dMYD
Starring Michael Cera
D
Anytime spent reading can be spent watching the film again.
Friday, 19 November 2010
Saturday, 22 May 2010
THE MALTESE FALCON
dMYD DVD
Starring Humphrey Bogart
M
A-list Pulp fiction, a trail-blazing noir masterpiece wedged full of treacherous dames, chain-smoking Bogart and snivelling weasels, all lit with the same acrid glare of slumbag San Francisco 1941. Peter Lorre and Bogie dry-run for Casablanca, waterfall dialogue and slap happy physicality ratcheting them up to the peak of the pre-war pile, whilst Hammet’s schizoid plot writhes and twists like a sentient rope. It’s brilliant. You won’t watch it.You’ve seen a Bourne film in the past couple of months. It’s quick. Compared to The Maltese Falcon it’s like having a seizure in a combusting fireworks factory. All the masterful techniques at the birth of an art form can’t compete with the attention span of a modern man with phone in pocket, headphone in one ear and an eye on the door, and they shouldn’t have to. Something else will come along in a few weeks to fuck your face, so don’t worry about it. But where does that leave The Maltese Falcon? Better than 90% of the films released this month but tough to sit through unless you’re dead or a ponce, the kill-off with kindness seems to be to jack it up with credo and seal it off as art. A relic of bygone time with atmospheric effects that James Cameron can’t even get invited to (blurring the lens, the crackle of sound, jumping on lines), the piece can stand as a monolith of Spielberg-stamped-out simplicity, a beautiful, slow dive into patience and time. Plus, in fifty thousand years this is what the archaeologists will think the real-life forties looked like, when pulp titans roamed the earth. Then they’ll watch Bourne 8065 in 7.2 nanoseconds and get back to work, cultural time-code stamped for the day. Good film.
PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME
dMYD
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal
d
Ticktockticktockticktockticktock. Hollywood’s reaching a critical mass and the bullet train can’t be stopped, movies flying out the sides and cracking unsuspecting farm workers in the wallet with the all the force of a bad idea. Gyllenhaal’s second time-travel escapade sees all the ingenuity and heart that made Pirates of the Caribbean become formula; English actors painted brown, offbeat Yank hearthrobber pulling an accent for the lead, throw in a guy from Coupling and set it in ye olde computer-generated world: Bam! No. For all its plot holes the biggest absence here is the size of Saturn: there’s no Johnny Depp. It’s Pirates with Will and Elizabeth as the leads, and every bit as jump-out-of-a-harrier death wish inducing as that sounds. However, the problems go far deeper than a simple case of cut and paste money-running; a dearth of quality dialogue and direction seems to be the blockbuster’s leprosy at the moment, but big-time
Monday, 17 May 2010
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
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
D
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.’
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.
dMYD DVD
Starring Lobotomy Stark
d
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
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.
Sunday, 16 May 2010
DOWN BY LAW
dMYD DVD
Starring Tom Waits
Trailer
M
Children by their millions scream all morning across the world – it’s time for school, it’s time to learn and it’s time to get punched in the face. The comparable adult experience is the mass hysteria that grips an average crowd at V Festival or that Hyde Park-O2-Mediocrity-Wireless-Backslap-Gathering-Thing. These people aren’t screaming for The Script, or Scouting For Girls. That’s medically impossible. No, en masse they’re pleading, screeching, bleeding from their mouths because they’ve been told that they have to watch an art-school film, on pain of being tarred with the idiot brush. Time to get cool.
Down By Law is art. It’s not entertainment. But, wait, no, of course it is, if you’re entertained by black and white, boredom, tracking shots and interminable stretches of silence, like a wistful psychotic reality-bendingly trapped in a 1940s photograph. Don’t go expecting to be mildly diverted even if you’re a fan of Rain Dogs; though the piece does stand as a Monotone Waits Festival dedicated to his gravelnessess’ fearsome acting prowess, it has none of the dive-bar charm of the man’s music or tightly drawn characters, preferring instead to cruise along blasting vagueness from a rusty grey cannon, never committing to a style or a meaning. It’s a Jim Jarmusch film, so you get some bang for your stolen torrent from a cornucopia of themes, hastily sketched out in whatever genre the director pinned his tail on that day. It’s a film about men, freedom, isolation, Tom Waits, the breakdown of language, brotherhood, mime, time, crime, nature, lust, emptiness, DJs, relationships, Italians, music, meaninglessness, misunderstanding, law, Tom Waits, slapstick, footwear, inanity, intolerance, barriers, boredom, fighting, loss, coffee, choices, penance and Tom Waits. If you’re interested in skimming lightly over all of these at the same time then Down By Law is the best experimental work in the medium of celluloid ever made. If you only want one or two then go watch Toy Story, it’s a laugh riot and the third one’s coming soon YIPPEE, WHOO, COOL!
