{"id":21717,"date":"2010-03-20T00:03:13","date_gmt":"2010-03-20T00:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=21717"},"modified":"2019-09-23T14:52:32","modified_gmt":"2019-09-23T14:52:32","slug":"saturday-night-at-the-movies-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/saturday-night-at-the-movies-18\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday Night at the Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/WPH6cm7U6hk\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>By Andrew Stevens.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s no link sadly (possibly conscious of inevitable online ridicule) but this week&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newstatesman.com\/books\"><em>New Statesman<\/em><\/a> carries a review of Hanif Kureishi&#8217;s <em>Collected Stories<\/em> by former <em>Sun<\/em> editor David Yelland.  There&#8217;s something deliciously twisted perhaps about the notion of Yelland, who also toiled under the tabloid&#8217;s notorious Thatcherite editor Kelvin McKenzie, heaping praise on Kureishi as he, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/the-hand-of-history\/\">like Alastair Campbell before him<\/a>, makes that post-breakdown transition from burnt out newsman to novelist himself and gets trotted out onto the publicity circuit.<\/p>\n<p>Such surreal irony provides us with the opportunity to reflect back on that era.  <em>London Kills Me<\/em> (1991) is a difficult film in many senses.  Difficult to get hold of now, sure (a DVD release is both overdue and keenly anticipated).  Difficult for Kureishi&#8217;s reputation as a screenwriter, as it has failed to secure anywhere near the critical attention of his mid-eighties work with Stephen Frears or <em>The Buddha of Suburbia<\/em> television adaptation in the early nineties.  The film does however segue beautifully into the likes of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/film\/filmblog\/2008\/feb\/20\/isnakedmodernbritainsmost\">Mike Leigh&#8217;s <em>Naked<\/em><\/a> (1993) and Patrick Keiller&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/shorttermmemoryloss.com\/london2010\/\"><em>London<\/em><\/a> (1994), both of which adroitly survey the ruins of the capital following the ravages of Thatcherism and act almost as a triumvirate of post-Jarman Kureishiland, an era which was in itself swept away by the synthetic (or naive) optimism of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/old-britpoppers-dont-die\/\">Britpop<\/a> and New Labour.  <a href=\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/de-googled-chris-petit\/\">Chris Petit<\/a> recently claimed that on reflection his own <em>Radio On<\/em> (1979) \u201cended with a car \u2018stalled on the edge of the future&#8217;, which we didn&#8217;t know then would be Thatcherism.&#8221; The tragically misfortunate characters of <em>London Kills Me<\/em> find themselves staring right back into that void.  The film includes Steven Mackintosh as a lead, him later going on to feature in Kureishi&#8217;s <em>Buddha of Suburbia<\/em> and <em>The Mother<\/em>, and most recently as Peter Mandelson in a TV docudrama (Yelland famously arranged for a sly wink homophobic war of words against the Europhile cabinet minister through the pages of his paper, declaring that Britain was run by a &#8220;gay mafia&#8221; and taunting Mandelson as the &#8220;Dishonourable Member for Copacabana East&#8221;, water under the bridge now, both claim).<\/p>\n<p>David Yelland has his function here, but it&#8217;s as a stoker in the New Right&#8217;s boiler room during much of what transpired in Kureishi&#8217;s books and films, not a peer hopefully seeking to achieve a modicum of equivalence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Andrew Stevens. There&#8217;s no link sadly (possibly conscious of inevitable online ridicule) but this week&#8217;s New Statesman carries a review of Hanif Kureishi&#8217;s Collected Stories by former Sun editor David Yelland. There&#8217;s something deliciously twisted perhaps about the notion of Yelland, who also toiled under the tabloid&#8217;s notorious Thatcherite editor Kelvin McKenzie, heaping praise [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buzzwords"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21717"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97835,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21717\/revisions\/97835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}