Batman: The Dark Knight Rises

I watched some of this too, and like every single other Batman film ever made, I found it entirely un-involving. This was event cinema! I was spending the time setting up a twitter account for my sister and trying to learn a few things about her hTC 8X phone.

I just don't care very much.

I have no investment in the character I think...not that I haven't read a few of the comic book stories and enjoyed them, I thought Arkham Asylum was a wonderfully done and atmospheric piece of work...but I'm not a fanboy and I'm still, perhaps wrongly, of the opinion that all this Young Adult and Comic Book originated film-making is a bit lazy and risk free.

Someone write something entirely new!!!! Find a new story!!! But no, we have to buy into this bloody huge mythos over and over again.

The endless angst about the internal struggle within Batman, this constipated angst, is very off putting, multiplied as it is by Christian Bale's shitting a wardrobe performance and silly growly voice.

He's as rich as Croesus, I don't buy it! He has toys, and pretty girls, and a great life. Tormented? Get to fuck.

Tom Hardy as Bane ought to be a fantastic opponent, but like Batman, his dialogue is often incomprehensible, and when you can hear it it seems like it could have been nicked from Magneto in any X Men movie with an added serving of fruit. Anne Hathaway is gorgeous, but what else?

And finally, as I endlessly tried to find a profile picture my sister wouldn't kill me for, my overall impression of most of the film was watching a man climb a chimney, and falling off, for an hour. This isn't a film, this is the occupation of a seven year old urchin!

Prometheus

Got round to watching this on Christmas Day.

I'd been led to believe it's very bad. It isn't. It's just a wee bit "meh" - with odd sorts of plot holes that either the film, or my own stupid brain, aren't explaining.

Like why is there a Geiger illustration of an alien seen in the Engineer habitat before anything resembling "The Alien"  - which seems to be created by genetic chance event instigated by David the android - exists, and David's motivation for carrying out a little unpleasant human experimentation isn't really explained.

As is also to be fair typical for movies of this nature, characters do daft things for no reason; "ooh look we're in a bit of this unknown habitat where strage creatures are afoot, let's stay here stomping about like idiots instead of leaving." That sort of thing. Other characters seem to have absoloutely nothing to do in the film whatsoever, hello to you most of the Prometheus crew!

The film is pretty. It has great scale. It's not unenjoyable. But the equation "Ridley Scott plus Alien Prequel" provides a lesser answer than what we hoped.

I'd trade my Glave for a Krull DVD

Krull is a very underrated film, I find. It crops up in sad unwanted corners, like the 5* channel on a sunday afternoon, confined to the 19th century syphillitic lunatic asylum of the media while inferior product gets it on on the proper channels.

Sad.

Krull, is of course a typical and utterly banal revival fantasy swashbuckler of the early 1980s - see also The Sword and the Sorceror, Conan, Ladyhawke etc - featuring the never seen again Ken Marshall, an uncharismatic pretty boy who at least isn't wearing a girls skirt like Tom Cruise in Legend; and also the English, but dubbed by American Lindsay Crouse, Lysette Antony who was seen to best advantage not wearing very much in the Depeche Mode video for "I Feel You."

The plot is of the typical "Rescue the princess from evil fascist lizard being" variety, with the usual "Oh no, our primary method of finding the princess has failed what can we do" "Well we can follow this extremely dangerous alternative that probably won;t work but just might even though it seemingly bears no relevance to our problem" "OK then" obstacle.

In the way, are snake brained Barabarellan leathermen called Slayers, who's reptile brain escapes are always censored out of matinee showings much to many a bloodthirsty child's disappointment. They have laser staffs (rather like the Gou'ald in Stargate) which happily can only fire once before they revert to a stabbier use. They serve "The Beast" who lives in a tormentier version of Howl's Moving Castle and who consists of a badly designed creature mixed in with close up library shots of an Iguana.

Yes, it's derivative, and silly, with mystically daft weapon, horrible comic relief and annoying basin haircut child - many of the rules of "How to be an Evil Overlord" have clearly been lifted from this film. But, it has a great strength, a fantastic UK and Irish supporting cast - ALun Armstrong, Liam Neeson, Robbie Coltrane, Freddie Jones, Francesca Annis an, err, Tucker Jenkins from Grange Hill. Their character banterings and bickerings make the film, and indeed save it from the more wooden leads, while "Carry On's" Bernard Bresslaw gets the more lumbering philosophical dialogue to show off his proper acting aspirations.

You can guess if it all ends happily or not! It doesn't for me, because Ive wanted to find it on DVD for ages. Yes, it's on TV all the bloody time, BUT I WANT IT FOR REAL DAMMIT. And I can't.

SHORT FILM - The Drowned World

The Creeping Terror of Mars...

It's not there to be seen at the moment, it's crimson brilliance hidden away until it next approaches opposition in a year or so's time. Jupiter entertains all night, Venus glitters in the frozen mornings and soon Saturn will be shaking off his duvet just before the dawn.

But not planet Mars, not for now.

And in some ways, this suits me fine.

