My weekend of pain...
Blood covered floor, crazed men wandering the streets, debris flapping around in vomit covered bins. This is not the apocalypse, this is the after math of a bank holiday in Sheffield Town Centre, most notably, West Street.
As I have recently left the student life behind me and no longer frequent bars in the week, the concept of Bank Holiday is a new and all together frightening one. I work in a bar on West Street, not the nicest of bars, but pretty much the same as the other establishments, which act as pseudo brothels/asylums for the recently paid and animal like creatures which drag themselves with blistered bare feet, up and down this mating ground.
I am a hypocrite, I am obviously a part of this drunken haze of a lifestyle, as I have already said I was a student until very recently, but the kind of hell I experienced working on a bank holiday feels like I have been hit round the head by a Jagerbomb and have come to the cold hard realisation is that to ‘live for the weekend’ and most notably, Bank Holiday is to live to be a mess. It’s an overwhelming depressing state of affairs when there lack something else to live for, so yes, drink, be merry, just don’t make me clean your blood up.
All night the usual stream of evil doers and ‘lads’ poured in the door until the place was brimming with nasty, nasty grinding and slurred speech; then midnight hit and you could barely move without treading on the debris of WKD bottles and high heels flung around the floor.
This is what you are to expect going out on a night, and I understand this, I just do not understand how, on a Sunday night, mothers, daughters, 9-5ers, dad, boys, granddads can come together and choose to brawl, full on brawl. I heard mothers say to their daughters things that even Jeremy Kyle would try to block out. I also saw a big, big fight. Two lads bumped into each other, and then into another two lads, and then into another, it was like watching vodka filled particles colliding to create a new world, this world has bottles raining from the sky, blood spurting out to cover innocent bystanders (I say innocent I mean girls just ‘getting low) this continued until the police came to shut us down. At this point, the poor things gathered around the watering hole were still trying to get served, still clutching desperately onto the bank holiday mentality although they could see through the bleary clouds of sambuca, their night was coming to an end. The venom I feel towards this night is not that people like to get drunk, it is that, personally, if I were to go out knowing I would 1. Call my mother and pretty much everyone a slag, 2. Get covered in blood, 3. Have to go home at 12 because no one would let me in due to points 1 and 2, I would board the windows up, sit at home eating my weight in cakes waiting for the next weekend, where perhaps, if I was lucky, I could get home without losing completely the shred of dignity I attained from working hard all week, although that is difficult from the offset because, as one of them, I probably am wearing a napkin and calling it a dress. If only they had burnt it all down.
Sunday, 5 September 2010
Gaisbourg review
Gainsbourg
The bio-pic is becoming a staple in the world of Hollywood and the British film industry. Be it action packed historical pieces following great men and their troubles, or modern day celebrities and their troubles. All these films choose to follow the turmoil of the spotlight; Walk The Line, a wonderful exploration into the anguish of Johnny Cash, Ray shows the plight of the genius of Ray Charles, and although boys these films are affecting, full of talent and all round enjoyable, they pretty much follow the plot line of boy is born, boy is hurt, boy sleeps around, boy takes drugs, boy usually meets salvation. This formula is not always quite so exact in the British exploration, films such as Nowhere Boy add an artistic flourish to a boy grows up, boy gets hurt… oh. These film have a tendency to focus on the agony and the consequential affect on a psyche, all shown through pained close-ups and monologues where all the deep, dark truth of the past is dragged out. Gainsbourg is a different type of work, not all together different, how could a life of a celebrity not involve beautiful women, pain, drugs? But what differs is that opposed to the usual signifiers of an artists suffering i.e. violence and tears, is that the psychology, is shown right next to the artist in question. This is done by life size models of what is troubling him; his doppelganger, his id, his devil on his shoulder -the point is to want fame, you must reject what you were and physically face the dichotomy every day. The conflict between the artist and the business man, the good or the bad is expelled to the surreal in this film. You see it without having to be told, this work is therefore somewhat removed from what you expect from the biopic. This film is not what you expect.
