Portico Quartet
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Labels: "paedoph isles"
28 Weeks Later
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.
Labels: Plebs
Primer (with the commentary)
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.
