Junk Monkey

Wednesday, February 01, 2012

So it's February the first already. the time of year I usually give something up. Fuck New Year's resolutions I seem to make Februaryish resolutions. My liver has enjoyed 9 years to the day without having to cope with any alcohol and it's been two or three days off a whole year since my lungs have been hammered with cigarette smoke. You know (he said putting on his best Woody Allen voice) if it wasn't for the smack and the hookers I don't know what I'd do...

Baboom tish!

Right, what to give up this year? No idea. I know it's not going to be watching films. I love watching films. As habits go it's less expensive than most and a lot more fun than some. AT the moment I am still working my way through the 200+ VHS tapes I got given a few months ago. A randomly selected VHS inserted into the machine without looking at it and see where we end up. Great fun.

This year I will watch some good films... this year I will watch some good films... this year....

January:

Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby (1999) - ...sometime this year. Freeway was a 1996 film starring Kiefer Sutherland and Reese Witherspoon and was, apparently, a 'twisted' modern day reworking the Little Red Riding Hood story. Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby stars Natasha Lyonne (hubba hubba! - but I'm weird) and is a 'twisted' reworking of the Hansel and Gretel story that segues from genre to genre without stopping to think where it's going. It starts out as a Women in Prison film with nude shower scenes and communal vomiting, turns into a 'killers on the run road movie' with a lesbian serial killer, before our 'heroines' end up in the lair of a child porn making transvestite nun in Mexico and for a moment or two the film starts to look like it's going to turn into a gory cannibal slasher film but it just stops instead. Written down like that it looks a lot more interesting than it was. I only stuck with it because I was hoping Natasha Lyonne was going to get naked. She didn't. (Well, not much.)
Shadow of the Vampire (2000) - Not bad little Vampire flick which plays with the silly notion that Max Schreck, the actor who played the vampire Count Orlok in Murnau's Nosferatu, was a real vampire playing an actor playing a vampire. Great cast headed by John Malkovich (who can do no wrong - apart from Mutant Chronicles), Willem Dafoe (who was Oscar nominated for this part), Udo Kier, and Cary Elwes (who are both favourites and both far funnier than you remember).
Planet of the Apes ( 1968 ) Again. Watched, this time, with Number1 daughter (aged 9) - and, after successfully hiding the case from her, the Statue of Liberty shot came as a real shocker to her. Job done.
Mary and Max (2009) - Australian claymation film about the long distance relationship between a young Australian girl and a middle-aged man from New York with Asberger's. Mrs JM was in tears at the end of it; I was bored rigid. Somewhere in there was a decent short but there wasn't enough to sustain a feature. Especially when 90% of the story was told through an omniscient third party voice-over narration. Anything with that much voice over starts to look like a radio play with pictures. As a comic book (sorry... graphic novel) it might have worked a lot better.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) - not great, but bearable, sequel which had a wonderfully downbeat ending. Everyone dies. The highlight for me tonight, watching for the first time in wide-screen and a decent quality, was spotting a member of the camera crew's discarded paper cup blowing into shot about 15 minutes in. A previously unreported smirky little film nerd goof that I'm off to log at the IMDb. (I'm so pathetic sometimes but it amuses me.)

Using Your Skill and Judgement...

---------------------------------------------^-------------------------
Escape From Planet of the Apes (1973) - confirming rule 7 of the Junk Monkey low budget film rule book: 'All time machines/travel in low budget movies take you to Los Angeles in the year the film was made - no matter how hard you try to make them go somewhere more interesting.' A not bad attempt at a Get Out of Jail Free card from the writer who blew up the whole planet - and by implication the entire population of the world at the end of the last movie.

