2017 Movie Diary (part 2 of  4)

April

1. Hackers -  An early example of Hollywood not really getting the newly fangled internet thing. Notable mostly these days for containing a brief (but I would imagine well-thumbed) shot of Angelina Jolie's tits.
2. Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
3. The Three Musketeers - I'm glad my critical faculties are still working. I got to the end of it thought, "Well that was pretty crap", then discovered it was a Paul W S Anderson movie. (I doubt if I would bothered watching at at all if I had known beforehand.) Some nice set design and locations but other than that utterly avoidable.
4. Gappa The Triphibian Monster - I have seen many Japanese rubber monster movies but none quite as boring and pointless as this one.
5. A Midsummer Night's Dream
6. Source Code
7. The Card
8. The Lavender Hill Mob
9. 2001: A Space Odyssey -
10. Bill - Weekly family movie choice of Mrs JunkMonkey
11. Airplane! - not as funny as I remember.
12. The Shaun the Sheep Movie - I was forbidden by my 8 year old son from choosing "anything with spaceships and explosions in" for my turn in the weekly family movie. Great fun.
13. Human Lanterns ( Ren pi deng long(original title) - a weird mixture. Almost like a kung-fu remake of a Italian giallo version of Yojimbo. Bits of it were very very odd. I liked it.

May

1. Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2 (2017) - and Marvel Studios make ANOTHER over-long violent film about a dysfunctional father/son relationship that ends in two white men having a fist fight during a Big Dumb Light Show during which all the major characters get to discover the true 'meaning of family' by robbing others of the opportunity of finding it by killing them.
2. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003) - by the numbers sequel with far too many - "erm... how did they know that?" leaps of movie logic to keep me interested.
3. Gods and Monsters - fictionalised account of the last days of James Whale shared with No.1 Daughter. Both of us were in tears at the end of it. And:
   
4. Bride of Frankenstein - James Whales's 1935 masterpiece, much referenced in Gods and Monsters. Not a bad double bill.
5. Jupiter Ascending (2015) - !!!! I haven't laughed at a film so much for ages.  Oh dear gods a hilariously bad film which plays with the Fortian 'we are all property' idea and the earth is due to be harvested by the aliens who own the planet.  Unfortunately for the film (though this is the least of its problems) the chief baddy is played by Eddie Redmayne who obviously channelled Dangermouse bad guy Baron Greenback as his inspiration. And whose volume control goes from one to eleven without ever touching the sides. A Razzie Award winner as  Worst Supporting Actor
   
6. Hollywoodland - A detective fantasy about the death of George Reeves (TV's Superman) which was well made, impeccably acted, terrifically dressed (Hollywood in the 50s without going overboard), and just didn't connect with me. I wanted to like it but it just didn't engage.
7. The Adventures of Pricilla Queen of the Desert - Number One Wife's favourite movie shared with Number One Daughter who loved it.
8. Le Voyage de James à Jérusalem - delightful little film about a devout young African Christian discovering the realities of life in the modern 'Holy Land'. This is why I buy movies in charity shops that I have never heard of. (And in this instance I could only just about read the blurb as it was in French.) Sometimes, just sometimes, you find wee gems.
9. Fiend Without a Face - funny (bad funny) British 'horror' film set around a US Air Force base in Canada (?) commanded by someone who refers to himself as 'an army man' (sic). Atomic-powered mental vampires suck the brains and spinal cords out of a bunch of not very good actors with very variable 'American' accents.
10. Creature From the Haunted Sea - I indulge my 15 year old daughter's fascination with the films of Roger Corman.
    
11. The Head
12. The Brain the Wouldn't Die - a double dose of women getting full body transplants. The Head was the winner by far. I really need to see the full uncut undubbed version - if it still exists.
13. The Deal - I think I could watch William H Macy read a telephone book out loud and find it fascinating.
14. Blood the Last Vampire - a live action adaptation of a Manga I had never heard of starring an 'Asian Superstar' I had never heard of. Wall to wall, ADHD, 'action' which stopped from time to time to let the heroine do that over the shoulder not quite looking into camera shot that Manga (and their live action adaptations love so much). There are few shots towards the end, as the Katana wielding, demi-demon heroine finally gets to confront her Nemesis that are trippily, visually interesting but it's not worth the effort to get there.
15. Alien Infiltration (aka Alien Opponent) - a would-be science fiction, straight to eBay, horror-comedy. Which failed to make the grade in any category. (Apart from the eBay bit: 75p including postage? - I should have known better.)
    
    The 'plot'. An alien crash lands in a rural junkyard and gets between some greedy arseholes and the body of the man they've murdered. They need the body to make an insurance claim. In frustration they do what everyone would do under the circumstances - go on television and offer a huge reward to anyone who can retrieve their victim. The rest of the film is spent watching the 'hilarity' that ensues as wannabee body retrievers run around getting shot in the head, eaten by alien parasites, electrocuted sawn in half by robots etc. etc. In one, played-for-a-laugh, scene a group of small children are sliced into pieces with an alien monofilament wire. Oh what fun.
    
    What makes the thing even worse than it sounds is that it's all so badly done, so irredeemably bad in fact, that it made Roddy Piper, the biggest name in the show and obviously just phoning in his part, look like a serious actor. Roddy PIPER! I really hope I don't see anything quite as shitty as this for the rest of the year.