To see Mars, late at night, in silence, on your own, is to be reminded of the tentacled terrors that we know DON'T, but REALLY DO, wait for their chance to cross the gulf of space between us and devour our living blood. I go inside after observing Mars, and every hanging coat, every shadow, every shadow cast by a streetlight, becomes an animate creature of terrifying, horrifying, scareifying Martian origin waiting to put a clawed finger on your shoulder the moment your eyes close.

You wake in Sleep Paralysis, and just beyond your frozen visual periphary, an upright bipedal grey martian prepares his probes and samplers for journeys into unmentionable parts. They control the horizontal, they control the vertical. They control the speed with which they open up your stomach and eat your intestines while you watch.

Observing with a telescope at 2am, as I have done, is worse. The green flash of launching cylinders is an imagined nightmare only a heartbeat away, the collapse of civilization under piles of mouldering, mutating red weed.

I shiver with fear every time I look at it. I bet many of you do too, as you stand alone surrounded my menacing whispering trees. But we all come back for more to see the God of War gaze contemptuously down at us, seeding our mind with fears...

Is there Life on Mars

Hiding in obscure little canteens at work. The size of phone booths. Populated by me, and a few fork lift truck drivers, an entirely alien race in themselves. Quiet.

And often I had the TV to myself, the fact the remote didn't work is only a minor irritation.

So, a couple of times, I've been able to sit eating my sandwiches (processed hand and processed cheese atop processed bread) and take in a bit of George Pal's 1953 version of War of the Worlds. And you know what, it stands up pretty well!

The colours are lush...the effects astonishing for the time...the spaceships look like they belong on the Paris Metro...the aliens are interesting...Gene Barry is brick of chin but not too wooden...it does follow elements of the book...the heat rays and green ball lightning effects looks great...there are some wonderful stereotyped foreign scientists especially the dutch woman who later found herself in Tenko I must think...buildings being blown up for no clear strategic reason APART FROM SHEER MARTIAN EVIL...look at that water tower go up boys!...Spielberg blatantly ripped off the martians for ET and justice was served when his War of the Worlds turned out to be shit.

It packs a lot into to its 80 minutes. Still deserves to be regarded highly. Although not as highly as a good English set version of the Wells book  would be if it ever got made. And not by Pendragon Pictures.

Two dimensional fun in Mos Eisley

Have had cause to watch Star Wars a couple of times recently, and what has really stuck out has been the utterly unecessary tinkering George Lucas did for the updates. The TV version on ITV a few days ago was presumably the 2003 rejig, the Gold Edition VHS I have is from about 1997.

In both of them, the new CGI and composite inserts are truly horrible to behold in the Mos Eisley sequence.

Mos Eisley is a desert town, where many would shelter out of the daytime sun by siesta-ing the day away in those little dome roofed buildings pimpling the sandy surface of TAttooine. But no, George decided it had to be a bustling, busy, diverse metropolis; a hive of activity. To achieve this, he decided to comp in losts of people and ...er...things, walking directly sideways across the shot, horrendously out of scale and blocking out what we really want to see.

For example, Lucas and Co reckons the scene where we first see "The Fore" being used, on the Stormtroopers, is best served by being totally obscured at first by walking giants, passing speeders, and leather beast of burden lizards.

When flat as pancake people aren't walking past getting in the bloody way, we are treated to hideous slapstick robot and creature vignettes - ooh look, the creature fell of the dew back, ooh look at the little robot get hit - setting us up for Jar Jar Binks. Ugh, why did they bother?

Let us have the original vision George! 

Tourettes and the Tunnels of Work

I work in a land fit only for escape; fit only for dreams day and night, dirty plastic floors delivering static shocks into the bodies of the otherwise waking dead. Cockroach traps are insectoid death trap christmas decorations in dark corners; sometimes a bird arrives through the lorry doors and can never get out again.

In the middle of is am I, stressed to the thirteens let alone the nines by the awfulness of it all, body flailing sometimes as somekind of electro chemical surge breaks the barriers of restraint and people try and ignore it and I'm not sure what kind of reaction I want. Not laughter. But not studied ignorance, the pretence of not being bothered.

I don't know what my own head is telling me, and I don't know what I'm trying to tell it.

So I head for the maze, the caves, the world in the racking created by creaking unsafe girders racked by the weight of stores and spares and topped by a thick caking of dust. You stand in the main aisle, it's like The Mines of Moria, stretching way into an artificially lit distance.

Within here the mind wanders and people can be hidden from until the crisis passes. Worlds are visited, words are written on invisible paper with invisible ink and stored until you can go home in a slanting rain. Imagine Maximillian from The Black Hole chasing you down here looking to gut you with his propeller fingers; can you find a turn off in time he'll ignore?

Vader may be awaiting next to the floor cleaning machines, and you won't know if he's being good or evil. Cryogenic suspension tubes litter the top of the racking and you wish you can climb in until the job, or more likely the world, ends in a salvo of violet lightning.

Fight the mech warriors, hide from demons of the darkness.  Or just stand there rocking back on your heels and looking at the radio speakers on the ceiling waiting for the escape route to be broadcast.

Here there are no managers, just other worlds far far better.

I'm creating them every minute.

--------------------------------


Copyright Bloody Mulberry 17/10/2012

STORY - To the Centre, Rosas!

