"To whom... speed means freedom of the soul."

"Kowalski drives to drive, with no real purpose for doing what he's doing. He decides to give his own life its definition and meaning, with complete freedom over his actions."

Transcribing the lyrics to "N.W.W.", i remembered what a great film Vanishing Point is. 
It quickly became clear at least two of my group had never seen it before. We are remedying this now.

"Remember Me": a new low in lazy plotting

Andy from Scams alerted to me this trailer:

So far, so sickly Dawson's Creek tripe. The clever twist comes in having the star-crossed, adversity-overcoming lovers separated for good at the end when the male lead gets, erm, killed in the September 11 attacks.

Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum nails it with the description "[a] shameless contraption of ridiculously sad things befalling attractive people", as does the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris, who notes how the film "crassly repurposes tragedy to excuse its cliches."

Seriously, it's not even been 10 years! Tho i suppose there's no official statue of limitations on grave-robbing. Alternatively, i love the idea that some idea-stuck suits in a Hollywood boardroom somwhere might have gone, "Y'know, 9/11 was pretty horrible. i think we can best convey the poignancy of this tragedy by adding a sparkly vampire."

And what's with the crappy recycling of the closing line from Se7en (warning: do not click this link if you haven't seen Se7en, ultimate spoilerville)? What a parade o'lame.

In search of the arthouse James Bond

i'm not particularly a big James Bond fan, but if pressed to name a favourite in the series it would have to be On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It's got proper emotional resonance (Bond is human and vulnerable - three-dimensional, in fact - rather than just the usual cartoonishly unstoppable force of nature); the criminally underrated George Lazenby, a better Bond than at least three of the ones that came after him, and far more appropriate to the tone of the material than Connery's knowing smirk would have been; meta-humour ("This never happened to the other fellow", complains Lazenby at one point); Telly Savalas as Blofeld; the stunning visuals (Piz Gloria, Saas Fee); and the best overall score of any of the films, courtesy of an on-fire John Barry and including Louis Armstrong's last recorded song before his death, "We Have All the Time in the World", with lyrics by Hal David. This post on the IMDb boards does a pretty good job of elaborating on its dopeness.

Anyway, i just found out about US TV network ABC's "unusual" airing of the film in 1976. It was shown in the channel's 2-hr Monday Night Movie slot; but ABC execs soon came up against the problem of how to fit a 142-minute movie into a 120-minute time slot and still have room for 30 minutes of advertising.

Their solution was to cut the movie into two sections to be aired over two consecutive weeks. Since this would still only fill one hour per section, they then elected to rearrange the order of a lot of the movie's scenes. The first part was deemed rather slow for ABC execs, so the thrilling ski chase scene, usually in the middle of the film, is brought to the very beginning. (This was also, believe it or not, considered a good tie-in to the '76 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, to which ABC had broadcasting rights). It then cuts back and forth between the ski chase scene, several scenes that immediately follow it, and the movie's actual beginning.

Potentially jarring continuity cracks are papered over with some bizarre overdubbed narration ostensibly read by 'Bond himself', but performed by a probably non-British actor affecting a slightly dodgy English accent (you can hear some at this page). After a while, the unusual editing disappears as abruptly as it arrived, and the movie resumes its normal chronology (the second part has no edits at all). This edit was only ever broadcast twice; the second time was in 1980, when both parts were combined into one unholy three-hour block.

To the Bond aficionado this probably sounds like hideous mutilation. However, as i mentioned, i'm not a Bond aficionado; i'm only a mild Bond appreciator at best, but i am a massive fan of errata, obscurities and weirditude, and to me the ABC OHMSS edit sounds like it could be an inadvertent arthouse masterpiece.

The $64,000 question is, has anybody got a copy of this pioneering "Broadcaster's Cut"? The page with the narration snippets above informs that you can get a DVD copy by donating to the website of another Bond fan, but regrettably this site doesn't seem to exist any more. Hypothetically i would pay at least as much as for a brand-new DVD copy of the available (authentic) OHMSS. Anyone?

mp3: Louis Armstrong — "We Have All the Time in the World" (YSI)
mp3: Propellerheads — "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (YSI)

RIP John Hughes (1950 — 2009)

And so the familiar landscape of the eighties continues to seep slowly, inexorably, away.


