Freckles & Doubt

Movie club! By age-old (i.e. approximately year-long) tradition this entails two movies linked by a theme. I've owned and been wanting to watch the original Godzilla for a while, but kept on coming up blank on something to pair it with. (Re-make? Aargh. Other daikaijū films? eek! Cloverfield would have been ideal, but everyone else had seen it. I wanted Akira for a "Destroy Tokyo!" theme, but Stv had seen it already.) Finally, as despair set in, I remembered that I also had a copy of Rango which I hadn't got around to watching. Perfect! the theme: LIZARDS!

And, of course, conceptual whiplash of the more neck-bracey variety. Godzilla is a black-and-white Japanese monster film hailing from 1954; Rango just won the Best Animated Film Oscar. And I don't think a chameleon is technically a lizard, anyway¹. However! they were both thoroughly enjoyable for very different reasons, and mature reflection suggests that the common theme could have been Fire And Water, or The Corruption Of Water, or even Water And Control.



The 2010 Hugo ballot contained a novella by James Morrow called "Shambling Towards Hiroshima", which featured Hollywood history, rubber monster suits and plots against the Japanese, and if I loved the story at the time (which I did), I love it even more having actually seen the film. Godzilla is one of those wonderful cinematic archives which makes you realise from moment to moment exactly how far film-making has come in half a century, at the same time as it ineradically demonstrates the power and precision with which the older tropes, conventions and special effects draw you into the film. (And how frequently black-and-white frames are starkly poetic). It was slow, clunky, alienating as much in terms of Japanese body language as the different pacing and storytelling, but it's a thoroughly worthwhile watch if only because it's one of the few examples I've met of unabashed allegory that isn't actually annoying. You have to realise quite how terrifying atomic bombs and their implications actually are when they're enacted on three levels simultaneously, two of them metaphorical. Also, it's enormously refreshing to watch scientists being respected and instantly credited instead of being silenced in the name of politics. And the special effects are surprisingly effective. The slow, inexorable, stumbling advance of the monster is somehow more terrifying than anything fast-moving, and Tokyo burns.

I could babble enthusiastically about Rango's extended pastiche of Westerns which is also a devoted love-letter, its pitch-perfect musical score (the music is genius), its brilliant voice cast, its frequently extremely beautiful visuals, its rapid-fire humour and continual film reference (the recreation of bits of the X-wing assault on the Death Star is extremely happy-making), its plethora of beautifully eccentric desert-creature characters, its ecological message, and the extent to which its animators were clearly having a blast. But I don't need to. I can sum up the film, and the indecent amount of pleasure it gave me, in two words. Mariachi owls. The chorus and commentary of the mariachi owl group caused me to lie on the sofa and giggle hysterically until jo&stv became quite concerned. No, really. Mariachi owls. Go and see it. Also, it's incredibly self-concious about narrative construction. Basically I was doomed.

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¹ Edited to add: no, wait, Wikipedia says they totally are lizards. And have "parrot-like zygodactylous feet", which is a curiously wonderful phrase. I love chameleon feet. Like little alien paws.

We seem to have invented a Sunday Morning Popcorn-Movie club: the combination (early show so empty cinemas, choice of really bad movie with full knowledge of such and the manic intention of enjoying it anyway) worked really well for Apprenticed To Nic Cage's Hair last week, so we tried it with The A-Team this morning. Hee. As in, giddy giggling, because explosions and escapes and wisecracks and absolutely no brain, oh my.

I have to say upfront that the A-Team never formed part of my patchy and intermittent TV-watching in the 80s. I suspect my mother may have banned it, on the grounds of its extreme, if comic-book, violence. I don't think this matters at all: everyone else has seen it, and its set-up, characters and catch-phrases are inscribed on popular culture in letters of fire. I have no idea if this was a faithful rendition of the atmosphere of the original, but it sure as hell felt like a cheesy 80s show brought blinking into the light of the new millennium and given a really big budget to play with.

Random observations, in no particular order:

• Physics? Of course physics is optional. Even movie physics is for boring people. We will thus fly helicopters upside-down indefinitely, fall great heights without injury, and do that thing with the tank that should have killed us all instantly. Enormous merriment will result from the Popcorn Club in the middle row of the theatre, who seems to have adopted a policy of acting drunk for the purposes of these movies even in the absence of alcohol. This is the secret of our success.
  
• This movie had a far, far better cast than it deserved. Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper and Sharlto Copley are all very well cast, and clearly suspend all pretense at serious acting in order to enjoy the hell out of the raucous unreality of this film. They have good chemistry, they inhabit their characters well, they're bloody good fun to watch.
  
