Performance Appraisal

Well, I’ve done everything else, and seeing as it’s the last day of the year, I suppose that its time to look back at my personal 2004.

Helluva year for me. I finally crawled out from under the soul-crushing rock of my previous job to claw back a sliver of dignity with a new job. Hugely tedious, but at least the stench of self-loathing no longer sticks to me.

I passed my driving test, after almost fifteen years of intermittent, half-arsed attempts to get round to it.

I gained a phenomenal little girl. (Surely THE highlight of my year).

This blog started. (Surely THE highlight of your year).

After a 2003 where not a single word of mine was published out there in the world, 2004 gave me a handful of magazine articles, a new role as the Film Editor for a widely read music website, and, my professional highlight to date, a really very excellent book was published with lots of wise and whirling words straight from my keyboard. Particularly proud of that one. Kudos to me.

On top of that, my healthily-polluted ideaspace kept spitting out ideas for comic books and movie scripts that I have diligently scrawled out with an eye on completion in 2005. The long-mooted Film Deal may well come off next year.

Personally, 2004 has been happy and successful.

Professionally, after a remarkably fallow 2003 when I lost all the momentum I had built up in the preceding years, 2004 reignited my writing career. Now I just need to keep building on that for 2005. I need more paid writing commissions for next year, I need to consolidate the contacts I’ve made this year, and I just have to keep on becoming a better writer. And I need to write a proper treatment for the Big Movie to get the wheels greased on that project at last. Amongst many, many other things that I can’t think of right now.

Ze clock, she is ticking.

AKA Year in Review: The Books

And so another Christmas comes and goes. I won’t go into any great detail about it here, seeing as, barring the odd superficial difference, Christmases are the same all over. I ate far too much. I probably drank too much. I’m positive I didn’t deserve the quantity and quality of presents I got. I will say, though, that it was a treat to have my first Christmas with little Buttercup. Even at the tender age of 3 months, she got a real kick out of it.

Anyway, enough of my yakking. Nothing can stop the AKA Year in Review, and the time has come to shoot a dirty look at my heaving bookshelves and eulogise the words of wisdom causing the wood to creak. Onwards!

Percival Everett – Erasure – A well-respected black author, who writes worthy but virtually unread academic tracts, is incensed at the soaring popularity of ghetto fiction. With a desire to put a gun to the genre’s head, he assumes the nom de guerre Stagg R. Leigh and pens My Pafology (later retitled Fuck), and then looks on in horror as the book becomes a massive success, as his life unravels out of his control. A great book where the storytelling is more important than the story told. Outstanding.

Newton Thornburg – Dreamland – Another well-deserved re-release from the long-forgotten crime writer behind the undisputed genre classic Cutter and Bone. First published in 1983, Dreamland is another tragic, elegiac knife in the guts of modern America, as money, drugs, porn, booze and corruption cause seeping lesions on the overfed white meat of Los Angeles, destroying lives indiscriminately. Strangely beautiful and sadly still relevant.

Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita – The fabulist masterpiece about the appearance of the Devil and his minions in Moscow, as they turn the city into a heaving lunatic asylum. I read this under duress, thinking I would hate it. I was wrong. One of the finest books I’ve ever read.

Susannah Breslin – You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? – Breslin’s reports from behind the open sets and sticky lenses of Porn Valley were astonishing, so I was really looking forward to this first collection of short stories. I wasn’t disappointed. Harsh, terse, sharp little stabs of fiction to disturb and unsettle, peeling back the flesh on the modern American psyche. Go grab an insight into her first novel here, and see what one of the freshest voices in fiction sounds like.

Hunter S. Thompson – Kingdom of Fear (Loathsome Secrets of A Star-Crossed Child In the Final Days of the American Century) – Conclusive proof (not that we needed it) that those who believe that the Good Doctor is past his prime are wrong, wrong, wrong. His power to take unerring aim with well-chosen words is undimished, as he slices away at the short-sighted evil fucks dismantling the world piece by piece. Still the Daddy.

George P. Pelecanos – Hard Revolution – The Greatest Living American Crime Writer. Fact. Another piece of history clicks into place as Pelecanos looks back to Washington D.C. in the days surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King. Pelecanos has yet to write a book that wasn’t stone brilliant, and this is no exception.

Don Siegel – A Siegel Film – I forgot I even had this book until I dug it out of a box that had been sitting in the corner of my office for the last year and a half. The man behind Invasions of the Body Snatchers and Dirty Harry writes his memoirs in a disarmingly honest, funny and entertaining way, slapping down all the fools he was forced to tolerate over the length of his impressive career.

Christmas Rapping

Hello-ho-ho. Saint Nick here.

Some of you will know me as Santa Claus, or Father Christmas, or Kris Kringle. You know, the portly fellow with the large sack that he unloads on you with a hearty laugh. Like Ron Jeremy.

AKA has kindly invited me to contribute to his blog for the day. I was unfamiliar with this Sucker Punch before now. What a potty mouth he has on him! I might have to put him on the “naughty” list this year.

Anyway, I was just chilling in my crib, listening to some Kurtis Blow, and AKA wanted me to say a few brief words on the eve of Christmas.

Firstly, those fraudulent impostors who pretend to be me in those built-up Shopping Areas of Rampant Commerce in cities all over the world. They are rubbish! They are besmirching my good name in order to sell you more tawdry cheap baubles! Let me clarify something for you:

I don’t smell of wee and Special Brew like those scallywags. I can smell those rancid stinkers from the North Pole!

Also, I fail to understand this excessive consumerism. You should be spending Christmas loving your families and laughing with your friends, not working yourselves into a sweaty, destitute frenzy by suckling on Mammon’s teat with your unnecessary spending!

Anyway, I must go. Rudolph has messed on the rug. And reindeer poop stains, don’t you know.

Don’t get broke, don’t get sick, and don’t get angry. To all the readers of Sucker Punch, have yourselves a very Merry Christmas.

