Been chewing over a way of expressing the type of anger this film generated. This is how it's looking so far: the film works much in the manner of the police infiltration of the Black Blocs during recent protests (in Genoa, for example) content to smash a few windows, trash a few banks
but all for reasons that are counter-revolutionary, self-serving and only to be condemned. This film may act like it, but it's not our friend. The film takes on the outer-trappings of High Art. The camera spins, the actors practice their silences, degradation, sex and extremes are served up
but to what effect? Are we really supposed to play-off the opening of the film (homophobia spiced up with brutal violence, disorientation in every sense) with the ultra-cliched final images? What are the creators trying to tell us? That life isn't hold on to your chair all sweetness and light? That life is cruel, vengeful, bombastic and crude? (Something achieved with a lot less self-importance in A Ma Soeur!
or even from an exposure to any mainstream media outlet at the moment). The problem is that this film takes a lot to watch: it demands patience, an open mind, a willingness to let the film lead us around the block. It delivers nothing of worth in return. Consequently, those with willingness, and those who thought they had it and felt they could test it by buying their ticket, have their faith thrown back at them. The incredible camera work and superb performances don't mitigate this (if anything, make it worse
an awful meal in a beautiful restaurant). This is a film worthy of contempt but let's not be idealistic and simply say this: it's a waste of my time. The director needs to wake up to contemporary reality and engage with palpable tragedy. This is titillation and shock for the Middle Classes and should be avoided as surely as a Multiplex.
Reviews
5 Reviews
Phoenix Nights
(2001–2002)
It's Grim Up North
18 March 2003
It's difficult to put a finger on why Phoenix Nights is so invigorating. For a while, you're just knocked for six that a soap opera format can be used so brilliantly, and enjoying the freshness of the (at long, long last) preoccupations of the post-Oxbridge Graduate monopoly on TV comedy. On reflection I think the thing is this: the series concerns itself with a very specific milieu the Lancashire Catholic working class community (the very same that informed so many of Anthony Burgess's books). This is the defining characteristic for Potter his sarcasm comes from an inherent toughness that goes with such an environment, a Northerness that looks on the brighter side no matter how awful things get, that sets about getting the job done. Potter is someone who unwittingly finds himself to be a cynic, and struggles to drop the cynicism (too Southern an attribute?), but encounters 101 little events each and every day that underwrite it. And so we're gunning for him; partly deluded he may be, but he's no Keith Lard ultimately, we laugh with Potter at the world around us.
As with The Office, Phoenix Nights owes an awful lot to the sublime first series of I'm Alan Partridge and, as with The Office, achieves so much more than the second series of I'm Alan Partridge. Unmissable, gut-wrenchingly funny comedy that somehow still takes you to a place Kurt Cobain would have been familiar with in his final few hours.
As with The Office, Phoenix Nights owes an awful lot to the sublime first series of I'm Alan Partridge and, as with The Office, achieves so much more than the second series of I'm Alan Partridge. Unmissable, gut-wrenchingly funny comedy that somehow still takes you to a place Kurt Cobain would have been familiar with in his final few hours.
Open Hearts
(2002)
Scenes from a Marriage
17 March 2003
A Bergmanesque study of a marriage that is turned upsidedown by one part mishap and one part momentary lapse of reason. What's provocative here, and makes for an intelligent and moving film, is the way in which the spurned wife (played with quiet dignity by the estimable Paprika Steen) doesn't dish up deserved revenge, quivering hatred or physical or mental violence. but, rather, offers an attempt to understand, to accept, and to hold the family together regardless. How rare is this? The line that stays with me - and it's a casual aside but one that cuts straight to the bone - is Paprika telling her husband's mistress that `we can't even afford' the new furniture he has lavished on her.
Once the film hits its groove, its DOGME origins are forgotten and we're left with intimacy and the thousand and one little tragedies that unfold on any given day of any given week. It could be said to be modest in scope, somewhat uninventive in form, and it does immerse itself uncritically in the middle class milieu (and in this respect, I would liken it to Moretti's `La Stanza del Figlio' - except that film does seem to express a suppressed distaste for Berlusconi's Italy), but there's an honesty and maturity that make it a valuable experience - particularly for any teenager used to a soap opera diet of hysterical marriage operatics. or for anyone still recovering from `Festen'.
At its best, and there's a frisson of that here, DOGME-95 has delivered fresh slices of life (or, to elaborate, privileges a panorama of personal battles against a recognisably familiar backdrop) - its Vows of Chastity whittling the camera down to something akin to a microscope.
Once the film hits its groove, its DOGME origins are forgotten and we're left with intimacy and the thousand and one little tragedies that unfold on any given day of any given week. It could be said to be modest in scope, somewhat uninventive in form, and it does immerse itself uncritically in the middle class milieu (and in this respect, I would liken it to Moretti's `La Stanza del Figlio' - except that film does seem to express a suppressed distaste for Berlusconi's Italy), but there's an honesty and maturity that make it a valuable experience - particularly for any teenager used to a soap opera diet of hysterical marriage operatics. or for anyone still recovering from `Festen'.
At its best, and there's a frisson of that here, DOGME-95 has delivered fresh slices of life (or, to elaborate, privileges a panorama of personal battles against a recognisably familiar backdrop) - its Vows of Chastity whittling the camera down to something akin to a microscope.
The Kid Stays in the Picture
(2002)
Faraway, So Close!
