Vaguely Simian

Another Year at the Pictures

2011-12-31T19:26:00.000Z

Film 2011

The end of the calendar year has always been a time of reflection, looking back at faults of the year past and formulating resolutions to improve the year to come or gathering low-rent celebs to provide sound bites covering any topic that can have a top 100 and involve TV clips. Anal types prefer to catalogue the experiences of the year, and being a shut-in fond of lists I'm providing my very own top films of 2011 to add to the millions of screen inches clogging the Internet.

This year I have seen 49 films at the cinema. This sounds a lot but based on previous years it's a bit low, less than one a week after all. Despite having a Cineworld pass my cinema visiting is in the decline - these days most cinema tickets in London are £10+ so if you want to see films at least once a week and not spend over £500 a year then Cineworld is your only option at just over £215 a year for a West End pass.
Even taking into account the Trocadero and Haymarket cinemas with about 10 screens between them, there are often a number of decent releases that aren't on in the chain, but that's not the reason I finally cancelled the subscription. In one recent screening a mouse or rat was fighting it's way into and/or out of a plastic bag, and then two films later they forgot to turn the lights down for the first five minutes of the film. Not something mentioned when they wheeled out Ray Winstone to growl on about how he loves going to the cinema for the experience. Still, shoddy cinema going experiences can't stop good films being good. Let's celebrate!

Cedar Rapids

Director Miguel Arteta had somewhat of a cult hit with 2000's Chuck and Buck, Jennifer Aniston vehicle The Good Girl is reportedly decent but his last, Youth in Revolt, wasn't an out and out success. Cedar Rapids however is an excellent entry into the comedy ranks, managing to be a warm and funny high school comedy that happens to be about middle aged insurance salesman at a hotel conference. The action is fairly predictable in a good way, recognised character types and situations are turned on their heads in this setting and renewed with the help of a snappy script and some great turns by the extended cast, John C. Reilly unsurprisingly brilliant as an obnoxious lout on the insurance scene, and Anne Heche shining with a great nose for comedy. Cedar Rapids, like Mamet's State and Main, brings about the feeling of a middle America that isn't all small town hicks suspiciously threatening rich yuppie kids but still has bite behind its warmth.

The Fighter

I've liked David O. Russell since his debut Spanking the Monkey, and Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees showed that he had a wider range than skewed family indie dramas, but I didn't expect something as fully formed as the Fighter to emerge.
Whilst a large part of it's success is down to Whalberg and Bale fully inhabiting their characters in this true-life tale of a boxer held back by his junky brother, Russell vividly recreates the world of Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1980s as Dicky Ecklund is followed around by an HBO TV crew while he trains his brother Micky Ward and flakes out on crack.
Boxing films are generally hard to ruin, naturally focusing tightly on a few characters with close knit ties and incorporating cinematic action sequences. The Fighter is no different, instead managing to spend more time on the familial problems of its leads without getting that movie of the week feeling. The whole cast, from Bale and Whalberg in their physically demanding roles, through Amy Adams and the cast playing Micky and Dicky's extended family, feel like real people and make this film more like the documentary within it rather than a dramatisation of the events years later. A career high for all involved.

Black Swan

Aranofsky has always been great, whether financially successful or not, and Black Swan continues an unbroken run of hits that make self destruction compelling viewing.
Natalie Portman plays Nina Sayers in a role that reminded me of Haneke's Piano Teacher - a professional artist still living with and stifled by her mother in adulthood. Nina (ballerina) is terrified at her abilities potentially lacking and her chance at the starring role in Swan Lake being ruined. Star director Thomas (Vincent Cassel) thinks her perfect as the swan princess but not passionate enough to play the Black Swan, and trains her hard to break through.
New York in winter is a large part of the film in much the same way as it was in Pi, the bleak hues in the urban settings emphasising the claustrophobia felt by Nina in a city bursting with so many millions as she starts to lose her grip on reality.
Aranofksy seems to be the master of psychological breakdown and at times Black Swan strays into the body horror of early Cronenberg. Urban alienation at its best.

13 Assassins

I've often written of Takashi Miike as one of my favourite directors, but he's rarely been what you could call mainstream. Miike's (latest) addition to latter day Japanese period action/drama films is still very much a niche but a much wider niche than some of his well over 70 films fall into.
A dodgy lord threatens the future of 1840s Japan itself with his psychotic, dishonourable behaviour, and his subjects conspire against him, building a squad of 13 samurai to work together and assassinate the insane warlord. There are a number of scenes of skewed Miike humour involving death and disfigurement, and po-faced discussions between the stoic samurai, but his assassins are purely heroic, cutting swathes through the sadist's henchmen.
The ending sequence is a massive set-piece involving a booby trapped village that impresses due to its scale, and despite the actors struggling to stand out in such a large primary cast Yusuke Iseya manages to impress as the hunter Kiga who professes immense strength and endurance despite a childish, monkey-ish demeanour, smashing the bad guys with blunt instruments.

The Guard

John Michael McDonagh's (brother of In Bruge's Martin McDonagh) debut is a big surprise, hugely enjoyable and darkly comic with a brilliant script brought to life by Brendan Gleeson.
The plot: A dodgy Irish Garda in the West of Ireland gets involved in an FBI investigation into drug smuggling.
Whilst this setting has endless potential to get bogged down in the swamp of stereotype, the sensibility of biting wit and cheeky knowingness keeps the film fresh at every turn.
The supporting cast is excellent, with Liam Cunningham and Mark Strong providing some memorable scenes, along with Don Cheadle as Gleeson's unlikely buddy in a loose buddy cop scenario. Oh, and there are beautiful, bleak landscapes for the breaks in between actors firing off witticisms at each other.

The Tree Of Life

I often find myself thinking that Terrence Malick is an overly ponderous director, feted by those who are afraid of not 'getting' something that's supposedly great and heaping unwarranted praise on overblown fluff. Then I remember watching Badlands for the first time, and being slowly and quietly blown away.
Tree of Life is almost purposely obtuse, a non-linear narrative mainly featuring segments of a 1950s American family's life, including Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt as mother and father of two young boys. There is heavy use of voice-over and numerous shots of the boys in nature, playing in the yard or in woods and streams. There is also a sequence which sees the creation of he universe, of the earth and of dinosaurs on our young planet.
I can't pretend to have fully understood the whole film, its meditations on existence as a choice between grace and nature embodied in the parents, but as dense as it is Tree of Life will reward repeat viewing.

Kill List

This film was another of 2011's crop that seemingly came out of nowhere. In part a study of a family strained by the livelihoods of the parents - father Jay (Nail Maskell) is an ex-soldier turned hitman and still haunted by a previous job gone wrong, mother Shel (MyAnna Buring) is also ex-forces and the pair now try and live a normal family life with their son in the suburbs. To make some more cash Jay's partner Gal (Michael Smiley) comes calling with a job offer. The film then turns into a dark thriller as Jay finds himself losing control when taking out the men on their list, Gal trying in vain to keep their jobs clean as Jay takes it personally with some sickening violence.
For the third act the film goes haywire, descending into pagan horror and madness.
It's unlikely you'll have seen anything quite like it.

Animal Kingdom

Writer-director Ben Michod's directorial debut is startling in its power and authenticity.
The story of a 17 year old boy having to deal with his criminal family after his mum dies of an overdose and he moves in with his gran and uncles, Animal Kingdom manages to be quiet and poetic in its slow build of tension as the return of one particular sociopathic uncle starts to unravel the family.
James Frecheville impresses as 17 year old J, presenting a tall, non-communicative teen, blank faced and further introverted when faced with his family troubles, but it's Ben Mendelsohn who stands out as eldest uncle Pope, quietly scary despite his age and size compared to the other men.
One of the things that stays with me is the lighting, cinematographer Adam Arkapaw doing for Melbourne what Brick did for Los Angeles and providing an underlying mood for the film as J's life crumbles. Guy Pearce and his moustache show up in a key role as the policeman trying to take down the family using J, but the film doesn't need star cameos to shine.
In a word: sublime.

Insidious

Director James Wan kicked off the Saw quagmire, admittedly with a fairly decent serial killer B movie which probably wasn't aiming to churn out the first production line of gorenography.
Insidious happily takes a different tack, concentrating on fear and chills rather than violence and blood as well as a fair bit of gonzo oddness.
It's a classic haunted house tale with possession, astral projection, ghost hunters and classic empty corners and open doors to heighten tension and is one of the scariest films I've seen in a long time, benefiting from a certain unpredictability aided by one of the children put into a coma early on.
Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne also help to elevate the film from its roots, playing completely straight, distraught at the bumping in the night that follows them from house to house, even the veteran Lin Shaye dials down the gurning that she usually reels out for her many comedy parts.
In terms of recent horror Insidious is up there with Drag Me To Hell, not the classic of the Orphanage but a firm second tier.

Tyrannosaur

Paddy Considine's directorial debut is a blistering examination of anger and pain.
Peter Mullan manages to top an already brilliant career with a performance of honed frustration and rage aimed at himself but directed at anyone in the vicinity, often with tragic results.
An unwanted chance at redemption comes when Peter's Joseph meets Olivia Colman's Hannah, a Christian charity shop worker with serious problems of her own. If Eddie Marsan turns up you've got a high chance of bad times.
Joseph's Midlands council estate setting is pretty bleak, but his character isn't as one note as kitchen-sink drama wannabes might portray, aware of his problems and failings and simply accepting that he's not a nice person, a stark way of dealing with issues that few stories tell without using simplistic binary morals.

Special mentions

Films that didn't quite make my top ten but nevertheless stood out include Melancholia, Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark, Take Shelter, Blue Valentine, Submarine, State Of Emergency and Drive.

Worst film of 2011

David Gordon Green made a startling debut with George Washington in 2000, a visually poetic coming of age tale in run down North Carolina. Whilst his subsequent output hasn't matched that film's grace, his second-to-last, Pineapple Express, was a brilliant homage to 70s stoner comedies and 80s buddy action movies, filtering the present day through the feel of those decades to create something familiar and yet fresh, despite borrowing heavily from the Apatow mould.

My first impressions of his latest film, Your Highness, were good, the trailer making the film seem like an irreverent take on sword and sorcery fables with a bit of modern swearing and stoner and dick jokes thrown in, reuniting James Franco and Danny McBride along with other Apatow regulars in order to swash buckles with knowing winks and foul mouths.
And yet after sitting down to the film proper, I find myself wondering when the comedy would begin. Joke after joke was rolled out to no effect, I could see the workings and what they were trying to do, but it just wasn't funny, not once. I waited in vain for things to pick up, hoping maybe it was just a false start, but it just carried on in the same vein. Maybe halfway through, up to the point when Natalie Portman's character appears, I couldn't take it any more and had to walk, the first and only time I have left a cinema before the film has ended.
Maybe it did turn a corner once Portman appeared, but I can't see it happening. A shame.

Revolver

2011-12-06T23:21:00.000Z

Revolver

Now that the dust has settled, as it were, it’s strange to see that Revolver is worlds away from the epic disaster that the media world labelled it as on its release back in 2005. With the hit Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels launching not only Guy Ritchie’s career but also a swathe of Brit gangster flicks and dovetailing with the rise of lad’s mag subculture, Ritchie was prime for a backlash.

The first glimpse of Statham has me thinking that his wig is impressive, it’s odd seeing him with hair and it looks relatively natural. A closer look shortly afterward reveals that his moustache doesn’t give off the same vibe.

There are strange little moments, Statham asking “can I go?” like a child sitting in a hospital gown talking to a nurse; shouting his friend’s name after he’s been shot, more like a mantra than in grief or surprise; “smart as a pair of little boy’s shoes”; a nice little moment where three groups have their tensions rising, intercutting between each despite different time frames; a lovely little animated sequence of the film as a heist plays out; Statham hit by a car in slo-mo straight through the windshield, only for the sequence to reverse all while he delivers a voice over about fate and motive; the final talking head segments of psychologists explaining how the only real enemy we have is our own ego.
Sometimes in criticism ‘interesting’ is a dirty word, but that is what Revolver is, and while it might not quite work it is worlds away from the glossy, empty, cockney gangster bollocks that people evidently prefer. The question is, did Guy Ritchie’s ego instigate Revolver or not?

Raindance Festival 2011

2011-10-22T13:58:00.001+01:00

Thoughts on the fest:

Whilst the Apollo is plush and it's nice to be able to see things there without selling a kidney, the festival seems a lot more heavily centered on the industry than the London film fest a couple of weeks later, and when I say industry I mean an ocean of droning, braying media types studded with the odd actor, director and producer. It's unusual in a film festival that I feel an urge to flee the screen as soon as the films is over, after all, I've heard my fair share of odd Q&A sessions at the LFF; it's pretty much just an objection to the people in general.

But to the films themselves:

A Thousand Kisses Deep:

Starts slowly and seems to stumble, looking like an ill thought-through indie that should have died in a twilight spot of a TV schedule, it quickly picks up as it centres around the unquiet life of Mia played by Venus and Attack the Block's Jodie Whittaker, dealing with the impact of a man on her life and thanks to a time-travelling lift, trying to fix the problem's of the past.
Skirting past the risk of mawkish whimsy, the film ably lays out the idea that the root of problems aren't always what they first seem and it could be a lot harder to change the outcome of things than you think. Her mistakes are embodied in the slack-eyed, reptilian menace of jazz loser Ludwig played well by Dougray Scott who succeeds in conjuring a man simultaneously charming and vile.
The denouement is satisfyingly unexpected without being an overtly twisty/turny thriller, indeed the whole film is largely confined to the one apartment building and jazz bar and a small set of characters.
The film has secured distribution and it would be worth checking out once its released

An Act of Godfrey

To script a whole film in rhyming couplets is certainly ambitious, and while there's an inevitably twee, 'luvvie' aspect to the proceedings it’s given a little more weight with the backdrop of a range of characters staying at a hotel while a conference on selling strategies goes ahead. A varied and decent cast evidently enjoy mugging along, there’s a convoluted back story which comes together quite well and lots of neat, clever little touches to the script (though maybe not as clever as it thinks it is).

Skinning

It might be a tad unfair, but after This Is England it's hard to watch a film about a boy getting in too deep with some unsavoury nationalist types with any large degree of optimism of it being as good. In this case our protagonist is a quiet maths genius who has made an unwise friend in a stereotypical bomber jacket and bovver boots skinhead, also seemingly something of a maths whizz. As they spend more time together he gets more and more deeply involved, until things turn violent and he ends up leading the neo nazi gang. Meanwhile we also see things from the police perspective, chiefly involving the corruption and bribery involved in the dealings with skinheads, rival gangsters and gypsy Roma.
Apart from references to the 90s Balkan conflict and the ongoing racial tensions, there's little to set this apart from any other tale set in Europe, until the ending sequence which basically suggests that some people are always going to be evil, there's not much we can do about it and they need to be managed. It's a weird conclusion seeing as there's little that's gone before to distinguish this story from so many others (involvement with the far right stems from an estrangement from family, peer pressure from friends, wanting to impress a girl etc.), but despite this point of difference there's nothing new to add here.

Monk3ys

Alarm bells rang at the start when it purported to be a film delivered to the Metropolitan police and various media outlets, such claims to reality fall apart quite quickly when your actors act like actors.
The opening sequence is of people viewed from POV cameras entering a derelict building and finding people in a grim and bloody mess in a dark sealed room, and in retrospect this glimpse into the future is necessary as starting the film chronologically would see a large proportion of the audience walking out early on.
So a trio of film makers set about filming three people locked in a room for 48 hours, each of whom represent a manifestation of the Id, Ego or Superego. The majority of the film follows the three subjects in the room - an introvert, extrovert and a drunk, via wall mounted and hand-held cameras in chronological order, interspersed with sequences filmed from their interviews and the film makers discussing them/the set-up, running through intros etc.
In the room, things go bad as they realise they're not getting out after 48 hours, and the three descend into violence, rape and murder, as you would fully expect would happen, apart from the fact you wouldn’t.
The problem is not the weak idea, but that this is all done in such a cack-handed way that it struggles to hold the attention.

State of Emergency

This is a lot more like a 'regular' film. Mostly linear, with the well worn story of some sort of man made accident resulting in people becoming infected/undead, getting red eyes and rushing about dispensing violence on the unaffected. A small country town, an every man, a small group of survivors holed up in a defensible building, trying radios and TVs for information, being forced to venture out into danger for supplies - there are a lot of elements that have become genre staples over the years, and yet State of Emergency has a quiet confidence to it that places it apart from dozens of also-ran indie zombie efforts.
Concerning itself more with the relationships and thoughts of the survivors, State of Emergency has numerous moments of quiet and calm as they wait out the crisis, and even the infected are calmer here then elsewhere in the genre, mainly seen quietly standing about or slowly wandering in fields, only succumbing to the usual running and snarling once unaffected humans are spotted.
Beautifully shot, there are a number of moments that make use of the mostly rural setting with vivid colouring even at night, though locations are few the film makes the most of what it does have. My pick of the festival.

Drive

2011-10-06T23:43:00.002+01:00

Drive

Like a 70s film set in the 80s, the music on the soundtrack almost made me gag. Despite this, I vastly enjoyed the slick, easy going surface of this beautifully shot thriller.

Playing something like a slow burn drama for the first two thirds, Gosling, despite his relative youth and slight build, is just about probable as the strong and silent archetype that has been around since the inter-war years of the last century. A man with talent and charm, he is quick to catch the eye of a pretty neighbour whose husband is currently inside. His gentlemanly behaviour gives an innocence to their relationship so that when the husband returns and Gosling's nameless driver steps back and helps in his way to keep the family together, it doesn't seem out of place.
After these moments and the seedy LA underworld asserts itself, we find ourselves more in Refn territory. Whilst hardly close to the visceral grit of the Pusher films or Valhalla Rising, there are moments of ugly violence from which the camera doesn't shy away, and even when guns are involved there is a proximity that brings urgency to these sequences, of the consequences of gunshots, stab wounds and savage beatings.
Like the best of the genre, Drive has an admirable supporting cast who breathe life into the periphery, including Ron Perlman as an arrogant Jewish gangster operating for the mob out of a pizza restaurant, and his business partner and ex-movie producer played by Albert Brooks. Carey Mulligan is as good as ever, and with an inevitably less meaty part she works well at conveying the connection and emotions that pass between her and the driver, a relationship acknowledged with looks rather than words. Brooks has few credits for things I've seen besides his voice roles, but he did play Tom the square in Taxi Driver, a film I was reminded of now and again watching Drive. As a loner character Gosling's hero is too pleasant to be God's Lonely Man, but there is an element of psychosis pushing him forward which gives the film's title a double meaning. The film's opening sequences too, bring to mind the taxi scenes, tightly shot from within the front seat of the vehicle, though in Drive the whole screen seems tight, emphasising the driver's focus and control over the surroundings as he negotiates the central nervous system of Los Angeles' roadways.

Aside from the violence, Drive marks a swerve away from the likes of Valhalla Rising, which very much brooded on landscape, memory and purpose whilst here the story is all, with nothing else to say besides a man changing his ways to accommodate newfound love, and stumbling because it wasn't part of the plan, and because of his inflexibility. Here, though, there is little of the introspective grief at a different life lost, of plans gone awry. Instead there is acceptance.

All the Statham, all the time

2011-08-07T13:41:00.001+01:00

Cellular

This is a great bubblegum thriller with Chris Evans well cast as the beachboy himbo Ryan, suddenly thrust into responsibility as he races around LA trying to help Kim Basinger’s kidnapped Jessica. She’s in a room with a bust phone but managed to get it working enough to dial a random number - Ryan’s. As he slowly realises that she is genuine and not some crank calling nutso, he goes to increasing extremes to try and save her and her family.

Statham is the lead kidnapper and does a decent job of being the main bad guy without dialling up the evilness element too much. To be fair it’s not a far cry from most of the roles he plays, only this time he’s hurting good people instead of bad. He does a much better job than many others placed in a role where he’s identified as crooked from the off, not hamming it up or trying to act overly twisted. Shame that he attempts to do an American accent.
It has a fairly starry cast - alongside Evans and Statham, Basinger is excellent as the women pushed to desperate acts, Jessica Biel pops up in a couple of scenes as Ryan’s ex, William H Macy steals the show as the cop nearing retirement in not quite the usual way, and there is a lovely turn by Rick Hoffman as a prissy lawyer who has his car jacked twice.

The movie zips along at a breathless pace as Ryan is forced to speed across the city in an effort to help Jessica escape. The tension exceeds on the whole as while a happy ending is a pretty safe bet it’s not a certainty that you won’t lose someone along the way. Evans is charming in the lead and helps the audience to keep up with a guy who spends a lot of time on the phone in a car, but it really is Macy’s movie.
As he says towards the end, “It’s a day spa you fuck!”.

-

In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege tale

So, Uwe Boll. He was universally panned in the eyes of gamers as his career as a film director seemed to hinge on taking a video game property and churning out crappy adaptations to make a quick buck. Starting with House of the Dead in 2003, then Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne, Dungeon Siege, Postal and Far Cry followed, with two sequels appearing for BloodRayne (USP: she’s a sexy vampire who kills nazis) and one for the Dungeon Siege adaptation.

The first Dungeon Siege film kept the video game name as a subtitle, preferring to go by the generic In the Name of the King, a title that could have been a gritty, made-for-TV British thriller set in Georgian England if made in the 80s, instead this 2007 production took a lot from the fantasy genre resurrected by Peter Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations. We may know of the likes of Dungeons and Dragons which popped up to ride the bandwagon, but ITNOTK seems to come late in the day, 6 years after the Fellowship first started their journey to Mordor.

The film is unsurprisingly poor, cack dialogue that nothing can save despite a pretty starry cast, generic settings that try and evoke the sweep and vision that Jackson created without his visual flair or budget, and an empty plot which basically involves a naughty mage forming an army of Krugs (Orcs) to take over the Kingdom and generally be evil. The motive he gives is that his new reign will redefine madness as power.
Statham plays the lead, called Farmer, who inexplicably is a complete badass without any military background in the usual ‘ex-special forces but now leading a quiet life’ cop-out. His lack of surprise at his ability to hold his own against a small army of rampaging Krug is odd, and his abilities are later explained by his being the King’s long-lost son.
So if the story is the pits, you’d probably just be hoping for some decent imagery or set-pieces to keep the film rolling, but no.
And yes, you read it correctly, Statham is called Farmer. Because he is a farmer, and the character believes that what you do defines you. If it wasn’t for the inexplicable ninjas that are the king’s personal guard (yes, LOTR with ninjas and it’s not good), or the tree women who swing about on vines and evidently decided that having pointy ears was a step too far, calling the hero Farmer would be one of the worst elements of the film, even more so than the cheap, crappy suits and masks that the actors playing the Krug wear.

So, that cast. It’s really hard to explain what happened here, was everyone blackmailed? Uwe Boll hardly had a glowing track record at this point and game properties were hardly prestige projects - about the only success was Tomb Raider 6 years previously, and ITNOTK was a few too many years late to ride on the association of the LOTR films.
Still, alongside your Statham, Boll managed to acquire Leelee Sobieski (almost successfully acts like she’s in a different, better film), John Rhys-Davies (evidently did not make enough from the Indy and LOTR films to avoid saying yes to the likes of this), Ron Perlman (seems to just like working), Claire Forlani, Burt Reynolds who just seems tired here, Ray Liotta who at the very least is enjoying himself hamming it up big style, but seems oddly out of place, and Matthew Lillard who is way too successful portraying the extremely irritating and treacherous King’s nephew.

There are good points. The CGI used by Rhys-Davies’ magus when he disintegrates into mist to move through walls is quite good, and Liotta is almost worth watching in a sub-Nicolas Cage gurning competition way, but the film is ultimately as boring and pointless as Will Sanderson’s rubbish Legolas wig.

Thankfully this might be the worst I’d yet to see on Statham’s list.

In Statham We Trust

2011-07-28T22:12:00.001+01:00

The Mechanic (spoilers, though if you really care you are a fool)

Statham is not happy being near steps. Or decking.

A bad man is driven home by some goons. His goons are mean to poor people on the way. At home he goes for a swim. His many guards do not see Jason Statham in the pool. Statham kills the bad man, then escapes. Statham gets angry at CLOTHES. Statham pays for sleeping men to look after his boat with LIQOR.
Statham meets a sexy young lady who is happy to see him scowl when he arrives at some 30s style speakeasy bar. Statham has sex with her looking ANGRY. Statham has NEVER told her his name.
Statham meets a friend, his only friend Donald Sutherland, in a cheap diner. Statham looks angry at the very IDEA of diners. Statham’s boss sends him a message that next he needs to kill his friend. Statham looks angry. His friend sends him a private jet so he can tell him to kill his friend in person. Statham looks angry. Statham kills his friend. Statham meets his friend’s wayward son at the otherwise deserted funeral. The son looks like a fool compared to the MANLY Statham.
The son is played by Ben Foster. Ben Foster looks like the older brother of Screech from Saved by the Bell. They did not NEED to cast Ben Foster in this role to make Statham look manly. Statham would look manly next to THE ROCK.
Although Statham is a hard man, he does feel SOME guilt for killing his friend. This is because he is COMPLEX.
The son acts stupid because of what he thinks happened to his dad. Statham killed him to make it look like carjackers. Statham stops the son from making a big mistake. The son wants Statham to teach him how to be within SNIFFING distance of his manliness.
Statham makes the son look after an emasculating dog.
Statham KILLS a man because he doesn’t like his slovenly appearance, and makes it look like a porn related ACCIDENT.
Statham sets up the son on his first hit because he looks like queer bait. The son doesn’t follow orders about how to take out his mark. The son DOES NOT know best.
Statham does. The son wins but only after a bad beating. Statham obviously only keeps him around begrudgingly, because he is COMPLEX.
Statham and the son climb a skyscraper to plan a fat man’s death. The fat man is a baddie because he doesn’t tell jokes. He may have also killed an innocent girl and greedily built a new age empire whilst being a junky, but mainly he’s bad because he’s FAT and NOT FUNNY.
After the fat man and MANY of his henchmen are dead, Statham finds out the boss LIED about his friend.
After dispatching a double-crosser on an empty BUS, Statham kills other, lesser hard men who have killed his LIQOR DRINKING BOAT MINDER. The son does a good job of taking out similar bad guys at Statham’s house. The boss means to kill them!
The son realises who killed his dad. Statham tells him “There is no peace”.
Statham goes after the boss. The boss says “He’s in the building get me the fuck out of here!”.
The boss leaves his building in a convoy but is not safe, as Statham and the son have big guns, a bus and a garbage truck.
Statham wins.
BUT. The son enacts revenge. listens to his music. Drives his car. Can Statham have lost. NO.

