Home Is Where The Heart Is

Join us on Facebook!

There's a knock at the door, Javier Bardem's man of the house opens it to reveal a stranger and for some reason his wife, Jennifer Lawrence, doesn't divorce him straight away. If somebody I know knocks on my door then I dive behind the sofa as though a fucking shot has just been fired through the window. If it's a stranger knocking then not only am I not going to answer but I'm one fucking step away from setting the dogs on them. Luckily for them that one step is actually owning some attack dogs, but even if I'm not having these wannabe-guests ripped apart, then I'm still certainly not going to invite them in. Alas this is exactly what Bardem does when Ed Harris's stranger comes a-knocking and despite the fact that they don't know each other from fucking Adam, it's decided that the guest can stay the night. Not that Lawrence is especially happy about this because not only is Ed Harris a stranger but he's also Ed fucking Harris. Nothing good ever happens in movies when Ed Harris shows up. Hey, do you remember that movie where Ed Harris turns up and they all live happily ever after? No! Because it never fucking happens!

Some Hazey Cosmic Jive

Join us on Facebook!

Near the end of Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets, the two lead characters find out that they're going to be stuck in a shuttle with each other for two hours and with nothing to do. “Great” one of them says to the other, “Two hours with you is going to feel like an eternity”. “Imagine how I felt”, a friend said to me after the film, “I had to spend two and a quarter fucking hours with them”. To be fair the film hasn't exactly received the warmest of welcomes with critics accusing it of essentially being cinematic candy-floss, colourful to look at but ultimately lacking in any substance whatsoever. They're not wrong either. Sci-fi movies have the potential to hold a mirror up to our own society and reveal profound truths about our existence and way of life. In this film we see Cara Delevingne stick her head up a jelly-fishes arse hole in order to see the future and, in honesty, I fucking loved it. Not just the head to anus scene but every rainbow coloured piece of bullshit that the film spewed my way. If gay pride was a person then this is the film that it would vomit out at the end of a really enjoyable but ultimately forgettable night out.

Why I liked X-Men: Apocalypse

Join us on Facebook!

Right now it seems that most of the reviews have treated X-Men: Apocalypse as though they're Scum's Ray Winstone by casually walking up to it, clobbering it in the face with a sock full of snooker balls and screaming “I'm the daddy now!” This was obviously both a surprise and a shame because up until now all of Bryan Singer's X-Men movies had been brilliant. Before he turned up with his fuck-off adrenaline needle, comic-book movies were essentially just lying on the floor like a dying crack-head with blood pouring out of its nose. With both X-Men and X-Men 2, he delivered the shot to the heart that's ultimately lead to comic book movies being conceived and shat out at a faster rate than Mickey Rourke can go through new faces. As a huge fan of this series I went into the screening with a combination of both hesitation and optimism. Although it was those same two feelings that I went into Batman V Superman with before leaving three hours later with a deadness to my eyes that suggested I'd just done a tour of fucking 'Nam.

Does This Survive The Cut?

Join us on Facebook!

I'll say right now that The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 is the best second half of a film that I've ever been forced into paying full price to see. Generally it's nice for a film to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but thanks exclusively to the greed of the money grabbing studios, that's sadly not the case here. Occasionally a franchise will start spewing out billions of dollars in box office returns and as the thing comes to its inevitable conclusion, the money men will do whatever they can to drag things out for as much as they can. As has been the case with other young adult franchises, their solution seems to be to stretch the final book out for longer than it needs to be and then slicing it in half like a magician with a real saw and an assistant that he doesn't particularly care about. Fans of the book will argue that the final two films had to be extended like this to get everything in, but that's only because they lack an emotional distance. When adapting for the cinema, it's often required to trim, chop, and change things for the story to translate between the two mediums. Kind of like shooting a hostage's arm off to kill a suicide bomber behind them. As an impartial spectator, I can see how that would have been for the greater good despite the probable pissyness of the louder, screaming loved ones.

Panem's Got Talent

Visit and join our new Facebook page!

A few years ago I made an exploitatively low wage as a videographer. We made everything from promo videos for crap businesses to wedding films for some fat brides and their toothless husbands. It was not an easy job though because at the end of the day it was less about filming what we saw and more to do with rolling a turd in glitter. One video for example was a message from a family to their son who was about to move away to Australia. At one point they wheeled the old Nan in to say goodbye with her knowing full well that she would likely be dead before he returned. With tears in her eyes she gave an emotional rendition of an old war time song and it was beautiful. Or at least it would have been had the walls to the house not been so thin that we could clearly hear the sound of somebody pissing in the adjacent bathroom. Ah well, moment ruined, let’s move the fuck on. Oh and on top of that there was also another video we made in which one man demonstrated- on his brother- the methods used in measuring people for bespoke clothing. As the man measured the inside of his brothers leg, we followed the tape measure up to the groin were we found that he was now sporting a rather profound erection. What is it they say about incest? That it's fun for all of the family! Anyway, the point is that people are fucking idiots and making them look good is not easy.

FatMan and Robbing

I've recently been reading a lot about the psychologist Carl Jung partly because understanding his theories makes me feel smart but mostly because I enjoyed Michael Fassbender's performance of him in A Dangerous Method. Anyway, Jung came up with this idea of us all having a persona which acts as a kind of mask by which we present ourselves to the world. On the one hand we have this persona to highlight the aspects of ourselves that we think are great but on the other we use it to avoid others from finding out about the bits of us that are actually kind of shit. Some people might want to seem more relaxed or ‘hip’ than they really are whereas others just don't want to be suspected for killing all those prostitutes that they keep dead in the cellar. Facebook is a great way in which we can do this nowadays as we spend hours crafting the idealised version of ourselves for our friends to accept. We delete the crap photos where we look ugly, whilst using, as profile pictures, any in which we're stood next to a fat person or ideally anybody with something as uncouth as a hunchback.

We have an idea in our head of who we'd like to be seen to be, and so I suppose any time we're presented with options relating to our presentation then we go for the ones that support that image. A perfect way of figuring out what a person is about might be their clothes, the way they've decorated their house or even the style of their hair for example. Personally I have a ponytail which suggests that I like people to think that I'm laid back whilst at the same time suggesting a hatred of conformity... because a ponytail is an act of rebellion that's only slightly less clichéd than getting a shit tattoo of a skull and listening to heavy metal music. Although that is true, the other reason is that after years of battling with my shorter, sticky up hair, I eventually gave up and disowned the fucker... He does what he wants and I won't question it so long as he leaves me alone in return. Turns out that what my hair wants to do when left to its own devices is grow. Who'd have thought it?

Batman, Mystique, Hawkeye, Lois Lane.. and introducing Bradley Cooper as 'Pubehead'..

I mention all of this because it seems that hair is the key to understanding the film American Hustle or to give it its original and far superior title... American Bullshit. Taking place in the late 70's and early 80's, the movie tells the story of a fat balding con-man played by Christian Bale who, along with his partner Amy Adams, is forced into becoming a mole for the FBI. In fact there's a good few scenes near the start where those two get to know each other by having fun and dicking about which is kind of like the shittest Justice League movie you could possibly imagine! This film is directed by David O'Russell who, some people will remember as the director of Three Kings, The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook and who others won't remember as the director of I Heart Huckabees. In case none of that rings any bells though then he's also the guy that got into a proper tussle with George Clooney on one set and was filmed losing his shit with Lily Tomlin on another. In regards to the Lily Tomlin one I suggest you check it out on YouTube if you haven't already just to see how blindly mad one human can possibly get... also it's fucking hilarious to see him storming in and out of various set doors as though it's a chase scene in a Scooby Doo cartoon whilst the elderly actress that he's screaming at remains fairly chilled out. If we're going back to Jung's theory of personas then it seems David O'Russell has worked pretty hard at presenting himself to the world as a massive angry twat.