Instant story written at the library, inspired by the music of Steve Reich and the dancing of Anna Terese de Keersmaecker

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 04/10/2012

The Taste of Literature

When I talk of taste, I'm not talking of "Jolly ho, I've such excellent taste in literature" or "People are developing a taste for fantasy in the light of Game of Thrones" or even "What the hell are you talking about, people have and always will have a taste for fantasy".

No, I'm actually talking about, well, a form of synaesthesia, that strange ability that some "people" have for seeing sounds, or hearing colours, or feeling tastes. That sort of thing. I've developed my own version of it.

I now have a taste for words. Words leave a taste on my tongue.

Whenever I think of the word "literature" I get this strange, large, flat, slightly tangy, slightly bitter, taste spreading all over the back of my tongue, feeling like it is filling my mouth from side to side, like a piece of lemon soaked rice paper. Thinking about not words, but the construction of words, the writing of letters, drops drizzle lime onto the back of my throat.

Like a literal word soup is rising out of my throat; not in a nasty, vomity way, but an enjoyment of the construction of letters, one after the other, the gap after a group of them then more.

Reading Clive James fourth chapter of his life story "The North Face of Soho" brings on the same feeling - not the actual act of reading it, but the thought of reading it. The taste is there when I think of "Blue pencilling" "Slugs of hot metal" "adjusting the balance of a line".

What makes it all even more bizarre is that this must indicate a subconscious desire to do all this, and BE a proper writer slash journalist slash essayist slashy "Man of Letters" because the actuality is that everything I write is straight out of the neurons in my head, 6 rounds rapid fire...

It's like sucking a lemon after slugging tequila.

A hard shot of words...

Cat People

I am sure discerning readers are familiar with this;

The most memorable scene, in my view, of many from Quentin Tarantino's superb Inglorious Basterds, backed of course by David Bowie's Cat People.

And that brings us on to the under-rated 1982 remake of "Cat People" which features this scene of, again in my view, equal beauty and greater mystery, in which Natasja Kinski finds out her origins. The backing this time is Moroder's original take on the song "Cat People".

The train shots cannot but help me of the video for "There Goes The Fear" by The Doves.

Cat People. Not a great film, perhaps not even a very good one. But this scene lives with me always. And Mr Bowie is present somehow in both!

Enjoy.

Doomsday

I bought Doomsday a while back, another "off to Cash Converters" £1.50 spent on a DVD, a DVD sold for god only knows what desperate purpose.

Profiting out of misery. That's what me and Cash Converters do.

Anyway, Doomsday is a film that crops us often enough on Sy Fy and I watch out of the corner of my eye, cut price Angelina Jolie  - but more attractive and less haggard - and former Lara Croft Rhona Mitra throwing some eye patched shapes while coping with Bob Hoskins using the same voice he did in thar Paul Hardcastle song that wasn't "19".

"Fink of the maaahney! Imagine what you caaan do wiv it!"

That one.

The film is from the same team that came up with the far superior Dog Soldiers and The Descent, and large chunks of the cast of those two films are lurking about here in minor to middling roles, leaving Mitra, Hoskins, Doctor Bashir from Deep Space 9, concrete voiced professional Scotsman David O'Hara and Malcolm "Mark of Quality Cinema" McDowell upfront. Sean Pertwee also gets to do his trademark dying before half time shtick.

The film is terrible. It is also brilliant. It is a blatant Mad Max rip off, not only of 2, but 3. The acting is bobbins, the script mainly terrible apart from some decent off beat humour and the plot largely an irrelavance compared to the odd, jarring but decently different jolt from chain saw custom buggy mayhem to Excalibur style sword maiming and a lengthy section that seems to exist only for Adrian Lester to show off his martial arts moves.

But to me, the whole sequence in the cannibal emo stadium makes the movie worthwhile; fantastically soundtracked by Adam and the Ants, Fine Young Cannibals (you'll never hear me say that again) and Siouxsie and the Banshees, a mohawked future death punk serves up crispy fried Pertwee to his minions while yelling great stuff about catching, cooking and eating his enemies. Fishnetted pole dancers strut and sway, and a busty lady in a bad tribal facial tattoo does some serious leering.

It ought to be worse than Tina Turner doing her "Welcome to Thunderdome" chain mail bra routine with Angry Anderson not singing the Scott and Charlene wedding song, but it isn't; the sequence works really well. Which makes me wonder, with the brains behind the movie that there were, the film isn't a whole lot better than it is.

To Write Like Ballard

More of an influence than Burroughs on me to be honest, although I have nothing in common with either of them, having neither shot my wife in the head nor been brough up in a Japanese Internment Camp. Formative years, a negative blank of non distinguishment, life the same as most others, fishing village to small town, nothing shot up, brains not blown out.

No Nova Mob graced my upbringing.

I like natural diasters, winds gutting the earth to the mantle, rains and humidity drowning the earth and leaving everyone counting back along their cervical vertebrae to a primieval jurassic park, primitive nervous system like the crocodile's bleeding up into a future where sophistication hinders not helps.

It appeals, as does sitting under endless rain under a tarpaulin with only rum and tea for company, grey clouds lowering to face level, and if the idea of fucking a cailipered cripple appeals not, I wish I could have thought of it as he did. Fuckholes lined in jagged metal; he saw it, I didn't. I can't.

Again I dream of having that power in my pen or the tips of my fingers; a dream, but a good dream, no? We'll see how it turns out, hammer the keyboard till you bleed, and let the words come

To Write Like Burroughs

I was drinking alone when the tipsy impudent couple across from me asked me what I was reading.

"The Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs" I said. "He was a repressed homosexual junkie who shot his wife dead by accident"

I thought the best way of explaining the work was like was to leave her to read the Hassan's Rumpus Room Chapter while I went for a cigarette. "You will never speak to me again now".

I smoked my cigarette and wondered how all the alien human anal sex while hanging, rubber dildoes up asses stuff would go down, jism spurting from the page into her bespectacled eyes, as I looked at another girl who was never going to talk to me.

She wasn't shocked, she thought it was all a bit forced. I diasagreed, I thought it was natural as hell, Ballard's Crash, now that is what I call forced and overwritten. I envy the flow of Burroughs words, little though my life will ever be like his.

I wish I could convey that kind of utter liquid, gooey force so effortlessly.

I Broke A Girl's Heart

I needed to try and refire my story writing in a hurry. I've been reading a lot about alien abductions lately. Wonder what goes through their minds?

The bunker

Don't bother with the Aliens Extended Edition. Really. Don't.

Do you know, it took me a long time to see it, until I finally got the Aliens DVD and see all this amazing new footage that my friend at University had been going on about back in 1994. "You should see the Sentry Guns!"

I wouldn't say my heart was pounding when I pressed the play button, but I was shall we say, "Interested."

Ridley Scott doesn't do Director's Cuts. All of his extended editions seem to be introduced with a little clip of his Ginger-Going-On-Greyness sat there in a chipperly avuncular fashion, saying that basically he doesn't do Director's Cuts cos his first cut was the best, but it's nice to see the deleted scenes.

. I can't remember what James Cameron said before this one, but I'm sure it wasn't "These scenes are a crock of shit, I can't believe I wasted the money filming them."

We kick off with a long and tedious "oh for fuck's sake cut to the chase" bit set in the colony on LV426, which is apparently entirely constructed with cheap plastic curtain rails and is populated by a myriad of crap actors of whom Captain Hollister from Red Dwarf is the best known. Cue redneck dad discovering alien ship and returning with a rubber chicken stuck to his face.

We are also treated to seeing Ripley sat on butcher's grass in the space hospital, being given a really really stupid photograph of her dead daughter - looking like Judith Hann off Tomorrow's World" - and doing some unconvincing crying. Or did this happen before? Fuck it I'm doing this from memory, and it doesn't matter anyway.

What else do we have. Oh yes, the much vaunted "Sentry Guns" scenes, along with the silly conversation about "Ant Hives". The Sentry Guns look ok, as models go, but they kill aliens rather too easily - in the manner of the Army of the Dead in The Return of the King - and the aliens they do kill are re-run footage hastily stitched in from what looks like the first marine raid on the cooling towers, but given a sort of fuzziness to make it look a bit different.

Yep, it looks different. And worse, like a Squid Head Star Wars figure being blown up with a firework while having yellow washing up liquid thrown on it. Shot in Super 8 and shown over and over again.

We finish with some "Don't be gone long" twattery, but the worst "Deleted" bit, by a mile, is the dire dire Hudson "rap". Forcing us over and over again to "Check it out" he masturbates over his weaponry like it's the night before Columbine round Dylan Klebold's house, reaching an orgasm with a decisive "Whap" before sticking his hand down his government issue camos for another round of frothy hand fun. "We got nukes, we got knives, we got sharp sticks" he ejaculates, before Apone  - and all of us - fearful of getting another faceful of sticky word come - tell him to "knock it off."

Er, I thought that's what he was doing already. Anyway, stick with the original cut. It does you no harm, and as Sly Stone would say, it might even do you some good.

Booba Lacka Lacka Lacka Booba Lacka Lacka!

In Two Thousand One and Three a Cenobite I Should Turn to Be

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20/06/2012

ndeed, I shall leave it a year. Watching the Olympics in a low key fashion might be rather difficult with nail and cheese wire impediments.

And then, in 2013, two thousand one and three, I shall seek out the Lament Configuration Puzzle Box and run inquisitive fingers over it's strange symbolic engravings, as the sky greys to black and sinisters coloured bolts of energy course along its structure.

And then, shall meddling open the box, and I will taken away from here, taken away from a world of drudgery and tedium, low paid humilation at the hand of low-bred in-breds, and taken to a world where “Pain and Pleasure are Combined”. My skin flayed, nails hacked out and my blood replaced by an agonising preserving re-animating fluid, full of parasites to perpetually stimulate the evil centre of my brain and eat away at the good.

And in a year, pvc clad and looking rather different of face and denture, I shall return and Lo! Shall all my life's irritants shall feel rusty chains rip through their plebeian flesh! But although, Cenobitically enhanced I may be, the more louche aspects of my ensavaged personality remain – and I shall drink Cuba Libras and Caparinhas with one hand, smoke Sobranie with the other into lungs pulled apart by rusty wire; all while kicking an enemy in the face with a spined boot, piercing cheek flesh again and again and again.