AKA Year in Review: The Music

This wasn’t easy. My tastes run towards the old skool, so for those expecting an exhaustive list of the good and great of 2004 are doomed to disappointment.

Yes, there were fine, fine albums this year from the Beastie Boys, De La Soul, Jill Scott and Prince. But they all have back catalogues full of fine albums, so no surprises there.

The closest we’re going to get to a musical retrospective is going to come from a glance at the stack getting the most play currently on the AKA Wheels of Steel. To wit:

Masters at Work Mastercuts – Kenny Dope – Disco Heat (2004) – OK, granted, this came out this year, but this is all predominantly late 70s stuff. Discs 2 and 3 are unexpurgated full tracks, but the real treat here is Disc 1, a DJ mix tape. Taking all the chunkiest slabs of funk and cutting the shit out of them, MAW man Dope strips the disco cheese out and only leaves the full phat.

Tom Waits – Foreign Affairs (1977) – Towards the tail end of his lounge lizard lothario era, and just before he embarked on the found sound alchemy of hitting dustbin lids, screaming down tubes and creating sonic marvels, this is Waits at his bruised and beautiful best, with that inimitable voice that sounds like bourbon and barbecue, gravel and gasoline, heartattack and vine.

David Holmes – Ocean’s Twelve OST (2004) – The Rat Pack stylings of the first film are tweaked for a more Eurocentric groove on another flawless package of retro concoctions from Holmes.

Snoop Dogg feat. Pharrell – Beautiful (2003) – The Neptunes sterile soundscape twinned with the loping drawl of the Doggfather gives him his best single since those days with Dre.

Maxwell – Now (2001) – One for the Where Are They Now? file. Maxwell’s third album came out almost four years ago, and not a semi-quaver from him since. One of the artists at the vanguard of the Nu Soul movement of the mid-90s, Maxwell’s mixture of 60s vocals, lush 70s arrangements, and a splash of 80s rawness created a sound that sounded reassuringly familiar and sparklingly new at the same time.

Bobby Womack – Lookin For a Love (The Best of 1968–1976) – What can I tell you? It’s Bobby Womack. It’s great. He certainly doesn’t need me bigging him up. The music speaks for itself. Classic.

SINGLE OF 2004 - Twista – Slow Jamz – This would win purely for rhyming “Vandross” with “pants off”, but this valentine to the quiet storm soulsters of the 80s combined with furious wordplay from the ubiquitous Kanye West has been played regularly in the AKA crib for the whole year. We have a winner!

Other than that, I’ve been leaning on old standbys for most of the year, with lots of Joni Mitchell (Blue and The Hissing of Summer Lawns) Stevie Wonder (mostly Fulfillingness' First Finale) and Curtis Mayfield (mostly the Right Combination album he did with Linda Clifford).

A caution on a worrying trend I spied at the end of 2003, which has been maintaining a dangerous pace this year – The evils of Fogey Jazz. Yes, I do mean this hideous Jamie Cullum, Katie Melua, Michael Buble stuff we keep getting. Jazz, like hip-hop 20 years ago, always used to signify innovation and flexibility. Now, its just tired rehashes, and white folks doing black music without any of the flair or creativity. Just a bunch of unnecessary covers foisted on us with depressing regularity. If I hear Rod Fucking Stewart massacring another standard, I will break his beak, shave his spiky head, flay his fake-tan hide and feed him to a leopard. Where’s Courtney Pine when you need him?

Oh, and I loathe the Scissor Sisters. Stop lauding them. 'Tis shit.

AKA Year in Review: The Movies

Right, I was going for a Top Ten but, being an ornery critter, I couldn’t whittle the list down that much. So I’m going with a Top Twelve. For the sake of fairness, I have deliberately rejected any films I saw in a professional capacity. If I reviewed it elsewhere, it was immediately disqualified for inclusion.

For those with memories longer than that of your household goldfish, you will know I’ve already unveiled four of the twelve. (That would be Kill Bill Volume 2, Man on Fire, Oldboy and The Punisher).

Time to stop you from waiting any longer. Here, in absolutely no order whatsoever, are the rest of the AKA 2004 Top Twelve Movies. Have at thee!

The Cooler – I’ve discussed this film on the blog before, so I won’t repeat it all here. Nevertheless, one of the all-time great Vegas movies.

The School of Rock – I wish I had been eight-years-old when I saw this, so it could have changed my life. All family movies should be as brilliant as this. (Having said that, I wish all Jack Black and Richard Linklater movies were even half as brilliant as this.) Rockin’ good fun.

Lost in Translation – In retrospect, maybe it is a little po-faced and pretentious. But the two central performances are fantastic, and it was funny, touching and beautifully shot. People who complained that there was no story should be locked in a Karaoke Bar with their ear lobes stapled back for all eternity.

Spider-Man 2 – I’ll come clean. I was one of the only people on the planet who thought the first Spider-Man movie was a bit, well, average. Having suitably lowered my expectations for the sequel, I was absolutely thrilled with this. Stan Lee’s most famous son faces off against Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus in THE Marvel Comics movie of 2004. (Which more than compensates for the truly dreadful Blade Trinity, which managed to unleash a heavy stream of piss all over the first two movies and Wesley Snipes, whilst producing a fantastic performance by Ryan Reynolds at the same time.)

Hellboy – Ron Perlman and Guillermo Del Toro weave wonders with Mike Mignola’s creation about a demon raised by the Allies to fight-the-forces-of-evil in the wake of the Second World War. Apart from the abrupt ending, this was sweet perfection.

American Splendor – A different kind of comic-book hero. The inspiring life of loveable curmudgeon Harvey Pekar and his stubborn refusal to change his ways for anyone, whilst all the while he plugs away at his life’s work, the underground comix of the title. Paul Giamatti should have won the Best Actor Oscar for this.

Infernal Affairs – Makes Michael Mann’s Heat look like a straight-to-video cheapie knock-off. A Hong Kong crime epic that will be neutered by its forthcoming Hollywood remake. The most rich and complex crime movie since L.A. Confidential.

