more questions than answers

wow. what a moment. my first post on a proper film blog. need to make my mark, need my own style. if i was a dog, i'd piss in the corner, but i am hesitantly guessing that's not the etiquette. perhaps my no-capital letter rants are the way forward. let me know when it gets annoying - you could write that post in capitals just to prove a point...

to be honest, it is with trepidation that i indulge on this site. my previous blog adventures have generally been vitriol aimed at celebrities firmly under my skin - take gremlin-faced know-it-nothing radio dj nicky campbell for instance - so to get involved with the film industry is a bold step.

so what do i write about? well, i saw 'no country for old men' at the weekend and thought that the dog who chased josh brolin down the river was pretty cool, i have a friend who likes 'donnie darko' just because it looks nice and i once saw kevin kline's 'in and out' at the cinema and threw peanut m&ms at the screen... or perhaps i should just talk about 'star wars' to get the hits up? oh shit, that was meant to end after the fourth post.

but ney, my first post is one for my bretheren. this one is for the novices out there too scared to voice their opinion in fear of the film nerd backlash. so what if i don't rate jack black? i'm not sorry for not sitting through 'raging bull' and am equally unashamed when talking about 'tin cup' (i'll save that for another time).


so i begin to wonder (shit, this is getting more and more sex and the city by the minute), what gives you the right to become a film critic? should everyone be given the honour? probably not - i mean, imagine the chaos - some twats have actually watched and enjoyed 'white chicks' and they don't deserve to be given an opinion. should you have watched a certain number of films? should you have watched all the classics? or perhaps you need to have ingested halliwell's and are able to shit it out on demand.

put me out of my misery if you have the answer, but until then i reckon it's pretty much open season. let war commence between those in the know and those out of it wherever these boundaries might begin and end. don't get me wrong, i want to use my position on the forum to preach but i also want to learn, and that doesn't begin and end with the ways of 'repo man' - no blog-offense intended,

until next time flicks reversed fans... i need to get back to my current quandary - should i go watch 'semi pro' just because it has will ferrell in it? i mean, it looks kinda funny...

life can be so hard.

£3 million home cinema

I don't know who Jeremy Kipnis is but I sure do like his home cinema...

If you're wondering what to do with £3 million then these are the specifics:

Picture Elements:
Sony SRX-S110 Professional Video Projector (4,096-by-2,160)
Stewart 18-by-10-foot Snowmatte 1.0 Gain Laboratory-Grade Motion Picture Screen

Players and Sources:
Sony BDP-S1 Blu-ray Player
Sony PlayStation 3 Gaming Console
Toshiba HD-XA1 HD DVD Player
JVC HMDH-5U D-VHS Recorder
SATA Drive (72 HDTV Hours Total)
Mark Levinson N° 51 DVD/CD Media Player
Pioneer HLD-X0 Hi-Vision HDTV MUSE Laserdisc Player

Surround Processing and Decoding:
Theta Digital Generation VIII 32-bit 8x Oversampling Dual Processors (13)

Amplification:
Mark Levinson N° 33h Amplifiers (2)
McIntosh MC-2102 Amplifiers (30)
Crown Macro Reference Gold Amplifiers (3)

Speakers:
Snell 1800 THX Music & Cinema Reference Subwoofers (16)
Snell THX Music & Cinema Reference Towers (8)
MuRata ES103A Super Tweeters (10)
Snell THX Music & Cinema Reference LCR-2800 Center-Channel Speakers (3)

The Whole Star Wars Thing

It’s best to get this out of the way. Put it out there and move on. There is no place for Star Wars here. Being the fourth post, from now until the next entry, Star Wars will be at least at fourth of the blog - but over time it will become a mere blip, as should the whole bloody franchise.

I wasn’t around when Star Wars happened - being born in ‘83 I escaped the whole fanfare. I remember having a Luke Skywalker toy but I didn’t know who he was at the time so he usually got beat up by He-Man or run over by Optimus Prime.

