There is little to be said for going it alone when visiting the video club.
Video choice is the most striking everyday example of the impossibility of consensus in the human species – even including the UNO! No matter how homogeneous the gathering you can imagine, it will be thrown into the sort of bitterly acrimonious cliques that make the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War look like The Cheltenham Conservative Ladies Immigration Discussion Group the moment you return with a Personal Choice Video. The sad thing is that we never learn from these experiences and live to walk the lonely furrow to the video rental store and find our personal Calvary yet again.
And why do we still refer to these places of torment as Video Stores: when was the last time that you took out a video? Popular nomenclature lags behind technology in that engaging way that it does so often. ‘The Hole in the Wall’ seems positively denigratory for the sophisticated money manufacturer beloved of all spent-out late-night topers. The uninitiated still ignorantly refer to mp3 when they should really be admiring their mp4s! How we laughed! What we need is a modern day Betjeman to rewrite ‘How to Get On in Society’ from a technoramuses’s point of view!
Video choice is the most striking everyday example of the impossibility of consensus in the human species – even including the UNO! No matter how homogeneous the gathering you can imagine, it will be thrown into the sort of bitterly acrimonious cliques that make the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War look like The Cheltenham Conservative Ladies Immigration Discussion Group the moment you return with a Personal Choice Video. The sad thing is that we never learn from these experiences and live to walk the lonely furrow to the video rental store and find our personal Calvary yet again.
And why do we still refer to these places of torment as Video Stores: when was the last time that you took out a video? Popular nomenclature lags behind technology in that engaging way that it does so often. ‘The Hole in the Wall’ seems positively denigratory for the sophisticated money manufacturer beloved of all spent-out late-night topers. The uninitiated still ignorantly refer to mp3 when they should really be admiring their mp4s! How we laughed! What we need is a modern day Betjeman to rewrite ‘How to Get On in Society’ from a technoramuses’s point of view!
How might he have written?
Do use your portable phone dear,
While I fit the ipod’s new tape.
I paid for it all with some money,
‘Cos the credit card’s just for a jape.
Ah Sir John, thou shouldst be living at this hour, cynics have need of thee!
So, whatever the group of you has decided it will never be right. You have marched towards the store with the injunction for something ‘just-out-not-too-bloody-adventure-decent-thriller-drma-action-with-character’ sort of thing. You return with something which you are convinced ticks all the boxes and are shocked (yet again) to find out that you have satisfied no one. Whereas, of course, if you return with some historic, critically acclaimed, German masterpiece – you satisfy no one but yourself. The difference between the two is not in the end result but in the intention. Left to my own devices I would choose sci-fi and/or decent animation for my group choice. You should see how that goes down! The only thing to do is to take everyone with you to choose. This is no guarantee of satisfaction, but at least all the arguments are in the store and when at home the arguments increase in intensity and virulence you can always blame everyone else ‘because they were there.’
You would have thought that Toni and I could be fairly confident about our choices when the both of us go and choose.
How wrong you would be.
Yesterday evening was a case in point. After my point blank refusal to go to the DVD machine alone the two of us trooped to the machine and made our respective choices. Toni’s was Hostel II and mine was 300.
Hostel II (Eli Roth 2007 in Spain) was a sequel to, you’ve guessed it!
This is a thoroughly repulsive film which tries though half decent cinematography and witty writing to pass itself off as something other than a thoroughly repulsive film. But it doesn’t manage that and it remains a thoroughly repulsive film. It attempts to develop character to ensure that we actually care a little for the fate of the three American girls and are concerned about the character development of the two rich American would be killers. Enough is done along these lines to show that there is a better film waiting to be made which uses the basic idea of wealthy sickos paying for safe murder and being protected by their wealth and power from any recriminations.
