Falling Sky

Seen 'Up'? See This!

Here's a pleasant treat this fine evening from the lovely folks at Pixar, though it'll only make an ounce of sense to you if you've seen the magnificent Up (and if you haven't... why are you even reading this? Go! See! Then come back and continue reading). It's an animated short in the spirit of the brilliant Wall-E companion short Burn-E, though animated much like an animatic, no lipsync but plenty of motion and colour, focusing on apparently incidental characters from the main film and sticking with them. Remember the two care home workers who come to take Carl away? Well, here's what happened to them afterwards. Best use of cats ever.

15 Films in 15 Minutes

Having been tagged with this here thingamy on Facebook I was just about to respond in kind, then figured I could do it here instead, thereby adding valuable content!  AVAST.

Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen movies you've seen that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag some friends (To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page and paste the rules in) and you will hopefully be interested in the results of what you get. Here are my 15 in no particular order.

No particular order?  We'll have no anarchy here!  Here they are, in proper alphabetical order with clips (where available) to demonstrate their shattering awesomeness.

Children of Men - rather depressingly, the closest depiction I've seen to how I picture the next 50 years or so.  I'm so much fun at parties!

Dumbo - the best thing to come out of the Disney studios, and one of the finest films ever. I almost posted the Baby Mine scene but it's so upsetting just thinking about it got my lips trembling, so let's freak out with a staggering outpouring of surreal imagination animated by masters.

Edward Scissorhands - a very imperfect film, but incredibly beautiful and means an awful lot to me, a reassuring hug for every emotionally-useless artistic adolescent.

Evil Dead 2 - Bruce, Bruce, Bruce.  And a chainsaw.  Best slapstick ever.

Fight Club - captured that end-of-the-20th-century feeling perfectly, technically astonishing and constantly a surprise.  And so gleeful!

Lawrence of Arabia - the finest land-based epic, catching the director's cut at the GFT a few years back was absolutely exhilarating.

Lord of the Rings - look, it's just one very long film split into three, so it counts as one. Yes it does.

My Neighbour Totoro - said it all already.  Childhood as it should be.

Swing Time - not just the best Fred/Ginger film, quite possibly the best song & dance film ever.  The story scenes aren't much cop, but when the music starts and the feet start to move it's pure perfection, as jaw-dropping as the finest old-school kung-fu.

Singin' In The Rain - it looks amazing, it sounds amazing, the script is deceptively witty - pure gold.  GOTTA DAAAAANCE!

The Empire Strikes Back - for my inner 8 year old and my outer 32 year old who still jiggles with excited glee during Hoth.

The Iron Giant - the finest male weepie ever, an animated film that completely caught me off guard with its sheer brilliance, ingenuity and power.  If you get a lump in your throat at the single utterance "Superman", you understand.

There Will Be Blood - I awarded it SIX TEACAKES.  Out of FIVE.

2001: A Space Odyssey - so much of what I love about cinema is here.

Wall-E - Possibly my favourite film of all time, but it's too soon to be sure.  Animated perfection.

Agree?  Disagree?  Speak up!

TWOF: 10 Aug - 16 Aug

First up, for no other reason except that it gives me great joy, the History Eraser Button sequence from the 'Space Madness' episode of ye olde Ren & Stimpy.  Good times, good times.

Right.  Urlesque ran this cracking picture from National Geographic, days before the papers got their mitts on it.  Chances are you've already seen it, but just in case:

Melissa Brandts and her husband stopped to take a photo using their camera's self-timer while vacationing in Canada. Intrigued by the sounds of the camera, a curious ground squirrel came over to check things out and popped into the frame right at the perfect moment...

A fine example of photobombing, a collection of the cuter/less scatological kind was later put together by said Urlesque - Cute Overload picked up on the best:

And as for Facebook, RWD (no, not oor Bob) had this cautionary tale.  Meanwhile, Bob-approved, along came an absolutely stunning trailer for Terry Gilliam's new film, seemingly bursting with imagination and eye-popping sights.  And Tom Waits as the Devil (or God when he's drunk?).  Must be watched in HD!

And just to freakify things further, there was this footage from BBC News of tadpoles feeding off their mum, all a-squiggling and brain-squirmy.  Sometimes nature looks awfully unnatural.

