Look out! He's got a knife!

Who needs Robert McKee?

"Act I, get your guy up a tree; Act II, throw rocks at him; Act III, get your guy out of a tree."
- Julius Epstein

Jesus whips the poor into shape

I always thought that the "the poor will always be with us" quote was about Jesus chiding Judas for his hipocrisy, rather than a sweeping statement about the poor.

As I understand it, Judas said something like "Foolish woman, wasting good money on ointment for Jesus's feet when it could have gone into the poor box!" Jesus, who knew damn well that Judas stole from the poor box, said something like "The poor will always be with you but you will not always have me." Meaning (in my interpretation) "Don't panic Judas, you can carry on robbing the poor box in a few days after you've made sure I'm dead."

I'm borrowing Kurt Vonnegut's interpretation, truth be told. I tend to agree with Father Kurt that Jesus was all about compassion.

But what the hell do I know about it anyway?

It's not working

Democracy isn't working. Someone think of something new, quickly.

I would make a suggestion myself, but it would probably be along the lines of "Turn everybody on with LSD" - which I genuinely think is a good idea, but someone has told me it's no basis for a political system.

Movies that never were

One thing that many movie buffs love to daydream about is movies that never got made, but were planned or merely discussed.

For example, Alejandro Jodorowsky's adaptation of Dune, to star Salvador Dali; this movie could have been a masterpiece in ways that David Lynch's eventual version was not.

In that case a good movie rose out of the ashes when Jodorowsky's special effects supervisor, Dan O'Bannon, wrote his own script for the same team (Chris Foss, Moebius and HR Giger) to work on; the result was Alien - hardly the innovative philosophical masterpiece Dune could have been, but certainly an effective and influential (if somewhat overrated and mechanical) horror movie.

My own favourite unmade movie is an Orson Welles movie - he is definitely the king of the unmade, the unfinished, and the generally butchered. Some long for the full cut of The Magnificent Ambersons; some pine after the never-finished Don Quixote; many pant after the nearly-finished The Other Side of the Wind.

Me, I lust for one of Welles's never begun movies.

After finishing Citizen Kane, and before it was known just how disastrous that movie would be for his career, Welles wanted to film the life of Christ.

As a Western.

With a straight face.

Can you imagine? I can imagine some kind of Jesus western, and I've read Philip Jose Farmer's JC On the Dude Ranch, but what would Welles have done? It would have been unique, for sure. Welles was not religious but had great respect for the teachings of Christ, and thus would have taken the project seriously but not reverently.

John Cassavetes vs Bruce Lee

Now THAT'S a way to spend a weekend: watching Bruce Lee & John Cassavetes movies.

But who would win in a fight? Most people would say "Bruce Lee of course!" But they're overlooking one vital and obvious fact.

John Cassavetes would win, because he hasn't been dead for as long.

Also, his movies are better.

Heh

I sometimes play a game with my home web browser (Mozilla Firefox of course - me am geek snob) where I type some words into the address bar and see what it matches me up with.

Last night I typed "stupid ho" and it came up with some Gwen Stefani lyrics. Neither "stupid" nor "ho" appeared anywhere on the page.

So how did it KNOW? Clever browser!

Danger: Diabolik

Woo-ha! What a movie. The ultimate cheesy '60s master-criminal James Bond-ish movie. Based on an Italian comic book (fumetti), if you loved Barbarella, this is similar in some ways (though Earth-bound) but better. Director Mario Bava (best known for gothic horrors like the masterful Mask of Satan and the genius Kill Baby Kill) pulls out all the stops. John Philip Law is great as the mostly silent anti-hero. Marisa Mell is gorgeous as Eva. The Beastie Boys video Body Moving is on the dvd, 'cause it's mostly made up of clips from the film with the Boys dressed up like the movie's characters in the close-ups.

It's hippy and it's trippy and it's got the best pot-smoking scene since The Trip. (Which came out in 1967 - Diabolik was 1968, but there were a LOT of pot-smoking scenes in movies during the year between them.)

Anybody want to watch it, maybe on a double feature with the uncut version of Jim Van Bebber's Charlie's Family?

Bloodshed hua-hoo!

Props.

Norm is the dance champion!

No, not Maria. Norm Hewitt won Dancing With the Stars! I even voted for him. I feel like I'm coming out of the closet or something...

But no shame here, because FUCK he looked staunch dancing the paso doble. Who says dancing isn't masculine?

Eek

I dreamt last night that I met Paul Verhoeven at a children's soccer game where we were both fathers of boys playing, and Verhoeven was only four feet tall.

I woke up in a cold sweat, then realised that I don't have kids. Phew.

Can't sleep

Must be all the no drugs.

Perhaps I'll watch the rest of the Singing Detective. There's only three episodes left. It's as staggeringly fucking brilliant as everybody says. Perhaps my non-enjoyment of Doctor Who is partly due to it suffering by comparison? Nah.

Traffic seems to have gone up so dramatically since I took over this blog from Pearce. Interesting.

I'm trying to like it, but it's not working

Currently I am six episodes into the new Doctor Who. Christopher Eccleston has settled down into the role, and Billie Piper is surprisingly good. I am very disappointed that the new companion is Todd from Coronation Street, who's about as exciting as a piece of burnt toast.

Also, what the hell is with this "six episodes in and we've barely left the Earth" rubbish? The only episode not set on this planet was set... in orbit around the Earth. Woo fucking hoo.

Here's my take so far.

*SPOILERS*

First episode: featuring the Autons. This wasn't very good. Eccleston seemed too manic. The story was daft, the man-eating rubbish bin being a particular lowlight.

Second episode: the end of the world. Pretty good actually. Zoe Wanamaker was fun as the last human.

Third episode: a Victorian ghost story, complete with Simon Callow as Charles Dickens. The best episode to date, it actually felt like Doctor Who. Eccleston is definitely warming to the role, and Billie Piper looks quite fetching in this costume. There's some good humour as well. I am a little concerned that the Doctor's blundering is directly responsible for killing two people.

Fourth episode: alien space ship crash lands on earth. There's some odd fart jokes throughout. It's nice to see Penelope Wilton playing one of her trademark daffy roles, and so soon after Shaun of the Dead. Unfortunately it all gets silly very quickly and drags on very slowly. And just when it looks like it's going to have a slam-bang finish, I realise it's going to be a two parter. Cute Asian scientist though.

Fifth episode: world war three or some shit. The fourth episode just keeps dragging on through the fifth one. The evil aliens are REALLY STUPID LOOKING. Were they supposed to be funny? That would only partly redeem them. By the end of the episode I am truly bored. Blowing up 10 Downing Street is funny, but this two parter is even worse than the first episode.

Sixth episode: Dalek. I've heard bad things about it. Starts off OK though. Except suddenly the Dalek is saying "Have pity!" Fuck that was a stupid idea, Daleks do not know the meaning of pity. The episode gets worse and worse from there, turning into a regular angst-fest. The "absorbing DNA from Rose to free itself" idea was dumb. (It doesn't even explain the "have pity" scene because that happens earlier. Stupid scriptwriter.) It ends with the Dalek topping itself because it got all sad, awww poor Dalek, awww poor viewer having to sit through this shit. And it's touted as being the last Dalek episode ever, what a waste.

So we've got one first-class episode, one pretty good episode, one not very good episode, and three total loads of fucking arse. On top of that the show has just recruited a boring actor as a new regular, oh goody.

I will keep watching until the end because it's Doctor Who and I've basically got to, and also because another episode might come along as good as #3. I like Eccleston and Piper, but am extremely dubious about the other fellow.

But all in all I like it about as much as Star Trek so far. Which means I think it's mostly balls with some good bits. Fucking pity.

King Dong

What the Hell is Kong holding Ann Darrow with in this picture? It's too short to be his leg.

Sex with Orson

I recently saw the documentary Orson Welles: the One Man Band. It had a whole heap of scenes from his unfinished movies in it, including two from The Other Side of the Wind.

Man, that movie looks fucking dope. I hope Oja Kodar & Peter Bogdanovich are able to get their shit together and finish it. Supposedly the first half is complete (finished by Welles) and the second half just needs to be edited. Though judging it from the fragments I've seen, "just" isn't the word, Welles pulled some freaky shit in there (especially considering it was the early '70s).

Like the sex scene.

Welles's collaborator on most of his late movies was Oja Kodar, a young Croatian woman. She co-wrote The Other Side of the Wind and acts in it. One of the two scenes from it in the One Man Band doco is of her riding in a car with several young men, and having sex with one of them in the back. It is, to my knowledge, the only sex scene in a Welles movie.

It's like no sex scene I have ever seen in a movie before. It plays like a full-on psychedelic scene, concentrating almost entirely on Ms Kodar. I think Welles was trying to do something new: rather than depict sex on screen, I believe he was trying to convey the experience of sex using the medium of film.

The scene is short, and the film quality was poor, but it was truly mind-boggling.