Starring Tom Waits
Trailer
M
Children by their millions scream all morning across the world – it’s time for school, it’s time to learn and it’s time to get punched in the face. The comparable adult experience is the mass hysteria that grips an average crowd at V Festival or that Hyde Park-O2-Mediocrity-Wireless-Backslap-Gathering-Thing. These people aren’t screaming for The Script, or Scouting For Girls. That’s medically impossible. No, en masse they’re pleading, screeching, bleeding from their mouths because they’ve been told that they have to watch an art-school film, on pain of being tarred with the idiot brush. Time to get cool.
Down By Law is art. It’s not entertainment. But, wait, no, of course it is, if you’re entertained by black and white, boredom, tracking shots and interminable stretches of silence, like a wistful psychotic reality-bendingly trapped in a 1940s photograph. Don’t go expecting to be mildly diverted even if you’re a fan of Rain Dogs; though the piece does stand as a Monotone Waits Festival dedicated to his gravelnessess’ fearsome acting prowess, it has none of the dive-bar charm of the man’s music or tightly drawn characters, preferring instead to cruise along blasting vagueness from a rusty grey cannon, never committing to a style or a meaning. It’s a Jim Jarmusch film, so you get some bang for your stolen torrent from a cornucopia of themes, hastily sketched out in whatever genre the director pinned his tail on that day. It’s a film about men, freedom, isolation, Tom Waits, the breakdown of language, brotherhood, mime, time, crime, nature, lust, emptiness, DJs, relationships, Italians, music, meaninglessness, misunderstanding, law, Tom Waits, slapstick, footwear, inanity, intolerance, barriers, boredom, fighting, loss, coffee, choices, penance and Tom Waits. If you’re interested in skimming lightly over all of these at the same time then Down By Law is the best experimental work in the medium of celluloid ever made. If you only want one or two then go watch Toy Story, it’s a laugh riot and the third one’s coming soon YIPPEE, WHOO, COOL!
HOT TUB TIME MACHINE
dMYD
Starring John Cusack
Trailer
d
You don’t need a time machine, you’ve got DVDs. Watch these again instead, the evergreen ‘80s fantasy-fuelled hilarity houses that this abom-a-thon wishes it could touch:
1) BACK TO THE FUTURE
Still the King. Such a fine slice of flux that every copy has created its own
time loop paradox, making it impossible get bored of even if you’ve seen it
on eighty-six separate bank holidays. Crispin Glover’s calling card and simultaneous disappearing act.
2) GHOSTBUSTERS
Saturday Night Live vs. Satan, and amazingly twenty-eight times better than that
sounds. Considering it already sounds like Dan Ackroyd dreaming up an eighty-foot Staypuff Marshmallow man to suffocate the entirety of New York with his
creamy goodness, the film still stands as a greater achievement than the Berlin Wall falling over. Bill Murray’s finest hour.
3) INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM
The worst one, and still more fun than a bucket full of neon-robot fun-dispensers.
Indy gets racist, beats up a Marwell’s worth of wildlife and smacks child-labour
laws back to the reign of Victoria, mostly with his shirt off. Plus thanks to the
wonders of time travel, that fourth one with the monkeys NEVER EXISTED.
4) GROUNDHOG DAY
The unbearable hell of eternity, made wonderful by cake, love and punching
nerds. Check the DVD extras for the scene where he spends twelve years
hanging Ned from a meat hook by his testicles and screaming Gilbert and
Sullivan into his chimp-masked face. Bill Murray’s finest hour.
5) BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE
WYLD STALLYNS!
The funniest thing about Hot Tub Time Machine is the unbearable likelihood that the Steve Parker lookalike will become a big star, despite being a lump of flesh ripped from Jack Black’s forearm and left to grow in a petri-dish full of liquid failure. Run away from it, run, the water burns the skin.
Starring John Cusack
Trailer
d
You don’t need a time machine, you’ve got DVDs. Watch these again instead, the evergreen ‘80s fantasy-fuelled hilarity houses that this abom-a-thon wishes it could touch:
1) BACK TO THE FUTURE
Still the King. Such a fine slice of flux that every copy has created its own
time loop paradox, making it impossible get bored of even if you’ve seen it
on eighty-six separate bank holidays. Crispin Glover’s calling card and simultaneous disappearing act.
2) GHOSTBUSTERS
Saturday Night Live vs. Satan, and amazingly twenty-eight times better than that
sounds. Considering it already sounds like Dan Ackroyd dreaming up an eighty-foot Staypuff Marshmallow man to suffocate the entirety of New York with his
creamy goodness, the film still stands as a greater achievement than the Berlin Wall falling over. Bill Murray’s finest hour.
3) INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM
The worst one, and still more fun than a bucket full of neon-robot fun-dispensers.
Indy gets racist, beats up a Marwell’s worth of wildlife and smacks child-labour
laws back to the reign of Victoria, mostly with his shirt off. Plus thanks to the
wonders of time travel, that fourth one with the monkeys NEVER EXISTED.
4) GROUNDHOG DAY
The unbearable hell of eternity, made wonderful by cake, love and punching
nerds. Check the DVD extras for the scene where he spends twelve years
hanging Ned from a meat hook by his testicles and screaming Gilbert and
Sullivan into his chimp-masked face. Bill Murray’s finest hour.
5) BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE
WYLD STALLYNS!
The funniest thing about Hot Tub Time Machine is the unbearable likelihood that the Steve Parker lookalike will become a big star, despite being a lump of flesh ripped from Jack Black’s forearm and left to grow in a petri-dish full of liquid failure. Run away from it, run, the water burns the skin.
Monday, 10 May 2010
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
dMYD DVD
Starring The Greatest Threat To Existence That Humanity Has Ever Faced
Trailer
Y
Tiresias with Powerpoint, a prophet from Capitol Mount come to spread the doom-word amongst a populace of cud-chewing, oil-flambéing sub-humans, One time Presidential Loser Al Gore seems an unlikely saviour of an entire planet. And he will be, if nobody listens to him. Though placing far too much reliance on the Gore Family Good Time Tedium Hour in order to placate the personality-obsessed sceptic septics, the film does make a convincing and terrifying case for how much we’re date-raping the planet while God’s away, making it a horror movie of sorts, but one where the audience can choose the ending by switching their lightbulbs off. If there’s any justice in the world it’ll go down in history as a world-uniting interactive exercise. If there isn’t there won’t be any history, any justice, or anyone left to read these words or laugh at how boring Gore used to seem before he got passionate about the planet not dying. There are other ways to get information about how not to condemn your grandchildren to an ungodly oblivion scenario, but this is as good an entry point as any, entirely worth watching for the bit at the end where Gore very calmly weighs up the options: MONEY…. or BEING ALIVE. Watch it, then do something about it. We’re all going to die anyway but we don’t have to take the entirety of human creation with us.
Starring The Greatest Threat To Existence That Humanity Has Ever Faced
Trailer
Y
Tiresias with Powerpoint, a prophet from Capitol Mount come to spread the doom-word amongst a populace of cud-chewing, oil-flambéing sub-humans, One time Presidential Loser Al Gore seems an unlikely saviour of an entire planet. And he will be, if nobody listens to him. Though placing far too much reliance on the Gore Family Good Time Tedium Hour in order to placate the personality-obsessed sceptic septics, the film does make a convincing and terrifying case for how much we’re date-raping the planet while God’s away, making it a horror movie of sorts, but one where the audience can choose the ending by switching their lightbulbs off. If there’s any justice in the world it’ll go down in history as a world-uniting interactive exercise. If there isn’t there won’t be any history, any justice, or anyone left to read these words or laugh at how boring Gore used to seem before he got passionate about the planet not dying. There are other ways to get information about how not to condemn your grandchildren to an ungodly oblivion scenario, but this is as good an entry point as any, entirely worth watching for the bit at the end where Gore very calmly weighs up the options: MONEY…. or BEING ALIVE. Watch it, then do something about it. We’re all going to die anyway but we don’t have to take the entirety of human creation with us.