And then I shall listen to the Velvet Underground and crank out chirpy bon-mots such as “Your sole...my pleasure” and “The road of pain is a less travelled one, but as you can see the journey is worth it” to some dotty American 19 year old who repeatedly refuses to tell their arse from their elbow.

And I shall attract acolytes, and followers ignorant of the true extent of my powers, and so shall statues be made of me. Worship me if you will, but remember to always quake in fear.

My boots trample the still quivering dead. Is my life so far gone that this future seems preferable to anything else. I shall tell you later.

In two thousand one and three.

Soul-less Sci Fi

I hate CGI and shiny surfaces; films sculpted out a block of marbled perfection, road tested by preview audience robots.

This is not the sccience fiction creation I aspire to.

I like rubber and latex suits where you can see the zip up the back, I like models where you can see the dinky drilled holes and the hairdryer parts and cannibalised airfix model kits.

I like planets with stupid names and pinky orange matte painted skies; where the mad scientist holds court amidst the fearsome buzz of Tesla Coils and robots menace damsels with heads made of an anglepoise lamp. I like rubber rocks being thrown, I like the papery thwack of collapsing polystyrene sets.

I like spaceships that look like breasts or phalluses with a November 5th sparkler providing the propulsion; I like craft with pointless wings in the unforgiving vacuum of space that emit sounds that you shouldn't hear in the void.

I like creatures that are tentacled entities of frightening antipathy towards the human race; or the occasional interplanetary policeman telling us to stop fucking about with atomic weapons especially if they have massive foreheads and strange hair.

I like grit. I like dirt. I like being able to see the fucking join. I like mistakes, failure and fun. I like being entertained.

And in modern sci fi, I get dazzled. And more often than not, I get bored.

Hard On for Trailers

An obsession about trailers is the same as any other fetish really...

There is no difference between the fanboy sweating and getting hot at the latest Prometheus trailer and the man watching an amply sized woman crushing bananas down her cleavage. The kid looking for details upon Batman's new cape is the same as the man who peers intently at the speculumned delicates of his lady love as she rides a shiny set of medical stirrups.

I gave up on it. I got vaguely excited at the Prometheus trailers in a follow-the-herd sort of way, then after the first one wondered why I was bothering...if I want to see the film, I'll see the bloody film, not analyse frame frame by tedious frame some 60 second snippet of it product placing its way into your psyche.

I don't recall the Harry Potter books being read out on the radio, random page by random page, still less anyone getting excited about it. Watch the movies people, don't give in to the endless hype machine of squid-enema-medical-eyeball licking-furry playing trailer porn.

Its getting boring.

Screenplay writing...

...is coming along, but not quickly. I just grab an hour or two at it when I can, I made this scene by scene plan, but realised this followed the book rather slavishly at times, so  ultimately I seem to be not using that and have done essentially a quarter of the screenplay straight off the top of my head!

God knows if I can do the whole damn thing this way...it is so difficult as it is! But, if, or rather when, I finish draft one, I will be so damn proud of myself.

Then, the tricky stuff starts. Tidying it up, re drafting, redrafting, redrafting, cutting out all that does not drive the story. Can I do it? Can I do it? And what will I do when I finish it?

Dreams of Teide.mp4

OPINION - Sphere and the Weakest Movie Ending Ever

As is my habit these days - dictated by my genetic scottish tight fistedness - I buy most of my DVDs from Cash Converters the UK Pawn Shop chain. Second hand DVDs for a pound or a pound fifty, viewing pleasure mined from the dismal fate of junkies flogging thier own or other folk's stolen film collections to pay for the next hit...

It's a sad place to shop to be honest, but I do pick up occasional gems there for next to nothing. Zardoz. Witchfinder General. Yesterday I bought Sphere for £1.50, the "Special Edition", of which I can safely say in traditional style, if that was the special edition I'd hate to see what the original theatrical release looked like.

The film is dreadful. That it wasn't cheap is shown by some nice big undersea FX shots, but the story is confusing, the script terrible, and the casting of Dustin Hoffman in an action movie like this baffling, as he mumbles and gumbles away like a scientist version of his Rainman character. I liked Sharon Stone's haircut, but Samuel L. Jackson, as he always is if he is underwater, was dire.

Like Contact, the attempt to make a film about alien contact that had some sort of scientific credibility produces a film that is utterly and bloodily boring.

None of this is comparable to the ending however. A big sci fi production surely needs a big sci fi ending, doesn't it? Battles, blood, or a twist so vicious it could be a theme park attraction?

What we got with Sphere was three people holding hands, counting to three, and then a big golden golf ball flies off. That was it. 80 million dollars spent on the worlds most boring seance and a lame gag about men holding hands.

Tempting fate it was...

For did they not think, the film-makers in all their sun kissed LA wisdom, that if you have an ending in which the whole point is merely for everyone to forget the whole thing, then the audience will probably do the same?

STORY - Mixing Bowl

A bit of five minute short story writing here, screenplay duties have kept me away from my instant short stories!

