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Showing posts with label Begin Again. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Begin Again. Show all posts
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Saturday, December 27, 2014
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My god do I see some shitty films. Being a film critic isn't all free pizza, soapy titwanks from PR agents, open bars and big plates of complementary croissants (though it often very much is). All too often you have to drag yourself at some ungodly hour to some frankly disgusting cinemas. With the deserved death of the piss-stained, tramp-infested labyrinth that was the Trocadero Cineworld, the Holloway Road Odeon holds the current title, with its dim bulbs, 30 year old seats and worryingly squishy lumpen carpet. These aren't necessarily the worst films I saw in 2014, but they were the shittiest times I had in a cinema:
HONOURABLE MENTIONS
'Begin Again' directed by John Carney
As I noted in my review there's nothing technically that awful about Begin Again. The principal cast does okay, the film is shot competently but unremarkably and for the most part it's inoffensive bilge. But imagine the film as that apocryphal Halloween apple with a razor blade concealed inside; the mouth-shredding sadism here taking the form of Maroon 5's Adam Levine. From the prickish tip of his stupid beard to his soppily warbling vocals to his lamely Dylan referencing waistcoat to his infuriatingly pointy shoes god I hate hate hate this man so so SO much.
And the film is saturated with both him and his limp-dick music! Songs that sound like this. Worse, everyone in the film goes all gooey and doe-eyed behaving like he's the reincarnation of Woody goddamn Guthrie. By the end of the film my eyes had narrowed to the thinnest of thin slits, my spine was curved like a cheesy quaver and my hands had turned into claws of hatred. I wanted my stare to somehow burn a hole through the screen, through the film, back in time to when they were shooting it and explode this man's head.
'Mood Indigo' directed by Michel Gondry
Hah! Turns out I was way wrong in that quote. It's dead easy to genuinely dislike Mood Indigo because it's a load of twee shite. Cast your eyes upwards to that moronic picture above of an embarrassed looking Audrey Tatou and Romain Duris sitting in that stupid looking car. What the hell is going on? Why does it have a cross on the side? Why are the wheels cross shaped? Variations on these questions fill every aspect of Mood Indigo, but the ultimate answer to them is that Michel Gondry needs someone to tap him on the shoulder and tell him that he's vanished up his own arse.
It's out of character for me to criticise a film for being overly imaginative, but it seems that panic set in early in this film's production and Gondry decided to fill the frame with whatever lol-monkey-cheese randomness that flitted through his head. A useful point of comparison are the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, which also contain bagfuls of weirdness. But Jodorowsky's weirdness always has an intentional symbolic point, which he happily outlines in his DVD commentaries. Gondry's tactic is to hope we're so distracted by all these whizzy gee-gaws that we'll not notice the film isn't shit. Well we did.
Gondry is an undoubtedly talented visual director, but this garbage marks the point where patience with his brand of kerrazy weirdness runs out. I hated watching it, feeling my respect for him gradually shrivelling the longer the film went on.
'The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies' directed by Peter Jackson
Whereas the other shitty films this year invoked bitterness, hatred and anger; the bloated conclusion to Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy just left me feeling a bit sad. I've been a fan of Peter Jackson since old times; his surrealistic low-budget punkish films like Brain Dead, Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles felt like they were made for teenage me. Then in the 90s the double-bill of The Frighteners and Heavenly Creatures cemented him as someone going places. This made the Lord of the Rings trilogy feel like the inmates had been given control of the asylum, the epic and the personal beautifully fused together. I ate up all those Extended Edition special features showing people piecing chain-mail together, getting off on the sheer care and craftsmanship that went into them.
So that the Hobbit films were so colossally shit felt like the dying of a dream. With the release of the final portion they can definitively be described as bloated, tasteless, ugly and narratively malformed pieces of shit. Peter Jackson has 'pulled a Lucas'; trying to recreate the magic of his classic works and in the process tainting them with shitty sequels. Over the last three years I've spent about nine hours watching this series; I'd have had a more productive time doing just about anything else.
SHITTIEST
'Divergent' directed by Neil Burger
One thing I appreciate most in cinema is brevity. For my money the ideal length for a movie is about 90 minutes. Obviously there are a load of excellent fat-free two hour films, but the longer the run-time the greater the tendency to lapse into flabby incoherency. Worse, there's a trend for longer and longer movies, figuring that length is roughly commensurate with epicness. This finds its logical conclusion in Divergent, a goddamn atrocious YA novel adaptation that clocks in at an arse-numbing two and a half hours.
The film looks crap, the actors keep glancing off-frame (presumably towards their trailers) and it's suffused with a kind of plasticky Sci-Fi Channel original vibe. I could feel my soul slowly leaking out of my shoes and sliding down the door. With a kind of full-body numbness rapidly setting in, the only option my crazed main saw open to me was to take a pin from my bag and begin slowly poking holes in the skin of my arm. It hurt like hell, but at least I wasn't going comatose. So Divergent, a film that made me self harm is undoubtedly the shittiest thing I saw this year.
And there's a sequel coming out in February. Oh joy.
....better pack some gauze.
23rd December: Gigs
24th December: Art
26th December: Theatre
29th December: Best films
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
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Begin Again is a lovely salad with a big lump of shit sitting proudly in the middle of it. Sure the shit is only touching a tiny bit of the salad, but you're sure as hell not going to be eating anything on that plate.
