Speechless (but not quite).

Before we move on with routine business here, it behoves me to throw down a quick line on yesterday’s US election results.

Groan all you like, but to be honest I’ve always felt frustrated by the determination of so many entertainment media outlets to remain “apolitical”, as if life-changing crises and fundamentally opposed worldviews can be put aside as we all get together and natter about the day-to-day trivia of, I don’t know, pop music, or Star Wars or something. Culture reflects the political landscape that surrounds its creation, and political realities reflects back upon the way in which we interpret culture – even on a blog that rides the currents of escapism and nostalgia as heavily as this one.

In fact, I’d even contest that this tendency to put on the blinkers and leave issues of everyday existence to the “political animals” has to some extent contributed to the formation of the black hole in which global public discourse currently finds itself, so, if you don’t consider this a valid forum for me to discuss such issues occasionally when the need arises, then… that’s too bad I’m afraid. I don’t consider my views on the wider world to be extreme or unreasonable, and I try not to become overly strident or repetitious in my expression of them, so hopefully you can still hang out here and enjoy the sights - but, neither do I feel that my beliefs should be kept out of sight, like mutant appendages at a dinner party.

I would have liked to have found some pithy way to tie things in with this blog’s usual subject matter… but I just don’t have the stomach for it right now to be honest. Like many people who continue to care for the well-being of their fellow human beings (and indeed, life on earth more generally) I have found the events of 2016 depressing beyond words, and a Trump election victory feels like the end of season finale.

None of us knows what happens next, so I’ll try to rein in my natural tendency toward doom-mongering, and keep the dozens of tangential diatribes I could launch into to myself. Let’s just say that, at best, I feel that representative democracy is on the skids on both sides of the Atlantic. The last time big-mouthed opportunists managed to make this amount of headway marshalling a dissatisfied proletariat with dangerous lies was in the 1920s and 30s, and you can end this sentence however you like, because I haven’t the heart for it.

Even if the resultant collapse of the geo-political status quo that has kept “our way of life” broadly intact over the past half century remains on the now-familiar level of infighting, chaos and indecision however, the predatory mixture of totalitarianism and free market capitalism currently gaining ground elsewhere in the world lies in wait. And as a worst case scenario meanwhile, I’m probably not the only one contemplating the manner in which an America-First President Trump, unshackled from NATO, is liable to respond to a 9/11 scale shocker on U.S. soil.

What was that I said about doom-mongering? Ok, let’s can it.

Whatever happens, it is as always the poor and voiceless and stateless who suffer first, and die first, whilst those of us who already have food on our plates bang the table like petulant children and demand we’re paid attention to. My most earnest wish right now is that selfish nation states would shut the fuck up and lend a hand to their neighbours, but it seems I’m paddling upstream on that one, so what the hell do I know.

For any readers in the U.S. grappling with more immediately pressing domestic concerns meanwhile, uncouth fighting words are probably the last thing you need right now, but I’ll nonetheless refer you to the words of the late Hunter S. Thompson, responding to the 2001 election of Bush Jr in one of his last published missives, because they are words I’d be keeping close to my heart were I over there with you. Just try not to throw them around too loudly in mixed company for a month or two – it probably won’t help.

Normal service to resume imminently. Thank you and good night.

Customer Notice:Welcome to the new,family friendly Breakfast In The Ruins!

General viewing, but some scenes may be unsuitable for younger children.

If you either use Blogger yourself or regularly peruse other Blogger-hosted sites, you will no doubt be aware of Blogger’s incoming policy of removing all weblogs that feature images of nudity or other sexually explicit material from public view.

Whilst I have never posted anything remotely pornographic on this blog, and images of (waist-up) nudity have been only an occasional and wholly incidental inclusion within my posts, the stern email warning I have received this week (“our records show..”, etc), together with the extremely irksome ‘objectionable content’ barrier slapped upon this blog a few months back, lead me to suspect that I’m probably going to be on Blogger’s hit-list when this policy comes into force next month.

Now, you may think that this would be a good point at which to make the case that the images I have posted here being fairly obviously presented within a context of artistic / cultural discourse rather than for the purposes of titillation or prurience, and perhaps to furthermore take issue with the bone-headed notion of imposing a blanket ban on any representations of the unclothed human body whilst continuing to allow an untold amount of genuinely pernicious and offensive material to be openly shared via the medium of text, which as far as I know will remain largely unregulated.

Indeed, these arguments could well be worth making if I could be certain I was dealing with fellow human beings with the time and inclination to mull over the finer points of my case. Sadly though, I suspect that Blogger’s forthcoming vice raids are more likely to be carried out using inscrutable algorithms, key word / image recognition software and pre-existing lists of supposedly ‘objectionable’ blogs, with only a small and presumably extremely over-worked team of staff left to deal with the inevitable avalanche of complaints (hi guys!). Thus, I just can’t be bothered.

Being forced to censor my own posts here – even in pretty minor and unimportant ways – leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and as such I’ve been mulling over the possibility of shifting the whole operation over to Wordpress instead. That’s still an option for some point in the future (let me know what you think), but to be honest I’m pretty snowed under with real world stuff and grown up responsibilites at the moment and so, again, I just can’t be bothered. So, this is basically just a really long-winded way of saying that, for the moment at least, I’ve caved in.

I’ve gone back through the ten or so posts in the archive that contained pictures of boobs (because that’s basically what it comes down to, I suppose), and replaced the images in question with one of these:

If you don’t like it , don't blame me kid. BY ORDER OF DA MANAGEMENT.

Hopefully this will get me off the hook, and hey, maybe if we’re lucky we’ll even be able to shift that damn content warning.

As I say, nudity and sundry saucy material by and large plays very little role in this weblog’s appeal (I hope!), and posting here will continue as regularly as it ever does, with no alteration to the subject matter or content of the actual writing.

That is all.

Wow, I Actually Saw a New Film:Some Thoughts on ‘Django Unchained’.



This week saw me undertaking my bi-annual trip to the cinema to actually see a new film, and turns out it gave me a whole bunch of stuff to get off my chest, so why not do so right here, I thought to myself, if only to spare my real life friends the hassle of having to listen?

***

Readers should be aware that there are going to be some fairly extensive spoilers in what follows, so if that’s an issue for you, I’d suggest waiting until you’ve seen the film before reading.

***

To begin, I should state that I like Quentin Tarantino’s films and offer no apology for it. For all that their thefts from other films can prove irksome at times, they remain ridiculously good fun, technically impeccable, and generally represent the best (only?) chance we currently get to see some of the spirit of 60s/70s low budget filmmaking blown up to 21st century blockbuster proportions. And like all QT pictures,’ Django..’ is indeed hugely entertaining - a defiantly UN-subtle, brightly hued business that’ll have you leaving the auditorium with a swing in your stride and a cool song in your head (hopefully the newly composed Ennio Morricone one, which is bloody stunning – wish it had been allowed to play out for longer in the film).

Moreso than any of his previous films though, the second you start to think more deeply on what just transpired on screen, the illusion collapses, and the gaping, ugly flaws of the project are revealed.

The thing is y’see, for me the success of Tarantino’s previous films rests on the fact that (with possible exception of ‘Jackie Brown’) they have all been entirely cynical, self-absorbed endeavours, wherein characters and situations simply play out as tropes of the various genres and aesthetics he’s riffing on – mechanisms for providing the requisite sights and sensations we expect from films like these, openly rejoicing in the fact that there’s no deeper purpose, no moral imperative at work whatsoever – the cinematic equivalent of the enthusiastic sneer that seems permanently etched on the director’s face. None of which is a criticism; on the contrary, it’s great, and it works very well for him.

‘Django Unchained’ though marks something of a sea-change in his approach. Perhaps tapping a bit too heavily into the underlying sentimentality of the Western genre, this one sees him inexplicably presenting us with what is essentially an earnest melodrama with a fairy tale ending – a film in which the characters speak directly in terms of love and friendship and destiny, rather than just offering barbed comment on the cinematic archetypes they represent, and in which genuine historical/political issues are evoked, and dealt with on a strictly one dimensional good vs evil type level. This new approach brings with it a new set of expectations, one that the director is perhaps not quite so used to meeting.

We’ll get onto that shortly, but first off, a more minor, personal, ranting-outside-the-cinema type gripe. I’ll put these paragraphs in italics so you can easily skip them if you just plain don’t give a shit.

