09/08/10 - Pink Floyd The Wall

Pink Floyd The Wall (1982, 95 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084503/

This is my 300th post! Huzzah!

I'd seen Pink Floyd The Wall just over three years ago but I felt like giving it a rewatch. It was one of the creepiest movies I'd ever seen from a deep psychological perspective (at least for me) and I guess I was watching it in getting ready for Thriller October.

The film tells the same story that Pink Floyd's album The Wall tells as it sets the songs to a movie. There's very little dialogue as most everything is told through the songs. The only real actor here is Bob Geldof as Pink.

The thing I find so fascinating about this movie is how little the band, director, and pretty much anyone involved in the film actually liked it. Roger Waters and David Gilmour both said it essentially fails at telling The Wall story. Seeing as how Waters wrote this (for the most part), I find this particularly odd. I, on the other hand, someone with basically no knowledge of the deeper inner workings of what was going on with The Wall and what exactly the band wanted to say, think that Pink Floyd The Wall works as a film. First off, I think it tells the story. I don't think it fails at this in any way. Waters says it's perhaps a bit too depressing and that it doesn't allow the audience to sympathize with Pink. While he is right to some degree I think it constructs a decent character in Pink. It's obvious that we are shown his failures and what has led him to build the wall in the first place. The haunting imagery of his depression is apparent and I think that in and of itself is enough to make us feel sorry for him. I guess one could say he doesn't actively try enough to break out of this funk or whatever, but I don't think that's valid due to how everything occurs.

Where Pink Floyd The Wall really stands out for me though is in the cartoon imagery that is incorporated. It's dark and disturbing from a psychological perspective. These aren't cartoons by the standard definition of the word; my mind is uncomfortable watching the images. They don't haunt my dreams or anything, but it's just hard to watch these monsters and images of psychological turmoil be shown and not feel creeped out nor have chilled feelings. I think this is what the movie does best. Yes, it's good at telling The Wall story (in my opinion) but it stands out for disturbing me (which, given the nature of the story, it should - again in my opinion).

On the flip side of the imagery coin, there is the non-cartoon imagery. This is where I think the movie completely fails. For every success there's a couple mishaps. I really like the children marching into the factory to the tune of "Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2" and think this really works. Also, I like how "Mother" and "In the Flesh" work with the cinematography. However, where the movie fails is frequently in between songs or during the more interlude songs if that makes sense. I feel that Pink Floyd The Wall sometimes adopts a very amateurish approach here. For example, there's one particular shot of a drainage pipe or a sewer that I recall. I hate to use the word pretentious because of the connotations of the word but the film somewhat comes off as pretentious here. "Look! This scene is important so I'm filming it this way." seems to come through. It's heavy-handed to me and detracts from what the film is saying. Maybe these are the moments the director and the band refer to when they say the film fails (or when they call it "the most expensive student film ever mad").

Overall, I gave this film a 7/10. In my opinion, Pink Floyd The Wall tells the story of The Wall very well through the use of complicated, dark and psychological imagery. There's some hic-cups along the way as the acting is pretty much non-existent and there's sometimes bad cinematography here and there. But the cartoon imagery works so well from my perspective that I give the movie a pretty good score.