The Brute # 2

When I'm not drawing comics I'm often reading comics.  All sorts of comics.  Superhero comics, French cowboy comics, long confessional autobiographical self-indulgent waffle comics.  Sometimes I really slum it and dig out the box in which I hoard my Atlas Seaboard collection:

Previous dips into my box of Bloody Awful Atlas Seaboard comics can be found here:

http://anotherjunkmonkey.blogspot.com/2016/06/its-long-time-since-i-wittered-on-about.html

and

https://anotherjunkmonkey.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-brute.html


....so where were we?  Issue 2 of The Brute:

Previously, a thawed-out superhuman prehistoric pre-human (The Brute) has thrown several people to their grisly deaths (and possibly eaten a couple) and is fleeing captivity - redheaded, pipe-smoking police chief Frazier has sworn to kill him on sight (sometimes, he keeps changing his mind).

The Brute's only 'friend' is ace anthropologist Dr Ann Turner. At the end of the previous issue the Brute has stowed away in the undercarriage of light aeroplane Songbird 5HI7... and now, somehow, is on the plane's roof....

A page later the Brute throws the other guy out. "He had no way of knowing," says our narrator, "that these flyers meant him no harm... that their plane but a machine, not a fearsome pteranodon!"

How the hell the Brute would know what a pteranodon was is an interesting point as he was shown battling mammoths in the last issue.  Either the Brute has wandering around in defiance of evolutionary theory since the late Cretaceous when dinosaurs roamed the earth or the author is an ignoramus and/or a Young Earther.

Needless to say, a plane without anyone flying it, and half a ton of pre-human ape-beast sitting on the cowling, is bound to....

Within two panels a pair of shadowy mysterious figures are at the crash site.

As luck would have it, the Brute has landed smack in the middle of an Ed Wood Re-enactment Society get-together.  The two shadowy figures turn out to be Dr Speer and his hunchback assistant Eric.

"Examine the wreckage carefully! We must salvage every electronic part that might possibly be of use in our work!", says Dr Speer.  "The engine for example!"    (er... ok...)

Doctor Look--!  I can stick my finger right up my nostril!

Weird salvage is soon forgotten, however, when the two discover the Brute lying within the wreckage.  "It appears that he is still alive! Ha! Ha! Ha!" -- "After some minor surgery he will fit in perfectly with my plan for vengeance!"

Who is this mysterious Dr Speer? and vengeance upon whom?  Good questions.  Luckily the not so good doctor spends the next three pages telling us exactly why, what, and whom in a long, rambling, Ed Woodesquian monologue.  This monologue is delivered to the faithful Eric (who must have heard it all a thousand times before) who manages to squeeze in a couple of  "I know"s in at the corners of  panels in the hope the crazed old loon will take the hint and shut up.

Basically, Dr Loon has been; "persecuted by the scientific establishment" for trying to create a race of amphibious 'REPTILE MEN' which would allow the human race to survive the coming nuclear annihilation. He has had his "Licence to experiment" taken away by "jealous scientists" after his experiments to convert "Bums, derelicts, hobos," and other "men of no value" into the Creature From the Black Lagoon ended up with them all dying.  "We must stop him!", you can almost hear these other scientist cry. "If he continues on at this rate there won't be any helpless dregs of society left for OUR deranged experimental programs!"

So, deep in the woods Dr Demento has perfected his technique and needs new victims.  He will implant a 'mind control electrode' (I think they stock them in Radio Shack) into the Brute and use him to kidnap members of 'the academy' so he can convert them into REPTILE MEN! Mwahahaha!  By the way we have now segued from Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster land to Ted V Mikels' Astro Zombies land.

"Meanwhile, several hundred miles away..." Hunky Police Chief Frazier has had another extraordinary flip flop about the Brute and no longer wants to shoot him dead on sight (which is what he wanted to do for a lot of last month's episode before changing his mind several times - mainly because he fancies the tits off  blonde anthropologist Dr Turner - who is determined to save the Brute from being shot dead on sight).  This man is the Boris Johnson of comic book police chiefs.  "Yes! Yes! Anything! Just let me in your knickers!"

The chief tells Dr Turner that he's had radio reports about a 'monster' on a missing plane and, though he can show her 'map coordinates' of where the pain has crashed, he's not bothering to go up and take a look until morning and if she can get there first maybe she can save the Brute from being "riddled with police bullets!" - What kind of fucking cop IS he?  "I have a crashed air-craft, two missing possibly dead civilians, and yeah whatever... I'll go up in the morning.  While you are there if you see a couple of dead aviators lying about just shove them in body bags and send them to the Civil Aviation authority will you?  And if you could do a full crash investigation while you're at it...? 

Meanwhile:

To test if 'the mind control' he has implanted in the Brute's brain worked and "see if my brilliant operation has been successful" (Will it still be a 'brilliant operation' if it doesn't?)  Speer gets the Brute to smash that standard piece of lab equipment, a huge isometric cinder block balanced on two 1960s TV stands.  There was one in our school chemistry lab.  We never dared ask what it was for - but there were rumours.

Needless to say the cinder block gets smashed. "Yes! Brilliant operation! I win! I win!". And then, to doubly check, Speer gets the Brute to smash poor Eric against a wall because the good doctor is fed up with him.  "You have outlived your usefulness" (to the plot).  That and the poor, misunderstood  Brute hasn't pointlessly murdered anyone for seven pages.

Somewhere else:

Dr Frederic Bertham's current line of research involves pointing small cannon at his forehead for some reason - possibly in an attempt to cure his horribly dislocated right shoulder.

Dr Bertham is hijacked on his way home from work by the Brute, carried to Speer's remote lab,
and operated on.  Mwahaha!

Another somewhere else:

Quite how 'Nuclear Physicist Dominic Beckman' is preparing for bed in this panel is a open to conjecture but, after smoking a cigarette, while pondering the 'news announcement' of Dr Bertham's mysterious disappearance, the Brute hijacks him from his own bed, carries him to Speer's remote lab,
where he is operated on.  Mwahaha!

And, somewhere else again: 

 

"This is Dr Legrand... " 

That ellipsis after the doctor's name represent the author's attempt to come up with third kind of scientist, " Molecular Biologist... Nuclear Physicist... and... and... oh crap! there has to be another kind of comic book scientist... erm... erm... whatever... I'll come back to this..."

Whatever kind of scientist Legrand (or later, 'Le Grand') is I hope it isn't in the field of electronics - unless this is THE Dr Legrand.  Inventor of that phone where you talk into the earpiece.

And that poor cop.  "Wha--?" indeed. As if throwing custard on the bugger was going to stop him.

Needless to say:  Dr Legrand... Brute... Hijack... operate... Mwahaha!

Meanwhile:

Dr Ann Turner has arrived at the crash site - which means that ALL of that Scientist ... Brute... Hijack... Operate... Mwahaha!  stuff happened in ONE NIGHT. Wow!  That's some going even for a homicidal Neanderthal and a crazed scientist named after Hitler's architect.  A crazed scientist who now gets to deliver one of the greatest lines in comic book history:

"I'm going to give Dr Le Grand the face of a platypus."

Sheer poetry.

The knock on the door is, as you would expect, Dr Turner who is looking for--

Oh, there he is...

Dr Speer, is delighted that find that scientists are now delivering themselves to his front door without having to send the Brute out to fetch them. (Tesco's have been doing this for years in our area.)   He immediately hatches a wizard wheeze.

 Nice of the mad bastard to take his hand away from her mouth long enough for her to have a quick "=gasp=" there.

Instructed to strap the girl to 'that other operating table', the Brute rebels!

(Forget Bride of the Monster and Astrozombies, we're in King Kong and Ann Darrow territory here.)


So, with all the pieces finally in place (apart from the police chief who isn't due to saunter up to the woods some time in the morning and who is, probably, at this very same moment, actively ignoring three drive-by shooting and a bank robbery in progress), and with only 3 pages to go to wrap this up - we can finally get on with the Brute vs Lizard Men action promised on the front cover.

