4331/17250
Still recuperating, but on the mend I think. Tonight we stayed in and took a punt on Netflix. The nice thing about this service is you can take a punt on something without incurring any extra cost. We came across a film I hadn’t heard of (which to be fair, isn’t that unusual on Netflix) called “Safety Not Guaranteed”. It starred Aubrey Plaza from Parks and Recreation, who we both really like. I suspected it wouldn’t be any good, but was intrigued by the premise of some journalists going to check out a guy who has put a classified ad in the paper asking for someone to come on a time travelling trip with him. But of course, with my strong feelings about the logic of time travel there was more room for disappointment.
But as it turns out the film is a little gem, less about time travel and more about the regrets we have as we get older and the things that we wish we could change. Is the time traveller deluded or a spy or just crazy or actually for real? It’s subtle and funny, with great performances. The Parks and Rec team don’t really seem capable of putting a foot wrong and the US continues to excel at producing brilliant female talent and allowing them to front projects.
Someone on Twitter this morning had mentioned that Sliding Doors was now on Netflix and with one good film in the bag I couldn’t resist revisiting this, one of my top 10 most rubbish films. But it’s so bad that I want to look and it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, so I thought I’d give it another go. I was not disappointed as it was extremely disappointing.
It is a film with a very strong central female character, who unusually in the first scene is in a room full of men though she gets almost every (exposition heavy) line. But alas the character is an idiot and speaks like she’s been written by a man and you immediately hope she dies in whichever timeline she finds herself in.
Watching this film reignited my interest in doing a director’s commentary of films that I have nothing to do with. I know a few other people have done similarish stuff, but I am not sure anyone has done a podcast in which the listener has to put on the actual movie and play the audio simultaneously, and even if they have, it’s more about the viewpoint of the person or people commenting. It’s something I could maybe do with a guest each week. I have resisted in the past as it’s obviously time consuming and technically a little bit beyond me. I think I’d have to hire a studio with the right equipment and god only knows I have spent enough money on stupid ideas this year already. It wouldn’t just be about pulling a film apart (though it might be in the case of Sliding Doors), but could also spark off other conversations. For example John Hannah rows along a stretch of river that I pass on my long run and I think I’ve actually been in the lift at the end of the film. It’d be a way to spring off into other conversations (though I suppose in Total Recall I was unlikely to get a guest who had been to Mars, either really or in an imagined holiday).
Sliding Doors would be a great film to do a commentary for, or indeed to do a sequel to, because there’s so much that’s clunky and weird about it. My wife compared it to “The Room” and I don’t think that’s far off. It’s just got better actors (not in all cases) who somehow manage to struggle their way through the awful dialogue, explaining stuff that they would never need to explain and swearing in the most strange manner ever. Having worked recently with actors who would question nearly every sentence I’d written, it’s hard to understand why no one attempted to alter the script so it at least sounded like stuff that people might say. Did Joey from Bread (who wrote and directed and who briefly appears) have their families held hostage?
Paltrow’s character is sulky and odd and not that sympathetic character, Hannah is miscast as the male lead and has no chemistry with Gwyneth, though to be honest I don’t think anyone could make his character work. The guy playing Paltrow’s cheating boyfriend, again with an almost impossible part of making this weird lothario believable decides not to bother and gives an extraordinarily over the top and strange performance. There is no reason why any of the women in the film would like any of the men that they are with and that’s what makes it so wonderful.
John Hannah’s nerdy, self-conscious schtick could never make anyone but another nerd laugh and even then probably only because they didn’t want to lose their only friend, but every thing he says makes whoever he is with laugh long and hard. Even his sick mother guffaws at some useless and creepy little aside. It would be an amazing film if they played this for real and the other characters didn’t laugh at anything he said. Or indeed if they went for an actor who was creepier and less charming than Hannah (actually quite hard) because most of the dialogue would seem sinister and strange.
I have long discussed the ridiculousness of a man quoting Monty Python sketches being able to bed anyone at all, let alone a Hollywood beauty and many people have remarked on the Gary Glitter conversation which now takes on a different tone in the light of what Glitter is known to have done. But here are my new realisations based on a new viewing.
