No Shit, Sherlock!

Time, I think, for the annual weekly No Shit, Sherlock! Award.  A coveted award which I dole out for  brave and conspicuous stating of the obvious - in uncalled for situations (often above and beyond the call of duty).  Idiots of the world - we salute you!

Today's winner of the month is the nameless bozo responsible for writing the 'Problem Solving' section of the manual for my Pace Sky minibox satellite decoder.  It is a booklet I have never needed to look at until today when, after installing a new dish, we discovered the damn thing didn't work.  The 'signal test' showed a nice strong signal but no moving pictures....

The manual's 'Problem Solving' section is set out as a table with three columns: 'Message', 'Possible Reason', and 'What to do now'.... it was no help at all - but I did come across the following: 

On-screen messages: 

------------------------------------------------------

Message:

'This viewing card is not authorised.  Call your broadcaster for assistance.'

Possible Reason:

Your viewing card is not authorised.

What to do now:
Call the telephone number on your screen to get your viewing card authorised.

 ------------------------------------------------------

Message:

'This programme is not available.'

Possible Reason:

This programme is not available in your area.

What to do now:
You will not be able to watch this programme.

------------------------------------------------------

I really wish I was making these up, but I'm not.  The winner though is this one.  Remember, folks, this is a manual written for people who can: A. read. B. know how to open a folded booklet, hold it the right way up, and presumably have opposable thumbs.  The winner of this afternoon's No Shit, Sherlock! Award is...

------------------------------------------------------

Message:

'Insert your Sky Viewing Card.'

Possible Reason:

There is no viewing card in the Sky Viewing Card slot in your Sky minibox.

What to do now:

Insert your viewing card into the Sky Viewing Card slot.

------------------------------------------------------

How did we manage?

In the end I just unplugged the fucker and plugged it back in again.  That did the trick.

PS.  An honourable mention goes to the entries on the General problems pages where, after the problems 'You've forgotten your PIN.' and 'You can't find the remote control.' the Possible reason column has been left blank.  

Very tactful.

.

My latest pointless hatred of an eBay graphic...

What? What? WHAT?

I mean WHAT! the fuck is that supposed to say?  Is it really supposed to say, ' Look, I'm a gormless fucking git.  I have a face even more punchable than Elijah Wood's!?'  (One of the main reasons I have never managed to watch the Lord of the Rings films is my totally  irrational desire to punch or throw things at Frodo's face every time it appears on screen, and as he is the hero of the story, and I guess would therefore be on screen for a long time; watching them could get expensive in replacement televisions alone.)

And why, 'Sell your tablet now! Get ready for the new iPad'?  Wouldn't it make more sense to buy the new iPad and THEN sell your tablet - after you've transferred all your important stuff to it.  And made sure the bugger works?

And what are those things on the left?  The ones with 'sold' stickers on them?  Whatever they are, the one on the far left is in no way a rectangular object occupying the same physical space as the other two.  Its either some strange failed quadrangular make of tablet (The Sinclair XZTabloid? ) or it is falling into a different alien dimension with strangely altered rules of perspective.  (Possibly the same different* alien dimension where trout-faced Frodo-a-like has come from.)

Damn!  I have now run out of this month's ration of question marks.

The good news is that due to technical whatevers beyond my control and, to be honest, comprehension, this month's list of last month's films is shorter than usual.  Same number of films I've just been less verbose:

April

1. Reign of Fire (2002) - which turned out to be a lot better than its reputation had lead me to expect. It's not art, it's not meaningful, it certainly doesn't make you want to think, it's Mad Max with dragons and it almost worked. Buggered if I can see where they spent 95 million dollars though.
2. Alpha and Omega - a kids animated adventure about anthropomorphic wolves (that look like Sonic the Hedgehog), made by undercooking a collection of Disney clichés and hoping for the best.
3. Red Rose (2005) - Many, many, many years ago I had the singular privilege of editing Red Rose director's first short. (A film he, wisely, does not list on his IMDb credits.) I thought at the time he was a over-confident, untalented, no-hoper (this was shortly before I realised I was an under-confident, talentless, no-hoper and got out of the business). He has gone on to finance produce and direct several feature films. If they are all as bad as as this one all I can say is he should have followed my lead.
4. The Empire Strikes Back- I promised the kids I'd watch it with them.
5. Profundo Rosso (aka Deep Red 1975) - At last! A Dario Argento film that lives up to its reputation.
6. Videodrome (1983) - for the umpteenth time. I keep forgetting how funny it is.
7. The Vindicator (1986) - even the presence of Foxy Brown herself, Pam Grier, can't save this Canadian evil corporation, creates cyborg killing machine with a soul, Robocopy.
8. Mother of Invention (2009) Tiresomely over-long mockumentary with a very thin joke is stretched far beyond any hope of being funny. All credit though to the makers for getting a lot for their piddling budget of $60,000 and credit too for not going down the cheap horror schlock route.
9. Dementia 13 (1963) early Francis Ford Coppola.
10. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) - what a funny funny film. Loved it. I also loved it for the near total lack of music. I think I'm right in saying there were only two bits of non-diegetic music in the whole show and those were at the start and end. I love silence in films. It's rare these days.
11. Rainbow (1995) - insipid, unmagical kids' tale directed by Bob Hoskins and notable only for being the first 35mm released theatrical feature to be shot on digital. And it shows.
12. Lemming (2005) - A young couple find a lemming jammed in their waste pipe and then their boss' wife shoots herself in their spare bedroom. After that things start to get a bit strange. Initially interesting but soon turns very French (ie over-long and not as clever or unsettling as it thinks it is).
13. Carnival of Souls (1962) - Creepy little film. Love it.
14. Le beau mariage (1982) - I don't get Eric Rohmer or understand why anyone watches him. He made his made his first film in 1950 and by the time he made this one, 30 years later, you would have thought that would have learned something about film making. If he did it wasn't on show here. Not an interestingly framed shot in the whole show. 97 minutes of self-obsessed, endless, pointless repetitive wittering delivered in long static takes by characters slap in the centre of the frame. Occasionally the relentless whining is broken by dull transition sequences where someone walks or drives from somewhere to somewhere else for no real reason - and it starts all over again - in French. Le yadda yadda yadda. Pause. Le yadda yadda yadda. It's not even minimalism; it's just empty. Basically the whole plot is this: a silly and very annoying young woman decides she wants to marry. She is introduced to a man at a wedding reception. She decides he's the one. He tells her he's not interested. The end. Apparently it was a comedy. All I can say the 'comedy' must have lost a lot in translation - or the French are even weirder than I thought. It looked like the first run through of a dull play that the film crew just happened to stumble on.
    Another VHS yanked out of the machine as soon as the end titles started and on its way to the charity shop un-rewound. Not wasting any more electricity on that! thank you very much.
    
    The only real acting was done by André Dussollier who also appeared in Lemming which I watched a few days ago. He is rapidly turning into my favourite French Actor I Had Never Heard of Before Last Week. He's good, does very good listening which, given that his character hardly gets a word in edgeways for most of the time, is probably why he got the part.
15. Starship Troopers (1997) - Space Ken and Space Barbie fight Evil Space Bugs for two hours.

*I know what I mean.

Before I bore the world rigid with this month's turgid list of films I have watched, here's an out. Something for you to go look at while I burble on to myself like the sad old obsessive I am. It's a page from a site devoted to Hammer Film Posters. A page of artwork for Unproduced projects. They were, apparently, working on a film called Zeppelin Vs Pterodactyls part of me is forever going to mourn the fact that it was never made.

http://hammerhorrorposters.com/unfilmedhammer.html

Still here?

1. Source Code (2011) - Not bad. Not bad at all - right up to the last minute, tacked on, 'happy' ending which sank the movie. Grrrrr.
   