The anticipation....

The Lizard Men are released!  At LAST!  Prehistoric Cave Brute faces the 'MONSTROUS PERIL' as he is  ATTACKED by AMPHIBIOUS REPTILE MEN!  The titanic battle twixt mammal and ex- mammal fish/beast/lizard things is HERE!

...and that's it.

"The pathetic reptile men are no match for the prehistoric ferocity of the beast man..."
Two panels.

Next! 

Well, Doctor Speer, obviously, who gets hurled into the Mk IV Acme Machine Most Likely to Explode standing in the corner of the lab'.

 

 "The Rancid oder of searing flesh"? I would guess the author is either: slipping in some vegetarian polemic there, or he has never been to a BBQ. And if it's purely a human flesh thing, I can tell you from personal experience - I once gave myself a really nasty burn with a blowtorch - that cooking human flesh smells delicious.  Just like roasting pork.  It was a very strange moment.  I was in extreme pain and simultaneously very hungry.

And 'oder'?  The Oder is a river in Poland.

So Ann flees.  Lab goes boom!  Ann is sad that the Brute is dead.  Ann goes home.  Brute emerges from the wreckage to continue his next Littlest Hobo adventure; "Not knowing WHERE to turn who he can TRUST... truly... ALONE!"

And I think that's enough of that.  I'll put the box of Atlas comics away for another few months.  Even my addled brain can't take much of this.

I really find it hard to understand how I gave up drawing for so long.  For years I just didn't draw.  The occasional doodle, sketch-maps, or rough diagram but not real DRAWING.  Now I find I really can't stop.  I really do love to draw. Here's some rampaging nuns I just threw onto the page at daughter number 2's suggestion for something to fill an awkward space in the new comic's back pages. (It relates to one of the stories in the book.)

 

It's not the greatest drawing in the world.  I will be the first to admit that.  But it flew off the end of my pencil in minutes and was coloured just as quickly.  I think I might JUST be starting to get a handle on this cartooning lark

Stupendous Stories

Oh this is a good omen.

After spending a couple of hours hand-crafting, from the finest, high quality pixels that money can buy, the cover for my next book. Then lovingly, tenderly, folding them into a superb, bespoke PDF format with just a zest of hyperbole to tingle the eyebuds - I actually go look on comicvine.gamespot.com - the largest Comic Book Database in the known universe - to see if anyone has ever made a book called Stupendous Stories before. 

They haven't.

They have now.

Almost.



(The regular reader of this blog - a wonderful construction that sounds like I am addressing each member of a large group individually, when I really know for a fact there is only one of you - the regular reader of this blog will have noticed that this cover looks nothing at all like the cover I was drawing "for my next comic" a few posts ago.  That's because this comic isn't that comic. The editorial staff of Gosh Wow comics (Merriol) decided that we were doing an all superhero comic this time instead of the mixed bag anthology Derek I was planning, or the all-SF Tales of the Unaccepted I haven't got enough material for.  So we've started a new title just for the superhero nonsense.  One of these days I'll get round to working on the second Geeks book.  I have a story plotted out - mostly - and pages of dialogue written and thumnailed.... One of these days. )

Art has been cancelled.

Art has been cancelled because my computer has stopped talking to my scanner - or vice versa.  Which is a BIT of a bugger as it's the only way I can get the pages and pages of comic strip I have drawn into the wider world of Photoshop, Sketchbook, and the other post- paper and pencil software I use to do the lettering and colouring (and fixing my more awful drawing disasters) and thence to the web and eager eyeballs all over the world.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, I suspect this only a temporary aberration - probably caused by me fucking with things that should not be fucked with - though I don't remember thinking "I wonder if this is entirely safe?" recently...

Ah well.  I just wish it hadn't happened in the middle of a seven page strip.  6 pages so far pencilled only 5 scanned.

Drat!

I'm taking a wee break from the 7 page superhero strip I'm currently working on to start  on the cover for the next paper comic:  We have a con or two coming up and I need to have something new to point at as people walk past the stall not buying stuff.  That and I needed a break from endlessly (it seems) drawing the same two guys and trying to make them look interesting as they deliver their lines (sequential art is HARD! Especially when you're foolish enough to write a script in which the entire cast is the same character from multiple alternate universes.  I'm never doing THAT again.) So, this evening, after finishing pencilling the day's page (six panels including one total cop out "I'll add the interdimensional portal thingy in Photoshop later" panel) I had fun throwing my space-babe heroine into the clutches of something with a LOT of tentacles.

This isn't totally gratuitous - there is a gag coming.

One of the great ways old SF movies (I'm talking about the 1950s and 60s here) used start was  to have our intrepid scientist/adventurers hold a press conference.  This was a great way  to get a shedload of info-dumping done thus getting the audience up to speed before the fun and games dodging meteor showers, getting attacked by giant rubber spiders, and trying not to kill the annoyingly stupid comic relief got going.   During the press conference  the scriptwriters could straight out answer the questions in the audience's mind (e.g.. "WTF is going on?") by having the questions posed for them by men with press passes tucked into their hatbands.   Concepts like multi-stage rockets, zero gravity, and the need to get to the moon before the 'Commies' could be explained in excruciating detail without sounding TOO much like a lecture.  These press conferences would often end with a Lady Reporter asking the Woman Scientist on the expedition for the 'Feminine Angle'.   (Sadly not ONE single Woman Scientist - and they always were single - answered '27 point seven degrees' which is a very feminine angle.  "None of your Right angled macho square stuff for me!").

 I digress.

 I have noticed that I have tendency to do something similar in my strips.  I find I often draw someone telling a crowd of people a whole pile of stuff that helps set up the joke.  A leader rallying his troops, a town crier making an announcement, a politician hectoring an audience.   In the strip I'm working on now I have a mass meeting of superheroes from across multiple dimensions - the trouble is jotting down 'crowd of faces' in my sketchbook as I'm writing the strip and doing a few loopy circles is easy....

When it come to DRAWING the bloody thing properly...

I seriously hate myself at the moment (well, the part of me that has to do the art hates the bit that writes the stuff) which is why I probably shouldn't work with writers.

My current work in progress has 106 faces IN THE FIRST PANEL!  All of which are attached to bodies and clothes and all of which will need colouring.... I am really going to have to give myself a stern talking too.  While I'm at it I'll give all the other bits of myself that do silly things a good talking to as well.  I'll hire a hall.

Hmm... I may get a strip out of this....

Comic Strip Writing 102

Argh! Looking through my recent  Arthur story on line I noticed two HUGE typos - since corrected - HOW DOES this happen?

Meanwhile I'm working on a superhero yakfest which runs to 7 pages but... and this is a BIG 'but' for me... (And yes, I can hear my kids snikkering - "he said 'big butt' snarf! snarf!") ...I'm getting organised. I'm doing the layout and lettering first. The thumbnail/script in my sketchbook looks like a workable layout* instead of my usual mess of tiny panels with too much text crammed into them Sometimes sideways and onto the next page, often with little arrows and asterisks telling me where to go next.

Usually this means that as I draw the strip out, the art has to expand to make room for the words and I will often find what was one page of doodle in the sketchbook turns into 3 or more pages of strip.
Sometimes X and a half pages which is kind of annoying because then I'll have to go back and write MORE stuff to get to the bottom of a page.

This time though I'm pretty sure I can stick to my plan - which will be a first. So do the lettering, Print out the pages. Draw in round the word bubbles. What can go wrong...?

[Watch this space.]

* I think I had just read Tim Pilcher and Dave Gibbons' rather excellent book How Comics Work and had obviously learned something.

Flags

Daughter #1 and I went on the AUOB  Indy March in Glasgow on Saturday.  The first time I have ever felt able to march / walk / protest (whatever) while carrying the national flag. I have loathed nationalism and the parochial mindsets that go with 'National Pride' and the symbology of banners all my life.  The only flags I have felt any identification with have been wide, all-inclusive ones.  The Pride Rainbow...  The EU flag... symbols of hope over adversity -  but these are interesting times.

