Stray Bullets

The Back of Beyond

2012-01-02T23:17:00.001Z

As 2011 inexorably wound down to its final days and notifications of notable deaths pinged up on Twitter on an almost daily basis, at some point after Harry Morgan and before Bert Schneider, we collectively learned of the loss of writer and journalist Gilbert Adair. I have to admit that I had never been a huge fan of Adair's writing but, prompted by a lovely obituary in the latest issue of Sight & Sound magazine, I rooted around for my copy of Adair's book Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of 100 Years of Cinema. I'm glad that I did.

Published in 1995 to mark the centenary of cinema, Adair selected 100 images - one per year, from 1895's La Sortie des usines Lumière to Tim Burton's Ed Wood in 1994 - and wrote an accompanying essay. Browsing through the book yesterday, I found myself with a new appreciation of Adair's writing. Joni Mitchell nailed it - we don't know what we got 'til it's gone. Idiosyncratic and defiantly personal film journalism is an increasingly rare commodity. I've banged on before about my frustration with the overpowering glut of generic, homogenous words sprayed online as just another cog in the marketing machine. Critical rigour and independent opinions have become subservient to the demands of Search Engine Optimization and picking the carcasses of dull press releases.

But Adair's writing is imbued with a love of film. As he writes in his introduction, film is "flickering like a great fire in the grate of the cinema screen, around which millions of us have warmed ourselves, gazed dreamily into the flames and occasionally got burnt".

I mentioned in my last post that I had watched 290 movies last year. The last one I watched was Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. Riffling the pages of Adair's book, I serendipitously discovered that he had selected that very film to represent the year 1956. It was a fine way to cap the end of 2011. This is what he had to say about it. Thank you, Gilbert Adair, and take it away. The floor is yours...

Two men sitting in an automobile. Two men outfitted in the felt hats and boxy, double-breasted suits and soberly immaculate collars and ties that, for most of us, have come to evoke the Hollywood cinema of the thirties, forties and fifties rather than any real, still recollectable time or place. This photograph, I admit, isn't "interesting"; its composition isn't eye-fetching; it might have served indiscriminately to epitomize scores of thrillers and dramas and police procedural movies made in Hollywood between, let's say, 1930 and 1960. Precisely. For it's perhaps time to acknowledge the extent to which the textural specificity of the American cinema is contingent upon what might be called its "urbanality". Putting it more crudely, it's all very well talking about The Ten Commandments and Gone With the Wind and Casablanca and Rio Bravo, but what going to the cinema during those years really meant was watching near-identical men in near-identical suits and hats sitting in near-identical apartment rooms and bars and black, bulbous automobiles; was watching movies that were, paradoxically, like nothing so much as books - books without illustrations. And therein, in a way which is difficult to communicate to the uninitiated but which no true cinéphile will ever need to have explained, can be found the medium's metallic poetry.

The film in question is Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and the two men are Sidney Blackmer and Dana Andrews. Its plot is exactly that - a plot - hatched by the newspaper publisher played by Blackmer and the journalist played by Andrews, a plot whereby the latter will deliberately implicate himself in an unsolved murder in order to demonstrate the ease with which circumstantial evidence can lead to wrongful conviction. There is, I should add, an eleventh-hour twist; but it's a twist only until the instant it's revealed; in the very next instant one realizes that the film could not have ended any other way. Jacques Rivette called it a theorem, a tabula rasa. It is, in any event, the rigorous purification of a genre to which Lang and certain of his fellow émigrés, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and Edgar Ulmer, had given of their best: the film noir.

There is, though, a most curious paradox in the film noir. I yield to no one, as they say, in my love of the genre and I recognize the pertinence of much that has been written about its inherent pessimism. Yet I must confess to never having found that pessimism very convincing. No one in the forties ever went to see a film noir with a sense that he was about to submit to a harrowing but salutary dose of existential nihilism (a nihilism that isn't just a matter of critical interpretation but is quite perceptible in both narrative detail and visual texture), just as no one ever need recoil from watching one on television now. Films noirs are great fun, for God's sake, great fun primarily because they never really do persuade one that the despair that they portray is ultimately a truth of the human condition - in the way that, at least while one is experiencing it, a film by Bergman does, or a novel by Kafka, or an opera by Berg. For most of us, I suspect, their fabled negativity is precisely that: a negative (in the photographic sense of the word) of the fundamental American positivity and optimism. The people who made them (and who were usually, as I've said, European exiles) loved America, just as did the people who watched them. Secretly, I believe, they were not even meant to convince.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, however, was meant to convince. As has seldom been the case in Hollywood's history, it's a film, a visually drab and unyielding film, about absolutely nothing else but its own subject. Two men in hats and suits sit in an automobile and hatch a plot, two men whose white faces and crisp white shirts stand out against the enveloping darkness like the white chalkings of a mathematical formula on a blackboard, a tableau noir.

Six Minutes To Midnight

2012-01-02T16:58:00.000Z

Hello, 2012! Before I start biting large bloody chunks out of the New Year, let's nail the coffin lid down on the year just gone.

2010 was a tough year for me that culminated in a perfect storm of banal details (cumulative long-term sleep deprivation; an icy pavement; sub-zero temperatures and a quiet street) that collided to almost end me. I headed into 2011 recovering from my near-death experience feeling tired, gun-shy and burned out. So, for the first time, instead of beginning a year with plans and schemes and wishlists of life goals to be accomplished, I decided to try a different tack. I was trying to do too much. I needed to streamline and simplify my life. I needed a year to lie fallow, retrench and regroup. And that's how I began 2011 with a complete lack of ambition. That way, I thought, I'd have a smoother ride through the coming year.

Well, that didn't work. 2011 was just as tough. Maybe tougher. I may have wanted to take it easy, but the world had other plans.

What I did do in 2011 was sit through 290 movies. Some were great, more were bad, most were forgettable. The important part of that last sentence is "most were forgettable". I wasted time. I have absolutely no intention of sitting through anywhere near as many movies in the next twelve months. Time to stop being a passive consumer of largely disposable entertainment. Less observation, more participation. Turning the tap off on the input, flicking the dial to ramp up the output.

I'm going to be 40 this year. I've got things to do. Let's get on with it.

Wake Up and Smell the Rice

2011-12-13T13:02:00.000Z

Today, the Criterion Collection are releasing DVD and Blu-ray editions of Seijun Suzuki’s delirious masterpieces Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill.

Would you like some reading material to accompany this visual treat? Of course you would. Good News: In 2004, Wallflower Press published 24 Frames - The Cinema of Japan and Korea, which includes my essay on Branded to Kill. I’d love to point you to a couple of places where you could buy this book, but...

Bad News: A bit of rudimentary Googling reveals that it appears that this volume is now out-of print. All is not lost, though, because...

Good News: I did, however, discover that my chapter is available in its entirety on Google Books. In fact, almost all of the book is there for your reading pleasure. There’s a lot of good stuff in that book from people far smarter and more reputable than me. I don’t claim to understand the whys and wherefores of Google Books, so I can’t explain why you can read the whole of my chapter on Branded to Kill, but not a single word of my later chapter on Battle Royale.

I’m desperately trying to avoid the usual authorial caveats about material I wrote almost a decade ago. You know the kind of thing I mean. The bits that I re-read that made me cringe, or where I spotted a different way of saying things that were more insightful or useful. Oh well. That book is receding some way off in my rear-view mirror now. Dive in and browse away by clicking here. Enjoy!

Write Around the Corner

2011-10-21T15:35:00.000+01:00

I don’t believe in the woolly nebulous idea of Writer’s Block. Whenever I get stuck, it’s usually because the problem is what I’m writing or how I’m writing it, not a blanket inability to get the words out. When that happens, I stop and write something completely different and that usually gets me back on the yellow brick road. (My real problem tends to be Writer’s Cockblock - when external factors or people prevent me from getting shit done).

I’m also wary of Advice for Writers. There are things that work, and things that don’t work, and those things aren’t necessarily the same for everyone. Having said that, there are times when I stumble upon a different perspective or a juicy comment that casts a new light on something that I’m beating my head against. No point keeping it all to myself, though, so here are a few things I’ve tripped over on my journeys around the Internet recently.

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”
Orson Welles

“You’re going to change your mind a thousand times. That’s a good thing. Only imbeciles never change their minds.”
Anna Rascouët-Paz speaking at San Francisco, Creative Mornings

William Goldman’s “Ten Commandments on Writing”
(from the perennial essential Adventures in the Screen Trade)

1. Thou shalt not take the crisis out of the protagonist’s hands.

2. Thou shalt not make life easy for the protagonist.

3. Thou shalt not give exposition for exposition’s sake.

4. Thou shalt not use false mystery or cheap surprise.

5. Thou shalt respect thy audience.

6. Thou shalt know thy world as God knows this one.

7. Thou shalt not complicate when complexity is better.

8. Thou shalt seek the end of the line, taking characters to the farthest depth of the conflict imaginable within the story’s own realm of probability.

9. Thou shalt not write on the nose – put a subtext under every text.

10. Thou shalt rewrite.

Korea Best

2011-10-18T14:21:00.001+01:00

The 55th BFI London Film Festival is in full flow and, judging by the vigorous churn of my Twitter stream, it’s getting full and thorough coverage. Go and stick the #LFF hashtag into Twitter Search and you’ll see what I mean. I’ve got no interest in adding to the LFF noise. I’m more excited at the prospect of the forthcoming 6th Annual London Korean Film Festival which arrives on the 3rd November and continues until the 24th. Plenty of other people want to talk about Kevin, I’d rather nock something else against my bow string - the festival’s opening night film Arrow, the Ultimate Weapon (or, as it seems to be increasingly known, War of the Arrows).

Director Han-min Kim’s third feature hits the ground running. Literally. The first images you see are pounding feet. The first sound you hear is laboured breathing. And that swiftly sets you up for the subsequent 122 minutes - a breathless, exhilarating, thoroughly enjoyable historical action movie. I found myself comparing it favourably to Apocalypto a couple of times.

The year is 1636, during the Second Manchu invasion of Korea. Chung soldiers (led by dour professional Seung-yong Ryoo, delivering the film’s standout performance) invade a village and kidnap Ja-In (Moon Chae-Won) on her wedding day. Her brother, the aimless and bitter Nam-Yi (Hae-il Park), is determined to rescue her, armed with nothing but his trusty bow and a quiver of arrows with distinctive red fletchings. The chase is on.

Han-min Kim’s sound design is glorious: lots of creaking bows, whining bow strings pulled taut and whooshing air as the arrows fly. The beautifully choreographed action sequences are leavened with well-judged moments of occasional slapstick humour, and everything builds inexorably towards a final reckoning.

The Opening Night Gala and European Premiere of Arrow, the Ultimate Weapon takes place on 3rd November at the Odeon West End in Leicester Square, followed by a Q&A with the soft-spoken and personable Han-min Kim and wrapping up with a K-Pop performance.

As usual, the festival programme is broad, varied and definitely worth exploring. I’m not going to copy-and-paste the contents of a press release here, so click here to head over to the festival website for further information.

Into the Mud, Scum Queen!

2011-10-11T16:16:00.000+01:00

I’ve got a tin ear for poetry. Always have done. And I’ve tried, believe me. But, as with any rule, there’s an exception - one single, solitary poet that manages to stir something within me. John Lillison, England's greatest one-armed poet. If I’m not mistaken, he was the first person ever to be killed in a car crash, in 1894.

With your indulgence, I’d like to share Lillison’s two greatest towering achievements with you. I hope you enjoy them as much as I always have.

Pointy Bird
O pointy birds, o pointy pointy,
Anoint my head, anointy-nointy.

In Dillman's Grove
In Dillman's Grove my love did die,
and now in ground shall ever lie.
None could ever replace her visage,

until your face brought thoughts of kissage.

Peeking under the hood of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive

2011-09-27T10:48:00.001+01:00

"I used to make movies. Sexy stuff. Some critics called them European. I thought they were shit." - Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) in Drive

I can understand the overwhelming allure that Drive must have held for Nic Winding Refn. An existential crime movie set in L.A.? I’d be pretty damn excited too. But maybe he got a little bit too excited, going hog wild front loading the thing with references, nods or homages to a bunch of his favourite movies. I really, really liked Drive, but I would’ve enjoyed it a lot more if I didn’t keep getting distracted by the memories of the movies that it borrows so heavily from. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should probably stop reading now. If you have, then let’s pop the hood on this baby and see what makes it purr:

Taxi Driver - When he’s not behind the wheel of his hack, the simmering soft-spoken Travis Bickle struggles alternately with the impenetrable obstacles of emotions, human interaction and Albert Brooks. There’s only one thing for it - let’s splash the walls with blood! Interesting bit of trivia - Paul Schrader’s original script was set in Los Angeles, not New York. The decision was made to relocate the action as taxi cabs were far more common in New York than L.A. at the time. And whilst we’re on the subject of Schrader...

American Gigolo - The second installment of Schrader’s “night workers” quintet that began with Taxi Driver. (The last three films to date in this loose, unofficial series are Light Sleeper, Bringing Out The Dead and The Walker). The scene in Drive set in the strippers’ dressing room reminded me of the scene in the opening montage where the titular manwhore Julian Kaye (Richard Gere) visits his tailor. Lots of light, mirrors, reflections. Lots of red.

Drive’s 80s-inflected electro score also clearly alludes to Giogio Morodor’s synthpop soundtrack. But that’s not all. Check out the opening titles: Blondie’s Call Me soundtracks a man, a road, a car and a very familiar cursive font.

Thief - James Caan is a master jewel-thief with a very fixed structure to his life in Michael Mann’s little-seen crime thriller. Sound familiar? A lot of Drive’s plot machinations echo those of Thief, but I don’t want to get into further specifics without getting too spoilery. (Did I mention that it’s “little-seen”? Worth seeking out if you are a Thief virgin.) Actually, a lot of the visual style of early Michael Mann ripples through Drive - a little bit of Manhunter, a flash of Miami Vice (the show, not the shitty movie). Also: Tangerine Dream are on synth duty.

Irréversible - Not all of Drive’s touchstones are American. Gaspar Noé’s brutal reverse-chronology headfuck looms large, and not only because of the graphic scenes of visceral bone-cracking violence and human heads being obliterated in sprays of copious gore. There’s also the colour scheme. Here comes that red again.

Le Samouraï - Yet another precise, methodical perfectionist with a rigid personal code. Yet another professional whose life is unexpectedly complicated by his relationship with a woman. (This is starting to sound like Genre Fiction 101. Granted, sometimes a trope is just a trope. But they endure for a reason, and these are the mental flashes I kept getting whilst watching Drive. See also Léon, John Woo’s The Killer, etc, etc.)

Hitman Jef Costello (Alain Delon) wears his trenchcoat like the Driver wears his scorpion jacket. Like a uniform. The similarities go deeper than that, though - there are certain narrative and visual cues from Jean-Pierre Melville’s minimalist masterpiece that crop up in Drive. For example, the moment when the Driver strides purposefully down the narrow corridor searching for Cook made me flash on this:

The Driver - This is the big one. If you asked me who my favourite director is, I would vacillate for a minute between John Carpenter and Walter Hill before plumping for the latter, and The Driver is one of the many reasons why - cinema pared down to it’s most basic raw components. Terse, tense, fast, relentless and perfect. Ryan O’Neal is the Driver. Bruce Dern is the Detective. Isabelle Adjani is the Player. And I can’t be remotely objective about it, so I’m not even going to try. Bruce Dern put it best: “You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna catch me the cowboy that's never been caught. Cowboy desperado.” Cue squealing rubber for 91 glorious minutes.

To Live and Die in L.A. - Say, that would be a pretty good alternate title for Drive, donchathink? Wang Chung wield the synths this time, and I’d argue that the car chases in William Friedkin’s movie easily surpass those from his earlier The French Connection. Robby Müller’s cinematography here is just gorgeous. Also, those colours again - lots of oranges (tangerines?) and reds.

Does this make it sound like a didn’t enjoy Drive? I hope not. I kinda loved it. I just kept getting pulled out of the film and into my memories. Also, I’d love a 1973 Chevy Malibu for Christmas. Failing that, I’ll settle for a satin scorpion jacket.

Word on the Street

2011-09-24T18:20:00.000+01:00

Browsing my bookshelves this morning, my eyes kept getting drawn to the same thin volume, so I pulled it down, blew the dust off it and cracked the spine. The book was Breakdancing - Mr. Fresh and The Supreme Rockers Show You How To Do It! It was a helluva way to start the day. Because it's far too good to keep to myself, I wanted to share my favourite chapter with you, a glossary of breakdancing argot circa 1984. Is it fresh or is it wack? You decide!:

If you don't want to completely embarass yourself, then don't tell your friends you just heard "a really outstanding song." Don't say, "That girl is really dumb." And if you're having a great time, going nuts with all your friends, don't say you're all "going nuts". 'Cause that's wack.

And if someone tells you that they have a friend who's a really BAD dancer, don't think he's not a good dancer. And Breakdancers don't "hang around."

Tell your friends you just heard a new song and it's really fresh. And you met this girl who's wack. And that you and your friends were buggin' out. And if someone does a BAD King Tut, then their Tut is fresh. And if you're maxin', you're relaxin'.

So if you don't wanna be wack and have a heart attack, pay attention to the following words and you'll be awesome.

Amaze 'em. This is how you win a dance battle. "You amaze 'em."
"How do you amaze 'em?"
"Easy. You just amaze 'em."

Awesome. Breakdancers don't need much of an excuse to say awesome. Some nights everything is awesome.
"Wow, look at that Adidas suit. Awesome."
"We're goin' to the Roxy tonight. It's gonna be awesome."
"I got the continuation of my Windmill. Awesome."
"I met some fresh girls. Awesome."
"Look at that cheeseburger. Awesome."

Bad. Bad is real good. In other words, if it's good enough, then it's bad.
"When we get our new Chinese suits, we'll be bad."
"Man, I saw this two-month-old kid doing the King Tut, and he was bad."
"Those Gazows are bad."

Bite. When someone bites one of your moves, then they steal it. Bite only has one very exact meaning, and this it. Biting moves is really wack, but everyone does it. Biting is little bit like cheating in a card game. If you see someone biting one of your moves, you can pretend you're biting you're finger, as a sign that you know they're biting. The most interesting thing about biting is that it shows how really individual Breakdancing is. Your moves are used to win battles, so if someone bites one of your moves, then they can use it against you in a battle.

Bugging Out. When you're going crazy, you're bugging out. Or if you get confused or mess out you say you're bugging or bugging out. Or if you see something or someone that really catches your eye and really stare, then you're bugging out.
"Man, we got on the subway and we were bugging out."
"What's the matter with you? You're buggin'."
"Man, those guys were buggin' out."

Chill. Good, O.K.
"His Pop is chill."
"You wanna go to the movies? That's chill."

Chillin'. Relaxing. Hanging out. Laying back.
"Hey, what's up?" "Chillin'."
"Hey, what's up?" "Chillin', willin', maxin', and relaxin'." or "Maxin' and relaxin', chilling, willing, and able."

Fresh. This is the big word. This will get you through a lot of tough situations. Fresh means original, good, or real good. And to say it right you always accent the word fresh.
"Our new routine is fresh."
"I heard a new record. It was fresh."
"He's too fresh."
Fresh is used in so many instances and so often, as long as you use it for anything good, you'll be fresh.

Juice. If you got juice, you got pull with someone who counts.

Maxin'. Relaxing. Or use max out.
"What's your beef?" "Maxin'."
"I'm tired, I'm gonna max out."

Power. If you're a dancer and you're really rocking, you're in power. When someone is in a position of authority, power or respect, you say that they're in their power - a very common term. For example, Michael Jackson is in his power. The Beatles were in their power in the 60's and 70's. Afrika Bambaataa, one of the most respected persons in Hip Hop, is in his power. Sometimes when a dancer feels like he or she has the audience bugging out, they'll do a dance move with a closed fist to indicate a state of power.

Rock. When you're really getting down dancewise, you're rocking.
"How'd it go?" "Man, we were rockin' shit."

Take out. If you win a battle, you take the other dancer out. If someone beats you, they take you out.

Wack. The opposite of fresh. Bad, not bad. Everything bad is wack.
"Man, you wack."
"He dances wack."
"Look at that Calvin Klein outfit. "Yeah, it's wack."