   
2. Boxing Helena (1993) - Not Good. Julian Sands is an actor I am coming to find perversely, weirdly compelling. Last film I saw him, in Ken Russell's Gothic, he spent the entire movie playing Percy Bysshe Bash Bosh Shelley wandering around like Julian from the Famous Five, grown up a bit, and having first year uni fun pissed out of his tiny little head on Newcastle Brown and coke. Nose coke, not 'the real thing' coke. I don't think anyone has ever tried drinking Newcastle Brown and Cola. I may be wrong.
   In Boxing Helena he is supposed to be a brilliant surgeon, with a galloping case of the Oedipuses, getting a fixation on Helena, played by the rather yummy Sherilyn 'Twin Peaks'* Fenn. He ends up keeping her captive in his house and then amputating all her limbs to stop her running away. Sands played this one like a British Crispin Glover all fumbling awkward manboy nervousness but without the charisma. (Luckily for him the rest of the cast didn't know what they were trying to do either; Bill Paxton turns in a particularly cringe-making performance.) I spent half the film just wondering what Sands was trying to do. He was obviously trying to 'do' something but I have no idea what. Maybe it's just me but I was pretty disappointed by the film. It's been on my 'must get round to' list for a few years now. People had warned me off it as a 'weird and horrible' film (And these were people who know me!? "I'sa begging you, Brer Fox, jess don't go an' throw me in thet briar patch!" I wonder how it took me so long to get round to watching it.) Sadly it just wasn't weirdly perverse enough. Maybe I'm getting old and jaded and have ODed on 'weird and horrible' films but Helena was pretty meh on both fronts. It was aiming to place itself in the creepily odd, but compelling, psycho-sexual darklands mapped out by Davids Lynch and Cronenberg et al, but missed and ended up in expensive, backlit humping, softcore erotic thriller territory - without the thriller bit and not that much of the erotic. Darklands lite. (And I can't blame the BBFC because they passed it uncut.) And then it all turned out to be a dream?! Fuck that.
   
   *and the rest of her's not bad too... (baboom-tish!)
   
   
3. Plunkett & Macleane (1999) - another chunk of 'Cool Britannia' Arts Council not entirely wasted. It's a British buddy-movie / comedy-western done with lots of design, lots of anachronistic music, and plot holes you could drive a horse and carriage through. The sort of film America turns out without thinking but, because this was British, had to be helped into the world with tax money. Lots of people didn't like it. They didn't like it, I suspect, because we're not supposed to have fun with our history on film in Britain. It's all supposed to be:
   
   
   
   • Merchant Ivory reverential and lovely soft focus, swanning around with Helena Bonham Carter draped in muslin.
     or
   • Dour, po-faced working-class, rickets and Hitler miserablism.
     and
   • Based on a novel that has already sold several bejillion copies. Preferably out of copyright - sorry, 'a classic'.
   
   
   - special exemption licences are granted for proven producers with a track record in comedy ie Monty Python and the Carry-on team but anyone else who deviates without asking first is just asking for trouble.
   American films can do what they like with our history; no one gives a shit. We just raise our eyebrows, go "Tch! Americans, eh?,". If we're really incensed we write a letter to the Daily Mail. We still then buy the DVD by the truckload but home grown films? They have to toe the line. This one didn't. And it was fun. I liked it.
   
   
   
4. Final Combination (1994) - Tedious, leadenly paced, join the dots, LA Cop vs serial killer crap. Made even more plodding than the script by having Michael 'The Plank' Madsen as our hero, and Lisa 'Am I in This Movie?' Bonet as our love interest. Oh the sexual tension! Both of them looked about as interested in each other as a couple of small kitchen appliances in a showroom window would be.
   
   A sample of the witty, 'flirtatious' dialogue:
   
   Her: "So, what about you?"
   Him: "What about me?"
   
   Trust me. That was as good as it got.
   
   A film so awful the killer had to jump out of character, and then through several really stupid and pointless hoops just so the film could end on a car chase. Then, after he was supposedly 'killed' at the end of that, he had to do something totally improbable, unexpected, unexplained (and conveniently off-screen) so we could have the inevitable fistfight in the hero's huge, hanger-like, loft apartment.
   
   
5. Ninja Apocalypse (1982) - which, sadly, didn't live up to its title. How could it? No ninjas and no Apocalypse just another Hong Kong cop movie with some terrible dubbing. I did get to pop the cherry of this film on the IMDb though. Long time since I've done that. Actually not quite true - there was already a review there but it was for a different film; so I shopped him and posted my own.
   
   
6. The True Story of Puss 'N Boots ( 2008 ) - well that was a mistake.
   
   
7. Les destinées sentimentales (2001) - leisurely paced three hours spent watching rich French people wallowing in luxury and philosophising at the drop of a hat about Art and Love in only the way people in French family saga films can. All in period costume too. Usually the sort of film that has me running for the hills. I nearly cried at the end. Some lovely lovely camera movements including one masterful cockup that was kept in because it turned out to be wonderful - or a masterful camera move that looked like a cock up but wasn't. Either way it was a magic moment.
   