Dawn of the Dead – This should have been awful. A Hollywood remake of one of the most beloved cult zombie classics ever. Somehow, it worked. Replace Romero’s shambling Undead with 28 Days Later’s souped-up Infected, stick some cannon fodder in a mall, and let rip. Resplendent in all its awful beauty, and genuinely scary.

WORST FILM OF 2004: Elephant – When Gus Van Sant was being reviled for his unnecessary shot-by-shot remake of Psycho, I just shrugged. So what? It was just an art-house conceit welded onto a Hollywood classic. Superfluous? Sure. But maybe that was the point. Well, Gus, I’m not going to fight your corner anymore. This film SUCKED! A meandering, directionless meditation on Columbine, this broke the cardinal rule of cinema: it was boring. Elephant dung.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: The Incredibles, Northfork, Jersey Girl.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

As the 342nd day of the year begins, and magazines and websites fill themselves with those extraneous “Best of” and “Worst of” the year lists, I find myself co-opting this most unoriginal of ideas and embracing the arbitrary breakpoint of one calendar year to have a look back, as I cast my jaded and bloodshot critical eyes over 2004’s movies, music, comics, books, television, current events…all manner of pop culture detritus that has floated through my thoughts in the last (almost) 12 months.

Critics always try to make connections where, often, none exist. They try to find trends where only coincidence resides. After all, they have copy to file and only a finite number of interesting things to say about any given piece of work.

Frequently, trends exist solely due to imitative behaviour. “Well, if that worked, then we should do it again and again and again, until we hammer it into the ground and suck every last penny out of it!” That’s why there are so many sequels.

2004 has seen the resurgence of the zombie film; the continuing success of the superhero movie; and the nascent birth of Hollywood’s move to remake all manner of Asia Extreme oddities (by sucking out whatever made them unique in the first place, and blanderising them in the name of Money, Money, Money).

Next year, I predict less zombie movies, more superhero movies, and a heaving warehouse full of American studio movies based on Korean and Japanese mini-classics.

But I digress. For me, THE movie genre of the year has been the full-blooded return of the Revenge Movie. And I do love to have me a good revenge movie.

The Bride’s mission finally ended in Kill Bill Vol. 2, Thomas Jane strapped on an armoury that would make the toughest mobster’s bladder void itself in The Punisher, Denzel Washington showed us a neat trick with exploding suppositories in Man on Fire, and Min-sik Choi topped that with an even neater trick with a live octopus in Oldboy.

Now, a lesser writer would try and find some tenuous connection between this surge of bloody retribution splashing in crimson arcs across cinema screens the world over. Shit like: it’s a sign of the increasing shift to the right in America. Or: it satisfies a need for catharsis stemming from the events of 9/11 and the War in Iraq.

But that’s all a bunch of crap. Tarantino has had a love affair with the revenge movie most of his life, the Marvel Comics character The Punisher dates back to the early ‘70s, the script for Man on Fire has been bouncing around Hollywood for a couple of decades, and Oldboy is the middle chapter in Chan-wook Park’s revenge trilogy that has been gestating for a while now. The fact that they all turned up at the same time is a simple matter of coincidence.

So, to that Wild Bunch of anti-heroes, to Beatrix Kiddo and Frank Castle, John Creasy and Oh Dae-Su, I salute you all and your endlessly inventive ways of dispatching evildoers. Even though not a single one of you could be excused of your own evildoings, you doomed death-dealers.

And every one of these four movies sits comfortably in my Top Ten Flicks of the year. AKA says check ‘em out.

Acronyms Kick Ass

I use “AKA” as my online moniker, because, conveniently enough, those three letters are my undeniably cool initials.

Coincidently, of course, those three letters denote “alias” in and of themselves. As in “Also Knows As” or “Another Known Alias”.

Lesser known (and, consequently, far less useful) acronyms include: “Asociace Komunikaèních Agentur” (the European Association of Communications Agencies) and “Attack Cargo Ship” (Auxiliary, Cargo, Attack). Avast, me hearties! I can definitely groove on some of that pirate patter.

Incredibly useless acronyms for a slew of clubs that I would never be a member of: “American Kennel Association”; “American Killifish Association”; and “American Kitefliers Association”.

No, I don’t know what a “killifish” is either. But further research tells me that it is “Any of numerous small fishes of the family Cyprinodontidae, including the guppy and mosquito fish, inhabiting chiefly fresh and brackish waters in warm regions.”

So, now we all now. Knowledge is power.

In Japanese, depending on where you put the accent, “AKA” can either mean “red” or “demon”. That’s right, laydeez, I’m a veritable Hellboy.

I’ve left my favourite until last. It’s something that I’m sure I should be dishing out more often. “Above Knee Amputation”.

Clearly, I have far too much time on my hands today.

Gutted

Four more years. Four more motherfucking years.

Shit.

Now the insanity will begin in earnest. Ragnarok is coming. The last four years was just the warm-up act.

This is a dark, dark day, with the Smiling Satanic Simian flinging faeces at us from his Big White House.

I am indescribably depressed at this news.

War of the World

Ohio, oh-me-oh, oh-my-oh. Damn, this is a tight race. As tight as the garrotte pressing against the throat of our planet, a sliver of red spotting at the seam of tension from the coil of razor-sharp red tape. So tight that we all hold our breath waiting for the outcome and I, for one, am going blue in the face.

When I get home this evening, I’m going to dig out my unread copy of Jake Tapper’s Down and Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency, (the exhaustive look at the dirty tricks behind the Bush-Gore 2000 Rumble) and my well-read copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.

Very, very exciting. The unfurling of history. But I don’t think there will be a definitive answer any time soon.

City Lights

The London Film Festival began on Wednesday.

I LOVE the London Film Festival. Two of my favourite things, London and Film, rubbing shoulders, ripping each other’s clothes off and violently bringing each other off in a fortnight of frenzied, hungry rutting, with blood, sweat and celluloid sprayed in all four corners of Leicester Square.