June

1. Romeo & Juliet (2013) - I am a real sucker when it comes to Romeo and Juliet. I don't think I have seen a version where the final scenes haven't reduced me to tears. Hell, I was wiping away the tears during Shakespeare in Love. This version however let me down. I just couldn't wait for them to die so the film would be over. I console myself with the fact that there's very little of Shakespeare left in here apart from the bare bones of the story and some of the famous bits you think you can quote. (Quite often very weirdly delivered. "I AM Fortune's fool!", "I am Fortune's FOOL!", "I am FORTUNE'S fool!", however you say that line it means something: for me it's Romeo's realisation of what he has just done. " I am such an IDIOT!"? - not here it doesn't; here it comes over as just another line to deliver. ) On the plus side the costumes, sets and location work were very good. But when you have one of the greatest love stories ever told being played out and you find yourself more interested in the scenery, or noting that just about everyone who gets on a horse can ride better than the actor playing Romeo, then you are in big trouble. Paul Giamatti adds some acting (seriously lacking elsewhere in the cast) and the editor provides one of THE ugliest jump cuts I think I have ever seen in a film. As Romeo walks towards Juliet in the crypt there is a cut, right down the line of action, between a shot of him walking away from the camera to one where he is walking directly towards the camera that made me exclaim out loud, it hurt so much. No, I didn't cry in this version. But everyone on screen did. Every other shot, it seemed, someone was dropping a tear from one eye or another. Everone got in on the act. Even poor Mr Giamatti had a crystick rubbed on his cheeks and had to look agonised as the the tears welled up. The best tears in the show though were the one painted onto Juliet's face in one scene. She's lying on her back and the tears just sit there, painted on, looking very thick - and with a bit of a matt finish. How not to film Shakespeare 101.
2. The Naked Gun - for once a film that IS as funny as I remember.
3. Sorority Party Massacre - a 2012 'comedy' slasher that just misses being the crappest film of the year so far by having more gratuitous nudity than last month's contender, Alien Infiltration. I really find it hard to believe that adults are involved in the production of shit like this.
4. Fear Chamber (1968) - Boris Karloff's last film. Made in Mexico it is an extraordinary film lots of bad and incoherence mixed in with a few moment of utterly wonderful weirdness. The basic plot is that a kindly old prof. (Karloff) discovers a rock-based life form deep within a volcano. The rock can only live and grow by being fed a chemical found within the brains of terrified women (!) so the doctor obliges. Not wishing to actually kill anyone he somehow contrives, in the space of a jump cut, to start an employment agency/hostel for foreign women with a medieval dungeon, and high-tech lab in the cellar. The rest of the film is an amazing farrago of pseudo-science, sadism, and weird editing involving a creepy sunglasses wearing turbaned Indian, dwarf murdering, revolving bedrooms, lecherous Lesbian whippings, strip tease, kidnapping, skeletons in wigs, exploding computers and some of the most gloriously bonkers editing I have ever witnessed (and I worked on a Donald Camell movie!). At one point I was convinced a sequence had been shot by having the cast playing catch with the camera. In the end our kindly prof., realising the true import of his deeds, destroys the sentient rock by playing all the computer records he made of its growth backwards at it thus reducing it to a mere sample, easily destroyed with a hammer. Probably the most ludicrous, Get Out of Jail Free science fiction ending ever. Entropy reversal by data rewind playback. It's like making the whole of World War Two disappear by reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich backwards.
5. Return to Oz - And I have a new favourite Disney movie. It used to be Dragonslayer - the only Disney film in which the princess gets eaten - but now it's this very odd Oz sequel. There were dull moments but enough extraordinary imagery to keep me more than happy. The scene where Dorothy steals the powder and the princess's heads all start screaming gave me the genuine whim-whams. A lot scarier and unsettling than anything in the Fear Chamber.
6. Missile to the Moon - a rewatch with Number one Daughter of one of my favourite of the 'First Men on the Moon Meet an All Female Society Dressed in Swimwear' genre (there are more of them than you would imagine). If nothing else I treasure this film for the most genius bits of American Desk Drawer Acting ever.
(The following is from my film diary back in 2008:)


  "It's a well know fact of life that the only reason you ever open a desk drawer in an American film is to pull out a powerful (loaded) handgun. Only reason. The only thing Americans keep in the top drawers of any desk is firearms. Early on in this movie one of our aged scientists does just this. He opens a desk drawer and pulls out a luger which he slips into his pocket. A few minutes later his partner becomes aware of unexplained things happening out on the missile launch pad and decides to investigate - but first!... he goes to the desk and pulls open the top drawer. But what's this? The gun has gone! He stares into the desk drawer for a moment. No Gun? Drawer. Open. No gun? How can this be? A look of blank incomprehension registers on his face (not unlike that on William Macey repeatedly saying "Hi Honey, I'm home!" in Pleasantville and receiving no reply). He shuts the drawer - and after a moment - it's crazy but it might just work - pulls open the top drawer ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DESK - and Whew! pulls out a powerful (loaded) hand gun and rushes off to investigate..."




7. Car Wash - Daughter Number One's rather odd choice for the Friday Night Family film.
8. Stop Making Sense - Talking heads in concert - what can be better than that? - watching it tonight I realised that if James brown is indeed the 'Godfather of Soul' then David Byrne is the 'Godfather of Dad Dancing' and I was struck by the utter drop-dead gorgeousness of backing singer Ednah Holt
   - that's her on the left: Fwaarrrrr!
9. Shock Treatment - the 'sequel' to the Rocky Horror Picture Show. A mess.
10. The House by the Cemetery - another off the infamous DPP, 1983 list of 'video nasties'. Can't say I feel that depraved or edified after watching it. A bit bored maybe.
11. Brazil - Gilliam's best. I've been wanting to rewatch this one for a while but been too worried that it might not live up to my memory of it. I needn't have feared. It was better than I remember.

So, as 2017 draws to a close I strap a couple of electrodes to the long neglected corpse of my blog and administer twenty-seven point two thirds and a half billion electron volts of pure unadulterated Movie Diary.

