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By James Flanagan ‘Flirt’ – Hal Hartley
The world's most frivolous director made things far, far worse with this offering from 1998. The same dull, uninvolving and mind numbingly pretentious story told in PRECISELY the same manner in New York, Rome and Tokyo. A man is given an ultimatum by his partner, commit or sod off.
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He buys time to think about it, walks off and is shot. But surely, I hear you protest, this is a simplistic and rather crass rendering of the story! Perhaps the talented filmmaker imbues the narrative with slight variations and shifts in character, tone, mood, pacing that mark each individual story. No! Nothing! That's it! There's more thematic and stylistic variety in the instruction video accompanying your rowing machine than this intolerable mess. One wonders if the dearth of |
material would have convinced the producers had Hartley set the film in Grimsby, Daugavpils and Leavenworth respectively.
‘The English Patient’ – Anthony Minghella
Nietzsche once accused (some would say a tad harshly) the poetry profession of 'muddying their waters to make them appear deeper than they are.' I'm quietly confident this was a direct reference to the work of Anthony Minghella. I've never been a fan of Minghella's meretricious approach to filmmaking, which seemingly always follows the same simple formula. |
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Take a slight and obvious narrative structure, treat it with the subtletly of aprize fight and disguise all of the above with stunningly photographed and gratuitously unnecessary photography. Never is this approach more abundant than in 'The English Patient.'
Ralph Fiennes again leaves the charisma in the car, the lovely but perennially unconvincing Juliette Binoche (in English speaking roles anyway) is a walking anachronism, and even Kristen Scott Thomas's impressive steel fails to enliven proceedings. John Searle's photography is predictably sublime and the editing is first rate, but every frame of the film is weighed down by the emptiness and bloated self-importance of the direction. Minghella's staging of Madam Butterfly, currently running at the London coliseum has attracted remarkably similar complaints. Perhaps his obsession with form would better be served as an architect
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‘Kid A’ - Radiohead
The Danish cartoon crisis has asked some searching and uncomfortable questions about the role and limitations of free speech in democratic society. The right of music reviewers to criticise Radiohead’s 'Kid A' springs to mind as an obvious example. I know it’s important to champion demanding records, especially when they’re produced by one of the critical and economic monoliths of the industry. The fact remains however, that KID A is a damned |
ordinary record. Too ambitious, too varied and with little sense of unity and cohesion. It is a group spectacularly over stretching themselves.
In retrospect, it is easy to see how noble Radiohead’s intentions were in conceptualising Kid A. Removing all signifiers to rock grandiloquence was a brave decision, one they are rightly applauded for. And let’s face it. Following up a record that generated the level of over-arched critical sycophancy that OK Computer did was never going to be an easy task. No one would have faulted Radiohead had they opted to release Ok Computers and Reasonable PCs for the next 30 years. We’d watch them as they spent their post-halcyon days accumulating Mickey Mouse positions on the United Nations, conspicuously reading The Economist and growing more and more boring. Instead, they dumped the guitars, hooks and melodies, listened to A LOT of early nineties Aphex Twin and produced Kid A, the most over conceptualised album in recorded history.
‘Everything In Its Right Place’ and ‘Kid A’ sound straight from Richard D James circa Ambient Works Volume 2. Then we’re hit with an Ornette Coleman monster jam in the form of ‘National Anthem.’ Next up we’re served a not particularly memorable slice of ‘The Bends’ (‘How To Disappear Completely’). Yes, the strings and sequencing is lovely, but the track’s basic musical material is incredibly mundane, as York’s warble slowly catches up and then imitates the keyboard line. Boo ha. The next stop is an Eno offcut too dull to feature on ‘Music for Airports.’ Even the album’s most celebrated track, ‘Idioteque’ features some incredibly clunky drum programming. It sounds as if a first year music student was left unobserved in the studio for five minutes, free to apply too much reverb, distortion and decay to the drum track, and no one noticed. I know that this was probably the intention, but it doesn’t stop it sounding lazy and crap. The remaining tracks, most notably ‘Optimistic’ and ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ follow ‘How to Disappear Completely’ in sounding like nothing short of giant steps backwards in Pablo Honeyesque tedium.
How this rag tag mess came to be internationally recognised as the most important album of the century to date is beyond me. Amnesiac, while suffering from similar problems is a vastly superior record. There’s more genuine innovation and adroitness in the rhythmic structure of the Pyramid Song than ‘Kid A’ in its entirety. The latter’s superiority as a record seems to rest solely on its ‘daring’ atonal qualities. Look. Let’s be honest. A rock band deciding to consciously avoid melody, hooks and traditional structures is a bit like asking Elton John to move to the Deep South. It ain’t gonna work. I know this is ‘art rock’ we’re talking about here, but the inclusion of the word ‘rock’ in that term still necessitates SOME tokenistic nod to melody and structure. That’s the reference point, the tonic from which all experimentation begins.
The emperor may be fully dressed, but that doesn't mean he didn't stop at a nudist beach for a quick dip on his way home.
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