One Word Movie

Portico Quartet

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:15:00 +0000

In April 2007 I wrote a review of Distant Voices, Still Lives, which very firmly got the shit rating. But after I'd walked out I saw a band busking out by the National Theatre which equally firmly got the good rating. And when I got back from holiday I found out the band in question, the Portico Quartet, had been nominated for the Mercury Music prize. So well done them. I mean, it's not like they're going to win but it's nice to see people with talent all growed up and doing well.

Hopefully Chris Dent will get nominated for the Turner Prize in a couple of years time and then I'll be able to take 6 months off work!

Thank you and goodnight

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:39:00 +0000

Hello there, I am a bit bored of doing one word movie reviews, well I will still do them in my head but I don't feel the need to post them on the world wide web any more. If you would like to avoid shit movies in future you should a) avoid any film which is not 300 that has a number in the title and b) any film with Jude Law in it.

That should massively cut your chances down.

If you are interested in looking at some of my photographs then please go here, otherwise thanks for reading xx cp

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 02:21:00 +0000

I don't care about the proliferation of different versions of Blade Runner - it's a good film, obviously, but it's not Ulysses. The changes are pretty minimal in any case - the only one I noticed was that Rutger Hauer says "I want more life, father" when he kills Tyrell, as opposed to the more Withnialian original. Which is a shame, because I used to enjoy imagining him shambling around drinking bottles of Haut Brion from the 50s while complaining that the Tannhauser Belt wasn't what it used to be.

Anyway, I didn't think it was that great a film. I don't know if it's because I've seen it, like, infinity times, but I'm not particularly interested if Deckard is a replicant any more. Although when I was a kid that seemed like one of the most amazing conspiracies which turned out to be true - a bit like Skull and Bones, for instance. And I don't rate his pulling technique either.

What I would like to know is why none of the action happens in the horizontal plane. It's almost like a visual tic that they are always getting in flying cars, or running up stairs, and you could make quite a big list of all the times that there are lifts in the movie. I wrote quite a pretentious essay about that in one of my finals papers, and while it's something that's certainly observable in the film, I couldn't come up with a good reason why. So if you have any good ideas that don't involve the word "stratification" I would like to hear them.

Silent Light

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 10:19:00 +0000

Although this film is about 2 and a quarter hours long, it's so minimalist that there's only about 150 cuts in it, and I reckon all the dialogue would fit onto a couple of sides of A4. Even in Big Font. It's about a man in a Mennonite community in Mexico who's bowling in the next lane over, if you know what I mean and I think you do. I'd just done the last of my Christmas shopping and was feeling pretty tired, so I had a bit of a sleep - and when I woke up it was still the same shot.

I was thinking of getting up and leaving because it was quite boring but what kept me in the cinema was the old couple directly behind me. Her mouth was wired directly to her brain, while he grunted like a caveman in a Raquel Welsh movie. They'd started during the adverts.

"That's a clever ad" she said after the grim one where Ken promises to break your legs if you go to work on your motorbike.

"MMmm yes"

Then the trailer for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly came on.

"I'd like to see that film"

"Mmm yes"

The trailer for 4 weeks, 3 hours & 2 hours came on:

"Is that film in French?"

After I had my doze they were whispering away like dried leaves in a paper bag. Then two of the characters started having sex. It wasn't meat platter sex or anything, but it was definitely unsuitable for a 12A certification. Plus the characters weren't exactly buff - looking at their bodies reminded me of those sad wrinkly balloons you find in a cranny two weeks after a party. Anyway, that was waaaay too much for the whisperers, they got up and left. Presumably when they have sex they do it with the lights off, in two adjacent rooms.

In any case, I am not sure if it is a causal relation or anything, but after they left the film suddenly started being brilliant. It had that intensity that alters the way you look at things after leaving the cinema. So it definitely gets the good rating.

Happy Christmas to anyone who is still reading.

Sketches of Frank Gehry

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 20:42:00 +0000

OK, so I think Frank Gehry's architecture is terrific, but this is a stinker of a film, and it feels long at 83 minutes. Sydney Pollack does a load of interviews with Gehry, but he commits the mistakes of a) knowing nothing about architecture and b) saying it at great length. Also, he shoots big chunks of the film himself, but he is clearly has no idea how to operate a camera. Basic rules of lighting and composition are ignored, and if you think I'm being hysterical about this, consider that there is one scene where Gehry is relating how his shrink told him to leave his wife, and he did, and while he's doing this Pollack doesn't get Gehry's eyes in the frame. In his relationship with Gehry in general Pollack strikes one as the thick one out of Mice and Men with a video camera clenched in his hairy fist.

There isn't really much attempt to explain why Gehry is such a talent, and Gehry himself is never caught off-guard, he's always performing for the stumbling, sycophantic Pollack. I wanted someone like Werner Herzog to fix Gehry with his cold blue teutonic eyes and laserbeam his soul. If you'd like to watch a documentary about architecture, may I recommend My Architect, which almost made me cry. This picture, by contrast, is a complacent and cock-heavy load of guff and heartily deserves the shit rating.