As a metaphor the basic premise of the film could easily be extended to the effects of, for example, an unfeeling capitalistic society which regularly uses death of the helpless to bolster up the ideology. This is not the film which does it, but the hapless (soon to be decapitated) survivor at the beginning of the film points to the rich and powerful having links which protect their organization. His nightmare where the investigating police officer turns out to have the dog tattoo and is a member of the murder syndicate and therefore perfectly free to rip his heart out, could have been further developed into a real conspiracy which would have added to the real horror of the film.
As in most of the truly sick depictions of human mutilation this tries to redeem its intellectual credentials with knowing self mockery, subtle irony and over-the-top grisly shlock slapstick. This doesn’t work, it merely emphasises the confused and embarrassed direction of the film and essential leaves it callously directionless. The ending of the film is equally made up of embarrassment, awkwardness and a simpering desire to please.
Revolting and, as I might have mentioned, a thoroughly repulsive piece of work.
My choice was ‘300’ (Zack Snyder 2007) which was a film adaptation of the graphic novel by Frank Miller.
I came to this film with high hopes, especially in terms of the visual distinctiveness of the presentation. The efforts of Snyder to reproduce exactly some of the graphic novel’s visual effects seemed promising. The pushing of the Persians over the cliffs was uncannily like the equivalent portrayal in the novel. Elsewhere in the film the techniques used were not as successful with many of the scenes looking merely graphically stilted rather than visually exciting.
The portrayal of the characters was also odd. We can never really know what this band of 300 actually looked like as they went into battle, but I doubt that they looked like the more than usually buffed and oiled bunch of virtually naked guys looking as though they were about to enter a Mr Gay Sparta competition – one kept waiting for the house music to start so they could get on with their John Travolta impersonations to gain maximum marks from the judges.
The height of something or other was reached with the appearance of Xerxes himself looking like something from a Boy George nightmare. Wearing a glittering jockstrap, rather randomly placed chains and rings, painted eyebrows and little else he looked more as if he was about to make an entrance onto the stage of some rather seedy gay bar as the fetishist stripper than the emperor god of the known world. When, towards the end of the film, he was waiting for Leonidas to prostrate himself he was seated at the top of his own slave drawn ziggurat one leg nonchalantly crossed over the other as if he was waiting for his gin and tonic with a slice of lemon in a tall glass filled with ice to be placed on a little doily. It didn’t work for me.
For me the character of Leonidas wasn’t coherent: he veered from witty humorist to inhuman killing machine with a bewildering rapidity that the back story did not make more believable.
Essentially I thought the film was an uneasy amalgam of styles with wonderfully OTT battle scenes. The loppings, cuttings, decapitations, amputations, stabbings, crushing etc, etc. were as gory (if not more so) than the carnage in Hostel II but in ‘300’ they had more of a ‘normal’ context; they were objectified by being in slow motion and they were painted as fiction by the unnatural colouring of the film. The deaths were altogether easier to take because these killings were institutionalised as a national means to an end; whereas in Hostel II the killings were for personal perversion and the particularity made them much more revolting than the ‘everyday’ deaths in battle.
While I fit the ipod’s new tape.
I paid for it all with some money,
‘Cos the credit card’s just for a jape.
Ah Sir John, thou shouldst be living at this hour, cynics have need of thee!
So, whatever the group of you has decided it will never be right. You have marched towards the store with the injunction for something ‘just-out-not-too-bloody-adventure-decent-thriller-drma-action-with-character’ sort of thing. You return with something which you are convinced ticks all the boxes and are shocked (yet again) to find out that you have satisfied no one. Whereas, of course, if you return with some historic, critically acclaimed, German masterpiece – you satisfy no one but yourself. The difference between the two is not in the end result but in the intention. Left to my own devices I would choose sci-fi and/or decent animation for my group choice. You should see how that goes down! The only thing to do is to take everyone with you to choose. This is no guarantee of satisfaction, but at least all the arguments are in the store and when at home the arguments increase in intensity and virulence you can always blame everyone else ‘because they were there.’
You would have thought that Toni and I could be fairly confident about our choices when the both of us go and choose.
How wrong you would be.
