Change Your Image
kitchenaut-1
Reviews
Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (1980)
An obscure film that deserves to remain so.
I wanted to like this. I usually enjoy off-beat humour, and respect the spirit in which this film was made, and although the film's narrative is disjointed, it isn't hard to follow, so that is not my issue with it.
The problem comes from the individual scenes in themselves. The dialogue is inventive, and I actually like the almost lyrical narration, but non-sequiturs are only funny if they are used in the right context, that is to say that a logical chain of language sets up our expectation, but the non-sequitur subverts it, as seen in The Young Ones and Look Around You.
What you have here is non-sequitur after non-sequitur, meaning nothing surprises you because you soon come to expect wackiness for the sake of it, and so the film's attempt to be mad is actually wholly predictable and boring. There are a few moments of inspired comedy - the hang-glider scene in particular - but again, unlike most people, it isn't the haphazard narrative that put me off, and while the dialogue is quite original, it's just a string of unusual lines without a conversation to belong to, 'Have you killed?' and 'he called me his/a perfect brick' are just nonsense for the sake of it. Nothing makes those funny in of themselves.
As I'd heard a little about its cult status, I expected something with the quality of Withnail and I or Python or Peter Cook's work. This is unique, but uniqueness is not enough.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
A nice little comedy if it wasn't so insufferably postmodern
Scott Pilgrim vs The World, which I hadn't seen until now, despite ravings from my fellow dweebs.
Firstly, i'm not a gamer, but I could appreciate the references from having played games on the SNES and Playstation As a film, I found the acting to be good, and Chris Evans, Thomas Jane (the 'vegan policeman') and Brandon Routh were all particularly funny, but overall the film was too dependent on self-conscious geek service and postmodern gimmickry to make it a truly decent film. If anything, many adults would've been distracted from the story by the constant smugness of the self-reflexivity- A girl's face becomes an emoticon, and a swearing character has a black 'censor' box over her mouth, only to be asked about it by the eponymous hero.
It sailed close to the wind with regards to acknowledging its roots in a comic and nearly fell to the same indulgent trap of pretentiousness as Sin City - over-stylised and overly reverential to the original format, thus appearing static and quite dull. As it is, it gets away with just being silly and playful, although the dialogue is of the egregious Whedon School of screen writing - flippant and far too studied to be believed; as if a single voice were engaged in a witty repartee with itself, as is usually the case with Tarantino, Whedon and the slew of imitators such as Orci and Kurtzman. I winced when the female drummer said 'Your bad was saying 'my Bad'', when that's the kind of dialogue the film uses throughout.
Overall, quite a mixed bag. 2.5/5
Sin City (2005)
Studied Camp In Pulp Noir Setting
That's what it feels like watching this film. It's a tour-de-force in post modern smugness. The actors deliver lines as if in the worst Corman adaptation of a Chandler novel, and the whole enterprise seems like a mash-up of cultural anachronisms, a patchwork of Noir, John Woo and punk. People have told me the comic is like this, but that just means the source material is a lazy exercise in self-indulgent genre 'subversion'. "Get this, I can write like Raymond Chandler, but add gun-wielding punk prostitutes and mutants, that makes this art!" No, it makes it affected and tedious postmodern claptrap. The sort of thing a pretentious 17-year old English literature student considers an art film, or Tarantino an auteur.
Godzilla (1998)
Very watchable compared to current releases.
Although it's not a particularly thoughtful or artistic film, no sane person expects it to be. It is a competently made and very watchable monster-disaster film, much more so than the voguish Cloverfield, which has stunningly bad characterisation, and a distinct lack of narrative structure. As a film, Cloverfield is woefully underwritten and the monster looks awkward and derivative of the creature in the excellent Host.
The action sequences in Godzilla are far more intricately choreographed, and the monster is more convincingly rendered, which is saying a lot considering the CGI is ten years older, but then a number of modern CG films seem to trade fidelity for hyper-kinesis, so that everything is moving too fast to make out details, which is just conning the audience; there are very few money shots, like the Brachiosaur in Jurassic Park.
There is a corny aspect, but it is charming, and not hopeless hokum, like 2012, which is probably the worst Emmerich film i've seen, and i've seen 10,000 BC.
Like a lot of films of the mid to late nineties, there is assumption that the audience still have a respect for story, and most nineties films of this genre stand up quite well to the dross like the later Star Wars prequels, Transformers, Skyline and Clash of Titans, which have no sense of writing talent behind them, and the characters are just types.
Even the effects of newer films look poor, due to aforementioned hyper-kinesis/ shaky-cam visuals.
Why is it that most modern event movies are so poor on all fronts?