SNOW MOVIES

And the cocaine rain didst come...

Snow.

A simple theme, perhaps, but fitting as today England was tucked up under a blanket of sparkling white.

Trekking across my local national trust park this afternoon- over 1000 acres of parkland- wrapped up in three tee shirts, a snazzy jumper, a big coat, hat, two pairs of gloves, three layers of sports socks and a trustworthy pair of wellington boots, I felt like Dennis Quaid in The Day After Tomorrow.

Standing on high ground and surveying the land, bucket sled in hand, there was not a soul in sight. A multi-national disaster could happen right now, I thought, and I would be none the wiser.

And then I happened across Knole House: monolithic Tudor residence. This would have been eerie. It should have been eerie. But what was wrong? Was it the cute little fawns skipping through the snow? No. Was it the reassuring sound of Tears For Fears blasting into my skull through my headphones? No.

It was a lorry arriving to remove the last evidence of the presence of a film crew. Hankies out, Deppomaniacs- Pirates of The Caribbean 4 has left town.

No, I don't want to talk about Pirates. I want to talk about Snow Movies.

There's almost something boring about productions filmed on location in Los Angeles. The biggest film industry in the world initially found it's footing on the west coast of the US not only for the money, but for the light, and as great and as convenient this is for exterior film production, blue skies and dry floors aren't too sympathetic a climate for the dramatic picture.

Perhaps it's my intense jealousy of Californians, who knows, but what I do know about filmmaking is that weather is a damn powerful cinematic tool.

In Do The Right Thing (Lee, 1989) Spike Lee uses "the hottest day of the year" in Brooklyn as a cauldron for racial tension. 

In Glengarry, Glen Ross (Foley, 1992) real estate salesmen played by Jack Lemmon and about half of the A-list actors in Hollywood are under pressure while a rainstorm relentlessly batters the streets of New York.

In Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950) a thunderstorm forces a priest, a woodcutter, and an anonymous man to take shelter under a ruined gatehouse, where they recount a tale of murder.

Compare the way a snowy setting can create an atmosphere in these movies:





The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)



Fargo (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1996) Apologies for the lame clip- all other versions are blocked on Youtube.



The Snowman (Jackson, Murakami, 1982)



The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)



The Empire Strikes Back (George Lucas, 1980)

In Dumb and Dumber (Farrely, 1994), the snowscape chased by Harry and Lloyd represents "someplace warm. A place where the beer flows like wine. Where beautiful women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano. I'm talking about a little place called Aspen".


I'm yet to find a movie where snow is the killer itself.


If you know of any indie flicks featuring knife-wielding snowmen send me a message, then a DVD. I've got a million pound hug I could write a check for.


Today this has been my space to indulge my appreciation of white sky fluff.

My wellies are back on and so's that snazzy jumper. I'm going back outside.

BFI Takeover and Leslie Nielson RIP

Today, Monday November 29th, has been remarkable in its duality.

One of cinema's most beloved comic actors has passed away, and Minister for Culture Ed Vaizey has announced that the BFI are taking over most of the responsibility from the soon-to-be abolished UK Film Council.

When it was announced in July that the UK Film Council was going to be abolished, Clint Eastwood wrote a very angry letter. Now if I know anything it's that when Dirty Harry says jump, you'd better bloody jump.

And jump they did. Albeit, up and sideways.

From next year the British Film Institute- not the UK Film Council- will distribute lottery money to film makers. The organisation shall have to expand to accommodate the extra responsibility as all of the functions of the now-defunct council, bar the encouragement of inward investment, shall now become their call.

According to today's Guardian, Vaizey has "reaffirmed that lottery funding for film would rise from £27m to more than £40m by 2014 and said there were no plans to change the tax credit scheme which has encouraged Hollywood studios to make films in the UK."

Plans for the BFI to partially merge with the UK Film Council were made over a year ago, but now it has been confirmed that the former shall actually swallow the latter. Film London is to continue the job of attracting Hollywood to Britain.

What better news could we have asked for on the day we are promised that the sky shall fall on us, shitting down cocaine rain?


And on a grave note:


Yesterday, Leslie Nielson, aged 84, passed away peacefully in his sleep. He was in a hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, suffering from a complication of pneumonia.

