Tag: drugs

Rise of the Footsoldier 4: Marbella

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

America has superheroes. Essex has hard boys. Very hard boys. They would wipe the floor with the Avengers. Despite being the third film after Pat Tate’s (Craig Fairbrass) untimely demise at the end of Rise of The Footsoldier (Julian Gilbey, 2007)— part of a real gangland murder that has been mythologised, Batman-like, in three different movies — Rise of The Footsoldier 4: Marbella dives even deeper into the backstory of the most popular character in the franchise (and perhaps all of Essex). While never remotely coming close to the gangster-in-paradise heights of either The Business (Nick Love, 2005) or Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000), Marbella is an undeniably entertaining Essex-lad romp that even further blends black comedy with cartoonish violence to a gleeful fever-pitch.

It starts with our hero Pat Tate finally out of prison, sometime in the mid-90s. He walks into his Southend club and automatically notices there’s no pills left. He moves out to Marbella to look for Frank Harris (Larry Lamb), the man who double-crossed him. Sadly Frank has died (literally shagged to death) yet another lad, Terry Fisher (Andrew Loveday) has taken his place. Although sceptical to work with the successor to his traitor, he accepts the job as Fisher’s bodyguard in exchange for a huge shipment of pills. Things get more complicated however, when another gangster appears on Fisher’s turf, leading to an inevitable bloody showdown.

This is the Essex gangster distilled to its most essential form. British gangster film regulars, and fine actors when they want to be, Terry Stone and Roland Manookian, play the Rosencratz and Guildenstern to Tate’s Hamlet, two hapless fools charged with getting the cash to Marbella before getting back in time for Nigel Benn’s big boxing match (a real-life tie-in only men over 40 will understand). Taking a connecting flight in Amsterdam, they spend a reckless, prostitute-and-weed-filled night in the Red Light District, soundtracked to Corona’s Rhythm of the Night. It’s completely stupid, but I laughed throughout. By rarely taking itself seriously, and by holding itself to no standards whatsoever, the expletive-ridden, casually misogynistic and callously violent Marbella achieves a kind of comic-book purity.Rise of the Footsoldier 4: Marbella

The strange success of the movie — which at a basic plot, acting and writing level, is quite flat— is embodied by Craig Fairbrass’ go-for-broke performance. Tate is the quintessential anti-villain of gangster cinema, a terrifying caricature with few redeeming features. He makes Joker look like a soppy mug. There has never been a problem Tate couldn’t punch in the face. Often coked up to his eyeballs, he is brash and impulsive, moving around like an early 90s Steven Seagal but with the same man’s current day physique. This is a guy who beat up a waiter in the original Rise of the Footsoldier for leaving him his bill before he asked for it. Who slits a restauranteur’s throat with a pizza cutter for refusing to give him the toppings he wanted. Here the ante is turned even further up, mauling his enemies with forks, golf clubs and other assorted instruments. It’s all completely ridiculous, but Fairbrass doesn’t blink, single-handedly holding the entire film together and somehow making it work.

As its the same coterie of actors that appear in almost every direct-to-DVD British gangster film, it feels like hanging out and having a few drinks with old friends. Your mileage might vary. It will play perfectly to its target audience: balding men in their 40s and 50s who wear leather jackets with blue jeans. Men who support either Chelsea or West Ham. Men who only listen to New Order, The Stone Roses and Oasis. Men who pay £30 to watch boxing on Sky. Men who think going to Continental Europe means either Amsterdam, Prague or the South of Spain. You know the lads. It will work best in a big group of them. Bring them around and drink every time Pat beats someone up. You’ll get drunk quickly.

Rise of the Footsoldier 4: Marbella is in cinemas and digital on Friday, November 8th.

Climax

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Cinema at its purest. Bright white on a screen. A woman starts crawling from the top of the screen. Extreme audience disorientation. We realise she’s crawling through snow. She appears to be in a bad way. Traces of blood. The camera follows her forward movement down the screen. Slowly a tree comes into shot from the bottom. We are watching the same overhead camera movement.

A series of vox pops on a television screen with shelves of books on one side and piles of DVDs on the other. Dancers answer questions on why dance is important to them. Would they do anything in order to make it big? What would they do if they weren’t able to dance?

Then the narrative proper begins. It’s 1996. We’re inside a building with a dancefloor watching the most amazing dance routines we’ve ever seen. It’s the final rehearsal for a dance show. After which the dancers will let their hair down in a party with a DJ. Unaware that someone has spiked the punch. The party will turn into bad trip and an in-your-face vision of hell on earth.

Welcome to the extreme and confrontational cinema of Gaspar Noé (Irreversible, 2002; Enter The Void, 2009). He likes, say the press notes, to set up situations of anarchy and chaos and then commit them to film. Which sounds like a recipe for tedium – and might well be so in lesser hands – but Noé possesses an incredible eye and cinematic aesthetic and what he puts on the screen is never less than extraordinary.

He is equally adept at showing a deeply distressing scene in which men talk about potential sexual conquests among the women nearby or a compelling episode wherein one woman admits to another that she’s pregnant with no idea as to the identity of the father. If such scenes play on our prejudices and probe our sympathies for different characters, they slowly give way to something much more supercharged and kinetic even as they invest us emotionally in what we’re about to watch.

