Film Review: The Way Way Back

Duncan is going on holiday to a summer beach house with his mum, Toni Collette, her new boyfriend Steve Carell, and Steve's daughter, a blond popular Regina George type who treats our hero like an ill-fitting Christmas jumper from grandma. Duncan is a NERD.  He likes STAR WARS and PACMAN. He finds a hard time fitting in with all the family fun at the beach, because his family are dicks and for the most part so are the neighbours, until he chances upon a Water Park run by Sam Rockwell and his band of merry dudes and dudettes.

Back in the article A Confederacy Of Former Dunces, I was trying to discuss what I used to call the 'indie-quirk' flick. In general, this would be the sort of movie for which Wes Anderson is the poster child, that has an independent vibe in spite of a modestly hollywood-level budget, and most commonly features the fairly standard plot structure of a romcom or a family drama which is offset by having lots of 'quirk': nerdy, awkward, introverted characters who at first seem a far cry from the Will Smiths and Julia Robertses of the big league, yet who nevertheless end up making the same kinds of decisions that fit conveniently into a three-act structure. 

However, five or so years on and it's no longer worth bothering to put a finger on the defining features of these films, because now you'll probably know exactly the kind of thing I mean if I just say “movies with yellow posters”:

Source: http://awesomenator.com/movies/movie-posters-that-look-the-same/

Now, The Way Way Back, the new offering from the guys behind family drama-but-in-Hawaii The Descendants, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, may not have yellow on its poster but it most definitely has a soul the colour of daisy pollen and Colman's mustard. To begin with, it goes for the classic mould of films like Adventureland, Empire Records and Dazed and Confused: movies about nostalgia's endless summer, where the holidays are filled with drink and frolic, there's coming of age coming out of the woodwork and if you're unlucky enough to have a summer job, it's somewhere where the boss is a cool mentor-figure and you're basically getting paid to hang out with your slacker friends all day and argue about Star Wars.  Lo and behold, the protagonist is even an awkward introverted young man who has a moment of bonding with a girl based on shared music taste. Bananas, taxis, custard, corn, lemons, yolks, American cheese...why is this so familiar...

Well, at least it wasn't the Smiths this time.

To boot, the main adult cast are like the Avengers of cuddly U.S indie: Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Sam Rockwell, Allison Janney, Amanda Peet and, um, that bald guy from Hot Tub Time Machine (...he can be Hawkeye). For the most part, like the Avengers, they all have their own style, and stick to what they do best: Toni is of course The Exhausted Mother, who's doing all she can to keep her dysfunctional family together; Rockwell is Lazy Lovable Slacker Man; Amanda Peet is The Modern Hippie; and Bald Guy is Bald Guy, who looks like an accountant but drinks like a beat-poet and parties like an accountant having a mid-lifey.

Fortunately, the film also manages to play on this familiarity, luring us into certain expectations before lightly sprinkling them in bright yellow wee. This factor is most prominent with Steve Carell's jerk stepfather character, for example: by casting someone whom we are so used to liking, it can at first be hard to accept that his character is quite obviously an asshole.  In this way, it's almost like we the audience are put in the same position as his girlfriend Toni Collette, who fails to see the sphincteral qualities of Carell's ageing jock for quite some time.

In addition, the main character, Duncan, begins almost like a parody of the nerdy-indie-introvert archetype, starting with the classic funny walk, spaced-out gaze and lack of dialogue, but within the first act taking this to extremes that are almost excrutiating: he never answers back, never explains himself, never makes any effort to be anything more than an inconvenient hanger-on, like a hint of fart-smell in the disco of his family's summer-long party. We're of course used to siding with the underdog, and we try hard to stay with him, but finding sympathy can be a bitch when the cute girl's making serious effort to flirt and he just stands there like a dead fish, not even babbling awkward replies as much as just pretending not to exist, in as creepy a way as possible.

Fuck conformity; build sandcastles.

After a while, though, this feels intentional, and it turns out that the film knows what it's doing. He ends up stumbling upon a sea-park bossed by Sam Rockwell, who takes him under his wing, introducing him to the cool sea-park gang, and the rest of the film gives us the gradual process of a dark and dorky outsider coming out of his shell with the help of a posse of awesome dudes who, unlike the dickhead audience, never judge people and are happy to invite everyone to their happy slacky party lifestyle. In short, the film begins by forcing on us a protagonist we don't really like, like the awkward younger cousin we're obliged to entertain at the family reunion, and by the end we feel genuine affection for him.

Aw, look he's having fun. Bless.

This is a neat trick, and it's supported by an above-average script. Sam Rockwell is brilliant as usual, his dialogue in particular sparkling like fresh lemonade, and there's a whole host of background characters that all pull their weight – every supporting character working at the park feels like a fully-fleshed out human being.  Toni Collette may be overdoing the Exhausted Mother thing (The Sixth Sense, Little Miss Sunshine, About A Boy...), but it doesn't really matter because she's really fucking good at it, and she does wonders filling out the dimensions of her character with a few choice tics and facial expressions.

The film walks a neat tightrope between the dramatic and comic elements. Essentially, it flip-flops between sections when Duncan's at home in an angsty family portrait, and the parts where he goes to the sea-park and it's a joky bubbly bimbly bombly boobaly bobbily boo. This sometimes feels awkward, and the balance of tone is tough to handle; overall, The Way Way Back has the camera-work of a drama with the dialogue of a comedy, so the jokes can sometimes fall flat in tone despite being funny on paper, like watching stand-up in a thunderstorm.

