Another Public Service Posting

I shop at Lidl's.

I'm not ashamed to admit it. Lidl's is cheap, doesn't play annoying musak at you while you shop and usually has the same things in the same places on the shelves most of the year round. They also have the best selection of fruit and veg in Fort William - which is a sad reflection on the Town which has spent years re-branding itself as the Outdoor Capital of the UK and succeeded to the point where the High Street has more winter sport clothing and mountaineering gear shops than most large cities.

There is precious little reason for any local to go down the High Street these days. 90% of the shops are either clothing shops of one kind or another (mostly Gortex stuff and hiking gear) charity shops, or pubs. It's insane that a town with a resident population of 10,000* has only two places to buy fruit and veg. Lidl's and Morrison's. Morrison's are crap. I have no idea what they do to their produce to make it rot so fast - sometimes fruit that looks perfectly good in the shop will have reduced itself to pulpy brown sludge by the time it's put in the fruit bowl a couple of hours later - and they vastly over package stuff. Shrink wrapped coconuts, that sort of thing. So that leaves Lidl. Which are not only cheaper but have real fruit and veg that hasn't been trimmed and wrapped in packs of six and quadrupled in price in the process. Sweetcorn 15p a cob, loose in a box, take as many as you want and if you want a bag go get one yourself. That sort of thing.


Right, rant over. To business.

Lidl also have some terrible package design. Just about everything in the shop is an 'own brand'. To disguise this fact and make the shoppers of Europe feel like they are browsing the shelves of a real shop with customer choice, teams of (presumably German) graphic designers have been beavering away for years making up faux brands to shove on the shelves of Lidls all over the continent.

Recently however they have either got themselves a new set of graphic designers, or started paying the the old ones more, because there seems to be a rolling design change affecting the store. All the labels are slowly being redone and improved. A lot of the old designs were great bits of Bad Art and need preserving before they are lost forever. Here are a couple of my favourites.


At first glance this carton of grape juice looks okay but after a few seconds it become apparent that the nice plump juicy grapes on the front are really clones. Look at the redder looking grape just under the Solvita logo, and then look at the grape lower down the carton next to the leaf on the left hand side. Same grape. Back to the top of the carton. See the two grapes to the right of the logo ... or the two to the left of the original one I pointed you at?
Lidl's graphic designers were working on such a tight budget they couldn't even afford a whole bunch of grapes to photograph!

"Helmut! What are you doing! Are you trying to ruin us! Take twelve of of them back and get a refund! We will Photoshop them. No one will notice ... "

Nothing too spectacularly dreadful here, no crappy Photoshoppery - apart from a bit of odd motion blur on the flying popcorn on the left - (presumably popcorn was cheaper than grapes) but it's the pseudo brand name that I find fascinating here. Charged with coming up with something quintessentially American, our crack team of Grafik-Designers came up with red, white and blue, stars and stripes, and the Statue of Liberty - three stripes and 171 stars, but who's counting?**. They also needed a name that would personify the USA - and thus was 'Mcennedy - American Way' born! 'Mcennedy'. It almost sounds right but isn't. It's like 'Kennedy' but ... isn't. It's just ... just ... wrong.

The Mcennedy 'brand' is stuck on anything vaguely non-ethnic 'American' in Lidl. To make it interesting sometimes the Statue of Liberty is holding her torch in her right hand (as above) and sometimes in her left ...


... forcing her to do a really weird back handed grip and probably dislocating her shoulder in the process. Poor old girl.

The breakfast cereals are a special treat though. Lidl's cereals - or at least the one we buy - are copycat clones of more famous and more expensive brands. This is the packaging for their version of Rice Crispies:


A bowl of motion-blurred, popping Rice Crispoids floating in that odd, super-white, non-wetting emulsion paint-like milk that only appears on the front of cereal packets, surrounded by a couple of weird Manga Lite Yoofyies doing 'hip' weird Manga Liteish things - like wearing gloves with only two fingers. I have stared at those gloves for years trying to work out why anyone, apart from an underpaid (possibly drunk) Grafiker who had once seen the back (or possibly front) cover of a Tokyo Mew Mew book, would think this could have been in any way, shape, or form, ever in the history of anything - 'cool'. Because that's what I think it's supposed to be. Cool.

"Hey mum look at the girl with the cool gloves on that cereal packet! "Can we have a packet of them, Mum can we, can we?"

These gloves have replaced The Flock of Seagulls haircut as the single most misguided attempt at 'coolness' in the history of Western culture.

Hmmmm, nice gloves ...

I'm going shopping in Lidl tomorrow so, unless they have replaced them already, keep your eyes on this space for the psychotic Scottish mongooses that appear on another of our regular purchases.






* It was 9,900 at the 2001 census - and god knows what the number gets up to at the hight of the summer tourist season but I would guess the population of the area will possibly double.

** Apart from me obviously.

My kids talk. A lot. All the time in fact. Sometimes, as living proof of the validity of the Infinite Monkey Theorem, they say things which are variously scarily weird, funny, or just plain daft. Sometimes Merriol and I (but mostly Merriol) think to jot down the little darlings' pearls of surreal wisdom.

Daisy explains opera:

Daisy: "Opera just goes on and on until they get tired."

Holly: "No, Daisy, it's when they get sore throats."

Sometimes it's best not to ask:

"Mum! I need a hat and two chopsticks for something - an experiment."

Daisy sings a lot too:

Song: "My Love was in my heart - but then it walked away ... "

We have a lot of imaginary friends living in our house, each racks up dozens of birthdays a year. For some reason we are expected to do the catering:

"It's Tina's birthday party today and she wants ten thousand ... er ... ten thousand and ten ... er ... a hundred and ten ... a hundred and one. A hundred and one! That's how many sweets she wants and I can't count to a hundred and one -> sigh <- unless I start at a hundred. A hundred, a hundred and one, a hundred and two ... "

Holly and Daisy are in the middle of a game. Holly is pretending to be on the phone:

"What! Oh No! Okay, I'll tell her to be calm about it. Daisy? That was the doctor on the phone. He's coming round to take your leg off and and put another one in its place ... an artificial one."

Another Daisy song:

"Flying in the sunshine - woah! Who unplugged my plane stuck in the mud?"

Holly explains biology:

"The two boys and the girl (Smurfs) got married. So they are going to have lots of babies, eh? Two sperms!!"

Holly does religion:

"I prayed to G - O - D today to make midges vegitarians - they really annoy me."

Definitely don't ask:

"Mummy, can I get a calculator, and a laundry basket with holes in it? ... what? ... I NEED them!!"

Daisy told me she and her friends spent their break-times at school playing 'Supernoodle'. Like an idiot I asked what the rules were:

"The rules of Supernoodle are: you run around with a metal spoon with a plastic handle and you just run around like a loonican and shout "SUPERNOODLE"! That's all."

Holly (7) explaining Robin Hood to Eben (6 Months):

"Robin Hood gives to the poor; but if the poor have all the money he gives it to the rich."

I woke up this morning to this one. The kids are on the landing outside our bedroom watching early morning cartoons and getting incensed by the adverts for laser eye surgery:

Holly: "Three hundred and ninety nine pounds PER EYE! - That's more than a thousand pounds!"

Daisy: "I know."

She's right, they don't:

"Daisy, Dead Sea cucumbers don't fly."

Here's One I Made Earlier - As Well

The new cover for the case.

All I have to do now is stick a bookplate inside it.

And Here is One I Made Earlier ...

I love my Sony Reader Touch (PRS-600), I do - I just wish it was a bit more like a book. It feels weirdly wrong reading something that you hold like a slice of toast that you are about to spread with jam.

What it needs is a front cover. You can buy cases for them which make them look more like a book, and have the added advantage of protecting the screen. Unfortunately they cost about £35 each - which I haven't got at the moment. Fortunately the Sony Reader Touch (PRS-600) turns out to be just a wee bit smaller in every direction than the inside of the average DVD case ...

... I've got a lot of them.

So this is what I spent this morning doing:

Materials: 2 DVD cases, black elastic, double sided tape, gaffer tape (duct tape).
Tools: Stanley knife, hand drill - 4mm & 2.5mm bits, needle & thread.

