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.

Everyone's A Critic

Lots of interesting stuff around on the net at the moment, not least Danny Stack’s take on professional critics - What are they for? What do they do?

Rightly or wrongly, I tend to rely on opinions when planning my viewing, purely for the reason that there’s nothing more disheartening than sitting through a film like Hannibal Rising and thinking that you could have spent your money more wisely elsewhere. So, on the most basic of levels, it’s pure economics. Seeing as it costs £16 for a couple of cinema tickets, I don’t want to waste my money on twaddle – I’ll wait for it to come out on DVD thanks (in fact, planning a trip to the cinema can be fraught with logistical nightmares as well: my nearest ‘arthouse’ cinema is the Duke Of York’s, which is about a five minute drive from Chipster Towers. Rock on! Problem is it’s in the middle of a densely populated residential area where parking is next to impossible. Even the local Odeon – which is closer – can be a pain to get to bearing in mind the state of Brighton traffic. I could always get the bus of course, but the buses all tend to be piloted by escaped psychopaths who love nothing more than knocking over defenceless pedestrians, so that one’s out.) Besides, I want to be warned in advance about films such as Ocean’s Twelve (smug, diabolical horse poop) so I can give them a wide berth.

Of course, it’s difficult to come across a critic whose taste segues perfectly with your own. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian hated The Prestige – I loved it. On the other hand, he slapped five stars on Kill Bill and described it as a ‘sugar rush’ – in my opinion QT would have benefitted from the services of a decent script editor with a bucket full of red ink. As for The Walker, Paul Schrader’s latest – well, the least said about that the better. Which is why I don’t take the word of the ‘professional’ critic as gospel. I’ll even take advice from the ‘blogosphere’ and elsewhere, which means that trying to figure out which film to see turns into an intuitive pasttime. When Oli slated Death Proof, it merely confirmed everything I’d read about the film, so that one was well and truly out (and jumping off the subject of film for a moment, Jon Peacey has even convinced me of the relative merits of David Bowie’s post-Scary Monsters output – no mean feat).

Even then, on the odd occasion it’s always refreshing to disregard the views of all critics and take a blind leap into the unknown. I saw Blue Velvet when it first came out, and remember walking out of the cinema feeling as if my brain had had a damn good shake – which is one of the reasons I go to the cinema in the first place. How many times can you seriously say that that has happened? And what made the experience all the more satisfying was the fact that I hadn’t read any advance critical notices at all.

Anyway, how can you not laugh when the first line of any film review starts like this:

In enjoyment terms, watching this is like wearing a helmet made of untreated sewage (Peter Bradshaw on Grounded).