As opposed to wishing a certain comedian would just get off stage and go stand in a thunderstorm.

All the same, there are so many lovely little lines of dialogue and truthful character observations throughout The Way Way Back that it's very easy to forgive any gripes about tone or overt adherence to certain tropes of the indie-gem universe. It's a neat little movie that fits in perfectly with the end of summer, and one that has very much earned its right to a yellow poster.

4/5

Review: Kick Ass 2

Kick Ass and Hit Girl are back, kicking ass and hitting girls.  Jim Carrey helps them for a bit.  The Red Mist has now changed his name to the Motherfucker.  Let the games begin!......oh.

Oh God. Oh dear sweet Jesus. I wanted to be professional about this. I wanted to have some kind of constructive introduction to this review, creating a sense of context for the film in question, talk about reactions to the first film, expectations for part 2 and all other necessary guff. Finally, once all the hype was established and put to one side, and I'd finished trying to build up tension like a birthday magician prepping the crowd for the grand finale, I'd reveal what I thought, drawing the inevitable rabbit of opinion from my hat with a 'ta-da!' and a star rating and a 'see this if you liked...' section to top it all off. I wanted to do all that, but I can't. The rabbit is dead.

What I'm trying to say is, Kick Ass 2 is bad. Like, seriously, your-money-would-be-better-spent-on-bubble-gum-and-fart-pillows bad. It's worse than the quality drop from Mean Girls to Mean Girls 2. From Tony Blair to Gordon Brown. From In Rainbows to King Of Limbs as-covered-by Spandau Ballet. From The Simpsons to live-action Simpsons pornography. From Belgian lager to Sainsbury's Basics lemonade left out in the sun outside a B&Q in Slough, with fag butts floating in the backwash. If you see it, you might actually die. From the badness. It will melt your soul in half. Don't do it. Think of the children. They are our future.

Why do you hate us???

So, what's the problem? Perhaps the only way to begin to address the ridiculous number of ways in which this film screws up is by comparison to Kick Ass One. One had lots of great things, such as a watertight and witty script, good casting, superbly choreographed fight scenes and a fantastic score. 

Most of all, though, its impact came from being a rare example of a film that is shocking and subversive, but not exploitative, and this is mostly down to the child-assassin, Hit Girl. In her breakout role, Chloe Glowee Mowee gave us an eleven year old girl who fights like Bruce Lee, murders criminals by the dozen like she's picking ticks off a dog and swears like Tarantino arguing in a youtube comments thread.

This was an incredibly daring and fresh approach; in standard superhero plots, children are only there to be saved from burning buildings, and to believe in Hero-man when all the town has turned against him in that part just before Act III when he doesn't think he can do it any more, until little Fucky reminds him that he's great and that he should believe in himself. With Hit Girl, however, Kick Ass totally messed with our understanding of that. By playing with film taboos around childhood innocence, we were kept in constant suspense. Here, children aren't being rescued from the burning building; they're burning the fucking thing down themselves, and capping all the survivors in the name of justice. Thus, in the climatic showdown between the kids and the Big Bad Guy, we no longer had the security of formula to assure us that the Good Guy will survive, and that the children won't get hurt. Anything could happen, and God damn, it happened with style.

Pictured: Style, in a nutshell.

Kick Ass danced majestically on the cliffs of good taste that overlook the dark valley of dead-rabbit awful, but never put a foot wrong. Kick Ass 2 is testament to the difficulty of getting that balance right, by showing us how bad it could have really been. To start with, there's an issue with the basic plot: Kick Ass had 'boy and girl want to be superheroes in real-life', which was not completely original¹ but had at least enough twists to keep it fresh, and served as a solid concrete foundation on which to build up the various other ass-kicking elements. In Kick Ass 2, we have “boy and girl are now superheroes; they go fight some bad guys. And the girl is having a hard time in school”. It's gone from being a twist on a standard formula to an awkward blend of two very boring genre movies.

Hey, remember this movie? It was pretty good, you should watch this instead.

On top of this, there's the casual racism. The arch-nemesis, Christopher Mistopher Plistopher's The Mother Fucker, assembles a team of villains with half-assed bad guy names built around racial stereotypes: the black guy is “Black Death”, the Asian guy is “Ghengis Carnage”, and of course we also have a thick-accented and inhumanly brutal Russian, 'Mother Russia', complete with hammer and sickle motif on her skimpy warrior bikini. This isn't as bad as, say, “Meesa Jar Jar Binks”, but it is completely unnecessary. Indeed, when the Mother Fucker first reveals these names, his right-hand man calls him out for being racially insensitive. Of course, he is completely ignored, in the name of alleged irony. Its all part of the mistaken modern trend in believing that racist jokes are o.k as long as you know they're racist.

Not-racism: an artist's interpretation.

This issue underlies the main problem with this film: it's a by-the-numbers action movie, with a by-the-numbers teen movie wedged in the middle like swiss cheese in a tub of Neapolitan, that tries to excuse its overwhelming lack of originality by occasionally winking at the camera and going 'superhero movies, amirite?'

It's not even worth going into the horribly misjudged scene in which an attempted rape is played for laughs, because the attacker can't get erect and ultimately bails. That fact stands well enough alone as one of many errors in judgement on the part of the film-makers.

At its core, Kick Ass was about taking a standard fantasy story, that of the costumed vigilante, and applying it to the real-world, where fights actually hurt, a lot, and crime has an annoying tendency to pay quite well. In the sequel, this idea is turned around: at the beginning, we are constantly being reminded by the characters that 'this is real life', but the film soon forgets this criterion as it devolves into bad fantasy. As such, the violence has no impact, the quips seem clunky and overwritten, and for heaven's sake there's an attempted rape that is played for laughs.

Another movie that's much more worth your time.

Overall, it's that rare breed of sequel that, in hindsight, actually manages to make the first one seem worse. Trying to go back and enjoy Kick Ass now is like trying to tuck into a delicious steak dinner when you've just taken a school trip to an abattoir.  I want to end this review with a nice pithy statement about my overall viewing experience, and a mark out of five. Alas, all I have is a dead rabbit and a hat full of turd-pellets. Just please, someone, think of the children. They need you. Goodnight, and God bless.

Edit: Having said all that, it turns out that there was something good to come out of this film. There's a pirated version currently doing the rounds, in which you can overhear the bloke who's recording it ask his talky neighbours to pipe down so he can resume his law-breaking in peace. Observe: 

1By this point, every modern superhero movie owes so much debt to the influence of Watchmen that you can't really call them rip-offs with a straight face. It would be like saying that every sandbox video game is a rip off of Grand Theft Auto, that every film with flashbacks is stealing from Citizen Kane, that cake is a rip-off of eggs and flour.

Netflix: The Main Reason I'd Move To America; To Hell With Healthcare

Take that, The Man.

Browsing U.K netflix is the most frustrating experience I have recently come across. 

"You like Quentin Tarantino? EXCELLENT!...No, we don't have any of those Tarantino films, but we have his most underrated gem 'Four Rooms' for you to enjoy! And also Kill Bill vol. 2! No, not volume 1. Just the second, less good one. 

Yes, of COURSE we have Guillermo Del Toro...'s film 'Mimic', the one that no one cares about, not even it's mum. 

But HEY, you like independent films sometimes, right? Yeah, you do, you little starbucks hipster, and you've come to the right place. In our independent films section you'll notice some totally undiscovered low budget treasures like Slumdog Millionaire, Good Will Hunting and Kevin and Perry go Large!  That'll go nicely with your flat-white and this week's Vice, IRONIC HI-FIVE!

Foreign films? Well of course, mi amigo, how about 'Starship Troopers: Invasion'? No, it's the sequel. Third sequel. Yes, of course it's foreign, the director's Japanese. Well all right, how about this lovely little Dutch film, The Human Centipede? Not working for you? No need to panic; set yourself down, un-sew your mouth from your netherlands and feast your eyes upon EVERY SINGLE BOLLYWOOD FILM EVER!!! Also anime. Lots and lots and lots of anime...."

It feels somehow like being promised a Led Zeppelin gig, only to turn up to see a Justin Lee Collins-fronted Zeppelin tribute band. And all the other members are Justin Lee Collins. And everyone in the crowd is Justin Lee Collins. And you rush to the bathroom for some air only to turn to the mirror and see that yes, you yourself are now Justin Lee Collins.

Having said all that, it's got a documentary about what it's like to be the guy with his hand up Elmo's ass for a living so I'm not quite ready to cancel my month's free trial yet.

A Confused School of Sunrise Slackers: Reconsidering Richard Linklater

The name Richard Linklater will never invoke the same idea of a cinematic auteur that we associate with contemporaries like Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh or even Kevin Smith, because his signature is far too subtle: although one can make connections between his films, it is too difficult to say what it is about his style that defines it. All the same, no other filmmaker of his generation has been able to capture so perfectly the conflicted mix of jaded intellect and blind optimism inherent to what the critics used to call Generation X.

Linklater (b.1960) was born and raised in Houston, Texas, and left college midway through his studies to work on an oil rig. Due to the dangers involved, oil riggers traditionally follow a work schedule of one month on and one month off, and this pattern left Linklater with a lot of free time to immerse himself in literature and film. Having the luxury of long idle spells in his mid-twenties to simply sit and think about life is one possible explanation for the abundance of philosophical ponderings in films such as Slacker and Waking Life.

Having decided that his heart was in filmmaking, Linklater bought an 8mm camera and moved west to the cultural capital of Austin. There is a wonderful scene in his most recent film, Bernie, (2011) in which a small-town local divides Texas culturally into five areas, dismissing Linklater’s new home city as “The People’s republic of Austin, with hairy-legged women and liberal fruitcakes”; this makes an amusing contrast to the stereotype of Texas as a Republican’s wet dream. Linklater helped cement Austin’s bohemian reputation through his founding of the Austin Film Society.

His first full-length film, Slacker, was shot for the minuscule sum of $23,000 before going on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. An aimless wandering camera drifts between different peoples’ personal narratives over the course of a day in the same small Texas town. It was an important landmark for American independent film in the early 90’s, a series of extended monologues stylishly shot that showed how much a film could do with such modest means. At the very least, it inspired Kevin Smith to make Clerks, whose legacy cemented in the eyes of financiers the box-office potential of no-budget cinema.

The following excerpt is taken from the opening of the film, and features Linklater himself playing a nameless travelling youth spitballing shower-thoughts at a silent taxi driver:

Slacker may have been his calling card, but it was his next film, 1993’s Dazed and Confused, that made him an accepted part of the cult indie canon. Another twenty-four hour narrative, this time focusing on a collection of Houston teenagers on the last day of high school in 1976, Dazed is not a “teen movie” as much as it is a movie about teenagers. It covers all aspects of the teenage psyche: the hierarchy of high school psychology, the will for mindless destruction of property, the arrogance of knowing that you are better than your elders, but also the strong communal bonds between people with the common goal of enjoying youth while it lasts. In addition, it has all the components of a good cult movie – a great soundtrack, quotable dialogue and Ben Affleck getting covered in paint. Quentin Tarentino once called it “maybe the greatest hangout movie ever made”, whatever that means.

This scene opens the film with a montage of the various high-school cliques set to the underrated Aerosmith groove-rocker 'Sweet Emotion':

1995’s Before Sunrise is best seen in conjunction with its companion piece, 2004’s Before Sunset. The former is the ultimate date movie: a wide-eyed American boy (Ethan Hawke) and a sassy French girl (Julie Delpy) meet on a train and decide spontaneously to get off in Vienna and spend the day walking around and falling in love, only to part each other’s company the next day. It is sweet but never saccharine, joyful but never trite. The sequel sees the two same characters meet up again ten years later for another day in which they look back and laugh at their youthful romantic folly. Linklater manages to avoid what could easily be an overindulgence of soppy celluloid lovey-doveyness through the magic of the dialogue, co-written by the two main actors, whose many little truths are spread across a series of conversations that manage to capture what people really sound like when they talk to one another, a rarity in modern cinema.

For 2001’s Waking Life Linklater took his knack for conversation pieces to the weird realm of lucid dreams, as the main character floats through his slumbering subconscious into a series of odd yet always fascinating dialogues. As opposed to Inception’s fun but silly action film with floaty-bits approach, Linklater’s affair comes far closer to portraying what dreaming feels like. In addition, it was filmed in Linklater’s unique rotoscoped animation style, in which sequences shot in live-action are painstakingly drawn over to create a surreal visual language that lies somewhere between real life and cartoons. He used this same technique for 2006’s dark drug-induced masterpiece A Scanner Darkly, without doubt the best adaptation of a Phillip K. Dick novel since Blade Runner, and the only film to truly benefit from Keanu Reeve’s wooden acting style by having him play a brain-fried synthetic drug addict.

The following scene gives an idea of how 'alive' the animation looks on screen, in a way impossible to show with still frames.  At the same time, the film conveys something about the daily habits and conversations of recreational addicts that is as funny as it is sad, and finds poetry within the balance:

As diverse as his resume appears, from teen comedy to flirtations with romance and psychedelic science fiction, the bulk of his best work is united in its attention to the optimistic daydreams of youth. Like a photographer trying to perfectly capture a bubble in mid-burst, Linklater’s work focuses on that sudden moment in life where we are at the height of our naïve idealism, sprung from secondary education with the certainty that we will grow up to change the world, brimming with ideas on how to do so, wrapped in the illusion that no one before us has tried like we will. Placed in that golden time between full time education and full time work, Linklaters’ characters have the freedom they’ve been yearning for since childhood but not yet the reality of serious employment to ruin it. The fact that many of his films take place within one day is a fitting tribute to the brevity of this spell.

Oh yeah and he made School of Rock.  Which was pretty good.

Key Works:

Slacker – One of the great indie debuts of the 90’s, a directionless wander through the lives of suburban Texas on a Summer’s day.

Dazed and Confused – The best film ever made about adolescence, all the wonders and horrors shot side-by-side with an ensemble cast that reads like a who’s-who of 90s American independent cinema.

A Scanner Darkly – a mind-melting near-future foray into the bizarre animation technique of rotoscoping, as Keanu Reeves goes undercover to investigate the suppliers and effects of Substance D, a mysterious new psychedelic drug. Features a brilliant turn from experienced drug lover Robert Downey Jr. in one of several roles that cemented his comeback.

Linklater’s ‘Before Midnight’, the third chapter in the modern love story that began in 1994’s ‘Before Sunrise’, was announced after this article was written, but it's out now, and it's great.

A Confederacy Of Former Dunces

I found an article I wrote a few years ago that was something of a satire and tribute to a lot of the indie films that were popular at the time. At least, that's what it set out to be.  It ended up being whatever the hell is written below.  I avoided the urge to change anything.  You can tell its age because it's an article all about the 'quirk' factor of cheesy U.S indie movies without a single mention of Zooey Deschanel. 

A Confederacy of Former Dunces

Pictures make articles look prettier so
more people will want to read them.

In which this Crouching Ginger Hidden writer seeks to investigate the appeal of modern American indie cinema, in a rather stream of consciousness fashion in keeping with the ultimate of movie makers that he bums, Charlie Kaufman.

Incidentally, if you haven’t yet seen Kaufman’s directorial debut and perhaps greatest work so far, “Synecdoche, New York”, stop reading this turgid shite and go find a copy, it’s like 3 quid in Fopp and everything. Or illegally download it. Or don’t. Or make up your own mind about whether or not you’d like to see it, and then act on that. Or don’t. Here’s my article:

The recent rise in popularity of American independent film has brought us many cinematic gems, and a fair few further try-too-hards. In particular, I’m talking about the latest brand of indie cuteness godfathered arguably by the great Wes Anderson, but which dates back to the likes of John Hughes and perhaps even beginning with Annie Hall, the ‘quirk flick’.

I’m sure I’ve no need to digress into details for you will have surely seen one by now; a sort of mish-mash of Addams Family values and the slow deliberate camerawork of aging stoners conveyed via a tongue so far into its cheek that any on-looking pornstar-scouts would proceed to hail that tongue in handshakes, business cards and mephedrone.

As cute as this currently well-craved brand of alt-indie is, one fears to imagine the damage it could inflict to our cherished memories of “The Breakfast Club” once big Hollywood bucks start fuelling the formula. Soon enough one of these graphic-novel reading noo-voe auteurs is going to be thrown a lot of cash to realize their most esoteric artistic wank-fantasies to the mega-budget full…and then get fired halfway through for going all ‘Heaven’s Gate’ and demanding the use of seven-hundred horsebacked extras to be extremely droll to one another on ice under a coral reef on the moon for an irrelevant dream sequence.

Following this, some hacky failsafe turdsock will doubtlessly be drafted up from the director bargain bin to save the picture from totally becoming the ultimate of suck by playing it safe and copying the ‘quirk flick’ formula to the max. This would of course be coupled with the prescription of a steady diet of every example they could find, from the awesomely quirky to the pleasant-ish time passer to the generic not-silly-enough-to-laugh-not-sad-enough-to-cry dull-as-dysentary balltits crap indie that Eric Cartman once perceptively described as “a load of gay cowboys eating pudding”.

For sure, this is all perfectly idle speculation with almost no basis in fact or sense whatsoever, but should such a film ever be made, I could only imagine the script to look rather like this:

A Family of Ingrates

A.K.A

“Little Miss Tenenbaum Hearts Donnie Huckabees And You And Me And Everyone Juno Knows’ Adaptation of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Dynamite Garden State of Happiness, Limited”

Cast:

Donnie – teenage boy

Quirk: uses a lot of internet slang, only ever eats cold sausages and lettuce.

Adema – Donnie’s mum

          Quirk: Addicted to leopard tranquilisers and anal penetration.

Henrietta-Fleabag – Donnie’s sister

          Quirk: child genius 6 years old, builds rocketships and could possibly time travel, ¹

Pindlethrippe Explosionfest– Donnie’s half-brother

          Quirk: Speaks only in quotes from Captain Beefheart songs. Carries around a banjo which he never plays. Has no bones.

Binksy Bonksy Conksy Monk: a postman who spies on the family on Wednesdays.

          Quirk: spies on the family on Wednesdays. Has too many bones. Paints pineapples onto his chest with a scythe made of cat hair.

Little Miss Tenenbaum – Donnie’s love interest.

          Quirk: is fairly ugly.

Scene 1: Interior, daytime, kitchen

Adema stares blankly out the open window. She lights a cigarette. We watch her smoke the entire thing whilst the opening credits role. She lights another. We watch this as well.

Donnie enters.

Donnie: 

Hey mom have you seen my socks?

Adema appears totally unaware of his existence.

Donnie:

Mom?....oh shit not again.

He rushes out the kitchen and back into the house, calling desperately for his half-brother Pindlethrippe Explosionfest and sister Henrietta-Fleabag to come to the kitchen to help their mother. They all return.

Donnie: 

You know what? I have a confession to make.

Adema continues not to care. Pindlethripp Explosionfest and Henrietta-Fleabag eat themselves in an amusing fashion. Binksy Bonksy Conksy Monk enters. He is a postman who spies on the family on Wednesdays. He is dressed as such. He then leaves, remembering that it is not Wednesday today, nor is it any other day. 

Little Miss Tenenbaum is about to enter, but then remembers that she is not an actual character in the film per se, but just someone who’s name is always mentioned by other characters. She recalls how upset this probably makes her, and proceeds to not exist.

Donnie stands up on a piece of marzipan that is also a tin tear drop, and begins his soliloquy in the voice of a drunken ocelot-tamer.

Donnie: 

Well, in short, I was getting really high last night, and accidentally set fire to my copy of the script. The fire spread, and went on to destroy ever over copy ever, whilst miraculously managing to stay contained within my room, and not cause damage to anything else. Quid pro quo, the movie has to be cancelled, as does any article writing about the movie, or any possible suggestion that the movie is or is not. And just like THAT…I’m gone.

Donnie stays standing like a statue made of Donnie.

The film ends, and receives a standing ovation from an almost empty audience of just one admirer, myself. I clap until my hands turn into red hands, and leave, comfortable in the knowledge that I am now better than everyone else.

In thirty years time or so, I will have a big smart looking funky beard and a tweed jacket, and will talk long and loud to everyone who doesn’t care less about this “long-forgotten masterpiece that deserves much greater recognition”. The size of my beard and tweedyness of my jacket, coupled with an appearance on television, will be sufficient enough reason for it to be re-released in remastered quality for the BFI, on a highly technological format downloaded directly into the soul, for the bargain price of seventy poos.

The greatest trick the art-house capitalists ever pulled was convincing the world they didn’t exist.

And just like THAT.