I think this is every movie I have watched over the last year:

January:

1. Les yeux sans visage (1960) - extraordinarily weird and wonderful piece of French transplant horror which has been on my must see list for a while. Thanks to Father Christmas and with the indulgence of Number One Daughter, who shared the experience with me, I saw it tonight. Wow! Loved it.
2. The Truman Show (1998) - Daughter Number One's turn to choose a film. I'd forgotten just how wonderful it was.
3. Ex Machina (2015) - dang! I like good SF films. and this was a good one. And, as Daughter Number One pointed out, the second film in a row to deal with a character in an enclosed environment in which they had spent their entire life.
4. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) - Daughter Number One's last choice in our week of movie watching while the rest of the family are elsewhere doing healthy outdoorsy stuff. I now have this tune firmly embedded in my earworm banks.
   
   ​
5. Robot World (2015) my IMDb review
6. Star Trek 3 The search for Spock - well that was a ponderous bore. I'd never seen it before - I can see where the 'odd numbered ST movies are crap' theory came from. The best bits were some dreadful costume design, the usual WTF? get out of jail free handwavium technobilge, ( "Protomatter. An unstable substance which every ethical scientist in the galaxy has denounced as dangerously unpredictable!") and hilariously risible dialogue.
   
   KIRK: ... Bones...?!
   
   McCOY: ... Rapid ageing... all genetic functions highly accelerated...
   
   KIRK: And his mind?
   
   McCOY: It's a void. It would seem, Admiral, that I've got all his marbles.
7. The Fantastic Mr Fox - which I like more and more each time I see it.
8. The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) - a lot slower and cruder than I remember.
9. Le Bossu (1997 aka On Guard) Good to see this wide screen on DVD as I only had ever seen it cropped on VHS. Great fun, a real old-fashioned swashbuckler with some great art direction and camera-work.

Feb

1. Buba Hotep - silly fun in which a geriatric Elvis fights an evil Egyptian mummy in an old people's home.
2. Jumanji - Friday Night Family Pizza movie.
3. Labyrinth - ditto
4. Survivor (2014) - Okay I like bad SF movies and This had 'bad SF movie' written all over the DVD case, "The fate of the planet lies in her hands - In the early 22nd Century, the Earth falls out of the sun's orbit..."
   
   "...falls out of the sun's orbit?"
   
   That's as far as I got before I decided I had to buy it. How? What? Why? Wha...? I mean for one thing 'falling' implies that something travelling in an uncontrolled manner down a larger gravity well. If the Earth had fallen out of the Sun's orbit that means... what the hell does it mean? And 'the sun's orbit', not the Earth's orbit around the sun.... I was in my 'This Makes NO Fucking Sense SF Movie Happy Place'.
   
   The cherry on the topping of the 'must buy this' cake though was realising that, buried in all the credits in that annoyingly small lettering cluttered at the bottom of the box (and yes I am the sort of sad git that reads them), there was no director's credit. There were producers credits, costume designers, DP, music and all the other usual (contractually obligatory) credits - but none for director. A film so bad they couldn't even make up an Alan Smithee name to shove in there? And they'd mispelled the name of the show's biggest name actor. 'Kevni Sorbo' (Formally known as Kevin Sorbo star of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Andromeda, and voice-overs for Skylander video games etc.) I hope they spelled all the Kickstarter backers' names that scroll past in the end titles correctly.
   
   I live for this sort of thing.
   
   The film itself was pretty bad. The opening exposition - in which our heroine tell us that, after the Earth 'fell out of the Sun's orbit' we tried to steer the planet with 'particle accelerators' but accidentally created black holes 'all over the galaxies' that somehow boiled off all the Earth's water but only after seven giant space arks had made it off the surface - was the best bit. (By this time I was in a sugar coma of delight.) After that it was Mad Max on foot, before a Planet of the Apes-a-like ending, with a bit of The Time Machine sandwiched in the middle. Quite often the most interesting thing on screen was the geology in which drone-mounted cameras endlessly followed our (rather yummy) Army of One heroine and her parkour running 'alien' pursuers. Some seriously interesting looking rock formations on display.
5. Solaris (2002) - the American remake. It's few years since I watched the 1972 Russian original which I consider to be a bloody brilliant film. I don't know what the 1972 version is about, alienation, despair, love seeing how long a director can hold a static shot of a slow moving river and still make it fascinating? I have no idea, but I love it dearly. The American version is sort of about, set design, heterosexual love, and the Judeo/Christian God in space. I doubt if I shall be rewatching it. (A decision I probably made during the cheesy visual reference of those hands from Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel with a small boy standing in for God and a (possibly dead) George Clooney being Adam).
6. Paris, je t'aime (2006) - 18 short films around a common theme (love in Paris) and it works. There are one or two sections that don't come off but that is hardly surprising. Looking through the reviews on the IMDb everyone says there are one or two that fail - but no one agrees which ones.

March

1. The Hidden Fortress - I just found a Kurosawa Boxset I'd forgotten about!
2. Belle de Jour -
3. My Neighbour Totoro -
4. The Harry Hill Movie -
   
5. Et Dieu créa la femme -
6. Dominion (2014) - sometimes you know you're in for a bad movie from the moment you first hear about it. I first heard about Dominion this afternoon when I picked it up in a charity shop.
   
   It cost me a quid.
   
   The cover was chock-a-block with funky spaceships heading for Earth. Some of them appeared to be exploding. The back had a graphic showing a GINORMOUS spaceship hovering over a city, like the opening episode of V , or Independence Day - there was a lone human with an automatic weapon silhouetted in the foreground. There were two grammatical errors in the opening sentence of the blurb - but the masochistic cherry on the "I must buy and watch watch this piece of shit" cake was the fact than the film not only starred but was produced by Booboo Stewart. Booboo Stewart! I have only ever seen one Booboo Stewart film before, the amazingly dreadful Hansel & Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft - my thoughts on which are buried in here somewhere - but his name alone was enough to make me buy it. He is a dreadful actor.
   