Despite his presumed status as a big fan of Westerns, I felt that QT at several points failed to stay true to the core values of the genre as I understand it. I don’t mean in terms of stuff like shifting the action from the West to the South and pushing back the clock to the pre-civil war era (things that you could at least *imagine* Leone or Peckinpah doing, even if they didn’t actually do them), but more in terms of the way the characters function, and the way that their actions define our sympathies towards them.

In essence, what I’ve always loved about the figure of the archetypal cowboy hero – what makes him so distinct from the often tedious romantic/chivalric heroes of most popular fiction – is that he operates on a purely utilitarian level. In a good Western, making a big show of honour and pontificating about one’s beliefs is left up to the bad guy. The cowboy silently observes, his motives opaque. And when the time comes, he does what needs to be done as quickly and efficiently as possible, then buggers off, leaving the bad guy floundering in his own pomposity and hypocrisy until he meets his inevitable demise. Fucking brilliant! That’s what I want ‘heroism’ within this genre to represent basically, and I was hoping that, given his ingrained cynicism and love of genre tradition, QT would come though with some of that good stuff. Sadly not.

What particularly irked me was the key moment when Christoph Waltz’s character shoots DiCaprio. Waltz’s Dr Schultz very much comes from the ‘canny, educated foreigner / enabler of the primary hero’ tradition of Van Cleef in ‘For a Few Dollars More’, Franco Nero in ‘Companeros’ etc, and if there’s one thing all of those guys would have recognised, it’s that they had a clear chance here to walk away in one piece with their goal (freedom for Django’s wife) achieved, without having to fire a shot… mission accomplished. But instead Schultz gets involved in some sanctimonious puffery about refusing to shake hands with the guy. Any proper, utilitarian cowboy-hero would realise that shaking hands with a bastard means nothing – that both men will be judged by their actions, not some ceremonial gesture – and would have got on with it and got the hell out of there. Even William Holden and the Wild Bunch would have realised that the odds were against them at that point, capitulated and withdrawn to contemplate vengeance at a later date.

Not Tarantino’s beta-hero though – he’s got to beat his chest and refuse to compromise and make his big moral point… even when that guarantees his own death and of a life of continued misery for the friends he’s gone to so much trouble to help out. Schultz is presented to us as a steadfast and noble character, worthy of tribute, but as he dies all we can think is “what an idiot”. Tarantino sets him up as a hero, but in the end he doesn’t make the grade and dies a fool, betraying his ground level goals for some misplaced moment of idealism.

So that pissed me off. And as for Django himself, well his conduct is even more troublesome in the hero stakes. If you were to assemble a panel of great cowboys of yore – Franco Nero’s Django included - and ask them to put themselves in New Django’s shoes during the epic gun battle that immediately follows the deaths of Shultz and Candie, I think their priorities would be clear – the girl (D’s wife) is the pivotal object in this scenario (and as far as the film is concerned, she very much IS an object, but that’s another story..), so keep her in sight, keep her safe and get her out of there. But what does Django do? He abandons her completely, running off to some other part of the mansion and blasting away at everyone in sight, as the remaining baddies casually creep up and put a gun to her head. Again – what an idiot! I don’t care how cool and aspirational you look in your black cowboy get-up Django, you fail cowboy class for that one.

Obviously these are just my own bugbears with the minutiae of the film’s plotting, based on expectations created by a bunch of old movies I happen to like, and as such might be entirely irrelevant to the casual viewer, but there is also something more seriously wrong with ‘Django Unchained’ that didn’t really occur to me until I was walking home from the cinema, something that put a bad taste in my mouth and proceeded to infest my feelings about just about every part of the movie, and that – and I realise how much of an ass I sound saying this about a Quentin Tarantino film – is the moral message that ‘Django..’ conveys.

As mentioned above, ‘Django..’ is the first film Tarantino has made that, by the very nature of its melodramatic storytelling and emotive subject matter, is forced to embody a social/political message, however simplistic. Ok, so I guess ‘Inglourious Basterds’ spent a long time telling us that Nazis are bad, but hopefully most viewers were smart enough to realise that that movie had more to do with other war movies than it did with the actual war, and treated its goofily superficial ‘message’ accordingly. ‘Django..’s message is similarly blunt, and we get it sorted out nicely in the opening five minutes - “racism is bad, folks – now enjoy the show”. And we do, patting ourselves on the back for being such a good liberal audience as we go along.