This is the first time in four years that I haven’t had press accreditation for the festival. I couldn’t really justify it with the new job and new baby. But I used to love the whole thing. In the lead up, there’s two weeks of back-to-back press screenings, three movies a day, starting at around 9.30am, leaving you on the verge of deep vein thrombosis by the late afternoon, squinting into the icy winter sky over the South Bank.

And then when the festival begins, there are more screenings. And interviews. And far too much coffee. And parties. And free beer. And you end up starting the day at 9am, and finishing at 3am in an after-hours dive in W1, arguing about movies with your peers, in slurred, nonsensical, fractured sentences. And sometimes, there’s a bit of journalism thrown in there too.

I’m going to miss it.

But to mark this occasion in my own special way, I’ve been reflecting on great London movies. And I’m struggling. It’s much easier to think of the London movies that suck.

Notting Hill is a bad, bad London movie. So is Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and Snatch. None of those films are any kind of London that I know. It’s dishonest fakery, a counterfeit London for an international audience who don’t know any better, and don’t care either.

And the Carry On films and the Ealing comedies and Brief Encounter are all interesting in an historical sense, or as entertainments, but it’s a London that predates me, and it doesn’t matter how much I like Sid James or Terry Thomas or Trevor Howard, these aren’t people I recognise from my London life.

So, here are the top three London films that I can think of at the moment:

An American Werewolf in London – It took the objective eye of the great and underrated (American) John Landis to conjure up this perfect confluence of horror and comedy. The gore and laughs are piled high to dizzying levels amidst some of the great London-on-film moments, like the werewolf’s-eye-view of a rampage around the London Underground, or the porn cinema showing “See You Next Tuesday”, where David is confronted by all his victims (in reality the now-closed ABC cinema on Piccadilly which is currently a ticket booth that I never, ever see anyone using), or the decapitated head bouncing down Piccadilly.

28 Days Later – Not strictly a London film, but this is up there for the startling opening shots of Cillian Murphy wandering around the abandoned zombie-ravaged capital, all shot on the fly, guerrilla-style, in the early hours of daybreak by Danny Boyle. Burning cars, littered streets, and toppled-over double-deckers. Just like the real London after the Poll Tax riots.

Dirty Pretty Things – “We are the people you do not see. We are the ones who drive your cabs. We clean your rooms. And suck your cocks.” My favourite London film ever. Superficially, it’s a thriller. But it resonates because it's really about how we live our London lives today. Stephen Frears has a meticulous eye for detail, and every scene rings true. This film opened the London Film Festival a couple of years back. And I do believe that is where I came in...

Writer's blog

One of the advantages of the multifarious Sucker Punch, for me at least, is that it helps to kick loose the inarticulate, the inchoate and the incoherent from my seething psyche, and strings it all together into a series of sentences that perpetrate the idea that I am a witty and intelligent man. Sometimes.

This blog frequently helps me win the battle against procrastination and, that bane of all wordpeddlers, writer’s block. It can be a pretty handy warm-up before the more arduous workout of my “professional” writing: the film reviews, the feature articles and, when I’m really rolling sevens, the contributions to books. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing. But it ain’t always easy.

I can come on here and spray paint my graffiti on the electronic wall without any of the performance anxiety of the other writing in my life, and sometimes I surprise myself with stuff on here that is far superior to the supposedly “real” writing that I sign my name to. And I’ve been wondering why that is. Partly, I suppose it’s because there are no limitations here. I can write as much or as little as I want, as often or as infrequently as I want, about whatever I want, without the straightjacket of editors, or house style, or deadlines, or anxiety about my professional reputation (such that it is).

Another factor must be subject matter. On here, I invariably write exclusively about topics about which I have an opinion. With, for example, a film review, I sometimes find that I have nothing that I really need or want to say about a movie, but I still have 500 words that I have to fill, and I hate to just hack something out if I can avoid it, so I punch it repeatedly in my mind until it acquiesces and says something vaguely meaningful, informative or entertaining.

You see, lately, I’ve been able to come to the blog, write away happily, post an entry, and then I go off, fire up a Word document, and gaze at a white screen for a long time waiting for some kind of inspiration. Admittedly, the demands of fatherhood make it difficult to think clearly sometimes, but this is something I’ve noticed before the arrival of the little poo-factory Buttercup.

And in some ways, the blog becomes another avoidance tactic to postpone the other work clamouring for my limited mental attention.

Not sure that there is any conclusion or solution for this one. I’m just thinking out loud. But I really am going to go off and try to finish a feature article I should have put to rest months ago.

By the end of the week.

Maybe.

You’ll Believe a Man Can Fly!

“Say, Jim! Whoo! That’s a bad outfit!”

Towards the end of 1978 and the beginning of 1979, I would have been in the early stages of my sixth year on the Planet Earth, around the time the last son of Krypton crash-landed into my life. Whilst my peers were obsessing over George Lucas’ galaxy far, far away, I was awed by a different fantasy. To this day, Superman remains the finest superhero movie ever made, and I’m convinced that, regardless of advances in technology, it will never be bettered.

From the jagged, opaque, crystalline refuge of his Fortress of Solitude, to the urban sprawl of Metropolis and the spinning globe atop the offices of the Daily Planet, everything was perfectly realised as a world just like ours, but not. And the moment that crackled along my synapses and irrevocably changed me, in the split-second when I pledged my heart to the cinema forever: The bumbling, well-meaning Clark Kent rips his shirt asunder to reveal that S, before diving into a telephone booth and appearing in the bold red, yellow and blues, his cape billowing in the city night. And then his feet leave the ground.

“Easy, miss. I've got you.”
“You, you've got me? Who's got you?”

Perfection.

And it wasn’t perfection because of the now-primitive special effects, or the word-perfect screenplay, or the confident, assured direction, or the all-star cast, or the point-of-view of a six-year-old boy witnessing miracles (although all those things played a part). It was all down to Christopher Reeve. He was Clark Kent. And he will always be my Superman.