On July 28th, 2011, Funny or Die posted a video of a spoof charity appeal for Netflix users featuring a man in tears at the prospect of not being able to watch all of Statham’s films in which he portrays a hitman. This was also the day I happened to choose to watch the Mechanic.

As action film’s go, it’s average. As Statham’s films go, it’s average, achieving neither the kinetic thrills of the Transporter series nor the sheer lunacy of the Crank films. It’s an also-ran and it’s hard to see how it ascended from it’s straight-to-retail/rental feel to a cinema release, but then maybe that’s because Statham’s the MAN.

Munchies made to make your mouth indifferent

2011-06-14T21:17:00.000+01:00

Munchies

The chocolate isn’t particularly spectacular, a standard milk chocolate that doesn’t have the taste and texture of that used in Cadbury’s Wispa, said to be made in Ireland from a different recipe from that produced in the UK. The caramel inside again offers little to stand out from other fillings found in Cadbury’s Caramel, for example, or those found in Quality Street. The biscuit ball centre is an insufficient size to have a significant impact on the overall experience, unlike the serious biscuit-based chocolates such as Twix or Penguin.
The individual topless pyramids do have an aesthetically pleasing aspect, but there isn’t enough of a difference here from, say Rolos.

So why are Munchies consistently one of the most expensive mainstream chocolate confections? With no luxury element, no special ingredients or packaging (just the paper sleeve and inner metallic paper lining) and no excuse of using Fairtrade ingredients (as the Cadbury’s Dairy Milk bar now does), it seems a mystery why Nestle seem to seek to position this product ahead of the pack.

Munchies were originally made in 1957 by the Rowntree Mackintosh company, who were then taken over by Nestle in 1988.

There is a facebook page dealing with this very topic. I am not one of the 21 (as of 22.05.2011) members.

I emailed Nestle customer services about the pricing policy, here’s what they said:

002893671A 23 May 2011

Dear Mr Taylor

Thank you very much for your email.

In answer to your enquiry, our recommended resale price for Munchies is generally around 67p. We can only recommend a resale price as the retailers are free to charge whatever they think is appropriate for the product.

Thank you once again for taking the time and trouble to contact us. Your comments have been carefully noted.

We hope this information will be helpful and thank you for your interest and loyalty to our products.

Yours sincerely

**** *******
Contact Centre Executive
Consumer Services

Not really a help.
Any key in the ingredients to explain the expense?
Milk chocolate is made from: Sugar, cocoa butter, skimmed milk powder, cocoa mass, lactose and proteins from whey, whey powder, butterfat, emulsifier (soya lecithin), natural vanilla flavouring), Caramel from: Glucose-fructose syrup, sweetened condensed skimmed milk, vegetable fat, sugar, salt, Biscuit from: Wheat flour, sugar, vegetable fat, cocoa butter, dried whole milk, cocoa mass, whey powder, barley malt extract, lactose, raising agents (sodium bicarbonate, ammonium bicarbonate), salt, emulsifier (soya lecithin).

So no, then. Pretty standard stuff, no gold leaf, no ground blood diamonds.

I love the nutrition information though, "Per 1/2 tube 133 calories" because you would just eat half the tube and then carefully wrap the rest up for another day. No.

Oh well, it'll always be a mystery but that last sampling hasn't persuaded me to make the small economic leap for potential confection satisfaction.

Hooah

2011-05-08T22:34:00.000+01:00

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

After the block-busting success of the first Modern Warfare iteration of the Call of Duty franchise, and fourth in the series, a direct sequel was inevitable. The first three games were successful takes on the World War 2 first person shooters that had gained popularity since the Medal of Honour games arrived on the Playstation, but Modern Warfare saw the series leave history behind to plump for a ‘near future’ take on conflict.
Rather than attempting to capture the feel of present day warfare, CoD 4 opted for a globe trotting action-fest which split missions between different military forces and perspectives (mixing mainly ground-based first person segments with aircraft fire support via grainy camera footage, for example). In its desire to deliver the big thrills it even included the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, albeit in a mainly scripted form.

This forced perspective is used fairly liberally in the follow up, with a couple of key sequences seeing your avatar fairly helpless and forced to observe the action with little chance for input, allowing the developers to keep you locked in on the narrative rather than wander off and look at the sky while something important happens.
Despite the mainly linear nature of the game and the use of inter-mission briefings to push along the distinctly 80s plot the message is still a little garbled with little background before you’re suddenly in the shoes of a CIA mole in a Russian terrorist’s gang, following as they gun down dozens of civilians in a Moscow airport.
The outrage sparks a war between Russia and the US, allowing the game to flit between the efforts of ground troops trying to reclaim heartland USA and special forces trying to hunt down the terrorist behind it all in clearly defined locations - a Rio favela, an oil rig, snow-bound military base, forest compound etc.

Whilst the plot wouldn’t look out of place in one of the more ambitious actioners fronted by the likes of Seagal or Van Damme in their heyday, the game offers undeniably exhilarating action as you often find yourself scrambling between cover, a near-overwhelming enemy force crawling out of the woodwork and taking out members of your AI controlled team. On the higher difficulty settings the intensity is almost too much, forcing you all too frequently to dive behind walls as the screen goes blurry and blood-smeared in the preferred way of announcing imminent death since games achieved the visual fidelity to do away with health bars.

On normal difficulty the campaign can be breezed through within a day of solid gaming, but aside from the challenge of going back to find the in-level collectables (intel), there is also a series of one-off ‘special ops’ missions which utilise certain play styles (stealth and sniping, riding a snow-mobile, defusing bombs against the clock) and have more of a score attack feel as they tempt you to go back for short bursts of action and beat you previous performance.

What has made the series a success, however, is the combination of hardware ownership and broadband access at the time of release that gave enough consumers the option of taking the game online in order to shoot friends and strangers in the face. I’ve no doubt that it’s a very polished aspect but not having played online for about three years (partly due to a stint of poor net access and partly due to the many late nights with Halo 3 and the like) I wouldn’t know.

Without this element CoD: Modern Warfare 2 is a highly polished shooter which offers up enough of a challenge to keep FPS fans happy, fairly decent AI and varied levels which manage to disguise the open corridors with some gorgeous artwork. It stands up well in a crowded market, but as a single player experience it’s not special enough to compete with the likes of the innovative Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath or the daddy of single player FPS’s, Half Life 2.

Wouldn't you like to be a Pepper too?

2011-04-25T23:37:00.000+01:00

I love Short Circuit.

I'm not sure why I always thought that Dr. Pepper would have a peppery taste, probably the name and the ad campaigns that try and persuade people to give it a try, as if it's the leper of the fizzy drink world.

Dr Pepper Zero
This smells a lot like cherry cola, but not much of a head compared to diet Coke.
Fruity taste, not a hint of a pepper's heat or sweetness. Less harsh than cherry Coke (not so much of that artificial flavouring) so a nice alternative in the fizzy pop world. From the ad tagline “What’s the worst that could happen?” you would expect a taste a little more divisive than vague fruitiness.

Diet Dr Pepper Cherry

Barely has more than a hint of a cherry odour beyond the normal Dr Pepper fruitiness, but the one different ingredient from the usual cola additives, ‘Red 40’, probably contributes to the reddish tinge to the usual dark caramel brown and a strong, dark pink colour to the bubbles (while they last).
The smell once in a glass is no stronger, the cherry having less of the artificial feel found in cherry Coke.
I can barely detect more of a cherry flavour than the general ‘fruity’ flavour that Dr Pepper has as standard, so what this is giving the Pepper devotee I have no idea. Shiny can?

Dr Pepper Diet Cherry Vanilla

The cherry smell is lighter than the non-vanilla version, so barely there. Red 40 is still present so the red tinged bubbles are still in effect in the intial froth build.
Rather than the vanilla adding anything to the mix, instead all tastes - fruit, cherry, vanilla, seem to cancel each other out and the drink seems like sparkling water with a vague, undefinable aftertaste. Very poor.

Dr. Pepper makes for a nice, fruity alternative to that sweet cola tang I seem to be vaguely addicted to, better than the straighter tastes of your Fantas and Sprites, and with less of an artificial hit than Cherry Coke. Nowhere near a diet vanilla coke beater though, that so called 'vanilla' cherry Dr. Pepper is a massive let down.

Drown your spirits

2011-03-20T23:27:00.001Z

Crabbie's

Crabbie’s alcoholic ginger beer has a stout, impressive looking bottle, trying to emulate the kind of vessel associated with real ale.

On first crack there is a light, spicy aroma of ginger, the head is very impressive and the amber tint neither too cloudy nor too clear - the substance is there but it’s not all sediment. On tasting, however, the beverage is deceptively light. Crisp and benefitting from being chilled, the ginger taste itself is very mild, even if it does linger, and the bubbles aren’t really in evident. The drink is a very easy one, and it’s a wonder that there was any need for the invention of alcopops at all if this were an available alternative. With none of the bitingly sweet tones of the chemically enhanced likes of WKD and Smirnoff Ice, this feels like a much more preferable choice for those who prefer their alcohol to be sweet rather than bitter, even though the ingredients do point to the use of sulphites, sugar and sweeteners. Much is made of the elephant trademark dating back to 1801 and the emblazoned statement in ‘original’ ginger beer, but the ingredients are unlikely to set this far from the alcopop crowd. Still, this is ahead in taste and I would recommend for those who are after a refreshing brew with a light kick (4%).

Diet Pepsi Wild Cherry

On cracking there’s only the faintest hint of cherry, certainly not the sweet tang of cherry drop boiled sweets I’d associate with flavoured cola. The high fizz factor of a diet cola is present and correct, but the large head soon gives way to a tamer brew with that familiar brown-hued darkness to the liquid. With the drink loose in a pint glass the cherry aroma is no stronger than from the can; the first taste isn’t 100% smooth, but there certainly isn’t that acidic hit you’d get from a badly made artificial flavour. As with the odour, the taste is light, supplying an edge to the usual diet pepsi taste, doing the job of adding highlights without overwhelming the original. This is something I could get used to, if it were a standard addition to most shops’ pop lockers.

The ingredients feature the usual suspects with only calcium disodium an unfamiliar addition. Crucially the can states ‘contains no juice’ in order to cover themselves against people assuming that the use of ‘wild’ and ‘with other natural flavours’ goes hand in hand with organic or the drink being good for you.

Guarana Antarctica

Subtitled O Original Do Brasil, so I’m assuming that this is Portuguese and it’s a Brazilian drink with guarana as a chief ingredient. Guarana was marketed in the 90s, before Red Bull achieved fame, as a natural stimulant, appearing in drinks and chewing gum with promises of alertness. I tried the gum but don’t remember it having any particular effect

That ingredient list is dense as hell.

On cracking the can there’s a quick citric whiff, but this weakens quickly. The fizz on pouring is moderate, with a small head that subsides almost immediately. The colour isn’t that appealing, piss yellow in keeping with energy drinks but slightly less radioactive looking than red bull.
The odour in a glass is less citrus and more sugary, hinting at syrupy thickness. IT goes down smooth though, the sugar not leaving an unpleasant coating and a taste somewhat like muted lime. This does taste more natural than your average buzz beverage.

Tab

Made by the coca cola company, this beverage smells a bit like diet coke on first cracking the can, it looks like diet coke after you first pour, and it also tastes like diet coke, albeit with an unpleasantly metallic/soily aftertaste. I remember Tab clear being basically a way of having clear cola, but I can’t see the point in Tab at all.

Diet A&W root beer

On the crack you get a strong whiff of liquorice, very reminiscent of dental mouthwash. Whilst the gloop looks like your standard cola in the glass that medicinal taste is overpowering, with only a hint akin to sweet caramel from the ‘aged vanilla’ underneath.
Not something I’d like to sample again, definitely a stronger taste than the naturally brewed root beer I’ve tried before.

Metro 2033 - Xbox 360

2011-03-20T17:51:00.002Z

Metro 2033 is heavily based on the novel by Dmitry Glukhovsky. In 2033 a nuclear war has resulted in Moscow becoming an irradiated wasteland populated by mutated creatures, whilst the surviving people live underground in the metro systems tunnels and stations. The player controls a typically mute character Artyom, who finds that his home station is under threat from mutants called Dark Ones, more deadly than the usual tunnel dwellers that attack those who wander beyond the safety of the stations.
As Artyom you venture out looking for help from other stations, coming across outposts of communist and fascist groups who seek to control what remains of the city until ultimately finding an old nuclear weapons facility. There are hints in cut-scenes that the mutant beasts are some sort of radioactive evolution rather than mindless killers, but this idea isn’t really fleshed out at any point. There may be more made of the idea towards the end of the game depending on the moral choices you make at various points (giving money to a beggar etc.) but these decisions don’t seem significant in and of themselves.
The game is ultimately a first person shooter with a few tweaks on the standard genre tropes. Certain areas of the metro, and most of the surface of Moscow, necessitate the use of a gas mask, which needs filters to keep fresh or Artyom’s breathing becomes heavier and harsher. Additionally it can becoming damaged in combat meaning you will need to scavenge new ones from your victims. Ammo comes in two different flavours, expensive military grade pre-war ammo, which is understandably rare, or the botch job amateur produced gear knocked out in the metro system. Ammo is used in the stations for trade, though what you can buy is restricted to trading ammo types, guns and upgrades and health kits.
As well as the gas masks another consideration is light - much of the metro system is swathed in darkness so a torch is essential, and although use is limited it can be recharged using a hand pump.
Much of the combat takes place in a state of mild panic as you wheel about in the dark, mutants clambering across ceiling and walls, so it’s more relaxing when you come up against the human enemies in their dens. The action is fast and violent, the game allows a certain amount of damage which ‘regenerates’ - the screen gets increasingly red which fades when you find cover - and much like the charging of the torch and opening your log book, using health kits is done in real time, opening a box of vials and administering a quick dose of something with a syringe.

Due to its setting within the metro system, the game architecture is often limited to corridors and tunnels, and when the world opens up on the surface you still have the standard apocalyptic ruin seen in everything form WW2 shooters to Gears of War and Fallout 3. Opting for Russian dialogue with subtitles gives the game more atmosphere, but there is essentially little deviation from the survival horror style of the FPS genre as you battle monsters and bandits in the dark. As the genre inhibits much of the storytelling and characterisation that an RPG allows, the combat is pretty much all Metro 2033 has to fall back on, so happily this is as meaty and involving as you could expect.
Nothing truly exceptional but a nice change from the CODs that currently dominate the overcrowded FPS stable.

Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs - Xbox 360

2011-03-20T17:01:00.001Z

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is illustrative of a change in the way film tie-in games are now produced. Typically seen as cash cows and chiefly a way of milking the last drops of cash from a franchise, games were often rush produced to meet the film launch deadline, inevitably resulting in sub-standard fare.
These days the film production companies are more savvy, preferring to be associated with a more quality product and therefore involve the development companies at a much earlier stage.
Meatballs certainly seems to capture some of the film’s magic, allowing for the fact that an inevitable lack in characterisation means a heavier emphasis on the art style and fantastical situations.
The gameplay chiefly involves platforming and combat, as is tradition with a tie-in aimed at kids. The mechanics are fairly basic owing to the perceived skill levels of the pre-teen intended audience, but the use of inventor Flint Lockwood’s gadgets to overcome the obstacles in the levels and deal with the sentient food aggressors lends it a little complexity. There are collectables hidden throughout each stage which accumulate in order for you to upgrade the devices, including a vacuum for sucking in and shooting out substances, a slicing blade, extending boxing glove and overpowered hair dryer.
The introductory animation is presented in a charming 8-bit style and this is repeated between each stage, while the levels themselves are bright and chunky, fitting the look of the film perfectly.
As the challenge is so slight the whole game can be wrapped up in a few hours, but they are satisfying hours. It would have been nice to have something a little harder (the NES era games were all aimed at kids but were pretty unforgiving - Ghouls n Ghosts anyone?) but it’s a fun diversion.

Word, Riggs

2010-01-13T22:06:00.000Z

All the movies, all the time

Gummi!

2010-01-09T20:07:00.000Z

Already into the second week of January in this year of 2010, it seems a little late to start adding to the avalanche of 'best of year's and 'best of decade' lists that spread through the world of written media like a particularly infectious rash. Do these lists ever get used as a way to avoid the mistakes of the past? Sure, there's value in revisiting and praising great art, especially if it was passed over the first time around.

Music is a particularly hard one to put down. Ever since I started using an mp3 player to feed me tunes, I've found myself a fan of the shuffle and therefore have trouble naming a given track, let alone the album it's from. Plus I can't pin somethign down as a 2009 release or one of the last decade without a lot of trawling back through my ipod's listings.
Perhaps a top ten 'most played' would serve as some indicator, in terms of songs?

Films are easier to pin down by virtue of the relative density - it's a lot harder and more expensive to make a film, so there are fewer, especially those that gain distributiom. But still, without referring to a list of what I've seen this year it's easy to forget some gems, what with the dozens upon dozens that I've sat through on the big screen in 2009. I can sympathise with, if not forgive, the lazy journalism that sees the lists populated by the more obvious contenders, as those which took the most bank or column inches are more likely to be remembered. Although a little more recent, and having the advantage of me seeing it twice at the cinema, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is genuinely my favourite film of 2009.

Not tending to keep up with the developments of family cinema, the film only came across my radar very close to release and not having read the book all I had to go on was the quirky name. I only got round to watching it a few weeks after release, after getting seeing the generally positive swathe of reviews that it earned.

Making a special trip out to Chelsea early on a Saturday, as it was only screening in early weekend time slots, I found myself surrounded by a number of families. At this point in my cinemagoing career I have come to tolerate certain behaviours - talkign through adverts is perfectly acceptable, people being a bit noisy is okay if it's not too frequent and the film isn't the kind of thing that necessitates intense concentration (stuff like the Twilight sequel or Paranormal Activity for example), so I wasn't automatically in violated mode at the prospect of infant burblings - ths was a kids film after all, and I felt confident I could follow the plot even with a few interruptions.

It turned out I had more to wory about from my own behaviour - Meatballs is a delight, rather than going the more recent kids film route of 'one for the kids, one for the parents' joke rationing to keep everyone happy, it seems that Meatballs just decided to have a fuckton of jokes that everyone would find funny all the way through. One particular scene, my favourite - and you should probably skip this paragraph if you intend to see it - involved a scene where our hero, amateur inventor Flint Lockwood, discovers snow (or rather vast quantities of ice cream having fallen from the sky) for the first time. Having never been in a snowball fight, he relishes the experience and joins the fray with gusto, leading to a scene whih plays out with an over-the-shoulder handheld cam style, following Lockood as he delivers headshots in a strange reading of slasher flick visual stylings that had me in literal danger of bursting into uncontrollable laughter - the prospect of which may no doubt have rather worried the parents in attendance at that screening.

I wrote about the film elsewhere:

"Excellent stuff, packed full of great characters, one-liners, visual gags, play-on-words, slapstick and it has a talking monkey. One scene in particular threatened to start me off on a giggling fit; I was expecting something at least passable and quirky, and came out very impressed. I didn't find out until later that the writer and director team were also responsible for Clone High - I can definitely see a similar scattergun approach to the humour and some of the mannerisms and movement of the characters. For a crazy gag-packed kids animation, this is up there with Emperor's New Groove"

Clone High was an MTV cartoon show that I caught thanks to the internet and is one of the few greats that it seems that I still don't know anyone who has seen it. The premise is that historical figures have clones made of them using their DNA, and are all sent to high school together. Abraham Lincoln, gangly and awkward, is the focus of the show, and from what I gather the series was cancelled after complaints from India over the portryal of Ghandi, whose clone finds the weight of history so heavy to bear that he shrugs it off and instead launches into a hedonistic part due lifestyle. The show is wonderfully written, packed full of throwaway gags, visual motifs, recurring in jokes and laughs based on character development and interaction, not to mention the occasional interjection of historical personality quirks when appropriate. Quick snippet - the school principal is a would-be evil genius who has a robot butler that refers

to everybody as 'Wesley'.

Although Clone High was very much aimed at a teen audience, the creators seem to have had no trouble redirecting their mirth targets to a group altogether more wholesome, and manage to fit in some sort of Lynchian nightmare into the final climactic act.

Once the DVD is released at the end of January, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs could easily become my favourite film of 2010, too.

Oh, and Bruce Campbell does one of the voices.

My updates on this web space are pretty erratic, and hardly thematically consistent. In an effort to keep myself writing more often I have pledged to write about every single film I see this year, whether it is the Oscar baiting The Road which I will no doubt see shortly, or the Sunday afternoon TV screening of Uncle Buck that I caught last week. There's little point in linking just yet, as I've not finished writing about anything I've seen in 2010 just yet (I think it's six so far, which isn't bad for nine days), but if last year is anything to go by the updates will be thick and fast, or at least thin and often.

Great malenky yarbles

2009-11-28T14:48:00.012Z

Paul W.S. Anderson has earned some deserved notoriety for being a bit shit.
His debut feature, with bright-eyed, chisel-cheeked Jude Law when he was still unfamous, was the grindingly shite Shopping, and a prime vehicle to allow Jude’s rubbish side to shine.

Mortal Kombat followed as Anderson’s first videogame adaptation. Seemingly blind to the steaming afterbirth that was Super Mario Brothers, someone decided that desperately trying to squeeze a film out of a one-on-one beat ‘em up remarkable for its gore was a good idea. The result was a Western action movie in the pre-Matrix days, meaning the action scenes were pedestrian and the game’s gore had been toned down to gain a bigger audience. It’s rancid excuse for cinema didn’t prevent it from spawning a sequel and a TV series. Wonders never cease.

Soldier was Anderson’s fourth feature, was universally panned and was at least an important factor in the downfall of Kurt Russell, who if it weren’t for a few unwise projects could have found himself in the position Bruce Willis enjoys today, mixing interesting work along with the clag.

Resident Evil was the second videogame adaptation, somehow coming up with a plot worse than the original game, infamously bad voice acting and all. Essentially an excuse to watch Milla Jovovich kick ass and use a little bit of dodgy CGI, this is exactly the kind of filler horror bilge that somehow manages to appeal despite the correct knowledge that it will inevitably disappoint. So many people have managed to do zombie movies right, it’s almost insulting when someone cocks one up. Still, I get the feeling that even though I have avoided them so far, the small part of me that yearns to see the sequels will never die.

Whilst not quite evoking the reaction I had to Terminator: Salvation in terms of Franchise Necrophilia, Alien Vs. Predator deserves special mention for making Resident Evil seem like it actually didn’t cock up as a zombie move that badly, in retrospect. Two of the most popular alien horror series had already met in the comic world with some excellent results. A number of stories had envisioned a universe in which the species co-existed and inevitably intruded into the lives of humans, with some success both critically and commercially. So you’d think that making a half decent movie featuring the two xenomorphs would be a piece of piss, and maybe it is. Maybe Anderson went out of his way to fuck it up, just to see if Fox would still release the thing. It achieved an age rating of 15, which can only be seen as a mistake. If your aim is to re-envision it as a subtle psychological horror where any physical trauma is artfully implied rather than splattered on screen, that’s fine, but to go for a halfway house with not enough of anything for anyone we all just go home miserable. And then set it in pyramids, under the Artic ice. Basically a setting as far removed from the earthly or intergalactic arenas you would ideally use, and basically looking like a leftover Young Indiana Jones backdrop that hadn’t been dismantled because they ran out of ideas and money.

Four years later Anderson came back with Death Race one of a number of remakes of classic 70s films that almost certainly didn’t take the original title of Death Race 2000 as it was released in 2008. To be fair, I have heard a number of positive reviews of this, in terms of “it’s good for a bullshit empty action movie”, and it does feature Mr. Jason Statham as the lead, but the trailer really put me off being packed as it is with clichés of clichés in some sort of post-anti-meta-critique of base action films. I did go and see Gamer in the cinema this year, so I think Death Race probably does deserve to get a look in at some point.
The latest project is apparently a return to the Resident Evil franchise; this time subtitled Afterlife, although he did write the two existing sequels so it can’t be argued that he is resorting to a return to past successes. Perhaps this will prompt me to finally watch the sequels in some sort of masochistic Resident Evil marathon which climaxes in a visit to the cinema to see the fourth instalment and a subsequent trip to hospital after gouging out my own eyes?

Speaking of which…

The one Anderson film I haven’t mentioned so far is also unique in that it’s quite good. Event Horizon was Anderson’s third feature, released in 1997, and featured the sublime Laurence Fishburne as our hero spaceship captain, seemingly existing in a universe with an alternate sci-fi film history where none of the films exist that would dissuade one to ever captain a rescue vessel in outer space.

When I say “quite good”, I’m really using the word “good” far more freely than many would be comfortable with, but in terms of Andersons catalogue it is truly a diamond in the rough, Argos diamond or no.

Event Horizon could hardly be accused of being original and lifts elements from
Alien – space rescue going wrong
Various haunted house movies – hallucinations of ghosts caught just going off screen, through doorways, up ladders etc.
2001 – cramped, circuit-board lined passageway
Jaws – crash zoom in said tunnel
Star Trek - the Event Horizon echoes the design of a Klingon Bird of Prey
Hellraiser – hell as a dimension, Neil’s Weir character ‘going native’ and becoming a demon involves a fair bit of self harm (ultimately the worst hell has to offer is physical pain, with the psychological element used to butter you up, whereas it should be the other way round)
The false ending of Scarlet(?) dreaming that they are rescued by Weir is a well worn horror staple, found memorably in Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street.
One of the deleted scenes features Neil’s Weir climbing headfirst down a ladder after Cooper and Scarlet, in bloody demon mode, and in the commentary for the scene Anderson admits it was inspired by the deleted “Spider Walk” scene from the Exorcist, making it unlikely that the similarities with myriad other films are coincidences. Most films, of course, can rarely avoid being influenced by previous works, but in this case it smacks just a little too much of recycling.
Two sequences in its favour are both based around vacuum – the well worn genre staple of a hull breach causing violent air loss is enhanced by Captain Miller’s rag doll buffeting as he struggles to escape, and an excellent sequence of a rescue mission for a crewmember caught in an airlock and about to be exposed to space without a suit.

