There is a delicious insouciance to be had watching Michael Winner at work. His mastery of the cinematic rhetoric and peerless ability to blend biting black comedy and social satire with intricate, subversive drama, coupled with a parody of the presumptive disorder of contemporary movie-going make him nothing less than Britain's answer to Verhoeven.
It is of course the tragedy of Winner's career that he has arrived at a time when hardly anyone is clever enough to appreciate the brilliance. Where other writer/producer/editor/directors (and who can name many!) insist on superficial shifts of idiom each time they make a film - one cringes at the thought of Winterbottom and Egoyan - Winner has approached the cinema with a ferocious dexterity that threatens to shake the foundations of the medium. His rhetoric - the wronged avenging the scum in a series of caustic execution set pieces - has delivered numerous cine-riches. Simply, Winner is a storyteller whose genius is to keep telling the same story.
In the powerfully conceived `Death Wish' for example, Winner staked his claim as the vigilante-dude and the world half-choked on his brilliance. This was particularly pertinent since the transatlantic hack Martin Scorsese had recently unveiled his plethora of filth, `Taxi Driver', a seething piece of self-narcissism on the part of its sickening `creator'. In what would emerge as merely the first of many tedious misunderstandings, the stupid critics who dissed Winner actually preferred the yellow-car film. The threat had Scorsese scuttling off to waste his time on bloated musical vehicles such as `New York New York' and `The Last Waltz', which represented vomit rather than filmmaking, projected at 24 bursts per second at that. No such tossing around for Winner. He is a bastion of proper cinema and made a real film like `Won Ton Ton, The Dog Who Saved Hollywood'.
Returning to his preferred themes with such subtly evocative pieces as `Firepower' and `Death Wish II', Winner's milieu began to deepen and enrich the palette of his lucky viewer. I marvel at his ability to tease the preconceptions while giving the enjoyment bone a most satisfying tickle. Each time Winner spins another stand-here-while-I-kill-you-filth-monger yarn, he deepens his audience's understanding for both the material and the power inherent in cinema itself to undercut the value system of not just society but a collective consciousness, informed or otherwise.
For me the 1990s have been his most rewarding decade yet. So deftly has he proved that his punch can be packed in the days of the precocious upstart (go back to Film School David and Paul) that other so-called filmmakers have blushed in humble gratitude at the Mighty Mike. Granted `Bullseye!' (1991) is hardly vintage Winner, but who else could have come back from such a mauling with a piece of work like `Dirty Weekend'? One might of course subtitle the film Death Wish VIII, but it would be a chronic error. Beneath the muck lies a liberating, staunchly pro-feminist slant on the tale, lending the film a raw, lifelike quality that no amount of excrement-munching and choked fellatio attempts and could sweeten. Once again, even after 32 years, the powers-that-be did not understand. They are dumb.
The response for Winner was a 6 year absence from the business. In an act of almost offensively brilliant self-deprecation; Winner filled the time writing about waiters, being smug and generally letting people laugh at him. What else could have possibly led to the creation of `Parting Shots', a film so good that my face has blisters on it?
Where can I begin to describe just how good this film is?
Firstly I should begin with how bad it is. Of course I don't really think it's bad, but it is necessary to see why Winner was so devilish as to make a film that has all the surface appeal of a turd party. The reason is this; post-modernism begins with Michael Winner. He is the inventor, purveyor and instigator of this purely cinematic phenomenon. The question then: how does an archly brilliant post-modernist respond to accusations he is an appalling waste of time, 30 years out of date? Answer: he makes a film which is both and laughs his fat gourmet-crunching arse off at the same time. Returning with a baby-belter of a movie (cutter Crust is back too), Winner combined his twin career-pillars of mass murder and knockabout comedy to awesome effect, essentially summarising his work to date and affording long-time devotees a chance to glimpse the future of cinema.
Winner paints a haunting, ethereal landscape of memory and loss; dreams failed and lives squandered to the mire of a country lost in regression and hypocrisy. Rea's Harry is the archetypal Winner anti-hero writ anamorphic. A wedding photographer. He simply records the still moments of other people's happiness whilst his own has slipped by him like a soft liquid. It is great fun to see Harry killing people who have annoyed him because everyone has enemies in their life who they want dead. Like his director, he turns murder in to a new kind of art form, breathlessly contemporary, yet somehow timeless in its piquant beauty.
There were a great many occasions during the film when I felt a lump in my throat, often several. The opening scene when Harry is told he has 6 weeks to live is one of the most devastating openings in modern cinema, rivalled only by `Apocalypse Now' and `Manika, une vie plus tard'. Other non-sequetant jellyfish moments include Harry telling Bob Hoskins that his swimming pool is half his before drowning him, saying,
`You can 'ave the bottom 'alf'.