First catch your DVD cases. Find 2 DVD cases that have this kind leaflet holder clip inside the front cover; the ones without holes behind them. Most DVD cases seem to have holes and it took me about three minutes and twenty five DVDs before I realised that I didn't have to open the case and look inside it to find out what kind of case it was. Poking the front in the relevant place and seeing if there was any give behind the paper insert was a lot quicker.

Open the case, remove the DVD, replace the paper insert with a big bit of scrap paper. This is to stop the transparent outer sleeve from getting wrecked so wrap in right round and tape it in place. Snap or cut off the leaflet holder clips. Cut out the bit that holds the DVD in place. I slid a piece of thin aluminium between the case and the the transparent outer sleeve to stop me slicing into the outer sleeve and the family heirloom table I had decided to do this job on .

Mark where to drill all the interesting holes.

Use hi-tech 4mm hole boring device to make 4mm holes through the case into the piece of scrap wood that has replaced the piece of aluminium.

Drill More holes, this time 2.5mm in diameter, into the top and bottom of the outer edge (not the hinge side) of the back.

So they look like this:

Use a knife and/or needle files to turn these sets of holes into slots then thread some black elastic from the inside of the case, thread it behind, but NOT between the case and the transparent sleeve, it wants to go outside - and back in through the other slot. Pull tight then sew the ends together. This piece of elastic will snap round to the front and hold the case together.

Then, starting at one of the holes near the hinge side, thread more elastic in and out through all the 4mm holes. The photo I took of this looked really crappy - black on black, not good. Make sure the elastic doesn't get twisted, pull it tight, then overlap the ends and sew them together.

Cut the front off another DVD case and trim to 125mm x 185mm and stick strips of double sided tape top and bottom. This is going to fill the huge round hole in the back of the case.

Slide the back in between the transparent outer sleeve and the case and press in place. Doesn't matter if any tape is showing inside the case as the next thing to do is stick a strip of gaffer tape (duct tape) on the inside.

After that it's just a matter of slipping the reader into place ...

... and print off a fake cover of some terribly intellectual and weighty book to disguise the fact you are really reading Dan Brown or Clive Cussler.

Which will have to wait till tomorrow, because it's now stupidly late and I have to be up early in the morning getting the kids off to school - oh what fun we have.

Bad Acting 101

Lesson 27.

Dear JunkMonkey Institute for Bad Acting, I'm standing in a crappy flat set wearing a green SpaceBimbo mini-dress, surrounded by people wearing costumes left over from Forbidden Planet, and I'm wanting to upstage Zsa-Zsa Gabor. How do I do this?

Well, Lisa Davis, this one's easy. All you have to do is make sure you turn to look at someone who isn't speaking yet - anticipate her only line in the scene by a good six seconds. This will cause the actor standing behind you to turn as well when he thinks he's missed a cue. You can improvise after that. If you are good no one will notice what the other actors are saying at all.

Queen of Outer Space (1958)

Every Movie I have watched in September

1. Gattaca (1997) - a decent bit of SF that eschews the usual running, shooting, and SFX and delivers an intelligent plot with some logically consistent twists. There are a couple of minor quibbles I have with it (why anyone would build a walk in incinerator you can switch on from the inside is a bit of a puzzle) but on the whole a pretty good effort.


2. The Princess Bride - Friday night with the kids - and I wish I was still doing the Three Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing because the link between these two would have been so easy. How many movies are there that have six fingered characters in them?


3. Alien Nation - formulaic mismatched buddy cop movie with a twist. One of them is an alien. Not badly done to start with but I started to loose it when our nasty villains throw one of the Aliens in the sea and he dies a horrible painful death. "Sea water's like battery acid to them!" I can't even start to work out the body chemistry of the aliens which allows them to get high on sour milk (pH of 4.4 - mild acid) but dissolve in sea water (pH 8 - slightly basic). Another oddity was the villain... and to explain the oddity you need to know the back story to the movie. Over to you Mr Wikipedia:
   

   "The movie is set in 1991, three years after a flying saucer bearing enslaved aliens (the "Newcomers") has crash-landed in the Mojave Desert. Los Angeles becomes a new home for the aliens, who take, or in some cases are assigned, sometimes comical human names (such as "Rudyard Kipling"). Now back to the JunkMonkey in the studio..."

   Thank you, Mr W. So. Quarter of a million aliens are processed through immigration and learn English with remarkable speed - the alien half of our hero partners (a demihero?) tells the human half he learned English in three months - they landed in America, they live in America. They have assimilated to American culture incredibly well in three years. Why then is the bad guy alien the only person in the whole movie who doesn't have an American accent - in fact he has a British accent? Answer: Because he is played by Terrence Stamp. And he's the villain. To the collective chicken brain that was running Hollywood at the time, all villains had British accents. Even ones that were supposed to be from a different species and have travelled untold light years to get here!
   
   I was just about to abandon Alien Nation when it abandoned me. Somehow I had managed to screw up the timing on the VCR and the tape ran out. The only reason it's in this list and not the 'Films I have abandoned for containing to much of the wrong kind of awful:' list is because the alien demi-hero was played by Mandy Patinkin who was in this evening's other movie, The Princess Bride. Serious Kevin Baconage going on here, and too much of coincidence to resist.


4. Futuresport ( 1998 ) - In the future the biggest sport in the world will be Futuresport! A sport so futuristic it is played while wearing bicycle helmets! It's that futuristic. Wow! And the point of Futuresport will be to throw a small ball into a hole while people try to hit you with sticks - wait! no! The point of Futuresport will be to make Rollerball look good. No! wait... I've got it now, the point of Futuresport is that the world's best Futuresoprt player will solve the world's problems by challenging the evil Pan-Asian (non American) Conglomerate to a winner-take-all game - where the winner takes control of the disputed Hawaiian islands and millions of people won't have to die in a war! Hurrah for sport! Hurrah for Futuresport! We know the Pan-Asian (non American) Conglomerate is evil because they pay their hired goons in Euros! and have people with beards and English accents, and, even worse, Australians with visible metal plates in their heads working for them and - even even worse - they cheat! Boo! Hiss! But the good guys have an ace up their sleeve - Wesley Snipes in a Predator wig and a Jamaican accent! He knows how to cheat even better than the cheating foreign bastards because he invented Futuresport! Hurrah! - It's not about 'playing the game' apparently.
   
   When the best thing about a movie is Wesley Snipes taking off a pair of sunglasses (and accidentally looking like Whoopie Goldberg) you know you're in trouble. Total. Fucking. Crap.
   
   I'm tempted to go to Morrisons and ask for my quid back.


5. Batman (1966) - I pulled rank on FridayNightisPizzaandMovieNight and made the kids watch it. Holly loved it. I win!


6. Leolo (1992) - my habit of buying any VHS on the Tartan or Artificial Eye label that I come across pays off again. Leolo is a 1992 French Canadian movie that might have won the Palme d'Or if the director hadn't told one of the judges (Jamie Lee Curtis) that he wouldn't mind fucking her like the little boy in the movies fucks a pig's liver. I really don't know whether I really liked it or hated it. I laughed, I was repulsed, I was captivated by its beauty, and bored by its selfindulgence. A piece of Art, or a piece of Crap? Will I ever watch it again? I really don't know. I do know I won't forget it in a hurry.


7. Dark City ( 1998 ) - Which looked even better on a second viewing (only partially because it was on DVD this time and not crappy old VHS). Annoyingly the DVD didn't have an option to avoid the opening narration - added at the chicken brain studio's insistence - which gives away 99% of the story before you get to the opening credits. So here is my usual Dark City caveat: If you have never seen it before, and you don't have the Director's Cut version which omits the narration, keep the sound muted until the opening credits. A crackingly good SF movie.


8. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) - Will Ferrell - Comedy genius or not? Still haven't made my mind up. I do know though that Gary Cole is turning into one of my all time favourite character actors.