The audience ends up with a strange experience where reality and the surreal merge together into the traditional format, but, not quite. There is difficultly in attempting to review a film which seems as though it is about 7 films all tied up and drowsily, elegantly coming together under a veil of French cigarette smoke. The film begins in Nazi occupied France with Serge Gainsbourg as a child, this, is perhaps the most enjoyable segment of the film, it flows with ease and humour, the surreal fits perfectly with an infant imagination. The next portion is the adult Gainsbourg, more haunted by his childhood demons, but the haunting is a wonderful example of black humour and the torture of a soul by himself, not just by the drugs. In this film Gainsbourg’s vice appears to be women, and some of the most beautiful creatures I have seen on screen; Laetitia Casta who plays Bardot is every inch perfection, the women combined with smooth dialogue and archetypal French-ness plays out beautifully and easily. On the other hand, there are the songs… a man most notably famed for his heavy breathing with Jane Birkin is famed for this song for J’taime for a reason, the others are nothing, blips in the film which do nothing to propel the narrative, nothing to move the audience. The film can not have been made to demonstrate Serge’s musical prowess, the film acts like an experiment in storytelling and an experiment with the weird, with a few numbers thrown in. This is the flaw, the film doesn’t fit together, interjecting the likeable dark, jazz filled rooms with brightly coloured and uncomfortable moments of song and dance. They appear as vehicles to demonstrate the ups and downs of life but they remain irrelevant, other aspects of the film handle this with much more ease.
This film does not offer musings on the weight of fame, it instead shows a man and the affects of fame, through his own mind. Audiences are to watch, admire and infer. To be shown and not told is a relatively fresh approach, but not necessarily easy to follow. Although engaging and poetic, Gainsbourg begins to lull and drag as the epitomes of biopic emerge; divorce, violence, tears, until a decrepit shadow of a man is portrayed. The film decides to put on screen a man in a surreal world of his own, a man which mirrors the style of the film perfectly, flawed, but entertaining.
The bio-pic is becoming a staple in the world of Hollywood and the British film industry. Be it action packed historical pieces following great men and their troubles, or modern day celebrities and their troubles. All these films choose to follow the turmoil of the spotlight; Walk The Line, a wonderful exploration into the anguish of Johnny Cash, Ray shows the plight of the genius of Ray Charles, and although boys these films are affecting, full of talent and all round enjoyable, they pretty much follow the plot line of boy is born, boy is hurt, boy sleeps around, boy takes drugs, boy usually meets salvation. This formula is not always quite so exact in the British exploration, films such as Nowhere Boy add an artistic flourish to a boy grows up, boy gets hurt… oh. These film have a tendency to focus on the agony and the consequential affect on a psyche, all shown through pained close-ups and monologues where all the deep, dark truth of the past is dragged out. Gainsbourg is a different type of work, not all together different, how could a life of a celebrity not involve beautiful women, pain, drugs? But what differs is that opposed to the usual signifiers of an artists suffering i.e. violence and tears, is that the psychology, is shown right next to the artist in question. This is done by life size models of what is troubling him; his doppelganger, his id, his devil on his shoulder -the point is to want fame, you must reject what you were and physically face the dichotomy every day. The conflict between the artist and the business man, the good or the bad is expelled to the surreal in this film. You see it without having to be told, this work is therefore somewhat removed from what you expect from the biopic. This film is not what you expect.
The audience ends up with a strange experience where reality and the surreal merge together into the traditional format, but, not quite. There is difficultly in attempting to review a film which seems as though it is about 7 films all tied up and drowsily, elegantly coming together under a veil of French cigarette smoke. The film begins in Nazi occupied France with Serge Gainsbourg as a child, this, is perhaps the most enjoyable segment of the film, it flows with ease and humour, the surreal fits perfectly with an infant imagination. The next portion is the adult Gainsbourg, more haunted by his childhood demons, but the haunting is a wonderful example of black humour and the torture of a soul by himself, not just by the drugs. In this film Gainsbourg’s vice appears to be women, and some of the most beautiful creatures I have seen on screen; Laetitia Casta who plays Bardot is every inch perfection, the women combined with smooth dialogue and archetypal French-ness plays out beautifully and easily. On the other hand, there are the songs… a man most notably famed for his heavy breathing with Jane Birkin is famed for this song for J’taime for a reason, the others are nothing, blips in the film which do nothing to propel the narrative, nothing to move the audience. The film can not have been made to demonstrate Serge’s musical prowess, the film acts like an experiment in storytelling and an experiment with the weird, with a few numbers thrown in. This is the flaw, the film doesn’t fit together, interjecting the likeable dark, jazz filled rooms with brightly coloured and uncomfortable moments of song and dance. They appear as vehicles to demonstrate the ups and downs of life but they remain irrelevant, other aspects of the film handle this with much more ease.
This film does not offer musings on the weight of fame, it instead shows a man and the affects of fame, through his own mind. Audiences are to watch, admire and infer. To be shown and not told is a relatively fresh approach, but not necessarily easy to follow. Although engaging and poetic, Gainsbourg begins to lull and drag as the epitomes of biopic emerge; divorce, violence, tears, until a decrepit shadow of a man is portrayed. The film decides to put on screen a man in a surreal world of his own, a man which mirrors the style of the film perfectly, flawed, but entertaining.
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