Is There A Starman Waiting In The Sky?

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Incredibly, I once found myself preparing to go out on a date with an actual human lady and so to make the most of this rare event I decided to buy myself some breath mints. “Why are you getting them?” My friend asked. “I stick a mint under my foreskin”, I joked, “that way my date will have minty-fresh breath when she kisses me after a blowjob”. “Really?” My friend asked in awe like a total fucking moron. “No”, I bluntly responded, “obviously fucking not”. But had I actually done that then in many ways that breath mint stored snuggly up my cock would have very much been like the film The Vast Of Night, in that it took me completely by surprise but was an absolute treat none the less. In honesty, it's been a few days since I saw the film but such was its power that I think I'm still yet to begin breathing normally again. I watch a lot of films and, as with all of life, the majority of everything is shit and ultimately nothing more than a loading screen of mundanity to tie us all over before we fucking die. But every so often you'll take a bite of that one incredible piece of fruit, or hear that one perfect piece of music, or have that one life-changing mega-wank and suddenly all of the other efforts will have been worth it for having lead to that one monumental moment. The Vast Of Night was one of these epiphany experiences and without any real poetic skill to express how I truly feel about it, I'll simply have to settle for telling you that I loved every single fucking second of it with every single fibre of my motherfucking piece-of-shit heart. 

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Darkness Prevails

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The new Hellboy is incredible value for money because it's only two hours long but it felt like it was on for a fucking month. The original two instalments of this series were helmed by the visionary director Guillermo Del Toro who created a fairytale world that was somehow epic in scale and yet still managed to focus on the complexities of its characters. I'm not even sure that this new film had any fucking characters now that I think about it.. Of course, it'd be difficult for any film to follow in the footsteps of one of Del Toro's with this being especially true of the Hellboy franchise. The second of his two movies was quite clearly designed to be the middle part of a trilogy and so like an unwanked dick in a massage parlour, we were all hoping that he'd return to finish it off. I understand that the studio couldn't justify the budget that he required for his final film when looking at how much he required and the box office results of those first two movies... but this new version is such a step down from what's come before that it's taking the absolute piss. It's like wanting to go to an art exhibition but because you can't afford a trip to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa you simply settle to go down an ally to look at a page of Readers Wives that some tramp has stuck to the wall with a piece of his actual shit.  

Spring Is The Bush Porn That It's Okay To Love

Have you ever heard of bush porn? Because as far as I'm concerned directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's film Spring is essentially the movie equivalent of bush porn. I have no clue why this was the case but before the internet was a thing it was quite common to find discarded porno mags within random bushes in the park. Well, like that bush porn from my early teenage years, I have no idea how I discovered the film Spring but I am 100% glad that I ended up coming across it. Interestingly enough I wasn't entirely sure how to describe this movie because I don't want to give away some of its surprises but Wikipedia has it listed as being a romantic body horror. If you can think of a more fitting term to describe some of the fucking grot that I saw when discovering some bush porn than 'romantic body horror' then I'll be impressed. For me, Spring is kind of like Call Me By Your Name in that it's about two people falling in love in a foreign country except that Spring has a surprise that's even grosser than that movie's 'eating the jizzy peach' scene.

The Rock Spanks His Monkey

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Although it pains me to say I was sadly at the funeral of my best friends' new born daughter the other week. During the speeches about her life it was genuinely mentioned that one of the experiences that had been lost was the chance for me to sit with her and explain exactly why The Rock is the greatest human of all time... And obviously this annoyed me. “Hang on” I thought, “why would I have to be the person to explain this? Does this mean that not everybody here actually fucking thinks it too?” It seemed an inappropriate time and place to bring this query up afterwards but it also seemed a little inappropriate that some people might not love The fucking Rock as much as I do and so I had to say something. I mean, seriously?! In the way that he raises those eyebrows whilst playing everything with his tongue firmly in his cheek it's like he's a cross between Roger Moore and the Incredible fucking Hulk. Just look at his entrance into Fast Five in which he stomps into the series with the confidence that the British Empire used to have whilst stomping around the world, casually claiming countries as their own. As Dominic Toretto and his merry band of morons were too busy stealing cars, it seems that they weren't quite quick enough to spot The Rock and his charm were stealing their own fucking franchise.