For someone as insanely devoted to comics as I am, I’ve never been into Superman comics. The character on the page never did it for me. I was spoilt from a tender, young age, because I saw the real thing. A bulletproof man who could jump buildings in a single bound, and was more powerful than a locomotive. Part of me never stopped believing that Christopher Reeve was really Superman. Clark Kent was just another fake identity in Superman’s Russian doll identity. When you peeled off all the layers of artifice, Christopher Reeve was a genuine superhero.

In 1995, the man who could fly was no longer able to walk. When he appeared at the 68th Academy Awards ceremony on stage in his wheelchair, I cried in a mixture of delight, joy, and sadness. Since then, he fought tirelessly for medical research to help cure the causes of paralysis, with limited, but by no means insignificant, success, hamstrung by political bureaucracy.

And now he's gone. And I can't think of a suitable goodbye that will do him justice, or that won't sound trite. But maybe I'm just not ready to say goodbye to him yet. So I'll leave it with these words from Jonathan Kent to his adoptive son, that could just as well apply to this greatest of American heroes:

“You can do all these amazing things, and sometimes you think that you will burst wide open unless you can tell someone about it, don't you? There's one thing I know for sure, son. And that is, YOU ARE HERE FOR A REASON. I don't know what it is, exactly, but I do know this much: it's NOT to score touchdowns.”

Always Greener

Dammit, I can’t sustain the unfettered hatred. I almost enjoyed today. I spent my lunch break sitting in the park, the sun blazing down causing little trails of condensation to swirl down the side of my ice-cold Dr. Pepper, reading a book (Joe Queenan’s The Unkindest Cut, for those who care about such things). I was the only one in the entire park. Green Park, it ain’t. But I did like it. I was chillin’ like a villain.

But I have no doubt that today was an aberration brought on by a pleasurable weekend and the unseasonably awesome hot weather we are having.

Oh yeah, you should all go and see Spielberg’s The Terminal this week. There are loads of reasons for this, but you can discover what they are for yourselves. Go. Watch. Enjoy.

Ballad of the Sad Café

With my days of indentured servitude here at the Big Bad Bullshit Business rapidly coming to a close, and with it my opportunities to go hog-wild in my favourite corner of the globe on a daily basis, I thought it was time to grab one last blow-out meal at the New Piccadilly on Denman Street.

The New Piccadilly will soon be going the way of deeley-boppers, videocassettes and Vanilla Ice. Apart from the fact that, y’know, the New Piccadilly is actually good and will be missed. The owner is hanging up his spatula, retiring and selling up.

It’s not just the quality of the food, the reasonably priced menu, the slightly-camp uniforms the waiters wear, the comfort in knowing that you can ALWAYS get a table, or the fact that both formica and cholesterol are in plentiful supply. All fine reasons for going there, but that’s not it. It’s the sad realisation that another part of My London is being shunted out of the real world and into the sepia-coloured contours of my memory.

My grandparents used to have a place like that. When they first came over from Cyprus, they had a greasy spoon on the Parkway in Camden. The floor was sheer geometric perfection, with black and white tiles from the front door to the kitchen. Then they had a place in Willesden in the late seventies / early eighties that I vividly remember. The ketchup dispensers shaped like big, red plastic tomatoes. My grandfather behind the counter cooking up the food, his beaming smile always visible through the fugue of greasy smoke, and my grandmother bussing tables with nothing but a stubby pencil, crumpled notepad and her ever-present hairnet keeping the thick, black strands of Mediterranean hair out of her face. I don’t think I ever saw her without that hairnet on.

I wish I valued the place whilst it was still there. To me it was just the place where my grandparents used to make me food. I remember that my brother and I always used to complain that we didn’t want to eat there. We wanted MacDonald’s…

That place was worth a million Big Macs.

For the record, I had a Mixed Grill (bacon, sausage, egg, chips, peas and steak), bread and butter, two large Cokes and a slice of apple pie with cream. I had a mad sugar jag and a bloated gut for the rest of the afternoon, but it was worth it.  

Cheers

Coach: What's new, Norm?
Norm: I need something to hold me over until my second beer.
Coach: How about a first beer?
Norm: That'll work.
 
Lunchtime drinking always seems like a better idea before than it does after. Empty stomach, a five-minute walk over to The Glasshouse Stores on Brewer Street, and the cheapest booze in London. I can conclusively say that my productivity will be severely diminished this afternoon. Fuck it. What are they gonna do? Fire Me? (I love that – it never gets old.)
 
Trying to hide the evidence by shielding my dilated pupils and moving cautiously yet purposefully. Chugging Smints like a pill addict to hide the beery odour. Finally getting around to eating some lunch (something I really should have done beforehand).
 
Need to blast the fog from my mind by the end of the day. I’m going out for a session this evening as well. (Readers of the sublime Don’t Explain Don’t Complain will know this already). And if I remember my history, the potential for messiness is high.
 
Woody: Pour you a beer, Mr. Peterson?
Norm: All right, but stop me at one. Make that one-thirty.

Go get ‘em, tiger

What else? Saw Spider-Man 2 over the weekend. After my disappointment with the first film in the franchise, the sequel excelled. The CGI has improved, but it still isn’t quite there yet. I still don’t believe that a man is swinging through the valleys and canyons of New York. But, mad props to Sam Raimi - he has a firm grasp of just how important New York City is to the Spider-Man mythology, making it an integral part of the story. Not only that, he is making the most of the best rogue’s gallery and supporting cast in comics. Doctor Octopus, J. Jonah Jameson, Aunt May – it’s all so good. And very funny, too.
 
And make sure you come back tomorrow for some big, exciting news. (Well, exciting for me, anyway. It might mean absolutely nothing to you.)

The glass has got some water in it

I like to think of myself as, on balance, an optimistic person. Not that you’d know that from reading this blog recently. Everything seems to be getting on top of me recently, putting me in an increasingly frazzled and foul mood.