So I carried a flag and walked in the sunshine and chanted a bit and blethered with people. For a while D#1 and I walked beside a bunch of middle-aged gay women carrying Rainbow, EU, and Scottish flags.  I felt more comfortable with them.

At the end of two hours we reached the rally at Glasgow Green and D#1 and I split off to go and get a coffee at Mono.  (I'm so out of condition I needed  a sit down.)  We had coffee, D#1 bought a couple of CDs and a DVD, we chatted a while, and when we came out  the march was still arriving at the rally.  There were a LOT of people.

I felt like I had been part of something.

I don't know who took this photo,

 or where it's from

 but isn't it GREAT?

Part 2 of the "Every film I watched, attempted to watch, or fell asleep in the middle of" for 2018.

December

1. Five Fingers -
   
2. Monty Python's meaning of Life
3. Fortress - well that was as awful as I remembered it being. Holy crap! They made a sequel!
4. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon - which, having not watched it for many years and then obviously not on a colour television ( yes- that long!), I was surprised to find wasn't in Black and White.
5. The Scarlet Claw Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes
6. Storm - Swedish SF/Fantasy/Existential Angst/Couldn't Make Its Mind Up movie that started off well but just lost me somewhere as it all turned out to be a lot less interesting than it was trying to be.
   
7. Star Trek Nemesis - I guess this must have been one of the more interesting Star Trek films because I only fell asleep once while watching it.
8. Lost Future - In the distant future tribal survivors of a plague fight for survival and a cure - watchable despite some seriously holey plot. Impressive set design work though.
   
9. The Tomorrow Man - not bad low-budget (near zero SFX ) time travel story in which a wanted criminal goes back in time to kidnap himself from his abusive father in order to take him into the future to give him a better childhood.
10. In Time - nice idea (time is literally currency - everyone gets born with 25 years of life but can buy gamble trade for more time to extend their lives) and it's an idea interestingly played with - but there are plot holes you could drive several buses through (side by side some of them) and enough 'gosh! wasn't THAT lucky?' moments for several films, but it looks good. Very stylish. There was enough going on that wasn't totally stupid to keep me watching .
11. Valley of the Bees (1967) - I don't know a lot about Czech cinema but so far I have been pretty well impressed by everything I have seen.
12. Ocean's Twelve - That was silly. A bit soggy at the end but a fun ride.
13. Return of the Pink Panther - I introduce my younger kids to Inspector Cluseau. We all giggled like loons. Great fun.
14. Iron Sky - it had its moments.
15. Narcoplis - low budget British SF which thought it was cleverer than it was. Anyone who had read any Philip K Dick or read ANY time travel SF could have told you what was going to happen for the rest of the film from about 5 minutes in. The rest of the world could have told you from about 10 minutes in. The film has a prologue set twenty years before the action of the main film. A title card "Twenty years earlier" separates the two. Our cop hero finds the unidentifiable body of a man of about 29 years old - and then goes to see his nine year old son and gives him a copy of H G Wells' The Time Machine as a present. (Three Very Dramatic Chords please)... blah blah blah...
    
16. The Mask - (with Number One Son). Never seen it before. I thought it was crap.
17. It's a Wonderful Life - with Number 2 Daughter.
18. Alien - with Number 1 Daughter.
19. Forbidden Planet - with daughter #2
20. Razorback - Giant mutant pig terrorizes a bit of the Australian outback as seen through the filter of an MTV video director who went on to make the hilariously awful Highlander.
21. Dracula 3: Legacy A film I own only because it has Rutger Hauer in in it - a few years ago I dared myself to watch every film he has ever made. Boy has he been in some s**t. I have no idea why I dared myself to do this stupid thing but I did and I shall. Dracula 3: Legacy was very s**t. One of those films where Hauer was obviously on set for two or three days at most (all his scenes took place in one set) and had a huge vampire lesbian orgy in it (on a different set) which was even less interesting than the usual lackluster "Do we have to...?" movie lesbian vampire stuff that turns up in Jean Rollin's movies of the 70s. I really must get round to watching some of his good films.
22. My Bloody Valentine (1981) Canadian slasher film on a DVD, which my teenage daughter tells me, has been shorn of all the "Good Gory Bits". From her descriptions of what was cut I don't think I missed much.

1.  

Part the first of my 2018 Movie Diary.

January

1. Black Narcissus - which just gets better and better every time I see it though I was annoyed with myself for spotting a continuity error this time which I will now never unsee.
2. Welcome to Collingwood - not as funny as I remembered it. So much so that it has found itself demoted from the shelves where DVDs sit proudly on display in cases on the shelves -  to the folders where they languish in polipockets making room for more, better movies.
3. Alfie - the original for the first time.
4. The Graduate - for the first time in ages, and funnier and better than I remembered.
5. The Old Dark House (1932) - peculiar little horror film directed by James Whale
6. Eraserhead -
7. The Hunger - Arty vampire nonsense with David Bowie dying from latex poisoning and Susan Sarandon and Catherine Denueve (and/or their body doubles) naked between the sheets.
   
8. The Handmaiden - Korean drama based on the novel Fingersmith by Sarah Walters. It's a long time since I read the book but from what I remember of it this seemed pretty true to the intent of the novel if not the detail. (For one thing the novel is set in Victorian England not 1930s Korea. And I don't remember quite so much sex in the book - but then literary sex is notoriously difficult to write, and sometimes impossible to read - whereas people can happily watch young bodies coupling in interested and varied positions for ages without getting bored. (Well I can.)
   
9. Eating Out - Low budget queer film in which a straight guy pretends to be gay to seduce a straight girl who lives with the guy he dates - who in turn is secretly in love with the straight guy's gay roommate. (That was a spoiler by the way.) Not as complicated as it sounds with far too much stagy dialogue but it had its moments. Gay male sex for a change.
10. The ABCs of Death (2012) - 26 short films, each by a different director. Each director was dealt, at random, a letter of the alphabet, a limited budget and final cut for a maximum of 4 minutes of screen time. I suspect a request was made that they open and close on a red or predominantly red screen to make the stitching together of the films more seamless. (Kudos then to Adam Wingard for opening his segment "Q is for Quack" with a shot of a film studio Green Screen). Like most portmanteau films some bits were good, some excellent, some dire. Though, as is usual with this sort of film, opinions differ wildly as to which bits are which. The Japanese entries were the oddest. The one where the kawaii school girl gets sucked up her teacher's bum ("F is for Fart") has to be one of the weirdest screen moments I have seen for ages.
11. Withnail and I - a repeat watching. Even funnier than I remember but that may well be because I was watching it in appreciative company (with #1D this time, knocking another off the 1001 list).
12. Against The Wind - An Ealing Studio film about the Belgian resistance during WW2. Some nice moments but too much plot (and too many little side plot lines) for the length. Not overly complex, it wasn't difficult to follow what was going on, but it all looked a bit sketched-in and cursory. Not enough space to engage with the characters. First film I have watched for weeks without an overtly gay storyline involved.
13. Flesh + Blood (1985) - Paul Verhoven's first English language film (?). Some toe-curlingly bad performances and lots of nudity. A bit like a Corman movie (echoes of the Masque of the Red Death) but with a bigger budget and less style because of it. Plot wise it's a bit of a creepfest too, relying as it does on the idea that women enjoy getting raped and then fall in love with their rapist...
14. Interstellar - with Number 2 daughter. I liked that! Just as Star Wars back in 1977 (ish) put all that Gosh Wow!, thud and blunder pulp SF of the Gernsback era pulps up on the screen, early 21st Century Hollywood cinema has finally gotten round to the Campbell era of SF. #2D was bowled over. As was I - for the first half. I loved that we the audience, didn't have everything spelled out for us. We were trusted to be smart enough to work out what was going on and assumed have enough SF in our collective DNA to understand . The second part was a bit less impressive. I struggled a bit towards the end with some of the film's science - some of the time dilation stuff was bit off and I'm really dubious about the 'you can come out the other side of a black hole event horizon if you go fast enough' - I'm not sure that's quite how it works and if time was going so slowly (relatively) on the planet wouldn't it be going even MORE slowly the nearer you got to the hole. Millennia would have passed before all the hand-wavy air science (it's like air guitar but with a slide rule) needed to get our hero back to his own solar system. And why did the villain opening that airlock door cause that huge explosion on the ship - other than the script says the film needed an explosion at that point and it the bad guy need to leave the plot without damaging the morality integrity of our scientist heroes.
15. Hairspray (1988) - D#2 is going to see the musical - so I make her watch the original first. She loved it. Job done.
16. Beautiful Creatures (2000) - another chunk of pre-millennial Lottery/Arts Council money pissed up against a screen. I imagine if you took all the out takes and deleted scenes from Bound, Thelma and Louise, and Shallow Grave and played with them for a bit you might end up with something a bit like this. About half way through I realised it was supposed to be a comedy.
17. The Abduction Club (2002) - mildly amusing costume Rom Com with lots of scenery, a few good jokes, Sophia Myles (hubba hubba!), and far too many candles. Why two pairs of runaways hiding in a church would light every candle they could find - while the lighting crew were flooding the windows' ingos with moonlight was a puzzlement. As was the director's habit of having characters appear out of nowhere centre screen. Wide shot of three characters on a beach with no one else in sight, cut to a medium close up of them - with a fourth suddenly appeared from nowhere. It happened at least twice.

