Freckles & Doubt

We haven't had a proper movie club in ages - movie club being, by definition, a session where we watch two movies with a putative thematic link, back-to-back, while eating Stuff On Rolls and imbibing alcohol to the level prescribed by the quality of the cinematic offerings. Sunday night wasn't technically a movie club, as we only watched one movie, but I propose to follow the principle of thematic linking between unlikely and disparate narratives by comparing the film, which was Bong Joon Ho's Snowpiercer, with my current state of work existence. (I'm glad I checked the director's name, incidentally, I'd remembered it as Boon Jong Ho, which is quite possibly a dreadful insult in Korean).

Given that Snowpiercer is (a) a dystopian, post-apocalyptic, extremely violent semi-thriller, (b) graced by Bearded!Chris Evans doing a surprisingly dark and driven tone which is the antithesis of his American Captaining, and (c) batshit insane and completely surreal, I should hasten to add that it doesn't have that much in common with my current state of work existence. My life right now is tragically missing any iteration of Chris Evans and is neither violent, dark, nor, currently, particularly surreal. What it does have in common with the film is a certain thematic tendency to a habitat characterised by continuous and ongoing movement which is dictated by Powers That Be who are severely above me in a hierarchy and whose dictates cannot be resisted without Negative Consequences. Not that my boss has a machine-gun or anything, but still.

Snowpiercer is (apparently extremely loosely) based on a graphic novel, and has as its bizarre premise a reverse-global-warming experiment gone wrong, plunging the world into catastrophic global winter in which the only survivors are hurtling around Europe/Asia in a very long, very socially stratified train on a circular train track. It is quite mad, and very dark, and very tense, and very beautifully filmed, and its culmination is cathartic beyond belief after the build-up and the increasingly horrific revelations. Its grimy lower-class protagonists fight their way up the train in balletic, impressionistic outbursts of extreme violence, and the upper-class train carriages are surreal pockets of hallucinogenic, heightened colour and bizarrely artificial life - they feel more like Doctor Who alien scenarios than anything else. Bonus Tilda Swinton being an almost unrecognisable caricature, and an overall impression of vivid nightmare. It's a very good film, for a given value of "very good film" which assumes "is a total mind-fuck."

My working life is characterised by a faculty administrative restructure, which has necessitated a sort of frantic game of Musical Offices as we all attempt to keep working while repeatedly relocating. I moved my stuff out of my office on Friday, along with my next door colleague's stuff as she happened to be in New Zealand, so they could knock a new door into the wall between us. My attempts to delay this process by a vital few weeks were steamrollered quite handily by various managers and Deans and what have you, because apparently this needs to be done Right Now owing to the inscrutable whims of builders, and the devil take the end-of-term pressures which have both me and Colleague at the mercy of continual angsty students in all this. The work should have been done over the weekend, but predictably wasn't. We are both squatting in temporary offices in the fortuitous absence of their rightful owners, but may, builders willing and the creek don't rise, relocate by Thursday or so. This will be temporary, as in the next couple of weeks both of us will have to up sticks and move completely to totally different offices in the opposite corner of the building. Since the necessary renovations haven't been done in the new offices, we'll move into offices a few down the corridor from the eventual location, and then move again when the new offices are ready. Colleague's move will be even more transient, as she's resigned and is moving to New Zealand at the end of the year. I am rather discombobulated by the change, and by the weirdness of being in someone else's working space.

Fortunately, as stated, my boss doesn't have a machine gun, and moreover looks nothing like Tilda Swinton, but I am nonetheless more than slightly inclined to see myself as hurtling indefinitely into the cold. Things would be materially improved by Chris Evans, even the grim and grimy version. I find Chris Evans curiously comforting.

The weather is officially absurd: Cape Town traditionally does February heatwaves, but usually not for so long, or so hot. It was pushing 40 for a couple of days, and I survived the weekend only by spending a portion of it submerged in jo&stv's pool, sipping champagne. I'm insomniac and headachy and stressed and tend to lie awake in my superheated bedroom panting gently and wishing for a nice comfortable death, preferably by hypothermia or freeze-ray. It's like the sultry heat before a highveld storm, only continuously, relentlessly, and without the catharsis of the actual rain. Am not happy. Am clearly on the wrong continent. I know the northern hemisphere is having a horrible winter, and I'm sorry if you're frozen or flooded or snowbound, but honestly, this is its own kind of unspeakable.

