GJBMarsh Reviews

Obsessed (1992 TV Movie)

Utter tripe

[18 May 2000]

This film has only one redeeming feature. It contains some extremely trite and hilariously cheesy montage footage of People Doing Things.

Apart from that, don't watch it. Do something, anything, else. Really, almost anything. Even cleaning your toenails. Twice.

You will save yourself a small part of your life.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Garbage. Worse than garbage.

[18 February 2000]

There are occasionally films which do not only make one revaluate a genre, but indeed society and culture in toto. This is one of those films. Were it to have achieved such a feat intentionally or even directly, sincere praise might be appropriate. In fact it does not. Rather, this film demonstrates clearly the extraordinary stupidity and the implausibly high tolerance for mass market publicity that we have come to accept as normal.

I will concede that qua conceptual art, there may be admitted some defence of originality in this work. In all other respects, it is entirely without redeeming feature.

The Matrix (1999)

Vastly overrated American derivative trash

[18 February 2000]

Anyone who has seen this film and raved about it, please re-consider: does it contain anything unique? No. Is it innovative? No. Is it exciting? Perhaps, but only because you are acclimated to MTV rather than to intelligent film-making.

Avoid. Or failing that, ridicule.

In the Company of Men (1997)

Highly intelligent, highly subversive

[3 August 1999]

While many of the stock emotional issues have been covered by others' comments, I feel many have overlooked the film's acid satirical wit and its anti-capitalist undertones.

"In the Company of Men" is not, primarily, about the way men and women behave but rather is about exposing the deep hypocrisy inherent in the way corporate culture and modern Western society essentially rewards precisely those characteristics which in the same breath it purports to censure. If these men are 'evil', they are simply doing what they must to survive. As the last line testifies, 'I can sell pretty much as well as anybody' - selling is about winning at somebody else's expense: definitively so.

The strong emotional response to the film that many viewers have is entirely controlled - not only is it intended to generate a localised disgust for the behaviour of the protagonists but it is further intended to satirise the culture that rewards such behaviour: we are being encouraged to generalise our moral disgust.

So every scene is shot like a glossy sales pitch, smooth surfaces, corporate anonymity, we buy the dream, we become complicit (if we are not already) so become as morally decrepit as Chad, as Howard.

It is a mistake to see Christine as the final victim - she is not. She is merely a victim. The ultimate victim is of course Howard who Chad deliberately played in order that he might triumph, in order that he might take the other man's job, in order that he might win. The suggestion is implicit: he destroyed his colleague's work so that he would be demoted, he 'played along' with his heartache so that he could be rendered mute.

So we see Howard and Christine through the windows of a card, through the windows of an Office, as animals in a zoo. Just as when Howard first entered he looked in the mirror, so he is left finally blinded, muted, destroyed. All those tall buildings with all that glass and we can't see inwards: perhaps that is the reason why.

"Show me your balls." Sadistic only as far as any of us are 'responsible' for our own selfishness - that here is portrayed as another myth. Rather, such selfishness is exposed in a highly intelligent and thought-provoking film as no more than a manifestation of the behaviour necessary, expected and highly rewarded in a fundamentally amoral capitalist system.

As a work of cinema, the film suffers, as do so many good films, from being too clever by half for the majority of its potential audience. If his film is emotionally bleak, LaBute is seeking only to reflect the amorality of his subject.

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977)

Hugely overrated rubbish

[3 August 1999]

I'll keep this short: there is no greater attestation to the essential intellectual vacuity of the vast majority of the population of the developed world than the success of the film "Star Wars".

Why will people persist in confusing film as an art form and film as a medium of mindless entertainment. How can Star Wars possibly be rated on the same scale as films like Citizen Kane.

A Short Film About Love (1988)

One of the most sensitive and powerful depictions of love ever committed to film.

[10/10 · 18 September 1998]

Unlike the other masterpiece in his Decalogue, Killing, in 'A Short Film About Love' Kieslowski treats the subject of love with an extraordinarily delicate, rather than a polemic, eye. As ever he manages to express more with subtlety than most directors ever will with expression: it is rather what is not said, what is not expressed, that leaves an indelible mark upon us.

Olaf Lubaszenko's central performance as the boy is, rather than 'opaque' as it has been termed, engrossing from the start. His innocence and fragility, just like the film's, are an invitation to the intimacy we progressively acquire. We, the film's audience, watch engrossed and exposed just as does he, and, in another sense, does the subject of his observations. His telescope becomes a direct motif; distance, separation, enlargement: all the things the filmmaker provides for the viewer. Thus, at emotional, intellectual and metacinematic levels the film explores its themes: observation and love.

While it may not come to solid conclusions (nor ought it to), the sensitivity with which the director watches his actors is utterly compelling. The resultant negotiation between man and women, subject and observer, viewer and filmmaker is a relationship, a love affair. Perhaps Barthes might have sought to go further, waiting for the end of the film, its 'death', to find psychological and sexual consummation to such an affair, and the film may support such a reading. Even a far less academic approach is sufficient, however, in order to enjoy the work at it appears at face value. We do not need to analyse in order to feel, and it is the film's emotional impact that remains when our brief voyeurism, our visit to the cinema, ends.