Memories of the Space 1999 Eagle

An image of my childhood, the classic toy Eagle transporter from Space 1999. At home in Scotland, I used to have one of these in our home up on the hill, overlooking the Bowling Green and the museum, and the long lawn me and the Murray boys used to play golf on with little plastic clubs and balls.

I used to hide in the strange cupboard under the stairs that didn't have a door, rather a maroon velveteen curtain, and make whooshing noises as I pretended to be Commander Koening or that Aussie guy called Alan who was always my favourite. Even then, I was a childhood who spent a lot of time looking inwards rather than out, although I had a fair few friends.

I always remember the episode where they thought they had returned to Earth, only it was an illusion placed in their minds by these blobby looking aliens that looked like the ones in "It Came from Outer Space".

Tragedy finally occurred when I made a high speed release of the transporter pod once too often, and I broke the release mechanism. The pod probably flew off behind the dusters and retro carpet sweeper, never to be found again, and the now rather skeletal looking spaceship ceased to appeal to me. It just didn't feel right.

Alas, like many things I owned in childhood, it would probably be worth a fortune now if I still had it in good nick...

The Decadent Future - The Hunger Games, and The Fifth Element

It struck me, just before a lampost nearly did, as I cycled to work this morning, how much the capital city sequences of the "The Hunger Games" reminded me of the fabulous Besson and Gaulthier (oh yeah, and Moebius I think) created world of The Fifth Element...

I rewatched The Hunger Games over the weekend, and got stuck into the reasonably generous DVD extras, a rare thing on a plain old DVD these days. The powers that be want us to shell out for our extras on all The Blu Rays no-one seems to be buying. For all its origins as a piece of (horror word) "Young Adult" fiction , the film does end up being highly watchable yarn, thanks to a strong performance by Jennifer Lawrence.

And yes, I know it's a rip off of Battle Royale. Matters not.

So yes, at first that Effie Whatever person appears, and she's got fantastic shoes on, and a wig, and look, she keeps re-appearing in differently coloured wigs, and now Katniss and her drippy pal are in the big city, and everyone is dressed in these Regency inspired futuristic outfits or whatever, and it's all contrasted with the homey peasantness of the naieve kids, and also the gleaming holographic technology.

And yes, it reminds me of the Fifth Element, where the opression is more corporate than fascistic, yet the folks still live in super high rise squalor in apartments so cramped the shower occupies the same space as the fridge; yet folk dress in highly stylised parodies of fashions of many periods, and the entire aesthetically glorious world seems to be entirely populated by models.

There's a story to tell here I think, the comparison just begs to be made. Unfortunately, it isn't me to tell it. I love the idea of writing about film, but I just don't have the language. I want to write about the style and look of the film, but when trying to describe the wigs as I did above, I couldn't think of the right word. Restoration? Georgian? Ah, just go with Regency. That's probably close enough. I could use the word dystopia but it would probably just cause me dyspepsia as I tried to explain properly why it was a dystopia.

And then, actually trying to criticise one above the other, how can I do that without really knowing what the respective directors and designers were trying to state with their visions of the decadent future, and whether they achieved their goals or not. I haven't got any notes either, if I'd known I was going to be seized with the desire to write properly, I should have sat assiduously with notebook and biro making all the oh so logical and pertinent points I was going to make about both films.

I didn't. I was just taken heavily with the notion of writing about this idea as my hands cracked and dripped blood as I wandered upset amongst the endless racks and boxes, seeing the pen as the means of escape, but not knowing quite how to go about it...I love the Fifth Element more, and it looks far better, but why? *shrugs* I can't really explain it.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 28/01/2013

Alien Resurrection - is it really so bad?

I needed to tidy, I needed to cook soup. I needed distraction that enabled me to lie under my duvet on the sofa and not do anything.

Not fancying another dose of Hawk the Slayer, I put Alien Resurrection on, which was sitting neglected next to it on a particularly dusty part of the shelf. I thought I might try and watch it with fresh eyes, and see if it is truly as bad as I remembered.


Alien is a classic piece of atmospheric, and let us not forget, sexual, horror. Aliens is a crash bang action fest where the extended cut should be avoided. And Fincher's Alien 3 gets slated by many, but I rather like it thanks to its strong cast and oily, greasy vibe. Where does Alien 4 fit in?