9. The Card - Charming gentle little British comedy, based on an Arnold Bennet novel, which I dearly love.


10. Time of the Apes (MST3K) - one of those dreadful Japanese Kids TV shows edited together by Sandy Franks to look like a movie. This time a blatant rip off of The Planet of The Apes with obligatory annoying Japanese child in shorts and lots of pointless running around and pointing. Fever-dream stuff.


11. Tron - Again. For the umpteenth time. This time as a special birthday treat. Mrs JM booked the High School's auditorium and I get to watch it on the biggish screen with friends and relations - some of whom have never seen it before (and are bemused). I like Tron. It's a fascinating film. The story is pretty rubbish very simple (verging on the simplistic); it lends itself (if you could be bothered) to any number of interpretations: it's an allegory about belief systems, global capitalism, a reworking of the Frankenstein story with the creation becoming the master, a darn good chase movie etc... take your pick. The acting and direction are nothing much to get excited about , they're competent and serviceable - but the look of the thing, the style. I love it - mostly, as I have said before - and several times today to whoever would listen - it is because it was never copied.
    The Star Wars style was ripped off, copied, duplicated, and watered down by other jump-on-the-bandwagon film makers, and so merchandised to death at the time, and since, by George Lucas that the freshness, novelty, and sheer fun of the first film is unrecognisable now. It's been buried under millions of tons of over-priced cheap toys, tatty imitations, and huge bloated pre/sequels.
    Tron never suffered that fate. No other movies co-opted the Tron style. It is one of a kind. This is not to say the movie has not been influential; no one can read any cyberpunk without seeing that, but in movie terms Tron is a unique stylistic treat.
    It was sold at the time as being a major innovation, the first time computer graphics had been used in such a massive scale in a movie and some of the graphics are still amazing. But what struck me watching it today was that so much of the movie was made with traditional animation techniques - people at easels with paper ink and airbrush. In 1982 it was still easier faster (and therefore cheaper) to paint backgrounds by hand to look like computer images than it was to make the computer images themselves. Things that I can do on the desktop computer with Photoshop in minutes were beyond their budget. The actors were Rotoscoped into the backgrounds by hand - a phenomenal amount of man hours - according to Wikipedia 500 people worked on post production including 200 inkers and hand-painters employed in Taiwan. There is a sequel in the pipeline. I'm not looking forward to it. Computer animation has become so commonplace that whatever they do it is going to look like just another movie.
    Though, if they get a decent story this time....


12. The Dish - It's the first moon landing. Neil Armstrong is about to set foot on the moon and it's windy in Australia - and that is about as exciting as this movie gets but jeso this is a great movie. I was in tears at the end of it. I was watching people sat watching a historical event on the telly and I had tears streaming down my face. I have no idea how or why this film works but it does. I think a lot of it has to do with the sound. The sound is wonderful, sometimes you are simultaneously listening to two or three things - in addition to the general background atmos: overlapping dialogue, archive news coverage, music and each layer of sound is telling you things and feeding you the story. It's wonderfully rich. And very funny.


13. Stranded in Space (1972) MST3K - very not good TV movie pilot, for a never to be made series, in which an astronaut finds himself trapped on Earth's evil twin. Having a planet of identical size and mass orbiting in the same plane as the earth, but on the opposite side of the sun, is a well worn SF chestnut - the idea is over 2,000 years old, having been invented by the Ancient Greeks. In this version the Counter World is run as an Orwellian 'perfect' society. Where for totally inexplicable reasons everyone speaks English and drives late model American cars. After escaping from his prison-like hospital, the disruptive Earthian is chased around Not Southern California by TV and bad movie stalwart Cameron Mitchell who, like his minions, wears double breasted suits and black polo neck jumpers - a stylishly evil combination which I fully intend to adopt if ever I become a totalitarian overlord. Our hero escapes their clutches several times before ending up gazing at the alien world's three moons and wondering aloud if he will ever get home - thus setting up one of those Man Alone in a Hostile World Making a New Friend Each Week but Moving on at the End of Every Episode shows so beloved of the industry in the 70s and 80s (The Fugitive, The Incredible Hulk, The Littlest Hobo etc.). The curiously weirdest bit was the title sequence. Somewhere between Stranded in Space first airing (under the title The Stranger) in 1972 and the MST3K version in 1991 it had somehow acquired footage from the 1983 movie Prisoners of the Lost Universe. So in 1991 the opening credits for 'Stranded in Space' ran under a few shots of three people falling into a matter transmitter and vanishing. It's a sequence that has nothing to do - even thematically - with anything that is going to follow. Just to add to the nerdy B movie confusion, one of the actors in this randomly nailed on footage is Kay Lenz who later appeared in a 1994 movie called Trapped in Space. Knowing this fact could never save your life, but it might score you very big points and admiring looks from fellow trash movie enthusiasts - if you could ever work out a way of manoeuvring the conversation round to the point where you could casually slip it in without looking like a total wanker...
    
    As an example of the shoddiness of the show: play was made of the fact that on this counter clockwise Counter Earth most of the people were Left Handed! (How scary weird and evil is that!) But quite why an alien planet full of left handed people wrote (in English) from left to right, instead of right to left which they would have found a lot easier to do, is never explained.


14. Earth Vs The Spider ( 1958 ) MST3K - one of those Cold War paranoia movies that isn't anything to do with the Cold War - or paranoia. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, Invaders from Mars and even I Married a Monster from Outer Space can be seen to be reflecting the mood and preoccupations of America in the late fifties early sixties - the fear of Atomic War, and the overwhelming conviction that there was a Commie spy under every bed. Earth Vs The Spider has nothing to do with any of that. Like most of Bert I Gordon's movies it's about jumping on the bandwagon and making money quickly by showing people running away screaming from something very big before the hero manages to electrocute it in the final reel. This one is shoddier than most of Gordon's Giant Things Chasing People movies and even manages to namecheck a couple of his other works - The Amazing Colossal Man and The Attack of the Puppet People - by having one of his characters work in a cinema which, by some amazing coincidence, only seems to show Bert I Gordon movies. When Preston Sturges managed to sneak in a poster for one of his other films at the end of Hail the Conquering Hero it was knowing and funny - here it was just pathetic and cheap. But then the whole of Earth Vs The Spider is pathetic and cheap - for 'Earth' read a small Californian town for 'Spider' read - well a spider, some hapless hairy spider shot in close up and superimposed on streets and roads as the script required. This movie contains some dreadful dreadful matte (or forced perspective) work as various characters wander round a darkened studio with decoupaged pictures of caves cut from the National Geographic Magazine held up in front of the camera for them to walk past. 5.6 on the Dreadfulometer. Extra points for having a 35 year old man with a receding hairline playing a teenager.


15. My Fair Lady - Holly's love of Hollywood musicals surfaces again. But I had forgotten it was almost three hours long! God there's a lot of songs in it. I was still awake enough at the end of it to spot a hitherto unreported (on IMDb at least) continuity error - In the final scene when Henry Higgins sits on the chair as he listens to her voice on the phonograph, Eliza's shadow can be clearly seen on the carpet behind him, to his left (screen right). In the next shot she is shown entering the room. Hurray for me! ( I know.... ) Four days later Holly interrupts us long-windedly asking her about something (but without giving her the chance to answer) by declaiming, like Mr Dolittle in the film: "I'm willing to tell you. I'm wanting to tell you! I'm waiting to tell you!"


16. Anchorman - Okay, that's me Will Ferrelled for the next few years. I think I just reached saturation point.

I've always had a minor thing for bookplates. This sort of thing. I loved finding them in old books - though I rarely did. Recently, after a recent thread about Jack Vance over on Palimpsest made me dig out this 1962 Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine from my attic, I rediscovered something that had fascinated me as a kid.

I wish my copy was in as
good condition as this.

The back cover of the magazine was given over to a full page advert:

The BEMs in your neighborhood won't run off with your books if you put inside the front cover of each book ... a gummed bookplate with your name printed on it!

Underneath this snappily pithy piece of Sixties advertising come-on were four small reproductions of bookplates with 'Your Name Here' written in the place where your name would go if you sent them $4 for 100 bookplates, $6 for 200, or a bargain 300 for $8!

