THE CONCRETE ROUNDABOUT (TCR)

Have You Got It Yet? The Story Of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd

John Lydon, A.K.A. Rotten, never said it better than he did on his audition for The Pistols. Rocking up wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt with the words ‘I Hate’ scrawled above it. I have no time for The Floyd. None. I loathe them. Overblown, pretentious, ‘real’ musicians. I fucking hate them. So fair to say that I approached this documentary with a bucket load of preconceptions. And guess what! I was right.

I’m assuming that every sentient being knows who Barrett was. But just in case. He was the original frontman of Pink Floyd. Wrote all their early singles, before overdosing on LSD and going mad. The mythologising of him as some sort of prophet really gets on my nerves. He was an arse hole, a self indulgent wanker. There’s nothing clever about drugs. Nothing. Everyone I’ve ever known who’s taken them have been a massive nuisance, and watching this reinforced my lifelong belief in this ethos.

It was the usual talking heads music doc’. Interviewed all his ex-girlfriends, all nice upper middle class attractive older women, surviving ex-bandmates, celebrity fans, and assorted hangers on. It’s nothing you haven't seen a million times before. There must be another way of doing this sort of thing other than plonking a camera in front of an interviewee and getting them to reminisce. But perhaps not.

There was nothing in this that I didn't know already. He was a fucking nusance who took too many drugs. Went mental. Returned to his childhood home in Cambridge, and lived the rest of his life as a recluse.

The end.

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For those that like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.

Mad Max

The original 1979 version starring a then unknown Mel Gibson.

I have no idea how many times I’ve watched this. Absolutely no idea whatsoever. But it must be in excess of 50, easily. Probably nearer 100.

It’s a good film this, really good. Made on an almost nonexistent budget, and as mentioned above, starring Mel Gibson as the eponymous anti-hero, and an equally unknown cast. Gibson isn’t particularly good if we’re being honest. More than a tad wooden, but the rest of the cast more than make up for him. Steve Bisley as Max’s partner Goose almost steals the whole thing, and he would’ve done if it weren’t for Hugh Keays-Byrne as The Toecutter, the leader of the biker gang. He looks perfect, immaculate. And as scary as shit to boot. More than a passing nod to Geoff Parry as the uber-cool Bubba Zanetti, and Tim Burns as Johnny The Boy.

We all know the premise of this, so there’s little point in going over the plot, but if you haven’t seen it, then do yourself a favor and watch perhaps one of the greatest scenes in movie history. Which is of course the biker gang arriving in the town. Revving their bikes, then the utter silence as they turn them off in unison. It's a great scene.

All in all, this is the best of the franchise. Most will pick the second movie, but most are wrong, if only for the utterly wonderful Toecutter.

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For those that like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.

The Zone of Interest

Beware, spoiler alert.

It's a holocaust movie. It's fantastic.

Schindler's List is great but plays for the gut, for the emotions. The Zone of Interest is more subtle and more disturbing and I suspect it's going to haunt me for some time to come. You don't see any violence but you see indications of it and you certainly hear it, albeit muffled and at a distance.

The basic premise (based on real historical characters): Rudolf Höss, the Commander of Auschwitz, lives with his family (and contingent of Polish slave housemaids and gardeners) in a nice house with a lovely garden, slap-bang next to the wall of the death camp. He runs the camp with bureaucratic efficiency; his wife Hedwig runs the home with a similar control. They are finally living the bucolic, idealised Good Life that they dreamed of when they first met. Their lives are ordinary, workaday, banal. The family picnics by the river, the children play games, Hedwig intones the names of the garden flowers to her baby, Rudi turns off the shower by the small swimming pool. And in the background, over the wall, flames belch out of the tall chimney. The children's rooms glow a faint orange at bedtime, as the chimney belches flame and smoke day and night.

It's directed by Jonathan Glazer, who made the excellent Sexy Beast, and it's scripted and filmed in German (so obvs I watched with English sub-titles, at the pop-up cinema in The Cock at Stony). Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller are superb as the two leads. Technically, the film is unusual and quite brilliant. Filmed only either in close up or in long shot and using only natural light, it's beautiful to look at in a muted way. The interiors all feature corridors, doors and staircases. There's a hint of Vermeer in the look. The drone-like music (played over the extended black screen after the opening credits and, especially, the entire sound of the film, has rightly garnered high praise. Life in the nice house is lived against a background hum of engines and whistles and the incinerators and the screams of the prisoners, the guards' abusive yells, and gunshots. Outside the camp, you can choose not to look but you can't choose not to hear.

Although the storyline is straightforward and linear, there's a handful of inserted scenes that are a leap of the imagination and are quite haunting. A couple of them feature an (apparently true) story of a Polish resistance girl who goes out at night to deposit apples for the camp slave workers to find. As no artificial light is used, it's filmed using infra-red night-vision. It looks very disturbing and is overlaid with Höss reading fairy tales to his children - tellingly, one of the fairy tales is Hansel and Gretel, specifically the part where Gretel tricks the wicked witch and burns her to death in the oven. The other insert is when Höss is walking out of the German command building. He goes along corridors and down flights of stairs. He looks down one corridor and suddenly we see modern day Auschwitz, before opening hours, with the army of cleaners sweeping the floors of the gas chambers and cleaning the glass of the exhibitions. It's gently shocking.

As you probably know, the film won two Oscars: Best International Feature and Best Sound. Both richly deserved. Do yourself a favour, go see this film. On a big screen if possible and with a decent sound system.

9/10

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I don't need your ill-informed, half-baked, idiotic opinions. I have plenty of those myself.