A Field in England

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🎙️ EPISODE 300: 01.24.2021 *Review starts @ ~ 3:24:44 This is a quick one-hitter of a motion picture. You know, like the weed pipe? Just take a lil toke, get lifted for a minute but it's really ninety minutes and what happened? Who's to say, really. I'm not a 'metaphors man' I suppose. A Field in England is a 2013 British historical psychological horror film directed by Ben Wheatley. And if you thought there was a lot going via that short description, you'd be correct! It's a beautiful and inscrutable movie, shot in black and white with a tiny cast for £300,000 (maybe $167 US?? impossible to know). The director Wheatley has had one of the stranger careers of the last decade, incredibly prolific and all over the damn place; moving from crime dramas to horror to horror comedy to dramedy to an Alfred Hitchock straight-to-Netlfix romantic thriller to a secret quarantine movie filmed in two weeks during the pandemic to the forthcoming Meg 2: The Trench (yes a sequel to that movie about the giant shark starring Jason Statham). I have not seen any of these other films but based on their movie posters and one-sentence descriptions, I assume it's safe to say that A Field in England is an outlier.

It's a fascinating blend of English humor and high art that left me scratching my head on more than a few occasions. For a fairly simple premise (some soldiers meet an alchemist on–you guessed–a field in England) it's a super dense and totally oblique film. It's a true original and a beautiful thing to look at, but in my perpetual search for deeper meaning, I kept coming up empty. Never before has the thin line between genius and amateur pretense ever been finer. And I'm perhaps not ready to make that call one way or the other just yet. I think this deserves multiple viewings so I'll hedge and grant it a very gracious 7... as I think about the black planet slowly expanding in the sky...

*** part of THE BIG EPISODE 300 EXTRAVAGANZA wherein I reviewed 36 movies, mostly live reads of critiques I wrote between 2009-2012. But this one was one of 6 that I watched and wrote recently, OK??. ***

THE 36 MOVIES REVIEWED DURING EPISODE 300

30 MINUTES OR LESS • ALEX BAG: UNTITLED FALL '95 • AWAY WE GO • BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD • BEING ELMO • BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM • THE BROTHERS SOLOMON • A BUCKET OF BLOOD •
THE CAMPAIGN • THE CENTER OF THE WORLD • CHRISTMAS ON MARS • THE CHRISTMAS TREE • CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE. • (500) DAYS OF SUMMER • A FIELD IN ENGLAND • FUNNY PEOPLE • GET HIM TO THE GREEK • GIGANTIC (A TALE OF TWO JOHNS) • INCEPTION • JEFF, WHO LIVES AT HOME • LEAVE NO TRACE • MAN ON WIRE • MIDNIGHT IN PARIS • MONEYBALL • MOON • MUTUAL APPRECIATION • POM WONDERFUL PRESENTS: THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD • RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES • SLEEPWALK WITH ME • SOME DRINKING IMPLIED • TIM AND ERIC'S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE • TRANSIT • TO ROME WITH LOVE • THE WICKER MAN • WINTER'S BONE • YOUTH IN REVOLT

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 300Z - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 300ii ⫸

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