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.

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