dMYD DVD
Starring Your Own Subconscious Fears and Desires
Trailer
M
You have no idea who you are. You’ve got no idea why you’re doing what you’re doing, when you’re doing it. Rickety Evil Neighbour David Lynch knows, but luckily he’s here to tell you in the most oblique way possible, with a punctured lung and an aged woman screaming blindly in the face of chicken. A dripping psychoactive plume of black trapped in a DVD, the disc festers away in a hive of apprehension and legend, daring you to watch it and get dark ‘n’ freaky, thirty years of reputation piled on top of it to stop the oddity running off. But it doesn’t need wives’ tales or write ups. It’s good. It’s very good. Not a film in any relatable sense, it really is a genuine experience, and like anything that doesn’t dump everything at you on a plate its worth depends on what you put into it. It’s your choice: a sofa-centered laugh riot with a bucket of marshmallows or a running jump into the frightening pits of your own soul, the whole thing depends on how much you’re willing to give to Lynch’s sparse canvases of image and metallic noise, like pressing your face against a Rothko painting in the dark, with a CD player full of rust. Sublimely ridiculous and ridiculously sublime at the same time, it defies genre, description and words, demanding to be seen or ignored depending on how far you’re willing to go. Just don’t touch the Lady in the Radiator.
Monday 26 April 2010
THE JONESES
dMYD
Starring David Duchovny and Demi Moore
Trailer
M
The young guy in the eighties business movie with the chequered tie and huge framed glasses has nothing left for the meeting with the big-wigs and he sweats and he mumbles as he stands to the head of the table all eyes on him it’s time to get fired and he looks about and he clears his throat he’s got nothing he’s got nothing for this fiscal quarter he’ll be eaten by the wolves think of something think of something now now NOW: ‘I uh… uh…I… STEALTH MARKETING.’ He stares. He’s silent. The older board members sit back, light cigarettes, smile. He’s laughed out of the room. He jumps.
Of course it’s ridiculous. Dead-eyed scumbags and struggling students acting around you, all the time, faking their lives and yours for the ability to sell three more cans of Cloven Hoof scented body spray? It’s the stupidest idea since David Cameron. It’s evil, rotting and warping the very reality around you into a commercial fug of unknowingness; it’s the end of Dollhouse where the corporate world bursts over the earth with fake humans and fake personalities, no one knowing who to trust, but this time… it’s to sell you something. Again. Always to sell you something. The most ridiculous part is that ‘Stealth Marketing’ is completely real, and it’s started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercover_marketing
The Joneses is probably the first mainstream movie to address this detestable headfuck, but yesterdays’ paranoid yet prescient sci-fi toss is this afternoon’s limping, predictathon romantic comedy; it’s not a great film. A hammer-powered smackdown between frightening satire and Hollywood bollocks, presumably the backers of the film were too terrified of losing future funding to allow a complete damning of product-world, preferring instead to slap a patronizing, humanizing ending onto a previous hour of refreshingly warped family values. The characters bizarrely react to each other like a real household, making it pleasantly odd to watch as daughter bed-hops with dad and mum sends the kids to their rooms for not making enough sales, though this weirdery rarely strays into actual entertainment; as a comedy it’s as hilarious as tetanus. The whole thing works as a simplistic reveal of how commercialism is slapping it’s way into our basest moral make-up, but to learn up on the creeping phenomenon its probably better to actually read about it or something before the smiling corporations stick an extension cord into your neck to pump adverts for meat straight into your purchasing cells. Nice try against the inevitable wave of evil though, and Duchovny does his best with a mouthful of exposition. It’s almost a shame that a movie built on advertising has the most boring title in the history of film; no one’s going to see it, and it’ll be too late. Now quit your moaning and saddle up; we’re all going to Burger King, to cheat on a cow or something. What?
