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Reviews
The Queen (2006)
Everybody's a Queen Nowadays
If this is an accurate representation of how the Royal Family behaved and what it said during that fateful week, then hats off to them. This is the modern world, you know, where one can send a text message to ease one's conscience over 300,000 dead after a tsunami, invade a country in which half the population are teenagers, and, just as they do in a country like Iran, tear one's hair out in the street over the death of someone one never even met. Bovarism, after Madame Bovary, was one of Aldous Huxley's favourite adjectives, and it means pretending to have feelings which one doesn't really have. The results, as he so scathingly portrayed, can only be disastrous. But the Great Blubbering British Public, pawn of the media, bald and obese and with leisure time on its hands, its stiff upper lip quivering like crazy and righteous indignation on its side, wanted to have a Great British Cry and a Big British Sulk over their Favourite Royal Personage, a public figure who came out with some of the silliest and creepiest comments ever heard, and turn what should have been a private affair into a cabaret spectacle. Blood on their hands what absolute twaddle! Then go off and give the likes of Elton John a popularity boost while you're still sobbing your socks off. Makes you proud to be British, doesn't it? If nothing else, this film does demonstrate how easily means of communication manipulate public opinion, and that's always just a step away from some fanatic coming into power. With superb editing, production design, sterling impressions all round (James Cromwell!) and a poignant prediction from the Queen on the fate of Tony Blair at the end of the movie, it's a shame it won only one Oscar.
The Song Remains the Same (1976)
An Unreseved Apology for Spreading Contagion in the U.S.A.
Without meaning to offend the more sensible amongst you, what is it about the American psyche which makes shrines out of this rubbish? It's impossible to get nostalgic about this just because it happened a long time ago: hype will always be hype.
The town goes wild as the bloated ego of the dirigible floats into town. As the group goes through the predictable motions yet again, we're treated to another robotic roller coaster ride to the tune of "look how well we can play our instruments"; yes, it's virtuoso time once more, like a tale told by an idiot, a screeching, cacophonous din full of sound and fury, going nowhere and signifying nothing except any old mystical interpretation you choose to slap on it, of course. This is overlong, fortified, dreary muck forked out of the old Yardbirds' stable, accompanied by the same old borrowed mindset reflected in feeble, misogynist lyrics about women being unobtainable goddesses or vassals of Satan, low harlots to be bedded before they abandon their lover to turn the next trick. Led Zeppelin: the sniggering rugby club of narcissistic cock rock.
Meanwhile, backstage, charmless manager-bully Peter Grant fuels the stupid mythology and rehearses his fatal heart attack by huffing and puffing himself up, roundly abusing the polite local staff and nearly bursting into tears at discovering a black guy selling old photos of the band for a few bob at an unlicensed stall. "Nobody makes a crooked buck from my boys, etc, etc." Poor quiet John Paul Jones! No wonder he occasionally got sick to death of it all! Such a waste of an excellent musician, too.
Perhaps my introductory question can be partly answered by the extraordinary visual appeal Zeppelin holds for the Big Hero Worshipper, the spoilt suburban brat and the clueless Walter Mitty who tenses his pectorals in the bathroom mirror and wishes his groin were girded by a gaggle of gorgeous, grovelling groupies, all of them gagging for it! Yeah, yeah, baby, push, push. So, while the weighty wish-fulfilment of the fantasy sequences is laughably childish, it's no surprise that Robert Plant's preening posturing hits the embarrassment jackpot, together with his sing-talking in the middle of "Whole Lotta Love", in which he ingratiates himself with the audience by adopting the famous false American accent, much derided, and deservedly so, by the British punk rockers of the day.
But there is a moral, or at least a message to the film; it is an unpalatable foretaste of the message sent by the even more monstrous example of Michael Jackson in the following decade: even if you're pushing thirty, provided that you have a seemingly inexhaustible income and you are mollycoddled and protected by ruthless muscle, you can spend time in a plastic bubble fantasy world of undiluted puerility, whilst penning the next constipated opus which you bequeath fit for an awestruck and ever-grateful public.
Wrong Turn (2003)
A Fantastic Movie - I Loved It!!!
We realize we've come a long way when we laugh at the comments of the uptight, middle-class Mrs. Grundys who denounced 'The Curse of Frankenstein' (1956) when Peter Cushing purchases a pair of eyeballs at the local charnel house (you can hardly see 'em they look like golf balls). The creepily funny 'monster trashes teenager' drive-in movies were old hat by the end of that decade, but when we start praising garbage like 'Wrong Turn', we're in serious trouble and that's exactly the kind of comment filmmakers like this want, because they perceive it as a kind of taboo which will stimulate business even more; for a large section of society, there is no such thing as stooping too low to make money. 'Plot': a group of young people get trashed in needlessly grisly ways by a bunch of deformed, grunting hillbillies original, eh? Fortunately, the cast are all somewhat over the age of consent, because, if child murder were the order of the day, then it's no mental quantum leap to surmise that these filmmakers would be at the forefront of it. Equating physical deformity with mental retardation and evil should no doubt please a lot of people, too. There's no psychological terror here, indeed no terror at all, just a wallowing in gore to elicit disgust, so full marks there. There's no taboo message, either - go on, line their pockets with you hard-earned cash, buy the special redux collector's pack (if it exists), and watch it over and over again until you're sickened by it or with yourself for wanting to see it even once, then give anyone else who likes it a very wide berth indeed. For those of you who still like it, check in for a lifelong holiday at the nearest sanatorium for the criminally insane.