Apparently, while we weren't looking, two of the apes from the previous films, plus another we hadn't met before, somehow managed to salvage a sunken spaceship, worked out how to fly it and did just that minutes before the world exploded and the shockwave hurled them back through time. Some serious suspending of disbelief had to be done. Better directed than number two which had a real hurried look about it, with some of the blocking looking very underdeveloped and hamfisted. Though there was one moment in this one when a short pan to establish someone sat in a room was followed by a cut back to the starting point of the pan - which started again in the same direction but then turned into a dolly shot instead. That was clunky. Two of my favourite 70's actors Eric Braeden and Bradford Dillman did their usual sterling stuff in support.
Some Like it Hot (1959) - Friday Night Film Club choice of Mrs. JM (one of her favourite films) First time up on the big screen for me. And again I was seeing the film as if it were new because of it. I was seeing Jack Lemmon do things that were new to me and for once I almost saw what people see in Marilyn Monroe. I've never understood what what all the fuss was about. Tonight I almost got it. Daughter Number 2 thought it was "Great" - she particularly loved the tango sequence.
The Funeral (1996) - Dir. Abel Ferrera. (see, I'm getting to the 'good' films). Another random pick from the huge VHS pile to give me a rest from the Planet of the Apes boxset. The Funeral is a slow paced, layered, beautifully shot, wonderfully acted (brilliant cast) nicely dressed gangster piece that left me stone cold. I'm not particularly disposed to gangster films - modern ones anyway. I still haven't seen any of the Godfather films and don't feel deprived. The film had things to say, there were flashes of real truth in the script - most of which fell to Walken's character but I just wasn't made to be interested in hearing them. The structure wobbled all over the place. A lot of the story was told in flashback from various viewpoints but it was all so vague and unfocussed that I ended up not caring. (Apart from noting at one point that cinematic rarity and irrational pet hate of mine: a flashback within a flashback.)

Off to the charity shop with it.
House of America (1997) - Wales. Tom Jones. Coal mining. Depression. Getting pissed. Family secrets. Smashing up the pub toilets. Unemployed. Coal mining. Incest. Mam's in the loony bin, nice room she got though. Suicide. Coal mining. Murder. Did I miss anything? Story obvious from about three minutes in and money from the Arts Council of Wales. "Well, that Trainspotting made a lot of money last year so it's obvious the world is gaggin' for Celtic fringe post-industrial misery innit?"

Based on one of those plays that gets public funding and is 'Important' and 'Says Something' and when it's translated into film looks exactly like a play that's been translated into a film. Yes, they may be standing in a field 'opening it out' but they're still talking stage dialogue, not film dialogue.

Thinking about it for 24 hours (not exclusively) I suspect the film was supposed to be a heartfelt cry against the swamping of Welsh culture by the all pervasive influence of America. As the only evidence of Welsh culture shown here were a couple of brief sound-bites of Tom Jones' songs and shots of bunches of miners (still in helmets and blackface coaldust) getting pissed in the pub I can see why our protagonists got obsessed with Jack Kerouac and necking neat Jack Daniels. Beats the fuck out of Max Boyce and Brains SA.

Can I go back to watching shit again? this arty crap is doing my head in.
The Brothers O'Toole (1973) - I'll watch anything with John Astin in it. The man is a comedy hero. Here he plays two parts in what is a very dull shambles of a film. When he's not on screen the pace drops to a crawl and the script just flounders about not going anywhere in particular - very slowly - and then Astin is back on screen and it's a funny little film again. He manages to get even the flattest of dialogue to be far better than it has any right to be (I suspect he rewrote many of his own lines). Another £1 well wasted in Poundland
Spawn (1997) - What. A. Piece. Of. Shit. Spawn is based on a comic book and looks it for every frame of it's running time. The lowest point for me was the moment when the demon, trying to bring an overly complex plan to start Armageddon to fruition, gloats over the recumbent body of his mortal minion evil, CIA-type chief played by Martin Sheen. At demon boy's suggestion Sheen's character has planted instant, total population of the world destroying, biological bombs all over the globe - and then left vital incriminating files on his desktop (like you do). He has also had a pacemaker type device fitted which will automatically set off the bombs if his heart stops beating. With me so far? Right. Demon boy spends most his very annoying screen time trying to manoeuvre dead, but bought back to life with superpowers, former hired killer Spawn into killing him. There is a climactic fight in a suburban house with Spawn's ex-wife and child used as pawns. Spawn can't bring himself to kill Sheen's character, because little Tammy will die too. Demon boy rants. "Then I will kill him and kickstart the apocalypse now!".* Martin Sheen had the good grace not to be in shot while this line was delivered. He may well not have been in the building - or even aware that it was in the script. I hope so.

At least the villain wasn't played by a British actor. (Very hard to cast a Brit as head of the CIA I would imagine.) The only Brit I could see in the cast was Nicol Williamson who got stiffed with that other standby role for British Male actors of a certain age, The Elder Mentor part. (Alec Guinness in Star Wars, Sean Connery in Highlander etc.) Apart from standing about telling our 'Hero' to use his powers wisely, he also had to do tons of rapid back-story, and narrative hole filling, voice-over narration. He didn't make another film for 15 years; then died. The first-time director is now only allowed to make things like Garfield's Fun Fest ( Video 2008 ).

*Geddit? Geddit? Do you geddit? Huh? Huh?
The Wisdom of Crocodiles (1998) More late 20C Arts Council money poured into a film (I think it was trendy; 'Cool Britannia' and all that). This time they seem to have backed a vaguely commercial horse with Jude Law as an urban professional vampire and the always strange and watchable Elina Löwensohn as the woman he falls in love with. Not perfect but better than I was expecting after seeing the dreaded words 'Arts Council' in the credits.

Someone called Hitler Wong played a character called Noodles Chan. It's his only film.
The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1955) - Confusing and dull, low-budget radioactive undersea monster, and misguided scientist with beautiful(ish) daughter mess which racked up more shots of people putting on Scuba gear than an entire series of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and more crappy clichéd dialogue than normal. A lot of ouch! editing too, where vital shots had obviously not been done, and staging so clumsy it was wonderful. Ferinstance these two guys are supposed talking to each other: "Establishing shot please... let's see if we can do this in one..."

"Great guys, we'll cut away to cover the fluffs. Now the close-ups, and talk fast, we're running out of film..."

"Okay, that's a wrap, let's go get lunch."

I've no idea what these two are looking at but it's not each other unless they are in parallel universes - which is possible as their shoulders would appear to be occupying the same physical space. Crappy film making. Love it.
Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D (2011) - better than number 3! The kids loved it. I laughed aloud several times despite my better judgement. The only thing that really spoiled my reluctant enjoyment was my irrational hatred of Ricky Bloody Gervais whose smugness just annoys the tits off me. (Even when he's just doing a voice for a robot dog and doesn't thrust his very punchable, self-satisfied face at the camera.)
The Shaolin Temple (1982) - another hour and a half of my life spent watching Chinese people whacking the shit out of each other. One of these days I'll actually work out if I enjoy these films or not. This one had some great scenery and a young Jet Li eating his girlfriend's pet dog, spit-roast over a fire. Yum yum.
At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991) - it's Jan the 16th and I may have just seen the best film of the year. I think.
Convergence (1999) - Christopher Lloyd shambles around Seattle being world-weary while very low-budget, spooky stuff happens to a girl in his office. It starts off okay, nice little X-Filey, millennial weirdness vibe building up and then it just goes nowhere and flounders around and all the spooky just gets not very interesting and by the time it's finally over it has turned into a New Age mumbo-jumbofest about 'converging energy lines' and 'patterns' and 'destiny' and characters giving full ponderous weight to every word while saying tedious things like this to one another:

Quote:

Angst ridden protagonist dude:
Why do I feel so empty inside;
like I've been betrayed?

Cafe owning mentor dude:
Maybe, because, in some way, you have.

Another dull waste of time and space.
Private Parts (1997) - I knew nothing about Howard Stern before I saw this autobiopic. Doubt if I really know anything now. But I enjoyed it. Laughed a lot. Paul Giamatti was, as always, brilliant.
Shark in a Bottle (2000) - A slacker, accident prone, postal worker, wanted for the possible slaughter of several co-workers, is forcibly recruited to work as a hit man. Shark in a Bottle is one of those films that really makes you think and ask it some fundamental questions. Questions like: Who the fuck thought this script was worth reading beyond page three let alone spending all the time and money and effort to shoot the bugger? Why does our 'hero' keep returning to his flat when he knows the 'bad' guys want to kill him (actually this one is pretty easy to answer: A. None of the neighbours ever complain about the powerful handguns being fired in it all day - someone did call the cops when he blew it up though. B. The budget didn't let him go anywhere else.) When are cheapo crappy film makers going to stop thinking "Hmmm. It looks like shit. I know! Let's pretend we're being mysterious by using some Angelo Badalamenti-like music over the really boring bits! You know, to give it a David Lynchy feel...". When is it going to end? Why is the remote control all the way over there? Was that supposed to be a twist ending? (Were we really supposed to forget about the dead hitman in the bathroom?) Is this supposed to be a comedy?

