The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael

i've long derided myself for the fact that i will watch 100 bad 90s-2000s uk exploitation-adjacent films i find on the bfi player before i watch 10 of the probably good classics on my watchlist. so i was immediately interested, for some reason, when this came up recommended, saying that it was derided upon release but had things to say and an interesting tone. i did not find this to actually be the case. in fact as somebody who has spent several years attempting to write a similar story about annoying teenagers taking drugs in a nowhere area for lack of better things to do, i have taken a lot from this film re: how not to do it.

main credit i'll give the film is that the cinematography is really good, appropriately grey and bleak, but it has 4 major glaring issues:

- the acting is awful. this speaks for itself. even lesley manville is not trying her hardest. nor should she, get that payslip and get out girl x
- the film is from the pov of a character with no character. total blank slate, no reason to be upset that he falls in with a bunch of criminal thugs and his character also has no motivations. in most circumstances, i'd say that robert was chosen as a POV just because At His Core He's A Nice Middle Class Boy and the UK film establishment can famously only empathise with the middle classes, but in this case the thugs aren't much more interesting tbf. also the film depicts peer pressure in such an annoyingly literal way that consists mainly of homophobic slurs.
- the film is kind of a commentary on the iraq war. I can tell because every 5 minutes somebody puts on the news and george bush or tony blair is there, talking about the iraq war, whilst the character isn't really paying attention. because they're too busy being horrible to one another and causing fights and problems in their own communities. this is the level of narrative sophistication we're dealing with apparently?
- the biggest issue is obviously the rape scene at the end. i'm not somebody who thinks representing sexual violence on film is inherently bad, i mean two of my 5 or 10 favourite films are naked and thelma & louise. but it is the one thing which i feel needs to serve some sort of narrative purpose to be justified in being shown. This can be either interrogating the subject of SA itself, revealing something you didn't already know about a character, or even just to incite the plot in some way like it does in naked. here, the people you've been told are bad people do a particularly horrifically bad thing, and it's supposed to be shocking because? just gratuitous and unnecessary. nothing about the film earns or justifies how horrible that scene is.

Anyway this is some sort of arthouse dare program movie which the bfi, from their bio of it, seems interested in giving a critical appraisal for some reason. I'm not interested.

i've long derided myself for the fact that i will watch 100 bad 90s-2000s uk exploitation-adjacent films i find on the bfi player before i watch 10 of the probably good classics on my watchlist. so i was immediately interested, for some reason, when this came up recommended, saying that it was derided upon release but had things to say and an interesting tone. i did not find this to actually be the case. in fact as somebody who has spent several years attempting to write a similar story about annoying teenagers taking drugs in a nowhere area for lack of better things to do, i have taken a lot from this film re: how not to do it.

main credit i'll give the film is that the cinematography is really good, appropriately grey and bleak, but it has 4 major glaring issues:

- the acting is awful. this speaks for itself. even lesley manville is not trying her hardest. nor should she, get that payslip and get out girl x
- the film is from the pov of a character with no character. total blank slate, no reason to be upset that he falls in with a bunch of criminal thugs and his character also has no motivations. in most circumstances, i'd say that robert was chosen as a POV just because At His Core He's A Nice Middle Class Boy and the UK film establishment can famously only empathise with the middle classes, but in this case the thugs aren't much more interesting tbf. also the film depicts peer pressure in such an annoyingly literal way that consists mainly of homophobic slurs.
- the film is kind of a commentary on the iraq war. I can tell because every 5 minutes somebody puts on the news and george bush or tony blair is there, talking about the iraq war, whilst the character isn't really paying attention. because they're too busy being horrible to one another and causing fights and problems in their own communities. this is the level of narrative sophistication we're dealing with apparently?
- the biggest issue is obviously the rape scene at the end. i'm not somebody who thinks representing sexual violence on film is inherently bad, i mean two of my 5 or 10 favourite films are naked and thelma & louise. but it is the one thing which i feel needs to serve some sort of narrative purpose to be justified in being shown. This can be either interrogating the subject of SA itself, revealing something you didn't already know about a character, or even just to incite the plot in some way like it does in naked. here, the people you've been told are bad people do a particularly horrifically bad thing, and it's supposed to be shocking because? just gratuitous and unnecessary. nothing about the film earns or justifies how horrible that scene is.

Anyway this is some sort of arthouse dare program movie which the bfi, from their bio of it, seems interested in giving a critical appraisal for some reason. I'm not interested.

Vile

Vile