FOUR LIONS
dMYD
Starring Riz Ahmed
Trailer
Y
Have you read these all the way through? The reviews? You don’t have to of course, and they’re long, a couple of paragraphs at least. It takes time, you could be doing something else, so there’s a big letter to give you the gist, and the name of one of the actors, if you follow films based on a gurning, largely money-hungry ‘personality’. There’s even a trailer, because a moving picture tells eighty-six thousand, two hundred and forty eight words. But this bit, this is just lecturing, it’s sermonizing the blessed and eulogizing the Michael Bay powered atrocity exhibitions that plague your soulless multiplex. (This isn’t a pretentious subconciousness metaphor: Cineworlds are shit.) If you’ve read this far you’re either a trooper, hopelessly sympathetic, or not yet evolved to the state where only whippet-quick images of explosions and tits hold your attention for more than twelve seconds. You’re playing catch up with the world. But don’t worry; the world’s still playing catch up with Chris Morris.
Nobody seems to know how to hold a debate on Islamic extremism, possibly because they’re still blowing our limbs off on a semi-annual basis and generally poking Western Civilization with a long stick laced with nitro-glycerin and faith-fuelled hate. Anyone without genitalia swinging from their forehead knows not to listen to the right-wing fuckjams constantly decrying the whole Muslim world as a vat of Satan, but equally the Liberal Left’s delicate, nuanced and longwinded arguments for actually thinking about things is boring enough to make you want to lodge a spatula into your frontal node. In truth, there are only two people who have worked out how to deal with the problematic issues involved here; Chris Morris, lanky trickster-God creator of The Day Today, and the complex Coloradoan gestalt entity known as TreyParkerMattStone. They’ve done it in a way to beat the stubborns, corner the attention-deficits, and piss off the die-hards. Their solution is to make ‘em laugh.
People pay attention when they’re chuckling. They want to laugh more, so they look, and they listen. Morris’ genius here is to ‘do for suicide bombers what Dad’s Army did for the Nazis’ – making them a ridiculous figure of such baffling stupidity that dimwits across the country can form a kinship with their ideological enemy, sing along to Toploader and generally all be human. Because that’s what everyone is; human, which makes us all fair game for being laughed at long and hard, until our lungs ache and we can taste the tears. Black humour isn’t the universal reaction to being in a terrorist attack, but it’s a damn appealing one. When the concrete’s crumbling around you and logic’s run off down the road it’s a beautiful freedom of everybody to sit back and laugh at everyone; the bombers, the zealots, the politics, the stupidity and emptiness of death, yourself. All you can do is laugh.
Morris has made a career of laughing uncontrollably into the abyss, chucking corks and bits of debris in a futile attempt to plug it up. Anyone expecting the delicate brilliance of Jam or Brasseye is going to be disappointed here; despite the occasion lapses into absurdist ‘clarkey cat’ lingo it remains a fiercely broad form of comedy, utterly different from anything else he’s attempted before barring The I.T Crowd. Stylistically it’s a return to more conventional comedy ala Gervais and Merchant’s soul-stomping shitfest Cemetery Junction, but unlike that drooling sell-out marathon, Morris has chosen to write a long-form sitcom about Jihad, saving it from being worthless by actually having a worth. If humanity stops running in cycles of stupid this may be seen as a game-breaker for the freedom to laugh at anything you want, in much the same way that South Park’s recent Mohammed baiting challenged the frightened rabbits and generally… sort of lost. Maybe they’ll all get shot and dumped in a river in black bags after all, and the world can carry on being serious and scared as it’s always been. Your choice. Oh… the film’s quite funny and the actors are all very good. Sorry.
Starring Riz Ahmed
Trailer
Y
Have you read these all the way through? The reviews? You don’t have to of course, and they’re long, a couple of paragraphs at least. It takes time, you could be doing something else, so there’s a big letter to give you the gist, and the name of one of the actors, if you follow films based on a gurning, largely money-hungry ‘personality’. There’s even a trailer, because a moving picture tells eighty-six thousand, two hundred and forty eight words. But this bit, this is just lecturing, it’s sermonizing the blessed and eulogizing the Michael Bay powered atrocity exhibitions that plague your soulless multiplex. (This isn’t a pretentious subconciousness metaphor: Cineworlds are shit.) If you’ve read this far you’re either a trooper, hopelessly sympathetic, or not yet evolved to the state where only whippet-quick images of explosions and tits hold your attention for more than twelve seconds. You’re playing catch up with the world. But don’t worry; the world’s still playing catch up with Chris Morris.