Bashing The Monkey

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With the exception of that time that I was working in a pub during some bloke's Stag night and I thought we'd just been raided by the police, I can honestly say that I have never seen a stripper in my life. However I imagine that they probably share a slight similarity with monster movies, in that 90% of what they do is a tease before revealing everything for the final 10%. So with a monster movie, you get a shot of a foot, then a silhouette, and then maybe a close up of an eye. Finally, and at the point that a stripper would be popping out her titty-boom-booms, you'll get the full body shot of the creature before it's swiftly destroyed with an A-bomb. Kong: Skull Island however spunks its wad up the wall before the opening title has even come up as during its first five minutes we essentially see Kong in all of his glory. In many ways, this is one of the more brilliant aspects of the movie because we're now left wondering where is left to go? If a stripper walks into a pub by opening the door with her already exposed peachy wah-wah's then what the hell is her show actually going to be? Well, in the case of Skull Island, what follows is an all-out orgy of weird creatures, adventure, and action. If a stripper were to follow the logic of this movie then I can only imagine that she'd leave the pub in a police van having turned the venue into a scene from fucking Caligula.

Godz and Monsters

I really wish I could think of a better metaphor for this film than the one I'm about to describe but I can't so bollocks to it. Apologies in advance... So, you know what's fun? Fucking. Ugh God, way too crude... Oh well. There's surely no denying that hiding your modesty inside somebody else’s modesty is good fun for all involved- oh and, for the record, I'm completely open to any offers right now. That last bit is irrelevant to the point that I'm building towards but you know... In my on-going efforts to get some, it can't hurt. I can't imagine that there's anything a girl loves more than a desperate geek! Ugh... Why do I even fucking bother. Anyway, so we live in a world in which every second of every day somebody is using some form of advertising to trick us into giving them some money. Considering everybody likes sex, it seems that the marketing goons have decided that the best way to do this is by bombarding us with sexual imagery and having us in a constant state of horniness. This is fine for adults but obviously kids are exposed to it all too, meaning that thanks to a barrage of provocative slogans and pictures of unobtainable titties, the concept of shagging is made to seem like the most important thing in the world... Until you actually do it. Now don't get me wrong, the first time I convinced somebody to take pity on me was great.. but that's all sex is. It's great. It's not magical or the be-all-and-end-all or even particularly life changing. It's just really good fun. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with Godzilla.

Documenting Unreality

Although The Blair Witch Project made it famous in the mid-nineties, the ‘found footage’ genre can actually be traced even further back to films like the grim, animal chop-em-up Cannibal Holocaust. Presumably it was originally conceived to hide the bugger-all budget and, to be fair, in those early movies it did a pretty good job. The problem with it though is that these days you can't get away from the fucking concept with it having now successfully evolved from an ingenious novelty into an annoying gimmick. I'm presuming that the intent of utilising this form is to add to the sense of realism but having now seen it so many times, I think there are two constant problems which keep ballsing the believability up. The first problem is the obvious- why doesn't the cameraman stop fucking filming? And the second is.. who edited that fucking footage?

Take Cloverfield for example, which is a film I do love but suffers from these problems immensely. There's a scene in that movie in which they are running through a subway whilst being chased by some little monsters that have fallen off a bigger beastie's underside and even then the camera continues to film. I'm sorry, but if I was in a small corridor being chased by Godzilla's angry pubic-lice, I'd be ripping off my own fucking arms just so that I could lose a little weight and run a tiny bit faster. As for the second problem, well... by the end of the film all of the main characters are- spoiler alert- dead. This is the same for so many films in the genre from The Blair Witch Project to Paranormal Activity. With this in mind, I always wonder which sick turd-monger found an extended snuff film and decided to edit a fucking narrative out of it? I mean, it really bothers me. Take the footage of Gaddafi being killed for example which is five minutes long and features nothing but his execution. Now imagine if he'd recorded a video diary whilst on the run which was found, edited into a film and released in cinemas! Not only would you have to question the sanity of whoever thought that would be a good idea but you'd also probably be left with the most morally reprehensible and cynical film since 2003's Love Actually.

Another movie that has recently fallen into this genre is 2012's Chronicle which right from the start managed to do something a little different. Most releases that claim to feature homemade footage tend to either be horror films or stolen porn, however this rather differently opted to be about superheroes instead. Actually, to give the film credit, it's not even about superheroes really, with it spending more time investigating what normal high schoolers would do if given amazing super-human gifts. Personally, I think if any of us developed powers then it wouldn't take long for us to use them for either thieving or perving. However, although Chronicle doesn't quite go down this route, it does spend a good while showing the main characters enjoying a fair bit of mischief before things go wrong and the shit hits the fan.