I didn’t come across Star Wars until the special editions in 1997 and enjoyed them. I thought they were a little ropey but could see why they we’re held up in such high esteem. That’s how it should have ended.

Ten years later we have a trilogy of weak prequels that completely watered down the whole thing - yet no ones seems to mind this. Magazines still write features and film blogs get excited by anything to do with it, from Darth Vader cookie jars to R2D2 bins. WOW!

Last week the internet got giddy at the prospect of another cash in - a CGI cartoon called Star Wars: Clone Wars set between Episode 2 and 3. I couldn’t quite quantify my main beef with Star Wars until I read about this new series.


MAIN BEEF QUANTIFIED: This series is about the clone wars that took place in the second and third film. Why is this a problem? Because it points out that up until this little spin off, there was no actual Star War on screen in the new films.

When the new trilogy was first mentioned, people got excited about seeing the Clone Wars as mentioned by Ben Kenobi, but the whole thing happened off-screen.

Phantom Menace was about trade negations breaking down (or something). I seem to remember a blockade of some sort but no war. Then Attack Of The Clones gave us the beginning of the clone wars and ended as the war was just about to kick off.

Surely the third film will show an actual star war! It would be a bit late but surely now is the time to show me the war…. Nope, along comes Revenge Of The Sith and it starts at the arse end of a three-year intergalactic battle.

Only now does George decide to show it - Really? The actual Clone Wars are gonna be a cartoon series?

It shouldn’t be called Star Wars. Half of the title implies a war. It’s exactly 50% of the title yet the whole WARS part happened off-screen.

In the real world I rage about this! Not because the new films pissed on my childhood like actual fans have complained but because I need to balance out the series’ unearned praise. At first I just shrugged my shoulders but I’m sick of the way people can still get excited about a cartoon spin off or a Potato Head Darth Vader.

When I see Star Wars topping best-of lists or people filling in forms claiming their religion as Jedi, I feel a need to make up for this by complaining about it - LOUDLY.

I shall complain no longer as I don’t want to give it any more undue attention. I have decided Star Wars is a petulant attention seeking little child. I (we) need to not give it any more attention in the hope it will start behaving itself.

Film fans should not pander to its demand for attention. Every couple of years it screams: ‘Look at me, I’ve got sequels!’ ‘Look at me, I’ve been remastered!’ ‘Look at me, I’m Special Edition.’ ‘Oh, Oh, Look at me, I’ve got prequels.’

It’s time it was made to sit on the naughty step and think about what it’s done.

Respect for Repo Man

The life of a film-blog tosser is always intense

At first Repo Man may not seem worthy of even a solitary viewing. It’s a cult 1980s satirical action-comedy road movie with sci-fi elements. Worse than that, its two lead actors would quickly become more famous to then contemporary audiences for their roles in John Hughes films. As handicaps go, the only worse start Repo Man could have was if it starred Andie MacDowell and was scored by Rufus Wainright.

Concerns are forgotten within seconds when the film actually starts. An instrumental version of Iggy Pop’s pulsating theme tune pummels away over sparse neon maps of Los Angeles and surrounding counties. Then we’re out in the desert following a Chevy Malibu being driven erratically. A motorbike cop stops the car, checks the trunk and is erased out of existence with only his boots left smoking on the hard shoulder.

This insanity does not let up until credits roll again, with Iggy and friends back, though this time the man himself gives it large on the mike with his trademark ragged, lupine yell.
Emilio Estevez is Otto, a disillusioned teen nothing who quits his supermarket job in hilarious fashion, only to be groomed as a repo man by steely veteran Harry Dean Stanton. Estevez is initially reluctant to take on the job of repossessing cars from drivers who neglect to pay their bills but shortly takes to the life, just as he meets the mysterious Leila who swears she has photos of an alien.