But unlike ‘..Basterds’, ‘Django..’ has no post-modern safety-net to fall back on, and, well I don’t quite know how to best put this, but: demonstrating that racism is wrong and that black people are the equals of white people should not exactly be a difficult proposition for a filmmaker to achieve in a one dimensional comic book-style movie in 2013. Issues of fate vs free will, imprisonment vs self-determination, the individual as representative of the masses etc should pretty much write themselves into a story about slavery, with no additional head-thinkin’ required. It’s not like QT is trying to do anything difficult or challenging with this material – it’s straight down the line primary school level ethics, and yet somehow he manages to screw it up royally.

The mess he makes of things might not be immediately obvious on a surface level, but just dig this ok, and see if you can get what I’m talking about:

When Schultz picks out Django to help him at the start of the film, it’s more or less pure chance. It’s not because he’s the toughest or the coolest or the smartest, it’s just because of some random information he happens to possess. Under different circumstances, he could have picked out any other slave in the South, and surely, we assume, this is going to be the point of the movie – that each and every slave can become Django, can break free and define his or her own future.

And yet when we reach the end of the story some two and a half hours later, this fairly elementary point has never been made. Instead the film falls victim to the rather insidious notion of unearned exceptionalism that seems to have become the norm in heroic Hollywood narratives in recent years – a notion that takes on a particularly ugly aspect when mixed up with issues of racism and historical destiny.

Although Candie and the world he represents has been thoroughly shot, castrated, crippled and blown up by the end of the film, his central doctrine of phrenology-guided racism – which he is allowed to fully outline in a lengthy dialogue scene – has never actually been effectively challenged. At the film’s conclusion, Django actually TAKES A LINE from the dead villain’s bullshit, happily describing himself as “the one in ten thousand exceptional n**ger”, whilst the other black characters in the film remain helpless imbeciles, craven traitors or, in the case of the women, so incapable of independent action they might as well be statues.

I mean, I hate to be the one to engage in supercilious “blah blah, so and so’s being vaguely racially insensitive” internet bitching as regards a movie that was generally highly enjoyable, and yes, Spike Lee’s much-publicised dismissal of the film was pompous and self-defeating (pretty much turning his nose up at the idea that a mere genre film could ever address serious issues), but still: honest to god Quentin, what were you THINKING?

Not only does this poorly-managed shift from random everyman to pre-destined superhero make for a lousy bit of screen-writing that even a second-rate spaghetti western director would probably have wanted ironed out before the cameras rolled, it also exposes a failure to responsibly address even the most basic moral/political issues that reflects very badly on a guy who’s been directing pretty good movies for over twenty years now. Hopefully he can chalk this one up to experience and return to what he does best – making superficial, escapist capers about amoral characters with no connection to the real world whatsoever.

Because, on that level at least, ‘Django..’ succeeds pretty well. There are lots of memorable scenes, good gags, fine performances from the supporting cast, great bits of filmmaking etc, all present and correct. It’s a pretty light-hearted affair given the subject matter, but as long as you’re primed to expect something more like one of Robert Rodriquez’ shiny action movie westerns than a work that approaches the great directors mentioned elsewhere in this post, it’s a good time, with a handful of transcendent moments that stir the blood the way a good western should.

For me, the best of these moments comes in the scene in which Django dispatches the Australian gangers who have been charged with delivering him to a hell-on-earth mining operation and high-tails it back to Candie’s plantation for a final showdown. There’s something truly rousing – genuinely heroic - about the way he hitches himself up on an unsaddled horse and roars off over the horizon, rifle in hand, as his fellow slaves stare at him in disbelief, his legend being born behind their eyes – “holy shit, check THAT guy out”. The film could have benefitted hugely from a few more moments like that – moments that give the figure of Django a wider role in the emancipation of black America, rather than just callously writing him off as an “exceptional n**ger”, standing head and shoulders above his fellows.

