, everyone has been dumbed down so much that our boy is now the smartest guy on the whole planet. And the same fate awaits him as awaited the brainy kids at school - CHINESE BURN CITY!!!!
It's not brilliant, and it spends a lot of time explaining its own humour, but it is sufficiently coarse, and the parody of Fox News is brilliant. To the extent that the studio who paid for it, 20th Century Fox (oops) gave it no publicity and a release on a handful of screens. So, as an exercise in shitting your own toast, it's certainly to be recommended. And it did make me laugh more than a few times, even after I had run 21.1km up and down Buxton in the nasty rain. So it just about scrapes into the
good category.
Zodiac
Even for a film about a serial killer, it's not very nice. It's long and slow and there are some really scary bits in it. It does get a bit silly because at the beginning it says it is based on the book by Robert Graysmith, and you realise that is who Donnie Darko is playing. So you know that until he writes a book he's not going to get chopped up, which sort of spoilt it for me but it was OK really because the film made getting murdered look very grim indeed. But if that had been me and I realised I had immunity I would go round San Francisco leaving graffiti about Zodiac's mum and he wouldn't be able to touch me, ha!
Robert Downey Jnr suits having a beard, and Donnie Darko is good as well, except that you never really get that much insight into his character. All he does is imitate Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, remembering to stop short of sculpting a big effigy of Zodiac out of mashed potato in his kitchen.
It is a
good film, but it is not exactly a fun night out. Mind you, have a read about these
cheeky chappies, they are REALLY frightening by comparison.
Art School Confidential
Pablo Picasso, as Jonathan Richman so eloquently observes in his song of the same name, was never called an asshole. And while this insight is fine material for a 4'21" pop song, when it's stretched out to feature film length it does flag somewhat (I do think the song gets a bit dull after the third minute as well, in fairness). The problem with the film is that it's too broad to be a drama and not funny enough to be a comedy, so I got bored after only 20 minutes of non-stop exposition and read some insurance schedules instead.
Even though Ghost World was brilliant, Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes have let themselves down a bit here with this
shit. Oh well, I am going to see that Zodiac tonight which hopefully will have neither students nor teachers in it and therefore might be
good.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
You may have noticed that it is nostalgia month in leafy Finsbury Park; I clearly remember watching Barry Norman reviewing Buckaroo Banzai on Film '84, thinking that it looked A-mazing, and my mum giggling at the dialogue. And then, because straight-to-video hadn't properly been invented, I never got to watch it. But the injustice of it all has always smarted.
Well, thanks to the wonders of online DVD rental, I finally got to watch this film last night. It's completely warped and incomprehensible, and I'm pleased as hell I never got to watch it when I was 13, because it would possibly have taken over my whole life, and maybe I would have thought that Jeff Goldblum's fluffy chaps (far left) were a laudable fashhion statement. It's a bit like David Lynch directing an Ed Wood, and there are more than enough authentic 80's moments to make it very engaging - check out the shoes on the geezer standing next to Jeff Goldblum in the photo. The sound engineering was pretty rubbish on the DVD I watched, so you couldn't hear them doing the very complicated explanations of the plot, which is a bit of a shame. And apparently there is a deleted scene available on the US DVD which has Jamie Lee Curtis playing Buckaroo's mum. Which isn't on the region 2 disc. Bummer.
If you like inexplicable deadpan retro-SF then you'll think this is good. And if you don't, I genuinely feel sorry for you.
Labels: C64, Pynchon
Half Nelson
I don't know why, but apart from School of Rock, there have been zero
good films about teachers, and it is expecting a lot of Half Nelson to break this streak. Ryan Gosling plays druggy teach, but even in the first frame he looks too good, as if the film has been brought to you by the Crack Marketing Board of America. So you downgrade your expectations; it is evidently too much to hope for the film to be real and truthful, maybe it will be entertaining? This wish is cruelly shattered after a few more frames, and then I was just sitting there in the dark trying not to get too bored. But it's very slow - the central point of the film being teacher... is.... such.... an.... ass... hole..... yet somehow the filmmakers expect you to overlook this blatantly obvious information until the last few scenes.
On the positive side, Ryan Gosling's Oscar-nominated performance is quite competent, but then again I'm not sure that impersonating a tiresome nob-end is a very laudable skill. This film is so
shit it makes you wonder if people who like it are just extremely incompetent human beings.
If you can think of any good films about teachers, please leave me a comment. I haven't seen that one with Sidney Poitier in it but I am open to suggestions.
Stasiland
Here's an interesting article on the film
The Lives of Others, by Anna Funder, who was responsible for the excellent history/memoir Stasiland. Check it out.
This is England
When I was watching this film I was wondering how people who weren't alive in the 80s would take it. What would they make of all the carefully delineated tribes (skins, scooter boys, new romantics, two-tone, and so on) the FATCHA references, and the lack of proper computer games and iPods? Well, I'm not sure, and anyone who is of that age is welcome to tell me via the comments, but I thought it was spot on, and really captured how scary and exciting it was. Bliss it was to be alive but to be young was very heaven, wrote Wordsworth, yet somehow he neglected to mention Roland Rat.
The film is pretty much a remake of TwentyFourSeven, only with skinheads instead of boxing. But mostly it's about growing up, trying to belong, and fear. There's a great performance from the wee lead, and Romeo Brass is all growed up in this one and playing a lad called Milky; at first the skinheads break the kid down, and then they build him back up again. But as the film goes on he stops being built up again. All the characters seem real, even the shoeshop woman who pedals fake DMs, and the film hangs together in a way that other Meadows efforts, like Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, don't.
This film is
good and you should definitely go and see it if you are a bit bored with emo superheroes.
