The Dandy – 100% funny (Again!)

Growing up I was more a Beano boy than a Dandy kid, but I always got the annual, and I bought it more often than Topper or Beezer.

I grew up in the dark days of the eighties, when the comics industry was going down the swanny, when the inexorable process of hatch, match & dispatch sped up, when each year left more yellowing newsprint corpses as the audience for children’s titles shrank whilst the speculators created an unrealistic boom in the market for more ‘adult’ material (“COMICS HAVE GROWN UP!” yadda yadda yadda)…

Long story short, by century’s close, the rich lineage of British comic strip weeklies had all been cut down to nothing. Only a few titles remained – and mostly TV- and merchandising-orientated, except for DC Thomson’s stalwarts The Dandy and The Beano. Both were tinkered with to try and make them more viable to today’s youth, to little avail; repositioned, renamed, redesigned. Each time each moved further from the essence of what made each of them so popular in the first place.

Until now. This new version is the closest to the ‘old’ Dandy, in spirit, in look, in attitude for many years. Sure there’s shiny paper, sure some favourite old characters don’t look how old fogies like me might remember them, sure it’s not the same as it used to be. No, it’s not 1985 anymore, and this is the Dandy we need for 2010.

Congratulations to editor Craig Graham and his team, including artists Lew Stringer, Nigel Parkinson and young turk Jamie Smart, for pulling off a stunning coup. A comic I can enjoy together with my boy

(Quarterly sub is only £15 – gwan, give it a go!)

[More detailed ponderings later, if I get the time - in the meantime check through the report on Down The Tubes.]

Aww crap

In the spirit of keeping up a head of blogging steam, here’s how my day has panned out.

Childcare – mostly good, with some excellent napping, very good smiles and awesomely damp nappies. We have discovered he likes early 90s college rock/indie type stuff, with a particular fondness for Belly‘s Star and Flood by They Might Be Giants. Less keen on Piece Of Cake (Mudhoney).

Housekeeping – cleared all the crap from LLF’s new desk in front room (I say “all the crap”, I mean “all my crap”); finally threw out loads of threadbare old clothes I’m never going to wear and which I would feel embarrassed about dumping over at Classics; tidied front room; got rid of detritus strewn around bedroom.

Technology – finally figured out how to reset password on the wireless box, meaning I could properly protect the network as well as enable AirTunes.

Work – shilled a little (though I note that my boss at the company I’m an external for has reacted to the impending corporate restructuring by massively revising her LinkedIn profile and soliciting lots of testimonials – possibly not a good sign…); finished off a couple of (non-paying) bits for friends.

Srs – caught some of the Julian Assange/Daniel Ellsberg thing at the Frontline Club, and the tail-end of the Dispatches prog on the Wikileaks #warlogs.

Lol – watched the end of Daylight Robbery, which was better than it could have been but a lot worse than it should have been, and started watching Militia, which is very bad so far.

So that’s been my day. Wanted to finish writing up my thoughts on the ‘What’s The Blogging Story?’ thing from Friday, but didn’t get enough quiet time to sort that out. Tomorrow, maybe.

A Week In Film #102: Catching up

Skeleton Coast
Seriously one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. Ernest Borgnine (oh Ernest!) is an ageing military man who pulls together a crack team of mercenaries to help him extricate his CIA son from rebel capitivity in Angola. To help him there’s that priest from The Mummy plus a bunch of B movie journeymen (and woman). Oh, and Herbert Lom (oh, Herbert!) briefly appears at the start as a shady arms dealer-cum-fixer. And Oliver Reed (okay, so Oliver needed the beer money) appears in the middle, apparently from an entirely different movie, as a diamond mine security chief. And Robert Vaughn as an East German colonel. Seriously.

You may not have liked Ted Kotcheff’s somewhat similarly-plotted Uncommon Valor, or shared its sentiment, but you surely could appreciate the quality of the craftsmanship.

