Pentuple Bill Mini Musings: November 2011...

The Exterminator:
This 1980s exploitation action flick got somewhat caught up in the 'video nasties' era here in the UK, but save for a few violent moments (such as a tremendous decapitation in the action-packed, explosions-galore opening five minutes) there's not an awful lot here to get your knickers in a twist about.

A Vietnam veteran takes to the meanstreets of New York City to sweep away the scum - the gang members, the pimps, the abusers, and so forth - in revenge for the terrible fate that befalls his good friend. After an impressively realised and explosive Nam-set opener, the movie quickly falters - the pace is all over the shop, the plot has an inconsistent focus, and the side characters are loosely considered. There are numerous great ideas littered throughout this revenge flick, including a vaguely explored governmental conspiracy, that could have (and should have) added up to a much tighter and more entertaining action picture - but alas it's not to be, especially with an underwhelming denouement that fails to provide a knock-out punch (let alone utilise the impressive arsenal that two main characters are seen packing).

Great ideas and great moments are lost in a disappointing murk. If you're into this kind of movie it's worth a watch, but unless it specifically hooks you, it'll mostly fade into the ether of your memory.


Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House:
As a kid I was a big fan of the Tom Hanks comedy The Money Pit (and I still am to this day) - and it was this Cary Grant-starring comedy that provided the foundations for it. Grant plays an Ad Executive in 1948 New York who dreams of a family home in rural Conneticut and, like an episode of Grand Designs, his dream project soon takes on a life of its own. The budget spirals, problems galore arise during the build, and it all becomes a bit of a stress. Naturally I prefer The Money Pit - as it's been a part of film-viewing life for as long as I can remember - but it was good to see this. The pace might be a bit sedate, and the comedy a touch on the soft-delivery side of things, but it was good fun nonetheless.


Island of Death:
One of the lesser known (yet still notorious) 'Video Nasties', Island of Death is a Biblically immoral tale of an incestuous couple spreading their wrath throughout the Greek island of Mykonos. Goats, amorous Frenchmen, homosexuals, randy old spinsters, the most pointless policeman on the planet, and anyone else going feel the wrath of this pair of misfits whose motives are - at best - foggy. The love-it-or-hate-it soundtrack works jarringly against-the-grain of the on-screen sadism, and it lacks any real sense of propulsion or purpose, but if you're fascinated by the era of the video nasty, then it's worth a look ... mind you, I'm quite glad I saw it on the Horror Channel instead of spending any money on it. To me at least, it's a one-watch-pony.


The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou:
As I've said before, over the last year I've suddenly gotten into Wes Anderson's brand of quirky ensemble comedies. Fantastic Mr. Fox, Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited, and now this - a similarly inimitable telling of Bill Murry's titular sea explorer who discovers he has an adult son just as he's about to set off on a voyage to track down the apparent Jaguar Shark that ate his best friend and collegue. It's exactly what I'd expect from a Wes Anderson film, although out of the aforementioned movies of his that I have seen, this would be at the bottom of the list for me personally - but that said, the bottom of this list is still quite high up in general.


Identity:
A cast full of names - including John Cusack (so as I continue to maintain, it's already worth watching simply for that fact) - populate this very effective, and incredibly fast paced mystery thriller. A series of people find themselves all trapped at a Motel in the midst of a torrential storm, and they're getting picked off one-by-one by an unseen killer. The reveal becomes apparent before its time and should have been hidden better for longer, but regardless, it's a stylish, efficient and very worthwhile thriller delivered by a talented cast and crew. It's one of those flicks I meant to see when it first came out in 2003, but for whatever reason I never got around to it - well I'm glad I finally did, because it's damn well worth a watch.

Flavours of the Month: June 2010...

Continuing on from last month, my obsession with Prison Break Season One exploded and I'm now eager to see the remaining three seasons. Initially I was sceptical as it does take a good four or five episodes to get you into the groove of the show, but after that you're totally sucked in and fascinated by how every single problem that arises gets solved ... and the last two episodes are nothing but awesome.

I read Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, as I'm a big fan of the film adaptation, and naturally it was ruddy great, and then I simply had to watch the movie yet again - inspiring another mini-Cusack fest complimented by another viewing of Grosse Pointe Blank.

There's been a lot of script writing going on, what with Summer Road (comedy drama, now onto Draft 2.2) and Allen Bridge (drama mystery with a somewhat supernatural tint, now in the planning stages).

I also got the Season 1 through 3 box set of Robot Chicken, so it was nothing but that for a couple of weeks as I gorged myself on the extra features - and yes, season 4 is pre-ordered.

I finished Red Dead Redemption, which was a ruddy good game, and is Rockstar's best game to date, I'd have to say. You really care about John Marston and you end up caring about his family too, and what's more you really feel involved in the setting - that of the dying days of the wild west - and wow, the ending really packs a punch (just remember, the game ain't over till you've seen the credits roll). Speaking of the credits, the soundtrack to the game is tip-top, especially those two tracks on the credits which leave a memorable mark in the context of the ending.

As such, there has been a bit of a soundtrack festival on my CD changer - the soundtracks to Red Dead Redemption, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and The Road - two are westerns, two are by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and all three are excellent.

Finally, a hot topic for discussion over on Homepage of the Dead at the moment is the forthcoming TV series The Walking Dead, and having never read the source material before, I've now gone and gotten myself into that. At the time of writing I've read Vol. 1 "Days Gone Bye", and I've just started Vol. 2 "Miles Behind Us".

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And there we have it, a whole year's worth of Flavours of the Month - to see the first one, follow this link:
http://deadshed.blogspot.com/2009/07/flavours-of-month-junejuly-2009.html

Flavours of the Month: November 2009...

I'm about a week late on this one, but nevertheless, away we go!

John Cusack...

Yeah it's a veritable hetero-man-crush going on. I finally got to see the ruddy excellent Say Anything, and then saw the rather brash 2012 ... which is good in it's own 'cheese burger kind of way'. It's not Beef Wellington, but you know what, a cheese burger can really hit the spot too.

Also I've been mad-keen on High Fidelity again. I've watched the movie another two times and have been listening to the soundtrack like nobody's business. As I've said before, I will pick up the book at some point and continue my obsession.

Writing...

I've delved back in to "Zero", as I've been blogging about on here recently, and November was marred somewhat in this respect. Not by the script, but by the software. As you'll have seen from previous posts, Final Draft was causing a right old load of trouble. However, moving to Final Draft version 8 has sorted the problem out and I've been merrily chugging away on Draft 3.1 - which is itself nearing completion. I just need to obsess over those first 10 pages some more and then I'll post it off to the BBC Writersroom at the beginning of January.

The next DeadShed Productions short film...

I've been gearing up for the next short film, doing prop research and then finally making a decision and ordering said props (which I think will work very well indeed). I've been recording dialogue in preparation, and have just generally been getting ready for it. A filming date hasn't been set yet, but we've been talking about shooting it for a while now, and the project itself has been gestating for a long old while. So keep your fingers crossed that we can actually get it on tape at long last.

Top Gear...

The most awesomest show in the entire world is back for its 14th series, yo ... nuff said.

Foo Fighters, Rammstein, and Guns 'n Roses...

I've been on a Foo's retrospective kick of late, but going backwards through their catalogue. During this time I rested for a long while on my favourite Foo's album (There Is Nothing Left To Lose), which really inspired me while I was heavily into some script writing on "Zero".

It's also been a time for some Rammstein. Not content with just have their latest album in my disc changer, I nabbed a copy of Rosenrot for a fiver.

Similar to the Foo's, I've been having a GnR revival in my hi-fi, what with Use Your Illusion 1 (great album) and UYI 2 (not that great, but with moments of greatness - e.g. "You Could Be Mine"). Next up is one of my all-time favourite albums, Appetite For Destruction.

James Cameron...

I've been getting amped up for Avatar (out in a couple of weeks time, woo!) and Total Film had a full-on supplement all about the man himself. Further to my JC revival this past month, I got Aliens of the Deep on DVD, and have Ghosts of the Abyss on its way. Roll on Avatar!

400th Blog Post...

Indeed, in November this 'ere blog got to it's 400th post, woo!

Videogames...

Such is the way with the videogame industry, they all seem to want to pimp out their titles at the same time as everyone else. Why this is a good idea is beyond me, because every gamer will know that you always get logjams of games.

Then again as you can so often crack through them fairly swiftly the first time through, it's not like you've got three World of Warcrafts to play or something. No, instead it was GTA Episodes From Liberty City - in which the second episode "The Ballad of Gay Tony" was much better all-round than the first episode, which was "The Lost & Damned".

Next up was a bash through Ghostbusters. As a GB videogame it's a 9.5/10 ... as a videogame in general it's a 7.5/10 ... but blimey did it make me grin with glee everytime I popped it in to play.

Then of course it was the biggest entertainment launch of all time, and strong contender for Game of the Year the world over. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I maintain that it sits on level pegging with the first Modern Warfare. Each game does things better and worse than the other.

While MW2 is a thrillingly intense action festival, with some amazing sights and sounds, the plot is full of cavernous holes, and indeed the story frequently gets lost in the chaos. Some levels - such as Burger Town - become too frantic, and you find yourself confused thanks to constant radio chatter, a compass with too tiny letters for North South East and West, and sometimes preposterous amounts of bad guys facing off against your little squad.

The increased difficulty/chaos on Recruit (aka Casual/Easy) Mode is also annoying. I personally don't want to be challenged, I just want to play and have fun. So you have to pay more attention in MW2 than you did beforehand. This can occasionally become annoying at a couple of points in the game.

However, MW2 does provide a serious dose of awesome sauce directly into your veins, and upon a second play through (which I'm currently cracking through at a fair old lick) it just feels better than the first time. No doubt there was an element of hype overload when I first played MW2 - and I actively tried to avoid the hype as much as possible, while maintaining my own excitement. Even still, it's hard to avoid the bombardment of utterly pointless MW2 hyping videos when you're subscribed to both IGN Entertainment and Machinima on YouTube. Seriously - calm the fuck down.

So yeah, while I blogged extensively about Modern Warfare 2 last month (go on, have a gander), I won't go on about it too much here. Safe to say though, when all is said and done, it sits on the same level pegging as the first Modern Warfare. Hopefully MW3 will fix the issues I had with MW2, but also continue the greatness.

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So there you have it folks, another month and another flavour shot.

2012 ... or how to crack a walnut with an atomic sledgehammer...

Originally I hadn't wanted to see this in the cinema - I was going to wait for DVD. However, the closer it got to release, and the more times I saw the trailer, the more I wanted to check it out just for the sheer guilty pleasure of it all.

Plus, it's got John Cusack in it - and it's always worthwhile watching Cusack on screen. In fact, after getting back from the cinema I caught the last 30 minutes of High Fidelity, and it just made me love that flick even more - it gets better and better every single time I watch it, and Cusack's brilliantly in-touch performance just gets better each time.

Anyway, plot wise you know what you're going to get. If you've seen Independence Day as well as The Day After Tomorrow, then you're all set to know exactly what's going to happen, and who is going to die when (and indeed why). Disaster movies seem to have a similar moral strength (perhaps harshness) that slasher movies have, but instead of blood and guts, it's huge ass buildings falling over, exploding, and exploding while falling over.

That last part though - that's exactly why I went to see 2012. I wanted to see a bunch of shit crumble like dominoes. I wanted to see a crazy amount of money being spent on a luridly over-the-top slice of disaster pie ... hell, nevermind the slice, 2012 is the whole goddamn thing in one gulp.

Honestly, if Emmerich ever makes another disaster movie after this I'd be surprised - he's done everything he could possibly have done, and some of it is even hoisted out of other disaster movies. Then again, many slasher movies play out in the same way...

2012 has come in for some harsh criticism since its release, and I think some of it - some, I stress - is undeserved. It's been moaned about that characters 'get over deaths too easily' - well that's bullshit, because the entire movie is a non-stop rollercoaster of shit falling over, so there'd literally be no time to stop and cry about it. Then, despite a little scene at the end, none of the survivors are going to be whooping and hollering for joy or sitting around having completely forgotten their loved ones. It's just that we don't see that on screen, and quite frankly there's no need to, especially in a movie this bloated and long-winded.

It has been said that there are too many characters, and too much soap opera storytelling - and I think that's right. It still works, and you still are able to follow who is who, but it's not necessary.

Storytelling though, when it does pop its head up from under the clouds of volcanic ash, crumbling suburban streets, and tidal waves, is obviously quite blunt. Then again, 2012 - like its predecessors - is just blunt anyway, it could never be anything else. It's impossible, surely, to interweave so many characters and so much action into two and a half hours without being blunt about it.

2012 is like cracking a nut with an atomic sledge hammer, but to be fair, it still cracks the nut.

As such, the variety of "goodbye" scenes still pack some punch. You sit there and think "what if that was me?" and "what would I say and do in that situation?" and as such it does tug at the heart strings a little bit ... in a blunt and totally unsubtle manner, but this is a broad strokes kind of movie. Blockbusters rarely do subtlety - so why are some folk so surprised that 2012 is as blustery and concrete as it is?

It has also been said that it's the most expensive comedy ever made, and that some of the humour is intentional - obviously, this witty sideswipe came from a (formerly, at least) broadsheet newspaper. I think some have been taking this movie too seriously, because when I was watching it I just couldn't see any way in which those making it could ever go more than five minutes without cracking up laughing themselves. There is tons of intentional humour throughout, and it's bloody well necessary, because if this was genuinely played straight it'd be the most spectacularly depressing movie ever made.

Just think about it, you're being thrown scene after scene of families being torn apart by disaster. You're seeing mass-scale destruction - events which are killing countless hundreds of thousands of people in seconds. There are many scenes of desperate, wild-eyed people trying to escape their looming fates, to get their children to safety, and so obviously there's always the need for some humour now and then to lighten the load.

Even the big scenes of destruction have an air of intentional comedy about them, they're so ludicrously over-the-top that Emmerich couldn't have been doing anything but guffawing heartily at the sheer chaos he was inflicting upon his viewers once the film was complete.

2012 isn't a well crafted roast beef dinner with all the trimmings, it's a cheese burger bought from one of those vans towed behind a 4x4 - there's always a time for both meals, and they both hit the spot with the same force, they just go about it in different ways.

I mean just look at the film I watched prior to 2012 - Moon - a gentle, subtle, intensely thoughtful piece of filmmaking which has gone straight into my top films of 2009 list. 2012, while it won't be going into the same list, still kicked the ass of The Day After Tomorrow, and still provided the "ooh, big thing fall down!" mass appeal, blunt force populism that everybody likes now and then.

Is the writing particuarly good? Not really - it's workman-like at best. Is the whole 2012 thing anything to get fussed about? No, especially as the Mayan calender doesn't predict global cataclysm. Is it enjoyable anyway? Of course it is - it's got John Cusack in it, and it's got Woody Harrelson stealing every single one of his few scenes as another beautifully whacked-out oddballs ... plus, a ton of shit falls over and explodes.

Anyone who was surprised by anything they saw in 2012 must have been kidding themselves. You know the rules of these kind of movies, and you know exactly how the plot is going to turn out. You know that really stupid, ridiculous, never-gonna-happen-in-real-life-ever things are going to happen (repeatedly). You know that children and dogs can never be killed (although two Russian rich kid blighters in 2012 were a pair of shits ... even still, their bastard father's moment to save them still holds some of that universal charm - a father saving his children - an ideal that traverses all social classes and societal splits).

Indeed, 2012 is just that - it's a universal theme kind of movie - and it even addresses this a couple of times. Cusack's hang-dog failed writer remarks that one billion Euros per seat is disgusting, but as the Russian oligarch drawls simply, if you were a rich man, wouldn't you do the same to save your children?