Anyway I said that hair was the key to understanding this film and it is, with each character sporting head pubes so awful that the shamed barber responsible should be forced to fall on his scissors. Christian Bale has gone for the classic look of having a bald head on top but with long hair around the sides to comb over after hiding the naked scalp below a scraggily glued on merkin. However despite being proper ridiculous, it really just serves to show us who the character is as the film opens with a long sequence in which Bale lovingly and meticulously crafts it from scratch. It's hard to create but shows that he's a man who'll put in the time and patience for just a little dignity. It also shows a more human side to him as we see a misjudged attempt at hiding vulnerability by accidentally drawing attention to it. His hair really has its cake and eats it by partly helping to endear him to us but also getting laughs out of how much of a knob it makes him look. This is true of pretty much everybody else too with Bradley Cooper’s tightly wound perm being representative of his tightly wound and slightly manic personality. I suppose that for both Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence who are both kind of fighting for Bale’s attention... well, their hair is like a peacocks feathers getting bigger and bigger as one tries to intimidate the other whilst keeping the eye of their mate on them. As well as these world class actors, the comedian Louis CK turns up as a fat, balding man with a ginger goatee... Amazing how chameleonic some people can be.

However not only does the hair tell you about the characters, it is so over the top and eye-catching that it draws your attention to just how fucking superficial everything is. Like any movie about money that's set near the end of the 70's and definitely the 80's, American Hustle also shows off the excess of those slightly tacky decades. For anybody who flashed their cash, films like this, Wall Street and American Psycho revel in their depiction of double crossing arseholes who hide their two faces behind either shoulder pads and beehives or pinstripe suits and offensively un-erotic porno tache's. This superficial streak is only emphasised by the films plot which is about a group of people who make a living from conning people into believing that they're people that they're not. I've never used the word 'people' more in my life than that previous sentence. Considering this was during crime’s tutorial decades where there was no internet to quickly Google for bullshit, assuming false identities was simply a case of coming up with a character, dressing up and again... presenting the correct persona. For the sake of this blog alone, I am so fucking glad that I read that shit by Jung.  

"It smells funny.. Like my fingers are here to fucking amuse you?"

However this idea of presenting a false persona through superficial details not only exists within the plot of American Hustle but actually within the DNA of the movie itself. The film has long swooping camera movements, cool edits, a heavy reliance on voice-overs and a great soundtrack. It also examines both morally grey characters, the corruption of the American Dream and also puts more emphasis on people's relationships than the actual plot. Just short of shagging Liza Minnelli, doing too much cocaine and almost dying of asthma, American Hustle seems desperate to convince us all that it is the work of Martin Scorsese. On top of that, there's a scene here that seems to take place in the same restaurant as the Goodfellas, 'Funny how? scene' and a fight between Bale and Lawrence that to anybody with blurred vision is kind of like the fight between De Niro and Sharon Stone in Casino. In fact the only thing it lacked to make it feel completely like a Scorsese film is the appearance of De Niro as a violent Mobster and then bam! About half way in.. Spoiler Alert... De Niro shows up as a violent mobster.

However, rather than feel like a Scorsese rip-off the film gets away with it because firstly, the whole thing is about depicting fake identities through surface details and secondly, it's just so much damn fun. Although at the very worst it did make me desperate to catch up with The Wolf of Wall Street. I can say with some certainty that so far this is definitely my favourite film of 2014 which is only partly down to the fact that it's the only one I've seen so far. However, even if that wasn't the case there's surely no way that anybody couldn't enjoy the scene where Lawrence is going apeshit to the song Live and Let Die and dancing like a pisshead with a power cable up her arse. To conclude, if you've not seen American Hustle then I recommend you go and check it out because it's funnier than most comedies and features great performances from everybody... Particularly Amy Adams who seems to be playing three characters at once- she's an English woman, an American Woman and a woman who can't decide if she's the English or American one. I'm not sure what Jung would say about the persona she puts out considering she's confused by it herself although I might have to read on and find out. In fact I only read the book once and there's a good chance that I might have gotten all this persona bullshit wrong. I'm pretty sure I haven't but... fuck.. I'll go re-read it. Hope you enjoy and see you next week motherfuckers!

