For the benefit of those living outside the UK, the word Poncy is
used here to mean:
"pretentious, unnecessarily decorated, stuck-up"
Peter Greenaway has made some of the most lavish films over the past 20 years and at the same time some of the most shallow. They are each stuffed tight with references to artists, paintings, books (including the bible of course) and plays. The purpose of these clever references is not to reinforce or illustrate a point, but rather to give the educated middle-class audiences a sense of smug self-satisfaction for recognising them.
Corny overused cinematic tricks abound to create feelings of surrealism that massage the public-school audience's desire to stand out from the crowd as being a bit mad, rather than the uninteresting, soulless sheep that they really are.
Filled with sex, the audience can feel titilated whilst justifying it to themselves it as being in the name of art. A Fuck's a fuck. A hard-on's a hard-on. Pete's not trying to make a point, he's trying to increase his takings.
Music too plays an important part in his films. The only choice for the truly poncy filmmaker is the worlds most Poncy musician - Michael Nyman. Heralded by just about everyone as Britain's leading classical musician, Nyman makes pop. He gets away with being called a 'classical' musician by using orchestras rather than guitars and synths. Nonetheless it is pap.
The relentless arpeggios and stolen chord changes could quite easily have been generated by a very simple computer programe. But when played by an orchestra sound classical enough to placate the small-minded bastards who buy his records together with other "light-classics",being too scared to venture into the world of classical classical, in case they are found out to be frauds.
Mainsteam french films contain as many shallow plots, annoying cliches and bad actors as mainstream films from the US. They're just different. The car-chase and gunplay are substituted with pseudo-intellectual narration and filtered colours. Narration is a dead giveaway. Generally, not always, but generally, it is a sign that the filmmaker is unable to get a point across without actually getting somene to tell the audience directly.
The gratuitous sex and violence is still there, unchnaged. A Fuck's a fuck.
A perfect example of this is when the French and the Americans got together to make "Leon". An all-American action thriller for the small-of-brain, but sprinkled with the magic-dust of ponce by the french. How easily poncy audiences took to the film by discussing the beautiful subtext of Leons relationship with a small girl. How easily the Hollywood audience took to the film by laughing at the comic value of this nasty killer teaching a young girl to fire a gun.
Quentin Tarentino created a couple of thought provoking, clever, funny films which not only received critical acclaim, but also made a fortune at the box office. The eyes of the big film-makers lit up with dollar-signs as they desperately tried to emulate Tarentino's winning formula.
Meanwhile, after 20 years of near-stagnation, the British film industry had become attractive to the American Money-men due to a couple of surprise hits. Consequently, when a bunch of chinless wonders from film-school came up with the idea of "Lock Stock",as the media whores dubbed it, money was not a problem. Marketed as the British answer to "Pulp Fiction" and blessed with some tactical casting and a poncy soundtrack, it couldnt lose.
However, the film is far from Pulp Fiction. It is a pretentious fantasy, shot in pretentious semi-sepia, with a pretentious plot. It has a comparable level of violence, but this is merely to titilate.
The film is set in a peculiar land that is apparently London. Obviously it is the london as envisaged by public-schoolboys. The characters too are tainted with a layer of romantic bullshit. When they aren't not getting nicked for doing large scale armed robberies, or growing massive plantations of cannabis in a house with a metal cage just inside the door, they're gambling with lots of extras from "Minder" in a local boxing ring.
Altogether its another Lethal-Weapon. Lots of violence, swearing and ripped-off jokes from other, better films, but packaged in a poncy way so that the middle classes can relive their guilt when going to see it. Oddly no sex, but they probably sussed that when it comes to TV, you can shoot someones hand off and make a joke about it, as long as you don't directly refer to vaginas.
This is sadly typical of the state of the British Film Industry at the moment. When there was no money to go round, the only films that got made were by people who really wanted to make films. Consequently they were frequently excellent. Now there's a seemingly limitless supply of American cash, any old shit gets chucked out...If you don't believe me then why not waste a couple of quid and see how far you get though "shooting fish" without wanting to hit someone. Thank god that Ken Loach is still doing what he does.