Free film overload
Three movie previews in as many days! When will this breakneck excitement ever end?
Firstly, to the Empire Leicester Square on Sunday morning. A new cinema for me, and I quickly discovered that Screen 2’s screen begins at ground level, thereby ensuring that the heads of everyone in front of you will be visible throughout the film. Meanwhile, the pre-film easy listening soundtrack abruptly turned into Ice Cube’s Check Yo’Self without warning. What a curious place.
The film was a Brit-flick called The Be-All and End-All. What starts off as a standard-issue coming of age comedy with Robbie and Ziggy, two 15 year-old Scousers, holidaying at a seaside caravan park quickly turns into something very different when Robbie collapses and - in time - finds out he has a terminal illness. From this point it becomes more of a romp wherein they try and arrange for Robbie to lose his virginity before he expires.
As you might suspect from that synopsis, tonally the film is all over the place - flitting between gently laddish comedy and big emotional themes with the odd slapstick set piece thrown in. The end product is not without charm, but unfortunately whether everything satisfies or not is still a mystery to me as the projector (or whatever it’s called nowadays) began to freeze and cut out for minutes at a time.
Remembering the knowledge I’d gleaned from the Kermode and Mayo podcasts - basically modern cinemas have one projectionist who presses play in each screen then goes off somewhere else, so they will have no idea if a film goes wrong - I raced to inform a staff member. They reset the film by a few minutes and tried again, but when it froze once more in the same place as before I cut my losses and left. Worse, with it being free and all I couldn’t even claim a refund.
I have to say I’m not exactly desperate to see the remainder of this film, which in itself should be an indication of whether it’s worth you bothering with it full stop.
Next, a preview of Norwegian Wood on Monday. I’d only heard about this a few days before and was somewhat ambivalent in my expectations, for the Haruki Murakami novel on which this Japanese production is based is a truly wonderful piece of art whose suitability for movie adaptation is hardly obvious. It’s difficult to fathom how Murakami can convey so much emotional depth using such sparse prose, and harder still to explain how a novel centring on a young man trying to come to terms with his best friend’s suicide and his relationship with the dead boy’s girlfriend was somehow an exhilarating enough read to become a runaway bestseller in its native land.
Inevitably the resulting film cannot hope to convey all the nuances of its source, and Norwegian Wood will likely end up in a mere handful of UK cinemas, if that. The sense of melancholy is all-pervading and with the absence of a real plot the film becomes a series of long, bleakly beguiling set pieces with minimal sound or dialogue. The performances are very good and somebody coming into this fresh may well appreciate its finer moments far more than I. Seriously though, if you’ve not already done so then read the book, for goodness sake.
You know how it is - you and your wife go out to dinner where she argues with your brother’s implausibly bitchy wife, you give her a quickie in the car park to make up for it, next morning you engage in witty badinage with her and your son (almost as if you were in a movie!), then before you know it she finds blood on her coat, the cops pile in and arrest her for murder! Tsk. How inconvenient.
Clearly your only course of action now - once you’ve exhausted all the appropriate legal remedies, natch - is to get some advice from Liam Neeson and then devote your life to breaking her out of prison. All while holding down your teaching job and bringing up your son. What could be easier?
Like all good thrillers (and plenty of bad ones), The Next Three Days is inherently ridiculous. It’s also a nice vehicle for Russell Crowe, thankfully doing a normal US accent this time, who does this sort of keeping-a-lid-on-one’s-tortured-emotions character with a minimum of fuss. It’s a film which mistakenly thinks it’s deeper than it is at times (perhaps inevitably, being a Paul Haggis film - cf Crash). Take it on a popcorn thriller level, let it sweep you away as the tension ratchets up, and enjoy the nonsense.
Firstly, to the Empire Leicester Square on Sunday morning. A new cinema for me, and I quickly discovered that Screen 2’s screen begins at ground level, thereby ensuring that the heads of everyone in front of you will be visible throughout the film. Meanwhile, the pre-film easy listening soundtrack abruptly turned into Ice Cube’s Check Yo’Self without warning. What a curious place.
The film was a Brit-flick called The Be-All and End-All. What starts off as a standard-issue coming of age comedy with Robbie and Ziggy, two 15 year-old Scousers, holidaying at a seaside caravan park quickly turns into something very different when Robbie collapses and - in time - finds out he has a terminal illness. From this point it becomes more of a romp wherein they try and arrange for Robbie to lose his virginity before he expires.
As you might suspect from that synopsis, tonally the film is all over the place - flitting between gently laddish comedy and big emotional themes with the odd slapstick set piece thrown in. The end product is not without charm, but unfortunately whether everything satisfies or not is still a mystery to me as the projector (or whatever it’s called nowadays) began to freeze and cut out for minutes at a time.
Remembering the knowledge I’d gleaned from the Kermode and Mayo podcasts - basically modern cinemas have one projectionist who presses play in each screen then goes off somewhere else, so they will have no idea if a film goes wrong - I raced to inform a staff member. They reset the film by a few minutes and tried again, but when it froze once more in the same place as before I cut my losses and left. Worse, with it being free and all I couldn’t even claim a refund.
I have to say I’m not exactly desperate to see the remainder of this film, which in itself should be an indication of whether it’s worth you bothering with it full stop.
* * * * *
Next, a preview of Norwegian Wood on Monday. I’d only heard about this a few days before and was somewhat ambivalent in my expectations, for the Haruki Murakami novel on which this Japanese production is based is a truly wonderful piece of art whose suitability for movie adaptation is hardly obvious. It’s difficult to fathom how Murakami can convey so much emotional depth using such sparse prose, and harder still to explain how a novel centring on a young man trying to come to terms with his best friend’s suicide and his relationship with the dead boy’s girlfriend was somehow an exhilarating enough read to become a runaway bestseller in its native land.
Inevitably the resulting film cannot hope to convey all the nuances of its source, and Norwegian Wood will likely end up in a mere handful of UK cinemas, if that. The sense of melancholy is all-pervading and with the absence of a real plot the film becomes a series of long, bleakly beguiling set pieces with minimal sound or dialogue. The performances are very good and somebody coming into this fresh may well appreciate its finer moments far more than I. Seriously though, if you’ve not already done so then read the book, for goodness sake.
* * * * *
Clearly your only course of action now - once you’ve exhausted all the appropriate legal remedies, natch - is to get some advice from Liam Neeson and then devote your life to breaking her out of prison. All while holding down your teaching job and bringing up your son. What could be easier?
Like all good thrillers (and plenty of bad ones), The Next Three Days is inherently ridiculous. It’s also a nice vehicle for Russell Crowe, thankfully doing a normal US accent this time, who does this sort of keeping-a-lid-on-one’s-tortured-emotions character with a minimum of fuss. It’s a film which mistakenly thinks it’s deeper than it is at times (perhaps inevitably, being a Paul Haggis film - cf Crash). Take it on a popcorn thriller level, let it sweep you away as the tension ratchets up, and enjoy the nonsense.
Comments