I am currently watching Big Momma's House

I wonder what it is pushing out of my brain. I hope nothing important.

Jolly Comrades

In the 1920s The Little Man was commisioned to make a series of films for the Pathe company. These were to be shown alongside the company's newsreels in British cinemas. The films varied in quality and covered an electic range of subjects in an inconsistent style. Only six films were made and Pathe did not renew The Little Man's initial contract. Nevertheless, the first film, documenting the lives of the entertainers and showmen who entertained the pickets during the general strike of 1926, is still considered a classic. Fresh from the National Film Archive, it is with pleasure and pride that we present this newly-digitised film to you today. We hope you enjoy The Jolly Comrades.

Minesweeper: The Movie

Found by Lucas.

Beowulf: The Blog Post

BEOWULF

In glorious IMAX Cockney-vision

Starring:

Ray Winstone as Beowulf
Anthony Hopkins as King Wassisname

Scene 1, Interior of King Wassisname's mead hall.

Beowulf enters.
Beowulf: Alright guvnor, I am Beowulf, son of Ronnie, son of Reggie, I 'av come to slay your monsta.
King Wassisname: I can smell your perfume Clarice.
Beowulf: You wot? You 'avin a fackin' larf?
King Wassisname: You have come to kill our Grendel?
Beowulf: Grendels? I've shit 'em!


Scene 2, Interior of King Wassisname's Mead hall, night.

Grendel enters.
Grendel: Arrrghhhh, arghhh, argggghhhhh!
Beowulf: Strike a light, what's your game?
Grendel: Arrrghhhh, arghhh, argggghhhhh!
Beowulf: Look you fackin' slag, you can fack right awf back down that fackin' frog and toad! You can't come down my manor playin' the biggun! Fack awf before I fackin' do you!
Grendel: Arrrghhhh, arghhh, argggghhhhh!
Beowulf: Alright you fackin' toilet, I'm gonna fackin' cat you up right proper, you slag!
Beowulf's comrade: You were only supposed to tear his bloody arm off!


Scene 3, Interior of King Wassisname's Mead hall, the next day.

King Wassisname: Beowulf has slain Grendel. Our nightmare is over. Later we shall eat Grendel's liver with a nice chianti (F-f-f-f-f), but first our bard will sing a song of Beowulf's victory.
Bard: Let's awl go daaahn the Strand ('ave a banana!). Knees ap mavver Brown, knees ap mavver Brown! Chim chimney, chim chimney, chim chim cheree! Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit! (Etc).

"I'll do you, you fackin' slag!"

Marvel vs DC

More here.

Many Happy Returns

Congratulations to Harry and Patricia Knowles. Harry: I hope this doesn't mean you will neglect the website that I have been reading since I first got on the interwebs back in 1996? My world would be unsettled without your film reviews filled with bad punctuation and unnecessary (but strangely comforting) details about your private life.

A Film I Shall Be Watching

[click to enlarge poster, film website here, found via Samizdata].

Carnivorous, Stinging, Walking Plants re-Invade London! Wait, Today They Look Like Zombies! - A Review of 28 Weeks Later

I have recently visited the cinema for the long awaited (by me) sequel to one of my recent favourite films, '28 Days Later'. The sequel with the silly title was receiving mixed reviews from reviewers whom I normally trust so I it was with a touch of ambivalence that I rested in the surprisingly comfortable chair in a good central position and waited for the film to start.

Before that moment I was treated to a full preview for Die Hard 4.0, which I have to say, looked like the absolute pinnacle of mindless fun and appears to have done for the ‘geriatric action hero’ genre what Matrix did for car chases and kung fu!

That preview was the highlight of the whole experience.

'28 Weeks Later' is unrelentingly dire, drab and awful. God it’s bad. Now don’t get me wrong, it has its moments. I’m certainly not going to attack it on the basis of a few continuity errors (“…we know it can’t species jump…”, er, wasn’t the original carrier a chimp?) or the inaccurate geography of London as some have done. The feel of the abandoned Capitol was as brilliantly rendered here as in the original and as the two child characters (blowed if I can remember names or pretend to care) cross the Tower bridge on a moped there is a genuine feel that the World has stopped outside the cinema (although in my case it was rather supplanted by a fear of ambulatory plants but, hey, it’s a better story!).

No the failings of this film are two-fold, no wait, three-fold… er well actually could be four. Tell you what, I’ll just try and explain why I didn’t like it.

