(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHO DOES OR DOESN'T SUCCEED)
[And now for a Bust of a movie that is unashamedly feel good.]
The Commitments (1991) Alan Parker's film adaptation of Roddy Doyle's novel of the same name. Stars Colm Meaney, Johnny Murphy, Robert Arkins and Andrew Strong.
In the end Robert Arkins fails to become the manager of the world's greatest (Irish, soul) band.
Son of Elvis loving Dubliner Colm Meaney, Arkins plays an ambitious young man, who will stop at nothing in order to realise his dreams of success in the music industry.
To this end he manages to bring together and equip a group of variously talented teenagers who gradually come to share his aspirations.
However, it is only the late addition of charismatic, middle-aged, veteran trumpet player, Johnny Murphy, to the group that not only lights a fire underneath the disparate bunch of wannabes, but which also ultimately leads to the band's demise.
Chief among the teenage talents Arkins recruits is bus conductor Andrew Strong, whose ill manners and boorish self belief is only just tolerated by the other band members because he possesses the singing voice of soul god.
Despite sexual jealousies, the mounting tension that Strong's presence generates, and a sometimes less than whole-hearted commitment to their cause, the group seems to be on the brink of success in clinching a record deal.
But after a promised guest appearance of one of Murphy's famous former jamming partners (the unseen Wilson Pickett) fails to materialise, Arkins decides, in frustration, to abandon his creation.
Only when he is stopped in the street by a chauffeur-driven limousine seeking directions, does Arkins realise how close he and the band came to hitting the big time.
Fifteen years after Bugsy Malone (1976) Alan Parker hit musical pay dirt for a second time with this modern take on the Garland-Rooney "let's put on a show" formula.
It's not hard to like a movie so completely infused with the soul classics of Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Wilson Pickett.
What raises this story head and shoulders above its antecedents, though, is the absolute authenticity of both the characters' voices and the lives of crushing poverty from which these would-be stars aspire to escape.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Commitments_%28film%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugsy_Malone
http://www.musicals101.com/who7c.htm#Rooney
http://www.musicals101.com/who3b.htm#Garland
Sunday 4 April 2010
Pan's Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno) (2006)
(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHETHER THE GIRL SURVIVES)
(SUPPLEMENTARY WARNING: THE BRIEF COMMENTARY THAT FOLLOWS THIS BUST CONTAINS STRONG OPINIONS THAT ARE GRAPHICALLY EXPRESSED AND THAT MAY CAUSE OFFENCE TO THOSE OF A DELICATE DISPOSITION.)
[And now for a Bust that tries to establish whether or not the fantasy portrayed is real or just imagined.]
Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish: El Laberinto del Fauno, "The Faun's Labyrinth" literally, "The Labyrinth of the Faun") (2006) is a Spanish language fantasy film, written and directed by Mexican film-maker Guillermo del Toro, starring Sergi López i Ayats and Ivana Baquero.
The young girl played by Ivana Baquero is callously murdered by her sadistically brutal army captain stepfather played by Sergi López i Ayats.
In the midst of the Franquist repression following the Spanish Civil War, Banquero and her heavily pregnant and sick mother are relocated to an isolated farmstead from which her stepfather, the father of the unborn baby, intends to hunt down guerrillas fighting in the surrounding forested hills.
A lover of books and fairytales, Bamquero finds respite from her unhappy situation in the companionship of her stepfather's housekeeper and in the company of fantastic creatures that only she can see and that dwell in the underground grotto of some nearby labyrinthine ruins.
While the captain goes about his business of torture and murder, all the time more worried for the health of his unborn child than for that of his wife, Bamquero is set three tasks by the giant faun creature she first met in the grotto, which are to prove whether she is the long lost daughter of the king of the faun's underground home.
Life for Bamquero in the real world becomes unbearable when her mother dies in childbirth, and her friend the housekeeper is discovered by the captain to have been collaborating with the guerrilla fighters.
However, before the captain can begin his torture of her, the housekeeper is able to escape to join the guerrillas, disfiguring his face with the knife that she always carries tucked in her apron.
The final task that Bamquero must complete, is to secretly bring the newborn child to the faun. The fact that she is able to magically get through locked doors and impenetrable walls to accomplish this suggests that the fantastic world of the faun may not be just in Bamquero's imagination.
Nevertheless, ultimately Bamquero cannot bring herself to give up her innocent brother to the faun in order to enter the secret realm.
Unfortunately, when the captain eventually catches up with her, he shoots his stepdaughter dead after recovering the infant, although he himself is shot dead moments later when the massing guerrillas, led by the housekeeper, catch up with him.
As Bamquero lies dying, in her imagination she is reunited with her dead mother and her royal father in their underground kingdom, where she once again becomes the princess that the faun had recognised her to be.
