FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
‘Mighty Boosh’ star Julian Barratt returns in the dark new TV comedy ‘Flowers’
05.05.2016
12:01 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
Last night I binge-watched four of the six episodes of the new Channel 4/Seeso black comedy co-production, Flowers (It’s already aired in the UK, where they ran it on five consecutive nights at the end of April after a two-part premiere; it’s available on Seeso from today). Had my wife not conked out, I’d have happily watched the entire series. I woke up this morning feeling very enthusiastic about watching the final ones tonight, and of telling our cherished, good-looking, high IQ readership about it. I think it’s safe to say that the Venn diagram of people who read this blog and those who would like Flowers, which stars Julian Barratt (The Mighty Boosh) and Olivia Colman (Broadchurch, Peep Show, The Night Manager) will overlap quite a bit. TV.com’s Tim Surette succinctly described it as “Arrested Development through the eyes of Wes Anderson reinterpreting Harold & Maude,” a razor-sharp summation that frankly I cannot hope to top. You see what I mean, though. If these Flowers seem to smell of something you might like, then I think you’ll like it quite a bit.
 

“I suppose you can’t have too much of a good thing… like joy.”

Flowers focuses on the idiosyncratic Flowers family. Maurice Flowers, a depressed and suicidal children’s writer, is played by Barratt in his best non-Boosh role since 2005’s Nathan Barley. Colman—an actress of extraordinary gifts—plays the sweet and kind Deborah, his normal-ish (emphasis on the “ish”) wife, a highly-strung music teacher who could make coffee nervous. Their strained sexless marriage is teetering on oblivion. They have twin adult children living with them, two creepy ne’er do wells—a dickhead “inventor” of stupid things (Daniel Rigby) and his peculiar sister (Sophia Di Martino), a vaguely gothy lesbian “musician” who obsesses on the pretty next door neighbor, who is apparently fucking her plastic surgeon father.
 

 
In Flowers, suicide, mental illness, pedophilia, incest and sexual infidelity are played for laughs. Writer-director Will Sharpe (who hilariously portrays Shun, Maurice’s Japanese assistant and illustrator) doesn’t overdo the more Andersonian elements of his script and neither does the stellar cast. They’re believably strange, not the Addams Family. For wallowing in such unsettling subject matter Flowers is actually quite unexpectedly subtle, and nicely cinematic for a TV comedy series.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
|
05.05.2016
12:01 pm
|
Peace and fucking. Believe: ‘Nathan Barley’ and the rise of the idiots
05.05.2015
08:45 pm
Topics:
Tags:


“Well weapon, yeah?”

The majority of DVDs that I own are British comedy series purchased on Amazon UK, but there’s really not much that was made after 2005 sitting on my shelf. 2005 was the magic year that international television shows could easily be acquired via this new thing called Bittorrent. And barring that, most programs were turning up on the even newer thing called YouTube.  It seems like YouTube has been around forever, right? Nope. It launched on Valentine’s Day of 2005, just the blink of an eye ago.

So the other day I was looking at my DVDs and I pulled out Nathan Barley, the 2005 comedy created by Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker. I haven’t seen it in nearly a decade and as I was rewatching the first episode, I was struck not just by how well it’s dated (which is to say not at all) but by how eerily prophetic it was. Nathan Barley, which predicts today’s frivolous world of cat videos, prank videos and all manner of time-wasting websites (JUST LIKE THE ONE YOU ARE READING RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE) debuted on Feb 11, 2005 on Britain’s Channel 4, four days earlier, you’ll note, than the birth of YouTube.
 

“Totally Mexico.”
 
In the context of 2005, Nathan Barley was (correctly) seen as a vicious satire of a certain type of parent-supported Hoxton hipster, specifically one who might work at VICE or Dazed & Confused magazine, be a DJ, vlogger, web designer, fashion victim, or all of the above. Nicholas Burns, as the obnoxiously oblivious titular character (a “self-facilitating media node” or “meaningless strutting cadaver-in-waiting” as Brooker has called him) pulls off one of the most memorably hilarious star turns in TV comedy history—in Britain, if you call someone “a Nathan Barley,” everyone would know what you meant, probably even the Queen. He’s a legend around my house, as is Julian Barratt (of The Mighty Boosh fame, who I actually saw first here) who plays his quasi-nemesis in the series, would-be serious journalist Dan Ashcroft. Ashcroft is the author of what he believes to be a scathing denunciation of the emerging self-absorbed idiotic pop culture landscape—of which Nathan is the exemplar par excellence—an essay published in Sugar Ape magazine, “The Rise of the Idiots”:

The idiots are self-regarding consumer slaves, oblivious to the paradox of their uniform individuality. They sculpt their hair to casual perfection. They wear their waistbands below their balls. They babble into handheld twit machines about that cool email of the woman being bummed by a wolf. Their cool friend made it. He’s an idiot too. Welcome to the age of stupidity. Hail The Rise of the Idiots.

 

“Shut up, fat arms.”

Dan’s problem is that the idiots he’s attacking—like Nathan—think he’s cool, and have no idea that he’s writing about them. Dan’s other problem, as he comes to realize throughout the course of the series, is that he’s a fucking idiot himself.

Continues after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
|
05.05.2015
08:45 pm
|
‘ABCs of Death 2’: Gory, hilarious trailer with 26 ways to die, a different director for each letter
09.02.2014
03:59 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
I’m not a big fan of the whole “gore” genre. Although I do harbor a fondness for Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Feast, 2000 Maniacs and The Wizard of Gore—and hey, I even saw Joel M. Reed’s hilariously gruesome Bloodsucking Freaks in an old school Times Square grindhouse (shudder)—generally speaking, modern “torture porn” movies are not my idea of a thick shake (if you’ll pardon my obscure Bloodsucking Freaks reference). Those films are goofy, camp fun, but I don’t feel like I’m missing anything having not partaken of the Saw films…

I write this by way of telling you that I have no idea what possessed me to click on the publicist’s email this morning for the latest release from the mighty Drafthouse Films, the anthology film ABCs of Death 2. I’d have thought there was nothing there for me, but I watched it, I laughed out loud and now I cannot wait to see this sucker…

Featuring 26 directors, each exploring the theme of death a letter at a time, including The Mighty Boosh’s Julian Barratt, Juan of the Dead director Alejandro Brugués, Rodney Ascher director of Room 237, animator Bill Plympton , Vincenzo Natali (Cube), twin sister horror auteurs Jen and Sylvia Soska (Dead Hooker In A Trunk), Lancelot Imasuen (star of the Nollywood Babylon doc) and many others.

ABCs of Death 2 will have its world premiere at Fantastic Fest on opening night, September 18, in Austin, TX.  The film will be available on VOD on October 2 and in theaters on October 31.

This is seriously NSFW unless you work at a morgue… and seriously funny, too.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
09.02.2014
03:59 pm
|
Bunny and The Bull: New Film from Mighty Boosh director Paul King
10.02.2009
04:43 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image

 

I can’t wait to see the surreal new British comedy Bunny and the Bull, from Mighty Boosh director Paul King. Although it keeps getting referred to as “The Mighty Boosh movie” (and looks quite Booshian) it’s not, the Mighty Boosh just happen to be in it.

image

 

Here’s the clip:


Bunny and The Bull review

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
10.02.2009
04:43 pm
|