Do You See

Foiled again! etc etc

Unlike, say, sailing, fencing is a naturally telegenic sport. Violent and shrouded in darkness with dramatically spot-lit little runways for the fencers to jab at each other, each point of a bout will take up at most a few seconds of one’s precious, attention-deficit-addled time. In fact, bouts at this highest of levels are like that old nature film of the grizzly bear swiping salmon from a stream - the crucial action simply takes place faster than a human can see it. Like chess players, fencers are always several moves ahead of what’s actually happening. But with the camera and playback technology available today, every bind, circle-parry and change of engagement can be slowed down, isolated, remarked upon and put into the context of the bout. And like the other combat sports, fencing requires ingenuity, creativity and grace yet thankfully doesn’t depend on a judge somewhere. You either hit somebody or you don’t. … read on …

Does The Pope Shit In The Woods?

The Pope’s Toilet (El Bãno Del Papa) is set up to be a droll satirical comedy about the supposed effect the Pope’s visit to a small Uruguayan town had. Based on true events, there is some humour in the small town folks dreaming of this one day windfall of pilgrims visiting their town – strategically placed near the Brazilian border (the Pope did not visit Brazil on that visit). And yet there really aren’t any jokes except at the expense of the simple folk of the town. And whilst there may be a degree of venal cunning displayed in the townsfolk’s opportunism, this has to be balanced against their abject poverty. Bearing in mind that our lead regularly cycles 60 km a day via the countryside to smuggle goods from Brazil, you can’t begrudge them a day of dreams. I don’t think the film does. But then where is the humour in someone risking their entire standing and livelihood to smuggle a toilet over the border to try and make a little bit of money out of hordes of tourists? … read on …

My Old Robots A Dustman, He Wears A Robotic Dustmans Hat

Wall-E is kind of the kids sequel version of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. In Idiocracy the world its being swamped by rubbish, and everyone is become slack jawed servants of a dumbed down society. In Wall-E the humans have left a waste strewn Earth and are drifting around in space morbidly obese in their hover chairs (at least until the idiosyncratic Hello Dolly loving robot comes and reminds them of their own humanity). Similar plots, though only one has a monster truck battle. And it isn’t the kids film!

Much has been written about the politics of Wall-E (from its anti-obesity scare tactics to its not exactly hidden green agenda). … read on …

The TranseX-Files

Most of the reviews of The X-Files: I Want To Believe have decided that it is on a par with a low quality standalone episode of the series, stretched needlessly to feature length. What intrigues me about this is that film reviewers tend not to be all that TV literate, and so I wonder if they really spent that much time exhaustively watching The X-Files. This film turns out to be something a little odder than this glib assessment; it is a mixture of paranormal investigation and Before Sunset.

What we get is Mulder and Scully acting like an old married couple, bickering when an old flame re-enters their lives. They have moved on, her to successful doctoring, him to wild man in the woods giving Grizzly Adams a run for his money in the shaggy beard stakes. The old flame returns, in this case the FBI needing their help on a paranormal case, and their cosy status quo is threatened. It becomes a weird relationship drama, showing us a how these characters have grown (or not) in the intervening ten years, throwing up new conflicts, weird work related jealousies and old reminiscences. … read on …

Blurzillas, the Olympics and Jet Li’s Piss

So the BBC have launched their slightly abstruse trailer for the Olympics. It being a two minute summary of Wu Cheng’en’s Journey To The West, better known in the west as MONKEY. The animated two minute trail takes a while to get on to the subject of the Olympics, and is subtitled Journey To The East - as that is what the BBC will be doing to cover the Olympics (DO YOU SEE). One assumes the music and imagery are largely based on the recent stage version of Journey To The West by Damon Albarn and Chen Shi-zheng, designed by Jamie Hewlett whose animation is unmistakable here. Fun that it is, it will probably infuriate a lot of people, and confuse anyone under thirty. Unless they know the story of the Monkey King all that well. Which they may have picked up a bit from Dragonballz, or seen the recent Jet Li, Jackie Chan film The Forbidden Kingdom. … read on …

MAMMA MIA IS AW(ful)SOME!!!

The tonal shifts in Mamma Mia are unsettling. The range of acting styles, from mugging through to camp are far broader than any film I have seen in years. The cinematography only occasionally lifts its head above competent and Meryl Streep should never, ever be allowed to wear dungarees again. But the soundtrack is terrific (even when being sung poorly by Pierce Brosnan) and the whole cast and crew seem to have such confidence in the quality of the overall product that it steamrollers you in its tracks. Mamma Mia is a terrifically entertaining two hours (even when it entertains for the wrong reasons: DUNGAREES STREEP), which is about 80% due to the songs.

Looking at this summers blockbuster fayre I think I have noticed a new trend. Namely the blockbuster aimed at middle aged women. Sex In The City and Mamma Mia seem squarely aimed at the 30+ female set, and unapologetically so. This is interesting because post-Jaws - this is an audience who have been generally ignored. … read on …

Bruce Wayne, Auf Wiedersehen

I was 16 when the Tim Burton Batman film came out. At the time it was the most-hyped movie I could remember for several years. It was the first major comic-book film to come out for a while, and the first since the new wave of comics - and specifically, superhero - respectability had hit in the mid-80s. That respectability had been kickstarted by a Batman yarn, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and word was that this new, big-budget Batflick would cement the new, slick, media-literate, violent and intelligent take on superheroics that Miller had helped pioneer. The NME, which had a fair few comics nerds hidden on-staff, used the (sizeable) figleaf of Prince’s soundtrack to run a bundle of coverage. The serious papers nodded in approval at Jack Nicholson’s vicious, charismatic, Joker. In retrospect, it was probably the high watermark of “WHAM! POW! Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore!”. … read on …

Billy Cor Knows The Score: The Watchmen Trailer

I’ve often been told that what makes Watchmen “unfilmable” is its complexity: this is surely not true. Generally this argument confuses complexity for detail, which nowadays is bread and butter to a sufficiently obsessive director and an audience with frame-by-frame access. And looking at the trailer that’s what the Watchmen film’s got. Yes, the story as a comic contains a lot of flashbacks, but it’s not as if this is a technique unknown to cinema audiences! If you lose the Black Freighter sequence you’ve got a relatively straightforward story, albeit one with a somewhat eyebrow-raising tonal shift at the end. … read on …

Cheap Shots: How To Stay A Head In Film Reviewing

Here’s how, from the Guardian website. You review Not Real Films…

Who Aggregates the Aggregator Aggregators?

And perhaps more importantly - who cares? If the impending closure of the obnoxiously “Web 2.0″ BBC Sound Index this Friday is any guide, the answer is pretty clear.

Oh sure, the site boasts more than 22 million “comments, posts, plays and views”, but those comments and posts are all from OTHER sites like YouTube, last.fm, iTunes, myspace, and the like. Sound Index sent automated “robot” scripts to these sites looking for the names of bands, fed what it found into some kind of magic algorithm, and produced a constantly updated list of the 1000 buzziest bands on the planet. Or well, the English-speaking planet. Probably. Slap some shiny, gumdrop-like buttons on the results, organise things with a direct rip-off of the iTunes “Coverflow” feature and hey presto.. well, what exactly? … read on …