One of them, drawn by artist Ed Emshwiller, was particularly fascinating to the childhood me, it showed a man holding open, and looking down at, a book - with an alien reading over one of his shoulders , and a robot keeking over the other. For years the image defined in my head what the robots in the SF books I read looked like - no matter how the authors described them. And for years I wanted that bookplate in my books. My Name There.

Now - through the mighty power of the washing machine sized laser printer in the office, several hours of endless fiddling on Adobe Illustrator, and a blatant disregard of any copyright laws that may apply - I now can.

My Name Here - at last!

I am now 50 years old and have been for a few days now. I can't say I have noticed any real signs of the Sudden-onset Decrepitude Syndrome I was dreading - the occasional urge to listen to Perry Como records and wear cardigans aside, I think I'm pretty much the same as I was last week. Actually my 50th birthday was a lot of fun. Very childish. Merriol, lovely woman that she is, hired the local High School's auditorium /cinema for the afternoon and I got to eat popcorn and watch Tron - of which I am a secret geeky fan - on the biggish screen. After that it was back to the house for jelly and cakes, and pizza, and balloons, and masses of chocolate. I think I now own more chocolate than several of the smaller chocolate producing nations combined.

Another cool thing I got for my birthday by Liam Aged 50:

A Sony Reader 600! Apparently I kept waking Merriol up at ungodly hours of the morning as I discovered new and interesting things I could do with it. Luckily she didn't demonstrate any of the new and interesting things she thought to do with it when I did.

There is also a bag of Kopi Luwak, the world's most expensive coffee, in the fridge. Mike and Morag bought it for me. Kopi Luwak is made from beans that have been eaten and then pooed out by some kind of Vietnamese weasel. I'm really looking forward to trying it. Maybe tomorrow.

Rate My Poo

I am officially going Ga-Ga.  I just turned over a CD to play the other side.

Is this just me?

Today Daisy came home from school with some weekend homework. Her assignment was neatly printed on a strip of paper tucked into a notebook. It's nothing onerous, she is only 5 after all, she just has to look for the letter 'R' in the newspaper and then take a page of the newspaper in to school on Monday with Rs underlined.

(And she will be taking a page of a very old Sunday paper, because I haven't even got round to reading last week's yet.)

What has got me shaking my head in bewilderment is the fact that the slip of paper contains 55 words arranged into four sentences - with two spelling mistakes.

"...look at my families newspaper..." and "...to see how cleaver I am... "

Am I just getting old and grumpy (or at least middle-aged and crotchety) but wouldn't you expect the people teaching your kids how to read should know how to spell simple bloody words like 'clever' and 'family's'.

I'm tempted to send it back, marked in red, with "Must Try Harder" written underneath.

I won't - but I'm tempted.

Half way through September and I haven't bored the world with what I watched in August yet.

Soon remedied...

1. Toy Story - Gets better every time I see it.






2. Tarzan, The Ape Man (1981) - I think I would have to be paid to watch this again. Dear god. I'm a bloke, and like most blokes I know I am somewhat fascinated by boobs. Boobs are incredibly brilliant things for all sorts of reasons (most of which I won't go into now) but dammit, I need something else in a 107 minute movie. A story? Some dialogue? Some direction? - John Derek, Bo's husband was cameraman and director and obviously thought that the world shared his obsession with seeing his wife get wet - every scene seems to involve Bo falling into water, or going for a swim, or having a bathe, or getting washed down. It's like being relentlessly pummeled with Pirelli Calendars or old Penthouse magazines. 107 minutes of watching Bo Derek (who also produced the movie) getting wet, jiggling her boobs about a bit, and doing 'acting' does not for a enjoyable evening make. (Does touching your mouth all the time count as acting?) Other highlights included Richard Harris (apparently bored out of his mind) seeing how loud he could shout, and wild Oran-outangs in Africa. Dull beyond belief. Mind you, it's not every day you get to see a movie producer kissed on the nipple by a chimpanzee.



The only vaguely erotic shot of the whole movie.



The Exterminating Angel - Luis Buñuel. Not seen many Luis Buñuel films yet but if they are all as good as this I will have to go hunting.



Kronos (1957) - Plodding Invasion from Space movie which hasn't got any better since I watched it last year but this viewing did provide me with one of my irritatingly abstract Namethatfilm Flickr group screen captures..





I watch these things way too closely for my own good, and I am not alone. The movie was identified, from this still, within a couple of hours....


The Island - shameless rip-off of Parts: the Clonus Horror (qv) which, despite (or more likely because of) having several shitloads of money thrown at it is a far far inferior film. Parts was by no means a perfect film but it tried hard to make itself credible. The only real thing we were asked to swallow whole and undigested in Parts was the fact that cloning was possible and that the clones of rich people could grow up from infancy, isolated and innocently ignorant of their true nature until their adult bodies were need for spare parts. In this piece of shit we are not only asked to believe that cloning is possible but that it is possible to clone people into adults. But also that, in defiance of the law which requires them all to be brain dead hunks of meat, it is also necessary to keep the clones fit active and happily aware - because the Evil Corporation* has discovered that if they don't give the clones a happy clappy life the organs fail within a few years. So, lots of scope for playing with ideas about what makes a human human and how far would we as individuals go to keep ourselves alive. Could we would we kill another version of ourselves to live longer? Lots of ideas to play with. All of which are totally ignored in favour of lots and lots and lots and lots of explosions and endless fights and explosions and shooting as our heroes are pursued by elite ex-SEAL security bods who fire off brazzilions of rounds of ammunition without hitting ANYTHING they aim at, manage to get their hands nailed to doors with a nail-gun (I kid you not) and are out run, out fought and out fucking everythinged by a three year old clone (who, until the day before, got his exercise being beaten on the X-Box by Scarlett Johansson). He's a lucky son of a bitch too is our hero. Here's the latter part of one of the chase sequences:

Our clones are on a flat-bed truck hiding under its load of train axles and wheels. A helicopter and many many trucks full of well-armed (but presumably cross-eyed) supergoons are in pursuit in a variety of vehicles. Ewan McGregor (for he is our three year old hero) accidentally pulls the only strap holding these several hundred tons of scrap metal onto the back of the truck. The axles start to fall off the truck. They smash into the following vehicles. Vans career all over the place. Car parts whang around like ping pong balls. The driver of the truck on which our heroes are fighting for their lives doesn't notice. He doesn't notice that his load has fallen off. He doesn't notice that the motorway behind him has suddenly turned into a demolition derby. He doesn't slam on the brakes. This. Is. Bollocks. Any truck driver in the world would slam on the brakes as soon as they started loosing their load. (I asked my Brother in law who is a Truck Driver). The baddies, now having run out of cars, launch two supersexy, two-man jet powered motorbikes after the truck. Ewan hits one of the drivers of one of bikes with a bit of chain he happens to find lying about - he finds bits of chain lying about and hits people with them with monotonous regularity in this movie - the people fall off the bike. Ewan and Scarlett get on the bike. They out-fly the pursuing baddies on the other bike and cause them to crash. (Obviously playing boxing with short blonde women on the X-Box is fucking good training for this sort of thing). Ewan and Scarlett crash into the side of a building. Ewan and Scarlett go right through the building in loving, plate glass smashing slow motion. They come out the other side of the building, fall off the bike, land on the stupidly huge, three storey high, bright red corporation logo the building has glued to the side seventy storeys up. They recreate the end of North By North West and Ewan hauls Scarlett to safety. The baddies arrive in a helicopter and start shooting at them. Other baddies arrive up the lift (this how we know it's 70 storeys) and start shooting at them from an open window. Shoot shoot shoot they go. Between them, these two sets of villains fire so many bullets in the general direction of the logo that they manage to bugger whatever is holding it onto the side of the building and it breaks away - all this without ONCE hitting our hero and heroine. For some unexplained reason the helicopter goes round the building while this is happening, looses altitude and reappears just in time for the logo to finally break loose and fall on top of it. Explosion. Falling helicopter. Falling three storey high corporation logo. Falling heroes. Some sixty storey of falling later all this stuff hits a building site. Massive amounts of flying scaffolding poles and building materials are now added to the maelstrom. The soundtrack is very very loud. The dust settles - and our two protagonists climb out of the wreckage without a fucking SCRATCH!