One of the original elements comes from the set design, which does often try to offer something a little unusual even if it doesn’t always work.
The captain’s chair design, suspended from the ceiling of their ship, means that Fishburne’s Miller looks odd, like a toddler sitting at the grown-up’s table with his legs dangling.
The random spikes and ornate symbols on the surface of the gravity drive and its chamber seem highly unlikely for a scientific experiment – ornate decoration doesn’t really go hand in hand with cutting edge technological development.

To expand on nonsensical choices somewhat, the idea that no one on Earth would have attempted to analyse the first message of the newly returned Event Horizon, leaving the crew to have a quick crack at it on the way also seems unlikely. There’s an argument that the rescue mission would have been assembled with haste, but they undoubtedly would have wanted to try and get an idea of what they were sending the team into.

Thankfully the cast are good, with Fishburne standing out in particular as an evident leader who desperately tries to keep control in both himself and his terrified crew as everything goes tits up, and Sam Neil managing to keep close to the line separating camp from menace which probably adds to the atmosphere of unease. Jason Isaacs and Sean Pertwee also feature and help to avoid the cats becoming characterless victims waiting for their death scene.

The CGI tends to stand out, these days it’s so ubiquitous that for every shot of a car jumping into a helicopter for which you think “aah, CGI” there are a thousand shots with added buildings, added people and altered skies that you will never notice. All of the CGI shots here just look that bit too shiny and basically computerised, though they tend to only be used when necessary, to depict zero gravity for example. This may seem a cheap shot at a film made in 1997, but when Moon was released eleven years later with such excellent use of model work it is hard to believe that CGI would be the better choice, either aesthetically or economically.

For all its faults Event Horizon is perfectly enjoyable and doesn’t compare too badly to more recent examples of the genre such as Sunshine, so it’s a shame that based on the rest of Anderson’s output it looks like a fluke the likes of which he won’t produce again.

Comfortably numb

2009-10-02T22:02:00.006+01:00

All About Lily Chou Chou is a study on contemporary Japanese youth culture, an attempt at examining the situation that has led to some Japanese teens becoming violent and despondent, an outcome which has bewildered the older generations since the Japanese economic bubble burst back in the early 1990s.

Centred around a young teen named Yuichi, the film deals with bullying, shoplifting, prostitution, suicide, rape and murder, and how he and his school mates submerge themselves into their culture to escape their grim realities - in this case an obsession with the titular pop star, Lily Chou Chou.

Rather than just being a gritty expose of modern Japanese youth, the film is often lyrical to the point of being willfully abstract, with the long opening scenes consisting of little more than Yuichi standing in a rice field listening to a discman, whilst text from the fansite he runs dedicated to Lily flashes on screen, as different fans discuss Lily's music and the idea that it taps into an alternate state of being, known as the "Ether".

The films is shot on handheld DV throughout, most obviously in a long sequence following Yuichi and his school friends on holiday on a southern island in Okinawa, which is shot in POV of the boys’ own hand-held cameras.
These scenes are a welcome escape from the school and home life of the characters, but as the sequence plays out it’s obvious that getting away doesn’t help the boys get away from themselves.

The cruelty that adolescents are capable of inflicting on each other is always disturbing, and the situations here ring true as similar incidents are a regular occurrence in the news, but the film's attempt at elevating the kitchen-sink subject matter with an arthouse eye doesn't entirely succeed, instead serving to highlight the insular thought processes of the kids and thereby making them less sympathetic. The concentration on the look of the film brings the audience away from the characters and results in you investing less into what happens to them, leaving you to passively absorb the injustices rather than be pricked into anger or sorrow. The essential core to the story is that one of the bullied becomes the bully, and is even worse than those that came before – it’s a situation that should evoke feelings of bitter irony but the isolation of the characters, whilst on the one hand doing a good job of conveying the numbness they impose on themselves to cope, results in the audience feeling a similarly subdued reaction.

The performances are all decent but some of the characters are less than well rounded, particularly the bullies, and this lends the atmosphere a more exaggerated cartoony feel that only detract from the more artistic directional aims.

Extras are confined to a trailer for the film and trailers for other ICA DVD releases.

It's not a bad film but the subject matter has been handled often within Japanese cinema and more imaginatively, and although shot two years before Gus Van Sant's Elephant it still manages to feel like a cheap copy.

The flavour of the weak

2009-09-20T18:24:00.008+01:00

It’s time for yet another fizzy dip.

Spar, the convenience store chain that have apparently been the official sponsor of ‘European athletics’ since 1996, have their own branded cola range. It seems that their marketing people decided that the nationality of the cola is what entices the consumer, hence their decision to go with “american diet cola” – “real american style, real american taste.”
It’s confusing enough that the label seems to call it american cola diet, but the instance of lower case for american is nearly as confusing as the idea that a cola is able to taste American. They even have a little logo on the bottle with a smidge of what looks like a New York skyline, proclaiming “Authentic American Taste” (this part is all capitals but I’m not going to replicate that here unless absolutely necessary).
They might have a point if the recipe wasn’t all chemicals, but the ingredients are the same as most colas. It does say in the blurb that it’s produced in the UK form cola flavourings imported from the USA. Because we don’t have taste labs in the UK, obviously.
Anyway, their heart’s obviously in roughly the right place as they care enough to include the adult GDAs for calories and salt and such, despite the fact that the levels in the drink are all ‘trace’.

On pouring the drink is fizzy, building a good head that lasts a fair few seconds, and leaving a good numbers of bubbles around the perimeter of the glass for a few minutes after the pour. The smell isn’t strong, giving a faint hint of cola bottle sweets. The taste is also faint, barely registering to the point that you could be forgiven for thinking it was slightly flavoured carbonated water; holding a mouthful before swallowing in an attempt to maximise the flavour makes little difference, if I didn’t already know I was drinking a cola I think it’s possible that I wouldn’t be able to identify what it was, besides it being sweet and not fruity.
In the grand scheme of things it’s hard to decide which is more important – for the cola to have a strong flavour or for that flavour not to be foul, but ultimately if you’re so very close to drinking water the only difference here is the added caffeine. Stereotypically the USA isn’t renowned for it’s subtlety, so attempting to sell this on the back of its american-ness isn’t going to do it any favours.

Spar do a vanilla flavoured version of their cola, though unfortunately only in the sugared variety.
Like the diet, this cola has only a faint whiff once you open the bottle, the vanilla is definitely present but there’s a lot less fizz on the initial pour.
First impressions? These are not the droids you are looking for. Taking a good nosefull at the edge of the glass brings in the kind of vanilla smell that you get with a vanilla coke with vodka, except that the mix has been poured in favour of the vodka leaving the acrid, poison smell of the alcohol tainting the bouquet. Hardly a good start. The first gulp fares no better; the vanilla taste is there, but in an oppressive way, coating the roof of your mouth. It is the vanilla of ice cream, but not some rich Devonshire vanilla ice cream, no, instead it has the taste of the cheapest most synthetic vanilla ice cream you could imagine – the panda cola of vanilla ice cream.

After the first couple of gulps the smell doesn’t lessen; that bitter warning remains suffused within it – “stay away, stay away”. And the taste continues to coat the roof of the mouth, barely lighting upon the tongue as if it works along the lines of a strange, reversed gravity.
It seems more and more likely that this cola was brewed using some dark magic.
Safe to say I’ve not found my diet vanilla Coke substitute in this offering.

As cola variations dwindle I have to diversify. To this end, bring on Idris drink company’s Fiery ginger beer. “Try me if you dare!!” The double exclamation marks clearly point to a beverage even more extreme than Pepsi MAX. Imagine!
Who Idris are I don’t know as it clearly states on the back that Britvic makes the drink. It uses ginger root extract, but is it fierier than other ginger beers? Not being a ginger beer connoisseur I have no idea, but I can at least see if it’s fiery.
So, fizzy on pouring but no head, the odour isn’t immediately noticeable on cracking the can, and the colouring is that of cloudy lemonade. A whiff from the glass brings a hint of ginger, but also a lot of lemon as you may expect what with citric acid being a main ingredient. And what does it taste like? Sweet lemon with a very slight ginger kick that mainly takes effect at the back of throat, lingering long after the swallow and threatening to build like hot spices, but never doing so, in a similar manner to the many moments of tension building in the film The Orphanage that see no release. Is it right to use Spanish cinema references in soft drink articles?
Yes.
If you buy Fiery ginger beer in an attempt to cement your Extreme reputation then you’re likely to be disappointed, I wouldn’t say that I’m particularly resistant to spice and I find this particularly weak.

So, what’s Cherry Diet Coke like? One of Coke’s more enduring flavour experiments, Cherry Coke has been around since 1982, according to Wiki, with the diet variant around since 1986. Cherry happily seems the perfect fruity fit for Coke as it’s sweet enough not to be drowned out and yet retains its particular flavour in the mix.
Pouring acts like Coke, unsurprisingly, producing a fair amount of fizz and an average head before settling down. The smell hits straight away, though, even though the can was cracked a foot away – that unmistakeable, artificial ‘Cherry Drop” twang.
At the lip of the glass the smell is there, and for a fan of cherry-flavoured boiled sweets it’s tantalising. Nothing is given away in the ingredients to hint at where the origin of this nasal sensation is born, but the catch-all term “flavourings” no doubt masks the very same parentage as that of Basset’s Cherry Drops (Wiki search, no I don’t mean “Baroness Cherry Drums”).

And the taste? More fruity than Cokey, though the punch of the cherry is disappointingly subdued compared to the smell that this brown ooze gives off. There’s also a bit of that coating feeling that you rarely get with diet fizzy pop, particularly clinging to the tongue like a second skin. Definitely more viscous than standard Diet Coke, which dribbles down a lot more closely to standard tap water, it’s probably that mysterious chemical that does it.
Not unpleasant then, and a welcome alternative to your common or garden Diet Coke, but definitely not a vanilla beater.
Still, even if Coca Cola are unlikely to win any ethical awards any time soon they can at least bask in the pride of producing one of the most belch-worthy beverages on the shelves. Most gaseous.

Not being a man’s man, I hate ale and beer and this dislike extends to anything sharing the moniker, meaning I tar ginger beer and root beer with the same brush. Whereas the Fiery ginger beer tempted me with a promise of a challenge, root beer I have been recently informed, usually contains some amount of vanilla and so is now naturally tempting.
The Bundaberg Australian Root Beer bottle has an old school beer theme to it, the style of labelling, font, brown glass and the way the kangaroo image is used with the lightburst behind it all conjure a certain association, perhaps making this the tipple for kids to drink so that they feel like grown ups? The liquid isn’t very bubbly and the odour isn’t strong enough to carry; the colouring is very similar to cola and ultimately belongs to the same family of beverages that at one time would have been branded as tonics rather than alternatives to water. Even at the rim of the glass the odour is weak, and reminds me of the mouthwash that they use at the dentists to give you a rinse. It tastes like that to, and is a little thick, definitely leaving a bit of a sweet coating on the back of the tongue as if the sugar decided to hang back after the liquid had made its way to your epiglottis. Definitely not a taste I could get used to as the medicinal quality is never outdone by the sugar, no matter how natural the ingredients or the brewing process are supposed to be. I can detect the liquorice and the vanilla bean to some extent, but not the ginger and I’ve no idea what sarsaparilla or molasses are meant to taste like. Not something to revisit.

My tastes have certainly come a long way in the last decade or so, on from the time when I would refuse vegetables or foods with sauces (which are legion), but this small and unadventurous taste exploration into the world of the pre-prepared Western soft drink proves that I am still quite limited.

Doctor, look out!

2009-09-14T21:38:00.006+01:00

I’ve never been much of a radio listener, so when I hear adverts on the commercial stations the form of the audio-only advert always strikes me – the techniques involved; the different methods used in the absence of visual aids. One advert that I noticed while staying with family recently (one of the few situations where I actually listen to radio, as opposed to podcasts) was on Kiss FM, and was a government sponsored anti-drug ad targeted at the mostly young Kiss audience. An actor played out a situation where they smoke a spliff, become paranoid and then get violent. I was reading a paper at the time and the radio was little more than background noise to me at that point, but once I focused on the ad I couldn’t help but release an audible exclamation. I’m sure that situations where cannabis users get paranoid exist, and a proportion of these may lead to extreme or even violent behaviour, but the idea that they were trying to promote this as likelihood rather than outside possibility incensed me.
I never enjoyed smoking cannabis back when I was a teen, though did sometimes enjoy the sensations that resulted, and I haven’t smoked or otherwise taken any in likely twelve years, but I can’t stand the hypocrisy that is flopped out time and time again when dealing with cannabis as opposed to the treatment given to alcohol. True, the government never condones binge drinking and the like, but you don’t need to binge to get a much higher proportion of people having reactions to alcohol that are far worse than those to smoking gear.
This is the TV version of the advert:

Despite the recent surfeit of blokey comedies in recent years, many of which are connected to the Apatow stable (who surprisingly has only directed three films to date but seems connected to dozens), it’s the Hangover that seems to be the enduring hit in the UK and is still screening in 21 screens as of September 12th despite having been released on June 12th, I’d be surprised if Mamma Mia had lasted much longer.
For a ‘bad taste’ comedy which not long ago would have invited comparisons with the films of the Farrelly brothers, the Hangover is pretty so-so with only a handful of belly laughs to be found in the overly familiar situation of people going to Vegas, over indulging and then engaging in a spot of OMG!!11! as they try to piece together the previous night. Perhaps the Great British public find the situations involving binge drinking comfortably familiar.

Unfortunately I’m no stranger to the concept of the lost night. A number of times I’ve found myself regaining consciousness the morning after and having no memory of what happened after a certain point. Regaining consciousness is not the most accurate way of putting it, as this implies passing out rather than blacking out, which is the phenomenon that I experience – a complete lack of knowledge of what I did or said, and then suddenly I’m back. A lot of the time it has to be said that it involved situations where a free bar led to me not keeping track of how much I’d had, or drinking at home or at parties meant that self-poured drinks contained undefined measures, but many is the time that I have eaten three meals, slept relatively well and only had 5 or so drinks before suddenly finding myself somewhere else at a later time. One study (GOODWIN, D.W; CRANE, J.B.; AND GUZE, S.B. Alcoholic "blackouts": A review and clinical study of 100 alcoholics. American Journal of Psychiatry 126:191-198, 1969) suggests that it is the concentration of alcohol in the blood that leads to blackouts, which is supported by the self-mixed and free-drink instances, although it would be interesting (and useful) to discover what variables resulted in blackouts in the cases where I consumed far less quantities and in seemingly ‘safer’ circumstances.

Some sort of homing instinct seems to get me back every time, though most recently I vaguely recall not being able to get into my flat and taking apart my wallet chain in order to try and pick the lock. I sat in my front doorway until half three in the morning when I remembered that my keys were in my back pocket.
I had been to a gig that night but do not remember a second of it; two CDs and a t-shirt testify to my presence there, and perhaps that I enjoyed it?
It’s not a happy time, as though I rarely get up to anything that I would be ashamed or embarrassed of in the cold light of day, it is uncomfortable to think of myself not in control of my actions. Am I really getting on with it, but much more drunkenly than usual, while the alcohol destroys the brain cells that record the memory of events? Or does another part of my consciousness take over while I am out of action – if so who is this version of me and where is he when I’m sober? More likely, but no more comforting, is the idea that excessive drinking leads to a form of anterograde amnesia – a state whereby you are unable to retain information so that you can still utilise skills you have learnt and can remember things before the amnesia took hold (usually due to brain injury), but anything that you experience afterwards is lost to your long term memory (most famously the basis for Christopher Nolan’s Memento).
Obviously in the case of binge drinking the effects are only temporary, with the ability to retain experience returning after the alcoholic influence subsides, but the idea that you can lose memory so utterly is disquieting.
Memory is ultimately the backbone of your very personality, formed as you are from the experiences and interpersonal exchanges that you build up over time – without these the ‘you’ that you take for granted when performing even the most cursory self reference as you look in the mirror in the morning would simply cease to be. You can lose snatches of it and still retain your essential self; but lose the lot and you are dead in mind if not in body. I find the physical connection between brain tissue and memory, and therefore the physical body and consciousness, to be the strongest argument against the popular idea of the immortal soul or reincarnation. Should the soul exist, it very well may ‘live’ on after your body dies, but once your brain is gone your consciousness goes with it – the ‘you’ that is reading and processing these words right now will cease to exist, which kind of makes the idea that you will meet your loved ones in heaven impossible – if brain damage can potentially destroy any memory you had of a husband or wife and a decades-long marriage, there’s no hope of retaining that information beyond the flesh and into the ethereal.

Arm me with harmony

2009-09-07T21:16:00.011+01:00

My hunt for soft drinks continues.
Resigning myself to the fact that there is no adequate vanilla cola substitute out there, I still find myself as a night person with a normal nine to five job. This means a certain amount of sleep deprivation that can only be controlled by liberal ingestion of caffeine. As I’m not a proper grown up I don’t drink tea or coffee and so have to rely on fizzy pop alternatives. Red Bull is the obvious choice, its 250ml cans packing the punch of two filter coffees, but this concentration is sometimes a bit much so the next best thing is the 330ml cans of coke and the like, which carry about the same as a cup of tea.
There aren’t that many soft drinks besides cola that actually contain caffeine, and being a drippy ethical sort I’m not comfortable with blissfully quaffing away at the products of the Coke and Pepsico mega corps who aren’t exactly squeaky clean.

The A.G. Barr soft drink company has apparently been around since 1875, is based in Scotland and is arguably most famous for Irn Bru. Irn Bru and Coke regularly fight over the top spot as Scotland's soft drink of choice, but as far as I can tell Barr don’t indulge in any overtly unethical business practises, you know, like condoning the murder of trade unionists.
Thus I was simultaneously pleased to find that I had a taste for that bright orange brew made from girders, and dismayed that the diet variety is pretty hard to come by round these parts. Two litre bottles are found in the odd supermarket but aren’t ideal for a desk-based drink at work, and so far I’ve only found cans in my local shop over the road. For a medium sized cornershop their selection is pretty comprehensive, and not only do they have the cheapest vanilla Stolichnya I’ve seen but also a fairly wide variety of Barr’s other products.

Barr Cola seemed an obvious choice; where would it sit in the cola pantheon?
The smell hits you as soon as the brew pours into the glass – the cola qualities are all there and not dissimilar from Coke itself. A sniff taken from the rim of the glass gives more of a hint of that cola bottle, chewy sweet scent, though. The froth builds quickly and rides high once the liquid hits the glass, but it’s very short lived and soon settles down to a mostly calm, slightly bubbling state.
It’s a very odd taste sensation. Despite being a full-sugar version, it’s not especially cloying, but somehow there is no taste in the meat of the gulp. It is almost as if you are drinking water with a cola lining, the taste seems to be contained in only the outermost edges of the liquid mass that you decant into your maw. The lack of that cloying feel is echoed in the viscosity; Barr’s Cola slips down very easily (probably due to the aforementioned lack of density in carbonation).
Whilst not particularly tasty, this could become a regular alternative to Coke, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be available in a sugar-free variety so is no good to me.

Then there’s Ka, the ‘sparkling Karibbean Kola flavoured drink’. That label design doesn’t exactly inspire me with confidence.
A lot less fizz than Barr’s simply titled Cola on the initial pour, but it settles in the same way moments later. The smell isn’t as obvious on twisting open the bottle, but at the rim of the glass its bouquet betrays a definite citrus element. There’s fruit in there somewhere.
It just tastes weird. Not very cola-like at all, the fruit seems like some hybrid mix of berry and melon. Is this really “A Taste of the Caribbean”? As with the Barr Cola it only seems to be available in a sugared variety, but like Barr Cola it also is not cloying and slips down smoothly. Again it’s quite a pleasant little concoction but my tooth rot fear precludes me from making it my drink of choice. Besides that, caffeine is not even listed as ingredient, so it becomes even more redundant for me. Still, it’s not the hideous Panda cola-esque abomination that the packaging design might have you believe.

As for Irn Bru itself? Just like the other Barr drinks, the fizz settles down early on, leaving a few bubbles to make for the surface, but on taking a sip you find that there is still a fair amount of fizz present. Whilst it still goes down as smooth as Ka and Barr’s Cola, a lot of gulping in quick succession is going to leave you in danger of rather plosive belching.
The odour has a pleasant fruitiness to it, echoed in the taste that has a definite citrus tang, leaning heavily toward oranges. It makes for a much lighter and refreshing alternative to Red Bull, which seems deeply entrenched within its artificial nature. At least Irn Bru has the good grace to disguise this.
Whilst neither of the Barr colas had ingredients out of the ordinary, Irn Bru does have one thing as a point of difference – ammonium ferric citrate (0,002%), which is presumably where the Irn comes from. Essentially the compound serves as an acidity regulator, so it would be interesting to know if this is an industry standard or serves to add to Irn Bru’s uniqueness. Presumably the standard ‘acidity regulator’ description would be used if the actual type was unimportant?

It’s interesting how certain urban myths are perpetrated and why. Was the MMR jab scare of a couple of years ago down to a slow news week or was there another agenda at stake? The vilification of sweeteners used in some soft drinks is another unsubstantiated rumour that is now taken as read in the same way that most people believe that the Godzilla remake is rubbish even if they’ve not seen it (and I am one of that number).
The article linked below aims to look at how you can dig deeper into the background of a website to try and ascertain its worth as a source, and it just so happens to cover one of the stories that spread about the artificial sweetener Aspartame. It has been cited as the cause for any number of conditions, but as yet none of these have been backed by any sort of scientific research or evidence, and yet it remains one of those common misconceptions – that diet soft drinks are bad for you; the sweeteners cause brain tumours; they can cause cancer; carbonated drinks rot tooth enamel.
Caffeine is about the only exception that has documented effects on health, and yet those who cry foul on diet sodas are likely to be coffee or tea drinkers themselves.

Are soft drinks evil?

I am fail

2009-08-22T13:09:00.004+01:00

I've always wanted to be a writer (after muppeteer), but since my late teens I've felt that my imagination had dried up and died, and I had no stories to tell. This lack of ability for fiction didn't stop me wanting to get into criticism, particularly of film, but with a lack of effort on my part and a very limited opportunity to make a living it will take a massive amount of will power to take that road.
In the meantime, as I ambled along with a bit of criticism thrown out here and there on various websites and my own blog, I was introduced to the idea of the 'drabble' by friends. Essentially an exercise in focus and restraint, it is a short story contained within exactly one hundred words and it seems like an ideal format to try and come up with and use ideas without being daunted by the idea of a novel or even a short story. Unfortunately it's a lot harder to fit ideas into one hundred words coherently, and the below is an example of overspill.

-

Of course it was ironic. She couldn't envisage actually telling people
about this, assuming that she even survived.
After years of panic and worry due to her phobia of air travel, Sally had given in to her desire to see new cultures and more of the world. Trains and coaches across Europe and Western Russia, and the brief visits to Northern Africa via ferries across the Med had only exacerbated her desire for adventure, rather than extinguishing it.
Three weeks ago she boarded a frieght vessel at Southampton, thanks to months of wrangling and a sympathetic captain who had a pteromechanophobic wife. They set off along the West coast of Africa, rounded Cape Agulhas and made their way across the Indian Ocean en route to Bangladesh. Sea travel agreed with her, the rythmic lurching of the vessel and the salty whip of the air raised her spirits; she looked forward to seeing India, the Far East and on into the Pacific.
It wasn't pirates that did for them in the end. The ship had been old and rickety,
and whilst this had added to the charm of the voyage in her eyes, the tornadoes that hit were the worst in three decades, and the ship broke up before the night was out.
She didn't remember how she came to leave the ship, whether she made one of the life boats or hit the water, when she fell unconscious. All she knew was the here and now - the bright, cloudless sky, the small island of rock and sand, so tiny she could see the entire perimeter from where she sat.
The boxes washed up from the ship, damp not just from the sea but from the slow melt of their contents. Part of the cargo had been a large number of pudding items from one of the UK's premium luxury food producers, kept frozen on board and destined for the tables of India's burgeoning upper middle class.
A dessert island.

Mr. Funny Shoes

2009-07-03T22:33:00.006+01:00

In the run up to the August 2007 release of Bioshock the game and its developers received a large amount of positive press, highlighting not only a new direction for the now mainstream First Person Shooter, but also a game that was seemingly steeped in ideas regardless of gaming genre.
The setting itself was a breath of air as fresh to the FPS as it would be stale and salty within Rapture itself. Whilst to this day many stable mates don't dare to venture beyond the well-trodden path of the space marine (see Gears of War, Fracture etc.) or WW2 soldier, the idea of an underwater utopia based on the principles of free markets and the stimulation of art and science is a large departure in and of itself, let alone envisioning this fleetingly proud city sliding into corruption and decay, and resulting in a mini eco-system consisting of psychopathic gene-altering survivors, sinister little girls who harvest corpses for valuable genetic-altering material (Adam) and their protectors, the hulking, diving-suited Big Daddies.

The aesthetic choice of the setting is interesting as it is firmly rooted in the ‘Golden Age’ of 1950s Americana, possibly the one period in which the US could lay claim to its own unique cultural stylings as in the centuries before World War 2, fashion, architecture and so on were heavily influenced by the myriad cultures that emigrated there, whilst from the 60s onward North American culture became more and more pervasive globally, leading to an inevitable dip in individuality as it became ever more ubiquitous. It is likely not a coincidence that one of the more aesthetically striking games in the short time since Bioshock achieved critical and commercial acclaim is Fallout 3, set in a post-apocalyptic 1950’s influenced America.
To be fair much of the architecture in Rapture itself is based on earlier movements, but the atmosphere of the 50s in terms of behaviour and dress is undeniable.

