demoncleaner
Posts: 2166
Joined: 3/10/2005
From: Belfast
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I thought it was at best pretty decent, at worst, I thought it was OK. Once again, the smug self-satisfied QFT audience seek to marr a perfectly good film with over-appreciative gut laughing at a film I would happily grin the whole way through. These beardy middle-class bastards have obviously hired a baby-sitter and gone to semi-significant lenghts to be out watching a film, and by God are they loathe to waste an opportunity to tell a room full of strangers that they are capable of getting a joke. I feel like standing up in the middle of the screening and yell "would you fucking laugh like that on your own, in your front room, on your fucking own...which...on the basis of this viewing is the way you should spend your fucking life?!" Their vocalised insights into an encyclopedic experience of humour was strangely dedicated to "if the vans a rockin'" jokes..... oh, how they made everyone else know how they could have (and did) laugh. Cunts. Strangely muted and throughly brilliant lines of idiot reflection "it's just that everyone else seems to find expressing themselves so easy... like you, with your knitting" went unregistered.
Anyhoo... the film. There wasn't much of the now trademark Ben Wheatley originality in this. There's a micro-budget and seismic tonal shifts which are tropes we can now assume are trademark Wheatley. But with recourse to random acts of non-plussed butchery we have a gimmick, and it's a gimmick that is pulled out every now and again to spice things up when the whole thing is flagging. And yes, this is where I talk about Nuts in May.
The shadow on the lung of Sightseers is Nuts in May. (And we know, there's creative accident here*, without prior knowledge or fore-thought... and we know that...but at the same time, fuck you, I want to talk about Nuts in May!)
With Nuts you have a fascinating array of observance, of people that you see everyday, overhear in bus stations,...and, Mike Leigh gets you intimate, from a safe distance mind you, with these humble middle-aged misfits who are sooooo ordinary British, but so distanced (thank fuck) from the reality that keeps most of us sane. The idea of Sightseers; we are so distanced from of clear insanity) makes this slightly less interesting, and more truthfully, gimmicky. Nuts in May is an hour-plus we spend (intimately) with that irritating couple who stole hours of hard-won sleep from Victor and Margaret Meldrew, who came round their house and kept them awake with interminable slides of their time at the marble arch caves of blah-blah-blah. Sightseers, however humble and micro-budget it is, is essentially high concept Natural Born Pot-holers. And you could argue that Down Terrace was high-concept (council house gangland) and Kill List was high concept (one broad genre hidden in another broad genre... Angel Heart did this and literally embodied this concept) but both those films were unrecognisable to an audience and that's what made them compelling (at best) or interesting (at the very worst). Sightseers, for me lacks that unique Ben Wheatley originality (unique originality? But demoncleaner, that's a tautology surely? Shut up you know what I mean!). What I mean is that Sightseers is recognisable to an audience, where Wheatley's first 2 aren't...once you know any third party can be randomly snuffed, then randomness can be expected.
But yes there are some great moments...the disposal of Martin I thought was fantastic. Once you see it, you see how literally, physically, disposable that situation was, and yet you don't anticipate it, and the dead-pan line afterward was icing on the cake, cap on the eruption,and so on and so forth.
The other thing to mention is that for the first time we get a glimpse of Ben Wheatley's visual eye...you know, that beautific Terence Malick, Herzog twilight hour beauty, and I don't know if he pre-plans an edit, but we do see some truly beautiful sequences here with a precision in swift cross-cutting. Sadly though, you can relegate these very pleasing accomplishments into terms best compared to a Badly Drawn Boy music video.
3/5
It's only the 3rd film but Ben has cut quite a dash that fans already want to talk about him in canon terms. For this fan I'd rather he get back to creeping us out with with behavior in "normal" set-ups,rather than having us knowingly patronise the behavior of "creepy people". But you know...Ben's charm is a humble, prolific and off-the-cut nature of producing films. Like Woody Allen, it's really difficult to take issue with one, there's no deal-breakers as such, it's all expression and wry experimentation. I really would have enjoyed this more watching it at home. It's those QFT middle-class bastards of open-enjoyment that have made me more analytic (at best) pissy (at worst) about this one
*Famously, Terry Gilliam had never read, or watched an adaptation of Orwell's 1984 when he made Brazil**.
**And that's probably why Brazil's..... SHITE! Don't get me wrong, sometimes that quixotic spill into unregulated creativity makes great things, and sometimes it make Brazil....which is SHITE!!!!
< Message edited by demoncleaner -- 6/12/2012 2:40:36 AM >
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