dotmund

E is for elephant

2012-02-02T08:00:00.000Z

Get your trunky crackers round this one. E is for elephant. And, indeed, for excrement.

If you would like a downloadable A4-sized elephant (that's almost lifesize, let's face it), you may find one HERE.

Dangerous times in east London's Benelux magazine collecting community

2012-02-01T10:07:00.001Z

Did you know that the first ever edition of Private Eye magazine is worth £1 million? It is also small, the size of a Mr. Men book. However, when money like that is involved, you know that magazine collecting Dutch gangsters won't be far behind.

My source of information was a former Belgian track athlete, whose family had emigrated from the Belgian Congo in the 1950s. He was in Whitechapel in hot pursuit of the magazine, which he was planning to acquire from the less financially-aware and then sell at auction. However, he was not that familiar with the mean streets of London's east end. This is where I come in.

Thanks to my intimate knowledge of the Jack the Ripper case, I was the ideal candidate. Especially seeing as I never do any bloody work and therefore wasn't busy. We tracked down the volume in a small shop (I am not sure where exactly, in reality I don't know London from the arse end of a donkey) but that was where our trouble started, as well-organised Dutch gangsters and magazine enthusiasts descended upon us on high-performance motorcycles. They knew exactly what they were looking for.

Fortunately, perhaps the last remaining broadsheet copy of The Independent was lying discarded on the pavement, principally because London is a filthy hole that needs cleaning (vote Ken Livingstone, folks). Concealing the valuable magazine within the newspaper I was able to saunter away unsuspected.

We crossed the river and went to my Belgian contact's riverside flat in Thamesmead. It was a strange issue of Private Eye. Although smaller format, it retained much of the modern day structure: political journalism followed by more satirical pieces. However, vast swathes of the back of the issue were dedicated to a multiple page Garfield comic strip adventure set at the Battle of Rourke's Drift. Luckily for me, my decisive action was rewarded by my Belgian partner, who agreed that without my quick thinking the magazine would have been lost to the Dutch - many of whom were trying to phone us to pinpoint our location - and agreed I should receive 75% of the proceeds from selling the magazine at auction.

The risk, of course, was that we would again have to head out onto the streets away from the safety of our hideout to get the sales process in motion. Good fortune struck again, however, and I woke up before I had to go through any of that. Although my pillow was gone.

On high alert

2012-01-31T08:00:00.000Z

I am a fundamentally friendly sort, though a bit shy in real life. Online, though, this just translates to being a fundamentally friendly sort. Result!

I always like to hear from people, particularly my friends. People who like to hear from strangers more are weird and you probably shouldn't trust them with any of your valuables: house keys, children, hymen, wallet etc. As such I have things set up to tell me when I have a new email (it's up there in the corner, see?) and things that flash up from Tweetdeck when I am mentioned or direct messaged on Twitter. It's a good system. Mostly.

Because when I'm not scratching away at a bit of paper with my tongue stuck out of the corner of my mouth, I am doing things to the digital image I have taken with my scanner-ma-bob thing (it's there, look). I have to tweak things here and there. Tidy bits up (mostly because I am both too lazy and too stupid to just CLEAN THE SCREEN), tweak the contrast, sort out sizes and filenames and just generally be hugely autistic about the whole thing. This is when being firmly plugged in to the seething currents of electronic communication begins to properly stress me out.

LOOK! THERE'S AN EMAIL! BETTER ANSWER IT, SLACKMUND

Yesterday I was scanning my picture of a dog when I noticed that the previous picture, (C is for crocodile), had been wrongly sized. Because I am an idiot, the printable version was A5-size rather than A4. So I had to re-scan that one too, which meant just a little bit more work. But then the flashing messages and the little mail notifier are not so welcome. In fact they drive me mad. "PROD PROD POKE, come along dotmund, there's a message here, why aren't you answering me? Do you have any idea how precariously balanced all your friendships are? You are a fucking arsewit".

Luckily, as a grown up, I have been able to take a step back and work out what the problem is, so that I can take steps to solve it. The problem, as I see it, is that I'M A FUCKING FANNY. So, my solution - which I will now be trying to implement forthwith - is to STOP BEING A FUCKING FANNY.

This may well work.

D is for dog

2012-01-30T14:03:00.003Z

If you want to download this to print out and colour in, you can do so here: CLICK

The America Project - Massachusetts

2012-01-29T08:00:00.000Z

Massachusetts (MA) size 10,554 sq.m population 6.5 million

Bordering states New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut (5)
State capital & most populous city Boston
Other notable places Worcester, Northampton, Springfield, Lowell, Cape Cod
Notable landmarks and natural features American Antiquarian Society, Worcester; Cole's Hill, Plymouth; Springfield Armoury.

Statehood 6th February 1788 (6th)

Twelve famous Bay Staters
John Adams (politician, 2nd President of the USA; born Braintree (now Quincy), 1735-1826)
John Quincy Adams (politician, 6th President of the USA; born Braintree, 1767-1848)
Susan B. Anthony (social reformer; born Adams, 1820-1906)
George H.W. Bush (politician, 41st President of the USA; born Milton, 1924 -)
Bette Davis (actress; born Lowell, 1908-1989)
Benjamin Franklin (politician, author, social philosopher, inventor and founding father of the USA; born Boston, 1706-1790)
Theodor Seuss Geisel (cartoonist and author; born Springfield, 1904-1991)
John F. Kennedy (politician, 35th President of the USA; born Brookline, 1917-1963)
Jack Lemmon (actor; born Newton, 1925-2001)
Christa McAuliffe (teacher and astronaut; born Boston, 1948-1986)
Donna Summer (singer; born Boston, 1948 -)
James Abbott McNeill Whistler (artist and painter; born Lowell, 1834-1903)

Three important events

1. Boston Tea Party (16th December 1773)
A hotbed of intellectuals, liberals and revolutionaries, Boston played a major part in the American Revolution. With tensions already running high over British taxes on paper and printing, an additional tax - that on tea - became the straw that broke the camel's back. A group of rebels known as the Sons of Liberty snuck on board an East India Company tea ship moored in Boston Harbour during the day of 16th December 1773. Come nightfall, they chucked all the tea into the bay. The British responded with further economic and military punishments for Massachusetts. By 1775 the situation had become a tinderbox, finally ignited by an armed confrontation in Lexington, MA which sparked the War of Independence.

2. The Boston Strangler (1962-1964)
Between 1962 and 1964, 13 women in and around Boston were murdered in their own homes, sexually assaulted and strangled with a silk stocking. There were no signs of forced entry into any of the homes, and panic quickly spread amongst Boston's female inhabitants. The victims were of all ages - the youngest, the final victim Mary Sullivan, was just 19 whilst the oldest, the second victim Mary Mullen, was 85. In October 1964, a man entered a young woman's apartment and raped her but then left. The victim identified her assailant as Albert DeSalvo. Quickly arrested, DeSalvo confessed to a fellow prison inmate to being the Boston Strangler whilst in custody. Tried for the offence, he was sentenced to life inprisonment in 1967. Doubts persist in many quarters, however, that the crimes were committed by DeSalvo or even the work of just one man.

3. September 11th 2001
On Tuesday September 11th 2001, two groups of hijackers boarded planes at Logan International Airport, Boston. American Airlines flight 11 was bound for Los Angeles International and departed at 7.46 a.m.. Half an hour later the Boeing 767 was hijacked by a group of five terrorists led by Mohamed Atta. It was flown into the North Tower of New York City's World Trade Center at 8.46 a.m., killing all 92 people aboard.

United Airlines Flight 175, another Boeing 767 bound for Los Angeles took off from Logan International at 8.14 a.m. At around the same time that AA Flight 11 was striking WTC 1, UA 175 too was hijacked by five men, led by Marwan al-Shehhi, and flown into the World Trade Center's South Tower at 9.03 a.m and killing all 65 people aboard. It was the beginning of the single biggest and most lethal terrorist attack in human history. In all, over 3,000 people lost their lives.

The America Project - Maryland

2012-01-28T08:00:00.000Z

Maryland (MD) size 12,407sq.m population 5.8 million

Bordering states Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware (4)
State capital Annapolis
Most populous city Baltimore
Other notable places Hagerstown, Ocean City, Towson, St. Charles
Notable landmarks and natural features Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore Inner Harbor, Backbone Mountain

Statehood 28th April 1788 (7th)

Ten famous Marylanders
Spiro Agnew (politician, 39th Vice-President of the USA; born Baltimore, 1918-1996)
John Wilkes Booth (Presidential assassin; born Bel Air, 1838-1865)
Divine (actor and drag queen; born Towson, 1945-1988)
"Mama" Cass Elliot (singer; born Baltimore, 1941-1974)
Judah Friedlander (actor and comedian; born Gaithersburg, 1969 -)
Philip Glass (composer; born Baltimore, 1937 -)
Linda Hamilton (actress; born Salisbury, 1956 -)
Dashiell Hammett (author; born Saint Mary's County, 1894-1961)
David Hasselhoff (actor and singer; born Baltimore, 1952 -)
Frank Zappa (musician and composer; born Baltimore, 1940-1993)

also from Maryland are my friends Sarah (b. 1982) and Jonathan (b. 1985). Hello both!

Three important events

1. Quasi-War (1799)
During the Haitian Revolution, America got a little twitchy about the colonial-minded French naval presence in the Caribbean. As such it commissioned and built its first six warships. One, the USS Constellation, was built and launched out of Baltimore. As tensions between the United States and France grew, the USS Constellation became the first US warship to capture an enemy vessel, L'Insurgent, in 1799. It was later renamed the USS Insurgent where it sank with flying colours in a storm at sea in the West Indies the following autumn.

2. The Great Baltimore Fire (February 7th-8th 1904)
As you may already have guessed, this was a great fire that struck Baltimore in 1904. Starting in the John Hurst and Co. building, It raged for over 30 hours, as a lot of the fire brigades sent to fight the blaze found that their hosepipes didn't attach properly to Baltimore's fire hydrants. 35,000 people were left unemployed by the fire, which destroyed 70 city blocks. It provided major impetus for the standardisation of fire-fighting across the United States, as well as the rebuilding of Baltimore in more flame-retardent materials.

3. Racial integration (1935)
Maryland was the first state to overrule 1896's Plessy vs Ferguson ruling which stipulated separate accomodation for whites and blacks, the 1935 Murray vs Pearson et al ruling demanding the desegregation of the Law School at the University of Maryland. It set an important moral precedent in the civil rights movement, albeit one which had no legal jurisdiction beyond the Maryland State borders.

The FIFA status of the two-headed Brazilian baby

2012-01-27T08:00:00.000Z

As you may well be aware, just before Christmas last year in Brazil a mother gave birth to a healthy baby boys, who - fairly unusually it has to be said - has two heads. Of course, these twins are by no means the only conjoined twins in the world, but as they were Brazilian boys and completely medically inseparable as they share a heart, I got to thinking about football.

Milton and Dingus, the only other conjoined twins to play
football for Brazil. They shared a body and one ear.

Brazilians are known worldwide for their footballing ability and there doesn't seem to be any reason that I can see that these twins should be any different. Many conjoined twins are connected in such awkward or ungainly ways as to completely preclude their participation in any form of professionally sanctioned sporting activity, but Jesus and Emmanuel are lucky enough to be pretty straightforwardly joined. As they share one set of organs, the body is a fairly anatomically standard, it just has two heads. There doesn't seem to be any bio-mechanical reason why Jesus or Emmanuel (actually, they'd probably both have to do it, or neither, when I think about it) couldn't become a professional footballer.

However, at the professional level things are a bit more complicated. Why people have to make things complicated, I will never really understand, but they do. You can't just chase a bladder around and score some goals. There is PAPERWORK.

Every professional player is registered and contracted to their club, so that they cannot play for anyone else. You can probably see where I'm going with this.

What constitutes a football player? Is it number of heads? If so, Jesus and Emmanuel are two players. But if it is number of hearts, livers, lungs, kidneys, arms or legs, then they are one. Does it come down to number of surnames? If so the Neville brothers could have counted as one player as long as they could get shorts big enough. Maybe it's kit. One kit means one player.

But Jesus and Emmanuel have two brains, two backbones. If they were to be classified as just one player, this gives them an advantage of one brain over all of their fellow players and in the majority of cases this is a bare minimum figure. Also they'd have an advantage in going up for headers. If Emmanuel missed it, Jesus could sneak in.

The other issue is, if they were - as many Brazilian talents are - snapped up by a top European club, they would be subject to EU Employment Law. If Sampdoria decided that Jesus was the very player for them but Emmanuel's registration was being retained by Montpelier, could the EU Employment Tribunal sue Emmanuel's heart or winky for restraint of trade?

Personally I believe that they should be allowed to play as one player, because they have one body. And this goes for any other sporting or physical activity. Come the day a baby is born with two heads and four arms I might have to question whether or not they should be playing singles or doubles tennis. Likewise, if Jesus and Emmanuel were to become chess grandmasters, I would have to reconsider my position.

Legal issues are not my strong point.

Heroes of tennis: Monica Seles

2012-01-26T09:27:00.001Z

The story of Monica Seles is one of the saddest stories in the recent history of sport. Although she won nine Grand Slam singles titles, who knows how many more it could have been were it not for the shattering knife attack by a fanatical fan of her greatest rival, Steffi Graf, in Hamburg in April 1993? Graf went on to win 22 Grand Slam singles titles, unrivalled in the Open Era. But at the time of Seles' stabbing, there was little doubt that it was Seles who had the upper hand. Graf, 4 years Seles' senior, had by April 1993 won 10 Grand Slam singles titles to Seles' 8, but after Seles' maiden triumph (at the 1990 French Open aged just 16), Graf had added just two Grand Slams to her tally - at Wimbledon in 1991 and 1992 (the latter being the only time in four Grand Slam finals between the pair where Graf prevailed) on Seles' least-favourite surface. Seles, in the meantime, won 3 out of the four available titles in both 1991 and 1992.

Seles returned to the sport in 1995 and promptly won the 1996 Australian Open title, but it proved to be her last. Were it not for the actions of one maniacal fan, the history of modern women's tennis would, I think, look very different.

A controversial figure during her playing days due to her characteristic grunting style, now to watching footage of Seles playing one realises that to complain about her vocal exercises would be akin to asking a man with a leaf blower to switch it off whilst a jumbo jet came in to land. The modern day ladies players have taken their own grunts, hoots and hollers to a whole new level of volume and absurdity. Perhaps one could argue that Seles started this trend off. However, not one of the whooping howler monkeys that have followed in her stead have been able to match the quality of her play or her overwhelming dominance of the sport.

Stuff falling off other stuff

2012-01-25T07:30:00.000Z

Everybody has got to go sometime. If you are a character in a film, though, your chances of doing so by falling off of something quite high whilst sat in some form of vehicular conveyance are very much higher than most. People dying often proves a narrative necessity, and here's the thing: in the language of film you've probably pretty much witnessed people survive more or less everything. Everything except ploughing off of a cliff in some form of transportation. This is the go-to visual "they're not getting out of that shit" device of filmmakers everywhere.

Every form of media has its own language, its own set of signifiers and codes. Luckily for us, the language of motion pictures tends to lean fairly heavily on propelling people off stuff as they are sat in other stuff to signify death. Come the day that John McClane finally shoots over the edge of the Grand Canyon in a golf buggy, we can pretty well be certain - for all his scrapes and bullet dodging - that Die Hard 18 will be the last installment.

I am a big fan. Being someone with experience myself of falling off of stuff, it's always cathartic to watch other people do it. The only reason that I don't suggest someone making a compilation film of all the best bits of stuff falling off other stuff in vehicles is because of another key factor which has made this such an important filmic device: use of stock footage.

Want to kill off a character without wasting any more film? Shoot them getting onto a train and then toddle off to the film library. Old horror 'B' movies are wonderful for this. There is one particular sequence in the Universal canon of which I am particularly fond. It has levers moving, train tracks dividing and a train shooting off of a sheer cliff into a ravine. It also features in at least two Universal films that I know of, and both of them are favourites of mine. Here is Jack Griffin, The Invisible Man, getting up to no good:

The Invisible Man (1933) dir. James Whale

Meanwhile, here is shocking REAL-LIFE footage of the results of railway points sabotage, by the insidious pro-Nazi group of fifth columnists led by Heinrich Von Bork, on a passenger train containing a leading British diplomat in Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror:

Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942) dir. John Rawlins

Two very different circumstances, two very different perpetrators, two very different sets of victims. One train. The Grim Reaper is satisfied, and so is the studio accountant.

The Invisible Man is notable in fact, as it also features a scene where the film's titular character kills off his erstwhile colleague and confidant Doctor Kemp by running his car off of the side of a steep hill. Explosions, death and pain ensue. It is a bold film that has more than one stuff falling of other stuff scene, especially given its running time of a mere 71 minutes. Sadly for Universal, the pace of development in car design far outstripped that of train design, meaning that within a matter of years that footage would be unusable for other films.

It doesn't just have to be trains and cars. They are popular due to their ubiquity, of course. It doesn't have to be cliffs or hills, either. In Steven Spielberg's brilliant directorial debut Duel, the thing that falls over the hill is a mean old truck. In the magnificent RKO horror film The Body Snatcher, Henry Daniell meets his maker as a result of ploughing over a ledge in a horse and cart. And in The Blues Brothers, the leaders of the Illinois Nazi Party's Waterloo is an unfinished road.

The simple and the classic will always be the most likely to prevail. The future may yet bring us Segways tootling off of the top of skyscrapers on the moon pursued by ATOMIC ROBO-SHARKS of course, but the results will always be the same. I asked Twitter yesterday morning for the film that contains their favourite stuff falling off of other stuff scene. The resulting top 5 list is particularly telling, I think. Its mainstays: internal combustion, natural hazards, death.

The Official Top 5 Films Containing the best stuff falling off of other stuff scenes:

5. Duel
4. Groundhog Day
3. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
2. The Italian Job
1. Thelma and Louise

Stuff falling off of other stuff on the silver screen. Long may it thrive. I'd say long may it live but that very much depends on the extent of the drop and some Newtonian physics.

C is for crocodile

2012-01-24T09:50:00.001Z

One of my favourite things about doing this animal alphabet so far is that after every new addition, speculation has been rife as to what the next animal will be but no-one has successfully guessed yet. Incidentally, I do have a list which is set in stone, because I am a very well-prepared young man.

I knew you were going to say that, for instance.

Crayons out, because today C is for CROCODILE.

As ever, those among you wanting to download a printable version may do so by clicking HERE.

Dotmund illustration sale

2012-01-23T09:20:00.000Z

Today is one of those sad and unfortunate times where I have to bring an air of reality to proceedings. Drawing pictures is the thing that I do and as much as I enjoy doing all that and doing all this, every time I do an illustration for a blog post it is theoretically a completely insane waste of my time, effort and materials.

Unless, that is, I at least make an effort to sell them off at LOW, LOW PRICES!

So think of this as a January sale. If you have enjoyed reading all this waffle, please take a look at these pictures and consider investing in the future of my sanity by perhaps buying one (or more) of them. You won't find cheaper actually-quite-reasonable-quality artwork anywhere on the internet (probably).

Thank you.

Pirate (17.11.2011) 20 x 21cm; pen, ink, pencil and watercolour on white card. £15.

Female tennis player (30.6.2011) 14 x 20cm; pencil on cartridge paper. £10.

Sherlock Holmes and The Scarlet Claw (2.2.2011) 14 x 22cm; pen, ink, watercolour and acrylic on cartridge paper. £25.

Earl of Rosebury (20.1.2012) 15 x 21cm; pen, ink, pencil and watercolour on white card. £15.

Wild west scene (16.12.2011) 19 x 29cm; pen, ink, pencil and watercolour on white card. £20.

Nuclear explosion (29.11.2011) 20 x 29cm; Acrylic on black sugar paper with collage (pen, ink and watercolour on white card). £20.

Click any of the pictures to have a better look. All prices listed are inclusive of postage and packing within the UK and discounts are negotiable for bulk buyers! If you are interested in one or more of these, please get in touch by emailing me or if you are a bold sort you can do things in public by adding a comment to this post or sending me a tweet: @dotmund.

Sunday evening round-up of new things

2012-01-22T17:30:00.000Z

Hello. Today is one of those days that I am spreading myself thinly, like the serving suggestion on a jar of Marmite. I'm everywhere, folks.

Firstly, I have collaborated once more with 5olly and Betsy on another podcast. However, unlike our previous efforts which were to be honest the outpourings of purely diseased maniacs (plus Betsy), this new one has a theme and a structure and 5olly even did some editing on it. It's a bit rough and ready as many first things can be but given the fact that we refuse to even contemplate doing any project until we're good and drunk, that's only to be expected.

It also features: a technical hitch which, due to dumb luck, probably proved to be the best thing that could have happened; 5olly and Betsy's cat Jerry asking to be let out; me receiving a text message, the unmistakable sounds of me eating tablet, 5olly cracking a tube of amber fluid and Betsy demonstrating once again that the world of librarians gain is the voiceover world's loss.

Anyway, our podcast addresses the thorny issue of how to decide which film to watch if they are both rated the same as each other by the esteemed organ, IMDb.com and is called Versus Sexboat for reasons which will become tragically apparent very quickly.

You can listen to and download our efforts here: Grease Vs. Sexboat.

We are sorry. But not sorry enough to not be planning more episodes in the future.

Edit: Versus Sexboat now has its own exclusive site, which you can see here: Versus Sexboat

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Also this weekend saw the launch of the new online art phenomenon, Draw Me A Daltrey. Anyone ever wanting the definitive gallery of Roger Daltrey portraits need look no further than this collection. As well as perusing their site and submitting your own Daltrey, you can also follow them on Twitter here.

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In a final magnificent twist, today also say the publication of this mighty anthology of questions and answers to which I contributed in varying states of sobriety last weekend. But as it is on Pleasing To A Mollbird and I have now told you several times you should be reading that blog, you will surely already know this, yes? Anyway, please read that and add your own answers to the questions in the comments section. Be warned, though, many of those questions are actually deceptively simple, and in fact represent deeply philosophical and existential quandries.

The America Project - Maine

2012-01-22T07:30:00.000Z

Generally speaking, the Sundays here on my blog are a dead loss, as I wake up in whatever ditch I fell asleep in and then try and buy a passing stranger's shoes that I may return home to sleep one off. So I came up with the winning idea of resurrecting my America Project for just such eventualities. I am clever. Anyway, on with the show.

Maine (ME) size 35,385 sq.m population 1.3 million

Bordering states New Hampshire, Massachusetts (2)
State capital Augusta
Most populous city Portland
Other notable places Eastport, Fort Fairfield, Bangor, Alfred
Notable landmarks and natural features Moosehead Lake, West Quoddy Head, Old Sow whirlpool, Appalachian Mountains

Statehood 15th March 1820 (23rd)

Ten famous Mainers
Anna Belknap (actress; born Damariscotta, 1972 -)
Frank Churchill (composer; born Rumford, 1901-1942)
Myrna Fahey (actress; born Carmel, 1933-1973)
John Ford (film director; born Port Elizabeth, 1894-1973)
Edwin Hall (physicist; born Gorham, 1855-1938)
David E. Kelley (writer and television producer; born Waterville, 1956 -)
Stephen King (author; born Portland, 1947 -)
Judd Nelson (actor; born Portland, 1959 -)
John O'Hurley (actor; born Kittery, 1954 -)
Victoria Rowell (actress; born Portland, 1959 -)

Three important events

1. New Ireland (1779)
Good losers as ever, the lovable colonialist Britons took the American Declaration of Independence with great equanimity and promptly invaded Maine in 1779 with a view to establishing a new colony called New Ireland, to serve as a base for all the British military and a safe harbour for more reinforcements to arrive by sea. The British proved stubborn, too, remaining in New Ireland until two years after the end of hostilities in 1781.

2. Aroostock War (1838-39)
Britain was once again responsible for some funtimes in Maine, although this time there was no actual armed conflict - although over 500 people lost their lives nonetheless. The problem was a dispute as to the exact location of the border between British North America, now Canada, and Maine. Principally because the verdant, forested disputed landscape proved a very tempting proposition for either side. As such, each side believed the other to be sneaking over with an axe and pinching all their trees. With tensions rising and beavers everywhere finding themselves out of a job, in 1830 the King of the Netherlands was even asked to mediate in the dispute. Eventually the US and UK governments stepped in and diplomacy prevailed. The 1842 Webster-Ashburton treaty decreed a border line acceptible to both parties - the USA gaining 7,000 square miles of disputed territory, the British 5,000.