Aside from the visual stylings, the influence of Ayn Rand and Objectivism is central to the conceit of Bioshock’s world, and explicit in the naming of Rapture’s founder Andrew Ryan, whilst the setting is ripped straight from Atlas Shrugged with a character named Atlas supposedly leading the resistance against Ryan’s rule and Rapture itself peopled with ‘great minds’ invited by Ryan to a retreat beneath the ocean (rather than into the mountains of the novel). Laissez-faire capitalism is implicitly blamed as the root of the breakdown of the fledgling society as no one oversees the rampant research into gene technology or stops the populace from abusing it before possible consequences are understood. Objectivism is echoed in the ideas of freedom of choice and action and character progression within a scripted medium - is the man asking 'would you kindly?' and giving you the illusion of choice similar to the game programmer giving, via interaction, the illusion of choice that the audience does not get from more passive mediums such as film, music and literature?

After the integral philosophical and cultural influences on the game (the fact that it had any was a cause for celebration in itself), much was made of the moral choices that would be presented to the player on arrival within Rapture. Essentially this boiled down to your choice of whether to "harvest" (read: murder) the little sisters for their Adam, or save them from their apparently benign co-existent relationship with the Big Daddies. You could usually decide to opt for neither and leave them to their own devices as they wandered the sub-aquatic halls, but both options resulted in rewards to power up your plasmids (gene-alterations that work in the same way as magic, basically).

On reading all of the preview articles, I got an impression that the idea of freedom of choice was rather more free than it actually turned out – on my first encounter with a (gene) splicer, bent over a baby carriage and sobbing, I thought that I might have the opportunity to talk with the character, to perhaps try and appeal to reason rather than violence. But the choice not to fight is never an option (unsurprisingly as your avatar sticks to the usual FPS convention of being mute).
The chance to decide whether to be 'good' or 'bad' has long been present in RPGs, with varying degrees of subtlety, and has been extant on console iterations of the genre for years, with the most widely-known examples being in the two Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic games and in the first Fable on the Xbox.
Being presented as the 'crucial' moral choice of harvesting in Bioshock rather overstated the matter, especially as the consequences of being the good guy and foregoing the power ups gained through murder were rather mitigated by getting gifts of power ups for being so gosh darned nice.

Regardless of the promises unfulfilled, Bioshock remains one of the high points in the evolution of the FPS since it began around seventeen years ago, standing alongside such greats as the Half Life series, mainly down to the attention to detail in creating an immersive world within which the well-honed point and shoot game mechanics could be enjoyed.
It will be interesting to see where they go with Bioshock 2 now that the ‘shock twist’ or Rapture’s story has been used and similar limited quandaries about freedom of choice and morality ultimately won’t have the same impact second time around. Making you the prototype Big Daddy smacks of the usual trend for sequels to have more and bigger bangs, but even if the new iteration follows the usual sequel formula it will still be refreshing to revisit Rapture after so many urban warzones, Normandy landings and bug hunts.

A real boy

2009-05-30T17:55:00.009+01:00

Released by Manga Entertainment to capitalise on the theatrical distribution of Casshern (the live action version of the story), Casshan is a remake of the 1973 TV series of the same name, which was created in the first place to replace the hugely popular Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (a.k.a. Battle of the Planets).
The similarities are noticeable in the design of Casshan’s helmet, as well as his robot dog that also handily transforms into some sort of jet.

Though released much later than Manga’s initial flurry of self-consciously ‘adult’ releases of the early nineties (it was released in the UK on October 31st, 2005), Casshan very much fits in with the sketchy quality of those titles.
Featuring a dated art style, re-use of animation sequences (common in TV productions) and fairly generic enemy design, with robots having a biomechanical appearance similar to the enemies seen in everything from Blue Gender to Beet the Vandal Buster, Casshan is guilty of numerous anime stereotypes; there is even the obligatory shower scene for the female character. Whilst many 80s horror films utilise the shower scene in order to promise a little nudity and appeal to the target male adolescent audience further, at least the exploitation is in keeping with the theme of the films – the woman is rendered even more vulnerable when naked to whichever nasty is offing people in the film. In anime, however, the shower scene rarely benefits from even a hint of context (Vampire Hunter D is an example that springs to mind).

So far, so-so. The plot involves robots taking over and at war with the humans, Casshan being humanity’s last hope as he is able to take the robots one-on-one. You’ve got a recurring anime theme of the protagonist being created or having a companion created for them by their usually absent, genius scientist of a father – in this case the father Dr. Azuma is responsible for creating the android leader of the robot army, as well as the suit with which his son Tetsuya melds himself to become Casshan (in a scene echoing that of Cronenberg’s Fly transporter).
As Casshan is now an android, we have scenes that briefly touch on what it means to be human, particularly as Tetsuya’s old girlfriend (she of the human resistance and random shower scene) insists that he still has a human spirit. This is an idea that crops up regularly in anime, particularly in Ghost In the Shell but originally in Osamu Tezuka’s Astroboy, where Astroboy is created by Dr. Tenma to replace his son Tobio who was killed in a car crash. Tezuka (often dubbed the godfather of anime) was in turn inspired by the 1883 story of Pinocchio, where Geppetto is the character who would become the mad scientist in Shelley’s Frankenstein and then reappear over and over again within the sci-fi genre.

The standard military fatigues of the soldiers emphasise the ridiculous costume that Casshan's love interest wears.

Fascist imagery crops up throughout, from kaiser-style pointy helmets to this Nuremberg rally scene.

Despite Casshan’s mediocrity, it is worth a watch if only for the commentary by Jonathan Clements, co-author of the anime encyclopaedia and a man who knows his stuff. Not only does he touch on the themes I previously mentioned, but he sets the context of the original story – not just the desire for a Gatchaman replacement but the social and political context of an early 70s Japan. Internally the country was experiencing the terrorist attacks of the Red Army who sought to overthrow the political conventions in society, in much the same way as the Baader Meinhoff Group in Germany and the Weather Underground in the US. Externally the Cold War was at a peak but Japan was left without the benefit of identifying with either super power involved in the threat of nuclear apocalypse.
As well as this he sets the scene for the creators of the remake – not just the practical limitations of a production for TV before digital animation became widespread, but the wider circumstances of the early 90s, which led to scenes influenced by the Gulf war and the Japanese economic collapse.
Whilst the commentary doesn’t improve the anime itself, it makes for much more interesting viewing and helps give further grounding in the history of anime itself – any Clements commentary is worth a listen and it is genuinely worthwhile seeking out the Manga releases on which his commentary tracks feature, regardless of the quality of the particular title.

The use of Christian imagery for aesthetic purposes in early 90s anime (see Judge and more famously, Neon Genesis Evangelion) is touched on by Clements.

The hand that feeds

2009-05-16T19:24:00.021+01:00

To start with, a refresher into my cola coverage to which this handy link will direct you:
http://oneinchlunch.blogspot.com/search?q=vanilla+coke

My search for a Vanilla Diet Coke alternative has been fruitless, but it has led to a mini soft drink adventure, the latest leg of which is now before your very eyes.

Fentiman’s botanically brewed Traditional Curiosity Cola smells like cola bottle sweets, and the initial taste is the similar but with a hint of the plant extracts that have been used – there is definitely a faint ginger hint. Oddly, after this first hit the liquid is curiously tasteless. It is a clean brew, however, going down easily and leaving no unpleasant aftertaste. There’s nothing wrong with it at all, but there just isn’t enough there to inspire any overwhelming affection. This cola is not excessively fizzy, but there’s enough of a kick to provide at least one satisfactory belch.

Ingredients are listed as: “Fermented ginger root extract, carbonated water, sugar, catuaba extract, gurana extract, caramel (E150), phosphoric acid (E338), cola flavour 9594 (flavouring), caffeine.”
I’ve encountered these before, apart from catuaba, which is a bark extract that according to Wiki is used in aphrodisiacs and remedies for erectile dysfunction…I’ve been unable to find any mention of flavouring 9594 so far.
Most interesting is the label stating that it contains “not more than 0.5% alcohol by vol.”, which makes me wonder if it’s flagged as an alcoholic beverage to retailers (as it tends to be stocked with soft drinks) and what the legality is of selling this concentration of alcohol to under 18s…

The bottle itself is a satisfying product, evoking the old-school charm of the era that calling something a ‘curiosity cola’ tries to conjure up.

Not entirely sure why there is a Star of David on the underside of the cap.

Still, the presentation is subservient to the taste, and as the taste is very minor in the grand scheme of cola I doubt I’ll be returning to Fentiman’s, particularly as it only comes in a sugared variety and my dentists are becoming progressively unreliable, so I’d like to avoid any visits beyond periodic check-ups.

Having said that, I’m prepared to take the risk this once in order to continue the cola investigation, toothpaste and mouthwash are not far away.
For the sake of detail fetishists I am rinsing the glass thoroughly in between to prevent taste contamination.

The can is so busy it is hard to work out what this is meant to be called, so we’ll go for Whole Earth Sparkling Delicious Cola.
The line below this is “Drink made with a dash of organic lemon!”, which surely should be preceded by “A”, otherwise the name is ridiculously long.
The front of the can also has “Nutty cola nut” with an arrow pointing to the top of the can, and “Whole Earth organic drinks are 100% delicious” and “And mase with bubble-licious sparking H20!” situated either side of the Whole Earth logo.
The initial impression is one of design by committee, too many cooks as it were, the can front being so cluttered it almost seems like a prototype design with all of the product features displayed at once accidentally made it to production, with so many cans manufactured that it was prohibitively expensive to scrap them.
In comparison to the back, however it seems sparse, with all the information barely squeezing in the available space.
To be fair, the ingredients are presented in four languages, which at least explains the abundance of text.
“Sparkling water, organic agave syrup, organic lemon juice from concentrate (2%), barley malt extract, natural flavouring, cola nut extract. Contains barley and gluten.”

"Natural flavouring" is clearly not descriptive enough, but we can only assume that it doesn’t represent a health concern. Cola nut contains caffeine, which itself is a flavouring, so it could be referring to caffeine. Agave syrup comes from the agave plants native to Mexico and are used as an alternative to sugar in cooking, so that’s the sugar substitute.

After the first pour it seems that the Whole Earth has a good deal more carbonation, but on introducing the nose over the lip of the glass it is an effort to try and draw forth an odour from the drink. There is a very slight fruitiness, more cherry than citric despite the mention of lemon on the front, but as I said this smell is hard to come by.
The taste itself is very bizarre, a fruit flavoured cola with massive emphasis on the fruit, and yet not like any fruit you have tasted.
The lemon is definitely there, and there is a syrupiness that you associate with colas, although the traditional cola taste is barely evident. It’s almost like a carbonated fruit drink for people who don’t like fruit and like their drinks brown. And organic. And Vegan. And not very carbonated, despite how it looked after the first pour.

What with the Whole Earth cola being so right-on and Fentiman’s being ‘botanically brewed’, it’s not a huge surprise to find one of the major players catching up to the bandwagon, with the introduction to the market of Pepsi Raw.

Whilst not as aesthetically pleasant as the Fentiman’s bottle, Pepsi’s Raw bottle is nicely streamlined with wibbly lines around its lower half. It’s a shame that the labelling is literally that, a clear label rather than something etched or blown into the glass itself, but I imagine that the ingredient details would be hard to produce en masse via etching. Going for the pop-top rather than the screw-on of the Fentiman’s, it’s heartening to see the Pepsi logo is off-centre – an unfortunate accident or a design decision in order to fir with the ‘organic’ nature of Raw?

The pour gives an impressive head, threatening to escape the confines of the hiball, but the odour is an unpleasant extremely earthy smell, very much reminiscent of the Red Bull Cola aftertaste. That same aftertaste is there in the Raw, too, the bitter earthiness is present in the sip but comes out more strongly after the swallow, and there don’t seem to be any other flavours to offset this. The kola nut is said to be bitter and that is certainly evident here, the cane sugar and caramel flavouring only offering weaker support tones to the acrid and musty kola nut taste, with a hint of the bitterness of coffee beans.

In contrast to the Whole Earth can, the Raw bottle is clean and simple in design, with the text white on the clear glass and taking up little of the bottle surface. It would have been good if they had left the RDA indicator (sugars: 28.8g or 32% of an adult’s daily maximum) round the back, but quite a lot of room is taken up with the barcode.
The ingredients list reveals “Sparkling water, cane sugar, apple extract, colour: plain caramel, natural plant extracts (including natural caffeine and kola nut extract), citric, tartaric and lactic acids, stabiliser: gum arabic and thickener: xanthan gum.”
The apple extract comes as a surprise as it’s very hard to detect, but on reading the Times article about the drinks launch (apparently UK only to begin with): http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/article3353735.ece
we find that coffee leaf is one of the ingredients, so presumably the source of the “natural caffeine”, which helps explain the final taste.
The Times reports that with the introduction of Raw, Pepsi hopes to gain ground over Coke, and that they have not introduced any new drinks for ten years. The Times isn’t clear whether it is talking domestically or internationally, as according to Wiki Pepsi Jazz was introduced in 2006.
The official Pepsi Raw site also goes into a little more detail about the ingredients (tartaric acid is found in grapes), but it’s strange that the Pepsi Company has decided to tap into this market. I would imagine that the demographic who actively seek out organic produce includes a significant proportion who would avoid products from dubious multinational corporations. The fact that it tastes worse than its equivalents really does it no favours. When it’s touch and go as to whether you are preferable to Red Bull Cola you probably need to take a long, hard look at yourself.

Last up is a variation on the daddy of colas, good old Coke itself.
Now, I know this looks like Coke Zero, which isn’t new to anyone now. Especially not me, after I first tried it out back before the swaggering-cock adverts that brought it to the nation’s attention.

It’s actually Kosher Coke Zero. Yes indeed.

As you can see, it builds up froth just as you would expect normal, ‘artificial’ colas to, though not to the extreme as Raw.
It smells as you would expect Coke Zero would do, sweet in an unnatural way, with that very subtle metallic hint underlying it all that reveals the move from the Diet Coke taste towards that of the full sugar variety.
It tastes as you would expect Coke Zero to, too, somewhere between Coke and its Diet brother, not quite as sharp and bloody as the former but not as sweet and light as the latter. To be fair this does taste ever so slightly closer to Diet than normal Zero does, but not so much that you’d notice if you weren’t sitting and drinking different colas all day.

I’m not entirely sure what makes it kosher.
The ingredient list doesn’t bring much enlightenment: “Water, Carbon-Dioxide, Caramel color (E150d), Edible Phosphoric acid, Sweeteners: Aspartame* and Acesulfame-K, Flavours, Acidity regulator: Lemon Salt (E331), Caffeine. *Contains a source of phenylalanine.”
I’ve included the capitalisation and bold type over from the label.
It appeared in my local Sainsbury’s during Passover and once that ended, they reduced their remaining kosher Coke and Zero stocks.
The ingredients are normal, no surprises there as even lemon salt or E331 is just another name for citric acid.
As none of the ingredients in themselves pose no particular problem, there must be something different in the method of production and/or preparation that renders this particular drink kosher, perhaps ensuring there are no leavening products in the factory where the Coke is produced.

I have learnt that Vanilla Coke is still available in the US, with a Zero version rather than Diet. Unfortunately Cyber Candy, the junk food importers, only lists full-sugar Vanilla style for sale.

My search continues…

I'm not the gay.

2009-05-11T20:14:00.007+01:00

Hilarious. If Rambo 4 could possibly be read as a audience-baiting challenge for people who enjoy action films, Crank 2 is the ultimate action movie as comedy, taking the piss out of action movie violence itself rather than attempting to inject humour via characters whilst keep the action straight (see Pineapple Express) or lampooning the genre.

The Crank films recognise that the very idea of action movies are ridiculous, and throw the improbably named Chev Chelios into one insane situation after another, maintaining a breakneck pace via a McGuffin which sees our man Chev having to race about a nondescript and dirty-looking Los Angeles, this time around trying to juice up his newly installed artificial heart so that he can last long enough to get them what done this.
Statham is excellent as the unapologetically cockney hardman, the frequent swearing fitting perfectly with the sketchy character whilst managing not to become a grating cartoon (there is something meaty in the way that he spits out a throwaway “Cunt!” at the body of a henchman, in the manner of another bullet fired in anger at daring to slow Chelios down as he chases the guy what he thinks done this). Maintaining a deadpan demeanour throughout succeeds in convincing us of his character within an unconvincing world of inane caricatures, creating a friction that racks up the laughs, albeit hysterical ones.

The nearest comparison I can think of is to the films of Takashi Miike. The unreasonably prolific director varies wildly in the quality of his output, but with such a large number of releases this makes for a favourable number of hits. The common aspect that unites his films is that they rarely ever stick to the genre. Mostly working for the Japanese straight-to-retail market (the Hollywood equivalent would be the fetid production houses that help Wesley Snipes pay off his tax debts), Miike is in the position that would usually be filled by hacks, churning out solid but predictable B pictures with low budgets. Instead, Miike takes the genre staples as the bare bones of a framework, and drapes them in the flesh of what sometimes resembles the aftermath of a nuclear attack on an ideas factory.

Of recent entries into the Western action picture, Taken is a good example of the usual high-water mark. It is solid with well-shot action set pieces, convincing fights and a generally lean plot that serves as a means to get to the meat of the picture. Whilst it is good at what it does, Taken doesn’t vary from the blueprint of the one-man army actioner and is remarkable mainly for Liam Neeson taking the starring role.
The Transporter films, also starring Jason Statham, follow the formula too, with smatterings of decent fight sequences, car chases and the odd explosion filling out the most basic excuses for plots. On the whole they perform their jobs well, taking the time and effort to produce quality set-pieces that you would expect from an action film, but again they don’t try and do any more than this.

It’s not that Crank 2 doesn’t know its limitations – it is keenly aware of its status as an action movie and the stereotypes and genre trappings that come with the territory. Whilst accepting that it is only meant to go from A to B, it decides that there’s no reason that it can’t do that the long way round, by launching into orbit before landing smack back down to earth in a pink monster truck.
Similar to the first film, Crank 2 is cram-packed full of stylistic bells and whistles, including 8-bit video game graphics, 80s style talk show interludes (in the vein of Trisha), split-screen, animated still shots, slo-mo and fast-mo and an Ultraman/Godzilla style tokusatsu fight.
Not without its faults (worst of which is the casting decision for the young Chev – surely they could have dubbed a better voice in later?) Crank 2 gets by due to sheer force of will coupled with an absolute barrage of ideas – whilst borrowing Miike’s method of taking something pedestrian and coating it in bat-shit craziness, it also uses his working method of putting out so many ideas that for every dud there are two gems.
Not only did I want to carry on with Chev as the film ended, I’d quite happily see it again soon as it’s the kind of disposable but highly entertaining film that deserves repeat viewings.
It would be a little premature to hail 2009 as the year of the Stat, what with the release of Stallone’s action-fan wet dream, The Expendables, next year, but I have the feeling that it will be hard to match the inventiveness of the Crank films in a production packed with so much muscle I can’t even think of an adequate jokey comment.
Even if he is going to be called Lee Christmas.

Under the influence

2009-03-13T23:33:00.007Z

Some people who know me are aware that I lament the passing of Vanilla Diet Coke. To some it was an insignificant blip in the history of the soft drink, but to me it was the culmination in sweet, unholy goodness. Ever since I first supped the dubious alcopop sensation that may have been called barcode after purchasing said from a North Finchley off license, I have subconsciously sought the sweet nectar of blended cream soda.
In this instance however, I was aware that there was little chance of re-living my past beverage highs, as Red Bull hardly has the tastiest pedigree.

Red Bull Cola. Many would think this a very bad idea.

As you can see, the reverse is jam-packed with information, a ream of text identifying each of the ingredients that help to form this concoction.

Anyone who has gone to the trouble of actually decanting Red Bull from its aluminium resting place will be familiar with the garish orange/yellow appearance of the stuff, a hue not usually found in nature aside from the urine of the unwell. For their cola variety the Red Bull company has wisely decided to go with the traditional brown colouring, but unfortunately the ancestry of this beverage makes itself known, the brown shade is highly influenced by orange and results in a look which speaks of a dubious bitter or perhaps a foul herbal tincture from a ‘natural high’ shop. Which I suppose is fitting.

Initial pouring finds that the concentration of carbonation seems to be higher than that of most colas, the frothy head building quickly and quite high, and persisting for a considerable amount of time. Once the froth has subsided, however, the liquid seems a touch flat, as if the fizz is mainly there for effect rather than for the experience.

The Red Bull Cola odour reminds me of Panda cola and other cheap copies of the cola formula, a rung or two below supermarket own brands and containing a cloying sweetness that smells highly artificial from within a soft drink class that is already steeped in artifice.
However, there is a fruity undercurrent which links this to the strange smell and taste of its older sibling, Red Bull itself, whose signifiers include a fruitiness that accompanies the unnatural, almost overbearing sweetness of the brew.

The taste is an odd one. In a move away from that of Red Bull, and towards that of cola, the drink somehow manages to cancel both out rather than finding a mutual meeting ground, and combined with the flatness of the liquid it makes for an unsatisfying experience. The hint of the Panda cola smell is there in taste too, but is now joined by the more prominent feature of cola bottles, again known for the feel of artifice when compared to most cola brands, let alone the Coke and Pepsi giants.
Worse than this is the earthy aftertaste that you really don’t associate with the cola style of soft drink.

The can claims it consists of 100% natural sources and natural caffeine, as if that makes it less of a drug.
“Sugar, C02, caramel sugar syrup, natural flavourings from plant extracts, galangai, vanilla, mustard seeds, caffeine from coffee beans, lime kola nut, cocoa, liquorice, cinnamon, lemon, ginger, coca leaf, orange, corn mint, pine, cardamom, mace, clove; lemon juice concentrate.”

Nice to know that it’s no less ‘dangerous’ than a sugary coffee, but as you can imagine all of those natural flavours together don’t necessarily make for a good taste.

One Day as a Lion

2009-03-07T11:49:00.007Z

A few years ago I got my second tattoo.
On my right shoulder is an eight-pointed cross, with arrowheads at the tips, and a red circle at the centre with tendrils snaking along each branch of the cross.

Back when One Minute Silence, a British rap/metal ish band with heavy political convictions, were still together, I was part of their online message board, chatting rubbish and having debates about politics with other fans. We met up a few times, had days out and went to some of the OMS gigs together, which were infamous for their audience involvement - the OMS mosh pits were brutal, but fair. There was a bunch of dedicated fans who were fixtures in the London metal scene from the late 90s onwards, the pit crew, who used to police the mosh, creating an atmosphere where you could happily decide whether you wanted to just stand and jig a bit at the very front, back or sides of a venue, or get into the mosh proper and slam into people, get slung about and get involved in the 'wall' and 'circle' that may not have been invented by the pit crew, but certainly rarely happened in London gigs without them. Bigger gigs included inflatable hammers, human pyramids and once the pipes on the ceiling of the Borderline where destroyed, leading to OMS getting banned from Mean Fiddler venues for an unspecified period.
One of the people I met from the board was a tattooist in training. He had already finished some pieces on friends and had a fair bit of his own work on himself. At this point, maybe 2001/2002, I had already got a tattoo of the biohazard symbol on my back, between my shoulder blades, and I asked this guy to do the cross for me. He came round to my place one sunny afternoon and did it in my front room with the whole kit in a bag - fresh needles, sterilisation equipment, rubber gloves, the machines and inks. Like many of the fans we have drifted apart since the band split up and the message board was closed down.

The tattoo itself has faded, but that's no reflection on his work. At the time I still worked at HMV, and the nature of unloading vans and carrying armloads of stock meant I wasn't as careful as I should have been, and some of the scabs were knocked off before healing properly. I've meant to get it reworked for years and I might nearly have built the momentum to actually get around to it - I did plan on visiting a tattoist in Islington this weekend, but they are closed due to a convention in Manchester so I'll have to keep the momentum going in my head.

The symbol itself I think I first saw when I was maybe twelve or thirteen. I'd never liked sports and did my best to get out of that kind of thing at school - when I succeeded I hung around the upstairs of the school sports hall with friends who had similar ideas, and to pass the time some of us played Warhammer, the table top war games from Games Workshop. One of the factions besides straight good and evil was chaos, and the symbol and idea behind it appealed to me; pointing in every direction at once, you can't be certain of anything.

Here is one of the original designs, currently at home on the web as part of the hubbub for the release of the Warhammer Online MMORPG, which hopes to go up against World of Warcraft.

And here is my own version, permanently etched into my flesh.

It serves as a reminder to me that change is the only constant in life. No matter how good or bad things are, they will not stay the same, so equally there is no point to give in to despair, nor should you take anything for granted. That mindset has helped me get through the hard parts of life I've gone through so far, and it's helped me to appreciate every little thing that makes life brighter, from a hug with a friend, a walk through a park and hot and cold running water to the more traditionally appreciated things like a great night out or the excitement of a first kiss.

The reason I've not kept up with the scribbling here is that I've thrown myself into my new freedom. After the end of my old life, and after coming out the other side, I've jumped with both feet into this city, trying to eat up everything it has to offer that looks like it tastes good, and since the beginning of 2009 either with dates, family or friends, I've been out for 38 of the last 65 days. Little wonder I'm not getting enough sleep.
But right now all my problems are good problems, losing sleep due to too much to do is preferable to it being due to wanker neighbours, for example, and last night the comic Adam Bloom asked how old I was and then went on to say how I looked the same age as another guy in the audience who he though was 23 (he was 25). At thirty this is a hell of a compliment and it helps me believe that I can make up for lost time.

Maybe I won't keep up the pace that I've started this year with, but at this rate I'll certainly have fun trying, and before the year is out I aim to add to my tattoo collection and get the question mark inked on me that I've wanted for 14 years.
If anyone has seen interesting question mark designs in their travels, drop me a link, I'm open to suggestions.

The weekend never starts round here

2008-11-23T01:39:00.017Z

I never really think of myself as a music buff, or even a music lover. Compared to my obsessions with movies and games, music seems to take a back seat as I rarely seek out anything new and have bought very little in the last few years.

Thinking back to my childhood, though, it seems a very different story.

