Dirty Shorts from '08

Our hill-billy entry for the Smoke and Mirrors 48 hour Film Challenge from October 2008. You're given the theme on Friday night and you turn in a completed film on the Sunday. Does it show, you decide...

Still Coming Soon, maybe.....

Rasslin'

The Wrestler (dir. Darren Aronofsky). 2008. US. – OUT NOW.

REVIEW

There are a number of inspired moments in Darren Aronofsky’s latest film ‘The Wrestler’ that see the line so blurred between that of the broken show-man and fighter in the script and Mickey Rourke’s own tortured journey from stardom to ruin, that the film feels like a beautifully shot ‘MTV: Diary Of’. Yet this is no vanity project for Rourke, far from it. Rumours of on set spats between the director and the star can be believed when you see the physical and emotional limits to which this film pushes Rourke’s performance as the gentle giant wrestler, Randy ‘The Ram’ Robertson. Yet, in many ways this tension between Rourke’s depiction of a man who is just looking for a good time but is in denial about the bed he has made for himself and the rapidly closing in world Aronofsky has created around him, is the key to the films success.
Many anticipate that this poignant warts and all tour de force from Rourke will win him his first Oscar and, like Daniel Days Lewis’ winning turn last year in ‘There Will Be Blood’, it’s a film thats success is hinged on this central performance. Also like PT Anderson’s movie, that performance is never bigger than the canvas against which it’s set. Ram is very much a product of his environment, a victim of it even.
Aronofsky’s unremitting gaze complete with long takes, the camera often lingering at a distance, is matched with the gruesome detail in which we see Ram nurse his injuries. It all combines to give these larger than life characters room to breathe and the audience a chance to smell the sickening mixture of blood and desperation long after the ringside screams have died down. The raw and beautifully underplayed performance from Rourke is also complemented and facilitated by stellar turns from Marisa Tomei and Rachael Evan Wood as the women in his life who are trying to love him. There are some who will see the poster for The Wrestler and watch this movie for an 80s themed nostalgia trip into the glory days of Prime-time wrestling and hair metal, and you have a feeling that had he told his own story, the Ram would’ve liked it that way and so perhaps would Rourke. Aronofsky though, had other plans; this is no Rocky Balboa underdog tale but rather a gruelling examination of one man’s pride, confusion and despite his best efforts, ultimate fall in the fight to hold on to who he is and who he once was, now he’s at the end of his life. The wrestling might be fake, but the hurt is very real.

TA

Spielberg minus Lucas equals Indy 4

Finally I managed to find the time to drag my grotty ol' bones to the local picture house to see "Indiana Jones and the cling-film, school-play prop skull". I am glad I waited for the hoopla to die down and going in, that my expectations were so low. It felt like it was made by a great film maker, fallen on hard times who was held to ransom by a tyrannical, egotistical studio head/producer and forced to return to a beloved franchise, long since concluded. Even worse that Hollywood fat cat is a crashing bore and fancies himself as a writer,his script being a derivative retread of the talented directors original films and not even that. Of course, this film is largely an expensive piece of rot. Except for when the script and story are put to onside. Our director when creating the action sequences and set pieces & free to work outside the limitations of this soggy script, reminds the world that when he story-boards and shoots he executes with precision, flair and style. Every single frame tells a cracking story and marrying that to a beautiful period detail, witty sight gags, 1950s technicolor style photography helps to create some perfect cinema. Yet when we return to the talking, it appears out of contempt for what he finds himself doing to his beloved creation in this cruddy new guise; he sticks the camera on a tripod for 5 minute two-shots and uses the first take in which the boom doesn't fall in front of the camera. In short: the joyous film-maker that Spielberg will always be, minus the creative black-hole George Lucas has become, equals Indy 4.

Of course, in actuality this isn't what happened. The truth was Steven let his boring mate come over and play again because he's too nice to say no him after all this time. His boring mate is such a twat that people have stopped telling him to shut up when he 'imagines' stories that are all clearly nicked from early X-files plots. Even then, poor old George saw it a long time ago so it's a bit like a seven year old boy on a sugar high at his own birthday party excitedly retelling his understanding of the Matrix back-story to a room full of adults who are tolerating him but not listening to him. And that's actually how it worked because this autistic seven year old has enough money to finance 150 million dollar blockbusters without the help of a studio.... So the adults in the room really did have no choice but to nod along, as this gabbling child pays their inflated wages.

I have to say, I think overall, it is a movie still worth seeing because about a third of the film (the set pieces specifically) put most other big current movie makers to shame. It does this by making you realize that you can have all the money in the world but a great action sequence has to be clear and simple, and can not be created entirely through editing and effects (see Michael Bay). In the end, it is interesting that the worthwhile bits weren't the moments that were throw back gags/references but the parts of the film that hinted at what might have been had they been working with even a merely passable story and okay script. So yeah, big ol' shame. And for the record: Lucas is a tool. He just is, and he needs to be sent to bed early and his crayon-set burned.

Revenger's well and truly... er, revenged.

This week our production of the Revenger's Tragedy written by Thomas Middleton and this time around re-imagined by Melly Still (Coram Boy) opened to the public and the press to much fanfare. It plays in rep with George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara (also well worth a look) until August in the Olivier, National Theatre, SE1.

Here is the trailer:



And one or two reviews from this the next mornings papers:


"Elliot Cowan is simpler and better as the duke’s heir, Lussurioso. He and Kinnear make a real success of exchanging knotty Jacobean lines like a couple of blokes bragging in a bar. John Heffernan and Tom Andrews, as the duke’s stepsons, Supervacuo and Ambitioso (the names point to the complexity of character the author was aiming at), are hilarious studies in not so much the banality as the weediness of evil."

Christopher Hart, Sunday Times. 8th June 2008.

Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre/reviews/the-revengers-tragedy-olivier-national-theatre-london-841251.html?r=RSS">click here
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article4076787.ece">
The Times: Click here

The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/06/06/btrevengers106.xml">click here

You bloody vidiot...

Here are four steaming new clips from a forthcoming two man comedy pilot for BBC3 I am in, called vidiotic. It involves the inane ramblings of a couple of video shop, movie geek slackers with overactive imaginations (I had to dig deep for that one)intercut with kerrazy comedy clips such as these:

Easy like a Sunday... erm, evening

Apologies for lack of posts but am busy rehearsing in the day, performing in the evening and crime-fighting around the clock... Until then, Antiques Roadshow out of the way, settle down with a nice slice of Battenberg and pour yo'self a cup 'o cosiness with the following musical short film nuggets featuring 'The National' courtesy of the consistently gorgeous Take Away Shows:

#40.4 - THE NATIONAL -Ada
Uploaded by lablogotheque

#40.3 - The National - Start a war
Uploaded by lablogotheque