Quote of the Month

"One massively compulsive game playable within another massively compulsive game? Why, that’s like mixing Pringles with heroin."

Alec Meer, via RPS.

Climbing the Mountain of Conflict

Busy times!

[Yes, that’s as far as I’m going to explain my most recent hiatus.]

 

Not entirely as busy, however, for yours truly not to have gone to the cinema on a whim - and while it still exists - to see a few recent reputed-to-be-good movies, over the past two weeks:

1) The fairly superlative Låt den rätte komma in [or Let the Right One In, for us heathen English-speakers] which I was privileged to watch with a Swedish-speaker (and part-resident), to boot.

2) A second viewing of The Reader (2008), as excellent as the first, in a crushing double bill with Sophie Scholl - Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl – The Final Days; 2005). Both movies were of the highest calibre, but that double-bill is not recommended!

Finally, tonight, the reason for this post:

Armando Ianucci’s In the Loop.

An adaptation of BBC political satire In the Thick of It, In the Loop is, quite frankly, the film a lot of people in this country (the UK) - amidst crises, leaks and smear campaigns - have been waiting for, a while now. But not just this country, maybe, hence my noting it.

I don’t know if it’s getting a release outside Britain, and it’s also certainly a bit of a comedy for those, well,  in the loop about the issues it tackles: politics, corruption, war, and being one of the boys. Still, even judged on its comedic merits alone, the writing is incredible.

‘Will you turn that fucking thing down already!? It’s just fucking vowels!’, announces (always) frustrated Scottish political bulldog Malcolm Tucker to the posh, well-intentioned, ‘old values’ minister accused of a leak. He’s referring to choral classical. “Do you know why you’re listening to that shit? You’re listening to it because it would be bad form if you wore a hat that said ‘I went to private school’, instead!”

 

So, in a nutshell, why should one see In the Loop?

Brilliant, sizzling, sparkling comedy writing and characterisation rarely seen or heard in contemporary political satire: bring to mind Yes, Minister (or Google it if not), only throw in the US and war, and entirely stop pulling any punches whatsoever. Yes, I mean that.

There should be a notice: “No punches were pulled in this feature.”

That bad good.

(Note that it’s not the plentiful expletives I’ve in mind when I say this.)

 

Why should one avoid it?

Well, it is like Yes, Minister. It’s a movie the plot of which kicks off with a minister of Her Majesty’s Government who can’t keep his mouth shut about a war he doesn’t want, but accidentally ends up supporting via a consistent stream of strategically mis-phrased views.

It also requires a substantial degree of intimacy with Britain, the British, and British politics to work, even for the US-centred themes.

And I watched it in a movie theatre full of over-60s and pseudo-Oxonian mid-30-ish Hugh Grant clones with their girlfriends, hanging from the lips of a foul-mouthed Scot finding, among other things, new and imaginative political uses for the word ‘cunt’. And we all laughed.