After a varied acting career which began in television and spanned 62 years, Nielson was best known for his role as Doctor Rumack in Airplane! (1980), an surrealist disaster spoof from directors Zucker, Zucker and Abrahams of Kentucky Fried Theatre fame. The movie's modest intentions were dwarfed by its success, taking Golden Globe for Best Comedy and a Bafta for Best Screenplay, but more notably it boosted Nielson to stardom; his comic turn typecast, you could say, and repeated in many features to follow.

Nielson's comic roles were characterised by a sharp, deadpan delivery in utterly absurd situations.

Here are some of his most remembered exchanges:

Rumack: I won't deceive you, Mr. Striker. We're running out of time.
Stryker: Surely there must be something you can do.
Rumack: I'm doing everything I can... and stop calling me Shirley.


Rumack: Captain, how soon can you land? 
Captain Oveur: I can't tell. 
Rumack: You can tell me. I'm a doctor. 
Captain Oveur: No. I mean I'm just not sure. 
Rumack: Well, can't you take a guess? 
Captain Oveur: Well, not for another two hours. 
Rumack: You can't take a guess for another two hours?


Rumack: You'd better tell the Captain we've got to land as soon as we can. This woman has to be gotten to a hospital.
Elaine Dickinson: A hospital? What is it?
Rumack: It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now.


(In The Naked Gun series, Nielson played Frank Drebin, inept cop)


Frank: It's the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girls dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day.
Jane: Goodyear?
Frank: No, the worst. 


Frank: Just think; next time I shoot someone, I could be arrested.

Mayor: Now Drebin, I don't want any trouble like you had on the South Side last year, that's my policy. 
Frank: Well, when I see five weirdos, dressed in togas, stabbing a man in the middle of the park in full view of a hundred people, I shoot the bastards, that's *my* policy! 
Mayor: That was a Shakespeare-In-The-Park production of 'Julius Caesar,' you moron! You killed five actors! Good ones!


Finally:

One for the road... (or... air?).

      

Scenes With Power

It's that special moment when you forget that you are watching a screen. You are trapped in the scene. You are there with the actors and you are bound to their tale. Their choices ignite a fire within you.

Bladerunner: The Director's Cut (Ridley Scott, 1982, DC 1992), is my favourite movie of all time.

It would take ten blogs to discuss the themes and ideas discussed through both this film and the novel from which it was adapted- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K. Dick- so I will spare the blurb beforehand, other than to introduce this scene as that which confirms Rachel's realisation that she is not in fact human, but an android:

Bladerunner, Ridley Scott (1982)

The sexual tension, the haunting score, the slow, beautiful pacing and the brooding, intimate cinematography create, for me, one of the most powerful 'love' scenes in cinema.

It is pure loneliness.

Next:

Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990), is another of my favourite movies. I could watch it time and time again. But every time I do set aside the three hours it takes to appreciate this masterpiece, I peak somewhere half-way in.

You're probably thinking I'm going to bang you a link straight to "Do you think I'm funny?".

Don't get me wrong- that's a great sequence- but it isn't a patch on this one.

Here's the set up:

Henry and Karen have only been dating a short while. So far we haven't got the impression that he cares for her that much. He's with Jimmy beating seven shades out of slimy wig-wearing Maurice for an unpaid debt when the phone rings for Henry. It's Karen. He meets her in a phone box a few streets from her house and she isn't holding up too great; crying and shaking. A neighbour had offered her a ride home but started touching her up on the passenger seat. She hit him, jumped out and ran to the phone booth. Henry's car speeds away.

We join the scene as Henry pulls up outside Karen's house:

Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese (1990)

It's the look in Ray Liotta's eyes as he walks away from the drive that get me every time. Also important about this scene is Karen's significant character change. She accepts the gun, so symbolically she accepts Henry's crooked lifestyle.

Anyway.

There's two fantastic scenes to check out on this cold saturday afternoon.

Message me up with some of your favourites, with or without links. I'd love to see them.

PS: For the sake of good times, here's an old song I've been hitting up recently. I used to work in a bar  and every week I'd put this tune on the juke both to please the punters and aggravate my girlfriend. Let's say I fell in love with it.



