Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 11 March

Pulp: a Film about Life, Death & Supermarkets (Habicht, 2014)

Firstly a quick reflection on yesterday’s ‘new releases’ newsletter. I realised after I’d clicked ‘send’ that the word I was wanting to use to describe Bong Joon Ho’s directing was “escalating” – that feeling that everything that happens increases the stakes, the risk, the tension. It’s not a straight line, even in an upward direction, it’s a curve that gets steeper the closer you get to the climax.

Unfortunately, Mickey 17 doesn’t quite pull that off to Bong’s usual level. Reader DD from Auckland, on his Letterboxd account, suggests that might be down to production disruptions or (rare for Bong) old fashioned poor choices.

I was thinking about how I used to decide on a film’s ultimate worth following a simple scale of “do I want to own it?”, “do I want to see it again?” “will I remember it?” and, even though I liked all four of yesterday’s films, I thought I’d run that rule over them.

Mickey 17 is an “own” but that’s mainly because I have a lot of other Bong films on my shelves and that’s what collectors do, but also because I think there’s pleasure to be had from the details that I didn’t get when I was so focused on the core.

Black Dog is a “rewatch”, mainly because I saw it alone and I’d love to know what the editor-in-chief thinks of it. Would I go back more than once? I’m not sure. Highly recommended nonetheless.

The Final Journey will live with me forever, I think, especially as I and the people I love grow older. Am I in a hurry to see it again? Not really.

And I can respect the craft behind White Bird, and the heart and humanity it wants to promote, but I’m pretty sure I won’t remember that I’ve even seen it in five years time.

Last Friday, my RNZ colleague Jesse Mulligan interviewed filmmaker Florian Habicht about the tenth anniversary screening of his documentary about the band Pulp – Pulp: a Film about Life, Death & Supermarkets – and I remembered that I hosted the post-screening Q&A following the New Zealand International Film Festival screening at the Embassy in July 2014.

Florian was in the house but Jarvis Cocker from Pulp was in a hotel room in Iceland and he joined us via Skype. Broadband was good in those days but there wasn’t the ultrafast fibre that we have now (and Iceland is a long way away) but the connection held up and Florian basically took over so I had hardly anything to do.

Funny to consider that the film is going to last longer than Skype itself, which is being end-of-life’d by Microsoft later this year.

I couldn’t remember actually reviewing the film but evidently I did mention it in this piece for RNZ about 90s-focused music documentaries that was posted in 2016:

The best film of the lot was made by Kiwi director Florian Habicht, on a commission from front man Jarvis Cocker. Pulp: A Film about Life, Death & Supermarkets is as delightfully idiosyncratic as its subject. Habicht chooses to tell a story about more than just the band because a band is more than just its members or its songs. It’s the fans, the city – Sheffield – that spawned them, the landscape. Habicht gets under the skin of Pulp in ways the other films are barely aware is possible.

Also in that column: Oasis: Supersonic (“There are diversions into studio hijinks and general drug and alcohol-fuelled japery but we don’t get much insight into the band creatively – they come across as not much more than a bunch of dysfunctional relationships packed into a tour bus”); the 2003 BBC Britpop documentary Live Forever and the 2011 film about the influential record label Upside Down: The Creation Records Story.

If you want to get really nerdy about the music scene in the north of England, I recommend Made in Sheffield which features ABC, Cabaret Voltaire, Comsat Angels, Def Leppard, Heaven 17 and the Human League. Not available online, I’m afraid – DVD only but Aro St Video still has a copy.

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Where to watch Pulp: a Film about Life, Death & Supermarkets

Aotearoa: Streaming on DocPlay

Australia: Streaming on FoxtelNow or DocPlay

Canada: Not currently available

Ireland & UK: Digital rental

India: Not currently available

USA: Streaming on Kanopy