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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 5 of 5. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by Quintal on May 1, 2007, at 17:32:26
The amazon.com version is crap, so I'll post the UK one here anyway. I just remembered finding this in my dad's video cabinet when I was nine. It served as an early form of porn/sex education for me and my friends. Anyone else from the UK remember it? I think it's sometimes shown as a late-night repeat on't telly but I haven't seen it for a while. Might even buy it to keep for nostalgia, and of course to watch Bob's smooth, perfect bubble-butt all over again. He reminds me of my form tutor that I had a crush on at the time.
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Amazon.co.uk Review
British films about sex are fairly rare, and mostly embarrassing: from the painfully anxious (Brief Encounter) to the hopelessly naff (the Carry On films). What a treat then is Rita, Sue and Bob Too, Alan Clarke's filming of a stage play by young Andrea Dunbar. It's an unsentimental, gleefully lewd comedy about shagging. Tagged for its cinema release in 1987 as "Thatcher's Britain with its knickers down", it even provoked a minor moral hullabaloo in the newspapers.
Rita (Siobhan Finneran) and Sue (Michelle Holmes) are two giggly Bradford lasses stuck on a ramshackle housing estate. They keep themselves in f*gs by occasional baby-sitting for nouveau riche couple Bob (George Costigan) and Michelle (Lesley Sharp). Bob fancies himself rotten, but Michelle has ruled that sex is off the menu. So one night, driving Rita and Sue home, Bob detours to the Yorkshire moors and offers the girls a little something extra in his front seat. Rita and Sue decide to grab it while they can.Alan Clarke's cult following is founded on his bleak, brilliant films about violent young men (Scum, The Firm, Made in Britain). But Rita, Sue is a tribute to Clarkey's ribald sense of humour. It even sports a cameo from novelty pop-act Black Lace, performing their non-hit "G*ng-Bang". Teenage debutantes Holmes and Finneran are terrific--just watch them dancing lustily around Bob's red leather sofa to Bananarama. In support, Clarke wisely cast skilled northern comedians like Patti Nicholls and Willie Ross, as Sue's foul-mouthed mum and dad. Amid the laughs, Clarke as usual doesn't stint from showing us the harsh, unlovely side of life. He shot the film on location at Bradford's Buttershaw estate, where Andrea Dunbar grew up and where, tragically, she died of a brain haemorrhage only a few years after the film's release.
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Posted by Phillipa on May 1, 2007, at 22:05:37
In reply to Rita, Sue and Bob Too, posted by Quintal on May 1, 2007, at 17:32:26
Don't think I'd want to see that. Not my style. Love Phillipa
Posted by Meri-Tuuli on May 2, 2007, at 1:00:57
In reply to Re: Rita, Sue and Bob Too » Quintal, posted by Phillipa on May 1, 2007, at 22:05:37
Bradford?! Yorkshire Moors?? ...... sounds absolutely hilarious! I've never heard of it. Probably wasn't all the rage in genteel York. Although I bet my brothers watched it (I was only 7 when it was released!)
I will have to watch it sometime, although I doubt my local DVD shop has it.
Its is about like those hmmmm, is it Keith Alan? No I made that up. You know the secrets and lies film? Whatshisname!? Mike Leigh (I just googled it).
Anyway I reckon you'd actually really like it Philipa.
Kind regards
Meri
Posted by Quintal on May 2, 2007, at 20:48:30
In reply to Re: Rita, Sue and Bob Too, posted by Meri-Tuuli on May 2, 2007, at 1:00:57
Yeah, it is very good! Very dark and gritty but absolutely true to life. You can imagine that sort of thing going on all the time on the Yorkshire moors. Here's a better review:
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Although he created work of unparalleled power and intensity for the small screen, Alan Clarke never really adjusted to a larger canvas: his three cinema features Scum, Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire and Rita, Sue and Bob Too! shrivel in comparison with such TV masterworks as Made in Britain, Road, Elephant and The Firm.That said, Rita, Sue and Bob Too! stood up surprisingly well for me. I hadn't seen it since its first TV outing in the late 1980s, when I was far less familiar with Clarke's work than I am now, and although I'm not about to hail it as an undiscovered masterpiece it certainly has more going for it than seemed apparent at first glance.