As Noé’s camera follows characters around the dance studio floor and the various rooms adjoining it, including a power supply room with high voltage equipment and ‘Danger Of Death’ notices on the door, he uses the full arsenal of cinematic tricks at his disposal. The camera rolls on its own axis so that sometimes, down is up, up as down and the floor is the ceiling. As the party gets increasingly out of hand, and a couple of performers decide to have sex in the background (that’s real sex, by the way, not the simulated for the cameras variety), the disorientated viewer is vaguely aware of them doing so on the floor in a top corner of the upside-down image above him or her.

There’s an intense physicality throughout running a whole gauntlet of states of being from intense sexual arousal, copulation and post-coital relaxation right the way through to anxiety, isolation, despair and death. Noe is a materialist: he thinks what matters is the here and now, the flesh, the carnal. His heaven and hell is found in our present existence, with the heaven of fleeting or lasting sexual relationship no more than a temporary respite from the hell comprising all the bad stuff, which is the only alternative.

The title Climax suggests a narrative aspiring to and reaching some sort of peak, hinting perhaps at an ecstatic, sexual group orgasm. That’s a sort of tease, because for many of the characters here the climax that they reach via their frenzied, drug-fuelled, dancing excess is more like the hurtling over the edge of a bottomless abyss rather than anything they might actually want. Or perhaps the characters here really do desire something like that. Who knows?

Yet in terms of both dance and cinematic technique the film has the feeling of someone grappling with the very foundations of the languages of both art forms to say something which has never been said before. Such wilful and controlled articulation of form, for this viewer at least, plays against the nihilism. That’s not to say the film is a pleasant experience exactly, but it certainly grabs the attention from its opening frame and never lets go, pushing the viewer into sensory overload and beyond even as it descends into madness and disorder.

Noé is extremely gifted, knows exactly what he’s doing, pulls out al the stops and never misses a trick. The result is both profoundly exhilarating and deeply depressing: an upper and a downer all in one. Most definitely not recommended for those of a nervous disposition: quite possibly, however, the dirty movie of the year.

Climax is out in the UK on Friday, September 21st. On VoD on Friday, February 8th.

Eric Clapton: Life In 12 Bars

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

You could be forgiven for thinking this is just another music documentary. Blues devotee and English guitarist Eric Clapton rose to fame in the sixties as in such bands as The Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith and Derek And The Dominoes. Since the seventies, he’s had a successful solo career. While Eric Clapton: Life In 12 Bars covers all that material in detail, its main focus is upon how Clapton coped (or didn’t) with the various tragedies in his life, some circumstantial and some self-inflicted.

A happy childhood ended at age nine with Eric’s discovery that his mum and dad were in fact his grandmother and grandfather and that his sister who had long since emigrated to Canada was in fact his mother. Worse, when she visited the family in England, she disowned him. Eric’s faith in humanity disintegrated at the most basic level: trust became impossible. On the BBC’s Uncle Mac kids’ radio show he heard the occasional Muddy Waters record and without any understanding of the music’s roots in the black man’s experience of the racist US connected with an art form that seemed to speak to him in his very core. As a teenager, he bought every blues record he could get his hands on.

Perhaps the film’s most telling clip has Clapton talk about feeling anger and working it out through his guitar. He demonstrates to the TV interviewer by playing a series of clearly angry licks. Years later, he dismisses some of his sixties material precisely on account of its anger.

Eric’s obsession with his best friend George Harrison’s then wife Pattie Boyd in the late sixties gave rise to the Layla album with his band Derek And The Dominoes, a powerful collection of unrequited love songs. He played Pattie the newly recorded work in an attempt to win her but she went back to her husband anyway. Around this time Clapton got sucked in to heroin addition and became a recluse. A few years later he made a comeback with an album and a world tour, but in reality he switched from smack to alcohol and became a wildly unpredictable performer who on one occasion told audiences to go out and vote for (racist British politician) Enoch Powell. As a man who loved the Blues and admired many black musicians, Clapton was deeply ashamed of this particular incident afterwards. He barely remembers the string of albums he made as an alcoholic. To illustrate the point, most of the record covers from the period whizz by in a matter of seconds on the screen.

He seemed to finally get his life on track when he discovered the joys of fatherhood in the late eighties only for his young son Conor to tragically fall out of a skyscraper window in New York a few years later. Determined to live life from then on in a manner that would honour his late son, Clapton wrote the song Tears In Heaven as part of his process of dealing with this tragedy. In recent years he appears to have found genuine happiness as a married family man with three daughters.

His route to his current contentment has been a harrowing one. By documenting Eric’s various personal struggles, his friend and the film’s director Lili Fini Zanuck has crafted a striking portrait which, far from merely showcasing a celebrated guitarist (which task it fulfils more than adequately in passing) tells how, via his impassioned music, this extraordinary individual has worked through the terrible situations in which he’s either placed or found himself.

Eric Clapton: Life In 12 Bars is out in the UK on Friday, January 12th. Watch the film trailer below: