David Peace, Novelist

the fuck does "expressionist naturalism" mean?

and why 30 years? did he just pluck that out of the air or is he marking the release of the last (proper) carry on film "Carry on Emmanuelle"?

no, pretty sure he means radio on.

TS:
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o183/getshirtless/whishaw/ben_whishaw6.jpg Vs. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01182/arts-graphics-2007_1182337a.gif

i absolutely love Andrew Garfield rebecca hall. i'd watch any old shite if she was in it and, in fact, i have: i watched "Lions For Lambs frost/nixon" two weeks ago.

wishaw out there, doing it for skinny dudes. i approve.

no, pretty sure he means radio on.

of course!

Apart from "cunt", I can barely understand a word Sean Bean says.

eh, lol, only thing I'd actually planned to watch on the telly this year and I've missed it. Probably just wait until it's finished and torrent it tbh.

expressionist naturalism is a lol.

not really feeling it. im imagining the novel is a lot more complex and loose-endy. maybe i missed something, but did they really make the evil property developer a child-killer? who was then pinning the child murders on gypsies? so he could build a mall? didn't think it terrible but still.

it's pretty terrifying to think that that was toned down compared to the book

been a while since I read 1974; did they conflate Derek Box and John Dawson into the one Bean guy? Also there was no mutilated underground serial killer and wife, dog torture or rape

pretty sure in the book the child killer was a swan-obsessed aspie who was making nice swan-related patterns for the Bean character's shopping mall, no shit

Dunford finds him mutilated underground and buries him alive with his insane wife

I don't think he rams any Police at the end though he just sits in his car waiting for them

i think this was pretty great but it's hard to say because i couldn't hear the dialogue and i couldn't understand the plot, was that just me? i'm not really used to following that sort of thing on TV so maybe that's it. or maybe it was all just too condensed or subtle.

the acting was amazing though and it looked incredible.

yeah captured the mood of the novel beautifully, but also captured the batshit plot intricacy

hope the greasy twat rival journalist's character isn't marginalised in the next one, he wasn't in the preview very much but the way 1977 handles the switch to his perspective is great

i'm guessing this will bomb if even us smart-arses couldn't understand what the hell was happening.

xpost 1977 is the one that wasn't filmed i think?

orite I thought they'd condensed four books into three programmes

oh no, wait, that's wrong.

yr right, i think.

the plot was classic noir ish:

- children are being killed
- evil developer in cahoots with police and local press wants to pin it on the gypises and irish who are squatting on the land he's bought to build a mall on
- young buck reporter back from london, investigates
- gets hardsonned by police
- encounters femme fatale (mother of adducted kiddie) whom he wants to save but
- she is 'difficult', and shagging aforesaid developer
- shose wife is mad and hints developer himself is a paedo or something?
- femme fatale disappears
- reporter gets done over so bad he decides to take revenge

is that right?

I dunno, I think Eddie shoots him for being so flippant about the killer's, like "pfft he kills kids, we've all got our vices huh" but I don't have my copy of the book to check if I'm wrong and I don't know if they were trying to convey the same thing in this adaptation

Classic James Elroy yes.
xpost

also, the reporter was in BRIGHTON dummy

it's all down south to me

This adaptation did explain stuff that's never explained in the book (and in a ridiculously off the cuff way), and also explained stuff that's explained in the book a lot quicker. You don't know why there's been the (frankly fucking terrifying) attack on the gypsy camp in the book till about 200 pages later, it initially seems to just be massive police spite and hatred. Maurice Jobson being an obviously malign guy straight away is a big example of the TV show straightening out the source material.

As a reverse to this there were a couple of added refs to things in the first book that weren't at all explained in the show, principal among them the decor at Dawson's party, which makes me think that some of that will be in later episodes.

MP4xA is right about Box and Dawson being conflated in this adaption.

Biggest disappointment was the lack of anyone being called "bad fucking Bowie".

The biggest change in style was the stillness of some of the shots in the TV version. The novels have no respite with people waking from horrific dreams to even more horrific reality. Dude's kinda like the 70s Northern HP Lovecraft or something.

Despite everything I'm still hyped for next week.

apart from some impressive location scouting, costume design, set dressing and mise en scene, thought this was a REAL let-down - haven't read the novs, but all the Ellroy comparisons only highlight the failure of this a whodunnit/thriller. the characters (and lots of the plotting) were total cliches - the ambitious journo, the damaged femme fatale, the banally evil criminal mastermind, the corrupt cops, complacent/drunken reporters etc etc. far too many 'dream sequences' and slo-mo sex scenes; a final half hour that was melodramatic beyond belief; no surprises or excitement, and nothing gained by, or said about, the historical setting. will watch next week in the hope of much better things (but will be amazed if it can match either the gordon burns or michael bilton bks abt sutcliffe and abt the police's incredible mishandling of the case)

the plot was classic noir ish:

- children are being killed
- evil developer in cahoots with police and local press wants to pin it on the gypises and irish who are squatting on the land he's bought to build a mall on
- young buck reporter back from london, investigates
- gets hardsonned by police
- encounters femme fatale (mother of adducted kiddie) whom he wants to save but
- she is 'difficult', and shagging aforesaid developer
- shose wife is mad and hints developer himself is a paedo or something?
- femme fatale disappears
- reporter gets done over so bad he decides to take revenge

is that right?