*I’m gone*

FYI: “Synecdoche, New York” is out now on DVD, in a normal proletarian one-disc vanilla version AND a two disc geek-jizz bells and whistles version with a shiny cover. That is all.x

1 Although this is merely one interpretation of the film, which has several interpretations, despite carrying an otherwise normal one-dimensional boy meets girl plotline, because the ending doesn’t make any sense. Genius.

Weezer Jolly Good Fellow

This is an article I originally wrote for the fantastic music blog, "The Hardcore and The Gentle", which you can find at jackinthejukebox.blogspot.co.uk.  I've reposted it here in the interest of gathering all my written eggs into one on-line basket.  It's part of the "Favourite LP's" series, in which blogger Jack asked his friends to write guest posts about their favourite album.  Which, for me, is without question...

Weezer - Weezer (or, The Blue Album) (1994)

You can’t write about Nevermind without talking about grunge. You can’t discuss King Crimson without saying prog. No overview of either Oasis or Blur could be complete without reference to the battle for Britpop glory that dominated their early history, despite how different they were, and how little either cared for the crown. Some albums are so synonymous with a certain sound that it becomes impossible to write a retrospective without taking this into account. This can prove frustrating for the artists themselves, as almost all of these musical buzzwords are the pigeon-holing brainchildren of journalists, and a lot of the time these buzzwords place far more focus on the look of a band than its sound.

Unfortunately for Weezer this proved to be the case, for when their debut album emerged in 1994, the pigeonhole parade took one look at the cover and cast them as Nerd Rock until their dying days. Within their sound may be contained the gain-heavy power chord freak outs of Pixies, the sweetly acoustic serenading of Cat Stevens, and a fair few stripped-down solos stolen from the glory days of Glen Danzig, but despite all of this, they wore glasses. Not only in public, but on stage, and in music videos. In addition, not a single one of their songs was about drug addiction – no winking references to spoons, no reports on visits to Dr Greenthumb, not even a passing mention of anything brown. Indeed, it seems that when lead singer Rivers Cuomo chimes about how much he enjoys hanging out ‘In The Garage’, it’s less for its hot-boxing potential and more about an irony-free desire for Dungeons and Dragons and X-Men comics. 

Wherein lies Weezer’s main appeal on their debut ten-track pop masterpiece: as with all great music, it’s incredibly honest. All the best musicians find new ways to convey where they come from, be it NWA's Compton, Bob Marley's Trench Town, Arctic Monkey's Sheffield, or even Sun Ra's Outer Space (or so he claimed...).  In Weezer's more terrestrial case, however, it was all about Suburban Nowheresville, Connecticut. No band who puts a couplet like ‘Come sit next to me, pour yourself some tea’ in the opening song of their first album could be aiming for street-cred, and it would almost be embarrassing to sing along to on the bus with your headphones were it not for the magic of Weezer: they sang infectiously catchy songs that make you not care about how lame you may look dancing to them, because you’re having too much fun. They would often recall the crooning pop numbers of Buddy Holly, with a modern post-Pixies adherence to loud-quiet-loud that gels perfectly - take the distortion out of ‘Holiday’ and you’ve got the sound of a hit 50’s 7 inch. From Holly to glam rock, at its best the Weezer sound is a compendium of every music that late-20th century teenagers have put on in their bedrooms and turned up loud for the pure joy of rocking out, free of inhibition.

What differs ‘The Blue Album’ from the later, suckier work of Weezer on albums like ‘Make Believe’ is the subtle blend of angst and insecurity that infuses ostensibly happy numbers like ‘In The Garage’, and conversely the notes of hope and optimism that run through more miserable titles like ‘The World Has Turned and Left Me Here’. Latter-era Weezer¹ are a little too content to wear their emotions on their sleeves, picking one feeling per song from the emotional spectrum and sticking to it, but the Weezer of yore had a wonderful way of making sad songs sound happy, and vice versa.

Thus, the success of ‘The Blue Album’ is a simple formula: ten perfectly crafted pop songs, from bouncy 3/4 opener ‘My Name Is Jonas ‘ to the dreamy walking bassline that fuels closing 8 minute wonder ‘Only In Dreams’, that encapsulate the main advantage of being a nerd: the ability to enjoy cheesy nerd things without giving a shit. And that’s pretty cool. 

Interesting side-note: The influence of this album has stretched far and wide, to bands as bizarrely un-weezer-ish as Deftones and Biffy Clyro, who have both covered tracks from this album – it is certainly worth checking out the latter’s rendition of ‘Buddy Holly’ as an example of artistic license gone magnificently insane. Remember that episode of ‘Family Guy’ where Peter turns a production of ‘The King and I’ into a war epic about robots from Space? This is the audio equivalent of that: 

Track list:

1. My Name Is Jonas

2. No One Else

3. The World Has Turned And Left Me Here

4. Buddy Holly

5. Undone - The Sweater Song

6. Surf Wax America

7. Say It Ain't So

8. In The Garage

9. Holiday

10. Only In Dreams

---

1 Weezer can be divided into several eras, beginning with the Golden Era of their first two albums, 'Blue' and 'Pinkerton', the latter being oft-cited as the most influential of their records, even if this writer prefers the former for having a bit more variety. The middle period consists of their next two albums, 'Green' and 'Maladroit', which are both fantastic, but on a slightly lower pedestal from the first two just because they didn't have quite the same wide-reaching impact on the indie pop canon. After this comes the Latter Era, when they somehow lost it and became, in the desire to beat the bush directly, a bit wank. Despite this, these later albums have enough good songs between them to make one great mixtape, and I would even argue that the 'The Red Album' was a minor throwback to the quality of the middle period, were it not for the lyrics on tracks like "Heartsongs" that sound like they were written by a drunk pre-pubescent Donnie Osmond and which ruin an otherwise marvellous set of  melodies. ^↩

Something Shit and Strange

     Youtube never fails to amaze me with its display of both people so talented that I'm forced to snap my mental paintbrushes and huff in a corner at my mediocrity, as well as people so far off the opposite end of the talent spectrum that I want to contact their families to get them sectioned just for believing in themselves.