Starring David Duchovny and Demi Moore
Trailer
M
The young guy in the eighties business movie with the chequered tie and huge framed glasses has nothing left for the meeting with the big-wigs and he sweats and he mumbles as he stands to the head of the table all eyes on him it’s time to get fired and he looks about and he clears his throat he’s got nothing he’s got nothing for this fiscal quarter he’ll be eaten by the wolves think of something think of something now now NOW: ‘I uh… uh…I… STEALTH MARKETING.’ He stares. He’s silent. The older board members sit back, light cigarettes, smile. He’s laughed out of the room. He jumps.
Of course it’s ridiculous. Dead-eyed scumbags and struggling students acting around you, all the time, faking their lives and yours for the ability to sell three more cans of Cloven Hoof scented body spray? It’s the stupidest idea since David Cameron. It’s evil, rotting and warping the very reality around you into a commercial fug of unknowingness; it’s the end of Dollhouse where the corporate world bursts over the earth with fake humans and fake personalities, no one knowing who to trust, but this time… it’s to sell you something. Again. Always to sell you something. The most ridiculous part is that ‘Stealth Marketing’ is completely real, and it’s started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercover_marketing
The Joneses is probably the first mainstream movie to address this detestable headfuck, but yesterdays’ paranoid yet prescient sci-fi toss is this afternoon’s limping, predictathon romantic comedy; it’s not a great film. A hammer-powered smackdown between frightening satire and Hollywood bollocks, presumably the backers of the film were too terrified of losing future funding to allow a complete damning of product-world, preferring instead to slap a patronizing, humanizing ending onto a previous hour of refreshingly warped family values. The characters bizarrely react to each other like a real household, making it pleasantly odd to watch as daughter bed-hops with dad and mum sends the kids to their rooms for not making enough sales, though this weirdery rarely strays into actual entertainment; as a comedy it’s as hilarious as tetanus. The whole thing works as a simplistic reveal of how commercialism is slapping it’s way into our basest moral make-up, but to learn up on the creeping phenomenon its probably better to actually read about it or something before the smiling corporations stick an extension cord into your neck to pump adverts for meat straight into your purchasing cells. Nice try against the inevitable wave of evil though, and Duchovny does his best with a mouthful of exposition. It’s almost a shame that a movie built on advertising has the most boring title in the history of film; no one’s going to see it, and it’ll be too late. Now quit your moaning and saddle up; we’re all going to Burger King, to cheat on a cow or something. What?
Thursday 15 April 2010
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN
dMYD DVD
Starring Swedish Actors You’ve Never Heard Of
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZJUgsZ56vQ
Y
Essentially Twilight from a parallel reality where filmmakers don’t hate you, this charm-oozing paint-poem of a movie is casually designed to probe the stranger questions of human connection through an inhuman, blood-drenched lens. The only half decent vampire revision since Joss Whedon was fictional king, here the overused haemoglobin enthusiasts are smacked down into a brutally realistic evocation of empty small town Europe in the late 70s, swathes of white and grey illustrating the drab nothingness that little Oskar has to trudge through on his way to a big, pointless school. However, the startling crimson injection of its dentally-challenged heroine changes the whole make-up of the piece, chucking questions of morality, love and monstrosity around like other horror films flick entrails. Child acting has always been a mine-field of am-dram mumble-a-thons battling screaming balloons of Daddy’s money, so it’s refreshing to discover that here it’s the kids who should quickly write up a new contract to never work with idiots or adults, deftly combining silent restraint with nanoseconds of heartfelt glances and reactions. The two leads almost single-handedly deliver a subtle treatise on the beauty and horror of naivety, aided and abetted by quiet support and a delicate, reverent script, never obvious but always sincere. Daringly ambiguous, touching and macabre, it also has the benefit of feeling very little like anything that’s come before, barring a psychotic breakdown on a school trip to Helsinki. In love. Run fast to the internet and watch it now before the inevitable Americana remake, an infinitely more soul-crushing prospect; nothing alive in the next year will be more terrifying than Miley and Billy Ray gothing up in order to teach us all how to be a little more ‘human’. Gee. And Shucks.