Ephemera

2011-07-13T11:09:00.000+01:00

"In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day." - Tom Waits

Which is to say that I might not be here, but I am around.

"You don't go down Broadway to get to Broadway! You zig! You zag!" - Ray Liotta in Cop Land

Hell Up In Harlan

2011-03-28T15:40:00.002+01:00

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” – Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing

Nothing that “Dutch” Leonard writes sounds like writing. It sounds like eavesdropping.

Elmore Leonard writes stories the way Howard Hawks used to make movies. It’s not about three acts, beginning-middle-end and all that Syd Field stuff. It’s about stacking great scene after great scene until you have a helluva story. Plots can be fun, but sometimes nothing beats a run of great scenes. It doesn’t even really matter where the story is going, as long as you enjoy the ride. And nothing makes a ride go smoother than being in the company of seasoned raconteurs with a nice line in salty dialogue.

“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” – Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing

There was a time when the overwhelming majority of Elmore Leonard adaptations failed miserably. The people who snaffled up those books as “properties” for adaptation misunderstood their appeal by foregrounding the least important component (the plot) and fudging the stuff that really makes his work sing (the characters and the dialogue). That finally stopped happening with the one-two punch of Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown and Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, paving the way for the small-screen arrival of Graham Yost’s Justified.

Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens first appeared in Leonard’s novels Pronto and Riding the Rap before easing further into the limelight with the short story Fire in the Hole, which serves as the springboard for Justified. Working out of South Florida, Raylan Givens is an anachronism. Imagine a cowboy wandering through an episode of Miami Vice. Deceptively unassuming with the soft-spoken manner of a true Southern gentleman and his ever-present stetson, if he ever has cause to draw down on you, you can be damn sure that bullets will fly. A questionable shooting gets Raylan booted back to Eastern Kentucky and the town of Harlan where he grew up, having to face up to the family and friends he thought he’d left behind. And that’s your basic set-up. Not so much “fish out of water” as “fish thrown back in the pond he’d been desperately trying to get out of.”

Leonard trades in the archetypes of crime and Western fiction: thieves and murderers, lawmen and gunslingers, all manner of colourful scumbags. But it’s never as clear cut as black hats and white hats and it’s not straight genre fiction. He’s much more interested in letting the characters speak for themselves as they navigate that large murky wedge of grey that we all live in. Which brings me back to the dialogue again.

All my favourite moments in Justified are the two-handers between Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan and his childhood friend, nemesis, extremist and explosives expert Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins). The verbal parrying between Olyphant and Goggins crackles in an ambiguous, complex brew of mutual respect, affection and enmity. It is the stuff that slash fiction is made of (and some of the “Brokeback Justified” videos I stumbled across on YouTube seem to bear that out.)

Although, running a close second in the favourites stakes, there is a killer moment in Season One when Raylan, sitting in a bar trying to get quietly shitfaced, turns and silences the raucous guffaws of a bunch of redneck boors with the line: “I didn't order assholes with my whiskey”.

But this is starting to sound a little bit too much like “Justified's Greatest Hits”, and that’s not the way to truly soak up the heady moonshine brew of the show. Justified is deep into the guts of Season Two right now. If you haven’t yet had the opportunity to sample the downhome, deadly delights of Harlan County, it’s time to play catch-up.

Here Be Monsters. And Whiskey

2011-03-09T14:32:00.000Z

In hot, sweaty, sticky Mexico, two gringos are desperately trying to do whatever it takes to get back to the USA, away from the alien spores and fearsome tentacles of Gareth Edwards’ Monsters. In stark contrast, last Thursday saw a large queue of freezing Londoners waiting eagerly in the cold outside The Royal College of Surgeons for Jameson Cult Film Club’s presentation of Edwards’ impressive story of survival and burgeoning love amongst the extra-terrestrials.

Inside and upstairs within the Hunterian Museum, the horror was unleashed early amongst an astonishing array of glass cases containing necrotic penises, monkey skulls, and jars of mutated internal organs. Sipping Jameson’s cocktails, it occurred to me that the collection wouldn’t look out of place on the catering truck for I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!

Fortified by whiskey, I returned to the main body of the building accompanied by the sounds of thropping helicopter rotors, eerie screeches and warning signals, guided through the crowds by people wearing gas masks and hazmat suits. The architecture of the 200-year old Royal College of Surgeons faded into the background. We were now quarantined on the outskirts of the Infected Zone.

Before the film began, Gareth Edwards and editor Colin Goudie took to the stage to introduce the film. Lubricated by free cocktails, Edwards was genuinely thrilled at the full-to-capacity turn-out for the screening and he felt compelled to warn us that, in his experience, usually a third of an audience end up hating the film. He made it clear that if you were expecting lots of monsters in Monsters, you were going to be disappointed.

Edwards and Goudie reeled off a list of their influences and reference points to prime us for the experience, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michael Winterbottom’s In This World and Lost in Translation. Goudie asked us to imagine Bill Murray sitting in his Tokyo hotel room, when all of a sudden Godzilla passes by his window. Which is to say that Monsters is not a monster movie. It’s a road movie / love story. With monsters.

Edwards hews to the old maxim that Less is More and he pointed out that, in Jaws, the shark is only visible for a total of three seconds within the first hour. Made with a $500,000 budget, a five-man crew, two actors and no script, with all of the special effects added in post-production using Adobe After Effects, Monsters is an incredible achievement.

(And, for the record, Gareth Edwards can’t talk about his forthcoming Godzilla project, no matter how much Jameson’s you ply him with.)

Massive thanks to the fine folk at Jameson Cult Film Club for a terrific evening. Can’t wait to see what else they’ve got planned for the rest of 2011. Monsters is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from 11 April.

Nicholas Courtney 1929 - 2011

2011-02-28T15:11:00.006Z

"You know, just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier in Robot

It's become something of a cliché to melodramatically declare "Today, a part of my childhood died", but last week, that was heartbreakingly true. For me, Nicholas Courtney and Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart are as integral to the mythology of Doctor Who as the TARDIS, the sonic screwdriver and the Daleks. And now, he's gone.

"The Cabinet's accepted my report, and the whole affair is now completely closed. A fifty-foot monster can't swim up the Thames and attack a large building without some people noticing, but you know what politicians are like." -- The Brigadier in Terror of the Zygons

In the hands of a lesser actor, the Brigadier could have come across as a humourless, officious, militaristic prig. But Nick Courtney brought a twinkly eye and a light touch to the role. I can't imagine another actor pulling off killer lines like "Chap with the wings there -- five rounds rapid."

The Doctor will live forever. Eleven bodies and still counting. But there was only one Brig. Splendid chap - all of him. RIP Nicholas Courtney.

The Destroyer: "Pitiful. Can this world do no better than you as its champion?"
The Brigadier: "Probably. I just do the best I can." -- Battlefield

From Fists To Firepower

2011-02-28T14:11:00.003Z

In April, Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch will be unleashed on cinema screens. Zack Snyder - the "visionary director" who made a career out of co-opting the visions of George A. Romero, Frank Miller, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. This must be a definition of "visionary" that I'm not familiar with...

The tagline for Snyder's Sucker Punch is "You Will Be Unprepared". I decided to prepare myself.

Over the last couple of months, I've noticed a gradual uptick in people arriving at the blog by Googling for information on Snyder's forthcoming geekbait. Sorry about that, Snyder fans. This blog has been called Sucker Punch for a long time. But it wasn't always thus. Back in 2004 when I launched this blog, it was called Stray Bullets. Time to dust that one off and rename this place once more. Everything old is new again.

Sucker Punch is dead. Long Live Stray Bullets!

Coming Attractions

2011-01-20T11:15:00.015Z

Three weeks into 2011 and I'm starting to look forward to the next year's worth of cinematic confections that will soon be foisted upon our hungry, welcoming eyeballs. Here's a quick and dirty rundown of the dispatches from the dream factory I'm looking forward to most. Let's start with the men in tights.

Based on poor advance buzz and an uninspiring trailer, I don't have high hopes for Green Lantern at all, but that doesn't stop me from thinking that I'll get a slight frisson of excitement the first time that Ryan Reynolds recites the Green Lantern oath.

On the other hand, I am genuinely thrilled at the prospect of seeing Chris Hemsworth shouting "I Say Thee Nay!" before whipping up a storm and whupping Asgardian ass with mighty Mjolnir in Thor. And now, I'm going to take this opportunity to run Greg Horn's illustration of Thor vs. Jaws. I smell mad crossover sequel money...

Another chapter on the road to The Avengers arrives later in the year with Captain America: The First Avenger. It's far too early to have any kind of sense of how this one will play out, although I'm pretty sure we won't be fortunate enough to see a moment quite as wonderful as this:

I'm not entirely sold on Source Code based on the trailer, but any misgivings I have are mitigated by my complete faith in Duncan Jones. Moon is one of my favourite films from the last few years and it doesn't hurt that Source Code bears a passing resemblance to one of the Greatest TV Shows of All Time. Ziggy, centre me in on Jake Gyllenhall!

Tetsuya Nakashima's Confessions (Kokuhaku) wasn't on my radar at all until Anne Billson raved about it on Twitter, describing it as "Heathers meets Battle Royale". It arrives in the UK on the 18th February thanks to Third Window Films. I am so there.

Following on from the creative nadir of Cop Out, Kevin Smith seems to have finally shaken off his predilection for dick jokes and Star Wars references for something much, much darker. This is a Very Good Thing. Bolstered by a terrific cast that includes Melissa Leo, John Goodman and Tarantino stalwart Michael Parkes, even Smith's most vocal detractors must've been impressed by the first glimpse of his low-budget horror movie Red State:

Read the following sentence: "A telepathic tyre comes to life and goes on a killing spree." Now, tell me you don't want to see that film. It's a killer tyre! It's like Christine! (But, you know, without the 1958 red and white Plymouth Fury). Pure high concept (and The Human Centipede proved that you need far more than a high concept to make a decent movie) but I'll say it again. Killer tyre! I think I love you, Rubber.

From the scuffed celluloid ashes of Grindhouse comes another film that began life as little more than a trailer for a movie that didn't exist. Until now. Rutger Hauer is a Hobo with a Shotgun. All my B-movie dreams come true in a shower of shell casings.

The Future, Mr. Gittes!

2010-12-30T18:21:00.004Z

Wrapping things up and clearing things down here at Stately AKA Manor, just in time to kick 2010 out the door (that lousy bum!). But before I welcome in 2011 with a rakish grin on my face, I wanted to dig out one more thing before it gets consigned to the archive.

At the beginning of this year, I had a thin sliver of microfiction published in Icon magazine’s Fiction issue (cover dated February 2010 and numbered issue 80) in a section titled “Stories for the end of the decade”. The brief, in their words, was that “It had to be connected to architecture, design or urbanism, but otherwise writers were free to do what they liked.” And it had to come in at 100 words or less. For what it’s worth, mine was exactly 100 words. For posterity and your fleeting amusement, I present it here:

And with that, I’m gone for the year. Happy New Year, friends and readers! I’ll catch you on the other side.

Thirteen Days - The Roger Donaldson Interview

2010-11-04T10:38:00.007Z

Seeing Anne Billson digging through her archives for some great vintage interviews to post on her blog MULTIGLOM (Go! Read them now! I’ll wait.) has inspired me to look back through my own cache of long-forgotten witterings to see if I can find anything blog-worthy. Here goes...

Back in the early months of 2001 I’d already been writing for the film website 6degrees for well over a year, but I was about to pop my interviewing cherry by sitting down with director Roger Donaldson who was in London to promote the release of Thirteen Days, a terrific film chronicling the terrifying moment in October 1962 when the world was teetering precariously on the brink of nuclear war. (Side note: I was one of the only reviewers who wasn’t given any access to the film’s star Kevin Costner, although he did brush past me in a corridor as I left.) It would be one of the last articles published on the site, just before it folded up and drifted away in the mass implosion of the first dotcom crash.

I’d been a huge fan of Donaldson’s No Way Out for years, so I was excited and nervous. About 80% nervous to 20% excited. I turned up at the Dorchester Hotel over an hour early and just paced around outside chain-smoking trying to get my head straight, worrying about whether the DAT recorder I’d borrowed would explode or how often I would mindlessly go “ummm” and “errr” (answer: a lot. They all disappeared thanks to the magic of transcription, along with a painful amount of my fatuous interjections.)

Before I switched on the DAT recorder, I told Mr. Donaldson that he was my first ever interview, so if he wanted to just talk freely if I stumbled, that would be fine with me. (I have no shame. None.) He was a gracious and charming interview subject, even though he’d been sitting there all day talking to journalists and he was saddled with me for his last interview of the day as we headed into the early evening. Looking back at the interview now, I can’t help noticing the section towards the end when he digresses to talk about starting out in a career, as if he’s talking directly to me.

One more thing to bear in mind. This interview took place in March 2001 - six months before the events of September 11th and a couple of years before Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, which makes this interview something of an interesting relic from a different time. Enough preamble - let’s get to it:

6degrees – The first thing that struck me about Thirteen Days is that it works on quite a few levels: there is the obvious epic scope of the whole thing and its global ramifications, then you have the relatively intimate portrayal of a group of men making incredibly hard decisions, and then you also have the relationship between the Kennedy brothers and Kenny O’Donnell. Which of these elements in particular attracted you to this film?

Roger Donaldson – Well I think, to be honest, before I read the script I thought I knew a lot about the event, and as I read the script I realized first of all how little I knew, and then secondly how dramatic and suspenseful this story was and how so many things went wrong it’s a wonder that it didn’t end badly, and as I turned every page I just wanted to know what happened next, and I thought that if I feel this way about the script, I’ve got to be able to make an exciting, thrilling movie about this. There were a number of other reasons, of course, that I was attracted to it, but the most basic thing was that I just really did feel like it was a good story that I could tell well.

6degrees - Did you know going in that you wanted to do it as a political thriller?

RD - Yeah. The movie was a political thriller, and the script was a political thriller, and I’ve always been interested in thrillers. In a way, every movie I make I think of as a thriller, whatever it is there’s always an element of tension and building suspense. Even a movie like Cocktail in its own way for me has got an element of that. I like movies that are about relationships and how they resolve themselves and how the politics of relationships play out, and in this particular case I just felt like, boy, this is a very tense story, the stakes were enormous, the characters were going into uncharted territory as these events played out, and I’ve got to be able to make a compelling story out of this material.

6degrees – Did you find that we were much closer to apocalypse than anybody could have possibly imagined? Do you think the people in that room were the only ones who really understood the implications of what was happening?

RD – Well, first of all the script made that point. But I was interested to know what the reality of it was with some of the people that had experienced it, and one of the things that I managed to do was to hunt down a lot of people who had been part of the real story. I managed to find the guy who had flown the first low-level photography runs over Cuba, I managed to find Ted Sorensen who was the speech writer for Kennedy, people like Robert McNamara are still alive who I spoke to and every one of these people reiterated that at the time they believed that it was going to happen, they really thought there was going to be a war, and they were convinced it was going to be a nuclear war, and they had this feeling of inevitability about it, accepting that there was nothing they could do to stop this thing happening, and you talk to someone like Robert McNamara now and he says “I don’t know how it didn’t happen”.

6degrees – And there are moments in the film where it’s so close.

RD – And that’s how he felt. He really thought that on that night when they delivered the ultimatum to the Russians and Bobby Kennedy goes off to speak to Dobrynin that there was no way the Russians were going to back down. They were painted into a corner because of this U2 being shot down, they felt like they had to take a pre-emptive strike against the missile sites and then all hell would have broken loose.

6degrees – Apart from the fact that the story is incredibly dramatic, do you also feel that it is incredibly relevant, in that this is something that could conceivably happen again?

RD – Well, things are different these days, and there’s one big difference, and that is that communications now are instant. Now, the President of the United States can get on the telephone and get through to Putin, and vice versa. So there is that instant communication. However, that doesn’t necessarily make resolving conflict any easier as we’ve seen.

6degrees – The film also seems to hammer home the fact that these massive events are dealt with by a select group of people, and these events succeed or fail on the merits of the key decision makers.

RD - Yeah. Look at how the Second and First World Wars got going, or the Bosnian War, or the wars that are happening right now in Africa. Take the Middle East, for example. There are a half dozen people calling all the shots, and you hope that there are some smart ones there! Because they’re not always that smart, and some of them just get there because they’re the most ambitious, but not necessarily the smartest.

6degrees – Another thing that struck me about the film was the fact that in recent years, and this is particularly relevant for younger audiences seeing this film, the name Kennedy is usually heard in association with Marilyn Monroe or Lee Harvey Oswald, and it’s refreshing to see Kennedy portrayed as a politician. Was this a side of him you consciously chose to put across?

RD – First of all, I made this movie for the young man I once was. I think that there is a lot of crap out there for young people, there are a lot of movies that speak down to them, that treat them like they’re stupid, as if all they care about is getting laid and going to dance clubs. Now, I was that kid too once, but there was also another side of me that was a serious person who cared about the world, who was idealistic, who cared about politics, and who felt that on the one hand, I was not really able to affect what happened in the world, but at the same time, realising that I was part of it.

At the time of the Vietnam War, I felt like I was a pawn in America’s plans and I got conscripted to go to Vietnam. I don’t know where I got it from, but ultimately I got this savvy and realized that this was not a bright idea, and as an 18 year old kid to get the courage to stand up to everybody, to all these adults who are going to put you in jail, or put you up against a wall and shoot you, or whatever, it takes a bit of courage to stand up and say “I’m not going to do what you tell me to do”. So I’ve always had that idealism and I remember that idealism that tends with age to pass you by a bit, and you get more of a realist about the world as you see the reality. I just think that there are a lot of issues now to do with nuclear weapons that young people should not just sit back and think everything is OK, because it’s not OK, and I would love this movie to be a focal point for examining the past and examining the present. I feel quite strongly about that. But the movie is entertainment too. I don’t think it’s a boring movie. It’s a history lesson, and you get your money’s worth.

6degrees – Are there any other historical moments that you would be particularly attracted to in terms of any future projects?

RD – History comes with baggage, unfortunately. And the further back you go the easier it becomes because people either don’t remember or they don’t care or it’s irrelevant. If you’re making something about Cleopatra, nobody even knows if she was Egyptian or if she was from Timbuktu, nobody really knows. I’m not a great history buff. The thing I would like to do is things that I’m passionate about, and I think this movie reminded me of that passion that I started my filmmaking career with and I don’t want to lose sight of that passion that I know I have. One of the great things about being young and getting out there and starting out your career is you have a passion and you know how hard it is to make headway. Your own ambition can take you a long way too, and you’re only as good as you know you are. The hardest person to convince is yourself, and it doesn’t get any easier as you get older. You still have to face the reality of your life, and how hard it is to get creative things happening, how tough it is to withstand the criticism that creativity always attracts, how single-minded you have to be, how prepared you have to be to sacrifice everything to get what you want, and yet, you’ve got to be a realist too, and you’ve got to make a living.

The movies that I want to make are the ones that I’m passionate about and where I feel that I’ve got something to say. Not in a preaching way, but just how I feel about whatever the movie is about. One of the most passionate movies that I ever made is a movie called Smash Palace, which I wrote, produced and directed myself, and its about a divorce, and it’s a gut-wrenching, up close and personal look at divorce but it’s also funny, entertaining, horrific and shocking, and it was a very successful movie for me and I keep remembering how hard it was to make, and how good I felt when I felt I’d made a movie I’d succeeded in, and I feel that way about Thirteen Days too. Thirteen Days was a very personal movie for me to make, even though it wasn’t my idea to make it. It was a very personal movie for me to be involved in because it was about issues that I have very strong opinions about, but it also embraced my strengths as a filmmaker who has succeeded in making some good thrillers.

One of the best reviews I’ve got was a review that said that the movie could be added to the fairly short list of great movies that have been made about the Cold War, movies like Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May, which are some of my favourite movies of all-time. So, sometime you get patted on the back and you go, Yep, you got it, and I feel like I got what I wanted to get, but I’m sure that there will be other reviews that won’t see it in the same light and they won’t see the relevance of it.

6degrees – I also thought it could be added to quite a select group of films that illustrate that men in rooms talking can be a phenomenally cinematic thing, films like Twelve Angry Men and Glengarry Glen Ross.