The western may traditionally be regarded as a genre that celebrates the individual, but as aficionados of the form like Tarantino should be aware, many of the best entries in the canon – and even most lesser-known John Wayne flicks – tend to end with the hero succeeding only thanks to the bonds of trust and compromise he has built with his allies (that utilitarianism again). And in the rare instances in which westerns have engaged with political issues and succeeded in making some kind of point ( I’m thinking particularly of Corbucci’s ‘Companeros’ and Damiano Damiani’s superb ‘Quien Sabe’ /‘A Bullet For The General’), they have done so through an appeal to a basic revolutionary collectivism, ending with the individual hero subsumed into the mass of the people, ready to overthrow the grandiose clowns who oppress them, regardless of personal loss or gain. I think that this approach would have been a perfect fit for Tarantino’s mixture of spaghetti western and slave plantation Southern gothic, and could have really given Django’s story the wings it deserved.

Given the director’s joyous screwing with history in “..Basterds”, what I really wanted to see at the end of this film (and it wouldn’t have taken much of a change of narrative to bring it about) is Django riding back towards the Big House not alone, but at the head of a whole army of freed slaves, fighting the Civil War two years early, with no damn Abraham Lincoln needed to help him out.

Corny and obvious maybe, but then EVERYTHING in this story is corny and obvious, and if you’re going to spell things out for the audience rather than relying on their perceived cultural sophistication (as per QT’s previous ironic mode), you might as well go the whole distance and leave their hearts swelling with cathartic glee, rather than with that faint withering feeling that accompanies yet another tale of a Chosen One stomping all over everybody for the sake of his individual happiness with his plastic fairy tale bride.

And I know, I know – I’ve just spent two thousand words chewing Quentin Tarantino out for making a film that doesn’t *mean anything, man*. I can’t believe it either. What a bore. As I say, the fact that they don’t mean anything is what I LIKED about all his previous films! But like any good cowboy, if he’s going to talk the talk, he needs to walk the walk, and failing to even mosey through a one-dimensional “racism is bad” revenge story without falling on his ass does not bode well for his future career as a proponent of grown-up issues. Sorry dude. But at least the violence was cool, and the one-liners were funny, and the music was good. Roll on ‘Kill Bill Pt. III’.

TV Eye: Imaginary Sharks, Blind Gunfighters and Sex in Space…

Apologies in advance for this post - it's pretty stupid. But I wrote it, so it might as well go up.

“AAh AAaaaooooOWWW!”, as Iggy Pop proclaimed at the start of about seventeen continuous takes back in the hazy days of 1970, pretending to be electrified a-new each time by the leftover fizzle of Ron Asheton’s stacks cooling down from the previous run through. And all things considered, I guess it’s not bad, as far as exclamations go. It is perhaps distantly comparable to the rather less extravagant n’ unabashed noise I made when discovering the prurient joys of 21st century junk TV a few weekends ago, which is what this post is about.

I guess I’ve touched upon my overriding disdain for modern television every now and then on this blog, and indeed, my rejection of the idiot lantern has become so ingrained in recent years that I’m basically completely ignorant of the forms modern Television takes, and the methods by which modern people watch it.

The last time I actually bothered to hook up my little movie-watching TV for television viewing, folks still did that by plugging a cable into the back that led up to an aerial on the roof, and we lucky UK residents four or five fuzzy channels to choose from. And the only things I deemed useful on any of ‘em were The Simpsons, Buffy, and the occasional movie. After all, TV rots the brain, right? Everyone knows that. And MOVIES ARE ART, and thus good for you, so I choose movies. And if today’s movie happens to be about bikini-clad surfer girls being strangled by an unconvincing slime monster with a mouthful of wieners, whilst TV is showing a documentary about the integration of non-religious imagery into Florentine art in the 16th century… well the theory still holds, damn it – don’t ask questions. Look, here comes the slime beast again!

Anyway… as I think mentioned a few posts ago, I was cat-sitting for some friends a few weekends back. Said friends are the owners of one of those new fangled boxes that you plug ya TV into that gives you like a zillion channels or something. A new experience for me, so I thought I’d sit down with the cats and bravely jump in at the deep end, checking out the kind of audio/visual stimulus that the rest of the world is getting beamed into their homes whilst I’m busy with more hermetic and self-improving pursuits, like watching old Vincent Price movies and such.