And that's just one of the chases.

*You knew there was going to be an Evil Corporation didn't you?


Bound - Lesbians vs The Mafia.



Lesbians, the Mafia AND drying paint!

Three years before they made The Matrix the Wachowski Bros. made this small neo-noir crime film which works on all its levels: it's smart, it's funny, and it's sexy. Loved it.


Track of the Moon Beast (1976 - well 1972 really but it was four years before the director - who was never allowed to direct again - could find a deaf / blind film distributor who would take it off his hands.) Track of the Moon Beast (aka nothing) Is a laboriously paced lo-budget, no-rehearsal variation on the Werewolf theme in which our hapless (and talentless) hero is struck by a chunk of moonrock which has been chipped off the moon by an asteroid (sic). A small piece of moonrock meteorite lodges in our hero's noggin and therefore, inevitably, turns him into a rampaging death-dealing creature when the moon is full. Just for a change he doesn't turn into a wolf-like thing but a giant lizard-like thing with predictable and tedious results. Monster. Girlfriend. Baffled police. Baffled scientists. Old legends. Scientist friend who puts two and two together - all the usual ingredients flacidly served up with amazingly inept direction. By the early 70s, after over 30 years of making this story, you would have thought that anyone who could point a camera in the vague direction of an actor could have done this with their eyes shut. Maybe that was the problem - maybe someone said "I bet I could make this movie with my eyes shut" and actually tried. It would explain a lot.



The movie's entire special effects budget.


I spent most of the film calling unused edit points. Unused because, presumably, there was nothing to cut to. It's a game I started very early on in the film. First real shot of the movie, which runs under the opening credits, is a motor cycle driving to camera. As the credits finish the bike pulls off the road middle distance and (slightly ineptly) parks. The rider starts to pull off his helmet - and that's where we should cut to a close up. Just as the rider pulls the helmet off. "Our hero ladies and gentlemen! You will be spending the next 80 plus minutes in this man's company so let's have a good look at him and show you what a good looking hunk he is..." except there is no cut because there's no close up; the rider pulls off his helmet, looks about a bit, gets off the bike, and before the opening shot has finally finished, half the audience have gone to sleep. There's a lot of that in this movie. Lots of whole scenes played out in wide shot. Very boring. Very slow.

I'm off to find the MST3K version now...


Invasion Earth: The Aliens Are Here ( 1988 ) - There are many contenders for the title of The Worst Film Ever Made - last night's movie, Track of the Moon Beast, is currently number sixteen on the IMDb's bottom 100 - but Invasion Earth: The Aliens Are Here is my preferred candidate for the title. It's shit. To quote my own IMDb review:


No matter how bad a movie is (and I have watched a LOT of bad movies recently) there is always some redeeming feature: a horrendously ill-written line, an idea that falls flat on its face, a moment of unintentional humour - something. There's always a little something that lifts it for a moment and leaves you with a warm nugget of discovery - something to hold on to as the rest of the mindless drivel flickers past your eyeballs... this movie's only redeeming feature is that it is just 78 minutes long. It is crap. Pure unmitigated, grade Z, unadulterated, high-fibre, total shit from the hopelessly confused start to the pathetically flat non-ending.
A second viewing some four years later hasn't improved it in the slightest. The central gag of the movie is almost good enough pass muster. I can hear the pitch now: "Aliens take over a small movie house and splice together footage from old SF movies to hypnotise the audience into.... er... well, we'll work out why later. But how about it? It'll be cheap!" They got the money but never did work out the why. Most of the movie's running time is taken up with cheap clips from older (much more interesting) bad old movies (or, even cheaper, their trailers) intercut with 'comedic' moments of people falling over and accidentally throwing popcorn over each other, and fantastically absurd and badly handled attempts to parallel (parody?) the action in the old movie on the screen with action in the cinema house itself; near the start there is a particularly incomprehensible sequence which intercuts between footage from The Blob, in which the titular blob* takes over a movie house, and the aliens taking over the movie house in which the clip from The Blob is being shown. It doesn't work. I have no idea what it was supposed be doing. Whatever it was the movie makers thought they were doing here, they failed. This is not uncommon in bad movies but most of the time you have an idea what the makers were trying to do.

*Not a phrase you get to write that often.


The Gunfighter - one of those great Westerns I have never seen before. It is wonderful. Apart from anything else, in these days when every sodding second of every sodding movie is scored, it was great to see a movie which had no music. No swirling syrupy violins telling you what you should be feeling at any particular frame. I may be wrong, but after the opening credits I don't think there is a single piece of non-diegetic sound in the whole film. The only piece of music comes right at the end as the congregation sing at Jimmy Ringo's funeral.


Over the Hedge - predicable bit of Dreamworks animation that takes all Pixar's usual bag of tricks and ticks and doesn't add many of its own. There were a couple of moments that made me laugh but the 'For the Adults' movie references were painfully clumsy and dragged it down. Naming a character 'Stella' just so another character can do the Marlon Brando / Streetcar "Stellaaaaaah!" thing is just plain insulting to the intelligence.


Young Frankenstein - Isn't Teri Garr wonderful? Opening a week-long Frankenfest on my telly (why not?) my favourite Mel Brooks film.


Blackenstein (1973) - Blacksploitation take on the Frankenstein story with some terrific expository dialogue:





"Yes, Eddy, Doctor Stein just won the Nobel Peace Prize for solving the DNA genetic code...".
Armless and legless Vietnam vet Eddy gets new arms and legs (where the utterly respectable Dr Stein gets them from is not explained) but Frankensteiny complications set in when creepy servant Malcolm deliberately swaps Eddy's 'DNA formula' for that of another patient (he's very woodenly in love with Eddy's wooden fiancée, Dr Stein's assistant, and wants his rival out of the picture). Most of the first half of the movie is made up of endless shots of the genuine 1930's Universal Frankenstein props in full colour, three people in white coats preparing injections, and establishing shots of the Doc's house (Enough already! We know where he lives!). The second half, shadowy disembowelings of hastily introduced 'characters' in dark alleys. It's a textbook exercise in padding. There is one wide shot of the lab in which the vague shadowy outline of our newly risen monster is seen walking slowly from screen right to screen left that runs for one minute and twelve seconds! - two shots later there is a phenomenally uninteresting 42 second shot of the monster walking away from the camera, in a location we have never seen before, and just in case you missed the shot in the lab it is repeated a few minutes later with fiancée girl asleep in the foreground. In the end the monster is eaten by police dogs! Utterly inept.


Lady Frankenstein (1971) - Frankenstein's daughter Tania (Tania Frankenstein?!?) attempts to avenge her father (killed by his own creation) by building a creation of her own. She does this by whanging her husband's brain in the body of a hunky but simple-minded servant boy. The usual rituals of by the numbers mayhem is served up but with a generous scattering of boobs and bums, and a wonderfully bonkers score which, on the crappy, legally downloaded copy I watched, drowns out great chunks of the rather strange dialogue. The movie has all the classic post Universal Frankenstein clichés. Torch-wielding mob, sparky things going ...zzzzzzzzzp! ...zzzzzzzzzp!...zzzzzzzzzp! in the lab, and the inevitable opening roof, up to which the soon to be animated corpse is lifted at the hight of the thunderstorm - though budgetary restrictions here meant that the platform only went as high as the top of a stepladder, and the lightning was simulated by a passing grip throwing some small fireworks about. That other staple ingredient of the Frankenstein myth, the moment when 'the monster' accidentally drowns a little girl he is innocently playing with, is presented with a real twist here. For no reason whatsoever (apart from the obvious) our smock wearing creation chances upon a couple mid bonk. She, as was the habit of Italians having sex in the seventies, is totally naked and he still has his trousers on. He runs away. She screams, gets picked up, faints and is thrown into a convenient river where she drowns. Creation number two kills creation number one, the torch wielding mob burn down the castle and creation number two strangles his wife/creator/employer (Frankenstein's daughter) while they are having sex in the lab. The End. Joseph Cotten (yes, that Joseph Cotten) played Frankenstein and the rather yummy Rosalba Neri played his daughter.