I shall proceed to avoid the horror by somewhat belatedly chronicling our last Movie Club, which was the weekend before last. Jo's choice: theme, Abused Sexualised Girls Strike Back And Kick Butt, although to variable effect. The films, in a classic whiplash configuration, and encompassing frankly improbable extremes in terms of thoughtfulness and political acumen: Sucker Punch, and Hard Candy.

Sucker Punch is a terrible film. I'm really glad to have seen it, because as a pure distillation of ingrained Hollywood sexism and exploitation it's an extremely powerful document, but it's an astonishingly bad piece of storytelling. I have to admit it has a certain amount of visual style and the germ, somewhere in the putrid depths, of a potentially interesting idea, but it's otherwise without redeeming feature. The most terrifying thing about it is, I think, the fact that watching it gave me the sneaking, inescapable fear that Zach Snyder, its perpetrator, is actually under the delusion that he was celebrating female empowerment. Which he really wasn't. The premise involves skimpily-clad girls incarcerated in a variety of institutions under highly sexualised threat, and escaping from it into layers of fantasy in which they fulfil video-game-style quests with the maximum possible amount of stylishly-shot action sequences, guns, swordfights, leering villainy and massive explosions. Given that the film skips between giant samurai statues, Nazi steampunk zombies, orcs, dragons, planes, zeppelins and Bioshock-style Big Daddies, the whole thing boils down to what Stv defined as "MashCeption: The Music Video". Or, possibly MashCeption, the Video Game. Something entailing lots of mash-ups and multi-levelled dream sequences and loads of visual style at the expense of plot, at any rate.

And in the final analysis it's about absolutely the opposite of female empowerment. It does no good whatsoever to take abused women and give them big guns and swords and allow them to kick butt if (a) all said women are vacant, childlike blanks whose abuse at the hands of lecherous monsters is dwelt on with slavering fascination, (b) they're all hyper-sexualised and skimpily if not fetishistically clad, (c) their every move in the "empowering" fantasy is dictated by benevolent, rescuing male figures, (d) the bulk of them end up dead, and (e) the whole thing is shot like a particularly hyperactive and clichéd wet dream. It's ultimately a deeply ugly film that spat me out the other end in a state of stunned disbelief. But also with a sort of horrible satisfaction, because after all the film simply takes to the logical extreme the kinds of objectifications and exploitations which are actually at the heart of a frighteningly high proportion of Hollywood blockbuster movies, in which women are ravaged, empty things splayed across the screen for the gratification of a gaze which is assumed to be entitled, unconstrained, heterosexual and male. Our cultural systems are pretty broken; this film should not be excoriated as an aberration but as a symptom of a system whose darker corners, thus mercilessly exposed, are nauseating.

Hard Candy is a very good film. We watched these in the right order, because after Sucker Punch it was a bracing blast of fresh air. Its take on the theme highlights Sucker Punch as the bizarro mirror world thing it is: Hard Candy is still about male sexual predator versus pubescent girl, but the power poles are ruthlessly dissected, examined and reassembled. I'm not going to talk about the film's plot detail, because its effect is very spoiler-vulnerable, but it's exquisitely cast, shot, paced and constructed. Compared to the gratuitous CGI sprawl of Sucker Punch it's a minimalist work of art, effectively two characters and one set. Ellen Page is revelatory (also, mad props to Ellen Page for her recent coming out as gay, both a brave and an important thing), and Patrick Wilson is as good as he always is, which is very. The cinematography is amazing: the house which forms the set is all clean lines and modern, blocky colours, and the camera lingers on these for moments of full-screen primary colour which punctuate and pace the action, underlining the film's overall mood of analytic contemplation. It's also a very tense viewing experience, full of build and shock and horrified expectation and, I have to say, a fair amount of vindictive satisfaction.