   
8. Flesh Gordon (1974) - any way you look at it Flesh Gordon is a real mess of a film with dodgy non-acting, wobbly camera work, rubbish sets, hardly any jokes, very variable special effects, no plot, no rhythm - and it makes me laugh. It's so naïvely enthusiastic it's just wonderful. Porn's Golden Age of Innocence, 'let's get naked and make a movie' fun.
   
   
9. Blood Simple (1984) - the Coen Brother's first. Meh.
   
   
10. The Best of Sex and Violence (1981) - not really a movie but a straight to video compilation of sordid and sleazy seventies film trailers (wall to wall tits and kung-fu) linked by the late immortal John Carradine. A glorious wallow in pre-compacted trash with a genuinely laugh out loud funny joke in one of the links that I fully intend to use at the first opportunity.
    
    
11. The Pyx (1973) I suspect there was an Early 70s Golden Age of Canadian Film going on at the same time as the Early 70s Golden Age going on in Hollywood (the period from Easy Rider to Star Wars). The Pyx, starring a very young looking Christopher Plummer and the always watchable Karen Black, is a odd one. A slowly paced, police procedural with Satanic elements, two storylines, one following the detective detecting the events leading up to Karen Black's character's death and the other following Karen's Black character in the days before her death. There's some very very odd pacing and very very odd framing (people almost falling out of the frame half the time - though that might be a bit to do with the cropped copy I saw), terse sparse dialogue, some very odd music (Karen Black wrote and performed the songs). All very unsettling. I'd love to see a decent copy in the proper aspect ratio.
    
    
12. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) - Only one more to go...
    
    
13. Hidden Agenda (1999) - Flat, plodding, unoriginal, under-achieving postwall Berlin straight to video 'thriller' with more than a few Third Man references. (Not overt homages, you understand. They just nicked stuff.) Second film of the week to have Christopher Plummer playing a cop. The most fun I had with it was trying to spot an exterior shot without a rising wisp or column of steam in it (some of the interior shots had them too) our director was big on steam rising from things for some reason. Quite often they were the most interesting things on the screen. My other game was betting which side of the screen our hero would clear the frame after walking down a long corridor towards the camera. That seemed to happen a lot too.
    
    
14. She Freak (1967) - Whoohoo! Total grade A WTF? paydirt. The story is minimal, gold-digger waitress from a small town joins the carny and marries the boss of the Freak show. He gets killed by her roustabout lover and in revenge the freaks carve her up and put her in the show - the end. (It's a rehash of Tod Browning's Freaks - a film which still has the power to disturb and gave The Ramones some of their most meaningful lyrics.) The style here is incredible. Short bursts of dialogue sometimes rendered inaudible by lousy on-location recording and other times by inappropriately loud music slapped on in editing, interspersed with long (sometimes very long) silent 'sequences' (I'm being generous here) of documentary-style footage shot in a real carnival with whole catalogues of almost not terrible jazzy library music filling up the soundtrack. It's insane. Over half of this movie is silent footage of people putting up tents, eating candy floss, or riding the waltzers, occasionally our heroine appears and wanders around past these real fairground punters - in one shot she takes 50 seconds! to aimlessly wander across from one stall to another - and occasionally she interacts with other characters in that under-rehearsed, 'we have no real lines to say here' way that people used to do in cheap holiday commercials. Overly large gestures, smiling and nodding, Catalogue Man style pointing and uncomfortable body language. Everything screams,"We don't know what we're supposed to be doing but we're getting paid to be here and the camera's running so we had better do something!" an insane delight. The director went on to make several other films, only one of which I have seen: the gloriously awful Space Thing!
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    She Freak makes Space Thing look like quality goods.
    
    
15. Chained Heat (1983) - Linda Blair goes to jail. The jail is full of drug dealing lesbians, corrupt, sadistic guards, an even more corrupt warden (whose idea of fun is to tape himself having sex with prisoners in the office Jacuzzi), and an even even more more evil outside contractor (Henry Silver having fun hamming it up) who takes prisoners home for the weekend to parties. In short, all the usual Women in Prison staples:obligatory shower scenes, racial tension, plenty of sweary words and ultra-violence - at least two rapes, one drowning (in the Jacuzzi), and I lost count of the fatal stabbings and beatings.
    
