Oh No! It's a million and one films time! Just catching up. Here's November and December's traunch. I watched a few decent films. Highlights include finding several films never released on DVD and Meg Ryan naked.

The following list contains naughty words.

More photos, including those of
naked people, will be added later.

November

1. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) - Directed by Kenneth Branagh (which makes it Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was 'presented' (whatever that means) by Francis Ford Coppola who had, two years previously, made Bram Stoker's Dracula. Sometimes known as Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. Sadly - and I think they missed a trick here - they didn't go for broke and call this one Francis Ford Coppola's Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) - and what a pile of hysterically overwrought dog plops it is too. Full of jaw-dropping "you what?" moments. My favourite I think being the moment when Victor Frankenstein fulfils some fanboy notion of the writers when he cries out, mid-crisis, "we must reverse the polarity!"* The exploding Helena Bonham Carter was fun too. At the end of the film, unable to cope with the fact that her husband has chopped her head off and stitched it onto her childhood friend's body (and made a real pig's ear of her face while doing so) she smashes an oil lamp over her head then runs around the castle and everything bursts into flames - sometimes before she gets anywhere near them.
   
   Nothing happens slowly in this film. Everything is full-throttle all the way. It is not subtle. And nothing much makes any kind of sense. Where for instance does Victor get the gallons of human amniotic fluid he needs to create 'The Bride' - and when? One minute he's unpacking crates preparing to knock up a mate for his creature; the next minute he decides against it and gets married instead and, that night, having spent most of the day riding in the general direction of 'away', the miffed creature turns up out of nowhere and rips out his new bride's heart on their honeymoon bed. "Oh for fuck sake!" cries Victor (who in a weirdly semi-incestuous way has been waiting to shag Helena Bonham-Carter's character for years). He gathers up her body and moments later is back at his home where, in the couple of hours he's been away someone - probably pixies - has fitted out his lab, filled a copper swimming pool with the aforementioned amniotic fluid, and stocked up all the batteries with electric eels (sic).
   
   Amid all this hysterical bilge and lumbered with a face-full of rubber and a script made of wood, Robert DeNiro almost made the Creature work as a real character.
   
   *Disappointingly this is not true. On checking my facts (always a mistake) and watching it again, with the subtitles on this time, I find he actually said "reduce the polarity". Damn!
   
   
2. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998 ) - probably the most pointless film version of a book I have seen in years. It sticks closer than usual for Hollywood to the original book and relies on great chunks of voice over first person narration to tell the story. Too much. It's like listening to an abridged audio version of the book with moving pictures. Like some sort of drug fuelled Classics Illustrated comic. I was very disappointed.
   
   
3. Rango (2011) - that was great! And Jonny Depp redeemed himself for last night's trudge.
   
   
4. Troll 2 (1990) - Troll 2 is one of those legendarily bad movies that has developed a 'cult' following. I know a lot of films are labelled 'cult' but I think this one does deserve it. People organise screenings and chant along with the best bits, a documentary film, Best Worst Movie, was made in 2009 by the, now grown up, kid lead, reuniting the cast and exploring the sad world of film geeks and conventions.
   
   Troll 2, made by an Italian crew with American amateur 'actors', tells the everyday story of an All-American Family (and the ghost of the dead grandfather) having a house-swap vacation in the small town of Nilbog (geddit?). Niblog is populated entirely by shape-shifting vegetarian goblins who eat humans (sic) that pass through town by converting them into plants. The goblins (the word 'troll'' is never mentioned in the film so why it's called Troll 2 is never explained) are ruled over by a scenery chewing, eyeball rolling Gothic Queen who glories in the name 'Creedence Leonore Gielgud'. Her ancestors moved to Nilbog generations ago 'from Stonehenge' (double sic). The film is a total bollocks of a mess. It lurches from one flatly-paced, badly-acted underwritten, dodgily-photographed, hamfistedly directed, incomprehensible scene to another with no regard to any kind of continuity or usual story telling techniques. The film can't make its mind up what it wants to be, but the suposedly 'horror' elements are far funnier than the 'comic' moments which, for the most part, are totally baffling until the penny drops that they are supposed to be laugh points. The scene where the RV fills with popcorn during the 'sex scene' has to be one of the oddest.
   
   There's hardly a scene or shot (or gesture, or line) in this film that doesn't fail. It's all wrong. All of it. Every single shot. It even manages to screw up that old reliable weird little chill of the ball bouncing down the steps - when you know there's no one upstairs! Done right, as it was in The Changeling (1980), it can scare the bejesus out of the most cynical of movie watchers. Here it not only didn't make any sense - other than frightening the two people in the world for whom even the idea of a ball bouncing down a set of well lighted steps is terrifying, it wasn't shot well and was a pointless out-of-nowhere "what just happened?" moment which leads into one of the daftest, "even to deranged Italian film-makers it must be obvious this makes NO sense whatsoever" endings in 20th Century cinema.
   
   This one's a keeper...
   
   
5. In the Cut (2003) ...this one isn't. I was driven to watch In the Cut by perversity (it's listed in my current non-fiction read, 101 Movies to Avoid: The Most Overrated Films Ever) and it was the first of many films mentioned in the book that I came across in my To Be Watched Pile. (Part of me really wants to alphabetize the 200 or so VHS tapes and DVDs in there but that way madness lies. I know it. But it's still tempting.) So, In the Cut. Shit film. Meg Ryan shows us her bits, and everyone who has ever seen ANY thriller movie in which the investigating cop has an affair with the heroine can chant-along-a-plot from there on in. Honestly, it's like the opening credits of Hanna-Barbera's Hong Kong Phooey*
   
   "Who is this psycho-serial killer? The hunky detective? NO!... Cornelius Webb the Gacy obsessed student? No way man!... Detective Ritchie Rodriguez the mild mannered hunky detective's partner? - could be!..."
   
   'Could be' my arse. It's ALWAYS the detective's partner. (That was a spoiler by the way.) Any flimsy credibility the plot may have started out with disappeared around the 45 minute mark when, after having hot and rumpy sex (Meg Ryan's bits, people!), our heroine and our detective have a little confessional session in which he tells her about how he lost his cherry, and she mentions the fact that he had seen her before (as he suspected), she watched him getting a blow job at the place and time where the killer's last victim was last seen. On hearing this the killer obsessed 'tec half-heartedly asks her a couple of questions, and after establishing that she has not only seen the victim - and almost certainly the killer - on the night of the murder, looks at his watch says 'I gotta go' and leaves. No reason. He just leaves. He leaves because the plot would have fallen on its stupid fat face if he had stayed in the room another second. One more question and the detective would have realised the only other person with the small (but distinctive enough to be seen across a room too dark to make out people's faces) tattoo on the inside of their wrist was... da da daaaa!!!!! His Partner!
   
   At which point the movie would be over and we wouldn't be able to spend the next hour looking at Meg Ryan's bits, while our arses went numb wondering just how and why her character would even consider having sex with the piece of shit, emotionally stunted, moron detective. (In order to make this plot point even vaguely plausible the script has to drag in Kevin Bacon to broad-brushstoke in a previous lover as a total twitching stalking cartoon fruitcake loon. It really is as ham-fisted as that.)
   
   And talking of ham-fisted, the only other heterosexual male (ie potential killer) with talking words in this show is one of Ryan's character's students. He's obsessed by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy and turns in his assignments liberally splattered with red, blood-like fluids. (I don't know why he didn't just walk around with a red painted kipper nailed to his forehead.) And why is every male in this show desperate to get in dowdy frump English teacher's knickers in the first place? Apart from feeding the film's screamingly obvious misandrist 'feminist' agenda item that all men are sexual predators and would happily shag a fridge if it was warm and didn't move too fast. (This is in fact true, but most of us are a little more subtle about it than the knuckledraggers shambling about here.)
   
   I suspect - though I have no evidence - that the only reason this film got made (and the only reason people went to see it) was because Meg Ryan wanted to get away from her wholesome Nice Girl Next Door image and flashing her pubes in a serial killer flick seemed the way to go.
   
   
   
   
   
   It wasn't.
   
   I'm off to dig out all the other 'movies to avoid' in my pile....
   
   EDIT: (Christ, I wish I hadn't watched this film. It's now 20 or so hours later and I'm still replaying it in my head - and not just the tits bits - and finding things I hate about it.) It's an incredibly insulting film, believing the audience is so stupid it won't spot the thudding great grinding and whirring as the mechanical plot strips its gears (eg our detective walking out on the smoking gun witness as mentioned above), because it's dazzling us with beauty shots of Meg Ryan reading snippets of poetry and asking us to contemplate their significance and meaning. Err, I don't get it. Must be fucking art then. It's a fucking art movie innit? What a clever person Jane Campion is; tits and poetry, all that's missing is the subtitles.
   
   And just why did our sexually unsatisfied English teacher spend so long drawing a large lighthouse on the blackboard when her class were discussing To The Lighthouse. I think even inner-city New York kids know what a lighthouse looks like. But why did she then colour it in red? Is it possibly because a red light house looks a bit like AN ERECT PENIS????? and as the climax (sic) of the film takes place at a bright red lighthouse that looks like AN ERECT PENIS (just like the model of a bright red lighthouse that looks like AN ERECT PENIS on the killer's office desk) they had to drag in some foreshadowing somehow. I'll lay money the shot of that drawing is being used as a text book example of how not to do foreshadowing in film schools around the world.** You know, if Tony Scott had directed this film it would have been laughed off the screen and derided as sexploitative, career-wrecking shite; on the up side it might have had a car chase in it as padding instead of all the endless shots of city architecture and those lingering shots of American Flags which are non-American film-maker's shorthand for "I am holding up a mirror to your society! Gaze upon it and despair!"
   
   
   
   
   
   I hate this film.
   
   *Geoffrey H Christ! There's a live action Hong Kong Phooey film in pre-production!
   ** To be scrupulously fair we don't actually see her do the drawing so it may be that the serial killer drew it before she arrived in the class. It's still shit though.
   
   
6. Body Heat (1981) - My faith in the system is restored. No matter which way you slice it this is as near perfect a sweaty sexy noire as you are ever going to get. Every one in it is perfect (even, though it pains me to type this,William Hurt). The music is perfect. The pacing is spot on. There's not a bum note in the whole thing. This time of watching I was struck by the subtlety of the business meant to throw the audience off track. For instance, as our sleazy lawyer, Ned Racine, is arranging the body of his victim in the cellar, in a building he is about to torch - making it look like the victim died while committing arson - he carefully unwraps the body from the bloody plastic it has been wrapped in. (People don't usually commit arson wrapped in plastic bags.) He tosses the crumpled plastic into a corner. There is a shot of the plastic sheeting landing. For the next ten minutes I was convinced (and I have seen this film several times before) that this carelessly discarded plastic, which we had been carefully shown, was one of the "25 ways to fuck up" that our killer hadn't thought of. It wasn't. The victim's glasses which he always wore were not on the body. That was the killer's mistake. I had totally forgotten about them because of one simple shot of a plastic bag. Simple misdirection. The audience is looking for the mistake. Give them something that looks like one. Don't make a big thing of it, let them think "Aha! I spotted that." Let them have a few minutes of smug superiority and then have a character point out what they really should have noticed. Clever scriptwriting. Great editing. I love this film.
   