There's another fabbo trailer here for Legion, starring the ever-splendid Paul Bettany as a machine-gun-wielding angel who's sliced his wings off.  All sorts of nastiness ensues - could be ace, could be sub-Underworld/Blade/Constantine mince.  Worth keeping peepers on.

Also on films, Roger Ebert's posted his review of Miyazaki's Ponyo.  As if I wasn't desperate enough to see it, he writes this:

There is a word to describe “Ponyo,” and that word is magical. This poetic, visually breathtaking work by the greatest of all animators has such deep charm that adults and children will both be touched. It’s wonderful and never even seems to try: It unfolds fantastically. [...] This 68-year-old Japanese master continues to create animation drawn by hand, just as “Snow White” and “Pinocchio” were. There is a fluid, organic quality to his work that exposes the facile efficiency of CGI. And, my God! — his imagination! The film opens with a spellbinding, wordless sequence beneath the sea, showing floating jellyfish and scampering bottom-dwellers. The pastels of this scene make “Ponyo” one of the very rare movies where I want to sit in the front row, to drown in it. This is more than “artistry.” It is art.

And it's not out in the UK until feckin' February!  Aaaaarrrrghhhh!

A friend on Facebook posted this video, two promo's produced for Halo 3 back in October 2007.  Why the relevance?  Well, the director went on to make District 9, released in the US this weekend and twatted GI Joe off the top of the charts.  If it's anything like this in quality, it should be a huge treat.

After all that noise, relax with this interesting piece on the accidental art of Google Street View.  Strangely fascinating - and so is the music of the Cardiacs which has somehow managed to completely pass me by for the last 32 years until last week when Marc Riley played Dirty Boy near the end of a show and blew my little mind, jaw-dropped for the first time in yonks.  I've since been trying to hear as much of their stuff as possible, not particularly easy when they're not on iTunes, Emusic or any other legit MP3 store and almost all albums apparently out of print.  Still, I have my ways, and what I've heard so far is ace - the influence on Blur is obvious, but Cardiacs are far more interesting, restless, wonky, thrilling to my old ears... bless you, Lard, bless you.  Here's a Cardiacs track from 1988, which certainly looks the age and has that 80's 4AD sound, particularly a lovely slab of guitar heaven towards the end.

To wrap up the week, Sully's stand-ins posted this wonderfully odd CG animation, deliciously French, melding Pixar quality with Magritte surreality.  Enjoy!

Muzorama from Muzorama Team on Vimeo.

Out Of The Loop

While the next film review simmers and boils in my skull, here's an addition to yesterday's review of In The Loop - a 2 min deleted scene that's been plonked up on Empire.  Presumably set around 3/4s of the way through the film (though there's no spoilers to worry about) it's as verbally profane as you'd expect from a scene where Jamie is unleashed on a ministerial department.  Though the film doesn't suffer for its absence, it does feature some fascinating tension as Jamie comes up against someone who doesn't just cower down.

****!

In The Loop

After a poorly week of extreme sniffling, sending shares of Olbas Oil soaring, I'm pretty much back to normal. I'd planned on catching Let The Right One In on Monday, rather than a cold, so I'll be watching that today - first up, The Lass and I treated ourselves yesterday evening to dinner at the consistently excellent First Coast (the pan-fried coley was a cracker, fresh and succulent) before swanning over to the Cameo for the 18:30 of Armando Iannucci's debut film, In The Loop.

There's been plenty of advance word for this film over the last couple of weeks, especially with the astonishing clusterfuck at No.10 over Easter, a situation that so mirrored the climax to E6 of The Thick Of It that I kept waiting for the revelation that it was all an immense viral campaign rather than genuine, all the worse for being so damn stupid. Sadly not - but at least it served to demonstrate what politics makes of people, something at the core of In The Loop. Despite all the hype, the waiter at the restaurant hadn't heard of it, so just in case it's passed you by as well (and it'll all be new to all you lovely colonial readers, so dig in) here's the rumpus. In The Loop is a spin-off, progression, upgrade of the aforementioned BBC series The Thick Of It, a Yes Minister for the 21st century rated 18 solely for language. It focuses on the roles of ministerial advisors, spin-doctors, assistants, civil servants and how politics is not the work of some great conspiracy but rather the result of individuals stumbling along, each trying to keep their own head above the waters of chaos, events and the public, even (or especially) if that means pulling their colleagues under in the process. It all rings horribly true to anyone who's followed British politics over the last decade, and working in the civil service has done nothing to dispel such a notion. Nor do I believe it to be party-specific - what The Thick Of It and In The Loop do is show just what the political system requires of people, the duplicity required when buffeted by the media, ever-changing public opinion, out-of-control events. A world where things only get done through coercion, blackmail and threats.

In The Loop widens the scope from Whitehall to Washington and the bizarrely vague path to war, though the driving force behind it, as with the TV series, remains Malcolm Tucker, policy co-ordinator.  Not so much a human as a force of nature distilled into pure furious venom and shot out of a big fucking rocket, Tucker is played with eye-popping force by Peter Capaldi - here's a taste from TTOI. Any fears that the veritable onslaught of Tucker-spawned swearing - a word that really fails to convey the level of extreme hardcore verbal violence unleashed upon various poor sods - would be watered down in ITL for an international cinema audience are dispelled in the first few minutes when Tucker gets wind of a ministerial radio interview that clumsily veers off-message. And that's just the beginning. As The Wire showed so well, swearing when done right is both big and clever, deployed with invention, creating insults that surprise and delight in their surrealism, the flipside being the mouth-breathing dipshits that stagger around town whose every other word is fuck, as though communication only works when constantly interspersed with swearing. Gordon Ramsay no doubt imagines his cursing to be in the Tucker camp, but he's more like the latter, the same tedious words used over and over without a hint of wit, imagination or emotion, a boring bully (still, turns out The F Word actually stands for freezing, so nuts to him).

There's more to ITL than just naughty words though. The depiction of the random, slip-shod way that war is toppled into in an environment devoid of principle, foresight or direction looks horribly believable when you dig into the political machinations in the build-up to the Iraq invasion. Again, like The Wire it shows that those in power are no less fallible than us poor shlubs, yet the decisions they make, no matter how ill-informed or hasty, can go on to have shattering consequences, and the only people who can survive in the corridors of power are those who can ignore those consequences, blank out the responsibility, focused on their own continuing survival. How else could you sleep?

Watching ITL you'll laugh, no question - I honestly can't remember the last time I laughed that hard, that consistently at the cinema - but afterwards anger follows, a frustration that there could be even the slightest echo of truth in what was shown, that something as devastating as a war could really be borne out of such a self-centred, short-sighted system spinning out of control. All those funny naughty words are the sugar around this pill of anger, frustration and outrage. How the hell did things turn out like this, and how the hell can it be changed? Chums, I haven't got a clue.

That sense of helplessness might put some people off, but please don't let it. ITL doesn't lecture you, it merely shows how things almost certainly are - it lets you decide whether you're fine with that. Some are, some aren't. And, crucially, more than anything, it's very fucking funny and an absolute pleasure to watch in the cinema surrounded by laughter. Utterly relevant, In The Loop is the anti-Boat That Rocked, a demonstration that British film comedy doesn't have to be light, fluffy, thick as shit. Show that there's an audience for something this sharp and vote with your cinema ticket.

Lost At Sea

"Duffy? Fucking Duffy?!"

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Earlier this week the Lass & I went to a preview screening of The Boat That Rocked, a film ostensibly about the UK pirate radio of the Sixties, complete with a solid cast and Richard Curtis writing & directing. I've always had a soft spot for Curtis, partly for the brilliant Blackadder, mainly for the wonderful adaptation of the Odyssey that he did with Tony Robinson for BBC Children (I've still got the two books they did and they remain a thrilling hoot to read). I wasn't expecting a classic film, but some easy-going fun with good laughs and a decent soundtrack seemed certain. Well, I was right about the music...

The Boat That Rocked starts off by setting the scene and immediately misfires. We're introduced to a fictional pirate radio station, Radio Rock, clearly based on Radio Caroline and the personalities on board. But there's no real effort to show how pirate radio came into being, where the DJs came from (which could've added some much-needed depth to the flat characters), how word about the station spread across the UK in those pre-net days, nothing like that. Nope, it's simply:

• Pirate radio plays rock & pop music!
• All women want to sleep with the DJs, except lesbians (and even they don't mind a grope)!
• The entire nation listens to this one station and keeps dancing, dancing, dancing, every hour of every day!
• Everyone, that is, except for the Government, with their suits and classical music, who just want to stop everyone having fun, because apparently fun is dangerous and anti-establishment! Booooooo!

And that's pretty much it. It's so insultingly simplistic, I kept waiting for things to take a turn, an "ah-ha!" to give it all some depth, relevance, a reflection of reality. Never happens - as social history goes, Austin Powers was more realistic and nuanced than this nonsense, while the depiction of women is on a par with the Sun and Loaded - they're there to worship the men, get their tits out and dance giddily, nothing more, and the film is perfectly happy with that.  Fucks sake, the Carry On films were progressive compared to this.  No wonder the only good quotes on the posters came from red-top tabloids.

So, it's not trying to show how things really were, more some clichéd, idealised rose-and-dope-tinted version of the Sixties. Is that so bad? Well, it is if the start and end of the film purport to place the story in the context of our social history, especially when the real story of Radio Caroline is far more interesting & relevant than what's shown here.

But no, instead you get some remarkably flat characters which really don't deserve the actors they get - Philip Seymour Hoffman is excellent, doing the best he can with a shitty script, and Bill Nighy is clearly having a ball. Indeed, it looks like the sort of film where people had a great time making it, only that doesn't carry through to the finished product. What little comedy there is barely survives the first hour, after which even a genuine humoured smile is hard to come by. There's dialogue in this film that you'd take to be a weak parody of Curtis' earlier work, if it hadn't been written by the man himself. See the dreadful Hugh-Grantesque gosh-I'm-so-terribly-awkward-but-you're-awfully-lovely speech that the frankly useless central character gives, or the bogglingly dumb move of giving not one but two of the establishment figures a 'naughty' name (Twatt and Clitt, for what it's worth. Seriously.) that barely raises a smile the first time and just grates after the second. The storytelling is feeble, the first half basically consisting of a bunch of scenes that never seem to connect to each other, while the second half is sodding woeful. I could've just about forgiven the flaws of the first hour, but the second is truly awful (and way too long to boot - this film is over two hours long and feels it) as the boat springs a leak and it turns into fucking Titanic of all things. And where earlier Curtis-scripted films would bring things together nicely, if cheesily, at the end, TBTR fails utterly. It tries to generate a drama, a heartlift that it hasn't lifted a finger to earn, instead generating nothing but rolling eyes and utter exasperation, tempered only with relief that finally, thankfully it's all over.

Honestly, there's hardly anything good to be said about the whole 2 hours 10 minutes. The soundtrack is certainly good, but with zero surprises you could hear the contents on Radio 2 or any mainstream classic gold station. Hell, chances are you've got most of the songs already, so save your time, save your money, stay at home and put some of those classic songs on yourself. You'll get so much more out of them pure than filtered and bellowed over by the film. And for a real taste of the difference pop music made to so many lives, read something like The Peel Sessions. Evocative, thrilling, it goes some way to capturing the sense of history, excitement and change that this music represented, something TBTR purports to do, yet fails in the weakest, dullest, squarest way.

And the above outburst? At the very end, following a knuckle-gnawingly embarrassing chorus of the cast yelling "rock and roll!!!" (you'll pray for punks, mods & rockers to turn up on gunboats and blow everyone out of the water) there's some godawful text attempting to place the film in the context of modern musical history, basically saying "thanks to all that, there's hundreds of radio stations today playing rock & pop" (with sod all mention of how the real pirate DJs led the charge on Radio 1, presumably as that'd sound too establishmenty) followed by a montage of album covers which are supposed to symbolise the very best of the last 40+ years of music but basically looks like an old iPod commercial showing off Curtis' CD collection. The very fact that the bland warblings of Duffy are one such highlight should tell you everything about the mentality of this film that makes rock'n'roll look as flacid, inoffensive and irrelevant as the establishment it seeks to mock. Rarely has there been a film so thoroughly slappable. This ain't rock'n'roll... this is shit.

Wild Things, You Make My Heart Sings

Between Brighton, birthday and a book with my name in it, there's a very proper post coming verrry soon.  Until then, here's a trailer for the film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's glorious Where The Wild Things Are.  You can watch it streamed below, or in full Quicktime loveliness here.  Promising, very promising.

Initially spotted at WWTDD, of all places.

UPDATE (10:15) - Talking of films, for anyone wanting free preview tickets to the even-more-eagerly-awaited Coraline, LOOKEE YONDER.

Get Up!

Get on Up!

Spotted, appropriately enough, at Enrico 'Pixar story artist' Casarosa's blog.

A Matter Of Life And Death Metal

(Well, thrash hair metal really, but that wouldn't have fit the title half as well.)

ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL

One of the most surprisingly enjoyable & affecting films for some time, I went along to this expecting some kind of quasi-Spinal Tap/Still Crazy rockumentary about power chords, huge hair and bigger egos, a film of unintentional comedy and not much else. It turned out to be something else entirely, a film that should appeal to anyone regardless of their appreciation or otherwise for The Metal. After all, how else could a documentary about a Canadian rock group pretty much unknown to the UK be getting a nationwide cinema release?

A little background, for anyone who's not already heard it all, from John Cooper of the Sundance Film Festival: At 14, Toronto school friends Steve "Lips" Kudlow and Robb Reiner made a pact to rock together forever. Their band, Anvil, went on to become the "demigods of Canadian metal," releasing one of the heaviest albums in metal history, 1982's Metal on Metal. The album influenced a musical generation, including Metallica, Slayer, and Anthrax, that went on to sell millions of records. But Anvil's career took a different path - straight to obscurity.

Initially, it feels like it really is going to be Tap made real, with early 80's video footage of playing to huge crowds in Japan, appearing on outraged talk shows, playing the guitar with a dildo, a suitably RAWK band logo - only to fast forward a quarter of a century. Audiences once numbered in tens of thousands are now in their tens (if that), the two core band members have to do dull day jobs just to pay the bills and it initially looks like they have a deluded attachment to the music of their youth that they never grew out of. But it becomes apparent that these aren't epic egos living in a fantasy land, forever looking back at former glories - it's purer than that, a genuine belief and love for the music and their skills (and they do have them - there's some stunning guitar fret work to be seen, even when playing squalid clubs), not to mention the wonderful relationship between the two core members of the group, Steve "Lips" Kudlow and Robb Reiner (Yeah, that's what I thought - no relation).

That's the point of the film, not the music itself (though I quite enjoyed that, and Metal On Metal really deserves to be recognised as a lost classic of the genre) but the lives behind it. Which all sounds rather po-faced, when it definitely isn't. There's an awful lot of humour in the film, yet it's rarely at the band's expense - more at the bogglingly bizarre cards that life deals them - and there's plenty of heart to go with it. It's such a pleasure just to watch Kudlow and Reiner on screen together, so very different and yet energised by each other, Reiner's stoic introspection against Lips' wide-eyed mania (a handy glimpse into my future, though I really need to work on my gurning). As the film progresses you realise that, far from mocking them, you're rooting for them, you want reality to somehow bend to their will, to give them the success and audience they deserve... somehow.

The glorious thing is that the film itself has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, resulting in the kind of attention and media interest that just doesn't come to metal bands. And that's because it's not about the music but the people who make it, the incredible enthusiasm for what they do against ludicrous odds, carrying on when all common sense would tell you to give up. They make the perfect underdogs and anyone who's ever struggled with the desire to create with the need to earn will find plenty to relate to. What at times feels like a requiem for better days long gone ends up as a heartfelt celebration for keeping the faith, for never giving in.  Where they'll go from here, goodness knows - Guitar Hero? Glasto? - but having spent 90 minutes in their company it's a joy to see them finally getting the recognition they've hungered for.  It's a hell of a ride - moving, hilarious, inspiring, hugely uplifting.  For those who continue to rock, we salute you.

Office Workers Of The World Untie

Not that I wear a tie to work, granted. Still, these are for all of us who spend our days staring at a glowing screen, tapping at keyboards, the mouse grafted to our hand... and then come home and do it all over again for fun.

SONG: Electronic Plantation by the No WTO Combo. (Feed readers, come on over to play it)

VIDEO: Clip from Mike Judge's spot-on Office Space, a DVD of which should be included in every admin job induction.