I believe the first single I ever bought was Turtle Power, the movie tie-in song on a cassette from Woolworths in Cricklewood (long since closed). It was a bizarre rap-lite concoction, and I think to my embarrassment that the first album I owned was either Bobby Brown’s ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ or Vanilla Ice’s ‘To the Extreme’, both second albums by artists who found fame as their style became fashionable, New Jack Swing taking hold around the time of Brown’s ‘My Prerogative’ being released, and Vanilla Ice cashing in on the novelty (s)hit single. Given the timeline it was probably Brown, but either way I stress that I was influenced by Top of the Pops, and was only about ten years old.

It was also Top of the Pops that set me upon a different path, however, after Iron Maiden’s ‘Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter’ reached number one and basically made me a Metaller, or Metalhead or whatever you want to call it. After that I got a leather jacket and started to grow my hair, and listened to everything from the obvious Metallica, Guns and Roses and Megadeth to lesser know acts like Pro Pain and Misery Loves co. A bunch of friends from school also shared an interested in music that was heavy and guitar based, and mostly thanks to them I hovered around the cutting edge of the scene, getting into the likes of Nirvana, Korn, Fear Factory, Incubus, Marilyn Manson, Tool and System of a Down either before they hit the big time, or before most people had ever heard of them.
I watched as the metal scene fragmented into even more little sub genres than the late 80s had to offer with the cock rock of Poison, stadium bollocks of Bon Jovi and thrash metal of Slayer and Metallica (pre-Black Album) to complement the more ‘bread and butter’ metal of Iron Maiden and Megadeth.
Rap and dance music started to have an influence, and things that had been around a while like punk split off in all directions, forming in that case a base for as diverse acts as Green Day, Pitchshifter and King Prawn.

I went to metal gigs and festivals and paraded around in baggy trousers, band t-shirts and hoodies (though it’s not hugely different now I’m 30), and have days worth of metal on my ipod even today, but it was never as simple as that.

Alongside the metal I was influenced by a number of sources. I remember furtively listening to NWA’s ‘Straight Outta Compton’at probably about 11 or 12, afraid my mum would hear it, and playing De La Soul’s ‘Three Feet High and Rising’ with considerably more volume.
This embarrassment at NWA was despite the fact that my mum was one of the biggest influences on my tastes, for it was her listening to New Jack Swing acts like R.Kelly and Warren G. that no doubt led to my Bobby Brown purchase, and it was her listening to Jungle on pirate radio as it first started to emerge in London that led to me becoming a big fan, and would lead to me twiddling through the FM band at the weekend, trying to find a station with a finger hovering over record so that I could listen to drum and bass as it was then, all Jamaican ragga and film samples set to deep, rumbling bass.
My predilection for dance music was always there, alongside all the other genres that vied for attention, and I wonder what would have happened if I were a bit older and had been a teen when Rave culture first started, rather than reaching 15 to find that the government had criminalised free raves with the Criminal Justice Act of 1994. I went to clubs and danced to trance music instead, before the shit they call trance in Ibiza was invented.

On the other hand, I was a working class kid from a post-industrial suburb, practically the inner city as far as North London’s concerned, but I went to a private secondary school with middle class kids who lived in the ‘proper’ suburbs, ones that had a postcode from a different county. This is probably a large ingredient in the reasoning as to why my tastes included white-boy guitar music as well as underground beats broadcast from tower blocks.

Indie was big too, and whilst I never read the NME like some of my more indie-centric school friends, I became a big fan of Select magazine and regularly took a chance on a band based on reviews in the mag.
As well as the emergence of metal variations like the downtuned metal of Korn and Deftones and the evolution of Jungle into Drum and Bass in the mid 90s, indie music enjoyed a big place in the spotlight with guitar based pop becoming fashionable again after a decade of synths. Blur, Pulp, Suede, Radiohead and dozens of others hit the big time, swirling around in tabloid celebrity culture despite being student music, usually a surefire way to stay out of the top end of the charts. Thus the Britpop phenomenon chugged along for a while and I was into that too, with sub-mutations all of its own as ‘indie’ and ‘dance’ merged and you had acts that were enjoyed by fans of all camps, like Orbital and Aphex Twin, and a rash of remixes bloated each and every release of a single.
And then you also had the emergence of Trip Hop, one of my favourite mini-genres, as Massive Attack furtively shuffled out of Bristol with Tricky, Portishead and my favourite Ruby following just behind.

Nowadays my musical discoveries are confined to the latest releases of the tried and trusted, stuff I happen to hear on a film soundtrack or similar, and new music of a broad hard-rock church thanks to a friend with a voracious appetite for new music within that hazy umbrella genre.
Because of this I feel like I’m not ‘into’ music anymore, but I guess you could say I was into it all ten years ago and I still haven’t finished with that yet.

Or it might be that I was musically Samson – since the late 90s there haven’t been any musical movements I’ve been inspired by. Bands yes, but bands all doing infinitesimal variations on what has gone before. Is it a coincidence that it was the late 90s that finally saw me cut my hair, after it tangled into a mass I couldn’t comb and I became fed up with it?
I’ve not been able to grow it long since, and my enthusiasm for new music has also stunted. The signs are there. Maybe someone put a hex on me?

CMB returns

2008-11-15T10:05:00.009Z

When I was younger I was known as the Cricklewood Monkey Boy. I was known for acting like a monkey, and I lived in Cricklewood.

I have lived in Cricklewood on and off all my life, with the odd year or so every now often spent in another part of London, but I keep coming back.
This time around it was to do with cheap rents and familiarity - having to move out at short notice didn't give me a lot of time to plan, so when I had no luck finding a place in my preferred areas I lumped for what I knew. I knew what the area was like, where everything was and all the transport routes, so given the choice of living in an unfamiliar area without the potential for saving any money, I came home.

The new flat is good, much better than flat minus one in that it is structurally sound - doors, walls and lights work, and extravagances such as the washing machine also function. Nice. Plus the advantage over the last flat is that I am in the top floor, and thus have no neighbours waking me up at three in the morning playing Guitar Hero. This is a very good thing and has manifested in a remarkable improvement in my sanity, no longer do I curse obscenities to the ceiling and wish unpleasant death on strangers.
I knew when I saw the place for the first time that there was no TV aerial, but I knew I could live without it. I rarely watch TV so the slightly wonky picture of an indoor aerial suits me fine.
What I didn't realise is that despite the fact there was a phone socket in the flat, this didn't mean I could assume that I could get a phone line. After dozens of phone calls to a number of landline suppliers, I found that my flat did not exist on their computer systems, and that meant that I could not have a line installed without first getting my flat to pop up in their drop-down boxes. It turns out that this will involve getting everyone in the building to fill in forms for the council and pay fees for the privilege of dwelling acknowledgment before I can even start the phone companies on installation and all the charges involved.
I gave up and decided to get mobile broadband, which also was nothing like straightforward after spending nearly two hours trying to set up an account with a phone company, only for my bank to block the 50p transactions that the phone company used to verify my address.

Still, a month on and it's all behind me now, I have a USB dongle which feeds me internet at frustratingly slow speeds, but at least I have access. And I've worked out how to re-save photos to a file size that the dongle will actually let me upload, so finally I present to you my new flat, the day after I moved in about five weeks ago:

This is the front room.

This is the kitchen.

FRONT ROOM IS KITCHEN!

Thankfully, I have a separate bedroom.

And the view from the front room. The building looming over the houses opposite is my old Primary school.

As I Live and Breathe

2008-11-10T18:43:00.005Z

Autumn has come around, after a brief respite from the abject failure of the British summer. Some warm, sunny days, unknown in Octobers past, have given way to the crisp chill and smell of leaves on the ground.

For me, the onset of autumn brings with it the London Film Festival and the chance for a taste of things that I might otherwise never see.
A lot of people are excited by the premieres and galas and star-studded extravaganzas that have been talked up for months beforehand, but with limited time and resources I much prefer to try and catch the little gems which may never get an official release in these green lands.
Anyone who has read one of the LFF programmes before will know that they, out of necessity, try and make every entry into the festival seem like a good bet for your time, regardless of the actual worth of the film. This makes picking a list of what to see a little more difficult, although realistically in these days of the ubiquitous internet it shouldn’t be too hard to dig up some opinion on a film, unless it is a world-wide premiere. At time of writing, however, I am without the net, with little prospect of getting it set up by November, if then.
So I have to use other means of narrowing the choices; known directors or actors are a start, meaning that I will be seeing Takeshi Kitano’s Achilles and the Tortoise this year, just as I would see anything by Takashi Miike (even though it meant I was once stuck watching the awful Izu). Another method of narrowing the field is to go for genre – a thriller or mad, revisionist western or cop film is more likely to be enjoyable, even if only average.
The most helpful part of the programme is the information on distributor – looking at any of the big names in the festival shows you who will be bringing them to our screens, large and small, once the festival is over. Frost/Nixon will be released by Universal Pictures International; W is brought to us by Lionsgate; Waltz with Bashir has been picked up by Artificial Eye; Che has been picked up by Optimum; Hunger by Pathe; Johnny Mad Dog by Momentum and Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist by Sony Pictures. Ideally, I’d like to see all of these, but rather than rush to fit them into the space of a few weeks sitting in a bad seat and packed into a sold-out screening, they will all come out at some point, a lot of them hopefully to Cineworld where I hold my handy pass.

The festival itself started on Wednesday 15th October with Frost/Nixon, but I was due to start on the Friday with a screening of The Secret, an Indonesian thriller which is meant to traverse genres in a way that the best of recent Korean cinema has managed to do.
Unfortunately I had mis-timed my screenings, and had gone to see Gomorra (on general release), which I expected to end at 8 and give me half an hour to walk to the South Bank from Haymarket. When I left the cinema it was 8:20 and I had no chance, a non-refundable ticket and nothing to do but go home and finish watching season five of The Wire. Not the end of the world, then.
Gomorra was an odd film, all crumbling, damp housing estates full of preening Italian gangsters as if this was the ruin of the second Roman empire. The setting is Naples, however, and there are no sharp suits to be found with this version of the mafia; rather the universal uniform of the hoodlum – sports clothing. Guns and drugs are the mainstay for crime, and these are found in abundance as we follow the day-to-day existence of the bottom rung of the Neopolitan mafia. As a gang war brings the world down around them, we follow a money-man, Don Ciro, who is the mafia equivalent of the social services, handing out a dole to families who are recognised as having helped the Family, usually by having a relative killed of imprisoned; two teens get up to no good after we first see them attempting to emulate Scarface in an abandoned mansion, we watch as they dig themselves deeper into trouble, ripping of dealers, stealing guns and all the while acting independently of any faction; a property developer seeks to get rich by taking on the waste disposal responsibilities of a number of Italian industries by dumping them into a quarry; a tailor gets into hot water after teaching Chinese clothes makers the techniques to produce haute couture; a young boy attempts to get himself into the gang and finds the downside to the relative glamour.
Gomorra is as blistering as La Haine but with no narrative to speak of it doesn’t attempt to hold the audience’s hand with signposts or other explanations. This helps to cement the realism of the film and at times it takes on a documentary feel. It certainly stands as a stark contrast to the experiences of British youths in their so-called ghettoes. The idea of stabbings over postcodes and being in the wrong manor seems even more ridiculous when compared to the Napoli estate, rife with crime and corruption to claustrophobic levels.

On Saturday I went to see Eagle Eye, also on general release. I had seen the trailer a number of times and had an idea of what to expect, specifically a paranoid techno-thriller along the lines of Enemy of the State, and whilst I hadn’t read any reviews I had seen some of the two star ratings it had been given. Still, it was technically free and seemed a better bet than How to Lose Friends and Alienate people, so in I went. I am about to tell you what happens, so if you really care please skip to the next bit.
The idea of ‘them’ being able to see and hear everything you do thanks to the extensive CCTV network and mobile phone tapping etc. isn’t a new one, but I wasn’t expecting it to be a rampant AI. A rampant AI which believed that the best way to serve the American people is to kill the people in charge of the country. Of course, It Has To Be Stopped, but despite the deflating feeling on discovering the twist of the movie it also feels like a genuinely subversive idea wrapped into a blockbuster-by-numbers. If you made a computer to protect society and told it the rules straight up, it would probably seek to stop the President of the USA as he makes things worse. It makes sense. There would have been no Bush jr. in the first place, as he didn’t actually win the election.
The worst thing about Eagle Eye is undoubtedly the embodiment of said AI – probably the laziest piece of film design this century, the computer has a light for an eye, like HAL, and is in a little, golden globe on the end of a stalk in a big dome with lots of shiny, golden spheres on the walls with echoes of Flight of the Navigator. After the uninspired but solid stunts leading up to the big reveal it serves as a puncture wound to the big blockbuster balloon for which there is no patch.
Plus there are sticking points. An AI being able to control automatic cranes with split-second precision and flying and unmanned, armed military plane through a tunnel, and Jerry Shaw jumping from a building onto train tracks below with no injuries don’t seem to pull the viewer out of movie land, but towards the end of the film when Jerry makes his desperate attempt to stop the AI’s murderous plan, he has a fight. It has already been pointed out that he is a good-for-nothing, drifting between crappy jobs and treating a string of girlfriends poorly, and that, after FBI agent Billy Bob Thornton asks some security guards how he held a shotgun, he is not a professional. And yet, after being chased and bashed around a number of times, Jerry is able to overpower a guard stationed at an underground entry point to the White House. A guard who is not knackered or stressed beyond belief after having just escaped from an explosion as the aforementioned unmanned plane crashes in the aforementioned tunnel, and almost certainly is trained to kill with his bare hands, is taken down by Jerry Shaw after a somewhat brief struggle.
Whatever, at this point the movie has lost after copying the AI design from a movie that is now 40 years old.

Happily, The Fall fares much better than director Tarsem’s previous film, The Cell, would have you expect. The Cell was never less than visually interesting, but undeniably failed to work as a narrative piece, becoming a mostly mundane serial killer/police procedural outside the sequences set in the psyche. The Fall fares much better due to the grounding in between the flights of visual fancy. The relationship between Lee Pace’s bed-ridden stunt man Roy and five year old Maria helps to cement the movie together when it could easily have been seen as a collection of pretty but empty scenes. Some of the visuals on display are unbelievably beautiful, to the point that you are distracted as you wonder literally where on earth the director discovered his locations, but the humour in the film and the fantastic performance by Maria halt any danger of The Fall slipping into pretension or a series of unconnected music video clips.
The mechanic of using people familiar to the protagonist in their dream world has been around since the Wizard of Oz, but here it used to great effect as the sequences are literally straight from the child’s imagination, by way of Roy’s story telling.

Three films in three days and I haven’t actually seen anything at the festival yet, but I’m certainly in the mood.

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That was obviously written a while back now, an echo of the past. I had recently moved into this new flat, and now I have seen the festival films I mentioned.
I will be posting pictures as is seemingly becoming a tradition; in the meantime, my latest review is up on hkcinema, link to the right.

It takes an ocean of stallions to shave our back

2008-10-07T21:21:00.008+01:00

Loaded magazine was launched in 1994 at the forefront of the ‘lads mag’ movement of boorish lad culture for the 90s, which turned on the touchy-feely influence on masculinity that had arisen in the 80s.
The lads mags were basically Playboy with less nudity, articles about things Blokes would/should be interested in such as booze, sport, gambling and real life gangsters such as con-turned-celebrity Dave Courtney, all punctuated with photo shoots of models or soap actresses.

In 1998, guy Ritchie capitalized on the geezer zeitgeist with the release of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a knockabout gangster film which mixed a cockney-fantasy view of the London underworld with a dash of Tarantino and another beneficiary of lad culture, Vinnie Jones, the ‘hard man’ of football. The film’s success spawned a plethora of copycats with Rancid Aluminium, Going Off Big Time and Love, Honour & Obey amongst the drek that followed two years later. Thankfully there are few genres in cinema which don’t yield the occasional gem and the brit gangster scene was no exception, offering up the goods with films like The Limey and Gangster No. 1, helping to stop Britain from seeming like nothing but a den of wankers.

Sexy Beast, however, is in a league of its own.
The debut feature by acclaimed music video director Jonathan Glazer (with promos for Radiohead and Massive Attack under his belt), Sexy Beast ticks all the generic boxes at first glance.
Starring uber cockney Ray Winstone alongside UK TV actress Amanda Redman as his wife, and featuring a pre-Deadwood Ian McShane who was best known as the rogueish antique dealer, Lovejoy, the film is the story of a London thief retired in Spain who is called on to do one last job.
Thankfully Glazer is a fantastic director and in Sexy Beast delivered a film that was fresh and cinematic and yet also heavily character-driven. The stylistic touches that Glazer developed for his advert and promo work are evident throughout the film, with fantastic sequences involving camera placement as we follow the point of view of a boulder tumbling down a hill, the revolving door of a bank and a car door opened and then slammed shut; a scene where the focus on Winstone’s face remains constant whilst the rest of the frame shakes violently behind him (a similar technique to that used in Fight Club with Pitt as Durden telling you that “you are not your fucking khakis”); a dream sequence involving a demonic rabbit man. What is so thrilling about the film is that every one of Glazer’s touches of bravura serves the characters and the story, rather than being flash for the sake of it.

The film revolves around the unwelcome return of the criminal past that Winstone’s Gal thought he had left behind. Ben Kingsley’s Don Logan is the vehicle for change, and it is a credit to both actors that they manage to convey that the usually imposing Winstone is terrified of the wiry Kingsley, totally convincing as a driven psychotic whose violence is mostly mental despite his taut and menacing physical presence. While much of the praise around the film was bestowed upon Kingsley for a role that was largely against type, Winstone gives a fantastic performance, conveying the love for his wife, the frustration at being unable to disentangle himself from his shady past, and his repressed panic at the thought of discovery by McShane’s Mr. Big, Teddy Bass, later in the film. It’s a shame that he is usually cast as the menacing lug (although Gary Oldman’s Nil By Mouth offered a more challenging version of that role) as it is clear that Winstone is a fantastic actor.

Sexy Beast deserves not only a place among the best British crime films such as the Long Good Friday, Get Carter and Brighton Rock, but deserves recognition as a classic British film which snuck into the geezer movie explosion a film about a man who just wants a quiet life with his beloved wife and his friends.

It's not you, it's me.

2008-10-04T18:38:00.002+01:00

Despite everything that I have ever read and seen, emotions are never clear-cut. At least for me.

My father died about one year after he threw me out of his flat. I warned him that I would never speak to him again when he threatened it, but he carried on regardless. I went and slept on the living room floor of my mum's flat, already too small for her and my sister and two brothers, but luckily I had a place at University and halls to move into two months later. She had originally thrown my father out about six years earlier for being a drunk, and after a time spent sleeping in his car, he bought a flat a few minutes away from us and I was sent to live with him at about thirteen years old.
It was the drink that led to the fist fight which happened before he threw me out, and it was the drink that killed him.
In books, movies and TV soaps, as well as accounts from friends and family, a situation in which you cut off a family member who dies always leads to you wishing you could have patched things up, that you could have made amends before they were gone, in line with the old cliche that you don't know what you're missing until it's gone, but I have never regretted cutting my self off from my dad. After he had said that he didn't want to quit the booze it was clear to me that he would never again be the father I once knew, and that there was no longer anything to miss.

I cried after I learnt of his death. Not at the time, but a day or two later I slept over with a friend who said I shouldn't be alone, and she was right, I broke down in tears and she held me, taking the edge off the grief. I could never understand why I cried so when I hated him, hated what he had become and had wished him dead on numerous occasions standing in the dark front room of his flat that smelled of cigarettes and cider, looking out at the cross roads outside the flat bathed in a yellow sodium glow.

More recently I have been dumped by my girlfriend of six years. The relationship was always difficult, never flowing naturally but always an effort to try and overcome obstacles, and seemingly involving a lot of effort and sacrifice on my part.
In this situation it is hard to work out what I feel. I am not as devastated as I have been after the failure of shorter relationships, but this is likely to do with the slow, inevitable decline. I wanted to end it myself numerous times for at least the last three years, but was always persuaded to give my one-time partner another chance every time, so the idea of splitting up isn't exactly new, but somehow it still feels like it's out of the blue, a shock, a wrench of the emotions.
Even though I have not been as miserable as I expected to be, I also have a feeling that it hasn't all hit home yet.
The arduous effort put into the relationship led to less time spent with friends and weaker links because of that - it will be hard to bounce back as a social animal, without even taking into consideration the fact that I've never really dated.

So now I'm thirty years old and single, and whilst I'm not sure if I regret the entire six year relationship, for the first time in my life I definitely have regret for my actions (or inactions); regret that I didn't stick to my guns the first time I wanted out, the first time I thought that it wasn't working and that I was sacrificing too much to make it work with too little effort to match it put in by my ex.

That this regret does me little good is of no matter - I have no more control over it than over the tears I shed for my father's death - but what does matter is that I don't know where to go on from here, I don't know how to prioritise friendships and romance any more and I have no idea how to be single.
It might all just fall together with time, but I'm certain that it will help to get some physical distance between this part of my life and the next, so I'm glad I have found a new place to move to and that in one week's time, the majority of the trauma of moving out will be over thanks to a little help from my friends.

Stick fiddling, button twitching sweats.

2008-09-10T21:27:00.008+01:00

After the glory days of the NES and SNES, Nintendo had faltered with their N64 console. A combination of highly expensive games due to the decision to stick with a cartridge format in a time of disc-based systems, a lack of third party support and the lingering image of Nintendo as a kiddy-centric company whilst Sony catered to the newly-emerged funky youth market all led to the Japanese games giant falling by the wayside in the late 1990s. Whilst things weren’t so bad as to lead to the company going the way of its old rival, who bowed out of the console race in order to churn out Sonic titles, Nintendo’s fall from the top of the console gaming league continued with their next entry into the games race, the Gamecube.

This time around Nintendo gave into the idea of discs, but ever wary of the dangers of piracy it still shied away from using standard CD-ROMs or DVDs, instead plumping for the titchy 8cm mini-DVDs that fit in with the considerate spacial stylings of the system itself. Almost an actual cube with a handle stuck to the back of it, the machine was less than 6.5 inches at its largest point and ran quietly compared to the increasingly powerful machines that were being released. The Playstation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox were different beasts altogether, with the PS2’s original incarnation (before its slimline redesign) looking more like a chunkier version of the more cheaply manufactured DVD players of the early millennium and the Xbox being simply a huge brick. Nintendo found that although the Japanese culture had something of a fetish for the miniaturisation of technology, Western markets were far more impressed by the image of the new machines being for a hip, young-adult crowd than the aesthetics of the actual machines, and this coupled with DVD playback and a wealth of titles (especially in the PS2’s case) saw Nintendo’s new rivals outperform its gaming-dedicated box.
Worldwide sales of 21.74 million machines seems respectable, but considering that the Xbox was brand-new to the market and surrounded by distrust of the Microsoft behemoth that gave birth to it, sales of 24 million units by May of 2006 certainly gave Nintendo cause for concern. As for the PS2, trading on the established Playstation brand and flooding the market with titles that catered for most tastes helped Sony to shift a stonking 127 million consoles by the end of 2007, with units still shifting despite the release of the ‘next generation’ PS3 in November 2006 in both Japan and the US.

Despite the low launch price of the Gamecube, Nintendo made a profit on each machine sold, an advantage that eluded the Microsoft and Sony corporations, which goes some way to explain their more aggressive content releasing strategies.
Microsoft had bought itself a cast iron hit in Halo, and set about keeping its userbase satisfied with all of the shooters and racers they could want. Sony simply threw tonnes of content to market, with the sheer numbers meaning that the odds were something would shine. Not traditionally being game developers, these two new gaming companies had little choice but to rely on third party content (or to buy the third parties themselves).
Whilst Nintendo had previously depended on its first party titles to be console-sellers, this time around many fans where under whelmed. Metroid Prime was a worthy addition to the Metroid franchise, brilliantly evolving the universe into a 3D world of eerie quiet and loneliness, but Super Mario Sunshine, the latest addition to the Mario series, lacked the punch of Mario’s 3D debut on the N64 and many fans criticised the deviations from the classic platforming formula. Likewise many Zelda fans balked at the graphical overhaul that Link received in the cel-shaded Wind Waker, despite the quality of the title itself, and the two-manned karts of Mario Kart: Double Dash were criticised as a gimmick that soiled the original’s classic gameplay.
After the third party publishers had abandoned Nintendo in the days of the N64 they had little reason to come back now that the PS2 was proving so popular, so despite the odd exclusive classics such as Animal Crossing and super Smash Bro. Melee, Cube owners often found themselves waiting for something worth playing.

However, as with most ‘failed’ consoles there were a number of gems hidden away that few got to sample.
Eternal Darkness from Silicon Knights was an early title that disproved the assertion that Nintendo was for kids, it being a survival horror game that differentiated itself from the schlocky Resident Evil and the clones of that series thanks to its basis in a Lovecraftian world, with ‘fourth wall’ interaction in the vein of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid. Alongside the familiar health and magic meters, your character also had a sanity meter that would be drained upon contact with otherworldly creatures and events that erred toward the macabre. As your character began to lose their grip on their psyche, you, the player would feel the effects as blood began to drip down walls, statues’ eyes would follow your progress, and most affectingly the game would start to play with your own sanity. On entering a new room, monsters would rear with no warning, killing your character and leaving you shaken and unjustly treated, before the screen would flash and place you alive and well back outside the room. On attempting to save the game the system would crash and inform you the file was deleted, before returning back to the save screen as if nothing had happened, and in the middle of play green-hued TV text would appear on screen alerting you to the volume being lowered. Such events worked well in their aim to unsettle, and tempted the player to risk their character’s sanity in order to see what the game would throw up next.