   
7. Amazon Warrior ( 1998 ) in a post-apocalyptic America where everyone has clean hair and good teeth, and suspiciously well maintained fences can be seen in the background, Tara, last of the Amazons, is hired to guide two women through dangerous territory. Plodding rubbish with clumsy fight sequences, even clumsier dialogue, and a budget that must have been in in the low dozens. One sequence in particular, where the 'king' hires our heroine, looks like it was filmed round the edges of a Renaissance Fair, not at a Renaissance Fair, but round the edges. As in:
   
   "Quick, while no one is looking we can get all these costumed extras for free - yeah, well, they'll be standing with their backs to us watching something interesting happening out of sight of the camera - but they'll cost nothing!"
   
   Total bilge, starring the producer and a lot of actors who went on to appear in such classics of his such as Vampire Time Travelers. Some of the actresses got their norks out (I love that word) thus leading us to the conclusion that no matter what: fire, flood, famine, or the end of the world by all out nuclear heck, the plastic boob implant industry will be alive and well and operating somewhere in southern California. One of those films where you know the actors walking towards the screen have hit their marks and are going to start talking because they're suddenly where the reflectors are adding fill light to their faces.
   
   
8. Brainstorm (1983) - Directed by Douglas Trumbull, Brainstorm starts out as a great little slow paced, thoughtful, hard SF film playing with ideas about new breakthrough technology, turns somehow into an evil corporation/military combine thriller, has an extended sequence of clumsy slapstick comedy before ending in a mystic, revelatory, light-show. It's a bit of a mess. An interesting one but a mess. It might have been a bit less of a mess if one of the stars, Natalie Wood, hadn't died in the middle of the shoot.
   
   
9. Yojimbo (1961) - Akira Kurosawa. 'nuff said.
   
   
10. The City of Ember ( 2008 ) - Friday Night with the kids. I enjoyed it more than I expected but it didn't make much sense in the end. The closed world civilisation which has forgotten its history and where no-one (apart from our heroes) questions the existence of a world beyond the city boundaries is a tired old Science Fiction trope - but done here with some nice set design. The inclusion of giant insects and moles (which are not apparently in the book) skews the whole film into making you think that the humans here have been miniturized in some way to survive the holocaust mentioned in the prologue sequence. (Which is another old SF idea see James Blish's 1952 story 'Surface Tension' for a good example). This is hinted at several times during the film obliquely (one of the old Mayors, whose portraits we see at one point, is called Podd which is as near as damn it the name of the father in the Borrowers books) or overtly. A character finds a piece of beetle and looks it up in a book. points at the picture and asks his father how they used to be so little when they aren't now? There's a carnivorous mole rampaging round the tunnels below the city eating people. Things like that. The fact that the heroes, when they finally make it to the surface, appear to be normal sized human beings is just confusing and unsatisfying.
    
    
11. Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General (1968 ) - the 'Export Version' (ie more tits and violence). What a great film. I mean really horribly good.
    
    
12. Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) - my annual watch of the ever-fascinating most famous contender for the best worst film ever.
    
    
13. A Bizarre Love Triangle (aka Cheoleobtneun anaewa paramanjanhan nampyeon geurigo taekwon sonyeo 2002) My first foray into Korean film. Within a framing device set at a wedding on the moon sometime in the near future (with some very very dodgy special effects and costumes that push all the wrong campness buttons) a guest tells how the three parents of one of the grooms (sorry, just told you the socko twist ending) got together. This turns out to be a long story of teenage lesbian lust, under-age schoolgirl seduction, suicide by self-immolation, kick-boxing, burglary, babies dying on operating tables, fruit fucking and sundry other everyday Korean pastimes, culminating in one of the central characters having a life changing revelation as she shits herself in a public toilet. It was at this point - somewhere about the two hour mark (the film is only 93 minutes long) that it finally dawned on me that I was watching 'a comedy' and I was supposed to be finding all this stuff funny. I can see why it was in the pre-owned bin of my local Blockbuster for pennies. It's going back.
    
    Things I learned from this film:
    
    
    1. You can show men sniffing artificial vaginas, women holding huge rubbery double-ended dildos, and waving strangely gyrating life-size artificial penises around on screen and still get a cert 15 in the UK. (qv 'bumping cunts'.*)
    2. I do not understand Korean humour.
       
       
    * You know that moment that sometimes happens when you type something and think: "this may be the first time in the history of the English language that these three words have ever been placed together in quite that order"? I just had it. 'qv bumping cunts'. Not a phrase you see every day - but a great name for a band!
    
    
14. Time and Tide (aka Shun liu Ni liu 2000) second Asian movie of the week (from Hong Kong this time) and the second Asian film to have a Lesbian getting pregnant after a one-night stand. Is this a common theme in Asian films? And why does everyone seem to steal cigarette lighters? I've watched 230 or so films so far this year; none have them have included scenes of cigarette lighter stealing until last night. The rest of the film was totally OTT Hong Kong Action nonsense which had me absolutely fascinated and totally lost in equal measure. I had no idea who anyone was or what was going on but everyone seemed to be having fun jumping out of seventh floor windows firing machine guns while talking on the phone to the person they were shooting at.
    
    
15. Invasion From Inner Earth (1972) - I first watched this jaw droppingly tedious piece of drek 4 years ago. Every now and then, while raking through my increasingly huge pile of shite films, looking for something to watch, I come across it and think,"It can't be as bad as I remember it". Tonight I proved myself wrong. It is.
    
    
16. Radioactive Dreams (1985) - A (possibly) not yet released on DVD piece of Big Box Video Trash from the glory days of Big Box Video Trash. Radioactive Dreams is the everyday story or two four year old boys left alone in a bomb shelter with nothing to read but hard-boiled detective fiction. They emerge 16 years later to a post-apocalyptic wasteland full of the usual MTV vibe post punk post Mad Max bestial types. This time the tribes were a little odder than the usual hairy biker types vs peaceful farmers, one tribe for instance was called The Disco Mutants and consisted of seven year boys wearing white suits who carried big hand guns and said 'fuck' a lot. In the end it all got very irritating with our two heroes looking more and more like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis wandering around an endless series of early MTV music videos. Videos from back in the days when they pretended to tell a moodily lit 'story' and didn't just fill the screen with jiggling well-tanned body bits. The film seemed very familiar somehow, though I'd never seen before. Only when I looked director Albert Pyun up on IMDb did it click. He also directed Alien in LA which was very similar in that it featured a lot of pointless wandering around in a MTV style Mad Maxiverse. Unusually for a 1980s PostApoc flick there were no noticeable displays of fingerless gloves - though there was at least one incidence of that other good old 80s PA Flick cliché, the burning oil drum.
    
    
17. BASEketball ( 1998 ) - Trey Parker and Matt Stone star in a David Zucker film. Stupid, rude, crude, and very very funny.
    
    
18. Vampire in Venice ( aka Nosferatu a Venezia 1988 ) - Another not yet released on DVD piece of treasure from my Freecycle haul of last week. A weirdly slow, decadent, Italian vampire flick that took four writers, and (depending on who you believe) up to five directors to get to the screen. Klaus Kinski gets to do his usual wild-eyed fruitloopery, grope two naked ladies, and walk slowly towards (and occasionally away from) the camera a lot. Christopher Plummer and Donald Pleasence appear in great chunks of what appears to be nearly, but not quite, the same film. And there are sequences of flamenco dancing vampire gypsies, priests being thrown out of upper storey windows and someone climbing up St Mark's Campanile then jumping off for no apparent reason (and getting caught in mid air by Klaus Kinski in a really crappy special effect). It sounds like a mess. And it is. The narrative lurches around all over the place, characters appear without introduction and then vanish without trace, but it's so oddly put together, and some of the photography and atmosphere is so beautiful, I was half convinced that if I kept watching it ought to make sense eventually. It didn't in the end but by then I was half convinced that it might make sense if I watched it again.
    
    Which I will do.
    
    One day.
    
    
19. The Naked Cage (1986) - A Cannon Films 'Women in Prison' piece of exploitation crap. The usual dutiful parade of all the clichés of the Women in Prison exploitation crap genre, you know, innocent blonde victim who can't act thown into a gaol, where no one wears a bra, run by a sadistic lesbian warden. Cue lots of cat fights, a bit of rape an obligatory shower scene. All topped off with a contrived happy ending. Even by the low standards of the genre this was a shoddy, and tedious, piece of shit. I was bored. A very long 91 minutes.

December

1. Snake & Crane: Arts of Shaolin ( 1978 ) - Jackie Chan hits people a lot for 96 minutes. Occasionally one of them gets to hit him back. I have no idea why.
   
   
2. Ella Enchanted (2004) - A teen / kids film that pitches its tent right in The Princess Bride, Shrek territory and doesn't do a bad job. A Friday Night Pizza Film Club that I enjoyed a lot more than I was expecting.
   
   
3. Orlando (1992) - For the umpteenth time (it's a ravishingly beautiful piece of work in every department) but on the big(ish) screen for the first time. And I was struck by just how funny the film is; I laughed several times.
   
   
4. The Shadow (1994) - another failed attempt to create a movie franchise based on an existing character. The Shadow is a masked vigilante striking fear into the hearts on villains with his almost supernatural powers, and has been credited with being the model for many pulp heroes since. (Batman bears more than a passing resemblance.) He's been fighting crime on and off since 1930 in endless pulps, novels, comics, and on radio (as played by Orson Welles no less) and the character has appeared in previous films in 1937, 1938, and 1940. There is now a big budget remake on the cards with Sam Raimi 'at the helm' (as they say in the funny papers). The 1994 film looks great, the faux 30s design elements are great, but it does suffer from a plodding script and is, sadly, just very dull.
   
   
5. Star Pilot (1977)- an American dubbed version of the 1966 Italian film 2+5: Missione Hydra. Somewhere between 1966 when it was made, and 1977 when it was released in America as part of the Star Wars feeding frenzy 2+5: Missione Hydra accumulated footage from at least three other films. The American distributors edited in footage from Doomsday Machine (which was originally shot in 1967 - after the release of 2+5: Missione Hydra - and which in turn contained footage from an earlier, 1962, Japanese film Yôsei Gorasu). I don't know what was cut out to make room. The original has got to be more coherent than this version which was crammed with more trash SF clichés than average with apparently no attempt to join them together in any way. Knowing he was stuffed from the get go, the director hit upon a stunning device of distracting the audience from the plot deficiencies by dressing the insanely yummy heroine in a variety of costumes that cunningly alternated between LOOK AT MY TITS! and LOOK AT MY ARSE! subtlety. Even when she wasn't wandering around in nothing but a small piece of net with some feathers sewn on the crotch she had obviously been instructed to flirt with the camera as much as possible. Every time there's a scene of earnest clunking dialogue going on, she just walks in, waves her arse at the camera bounces up and down, and does just about everything she can to get the audience to look at her perky titties - bar holding up a hand-written sign saying 'TITS'! She can't even get a coffee cup in the background without doing an arabesque in 'Look at my Bum' pants:
   
   
   

   
   She's upstaging us again, isn't she?
   