Firstly the NATO coalition forces, that are exclusively American and appear to have no command structure and are excitingly incompetent, are just characterless clones despite the fact that two of them are main characters! There is no attempt to fill in the story behind their presence or slant the audience in one direction or the other as to whether their presence is beneficial or not. Which considering the final results of their actions and behaviour in the closing sequence is just unforgivable. A beautiful opportunity to bait and switch the audience was missed here. You end up feeling just a little confused as to who the real bad guys are, and not in a moral dilemma sense of the first film either.

Secondly, the characterisation of one of the ‘zombies’ just does not work. They’re mindless. That’s the whole point. So the fact that the same one keeps turning up at key moments at the right time spoils the whole feel of a horde of screaming monsters. It implants the notion that they are more intelligent that previously believed which then destroys the mythos of the RAGE as previously created.

Now the camera work. Oh god, I get a headache just thinking about the opening sequence. I understand that highly fragmented and fast moving Blurrovision™ type shots are meant to convey panic and fear but there are limits. They should have handed out motion sickness drugs with the popcorn.

My main problem with this film is that it felt like a missed chance to maybe make the defining trilogy of this genre. The first film is brilliant, flawed, but brilliant. The second is formulaic, flawed and disappointing. Watch it, I would suggest, but do so on DVD and save yourself a few bob.

Oh well, there is always Die Hard to look forward to I suppose.

*As is made clear in the tags, this is a Pritchard Buckminster article that has, due to technical problems, been posted by Edwin.

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Nobody does it better, makes me feel sad for the rest

Film Review: Dead Man's Shoes

Before seeing Dead Man's Shoes, my only experience of director Shane Meadows' previous work was 24-7 (vague recollection, not that impressed) and before that Small Time (I remember not liking it, but it was a while ago, so this may be unfair), so I really didn't know what to expect.

The film centres around the characters of Richard (Paddy Considine) and his brother Anthony (Toby Kebbell). The plot is easy to explain: Richard is a soldier who has returned to his home town of Matlock in Derbyshire to take murderous revenge on the drug-dealing scum who have been tormenting his younger brother Anthony (who has learning difficulties). It really is as simple as that. But what the film lacks in apparent complexity, it more than make up for in its execution and depth of portrayal.

From the sublime opening scenes featuring Richard and his brother hiking home through the gorgeously filmed English countryside, which for some reason made me think of Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza (I apologise if that seems pretentious, it is just what came to mind), to the ridiculous nature of the idiotic yet idiosyncratic losers who inhabit the small towns of England, Dead Man's Shoes depicts England as it is. OK, so it is not England for everyone, and many of us strive to escape and forget the influence of the kind of lowlifes featured in the film, but for the slice of the country and the culture to which the lens of Meadows' camera is directed, it tells a truth. I always admire people who can see things clearly and without pretension, as is not something that I find easy, but Meadows and lead actor/co-writer Considine achieve this.

Paddy Considine as Richard in Dead Man's Shoes

Considine gives a performance which runs from menacing to genuinely touching, but which is always believable. Richard is fearless and Considine makes this clear in every scene. Something has made the soldier completely unafraid of the men who have persecuted his brother. He no longer cares what happens to him and this terrifies the gang. But his portrayal is not over the top. His protective love for Anthony is touching, but not sentimental; his menace is menacing because it consists of unpredictability, not because of grandstanding dialogue. There is none of the sub-Tarantino banter of a Guy Ritchie plastic gangster movie. Considine's career has rightfully taken off and I look forward to his portrayal of Rorschach in the adaption of Alan Moore's brilliant Watchmen graphic novel. The rest of the cast do their jobs admirably, including Toby Kebbell who turns in a totally believable performance as Anthony.

To my mind the film does have a few weaknesses. A major weakness is the score: although Aphex Twin's claustrophobic electronica is used to great effect in certain scenes (especially the "drug scene"), some of the other instrumental and choral music was, in my opinion, unsuitable. Firstly, many pieces were played too loud compared to dialogue in the surrounding scenes, leading to the music overwhelming the beautifully directed shots of Richard walking through the picturesque and evocative East Midlands landscape. Secondly, the music often didn't match the setting. This is hard to explain, but the tracks summoned up images in my mind of the South of France or the majesty of Rome rather than rural Derbyshire.

The film also had some unrealistic elements. These are minor flaws in an otherwise very believable setting and cast of characters. One example, that got on my nerves, was that the gang drove around in a Citroen 2CV. I'm sure this was for comedic effect, and a fully weighed-down Citreon containing a rag-bag troupe of drug-dealers is an amusing image, but it is wholly unrealistic. Reasonable looking used cars are dirt-cheap in 21st Century England. Every time the Citroen appeared, I was no longer immersed in the film.