Abandoned in January:

Macbeth (2015) I got to the murder of Duncan and quit. Striving for muddy 'authenticity' it made you wonder why anyone would want to live in the rainsodden, barren desolate representation of Scotland portrayed here, let alone plot and scheme, and murder to rule it. Other throwing things-at-the-screen moments were prompted by the vast amount of candles in every interior (and flambaux and bonfires outside), and the total lack of any visible infrastructure to support the vast number of candle makers and firestokers that were obviously needed in Scotland at the time. Just mud. Mountains, more mud, and rain.

I live in Scotland and yes it is cold, wet, muddy, and rainy - BUT NOT ALL THE TIME!

Macbeth's castle that-
"The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle:
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
The air is delicate."

Is represented by a wooden shedlike structure, a couple of tarted-up army surplus marquees (that presumably doubled as location craft services, costume and make-up tents), and loads more mud.

All the dialogue, recognisably Shakespeare's (what was left of it) was delivered in modern 'realistic dialogue' type whispering mumbles. Close to mike, looped studio acoustic everywhere: field, tent, or shedlike structure, all sounded the same. Hard to hear, uninflected, diction-free muttering. All accompanied by mildly discordant, middleeasterny sounding, stringed instruments. The music sounded oddly interesting, ethereal, and unsettling for the first few minutes but got very irritating very quickly.

Some of the photography was nice.

No Tomorrow (1999) - I finally find a Pam Grier movie I couldn't watch. In the opening sequence some sort of illegal arms deal goes wrong and ends up in a gun fight with endless explosions and the same three stuntmen falling off the exploding stuff (sometimes on fire, sometimes not) for ten minutes. I got bored, fast forwarded a bit to find Pam Grier info-dumping to an assembled team of cops, info-dumping all the stuff that any decent script would have shown us instead of all those explosions I'd just FFd through - after about ten minutes of a slideshow of villains, and other villains, and some other villains' friends and known associates I figured it was time to quit. Which is probably why it was only 25p in CEX.

Februrary

1. Avengers Assemble! - with D#2. A bit overlong but ok.
   
2. The Fly - before we watch the modern remakes in the 1001 List D#1 thought we should watch the originals. Better than I remembered - though the coda was a little twee and superfluous.
   
3. The Thing - Great sound! Lots of tight overlapping dialogue. Love that sort of stuff. And a wonderfully strong female character (for a piece of 1950s SF).
4. Godzilla - the latest one - went on for a bit looked rather groovy in places and I was totally uninvolved. I did spend a lot of my time wondering if citywide blackouts do always progress across the city from left to right (or right to left depending on which way the camera is panning) or whether everything just goes OUT pooph! just like that. A lot of the action in this movie flowed wonderfully, carefully orchestrated mayhem that just happened to follow on to the next bit like a huge exploding domino topple as the camera panned across just in time to catch it. It got rather dull after a while.
5. The Men Who Stare at Goats
6. Cat People (1942)
7. ExistenZ (1999) - I introduce D#1 to the weird and wonderful world of David Cronenberg. She gets it.

March

1. King Arthur - Clive Owen - why?
2. Alice -
3. Humanoid Woman -
4. Spun - Messy overlong drug movie .
5. Robot Overlords - Small budget British SF which reminded more than anything has recently of the sort of stuff that the BBC used to do on a Saturday night when Doctor Who was off on holiday. Very British post-apocalyptic with totalitarian overlords keeping the enslaved humans in their place. Great echoes of John Christopher's Tripods books and Peter Dickinson's Changes novels. And I really rather enjoyed it.
6. Angry Red Planet - Rewatch of one of Sidney Pinks almost good SF films. This is the one with the weird RED camera effect for the exteriors of Mars's surface and the weirdest 40 foot high Martian spider bat monster ever filmed.
7. Mechte navstrechu (aka A Dream Come True) strange - and, as it turns out - thankfully quite short piece or Soviet SF later cannibalised by Roger Corman for the weirdly creepy Queen of Blood.
   
8. Iron Man - Daughter #2 and I are catching up with the MCU. I enjoyed this a lot more than I was expecting. It was genuinely thrilling in places.
9. Orion's Loop (1980) This movie is - at least with the English subtitles available to me (it's Russian) - an incomprehensible mess. I have watched a LOT of bad SF movies in my time but this really is a clunker.
   
   The plot, such as I could make out concerned a Soviet spaceship's journey to the heart of a deadly phenomenon, the titular 'Orion's Loop', which is heading for Earth. The crew are supplemented by an equal number of robots which (for brilliant cast/budget reducing and cunning 'plot twist' setting up reasons) have been made identical in every way to them. It is soon revealed, by ethereal aliens, that the dangerous alien phenomenon heading for Earth is actually a benevolent alien phenomenon manufactured by themselves. The aliens used to live in the solar system - but don't any more because their planet ('the tenth planet') got destroyed (for unfathomable reasons) and they now live somewhere else . Seeing Earth in the path of a 'Space Typhoon' carrying a a deadly 'Glass Virus', they send out their sooper dooper radiation belt to save their former neighbours. For some reason these ethereal aliens have managed to kill several spaceships full of people by talking at them too fast before our gallant Russians manage to get them to stop gabbling and explain things in simple sentences.
   
   One of the Russians doesn't trust them and does that, 'going mad, putting the whole mission in jeopardy' thing that worked so well in Ikarie XB1 - and didn't here - before getting a hug from the female robot and just vanishing from the movie because... I dunno... the actor had to go make the tea? Your guess is a good as mine.
   
   From time to time we have some shots of the cast on holiday on the coast. I would guess shot at some local Black Sea resort as this film was made by the Odessa Film studios. What this footage has to do with what is going on in space is not clear.
   
   There's lots of zooming panning and hand held camera in this film. The only other reviewer of this film on IBDb likens this to avant garde 60's experimental film making. I think he's being very generous. It looked to me like Jess Franco had attempted to shoot Solaris in two days, on the set on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. (Not helped by the fact that our heroic captain does a Mannix over our inept cameraman - the cameraman's leg appears in the frame at one point - as he lies on his back then films the actor running away on the ceiling.)
10. Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1965) - I introduce D#1 to the gloriously bonkers world of Hammer Horror.
11. And Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)
12. A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1981) -
    Every now and then for the last couple of decades I have taken the occasional look at a Woody Allen film (with as open a mind as I can muster) in an attempt to work out what it is that people seem to adore about him so much. Having just read an extended magazine interview with the man in which he came over as a genuinely likeable human being I thought I was in a good place to have another go at finding what 'it' is.
    