This blog is teetering dangerously close to really bad stand-up comedy. It’s not very constructive for me to rail about polyphonic ringtones, people with umbrellas or cigar smokers. Pet peeves don’t always translate into good writing. If I thought it was cathartic, I’d happily write about it. Just let it all explode onto the web in a gory mess of Travis Bickle bloodletting. But it doesn’t make me feel better. It just makes me stew for longer on things that don’t really merit so much scrutiny.

Some painful belt-tightening recently has resulted in me widening my outlook to find entertainment and distractions that fall between the posts marked “Cheap” and “Free”. I’ve found it difficult to devote time to simple pleasures in the last month or so. I miss reading uninterrupted for long periods of time. I miss the feeling of loosing my imagination free of its constraints to let ideas surge onto a page. I miss the ability to sit and watch a movie without feeling my eyelids fighting to stay open. And I miss the sensation of listening to someone talk without getting aggravated and confrontational. Sometimes, just stringing a coherent sentence together is an epic task.

Yesterday, it was clear that the good weather had well and truly passed for the time being. Good news for me, as it means my hay fever has gone on hiatus. Fed up of lunch breaks that consisted of sitting in St. James’s Square munching on sandwiches, Becket & I decided to go walkabout. We ambled down to the Mall, flicked through the overpriced magazines in the ICA bookshop for ten minutes, and then headed on over to the Horse Guards Parade. Over thirty years living in this city, and I’d never really seen it properly before. The rain whipped our faces as we checked out the big-ass cannons in the courtyard. It was great.

The rest of the hour was spent deliberately treading the back streets of the city up towards Leicester Square. Browsing the graphic novels in Comic Showcase up on Charing Cross Road. Stumbling upon out-of-the-way noodle bars in the alleys around Chinatown’s Gerrard Street. Amazing to think that where Dr. Johnson once convened with his Literary Club, you can now bag some Japanese pink mags and a copy of Battle Royale II on VCD. Now that’s what I call progress.

Best lunch hour I’ve had for a very long time. And the walk was more nourishing than any sandwich could have possibly been.

Brother Ray

Murph: Tell me a little about this electric piano, Ray.
Ray: Ah, you have a good eye, my man. That's the best in the city of Chicago.
Jake: How much?
Ray: 2000 bucks and it's yours. You can take it home with you. As a matter of fact, I'll throw in the black keys for free.

The first time I saw The Blues Brothers at a young, hairless age was also my first exposure to the grandfather of soul Ray Charles, kicking some serious Hammond funk on “Shake Your Tail Feather”. It broke my fragile, unschooled mind.

There are obituaries all over the ‘net for Ray, so I’m not going to duplicate all that business here. You want to know where he was born, his discography or any of that mess, look elsewhere. This is what the man and his music meant to me.

In an age where “soul” is just as much an overused and abused word as “genius” or “classic”, Ray Charles epitomised all three. My all-time favourite Ray Charles track is still the one I’ve been playing all weekend whenever I’ve been able to snatch five minutes for myself. The title track of Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (just like the better-known “Georgia on My Mind”) opens with that unique anguished howl yanked out of the dark abyss at the core of the great Soul Men, that gives you minor heart palpitations, like a lovesick werewolf baying for heartbreaking, soul-destroying sex.

Genius + Soul = Ray, and in this age of anodyne pop “idols”, music just got a lot less interesting. I’m mildly placated by the fact that he’s now jamming with Miles, Marvin and Barry White, drinking, cussing, grooving and checking out the heavenly bodies. He deserves it.

Ray Gun

It’s not earth-shattering, but B-movie actor, Alzheimer’s sufferer and one-time POTUS Ronald Reagan is no more. And I really don’t need an excuse to draw some tenuous links between movies and current affairs.

Some aimless surfing yielded this interesting quote from Ronnie from an address to the nation on January 16, 1984: “History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.”

GWB obviously wasn’t taking notes that day. Say what you like about Reagan, but the man was an actor, and he knew how to deliver a killer line. Whether he believed it or not is another thing.

My favourite Reagan-related exchange is, of course, this:

Dr. Emmett Brown: Then tell me, "future boy", who is President of the United States in 1985?
Marty McFly: Ronald Reagan.
Dr. Emmett Brown: Ronald Reagan? The actor?
(chuckles)
Dr. Emmett Brown: Who's Vice President? Jerry Lewis?
Marty McFly: What?
Dr. Emmett Brown: I suppose Jane Wyman is the first lady. And Jack Benny is Secretary of the Treasury. I've had enough practical jokes for one evening. Good night, future boy.

Magnificent Obsessions

In an unscheduled intermission from the regularly programmed meditations on films, writing, and writing on films, you’ll just have to tide yourselves over with this.

There’s a red triangle flashing neon in my mind, screaming “KEEP IN LOW GEAR”, but the beast is too hard to get a handle on, and is skidding out of control. I’ve got an inbox groaning under the weight of unanswered e-mails, film reviews pending, friends and family being neglected, the elusive next job still to be found, and a day job that I despise with a virulent intensity, especially as it keeps sapping my ability to do anything else meaningful. Thank fuck we have a 3-day weekend around the corner.

The only thing keeping me going in my snatched moments shuttling between obligations are books. There are a handful of books jostling for space amongst back issues of Empire and Time magazine in my ever-trusty bag, and they all aid in letting me hold onto the slender hair that is my lifeline between this existence and a full-on, Michael Douglas in Falling Down spaz-attack.

On the go at the moment, in no particular order:

Ed McBain’s Sadie When She Died. Slowly filling the gaps in my collection of 87th Precinct novels, and this one’s a corker. Words that crackle and pop across the page, sending you hurtling towards the end, when you just know that the trusty bulls of the 87 will prevail. Class.

Volume 7 of Tokyopop’s manga adaptation of one of my enduring fixations, Battle Royale. Eviscerations, big doe-eyes, high-tech weaponry, and the obligatory panty shots.

