hardware: richard stanley

with no little trepidation i went to see richard stanley’s hardware (and the man himself speaking) at the gft this week.  trepidation mainly because i hadn’t seen the film for at least ten years and i figured like most things from my teenage years it would turn out to be shite.  luckily for me it’s stood the test of time.  i think mainly because of the low-tech story-wise and on-screen.  the future always looks better when everything’s filthy and grimy and fucked.  that and the fact in many ways it’s oddly prescient. 

anyway what’s not to like?

lashings of sex, violence, bad language, killer robots, religious iconography, nods to argento and jodorwosky and leone, ministry, iggy pop, lemmy and public image ltd.  everything an impressionable young lad needs growing up.

so good i ordered the five disc dust devil / documentaries box set.

it makes me wonder how british cinema came to mean costume cinema.  now for fucks sake somebody give the man some money to make another film.   and STOP remaking remains of the austen atonement.

please.

oh and the soundtrack:

composer simon boswell describes his score for hardware as if a celtic ry cooder on acid had discovered god and decided to write opera.

for the film’s climax (which is an utter mindfuck), boswell explains: ‘i visualized a scene in heaven – with jimi hendrix, stravinsky, and the moscow state choir all jamming in a very small room.’

he’s worked with alejandro jodorowsky, dario argento, 23 skidoo and phillip glass, by christ.

• ministry: stigmata
• public image ltd: the slab (the order of death)