The melodrama is funny in this low-rent costume drama about a thrill-seeking upper-crust temptress and wanton highway robber masquerading as a sweet-natured debutante. It’s rammed with barely concealed innuendo and has a musical score so overbearing it detracts from what would pass for engaging conflict.
I kept watching because the existence of this movie is amusing. I can picture it made today, mammoth budget starring the ‘next big thing’ as the downtrodden heroine, the victim rather than vixen, and probably the androgynous type, with all the attributes of your box-tick ethnic minority on a zealous rampage.
A lot of films are packaged like this now. And they’re all worse than The Wicked Lady (1945).
Kes (1969) is magnificence, a fiction but approaching documentary or neorealism. The genius simplicity of this wonderful motion picture has to be seen in the context of its time. Mannerisms aren’t the director’s concern in this naturalistic portrait of a quite remarkable young lad’s attempt to escape the creatures around him, the social structures more brutally laid down in If…. (1968).
And the PE teacher in this movie defines life. They were even like that in the ’90s, horrible failed athletes or would-be cops who didn’t pass the bleep test, and I’d put a wager on them doing very nasty and illegal things in addition to being a physical mess.
Some of the teachers in this, fucking hell. Caning children who aren’t even yours?! Why didn’t their parents rock up to school and kick fuck out of these cane-wielding tyrants (Colin Welland aside), you may ask?
My only explanation is that alleged educators were somehow elevated into the stratosphere once. It’s a class thing.
So much promise was here, ripe material with the still-universal reality of social and financial structures controlling an individual from the womb – the Peasants Revolt (1381) parallels are real. And Paul Greengrass doing the Bourne shaky-cam Middle Ages aesthetic is a proposition.
There are some goodies, the peasants destroying records/archives and thus wiping the debt, in essence one of the a priori Space Monkey aims of Fight Club (1999). The frantic scene of the communication methodology of the time was expert, and I’ve never seen a film highlight the operational importance of this.
So much promise, then, but it gets really, really rubbish, and it’s a shame. The centrepiece sequence of the storming of London by the cider-infused (one presumes, as they all appear off their tits) riff-raff has the director attempt to inject a bit of epic scale into it so he reverts to that bird’s eye elevated shot of ‘the battle’ like Oliver Stone did in his train wreck Alexander (2004).
Incongruous digital buildings with digital ‘people’. I was semi-fuming. It’s a ruinous vice and so stylistically apostate to the intention of the film, I almost punched the laptop. But I didn’t, because I’m poor, much like these peasants.
My brethren here aren’t portrayed in a flattering light but are sketchily painted as highly amenable, sanguinary human wigwams licking the Kool-Aid in the deepest depths of Pre-Renaissance Hell. I suppose this film does make a point.
Trigger warning: there are some ugly-looking fuckers in this yarn, flea-ridden serfs who all sound like Gareth Keenan from The Office. It’s a nice feature of a letdown film. And Stannis Baratheon also cameos as a grovelling bishop or something. As pathetic as he is, it shows the range of the brilliant Stephen Dillane.
I hated this film because it could have been a contender. Brace yourselves for this maddening mishap.
This movie is fucking horrible, but in a good way.
Our lad Bex, spiralling deeper into what they – you know, the broadsheet columnists cocooned in their ivory towers, sucking on lattes and all that – deem ‘toxic masculinity’, clearly has issues. As do all his chums.
How the sport of football somehow inadvertently bred mass hordes of cretinous thugs is a sociological question beyond the scope of the movie, but the broader context is at least established amidst the lurid bar brawls and messy Stanley knife shenanigans.
It’s grim viewing, but like American History X (1998) or Bad Lieutenant (1992), it’s rather mesmerising in its gritty, guerrilla style
A soap-colliding curiosity as we also have both Corrie Street’s Jim McDonald and EastEnders’ Phil Mitchell share the same frame. Two hooligans for the price of one.
What a fabulous motion picture in every respect, top-tier cinema from an age we can hold in reverence as the most fearless period of creative endeavour. A flawless movie that is still timely.
I hated this movie not for its message but because of how stupid and ineptly shit it was. The cinematographer appears to think that a telephoto shot of a person, without any relationship to his environment, is somehow visually arresting. You don’t have any sense of geography within the scene. What else?
The worst piece of writing has two lads playing basketball telling the audience that Mad Mel is a war college graduate and academic baller. Because he has to be infallible.
And then the truly non-talented, un-talented Sam Elliot arrives with his usual grouchy schtick. The bloke is an utter pain to movies, and there is no point to him.
A blow-by-blow history lesson overstuffed with unnecessary voice-over, but it’s almost worth watching just to witness Lane Smith as Tricky Dick.
I perceived myself to be in a precarious position, uncomfortably viewing the editor from Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-1997) fiddle, half-pished, with a 1970s tape device (whatever they were), but it was a privileged prism through which to appreciate the final days of Richard Milhous Nixon.
Waste of time. But I’ve seen worse movies. There’s always a more rotten film.
Try getting this slice of ’90s nostalgia out of your head:
This movie got so uncomfortable, for the sixth viewing, that yes, it was a wee bit of a struggle – was celebrity worship like this before the internets? – to not turn it off, Scorsese pushing the awkwardness to the max.
De Niro’s strange concoction that is Rupert Pupkin keeps turning up, the proverbial gatecrasher, won’t take no for an answer and as confident as can be, wholly without any insight into his own insanity. He’s Travis Bickle but less visually threatening. But just as mental.
Celebrity is the answer to this lad’s problems in the most static, non-expressionist masterpiece Scorsese made. The visual discipline even works in its favour in how it defines the insufferable presence of this Pupkin creation.
For a movie exclaiming to be all about the gargantuan power of the mind and the grand role of shadows as a visual metaphor (about … something), it displays scant interest in either.
I don’t know what this is meant to be. I don’t think anyone in it knew, either.
But it’s certainly pish.
Alec Baldwin, somehow the least annoying Baldwin of four vexing Baldwins, did have most of the attributes you’d apply to leading man goodies – aside from likeability. He even peacocks his Austin Powers/Ryan Giggs chest hair/love rug here with no irony attempted. B for Baldwin effort.
But he’s still delusional in his attempts at the hero role because he’s rubbish at it.
Some actors are better when they’re that frazzled weirdo in a supporting role.
This was free so I watched it. And I had nothing else to do.
This frankly bizarre (that it exists), slim excuse of a movie is from the Mad Mel era when he was mad but not as mad as he blossomed into when his directorial efforts, all brutal belters bordering on the sublime, began to unleash his inner … madness.
What do women want? Not a lot according to this motion picture. In fact, all of their thoughts appear to revolve around men, and especially Mad Mel for he’s so damn sexy, isn’t he?
About 34 minutes into this, I felt kind of embarrassed and ashamed. But I watched it all because I have no life.