PPS. I wasn't working in this bar in the 80s. I was born in the 80's, grandad.

On The Road

In the bar I told Dean, "Hell, man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict."

- Sal Paradise

Its been the fashion of the past forty years for the myth of The Beat Generation to get dragged up every decade or so- usually by a newspaper article marking the release of a new edition or a collection of unpublished poetry.

With this comes a resurgence, though increasingly more brief, of the spirit of the beat.

Defined by the self expression and liberation of the individual synonymous with the era, the movement changed literature in the way that in the late seventies punk changed music. It brought poetry and expression to everybody; the feeling that you or I could express ourselves via this seemingly inaccessible, intellectual medium.

It was like watching an Aaron Katz movie if Aaron Katz had made good movies.

Of course, this was an illusion. Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and friends were well read, experienced, and in some cases fierely intellectual; but they weren't elitist.


To collectivise these writers, in essence, removes the individuality of their personal voices.

The movement has been criticised for such crimes as lack of narrative drive, rambling, threadless discourse and purile filth, and in some cases these claims can be substantiated, but it is also widely believed that art derives from risk and pure expression is never concise.

Why am I banging on about literature?

Walter Salles' forthcoming adaption of Jack Kerouac's On The Road; one of the most highly celebrated novels of the movement. That's why.

The novel follows Sal Paradise- Kerouac's alter-ego- on his travels around the US and down to Mexico, during which he rides the rails, hitch-hikes, works various details, meets various women and ingests various toxic substances. Sal's best friend, Dean Moriarty, represents the freedom he's always chasing, and fades in and out the story as frequently as he does relationships.

Probably the biggest problem fans of the novel have with this adaptation is its seeming impossibility.

Lacking any strong narrative or character arc, the novel has long been concluded- as has Kerouac's entire canon bar his debut The Town and The City- to be a triumph of style over substance. How can this film emulate what is, in essence, jazz in word form?


This movie has to be more than story. Or, rather, it has to replace story with mood. Will Walter Salles give Sal a beginning, a middle and an end? Will he give one of Sal's few relationships a dramatic focus?

In his list 'How to Write Beat', Kerouac wrote, "Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form", and truthfully On The Road is very cinematic. But cinema- or commercial cinema- can not rely on pictures alone to tell the modern story, and beautiful images alone can not substantiate a form which requires change and character. True, the landscape is a character, but does what is beautiful to read translate into something that is beautiful to watch? Not as often as you'd hope.

This was heeded by David Cronenberg in his ode to William. S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Naked Lunch (1991). A novel you couldn't literally adapt sheerly on the merits of it's content, Cronenberg instead interpreted the work and combined its narrative with a semi-biopic of the writer, using Burrough's style to evoke a similar, though highly toned-down, atmosphere of discomfort.

Similarly, another forthcoming film, Howl, Epstein/Friedman (2011), doesn't literally adapt its source material but focuses around the obscenity trial Allen Ginsberg went through following the publication of his poem of the same name in 1957.

Would it be more apt to make a film out of Kerouac, not one of his novels? Probably not. He wasn't half as interesting personally as Burroughs or Ginsberg, or even Charles Bukowski (one loosely tagged with the word beat- a subjective case).

After reading a book everybody imagines the perfect movie star to play the lead(s) but I bet you can't name a single person who would've predicted Control's Sam Riley as Sal Paradise, or relative unknown Garrett Hedlund to play the notorious Dean Moriarty. In an era of British actors taking the lead in US productions (i.e. Teachers' Andrew Lincoln in brilliant big-budget TV drama The Walking Dead), who better than the man whose portrayal of a Manchester music scene legend left Cannes figuratively speechless in 2007.

On the Road is slated for US release in 2011 and is currently in production on an estimated 25 million budget.

If it's a good enough script these actors will fly.

Do Jack proud, Jose Rivera.

It's all down to the script.

I went along home by the ding dong bells and daisies, I put a rose in my hair. I passed the Grotto again and saw the cross on top of that hump of rocks, saw some old French Canadian ladies praying step by step on their knees. I found another rose, and put another rose in my hair, and went home.
    By God.

This Week's Box Office and Great Movie Trailers.