C’mon TV; I’ve got three or four free nights ahead of me; show me how rotted my brain can get!

Thursday:

For a while, things were looking pretty grim out there…. page after page on the channel guide of nada, zilch, boredom – hundreds of varieties of anti-matter anti-entertainment, just as my curmudgeonly anti-TV standpoint had led me to expect. I was gonna pack it in and watch a DVD instead when I started scrolling through channel numbers in the 500s, but it was THEN, just before the slide off into home-shopping and xtian stations, that we started to hit the, uh, ‘good stuff’. Three words for you: THE HORROR CHANNEL. I mean… wow … they have one of those? That’s pretty cool.

As it turns out though, The Horror Channel kinda sucks. When I tuned in, they were showing another thrilling installment of Friday The 13th: The Series, the existence of which is certainly news to me. I mean how the hell does that work? Does Jason whatshisname go traveling from town to town, solving the problems of simple, smalltown folks by means of stabbing them, before wondering off into the sunset for next week’s adventure? It was pretty bad anyway, so I didn’t stick with it long enough to find out.

Later on, The Horror Channel were showing entries III and IV in an unknown-to-me vampire franchise called Subspecies. Full Moon Productions guy Charles Band was prominently mentioned in the credits, so hell, I thought it might be a laugh. Alas no. These movies seemed to feature interesting looking European locations and a pretty solid vampire-hunting heroine, but mostly Subspecies just gives us a load of really bad ethnic stereotyping, shoddy sets and endless scenes in which a chubby sub-Black Metal vampire guy who looks a bit like Mortiis skulks about the place throwing out garbled mouthfuls of vampiric claptrap. Seemingly this is some kind of ‘saga’, which I suppose is modern horror parlance for “people talk bollocks for hours and nothing fun ever happens”. The whole thing seemed quite bone-crushingly earnest. Ho-hum.

Satori awaited but a few clicks away though, as I discovered ‘Movies4Men’! Christ, what the hell do they show on there, I hear you ask; razorblade adverts? sports biopics? porn? No, get this: ‘Movies4Men’ show second-string Spaghetti Westerns (and occasional action/gangster flicks), pretty much all the time! Hot dog! Now let it be said that I usually go out of my way to avoid any product specifically marketed at ‘men’, but I swear, I’ve never before felt as manly as I did when Movies4Men let me watch Antonio Baldi’s ‘Blindman’ and Abel Ferrara’s ‘King of New York’ in quick succession. I could have damn well gone out and cut down a tree and turned it into a fence whilst wearing a sweat-stained vest right there and then.

Thanks to ‘Movies4Men’, I also got to watch a happy handful of Spaghettis so obscure and underachieving no one’s even bothered to review them on IMDB in some cases. No Alex Cox plaudits for YOU, ‘Brother Outlaw’ (1971) and ‘I Want Him Dead’ (1968)! The chunks of them I watched were ok though. One of them had Tony Kendall in it. Watching Italian westerns is kind of the movie equivalent of listening to the Grateful Dead; I can all too easily just zone out let them ramble on endlessly, critical faculties disengaged, appreciation of stuff that’s actually good long forgotten.

Blindman was pretty great though! By ‘great’, naturally I mean it was totally stupid, pointless and objectionable, but what can I say? Baldi and co kick it with the kind of gusto and good humour that clear befits the tale of a blind crack-shot gunman and Ringo Starr escorting a wagon full of kidnapped prostitutes across a backlot desert, and as such it’s the kind of movie that’s impossible not to enjoy on some level. Plus, a good Spaghetti always stands or falls by its ending, and the one here is total comedy genius – as an off the cuff “ah, screw you” to anyone who was expecting the requisite shot at Leone style majesty/tragedy, it’s inspired.

Somewhere in the midst of all this I flicked over to a nearby TV movie channel and became one of the few sober adults to have ever watched Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus in its entirety. C’mon, don’t lie, I know you watched the trailer on youtube. And basically, I’d recommend you keep on doing so rather than investigate further, as MS vs. GO stands as perhaps the preeminent example of a film built around two ten second ‘cool bits’ to grab people’s interest on Youtube, and 89 minutes 40 seconds of cynical clock-watching.