I don't write about blood enough.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 11.05.2012

OPINION - Richard B. Riddick

Every so often I check in on IMDB or Wiki or whatever, to find out what the latest progress on the next Riddick film is.

Now, as I read somewhere else, Vin Diesel now looks like Tony Hart's plasticine pal Morph, but Riddick was a fantastic creation that made him a star. Pitch Black was a superior and innovative B Picture. The Chronicles of Riddick like David Lynch's Dune was hampered by some daft scripting and terrible acting - not by Mr Diesel himself - but was fantastically designed and conceptualised. The section set on Crematoria and in the choking sulphorous prison was great.

My problem with it was that it was just not from the same universe as Pitch Black. That said, I thought the Necromogers were fascinating, and was looking forward to seeing how Riddick's apparent rise to Lord Martial would develop, and whether we would see the Underverse.

Well, we've apparently all died before our due time. The latest little bit  googling reveals that Riddick 3, or simply "Riddick" seems to be a stripped down affair, with some odd sounding casting for a major release - Katee Sackhoff, former WWE superstar Batista?  - with Riddick stranded on an alien world fighting monsters and mercenaries. We're back in a Pitch Black universe, by the looks of things.

Karl Urban's back, although I'm not surprised that Thandie Newton isn't.

It maybe that we will see Furya and Underverse in two mooted sequels, but I'm guessing the backers want to see if the Riddick character flies, financially speaking, before going larger scale.

I hope it does. I love these movies. There's something a shade different about Riddick's universe that deserves a bigger audience.

OPINION -The Dreaded Maximillian

I always think that Maximillian, the rotor twirling, Anthony Perkins drilling (not that way) crimson terror of Disney's The Black Hole is one of the more satisfying, and genuinely frightening, robot designs of sci fi - and horror for that matter.

As a child, I always imagined him chasing me down corridors aboard the Cygnus. How could I get away? If I turned the corner quick enough would he miss me?

Or would I end up having my intestines blended by those fearsome blades of of his?

Hey, I'm writing a Feature Film Screenplay

I've wanted to for many many years, but have always been afraid to.

Now, I'm conquering my fears, my ADHD, my disorganisation, and I'm having a go. Just as an experiment. Just to see if I can do it. The presence of Prometheus inspires. As does watching all the Lord of the Rings special features...the process of creation is such a wonderful thing.

It's an adaptation, of a very very obscure sci fi novel - will worry about rights later, if it ever comes to that. I'm making changes, making it my own, trying to find something new in the story, trying to make it more relevant to 2012, trying to make a stronger story. Because my primary function is as a storyteller above all else.

I'm writing a feature film.

And I'm doing it from memory.

OPINION - Prometheus and the Too Futuristic Prequels

Well, with many other people I sat into the first advert break of Homeland, which I never watch, to see the Prometheus trailer.

I was excited, but stupid-feeling. I had become one of the hated fanboy trailer freaks who sit through a 4 hour domestic drama set on a farm in India in order to see a trailer for the latest Spielberg attraction, while scrawling notes in a jotter at banshee pace.

I've only done it before. Honest. And only because I was keen to see what aforementioned Spielberg's martian fighting machines looked like. But I wanted to part of something; I wanted to be a member of the community of the first, and do my #areyouseeingthis - hello Corporal Hicks was it? - tweets with the rest of the UK, or world, whatever.

And I was going to write about it - ooh that's a very nostromo looking silhouette there, hmm the Prometheus ship reminds me of Serenity crossed with the Betty from Alien Resurrection; or my god Wutani engineered the xenomorphs - HUMANITY BROUGHT IT UPON THEMSELVES!!!!

But no. Leave it to proper film writers, not hopeless wannabes like me.

The point that does occur, with all the flashing lights, colourful spacesuits, super resoloution pictures, flashy computer screens, and a space jockey hologram thing where he looks far too much like the elephant man not to have a slight giggle, the whole film looks too new.

It's a prequel world. Set god knows how many years before the low tech grimey "Space Truckers" of the first Alien movie, the world of Prometheus features rinky dink gesture control displays and neon heads up displays. Alien had  Apple 2 10 pixels per square yard monitors the size of a postage stamp. Is humantiy supposed to have devolved in the same amount of time it factually took us to get from the Wright Flyer at Kittyhawk to the Jumbo Jet?

It doesnt make sense!

Take David, the beautiful nazi wet dream android played by the enviable Michael Fassbender. He is supposed to have evolved into those far more attractive models, er Ian Holm and Lance Henrickson!

Logically, surely the android should thus have started looking like Kirk Douglas' scrotum???

It's a minor point I know. I'm a pointlessly cross silly geek. Of course film makers are going to want to use the nicest tricks, the fanciest shizzle, all their latest effects. But to me, it never rings true. The TV Enterprise prequel emphasised "Hey, No sliding automatic doors!!!" but still looked like it was filmed 400 years later, while the JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot prequel looked like it was shot 4000 years later.

And as far Star Wars Episode 1, it was "A Long time ago, in a galaxy far far shinier and newer, than the first one."

My ever lasting prequel bugbear. And may god curse my soul.

