Filmography
Dec. 3rd, 2012 05:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyMy Beautiful Laundrette
This had been popping up as a Thing, and given the reaction on my Twitter when I shared that I was watching it, it really is a bit of a cult queer film. The story follows a young Anglo-British man who is taken into his uncle's business and given a failing laundrette to run; he must deal with both his family's odd loyalties and his feelings for his white once-fascist friend who he brings in to help run the business. There are a lot of tensions, a lot of cultural identity issues, and a bit of gender stuff in the expectations around Anglo-Indian girls of the period.
I have to say that for some reason this made me think of Derek Jarman;![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
brokenlogic thinks that this is due to them both capturing the same kind of historical period, but I'm wondering if there's more there than that. While the relationship between the two young men is definitely affectionate, there's also a weird undertone of sadism which never gets explicitly addressed but surfaces in odd places through the dialogue. It may be a feature of the subculture of the period, of course, but it was a strange resonance.
The plot is not stand-out brilliant, but I can see why this film resonated so much and has been labelled 'cult' now. It strikes me as one of those films that makes a big impact on you if you're the right age when you first see it; I'm not at that age, but I'm still glad I've seen it.
Dirk Gently
I didn't know this, but apparently last year somebody made a four part series based on Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently novels with Stephen Mangan as Dirk. I read one of the Dirk Gently novels when I was a teenager and, erm, I think I was too young to get it - there's a lot of Doctor Who humour that comes through the adaptation, and it's all quite reliant on pastiche and parody to work. Which I wouldn't have got as a teenager. It's a cross between Poirot and Doctor Who, really, shamelessly mocking both with glee and also those lovely Adams leaps of logic. It's good fun, Mangan isn't as annoying as he can be, and it's enjoyable television.
This had been popping up as a Thing, and given the reaction on my Twitter when I shared that I was watching it, it really is a bit of a cult queer film. The story follows a young Anglo-British man who is taken into his uncle's business and given a failing laundrette to run; he must deal with both his family's odd loyalties and his feelings for his white once-fascist friend who he brings in to help run the business. There are a lot of tensions, a lot of cultural identity issues, and a bit of gender stuff in the expectations around Anglo-Indian girls of the period.
I have to say that for some reason this made me think of Derek Jarman;
brokenlogic thinks that this is due to them both capturing the same kind of historical period, but I'm wondering if there's more there than that. While the relationship between the two young men is definitely affectionate, there's also a weird undertone of sadism which never gets explicitly addressed but surfaces in odd places through the dialogue. It may be a feature of the subculture of the period, of course, but it was a strange resonance. The plot is not stand-out brilliant, but I can see why this film resonated so much and has been labelled 'cult' now. It strikes me as one of those films that makes a big impact on you if you're the right age when you first see it; I'm not at that age, but I'm still glad I've seen it.
Dirk Gently
I didn't know this, but apparently last year somebody made a four part series based on Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently novels with Stephen Mangan as Dirk. I read one of the Dirk Gently novels when I was a teenager and, erm, I think I was too young to get it - there's a lot of Doctor Who humour that comes through the adaptation, and it's all quite reliant on pastiche and parody to work. Which I wouldn't have got as a teenager. It's a cross between Poirot and Doctor Who, really, shamelessly mocking both with glee and also those lovely Adams leaps of logic. It's good fun, Mangan isn't as annoying as he can be, and it's enjoyable television.