    And it was as boring as hell. The 'climactic' prison riot is one of the most lacklustre ever staged for film. Prisoner Cell Block H with T&A.
    
    
16. Hellraiser (1987) - erm... I liked the music?!
    
    
17. Battle for Planet of the Apes (1973) The very cheap and tatty final chapter in the Apathon. Less awful and more boring than I remember. I'm glad my rewatch of all the Apes films is over. I still think the first one is a terrific piece of cinema but it was sad watching their rapid decline into TV movie quality shoddiness (the first film came out in 1968 this last in 1973, only 5 years later).
    
    
18. Police (1985) - French. Very French.
    
    
19. Garage Days (2002) - I have now watched all of Alex Proyas' features and this one,which comes half-wayish (no 4 of 6) through his career to date, confirms my long held theory/prejudice that his earlier films were better and the more money he gets to spend on CGI flasheroonies the less interesting his films become.
    
    
20. Zoom Aacademy for Superheroes (2006) - which was no better than the last time I watched it. The kids loved it. But they have no taste.
    
    
    Abandoned this month:
    • Last Images of the Shipwreck (1989) (original title Últimas imágenes del naufragio) I woke up an hour in to it to find the same two characters sat in a dark room having the same not very interesting conversation in Spanish that I had fallen asleep during half an hour previously. It may have been a different dark room. I didn't rewind to find out.
    • Telling Lies in America (1997) - about 30 minutes in I realised I never want to see another obviously autobiographical American Coming of Age Story in my life, no matter how good the music, and acting is, or how shiny the huge, chrome-encrusted vintage cars are. I just don't care any more.

Recently I posted about Daisy coming home from school waving a certificate she had been awarded having 'acheived' the bronze level in the classroom good behaviour award scheme. Yesterday, apparently, one of her schoolmates went home with a certificate proving he had reached 'sliver' level.

The inner SF film geek in me that was so amused by

]==[]===© •

the other day was also quite taken by this:

|-O-| (-O-) |-O-|

I really do need to get out more.

My inner geek is easily pleased. I just saw this in someone's signature on an SF forum:

]==[]===© •

And laughed.

Merriol and I independently, and probably for very different reasons (which neither of us have deeply examined), have always wanted one of those old-fashioned roller type school blackboards. Today, as a result of raw unfettered serendipity - and me carpe dieming at just the right time, we have one.

Holly's classroom at school has a brand new superdooper interactive whiteboard and because I walked Holly up to school today - something I hardly ever do - we have the old one. It was lying in the playground waiting to be broken up. The Headmaster was more than glad to help Merriol's dad and I load it in the back of the car. Now all we have to do is shift a light fitting, and a couple of notice boards, and build a supporting structure for it....

I just love the way my kids' brains work.

This morning, at breakfast, number three child who is not yet three, decided that his chair at the table wasn't high enough. So he went off, got a piece of paper and a pencil, drew himself a picture of a booster seat, put it on the chair, and sat on it.

This cheered me up immensely all day. A mood that was only dampened when number two child came home waving a certificate she had been awarded at school. They have a good behaviour reward chart system going and today Daisy 'acheived' the bronze level.

Last week we got a letter from the school announcing that a Fair Trade tuck shop was opening at break times selling, amongst other things, 'Fairtrade Raisons'.

These people are teaching my kids to spell? Grrrrrrrrr!

Another Short Scene From the Screenplay of my Life:

INT: KITCHEN: DAY:

Daddy is doing boring Daddy housework stuff. Enter Eben, aged 2, staring at something small held in the palm of his hand.

EBEN:
Daddy? What's this?

ME
What's what?

EBEN:
This.

Eben holds out a small brown piece of something which I take in my hand.

ME
I don't know. Where did you find it?

EBEN:
Up my nose.

The gable end of our house is leaking. Water comes in through the top of the windows hits plastic sheeting taped and pinned to walls and windows and is channelled into buckets which I empty (frequently).
The gable end of our house is tall - 8m to the apex and it all needs repointing. I can't do it off a ladder as all my limbs will be occupied in 'holding on' and 'not falling off' so I just spent a lot of money we have not got on one of these:

Slightly shorter than that but tall enough. I ordered it several weeks ago. It finally arrived yesterday.

Apart from the sticky-outy stabiliser bits and the instruction manual.

They're in Kent for some reason.

Guess I'm starting on the repointing NEXT weekend then.