The rest of the doco was pretty entertaining. It nowhere near lives up to the promise of recreating the style of Welles's brilliant final completed film, F for Fake - at best it comes across as a poor imitation - but the clips alone are worthwhile, and there is a long, fetishistic sequence at the start where the camera lingers on Oja Kodar's collection of hitherto-unseen Welles film that ably conveys the longing many people have for his lost films, whether they be the unfinished ones or the masterpieces that are only available butchered, like The Magnificent Ambersons.

Kamaal the Abstract

I can't hold my tongue any longer. Q-Tip's Kamaal the Abstract is the best album I have heard recently. The whole album is made with live instruments, and it's a combination of beautifully realised jazz noodling with Q-Tip's typically incisive lyrics and flow. It's not even hip-hop. It's the modern equivalent of Miles Davis's Kind Of Blue - it's that good.

I would say at this point "Run out and buy a copy now!" But you can't, because it's never been officially released. It was supposed to come out in April 2002 - yes over 3 years ago - and there's still no sign. The official website claims it's still coming soon...

Q-Tip was, of course, one of the MCs in A Tribe Called Quest. He's also turned up in a number of other places, eg the Beastie Boys' Get It Together, De-La Soul's Buddy, and of course Deee-Lite's mighty Groove Is In the Heart.

Even given the jazz bent of Quest's classic album The Low-End Theory, this is a revelation. I cannot do justice to it in words, which is too bad as you can't go hear it on a listening post. Ha-ha, sucks to be you.

Weed album of the millenium - so far. Let's see what the next nine hundred and ninety-odd years bring us.

Land of the Dead - first review online

"The greatest thing about this film is that after a break from his Dead world of twenty years, Romero has gotten everything so RIGHT. He knows the rules he set up, but he's confident to push the envelope as he did previously with Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead."

More here

The end of the first Trial of the Century

The 20th's Trials of the Century included the Nuremberg Trials, the Manson Family trials, and the OJ Simpson Trial, as media fell over themselves declaring each Trial more Important than Any Other of the Century.

(Exactly why the trial of a football player accused of a double murder is more important, newsworthy or otherwise Of the Century then the trials of people accused of genocide has never been adequately explained. By anyone. Ever. Because the real answer is that all the media cares about is exploitation in the name of profits and Trials of the Century are all about how many people are looking, and true or not that's not a good enough explanation for their behaviour.)

The 21st's first Trial of the Century is of a scary-looking self-mutilation-by-plastic-surgery pop star gone to seed, accused of kiddie fiddling by a family who have supposedly attempted to shake down celebrities for money in the past.

Obviously he was going to be found as guilty as the football player was, because the prosecution was utterly unable to prove their case due to the equation of unreliable witness testimony vs. celebrity status.

Is scary-looking-man actually guilty? We'll never know. It sure would have been interesting seeing him share a rec room with Charles Manson though.

Enough Is Enough!

OK, to hell with this moaning minnie. I'm taking over this blog.

Another unwarranted whinge

Where the hell do they find the presenters for C4? They made radio DJs seem intelligent and witty by comparison. I cannot think of a C4 presenter who I don't regard as a fucktard.

Flashbacks is the worst offender. For every retro music video we watch, we need to sit through more than twice the song's length in the unscripted drunken ramblings of an utter tool.

(I hope that he's drunk and it's unscripted. Otherwise the creative void is too ghastly for even Nietzche to stare into.)

As a result I don't watch the shit anymore. Fuck those idiots. My arse would make a better TV presenter. It's prettier than Jacqui Brown, for a start.

Another fine mess

I'm not standing next to the lava lamp anymore.

It turns out to have been switched off the whole time.

I have learned nothing about the nature of space lava and how it relates to the near-fatal burning of whinging evil-doers.

Damn.

comedy

Righteous quote:

"People who don’t have great senses of humor think that comedy is that you just think something’s trite and stupid and you don’t care about it. [They think] if you’re laughing, it’s because what you think you’re laughing at is stupid — because that’s about as far as their sense of humor goes. People don’t realize that it can be something a lot deeper than that."
- Trey Parker

Yes! So true.

Kurt Vonnegut once said something along the lines of, "Laughing is what you do when the only other option is screaming."

Laughing is no less serious than not laughing. There is no such thing as "It's no laughing matter."

Do they come in Kermit Green?

Heh.

I laughed 'til I stopped.

Thanks to Martin for the link.

Attack of the killer 'C' word

Here's my take on the infamous 'starts with c, rhymes with punt' word. Bear in mind that it is my own opinion, is relatively uninformed (certainly I have made no particular study of linguistics) and I am not attempting to pass it off as a kind of fact. Nevertheless, I believe this most sincerely.

As I see it, language is a tool for communication. The problems start arising (almost immediately) when we use this tool to define the universe rather than to merely describe it - I suspect that everybody does this to a greater or lesser extent.

