“Doomstruck,” posted on 10.5.22.
Day: October 29, 2022
Sucker That I Am
Last night I bought the new “Revolver” remix, but only the album itself and not the expanded outtake version that cost $34 or thereabouts.
I’m saying again that a significant reason for the Beatles’ success was the fact that three of them were exceptionally good looking. If the Beatles had been burdened with homely faces (i.e., if they had looked like two or three of the dorks in The Association) their trajectory might have been quite different.
Is the ’22 Revolver remix a cash grab? Of course it is, but it’s also the first using a digital technology (developed by Peter Jackson’s team) that allowed Giles Martin to break it all down, instrument for instrument, and remix or even reconstitute the original songs. I can really hear and even feel the enhancements.
Seriously Hated “My Policeman”
My Policeman (Amazon Prime, 11.4) is a tepid and morose gay tragedy, set in late 1950s England. And Harry Styles‘ rote performance as Tom Burgess, a sexually repressed gay policeman, is not a burnisher. Ditto David Dawson‘s as Patrick Hazlewood, a museum curator who becomes Tom’s lover and a rival for his affections in the matter of Emma Corrin‘s prim and proper Marion, who Tom marries because he needs a beard, which is a shitty thing to do.
But Marion evens the score down the road. Shittily, I mean.
Give Styles credit for bravely and energetically committing to some fairly graphic sex scenes with Hazlewood (kiss-slurping, panting, blowing, ass-fucking) but as I said in an earlier post, Styles is hot but Hazlewood isn’t, or at least not hot enough for me.
There are some pretty guys whom straight guys can at least imagine having some kind of vague intimate contact with. Mick Jagger in Performance was one. In True Romance Christian Slater‘s Clarence Worley says that he could’ve fucked the young Elvis Presley. But one look at Hazlewood and I went “nope.” Cold eyes, dorky haircut, emotionally needy and greedy.
I had a good laugh, however, when Dawson/Hazlewood hooks up with some anonymous guy and they decide to get down in an alleyway. They’re busted by a pair of bobbies before anything happens, but just before Dawson is about to drop to his knees the recipient drops a magazine on the damp pavement so Dawson won’t chafe his knees and his trousers won’t get wet. Thoughtful.
To be perfectly honest, My Policeman struck me as a stacked deck — basically a gay agenda film by way of an indictment of straight British society and the cruel repressions of the immediate post-war era.
It basically says that while being gay in 1957 Brighton was often a lonely and miserable thing, it was infinitely preferable to holding down a dull civil service job (Styles is a bobbie) while enduring a dull and regimented married life with a woman you don’t love and don’t really want to fuck either (the sex scenes between Styles and Corrin are grim and sad). And it absolutely revels in the joys of gay sex, over and over. Oh, the rapture, the ecstasy and the muscle tone!
It’s based on a year-old, same-titled book by Bethan Roberts. The Amazon copy reports that Roberts “reimagined the real-life relationship that the novelist E. M. Forster had with a policeman, Bob Buckingham, and his wife.”
Well, if it was good enough for Forster…
I was ready and willing to be engaged and transported, but less than five minutes in I was muttering “oh, shit” to myself. I knew this ploddingly pedestrian, dull-as-dishwater drama would be trouble during the opening credits, in fact. I can always smell trouble coming ‘round the bend.
While most of My Policeman is set in ’57 and ’58, about 35% or 40% is set in the late ’90s when Styles, Dawson and Corrin’s characters are in their mid to late 60s. They’re played, respectively, by Linus Roche, Rupert Everett and Gina McKee.
Honestly? McKee, who plays the least obliging and most clueless character, struck me as the most appealing. Her manner is gentle, her eyes are kind and she has a nice smile. Plus she doesn’t push it.
I was sitting in the third row in a nearly vacant theatre (two older women were sitting 10 or 12 rows behind me), and so I decided to keep my phone on and text my reactions to a friend as the film went along. Just watching it would have been unbearable. I had to fight back with my fingers and thoughts. Here are some of them:
“Watching Policeman. Totally tepid.
“The older guy who’s had the stroke (Everett) doesn’t look like either Styles or Dawson so who is he? Okay, fuck it — I’ll look it up on Wikipedia.