I have a rich and varied life. When I'm not watching crappy genre exploitation films, with few to no redeeming features, I'm often to be found reading crappy genre exploitation books - with few to no redeeming features.

Occasionally the two collide.

At the moment I'm suffering the double-whammy bewilderment of reading the novelization of what promises to be a most godawful film. A film that STARRED Gareth Hunt. Just think about those words for a moment; let the true horror of them sink in... 'Starring Gareth Hunt'. Not 'Also starring', 'co-starring', or even 'With a special guest appearance from'. But 'Starring'.

The film (and the book) is called Licensed to Love and Kill and is a very late very cheap very unfunny spy caper spoof. A last 1979 gasp of the Superspy craze started when James Bond first hit the screen in Dr No.

Here's the cover:

And here's the blurb from the back:

Charles Bind is No. 1 THE MAN EVERYBODY WANTS! A Women want him because nobody does it better. Jensen Fury wants him because no other agent has ever caused him so much trouble before and Fury wants No. 1 very, very dead!

The prologue contains a truly genius bit of rubbish writing The book opens with our hero tied to the pilot seat of a plane by el Fatah terrorists. There's a bomb on the plane and the terrorists have 'chuted to safety.

The seconds towards doom ticked away. One minute and eighty seconds from now and he would be raining all over France in a million bloody pieces.

Faced with immediate extinction and unable to move his hands, which are tied behind him, our quick thinking hero bites a collar button off his flight suit and spits it at the 'PILOT EJECT' button. Kapow! The plane's canopy shoots off (severing his bonds somehow) and he is hurled into the velvet sky. and his parachute opens - what considerate terrorists. He lands, gathers up the 'chute, strips off his flight suit to reveal an 'immaculate white evening suit' with a rose in his buttonhole, and strolls to meet his date in the Monte Carlo casino that fate and Fatah have delivered him.

Luckily the plane explodes in a braziiion bits so the author doesn't have to explain what kind of plane it was that had enough room for 'terrorists' (i.e. more than one) to move about enough to tie someone to the pilot's chair, take off, and then bail out with 'chutes of their own - but yet still had an pilot ejector seat. Some sort of jet-fighter-cum-wide-bodied passenger plane perhaps?

What got me though was the 'One minute and eighty seconds' on the bomb timer - isn't that two minutes and twenty seconds? Or maybe Fatah bomb-makers used some sort of metric timers that use 100 seconds to the minute, the bastards.

The rest of the book is turning out to be equally awful. I can't work out if it was really written by a spotty fifteen year old with no imagination or someone pretending to be. Someone is taking the piss though. Every time a character gets into a car and guns it, they're going ten miles an hour faster than whoever gunned their car in the previous chapter so in chapter one our hero is doing 110 mph down the Strand (or wherever) and by chapter seven he's doing 180 down Sunset Boulevard. I expect him to break the sound barrier by the end of the book.

More Thrifty Tips for Twats

Being more of the same as yesterday's post:

The Recession, Thrift, and the Need for Revolution

Which (if you haven't already) you had better read before going on, just to get the drift of what I'm chuntering about.

I put children's felt tip drawings in white Ikea frames and hang them all together. It is much cheaper than buying expensive art and more personal.

Savannah Miller - fashion designer

So, basically, cheap art costs less money than expensive art. Well there's a 'No Shit, Sherlock!' award winner if I ever saw one. Don't buy a Damien Hirst, get the au-pair to ask Jocasta and Hermione to scribble on some paper and stick it on the wall... Savannah, you're a genius!

And remind me never to accept a dinner invite from this woman:

For a brilliant pore-cleansing scrub mix orange juice or lemon juice with baking soda and crushed papaya. And eat the leftovers for breakfast.

Marcia Kilgore - founder of Hope and Glory skincare
and FitFlops shoes

All together now, "Eeeeewwww!"

But wait!

Chinese supermarkets are brilliant for Zen-esque bamboo kitchen utensils, wooden bowls and prettily patterned ceramic bowls.

Michelle Ogunehin - editor in chief of 'Elle Decoration'

'Zen-esque'?!? It's at moments like this that I start to ask myself deep and meaningful questions like, "If a fashionista falls in the forest does anyone give a shit?" and "What is the sound of one hand clapping an overpaid tosser round the ear-hole?"