The film has the wrong name. It is not the Sliding Door of the tube that changes Gwyneth’s destiny. Her journey is altered because in one reality a girl playing with a doll gets in her way and in another the mother pulls the girl our of Gwyneth’s path. So surely the film should be called “Girl With A Doll Gets Moved”. I would like to see a film in which we find out how the life of the child is affected by this minor change in her day. I suspect the repercussions would be massive. Not only would her day be different and become exponentially so as time passed, but also (as we see) people around her would have their lives affected and altered and very soon we’d have a massively different world. The domino effect is not examined in this film at all. If moving a child can have such a knock on on one person, what repercussions would Gwyneth missing the train have on everyone else and so on? Would John Hannah really turn up at the same time at the same bar in both scenarios later that evening? Possibly, but not certainly. Meeting Gwyneth on the train or not will make big changes to his day.
The other thing that really struck me this time was John Hannah’s slightly ambiguous relationship with his hopeless restaurant owning friend Clive. It strongly feels to me that they are more than just friends - in fact they don’t really work as friends at all. I suspected this time that they were secretly having an affair and that maybe Hannah was trying to make Clive jealous by inexpertly flirting with this vulnerable woman (it would certainly explain his inexpert chat-up techniques). It really made sense of pretty much every scene with Clive and I think the actors are playing it that way. Hannah had even attempted a marriage with “a decent woman” to try and overcome his true sexuality, but it failed very rapidly. Clive may be the key to all this. I would like to write another sequel telling the story from his perspective.
There are some truly amazing lines in this film and lots of the characters seem to think that “shagging” is an acceptable swear word. Gwyneth says it twice in one exchange and her friend says “You’ve already said shagging” and she should add “and no one say shagging”. But the best line goes to Gwyneth’s boyfriend who says, “I’m on the pissing phone, Lydia, for goodness sake.” However bad this man’s performance is I have to admire him for having a go at that. Again using pissing as a swear word is not only bizarre, but open to misinterpretation, but to combine that with the weak and old-fashioned phrase “for goodness sake”. It’s a car-crash of a line. Did he ask is he could say “for fuck’s sake” or even “for shag’s sake”? Or to just leave out the pissing? Or did he just think, “ the text, the text, the text” and thought he could make it work.
And the ultimate creepy line comes from Hannah, after he’s convinced Paltrow that his marriage is a sham and that he loves her, in order to get her to kiss him he says, “Permission to engage the enemy, sir.” Which would be inappropriate at any time, but would surely make any sane human being walk away and never speak to you again. Unless Hannah is secretly a weirdo serial killer who wants to keep her in a well. Again another film I’d like to see, curtailed because Gwyneth goes and stands in the road.
Let’s skirt over the confusing message of the simultaneous accident, the unmourned miscarried babies and the fact that one Paltrow survives and the other doesn’t or why the two lives somehow connect with each other enough for the living Paltrow to recall stuff that happened to the dead one (that’s the magic of romance). I would like to see a film where she catches the first lift at the hospital at the end and misses Hannah all together. What happens to her in that reality? And maybe make sequels for every single decision she makes in all resulting time lines. To keep it simple it could just be every decision she makes at a sliding door. I wonder if Gwyneth would be up for it.
I loved hating the film and had the time of my life watching it again, which I suppose makes it a great work of art. Never mind that every film is Sliding Doors where they just don’t show you the alternate universe and instead leave you to think - blimey if he hadn’t done that, then something different would have happened. Never mind that that is true of life in general. Every decision, no matter how small, impacts on pretty much everything that will subsequently occur. Just enjoy the strange dialogue and weak exposition and wonder why this is perceived as a great comedy movie and “The Room” is not.
I learned on wikipedia that it was whilst watching the trailer for Sliding Doors that Eminem first heard Dido’s song “Thank You” and inspired him to add part of it to his song “Stan”. Imagine a Universe where he hadn’t seen the trailer. Or one where Peter Howitt had used a different song for the film. I’d like to see some Sliding Door sequels about that as well. I think out of everyone involved in the whole project Dido’s life probably changed the most because of Sliding Doors.
Another guest announced for RHLSTP. Joining Victoria Coren Mitchell on 10th November will be the brilliant Milton Jones. Book now.
And I am gigging in Belfast on Sunday. Buy tickets here.