RD – And they don’t come along often. In some ways, it’s the hardest part of making movies, to make straight dialogue gripping and to get the audience listening. It’s hard. People aren’t used to listening for long periods of time.

The Freaks Come Out At Night - VHS, video nasties and Trash Humpers

2010-09-07T11:35:00.004+01:00

I remember watching The Exorcist for the first time decades ago on a murky VHS copy that must have been copied from tape-to-tape many times over before it got to me. It was virtually, but not quite, unwatchable. It was that borderline can’t-quite-see-it-properly feeling that made it so terrifying. In the wake of the Video Recordings Act 1984, Warner Brothers had decided not to submit The Exorcist to the BBFC for classification, and it remained legally unavailable in the UK until the theatrical re-release in 1998. If you weren’t lucky enough to own a pre-certification copy, the only way to see it was on copied tapes passed around amongst friends. It scared the shit out of me, and I wouldn’t watch it again until the sparkling new prints appeared in cinemas again.

When I saw if for the second time, it felt like a totally different film. On VHS, I was horrified by the staticy indistinct images on the degraded tape. By what I couldn’t see just as much as what I could. On a cinema screen, my fear was superseded with utter exhilaration at watching William Friedkin’s perfectly-realised vision of The Devil Comes To Georgetown. The Exorcist remains one of my favourite films of all time, but it has never scared me once since that first viewing. The horrors remained on that videocassette, as if it were only the moulded black plastic shell and magnetic tape themselves that contained the real terrors.

And now along comes Harmony Korine, putting the nasty back into video.

There is a moment relatively early on in Trash Humpers which shows a fat kid in a suit bludgeoning a toy baby doll’s head repeatedly with a hammer, laughing and saying “I told ya I’d kill her!” over and over again, the dull thwack of the hammer’s weight bouncing off the hard plastic, causing the doll to jump off the ground in a grotesque dance. Watching Trash Humpers feels a little bit like being the plastic doll, with Korine wielding the indiscriminate hammer straight at your head.

The title of the film is the only synopsis you need. It’s not an evocative metaphor like Reservoir Dogs or Chinatown. It really is about people who hump trash. If I’d hated it, this would be my opportunity to skewer the film by twisting the title into a two-word review: Fucking Rubbish.

There are two stock phrases that a depressingly large number of unimaginative writers wheel out to describe Harmony Korine: “enfant terrible” (which should really be retired now that he’s 37) and “agent provocateur”. But both of those phrases are just lazy critical shorthand that ultimately say nothing. It would be more accurate to say that Korine is Loki, the trickster of cinema, or maybe a carnival barker ready to parade his latest succession of freaks.

Presented as found footage (a discarded VHS cassette that plays like the home movies of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Leatherface and family) Trash Humpers is divorced from any kind of coherent narrative or context. And without either to hold on to as an anchor, it’s an unsettling succession of unconnected scenes that are stretched past the point where they become boring, and yet it is that very interminable repetition that makes it so disturbing, until the cumulative effect takes on a seductive, compelling quality. Some of the most interesting bits in Trash Humpers comes from the limitations of VHS, random unavoidable moments of picture distortion, colour saturation, static and screen-roll.

With a running time of only 78 minutes, Trash Humpers feels much longer, and I wriggled restlessly watching it all in one sitting. No matter how much you may dislike it whilst it plays out in front of your eyes, it has a way of getting under your skin and haunting you until you want to sit through it again. It’s a film that manages to repulse you whilst hypnotising you at the same time. I’m already toying with a second viewing just writing about it here.

Trash Humpers is available on DVD via Warp Films from 20th September and, this is the bit I really like, you can also pick it up on individually customised VHS tapes or even, if you have £7,500 to spare, on a 35mm film print. Click here for further details.

You’ve Got A Friend In Me

2010-09-03T13:49:00.004+01:00

Warning: If you haven’t seen Toy Story 3 yet, Here Be SPOILERS.

I saw Toy Story when it came out fifteen years ago and fell madly in love with it straight away. That love has only increased with the passage of time.

Shortly afterwards, the not-yet-Mrs. AKA bought me a Buzz Lightyear for my birthday - a gift that proudly sat on a shelf in my home office, occasionally taken down so that I could press the button which would allow him to call out to me. “This is an intergalactic emergency!“. “I am Buzz Lightyear. I come in peace”. “To Infinity And Beyond!”.

The fact that I was well into my twenties was irrelevant. I was Andy, and Buzz was my toy and everything was as it should be.

Fours years later, I saw Toy Story 2 and my love for Andy’s toys continued to grow. (Although I flout conventional wisdom by maintaining that the first remains the finest in the series.)

Fast-forward. My daughter was not even two year’s old when she pulled my Toy Story DVD down off the shelf. It was the first film that she ever watched from beginning to end, riveted to the screen and falling in love with Woody, Buzz and the gang in the same way that I had a decade earlier. Soon after, she took the Buzz Lightyear down off my office shelf, and then toddled over to my desk to grab a black Sharpie and press it into my palm. She told me that she wanted me to write her name on the sole of one of Buzz’s feet, just like Andy did with his toys. My Buzz Lightyear was now her Buzz Lightyear.

As the years have passed, we’ve both seen the first two Toy Story movies so many times that we can quote whole reams of them verbatim. They are as exciting and funny and moving as they’ve always been, and we never tire of them. From a solitary Buzz Lightyear, her cache of toys has grown to include all the main players in the Toy Story saga. Woody is her favourite. She will plant his hat on his head at a suitably rakish angle, yank the pull-cord on his back and grin in delight as he tells her that “You’re my favourite deputy!”, before planting him on the back of his trusty steed Bullseye for a ride around the carpet.

Last month, we finally went to see Toy Story 3 together (in glorious 2D). I don’t know which one of us cried more. She was inconsolable as Andy finally said goodbye to his toys. I scooped her up into my arms to reassure her that this was a happy ending, that the toys were getting what they’d always wanted - someone who would love them and play with them. But as her little body trembled with sobs, I was choking back hard on my own emotions. Because I finally realised that I’d been wrong all along. I wasn’t Andy. I was Woody. And one day, my daughter will grow up and put away her childish things.

I’ll just hold on to what Woody tells Buzz at the end of Toy Story 2: “It’ll be fun while it lasts.”

Thank you, Namaste and Goodbye

2010-06-03T16:10:00.006+01:00

This should go without saying, but there are big, honking SPOILERS for the end of Lost in this post. This is your last and only warning.

Lost has been one of my enduring obsessions for the last six years, and that will sound like a staggering understatement to anybody who has ever met me. I'm sure that I've bored the shit out of everyone by talking about it endlessly. This isn't an apology. This is, however, intended to be my final public utterances about Lost. Time to open our eyes one last time...

The final episode of Lost absolutely worked for me, and as time passes, I appreciate it more and more. Whilst I accept and understand that it was never going to work for everybody (and I do have my own issues with some elements of the final season's FlashSideways strand) some of the more vitriolic responses I've read have puzzled me, in particular the hysterical screeds weighted with an unwarranted sense of entitlement. Writers have one duty only - to tell the story that they want to tell, not the story the audience wants to see. (And let's take it as read that you can't please all of the people all of the time.)

The dissatisfied segment of the audience seem to have one overriding complaint - that all of the questions and mysteries set up over the last six years weren't answered. Personally, I don't have a problem with that. I'm glad that everything wasn't answered. Lost wasn't a parlour game or a mathematical equation that needed solving. It was a story. Stories should entertain on some level without succumbing to lumpen piles of narrative-killing exposition. Stories aren't about answering questions. They are about asking questions. And one of the things that I loved about the Lost finale was that it was sufficiently ambiguous in places to allow room for the viewer's interpretation to seep in and fill the gaps. After all, did we really need a cast-iron scientific or even mystical explanation of the Island in painstaking detail?

If you don't believe me, then look at Heroes or FlashForward - shows that tried to emulate the multi-character narrative and mysteries that had worked for Lost and failed. Because they were so wrapped up in the mythology and the puzzles and the tricksy answers, that they short-changed the characters. And without the characters, you may as well just pack that shit up and go home.

But Lost knew that if you placed the characters front and centre, with convincing, compelling characters played by talented, well-cast actors, then the audience will follow you anywhere. It's no coincidence that the first season dwelt almost exclusively on the survivors of Oceanic 815 and their backstory before unleashing all the freakier elements. Because once you buy into the characters, you'll have less resistance to smoke monsters and four-toed statues and time travel. They just become additional elements woven into the story.

Cries of "They were making it up as they went along!" were inevitable. Specific character beats and details were undoubtedly shaped in the process of scripting, sure. All good writing evolves as it gets sculpted and crafted on the page. Why reject a new idea or insight or scene if it helps the story? But with hindsight, you can find evidence of the ending seeded throughout the show's past. After all, we were clearly told "All of this matters" and Jacob's answer is the clearest explanation of the ending: "It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress."

Jack was always meant to be the one who killed the Smoke Monster. All of his experiences since the plane crash were leading him towards that final moment, and he needed all of those experiences and relationships to get there. Likewise, Hurley was always going to be Jacob's true replacement for the same reasons. (And I never bought into Jack as the Candidate. He could never have been the Candidate, because he was meant to literally be the Shepherd).

On the subject of the Smoke Monster, I can't call him the Man in Black or Jacob's brother. Riven with guilt and grief and warped by his adoptive mother, Jacob made the mistake of treating the monster as his brother, even though I think Across the Sea shows that it was not his brother, it was just a skin for the monster to wear. It wasn't Jacob's brother, just as it wasn't John Locke or Christian Shephard or Alex Rousseau. In the Season 3 episode The Cost of Living, the Smoke Monster as Yemi, just before he deals the death blow to Mr. Eko, says: "You speak to me as if I were your brother!", a subtle bit of foreshadowing that wasn't destined to pay-off for another three years.

Or, if we are trawling through a backlog of 121 episodes for pointers to the ending, how about Penny's letter to Desmond tucked away in his copy of Our Mutual Friend way back in the Season 2 finale Live Together, Die Alone? In particular, I'm thinking of the line "Because all we really need to survive is one person who truly loves us."

And how about the Dharma Initiative's greeting of "Namaste", which ties in to both the glowing light in the heart of the Island and the environment of the FlashSideways, because any Yoga practitioner will be able to tell you that "Namaste" translates from Sanskrit as "The light in me sees the light in you". If anyone has an issue with the spiritual overtones of the finale, it may be worth pointing out that Lost has always been peppered with religious markers along the way from Christian Shephard (and I'm stunned that so many viewers seem to have missed the connotations of that name. Names have always been significant in the Lost universe) to "God loves you as He loved Jacob" and Eko's Jesus Stick inscribed with "Lift up your eyes and look north John 3:05". And that's barely scratching the surface.

So fuck the naysayers. I liked it a lot. I loved the reappearance of Frank Goddamn Lapidus. I never believed for a second that he had died in the submarine explosion. The Island had tried to pull him there three times (once as the pilot of Oceanic 815; once on Widmore's freighter and finally as the pilot of the Ajira flight.) After all that effort to get Lapidus there, he wasn't going to be killed off so easily. Everyone brought to the Island was there for a reason (John Locke was right) and, never forget, you don't get to die or escape if "The Island isn't done with you yet."

Then there is the perfect yin and yang of Hurley and Ben taking over as the Island's protectors, a double-act of the one with the sweetest, most incorruptible nature reaching out to the one with the most blood-stained, tainted soul to forge a new way forward, breaking the centuries-old cycle driven by Jacob's dysfunction and Mommy issues and free from the destructive powers of the Smoke Monster.

The Ajira plane takes off as the Island is finally done with our survivors. Richard is finally ready to live (his first grey hair was just one of many killer moments in the finale). Claire is finally ready to be a mother (as she was told way back in the first season "It is crucial that you yourself raise this child."). Kate has finally allowed herself to love unselfishly. Miles and Sawyer are finally ready to star in the wisecracking buddy-cop spinoff LaFleur. (Oh how I wish that last one were true).

And how beautiful it was that the plane carrying his friends home was the last thing that Jack saw before he was allowed to die. The Island was done with him, and Jack had finally done what he had been trying and failing to do over and over and over again since the beginning. He fixed everything. And, damn, if I didn't get a little misty-eyed when Vincent came loping out of the bamboo cane to lie down next to Jack. They had all learned to Live Together, so Jack didn't have to Die Alone.

And now one of the most literate, erudite, thought-provoking, ambitious, densely-layered, exciting and sometimes infuriating mainstream shows in recent memory is over. Where else are you going to find a show where the world is saved by the combined forces of true love and duct tape? But now it's time for me to shut the fuck up about Lost once and for all. What happened, happened. And I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Face/Off

2010-05-30T21:22:00.002+01:00

I deleted my Facebook account a couple of weeks ago. I probably should have mentioned that before, I suppose, but I've been kinda busy.

As timesucks go, for me Facebook was by far the most useless. I never really "got" it (and believe me, I tried).

Like a lot of people, I was concerned with the labyrinthine counter-intuitive privacy settings, but that wasn't the thing that made me delete my account.

And I was fed up of the endless stream of invites to events in different fucking timezones that I was never going to go to, and the frivolous "Which mould spore are you?" quizzes, and the invites to "friend" people I met once at a bus stop in 1987. But none of those things were the spur I needed to delete my account.

No, the decisive push which made me finally press the "Sayonara Bye Bye" button was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg referring to his user base as "dumb fucks". That statement needs no further editorialising from me does it? No, I didn't think so.

So, that's one crusty barnacle I've managed to scrape from my online presence, and I have no regrets whatsoever.

I am, of course, still babbling uncontrollably over on Twitter. See you there, muchachos!

And Then There Were Four

2010-05-26T19:19:00.003+01:00

The ranks of the AKA Army have grown by one.

My son was born at 2.07am this morning. He weighed 7 pounds and 14 ounces. At least, I think he did. Does. I'm a little bit addled from sleep-deprivation. I've only had two hours sleep since I woke up at 6am on Tuesday morning. I should probably do something about that...

Also: Longest. Labour. Ever.

I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly thank him for waiting until after the Lost finale before arriving. Thanks, son! I'll never forget this.

He doesn't have a name yet...we're still working on it. I'll add it to the ToDo list.

Mother and baby are doing well. Mrs. AKA was a goddamn warrior and impressed the shit out of me. Gritted teeth never looked so sexy. My daughter is adapting to a new little brother. She seems to enjoy singing to him. He seems to enjoy listening to her sing. This is gonna work out just fine.

That's enough for now. My duvet, it calls to me.

(Above picture is an artist's respresentation only. Not actual baby).

The Cat on the Mantelpiece

2010-03-16T16:04:00.007Z

Last week, despite my general disdain for remakes in general and horror remakes in particular, I watched Breck Eisner's new iteration of George A. Romero's The Crazies. There seems to be something sufficiently sturdy and robust about Romero's stories and ideas that means that his work tends to withstand a reheating at the hands of others. And The Crazies 2010 proved that - it was pretty good fun and it moves. But I can never just sit and enjoy a horror movie without trying to pick it apart and see how all the pieces fit together, examining what works and what doesn't. So this is me musing out loud about the mechanics of horror movies.

I have a pet phrase I use when talking about horror movies called "the cat on the mantelpiece". It means a cheap, fake-out jump scare. For example: a character apprehensively walks into an empty room and, without warning, a cat jumps off the mantelpiece and makes them (and the audience) jump. Or someone suddenly reaches into the frame from off-screen and grabs a character's arm. There's no other context or anything specifically scary about these moments. It's just a cheap jump. I'm not overly fond of them, but they do have their uses. For a start, it puts your audience on edge and sets up a feeling of unease. You can have one or two of these towards the beginning of a movie and that's fine. When it comes to setting the tone, any trick is fair game.

But if you overuse them (and The Crazies came dangerously close to overdoing it with "cat on the mantelpiece" gags, but just about got away with it), or if you are still using them deep into your running time, I lose patience pretty quickly. Anyone can do a "cat on the mantelpiece" gag. It's the equivalent of a fart in a comedy. Cheap, easy, effective but lazy. By the time you are deep into the story, you should be furnishing the audience with real scares driven by the tone, the situation, the story, the characters, the monsters, whatever. Not extraneous jumpy things because you haven't figured out another, better way to provide scares.

(Sidenote: Sam Raimi is a master of "cat on the mantelpiece" gags, and Drag Me To Hell is chock full of great ones. But most filmmakers aren't Sam Raimi and don't possess his judgment and sense of pace and timing for these things. Raimi knows when to use them and how to use them, giving Drag Me To Hell an infectious sense of fun.)

But thinking about the "cat on the mantelpiece" also leads me to thinking about framing in general. In horror movies, if I ever see a character framed to the side, I'm never looking at them (regardless of the intention of the director). My eye is always drawn to the dead space to their left or right, because I'm expecting something to happen over there. And even if nothing happens and if it has still served to unsettle me somewhat, then that's fine. The importance of tone in horror can't be underestimated.

I'm particularly fond of frames within frames: TV sets, windows, open doorways - because they can either serve as a separate focal point, or can somehow emphasise the action happening in the wider frame. One of my favourite frame-within-a-frame moments works beautifully for both horror and comedic purposes - the moment in Shaun of the Dead when Shaun is fiddling with the fusebox at the Winchester and inadvertently switches on an outside light briefly, even though he himself misses it:

Also? Hazmat suits. Hazmat suits are inherently creepy and are probably under-utilised in The Crazies. Whenever you can't see someone's face or eyes, when they are wrapped in gas masks and shapeless, creaking plastic, it serves to dehumanise them and makes them something to be feared. Interestingly, the absence of a visible face doesn't apply to superhero movies, but that's because an invisible face is supposed to unsettle other characters in the story, not the audience. Spider-Man isn't scary to us, because we've already seen nerdy Peter Parker before the mask goes on. Going back to Raimi again for a second, he has to resort to tricks that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko never had to worry about. In Spider-Man comics, it's perfectly acceptable for entire comics to show Spider-Man masked. But in movies, the problem is that masks don't emote (with the possible exception of V for Vendetta, where Hugo Weaving managed to convey so much with tilts of the head and other little bits and pieces of subtle body language). You can't see fear or anger or tears through a mask. And you can't see the face of the leading actor who has been paid so much to wear the iconic spandex. (Or their bloody tears. What is it about modern storytelling that demands that the protagonists get all weepy-eyed all the time? Lazy, lazy storytelling shorthand. Yes, Doctor Who. Yes, Lost. As much as I love you, you are both so guilty of this.)

And I'm done. I leave you now with a shot of possibly the finest "cat on the mantelpiece" scare of all time, a rare one which actually does pay off from a character and storytelling perspective. Take it away, Bruce.

Stray Rounds

2010-03-03T15:17:00.008Z

There is a persistent bit of received wisdom that you will repeatedly hear from writers - a mantra that states you must write every day. Here's an example:

“To be a successful writer, write every single day whether you feel like it or not.” -- Alex Haley

It's a perfectly sound bit of advice. But, as with all tidy little homilies, it doesn't quite tell the whole story. Sometimes you need to take a step back. Sometimes you need to stop staring into the heart of the sun or you're just going to go blind. I'd been banging away at a few things for the last couple of weeks, and no matter how hard I hammered away at the square pegs, the motherfuckers were never going to fit into the round holes. And then I had one of those Eureka moments where I realised that the problem wasn't how I was writing. The problem was what I was writing. It was never going to work to my satisfaction, largely because I'm not a "content provider", I'm a writer. I'm not very good at hacking out anodyne text-based wallpaper for websites, because I just can't get excited about it. Sure, I can do it, but I'd rather not. Fortunately, I don't depend on writing gigs to pay the bills, so I can just bow out of those jobs and leave it to those better suited to that particular brand of soul-destroying drudge work. But the process left me antsy and irritable, and I needed to step away from the keyboard for a couple of weeks to sluice out my polluted brainpan.

And one of the things you don't hear so often when writers are banging on with all their "I'm a writer. I write every day. Yes I do. Write write write." is that sometimes you just need to turn off the output and ramp up the input instead. Writing isn't purely about putting one word in front of another endlessly, regardless of quality or reflection or passion. Sometimes you need to go outside and get on with the gloriously messy business of life to remember why you write in the first place. Which is a convoluted way of saying that I've been stoking the furnace for a few weeks to get myself fired up again. And it worked. Here's a random sampling of the pop-cultural delights that have tweaked my amygdala during my brief self-imposed sabbatical:

Ode to Kirihito

Groundbreaking mangaka Osamu Tezuka is still best known in the west for the family-friendly adventures of his robot Pinocchio Astro Boy, but this hefty 832-page graphic novel from the early 70s shows off his flair for formal experimentation in a sprawling picaresque tale of body horror that is impossible to reduce to a synopsis, defying easy genre classification as it bounces around from medical and political thriller to freakshow weirdness. (I'm particularly fond of the Human Tempura. Don't ask - just buy.)

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

Andy Serkis plays Ian Dury. Really, you don't need much more of a pitch than that to get me hooked. One of London's finest ever lyricists and a genuine one-off, with the light touch of Ogden Nash seasoned with a generous splash of bloody-minded piss and vinegar. And Serkis just nails it. I seriously doubt I'll see a performance that good for the rest of the year. Plus, those songs performed with the actual Blockheads. I loved every minute of it and reeled out of the cinema grinning like an idiot. Je t'adore, ich liebe dich, hit me, hit me, hit me...

Me Cheeta

I picked this up on a whim and I didn't regret it. Part satire on the glut of bloated self-serving celebrity memoirs choking the shelves of a dwindling number of bookshops, part marvellously filthy tome full of salacious gossip (after all, no animal has ever been successfully sued for libel), part serious reflection on the mistreatment of animals in the service of entertainment and, best of all, a beautiful valentine to the mighty Johnny Weissmuller, the greatest Tarzan of all time. I wasn't sure what to make of it until a couple of pages in and then I hit this line, sat back and enjoyed the ride:

"Rex Harrison was an absolutely irredeemable cunt who tried to murder me — but still, you have to try to forgive people, no matter what. Otherwise we’d be back in the jungle."

Leverage

The fantastic con-of-the-week show about a crew of specialists pulling a Robin Hood and ripping off the Man to help out the little people. Or, as neatly encapsulated by master thief Parker's off-the-cuff line: “Sometimes bad guys are the only good guys you get.” Leverage really sings not only because of its exuberant sense of fun and the superlative swiss-watch machinations of the plot, but it manages to succeed with something that so many other shows get wrong - it marries five perfectly-cast actors with five brilliantly-written roles. These aren't the bland cookie-cutter cyphers of the CSI franchise. And the fun train never stops.

This is Aleph

2010-01-21T11:05:00.003Z

Already three weeks into the new decade, and it occurs to me that it's been a while since I last set out my online stall and pointed everybody at the various locations where I stink up the Internet like a virtual hobo. I know that the sidebar points to most of these places, but then the people who visit the blog via an RSS reader don't see that stuff, do they? OK, here we go.

Where I can be found online in 2010:

Sucker Punch - This place. My own personal Nexus of All Realities and the central hub of all my online activity. Internet years are like dog years, and in a few short months Sucker Punch is going to be six years old. By my rudimentary calculations, that means the blog is on the verge of a mid-life crisis. And yet, I still feel like I'm just getting warmed up. The focus of the blog has always bounced all over the damn place from shapeless rambling and little peeks at slivers of my life, to focused pieces on specific topics or as an outlet for thinking out-loud just to clarify things in my own mind. For someone as intensely private as I am with a persistent habit of compartmentalising my life, I seem to talk an awful lot. A few of my friends have said things to me recently that have made me take another look at my online persona. Some are surprised at how little I write about myself or my life, and some wish I would write more about things I know, things I think or things that are worth sharing - basically, the stuff I tend to say to people when I'm sitting opposite them. So I'm thinking that 2010 is the year where I pull back the curtain just that little bit more in the hope that I don't scare the living shit out of everyone. Let's find out how well that works out together.

Shrapnel - My tumblelog. The strapline "Jagged shards of popular culture eviscerating the flabby guts of the Internet" says it all. I use it as a bottomless all-purpose bucket where I chuck images, video and all sorts of other crap I unearth whilst trawling the murky corners of the Internet. Sometimes research material, but mostly just stuff that amuses me.

Last.fm - The vast majority of my aural input is catalogued here. If I'm trying to concentrate on something and I need to drown out potential distractions, the "Recently Played" chart will rapidly fill up with the background noise of really bad jazz or soundtracks to old exploitation movies. If I'm just listening for pleasure, you'll see it jump the rails to a stream of funk, soul and hip-hop, or what my daughter refers to as "Daddy's Old Skool".

Occasionally, I'll mess about on Blip.Fm, purely because it plugs into Twitter easily, which seamlessly brings me to...

Twitter - My daily, rolling spewings in 140-characters nuggets. Having been on Twitter for nigh on three years now, I've looked on with some amusement at how this has exploded into the mainstream over the last year or so as if it was something new. You pesky kids! I was chatting shit on Twitter before you were even an itch in your daddy's pants!

Flickr - I see things, I point the camera on my N95 8GB at them, I click, I upload them to my Flickr page. What more do you need to know? Have a look at the pictures - apparently they're worth more than a thousand words.

Del.icio.us - Still indispensable for me, although it does seem to have fallen out of favour somewhat. I frequently need to capture urls on the move, and I find it more useful to find relevant search results here than on Google, due to the folksonomy of hivemind tagging. A mixture of research material and pages of bookmarks that reflect my preoccupations and enduring obsessions.

Facebook and LinkedIn (or "Corporate Facebook") - Feel free to Friend me or make a Connection with me or whatever the bloody jargon is this week. Don't Poke me. I only like poking when there's some kind of Happy Ending.

How to contact me - I've resisted sticking an email address here, mostly because when I've tried it seems to attract spam and, occasionally, hate mail. If you don't already have my email address, then the best ways to contact me are via Twitter, in the comments section anywhere here or via Facebook.

Now you know where I am, let's spend the rest of the year figuring out where I'm going.

Eat Lead, Slackers!

2010-01-12T16:26:00.005Z

And we're back. At last.

Took me a little longer than expected to get myself up to 88mph this year. Last week was almost a total write-off. I was all ready to hit the ground running hard and fast, only to discover that the ground was covered with ice and snow and I was slip-sliding all over the damn place. Last week morphed into a binary existence of either slowly traveling across ice and snow or trying to stay inside away from the ice and snow, so I treated the week with the contempt that it deserved - as a hangover from the end of 2009. Also: I'm a fucking mammal, so the inclement weather made me want to either sleep or eat instead of prodding the brainmeat into action.

So, as far as I'm concerned, 2010 started yesterday. Works for me. There's a helluva lot I want to do this year, and the words aren't going to write themselves. My To-Do list may be a vicious, unwieldy bastard sometimes, but I wouldn't want it any other way. I feel like I'm off to a good start anyway. Bring it!

Hype Alert! Noticed yesterday that I have a piece of microfiction in the current issue of Icon magazine, which pleased me hugely as I wasn't expecting it. Whilst I wouldn't expect anyone to buy the magazine on the strength of my minor contribution alone, it is worth noting that the current issue is a special all-fiction issue, featuring work from Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow and Will Self amongst many others, and it's bloody good. Whilst magazines are withering on the shelves and coughing up bloody ink-flecked chunks of pulpy matter as they die off one by one, publications like Icon magazine are luxurious objects of beauty, crafted by people who realise that content, form and aesthetics are inextricably linked. Icon magazine invites you to stroke the cover lovingly every month before wrapping your brains around the text. Buy it!

That's all for now. There is work to be done...

Keep the Bugs Off Your Glass and the Trouble Off Your Ass

2009-12-23T14:58:00.006Z

The end-of-year slowdown is in full effect as we prepare to cruise gently into the New Decade in a postprandial tryptophan-induced haze.

I was going to write a Year or Decade In Review. I kicked it around for a couple of days, but I just couldn't get excited about it. "Best Of" lists are clogging up the Internet like a virulent outbreak of pixelated weeds and I've grown bored of reading them, so I sure ain't gonna waste my time adding another one to the pile.

I'll give you this much - Battle Royale remains my undisputed favourite movie of the decade, and if you have a burning desire to discover my thoughts on that, I've already written 4,000 words about it here (in addition to another chapter on Seijun Suzuki's Branded To Kill). It'll make for a fine last-minute Christmas gift for the blood-thirsty cineaste in your family. And that's the shameless plugging for the decade over as well.

There is one more Favourite Movie of the Decade I wanted to write about in detail, but I'll save that for a dedicated post next year, in which I'll pledge allegiance...to the band...of Mr.Schneebly. But I've already said too much...

Every year at this time, I always say to myself that I want to achieve more in the following year. And I do. Every year the output increases in both quality and quantity. But I'm still never satisfied. My reach continues to exceed my grasp, and that's no bad thing. I look forward to further grasping in the coming decade.

OK. That's enough aimless prattle on the blog for 2009. I'll continue to spit out 140-character pellets of bullshit on Twitter over the festive period. I have movies to watch, comics to read, friends and family to catch up with and bourbon to imbibe. I'll probably be climbing the walls by Boxing Day.

All that's left for me to say to you all, my dear friends out there in Interwebland, is Merry Christmas and I hope that 2010 brings you closer to whatever it is that you want out of life. Onwards!

Click! Slingers Is Coming

2009-12-04T11:28:00.002Z

I've been following Mike and Toby's adventures with the gestation of Slingers on Twitter for a long time with growing interest. And then yesterday, Warren Ellis blogged the Slingers sizzle reel and all of a sudden Shit Just Got Real. I absolutely love it when One of Us does good, and it's easier to throw unreserved support behind something when that something is genuinely really, really bloody excellent.

If you like heist movies; if you read 2000AD growing up; if you have a functioning brain, a neglected adrenal gland and a hunger for damn good television, then this is for you - The Slingers sizzle reel. And make sure that you head on over to Mike's blog and tell him how much you love it:

SLINGERS from Mike Sizemore on Vimeo.

Living In A Box - Paul King's Bunny & The Bull

2009-11-25T14:05:00.005Z

Let's get one thing out of the way before I get stuck into this: I have no intention of making endless references to The Mighty Boosh when discussing Bunny & The Bull. Back in 2004, reviews that constantly compared Shaun of the Dead to Spaced were tedious and unfair. Movies have to succeed or fail on their own merits. This isn't a spin-off from a TV show. So all I want to say about The Mighty Boosh in relation to Bunny & The Bull is, yes, Paul King directed most of the episodes of that show and, yes, both Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt appear in extended cameos. OK? OK. Let's do Bunny & The Bull the favour of treating it as a free-standing entity. Moving on...

It's difficult to discuss exactly what Bunny & The Bull is, or even what it is about, without diminishing it somewhat. I'm not worried about straying into spoiler territory, it's just that I expect that Bunny & The Bull is likely to be different things to different people. Whilst King's movie is undoubtedly very, very funny in parts, I think it would be a stretch to call it a comedy. It's a buddy road movie where two friends travel across Europe in search of romance and adventure. Or maybe they never leave the confines of a cramped London flat. Or perhaps they never get any further than moving around the wounded psyche of repressed naif Stephen Turnbull, played by Edward Hogg.

And therein lies the true strength of Paul King's movie. Bunny & The Bull is a slippery film to nail down, which makes it far more interesting to me. No matter how much the film seems to be about friendship and love, there's a thinner, darker skein woven around it all weighted with loss and tragedy. It's fun and enjoyable and laugh-out-loud funny in places, but you can never quite escape the slightly disturbing, unsettling fug that hangs in front of it all like dirty net curtains. Having two apparently contradictory tones at play is a difficult trick to pull off, but King just about manages it.

Edward Hogg's wired, twitchy performance in the astonishing White Lightnin', which helped that little-seen gem snag Le Hitchcock d'Or Prix du Jury at this year's Dinard Festival of British Cinema, showed what a mesmerising screen presence he can be. In Bunny & The Bull, Hogg has to do most of the heavy lifting as the straight man to Simon Farnaby's reckless, lovable oaf Bunny, without the fall-back of intermittent goggle-eyed one-liners.

Stephen's memories take place in a beautifully-constructed environment of carefully-lit backdrops, miniature models and calculatedly ramshackle, dreamy sets. Once you get past the sheen of artifice and the gags and the distracting cameo appearances, there's a genuinely affecting movie tinged with hope hiding just beneath the surface.

Bunny & The Bull is released in the UK on Friday 27 November. I wish that cinemas still showed a cartoon before every movie, because showing the original Bunny and Bull in the Warner Brothers Looney Tunes short Bully for Bugs first would make for a damn fine double-bill.

40 Reasons why I love Sesame Street

2009-11-06T11:00:00.016Z

1. Can you tell me how to get...?

2. Super Grover!

3. Sesame Street does Mad Men

4. Cookie Monster eats the World Trade towers in 1976 (via Boing Boing)

5. The Pointer Sisters and the Pinball Number Count

6. How to make your own DIY Pointer Sisters Pinball Clock

7. Bert and Ernie

8. Miami Mice

9. The Amazing Mumford

10. One of these things is not like the other things

11. Bob

12. Hooper's Store

13. Heeere's Cookie Monster! (via Popped Culture)

14. Count von Count

15. C is for Cookie

16. Slimey the Worm

17. Sesame Street Fever

18. Gordon

19. Follow That Bird

20. Oscar the Grouch

21. Who Are The People in Your Neighborhood?

22. Stevie Wonder performs Superstition

23. James Earl Jones counts to ten

24. Kermit the Frog's News Flash

25. Johnny Cash sings Nasty Dan to Oscar the Grouch

26. Big Bird in China (via Kung Fu Fridays)

27. Mr. Snuffleupagus

28. R2D2 and C3P0 visit Sesame Street

29. The Typewriter Guy

30. Gladys Knight & The Pips tell you how to get to Sesame Street

31. The cast of Bonanza count to 20

32. Guy Smiley

33. Grover the Waiter

34. Lena Horne sings the alphabet

35. The Bill Cosby alphabet

36. The Mad Painter

37. Richard Pryor demonstrates emotions

38. Cookiegate

39. Big Bird sings It's Not Easy Being Green at Jim Henson's Memorial

40. This blog post was brought to you by the letters H and B, and the number 40. This has been a production of the ...

Happy Birthday, Sesame Street!

UPDATED: Just found an extra clip and it was far too good to exclude. So here's my 41st Reason why I love Sesame Street. Jesse Jackson and I Am Somebody:

The Quick and The Dead - Revisiting 28 Weeks Later

2009-10-26T16:42:00.006Z

Over the weekend, I watched Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later again for the first time since its original theatrical release. With a couple of years perspective, I enjoyed it a lot more the second time around.

Which isn't to say that I didn't like it back in 2007. I did - a lot. But this time, I could watch it without endlessly comparing it to Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. Back then, I penalised Fresnadillo's movie for not being sufficiently scary, and for amping up the action and big-scale splatter. But that's just not fair. 28 Weeks Later has plenty of good scares, from the superb pre-title sequence showing a small group of survivors in a remote boarded-up house suddenly overwhelmed by the infected, to the moment when the inevitable cycle of infection ramps up all over again with one fateful kiss, to a treacherous walk down a stalled escalator in a pitch-black tube station, decomposing corpses slick and crunchy underfoot.

There are definite parallels here between the claustrophobic simplicity of 28 Days Later (and Ridley Scott's Alien) and the tooled-up militarism and firepower of 28 Weeks Later (and James Cameron's Aliens). The same song played with different instruments, and there's nothing wrong with that, because it's all about the execution. Whilst the first chapter in both series focus more on anticipation and tension, guile and smarts and hiding in the shadows, the second installments shift approach slightly to things that explode or ignite or crash and go "Boom". Interestingly, though, for all the mounting shell-casings and rising pyres of flame in 28 Weeks Later, the element that makes it all work is the family that finds itself torn apart, put back together and then rent asunder all over again over the course of the movie. Without that, it would just be another Living versus Dead knock-down drag-out (albeit one done with a lot of style and well-judged gore).

The true horror of 28 Weeks Later isn't the rampaging infected let loose on London once again. It's the tragic inevitability of the moment when the American military realises that everyone has to die in an attempt to contain the outbreak - infected and living alike. A decision which is even more devastating once it fails.

The aerial shots of an abandoned London are just as starkly beautiful as they are in Boyle's movie. No clusters of pigeons in the sky. No swirls of smoke from the buildings. No streams of traffic crossing the capital. And no people. Yes, I know that someone in an effects house probably spent hours digitally removing all signs of life from aerial footage, but that doesn't make it any less striking.

And the street level shots of London are equally gorgeous, with every street corner marked not only with overturned cars and dark stains, but towering mounds of bright yellow refuse sacks full of diseased body parts awaiting disposal and incineration. (Yes, I am aware that I just described piles of corpses as "gorgeous"...)

Cillian Murphy spent the first half hour of 28 Days Later making a mental adjustment adapting to the post-apocalyptic world that disintegrated whilst he was comatose in a central London hospital, and the rest of the film redefining himself in order to survive in a new world. Here, the destructive guilt Robert Carlyle has been carrying for 28 weeks is the catalyst that starts the cycle of arterial blood spurts and mouthfuls of torn flesh all over again. Both actors display a different flavour of muted numb acceptance, and Carlyle is astonishingly good. No amount of cold clinical military logic can compete with the gnawing emotions of a shattered man.

Back in 2007, I hadn't seen The Wire yet, and The Hurt Locker didn't exist, so this time I was looking at Idris Elba and Jeremy Renner with different eyes. Disappointingly, the role of a stiff unyielding commanding officer isn't much of a stretch for the man who essayed the complex and ambitious Stringer Bell. But I couldn't help looking at Renner's character and imagining him as Kathryn Bigelow's daredevil Sergeant James and thinking that, after coping bravely and recklessly with all those unexploded IEDs in Iraq, he's still unprepared for the chaos of London's blood-vomiting infected.

iMDB teases that the long-rumoured 28 Months Later may finally become a reality. If it does eventually run bleeding and screeching to the big screen, it's got a lot to live up to. Here's hoping it's no Alien³.

Moving Pictures

2009-10-12T14:57:00.008+01:00

Yes. I know. This blog has gone quiet again. It'll sputter back into action again soon, I'm sure.

Until then, a thought. The last couple of months have convinced me that 2009 is shaping up to be one of the finest years in cinema we've had for a long, long time. And here's my evidence - just a few of the beautiful, indelible images that I've been carrying around in my head, and the reason why I still take myself into dark rooms with a wall of flickering light in front of me, waiting and hoping to be showered with moments like these:

This is not a love story - (500) Days of Summer

2009-08-20T20:43:00.008+01:00

Before I begin, a disclaimer. Generally, I really don't like what passes for romantic comedy these days. I'll make an exception to this rule if a movie includes Simon Pegg and a blood-stained cricket bat. If there's a chance that Hugh Grant might bumble onto the screen, you'd have to bludgeon me with a blood-stained cricket bat to keep me in my seat.

You see, the overwhelming majority of romantic comedies are neither romantic nor comedic. On the whole, they're lazy by-the-numbers retreads of things you've seen done many times before, and better. They seem to exist solely to give Jennifer Aniston or Kate Hudson some semblance of a career. The startling lack of imagination in this virulent, mulitplex-infecting genre even extends to the advertising campaigns. The posters go a little something like this: The two leads against a white background. Leaning against something invisible. Smirking. Faces you want to punch repeatedly.

All of which is just a preamble to say that (500) Days of Summer is genuinely both funny and romantic. And, refreshingly, it dispenses with the depressing inevitably of a "they lived happily ever after" ending by setting you straight up front. A voiceover tells you what to expect - "This is not a love story" - and one of the first things we see is the aftermath of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel's failed relationship at the straggling end point of their 500 days together. The film then scrolls backwards and forwards along the timeline, using numbered title-cards denoting which day of the relationship we are at, shuffling and juggling them so that the good days are juxtaposed with the bad, nascent passion rapidly mutating into devastating heartbreak and back again.

"A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order." Jean-Luc Godard

What else has (500) Days of Summer got?