3. Tourism (1850s)
Maine has a very pleasant mild climate and attractive landscape, ideal for the wealthy to swagger about in while all of their American brethren sweat and fart in the broiling sun of the southern and western States. With Maine's population falling significantly in the early 19th century thanks to war and the allure of gold rushes in Ohio and California, it left gaps open for migrant workers and summering tourists. Some of America's most notable families - such as the Bushes and the Rockerfellers - have established holiday retreats in the State.

B is for bear

2012-01-21T07:00:00.000Z

I must confess that I was somewhat bewildered by how popular the first entry in my animal alphabet colouring project was. Not least because it meant that people were quite unlikely to forget I'd started it and that I now needed to draw 25 more pictures. However, now it is only 24! Because B is for bear (and also for bee).

As before, if you would like to download this picture in A4 size, you can do so here: CLICK

The Corinthian spirit (imaginary)

2012-01-20T07:00:00.000Z

Let me tell you about the perils of drink. Over the Christmas holidays, a period of the year I generally spend entirely intoxicated, I happened upon Celebrity University Challenge. I enjoyed it because the alumni representing their alma mater were obviously all earmarked as probably being thickies so the questions were a bit easier. This meant I could answer loads of them and look clever and perhaps not as drunk as I actually was (which was 'quite').

It was not all wine and roses, though - although ironically it often was wine and Roses - because there was An Incident. The Incident happened somewhere in the area of space between Jeremy Paxman's mouth, my ears and the bit of my brain I use to remember things.

"Who was the British Prime Minister who won the Grand National whilst serving his term of office?"

I could not remember what the name of this gallant and wonderful man was, but I squirreled away the date I thought he said - 1894. "Now there's something worth blogging about!", thought drunken me, and I wrote it down on a piece of paper. (Yes, I plan this stuff in advance).

What a triumph of the Corinthian ideals of the Victorian era! With no immediate threat from ICBMs or Trades Unions to occupy him, the Prime Minister got on his horse and won the bloody Grand National! Now that is a story. Other Prime Ministers should ride the Grand National. In fact, they should be entered into the race every year as one of their prizes for winning Prime Minister Idol or whatever the hell it is we call it these days. The public could then vote on what horse they get to ride. Popular PMs, such as Lloyd-George, Churchill or Clement Atlee (these are the only ones, let's be honest) would get to ride Red Rum probably, while John Major and Sir Alec Douglas Home would have had a skankmule. David Cameron could ride Gideon.

But, alas...

When Wikipedia stopped making Britain well aware of the fact that we don't have a lot of say about American political issues on Thursday morning I looked it up. The British Prime Minister in 1894 - Archibald Primrose, Earl of Rosebury - was indeed a racehorse man but it was as an owner that his horse Fat Nev won the 1894 Derby at Epsom. My brain and liver had conspired to ruin everything.

But I am not one to be discouraged by such a thing, so I now present the blog post as I wanted it to be written, complete with accurate illustration.

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebury (1847-1929)

One of Archibald Primrose, Earl of Rosebury's first acts as Prime Minister of Great Britain was to win the 1894 Grand National at Aintree. In a triumph of the Corinthian Spirit, he cast aside his dispatch boxes and sat astride the unfancied mare Manky Mave. In spite of starting odds of 60-1, he lapped the field, a stunning achievement in a two-lap race on a horse that had whooping cough and was, it was later discovered, quite heavily pregnant.

Stepping off his horse, Primrose attributed his thrilling victory to a triumph of Liberal ideals and dedicated his win to the baby Jesus, whom he had met in a dream. Primrose, who didn't remove his top hat throughout,

(that's enough of that)

Things to make and do

2012-01-19T07:00:00.000Z

I had high hopes for this post. Hopefully this post - the one in my head - will emerge on Friday or next week or something. Unfortunately it proved very difficult to research on Wednesday evening thanks to the anti-SOPA blackout. Could Dotmund be the first casualty of this crass lump hammer piece of legislation?

The answer, of course, is no. But possibly yes.

So I thought that instead it would be a good idea to make a start on another idea I have scrawled here in my own blood, namely "colouring in". I think children like to do this, as indeed do some adults. To be honest, I've always hated colouring in and I still do. Is it not enough that I've drawn a picture?

However, that may just be me. So I thought it would be nice for my blog to give something back to sort of make up, in some small way, for the hours and hours of your life that you simply won't be getting back. My chosen method is to make 26 pictures, one for each letter of the alphabet, for your children or husband to print out and colour in. Hopefully this will shut them up for upwards of five minutes at a time - ten if they try and keep within the lines - allowing you to have some much needed peace and hopefully staving off that nervous breakdown for another hour or two.

Today, 'A'. 'A' is for Anteater. And yes, I know it is technically a Giant Anteater and that Giant Anteater begins with 'G'. If you're going to get pedantic with me about nomenclature then this is going to be an insufferably long year. As this project develops I will be using the label "Animal alphabet" so you can easily gather them all together and rip me off.

Note: Blogger is a bit exotic about the way it displays pictures, and it has re-sized this one rather too much to be much use. So here's a the full-size image to download or print or throw poos at: CLICK.

Guitar heroism

2012-01-18T07:30:00.000Z

I hate guitar solos. Whenever some wisp-haired ninny takes a step forward to take a solo on their god forsaken AXE I just want to stick knitting needles in my ears and be done with it. Of course, given this fact it is inevitable that all of my favourite music - give or take one or two exceptions - was and is made by performers who conform fairly religiously to the old Buddy Holly and the Crickets 'three guitars and some drums' template.

This is not contradictory. Because a guitar can't be blamed for the nobwipe that it is attached to. It is only the conduit for the vision of the person who wields it. With a bit of sense and balance, you can RIGHTEOUSLY WAIL ON YOUR AXE, DUDE without it ever sounding like a case of, "RIGHT, HERE IT COMES, GONNA DO A BIG SOLO, THE BASSIST AND THE DRUMMER WILL JUST PLOD AWAY, HERE IT COMES, OH MAN I AM THE BEST". Jimi Hendrix is a good example of this. He spent a (short) career exploring the sonic capabilities of his instrument (snuk) but never lost sight of the ensemble.

He didn't do a load of dreary, pretentious old bloody guitar warbling, is what I'm driving at. And when he did, it wasn't so obvious that, "Oh This Is The Solo, Oh Hooray".

Reign in your worst exhibitionist tendencies, though, and as my iPod will confirm a guitar can be a magnificent and wonderful thing. A machine that kills fascists, even. However, keeping your playing held back and restrained should not be mistaken for not bothering with any showmanship.

Modern rock 'n' rockers are shamefully slapdash in this regard. When was the last time any of them really developed a top new guitar playing move? 1950s right up to the 1980s there were guitar playing moves left right and centre, as the following diagram demonstrates:

Three classic Guitar Moves (click for bigger)

Since the nineties, though, nothing. I blame Britpop. Bunch of middle class art school dropouts (or, in the case of Oasis, school dropouts) just standing there strumming away. Often it was the front man who had to pick up the slack, hence Jarvis Cocker's elaborate peacocking lope, Damon Albarn pricking about, Brett Anderson rubbing his nip-nips, or Liam Gallagher standing there looking mean. Let's make 2012 the year that Guitar Moves return! Let no lead guitarist leave the stage at Glastonbury this year without having sprained their ankle!

As ever, as a free service, I have decided to suggest a few possible new moves to get you all started.

The Heron

1. The Heron
Play your guitar whilst stood unflappably on one leg. May not be immediately impressive but you just watch everyone gaze on in wonderment after a full hour as your ankle fills with fluid and you get varicose veins.

2. The Turbo Who
Smash your guitar up in between bars. Why wait for the end of the song, or the show?

3. The Shave
Multi-tasking is always a welcome characteristic, so why not perform your ablutions as you perform your latest number 38 smash hit single?

The Shave

4. The Get Your Dick Stuck In The Strings
OK I've done too many of these now.

On the future of the internet

2012-01-17T07:30:00.000Z

Whisper it folks but, I think this internet thing might get quite big. Already people are talking about doing business on it and this blog itself gets upwards of three readers per year. This is clearly the boomtime for the world wide wireless web wob. But as with all booms, some people are forecasting that bust could be just round the corner.

The problem is that the internet is still so young as to be largely unregulated but has grown so quickly as to be ubiquitous in Western life. And this makes important people very, very, nervous. Already we've seen I Am Spartacus style mass demonstrations of super-injunction busting prurient information sharing which has aggravated The Famous. But it's The Rich who are the real problem because they own stuff and they don't like thinking about people getting it for free. Democracy is a wonderful thing to aspire to, until the terrifying day that it actually takes hold.

What with the madness of the US Stop Online Piracy Act ongoing and similar initiatives in the pipeline all over, I think filling your boots now is probably for the best. The internet will inevitably one day bow down to the same regulation and censorship as everything else. It's a concern, as any other thing which doesn't yet have a face is a concern. However, as long as the internet of the future contains email, blogs, Twitter and the following three videos, I will be fairly content.

The Three Most Important Videos* on the Internet, by Dotmund (aged 31¾)†

1. HOT TUB POO GIRL

2. DOG SHAGS OTHER DOG AND THEN DOES A SICK AND EATS IT

3. FAMILY OF TOTAL FUCKING IDIOTS TRY AND FELL A TREE WITHOUT ANY UNDERSTANDING OF THE BASIC LAWS OF PHYSICS OR EVEN OF CAUSE AND EFFECT

I mean, honestly. What more could you actually ever need there to be on the internet?

* Things
† By the way, I am sorry about this. I shouldn't write blog posts at bedtime.

Facebook: what would Jesus do?

2012-01-16T09:25:00.000Z

Today's post has been inspired by THIS post from the weekend by my friend Moll. You should already be reading her blog if you're the sort of intelligent person I like to credit my readers as being. But if you're not, then I will be displeased.

Facebook. I don't know if I like it. I enjoy it when I'm drunk, I suppose, and there is much truth in drunkenness. If everyone was drunk all the time then the world of subtexts and self-delusions would quickly give way to a higher plane of truth and obesity and vomiting. But during moments of clarity, Facebook and my continued involvement with it troubles me. Not a lot. But enough.

For one thing, I distrust anything that it is so difficult to leave. When I sign up to any free account - call me old-fashioned - I sort of assume that deleting that account will simply be a matter of clicking on a button. Facebook is more like a prison. There IS a way to delete your account properly, rather than just "deactivate" it, which I believe I have bookmarked somewhere come the day THAT BASTARD PUSHES ME TOO FAR. But until then, I'm banged up. Doing BIRD. PORRIDGE.

Actually, Facebook is worse than a prison. When you are released from prison, I don't imagine that you are stopped in every doorway by someone saying, "if you leave prison, your cellmates Knuckles, Rimjob, Brutus and Slasher Harris will miss you...". Being guilt-tripped by a website fucking SUCKS.

Another object lesson of Facebook's angsty teenage need to make me feel bad: my friend's twin brother does music. He is very good and everything. He must be, because I LIKE him on Facebook and I am hard to please. But in doing so I become part of a group who are all automatically invited to his gigs, which are mostly in north London, where he lives but I do not.

I am extremely well-brought up so feel it's a little rude to not respond to an invitation, even if it is just to decline it. So I go to do that. A dialogue box poppeth up. "YOU ARE NOT GOING??!? Say why here..." or suchlike. The wording was less hysterical, I was more so. And yes, OK, you can skip doing so. But fucking hell, really? Talk about a needy website. I'm surprised it didn't then automatically email me saying that 'Tom Peacock Contact ISN'T TALKING TO YOU ANY MORE, harrumph'. Up yours, Facebook. Up yours to all hell.

My actual real-life Facebook page with a few subtle redactions

Here's another thing. Being a rather socially awkward person with crushingly low self-esteem, I find it hard to say no. If I say no, people will stop liking me and I will have no friends and die alone in a pool of my own tears and then my mortal remains will be used for medical experiments or very low-grade pies. (Yes, I know that this is patently absurd, but it's what my brain does automatically. Stop judging me. Or continue, just please don't stop liking me!)

Back in the day on the Wide Wide World of Webs, it was all messageboards. People could see what you wrote and you could see what they wrote. Sometimes you didn't WANT to, frankly. Some people are DICKS. Then, saints be praised! Twitter came along. Now you can build your own messageboard, a timeline of things being said by people who you want to hear from and nothing from people who bore you, or have uncomfortably exotic ideas about the Raj. Other people, too, can subscribe to your own ramblings. You don't have to do anything. People interested in your words can come and go as they wish, without your ever needing to know about it if you don't want to. The system works! Apart from obviously when it doesn't and that whale appears.

With Facebook, you get the dreaded thing. Friend request. Lionel Hhoops, the college roommate of the sister of your best friend when you were 7, wants to hear what you have to say. For a well-balanced person, that is easily dealt with. But I'm sat here now thinking, "listen pal, it's a miracle anyone tolerates you as it is, you arsehole... so who are you to reject the Hhoopster? One day it may just be you and Lionel once everyone else realises what a loser you are, up yours".

This is why I kind of hate Facebook but am still on it. Because it's not really Facebook's fault that I'm mental. All I'm saying is, it doesn't necessarily do anything to help me to reduce the amount of mental. Facebook is all right, but it makes me twitch.

*Twitch*

Nom de nick

2012-01-15T07:30:00.000Z

Tonight is the BDO World Darts Championship final and a good time to reflect on how, outside of sports traditionally associated with British pubs, or the large scale wearing of Spandex, there's a bit of a dearth of nicknames. In darts, the nickname is everything. There are few sadder sights than the darts player without a preposterous moniker emblazened on the back of his frankly massive polyester shirt. It looks like he's got no friends. They may as well give him a bell. Maybe they do. But even then he could have used it to his advantage. Step up to the oche, Trevor "The Leper" Jones!

They're useful for the commentators, too, who as I have mentioned before here generally tend to struggle to find much insightful to talk about in watching two overweight middle-aged men throwing darts. In between moments of tension they tend to comment on the man in the crowd dressed as Elvis carrying 22 pints of lager back to a table entirely draped in Dutch flags. But when those moments of tension arise, the nickname is the first thing they reach for, and the first thing to be stretched and tortured to the kind of extent you'd normally associate with the Spanish Inquisition.

THEM: OH! He's just missed... Wolfie will be HOWLING about that!
ME: He's not a real wolf.
THEM: And now the crowd are getting behind his opponent, have they all left the PACK?
ME: He's not a real wolf... (continues for eight days)

For all of the crimes against language and sanity they cause, though, I just adore darts players' nicknames. Most of them are descriptive, some of them are even witty and some go over and above that, achieving a kind of perfection of synergy between object and signifier that would have even Noam Chomsky nodding his approval.

So let's celebrate the darts player and their nicknames! Here are my pick of this year's BDO championship draw, plus a tip of the hat to the greatest sporting nickname ever bestowed on a human being.

MARTIN "WOLFIE" ADAMS
Much can be made of Adams' love of wolves, or films with wolves in them, or Wolverhampton Wanderers, or whatever it is. But the simple fact is, this name stuck because that beard gives him a slightly lycanthropic air.

TED "THE COUNT" HANKEY
Ted Hankey loves his gothic films and vampires. Dressing up as a big fat Count Dracula and flinging rubber bats to pounding techno beats as he wanders up to the stage is the natural step to take. And, I might add, one still preferable to the Twilight saga.

ALAN "CHUCK" NORRIS
Alan Norris has the same surname as martial arts lunatic Chuck Norris, you see. Although as he himself sagely points out, you also chuck a dart.

MARTIN "THE ASSASSIN" ATKINS
Occupational nicknames are always a favourite in a sport where semi-professionalism is still fairly common. Whether or not advertising the fact that you are an assassin for your day job is a wise idea is another question entirely. Although it may actually be a hollow boast regarding his accuracy, who knows?

TONY "THE SILVERBACK" O'SHEA
Anthropomorphic nicknames are very popular in darts. Although it's infrequent that ones like "The Gazelle" or "The Cheetah" come out.

GARRY "THE COUGAR" THOMPSON
He's only fooling himself

PAUL "JENNO" JENNINGS
If in doubt, stick an O on the end of your name, British public school style. Which brings us to:

DEAN "O" WINSTANLEY
Surely he could have tried harder than that?

and now to the two heroes of the hour:

CO "THE MATCHSTICK" STOMPE
The Netherlands' Stompe was never the match of his great contemporary Raymond "Barney" van Barneveld at the oche but he had the edge in the nickname stakes, taking advantage of the fact he was the only man ever to play the sport at World level to be thinner than his darts. However, even the noble Stompe can't hold a candle to the ultimately nicknamed sportsman, so please step forward...

LES "McDANGER" WALLACE
This is beautiful beyond all words. The 1997 World Champion was Scottish, which explains the kilt and also the Mc. But McDanger! As if that were a thing! McDanger! I could analyse this forever but I'd only get tangled up and besides, it's the sort of thing you're better off pondering by yourself. Let your mind wander. McDanger.

McDanger!

Godzilla, slight return

2012-01-14T07:00:00.000Z

Oh yes they are

2012-01-13T07:30:00.000Z

It's the close of the pantomime season and this can only mean one thing. Whilst the rest of the actors disband to their familiar pastures of local radio and BBC 1's Doctors (when was there last a pantomime poster in the UK not featuring the words "... from BBC 1's Doctors"?), pantomime cows disappear entirely from view. Make the most of them this week, folks: you won't see another one until December rolls around again.

For generations, the normally high standards of scientific inquiry have been unusually content to just accept this state of affairs. It's baffling really, considering the investment in terms of money, time and intellect that the British nation are capable of - just look at their input at CERN, for instance - that no-one has ever really tried to study where the pantomime cows all go between January and December.

A lot of people will tell you that they are not real cows.

I say, let's not make any definitive statements until we know things for certain. Facts - DATA - is what we need, not hokey old conventional wisdom.

So it was at this point I decided to catch a pantomime cow. Here's my plan.

To catch a mocking cow

As with all good science, you have to have a hypothesis. My hypothesis is that the pantomime cow is a migratory species. Britain in the months of February to November is, on average, too warm an environment for it. So, my belief is that they majestically sweep northwards once the pantomime season is finished, most likely at night as to my knowledge this great migration has never been witnessed.

Of course, in order to test my hypothesis, I need a pantomime cow, which I intend to capture according to the above in-depth scientific diagram. A basic tiger trap should prove sufficient, although the pit required does need to be large enough to contain a pantomime cow: an animal that is, on average, the size of two adult men. To tempt the cow I'm using food as bait. Again, no-one is exactly sure what a pantomime cow eats - cynics will tell you that it's green room Pringles - so a small amount of trial and error is going to be required. Capturing my pantomime cow could well take some years and a bit of luck, but it's time I'm willing to invest.

Once I have a pantomime cow I plan to electronically tag it so as its migratory patterns may be precisely tracked and traced and we can finally know for certain where the pantomime cow summers. There is a chance that after years of digging holes, testing different food combinations and countless court appearances that my budget won't extend to electronic tagging equipment, in which case I plan to put a small hole in a pot of paint and hang it off the pantomime cow's udder, creating a trail I can then follow.

There's no need to thank me.

Godzilla - your questions answered

2012-01-12T07:30:00.000Z

I am an expert on Godzilla. I have seen at least three different Godzilla films, not including the fact I've seen both the original Japanese and the updated original with added American scenes starring Raymond Burr as a scientist called Steve Martin. Also, I decided this morning that I was an expert on Godzilla. These days becoming an expert really is as easy as that. As long as you tick the right box on Wikipedia, you can be an expert on anything.

Being generous of spirit, I decided to use my newfound expertise on Godzilla for good and answer any questions that my loyal readers may have about Godzilla, plus the definitive answers to some more standard and basic questions. Thanks to all those who asked questions. Bigger thanks, in many ways, to anyone who didn't. I can only apologise in advance for what is about to happen.

What colour is Godzilla?
Many people believe that Godzilla is green. However, when in doubt, I always think you should return to the original source material. It's fairly clear from that that Godzilla is in fact dark grey.

What sex is Godzilla?
Opinion is largely divided on this thorny issue. Godzilla-watchers everywhere eagerly watch Godzilla's undercarriage to see if Godzilla ever does an egg or pops a boner. Until then, it's hard to make a definitive call. I think of Godzilla as female, like Mother Earth.

How does Godzilla get such powerful thighs?
Step aerobics.

Godzilla: HONK

And now onto your questions:

What was the name of the bloke in the rubber suit in Godzilla Raids Again and what did he have for lunch on the third day of filming? (@NobbyNobody, via Twitter)
The actor essaying the role of Godzilla has changed many times, but in the early Toho Co. films it was almost always Morris Woodman, a British-born character actor who found himself working in Tokyo following World War II. On the third day of filming his wife made him a bento box but he forgot it and was forced instead to bum a Billy Bear luncheon meat sandwich off of his co-star Minoru Chiaki.

What is Godzilla's view on Scottish Independence? (@ajholman, via Twitter)
Godzilla is in fact of Scottish extraction, Godzilla's grandmother having been Agnes Godzilluch. Godzilla believes that, whilst independence is broadly speaking a good idea, it would be better as a graduated process of devolution rather than a clean, sudden split.

Does Godzuki prefer Dairylea or real cheese? (Neil Porter, via Facebook)
Like all Godzillas, Godzuki is not fond of any dairy products. But if pushed, Godzuki favours a Dairylea Lunchables with a tram for dipping.

How much Um Bungo can Godzilla consume in a single sitting? (Chris Leate, via Facebook)
As with many of us, not as much as Godzilla used to be able to. At Godzilla's peak, Godzilla could happily drink up to 800,000 gallons in a single sitting. But bladder capacity is a variable thing and drinking that much now would have Godzilla having to get up every twenty minutes all night to pee. Also, Godzilla's dentist advises against too many fruit drinks. 300,000 gallons.

How large are Godzilla's testes? (Nina Tame, via Facebook)
This of course begs the question re. the sex of Godzilla. However, there must be a male Godzilla somewhere or there wouldn't be any more Godzillas, so... Testicle size is inversely proportional to the fidelity of the species. The greater the monogamy, the smaller the testicle tends to be. Given the relatively small numbers of Godzillas, monogamy is rather thrust upon them, meaning Godzilla has surprisingly small testes considering Godzilla's huge stature. The left one is the size of a Ford Iveco lorry, the right one is slightly smaller.

What is Godzilla's morning hygiene and style routine? (@gazbeirne, via Twitter)
The key thing to remember is that Godzilla lives in the sea. It's a harsh environment for the skin. So the first thing Godzilla does in the morning is to apply moisturiser and then a natural mud pack whilst Godzilla brushes Godzilla's teeth. After that Godzilla favours a shower to a bath and prefers Original Source Mint shower gel if Godzilla can get it. Godzilla usually can. What many people don't know is that Godzilla wears a subtle amount of eyeliner to bring out Godzilla's cheekbones. Godzilla favours Black Magic 161 by Rimmel.

When Godzilla is playing football, does he like the ball to feet or is he more of a stick-it-over-the-shoulder-and-I'll-chase-it kind of guy? (Colin MacKenzie, via Facebook)
Godzilla has lost a yard of pace over the years, but Godzilla's natural attributes of height and atomic strength make Godzilla an ideal target man, so Godzilla is generally more comfortable with the ball in the air.

Am I right in assuming that, as a reptile, Godzilla owns the largest cloaca on the planet? (@ricomonkeon, via Twitter)
Yes.

Did Godzilla get on with Gamera behind the scenes? (@sinistergiraffe, via Twitter)
No, Godzilla did not. Whilst Godzilla's friendship with Mothra when the cameras were not rolling is fairly well-known, with many stories of over-indulgence in the bars and clubs of Tokyo to attest to it, Godzilla and Gamera had an at-best thorny relationship. It was not helped when Godzilla loaned Gamera 1000 Yen to pay off a gambling debt and Gamera was slow to repay. Towards the end of their time together, many of the fights between Godzilla and Gamera that made it to the screen were in fact largely unscripted.

Gamera: Gambling problem

How much wood would a Godzilla chuck if a Godzilla could chuck wood? (Jason Burt D'arcy, via Facebook)
Twenty wood.

Who would win in a fight, Godzilla or The Iron Lady? (@robmanuel, via Twitter)
In spite of Godzilla's many advantages - height, weight, atomic strength, continued radioactivity, laser eyes and fire breath - The Iron Lady would by no means be a pushover. Her handbag contains a pretty weighty volume of the writings of Hayek, plus egged on by Keith Joseph and Willie Whitelaw, she is likely to fight dirty and exploit any weakness in her opponent. Godzilla, on a split judge's decision.

Is he a dog or a cat sort of monster? (Nina Tame, via Facebook)
Like many solitary, creative, people, Godzilla really prefers cats to dogs. Godzilla does not enjoy the forced socialising in parks that dog ownership can often entail.

Does Godzilla have any swaps for the 1996 Panini Football album? I'm missing Ian Rush and a couple of shinies. (Andy Lancaster, via Facebook)
Godzilla has little time for sticker collecting what with Godzilla's charity work taking up most of Godzilla's evenings. Also, Godzilla finds that Godzilla's album gets wet under the sea. But Godzilla does have a foil Coventry City badge sticker if that's any use?

Does Godzilla keep his ketchup in the cupboard or in the fridge? (Sarah Carter, via Facebook)
Godzilla is always mindful of food safety and favours the fridge once Godzilla's ketchup has been opened. Although during spells of cold weather, Godzilla doesn't mind moving the ketchup to a cool cupboard after it has been opened if there's no room in the fridge. Before it's been opened, a cupboard will do.

Does Godzilla want a cuddle? (Edward Peacock, via Facebook)
Yes.

What would be his preferred make of car to use as rollerskates? (Iam Mudrock, via Facebook)
Godzilla used to favour Hondas, as a result of a long-standing marketing tie-in. Since that expired, however, Godzilla favours the Kia, which Godzilla claims has the softest roof.

How thick is the shell of a Godzilla egg? (@5olly, via Twitter)
Half an inch.

Mothra: unpredictable

How many teeth does Godzilla have and what toothpaste does he use? (@5olly, via Twitter)
Most Godzillas have 48 teeth. 26 on the top jaw and 22 on the bottom jaw. However, Godzilla lost one in a fight with Mothra, so Godzilla only has 47 teeth. Godzilla favours Colgate, which offers Godzilla 24 hour protection from plaque.

Who does Godzilla think is the best expert on Godzilla? (Must be human) (@5olly, via Twitter)
Until his death, Russell Harty. Since then, me.

How big are Godzilla beans? Does Godzilla get beaned? (@davidwhittam, via Twitter)
Godzilla, unlike the domesticated horse, does not accumulate "beans" of smegma in Godzilla's urethral opening, as it is better designed. Godzilla did get beaned until 1984, when Godzilla was forced to reveal that there was no need for it to be done and Godzilla just liked it.

Does Godzilla lie about his tea? (@5olly, via Twitter)
Once Godzilla claimed that he'd eaten Yokohama for his tea when in fact it was Chiba. However, this may well have been a geographical misunderstanding rather than an outright lie.

What word games does Godzilla like to play? (@alicestronaut, via Twitter)
Many of the monsters of movieland favour Scrabble but Godzilla is very much Godzilla's own Godzilla and instead prefers the card game Lexicon. Godzilla also likes Boggle and joining Mothra in a game of consequences between takes.

When battling Mothra why doesn't Godzilla turn on a giant booby-trapped bedside lamp? (@matsimpsk, via Twitter)
Godzilla has a keen sense of fair play. However, if Godzilla ever felt that Mothra had itself fought in an underhanded way, then Godzilla might do just that.

What does Godzilla think about GM foods? (Caroline Marshall, via Facebook)
As one might expect from any creature woken from a state of deep sea stasis by the meddling of man and his atomic bombs, Godzilla has great misgivings about GM foods and feels that whilst the prospect of increased yields and less spoilage is very alluring, there needs to be sensible caution exercised in the use of GM.

If Godzilla were a girl, who would her favourite designer be this Spring '12 season? (Anna Forster, via Facebook)
Godzilla keeps surprisingly well-apprised of all of the latest trends in ladies fashion, although Godzilla decribes Godzilla's own style as being more smart casual than dressy. Godzilla expects the 1970s look to be in and expresses particular fondness for Michael Kors.

Was Godzilla circumcised? (Megan Belcher, via Facebook)
Yes, but not intentionally.

Which Beatle, Muppet and Star Wars character was Godzilla's favourite? (Megan Belcher, via Facebook)
John Lennon, Fozzie, Han Solo.

Thanks once again to everyone who asked questions, to which you now all know the answers. If you need to know anything else about Godzilla, just make it up.

Addendum:
I've had some COMPLAINTS. Well, one. That I didn't answer all the questions. So here goes.

What is Godzilla's favourite biscuit? (@5olly, via Twitter)
Abbey Crunch.

When Godzilla last watched Titanic, did he wish he could rise up and bite Leonardo di Caprio's head off? (@5olly, via Twitter)
Godzilla has never seen Titanic, Godzilla does not really enjoy films with happy endings. Although Godzilla has seen the actual Titanic, on Godzilla's summer holidays.

Can Godzilla confirm or deny if Carol Klein sticks her parsnips up her bot-bot? (@5olly, via Twitter)
No, Godzilla cannot.

What does Godzilla think about last minute questions? And pies in lingerie? (Kev Beeley, via Facebook)
Godzilla is not crazy about either. Although Godzilla has designed a bra with mini Melton Mowbray pork pies covering the nipple.

What is Godzilla's opinion of the cartoon about him created in the 70s? Does he feel he was portrayed objectively? (@5olly, via Twitter)
Godzilla was not initially consulted about the cartoon being made which made Godzilla pretty angry. However, Godzilla's Agent and Godzilla managed to find a satisfactory deal where Godzilla had a veto over scripts and got to meet Scooby Doo. As such Godzilla was happy with Godzilla's cartoon portrayal.

Cultural analysis: Waylon Jennings on The Johnny Cash Show

2012-01-11T07:30:00.000Z

Today I am looking at my absolute all-time favourite country music performance, Waylon Jennings's magnificently louche rendition of the classic Chuck Berry song, Brown-Eyed Handsome Man on the Johnny Cash show, probably from c.1969. The whole thing appeals to me: the colour, the outfits, the music and the song. All put together it's 110 seconds of your life very well spent. But why only spend 110 seconds on it? Using my helpful in-depth guide, you can waste away even more of your precious time!

Let's delve deeper.

0:01 - 0:09 Here's Waylon, playing us in. One thing that will immediately strike you as somewhat incongruous (and, therefore, brilliant) about this whole performance is that it has rather more velvet and ruffled shirts than you might expect from country music as a genre. To the left of Waylon's set was probably Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys warming up to play next, surrounded by hay bales, bull horns, milk urns and live goats. Waylon Jennings is doing it differently. Lounge style!

Waylon Jennings: handsome man

0:10 Our first wider shot of the action shows the full extent of the set. It's quite magnificent. The band are all stood on plinths which are like the caricatured country and western buildings in Yosemite Sam cartoons. Behind them, though, is anyone's guess. Brasso tin? Snowflake version of the Union Flag? Vengeful wife ruins set man's plywood cupboard with jigsaw? We'll probably never know.

0:22 Waylon is ably assisted in his strumming by his group. Perhaps the most striking member of this happy band is GuitarBot 2000, the world's first guitar-playing cyborg. Any human guitarist is normally fully occupied just handling a six-string or a twelve-string guitar, so GuitarBot was created to be unintimidated by the cacophonous all-wood eighteen string behemoth MULTI-AXE. GuitarBot is favouring the 12-string for this performance, but rest assured that should he have needed to, he could have played Purple Haze with his feet alone on the six.

0:26 Here we see the full band. Every band, when supporting an artist billed as a solo act, should always be dressed the same. That's just the rules of rock 'n' roll. So here they are, bedecked in a colour best described as "nuclear teal" and keeping it funky farm fresh. In the immediate foreground is an organist keeping a beat chugging along in dashing Ray Manzarek style. The drummer is keeping himself to himself, maybe anticipating his big moment is yet to come. The three guitarists, in the meantime, are exhibiting three different axe-wielding techniques. The bassist favours keeping it low slung, perhaps to disguise any unfortunately timed erections. Or perhaps to encourage them, who knows. GuitarBot continues to wrestle with his 18-string leviathan in the standard (or "Western") stance. Waylon Jennings, meanwhile, handles his guitar as if it is a shotgun primed and ready to get rid of a troublesomely persistent mole in his front lawn.

GuitarBot2000 - brown eye

0:42 Waylon Jennings is only flesh and blood like all of us (well, apart from his guitarist) so it's only natural he'd have a Paul McCartney and Wings moment. Appearing now in dazzling red velvet and frankly enormous hair is his new wife, Jessi Colter, on electric keyboard.

0:54 Waylon Jennings - as you may remember - is only flesh and blood like all of us (well, apart from his guitarist) so it's only natural that, with his new bride just off to his left dressed as a Regency page, he'd allow his eyes to wander. He's singing a song about Brown-eyed Handsome Men. He's a brown-eyed handsome man himself. It'd be easy as Britain's most single man to resent such things but Waylon pulls it off with such aplomb and cool. It's hard to begrudge a man for doing things that you yourself would do if you had their talent, looks and timeslot on American network television.

1:01 The drummer's big moment! As the song moves towards its climax, it is heralded by a spirited drum fill. It's one of my favourite parts of the whole song so it's a wonder that the director didn't see fit to show us the drummer in close-up, even just briefly. Then again, when the whole studio looks like Kula Shaker's debut album cover and Vishnu liable to be summoned at any moment, such distraction is perhaps understandable.

Jessi Colter - sponsored by static electricity

1:14 As any fool know, cyborgs are liable to attain sentience if they are good cyborgs like Robocop. Could it be happening here before our very eyes? It's possible, as GuitarBot 2000 is beginning to show signs suggestive that he has indeed managed to gain some degree of self-awareness. Specifically the awareness that he needs to go and urinate.

1:25 Jessi Colter's keyboard stylings are on display here, gently prodding the keys like a nervous medical student palpating a tender abdomen on her first day in the paediatric appendicitis ward. Waylon Jennings likes what he sees, unaware of the ongoing rise of GuitarBot 2000. Specifically the ongoing rise of his need for a widdle.

1:47 As the song winds to a close with a final flourish and a deserved round of applause, we get to have a final look at the shininess of Waylon's hair, which is truly remarkable. In keeping with country music traditions, this was greased up earlier using the over-run from the rear axle on a John Deere tractor. Meanwhile, GuitarBot is being hurried back to the workshop to be catheterised.

No-one likes a saxophonist

2012-01-10T08:45:00.000Z

I've been listening to a lot of jazz lately. Particularly Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. I had a Damascene moment the other day during Miles Runs The Voodoo Down about the nature of life. Such moments stick with you and make you more keen to include albums in top 10 lists when you're asked by The Record Mirror or Sounds.

I like Miles Davis records particularly because Miles was a trumpeter. Jazz is haunted by the spectre of the saxophonist and, as I was discussing with my ever-wise friend Ed at the weekend, no-one likes a saxophonist. "I find that knowing there's a saxophonist in a band's line-up actually puts me off wanting to listen to that band's output," he argued. He is not wrong.

ADOLPHE SAX (1814-1894) -
in many ways this is all his fault

I don't think there's anything particularly objectionable about the saxophone from the point of view of the way it sounds. Well, who knows, maybe there is. But I don't think so. However, there's something about saxophonists that is surely bound to set the teeth of any clean-living citizen on edge. Something about their hunched-over, eyes-closed, self-satisfied concentration that just makes you want to put a fish in their embouchure or a potato up their bell-end. Of their saxophone.

It's a pretty British attitude, I suppose. The saxophone is a bit of a peacocky sort of instrument and there's nothing us Brits like more than taking showy people down a peg or two. Nevertheless, the saxophone's COOL reputation continues to precede it. It's hard to know what is best to do. In fact it isn't. There's no problem with the timbre or range of the instrument itself, merely with the people who play it - so the only rational conclusion is to build an automaton, bellows up one end to make the sound come parping out and some hydraulic fingers to control the keys and the notes.

But what a bloody smug machine that would be. Another job lost to mechanisation and now the sodding thing is playing the saxophone!

No-one likes a robotic saxophonist.

Let's darts!

2012-01-09T14:20:00.000Z

Did I write a blog post last year about the BDO World Darts Championship? And the year before that? I probably did*. Am I going to do another one anyway? Of course! It's one of the great traditions of my year so I may as well make reading this old rubbish one of yours.

I love it. I love the whole thing. The visuals, the excitement, the noise, the characters and the futility. I love the reigning World Champion Martin Adams, a man of such good humour, honesty and moral scruples that he is by far and away the professional sportsman for whom I have the most respect. But most of all, I love the TV coverage and the magnificence of the commentary.

The simple fact is, there's no way to make darts any more than it is - two fat-bellied men throwing darts at a board. Even the legendary Sid Waddell, who has a double first class degree in English Literature from Cambridge University can't elevate it. When he compares Eric Bristow to Alexander the Great, the brilliance comes from the humour of the juxtaposition. No matter how much anyone loves darts, it's always only darts.

Which brings us to Tony Green, a man who loves darts so much it can often leave him completely tongue-tied. This is his burden, particularly as he is a commentator on the game of darts. Every year Tony Green commits crimes against the English language, twisting it into a Möbius strip of a Möbius strip and back again. Last year he was waylaid by illness (I think maybe he sat on his darts) and unable to commentate on the final. The loss was palpable. I would like to BBC to release Tony's entire commentary output from each year's Championship as a podcast. It would be so starkly beautiful I think it could win the Turner Prize. If you listen to enough Tony Green as a stream of consciousness, I think you may well be able to achieve a higher state.

BEST OF ORDER PLEASE

I don't like the PDC. Great brassy whore of a thing. It's pretty easy to avoid it, I don't have Sky. But even if I did, I think I would give it a wide berth. There's an unpleasantness to it. The whole thing was built out of players wanting more money, nothing more or less noble than that. Where the BDO has history, honesty and the growth of the game at its heart, I see nothing but an aggressive air of proletarian menace and the celebration of spending new money in the PDC, the sporting equivalent of a man just out of prison winning the EuroMillions. Whenever I've seen the PDC on television, it's terrified me. OK, there's little doubt that it attracts many (well all right, most) of the game's top talents, but the crowds are like a baying mob. As if Unicorn had plonked an oche in the middle of the Tottenham riots. Game on!

So another January and another heap of praise for the British Darts Organisation and all they do. Christmas is never really over for me until I've spent a little time in the company of Martin "Wolfie" Adams, Ted "The Count" Hankey, John "Boy" Walton and Garry "The Cougar" Thompson (no man has ever looked or moved less like a cougar, but then again a cougar isn't as proficient at darts). Every year is the same, every year is slightly different, just like a colourful, eight-day long microcosm of life itself only with higher consumption of lager and more gold. There's some old faces, there's some new faces (I'm particularly excited about a new referee this year who looks about 14 and speaks.... very.... slowly.... and.... deliberately.... one.... hundred.... and.... eighty) and there's many more words of wisdom to be had from Tony Green and Bobby George.

This year, I'm hoping to learn fundamental truths about space and time from them. Also you get an Elizabeth Duke voucher by watching.

* turns out I didn't, but I did do one in 2009. Time flies when you're watching darts.

Klaatu Deetu

2012-01-07T09:00:00.000Z

1950s science fiction films are the best, there's absolutely no doubt. OK, the ambition and the special effects of their 1960s, 70s and 80s cousins may be superior, but they can't match their forebears for their scope and philosophical understanding. The 1950s was the first decade where science had started to become FACT rather than anything else. The early explorations of the new world order of the atomic age were destined to be the most profound and influential films of the lot.

If you watch enough 1950s science-fiction films you can learn how to live your life! Now we all know that Things are not to be trusted and Blobs can be destroyed with a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher. But one of the most significant films of the lot is The Day The Earth Stood Still, a moralistic fable about an alien coming to earth in a spaceship to warn humanity about the futility of its warlike tendencies. It is unquestionably one of the absolute classics of the genre, a film that people should and do come back to for inspiration time and time again.

The thing is, I don't like it.

It makes a number of very good, very honourable, very sane points. But I don't like it. The basic tenet of the film is that, when viewed from outside this small marble floating in space we call planet Earth, our internal squabbles are completely trivial and self-defeating, our ability to destroy ourselves a joke. Which is. of course, true. But by god this film labours the point. We all get it! Honestly we do. It's one of the great ironies of life. No matter if every single citizen of Earth knows deep down that something is a universal truth, it doesn't have any ultimate bearing on government policy. We get it Klaatu. Stop making vague threats at our intellectuals! Talk about a preachy alien!

It's an engaging enough film. It's worthy, too, of its reputation and critical acclaim. But for anyone with ever half a brain it's so self evidently truthful to be an irrelevance. Let there be no doubt, if you are profoundly stupid this film may yet save your soul. Maybe that's the point of it. And yes, obviously it was made during a very different era. Supposedly at least. Is the world really a safer, more stable, place now than it was during the bipartite Cold War struggles of the 1950s?

Nevertheless, it's hard to dislike The Day The Earth Stood Still. The world was beginning to find itself in such a to-do that really, only such remedial, primary school, action seemed like it would do any active good. Start from the bottom and work up. Maybe we are better off now, now that buffoons like me can complain about this that and the other? I hope so.

I hope so mainly because the valedictory speech of the film, where Klaatu extolls the virtues of having a race of unthinking, indiscriminate, massive robot peacekeepers on your home planet, is philosophically troubling to the point where I honestly believe both Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau may have been script consultants. People forced into peace-loving freedom and law abidance through fear of instant death! It's a big intellectual quandry (it probably isn't). But hey, maybe being forced to be peace-loving under pain of TITANIUM DEATH (the logical extension of Rousseau's The Social Contract, perhaps?) is the way to go. There'd be no wars.

Just a great, big, love-in.

Standing in the way of progress, looking to one side

2012-01-06T07:33:00.000Z

Today's post was inspired by yesterday's journal entry over at The Middle Class Handbook, which is a site that I personally think it's a good idea to read.

I don't know about you, but when I cross a road, I always like to avoid being killed so wherever possible I use crossings. I'm quite defiant about it. I'll stand there long after the last jaywalker has made their excuses, waiting for the little green man to appear. The thing is, I think people who jump that particular gun are thinking that the trade off of possibly getting really very seriously injured for arriving at their destination several seconds earlier is worth it. Having been really seriously injured, I must assure you that it is not.

Which leaves me standing at the crossing. I've pressed the button and everything - this is something which often escapes people's notice but I find it's an important step in the whole road crossing process. I'm going across the road. Across the road is where I am going to go. Straight ahead of me is my destination. Head up. Wait for that green man. He'll see me right.

And in the good old days (yes, this is going to be one of these. But I'm right, so suck it up) it was as simple as that. The little green man was waiting for you, straight ahead on the other side of the road (which as you may recall is my destination).

Road safety in action, and in Acton

But progress is an important thing. You should not and cannot, we are told, stand in its way. In this particular incidence, this is possibly because you'll get run over by a bus. Because yes! For reasons best known to someone presumably, the little green man has moved down to your side. Hip-mounted road safety is the way forwards, or indeed sideways. This is so stupid it actually hurts my brain. Not only has 'head up, look straight ahead' been the system worldwide since time begun, but it has also been the system for a good reason. On top of all of that has become a reflex, a muscle memory.

Watch a busy crossing today. I guarantee you will see at least one person look ahead, look confused, look around... then remember and look down to their side. Possibly whilst rolling their eyes to the heavens. They may even look thoroughly pissed off, as they should.

This new system makes me so angry that I'm worried my head will explode. But I reserve particular ire for the ones where the little box containing all the red man green man goodness is oriented in such a way that only people on YOUR side of the road can catch a glimpse of it. This isn't the bloody Crystal Maze for heaven's sake. Sweet Christ.

If course, in a generation's time, it will have become second nature. The children growing up now will be so used to it that changing it back to the right and proper way would be just as disorientating. However, I'm still fuming about this so all I can say is that I hope all the children of today grow up with a bleedin' permanent crick in their neck and a slight lean.

I always knew that I would turn into a disagreeable old coot sooner rather than later. But I'd never have predicted that it would be my adherence to the tenets of basic road safety that would push me over the edge.

Have a banana

2012-01-05T09:25:00.001Z

What I want to know is, what are the United Nations doing to protect people like me, who don't like bananas? We're a pitifully small number of people, easily the numerical equal of any distant jungle or island tribe whose ancient way of life is deemed worthy of preservation. But we're also far more geographically dissipated, meaning that interbreeding to pass on the vital Bananas Are Shite gene (it's recessive) is difficult.

Not liking bananas isn't like not liking olives or brussels sprouts. The poxy, stupid, yellow bastards are considered to be so universally adored that they pop up everywhere. Oh, have some banana bread. Here's a banana smoothie. Here's an ice cream with a banana in it. We've flavoured your arse medicine with banana, get stuck in. You people out there who love bananas have created a world in your own image, forcing the huddled minority to shuffle about in a netherworld, gasping for potassium.

I'm two in the hole, actually. I don't like mashed potato either. It's a texture thing fundamentally but also a little bit a taste thing. You know how people complain that children don't know where food comes from these days? Well, my problem is the opposite one. I have seen a potato. I know a potato's ways. It's a hard brown thing what's lighter inside innit. The incongruity of mashed potato jars horribly with me. Why should that thing, which could be mistaken for a rock or a particularly unlucky mole, be imbued with the virtue of CREAMINESS? Oh sweet heavens it gives me the limpies.

This is my Everest

It's not just mashed potato, it's any puréed thing which would otherwise be solid and lumpen if we'd just left it alone and stopped bullying it. The way I figure it is that a human being, if they are lucky, might get 60 years with functioning teeth. Come your dotage, you'll have ample opportunity to cram mush down your gummy maw. All the while, no doubt, thinking, "I wish I'd not wasted so many of my good toothy years sucking down celeriac purée when I could have been honking on pork scratchings and raw carrots".

And again, the mashed menace is so universally adored as to make me a cowed refugee in my own land. I accept every dinner invitation with such happiness and gratitude, only to start to wonder if Nemesis will be there awaiting me. Will I ever be set free? Should I try and learn to love mashed spuds? Why aren't they willing to meet me half way? I don't want potatoes and me to fight, we have such a long and happy history.

My message to you all today is one of tolerance and acceptance of the beliefs of others. And when catering, stick to food that everyone enjoys. Like rollmop herrings, or gherkins.

Batmaniac

2012-01-04T10:25:00.004Z

Hello. You probably know already that I draw pictures that may well be termed as cartoons. Well here's a thing about being a cartoonist: I have generally found that if people know you are a cartoonist it presupposes an extensive and actively growing knowledge of every single comic and animation ever made. I hate to disabuse people of their frankly absurd notions but in this case I have to. I know very little about either.

I would occasionally read comics in my youth - Buster and Whizzer and Chips were my favourites because the Beano and Dandy were a bit staid and old fashioned then. And I have always loved animated cartoons but not for their own sake. They had to be funny, or have good characters and stories, or preferably all three. I'm more interested in the writing than the art.

All of this cannot adequately explain the argument I am about to make. Indeed, it essentially flies in the face of it. But here I go anyway.

There is only one Batman film that I will watch, or that I consider worthy of anyone's time. It is Batman, the schlocky, campy, absurdist 1966 film version of the impending and rightfully legendary TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward. All other Batmans are simply a waste of time.

Comic books - without wishing to completely explode anyone's world view, Batman is a character from one of these - have supervillains set up deadly scenarios for superheroes, only for the protagonists to make a series of audacious and unlikely escapes. Often using handy and never-before-mentioned means, such as Shark Repellent Spray or Bat Gas. Everything is clearly labelled for the avoidance of doubt. It's daft, fun, throwaway (why do you think early issues are so valuable?) entertainment. It's silly and diverting and so clearly fantastical that it provides escapism from the humdrum.

Every single Batman film that has followed has been dark, sinister and deadly serious. Batman is real, walks among us and has Issues. I hate them for that. The 1989 Tim Burton version starring Michael Keaton wasn't bad, to be fair. It still retained a certain sense of humour, not least in casting Jack Nicholson as a suitably mental Joker. The 1992 follow-up Batman Returns isn't without merit either, with Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer well cast in their supervillan roles. However, that's as far as it goes.

I reserve particular ire for the Christian Bale Batman films. Batman Begins is a piece of shit, one of the worst films I have ever sat through. Where's the escapism or the sense of humour? And why does every big summer blockbuster film these days need a thirty-minute expositional kung-fu training sequence tacked on to the bleeding thing? What makes the original Batman so beautiful for me is that it stars Adam West, then 38-years old and a bit podgy round the middle like so many 38-year old men are. He was a gentleman crime-fighter of the Old Etonian tradition. He fought according to the Queensbury Rules. As soon as the bloody Kevlar body armour and kung fu and emotional pain and people dabbing iodine on open wounds whilst looking meaningfully at each other, I'm out.

I hope that this post doesn't cause Christian Bale to give me an earful of abuse. But even if it did it would prove my point. Comic book films need to stop taking themselves so seriously.

Ronald Searle 1920-2012

2012-01-03T12:18:00.000Z

One of my heroes has died. Ronald Searle was 91 years old so his passing isn't a shock but it is still a sadness. I believe he is the greatest cartoonist that the world has ever produced, capable of producing such enchantment, wit, animation, joy and wisdom in a simple drawing that he should be held up with all the other greats from the history of art.

He's going to be fundamentally remembered and talked about in the context of St. Trinian's, but of course he produced so much more. Magical illustrations, reportage and travelogues. Pictures of stars of stage and screen. Magnificent, understanding, pictures of animals. You could spend many far less profitable hours than the ones you could devote to looking through the pictures on this magnificent tribute site.

More or less every single cartoonist and graphic artist from his professional emergence in the1940s up to the present day - and beyond, believe me it will be and beyond - has been influenced by him, whether or not they even know it. Many of his more overt disciples have gone on to become some of the most respected names in the industry of their own right - Gerald Scarfe, Ralph Steadman and Matt Groening among their number.

I hope that the countless tributes Searle's passing will produce are copiously illustrated with his work. They represent the very definition of a celebration of life. Both his and ours. Today I feel sadness but also the most enormous sense of gratitude and wonder. The latter two will always remain.

Like everybody who has ever lifted a pencil to try and draw a picture from the 20th Century onward, I owe him more than I can ever say.

Showers are rubbish and for the weak

2012-01-02T13:15:00.001Z

I prefer baths to showers. I will always have a bath instead of a shower wherever possible. I don't understand the modern obsession with viewing the bath as somehow an extravagance, a pamper or a whole evening's work.

And yes, in the words of Cosmo Kramer, there is an aspect of lying around in a tepid pool of your own filth to it. But I suppose I must just be into that.

The strength of the bath is that it provides me with thinking time. When I'm in the bath, I don't listen to music or the radio or read (the pages get wet, you mad people, what are you thinking of?). I don't watch television or play with plastic battleships and re-enact some of the key naval engagements of World War II. I don't even sing. I don't even wash myself. I don't even put any water in it. OK, the last two things were lies.

So it's just me and some soap and my rubber duckie (which, tragically, I do not have and if I do anything this year it should definitely to be to get one) and my beautiful, brilliant mind. The same mind which conspires against me for the rest of the waking and unconscious day, telling me how rubbish I am and how it would have been better for everyone if I'd died that time, is somehow placated entirely by warm water and the partial immersion of its associated body therein. Bathtime allows me to think with a clarity, constructiveness and rationality of which I simply do not seem capable in any other situation. Standing up brings out the absolute worst in me. I also get all my best creative ideas in the bath, including ideas for blog posts. I thought up the idea for this one and drafted it in my head in the bath this morning.

I've worked through a lot of stuff when in the bath. If I switched to showers I think I'd be dead by now. In fact, that's not even a joke.

You can't think in the shower. You can sink and wank and clean your stinkables, certainly, but you can't think. Ray Mears taught me that. He said that when you're in a survival situation in the rainforest, you should make your shelter before the afternoon downpour starts, because the simple unrelenting pounding of raindrops on your head makes it difficult to think clearly. He's right. Try and do some algebra in the shower. It is hard. In the bath, in the meantime, you are able to start to see the meaning of the cosmos.

You can learn a lot from Ray Mears. He espouses survival, which is a wise thing to espouse. But the key thing he teaches you is humility, an understanding of what human beings truly need. Not what they think they need or might like to think they need. Just what you have to have to get by. A foundation upon which one can then start to build comfort and happiness in time. It's an important lesson, and it's remarkable that we have to rely on a man whose diet primarily consists of ants and wipes his bottom on leaves to teach it to us.

I tell you something: I bet Ray Mears is a bath man.

Goodbye 2011

2011-12-31T09:21:00.000Z

My 2011 awards are definitely legally binding

2011-12-30T17:58:00.000Z

The end of 2011 is upon us. I've crested the peaks! I've plumbed the depths! I've generally speaking managed to look miserable whichever one I was doing at the time! I've only cut my hair once (and that was because some teenage girls were pointing and laughing at me at Shoreham station. I am 31 years old). I have done an unprecedented 219 blog posts (although 30 of those were written by other people). I have tweeted approximately enough words to have written a novel. I have not written a novel.

All of these things give me an increased sense of self-importance so I'm going to talk about some of the stuff I have most enjoyed this year, in this, the seasons of awards and the BBC telling us it's been the hottest/driest/wettest/coldest year on record as if I'm supposed to be able to do anything about that.

My favourite blog post of the year that I wrote is definitely this one, about the Doncaster Warehouse rave. Whenever anyone says anything nice about my blog then I immediately think back to this post and assume that it's about that. I have not heard anything from any of the key players in that spirited drama, which is a shame. Although they're probably all far too busy being responsible middle-aged people these days.

My favourite blogs of this year have been Skulls and Ponies, Panda and Crumpet and I See A Beautiful Future. During the year I have met all of the people responsible for these blogs and was delighted to discover they are all as lovely as I'd hoped they were, whilst they discovered I'm a lot worse than they had feared I'd be. All three of these blogs are so bursting with ideas and style the internet can barely contain their goodness. They are also shot through with a level of honesty and thoughtfulness to which I can only aspire.

My favourite blog post of 2011 is either this one by Betsy about STRESS or this one by 5olly, which defies all rational description but reminds me that the world would be better if 5olly blogged more often. 5olly also wrote the funniest post on this site of the entire year, a fact simply bound to make me feel bitter.

My favourite thing that I drew this year is my illustration for Panda and Crumpet's first anniversary blog post of Johnny Cash. I've had a very average drawing year in 2011. Nothing too special, nothing too lousy. Ideas have been hard to come by too often. However, this is just about perfect. When I see things like this and remember I did them it makes me think that there's a chance that I don't completely stink the place out.

My favourite thing on television this year was Burnistoun, the best sketch show that's been on British television in over a decade and inexplicably squirrelled away by the BBC so that it's only available to English viewers with access to iPlayer or enough amphetamines to stay up to the witching hour. It deserves a much bigger audience. They should put it on instead of the 10 o'clock news. The most disappointing thing I saw on television this year was the latest series of Doctor Who, the plotlines of which too often required a doctorate in theoretical physics to understand.

My favourite music of this year was all from 1991.

My favourite film of the year was Senna. It is also the only new film I saw in 2011, which is not to detract from how good it is.

All in all, I'm awarding 2011 seven out of ten.

New Year's resolutions

2011-12-29T10:18:00.000Z

I don't normally make New Year's resolutions, least not formally write them down. However, this year I have. I think some sort of public accountability might make me actually pull my bleeding finger out and get some stuff done. I am pretty sure that one day this piece of paper will come back to haunt me, like Charles Foster Kane's Declaration of Principles. This is one reason that I shall not be giving it to Jed Leland, that troublemaking swine.

Hello

2011-12-26T12:29:00.001Z

Hello. That's what they say. When you are walking, that is. I'm not sure what happens to British people as soon as they get off public highways and onto promenades and footpaths but they seem hell-bent on saying "HELLO!" to people as they pass. Whatever it is I am clearly immune to it. In many ways I would quite like to try it, but never on a footpath on the Downs or along the seafront or in the woods. I'd prefer to try it in central London at 8.15 a.m. on a Tuesday morning.

I digress slightly. Today I went for a walk to Shoreham Old Fort. This is in Shoreham. Shoreham Beach, to be precise. West Sussex. Although by that point you're getting quite close to being in East Sussex, so close that you can smell the refinement. Or you would be able to if it weren't for the diesel fumes of heavy industry.

Anyway, I took pictures of it, so if you are a fucking lazy bastard or something, you can vicariously live my thrilling life. But rest assured that I hate you. Unless I don't. So, that's that cleared up. (Click them to make them bigger)

This beach hut looks like Adolf Hitler.

This bin comes with instructions about what to put in it.

Lonely egret is lonely.

Shoreham in the distance, houseboats in the middle & loads of green stuff in front of that.

Shoreham fort. Designed to keep the Egyptians at bay. It's working.

R.I.P. Harry Ayre, whoever you are. I imagine he drowned.

Shoreham power station busily making power which does not interest seagull.

There's an entire army division in this shed (re: Egyptians)

Shoreham lighthouse and lifeboat station. To prevent deaths (sadly not that of Harry Ayre).

I don't know what this is.

Cormorant. Maximum speed 6 knots.

Here are some boats going to B&Q.

Here is Shoreham lighthouse again BUT! from a different angle.

These boats are a bit knackered. Sort your boats out, people.

BEACH. Looking back towards Worthing. Wherever the hell that is.

There are some hardy souls fishing here. They have caught some birds.

There is Shoreham High Street, where everyone is high. HIGH ON LIFE. And some drugs.

I should also point out that I could have walked past the Shoreham houseboats but chose not to. This is because my photography skills are largely limited to taking wonky pictures of seagulls and falling over. Luckily for you, though, in November I walked along there with my friend Lolly and she is super-blazing-OMG-awesome at photography so you should have a look at her pictures instead. Go on!

Happy Christmas

2011-12-25T20:00:00.001Z

Hello blog. Blog is a bit like a diary really. I tell it all sorts of things and sometimes forget that other people can - and indeed are encouraged to - read it. Never completely though. There's always that thing in the back of your mind urging caution.

I'm an old stager of social networking. I've never really been an early adopter of anything before but this time I have been. Kind of accidentally, and a lot of the people I know are far more seasoned campaigners than me. But I've pretty much seen it all now, as I've mentioned here several times before. One of the consequences of this is that I'm possessed of a fairly firm set of principles and guidelines about what I will and will not post.

I am now particularly drunk thanks to whomsoever it was who invented the red grape. But my principles are so unshakeable so I'm not going to start whiffling on about my specific personal business now. Interestingly I have no such foibles about discussing (in some depth) the parlous state of my mental health. Maybe I know that, really, that's all just make-believe and hooey. I imagine that most people who will read this will know me and will maybe know what I'm talking about anyway.

This Christmas Day could well prove to be a highly significant one for a number of reasons. I've been very determined to enjoy the whole holiday season - to the point where, in fact, I've even worried about not doing so, dissecting the whole experience bit-by-bit in my head to try and decide if I'm doing it RIGHT. But after lunch today, full of meat and brassicas and wine and Christmas, I sat (lay, heaving) down on the sofa and just thought about stuff. I felt such great waves of gratitude at my good fortune to have such wonderful people around me in my life that I almost wept. I felt truly happy.

I hope you have all felt truly happy this Christmas.

Christmas song digest

2011-12-24T08:00:00.000Z

Hello. Regular readers of this shit will no doubt be aware that I am pretty much completely dead inside, devoid of any of the normal human emotions or sentiment. However, even this doesn't mean I'm completely past enjoying Christmas songs. That's right. Think on that one.

Here are some Christmas songs which, if you don't like them, you can rest assured that you're even more twisted, shrunken and dried up inside than me. In which case I sincerely advise that some sort of therapy could be useful in the new year.

Be warned. There are very few trendy or left-field suggestions here. I'm not even being meta. Or meta-meta. Christmas is fundamentally a time for chintzy, shiny rubbish to make up for the general lack of daylight. I make no apologies. Well, some apologies.

I hope you all have a happy Christmas.

Darlene Love - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

This is my favourite track from the Phil Spector Christmas album A Christmas Gift for You. My overall enthusiasm for this album is very much under control. I dislike Phil Spector's production, his Wall of Sound - whilst pioneering - was so much more aggressive and unpleasant than Brian Wilson's that I believe Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys is a more festive-sounding record, even though it has nothing to do with the season. Phil Spector having been continually proven to be more aggressive and unpleasant a human being than Brian Wilson this isn't a particularly big surprise.

I love this record, though. The smack-you-round-the head-until-it-bleeds stridency of the production, the content of the song and the vocal performance all come together beautifully.

Wizzard - I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day

There's no doubting that we all disagree with the title of this song. However, it's increasingly as traditional as roast turkey and profound emotional pain to the whole affair. And yes, it's annoying and twee and shit, but that's Christmas all over.

Slade - Merry Christmas Everybody

This song is brilliant. You know it. I know it. There's no point in hiding from it any more. Just bloody accept it so we can all move on with our lives. I don't want Christmas songs to be dark, or different, or have a message or a story to tell. This song is absolutely the best example of its kind. Fact.

Shakin' Stevens - Merry Christmas Everyone

Herein lies the all-time greatest cultural achievement of the Welsh nation. Probably the last great Christmas pop record ever made. No wonder the world's gone to the dogs, it was 26 years ago.

Die Hard: A warning from history

2011-12-23T07:30:00.000Z

As we all know, the inspirational boffins at CERN have been colliding hadrons with the best of them over the last three years and inventing physics and discovering bosons and all sorts. But one of the best-known effects of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland is that in 2060, it opened a portal in time and space allowing time travel. Today's post comes courtesy of the 80-year old me, who popped round this morning with his considered historical retrospective of all of the Die Hard film series.

For almost 100 years, Die Hard films have been entertaining the masses with their slick blend of violence, wit, thrills and vests. They have variously taught us never to trust the Germans and also that the best form of defence is to blindly attack without any fear or indeed knowledge of the likely consequences. A practice which Bruce Willis took into his unfortunate four-year US Presidential term with some disastrous results, most of them for Suriname.

I love Die Hard films. They make me feel alive. Or rather, they make me feel like whatever explodes near me, I will not die. Alas, the series itself, as all things must, came to an end in 2042. Still, it allows me to provide a considered retrospective of the whole set. Some people believe that it remains the high watermark of what human civilisation has produced. Others, don't.

Die Hard (1988)

The original and, some think, still the best. McClane arrives at the Nakatomi building in Los Angeles to spend Christmas with his estranged wife and family, only to have his plans interrupted by a German terrorist syndicate led by Hans Grüber. This film establishes the pattern for all of the future installments: our hero is, by a combination of accident and misfortune, left to battle all the forces of crime and evil single-handedly. Often in spite of the bumbling of uniformed paper pushers. The enemy are sharp, multinational and prepared for every eventuality. ALL BAR ONE.

Die Hard 2: Die Harder (1990)

As we all know, Die Hard 2 is the best Die Hard film. McClane has to thwart a cartel of ex-military men hell bent on rescuing a deposed South American military dictator, with a perky weather eye on his massive stash of cocaine. Their method: taking over Washington DC's Dulles Airport on Christmas Eve, without a care in the world for all the people in the skies above. Including, of course, McClane's wife, Mrs. McClane. This one is non-stop pulsating action, with some top Sherlock Holmes-style sleuthing from the nevertheless always-in-a-vest John McClane. On the way, he escapes certain death by using an ejector seat and explodes a jumbo jet with a trail of leaking fuel. The latter represents the action film equivalent of Scooby Doo floating down a corridor after the whiff of a sandwich.

Die Hard 3: Die Hard With A Vengeance (1995)

The Grüber dynasty returns, with Hans' younger brother Simon engaging John McClane in a preposterous game of Simon Says across New York City to find a bomb planted in a school, all as a blind so that his terrorist cartel (many of whom are masters of disguise and ninjas) can rob all the gold out of the Central Reserve. Together with a shopkeeper from Harlem who hates whitey, McClane must foil Grüber before his accent slips and reveals that, like all Germans in Hollywood cinema, he's actually RADA-trained. Die Hard 3 has perhaps the most thrilling first half of any film in the series, but the pace slackens somewhat towards the end, which is a shame.

Die Hard 4.0: Live Free Or Die Hard (2007)

Cyber-terrorism brings the entire eastern seaboard of the United States to a complete standstill. McClane, once again in the wrong place at the wrong time, must protect a seasoned 12-year old computer hacker so that he can save the world whilst combining being a major Luddite and saving his, now teenaged and inevitably estranged, daughter Lucy. Some of the set pieces in this film are so preposterous as to be almost cartoonish - McClane's spell hanging off the wing of a fighter jet is a particular highlight. Die Hard 4.0 divides opinion as a result, but I think there's really no need - every Die Hard film is complete, wonderful lunacy and requires the suspension of disbelief and good faith on the part of the viewer.

Die Hard 5: Die Hard Left, Right, Then Left Again (2014)

John McClane - oddly still not a huge world celebrity and global hero - is sent on secondment to Ludlow, Shropshire to teach schoolchildren the Green Cross Code. Again in exactly the worst place on earth at the exact wrong time, a group of embittered biological scientists release a superplague in Bristol Zoo. Owing to Britain's stringent handgun laws, McClane must thwart their nefarious scheme with a purloined pea shooter until he meets an embittered but beautiful sheep farmer on the Welsh border who teaches him to love again and more importantly has a shed full of shotguns.

Die Hard 6: I'm Dying Hard (2020)

John McClane achieved some measure of fame as a result of saving the world in Die Hard 5 - doing so five times apparently gets you on the cover of Time Magazine. However, during an appearance on Rikki Lake discussing his ongoing treatment for lung cancer, the youngest of the Grüber brothers, Gus Grüber (Daniel Radcliffe) rears his ugly head. Holding the entire studio audience to ransom with a bomb made of pork that Rikki Lake had unwittingly eaten, the televised farrago distracts from his gang's overarching aim - stealing everything in the entire world.

Die Hard 7: King Tut or Die Hard Trying (2037)

A militant group of Egyptologists plan to change all of culture back to 3000 BC levels, including replacing modern alphabets with hieroglyphs and chucking the Rosetta Stone in the sea. Their paymasters, a major multinational phone company, are about to launch the only smartphone that can send texts in Runes and are looking to corner the market. McClane - who survived cancer by shooting it - is typically on a sightseeing cruise of the Nile when everything kicks off. A controversial film, finished digitally after the 81-year old Bruce Willis died of scorpions during the production.

Die Hard 8: Died Hard (2042)

The most controversial film yet, as a puppet John McClane discusses his life story in a retirement home in the Yukon Valley. Cobbled together with a selection of clips, outtakes and deleted scenes from the previous 7 films, Died Hard was criticised for lacking a solid narrative drive, although many critics raved over the content of some individual scenes which they believed to be among the strongest in the franchise. The scene where McClane rides an atomic brontosaurus through Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia posthumously won Willis an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Rocky 2, The Rockening

2011-12-22T10:13:00.000Z

I admit that I've already written about the film Rocky, but I just can't stop thinking about it. The reason for this is simple: every review I read of it is glowing and it bored the pants off of me. This leads me to believe that I'm missing something. But the more I analyse it, the more I come to the inescapable conclusion that Film World is in the grip of a mass delusion and that I am right, a lone voice in the wilderness. I suppose this makes me Film Karl Marx.

"Expertly paced, benefiting from well-drawn characters and an evocative, often funny script, ROCKY simply pushes all the right buttons"
The Eighth Virgin Film Guide (1999)

This quote comes from their four-out-of-five star review, meaning that they consider Rocky "excellent". But it isn't! It is daft.

Rocky Balboa, as you may recall him from yesterday's post

Who is Rocky supposed to be? He's a socially-conscious man who is down with the poor and the disenfranchised yoof, but his job is to break people's knees for a debt collector. And he's not very good at that, social consciousness gets in the way. And although he's poor and never made much of himself, he doesn't seem down about it. He's happy in his own little pond, with his turtles. If this is meant to be a great tale of redemption, it's happening to somebody who doesn't need or want it.

Maybe Rocky is on a messianic quest to die for all our sins by getting his face beaten to a pulp? This was a key element to Raging Bull, Jake La Motta seeking punishment and justification from his in-ring beatings. And he certainly does get a beating. So does Apollo Creed. Their title bout is almost certainly the most brutal boxing encounter I have ever seen. Every single punch gets through, as if The Penguin out of Batman had malevolently suggested that blocking was for big blouse-wearing poofters. The punishment meted out to both fighters in the first 30 seconds of the first round alone would normally be sufficient to see the ambulances being called.

But Rocky Balboa accepts his lot, be it beating up Hobo Joe Ratboy in a Church mission centre or fighting for the Heavyweight Championship of the World (this would never happen, but still, we must remember that it's a film and in films anything can happen). He tries his best, whether his opponent enters the ring on a horse or whether they bring their own Thermos. He's happy to make a crust from boxing. He doesn't care if he could have been a contender, could have been somebody. He's just happy to get some money for cigarettes.

Even the introduction of a love-interest doesn't seem to be the motivating factor. He's happy to do this for himself and then go home for a little wuggle. Although I have to say, Rocky's success in bringing the autistically-shy Adrian (that's a man's name) out of her shell is far better than any 300 lb man who punches beef for a living had a right to expect. I think Rocky Balboa's real calling was social work. A missed opportunity. In between punches, he could have waylaid Apollo Creed by asking him about his mother.

Maybe I'm over-thinking this (I am). But really, why would anyone really worship a film that falls apart under even the most basic scrutiny possible, i.e. by me, an idiot? My expectations of a film are not that high. I love shit films. I have already written about my love of the oeuvre of Mr. Renny Harlin and Snakes on a Plane. I don't ask for much. But then, I also love good films, films that change the pace of the world, alter your perceptions and make you think. I wonder if perhaps the reason Rocky has disappointed me so much is that it resolutely falls in between these two camps. I can cope with stupidity and I can cope with genius. Mediocrity makes me nervous.

Rocky (or: are all films about sport rubbish?)

2011-12-21T11:00:00.000Z

I'd never seen the film Rocky before yesterday. Generally speaking I've tended to avoid any film where Sylvester Stallone punches a cow and for preference I'd have wanted the cow to be alive. However, this Christmas I have decided to watch at least one film every day and Rocky was conveniently located on the television. So began the relentless pounding on a bovine and montages with steps in (not the pop group).

I knew an oddly large amount about Rocky considering I'd never seen it. I knew it was Sylvester Stallone's breakthrough film, the lead role in a self-penned script, written in the absence of any decent acting roles presenting themselves to him. It was very well-received, too, winning the Academy Award for best picture and Stallone nominations for both his performance and his original screenplay.

This is all very remarkable considering that it's a really dull film.And I mean dull. Duller than any film where Sly beats the crap out of a beef more than once has a right to be. Formulaic. Poundingly so. I began to emphathise with the meat. But it's not Rocky's fault. It is a film about sport, and films about sport are largely unsalvageable, even in cases where The Penguin from Batman makes a concerted effort to not be like The Penguin in Batman (which, in this instance, he does not).

Rocky Balboa, whomping ass on some beef yesterday

I like films and I like sport, so the absence of any good dramatised films about sport should irk me. But it really doesn't. What irks me is that people plough on trying to make them regardless.

I think that the problem is that sport is intrinsically more dramatic than narrative fiction. Everything that can be written and imagined has occurred in sport, but even less likely things have happened too. And sport is not always fair and friendly to narrative. Bad things happen and at unfortunate times, unpopular people win, popular people endure a career without. Films are fair. Life is not.

Of course, this is the reprieve for the sports documentary film. Without the responsibility of having to come up with its own story, the very best of both worlds can come out to play. Indeed, sports documentaries can often be among the most engaging and moving films one can ever see. In the last year I've been enthralled and captivated by both Senna and When We Were Kings. No-one could invent Ayrton Senna or Muhammad Ali, and if they did no-one would believe them.

All of this makes Raging Bull all the more remarkable for me. Of course, it is based on biography, which helps make the story ring true. But it is also impossibly dramatic and moving without ever sacrificing the power and impact of any of the in-ring action sequences. (Unlike Rocky, Raging Bull's fight sequences do stay entirely within the ring at all times, an inspired decision). Maybe therein lies the secret formula for all sports films: to combine biographical detail with good acting and memorable scenes.

It's a formula that Ron Howard is currently trying to replicate in his forthcoming film Rush, about the friendship and sporting rivalry of racing drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda. Hunt and Lauda, both men of huge character and talent, shared a unique camaraderie for top line sporting rivals and a titanic 1976 season full of excitement, controversy and mortal peril. It's a story that would have been a great film.And now it will be.

But I'm not holding my breath. It'll be a film about sport, after all. And they're always rubbish.

The Big Bus

2011-12-20T08:00:00.000Z

Today's film blog is a guest post by Dave, the author of the spirited blog of lists, Chop's Top Fives. It contains everything anyone could ever want from a blog post: an atomic-powered bus and a top 5 list to finish.

Thanks to Dave!

I don’t get to watch enough films. Certainly not enough films that I really want to see. This is, at least partly, to do with having children. My boys are 8 and 11 and generally rule the television remote from early morning until early evening. Once we have got them off to bed, a process that seems to take longer every night and generally involves some level of shouting, heated discussion or basic bribery, we’re left with a slot of about an hour to eat tea and watch something Mrs Top 5 likes. I then have the television all to myself from around 10 o’clock until I fall asleep on the sofa. Recently this has been roughly ten minutes past 10.

We go to the Cinema quite regularly but nearly always with the boys (this is a good thing I realise, I’m not complaining) and therefore only to see the latest family blockbuster. That means it will probably be animated, definitely be in 3D and almost certainly star Ben Stiller.

All this pre-ramble just goes some way to explaining the reasons for the huge number of well known films I haven’t seen (Top Gun, Casablanca and Saving Private Ryan to name just three) and my general poor taste in movies.

Should you spend any time in a pub with me, and if we are to spend time together I highly recommend a pub as the best location (it’s where I’m at my most entertaining), and the conversation turns to film then the chances are I will, at some point, extol the virtues of the 1976 disaster movie spoof The Big Bus.

I love The Big Bus, I think it’s hilarious and can reel of lines of dialogue with little encouragement. However I’m acutely aware that I’m in a small minority with this opinion. I’ve recommended this film to a lot of my friends. This has not always worked out particularly well. In fact I only know one other person in the world who likes The Big Bus as much as me and we saw it for the first time the same weekend and have traded jokes from it at regular intervals ever since. Everyone else thinks it’s shit.

I watched it recently with my two boys. I thought this might broaden their film tastes and provide us with more opportunity to watch something other than an episode of “The Amazing World of Gumball” or “Johnny Test” for the 37th time. We lasted 25 minutes before they made me turn it off.

To be fair, it does start quite slowly. If you’re prepared to give it a chance (or are just happy to skip the first half-an-hour) I think you’ll find it’s worth your time. You might also want to consider having copious amounts of alcohol on hand to help you through the dull bits. With this in mind, and because I struggle to write competently in any other form, here’s a top five of my favourite moments.

1. “Quick, raise the flags of all nations” – The main star of the film is the Bus of the title. A nuclear powered bus, called Cyclops, which is equipped with all the conveniences you’d expect from modern travel; A bowling alley, a swimming pool, a formal dining room, a piano bar, and the flags of all nations. The climax of the film sees a bomb go off (I’m not spoiling anything by telling you this) and the drivers fighting to regain control as Cyclops weaves it’s way through mountain roads. The flags of many nations are their last ditch attempt to slow the bus down.

2. “Why do they call you shoulders?” – The Bus is driving non-stop from New York to Denver so needs two drivers on board. Co-driver "Shoulders" O'Brien has huge shoulders but that’s not where he got his nickname from.

3. "Eat one lousy foot and they call you a cannibal" – Lead driver Dan Torrance had been accused of saving his own life by eating all of his passengers when a previous Bus he drove crashed at the top of Mount Diablo. He spends most of the film claiming he survived by eating the seats and it was his co-driver who ate the passengers, but finally breaks down at a formal meal to celebrate the Bi-Centenary.

4. “Look out he’s got a broken milk carton” – Before being recruited to join the crew Torrance is down on his luck and shunned by his fellow bus drivers. A fight breaks out in a bar and the weapons of choice are a cardboard milk carton and a broken candle stick.

5. “Welcome to the oriental bar” – The piano bar sits on the top deck of the bus with panoramic views of the surrounding country. The bar sees various passengers drowning their sorrows whilst the pianist sings inappropriate tunes.

I’m not sure I’ve done a great job of selling the film. Reading back what I’ve written doesn’t make it sound very funny, yet I’ve been chuckling to myself throughout.

If you do watch this movie, please don’t hate me afterwards.

2011: accentuate the positive

2011-12-19T10:36:00.000Z

All year I've been complaining about the shitty year I've had. This is my right as an Englishman. It's also been a complete waste of my time. Trouble is, I've started to believe my own propaganda. Last week I got some bad news. Personal stuff, you'd not be interested. But the point is, it stopped me from blundering blindly along, bemoaning my misfortune over the last 12 months. It's been alright. It's actually been better than alright, it's taught me about being a human being.

What I will take from 2011 is that you don't need unendingly positive things to happen to you for them to be positive experiences. In fact, much of what has happened to me has ultimately led to stress, worry and sadness. I've lost a grandparent who was a significant part of my upbringing. I've lost my cat who had been part of my life for over half of it. Friends have moved away, moved on, moved up. And there's nothing but the prospect of more to come. But that's OK because 2011 has taught me I'm equal to it.

In fact, 2011 has taught me that I can be better than it. I've never made more new friends in a year as an adult as I have in the last 12 months. And that's not through things falling into my lap. It's been because I've put myself out there to do it. I risked rejection to do it but ultimately didn't encounter any. It's been a learning experience, and like any learning experience I'm not there yet. I have been slow to adjust to all the new things. This will get better and I will be better in 2012. I've been a good friend, a new friend, an old friend and I'm afraid to say, a bad friend in 2011. Not bad for any other reason than blindspots, laziness and not realising all the things I could and should have done.

There are a couple of people who I feel I've treated particularly shabbily and I'll be trying to redress that balance and keep it redressed next year.

But like everything else that has come out of 2011, although I don't feel good about having done that, I'm not feeling good about it for good reasons, positive reasons. I'm not beating myself to a pulp in a corner over some perceived internal failing. I let myself slip, I recognised it and learnt from it.

2011 has been really tough going, but I've got through it and I'm a better person because of it. And it's not just me thinking that, independent adjudicators have confirmed it. Which is particularly pleasing to me. 2012 promises to be the hardest year of my life. But I'll get through that as well.

I hate Westerns, they are shit

2011-12-16T08:30:00.003Z

I'll give almost any genre of film a go. For one thing, strict generic classification of stuff is a rather reductive thing to do. For another, the more stuff you deny yourself on principle then more fool you, I increasingly find. However, I don't watch Westerns. I hate Westerns. They are shit.

It may be that they were so beloved of my grandfather, of whom I was always terrified. Maybe I associate them with that. But then, he also liked to watch sport on TV, and I can report no significant negative associations there. No, I'm pretty sure the problem lies within the Western itself, and how shit it is.

I'm not even sure why they're popular. They were pretty well ubiquitous in the early days of Hollywood, mainly I suspect due to the geographical location making endlessly dull retellings of the great American frontiersman's travails particularly easy to shoot without the need for any additional backdrops or scenery. Plus, you know, it's a nice story. Wholesome. Who wouldn't want to be reminded about the merciless cultural imperialism and rapacious greed of the European settlers at the expense of the native people? Fun times.

And yet, people still make Westerns. They've been making them pretty much non-stop since the dawn of cinema. This probably explains why in any average week on British television, you'll probably find a Western every couple of days or so in the schedules. It's enough to make me want to amputate my head. Fortunately, I discovered that not watching them was easier.

I thought that, as I'm currently engaged in a series of posts about films, it may be nice to redress this bias. Educate myself in the ways of the Westerns. Perhaps even live blog the experience of watching some of the classic Westerns that will no doubt be on over the Christmas holidays.

Last Saturday I watched a porno whilst drinking Carlsberg Special Brew for the benefit of the advancement of human knowledge. HOWEVER. When it comes to Westerns, I just simply can't bring myself to do it. Even in the name of science.

I hate Westerns. They are shit.

Let's make a film

2011-12-15T08:45:00.000Z

I've been writing a lot about films recently. Well, it has been my film series. However, I thought it might be a good idea to lay my cards on the table and reveal some of my own ideas for films. Long-time readers of my blog will know that this is not the first time I have done this. They will also know that I'm an idiot and what is about to follow is not the sort of thing anyone should waste any time reading.

Nevertheless, for the rest of you, I'm a man of many ideas and almost all of them have not been thought through in the slightest. However, if anyone makes a film based on any of the following outlines, you owe all the money to me.

Jim Smitt and the Megalodon

Jim Smitt's run-of-the-mill suburban life is interrupted when a megalodon moves in next door and teaches him the true value of partying down.

President Bear

The United States Presidential Inauguration ceremony goes badly wrong after a passing grizzly bear is erroneously made the 45th President of the United States. The law makers face a race against time to rewrite the constitution and remove the bear from office before he bombs Mexico.

Atomic Titanic

Evil nuclear scientists make a cruise liner that not only can never be sunk but also never be stopped, and force the cast of 42nd Street to perform on it round the clock. Can rogue iceberg scientist Dr. Melly Gound be lured out of retirement to end this madness?

Son of Dog

A man whose Patterdale terrier has been officially declared as the second coming of Christ by the Vatican has to trek across Europe before he's crucified by the Romans.

Bag of Skunks

A terrorist group hold a nursery school for genius children of scientists and mathematicians hostage with a big bag of skunks...

This was written down in the United States

2011-12-14T15:33:00.004Z

"Well, the Lone Ranger and Tonto
They're ridin' down the line
Fixin’ everybody’s troubles
Everybody’s ’cept mine
Somebody musta told ’em
That I was doin’ fine"

Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan's Blues

Everybody likes to be nice and helpful. It's a good feeling to help someone out, or even feel that you've done your best to try. Of course, even if the problems are very similar to your own, solving them - even helping to solve them - is a very different proposition. This week I've been doing a bit of troubleshootin' and shoulderwork myself. I feel good about that. But it's made me realise I'm a hypocrite if I then don't also try and address the same things in myself.

I've been thinking a lot about counselling recently, mainly due to my friend Nina's brilliant new blog on the subject which I have mentioned here before, but also because a number of my friends have told me about their positive experiences of it in the past year or so. Not only have I heard about their positive experiences, I have also seen and felt its beneficial effects in them.

I've had experiences of counselling in the past, but they've all been negative and unhelpful. I'm sure as much of the failures were my fault as they were the fault of the people involved. Nevertheless, failures they were. The most recent of these was in 2002, which as mathematics professors everywhere will be able to tell you is nearly 10 years ago. A person can change a lot in ten years, especially if 10 years ago you were 22 years old and as such thought you knew everything. These days I'm far less dismissive of anything, knowing full well that things have a way of coming back round in circles and if you're too cocky, of biting you on the arse.

My concern is that it will be too difficult to find the right person. I know that the right counsellor or right approach is out there for me somewhere, or rather, that is what I now choose to believe. It's not a friend you want. I want someone outside of that, someone who can ask and be told things that I'd not necessarily be comfortable sharing with people I know. However, I also want them to be someone who I feel I can trust, whom I respect and someone who actually cares.

Like a friend.

I hope this guardian angel exists out there somewhere, because I think I owe it to myself to try and find them in 2012. Even if only to address my impossibly high expectations of people and of things.

On the cult of the director and Renny Harlin

2011-12-13T09:27:00.005Z

Being a man of the people (hello, people) I'm a little bit suspicious of the whole world of the cinematic auteur. Should films be covered in the fingerprints of the person (it's usually a man, let's be honest. Only men have got enough spare time to piss away making films) who made them? Should they reflect their own personal and/or artistic vision? Do they?

It's certainly the case that many directors films will be stylistically similar. They'll all have a style and a theme of their own. Many stick to one genre or one formula, especially if it proves to be successful or lucrative. That's fine by me. I understand that. However, people doing it consciously gives me the limpies. That just smacks of being fake. Trying to fake being yourself. Now there's one to test even the very best counsellors.

If I'm honest, I have sought out particular films simply because they were made by a certain director in my time. However, this was simply born out of the fact that I have enjoyed their other work. Alfred Hitchcock is a very good example. Hitchcock made some of my very favourite films and his ideas about what cinema should be are compelling (I got a book about it, you see). But I've never given in to the personality cult of the director. I don't want to go into a film thinking, "I WONDER WHAT THIS PERSON HAS TO SAY". I just want to see a good story, told in an interesting and engaging way.

However, all my best efforts to be an intellectually bankrupt simpleton are at risk of being derailed thanks to one man (I think he is a man): Renny Harlin.

I am fascinated by Renny Harlin. He has a good name, for a start. Renny. But then there's also the films that he makes. You can't go wrong with The Long Kiss Goodnight or Deep Blue Sea. You really can't. For one thing they've both got Samuel L. Jackson in them. Pow. Renny Harlin also made the best Die Hard film of the lot, Die Hard 2: Die Harder. And Cliffhanger, the film tht definitively proves that heights are bad and John Lithgow is not fundamentally cut out to play criminals. These are four films of a key group which I plan to come back to at a later date: Films that I will watch every time they're on television.

The trouble is, I end up thinking "who is this man Renny Harlin,who makes my heart pound so with his exciting action films? I wonder what he has to say?"

Damn it!

He's too enigmatic, that's the problem. With his terrific name (Renny) and his films and the fact that I don't even know what he looks like. I decided to try and demystify him so I could stop being such a film ponce. Yesterday afternoon I watched How To Murder Your Wife (director: Renny Harlin) and as I did it drew what I thought Renny Harlin might look like in my book. Here are the results.

I think it helped. He certainly seemed less elusive and fascinating now that he had a face. But of course, I couldn't leave it there. I had to find out what he actually looked like, so that I might finally achieve closure. And here he is:

Tintin's dad. Apparently he's from Finland. Who knew? So there you are. I'm finally free! Stick it up your arse, François Truffaut!

My first porno

2011-12-12T14:05:00.004Z

Not all men are porn-obsessed smutmonsters. Honestly, we're not. On Saturday evening I watched my first ever porn film along with my friend 5olly. It was his first porn film too, and at 40 years of age he is nine years older than me. That's a combined 71 years of dispelling all sorts of popular notions about the male of the species. We should be very proud.

Sadly, we then watched Sexboat and blotted our copybook to some extent.

It's hard to know exactly what to make of Sexboat. It being our first and only pornographic film experience, our plane of reference is seriously lacking in calibration. Are you supposed to compare it to other films you have seen? In which case, I can tell you now that Sexboat is not as good as Citizen Kane or The Apartment. Or anything, actually. It is in fact the second-worst film I've ever seen.

Yes, the unlikely saga of two male stowaways - in drag which is less believable even than Bernard Bresslaw in Carry on Matron, mind you - aboard an entirely female cruise ship and featuring rapist pirates, gratuitous sex scenes and next to no plot is still better than Sliding Doors.

However, I rather suspect that the pornographic film is something of a genre apart. Not least because its rating on IMDb is a surprisingly generous 7.2 out of 10. That's from over 100 ratings. Could it be that I missed something? It's described as an "adult comedy". Were there all kinds of knowing pornographic in-jokes and people playing with generic conventions to confound the viewer's expectations? It's possible there were and that I'd have to watch it again to spot them all.

I really don't want to watch it again.

It was horrible. Before we started watching the film, as well as drinking really quite heavily, 5olly and I were planning to make a podcast of our experience. I'd suggested we had a bell or a hooter we could sound whenever we became aroused, from the point of view of full disclosure. It was a nice conceit. However, in the end we recorded it as a video podcast so it was not a necessary device. That, and the fact it was the least arousing thing I'd ever seen.

You could probably find more titillation in a film of an abattoir. Bits of meat shot from certain artistic angles could offer some sort of figurative aspect that may excite the imagination. Imagination is not the key consumer of Sexboat. The people who watch Sexboat are not going in to use their brains. You needn't have to conjure up any mental images, unless the mental images you're after are something other than: cock, fanny, spunk or tits.

Ideally, to be a real student of cinema, I will need to watch more pornographic titles so as to better understand the language and conventions of the genre. Maybe then I could explain why anything that happens in a porn film happens. But then I'd be the sort of person who could explain the mise-en-scene of Donkey Scud Tit Shooters 3 and I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with that.

Northern monkey

2011-12-10T08:15:00.002Z

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A History of Middle-Aged Englishmen in Movies/My Heart

2011-12-09T10:57:00.006Z

Today's guest post is by my friend Jessica. She's an American but as we're always being told, Britain is overflowing with immigrants so she lives in the UK. It's handy that she does, mind you, as that's where the majority of her favourite film stars are from, as this piece now reveals. Thanks to Jessica!

As a teenager in Chicago in the 1990s, I had a very impressive series of movie magazine cuttings on my bedroom wall. Most impressive is that they were not of Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio. They were of old English guys. I am an American.

I am going to list some of these middle aged Englishmen and the movies of theirs I watched over and over when filled with adolescence’s surging, hormonal longing. I will not, however, make some kind of creepy Freudian analysis of this or connect it in any way to how I ended up marrying an Englishman eight years my senior. I will not even mention that at all.

Tim Roth

Tim Roth is the yappy terrier of middle-aged English actors. He is scrappy and rough and he thinks he’s in a Scorcese movie but isn’t it adorable because you could pick him up pinched between two fingers and he’s much too short for any adult human female. All of his jumpers were oversized. I don’t know what else you need to know.

I used to watch three Tim Roth movies over and over in the 90s. One of them was Reservoir Dogs, in which he does a pretty good job of a pretty terrible American accent. He gets shot in the stomach and goes all pale and covered in blood, which is a really good look. This movie also proves that if you stand next to Harvey Keitel for a while, you will look like a beautiful angel with the skin of a sainted toddler, which is also apparently a very good look.

Captives is a tiny movie in which Tim Roth plays a violent criminal who is for some reason allowed to leave prison for treats like attending college classes and buying some bits from the Sainsbury’s and fucking the sexy prison dentist in a men’s room stall. At fifteen, I thought that yes, it would probably be an excellent idea to fuck a prisoner in a bathroom stall if he was, you know, nice to me and stuff.

Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead was my third obsessive Tim Roth movie. The one I could talk about in my English class without using the phrase ‘fucked the prison dentist in a men’s room stall’. The one that made me read Tom Stoppard plays and think, like, really intensely about Shakespeare and stuff because it was dark and went really well with early Cure records. This movie got a lot of play because it also featured my next big 90s crush.

Gary Oldman

I remember reading an interview in which Winona Ryder claimed she was too terrified to talk to Gary Oldman when they were making Dracula. Well, good, Winona. That means you were paying attention. You are Molly Ringwald and he is Judd Nelson but he is never, ever going to give you his earring, do you hear me?

Gary Oldman was terrifying as Dracula, he was intimidating as Beethoven in Immortal Beloved, but the best…the best…was as the crooked cop in Leon (known as The Professional in America because we don’t ‘get’ French names, apparently, and might go into Blockbuster and shout ‘LOO? LOUIE? LONE? LONER? LUNCH? LOOGIE? OH DAMN IT I HATE FOREIGNS SO MUCH JUST GIVE ME TITANIC!!’). If Tim Roth was the perfect guy to do puppy eyes whilst slowly bleeding to death, Gary Oldman was the perfect guy to make some guy slowly bleed to death. He did this thing in Leon where he popped a pill of the illegal variety and craned his neck up and back, like a convulsion.

If you don’t know why that’s attractive, I can’t help you.

Rik Mayall

Drop Dead Fred.

Shut up. Seriously, just shut up. He was FUNNY and he had INTERESTING SHOES and REALLY LOVED PHOEBE CATES and just SHUT UP.

French films, part 2

2011-12-07T07:30:00.000Z

Today's guest post in Guest Post Week is the second part of Betsy's guide to some of her favourite films. The first part may be found here. Thanks again to Betsy!

I am by no means a movie connoisseur, but I do love a French film. I have quite a collection of French films on DVD, and although I’ve given up trying to persuade my other half to watch them with me (because he is deaf and relies on lipreading a lot, so trying to lipread a language he doesn’t speak is understandable problematic) I do go through phases of watching them myself. The thing I love about French films is the same thing as I love about French music. It’s just fundamentally different, they’re made from a perspective different from mine (British) and different from the one I’m used to from most of the films I’ve seen in my lifetime (American), but they have a sense of humour and an attitude that I really, really enjoy.

So here are a few reviews of a few French films that I particularly enjoy, that star some of my favourite actors, and that remind me of a particular time or a particular place.

Nikita (1990)

Nikita, another Luc Besson classic, was one of the first French films I saw outside of the ones I had to watch at school. My brother bought it for me on DVD (for my 17th birthday, I think) as he already loved it, and although he’s not a linguist himself he speaks excellent ‘ridiculous French’.

The plot of Nikita is a famous one by now… the drug addled criminal girl whose execution is faked so that she can be taken to an underground government facility for retraining as an assassin, with the threat of execution hanging over her head should she misbehave or fail any part of that training, it already being a done deal in the eyes of the law. Fully trained and now a sophisticated young woman, Nikita is sent into the world to set up home and wait for further orders. When they come, those orders require more of Nikita than she has to give, which surprises her as much as the rest of us given that in the opening scene she had, in cold blood and with no reaction whatsoever, shot a policeman in the head during a robbery.

My enduring memories of this film are of lines that seem ridiculous, but that I can still feel. “Je l’ai zappée” – I zapped it. A member of the gang that did the robbery, Zap, spoke this line slowly and somewhat dim-wittedly. What did you just do, Zap?! I zapped it. Then Zap got zapped and that was that.

“C’était murée!” “Bien sûr que c’était murée”. It was bricked up! Of course it was bricked up. During her first mission, her maiden voyage, her first solo assassination, Nikita was brought to a fancy restaurant, on her birthday, and told to kill a man and escape via a window that, as it turned out, was bricked up. She made it home (to the secret underground training facility) anyway, and on expressing the betrayal she felt at being sent on a mission with no exit strategy, or, even worse, an exit strategy built on a lie, it was made clear to her that unless she could find her own way home, even from what could’ve been a suicide mission, she was of no use to anyone. Having thought she’d built up a relationship with her handler, this was the point at which she realised that, to the organisation at least, she was nothing but a means to an end.

When, later, everything goes wrong on a mission and she has to call in Le Nettoyeur (The Cleaner), played by Jean Reno, another one of my favourites, she finds herself pleading with him to stop killing people, even though killing people is the best way to clear up her mess, it all becomes too much.

Although this film was remade by Hollywood with Bridget Fonda in the title role, and more recently has been made into a TV series, this is another example of the French take on a story having a different hue to it, somehow. Besson’s Nikita is not a girl down on her luck who ends up in a bad situation, she is a bad girl who is found and used by even worse people. She is a girl who has been capable of evil but has had it trained out of her, supposedly replaced with a complete lack of conscience but in fact replaced with self-awareness and regret.

That said, in the remake Gabriel Byrne played her handler, and who doesn’t like a bit of Gabriel Byrne?

Le Placard (The Closet) (2001)

In Le Placard, Daniel Auteuil, another one of my favourite actors, is a downtrodden accountant in a rubber factory who, through one lie told to save his job, achieves stardom, sex appeal and the respect of both his son and his ex-wife. On hearing that he is to be fired, François (Auteuil) spreads a rumour that he is gay, on the advice of his new neighbour, a retired psychologist. As one of the main products of the factory he works in is condoms, and fearing a backlash from the gay community which could seriously damage their business, his bosses don’t fire him after all. As everyone around him begin to imagine the secret life that their quiet, unassuming accountant had managed to keep from them, they start to view him in a different light, viewing him not as someone sad and pathetic but rather someone living an exotic double life that overshadows their own.

Gerard Depardieu does a wonderful turn as a bully of a colleague who, warned that he is now coming across as homophobic and losing any respect he had previously been granted, tries to redeem his own image by making friends with François instead, trying far too hard and finally being accused by his wife of having an affair.

My favourite scene in this film is the gay pride parade into which the factory enters a float, with François as the main attraction, wearing a hat shaped like a condom. This image, shown on TV, is seen by his son, who starts to relate to François as a person rather than just his dad, and his domineering ex-wife, who demands an explanation but does not expect the response she receives from the new, confident François.

The Frenchness of this film is in the handling of the subject matter. At no point does Auteuil ‘camp it up’, and this is the genius of the whole thing. This isn’t about a man ‘doing gay’, this is about a man whose whole life changes when he gains confidence in himself, purely because of being treated with respect for a change. I cannot imagine a Hollywood remake of this film without cringing, because I can’t imagine Hollywood making this ‘commercial’ without having Jim Carrey or Steve Carell ‘getting their gay on’ for laughs. Just look atI Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry.

Les Rivières Pourpres (Crimson Rivers) (2000)

I saw this film in the cinema in Paris, and I now own it on DVD. Having watched the DVD about eight times, I am now starting to get a grip on what the hell is going on, so this review is going to be less about the plot than the people.

This film stars Jean Reno, again, alongside Vincent Cassel, yet another one of my favourite French actors. Reno is investigating a whole bunch of weird shit that’s gone down at a private school in the middle of nowhere that appears to be trying some form of eugenics, by attracting the brightest and best, the most academically successful, the most athletic, the most physically perfect children in all of France, and putting them together to study and eventually breed.

The story also involves medical experimentation, torture, nazi vandalism, identical twins, a blind nun, an avalanche and some drug dealers, not necessarily in that order. Vincent Cassel gets to smoke a bit of weed in a police car and then do a bit of martial arts on some nasty drug dealers.

You know how I like a bit of martial arts.

What I like about this film being French is that I doubt I’d be able to follow the storyline if it was in English, but I still find myself drawn into trying every time, and it being in French just adds another layer to the puzzle.

Like trying to do a jigsaw when you don’t have a flat surface to balance on.

Why I'm a friend of Dorothy

2011-12-06T08:30:00.001Z

Today's post in this, Guest Film Post Week, is written by my friend Dave, who is very nearly old enough to know better (it's his 34th birthday on Thursday, the scientifically-established age at which one should know better). He also writes blogs for The Huffington Post, so getting him to write one for me was quite a coup and living testament to the power of those photographs of him I have.

Dave's post - full title: Why I'm a Friend of Dorothy by David Whittam (aged 33 years and 362 days) - deals with his love of a film which is not necessarily the first choice of adult males in the UK. But after this, who knows? Maybe. Thanks to Dave!

I seriously think that The Wizard of Oz may be the greatest film ever made. I’m not normally one to be effusive with praise about anything, sarcasm and suspicion being my two default settings but this one film melts all my cynicism away within about five minutes.

When I was about five, my Mum and Dad divorced and every weekend I went to stay with my Dad until I was about 14. Mainly to give my poor old Mum a bit of peace I think.

Going to my Dad’s was quite exciting as, well, he had a video player. This was fairly new-fangled technology at the time – you could record stuff off the telly and watch it later and everything.

Nearly every week, I would sit and watch a film or two. On heavy rotation were: Labyrinth, Santa Claus and The Worst Witch. I think this explains a lot about me.

The film I probably watched most in my childhood though is The Wizard of Oz. I know every single line and can sing along (badly) to every single song. I even know all the smooth dance moves the Scarecrow does.

It’s a film that doesn’t age for me, I can still being thrilled the first time I saw the black and white gloominess of Kansas burst in the technicolor gloriousness of Oz. Kansas was just as alien as Oz was to me, I had no idea where it was as a child, and I’m still not entirely convinced it exists.

It’s all such a burst of craziness. Munchkins! Talking Scarecrows and Lions! Wicked Witches! Rubbish Wizards!

It even took me years to realise that the people working on the farm were playing the characters in Oz, I just thought Dorothy was delusional when she said “And you and you and you...and you were there.”

The songs are joyous, memorable and instantly make me feel 10 years old again.

A 16-year-old Judy Garland commands the screen and I have to say, from the first moment I saw her, I loved her. Never mind the fact she was already dead, I didn’t know that. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen — apart from maybe Jennifer Connelly in Labyrinth.

The Wizard of Oz is a simple tale really, about how the things you think you are missing are usually already there but its good heart, strong visual style, perfectly cast actors and musical score mean it’s a film I can watch again and again on DVD.

Plus, you know, flying monkeys and shit.

Learning to love gory films

2011-12-05T16:51:00.009Z

This week is a week devoted to guest posts. The reason for this is twofold: firstly, the quality of the stuff that people have sent me is excellent. And secondly: I've got no ideas and nothing much to say on any subject, even film, this week.

Today's contributor is confirmed member of the Twitterati Jason - or, as his family call him, @mixmasterfestus - explaining how he came to enjoy gory films. Thanks to Jason!

Rasczak

This blog is a tribute. A loving, heart felt testimonial to a film that gave me so much and asked so precious little. It brought a lost child from the darkness to the promised land in which he now proudly presides. The film I refer to is, of course

My saviour

Yes, it's Starship Troopers. Paul Verhoeven's brilliant brilliant brilliant feature film retelling of a book I haven't read (go figure). I'm sure the book is delightsome. I watched it again recently and felt it prudent to write down why it means so much to me.

Now, I treasure this film because it taught me something, something I needed to be taught. All of Verhoeven's great films have a core message, they're a sci fi tilt on an underlying idea. Robocop, Total Recall et al were very idealistic films which complimented his visceral style with a strong commentary on a given subject, I thought so anyway. Whilst Starship Troopers has a great commentary about the folly of human's brute force approach etc, it wasn't about that for me, not when I first watched it anyway. Let me take you back...

When I was a kid, I had a problem, something I could not overcome and lead me to miss so many great things growing up. Now this wasn't any kind of depression, anger issues or any of that stuff. My childhood was a delight. No, my problem was something a lot more silly and baseless.

I was terrified of gory movies.

I could not stand them. They very idea brought me out in cold sweats. I would avoid situations when there was a chance people would want to watch them. Terrified.

A good example I distinctly remember would be a Cub Scout 24 hour charity darts marathon. How could you forget something like that? It's the scene, man. During this event the Cubs had conspired to watch A Nightmare on Elm Street {insert number here}. My gore alarm went off big time and I fled like a fleeing thing. I'd never seen the Elm Street films but I'd heard enough to know that it wasn't for me. I only remember seeing a bus teetering on a mountain. I now know the key to the problem could be found in this sentence

"I'd never seen the Elm Street films but I'd heard enough to know that it wasn't for me"

I'd never seen it. None of it. I had no experience to base my opinion on, so the idea I had formed in my brain was that if I saw some gore I would die the death of dying. This is how the irrational fear, a phobia if you will, was built. It was the product of an overactive imagination.

I'm ashamed to say this quite daft situation I found myself in lasted till I was about 14-15. I would take steps to avoid seeing anything remotely gory, I even shyed away from playing Mortal Kombat II. It was a sorry state of affairs.

I also remember looking at a book in the library about cinema, in particular a picture from Robocop. It was Alex Murphy just after he had been shot to bits. I was looking at it, it wasn't very gory but I was thinking, "I can never watch this, ever". Even films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were a no go. Looking back now it was all very very silly.

My lowest point came when watching the film Glory, a 1989 film about the American Civil War starring Ferris Bueller (Save Ferris!).

My lowest point

It was a school History class and there were roughly 40 of us sat in a small room on a blazing summer's day. I was already a bit shaky when someone's head was blown up by a cannon when it happened. A man was having his leg amputated, screaming and shouting, the whole shooting match. Then it happened, as a shower of blood hit the curtain there was an very loud *bang* in the classroom.

I fainted

The bang was the connection between my head and the desk. Oh what a silly billy I felt. Imagine feinting whilst watching a film about the American Civil War. It still shames me now, but all was not lost. From my squallid pit of baseless fear, I had a presto chango revelatory moment.

I remember it like it was yesterday. My dad, my mate Rich (who was the complete opposite of me gore wise) and I settled down one evening to watch Starship Troopers. I'd never seen it, heard of it or about it before. Little did I know my self respect was going to rise like a Phoenix. The film started and after the first little propaganda splash, this happened:

The Moment

Suddenly everything, everywhere, was gore gore gore. The thing about Starship Troopers for those that haven't seen it (shame on you) is it, so gory, so quickly that you don't really have a chance but to watch it. Well I say 'so gory' it's not that bad really. But that's kind of the point, I saw it for what it was.

As the film went on. I learned what movie gore was all about. Moments like this:

sunshine

this:

lollipops

and this:

rainbows (they sucked out his BRAINS)

I think it's Verhoeven's visual style. It's quite exaggerated but and feels almost comic like in it's application. Moments in Total Recall and Robocop are quite the same, it's really fierce but so overblown that it makes it hard to take it truly seriously. The brain sucking bit still creeped me out but hey, dolly steps.

The main thing was the immediacy. It was as if someone had strapped me down like Alex in A Clockwork Orange and forced me to face this thing. When I saw it in the clear light of day, saw the limbs flying everywhere, I realised there was nothing to be afraid of. It's just effects. I was free. Free as a bird who'd just watched Starship Troopers. I think we can all agree, that's pretty fucking free.

I equate the feeling to like having just had a really good vomit. It is such a load off. You don't feel great but you know everything is going to be ok.

It was the beginning of a remarkable transformation. I now find all that I had feared as completely hilarious. During the The Devil's Rejects, I laughed like a loon when the woman got hit by the truck. Sweeney Todd, I was crying with laughter every time someone's lifeless body crunched in a heap when dropping into the cellar. Most recently watching Kick-Ass I guffawed as the gizzards flew. I might have a problem.

A good one to look out for is:

Dead Snow

Dead Snow, a Norwegian film about Nazi Zombies and the glorious gory dispatch thereof. It's not so much a film as a showcase for new and innovative dismemberment. Suffice to say I laughed more than I should have done. You know it's going to end well when a guy has his head torn in half.

I still shy away from some gore, but it's all to do with context. I'm not interested in films like Hostel and Saw which equate to torture for me, it's uncomfortable to watch and tend to avoid it. Though saying that, I've been forced to face it in films like 28 Weeks Later and Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and I've come out the end having enjoyed it. So I guess I should learn from my own experience.

The point is, a whole new world of cinema was opened to me by Starship Troopers. I watched it a couple of nights ago and whilst the violence seemed a bit tame compared to some stuff I've now seen, I still loved it to bits. It shall stay with me forever. It opened my eyes to the glorious fountains of corn syrup and red food colouring, showing me that it is nothing to be scared of and for that I am forever thankful.

French films, part 1

2011-12-04T09:00:00.001Z

Today's post was written by Betsy, and is one of two discussing her favourite French films. Today's post deals with the thorny issue of what becomes of French cinema once Hollywood get their mitts on it. I think you can probably guess, if you don't already know.

Thanks to Betsy!

I am by no means a movie connoisseur, but I do love a French film. I have quite a collection of French films on DVD, and although I’ve given up trying to persuade my other half to watch them with me (because he is deaf and relies on lipreading a lot, so trying to lipread a language he doesn’t speak is understandable problematic) I do go through phases of watching them myself. The thing I love about French films is the same thing as I love about French music. It’s just fundamentally different, they’re made from a perspective different from mine (British) and different from the one I’m used to from most of the films I’ve seen in my lifetime (American), but they have a sense of humour and an attitude that I really, really enjoy.
So here are a few reviews of a few French films that I particularly enjoy, that star some of my favourite actors, and that remind me of a particular time or a particular place.

Taxi (and Taxi 2, and Taxi 3) (1998, 2000 and 2003)

Forget about the Hollywood remake of this, which starred Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon. I haven’t seen it, and I’ve no intention of doing so, for the cast list has already told me all I need to know. This will be a true Hollywood Remake, and in trying to make it commercial I can’t believe they won’t have stripped away the charm and humour of the original, replacing it with all the charm and humour of a rabid elephant.

The original film was written by Luc Besson, the genius behind some of my favourite films, including The Fifth Element, Godzilla (the Matthew Broderick version) and Nikita. Samy Naceri plays Daniel, taxi driver and boy racer, who gets roped into crime-fighting adventures by Émilien, played by Frédéric Diefenthal, a police detective whose disastrous attempts at passing his driving test are demonstrated to the viewer often. Daniel is a bad boy but he has no intent to harm anyone (unlike Samy Naceri himself who has spent time in jail for attacking a man with an ashtray, stabbing another, a road rage attack and the assault of two security guards while he was being treated for a drug overdose). Émilien is a good boy who wishes he could be bad, or at least brave enough to talk to his German (in nationality) Amazonian (in stature) goddess of a colleague, Petra (played by Emma Wiklund, who is actually Swedish).
Taxi is a comedy action movie. There is quite a bit of slapstick, but the way it’s done is very subtle - there’s no accidentally hitting people with a plank or and nobody falls down stairs, but Émilien does hide in the boot of a car at one point and there is a scene with a shockingly unlucky pair of car thieves.

The thing I love the most about Taxi is the French. It’s set in Marseille so it was my first experience of hearing French spoken in an accent that sounds, to my ears, very Italian. The cast is generally very young (there are a lot of pizza delivery boys who Daniel worked with before getting his taxi licence) so there’s a cheeky, carefree atmosphere to a lot of the film. There are lots of driving scenes on long, straight roads running along the coast, everyone has a tan and the ladies wear beautiful summer dresses and they’re all so very, very French.
The sequels are based on similar lines (Daniel and Émilien getting each other into trouble and hauling each other back out again) and, although I haven’t seen Taxi 4, I’d heartily recommend watching these films if you get the chance.

Le Dîner de Cons (roughly translates as Dinner for Fools) (1998)

Le Dîner de Cons is another wonderful French film remade by Hollywood and completely massacred from top to bottom and start to finish. For one thing they renamed it Dinner for Schmucks which is just the harshest, cruellest, most unnecessary rewrite of the concept with a single word that I have ever seen. Because this film is not about schmucks, it’s not about cretins, it’s not about us laughing at people who we think are stupid, it’s about people who (wrongly) believe themselves to be perfect laughing at those who they consider to be beneath them.
This is a surprisingly sweet film, in which a group of successful businessmen decide that they will have a regular dinner, each inviting one special guest each time, primarily so that they can laugh at him or her for being a bit daft, and at the end of the night crown one guest as the Champion Idiot. This film is about the night that Pierre invites François.

The main character’s wife thinks it’s a cruel thing to do and refuses to attend the dinner, leaving the house shortly before François arrives. François is a cheerful sort, a simple civil servant who enjoys making miniature landmarks out of matchsticks. Pierre finds himself in a tight spot and ends up relying on François to help him out, all the while mocking him and treating him like a servant, as François, eager to help a fellow human being, runs himself ragged to help out. I found myself feeling bad for François, not because he felt bad, but because he didn’t. Apparently choosing to believe the best of everyone, he lets the insults and the demands fly over his head, which just makes him more and more the fool that Pierre was looking for all along.

The thing about this film is that you come to realise that while Pierre feels superior to François in every way, Pierre lives his life so destructively and with such deception, that you end up hoping for his downfall, and yet François won’t allow it, constantly trying to shield the man he considers a friend from his wife, his mistress, his former best friend turned nemesis and the tax man.

Le Dîner de Cons is somewhat of a comedy of errors, but it is a sweet one. As the man who planned to entertain himself by mocking another finds his life falling apart, the man who only ever aims to please finds himself indispensable to someone he admires and respects, without expecting the same in return. This film, which was originally a play, is sweet and gentle and subtle and the characters evolve throughout it.

The Hollywood version is a sledgehammer in which the ‘bad guy’ was bullied into it and everyone will be OK in the end. Turning this film into a modern day Bedlam, making the “schmuck” into an actual weirdo (Steve Carell, quelle surprise, plays a man who makes little theatrical scenes with the corpses of dead mice), encouraging filmgoers to laugh and poke at the simpletons and their stupid, selfless ways completely misses the point and I don’t care whether there’s the big “oh, now I see why what I did was wrong, can you ever forgive me?” scene at the end, although you totally know there will be, because Hollywood is nothing if not predictable.
This is a large part of the reason why, whenever Hollywood remakes a French film, I’d rather just watch the original.

Films which make you an evangelist: The Invisible Man

2011-12-02T08:06:00.006Z

I love the film The Invisible Man, James Whale's 1933 adaptation of the H.G. Wells story. I love it so much that if it were a woman I would try and set her up on a date with my friend Ed Dickins, because she would be far too good for me.

I first saw it in 1995 and was flabbergasted. I have loved the Universal Studios horror film series ever since I first clapped eyes on Frankenstein when I was about 12 or 13. I love their classical style, mired in the European traditions of the original literature. This was helped by the fact the Universal Studios were owned by the Laemmle family, German emigrés. Many of the actors in the studio repertory company, too, were from Europe, the majority from the UK. Whale himself was an Englishman - born in Dudley.

I've written here before about my love of this rotating company of actors who crop up time and again in Universal's films of the period. What I particularly love about it is the fact that it never turns into a joke. In fact, the familiarity of the same old faces appearing - not just as lead actors but as barmen, sailors and maids - acts as something of a comfort blanket. Always important when there's a monster on the loose!

And The Invisible Man's monster is one of the best of the lot. The film deals primarily in philosophical and psychological horror, with the film's titular star descending into madness as the combination of his invisibility drug and the potential power of his discovery come together. There's a tension and a menace which give this film such an edge over many of its contemporaries. At the time, of course, a lot of films were rather static out of necessity - in the infancy of the talking picture the sound equipment was very cumbersome and led to a slew of drawing room-set dramas. Even the classic Bela Lugosi Dracula film is largely a one-room play.

The Invisible Man, too, has its drawing room sections. But it is so much more, too. I think of it as a prototype of the Hollywood blockbuster. It has action, suspense and moments of terror. But what really sets it apart are the dazzling invisibility special effects. It's fun to watch King Kong, or any of the Ray Harryhausen-designed monster films of the 1950s. But it's possible to watch films that were made in the 1980s now and have to stuff handkerchiefs into your mouth at the laughably basic special effects. Not so The Invisible Man. It barely ever misses a beat. Considering the time, the infancy of the medium and the technological limitations, it's one of the most astonishing achievements in the history of cinema. It was all achieved with a lot of black velvet and the technical mastery of John P. Fulton, John J. Mescall and Frank D. Williams (Hollywood special effects people always have a middle initial, from which they derive their awesome powers).

If you've not seen The Invisible Man, please try to. It's one of those films that turns you into an evangelist for it. The Terminator is another such film with me, although I have to say I think The Invisible Man has better, more believable, special effects. It really does. Also, The Terminator can't claim to have in its supporting cast the magnificent Una O'Connor playing a shrill, shrieking, hysteric of a publican's wife. Another oversight, there. In fact, The Invisible Man and The Terminator share another key characteristic: their stars are unusually constrained by Hollywood's standards - Arnold Schwartzenegger only has twelve lines of dialogue, and Claude Rains spent his first starring role in a motion picture wrapped up in bandages, only appearing in full face in the last frame of the entire film.

Yes, if only someone could combine The Invisible Man and The Terminator, you'd have the perfect film. Rest assured, I'm working on it.

Snakes on a Plane

2011-12-01T09:00:00.001Z

If you've never seen Snakes on a Plane, you're missing out. Without fear of contradiction, it is the greatest film ever made. When I first saw it, nearly 3 years ago, the early signs were not good: despite its ubiquity as a monument to the power of the interwebs, Snakes only received two stars in its Radio Times review. However, in their brief generic categorisation of the film - "nightmarish horror-thriller" - I noticed they had neglected to include the word "comedy". This is a sure indication that they missed the point somewhat.

Quite whether the director had comedy in mind is perhaps another matter, but rest assured that the ever-cool Samuel L. Jackson knew what he was dealing with. His delivery of the immortal line "I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane" rivals anything else in the history of cinema, whilst also acknowledging a profound debt to people on the internet who, like me, think they're so very funny. Meanwhile, as Juliana Margulies fought a pitched battle with a puff adder armed only with a spork, vipers, cobras and assorted asps bit the remaining passengers exclusively on areas of the body suggestive of the fact Benny Hill may well have been a script consultant. He wasn't, of course, having died in 1992. However, I remain unconvinced that the cause of his demise wasn't from a poisonous snake biting his todger. Or his tit, or his arse.

I greeted each of these little nibbles with howls of glee, but the film still had more to offer. The snake in a sick bag was a particularly nice touch, as was the late appearance of an enormous man-eating boa constrictor, which appeared to have lots and lots of teeth. Molars, everything. You can learn so much from watching Channel 4.

As the tubby one from Kenan and Kel landed the plane using video game skills alone, I began to reflect on this film's bafflingly as-yet-untapped sequel potential. Perhaps the producers of the original film were worried about things getting formulaic or, worse still, mildly risible. Quite how this could be a concern for anyone who has just financed a film where an Asian-American mobster fills a passenger jet with randy snakes, I don't know, it's just a suggestion. As a framework, though, the High Concept film is ideal for the postmodern 21st Century, where thinking is to be discouraged. Further, in these times of financial hardship, a film advertising its entire intentions and plot in the title would surely help save moviegoers spending money. No more would hard-earned cash be wasted on cryptically titled films which promise much nudity and an orgy of violence, but turn out to be a 3-and-a-quarter hour long exploration of the social and cultural impact of Dutch colonalism in Sub-Saharan Africa, pre-1900.

As such, and as a free (until you actually want to make them) service, I have some suggestions for additions to the inspired Snakes on a Plane franchise. Naturally, all these films are to star Samuel L. Jackson. And Bruce Willis, I want Bruce Willis as well.

Crickets on a Bus

CIA operative Zephod J. Motherfuck is charged with the responsibility of helping his great aunt Beatrice home with her shopping. Her house is just 5 stops down the road, but the bus is infested with crickets. They are jumping about, getting in people's pockets and their hair. The driver, getting one in his eye, almost loses control of the bus but doesn't quite, as Motherfuck rounds up the aggressors with a rolled-up newspaper.

British Snakes on a British Airways Plane

Returning to America after a mission to protect the American ambassador in London, CIA operative Walter X. Bumber discovers a terrorist plot to release a bucket of adders, grass snakes and slow worms on a packed Jumbo Jet just seconds too late. Rounding the snakes up, aided and abetted by the panicking passengers - one of whom finds a grass snake asleep in her bag and freaks out - Bumber faces a moment of panic when the pilot is bitten by an adder and has to have a bit of a rest for a while.

Swans on the Lam

Jake and Patty, a pair of mute swan outlaws tracked by CIA operative Jonas F. Hammalammer, make good their escape by riding a lamb across state lines...

Why I love the Harry Potter films

2011-11-30T08:30:00.000Z

Another guest post on the ongoing subject of films today, this time from Nina, one half of the venerable and brilliant Panda and Crumpet. Nina's essay is entitled "Why I Love The Harry Potter Film Franchise" and has been entered for many school prizes, with great success and a bumper haul of House Points expected, in spite of a potentially risqué conclusion.

Thanks to Nina!

Click for bigger

You can read more from Nina at her counselling blog, I see a Beautiful Future (and I advise that you do).

Apocalypse Then: A brief history of nuclear cinema

2011-11-29T19:30:00.002Z

Today's film blog is another guest post, this time by Ian, whom you probably know best from his multiple-award winning football site Twohundredpercent. However, Ian is a man of many other interests, not least nuclear war films. Many is the Sunday morning I have spent with him in his house, in a cold sweat and with tightly-clenched buttocks. AND THEN HE PUTS A NUCLEAR WAR FILM ON, etc.

This post is as exhaustive a guide to anything that you are likely to find on my blog, so I commend it to you highly. Thanks to Ian!

There are, perhaps, no two phenomena more quintessentially of the 1980s as the concept of having a television in the kitchen and films about the Soviet Union and the United States of America using Western Europe as the board for an apocalyptic game of backgammon. It is, therefore, probably no great surprise that I was in the kitchen of an opulent house in Radlett (while my parents had a French evening next door) as the city of Sheffield was blown to smithereens before my twelve year-old eyes. Threads, the BBC's 1984 docu-drama about an imagined World War Three remains the high water mark of this ghoulish genre, but films about our apparently impending annihilation have a considerably longer history than a mere twenty-seven years.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that story-tellers of any persuasion reflect the time during which they are writing as much as shape our opinions. With this in mind, it is perhaps no great surprise that the grandfather of this genre, the BBC's seminal 1965 film The War Game, should have been made within three years of the Cuban missile crisis. By the standards of the time, The War Game was bleak, bleak material. Set in Rochester, it depicted the before, during and immediate effects of a nuclear attack on Britain, with a variety of talking heads putting arguments - some reasonably coherent, others as mad as a box of frogs - for and against the nuclear deterrent.

The War Game suffers a little from the limitations of the time during which it was made. The modern viewer, weaned on lavish CGI and the constitutional right to see blood and internal organs in (soon not to be) living Technicolor, may feel let down by a relatively slow pace and a singular lack of mushroom clouds. None of this is to suggest that fans of the macabre will be completely disappointed, though. Some of the bomb's victims look suitably mournful and char-grilled, while the film's finale – which is more about the breakdown of societal norms than the after-effects of enormous exposure to radiation - is likely to sear itself into the consciousness of anybody that sees it.

Curiously, the back story behind The War Game is almost as interesting as the film itself. It had been due to be broadcast as part of the BBC's The Wednesday Play series, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the American nuclear strike on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, but was pulled by the corporation on the eve of broadcast, with on the grounds that it was "too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting". This didn't, however, prevent the film from a limited theatrical release and it subsequently collected an academy award in the best documentary category in 1966. The BBC finally got around to showing it to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, during the summer of 1985.

The 1970s were a period of detente for the superpowers, and accordingly film-makers turned their attentions elsewhere. By the beginning of the 1980s, however, the thawing of relations between east and west had taken on a decidedly frosty feel again, and it was time for the media to start articulating - some may prefer to use the word "feeding" here - the very worst fears of its viewers, and considerably beyond. Alongside such paranoid hokum as Red Dawn (in which a group of teenagers repel a Soviet invasion of the motherland with an armoury that largely consists, initially at least, of twigs and moss) and WarGames (in which Matthew Broderick almost kick-starts the third world war by trying to play chess with a military super-computer), two behemoths of the genre surfaced.

First up came The Day After, a serious attempt to address the great “What if?” of the early 1980s from an American perspective. Produced and broadcast by ABC television, The Day After is set in Kansas City, Missouri, and follows the travails of a group of families in the Mid-West of the United States of America as global apocalypse kicks off around them. The film packs a lot into the first twenty minutes, with the political background to the film being crowbarred in through a series of overheard radio and television broadcasts as the main characters are introduced. The characters discuss the impending crisis with a peculiar detachment, as if the dread scenario could never affect them. Such an insular attitude is, perhaps, unsurprising in the Mid-West of the United States of America, even though European viewers might be surprised by the apparent unconcern of the film's main characters over the fact that Western Europe is already being reduced to a pile of irradiated rubble.

By the time of the nuclear attack takes place, the loosely-linked assortment of characters have been fully identified, but it is here that the film starts to go off the rails. The special effects as the bomb hits are poor, and the inevitable absolute terror of the strike feels watered-down, as if someone at the network cut down the after-effects of the bomb itself. Indeed, it is possible that this was the case – the original plan was for the film to be four hours long and broadcast over two evenings, but the final version ran to two and a half hours and was shown in one sitting – and storyboards were drawn up for an extended version of the film, but this was never shown. It is now understood that ABC censors insisted on considerable cuts to the original film before they would allow it to be shown. Criticism that The Day After makes the after-effects of a nuclear strike seem more survivable than they would have been is a valid one, and this is a feeling that cannot even be counterbalanced by the - admittedly morbid – sight of Steve Guttenberg losing most of his hair from the effects of radiation sickness.
Still, though, The Day After provoked a debate in the United States of America at a time during which it was important to have one. In Britain, however, we would have to wait a further year for the same, but when it came, it came with the full force of a ten thousand megaton explosion. Threads was, as The Day After had been in The United States of America, a reaction to a broader political situation. The stationing of cruise missiles at Greenham Common had brought the issue of nuclear disarmament in Britain to the top of the political agenda (the Labour Party had unilateral nuclear disarmament as one of its key policies in its “longest suicide note in history” 1983 General Election manifesto), and it was timely that the BBC should revisit a subject that they had been too troubled to broadcast almost two decades earlier.

Written by Barry Hines (who had previously written "A Kestrel For A Knave", the novel upon which the film Kes was based) and directed by Mick Jackson (who went on to produce the 1992 Whitney Houston vehicle and snore-fest The Bodyguard), Threads was based upon three significant artifacts of the Cold War - Protect & Survive, the much-ridiculed 1980 government pamphlet which advised the public on how to best prepare for a nuclear strike, Operation Square Leg, a government home defence exercise which was intended to try and establish what the effects of a nuclear strike on Britain, and QED: A Guide To Armageddon, a 1982 documentary which sought to explain the effects of a nuclear attack upon London, whilst also demonstrating how utterly useless any attempts at civil defence would likely be. Jackson described the film as an attempt to create a “workable visual vocabulary for thinking about the unthinkable”, and to say that he succeeded would be something of an understatement.

As with the aforementioned films, Threads starts in a soap opera-esque style, the story of a young couple, she pregnant, moving into a flat together in Sheffield. Their two families are from different social classes – hers is middle class, while his is working class – and there is a stilted meeting between the two, with the news (presented by Lesley Judd of Blue Peter, of all people) playing on the television in the background. Yet all the time, the machinery of war is moving in the background. Television, radio and newspapers begin to intrude into the foreground of every scene in which they appear. A dispassionate voice-over explains the machinery of war slowly and inexorably grinding into place. The story cuts away to an unrelated sub-plot, the story of a hopelessly ill-prepared council worker charged with putting the government's emergency measures into effect.

The money shot – the explosion of a nuclear weapon over Sheffield – is largely made up of stock film and is possibly the weakest part of the film, but it is as the fallout starts to settle that it comes into its own. Unlike The War Game, Threads doesn't end a few hours or days after the bomb drops, and unlike The Day After it doesn't pull any punches in its depiction of the aftermath of such an attack - "Threads makes The Day After look like A Day At The Races", wrote one reviewer at the time. Statistics flash up on the screen, giving estimates of the number of nationwide deaths. At first, the survivors seem very alone, as if the world has ground to a complete halt around them. Over time, however, society starts to regroup, although by this time a nuclear winter is starting to set in. The audience is left to assume who has died and who has survived, and Jackson fast-forwards years into the future, showing a world that has been blown back a thousand years in time by the destruction of its infrastructure. “In an urban society”, says the voice-over at the start of the film, “everything connects. Each persons needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric, but the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.”

While The War Game, The Day After and Threads make up the holy trinity of the genre, there are a couple of others that are also worthy of a mention. World War 3, a 1998 film made by the German television company ZDF, cleverly pulls apart contemporary news reports of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attempted Soviet coup of 1991 to stitch together a vision of a world in which a hard-liner ousts Mikhail Gorbachev and deals with the attempt to liberalise Eastern Europe in a somewhat different way, but stops short of dropping the bomb itself. Meanwhile, Countdown To Looking Glass, a made-for-TV film from 1984, attempts to run as a series of news broadcasts as a banking crisis precipitates a clash between the superpowers in the Middle East, only to ruin itself with a sub-plot that looks and feels like a series of out-takes from Days Of Our Lives.

The moment for the nuclear apocalypse film, it seems, has passed. While big budgets will now be spent on dystopian visions of the future, these have tended in recent years to be focussed upon natural disasters – Deep Impact, Armageddon, 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and so on – or upon that very twenty-first century paranoia that has come about thanks to the threat of terrorism and its hysterical coverage in the press. Yet these films were important. They informed the public – mostly reasonably accurately – of the science and likely chaos of the use of atomic weapons, and provided that “workable visual vocabulary for thinking about the unthinkable” of which Mick Jackson spoke when describing Threads. That they scared the living daylights of twelve year olds in 1984 and retain the capacity to traumatise three, four or five decades on is a testament, not only to the skill of the film-makers concerned, but also to the absolute horror of their subject matter.

You can watch Threads, should you wish to, here.
You can watch The War Game, should you wish to, here.
You can watch The Day After, should you wish to, here.
You can watch World War 3, should you wish to, here.
You can watch Countdown To Looking Glass, should you wish to, here.

Films you haven't seen: Robocop

2011-11-29T08:24:00.005Z

I've never seen Robocop. Well, I hadn't until last night, when the powers that be on Channel 5 decided to try and give me an idea for my blog. They're all regretting that now.

Robocop is one of those films, very much of the zeitgeist of the 1980s. It's duly become so much more than a film: a cultural reference point, videogames, toys - the whole schmeer. But I'd never seen it. This is always dangerous for films like that. You're already so aware of it that there's a danger the film won't live up to it or that it will appear to be a parody of itself.

SATIRE. Now there's a thing. There's a word which I've always seen applied to Robocop. I was sort of expecting a coruscating commentary on the issue of police brutality and the rule of law. However, that simply wasn't there. The satire exists instead in the outer cosmos of the film - the news reports, the glimpse of how big business influences society. At the centre of the film Robocop, I would have argued, is philosophy. I think that Robocop could well have been written by Alan Turing.

All the elements are there! Can robots dream? Can technology acquire a consciousness or a conscience? Are virtues and morals programmable, self-evident in nature or must they be acquired experientially? These are some high-grade degree-level philosophical posers.

Perhaps the ultimate satirical element to the film - and maybe one which was unintentional - is that for all of the near-future science fiction shenanigans, the whole narrative lurches awkwardly towards conforming to traditional generic codes. Of course Robocop has a female partner, she provides both a love interest and a cop buddy. Towards the end, unmasked and looking like Richard O'Brien's head attached to a Dyson, Robocop is anything but Robo. It begs the question, dare anyone risk a completely mechanical protagonist? When even Johnny Five manages to acquire sufficient soul to campaign for suffrage in spite of being made out of Meccano, you have to wonder.

Still, for all of its PHILOSOPHICAL SHORTCOMINGS, I found Robocop to be a highly enjoyable film. I particularly enjoyed the wonderfully exaggerated and graphic scenes of violence and death throughout - another of the films satirical elements that really work. The irresistible convergence of Hired Goon and Massive Tank of Toxic Waste was particularly magnificent. Such a shame he died (exploded) - he was only two days away from retirement (starring in his own B-movie franchise).

That's the strength of films like Robocop, and why we need more like them. It works on numerous levels. On the one hand it had me reaching for my university notes and reading lists to re-address the thorny issue of the Mind-Body problem. But before things got too Cartesian on my ass, someone got massively killed. In a cocaine factory. A factory! These exist. Even Gilbert Ryle would have gotten caught up in it, and old Gilb was a hard man to please. Especially after he crashed his car into all that toxic waste. Why can't there be more films which present significant ontological discourse with a side dish of grenades and PAIN?

Are modern action films dumbing down? None of this would have happened if Baruch Spinoza had written The A-Team.

Films which change your life

2011-11-28T09:00:00.002Z

Today, another excellent guest post. Your author this time is Fran, who writes the brilliant blog about craft and life Skulls and Ponies. Fran's chosen subject is a film which changed her life. Thanks to Fran!

When dotmund asked me to write about a film that had impacted on me in some way I was very excited! It’s a great credit to film makers all over the world that a two-hour interaction between people portraying a story about something-or-other on a digital screen can effectively change your life. I know that sounds terribly melodramatic, but it’s true. Whether it be a beautiful love story that helps shape the way you view relationships (*ahem-all-teen-movies-ever-ahem-10-things-I-hate-about-you-ahem*) or a horror film that leaves you terrified of turning the light out at night; it can change how you choose to interact with the world. For me that is an amazing ability. It’s like a super power.

The film I’m going to write about is one that really fucked me up for a while. It got under my skin and became almost an obsession for about three months of my life. The film in question is not a gooey love story that had me searching for my soul mate, nor a tense thriller that made me afraid of my own shadow. This film not only educated me about a real life event I, ashamedly, had no awareness of but it gave me such tremendous hope for humanity whilst at the same time making me inextricably sad. The film is Hotel Rwanda.

I saw Hotel Rwanda in the comfort of my own living room in 2007 and cried throughout the entire movie. I wasn’t just crying because of the horrific content but crying because it showed how one man, one actual real life man, showed such immense courage and bravery despite his world literally falling apart.

The story is that of Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu man married to a Tutsi woman, who ran a prestigious hotel in Rwanda. Despite death on his doorstep every day, and constant bribes to the Hutu military to even stay alive he continued to take in and shelter Tutsi refugees. He took in about 1200 refugees in total - saving all of their lives.

In 2007 when I watched this film, I had absolutely no idea this atrocity had happened. In 1994 I was only 10 years old but it shocked me that someone like me, who is educated and (somewhat) intelligent and aware of the world could have no idea this even happened, even in retrospect. Yet even at the time it wasn’t well publicised. When the footage of the mass murders going on in Rwanda finally did hit the national news, neither Europe nor the US chose to intervene. The whole of Rwanda had only 300 UN peace keepers (who were not permitted to attack) to defend them. Over one million people were killed in the Rwandan genocide. One million.

I think anyone who has seen this film would probably struggle to shake it off, but I just could not get it out of my head. At first I wanted to educate myself about the genocide, so I spent hours and hours reading up on it. I then discovered the film was based on a book called “An Ordinary Man” by Paul Rusesabagina. I bought the book immediately reading it cover to cover. I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened and how it had happened and how the UK had done nothing. I would talk about it all of the time, to anyone that would listen. I wanted to know if other people knew about it and if they did how it wasn’t consuming every minute of their waking day like it was me.

This went on for months. Eventually I managed to claim my life back and stop thinking about it quite so much but I don’t for a second regret watching the film. I am so very glad I did and I am glad it consumed me for those 3 months because I needed to know. I needed to see, I needed to be educated, as did the world. Maybe this is an extreme example of the effect a film maker can have on his/her audience, but hopefully a poignant one. That film is imprinted on my brain forever and I am glad.

I want to leave you with just a few excellent and thought provoking quotes from the film:

Jack: [after Paul thanks him for shooting footage of the genocide] I think if people see this footage, they'll say Oh, my God, that's horrible. And then they'll go on eating their dinners.

Pat Archer: [Red Cross Volunteer relaying the last words of an orphan slain by the Hutus] Please don't let them kill me. I... I promise I won't be Tutsi anymore.

Statham Sunday part two - Violence in movies

2011-11-27T14:00:00.001Z

Statham Sunday continues with this excellent guest post by Betsy. She's a noted Stathamologist, so heed her wisdom.

Thanks to Betsy!

Violence In Movies

(or: A Love Letter To Jason Statham)

I love films. I watch films a lot. I love DVDs, because it means I can watch whatever I want, whenever I want, and I have a lot of DVD box sets of TV series, but I have a lot more films.

This year my other half decided to watch the IMDB top 100 war films, and blog them all. I haven't been watching them with him, but I have seen a few films I wouldn't otherwise have chosen to watch, and they weren't all bad. That said, some of them were abysmal.

My own taste in films is awful and I don't care. I love films that other people seem to think I should be ashamed to love, but I'm not. I own films that people seem to think should be sold in a brown paper bag, but I not only bought them in broad daylight but I watch them regularly and love it.

One of my many movie related downfalls is Jason Statham.

His films are always ridiculously violent, often visually veering to the extremes of contrast in either shades of grey or blindingly bright colours. The Jason Statham films that I own are Crank, Crank: High Voltage, Snatch, The One, Death Race and The Transporter. I have seen, but don't yet own, Blitz, The Expendables, War, Transporter 2, Revolver, Ghosts of Mars and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

These films serve to fufill a very specific entertainment urge, which I like to call “something stupid and violent that will make me laugh”.

I can always, always watch something stupid and violent that will make me laugh. And if a film is stupid and violent enough, it will always, always make me laugh. Not just if it's stupid. See No Evil Hear No Evil rarely raises a smile, it's just not my kind of thing. And not just if it's violent, much as I love Jodie Foster and as moving as The Brave One is, it's not exactly laugh-a-minute material.

The thing about violence is that in real life, it is disturbing and upsetting. There are certain types of violence that I can't handle in fiction either. I can't watch films that contain any kind of portrayal of rape or sexual assault, be it shown or implied. However cleverly it is filmed or edited, and whatever the message, I don't want to see it or be told about it. I know it's something that happens, but I think it is amongst the worst things that happen in the world and I don't need a director to tell me how awful it is. I get it. I left the room during Requiem For A Dream when the junkie girlfriend starts selling herself for drug money. A reminder that this kind of thing happens in real life, and not particularly rarely, took away any desire I had to be entertained and made me run outside in case I vomited. A strong reaction, I know, but it's just the way I am.

Jason Statham doesn't do serious violence. I've seen him kill and injure people with guns, knives, a car, a hurley and his bare hands, I've seen him do serious damage, minor damage, physical damage, property damage, damage to space and time and damage to the American accent. But he only hurts the bad guys. If he hurts a good guy, you get to see his remorse. If a good guy gets hurt by someone else, you get to see the vengeance.

And it will be violent.

And it will be stupid.

And it will make you laugh.

One thing to remember about stupid violence that makes you laugh is it very often involves some form of martial arts. Jason Statham is very good at martial arts, and his fight scenes involve lots of spinning and jumping and whirling, throwing things and hitting exactly what he was aiming at. It's satisfying to watch. But that's not the limit of his abilities.

In Death Race, Jason Statham teams up with an opponent to flip a massive evil truck and destroy all the evil soldiers within it. In Crank: High Voltage he beats the crap out of Corey Haim (god rest his soul) for sleazing on his girlfriend. In Blitz he beats up a gang of would-be car thieves in the very first scene. I don't even think it's his car they're trying to steal. It's ridiculous and it's awesome and it sets the scene perfectly, because you know what he's capable of, and you know how far he'll go.

Because what you know about Jason Statham in all these films, and by Jason Statham I mean whatever character he's playing, because I refer to him as Jason Statham the vast majority of the time and rarely remember the names of his characters, what you know about Jason Statham in these films is that to some extent, in some way, he is the underdog. Jason Statham never plays the millionaire businessman, or the suave sophisticated spy, or the happily married family man. Jason Statham is the minimum wage manual labourer whose family is murdered by a man in a ski mask, or the underground boxing organiser who owes a favour to the mob boss, or the man locked up for something that, well, to be fair he probably did do it, but he's probably also keeping the heat off his brother, or boss, or family friend.

Jason Statham never plays the man who does violence for the fun of it. Jason Statham plays the man who is forced into violence but, luckily, happens to be very good at it. And you're happy that he's good at it, because he is avenging his murdered family, or biting back against the mob boss, or getting what's owed him on his release from prison.

I don't know what Jason Statham is like in real life, I've obviously never met him. From the blooper reels I've seen on my DVDs he seems like a laugh, and I know he doesn't take himself too seriously. Have you seen Crank: High Voltage? He's built like a brick shithouse and he used to be a diver, competing in World Championships and forming part of the British National Diving Team. He's somehow pretty and not pretty at the same time, rough around the edges as if he's made up of ugly features but put together it works out well, like if someone managed to make a good likeness of Julia Stiles out of a Mr Potato Head game. I know hardly anything about his private life, only really that he used to go out with the woman who played Sarah Connor in The Terminator TV series, and of course Kelly Brook left him so she could go out with Billy Zane.

Kelly Brook is a fucking idiot.

Jason Statham, I love you.

Statham Sunday part one - On the suspension of disbelief

2011-11-27T07:35:00.004Z

Flim 2012 continues today with two posts around a single theme - Jason Statham films. It takes a special type of actor to have an entire genre named after him. He is that type of actor. This morning, mindful of the fact I'm rapidly becoming the guest editor of my own blog, I'm going to do this post about the importance of good faith. This afternoon, an excellent guest post by Betsy, entitled "A Love Letter to Jason Statham". For all non-believers, this will surely be the day when the scales fall from your eyes.

I love Crank and Crank: High Voltage. They are astonishing, brilliant films. They are also terrible. Two of the most stupid, pointless films ever made. Crank: High Voltage might actually be the worst film I've ever seen. I love it. You should love it too.

There are some people who do not subscribe to the "so bad, it's good" school of thought. I am not one of them. Of course, I accept that some films are just bad. So irredeemably awful that no light can escape the surface of their black heart. Sliding Doors being the ultimate example. Crank and Crank: High Voltage are not. With a perky combination of profound self awareness and magnificent futility, they manage to break through to the other side.

Seriously, they do. If you want to get poncy about it, you could say that they so extend the elastic of their supposed generic conventions that it snaps, leading to the creation of a whole parallel set of semiotics required for the successful reading of what the film is trying to do. However, that's a bit high-fallutin' for a film franchise where Jason Statham shags Amy Smart in public to save his life. Twice. So instead, let's just say that it's complete unbelievablity, wilful stupidity and grinding pointlessness make you laugh and make you happy.

If you argue that action films shouldn't do that, I say you should untie the apron strings a little. Just go with it. Enjoy it. Suspension of disbelief is absolutely vital to the enjoyment of so bad they're good films.

Never is this truer than for Crank and Crank: High Voltage. In Crank, Statham is injected with a McGuffin of a drug which stops the heart unless it is continually pumped full of adrenaline. If you can't get past that, then you're going to have serious trouble with the Red Bull-chuggin, public porkin, drug-sniffin, epinephrine-shootin, car-crashin, boner-poppin lunacy which ensues. With a bit of good faith, though, this becomes a tapestry of good things. And after all, it's a film. If films were meant to be true to life, they'd be hours of crushing disappointment followed by a poo break.

If you didn't enjoy Crank, then you're going to HATE Crank: High Voltage, where Statham's heart has been actually physically replaced with an electric pump which needs to be continually electrocuted. Yes, the friction from wild public sex on a race course is sufficient for this, why not. And yes, he ends the film on fire. Who cares? He ended the first one falling out of an aeroplane to his certain death.

If you start asking questions of a so bad it's good film, even stop to question it for a single second, you need to abort the procedure. Watch Trois Couleurs Bleu instead and thoughtfully stroke your beard. Without good faith during films like Crank and Crank: High Voltage you would surely go insane. Anyone with even a basic working knowledge of US-UK immigration law, for example, would no doubt question how Chev Chelios manages to survive working as a freelance hitman without a visit from the IRS or the State Department, and that's before he even sets himself on fire. Maybe he's an illegal immigrant. In which case, keeping your head down and not chucking two up your girlfriend in public would be the way to go?

But there you go. Maybe Crank is not real. But that's OK. It's good for things not to be real. Especially when November sucks this hard.

Film blogging for people who don't like films: a five-point guide

2011-11-26T09:00:00.005Z

Today's post is written by 5olly. At the end of 2009, mindful of the fact he generally actively avoided watching films, 5olly set himself the challenge of watching the IMDb top 100 films in 2010 and blogging about each one. It didn't work. So for 2011 he's been doing the Channel 4 top 100 war films. This is going better. But I'm not convinced he likes films yet. Or blogging. In spite of this, it's fair to say no-one blogs quite like 5olly.

Here's his five-step guide for anyone thinking of attempting the same sort of project. Thanks go to 5olly!

5ollymund Meatburger (Popular Film Blogger): http://5olly.wordpress.com

Yeah. You should do what I do. Cos what I do rocks! When I say 'it rocks', what I mean is it sounds like it rocks, what I actually mean is 'it's shit'.

5olly's Top 5 List of How to Watch any Top 100* Films List.

* When I say list, i mean a Top 100† Movies list from the interweb

† And when i say Top 100, I mean Top 100 (IMDb Channel 4 War Films, 70's Porn Films)

They're all equally hard to watch. Except the ones that make you hard.

1. Get a hobby.
Everyone needs a hobby, and some people already have a hobby but still feel they need one. If you feel like you need to watch IMDB's Top 100 movies, you definitely still need one. (A hobby)

2. Enjoy writing bollocks.
Personally I hate films, but I like writing even less. If you feel the same then don't bother.

3. Assume that people you know will be interested in what you've written.
This is always a trap. Some of my friends like shit that I hate.

4. If you're worried that people you know won't be interested in what you've written, then make sure that people you don't know are intrigued enough to not ever bother coming back again.
I heard this wisdom at a Tory Conference in Greece.

5. When not using double negatives, always try never to use the correct amounts in each sentences. NOT!
If you can't hold your penis in one hand, then hold your hands together with someone. Then you can't hold your hands together with your penis in someone.

One of 5olly's ideas for next year's film blogging project is, as he mentioned, 1970s porn films. I know I speak for all of us when I say I really, REALLY, hope he does this.

Films which take you to another time and place

2011-11-25T08:55:00.000Z

Doing a series of film blog posts is all very well and good but I can only talk about the films I have seen, which would make for a fairly blinkered selection. So I've asked some of my friends and favourite bloggers if they'd make a contribution too. Today, Lolly from Panda and Crumpet talks about the films which transport her to a different time and place. Big thanks go to Lolly!

Hello.

I'm not really aspozeda write about why I don't believe in watching films that are so bad they're good, so instead I'm going to have a sit and a bit of a think about my favourite films that take me to another place or time. Because that sort of thing is my favourite. Escapism. Being totally sucked in. Far away places. Long times ago.

Last Year in Marianbad (1961)
This film is so beautiful, glamarous and disorientating. Set in a confusing and dreamy limbo world within a Baroque hotel interior, with outfits designed by Coco Chanel, whenever I watch this I get sucked right in to the picturesque ornamental gardens and palacial bedrooms, and also, confusingly, the video for Blur's 'To The End' which parodies it. The thing that I really fall in to though is the narration. Monotonous and repetitive (and French), I spend days walking around with an inner monologue narrating as I effortlessly swish my way through neverending corridors, sculpture gardens and hedge mazes (or "Willesden Green" as some people pronounce it).

eXistenZ (1999) (and Videodrome (1983))
Ongoing existential nightmares and losing touch with reality are me. But that's also sort of about the very idea of watching films, in a way. And the way we interact with technology, which is obviously what both of these films explore. Life is confusing. I have a massively overactive imagination and lose my way in it a bit, forget what things have or haven't happened or may or may not have been said. Multiple realities, dream worlds, existing in all of these different places and exploring them.... mmmmyes please.

The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) (2007)
Not the cheeriest film in the world. A concentration camp may not be the ideal place for a spot of cinematic escapism, but aside from this story being true and captivating, and however much bacon I may eat, there are some bits of my family history that I am consistently compelled to get lost in. I have always been fascinated by the little pockets of smaller stories surrounding WW2. I'm always delighted, in a very odd way, to watch films like this with people who have had much less exposure to the history and events of the Holocaust. Being sent to schools where we watched Fiddler on the Roof, Schindler's List or Europa Europa (another absolutely amazing film by the way) as 'special treats' has softened the blow of the scenes in The Counterfeiters where men are marched through the snow in leg irons. Shrugging these things off of the screen because I know they happened to people not so far removed from myself, whilst others wince and gasp, somehow adds to my experience of me feeling lost inside these stories, like they are somehow part of me.

I suppose they are in a way. The strokes of luck and fortune that led to me or my parents or their parents even being born; The story of my great uncle escaping Europe by foot after attending Hitler's Olympic Games; Anne Frank's bookcase; Tattoos on forearms; And Adolf Burger's life-saving typographical skills. I love this film for being German, too. It feels somehow balanced differently. You become completely part of this life by watching the twists it takes.

The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
Classic typical Wes Anderson. All the ingredients you need are there. Colours. People with no real job. Vintage/timeless outfits. Bill Murray. People trying to 'find themselves'. And most importantly, Jason Schwartzman. Oh, Jason. Ahem. Anyway. Yes. You've probably seen this so I shan't bang on about the sublime directing, or the crafty set production techniques that went in to setting most of the film on a train. This film takes me to India. It puts me on the train with the brothers. It's so immersive. I have watched this film so many times - in fact I'm probably going to watch it tonight now - but it leaves me feeling the same way EVERY time. That I must go somewhere. Explore some things. Explore myself. Reconnect with my family. Write some stuff on my typewriter. And also marry Jason Schwartzman.

Gainsbourg (2010)
I'm really surprising myself with how recent these are. I fucking love Serge. I even love the imaginary posthumous (mmm, hummus) Serge who inhabits my twitter timeline with talk of his balls and swearing about politics. Joann Sfar did an amazing job of bringing his massively long graphic novel to big-screen life. You feel like you're sneaking around next to Serge as a child, as a young crooner, as a sleazy revolting brilliant old dog, like you're sat next to him, like his ugly cabbage-headed alter-ego which haunts his reflections and moments of insecurity. PARIS. I bloody love Paris. I LOVE FRANCE. I must go, immediately. And smoke! I need to smoke ALL the cigarettes. And eat pickled cucumbers with my Jewish grandpa. And paint and fuck and speak French and be a disgrace.

Films which teach you about yourself: The King of Comedy

2011-11-24T09:45:00.005Z

Martin Scorsese is good at films. I have not seen all of his films - my brief flirtation with THE DIRECTOR as THE AUTEUR only lasted as long as I realised that films with massive, angry, genetically engineered, vengeful sharks are normally directed by a wide range of people - but I know he is good at films because I consider three of his films to be the most important films in my life.

Like many DISAFFECTED YOUNG MEN, I have found a lot of solace in these films, and a lot of understanding of myself. I am nothing if not a stereotype. However, whilst the majority of attention is focussed on the other two - Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) - I want to talk mainly about the third: 1983's The King of Comedy.

I think finding yourself through Taxi Driver and Raging Bull as a MAN, or even a MAN'S MAN, is far mor glamorous. But sadly The King of Comedy is far more me. This isn't necessarily such a bad thing: John Hinckley Jr. found himself through Taxi Driver's troubled protagonist Travis Bickle and ended up sending spunk and turds and wee to Jodie Foster and then shooting Ronald Reagan.

No, you have to be true to yourself, and in truth, I am Rupert Pupkin.

If you are not familiar with The King of Comedy (and I really, REALLY, must stress that you should see it, it is magnificent), it stars Robert Di Niro as a nobody, Rupert Pupkin. Pupkin, a talentless but dedicated autograph hunter and student of fame, is obsessed with American talk show host and comedian Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis). He dreams and fantasises all day about he and Langford being friends and peers, about himself being the new king of comedy. In the end he concocts a kidnap plan in order to get himself some coast-to-coast airtime for his fabulously average stand-up act.

I don't want to relate to Rupert Pupkin. But I do. I see in him everything about me that I find squirmingly embarrassing and undesirable. Pupkin is a fantastist, incapable of seeing anything but the end goal, blind to the individual steps you need to take to get there. He is so dazzled by his own perceived brilliance that he's lost sight of his crushing mediocrity as well as losing sight of himself. I see me in everything Rupert Pupkin says, thinks and does, and it worries me every single time.

Well I see me right up until he takes the proactive - and ultimately successful - step of kidnapping his hero and holding him to ransom. I suppose the dangerous thing about the film is that it could be seen to teach such deluded fantasist nobodies such as myself that to follow one's maddest ideas is the solution. The fact that it does not, I think, is due to the strength and depth of Di Niro's performance. Di Niro makes Pupkin undeniably loveable but also bewildering, amusing, frustrating, annoying and pitiable. His loveability is shot through with a sure knowledge that it cannot be sustained. Pupkin is a charming, but hollow and undesirable, man.

In learning about myself from The King of Comedy, I decided I really have to also try and learn FROM The King of Comedy, too. Dedicate myself to Pupkin avoidance. I think the key lesson I try and take is to never forget yourself and your own limitations. Part of that is accepting that I will always be a daydreamer, whose brain runs away with him in elaborate wonderful ideal-world scenarios. But equally, a part of that is accepting those for daydreams being all they are. The kindness and patience shown by much of the supporting cast - constantly beset with maniac fans like Rupert Pupkin and Masha or the wild ego of Langford - is I think the true aspirational element to this film and the one I try and take away.

I just hope that I remain able to see, and understand with such brilliant clarity, both sides of that coin in the same way that Scorsese and Di Niro do. The King of Comedy is, I think, my favourite film of all time. It's not the easiest film to watch and consequently, nor is it the one I see most often. But it's always the one which leaves me filled with the most wonder. I love it. And coupled with Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, it's more than sufficient to forgive Robert Di Niro ANY number of Meet the Fockers-style family comedy film catastrophes (although personally I think he was magnificent in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle).

Tomorrow: Lolly from Panda and Crumpet on films which take her to another time and place.

Flim 2012

2011-11-22T08:00:00.003Z

As my bewilderingly loyal readers will know, earlier this year I did a series of posts about favourite albums and the favourite albums of my friends and fellow blogging machines. I love albums. But they're not the only way in which you can enjoy music.

Films are different. They are not something you can particularly enjoy by having them on in the background, or expect to receive the same gratification watching one scene as you would by seeing the whole thing. They are something which require a bit of commitment and engagement, the desire to sit down and concentrate on it and it alone until it's finished telling its story.

For me, winter and particularly Christmas time are prime film watching moments. Over the Christmas holidays I will be making a list of all the films on which I really ought not to miss, as I have been doing since I can remember. There've been fairly meagre pickings in recent years - the last real bonanza was about 10 years ago, when the BBC ran a huge series of the films from the Universal Studios horror canon - but there's usually at least half a dozen films which I've not seen before, that rarely come up, or that will surprise me if I give them the chance. Last year I promised myself I would try and watch as many films as I could and I'll be doing the same thing this year. Probably whilst drinking port and eating chocolates.

I weigh 415lbs.

To accompany this, I am going to be trying to do a series of posts on this actual very blog about films. Good ones, brilliant ones, ones which change you, awful ones, grindingly awful ones, BRILLIANTLY awful ones, sad ones, ones that take you out of time and place, ones which you can watch again and again. I hope that I will also be able to get some guest authors to share their own thoughts, to produce a wide-ranging series of recommendations and stories. And there won't be a review in sight. I have rashly also said I will try and provide illustrations for these posts, which was a monumentally daft thing to say but it would be good so I will try and do that as well.

I hope we'll all enjoy it and that it will encourage you all to watch as many films as possible, instead of other boring winter activities like whatever the hell it is you people do whilst I'm sat at home in my pants watching films.

All boys like Velma the best

2011-11-21T13:38:00.012Z

Yesterday I spent a lovely afternoon discussing ducks, swans, feeders and the potential for lesbianism in dogs in Queen's Park, Brighton with a very superior class of people indeed. One of them was one of my favourite bloggers and tweety-tweet-tweeters, Mollbird, whom I was meeting in actual real life for the first time. You should definitely read her blog if you don't already do so. Go on. Do it now, this will still be waiting for you when you get back. She once got pepper sprayed in a cinema, rendering a 3-D experience resolutely 0-D. What more do you want?

It's always nice to meet people who you've been following on Twitter, I find, because as I've said before there's very few surprises. Most people are the way they are on the site, and now you've got the added bonus that they can tell you things in longer increments than 140 characters or fewer. I learnt new facts and was able to establish that Moll - who has one of your actual degrees in film studies - shares my passion for films having more sharks in them wherever possible. Hell, even wherever NOT possible. Just get some sharks in, and make sure they're ANGRY. I feel that her opinion was validation of a theory on the filmmaker's art which may otherwise very well have just been the rantings of a complete idiot, like everything else I say.

Another important thing to come out of yesterday afternoon, however, was Moll posing the vital question: which cartoon character would play you in a film of your life? These are the sort of vital questions that I feel are criminally ignored by society at large because they think they are stupid or trivial. But, and I'm not actually joking about this, I think they're the most important things. It's the little, stupid and trivial things that make up life.

Her choice was Velma from Scooby Doo. A lot of my friends answer Velma to that question, in fact. Alice was also there and quickly agreed that Velma was her choice too*. It was a whole world of Velmagic going on. It's a good thing. It shows a sense of humour and wry self-depreciation. It's a sign that they value their depth of character. Velma should be an icon for our times.

I wonder, though, how many women when noting their Velmatic tendencies actually know that when it comes down to that vital Scooby Doo Choice, all boys like Velma the best? Well, all boys you'd want to have anything to do with, anyway. I'd go as far to say that you should be highly suspicious of a man who would choose Daphne over Velma, nor anything to do with a woman who would do the same thing when trying to find a cartoon shorthand to describe themselves.

This is a bold statement, and maybe it's just me. But I really don't think it is. I really HOPE that it isn't, too. I can scarcely imagine the horror of a society ruled by Daphnes and Daphne-chasers. I needn't even bother imagining it, in fact. I just need to watch any of the programmes on ITV2 to show me what that would be like. I think it's horrifying, vapid and materialistic. It's time that Velmas and Velma enthusiasts took back popular culture for themselves. We have nothing to lose but our Scooby Snacks.

By the way, the cartoon character who would play me is Muttley. And I would like a medal, yes.

* I should point out that Alice says I have misremembered this and that in fact she did not make a specific choice. However, I'm trying to construct a sociological theory with help from empirical evidence, so I'm leaving it in.

Horse

2011-11-20T08:00:00.000Z

Stegosaurus

2011-11-19T08:00:00.000Z

On firefighting

2011-11-18T10:29:00.003Z

Twitter is a dangerous place for me to be really. With only 140 characters available, getting your point across can sometimes be tricky. Reading between the lines is often imperative. It's unfortunate, then, that this is a skill I really don't possess.

Yesterday my timeline was full of gloom. It was a gloomnami. Having just come out of a big spangly gloom myself, I thought that this was just typical. "Why can't everyone be cheerful at the same time?", I pondered.

When this was pointed out again to me this morning by my friend, it gave me pause for thought. I think that I do spend an awful lot of time taking care of making sure everyone I care about is happy rather than do it for myself. I suppose I have always done it, and assumed that everyone was doing the same thing. It's a characteristic I have inherited from my mother, whose frankly mind-boggling altruism (of course) drives me mad. "Why don't you just take care of yourself first?", I wail, continuing a proud human tradition of being most annoyed by the characteristics in others that are most damning of yourself.

Thing is, wanting the people you love to be happy isn't a particularly bad characteristic. There are worse ones. Racism, farting on all the cans in a supermarket or wiping your bum on the curtains are but three examples. However, when the same people I am trying to cheer are at the same time worried about whether I am happy, it's somewhat counterproductive.

"Don't worry about me" is something of a mantra of mine. And I always mean it. But I wouldn't say I've ever been particularly happy at any point in my life thus far. Neutral is about as high as I pitch for. Maybe it's time for me to worry about me a little bit more. If only because it will give other people one less thing to worry about. And then they'll feel happier.

Big cats

2011-11-18T08:00:00.000Z

Pirate

2011-11-17T08:00:00.000Z

Ungulate

2011-11-16T08:00:00.000Z

Naive

2011-11-15T21:30:00.003Z

Nothing here

2011-11-14T07:32:00.000Z

There are four types of monkey

2011-11-13T17:20:00.001Z

Folie à deuxmund

2011-11-11T15:12:00.000Z

I am not dotmund. Obviously, posting this as dotmund on a blog called "dotmund" doesn't help my cause. Perhaps you found this post by clicking a link posted by dotmund on Twitter. Or via my profile on b3ta.com or on Flickr (both dotmund, in case you'd not guessed by now). But still. Dotmund is not me, either. Not all of me. I don't think so, anyway.

Which isn't to say I wouldn't like to be dotmund. A lot of people like him. He's a bit of a character. Sometimes he says funny things, interesting things. Sometimes he says provocative things, or draws a picture that people enjoy. Dotmund very much exists, but I am not him.

I wish I knew who I was. I don't really understand people, you see. I feel very alone and alienated when I'm around them. But I am quite intelligent, so I've grown adept at blending in. I can talk to people on more or less any subject in more or less any situation. My ability to bluff my way through being a human is a necessity for me, as my greatest fear is being found out.

I suppose dotmund came in as a sort of caricatured version of bits of me I thought would appeal to people. But he's not really me. That is to say, he is but he shouldn't be everything I am. There is a symbiosis in our relationship, of course. Neither of us could exist without the other. Increasingly, however, I worry that my role in this has come down to the bare essentials - breathing, eating, keeping everything in order until the next time dotmund is required - because that's the person people want to see. When I die, I suspect dotmund will be the name on my tombstone. I can't blame anyone for that. But he's not me. I hope he's not me. Or rather, I hope the bits of me he is aren't all there is.

I don't even know who I am any more. Like, I wouldn't even know how to introduce myself to someone. I have so many names these days. Like a well-loved pet. Maybe that's what I am. What I do know is that as soon as someone says "you may know him as dotmund" eyes light up and I get to play at being dotmund for a while.

But I'm not him. I kind of wish I could remember who I really am. But at the same time I'm scared to in case I find that there's nothing there any more.

Read something else

2011-11-10T16:45:00.005Z

The keen-eyed among you will have noticed a distinct improvement in the overall quality and tone of my blog in the last couple of days, because I've not been writing it. So as not to spoil my batting average, here's another of my occasional round ups of better things to read than stuff I write.

Firstly, long-time sidebar dweller (and as such someone you should already be familiar with), Jessica Harby now has a website for all of her art. You need to see this, because she is really good.

Another long term inmate from my Friends section is Betsy, who now has more blogs than she does legs. This latest one isn't about diabetes or horrible disfigurement, though. It's about other things. Last night's post about stress is properly brilliant and deserves to be read and read again.

My friend Andy, meanwhile, has turned his back on boring old British snacks in favour of the increasingly broad and exciting array of foreign snacks on British shelves as well as any contraband smuggled in on planes hidden down people's trousers. Marvel as a man whose diet used to be 90% vinegar and peas now chows down on a Knoppers.

Last weekend I spent a hugely enjoyable Saturday evening with Bob Manning and his lovely family in his garden, setting fire to things and throwing them up in the air. Luckily it was Bonfire Night and no-one noticed. Bob is raising awareness about and money for MS by getting musicians to record cover versions of the song he wrote, Washington Parks. You can find out all about it here.

I mentioned I See A Beautiful Future last week, but I'm going to do it again, both because I think it's developing into a really fantastic site and also today it's got a song on it and everything.

If you'd prefer to just gawp at something in wonder, my friend Lolly - who the memory champions reading will no doubt remember wrote Wednesday's post about her favourite albums - has finished uploading her photographs from her American road trip between LA and Las Vegas last month. She is an amazing photographer, so these are amazing photographs.

Finally, I have to admit defeat and confess that this last link is something I did write. However, it's worth checking out the rest of the blog as well, because it gets a lot better after that. Mental Spaghetti.

While we're all about me (boo) here's a handy guide I made to some aspects of Twitter etiquette which are seemingly being forgotten or gleefully ignored. By dicks.

My favourite albums: Fran

2011-11-10T08:00:00.001Z

Another guest post today. This time it's from my friend Fran. Fran is 27 and lives in Brighton, which is an excellent place to live. She is also the author of her own excellent blog about life, craft and creativity, Skulls and Ponies. You should definitely read it.

Fran's (no particular order) top 10 is as follows:

1) A Perfect Circle - Mer De Noms
This album is my everything. It’s the one. My true love. My soulmate. As much as I love Tool, I have always preferred APC. This album lifts me up when I’m feeling down, comforts me when I’m feeling wallowy and never fails to make me smile when I’m feeling good. It’s perfect.

2) Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes
I used to listen to this album with my Dad in the car. My parents divorced when I was 4 so I spent a lot of time in the car. I used to play ‘Leather’ on repeat. Bit weird as the lyrics open with ‘Look who’s standing naked before you...’ but I was a kid. I didn’t care about the words. The music connected with me and still does.

3) No Doubt - Tragic Kingdom
I loved, loved, loved this band so much when I was younger. From about the age of 11 I just thought they were the best thing ever. The first time (and the only time) I saw them was at Brixton Academy. 17, young, naive, terrified of London. With Gwen Stefani’s new pop career I could easily shy away from claiming they are one of my favourites but they are. It was a close tie between Tragic Kingdom and their self-titled album but T.K is just still so very very brilliant.

4) Between the Buried and Me - Colors
So up until very recently I was massively into metal, hardcore, screamo, prog etc. It’s only in the last few years I’ve started to like indie and folk! BTBAM’s songs are just stunningly beautiful. They ebb and flow and tell you a story. White Walls is the ultimate track with an epic build that then suddenly crashes into destruction. Glorious.

5) Jeff Buckley - Grace
Maybe I shouldn’t admit to this one? I mean it’s a bit of cliche really for anyone my age, but it’s the truth. This album is undeniably amazing. The vocals are what make it. I’ll say no more than that.

6) Modern Life is War - My Love, My Way
Melodic hardcore at it’s best. I understand this probably isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but man this album is just fantastic. MLIW (sadly no more) just had the best lyrics, and every song is so full of passion. My favourite is First and Ellen with the last line ‘So scrape your heart up from the bottom of the bottom of the barrel. Keep your faith in the path that's growing narrow. Kill the doubt inside your head. We overcome. We push ahead.”

7) Deftones - White Pony
I think it’s fair to say this album is a little dated now in terms of sound, but I still adore it. Deftones were one of those bands that when I first heard them I hate, hate, hated them. I couldn’t get it and then one day BAM! I just completely got it and understood what all the hype was about. It was like it just clicked. I love Passenger - it also features Maynard James Keenan (Tool, APC)

8) Faith No More - King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime
I love Faith No More and have done since I was a kid. I never really knew anyone who was as into them as me until I met my friend Dan (who is one of best friends) and it was the basis of our friendship! 2 years ago they did a reunion tour which Dan and I leapt on! When Dan was 15 he had a ticket to go see FNM but they broke up before he got chance to see them and was completely gutted. Seeing them at Brixton was an emotional experience. The very next morning we got on a bus to Download with all our friends and got to see them the very next night.

9) Lit - A Place in the Sun

10) The National - Boxer
My very indie boyfriend got me into this band. He likes a lot of the same music as me, but also is a massive indie boy. Before we got together nearly 2 years ago, we had been friends for a while (having met at Uni). When we first got together he made me a playlist and Fake Empire was one of the tracks on it. I thought the lyrics were “We are half away in a facon pie”.

My favourite albums: Lolly

2011-11-09T08:01:00.003Z

Hello blog fans. This is my 300th post, incredible huh? In order to properly celebrate I decided to get someone else to write it for me and resurrect a feature from earlier in the year - favourite album lists. For listalbumblog fans, you'll no doubt be pleased to hear that there will hopefully be one or two more of these in the near future. For the dissenting voices, I suggest you go and read Silvio Berlusconi's Facebook page until I'm done.

Today's list is from my friend Lolly. Lolly is 29 and is very much one of those Londoners, having been born and bred there. It's also where she lives now, if you can imagine such a thing - although she has also spent time living in Leeds, Brighton and Melbourne, Australia. Lolly is one half of the excellent Panda and Crumpet, so you can read more of what she gets up to there if you want. I sincerely advise that you do.

Here is Lolly's list:

1 - Expecting To Fly, The Bluetones (1996)
I've written a lot about The Bluetones and the impact they've had on the past 15 years of my life on my own blog. It had to be the first one I wrote about. When I first heard Slight Return on the radio I knew they were MY band. It sounded like how I wanted everything I ever wanted to listen to again to sound. I've spent half of my life (bloodyell, I know, right?) seeing them live, until I stood next to grown men sobbing at their final show last month. This album is perfect. Tales of calm melodic heartbreak follow jingle-jangle magical indie-pop. It never sounds anything other than wonderful.

2 - London Is The Place For Me, Trinidadian Calypso in London, 1950-56
This album captures so many brilliant social and historical gems - every song is like a whole world in a little story: getting lost on the Underground, city-wide celebrations, racial tension and cricket. Everything on here is still so relevent today and my WORD it sounds amazing on a sunny day.

3 - I Lucifer, The Real Tuesday Weld (2003)
Stephen Coates is an extraordinary man. Writer, performer, artist, musician... He's created an entire mythology and cast of characters out of his undying love for London, it's history and secrets. The band's body of work is huge. This album in particular acts as a sort of soundtrack to Glen Duncan's excellent novel of the same name, which incidentally, is in my list of top 10 books. AND he got the entire idea (and name) for the band because of a dream he had. Which is wonderful. And inspiring. Good shit.

4 - Substance, New Order (1987)
Well, I mean, come on. Obv.

5 - Tigermilk, Belle and Sebastian (1996)
Properly timeless, if you ask me. Which you are. Does the same things to my ears and brains and insides as it did when I first heard it. Although best reserved for lazy Sundays (on vinyl, natch) now rather than jumpy CD whilst sobbing over unfinished GCSE art homework.

6 - The Best of Kid Creole & The Coconuts (1990)
Camp and brilliant - so 'of its time', and way before MY time, really, but I properly discovered them after watching the brilliant film Downtown 81, where Jean-Michel Basquiat wonders around downtown in NYC, and stumbles in to a live Kid Creole performance. I love his glam gang of Coconuts, his 1930-40s style, the whole thing is a hilarious innuendous Latin carnival and I bloody love it.

7 - Tellin Stories, The Charlatans (1997)
I was 15 when this came out. So it instantly meant a lot. Still does. And if you don't follow Tim Burgess on twitter then you're missing out on some of the best imaginary morning coffee on the internet.

8 - Dig Your Own Hole, Chemical Brothers (1997)
After being convinced that boys with floppy hair and guitars was the only way for me, I was really shocked when my teenage girly boy-in-band-loving self couldn't get enough of this album but it's SO DAMN GOOD. It's just genius. I don't need to say much about how important and different and great this was and is. You know.

9 - LA Woman, The Doors (1971)
Jim Morrison's last album. The first thing my dad ever bought on CD (because his LP had been damaged. By me). Curious as to what all the fuss was about when I had decided to decorate that poor record, I made sure that this was also the first CD I ever stole off my dad.

10 - Songs the Lord Taught Us, The Cramps (1980)
Spooky and loud and innovative and just a little bit comedy. Bloody brilliant bit of psychobilly. I stayed in a Cramps-themed trailer in the middle of the California desert this year, and just realised I've not listened to this since then. Best go do that then.