(i know i should sort be obliged to feel a certain kinship for Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, but Molly was like a perfect sonnet in female form in that film.)

"RIP 80s dreams of friendship crossing social strata" — Pip

RIP John Hughes.

mp3: Simple Minds — "(Don't You) Forget About Me" (YSI)

Christian Bale: right idea, wrong reasons

The funniest thing about Christian "slightly too convincing as Patrick Bateman" Bale's silly on-set luvvie tirade is that he felt it was necessary to spill out the agonies of his tortured artistic soul over, of all things, a Terminator movie.¹

i mean, it's not exactly Citizen Fucking Kane, is it?

i'm all for artists who practically kill themselves and others around them out of passion to make the results greater than they would otherwise have been. Steve Albini can by all accounts be an abrasive dickhead, but he does it to push his performers to the limit of their abilities, and the results are demonstrable. The Velvet Underground were basically Lou Reed and John Cale's five-year confrontation with the whole of Western society, but they also happened to be geniuses. Bale's former director Werner Herzog, one of my favourite ever ever filmmakers, and Klaus Kinski, the man he described as his "best fiend", nearly killed each other multiple times over the filming of five separate pictures, but the pictures in question were incredible.

BUT THIS IS A FUCKING TERMINATOR MOVIE.

i blame the Batman franchise and its irritating aspiration to be Dark And Profound™ all the time for the fact that we now have to treat any given piece of Hollywood fluff devised for mere entertainment purposes as if it were a radical new Dostoyevsky interpretation or something.²

The only Batman film worth watching is the 1966 version featuring the spandex and the "KER-POW!"s and Batman delivering the line "some days you just can't get rid of a bomb" with an entirely straight face, not least because it just ADMITS that it's a jokey comic-book adaptation and then gets on with the task of being ace, rather than dicking about pretending to be Requiem for a Boring Dream.

In other words, everyone seems to be treating Bale's outburst as "bad but justifiable". Says Darren Aronofsky: "[a]lthough it's never good to lose your temper that bad for obvious reasons, we don't know what scene he was doing. He could have been doing a deeply, deeply intense emotional scene."

Surely that's completely backwards. The tirade? Big deal. It's the use of utterly specious and flimsy art to justify it that perturbs me.³

"He could have been doing a deeply, deeply intense emotional scene."

In Terminator Salvation? Could he? Really?

The problem here is not Bale's short temper. It's our expectation that "deeply intense emotional scene[s]" are the norm for big-budget major-studio summer action flick franchises these days. If you want harrowing emotionalism and intensity, go watch Through A Glass Darkly or something. If you want big dumb action thrills (who doesn't sometimes?), go get out Snakes on a Plane. But try and pretend that one's the other, and you just sell everyone short.

If anything good comes out of the current recession, it'll hopefully be an end to this kind of gratuitous posturing comic-book-goth pseudo-soul-searching, and a return to a mainstream that'd rather have a bit of fun than force itself to sit around chain-smoking Gauloises on pavement terraces all day with copies of something obvious by Nietzsche left lying conspicuously about. "'Ere's 'oping", as Camus would undoubtedly have said.


¹ Yes! This post has footnotes.
² And the Cult Of Heath™, too, for that matter — can you just give him the fucking posthumous Oscar so we can all stop talking about him, already?
³ Same with the whole Gordon Ramsey thing. Stop swearing at people, mate: at the end of the day, you're a cook. Know your place.

The joy of criticism.

An abject lesson (to anyone who might have doubted it) that sometimes, criticism of pop cultural artefacts can be of a lot higher quality and more rewarding than the film, book, play, etc. it's actually critiquing. Don't believe me? Read this Slate article (as reprinted below) on the filmmakers responsible for Scary Movie, Shit Movie, Rehashed Spew Movie, and all the rest of 'em. My particular favourite diss is highlighted in dark red, but you may take yr pick of the riches on offer.