It's got two exceptional central performances from a pair that haven't appeared on screen together since Jordan Melamed's criminally under-seen Manic. (Levitt really does look more and more like Heath Ledger with every passing year. Someone should tell Christopher Nolan that we've found his next Joker.*) As much as Levitt brings a spot-on lightness of touch to his role, Deschanel is the one with the tougher act to pull off. She has to be convincingly and simultaneously plausible as both the ideal dream woman and as an icily-detached and insensitive bitch, without once ever sliding into a hackneyed stereotype of the Kooky Chick. The truth, of course, is something more complex and believable than either extreme, as the film's accretion of details reveals as it progresses.

It's got a full-blown song-and-dance number to the Hall & Oates tune You Make My Dreams.

It's got a lovely spot of flirtation centred around the theme tune from Knight Rider.

It's got wit, charm and inventiveness. It's got to be worth 95 minutes of your time.

The only thing (500) Days of Summer needs now is an audience. Make sure that it has one.

(500) Days of Summer is released in the UK on 2nd September. Thanks to the gang at Jam for the screening. And whilst you're waiting for the movie to rock up at your local popcorn palace, have a play making yourself a virtual C90 at the nifty (500) Days of Summer Mixtape site.

*I totally stole this observation from @ControlB. Sorry, Brett

One Million Giraffes (and one Clay Shirky)

2009-07-22T22:54:00.007+01:00

There are a lot of things that the internet does really well. It does meaningless well. And crowdsourcing. It does magnificent towering monuments to imaginative folly, and creativity, and creating a community out of every single person online.

At the moment, my imagination has been captured by a web project that encapsulates all of these things and is beautiful in its simplicity. In Stavanger, Norway, there’s a man called Ola Helland. He made a bet that he could collect 1 million giraffes by the end of 2011, by leveraging the power and goodwill of the People of Planet Internet. And from that bet was born One Million Giraffes.

The only rule is (in Ola’s words): “Your giraffe(s) can be created in any way and form, but not on a computer”. The barrier to entry is negligible. You don’t have to create a masterpiece. You can dash off a crappy giraffe in mere minutes if you wish. After all, a crappy giraffe is still a giraffe.

But I’ve been endlessly delighted by the breadth of inventiveness on display from the thousands submitting their giraffes. People could do it the easy way (and some, of course, do), but where’s the fun in that? If you’re going to do something for no reason whatsoever, do it with gusto!

Clay Shirky explains all this stuff much better than me in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising Without Organisations. (I’m sure Shirky would prefer it if I spelt that title with some “z”’s where I’ve placed “s”’s, but I write the Queen’s English on this side of the Atlantic. The internet also does “divisive” and "nit-picking" very well, too…)

As Shirky states in the book: “You can think of group undertaking as a kind of ladder of activities, activities that are enabled or improved by social tools. The rungs on the ladder, in order of difficulty, are sharing, cooperation, and collective action.”

I’m pretty sure he wasn’t thinking about giraffes when he wrote that sentence.

At the time of writing, Ola has 22,121 giraffes, so he needs 977,879 more. Go and make a giraffe and send it to him. It’ll make him happy.

And if you’re wondering, here’s a picture of my contribution. It's one in a million:

Metal Fatigue

2009-06-22T14:16:00.004+01:00

(Or "Why I won't be subjecting myself to Transformers 2")

It would not be strictly true to say that I have a blanket disdain for the oeuvre of Michael Bay. The Island didn't totally suck and, like Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, I too have an unhealthy affection for Bad Boys II. Anything that extreme and that offensive - that pushes the buddy-cop movie so far past the breaking point until all that remains is a clotted mess of spent shell-casings, twisted metal and bleeding eardrums - deserves some kind of warped recognition.

But I remember my experience of being battered by Bay's first Transformers movie. And it's not something I'd willingly put myself through a second time.

A couple of years ago, I had a blistering job interview that left me reeling. It was more like a sustained attack on every single element of my professional and personal life to date. My interviewer made Sir Alan Sugar look like a pussy. It was interminable and painful, like a trip to the gym after decades sitting slumped on a couch, and the interviewer's opening gambit was "I don't believe half of the shit that you've written on your CV, but we'll come back to that later."

Two and a half hours later, I staggered back out into the murky, welcoming air of London, loosened my tie and tried to remember how to walk again. I was completely and utterly spent. I hopped on the Tube and headed towards Leicester Square, figuring that I deserved to treat myself to a movie. Something big and dumb that I wouldn't have to think about. Something that would just wash over me. I chose Transformers.

At that point, it would have behooved me to remember that Michael Bay calls his style of filmmaking "fucking the frame". In Transformers, the frame should have brought Michael Bay up on charges for sexual assault.

I'm just old enough not to have any kind of nostalgic affection for the robots in disguise, so I wasn't concerned that an icon of my childhood was going to be defiled by a movie. That was one thing working in my favour. Turns out that was the only thing working in my favour.

Not only was my choice of movie a boneheaded move, but I thought I'd catch it on the largest screen of the Empire Leicester Square, where everything is bigger and louder. It's easy to describe the Transformers movies as "robots hitting each other". It felt more like "robots punch me in the head over and over and over again for two and a half hours."

And another thing. I really don't comprehend the enduring appeal of Shia LeBeouf. He's a perfectly adequate performer, but he's not leading man material. But then, he is playing second fiddle to clanking metal.

And I sat there thinking "You know, big robots are inherently cool. Big robots changing and unfolding should be visually interesting. But when the director keeps cut-cut-cutting and the soundtrack keeps clang-clang-clanging, what is the point of all these horrendously expensive visual effects when I can't keep track of whatever it is I'm supposed to be looking at?"

I also thought: "This is giving me a fucking headache."

For the second time that day, I weaved outside dazed from a not-particularly-pleasant sensory onslaught. And that's why I won't be pissing any of my money up the wall to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

(Postscript: It was worth subjecting myself to the interview, though. I got the job. I've still got the job to this day. My interviewer likes someone who can hold their own against a verbal reaming. So the day wasn't a total bust.)

Unhappy Campers - Kirkman, Moore & Adlard's The Walking Dead

2009-06-17T13:29:00.008+01:00

Zombies. I love 'em. Can't get enough of them.

The birth of the current strain of post-apocalyptic zombie story can be traced back to George A. Romero's landmark 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead and the moment when a doofus in specs (looking not unlike one of the Proclaimers) lurched around a graveyard saying "I'm coming to get you, Barbara!" The joke was on him. Within minutes, he was zombie food.

If Night of the Living Dead was the first born child of the zombie apocalypse, then travel that line a little bit further back and you hit that child's bloodthirsty progenitor - Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend. Whilst the relentless creatures at the dark heart of Matheson's novel are vampires rather than zombies, all of the major tropes of zombie fiction are already here: rapid societal collapse; a devastating and largely unavoidable pandemic; survival; and the concept of the enemy as something that used to be us (and, equally terrifying, something that we can still become).

(I won't veer off into a reflection on the subsequent movie adaptations of Matheson's novel - The Omega Man or the recent Will Smith version - because that would be one digression too many for this little ol' blog post).

Since Romero's original Dead film, the zombie movie has thrived and proliferated, currently enjoying a particularly fertile period with variable results. But they all fit to the same basic templates, largely due to the time constraints of a feature-length movie. You've got about 90 minutes to get in, unleash the flesh-hungry critters on your rag-tag band of random survivors, throw some gore at the screen, and get out again. And there's your movie. There are a lot of different ways to play that particular tune, but the skeleton of the story is essentially the same.

But what if you could dispense with that limitation? What if you could stretch that time frame to do more than just set-up your scenario as an excuse for bursts of gut-munching and decapitations? And that's when you start looking at other mediums better suited to the slow-burn.

Which leads me to Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard's monthly comics series from Image Comics - The Walking Dead. (Tony Moore was there for the initial six-issue arc, with Adlard taking over from there). I enjoyed the first two volumes of the book, but there was a slight feeling of been-there, done-that even though there was a great deal to enjoy and the execution of the story was exemplary, because the first two books are familiar exercises in world-building in the early days of a Grave New World. But I wasn't completely and utterly hooked until Volume 3 - Safety Behind Bars got its rotting teeth into me, because that was the point where I really started to see the bigger picture.

Unlike the majority of zombie movies, where the living are almost as disposable and loosely sketched as the shambling undead, The Walking Dead is all about the long game. Kirkman follows the lives of an ever-changing group of survivors from the moment that the zombie apocalypse begins and continues forward over a growing period of time. There is no end point. We can follow the characters as they fight and change, adapt and survive, live and die - month after month, year after year. The stories work better when the zombies are the set-dressing and the living are foregrounded.

And that's what makes The Walking Dead such an outstanding piece of work. The real enemy isn't the unending supply of gnashing corpses. The enemy is the living. We see survivors under stress and the terrible and wonderful things that people can do to and for each other in order to survive. And because we have the opportunity to spend time with them and get to know them, every casualty is more keenly felt. It's not just an expendable cast member for a cool sight gag involving unravelling entrails.

Don't get me wrong - Kirkman and Adlard leave plenty of space for horror and excitement and fun and surprises. But they still get to grips with the practical minutiae of living in a world where civilisation as we know it has ceased to exist and they make it compelling. And the best thing about comics? Unlimited budget means unlimited imagination. A shot of two talking heads costs the same to create as a rampaging horde of zombies replete with dripping jaws and flying extremities.

Kirkman plays by Romero Rules - the dead are slow and mindless; you can "turn" without a bite (natural death will still provide the same end result); and Romero's Cardinal Rule - Never, ever explain how it happened. Zombie stories that try to provide some sort of rational or scientific explanation for the apocalypse always somehow diminishes the story. I can't overstate the allure of the Unknown. If you subtract the "Why?", everything else is so much more unnerving.

I'm a late-comer to The Walking Dead, and I burned my way through the first nine volumes of Kirkman's ongoing epic in the space of a week. Can't wait for the next one.

The Walking Dead is available in monthly installments from all good comic shops, or in a variety of collected editions from fine purveyors of printed matter.

The Beginning of the Ends

2009-06-15T11:43:00.004+01:00

It's been quiet around here, hasn't it? Let's see if I can do something about that.

There are a few reasons for the dearth of new blog posts. I've been writing almost exclusively offline recently and, on top of that, I keep sliding into phases where my Output slows down to a pitiful trickle and so I ramp up the Input, squeezing stuff into my head to see what sparks off all the gunk slooshing around in my brainpan.

Partly by design, but largely by coincidence, a disproportionate amount of the entertainment I've been consuming lately has been post-apocalyptic or survivalist fiction. The "design" bit of the equation falls under that multi-purpose word "research". For quite a while, I've been working on a script which is only tangentially post-apocalyptic survivalist fiction, so I've been eating up stuff safe in the knowledge that I'm not plagiarising anything or anyone. The "coincidence" bit is just grabbing books, comics, movies, etc. that pique my interest and discovering that, yet again, there's an End of the World scenario at play.

But here's the thing that's really interesting to me. Post-apocalyptic stories all start from a similar starting point - "Something Bad Happens and Everything Changes" - but I've been endlessly delighted at the breadth and range of stories you can get to by spinning off from such a flexible and versatile beginning.

The enduring appeal of post-apocalyptic fiction is obvious and understandable. All day everyday, newspapers and rolling 24-hour news channels scream in our faces about Y2K bugs, avian flu, SARS, swine flu, the collapse of banking institutions, terrorist attacks, ecological disasters and on and on and on. Great horror stories get under your skin because they tap into your existing fears and make them easier to process by clothing them as zombies or vampires or killer cyborgs from the future.

So consider this an introductory blurb because, for the foreseeable future, this blog is going to carry my impressions of a significant pile of the aforementioned post-apocalyptic fiction. Some of it might come off as notemaking in public and thinking out loud. But I'm interested in looking at both the similarities and differences in this substantial and growing sub-genre and not just purely in terms of storytelling. I hope that I'm not the only one to get something out of it.

Now if you'll excuse me, there's an underground bunker that I need to finish building.

Invisible People - Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy

2009-02-25T13:05:00.003Z

Traditionally (and unimaginatively), the vast majority of film reviews lead with a brief synopsis of some kind, but to take that approach with Wendy and Lucy would do the film a massive disservice. I'll prove it to you:

Wendy is driving to Alaska with her dog Lucy in their ailing automobile, with the aim of finding some kind of work in the fishing industry. En route, somewhere in Oregon, all it takes is one bad decision and a couple of strokes of terrible luck to throw her plans and her precarious existence into potentially devastating disarray.

But that slender, ephemeral story-engine tells you nothing of real value about Wendy and Lucy, because it is so much more than that. In a less ambitious movie, the events of Kelly Reichardt's film would merit little more than a wordless five-minute montage sequence wedged in between chunks of wordy plot and action. By choosing to slow things down, Reichardt magnifies the details, and by closing in on them and holding them up to the light, shows us something we might otherwise choose to ignore.

Ignoring, neglecting or otherwise missing things cuts to the core of Wendy and Lucy, because in many ways this is a movie about marginal lives and invisible people - lives that can be crushed by one bad day, one unplanned expense or the thoughtless, officious cruelty of those whose throwaway decisions carry hefty consequences.

But Reichardt's intimate camera and lovingly-framed close-ups never flinch in showing us these invisible people, and by refusing to cut away or to hurry things along, she succeeds in making the invisible visible. By zeroing in on the smallest moments, we feel the consequences of everything more keenly. We feel the intense disastrous repercussions when Wendy's car won't start one morning, and again when Wendy discovers the likely cost of repairs. We hold our breath when a stranger suddenly appears whilst Wendy sleeps in the woods. After having seen Wendy meticulously account for her expenditure in a notebook, measuring out her life one dollar at a time, we feel the crushing weight of every unexpected financial setback.

The spare style of Recichardt's film is ably supported by understated performances by the small cast. The career of Michelle Williams has been unfairly overshadowed by distracting labels like "The one off Dawson's Creek that isn't Katie Holmes" or some designation that ties her to the ghost of Heath Ledger. But she's always given great performances in films both underrated and largely forgotten (Me Without You) or overrated for all the wrong reasons (Brokeback Mountain), and her role in Wendy and Lucy may be the best one of all.

It's always good to see Will Patton (an actor I've enjoyed and admired ever since he blew his brains out in front of Kevin Costner in No Way Out), even if his appearances here as the mechanic are all too brief. And Wally Dalton has a gentle aura of comfort and power as the nameless security guard, on his feet in a perpetually empty store parking lot, squinting in the sun, patiently waiting for nothing much at all to happen. As the closest thing the film has to a Voice of Reason, he articulates the Catch-22 that the film hinges on: "You can't get an address without an address. You can't get a job without a job. It's all fixed."

If I make it all sound like doom and gloom, it's not. The film is studded with random acts of kindness and unexpected beauty, like the scenes of Wendy and Lucy taking a break from the demands of perpetual motion on the open road, as the sun shines through the trees and Wendy throws sticks to her companion as they are returned in a breathless slobber.

Through it all, even when things appear to be at their most bleak, with a perfectly-judged use of sound design, we hear Wendy's gentle, melodic humming. And when we hear that, it gives us hope that, no matter what happens, Wendy will make it through it and endure, even though there's not a shred of evidence to suggest that that might be the case. Somehow, though, that uplifting, reassuring hum let's us know that everything is going to be all right.

Wendy and Lucy is released by Soda Pictures on 6 March.

Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die

2008-12-11T13:13:00.006Z

Has it really already been nearly four years? Almost four years since Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, in one last defiant act of self-mythologising, picked up one of his many handguns and ate a round? Damn...

Director Alex Gibney celebrates the man and his words in the new documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, an anecdotal stroll through the life of the irascible doctor from the breakthrough publication of Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs in 1966 right up through to the moment where it all became too much on that day in 2005.

The main focus, though, is HST's political writings, particularly his coverage of the 1972 US Presidential Election between George McGovern and Thompson's archnemesis Richard Nixon. The film goes some way to redressing the balance of Hunter's reputation, moving away from the traditional depiction of HST as the crazed chainsmoker Raoul Duke roaring across the cultural wasteland of Las Vegas in a Cadillac dubbed the White Whale, to the unconventional and incisive commentator on the state of the political landscape, as a fundamentally decent yet flawed senator fights the incumbent monster and loses.

And let's not forget the artist in repose. Writers don't write by getting swacked on booze and passing out. Writers write by sitting and hammering the words out one at a time. And Gonzo reminds us of the peaceful Thompson taking refuge from the insanity of his country, holed up in Owl Farm, listening to music and weaving words out of nothing.

Personally, I've always felt that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is by far Thompson's most overrated work, a book that is lauded far more for its style than its substance, and lacking the lethal precision of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 or the reckless embedded journalism of Hell's Angels or the playfully vitriolic jabs at America found in the pieces collected in The Great Shark Hunt (in particular the glorious The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved - an article cited here as the birth of Gonzo with the arrival of Ralph Steadman's bile-flecked inks).

But Gibney overplays his hand a little and ends up overstating HST's political clout. Did Thompson really play such an integral part in the momentary rise of McGovern in '72 and the arrival of Jimmy Carter in '76? I don't think so. Without taking anything away from Hunter's blistering writings from that time, the readers of Rolling Stone magazine were such a tiny subset of the potential electorate that any changes wrought by his words would have been negligible.

Gibney deliberately draws subtle parallels between the McGovern-Nixon knockdown dragout and the devastating results of the 2004 US election. McGovern was the John Kerry of his age, and it's telling that Thompson took his life shortly after. Maybe he couldn't take that kind of crushing disappointment twice in one lifetime.

There is a jarring leap from the late '70s to his suicide in 2005, making the uncomfortable implication that HST was largely irrelevant for the last 30 years of his life, although Gibney does make the plausible argument that Thompson's increasing fame was instrumental in preventing him from doing what he did best - throwing himself into the action whilst casting himself as both major player and amused and horrified onlooker. When everybody knows who you are, it's not so easy to take on the role of overlooked observer.

Some theories postulated in Gonzo just don't ring true. It's disingenuous of Thompson's first wife Sandy to suggest that if HST were still alive he would have a lot to say whilst raging against the state of the world in the New American Century. Looking at HST's published writings over the last three decades, there is nothing to suggest that this would be the case. Granted, Thompson dipped his toe in and out of the Reagan, Clinton and the double Bush eras, aiming the odd barbed dispatch at the political establishment, but it was rare, and lacked the dead-on venom spat out in his anti-Nixon screeds.

Additionally, there are massive gaps in the narrative of Thompson's life, as the film excludes events such as the tragic disappearance (and probable murder) of Oscar Acosta in 1974, or the horrendous clashes between Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and Thompson in the latter stages of his career. But those are forgivable omissions, and in a life as eventful and wreathed in myth as Thompson's, something has to give or you'd end up with a mini-series instead of a two-hour movie.

The passing years and the Wild Turkey and the drugs all took their toll on Hunter. The fire in his belly had been dimmed by disillusionment and tranquilised by chemicals. It's devastating to look at the juxtaposition of Ralph Steadman exuberantly jumping up and down in his studio and then look at Hunter towards the end of his life slumped and slurring back at Woody Creek, the years of excess having ravaged his mind and body.

But it's not all memories of a life in self-destructive decline. The film is full of tales of Thompson the prankster and provocateur. Fun with ballistic weaponry and the mojo wire and deadlines that came and went to the frustration of his editors. Mischievously accusing Democratic candidate Ed Muskie of an Ibogaine addiction in 1972 and watching the fallout with glee. And there are the all-too-infrequent glimpses of the Young Hunter with the soulful eyes and the square jaw and the clipped Southern pronunciation leaking out of the side of a cigarette holder.

Then there's the glorious moment captured in a snippet of second wife Anita's home-movie footage from recent years of Hunter clacking away on a typewriter, swigging from a long glass, Elton John's Candle in the Wind interminably playing on a loop in the background as his eyes light up, there's a crooked grin and a clap of his hands. He's in the zone. When all the disparate strands swirling around in his head come together ready to be fired onto the page. The moment every writer always reaches out for.

Gonzo reminded me that the world was a far, far better place for having him in it, kicking against the pricks with the sunlight glinting off his reflective shades and a demonic sneer on his lips. We will not see his like again.

(With thanks to Little White Lies for the screening)

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt."
(The last published words of HST, sent in a letter to Anita four days before his death and published in Rolling Stone magazine as Football Season Is Over)

Punch-Out

2008-11-27T11:05:00.004Z

There is no escape from me now...

