End Transmission
Saturday, 30 March 2019
Friday, 29 March 2019
RIP Shane Rimmer
Gutted to hear that Shane Rimmer, an actor who - if you grew up in the UK at any time in the 60s, 70s and 80s - has been such a part of all our lives, has passed away at the age of 89.
Canadian born Rimmer's most iconic role was one that only required his vocal talents, namely that of Scott Tracy in Thunderbirds, but he was instantly recognisable for several supporting roles in some of cinema's biggest franchises; Star Wars, Superman, Batman, and a total of three James Bond movies, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds are Forever, and The Spy Who Loved Me. Other film credits included Gandhi, Rollerball (pictured above), Doctor Strangelove, Reds, Out of Africa and Dark Shadows, whilst he appeared in TV dramas like Doctor Who, Coronation Street, Dockers, and the controversial 1977 April's Fools joke (which actually aired in June that year!) Alternative 3, a cod-science documentary about the 'brain drain' which revealed that the elite of society had actually left the soon-to-be-destroyed earth for a new life in space, that continues to resonate among conspiracy theorists to this day.
RIP
Canadian born Rimmer's most iconic role was one that only required his vocal talents, namely that of Scott Tracy in Thunderbirds, but he was instantly recognisable for several supporting roles in some of cinema's biggest franchises; Star Wars, Superman, Batman, and a total of three James Bond movies, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds are Forever, and The Spy Who Loved Me. Other film credits included Gandhi, Rollerball (pictured above), Doctor Strangelove, Reds, Out of Africa and Dark Shadows, whilst he appeared in TV dramas like Doctor Who, Coronation Street, Dockers, and the controversial 1977 April's Fools joke (which actually aired in June that year!) Alternative 3, a cod-science documentary about the 'brain drain' which revealed that the elite of society had actually left the soon-to-be-destroyed earth for a new life in space, that continues to resonate among conspiracy theorists to this day.
RIP
Thursday, 28 March 2019
Possum (2018)
Possum is the feature length directorial debut of writer and actor Matthew Holness. I've been a big fan of Holness' work for years now - not just Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace but his previous directorial efforts like A Gun For George and The Snipist - and, as a result, I wasn't as thrown by his choice to play things so ickily straight as he does here as others who are only familiar with his spoof (but admittedly dark) comedy may have been. Possum is as creepy as fuck, but I think I'll need to watch this one again to gain a proper, greater appreciation of it.
The retro aesthetic he has always favoured, photographed with such bleak accuracy by Kit Fraser, conjures up memories of many a classic '70s PIF or horror film, and it's hard to determine just what period this film is actually set in, or indeed whether it is all set/occurring in his protagonist's Philip (played by Sean Harris with the usual gaunt and mumbling intensity) head, which is stunted to say the least. The unnerving score from the (BBC) Radiophonic Workshop also fixes the action to a bygone time that believed bright oranges and shit browns to be compatible, recalling as it does the classic era of Doctor Who, but Holness' decision to let scenes play out with little or no dialogue is also reminiscent of various expressionistic silent movies of the 1920s and '30s too.
Unfortunately these sequences can appear a little repetitive, making Possum feel rather aimless, or worse, revealing the roots of its short story origins being adapted to a full length feature. Whilst this feature is only 80 or so minutes I would imagine some restless audiences may easily tire of Harris' many wanderings of East Anglia's urban scrubland. Whilst I can appreciate the cyclical nature of the protagonist's actions from a psychological viewpoint it's worth saying that I quickly guessed the metaphorical nature of Philip's angst and concerns almost straight off the bat, so that even I, with some considerable goodwill, found the playing out of it all a little one-note.
As the film is essentially a two-hander between Harris and a grubby, leering Alun Armstrong, this also means that there's little respite to be had here either and a desire for a long shower afterwards may be the common consensus for most viewers. Nevertheless, Possum relishes in its ability to find intelligent scares from its Freudian psychology and, in its creation of the 'possum' puppet itself, delivers something truly unsettling and nightmarish. Whilst I'm not convinced, on this first watch at least, that Possum is a success, I cannot find fault in Holness' desire to at least try something different and applaud such an experimental nature from a debut feature-length director.