Watching it in tandem with Sucker Punch highlights the differences, particularly the extent to which Page's character is almost entirely unsexualised, with a matter-of-fact thoughtfulness about her which undercuts potentially flirty moments and allows her to swing between childlike innocence and tomboyish determination. But the juxtaposition also demands that the film be subjected to the same questions: is this about female power? does it escape the exploitative presentation of women seen in the blockbuster? And of course you have to be aware that the highly-charged power relationship the film depicts is fully capable of being sexualised even given Page's performance; of mining the young body under the lens for purposes of titillation rather than thought. It also, despite the film's plot twists, runs the risks of demonising the victim, presenting her as damaged and inhuman: the film's violence is both more restrained and more real than Sucker Punch's. But on the whole I think my vote is for success rather than failure on political grounds. It's an uncomfortable watch, but for the right reasons - because it shakes up your assumptions, explores and redefines rather than adopting, externalises the rot in our cultural constructs rather than either eliding or exploiting them. I'm not sure "enjoyed" is the right word, but this is a good film, and I respect and admire what it achieved. Although, my pervy fairy-tale fancying heart being what it is, they could have done a lot more with the Red Riding Hood motif. I'm just sayin'.

My subject line is from the Eurythmics, "Wide Eyed Girl", mostly because I automatically think of Annie Lennox when I think of women kicking butt. Also Buffy, River, Phryne Fisher and Captain Marvel, but song lyrics are traditional.

Movie club! Last weekend we watched Jo's choice, which was a pairing of Cloud Atlas with The Nines, the purported theme "films composed of separate, vaguely connected stories using the same actors as different characters and with weird science fictional elements". The food pairing: fancy artisanal sausage and mash, for no good reason other than it was good. (Usually it's something on rolls).

I'm glad movie club prodded me into seeing Cloud Atlas, I've been rather afraid of it. It's one of the averagely intimidating David Mitchell novels (i.e. very), and despite having read it a couple of times I cherish only the vaguest recollection of some of its detail. (The futuristic Asian setting and the 19th-century composer bit stick out, for some reason). The buzz on the 'net has also been somewhat varied: some people thought the film worked, others really didn't. I would have thought it fell into the general category of "cordially unfilmable", personally, but on the whole I was agreeably surprised. It kicked in as slightly over-long and slow to start, but the editing of the various strands of story together, and the highlighting of the thematic links between them, was brilliantly done. It was visually very powerful, and its images have stayed with me since I saw it. It was also very well cast, and while the weird re-racifying of characters jarred me a lot (white actors as Asian characters, black as white etc), I finally conceded that the blurring of racial boundaries was a sort of deliberate thematic effect which wasn't entirely lame. It's absolutely worth sitting through the first part of the credits for the quick picture gallery of the actors in their different roles - some of them are completely unrecognisable. It has a rather slow start, but on the whole it's an interesting and absorbing film, often cruel and tragic, but achieving a surprising level of fidelity to the mood, tone and focus of the novel. If something as disparate as Cloud Atlas can be said to have a focus. Discuss.

I'm not entirely positive about The Nines. This was an odd indie thing starring Ryan Reynolds and Melissa McCarthy, both of whom are extremely likeable actors; it featured three separate stories, all present-day LA, with RR and Melissa as different characters, and some really odd connections and resonances between the three scenarios. Overall, though, this felt like an interesting idea which the film-makers singularly failed to develop in any ultimately satisfying way. The first two thirds or so were creepy and interesting, the moments where the scenarios blurred together were genuinely strange and threatening, but the film's explanation of itself really didn't live up to the promise of the set-up. It felt both over-explained and unconvincing, somehow. But I enjoyed its self-consciousness about narrative, its focus on characters who were storytellers and worldbuilders, and whose lives and skills reflected the way in which the movie tried to deconstruct itself. I don't think it succeeded, but it was an interesting try.

Next up, possibly: random Shakespeare adaptations. Julie Taymor's version of The Tempest, and Ian McKellan's weird fascist Richard III. Or, if that seems too indigestible, one of the above plus something unlikely and only tangentially related. Taking suggestions.

Today I appear to be listening only to music from bands in the letter C. Reading from the top in the pile of random CDs which recently arrived from Loot and still need to be ripped to my work machine, these are The Cure, King Crimson and The Carpenters. I accept no responsibilities for muscle trauma resulting from your conceptual whiplash, thank you very much.