Thanks to the fine folks at Mippin, Sucker Punch is now easy to read on the move.

All you have to do is enter the following url into your phone's browser: http://mippin.com/mippin15827 and, boom, there it is.

First, I took control of your monitors. Now, I own your mobile phones! My secret plans for global domination continue apace...

W. Ex. Why? See

2008-11-20T07:40:00.002Z

Exciting times, aren't they? But that doesn't stop the apprehensive cynic in me from thinking that there's still time for things to go wrong. Can we manage two more months of buttock-clenching and grinding teeth? Yes, we can:

Trouble in Paradise - Rodrigo Plá's La Zona

2008-10-16T14:06:00.004+01:00

La Zona. Not a nice place to visit, and you wouldn't want to live there.

A butterfly gently floats over swathes of white picket fences, immaculate lawns and contented suburbanites. A perfect domestic idyll.

And then the delicate little butterfly has to go and incinerate itself on an electrified barbed wire security fence keeping a crowded, polluted, run-down and corrupt Mexico City at bay.

Stupid butterfly.

But in the first few silent minutes, Plá has quickly and efficiently set out his stall, making it apparent that he's taken a few notes from the David Lynch playbook - a spotless utopia only exists as an anodyne mask to hide something dark and rotten just nestled beneath the surface.

During a thunder storm, a falling billboard causes a brief power outage, giving four opportunistic thieves the chance to breach the heavily-fortified gated community of La Zona. But a botched robbery is only the beginning of the shitstorm that's unleashed, as the fragile veneer of the civilised middle-class residents starts to disintegrate to reveal the true extent of their own dysfunctional, destructive, self-serving and poisonous natures. It's Lord of the Flies time in La Zona. Cue screaming, running, shooting, bleeding...

If George A. Romero's Land of the Dead taught us anything, it's that a residential oasis locking out monsters doesn't work, because it doesn't solve the problem of protecting you from the monsters on the inside of the perimeter.

Capturing the corrosive and ultimately selfish paranoia of the middle-class in a way that would make this a great double-bill with Michael Haneke's Hidden, Plá's movie never backs down or pussies out. Everyone is culpable and everyone is guilty. You can wait as long as you want to breath a cathartic sigh of relief, but there is no heroism or redemptive moment to send you out of the cinema back into a world where all is safe and well. Hard, bleak and unforgiving, La Zona is a terrifically-tense thriller that says more than you might like about the world that we all live in. Go see it.

Plá's second film, The Desert Within, is showing at the London film festival later this month.

La Zona is released by Soda Pictures on 17 October.

Isaac Hayes 1942 - 2008

2008-08-11T14:43:00.002+01:00

Now this is going to be pretty hard for me to write about. Isaac Hayes died on Sunday at his home in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 65.

For decades now, a week hasn't passed in my life without me listening to the music of Isaac Hayes. To some people, he is the Oscar-winning composer of the score from Shaft. To others, he will always be South Park's Chef.

To me, he is a giant. One of my very few personal heroes. I've written such a vast amount about my life-long love affair with Shaft - the movies, the books, the music - that you can just mess about in the blog archive here and find reams of stuff about John Shaft and Isaac Hayes. It's one of my enduring obsessions, and today that obsession is tinged with just a little bit more sadness than before.

I've listened to the Theme from Shaft more often than any other piece of music by a massive margin. I never, ever tire of it. And I never, ever cease to get a little tingle of excitement when Isaac Hayes opens his mouth for the first time and the words start rumbling out.

Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?

There will never be another Isaac Hayes. The list of his achievements is dizzying in its breadth and scope. Here's just a teeny, tiny sampling:

He was the Duke in John Carpenter's Escape from New York.

He was Truck Turner.

He was the co-composer (along with David Porter) of Sam & Dave's Soul Man.

He created the Isaac Hayes Foundation to promote literacy and music education around the world.

I've been trying to write about Isaac Hayes for hours, and the words I grab hold of are never the right ones. So I'll let the music speak for me. Here's the moment that I fell in love with Isaac Hayes for the first time. John Shaft strides out of a Times Square subway opening as the guitar kicks in, and I'm losing my heart to a piece of music forever...

Bernie Mac 1957 - 2008

2008-08-11T12:39:00.003+01:00

"You don't understand - I ain't scared of you motherfuckers."

If I was a betting man, and someone was running a deadpool on the charming conmen of Ocean's Eleven, I would have picked Carl Reiner as the most likely to kick off first. Maybe Elliott Gould on the outside. But I never, ever would have gone for Bernie Mac as the first to take the Big Dirtnap.

Bernard Jeffery McCullough died from complications due to pneumonia on Saturday morning at the age of 50. I'm gutted.

The first time I discovered Bernie Mac was listening to Prince's Pope and the playful growl sampled here and there in between the percussive funk kicks and the Minneapolian's rudimentary raps. Years passed before I learnt who the owner of that voice was. And what a voice it was.

Propelled to wide fame by Spike Lee's stand-up movie The Original Kings of Comedy, Bernie Mac followed in the footsteps of Richard Pryor, in the sense that both were wickedly funny comics and naturally gifted actors who largely made crappy movies. In Pryor's case, for every Stir Crazy, there was a Bustin' Loose or a Critical Condition.

For the sharp-dressing, goggle-eyed Bernie Mac, the successful roles were buried amongst the junk. As croupier Frank Catton in Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's trilogy, Mac had moments to shine with his ten co-stars in Ocean's Eleven, but was largely hidden in the two sequels as the series progressively turned into the smug George, Brad & Matt Show. And moments of brilliance were eclipsed by the relentless powerhouse performance of Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa.

It would be kinder not to dwell on things like the teeth-grinding Guess Who or the embarrasment of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, although Bernie was one of the few things to enjoy in his cameo as used car dealer Bobby Bolivia in the visual headache of Michael Bay's Transformers.

The closest Bernie Mac came to a signature role was the fictionalisation of himself in the sitcom The Bernie Mac Show. Unwillingly raising his drug-addict sister's three kids, "Uncle Bernie" just wanted to sit around the house smoking cigars, hanging with his boys and playing poker. But this wasn't a sacharine contemporary spin on The Cosby Show full of domestic harmony and sentimental life lessons. The show had teeth and balls and jokes. After all, Cliff Huxtable never threatened to bust Theo in the head until the white meat showed...

I usually read fiction with the little casting director in my head slotting actors into roles. I always imagined that Bernie Mac would be ideal casting for the role of Fearless Jones in the period-set Walter Mosley crime series about the bookish, smart and nervous Paris Minton (who I always see as Don Cheadle) and his best friend, the kind-hearted, loyal, womanising, simple soul Fearless Jones, with his beaming smile and devastating fists. But that bit of fantasy casting will remain just a random reflection in my head now.

Farewell, Bernie Mac, and thanks for all the laughs:

"I came from a place where there wasn't a lot of joy. I decided to try to make other people laugh when there wasn't a lot of things to laugh about."

Seduction of the Innocent Part 2 - Matt Fraction, Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon's CASANOVA

2008-07-28T21:41:00.004+01:00

James Coburn in Our Man Flint. Jim Steranko-era Nick Fury comics. Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik! Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius. This is only a tiny sampling of the special ingredients thrown into the blender of Matt Fraction's mind with the dial set to "frappé", whisked around until it spews out the nutritious creamy goodness that is Casanova.

I should try and give you a brief synopsis of the series. Not sure that I can. I damn sure can't pigeon-hole it by genre. Here's the best I can do: Spies, psychedelia and sex. Robots and doppelgängers and parallel worlds. Guns and pop music, redemption and identity, family and loyalty. And just good ol' fashioned Blowing Shit Up.

People talk about the writer's "voice". The distinctive individual style that is unique to the writer. Matt Fraction got that shit in spades. His is one of the strongest voices I've heard in a long, long time. Because Casanova is completely and utterly about Matt Fraction and his life, interests and preoccupations. And at the same time you don't need to know a damn thing about any of that to immerse yourself in the delirious, dizzying. wonderful pop-culture stew of Casanova.

Aided and abetted by the brothers Bá and Moon (who alternate storylines and cover art), their two-tone linework is simultaneously concise, expressive, detailed and sparse, telling you everything you need to know in the way that you need to know it.

Like all writers worth a damn, Fraction needs you to keep up with him. He's not spoon-feeding you the story or ladling on the exposition. He credits you as being smarter than that. So let's not disappoint. Casanova certainly doesn't. Fraction can confidently bounce from shit-eating goofiness to cold-stare seriousness and back again in the space of a few short-panels. Did I mention that it's funny too?

Volume 1 Luxuria is currently available, with volume 2 Gula coming soon. Fraction has intimated in interviews that Volume 3 is still about a year off, so wrap your eyes around this good stuff in preparation.

Pa-Zow!

Supplementary Ephemera

Matt Fraction has a blog here and he twitters away here.

And Fábio Moon & Gabriel Bá have their own blog full of eye goodies right about here.

Oh yeah, there's a movie on the way too.

Outlook Cloudy

2008-06-24T23:34:00.003+01:00

Oh, now I like this. Just been playing with Wordle, which is the perfect little webtoy for someone like me who measures my life a word at a time.

For example, here's a big ol' beautiful word cloud made from my del.icio.us tags:

I suppose the inside of my head looks something like that - a tangled orgy of all my preoccupations rubbing up against each other until the juices pump uncontrollably. I think I might need to lie down for a bit...

Seduction of the Innocent Part 1 - Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips' CRIMINAL

2008-06-21T01:00:00.003+01:00

Welcome, True Believers, to the first in a short series on the comics that are rocking my world in 2008. It occured to me that it might be a good idea to talk up some of the rough diamonds on the racks and maybe, if I'm lucky, push some readers in their direction. Couldn't hurt, right?

First up is Criminal written by Ed Brubaker and illustrated by Sean Phillips - for the reader that likes their broads to be stacked, their femmes to be fatale, their men square-jawed, their cigarettes unfiltered, their guns smoking, their money laundered and their morality murky.

The interweaving lives and crimes of a cast of conmen, crooks and cops down the years, there is an undercurrent of melancholy and the ever-present prospect of random violence and tragedy in every story. This isn't a book about good guys and bad guys - it's a book about damaged people fighting to get through their lives, played against a nicotine-stained, neon-lit backdrop of revenge, double-crosses, sex, murder and betrayal. I'm tempted to say more, but one of the joys of Criminal is unravelling the twists and turns of every story. A single chapter has more detail creeping out at the panel-borders than most entire books do.

Brubaker clearly has an abiding love of hard-boiled crime fiction, classic film noir and the nihilistic crime movies of the 70s, and yet despite the obvious influences of the material, he still manages to blend it all up and then pare it back down into something fresh and exhilarating, whilst luxuriating in genre conventions. There isn't a single panel or hard-bitten slug of dialogue that feels like fanboy homage or a pale imitation of past works. With the fantastic linework of Sean Phillips making the death and decay hit home even harder, this is the real shit. As devastating as a left-hook from a washed-up prize fighter, as heartbreaking as the smile from a hooker on a street corner at sunrise and as tough as the barrel of a .44 poking into the small of your back, Criminal is one of the best books on the shelves. Read 'em and weep.

So far, there are two Criminal collections available: Coward and Lawless, available from all fine purveyors of pictorial storytelling.

Please remember this, though - books like Criminal can live or die by monthly sales, and the Criminal mob reward the early-adopting monthly-readers by adding supplementary material that is not available in the trade collections. The text pieces by guest writers at the back of every issue are definitely worth a read.

Want a free taste? Click here to download a PDF teaser. The first hit comes for free and then you're hooked.

Supplementary Ephemera

Ed Brubaker's website can be found here, and the page about Criminal is here.

Sean Phillips wields his mighty pencil here.

And here is the Criminal blog.

If you're looking at the subject line for this post and thinking "What the hell does Seducton of the Innocent mean?" then click here and learn something. I shower my wisdom upon you like a benevolent drunk pissing on the doorstep of your mind.

If you like your pulp fiction without the purty pictures, the novels published by Hard Case Crime come with my highest possible recommendation.

Now get out of here, kid, ya bother me.

Freakangels

2008-05-31T11:36:00.004+01:00

Because Warren asked so kindly and because it's excellent, free, weekly and there is absolutely no good reason why you aren't already reading this:

Freakangels is a free, weekly, ongoing comic written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Paul Duffield. Every Friday, there's a new installment online. Stop reading this and go read that.

Go. Read. Enjoy. That is all.

London Calling

2008-05-01T00:09:00.006+01:00

Warning: Everything written here is done under the influence of significant amounts of alcohol. Make of that what you will. The sentiments still stand and remain valid, even if they are fuelled by an unrestrained wave of righteous indignation. Let’s do this. Also? I love you, spellcheck.

Hello, London. Today is the 1st of May 2008. The date of the London mayoral elections. (Is there an uglier word in the English language than “mayoral”? There must be, even if I can’t think of one right now.)

I’m utterly fascinated by politics. Have been ever since my impressionable young mind was recast in the wake of reading Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 many years ago. My nascent interest in political chicanery lay dormant for a long time until Aaron Sorkin’s glorious The West Wing flared it up again, followed soon after by the horrific and compelling car crash of the Bush-Gore stand-off back in 1998. Ah, the memories! Now I’m probably hooked for life. The corruption, the back-stabbing, the mud-slinging – all the drama of life is here.

And I really wasn’t going to write about the London elections. Really. But I was out earlier and I made the mistake of casting my eyes over the front page of a discarded London freesheet and it made me furious. I ripped off the page so I could excerpt it here. This is the fourth paragraph from the lead story of thelondonpaper (irritating lack of capitalisation and shabby neglect of the spacebar is theirs, not mine):

“thelondonpaper is not taking sides in this election; unlike other newspapers, we are not going to endorse any candidate. We launched with a premise of party political neutrality, as an antidote to the corrosive and destructive bias elsewhere in the media and in politics. We know Londoners can’t stand being patronised. So much so, that the last two mayoral elections have seen the electorate ignoring the media, the polls, and even the Labour party, by electing Livingstone.”

Got that? Now read it again, paying special attention to that last sentence. It’s OK – I’ll wait.

Now, is that the most fucking outrageous and disgustingly odious example of doublethink you’ve read lately or what?

So – I’m going to pin my colours to the mast and indulge in a rant. Join me, won’t you?

First up, I’ve been listening to a lot of bullshit this week. This is a real conversation I had yesterday. My colleague was laughing at Boris Johnson and so I said “He’s a prick.” The response? “I know! He’s a fucking idiot. That’s why I’m voting for him!”

And that’s not an isolated example – it’s just representative of the crap I’ve been exposed to.

Mistaking Boris Johnson for a floppy-haired buffoon is on a par with the mistake that Middle America made when thinking of Bush as a down-home, clumsy hick. These really aren’t stupid men. You don’t attain this level of success by being a moron. Playing a character, even if it is a lovable clown or an amiable doofus, is just another tactic to endear themselves to us. Anything that garners a vote is OK by them.

I was going to go on a tear about the filthy smear campaign that Andrew Gilligan and the Evening Standard has waged on Ken Livingstone for months now, but I figure that if you’re dumb enough to buy into the hate and fear peddled by the Standard on a daily basis, then you kind of get the mayor that you deserve. So let’s skip that.

Do I think Ken is the dream ticket? Of course not. But I do genuinely believe that he loves London and that he wants this to be the world-leading capital city that it has always been, as well as having a genuine interest in environmental issues. And I also believe that Boris would be a really bad thing for this beautiful, unruly, maddening, intoxicating, insane, glorious bitch of a city.

But that’s just me. Don’t take my word for it. Make up your own damn mind.

(Plus - None of these guys are going to fix the mess that is the London Underground. That’s pretty much irrevocably screwed.)

I’m fed up of listening to otherwise apparently intelligent people basing their decision on the next London mayor on personalities or their local bus route or a shallow witticism fired off at a photo-op. Vote for whoever the hell you want. If you truly believe Boris is the best candidate, then go for it. Do your thing. One man, one vote, right? But don’t be swayed by trivia and distractions and irrelevant headlines. Voter idiocy is just as toxic as voter apathy.

X marks the spot. Let’s see what happens next.

Cracking Up

2008-04-23T07:08:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, my employers took a bunch of us lowly wage slaves over to Tate Modern for lunch. The reasons for the lunch and the lunch itself are irrelevant, so let’s just skate on past that.

As we left, passing the Turbine Hall and the current installation, Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (better known to almost everyone as “the crack in the floor”), we all paused to have a good long look. Very impressive, but its impact was diminished by the fact that sections of the crack were covered up with duct tape and plastic sheeting.

Everyone else came out with the bog-standard pedestrian responses of “But it’s just a crack!” and “Why have they done that?” or “I don’t get it.” But then they didn’t try. They just saw a crack in the floor and nothing else.

I tried to argue that the reason that I liked it is that is was, simultaneously, an actual crack and the illusion of a crack.

This just got me a lot of blank stares. So I tried to explain it to them like this:

In an old Road Runner cartoon, Wile E. Coyote got a tub of black paint and with it painted a fake road and then a fake tunnel smack dab in the middle of a large boulder, with the intention that the Road Runner would slam straight into the side of that boulder.

Seconds later, the Road Runner comes beep beeping along, roaring past the coyote and goes straight through the “tunnel” effortlessly, as if it were actually there. Puzzled, the coyote tries it himself and, sure enough, he slams straight into the boulder because, of course, the tunnel isn’t really there.

I was quite pleased with this explanation, but now there was a smattering of confused laughter accompanying the vacant faces. Oh well – I try to open their eyes and yet they are still blind.

And I know that the artist’s intentions may be vastly different from what I get out of it, but that’s the thing about art. Once you hurl it out into the world, it belongs to everybody who experiences it in any way that they see fit.

There have been various attempts to discover just how they put this crack in the floor of the Turbine Hall. Builders and architects have a number of theories, whilst many of them admit that they don’t quite know. Any one of those theories may be correct. Or none of them. But I think to explain it would take something away from it, like debunking a brilliant magic trick, or pulling back the curtain to reveal that the Wizard of Oz is just a befuddled old huckster from Kansas. Not knowing is part of the whole thing.

But only a part of it. The other part is this: some days you’re the coyote and some days you’re the road runner. You can be both. And there ain’t nothing wrong with that.

Beep beep!

My Life Online

2008-04-13T14:47:00.005+01:00

So, despite the fact that Sucker Punch occasionally goes a bit quiet now and then, that doesn't mean I'm not a chatty bastard elsewhere on the web. I can prove it too. AND I can tell you about my new blog. Oh yes. Keep reading...

Here is where I can be found online in 2008:

Sucker Punch - Where it all began, and what you are looking at right now. The hub of all my online activities, my first Internet baby, and it's going to be four years old in about a week. And in Internet years, that is freaking ancient. This is the place for thinking out loud, chatting shit, random snapshots of my life, my preoccupations, and the inside of my messy head. Reassuringly inconsistent, just like me.

Last.fm - The sounds that fill my earholes are catalogued right here. Music is integral to my life, and especially important when I need to block-out any bullshit that may invade my headspace at any given time. This happens more often than you would think.

Flickr - I'm including this purely for completist's sake. My Flickr page is pretty pathetic. I keep promising myself that I'll upload more interesting photos, but it's largely just shots snapped from my camera phone. I need to buy a new camera, and then I need to remember to carry it around with me, and then I need to remember to upload the photos. I'll get there in the end.

Twitter - I'm hooked on Twitter. It is utterly addictive, and a running commentary on what I'm doing most of the time. Also, there is a direct correlation between the amount of alcohol in my bloodstream and the frequency of tweets. I talk crap when I'm sober, so you can imagine the sort of ridiculous bollocks I spout under the influence. Read my tweets and laugh both with me and at me.

Tumblr - At last, we get to the real reason for this post. I get to unveil my latest web presence. Behold SHRAPNEL! "Jagged shards of popular culture eviscerating the flabby guts of the Internet". I've been concerned for a while that Sucker Punch is getting a bit too choked up with YouTube videos and stuff that amuses me, just chucked on here with little commentary. I always prefer it here when it's largely text-based pieces. If I want a tumblelog, I should go and make one. So I did. And here it is. Took me a while to get a good handle on this, but I think I'm there now. There's a link to it in the sidebar, and it also has an RSS feed. Want to know what amuses me? This is the place.