PIC - Death Star Alternate Designs

here's me just messing around with my secure unit issued felt tip pens. My artistic ability knows all bounds

FILM - Guess the Film.mp4

Superhero Superficial

With apologies to the long forgotten Voodoo Queens, who sang...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcfJUiTf7eM

Supermodel Superficial!!!

I'm a bit fed up with the endless superhero films. I'm as "meh" as any cliche spouting lazy writer can be when it comes to Superman, Spiderman, the apparently Steedless Avengers, or any other leotard wearing platitude spouting fool.

"Prepare to Face Justice!!!" - oh fuck off.

Superheroes are fantasy figures originally designed to appeal to feeble men who were always getting pasted by jocks and couldn't get a girl even if she looked like Eric Stoltz in Mask, and in parallel to appeal to an America insecure in the face of Nazis and Communism. They are alternate egos, a feeble boy with a black eye imagining himself to be chiselled from granite "sock pow kerblamming it" to his foes. The opressor becomes the opressed. And he gets to give the  - to give them credit - usually quite sparky wench a big kiss at the end, his brain too young to understand the concept of hot, filthy penetrative intercourse.

I hate them. I wish I was a big strong beyond-super entity, capable of giving Superman and his Kryptonite knickers a good kicking, before stealig Lois to a dirty planet hideaway.

Spot. The. Hypocrite.

FILM - The fx of a child.mp4

STORY - Flavour Drizzle

I was at the library today, working on my CVs, burning linux ISO discs and ever reading, ever learning. The library is in a small park much favoured by the street drinkers in summer months; they were clustered around a statue, practicing their arguing for later in the day. And then the rain streaked the window before turning to hail, and I decided to write about rain.

As ever this is written quickly, and unedited. The fingers fly across the keyboard and you see the results.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20.04.12

STORY - Taken All Back

So this is another rapid fire story, a story written on a day that I thought was good but hadn't seen enough done. A day where I wondered about the world a bit. And so in the end, 30 minutes ago, I wrote this.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 14.04.2012

Firefly versus Farscape

Someone I know is being indoctrinated into Firefly.

THis is a good thing. Firefly was a great show, gritty, low tech - which I love - well written and well acted by the usual Joss Whedon suspects. It is superior to the Serenity movie, which despite the addition of Chiwetel Ejiofor looks far too shiny. Far too shiny indeed.

Nonetheless it's a superior piece of Cult TV, and I really wish I hadn't given the DVDs back to the guy I borrowed them from.

However when I tried the same trick myself, on the same person, with Farscape, with the fun and jolly "Crackers Don't Matter" the response was all a bit "meh". I loved Farscape the moment I saw it, was gutted when it was cancelled despite the fact that after Series 2 it lost its way a little and turned too much into the Ben Browder show on occasion.

"A bit meh" - I was hurt and offended I can tell you. Wonderful characters, genuinely inhuman creatures - not just people with wrinkles stuck on their noses (Guilty as charged, Star Trek TNG) - Scorpius, the greatest camp villain since Servalan from Blakes 7, and settings just not found elsewhere.

I don't understand how any geek or nerd could not like Farscape!

FILM - Garden of remembrance.mp4

PICTURE - Ridley Scott on Prometheus set

Guardians of the Galaxy.mp4

STORY - New Man New Woman

Someone tweeted "Where are all the real men nowadays?"

This made me think a little. What was a real man, for a start? The same as a "New Man"? Or an "Old Man".

What about women? Is humanity sleepwalking into fatal passivity. I don't know. And I'm not qualified to speak. But I thought I'd write about it anyway.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 06.04.2012

STORY - Sex Food Death

I wrote this inspired obliquely by a dear friend's misfortune, and just wanting to write. The library makes me want to write, there are odd people, and wonderful books.

So here it is, Copyright Bloody Mulberry 05.04.12

I await the cats pleasure

So I have written the script, as it were, for the cat starring film project, but the cat is a tempramental actress and heavy per diems of Kit Kat treats will be required to get her working, and hopefully staying in the same place.

Is there wisdom in trying to make a film with a cat? No. But she doesn't require much in the way of pay, and doesn't quibble over image or online rights.

Sorry...

I'd already put that film link up before, I confused myself (not hard!)

There will be some new content in the next few days though. I'm trying to figure out how one can get a cat to act. And I have my War of the Worlds "artwork" to finish up

My sci fi news

As I type this, I'm sat writing a longer format short story, one that doesn't really know now where it is going, and I'll only know when its got there. I have plans for all sorts of little films and skits, and indeed have one for you here...

And the Outlook is

This is a little skit I quickly filmed on impulse.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25/03/2012

What am I trying to achieve?

I'm no genius. I know that. It pains me.

I am no performer, artist, philosopher; let alone a polymath.

What I am trying to do, with a lot of frustration, is try and capture the essence of what (rarely!) makes me think I'm any good. Trying to capture the lightning inspiration that I think my brain enhanced by Tourettes and or Aspergers. This is a purely spontaneous, stream of consceince kind of feeling. I can't write it down, record it, or film it. But I am going to try. I don't think I'm being very successful as of yet.

But I will keep trying. There's got to be something good I can put out into the world.