There is one redeeming feature, however, and that is that Julian Schnabel really looks like The Dude.

Tell No One

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 20:29:00 +0000

Excellent silly chase thriller, with superb editing and sound. And a great chase scene which makes you flinch in your seat. The only downside is that it needs 15 minutes of exposition at the end to sort it all out - somehow I was sure that they were going to reveal that the evil paedo was behind not just 9/11 but he had also fixed Big Brother and got into my fridge and turned the milk off. But it is very good all the same, even though it could have done with being slightly less ridiculous.

28 Weeks Later

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 02:28:00 +0000

The problem with this film is that you're not worried about the Rage virus. Instead a lot of the people in it seem to be infected with something much worse - the Spasmo virus. Everyone is so incompetent I reckon that in the third film there would be a scene where a zombie is charging towards someone who shuts their eyes in self defence, on the grounds that if they can't see the zombie then the zombie can't see them, and they are safe, QED. There is also a lot of emoting and family bonding going on. I don't want that in a zombie film, it is positively against the zombie rules. What will they think of next, dancing penguins?

And there is one hilarious bit where it is revealed that you can survive a chemical weapons attack by holding your t-shirt over your mouth and breathing through that. It is not entirely without merit but all the characters are such prime dimlos it is hard to feel any sympathy for them whatsoever. Quite a few of my friends liked this but unfortunately they are wrong and it is shit.

Primer (with the commentary)

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 18:47:00 +0000

I thought I would watch Primer with the commentary turned on in case it could explain what the fuck was going on there. Well, the answer is, fat chance. It's still a good film, but Shane Carruth, the director, spends a lot of time talking about the sound editing and how tortuous it was getting the focus correct on the dolly shots. You or I would have thought, bollocks to dolly shots, I will do something easy. But I think it is noteworthy that practically the whole of Primer is a dolly shot; and it is almost as if the director has sought to pass some of his frustration with the process onto the audience by including dialogue that is not so much tangential as asymptotic, and a plot-line that deliberately makes no sense. But that is the sort of thing I really like. Sorry.

Idiocracy

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Wed, 30 May 2007 20:37:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Sun, 20 May 2007 22:36:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Sun, 20 May 2007 13:51:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Sun, 13 May 2007 11:32:00 +0000

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.

Half Nelson

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Mon, 07 May 2007 15:47:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Sat, 05 May 2007 22:24:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Sat, 05 May 2007 11:46:00 +0000

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.

Zéro de conduite

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:38:00 +0000

Zero marks for conduct is what you get in school if you behave particularly shittly, but this film is fantastic. Even though it was made in 1933 and it's less than three quarters of an hour long, and even though it's about a bunch of naughty schoolkids reenacting scenes from Baggy Trousers, it's got an impossible poetic grace about it. It's by Jean Vigo, who made the equally wonderful L'Atalante, and who died a year after making this film, aged 29. It inspired the Truffaut of The 400 Blows, and If... is almost a remake of it. There's nothing else like it, and missing out on the films of Jean Vigo is like missing out on one of the smaller and more unique pleasures of being alive.

I thought it was pretty good.

Distant Voices, Still Lives

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 21:13:00 +0000

The aesthetic experiment comes to fruition. This film doesn't start off too bad, very intense camera-work, a shot of a hall in a terraced house held for ages, before slowly zooming or dollying inwards to the sound of disembodied voices. And that's the high point. This shot and the idea behind it are repeated many times throughout the film, which is emblematic of its failings. There is no deepening of the drama, no understanding, no modulation of the emotional tone. Pete Postlethwaite smacks his missus; it is shocking. He does it again; it's tiresome, in the same way as a conversation with someone who really wants to talk about bus routes. He lies in a hospital bed. You wish he would die, in a slightly bored fashion, so as to be able to get out of the cinema earlier.

It's a funny word to use of an overly serious film about domestic violence, but I found it sentimental, in its unwillingness to engage with the characters as real people. And fortunately I had seen this film before, so I was able to do something I hadn't managed to do 20 years before, and walk out.

The sky had cleared and it was a beautiful evening by the river; this lot were busking by the moebius prism outside the NFT, and there was more enjoyment in five seconds of their music than in an hour of Terence Davies' best. A shit film that couldn't spoil a nice day.

Exciting Aesthetic Experiment

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 18:17:00 +0000

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.

United 93

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 21:15:00 +0000

Quite simply, essential viewing. It's remarkably restrained and completely gut-wrenching at the same time, as it turns from a dull morning into a nightmare in the office for the air traffic control to Das Boot on a plane at the end. When I was watching that Family Friend movie I got the impression that no-one cared if the film was any good and they all just wanted to get to the end of the shooting script. But the film-makers here worked with the surviving family members and you can tell they had a palpable obligation to do a good job. It's a remarkable document and an outstanding film. And the only DVD I've ever watched where the bonus materials make you blub.

