My beloved doesn’t cook that much. I am a kitchen hog, and will happily usher her out of the room while I create culinary masterpieces. She’ll happily be ushered. Let the goon do all the work. But just because she doesn’t, don’t mean she can’t. When TLC picks a saucepan up, the results are always delicious. Last night, after I returned bone deep weary from a working weekend, she put together the best cauliflower cheese I have ever tasted.
Author: Rob
Writer. Film-maker. Cartoonist. Cook. Lover.
Play The Game, The Game Plays You: X&HT Saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
A note, before we begin, on the vexed question of remakes. I’ve already been caught out once this year by taking a stand against them, and came close to missing out on a film that may be in my Top five for the year. I should know better. There’s no such thing as an absolute rule. Everything on this blog runs according to the Pirate Code. I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.
Continue reading Play The Game, The Game Plays You: X&HT Saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
The Tale Of The Scorpion: X&HT Saw Drive
You think you know this film. You already have your references in your pocket like a deck of cards. Two-Lane Blacktop, maybe Vanishing Point. Bullitt, of course. Walter Hill’s The Driver, for sure. If you’re clever, William Friedkin’s To Live And Die In L.A has been slipped into the stack.
The pre-title sequence does nothing to change your mind. Throbbing synths, a heist, a chase. A nameless driver, expressionless, almost wordless, dressed in a retro silver jacket with a scorpion on the back. Even the titles are done in hot pink Brush Script. You’re guided towards Risky Business, After Hours. It’s 80s kitsch done with flair and style. Nothing more.
And then, just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, the damn thing keeps changing gears on you, accelerating away, upping the game. The film wrongfoots you at every turn. Moments of heart-glow tenderness are matched with scenes of shocking violence. The bad guys are worse than you think. But the plan they concoct, the engine of the film, has a fatal flaw. No-one really knows the driver. Which means that no-one really knows what he’s capable of. And that scorpion on his jacket isn’t an affectation. It’s a plain-as-sunrise warning.
You won’t see a better slice of LA noir this year. Newton Thomas Sigel’s cinematography is dripping with hot gold and sky blue. NOT teal and orange, let me stress that – this is one good looking film. Ryan Gosling has the driver nailed. He wears a mask, and when it slips, when the cracks start to show, that’s when the fireworks start. Albert Brooks has finally figured out rule number one: comedians make the best villains. The real star of this film? Los Angeles herself, dolled up in cheap diamonds and lurid stripper-chic. The driver knows every inch of her, and doesn’t understand how cruel she can be at all.
Drive takes all the assumptions you have about driver films and flips them over. This one really is about the journey as much as the destination, and believe me, it’s one hell of a ride.
You think you know this film. Trust me. You don’t.
Two Mornings
In the South of France, docoDomsy sets up a time-lapse shot before a day on his promo project for Mas De Calage, a local winery.
Meanwhile, I take my place amongst the flood of people pouring through London Paddington, facing another day at work.
</Torch Song: The high camp of Torchwood: Miracle Day
Caught the last episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day last night. It’s a series that, while riddled with flaws the way Swiss cheese has holes, I found myself enjoying. Once you stop trying to take it seriously as a genuine exploration of a Big Idea and buy into the high-camp, wildly gesticulating opera of the thing, then it becomes a far more palatable option. Let’s face it, if the show really wanted to show us the effects of a world without death, you’d be in for a much grimmer prospect.
I loved the way Lauren Ambrose and Bill Pullman both got the tone. Ambrose in particular, who I adored as Claire in Six Feet Under, really went for it, all hair and bug eyes and shrieking. The script even got a joke out of it, as she was smacked around by Gwen while the show built up to it’s Really Big Explosion. “How much lipstick can someone wear?” Well, in this show, there’s no such thing as too much.
The fanboi rollcall of ex-Trekkies and genre stalwarts simply added to the hilarity. Look, it’s Q! With a beard! Nana Visitor still looks like an alien even without the nose-thingy!
Look, come on. You couldn’t take it seriously. It was clever of Russel T and his co-conspirator Jane Espenson to move on from the bleakly adult themes that Children Of Earth had explored so effectively, and try something more over-the-top. And dear gods, they did it. Immortality, brought about through a magic tunnel through the earth that was somehow the physical manifestation of the soul of the planet. You couldn’t do that on Hollyoaks. The show became a manic, globe-trotting whirlwind of crazy ideas, big ‘splosions, gore, sex and tantrums.
Gwen Cooper has changed too. No longer the audience’s eyes, ears and questions, she’s a superspy now, a stone killer whose secret base just happens to be a terraced house in Cardiff. A woman whose mothering instincts include shoving a Glock into the face of any threat to her daughter. To be frank, she’s the reason I kept watching. She took the hysteria and bombast around her and made it, if not believable, then somehow bearable.
Everything’s geared up for another season, with a Buffy-style Big Bad in the shape of the Three Families and another immortal on the planet. Will we get one? Well, viewing figures in the UK have tanked. But Starz, who backed the show in the States, have form when it comes to pushing out high-concept, high-camp genre shows. This could be the start of something faaaabulous.
The Lady and The Father: Burma Chronicles
Journalism in comics has a much greater pedigree than you might think. Political cartoons have been with us since the Romans, who daubed parodies of disliked senators on the walls of their cities. To this day, the form has the ability to shock, provoke and anger to the point of murder, if you consider the case of Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist killed for his depiction of Mohammed.
Travel journalism is less well represented. You could argue that Herge’s Tintin took place in such carefully researched and exquisitely rendered locales that it equated to a kind of travelogue – although it would be decades before we could see how accurately he’d got the moon. For most people, Joe Sacco’s work in Bosnia and Palestine is the definition of travel journalism – angry, passionate comics that get to the heart of the conflict.
A different approach is taken by French-Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle, whose Burma Chronicles is out in a new paperback edition from Jonathan Cape in the UK. Delisle is married to Nadege, a Medicins Sans Frontieres administrator, and their journeys into strife-torn areas give him unprecedented access. The book tells of their trip to Burma at a point when the generals who run the show are beginning the next in a long series of clampdowns. As funding and visas are pulled, Guy, his wife Nasege and their baby son Louis struggle to find a life in a country that, officially at least, refuses to admit that they are needed.
Delisle approaches his story from the opposite angle to Sacco. He is no journalist, and never agitates to get into the dangerous areas. He’s principally a house-husband, there to look after Louis, an adjunct to Nadege and her work. Tootling around town with Louis in a buggy, he becomes almost invisible, and is free to observe the everyday life of the people. He discovers that the place they have rented is just around the corner from the house where Aung San Suu Kyi has been held under house arrest for decades. He never sees her, of course, despite vague efforts to at least walk down her street (an effort that’s finally rewarded in an unexpected way). But, as in life, she is an unspoken presence, a thread running through everything, binding her people together in the face of crippling poverty and brutal repression.
Delisle has a simple, clean style that again is the polar opposite to Sacco’s pyrotechnic, fish-eye-lens freakouts. He draws himself as an abstraction, a simple collection of lines that reminded me a little of the 1992 Olympic mascot Cobi. Otherwise, his settings and characters are picked out with care and grace. As we follow Guy, Nasege and Louis through their year in Burma, we get to know and care about them and the lovely, punished country around them.
The story unfolds quietly, and always with a wry humour. Guy is lazy despite his best efforts, his promises to do more frequently washed away in the everyday tasks of looking after Louis or getting some drawing done. But he does, gradually, come to an understanding with Burma. There’s a lovely sequence towards the end of the book where he finally tries a three-day meditation retreat (granted, just round the corner from his house). Burma Chronicles is full of moments like these – the wordless, 24-panel pages of his trips to tourist destinations are sheer, joyful cartooning at it’s purest and most skilful.