The current UK box office stands as so:

1. Due Date                          2.35m
2. Jackass 3D                       1.7m
3. Despicable Me                1.18m
4. Saw 3D                           1.07m
5. Paranormal Activity 2       688K



So early winter's doing favours for both horror and the third dimension. I wouldn't call Paranormal Activity 2 a relatively HUGE success at 688K having been out for the best part of a month in our cinemas, but considering it cost 2.75million to make and it's grossed almost 82million worldwide, I don't think director Todd Williams is going to be eating ham and cucumber sandwiches for the next few months.

On paper it's a middle of the road top 5.

Two sequels using 3D as a gimmick to justify themselves (yes I know I loved Jackass but it's a gimmick all the same), a horror sequel (yawn), an animated feature, and a decent comedy yarn from the director of The Hangover.

What have we got to look forward to?

MACHETE. Release date: Friday 26th November.

If you saw Robert Rodriguez's splatterfest Planet Terror (2007), his half of the Grindhouse double bill (The other being Tarantino's Death Proof (2007)), you may recall a series of fake trailer segments which preceded the movie. One of these was Machete, the story of an assassin claiming bloody revenge on the employers who tried to kill him.

Here's a reminder:

Machete (original trailer), Robert Rodriguez (2007)

It was entirely tongue-in-cheek. A mock 1970's action flick with camp over-the-top stunts and chic poorly written dialogue punctuated with brilliantly bad lines. In one scene he drives a motorcycle through the air over an explosion while raining machine gun hell upon bad guys below.

I'm really hoping that this works as a feature. Sometimes there's ten ideas which, when crammed together, make an enthralling two minutes, but when spread out prove to be as thin as a slither of butter on a giant slice of bread.

We'll have to wait and see.

As for the other big release:

Unstoppable. 24th November.

On the IMDb most popular forthcoming list, Unstoppable is at the top. Not one to let a trailer decide for me, I'm going to give this flick a try. It may look like the most lame idea in the world for a movie; runaway unmanned train speeding through the US, Denzel Washington, a retired railroad worker, decides to try to stop it; but you never know because it's Denzel and he rarely chooses a bad movie.

But isn't there a rule for these things? A runaway train has to have bandits on it, or terrorists or something? Can this movie really tell us something that Steven Seagal hasn't already told us? AND with his FIST?

The trailer for Unstoppable that preceded Jackass 3D the other night was another case of show-too-much. The edit must have been ten minutes long and the only plot point it held back was the final reveal. Golden rule: a trailer has to make you ask questions. The only question I was asking was "why should I pay to see this movie after you've just shown me everything?"

A good example of a trailer is the teaser they did for The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007). I still didn't go to the movie, but it was a very good trailer:

The Hills Have Eyes 2, Martin Weisz (2007)

Sometimes a trailer can be better than the movie itself. Quite often, a good trailer will convince people to see a bad movie. Occasionally a good movie will be promoted falsely (i.e. in the wrong genre) and so it won't do well because the target audience doesn't know it's even there for them, and the audience it does draw in are disappointed because they took their first date to see House of a Thousand Corpses expecting to see romance blossom from a massacre.

Here are some of my favourite trailers:

"How to fly... how to fight... how to crow... how to save Maggie how to save Jack... HOOK is BACK"

The immortal words of Toodles in one of the greatest children's films of all time and the only picture Spielberg wished he'd never made.

You don't see Neverland. You don't see Hook. What's going to happen? Why, you'll have to see the movie.

HOOK, Steven Spielberg (1991)

Isn't it cliche to be a young film enthusiast who likes A Bout De Souffle? Well damn you all I say.

A Bout De Souffle, Jean-Luc Godard (1960)

Why don't they make trailers as terrifying as this any more?

I think I just shat myself, and this is the low res version.

Alien, Ridley Scott (1979)

Finally:

One of the most mind-bending experiences you can have sat in front of Youtube. Post-apocalyptic Doctor Who nightmare of ants and kitsch and God knows what this is about. All I know is that you must heed the warning of voiceover guy:

"In the next few moments we will try to give you an impression of a new kind of film experience..."

PHASE IV: Killer Ants, Saul Bass (1974)

What are your favourites?

