Shit Just Got Real

Four years ago, after having just sat through Bad Boys II, I scrawled the following in the back of a notebook:

“Pure, unadulterated, could-have-been-made-ten-years-ago, big-screen madness. Extreme car chases, extreme shoot-outs, gratuitous foreign drug dealer accents, gratuitous swearing, deafening music, extreme gore and carnage, gratuitous nudity…it’s a pure distillation of the late 80s-early 90s action aesthetic, and I loved it like it was my first born child. And NO CGI!! Take that, you Matrix-loving bastards! Blowing shit up is much more pleasing than elaborate pixels jumping around in a soulless cinematic epileptic fit.”

Coming eight years after the original, absolutely no-one was eagerly awaiting this belated sequel to the Will Smith-Martin Lawrence buddy cop-movie. I certainly wasn’t. After a long summer choked by leaden FX-heavy misfires like Hulk (Don’t make it Ang Lee. We wouldn’t like it when it’s Ang Lee) and The Matrix Reloaded, I was just forcing myself to sit through the last of the summer 2003 blockbusters.

Critically reviled in all quarters, I was surprised and exhilarated by the delirious excesses of Bad Boys II. My friends all thought I’d finally lost my shit when I kept talking about how brilliant it was. Big-ass explosions will always defeat dodgy renderings of lumpen green monsters or the turgid pseudo-mysticism of Keanu Reeves.

For the last four years, I was convinced that I was the lone fan of the unfashionable Bad Boys sequel. Finally, Hot Fuzz has come along to prove that I was never alone. Just as Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost moulded Shaun of the Dead from their abiding love of the Romero zombie movies, Hot Fuzz is where they pledge an oath of fealty to the over-stylised, explodo-fests of Michael Bay and Tony Scott. And it is Great!

Cannily blending the milieu familiar from numerous sedate Sunday evening rural copper dramas with the all-star cast of a good Agatha Christie adaptation, Hot Fuzz plays with all the conventions of both the noisy American action movie and the gentle British portrayal of small-town police without once treating the story as mere pastiche. Simon Pegg is as terrifically impassive as the T-1000 as he chases after evildoers, and the oleaginous Timothy Dalton is wonderful. 2007 at the movies is shaping up pretty well so far. Bring the noise!

Buck Up

An apology is in order.

Glancing at the previous blog entry, I am stunned and disappointed to notice that I failed to make a glaringly obvious and reasonably amusing joke. I will rectify this oversight post haste.

I should, of course, have finished that post with the sentence: “Twiki gets a booty call”, or maybe even, “Now that’s a booty call!”

The fact that I was recovering from the ill effects of an evening of heavy drinking when I wrote that post is no excuse. It won’t happen again. I will endeavour to acknowledge every double entendre, no matter how puerile, from this point forwards.

I thank you for your patience and understanding at this difficult and joke-free time.

I will now go back to waiting for the postman to deliver my Buck Rogers in the 25th Century Season 1 DVD boxset, proving once and for all that inconsequential musings can and do lead to unnecessary expenditure. I can’t wait…

The Year is 1987

I know, I know. There have been interviews to attend, colds to endure, a day-job to suffer through and writing projects to wrestle with. But I’m back now.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the dying art of television opening title sequences. There’s nothing quite like devoting valuable brainspace to pop culture ephemera. It helps me relax.

As much as I admire the ominous minimalism of the Lost opening, with the lone word tilting, blurring and drifting away with a single noise crashing over the top of it, I miss the days when, in one rapidfire burst of sound and vision, you’d be handed the entire premise of the show.

There are many fine title sequences from the 70s and 80s, but one of my undisputed favourites has to be this: William Conrad’s gravely baritone gives you the backstory, as concentric circles scroll away delivering the good stuff: spaceships and phasers; alien women and small robots; and Erin Gray in white lycra, whilst a bombastic chunk of epic music tells you that you are About To Be Entertained. In just over a minute, nothing says “Here Come The Fun” quite as efficiently as the opening of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. And I can prove it. Look:

What ever happened to Gil Gerard anyway?