― FREE DOM AND ETHAN (special guest stars mark bronson), Thursday, 5 March 2009 23:21 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is spot on but makes it sound clearer than it actually was on screen. why were they mumbling too? had to mute the adverts and their mad compression we had the volume up so loud.

beautifully shot, but when was that ever going to be in dispute, but I had no idea what was going on half the time and I wasn't even idly browsing during

Pretty disappointed overall. Think the conflating of characters from the book didn't work at all and actually made it more confusing. I mean it was fairly ridiculous just having Dawson offhandedly admit to being the killer. Although apparently Sean Bean and Rebecca Hall are in the third one, so it might all be explained in due course?

had to mute the adverts and their mad compression we had the volume up so loud.

same here. i don't think i've ever had my TV up that loud and i still couldn't understand half of what was said. then the ads came screaming in and i'd mute the volume and miss that it had come back on.

also, i have to say, a lot of the financial end of this seems to be riding on the possibility of selling it abroad or even releasing it in cinemas overseas which seems a vain hope. it might work in non english speaking countries right enough: i even tried watching it with the subtitles on!

I thought it looked absolutely fantastic, with so much fucking terrific cinematography, and started well, continued well, and then absolutely bottled the ending worse than Chris Waddle bottled that penalty many, many years ago. I don't think I've ever been more disappointed with an ending. I assume that's Peace's fault (not having read the books). I got the plot; Bean's a serial paedo and developer, fucked Sir Peter Hall's daughter when she was a kid, carried on fucking her, fucked her daughter too later on, who was probably his own daughter as well (and her husband finding that out is what caused him to commit suicide, on top of her abduction), in with police cos of enormous building yields etc, in with paper editor, flash parties, wife driven mental by his affairs with both women, men, and kids, and his general nastiness, etc etc etc. Then Andrew Garfield goes all Punisher and bob's yer uncle. Silly.

Also I had no problem understanding anything at all, but my family's from Yorkshire, so that probably explains it...

Also, Andrew Garfield is not an attractive man, and inside 40 minutes he'd bedded two attractive women. With that underbite! How?

It was the 70s, that was a hot look.

It felt like a cross between Chinatown and the Beiderbecke Affair.

The ending of the novel is pretty ridiculous as well tbh but in a different way from the TV show. In the novels there is no confession from Dawson and he isn't even one of the people shot in the club in the book. The whole child murder plot sprawls through the four books and even by the end of the last one there's no real explanation for some of it. The TV version tries to get at the elliptical nature of the books sometimes, then blew it with lines like Bean's final one.

(x-p coz I went in a meeting in the middle of writing that).

Stevie T sooo OTM! this morning i was thinking how much this was like CHINATOWN, w/ Towne’s original ‘happy’ ending restored – ie the murder of the evil paedo figure – rather than Polanski’s (to me more persuasive) triumph of power/corruption. So many other similarities – cynical investigator rediscovering integrity, love affair w/ a deeply damaged victim, historical/geographic specificity etc. etc. But again, RED RIDING comes off v. poorly in comparison.

Also, Andrew Garfield is not an attractive man

i find this incomprehensible.

It reminded me of Get Carter a fair bit- developers colluding with corrupt police and local authorities, along with a strong whiff of 60s permissiveness gone horribly wrong. Also a lot of brutalist 60s architecture.

I loved Sean Bean's car. Anyone know what it was? Some kind of Jag?

sean bean was very good in this.

It reminded me of Get Carter a fair bit- developers colluding with corrupt police and local authorities, along with a strong whiff of 60s permissiveness gone horribly wrong. Also a lot of brutalist 60s architecture.

Yes, couldn't help thinking about Poulson/T.Dan Smith when watching this. Favourite moment, Sean Bean crushing the model tree with his finger. Something very comic about it but also told a lot about the guys character i.e brutal vulgarian.

Also, Andrew Garfield is not an attractive man

Of course he is, he looks like Gareth! I think this overdid the "It's the 70s and it's really really grim" bit, I mean what are they going to do in the 80s when things are even grimmer?

Some things were grimmer in the 1980s, some weren't?

Chris Waddle did not 'bottle' a penalty: he had the 'bottle' to go up and take it, and he missed.

Radio On is a terrible film. It's OK until you actually see it.

I've read DP but wasn't around to watch this; to be honest I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it anyway. Stevie T's Morleyesque description sounds true except wasn't Beiderbecke a rather jolly programme?

I thought this was pretty bad - it looked fantastic but it laid on the whole noirish atmosphere so thick it ruined basic things like pacing and tension and characterisation and the viewer actually giving a shit who the killer was. It somehow managed to seem both understated and overwrought at the same time.

That said I stopped watching 2/3rds of the way through because I actually want to read the book at some point and didn't want to blow the ending.

Also the dialogue was so hushed in places it was impossible to work out what was going on. Haven't they heard of dynamic range compression?

a lot of people had trouble hearing what they were saying. i didn't coz i listen to the tv through headphones. i hadn't reflected on how weird that is till now.

with the cinematography, which a lot of people have praised, i kind of think: there was certainly a lot of it. had a similar response to 'hunger', in a way -- slight artiness about individual shots, but, as matt says, getting bogged down in that. im sure they'll win awards.

(also: it wasn't exactly a radical re-imagning of the grimy mid-70s. it looked exactly how you thought it would, brown and smoky. it isn't actually a million miles from life on mars, just a bit browner and smokier.)

Aahh, I meant to keep an eye open for something by this guy when I was out today but was just like "uhhh, his name was...Daniel...something, shit...what was the name of the book I read about...One Thousand Japanese..umm...ah fuck it".

Thanks, ILX.

I think the characterisation of the gay guy was the bit that finally made me give up on this fwiw.

http://blog.wired.com/music/images/2008/06/30/conversation_hackman.jpg
Enrique enjoying the latest episode of Skins, yesterday.

"enjoying"

Can't believe so many people didn't like it. For those wondering about how it ends, remember it's only one of three.