I was watching Nicholas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising film on my laptop the other day, and the instant the film ended, something catastrophic happened to the computer. Turned out to be an irreparable failure of the hard drive, so I can only assume the thing was killed by the sheer awesomeness of Mads Mikkelsen's sneer.
The reviews for the most recent version of The Great Gatsby
were painfully predictable, pointing out that a Baz Luhrmann film was all style
over substance, with the film overwhelmed with glitz and swooshing cameras and
an oppressive soundtrack, like that's some kind of new observation, rather than
anything people were saying 20 years ago.
Those reviews may have a point, but I have the opposite
problem, and wanted it to be even crazier. I'm always down for some glitz and
outrageous glamour, and if you're going to go down that road, you might as well
go all the damn way. Showing any type of restraint in when you’re shooting for
this level of decadence is a sin.
So The Great Gatsby turned out to be a bit of a PG-13
horror film, without the gust to go fully crazy. It’s beautifully absurd up to
a specific point – and that point is reached and transcended during the
brilliant moment when Gatsby reveals himself, with literal fireworks in the
background - but then it all shifts down a gear, and ultimately loses its bid
for gaudy greatness.
I’m still glad I went, because it's still bloody Gatsby,
and it's certainly better than the hazy seventies effort, and all the women I
know thought it was fabulous, and all the guys I talked to about the film
appeared to be actively repulsed by the idea of going to see it, so it must
have been doing something right.
It might just be because I've been listening to ...Like
Clockwork a whole lot lately (it's the first proper album I've bought in
months), but I really wish somebody would use Queens Of The Stone Age for a
whole soundtrack.
I love it when a rock and pop band comes in and does the
soundtrack for a whole film, giving it a level of style that a playlist of
various tunes can rarely achieve. I loved it when they used Queen for the Flash
Gordon soundtrack (an album that has held up surprisingly well, and possibly
better than the movie itself). I loved it when Air did all the music for the
Virgin Suicides, giving Sofia Coppola's first – and best – film its exquisitely
dreary and menacingly plodding sound. And I loved it when Pink Floyd fucked
around out on the edge of Zabriskie Point.
And I would love it if Josh Homme and his Queens Of The Stone
Age chums would do something for a movie that could make great use of their
menacing growl, slow dirges, sudden bursts of frenetic musical violence and
long, protracted periods of guitar wankery. That could be something groovy.
Most times, I like the trailers to Martin Scorsese films
more than I like the actual film, (and I often end up liking the film a lot
too). The Wolf of Wall Street looks no different, and it’s a typical bloody
Scorsese trailer too, cut to that same fast and popping beats that all of his films
get previewed with. Although it does looks like the film is worth seeing just
to see some more sleazy Matthew McConaughey, because sleazy McConaughey has
unexpectedly become one of the most entertaining things in modern cinema.
I'm still hopelessly optimistic about the immediate future
of cinema and, as always, I’m hoping for the best. There are a bunch of films
coming out in the coming weeks and months that I’d deeply looking forward to
seeing, like A Field In England and Upstream Color and Kick-Ass 2 and Gravity
and The World’s End and Only God Forgives and Stoker and even the new Superman
film, which hasn't opened here yet.
But the one film I'm looking forward to more than anything
else put together is the new Mad Max film. I know that when a new movie in a
beloved series comes out years after the rest, it’s not a good sign, and few
can match the thrills of the original, even with the same creators on board.
But I adore the Mad Max films with the power of a dirty great V8 because speed
+ crazy fucking stuntmen + Australians = balls-out mentalness, and I was
greatly heartened by a recent article I read that said the only CGI they’re
employing is the wiping of the safety wires. (The use of computer effects for
stuntwork destroys all the value of the crazy bastard who does actually put his
life on the line for our entertainment.)
Also, the new film is partly written by Brendan McCarthy, so
they have me right there.
One of the (many) nice things about having a wife who is
nine years younger than me is that even though she is pretty clued-up, I've
still had a bunch of years to watch a lot more films than her, so there are a
lot of movies that I assume she's seen, because everybody from my generation
was into them, but she has no idea what I’m on about, so we have to sit and
watch them again, and I get to see how a favourite film is seen through a new
pair of eyes.
She has seen a lot of films from the past 20 years, but she
is particularly dark on the seventies, so every now and then I get to whip out
a French Connection or The Exorcist, and see how it stands up, after all these
years. Every now and then she will surprise me by revealing that she’s never
seen something as obvious as the Godfather films, and we’ll have to immediately
check that out. (She usually provides the motivation for us to sit down and
watch one of these films. I don’t force anything on her, even if I’m convinced
she’ll love it.)
That’s what happened this week. We’re going to watch Apocalypse
Now tonight. She says she’s super keen to see it, but I don’t think she really
knows what she is in for.
The horror. The horror.
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