There is a chance that I'm the only person who woke up this week with the desire to see Revolver.
Such is life. When I was younger - so much younger than today - I saw Revolver after it had come out because, as I think I've covered in some previous entry somewhere, I really used to be deeply into Guy Ritchie's films. If you've seen Revolver, you may find this funny, especially given the dodginess of Jason Statham's facial hair choices in the film. Seriously, that Fu Man Chu mustache / stubble combo is intense. Revolver is, however, an interesting film - in my opinion - if you take it apart and consider the pieces, rather than the way they've been smooshed together. Visually, for instance, it's fascinating - the colour palette is amazing, because it's more than just the orange/blue spin the colour wheel and pick two opposites school of thinking. (That said, Ray Liotta does spend a lot of time in blue light - or with a blue filter on the shot - while he's ostensibly tanning.) There's also some innovative camerawork that needs paying heed to, also - especially during Sorter's very calm, very collected rampage towards the end, which is camerawork like you've never seen put together, where the camera never stops moving but the shot keeps changing (and the shots - a pun, or play on words - keep coming). It's also worth locating the film in the context of Strong's career, as an aside - after revolver, it's less Prime Suspect Six and more Syriana, Stardust and Sunshine, so there's an alphabetical moving-on as well as a stardom-related moving-up. You could say the same for André 3000 - and it just feels wrong to refer to him as André Benjamin - but in his case, his film career... Let's just not go there. It'll take you all of two clicks to check it out in Wikipedia, if you're so inclined. I really like Idlewild, but the rest... Revolver is, however, not universally loved. I like to pretend that the criticism about the 'pretensions' and the 'plot' are just veiled digs at Jason Statham's facial hair, but the fact is that the plot is a bit pretentious, but this is only a bad thing because it keeps trying to ground itself in a gangster story. Ostensibly there are two plotlines; - Green is out for revenge on Macha because Green's sister-in-law ended up dead following the last time they were involved - Green is trying to dissipate his id - which is named, I think, Sam Gold, although Sam Gold is a collective term for every character's id - by confronting his primal, fight-or-flight fight-or-fuck urges. Okay. Pretentious. The second one, however, is arguably the more interesting of the storylines, because it skips merrily away from consensus reality and moves the viewer into a world where two criminals - who may or may not exist - can vanish from their cells in solitary confinement without a trace, can predict the future (with a limited range) and can cure a man of a degenerative blood disease by making him donate his entire fortune to charity. It's all figurative, don't you know, because by ridding himself of his ill-gotten gains, Green is cleansing his karma (and doing so even more by displacing his largess onto his enemy for them to take the credit). Green, having spent his two years out of prison - - And yes, watching someone get released from prison then immediately cutting to black and Two Years Later is just plain cheeky - - making money using his ingenious con system taught to him by his maybe-cellmates, trapping the three people responsible for his sister-in-law's death in the web of their boss to their eventual detriment then demise and then walking up to his nemesis and winning a fortune from them on the flip of a chip, has technically rotten karma, and it's all because of his id. I don't know if I actually have to italicise id, but I'm enjoying doing so, so... If Mr Ritchie had simply played it out as a straight revenge tale - Snatch meets Ocean's Eleven - then it would have been just another cockney-ish gangster tale in his canon of gangster tales. If he'd taken it all the other way and just went for full-on Kabbalah mysticism, it would, in theory, have had even less of an audience. So in a way - in a roundabout way, although as much of a roundabout way as a driving tour in Milton Keynes - Revolver is the ideal, crazystrange mix of 'Themes Guy Ritchie Knows How To Do" and "Themes Guy Ritchie Was Interested In At The Time", or at least the right mix to draw an audience, however small. Here's something final to ponder on - using my atrophied film information-finding skills, Revolver has a slight weirdness to it's statistics. For one, I can't find out what the original budget was. The last film I ever had this trouble with was The Spirit. Don't ask. Seriously, don't ask. Spiraling out from this, consider that, according to my limited sources, Revolver had a box office of $84,738 in America, which is shocking. That's just under $1700 per state, or $0.0003 per person in the USA, although that's using the current population for the statistic, which is misleading. Were there just no Ray Liotta fans who wanted to see his arse on screen in blue lighting out there enough to justify a ticket to the film? Was it just not marketed, at all? Don't get me wrong, it went on to gross nearly $7 million in Overseas Territories, i.e. Not The USA, but still, I'm assuming that it cost more than seven and a half million to make, because it's so damn sparkly. Plus, it only cost me 80p to buy. It was worth the price.