If this all sounds ludicrous, that’s because it is. In genre terms it may be all over the shop, but each scene is terse, punchy and refreshing like outdoor nudity in winter. Alex Cox, who befriended real-life punk heroes like The Clash’s Joe Strummer, directs Repo Man with the pugnacious, resolute certainty of a nothing-to-lose band playing their final gig. It’s little wonder he went on to shoot Sid and Nancy, the Gary Oldman-starring biopic of the late Sex Pistols bassist.

But whatever praise iconoclast Cox deserves, Repo Man is Harry Dean Stanton’s movie. As Bud, he doesn’t like communists or Christians, but reserves the full extent of his spite for the average joe. “Ordinary fucking people, I hate ‘em,” he snarls, while sharing caterpillar-sized lines of neat amphetamine with his protégé. At this point keen Estevez watchers may amuse themselves by comparing the scene to The Breakfast Club’s library joint session.

A brilliant character actor who appeared in Alien before this and Pretty In Pink after, here Stanton is the flip side to Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross. They both realise life is a perpetual disappointment but while Lemmon's Shelley Levene is weak and desperate, Bud fights against weariness and is angrier and sharper than men half his age.

In many ways Harry Dean Stanton was the man who could’ve been Tommy Lee Jones. Both men can lead or impress in bit parts, both work well alongside eccentric directors, both have incredible, weather-beaten faces that express more than a hundred scripted pages could and both men play themselves in every film they appear in. But Harry Dean never had The Fugitive or Men In Black to launch him into the stratosphere.

Ultimately films that stay in your brain, nag away on the journey home and distract in the supermarket aisle have to be about more than just a great story and vivid protagonists. Silver screen and home viewing favourites always include these but the juice is in the details.

Repo Man satisfies with a wealth of hilarious, bizarre and smart moments. No sponsorship could be raised from the usual corporate film donors, so groceries in the film are without brands. Beer is just beer, dog food, just dog food. Of course, Cox mocks this by naming three of the repo men after brands of beer. Miller and Lite, themselves worthy of their own lengthy tributes, sit alongside Bud.

There is also a surreptitious crime wave perpetrated by Otto’s former friends, weed-smoking layabout parents who give away money to televangelists, an appropriately tense, anarchic south-California hardcore soundtrack and genius quotes.

The last word on Repo Man can only be about its best words. Each viewer will have their own preferred line, but for those who love public transport, there can only be one: “The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.”

The Dark Knight turns to Lego

This has been doing the rounds...


Although it's not as good as:

The Fly The Opera?

Who would have thought The Fly would become an Opera?

An operatic remake of the 1986 remake of the 1958 Vincent Price original (based on a 1956 short story – Phew!) that teaches us becoming a fly-man isn’t as cool at it sounds.

Sharing his new transporting invention with a fly causes Jeff Goldblum’s scientist and the insect to bond or as Jeff puts it: “It mated us, me and the fly. We hadn't even been properly introduced.”

Being joined with a fly in a science experiment, you’d hope to go down the Spiderman route but poor Jeff has bits fall off him as he slowly turns into a 185 pound fly via Michael Jackson.

Cronenburg was the king of cinematic goo at the time but The Fly became so much more than the likes of surreal nasty Videodrome because of its truly tragic nature of, er… operatic proportions, turning it from B Movie into a B+ (see what I did there?).

How similar it will be to the film will remain unknown to the likes of me as it’s only playing in Los Angeles but I doubt anyone can match Jeff Goldblum’s career defining performance (Damn you academy awards!). The film’s composer Howard Shore has also written the opera’s music which is surely a good sign.

My only hope is that this stage production includes the musical numbers: “Be afraid, Be very afraid” and - if there is any justice - “Is that his penis in a jar?”

Howard Shore’s The Fly will play for 6 nights in September 08. Check it out yourself at the link below and tell us what ‘80s’ classics you want to see become operas in the comments. My choice is Ghostbusters.

http://www.laopera.com/productions/0809/thefly/index.htm