Later in the console’s life, once most had abandoned it, the First Person Shooter Geist was released. Whilst the Xbox had claimed the throne of the FPS fans’ console of choice from its launch with the legendary Halo, the Gamecube exclusive Geist featured an interesting gimmick little seen in gaming, let alone the FPS genre.
Possession as a gameplay mechanic had been used in platformers before, such as Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, but it was a first for an FPS (although the remainder of Geist was pretty generic).
A tale of a special forces agent aiming to stop the plans of a mad scientist type who had recruited his own army and mucked about with powers beyond our ken, in this case spirits and a dimension of demons, saw lots of journeys around military facilities, along corridors and inside air ducts.
The difference here is that early on in the game, your avatar the agent is captured and his body is separated from his spirit. He/you escapes from the special ecto-containers that the bad guys have constructed and then the game proper begins.
Via mostly scripted set pieces you get the opportunity to possess objects in the game world in order to manipulate them and scare animals and people wandering around. Once the targets are sufficiently terrified, you can visibly see a change in their aura as a signal to their vulnerability, meaning that you can take them over and utilise their abilities to your own ends, whether that be using a rat to access confined spaces, scientists to get hold of experimental weaponry or the more obvious soldiers to kill other soldiers.

Geist is not a great game, the visuals are clunky and blocky and the negotiation of the 3D space is sometimes awkward. As previously outlined the story is steeped in cliché, and the chances to use your powers are very linear and limited, but throughout playing the game you can see the great potential of the feature and I couldn’t help imagining the possibilities of similar gameplay let loose in the highly detailed sandbox environments of the current videogame generation.
Half Life 2 has proven that although a linear game, a key hook such as the gravity gun can be used to open up the player’s imagination and experimentation within a virtual environment, and the thought of the possession feature being used freely in a large, highly detailed open-world game along the likes of Grand Theft Auto 4 is busting with potential.
As the gaming industry develops and the options open to the consumer during play become more important to sales, the possibility of an open-ended possession sim is more and more likely, so hopefully the developers won’t forget a little-seen game from Nintendo’s dry period.

Hoping for an Indian summer

2008-08-31T15:53:00.015+01:00

I'm not exactly a movie buff or an authority on the silver screen, but I have a healthy interest and like to think I have a broad, if shallow knowledge of film.
There are precious few films I won't watch and have enjoyed films from a number of countries in every genre, but one area that is daunting to get into is also one prolific sources world-wide: Bollywood.

There are lots of generalisations that you could vicariously pick up about mainstream Indian cinema- the size of the business globally, the long running times and the fondness of musical numbers, but the films themselves present a barrier to those outside the Indian community.
Being a fan of film I don't want to miss out, wherever cinematic goodness can potentially be found, so thought I'd start of safe with a film called One 2 Ka 4. It had a tempting 18 certificate stuck to the cover with Bollywood superstar Sharukh Khan looking moody and armed, and the blurb on the reverse telling a tale of cops, revenge and such.

First thing to mention is that One 2 Ka 4 was actually rated 15 by the BBFC so it's odd that the distribution company, Spark Worldwide limited, went and plastered an 18 rating sticker on the DVD case. This is what they had to say on the back:
"Javed (Jakie Shroff) and Arun (Shah Rukh Khan) are members of a special task force that combats drug trafficking. Their main target is a notorious drug lord called KKV (Nirmal Pandey). After a tense encounter, they do succeed in arresting him, but KKV, with his powerful connection manages to get acquitted in court. Javed entire life revolves around his four motherless children. Into this idyllic existence, comes a dastardly ambush; a sudden and cruel burst of gun fire that kills Javed. Arun is devastated. He decides that from now on he will look after Javed's orphaned children. But the children hate him and refuse to have anything to do with him. In sheer desperation, he turns to Geeta (Juhi Chawla) a loud and talkative rustic girl whom Javed had befriended. Geeta comes home with Arun and wins over the children. And then, one day,. as he tails KKV to a nightclub, Arun sees him dancing with a stunningly sexy woman. Its Geeta! Shocked out of his wits, he rushes home angrily confronts Geets. She bursts into tears and swears she was at home all the while. Arun is confussed but all the more determined to solve the mystery and get to the truth."

A fairly familiar story of a pair of cops, one a widower with children, who is killed during a drug lead and leaves his children in the care of the younger partner, played by Bollywood heartthrob Sharukh Khan.

There is a very strange moment (although probably normal in Bollywood films) when the film gets an intermission. The film pauses precisely at the point of when Khan realises his village-girl nanny has a secret identity, blacks out, and then resumes but in reverse, rewinding through the scene. The film then starts up again to bring us up to the point of a cliffhanger, which is a fairly useful device to give you a reminder of what’s going on, were you to be mucking about in the cinema looking for snacks and things for fifteen minutes.

The action scenes are inept with the cops running about like they're in an amateur production, pistols in both fists pointing and firing seemingly without aiming. There is slow-motion and acrobatics, but the overall feel is that of a parody rather than of pleasingly balletic gunplay. Not only is this strange after years of decent action films from both Hollywood and Hong Kong to draw influence from, but when taking into account the care and attention taken in the choreography of the songs it seems odd that some of that wasn’t applied to the action. Obviously the priorities of Bollywood lie elsewhere, but it is strange to think that the majority of Bollywood productions are essentially romantic comedy musicals.
I would of course be happy for anyone to point out a wider range of genre explorations within Bollywood (as opposed to the more arthouse side of Indian cinema), but from what little I know every film will essentially boil down to some romance and songs, possibly with comedy.

The climactic action scene is pretty good though, despite the awkward combat there is lots going on with a truck driving into a plane, a massive shoot-out with people leaping through the air, explosions and Khan pasting the guy who killed his partner before killing him with a prototype engine fan.

Kahn’s love interest, played by Juhi Chawla, is absolutely beautiful and a great comic actress, but the main villain KKV, played by Nirmal Pandey, is a revelation, so scenery-chewingly over the top that he comes out the other side of hammy, convincing you as a slimy drug dealer who is totally and utterly unhinged.

All in all it’s entertaining and funny, the songs are either good or good enough to put up with and most have inventive or bizarre settings, but it really does feel its full three hours.

Only when I fall

2008-08-26T20:37:00.007+01:00

Having pretty much given up such vices as drugs and booze the extent of my indulgence into illicit substances chiefly involves diet Coke, in all its corporate, chemical saturated glory. I’ve talked about this before, and specifically my overwhelming affection for the limited run of vanilla flavoured diet Coke, which encompassed both my addiction to the fizzy brown liquid and my preference for the blander side of confection. Unfortunately for me, the evil multinational Coca Cola company decided to terminate the infusion of synthetic vanilla flavour and went back to the same old cherry crap, along with the lime version that seems to have been around for ages.
For a number of months my life had that bit less colour, until one day I happened to visit a shop specialising in the importation of foreign confection and found a sliver of fizzy hope. A hope named Jazz.

Jazz diet Pepsi comes in two flavours, or at least two flavours that were in the shop’s fridge and hinted at the possibility of a near match.
First there is Jazz diet Pepsi Caramel Cream “Indulge your senses”. It says that above the name, trying to give you a reason to take it out of the fridge.

It tastes like the description suggests – creamy with a hint of caramel, a heavier, chocolatey taste that wasn’t found in the vanilla version of diet Coke. However, the aftertaste is less pleasing, being on the tinny side of metallic rather than the bloody copper taste of straight Coke and Coke Zero (which is also less than pleasant). I find a bit of the metallic aftertaste in diet Pepsi, so this could just be a Pepsi thing.

Also, the can looks the same but the volume is stated as 355ml rather than the 330ml UK (and possibly European) standard, most likely due to the metric division, with us getting around a third of a litre whilst the yanks go for 12 fluid ounces.

About a third of the way through the can and the caramel comes across as more unnatural, an unpleasing plasticness I tend to associate with cheap confectionary, whilst the cream is far less prominent than that of vanilla Coke and so can’t take up the slack.

Ultimately the choice of caramel may initially seem a good idea as the whole nature of fizzy drinks is a luxury, as with sweets and chocolate, and therefore more luxuriousness is surely more tempting (hence double choc chip etc.). However, the key flavouring in the sparkling water that is the cola has caramel origins in any case; can you have double caramel?

Jazz diet Pepsi Strawberries and Cream tastes more like a lollipop than any natural strawberry flavour, which is to be expected. There is a hint of cream that gives a tantalising glimpse of vanilla cola, but this is mostly drowned out by the boiled sweet tang of the strawberry. In this case there is no unpleasant aftertaste and no metallic hint, though it should be noted that this time I drank from a glass instead of the can, so it could just be the poor quality US can type that was affecting the flavour of the caramel Pepsi. The fact that this is closer to vanilla Coke makes it worse than the caramel in a way, like a prostitute wearing a mask of your dead wife.

It’s interesting that some (but not all) of the ingredients include explanations (eg. Potassium Benzoate (preserves freshness), Calcium Disodium EDTA (to protect flavor) and that the UK food market hasn’t gone this way, considering the current fashion for healthy eating, organic food and such and such. The caffeine content is also quantified on the caramel flavour (38mg per can) that is another detail I’ve not seen in the UK.
As for the actual ingredients themselves, there are some old friends I remember from my piece after the launch of Coke Zero – Phosphoric Acid, Aspartame, Acesulfame K and Caramel colouring (E150d) all come as standard in your fizzy cola, but these two explained ingredients are new to me. Perhaps this is precisely why they feature explanations; the savvy cola connoisseur is perfectly aware of the make up of their favourite fizzy beverage, but confronted with some rogue elements they need to be soothed by the reasoning behind the introductions. We obviously won’t argue with preserving freshness, and the flavour is one of our chief reasons for consumption, surely? Therefore, Potassium Benzoate and Calcium Disodium EDTA can only be good things. As a preservative, Potassium Benzoate (E212) “inhibits the growth of mold, yeast and some bacteria” (Source:Wiki), which definitely sounds like a good thing, although there is a warning that mixing the substance with vitamin C can create the carcinogen Benzene. Whilst cancer is no laughing matter I rarely find myself mixing coke and orange, but it’s useful to know what you shouldn’t be washing vitamin pills down with. A time frame between coke and vitamin C ingestion would be useful, but I don’t fancy risking cancer in order to carry out the tests.
Calcium Disodium EDTA (or ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid) is actually used in soft drinks to help prevent the formation of benzene, so we can all rest easy when partaking of the luxury alternative to water.

Ultimately disappointing, ‘normal’ diet Coke, diet Pepsi and Pepsi Max are preferable (though maybe not Zero), let alone the holy grail of vanilla diet Coke.

Filthy Jazz Pepsi.

Also, the pictures are crap because of my camera and because my eyesight has withered after two years of a desk bound screen based job.

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My latest DVD review (of Pulse) can be found in the links to the right.

Three decades in and none the wiser

2008-08-10T23:41:00.016+01:00

Everything works this time around. These upstairs neighbours aren't particularly more noisy than the last ones, but have been at times when you might want to sleep. Other than that it's lovely, although quite often cold which will probably be more of a problem this winter. Gloves inside?
You can get to the terrace through the kitchen, which is nice, or has been for about two weekends this summer. Aaah, great British weather.

Altogether moving in wasn't as stressful as I feared, but next time I will be paying for people to do it, or hiring a big van at the very least. If ever there was a time when you needed Mary Poppins....

...then get out of the kitchen

2008-08-10T23:25:00.008+01:00

Despite Michael Mann’s seeming fixation with the urban and its unnatural light, Heat is literally a modern day Western.
Pacino’s Vincent and Deniro’s Neil are the Sheriff and the Outlaw, their paths fated to cross in the literal Wild West, albeit after decades of development and modernisation.

The film opens with a classic Western motif, a train pulling into town as smoke billows across the tracks, only now the ‘town’ is present day L.A. and the train is a smaller, more delicate relation to the iron horses of the old West. Mann’s use of little seen locations also invoke the old West at times, a remarkable achievement in the urban sprawl of the city, with the scene where Neil’s crew trick Vincent’s team into being themselves surveyed using the wide open space surrounded by industrial works and cargo containers standing in for the mountains and valleys of the genre.

In the Old West of cowboys and indians, men were defined by their jobs, the role of the sheriff, the outlaw or the ranch hand being that man’s life, but in the modern West, as with that of what we refer to as the Western world, the separation between work and life has become much more pronounced with leisure time and relationships receiving a keener focus than in the centuries gone by.
This is reflected in Heat with the conflict in both men’s lives between work and the rest. Our introduction to Vincent is him making love with his wife, whilst Neil’s mantra is a piece of wisdom passed onto him by outlaws past – that you should have nothing in your life that you are not prepared to walk out on in thirty seconds should you feel the Heat around the corner.

Our first sight of Neil is as he leaves that train, walking into town with a one-track mind, the score. His efficiency is remarkable as he infiltrates a hospital in order to secure an ambulance for the job, quickly striding through the corridors with the air of an employee who has paced the same trail a thousand times, and a scene echoed at the end of the film in his pursuit of Waingro at the hotel. This second time is Neil’s undoing – throughout the film we see him falter at his dedication to the score, giving in to the desire to have a life outside work like the world around him. At the hotel he is motivated by revenge and is more subtle indication that he has violated his own code than the girlfriend waiting in the car outside. Not being able to sever connections to his friends is his undoing, leaving the sheriff and the side of ‘good’ to succeed, although Vincent doesn’t win.

Despite opening with the love scene and hints that he is a better father to his step-daughter than her flesh and blood, followed by the brief domestic staple of the husband rushing off to work at breakfast, the sheriff’s work rules over his life. His third wife Justine finds the opportunity more than once to deliver a speech about how, even though he is with her in body, his mind is with the dead of his cases.
Pacino’s performance in Heat is famous for his barking, eye-bulging delivery in a many scenes, his face contorting on a number of occasions in a way much more frightening than when he was called on to play the devil. But many seem to miss that this bombast is entirely fitting with this entirely driven character, a man totally focused on the chase, or more aptly the hunt. Like Neil, Vincent strides around fuelled with purpose, sometimes chewing vigorously, impatient with seemingly time-wasting informants and abrupt even with his own men (though clearly with no disrespect). The scene that encapsulates his passion comes toward the end of the film, comforting his wife after her daughter’s suicide attempt; he confirms that they as a couple are not going to work and she reluctantly releases him back to his work. He speeds down the stairs out of the hospital and you can practically see the scent of hunt in his nose.

After three failed marriages Vincent has accepted that his will not be a normal life, that his role is his life as it was in the Old West, whereas Neil has spent the majority of his life assuming that was how it should be for him, and only now is realising that he has a void, that there is something missing that he needs. But this does not fit with his role and breaking from his code means doom. As with the act of revenge, his reactions at having to abandon his new love Eady don’t fit with the code, and there are several cuts between Neil watching Vincent approach, but not easily processing the idea that he has to leave Eady behind.
It is now too late for him, and he is not undone by the light of the airport runway – as he pulls from cover a smile plays across his face – Vincent is in his sights and so is his freedom. But this emotion of pride or joy betrays his attitude earlier in the film, when during their single conversation Neil tells Vincent that he will not hesitate to put him down if that’s the way it plays. In the event, it is Vincent who does not hesitate – whirling and firing instantly on seeing Neil’s shadow, and despite the first shot disarming the outlaw the sheriff drills him in the chest.

But in the same way Vincent feels release in acceptance that the normal life is not his life, knowing that he lives for the hunt isn’t necessarily a good thing. The sheriff may have got his man, but he knows that nobody wins.

Indeed

2008-05-25T20:45:00.007+01:00

Fingers crossed, I will be moving into a new place before the month is out.
I saw the washing machine in use with my own eyes when I was viewing the flat, and it is therefore already better than where I am.

They (ie. Sunday paper columnists and such) say that moving home is one of the most stressful things you can experience, and doing it for the second time in a year is having an effect on me. It’s actually easier this time around as I never fully unpacked here, and I’ve been shedding a few items along the way, being ruthless about whether I will actually want to watch a particular DVD, listen to a CD or read a book again – meaning that now I am finally getting around to watching Alias series one.

I picked it up in a sale due to the general recommendations of friends and ex-colleagues, and it’s a fairly entertaining watch, but there’s a problem. I have just watched the Wire season 4 across two days. Seeing as the Wire is possibly the best TV series ever produced, it’s a tough act to follow. It probably doesn’t help that Alias is a slightly glossy big-budget show which revolves around a pretty young lady being a spy, but all of the smirky funny bits, slo-mo, soft-focus ideal-home ‘real life’ scenes, international locales that all look like California and god-awful singer-songwriter moments detract from the experience for me. Maybe it’s my own inability to process the type of show that attempts to be a drama, soap, comedy and thriller simultaneously, whilst others excel at one thing. I guess that’s not actually true, as Firefly is admittedly a mishmash of things, but it excels at its mash.
It kind of tells me that it would be a waste of time for me to ever bother with the likes of 24, so now I’m just waiting until I can get my hands on my next ticket to the corners of Baltimore.
Spoiler! All my problems with the show are illustrated in one scene where Sydney considers that her double-agent mum had her as part of a spy plan, involving looking at photos in her soft-focus apartment delivering a voice-over with what sounds like Enya playing in the background. Pah.
Oh no, wait, a scene with Quentin Tarantino running down a hall to Rob Zombie’s Dragula after using a motion tracker that’s literally straight out of Aliens (and therefore using tech design that looks 20 years out of date) probably pips it.

Lester Freeman shows the team the Deadwood piss-take from season four

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I went to see the film ‘Rec’ blind, as it were, without having read a scrap of print about the thing before my bum was on seat – all I knew is that it wasn’t from the UK or US, and that it was a horror film that probably revolved around camera POV. (More spoilers for those who need to know.)

Horror films have been using first-person shots to ramp up the tension for decades, with 1978s Halloween springing to my mind from behind the mask of the young Michael Myers, as he commits the deed that gets him locked up. The strictly controlled vantage point and limited peripheral vision of first-person shots all contribute to a build up of fear, in much the same way as tight close-ups and darkness are used to stimulate your imagination about what you can’t see. The Blair Witch Project is arguably the most famous in the horror genre to use the POV of a video camera to the same effect, cutting down the field of vision of the naked eye and doing away with objective shots so that you identify more closely with the situation of the people being terrified. A number of films have used this device since the last millennium (or 1999) when Blair Witch was released, but few have decided to stick to it exclusively, with even 2002s My Little Eye avoiding the problems of exclusively subjective shots by having its action relayed via CCTV cams.
Cloverfield is the highest profile first-person horror since Blair Witch, and Rec was released within months of it, but both find it hard to get around the problems inherent in the device. Scream managed to successfully lampoon the horror film’s descent into genre rules whilst being a decent example in itself, but was filmed before the most recent addition to the list of ‘unrealistic behaviour in the horror genre’ was added to classics such as “let’s split up”: when you are experiencing something creepy, scary or even life threatening, don’t put down your camera as it’s obviously more important to document what’s happening than it is to escape with your life.
To be fair there would be no film where this not the case, but it is a problem that, for me at least, makes it harder to suspend belief and therefore enjoy the movie.
Whilst Cloverfield went the opposite direction to the Blair Witch in terms of scale and spectacle, Rec takes a much more low-key and credible direction, for the beginning at least.
The film follows a TV production crew of two, the presenter Angela and her camera-man Pablo, as they wander the streets at night, documenting the lives of those who work whilst we sleep. During a stint at a fire station, Angela gets her wish to liven up the show when an emergency call comes in and the crew accompanies some firemen to the scene.
Reports of screams from an old woman’s flat have led to the police to ask for the fire service’s help to break in – what they find is a crazy fat lady covered in blood, who shortly attacks and bites one of the police officers before things go to pot. The Police lock down the building and the residents of the apartment block, along with the remaining policeman, firemen and documentary duo find themselves subject to some sort of zombie/infection outbreak. Dead people walk and want to eat the living, and of course the ambitious Angela sees it as the story of the century rather than a nightmare situation, and Pablo doesn’t put down his bloody camera.
Rec doesn’t offer anything you haven’t seen in the multitude of living dead/28 x later offerings, as people carry on as if they’ve never seen such a film before. True, if it happened to us, you probably wouldn’t want to believe it either, but as soon as you did you might decide it was worth a try to start separating heads from bodies. Anyway, Rec ticks all of the boxes of the zombie/hand-held cam sub-genres, including the recent favourite pitch black/night vision scene that we have seen in 28 Weeks Later, I Am Legend and Cloverfield, but the tangent that Rec diverges into basically steals from the Exorcist, as it transpires that the zombie outbreak is due to an enzyme spread by a girl possessed by a demon in the attic.

So Rec is a right little vulture of a film, picking over the carcasses of horror gone before and putting together a Dr. Frankenstein creation of re-animated parts. That’s not to say it’s a bad film, it’s well made and features good performances, and the opening act is great, but there is nothing on offer that you haven’t seen an improved version of elsewhere.
What’s most surprising is not the magpie-like collection of other horror movie shiny things, but the fact that Hollywood has already lined up a English language remake. And not only have they lined up said remake whilst the corpse of Rec has yet to expel its last breath, but judging from the trailer it seems to be a shot-for-shot remake.
Check the trailer out yonder: http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/quarantine/

The only feature that would prevent me from immediately dismissing Quarantine in its entirety is the fact that it features Jennifer Carpenter in the lead, who also assumes the role of Dexter’s sister in the TV series Dexter. So it can’t be all bad.

The code of Harry.

2008-04-12T21:18:00.005+01:00

After I finished my GCSE’s, I went into the 6th form at my school to study A-Levels. This turned out to be a very bad idea, as I was so disinterested in learning anything there I could barely muster the motivation to turn up. After a couple of rubbish months, I reached an agreement with my parents that I would take the rest of the year off, applying to go and take A-levels at a college where there would be more subject choice and crucially, it wouldn’t be a school.
Both of them doubted I would go, thinking I would become too used to a life of leisure as a teen, spending all weekend with friends and watching films on the telly during the week, but I proved I was as good as my word and went.

In the interim though, I found myself with a lot of spare time, as all of my friends were occupied in the week, my money was very tight as a jobless sixteen-year old and there were only so many films shown on terrestrial TV each week worth watching.

I was ‘into’ music back then, and found the now defunct Select magazine a decent periodical to cater to my tastes. It wasn’t too concentrated on any particular style, but at the same time it deviated decisively from the mainstream, nominally dealing with ‘indie’ music when that could be a catch-all term for anything from Radiohead and Pulp to Roni Size and Belle and Sebastian. In those pre-internet days, I would often give a band a go solely on a decent write-up, and discovered a handful of little gems in that way.
Devouring each issue cover to cover, I inevitably came across the pen pal section and with all the time at my disposal, decided to have a go. After placing an ad in the mag, people wrote in response and Select forwarded them to you, so you could then decide who deserved a reply. Over the next five years or so, I kept in regular contact with as many as a dozen indie girls at once, girls mainly as I am a straight male and also because my male friends far outnumbered the female. As a male I frankly didn’t see the point in writing to someone else like me.

The letters were a great way of making friends, of connecting with people over vast distances who you would likely otherwise never meet, and getting to know them far better this way even if you had. I shared tales of teen hedonism, private worries and anguish, hopes and dreams and hazy rambles, I talked people through problems with relationships and family troubles, and shared a lot of my own baggage at the same time. I ended up having serious relationships with two of my penpals (though happily not at the same time) and even today I have a tenuous facebook-based friendship with a (non-ex) penpal, even after about thirteen years.
Writing letters was also an outlet for creativity, with only the limits of the imagination as a barrier to experimenting with decoration and calligraphy and any number of things to entertain both my friends and myself.

As people went off to uni and became more strapped for time, the letters gradually dried up on both sides, but rather than just a sign of a passing phase or the end of an old habit, it also came about at the time when the internet and mobile phones had just started to gain a serious hold on the UK consciousness, the first inklings of the massive part of our culture that electronic communications hold today.

Now that people are able to instantly exchange messages, post their thoughts, photos and videos for anyone to see and can access the internet from anywhere via their mobile and be in touch literally 24/7, the letter now seems a particularly outdated institution, reduced to situations where you might want some official statement or document ‘in writing’, with some physical evidence of its existence.
In these days of Myspace, Facebook, Youtube and indeed blogging, the era of the penpal would seem to be utterly extinct.

And I’m not sure how to feel about it. It can certainly be argued that it is easier to keep in touch with people, and that geographic location ceases to pose an obstacle. It is now fairly straightforward to locate people with similar interests as yourself, and the idea of meeting someone you ‘met on the net’ should feel no less daunting than the days when the entire foundation of a friendship was based on words on paper, but I can’t help feeling like there’s some sort of lack of quality now, an indefinable dumbing down or drop in standards. I’m painfully aware of how the idea all sounds so utterly Daily Mail ‘back to basics’, but I do feel that there was an effort involved in letter writing that is hard to recapture in e-communication, an anticipation in the wait for a reply that has vanished thanks to instant messaging, and some sort of personal, private openness that would be generated when writing one letter for one other person, when poring over what to say and how to say it, that has disappeared and been replaced by e-mail dialogues and monologue blogs that do not become adequate stand-ins for that peculiar calculated to-and-fro that came from letters.

I guess it’s something you can’t help doing as you get older, looking back at how things were and feeling that they were better then.
But then back when I started writing to penpals, we had no South Park. So you can see how I also think some things are much better now.

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After a good start, season 12 of South Park brought us Major Boobage, an episode that covered urban myths about homemade highs whilst heavily referencing the animated film Heavy Metal, and its predilection for top-heavy ladies. These sequences aren’t much more fun than the dull source material, but the episode scores huge points for the new way to get high at home.

Then episode 4, Canada on Strike! came with ups and downs. Revisiting Stone and Parker’s alternate vision of Canada as a country of flapping-head people who burst into song, it twins a nice idea of Canada striking and no-one caring with a swipe at the cult of internet and particularly Youtube celebrity, ultimately featuring a showdown between some such ‘stars’. Unfortunately your enjoyment will be directly related to whether or not you’ve seen the referenced clips, and a joke in the Canada scenes is repeated far too often, although does pay off a little at the end. Thankfully there is gold in the music video the kids make of Butters to put on Youtube and make “some of that internet money”. “What what in my butt” indeed.

I’m hoping that episode 5 will see the season hit the high notes, and the set up sounds promising as it involves Ms. Garrison deciding she wants to be a man again, and everyone in charge at the school seemingly forgetting what Eric Cartman is like and putting him charge of the class. Seeing as season 12 started with Cartman giving Kyle AIDS, fuck knows where this one is going to go.

