HonkWatch #083: Jarhead

More from Jarhead: Swoff coughs gut custard after coming across the burnt flesh expressway that is the road to Basra.

<3

I am in a rather jolly mood at the moment, despite everything, because today my LLF returns from her adventures, and tomorrow I shall see her

* Waves *

This is, of course, dependent on her and her travelling companion’s stowawayability… And losing the phone didn’t help!

* Crosses fingers *

HonkWatch #082: Jarhead

The other day I watched Operation Homecoming, a documentary about a project helping soldiers to record their war memories. It was quite engaging, and featured American combat veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan talking about their experiences and reading their writing, interspersed with writer-fighters from previous conflicts.

One of the participants was Anthony Swofford, whose memoir of the previous American adventure in the Persian Gulf, Jarhead, was turned into a movie of the same name by Sam Mendes.

So here’s Jake Gyllenhaal as Swoff from that film, having his sand puke nightmare.

One balmy afternoon in the inner city…

A charming scene played out on Stokes Croft this afternoon…

(Sallow-cheeked young Scottish man, pale of face and whiskery of chin:)

Fuck you, you dirty slag!

(Gaunt-looking young woman, with a voice suggestive of a swollen tongue and a missing tooth:)

Fucking… Smackhead!

— Exeunt —

Piss & Vinegar #027: Gangster No. 1

Talking of British gangster films, here’s ageing hoodlum Malcolm McDowell taking a wazz in Paul McGuigan’s Gangster No. 1. Very hygienic.

HonkWatch #081: Rise Of The Footsoldier

Andy Riot (Rhys Williams) coughs up under interrogation from ‘truth serum’ wielding Turkish gangsters in the Gilbey brothers’ not-too-shabby hooligan/gangster flick Rise Of The Footsoldier.

For all my pre-viewing concerns that it would be another slice of post-Ritchie Britflick gangster wankery, I actually thought it was alright; I suspect that the IMDb rating (6.9) is about right. It’s fairly proficiently made, though the camerawork is a little too kinetic all of the time in the first half for my taste.

On the other hand, too much has been crammed into it. There’s football hooliganism from the late seventies into the dawn of the nineties, taking in Bill Gardner, the ICF and the police crackdown; then running doors from sticky-floored niteklubs into ye birthe of acide house; involvement in ’security’, ‘protection’ and then ‘distribution’ work; then into the whole Essex clubs/drugs nexus, leading up to the Rettendon murders. There’s too much going on that should have been dealt with at the script stage.

Still, there are some strikingly detailed touches along the way – the answerphone messages during the period between the first news of the murders and the identities of the dead men being revealed, and the disfigured corpses – which appear to have been developed out of the original court evidence.

However, the film does seem to attribute to Leach more influence and importance than he actually had. It also seems to conflate his experiences with those of others. For example, his original meeting with Craig Rolfe sounds very similar to an incident related by (head of security at Raquel’s nightclub/Tucker associate) Bernard O’ Mahoney. The car destruction scene also sounds like an event O’ Mahoney claims to have orchestrated. There are several more such instances.

Stepping back from the film – which I found visceral and watchable – I do wonder why it is hung around Leach. For the first hour, Leach is clearly at the centre of the events being portrayed, yet for most of the ‘Essex Boys’ narrative which fills up the rest of the movie, it’s all about what Tucker, Tate and Rolfe do (and what is done to them); Leach doesn’t really figure in it.

Cast-wise there’s not much for women to do in it, sadly (for all the problems with ID and The Firm, at least Claire Skinner and Lesley Manville were given a little more meat to work with) – wives and whores all, either serving as chattels to big, meatheaded men, or else rending their garments over the battered, broken or lifeless bodies of their menfolk. But the men in it do look and sound like the sorts of people they are playing. Ricci Narnett (one of the scary soldiers from 28 Days Later) does well as Leach (though the part is perhaps written too much as a ‘hero’ of sorts), whilst Terry Stone, Craig Fairbrass and Roland Manookian are enthusiastic as Tucker, Tate and Rolfe. The Tucker hair looks just like the photos, too!

There are definitely too many moments when things descend into pointless musical montage, and the voiceover narration doesn’t help hide that the structure of the film is confused and bloated; but overall, though, a fairly decent flick. Better than Essex Boys and Green Street, and not as idolatrous of violence and violent people as Guy Ritchie.

PS It has both Frank Harper and Billy Murray (who also produced) in it

PPS After being mildly impressed by ROTF, I checked out the earlier Gilbey feature, Rollin’ With The Nines. Despite sharing many of the cast and crew, it was just awful.

Piss & Vinegar #026: A Cock And Bull Story

Young Tristram Shandy taking a pre-sash-assisted circumcision slash in the Michael Winterbottom/Frank Cottrell Boyce/Steve Coogan adaptation A Cock And Bull Story.

HonkWatch #080: Faith (E4)

Liquored-up Parliamentary researcher Joel (Alexis Denisof) chokes up after tabloid hack Nick Simon (John Hannah) offers him an unpleasant choice in conspiracy thriller Faith.

It’s not a bad little potboiler – no Edge Of Darkness, but better than Fields Of Gold or Oktober, and whilst less polished, more plausible than State Of Play.

(Dedicated to El Barlow )

Frayling at the edges

The other day I watched a programme in a series called Nightmare: The Birth Of Horror*, in which Christopher Frayling looked at the creation and success of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Today on Shadowlands I noticed a reference to “Sir Christopher Professor Frayling”.

This led me to have a quick look on Wikipedia to find out more about Frayling.

Apparently, when Frayling was knighted, he

chose “PERGE SCELUS MIHI DIEM PERFICIAS” as his motto, which translates as “Proceed, varlet, and let the day be rendered perfect for my benefit”. In more modern English, the phrase would say: “Go ahead, punk, make my day”.

* This programme also taught me the word ‘bibliogenesis’ (in Frayling’s words, “birth by books”).

Life and all that jazz

I just realised that I’ve still not finished writing up Black Moon, most remiss.

There’s been a lot going on in my life of late, so I’ve rather got behind with things. Normal service should be resumed soon, if I still have somewhere to live

HonkWatch #079: Soldier Blue

Soldier Blue is a revisionist Western from 1970. It’s based around the Sand Creek massacre, in which Colorado militia wiped out an entire Indian village. The climax of the film graphically shows American troops firing upon Indians under the white flag, killing unarmed children, women and men, burning down tipis, scalping prisoners. It is a brutal and extended scene, which says more with its bloodied images than the rest of the film, which often feels leaden and proselytising.

Peter Strauss plays a young trooper – the ‘Soldier Blue’ of the title – who falls for a white woman (Candice Bergen) who has spent time living amongst the Cheyenne. He believes the Indians to be savages, and in the necessity to contain them, control them, civilise them. She, on the other hand, sees barbarism in such ‘civilisation’. Only at the end of the film does Soldier Blue open his eyes to the visions she has spoken of throughout the story, and with this his only response is to vomit.

Pillorying the Post

Introducing Evening Post Watch – the blog all Bristol asked for!

As the explanatory blurb goes:

The Bristol Evening Post is the main daily newspaper for Bristol and the surrounding urban area. It has a daily paid-for circulation of 50,000.

The Post is owned by Northcliffe Media, which is in turn owned by DMGT owners of the hated racist right-wing Daily Mail. There are three other newspapers published in Bristol.

The Western Daily Press covers the wider South West with a focus on rural areas.

The Bristol Observer is a free weekly which has been whittled away to little more than an advertising sheet.

The Metro is the free daily which litters the streets of Bristol every morning. These papers are also owned by Northcliffe and DMGT.

We have a local listings/entertainment/news magazine of the Time Out type called Venue which was recently taken over* by Northcliffe.

Very few of the independent or alternative publications which have been launched here over the years have survived or reached a wide readership.

Bristol, like most cities today has a media dominated by corporations. The Post influences and shapes local opinion and debate and intervenes in political issues yet it answers only to the money-men.

The Post is an odd mixture of reactionary bile, pettiness, banality and the plain odd. It is, like most regional papers, mostly staffed by decent journos who are overworked, under-resourced and underpaid.

This blog is a modest attempt by ordinary Bristolians to take a critical look at some of the output of Bristol’s corporate monopoly press.

Contact: eveningpostwatch@gmail.com

Tis a near-Sisyphean task, so good luck to EPW in its attempts to tame the beast.

PS My favourite EP poster from my days selling newspapers is up on the front page too: “CLFTON CAT’S PLUNGE DRAMA – PICTURES”

* Not really that recently

Gettin’ High #001: North By Northwest

Can’t beat rewatching North By Northwest.

I’m not sure who’s responsible for this sequence – looking down the side of the UN building as Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) makes a dash for it, with the killers on his heels – but I’ve always liked it.

Piss & Vinegar #025: The Gathering

I’ve no idea why I got The Gathering, but I did. It’s not a very good film. It sort of reminds me of a wannabe Omen, but ends up making the same sort of schoolboy errors as The Ninth Gate. It’s a horror film that holds no horrors.

American hitch hiker Cassie (Christina Ricci) is knocked down by a distracted Marion Kirkman (Kerry Fox), who feels responsible for her, and so takes her in after she is discharged from hospital. Meanwhile, Fox’s art historian husband Simon (Stephen Dillane) is working on a dig on behalf of the Church; it seems two festival goers at that year’s Glastonbury fell through a hole in the ground into an entombed early Christian site, and so now it must be properly excavated and its treasures investigated. And guess what: it turns out to be built by Joseph of Arimathea!

Meanwhile Cassie keeps having these funny feelings, and lots of slack-faced, straw-chewing locals seem familiar to her, but she can’t figure out why. In the midst of all this, she strikes up friendships both with the Kirkmans’ young son Luke and with sympathetic hottie Dan (Ioan Gruffudd).

Frankly even typing this out is making me feel listless. It’s a rubbish film. The name refers to a bunch of people who were supposed to have turned up at the crucifixion to have a good rubberneck at the death of Christ, and who were cursed to live forever, watching all manner of atrocities, and all those weird yokels – and Dan, and Cassie herself – are members of the group, as depicted in statue form in the damned Josephine church. God, the film’s so bad it’s even poisoned my command of English. Apologies.

But there is at least a soupçon of piddle. I think it’s the kid wetting himself towards the end when the bad guy comes to kill him or something.

HonkWatch #078: Bottom (S1E1)

Eddie readies himself to blow all over Richie’s head in the first episode of Bottom.

Never fear, Super Coops is here!

The Bristol blogosphere’s favourite lackey of the Post is back at work!

Framed Documents #005: Hardware

In the post-apocalyptic near future world of Richard Stanley’s 2000AD-teefing SF flick Hardware, Jill (Stacey Travis) pulls out another Major Good Vibe reefersplifftypedoobie…

(Whilst pootling around the web reading up about the film and its director, I came upon a very interesting and long interview with Stanley conducted by Tom Huddleston. The Shok! incident is not mentioned, though.)

Piss & Vinegar #024: Skins (S2E5)

During a meeting with the Roundview Sixth Form College principal, Chris is shown CCTV footage of him pissing on a security guard. He’s not going to be expelled, merely a mutual agreement will be arrived at by which he will depart. From Skins.

HonkWatch #077: Enemy At The Gates

Commissar Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) heaves a little combat stress mess whilst lying low in a dry fountain piled high with corpses during the Battle of Stalingrad in Enemy At The Gates.

From Here To Shiternity #009: Trainspotting

I’ve noticed that the shit pics have properly dried up of late, so I’ve gone back and rooted through a few flicks which I know have an element of evacuation but which I haven’t yet featured in Motion Picture Motions; and so it is that we have here Spud (Ewen Bremner) waking up, dazed, confused, in an unfamiliar bed, from Trainspotting.

Names That Obey No Gender Conventions #002: Michael Michele

That be Ms Michael Michele, formerly of Homicide: Life On The Street and ER.

Forget-Me-Knot #004: Sadie

Contact Sadie

I’ve had this on my phone for months. Who the fuck is Sadie? I don’t think I’ve ever met a Sadie, let alone known a Sadie. Why “contact” her? Why not “speak to” or “call” or “visit”?

Most troubling.

HonkWatch #076: The Custard Boys

This one’s an odd’un: The Custard Boys is apparently an amateur affair, a 1979 homemade adaptation of a 1961 novel by John Rae which a year later was turned into a more polished feature film called Reach For Glory.

It’s set in East Anglia during the Second World War, and centres on a gang of schoolboys – locals and evacuees – who spend much of their time playing war games or else bullying each other. A new boy called John arrives, and is almost immediately picked on; that he is an Austrian refugee, albeit Jewish, really doesn’t help him to blend in. But he does form a close friendship with John, the son of a Great War veteran. It isn’t to last.

Here we see one of the boys all dressed up in cadet uniform and squarebashing his guts up following what in telly preview parlance appears to be known as ‘a tragic series of events’.

It’s not a great film, in terms of script, acting, direction or costume (sometimes main characters are blatantly wearing the finest 1979 had to offer), but whilst it’s no It Happened Here or The Machine Gunners, it is still a watchable little TV play.

Framed Documents #004: Juno

That Juno is offering good value blogging…

Hey Bleek! Spank off to this with motion lotion.

Just kidding! (Sort of)

Your best friend,

Juno

Young Gifted & Slack #001: Kate Ashfield

As Liz (“Please can we just calm. The fuck. Down!”) in Shaun Of The Dead, Kate Ashfield was great. She was as believable as you can get in a zombie apocalypse comedy. Rooting back (assisted by embarrassed DVD commentary confessions) I watched Guest House Paradiso, the Bottom-movie-by-any-other-name in which she first featured with SOTD co-stars Simon Pegg and Bill Nighy; the film isn’t great, but she has spirit in it.

More recently I happened across a sitcom which piloted in the late 90s, called Love Is A Many Splintered Thing. It’s an Alan Davies vehicle in which he plays Russell, a frustrated musician earning a living writing advert jingles. His marriage has gone stale, and he ends up having an affair with a horticulturalist from Oldham. That’s Elly, played by Ashfield.

For some reason – a reason perhaps tied more to the fact that pert breasts are preferable to the stodgy script than for any plot development purposes – Elly sometimes flashes Russell in public places. She does it both as she leaves his house the morning after their first night together in the pilot, and whilst coming down a slide in a children’s playground during episode one. There’s even a gratuitous fully naked scene in episode five, when her landlady/friend/lover Camilla (Josie Lawrence) gives her a massage while at a Turkish bath.

Thankfully since then Ashfield seems to have been given roles involving a little more thought than just “Things are moving a bit slowly – let’s have our female lead disrobe!” Whilst I have no problems with nudity, in life, culture or art, when it’s being used to prop up Alan Davies’ television career, I think it’s time to say ya basta.

9th of November

I just saw the date…

Location³ #001: Backfields

A recent pic of Backfields in St. Paul’s (facing across Upper York Street into the new Knightstone development in the former industrial estate) contrasted with the area as shown in the 1996 Christmas episode of Only Fools And Horses, in which the Coroner’s Court stood in for Peckham Town Hall.

Taking The Fall #003: Evil Dead II

Ash (Bruce Campbell) is sent flying through a temporal portal spirited up out of the Necronomicon at the end of Sam Raimi’s fantasy horror romp Evil Dead II. How terribly Time Tunnel!

HonkWatch #075: Juno

Juno again; and here our protagonist serves up a blue Slurpee sacrifice into her stepmom’s favourite urn by way of an offering to the gods of morning sickness.

Fecking Firefox!

Today I updated my Firefox to 3.0, and I’ve noticed that the regular Flash audio player isn’t showing up where I’ve posted mp3s on this blog, that the Yahoo players won’t play, and that only YouTube videos are visible. And somehow my formatting’s been affected in some places! Grrr!

Everything seems fine on Safari though, I shall have a pootle around tomorrow to see if there’s anything that I can do to remedy things. Please do let me know if you’re having trouble accessing anything else.

Cheers