"Who's got a touch of the mad-cunt about them?"

Just to quickly summarise the set-up for anybody who’s not yet seen it, there are three friends who get blasted by radiation from some big blue rock thing that they find underground. From then on they become telekinetic, meaning that they can move inanimate objects using just their mind. One of the lads however is suffering a slightly turbulent home life with his father being an abusive alcoholic and his mother dying from a disease that leaves her bed ridden and mumbling. Not to ruin what happens but this guy also has a touch of the mad-cunt about him and so probably isn't the best creepy critter to be given magical abilities that allow him to kill. It's also this slightly odd chap who has decided to film every single thing that he does and so by default I guess is the main character. I suppose this movie is a bit like Carrie but for the YouTube generation in which any old twat with a pulse feels the urge to dramatise their own life and share it with the world for likes and hits. If Kick-Ass is a film about heroes without powers then on the flipside, Chronicle is a film about powers without heroes.

So I guess at first we should discuss the films good points of which there are more than plenty. The acting for a start is really very good with each actor managing to convey the various complexities required of them in a completely naturalistic way. As mentioned at the start, the handheld style is often used to make up for a shitty budget and so in past films there's also been a slightly shitty cast to go with it. That's not the case here though, with lead actor Dane Dehaan managing to retain the audiences sympathy (or at least our understanding) even when he starts to slip into the unhinged land of the psychotic vengeful prick. According to the ever reliable IMDb, Chronicle's budget was allegedly around $12,000,000 which is next to nothing in terms of funding a film of this scale. Obviously the average human could lead a happy life of cocaine and whores with that amount of cash but for a superhero film it does seem fairly ambitious. Although some of the flying scenes in the film kind of look a little green-screened, it's not really that obvious and so the film should be proud that it accomplished something of such scale with so little resources. To put things in perspective, you could fund around sixteen films at this cost for the same budget as the diabolically fuck-awful Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon. On top of that there'd probably still be enough change left over to have that life of drug filled orgies as well.

As with every found-footage film though, Chronicle once again falls victim to those two issues of ‘why film It?’ And, ‘who edited it?’ In regards to the first point, I can understand why you might want to film yourself if you've just learnt how to fly. There's millions of people uploading footage of themselves shaking their fat arses to music online right now and so I have no issue with some gifted fucker wanting evidence of his ability to defy gravity. However there's a female character walking about without any powers and she never puts her bloody camera down. There's one scene at a rave in fact where she's filming one of the main characters whilst he films her and they have a conversation with each other. In terms of character development, the conversation is completely relevant but in terms of reality, it's just kind of boring. I guess within the context of the story, this chat is important but the characters can't see the bigger picture and so as a small conversation, you'd turn the fucking camera off and save its battery. Also, as somebody who tits about with cameras from time to time I'd really love to know how they got such clear sound from their conversation amongst all of the much louder background music. I think that for those school kids to have such a phenomenal microphone at an affordable price is the moment that this film really makes its roots in sci-fi particularly obvious. Oh and yes I can hear the 'Pedantic Arsehole Alarm', going off here too...

"So who do you think will be fucked to edit our film?"

As for the second question of who edited the footage- well, in this case I really haven't got a fucking clue. Near the end of the film there is a huge fight across the city which, although visually brilliant, in reality would be a massive bitch of a sequence to put together. This is a task made harder by the fact that at this point the main characters camera has buggered off and so all the footage we see is seamlessly pieced together from images captured on CCTV, news reports and the public’s various mobile phones. So if we're to watch this film under the belief that it is found footage then we're also to believe that some randomer did a region wide collection of video material. In fact there's a shot at the very end in a random place, in a random country that proves that their collection was not only very thorough but that their obsession and interest was probably kind of unhealthy. The kind of person with the patience to collect all that footage would probably also be the kind to have newspaper cuttings of a celebrity on his damp walls that have their eyes scratched out and are coated in semen.

