why are 'british' films shit?

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

UK needs to start making good music again first, then we can talk about film.

he even undermines his own argument there a bit -- ira atrocities were pretty thin on the ground in '71, and nothing was happening on the mainland then.

it's possible for a musician to make a living by selling in the UK market with minimal penetration elsewhere. this is basically impossible with film, and the idea of strictly "british films" has been pretty iffy since, oh, the first world war.

"death at a funeral" is being billed as a british film, i notice, despite being clearly directed by an american (frank oz)

aren't simon pegg / nick frost films and guy ritchie gangster romps, regardless of merit a rebuttal to that nrq?

don't think so. 'hot fuzz' was financed by universal (or whoever working title is a subcontractor for). 'lock, stock' *possibly* was done outside of the system, but 'snatch' would have had been done with the US market in mind.

I didn't know that you read The Guardian.

Also, this thread makes me wonder what happened to Peter Mullan? As a director, I mean.

Wot no love for Thunderpants?

(Srsly - it's really good! And Rupert Grint can act his little socks off - far more than the other guy in that slightly more famous series of films he's been in lately).

Maybe this is why?

Too impatient to train as an actor, and having briefly tried the traditional route of castings and pumping connections, Fucilla decided to buy his way in.

Soon Phil Davis, Paul Kaye and MC Harvey of So Solid Crew were on board, too...

Phil Davis' optimism is a joy.

"Sometimes a film looks fantastic. Everyone's excited and talking about the genius of this and that, how it's going to be a masterpiece, and it turns out to be poop. And sometimes the opposite is true. It seems to be a complete nightmare, but then it all comes together. And no one would be more pleased than me if that happened to The Big I Am."

what underpinned Fucilla's ambition, friends and workmates agree, what made him stand out from every other fantasist and wannabe, was self-belief and a monumental ego

errr

Phil Davis, Paul Kaye and Steven Berkoff

Enjoy the work of these 3 dudes

a young thug's brutal coming of age

oh fuck off

The opening sentence alone!

Brixton-born City trader Robert Fucilla had succeeded in everything he had put his hand to, from selling oil to backing British hip-hop acts, and believed his Italian ancestry gave him a shot at being a British Al Pacino.

It's like the only logical response is "Wow, I hate you."

Also:

"Madsen was to wear silver shoes, Berkoff an aqua blue latex suit. All the stylistic things were coming off."

I'm reading this and all "Wait...it's a superhero movie now?"

And a literal LOL here:

Shooting was just days off when Gregory, the would-be joyrider, confessed that he could not drive.

:-D

I'm gonna let this one slide cos I'm a lazy man but srsly guys the next Brit Gangster flick that comes out I'ma beat the director to death okay guyz?

Vinne Jones stars as Noodle, an internet hardman with a brutal grudge against shit british gansgter film directors. Directed by Guy Ritchie.

When I was in a band some dude in the local paper said I looked like Gazza so rong leading man rilly

what are the funniest british movies ever made? it's occurred to me that 'in the loop' might genuinely be the funniest.

blah life of brian blah withnail and i blah ealing blah blah blah.

No way am I pushing a dinghy out into the tsunami-laden waters of ILXors sensayuma. Brian and Grail are v. funny tho. Nuts in May too, tho not properly a movie I suppose.

I have this fundamentalist notion that funny ought to mean "makes you properly laugh til you hurt", tho, so on that level I don't think most funny films are funny.

I agree. Shaun of the Dead is a modern classic, but that's beyond just the laffs.

Maybe not an obvious choice, but there are many moments of sublime comedy in A Room For Romeo Brass. And it's a brilliant film as well.

x-post - damn straight NV, Nuts In May is hilarious.

Well, my favourite movies (the two late Bunuels with long titles) are only occasionally thigh-slapping laugh-till-cry funny, but have a fundamental, all-knowing humour to them, which makes them profoundly funny IMO (the wit of a man who has lived on a mountain for 80 years), but yeah I'm kinda going more for the outright lols here.

In The Loop made me laugh harder than any other British movie ever. And was the most I've laughed in a cinema.

Ooh, would like to see Romeo Brass and Nuts In May now!

Shaun Of The Dead is very good for almost an hour, very lame for 40 minutes imo.

Paddy Considine's debut in ARFRB is completely beyond my pitiful powers of description - if you've not seen it then the dvd is four quid on Amazon at the moment, for the price of a pint it's an absolute steal.

I'm deeply agnostic on SotD precisely cos I think it's free of belly-lols. But I like lots of comedies that don't make me lol, especially old comedies that tend to be excused by the shifting fashions of what's funny.

Simon del Desierto has got Bunuel's best proper lolz I think.

Gregory's Girl still has its moments. I think Britannia Hospital had some rich, bleak lulz but it's been a long time. The Likely Lads is probably the best sitcom to movie conversion but rollicking laughs is never really that show's point.

I've just gone thru a list trying to remember anything else but jaysus there's been a lot of slightly warm feeling minor smirk shite made in this country.

Gregory's Girl still has its moments.

oh fuck I forgot Local Hero!!!!!

altho Local Hero is one of those not-laughing-a-lot-but-very-good comedy movies to which you allude

I like to think of "Comedy" in a broader Shakespearean sense and "funny" in a "I am actually laughing" sense.

yeah, that works. also means that those bunuel movies are comedies. awesome.

(obscure object might well be a tragedy, come to think of it...gah, definitions)

LJ if you get a chance to see Nuts in May you shd also try and find Jack Rosenthal's 70s classic Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. which features the internal monologue of a severely depressed Sunday league referee iirc.

:D :D :D awesome

A lot of Britain's best 60s/70s/early 80s movies were shot as Play for Today made for TV dealies basically.

wait isn't ARFRB about a psycho dude? considine wasn't funny in that, he was terrifying! iirc.