Little Miss Sunshine
I bloody loved this – odd, dysfunctional family goes on road trip to beauty pageant for little girls. Hilarity ensues. Husband-and-wife directorial team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris ace it. Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Abigail Breslin, Steve Carell, Paul Dano and Alan Arkin take a bow!

Heat
A comfort film – familiar like an old sweater. Not even Val Kilmer can spoil it.

“Andy Coulson is guilty” says Roy Greenslade

So I went to the ‘What’s The Blogging Story?‘ event at the Watershed I mentioned earlier. Bit of a curate’s egg, really – some interesting panelists, but very little chance to actually talk about blogging, the social web or much else. Frankly it was not worth the seven quid I paid to go.

Ex-Mirror editor-turned-Guardian media pundit Roy Greenslade had a stab at being a bit quote-worthy on former News Of The World boss-turned-Tory spin king Andy Coulson and his involvement (or otherwise) in the hacker scandal*:

Just go to Coulson now… The only reason anyone can get hot under the collar about Andy Coulson is because The Guardian have exposed him. Because they have exposed him, because The Independent have taken it up as a big cause as well.

Now that’s a perfect example of the way in which the other press, self-interestedly, because they either support the Tories, or they support Rupert Murdoch, covertly, allow this to go forward.

But there’s plenty of stuff on the net about Coulson, plenty of material available, and I think that… By the way, we haven’t dropped the Coulson thing, none of us have dropped the Coulson thing. I mean, I know the guy is guilty. Is that being tweeted?

I know, I know, I know an editor must have known. I do, I do, I did say on a public platform recently that it is either a case that he knew, and therefore is lying, or it is a case that he didn’t know, and is therefore the most incompetent editor Fleet Street has ever known. Is that being tweeted? Because that’s the truth of the situation.

So he’s either a liar or incompetent, and therefore he shouldn’t be director of communications of our Prime Minister’s office. And we will pursue this.

I think that the line-up went something like this…

Chair/moderator:

• Mike Jempson (MediaWise)

Panel:

• Sarah Ditum (Paperhouse, @sarahditum)
• Roy Greenslade (The Guardian, @GreensladeR)
• Brooke Magnanti (Belle de Jour, @belledejour_uk)
• Sunny Hundal (Liberal Conspiracy/Pickled Politics, @sunnyhundal)
• Donnacha DeLong (National Union of Journalists vice-president, The Revolution Will Be Streamed, @donnachadelong)
• Anton Vowl (Enemies Of Reason, @antonvowl)

2nd table:

• Kevin Arscott (Angry Mob, @uponnothing)
• Will Gore (Press Complaints Commission)
• Elisabeth Winkler (Real Food Lover, @ewinkler)
• Chris Street (Bristol Editor, @bristoleditor)
• Iqbal Tamimi (Palestinian Mothers)

Download Greenslade’s Coulson soundbite | Download audio of whole event (approximately 2hrs/107MB)

I’ve been mulling over tonight, and will back up a few thoughts tomorrow if I get the chance.

* The scandal being so many papers – tabloids and broadsheets alike – were/are at it.

ETA:

I’ve been out of the blogging saddle awhile, so that I’ve been tweaking this post so much I’ve given it jogger’s nipple, soz.

Bristol Festival of Ideas: What’s The Blogging Story (tonight, Watershed)

Afternoon there.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. Things have been rather hectic on the home front, happily so I hasten to add. The reasons why would be clear to anyone who’s endured the photos I periodically throw onto my twitfeed, so I won’t compound the saccharine assault here with further explanation.

Anyhow, I think i shall be getting back into the blogging in coming days. Plenty to rabbit on about – a new Evil Empire, rather a lot of new films (thanks to my eBay penny bid DVD strategy), a vast backlog of screengrabs, local shenanigans, the usual stuff really.

If you are of a blogging persuasion, you may be interested in the Festival of Ideas event at the Watershed tonight. Terrible name (‘What’s The Blogging Story?‘), greatly overpriced (seven squiddlies!), with the wrong names too high up the marquee (Greenslade, Belle de Jour).