This isn't Rosalba Neri


Flesh For Frankenstein (1973 aka Andy Warhol's Frankenstein - and a shitload of other titles including the rather wonderful Up Frankenstein) A very gory very hysterical mess. It was only towards the end I realised they were trying for comedy and had been all the way through. I should have been tipped off when Udo Kier as the baron humps his half-finished female creation on the slab and then declaiming in his thickest Cherman accent: "To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life... in the gall bladder!" but I was having so much trouble trying to stay awake.



You did vat to mein gauwl blatter?


The dialogue was inane and the pacing leaden. I suspect - though I have no evidence, not that I've looked for any - that a lot of the dialogue was semi-improvised. Improvising is hard work even if you know where the scene is going and what information you need the audience to hear, doing it in a second or third language as these guys appeared to be doing, must be next to impossible. So, Germans improvising very obscurely black comedy with lots of tits and giblets thrown at the screen (it was shot in 3D). Got that? Good. Another film I watched so you don't have too.


House of Dracula - Dracula, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein's Monster, Misguided Kindly Doctor Turned Evil By One Of His Own Experiments, and (as a brilliant cherry on the cake) a Hunchback Nurse! incredibly dull trash heaven. Dracula turns up at a kindly doctor's cliff-top castle wanting to cured. So, by an amazing coincidence, does The Wolfman. When the doctors says he can cure the Wolfman but not before the next full moon our tormented lycanthrope throws himself off the cliff only to be swept into a sea cave that: (big breath) not only contains the preserved but inert body of the Frankenstein monster (apparently last seen sinking into quicksand!), but has the perfect temperature and humidity for growing the 'mold' with which the doctor plans to cure the Wolfman, AND also contains a hitherto unknown secret entrance to the castle. Phew! (I would guess our screenwriter was a two bottle a day man.)




Grrr! Grrr! erm... er... line?


So - not a lot happens after that. Dracula turns a tap during a blood transfusion and turns the doctor evil and just as the obligatory low budget mobette (What is the word for a small mob? Is there such a thing?) of torch wielding extras turns up wanting to know what's going on and where their pay-check is coming from, the doctor throws a couple of switches, revives the monster and the castle collapses in flames around their ears. The last of the Universal Frankenstein movies - Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein ( 1948 ) doesn't count - it's a sad ending to the saga spawned by the bonkers glory of James Whale's Frankenstein and the even better Bride of Frankenstein.


Singin' in the Rain - Friday night pizza movie choice of daughter number one who, at the tender age of seven, is showing an excellent taste in Hollywood musicals.


Mistress of Atlantis - G W Pabst's weirdly compelling version of the much filmed novel L'Atlantide by Pierre Benoît (this is the second of seven filmed over the years). I've never read the book and I imagine the story has been pared to the bone here but what reaches the screen is wonderfully hypnotic and dreamlike with minimal dialogue and almost every shot slowly re-framing, panning, tilting, or dollying. I wish I had a better copy. Like the one this screen capture came from:





For some reason I cannot begin to fathom I find images of wind-up gramophones in the desert strangely fascinating.


The Mole People (MST3K) - I also find the films of John Agar compulsive viewing too. So far this year I have seen him shrunk and shoved in a bottle (or was that last year) and had his body taken over by an evil discorporeal brain from another planet. He really is a dreadful actor. In this one he climbs a mountain falls down a hole and discovers a lost tribe of albino Sumarians who live on a diet of mushrooms, spend a lot of time whipping Mole Creatures, and are ruled over by Alfred from the Batman TV series - basically nothing much has changed since the last time I watched it a year ago. But that was the full vanilla version. Mike and the Bots added more than the usual amount of hilarity to this one.


Slipstream (1989) - odd one this one. As SF movie pedigrees go 1980s movie credits couldn't get much better than this: directed by the writer director of TRON, starring actors who had appeared in Star Wars, Aliens, and BBCs excellent Edge of Darkness, the producer of two Star Wars films was in charge, the editor had cut Alien and Legend, hell! even the conductor had worked on Robot Monster in 1953 (but I doubt if he boasted about it)*. What arrives on the screen is a weirdly disjointed long aeroplane chase which switches location from what looks like a very wet and miserable North Wales to a sunny and dusty Turkey without missing a beat, has Bob Peck playing a poetry quoting android, wandering a post apocalyptic wasteland in a business suit pursued by a blond, bearded, psychotic lawman Mark Hamill waving the kind of long-barrelled pistols only previously seen in Sergio Leone movies. The sort of climax takes place in an underground museum lorded over by F Murray Abraham. Very odd. I'm not sure it works - but the memory of it made me want to watch it again. It's not as good as I remember it, which is odd given that I see from my blog that I didn't particularly like it the first time I watched it.

*As an added bonus it also has the rather yummy Rita Wolf whose boobs were the only decent or memorable thing about My Beautiful Laundrette.


It! The Terror From Beyond Space - well, Mars actually. I seem to be in a rewatching mood this week. I first watched this one a year ago and this time I was struck mostly by the wonderfully efficient set design. Most of the action of the movie takes place in a spaceship, with the crew moving from deck to deck trying to outguess and kill the rampaging monster loose on-board. (It's Alien 20 years before Alien was written.) The space ship in the movie is a real spaceship, one of those 1950s pointy silver cigars with wings, and the decks were stacked up one on top of the other, like layers of a cake with a central set of ladders and hatches. Each deck was different but, on a second viewing, obviously shot on the same set. Walls were rearranged and it was dressed differently, different signs over the doors etc. - and bugger me it worked. It's a clever bit of set design. Babylon 5 used a similar, simple but effective trick. Each 'sector' of the station was called by a different colour 'Green sector', 'Blue sector', etc The corridor sets incorporated a coloured strip at about hip hight. It must have taken only minutes to strip off one colour and substitute another - "and here we are in Grey Sector!" It worked and... and my geekyness is showing isn't it?


Ghostbusters (1984)- I first saw Ghostbusters many many years ago. I didn't like like it. I just didn't understand why anyone though Bill Murray was in any way shape or form funny. Anything I saw him in just fell flat. Then a few years ago I saw him in Jim Jarmush's Broken Flowers and I got it. I suddenly saw what everyone else had been seeing in him all along. He was funny! So I was quite looking forward to watching this again. I still don't like it. It's not particularly funny, or scary or complicated. Couple of nice lines: "Listen... do you smell something?" and "Back off, man. I'm a scientist." have entered my Great Lines To Steal list. But the rest of it I thought was pretty blah. What was fascinating though was watching the other actors on screen finding Bill Murray funny. One shot had William Atherton, as the health inspector, in a OTS where Murray had his back to the camera. I don't know what Murray was doing - because we can't see his face - but Atherton was fighting hysterical giggles whenever he looked at him. The shot didn't sit well in the scene as Atherton's character was supposedly angry and aggressive at the time. he same thing happens in a similar shot with Sigourney Weaver - but she's supposed to be laughing so it works.


Laserblast (MST3K) - again.


Christmas on Mars ( 2008 ) - Low budget art SF film that looks good, sounds great, and has a weird otherness that makes you keep watching - but fails to be truly wonderful because the script, if there was one, is so thin as to make it near pointless. The Plot: Major Syrtis (the only obvious joke in the movie, folks) is living on Mars in a wonderfully realised junkyard of a base. This is what space stations will look like after a few years of habitation; it's a cobbled together, patched and repaired mess. It's what the spaceship in the SF movie that I'm never going to make looks like; the bastard offspring of Mir and Dark Star - anyway, back to the plot: It's Christmas eve 2055. The first baby on Mars is due to be born the next day. The 'oxygen generator' breaks down. Major Syrtis is organising a carol service but the man he has appointed to play Santa Claus is having hallucinations and runs out into the Martian surface wearing the Santa suit. He dies. An enigmatic (ie he has no dialogue) alien arrives and is told to put on the Santa suit. The enigmatic alien fixes the oxygen generator. The baby is born and the alien departs. The End. Christmas on Mars apparently took some seven years to shoot - a lot of it in sets built in the director's back garden and, though it looks wonderful, you would have thought that at some point over the seven years someone would have thought to write some dialogue that consisted of more than "Um..." and "Fuck!" I'm not against swearing. Far from it I think a good well-placed expletive can work fucking wonders. But when erm... every fucking line in the fucking movie is fucking um.. well... um... fucked up. Then... you know. Um.... er... you know - fuck it! This may be the way people talk in real life but movies aren't real life. Even movies that look like real life don't look like real life really looks. Even on Mars.