One of the longest 94 minutes of my life. Dreadful.
James and the Giant Peach (1996) - fun little family film which (as usual with films chosen by the kids) I enjoyed a lot more than I was expecting too.
Hao xia (1979) aka Last Hurrah for Chivalry - more Chinese people wellying seven kinds of shit out of each other at the drop of a hat. This time John Woo was directing and some of the camera moves were far more complex than usual.
Sketch Artist (1992) - an above average made for TV / Direct to LaserDisc crime noir. Not great but not bad. The obligatory sex scene was almost justifiable and for once looked like a couple having realistic, frantic, make-up sex, not indulging some bizarre choreographed gymnastic workout with lots of soft-focus, body doubles, and panning camera-work. It actually looked like two people fucking. I am so bored with rubbish sex scenes. I was watching one supposedly erotic scene the other week, with all the ritualistic back-arching, finger-licking, nipple-slurping, et al and I was spotting continuity errors - 'Oh, the bra strap's back up... now it's down... now it's up again...' I think I'm getting old.
Heavenly Creatures (1994) - Early Peter Jackson. And interesting.
Sanctuary ( 1998 ) - Straight to video Priest With a Past 'thriller' (he was a CIA hitman) which almost breaks new ground for me. The whole story is told within a framing device of 'our hero' being interviewed by dark figures. Cue title. '6 Days ago. Chicago... ' and the story proper starts to unfold in a flashback - except it doesn't because, almost as soon as we are settled into Chicago six days ago, we are soon kibitzing on a second layer of our hero's flashbacks. He starts off by taking us to 'Langley four years previously' and then hop skipping about his whole life from childhood onwards through years of rigorous training to be a government within a government sponsored assassin - before running away and becoming a priest. With me so far? Good. During one of these flashbacks - within a flashback - the younger child/hero/priest/assassin has a moment where, in soft memory-inducing focus, he has a reverie remembering his dead mother. For a moment there is a non-diegetic sound cue as he recalls the sound of her voice and for a second the film teetered on the edge of diving into a flashback - within a flashback - within a flashback! Heady stuff. I don't recall ever having been that close to a narrative chasm that deep before. The rest of it was shit. Pure unadulterated shit which alternated from confusing to boring and back again with without breaking stride. The bad guys hunt him down, lots of innocent people end up dead, the Priest starts killing people again without a shred of remorse and foils the evil plot to - er - do evil stuff. (What was the Evil Plot? I've forgotten.) Whatever. It also has one of the dumbest 'twist' let's-set-up-a-sequel endings: The hooded figures from the start of the film turn out to be a secret society of Papacy within a Papacy Catholic Priest Hitmen/Ninjas who want to recruit him.... oh God....
The Big Swap ( 1998 ) - a group of friends, all of them irritating, smug, middle-class, professional wankers*, swap partners a couple of times and the wheels come off their semi-perfects lives.

Whoop de do.

A terribly wordy script full of place-holder dialogue like: "I thought we could try that new restaurant. You know, the one on the high street." delivered by far too many characters who are introduced en masse. We're given a voice-over guided tour of the whole cast in the first couple of minutes and after that we're on our own. Three minutes later the wheels are starting to come off relationships we know nothing about - and we're supposed to care? Oh come on!... it's hard to generate any sympathy for the simultaneous emotional problems of ten total strangers.

One of the leads now writes for preschool CBeebies regular Chuggington.

If the French had made this (even on this budget) it would have been sexy, elegant, sophisticated, and smart. (And the tits would have been less British too.) The French would have known how to make this film. (They should do, they've done it often enough.) But because it's British it's just awful. British Film just didn't know how to do sex.

*I don't think I quite meant that to read like it does - nice work if you can get it though.
Despicable Me (2010) - funnier than I remembered.
The Mesa of Lost Women (1953) - Whenever you hear someone say "X is the worst film I've ever seen!" you can pretty much guarantee they have never sat through any number of truly dreadful films like: Egagh, The Horrors of Spider island, The Wild Women of Wongo, Nude on the Moon, The Mesa of Lost Women etc.. All of them are dreadful but The Mesa of Lost Women is a wonder and a marvel. A film that defies watching and one of the films that started me in my exploration of Trash Movies. It's one I return to from time to time to get my bearings - or when I need a good sleep; great chunks of it are incredibly boring; I mean seriously, hypno-toad, trance inducing type boring.