    Whatever it is I didn't see it here. You would have thought with a title like A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy there would have been some sex or comedy in it. Apart from one throwaway line line delivered near the end of the thing which was genuinely funny - more for the delivery rather than the content - the film didn't raise a smile!
    
    I remember hearing an interview with Jack Lemmon, many years ago, in which he said that when Billy Wilder was directing him in a scene in Some Like it Hot Wilder gave him a pair of maracas to hold, and told him to shake them after Tony Curtis said his line and stop before he delivered his own. Lemmon was perplexed. The scene's dialogue was a snappy and rapidfire to and fro interchange. The maraca shaking would slow it down to a crawl. But Wilder was the director and Lemmon did what he was told. When Lemmon saw the film with an audience he understood. Curtis's line were funny. So were Lemmons'. If Lemmon had come in with his line as soon as his actor's instincts told him to, the audience would not have heard it because they were still laughing at Curtis's previous line. His line would have been lost. Curtis's next line would make no sense... and the scene would have collapsed like a house of cards. Wilder knew where the laughs were and built space into his direction to let the audience enjoy them. Allen doesn't leave any space for the audience. We're not given any space to get the 'jokes' (such as they are) because there's always someone talking straight after them. What they are saying is usually inane piffle and by the time you've registered that what they are saying is of little consequence and not a zinging comeback (if was generous I could concede that a lot of the inconsequential dialogue here is Allen's carefully crafted, verbal equivalent of maraca shaking) any humour in the 'joke' that just went past has evaporated.
    
    The less said about Allen's helpless, "oh look at me, I'm so clumsy" shtick the better.
    
    I'll give it a couple of years and have another go.
13. Red Reaper (or Legend of the Red Reaper depending whether you want believe the front or the back of the DVD case). Dear Mother of Gods! WHAT A FUCKING AWFUL FILM! Not a "so bad it's good film" just BAD! Ok, I'll admit I wasn't expecting a lot - the cover had a chainmail bikini warriorwoman on the front which sort of conned me I was buying (for 50p) a Red Sonja knock off - but dear gods! Instead of a Red Sonja knock off I got a BloodRayne knock off acted out by weekend Renaissance Fair cosplayers vs weekend death metal goth cosplayers in a variety of locations that had subtropical and alpine ecosystems within a few minutes walking (or running) distance of each other. Not that was the least of this film's problems. It was a mess. A real turd. Lots of our heroine's voice-over narrator filling in endless over complicated backstory, characters who appeared from nowhere and vanished just as quickly taking whatever barely sketched in reason they had to be there in the first place with them. Endless repetition of same shots over and over again. And then again. And some of the most audacious and sustained 'not actually showing people speaking on screen because the dialogue was rewritten and rerecorded after the shooting was over' editing that I have seen in any film - ever. The conversation between our heroine and her mother (in which more endless plot points are delivered) is a masterpiece. For a minute and half, for over 44 shots, (I went back and counted) all we see on screen is whoever ISN'T talking. Occasionally there are cutaway shots to some of the endless repeated flashbacks we have seen dozens of times before, or to a crystal ball showing us shots we will see later in the film. It's incredible. The fact that the sound quality goes totally tits up here makes it especially wonderful. Other delights to be had are trying to guess how much blood the makeup department will have splattered over our heroine in the next shot. I guess there must have been a continuity person on set at some point but their work was for naught as shots from here, there, and everywhere are cut together willy nilly so that people get cleaned up and messy again from shot to shot, costumes vary in the same scene and one actor's mustache gets a trim and gets shaggy again within a couple of minutes. And I have to wonder where some of the establishing shots came from. The mother's rather groovy ethnic medieval hut has a huge radio mast sticking out of the roof!

Here's a lesson.

So there I am, sitting idly drawing fan art crap for a con we're going to soon; my Geek characters decided to keep me company and started a heated debate in my head about whether Wonder Woman would shave her armpits or not. I was drawing Wonder Woman at the time and seriously considering giving her some generous under-arm hair (I'm European; I like women to look like mammals not plastic dolls). After a few minutes I stupidly typed, "would wonder woman shave her armpits" into the nearest search engine and got over 470,000 results.

Any possible joke died stillborn on the spot.

New rule of thumb. Write the joke, THEN do the research:



With heartfelt apologies to Mucha and Jack Kirby:

2017 Movie Diary (Part 4 of 4) - which contains a stupendously long rant about my loathing of Bladerunner 2049...


October

1. Dougal and the Blue Cat
2. Brazil - for the second time this year - with daughter Number One this time.
3. Showgirls - which was even godawfuller than I had been lead to believe. How can anyone make a movie featuring so many naked people so BORING? Basically it's 42nd Street with the songs substituted with wall to wall tits.
4. The Mummy (1933) - slow, stagy, dreamlike - I loved it!
5. Bride of the Monster (MST3K) with kids.
6. The Bride - Sting as Baron Frankenstein...? Who? What? WHY?
7. The Invisible Man
8. Ikarie XB1 -
9. Priest - well that was pretty godawful.
10. Delicatessen - another knocked off Daughter Number One's 1001 Movies list.
11. Amazon Women on the Moon
12. Queen of Outer Space
13. Le Dernier Combat (The Last Battle 1983) - Black and white, French, nearly dialogue free, post-apocalyptic movie.
14. Bedazzled (1967) - shared with Number One Daughter. Very funny.
15. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them - lots of CGI with some actors. Lots and lots of CGI. I was bored. The CGI was CGI - whoosh! pow! whoosh! oh look something else flying about where the actors were told to look and crash! look the actors are jumping out of the way of something the director has told them will be there eventually. So fucking what?! When there was less CGI on the screen the actors got to say lines which were, I guess, supposed to build threat and mystery but just induced confused boredom in me. Mainly, I suspect, because there was no point in trying to work out what the mystery was. The solution, to whatever it was that was apparently mysterious, was A: obvious from about 5 minutes in, B:bound to involve an explanation involving a whole chunk of J K Rowling's special brand of previously unmentioned make-it-up-as-we-go-along magical lore and C: solved/resolved using another chunk of Rowling's special brand of previously unmentioned make-it-up-as-we-go-along magical lore AND a shitload of special effects.
    
    To add insult to injury the film refused to end and just kept on going for a good ten minutes longer than it should have done as all the good guys had their extended happy endings milked dry then turned into hamburgers and wallets (not many deleted scenes from THAT end of the movie).
16. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) - first time for me on a decent copy and the first time for #1D who loved it

November

1. The Fantastic Four (2005) which looks a hell of a lot better than it used to do when held up along side the 2015 version. But that's still not saying a lot.
   
   For some reason the rest of the family went away for the day leaving #1D and myself alone with the DVD remote so we watched...
   
   
2. Being John Malcovich
3. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
4. Broadcast News
5. The Man Who Fell to Earth  -
   
   ...a day well spent.
   
   
6. What Waits Below - a 1984 British film, about the US army and a bunch of anthropologists encountering albino, underground-dwelling 'Lemurians' (aliens?) which was shot in America, and somehow managed to look Italian. Despite the endless, plodding around in very well-lit, unexplored caves, and a superb piece of sustained padding in which the cheapest actor with a speaking part wanders off alone to a horrible fate, there was something oddly watchable about this movie. It was routine pulp movie making but, from time to time, there were glimmers of a better, eerier movie trying to get out. (Moments often sent crashing back to earth by Timothy Bottoms as the over-zealous American General-in-Charge villain turning every line up to eleven after the second or third word.)
7. Her (2013) - smarter than your average AI/sentience movie in that it totally sidestepped the "Am I sentient?" bit and played with Phase 2. What next?
   
