Each Day, A Film:
January 6th 2012
To be honest, I wanted to talk about The Beach today, and kick off a strange little Robert Carlyle marathon, but I haven't had time to rewatch it - and I plan on watching as many of the films I write about here, although of the five so far I didn't get the chance to watch Double Indemnity, but I've seen it enough that I felt comfortable writing about it anyway and damn but this is a long sentence - so instead, we're going to do something a little different.
Today is all about Not Quite Hollywood.
It's important to note that I love the strange, and the weird, when it comes to films. I had to explain this - albeit in the context of Bhangra and Bollywood music - to a recent friend. It's difficult for anyone born after, arguably, 1990 to quite understand, but when I grew up it was in a small town, with four TV channels, two radio stations other than the BBC channels, and if you wanted to listen to music other than what was on the charts you had to actually go and damn well find it, whippersnappers, the rain was never cold, everything was cheaper and love wasn't deadly, etc, etc, etc...
I joke, but it's a truth for me that - for good or bad - I recognised the necessity of searching out interesting and strange things, which meant failing as much as succeeding, of course. I lived in London for a while, but being terminally shy I didn't explore as much as I would have liked, so my searches were confined to Camden CD stores and receiving a ridiculous amount of free CDs as a 'student journalist' meant I didn't actually have to go that far for the new, the strange, and the occasionally crap.
The problem is that this sounds elitist, but nothing could be further from the truth; I listen to Radio 1, for instance, on a regular basis and have done for about twelve years, and I love mainstream music. At the same time, I love finding odd little cultural corners and bringing stuff out into the light.
This was before the culture flood, though. Culture Flood is another term I use loosely, but for me it denotes the period from when the value of CDs and DVDs started to drop to the increase in digital media sales - neither of which is a bad thing, but suddenly it's like swimming in an ocean rather than navigating a river; there's so much in every single direction that finding stuff becomes a completely random rather than a targeted proposition. Again, not a bad thing, because I like random, but now, frankly, I have no idea where to begin looking. This probably means it's time to go back to Camden, but even that's changed a little since I used to go there searching for CDs and strange accessories.
Anyway... A while ago, Not Quite Hollywood popped up on my radar, and was added to a wishlist, but nothing further really came of it until I finally got round to ordering a copy, but I wish I'd watched it earlier, to be honest, because it's an illumination of a world of filmmaking that probably rarely left Australia - and sometimes that looks like a bad thing - but it's a tale told with such happiness and seemingly happy - if occasionally conflicting - memories that it's impossible not to get carried along with the proceedings.
I wish I could find some of the quotes, but alas both my memory and IMDB fail me - although the discussion over whether George Lazenby (playing a villain) punched the hero of the film (who every single person describes as being an arsehole in real life) for real is entertaining, given that Lazenby swears he didn't and everyone else swears he did.
If you like things easily divided into sections, it's basically Sex, then Horror, then Cars, so if you're uncomfortable with nudity, you're basically screwed, but again, everyone gets in on the action, with actresses revealing they were happy to earn an extra $100 for stripping and directors talking about all manner of strange goings-on.
Also, what's quite refreshing is that Quentin Tarantino, while forming a nice touchstone within the documentary, isn't basically cut back to every five minutes because he's a big name; he's used as a handy reference point, but he's not revered, and that's all kinds of refreshing.
I've got no especial love for exploitation or grindhouse films, but damn if this documentary doesn't make them look like the most fun you can have with or without your clothes on, at the same time as lampshading the goings-on and leaving nobody unscathed. It's that kind of film where everyone smiles as they call everyone else and themselves a bastard.
It's a good documentary to talk about before the weekend, because if you see it you'll be left in a good mood for days.
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