If you need an antidote to the DC Comics reboot sturm und drang, Burma Chronicles fits the bill perfectly. It’s subtle, sharp and intelligent comics work, an incisive commentary on the state of Burma at a low point in the country’s history. Moving, hilarious and insightful stuff.
The Everliving Undead
I’m crossposting this with my gig over at the United Kingdom Zombie Defence League. It ticks too many of the boxes I regularly mark off here not to make it available to you, oh Readership. Howevs, before we begin, I urge you to check out the UKZDL site – it’s full of zombieliciousness!
Sunday Spiritual: View From A Tower
December 1999. A month filled with portent and pre-millenial tension. We were in New York, after a week in Boston in which I’d seen a red moon rise while we watched the sun set on the observation deck of the John Hancock Tower. TLC had suffered through a brutal bout of food poisoning, and I had an eye infection that had fused my eyelids shut. The red numbers of the signage at the old Marvel building on Broadway merged in my head with the posters for the new Schwartzenegger movie. 666. End Of Days. It had been, by any definition of the word, a strange holiday.
But it was our first time in the States, and New York was everything we’d imagined and hoped. We did all the tourist things, giggling like loons at the sheer sensory overload of Times Square, braced in the brutal cold at Battery Park. The towncar from Newark into town had been like the Sopranos titles in reverse, complete with a motormouth driver called Vinnie, who asked us if we’d heard of this chick called Madonna. We were two blocks from Grand Central. It was, just as everyone says, like starring in your own Woody Allen movie.
And here we were, on the brightest day I’d ever seen, standing on the roof of a 107-floor tower, gazing at the whole city spread out before us like a strange, magical carpet. Behind us, a school party chattered, peering unconcerned over the barriers, looking for their school. Even in winter, Central Park was green, and the sky around us (it felt as if we were so high that it could no longer be above our heads) an achingly flawless blue. Our breath froze, and I swore it sparkled in the clean air. TLC took my hand, and we lost, momentarily, the capability for speech. There was no need for it, in this still point of beauty and joy.
This is a memory I cherish, and it can never be tarnished, never be changed, never be corrupted. I choose not to reflect on the events that came after, or note the arbitrary anniversary of a lunatic deed. There are plenty of other places that will. Today, I choose to remember happier times. I choose to celebrate the gifts that we have been granted, and a city awash in light.
They Sure Made A Monkey Outta Me: X&HT (finally) Saw Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
It takes a big man to admit he was wrong. Which must make me some kind of giant, even though I’m feeling quite small at the moment.
A telling off in the comments and quiet disbelief from everyone that had seen the film that I was taking a stand, mated with a quiet Thursday where there was nothing else on at the Vue led to me taking a seat at an afternoon screening of Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes.
Continue reading They Sure Made A Monkey Outta Me: X&HT (finally) Saw Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
A New Phase part 3: UKZDL
In a fine example of what TLC likes to call my tendency to overextend, I have signed up as writer to yet another website. At this rate, I will be doing the whole internet by this time next month. We are apologises in advance for the subsequent droop in kwalitee.
The new endeavour is a gig on a new zombie site, UKZDF. Stands for United Kingdom Zombie Defence League. There’s an element of ARG and role-play in here – head of the League, “Sarge” Rob May (an X&HTeam-mate of long standing, I might add) has spent a long while working out the best places to set up a defensive perimeter should the zombie plague hit Reading (hint: don’t do a Romero and hide out in the Oracle). But the site also seeks out and celebrates the best in zombie culture.
Up on the site at the moment, we’re looking at the upcoming launch of Dead island, which looks to be the zombie game of the year. There’s an interview with the producers of the Walking Dead, and a review of the first two in a great new series of books by Mira Grant, Newsflesh.
Oh, yes, and a brief history of the zombie in popular culture pre-Romero, which is my first contribution. Sarge has been good enough to give me my own section, so keep an eye out for weekly blather from me. It’s early days, but the site already looks good, and there’s some interesting people lined up to contribute. If anyone’s interested, let me know and I’ll forward your names onto Sarge.
In the meantime, read and enjoy. It’s a dead cert.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 