All posts by Ron Swanson

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About Ron Swanson

"Ron Swanson" is a pseudonym.

I Love How I Met Your Mother

Television

by “Ron Swanson”

“I am delighted”

I love How I Met Your Mother. I love many TV shows, but this is something else, something serious. It’s not the best comedy on TV, but it might be my favourite. Yes, it’s a formulaic New-York set sitcom, about five friends, all attractive twenty/thirty-somethings. While it was marketed as, and, set-up like, a cheap knock-off of Friends, it’s a much better show.

For the record, I also love Friends, but How I Met Your Mother has pushed itself where the earlier show became lazy and bloated. The character development is consistent, and the comedy comes from the beautifully, intricately structured way in which we have got to know these people. There’s no equivalent to the ‘Rule of Tribbiani’ (in any given situation, Joey Tribbiani’s stupidity will expand to fill the available joke) and there’s a confidence and consistency to characterisation that has seen the show develop beyond any reasonable expectation that anyone might have initially had.

It’s not that there aren’t bad episodes of How I Met Your Mother: some 145 shows in, it would be incredible if there weren’t, but the worst episodes are a victim of their ambition. To explain that, I have to go back to the beginning, somewhat, which is kind of a Future Ted thing to do.

Continue reading I Love How I Met Your Mother →

Unleash Your Enthusiasm!

Home Video, Television

By Ron Swanson

Here at Mostly Film, we love American TV, but I hate the fact that rubbish like Two and a Half Men is stuffed down your throats for hours a day in the UK while 30 Rock and The Office are left to flounder in their one half-hour spot on Comedy Central. Still, at least there’s a chance to see the oft-neglected, forgotten gem that is Friends. E4 are so concerned you might miss out on this slice of the current cultural zeitgeist that they kindly repeat each night’s episode, um, three hours later.

Given that cultural landscape in the UK, I, and two of our regular contributors, am going to espouse the virtues of a handful of US TV comedies that haven’t received enough acclaim in the UK. Continue reading Unleash Your Enthusiasm! →

You Really Don’t Want What She’s Having …

Genre, New Releases

The problem with the modern romcom is men, says Ron Swanson, and not for the obvious reasons.

Name this man

The Hollywood romantic comedy seems like it could not be in worse shape unless all films in the genre teamed Jennifer Lopez with Steven Tyler. In the past twenty years only two American romantic comedies have made more than £15m at the UK box office. To put that into context, among the films that have passed that entirely arbitrary landmark this year are Gnomeo and Juliet, The Smurfs and Black Swan.

It’s when you look at the two films, Hitch and What Women Want¸ neither of which, I would imagine, would feature very highly in any ‘best of the genre’ lists that one stark truth begins to appear: the romantic comedy has been betrayed by the absence of the A-list actor. Continue reading You Really Don’t Want What She’s Having … →

Cinema Week: The Future of Cinemas

Future Releases, Places
In the cinema of the future you’ll be able to laugh as loud as you want

Ron Swanson: Uncle Frank and I were approached to write this piece because we both work in the film exhibition industry, and have an immediate professional insight into the issues that are going to affect in what happens in your local multiplex or arthouse over the next five or ten years. We hope you’ll excuse our anonymity, but some of this could be DYNAMITE.

I guess it’d be good to start by talking about some of the great things that are going on? Box office is up (Avatar, Mamma Mia, the latest Harry Potter and Toy Story 3 are the four biggest releases of all time at the UK box office, and all were released in the past four years). Digital presentation means that customers are getting better quality of projection when they buy a ticket, and you can see a wider range of events at the cinema than ever before, from opera to live sport, 3D ballet to a concert film from young whippersnappers like JLS.

So, Frank, what do cinemas have to complain about? Continue reading Cinema Week: The Future of Cinemas →

Attack of The Clones: Hollywood’s new originality

Film Making, New Releases

By Ron Swanson

“So, someone has to be Dawson? No way, man…”

Striding through a wasteland of bloated sequels and wasted comic book adaptations comes this blockbuster season’s one true warrior of originality. Ignore the name; Super 8 is not a (seventh) sequel to Rainn Wilson’s twisted comic book movie. Instead, it’s a collaboration between one of the finest young filmmakers to be embraced by the Hollywood mainstream and one of the all time greats. Yes, that’s right: Super 8 is going to change the way Hollywood does summer blockbusters!

Now, if Mostly Film had the budget, that would all have been voiceover, and following that there would be a record scratch, and the picture would flash across images from seminal films like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET (all directed by Super 8 producer Steven Spielberg), Stand by Me and The Goonies. Super 8 may not be a sequel. It may not be an adaptation. What JJ Abrams’ new film is, though, is an unashamed homage to the films of the 1980s films that I, for one, grew up adoring. Continue reading Attack of The Clones: Hollywood’s new originality →

Cannes Film Festival 2011

Film Festivals

by Ron Swanson

‘Cannes. Shit. Still in Cannes.’

After a few days with minimal sleep, spending hours on end queuing in the blazing sun, eating and drinking more unhealthily than usual, that was my first thought upon waking up most mornings. I had planned to adhere to two rules when writing this column, the first of which was ‘no complaining’. Thankfully, the second was not to state my admiration for Hitler at all, and I feel like that’s been achieved.

When the Festival starts, Cannes is a place unlike anywhere else in the world. It’s a mixture of the glamorous and the trashy, a place without much class, and a place that I love, almost unreservedly. If only there were nobody else here – as it is the festival-goers are rude, entitled and snobby, a combination of industry insiders, journalists and wealthy, elderly local residents for the most part – it would be just about perfect.

The sedate world of the London Film Festival, which I’d been frequenting for years before I first came to Cannes, doesn’t prepare you for this. Fighting broke out this year as people jostled for position for the first screening of Terrence Malick’s wonderful The Tree of Life. While Leicester Square is no stranger to a brawl, it isn’t usually over who will get an opportunity to see the new work from auteur X first. As I queued, unsuccessfully, to see Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, a woman two or three places behind me launched into an astonishing tirade against the security guard who had just announced that the screening was full. She did accuse him of impinging her human rights. She did not, unfortunately, compare him to Hitler.

Any self-respecting article about the 64th Cannes Film Festival has to address the Von Trier issue head on. I would have liked to have been able to say that, maybe, Von Trier’s lack of self restraint was as evident in his two and a half hour opus as it was in his press conference, but unfortunately, I didn’t get in to see it. What I will say is that this year Cannes has welcomed Mel Gibson, whose anti-semitic rants are on public record, and, in previous years, convicted criminals like Mike Tyson. Choosing to ban a director for saying something stupid is hypocritical and naive at best. Interestingly, considering Von Trier’s film split critical opinion, Kirsten Dunst won the award for Best Actress. But enough about films I didn’t see.

Continue reading Cannes Film Festival 2011 →