Del.icio.us - My social bookmarking page. Indispensable to capture urls on the fly, or to search for bookmarks in a more targetted way than a traditional search engine. Especially handy to keep a grip on urls that I need for research purposes for anything I'm writing. I suppose it's an insight into the things that interest me too. My last 10 bookmarked urls pop up in the right-hand sidebar here too.

Facebook - The only place online that bears my real name, so I'm not providing a url for it here. And anyway, I think Facebook has maybe 12 months of usefulness left to it. Even that prediction may be a bit ambitious. It's getting weighed down by too many third-party applications that don't add to the experience - it just detracts from it. I find Twitter more useful as a social network than Facebook anyway. Facebook is soooooo 2007. I still check up on it every day, and I use it now largely just to stay in touch with friends. And I do have a soft spot for Facebook, because without it I wouldn't have landed a lucrative writing gig just before Christmas. Never throw anything away, because you never know when you might need it.

I know that there are applications like Profilactic for aggregating all these disparate webstrands into one central place, but I haven't found one that I like. Or maybe I just don't like them at all. As far as I'm concerned, Sucker Punch is my social media aggregator - don't think I need another one.

How to contact me online: I used to have an email address in the sidebar so that I could be contacted directly by readers of the blog. Mostly, all I got was spam. Until the day that I received some hate-mail from an author whose novel I ripped to pieces. I must get around to posting that email here at some point. The best way to get hold of me is to Direct Message me via Twitter. And, yes, this is a shameless ploy to get you all signed up to Twitter.

Avanti!

Storyville

2008-04-13T13:03:00.004+01:00

Been thinking about stories and writing and stuff a lot recently. Some of that thinking goes a little bit like this...

I'm fascinated by the way that children, even very young children, have an instinctive understanding of stories and storytelling. They understand what they mean, not just on the surface, narrative level, but they manage to take away more than just that from the experience. And they also understand concepts that us adults often mistakenly construe as confusing. I'll show you what I mean:

I was sitting down to watch the season opener of Doctor Who last week, Partners In Crime, and I wanted Buttercup to sit and watch it with me. Terrified of the Daleks and the robotic Host that appeared in Voyage Of The Damned, she was reluctant to be scared senseless in the name of entertainment. I assured her that there would be nothing too scary, and that there was nothing to worry about. (I don't know why I said that - I had no evidence to back up this promise. It may have been a pants-soiling 50 minutes of shadowy corridors and rampaging monsters for all I knew. But Doctor Who has a long and storied history of children watching from behind the sofa or between their fingers, so why not pass on the Joy of Fear to the younger generation, eh?).

So my little 3-year old girl huddled in my lap, tense on the off-chance that some dripping alien monstrosity would appear so that she could bolt from the room. Once the Adipose finally appeared, she relaxed. Blobby CGI moppets are reassuringly benign.

Anyway, I'm digressing. There is a point to all this. Here's the thing. There are aspects to the storytelling that she instinctively understands without needing explanations or following 45 years of continuity. She understands that Tom Baker with his boggling eyes and dragging scarf is exactly the same man as David Tennant in a crumpled suit and flyaway hair. She doesn't know what "regeneration" or "Time Lords" or any of that stuff is. She just understands. And she realises that he is "The Doctor" and that "Doctor Who" is just the name of the show, not the character. She accepts without question the fact that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than on the outside. She understands that it's a spaceship and a time machine and, for all intents and purposes, the Doctor's home. I don't know how she understands all this, she just does.

So the supposedly complex baggage of the show and the character turns out to be the easy bit. It's when assumptions about stories and storytelling creep in that the puzzlement sets in. Buttercup understands the idea of heroes and villains, goodies and baddies. But trying to apply her preconceptions about those roles brought on a flurry of questions. After watching the Doctor and Donna run around corridors for ten minutes, the questions began:

Buttercup: Is the Doctor going to beat the baddies?
AKA: Yes. Good always wins over bad.
Buttercup: Is he going to punch them?
AKA: No.
Buttercup: (on seeing the sonic screwdriver for the first time) Is he going to zap them?
AKA: No.
Buttercup: Is it like a gun?
AKA: No! The Doctor hates guns!
Buttercup: Like Batman?
AKA: Yes! Exactly like Batman! They both hate guns.
(pause to watch more frantic running)
Buttercup: But how is he going to beat them? He just runs away all the time!

This stumped me for a couple of seconds. She was absolutely right. The story didn't mesh with her ideas about how heroes vanquish the villains, because there was no tangible conflict or confrontation. The Doctor at this point was actively avoiding confrontation in the name of self-preservation, and Buttercup understands heroism as sacrifice and struggle and facing villainy head-on. Not running away from it. But I had an answer:

AKA: He is going to beat them with his brain!

I think it took her a while to process that answer, but it was the truth. The Doctor is a scientist. An adventurer. He doesn't see things as binary as goodies and baddies. And the Doctor "winning" doesn't necessarily correlate to someone else "losing". He can Save The Day without physical confrontation. Once Buttercup had wrapped her mind around that, she could settle back and see where the story was going to take her. And she laughed at the little Adipose skidding and grinning and waving on the screen. She didn't see them as "baddies" - they were just different and alien.

So, yeah. Stories. Themes. Narrative. Lot of that in my head at the moment. As you can see from the infrequency of posts 'round these parts recently, I've been otherwise engaged. The vast majority of my writing this year has been offline, and I've been more prolific than I have been for a long time. One of the things I've been doing is keeping a journal, which interests me for a lot of reasons. Mostly because it's all about weaving my own experiences and thoughts into some kind of narrative. There it is again, you see. Stories. Inadvertently putting the random events of my life into some sort of narrative framework to make it easily digestible and understandable, rather than a succession of isolated unrelated fragments (which is probably closer to the reality of most people's lives).

OK. Rambling a bit now. Let's hope the narrative thread of this post is strong enough that my points make sense. After all, I'm just telling you a story in the form of an anecdote - and it's not just about a father and his daughter watching TV together.

The Empire Swings Back

2008-03-14T22:32:00.002Z

Mork calling Orson. Come in, Orson...

There are only two reasons that I've popped up here:

1. I haven't been here for a month, and I thought it might be a good idea to show my virtual face just to assure you that I'm still alive; and

2. I've just killed a bottle of red wine and I'm trying to find reasons to avoid passing out.

But to make your journey to my dank little corner of the internet vaguely worthwhile, I'll slap some YouTubey goodness up here for you. It's been all over the web, but I love it and I need somewhere to store it, so here's as good as anywhere. The opening titles to Star Wars done in the style of Saul Bass. I hope you enjoy it, because typing all this shit out with my inebriated fingers hasn't been easy. Nanoo Nanoo!:

Steve Gerber 1947-2008

2008-02-12T22:15:00.000Z

Now this is a damn shame. On a day when it looks like the Writer's Strike is over, a man who spent much of his career fighting for the rights of writers whilst redefining what comics could be has lost his battle with pneumonia. I'm indescribably gutted.

"I wouldn't describe myself as fearless, but I think you have to accept the possibility of failure if you want to achieve anything, in any field." - Steve Gerber, 1985

Just Say No

2008-02-10T11:44:00.000Z

After 30 years, the BBC has finally decided to put Grange Hill out of its misery and has cancelled it, snapping it off like so much useless necrotic flesh. Many column inches have been filled with paeans to the golden years of this once-great British institution to mourn its passing. Lucy Mangan has a decent article up at The Guardian which reminded me of episodes lost to my memory years ago.

I don’t want to add to or compete with the glut of “Wasn’t Grange Hill great?” articles. (Largely written, I suspect, by people who haven’t watched it in 20 years. I reckon it hasn’t been worth watching for about that long anyway…)

No, I’m more interested in reminiscing about the day when I was in an episode of Grange Hill. Around 1985, I think. My school was approached by the makers of the show, and my entire school year was drafted in as extras with the odd line of dialogue. Cheap labour, I suppose. After all, we all had school uniforms. All we had to do was put on a Grange Hill school tie and, bam, we’re in costume.

My memories of that day are cloudy at best. But I do remember my class and the cast of the show interacting. They came across as a shower of drama-school shitheads, over-excited, cocky and interested only in showing off, flexing their pre-pubescent muscles, picking fights with us and driving the director insane by fucking about whenever the camera was rolling.

In the actual episode itself, I can be seen in the corner of the frame every now and then. I caught a rerun a couple of years ago. It was like a school photo with moving pictures. I wish I had a copy of it on VHS.

Oh well. Bye bye, weird little Danny Kendall and scary Mr. Bronson. Bye, Zammo, Tucker, Gonch and RowLand. And, as part of my Ongoing Lament that Opening Titles Used To Be Better, here is how I really remember Grange Hill. Badap bow bowwwww:

Sucker MCs should call them Sire

2008-02-08T07:22:00.001Z

Wow. I saw this photo for the first time yesterday, and I love it:

Taken in 2005 by Jonas Karlsson, it's the Reverend Joseph "Run" Simmons and Darryl 'DMC' McDaniel, the Kings of Rock that we know and love as Run DMC, floating in a car.

The photo is currently appearing as part of the Vanity Fair Portraits - Photographs 1913-2008 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. I'm gonna have to head over and see this bad boy full-size and hanging from a wall.

And there was a nice article about the making and taking of the photo in yesterday's Guardian which you can read online here.

Roll to the rock, rock to the roll
DMC stands for devastating mic control...

Sure Plays A Mean Pinball

2008-02-06T06:47:00.000Z

I still manage to uncover fragments of my youth from the mystical picture box that we call YouTube. Up in the mornin' and out to school, the teacher is teachin' the Golden Rule.

You want entertainment? Education? A clip as enjoyable for my three-year old daughter as it is for me? Psychedelic animation? The Funk? Flutes? The number twelve? Oh yes. This one has it all. From the golden days of Sesame Street:

Found

2008-02-04T06:00:00.000Z

Excitement runs high in my home, my head and my pants at the moment because Lost is back!

I always approach a new season of Lost with trepidation. What if it is rubbish? What if it no longer works? I needn't have worried. I'm as hooked as I ever was.

People who know me will attest to the fact that I will become an obsessive lunatic fanboy for the next couple of months. I might need to get the words "Not Pennys Boat" on a t-shirt...

Man In The Mirror

2008-01-30T22:20:00.000Z

"So, what did you get up to last night, dawg?"
"Don't call me 'dawg", motherfucker! Who the hell talks like that?"
"Apparently you do. You're talking to yourself. You see, this is a flimsy expository device to make your observations about the movie you saw last night more interesting by reframing your pedestrian opinions in the form of a dialogue with yourself."
"Aha! OK. Let's start again."
"Cool. So, what did you get up to last night?"
"Well, I went to a screening of Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely."
"Another screening? Certainly racking up the free movies this month, aren't you?"
"Not just free movies. Paid cash money to take Buttercup to see Alvin and the Chipmunks on Saturday afternoon. Ah, singing rodents. Good times."
"Aren't we straying off the subject? I freaking loved Gummo, so I must have been looking forward to Mister Lonely. What's it all about?"
"Yes, sorry. Mister Lonely - difficult to articulate in a tasty soundbite, but I'll give it a go. It's a film about celebrity impersonators and impossible dreams and skydiving nuns."
"Sounds great!"
"It is great - some of the time. It's not one of those movies governed by a strong narrative throughline, but so what? Narrative is overrated. It's wildly uneven but when it's good? Man, it is awesome!"
"For real!"
"The film bounces back and forth from Paris to Panama to the Scottish Highlands, tracing the lives of a group of celebrity impersonators including Michael Jackson (Diego Luna), Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) and Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant). Oh, and James Fox is the Pope."
"Rawk!"
"Innit! Stunning performances all, but Werner Herzog practically steals the entire movie away from the lot of them. Glorious."
"And skydiving nuns! Now seems like a good time to mention that Mister Lonely will be out in the UK on 14 March 2008 and the US on 30 April 2008. This talking-to-myself-in-the-third-person is getting really irritating now. Can we stop this foolishness?"
"Shut up!"
"You shut up!"

You Used To Think That It Was So Easy

2008-01-27T13:19:00.000Z

“Windin' your way down on Baker Street
Light in your head and dead on your feet
Well another crazy day
You'll drink the night away
And forget about everything”
Gerry Rafferty - Baker Street

Excitement and anticipation were my overriding feelings on Wednesday night as I headed towards Leicester Square for a screening of The Bank Job. And here’s why:

1. The invitation to the screening was printed on an old, discontinued one pound note. How unutterably cool is that?

2. The director of the movie is Roger Donaldson, a filmmaker I am exceptionally fond of. Not because he is such a gifted storyteller, or because I absolutely love No Way Out and Thirteen Days, but because seven years ago he was gracious and accommodating to an inexperienced film journalist conducting his first interview and he made me feel comfortable and relaxed as he answered my questions. A true gentleman.

3. It’s a heist movie! I love heist movies!

4. The pitch worked on me straight away: “In September 1971, thieves tunnelled into the vault of a bank in London’s Baker Street and looted safe deposit boxes of cash and jewellery worth millions and millions of pounds. None of it was recovered. Nobody was ever arrested. The robbery made headlines for a few days and then disappeared - the result of a UK Government ‘D’ Notice, gagging the press. This film reveals what was hidden in those boxes. The story involves murder, corruption and a sex scandal with links to the Royal Family - a story in which the thieves were the most innocent people involved.”

5. It’s a movie about London and history and corruption and secrets and lies. And it all takes place on Baker Street, a road that has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I’ve worked on Baker Street. I set foot on Baker Street nearly every working day of my life. And the attention to period detail is just glorious. Sure, the odd anachronism sometimes pokes its way into the corner of the frame now and again, but this is an irrelevance when the film manages to get everything else so right.

6. Peter Bowles is in it!

When I walked out into the chill night air of Leicester Square after the movie had ended, I was not disappointed. My excitement and anticipation had been justified. Ten minutes after the curtain had dropped and the last of the credits had rolled, I was standing outside 185 Baker Street. It is still the site of Lloyds Bank 37 years on. And all these years, as I’ve been walking past, I never knew that it was a location dripping in intrigue and mystery. Not only as the location of the “Walkie-Talkie Bank Job”, but the hidden crypt running under the street containing the remains of many who died in the Great Plague of London in 1666.

With The Bank Job, a whole bunch of my preoccupations come together in one satisfying package. It’s still only January and I might have already seen the best film of the year. AKA says check it out.

The official website for the movie complete with the trailer can be found here, and for some more background on the true events that inspired the film click here.

The Bank Job is released in the UK on 28 February 2008 and in the US on 7 March 2008.

Shoulda Taken That Left Toin At Albukoikee

2008-01-14T21:43:00.001Z

I wish I could run through a solid brick wall and leave nothing but a perfect AKA-shaped hole in my wake.

I wish I could run off a cliff and keep going, running through the air before the awareness that solid ground has disappeared hits me. I'd be suspended in thin air for a scant few seconds before plummeting into a canyon as I vanish into a cloud of dust.

I wish explosives could go off in my face and leave nothing more than blackened scorch marks and burnt hair which would magically disappear before the next scene.

I wish the soundtrack to my life was the sound of tightly-coiled springs twanging and cymbals clashing.

I wish life was like a Looney Tunes cartoon. I’d let the worst happen, dust myself off, and let Porky Pig wave the audience goodbye.

You do realise, this means war.

Trapped In A World He Never Made

2008-01-12T14:20:00.000Z

January – the poorest month of the year. The longest interval between pay cheques and the financial hangover from Christmas hungrily gnaws at the hollow pockets of my wallet. What’s a guy to do for entertainment?

I suspect that 2008 will be the Year of the Press Screening for me. Plonking down cold hard cash to watch movies might be one luxury I can’t afford in the coming months. Fortunately for me, there are always stray e-mails penetrating my inbox inviting me to screenings. So this week, I went to see my first movie of the year. And no-one believes me when I tell them what I went to watch. Even if they do believe me, I can detect in their eyes a look that screams “Why, man? Why would you do such a thing??”

Ready? I went to see THIS!

Yes, to commemorate the DVD release of Howard The Duck, I squeezed myself into one of Soho’s miniscule screening rooms to let the insane magic of one of cinema’s most derided creations wash over me. And I’ll tell you a little secret. I was one of the only people who went to see it 20 years ago when it was released in the UK with the bland, almost-apologetic title Howard: A New Breed Of Hero. I loved it then too – for entirely different reasons though.

How can you not love a film that is so inept, misconceived and borderline offensive, riven with bad acting and dialogue that makes your ears weep, yet at the same time is genuinely funny, thrilling and thoroughly enjoyable from curtain up to curtain down? I am in awe of the fact that something as gloriously lunatic as Howard The Duck exists in the annals of cinema. And there really is a lot to recommend it.

The one thing that the film gets right is the character of Howard himself. The flip-side is that it totally fumbles the purpose of Howard. In Steve Gerber’s wonderful 70s comic, Howard was us. He wasn’t the freak. Everyone else was. He was Gerber’s mouthpiece – a vehicle for his frustration and amused irritation at the state of America in the 70s. In the movie, Howard just ends up as another reluctant action hero.

The duck effects in the movie actually stand up reasonably well in 2007. And there is more fun to be had here than in the stodgy lifeless effects spectacles foisted on us every summer.

But it says something when the best performance is the one given by the guy in the duck suit. Lea Thompson hit an all-time high with Back To The Future, only to thud right back down to earth with Howard The Duck. And the less said about the inter-species sex hinted at in a family film the better. Jeffrey “Ed Rooney” Jones is both teeth-grindingly dreadful and so far over-the-top that you cannot help but fall madly in love with his crazed appearance. And as for Tim Robbins – there’s no sugarcoating it. He is just crap in this.

It made me want to crack open my Essential Howard The Duck collection, just so that I could enjoy once again how it all began. And I’d definitely sit through the movie again. I might wait another 20 years until I do though…

Damn Right

2008-01-09T00:38:00.000Z

I love this:

(Found via Ectomo “a wonder closet of fringe art, culture and ephemera”. You should be reading it. Trust me.)

Shrapnel

2007-12-28T14:13:00.000Z

Hello, I’m AKA. You may remember me from such blog postings as “Incongruous YouTube Video” and “Shapeless Rant About Something Insanely Trivial”.

Been quiet around here recently, hasn’t it? You can always trace a direct line from the infrequency of postings here to the crazed rush of industry in my life. December has been Mad Busy.

At this time of year, I usually do some kind of “Year In Review” bollocks. Not this year. I can’t be bothered. 2007 has been a weird, strange chapter in my life – a year that has veered unpredictably between devastating lows and exhilarating highs, and I’ve found it to be exhausting and, in many ways, crushing. And with only four days left, I still have no idea what the rest of this brutal year will throw at me. Can’t wait to see the back of it. Come on, 2008, hurry up!

December involved epic amounts of time juggling. In addition to the considerable and growing demands of my day job, a hefty, lucrative writing job fell in my lap out of nowhere (proving that Facebook actually does have viable social networking resources that can be translated into cold, hard green). The writing gig entailed three and a bit drafts, numerous meetings with producers and directors, mountains of (ultimately useless) research material that needed sifting and very little sleep. 4 hours a night max became the norm for a while. Weekends didn’t exist. I was shooting around London like a rubber ball stapled to an Oyster Card. And the deadlines were as tight as whalebone corsets.

On the upside, my long-dormant writing career got the sort of boost that I really didn’t predict and, if all goes well, this might be a nice little sideline moving forward. Sure, the money is nice, but the best thing is the fact that I get the opportunity to do what I do best – making shit up.

And the Christmas break has not brought me any kind of respite or opportunity to recover from the demands of the year. I’m tired in every way imaginable. I’ve been skating on the cusp of a burn-out for so long now that it’s become my default setting. What I want from 2008 more than anything is peace and stability. That would be a great belated Christmas present if anyone can swing it.

Jack Lord Can Kill You With His Eyes

2007-11-12T23:35:00.000Z

It's late, I'm a reluctant insomniac, my chicken-pox riddled bambina has taken my place in the marital bed, I'm desperately trying to postpone another night on the couch and the prospect of wedging all 6" 3 of me onto a lumpy sofa half my size makes my spine scream in fearful anticipation, and the beer I just cracked open is just too damn perfect to abandon just yet. There's only one thing for it, dammit! Time to revel in all 56 majestic seconds of this enervating sliver of pop culture wizardry over & over & over again. Aaaaaaand GO!