Lanterns in the trees in the garden are so pretty at night. I am currently saving up all my glass yogurt pots to tie wires round and hang from branches with tea lights in them. I know that yogurt in glass pots is not exactly thrifty but once you recycle them, surely you can offset the cost!

Rita Kong - interior designer and author

It was news to me yogurt came in glass jars but then I shop at Lidl, not Waitrose.

That little whiny gasp at the end of this one at least shows that Rita knows she's talking wank. What she's realized she's saying is, "You too can justify the expense of buying something posh in overly expensive packaging by doing something pointless with the jars afterwards."

Dead thrifty.

Right, I've had enough of these twattering, self-deluding loons.

I'll leave you with one last bit from the article which I did think was a genuinely good piece of advice. I would love to know the story behind it.

Don't drink half a bottle of red wine before going on eBay.

Ben Pentreath - interior designer

Waking up the next morning to find you've spent the night nobbing someone called Tracy who smells like an ashtray and looks like the back end of a block of flats is one thing. Waking up and finding you've bought something as fuck ugly as, say, a painting called "Nicolas Cage awaken by naked man with a fudgesicle" (oil on Canvas panel 12x16) must be another.

The Recession, Thrift, and the Need for Revolution

Every now and then, trying to get a grip on the tottering piles of shite around JunkMonkey Mansions, and spurred on by a need to bring a little more dosh into our cash-starved home I have been attacking the piles of old magazines lying around here. The glory days are gone but time was I occasionally used to get really stupid prices on eBay for Sunday supplement magazines with the right celebrity on the cover. (Over £100 for a week-old Sunday Herald Magazine with a picture of Ewan McGregor once.) These days a lot more people are at it but I still have a go from time to time.

Winnowing out what is worth the effort of putting up for sale is a pain but for the moment I have been getting rid of those magazines that don't have a 'celeb' on the front cover. I do have a flip through the magazine first on the off chance there is someone floggable on the inside. Occasionally an item or article will catch my attention and I will read it.

So it was with the Sunday Telegraph's Stella Magazine for 5th June 2011. No one on the cover - well, no one famous - but on Pg. 32 I was stopped by the headline,

'Do You Get My Thrift? 40 ways to save money stylishly'.

Always one for money saving ideas I had a look...

Let me share some of them with you.

For a touch of authentic Caribbean style serve margaritas in recycled jam jars (salt rimmed of course) as they do at Hartwood, a trendy new resteraunt in Tulum, Mexico.

Lulu Kennedy - fashion talent spotter

Not just jam jars mind you, but 'recycled' jam jars. I guess that means you wash them first? or fish them out of the local bottle bank and then wash them? who knows? And how authentically 'Caribbean' is something they do in a trendy restaurant in Mexico? I think the word 'style' here is being used in the same way as Lidl's use it in packaging their products. 'Italian Style' Lasagne, 'English style' sausages, or 'Scottish style' haggis, anyone? And is a 'Fashion Talent Spotter' a real job? or is it one of those 'let's give the boss's new shag a poncy title and hope she doesn't actually do anything' 'jobs'?

Learn to make things you love. My whole career emerged out of not having the money to buy taxidermy - I decided to learn how to do it instead.

Polly Morgan Taxidermist

??!!!

I can see how this would work around our house:

Holly:
Dad, I want this weasel
stuffed! and I want it now!

Me:
But, love of my life,
we can't afford it.

Holly:
Then, by Jingo! I'll do it
myself - pass me that spoon!

Skin care:

Whenever I'm in America I buy Cetaphil Moisturizing Cream in bulk from Duane Reade. It's only $10...

Jo Malone Perfumer

"Whenever I'm in America"? Which planet are these people living on? (This one I guess given they visit America a lot and, elsewhere in the article, urge people to "head to Campden Passage market in Islington" - presumably to distract attention from the real hunting grounds somewhere else.)

How about this one though? I'm pretty sure she's from Earth...

Find bargain gold frames at antique markets or charity shops and put your own images inside to make them look grander and much more expensive!

