January 15th 2012 (Retrospective)
In point of fact, I hadn't realised how my tastes had realigned from loving the Bond films to finding them at best fun exercises and at worst reprehensible.
It's strange how things change.
At the same time, it's probably time to move on from Bond - at least temporarily - to talk about a film that, thirteen years on, I love equally as much as the first time I saw it as part of a film marathon in a student room in a long-since-gone tower block in far-East-London.
That film is Plunkett and Macleane.
Now, here's a mildly diverting exercise: first, watch the British trailer, then watch the American trailer. Interesting, no? The first is a meta-deprecatory pisstake of the British period film, the second film tries to make it look like a buddy comedy with some social commentary attached and the swearing edited out.
Well, I found it interesting.
This is probably going to kick off a series of film 'discussion' centred around personal experience, so I'm going to start that way in the hope of carrying on that way.
But before we get into that, let's take the film apart, because there are so many weird elements sparking against each other that it's a wonder the film stock didn't catch fire. Firstly, yes, there's Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller, fresh from Trainspotting. Then there's
On top of this, Ridley Scott's son, Jake, seems to have taken on the film as a kind of inverse career trajectory - currently, the way things are done is apparently to direct the hell out of hundreds of music videos then get a film, a lá Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, et al. Jake Scott, however, directed the film and now ostensibly does what he loves, i.e. music video projects, in between working on what's apparently titled the "HBO Voyeur Project". No, seriously, it's on his IMDB page - go check it out. I'll wait.
So there are lots of weird little sparks and chemistry actions going on, and on top of that you have the music of Craig Armstrong, who appears to have hit his stride in scoring terms at just the wrong moment, because the music is something like 125% more epic than the film - although that's not a bad thing, because the music improves the film immeasurably. There are two pieces from it that I currently still even now listen to on repeat;
Don't ask me why, but these two pieces of music are, for me (and probably only me), perfection - some strange synthesis of period and house.
So the first time I saw the film was with a friend of the time - who's still technically a friend, although I haven't seen him in maybe a decade, now that I come to think of it, which is a little sad - who was, at the time, a Rich Student. You know the type; no worries about money, no worries about people not knowing he had no worries about money, kind of laid back. He was - and most likely still is - a good person, but people did treat him like a rich kid.
So one evening we decided to - I'm assuming, and it's probably a fairly accurate assumption - get some beer and some crisps in and sit down to watch four films in a pokey student room on the ninth floor of a student tower-block hall of residence (that was, rumour had it, on a 1.5% incline, but what can you do.)
Right now, I'm honestly trying to remember all four films that we watched; I know that, obviously, Plunkett and Macleane was in there, and I think we finished with the South Park film, but as for the others... I think one was Go, and I want to say that the other was Snatch - or maybe The Beach - but it saddens me that I can't place them with any particular accuracy.
After that, I believe I saw Plunkett and Macleane at least once more in the next student house - shared with the same person and a few others - and then came graduation, the real world, etc.
And then one day I found a copy in a charity shop for, I believe, £1.99, and fell in love with it all over again. Now, let's be honest, it's not a film that's due any particular kudos or respect or that will win any awards. Nobody who likes period films will watch it, because it spends the majority of it's time taking the piss out of them; nobody who likes action films will watch it, because it looks like a period film. But the middle of that Venn diagram attracts the curious and the strange, and I'm both, really.
Of course, for me it's partly nostalgia, which is something that never quite goes away. Which is why I'm writing about it on a Friday night, late, when I should by all societal norms be drunk, or curled up with a willing woman, or doing anything other than writing.
But here I am. So get ready for some more trips down memory lane, barely articulated and overly-nostalgic as they are.
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