Greatest Clicks

To commemorate a decade of this blog, here’s a Top Ten rundown of the most clicked-upon posts Of..All...Time! I‘m loathe to call them “the most read”, because it may be more accurate to say these are things people clicked on, stared at for ten seconds and clicked away again in abject boredom. Who knows? Nevertheless, I’m doing it anyway. Here we go...

10. Black as Midnight on a Moonless Night

In which I rhapsodise about the Tao of Special Agent Dale Cooper and his eternally wise words on the finest beverage of all - a damn fine cup of black coffee.

9. Quid Pro Quo, Douchebags
I hate The Hangover with a vengeance. Even more than The Hangover hates you (and believe me, it does). So I decided to articulate my enmity here at some length. It warms the cockles of my blackened heart when people tell me how much they agree with me. Since I wrote this post, I found out that Mel Brooks is a big fan of The Hangover. This makes me ineffably sad.

8. Justice Is What I Seek - Avenging The Lone Ranger

My vigorous defence of Gore Verbinski’s unfairly-maligned future-classic The Lone Ranger, my favourite film of 2013.

7. Spring Break Forever, Bitches
My look at Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers refracted through the lenses of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and Dorothy Gale’s Technicolor trip to the merry ol’ land of Oz.

6. Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die

Some thoughts on one of my literary heroes, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, after sitting through the somewhat dissatisfying Alex Gibney documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. When the going gets weird, the weird turn to blogging.

5. Kentucky Fried Friedkin
Following a screening of his blistering southern fried noir Killer Joe at London's BFI Southbank in 2012, William Friedkin took to the stage for a Q&A with Mark Kermode. I captured the best bits here.

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

Once upon a time, The Walking Dead was only a hugely popular ongoing black-and-white comic series and I loved it. I still love it and this is where I wrote about why.

3. Peeking under the hood of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive
I am eternally conflicted about both Nicolas Winding Refn and his film Drive. For all the things I like about both, I am convinced he’s just a trickster plagiarist who pilfers bits from his favourite movies and then bolts them together into sleek, shiny Frankenstein monsters. After watching Drive, I tried to unpick Refn’s myriad influences and wrote about them here.

2. It Came From The Archives! - Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale

This one is super lucky! I first wrote about Battle Royale back in 2003 for a book. Then the book went out of print. So I took those words and put them here for the world to enjoy anew.

1. Living In A Box - Paul King's Bunny & The Bull
I can’t account for the popularity of this post on the little-seen and largely-forgotten 2009 film Bunny and the Bull. Either hardly anyone has ever written about it or (more likely), people are actually Googling for the 1953 Warner Brothers Looney Tunes short Bully for Bugs and are landing here instead...

Ten Years A Blogger

Ten years.

Ten years since this.

Ten years of my unfiltered witterings, bad jokes and thinking aloud in public.

That's fifty-three dog years.

I wanted to mark the occasion by saying Thank You. If you've ever read anything here and enjoyed it, or laughed, or rolled your eyes, or just landed here because you were Googling for filth and this is where it brought you, then Thank You.

Here's a roll-call of my favourite search terms that brought people to my little cul-de-sac of the web over the last decade:

"dreamed about wee wee"
"Murdock & B.A. kiss"
"the end of easy riders was bullshit"
"nonchalance bukkake"
"teenage girl facking"
"what is batty-watty"
"sucka loely big prick in public"
"dishwasher safe sex toys"
"Isaac Hayes sexual accomplishments"
"Goddamn Lapidus"
"georgette romero the dick sucker with champagne"
"In July peas grow there"
"jerking off in theatre"

I salute you all, frantic one-handed Googlers, and I'm sorry you didn't find what you wanted. You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find, you get what you need, baby.

Which applies to me too. Thank you.

And stick around, so we can see what happens next together.