12 March 2003
It's something of a scandal that this has been given a wide cinematic release. As a `film' it is unworthy of such a thing on all levels. Do I detect an increase in the amount of documentaries that are given cinematic releases - pushed as `events'? It's a pity that for every Nick Broomfield, there's a `One Day In September' (seemingly designed to be light entertainment for Clancey readers; loving recreations of the final `shoot out' - and shot through with an appalling bias; check Edward Said's condemnations, first published in The Guardian newspaper). Here there are a couple of Lynchian flourishes (slow tracking through the beautiful-but-sinister front room of the protagonist, ominous rumbling on the soundtrack) but that's about it in terms of `cinema'. In terms of story, it's also something of a whitewash; in a timely fashion, even the `official version' of the truth doesn't make much sense. Plus there are things that can't be true (Evans claiming he had to "woo" Polanski to Hollywood for Rosemary's Baby) and are highly questionable (Evans basically claiming he was the brains behind The Godfather).
The redeeming feature is the rare footage: Polanski working on set, a Mike Nichols-directed 10 min promo that Evans used to ensure that Paramount didn't fire him and an amazing Hoffman improvisation on the set of Marathon Man. Hoffman does an unfunny comedy turn as Evans 20 years hence (ie in 1996) and gets EVERYTHING right - health probs, divorce, loss of business contacts etc.
Titles at the end tell us that Evans has bounced back (shades of Alan Partridge?) and lists some of the most forgettable and unsuccessful films of recent years (Jade, Sliver...) to prove this. Then it says that Evans suffered a heart attack while pitching a film idea to Wes Craven! WES CRAVEN! And that he joked that "There's never a dull moment around here" while lying on the floor in agony. I mean...
The only lesson is that talentless wannabes in the right place at the right time with the right people can facilitate something worth doing... but even then you get the sense that Evans was too useless to prevent Coppola making The Godfather in the way he did (anyone else would have of that mindset), evidenced by his overseeing of The Cotton Club and its disastrous postproduction and reception. Not only that, but the Evans films, as Time Out says of Love Story, were dated even before they were released... so he's not even worthy of the title "hipster". Don't get me wrong, I'd be the first to work the bar with the man himself for several hours - and that's why the film fails: we don't get the tarnished Golden Boy of Hollywood's great, last hedonistic period, rubbing a Gatsby sheen onto jaw-dropping anecdotes (of which there are many). We get someone with a hang-over delivering a CV. The makers need to check the rightly-famous 1980s BBC documentary on Orson Welles. People are likeable, life is intrinsically exciting. subordinating film to that is the right decision at times, rather than feeling the need to recreate it.
Some of the film seems heavily indebted to Biskind's must-read gossipslurge "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls".
The redeeming feature is the rare footage: Polanski working on set, a Mike Nichols-directed 10 min promo that Evans used to ensure that Paramount didn't fire him and an amazing Hoffman improvisation on the set of Marathon Man. Hoffman does an unfunny comedy turn as Evans 20 years hence (ie in 1996) and gets EVERYTHING right - health probs, divorce, loss of business contacts etc.
Titles at the end tell us that Evans has bounced back (shades of Alan Partridge?) and lists some of the most forgettable and unsuccessful films of recent years (Jade, Sliver...) to prove this. Then it says that Evans suffered a heart attack while pitching a film idea to Wes Craven! WES CRAVEN! And that he joked that "There's never a dull moment around here" while lying on the floor in agony. I mean...
The only lesson is that talentless wannabes in the right place at the right time with the right people can facilitate something worth doing... but even then you get the sense that Evans was too useless to prevent Coppola making The Godfather in the way he did (anyone else would have of that mindset), evidenced by his overseeing of The Cotton Club and its disastrous postproduction and reception. Not only that, but the Evans films, as Time Out says of Love Story, were dated even before they were released... so he's not even worthy of the title "hipster". Don't get me wrong, I'd be the first to work the bar with the man himself for several hours - and that's why the film fails: we don't get the tarnished Golden Boy of Hollywood's great, last hedonistic period, rubbing a Gatsby sheen onto jaw-dropping anecdotes (of which there are many). We get someone with a hang-over delivering a CV. The makers need to check the rightly-famous 1980s BBC documentary on Orson Welles. People are likeable, life is intrinsically exciting. subordinating film to that is the right decision at times, rather than feeling the need to recreate it.
Some of the film seems heavily indebted to Biskind's must-read gossipslurge "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls".
Cry for Bobo
(2002)
Odd Man Out
11 March 2003
One of the legacies of post-war British cinema is social realism. Another is the gangster film. The former is championed by affiliates of the Leigh-Loach-`Play for Today' school. The latter by those who mistake Tarantino (et al) for Melies. I have no quarrel with any of them, but allow me a big `Thank Christ!' for CRY FOR BOBO. It's so rare to find a film that kicks out conventions (especially in this most convention-ridden of film production areas: the state-funded short film) and so opens the gates to a flood of cinematic imagination. And CRY FOR BOBO delivers this in aces; a hyper-kinetic blast of (caricatured? Grosz grotesquerie? Cartoon-like? Downright surreal? Felliniesque?) clowning around. that is: literally clowning around. Belly laughs are the order of the day here. And the director has the audacity to take the pith out of both schools, with scenes of faux-gritty social realism (albeit with clowns.) and, without wanting to spoil the ending, High Peckinpahisms. The creators of this film are undoubtedly cine-literate and anarchic individuals, yet with the discipline to strike an absolutely correct balance - especially in terms of the (arresting) performances - and implement a streamlined, confident, professional product. Good on Tartan Shorts for supporting this! We need to see more from David Cairns and his team!
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