JARRING INTERRUPTION ONE: GET FUCKED FILM FESTIVAL

Being thrown in the back of a van and beaten with yeast before getting shipped to a nearby asbestos warehouse didn’t make for the best day of Louis Fitzsimmon’s life, but he enjoyed it nonetheless. His captors were well-meaning and friendly, violently nationalist Sarkozy supporters who had been locked in a three man-coffin for five years, unaware that their man had already won and retained Presidency of the beloved motherland. Cheerfully beaten around the face and lips when he related this information, Louis was subsequently tied to a chair for eight hours and forced to watch footage of Qwop Qwop’s disastrous bid for the 1984 Commonwealth 100 metres record, before a door slammed stage right to wake him from his stupor. They had left.

Shuffling his half-man-half-cheap-wood-substitute frame over to the window, he caught the van coughing and tipping its way around the corner and back to France, a trail of confetti and grenade rounds in its wake. Tear stained eyes found a small table in the corner of the room. A table stuffed with eight pills, four packets of mushrooms, three large bags of sticky, gummed up weed and a forklift truck full of cheap Romanian Vodka. The French knew how to say sorry.

There’s always a catch. A note scribbled in hasty crayon left Louis with his predicament; two movies, no time, a butler’s dozen of barbiturates. His synapses clogged with cheap drugs and seafood, the poor lab-lad had no choice but to bow to the demands of French Terrorism. Lurching violently around the room to the antique VHS player, he picked the film with the tits.

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS

dMYD DVD

Starring The Carrie Nations

THIS IS MY HAPPENING AND IT FREAKS ME OUT

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Delorean delivery! What’s the dial? 2662 and the sun’s gone out, but Raptor Jesus, look what I’ve found! How’s that? What’s what? In the hand dummy, the colour, the shape! Never? Never! Well I never, how I wonder, time for a show! Dig these sounds, you can see the notes on the back of that guy’s neck… but only after one. Then the neon flares up and you can’t see the floor for bubbles. Sweet talking, Candy Man! But… what are they doing? Why is it so… I feel so strange… Whoah! Hold up there Play Doll, the party’s only just started! Take three of these and call me in six, but watch out for the actors on the banister… they haven’t got any idea… I went into that room. I went into that room in the hall. And? They’re drinking, and smoking, and they don’t have any clothes on and… and one of them had a cape! Z-Man! Women and children first, the lifeboats have no linen and the rhinestones are falling over the bough… But holy hell little darlin’ you want a trip you get with Z-Man’s crew! I’m telling you he’s the only cat in all of this downtown that knows what they know and a whole lot of what they don’t! Hang cool teddy bear, eyes to the screen. It’ll all be over soon but you still wanna go back. Find it! Oh baby now, FIND IT! Find what? Jeez, quit fooling around and swing from that branch, I can hear them from way on over here. Walls of light and the keys to the wild frontier! Dames! Kittens! A man in the box on the edge of the world and he knows the way to find you, he’s taking you with him baby and all you’ve gotta do is follow it… You’ve gotta follow the sweet swingin’ beat of The Kelly Affair!

Stifling a cry he began weeping with joy. Realising the contradiction in terms for what it really was, his remaining hair fell out and ran to the door, pleading to escape the rolling hills of papyrus and gravity that his existence had become. Arch blades of childhood wonder rooted him to the spot, his drool spooling around the marbled floor of the warehouse in an ever circling spiral of film knowledge and criticism. A microphone pressed to his lips on the other side of the wall. He could see them! He could see himself talking!

‘Mr Fitzsimmons, your thoughts on the motion picture?’

‘It’s the 1960s.’

‘Yes, yes it is. Have some more MDMA.’

As he began to wear his own sense of discomfort, he knew something was up. There was a pit of bulls and something was stuck behind a garden, just out of reach…

Screaming silently as he fell down the rapids, it occurred to him that, really, only one man could help him now. He spat out his future and popped in the second video.

THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN

dMYD DVD

Starring Lobotomy Stark

Trailer

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Iron Man is the best superhero ever. Carefree, cocksure, powered by money, he’s a shrapnel-blasted war-cripple who snaps his frown sideways-round by building a flying life-support system with lasers and rockets and everything cool from the middle of an eight-year old’s mind. He’s even an alcoholic, with all the slurring, vomit and misplaced civilian casualties that this entails. He flies, he smiles, his armour’s a golden funtimes-magnet.All of which makes it incredible that Marvel Animation Studios managed to fuck this up so incredibly. What do you like best about Iron Man? Is it Iron Man? Would you like to see Iron Man in a film about Iron Man? Is Iron Man important to you in your definition of Iron Man? Where is he? WHERE IS IRON MAN?He’s about an hour in for around five minutes. He’s poorly animated, badly voiced, strangely characterised and completely uninvolving. His own father hates him, and wants him dead. He loves ancient Chinese temples. He’s an approximation of what blind people with no hands think is 3D. Admittedly Marvel Animated features fall somewhere between Cruel Intentions 3 and John Cena movies in terms of quality, but writing a parallel universe fan-fiction animated by bears a year before Robert Downey Jr. rips up the silver is a recipe for avoidance from all but the most desperate, death pleading, Stella-drenched film babblers. If you remember the sixties you should be dead, but if you’ve read any reprints of the blast-coloured births of these modern idols you’ll notice a jumping, jiving, fizz-bombing run up to fun, two men in a beige room main-lining pop-art genius and doing it for a day-job. They made Iron Man. These guys ripped him up and painted him grey. A pile, then. Walk on eight year olds, follow Uncle Robbie to the back of his van. Ignore the smoke.

VANS? NO, no more vans, I can’t see for the smoke and the light… what’s the time? Why isn’t he Iron Man yet?

Concrete. He was back. If anything could beat drugs it was the crushing disappointment of seeing your favourite capitalist raped and used by a cheap animation company to make money. It was what the shareholders wanted. Everyone approved. The best part of the movie was the expectation that it was going to be good. Biting off his shackles and crawling to the door he decided to go back to work, the vain hope of someday building his own high-intensity Swiss army suit the only thing keeping him from dashing his head against the rocks. The drugs were crawling slowly out of his tear ducts and forming into a purple mass on the floor as he groped blindly for the catch that would save his life.

As the warehouse burned he stepped dizzily out into the light of the free world. The purple creature behind him reared up and followed him down the road, grabbing idly at his testicles.