---

---

Now I Know How Joan of Arc Felt

Hunger Games was one of the few films that I went into almost completely blind as I hadn't really paid any attention to the trailers and I sure as fuck hadn't read the books.  As it turned out though I actually thought it was pretty fun...  If there's any kind of tween movie that might appeal to me then I suppose it'll be one set in a dystopian future where the penniless peasants are tormented by a ruling class of pantomime bastards. I also liked how it vaguely hinted towards being a satire of reality TV in which shitty, shite shows such as Big Brother and The Apprentice have been replaced by a Government ordered infanticide. Stealing the povvy kids and then throwing them into a gladiatorial arena to broadcast their brutal deaths might seem a bit extreme but now that Breaking Bad is over I guess we all have to watch something. I know these 'games' exist to keep the locals on their best behaviour but I'm too old to be picked, I hate children and I'm yet to produce any demented spawn of my own. If I lived in the world of this film, I'd be rounding up kids to fight like I was the fucking child-catcher for all the shits I could give about them. Still, as I say the first film was quite enjoyable and reminded me that it really has been too long since I last saw Battle Royale. I know the fans get really pissy when that Japanese Classic is mentioned but it's not insulting to highlight a comparison and they really are similar, so you know... sorry, but tough shit.

So I went into the first one blind and decided to do the same for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire too. At this point, Katniss is now just trying to get back on with her life after the horror she's been forced to endure. She's got a family to look after, is suffering badly from the trauma of her previous murders and only just has enough time to toy with the hearts and souls of the two men that she claims to be in love with. She's also being wheeled about on tour like the fucking elephant man where she's presented to the grubbier towns and forced to vomit out a speech load of bollocks. Because if you're a mourning parent, nothing makes you feel better than being buttered up by the bitch whose refusal to die is the direct cause of your own child’s horrendous death! Despite this though, Katniss has become quite the figure of hope since the last film with her climactic suicide attempt being seen as an inspirational message of “fuck you” to the twats in charge. To be fair if we have to have a face plastered on every T-shirt and adorning the walls of every clichéd students’ bedroom then Jennifer Lawrence does place moderately higher than Che Guevara in a round of 'rate the hotties'. Because of this apathy killing bullshit, Donald Sutherland's President Snow begins to ponder how best to get rid of Katniss before the ungratefully abused begin a tramps’ rebellion. Thankfully though, and just in the nick of time, Philip Seymour Hoffman arrives straight from the set of some other film to suggest that they simply sling Katniss back into the arena. Because it is conveniently the 75^th year of slaughter-joy, it is announced that all surviving previous winners will be forced to play together in a kind of ex-kiddie-slayer/Avengers style cross over.

In case you've forgotten, the chap on the right is 'Boring Pete'.

Okay so let’s start with the obvious problem which is that tragically, this poor little thing has been struck down by a bad case of middle-film syndrome. I guess what I mean by this is that if you haven't seen the first one then you're going to be pretty fucked in terms of following everything here. It just kind of assumes that you'll know who the characters are and it doesn't really explain exactly what they've previously been through. There's one scene in which the little girl who was killed in the last film has had her image painted onto the floor to taunt Katniss. However if you'd forgotten or simply didn't know the importance of that character then it just looks like some poor unfortunate has suffered the flattening effects of a parachute failure. This didn't bother me personally because I'd seen the previous film and I really don't care about people who aren't me, however what did piss me off was the film’s end which was so noticeably absent it was like somebody had suffered a dicky fit and spontaneously decided to  kick us out of the cinema. I mean yes, some vaguely climactic fuckey-uppery had just gone down but nothing suggested that we were only seconds away from the credits. I understand that we now live in a world where the next film is more important than the current one but it would be nice if we were left with at least a small feeling of resolution… The Marvel films are obsessed with the idea of an ongoing story but every single one of their entries has still managed to both continue the overall narrative and remain admirably stand alone. Maybe this will be more forgivable once the The Hunger Games franchise has concluded and I can see everything in context but right now it was just a full-on pain in the tits.

The other problem I think is that despite not explaining the last film too well for any newcomers it does kind of go on to just replay it beat for beat. The first hour is spent explaining why Katniss is going to be taking part in the games and the second half shows her attempt at surviving them. In terms of a broad arc, these two films are about as different as chalk and cheese... if the cheese was also made out of chalk, which is kind of a shame really because I actually think that this second film is better than the first in almost every single way. Previously the focus was on the happy slashing of children however this time there is a lot more emphasis on simply enduring the experience. The gang of misfits that form together to survive are, I think, actually a lot stronger this time around with some even daring to adventure further than the land of archetypes and almost into the crazy world of being proper characters. There's a little old lady that turns up, for example, who shows more emotion in her crusty Grandma Death eyes than some tween films even achieve in their entire franchise. I don't know if the biddy was an actual actress or not but by the way in which she gets Yoda-style piggy backs everywhere I'm pretty sure she must have been created within the Jim Henson Workshop.