Doubleplusungood

Yesterday, in the wake of the latest Budget announcements, Conservative Party Chairman Grant Shapps posted the following on Twitter:

There are lots of things I could say about that, but I know that you are already thinking the same thing, so I’ll skip over it to get to this next bit - an excerpt from George Orwell’s 1984. Emphasis in the following extract is mine. (And a h/t to Tom Muller for pointing me towards this):

“So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”

Michael Bay's The Birds

It was announced today that Michael Bay, frame-fucker extraordinaire, will be producing a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

I'll let that sink in for a minute.

Regular visitors to the blog will be familiar with my antipathy towards Mr. Bay's oeuvre. This afternoon, I just couldn't help myself. Which is why I went on a crazed tweet spree imagining Michael Bay as the auteur steering this remake. I have Storified those tweets for posterity. Nothing You Have Ever Witnessed Before Has Prepared You for Such Sheer Stabbing Shock!

...And remember, the next scream you hear could be your own!

Heart of the City

This morning, as I made my way across London, my mind wandered (as it is wont to do at this time of year) to thoughts on Valentine’s Day. And I was thinking about how deeply strange it is that we associate this day with romance. There are many stories about Saint Valentine that differ in a variety of ways, all of which may well be apocryphal, but they do all have a number of common strands. Bishop Valentine lived in Third Century Rome, and on February 14th (of an indeterminate year) he was incarcerated, tortured and finally beheaded. And we commemorate this with chocolate and flowers and gushy, hollow sentiments.

So when someone says “Be My Valentine”, they are essentially saying “I want to decapitate you”. We are a population of surreptitious skull-fuckers…

Whilst all of this was rattling around my head, I was battling the reliably unreliable London Underground and, for reasons far too dull to enumerate here, my journey forced me to be disgorged from the Tube at Charing Cross. As I brought myself back to street level, I found myself in Trafalgar Square, and I stopped in a little bit of breathless awe. I looked across at the entrance to the National Gallery, and I looked up at the granite slope of Nelson’s Column. I was surrounded on all sides by the four bronze lions, their surfaces slick and shiny with rain.

Amongst all the concrete and grey, over on the fourth plinth I could see Katharina Fritsch's Hahn/Cock, a splash of bright blue popping on a grey landscape. I turned my face to the sky to feel the light bite of the drizzle falling from the flat slate grey sky and I just thought that it was All So Damn Beautiful. All of it.

I've lived in London from the day that I was born, in University College Hospital. Can’t get much closer to the heart of the capital than that. That’s over four decades moving around and over and across and beneath this city. And I find it endlessly surprising and infuriating and delightful. It still shows me new sides of itself. It still finds way to please and stimulate me, even when I’m not in the mood. And I thought...Now, that is love.

Happy Valentine’s Day everybody.

Philip Seymour Hoffman 1967 - 2014

"I know this sounds silly and I know that I might sound ridiculous. Like this is the scene in the movie where the guy’s trying to get ahold of the long lost son, you know, but this is that scene. This is that scene. And I think they have those scenes in movies because they’re true, you know, because they really happen. And you gotta believe me. This is really happening. I mean, I can give you my number and you can go check with whoever you gotta check with and call me back, but  do not leave me hanging on this. All right? Please. Please. See, this is the scene in the movie where you help me out." -- Philip Seymour Hoffman as Phil Parma in Magnolia

The Full Clip #5

Struggling to focus on any one thing for any prolonged period of time this week. I keep flitting from task to task, which means I’ve just got a heap of half-finished bits and pieces in front of me. In an attempt to corral my skittish tendencies by forcing myself to actually finish One Damn Thing today, I’m putting on my crown as The King of Displacement Activity to bang out a blogpost, as I herald the entirely-unplanned return of The Full Clip, a collection of things I've tripped across on the internet when I really should be doing something else. Here we go...