The opening sequence alone is a masterpiece of incomprehensibility. A couple are rescued from the 'El Muerte Desert' ("The Desert... of Death!" as our VO narrator translates for us a couple of times). We start to see the story of how they came to be there told in flashback; but whose flashback we are watching is totally unclear. Is it the pilot rescued from the desert who is actually talking when the flashback starts? or is it comedy Mexican Pepe on whose face the camera is lingering as we fade with the helpful narrator hinting that Pepe knows more than he's telling? Is it the narrator's flashback? Who knows? By the end of the film ownership of the flashback is firmly established as being that of the pilot of the crashed plane - but there's a problem. The start of the flashback narrates events that the pilot has no knowledge of, which happened long before he appeared in the story, and about which he had no way of finding out during the course of the narrative. The only people who could have told him about them die within minutes of their meeting. I think the ownership of this flashback changes, during the course of the film, from one person to another. Possibly a unique event in the history of cinema.
Scandal (1989) - Okay, British Film can do sex. But only if it's a costume drama!
Mediterraneo (1991) - Gentle little film about a forgotten bunch of Italian soldiers stuck on a small Greek island during WW2. Out of radio contact, and cut off from the war, they slowly fall for the charms of the local girls and the gentle calm of the island. One of those films that lull you into such a feeling of warmth and security that you spend the second half of the film hiding behind your internal sofa waiting for the inevitable tragic misunderstanding; waiting for it all to go hideously wrong when the war catches up with them. It's a horrible feeling. I hate it. This time though things didn't go horribly wrong. Everyone lived!

Kannibal (2001) - a straight to DVD, self-financed, incomprehensibly plotted, dreadfully acted piece of serial-killer bumsplatter which is close to nudging Zombie Women of Satan off top spot in my Crappest Film ever Made in Britain list. Godawfully dreadful in every field. I can't work out what was worst aspect of the show,: whether it was the direction - which was, frankly, fucking awful, the script - which was, frankly, fucking awful, or the production values - which were even worse than fucking awful (when they were there at all). In the end though I decided it was the script. It's always down to the script in the end really, isn't it? As evidence I tender the following badly-delivered monologue. (Which I transcribed with much labour and swearing; I forget how cumbersome VHSs are for doing this sort of thing compared with DVDs.)

To set the scene: the killer, having finally messily disposed of all the members of a Russian Crime family, and their lesbian lovers (and eaten most of their livers), makes his way to New York. He leaves some flowers at a woman's grave, and thence to the sickbed of the aged matriarch of the Russian Mafia clan. 'Why are you doing this?' she wheezes through a layer of badly applied latex. In reply he inserts a tape into the convenient video player at the end of her bed. Cue a not very good English actress putting on a variable 'Noo Yawk' accent as she pretends to read the news straight to camera...

Quote:

"This is February the fourteenth sixty minute special coming to you from down-town New York. Today saw devastation and travesty (sic) in the streets of Manhattan like never before seen when a failed bank raid went wrong and one woman and her unborn child were killed instantly when a hijacked bus careered into the side of her station wagon. It all started at 5:45 when a gang of four armed men broke into the Federal Reserve Building. Unluckily for that (sic) an informant had raised the awareness of the police and a team of FBI were waiting. After a lengthy gun battle one of the men escaped and hijacked a local 201 bus to make his getaway. We understand the bus started its journey at 6:15, the hight of the rush hour traffic in Manhattan, and if it were not for police valour and diligence in this matter there could have been many more accidents. Within a short space of time police had set up various road blocks along the route the bus was travelling hoping to stop the carnage before it careered out of control. It was along the highway that the bus hit the station wagon causing it to smash into another vehicle head on killing the occupant on impact."

You have to admit it, that is a really great bit of shitty writing. "A failed bank raid that went wrong," does that mean it succeeded?
Another treasurable moment came earlier when the police inspector investigating the crimes wanted to know if someone was 'implied in the murders' instead of 'implicated' - a singularly dreadful bit of acting, by the way, from Lucien Morgan who turns in an astonishingly amateur looking performance that would have got him booed off the stages of village halls around the country had he tried it out in front of live audiences.