Lexy and Stephany fall somewhere towards the latter end. They sound like the soundtrack to a child psychopath in an 80's disco getting turned down for a dance by everyone in the room, including the teachers, before storming outside for a cry and catching sight of a half-drunk 2 litre of white cider with visible backwash sediment lying prone against the curb like a sick, scrawny, see-through animal, which bottle said child grabs like a chalice and chugs until she realises it's just lucozade and tosses it away and goes back inside and spends the rest of the disco in the corner playing su doku on her mum's borrowed nokia.

Its like a version of the disco scene in Napoleon Dynamite in which every character is played by a mute Karl Pilkington with wigs.

It's like having a teenage bear cry on your shoulder about his ex bear girlfriend and you being bored of his woe-is-me-ing but also terrified that if you try to move away he will bear-claw your face into stubbly prosciutto.

It's backwater youtube chintz elevated to a whole new level of awful previously reserved for Detroit crime statistics.

And its catchy as hell. And are they dancing in front of a powerpoint presentation or what the fuck is this thing? We will never truly know.

Bless you, Lexy and Stephany, for making me want to go outside.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBqNK6apjiQ#at=62

The Pagan Defense League

I’ve finally decided to come out and say what we’re all thinking.  This country is in a war of religion, and I’m sick of how no-one is doing anything about it.  Our beautiful land of Blighty is being infested by a monotheistic religion from the Middle East, whose followers are causing menace to honest blue-blooded Englanders.  You see them coming over here with a holy book that is absolutely filled with hate and bile and fire and brimstone, when taken mostly out of context.  Enough is enough; Christianity is paving over our home-grown Pagan traditions, and if we don’t act soon they’ll be taking it right into parliament and we’ll end up an entirely Christian nation of sissy choir singers.

Pictured: Immigrant scum

It all started long ago with them bloody Roman immigrants, who came to our country and bred like a plague, building temple after temple to their stupid Geesus, or whatever his name is; they all look the same.  Now, there are entire areas of this country that are populated almost solely by Christians.  When was the last time your local baker had a proper pagan name?  They’ve all got funny Christian names; our banks are staffed by Johns and Marks and Williams.  What kind of stupid bloody name is William? It’s got ‘willy’ in it, enough said.

You see them flocking to our sacred Stone Henge, taking patronising pictures with their camera phones, stealing the soul from our cultural heritage, and pointing and laughing at our traditions like we’re standing here worshipping fucking My Little Pony.  They are defecating all over traditions that date back to the birth of the British Isles themselves, when they were flung from the hallowed vagina of our sacred Mother Nature Divinia in 4,000 b.c. 

What’s more, you know what ‘b.c.’ stands for, right?  See, they even forced their stupid dating system upon us, making us refer to everything in relation to the birth of their stupid prophet Chris.  Even though they can’t even decide when the beardy bastard was born, so they just said it was the same day as the birth of our sacred Sol Invictus.  After that, they wiped their collective Christian arse with our spring fertility ceremonies, kept the bunnies and eggs and called it Easter.  So what you’re telling me, Johnny Bible, is that the day Chris was crucified changes every year in accordance with the coming of the full moon? Come off it, mate. I’m sick of all these Christians taking over Pagan holidays. You can’t even call it Winterfest anymore, it’s Christmas this, Christmas that.  They built a Santa-shop over my sacrificial pyre.  I inherited that pyre from my great-grandfather; it’s got virgin bloodstains on it that are older than Bruce Forsyth.  

Get off my heathen pavement you drunk heretic

Every day in the news we’re reading about Christians committing crimes. Of course, they don’t always say they’re Christian, but you can tell they are from their pasty white faces, knobbly knees and all the disgusting tea stains on their teeth. Christian man Raoul Moat shooting all those people in Cumbria.  Christian leaders going around telling us not to be gay like it’s any of their bloody business who I share my privates with.  Christians wasting trees printing out their phony scripture, as if passing on religious instruction by mouth isn’t good enough for them.  Christians littering our streets with their cigarettes and gum and drunkenly pissing on our pavements at two in the morning as they spill foreign burger lettuce from their fat ugly mouths.  What, you thought hamburgers were English?  Take another look at the word, mate.  Absolute foreign conspiracy in a sesame-seed bun of deception.

I see them coming over here and paving over our stone circles, replacing them with church after church.  I grew up in a tiny village outside of Cambridge, which now boasts three churches for less than four thousand people.  Yet when I tried to pray to my proper pagan British god of Anthwrara, the Lord of Darkness, Shepard of Death and Bringer of Righteous Suffering unto the Aberrant Masses, I managed to get barely five minutes into the Naked Mud Dance of the Triumphant before the Legoland security personnel were escorting me from the premises.  They even confiscated the little foam sword I'd nicked from the souvenir shop, a process which took at least another ten minutes as I had firmly lodged it halfway up my rear English channel, in a gesture of valiant assault against the profanity of sinful expulsions.  The PC brigade is slowly but surely stripping me of my patriotic right to be an utter cunt.

