Category Archives: Cinema

Oct 12 2019
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Cinema, Film, Movie, Photography, Thailand, Tourism, Transport, Travel, Uncategorized

Thai road-trippin’.

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Time flies. This was six years ago today, and what a silly wee adventure it was, Bangkok to Rayong to Pattaya to Ayutthaya. The piece-of-shite motorbike I purchased off a Burmese borderline dwarf exploded about two hours into the journey to Rayong so I had to sit on a rotten minibus like a tinned sardine for half the day. But Fleetwood Mac got me through proceedings. I hate to appropriate the word ‘epic’ but this sojourn really was because it had everything; it was The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) but without Velcro dartboards to launch midgets at.

Good times.

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Oct 06 2019
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Cinema, Film, Uncategorized, United States

The Mighty Ducks trilogy – good god.

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Some things shouldn’t be revisited, mainly items from childhood that fill you with nostalgic joy. The Mighty Ducks movies are a mighty (sorry) example of this. I was convinced they were masterworks because time is an emollient cream of sorts. By gum, these films are fucking dire.

Where to begin? We can start with Emilio Estevez’s face. It is unchanging throughout. The bloke has the acting chops of a turnip and the charisma of a sock. If he were my coach I’d quit the team. What is even worse, though, are the kids. They are so annoying that I think I’d spike their milk bottles with cyanide had I passed through the school system with them. The one exception is the fat bastard from Keenan and Kel who pops up in the sequel; he’s the only critter there with an IQ.

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And what a mad movie D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994) is. For some reason the bad guys are from Iceland. Every single one of them looks 10 years older than their age and appear to be either Neo-Nazis or overgrown members of the Hitler Youth. Their coach is even called ‘The Dentist’; Marathon Man (1976) flashbacks kicking in.

However, the theme tune is splendid and the Flying V looks aesthetically pleasing even though it makes zero fucking sense.

The ’90s were an odd time.

Further reading/viewing:

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2141498-25-things-you-never-knew-about-the-mighty-ducks-trilogy

https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/d2-mighty-ducks-review/

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Sep 29 2019
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Britain, Cinema, Crime, Movie, Movies, Photography, Tourism, Travel, Uncategorized, United Kingdom

Newcastle – in search of Jack Carter.

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I was in Newcastle this week. The city is a bit of a toilet and their football fans quite possibly the most delusional on the planet. I fondly recall Michael Caine’s Jack Carter uttering the immortal line, “Listen, the only reason I came back to this crap house – was to find out who did it. And I’m not leaving until I do.” That’s Newcastle in a sentence.

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It has its wee charming attributes, though, as do most post-industrial northern dwellings. It’s Hovis advert territory but with tracksuits. I spent my time here wandering about like a wee numpty in search of locations featured in the movie. I didn’t find any, although I did locate a hostel kitchen that had no sink.

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Further reading/viewing:

https://www.movie-locations.com/movies/g/Get-Carter-1971.php 

https://www.getcarter.xyz/locations/arriving-in-newcastle/

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/former-get-carter-pub-re-opens-8285847

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Aug 31 2019
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Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Uncategorized

The Swarm (1978). So bad it’s good?

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Michael Caine and … killer bees. Yes, the bloke – now a global institution – from Zulu (1964), The Italian Job (1969), Get Carter (1971), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and a smorgasbord of Christopher Nolan films in a twilight career resurgence, plays a constantly-shouting macho entomologist (one of a kind) in this thoroughly ridiculous disaster movie from the director of The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). It’s entertaining because it’s shite.

The attraction with garbage like this is that it’s comforting sometimes to see lauded thespians and ‘the elite’ brought down a peg or two; I’m thinking of ‘It’s a Royal Knockout’ as the prime example, though this escapade did not involve sociopath insects … oh, wait a minute.

Anyway, I can’t get my head around how some movies have come into existence, and struggle to picture the pitch made to executives who greenlit the thing – “This is about hyper-aggressive killer bees. We want the cockney bloke from The Ipcress File (1965).” I personally find it a hoot that Caine justified the dross in an interview by declaring the wage he earned bought him a house. Fair enough.

“Will history blame me or the bees?”

What a line.

Further reading/viewing:

https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/the-swarm/27505/10-remarkable-things-about-the-swarm

https://movieweb.com/the-swarm-movie-michael-caine-bees-deficating/

https://worstmoviesevermade.com/best-worst-movies-ever-swarm-1978/

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Aug 28 2019
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Art, Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Uncategorized

Inglourious Basterds – a decade on.

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Discussing Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019) with a friend after seeing it the other evening, I was reminded that Tarantino’s genre-bending WWII-era masterpiece is now 10 years old this month. Some critics took umbrage at QT’s depiction of a commando unit of Jewish American soldiers as Allied equivalent Otto Skorzenies, but they’re missing the point: Tarantino is more likely including such things for the purpose of annoying his detractors rather than drawing any historical comparisons. He does it because he can.

Regardless of any ethical considerations when it comes to shooting history (and re imagining it), the movie is so witty and sometimes outright hilarious. It’s pure entertainment, and of all the post-Pulp Fiction (1994) Tarantino films, his least indulgent, with no unnecessary scenes stretching out the running time. We can also christen this ‘The Christoph Waltz show’. His Hans Landa is a behemoth, a cunning, sociopathic polyglot five steps ahead of everyone else. He even makes the eating of strudel captivating.

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N.B. There is an outrageous ‘Antonio Margheriti’ connection between Basterds and Hollywood, Donnie Donowitz’s alias he adopts for Landa the same moniker as the real-life Spaghetti Western director whom DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton stars for in Hollywood. 

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Aug 23 2019
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Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Uncategorized

Waterworld (1995) – Mad Max on water.

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A notorious ‘flop’ that actually turned a small profit, Waterworld (1995) is at equal turns demented, awful, and glorious. A lot of the smug and snooty assassination of it clearly came from critics of the era who decided the omniscient Kevin Costner was getting too big for his boots. The movie is indeed patronising and way too overblown, character decisions perplexing, the dialogue stilted, and Costner appears to be sleepwalking through much of it and at full performance attempting a Clint Eastwood ‘Man with No Name’ number. And it can’t hold a candle to any of the Mad Max movies.

However, the stunts and action set pieces are nothing if not spectacular, and it’s one of the few ecologically themed movies out there, something with a vision that at least attempts to make a point. There are also so many peculiar moments amidst the explosions: Kevin Costner drinking his own piss, Kevin Costner’s gills and webbed feet, Dennis Hopper – who appears to have wandered off the set of Speed (1994) – away with the fairies, and the interlude with the loco Irish (or he is Scottish? Or a mixture of the two?) would-be rapist who has a talent for hoarding paper. It’s an experience.

Nothing’s free in Waterworld.

Further reading/viewing:

https://www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/1035947-18-things-we-learned-from-the-new-waterworld-blu-ray

https://lwlies.com/articles/waterworld-review-kevin-costner/

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Aug 15 2019
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Cinema, Conceptual art, Film, Modern art, Movie, Movies, Technology, Uncategorized

Deepfake – revenge of the nerds.

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This deepfake stuff is going beyond the nonsensical and getting out of control. I’ve just seen one in which Tom Cruise replaces American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman for the infamous Sussudio homemade porno.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/deepfaked-tom-cruise-american-psycho-sex

It’s creepy as fuck, not helped by the fact there appears to be a lot of Cruise in Bateman, and that in the novel both the sofa-jumping Scientologist and the Whitney Houston-loving serial killer share the same building and even meet in a lift (rather the hilarious scene).

There’s another one doing the rounds, Jim Carrey’s The Shining (1980) shtick. Appropriating images for YouTube vids, ruining the sacredness of classics. It’s pointless and crude, bedroom technology piggybacking off artistry.

And then we get into politics and porn, a rabbit hole of ethical discourse. The world would be better off with deepfake. Still, Tom Cruise as Patrick Bateman is inspired. Sorry.

Further reading/viewing:

https://www.creativebloq.com/features/deepfake-examples

https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a28691128/deepfake-technology/ 

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Aug 03 2019
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Art, Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Stanley Kubrick, Uncategorized

Waterloo (1970) – nostalgia clouds everything.

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Sadly, I’ve seen this movie more times than I have Barry Lyndon (1975), and this impressive calamity (accidental oxymoron) is what is universally posited as the reason Kubrick never made his Napoleon biopic.

It’s a hell of a logistical achievement, grand scale Abel Gance-like cinema utilising an entire Soviet infantry division; the sheer fact it got made is stupefying. At the same time it’s utterly dreadful, the director wielding his camera with carefree abandon, going from one style to the next like an ADHD child with a Tyco Xmas pressie. And the performances are dire, Rod Steiger’s Napoleon especially. He is constantly bulging his eyeballs, histrionics reaching Nicolas Cage levels. Even more fingernails-down-the-blackboard cringe are his inner monologues, the wee Corsican revealing his every banal thought to the audience.

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Yet it was always on TV, strangely on Sunday afternoons. It remains ‘just one of those things’. I’ll probably see it again (I voluntarily watched it the other day), my own guilty pleasure. As Pauline Kael said, ‘You talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.’

Full horror show here:

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Jul 30 2019
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Art, Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Photography, Technology, Uncategorized

Russell A. Kirsch and the first digital image.

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This is the first digital image ever made or seen. The bloke Kirsch, a computer scientist, converted a photo of his child into binary form with some kind of scanner.

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It’s a terrifying image. The whole affair reminds me of that baby at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

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Further reading:

https://petapixel.com/2010/11/04/first-digital-photograph-ever-made/

http://wafflesatnoon.com/first-digital-image/

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/the-history-of-digital-imaging-began-with-a-baby-picture/382161/

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Jul 17 2019
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Architecture, Art, Britain, Cinema, Edinburgh, Film, Movie, Movies, Photography, Scotland, Stanley Kubrick, Uncategorized

A Clockwork Balgreen.

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Visions of A Clockwork Orange (1971) every time I run the Balgreen gauntlet for the tram to York Place, Alex DeLarge and his droogies bashing in a poor drunken hobo for kicks. Such ultra-violence has probably happened half a dozen times in this foreboding underpass, but without the costumes and long eyelashes.

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