Posted by Bonnie on 22 May 2008 at
12:00
Peter Howitt's directing debut, Sliding Doors, put him on the map. This vanity project could — and should — shove him back into obscurity.
Based on Stuart Browne's acclaimed, posthumously published novel, the film follows the many chemical highs and lows of druggie Noah Arkwright, a cult film director whose self-destructive tendencies arouse the interest of police, doctors, AA group leaders and several angelic women.
These good people want to save Noah. The irony that is supposed to hit you as tragic is that when Noah finally stops trying to kill himself, testicular cancer steps in to finish the job.
Howitt adapted the script himself. Much of the self-pitying vitriol lacks novelty. And the female characters are staggeringly unbelievable.
But hey, that's nothing new. It's the fact that onetime actor Howitt chooses to cast himself in the lead, as well as direct, that makes your jaw drop.
As Noah, Howitt is devoid of charisma. More crucially, (since the film is full of one-liners) he is unfunny. A comedian like Simon Pegg might have made the self-conscious self-loathing work. With Howitt omnipresent (Noah provides a voice-over throughout) panic sets in. There's no escape.
Howitt's direction is as flat as his delivery. Noah's switches between past and present should shake us up like a rollercoaster. But, thanks to Howitt's dead hand, each whimsical digression seems to last an eternity.
Safron Burrows is actively bad as Noah's cellist wife, all fluttery hands and vacant eyes.
Rachel Stirling has nothing to do as the ex-alcoholic determined to sober him up. Tom Conti — as a foxhunting doctor — is delightful.
Delusions of edginess haunt Dangerous Parking. Alas, all it represents is an opportunity, criminally wasted.
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Posted by Bonnie on 22 May 2008 at
12:00
Dangerous Parking is, much like its unreliable narrator and addled protagonist Noah Arkwright (Peter Howitt), all over the place. Like an epic, it opens in medias res — except that drunken, drugged-up Noah is fleeing a church AA meeting rather than heroically facing up to his demons — and from then on, the film comprises an increasingly claustrophobic cycle of flashbacks and flashforwards, fantasies and hallucinations, anecdotes and evasions. So convoluted is the film's approach to storytelling that you won't need mind-altering substances to appreciate this character's sense of disorientation, as Noah struggles to find his centre and "truth, the best drug on the market".
Noah is sipping, snorting, and screwing his way from one self-destructive scenario to another, until eventually, after the intervention of his new acquaintance Kirstin (Rachael Stirling) and his best friend Ray (Sean Pertwee), and after warnings from a doctor that his excesses will soon kill him, he dries out in a rehab clinic where the regime of heavy medication leads him to lose track of time. We feel similarly — for in this most anachronous of narratives, we already know that Kirstin is going to die suddenly some time in the future, we do not yet know of the bizarre squid incident that that has already led Ray to give up the booze on the sly, and it is now a while since we first met Noah's guardian angel, the cellist Clare Mattheson (Saffron Burrows), who will marry and have two children with him, even though, at this moment in rehab, Noah has yet to meet or even hear of her himself. And we have a pretty good idea, too, that cancer, rather than drink and drugs, will turn out to be Noah's real poison…
In Peter Howitt's Dangerous Parking, Noah is not only played by the director, but is also a cult director himself, and one of the many reflexive games played by the film is the way that Noah, both as narrator and character, is always trying to re-direct his experiences to make them less shabby and more cinematic. In this way, Howitt's film is able to go through all the clichéd tropes of addiction, recovery and terminal illness while at the same time repeatedly subverting them. Even the final scenes, for all their carefully contrived pathos, end up being deconstructed by Noah's self-effacing (and terminally paradoxical) voice-over, as though, to the very last and beyond, he is still struggling to negotiate an artistic compromise between illusion and reality.
This recurrent technique, whereby we are first manipulated into an emotional response to the images on screen, only then to be reminded that it is all just smoke and mirrors, runs the risk of alienating the viewer — as does the rather unlikeable character of Noah, who for all his slippery elusiveness, is not at all lying when he calls himself "wanker", "arsehole", or worse. And yet death — the one thing that cannot be evaded or denied — is ultimately what grounds Dangerous Parking. That Stuart Browne, the author of the semi-autobiographical novel on which the film is based (and to whom the film is dedicated), actually did die of cancer in 1999 (before his book was published), is one truth that even Noah cannot simply undo or cut out, no matter how he may try to refashion it for our entertainment and his own aggrandisement.
In the end, Dangerous Parking is a tricky, self-conscious film that refuses to take the easy path to laughter or tears, and it is certainly the braver, and probably also the better, for it. The director of Sliding Doors has crafted a work that begins like a Trainspotting clone for the middle-aged generation, but ends closer to the spirit of Shallow Grave, preferring to expose its own narrative artifice than to offer viewers the reassurances of eleventh-hour redemption. Its flaw, though, is its length — by the time it is all over, this overdose of visual exuberance and mercurial tale-telling has drifted from engaging to plain exhausting.
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Posted by Bonnie on 21 May 2008 at
11:03
I would like to apologise for any broken links or errors on the site at the moment. I am preparing the content for moving over to the new version of the site, so things will be a bit messy for a while. I’m really hoping to get the new version of the site up before the end of May, so please remain patient and hopefully things will be ready soon!
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Posted by Bonnie on 21 May 2008 at
12:00
Based on the critically-acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel by the late Stuart Browne, Dangerous Parking tells the story of Noah Arkwright (actor/writer/director Peter Howitt), a cult indie director whose love for the high life is leading him down a one way path to destruction.
Noah is too busy having fun drinking and snorting anything he can get his hands on to notice that he has a serious substance problem, until he meets Kristin (Rachael Stirling), a young former boozehound who has mended her ways.
The efforts of Kristin, his best friend Ray (Sean Pertwee) and a stark warning from a doctor convince Noah that his behaviour is killing him, prompting Noah to check in to a drying out clinic . The appearance of cellist Clare Mattheson (Saffron Burrows) reinforces his motivation further, but just as things seem to be looking up, Noah hears some very unwelcome news. The story unfolds in an extremely fragmented non-linear manner, and with a similar appetite for excess as his protagonist, Howitt throws every narrative device imaginable into the pot. There are a dizzying array of flashbacks, time leaps, hallucinations and fantasies, as well as a number of reflexive post-modern audience-baiting manipulations that go a bit too far at times. Unquestionably brave and impressive in scope, there is much to admire here but, ultimately, the film tries to be a little too clever for its own good.
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Posted by Bonnie on 21 May 2008 at
12:00
Dangerous Parking (18) is a hallucinogenic rollercoaster of a film that will make you laugh and cry.
Sometimes difficult to follow but always engrossing, the film is based on the novel of the same name by Stuart Browne.
It follows fictional film director Noah Arkwright (Peter Howitt) as a chance encounter with the enigmatic Kristin (Rachel Stirling) forces him to re-evaluate his life and give up the drugs and booze that have driven him so far.
With a top supporting cast including the likes of Sean Pertwee, Saffron Burrows and Tom Conti, the film is fantastically acted on all fronts and will have your head spinning — in a good way — from start to finish.
The constant changes in pace and the mixed-up narrative give the main character a realism which makes us believe in his plight and — whether we like him or not — care about where his story will end.
Having taken on the role of writer, director and lead actor, Peter Howitt has a lot to be proud of about this sometimes hilarious but equally hard-hitting film. Dangerous Parking could be the best Brit flick for many years.
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