What sissy Prophets do when they're not spinning lies

I’m not saying any of this from a place of ignorance; I’ve skimmed the Wikipedia pages on Christianity and the Bible for enough time to find sentences that support my well-endowed prejudice.  I’ve read article after article from completely reliable anti-Christian propaganda blogs like fuckthemeek.com and shovethatwaferupyourdogmaticarse.blogspot.co.uk.  They all cite sources like the Daily Mail, together with general hearsay they gleamed from their mate down the pub what said this and that, and you’d be mad to tell me you can trust anyone better than your mates from down the pub what said this, or that. They’re your mates, for Anthwrara’s sake.  Thicker than water, they are.

So what have I learned from my exhaustive research?  Firstly, Chris was a carpenter.  What kind of almighty Messiah has a day job?  Obviously one who can’t be bothered to commit to his followers full-time without popping off to fix a window for cash-on-hand.  Beyond that, you know what kind of thing he used to bang on about?  He said when someone slaps you, you’re meant to turn the other cheek, like a little bitch or something. Blessed are the meek? They’re inheriting the earth, are they?  It’s like they want to turn our brave and fierce country into a pasture land for complete pussies.  Probably so they can bring more of their kind here to walk all over us while they stamp our history into the dirt. It makes me physically sick.  On top of that, their Bible says he once invited a load of mates to his for some bread and wine, only then telling them it was actually bits from his own blood and body!  God damned cannibal.  God damned sissy cannibal day-jobbing tosspot.  In my humble view, he deserves to be hung up and nailed to a tree or something with thorns stuck in his head and left to die there, see how he likes that shit.

The Britain we all dream of

It’s time to fight fire with fire. The only way to stamp out such an intolerant and misunderstood religion is with our own home-grown brand of proper British intolerance and misunderstanding. Aux armes, citoyens!  Let’s see how well they turn the other cheek when you’ve slapped them hard enough to snap their heretical necks in two.  Then let us piss their remains into the gutter so we can get back to the tolerant and peaceful Britain of the Hovis ads of yore.

Film Review: We Went To War

It is very easy in our current era to become desensitised to warfare.  Through the popularity of the fantasy war epic Game of Thrones, the Oscar success of civil war drama Lincoln, or the startling sales of Call of Duty and other war-themed video games that could bankroll an entire invasion, we are, as ever, transfixed by the majesty and morality of battle. The long term consequences of this bloodthirsty entertainment shouldn’t be of too much concern, as it is far from a new phenomenon; the epics of Homer were just as gruesome as the gunshows of Tarentino.  We can permit ourselves to enjoy them, so long as we can still remind ourselves of the real-life consequences of real-life bloodshed.  Let us be thankful, then, for a documentary like We Went To War, that forces us to reconsider what becomes of the veterans of a senseless conflict nearly forty years past.

Michael Grigsby’s new film is a taciturn tribute to the soldiers of the Vietnam War.  It arrives 43 years on from Grigby’s I Was A Soldier, which followed three men, Dennis, David and Lamar, as they returned from Vietnam and tried to settle back into life at home.  Now, he follows the same three soldiers as they continue living day to day in rural Texas, their scars now aged but still raw and ever-present.  A series of extended still shots of their native countryside, combined with wide tracking takes of cars progressing across the endless landscape, place us into the serene and ostensibly relaxing location.  However, when coupled with the testimony of these men as they still try to recover from the mental wounds of war, together with a soundtrack of pop music from the Vietnam era, an atmosphere of irresolution, unrest and disaffection creeps through the celluloid of empty streets and lonely forests.  We see archive interviews with these men shortly after their return from Vietnam, juxtaposed with more current footage of them as aged relics of American history, and come to see how little has changed: they are still at war in their minds, overcoming flashbacks, alcoholism, and the long term effects of chemical weaponry.

The power of the film lies in its startling modesty; there is no footage of battles or patriotic Presidential speeches, nothing that would relate back to the Hollywood warfare of classic Vietnam films, whose depiction of guns, guts and explosions tend to paradoxically sate our thirst for glorious screen violence as they try to decry its inhumanity.  In its place, we have the real-life aftermath of the real men behind the myth, recalling through candid testimonial what it is like to live everyday with the post-traumatic fear that the enemy is still lying somewhere over the hill.  In addition, we hear from their now grown-up children, to whom they could never properly relate their experience, and see them talk about it with more recent veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The overall effect of watching We Went to War is that of a profound re-sensitisation; it brings the serious consequences of thoughtless ferocity to the forefront, stamping the price of warfare onto your brain like a violent hangover.  In an age where you can download Assassins’ Creed to your smart phone within minutes, this makes for profound and essential viewing.

“We Went To War” is out on general release from the 29th of March. A special preview screening and Q&A with the creators is taking place this Sunday, March 24th, at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts. Details can be found at http://www.ica.org.uk/?lid=36899

We are saddened to report that the director, Michael Grigsby, passed away on the 12th of March, aged 76. Our thoughts go out to his family.

Rating: 5/5