Metal Fatigue

(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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."