Starring Swedish Actors You’ve Never Heard Of
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZJUgsZ56vQ
Y
Essentially Twilight from a parallel reality where filmmakers don’t hate you, this charm-oozing paint-poem of a movie is casually designed to probe the stranger questions of human connection through an inhuman, blood-drenched lens. The only half decent vampire revision since Joss Whedon was fictional king, here the overused haemoglobin enthusiasts are smacked down into a brutally realistic evocation of empty small town Europe in the late 70s, swathes of white and grey illustrating the drab nothingness that little Oskar has to trudge through on his way to a big, pointless school. However, the startling crimson injection of its dentally-challenged heroine changes the whole make-up of the piece, chucking questions of morality, love and monstrosity around like other horror films flick entrails. Child acting has always been a mine-field of am-dram mumble-a-thons battling screaming balloons of Daddy’s money, so it’s refreshing to discover that here it’s the kids who should quickly write up a new contract to never work with idiots or adults, deftly combining silent restraint with nanoseconds of heartfelt glances and reactions. The two leads almost single-handedly deliver a subtle treatise on the beauty and horror of naivety, aided and abetted by quiet support and a delicate, reverent script, never obvious but always sincere. Daringly ambiguous, touching and macabre, it also has the benefit of feeling very little like anything that’s come before, barring a psychotic breakdown on a school trip to Helsinki. In love. Run fast to the internet and watch it now before the inevitable Americana remake, an infinitely more soul-crushing prospect; nothing alive in the next year will be more terrifying than Miley and Billy Ray gothing up in order to teach us all how to be a little more ‘human’. Gee. And Shucks.
CEMETERY JUNCTION
dMYD
Starring Ricky Gervais
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYDeHIszUqA
d
Don’t mess with science. Science did everything first, science knows why you cry, and science is going to stop the inevitable black-hole-end-of-all-things with a Pan-Dimensional Hadron Collider and a Bucket of Paper Clips. Science’s big discovery this weekend is the long-debated half-life of talent: its ten years. Ten years from being a trailblazing cement-balled idea-fountain to facing a dull grey slide into rehashing the past-glories of the eighty-six million generations before you and dying, cold and alone, buried in a pit of money. Paul McCartney. John Lydon. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. The Office is brilliant: Cemetery Junction is the stuff they used to laugh at whilst thinking up David Brent in Wetherspoons, huffing ingenuity and running on Rustlers and cheap lager. But that was ten years ago. You can see what they’re doing; it’s a youth movie, made by grown ups. It’s an escape fantasy delivered in a style that was haemoragingly boring and out of date even in the film’s heavy handed 70s setting. It makes you want to set fire to your premier seat, just to watch the Minstrels popping about as you burn. The actors aren’t at fault here; this is all Gervais and Merchant’s mess, a cliché decathlon with 6th form dialogue and characters devised on the back of miniature cereal packets. Pity the first-timers caught up in it, even the one whose acting style consists of staring at a wall for eight years, causing the hands of your watch to move backwards as boredom becomes your new stepdad. Pity Ralph Fiennes even more, forced to do his best with a villain so pantomime he might as well wear a cape and sit at the end of a pier downing Lambrini. This probably isn’t the end for the former GENUINELY FUNNY MEN but it does represent a big old spit in the eye for any integrity they used to carry around as the result of writing one of the best sitcoms ever. Occasional flashes of the old dialogue slither through, but overall it’s worth waiting and praying for the other offerings from The Big British School of Comedy this year: Pop-Cultural Cardinal Edgar Wright’s Proto-Seminal ‘A RENZOKUKEN TO THE FACE OF THE ENTIRE FILM INDUSTRY, THE MOVIE’(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgOLmjhxVVU) and Chris ‘Christ’s Fat Cock’ Morris’ ‘Jihadi Dad’s Army, Four Lions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGk2TojOd-4) Both will be ninety eight times better than this. And death by Black Hole.