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Disaster Movie, the latest spoof from director/writer tandem Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, hits theaters on Friday. Despite the fact that no Friedberg-Seltzer movie—their previous works include Epic Movie and Date Movie—has received anything close to critical acclaim, the duo continues to churn out films at a spectacular rate. Earlier this year, in an essay pegged to the release of the 300 takeoff Meet the Spartans, Josh Levin called the Friedberg-Seltzer movies "massive consumer fraud" and asked why audiences continue to patronize these terrible films. The article is reprinted below.

Meet the Spartans (20^th Century Fox), the latest spoof from Scary Movie/Date Movie/Epic Movie auteurs Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, begins with King Leonidas from 300 getting crapped on by a dancing penguin who exclaims, "I'm about to make you my bitch!" It ends with—spoiler alert!—a Stallone impersonator gyrating in the outfit Britney Spears wore to the MTV awards. In between, there are thousands of bad gay jokes (Leonidas' battle plan: "I'm going to take them in the rear"), thousands of even-worse gay jokes ("It looks like backstage at an Elton John concert"), and "fake" in-movie commercials for Gatorade and Dentyne Ice. The action regularly stops so the characters can be evaluated by the judges from American Idol, America's Next Top Model, and Dancing With the Stars. Those who stick around for the closing credits are treated to the sight of George W. Bush getting kicked in the nuts. Judging by the respective approval ratings of Bush (31 percent) and the Friedberg-Seltzer comedy team (between 2 percent and 3 percent, according to Rotten Tomatoes), audiences would have preferred to see Bush, or perhaps even Stalin, kick Friedberg and Seltzer in the balls.

Various news sources have declared that Meet the Spartans has a running time of 84 minutes. Some online reviews peg the actual running time at 68 minutes. I went to a 5:30 p.m. screening. After previews, the movie began some time between 5:44 and 5:47. The closing credits started at 6:47. After a cast-performed rendition of "I Will Survive" (note: this was a reprise of an earlier performance) staged on the American Idol set (note: not the real American Idol set), the credits ran over a black screen. Perhaps two minutes later, the credits gave way to scenes that weren't strong enough to make the first 60 minutes, including Spider-Man removing Donald Trump's toupee. After about five minutes of these deleted scenes, the credits started again. They moved at about 10 lines per minute. And, considering the movie is about an hour long and probably took about six hours to make, they included a surprising amount of names; I'm guessing 8,000. By the time the credits had been slow-rolling for several minutes, the other 15 people in the theater had gone home. As the credits continued, I put on my headphones and listened to some music. At 7:09, more than 20 minutes after the credits began, I was rewarded by the aforementioned five-second, fake-Stallone-as-Britney bit. The lights went up and I left, shaken and depressed.

Isn't it massive consumer fraud to charge $10.50 for a barely hour-long movie? Perhaps, but it would've been unforgivable to make Meet the Spartans any longer than an hour. This was the worst movie I've ever seen, so bad that I hesitate to label it a "movie" and thus reflect shame upon the entire medium of film. Friedberg and Seltzer do not practice the same craft as P.T. Anderson, David Cronenberg, Michael Bay, Kevin Costner, the Zucker Brothers, the Wayans Brothers, Uwe Boll, any dad who takes shaky home movies on a camping trip, or a bear who turns on a video camera by accident while trying to eat it. They are not filmmakers. They are evildoers, charlatans, symbols of Western civilization's decline under the weight of too many pop culture references.

As Bryan Curtis has pointed out in Slate, the spoofs of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker—the team behind Airplane! and The Naked Gun—are characterized by their facility with the tone and detail work of genre films and their genius combination of straight-faced B-movie actors with lowbrow punch lines and sight gags. Friedberg and Seltzer, rather than tweak the clichés of the movies they parody, take a NOW: That's What I Call Movies! approach, using farts and leather underwear to not-critique a collection of pre-chewed moments from recent blockbusters. In Meet the Spartans, the mere act of referring to Transformers, Happy Feet, Spider-Man 3, Ghost Rider, Rocky Balboa, Stomp the Yard, Shrek, Lindsay Lohan, Kevin Federline, or Deal or No Deal is presumed to be hilarious. (If you'll indulge me for a second, I will pause to crack up Friedberg and Seltzer: "Paris Hilton.") An example of this soft-hitting mashup style: After Leonidas punts American Idol's Sanjaya into the "pit of death," a Simon Cowell impersonator declares the kick "utterly dreadful," whereupon he too goes spelunking in the death pit. Take that, Simon Cowell!