Message me up.

To Old Friends: Jackass 3D

This evening, for the first time in months, I left the cinema with the very faintest hint of a glimmer of a tear forming in the corner of my eye.

Ten years is a long time to know somebody. In real life, I've only known one friend for the same amount of time as I've known Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Dave England, Steve-O, Danger Ehren, Preston Lacey, Ryan Dunn, Phil and April Margera, and Wee Man. To me that counts as a substantial relationship.

When the closing credits rolled it was like being crushed in the middle of a great big group hug from a small army of sweatier, older, hairier brothers. Meanwhile, Spike Jonze revelled in the art of total destruction; blowing up just about everything he could get his little mitts on for the humble purpose of capturing a tortured expression in high definition 3D.

How could you not love this.

Of course they have their disparagers.

"Did they need to make another movie?"

Did Scorsese?

I'll tell you why you should fork out to see this. Three dimensions justifies the second sequel. Super slow-motion replays in hi-def with dildo explosions; fecal matter splatter; bits of... things. Jackass 3D is pushing the artistic boundaries of the medium.

"The Invisible Suit"

3D cinema isn't the future. 3D cinema is now. But they can't tell you it's now because then you won't think that it's current because current is getting what's coming earlier than it should come, which is now.

By the time everybody has a 3D television they'll start bringing out hologramovisions at five grand a pop. Everybody'll rush out and buy them, then six months later they'll become cheaper to make way for the hologramovisionogulator which will be the same thing but with a slightly shinier ogulator... And so on.

We are living in the future. So when is now? Why, it's yesterday, because yesterday is boring history.

Blu-ray? £20 for Die Hard? Really?

Anyway.

Back in the olden days when kings lived in cold stone castles and people ate hog roasts all of the time and not just on fireworks night, there were such men whose vocation was in the art of Jestery. The jester was the fool- the clown- whose slapstick would amuse the dignified crowd.

These men from Dickhouse Productions are the jesters of our day. Comedy hasn't changed, but it has had to become a bit more imaginative.

Duck Hunt:

A giant inflatable thing sits on the edge of a lake. A man dressed as a duck lies on the end of it. Two men jump from a crane onto the other end of the inflatable: duck man flies into the air. Two boats full of men fire paintball guns at the flailing duck, who is airborne for the best part of four painful seconds before crashing into the water in a cloud of feathers.

Laughter.

Ram Jam:

Two men dressed as members of a marching band, complete with tuba and trumpet, decide to find out whether music can tame wild beasts. Reveal: an angry RAM. Tuba player enters the pen, instantly invigorating the animal's imperative to destroy. He gets through little but one note on his instrument before being battered to the floor. He is battered again. He cannot get up. Meanwhile, trumpet player's jeans are stuck on pole. He cannot come to the tuba musician's aide. Pain.

I enjoy Frasier. I laugh out loud to Woody Allen. Chris Morris and Armando Ianucci are the gay dads I never had. Still, can one not watch You've Been Framed religiously every saturday night? Can one not watch one grown man throw a glass of water in another's face, followed by a boxing glove, all in slow motion, to the Rocky theme tune?

If one can't do that then one is sad at the snobbery of other ones.

Jackass was nothing but pure fun. It was a group of friends making each other laugh, filming it, then hoping it would make others laugh. Not everybody liked it- not everybody has the same sense of humour- but certainly enough people laughed to justify it being on television. Three Series. Three movies. Knoxville was a movie star for a few years.

The reason we loved them so much is because these guys were guys like you and me. Regular Joes with unusually large balls.

Immature?

You could have spent the last decade sitting in a South Kensington champagne bar exchanging witticisms about the way Martin Amis's latest post-pubescent loser wants to touch a "boob", but I doubt that you almost fell off of your fucking chair laughing about it.

Getting all blurry eyed in the end credits- thanks partly to the tear-rendering friendship song performed by the cast- I took the time to reflect on the last ten years of my own life.

You know what? I haven't grown up at all. But neither have my oldest friends. So it doesn't matter one bit.

This Movie is Fictional and My Cat is Real.

The other day, I discovered my shock limit.

I didn't think that it was possible.

In fact, I still don't think that it was possible.

