Some pretty weird shit Christmas telly viewing. In short: we didn’t watch any Christmas telly. It’s crap. Yeah, yeah - quite an overstatement. I still can’t resist bingeing on Eastenders.
Dig a little deeper on the iPlayer and there’s a glorious run of classic Christmas Eastenders episodes up for grabs. BALLS to the middle class crap of The Archers. Eastenders is where it’s at.
But anyway. About my other weird shit Christmas telly viewing.
A bit of VPN action, an anonymous Tor browser account, and oh, here we go. I seem to have downloads of the Dylan biopic and Mike Leigh’s Meantime in less time than it took me to cut another slice of Christmas cake. TUCK IN!
Dylan’s A Complete Unknown was screened at the local village cinema earlier in the autumn. It was raining and there was some football on the telly. I am a very lazy film viewer. We fired it up back at home as the Christmas Eve entertainment.
First things first: biopics - whether endorsed by the artists or not - are best viewed as a piece of fiction. There are elements of the truth that blend in there, but the narrative is there to entertain, not to inform.
A Complete Unknown does this very well. It’s quite an achievement to have two hours or so focussing on the main character, and you’re still not sure if he is a 20th Century hero, or a complete little shit.
Dylan doesn’t come out of it very well. Johnny Cash does.
The character of Dylan is portrayed as a musical trailblazer - which he undoubtedly was at the time - but something of a nasty piece of work when it comes to women. I’m aware that all major films need the romantic angle. But I would the film had focussed on the transition from folk to electric.
It does this as well of course, but some of the relationships get in the way of the epoch defining moment at Newport. Joan Baez’s character in particular seems to exist only to act as a metaphor for what Dylan was walking away from.
A Complete Unknown was very watchable. The songs and performances don’t leave you cringing and wanting to play the originals. Dylan did look cool as fuck around this period as well.
The Happy Happy Joy Joy film for Christmas Day was Mike Leigh’s Meantime. I have no bloody idea why I decided to download this a couple of months ago. It must have been a recommendation from Robert Elms or the like. It’s been sitting on my hard drive, waiting for the right moment.
Christmas Day seemed like the ideal opportunity to play a 1983 kitchen sink drama, focussing on unemployment, Thatcherism and family breakdown.
Have a good one, etc.
The film actually worked really well for us. We approached it not knowing anything about it. I wasn’t even aware of the plot, or the actors - Tim Roth, Phil Daniels and Gary Oldman - quite a cast list.
At first I thought it was a recent Mike Leigh production, retrospectively looking back at some of the darker days of Thatcherism. But nope, it came out in 1983. It captures the bleak period perfectly.
There is a perpetual expression of gloom that hangs over every scene. It isn’t a feel good film and won’t have you rooting for the main characters. I got the impression that the plot wasn’t scripted, just loosely formed. The actors were encouraged to improvise around basic scene set ups.
Oldman as a thick as pig shit skinhead pulls this off remarkably. I didn’t even realise it was him playing the part until the end credits rolled. He must be the most chameleon like English actor over the past forty years or so.
At various stages in the final thirty minutes, we commented that the film will probably end abruptly in the next scene. It’s the type of storyline that isn’t really resolved. It’s just a slab of everyday struggle and existence.
And sure enough - cut to the credits, we’re done.
The Eastenders Christmas double header that followed needed intense analysis to understand the plot that changed with almost every sentence. Sometimes I prefer films that present you with a situation, and little else to consider.