Emilia Wickstead fashion designer

...but not this one. She's from a Bizarro World, parallel Earth where everyone eats breakfast late at night, wears gravy as earrings, and even the simplest of concepts take years to understand. Fuck me sideways with a trout! Putting images in gold frames makes them look more expensive! Did anyone tell the entire History of Western Art about this? The exclamation mark at the end of the above quote is not me dramatizing things for comic effect, it is there on the page. This witless twit thought this was such a earth-shattering idea that she shouted it. I love that 'find bargains' too. Just go out and find bargains, that's what I'll do today. Go find some drooling proles who don't know the value of what they are selling and have it off them for a few beads and shiny things. (This woman dresses the Prime Minister's wife. Explains a lot.)

I really love this one:

Spray fleamarket finds with high-gloss paint. I cheat and go to car sprayers. You can do it yourself but it is a messy business and I find the finish is never as good. Car spray is almost like lacquer so suddenly your tired old standard lamp is transformed into something way more playful, bold and super-glossy. Make inquiries with the garage first (don't do as I did and just turn up with a pile of stuff), and don't expect them to do any of the prep work - the rubbing down and filling. For a standard lamp expect to pay about £50 and between £100 and £150 for a table.

Abigail Ahern - interior designer and author

Mr Pooter lives!

I would have loved to have been there when our Abigail turned up at her local garage with ' a pile of stuff' and asked them to spray paint it for her.

EXTERIOR DAY: A DINGY RAILWAY-ARCH, BACK STREET LOCKUP SOMEWHERE IN STRETHAM.

Winston, a paint stained, car re-sprayer is shoving license plates into a dustbin when he is approached by a wealthy woman with an armful of miscellaneous tat.

They start to talk.

CLOSER TWO SHOT

WINSTON:
"You what, love?"


WOMAN
"I said, would you spray this lot for me?
I can pay you. Look, I have shiny things.
Beads... and mirrors."


WINSTON:
"What? you wannus to spray this lot for you?"


WOMAN:
"Yes, please."


WINSTON:
"Even the stuffed weasel? Nah, Fuck off. You're
'avin us on. This is a wind-up innit? Here, Burt, come
over 'ere. This bird wants us to spray this lot of junk."


BURT:
"Wassall this then? This all knocked off is it? We usually
do cars. You know hot Rollers and that. Drive 'em in,
give 'em a quick once over, and off to the Saudis with
it on the next boat. Don't fink there's no profit in
repainting crap like this though... is that a stoat?"


WOMAN:
"No, I'm really rather serious. I thought a new coat of
paint would make it all you know, playful, bold
and super-glossy!"


BURT:
"Right... where's the cameras..."

Suddenly Winston tugs Burt's sleeve, whispers in his ear, and points up the road to where an expensive car is parked.

BURT:
"'ere, is that your Lamborghini? Tell you what,
love. Leave it here and come back in a couple of
hours. Why don't you take the bus? Leave the car
and we can pop the stuff in the boot for you
when we've done, 'ow about that?"

How I wish...

More soon.

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:

1. 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.)
   
   
2. 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).
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. 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.
   
   
5. 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...
   
   ---------------------------------------------^-------------------------
   
   
6. 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.
   
   
7. 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.
   
   
8. 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.
   
   
9. 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.
   
   
10. 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
    
    
11. 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?
    
    
12. 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.
    
    
13. 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.
    
    
14. 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.)
    
    
15. 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.
    
    
16. 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.
    
    
17. 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.
    
    
18. 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.
    
    
19. 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.
    
    
20. 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.
    
    
21. 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.
    
    
22. 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.
    
    
23. Heavenly Creatures (1994) - Early Peter Jackson. And interesting.
    
    
24. 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....
    
    
25. 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.
    
    
26. Despicable Me (2010) - funnier than I remembered.
    
    
27. 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.
    
    
28. Scandal (1989) - Okay, British Film can do sex. But only if it's a costume drama!
    
    
29. 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!
    
    
30. 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.

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

1. The Dinosaur Hunters - Deborah Cadbury.


2. 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.
   
   
   
   
   



3. 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.
   
   
   
   
   



4. 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.


5. The Mad Old Ads - Dick Sutphen


6. Scrivener's Moon - Philip Reeve.


7. 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

1. 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.


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


3. 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.


4. 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.


5. 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.


6. 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

1. 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.


2. 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.


3. 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.


4. 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.


5. 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.


6. 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.


7. 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.


8. 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

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


2. Critical Threshold - Brian M Stableford


3. 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.


4. 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.


5. 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.


6. Shadow and Light - Jonathan Rabb.


7. 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.





8. 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.