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Originally Posted by demonrail666
Yeah, I've also got a thing for 70s urban dereliction. And I know what you mean when you talk about them as sort of 'landscape films'. There's a specific atmosphere to those settings.
I remember as a teenager going to the Scala in Kings Cross, when that area was still really sleazy. I'd never seen a prostitute or a junky before I went to Kings Cross and I'd always love coming out of the cinema after watching something like Maniac or Vigilante to see my own equivalent on the walk back to the station. It's criminal how clean Kings Cross now looks. Along with Soho it used to be my favourite part of London. (Soho's another area that's had much of its soul polished out of it now. Vegetarian options at the Coach & Horses?!?)
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I was in Kings Cross recently and it's progressively being turned into John Carpenter's worst nightmare. I like the interiors of The Guardian's building, which contain a pretty sweet auditorium and art gallery, but you're right, no respectable low-life would hang around in that area now. Plus, I got this feeling that parts of the scenery have been bitten off by an enormous entrepreneurial mouth.
I re-watched Gary Oldman’s ‘’Nil by Mouth’’ in honour of your earlier mention of it on this thread. This movie is a perennial 10/10 movie for me and it gets better with every watch. I rank it alongside Larry Peerce’s ‘’The Incident’’ as one of my favourite dealing with the more unpleasant things in life. I’ve also found an old Gary Oldman interview, recently, where he talks about the film and explains how it’s one he
had to make, particularly because you have movies like ‘’Leaving Las Vegas’’ where the alcoholic seems like he’s been pampered too much to really represent the real effects of rampant alcohol abuse on your body and your relationships with others. In the same interview I was happy to find out that he seems to feel the same sort of irritation for Tarantino’s work as me. You see, I don’t have a problem watching ‘’Pulp Fiction’’ or ‘’Kill Bill’’ for pure entertainment, it’s the sort of geekery they transude that gets me going. I am aware his work is meant to be viewed as a cartoonish regurgitation of his film-watching habits, and with that in mind I can agree that he’s alright as a director. When you hear clueless bloke after clueless bloke proclaiming him the biggest thing that happened to cinema for the umpteenth time though, that’s when you wish he didn’t get the sort of recognition and success he normally gets. This also explains my snide remark towards him when I mentioned Mario Bava’s ‘’Rabid Dogs’’, who’s one of his favourite directors, it seems.
Other movies I watched recently include Mark L. Lester’s ‘’Class of 1984’’. I always liked this film and it was good re-watching it for the first time in years. Timothy Van Patten is excellent as the psychotic kid who leads the gang of little shits making the school a dump to work in for teacher Mr Norris. For some reason I remembered it being filmed in a much grittier style. I think that is probably because the first time I’ve seen it I was 11 or 12 years old, so it must have had a more dramatic impact on me then.