   Needless to say NONE of the stuff that was on the cover appeared in the film (which looks like it was shot on someone's phone - apart from the library helicopter footage establishing shots and prologue - more of which later).
   
   In a stroke of cost/design cutting genius, most of the alien ships zipping about the place were seen as stark black outlines against bright skies or planetary backgrounds. They might as well have been cardboard cut-outs. When we did get to see some light and shade on them, the SFX was about the level last seen in season three of Babylon 5 back in the mid 1990s. The script was fucking awful too and was probably created by randomly cutting and pasting from the comments under Youtube UFO-nut videos by someone who have never read an SF book in his life and wouldn't recognise a hoary old cliché if it bit him in the arse.
   
   "Oh 'Galactic Council' that sounds neat, 'Prime Directive 'oh I'll have that.... "Time is different there" Wow! Mind-blowing concept...." etc.
   
   Somewhere along the line I suspect the film came in three minutes short. I can't think of any other reason for the bizarre prologue in which a bunch of aliens (who never appear in the rest of the film) explore a desert planet as a voice over tells us (in meticulous detail) what is happening on screen. The explorers find an underground facility full of embryos in suspended animation and we learn that the Desert Planet is EARTH! Dum Dah Dahhhhh! and the embryos are mankind's last hope of rebirth after - cue flashback to the main movie showing how, with only five days till the invasion fleet of evil Booboo Stewarts from Draconis Nastiplanet arrive to wipe out humanity, a kindly alien twerp gets everyone around him killed as he rescues his girlfriend before vanishing off to the stars with the pointless crystal maguffin of something. Though to be fair, in a voice-overed post script, which looks like a total afterthought, he does come back and, by the magic of some cheap shots of a fleet of spaceships and some library music (the largo from Dvořák's 9th), rescues the unslaughtered bit of humanity that the beneficent aliens couldn't be bothered to save earlier in the film, and relocates it to some other stock footage which has been colour graded to make it look a bit 'alien'. All of which makes the pointless prologue even more pointless that it appeared at the beginning of the film!
   
   I know it's easy to say "this scene looks like it came from a different film", but the fact that the prologue is also better photographed than the main feature, and has its narration credited to a different writer, really, really, really makes me think it has come from a different movie entirely.
   
   So far the worst film I have seen all year and yes, that does include the Kevni Sorbo one.
   
   EDIT: A few days later, looking back at it, the highlight for me (there's always a moment in any crap movie, no matter how bad, when you learn something. Usually it's how NOT to do something. This film's nugget of  "well I'll remember not to do THAT in my movie" was the moment when our hero is looking through the super-secret, government-suppressed, UFO stuff on the USB stick of Destiny. Two characters peering at a screen muttering, "Wow!", and "Look at that!", and "Amazing!". The shot is framed so that we see the characters faces and the back of the computer monitor they are looking at. This makes a certain amount of sense. Filming a TV or computer screen is not as simple as it would appear - all sorts of interference patterns crop up between the scan lines of the screen and the frame rate of the camera. This set up, of only seeing the actors' faces looking at something the viewer can't see, also gives the editor more freedom to cut away from it to a shot of a screen with anything on it rather than having the actors and what they are looking at locked before it gets to the editing suite. The actors don't have to appear in the same shot as whatever they are supposed to be looking at. What went wrong here was that the editor chose to show screens full of folders. Hero: "Wow look at that!": cut to screen full of folder icons and a cursor: cut to hero looking at screen, "Amazing!". The effect was to make him look like a right bozo - easily amazed these UFO nuts.
7. Intacto (2001) - Spanish film that plays about with the idea that luck is transferable and can be stolen or wagered. Strange and slightly wonderful.  I will be coming back to this one.
8. Monsters University - Friday night pizza and movie with the kids.
9. Atomic Cyborg Aka Fists of Steel - Italian low rent Terminator knock off without any of the special effects, plot, or character development. Another added to the stinky 23rd Century Label collection - 75 pence well spent.
10. The Lego Batman Movie (2017) - which started of well enough but by the end of it I was overwhelmed with indifference.
11. Alien Blood (1999) - Okay. THIS is the worst film I have seen so far this year and will probably remain so*. For a film involving aliens, lesbian vampires, gratuitous nudity, lots of machine guns, children with psychic abilities that can make people explode, and the random shooting of jugglers and bagpipers - this is one phenomenally dull film. One of those films in which nothing happens for ages and people stand around looking vaguely in the general direction of where someone else might be if the director had bothered established the geography of the room, while cheap synthesiser music tries to build some kind tension. At some point someone says "Fuck this!" and shoots someone else for reasons never even partially explained. And then we'll have a painfully slow series of cross fades of random pieces of countryside and (probably symbolic) flames till the film ends up somewhere else with some other characters doing something equally vague. According to the IMDb this shot on video, piece of shit had an (estimated) budget of £1,000,000. I would guess that estimate could be at least several hundred percent over-generous. It's a bad home movie.
    
    * Out-classes the other two nominees by far. Also a serious contender for the most pointless and ineptly shot gratuitous nude bathing shot of the year.
12. Space Station 76 (2014) - erm... ok? That was all a bit pointless. A bunch of people are vaguely unhappy in an interestingly designed, retro look space station. (The conceit here is that this is what the future looked like in 1976 - all Space 1999 interiors, video cassettes.  Everyone smokes.  Lots of nods and references to other films like Silent Running, and 2001.) No aliens or melodramatic twists, just day to day suburban life of a bunch of unlikeable people on a space station. A bit like 1990s space soap Jupiter Moon but with a bigger budget, smaller cast, and fewer plot points.. and it's all just a bit dull.
13. Clue
    
14. Mondo Hollywood - "a magnificent display of Sixties self-indulgence. Timothy Leary wannabees, rootless rich kids, druggies and thrill-seekers join to make Hollywood seem like the center of the cultural universe. Too bad it's only in their addled minds." IMDB reviewer 'tdickson'.
15. King Kong vs Godzilla - Godzilla films don't make much sense and were probably made for a target audience of seven year olds but this one was even more of a bewildering pudding than others I have seen. Some real kak-handed English language footage had been added in which 'UN reporters' talked straight to camera (while trying to keep a straight face) helping the narrative along by saying "Godzilla is now here!" while pointing at a small map of Japan. People pointed at maps a lot in this film; probably the only characters that didn't point at a map at the drop of a hat were King Kong and Godzilla.
    
