Just finished watching Funland: Carter Krantz sets off oop north from London, looking to find out what happened to his mum, and finds himself plunged into a sick morass of pornography and nastiness.
If that sounds familiar, it is. Funland is a TV series with a basic plot similar to the seventies movie Get Carter.
Naturally, though, if you are going to expand a movie out to a TV series, you need to throw in a whole lot of extra detail. Funland does that in spades. For a start it moves the action from Newcastle to Blackpool; presumably a haven for all sorts of deviant behaviour. And Jack Carter was trying to find out what happened to his brother, not his mum. There are also many more characters. But while Get Carter is taut, tough and wickedly cool, Funland is violently gaudy and overlong.
(Movie makers thirty years ago seemed capable of telling a story without resorting to histrionics. Not that they didn't get carried away back then. A dour glare was enough to carry a moment of menace. Today's movie makers chuck the kitchen sink at the viewer. Bad guys spasm around brandishing ordinance to make sure you know they're the villain. Maybe it's the same mentality that causes sport organisers to have fireworks.)
To be fair to Funland, it goes alright, certainly it starts off well. The first three or four episodes are perfectly entertaining telly. But by about episode five the impact of all the dildos, strippers, leering pervs, gangster crones and gay taxidermists is wearing off. Around episode eight you're mainly still watching because you want to find out what happens in the end. Who did what to who and why. That's the difficulty of crime stories. With the core thrust being whodunnit, it's almost impossible to stop wondering whodiddit. Unless the story or characters are exceptional enough to keep you focussed on the moment, at some point your attention will drift, as mine did. The last third of Funland just wasn't interesting enough to stop me going "Ok, let's be having it then."
Funland runs to 390 minutes, that's 132 hours for those of you not good with clocks. Were it cut down to around four hours it would have worked much better. 240 minutes at most.
Get Carter - one of the best British films ever made, up there with Long Good Friday. Probably the best performace Michael Caine ever gave.
Has an absolutely stunning ending....
Posted by: Mark | 26 January 2007 at 05:32
390 minutes = 132 hours???
3900 minutes=65 hours 7920 minutes=132 hours
So how long was it?
Posted by: Martin | 26 January 2007 at 10:48
Mark, I was actually going to use an analogy featuring The Long Good Friday and Little Britain, but in the end even I couldn't be that hamfisted.
It was 390 minutes, Martin. The 132 hours bit was a "joke".
Posted by: Tony.T | 26 January 2007 at 12:10
"Movie makers thirty years ago seemed capable of telling a story without resorting to histrionics."
I couldn't agree more. I'm always surprised at how dour cinema was thirty years ago, compared with the present product.
Posted by: carneagles | 26 January 2007 at 12:22
I can't work out if that's a sledge, or not.
Posted by: Tony.T | 26 January 2007 at 12:29
It's not.
Posted by: carneagles | 26 January 2007 at 13:26
Check.
If you want another great example of a suspenser not getting carried away with "histrionics" try The Parallax View.
Posted by: Tony.T | 26 January 2007 at 13:31
martin - let that be a warning about Tony's measuring ability. Don't ever ask him how long his member is. OK?
Posted by: Francis Xavier Holden | 26 January 2007 at 17:40
Humourous hyperbole. I see. I really only do pedantry and maths.
Posted by: Martin | 26 January 2007 at 19:51