What I learned from watching this film: Shooting out on location, guerilla style; out on a London streets say, (guerilla style because you have no permissions to be filming on the public highway); shooting brief insert panning shots of a character walking round a corner; it's a neat idea to do it from inside a parked car. Passers-by and the police are less likely to spot you, and point at the camera, or try to arrest you. Pretty standard cheapo film making technique. But I'd make sure there's enough money in the budget to run the car through a car wash first. Panning shots with fingerprints and glassy smears over them look like shit.

This one's a keeper.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

While I'm at it (see my earlier post today) here's 3 month's worth of books which gets me up to date (ish). Real posting will resume soon.

September

The Dinosaur Hunters - Deborah Cadbury.

Modesty Blaise - Peter O'Donnel. I'm sad to say, camp trash fan that I am, that I have never seen the Joseph Losey film version with Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp. This books turns out to be a novelization of a script that wasn't used. Dated, but trash crime/spy action fun with a bit more than the usual amount of character development.

Honey West: This Girl for Hire - G G Fickling. My scheme to spend September reading books with strong female protagonists wearing black and carrying a gun on the front cover comes to a grinding halt with this dull, badly written piece of 'tec drek. Girl private eye Honey West wanders around loosing her bra a lot and blunders around a Hollywood populated by six identical people who all hate each others guts and all have feeble excuses (and plenty of coincidence laden opportunities) to see every one of the others dead. I didn't finish it.

The Dylis Powell Film Reader - Ed. Christopher Cook. Collected reviews and other writings from one of the doyennes of grown-up British film Criticism. Enjoyable stuff. As a book, however, it had one major annoyance. Each section - some only a couple of pages long - was dated at the end of the piece. Personally I would have preferred the date at the start of the article so I knew whether she was talking about a film she had just seen for the first time in 1949, or coming back to thirty years later. I never knew if I was reading an initial response, or a mature consideration. I took to reading with a pencil in hand, flipping to the end of the next article, then writing the date I found at the end in at the start so I don't have to wonder next time I read / look something up in it. It pained me every time. I hate writing in books.

The Mad Old Ads - Dick Sutphen

Scrivener's Moon - Philip Reeve.

The Fortunes of Captain Blood - Rafael Sabatini. Swashbuckling nonsense from 1936 in which Captain Blood walks through six 'adventures' aided by a lot of luck, buckets of coincidence, and a motley assortment of minor characters who say things like, "Od's blood! He speaks aright!"

October

Tyranopolis (aka Future Glitter) - A E van Vogt. Another late (1973) bonkers piece of van Vogtiness which starts with the words:

Quote:

Professor Dun Higenroth read the offical letter with pursed lips:
"...Your good fortune to have won the Accolade for your field... Hence, your decapitation on behalf of your students in the advanced educational program... will take place on Patriotic Day. Congratulations..."
There was more, but that was the gist.

...and ends with an incidental character everyone had forgotten about from midway through the book suddenly reappearing on the last page and decapitating the villain for no apparent reason. In between there is the usual van Vogtian confusion of false starts, unexplained endings, and 'what the hell is going on?' middles.

The Winds of Gath - E C Tubb. The first of the 30+ book thud and blunder Dumarest Saga.

The Iron and the Anger - Francis S Rayer. A forgotten novel by a forgotten author. Though with prose like this at his fingertips you have to wonder why:

Quote:

Kyrie Michaelson stood by the wide workshop door. "Explain what this crystal you call mensite is and what it does," he urged gravely. His brows jutted bushily. He was a large man and his wide face was concentrated somberly.

dang it must have been great being an SF writer in the glory days of pulp.

The Hell of it All - Charlie Booker. Either I have overdosed on Charlie Booker or (more likely) I am Charlie Booker. many of his fulminations and 'misanthropic scribblings' strike me as perfectly reasonable and sensible.

Raven 5: A time of Dying - the fifth and final novel in the Raven Swordmistress of Chaos books written by the tag team of Robert Holdstock and Angus Wells. This one was written by Wells and is pretty dire. Stuffed to the gunwales with padding: detailed page-filling descriptions of rooms which the characters immediately leave never to return - that sort of thing. Expanding a paper thin plot: Five pages of plotless, "I'll tell you a tale", framing device. Ravening Beast terrorises a city. Ravening Beast captures Raven and takes her to another realm. Secondary hero companion rescues Raven who destroys Ravening Beast in the final pages. Two more pages of pointless framing device.