The thing is though that the film really doesn't need the found-footage stuff at all. Like I said, in that final battle the images are coming from so many various cameras that the purpose for it being handheld becomes seriously unclear. Instead of just being able to appreciate the nice looking shots, you end up wondering how they got it and where it was from. Early on too, the film gets around the issue of never having the cameraman on screen by having the camera follow the main character via his telekinesis. I mean, don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the inventiveness of that but it still makes the concept of them filming it themselves seem fairly redundant. Two films that get around this problem are both District 9 and Monsters and perhaps Chronicle should have looked to them for inspiration. District 9 claimed to be found footage until the action started at which point it just fucked off that idea and filmed everything as normal. Monsters was a low budget film that had a handheld feel but still managed to look beautiful and avoided the problems of each shot demanding the scrutiny of its logistics. Look, I know I'm coming across like a proper nitpicking bastard but these things bother me. I dunno... maybe I have low-level autism or something. It's just that for me, the found footage style makes the claim of increasing the realism that with film you take for granted anyway and in doing so ironically raises more questions about its believability.

That aside though, I did love the film- a lot.. not only does it feature interesting characters but it slightly subverts the superhero genre by having it follow someone who really isn't a hero at all. The film itself was directed by Josh Trank whose next movie will be the re-booted Fantastic Four which, based on this, I'm genuinely excited to see. It's also interesting to note that every director who has made a successful deconstruction of the superhero genre has gone on to do something official for Marvel as their very next project. So that's Trank, Matthew Vaughn, James Gunn and Jeff Wadlow I guess. I have nowhere to go with that point, it's just something that I'd noticed and I'm at a point where I could do with any readers letting me know if it is in fact autism or perhaps OCD that I'm suffering from. Max Landis is also worthy of praise in regards to Chronicle considering he wrote the script that it's based on. If his surname sounds familiar then that's because he is the son of legendary film director John Landis. Hollywood is a hard place to break into and so I can't help but wonder who young Landis had to suck off to get in…

Anyway so the film is very good- it's just such a shame that in my humble opinion, the gimmick of found footage is a fundamentally flawed one. Having said that, Chronicle is a well written, well directed, well acted mixture of Carrie, Grizzly Man and Akira. Even if the found-footage thing is a distracting pain in the arse, you're still left with a pretty good ninety minutes of inventive, cult shit to enjoy so really, I shouldn't complain.

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Super Trooper

Nostalgia is a drug that turns the past into a dream. This world is a shitty place to live but thanks to that rose-tinted antidepressant, we remember things a little bit better than they where. In all honesty I think we can credit it for being the sole reason that people from the 1980's haven't committed suicide yet. If Margaret Thatcher’s reign of terror wasn't enough to be ashamed about there was also AIDs, racist skin-heads and worst of all nobody trimmed their pubes. It was a decade in which John Lennon was shot dead and yet human-gremlin Chris De Burgh was allowed to warble his nauseating cries in a shockingly bullet free environment. However, as well as being a sort of self-prescribed Lithium, nostalgia is also one of the main ingredients in plenty of films. One movie that relied heavily on it that I happen to have recently seen is J.J. Abram's monster movie Super 8.

Super 8 starts in a warm suburban area during the 1970's as a gang of pre-pubescent kids plan to make a short film. These days they'd just record themselves happy slapping and then stick it on Facebook, but this gang have instead bizarrely decided to make something with a story and zombies. As a scene is to be shot at a railway station in the middle of the night, the kids sneak out one evening to get the footage and without telling their parents. Thankfully, the 70's were a time in which paedophiles didn't exist and so the only thing the kids have to worry about is a train being de-railed and an alien escaping from one of the carriages. Unfortunately for our young Ed Woods, this is exactly what happens with the entire crash being captured on their camera.

After that night the kids make the decision to keep the incident to themselves. Partly because they believe they'll get into trouble, partly because the man who caused the crash waved a gun at them and partly because the army is looking to kill any witnesses. Despite this threat however the kids instead decide, “fuck it, let's finish the film”. They grab their parents’ porno camera and continue filming their amateur zombie flick. At this point too, the Alien starts acting like a proper fucking scallywag by playing silly buggers with the locals dogs and stealing car engines. It's basically a thieving Winona Ryder but with six arms and scales.

