Thursday December 29th 2011
Ten films in and Grantwatch, my valiant odyssey through the annals of Hugh Grant’s back catalogue, is really starting to get interesting. I’ve already covered a lot of the basics — Four Weddings, About a Boy, both Bridget Jones movies — and now I’m getting on to some of the more obscure stuff. Yes, even more obscure than Extreme Measures.
Last night I watched The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, one of the oddest (and most elaborately named) entries in Grant’s thirty-strong cinematic oeuvre. Released in August 1995 (just over a year after Four Weddings made him a household name) the film reeks unmistakably of contractual obligation, but that’s not to say that Hugh isn’t putting his all in.
You’d be forgiven for assuming that the film’s lengthy title was a metaphor of some kind, perhaps referring to a triumph over adversity or a coming of age, but TEWWUAHBCDAM is a much more literal affair than that. Set in 1917, it tells the story of Reginald Anson, a young cartographer tasked with aiding the war effort by measuring the heights of Welsh mountains. Under new regulations, he’s forced to downgrade one such mountain to a hill due to its dwindling stature, much to the consternation of local villagers who set about ‘raising the mountain’ by dumping a load of soil on it.
So basically:
Well done everybody, take the rest of the week off.
The film takes equal pleasure in mocking Grant’s ‘Englishness’ and parading around a load of mindless Welsh stereotypes, headed up by Colm Meaney’s wily philanderer Morgan the Goat. Tara Fitzgerald (who also starred opposite Grant in 1993′s Sirens) plays the love interest, but whatever the poster might have you believe …
… TEWWUAHBCDAM is not a romantic comedy. So while it’s vaguely implied that Grant and Fitzgerland fuck at the top of the mountain towards the end of the film, most of their scenes don’t get much more steamy than this:
Still: a hot look for Grant, I think you’ll agree.
Sadly, the film enters the Grantwatch chart towards the bottom of the list, beating only Bridge Jones: The Edge of Reason. But don’t let that put you off: if you’ve got 99 minutes spare and very little else to do, then you could certainly do worse than this charmingly straightforward little film — as the tagline so ably puts it, it’s ‘a romantic comedy about a town that wouldn’t give up. A man who couldn’t get out. And the mountain that brought them together.’
Literally.
Sunday December 25th 2011
Click here to view the full wall. Warning: enormous.
Friday December 23rd 2011
The definitive Ultra Culture end-of-year-list is now online, and for the first time ever, I’ve added a comment box at the bottom so you can all tell me how massively wrong I am.
Wednesday December 21st 2011
“There’s too much anal rape in this movie,” joked David Fincher when quizzed on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo‘s Oscar chances. If those sound like the flippant words of a first-year film student out to prove just how pRoVoCaTiVe he really is, then they’re a good indicator of the level of nuance exercised by Fincher in the film.
Based on the hit Swedish novel by Stieg Larsson (originally titled Men Who Hate Women) the film is an indictment of institutionalised misogyny, thinly veiled behind a Midsomer Murders-esque mystery thriller. Lisbeth Salander, the titular ‘girl’ of the anaemic English title, is a prodigiously talented hacker and misandrist vigilante, whose rape at the hands of her court-appointed guardian is as horrific as it is blatantly allegorical — she might as well be wearing a mask with the words ‘All Women’ written on it while he screams ‘I am society!’ between thrusts.
The main narrative, in which Salander teams up with investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist in order to solve a complex series of violent crimes spanning four decades, is merely an extension of this thesis. In fact, from Blomkvist’s initial sales pitch (‘I want you to help me catch a killer of women’) through to the outrageously melodramatic conclusion, Fincher’s film offers barely a line of dialogue that can’t also be read as a comment on society’s ingrained misogyny.
Good for him, right? It’s not every day you get a $100 million tentpole studio release that willingly tackles such an important societal issue. The problem is: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo makes almost no effort to effectively tackle misogyny, beyond pointing at it for half an hour and then punching it in the face for a bit.
The film offers two methods for fighting society’s maltreatment of women: the cautious, journalistic approach exemplified by Blomkvist, who spends months interviewing, analysing and investigating his suspects; and the hands-on, militant response embodied by Salander, who exacts revenge on her attacker by raping him in kind. But while most films might explore the relative merits of these vastly different — and equally flawed — approaches, Fincher’s movie merely picks a side.
Time and time again, Blomkvist’s methodical techniques prove inadequate, inaccurate or unhelpful, whereas Salander’s brutality consistently delivers results — a trope that’s well established in action movies and buddy cop comedies, but rather more unsettling in a serious drama about institutionalised misogyny.
The film revels in Salander’s ruthlessness, painting her revenge-rape as not only righteous, but also empowering and ‘kind of badass’. We’re practically urged to cheer along as she pays her oppressor back for the brutal anal rape (cinematic shorthand for ‘doubly bad rape’) he inflicted on her earlier. Now, call me a woolly liberal but I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to suggest that sexual abuse is best fought with sexual abuse. As the film itself suggests, this ‘paying forward’ of physical brutality is what gave rise to our culture of abuse in the first place, and yet our reaction to Salander’s retaliative rape is meant to be one of unthinking support. Evil Shall With Evil Be Expelled indeed.
There’s no question that Fincher is a thoughtful guy, and an immensely talented director, so quite what attracted him to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is beyond me. For the most part it’s a gripping and effective piece of filmmaking, and one that’s technically masterful, but — unable to make sense of Larsson’s already confused source material — Fincher’s film soon lapses into hypocrisy. Still, true to his word, it does feature a considerable amount of anal rape. Hardcore, man, hardcore.
Monday December 19th 2011
As if to make amends for some of their totally bonkers decision-making this year, the BBFC have announced that six retro Black Cards (based on those used in 1913, the 1940s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and the present day) will be reintroduced in 2012 to mark their 100th year.
The first (above) is based on the original 1912 theatrical card, first shown in 1913.
Can’t wait to see this rolled out across some of 2012′s ropier material:
See? It makes anything look classy.