Ryan Gilbey’s It Don’t Worry Me. Admittedly, we don’t really need yet another book singing the praises of the 1970s American movie-brats (Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese et al), but this is a passionate and intensely personal look at a decade of great movies, and a nice counter-point to the scurrilous rumour-mongering of Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

Lee Server’s biography of the heavy-lidded hipster, Robert Mitchum, Baby, I Don’t Care. Wading through this one very slowly, but it’s worth it, covering his womanising, dope-smoking, ill-advised foray into music, and, of course, his movies.

Right, someone’s on the verge of cracking a whip again. I’m gone.

All the Write Moves

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” – The Wizard of Oz

My first film-writing gig opened my eyes in a lot of different ways. For a start, talking to other people who did the same thing, I realised that I had seen more movies than most of my peers. Not boasting, just a fact. However, I do believe that to be good at this, it is very important to have a depth and breadth of knowledge when it comes to the history of cinema. I like to think that good film journalists aren’t just critics shouting, “This is good. See it” or “This is shit. Avoid!” like carnival barkers. I think the good ones are cultural commentators who can say something about the art, craft and entertainment of film and filmmaking, with the ability to discuss movies contextually. If you are lucky, you can cast a sliver of light on things that people don’t tend to see or think about, refracted through your own experience, observations and opinions. And if I can impart even the tiniest nugget of the enthusiasm and giddy child-like wonder I feel about the big screen that I love so much, then I’ve done my job right.

“That's part of your problem: you haven't seen enough movies. All of life's riddles are answered in the movies.” – Grand Canyon

Now, here are a couple of dirty little secrets that the hermetically sealed film journalism community probably don’t want you to know, things that I learnt quite soon after my journey into the rarefied world of press passes and Soho screening rooms. A lot of film journalists don’t have the depth of knowledge to do the job well. A depressing percentage of my generation of writers believe cinema began with Star Wars. Even more mind-blowing, the next generation filling the pages of glossy magazines act as if cinema began with Pulp Fiction. This limited knowledge is hampered by the fact that most of the films they have seen have been churned out of the Hollywood meat-grinder. Access to a wide variety of films isn’t difficult, especially with the advent of multi-channel television and the proliferation of DVD.

Most film writers also suck. The standard of writing on the whole is poor. Don’t get me wrong – there are lots and lots of very talented film journalists out there. Sadly, there is a hell of a lot more bad ones. Like most industries, this is very much an “it’s who you know” business, and doors only tend to open if you know the guy on the other side with the keys in his pocket. You don’t succeed in this game by being the best. It’s all about the contacts.

Some film journos are frustrated wannabe filmmakers, who only are only in this game to get access to the talent and PR companies, thinking that they can sneak in the back door of the film industry. They probably can’t. But, damn, they are obnoxious.

Next time: research versus knowledge, “Don’t give up the day job”, and actually sitting through the movies. I bet you can’t wait, can you?

One last thing. Whilst writing this I’ve been listening to Imagination. I make no apologies for this. They were phenomenal. Don’t be a hater.

Do the Write Thing

“Dear Mr. Vernon: We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it is we did wrong, but we think you're crazy for making us write an essay telling you who we think we are.” – The Breakfast Club

The other day an old friend of mine asked me how many times I’d been to the cinema that week.
“Four. But that’s an aberration. Usually I try and go once a week. Why?”
“And how many films did you watch at home?”
“One. I usually watch one or two over a weekend. Why are you asking me these questions?”
“I just wanted to know what qualifies you to be a film journalist.”

As someone rarely short of words, that shut me up. In over four years of writing about movies, no one has ever asked me that question. I didn’t have an answer. But here’s what I tried to say to him then. (It’s worth noting that at the time, I’d already had two pints of cheap beer on an empty stomach, so I’m doing this without the benefit of muddy thinking and a thick tongue).

I have absolutely no professional writing qualifications. And, personally, that works for me. You might be able to teach people the craft or discipline of writing, you might be able to inspire them to want to write, but you either fill pages with words, or you don’t.

“Nobody teaches a writer anything. You tell them what you know. You tell them to find their voice and stick with it, because that's all you have in the end. You tell the ones who have it to keep at it and you tell the ones who don't to keep at it, too. Because that's the only way to get where you're going.” – Wonder Boys

Now, on to specifics. Why film journalism? (I refuse to use the designation “film critic” here. I don’t critique films, although I sometimes criticise them. I’m only interested in writing intelligently, educationally and, on my good days, entertainingly, about cinema.) The film journalism thing was a fluke. I was someone who wrote aimlessly. Scribbled stray thoughts in notebooks. Stole snatches of overheard conversations to use at a later date. Had great ideas for stories, which never went beyond the idea phase.

And then I had the opportunity to write something professionally about movies. So, given this chance to force myself to complete something, something with a deadline and a publication date, that people other than myself would read, I forced myself, with much anxiety and insecurity, to do it. Best thing I ever did.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself…my misadventures in the Screen Trade began long before that day. To be continued.

Reasons to be Cheerful Part 4

Soho in the Summer
Tony Montana and an Ambar
A new film by Almodóvar

New comics on a Thursday
A strong black coffee from a café
And a BMT from Subway

Finger-sucking Leslie Grantham
Something he really should abstain from
Made him look like a right plum

Cheap beer with my homies
Green Park and a light breeze
Sometimes I’m not that hard to please

Reasons to be cheerful
Just
For
Me

Better the devil you know

On Tuesday night I went to an early evening showing of Rosemary’s Baby at the Prince Charles Cinema, just off Leicester Square. It’s an undisputable fact (because I say so) that the Prince Charles is London’s best cinema. When most of the screens around the centre of London are charging over a tenner for a movie (which, in the case of over-sized TV screens like the Odeon Mezzanine, is a fucking crime), the Prince Charles has a varied programme of ever-changing features for, at the most, four quid.

The print they had sourced for the film was diabolical (pun intended). Crackling and popping throughout, dialogue and movement jumping all over the place, and at one point the film must have jumped straight off the reels as it flickered and disappeared completely for five minutes. It’s almost like they were trying to live up to Quentin Tarantino’s description of the place as an old-school grindhouse.

