Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (DVD). Some good acting (Robert Carlyle is rarely not), some funny moments (particularly Ricky Tomlinson), some poignant moments. But ultimately there was something lacking in this movie, and I don’t think it was just because some of the dialects weren’t quite intelligible. For instance, after the punch-up at the end, why on earth would Dek let Jimmy take his beloved car? It didn’t ring true.
I just noticed on the back of the DVD case that not only is the obligatory review quote the rather-less-than-stellar “an excellent British film”, but this quote is credited to… wait for this… imdb.com, and turns out to be a comment from a film-goer in Wales. Evidently no professional reviewer said anything good enough.
Maybe it lost something in the translation. From my point of view, perhaps it could have been a great film, but it didn’t quite make it.
5 replies on “Midlands”
Film studios always put fake quotes in to sell their more crappier movies. I saw a DVD cover of “Heaven’s Gate” at JB Hi Fi one day (the biggest movie flop of all time and it bankrupted United Artists forcing it to be merged with MGM) and there was a positive quote from some obviously fake publication. “Glitter” (the Mariah Carey egofest) was the same.
of course, it all started with some film made by Time Warner being fined because of this huge “Quote” from some journalist in a magazine like Rolling Stone saying “This movie is so mind blowing, I am clinically braindead” rah rah rah, and the editors of the magazine saw it and were like “Who the FUCK is that guy, supposedly working on our mag??” And it turned out to be a very widely practiced activity within the film industry….using a made up name, and making up some quote about how fucking amazing the film is. It makes me so ANGRY!
I was quite disappointed with this film, the only good thing was that Robert Carlyle was in it :)
A bad thing about having Foxtel is that you see LOTS of movie review shows that are obviously biased, especially if the film comes from 20th Century Fox (who shares the parent company as Foxtel), Columbia, Universal, Paramount and Magna-Pacific (all of which provide Foxtel with programming). They would give a bad movie a good review which to me stinks of conflict of interest. Two examples are when musicMAX and Channel [V] reviewed The Secret Garden and the Eddie Murphy stinker The Haunted Mansion. [V] ran a six minute making of infomercial for the latter proclaiming how good it is, while the Age’s Phillipa Hawker gave it a critical caning. Obviously the studios would not let a cable channel that they own say a bad review about their own movies.
I remember seeing this for free at the last Melbourne film festival – the only good thing about it being that it was, indeed, free.