   
   Oh to hell with it, long time since I posted any pics of Astro-crumpet. Some more screen caps of the little minx I think.
   
   
   
   Here she is running back into a building during
   an earthquake just to show us her knickers
   
   
   Overhead shot of weightless writhing
   - two years before Barbarella.
   
   
   Oh no! They forgot to restore
   her 'artificial weight'...
   
   
   What the average girl, kidnapped by aliens,
   and about to be attacked by men
   in gorilla suits wears of an evening.
   
   
   And this is what she looks like from the neck up.
   

   
   

   I may well watch this one again - just to see if I can make any sense of it. I do know, however, that if I ever get to direct a film it is going to have a sequence in which a woman is dropped onto a trampoline in slow motion. As attempts to simulate weightlessness goes it wasn't bad. As attempts to show us the heroine's knickers go it was pretty desperate. Looked like fun though.
   
   
6. White Castle (1990) - She's 43 and a waitress in a burger joint; he's 27, a Jewish yuppie still in love with his dead wife. Join the dots. I defy anyone not to laugh at the climactic, emotionally charged pivotal moment when our yuppie hero finally realises he's lost the love of his life. At a party set up to get him together with a 'suitable', ie yuppie, wife, he takes her hand-held vacuum cleaner of the kitchen wall opens it, peers inside and wails, "There's no dust in her Dustbuster!" I nearly pissed myself with laughter.
   
   
7. Girl 6 - 1996. The first time I've seen a Spike Lee film since Malcom X back when it came out. I have no real reason for never having looked at any of his other films, I just haven't ever got round to seeing any. Girl 6 ended up on my screen tonight as part of the game I'm playing at the moment. Over in the corner of my living room is a huge cardboard box full of VHS tapes with no cases. I have no idea what's in the box. I choose one at random without looking at it and if I'm careful where I look as I put it in the machine, and FF past the black and white identification thingy that appears on-screen for a few seconds right at the start of the tape, I have no idea what I'm watching until the titles come up. It's fun.
   
   
8. The Club (1994) - one of those straight to video horror films starring 'Who?', 'Who?', and 'Never heard of him.' The clock is approaching midnight at the Prom night dance which, for unexplained reasons, is being held at a large mock Gothic mansion. A dreary slow plodding opening suddenly takes a sharp left turn into Lynch lite weirdness as all but six of the guest mysteriously vanish followed by lots of running up and down the same few corridors as the camera man tries out a variety of wide angle lenses. After a while it all got very samey and repetitive and the initial 'This is weird', vibe gave way to a 'This is dull' vibe. In the end it wasn't quite an 'but it was all a dream' ending - but not by much.
   
   
9. Tank Girl - Violent stupid and almost fun.
   
   
10. L'atalante (1934) - the older I get the more I realise I just don't 'get' French films. Especially those deemed by those who know to be 'classics'. Over on IMDb L'atalante is variously lauded as the most beautiful, the most erotic, or the saddest film ever made. There's hardly a dissenting voice on the boards; it is a 'masterpiece'. Maybe it is and maybe it's just me being thick but what I saw was a scrappy, almost amateurish film with the occasional nice shot but which jumped about from scene to scene with very little unifying style, some very dodgy transitions, a very very thin story with huge narrative jumps in it, annoyingly selfish characters, and some underwhelmingly unfunny 'comic interludes' (what the hell was all that nonsense in the dance hall with the singing peddler all about?). Maybe I'm just a pleb with plebby tastes but it just looked like minor league, of its time, best forgotten, so-what? (The cynic in me also wonders if the director hadn't been dying romantically young from TB during the shoot whether it would be remembered at all.)
    
    
11. The Corpse Bride (2005) - Daughter number one stretches her Pre-teen Disney-Noir Goth muscles and chooses this as her Friday Night Pizza and Film Night choice because: 'it's by the same people who made Coraline,' and 'it's stop motion animation not computer'.
    
    
12. Rush Hour ( 1998 ) - First time viewing, random Lucky-dip film of the night. Isn't Chris Tucker annoying? I mean annoying? I'd only ever seen him in The Fifth Element before, he was annoying in that but I assumed that that was the part. It wasn't; it was the persona. I doubt if I'll watch the sequels.
    
    
13. Metroland (1997) - I liked this. I really liked it. It 'spoke to me' as they say. Some nice acting and a great use of colour.
    
    
14. The Big Brass Ring (1999) - Political 'thriller'? based on an unfilmed script by Orson Welles.
    
    
15. Diva (1981) - un Film Policier which sort of convinced me that sometime I do 'get' French films but only, I suspect, if they have ludicrous moped chases through the Paris metro system and naked women in it. Why though does every French film seem to have to have at least one scene set in a woods at dawn? Total credibility stretching, coincidence-ridden, plot-hole ridden nonsense but done with great style.
    
    
16. Arlington Road (1999) - Pretty good.
    
    
17. Carry-on Spying (1964) - I was tired!
    
    
18. Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988) - there are only two reasons to watch this movie. They're pretty good reasons too.

A new year. All sorts of stuff has happened since I last posted here. (New Year's resolutions about posting more often on my blog getting broken for one.) In lieu of anything interesting to report to the world, here's a list of every film I didn't manage to finish watching last year. Tomorrow I'll post the films I did manage to finish in November and December and then I'll be up to date and can think of following the kids around with a notebook in the hope that they will say something amusing or baffling.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

Disaster Movie ( 2008 ) - dear Mother of God! this was awful. I lasted 20 minutes.

Brothers (2001) - and twenty minutes was all I lasted with this self-financed piece of bumdrizzle about lads on the pull in Greece. Just how bad is this movie? If I tell you it has more semi-naked and naked women in it than any other film I have seen this year and I STILL couldn't watch it, you may get some inclination of just how fucking crap this is.

Monster from Bikini Beach ( 2008 ) - a 95 minute 'comedy/horror' made for $10,000 dollars. A splatter homage to all those beach party monster films of the 60s - in living colour with more nudity, and gore, and I fell asleep. Dreadful. I can see why no one has bothered to reviewed it on IMDb. Usually cheapo drek like this can usually attract someone who was in it, or did the catering, to write something about how much fun they had making it. Not this one.

The Sasquatch Gang / The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang (depends whether you read the box or the opening credits 2006) I gave up after 15 minutes when I realised that the mumbling morons on screen were A. incomprehensible B. supposed to be funny C. not going to die violent and horrible deaths in the next two minutes.

Jambon Jambon (1992) even the prospect of Penelope Cruz appearing naked couldn't keep me interested in this haphazardly unfunny bore. I gave up after 30 minutes.

Mutant Chronicles (2008) - What a mess! I gave up after 30 minutes when the narrative structure had disintigrated to the point where the monk narrator (Ron Perlman hiding behind an Oirish accent) got fed up re-explaining the back story (and what had already happened on screen), stopped, and listed one by one the assembled team we didn't see him just recruit. One minute he's saying "I need twenty men and a fast ship," the next he's listing the crew recapping a sequence the director didn't shoot or cut. There was a lot of weird narrative dead ends in this and sundry bits of story flapping about looking for a home, so many in fact that I stopped the DVD at one point and looked it up on the IMDb convinced that what I was watching was a whole TV series hacked down to a 110 minute movie. It wasn't. It was supposed to be like this. What I was watching was a film based on a game. What the hell is John Malkovich doing shit like this for?

Battle in Heaven (2005) - piece of arty Mexican shit full of stupendously long shots in which nothing happened. Most of them were of nothing. Look! some traffic on the street. Look! some people walking. Look! some more people walking. Look! our 'hero', a bovine Mexican non-actor who stares at things that were off-screen a lot.
Occasionally the camera would hand-held pan from looking at his profile to follow his eyeline and we would see what he was looking at, the pan would then often continue past whatever he was looking at, come round in a full 360º and find HE HAD MOVED! Shit on a stick! The fat Mexican has moved! My willy sphincters could hardly contain my fucking water! After 45 minutes I started to watch it at FF X2. It didn't make any difference except I had to read what few subtitles there were a little bit faster. I turned off at the 50 minute mark. Imagine yourself being trapped in a cinema with the most obnoxiously pretentious 'I'm going to challenge and then redefine the whole diegesis in the narrative structuralism of cinematic language,' type arty wanker film student as he shows you seventeen hours of unedited rushes of rusty oil tanks by the side of a railway line. That would be preferable to watching this. It would be preferable because:

a. you wouldn't have to see overweight Mexicans fucking and
b. you could grab the director and force feed the little tosser with the endlessly spooling film till he exploded.

Bloodsuckers aka Vampire Wars: Battle for the Universe (2005) - piece of shit Sci-Fi channel TV movie that must have looked so good on the back of the envelope it was written on. I really can just see how this show happened. The boss of The Sci-Fi channel walked into the the office one day and said "Firefly with Vampires! Here's a couple of million dollars. Come back Tuesday with a rough cut." It was dire. I mean unwatchably dire. The Sci-fi Channel's stuff is usually pretty stinky but this was just too far the other side of stinky, even for me. One of those shows that has a captain 'with a past' who is initially disliked by all the members of the renegade crew (who all have 'pasts' of their own to deal with) where everyone snarls and snipes at each other because it's the only way the writers can generate 'conflict'. The usual lazy TV bullshit.

Incubus (2006) - Six vaguely symmetrical young people, lost in the forest after a car crash and desperate to keep warm, break into a windowless building. The building is unmarked on any map but we know, from a pre-credit sequence, it has at least one axe-wielding crazy inside. I gave up at the point where the six vaguely symmetrical young people lost in the forest climb on the roof, kicked open the cover of a huge ventilation shaft and pulled out hitherto unmentioned ropes and abseiling gear which they had been carrying around in their rucksacks for no other reason that there had to be some way for the scriptwriters to get them into this building without them being able to leave. (The rope breaks.) Apparently this film is so bad it even bypassed the 'straight to DVD' route and went 'straight to download'. This was, according to the IMDb, 'The first direct-to-download film. The film premièred on t'internet and was released through AOL.'

Sci-Fighters (2004) Starring Don 'The Dragon' Wilson (I really should know better by now). Martial artists get stuck in a virtual reality game and have to kick things a lot to a pumping 80s style soundtrack. In the 80s this would have been crap. In 2004 it was well past its sell-by date, as were most of the Martial Artists on screen. I wouldn't like to say this to their faces (I value my nose too much) but they looked really slow and plodding (our hero is 50 and the heroine 47 - it shows). Some of the fight choreography just stank and the script and acting were laughable. I fell asleep.

Mimic (1997) I had hopes for this one. Based as it was on a short story by Donald A Wolheim, a writer and editor who knew his SF, and directed by Guillermo del Torro. I gave up after 50 minutes when I wandered off to the IMDb to find out just how long this boring, predictable there's 'something in the sewers' yawnfest was going to go on for. I didn't go back.