Anyway, this is petty. Dead Man's Shoes is excellent English cinema, which is far more realistic and entertaining than the so-called "social realist" films of the 60s and 70s ever were (Kes excepted). It is also a refreshing change from the all the tedious, mockney gangster flicks that infested the English film industry in the 1990s.

Intriguing Biographies on Wikipedia

A number of months ago Charles Pooter pointed me in the direction of the Wikipedia article for Science Fiction writer and popular co-photographee F. Gwynplaine Macintyre*.

Mr Macintyre as seen in photographs with popular American journalist Andy Rooney, Playwright and London figure Toby Young, Politican Journalist and Comedian Boris Johnson and Science Fiction Writer Adam-Troy Castro

I have to admit, that I've been a little hooked ever since. The Wikipedia article itself is intriguing, we have these incredible events one after another - a disease so unusual Wikipedia doesn't have a page for it and it must be described in the article, expatriation to Australia, work on The Prisoner, poetry derided by the poetry community, heroic adventures to discover lost silent movies. I suggest you go read that article before continuing this one.

Wow! Please take note of the style of the piece, the list of "praisers" at the top of the piece - fame by association? The continuous references to mystery "few clues", "ghosting"... Then amongst this obfuscation there is all the inside information about his ghostwriting and relations with other poets and opinions on word use... I could go on at length about the unusual features of this Wikipedia article that yell fake from the rooftops, yet in the most interesting ways. Much like the novel House Of Leaves (reviewed previously) the obvious fabrications make the unseen underlying story more intriguing... Because there are still those definite photographs (what is a New Wave SF writer doing with Boris Johnson?), coming across like some bizarre Doctor Who figure in historical event after event.

So I dug a little deeper on Wikipedia, and it became obvious that almost this entire article had been written by the unregistered I.P address 66.9.172.83, and yet his novel The Woman Between The Worlds (doesn't sound like my taste, sounds a little too New Wavey for me but you can't tell without reading it), and his poetry are reviewed and available on Amazon. Curiouser and Curiouser.

At this point, an aside: back in my university days I knew a flamboyantly obese man whose name was something like Kevin, or Edward, or Tom, but insisted upon being called Napoleon. In the days when I used to go to heavy metal concerts he was the classic example of the sweaty guy you dreaded finding yourself behind, whose hair you discovered all over you after you left the gig and you could never tell if the sweat covering your once-black t-shirt was yours, or his. It was impossible to get to the bottom of Kevin's (as I will call him) personality because he covered his insecurities with fatuous bluster, and most people I knew just gave up on him after two or three attempts. I didn't hate Kevin, no one did, but no-one I knew ever managed to communicate with the man who was someone's brother, someone's son... They only managed to get Napoleon, the hard drinking computer programmer who had gained his nickname for hard-boiled tactics in role playing games.

As I read further into this Gwynplaine "myth" (I admit to spending over an hour thinking about this man) I kept seeing Kevin/Napoleon in my mind, but also seeing Borges and his fantastical fictional essays. To my tortuous view of reality, if the myth is good enough it justifies the lie (I personally have experimented repeatedly in the fabricated essay form elsewhere, it's probably my best fictional work), what I desperately wanted was some seed in the middle of this fantasy, something substantial to reveal it all. So what, or who, exactly is this Gwyn character? There are too many mentions of him in the science fiction world to write him off as a two dimensional fantasist, but much of the resources on the internet (alt.films.silent has extensive complaints about his lies and behaviour on IMDB) make one suspect... If you can find the key fact that makes his story fit together I salute you. This is more than a false Wikipedia article, because you don't just grow a massive set of mutton-chops like that in minutes, this man lives and breathes this myth he has created.

My suspicion is that he must have built up this identity of his before the invention of the internet, and now is stuck behind his farcical facial hair in a world where Google makes his fabrications all too transparent... A computer terminal with a man attached, wifeless in a small village in Wales is the image I have in my mind. And yet, yet, I sense a real respect for him in many places I have tunnelled. I hate to write off a man who has clearly contributed to the genre I love, but if you fill up a publicly owned balloon with hot air, I almost feel a duty to prick it. So, Gwyn (and if I have read your character at all I am sure you will find this article via Google within a day of posting) I salute you for your class, and respect your myths... But couldn't you have done, well, a better job of it?

* (Very soon after posting this piece a spoilsport Wikipedian stubbed the article, above is the original version and the new version is found here.)

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After graduating from Belmarsh, Lord Archer returned to his successful career as a gardener