MBV 3D = MDP*

Contains spoilers for My Bloody Valentine

There are a lot of great and interesting movies doing the rounds at the moment: Revolutionary Road, The Wrestler, The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, Frost/Nixon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Bride Wars (just kidding).

With all these in mind, for some reason I ended up going to see My Bloody Valentine (in 3D no less – not that you’d know it. Most 2D films offer more 3D thrills than My Bloody Valentine).

As is usual with films like this, it’s not really worth launching upon a lengthy critique of its narrative. My Bloody Valentine (MBV) is essentially a B-movie – I certainly didn’t hand over my hard-earned cash and expect something penned by David Hare or Simon Beaufoy. However, what I did expect was a load of schlocky, campy, nonsensical fun. And for a moment, MBV threatened to deliver...

There’s one sequence in the movie that is almost worth the price of admission itself: without going into mind-numbing detail, it involves a motel-managing dwarf, a butt naked Betsy Rue, a nasty trucker and a pickaxe in the head. The rest of the movie doesn’t even come close to what the critic Anthony Scott of the New York Times describes as the ‘zesty crudity’ of the B-movie:

...the cheesy, campy, guilty pleasures that used to bubble up with some regularity out of the B-picture ooze of cut-rate genre entertainment... now dominate the A-list, commanding the largest budgets and the most attention from the market-research and quality-control departments of the companies that manufacture them... For the most part, the schlock of the past has evolved into star-driven, heavily publicized, expensive mediocrities...

Even when filmmakers take on the subject of the B-movie, the results can be patchy: look at Death Proof, possibly the most crashingly dull B-movie ever made (the traditional B-movie certainly never contained acres of boringly pointless dialogue). Planet Terror is much more like it – supremely daft, the film even dispenses with core parts of its narrative by pretending that whole reels of the film have gone missing, which means it can jump straight into the action without titting about with hectares of talky exposition (something that Death Proof is stacked to the back teeth with).

When a B-movie is done well – Frank Darabont’s The Mist, for example, or even Kubrick’s The Shining – it can even transcend the usual A-list dramatic fare (Revolutionary Road anyone? The Reader?). I love a good B-movie – the problem with MBV was that it was only half a good B-movie – when the only thing that’s keeping you awake is the sight of Tom Atkins’s jaw flying past your shoulder, you know you’re in trouble.
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* MDP = Mostly Dog Poo.

BBC Mess with Space/Time Continuum

Strictly Come Dancing is doing my head in, but probably not in a way you’d expect...

All filming is obviously done during the course of a single day, but in order to squeeze as much air time out of it as possible, the BBC spread the results of the filming across two evenings (the main ham twirling is done on a Saturday, then there’s the painfully prolonged results show on the Sunday). The only problem is that during Sunday's show, everyone pretends that they've re-convened and that it’s being filmed live (the only non-cunning difference between the Saturday and Sunday shows is that Tess Daly is wearing a different frock).

Now this is hardly a scandal along the lines of last year’s Blue Peter pussy outrage, but it has a peculiar effect inasmuch as it starts to make me doubt my own sanity. That, and the effect it must be having on the space/time continuum. I mean, there are people out there filming a show who are pretending that they’re doing it twenty four hours later than they really are (or maybe they aren’t, in which case I must be mental). Over on ITV, The X-Factor wraps everything up in a single evening, with the results show following hard on the heels on the live show (perhaps the BBC figured that their target audience would all be safely tucked up in bed with their cocoa by 10.35pm, and therefore too knackered to hang about to find out that Gary Rhodes is a borderline psychopath).

The upshot of this is that if the very fabric of the universe is ripped apart in the next couple of weeks, I’m going to blame Strictly Come Dancing (oh, and whilst we’re about it, I’ll blame The X-Factor as well – it gets blamed for everything else, so no-one will notice if we tack the end of the world onto the list as well ;-)).

Sounds Like A Rude Word But Isn't.

There are some things in life that I’m destined just not to get: for example, anything written by Stephen Poliakoff, or any script that is unlucky enough to find itself in the hands of Michael Winterbottom. Whether I’m simply demented, stupid or slightly retarded, I have another item to add to the list – the films of Pedro Almodóvar (well, Volver at least).

Maybe my not liking Volver exhibits my own prejudices and subjective dislikes much the same as anyone else, but when Mark Kermode describes it as a gorgeously melancholic melodrama-cum-ghost-story, I have to wonder whether he saw the same film as I did. Yeah, OK, so there’s nothing drastically wrong with it – it’s just the critical avalanche of hyperbole that is heaped upon this film just seems to be a little misplaced to me.

Talking of hyperbole, here’s Paul Howlett:

Almodóvar manages to make a ludicrous farce about a mother and daughter who kill the abusive man of the house and set about covering their tracks, hindered by a back-from-the-dead grandmother, into a work of emotionally astute, heartaching drama. It's pure magic...

Except, it isn’t – not really. I think the best way to describe it is three parts melodrama, two parts soap opera and one part camp (or five parts camp if you consider that melodrama and soap opera fall under this heading as well). Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely nothing against soap opera/continuing drama, or anything that is even remotely camp for that matter – it’s just that in Volver, soap opera is equated with ‘trash TV’, where in fact the film doesn’t really do anything to transcend the genre it’s supposed to be an ironic homage to. Think of it as a feature length episode of Emmerdale with the camp quotient turned up to eleven. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not my cup of tea – like I said before, the fact that I didn’t like Volver harshly exposes my likes and dislikes, and there’s nothing I can really do about that. However, if an ‘emotionally astute’ drama is Almodóvar’s aim, then to my mind why can’t the story be told without it being fed through the prism of camp, ironic or not?

Down at the level of screenwriting mechanics, something seems to be amiss as well: although the central planks of the narrative are all sound, characters spend an absolute age saying hello and goodbye to each other, before walking across the street to do the same in someone else’s house. Characters get out of cars, walk down streets, then walk back up them. Cut these travelling to-and-fro moments out of the film, and you’d probably lose about fifteen minutes (which would be a good thing, as I almost nodded off at the 110 minute mark). A good deal of exposition is delivered during these moments in such a way as to make it obvious that these little nuggets of information are going to be vitally important later on – and there’s the problem: it’s obvious that they’re going to be important. Apart from one clunkingly enormous revelation at the film’s conclusion (which is both startling yet somehow banal), everything just seems eminently predictable.

Ah well – I’m off to see Iron Man at the weekend – something tells me that the camp quotient there is going to be dangerously low.