The Letter S is for Serendipity
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Starsky and Hutch
(Todd Phillips, 2003 – 101’, 15), 23Mar04Stoopid. . . interesting dalliance with the homo-erotic subtext that so passed me by as a naive adolescent growing up in The Shires. What can you do???
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School of Rock, The
[Richard Linklater, xy, cert], 27Feb04A disappointing teen and pre-teen wish fulfillment movie that wastes the considerable talents of both its director and lead actor. Jack Black, is Dewey Finn, a following-his-dream rawk loafer and axeman with local wannabe rockers. Sacked for being too axetastic and under pressure to come through with the rent, Finn busts a serious move, assumes his flatmates identity and snaffling a job as a supply teacher at an expensive prep school figurres on an easy route to financial security. But what is the woefully under-qualified Finn going to teach the prim ten year olds in his charge. Well dear reader, you're no doubt way ahead of me: he's going to teach them how to rawk!!!
SOR strikes this idle viewer as a put-up job for Black's retinue of rock cred. As one half of the masterful spoof band Tenacious D, a truly loving and hilarious pastiche of bands that have rocked through the ages, Black's musical pedigree is without doubt. Here he drags a bunch of posh kids back to the last century to expose them to AC/DC, the mighty Sabs and the questionable Yes ('Roundabout'?!) in a lame quest for hilarity. Whilst acknowldging the stupidity of much of the oeuvre, Black also acknowledges the power of the music. The warmth and humour with which his part-boy, part-man identity assume the right to rock (to 'stick it to the man') signal a warm regard for music that form the corner of many a teenagers identity.
There is something unsettling about ten year olds assuming the stage mantle of good rocking grown-ups, their acting out of the sexuality of adults, however subliminal felt just a little too odd. Perhapos that is the path of childhood now, the innocnce of earlier years abandoned increasingly early by children subjected to
The delighted grin that slid itself across my face as Deep Purple's 'Smoke on the Water' was bludgeoned to death by Finn's nascent rawk band didn't last. Black's obvious enthusiasm for the culture isn't able to prevent this movie from straying into formulaic 'Let's do the Show Right Here' territory. The
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It's cold and grey and I can fel the need for daylight growing in me. It's about this time of year I start to struggle with a touch of SAD, a nagging depression bought on by a lack of light. Sitting in teh cineam in daylight seems counter-productive. But sit i did, catching up with this much lauded film, its animated form coming at the same time as two other feature length cartoons
Spirited Away
[Hayao Miyazaki, 125, PG], 30Dec03A feature length animated tale that follows a curiously familiar path. A family stray into a secret land and despite their young daughters protestations, ma and pa end up turned into pigs. Spirits appear as sun goes down and the magical possessors of this mystery domain appear. Our youthful heroine must seek out the heart of the kingdom, subsisting in a land of spirits, fighting darkness and her own fear to find love and triumph over odd and alien foes.
I was reminded of those Rupert annuals that used to turn up with a comforting regularity each Xmas. Rupert was an unusual comic, its unusual settings at odds with any sense of what was different for this boy growing up in provincial England. So also Spirited Away’s great strength is its ability to conjure up a world of increasingly diverse and mind boggling form. Each new and bizarre creature, the huge palace that serves as a bath house to the gods in which Chihiro finds employ and a substantial hold on the land of immortals, the gods and monsters who form the clientele. One suspects that if this had been the product of even the most feverish of western hand a lesser effect would have been achieved, but the sheer otherness of this Japanese sub-cultural form leads to an overwhelming
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Came out of this abbee grinding my teeth, a reminder of somewhat more intense tiems gone by. And times I'm glad have gone . . . yep, this is that kind of movie!
Spun
[Jonas Akerlund, 100, 18], 3Dec03Spun: one of a barrage of terse slang for crystal meth-amphetamine. Essentially a tidy mix of laundry detergent and lighter fluid, meth is speed for those who really need to die beofe they get old. And now it has its very own film! Manufactured in bath tub set-ups the toxicity of this ferociously sytnthetic drug is the solvent that bonds the agents of Spun together.
Mickey Rourke doesn't sem to have to try particularly hard to be a seedy drug manufacture, falling back on the seedy barfly pugilist persona he has made his own.
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