As a parting shot, I give you this – a moment of supreme oddness in a show that was full of them. Dumb, but undeniably Fun. Enjoy:

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

The other day I was speaking to my Mum on the phone. The conversation went a little something like this:

Mum: So, seen any films this week?
Me: Yeah. Smokin’ Aces.
Mum: Smoking Arses?
Me: No. Smokin’ Aces.
Mum: Smoking Anus?
Me: What is wrong with you??

I don’t know what I found more troubling about this exchange: uncovering my Mum’s newfound love of coprohiliac humour, or the fact that she thinks I spend my free time watching movies called Smoking Anus.

Anyway, that telephone conversation was the most entertaining thing that came out of sitting through Smokin’ Aces. Because it’s not good. And here comes the bit where I tell you why.

Smokin’ Aces is this year’s Lucky Number Slevin or Confidence. The kind of movie endlessly and irritatingly described in reviews as “Tarantinoesque” or “Post-Tarantino”. You know the kind of thing – a slew of extended cameos by stars and recognisable character actors dressed as over-stylised hipsters and hoodlums, peppering faux-hard-boiled dialogue with jarring pop-culture references, before everything descends into a melange of double-crosses and twists, bullets and blood all the way to the end credits.

But here’s the thing – Quentin Tarantino takes his love of genre films, whether they are blaxploitation movies or Shaw Brothers movies or heist movies, and not only pays homage to the very things he loves, but he also moulds them into exciting and resilient films that light up the screen and stand up in their own right. Tarantino’s movies may reference the past but they are resolutely modern or, even better, timeless. His inspirations and influences are clear for all to see, but his skill as a filmmaker elevate his films beyond simple retreads of the familiar. The difference between Quentin and Smokin’ Aces is the same as the difference between homage and plagiarism, passion and hackery, creativity and laziness.

What is Smokin’ Aces about? Well, it’s about fifteen minutes of clunky exposition distributed amongst the cast in tedious and unnecessary detail, replete with text flashing up on the screen to tell you who everybody is. You won’t care. Most of the cast are cannon-fodder anyway. The remaining hour and a half of the film is essentially the shootout at the end of True Romance stretched way past breaking point.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some small pleasures to be gleaned from Smokin’ Aces. There are odd moments of weirdness that made me smile, but nowhere near enough to sustain the entire movie. I’d watch Andy Garcia in pretty much anything. (I’m a sucker for that mellifluous Cuban lilt and that steely gaze). Jeremy Piven does his best with what he’s saddles with (but for me his finest hour will always be Very Bad Things). And yet again I’m impressed and frustrated with Ryan Reynolds. He is always very good in poor movies. He’s got a great screen presence and he can do comedy, whilst still having considerable “straight” acting chops. Kinda like a young Michael Keaton, with that same crazed intensity when he needs it. He was by far the best thing in Blade: Trinity. He was great in the passable Clerks knock-off Waiting. Someone needs to show some compassion and give this man a decent movie! Either that or fire his agent.

Other than that, Smokin’ Aces is hollow entertainment, all cordite and quips, but when the smoke finally clears, the biggest con is the one that swindled me out of 108 minutes that I’m never getting back.

Mind Adventures

"The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size." Oliver Wendell Holmes

Things have been mighty quiet here at Casa Del AKA, I know. I’ve been busy working hard on my screenplay Rotten Timing.

I’ve got the beginning, I’ve got the ending, I’ve got the spine and the skeleton and the structure of it all worked out. Now, I’m just trying to add muscle and meat to it - the laughs and the horror and the excitement and the drama and the tears.

Mostly, I’ve just been bouncing ideas like a messy ball inside the walls of my skull, letting them ricochet off the ganglia and coming up with wonderful things. Lots of reading, reading, reading. I try and scrape together the time to wade through the mounds of research material that I’ve accumulated, sitting quietly soaking it all up until a flare gun blasts inspiration into the darkness, lighting up the corners that hold things that I never knew were hiding there. This starts a bout of frantic scribbling, before the cycle begins anew with another round of reading.

I’ve been avoiding fiction since I jumped back into this project. Other people’s ideas leak into my own too easily that way, and its best avoided. Instead, I’m mired in quantum physics and determinism and the teachings of Buddha.

Other than that, work is kicking my ass. Getting out of this job has become a priority. It’s become soul destroying. The only thing that gets me through it is the knowledge that I will be back home with my family at the end of the day. Buttercup continues to be an endless source of pleasure and delight. If I’m lucky, I get home in time to read her a Mr. Men story before she goes to sleep, and then we sit and talk about the story for a couple of minutes before I tuck her up in bed.

This morning, I was heading for the door and I could hear her calling me. I went to see what she wanted.

Buttercup: Daddy! Daddy!
Me: Yes, Baby.
Buttercup: I want to play with you, Daddy.
Me: I want to play with you too, darling, but I have to go to work.

She throws her arms around my neck and gives me a big hug. I give her a kiss and disentangle her before placing her back in her mother’s arms. I’m leaving all this for a four hour round-trip commute and eight hours of being ignored or mistreated in the middle of a concrete wasteland?

Walking out of the front door, the cold wind dried my damp eyes.

AKA Year in Review 2006: The Movies – Part Two

Time for the rest of my dirty dozen. Let’s get on with it:

Snakes on a Plane – The movie that was supposed to change the way that films were marketed, and was then deemed a flop when the massive online push for this modern-day B-movie was not enough to make it a hit. Who gives a shit about box office? This was still great, unashamed popcorn movie-making. Sam Jackson spends a sprightly and hugely-enjoyable 105 minutes getting some motherfucking snakes off a motherfucking plane. It’s time to open some windows…

Thank You For Smoking – Aaron Eckhart at his fast-talking, scumbag best, as the leading spokesman for Big Tobacco, beset on all sides by a stupendous supporting cast made up of Robert Duvall, Sam Elliott, Maria Bello and Rob Lowe, amongst others. Maybe not as smart and as funny as it thinks it is, but still smart and funny enough to make my Top Twelve.

United 93 – Paul Greengrass’s clinical dissection of the events of 9/11, with the focus on the fourth plane. Never judgmental, and all the more powerful for it. The line between documentary and fiction is blurred to leave a painful exploration of an important moment in recent history. Everyone needs to see this.

V for Vendetta – Comic book adaptations are notoriously hit-and-miss. When you add Alan Moore adaptations to the mix, the misses far outweigh the hits. After all, comics have an unlimited effects budget, and the only limitations are the creative ones in the mind of the writer. I went into V for Vendetta expecting the worst, and ended up being delighted by it. Hugo Weaving is masterful as the titular V, in a performance of subtle physical acting, using his impassive porcelain mask as an asset, rather than being hindered by it, and the subtext of Thatcher’s Britain updated to Blair’s Britain didn’t hurt one bit. Remember, people should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

Wolf Creek – A movie I finally caught up with on DVD. Where most horror movies use well-worn variations on long-established genre tropes such as the things hidden in the black of night and the claustrophobic confines of the cabin in the woods, Wolf Creek spins it around to the vast, endless expanses of the Australian outback in the blinding bright light of the brutal sun, and there’s still no-one coming to the rescue. With one single, solitary line of appropriated dialogue, John Jarratt becomes of the great movie monsters. That’s not a knife, this is a knife!

Zatôichi the Fugitive (Zatôichi Kyôjô Tabi) – Made in 1963, and I finally got to see it in 2006. In the only night of pure self-indulgence I allowed myself this year, I settled in for an evening of cult Japanese movies at the NFT, one of which was this, the fourth entry in the long-running series about the blind swordsman. There are no words to describe the brilliance of Shintaro Katsu as Zatôichi. My face hurt from the perpetual grin I had smeared across my face watching this. Perfection.

