Who the fuck is Ken Russell? I know the name and I’ve seen some of his huge filmography, but he has also always remained an elusive figure to me. I have never seen that many of his films and there doesn’t seem to be a real throughline in the ones that I have seen. Except that they are all weird.
I will start with an admission: I have seen quite a few of his movies, but I remember them in a weird haze where I’m not sure what is from what movie, so I won’t discuss specific movies very much.
This is something I have been thinking about for a while now, so instead of planning this any further, I just decided to do this. The point being that I am going to write a series of posts about movies, directors and related concepts that might be considered guilty pleasures.
Roughly eight years ago, I wrote about the opposite of this. While I still find that idea compelling, let’s look at this from the other side. Back then the message was not to set everything in stone, but if you have an interesting character concept, just research it. There is someone in history who’s life applies to what you are doing.
…although the novel was published in 1979.
Spoilers, but I’ll warn you before I get there. There’s actually so much I want to talk about there, but I’m hoping not to be too long-winded.
It took two years to get this out to theaters. That’s weird. Although, it was kind of a dud. Still, I do think it’s worth talking about.
In Finland cars are considered classics if they are at least 25 years old. Following that same rule, I have arbitrarily decided that a movie needs to be of a same age to qualify as a classic. However, not all movies of that age are classics.
Since in some of these the magic is the movie, I can’t really avoid spoilers, so I’m not going to.
Maybe this is just a problem with trailers in particular, but the trailer for this movie didn’t really sell me on it. Sure, there’s a mystery, but the mystery didn’t seem very intriguing in the way it was presented. It felt like the movie would focus on a different thing, but after this got 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, I thought I have to see this. It did help that it’s directed by the guy who did Barbarian.
I try not to watch YouTube Shorts, because it’s easy to just swipe to the next one and thus spend much more time then you were planning to. However, I had a few minutes of waiting, so I did just that. (It’s fine to watch them if you know your scrolling is going to be interrupted.)