It's just so good. Also funny is Oliver Reed as well as John Cleese who I like. The ending is such a subversive, head-stoking success that I wondered if I could have done it better myself, even if I had an extra brain. Michael Winner is a man for our time and the time of our children. I love him. I love him.
I love him.
It is of course the tragedy of Winner's career that he has arrived at a time when hardly anyone is clever enough to appreciate the brilliance. Where other writer/producer/editor/directors (and who can name many!) insist on superficial shifts of idiom each time they make a film - one cringes at the thought of Winterbottom and Egoyan - Winner has approached the cinema with a ferocious dexterity that threatens to shake the foundations of the medium. His rhetoric - the wronged avenging the scum in a series of caustic execution set pieces - has delivered numerous cine-riches. Simply, Winner is a storyteller whose genius is to keep telling the same story.
In the powerfully conceived `Death Wish' for example, Winner staked his claim as the vigilante-dude and the world half-choked on his brilliance. This was particularly pertinent since the transatlantic hack Martin Scorsese had recently unveiled his plethora of filth, `Taxi Driver', a seething piece of self-narcissism on the part of its sickening `creator'. In what would emerge as merely the first of many tedious misunderstandings, the stupid critics who dissed Winner actually preferred the yellow-car film. The threat had Scorsese scuttling off to waste his time on bloated musical vehicles such as `New York New York' and `The Last Waltz', which represented vomit rather than filmmaking, projected at 24 bursts per second at that. No such tossing around for Winner. He is a bastion of proper cinema and made a real film like `Won Ton Ton, The Dog Who Saved Hollywood'.
Returning to his preferred themes with such subtly evocative pieces as `Firepower' and `Death Wish II', Winner's milieu began to deepen and enrich the palette of his lucky viewer. I marvel at his ability to tease the preconceptions while giving the enjoyment bone a most satisfying tickle. Each time Winner spins another stand-here-while-I-kill-you-filth-monger yarn, he deepens his audience's understanding for both the material and the power inherent in cinema itself to undercut the value system of not just society but a collective consciousness, informed or otherwise.
For me the 1990s have been his most rewarding decade yet. So deftly has he proved that his punch can be packed in the days of the precocious upstart (go back to Film School David and Paul) that other so-called filmmakers have blushed in humble gratitude at the Mighty Mike. Granted `Bullseye!' (1991) is hardly vintage Winner, but who else could have come back from such a mauling with a piece of work like `Dirty Weekend'? One might of course subtitle the film Death Wish VIII, but it would be a chronic error. Beneath the muck lies a liberating, staunchly pro-feminist slant on the tale, lending the film a raw, lifelike quality that no amount of excrement-munching and choked fellatio attempts and could sweeten. Once again, even after 32 years, the powers-that-be did not understand. They are dumb.
The response for Winner was a 6 year absence from the business. In an act of almost offensively brilliant self-deprecation; Winner filled the time writing about waiters, being smug and generally letting people laugh at him. What else could have possibly led to the creation of `Parting Shots', a film so good that my face has blisters on it?
Where can I begin to describe just how good this film is?
Firstly I should begin with how bad it is. Of course I don't really think it's bad, but it is necessary to see why Winner was so devilish as to make a film that has all the surface appeal of a turd party. The reason is this; post-modernism begins with Michael Winner. He is the inventor, purveyor and instigator of this purely cinematic phenomenon. The question then: how does an archly brilliant post-modernist respond to accusations he is an appalling waste of time, 30 years out of date? Answer: he makes a film which is both and laughs his fat gourmet-crunching arse off at the same time. Returning with a baby-belter of a movie (cutter Crust is back too), Winner combined his twin career-pillars of mass murder and knockabout comedy to awesome effect, essentially summarising his work to date and affording long-time devotees a chance to glimpse the future of cinema.
Winner paints a haunting, ethereal landscape of memory and loss; dreams failed and lives squandered to the mire of a country lost in regression and hypocrisy. Rea's Harry is the archetypal Winner anti-hero writ anamorphic. A wedding photographer. He simply records the still moments of other people's happiness whilst his own has slipped by him like a soft liquid. It is great fun to see Harry killing people who have annoyed him because everyone has enemies in their life who they want dead. Like his director, he turns murder in to a new kind of art form, breathlessly contemporary, yet somehow timeless in its piquant beauty.
There were a great many occasions during the film when I felt a lump in my throat, often several. The opening scene when Harry is told he has 6 weeks to live is one of the most devastating openings in modern cinema, rivalled only by `Apocalypse Now' and `Manika, une vie plus tard'. Other non-sequetant jellyfish moments include Harry telling Bob Hoskins that his swimming pool is half his before drowning him, saying,
`You can 'ave the bottom 'alf'.
It's just so good. Also funny is Oliver Reed as well as John Cleese who I like. The ending is such a subversive, head-stoking success that I wondered if I could have done it better myself, even if I had an extra brain. Michael Winner is a man for our time and the time of our children. I love him. I love him.
I love him.