How come you and mom don’t sleep in the same bed anymore?

2008-03-24T11:52:00.005Z

Two hours and three minutes into David Fincher’s ‘Zodiac’, the son of Jake Gyllenhal’s character, Robert Graysmith, asks him that very same question.
The story of an obsessed man letting his relationships with his partner and family slide is a familiar one in cinema.
Broken relationships became more prominent in film as they did in life, with Kramer vs. Kramer perhaps being the most prominent in the 70s as the event of divorce was on the rise.

The subject has always been one of the cornerstones for the conservative argument that society's morals and values are in decline, whereas in reality the means of obtaining divorce have become easier. The likelihood is that the instances of divorce as a proportion of marriages has risen over time chiefly because the law has changed and become more lenient, particularly towards women in terms of assets and custody of any children. Alongside this, the social stigma on unmarried couples has lessened over the decades meaning that it is hard to gain statistics on those who live together as husband and wife and whether they later split up.

Whether divorced parents are worse for a child than parents who remain together unhappily is much harder to measure than raw divorce statistics, and arguably it’s one of the key issues related to the argument for moral decline. Various statistics are flung about related to the proportion of children with lone parents getting involved with crime, but these figures are often taken out of context without looking at the social background involved – the proportion of middle class children with lone parents turning to crime could well paint a different picture.

My parents never married, so yes I’m a bastard, but they still split up. As is usual in these situations it wasn’t a solution that was reached quickly and rationally, instead being preceded by years of arguments that led to a number of evenings when I would sit near the door of my bedroom, wondering what was going to happen.
I’ve never been a very sociable kind of person, even within my own family, so most of what I know happened comes from my own experience – my dad was becoming more and more of a drunk, obviously making my mum unhappy up until the point where she threw him out. He lived in his car for a while, definitely months and possibly over a year, but eventually he got it together and bought a flat a few minutes away from us. Shortly afterwards I went to live with him, leaving my younger brothers and sister back at the old flat with mum as it was too small for us all. I lived with my dad there from thirteen to nineteen, going back to my mums virtually every evening to have dinner with her and the kids. My youngest brother and sister would often come over to stay on weekends, but dad was still drinking and only drank more as time went on, eventually kicking me out of the flat a couple of months before I turned nineteen. Thankfully I had got into university by that point, though, so after a few months sleeping on the front-room floor of my old home I went and lived in halls.

It was hardly the worst of experiences as I was never beaten or abused, but with separated parents living so close and yet rarely communicating I became the go-between as I would literally go between the two homes, having to occasionally absorb the bile that either parent held for the other.
Ever since then the most important thing to me has been security, a home with a sense of permanence, and perhaps this has led to my low ambition as all I’ve really wanted is somewhere I’m happy to return to every day.

Apart from the line in Zodiac the reason this has all come back to me is the flat I am in now. Besides the insecurity and anxiety I get from living somewhere impermanent, a place I know that I will soon move from for the reasons I’ve mentioned before, there are the neighbours.
Among the list of inconveniences that come free of charge with this flat – the floor so uneven that I prop the fridge with a piece of wood to stop the freezer unit frosting up in one corner; the leaky cistern; the badly wired cooker – are the noisy neighbours. With two young kids the family upstairs really can’t help being noisy, especially in a building as rickety as this. Judging from my own floorboards I’m sure that I would drive people downstairs mad, if it weren’t an empty shop. However, it’s not really the kids that get to me as they find new and exciting games that seem to involve dropping weights many times their own size from a considerable height and such. It’s the parents.
On a fairly regular basis they have a screaming match with each other, loud enough to make out every single word they say meaning that their kids can too. Except that unlike their kids, I’m not fluent in French (the family is Algerian). It makes me wonder what’s best for them – do they sit in their room in the dark at night, frightened as their parents scream, or have they become accustomed to it now, developing coping mechanisms like the bright-eyed little girls on a recent channel 4 documentary about the state of Iraq, who described how men came in to their home and shot their father in his stomach.
Would they be happier if their dad wasn’t around? It has to be said that each situation is different - I have good memories of my dad when I was little, of going for a walk to the shops at night and going on holiday around England and Wales, but the drink took that all away, or rather his weakness for it and unwillingness to stop. As it’s French for all I know they could be arguing about who loves each other most.
Probably not.

There aren’t any answers here and I don’t have any special insight, but two of my friends have got married and had kids in the last couple of years, so I not only hope that they become part of the statistics of those that don’t get divorced, but also that they never want to.
Love and luck to both those new families.

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Thankfully season 12 of South Park has started well with ‘Tonsil Trouble’, infecting Cartman with HIV, but it has really taken off with episode 2, ‘Britney’s New Look’, mixing commentary on the cult of celebrity and the menace of paparrazi with Omen and Invasion of the Body Snatchers references. This season has a lack of concurrent sub-plots so far, but in episode 2 there is repeat mention of Butters dressed as a squirrel.
Sweet.

Euthanasia, The Last Starfighter, Monty Python and the Sony PSP

2008-03-19T20:58:00.007Z

It's getting on for nearly three months since I last posted here, or blogged as is the parlance of our times.
It's a keen indication of the state of my self-discipline; if I get out of the habit of doing something I find it hard to get back into it. Thus I go through phases of watching DVDs, socialising and writing. For example I had a review copy of Exiled, the Johnny To Hong Kong action/arthouse flick, since late 2007, and had already seen it in the cinema, but as many familiar with writing will recognise it's often hardest to get started. Once I finally persuaded myself to knuckle down, I enjoyed it as I always do, and immediately afterward I watched a Japanese horror flick that was gathering dust in my collection and promptly reviewed that too (Exiled link to the right with the others, Premonition will be up in the coming weeks for the benefit of those few who would ever come back after getting this far).

It wasn't just sloth or a vague reluctance induced by fear of failure that curtailed the blogging habit (which was hardly prolific in the first place). In January and continuing on into February, I found myself incubating a lovely strain of the flu which I suffered with for no more than a week, but which led to a lengthy recovery period in which I didn't feel like much of anything. During the Fun Flu Week 2008 I found myself subject to a hair-trigger cough which would induce fits of hacking at the slightest movement and which were impossible to halt at will. I have had the flu (as opposed to a bad cold) once before, and whilst I remembered the woozy, dizzy and weak status that the condition provided me with, the coughing was new and I was mostly surprised that it didn't rend my throat into shreds. As the worst of it passed and I started to slowly get back to normal, I realised that the superhuman coughing efforts had had some sort of effect on the muscles in my torso, resulting in the feeling that I had recently been beaten by a small group of people wielding bats, unless I didn't move or breathe too hard. For a few weeks afterward I was barely able to keep up a brisk shuffle, and I found myself reminded of old age and the fact that, yet again, I shouldn't take my health for granted but instead be grateful for every day that passes where I can see, hear and walk up the road with little difficulty.

Having worked in the retail industry for over a decade, I am painfully aware of some of the more astoundingly petty little grievances that people hold and are unable to put into perspective, so I feel that I always start out with an advantage in terms of optimism over the next man-on-the-street. It's for this reason that I am logically, rather than reactively looking to move out of my flat, photos of which long-time readers will remember me posting at the tail end of last summer. It's not because of the guts of the bath being permanently on display as the landlord hasn't had it fixed. It's not because the toilet cistern leaks or because the upstairs neighbours have noisy kids or because I had to keep taking days off work to let engineers in to look at the washing machine that was meant to have been fixed before I moved in (5 visits and still broken). No, these are little problems that I could easily live with and ultimately do not really cause me any pain or much inconvenience. The problem is that the windows are so badly fitted that when it is windy, the frames emit the sound of an elephant playing a harmonica, loud enough to interrupt anything you may choose to do, including sleep. As having the windows re-fitted would be two tasks, firstly getting the landlord to do it in the first place and secondly having to put up with the sodding building work involved, I'm not exactly mad about the idea. The only alternative is to open the window, which stops the elephant but unfortunately reminds you how noisy it is with the window open.
Ah well, all it means is the inconvenience of packing up, moving on and doing all the admin involved in moving house, daunting from this end but it will all be over a couple of weeks afterwards. Plus, the handy bonus and raise that I recently got a work will make it that much easier to find the next flat.
Which is nice.

Minor inconveniences no.279367: seemingly having no hash key on this bastard ibook.
Minor inconveniences no.283749: having my rechargeable hair clippers run out mid-shave, and realising it doesn't function whilst plugged in.

I'm still having trouble understanding how South Park Season 5 came out on DVD in the UK a few months ago, passing effortlessly under my radar, and no-one thought to inform me.
I have been a South Park fan since the first few episodes, after I realised there was more to it than the gimmicky adverts which ran hourly on Channel 4 for a few weeks before the first screening. I was working at the Bond St. HMV before it moved to the other side of Oxford St. back then, or at least it hit UK TV soon afterwards which would put it at around 1998.
I followed it regularly and bought the series once they were available on DVD, but for some reason they mysteriously stopped at Season 4. The release date came and went for Season 5, and Season 6 didn't air in the UK. Luckily, I first got myself the internet in 2001 so I was able to find episodes that some kind Americans had captured and released on the net, and it was at this point that I became a Big Fan, when they began mixing the skewed humour with detailed pop-culture references and political commentary. It was possible to 'get' the episodes on a number of different levels which made for a satisfying as well as sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious watch.
The Season 6 episode 'Scott Tenorman must die' became the highlight for me, and began a golden run which remained unbroken for at least three seasons, with only blips in those to follow.
Season 12 has started over in the US, and I am looking forward to some more classics akin to the clash between Heaven and the forces of evil (Best Friends Forever), or the time when the boys tried to send a Killer Whale (Free Willzyx) into space.
But I didn't know Season 5 had been released, and worse still Season 6 came out on Monday, but i can't afford either until I am paid next week.
This is worse than not being able to sleep when it's windy.

Thanks for those of you who read to the end. In case you're wondering, I got out of the habit of socialising about three or four years ago, and I've yet to get back into it.
I blame Davey for coming down to London and stealing all my charm.

Yes I could have bought the region 1 DVDs of South Park which have been available for maybe two years now, but I had an irrational fear of my ancient DVD player packing up and not being able to find a decent multi-region player to watch my beloved South Park with. We can't be rational all the time.

And when he found that right box in the attic, he saw that Ted had been devoured by moths.

2008-01-07T20:41:00.000Z

A New Year means a new season on Japanese TV, and with that comes a new set of anime series.

Armored Trooper Votoms: Pailsen Files is something of a sequel to a remake.
Set in a future where interplanetary colonial wars are waged with the use of slow, stubby mechs, the series kicked off with it’s own take on the Normandy landing. Away from the action, there is some sort of guff going on about secretly trained super-soldiers that may be key to ending the hundred year’s war, but there’s absolutely nothing on offer thus far to stand Pailsen Files out from the overpopulated mech war crowd.
With such ineffectual machines, it’s hard to work out how war in this fictional universe developed into using resource hungry combat suits – it seems to make far more sense to have standard human infantry, but I suppose there could have been a sort of armoured suit arms race – you can’t send soldiers into battle against walking tanks unless they have their own.
It is also saddled with a horrible 80s rock style opening theme.
In a word, so far this show is drab.

Kaiketsu Zorori is about a travelling fox named Zorori who is training to be the master of mischief. With its animal characters, bright, primary colours and loud, clear voice-artist delivery, this show is squarely aimed at the younger audience. In the first episode hour anti-hero meets up with two boar brothers who decide to become his pupils, and sets about a scheme to try and disrupt the marriage of a prince and princess and take her for himself, using a robot dragon, a giant rice cake and lots of slapstick. The art style is reminiscent of 80s classics like Dogtanian and Willy Fogg, but without the nostalgia to back it up this will only really appeal to the target audience of school children.

H20 – Footprints in the Sand is one of many shows about a boy who transfers to a school in the countryside that has lots of girl students. What differs in H20 is that the school, despite serving a village, is a large Victorian mansion style building, and the boy, Hirose Takuma, is blind.
This gives the show an excuse to serve up the bawdy humour common to the genre, with Hirose accidentally touching one girl’s chest and lifting the skirt of another with his white stick.
The harem in this version of the ‘harem comedy’ consists of a clumsy girl, a crazy girl who thinks she’s a spirit, an arrogant girl who has a little gang and the serious girl whom she bullies.
There’s some reason hinted at as to why the serious girl, Hayami, is being bullied, and by the end of the first episode the girl who thinks she’s a spirit, Otoha, visits Hirose in his dreams and temporarily gives him sight.
At this point things could go either way, as all the ingredients are there for another generic harem comedy, but there are seeds which have the potential to develop into something more.

Rosario + Vampire starts as it means to go on, with a schoolgirl riding her bike amongst the cherry blossom, until her skirt catches the wind and you see her knickers.
Aono Tsukune is a 15 year-old high school student. His grades are bad, but his dad finds an entry form to the Youkai academy dropped by a priest, meaning Aono now doesn’t have to repeat the year. On his journey to the school he receives warnings that it’s a terrible place, but when he is bumped into by Akashiya Moka on her bike he forgets all this, as she’s very cute. She also claims to be a vampire.
It turns out that the academy is a school for monsters and that any humans found will be killed on the spot. The monsters are meant to keep to human form and not reveal what kind of demon they are, but it’s still enough to freak Aono out. He tries to flee and is pursued by Akashiya as he’s her first friend, but finds that there are only buses out every month. They also fight an orc along the way who wants Akashiya for himself, but her true vampire form is too powerful, despite only seeming to amount to her hair going white, her face a bit meaner and her boobs swelling against her top.
The show could have made something of the fish out of water scenario, and had the potential for some interesting artwork with such a rich history of Japanese demon folklore, but as evidenced by the poor design of the hulking orc and the dozens of panty shots in the first episode, it’s highly unlikely that Rosario + Vampire will be looking to break the mould.
There are already many better ‘boy meets strange girl’ shows out there so unless you’re a huge fan of anime panties there’s little reason to seek this out.

All in all 2008 has not started off as a good year with which to persuade doubters that anime isn’t all the equivalent of Hollyoaks –predictable, vapid, bland and stuffed with crass titillation.

Thankfully my latest review, of '15' from Singapore, is up over at www.hkcinema.co.uk, there be links on your right.

Happy New Year!

Bullfighting with Bardot

2007-12-26T18:48:00.000Z

I always new that I'd be robbed one day.

By my late teens, practically all of my school friends had been mugged at some point.
For the most part, nothing was hurt but their pride, giving in to the threats of the bigger, usually older boys that often outnumbered them, but one guy did come in to college one morning with bad grazes up his face after being tackled to the ground in Harlesden.
As the years went by and I met no challenges, I often wondered why I managed to avoid being a victim too.
Did I have some keen street smarts that I wasn't myself aware of? Did my protruding brow and natural composure of dissatisfaction combine to create the impression of a man with slight build with whom you do not want to mess?

Of course I have no idea, and rare was the occasion when I did not consider an attack whilst out and about alone a real possibility. What would I do? Was there somewhere to run; would I fight back; how many would be too many; would I still resist against a knife; where were the makeshift weapons on my journey - the loose bricks, empty bottles etc.
It wasn't so pervasive that I'd call it an obsession, more it was a consideration, one of the many things you think about in the periphery of your consciousness when walking, like checking the road for traffic or glancing at the pavement for dog shit.
Perhaps this perpetual state of awareness helped me avoid trouble?

Then at the end of November the phone rang when I was about to leave for work. As I never get calls in the morning, I thought it may be important, so I picked up to hear a robot voice identify itself with my bank. I proceeded to ask me for security info, and as it wanted nothing too detailed I went along with it. It was when it asked about my recent transactions that a chill ran up my spine. Money out from a machine at the weekend? Yes. Online council tax payment the day before? Fine. 250 Euros withdrawn in Sicily that morning? Fuck!
I got put through to a human who proceeded to go over the details for me. Card stopped, replacement sent recorded delivery. But I won't be home, can they send it to a branch? It takes longer and they'll leave a note so I can pick it up. What about the PIN? I can use the old one as the thieves won't have the new card details. Their fraud division will be in touch about refunding the total stolen £360.
So the card didn't arrive, nor a note to say someone had been round, and a week on I rang them up - it had been dispatched that day so they canceled it and sent a new one, this time to the branch near my work. Three days later I get a letter from a courier company, saying they tried to deliver a card when I was out. It took ten days to tell me this, cunts. A further three days and my card has turned up at the bank - I can use my PIN, right? No, it's been changed. Great. Another five days or so before that turns up at the flat, the morning I am due to leave to see the family for Christmas.
The money was refunded surprisingly quickly, within two weeks of being robbed, but I was left with no access to my cash without going to a bank with a passport and all kinds, and not enough in there to get the presents I wanted to get for my love ones. Because of some virtua-mugging cunt.

It's unlikely I'll ever meet the people that robbed me, and if I did I wouldn't know it, but there were two films released this year that give you an idea as to what I'd like to do:

Have a happy new year!

Desperate ventilation

2007-11-23T23:21:00.000Z

It's odd to think that I've been a pretty solid internet user for the past six years.
Whilst many battles are waged about what the internet is and what it means, from my own perspective I have to admit that it has made a huge impact on my life.
The ease with which you can procure information made me interested again. That inquisitive spark that led me into the philosphy degree that I gave up on after a combination of death and finding out that it was little more than a specified history course, was lit again and I did more writing and research in a few months than I ever did in three years at university.
I even wrote an article/essay examining the impact of allied bombing campaigns on immigration levels, just for fun.
Ah, those heady days.
Then there were the virtual communities, the coming together of like-minded (but sometimes polar-opposite) peoples under assumed names, to debate the political issues of the day or compare pop culture, usually with copious amounts of arguing.

Nowadays it's mostly swift raids into the web, seeking out a hit of entertainment here, some information about cinema times or where to find cheap games there, but mainly, the internet got me writing, so much so that it feels like it's something I should have always been doing, but somehow got lost along the way. First about politics, then about films as I became disillusioned and stopped trying to keep up.

This blog is a continuation of this trend, an outlet to wax lyrical about whichever topic gains my fancy, whether read or not as I mostly write for my own enjoyment - barely a handful of people are ever likely to read this, after all.

Still, this post isn't really about the internet itself, or what it has done for/to me. Instead, it's an opportunity to link to this video, a great example of what the combination of virtual community and creativity can bring. Every few seconds brings some new idea or great image, and the tune is, for me at least, the kind that stands infinite repeat listens. Every time I come across it I end up watching the whole way through so it's odd I've not thought to seek it on YouTube before.

Enjoy.

Kerry's animal tincture

2007-11-06T21:16:00.000Z

I have seen lots of films, and I have written about some of them. For some reason I enjoy it, and it makes me feel productive.
I am clearly deluded.

Death Proof:
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this. After the enjoyable mess of Kill Bill I wasn't expecting a lot from a film that further celebrates the B-pictures that Tarantino clearly genuinely loves, but everything from the sleazy, characters of the first half and it's downgraded, frame- skipping treatment, to the great performances from Russel and the sassy, engaging posse from the second half lends Death Proof a sheen of quality. It revels in its low-rent ancestors but holds together a narrative far more successfully than Kill Bill did, making me wonder what could have been added to the movie post Grindhouse split. All the typical Tarantino tics are there, from the feet to the self-conscious witty dialogue to the visceral action, but there is something more satisfying there this time, perhaps being a benfeit from not having the timeline-jumping tricks of most of Quentin's other pictures.
It's still not as good as he's capable of, but in Death Proof as with Jackie Brown, Tarantino has made a film that shows as much admiration as fanatic adoration for its flea-pit origins.
True, there are a lot of holes to be picked, but this time around they're not so important.

Ploy:
Ploy is very laid-back.
It's evocative of both the odd, slowed-time feeling of waiting with the three main characters all in-between two points, killing time at a hotel, a classic setting for transition, and the dream state that they are all in as they potter about, snatching a few winks of broken sleep.
The dream sequences stand out as more conventional narratives, and all have a stark quality where you often aren't sure of whether the scene is 'really' happening.
Some of the ideas about love and relationships struck a chord with me, and it felt odd that this indie Thai movie should be so astute in its observations, with no cultural difference in these feelings.
It's undoubtedly a slow film, and I know if I'd not slept enough that week I'd have difficuty concentrating, but in the right frame of mind this is a great film.
You probably already know if you enjoy films that are slow and langorious, taking their time to explore ideas and characters, or whether you prefer films that concentrate on the narrative thrust and advancing the plot.
So you probably already know if you'll enjoy Ploy.

Glory to the Filmmaker!:

I've not yet seen 'Takeshis' and know that this draws a lot from it, but for me this reminds me a lot of 'Getting Any?' - essentially a sketch-based comedy movie, with its absurd situations, deadpan characters and broad humour.
Some of 'Glory...' is amusing, particularly the early scenes where we are treated to a series of sketches based on an alternate reality of Kitano's directorial career as he tries to make successful films, trying out different genres and taking the piss out of the road he has taken so far. It does degenerate toward the end as the film concentrates on one scenario and the gags slow down, but it isn't a bad film, even if it is probably Kitano's worst so far.
It's still interesting to get an insight into what he thinks of himself, and have a movie that pretty much explains the reason for its existence.
Looking at the vast range of outlets for creativity that he's been using for decades, it's less surprising that he has decided to direct something way out line with the usual features for which he has become known, and he no doubt knows that a large part of his audience probably would be happy with another Hana-Bi, or even Violent Cop. 'Glory...' feels like he has decided to film his own search for a project, trying to avoid retreading old ground but unsure of where he should go next. It makes for an interesting film, but unfortunately not quite as enjoyable as the narrative films he's made so far.

No Mercy for the Rude:

Like the best in recent Korean cinema, No Mercy for the Rude flits between genres, successfully mixing slapstick humour and taut, serious drama in a film which is more than just a spoof of the 'cool assassin' sub-genre.
It borrows numerous features from other films, the muteness of the protagonist and surrogate family remind me of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, whilst the sharp contrast between genres that somehow still seem to mesh evokes The Host. The detail of the characters who seem simultaneously exaggerated and authentic, and the settings that are both humdrum and distinct at the same time add up to a finely crafted feature that demonstrates that South Korean cinema is still on a roll, more than ten years on.

Ocean's 13:

Ocean's 13 is weird.
After the exercise in plot periphery that was 12, 13 is all about the heist. From start to finish it is non-stop planning and set-up and damage control, but this time you have something to root for as it's a revenge job.
I'd avoided anything about this before seeing it and so came in fresh, wondering how they could successfully engineer a situation in which all these millionaires would meet up again to risk it all - ah. Nice one.
Very enjoyable, but less depth somehow. Still a lot more impressive than a squillion similar hollywood flicks, and that score is fantastic. Holmes again managing somehow to bring something classy, timeless and inobtrusive yet definitely an essential part.

Ocean's 12:

It's a bit strange how Soderbergh managed to slip this through Hollywood, even with the name stars and the success of the first. Here it's not about the heist at all, it's all about the characters, about quirks, thier interaction. It's a film about moments, and it's really verging on the sublime. I can see why this has had such mixed reviews - from the perspective of the 'more of the same' sequel, this is rubbish, and more like a compilation of deleted scenes, the great little moments that the director loves but had to cut for time and pacing.
Someone else gave it half a star with this little number: "It's like some sort of hellish indie movie the rest of the time"
That's exactly what it is, with some little heist moments tacked on.
Your opinion is really going to revolve around what you expect before you see it.

Time of the Wolf:

There is no redemption and there are no heroes.

Haneke seems to really hate people. It's hard to imagine actually enjoying his films, as good as they are, and time and again it feels like an endurance test that you are compelled to take.
For me, he's always seemed like the classy older brother to Gaspar Noe, less bravado and far more chilling.
The end of the world is nasty and grubby, nothing is explained but it's horribly believable. It makes every other post-apocalyptic film seem like the work of adolescents, but it's hard to recommend a vision so bleak.
Not the best of Haneke's films, but it certainly fits in with the tone that has cut through the Piano Teacher, Funny Games and Hidden like a dull razor.

Conversations With Other Women:

For a film which concentrates largely on just two actors, it's important to get good performances. Luckily, Bonham-Carter and Eckhart are effortless in this tale of lost love. It treats the subjects of infidelity and the motivations behind the actions - the doomed attempt to rekindle the flame, the mixed yearnings - with reverance and skill. There are no easy answers or happy endings, but maybe there don't need to be. Afterwards it's the people I remember and not how it was shot, so the style is perhaps a way to distinguish it from the feeling of a play where this story would easily be at home?
Good.

I also saw The Marine recently, a cliched action vehicle for a WWE man whose name I forget. It is stunningly bland, with little to distinguish it from a bajillion other knucklehead fighty/shooty B-pics of the type that usually go straight-to-retail/rental hell. It's only Robert Patrick's turn as the slightly surreal bad guy that gives this a flicker of substance. It is also quite amusing to watch the star fly into the air in front of explosions in the same way, three times in a row.
Alongside the likes of Crank, this fares little better than that advert where the kid is hit by a car before he becomes a film star.

And for my return to DVD reviews, I have covered the Optimum release of Election 2, which isn't a sequel to Reese Witherspoon's excellent high-school film.
Link to the right!

The New Milk

2007-10-22T22:21:00.000+01:00

I could never be confused as a man’s man.
I was relatively short until my mid teens, and even as an adult I have small hands and feet and a slight build. I had a squeamishness of dirt and muck when I was young, a fact often pointed out by my family when I visited my great Gran’s farm, and I’ve never been interested in sports or cars. I’ve only been in one real fight, and that was with my dad, but he was pretty drunk so I don’t think it counts.
I also had little time for beer, as growing up I saw booze solely as a vehicle to drunkenness, and therefore was not interested in the taste of the liquids in question, especially when they tasted of stale dog’s piss. Luckily, my teenhood coincided with the great British introduction of the alcopop, allowing me to sup a tipple without resorting to spirits and mixers, seeing as spirits are absolutely vile and taste like the poison they are. To this day I don’t see the attraction of any alcoholic drink as a drink in and of itself, devoid of the inebriating affects, and I can’t help but believe that teenage boy after teenage boy inures himself to the foul taste of beer and lager as part initiation rite, part peer pressure and part machismo posturing. Thousands upon thousands of men will argue that they enjoy a beer for the drink itself, vast industries and even festivals are devoted to beer as if to underline the legitimacy of the beverage, but how do you argue that you are excluded from social conditioning? “Oh not me, I actually like the taste”.
Even wine, some variations of which could realistically be described as potable, has embedded itself within a vast web of self-conscious maturity, as so-called connoisseurs whip up in a frenzy about the myriad tastes and textures for what is a drunkenness tool. Sure, you may prefer a certain flavour to convey you to the point of pissed, but that’s all it is.