Friedberg and Seltzer have also failed to absorb the Zuckers' understanding of the power of the straight man. While Sean Maguire declines to wink or mug through his portrayal of the mighty Leonidas, the filmmakers betray their lead actor by having him shout "Paris Hilton!" or "Dane Cook!" every time one of the film's copious celeb impersonators makes an appearance. Not content to merely insult its audience by charging full fare for a pastiche of sub-Mad TV-level sketches, Meet the Spartans dares to presume that it's smarter than the people watching. In anticipation of writing a piece on the decline of the spoof genre—a project that has been aborted, because forcing me to watch the entire Friedberg-Seltzer canon would require Slate to spend millions in hazard pay—I rented one of the duo's previous titles, Date Movie. I made it only halfway through, but I did notice that the DVD included an option to watch the film with a laugh track. I'm not kidding, and I don't think Friedberg and Seltzer are, either—they think we're too stupid to know where the stupid jokes are.

Here's the great irony of the Friedberg-Seltzer phenomenon: These two churn out crap, then brazenly parade the crapitude in trailers and commercials, essentially daring America to stay away. Instead, we reward them by making Meet the Spartans the top-earning movie in the country, the second straight Friedberg-Seltzer film to earn that honor. The movie's $18.5 million take has a lot to do with its release date; even in the dumping ground of late January, something has to be No. 1 at the box office. The film's success, though, is not a sign that popular opinion diverges from that of the critics. On its opening weekend, Meet the Spartans played to the audiences most predisposed to like it: frat boys, middle schoolers, the actors' parents. Considering that crowd, the movie's C- CinemaScore—a rating compiled by querying the exiting audience—is appalling.

I don't blame Fox for releasing the likes of Meet the Spartans—these movies are so cheap to produce that they're guaranteed moneymakers. But why do audiences keep encouraging the studio by coming back for more? My theory is that Friedberg and Seltzer have managed to stay just anonymous enough that people in the mood for a good spoof aren't aware that they're about to subject themselves to the hacks behind Date Movie and Epic Movie. As soon as the duo becomes better-known and better-reviled, they will have only one recourse: self-parody. Hitting the screen in 2009: Not Another Friedberg-Seltzer Movie.

Keith Vaz fucks up / Starbucks fucks off

Another example of the current government's uncanny ability to deal with the really important issues in our society, the ones that affect us all, the ones we all carry so close to our hearts.

Yep, that latter-day Roger Cook Keith Vaz has fearlessly stuck his neck on the line, weighing in with his usual integrity and passionate on the deeply troubling and incredibly important issue of the cinema rating of the new Batman movie. Holy Totally Significant Issue, Batman!

According to the Beeb, Vaz told The Independent, "The BBFC should realise there are scenes of gratuitous violence in The Dark Knight to which I certainly would not take my 11-year-old daughter. It should be a 15 certificate."

Uhhh, got news for you, Keith. A 12A certificate actually doesn't admit an 11-year-old (the clue's in the numbers) unless you specifically ignore the BBFC's advice and take the kid in with you as its legal guardian. So, um, your 11-year-old daughter wouldn't in fact be able to see the film anyway, unless you were a wilfully negligent parent. So if you don't want her to see it, don't take her to it. Just don't try and impose your misunderstanding of the ratings system on the rest of us for cheap political points.

How does such an egregious dunderhead get to lead a Select Committee, anyway? Presumably "Select" is like a Labour euphemism for "backwards", like "special" or "cerebrally challenged" or something.

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In other news, three cheers for the Aussies! Apparently they've largely driven Starfucks out of the country altogether, corporate monolithery and shitty coffee and all.

When i got my mobile a few years ago, the inbuilt T-9 dictionary could accurately complete the word "Starbucks", but not "Shakespeare". So this news is not before time at all.

MP3: Don Caballero: "You Drink a Lot of Coffee for a Teenager"