Well I am off to see Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon at the BFI later meant to see it last night but was just too knackered after the LRC AGM. Crikey…I am getting old.
So I ended up at home, brain addled (still recovering from a sinus cold) slumped on the sofa watching Four Weddings and a Funeral. I saw that film twice in one week at the cinema way back in ‘94…. don’t ask! I didn’t mind it to a certain extent, well made bubble gum for the eye, though it had the stamp of the Richard Curtis annoying style of pompous dialogue…and the start of a franchise starring Hugh Grant.
Indeed…. I also remember going to the cinema around 2003 and seeing a trailer for Love Actually. Have experienced cheering, clapping and walk outs but never booing before. Once the trailer was shown there was immediate booing by the whole of the audience. I think people were suffering from Richard Curtis fatigue (and now he is writing Dr Who episodes). And the recent The Boat That Rocked sank without a trace… again I saw a trailer sans booing and it looked….in prosaic language… sexist shite…
The film I was seeing in 2003, if you are interested, was the wonderfully bittersweet and an exercise in alienation, Nói Albínói. A great antidote to the over blown and bloated, Love Actually….
I have great expectations regarding Haneke’s The White Ribbon…..
November 15, 2009 at 4:23 pm |
I saw Four Weddings in Woodford when it came out to a fanfare of enthusiastic reviews around the same time that you did. The mainly working class audience sat largely in silence apart from the odd raspberry and contemptuous guffaw. Leaving the cinema, the chief reaction was how crap it was and how did it get the positive write-up and how we all felt ripped off.
It was hard to miss the cynical way it was aimed at the American market with nothing we recognised as real life in Britainland. As for the token council estate represented in the movie, oh puh-leaze!