I am probably coming at this with a skewed vision however, as I don’t see the fuss in food and drink and don’t get excited by it. Of course I prefer some tastes to others, but given the choice I could do without the bother of eating. Most of the time it’s a chore that I have to get through in order to continue functioning, and I often put off meals until later because I can’t be bothered with the preparation.
At times I feel like an atheist in a world of believers – I don’t really believe in food.

But that’s another topic for another day.

Ironically enough this topic came up thanks to a flavour that I do enjoy.
I posted last year about the limited edition diet Vanilla Coke, lamenting its demise, when recently I came across a vanilla flavoured Absolut vodka. Of course I have known about flavoured vodkas for years, but as they do not tend to be stocked down the local supermarket, and I haven’t been as interested in drunkenness for some years, I never sought out such a thing before.
I happened upon the stuff while looking for something else, and decided it might be a decent substitute when mixed with diet Coke, with the added value of tipsiness. At this point I had already been on the hunt for cream soda, and specifically a diet variant, to fill my vanilla coke hole, but I had been stumped at every newsagent and supermarket until I came across Sainsbury’s own brand stuff.
Not a match on what I wanted, but it was close enough to bring the memories a touch more vividly to the surface.
Needless to say I set about my Absolut/Coke mixing with some mild excitement, and this is what happened.

Here are the ingredients with which I hope to resurrect the soul of Vanilla Coke, even if it is a shambling, undead version of the glory it once was.

Diet Coke you know, the non-sugar variant of the world’s most widely known beverage after water, and a poster-boy for global capitalism.

The Diet Cream Soda is a Sainsbury’s own brand, and purports to have ‘only natural flavours’, self-consciously jumpiing on the current organic/carbon neutral etc. band wagon. As I’ve said it’s been hard enough to find any Cream Soda, let a lone a diet variety, so it really has no competition in my search for sugar-free vanilla-pop.

Absolut Vanilla is Absolut vodka, with vanilla in it, and neat it’s probably the only spirit I can keep down, but still not an experience I’d enjoy repeating. There’s something perversely enjoyable in the feeling of spirits burning the throat, but being no fan of vomiting I don’t want to take the risk.

First up: Absolut Vanilla with Diet Coke.

This is a hard one, as I don’t want to use too much vodka. True, I’m a wuss, but also too much vodka will make the mix too alcoholic and therefore ruin the desired affect. As it is, even with this small measure of vodka, the taste is evident in amongst the coke, and the vanilla flavour is perhaps too natural, too sweet, to bring back the memories. It reminds me more of vanilla ice cream than vanilla coke, but even then the vanilla taste is still sweeter than a coke float – perhaps because there is less dilution?
Not what I was after, then, but nevertheless an effective way of getting vodka down you very, very quickly.

Second up: Diet Coke and diet cream soda.

As neither of these is likely to be dominant, I feel it’s safe to go for a 50/50 mix as we want both flavours present.
Unfortunately, this tastes just like the Absolut and coke, only without any alcoholic kick. The sweetness is a little softer, but it’s still far from whichever dark chemical the Coca-cola company saw fit to brew up. It probably doesn’t help that I already feel a little tipsy from my one drink, I could probably be out-drunk by 12 year olds at this point.
But no, the cream soda taste is fairly strong and is clearly eclipsing the coke, and yet if I balanced the mixture in the coke’s favour then I risk dwindling the vanilla input, which defeats the whole purpose of this jaunt.

Third and final: Coke overcomes the cream.

A mix more in favour of coke may help, but I didn’t hold out much hope. And actually, it’s just weak, a dilution of each half, this is the worst of both worlds.

Bastard.
For the moment I’ll just have to hope that Coke get bored with their orange variant and bring back the vanilla to its needy public.

And now you can see that, rather than living alone in order to avoid other people, it is more my selfless gift to everyone.

Here’s a Kids in the Hall sketch that I think is relevant at this juncture. Despite tonnes of KITH clips on the ubiquitous Youtube this particular one has been pulled by The Man, so it has to be a link rather than an embed, I’m sorry to say. Clicky!

Girl drink drunk

Eyes that turned my very core to dust

2007-09-25T20:37:00.000+01:00

It's been a long while since I posted, a long time to get out of the habit of blogging and writing reviews.

I hadn't realised, not having moved house in nearly ten years, just how time-consuming it would all become, with a solid week of packing before informing the various services and institutions, and then the age-old tradition of negotiating the archetypal hands-off landlord when trying to address a dozen and one domestic complaints.
Suffice to say, I do not take hot water for granted, the easy transportation and convection of this most necessary of liquids is a daily wonder, a luxury to be cherished.

But this a mere blip, a hiatus if you will, for I am back in the game and may yet write something almost witty.

Having said that, Halo 3 finally comes out tomorrow...

My fine lines and dark circles are more prominent

2007-07-11T20:42:00.000+01:00

E3 (which I believe stands for Electronic Entertainment Expo) has been the games industry's chest-thumping bandstand for years now, as console manufacturers, publishers and developers all vie for the attention of millions of gamers and their billions of moneys. Often acting as a showcase for the forthcoming games of the Christmas run-up and following year, the E3 ballooned into a braying behemoth, with a swollen attendance level and ever-expanding budget for those behind the the scenes.
After last year's zenith, a number of gaming's big hitters realised that the cash squandered on promotional activities looked set to eclipse any return on investment, especially as game development budgets spiral and margins shrink. They decided that E3 '07 would be a much more modest affair, paring things down to the bone and cutting down the bombast and 'booth babes' in favour of the event's real focus - the games.
Many a net pundit worried about an empty space in the calendar, a dearth of juicy games news that would hopefully be picked up by other international events, but it seems the big three players have merely taken advantage of the current techno climate. With the three home consoles all offering some sort of downloadable content facilities or net access, why fork out for a thumb-fun festival when you can just beam the teaser trailers direct to your potential customers?

Those worried by the E3 shrink should now be fully satiated by the eager ejaculation of electronic elucidations.
The internets are positively plastered with up-to-the-minute soundbites, screenshots and trailers, and indeed it is these trailers that explain the ease with which Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft stepped back from the merry-go-round. Short of demos released for each and every title, the trailer is the best way to give you an idea of what a game may be capable of, carefully edited to get you salivating for more content and the impending release.

There is a lot of promise on the horizon, and a lot of potential for all three parties, but there really is only one game that I am interested in:

Halo 3 got me to buy a 360 recently, picking a machine up when I saw one cheap enough in time for the September release.
Halo got me to buy the original Xbox, despite having played through the game from start to finish on friend's machines.
Halo 2 got me to stay online, shooting at shrill-voiced American teens as the adrenalin coursed through my system and I played into the small hours, feeding off that twitch-game hunger for 'just one more go'.
Despite the repetitive latter act of Halo, the mindless (though fitting) rush of the flood when compared to the cunning of the Covenant and the endurance-testing grind of the Library, Halo has won a place in my all-time top games.
The kind of game you can come back to years later, I have played through some levels of Halo dozens upon dozens of times, with fun melee runs on easy modes and a hard-fought battle against overwhelming odds on Legendary, the enemy AI and precision aiming of pistol fire and grenade lobs still ranks amongst some of the best in the First Person Shooter genre.
Even the cheap-shock non-ending of Halo 2 didn't taint my affection for the series, as I returned again to replay choice sections and try and find those bastard secret skulls.
Alongside the sublime coding, the Halo storyline has a lot of background depth, even if it does sometimes manifest in the trite (the main character Master Chief, is named John 113, which is also a bible reference...). Usual space marine grunt frag-fests barely make an attempt at a coherent storyline, but the portrayal of the alien Covenant's systematic, faith-fuelled eradication of mankind enjoys a substantial background beyond the games, and makes for a passable sci-fi tale (as evidenced in the tie-in novels by Eric Nylund and Wiiliam C. Dietz, The Fall of Reach, The Flood and First Strike. The first and last are pretty good, freed as they are by not being tied in by the in-game plot, but I have not yet read the newest Halo universe book, Ghosts of Onyx).

I have been looking forward to Halo 3 since the second I finished the second game, and despite the possibility for more big flaws as found in the previous instalments, and the surrounding cash-in circus that includes wallets and bags, the Real Time Strategy game Halo Wars, and not one but two different special editions of the game itself (the turbo-bastard edition of which I pre-ordered weeks ago), I don't doubt that I will be hugely satisfied and probably surprised when it finally finds its way into my disc-tray.

I am sold, hook, line and sinker.

The only other E3 tidbit to excite me was the news that Bungie's (for they are the developer of Halo) precursor to Halo, Marathon, is coming to Xbox Live Arcade in a natty enhanced mode. I have been aching to play this since I first heard of it (you can see the historical reference in the title, that Halo later shared with it's use of the Spartan codename for the enhanced soldier you play, and the Mjolnir codename for his armour...more in depth examination of the background to Halo can be found at this excellent site, as well as links to fan art, stories, videos and untold amounts of crap - http://nikon.bungie.org/)

spider spider burning bright

2007-07-07T22:54:00.000+01:00

Combien coûte ce chien dans la fenêtre? Celui avec la queue de remuement.

2007-06-23T00:15:00.000+01:00

Stuart Harling, currently being tried for the brutal murder of the nurse Cheryl Moss in April last year, is one of the latest figureheads of the unquestioned demonisation of video gaming in the media.
“… the defendant was a "loner and fantasist" who spent much of his time playing computer games and surfing the internet to fuel his interest in serial killers, knives, racism and pornography.”

One year later on the other side of the Atlantic, the murder of 32 people at Virginia Tech University by Cho Seung-hui was blamed on the influence of video games. In this particular case the hugely popular online shooter Counter Strike took the flak, largely thanks to the disturbingly swift cod-punditry by the infamous Jack Thompson. The well-known US anti-games campaigner once again lost no opportunity to bend a tragedy to his motives, flying in the face of a total lack of evidence: Click

The urge to jump to conclusions and strike out at the nearest scapegoat is familiar, and echoes the media coverage in 2004 after the murder of Stefan Pakeerah by Warren Leblanc in a Leicester Park. In this case it was the turn of Manhunt, an undoubtedly violent game by the developers of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, Rockstar. Stefan’s mother, Giselle, called for a ban on violent games as she saw Warren’s alleged obsession with the game as a core factor to his actions, despite the fact that the police discounted this possibility based on the fact that the murder was motivated by robbery:
which is more likely?
This didn’t stop several retailers withdrawing the game from sale in a bid to avoid unwanted negative attention.

This week’s news shows us that this time around, retailers may not even have the choice. The BBFC has rejected Manhunt 2 from gaining a certificate, making it illegal to sell in the UK and the first case of a game being totally banned to my knowledge.
The game has received an ‘Adults Only’ rating in the USA, (presumably equivalent to US cinema’s ‘NC-17’ or the UK’s ‘18’) but seeing as it has been developed for the Playstation 2 and Wii, and both Sony and Nintendo refuse to carry ‘AO’ rated games on their systems, this too is an effective ban on release.
Predictably, multitudes of enraged net-denizens have seen fit to lambaste the actions of the BBFC, and indeed of ‘the Man’, despite obviously having never played the game for themselves. There could very well be sound reasons behind the decision, but I can’t see how Manhunt 2 managed to distinguish itself from so many games for which violence is the sole raison d’etre, particularly the original game. Is it more depraved than Hostel? (a film I’ve not yet seen, merely because it seems like an excuse to see what torture scenes they can come up with, as opposed to something like Jason X which revels in violence and death scenes but does so in such a way that it’s hard to deny at least the attempt at black comedy)
At this point in the 5th generation of consoles, it’s hard to say what the qualitative differences are between gaming and films in terms of their effect upon the audience, but I can’t help but think that this is a 21st century version of the urge to cover up the penises of statues lest they tempt maidens into wanton acts of depravity.

Sure, that comparison is a bit facetious, but I think it’s worth comparing the cause/effect relationship. The existence of myriad examples of Beatles recordings doesn’t make me a massive fan, despite the fact that I like them. But the person who does take a big shine to the Fab Four is likely to spend a good deal of time and money tracking down all the different recordings they can lay their hands on.
A propensity for violence may not be in the same class of leisure-time pursuits, but it is hard to deny that someone interested in maiming or killing their fellow man is likely to hold an interest in violent games and movies, serial killers, weapons and suchlike. Most of these things are easily obtainable to all, but this doesn’t manufacture more psychos. In essence, the material does not generate the obsession, the obsession leads to seeking out the material.
On the other hand, in a move of heroic audacity, there is the possibility that Rockstar have purposely manufactured a totally OTT version of their game in order to garner reams of free publicity, before appealing to the review boards and submitting the ‘edited’/original version of the game, and then cashing in. This is highly unlikely however, in light of the fact that review copies had previously been sent to critics, offering the chance of highlighting such a scam, and perhaps more importantly the acres of negative commentary over the past months concerning the PS3 is likely to have dampened any enthusiasm for such a risky manoeuvre.

Besides the general criticism of the machine’s price-point, the lack of decent software, the hard evidence of slow sales (in the US in May, the PS3 barely shifted half what the 360 did, and less than a quarter of Wii units, whilst the first week of June saw the Wii outsell the PS3 8 to 1 in Japan) and the backfiring publicity stunts such as the fake fake blog and European God of War 2 launch party, the problems of Sony have been compounded by yet another poorly conceived sideswipe at video gaming.
The fuss over Manchester Cathedral’s use as a setting for part of Resistance: Fall of Man seems particularly bizarre.
Besides the fact that the game is undeniable science fiction, with the violence at the centre of the dispute aimed at the invading hordes of aliens into WW2-era Britain, games have featured real-life backdrops, including places of worship, for years, particularly in the many popular World War 2 shooters and strategy games.
Churches and the Vatican have long been the source of inspiration for many a violent and gory horror film, and it seems bizarre that the Church of England would choose this game at this time to pick a fight.

The fact that it gets mentioned in Parliament highlights the dangers of well-meaning but ignorant people sticking their oar in – yes violent games that are becoming increasingly photo-realistic may have an adverse affect on some young people who might play them (often despite these games being rated out of these children’s hands, blithely supplied by parents who give their kids GTA to shut them up on the one hand, and then open the Daily Mail floodgates with the other), but in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, why should games be treated any differently from movies and music?

Time and time again, otherwise rational human beings completely purge their minds of the idea that their fellow man was quite capable of committing heinous crimes in the days before games, movies and mass literacy, and in no smaller proportion than today.

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After that more heavyweight fare, you may be in the need of light refreshment, and so I point to this video which shows a gamer in the making:

Also, feel free to have a read of my latest movie reviews, all accessible via the handy links section to the right, newest reviews are from the Duelist on up.
Apart from the viewing of movies, I’ve had my time eaten up thanks to my cave-in purchase of a PS2. I’ve already clocked the very violent, enjoyable and 18-rated God of War, and now I’m a good 30 hours into Final Fantasy 12, so I’m quite glad it’s been a rainy summer thus far.

A sweeping generalisation

2007-05-28T00:11:00.000+01:00

Each season dozens of new anime shows are broadcast in Japan.
A handful of these are chosen by the various fansub groups for translation, and are released for download over the net. A further proportion of these titles are then picked up by the anime distribution companies, and then another fraction are picked for UK distribution, meaning that the majority of titles never see the light of day here.
It’s true to say that this filtering process does do the job of filtering the wheat from the chaff, but a lot of great series are never picked up and even those that make it can often take years to reach our island.

For the moment the fansub community offers the best opportunity to catch series that you might otherwise never see in translated form, and as ever this season has offered up a smattering of shows that peak the interest.

Darker than Black is set in the near future, where shadowy government operatives called contractors use their psychic powers to do whatever it is shady agents do, and adopts a straight-faced more realistic tone akin to that found in the acclaimed Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. After a couple of episodes it’s hard to say if this is worth sticking with, but it certainly is ‘dark’.

Denno Coil is also set in the near-future, where cyberspace is integrated into the real world via hi-tech goggles and holographic pets are the norm, but the tone is completely opposite to Darker than Black, focusing on the experiences of a young girl who has to move to a new city and meets a young cyber-detective investigating illegal programs living in hidden cyberspace. The show reminds me of My Neighbour Totoro, with its cutesy animals and the tumbling, giggling little sister to protagonist Yasako, who shouts “poop!” at everything. Despite the initially simplistic style, Denno Coil sports some sophisticated animation.

Claymore is set in the favoured anime backdrop of a generic medieval world of swords and sorcery. In this case, the Claymores are half woman-half demon warriors who travel from town to town, answering requests to despatch demons, or Yoma, who disguise themselves as people in order to have ready access to their favourite food – human guts. The set-up is initially clichéd, but the story quickly picks up the pace and by episode 8 has turned into a shocking and gripping show.
Lots of bloody violence which crucially comes second to the character development.

El Cazador de la Bruja also treads familiar ground, dealing as it does with bounty hunters, and that old “children who have escaped from labs with uncharted special powers and who are on the run from secret organisations” chestnut. In this case the setting is Mexico and our kind hearted bounty hunter forms a female double-team with the escaped super-child. There are flashes between the action as our girls outsmart/fight their pursuers, and the wider plot as we see who we assume to be the man in charge of the super-child programme do his secret organisation thing. It’s totally generic and unlikely to go anywhere particularly interesting, but is polished with a fair amount of charm that keeps it worth watching.

My favourite of the season, though, is yet another entry in the well-worn category of High School rom-com.
Lovely Complex stars the unlikely duo of Otani and Risa, a short boy and tall girl who are unlucky in love, thanks, it seems, to their height, and end up hanging around each other, constantly bickering as their friends pair up around them. They both have a lot in common and it’s clear from the off that these two are meant to be together, but it’s a rocky road.

Lovely Complex manages to mix the comedy well with the drama. You do care about the characters, particularly Risa who realises first that she and Otani could be an item, which is no easy task when the jokes are so prominent. With lots of exaggeration of expression, physical comedy and misunderstanding, Lovely Complex is genuinely funny and highlights the popularity of this genre in the West. Whilst a number of comedy shows mercilessly lampoon popular culture, it is hard to get a lot of the jokes when said culture is unfamiliar. On the other hand the various situations related to love in high school are familiar to most people; the unrequited love, love triangles and the squirming attempts to ask your dream boy/girl out are things that many more people can identify with than Ultraman parodies.
Even though you can barely breathe for anime high-school romcoms, Lovely Complex stands out for me as one of the better examples, and indeed a decent show in its own right.

I would have loved to include a clip from the show as animation is unsurprisingly key in anime, but the only thing available on Youtube at the moment are snippets of the live action version of the show, chocked to the brim with some of the worst acting that you could ever hope to avoid.

Crocodile

2007-05-17T23:09:00.000+01:00

Movies are often designed to elicit emotions in their audience – the fear of the horror film and the joy of a comedy are examples of two genres which offer up efforts that aim to do their utmost in bringing about the desired feeling in the viewer.
Two genres that everyone is familiar with, and kin to the weepie, a type of movie often aimed at a female audience and deigned to tug the heartstrings via some doomed or troubled romance that usually, but not always, wins through in the end.
I like to think that I’m too cynical and knowing to fall for the obvious attempts of some movies to increase hankie use, but even I, stiff-upper-lip Englishman that I am, have found the tears welling up thanks to some films.

The majority of movies that have moved me have come about in the last few years – could it be that movies are getting more cutting, or am I just going soft in my old age?

The first film I remember leaving me in danger of wet cheeks was Dancer in the Dark, Lars Von Trier’s case against capital punishment which featured Bjork in her first and last starring role.
You do kind of expect that a film about a self-sacrificing, single mother, who is slowly going blind as she desperately tries to provide for her son before being unjustly sentenced to death, may try to elicit a response. And you’d be right. But what could have been a worthy but stodgy TV movie of the week in another’s hands, becomes, due to the direction of Von Trier and the influence of his Dogme background, a devastatingly intimate story that earns rather than forces its empathy from you. After the film finished, all I heard around me in the dark as the credits rolled were the snifflings of the Curzon Soho patrons penetrating the stunned silence.
Don’t hold the fact that it’s a musical against it.

Not long afterwards I caught a screening of the Grave of the Fireflies as part of a Studio Ghibli season at the Barbican. Directed by Isao Takahata, the co-founder of the studio alongside the better-known Hayao Miyazaki, the film tells the story of a brother and sister’s desperate struggle for survival when they are orphaned as a result of the Tokyo fire bombing in World War 2. The death of parents and children in peril are themes that are admittedly ripe for the cynical heart-string pluckers of the weepie world, but even though the body of translated anime offers few examples that transcend the realms of adolescent fantasy or romance, Fireflies succeeds in telling the tale with no little subtlety and care, allowing you to develop a real attachment to the children that would have been so hard to achieve with live actors and their fine line of schooled ability or unskilled naivety both potentially pulling you out of their world.
Again, a hushed auditorium punctuated by wet sounds as people dragged themselves, dazed, from their seats.

Alongside the films of Satoshi Kon that match live action cinema for their craft in storytelling, beauty and immersion, Grave of the Fireflies is one of the finest anime movies ever made.

No films got to me as deeply in the intervening years. Some like Seul Contre Tous, or Funny Games, succeeded in shaking me to the core so that I felt shaken for hours afterwards, but these weren’t sad films so much as a type of horror film that needs not rely on monsters and are all the more horrifying for it. United 93 also left me affected, as surprisingly for a film in which you know the entire plot from beginning to end beforehand it was and is the tensest film that I have seen in my life, but it didn’t push the same buttons.

Then last year came Children of Men.
I have spoken of this film before, and it is truly a film that deserves to be seen before you learn anything about it, but suffice to say it was the best film last year. I’ve written about it before (link), but it needs to be said that it not only brings you close to the characters so that you fear for them, but it says things about the world today that also cut me deep. Without giving to much away, after one of the most superlative scenes of the film (and, indeed, cinema) I had to literally fight back the tears for about ten minutes, such was the urge to just burst out sobbing. It is a truly affecting film and I would urge (again) that everyone who thinks themselves a fan of cinema owes it to themselves to see it. Looking back on what I’ve written, I suspected that I might have built it up too much.
But I haven’t.

Reign Over Me is an odd one. I initially resisted the idea of seeing it chiefly down to the casting of Sandler. I’d never actually, watched an Adam Sandler movie from start to finish before, so my dislike was firmly irrational, but that feeling was enough to have me avoid him until now.
After a favourable write up in Time Out, though, combined with my free cinema pass and a work related journey near one of the few cinemas screening the film, I decided to give it a shot.
The tale of a dentist bumping into the college roommate he has not seen in years, it revolves around the fact that his old friend, Charlie Fineman, lost his wife and kids to one of the planes used on the fateful day of September 11th 2001, and has retreated into an adolescent bubble ever since, aided by a huge compensation payout.
In part it seems a typical Hollywood offering, with schmaltzy sentiment and some skirting round the more difficult problems faced by the characters, but there is real warmth there, too, along with some great acting from Don Cheadle who shines in the lead role of the everyman Alan Johnson, a character that could so easily have been a bland foil to Sandler’s occasional Rain Man-esque histrionics. Jealous of Charlie’s freedoms, Alan feels trapped by his job and his family, and finds some release through his visits to his friend, but comes to realise that what he has is actually what he needs blah blah blah. Ably supported by Liv Tyler, Jada Pinkett-Smith and Saffron Burrows, with a brief but hearty cameo from Donald Sutherland, Reign Over Me manages to move almost despite the seemingly cynical origins of a film that seems designed to tug at America’s heart(land)-strings and provide Sandler with another crack at getting taken seriously with that whole acting thing.
Whilst Sandler is admittedly responsible for the scene that actually caused me to well up, be it from the power of ACTING or the situation of his character, it is nevertheless Cheadle’s movie and makes you wish that he wasn’t so often stuck in supporting roles, playing that second fiddle. Whilst certainly not one of the greatest movies dealing with grief, it’s worth watching for the Don alone.

It also has one of the greatest examples of movie product placement with Sony’s Shadow of the Colossus, rubbing your face in the fact that Charlie Fineman Has Retreated Into A Fantasy World.

Most recently though, it is the marvellous This Is England that has been worrying my tear ducts.
Set in 1983, Shane Meadow’s latest follows 12 year old, fatherless, Shaun, who gets picked on at school and generally has a rough time of things until he is welcomed into a gang of skinheads by Woody and finds happiness with his new friends and surrogate family. Inevitably this joy is short lived thanks to the return of Combo from a stretch inside, who quickly divides the group with nationalist speeches, and takes Shaun under his wing when Shaun decides he wants his dad’s death on the Falklands to mean something.

This Is England is an uncanny glimpse at early 80’s Britain risen from the dead, with every performance note-perfect and a devastating and gripping story despite the predictability of things all going wrong.
As Combo, Stephen Graham succeeds in the unenviable task of portraying a racist, thuggish skinhead as a three-dimensional character, but it is Thomas Turgoose who shines out as Shaun, exactly like a 12 year old boy from ’83, with that intangible mix of wisdom and innocence that films fail to capture with child characters again and again.
Even though you can see the events at the close of the film coming from a long way off this builds on rather than detracting its power, making for a searing and sobering experience.
A massive contribution to the emotion involved comes from early in the film where a few scenes of the gang together somehow seem to distil what it means to be friends, and is as touching as the tragedy that rears towards the end.

This Is England shares with A Room For Romeo Brass and Dead Man’s Shoes a wonderful naturalism from the performers, so that it never seems that you are watching a film with players but rather are catching a slice of people’s lives. This Is England joins the aforementioned films as some of the best British cinema has to offer and marks Meadows as a director to watch, if only to see how he plans to follow what he has achieved so far.
Best film of the year.