London

This is simply awful.

It's very pretentious. Constant references to artists and philosophers, even though they are irrelevant to prove the point the narrator is trying to make. Use of the french language for no other reason than trying to sound "fancy".

Some pretty shots, like the recurring theme of water, that was good.

Extreme manipulation of the events that happened in 1992. Conservatives win the election and right after the IRA bombing is shown, almost suggesting that the bombing was a response to the result.

Constantly criticizing the monarchy and conservative supporters. Making it hard to classify this as an excursion film. If it was up to me, I would put this in the "*Author complains for 1 hour and a half straight through its characters about the world he lives in and blames SOCIETY" genre. Yep, its one of those wE LIvE in A sOCieTY BS movies.

This is the first of the two travelogues of our anonymous commentator and his companion Robinson, the second one being the awesome Robinson in Space.

Essentially this is a travelogue of London in 1992. It concentrates on locations and issues within London precious to the commentator, and also on the political and social events of the time. The film is shot mostly as stills of the locations visited, and is very well observed. One sequence which lingers for me is the film of the aftermath of the IRA bombs in the City of London at that time, which are eerily beautiful.

The election of 1992 is recorded and commented upon, and the monarchy dont escape unscathed. The writer is very very obviously a socialist, and the commentary is heavily 'Old Labour', but is in turns informative, witty, and thought provoking.

It attempts some major social points, but is preaching to the converted somewhat, this is definitely for the Art House Crowd - You would never see this at a Multiplex. However, is good to see it on film

I gave this 8/10, but Robinson in Space got 10. If you get the chance to see either, do, opportunities are few and far between, and it's made in a very unusual and exiting style.

This film has a hypnotic feel to it, the narrator fits the scene as well as the music. The photography is good to supered. The film maker seem to be on a quest for something, but we don't know what. The images do linger, and the sense of London being a comusuming monster works well. We never see the film maker giving the film a hidden depth,and the narrator makes many references to a unknown person (who lives in Vauxhall). We see a familiar London, but also (and this is the clever part) a strange London. The route master bus for instance, so common, but in this film a strange object - maybe from outer space. I just simply enjoyed in. It nice to see a personal film like this being made, but wonders, who was the film made for? And where could this film be shown. As Lonodn continues to change over this film will become more and more remarkable.

I'm sorry, I know I am in the minority, but I really didn't get this doc-montage-essay, for all its wit and cleverness, and lush photography, and even lusher soundtrack, I felt I was being soundly manipulated by the filmmaker into seeing London as a political and spiritual wasteland. Yes, this film is, I suppose, artistically good, I felt some of the narration was poignant, and resonant of an underlying angst that many people experience in London, which can be isolating. Still, the haughty, droning voice of the narrator, really put me off. The simplistic dichotomy of labour versus conservatives, one good, the other doom laden, an insult to my intelligence, and the lack of voice within the film, apart from the writer's insistent polemic, was by far the most meaningful element. The film approves itself, and obliterates all dissent.

Well, I don't have anything to say about this film that's as intelligent as Margarita Nikolaevna's comments, which you should read.

A whole interconnected body of work appeared at the end of the twentieth century which seemed to want to deal with 'the problem of London'--with the fact that, while London had been the most modern city on the planet for a terrible length of time, it had never arrived at any conscousness of the nature of its own modernity. I'll name some of these works---Iain Sinclair's _Lights out for the Territory_, Allan Moore's masterpiece, _From Hell_ (which this film understands, I think, much more deeply than the Hughes Brothers'), the pics of Mark Atkins, Peter Ackroyd's _Hawksmoor_, Michael Moorcock's _King of the City_, the job Bill Drummond did on the M25---but Patrick Keiller's film is the most magnificently negative and observant of all of these. Of course it enters into a dialogue with Benjamin's marvelous theorising about how Paris was the Capital of the 19th Century, but if you haven't seen it you should be warned that there's a real humour and humanity here which we're accustomed not to find in serious documentary: eg. the great joke of the mysterious guy in the shopping-centre reading Benjamin.... Oh, yeah, now I wait in the Ikea caff, piling meatball upon meatball, and waiting for the fullfilment and suppression of flat-pack...