There is some actual, real ideological meat to chew into with this movie - you know, beneath all the shit falling over of course. It may not be subtle, it may not be especially deep, and it's surrounded by as much lunacy and as many epic plot holes that any human can take, but it still has something simple and universal to say about the basic, deep down human instinct for survival, the want for a connection to a society, and for the want to save the ones you love - and indeed, to say what you've always wanted to say before it's too late.

I'll say again, it's far from a great film, but I've seen so many films worse than this, and an atomic sledge hammer still cracks the nut.

Say Anything...

I had a bit of a John Cusack movie fest a few weeks ago, and I spoke about how I got Better Off Dead, and Say Anything mixed up. I was looking for 'the movie with the ghetto blaster above the head' moment, and got my wires crossed and saw Better Off Dead - fortunately, that was a good little flick.

Anyway, Say Anything was on Channel 4 the other night and I ended up watching the whole thing before bed on Sunday night. I had intended to just watch it in stages, but by the time I was half way through I was so invested in the characters that I just kept going.

It's a cracking film, it really is. It's well observed with detailed characters, and as you should all know by now (as I've said it a bunch of times) anything with John Cusack in it is worth seeing (it's why I'll probably end up going to see 2012 soon - well, that and simply wanting to see stuff fall over for two hours).

I found myself connected to these characters, and it made me yearn for my teenage/student years. Little moments here and there reminding me of those years gone by, all delivered spot-on by Cusack who - as usual - gave an honest and inspiring performance. It almost feels like a forerunner to High Fidelity which came along a decade later, and that's no bad thing at all of course.

I also found it quite enthralling as I've been busy re-drafting a script (which I talked about the other day), and they both skirt similar territories - so Say Anything is helping to inspire me to finish off the last tweaks and start getting that script sent out there.

Say Anything gets a big old thumbs up from me. It's a 1980s teen-com with John Cusack in it. What's not to like?

Better Off Dead...

Originally looking for Say Anything - 'the movie where John Cusack holds a ghetto blaster above his head' - I'd gotten my wires crossed after seeing the cover for Better Off Dead so repeatedly. So off I trotted fully expecting that very scene (which I've seen lampooned all over the place, especially animated sitcoms from Fox), and I didn't get it - naturally - it's the wrong damn movie for that scene.

It does still have John Cusack in it, and it's still a good watch. It's almost like the a John Hughes movie strained through a sort of teenage, sub-Monty Python filter. It's oftentimes utterly bizarre, or blackly comic, or just downright weird.

It makes no excuse for being fairly scattergun with certain subplots (suicide contemplation, and a techno-whizz-kid little brother, for two examples) and it does feel generally low budget throughout. It doesn't have the flair of a Hughes movie from the 1980s, it doesn't have the flashy soundtrack (although the animated hamburger dancing to Van Halen is a highlight), but it does have John Cusack ... and like I've said before, if it's got him in it, it's worth seeing.

Jilted by his social class obsessed girlfriend (who trades up to some skiing douchebag spawn of a WASP community), Cusack's bewildered teenager attempts suicide and generally bumps around from moment to increasingly odd moment. A maths class with exceptionally eager and capable students (except him), for example, sets up this protagonist as a real outsider in a 'perfect' suburban world.

Then throw in a chubby neighbour's amorous advances on a French exchange student, a Howard Cosell-like Asian duo, and that aforementioned kid brother and you've got one oddball kind of 80s teen comedy.

It almost has its cake and eats it too ... it's not schmaltzy, but it still ends happily ... and rather than a whole generation of disjointed teenagers (a la John Hughes), it's just Cusack's bewildered, day-dreaming teen all on his own in a rather crazy world.

Although scattergun in its handling of the occasionally bizarre plot, and not as tightly written as a Hughes movie, it still offers plenty of free-and-easy fun.

Oh, and in case I hadn't mentioned already a bunch of times, having John Cusack in it automatically makes it worth seeing.