And that’s almost a wrap. If everything had gone according to plan, this would have been posted before Christmas, and I would have ended things with the final part of the Sucker Punch Christmas Advent Calendar Funk Nuggets. But everything seems to accelerate out of my control before Christmas, and this got side-lined. And then on Christmas Day, I heard that one of my musical heroes had died. So this final piece of funk history should be given to Soul Brother Number One, The Hardest Working Man in Show Business, Mr. Please Please Please, Minister of the New New Super Heavy Funk, Mr. Dynamite, The Boss, The Godfather of Soul and a man who was the living embodiment of the funk. Mr. James Brown, take it to the bridge…

AKA Year in Review 2006: The Movies – Part One

The end of 2006 is almost upon us, so it’s time once again to hurl my body onto the burning embers of another year’s worth of popular culture. I notice that I didn’t do this last year, and that this is the first time I’ve done this since 2004. Then, like now, I’ve opted for a Top Twelve rather than a Top Ten. But, before I unveil the list, a few observations…

This year I saw far, far fewer movies than I have in previous years. There are many reasons for this: I was less enthused with what was available to me at any given moment; I seem to have less time to indulge myself; I’m tired. I don’t know where all my leisure time has evaporated to. Some serious lifestyle changes are needed for 2007, but I’ll save that for a different blog entry.

With that in mind, my Top Twelve is composed of what I have seen this year, without cleaving strictly to release dates. Some of this stuff I caught up with on DVD long after original theatrical release, and there’s a wild card as my twelfth entry on the list, as it was something that was made in 1963. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

As a result of my much-reduced movie-viewing (something I hope to address next year), there are some notable omissions – movies that I would imagine would have had a damn good shot at appearing on my Best of The Year list had I seen them. Missing in action, then, are Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, Joon-ho Bong’s The Host, Kevin Smith’s Clerks II, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver. Well, there’s always next year.

So in alphabetical order, here is the first half of my Top Twelve:

The Black Dahlia – Much-maligned on release, and not without justification, this movie is a colossal mess. The four lead roles are horribly miscast. Fiona Shaw’s manic, mannered performance looks like it has wandered over from another movie entirely. There is far too much plot and story vying for attention that it never really gets. It’s all over the place. That doesn’t stop Brian De Palma’s adaptation of the first part of James Ellroy’s LA Quartet from ending up in my Top Twelve. Audiences looking for noir ended up getting pulp instead, and that’s fine by me. I do so love me some pulp. It may be a mess, but I still loved it.

Casino Royale – Or, as I like to call it, Bond Begins. The icons need rejuvenating now and again. Sometimes it works (Batman Begins, the Doctor Who relaunch) and sometimes it doesn't (Superman Returns, the BBC’s Robin Hood relaunch). Casino Royale worked. Bond films are always entertaining diversions, but they’re rarely rewatchable. You just wander out of the cinema having enjoyed yourself, and forget all about it. Casino Royale strips away all the barnacles that have become encrusted on the 007 mythos over the decades (the gadgets, the girls, the suave debonair one-liners), and takes Bond back to basics. Daniel Craig is phenomenal, playing Bond as a bestial brute of a man. In a neat inversion of the formula, Craig becomes the eye-candy rather than the women, his body a rippling mass of cuts, bruises, cartilage and lethal simian musculature. He fails as often as he succeeds, but fights on with determination and animal cunning. I’d watch it again.

Hidden (Caché) – Michael Haneke’s tale of a middle-class French family terrorised by anonymous videocassettes delivered to their home is both ice-cold and razor-sharp in its forensic dissection of paranoia, guilt, culpability, and personal responsibility. Unsettling and truly brilliant, Hidden would make a nifty double-bill with David Lynch’s Lost Highway.

Inside Man – A heist movie to rank up there with the greats like Dog Day Afternoon (an obvious touchstone for this latest Spike Lee joint). To discuss it would be to spoil it, but I will say that Lee manages to create an exhilarating genre piece that still manages to seamlessly weave in dead-on observations about violence, the media, corporate America and living in post-9/11 New York. Glorious.

