The Angelic Conversation

The Angelic Conversation. Derek Jarman. 1985. ⚅

The British Film Institute released a blu-ray set of a bunch of Jarman movies the other year, but I haven’t gotten around to watching any of them. I’ve seen all of them before, I think… and I was surprised to find that The Last of England wasn’t included?

But here’s The Angelic Conversation, which is probably mostly famous for this:

I’ve listened to the Coil soundtrack CD a bunch of times, so it’s odd and eerie to new watch the movie (which I haven’t seen since I saw it at the Cinematheque in the early 90s)…

[ten minutes pass]

The 8mm footage looks great in the 2K version. All the grain and all the wonky colours. I’m guessing it was sourced from Jarman’s 35mm blow-up of the 8mm?

[edit: I’m watching the documentary extras now, and there was apparently a VHS step here? I thought I saw some VHS artefacts here… Oh, and the Lee Drysdale interview, where he tells the story of how David Bowie was going to be in Neutron (and was in talks with them for nine months without signing a contract) is hilarious. Apparently Jarman cribbed Bowie’s Marlboro back and put it on his mantlepiece, and Bowie saw that and freaked out (Satanism or extreme nerdery?), and then just ghosted them. And then he made Elephant Man instead of Neutron. And then the story about meeting him again years later. And how about how the music that ended up on Scary Monsters had been meant for Neutron, and referred to bits that Drysdale had written in the script, and used Jarman’s aesthetic in the videos and stuff. I have no idea whether any of that is true, but it’s fun.]

Oh, if you haven’t seen this movie: It’s Judi Dench reading a bunch of Shakespeare sonnets over a low-framerate (3 FPS? I tried counting) blurry shots of some guys with torches.

It’s great!

[more minutes pass]

“Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds”

[the end]

It’s so weird how well this works. Your mind (well, my mind, FSVO) drifts off during the more abstract bits, and then snaps back into focus when Dench starts declaiming a sonnet, and then it’s like YES!

It shouldn’t really work at all… Jarman just got on eye for visual rhythm and pacing, and what could have been, well, nothing becomes something very much indeed.

Fast and Furious

Fast and Furious. Justin Lin. 2009. ⚁

[ten minutes pass]

Now, this is how you start one of these movies: Lots of really stupid and stupidly fun highway action. (The CGI is horrible, though, even for a 2009 movie.)

I started watching these movies because I wanted a contrast to, well, serious movies, and the first F&F movie was just about perfect. And then the second and the third movie made me lose the will to live.

But we’re back on track now? *crosses fingers*

It’s by the same movie as the really boring Tokyo Drift movie, though:

Which didn’t make much money. So why did they let him make another one?

Oh! But this one did make a lot of money, so whatever their reasons were for giving him a second chance, it did pay off.

[fifteen minutes pass]

Ah, so basically all the characters from the first movie is back? Including Diesel and Parker. I guess that’s why this was green-lit.

But after the initial action scene, this movie drags. Draaaaags. And not in a good way (no, not that way and not that way either). It’s just all … getting caught up with the “plot” which I think is pretty superfluous anyway.

But perhaps there’ll be a pay-off.

[ten minutes pass]

I don’t know… I think it lacks… rhythm? I’m not really talking about how Lin is making a cut once per second, but just how it all fits together. Like, when ex-bleach blond(e) guy rolled into the garage with all the (presumably) cool cars — that was an opportunity to play some “dope” music and fuck around with sensual shots of the cars. And there was basically nothing.

Or in the montage when ex-bleach blond(e) guy and Dom were fixing up their cars — it was just hard to get hard about that, or even tell what they were doing, or even, on a basic level, to tell the two sets apart.

Lin… isn’t a good director. He’s no Cohen. It’s just a jumble of images instead of a synaesthetic overload.

It’s also weird, casting wise — all the drivers (so far) are male, which goes counter to the first two movies, at least.

[half an hour passes]

This is better than the previous two er episodes — but it’s still a really, really bad movie. Some of the scenes almost work, but there’s so much tedium in-between the stuff that’s almost fun…

[the end]

Look, I would have been fine with a movie that was all guys and gals driving their cars around, interspersed with scenes of them adding more gadgets to the engines of their cars, but apparently that’s too expensive to film? So instead this movie is 90% guys sitting around talking to each other, being angsty and stuff.

So I get why this movie is this way, but I only hope that the next movie has a bigger budget so that there’ll be more driving around. And not an end scene like this one has, with CGI cars in CGI tunnels. But I guess that may be what the target audience likes, anyway? Make movies more like video games?

ME AM LIKE DRIVING CARS AROUND ME AM GEARHEAD

Hm… should I watch the next movie in this series now or one of the Derek Jarman movies I got on a 2K box set the other month? Hm… It’s been a while since I watched The Last of England…

Father Goose

Father Goose. Ralph Nelson. 1964. ⚁

What… what on Earth is this? I don’t quite know how I came to buy this DVD, but I was shopping for screwball comedies a while back, and perhaps this was part of that?

But it’s… it’s a comedy WWII movie? From 1964? In colour, and with a somewhat out-of-shape Cary Grant? And all the other actors are speaking English instead of American?

Oh, it’s from Republic Pictures? They went bankrupt, right? So this is probably from one of those public domain box sets I bought several years ago…

And that’s a pretty weird wipe for a mid-60s movie. Did the people who made this DVD get creative?

It’s also completely non-restored, so everything looks… pretty bad.

Oh, well. How bad can it be? I mean, it’s Cary Grant?

[an hour passes]

It’s pretty bad, and I’m not quite sure why. There’s some repartee in here that’s really witty, but somehow it doesn’t really… connect? Grant is playing a type of character unusual for him — a grizzled discontented alcoholic seaboat captain. He seems more like… he’s annoyed at having to do the movie?

I like all the actors, really — the stiff-upper-lip British military, the French teacher (and love interest), the kids… and yet I find it really, really hard to pay attention to the film at all. I wonder what the critics thought about it…