Starring Ricky Gervais
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYDeHIszUqA
d
Don’t mess with science. Science did everything first, science knows why you cry, and science is going to stop the inevitable black-hole-end-of-all-things with a Pan-Dimensional Hadron Collider and a Bucket of Paper Clips. Science’s big discovery this weekend is the long-debated half-life of talent: its ten years. Ten years from being a trailblazing cement-balled idea-fountain to facing a dull grey slide into rehashing the past-glories of the eighty-six million generations before you and dying, cold and alone, buried in a pit of money. Paul McCartney. John Lydon. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. The Office is brilliant: Cemetery Junction is the stuff they used to laugh at whilst thinking up David Brent in Wetherspoons, huffing ingenuity and running on Rustlers and cheap lager. But that was ten years ago. You can see what they’re doing; it’s a youth movie, made by grown ups. It’s an escape fantasy delivered in a style that was haemoragingly boring and out of date even in the film’s heavy handed 70s setting. It makes you want to set fire to your premier seat, just to watch the Minstrels popping about as you burn. The actors aren’t at fault here; this is all Gervais and Merchant’s mess, a cliché decathlon with 6th form dialogue and characters devised on the back of miniature cereal packets. Pity the first-timers caught up in it, even the one whose acting style consists of staring at a wall for eight years, causing the hands of your watch to move backwards as boredom becomes your new stepdad. Pity Ralph Fiennes even more, forced to do his best with a villain so pantomime he might as well wear a cape and sit at the end of a pier downing Lambrini. This probably isn’t the end for the former GENUINELY FUNNY MEN but it does represent a big old spit in the eye for any integrity they used to carry around as the result of writing one of the best sitcoms ever. Occasional flashes of the old dialogue slither through, but overall it’s worth waiting and praying for the other offerings from The Big British School of Comedy this year: Pop-Cultural Cardinal Edgar Wright’s Proto-Seminal ‘A RENZOKUKEN TO THE FACE OF THE ENTIRE FILM INDUSTRY, THE MOVIE’(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgOLmjhxVVU) and Chris ‘Christ’s Fat Cock’ Morris’ ‘Jihadi Dad’s Army, Four Lions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGk2TojOd-4) Both will be ninety eight times better than this. And death by Black Hole.
Friday 9 April 2010
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG THE MOVIE
dMYD DVD
Starring the mysterious Hyper Metal Sonic
d
If one in every hundred novels holds a great film, then THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A GOOD MOVIE BASED ON A VIDEOGAME. Visceral thrills for people too scared to leave the house, button-cracking-games at their best jam interactivity at your palms and retinas, screeching into your ears about Metroids, Jinjos and other pixellated oddities that sound like a list of complaints at an STD clinic. That feeling of control? It’s not there in a film. It’s gone. You can rant about it for eight hundred years afterwards on message-boards and worthless blog-matter, but it’s not yours, you didn’t make it, you can’t change it. Which is a shame for Sonic the Hedgehog The Movie, because it really is a bucket of rubbish. Animated by half a scarecrow with crayons for fingers and a bag of piss for a brain, the whole endeavour is really only worth it for the parade of unwieldy accents that the desperate, content-ignorant hacks bring to the script, Sonic in particular sounding like a schoolgirl with no lungs attempting to play Blanche DuBois. For normal people it’s perplexing, but at least fans will be happy – all your beloved Sonic characters are present, including Princess Sara, someone called the ‘President’ and pre-school favourite ‘Drooling, Cursing, Mentally-Deficient Owl’. The plot makes no sense whatsoever, riffing on Terminator, cross-dressing and childhood nightmares from playing the Mega Drive for eighteen hours, whilst the soundtrack is awful enough to make you crave death by contortion. Disjointed, crack-dubbed nonsense then, but unfortunately not good enough to be vaguely entertaining. Excellent title though, great job 1996.