I have watched probably every scene of extreme violence in cinema, be it within their original contexts or via splatter montages on youtube (which, I have to admit, get a bit much after the fiftieth decapitation), but nothing prepared me for this depraved piece of cinema.

And no. I'm not talking about The Human bloody Centipede. That's infant school stuff.

A friend and I had decided to stay in for once. We bought a few ales and a packet of hobnobs and set ourselves up in the living room with a blanket on our legs to keep the chill off. The lights dimmed, it was time to put the film on. "Isn't it pleasant to have a nice evening in," I even said, I think.

And then it happened.

I can't remember at exactly what age, but I was very young when I became fascinated by blood and guts in movies.

Adults told me that I was too young to see certain films, which meant that there wasn't a thing in the world that could stop me finding them, borrowing them, copying them, just as long as I could see this illicit material which I'd been promised would burn my eyes out. If it was taboo, it was good, even if it was shit.


I used to watch Bad Girls on ITV crouched over the small telly in my parents room with the volume on one bar. I would watch the first series of South Park at my friend's house and cover up to mum by saying we'd been drinking cider..

This was exactly what got me started: 

Monty Python and The Holy Grail, Terry Gilliam (1975)

Monthy Python and The Holy Grail. 

The Shining. Predator 2. Alien 3. The Terminator.

These were the films, or should I say gems, nestled amongst my parent's collection of movies recorded off the telly. I must have fast-forwarded through a hundred movies looking for the slightest bit of violence in order to find these. Thank goodness my dad wasn't a David Cronenbourg fan or I may have overdosed too young.

Since then there hasn't been a means of death I haven't seen realised fictitiously on screen.

Don't get me wrong- I'm not a sick individual. For an example of how "normal" this condition is just look how far the Saw franchise has come. And my film appreciation is not merely limited to those with blood and guts. This would be a very short and/or repetitive blog if that was so. And I wouldn't have even touched mumblecore.

These are just films that I watch from time to time, non-exclusively, but my point being: without emotional effect.

None of this 'shock-training' could prepare me for this one movie.

Sat so pleasantly in front of a telly on that rainy tuesday evening with a cup of tea in one hand and a beer in the other, a part of me cried like it had never cried before.

The director of Irreversible (2002), Gaspar Noe, discovered that the noise frequency of 28Hz, similar to that produced by earthquakes, causes nausea, sickness and vertigo in human beings.

Not only is this the soundtrack to the first 30minutes of this film- a droning, whirring, circus trombone which does nothing but go around and around in a grrrrrrrruuuuuuuurrrroooowwwwwwwwuuuurrrrgggrrrrrrrrruuu, but it is the soundtrack to a continuous shot which swoops and spins and twists through the labyrinthine corridors of an underground Parisian gay S+M torture dungeon with dim red flashing lights and visions of the club's patrons sexually torturing each other.

So far so tame, you say?  Well, throughout this grot safari we are following the film's main protagonist as he storms through the many rooms and corridors searching for someone. He is angry. No, he is BLINKING ANGRY. The camera twists and loops enough to make you feel sick through this alone, let alone the neverending chuck-tune you are forced to endure. Just when you think you're ok- just when the camera seems to settle somewhere and our man finds who he is looking for- Noe pulls his puke ace.

Our man's arm is snapped in half in front of our eyes, then his friend beats the villian to the floor, picks up a fire extinguisher and- in real time- BEATS HIS FACE IN WITH IT. Doesn't sound too bad? Well no, it is. You see every single pummel that this face gets from the fire extinguisher, to the point that his skull is being caved in and bits of it are smashing off. 

I reached my limit.

This is actually not the most controversial and appalling scene in the movie, but it is by far the most visceral.

Gaspar Noe tried very hard. He succeeded.

Ruggero Deodato employed a similar level of effort in his attempt to shock with Cannibal Holocaust (1980), a multi-layered found-footage mockumentary charting the exploration of a group of young American filmmakers into the Amazon rainforest. 

The director managed to blur reality by combining a very realistic handheld camera style with believable acting, genuine locations and genuine tribespeople as the cannibals. But this wasn't enough. Extracting stylistic elements from the italian Mondo documentaries of the sixties, he discovered that by portraying real brutality to live animals alongside the realistic fictional murder of human beings, the boundaries of reality in the viewers mind would become blurred.