Where most of London’s picture palaces now have superb sound, pictures and auditoriums, the Prince Charles is stubbornly old-fashioned, and all the more loveable for it. Sticky floors, uncomfortable seats and a bizarre auditorium that seems to dip in the centre. If you end up sitting towards the back, you can actually find yourself looking up at the back of someone’s head.

Weird crowd in that night, too. It felt as though the whole audience had plastic bags in their laps that they insisted on crushing repeatedly throughout the film. There were at least two ongoing conversations non-stop in my immediate vicinity for the duration of the entire movie, and around four separate mobile phones went off as well, despite the on-screen plea before the movie started that phones must be turned off, as the cinema has “state-of-the-art sound”. Hah! But that’s what you get for going to the cheapest cinema in London.

Anyway, a very small price to pay for a movie-going experience that really is an experience.

Rosemary’s Baby was part of a day of Roman Polanski movies, and I’d never seen it before. I didn’t actually find it remotely scary at the time (The Ninth Gate scared me far more), but it’s really stuck with me for the last day or two, and it’s getting more and more retroactively creepy and disturbing the more I think about it.

The pop cultural significance and context of the movie is intriguing too. Frank Sinatra served Mia Farrow with divorce papers during the making of the film and, not long after, Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, and unborn child were horrifically slaughtered by Charles Manson and his gang of happy psychos. By the way, never, ever do a Google Image search for “Sharon Tate”. There are some really sick fucks out there. You have been warned.

Rap will eat itself

I'm just a white boy called the Deputy CC...

Bloody Satisfaction

It’s finally here, and I’ve finally seen it.

Kill Bill Vol. 1 was like a hypodermic of adrenaline slammed straight into my breastplate, which left me stumbling out of the cinema with my eyeballs bleeding, my ears roaring with static and the word “Wow” on a continuous loop dribbling out the corner of my mouth.

Vol. 2 is something quite different. It’s more of a slow-burner, as befits QT’s latest pop culture cocktail of reference points, but just as good in its own way. Where Vol. 1 was a mess of Japanese influences, from anime and the pop yakuza stylings of Seijun Suzuki to the extreme cartoon gore of Takashi Miike and the raw brutality of Kinji Fukasaku, Vol. 2 is more preoccupied with the damaged romanticism of Sergio Leone, the burnt-out hardasses of Don Siegel and the wobbly zoom shots of the Shaw Brothers.

David Carradine is disturbingly sympathetic as Bill, and Daryl Hannah almost steals the entire movie as instant icon Elle Driver. Then there’s Gordon Liu as Pai Mei, Michael Parks as Esteban Vihaio (topping his return as From Dusk Till Dawn’s Earl McGraw in Vol. 1) and even a glorious little cameo from B-movie legend Bo Svenson.

Pure, visceral cinema with the dial set to eleven, and I can’t get it out of my head. I don’t want to, either.

French tickler

Last night, I went to a preview screening of The Good Old Naughty Days (Polissons et galipettes) at The Other Cinema. Leaving aside the ever-so-slightly uncomfortable fact that I was a lone male going to view hardcore pornography, let’s have an up-close-and-personal gynaecological glance up the metaphorical snatch of this piece of celluloid exotica.

Essentially, the film is a collection of 12 silent porn movies dating from between 1905 and 1930, and every permutation is covered in the brief 70 minute running time of the movie. Straight, gay, lesbian, oral, anal, group, cumshots and, oh yeah, bestiality. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

First up, Michel Reilhac is credited as the director of the film. Director? Really? He sat through a bunch of archive porn, selected a handful, cut them together, wrote some vaguely amusing intertitles, chucked a score on it….but I don’t think he can in all fairness be designated the “director”. It’s highly unlikely we will ever know the real directors of this anonymous smut, but M. Reilhac is undoubtedly not the auteur behind this festival of filth.

On to the content. Anything that gets old enough eventually accrues a veneer of respectability but, let’s be honest, this is pornography. Filmed footage originally conceived purely with the aim of titillation and arousal. It ain’t art.

As archive footage, though, it’s genuinely fascinating. Evidently, some things are constants in the world of hardcore, even a century on. Loads of close-ups and, more often than not, a money-shot at the end of the reel. The plot lines (if you can call them that) are also old favourites, straddling the blurry line between saucy Carry On-style humour and the staples of hardcore fantasy: nuns and priests, teachers and pupils, nurses and patients.

The differences are also interesting. Although lesbian sex is common in modern porn, there is a fair bit of man-on-man action mixed in here as well, without worrying about self-consciously dividing things into “gay” and “straight” porn pigeonholes.

It’s also refreshing to see people with all sorts of different body types who, on the whole, look like they are really enjoying themselves, in movies that are well shot and well lit.

Now, the scene with the dog. I’m no prude, but I cringed at this. With almost no encouragement, a little fluffy white dog first laps away between a woman’s legs, before sharing a man’s cock with her later on, licking away like it was a water dish. So, so wrong. Kind of funny, but, for fuck’s sake, it’s a dog eating pussy and sucking cock! Archive footage or not, there are still some things that don’t accrue the veneer of respectability with the passage of time.

Riddle me this, Batman

So I’m looking at the U.S. Box Office Charts for last week. At number 1, the concluding half of Tarantino’s splatter-and-samurai epic Kill Bill. And at number 2 with a bullet, the big-screen outing of Marvel Comics anti-hero The Punisher.

I don’t get it. Why would you release not one but two bloody revenge movies IN THE SAME WEEK! Isn’t that just cannibalising an audience who, in all probability, want to see both movies?

Who schedules these things?? Couldn’t one of them have been held over for another week-end? Or do people walk out of one movie and think, “That was cool! But do you know what? I haven’t seen nearly enough violent retribution or arterial blood sprays for one day. I wonder what else is on?”

See also: Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead both in cinemas here. When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will fill the multiplex.