Barrier 346 - Karl Zeigfreid (R L Fanthorpe) A long time since I have read a Badger Book. They haven't improved while I wasn't looking at them.

November

101 Movies to Avoid: The Most Overrated Films Ever - Alan Smithee. Not bad little, read in one sitting, list book by someone who I would guess is in the business but has chosen to hide behind the pen name Alan Smithee, a name used by Hollywood directors for years when they didn't want their name to appear on the final product.

The Face on the Cutting Room Floor - Cameron McCabe. A really really odd detective novel which, after the story finishes on page 248 with the narrator/murderer about to be in turn murdered by the policeman in the case, there is a 50 page epilogue penned by one of the characters in the book explaining in laborious lit crit detail why what you have just read is all rubbish. At which point the original narrator comes back from the dead for a bit, and after it has been explained that everyone else in the book was in fact the lone murderer, it only remains for narrator of the epilogue to shoot someone dead in the last three words of the book. Everyone did it. Very very odd indeed.

Projections 12 - Var. Probably the least interesting of the Projections series I have read so far in that it spends a lot of its length talking about Film Schools which don't really interest me. Not the book's fault, mine. I like this series. It's ostensibly written by film makers for film makers though I suspect their readership is mostly made up of fanboys like me who like to think we are listening in on part the creative process. That's the trouble with eavesdropping, sometimes the conversations you listen to are a tad dull.

F.A.T.E. No 6 Settetee Alert! - by Greogory Kern. 'Adventures of Captain Kennedy Super-hero of the Spaceways.' Total rubbish with a cliffhanger '"Move and you die!' said a voice." endings to every chapter and a character so prescient he gets his people to investigate an evil corporation even though no one (his informant or the author) has mentioned their existence until he orders his minions into action.

Witchcraft Through the Ages: The Story of Haxan, the World's Strangest Film, and the Man Who Made It - Jack Stevenson interesting little read. Could have done with a better editor though; some of the sentence structures were very odd.

The Ice Schooner - Michael Moorcock. I consumed huge numbers of Moorcock's books when I was a lad. I remember this one as being better than most of his Sciencey Sword and Fantasy nonsense. A Heart of Darkness type journey through madness and obsession to an mythic goal set in a post holocaustian ice-age world. Moby Dick on ice. And it was all right too, right up until the last couple of chapters when the destination is reached and great gobbits of exposition are thrown at the reader to explain everything and finish the book quickly. Pity.

The Black Corridor - Michael Moorcock. Written in the same year as The Ice Schooner (and at least one other novel - he was prolific was Mr Moorcock) this is a straight SF novel about loneliness and madness and isolation and it works. I read it one sitting. Hooked.

The Distant Suns - Michael Moorcock. Now here's the other side of Moorcock, infantile trash which I hope was written for the juvenile market. A plot Hugo Gernsback would have dismissed as simplistic, and characters and situations which wouldn't strain the readers of Enid Blyton. According to the introduction it was co-written with Jim Cawthorn - who I remember as an illustrator more than an author. I would guess they wrote alternate chapters and left each other with cliffhangers to resolve. Like this from chapter 23. Our hero has just found his wife (previously presumed eaten by troglodytes) in a camp of the primitive tribes-people who have just captured him:

Quote:

Gasping, he halted before her staring into the face he knew better than any other in his personal universe. The familiar wide green eyes looked calmly back at him without any sign of recognition. "Cathy!" he cried, "My God, what have they done to you?"

A brief chapter in some parallel action later he touches her face tenderly and all her memories instantly flood back.
Note in margin of original manuscript:

Quote:

Ha! You have to do better than that, Jim.

Hard to believe that this is the same author as The Black Corridor and harder to see why it was ever reprinted. (Even harder to fathom is why I just bought another copy having forgotten I'd just read it.)

December

Movies From the Mansion - George Perry. Gushy, well illustrated history of the first 50 years of Pinewood studios.

Critical Threshold - Brian M Stableford

Coraline - Neil Gaiman. Read to the kids. Number one daughter says 'it's better than the film' and it's a joy to read aloud.

The Drums of Dracula - Robert Lory. A New English Library Piece of shit from 1976 full of the most gloriously godawful writing:

Quote:

The Snake now had wound its way upwards to Euleila's thigh, a thigh which was trembling in almost volatile shudders as the snake's head rose even higher.