    All that this cutting away to the UN newsroom did was slow down the action and make it look like the two strands of the film (Kong on one hand and Godzilla on the other) were coming from two separate movies.
    
    The best bit for me though was the sudden, strange cognitive dissonance moment when I realised all the black-faced, body-painted "primitive, superstitious natives" going "wugga wugga wugga" on Kong's island were Japanese extras painted up to look suitably 'ethnic'. Back in 1963 this kind of thing was acceptable in Hollywood films, when studios regularly sprayboothed and makeup-slapped Caucasian extras to double as 'Africans', or 'South Sea Islanders' but I'd never made the logical jump and thought that Japanese film makers would do the same.
16. Scavengers - whooo that stunk! A Firefly like crew of misfit (but loveable) 'scavengers' led by a 'Russel Crow Look alike of the Year' winner...
    
    ​
    ... find the Maguffin of Evil Destruction and are pursued around the galaxy by Captain Black McNasty and his black clad crew of nasties - some of whom are black. You know Captain Black McNasty is evil because he has this habit of shooting his crew members dead half way through conversations, and spends most of his time whispering his dialogue in a gruff mumble while trying to count spiders in the corners of the ceiling. A seriously great virtuoso performance by Sean Patrick Flanery (whose place in history is guaranteed by having played Indiana Jones more often than Harrison Ford). A masterclass in bad acting.
17. Evil Aliens - dreary alien invasion gross out splatter 'comedy' which has one genuinely interesting moment and one half way decent joke buried in all the tasteless offensive shite. One was the combine harvester having a cassette tape labelled "Ambient Farming Music" (in Welsh) the other was the moment when the blinded sound man of the on-screen film crew navigated his way down a beach using his sound equipment. For a second or two there was some interesting film-making on the screen. The rest of it was total garbage.
18. Stranded (2013) - I bought this in a local charity shop purely because of the bit of the blurb that read "Directed by Oscar Nominated Roger Christian; the creative mind behind Star Wars and Alien" Whoohoo! The creative mind behind Star Wars and Alien! Cool! George Lucas and Ridley Scott's Svengali!
    
    No.
    
    Sadly I knew this to be a piece of wishful thinking on some sales person's part because if anyone from marketing had bothered to look him up they would have soon found out that, though Roger Christian did indeed work on both movies, he was hardly the 'creative mind' behind them. In the 1977 Star Wars he worked as a 'set decorator', and was one of two 'Art Directors' on Alien.
    
    What the blurb writer failed to mention though was that fact that Roger Christian is probably most famous for having directed the millennial mega-stinker Battlefield Earth.
    
    Sadly Stranded isn't as enjoyably bad as Battlefield Earth. It's just bad. It's yet another small crew in a confined space with something horrible in the air ducts picking them off one by one story. The entire crew of four of a lunar mining base are thrown into horrible jeopardy when an unexpected (huh?) meteor storm punches holes in some small bits left over from an episode of Space 1999 and suddenly everyone is running around in the dark trying to stop something happening while things explosively decompress stuff in the wrong direction - and for ten or so minutes I had no idea what anyone thought they were supposed to be doing. Seriously no idea. But whatever it was they had to do it NOW! Before things went CRITICAL! or OVERLOADED! So they did. And things GOT WORSE until Christian Slater OPENED A BIG AIRLOCK THAT WOULD FIGURE PROMINENTLY LATER IN THE MOVIE and let all the evil Carbon Monoxide out. After that things settled down for a bit and we found out what our characters were called - because you know all that boring stuff that you usually find at the start of this kind of movie? The sequence where you get to see them wake up and have breakfast and squabble for a bit? Where you get to meet the cast and find out who they are, and work out who the likeable ones are, and who the funny one is, and what the hell they actually DO for a living...? This movie didn't bother with that bit. It just threw rocks at the characters.
    
    Anyway, before we've got the characters' names straight in our heads (there are only four of them how difficult can this be?) one of them has got herself infected by some alien spores that came off one of the meteors and is suddenly MASSIVELY PREGNANT! Boss man Christian Slater is yelling about keeping her in ISOLATION and opening the door to med bay every three minutes (and leaving it open) and then LOCKING HER IN ISOLATION again till he has open the door again a few seconds later and then he's yelling he has to QUARANTINE her. But then she gives birth to an alien thingie which escapes through the door he left open.... And on and on it goes with people doing stupid and pointless things just to keep the plot running. For instance: at one point in this pile of keich our commander is wrestling with the infected quarantined woman in the med bay and, before he subdues her, is stabbed by her with some sharp surgical instrument . At which point the doctor comes in (through the door the commander had left open - yet again) and, for no other reason than the plot says he has to, the doctor takes his belly-stabbed commanding officer OUT of the Med bay (where all the medical equipment is) to to stitch him up somewhere else in the station (oh and they leave the door open again). You see, if he DIDN'T take Slater's character somewhere else to stitch him up, and leave the door open, another character couldn't do what he has to do to keep the plot moving in the med bay simply because there would be someone there to stop him. And the film would have ended. Stupid film.
    