At Buzzfeed (I know, shut up), Mark Slutsky talks about his blog Sad YouTube, which curates and preserves the stray shards of heartfelt and personal anecdotes buried in the slurry of comments under YouTube videos. We’re so used to the tedious accepted narrative that Reader Comments Are Sick And Wrong, and that’s demonstrably untrue. Sure, comment sections are the global water colour for loons of every stripe but, honestly, we’re all adults here. It’s easy enough to skate past the lunatic ramblings to actually dig deep for the good stuff. In Slutsky’s words: “It’s a repository of memories, stories, and dreams, an accidental oral history of American life over the last 50 years written by the site’s millions of visitors every day.” Read the rest in his article Sad YouTube: The Lost Treasures Of The Internet’s Greatest Cesspool.

Over at her blog, Sarah Werner eloquently skewers the likes of @HistoryInPics and similar twitter streams that churn out “vintage” photos, frequently with little or no context, attribution, citation or accuracy. “These accounts capitalize on a notion that history is nothing more than superficial glimpses of some vaguely defined time before ours, one that exists for us to look at and exclaim over and move on from without worrying about what it means and whether it happened.” It really is worth clicking through to read the rest of it: It’s History, Not A Viral Feed.

It only came to my attention the other day that jazz guitarist Ronny Jordan had recently died. I remember seeing him play a terrific set at Ronnie Scott’s back in the day, and fans of The West Wing undoubtedly cherish the scene where C.J. Cregg performed The Jackal. Of all his songs, that’s the one I return to the most often. Here’s an obituary at The Guardian and here, one more time, is The Jackal:

On a lighter note, check this out. In the 2015 of Back to the Future Part II, Marty McFly is briefly menaced by a lurching hologram that attacks him as part of an advertisement for Jaws 19, directed by Max Spielberg. In 2014, we still haven’t got any further than Jaws: The Revenge (the fourth film in the series and the one that killed the franchise stone dead). So we’re still fifteen Jaws sequels away from the world glimpsed in the Hill Valley of 2015. But, history can still change...A fan has issued a call-to-arms to cobble together another fifteen Jaws sequels before October 21st 2015. Read more about this glorious folly here, and good luck to him: The Jaws 19 Challenge.

One last thing: Peter Capaldi is The Doctor. David Tennant riffed on Peter Davison. Matt Smith travelled through time and space in the wake of Patrick Troughton. And Capaldi? I think we all know Who he likes the best…

Reverse the polarity! Here's hoping he can bust out some Venusian Aikido too.

They Call Him The Bandit

There’s no getting away from it. The New Year has begun, and I find that sometimes it helps to clarify my approach to the next twelve months with some sort of Statement of Intent. This year, I will be hewing closely to the words of the prophet Jerry Reed:

Yes, for 2014, I will be adopting the Bandit as my spirit animal. I've got a long way to go and a short time to get there. Just watch ol’ AKA run.

Keep your foot hard on the peddle...Son, never mind them brakes...

Listomania! My Favourite Films of 2013

I really wasn't intending to write another blog post this year. And I certainly wasn't planning on doing a "Best of the Year" list. But in my idle moments, my mind shuffled a list together without my explicit permission. Damn brains. They never do what they're told.

To exorcise this list from my unruly grey matter, I'm putting it here. For a more sprawling / detailed / shambolic look at My Movie Year in 2013, I refer you to this earlier blogpost.

In some sort of vague order, here's my Films of the Year list, and in at Number One with a silver bullet is:

The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski)

Comfortably sitting in second place is:

Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)

The rest of the top five are rounded out by, in no particular order:

Du zhan (Drug War) (Johnnie To)
No (Pablo Larraín)
La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty) (Paolo Sorrentino)

Bubbling under, pop pickers, the final five are:

La vie d'Adèle (Blue is the Warmest Colour) (Abdellatif Kechiche)
Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore)
Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino)
The Kings of Summer (Jordan Vogt-Roberts)
The Paperboy (Lee Daniels)

And now I really am going to get lost for the last few dying days of 2013. See you next year.

Punching Out

That's it! I am now officially off-the-clock for the rest of 2013, so I'm winding things up here on the blog for the year.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my friends and readers. See you on the other side.