A last minute find
I remember watching Blade on DVD a couple of years ago thinking ”surely we’re due for another stylish big-budget Hollywood comic-book adaptation from Stephen Norrington around now…”. When I heard he was directing LXG (which I didn’t go to see) I just assumed that was it.
But actually, after the success of Blade, he followed up with a semi-autobiographical independent movie set in London - The Last Minute. It’s odd, because this sort of low-budget picture is usually the last thing a director makes before their big Hollywood break. Everything after should just be big-budget adaptations and franchise sequels. For the little projects they’re co-producer, not auteur.
But, this almost was that pre-Hollywood film. It was written by Norrington, pre-Blade as a second movie. An over-hyped artist, Billy Byrne (probably
representing Norrington himself) is awaiting reception of his highly anticipated second big work (which, if Byrne is Norrington, would have been this movie). Painfully unaware of his own insecurity and need for public adulation - he projects himself as a risk-taker… after all, what’s the worst that can happen?
The exaggerated consequences of his failure become black comedy – Byrne’s work doesn’t live up to the hype in the eyes of the critics, so he inevitably falls into a downward spiral of abandonment, crime, violence and drug addiction. As you do.
In reality this wasn’t Norrington’s second film, Blade was. And Blade was successful. The combination of guns and vampires made it a big hit with the kids. But perhaps it put him back where he started, now with more hype, more money, and greater expectations. Going back to making a movie about his own fear of failure might seem a little self indulgent. And a little odd when it meant turning down some plum projects. So, that the film exists, invites us to speculate why. Maybe it was therapy? Perhaps, when faced with the possibility of a high-profile failure, he bottled it. If Norrington is as insecure as he paints Byrne then if the next big thing from “the next big thing” turned out to be shit… you’d probably never hear from him again. Studios don’t spend millions on a director who can’t project confidence in their own abilities. So it’s already bad enough that he’s cursed with being English.
So maybe The Last Minute was made for the director, rather than the audience. As something that didn’t need to be hyped. Something that didn’t have to live up to expectations. And a film that I don’t think received a UK general release. Which, annoyingly, meant I’d never heard of it.
For some reason this one had completely slipped under my radar. I just happened to be browsing the second-hand DVDs in the basement of
CeX when I found it. It was cheap enough to take a chance. Serendipity, because it’s the kind of movie I really like.
Had Ringo still been around, I’m sure it would have suggested it to me.
Ringo, if you’re new to the interwebnet, was the movie and music recommendation site that later became Firefly, which was then sold to Microsoft, who then subsequently shut it down.
The way it worked was as follows (to the best of my recollection): you were presented with a list of about 30 movies, and for those you had seen you needed to mark off which ones you liked, and which you didn’t. This info would then be fed into a database and an algorithm would attempt to suggest 10 movies you might like based on the responses of others.
Of course, the first ten movies were titles that were already in my video collection. So mark them all as “liked” and submit again. Another 10 movies I already had. Spooky. Clearly I am not a beautiful unique snowflake.
OK, I concede that back in the mid-90s the percentage of web users who were fans of Blade Runner and Terry Gilliam movies was probably higher than today. But, still. I decided to test it out. After a few iterations I got a suggestion for a movie I hadn’t seen - Delicatessen - and rented it that night. I loved it, natch. I now have it and a couple of other Jeunet movies on DVD.
There are other recommendation systems out there, but these days it feels like you’re volunteering your “valuable customer profiling data”. Given the choice I think I’d rather hear a recommendation from a friend than a program. Which is not to say I’m looking for something with a nasty whiff of the “social software” about it. Some invitation to join my “taste tribe”.
Gah. Am I the only one who sees that, if left unchecked, these systems could bring about some Gattaca-like society, where social status is determined by the prevailing tastes. Where children are tested by monitoring brain activity while watching a variety of films…
I’m afraid your son scored quite low on the empathy/engagement index. In fact we registered significant resistance during the more emotionally intense pieces. It’s not all bad news, however. There were high levels of stimulation for the mise-en-scene, so we’ll probably be assigning a low-level technical role, perhaps in development or systems administration. Unfortunately this may still make him ineligible for entry into a mating programme, so I wouldn’t hold your breath for
grandchildren.
Like Blade, The Last Minute looks fantastic. The only reason I know it’s a low-budget film is from hearing the director and producer describe it as such in the extras. It’s ultra stylish, to the point where it feels like the video for its own soundtrack. (The sort of style a negative review would categorise as cold or soulless. As if they were reviewing a early Psygnosis game where style vs substance was an actual trade-off. Films that look like high-concept music videos in my mind are not a bad thing.)
We get a tightly packed journey through a stylised London subterrania: Over-the-top fetish clubs just a dingy corridor away from the mainstream. A lovable tribe of Dickensian urchins are revealed as foul-mouthed smack-addicts. Sharp suited gangsters follow up a bit of the old ultraviolence with a musical number. A bit Clockwork Orange, a bit Blue Velvet.
I like to listen to director’s commentary for various reasons. Sometimes for the trivia (“the arse was a prosthetic”), but mainly to hear them apologise for the tiny mistakes you wouldn’t have noticed and justify the things you did. Michael Bay, on the commentary for The Rock, explains that if the car chase sequence in that movie seemed a little ”tacked on”… well, that’s because it was. Slow bit of the picture, needed to keep the audience awake. The reason Norrington gives for the (seemingly out of place) action sequence near the end of the movie is that, well, he just really likes directing action sequences. And it’s his movie, so anything he considers cool goes in.
As the stream-of-consciousness blurb on the DVD case puts it: ”If you liked Trainspotting and Fight Club then you will like this film, but to be honest, if you liked Moulin Rouge, you might not. Then again, you never know.” Which, just like a Ringo recommendation, is probably as useful as it gets. The path to redemption for Byrne is represented in escaping to Iceland.
The virginal landscape apparently cleansing him of his fear, amplified by the dirt, the blood and vomit of London. The weight of expectation is transferred to his rival (another character representing an aspect of Norrington) who already possesses an Arctic cool, and doesn’t have the same need for success so is happy to make compromises for money. No problem selling junk to kids…
It seems a little like a cop-out ending. He’s running away rather than engaging in the confrontation we’ve come to expect in movies. We don’t even witness the shit that must follow, attempting to go cold turkey alone in a foreign land (and isn’t Iceland where they sent the dissenters in Brave New World?). But we already know from the opening scene, that two years later he’ll be OK. It’s just the first step to becoming healthier, and no longer interested in wasting his life worrying about achieving the goals that weren’t really his to begin with.
LXG was released two years after “Last Minute”. It’s released on DVD tomorrow. I might check it out, but I don’t have high expectations. It wasn’t well received by the public or the critics. But I suspect that the director had already found his Iceland before the verdict was in.
Then again Underworld is also out tomorrow. I haven’t seen it – but guns and vampires? Sounds like my kinda flick.