    I spent most of the film trying to work out why a static, underground moon base would have seatbelts in the office chairs. I guess for a similar reason that the BIG AIRLOCK THAT FIGURED PROMINENTLY LATER IN THE MOVIE looked like it was designed by someone other than whoever designed the rest of the space base. The airlock is a fully articulated irising piece of sexy, almost organic, design while the endless corridors of the space base are utilitarian, rectangular, and drab. Factor in too that we never actually see any of our characters standing next to the thing and it would be very easy to presume that the airlock door did in fact come, second hand, from a different movie. The chairs had seatbelts because Stranded was shot, I learned from the 'Making of' extra, on a standing generic Space Station set that someone has in a shed in Canada. In the next movie made there someone would be flying that set through the heart of a supernova and would want to be well buckled in as the camera pointing at him was shoogled about.
19. Deux jour, une nuit
20. Brave
21. Dracula 3000 - Holy mother of God! There aren't many films that cause physical pain to watch but this is one of them. Another of the endless number of low budget SF films in which a mixed-sex crew board a derelict space ship and find something nasty on board. This time it's Dracula. And that's the end of the plot. Seriously. The rest is just watching the director sneaking his cast and crew into what looks like a petrol refinery when no one is about and filming them walking up and down the same three corridors for hours and hours. Occasionally they stop by to see if the local high school art class has finished making the few purpose built sets and do some expositioning at each other. (The 'recreation room' where some of the 'action' takes place has a pool table and some comfy sofas, and a weapons rack stocked with loaded semi-automatics. Like all interstellar cargo ships.) Udo Kier lends his B movie credentials with a limp, on-screen, cold reading of bits of script that are supposed to be the the ship's previous captain's log. The ONLY thing that could have saved this film from the IMDb's bottom 100 would have been copious amounts of gratuitous nudity. There wasn't any.
22. Guardian Angel - Cynthia Rothrock kicks stuntmen for a very long 97 minutes before there is a pointlessly dull motorboat chase (at the end of which our heroine is too stupid to turn the wheel of a speeding motorboat heading for some cliffs several hundred feet away and instead grabs hold of a rope that is inexplicably dangling from a helicopter hovering overhead). Other highlights included our villainess, holed up in a hotel room, boiling water in an enamel saucepan on a gas ring to make a cup of tea (do Los Angeles hotels normally come equipped with kitchenettes?) and then cauterising a bullet wound with the saucepan, and some fantastically crap costuming.

to be continued...

I think this just about sums up my attitude at the moment:

‘We want independence, not for any flag or anthem, but for the opportunity to create a better, fairer society. Not because we are inspired by a great past, but because we aspire to a better future. Not because we regard Scotland as superior, but because we refuse to accept that it is inferior”

http://indyref2.scot/my-nationalism-not-yours

Yet another brief Snippet from the Screenplay of my Life.

INT. KITCHEN. DAY.

I am drawing at my drawing table and Number Two Daughter is just home from school.

ME:
(Always looking to accentuate the positive.)

So, what's been the best part of the day?

No 2 DAUGHTER:

Finding out that Jaffa Cakes don't make me itchy.

Another Brief Snippet From the Screenplay of My Life

 THE CAR. INT. DAY.

I am driving, EBEN is sitting next to me on the front passenger seat, eyes glued to his Nintendo DS.  He's playing Scribblenauts, a (to me) incomprehensibly complex puzzle solving,role-play game in which interactive items are combined in varied and interesting combinations. 

 EBEN: 

What do you need when you go camping... 

Other than a fire, and a chair? (Pause)

 Oh! My chair's on fire....!

Just came back from Fort Con - Fort William's first comic convention where we ran a little competition to give away a copy of Geeks #1

Your The winner was Douglas McIntosh of Glenrothes with a total of 22 correctly named shirts.

The Brute

The second wander through my collection of bloody awful Atlas Seaboard comic books.

(The previous wander is here: Planet of the Vampires)

The Brute, like Planet of the Vampires, only lasted three issues.   In the first episode of The Brute we open with three young brothers exploring an incredibly well-lit, previously unexplored, cave. "I -- I bet we're the first people to explore this cave ever!".  The three of them come face to face with a giant, blue, prehistoric man-beast who we all know from the cover is THE BRUTE!

"Good >CHOKE< Lord!". Gasps one of the kids, showing the writer's  unerring ear for the teenage vernacular.  The prehistoric man beast  kills, and presumably eats, two of the lads leaving the last one to escape and propel the plot.

 

Actually the fact that the man beast eats two of the boys is only implied (this is a 1970s Comic Code approved comic after all) but the fact that it is even implied was, I would imagine, pushing the boundaries of the code but, more importantly, does allow me to pose the question, "Ate two, Brute?"

(Sorry.)

"But what manner of beast is this murderous blood thirsty monster? Is he man or animal? Beast or something worse than a beast?" (...erm?) After a flurry of rhetorical questions we have a three page flashback through the aeons to the days of the bestial sub-humans, to the days before man, when "nature created scores of races midway between man and ape". (All of them, by the way, pinky-skinned and with an innate urge to wear Comic Code approval securing loincloths.)  Anyway, one of these pink-skinned, men-worse-than-beastial, subhuman brutes gets himself frozen (were not shown how) into a solid block of ice which somehow (were not shown how) ends up deep in the bowel of a cave.  Apparently the glaciers were prone to "carving labyrinthine caverns in the faces of great stone cliffs" (and there is precious little detail given how that happens either).  So he sits there for a while... the next three panels read "The eons passed...", "The centuries passed...", "Eons came and went...".

Until! Aeons (and centuries), and aeons later...

"Think this new atomic power plant will have any adverse effect on the environment?"

"Oh, it may raise the valley temperature five or six degrees, but not enough to make any real difference!"

Now that's what I call an Environmental Impact Assessment.

drip... drip... drip...