'Volatile shudders' wow! Actually I feel a bit sorry for Euleila a 'beautiful black woman' with a 'primitive mind' who, for the sin of being easily duped by our musclebound hero, gets stripped naked, chained to a wall, gang-raped, almost sacrificed on a voodoo altar (see above) then gets turned into a vampire before finally getting staked through the heart on the last page.

Quote:

When the door of the ramshackle house had closed behind the old black woman, an almost silent pair of wings disturbed the air across the way. they had descended from a height not all that great, but so swiftly that, even had there been eyes to see their movement, they would have had to be especially alert. A blink of the eyelids, and there would have been nothing to see.

But there was no observer. If there had been, the wings would not have come downward. They would have waited until the pair of red eyes between them had satisfied themselves that the risk of detection was gone.

For the space of four human heartbeats there was no sound in the street, no movement anywhere, including the darkest of the dark shadows between the two houses across the way from the door the old woman had entered. And then, suddenly, where there had been nothing, no one, there was.

Drums of Dracula is number five in a series of nine. I can't wait to find the rest.

Excavating Kafka - James Hawes. A fascinating debunking of the Kafka myth (lonely, isolated, unknown, tormented, persecuted Jewish genius) that places him in (and therefore his writing) in context. Turns out he was a well-liked son of a millionaire businessman father, and was well connected in literary circles. Kafka far from being an unknown was making a real name for himself before the minor inconvenience of the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire got in the way. The tormented bit may be true, but no more than any other middle-class sado-masochist of the day.

Shadow and Light - Jonathan Rabb.

The Planets - Dava Sobel. Easy to read, science lite, whistle stop tour around the solar system that, nevertheless, made me grind my teeth by using variably Fahrenheit, Centigrade, and Kelvin scales from chapter to chapter. So the Sun's core was X Kelvin, one planet's surface was Y Centigrade and another's was Z Fahrenheit. It's a personal hate of mine but if you're going to use a system of measurement, stick to it! She also sometimes used centemeters and sometimes miles and, at one point, miles and 'Roman miles' in one sentence without giving any way of comparing the two. Grrrrrr.

The Master Weed (Another Adventure of the Space-Puppet) - John Rackham. Another oddity found in my attic. A 1954 'Tit-Bits Science Fiction Library' about the thrilling adventures of a Captain Video like space-ranger and his identical remote-controlable simulacrum. In this episode they thwart the evil plans of a mad scientist whose dastardly scheme to take over the planet Mars hinges upon everyone on the planet simultaneously smoking drugged cigarettes. So cunning is his plan that they all do just that! He would have got away with it too, if it hadn't been for our meddling hero who turned up at the fateful event as a robot. He had to pretend to be drugged until he could rescue the token semi-naked space bimbo which he did by skewering the villain to a control panel with a casually discarded screwdriver - and then electrocuting her head. They don't write them like this any more.

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

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!
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.
Rango (2011) - that was great! And Jonny Depp redeemed himself for last night's trudge.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yojimbo (1961) - Akira Kurosawa. 'nuff said.
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.
Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General (1968 ) - the 'Export Version' (ie more tits and violence). What a great film. I mean really horribly good.
Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) - my annual watch of the ever-fascinating most famous contender for the best worst film ever.
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!
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.
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.
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.
BASEketball ( 1998 ) - Trey Parker and Matt Stone star in a David Zucker film. Stupid, rude, crude, and very very funny.
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.
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

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tank Girl - Violent stupid and almost fun.
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.)
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'.
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.
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.
The Big Brass Ring (1999) - Political 'thriller'? based on an unfilmed script by Orson Welles.
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.
Arlington Road (1999) - Pretty good.
Carry-on Spying (1964) - I was tired!
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988) - there are only two reasons to watch this movie. They're pretty good reasons too.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

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.

Monday, December 12, 2011

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..."

Wednesday, November 02, 2011

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.

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.

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.)

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!)

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.

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.

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!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.

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.

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?

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.)

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!?)

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

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

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.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

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.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

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.

.

Monday, October 24, 2011

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.

Friday, October 21, 2011

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.

Junk Monkey

Wednesday, February 01, 2012

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Wednesday, November 02, 2011

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Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Another Brief Snippet From the Screenplay of my Life

Monday, October 24, 2011

Drawers for Windows 3.11

Friday, October 21, 2011

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