Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I thought the film was great but you're right, it was pretty much an episode of I'm Alan Partridge that lasted for 90 minutes instead of 30.

Saxondale from, what 10 or 12 years ago was quite good too, although again the character felt a bit like typically Cooganish awkwardness left to run on cruise control. In fact the character was almost a cross between Partridge and the real Steve Coogan, I thought, with the obvious love of fast cars and frequent hints of a debauched and druggy past.

Not seen 24PP but I really want to see it now.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Can't believe you've not seen it. I may be wrong, but I imagine you'd be into it. There are some truly great comic set pieces, and Coogan as Wilson is one of the most self-casting roles ever. Collapses the gap between myth and reality on purpose, which is the only way most biopics can escape being unbearable
 
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Leo

Well-known member
version, you're convincing me to give it a chance. liked season one, never watched season two based on reviews, been hesitant to watch three.
 

Leo

Well-known member
is it uncool in the uk to like fleabag? too popular at this point? binged series 2 last night, thought it was pretty good. women love it, that's for sure.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
What's the Refn thing about? Had a Google but info fairly scarce. Probably nothing like all his later stuff. I'll definitely watch it, I love pretty much everything he's done.
Fleabag; I watched the first series and thought it was pretty good. Certainly ambitious but I'm not sure it always worked. I get the impression the second series might be better but I haven't bothered.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
The Refn thing looks ace, perfect timing as I've been in the mood for more Lynchian LA Noir ever since watching Silver Lake, a whole series of precisely that made by one of my favourite directors is just too good.
 

version

Well-known member
What's the Refn thing about?

Too Old to Die Young review - Nicolas Winding Refn's dead-eyed LA nightmare - https://www.theguardian.com/film/20...-nicolas-winding-refns-dead-eyed-la-nightmare

The show is every bit as hypnotically horrible and upsetting as you would expect, with terse lines, tense pauses, dead-eyed glares, all conducted at the andante pace of a zombie continuing to move after being shot – and delivering a doomy, sepulchral, and very plausible evocation of pure evil. Despite its occasional forays into the fierce sunshine of California and New Mexico, this is a creature of the night, lit by neon, an underworld of madness and fear. The two episodes shown here allow only for a partial understanding of what is supposed to be going on, but it’s clearly influenced by Lynch and Tarantino, and like Refn’s bygone horror Only God Forgives, there is a sense memory of the corridor of blood that Travis Bickle will walk down in Taxi Driver. And the hero himself is a little like Ryan Gosling’s implacable wheelman in Refn’s Drive, from 2011.
 

Leo

Well-known member
ever since watching Silver Lake, a whole series of precisely that made by one of my favourite directors is just too good.

what show is this? googled the name but what I found didn't seem to match up with your description.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
what show is this? googled the name but what I found didn't seem to match up with your description.
Yeah I wasn't clear maybe, I meant the film Under The Silver Lake... I'm saying that the Refn thing seems like a series of more of the same but possibly it sounded like I was talking about the film.

Under the Silver Lake is a 2018 American neo-noir mystery film written, produced and directed by David Robert Mitchell. Set in Los Angeles, it follows a young man (Andrew Garfield) who sets out on a quest to investigate the sudden disappearance of his neighbour (Riley Keough), only to stumble upon an elusive and dangerous large-scale conspiracy.


 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Just now been watching the US tv show What We Do In The Shadows, it's a kinda spin-off of the NZ film of the same name, one of the few funny films of the last few years. The series (with Matt Berry and loads of British actors) is not as good as the film - just not quite as sharp somehow - but it creates quite a satisfying world of vampires in NY and has its moments. Wellington Paranormal which is another spin-off from the same film is a lot better though, that really is fucking funny.
 

DLaurent

Well-known member
Twin Peaks with my sister and brother in law. First time they've seen it. I forgot how much filler there is. The bits about the mill business are dull. I wanted it to get to the red room already. So my brother in law got bored of it (kept falling asleep) and suggested we watch The Virtues (Shane Meadows thing) instead. It's as I expected two episodes in. Kitchen sink stuff. Though will be watching it throughout. Glad to hear about the new Refn thing as it will give me something I wanna watch with them.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Beyond Alienation

A minor Made in Chelsea squadron has been dispatched to the shores of Croatia for limpid summer romance, a rather dilapidated and dilatory expedition, the underlying shabbiness of which is somewhat disguised by the soft haze and bleached colours deployed by the post-production team.

