Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Stained with the butterdrips from Crumpets



No particular reason for posting this. I know 'Crow Crag' successfully passed under the hammer, but that’s not why.

All I really wanted to say is, if I ever get tired of watching this movie, it will be a very sad day in sourpusworld.

I remember it as a slow burner. A student in London at the time of release (1987), I went to see it on a naff-all-else-I-fancied-doing sort of whim, at a poorly attended afternoon showing; no idea what it was about, having missed what few reviews there were.

I came out with the feeling that I had been grafted a new funny bone.

I know it’s considered a student house, hardy perennial now, but at the time it didn’t even qualify as a well kept secret in the ‘trendy’ South London college I attended. No one else I knew seemed to be interested in seeing it and then it just seemed to disappear from view. I didn’t start to hear about it again until the early Nineties, as word of its awesomeness properly spread. By then, to paraphrase Marwood’s bathroom soliloquy, it had melted through my nervous system and was seeping out the pores.

Bruce Robinson, I salute you.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Donds - that film means a lot to me, and has been with me all my adult life, and i bloody love it like a very close friend.

sourpus said...

D'accord, Blimpy old man. Obviously its not an issue to catch fire on here..I just felt like expressing myself on the subject.

I'd also like to see one of Robinson's other novels ('Thomas Penman') made into a movie, as I think it has cinematic potential..the story of a boy whose hobby is shitting himself. Until he discovers girls at least.

Anyone else here read it?

saneshane said...

hey ya sourpus.. people on here have been keeping me busy so unable to keep up the comments.

First watched Withnail when I started college.. the film studies got nearly new films or old arty ones and showed them in a little local cinema called the continental. I lived round the corner so went every week.. the building was beautiful and the tiny cinema was run by and odd couple who took for the tickets and then spent half hour getting up the 12 steps to the projector.
Apart from the students, the art house films would only get a maximum of 15 people in watching. (3 of us paid to see 'Drowning by Numbers')
The couple kept going by showing 'Nature' films in the afternoon O.A.P discount! 50p extra to sit in the double seats in the last two rows.

I loved that place.
and the old decaying faded glory of the place suited Withnail and I down to the ground.......

..also, the offie was next door and they didn't mind the interesting cigerettes in 88ish.

Two years later and they'd knocked the place down and built an identikit pub.. how it wasn't saved is beyond me.

steenbeck said...

Me too! I loved it when it came out. I haven't seen it in years--I think I'd better watch it again.