The Lives of Others

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 22:20:00 +0000

This is the Stasi-tastic winner of the Best Foreign Picture Oscar, and it's pretty good. It features a storming performance from Ulrich Muehe, the German Kevin Spacey, as well as loads of crap cars and brown telephones. It's a little obvious, and lacking the intensity of The Conversation, for instance, but expecting too much originality from an Oscar winner is like wanting deodorant on a tramp.

It made me want to go here, anyway.

Charulata

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:53:00 +0000

The Time Out film guide described this flick as Jamesian, which I have to assume is a very literate way of calling it boring. Giving it the shit rating might be a bit harsh, but the soundtrack had so many crackles on it that it sounded like a Geiger counter factory. I really couldn't concentrate, plus I have just got a new computer with a big telly on it so I had to go and play for ages on Google Earth instead.

Memories of Murder

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:31:00 +0000

This is a 2004 cops vs serial killer drama from the same Mr Bong as made The Host. It is good and well shot, but it suffers from a lack of ambition - you never find out too much about any of the characters or the world they live in. On the other hand it may have been the bastard-strength Polish beer I was drinking.

There is a lot to admire though - the coppers clearly learnt their kung fu skills at the Cantona academy (shame they don't get to practice on Palace fans as well) and the subtitles appear to have been compiled by Withnail. Any film which includes the line "is wanking a crime" has to be worth a look.

Sunshine

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 13:21:00 +0000

Here is my monthly apology for not having blogged very much. I saw that Friend of the Family film by Paolo Sorrentino which was shit-tacular and about as much fun as watching a pigeon eat stale vomit. Sorrentino made The Consequences of Love, which was fantastic, so you can't help but think that half-way through shooting Friend of the Family he must have realised what a dog's arse of a film he was making and lost all heart.

That put me off films for a while until I went to the flash new Apollo cinema in Regent Street to see Sunshine. The big concept of the Apollo is that you pat £12.50 to get in but it is all very Premium Economy in there which means you get reclining seats and fake ice in the bogs. The film was good as well, apart from the ridiculous slasher subplot - only a buffoon would think that a movie about people flying an enormous nuclear bomb into the heart of the sun needed a bit more excitement. It is on a par with trying to liven up your journey into work on the Central line from Loughton with a bit of nude carriage-surfing in the Leytonstone area.

Plus when the crusty space gimp appears they all start talking about God and it threatens to go a bit Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Thankfully that doesn't go on for very long and there is the appropriately trippy ending nicked out of 2001. Go and watch this film at the iMax and take loads of drugs beforehand, lovely.

The Science of Sleep

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 21:33:00 +0000

Sorry I have not blogged for so long, I went skiing, gave the office a cold and other glamorous things like that. Also I have written too many business-orientated e-mails and I'm worried that my brain is becoming full of suck and logic. Well, however cabbagey it may get but it is never going to be as ridiculous and downright fuckin' sauerkrauted as what's going on inside the cute Mexican boy's head in Science of Sleep. It's an inventive film that only topples over into tweeness, like, all of the time. But it is still good, despite him treating his woman real bad.

Shit triple header

noreply@blogger.com (Chairman Peyote) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 22:16:00 +0000

For the last three weeks now I've been buying the paper of a Friday looking for exciting new releases, but it's been even more disappointing than the cricket. By way of illustration, these were the exciting premieres on Friday January 19th:

Black Book: shit
Babel: shit
Rocky Balboa: shit
Iraq in Fragments: shit
Infamous: shit
The Return: shit
Play: shit
... and Asterix and the Vikings, which has teenagers in it for fucks sake. shit.

I thought I could hold out another week, and so, 168 hours later, on January 26th, these are the celluloid offerings which graced the nations screens:

Old Joy: shit
Blood Diamond: shit
Bobby: shit
Venus: shit
The Fountain: possibly worse than Highlander 2 and therefore really quite distinguished but not in a good way. Shit.
The Lives of the Saints: shit
Suburban Mayhem: shit
Them: sadly without any giant ants in it. Shit.
Salaam-E-Ishq: shit

And now, coming out in a few short hours time are the following gems:

Dreamgirls: shit
Arthur and the Invisibles: shit
Notes on a Scandal: shit
Running With Scissors: shit
Welcome to Dongmakgol: shit
Gridiron Gang: shit

Is there some scary new phenomenon occuring? When I walk through Clissold Park to see the fat goats, I can see crocuses trying to come up. Are we also in the middle of some kind of global shitting-up of films? I've got so desperate that I just added the Metallica film to my rental queue.

If you would like me to watch any film, leave me a comment and I will do my best. Even if it is a shit one. I'm dying here.