The film revolves around Dan (Mark Ruffalo) and Greta (Keira Knightley). Dan, channelling the rumpled, acerbic carelessness of a Groundhog Day era Bill Murray, is a fallen star record producer / A&R man. He rolls around New York drunk off his tits in a vintage black Jaguar with a strangely canine aura to him. This is a Mark Ruffalo you could imagine spotting behind the bars of the local dog pound, looking sorry for himself, whining and pawing at his cage. Naturally his personal life is a complete shambles, with a distant, troubled daughter and exasperated wife viewing him with outright contempt. After being sacked from his job and bopped in the face by an angry bouncer he hits rock bottom, contemplating jumping in front of a subway train and ending this miserable existence. But first another drink, so he stops in a bar where he finds...
Greta! Greta is a precision-tooled objet d'indie girl - from her casually tied back, shampoo ad glossy hair to her very on trend patterned summer dresses. She plays a beaten up acoustic guitar almost bent double over it, as if she's really, really into the music, man. She's a British girl in New York, having arrived as the girlfriend of Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) an indie superstar who is currently in the process of blowing up (unfortunately not literally). Their picture perfect relationship is shattered when Kohl starts banging a sexy A&R girl and Greta proceeds to mope around the city looking attractively wan and miserable, guitar in hand.
Greta plays a song in a bar that touches Dan, the two become friends and Dan's creative juices start flowing as he devises a new type of album - one entirely recorded on the actual streets of New York City! Soon the two are collecting various musicians, writing songs, recording and engaging in cute indie montages where they wander around smiling and listening to their music collections. As the album begins to come together, so do their fractured lives - the pair almost literally healed by the divine power of guitar led indie. Isn't music a wonderful thing?
It really is. But oh boy, not here. I'm going to bang on about how crappy the music in Begin Again is for quite a bit now, but if you want to skip that I can summarise what's wrong with this film with one simple point: the lead singer of Maroon 5 has a large role in the movie. Maroon 5. For FUCK'S sake. I mean... listen to this (not all of it obviously that would be insane):
It really is. But oh boy, not here. I'm going to bang on about how crappy the music in Begin Again is for quite a bit now, but if you want to skip that I can summarise what's wrong with this film with one simple point: the lead singer of Maroon 5 has a large role in the movie. Maroon 5. For FUCK'S sake. I mean... listen to this (not all of it obviously that would be insane):
(my blood boils over at precisely 02:45)
I'm really sorry I subjected you to that. But goddamn that's bad....
This is the lump of shit in the otherwise alright salad: the music in Begin Again really, really, really sucks. It's flaccid, over-produced, syrupy indie rock sung by oh-so-deep wankers in flannel shirts perched atop stools in depopulated prick-bars. This is music devoid of passion, imagination and feeling, made so much worse by the fact that these musicians consider themselves painfully authentic. As they incessantly drone on like delicate little flowers about their feelings, staring off into the middle distance with big doe eyes I wanted to jump into the movie screen, smash their bloody acoustic guitars over their heads and put on some Extreme Noise Terror or maybe a bit of hard acid techno.
As they go on to produce Greta's atrocious album they rope in a gaggle of musicians who proceed to fanny around on top of buildings in porkpie hats creating the kind of sludgy brainless acoustic whiffle that you'd generally expect to find as muzak in your local branch of Starbucks. Then, through furrowed, confused brows, we watch as everyone in the film simpers over how great it is. "Greta, your album is amazing!" they breathlessly intone. "No! It's shit shitty shit shit!" I (inwardly) heckled back.
For a film about the wonder, power and beauty of music to subject us to the guy from Maroon 5 repeatedly bleating his tortured little heart out feels like a particularly perverse form of torture. It's especially cruel given that, aside from the music, everything else isn't all that bad. Both Knightley and Ruffalo bring something neat to the table, there's a charismatic cameo from CeeLo Green and an appearance by an fascinatingly bearded Mos Def. It's all framed and lit beautifully, with cinematographer Yaron Orbach finding a bewilderingly impressive number of ways to frame two people sitting next to each other listening to headphones. Even James Corden is likeable here!
But all that good stuff is for naught. If you make a film about music where the music sucks then you're leaving port in a ship with a gaping hole in the side. Water is rushing in, people are futilely diving overboard, alarms are blaring, red lights are flashing. Eventually the boat keels over and vanishes beneath the waves. There are no survivors.
This is the lump of shit in the otherwise alright salad: the music in Begin Again really, really, really sucks. It's flaccid, over-produced, syrupy indie rock sung by oh-so-deep wankers in flannel shirts perched atop stools in depopulated prick-bars. This is music devoid of passion, imagination and feeling, made so much worse by the fact that these musicians consider themselves painfully authentic. As they incessantly drone on like delicate little flowers about their feelings, staring off into the middle distance with big doe eyes I wanted to jump into the movie screen, smash their bloody acoustic guitars over their heads and put on some Extreme Noise Terror or maybe a bit of hard acid techno.
 |
| I really hate this man. |
For a film about the wonder, power and beauty of music to subject us to the guy from Maroon 5 repeatedly bleating his tortured little heart out feels like a particularly perverse form of torture. It's especially cruel given that, aside from the music, everything else isn't all that bad. Both Knightley and Ruffalo bring something neat to the table, there's a charismatic cameo from CeeLo Green and an appearance by an fascinatingly bearded Mos Def. It's all framed and lit beautifully, with cinematographer Yaron Orbach finding a bewilderingly impressive number of ways to frame two people sitting next to each other listening to headphones. Even James Corden is likeable here!
But all that good stuff is for naught. If you make a film about music where the music sucks then you're leaving port in a ship with a gaping hole in the side. Water is rushing in, people are futilely diving overboard, alarms are blaring, red lights are flashing. Eventually the boat keels over and vanishes beneath the waves. There are no survivors.
★★
Begin Again is released July 11th
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