So, what are we to make of such a universally praised (especially by one Mark Kermode writing for the Guardian newspaper, whose high opinion of the movie is only surpassed by his high opinion of his own opinions) and prize garnering creation?
Well, this is a fantasy film like no other, with absolutely no ambition to be a feel-good movie.
Without doubt the film represents the pinnacle of writer-director del Toro's small but mostly excellent body of work to date. It demonstrates a combination of film making skill and imagination that is perhaps second only to that of the great Terry Gilliam.
However, in exactly the same way that del Toro's youthful heroine is only able to cope with the brutal reality of her life by escaping into fantasy, the film's bloody and unremitting bleak setting in the brutality of the Spanish conflict is only made palatable by the distractingly fantastic, although similarly dark, flights of del Toro's imagination.
Perhaps that was exactly the director's intention.
Whether or not it was deliberate though, it is hard not to feel (and it is at this point that readers of a sensitive nature should turn back) that one has unwittingly consumed something the leaves such a bad taste in the mouth, that it might as well have been a candy covered turd.
Of course, there are plenty of other such cinematic confections on offer, but none that are as worthy of your consideration as this.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan%27s_Labyrinth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Gilliam
(SUPPLEMENTARY WARNING: THE BRIEF COMMENTARY THAT FOLLOWS THIS BUST CONTAINS STRONG OPINIONS THAT ARE GRAPHICALLY EXPRESSED AND THAT MAY CAUSE OFFENCE TO THOSE OF A DELICATE DISPOSITION.)
[And now for a Bust that tries to establish whether or not the fantasy portrayed is real or just imagined.]
Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish: El Laberinto del Fauno, "The Faun's Labyrinth" literally, "The Labyrinth of the Faun") (2006) is a Spanish language fantasy film, written and directed by Mexican film-maker Guillermo del Toro, starring Sergi López i Ayats and Ivana Baquero.
The young girl played by Ivana Baquero is callously murdered by her sadistically brutal army captain stepfather played by Sergi López i Ayats.
In the midst of the Franquist repression following the Spanish Civil War, Banquero and her heavily pregnant and sick mother are relocated to an isolated farmstead from which her stepfather, the father of the unborn baby, intends to hunt down guerrillas fighting in the surrounding forested hills.
A lover of books and fairytales, Bamquero finds respite from her unhappy situation in the companionship of her stepfather's housekeeper and in the company of fantastic creatures that only she can see and that dwell in the underground grotto of some nearby labyrinthine ruins.
While the captain goes about his business of torture and murder, all the time more worried for the health of his unborn child than for that of his wife, Bamquero is set three tasks by the giant faun creature she first met in the grotto, which are to prove whether she is the long lost daughter of the king of the faun's underground home.
Life for Bamquero in the real world becomes unbearable when her mother dies in childbirth, and her friend the housekeeper is discovered by the captain to have been collaborating with the guerrilla fighters.
However, before the captain can begin his torture of her, the housekeeper is able to escape to join the guerrillas, disfiguring his face with the knife that she always carries tucked in her apron.
The final task that Bamquero must complete, is to secretly bring the newborn child to the faun. The fact that she is able to magically get through locked doors and impenetrable walls to accomplish this suggests that the fantastic world of the faun may not be just in Bamquero's imagination.
Nevertheless, ultimately Bamquero cannot bring herself to give up her innocent brother to the faun in order to enter the secret realm.
Unfortunately, when the captain eventually catches up with her, he shoots his stepdaughter dead after recovering the infant, although he himself is shot dead moments later when the massing guerrillas, led by the housekeeper, catch up with him.
As Bamquero lies dying, in her imagination she is reunited with her dead mother and her royal father in their underground kingdom, where she once again becomes the princess that the faun had recognised her to be.
So, what are we to make of such a universally praised (especially by one Mark Kermode writing for the Guardian newspaper, whose high opinion of the movie is only surpassed by his high opinion of his own opinions) and prize garnering creation?
Well, this is a fantasy film like no other, with absolutely no ambition to be a feel-good movie.
Without doubt the film represents the pinnacle of writer-director del Toro's small but mostly excellent body of work to date. It demonstrates a combination of film making skill and imagination that is perhaps second only to that of the great Terry Gilliam.
However, in exactly the same way that del Toro's youthful heroine is only able to cope with the brutal reality of her life by escaping into fantasy, the film's bloody and unremitting bleak setting in the brutality of the Spanish conflict is only made palatable by the distractingly fantastic, although similarly dark, flights of del Toro's imagination.
Perhaps that was exactly the director's intention.
Whether or not it was deliberate though, it is hard not to feel (and it is at this point that readers of a sensitive nature should turn back) that one has unwittingly consumed something the leaves such a bad taste in the mouth, that it might as well have been a candy covered turd.
Of course, there are plenty of other such cinematic confections on offer, but none that are as worthy of your consideration as this.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan%27s_Labyrinth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Gilliam
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