high hopes and a disturbing experience

horsemouth's flatmate has suggested that high hopes is best understood as a horror movie - insufficient characters trapped in defeat (and yet surviving anyway)

 Subject : sunday
Posted Date: : 03 Dec 2006, 12:40

 horsemouth waved his friend jacques (this means someone horsemouth has actually met in the real world) off on his trip to india last night. round there he was reminded - watching mike leigh's 'high hopes', how much he hated that whole ken loach, mike leigh thing. Or rather how much he used to like it when he cared about 'political sigificance' - now that horsemouth attempts to subscribe to less vulgar notions of that and indeed 'realism', the appeal of them has vanished.  Both the sister and the yuppy neighbor woman character are thatcher's sisters - it's fine that the gentrification of islington kings cross is misrepresented as being conducted by the old (public) school posh (the film-maker is repeating the mistakes of the military in fighting the previous class war rather than the current one), whereas it was conducted by the new labouratii, it is that the sister is in the long line of  attacks upon the working class attempting to change themselves in any way  - the simple fact is that Mike leigh's side lost and that the attitudes in the movie are mere historical curiosities. The very buildings in which it was filmed were not gentrified but demolished to make way for the eurostar terminal. At the time everyone was completely happy to see ourselves (marginal london lumpens and, a later term, slackers) portrayed - and in a sense I am unfairly criticising the movie for failing to solve the problems of the era (at least in its own terms) The issue is not that these films are not realistic - to be a film is necessarily to be unrealistic. Naked is a much better movie but in attempting to show the ugliness produced by this disenfranchisement of a whole generation but it is in fact itself sexist just look at the camera angle as the caitlin  character leaves the movie (shot on a street in dalston - house gentrified). ps. The david thewliss character was deeply popular with gobshite northern ravers. Americans like these movies because they are not hollywood but in fact they are not wholely movies - they owe more to documentary. Currently reading studies in european realism - georg Lukacs -here mike leigh is not a balzac (on the wrong side but getting through to the truth nonetheless) , he's a zola, or maybe even a hugo.

Subject : a disturbing experience
Posted Date: : 01 Dec 2006, 18:27

 horsemouth has just had (well on thursday) a disturbing experience... one of the skinnier fat children brought a knife to the beach and during a children's game announced he was going to 'poke' one of the others with it and proceeded to show the other child it. what disturbs horsemouth is the thought not just that these (frequently sulky) children are armed to the teeth but that this was regarded as a source or fit subject for entertainment by the other child. This knife carrying is thought so little of  that it can be the subject of a childrens game even when their psychiatric social worker is present. 'ooh! don't stab me! don't poke me! ooh!' lisped one. horsemouth resolved to quit that beach and seek donkey-work elsewhere. of course he has told the fat controller of beachside donkey operations - (having first consulted his union rep) who will no doubt tell the children's chief psychiatric social worker. horsemouth has refused to identify the particular child involved and hopes that the matter will stop there - with some general knife safety training for the children etc. and that on no account will horsemouth be labelled a grass and condemned to talk to laughing policemen. this does not however seem likely...

indeed it would be worrying if it did - 'disarming children!... fiddle de-de!' says the chief psychiatric social worker ' there's no proof they were ever armed' he temporises, 'other than the word of this clapped out old donkey.'