As I mentioned, the movie relies heavily on nostalgia. Nostalgia for the 70's and nostalgia for the childhood that we all wish we'd had. The decade is lovingly recreated with old cars, disco music and not a mention of the Bond movie Moonraker. I don't care how bad Idi Amin's dictatorship got, it can't have been worse than watching a bird do a double take as Roger Moore rides a boat through the streets of Venice…

In regards to childhood, this movie takes the Stand By Me approach. It shows being young as such an independent, adventurous time that I wish I'd occasionally ventured into the mythical land of ‘outdoors’ and gone exploring myself. In reality I would go out occasionally but only if my Mum had spitefully hidden the Nintendo hand-controller. The closest I got to a nostalgic childhood adventure was watching a young girl from my road doing a shit under a slide. She told me it was “our secret and if anybody asks we should say it was a dog”. I informed her that as far as I was concerned, “it was done by a dog” and we never played out together again. Hardly the fucking Goonies was it?

Abrams has made no secret of the fact that this film is a love letter to the works of Steven Spielberg. As such it contains elements of everything from Close Encounters, E.T., Jaws and even Jurassic Park. It's kind of an odd film in that way as by being intentionally derivative of Spielberg it contains everything that is great about his films but in a way that is not quite as good. It's the equivalent of somebody now going around Whitechapel to chop up some whores but wearing a Jack the Ripper costume. On the one hand you can see the loving references to everything you enjoyed the first time round but on the other you can't help but wish that it was a little more original. Maybe instead of boiling their organs he could deep fry them or eat them with a Pot Noodle? The point is you can't do better than the things you're replicating so rather than carbon-copying them, why not do something a little different? If it was me I'd probably stick the whore’s heart in the microwave and then have it with a cup of tea and some chocolate hobnobs. But that's just me...

The other problem with Super 8 is that you don't see the alien for the majority of the film. Generally that's not a problem as in the case of 2010's Monsters. In that film, the beasts were just slime-ing around in the background doing their best to avoid the plot. Here though the creature is sort of forgotten about and then returns as the centre piece of the movie. The only problem is that by the time he comes back I've already lost interest in him. It's a little bit like having a respectable dinner party and just before dessert, Mr. Blobby runs in, smashes the place up and has a wank. It's not that we don't like Mr. Blobby but rather that things were going really rather well until he ruined it by spraying the post-meal trifle with his presumably pink spunk.

I guess the issue is that the film is composed of two genres. Half of it is a sci-fi movie and the other a coming of age drama, however by being so character heavy, it's the latter aspect that works the best. A relationship starts to blossom between two of the kids however they conclude the film by going alien hunting. A more natural progression of their story arch would obviously be a disastrous attempt at finger banging each other followed by estrangement and then probably suicide. With its Stand By Me cast of kids trying to make a movie- one of the films that this closely resembles is Garth Jennings Son Of Rambow. Super 8's last act becoming The Goonies from Space is a little bit like if Stallone had turned up as Rambo in that other film, slit the two kids’ throats and then skinned them. Obviously Stallone murdering two children in order to wrap up a family movie would be a disastrous decision. He's an awful actor and would no doubt ruin it with his post-stroke, gorilla grunting.

Despite that, in my humble opinion, Super 8 is still a really good film. If you want to celebrate everything that is great about Spielberg without watching any of his work then this is the DVD for you. I'll definitely be watching it again simply because of how much I enjoyed the company of those characters. They were brilliantly acted, realistically written and for kids, they were unrealistically likeable. Where child actors are generally concerned I think most people start praying their film’s plot is about to incorporate infanticide. Even as a kid, my thoughts when seeing the young Anakin were, “what an irritating twat”.

There's only one point in which the Sci-fi and the “coming of age” combine and that's in the magnetic jewellery conclusion. I know it's the sweet music and the manipulatively sentimental imagery, but fuck it- I enjoyed that too! Perhaps this film is in too much of a debt to Spielberg but at least it's not a franchise. In a land of sequels, prequels and remakes, anything even close to new should be celebrated. It's made by a phenomenal film-maker who will do even better when one day working with his own material. One of the best things about Spielberg’s films is the fact that they're clearly made by a man full of love. Like the boiling pot in Jack the Rippers final murder, plenty of heart is definitely what this film contains. If anybody deserves a nostalgic letter of admiration for their work then one to Spielberg from JJ Abrams is the one I want to see. Having said that, one to Ken Loach from Michael Bay might be fun too. Who wouldn't pay to see the bird explode at the end of Kes 2: Revenge of the Fallen.

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