Invisible Mom - Another Fred Olen Ray film I couldn't be bothered with after the first ten minutes.

Hello Blog, nice to see you are still here.

Today Holly emptied her school bag. She didn't want to do it but I asked her to. It was a mess in there. Needed sorting.

"Make two piles," I said. "One for stuff you want to keep, the other for stuff that's for the bin."
"Okay," she said and started taking things out of the bag. "I've been looking for that pencil!" A few minutes later she had an impressive pile on the keep heap and a smaller pile in the garbage.

She stopped taking things out and looked into the bag. She put her hand in and had a rummage.

"Okay," she said. "I think everything else in there can go in the compost..."

Sorry, but after two or even three almost real posts it's time for: (Fanfare please...)

The relatively short list of every film I watched in October.

1. Beat (2000) - various progenitors of the 'beat movement' are imitated by various actors and the camera is pointed at them while they do so. I've never understood what made the the Beats so great; they've always come over to me like a bunch of self-obsessed pretentious druggy wankers but I guess their timing was right. I didn't come away from this film with my opinions changed or impressed in any way by the telling of the tale. Quite often you can see a film about characters you hate but still admire or enjoy the way the film is made. The music was nicely understated and whoever did the colour timing was good but other than that I was bored rigid.


2. Daybreakers (2009) - A futuristic vampire flick which does that good old SF trick of saying "What if...?" and then riffing on it. This "What if...?" must have been something along the lines of, "What if the vampires in Matheson's 'I am Legion' had won?".* So - we get a nocturnal world which is pretty much the same as the modern world only run by vampires - with an ever dwindling supply of humans to feed from. Market forces come into play. Human blood prices skyrocket - cue cardboard cutout evil corporation blood farmers. (In this case the corporation really is evil 'cos it's run by Sam Neill who, since he was the Antichrist in Damien III: The Final Conflict, can play on-screen evil with his eyes shut and one arm tied behind his back - and he's a fucking vampire. An evil vampire corporation run by someone with Antichrist luggage; You don't get any more evil than this.) Vampire society is falling to pieces. One man holds out a possible hope for the future. Human-loving vampire scientist Ethan Hawke (who, since he played Vincent Freeman in Gattica can play lone sympathetic outsiders in a futuristic evil corporation with with his eyes shut and one arm tied behind his back). Unfortunately his formula for synthetic blood makes (vampire) people's heads explode. He makes contact with the human underground, who sense his inner decency and together they discover a blinder of a plot twist out of the arse cure, and after the usual amount of gun play, exploding vampires, and evil corporate suit types being dismembered in lifts, the heroes ride off into the sunrise with a voice over that suddenly makes the whole thing look like a shoddy 80s TV movie of the week pilot. Which is a pity because there was some interesting "What iffery" going on in the background. Some of the follow on logic that comes from having a society of vampires was pretty well worked out and fun. Trouble is the story it was there to support wasn't good enough to justify the effort. A nice try though.
   
   * ...oh poo, I just remembered. They did win, didn't they? (At least they did in the original book.)


3. America Brown (2004) - an interesting buy from the Poundshop this one. Sometimes they have real films in there. Films you've never heard of right enough, full of people who you don't recognise but sometimes there's a goody in all the crappy, no-budget horror schlock.
   
   America Brown is a first (and so far only) feature from writer director Paul Black. It's a story of a young football player suffering a crisis of guilt and self-doubt who escapes Texas for a while to track down his childhood football hero (now a priest in New York). The story isn't complicated and the film is slow, takes its time, is never hurried but is never boring. I'm keeping hold of this one though for one superbly well-judged moment of nothing happening on the screen which I thought was wonderful. Towards the end of the film our hero is leaving New York. He says goodbye to the three friends he has made. And then descends the steps into the subway and out of our sight off screen. We see the three friends looking down after him. It holds on them looking. And holds. And holds. And then one says. "I wish I could do that." All the time we watch the friends we expect a cut. A cut to an angle from their POV (or near enough) of the boy leaving maybe stopping and turning, a final wave before he's gone? We don't get it. We wait but it doesn't happen. We wait just like the characters we're watching are waiting. He doesn't turn around. He just walks out of their sight. "I wish I could do that." It was a lovely bit of film making. Loved it. (And a nice counterpoint to the fact that when the two characters met they bumped into each other in the street and then both, taken with what they see, looked back at each other.)
   
   I wonder why I have suddenly started talking about films in the first person plural? I've obviously been reading far too many books of film criticism recently. Laocoon!)


4. Thunderpants (2002) with the kids - and not for the first time. I love this film. A good old-fashioned family film about an 11 year old boy with uncontrollable flatulence. I really don't know why Disney didn't pick this one up because it's a real 'follow your heart' story. A young boy surmounts all the obstacles placed behind him to find his gift and achieve his dream - with fart jokes, (lots of fart jokes) it also has ludicrous opera singing scenes with the hero 'singing the high bits with my arse', a kid facing a firing squad, ritual humiliation, more fart jokes, and some crackingly knowing OTT performances by well kent faces - before climaxing in the launch of a shuttle rescue mission - powered by a tube stuck up our hero's bum.
   
   I find it hilarious. (Not a word I use lightly.) And I can thoroughly recommend it to all. If nothing else for the great weird design elements which mash -up an odd, never-really-happened, British early sixties (where the only vehicles on the streets are Minis and everything is various shades of bottle green) and a high-tech modern setting with an international space station and space shuttles. It's the kind of visual cognitive dissonance that I like.
   
   And it's got fart jokes.


5. The Illusionist (2006) - I enjoyed that. Not sure it holds up plot wise (were we really expected to believe that the straw stables in the royal hunting lodge was unchanged for the several months between the night of the incident and the discovery of the locket?) but a good watch.


6. The Matrix (1999). I first saw this when it first came out and I thought it was a pile of vastly overrated crap. Now, many years later and having watched many more much worse movies since, I thought it might be worth giving it another try.
   
   I still think it's crap.
   
   Actually the first few minutes are okay I like the movie up till the point where Maurice Fishbourne does the big reveal and explains what it's all about. The whole 'we are just batteries' bit just pushes a big red 'Oh Fuck Off!' button in my head. I persevered though and watched the eye candy but the bit that really made me laugh out loud was the moment when Carrie-Ann Moss' character brings our hero back from the dead with a kiss. Oh, come on! What!?!? Somehow we managed to get from a semi-decent looking, what is going on? SF distopia into a la-la Disney world where dead people are bought back from the dead with a whisper of love. I expected her to start singing and bluebirds to join in the chorus. This sort of thing is fine in fairy tales. Makes sense in fairy tales, part of the fairy tales rule book that is but in a 'science fiction ' film? Pants!.
   
   Until!
   
   I realized it did make sense! Think about it. For the first umpty-x years of his life in The Matrix Reeves' character was a computer programmer. He lives alone in a room with computers. He's a hacker. He's a nerd. A social misfit. Now, just at the moment he's popping his clogs, a female woman of the opposite sex finally comes on to him? This is it! He might get sex! "Fuck this being dead lark," he's thinking with the last firing neurons in his head, "I might get to do sex - with someone else in the room! I'm going back!"


7. The Matrix Reloaded (2003) - more of the same but with more slo-mo and Keanu Reeves wearing a cassock. And a real dubious morality which (for all the fanboy knicker-wetting about how deep and philosophical these films are) boils down to us being asked to root for religious fundamental terrorists as they kill vast numbers of innocent bystanders, blow up power stations, and similar delights.


8. Altered States (1980) - given that it is directed by one of my least favourite directors, Ken Russell whose arty 'boundary pushing' just comes over as cheap and puerile self-indulgent wank to me, and that it starred one of my least favourite Hollywood actors, the plank of wood incarnate William Hurt, I enjoyed this a lot more that I expected. I came to scoff but I came away slightly impressed. Partially I think because Russell's throw-everything-at-the-screen-at-once, wacky, let's offend the Christians imaginary is largely confined to sequences where it actually makes some sense (ie one character's subjective drug-induced hallucinations) and Hurt's character is the sort of repressed unemotional lump that perfectly suits his repressed, clenched acting style.


9. Transylvania 6-5000 (1985) - Shot in 30 days in Yugoslavia. A 'comedy horror' which wastes its pretty good cast on one lame gag after another. The last half hour is just painful to watch. Gina Davis was fun for the few minutes she was on but everyone else was either going through the motions or hamming it up horribly. The script stank. Not even old reliable Jeffrey Jones could rescue this - and he made bits of Howard the Duck watchable.
   
   
   
   
   
   


10. They Wait (2007) - above average horror flick which, though serving up nothing particularly new, served it up more than competently and with a few genuine 'Made ya jump!' moments along the way. Sort of like Poltergeist with a Chinese slant. Ghosts, not gore to the front here with many of the special effects being done in camera and not with a truckload of CGI in post. I like stuff like that, moments where someone has thought through an on-screen gag to the point where it's all done with the actors and the camera; one character stepping to one side to reveal there's someone standing behind them - when you know there can't be anyone there because of what you just saw in the previous shot. That sort of thing. I like that sort of thing. I much prefer that sort of thing which is smart, and thought about, than all the 'body parts flying through the windows and incommoding the passers by' stuff. Don't need to see that. That's easy. Scare me witless with an attractive girl standing motionless on the pavement, staring fixedly at a doorway? that's clever.


11. Arsenic and Old Lace - An all-time favourite. I'll be saying "Bon voyage!" in a Peter Lorre voice every time I leave a room for weeks now.
    
    
12. Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) - a good way to commission BIG SCREEN Film and Pizza (but Occasionally Onigiri) family film night. As usual with kid's films I enjoyed this a lot more than I was expecting.


13. King Kong (1933) - just to test if the new digital projector does black and white and 3:4. It does. Great film. Total cobblers but great fun.


14. Art School Confidential (2006) - Damn. One of those films I really really wanted to like a lot more than I did. Being the son of an Art College lecturer, and often spending great chunks of my holidays in the art school studios as Dad worked on sculptures. And having then gone on to be an art student myself, I was really impressed by the feel and the art direction here. They got the ambience and the look just right. It was horribly, accurately, grotesque without having to exaggerate anything. Some great laugh out loud lines too:
    
    
    
    
    
    

    Jerome: How long have you been painting triangles? Professor Sandiford: I was one of the first.

    
    
    and
    
    
    
    
    
    

    Professor Sandiford: Now Eno, why haven't you been doing the assignments? Eno: Frankly, I find them constricting and largely irrelevant. My work has nothing to with form or light or colour, but with questioning the nature of aesthetic experience. Professor Sandiford: I'll buy that.

    Being two of my favourites. And I have forgiven John Malkovich for doing the shit Mutant Chronicles which is the last thing I saw him in. But in the end the whole serial murder mystery bit just didn't work for me and felt tacked on to make it sell-able to a studio.
    
    On the double-plus good side we get to see Sophia Myles naked, which, sad old fart that I am, I think would go a long way to rescue any movie. Am I getting old? because I was surprised to find that lines like "We used to bump cunts." are rated 15. When I was 15 I didn't know what a cunt was! let alone that a certain type of lady liked to bump theirs with other ladies. Nice to know some things have improved over the last 40 years.


