why are 'british' films shit?

'Honest' was great, though!

Pete makes the case I meant to make in a far more reasonable and well-informed way.

_________________

'in your dreams'

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134741/

a bbc tv movie. i remember it vividly.

as for brit flicks, this comes from an old, angry version of me. ive calmed down now. i wonder what i would have thought of love actually back then.

but i am confused as why current output is so gangster-orientated. i am monumentally bored with this topic, which is why i have never seen godfather, goodfellas etc. i might see kidulthood i suppose, but thats about it.

theres loads of good british films obviously. i think that we are not very prolific in putting out good ones, there tends to be maybe 1 or 2 a year, as opposed to other countries which have a higher scoring rate i think.

Only Clive James (and he's Australian).

the bbc2 thing which aired last night on british thrillers was without doubt the worst programme of all time.

i figured it would be bad so i, get this, didn't watch it.

i did watch Daredevil tho...

Didn't see it, but was Helen "I'm a right cockney gangster" Mirren as ludicrous as she sounded on the advert for it?

i'm supposed to watch this sort of thing, for college, like.

helen mirren was one of the less annoying interviewees. the revelation that her grandparents ran tings in the london gangland of the 1940s was interesting.

generally, though, i could do without richard bacon's views on 'the long good friday'.

the problem was it felt pressure to be celebratory. why not just admit that british cinema has been mostly a load of rubbish. 'the third man' isn't really british.

What I miss most are the really visionary british films - the kind made by the likes of Powell & Pressburger, Nick Roeg, Peter Greenaway, even Ken Russell.

What's worse than Hugh Grant is the ghastly influence of Ken Loach - all that fucking worthy, downbeat, dour, social realism.

You can't get a film funded in the UK now if it doesn't feature an asylum seeker being preyed on by paedophiles via grainy CCTV. What's worse is you always doubt the sincerity of the intentions behind these films as you know that they're conceived to ensure all the correct boxes are ticked on the Lottery Fund application forms.

"Issues" films. Bleh.

that's why you find a private investor

Or not, as appears to be the case.

not sure if the lottery fund even exists. but it tended to fund brit gangster films and shitty romcoms, not loach material.

loach et al often get money from abroad. i'm not mad keen on him but there's nothing wrong with films about asylum-seeking paedos or whatever.

roeg is okay, but fuck greenaway and russell. p&P are from a very different era.

> the bbc2 thing which aired last night on british thrillers was without doubt the worst programme of all time.

was ok up until Mona Lisa. plus they gave away the end of shallow grave which i have had on video (ie vhs) for about 10 years and still haven't watched.

all the pre-60s stuff was rubbish. all they had to say about hitchcock was 'some themes familiar from his more famous american films were present in his british films.' everything else was overfamiliar.

best spoiler complaint ever (xp)

"but fuck greenaway and russell."

the devils is a great film.

he did some interesting things (as did greenaway) but so has loach; and as a whole i'd go with loach's body of work over russell's.

http://the88s.blogsome.com/images/if.jpg

british, 'british' and not shit = out on DVD this week.

hurrah!

Peter Greenaway is great

i'm an american and i have to say, I love all your movies about coal miners going up against margaret thatchers.

Strike?

I was just kidding - the "coal miners during Thatcher years" British indie film is kinda cliche here

Frogman OTM, The Devils made me weep. Russell can fuck around inconsequentially as long as he likes, he gets a pass for that one film.

Also, there was once a time in my life when Greenaway was a household god. I'll still go to the wall for Drowning By Numbers, The Cook..., and especially The Falls. Never did get to see that Tulse Luper feature he made a couple years back.

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2149012,00.html

aight, you know what, fuck it, alex cox otm. it has been a travesty, this "summer of british films".

Get Carter was made in 1971. I was a teenager then, and can assure the promoters of this depressing vision that, despite strikes and IRA atrocities, Albion was a long way from skid row. When I went to college, the government paid for it. I incurred no debt. The state owned the water pipes, the reservoirs, the airline, the lecky, the telephone system and the railways, which ran on time and were reasonably cheap. We weren't engaged in two wars of colonial aggression. Muslims weren't our enemies. And the weather was great!