So naturally I kinda enjoyed it, in a disconnected K-hole car-crash observation sorta fashion: guys portraying submarine captains sit on sets, shouting stuff into headphone mics and clicking Atari ST joysticks as lights flash and the camera goes shaky, interspersed with the same few unimpressive CGI shots of our prehistoric beasties, repeated ad-nauseum. Our heroes are scientists, and they spend a great deal of time DOING SCIENCE, by means of decanting brightly coloured liquids between beakers and test tubes, whilst nodding and half-smiling at each other in a “damn, we’re a great team, we’re doing good work here” sorta fashion. It was quite nice, kinda hypnotic, like that bit in “Astro Zombies” where John Carradine spends about an hour farting about in his laboratory, doing meaningless things reaaally, really slowly. God I love “Astro Zombies”. ANYWAY, back to MS vs. GO - if anyone ever explained what all this food-colouring related jollity had to do with repelling Mega-Shark before he eats California, I must have missed it, but as I say, I liked it just fine. There were ‘beautiful’ sunsets, and there was limp ecological moralizing, which was less good.

There is something deeply sad about the psychology of an industry that makes a movie called “Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus”, utilising technology by which said beasts can be realised with handy pixels rather than cumbersome model/effects work… and then delivers a film almost entirely devoid of either Mega Shark or Giant Octopus. In fact there was so little Giant Octopus it was beyond a joke – it’s like those lazy potheads with the animation software were just like, “Eight arms? Fuck that man – let’s just do another one with the shark instead”.

Gone are the days when noble gentlemen like Ishiro Honda recognised that the desire to watch movies about giant monsters hitting each other is a perfectly reasonable one, and treated their audience with appropriate respect, providing content, incident, drama, visual excitement, ideas and fun for everybody, alongside lashings of painstakingly realised monster-bashing.

By contrast, the unspoken message emanating from MegaShark vs Giant Octopus’s creators seems to be that anyone watching a film like this is probably a retard, and thus they deserve whatever tossed off crap they get. Then I bet they go home and work on their abstract photos of electricity pylons or pilot scripts for ‘intelligent’ high concept TV shows or whatever crap it is they’re REALLY into, leaving the rare opportunity to make a great bit of popular cinema they’ve been handed to wither on the vine. Fucking assholes.

I know I said ‘sober’ a few paragraphs ago, but I guess by now I must have been pretty plastered, or else suffering some kind of psychotropic trash overload, because the next thing I remember I was trying to watch something called Emmanuelle in Space, which… well fuck it, I don’t have to justify myself to you. I think it was a TV series rather than a movie, but either way, sub-Red Shoe Diaries ‘erotic encounters’ interspersed with occasional repetition of the same model spaceship fly-by shot and some footage of guys wearing flimsy-looking virtual reality headsets seems to be the somewhat puzzling score here. What’s the betting that the dire softcore stuff was originally a different show/movie, and they just threw the other bits in Al Adamson style, new title, and hey presto, money in the bank! If any of your local zillion channels ever happen to be showing this one, I recommend tuning in just for the credits sequence / theme tune – I think it actually made some part of my brain melt. My hand/eye co-ordination is shot, but it was worth it. It’s truly incredible.

Even more puzzling, there was another barrel-scraping Emmanuelle spin-off on another channel that didn’t seem to have anything to do with faux-European decadence and crap softcore sex at all, and instead was some kind of made-for-TV movie about Californian lifeguards fighting CGI sharks so shoddy they make Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus look like a natural history seminar. What the hell? I don’t know who it was who originally came up with the Emmanuelle name/concept (assuming “chick has lots of sex” can be claimed as a concept) all those years ago, but I bet they must get up each morning and ritualistically punch themselves in the face for not copyrighting it.

Friday / Saturday:

Ok, so sadly the evening related above was by far the best day of my TV excursion. After that things get a bit hazy, and I resorted to watching some decent(?) movies on DVD, and even talking to people and doing other things, but I still have some mixed up memories or what transpired TV-wise. Memories that seem to confirm that when it’s not Spaghetti Westwern night, ‘Movies4Men’ show a lot of war films, and revenge thrillers and stuff. One of them was old, and Italian, and had Klaus Kinski in it, but it didn’t really hold my interest. The rest were ‘90s, and American, and blah.