Little Children – An examination of middles-class ennui that makes American Beauty look like the over-praised, overly-mannered Plastic Bag Full Of Nothing that I’ve always known it to be. Aside from the irritating and intrusive omniscient narrator that keeps popping up, this is a corker of a film with possibly Kate Winslet’s finest performance ever. So, so good.

Me and You and Everyone We Know – I have grown to loath the word “quirky”. It has become an all-purpose word that has lost its meaning. It’s hurled at anything that dares to be different or shuns formula and cliché. Miranda July’s beautiful look at how people interact and ache for intimacy and love is exactly the sort of movie that has probably been described as “quirky” many, many times. I would rather call it lovely, funny and uplifting.

The other six to follow. But before I leave, it’s time to get on the good foot with the Sucker Punch Christmas Advent Calendar Funk Nuggets! Today, I bring you the manly Minneapolis funk of Morris Day and The Time, the only band that could make Prince quake in his high heels. Everyone knows Jungle Love and The Bird, so I’ve gone instead for Jerk Out. From 1990, when the original line-up was reunited for Graffiti Bridge, here are those magnificent seven shameless hipsters making fools out of themselves and chasing girls. Oh Lawd…

Peter Boyle 1935 – 2006

Holy crap. Peter Boyle died.

To most people, Peter Boyle will be forever known as the perpetually grumpy Frank, the curmudgeon always prepared to fire off a withering putdown as the patriarch of the dysfunctional Barone clan in Everybody Loves Raymond.

But for me, Frank Barone was just another chapter in the long and wonderful screen career of a fine character actor whose performances have tweaked my pleasure centres for decades. Even his briefest appearances struck a chord and stayed with me. The role of Wizard, the philosophical hackie who passes on his street-corner wisdom to the simmering Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver is a relatively small one, but it remains an unforgettable scene in a movie crammed full of them.

“You get a job. You become the job.”
Peter Boyle as Wizard in Taxi Driver

His broad glistening bald pate with the wisps of hair framing it on the sides, his immense grin, the eyes that could twinkle with either mirth or malevolence (or both at the same time) – whenever Peter Boyle appeared on-screen, you knew that you would be in for something to savour. Personal favourites include the tremendous Seventies caper movie Slither, and his showing as the standard-issue shouty police commander in Walter Hill’s Red Heat. He steals every scene from Bill Murray in Where The Buffalo Roam, despite the fact that Murray is superb as the good Dr. Gonzo himself, Hunter S. Thompson, and Boyle still manages to eclipse his efforts with a manic, wild-eyed, utterly hilarious performance as Carl Lazlo, a thinly-disguised portrayal of Thompson’s friend Oscar Acosta. But there are two films in particular that I can watch again and again and just revel in Boyle’s mastery of comic timing.

“I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not have strange gods before Me. Out of my way, asshole.”
Peter Boyle as Jack McDermott in The Dream Team

The first is The Dream Team, where he plays Jack McDermott, a former advertising executive with a predilection for undressing at inopportune times and who now believes he is God, set loose on the streets of New York with fellow crazies Michael Keaton, Christopher Lloyd and Stephen Furst. (All four of them are just terrific in this movie). Truly wonderful stuff.

“This is the body and blood of our saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. And a damned fine Beaujolais!”
Peter Boyle as Jack McDermott in The Dream Team

The other movie is, of course, Young Frankenstein. What can I say about this film that hasn’t already been said? Nothing at all. So, in a break from the onslaught of funk music I’ve been hurling up here all month, I leave you with this moment of comedy gold. Peter Boyle. Gene Wilder. Putting On The Ritz.

Stray Bullet Points

Ola! I’m back with some bits and pieces from Barcelona. It has been harder than I thought to weld all this stuff into something resembling a compelling narrative. The narrative part is easy. Making anyone other than me give a shit has proved much tougher. (This is what happens when you take three months off blogging and retreat to the harmless confines of the just-for-me paper-and-pen journal.)