FILM - And the outlook is.mp4

Steampunk Sci Fi movies

Was just wondering about his, as I equally pondered why someone called "Earth Science and Gay Sex" was looking at my sci fi tumblr.

What Steampunk Sci fi movies are out there? You'd have though with the popularity of the genre - the genre books do very well don't they? - there would be more out there. My in depth, sophisticated research reveals;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk#Television_and_film

Which seeing as I don't count Wild Wild West - to me Steampunk should have a more inherently European feel for some reason - and LXG was an abortion doesn't leave us with very much. Recently The Asylum had a crack with their version of Sherlock Holmes, but it wasn't fantastic, although rather more interesting than a lot of Asylum's output.

The genre is visually rich, gives you a chance to put some hot girls in interesting outfits, and gives chunkier chaps a chance to shine; for some reason I always have this idea in my head that a lot of Steampunk fellows are not the skinniest.

It also has the chance to incorporate fantastic design elements and Art Direction, and perhaps more adult themes than Space Opera type stuff.

I'd love to see something, and I'm not a steampunk fellow. But maybe it just doesn't put bums on cinema seats or flog DVDs.

PICTURE - War of the Worlds Animatic

A fun quick sketch for the War of the Worlds film I'm making

STORY - Thirst

This is another very quick story, no edit, inspired by news reports of the impending drought here in the UK. What if it ended up being life threatening to some? Rather than hosepipeless inconvenience

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 13/03/2012

Animatic Film Project

So, after a failed sneaky attempt to write a short script at work yesterday - the ancient, creaking, pre-2001 monlith heaps of junk can't run word in a virtual desktop without crashing repeatedly - I find myself about to go shopping to hopefully buy some bits and bos I need for my new project.

Basically I am going to try and make a film which is a story illustrated with my wn animatics. Now I'm no artist at all, so I'm going to keep everything nice and two coloured and simple. I suppose it will be like La Jetee only with drawings - A5 sketchbook and thick red and black marker pens needed, I think. Possibly blue and green ones needed for others.

I'm just trying to find new and cheap ways of putting things out there!

My script by the way, was for a sci fi short film featuring my mothers cat. Probably a better actress than most round here, and one that requires only waitrose pouches and Iams.

And unlike the Iams cat, our cat can read!

STORY - I The Vanguard

I wrote this after seeing a BBC story about Trident Missile renewal about 20 minutes ago. I love writing about sentient machines or other inorganic things

Copyright BLoody Mulberry 06/03/2012

The Waiting Child

New movie project in the offing

OK, after an abortive attempt to shoot something in the week, I'm going to gather my "equipment" and head out on location to shoot some sort of sci fi project that kind of deals with the issues of Tourettes and Aspergers, or the great issues of whatever it is, whatever I am and whatever it is doing to me.

Everyone says they can never understand me, so I guess it's up to me to try and explain things a little. But only a little, don't want to take the mystique away, and I don't want to blow their minds!

Mainly people with AS BTW tend to associate themselves with the great "unemotional" characters of Sci Fi, Spock, Data, Seven of Nine etc. I wouldn't go so far, I've never been properly diagnosed and what I think I am varies from day to day, sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both. I don't want to hijack other peoples cultural experience I guess.

Tourettes, however, is something I wish it was able to get out there properly, nothing ever expresses what its like for your body to do the things that it does, the frenzy, the convulsing. Or the terrible and horrible obsessing, or how to have a productive life.

No Tourettes on TV and film is all coprolalic swearing crap.

STORY - Research Bulletin OX1454 – Recreational Past-Times

I've never written about football before, and the overblown as ever coverage of tonights England-Holland game made me see if I could come up with a quick soccer related sci fi story. So, here we go.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 29/02/2012

STORY - Salyut 6

Well, with a few spare minutes at the library, doesn't it occur to everyone to write a story about the last thoughts of an abandoned Soviet Space Station?

Short Story - East West

This story was also posted to my tumblr. It was written in 13 minutes, a self inflicted challenge to write a story in the 13 minutes it takes to listen to the classic "East West" by the Butterfield Blues Band. Trippy Psych Blues to write sci fi to!

My story East West is copyright Bloody Mulberry 17.02.12

The Red Light of Fear

And a good evening to you

So Bloody Mulberry is up and running, and here I am to talk about it.

What is Bloody Mulberry? Well, it is the label I have decided to give my modes of self expression - ugh, cue appearance in pseuds corner in Private Eye - that after supportive encouragement and a bit of self inflicted "Show some balls and get on with it" boots up backside here I am.

I write short stories, and scripts, and also films. In the past I wrote a couple funded by a University and then the UK Film Council, but then things went quiet and I felt, well maybe I'm not up to it.

I always wrote. I just didn't show anybody. I wrote scripts, and got deflated everytime DV shorts or whoever rejected me. Well, now I'm putting them out there. Between here and my tumblr;

http://bloodymulberry.tumblr.com/

You will find short stories, films, stories read aloud, stories discussed, and maybe stories that die on the vine. Other fun stuff will be found too.  Mainly of a sci fi and horror bent, but with a bit of retro and other stuff thrown in.

I hope you enjoy it.