Nobody seems to know how to hold a debate on Islamic extremism, possibly because they’re still blowing our limbs off on a semi-annual basis and generally poking Western Civilization with a long stick laced with nitro-glycerin and faith-fuelled hate. Anyone without genitalia swinging from their forehead knows not to listen to the right-wing fuckjams constantly decrying the whole Muslim world as a vat of Satan, but equally the Liberal Left’s delicate, nuanced and longwinded arguments for actually thinking about things is boring enough to make you want to lodge a spatula into your frontal node. In truth, there are only two people who have worked out how to deal with the problematic issues involved here; Chris Morris, lanky trickster-God creator of The Day Today, and the complex Coloradoan gestalt entity known as TreyParkerMattStone. They’ve done it in a way to beat the stubborns, corner the attention-deficits, and piss off the die-hards. Their solution is to make ‘em laugh.
People pay attention when they’re chuckling. They want to laugh more, so they look, and they listen. Morris’ genius here is to ‘do for suicide bombers what Dad’s Army did for the Nazis’ – making them a ridiculous figure of such baffling stupidity that dimwits across the country can form a kinship with their ideological enemy, sing along to Toploader and generally all be human. Because that’s what everyone is; human, which makes us all fair game for being laughed at long and hard, until our lungs ache and we can taste the tears. Black humour isn’t the universal reaction to being in a terrorist attack, but it’s a damn appealing one. When the concrete’s crumbling around you and logic’s run off down the road it’s a beautiful freedom of everybody to sit back and laugh at everyone; the bombers, the zealots, the politics, the stupidity and emptiness of death, yourself. All you can do is laugh.
Morris has made a career of laughing uncontrollably into the abyss, chucking corks and bits of debris in a futile attempt to plug it up. Anyone expecting the delicate brilliance of Jam or Brasseye is going to be disappointed here; despite the occasion lapses into absurdist ‘clarkey cat’ lingo it remains a fiercely broad form of comedy, utterly different from anything else he’s attempted before barring The I.T Crowd. Stylistically it’s a return to more conventional comedy ala Gervais and Merchant’s soul-stomping shitfest Cemetery Junction, but unlike that drooling sell-out marathon, Morris has chosen to write a long-form sitcom about Jihad, saving it from being worthless by actually having a worth. If humanity stops running in cycles of stupid this may be seen as a game-breaker for the freedom to laugh at anything you want, in much the same way that South Park’s recent Mohammed baiting challenged the frightened rabbits and generally… sort of lost. Maybe they’ll all get shot and dumped in a river in black bags after all, and the world can carry on being serious and scared as it’s always been. Your choice. Oh… the film’s quite funny and the actors are all very good. Sorry.
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
VICKY CHRISTINA BARCELONA
dMYD DVD
Starring Penelope Cruz, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, and Javier Bardem
Trailer
Y
Sit down and glaze, tilt your head to the side, feel your right palm drowning in that jar of mild salsa, your jeans moving slowly off the leather in a gravity-indulgent trip to the floor. Open your mouth a bit, lower your lids. Nobody can see, and if they could… well, they might forgive you. Relax. It’s time to watch a pretty load of nothing.
Film as landscape painting, the simplicity of Vicky Christina Barcelona is sat there in the title, beckoning you forward with a stylish DVD case and a bottle of cheap red. It’s an easy ride for the dumbest senses, your eyes lazily following Scarlett Johansson as she runs across the grass, heart beating slightly out of step as Javier Bardem pops on his nerd-glasses and eviscerates himself on canvas. The languid vistas and dappling shadows of Barcelona ebb in and out of shot as the mannequin stunners traipse across bohemian idylls; the galleries, the streets, the fields, the poetry vineyard and the view from the top of the world, all lit in the same soft warmth of terracotta and sunlight. Spanish guitar hovers around the corners of every scene, framing everything in an easy fantasy world, a film as aesthetic pleasure, something beautiful to run in the background and enjoy as you start to drift away…
Actually no, of course not. It’s a Woody Allen film. Turn the volume up and the gentle pastels on the screen schism and slide into two separate portraits, a gulf between what you hear and what you see on the celluloid. Listen to the words whilst staring at the lips. This is Allen filtered through some of the most beautiful people alive, the director choosing his place and actors for maximum discomfort, a surreptitious contrast between perfection and perception. Essentially four essays on the facsimiles of love and art, creepy uncle Woody picks up some of the most attractive mouths in the world and uses them to deliver a deliberation and observation of their confused attempts at lust, creation and meaning. Each character compulsively lies to themselves on the subjects that keep them alive, brief moments of happiness and assurance overridden by time marching on, twisting relationships and dissolving constructs to create a sense of dull chaos pervading humanity’s lack of meaning. The assured Spanish ‘artists’ have the most to lose, but it’s Johansson’s character that elicits the most sympathy; a girl searching for something that doesn’t exist, but something that she couldn’t understand if it did, living a fiction. The neurotic world-hater mercilessly piles on the juxtapositions between vision, narration and cold-hard emptiness, culminating in a final shot of emotionally-unknowing lost folk so sad it’d make The Graduate cry. One of the world’s most cynical men delivering a sermon through four of the world’s most beautiful people, it’s an odd experience that leaves you dissatisfied with everything and contemplating inserting a biro into your head. But it is very, very pretty.