8. Interview with a Vampire - for the first time. And which I rather enjoyed. I'd never really realised before how gorgeous Brad Pitt can be when he wants to.
9. Rogue One - I think I actually made my kids jump with my cry of, "Oh, for Christ's sake!" when R2 and 3PO managed to get themselves shoe-horned into the script. Though, if truth be told (and why shouldn't it?), any hopes I had of anything new, or interesting appearing in the latest Star Wars Annual Marketing Tool had vanished long before. They finally died when the:
   
   "He doesn't like you."
   "I'm sorry."
   "I don't like you, either."
   
   guy from "A New Hope" bumps into our heroine on a street, half a galaxy away from where he turns up a few days later in the next movie, to bump into Luke Skywalker. (And how DID he and his pal avoided being vaporised with the rest of the city when the Death Star zaps it a few pages of script later?)
   
   So, Rogue One, same crap different box. I got fed up with counting the number of times our hero-of-the-moment got themselves into a hopeless situation only to be saved by a well aimed laser bolt heralding the sudden arrival of an off-screen rescuer. And I spent a lot of my time wondering why Star Wars universe space ships have to do that rotating 180 degrees thing as they land - AND when they take off. (Maybe it's something to do with winding up the elastic band that powers the motors, who knows?) And I just loved the way everyone helpfully tells each other stuff which is happening on screen in case we don't get it - "That Star Cruiser is disabled!"
   
   My 8 year old enjoyed it.
   
   I hope he grows out of Star Wars soon so I don't have to watch any more of this boring drivel.
10. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer - after threatening my Number Two Daughter with this for a couple of weeks since we watched the 2005 and 2015 iterations of the Fantastic Four origin movies I finally got round to inflicting it on her. Her comment? "....people paid money to see that?!"
11. Foxy Brown - I sort of managed to convince myself - but no one else in my family - that the Pam Greer boxset I bought the other day was for research purposes. I'm writing a comic strip about a 1970s soul sista superheroine. But, to be honest, I just find Pam Greer as sexy as hell.
    
12. Black Mama White Mama (1973) another of the endless number of 'women in prison' films of the 70s and 80s. This time lifting the central premise of The Defiant Ones by having a mixed race pair of escaped convicts learning to cooperate and respect each other. And throwing in a revolutionary army, a Patty Hearst type rich girl joining 'The Cause' (two years before Patty Hearst was kidnapped) and all the usual WIP tropes ticked off one by one (Shower scene? Check!... Predatory lesbian warder? Check!... Solitary confinement sequence? Check!... Catfight? Check!) until a violent bloodbath (including some audacious freeze frames) in which lots of Filipino stuntmen run around firing guns. I think all the bad guys got deaded and some of our hero guys got away but as everyone was wearing near identical casual clothing and near identical 1070 moustaches it was a bit hard to work out which side all the footsoldiers were on.
13. Coffy - last of the Pam Grierathon. I liked this one less than the other two.
14. Guy X - meh!
15. Factory Girl - with Andy Warhol geek, Number One Daughter. Isn't Guy Pierce a really good actor? Everything I see him in I like him more and more. (Ignore The Time Machine - that didn't happen.)
16. Funny Bones - a favourite film of mine that just gets better every time I see it.
17. Thor - Yet another Marvel movie that ends in a climactic fist fight between two white men. But I really quite enjoyed this one. (The movie, not the fist fight.) There was some nicely observed acting going on and, for once, I felt the CGI actually served the story rather than the other way around.
    
18. Snowpiercer - Another comic book movie. 2013 English-language South Korean-Czech science fiction / action film based on a French graphic novel. To add to the confusion the DVD copy I watched was on a Spanish disc with subtitles in Italian, Catalan, and Castilian. It did have the original soundtrack, which was mostly in English, but as several of the characters speak Korean throughout I had to puzzle out what they were saying from the Castilian subtitles. The first three quarters of the film were pretty good - including an utterly bonkers turn from Tilda Swinton which was worth the price of admission alone - but it all went a bit ho hum towards the end. Though, to be fair, there wasn't anywhere it really could go. The film-makers get bonus points though (SPOILER AHEAD) for having the courage to kill off the entire human race by the end of the film (bar two, but, as they are face to face with a, presumably, very hungry polar bear in the final frames, I doubt if they survived past the closing credits).

December

1. The Twins Effect - a 2003 Hong Kong Buffy / Twighlight / Wire fu/ rom com/horror/comedy that didn't work on ANY level. And wasted Jackie Chan's talents. I fell asleep.
2. Bladerunner 2049 - Just came back from watching this with my daughters at the cinema and, quite honestly, I was bored shitless.
   
   Daughter Number One (aka 'D#1' who, like me, thought Arrival was brilliant) was equally bored, and Daughter Number Two just fell asleep. The highlight of the evening, apart from me nearly losing it to an attack of the giggles (hysteria would have followed) when the police chief - with not a hint of post-modern irony anywhere in sight - told our hero cop - that he had to turn in his gun and badge and he had...all together now...! "Forty-eight hours..." was when the call girl turned up at our hero's apt and the AI GF stepped into her and shared her experience making love to the hero. D#1 and I had a brief - "Didn't we already watch this scene?" moment before we identified that the identical situation had been played out in Spike Jonzes' Her which we'd watched a few weeks ago*.
   
   And why was everything so ponderously SLOW? I'm in my late 50s. I'm irritated by modern ADHD rapid cutting styles that don't allow the audience time to savour the imagery or give the actors time to do any acting. I like Tarkovsky's films. I watch three hour French movies in which nothing much happens (though I will stick my hand up to being bored witless by La Belle Noiseuse). I am used to long slow films. I like long slow films. What I don't like is short-scripted, routinely-plotted, action movies played out as if they were slow, philosophicaly inclined, art-house, character pieces. And it was all needless. Everyone took ages to get anywhere. Every room had to be walked across slowly. Every conversation had to have long ponderous pauses between ---------------- phrases. ---------------- And ---------------- sometimes.
   
   between --------------- --------------- --------------- every
   
   ---------------- ---------------- word...
   
   Apart from anything else, it must be a bugger to act. I swear I could see panic in the actors' eyes from time to time as they desperately tried to remember whether the sentence they were half-way through was a question or not and whether they should be inflecting upwards - or was it already too late?
   
   Every possible moment was stretched out as far as it could go and then a bit more just for luck. “Okay that was great, we'll do another this time remember, Don't play it for real until it becomes real... but either way you get there, could you slow it down so we can see it.” I really do suspect that every single foot of film that went through the camera ended up on the screen. The movie looked like a first assembly cut with all the Special Effects already in place. There was no reason for any of it. Long slow shots of actors doing 'thinking acting' while the rest of us wait for him to catch up with the only plot point within living memory got wearing after a couple of hours.
   
   Daughter Number One (not a fan) is of the opinion (and is very convincing) that Jared Leto's character was made blind because Jared Leto (the actor) has, "no idea where to put his face" and by shoving contacts in him, and letting him just wave his head about all over the auction they saved weeks of rehearsal and shooting time.
   
   "No, Jared.... Cut! Jared, Harrison's over there. Jared? Jared? See the man in the chair? Could you look at him when you're talking to him.... Please? Just once? Okay.... take seventeen.... and action! ... Oh Jesus! Where's he going NOW!?..."
   
   We also at one point had a guessing game going as to which character was going to cry next. They all did. Apart from Jared Leto's character. But then he probably did, but was almost certainly facing the wrong way at the time so we didn't get to see.
   
   [Next morning] Thinking about it, I have come to the conclusion I am am even more disappointed in it than I was. I love the original book which I first read back in the 1970s, And I adore the original film which I saw in the cinema back at the time of its release. (When it had a voiceover.)
   
   The book was very funny - the opening chapter makes me laugh out loud with its absurdity. I think people forget how funny Dick can be.
   
   There is an economy and society in the book - crumbling and decaying albeit - but there. The original film is a stylistic treat and has hustle and bustle. There is an underlying society. We might not know what all these people are doing, rushing around from here to there in the street, but it looks like some kind of reality underscores the action. People have jobs. People buy and sell things. People eat. People don't just stand around on stairwells, or stand about outside robordellos**, or stand about behind desks like they do in 2049.
   