Having said that, when it comes to the games in Catching Fire, there are two very distinct groups of people... There are the 'almost characters' that I've just mentioned and then there are the 'very much not characters', who unsurprisingly don't do so well. Take it for granted that every-time the canon is fired and an image of a newly deceased is shown, you'll almost definitely wonder who the fuck they were. In fact it's almost like a short term memory test in which they flash up a photo of some random extra and then you have to try and remember which scene they were probably in. I suppose there's also a kind of minor third group too who are the, 'very much not characters but who are also very obviously cunts'. These are the shit stained, arse holes with sharpened teeth and bollocks for faces that are hyped up before the games begin and who are presumably meant to be this films lethal gang of killer twats. However once everything kicks off, we almost never see them again as Katniss instead finds danger simply from the environment. Not that this isn't thrilling in itself but it just seems odd to do so much setting up only to ultimately go and fuck it off. Instead, the majority of the excitement instead comes from destructive tsunamis, mental monkeys and a fog that causes such bad acne that anybody to get caught by it simply drops dead from shame.

I've always been a fan of subtle films...

In terms of huge improvements, I think that this film really did a great job of helping the colourful Oz-like world of The Capital mesh with the poorer district's depressing plot of dirt. For me, one of the biggest faults previously was the way in which the two contrasting looks didn't blend at all. It was like watching a character travelling from the grit of Deadwood towards the camp glitz of an Elton John stage show where he's frumping about in full Dame mode. I can't say for sure how they've fixed this but I imagine it's probably in a slight shift of the colour pallet so that the leap from misery to money isn't quite such a wanking-hand slap to the face. I also thought the special effects in general were a lot better here with pretty much everything on screen seeming perfectly real to me. Well, I mean Stanley Tucci's teeth didn't look real as they were so blindingly white that they required the use of a pinhole viewer to see, however these were obviously exaggerated to prove a point. It seems like the effects budget of the first film was spunked onto maintaining Wes Bentley's demented beard. Now that he's gone I guess they had the money left over to ensure that the effects were now more effective than shoving some bubble-gum under your eyelids and then face planting some clip art.

I suppose I'll conclude now by just mentioning what it actually is that makes Catching Fire so great and explain the reason for the blog title. The one thing that alone justifies the price of the ticket is simply Jennifer Lawrence. There are so many things that are great about her that I'm pretty sure that the only logical way that I can truly express my appreciation is to now just use my cock to type out the word LOVE. We live in a sexist world in which most big films only really cater to fourteen year old boys who would probably much prefer to ironically download it illegally having recently discovered -and prioritised- masturbation. As such, Katniss is a really important character considering that she's not only a strong non-man but she's also a non-man that has her priorities right. There are two slightly dull guys trying to love-hump her and although she kind of messes them about a bit, she knows that above everything surviving is the number one goal. Whereas most females on film only exist to validate the masculinity of the main character through the use of some downstairs gushiness, Katniss is both completely independent and also a rabble rousing hero to the smelly old down-and-outs. Obviously the most famous female revolutionary in our history is probably Joan of Arc who is clearly an inspiration here with one clue being Katniss's burnt-at-the-stake style of dress. I therefore decided to call the blog, “I know how Joan of Arc Felt”, because despite being male I was still able to relate to the lead character. I felt that this title might highlight the fact that it's about time that filmmakers realised that our species actually consists of two genders and that it might be about time to start representing both a little more equally. Perhaps even more importantly than that though, the title is also lyrics from a song by The Smiths of whom I'm a huge fan. If you already knew the reference then we can be friends. If you didn't then I really do hope you enjoyed the film but as far as 'me and you' are concerned it would simply never work. Sorry.. and see you next blog.

---

Follow this blog or I'll fucking cut you.

---