It took a bit of time to get back into watching films. My attention span is not what it - - Ooh! Shiny! - - Where was I? Anyway. Part of my rehabilitation was watching so-bad-they're-maybe-good films. Another part has been trying to find out-of-the-way films. To explain this; I'm a huge William Gibson fan. Of his books, I'd put Pattern Recognition right up there as my favourite. Pattern Recognition's central character, Cayce Pollard, is fascinating on many levels, but one of these is that she has an allergic reaction to certain brands (in the primary instance, the Michelin Man). I don't claim anything as extreme as that, but I have started feeling less and less like going to see what you might un-ironically call 'mainstream cinema', partly because the story-lines tend to be... Guessable, I think, is the word. There's a whole debate to be had about the necessity of selling recognisable product - i.e. guaranteeing an audience with the promissory note that what they're going to see will fall within expected experience boundaries - which is fine and good. Really, it is fine and good, because you have to have a template that at least tries to guarantee a return on investors' money. It's getting a bit bad, though, because I now hate the idea of going to the cinema, and that makes me feel old. It also makes me feel like, say, a Methodist going to a Baptist church; the same religion, but completely different expectations. For instance; I know I'm not the only one to think this, although that doesn't help, but; is it so fucking difficult to turn off your smart phone in the cinema? If you're so in-demand and can't miss an email or your personal empire will crumble, why the fuck are you watching a film? Having a bright screen in your field-of-vision in a darkened cinema is just distracting as shit, really. Then there's your common-or-garden talkers, crunchers, and all-around depth and variety of humanity represented in the worst aspects of what people think they can get away with in public spaces. So cinemas are out, unless justifiable homicide has been put on the lawbooks here and I simply haven't noticed. This has led to me trawling my local CEX to find cheapjack films or less cheap films that are, in some way, off the beaten track. This is how I came to end up watching Red Hill.
If you're looking for the short verdict - and if you're looking for the short verdict and you've read this far, what the hell - then Red Hill is well worth watching. The trailer does a good job of making it look like a horror slash western, however, when it's really not. Spoilers from hereon out, in case you needed warning. The one main problem with Red Hill is narrative necessity. You have two divergent plot strands; a young police constable moving to the sticks for the quiet life, and a violent prisoner travelling back to the town to exact a bloody revenge on all the law therein. These just so happen to happen on the same day. In some ways, this may be a budgetary fact; to film an extra, say, twenty minutes to half-an-hour of Cooper adjusting to small-town life, getting to know people, settling in but not always sure of the secret below the town's surface would probably have cost too much and slowed the pacing down. So, fine. Narrative necessity demands that the escaped murderer - well, 'murderer' - comes to town on the same day the new policeman arrives. Such is life. I would take issue with one other neat piece of narrative causality, however; for a small town, Red Hill has almost no visible inhabitants. The only time you see more than, say, ten people at once, is at a church meeting at the beginning used to establish the Sheriff's character, where a lot of lineless extras sit in the church hall and clap and holler. After that, the most crowded scene is where the Sheriff rounds up his posse, and even then I'm struggling to remember if there were more than ten people there. After that, the townsfolk disappear, because there's a storm coming - so the storm warning is issued and everyone is told to hole up and hide - although the storm is, of course, also a metaphorical storm in the form of Jimmy. Jimmy is, arguably, the most fascinating character, even though he doesn't say a word until the final few minutes. He's portrayed as this force of nature sweeping into town to exact revenge on the people who wronged him in the worst possible way and made him pay the price for it. There's a slight story-line schism around Jimmy, however. Cooper's plot is kind of TV-movie big town cop in a small town, with all the cutesy that implies; but when Jimmy rides into town, that's all shelved and Cooper's elastic-band stretches further away from the main story-line until the end where it snaps back and draws him with it. Put it this way; out of narrative necessity, Cooper is knocked out and left in locations far away from the action twice, and has to work his way back into the main plotline. This means the pacing takes a knock here and there, but this is saved somewhat by the fact that the visuals are gorgeous. Seriously; any concerns about a tv-movie plot are taken care of by the cinematography. Occasionally the framing is a little weird, but otherwise it's amazing. So the main problem is that the two story-lines take a long time to mesh, and because of this neither really has any room to properly breathe and evolve; they both just kind of happen and then happen together. It doesn't help that Jimmy's story is arguably much more compelling than Cooper's, although that's a function of the revenge story-line versus the pastoral story-line, and it's kind of inevitable. It was worth, however, the £2 I paid for it. I fear this cannot be said for the next selection, for which - like an idiot - I paid £6 for even though it was never going to be worth that much;