The endless drifting episodes of this social drama since 2011 have produced diminishing and yet oddly rewarding returns: new generations are drafted in to mingle with seasoned veterans, and the newer and younger they are, the less distinguishing features they present: the blondes multiply, get goofier, gently plumier; the venal lads lesser snakes than their forbears, little adders slithering around in the wake of that old Boa Constrictor Spencer Matthews. The big chief in Croatia is Jamie Lang, the village idiot who peddles boiled sweets on the back of his family biscuit fortune. Somehow, the effects of these meaningless, recycling personal schisms and couplings are compounded over time; it becomes richer and more interesting by blank default.

It is still as gripping as it ever was, as it gets even emptier and even more vague and pointless. That's the logic of the thing: a hollow drift of non-events that simulate the motion of emotions, seem to suggest forward momentum, things happening that you cannot actually recall happening one minute after switching over to the rolling disaster that is the Ten 'O Clock News. The traumas add up to nothing even though they break like atmospheric ruptures in the weird psychic meteorology of these fabricated, yet existing, cliques. The dwarf stars that glide through the show now exist in a pretty strange place, acting out their lives like we all do but in a more extreme way, but without anything extreme (like unemployment or illness) actually happening to any of them. Being on TV is not even a big thing for them, simply another component in their surface self-actualization.

Sophie "Habbs" Habboo has just ditched perpetual goon Sam Thompson, but it's hard to even determine what effect this had on her if any: it was just a plot point in her summer, which happened to coincide with the filming of the Croatia junket, for which it was scheduled neatly in the first place. This is a complicated way to live. Habbs is self-employed, an entrepreneur; her job is that new thing, the CV staple that is The Social Media Influencer, a role she crafted on the back of a degree in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, surely a legitimate way to use such a qualification. Her zone of influence is her Instagram account, upon which she reclines in expensive bikinis, skirts and drapes, gripping niche beauty products and fellow Made in Chelsea cast members, and friends. In her friction-less negotiation of tangled layers of reality and fiction -- emotional murmurs at the service of self-presentation/self-fashioning -- she is the latest exemplar of the Made in Chelsea condition that was once given the definitive model by the legendary Oliver Proudlock.

Proudlock -- HIMSELF! -- perfected the semi-detached exploitation of the reality soap platform, as he was quietly and proudly exploited by it, to pimp his own entrepreneurial ambitions that found their ultimate locus on his multi-platform ego-site, pushing his art and fashion label, and presenting the infamous "What is Proudlock wearing today?" blog that was an unintentionally comic take on the i-D straight up format. This was all achieved with some easy and even admirable aplomb. Proudlock was so self-conscious that he lacked any and all sense of self-awareness, let alone irony. Who can forget the episode when he turned up in a bespoke, skinny three piece tartan suit, personally dictated to his long-suffering tailor; part Helmut Berger in The Damned, part Rupert the Bear. Nobody could match the innovative chutzpah; he was a mere sideman on the show, but distilled its pure essence.

Maybe there is nothing wrong with this at such innocent, extreme points, like Proudlock. There was no crisis in this, none of the existential angst displayed by Donald Trump in his psychotic Twitter war with the forces of the Mainstream Media, a fight to the death to wrest control of his self-image. Proudlock and Habbs can do this without any internal turbulence whatsoever; they don't even seem to be surprised, let alone confused, by the spectral, multi-layered lives they now lead. They cannot be said to be unreal, even as they shed huge chunks of their identity to whatever notion of reality can be said to be left to navigate. But then, almost everybody does that now, to a greater or lesser extent, outside of war zones or rain forests or remote peasant tundra.

Made in Chelsea is a long way beyond alienation: Antonioni minus Marx. It began like this in 2011, when things were even less strange and displaced than they are now, although we do not seem to have moved on many mental inches, even though it feels and looks like a new paradigm of unreality. In some ways it is not even that far from the society dynamics, egotistical gymnastics and forced coincidences of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time novel cycle, but way more condensed and missing the political and historical context. The principal, invariable mise en scene of Made in Chelsea is the chance meeting by some lovely Edwardian railings on an elegant Chelsea or Pimlico street, in the New London where you would never see a Quentin Crisp parading blind with mascara and dumb with lipstick on those streets anymore*. What a surprise! Fancy meeting you here, of all people at this time is this Megalopolis. Otherwise, events occur in specially selected and advertised eateries, boutiques and bars around town, a hi-gloss/glazy backdrop to engineered encounters, couplings and traumas that spill onto the gossip pages and Daily Mail online and actually overlap with lives conducted in a liminal fashion that are not at all radical or even postmodern as they might have seemed, or even been, in 1982, when this was a future, theoretical fantasy.

Habbs and Jamie Biscuits are now a couple. It's a social eclipse.
 
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