The last time I left you hanging, I was heading for the airport armed with nothing more than a bagful of essentials and the rudimentary Spanish I’ve picked up watching Dora The Explorer with Buttercup. But there’s not enough meat on the story of my trip to write this out as a travelogue of “I did this, and then I saw that, and you wouldn’t believe what that motherfucker said to me then?”

When in doubt, go for short controlled bursts of easily-digestible highlights. It was a month ago now, so this is just an exercise in sense-memory and deciphering my disjointed notes. Enough of the cons, let’s get on with the prose:

The Schmooze – Years on from my time in the customer-facing world of retail, I thought I had lost the ability to talk unrelenting crap to complete strangers. I was wrong. It was as easy as ever to turn it on and turn it off. I just flicked my Internal Bullshit switch, and the effluent was flowing same as it ever was. I find that a bit disturbing…

Working the stand at the convention, I unleashed the closet carnival barker that must have been hibernating deep inside me for the last decade or so, and I was practically standing on tables shouting “Come and get some free shit!”. I was propping up the stand like a bartender, lubricated with free beer, doing some of that soft sell nonsense.

Man, that made me feel dirty. Never again. Forgive me. Marketing is for scum. I hereby permanently recuse myself from the ranks of the ScumPeople.

First Impressions – In the spirit of fairness, I decided to give my colleagues a clean slate in Barcelona. No matter what I thought of them, I’d give them a fair shot to prove me wrong.

That was a colossal Waste Of Time. By the end of the week, I was having an internal conversation trying to decide whether Rainbow was a sleazy prick, or was he a scum-sucking fuck bag?

The Wednesday Night Party – More freeloaders eating plates of fried shit that you can only swallow with free beer. Also, the weird disconnect you get when the song on the sound system has nothing to do with the music videos playing on the large screens all over the place. It’s always disconcerting to see the video for We Are The World on mute, looking at Al Jarreau or Daryl Hall crooning earnestly into a microphone, when all you can hear is the thudding bass of Gwen Stefani on Hollaback Girl saying "This my shit" over and over and over again.

In a moment of serendipitous cosmic rebalancing, in the cab back to the hotel, the radio was playing John Denver. As I listened to him singing, I felt very, very homesick. “Take me home, country roads…”

Parting Shot – I did manage to get about five minutes to myself. One evening, I went to the roof of the hotel to take some photos. It was worth it. With all the money spent on so much unnecessary travel and food and software and bullshit, all the R&D, all the focus groups and extensive testing, NOTHING was as perfect and as beautiful as the one, free, pure thing I experienced that week. Sunset over Barcelona:



And we can finally say goodbye to all that. Thank Odin I’ve got that out of the way. Next time, something else. I promise. But before I go, lest we’ve all forgotten, it’s time for the Sucker Punch Christmas Advent Calendar Funk Nuggets! Back from the days when TV shows had the sound of screeching metal interspersed with the glorious madness of the wah-wah pedal, here is Laurie Johnson’s moment of funk immortality, The Professionals:

Too Much Coffee Man

This morning I drank three cups of strong, black coffee followed by a can of Red Bull.

Stupid. Very stupid.

Now I can hear my blood singing as it rockets around my veins, and I’m trying very hard not to grind my teeth. As a result, I’ll get back to that Barcelona stuff tomorrow or something. I can’t hold a thought down long enough to do anything useful today.

But I won’t leave you with nothing. Oh no. Here is the latest exciting instalment of the Sucker Punch Christmas Advent Calendar Funk Nuggets. This one is for my man B to wish him a Happy Birthday for tomorrow, because I know he loves this. Groove on, brother. Here are the Red Hot Chili Peppers with their cover of the Ohio Players’ Love Rollercoaster. Also, this record is the source of one of my favourite urban myths.

You give me that funny feeling in my tummy…