So a word, which was once merely a label used to describe something, becomes a thing in and of itself. Thus we let ourselves be enslaved by language, as we let the words dictate what our reality is rather than using it to describe our experience of that reality.

By finding a word offensive IN AND OF ITSELF, and therefore becoming upset merely by hearing or reading it rather than by taking it as part of the entire context which it is present in, we contribute to our own enslavement.

However! Through prolonged exposure to the word in myriad contexts, I believe we can free ourselves from this enslavement. This is happening with many words - the 'f' word is an obvious example; every day I hear more different people using this words in a totally casual context. Sometimes they are people who I know darn well were offended by the word in the past, but now couldn't give a fuck.

The 'n' word is in a similar state, thanks in no small part to Richard Pryor and those influenced by him directly or indirectly (like many comedians and rappers). This used to be an automatically offensive word, and anyone using it was obviously racist. Nowadays people of all colours and ethnicities cheerfully call each other niggers without a second thought, and only truly racist usage tends to offend.

A good example of this can be found in the song "Straight-Up Nigger" by Ice-T. Ice spends the whole song explaining his use of the word. After the wong has finished, we hear a white-sounding man saying "Look at those fucking niggers," and BAM it's offensive again. Because of the word? No, because of the context he said it in and the tone of voice he used.

So as far as I'm concerned, finding a mere word offensive in and of itself is folly, distorts your reality, and helps make you a slave. You silly cunt.

Snagglepussy

Probably everyone else in the world already knows, but according to this Led Zeppelin recorded a whole bunch of old blues songs and credited them all to themselves. For example The Lemon Song (credited to being written by Bonham/Jones/Page/Plant) is really Howlin' Wolf's Killing Floor with a different title.

"So what?" you say. Well the Zep are the first people to complain when someone samples one of their songs without permission. Eg Schooly-D's song Signifying Rapper, which sampled Kashmir - it's not in the movie Bad Lieutenant anymore, and he's apparently still paying Zep for his unauthorised use.

What's the moral of this story? It's not about hipocrisy 'cause that's too obvious. It's:

"You might get away with robbing a broke blues legend, but not a bloated & over-rated Rock Dinosaur."

It was space lava!

I figure space lava is probably the stuff they put into lamps. To test, I stood next to my lava lamp.

In fact I'm still there. Someone let me know when I can move.

Blah

I can't be bothered today. Here's a quote.

"My programme, Michael Winner's True Crimes, got 11 million viewers, which proves that any idiot can go on television."
- Michael Winner

Dark Water

Hey wow, Jennifer Connelly finally got a starring role!

But it's another Americanized remake of an Asian horror movie.

Oh well, it can't be worse than A Beautiful Mind.

Lava is the best medicine

Out of all the daft baiting I've done lately, the thing that people are getting most upset about is a quote about the behaviour of lava in a space opera movie.

Apparently in the new Star Wars movie, there is some kind of lava-like substance. Apparently it may or may not behave in a manner this is or isn't consistent with ways that some kinds of real-world lava may or may not have been known to behave.

That's all I know for sure. *giggle*

I'd like to say I was demonstrating how people get worked up over the most trivial things while ignoring what's really important, but the truth is I was just being silly.

Tee hee

My kind of in-joke.

Best British comedians

I recently listened to Why Bother? which was a series of radio interviews between Chris Morris and Peter Cook, with Cook using his Sir Arthur Streep-Grebling character.

It got me thinking about British comedy, and I started mentally compiling a list of my top five Brit comedians of the radio & tv era. It went like this:

1/ Spike Milligan
2/ Peter Cook
3/ ... er...

Milligan & Cook were mammoth talents, to the extent that it's hard to imagine where modern comedy would be without them. Every potential #3 I could think of lagged so far behind them I kept thinking "There must be someone better!"

Hopeless crushes & unrequited love

I haven't had a crush on anybody in aaaaages. I'm beginning to wonder what's wrong. Am I turning asexual?

"Son, you'd better stop reproducing with yourself or you'll go blind!"

Seeing as how I am a quiz ho...

...how can I not do the quiz designed my one of my top 5 writers?

You are Marisol. You are eclectic, innovative, and
a little dangerous, but not quite as crazy as
people tend to think -- you have strong
principles and a solid grounding in culinary
tradition. You do exactly what you believe in
and don't give a good goddamn what anybody
thinks. Some people resent you for that, but
you really have no choice in the matter; you're
incapable of compromise.


What Famous New Orleans Restaurant Are You?
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Da girlz dey luv me

You are Schroeder!


Which Peanuts Character are You?
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