Wednesday, 27 March 2019
Out On Blue Six: The Beat, RIP Ranking Roger
Another day, another loss to the music industry; Ranking Roger of The Beat (or The English Beat if you are Stateside) has passed away at the age of 56
RIP
End Transmission
Monday, 25 March 2019
Stanley, a Man of Variety (2016)
I commend Cookson and Spall for their experimentation, but I cannot recommend Stanley, a Man of Variety as a film. It may have worked rather well as an episode of Inside Number 9, from the similarly vintage and macabre loving Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, but that’s about it. If you’re looking to get a dark-edged and surreal fix of your favourite old school comedians, then you’d be better served watching writer/director Paul Hendy’s short film The Last Laugh on Vimeo instead.
Read my full review at The Geek Show
Out On Blue Six: The Walker Brothers, RIP Scott Walker
Scott Walker gone. Words fail me. So I'll turn to this incredible and rather apt song, just one of many beautiful tunes he gave us
RIP
End Transmission
Saturday, 23 March 2019
Maeve (1981)
"Men's relationship to women is just like England's relationship to Ireland. You're in possession of us. You occupy us like an army"
It's the generally accepted view that the British film industry was in the doldrums in the 1980s but I think that verdict needs to be tempered by the fact that this period saw a time of great artistic creativity from young independent and political filmmakers (Richard Woolley immediately springs to mind), which makes the fact that the work which they contributed in this period is now so scarce and overlooked all the more frustrating. When you stumble upon such work however, it makes it all the more rewarding to the viewer. Maeve, directed by Pat Murphy and funded by a grant from the BFI, is one such film.
Simply put, the film tells the story of Maeve Sweeney (Mary Jackson) a young Irishwoman who, having spent some time in the relative peace of London, now returns home to the Troubles-stricken Belfast. Returning to her family home and her old haunts, stimulates in Maeve memories of her childhood and adolescence and forces her to question herself, her politics and her identity. However, it's this latter analysis that makes Maeve such an intriguing prospect, as Murphy approaches ideologies such as feminism and republicanism in an experimental and reflective film style, that is perhaps best evinced by the narrative's many unheralded temporal shifts and Murphy's decision to allow a character like Maeve's despondent father (Mark Mulholland) to deliver anecdotes almost directly to camera, as if the audience itself were a complicit character within the film.
What is especially remarkable about Maeve is that it is a film that addresses the political situation in the north of Ireland from a woman's point of view. Granted, there are many other films that explore the Troubles and choose to place a woman at their centre, but they are invariably tales about a woman without man, grieving for their significant loved ones lost to the cause, incarceration or death, or tales of women simply possessing enough practical common sense (of the stereotypically feminine or matriarchal no-nonsense variety) to take a stand against the man-made violence they see around them, whereas Maeve speaks to a much more interesting feminist perspective hinted at in the quote I placed at the top of this review; namely that once the war is over, no matter what side has 'won', nothing will have changed for women if their menfolk still expect them to be wives and mothers only. Incarceration does feature in Maeve - her father was falsely imprisoned which goes some way to explain his detached nature - but both Maeve and her resilient mother's (played by Trudy Kelly) reaction to it is anger at the general consensus that womenfolk should simply accept this situation (along with the acceptance that informing on the real perpetrators is against the code) and that Maeve's leaving of such a committed nationalist community and way of life for bohemian London (and, in general England, the enemy) is considered as some kind of treasonable act or of having ideas above your station and class (even by her republican boyfriend, played by John Keegan). Where Murphy's film is bold and still incredibly refreshing is in its defiant challenging of Irish gender stereotypes and imagery.
Visually, the film is very arresting too. Murphy delivers a series of authentic images of Troubles-era Belfast, but shot through them is a very artistic, somewhat surreal eye. This is especially pleasing as, the thought of tanks and armed soldiers strolling through such recognisably everyday streets will always feel surreal for British viewers. Thus, when Maeve and her younger sister Roisin (the ever-superb Bríd Brennan, refreshingly carefree here after her role in the Billy plays) are forced to hop on the spot for two rifle-toting soldiers whilst children play on the swings just yards away, or when the younger Maeve watches as her father painstakingly unloads his van of several television sets in the pouring rain, only to be instructed to place them all back in by a soldier the moment the last one touches the tarmac, your appreciation of the reality of this situation is accompanied by the invitation to embrace just how stupid it all is/was. A later sequence, almost dreamlike in its imagery, sees Maeve and Roisin heading for a night on the town. After passing through the checkpoint where their bags are inspected by the RUC, they immediately take in the sight of a bare-arsed squaddie giving a bored-looking local girl a knee-trembler in a shop doorway. It's scenes like this that I know will linger long in my memory.