Starring Penelope Cruz, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, and Javier Bardem
Trailer
Y
Sit down and glaze, tilt your head to the side, feel your right palm drowning in that jar of mild salsa, your jeans moving slowly off the leather in a gravity-indulgent trip to the floor. Open your mouth a bit, lower your lids. Nobody can see, and if they could… well, they might forgive you. Relax. It’s time to watch a pretty load of nothing.
Film as landscape painting, the simplicity of Vicky Christina Barcelona is sat there in the title, beckoning you forward with a stylish DVD case and a bottle of cheap red. It’s an easy ride for the dumbest senses, your eyes lazily following Scarlett Johansson as she runs across the grass, heart beating slightly out of step as Javier Bardem pops on his nerd-glasses and eviscerates himself on canvas. The languid vistas and dappling shadows of Barcelona ebb in and out of shot as the mannequin stunners traipse across bohemian idylls; the galleries, the streets, the fields, the poetry vineyard and the view from the top of the world, all lit in the same soft warmth of terracotta and sunlight. Spanish guitar hovers around the corners of every scene, framing everything in an easy fantasy world, a film as aesthetic pleasure, something beautiful to run in the background and enjoy as you start to drift away…
Actually no, of course not. It’s a Woody Allen film. Turn the volume up and the gentle pastels on the screen schism and slide into two separate portraits, a gulf between what you hear and what you see on the celluloid. Listen to the words whilst staring at the lips. This is Allen filtered through some of the most beautiful people alive, the director choosing his place and actors for maximum discomfort, a surreptitious contrast between perfection and perception. Essentially four essays on the facsimiles of love and art, creepy uncle Woody picks up some of the most attractive mouths in the world and uses them to deliver a deliberation and observation of their confused attempts at lust, creation and meaning. Each character compulsively lies to themselves on the subjects that keep them alive, brief moments of happiness and assurance overridden by time marching on, twisting relationships and dissolving constructs to create a sense of dull chaos pervading humanity’s lack of meaning. The assured Spanish ‘artists’ have the most to lose, but it’s Johansson’s character that elicits the most sympathy; a girl searching for something that doesn’t exist, but something that she couldn’t understand if it did, living a fiction. The neurotic world-hater mercilessly piles on the juxtapositions between vision, narration and cold-hard emptiness, culminating in a final shot of emotionally-unknowing lost folk so sad it’d make The Graduate cry. One of the world’s most cynical men delivering a sermon through four of the world’s most beautiful people, it’s an odd experience that leaves you dissatisfied with everything and contemplating inserting a biro into your head. But it is very, very pretty.
IRON MAN 2
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Starring Robert Downey Jr.
Trailer
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Iron Man is a terrible superhero. Boring, pious, powered by money, he’s a globetrotting guilt-merchant constantly found moaning about how hard life is whilst blasting above the stratosphere in his blindingly fast greatest-piece-of-technology-ever. Which he keeps to himself. He even only became a comedy drunk for ten minutes so that he could spend the next thirty years of comics espousing the wonders of sobriety.
All of which makes it incredible that Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. managed to make a walking goatee the coolest cape-fancier on the celluloid block two years ago, a whippet-smart multimillionaire sex pest who fixes martinis whilst Cyclops cries, or laughs in Batman’s face as he endlessly bangs his head against the grave of his parents. Have they done it again? No.
