Home > The Magazine > Arts

Tuesday 2 December 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Missing the mark

Toby Young

Wednesday, 3rd September 2008

RocknRolla
15, Nationwide

Guy Ritchie’s career has been in the doldrums recently. Having tried to remake Swept Away, then following it up with a Kabbalah-inspired remake of The Prisoner, he’s finally seen the error of his ways. He has now remade Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and the result, while hardly a classic, is a big improvement on Revolver. Not that I’ve actually seen Revolver, but according to Rotten Tomatoes, a website that keeps track of these things, it was one of the worst reviewed films of the year. RocknRolla is merely mediocre.

Comparing RocknRolla with Lock, Stock, it is hard to pinpoint exactly what has gone wrong for Guy Ritchie. Is it that his comic vision of the London underworld now seems a bit hackneyed, or simply that Ritchie himself has become a bit of a hack? Both, I suspect.

Watching Lock, Stock when it first came out, I was pleasantly surprised. Ritchie had succeeded in resurrecting a moribund genre — the British gangster picture — by injecting it with some much-needed black humour. Instead of trying to update The Long Good Friday, which was the mistake most of his competitors made, he seemed more indebted to the great Ealing Comedies. Yet this was The Lavender Hill Mob via Mean Streets — a portrait of London that owed as much to Martin Scorsese as it did to Charles Crichton. Robert McKee, the legendary Hollywood screenwriting guru, was so taken with this strange cocktail that he credited Ritchie with having invented a new genre: black farce.

The thing that made Lock, Stock such an impressive debut was the sheer confidence of its 29-year-old director. Ritchie seemed to possess the same swagger — the same cocksure arrogance — as his cast of young villains. In this respect, the film was like a billboard for London’s rediscovered sense of self in the mid-Nineties.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page

More articles from: Toby Young | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

A perfect cadence

Stephen Pettitt

This year, on 11 December — and I wish more people knew about it than actually do — the American composer Elliott Carter celebrates his 100th birthday.

Forgotten wonders

Andrew Lambirth

Byzantium 330-1454
Royal Academy, until 22 March 2009

Out of the ordinary

Carolyn Bartholomew

Carolyn Bartholomew talks to Tilda Swinton, an actor who has made a career out of being unconventional

Life lessons

Kate Chisholm

Talking to my dentist, as one does, we discover a mutual enthusiasm for Radio Three’s Composer of the Week (Monday to Friday) and especially its presenter, Donald Macleod.