Much of Maeve's theoretical debates stem from scenes shared between her and her boyfriend/ex boyfriend, Liam. Here, through her leading lady, Murphy attempts to challenge the notion of a paternal nationalism and demand a place for feminism. Tellingly, the film pinpoints the distance between the characters; Maeve looks to the future, whilst Liam only ever to the past. When he argues that the past is important enough to oblige us with a way of understanding the present, Maeve is quick to remove him of his - and republicanism and the patriarchy's - ignorance; "You're talking about a false memory... the way you want to remember excludes me. I get remembered out of existence." Taking this quote in the context of Murphy's subsequent career as a filmmaker - which includes films like Anne Devlin, which approaches the 1803 Irish revolt from the experience of a female republican played by Brennan, and Nora, the James Joyce biopic told from the POV of his wife and muse, Nora Barnacle - I'd say that Murphy was doing her best to place women back into the picture.
It's the generally accepted view that the British film industry was in the doldrums in the 1980s but I think that verdict needs to be tempered by the fact that this period saw a time of great artistic creativity from young independent and political filmmakers (Richard Woolley immediately springs to mind), which makes the fact that the work which they contributed in this period is now so scarce and overlooked all the more frustrating. When you stumble upon such work however, it makes it all the more rewarding to the viewer. Maeve, directed by Pat Murphy and funded by a grant from the BFI, is one such film.
Simply put, the film tells the story of Maeve Sweeney (Mary Jackson) a young Irishwoman who, having spent some time in the relative peace of London, now returns home to the Troubles-stricken Belfast. Returning to her family home and her old haunts, stimulates in Maeve memories of her childhood and adolescence and forces her to question herself, her politics and her identity. However, it's this latter analysis that makes Maeve such an intriguing prospect, as Murphy approaches ideologies such as feminism and republicanism in an experimental and reflective film style, that is perhaps best evinced by the narrative's many unheralded temporal shifts and Murphy's decision to allow a character like Maeve's despondent father (Mark Mulholland) to deliver anecdotes almost directly to camera, as if the audience itself were a complicit character within the film.
What is especially remarkable about Maeve is that it is a film that addresses the political situation in the north of Ireland from a woman's point of view. Granted, there are many other films that explore the Troubles and choose to place a woman at their centre, but they are invariably tales about a woman without man, grieving for their significant loved ones lost to the cause, incarceration or death, or tales of women simply possessing enough practical common sense (of the stereotypically feminine or matriarchal no-nonsense variety) to take a stand against the man-made violence they see around them, whereas Maeve speaks to a much more interesting feminist perspective hinted at in the quote I placed at the top of this review; namely that once the war is over, no matter what side has 'won', nothing will have changed for women if their menfolk still expect them to be wives and mothers only. Incarceration does feature in Maeve - her father was falsely imprisoned which goes some way to explain his detached nature - but both Maeve and her resilient mother's (played by Trudy Kelly) reaction to it is anger at the general consensus that womenfolk should simply accept this situation (along with the acceptance that informing on the real perpetrators is against the code) and that Maeve's leaving of such a committed nationalist community and way of life for bohemian London (and, in general England, the enemy) is considered as some kind of treasonable act or of having ideas above your station and class (even by her republican boyfriend, played by John Keegan). Where Murphy's film is bold and still incredibly refreshing is in its defiant challenging of Irish gender stereotypes and imagery.
Visually, the film is very arresting too. Murphy delivers a series of authentic images of Troubles-era Belfast, but shot through them is a very artistic, somewhat surreal eye. This is especially pleasing as, the thought of tanks and armed soldiers strolling through such recognisably everyday streets will always feel surreal for British viewers. Thus, when Maeve and her younger sister Roisin (the ever-superb Bríd Brennan, refreshingly carefree here after her role in the Billy plays) are forced to hop on the spot for two rifle-toting soldiers whilst children play on the swings just yards away, or when the younger Maeve watches as her father painstakingly unloads his van of several television sets in the pouring rain, only to be instructed to place them all back in by a soldier the moment the last one touches the tarmac, your appreciation of the reality of this situation is accompanied by the invitation to embrace just how stupid it all is/was. A later sequence, almost dreamlike in its imagery, sees Maeve and Roisin heading for a night on the town. After passing through the checkpoint where their bags are inspected by the RUC, they immediately take in the sight of a bare-arsed squaddie giving a bored-looking local girl a knee-trembler in a shop doorway. It's scenes like this that I know will linger long in my memory.
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