Guy Ritchie

[RNL]

Guy Ritchie (1968- )



1. Snatch (2000) 2/10
2. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) 2/10
3. Revolver (2005) 1/10

[jrod]

Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
Snatch

[Vercetti]

Snatch

[Capo]

1. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels 1998
2. Snatch 2000

[svsg]

Lock Stock and 2 smoking Barrels
Snatch

I really liked each and every character in these 2 really funny movies. My only complaint is that these are almost identical in theme and style. But when they are good quality, it is really not that much of a complaint.

[Boz]

Shit Wetdog, you actually saw Revolver? I've read some incredibly polarized reviews. It was never released here. Care to eloborate on your rating?

Snatch (2000)
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998

[jake]

How you can pan Hitchcock for "lack of depth" and give such high ratings to this hack I'll never know.

[Boz]

Ritchie's more of a style thing for me, as well as some other directors. I just like the way he directs.

[jake]

There really is no consistency is your criticisms. I don't understand how you can pan one director for "lack of depth" and then on the other hand praise another for their style? (Maybe you find depth in Ritchie's films).

Don't you think Hitchcock is stylish too?

[Boz]

No, actually I don't.

I find his direction (with some notable exceptions in Psycho) to be stiff, old-fashioned, conservative, and boring.

[Vercetti]

Are you shitting me? I can tell a Hitchcock film from an average film from the same time any day of the week. His camera movements alone are recognizable.

Explain how Vertigo, Rear Window, etc. are conservative. And even so, is that a bad thing? What's from with deadpan or minimalism?

[RNL]

mistamista said:

Shit Wetdog, you actually saw Revolver? I've read some incredibly polarized reviews. It was never released here. Care to eloborate on your rating?

This is what I wrote after seeing it last September.

I didn't like either of Guy Ritchie's previous gangster comedies, and was thoroughly pissed off at having to substitute this (which I didn't want to see at all) for A History of Violence (which I've been anticipating for a year and a half). However, this one's worth a watch, I think. Perhaps as a reaction against the panning his last film, Madonna-vehicle Swept Away, received, and reservations about his ability to genuinely expand on Snatch, Ritchie has decided to do something more challenging - he's taken all the qualities of his first films, all the stereotypes and idioms, and woven them into an impenetrable, determinedly vague film about... something, or nothing - but mostly itself... I think. :/

There's plenty of hedgy allusions to philosophy, religion and literature that never really cohese on a conceptual level, and the film's structure seems more like a facade concealing a hollowness than anything particulary layered, but all the intellectual non-sequiturs are still fairly thought-provoking in isolation from oneanother - fallen gods, the mind/body relationship, the moment of death, futile materialism, and films about films (the movie opens with a half-dozen famous quotes, then proceeds to explicitly quote famous films). Revolver's strengths, actually, don't really lie in any of its inherent qualities, but rather in what filmmaking issues the inscrutable puzzle forces the audience to confront and consider (or, alternatively, I suppose, miss/dismiss). The whole film seems to be a manifestation of one of its recurring bytes of chess theory: In each game there is a winner and a loser, the winner's job is to feed the loser what he needs to slowly hang himself. The audience is either the winner feeding the film its meaning, or the loser trying to extract it.

Regardless, there is one moment of absolute visual brilliance that I must mention. It's toward the end, a scene in which an assassin wipes out an apartment building full of bodyguards, intuiting their positions and shooting them through the walls and ceilings. The camera totally distorts our perception of space, panning, without cuts, between two spacially disjointed locations and artificially unifying them, before panning again and doing the same. It's hard to descibe, but it's an astonishing scene.

[Boz]

Thanks for that. How'd you come to see it? Download?

[RNL]

No, it came to cinemas around here.

[Boz]

Oh, I don't know where your from, so I wasn't sure.

[Capo]

He's from Mars.

[Boz]

Well I heard it was bad, but wow. Showing on Mars only?

That's rough.

[Anasazie]

1. Snatch (2000) 2/10
2. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) 1/10

The single most irrelevant director in the world?

[svsg]

Far from it

[ronnierocketago]

And unsurprisingly, I'm apparently the only FCMer who saw his SWEPT AWAY remake that really curtailed his then-rising career to hell.

Thanks Madonna!

SWEPT AWAY (2002) - *1/2