The Hapiness Cage (1972) - aka The Demon Within, The Mind Snatcher. A very young Christopher Walken gets his personality wiped in a very stagy set-bound adaptation of a play in the Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest vein. Not badly done but very wordy.

Normal Service Will Be Resumed Soon - Honest.

We Had Shepherd's Pie For Lunch... It Didn't Smell This Time...

I like books to have indexes.  Very useful, sometime interesting in their own right, and occasionally funny too - the indexes to Joe Queenan's If You Are Talking to Me your Career Must be in Trouble and Rich Hall's Things Snowball are particularly fun.   I think all books should have indexes - even fiction. (Especially fiction over 300 pages with more than four characters.)
Therefore imagine my teeth gnashing today when I was looking for a recipe for moussaka for tea and I came across this in Elizabeth David's Italian Food:

'Mousaka, 268'

I turn to page 268

'Considering that aubergines have been cultivated in Italy since the fifteenth century, it is odd that the Italians have evolved a dish of aubergines half as good as the Balkan moussaka...'

  - and that's it.  The only reference to moussaka in the whole damn book!

What IS the point?   What is the bloody point?

Oh Look - Sterile Fluff.

Me:
Daisy, Did I hear Mum shouting at you?

Daisy:
No, She was just telling me something in a very loud voice.

Tonight Daisy did dancing for us. This is her dancing the opening of The Wizard of Oz to the incidental music of Lawrence of Arabia.

I have spent most of today trying not to think of Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson (in full Noel Coward, Brief Encounter mode) delivering The Human League's Don't You Want Me Baby

"You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when I met you."

It's really starting to annoy me

Another Small Snippet From The Screen-Play of My Life (No. 67)

Tonight, a pub meal down at the Laroch: (we have guests and no food)

Holly:
You know that the sign for water is H2O?

Me:
Yes.

Holly:
Is the sign for ice H2O cubed?

I'm back. I've just spent the last couple of weeks down at Merriol's parents, doing very little apart from play with the kids sleep too much, wander around charity shops buying books records and DVDs. I had a great time. Unfortunately I still managed to find time to watch a lot of bad films when no one was looking....

July

1. Monty Python and the Holy Grail - for reasons which I will explain later.
2. Krull - One of the dullest 'fantasy' films I know. Everything is so fucking ponderously slow... and I had to keep biting my lip and stop the MST3K type rifftrack that was bursting to get out of me because daughter number one was hooked ("I told you there would be kissing!") and it's one of Mrs JM's sacred childhood memories. But now I'm alone at the computer with none of my family shushing me or giving me 'stop pulling the ears off my teddy bear' glares...
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. The Alien Factor - The second film I have seen directed by Baltimore's other trash movie director, Don Dohler (the first, and much better one, is John Walters). I titled the review of the first Dohler movie; 'I would Rather Eat Other People's Earwax Than Watch This Piece of Drek Again'. Same goes for this one. Full of painfully long sequences where nothing happens, very slowly, usually showing various non-characters walking uphill through the woods, sometimes towards the camera, sometimes away - versatile director, our Don - and usually followed by the exact same sequence of shots shown in the reverse order with the characters running away from whatever they just found. The director must have been endlessly telling his 'actors' to 'walk to the top and then run back down as if something is chasing you'. Still, I had fun spotting the continuity errors and the shots made on the days when the 'heavy snow' mentioned so often in the script had melted. And I did learn one trick which I will remember when I come to direct a cheap movie about people getting ate by aliens in the woods. Make all your characters wear blue jeans, then shoot a few shots of someone's (anyone's) legs walking through weeds. It will cut in anywhere!
4. Fitzcarraldo (1982) - you know, sometimes you just have to put aside all the lesbian Bee girls, and rubber suit swamp monsters, and killer gorillas, and all that other good stuff and just watch Klaus Kinski going insane up a South American river for two and a half hours. The whole winching the boat up the hillside sequence was terrifying. I really wish I had seen this on the big screen.
5. Burden of Dreams (1982) - a documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo. Turns out the reason the sequence showing the hauling the boat over the mountainside was so terrifying was because it was terrifying. The designer of the pulley system they used gave it a 70% chance of failing with a 'catastrophic' loss of life unless the film makers made changes. They didn't. He quit.
6. Phase IV (1974) - Much much better than I expected, this is the only feature film directed by Saul Bass, Oscar winning designer of animated title sequences (The Man With the Golden Arm, Psycho, Vertigo, Spartacus, Goodfellas etc.). After some (unexplained) cosmic event, desert ants start to demonstrate superior intelligence. Two scientists man a research base and attempt to communicate with them. This is what low budget movie making can be like. Basically the whole of the action of this movie takes place on one set, and one location. There are six actors seen on screen and four of them don't say much (one doesn't say anything before getting himself killed). And ants. There are a lot of ants. In super huge close up. Don't watch this if you don't like ants. I was very itchy at the end of it. The ending, after man and ant have come to some sort of understanding, is one of those enigmatic, post 2001: A Space Odyssey, looking forward to a possible bright new future for Mankind endings (sunrise and all) which were so popular at the time in SF movies. I like this kind of ending. It's optimistic without being patronising. All the plot lines and twists aren't ironed out and presented fully resolved, it leaves the viewer with the job of supplying their own ideas, it treats the audience as if it has some kind of smarts and isn't just popcorn-chewing, seat-buying fodder. (The fact that this isn't the director's original ending but was imposed by the Producer, is even more remarkable because - as I understand it - the director did originally want to cross a lot more Ts and dot a lot more Is for us.) And when did 'Possible Bright New Future' endings (must come up with a good pithy acronym for this) replace the old 'There Are Some Things Man is Not Meant To Know' endings of the 30s 40's and 50's. Was it 2001? I need to watch more movies to find out.....
7. Bee Story - the less said about this the better..
8. Idaho Transfer (1973) - So, back to the 1970s SF... Idaho Transfer is a time travel story in which a group of young students travel some 60 years into their future to find a post-apocalyptic wasteland. They don't make them like this any more. During the course of the story the heroine accidentally kills her much more sympathetic sister and ends dying herself when she is shoved into the fuel tank of a car by a passing motorist who finds her starving at the side of the road. Hardly a 'Possible Bright New Future' ending but not the pat Hollywood happy ending that would have been nailed on by the suits these days. Featuring a cast of mostly unknown or unprofessional actors who, for the most part, never did anything else. Slow and horribly dated in parts (Hippies never age well) this is a strangely disturbing little movie.
9. Mesa of Lost Women (1953) - a candidate for the most annoying soundtrack ever recorded. I first watched this film five years ago (IMDb comments). It hasn't got any better since.
10. Tank Girl (1995) - Almost against my better judgement I like the Tank Girl comics. They're stupid, violent, rude, and pointless but they are pure trash fun. The film is not. It's stupid right enough, (a bit) violent, (a bit) rude, and certainly pointless but it's not fun. Maybe the character was doomed to fail on the screen after all beer swilling, kangaroo snogging, tank driving, punkoid lad-ettes aren't that common in Hollywood films and the attempt to fill out the character, give her a back story and make her spend the last part of the movie running around trying to save a little girl from the clutches of the evil corporation is just pure formula bullshit imposed on an uncontrollable anarchic character*. The tank ends up as just another piece of window dressing. In the books it is a major part of Tank Girl's life (She lives in it. Hell, she even gets pregnant by it!). The film makers doubly nail their heads the coffee table of fortune's hostage (I lost control of that metaphor in the middle somewhere) by using a lot of Jamie Hewlett's original art in the movie, both in the opening credit sequence and, from time to time, intercut into the action. "It's wild!" You can almost hear the director telling the producers. "It's Wacky! Wild and 'With it'!" - Wrong! All it does is remind the audience how wonderfully inventive the comic was, and shows up how predictably pedestrian the film is. Bad move.
    