One word of warning, though - for God's sake don't be fooled by the DVD box, which makes it look like some kind of ghastly softcore sex romp. Indeed, I felt embarrassed buying it - the shop I bought it from put it on the same shelf as the likes of Randy Financial Adviser and Two Lesbians and a Plumber - not too surprisingly, when the back cover promises "two schoolgirl babysitters who are introduced to the adult ways of the world by Bob their employer".
This is in fact an entirely accurate description - but anyone expecting titillation is going to be in for a major let-down. George Costigan, who plays Bob, said of the sex scenes that "anybody who found it erotic would be a bit damaged, I think. It's just clumsy and real and fumbling about, it's not sexy and it's not meant to be. You're just looking at a bunch of people grabbing it while they can."
Sexy it isn't, but the film is often hilarious - Clarke's friends attested to the fact that this was the closest he ever came to capturing his own deadpan and distinctly Northern sense of humour (he was born in Liverpool) on film. That's not to say that it isn't often as bleak as his other studies of 1980s Britain - the underlying desperation of the characters keeps bobbing to the surface, despite their attempts at laughing it off, but the mere fact that they do try to laugh it off makes it a decidedly different viewing experience from the relentlessly downbeat likes of Christine and Road, which Clarke made at about the same time.
The writer made a considerable difference - most of the writers of Clarke's films tended to be male and roughly the same age, whereas Andrea Dunbar was a Bradford playwright not much older than her protagonists when she wrote it, and whose initial response to an offer to work with Clarke was "I'm not f*cking writing for any f*cking wanky f*cking film director" (incidentally, the film's big-screen origins mean that the language is somewhat riper than it is in Clarke's other films!). Clarke apparently loved working with her (though it seems the feeling wasn't mutual!), and made much of the film on the run-down Bradford housing estate that Dunbar herself lived in, with her family and friends in attendance to offer suggestions.
Rita and Sue are teenage girls, whose loud, brassy confidence belies their ignorance of the world in general and sexual matters in particular. After offering to drive them home, Bob, the father of the children Rita and Sue have been babysitting, seduces both of them in his car on a deserted moor. After that, they continue to meet up clandestinely - always as a threesome, to prevent Bob showing any favouritism - but it's an utterly empty experience for them: Rita and Sue do it because it makes them feel adult and wanted (albeit briefly) while Bob is using them as a substitute for his own passionless relationship with his wife. Needless to say, things turn out badly, though I'm not going to give away spoilers here.
Like Clarke's other films of the period, Rita, Sue and Bob Too! was shot on location using long Steadicam-powered takes, the camera constantly circling around his characters, tracking their movements, especially when they're on foot. David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film - arguably the first book to take Clarke's work seriously - calls him "a poet for all those beasts who pace and measure the limits of their cages - no-one has ever grasped the central metaphor of walking quite as well as Alan Clarke".
Much of the film is set out in seemingly limitless open space, but it's populated by people who can't see further than the end of their noses (or, in Bob's case, another organ). When Sue gets herself a Pakistani boyfriend her own age (played by a very young Kulvinder Ghir, of subsequent Goodness Gracious Me fame), she can't really relate to him because her entire knowledge of his native culture comes from her family and friends' petty prejudices and watching unsubtitled Bollywood films with him in the local cinema, and he has similarly blinkered views about women's subservient role (so does Bob, come to that).
The three lead performances are well-nigh faultless: Siobhan Finneran and Michelle Holmes never achieved the heights of the likes of Ray Winstone, Phil Daniels and Tim Roth, to name other actors who made their debuts in Clarke films, but that's no reflection on their performances, which are more than up to the same standard (and given vividly drawn characters and dialogue to match). And George Costigan is wonderfully sleazy as the horrible, nouveau riche Bob, whose sharp suits conceal tattoos from a previous existence, and whose cocky demeanour is deflated by unexpected impotence. And few directors handled supporting extras quite as well as Alan Clarke - Sue's family and neighbours are particularly well-drawn. It's not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a sadder and wiser piece of work than its advertising or initial reception suggested.
--------------------------------------------------I'll send you a copy of the DVD that came free with 'The Sun' if you want?
Q
Posted by Meri-Tuuli on May 3, 2007, at 1:15:31
In reply to Re: Rita, Sue and Bob Too » Meri-Tuuli, posted by Quintal on May 2, 2007, at 20:48:30
OOoooooooooi
Yes please!
This is the end of the thread.
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