The Messengers (2007)
The Messageless Messengers
Here we go - again! Ever since the first ghost was supposed to have been seen, you can bet your bottom dollar that the supernatural revenge motive (or motif) was linked to it soon after. So this tired old bogey is dusted down, given a computer-generated makeover and slopped up to an unimaginative public with nothing better to do on a Saturday night. In the last few years this motif has materialised in 'Stir of Echoes', 'What Lies Beneath' and 'The Gift', to name but very few. Then there are the speeded up spasms of these apparitions, first seen in 'Jacob's Ladder' and done to death ever since. Can you guess which part of Ye Olde Dark House is spook central? Why, 'tis the cellar (just for a change). Just when we think she's safe, out of the mud springs a hand to drag her down just like in 'Carrie'. Will the public never tire of this drivel? You may get a start or two, but it's nothing you can't do by playing hide-and-seek at home. So, all you talking heads in the extras section on the DVD, never stop telling me how original this is (it isn't) and how absolutely terrified I should be because I'm not.
David Bowie: Glass Spider (1988)
The Pointing Finger at the Glass Spider Affair
Now that it's out on DVD, this irredeemably embarrassing and excruciatingly funny spectacle is graven for posterity! In search of a persona and fighting to stay inside rock's credibility jungle, the Great Man cowls behind a self-aggrandizing third-rate variety extravaganza, 80's style, by descending from a giant glass spider, instantly reminiscent of the tacky flying saucer from which the Electric Light Orchestra used to emerge. The embarrassment level of the on-stage antics seriously rivals that of Kiss, Genesis, Queen, Blue Öyster Cult or Led Zeppelin at their pantomimic worst. He continually tries to ingratiate himself with the crowd by putting on a nauseating Phil Collins-style false bonhomie, with a barrage of smiling, winking, grimacing and looks of false surprise as the stage troupe drags him back from the edge of the stage when he tries to touch hands with the audience. And gee whiz! A girl in the crowd gets up on stage and turns out to be one of the troupe! High comedy points include the tatty, pretentious introduction to 'Time' and Bowie performing levitation on a girl as a resurrected Peter Frampton wails out an off-key rendition of 'Sons of the Silent Age', but what really rolled me out of bed in stitches was the look on Bowie's face during the hysterical 'sitting-on-the-toilet' dance in the middle of 'Fame' a real belter. If you see a copy, snap it up without a second thought: will correct all manic depressives, potential suicides and those with delusions of grandeur! Hellzapoppin'!
Carry on Behind (1975)
The Sad Decline of Great British Innuendo
I've ticked the spoiler box just in case, but anyone familiar with the 'Carry On' series knows there's never any plot to spoil. If a geriatric Sid James going on a camping holiday to try to 'get off' with his 33-year-old girlfriend in 'Carry On Camping' seemed out of date for 1969, then watch this desperate rehash with your thumb poised above the fast forward button: Swedish stunner Elke Sommer sets off with fellow archaeologist Kenneth Williams (passable, but the same) on a hunt for missing pieces to a naughty Roman mosaic buried underneath a caravan site in the summer season. Flaccid 'jokes', laboured slapstick and bad editing abound with a foul-mouthed flyaway mynah bird, a runaway Irish wolfhound, midnight pratfalls in nightdresses and pyjamas, and the inevitable shower stall scenes.
As with Hammer's formula-into-film, how could any of them, scriptwriter, crew, players or audience, not have realized that it was all old hat, so very, very flogged to death and utterly and irrevocably over? Offensive not just to all women everywhere, but to every sentient creature in the universe, this arrant nonsense will serve its best ever purpose by keeping a date with the recycling bin.
Pink Floyd: Delicate Sound of Thunder (1989)
Another Buck in the Billfold
Oh, dear! Roger Waters was mistaken if he thought Pink Floyd would dwindle and die without him, but this album represents all that was wrong with the post-Waters Floyd. First there's 'Shine On, You Crazy Diamond', one of the more amiable soporific Floyd opuses, but their inability to hit the right pacing means it's hiccupping all over the shop here. The numbers from 'A Momentary Lapse Of Reason' are leaden and laden with morose sentimentality, and Floyd's heightened obsession with making the maximum possible impact meant the loss of subtlety and surprise (a bugbear of symphonic rock at the best of times): the songs, like the ecstatic crowd, just thunder on indelicately somewhere in the background. The mechanical 'Learning To Fly' is a clumsily overproduced tune trying to sound spacey. And what is the point of a song like 'The Dogs Of War'? The musically superior 'Us and Them', also featured here, had already made the same point some fifteen years earlier in a much more poetically succinct manner. Even the excellent 'One Of These Days' is messed up; it certainly packs a punch, but there's a dreadfully peppy, stylised 80's sound to it, and that's the problem with the whole album. Rock groups, ever fearful of being labelled as passé, sometimes do the silliest things when pandering to the fickle tastes of the zeitgeist. By that time, Prozac Floyd had descended to the visual dork level of a Howard Jones, with the session men sporting ridiculous mullets and straining out jazzed up sax and guitar versions of the tunes which made Floyd great, accompanied by David Gilmour's silly and irksome growling. The point of this album? Another buck in the billfold.