But Sarah Ditum from Paperhouse and Anton Vowl from Enemies Of Reason will be speaking, so I think it could be moderately interesting. I may see you there.

A Week In Film #101: FFS

An American Werewolf In London
I could watch this over and over, but it was the first time the LLF had seen John Landis’ classic horror-comedy. She stayed till the end, which is pretty good for her.

The Village
Probably my favourite M Night Shyamalan film. Some very good performances. I think the twist obsession (both of the director and the director’s critics) undermines what is a pretty taut mystery picture. Beautifully photographed, with excellent sound design.

A Room For Romeo Brass
Shane Meadows’ first stone cold classic, with some incredibly powerful scenes (Morell and the boy who talked to Ladine; Morell and Ladine; Morell and Joe Brass; that ending) and knockout performances from (to name but two) Frank Harper and Paddy Considine. Vicky McClure definitely hints at how good an actress she will become.

16 Blocks
Malformed Richard Donner cop flick, with booze-soaked, past it old hand Bruce Willis given the job of delivering a prisoner (Mos Def) whom a bunch of renegade police want dead.

Premise-wise no complaints, and a good core cast (David Morse always gives great value), it’s just it has no pace, quickly gets bogged down, and just lurches from one all-too-static set piece to the next, giving the feeling of an expensive audition piece.

Four Lions
Chris Morris’ jihad comedy, sublime.

15 Minutes
John Herzfeld (2 Days In The Valley) fumbles the ball here – something approaching a satire on the nature of the news media, played out through some cops and robbers action, with seasoned, media-savvy cop Robert De Niro teaming up with grumpy fire investigator Edward Burns to get on the trail of a pair of murderous East Europeans. But it loses the momentum halfway through and never really recovers.

Karel Roden (Blade II, The Bourne Supremacy, Running Scared) and Oleg Taktarov (44 Minutes: The North Hollywood Shoot-Out, Bad Boys II) are good fun as the scary Tartars though.

Guy X
‘Buffalo Soldiers meets MASH!’ claimed the cover. Well, we know that the cover always lies. A rather dull tale about a soldier (Jason Biggs) deposited by mistake at a US military base on Greenland in 1979. Hilarity ensues. No! NO! Hilarity DOES NOT ensue.

Corrupt aka Copkiller
Bizarre Italian film about corrupt New York cops (including Harvey Keitel) targeted by a police-hating nutter (John Lydon).

Yes, John Lydon. Johnny motherfucking Rotten. Killing cops in NYC.

Not great, but solidly built, and worth catching for curiosity’s sake at the very least.

A Week In Film #100: Hols an ting!

Dahmer
Quite possibly the best serial killer film I’m seen, with Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker, Take) getting under the skin of Midwest killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Writer-director David Jacobson handles the material sensitively (well, as sensitively as you can with the story of a fellow who killed more than a dozen people and kept bits of the bodies), and does well to give his Dahmer something approaching depth. Renner is superb. Highly recommended.

Role Models
Very silly comedy about a pair of humps (Paul Rudd, Seann William Scott) who end up on a probation programme having to mentor troubled youths (foul-mouthed Bobb’e J Thompson and pre-Superbad Christopher Mintz-Plasse). I proper LOLed, but everyone else went to bed before it finished.

American Movie
Amazing documentary by Chris Smith about would-be Milwaukee horror auteur Mark Borchardt, a man who sees himself as the new Tarantino-meets-Romero, and his efforts to get his meisterwerk Northwestern made…

True human comedy, great fun, packed with amazing (but real) characters, full of pathos, and of course MIKE SCHRANK, Mark’s acid-addled best friend, a man of few (coherent) words. If you’ve never seen it, do

Män Som Hatar Kvinnor AKA The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
That Swedish thriller movie based on that Swedish thriller novel by that Swedish dead guy Stieg Larsson. Alright, I guess.

A Week In Film #099: Harrumph

Heist
David Mamet returns to his favourite turf – lies, cons, double-crosses. This time round it’s a crew of robbers led by Gene Hackman. Not a classic but watchable.