AKA’s TV Round-Up

2007-11-11T12:31:00.000Z

I am currently following the events of the Writers Guild of America strike with great interest. A titanic battle where art and commerce collide! I sense that they are hunkering down for the long haul on this one. Good.

It is estimated that the 1988 writers strike cost the American entertainment business in the vicinity of $500million. Good.

To paraphrase V: “Writers should not be afraid of their employers. Employers should be afraid of their writers.”

So now seems as good a time as any for a quick once-around-the-block look at my current viewing habits. The current American television schedules hold very little interest for me. I’m done with sitcoms. I may occasionally dip into the odd episode of Scrubs or My Name Is Earl, but the sitcom is a tired format at the moment and needs either resting or a serious smack around the head.

Which leaves me with only three currently airing shows that I follow on a weekly basis. Two of them are television at its best, and the other one is Heroes. And don’t worry; this is entirely spoiler-free, so read on without fear:

Dexter
The life and times of a everyone’s favourite ethical serial killer, Dexter Morgan continues to juggle his personal relationships and his own murderous impulses as the second series seamlessly flows on from the events of the first. Despite the absence of a Big Bad Nemesis for Dexter like the Ice Truck Killer of Season One, all the sub-plots and character arcs are simmering away nicely and flowing naturally onwards. Dexter hasn’t taken a hit in quality from Season One, and Michael C. Hall is still as wonderfully charismatic and twisted as before.

Good news: All the episodes of Season 2 are in the bag, so Dexter won’t suffer as a result of the strike. It also seems like Season 3 has been given the green light.

Also worth mentioning: The opening titles of Dexter are without doubt the best on television at the moment – a montage of a mundane morning ritual, with innocuous household objects recast as ominous and unsettling with a judicious use of sound and framing. Check it:

House
Another anti-hero still on top of his game. Well into Season Four, and House continues to make a virtue of its limitations. The format – an obscure illness is endlessly misdiagnosed for 40 minutes until inspiration hits in the closing minutes and they work out what the hell is going on. Every. Single. Week. And it really doesn’t get tired, due to excellent performances and withering one-liners from the misanthropic disease detective. Shifting the supporting characters around has given this show a hypodermic shot in the arm. Sadly, it looks like there are only enough scripts to take House to the end of the year and we’ll be heading into 2008 with a handful of unresolved character arcs. Never mind. Always leave them wanting more, right? Pop a Vicodin to dull the pain.

Heroes
Attempting to combine the complex multi-threaded narrative strands and mysteries-within-mysteries of Lost with the soapy mythology and epic sweep of old X-Men comics, Heroes never attains the heights of either, with the exception of the inspired cheerleader autopsy sequence in Season One. It’s always been entertaining enough, but never really great.

And Heroes continues to suffer badly from an over-reliance on nonsensical coincidence to make the characters cross paths, and the introduction of bland pretty-boys-and-girls-with-special abilities that do nothing for the story. There is a reason why Hiro Nakamura was everyone’s favourite character. He was the everyman who had a sense of wonder and awe about his powers, and the one character that represented the notion of an (almost) ordinary man in extraordinary situations.

Add to that a glacial pacing in the early episodes with only incremental plot advancement in every episode, and Heroes is really struggling. The last episode hinted that things are getting back on track and moving at an accelerated pace to hold flagging interest. This is all likely to come to a halt soon with only a few episodes left before the scripts dry up. This is A Good Thing. Maybe the writing team can reflect on what’s gone wrong and up their game for next year. Here’s hoping.

So with the clock ticking before the US schedules dry up and end up swathed in reruns, what does that mean for international television? Surely this must be a great opportunity for the UK’s best shows to find an audience elsewhere as American broadcasters look for The New to plug into their ailing schedules? Which neatly brings me to:

The Sarah Jane Adventures
The BBC’s latest, kids-oriented spin-off from Doctor Who, The Sarah Jane Adventures succeeds in all the ways that Torchwood failed. With the tone of the “classic” Who of the past, the show has the format of “monsters / aliens / ghosts invade Earth and are repelled by plucky teenagers and their experienced mentor”. The shows pop off the screen in a CGI squall of bright colours and lights. Lots of screaming and running and gadgets and cliffhangers and cackling villains and vanquished ghouls. This is what live-action Scooby-Doo should really look like. Terrific stuff, and far better than anyone could have hoped for.

So, what’s next? Don’t know about you, but this just about punches every single one of my geek buttons. Friday 16 November – BBC1. Oh yes:

Here We Go Again

2007-10-21T15:53:00.000+01:00

I’m two weeks into the new job and I’ve finally managed to get the New Guy stink off of me.

In a nutshell? I like it.

It didn’t take too long for me to adapt from the slapdash amateurism of the last place of employment to the slick professionalism of the new place. Got a nice desk, comfy chair, free lunch every day and a great view of the Thames from my office. I’ve also got a constant feeling of déjà vu.

I’m deep enough into my working life now to see certain patterns. I have this nagging feeling that I know these people. I don’t. I just know the types. The artificial blonde with the severe business suit, the arctic smile and the dead eyes who always appears to be pleasant, but she can’t hide the petty officiousness buried under layers of pancaked make-up. The effete prankster with a battery of catchphrases who’s convinced that he’s hilarious but really he’s just irritating. The doughy, perpetually exhausted longtimers who bitch and moan about the work, even though they refuse to either Shit or Get Off The Pot.

I’m busy all day every day (and I seem to be in meetings all the time. What is it with Big Corporates and incessant meetings?). I’m back in a shirt and tie. But I’m into it. I’m enjoying it. I’m comfortable and confident and I feel challenged and I’m learning and I feel a part of it. I’ve been made to feel welcome. It’s more than I expected.

So far? So very, very good.

End of Daze

2007-10-05T10:28:00.000+01:00

I’ve just sat down at my desk in my office. It’s the same desk I’ve been sitting at almost every weekday for the last 25 months. Today is the last day I will arrive here, sit here, work (or pretend to work) here. Do anything here.

Feels damn weird. I feel like I need to mark this moment in some way. Cock my leg on the last two years and leave my scent behind in some tangible way. But that’s not going to happen. I’ll be forgotten by midday next Monday. Which is fine by me.

I’ve hated working here more often than not, but I suspect that at some point in the future I will look back on this time with some kind of twisted fondness. But not yet, and not for a while.

The sun has decided to come out and play for this last day. It almost manages to make this place look decent. This big, ugly concrete warehouse pretending to be an office building at the furthermost point on a big, ugly industrial estate, the outside of the building choked with weeds and triffids and rats the size of terriers. The murky dark water of the Grand Union Canal oozing past the window, rancid with filth and ducks desperately trying to swim through the muck and the plastic bags and the rainbow-coloured oily swirls leaking into the water from the car garage next door.

So. No more shaky air-conditioning that makes the room arctic on the hottest days of the year, or sweltering hot on the darkest days of winter. No more struggling to find space on a tiny desk choked with pens and papers and coffee mugs and standard issue office bullshit. No longer will I have to run a gauntlet of empty cardboard boxes and misshapen polystyrene and busted monitors and discarded cabling just so I can get to the toilet or the kitchen.

And, hopefully, no more insane, nightmare edicts from the technically-challenged company directors. I still shudder when I think back to the dark days of Summer 2006, when for three weeks it was decreed that we drop everything immediately to dedicate our waking hours to reading Every Single Incoming Spam e-mail. From cain’t see to cain’t see, from log-in to log-out, from 9am to 5.30pm, it was nothing but an endless parade of penisviagrarolexmortgagecasinolotteryorgasmhoodia craziness, burning my eyes, crushing my mind, breaking my spirit. And all because maybe, just maybe, one in every 10,000 e-mails might be a mistakenly-snagged valid e-mail with a customer who wants to spend £10 on a piece of shitty software.

Regardless, this is the closing of an undeniably odd (but annoyingly representative) chapter in my working life and I’m glad that it is finally (almost) over. It went on at least a year too long, and this ending is overdue, so I might as well welcome it with open arms, a gleam in my eye, and these words on my lips: “What took you so damn long? Come on, we got things to do!”

And it’s time to go do them.

You, Robot

2007-09-26T15:16:00.000+01:00

Nestled in the midst of yet another summer where cinemas were buckling under the weight of bloated effects-heavy spectacles choked by a surfeit of plot strands and character arcs all struggling to extricate themselves from unnecessary narrative complexity (I’m looking at you Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean At World’s End!), along comes the small and perfectly formed Electroma from Parisian bleep-sculptors Daft Punk.

Whereas the summer’s standard issue eye candy is just passive entertainment, a relentless barrage of noise and nonsense requiring absolutely no contribution on the part of the audience, Electroma is the opposite. It leaves plenty of room for the viewer as an integral part of the experience, allowing them to project their own feelings, interpretations and responses on to the film.

Those wacky Daft Punks may disagree with me. Co-director and imaginaut Thomas Bangalter describes Electroma as “…experimental and inaccessible; however, it's a movie that does not require your brain to function.” He couldn’t be more wrong. It is a far richer experience when both your brain and your emotions are receptive to the sounds and images skittering across the screen.

Heavily indebted to 70s American cinema, in particular nihilistic road movies and sterile sci-fi dystopias like Electra Glide in Blue and THX 1138 (with a dash of the suburban weirdness of David Lynch thrown in as seasoning), Electroma is the story of two leather-clad robots cruising the American highways, flanked on either side by a craggy burnished orange backdrop familiar from old westerns, saddled up in their black 1987 Ferrari 412 with its license plate displaying “HUMAN”.

And that’s all they want – to be human. To be different in a world full of robots. And that’s basically the whole story.

With the slow and hypnotic accretion of meticulously selected and stunningly beautiful imagery, Electroma is an entirely wordless meditation on the meaning of humanity, belonging, assimilation and conformity.

Every single miniscule element of Electroma is seemingly crafted with painstaking precision, from the grotesque human masks that the robots wear, melting in the sun and running down their faces like rubbery pink tears, to the immaculate location shots, in particular one striking shot of the desert laid out like the curves of a reclining woman, with a serendipitous pile of scrub brush appearing tantalisingly like a pubic mound.

Even better than the visuals is the fantastic sound design – the repetitive scuffing of boots on gravel; the crackling of flames; the unwavering drone of the Ferrari. Even the silence is perfect.

Music also plays a part in the whole tapestry (although, wisely, nothing by Daft Punk themselves). My personal favourite use of music is the sound of Curtis Mayfield’s Billy Jack as the two robots walk through a suburban town centre proudly wearing their new faces, in a twisted parody of Richard Roundtree or John Travolta strutting defiantly in the opening sequences of Shaft or Saturday Night Fever.

In a film without words, subtle physical performance and use of body language is vital, and Peter Hurteau and Michael Reich acquit themselves admirably. But I’ve said enough. A film that’s a blend of impressions and imagery is not a film that can be sold on the strength of words. And it’s now available on DVD.

Tempted yet? Here’s a teaser trailer.

Songs for Swingin' Lovers

2007-09-18T11:11:00.000+01:00

Buttercup is going to be 3 in just over a week. She has exemplary taste in music. I can prove it too. Look and listen:

At the moment, this is her favourite song. For the last few days we have both been wandering from room to room singing it incessantly. I can’t get the thing out of my head and, let’s face it, why would I want to?

Bobby Byrd 1934 – 2007

2007-09-17T09:57:00.000+01:00

I know you got soul
If you didn’t you wouldn’t be in here

Beautiful obit by Red Kelly over at The “A” Side

Bobby, take it to the bridge…

Work Out

2007-09-05T15:47:00.000+01:00

As of this Monday just gone, I have been in my current job for two years. I started with a healthy degree of new-job-enthusiasm. It didn’t take long for that to degenerate to the level of mild apathy. By the time my first year was up, I was well into the Outright Hatred zone, and I never got out of it.

It was around that point that I started looking for a new job. By my calculations, that’s over a year of hardcore job-search, with all its attendant annoyances: poring over webpages and squinting at the poorly-worded job ads in miniscule type; endlessly tweaking CVs and cover letters; verbal jousting with aggressive, incompetent and overly-friendly recruitment consultants; burning through my annual holiday allowance (with the odd sick-day thrown in) to attend interviews.

I must have been devoting around 20 hours a week to job-hunting. Over 300 job applications. Circa 30 interviews, increasing in frequency to the point where I was out of the office twice a week.

Now, the eagle-eyed readers amongst you will have noticed that I am writing in the past tense…

In the last few days, I have received not one, but two, job offers. I’ve grabbed one of those fuckers with both hands.

I feel a bit overwhelmed at the moment. It’s such a momentous thing for me, and I finally feel like I am back in control of my life in a significant way. My current job has been A Fucking Nightmare - and that’s an understatement.

There is no downside. There is only upside! I get out of this crummy North London suburb overrun with rats and fast-food joints. I get to have more time to myself (at least for the next month whilst I work out my notice period) now that I don’t have to endlessly pursue job opportunities. I’m joining a company flush with potential and the promise of a new beginning. I’m back in the heart of that fickle bitch London.

Such an immense weight has been lifted from me that I feel a little dazed by it, and I’m still adjusting to these impending changes. I haven’t tendered my resignation yet, as I’m waiting for all the paperwork to come through confirming everything, but in four weeks, my world will shift on its axis ever so slightly. And Donald Byrd was right – Change really does Make You Wanna Hustle.

I haven’t managed to wrap my head around all the implications of this, but the main one that affects you, dear reader, is that I finally get the opportunity to devote some valuable brainspace to writing again. This means more tinkering around with my little pet projects, but it also means an increased presence here for the next few weeks at least.

We’ve got a lot of catching up to do…

Tall in the Saddle

2007-08-24T12:26:00.000+01:00

“Back in black, I hit the sack,
I've been too long, I'm glad to be back
Yes I'm let loose from the noose,
That's kept me hangin' about.
I been livin’ like a star 'cause it's gettin' me high,
Forget the hearse, 'cause I never die
I got nine lives, cat's eyes
Abusing every one of them and running wild.”
AC/DC - Back In Black

Oh yes. The Summer of my Discontent is now finally over and made glorious. There’s a metric shitload of things I wanted to write about, but I seem to be perpetually under the gun at the moment and just running to catch up with myself, so that’s going to have to wait.

I’ve finally managed to get my Twitter page to feed into the blog properly, so scroll down the column on the right and you’ll have a more accurate idea of my daily movements and adventures.

As I wrestle with the remaining hours of this week, I am comforted to know that we’re heading into a three-day Bank Holiday weekend which ends with my 35th birthday. Every day that we can rouse ourselves from our slumber and breathe in and breathe out is a day worth celebrating, as we put one leg in front of the other and continue to navigate our way around this Big Bad Ball of Mud. That goes double for birthdays.

“They gotta catch me if they want me to hang
'Cause I'm back on the track and I'm beatin' the flack,
Nobody's gonna get me on another rap
So look at me now, I'm just a makin' my pay,
Don't try to push your luck, just get outta my way.”

Mike Wieringo 1963 – 2007

2007-08-18T01:31:00.000+01:00

Blogging still at a minimum, but I didn’t want this to pass without comment. Criminally underrated comic artist Mike Wieringo has died unexpectedly at the age of 44. Here are two of my favourite sketches by Ringo. First is a dashing re-imagining of Buck Rogers as part of a thread on Warren Ellis’ soon-to-be-defunct message board THE ENGINE:

Here is the other one. Ringo’s stint on Fantastic Four with Mark Waid is one of the most-beloved runs on the title, elevating it once again to its position as The World's Greatest Comic Magazine. Here is a tragically poignant picture of the FF waving goodbye to Ringo and his mighty, irreplaceable pencil:

Urban Decay and the Vinyl Frontier

2007-07-22T18:25:00.000+01:00

I’m still navigating the choppy waters of my personal life. I’m surrounded on all sides by ravenous sharks, and there is definitely blood in the water. Nevertheless, if I don’t do some writing, I’m going to go bug-fuck crazy. So here I am. Deal with it. Warning: This is going to be a bit rambling and shapeless. My thoughts tend to be skittish and unfocussed at the moment. And I’m rusty as hell with the ol’ word-slinging, so bear with me.

In the last few weeks, I’ve had a handful of reasons to be in the centre of London with time on my hands, so I’ve spent quite a bit of that time aimlessly wandering the streets, trying to hit some of my favourite areas. And I’m discovering that my favourite areas are gradually facing extinction.

About a year ago I wrote about the demise of Comic Showcase, but what I didn’t know at the time was that it was only the first salvo in the slow disintegration of parts of “my” London. London is many things to many people. No two people see this city in the same way. And that’s the way it should be. But it seems that progress or evolution or whatever- you-want-to-call-it has decided to call time on My London.

I suppose I first had an inkling a couple of weeks back. I went to a party thrown by a company I worked for many years ago – the company I was working at when this blog was born. You can check the archives to get a flavour of my hate-hate relationship with that place.

It was more of a wake than a party. After eight years in business, and having never turned a profit whilst ploughing millions into a misguided vanity project, they had decided to stop throwing cash onto the pyre. It was the end of the road. One of the deciding factors was the fact that the building where they were based was going to be demolished, and they couldn’t face another costly and ultimately fruitless office move. I was one of the key personnel involved in the previous office move. The reason then? That building was going to be demolished.

And I thought about my not-particularly happy working career. The jobs, the companies, the colleagues. Lots of places, lots of people. And it dawned on me that, with the exception of one company, they have all gone. They’ve either crashed and burned in failure, or they’ve cashed out in a smug burst of orgiastic glee, jerking off into rolled up £50 notes with a big “fuck you” grin on their faces.

Not only have the companies disappeared, their employees have scattered on the winds of opportunity, rolling up wherever the need for a paycheck takes them. And more often than not, even the buildings that housed those companies have been razed to the ground, to make way for plazas or mini-malls or who-the-fuck-knows.

Coincidentally, I also discovered the other day that my current company is on the verge of selling up. It appears that the directors have been casting around for buyers, and it looks like they might have found some. It’s only a matter of time. I discovered this through unofficial channels, so I’m not supposed to know this. I always seem to know things that I shouldn’t…

I went off on a bit of a tangent there. What I really wanted to write about was Berwick Street. The Fopp chain of record stores folded over a month ago, simultaneously doing away with my source of inexpensive music. It was always an excellent source of low-priced niche music. If supermarkets are increasingly catering to the Top 40 crowd, it fell to Fopp to cater to the rest of us, and they did it well. Their implosion had little to do with their day-to-day business, and more to do with a cash-flow problem brought on by acquisition and rapid expansion. They committed commercial suicide.

So, on Thursday afternoon, with time to kill and nothing to adequately slaughter it with, I decided to hit Berwick Street, Soho’s Mecca for the music shopper. Well, it used to be. Not anymore. It has changed. The stack-‘em-high, sell-‘em-cheap Mister CD had gone. Both branches of Reckless Records had gone. Selectadisc is long gone. The only remaining record store on Berwick Street is Sister Ray, and I wasn’t impressed. The prices aren’t that good. Neither is the stock range. I managed to snag a Latin jazz CD for £2.99, primarily for the Joe Bataan cover of the Theme From Shaft.

I remember the days when I could walk up and down Berwick Street all day (stopping occasionally for a burger or a beer), digging in dusty stacks of vinyl and finding piles of stuff that I wanted. I always had to put things back, because the stuff that I wanted exceeded what I could afford. Last week, it was a struggle to spend 3 quid. My friends and I would be tempting permanent spinal injury by hauling around bags weighed down with stacks of black discs engraved with the funkiest basslines and the baddest horn breaks. We were avid crate diggers, looking for elusive and unusual funk and jazz albums. And we never left empty-handed.

I know that shopping online is cheaper, but it’s purposeful. You want something, you find it at the best price and you get the fuck out. But you can’t browse in the same way. There’s nothing like holding something in your hands that you never knew existed. The death of the specialist shop is the death of pop culture archaeology, chipping away in the dust and the dim light to reveal a surprise.

Now, when I get on the train home from London, I don’t take any extra treats home with me. Not even memories.