    
    
    
    * I know the marketing of a movie has very little to do with the making of a movie but the systems mishadling of the character is summed up most neatly by the movie's tag line: "In 2033, justice rides a tank and wears lip gloss." Tank Girl wasn't about Justice! It was about beer, and fags, and having sex with kangaroos, and playing baseball with live hand grenades.
11. Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987) - yet another adaptation of Richard Connell's short story "The Most Dangerous Game".
    
    First published in 1924, The Most Dangerous Game tells of a big-game hunter from New York, who falls off a yacht and swims to an isolated island in the Caribbean, there he is hunted by an insane Russian aristocrat who, bored with hunting animals, has taken up hunting human beings, the most dangerous animal of them all. The story has been reworked and adapted endlessly since it first hit the screens in the 1932 version starring Joel MaCrea which was, reputedly, shot at night on the jungle set of King Kong. There have been at least eight feature film versions since. This one is almost certainly the first to feature androids, mutant jungle beasts, and quite so much Victoria's Secret lingerie - often in the same shot.
    
    
    
    
    The other set.
    
    
12. Sex Madness ( 1938 ) - Oho! Cheap 1930's sex exploitation film which hammers home its message with a badly edited sledghammer. and some wonderfully over the top hammy acting. It does for STDs what Reefer Madness does for dope. After starting off clumsily setting up several posibly interesting, suitably sordid and lurid storylines; Lesbian seduction, M type child murderer driven to kill by a flash of knickers in a burlesque show, the son of the town's biggest blue nose reformer attending a drunken orgy with a fast chorus girl, the movie suddenly throws them all out of the window and we follow the trials and tribulations of Milicent, a chorine who, having won a beauty contest, goes to New York, gets the clap, then returns home to give a dose to her innocent childhood sweetheart. The film returns to the blue-noses' son towards the the end and the scene where he confesses to his father that he too is... gulp! 'a victim' has some of the most hilariously wooden acting I have seen for ages.
    
    The sound quality of the copy available here gave me one of the best unintentional laughs of the night. It took me several replays before I finally understood that the innocent Millicent wasn't telling her doctor:
    
    
    
    Millicent:
    Oh, it's just the usual sort of
    a story I suppose. After the contest
    was over I thought of all the
    wonderful things a girl ever dreams
    about - Fame! - and Fortune!
    - and Luncheon Meat!
    
    
    (It's at about 18 minutes in if you want to work out what she's saying for yourself.)
    
    
    
    
    Re-edited several times, and released under a variety of titles to gull the gullable ( aka Human Wreckage, They Must Be Told, Trial Marriage, About Trial Marriage... ) Sex Madness was the almost shot for horrendious line crossing shot 'inspiration' for the Social Disease! section of the very variable Amazon Women of the Moon.
13. Grease - I don't like Grease. I thinks it is a vastly overated film which, apart from Eve Arden and Stockard Channing (Hubba hubba!)*, has very little going for it at all - apart from making John Walters' Cry Baby and Hairspray look even better. Holly was entranced, though I'm glad she didn't ask too many questions about the lyrics:
    
    
    
    Quote:

    You know that ain't no shit we'll be getting lots of tit In Grease Lightning Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go Go grease lightning you're burning up the quarter mile (Grease lightning go grease lightning) Go grease lightning you're coasting through the heat lap trial You are supreme, the chicks'll cream for grease lightning Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go Purple french Tail lights and thirty inch fins oh yeah A Palomino dashboard and duel muffler twins oh yeah With new pistons, plugs, and shocks I can get off my rocks You know that I ain't bragging she's a real pussy wagon Grease lightning

    "Daddy? What's a 'pussy wagon'?"
    
    
    *(Just want to point out that that 'hubba hubba' is just for Ms. Channing alone, not Eve Arden, nice woman I'm sure she was.)
14. X ( 19xx ) - It's not called 'X' but just to prolongue MrBaliHai's enjoyment over at NameThatFilm I'm not revealing the name of this one just yet. - 'Brilliant' but cocky snot-nosed teenager with attidude is sent to the mysterious Psychological Institute just outside of town. We know he's a genius because his idea of fun is flushing half a pound of 'pure sodium' down the school's toilet to make them explode. He does scientific japes, see? Got to be clever. This is also the movie's idea of foreshadowing - that and all the 'Danger Sodium is used in this area!' signs all over the boiler room we know is destined to be the scene of the climax - every wall has at least one just in case any got lost in the final edit) At the Psychological Institute just outside of town our 'hero' discovers that the creepy doctor running it (and hypnotising the local population via his TV show) is in cahoots with a giant brain (complete with teeth, googly eyes, and a prehensile spinal column). With the help of his girlfriend and another more disposable male friend with a terrible mullet he destroys the brain just before the TV show goes nationwide. (Actually he does it alone, the bad mullet gets eaten by the brain (sic) after being somewhat useless, and the girlfriend gets TV hypnotised and chained to a pipe.) Made in Canada, X tries for weird unease and creeping visceral horror but blows it by throwing the monster at the screen within minutes and leaving itself nowhere to go. It looks like a cheesy low-budget David Cronenberg wanabee (One Cronenberger with cheese to go!) and ticks many of my favourite bad movie cliche boxes: Disembodied brains, gratuitous nudity, movies made in Canada always being set around Christmas*, prolonged chases up and down the same two stairwells (though no one did that leaping over the railing thing that has always baffled me), lousy location sound, and women doing that 'backing up to perfectly flat walls for no other reason that to have hands suddenly come bursting though the wallpaper to grab them' thing - I never can have enough of that.
    
    Or these...
    
    

    *Snow. As I have said before, the only reason for snow in a movie is that it's Christmas. The Christmassness in this movie is minimal. One brief snatch of Christmas music over a car radio, and a discarded Christmas tree on the sidewalk outside the hero's house in the dénouement. It's a measure of the movie's cheapnesss that in the final long shot of the street - in which we see the hero's garbage set out for collection - that his is the only house with a pile of garbage outside it. Either our hero's family are incredibly tidy and have their garbage out long before any of their neighbours - or the production company was so strapped for cash they couldn't afford more than one pile of empty cardboard boxes to dress the location.
15. The Saint (1997) - Do do di do doo doo doooooooo.... See Val Kilmer wear wigs! See Van Kilmer wear false moustaches! See Van Kilmer do funny foreigner accents! See Val Kilmer bore the pants off the audience! What a plod of a movie. What should have been a jolly James Bond meets Diabolik piece of fun turned into a long trudge of 116 minutes worth of bollocks as, on behalf of the Russian Mafia, Val Kilmer steals the 'formula' for cold fusion from a beautiful lady scientist (who keeps it tucked into her bra) and then changes his mind (when he discovers he quite likes what else she keeps in there as well). When was the last time anyone seriously built a movie around the only copy of a professor's secret formula written on a piece of paper? This is 1940's serial plotting - not in itself a bad thing, many an enjoyable movie has been built around recycling paper-thin ideas from paper-thin movies but few have taken themselves so deadly, ponderously, bum-numbingly seriously as this one does. Anyway. Not many complication ensue. Good triumphs over evil. The dénouement seems to take half the length of the movie again but I will remember it slightly fondly for one brief moment of classic bad movie acting. The Saint includes the most incredibly crap 'baddies telling each other the details of how clever they have been in their evil scheming just so the audience can hear' scene outside of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, "He! He! He!" type evil laughing and all. Who would have guessed all the heating oil for all of Russia had been syphoned off into a tank under the baddies' palatial hideout? Who indeed? And who but the Russian Mafia would happily discuss such things as Val Kilmer, disguised as a cleaning lady, plants a bug in their evil headquarters? Elisabeth Shue was pretty.