"Meanwhile," (or 'later' as that was all told in flashback) "in a local hospital some miles away from the cavern..." bullish local  police chief, Chief Frazier (male), and the local caring anthropologist Dr Turner (female - and no prizes for guessing where that dynamic is going to lead) visit Larry the surviving brother who has been driven insane by his experience.

The cave is cordoned off and, after dropping some tear gas down a fissure that "leads right down into the cave", a cave, remember, that no one has ever explored,  the Brute is forced into the open where he kills an over-eager TV camera man by throwing him "to gory smithereens against the wall of the rocky cliff..." before being tranquillised.

After a court hearing the Brute is released into the care of caring anthropologist Dr Turner for study, despite the somewhat understandable objections of the slaughtered kids' father who concocts a cunning revenge! Months later he creeps into the lab, slugs Dr Turner and frees the Brute. "You're free! Maybe after you've killed a few more people they'll see I was right about your being a menace and give you the fate you so justly deserve!"

Only 'maybe'?  I really like the idea that he's thought this one through, been planning it for months, but still has doubts.  Needless to say the Brute has become quite fond of the Doc and is not best pleased that the old git has slugged her. Grrrr!  The Brute seems reluctant to go and kill some people just to make the old man happy so the the old bastard shoots him.  The Brute barely notices the bullets that "smash into his massive shoulders" and hurls him into a concrete wall with "the unnerving sound of shattered bone" before shambling off.

Next day.  The doc gets a ticking off from the judge and Chief Frazier gets to go Brute-hunting  with shoot to kill orders... 

...while the judge goes off to get whatever the hell happened to his finger sorted out.  I think that's supposed to be his finger though I can't work out how it is attached to the rest of his hand. The drawing in this comic is particularly awful.  For one thing the Brute varies in size alarmingly from panel to panel.  On the cover he's a couple of storeys high. The first time we see him in the book the teenage boys are about the length of his forearm. By the time he's being studied by Dr Turner he's shrunk to the size of a small chimpanzee.

And the fact that she is impressed by his using a tool to drag a bit of meat (that's supposed to be meat - honest) into his cage when he has been wearing clothes and sporting a fine necklace made from animal teeth for the whole time she has known him makes you wonder if she is really cut out to be an anthropologist.  I'm pretty sure she's not cut out to be a comic book character.  Just look at the way she's treading on the police chief's word balloon.  Okay, it was pretty careless of him to leave it there but there's no need for her to put her foot in it. 

Anyway that was pages ago.  The last time we saw the Brute he was about ten foot tall, throwing a bereaved parent at a wall and shambling off.

"Meanwhile, at a small private airport not far away..." the writer and artist let the readers know what they think about the comic they are making by writing 5HI7 all over the last page.

(Talking about crappy drawing just take a look at the red propeller on that plane top left. Those lop sided blades would shake that plane to bits as soon as the motor turned over.)

And as the plane takes off from "runway number 12" (this is obviously one of those very big, small airports) someone who looks suspiciously like Chief Frazier breaks the fourth wall and wonders if he is supposed to be Chief Frazier and should he say something?  Possibly "If this is 'meanwhile'  how can I be in the courthouse and here at the same time?"  So maybe it isn't Chief Frazier - but why is he looking at us like that?  It's creepy!  Stop it!

As the Chief Frazier-a-like stares at us, the Brute clings to the underside of Songbird 5HI7 and flies off unnoticed to the next issue where he will, we are promised, face

"The Horror of the Reptile Men"

I can almost not wait.

Bleeeeugh!

Suffering from Aggravated Lethargy type Man Flu.

Rorschach's Journal Third of September, 2016. Tonight a pizza died on the streets of Fort William:

Blogging has taken a back seat recently to getting Geeks #1 'to press' (I think that's the term).  We sent our printer what we thought was the finished art work last week.  All spellchecked, and lined up, and dusted for fingerprints and everything else we could think of.  

A couple of days later he sent us a PDF proof copy.  

There were spelling mistakes.  

How?  I have no idea.  We had stared at the thing for so long, gone over it and over it, and we'd still managed miss them.  Three days later with Merriol, Mum, and I going over printouts with a variety of coloured pens and utter nitpickyness, we got it finally finally done.  A second proof.  Everything is good.  We'll spot something I'm sure when we get the physical copies but with luck it will be so vanishingly small the regular reader will have to use an electron microscope to spot it. (Number 37 in 'My Great Hostage to Fortunes' sentences. )

Meanwhile, here's a short strip I did for the latest issue of online SF magazine Mythaxis:

http://mythaxis.co.uk/12issuev18.htm

...

 . 

This year's Glasgow Pride was a little wetter than last years': 

Here's a bit of serendipity.

This morning I looked at a page of pencil I did yesterday for a strip I'd just written and I was a bit pleased with it. As I said in an earlier post I hate the inking process. Copying the drawing in ink seems to kill the fun that I had doing the drawing in the first place. It's such a slow laborious process (for me anyway) I just can't be spontaneous while I'm doing it.

Today I thought, "You know, I'll just scan the pencil and see what that looks like."

The strip didn't have to match anything I had done previously - these were new characters - so I'd had fun and played a bit more than usual.  I scanned the pencil drawing in and it's okay. A lot less constipated than my normal stuff.  A bit of tweaking in Photoshop and I'm happy.

Later, while having a cup of coffee, I pulled down a book of Berkley Breathhed's Bloom County strips to read - this is a book that has been sat on my shelves undisturbed for maybe five or six years? - towards the front of the book Breathhead has included a page of drawings from his sketchbook.

Every idea - good or bad - started just like this.

 The tragedy is that pencil drawings never look quite 

as good once they've been civilized and transferred

 in ink onto the blank strip - a pity. 

Huzzah!  I'm not the only one.