The Horror Channel meanwhile continued to prove themselves the world’s leading purveyors of godawful vampire claptrap – hours upon hours of it. Jesus, somebody stake those fuckers, then at least they might shut up! If you manage to stay up late enough though, they do at least have the decency to show a weirdo cult movie or two on the weekends – usually hitting at that magic “must stay awake till the next ad break” point in the early morning, when lunatic movie imagery flows into dreams, and vice versa.

I recall seeing most of The Gore Gore Girls, and thinking, Christ, this is even more vile and deranged than I remember it being. Really fucking morbid and brain-damaged and almost psychedelically primitive, even by HG Lewis standards. Not good to fall asleep to, but somehow I managed. I think the cats enjoyed it. All the bright colors and sudden movements and seething mush – repetitive barbarity on a level so basic, I think most mammals would probably get the point.

Sadly none of the TV series/TV-movie based trash I encountered during the weekend proved even remotely watchable, but somehow I soldiered on. I remember nothing.

2:30am on the third night, I should really have gone to bed, but The Horror Channel had something on their schedule called Lips Of Blood. No advance info on its contents, and naturally that’d be an obvious title for yet more ‘90s vampire claptrap, but…. there is a chance… it COULD be…. Yes, yes, it actually is! It’s a screening of the only ‘70s Jean Rollin movie I’ve never got round to watching! Hallelujah!

Obviously it was a hell of a lot better than anything else I watched this weekend, but on first go-round I don’t think it was one of my favourite Rollins. Kind of a transitory work between his earlier fun-packed vampire flicks, and the slower, more existential approach he went on to develop in ‘Fascination’ and ‘Living Dead Girl’ maybe..? Too much of the latter to really make an impression on me when I was fighting to keep my eyes open I’m afraid, although I do remember some characteristically wonderful shenanigans with the ubiquitous vampire twins.… were there four of them this time, or did I dream that? I’ll have to give ‘Lips Of Blood’ another watch when I feel more up to it.


And that makes the perfect conclusion to my TV odyssey really: staying up all night in order to blearily watch an example of precisely the kind of weird old horror stuff I usually watch at home anyway.

So, TV: it’s quite good on Thursdays, but beyond that, fergeddaboutit.

And if my hosts for the weekend (who shall remain nameless) ever read this: I’m sorry I made your cats watch a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie when they should have been out doing healthy nocturnal cat type stuff. They seemed ok about it though, I think.

[Insert bad "Who watches the Watchmen? - nobody if they can help it" type joke here]

As the final nail in a pretty damn secure, lead-lined critical coffin, Jessica Hopper tells me everything I need to know about the Watchmen movie in one convenient paragraph.

I remember years ago reading an interview with Alan Moore in which he talked about how he found overblown, poorly thought out Hollywood blockbusters to be actively offensive, saying something to the effect of; if I write a shitty comic, ok it wastes some paper, but I'm not throwing away $150,000,000 that could be used for the betterment of mankind on realising some teenage videogamer's wank fantasy.

So quite what karmic/magickal evils the poor guy must have wrought in a past life in order to see ALL of his major writerly works transformed into a series of movies so point-missingly crippled at birth that they alone could stand as a pretty thorough A, B, C of everything that's wrong with the past two decades of Hollywood cinema, I can scarcely imagine.

Seriously: all we need now is M. Night Whatshisname doing an Americanised 'Voice of the Fire' in small town Ohio and Ridley Scott's idiot cousin making his directoral debut dragging that woman in the leather from the Underworld movies through the mill as Halo Jones, and that's Moore's whole life's work, shot in the belly and left for dead.

I guess he must at least be enjoying the royalties, extra sales, publicity, suits reading "V For Vendetta" on the tube etc, and can rest safe in the knowledge that he still has a pretty huge cadre of longtime fans who are able to appreciate his work on it's own merit, but still, it must hurt.

And, word to wise: if I were an evil, scheming studio mogul who was gonna set out to desecrate the work of one cantankerous cult author, I probably wouldn't pick a guy who looks like this, carries a big stick everywhere and practices ceremonial magic:


I've seen "Theatre of Blood". I know what's coming down.