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Reaching out
Battleship Potemkin certainly left a mark as being particularly grim.
en.m.wikipedia.org
What’s the grimmest, bleakest or most pessimistic film or tv show you’ve ever seen?
- Thread starter Orang Utan
- Start date
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Female Trouble by John Waters is now up there for me.
It's a grower. I saw it at the cinema a couple of months ago and its unremitting pessimism is only now really hitting me.
It's a grower. I saw it at the cinema a couple of months ago and its unremitting pessimism is only now really hitting me.
mwgdrwg
Be a Pisces. Jam.
I don't believe it!
Here's some words from Mike Hodges about his film 'Get Carter' (1971)...
"Soon after its release in 1972, the film was banished to the dark shadows of cult status. It was, after all, not considered a very nice film here in the UK. But then most of my films have been more appreciated beyond these shores, particularly in the US and France. That changed when, in 2009, the BFI decided to release it again; albeit in a limited way. This time around I think British audiences found the endemic corruption intimated in its every frame more acceptable. By then their rose-tinted glasses were off. [In 2009] We no longer saw our country as a beacon of propriety, and law and order. Our parliamentarians, police, press, the whole damn edifice, had been found wanting. They all had their noses in the money trough. The cancer of greed had reached every organ of British society. Maybe, just maybe, 'Get Carter' had been an accidental augury?"
Just about everything in 'Get Carter' is grim, nothing is glamomous - the storyline, the characters, the violence, the porn, the architecture, the environment, early-70s Newcastle itself, the abandoned industry, the weather, the physical and metaphorical mess.
Not a single character comes out of it well. You know from the very start that everybody in it is doomed in one way or another. Few of the characters generate any sympathy (a young Alun Armstrong getting a kicking he probably doesn't deserve, maybe). The only character who is portrayed as honourable or likeable is Jack Carter's brother, and he's already dead before the film even starts. The only line of humour I can remember is shortly after Bronby has been lobbed off the top of Trinity Square car-park, with one of the architects saying "I don't think we're going to get our fees on this one".
There's none of the glamour or riches or material rewards that you glimpse in other gangster films - whether 'The Long Good Friday', 'Goodfellas', 'The Godfather' trilogy or even the shallow lad stuff like 'Lock Stock'. And that is it.
Still Michael Caine's greatest film though.
"Soon after its release in 1972, the film was banished to the dark shadows of cult status. It was, after all, not considered a very nice film here in the UK. But then most of my films have been more appreciated beyond these shores, particularly in the US and France. That changed when, in 2009, the BFI decided to release it again; albeit in a limited way. This time around I think British audiences found the endemic corruption intimated in its every frame more acceptable. By then their rose-tinted glasses were off. [In 2009] We no longer saw our country as a beacon of propriety, and law and order. Our parliamentarians, police, press, the whole damn edifice, had been found wanting. They all had their noses in the money trough. The cancer of greed had reached every organ of British society. Maybe, just maybe, 'Get Carter' had been an accidental augury?"
Just about everything in 'Get Carter' is grim, nothing is glamomous - the storyline, the characters, the violence, the porn, the architecture, the environment, early-70s Newcastle itself, the abandoned industry, the weather, the physical and metaphorical mess.
Not a single character comes out of it well. You know from the very start that everybody in it is doomed in one way or another. Few of the characters generate any sympathy (a young Alun Armstrong getting a kicking he probably doesn't deserve, maybe). The only character who is portrayed as honourable or likeable is Jack Carter's brother, and he's already dead before the film even starts. The only line of humour I can remember is shortly after Bronby has been lobbed off the top of Trinity Square car-park, with one of the architects saying "I don't think we're going to get our fees on this one".
There's none of the glamour or riches or material rewards that you glimpse in other gangster films - whether 'The Long Good Friday', 'Goodfellas', 'The Godfather' trilogy or even the shallow lad stuff like 'Lock Stock'. And that is it.
Still Michael Caine's greatest film though.
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
Jude Rogers also wrote this in The Quietus - excellent article:Radio 4 is doing a thing about Threads on 21 September.
‘The most horrific, sobering thing I’ve ever seen’: BBC nuclear apocalypse film Threads 40 years on
Ahead of a timely re-airing of Mick Jackson’s famously bleak docudrama, its director recalls why he unleashed a mushroom cloud on Sheffield in 1984www.theguardian.com
Surviving Threads: Why Are People Drawn To The World's Most Harrowing Film? | The Quietus
Threads mega fan Jude Rogers asks why such a positive community has sprung up around what is probably the world's most harrowing film
thequietus.com
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
Reading that prompted me to find this Leeds & The Bomb pamphlet online:
It was given out to all and sundry in 1983, so I would have been 10.
Me and my friends were obsessed with that leaflet! It probably had more impact on me than any book I’d read.
We would pore over this map in particular:
Most of us were lucky enough to live in the red and orange zones, and we’d tease the posher kids who lived in the yellow and white zones as we’d get vaporised instantly and they’d survive longer but get radiation sickness and suffer terribly like Jim & Hilda in When The Wind Blows.
It was given out to all and sundry in 1983, so I would have been 10.
Me and my friends were obsessed with that leaflet! It probably had more impact on me than any book I’d read.
We would pore over this map in particular:
Most of us were lucky enough to live in the red and orange zones, and we’d tease the posher kids who lived in the yellow and white zones as we’d get vaporised instantly and they’d survive longer but get radiation sickness and suffer terribly like Jim & Hilda in When The Wind Blows.
Nine Bob Note
Self-Isolating before it was fashionable
We were told in school in the years following the end of the USSR that Barrow would have been a first strike target and as such everyone would have been very dead with no chance of survival. I'm sure as kids we took some pride that our famously shitty town was clearly so feared by a mighty enemy. I remind myself of that whenever I contemplate buying generators, water-purification tablets or other such shit off Amazon 
PTK
Paul Kegan
I can't download from the link, as it may pose a security risk. Who produced this leaflet?
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
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