Talking about concatenations by odd thematic link, we had Movie Club on Friday night, with a theme of vampire movies which was - gasp - not actually chosen by me! Stv was, in fact, guilty of the choice, probably more accurately described as "really odd and thoughtful semi-art-house vampire movies", with a side order of "human emotional realism and pathos arising from unnaturally prolongued life". When I say that The Hunger wasn't in the mix but darned well should have been, you will (if an educated vampire-fancier) immediately realise that the movies we watched must have been Guillermo del Toro's Cronos, and the Norwegian Swedish Let The Right One In. Neither of which I'd seen, incidentally (although I have a copy of the original Let The Right One In novel, which I haven't got around to reading yet, does it count?), so I consider my vampire-fondling street cred to have been materially raised by the evening's watching.

Cronos made me realise exactly why Guillermo del Toro was keen on a Mountains of Madness adaptation, and why he'd be perfect for it. While being considerably beyond my ick-barriers in terms of the usual delToroid gaping wounds and peeling flesh, Cronos made me incredibly happy because it's completely and perfectly Lovecraftian. It has the fascination with the past, with ancient tomes filled with occulted, terrible, secret knowledge; the greed and blind obsession of men desperate for particular kinds of power at any cost; the occluded mystery and inexplicable significance of supernatural manifestations; and the inevitable self-destruction which results from grasping at the forbidden. No-one does "hideous things man was not meant to know" better than Lovecraft, and del Toro gets that, perfectly. He's materially assisted by the cinematography, which is atmospheric and often oddly beautiful - the framing of the last scene in particular was heartbreaking. (Guillermo Navarro, the cinematographer, also shot Pan's Labyrinth and both Hellboy films, and, oddly enough, From Dusk Till Dawn).

Cronos was particularly fascinating, though, because del Toro also has a far more real and meaningful grasp on actual human emotion than Lovecraft ever did (other than fear, of course); the grandfather/grand-daughter relationship at the heart of the film is warm and vital and often endearingly sweet, which makes the bloody horror of the film's denouement all the more telling. Mad props to the child actor playing Aurora, who speaks precisely one word in the entire movie, but manages to convey volumes through her silence. (Also, Ron Perlman is always watchable, if hammy beyond ham. Seeing his cheerfully dim lout stumble through the film somehow made me want to see him play Bulldog Drummond). As a vampire movie it's also interesting in its ability to render explicit the costs of immortality, and the abject, bodily grossness of an addiction to blood-drinking.

I don't think Cronos is a great film in absolute terms, but I think it offers an almost perfect rendition of its chosen tropes. Let The Right One In, on the other hand, is a great film. It's exquisitely shot and beautifully paced, and the story-telling has a minimalist restraint which is peculiarly satisfying and deeply evocative. Once again the film is carried as much by its child actors, who are wonderful, as by the stark chill of its snowscapes which so powerfully underpin its exploration of childhood themes - innocence, trust, dependence and, ultimately, power.

I loved Let the Right One for its exploration of the vampire myth. For such a deliberate and thoughtful film, it's actually using an extremely conventional version of the vampire - supernatural strength and speed, sensitivity to light, inability to enter without an invitation. All that's missing is the fangs. Nonetheless Eli is anything but a stereotype, a fascinating construction skating with exquisite poise on the liminal edges of child/adult, predator/vulnerable, monstrous/pathetic. One responds to her with a curious mix of terror and empathy, as does Oscar himself. In fact, empathy is a powerful device in the film; you cannot help but sympathise with the dogged, desperate incompetence of Eli's protector, with the narrow but likeable world of her victims, even with the abusive home life of Oscar's main tormentor. Ultimately, though, the film suggests that Eli is not the monster; her violence and her disturbingly drifting identity (this film does incredible things with gender) are simply an externalisation of the strange undercurrents of alienation and violence and eroticism which underlie Oscar's everyday world.

The vampire in the twentieth century has become internalised, psychologised; rather than othering the monster with proper terror, we seem to be driven to understand it. Both these films represent a highly-developed form of that impulse. They deny the easy erotic appeal which motivates many more popular versions, in their empathetic address to the unnaturalness, the loneliness, the physical distastefulness of being a vampire. If the monster is not in the vampire, disturbingly, it must be in us.

Movie club again last night! stv's choice, which was ostensibly "Road Movies" but in fact turned out to be "non-Hollywood politically sub-texted road movies set in rural areas of third-world countries and focusing on revelations of sexual infidelity". This is, of course, because there are no new ideas any more, but mostly because humans are pattern-recognising creatures and will make links between any two anythings juxtaposed. It worked very well last night. We watched Y tu mamá también and White Wedding, both of which were thoroughly enjoyable. Food check: abandoned the rare beef fillet in favour of giant cooked gammon on post-Christmas special, plus various Things To Put On Bread (snoek pâté, roasted red pepper hummus, camembert). Yum. Also, cold, which was necessary as Cape Town continues to continue hot.

I didn't see Y tu mamá también when it first came out, possibly because of the hype, but mostly, I suspect, because it looks like a Serious and Emotionally Difficult Film, and I avoid those like the plague most of the time. I am incredibly glad to have seen it - it's an amazing piece of cinema, which manages to be funny and filthy and affectionately real about teenaged boys while also delivering large quantities of pathos and insight, as well as ongoing political commentary which is all the more punchy for being hands-off and in the background. As represented, Mexico is scary, both in its poverty and its privilege, and horribly familiar. (As, in fact, are the teenaged boys - it's a bit odd, to watch this kind of film with my kind of job, where I am in daily contact with teenaged boys. I find it all too terribly believable that this lost, stoned, hyper-sexual ineptitude might go on in the bits of their lives I don't see). Mostly, though, I loved the way this film was made. It's real and gritty, the (good lord, wildly frequent) sex scenes are disturbingly un-soft-focus, but the whole thing is framed with a beautiful restraint and minimalism which delineates with a kind of detatched and rueful affection but doesn't insist on interpretation. Wonderful film.

I really didn't expect to enjoy White Wedding, which is a 2009 South African film about a hapless groom's attempts to get to his wedding in Cape Town, via the Eastern Cape. In fact, it's a blast to watch - a good-humoured, well-made, fast-moving romantic comedy which manages, in passing, to nod to, pillory and affectionately deconstruct a whole host of South African political subtexts. I'm amazed by how well they get away with some fairly howling stereotypes; black wedding couple negotiating the generational gaps between Westernised and traditional township weddings; black player best friend; white English tourist; rural black grannies and township mothers; and the delirious scene with the drunk black hero singing "Delarey" in an Afrikaner pub. It's full of happy little throwaway moments, characters and jokes which makes it busy and vibrant without actually detracting from the coherence of the overall plot. This movie honestly shouldn't be as much fun to watch as it was. Also, Cape Town scenes cause all onlookers to cheer and punch the air in civic loyalty.

Latest movie club last night, Jo's theme, that being "unsuccessful superheroes" (and, I have to say, supper consisting of superlatively good rolls with rare fillet steak and salad, on the Whole Earth Market principle, and tiramisu, because I felt like making it). We watched Mystery Men and Kick-Ass, which was an extremely interesting experience despite the fact that neither are great movies. Both are highly uneven in tone and effect; both have glorious moments of humour, commentary or heart, and inglorious moments of slapstick, camp, gross-out, or predictable, glossy Hollywood stupidity. They make me realise how much of a steel-boned electric eel the superhero mythos is; how it twists and turns in the film-maker's grasp, and frequently turns to sink its six-inch teeth into the unsuspecting camera's eye.

Mystery Men is actually bearable for a Ben Stiller movie, which from me is something akin to high praise. It has dated rather; I suspect some of its inversions and assaults on heroism would have been fresh at the time, when they seem old hat now. (I can certainly see its influence on Doctor Horrible). It is blessed with a mostly highly accomplished cast who seem to be enjoying themselves to an almost indecent extent, and production values which appear to have consisted of giving the art director a very large budget and a very large supply of very good drugs, and then locking them in a room full of B-movies. I loved the look of it, although it also made me realise that Western civilisation needs to feel very, very embarrassed about disco. And if nothing else, it won my heart by the delirious rightness of a supervillain called Casanova Frankenstein. (Geoffrey Rush, as usual leaving no scenery unchewed).

Kick-Ass is something else entirely; I can now see why there was so much of a furore over it when it came out, although, true to hypocritical type, Western civilisation needs to feel very, very embarrassed about the fact that it got its knickers in a twist about an 11-year-old girl saying "Fuck" a lot when it should really have been chilled to the marrow by the 11-year-old girl merrily and bloodily dismembering people with a dirty great sword. I'm a bit saddened by the way in which this film missed being a very bleak, black, vicious commentary on the nature of violence and moral polarity (what Tarantino could be if he wasn't a dick), copping out instead to a feelgood Hollywood ending which removed most of the teeth from the issues. I am, however, pleased to see that Nic Cage managed to sneak away from Nic Cage's Hair for the duration of the film, and deliver a performance bizarrely able to exist in the same sentence as words such as "nuance" and "restraint". Chloe Moretz was brilliant. Chloe Moretz is always brilliant. We are watching Miss Moretz's career with considerable interest.

To tell stories of superheroes is to grapple with the nature of agency, of individual responsibility, of violence, and no more so than when you attempt to do it ironically. Ironic superheroes lose the glossy, effortless ease of the heroic intervention, and thus deconstruct their own assumptions; they blow apart comic-book innocence to deal, inescapably, with the fact that at base all superheroes are crazed vigilante serial killers. Superhero conflicts dramatise the fact of our own human nature, which is unpleasant. The classic superhero defeats human evil, but it's not so simple when the gaze is ironic. Mystery Men turns that moral spotlight inward to the superheroes, Kick Ass turns it outward to the world, but under both spotlights we have to confront that people are either weaklings or bastards, the world is fucked and needs fixing. The black/white simplicity of the superhero dissolves under the postmodern gaze, and quite right too.

Mystery Men's play with violence is mostly to undercut it playfully (I rather fell for the concept of a "non-lethal tank"), but occasionally to redirect it senselessly - the fate of Captain Amazing was horrible and perfect (and Greg Kinnear is great. Why haven't I run across him before?). Kick-Ass is more interesting: the way in which wrong and right, good and evil, shifted between the characters and the hero/villain axes, was endlessly fascinating. Big Daddy is mild-mannered and says "Darn it!" where his daughter is cheerfully psychotic and says "Fuck", but he's the one who's perverted a child into a killer. The bad guys are murderously amoral druglords except when they're transfixed in front of the Youtube version of superhero violence, in which case they're ordinary guys uncomprehending before the bloodily psychotic. The usual ramifications of identity and masking in the superhero tropes here multiply endlessly out into the world at large: it's no accident that the dweebish central character is playing the Gay Best Friend ploy, it neatly shadows the inherent conflict at the heart of the idea that the immoral becomes moral when you're hiding behind a costume, or a mask, or a label.

Neither film, ultimately, worked particularly well. Mystery Men should have come with a warning label "CONTAINS EXCESSIVE CAMP" on the box; its self-consciously ridiculous extremes too often overcome its heart and humanity. Kick-Ass has the potential to be a genuinely dark and disturbing meditation on violence, our desensitisation to it, and our willingness to accept it under the guise of mythology; it cops out, however, losing conviction and courage to deliver, instead of the warped moral lesson of an eleven-year-old serial killer, a feel-good Hollywood ending. It's a sadly lost opportunity, although I have to admit that any version of the film which remained true to its potential would have been almost unwatchably dark and twisted.

I personally prefer my superheroes unironic; I'd rather be charmed by illusions of agency than horrified by the realities of violence. But these were interesting films, and however flawed, have at least achieved something in that they've made me momentarily ashamed of my investment in the myth.

Today's subject line courtesy of Worthless Word for the Day. "Sparble" is a verb meaning "to scatter or disperse", but mostly I just like the way it sounds. The sixteenth century has a good line in words.