Starring the mysterious Hyper Metal Sonic
d
If one in every hundred novels holds a great film, then THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A GOOD MOVIE BASED ON A VIDEOGAME. Visceral thrills for people too scared to leave the house, button-cracking-games at their best jam interactivity at your palms and retinas, screeching into your ears about Metroids, Jinjos and other pixellated oddities that sound like a list of complaints at an STD clinic. That feeling of control? It’s not there in a film. It’s gone. You can rant about it for eight hundred years afterwards on message-boards and worthless blog-matter, but it’s not yours, you didn’t make it, you can’t change it. Which is a shame for Sonic the Hedgehog The Movie, because it really is a bucket of rubbish. Animated by half a scarecrow with crayons for fingers and a bag of piss for a brain, the whole endeavour is really only worth it for the parade of unwieldy accents that the desperate, content-ignorant hacks bring to the script, Sonic in particular sounding like a schoolgirl with no lungs attempting to play Blanche DuBois. For normal people it’s perplexing, but at least fans will be happy – all your beloved Sonic characters are present, including Princess Sara, someone called the ‘President’ and pre-school favourite ‘Drooling, Cursing, Mentally-Deficient Owl’. The plot makes no sense whatsoever, riffing on Terminator, cross-dressing and childhood nightmares from playing the Mega Drive for eighteen hours, whilst the soundtrack is awful enough to make you crave death by contortion. Disjointed, crack-dubbed nonsense then, but unfortunately not good enough to be vaguely entertaining. Excellent title though, great job 1996.
KICK ASS
dMYD
Starring Aaron Johnson
Y
Does exactly what it says on the tin. But not exactly. Summer 2008 saw two-hour misery spectacular The Dark Knight eating up time and wallets with dour abandon, so naturally along came beady eyes, grasping hands and a gnawing, stumbling critical acceptance of the superhero movie, in turn freeing filmmakers from the shackles of jumping through hoops of pure origin in order to twist the formula and take the piss. Hence Kick Ass. But again, not exactly. From the first shuddering radio crackles of men in the sky to the final geek-jump circle-jerk Joker quote it’s clear that Kick Ass is a film designed not to rip sheets off the spandex set but rather to gently poke at them with a stick of love, homaging and toadying in equal measure. Doing this with a free platter of bone-shattering violence and glaring primary colours is a nice touch, but ultimately the whole thing’s not quite as shocking and revolutionary as it thinks it is; the ‘real life superhero’ aspect gets thrown out the penthouse window when jetpacks, gangsters and katana wielding-tartan-skirted cartoon characters are chucked in, creating a film that has no idea what it is or what’s going on, but is going to have some fun trying to work it out. The whole thing drags a bit by the end, some of the acting is pantomime-hilarity and the script occasionally falls down a manhole and bleeds, but these are minor cynical window-dressing to what is essentially an eleven year old girl getting kicked in the face by a grown man. Its fun, isn’t it? Yes it is. Go see it, have fun. Here’s the best part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgOLmjhxVVU
Starring Aaron Johnson
Y
Does exactly what it says on the tin. But not exactly. Summer 2008 saw two-hour misery spectacular The Dark Knight eating up time and wallets with dour abandon, so naturally along came beady eyes, grasping hands and a gnawing, stumbling critical acceptance of the superhero movie, in turn freeing filmmakers from the shackles of jumping through hoops of pure origin in order to twist the formula and take the piss. Hence Kick Ass. But again, not exactly. From the first shuddering radio crackles of men in the sky to the final geek-jump circle-jerk Joker quote it’s clear that Kick Ass is a film designed not to rip sheets off the spandex set but rather to gently poke at them with a stick of love, homaging and toadying in equal measure. Doing this with a free platter of bone-shattering violence and glaring primary colours is a nice touch, but ultimately the whole thing’s not quite as shocking and revolutionary as it thinks it is; the ‘real life superhero’ aspect gets thrown out the penthouse window when jetpacks, gangsters and katana wielding-tartan-skirted cartoon characters are chucked in, creating a film that has no idea what it is or what’s going on, but is going to have some fun trying to work it out. The whole thing drags a bit by the end, some of the acting is pantomime-hilarity and the script occasionally falls down a manhole and bleeds, but these are minor cynical window-dressing to what is essentially an eleven year old girl getting kicked in the face by a grown man. Its fun, isn’t it? Yes it is. Go see it, have fun. Here’s the best part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgOLmjhxVVU
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