I haven't hated all over a film in a while now, and I really need to vent and shit al over somebody's work, like, right now. And as An Education just so happened to be the film I watched this evening, An Education is going to be the film that gets the full brunt of my dickishness. I just can't go on being nice for too long, it feels wrong, and besides, destroying the work of professional film makers, whose achievements I could never, and never will, match, is so much more fun and massaging to the ego. I should probably leave out my personal mood when I am watching a film to review, but I don't care, this is my god damn blog and I will do what I bloody well please; besides, my university project group and I made a film today far superior to anything ever made,...in the history of man... possibly the universe...even if it does have me trying to act (and I mean trying, I fail spectacularly as an actor, Im massively shit). So before I begin tearing a new asshole into this film, I will say this; it is really good, I recommend you go see it, I really do. Everything I say in this bitch rant will be true, 100%, only I am going to take things out of context, over analyze and use paraphrases of the script, just to make it sound bad...because I want to.
An Education is like a manual on how to be a sexual predator in the 60s. Peter Sarsgaard plays David. David is the creepiest man EVER. Seriously! He rides around local Twickenham schools looking for young girls, he likes the young girls does our David, and when he finds a suitably innocent and vulnerable one, he picks them up in his car, then tries to groom them to get all up on his junk. We follow the short tale of the time he spends with one of these girls, by the name of Jenny (played by Carey Mulligan). Jenny is like, smart as shit, and has dreams of going to Oxford to read English and be all Oxfordy, but for a 16 year old girl, the temptation to hang out and be wooed by a man in his mid thirties is just too much, and so she and Davis begin a weird little tryst, and it is creepy.
I will first point out, how seemingly nobody seems to care that this 16 year old girl is dating a man more than twice her age; I was not around in the 60s, but I am pretty sure that shit was still frowned upon. Her friends are blinded by his sports car, her parents like him because he is charming, Jenny likes him because he is new and exciting, the only people who seem to be against this romance are her teachers, but not because it is just plain weird that she is dating a man on the verge of a mid-life crisis, they just want her to go to Oxford. Her own father is so fucking stupid, that he can't see when David is lying blindly to his face, just to pry Jenny away for a weekend here and there to examine her lady bits, he even claims to know C.S. Lewis. Jenny's dad is on another level of retardation.
I want to come back to the point of how creepy this David guy is; first he scouts for this young piece of prime in a bloody school district, he takes her to a classical music thing, then gets her drunk. He proceeds by taking her to Oxford for a weekend with his friends, and this is where he gets really REALLY slimy. When he and Jenny are in their hotel room, Jenny informs David that she is a virgin and would like to remain that way until she is 17. David responds be saying "good on you old girl" but then shit gets really fucked up. He slides over to the end of the bed, looks her in the eye and outright tells her she is now to be known as Minny Mouse, and she has to call him Bugalub!?!?!?! WTF? Somehow this crazy psycho babble works and after asking "Can I have a peep?", Jenny promptly drops her dress and flashes him a bit of barely pubescent boobage. Thats account number 1.
Later, he takes her to Paris, but the night before they miss their flight, so they end up shacked in a hotel room near the airport. Jenny has just turned 17, so obviously David is ready to get all up in that, but nooooo, before they can have sweet sweet cradle snatching sex, he requests she takes some preparations by shoving a banana...yes a banana,...up her woo woo to test the waters. I wish I was making this shit up! It was like a scene from some rejected Amsterdam porno, I just sat there slac jawed thinking "he has to be joking! Right?" but he wasn't, he was deadly bloody serious. To top it all off, David has his job. Oooooh his job, this is a classic; David takes advantage of scared old women, by moving black families into houses next door to them, forcing the racist old dust bags to move out, after which, he promptly buys and resells their abandoned houses. Thats right everyone, David is in the buissiness of the slave trade, only thing is the slaves don't know they are slaves. They just think they are getting a sweet deal on a new house, but before they know it they have scornful looks from all the OAPs in town and the Womens Institute are mailing them cyanide laced Victoria sponges. David is an asshole. I won't ruin the ending for you, but his ass clownery continues.
This leads me onto my next point on how apparently everybody in 1960s London is massively bigoted. Jenny happily asks David "What were you doing talking to those negro people?", as if they were some strange sub species. But to be honest nothing can brush on the perception that everyone in 60s London hated Jews. I mean my god, Jenny's father accuses every boy she brings home of being a "Wondering Jew", her head mistress tries to convince her to break up with David as he is Jewish and "did you forget the Jews murdered or Lord Jesus?!", and her friends don't seem to up on the idea either. Again I wasn't around then, but I can't believe that being that anti semitic was still in fashion.
I will conclude this cack pile of a review with the fact that Jenny wants, for some strange reason, to be French. I think she may have an illness of some kind that is just never mentioned, but she seems to have a hampering to join the ranks of our smelly friends across the channel. However this may just be a clever narrative structure as Jenny does seem very quick to run away from her education as soon as an easier alternative, namely doing nothing and letting David do everything for her, becomes available; and the act of giving up and crawling into the fetal position whilst other people do your shit for you, could be considered a trait of the French, by some...not necessarily me. But obviously me as well.
Aaaaanyway, fuck An Education
But at the same time go see it it is awesome.
P.S - I think Carey Mulligan may be the new Audrey Hepburn, she has that same classic beauty (even if her imdb picture is a bit lesbiany), and she looks just like her with her hair up. She has a effortless class about her and after checking her imdb, I discovered she is due to star in My Fair Lady, in 2012, so I gave myself massive kudos for guessing that shit ahead of time.
So till next time (when I will hopefully be in a mood to write a serious review)
Peace
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