We did Movie Club again on Friday night, finally, after several months of arbing around being disorganised. It was my choice, with a theme I delineated as "Weird-Arse French Animation", but in fact it might just as well have been "French drawings of boobies!" We watched Les Triplettes de Belleville, which I'd seen before and which is awesome, and Gandahar, which is obscure and trippy but also fairly awesome.

Les Triplettes de Belleville is your perfectly standard retro-animated quest narrative involving Tour de France cyclists kidnapped by the Mafia for an underground betting ring which is subsequently broken up by mad, musical, apparently indestructible old ladies. It's surreal, beautifully understated apart from the grotesque exaggeration of the animation (giant French noses ftw!), almost entirely without dialogue, and completely demented. Stv and I were braced for it, having seen it before, but I think it may have broken Jo's brain a bit. (The dog being used as a tyre seemed to get to her). Also, I find the frog-eating a bit difficult. The boobies come in in the initial "Belleville Rendezvous" 1920s music-hall song, performed by the titular triplets with a Josephine-Baker-style dancer. It's insanely catchy and has been revolving around my head, and in my dreams, since Friday. It's a lovely movie, for a given value of "lovely".

Gandahar was more of a gamble: late-80s French/Korean animated sf directed by René Laloux, who is also responsible for Fantastic Planet, which I haven't got around to watching yet. Gandahar has a dreamy, pen-and-wash style to its backgrounds and a sort of stripped-down simplicity to the characters; it features noble, beautiful Gandaharians, strangely twisted and deformed mutants, armies of metallic men with red glows in their chests, giant insane brains, time travel, incredible quantities of topless women, and an underlying peaceful-existence eco-theme that I darkly suspect James Cameron may have ripped off for Avatar. It's the kind of film that vaguely makes me wish I actually did psychedelics, I suspect they'd help; the plot is fairly tightly-knit and coherent, but a lot of the images are extremely weird.



I enjoyed the film, in a dreamy, detached sort of fashion, and I loved the art. I'm also fascinated that I've managed to hang around on sf blogs and sites and in sf criticism for about ten years and have never actually heard of this film apart from the random mention in passing which prompted me to order it. Clearly French sf flies below the radar. Possibly because of all the boobies.

So, jo&stv and I invented a new monthly movie club, the purpose of which is to get together to watch two movies selected by theme. Any theme. Preferably not too serious or meaningful, and I have to add for the record my absolute miff that my fellow members rejected two to one my initial suggestion of choosing films with the theme of RDJ. Next time they're getting Fred Astaire. Last night's inaugural meeting, hosted by me and joined by the Evil Landlord with guest status, somehow caused me to spontaneously produce a sort of walls-of-Harfleur motivational pre-watching speech which went something like this:

"OK, people, listen up, let's lay out some parameters here. Our mission tonight is to subject to rigorous scrutiny and analysis the absolutely shitballs-retarded things that Hollywood does while purporting to represent the internet, programming and hackers in its popular films. To this end we are watching Hackers and Swordfish, in that order, which is chronological. I draw your attention to the fact that actual computer professionals have frequently been, and will continue to be, harmed in the watching of these films: I trust you have all signed Form WTFBBQ in triplicate, indemnifying the assembled company from any damage up to and including drooling, choking and homicidal rage. Particularly the Evil Landlord, who is also not allowed to make derogatory comments about any web developers present.

"I am completely unable to remember any notable plot points in these films, other than the aforementioned shitballs-retarded representation of computers, but in the important category of Psycho-Sexual Narrative, eye-candy division, we have Hugh Jackman and that cute blonde boy, wossname, Jonny Lee Miller. Also Angelina Jolie and Hale Berry, if you swing that way, and for Angelina I might. I would suggest a drinking game in which we drink any time anyone uses technojargon incorrectly or we are shown graphic 3-D representations of the Information Highway or a hacking montage including same plus mucho typing of gibberish, but alcohol poisoning often offends so I'll leave it to your discretion. Got that? Right. Onward." ( Don't say I didn't warn you. )

Tuesday random linkery is random. Dr. Horrible's Emmy hack should be watched by all right-thinking peoples, it's very funny. Conversely, Neil Gaiman's Blueberry Girl is wise and beautiful and moving, and is also the only thing in the whole wide world that has ever made me cry because I don't have a daughter.