You Really Need To See This Film

By Michael Glass

Until recently I’d never seen The Godfather. Shocking, I know, especially for a film student. It wasn’t deliberate, I’d just never got round to it before. There are plenty of big-name films I’ll happily own up to never having watched: Casablanca, The Exorcist, The Seven Samurai, Schindler’s List… and I’m cool with that. But if I tell my friends that I’ve never slipped in the DVD of Apocalypse Now, the response is always, “Oh, man, you really need to see it!”

Why? Why do I need to see it? I might not like it. In all honesty I found The Godfather fairly boring; who’s to say Francis Ford Coppola didn’t drag out Apocalypse Now in the same way? When I’m assured of the film’s greatness, surely all that can do is build it up so much that I can’t help but be disappointed. I’ll always accept that I’m missing out on one of the best examples of cinematic genius, but I’m not going to go out of my way to see it. Not knowing what other people are so excited about really helps you dismiss it; it’s when you know that someone hasn’t seen a film you loved that you want to convince them to watch it.

I borrowed the DVD of Ken Russell’s controversial epic The Devils from my brother at least six months ago – it’s still sitting on my shelf, untouched. He told me I needed to see it, I believed him, and yet, I haven’t felt that need for half a year. I, like all of you, am faced with an impossible challenge today:

There’s simply too much out there. You’ll never be able to observe it all, it’s coming too thick and fast. We need to come to this realisation en masse. The goal is unobtainable – you’ll never become an omniscient consumer, fully saturated with every piece of ‘content’ the world has to offer, floating on an ethereal plane like some Kubrick-esque space-baby of cinematic and televisual knowledge (a simile I present to you having never watched more than half an hour of 2001: A Space Odyssey). Trying to get round to watching everything you’re told you need to simply makes you feel stressed and incomplete, that somehow you lack value as a human being because you missed out on Lost.

So try this in future: if someone tells you that you need to see something, that you’re missing out on one of life’s great experiences, explain patiently to this person that you’re a well-rounded, intelligent individual who possesses the kind of joie de vivre and infectious carefree temperament that only a life without the pressure of endless consumption of content can achieve. Tell them you’ve achieved a form of enlightenment, that you look down at those who have yet to be freed with pity, and that you hope they will be able to join you on your island of serenity. The more that people understand that time catching up on The West Wing would be better spent on personal, creative, fulfilling endeavours, the more the stress of Western civilisation will be lifted. Altogether now - Viva la revolución!

(Oh, by the way, if you haven’t seen Mad Men, you really need to. It’s this great drama about ad men in the 50s, just dynamite, best thing on TV right now, you should catch up with the DVDs…)

Summer Officially A Complete Waste Of Everyone’s Valuable Time

By Michael Glass

Well, Warwick, here we are again, returning for another year of shirking and drinking. I hope your summer’s been more enjoyable than mine.  In the good old days there were usually plenty of exciting things to do during our summer time off, but now almost all of them earns you an ASBO, an STD or some other acronymic malady, so all we have left is the cinema.  And what a poor backup that was.  Normally the experience of moving images with a synchronised soundtrack is enough to make me smile brainlessly for at least an hour – this year I spent most of my time doubled up on the floor in chronic gut pain vomiting from the cascade of gruel being doled out to me on the silver screen.  Though it might also have had something to do with the double-jumbo-toffee-salted-mega-shaking-bubble-afro-3D-hyper popcorn I had.  In any case, here’s a round-up of the films I hope you missed.

Transformers 2

Let’s go right for Goliath.  Where to start?  Learning from the mistakes he made in the first Transformers, Michael Bay ruthlessly scribbles out every page of the screenplay that even hints at plot and dementedly scrawls in crayon the words ‘MORE ROBOT FOR FIGHT MAKE HAPPY MONEY MONEY’.  I’ve seen the shooting script.  Transformers 2 is a primordial soup of a film in which you can’t even hear the dialogue properly because it sounds like everyone’s underwater, and the audience has matchsticks put under its eyelids in case they miss any of the ROBOTS which Michael Bay has fought so hard to retain from the first flick.  When a Yorkshirebot from Englandland showed up and teleported everyone to Egypt, my brain melted and came out of my ears.  Or was that the popcorn.

Funny People

An optimistic title, to be sure.  What a shame the film follows a complete tosser, played by Adam Sandler, who frankly seems to deserve the cancer he gets, before making him all better again and giving him a new chance at life that he does his very best to foul up.  Trying to reunite with his ex-fiancée all he manages to do is damage her family and fail to make nearly enough funny jokes along the way.  The final hour of the film is particularly hard to watch given that a dog ate the plot and Eric Bana delivers an electrifyingly embarrassing performance as Sandler’s makeshift enemy.  After two and a half hours the protagonist learns nothing and the audience leaves feeling depressed.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Or, as every single review has re-christened it (and this one only does so with the cloak of faux-intelligent self-awareness), CGI Joe.  I’ll waste no time here, I didn’t even bother seeing this thanks to the ample warning the trailer gave me.  If you find yourself disappointed or even angry that a reviewer would place a film in this type of list without even watching it, I fully endorse your complaint.

Brüno

How original and fünny it is to take the piss oüt of Americans!  Following the strict mantra of ‘pick the easiest targets and comedy will effortlessly arise’, that achieved such stüpendoüs resülts with Borat, Sacha Baron-Cohen once again visits the ÜSA with a simple character which, while designed to extract the homophobic and stüpid natüre of the clearly-alien American race, does far more to exhibit his own discomfort with and immatüre attitüde towards sex and sexüality.  One can only hope that Sacha Baron-Cohen will grow üp soon.

Public Enemies

Included here because of the level of disappointment it delivered, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies was shot on a mobile phone or something to achieve a realism and rawness that would bring the 1930s vividly to life… but ended up looking utterly unprofessional and plain.  Add two top-class actors, in Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, who give dictionary-definition by-the-numbers performances, and a story that utterly underplays the drama and intrigue surrounding the main character, and the result is a soggy piece of work that makes you yearn for Heat.  And I didn’t even like Heat.

Gamer

This ought to be right up my street, and many of yours.  A futuristic film based on videogames in which players control not a virtual soldier but a real man with a real gun, inside a real battlefield.  Written and directed by the Crank duo, the line of stupid videogame-inflected adrenaline-flicks continues with far less entertaining, and in fact, morally rancid, results.  It’s difficult even to tell what the film thinks of itself – does it consider itself intelligent and thought-provoking or does it simply revel in taking the moral low ground and showering the audience with a frankly epileptic montage of violence and woman-hating lechery?  CrankGamer may prove to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  And why, why, why is Ludacris involved? was on the line between stupidly entertaining and simply atrocious –

Drag Me To Hell

Supposedly a return to form for Evil Dead director Sam Raimi, Drag Me To Hell does force several jumps amongst the audience (largely because of how astonishingly loud the film is), and its ability to create suspense can’t be denied, but it is fundamentally hollow.  The scares are not enjoyable – rather, they occur so often and with so little variation that the cumulative effect is that of a sledgehammer.  There is no pleasure to be derived from the shocks, only a desire for them to end as soon as possible.  This simplistic horror was reportedly meant to be the cinematic equivalent of a ghost train: short, sharp, and full of scares.  Unfortunately, the other corollary with ghost trains is that they’re always shit.