   It's long been an annoyance to me that in any Hollywood historical film (especially those featuring a castle) you never see any fields. You might see the odd chicken running around - no, forget that. You ALWAYS see the odd chicken running around - but you never see any fields. Never see (even in the background) that there is any husbandry going on. That the people in the world we are being shown actually DO anything other than be dramatic, or serve as cannon fodder. I often just watch movies and wonder what do these people DO all day when there's not a war on, or a plot to be foiled? What do they eat?
   
   BR2049 was totally lacking in humour. Nada. Nothing. Not an intentional smile in the whole thing. [EDIT: Apart from the bit with the dog.] And there was no underlying reality. How, for instance, did the vast Dickensian orphanage work? I mean how? How did 'customers' get there when the place was surrounded by scavenger types capable of, and happy to, harpoon and bring down police cruisers? (Notice how our hero suddenly has no compunction about killing to death anyone who threatens him - despite his, 'I have never killed anything that was born' moment a while before.) What did all those kids EAT? There weren't even any chickens - even synthetic ones - running around.
   
   If 'real wood' was so rare and expensive that a small wooden horse made our hero 'a rich man' why was the dead tree at the farm - surely worth several gazziliion times more - just ignored. "Holy crap!" says slicked-back hair police chief. "A whole tree! Well that's my department's budget problems solved for the next twenty years."
   
   It looked pretty in places though. A bit like flipping through a big coffee table book. Ohhh Ahhhh - but it echoed. It was hollow.
3. Silent Running - Now that was an interesting experience. I've seen Silent Running six or seven times since I first saw it in the cinema where it was running as a second feature to the newly-released American Graffiti.
   
   It's an OK film. Not one of the greatest SF film ever but a good example of the genre from the mini golden age that Hollywood enjoyed before Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas buggered it all up by making films that made more money than sense.
   
   At no time during any of the watchings of it have I ever felt the need to cry. At times I remember feeling slightly embarrassed by the near mawkish sentimentality on show. Tonight I snivelled like a baby and had tears streaming down my face at the end of it. How? Why?
   
   This time I was watching it with my two daughters. Daughter Number One (aged 15) had never seen it before and had chosen it as her turn in our turn-and-turn-about family film night. Daughter Number Two (aged 13) HAD seen it before... and fell asleep.
   
   The way our chairs were arranged as we watched the film meant I could not see my daughters. At the end of the film Daughter Number One was in tears. Real, big, wet-faced, trembling lips greeting. Somehow, silently, without being able to see her, I had picked up on the depth of feeling the story had induced in her and joined her. I've always known that watching a film with an audience (rather than on your own) intensifies the experience but I had never felt it so strongly and strangely as tonight. I really do doubt that telepathy exists but this was the nearest thing I have ever felt that came close to it.
   
   Her explanation? Pheremones. She reckons I smelled the sadness coming of her.
4. The Spanish Prisoner - in which I discover a new rule of movie watching. It's been a long held theory of mine that you come out of a good movie (i.e. one that you have engaged with - not some critically lauded piece of art that had you stroking your chin all the way through) that you come out of a good movie moving differently. You'll come out of an swashbuckling adventure film, swaggering and leaping about like Errol Flynn on steroids, out of a Hong Kong chop socky, hyper-actively jerky. I'd never noticed that a good film affected the way I talk before. After 90 minutes in the company of David Mammet's characters it took Number One Daughter and I a good couple of hours before we were able to complete a sentence without...?"
   "Overlapping?"
   "Yes..."
   "Over lapping..."
   "...and..."
   "...completing each other's..."
   "....sentences."
   "We did that
   "We did."
   "We did, didn't we?"
   "We did."
   "A lot."
5. Metropolis (1927) D#1 and I watched Fritz Lang's fully as restored (as it will ever be) 1927 Metropolis. (The version that includes the rediscovered South American footage with Fritz Rasp's part restored.) Me for the umpteenth time (in various versions), her for the first time.
   
   Damn! but it was an ambitious and beautiful film. 15 minutes shorter than Bladerunner 2049 but felt half that.
   
6. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me - D#1 and I finish off our mammoth watching of Twin Peaks, series one and two, with the prequel movie. One the whole I felt the movie was more than a bit of a wasted opportunity and didn't add anything much of anything after the first 20 minutes or so when we get past the guest star heavy prelude and arrive in Twin Peaks itself.
7. The Aristocrats - various 'comics' (some of whom I had actually heard of) tell a filthy joke for 90 minutes. Parts of it were actually quite funny but it was over-long.
8. Get Shorty - meh.
   

* I can recommend Her . It has smarts. Much more than this turd.
* * 'Robordello n. A knocking shop staffed by androids. A word I have (as far as I know) just made up and am extremely chuffed with.

2017 Movie Diary (Part 3 of 4)

July

1. King Kong Lives! - Oh gods that was terrible! I don't think I have spent so much time watching people staring up at the top corners of the screen (cut to an up angle of an actor in monkey suit then back again) than I have in the last 100 minutes.
2. Sexy Killer - Spanish slasher/zombie flick that played for laughs (and sometimes got them) whilst throwing all sorts of trick and ticks at the screen - the protagonist is constantly breaking the fourth wall - she rewinds the film at one point, takes part in a commercial break, and is in a split screen chase sequence. Not sure I'm ever going to want to watch it again.
3. 800 Balas (800 Bullets) - Spanish homage to the Spaghetti westerns of old which would have been a lot better if it had slowed down occasionally. It was relentlessly fast even when nothing much was happening. One thing I did learn though though. In Spanish cinema it is perfectly acceptable to have scenes in which a 10 year old boy fondles the naked breasts of the attractive young woman trying to seduce him, and later be shown in bed (full clothed) next to her (fully naked). Why did I never get acting gigs like that?
4. Shiri an over-long, pointlessly violent Korean thriller that signalled every 'twist' so far ahead that you didn't notice them when they arrived.
5. 9 1/2 Ninjas - one of the unfunniest 'comedies' I think I have ever seen. Made by people who presumably had seen a couple of Zucker Brothers movies, thought, "That looks easy!" and then found out it wasn't.
6. 976 Evil 2: The Astral factor - pretty meh sequel to a film I've not seen that had one really nice inventive moment. A secondary character gets sucked into a TV she had been watching (a la Pleasantville) and becomes part of the final scenes of public domain movie It's A Wonderful Life which suddenly segues into the, equally public domain, Night Of The Living Dead.
7. Desert Warrior (1988) - another Post-Apocalyptical Mad Maxican riot in which Lou 'The Hulk' Ferrigno struts his stuff. Mad Max trope points are clocked up with incredible rapidity, desert environment, vehicles with too many roll bars and/or spikes, people standing in said vehicles as they move, character in eyepatch, fingerless gloves, and a fight to the death in an arena all hit the screen in the first few minutes. After that it was watching people in helmets - lots and lots of face-obscuring, reuse-the-same-extras-in-a-different-costume, helmets in this film - walking up and down corridors or across vast tracts of desert. Lots of walking in this film. Lots and lots of 'getting from here to there as slowly as you can to pad out the running time', walking. My heart would fall every time we cut to a wide shot of desert with a figure on the extreme edge of the frame because you knew what you would be looking at for the next couple of hours... (I exaggerate for comic effect. But not much.) Interspersed with all this walking were scenes liberally sprinkled with TERRIBLE acting. Real junior school, end of term show level, "Yes!... I will Now. Say my. Line!" acting - from grown ups! I don't think it was supposed to be funny. (But then the 'laser guns' in this film actually do go, 'pew! pew!', so maybe it was.) I do know the first time director has never helmed anything else for which, I guess, we must be thankful.
   