• I really, really enjoyed Patrick Wilson's CIA agent, played just off-beat enough to be extremely entertaining. I never remember the actor's name, but he impressed me no end as Nite Owl in Watchmen, and was also a rather dreamy Raoul in Phantom of the Opera. Given that these three roles are overlapping on the Venn diagram only in the bit which says "Patrick Wilson" as opposed to any actual shared characteristics, I darkly suspect he may also be a good actor.
  
• I decline to talk about the script and plot, on the grounds that I don't care. There was a script, it was pretty terrible, the plot was full of events and double-crosses and what have you, and after a while I stopped feeling obliged to follow it and simply enjoyed the mad action set-pieces. And the evil-minded German granny.
  
• I am made ridiculously happy by watching any action hero fly things, drive things, crash things, fall out of things, rappel down things, shoot things, explode things, heist things, chase things, con things or make things out of other gadgety things and do creative things with them, as long as they do it with sufficient commitment and flair. Which they do. Gritty realism, so overrated.
  
• This movie is watchable solely because it utterly fails to take itself seriously. It's brainless, explodey, actioney, warm-hearted, smart-arsey and proud of it. It's enjoyable if you allow it to simply be what it is.

I'll turn my notional academic dignity in at the door now, if you like. Without shame.

Thought for the day: dear spammer, if your email has a subject line which reads "PLS OPEN YOUR ATTARCHMENT AND FEW YOUR WINNING PROCEDURE" it is so utterly doomed before it starts that it's causing me actual pain to contemplate the mere fact of your existence. Not that the existence of spammers is anything other than painful at the best of times, but I mean, really. If you're going to be a pestilential blot on the face of the modern internet community, can't you at least be competent at it? Incompetent evil gives me toothache.

Talking of which, I am still attempting to live down the fact that I inflicted G.I. Joe, now with added pointlessly inept bad guys, on jo&stv for our Friday night movie veg-out, on the grounds of (a) probable cute crash-boom special effects, for which I have a well-documented weakness, and (b) Joseph Gordon-Levitt. In the event we spent most of the movie wincing sympathetically on behalf of JGL and other unfortunate actors (Christopher Ecclestone? noooooo! Arnold Vosloo? shaaaaame!) clearly forced by incipient starvation to sign on the dotted line for the ginormous cheque. (Theory: JGL does this sort of thing to fund his next three indie movies of choice, and it is our duty to support him on the grounds that we might get another Brick.) G.I. Joe is a bloody stupid film. It has occasionally cute if somewhat predictable special effects. Channing Tatum is unexpectedly likeable if more or less mahogany all through - it's particularly interesting to see him doing the action thing given that I last saw him bopping around the show in Step Up, about which I decline to be embarrassed on the grounds that Jo gave it to me as a joke present.

Following the random association game, I have just scored a copy of Shaun Tan's The Lost Thing courtesy of Jo's birthday, since she received a duplicate present and passed on one to me. This is a weird, lateral, poignant, beautiful, delicate, intricate, heartbreaking and very, very odd piece of graphic art, and I'm more than slightly in love with it. Have a look.

I'm also slightly in love with the new version of Firefox, which has produced all sorts of minor innovations with things like new tab placement: it now all conforms much more closely to my personal logic, which either means (a) score, the design team think like I do, or (b) score, they've trained Firefox to read my mind so it thinks like I do. Not that I think much today, being still a little short on sleep after Jo's raucous party on Saturday night, with attendant booze levels, epic clean-up and more wine for dinner last night. I don't think I was hungover, but I'm a tad fragile still.

We also watched The Hangover on Friday night. I didn't expect to enjoy this nearly as much as I did. It looks as though it's going to be the usual horrible frat-boy dick-joke gross-out collection of misogynistic bullshit, and at every point in the film where it starts moving in that direction, it takes a sudden hard left turn and goes somewhere else instead. It was refreshingly unexpected. It's also more or less completely sold by its cast, who are superb, and by the pleasing levels of surreal generated by the flashback format. Drunken manly antics are much easier to deal with when they're all postmodern. Bonus tiger, Mike Tyson, Bradley Cooper giving a surprisingly good imitation of a total dick dead against type, and a completely inexplicable chicken.

I'm going to stop there, because this wayward puppy thing could get out of hand. Tomorrow I shall attempt to post about the house, which is almost finished and looking, while still inexpressibly grimy, rather excitingly new.

