As Long As The Music Is Loud Enough...

I don't get out much, and unfortunately, I also don't have a particularly exciting home life. This I'm sure can be attributed to television. And while I'd like to think that I control my life through my own volition and not via a roster of mind-numbing reality TV shows, I'm also quite realistic. Which is why Sunday night's lack of must-see TV makes passing the time hard for me. And often I feel like a baby whose pacifier has been abruptly yanked out of its mouth, cruelly dangled in front of its face, and then tossed by the wayside. Which is also why, when there isn't anything on the tube, I turn to TV's more sophisticated sister, le flick.

Last night I had the pleasure to watch a fantastic movie. The premise; Queen Elizabeth travels through time with the aid of a mystical being and finds that present day Britain is bleak and horrid. Part Clock-work Orange, part punk, part Nazi revival, stir with a little anarchy, add some kink, and you've got Derek Jarman's Jubilee.

However, The reviews of this movie on IMDB are incredibly mixed. Those who loved it did so for Jubilee's art-house flavor and interesting imagery. Those who hated it thought it was watered down punk or unnecessarily violent and crude. And while I'm as punk as George W. Bush is literate, I can understand why people who "know" movies and/or the punk scene may think that Jubilee is obvious and overly conceptualized. However, I'm all for the glaringly evident, and I don't see why ideas have to be masked behind frilly metaphor. So for people like me, Jubilee is great in that it conveys all sorts of sociological phenomenon through an amped-up visual lens, leaving little to be parsed. In fact, and without giving anything away, Jarman reaches just beyond the grasp of the imagination. And for a square such as myself, I'm awed at his ability to put picture to thought in a way that is far more sophisticated than my level of creativity. And while at times Jubilee is disjointed, what it lacks in continuity, it makes up in spirit.