Needless to say, even taking a charitable view, it is comfortably the worst of the 4. Again, it's a strong cast with it's cultish crew of Ron Perlman, Dominic Pinon, and Michael Wincott, and Winona Ryder is not so really out of place. But it's script writer, a certain Josh Whedon, is. "If those things get loose, it's gonna make the Lacerta Plague look like a fucking square dance!" is symptomatic of the "yoof interest" awful dialogue that finds its way into the script. Add to this the endlessly clanged desire to explore Ripley's historic desire for motherhood results in a clearly not giving a toss Sigourney Weaver creeping around like a genetically engineered incestuous abuser, muttering in am dram fashion when she isn't cosying up to xenomorphs for some borderline interspecies nookie.

"I'm the monster's mother..." "You mean....my baby?..." Weaver breathes, and the audience giggles, turning into outright cackles when Brad Dourif's signature oddball introduces "The Newborn", the human-alien iceberg that sinks the movie in many more pieces that the Titanic went down in. Looking like a heavily KY'd Scooby Doo villain, the brain eating space pug dog roars, whimpers and coos through 'emotional' scenes with Weaver that plunge the depths of emetic bathos.

And then we have Jeunet's direction. It seems to me that he feels pretty early on in the piece that his chances of making a visceral masterpiece have been fatally compromised, and so decides to lather the gore on and seemingly stick cameras down people's throats on several occasions, while trying to fit in a bit of humour such as spaceship General chap Dan Hedaya giving a cornball salute before picking his cerebellum out of an alienised hole in the back of his skull. But the nadir is the scene where clone number 8 Ripley meets the previous failure versions of herself, seemingly including Captain Caveman in a jar; and Joey Deacon clone strapped to a bed dribbling "kill me" before meeting a humane and painless death at the end of a..er...flamethrower.

"Kill Me?" "Kill Us" chanted the audience.

Sleeper Service

As is a favourite pastime of mine, I was out running while listening to Radio 4. I'm old now you see, and I don't have portable DAB. I wish I could be listening to 6 music like a cool, old, sad guy.

In any case, there was a wonderful documentary broadcast about the London Euston to Inverness and beyond Sleeper Service train. Leaving London at 915 at night, it wends its way up North, beyond such glorious places as Crewe, Preston and Carlisle. It's an expensive, rather wealthy business person past-time to be sure, which is ironic, as the accomodation must be rather cramped and spartan even for first class.

But I loved the sound of it! The comradeship, the relationship between regular travellers, the barman reporting the bar being drunk nearly dry. I love the idea of long journeys, of adventures. I'm sure that if I had my own cabin on that train, I'd nestle into my bunk and pretend to be a spaceman being out into suspended animation, and dream of stars.

I just imagine the possibilities for stories, for adventures. A murderer on the train, mutated DNA, he can crawl down the side of a speeding train into YOUR window. The train disappears on going into a tunnel, never to emerge...aliens kidnap the whole train...a tunnel floods with the train inside...one of the passsengers is a political dissident and other passengers are a secret service assasinsation squad, polonium poisonings amidst the half wine bottles and plastic glasses...women who are mermaids in disguise seinding the train to the bottom of the Firth of Forth...poison gas attack, poison fish attack...pollock spray cyanide in the carriages, halibut shoot survivors...passengers bodies rip as train food found to contain alien eggs...

All the possibilities. And the best you got was Snakes on a Plane on a Train. Pah.

I still so want to go though. And maybe the story will happen while I write it. Like the tableaux Iain M. Banks describes on the "Sleeper Service" he wrote about

SHORT STORY - Spindizzy - three minute writing exercise

Spindizzy

I found that if you rotate really really fast, while standing looking at an apple tree in my garden one steel grey day in September, that you can make the world stop. There I was, doing the whirling dervish thing as cackling fruit hung pregnantly upon the bough, the sick feeling in my head bringing bile to the back, then front, of my throat.

I spewed all over a dandelion plagued patch of lawn, but never stopped.

A robin and a blackbird were laughing and pointing their wings. There was a rushing in my head. I brought up more of my stomach and a lot more of my liver and kidneys to nourish the sickly grass.

I was moving so fast my finger tips were starting to burn with the friction of the air.

And then, all stopped. I slammed against a quantum wall as I had predicted; my body stopped instantly with no momentum. 345,599 revoloutions per second. That was the speed predicted. That was the speed I had hit.

And at the moment I hit it, the world stopped rotating, its inertia failed, and I was able to watch all the people and animals not glued or velcroed to ground level shooting off into the ky like they'd been thrown off a roundabout and dashed into bloody pulp upon the arc of the heavens.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 04/01/13

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.