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Reviews
Start the Revolution Without Me (1970)
Absolute Merde
This film is as funny as a wet Monday morning on a lung cancer ward. Think Carry On Don't Lose Your Head with no funny jokes and a much larger budget. Fetch the tumbrels Robespierre. Orson Welles turns up at the start to announce "I'm not in it." One can almost hear the relief in his voice. His sonorous tones are restricted to repeating the same unfunny joke every few minutes. Who thought that saying "1789" over and over again was going to be funny? It isn't.
Gene Wilder can of course be extremely funny but his passive aggressive acting style can grate and this mess offers him no help. Donald Sutherland must have been mightily thankful that M*A*S*H came along in 1970 to showcase his talents as this tin bath of a movie had the potential to drown anyone's career.
The whole mess proves that you can have a talented cast and crew, sumptuous location shooting and all the other benefits that a decent budget affords in film land but if you have a bad script then you have a bad movie.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
Magnificent, Malevolent Destiny From Peter Weir
Some ideas from just having watched a masterpiece.
It's thirty years since I'd seen Picnic At Hanging Rock and I'd forgotten what a mesmerising experience it is. Peter Weirs' films were always mystical but no film I have ever seen can show so little and suggest so much. The film starts in 1900 but the new century will bring no vitality, optimism and happiness. This is a film about one woman's kismet.
Sara bookends the film. It is about her and the Picnic is no more to the film than a mocking reflection. When we first meet her the viewer is drawn to the idea that she is mute. We don't yet know that even when she does speak no-one will ever listen. Everything is just out of reach; from her poetry that nobody will ever hear (Mrs Appleby cuts her short after she attempts to read it aloud to her) to her unseen benefactors that never pay. Sara has a brother nearby that she never finds. The slight curl of her lip in a smile when she decides to commit suicide is again subtle. Unseen of course like the rest of her life. Not for nothing does the film start with a quote from Lewis Carroll, the epitome of a man reaching out for something he could never find. The rock is the only solid, eternal character of the film. Timelessly mocking human frailty and malevolent destiny. Everything else is mist.
I suspect Weir was a Thomas Hardy fan. Just as Hardy's Tess leaves the earth by a distant flag hanging silently, so does Sara in her own suicide. And symbolically she was never allowed to attend the picnic which lends the film its title. Yet at the very end the last frame is of Miranda, lost to all but really vicariously doomed through Sara's love for her. Everything that Sara touches must perish. Her love for Miranda, Mrs Appleby's guilt-ridden suicide on the Rock, the other "masculine minded" character Miss McCraw - Mrs Appleby's quote. The torn fragment of dress is of course never matched to any girl. Miranda's? We can guess but of course that will always be out of reach. We hear torn fragments of Beethoven. We see a swan for a few seconds, the symbol of white chastity. Sara will die a white clad virgin.
Sara is metaphorically killed by the Rock and all who physically perish there do so through association with her. The last frame shows Miranda but we are seeing Sara's death as well.
Absolutely magnificent.
R.
Side by Side (1975)
In Reply To World Of Weird
The actual quote is "There's something about a girl's neck that really turns me on!" It is spoken by Billy Boyle to Stephanie De Sykes when she takes him back to her flat to watch the sublime Noosha Fox (a.k.a. Susan Traynor) and the eponymous band warble "Imagine Me Imagine You" and a year before Fox's S-S-Single Bed. A Marlene Dietrich for the pineapple and cheese on a stick cocktail generation.
Any film featuring a blacked up Barry Humphreys and The Rubettes is fine by me. A great double bill of early to mid seventies nostalgia would be to watch this with Never To Young To Rock, another celluloid wallow in Glam Rock with Dave Mount, a bewildered looking Freddie Jones and Peter "seperated at birth from Mud's Rob Davies" Denyer. Please Sir can I have some more?
Best watched through the dimpled meniscus of a pint jug filled from a Watneys Party Seven and some Golden Wonder Cheese And Onion crisps.
EBC1: Emu's Broadcasting Company (1975)
ebc1
I also remember the weekly series within the programme, The Emudin Line (Emu would lower a whisk into the water from inside a boat and it would travel along at a fair rate of knots) and the terrifying Dr Emu and the Deadly Dustbins. Thank goodness the dustmen's strike in the winter of discontent ended before the dustbins could take over the world.