SAM TYLER WAS RIGHT

The, relative, strength of British TV, historically anyway, is definitely a factor. Maybe the theatre too, it's generally shit but it has had exaggerated respect in the UK imo.

Thanks to someone's recommendation of the BFI Flipside documentary, I ended up buying one of the films profiled: Privilege by Peter Watkins.
It's about the british government using a pop star to seduce his fans into religious nationalism. I thought it was slightly too long and occasionally too on the nose but the portrayal of the pop star's anxiety, frustration and the way he has been infantilized was quite powerful. The advert for apples and the anarchist character were quite fun too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_dZEky0KAw

I've had that on my wish list forever, seems quite unWatkinslike in some ways. There's a fair bit of on the noseness in most of his films but he's so good at moving his camera and creating an authentic sense of documentary that it never bothers me

It's about the british government using a pop star to seduce his fans into religious nationalism.

Gotta say this doesn't appeal to me. But he is one of the greats and he made an appearance to introduce a screening of La Commune, which was a great way to go. Edward Munch is also fantastic!

I was not at that screening, sadly.

I didn't know there was a Flipside documentary - only know it as a BFI sub-label for brit grindhouse stuff. I own two releases: The Pleasure Girls (really good, surprisingly feminist movie about a flatshare of young women in 60's London - also has Klaus Kinski as a love interest, if you can believe that) and The Party's Over (about the dangers of bohemian nihilism - preachy, whiny moral majority bollocks. Good Oliver Reed perf tho!). I also saw Man Of Violence, which is in that collection too, on the telly once - terrible movie, but kind of fascinating in its total incompetence, and fwiw it does feature a male protagonist who has sex with a dude, which is pretty progressive for 1970's British genre cinema.

Other Flipside discs I would recommend:

Herostratus, Duffer/The Moon Over The Valley, Deep End, The Black Panther, the BS Johnson anthology You're Human Like the Rest of Them, Symptoms and Psychomania.

Privilege is Watkins' most conventional film, and yes, suffers a bit from didactic obviousness, but it's interesting too to see a 60s 'youth' film express disillusionment with the notion of popular music as a form of subversion.

I really enjoyed Black Panther, Donald Sumpter is tremendous in it.

He is. And yes, I loved the grimy banality of the 70s settings - brought to mind other, similar shabby British serial killer texts like the film of 10 Rillington Place, or Gordon Burns' Happy Like Murderers.

I have a lot of the Flipside films on DVD/BD; one of the few rewarding parts of my job around 2008-11 was getting these as freebies for working on the subtitling (yearned after all the COI / Free Cinema / Humphrey Jennings compilations too, but didn't have enough input on those to blag anything). Deep End might be the best.

I'll also rep for Queen Of Spades, KJB. May be Anton Walbrook's best performance.

― the clones of tldr funkenstein (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, February 2, 2010

This is newly released on disc by Kino Lorber in the US, and I recommend; superbly crafted, a Scorsese favorite.

Walbrook's antihero hisses with such reptilian duplicity that I couldn't help but see Peter Lorre in the role, and sure enough, he played it in a radio adaptation of the Pushkin story.

The Railway Children Return, fuck this let's take off and nuke the British film industry from orbit

Wonder if I need BFI Player to watch Queen of Spades again.

hey look it's the guy who has bad, wrong, smug opinions on TV for money

Like all 1970s British movies, great cast shit film.

— David Quantick (@quantick) July 17, 2022

i just watched dirty pretty things with my kids and 3/4 of the way through they asked why it was so boring and i wanted to throw them both through the window

IT’S FUCKING ART YOU CRETINS

DPT is grebt but it's also a very "keep these spaces liminal!" film

now that i’ve settled down i have had to admit it is not really a movie for kids

but yes it is full of liminality isn’t it - a minicab backroom, a hotel kitchen, an airport, an shared apartment with only one key, a mortuary… the river styx is even invoked at one point

the way the gang joined up at the end to pull off a plan made me think of kaurismaki