Face/Off

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!

The Cat on the Mantelpiece

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

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

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!

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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: