Pete's Minute Reviews

Pete's Minute Reviews

Being reviews of: El Alamein, The Mist, MI:3 and Paradoxia by Lydia Lunch

I started to write reviews like this when I first joined myspace a couple of years ago - the remit (I gave myself) was to briefly review films I'd seen on rental. Just to keep my hand in, and to remind myself what I've seen and what I've thought, I've decided to write a few more.

Please be warned, SPOILERS ahead.

El Alamein (written & directed by Enzo Monteleone)

I came across this on movies4men, whilst idly channel hopping and checking out the schedules of the ass end of the movie channels on SKY. I looked at the blurb, and it seemed interesting - The 2nd Battle of El Alamein from an Italian viewpoint. I'd heard nothing about the film previously, and so my expectations were fairly low (also, given the channel it was on - mostly crap B movies). I was really pleasantly surprised. The dialogue was good (sub-titled) and the acting reasonable throughout.

The first and last images are of a motorbikes and desert roads. In the first our protagonist (Serra) is riding pillion and coming towards us along a dusty road in North Africa; in the last he is alone (just about everybody else is dead or injured) and riding away, ostensibly to get help for his dying commander and his sergeant (who is nobly staying behind with their commander, probably to die or at best get captured by the advancing British).

In between those images we get the boredom (sitting in trenches just waiting to be attacked), the terror (random shelling from the British, who they can't even see, and who are the other side of a mine-field) and the shock (the guy who is taking Serra to his section is blown up and "disappears into the sand" - the only part of him they find is an ear) of war.

The first hour or so of the film builds up to the attack by the British, and when it comes it doesn't disappoint. The tanks don't look that accurate but the battle is very intense, and well done, very believable. Then the retreat begins... Serra's company is told to go to one place and when they get there, to go to another... till they end up sleeping in the graveyard of a small church in the middle of the desert. It is absolute chaos! Madness! And really well done.

All in all I think it's one of the best war movies I've seen in awhile. Unlike most British and American WW2 movies it's about defeat, rather than victory or success. It didn't have too many of the usual cliches about war, that it's hell and all that... (though it is, and looked it here). I'll probably get it on DVD so I can see it properly...

The Mist (written & directed by Frank Darabont)

This got decent coverage, so won't say much about it. If you've not seen it DON'T READ THIS, as I am going to be discussing the ending.

Based on a novella by Stephen King, which I'd not read, despite it being on my shelf in two books (the original anthology and King's collection) for 20 years or so. But it always seemed to be the sort of thing I like... Briefly, if you know nothing about it, both the movie and novella are about a group of Americans trapped in a supermarket whilst outside in the Mist, which has arrived seemingly out of nowhere (probably another reality) are all manner of hideous creatures, that like nothing better than munching down US citizens... (oh and ripping them to shreds too).

After watching the film, I went away and skim read the novella, and the film does seem quite true to its source, though the ending is quite different (the novella is told in the first person, ending on a note of mystery - we don't know what happens to the surviving protagonists...)

King did (perhaps still does - I haven't been able to read anything of his since I gave up on IT years ago) have a bit of a thing about fundamentalist christians, and found the example in the film to be a bit tiresome (same old same old). I also don't find it credible that so many people would follow the nutter (though this is the point no doubt, and this is set in middle America - I just have more faith in people perhaps). I know people can be nasty, mean and vicious, but such invidious circumstances often bring out the best in people rather than the worst (but it's easier and seen as more dramatic, obviously - I'm still not convinced).

Lastly, the scene in the car at the end... Again, I felt personally speaking that it strained credulity. It's just a shock ending for its own sake it seems to me. I was thinking as he got out the gun "no don't, you're going to regret it, it's wrong, there's always hope" and sadly I was right... I can't believe any parent would do that, or even could do that... For me to believe that, the character has to be more deeply portrayed... The action given more weight than by what has gone before... Anyway, I hated it in the end. Because of the end...

MI:3 (written by Alex Kurtzman, Robert Orci & JJ Abrams and directed by JJ Abrams).

I watched this for the first time on Sunday evening, on ITV. I quite enjoyed the first one, watched the second, and was interested in 3 because of the JJ Abrams connection (creator of Lost and director of the new Star Trek movie; also as a footnote the guys who wrote this with JJ also wrote the ST movie too). Not one of them is as good as any of the Bourne movies, but they are what they are, and are a reasonable way of passing the time on a lazy Sunday evening...

Well, keeping this brief...

One thing I did notice - 3 impossible missions...

It was reasonably efficient, and enjoyable up to about 2/3rds of the way through... Obviously this sort of thing is all about suspension of disbelief, about how to make the impossible credible, which they mostly managed to do (just barely in some cases, though perhaps not!). I did think that it was a bit longer than it needed to be... (because of the adverts it was over 2.5 hours long, actual time 125mins, would have been better at around 100 methinks).

All in all, not a total waste of my time... but I do have about 50 DVDs that need watching...

Paradoxia by Lydia Lunch
"A Predator's Diary"

Lydia Lunch, queen of no wave, siren, writer, musician, actress etc wrote this autobiographical book in the 90s and it was originally published in 1997.

I first got interested in her when I read in the NME about the band she formed with Nick cave, Marc Almond and Clint Ruin (aka Foetus aka JG Thirwell) in the early eighties called The Immaculate Consumptives (and which existed to perform only for one weekend in late 1983). I've always been fascinated by extremes, and she's always been pretty extreme, both in her art and in her personality. I always like her attitude. I bought a T-Shirt in 1986 that says "Fuck the World, Feed Lydia Lunch" with a picture of her on the front giving the finger with both hands!

Musically the best things she's done (IMHO) have been with Rowland S Howard, namely the LP Shotgun Wedding and the cover of Lee Hazelwood's Some Velvet Morning.

I've been reading Simon Reynolds' Rip it up and Start Again Post-punk 1978 - 1984, which revitalised my interest in the period (about which more later) and in Lunch and her cohorts.

The book is very readable, albeit one that is a bit of an incoherent mess, well, that's a bit unfair perhaps, but it is very raw and unstructured. It's almost like she sat down and expelled each chapter in one go and never bothered to revise it (each individual chapter), or the book as a whole. It jumps all over the place and you never really get a sense of time moving forwards, though it is generally chronological (chapter by chapter). I was quite disappointed with one aspect of it in that it never really relates to her art - it's really only about her psychosexual exploits... Very interesting though they are!

She comes across for most of the book as the quintessential survivor, doing whatever she has to, to fill her needs, and to just simply survive. She turned up in NYC, from upstate New York, in the mid-70's, 82 dollars in her pocket, and only 16 years old... And despite a social (er.. sexual) life which seems totally OTT carved out a creative niche for herself... You have to wonder how... Apart form the fact she could have been dead by 20!

Not sure I could heartily recommend it, unless you like that sort of true-life confessional (almost pornographic) literature... But I enjoyed it...!

Next time on Pete's Minute Reviews...

Er... we shall see...

(17th Feb 2009)

P.S. I obviously wrote this a few years ago, and I still like it. There is no over-arching theme to the review, these were just a few things I'd watched or read that I wanted to comment on. I will try to do more like this in the near future.