After banging his debut and doing a commercially successful sub-par american semi-remake in the form of
Snatch, Ritchie wanted to eat the world and did bite one of its biggest figures:
The main reason this guy is here comes from one of his infamous collaborations with his then-wife
Madonna, who was LARPing as a british royal at the time and what better than to have this dude, a young high-energy successful party boy with lineage, as her prize for a while. Honestly i probably would've done the same if i was Guy
Madonna was still hot back then but she previously burned coal, so who knows maybe i would've not but it seems our boy here went a little overboard with it.
The mainstream media had many field days with these two and to be fair their usual projects were trashy or didn't really fit into perspective, we can mention the well-directed but horribly acted BMW action shorts which Ritchie co-directed with Kar-Wai Wong and starred the mentally-retarded Clive Owen, the infamous Madonna cameo/theme song for 007's
Die Another Day in which both lobbied hard to get and also the panned 2002 remake of
Swept Away, directed by Guy himself and starring Madonna with Adriano Giannini, the son of the original protagonist.
The movie sadly shows plenty of scenes with the italian stud kissing, rolling and downright banging Madonna on a desert island while Ritchie somehow called for re-shoots to achieve perfection, something which made him suffer the highest ridicule that still goes onto this day, mainly because the movie was considered hot garbage (haven't seen it so can't say) and the supposed re-shoots seemingly didn't work any good at all, making his """suffering""" and the uncomfortable times the entire crew had go in vain.
There is something salvageable there, in fact i think it's pretty decent and probably the only good thing to come out of that hilarity is this video,
What It Feels Like For a Girl, made in 2001 for his dear wife.
This here shows one of the few well-done examples of
hyperkinetic action cinema, the formal street name for the genre spawned from Hong Kong action cinema and refined by the Japanese some time later (mainly by Takashi Miike) that shows deuscth angles galore, quick
but legible cuts into action moves, schematic visual explanations of objects in motion ala futurismo, overall somewhat complex camera work accompanying hyperactive editing/montages, exaltation of colours, night life, larger-than-life characters and the average special sauce of not taking anything seriously while doing this.
It's very easy to screw this kind of sub-genre, hence why very few achieve this while being entertaining and not migraine-inducing, even the masters like John Woo, Tsui Hark and Miike ended up screwing some attempts up in the process; not here, although overly juvenile, edgy and silly with no substance in initial motivations (like most of Ritchie's work to be fair) this short example plays its cards on time and without overdoing it too much. It does delve well into the independent woman power fantasy but the implications she's the devil/a demon mainly placate this, the song probably is a bit too serious for its own good to be frank.
It's all good fun but some channels didn't think so, the video was banned in some countries for its absurd portrayal of violence, namely MTV and VH1 screened only the official debut of it and then dropped it hard. In my case i remember the video getting heavy circulation on MTV Latin America, so i guess it didn't apply everywhere.
After that fiasco and having directed two popular but lambasted films,
Revolver and
Rockn'Rolla, our man here got a second breath and went on to make the surreal re-imagination of Sherlock Holmes, which then spawned a couple of projects more and got him the seat for the recent Aladdin (the one with the CGI). I don't think he ever succeeded a project in quality after his debut
Lock, Stock... but Madonna's video is the closest thing i can think of, in other terms i think the guy is rolling in money at this moment and banged anything he could after getting the divorce so fair play to him.
Guy Ritchie directed only 4 music videos, one was a one-night stand done as a favor for a DJ i think, 2 for Kenny Dope and the final one for his own girl/milf. Here's the latter 3, one in .mp4 converted from a VHS, a standard .vob and the Madonna one in .mkv from a .vob done losslessly.
>https://anonfiles.com/r1z1MeW2ob/_-film-_MsVd_GRitch_rar
If someone knows where can i upload stuff while making "a database" of sorts that would be appreciated, i'm thinking something like that anon did with the video game share threads because these zipped files are getting heavy and the host itself might be a bit unpredictable in the future.