15. House of the Black Death (aka Blood of the Man Beast, Blood of the Man Devil - 1965) - a wonderfully incoherent pile of poo which just makes no sense. At all. None. I had no idea for its entire 89 minute run time what was supposed to be going on. As far as I could make out it had something to do with Lon Chaney Jr trying to take over power from John Carradine by running a coven and summonsing up a demon to get his hands on some sort of magical book. Carradine's son turns into a werewolf. A visiting doctor has a sliver of the Holy Grail in a crucifix. The film also has large-breasted British 50s sex bomb Sabrina belly dancing in a graveyard FOR NO APPARENT REASON WHATSOEVER. (Other than the obvious, her previous screen credit was as 'Virginia' in Blue Murder at St. Trinian's. If I remember rightly all her character did was sit there filling a tight-jumper with which she then tried to knock over the camera). There were great jumps in the narrative where a central character locked in a room not only transforms into a werewolf off-screen but then dies between one shot and another without any reason being given. Another pair of characters return from somewhere unexplained having seen something that completely turns one of their world views upside-down. (We never find out what they saw.) A character who, while guiding two others, says: "I'm only allowed to take you this far!" before abandoning them - only to reappear at their destination and then offer to guide them somewhere (else?). (They might have got away with this drastic bit of machete editing if the character in question hadn't been the only person in the entire film wearing a very identifiable black and white spotted shirt.) Another fine mess from Jerry Warren, the man who bought you Teenage Zombies, The Incredible Petrified World, and The Wild World of Batwoman - all of which I have seen at least twice and all of which, deliriously awful films that they are, are vastly better than this. To be fair, he was bought in at the last minute to 'rescue' the film which had been made by someone else. But how bad does a film have to be before you bring in Jerry Warren to rescue it?


16. Caged Heat (1974) - Jonathan 'Silence of the Lambs' Demme's first feature and a delightfully weird little movie it is too. It sets up all the typical Women in Prison clichés and then ignores them (apart from extended shower scenes. This was a Corman production it was probably in Demme's contract that there had to be X number of tits on screen taking up Y number of minutes of running time - on reflection that's probably all there was in his contract. Give us ten minutes of tits and you can do what you want with the rest of it, so long as it's in colour and in focus.) So lots of tits. Sadistic guards, pervert doctor, dream sequences, sexually repressed governor, cartoon ultra-violence, lots of tits, a weird post-hippy revolutionary vibe, and a terrific score by John Cale complementing some very weird and fun sound design. Loved it. (And not just for the tits.)


17. Matrix Revolutions (2003) - well that's them watched. God I was bored. Actually it started off disappointingly by not opening with Laurence Fishburne saying: "Previously, in the Matrix..." followed by one of those little two minute rapidly edited highlights of the previous films to bring you up to speed. You see, the previous film, Matrix Rides Again, had ended on an semi-cliffhanger and, even though I only watched it a couple of weeks ago, I had no idea what was going on at the start of this one. Towards the end of number three however, I was so bored I suddenly realised I was checking my mail on my phone. I NEVER check my mail while I'm watching a film, 99.9¼ of the time, no matter how awful it is, I watch the film. I may occasionally fall asleep while watching a film. I don't want to fall asleep, I want enjoy the movie, but sometimes... duh... wha? oh crap I fell aslee... who's he...? ...end credits? wha...? I fell asleep again... Okay... time for bed, try this one again tomorrow.
    
    If I just can't watch it, if it is so unbearable that even I can't stomach it, I turn it off. And even then I'm trying to work out why I'm not liking it enough to do that.
    
    At some point during Matrix Revolutions I became so uninvolved with the film that I forgot I was watching it. It just faded from my mind and became part of the background. Once I'd realised what had happened I stopped the film and went back a couple of chapters and sat on my hands for the rest of it. I wonder now why I bothered.
    
    (Incidentally if you type "ascii code page" into IMDb's search engine as I just accidentally did while trying to how to do the ¼ thing up there, the first hit it returns is All Nude Page 3 Models: Eve Vorley and Charmaine Sinclair (1997) (V) How? Why? What!?)


18. Megamind (2010) - Friday night family film of some brilliance.


19. Jazz on a Summer's Day (1959) - a total joy.


20. Dune (1984) The David Lynch one (and not for the first time so I have no excuse) which, in a weird and grudging way, I quite like for the first half its run time. The second half things just get absurdly crammed in as Lynch runs out of ways to get characters to tell each other what was going on and he just shoves several hundred pages of densely plotted book into three quarters of an hour of screen time and it gets farcical. Afterwards, in a fit of pure masochism, I watched great chunks of the TV edit from which Lynch had his name removed. I don't blame him. His edit was weird and flawed but strangely interesting in places. (Like most of his films, I suppose.) The TV edit is just cheap and tacky.

I think I've finally worked out why Peppa Pig is so popular; I saw this in a bookshop today:

On further inspection it turned out to be a Bumper Activity Book. I had been almost worried for a second.

Another Brief Snippet From the Screenplay of my Life

Eben:
(Clutching a small plastic tool-case
full of small plastic tools.)

Me got toolcase. I make something.



Me:

What are you going to make?



Eben:

Pancakes.





.

Drawers for Windows 3.11

This afternoon I finished a job that has been hanging around for a year or so. The bottom drawer of Merriol's chest of drawers has now finally had all the veneer replaced and new cockbeading run round the edge. It's not perfect but she has been without the thing for a long time and has recently been dropping really heavy hints:

"I don't care what it looks like - I WANT IT BACK!"

After last week's week of solitude when Merriol and the kids went down to Sheffield and let me watch rubbish horror films get on with some of the jobs that needed doing round here, I have finally got a grip on the guddle that is my workshop and can start to turn the tide of half-finished projects that is constupating it.

One of them was the drawer.

Tonight Daisy helped me bring it upstairs and put it in place. It isn't heavy I just enjoyed the 'help'. We slid it into the space. It stuck. The front edge protruded about 50mm into the room. We slid it out and looked in the carcass. Nothing there. We slid it back into position and tried again. It stuck again with the same 50mm protruding.

"Now why the hell isn't that going in?" I asked.
"Well it hasn't been in for a long time," said Daisy helpfully. "Maybe it doesn't recognise it."

Spends far too much time on the computer does that child.

I am a happy man.

Last month my mum and dad bought me a digital projector for my birthday. Last week I ceiling mounted the thing under the balcony in our stupidly tall living room. Today I found (in a skip at the local recycling centre) a projection screen big enough to make use of it.

It took me about five minutes, a small piece of gaffer tape, and a large brass washer to fix the problem which had presumably got it thrown away in the first place. A bit of sorting of plugs and cables in the dangerous cable place behind all the electronics stacked in the space under the stairs* and we all settled down for tonight's regular Friday Night Family Film (with pizza) looking up at a 1.5m wide image thrown at it over our heads from the ceiling mounted projector. It is as close a simulacrum of a real cinema as I'm ever going to achieve, unless my Premium Bonds come up, and I loved it.

Daisy showed people to their seats. Next week she's going to have a box with choc ices in it slung round her neck.

There's something very special to me about looking UP at a cinema screen. Most films these days are consumed at home or in steeply raked cinemas where, more often than not, you are looking down on the screen or at least you're at at eye-level with it. Which is a pity. There's something very magical about being forced to look up at the action. If you think about it, churches and other places of transcendental entertainment are always designed to make you look up. All those high arches, splendid ceilings, crucifixes mounted high up on the walls. You worship kneeling down and heaven and god are up above you. The priest mounts a pulpit before he speaks. 'Lift your eyes and look to the heavens' Isaiah 40:26. There's something about human brains that gets all mystical when it's tilted back for a long time. Or, if not mystical, then certainly suggestible. This is why the stars of Hollywood's golden era(s) were worshipped. The audience were assuming the body postures of supplicants and this influenced the way they perceived what happened in front of their eyes**.

And big screens are great too because you have to move your eyes. With a television, even a large one most of what is happening on screen can be seen at a glance. With a big screen you have to move your eyes to find out what is happening. On a really big screen you have to turn your whole head. In the days when Real Cinemas ruled the world and screens were the size of football pitches stood on their side, people could get serious neck injuries from keeping up with the action.

Okay, here's an example. Standard head-on shot of two people sat in the front of a car driving along. Suspend your disbelief and put aside your knowledge that they are in fact in a car that is being towed, and there is a film crew sat on the bonnet (possibly in a large black tent to stop refection in the windscreen). You're watching two people, in a car, having a conversation. The director doesn't cut away from this angle for a long time. On a TV this is a pretty boring shot. There's two people staring out at you, you stare back, they're talking. On a large screen you can't look at both of their faces at the same time. You have to choose. As the conversation goes on you turn your attention from one face to another, and you don't necessarily look at the person who is doing the talking. As in real life you want to see (if you are at all interested) what the other person is thinking about what he is being told. By doing this, by turning your head, choosing which face to look at, you become a participant in the film instead of a mere observer.

I like being in the movies.




*From top to bottom: Record deck, Sky box, Amp., CD player, Cassette deck, MiniDisc player, audio switching box, DVD player, VHS player, and a PS2. Unplugged at the moment but contributing to the guddle are a Betamax player, a Nintendo 64, and a Sega Dreamcast - there's also an unidentified silvery box lurking back there which may be another satellite decoder; I'm scared to look. Add the three extension cables that this lot hang off, and all the cables for the possibly defunct TV amplification/distribution scheme Len and I built into this house some years ago (theoretically we should be able to pipe anything going into the TV to all the rooms upstairs), and you can see why I only go back there after telling people where I'm going and how long I expect to be. "If I'm not back in twenty minutes tie a rope to one of the kids and send them in after me."

I really must make a schematic of it all one day.

Remembering what combination of knobs and switches you need to twiddle on the front can be a bit daunting too.

** I realise this argument falls flat on its arse as soon as you mention the word 'balcony' but I like it.

Gods! this piece of shit graphics is annoying me. It's from eBay's current sign-in page. 'Look,' it's supposed to say. 'You can trust us. We've got a scary woman with muscley arms standing behind a hatch half way up a wall. Nothing can get past her. You're safe.'

That's what it's supposed to imply.

What it say to me is: 'Walk right in and help yourself.' Look at those doors. Just look at them. There's no way they are going to meet. Just look at them. Push them to and there'd be a two foot gap between them. And what are those keys for? The key on the right is in a keyhole that isn't attached to a lock of any kind. There is a lock on the other door - you can tell it's a lock because the bolt is out - though what the bolt is supposed to go into isn't apparent because there's no where for it to fit into on the other door - not that they meet anyway.

