It’s bitter and sweet, right? What you got here is contraction and expansion. Absolute and relative. Don’t get me jam! No fucking jam. See, I don’t like raspberry jam, because it’s too tart. I do like strawberry jam, but it’s a bit too sweet. What you got with marmalade is fucking bitter and sweet.
This is an excerpt from Guy Ritchie explaining how he goes about his films.
I should say that I don’t hate Guy Ritchie, far from it, I really enjoyed Lock Stock and Snatch, and even went into Revolver with a positive frame of mind, which was wasted on the film itself.
The whole Kabballa, Madonna faux Cockney thing is a bit shit, but I don’t hate Polankski films just because he ass rapes young girls (that reminds me, is that old bastard in jail yet?).
Artists do get up their own ass some times. I’m up mine now.
We try and explain things in a way that makes them sound way more intelligent than we are.
But Ritchie, you can’t pretend you are making the equivalent of Marmalade films when the last film I saw of yours was Rock’n'rolla, and it was cockney action film by numbers.
It wasn’t a steaming pile of shit, like say Revolver, but it was just a film.
Not Marmalade.
It didn’t provoke me, it wasn’t bitter and sweet, it was just a action film, far from the best or worst of the genre.
That is ok though, film making is the hardest art, because you have to convince other people to give you money, and that means compromise.
Some dude with a canvas can do an illustration of a vulva’s inner turmoil, but convincing a film financier to do the same might be tougher.
Ritchie’s films, when he is at his best, are fun.
That is a good thing, no he isn’t Aronofsky looking for the deeper meaning of life in the cum tree, or Jim Jarmusch redefining the very idiom of no plot, but people like his films just the same.
They don’t like them because they contract and expand.
They like them cause cool shit happens, people swear, the good guys keep digging themselves in shit and then they end with a satisfactory end.
Everytime Ritchie has strayed from that premise film audiences have said “meh”, or real words.
That is not to say he shouldn’t experiment, but the thing with experiments is they often don’t work.
And most people fucken hate Marmalade.