Yesterday evening was a case in point. After my point blank refusal to go to the DVD machine alone the two of us trooped to the machine and made our respective choices. Toni’s was Hostel II and mine was 300.
Hostel II (Eli Roth 2007 in Spain) was a sequel to, you’ve guessed it!
This is a thoroughly repulsive film which tries though half decent cinematography and witty writing to pass itself off as something other than a thoroughly repulsive film. But it doesn’t manage that and it remains a thoroughly repulsive film. It attempts to develop character to ensure that we actually care a little for the fate of the three American girls and are concerned about the character development of the two rich American would be killers. Enough is done along these lines to show that there is a better film waiting to be made which uses the basic idea of wealthy sickos paying for safe murder and being protected by their wealth and power from any recriminations.
As a metaphor the basic premise of the film could easily be extended to the effects of, for example, an unfeeling capitalistic society which regularly uses death of the helpless to bolster up the ideology. This is not the film which does it, but the hapless (soon to be decapitated) survivor at the beginning of the film points to the rich and powerful having links which protect their organization. His nightmare where the investigating police officer turns out to have the dog tattoo and is a member of the murder syndicate and therefore perfectly free to rip his heart out, could have been further developed into a real conspiracy which would have added to the real horror of the film.
As in most of the truly sick depictions of human mutilation this tries to redeem its intellectual credentials with knowing self mockery, subtle irony and over-the-top grisly shlock slapstick. This doesn’t work, it merely emphasises the confused and embarrassed direction of the film and essential leaves it callously directionless. The ending of the film is equally made up of embarrassment, awkwardness and a simpering desire to please.
Revolting and, as I might have mentioned, a thoroughly repulsive piece of work.
My choice was ‘300’ (Zack Snyder 2007) which was a film adaptation of the graphic novel by Frank Miller.
I came to this film with high hopes, especially in terms of the visual distinctiveness of the presentation. The efforts of Snyder to reproduce exactly some of the graphic novel’s visual effects seemed promising. The pushing of the Persians over the cliffs was uncannily like the equivalent portrayal in the novel. Elsewhere in the film the techniques used were not as successful with many of the scenes looking merely graphically stilted rather than visually exciting.
The portrayal of the characters was also odd. We can never really know what this band of 300 actually looked like as they went into battle, but I doubt that they looked like the more than usually buffed and oiled bunch of virtually naked guys looking as though they were about to enter a Mr Gay Sparta competition – one kept waiting for the house music to start so they could get on with their John Travolta impersonations to gain maximum marks from the judges.
The height of something or other was reached with the appearance of Xerxes himself looking like something from a Boy George nightmare. Wearing a glittering jockstrap, rather randomly placed chains and rings, painted eyebrows and little else he looked more as if he was about to make an entrance onto the stage of some rather seedy gay bar as the fetishist stripper than the emperor god of the known world. When, towards the end of the film, he was waiting for Leonidas to prostrate himself he was seated at the top of his own slave drawn ziggurat one leg nonchalantly crossed over the other as if he was waiting for his gin and tonic with a slice of lemon in a tall glass filled with ice to be placed on a little doily. It didn’t work for me.
For me the character of Leonidas wasn’t coherent: he veered from witty humorist to inhuman killing machine with a bewildering rapidity that the back story did not make more believable.
Essentially I thought the film was an uneasy amalgam of styles with wonderfully OTT battle scenes. The loppings, cuttings, decapitations, amputations, stabbings, crushing etc, etc. were as gory (if not more so) than the carnage in Hostel II but in ‘300’ they had more of a ‘normal’ context; they were objectified by being in slow motion and they were painted as fiction by the unnatural colouring of the film. The deaths were altogether easier to take because these killings were institutionalised as a national means to an end; whereas in Hostel II the killings were for personal perversion and the particularity made them much more revolting than the ‘everyday’ deaths in battle.
I think that ‘300’ will survive as a pointer towards better films which use the non-naturalistic style of the graphic novel to achieve their effects.
I look forward to watching them.
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