Well, a bit; this is still Downey Jr’s playground. Funny, smart, ad-libbing and pissing about in an endless grab-bag of scene stealing, his natural charm burns through the tedious dumb-assery of the script whilst simultaneously running eight laps around the rest of the cast, tying them to a chair, and setting them on fire. Without a decent idea to cling to, the rest of the characters devolve slowly into the shining, empty CGI-effigies of themselves that adorn the posters; Mickey Rourke does nothing with nothing, Scarlett Johansson gets her lips out, and Samuel L. Jackson sits around and gets fatter in a disappointingly boring interpretation of a man named ‘Nick Fury’. The only one who escapes from drowning in Downey is the eterna-dependable Sam Rockwell, playing Tony’s evil nerd-twin in such an offbeat and easy manner that you wonder if he spent the 90s sucking on the same pipe of magical talent crack, dreaming of a day when he could headline an incredible film that nobody wanted to watch. The makers have taken a running leap into the stupidity that makes up 96% of superhero films but neglected to bring any excitement with them; when you can count the action scenes in a two hour slog on one hand it’s clear you’ve got a problem. When the best one of these consists of a tattooed piece of mahogany armed with ‘Repulsive Whips’ being repeatedly rammed by a fat man in a car, you’ve made a bad film. A bad film nonetheless saved by a great actor, but the sheer level of disinterest in the cardboard characters doesn’t bode well for 2012’s all-star spread-thin smack ‘em up spectacular. If only The Avengers was being directed by the greatest writer of ensemble comedy-drama of the last ten years, a man able to sum up a character in three lines whilst retaining a borderline-genius for pacing and emotional nuance… Sigh…We may never know…
Still, Iron Man 2. Moan that it’s not Spider-man. Thank Stan Lee that it’s not Spider-man 3.
Starring Robert Downey Jr.
Trailer
M
Iron Man is a terrible superhero. Boring, pious, powered by money, he’s a globetrotting guilt-merchant constantly found moaning about how hard life is whilst blasting above the stratosphere in his blindingly fast greatest-piece-of-technology-ever. Which he keeps to himself. He even only became a comedy drunk for ten minutes so that he could spend the next thirty years of comics espousing the wonders of sobriety.
All of which makes it incredible that Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. managed to make a walking goatee the coolest cape-fancier on the celluloid block two years ago, a whippet-smart multimillionaire sex pest who fixes martinis whilst Cyclops cries, or laughs in Batman’s face as he endlessly bangs his head against the grave of his parents. Have they done it again? No.
Well, a bit; this is still Downey Jr’s playground. Funny, smart, ad-libbing and pissing about in an endless grab-bag of scene stealing, his natural charm burns through the tedious dumb-assery of the script whilst simultaneously running eight laps around the rest of the cast, tying them to a chair, and setting them on fire. Without a decent idea to cling to, the rest of the characters devolve slowly into the shining, empty CGI-effigies of themselves that adorn the posters; Mickey Rourke does nothing with nothing, Scarlett Johansson gets her lips out, and Samuel L. Jackson sits around and gets fatter in a disappointingly boring interpretation of a man named ‘Nick Fury’. The only one who escapes from drowning in Downey is the eterna-dependable Sam Rockwell, playing Tony’s evil nerd-twin in such an offbeat and easy manner that you wonder if he spent the 90s sucking on the same pipe of magical talent crack, dreaming of a day when he could headline an incredible film that nobody wanted to watch. The makers have taken a running leap into the stupidity that makes up 96% of superhero films but neglected to bring any excitement with them; when you can count the action scenes in a two hour slog on one hand it’s clear you’ve got a problem. When the best one of these consists of a tattooed piece of mahogany armed with ‘Repulsive Whips’ being repeatedly rammed by a fat man in a car, you’ve made a bad film. A bad film nonetheless saved by a great actor, but the sheer level of disinterest in the cardboard characters doesn’t bode well for 2012’s all-star spread-thin smack ‘em up spectacular. If only The Avengers was being directed by the greatest writer of ensemble comedy-drama of the last ten years, a man able to sum up a character in three lines whilst retaining a borderline-genius for pacing and emotional nuance… Sigh…We may never know…
Still, Iron Man 2. Moan that it’s not Spider-man. Thank Stan Lee that it’s not Spider-man 3.
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