Once inside, assuming you can get past scary, but reassuring, folded arms woman (arms crossed, a classic 'guarded' posture but with a calmly confident smile) - maybe by waiting she goes for a pee, she can't stand there all day - you're into the hub of eBay's crack team of cyber crime fighters. CSI:eBay. Who seem to be happily standing around chatting, looking out of the window, and generally goofing off rather than pummelling account-jackers to bloody pulps with blunt instruments or water-boarding those idiots who pointlessly list shit that no one in their right minds is going to buy (because a there are 30,000 identical items, without any bids on, already listed at a lower price.) That's what I want the people in charge of making sure my account isn't ripped off by some Russian scammers to be doing. I want eBay to be patrolled by Judge Dredd and rabid Rotweillers, not some extras from the Ikea catalogue.

Rant over.

I'm going to jump the gun here and give you a wee chunk of this month's movie list 20 days early: Over the past few days I've climbed off my Crap Italian SF Tits and Arse Zombie Horror Movie treadmill and watched some real films. With subtitles and proper acting. No zombies. No spaceships. People. (Okay, sometimes they're naked people but it's ART naked, not Tits and Arse naked; there's a difference.) Two nights ago:

Le Mépris (1963) - Jean-Luc Godard is another one. I mean he's another 'great' French film director I just don't get. In Le Mépris we get to watch Bridgette Bardot and Michel Piccoli walk about a lot, climb in and out of the bath and wander about some more as they spend 70 minutes trying to work out whether to go Jack Palance's villa in Capri (or not), eventually they decide to go then spend 20 minutes being unhappy when they get there, "Why do you hate me?" - and then one of them dies in an off-screen road accident.

Okay...

Because the copy I watched was a VHS on the BFI Connoisseur label (50p inc. postage on eBay) I slipped out the insert to read the extensive notes printed therein:

'Following the gleeful iconoclasm of his early features, Godard achieved maturity in a string of masterworks interrupted, post 1968, by a decade of Laocoon-like struggles with Marxism and cinematic deconstruction.'

Laocoon it turns out (I looked him up) was a Trojan priest who got smitten by the gods for fucking in church. First blinded, and then strangled by a snake. (And I hereby repent of the quickie I had in that baptist church in Cardiff all those years ago with a Swedish girl whose name I forget.)

As you may have gathered I had never come across this Laocoon feller before in my puff.

This Laocoon Feller mid-smite.

Arty T&A (and willies)

Tonight, in the bath reading the final entry in the Dilys Powell Film Reader (which has been my bathroom book for the past couple of months), I read:

'Suddenly, as I recall whole days spent with eyes trained on a Laocoön-complex of heaving pectoral muscles and shoulder blades...'

Spooky.

Or not. Maybe it's some sort of badge of honour for film critics to mention him. Maybe it's part of some elaborate arty in-joke. The Laocoön Complicity, isn't that a Robert Ludlum? Now that I've cracked it I expect Alexander Walker to turn up on my doorstep with a bucketful of money and the key to the Sight and Sound executive bathroom.

Or not.

Just to get the tediousnocity out of the way for the month, it's my monthly record of eyeball abuse. This week with tits! and Brian Blessed! (I almost had you interested there.)

August

1. Dragonslayer (1981) - which for my sins I have never seen before. Daughter number one chose it for a family film night - she's got a thing about dragons at the moment and was reassured that, because it was a Disney film, 'it wouldn't be (too) scary'. That's that rule of thumb gone down the drain then. We were both snuggled together on the sofa but I don't know who was reassuring whom. A Disney film with nudity and where the feisty princess gets eaten! What a eye-opener. I loved it. Fucking brilliant dragon too, but Ralph Richardson as usual, and without breaking sweat, stole the show away from everyone. Damn, that man had great timing. (H)


2. The Elevator (1996) - A successful Hollywood writer/producer gets trapped in a lift and he has to endure hearing four semi-demented short scripts of a wanabee writer trapped in there with him. An incredibly long 92 minutes. Starring the writer, and the producer (who were, at the time, married) the shorts we get to 'enjoy' are dull predictable talking-head two handers with occasionally some very abrupt lurches into stagy theatre lighting thrown in. Currently not flying off the shelves in Poundlands everywhere.


3. Highlander II: The Quickening (1991) - What an unholy mess of a film. To help the audience cope with the previously unsuspected fact that fictional Scottish icon Connor MacCleod 'The Highlander' (played by Frenchman Christopher Lambert) and his Spanish oppo Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez (played by real life Scottish icon, Sean Connery) are in fact really aliens from the planet Zogfart the script has to have characters recap the story so far:
   
   
   Heroine:
   Okay, now let me just see if I can get this straight... You're mortal there but you're immortal here, until you kill all the guys who're from there who've come here... and then you're mortal here. Unless you go back there, or some more guys from there come here, in which case you become immortal here - again.
   
   MacCleod:
   Something like that.
   
   
   

   When they got round to making Highlander 3 they pretended this one hadn't happened.


4. The Lawnmower Man (1992) - One of those films that has been on my radar for a while - ie it keeps turning up in car boot sales but I have never actually got round to buying it. It usually manifests itself on one of those Hollywood four films on two DVD disc sets along with three other films no one wants to watch. Today I found it in one of my local charity shop haunts where they give away VHS tapes, they're so unsaleable these days. So, finally, I get to watch The Lawnmower Man for free! - well, for the price of the electricity used to power the TV and VHS player (+ 35 or so p for the popcorn) - and as it was originally intended. On a big box, ex-rental VHS with 20 minutes of trailers for films no one wanted to watch (then or since) and adverts for the Commodore Amiga 600 home computer.
   
   
   The Lawnmower Man (when I finally got to it after all the hard sell) turns out to be your usual Hollywood mashup on the Frankenstein theme. This time thrown into the mix are great chunks of classic heartbreaker SF story Flowers for Algernon and slabs of Tron, other randomly tossed in ingredients included the Evil Corporation (whose evil minions handily keep boxes of easy to operate, push button demolition charges in their standard evil henchmen black vans), a cute kid, an evil priest, and an hilariously inept set piece in which an abusive father is chased round his own home by a telepathically controlled killer lawnmower. As shite as it sounds. There was a sequel - for which I am now actively searching.


5. Sphere ( 1988 ) - Ditto radar, ditto car boot sales, same charity shop. Sphere is Solaris underwater with explosions, mutilations, death and oodles of dodgy make-it-up-as-we-go-along Hollywood 'science'.
   
   
   The trailers were less interesting on this tape. Couldn't tell you what they were for but I do remember noticing that more of them were adverts for things than for other films. This VHS copy was released a few years later than The Lawnmower Man one and for sale rather than rental. I guess the marketing guys have it all worked out that repeat viewers are more likely to be sold Mars Bars than being reminded of the awfulness of Project Shadowchaser. One thing that hadn't changed though was that both tapes started with British Voice-over Man loudly booming, "Beware of Illegal Video Cassettes!" at me. Makes them sound dead scary and dangerous. Like little cuboid gremlins that'll slide out from underneath the furniture and bite your ankles*. I watch my films with all the lights off and a bag of popcorn to hand in as close an approximation to a cinema experience as I can manage in my own living room (I even change seats twice before I'm happy and yesterday outdid myself by spilling a fizzy drink so the floor ended up all sticky). Before I sit down to a film these days I've taken to looking behind the sofa in case there are illegal video cassettes lurking down there, waiting to attack me during 'a scary bit'. God, I wish the films I watched were more interesting.
   
   
   * The film rights to this stupid idea are still available, talk to my agent.


6. Alien Resurrection (1997) - Another set of dittos. Loathed and castigated by many die hard Alien fans (there are some weird people in the world; they're MOVIES, you saddos!). This is the fourth in the series, and looked at in isolation (it's many years since I saw 1, 2, and I'm not sure if I've ever seen 3 all the way through), is not that bad a film for a 'Oh crap we're trapped in an enclosed environment with KILLER THINGIES and the only way out takes us via an infeasibly complex route' type film. Okay, it goes a bit tits up at the end but so do a lot of other films loved by cadres of devoted hardcore fans. There were some nice touches here, a few genuine scares, and a couple of laugh out loud moments - the best surely being the moment when Rod Perlman's character freaks out after an Alien attack and uses a HUGE gun to shoot a normal sized spider on its web.
   
   
   The script is credited to Joss Whedon and I was struck by the similarities between the ragtag crew of opportunists and smugglers from 'The Betty' and the ragtag crew of smugglers and opportunists from Firefly, a series Whedon brought to the screen 5 years later.


7. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) - I wanted to like this so much. It started well but I was fed up and irritable by the end of it. So much so that I was in full on nitpicking mode. For example, when Edmund gets mortally wounded near the end, and then gets dosed with Susan's 'Get Out Of Jail' magic 'One Drop Will Cure Anything' juice that Father Christmas gave her - he recovers. One second Argh Ugh Snotty little twerp dying from having a sword thrust into his belly, the next, sitting up big hugs loves and kissy kissy. By Jingo that's some good stuff!. Why didn't it immediately heal the split lip the make-up department had been diligently keeping continuity with on his bottom lip? You can see I was really involved with the action can't you? And was the wicked Jadis's chariot pulled by polar bears as some kind of dig by the overtly Christian producers at well known atheist Philip Pullman's polar bear-like panserbjørne? The kids, needless to say, LOVED it. (L)


8. Cosmos War of the Planets (1977) Prompted by a post on another forum I rewatched this - and so can you! It's available free via http://www.archive.org/details/Cosmo...of_the_Planets. I thoroughly recommend it to all. It is a very unintentionally funny and very surreal film. I defies all known conventions of film logic (even Italian ones). For most of it's running time it Just. Makes. No. Sense. I imagine it would be even surrealier* and funnier stoned but even dead cold sober (9 years and counting) it's still laugh out loud stupid. And contains moments of SF genius that will live with you for years - no matter how hard you try to forget them. I especially recommend the 'sex' scene at the 23 minute mark. Now THAT's foreplay.
   
   

   
   
   AND it has well-endowed Astro-crumpet to try and distract.
   from the plot deficiencies. What more could a man ask for?
   
   

   * there is now.


9. Ghostwatcher (2002) - Zero budget, underachieving 'horror' that almost had a couple of nice moments but was so plodding tedious that I ended up watching the last third with my thumb on the FF button of my remote. Another £1 wasted at Poundland. Laughing all the way to the bank those buggers.


10. Space Cowboys (2000) - I loved it. A real joy of a film - right until the moment they actually got into space and it suddenly went from being a gentle, amusing, and well presented tale about friendship and regret, redemption and ambition finally being achieved - and turned into Moonraker...
    
    
    Holy crap what just happened?
    
    
    It was like the last reel was from a different film, like The Dish suddenly turning into Mad Max for the last twenty minutes, or Gregory's Girl turning into Highlander II. The only saving grace was that it looked like nobody involved - apart from the special effects guys - gave a fart about this bolted on, 'we got to do this shit to sell it to the studios', 'action' sequence and it is an utter shambles.


11. Tropic Thunder ( 2008 ) - Started off funnily enough but by the end had descended into a slice of the usual America wish-fulfilment crap in which any bunch of American Male amateurs, no matter how stupid, armed with with automatic weapons - even loaded with blank ammunition - can beat the crap out of any army of non-Americans with automatic weapons, no mater how well-trained, profession, or desperate they are. The only thing that really kept me watching till the end was Robert Downey Jr.'s show-stealing turn as the Australian actor who 'blacked up' for his role and always stayed in character until he'd recorded the DVD commentary.


12. Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) - Some really shoddy science (simultaneous nuclear bomb tests knock the world out of orbit and towards the sun) but some great film making. A smart script that has our protagonists acting like real people in the face of possible catastrophic end of the world. They carry on doing their jobs and hope for the best. Nothing they can do, no false heroics, no Hollywood bullshit and even after studio interference the film has a wonderfully unresolved ending. (The world is basically fucked - or it isn't. We don't find out.)
    
    
    I'd never seen it with the coloured bookend sections before, they were a nice surprise. The opening is tinted a hot bright orange and the film is told in a nice cool black and white flashback. And I don't remember it being so damn sweatily sexy either:
    
    

    
    Curiously she didn't ever work for Disney again after this... )
    
    

    Apparently I have been remembering a slightly less fleshy, American version in which the same scenes were played out with Janet Munro showing less boobage. We used to make damn fine films in this country.


13. The Bruce (1996) - and we also made some right old shit too. Starring Brian Blessed, Oliver Reed, and 'Wolf' from the Gladiators*...
    
    
    
    
    
    ...The Bruce, tells the story of Robert the Bruce, Earl of Carrick, as he unites the 13th Century Scots in a rebellion against the hated English, led by Edward I - not to be confused with the film Braveheart (which came out the year before) in which William Wallace, a commoner, unites the 13th Century Scots in their battle to overthrow English rule. Not that anyone would confuse the two. For starters Braveheart had a budget that extended beyond getting the local battle re-enactment societies to amble past the camera in their Sunday best and unenthusiastically cheer from time to time. I presume they could also afford some professionals. It must be hard trying to recreate the Battle of Bannockburn with a hundred amateurs and the one stunt man mentioned in the credits. Dreadful music too. It just maundered around trying to be endlessly stirring and ended up underlining the deficiencies in the direction and a script which flopped all over the place and pissed away all the hard work put in by the actors. One particularly dreadful moment came when Robert the Bruce encounters the treacherous Comyn in church. Comyn points out they cannot fight on hallowed ground, this sentiment, expressed by one Hairy Scot Wig (tm) bewigged actor to another can only mean one thing to a true red-blooded Scot (or bad movie fan)... HIGHLANDER! As the entire audience cry; "There can only be one!" the two have a badly arranged fight and Comyn is killed, but, sadly, not beheaded in an orgy of special effects. The Bruce flees and the body is discovered. "Murder! ... Sacrilege!" the discoverer cries. And continues to cry, over and over again, "Murder! ... Sacrilege! Sacrilege! ... Murder! ... Sacrilege!" as the directors leisurely pans down the victim's outstretched arm to eventually arrive at The Bruce's cross clutched in his hand. I guess the intention was to have this damning piece of evidence used later in the film to prove The Bruce as the killer - except it isn't. It's never mentioned again. Either the sequence it was placed there for was edited out, never shot, or, more likely than not, never scripted. So why have the extended shot in there at all? And why have the off-camera voice of the poor sod actor endlessly shouting "Murder! ... Sacrilege! ... Sacrilege! Murder! ... Sacrilege!" as it played? Well, there had to be something on the soundtrack I suppose but it's really down to bad editing and shitty direction. Add, rubbish lighting, minimal set dressing (everyone in the 13th Century lived in huge castles with no furniture, or small hovels with no crops in the surrounding fields), occasional adequate acting (did I mention Brian Blessed was in it?), and you have a seriously dull film on your hands.
    
    
    *The trailer for production company Crowell Pictures' previous film, Chasing the Deer, contained the immortal line "...and introducing fish..." which sent my mind off in 34 different directions (including a hilarious 'Haddock meet Cod, Cod, Haddock' routine) before I was vastly disappointed to realise they meant Fish, the singer from Genesis-lite prog rockers Marrilion, making his feature film début.


14. Toy Story (1985?) - Eben, aged 2, gets to chose this week's Weekly Family Pizza Night film. He likes Buzz.


15. American Scary (2006) - A slight, cheaply made, documentary - ie lots of talking heads sat in front of wrinkled fabric draped across the background - giving a whistlestop history of the TV Horror Movie Host. A peculiar minor art in which people dress up in Halloween costumes and and introduce crappy films on local TV stations late at night. No Cassandra Peterson (Vampira) boo! but they managed to get Maila Nurmi (Vampira), and Neil Gaiman (Neil Gaiman) to talk to them. What could have been an interesting little project was spoiled by obvious TV slot editing and some dreadful music. As a way of gluing the rapid machine gun cutting of talking heads together someone had the bright idea of running music underneath everything like musak in a lift. It got very irritating.


16. Zombie Strippers ( 2008 ) - There were actually a couple of nice gags buried in this piece of shit. Small ones. Not worth digging for. Why do American males in films turn into howler monkeys at the sight of a pair of plastic tits? I spent half the film bemusedly fascinated by the rigid immobility of Jenna Jameson's boobs. I wasn't punching the air with mock hysteria like the extras in the club, I was trying to work out what they were. They were fascinating, looked like like pink soup bowls stuck on the front of her chest - with nipples on top.
    
    
    The IMDB tells me that the film came in under budget, by which I can only assume the director didn't have a second cup of coffee.


17. Catch Me If You Can (2002) - Well that was an amiable bit of fun.

Dear Blog. It's been months since I bored the world with an Every Book I have read list. In fact I don't seem to have done it at all this year. So here goes:

January

1. The Dancers of Noyo - Margaret St.Clair. 'How long would men dance beneath the whips of the androids?' Dull 1973 SF novel in which our heroes get captured and escaped with relentless monotony (sometimes between chapters) and a lot of unexplained spooky action at a distance stuff goes on, groovy cover though.
2. The City Dwellers - Charles Platt (1970) A collection of linked short stories, snaphots from a loose future history that charts the decline of the human population which clings stubbornly to a decaying city. Reminded me that I haven't read Bradbury's Martian Chronicles for a few years. I like books that are collections of short stories that form a larger narrative. Keith Roberts Pavane is very good example. The City Dwellers is a pale shadow of both those books.
3. The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling Bedtime reading with the girls.
4. Projections 10 - ed. Mike Figgis
5. The Food of the Gods - HG Wells. 40 odd years since I read this. I must have been a tenacious reader as a kid or skipped a lot. I don't remember it being anything like a preachy as it is. People sermonise at each other at great length.
6. Diary of a Nobody - G & W Grossmith

February

1. Gentlemen of the Road - Michael Chabon. Rollicking old-fashioned historical adventure yarn full of hairsbreadth escapes and convenient coincidences which only stopped me dead in its tracks once. The word 'teamster' seemed wildly out of place in the world of the Byzantine Empire.
2. The Syndic - C M Kornbluth. A 1953 SF novel set in a future where the Syndicate and the Mob rule. Surprisingly funny.
3. The Priests of PSI - Frank Herbert. More proof, if proof be needed, that had he not written Dune, Herbert would be long forgotten by now.
4. Solaris - Stanislaw Lem. I have meant to read this for a long long time. The 1972 film version has been a favourite of mine since I first saw it in the mid 70s. After repeated watchings I'm still no clearer what it's all about. Reading the book hasn't really helped me to a deeper understanding of it. The film is much more layered and mysterious, with the book (which in parts I found ponderously dull) acting as a central core from which much more interesting ideas and images have been spun.
5. Vortex: New Soviet SF - Ed. C G Bearne. More Soviet era SF. Short stories this time, a couple of them interesting, A couple just dull and a couple of them so hackneyed they wouldn't have been out place in a copy of Tales to Astonish:
   
   
   

   
   
6. Run to the Stars - Michael Scott Rohan. Modern(ish) but 'good old-fashioned', 'only one man can save the Earth', crash and bash SF. (Except that, in the end, he doesn't manage it and the implication is that he also fails to stop a planet full of aliens getting destroyed too.)

March

1. Toyman- E C Tubb. The third (of the 33) adventures of lone rent-a-hero, Earl Dumarest as he wanders the galaxy looking for his lost home planet, Earth. I read several of these as a kid and remember them as not being that interesting. I was right. Page turning pulp from an author credited with writing over 140 novels and 230 short stories and novellas, many of which I must have read but none that I can bring to mind. Curiously, re-reading Toyman 35 or so years after I first read it bought back none of the memories of time or place that re-reading half remembered books often invoke. Utterly forgettable - I probably didn't even notice I was reading it.
2. Tales of Wonder - H G Wells. Not quite as wonderful as they probably once were but interesting as precursors of modern SF. One story 'The Star' is an interesting precursor of Wells' own War of the Worlds.
3. Mission to the Stars - A E Van Vogt. More weirdness from Van Vogt - though not as weird and badly written as his later stuff. Starts out as a rip roaring full blown space opera (one spaceship has a crew of 30,000!) and ends as a cheesy romance. The odd shape of the book may be due to the fact it is a 'fix-up' of previously published stories.
4. Into the Labyrinth - Francoise Mallet-Joris. 'A tender and Brutal Story of Forbidden Love' no less.
   
   
   

   
   
   A French teenager is seduced by her father's mistress and swans around wallowing in self-inflicted teenage misery for 150 pages before deciding to stop.
   
   

   I adored her for saying that. She was holding in her lap a long sheaf of flowers and she looked, in her yellow blouse, like a dazzling idol a Mexican or Incan godess in a temple lost in the jungle full of precious stones and serpents. And on my shoulder she laid her hand, that brown, hard, lined hand of a haymaker, not at all the hand of a sexual pervert but rather a hand made to lie on the neck of a horse or the hip of a woman, with its fingers a little too flat, a little too supple, evoking the hands of Chinese torturers.

   The author was only 19.


5. Veruchia - E C Tubb. More instantly forgettable adventure (5 of 33) with lone rent-a-hero, Earl Dumarest. This time the book contained a fantastic amount of blank paper. Most publishers seem to like to start chapters on the recto (right hand) page so if a chapter ends somewhere on a right hand page it will be immediately followed by a blank verso (left hand) page. Here chapters are headed by a chapter number that takes up a whole page. The numbers aren't very big and are surrounded by a lot of white paper (well yellowish and slightly foxed paper, this book is 40 years old), this is followed by a blank verso page and the text of the next chapter starts about a third the way down the following recto. This book is 191 pages long. By the time you have taken away all the blurbs, printing history, 'other books by this author', title page, and advertising at the back, you are left with 181 pages. 18 pages of that (10%) are totally blank apart from the chapter numbers (that's whole pages, I haven't included all the bits, the blanks thirds at the start of every chapter and the half empty pages at their ends which must add up to another four or five pages in total). No wonder it didn't take long to read.

April

1. Of Time and Stars - Arthur C Clarke. More quaint, old-time SF shorts.
2. Kaleidoscope Century - John Barnes.
3. Raven 2: A Time of Ghosts - Richard Kirk the pen name for Robert Holdstock who was writing with his tongue firmly stuck in his cheek. Well, I hope he was taking the piss; it made me laugh so much.
   