Deodato's key stroke was to make the morality of his movie ambiguous. Who are the real monsters? The flesh eating cannibals who tear the filmmakers to pieces? Or is it the filmmakers who brutalise wildlife and rape teenage village girls?

And this ambiguity, for me, is also where Irreversible stands up.

Its narrative plays out in reverse- a revenge story with the revenge being claimed at the beginning, we then go back in time to see why. And yes, the crime is bad enough, in some cruel way, to justify the horror of the act that we begin with. So this film is forgiven for making my eyes want to scream.

And despite Noe's desire for your recently eaten dinner, Irreversible is a triumph in the craft of filmmaking with its long, dynamic, sometimes physically impossible camera movements, and complicated continuous takes- some up to half an hour long. 

Yes, it is possible to use the word Hitchcock in this article. (see Rope (1948). 

So.

Here's my topic of the day:

Is the sole fact that a film provokes a strong reaction within you a sign of its merit?

My answer:

If you showed me a video of my cat being eaten by another cat I would want to throw up but I don't think I could thank the man who filmed it.

Then again, this movie is fictional and my cat is real.

This is how Gaspar Noe upset me so much:

Irreversible, Gaspar Noe (2002)

Reality Television. This is next.

Reality television has become rather banal.

Why don't we take the ideas of the movies to spice things up?

The Running Man (1987):
Arnold Schwarzenegger is blamed for a massacre that wasn't his fault. He goes to prison, sets up a daring escape, but is caught again. His penalty? To compete in a game show in which convicted felons have to run for their lives, pursued by STALKERS: gladiator-like "heroes", whose job it is the satisfy the blood lust of the public by brutally eliminating the runners. Last runner alive wins, or so the rules say...

An entertaining satire on the relationship between society, violence and consumerism.

The Truman Show (1997):
Truman Burbank has been born and raised in the idyllic town of Newhaven. He has a best friend, a wife, a job. The perfect life. What he doesn't know is that everybody he knows and has ever met is actually an actor, and that Newhaven is a television set inside of a giant dome. The producer, Christof, is in the moon, orchestrating the twenty four hour show. He is, in effect, God, for his choices shape the life of this one man around whom the world's gaze revolves.
   When a television spotlight falls mysteriously from the sky, Truman's curiosity is re-ignited and soon cracks in the facade that is his life become emboldened. He has always dreamed of freedom, but only now does he begin to understand what freedom truly means.

A powerful, emotionally charged, human drama. A hilarious critique on product placement. Visionary. Terrifying. Beautiful.

Fact: Seahaven is actually a real town in Florida called Seaside. (People actually live there). (Jesus Christ).

An exhaustive list I've provided there. They were the good ones.

Now I have a couple of ideas of my own:

The Greatest Adventure of All Time:
Last year, an American named Gary Brookes Faulkner was found wandering the foothills bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan. His possessions were: a pistol, a sword, night vision goggles, and a bible. What was he doing there? Hunting down Bin Laden, of course.
Now I'm not usually one to pipe up on the old license fee debate. I think the BBC spend their money fairly wisely. However, there's no reason why they couldn't axe the next series of My Family in lieu of providing honourable warriors like Mr. Faulker, or even members of the British public, with a camera, some rudimentary editing equipment, and a ballistic knife, then sending them off on The Greatest Adventure of All Time.
Donald Mcintyre would be well up for that.
And if they die? No excuse not to lower the licence fee, which is too high might I add. Too damn high indeed.

What's it gonna look like?:
Take some women with very small brains. Take some scientists with very little regard for ethics. What do you get? Laboratory testing roulette.
What happens if you inject the DNA of a black labrador into the egg at three weeks into a human pregnancy? Let's find out!
What happens if you change the genetic code of a gestating foetus to incorporate the legs of a tarantula spider? Why the bloody hell not!
The only thing that can possibly go wrong is bad television, but even that's not a problem. Everything Johnny Vaughn seems to do is exciting until you actually watch it but we still watch it anyway. Remember that programme in which they tried to convince people that they were actually going into space? Exactly.

Got any ideas?