   
8. Waxworks - a better than I was expecting horror which, though not brilliant, was far better than it had any right to be. Mind you, most things with David Warner in them are.
9. Autómata - one of those not bad SF films which seems to have missed it's audience (or vice versa). Unfortunately for Autómata it was released around the same time as the similarly themed Ex_Machina. Ex_Machina is certainly a better film, but as an entry in the When Does Machine Sentience Start? genre this deserves a look. Well worth the £1 I paid for it on eBay. Stylistically it's very obviously (shamelessly?) influenced by Blade Runner but there are some knowing nods to other less obvious SF films too: Logan's Run and Cherry 2000 to name but two.
10. Ender's Game - Lots of SFX.  I didn't like the book.  I didn't like this.
11. Trans Europ Express - Once banned in the UK, now rather tame, piece of erotic French weirdness.
12. It Came From Outer Space
13. Alienate -
14. Coherence (2013) - I like it! This may need rewatched and pretty soon too. Now here's a thing. I watched both this and Alienate on the same day. They have similarities. Both are low budget sf films which focus on the actions of individuals trying to survive and understand the extraordinary (mostly offscreen) events that have radically altered their lives. Both have a failed/failing relationship at their core. After watching Alienate for about an hour I was driven to turn on the On Screen Display of my DVD player to find out how much more there was to go before it ended. Only 36 minutes had elapsed. After watching Coherence I was amazed to find it had a running time of 124 minutes. I would have sworn it was only 80/ 90 minutes long.
15. Mulholland Drive - David Lynch's best watched with Number One Daughter.  I had forgotten quite how much sex there was in it.  It's more than slightly uncomfortablemaking watching lesbian sex scenes with your gay daughter.

August

1. Lady from Shanghai -
2. Bellville Rendez-vous -
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -
4. The Sinister Urge - (MST3K) an Ed Wood I have never seen before. (Well, most of it I had never seen before, some chunks of this one did turn up in other Ed Wood films - or vice versa). Joined, halfway through, by Number 2 Daughter who has never come across MST3K before and is, I suspect, an instant fan.
5. Manos Hands of Fate (MST3K) - I was right.
6. Reno 911 Miami - well that was pretty shit.  A big screen outing for a TV show I had never seen more than clips of before.  I guess I must have seen some of the more subtle, funnier bits or the film upped the squirm levels because this was just garbage.
7. Around the World in 80 Days - silly fun.
8. The Flesh and Blood Show - Pete Walker's first 'horror' film. He got better.
9. Attenberg - Greek arthouse film about a father daughter relationship. It worked.
10. The Evil Cult (aka lots of other titles) - OTT hyper-chopsocky capers with Jet Li and Chingmy Lau. I had NO idea what was happening for more than 45 seconds at a time. Utterly bewildering and thoroughly enjoyable.
11. King of the Zombies (1941) - a creaky old Republic which some people laud as being subversively anti racist. (For its time.)
12. Anti Matter (2016) - low budget British SF. Smart stuff. I liked it.
13. Police Story 2 - Jackie Chan at his finest.
14. Plankton (aka Creatures from the Abyss) Italian horror crap that made Troll 2 look well made. Five 'teenagers' find a (seemingly) abandoned boat in the middle of the ocean and the local fish - which have been lunching on radioactive plankton and thus mutated into hyper-sexual flying fish with a taste for human flesh - eat them.
    But not soon enough.
    The gratuitous nude shower scene was a brief but welcome relief. (The actress's only screen credit. Presumably - given the rest of her performance - she went back to something a lot less intellectually challenging than standing still in a bikini and fondling her breasts in the shower.)
15. The Machine (2013) - yet another addition to the 'When does an attractive 'female' robot (called Eva or Ava*) become sentient?' genre. This time, I'm sorry to say, I didn't buy it. The script wasn't tight enough and I didn't believe in any of the characters at all... until the final couple of shots and the last line. Then, suddenly, just as the film ended, there was a little moment of a really great movie shining through but I doubt it was worth the effort getting there. Not sure the obvious reference to HAL's "I'm afraid!" line as the robot has its personality wiped helped. It's always dangerous to remind the audience about better films they could be watching instead of yours.
    * For some reason they are never called 'Beatrice', or 'Hortense', or 'Hildegard', or any of the million other perfectly respectable women's names nearly always 'Eve' or 'Eva' with the occasional 'Maria' thrown in.
16. Brotherhood of the Wolf - a bit over-long mashup of French historical swashbuckler, choppy socky martial arts, and monster on the lose genres all mixed up with the sort of religious secret society skulduggery that seems to crop up in French fiction more often than anywhere else. Not as big as the sum of the parts but entertaining enough. (Some of the more entertaining parts belonged to Monica Bellucci.)

September

1. Dune (for the umpteenth time) with Number One daughter (who was seeing it for the first time). Much hilarity was had.
2. The Other Side of the Bed (2002 aka El otro lado de la cama) - meh!  Spanish sex comedy musical which got very repetitive.
3. Snow White and the Huntsman -
4. Fantastic Four (2015) - oh wow! It actually makes the 2005 version look good! I had bought the copy we watched in a charity shop for a quid back when it was first out. I mean, how bad does a film have to be that you find the thing on sale second-hand in charity shops the week it is released on DVD? My curiosity wasn't piqued enough to actually watch the thing though and it's languished in my 300+ disc pile of unwatched movies till I mentioned this to Daughter Number Two who, being my daughter, is developing a great taste in crap films. And suddenly it became a MUST SEE NOW! movie.
   The answer to the question "I mean, how bad does a film have to be...?" is 'Bad'. Very Very Bad. I think my moment of realisation of how truly awful the film was was the moment it dawned on me that the actor playing the teen Reed at the science fair was IT. He was our hero. He wasn't a stepping stone between the child actor playing kid Reed inventing stuff in his garage, and some other older actor playing grown-up, mature hero Reed. 'This speccy dweeb is our lead?' I thought, 'You're kidding me?!'. I'm sure the kid is a decent actor, and I'm sure he is a nice person but he was woefully miscast.
   As for the convolutions the script had to go through to get a black actor into the mix the less said the better. It would have been much simpler to dump the brother sister relationship (which played little to no significant part in the story anyway) and get rid of all the adoption bullshit they had to nail on to get it to work. The script had no problems with dumping other huge chunks of the 'canon' - why not this one?
   Truly Bad.
5. Slaughter High - pretty shitty slasher film in which a bunch of British Actors, all way too old to play teenagers, try to keep their 'American' accents under some kind of control while reading lines written by someone who had watched a lot of old movies.
6. The Class of 1999 - cliché heavy late 80's sf high school gang warfare crap.
7. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) - the best. The final scene gave me horrors just like it did the first time I saw it, back when it came out. That time I didn't know it was coming, this time I did and it still got me. It got Number One Daughter too who was genuinely terrified at the end. I love being a dad.
8. Martian Land - It's not great, in fact it's a pretty naff piece of junk but by, low budget (Sharknado) production company, The Asylums's standards it's a masterpiece.
   The plot is unfocused and all over the place and doesn't make much sense from one minute to the next. Most of the acting is one note (but then so are the characters so it's hardly ALL the actors fault - some of the dialogue is execrable) and some of the acting is okay. (The stand out was Arianna Afsar who did a pretty good job with a minimum of material.) The SFX are not terrible. All in all, the usual. Ho Hum.
   But there is one aspect to the film which was refreshing. The two young women trapped at the start of the film, and who have to make their way through the course of the film from point A to Point B to do something important - are a couple. They're a lesbian couple. And nothing much is made of it. It's not played up for titillation. It's not polemical. That they are gay is not a problem for the characters, or anyone they encounter. It just is. They're gay - so what? Background stuff - and they both survive to end of the film!
   Martian Land not going to win any GLAAD awards but Yaaaaay! it's a step!
9. Wishing Stairs (2003) - I dip my toe again into the waters of Korean Ghost/Horror. Set in an all girl High School for the arts, Wishing Stairs is a tale of mild lesbian obsession, ballet, sculpture, and psychotic haunting that reminded me of a sort of Asian Bunty story gone wrong. The Four Marys at Slaughter High. I came out of it slightly baffled.
10. Whispering Corridors - more ghastly Korean schoolgirly ghostliness. I liked it.
11. Love and Other Catastrophies - a repeat watching of a lovely little Australian film about student life (including a happy lesbian couple for a change) prompted by my having bought the director's only other feature (Strange Planet) the other week.