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| Ghosts of Mississippi (50%) |
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Plot: A rebellious Nottingham working-class youth, sent to reform school, is singled out to represent that school in a long distance race against an upper-class boys institution.
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MCT:April 17, 2008
I probably had my expectations set too high for this as I was expecting something on par with the fantastic 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning'. Both are after all 'angry young men' dramas from the same period and with the same setting and tone.
Just like 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' this was a gritty critique on the times the film was made in and it's social problems. And it has plenty a fantastic scene. The main problem with my enjoyment was that unfortunately it's not dated very well. Constant use of sped-up footage to show things such as the characters' eagerness does nothing but inject out-of-place humour into the film. The music score also seems completely out of place at times. I can see what the director was trying to achieve with it, I just don't think it worked particularly well.
That all said and done, it's a great example of low budget film making, I just hoped for more.
Personal enjoyment: 6/10
Actual quality as a film: 8/10 -
MCT:April 5, 2007Well, I must say I'm very surprised. I've never really seen such an important conceptual movie ruined by such poor filmmaking.
The post-war angst of this film, plus its youth culture concepts and even more important, its attempts at time at social realism, make a very biting and angry essay on social materialism and conformity of the time. The acting is amazing, and the arguments it makes are very poignant, but everything else at one point or another falls completely apart.
For one thing, the story is predictable in a bad way--by the time the movie is a third of the way over, it's hard to pay attention because it's pretty obvious the decision he is going to make at the end, whatever his motivations (the revealing of which aren't nearly as surprising as they should of been).
The cinematography was terrible! Many close-ups are indecipherable due to the fast movement of the bodies or characters within them, a lot of the mise-en-scene is cluttered in a distracting, "Wait, what are we supposed to be looking at?" way, and sometimes it seems like the filmmakers didn't care about the fact that their camera seems to be ready to fall over. One particular tracking shot down the side of the street was awful in a way that made me wonder, "Why did they even bother including it?" I get a sense that in many ways, this is a low-budget film, but I've seen enough films rise above their budget for much less important topics often enough that it feels almost like all the energy went into the scriptwriting and acting and by the time they got to the actual shooting, they all ran out of energy.
The editing is uneven. Some parts of the editing are magnificent, mostly with the running/flash-back style cuts and montages. The continuity editing is terrible, and half the time it looks like they just didn't care where the shot ended, just as long as they had another shot (good or bad) to follow it. This movie moves like a clunky engine desperately needing some transmission fluid, and no amount of "social realism" forgives that, especially since this movie isn't.
Overall, I was disappointed because had the actual production of this film been well done, the movie itself would have been very amazing. It is, indeed, memorable. It just suffers from bad grammar that garbles up its message.
--PolarisDiB -
MCT:March 31, 2007
This is a masterpiece of British cinema and best the example of the British new wave movement of the 1960's. There is a phenomenal performance by Tom Courtenay as the working class lad who is living a dead end existence. The last ten minutes of the film during the running race climax is as good an example as I have seen anywhere of showing the art of editing within cinema. A first-place pleasure!
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