Here's the strip:

Keeping focussed on editing the Geeks comic is hard. Yesterday, my comic drawing time got sidetracked into drawing this, which popped into my head as I was falling asleep the night before - ALWAYS keep at least one notebook and art materials by the side of your bed!









Nice to have a rest from wrestling word balloons - and we are now 200+% funded on Kickstarter. Woohoo!

I post my strips up on Flickr.  The last strip I put up there had 139 people look at it yesterday.  Because I can see how people arrived at the page I can tell you that of the 139 - 130 got there via Flickr's search  tool.

115 were looking for "boobs"
12 for "boob" (just one?)
and one was looking for "july 10 2016 boobs"

"July 10 2016 boobs"  is so weirdly specific that there has to be a story behind it.  If you work out what it is please let me know and I'll see if I can draw it.

I have often thought that the best way to really appreciate something is to try and do it yourself and find out how bloody hard it is to get right.

At the moment I am slaving away at the comic book and really coming to appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into the lettering of comic books.  It's a bugger!  I'm also spending a lot of time wondering what the hell I thought I was doing this time last year. 

When I draw the strips I draw it in pencil, then again in pen, then I scan that pen drawing into Photoshop and 'colour', and tweak, and letter on the computer.  When I have finished faffing about it's not uncommon for a strip to have 40 or so layers.

[For the uninitiated think of Layers as transparent sheets with bits of the drawing on. Pile all the sheets up and look through them and the image is complete.  You can draw, erase, and  slide individual sheets around or stack them in different orders - or make what's on them more (or less) opaque as you wish - or... well, the possibilities are endless and, as you can imagine, it's sometimes hard to keep track of which layer, which bit of drawing is actually on.]

Most of my finished files have a background layer (the original drawing), a 'Black and White' layer on which I tweak lines and erase mistakes, two or three layers of greys, a couple of layers of word bubbles (sometimes bubbles overlap and it is easier to nudge them around if they are on separate layers), the tails of the bubbles get their own layer, as does the 'Whiteout layer' where bubbles join, each separate speech gets its own layer (whether you want to or not, it's a Photoshop thing) etc. etc.etc. 

It soon mounts up.  As I have gone on I have got more organised.  I now diligently name the layers as I make them and have them organised in a, by now routine, set pattern.

A year ago I was all over the place.  The files I'm working on are total chaos.  Half my time spent relettering and tweaking the old strips is just spent trying to find out where the word bubble I'm supposed to be altering actually IS.  I mean I can SEE it - but can I find it?  Can I buggery?  

It's very frustrating not being able to find the thing you can see right in front of you.   

Merriol and I have started work in earnest editing the comic book.  The first pass through the strips and we'll be working on the text working pretty strictly - though not slavishly - to the comprehensive and well set out rules of comic strip grammar here:

http://blambot.com/articles_grammar.shtml

I came across the site last year.  I wish I'd come across it earlier.  The lettering on some of my earlier strips is just plain UGLY and I'm having to redo them panel by panel, balloon by balloon.

Going to be a bit of a slog but will, I think, be worth the effort.

Woohoo!

That went a lot more quickly and easily than we had any right to expect.  Our Kickstarter thing has 27 more days to go and we're already over our target.  This is a good thing.

As this is our first project we're not going to complicate matters by adding new targets and offering new rewards - so called 'stretch goals' but we're not going to turn down additional pledges.  (For one thing I'm not sure if we can, and if we are able to I don't know how we do).  The money from additional pledges will go towards an increased print run and upgrading/buying art equipment, like some posher paper for me to draw on, and Letraset ProMarkers - ooooooooh....Letraset ProMarkers*.

All we really have to do now is finalise the page order, proofread the thing to death - we WILL miss something. Get the artwork fitting the templates from the printer, wait till the Kickstarter campaign has finished and get everyone's names ready for the backers' Thank You credits...   (Should they be in alphabetical order? or order that people backed us? or in order of their shoe size?  This sort of thing still needs to be decided.) We have to get their addresses, and make all the mini-comics, buy packaging material, and... etc.... etc....

Well, there goes our summer holiday....

It's going to be brilliant!  And we can't wait.  Thank you.

It sure as hell beats Skegness!

*and cakes

More Kickstarter

Well so far so good!

Strike that. So far - VERY good!

The Kickstarter thing is going better than we expected/hoped. We've 19 backers and are 63% funded in less than 24 hours. We're surprised, and relieved, and happy - and that's without my mum chipping in... Hello, Mum!


Here's a shorter link to the page:

 http://kck.st/295ObDa 

EDIT:  as I was typing this up we had another backer.... it's now 66%

Kickstarter

Merriol and I just pushed the button on our first Kickstarter campaign!.... Actually,  to be truthful, we pressed the button, reloaded the page, waited for M's phone to catch up so she could take a photo of the momentous occasion, pressed the button again, wondered why nothing had happened, realised we had pressed the wrong button, scrolled down the page, filled in a box we'd missed - pressed the OTHER button and...

...we have a live Kickstarter project! - woohoo!  Yay Us!  And here it is:  Go click.  Go buy our comic book!


Please....

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/689964224/gosh-wow-comic-book

Pudding

We like puddings in JunkMonkey Mansions.  I suspect if the kids could work out a way of living on puddings (and crisps) they would be happy. Some go down better than others.

This was a recent one that came from our last trip to an Asian supermarket:

Mmmmm Pudding Powder! 

Mango flavoured pudding powder that's 100% - something...

Eating it reminded me of this strip I drew a couple of months ago and don't think I've posted here.

Oddly the usually bizarre Engrish that Asian packaging designers scatter about their boxes is uncommonly readable. Mind you 'Pudding softly or hard by adding or reducing water capacity.' is pretty good.

And the laws of physics are obviously different in the Far East.

Water in China boils at 'about' 90 degrees C????