Deary me, clearly an official Week From Hell, haven't posted since, gawsh, Tuesday. Sorry, internets. Inadequate brain/time representation in the State of Me. Four more days and I'm on leave for two weeks. If I keep the chocolate biscuit supply constant, it's conceivable I may escape before I actually slaughter a student.

In keeping with the current theme of Brain? What Brain?, this morning we (jo&stv + self) took ourselves off to see 2012, on the grounds that if you're going to watch California crumble, tilt and slide into the sea, it may as well be on the big screen. Before anyone feels the need to pillory my taste in film, let me hasten to add we fully expected it to be loud, stupid, clichéd, cheesy and dire, and I'm happy to say it delivered exactly what it says on the box. It was also, in a heady, shitballs-retarded sort of way, and probably as a direct result of our cheerfully low expectations, bloody good fun. The cast was a bit patchy - am I alone in finding John Cusack increasingly unappealing? he seems to be creeping inexorably into Nicholas Cage territory, although mercifully without the wig malfunctions. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Oliver Platt were watchable, though, and I recognised with glee a slightly heartstring-tugging turn from Blu Mankuma, who's horribly familiar most recently from Supernatural as a nice-but-doomed doctor, and way back when in X-Files. Also, bonus Insane!Woody Harrelson, although that might actually be a tautology.

This thing has not much in the way of plot, just enough to vaguely point all the special effects in an approximate direction as they stagger along like drunken juggernauts. I thus feel absolutely no compunction in spoilering it all to hell, it won't affect your enjoyment of the movie one iota since the clichés broadcast their inevitable upshot VERY LOUDLY from the word go, and in any event all the really cool catastrophe sequences are in the trailer. In terms of clichés it has 'em all: separated couple with Cute Kids, check, and Inevitable Reconciliation. Nice Guy new boyfriend, check (doomed, obviously). Hairs-Breadth Last-Minute Escapes, some self-sacrificing, check. Doomed Extraneous Ethnic Characters, check (old black dudes, Russian mobster's moll, Russian mobster, nice Indian physicist and family, Wise/Wizened Gnomic Tibetan Monk). Really Bad Science, check (lots of neutrinos! start acting as a wave! new particle invented!). "My God" count, only 2, but "This is impossible!" probably four or five, I lost count. Entirely spurious moral message tacked on in defiance of logic, consistency or justice, check. Earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, check.

California go boom. White House go boom (gets an aircraft carrier dropped on it, which I can only assume is an entirely unintended ironic commentary on the Bush regime). Yellowstone Park go boom. Hawaii go boom. Tokyo go boom under crashing tsunami waves. The Cape ends up, in a move which caused the entire movie house to collapse giggling, as the New Hope for all the giant space-agey arks, since apparently the Drakensberg are the new highest point in the world. (All the fancy tech for keeping track of things signally fails to go boom, fortunately for the film's overall comprehensibility. But they still can't pronounce "Drakensberg"). Overall blood, none at all bar scratches, scrapes, one lost leg and a dead moose. Kids and small dogs entirely unharmed, save the little Indian boy, who was a chess-playing geek and presumably doesn't count.

Overall cheese factor: those little highly-processed soft cheese triangles in the individual wrappers. Not much flavour, very packaged, curiously more-ish despite being fundamentally disgusting and leaving you with a thin film of plastic on your tongue.

Somewhere in my future is an extended meditation on exactly why it is that disaster movies make me so incalculably happy. I can't work out if it's my primitive sense of justice, my inbuilt belief in the ultimate insignificance of humanity despite its delusions to the contrary, or if I'm just a nasty, vindictive sort of person, but Earth go boom, I'm happy.

Now I go forth to assist the Evil Landlord in his fixed, Germanicly stubborn purpose of braaing despite a merry south-easter. If I'm off the 'net for a while, it's because a low-flying tree branch has clocked me and laid me out.

I'm being stalked by a bug. It's lurking in the corner of my vision, flexing its muscles and trying out special effects on my hapless form. I'm tired, crotchety (apologies to the nice young man who wanted advice during my lunch hour, he probably didn't deserve to be snarled at just because he can't read the notice on my door), glandular, sinusy and incredibly slow to think or move. Except all of it is only slightly, increasing only in tiny increments, so I can't really say I'm "sick". Either it'll get in all its practice on me and rollick off to the next victim, snickering, or I'm about due to be laid extremely low by something epic. News at 11¹.

For some reason feeling under the weather tends to make me default to watching mindless action flicks every evening, which is distressing because I've come to the end of my James Bond collection (all the Pierce Brosnan ones). On Sunday I wantonly introduced the Evil Landlord to the joys of Mr and Mrs Smith, more or less in revenge for Thursday's True Lies, which annoyed me more than somewhat owing to (a) the block of wood impersonating the lead character, and (b) the INCREDIBLE SEXISM! The scene in the hotel room with the wife forced to impersonate a prostitute for her husband's enjoyment may have done irreparable harm to my blood pressure. However, clumsy and unlikely Harrier jump-jet rescue scenes ftw. Mr and Mrs Smith, on the other hand, infallibly makes me giggle like a schoolgirl, it's so magnificently silly. And, may I add, rife with extended metaphor, so there.

OK, bugger this for a lark, I feel like hell. Going home early, and the Dear Little Students can possess their angst-ridden souls in patience until the morning, when hopefully some serious sleeping will have bored the lurking bug into packing up its symptom kit and buggering off.

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¹ Except I'm not allowed to say that because otherwise wolverine_nun waits up until 11 especially, and gets all disappointed.²

² I'd swear she said as much in a comment once, but I can't find it. Possibly I hallucinated it. At any rate, I can report that I use the phrase "In other news" ridiculously often, and "News at 11" marginally less so.

I derive considerable pleasure from contemplating the fact that my DVD collection is now reaching the proportions where, if I randomly decide of a Saturday evening that I want to watch something irrevocably silly and B-movie while consuming half a bottle of red wine, Independence Day is right there. I love that movie. It's so utterly dreadful, and the thunderous crash with which the clichés fall into place is so deeply pleasing. Besides, bonus Adam Baldwin, not to mention random arguments with the Evil Landlord ("the giant spaceship should have crashed on the base!" "no, it was slipping sideways when it blew up!" "was not!") and the fact that my copy is apparently a special edition with bunches of additional footage, causing me, until I worked out this fact, to glare accusingly at the bottle of wine every time I really didn't remember that bit. Also, the active pain of the frequently abysmal essays on Pan's Labyrinth I've been marking all afternoon is now somewhat dulled.

I'm going to bed now. Any typos in this post are entirely drunken.

The mere fact of a three-day weekend seems to have switched my brain off. This is not entirely a bad thing, putting me in exactly the right space for watching Reign of Fire (dreadful, entertaining, topless!sweaty!Christian Bale, cool dragons) and Nightwatch (weird, interesting, good-for-a-given-value-of, strange special effects) last night, while eating pizza. And Sid is all rampagous again, leaving me snuffly and with less room in the inside of my skull for actual thinking, which Does Not Bode Well for the review I have to finish writing this afternoon.

So, random linkery.

• This idiot was clearly bitten by a knitting needle in early youth and has never recovered. As rants go, this lacks any vestige of quality, intelligence or logic. I immediately thought the same thing that strawberryfrog did: hello, handcrafts actually do constitute an act of resistance in an age of mass-production.


• Henry Jenkins hypothesises, and proceeds to entertainingly demonstrate, that Obama is actually Spock.


• Kage Baker does actually intelligent things with time travel. Also, Renaissance herbery! In the Garden of Iden is available off the Tor sign-up list, which is a truly worthy thing for which to hand over one's email address. (This service announcement for the benefit of librsa, who needs to sign up).

Yesterday starmadeshadow prodded me out of my oblivious lethargy to finally go and see V for Vendetta, by the skin of our teeth - I think that was the last day it was showing. Is it just me, or do the Canal Walk Nu-Metros put their sound levels up to cater exclusively to attention-deficit teenagers who spend too much time listening to loud music? They certainly angle their interior decorating towards adolescent mess - the carpets are pre-spotted with random white dots, presumably in a desperate attempt to disguise popcorn spillage. I always expect them to crunch underfoot.

Notwithstanding the slight buzzing in the ears, and the state of exquisitely apprehensive expectation engendered by the fact that I loved the graphic novel and Alan Moore hated the film, I am happy to say I really enjoyed it. For reasons thusly:

• It was visually very cool, and, to my somewhat wayward memory, enormously faithful in atmosphere and feel to the graphic novel - dark, essentialist streets and slightly dischordant suburban interiors. They also cast all sorts of actors who had the right shaped faces - craggy, cynical, world-weary. And Natalie Portman with no hair is simply beautiful. Although I tend to feel that it's a horrendous pity brilliant actors like Stephen Fry get typecast as gay characters just because the actor's gay. They're supposed to be actors, after all.
• The film's political content was interestingly and rather cleverly updated to contemporary issues; there was a certain, inevitable bluntening of message, but not as badly as it could have been given the manifold iniquities of Hollywood. It remains a powerfully political film, which maintains its fairly complex examination of terrorism and government control in the teeth of the monster that is post-911 political correctness.
• All those explosions to Tchaikovsky's 1812 are as simply visceral as all hell. Then again, my response to fireworks of any kind is a sort of joyously fluttering 8-year-old "Wow!", so I may be biased here.
• I have to tip my hat to a film capable of building up enough symbolic punch that the surreal vision of thousands of cloaked, masked, hatted Guy Fawkeses moving through the deserted London streets made me howl like a baby. Dammit.

I felt remarkably drained last night, and came home from book club distressingly sober and almost incoherent with exhaustion; I'd add this as a last, most telling tribute to V for Vendetta, except further evidence on waking up this morning reveals that I was simply coming down with a cold. Possibly wolverine_nun's. I may have to explode her hob this evening in retribution, or something. Hideous is the power of the DM.

Darn that starmadeshadow. After years of me shrugging and going "Que?" while she and various other female friends swooned over Vin Diesel, I have succumbed to the frenzied fangirling so far as to admit that he's quite watchable. And, of course, a D&D player and mad sf fan, which has to count for something. This revelation probably sparked by re-watching Chronicles of Riddick, which is utterly cheesy in all the right ways, and pushes all my buttons in terms of sweeping space opera with a good dose of fight scenes, fantasy symbolism and the correctly medieval-retro costuming. I'm a simple creature, when you get down to it. Also fun to watch a muscle-bound dude with Attitude in spades who manages to subtly send himself up more or less continually (especially viz. the ridiculous Steaming Riddick scene, quite my favourite in the film for sheer deliberate over-the-topness). Irony in the Hollywood star, so a dying art. Jury as yet out as to whether the vague approval rating will lead me to go and watch The Pacifier. It has kiddies in it. Yetch. There's always Boiler Room, in which I believe he wears designer suits more or less continually. There's not a man on the planet who doesn't improve a thousandfold in a suit.

Just had a rather good evening having supper with aforementioned starmadeshadow (who is turning into a mall rat), thereafter watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Pleasantly surprised by the film, actually. Intelligent and playful use of the marriage-as-violence, violence-as-marriage trope, or theme, or whatever (paradigm?), and very little condescension to the audience; some quite subtle and nuanced moments where you had to be quick to catch the implication. Plus one of the great tango scenes in recent cinema. And lovely moment with Brad Pitt intimidating a hostage who's wearing, as far as I can make out, a Fight Club T-shirt. Also, of course, a rampantly negative view of marriage, given that the Happy Couple shoot up both their house and a home-store. Death to domesticity. All the more pointed in that the violence is a sex-substitute; the great orgasmic fireball as the house collapses had me giggling helplessly. So one up on the Renaissance sonnet-writers.

The meeting this morning was, amazingly enough, quick and efficient, and I was not forced to bludgeon anyone to death with the collected works of George Bernard Shaw. Campus has a certain serene charm without students - great empty spaces, lots of parked cars but no actual people, since it's only students who really wander about between buildings. One developes a niggling feeling that one has accidentally come to work on a public holiday, or after the rest of the human race has unexpectedly been abducted by aliens. Restful. Roll on the alien abductions, say I.

I have quite a lot of private vices unbecoming to an English academic, and have recently discovered a new one: disaster movies. I have a low penchant for disaster movies. Something in me finds it deeply satisfying to watch aliens blow up the White House, or a tidal wave overwhelm Manhattan, or Viggo Mortensen's career take a catastrophic nose-dive in a sandstorm on a piebald horse. It's probably a simple subset of the B-movie weakness, and indicates a basic narrative pleasure in the obvious working out of genre expectations. Next up, I shall dig out The Core, and, recking not the anguished screams of distant astro-physicists, probably enjoy it thoroughly. Wicked me.

This afternoon I put together my last newsletter for our SCA Kingdom. From next weekend, I will no longer be Kingdom Chronicler. Since I've been doing this job - which entails collating and laying out a 24-page newsletter once a month, plus printing and mailing all or some of it - for four years now, I think there's going to be a bit of a gaping void in my life. Just to add to the gaping void already left by the completion of the book review process, that is. I am clearly unfulfilled unless madly busy on something large or ongoing. Sigh. I shall have to start writing the Great South African Fantasy Novel, or something.

I still have the 'flu, and am a disgusting snuffly object. Also, the inside of my skull is buzzing fretfully, as a result of some combination of the exam essays I've just marked on internet eroticism, the myriad cheesy explosions of the second half of Independence Day on TV, and the hot rum toddy hitting the Sinutab. *snuffles off to bed*