   
   
4. Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Jack Finney. A crackingly well paced little chiller which copped out at the end - the films' endings are a vast improvement.
5. Sea-horse in the Sky - Edmund Cooper. Read in one sitting, in one eyeball out the other, 'so what' SF.
6. The World Grabbers - Paul W Fairman. Mercifully short novel of indeterminate genre in which our hero goes from one pointless circular conversation to another without learning anything about his nemesis or why a mysterious group of mystics won't stop him from taking over the world. Right at the end of the book the mysterious group of mystics do decide to stop him taking over the world for no apparent reason (other than the author had hit his contracted number of words) and the book just stops. Groovy cover though..
   
   
   

   
   

   by Jim Barker, on Flickr

   
   
7. Earth Abides - George R Stewart. Early (1949) post-apocalyptic SF.
8. A Rage in Harlem - Chester Himes
   
   
   

   
   
   Another book bought for 25p just because I liked the cover. What a discovery. It's great. I'm on the lookout for more Himes.
9. Duel - Ed. William Patrick, a collection of "Horror stories of the road" that varied from ancient and creaky stories that just didn't bear resurrecting to a couple of interesting, more modern pieces. The best is the title story by Richard Matheson.
10. Charisma - Michael Coney. Mid 70s British SF novel which swithers between being a traditional crime novel (who did murder the obnoxious hotel owner businessman Mellors?) and a parallel world love story. The only people who can travel to a parallel world have to be dead in the world they are going to; if the person in the destination world was still alive and the two met they would cancel each other out and vanish. The hero loves a girl who is dead in this world and conversely he is dead in hers. Lots of to-ing and fro-ing between worlds as the hero becomes the main suspect in the murder case (probably because he did it - or rather his doppelgänger from another world did.) Lots of the same characters dying in different ways and it's all getting wonderfully confusing and mind-boggling before it all gets resolved in a cop-out ending that appears from nowhere. (But with a final twistette to sweeten the disappointment.) Christopher Nolan should make a film version.

May

1. Wildeblood's Empire - Brian M Stableford. Innocuous mid 70s SF.
2. The Anarchistic Colossus - A E van Vogt. Late, and therefore almost incoherent, van Vogt. Van Vogt is one of those rare writers who actually seemed to get worse over the years. SF writer and critic Damon Knight said that

   van Vogt "is no giant; he is a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter." Knight described The World of Null-A as "one of the worst allegedly-adult science fiction stories ever published." About van Vogt's writing in general, Knight said: In general van Vogt seems to me to fail consistently as a writer in these elementary ways: 1. His plots do not bear examination. 2. His choice of words and his sentence-structure are fumbling and insensitive. 3. He is unable either to visualize a scene or to make a character seem real. Wikipedia

   And though I agree with just about every word of that I find his books compulsive reading. They are so odd I just can't put them down and while his contemporaries from the Golden Age went on to write longer and longer more complex tomes (I'm thinking particularly of Robert Heinlein's later doorstops of novels) van Vogt continued write fairly short books. This one clocks in at 176 pages and I had no idea what was going on for most of them.
3. The Wages of Fear - Georges Arnaud. Another book picked up because I liked the groovy cover - then remembered the film was pretty terrific.
   
   
   
   
   
   The book is pretty good too. From time to time it looks like it's suffering from translator trouble and it takes a long time to get to the meat of the story but when we get there the almost suicidal attempt to drive two trucks loaded with Nitroglycerine along a rough and unmade South American road is gripping stuff.
4. Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905) - Edwin Lester Arnold. Limp 'I go to Mars by some magical means (flying carpet!?) and almost have some incredible coincidence-laden adventures, including rescuing and falling in love with a Martian princess, before being mysteriously returned to Earth'. Six years later Edgar Rice Burroughs used almost exactly the same storyline in his A Princess of Mars, Burroughs made his hero more vigorous and proactive, made the coincidences even more outrageous, and cleaned up. Princess of Mars still sells by the shitloads and is getting a film adaptation as we speak, Gullivar Jones is an obscure bit of SF that is almost totally forgotten; though the character Gullivar Jones does geekily turn up from time to time in more modern works. He is the first character to appear (magic carpet and all) in Vol 2 of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen adventures.
5. Simon Rack: Earth Lies Dreaming - Laurence James. The first book by the incredibly prolific Laurence James (he wrote at least 150 books under various pseudonyms). The first of a short lived series, five books were published, featuring an interstellar James Bond type and his pun prone sidekick. All sex and violence. Being published in the seventies the violence is bone-crunching, eyeball-poppingly graphic and, being British, the sex never quite happens on the page. It's total shite.
6. The Monitors - Keith Laumer. Funny (in places)1960's SF.

June

1. The Undercover Aliens - AE van Vogt aka The House That Stood Still which is my second favourite pointless book title. (The first is The Man With Only One Head). More bewilderingly plotted nonsense from a master of the genre. This time the bewilderingly plotted nonsense concerns a bunch of immortal Aztec cultists and their radioactive marble house and one of their number's overly complex shenanigans to destroy the others and take over the world. When I tell you that the plot involves secret tunnels (as does every other van Vogt book I have read. I suspect he wrote secret passages into his spaceships when he could), immortal Aztecs pretending to be Martians and destroying nuclear bomb factories in hostile countries, secret spaceships that launched from (and returned to - without anyone noticing) downtown office blocks, lifelike masks which could be applied in seconds and make the wearer indistinguishable from whoever they were modelled upon, a three thousand year old mind-reading alien robot, a private investigator, phials of three thousand year old plus transuranic elements 'unknown on Earth', and a hero who manages to fall in love with the daughter of an ancient Roman official in Britain (shipwrecked in California (sic) on her way home to Rome) - and get slugged unconscious several times during the course of the 172 pages, you will have some idea of why, even having just finished the damn thing, I have no idea who did what to whom or why in the end. Imagine Enid Blyton deciding to write an SF novel while on acid. That's the flavour.
2. Screen Burn - Charlie Brooker. I laughed. A lot. I have no idea who half the people he was talking about were but his spleen is so well vented I don't think I missed much. Most wannabee celebulites are pretty interchangeable anyway (from what I gather from my brief glances at the covers of Hello!, Chat! Take a Break! and Twat! and the other celeb mags up on display at the checkouts in Morrisons - in true Charlie Brooker style I just made that last one up though, to continue in Brooker mode, it would make make a great magazine - Celebs naked from the waist down. I'd buy it.) More!
3. The Status Civilization - Robert Sheckley.
4. Dawn of the Dumb - Charlie Brooker. I laughed. A lot. Again.
5. The Saint Closes the Case - Leslie Charteris. I've never read a Saint book before which I thought was an oversight. I doubt if I will read another.

July

1. Body Politic - Paul Johnston. A serial killer novel set in an ill thought out Orwellian future. Another of those books set in a hypothesised future written by someone who don't like (or understand) SF. The author even disclaims any SFness on his webpage, "the novels are not sci-fi" he says. Which raises the question why bother coming up with a (not very) complex society different from our own in which to set the story? Sorry, kiddo, you do that and you've stuck a bloody big SF label on yourself no matter how hard you deny it's there and, unfortunately for you, it's going to get measured, judged, whatever by the rules of that particular genre. As a crime novel, I've read worse, as an SF novel, it's shit.
2. Adam, One Afternoon - Italio Calvino.
3. Wetworld - Mark Michalowski. A dire Dr Who novel only because daughter number one had just read it and I wanted to see what she what she was enjoying - she's young.
4. I am Legend - Richard Matheson. First time I had ever read it. Another Must read classic of the genre ticked off. Not bad.
5. The Underground Man - Ross MacDonald (a Lew Archer Mystery). Dreadfully dull. I will not be going back for more.
6. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S Thompson. Many years since I read this. I had forgotten how funny it was.
7. Michael Tolliver Lives - Armistead Maupin. Many years since I read the Tales in the City books (end to end, in one go) and this was a wistfully sad little coda.
8. Foundation - Isaac Asimov. Another of those Great Novels of SF which, when you actually look at them objectively don't look that good all these years later. In this one we get to see the fall and rise of Galactic Empires via the medium of people in offices describing the political situation to each other in one to one meetings.
9. Bad Science - Ben Goldacre. One of those books which I am going to lend to people and loose.

August

1. The Eye in the Pyramid - Robert Shea and Anton Wilson. The first of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Not as weirdly compelling as when I read it back in the early 80s. But I was stoned half the time back then.
2. The Survivalist No. 6: The Savage Horde - Jerry Ahern. Jesus, Mary and all the Saints! This has to be THE single most fuckingly awful book I have ever read. 59 chapters spread over 208 pages (that's 3.5 pages per chapter - though some are actually less than a page long) of porny gun-wanking in which our 'hero', John Thomas Rourke, shoots people. Lots of people. He must kill at least hundred people in this book. He doesn't ask many questions before shooting them either, but it's all right really, this is Post Apoc America and the people he kills with relentless and boring frequency are all 'brigands' or 'wildmen', hairy ill-shaven (and therefore amoral) targets for clean shaven and God fearing him to gun down page after page after page after page.

   “He already had the target-a man about six-foot four, unshaven, his black leather jacket mud-stained, a riot shotgun in his hands, the pump tromboning* as the twelve-gauge, roughly .70 caliber muzzle swung on line.”

   To break the monotony reading about John Thomas shooting people in the head page after page we are often treated to fetishistic descriptions of guns being reloaded; the hero's weaponry: a pair of chromed Detonics Combat Master .45 pistols in Alessi shoulder holsters, Colt Python and Colt Lawman revolvers, an A.G. Russell Sting 1A knife, and a shoulder sling with a CAR-15 assault rifle; and, occasionally, a parallel story in which John Thomas' wife shoots hairy amoral, would be rapists in the head with either an M-16 assault rifle or .45 automatic - even their 8 year old son gets in the act and shoots the occasional hairy ill-shaven biker in the head - though he has to make do with an antique lever action .30-30 Winchester rifle. There are twenty-nine books in the series. Four books after this one (according to Wikipedia) the united Rourke family get themselves cryonically frozen and wake up 500 years later - by which time the human race will have presumably bred enough targets for them to bother getting up again.
   
   
   *'Tromboning' is, apparently, a genuine shooting term and nothing to do with the male gay sexual act of the same name.
3. The Disaster Zone - J G Ballard.
4. Bonk: the Curious Coupling of Science and Sex - Mary Roach. Mildly entertaining, but sometimes irritatingly smug, book about the science of sex. Very reassuring too, every time I read about another interestingly horrible sexual dysfunction it was like ticking off another 'No' box in some extensive medical check-list in my head. I came out the other end of the book reassured by my (relative) sexual non weirdness, but above all glad I don't spend my days doing any of this research for a living - or even masturbating pigs to orgasm to increase their fertility, as employees on Danish farms are encouraged to do (there is an illustration showing how to do this). Not one to read anywhere near kids who are likely to over your shoulder and ask, "What's that man doing?"