Bludgeons for Bobbies
The Bed Sitting Room (1969)
directed by Richard Lester
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
watched instantly on Netflix
A three-minute nuclear war leaves a dozen or so survivors to tramp around ruined England and comment satirically on such dull British tropes as: Class; Cuckolding; Death; Honor; Police; and, of course, Daughters in Miniskirts Sneaking Around Subway Stations with Handsome Boys. At one point a family stumbles through the same over-saturated volcano that a holocaust survivor climbs in Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, which makes me think that Kurosawa wasn't so much putting his visions to film as forgetting some of the movies he'd watched twenty years before. Fifteen years ago, I liked Monty Python as much as the next guy, but there's a limit to how much Anglophile Absurdism a 21st-century American can take.
I liked the Beatles, too, and I still like A Hard Day's Night. But this isn't that because The Bed Sitting Room is, above all else, a movie about adulthood and its failings. The closest Lester gets to the youth of Shaggy George and Ringo is a bit of physical comedy involving a sea trunk, a well, and a mine shaft. Someone scores a pratfall, the dust settles, and we think back to the sight gag with the glass and the bottle of wine. Surrealism wins every time.
directed by Richard Lester
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
watched instantly on Netflix
A three-minute nuclear war leaves a dozen or so survivors to tramp around ruined England and comment satirically on such dull British tropes as: Class; Cuckolding; Death; Honor; Police; and, of course, Daughters in Miniskirts Sneaking Around Subway Stations with Handsome Boys. At one point a family stumbles through the same over-saturated volcano that a holocaust survivor climbs in Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, which makes me think that Kurosawa wasn't so much putting his visions to film as forgetting some of the movies he'd watched twenty years before. Fifteen years ago, I liked Monty Python as much as the next guy, but there's a limit to how much Anglophile Absurdism a 21st-century American can take.
I liked the Beatles, too, and I still like A Hard Day's Night. But this isn't that because The Bed Sitting Room is, above all else, a movie about adulthood and its failings. The closest Lester gets to the youth of Shaggy George and Ringo is a bit of physical comedy involving a sea trunk, a well, and a mine shaft. Someone scores a pratfall, the dust settles, and we think back to the sight gag with the glass and the bottle of wine. Surrealism wins every time.
posted by NPK at 11:30 AM
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