Ye Olde Terminator

My head spends an awful lot of time on idle thinking. Such things may or may not include...

1) - A meeting at the Bond Villain's volcano headquarters. Blofeld type chap sits at the end of the table, stroking his squashed face ugly Persian cat with one hand while fiddling with a cigar cutter with the other. Henchman sit around, fat ones, thin ones, scared ones, oriental ones, ones missing eyes, ones missing limbs. There is a solitary woman amongst them, sporting the correct number of eyes, arms and legs, but looking rather chubby.

"Gentlemen, before we discuss the implementation of "Operation Terror" can I just take this opportunity to give our best wishes to Jacqui from HR, who is going on maternity - and by the way, it isn't mine! Seriously, we wish you all the best, and enjoy being a mum!"

The fingers sporting rings containing poison pick up an envelope from Clinton's Cards. A factotum with a claw for a hand passes a bunch of Waitrose flowers over. A tin of Celebrations is opened, everyone goes straight for the malteser ones.

Well, it happens like this in every fucking workplace I've been in, why not Doctor Death's?

2) Due to navigation error, the Terminator goes too far back in time and finds himself having to kill a 13th Century ancestor of Sarah Connor. Naked, he first has to cloth himself.

"I want your jerkin, your bootikins, and your donkey" he announces to a passing peasant, before taking himself off down the Blacksmith's to get tooled up.

"I want a phased pulse rifle in the 40 megawatt range"

"Prithee Sire, only what you see!"

"The sword, the dagger, and the mace"

"A fine choice young master. All these weapons would surely grace a stout castle, which art thine fancy?"

"All of dem."

"Crivens! Thou shalt not do that, my liege."

"Wrong."

SWIPPPPPPPPEEEEEEE....kudummmmm

Inception - How do you Learn to Dream?

My dreams, head full of Tourette medication and restless sleep patterns, often have outbreaks of craziness. Most dreams you barely remember, flickers of images that are burnt out the moment you open you eyes and the sandman drops you back off in the land of consciousness. Others are burnt into the gallery of your memory with a laser.

They come and go. In my super stressed university days, every dream I had was a) lucid and 2) involved flying. I was aware I was dreaming so often, in a REM world little different from ours.

Until I decided to lift off the ground like an airship made of feathers, and drift around like a sky manatee. No propulsion was necessary, no awful flapping. Just ease of movement by the power of thought in a world where no harm could come.

Paradoxical movement. Inception. Niever since have I been able to control my dreams as well as they do in Christopher Nolan's other masterpiece - after The Prestige.

The dream machines in inception are never quite explained to us. We see a suitcase with a metallic case, centred with a large button used to kick the dreams off. The use of sedatives is implied, but none are seen being introduced into the machine, although it looks as if there are places for them to be placed.

The tubes that network the dreamers to the machine don't appear to be IVs, you never see any of the cast introducing them into their veins; they just seem to be strapped around the wrist. Likewise, there seems to be no connection from the brain to the machine, this must be being served by the tube on the arm.

And then, how do they get such control over the environments; the architecture, clothing, and weapons. Eames (how I want to be him) produces a huge gun when the team are trapped in the warehouse, but gives no idea as to where it comes from other than saying, movie stealingly "You should dream a little bigger, darling." - so, do you imagine your own gear coming in, or is their some kind of central dream server you gear up in, akin to The Construct in "The Matrix."

Also, how do they dream with such utter clarity...no fuzziness, changing faces, suddenly changing locales? Is it in the militarily developed software or hardware, or are only certain people good enough at dreaming to work in this alpha waved mindscape?

I wish I was that good. And I wish I was Tom bloody Hardy.

They Make You Communist – The Invaders from Mars

One of the things I like to do when I get the chance, when I'm not studying planetary sciences, journalism or the history of the ancient Roman sewer, is to settle with a huge cup of tea in Starbucks or wherever, and watch a classic film over wi-fi.

It takes two or three visits, but the movie gets watched eventually, as the tea gets colder and the pigeons stare in through the window at me. The latest one I watched was “Invaders from Mars”, a 1953 piece of classic atomic age paranoia with a cast no-one's ever heard of, and an irritating boy as the chief protagonist.

The film is slightly different from the usual “Kid sees something, no-one believes him” plot you get in movies of this type, right up through Jaws in the 70s, in that it takes that standard trope and spins it into “Kid sees something, no-one believes him until a lot earlier in the film than is normally the case.” Late at night, the boy David sees a bright green flying saucer land in the sand pits behind his house – how Horsell Common like! - and in the morning his father, a worker at a secret rocket research plant, goes out to investigate.

He comes back eventually as the family begin to panic...but he isn't quite the same. In fact, his voice is flat, he is agressive, and he hits his son! But far worse than child abuse IS THE FACT HE HAS BEEN TURNED INTO A COMMUNIST! We know this because in 1950s American carport suburbia, only communists would shout at their wives and beat their kids up.

As further confirmation that he is now evil, he is lit predominantly from underneath so his pinko face is now covered in sinister shadows, and he stops shaving, instantaneously going stubbly in the space of 15 minutes.

The wife is of course properly submissive to even her spousal Stalin, but at some point she goes out to the sand pit and comes back acting the same way. David's friend, a neighbourhood Bonnie Langford and daughter of another rocket scientist, goes out to the pit and returns to set fire to her house before dropping dead of a mysterious brain haemmorhage.

Luckily the boy is rescued from his now evil parents by a woman doctor, and a distinctly unsceptical astronomer who belies in UFOs – The Lubbock Lights and George Mantell's death get a mention – and has a magical telescope that can see David's house even when pointing at the sky. And through this scope, they see various soldiers and local people being sucked down into the sand, including a General.

That same General is then caught trying to sabotage the Rocket factory, before he too dies of a Stroke. The army are all too ready now to believe there is something down there, as it transpires the dead have had crystals implanted into their brains, controlling their very actions. COMMUNIST DREAMS OF MIND CONTROL HAVE BEEN MADE REAL.

So everyone troops off to the sand pit, stock footage of tanks shoot at it, and eventually everyone gets sucked down into the sand to meet giant “Mu-tants” - supposedly 8 feet tall Martians with silly masks on and very obvious zippers up the back of their genital free bodysuits. They have turned the tunnels below the sand into explosive condoms (TRUE) that turn into explosive oatmeal (ALSO TRUE) when fired on by a hokey looking laser.

The child and his scientist mentors are eventually led before a head in a goldfish bowl that does sod all apart from fiddle with its pincers and is apparently “Mankind, distilled into its ultimate form”. The woman, of course, is selected for crystal implantation by the disembodied head, before of course rescue happens and the boy blows the aliens up with their own exploding oatmeal contraceptives, before he wakes in his own bed and finds IT WAS ALL A DREAM.

But then he sees the saucer land again...

The film is collosally stupid, and colosally entertaining, particularly the stuff legged lumbering Martians and their all too obvious outfits, but it also stands out as one of the paradigm movies of American “Reds Under the Bed” paranoia. After visiting the pit, the adults come back cold, evil, and with all their individualism erased. They engage in covert attacks on American military might, are clearly godless, and their leader is essentially the embodiment of the US perception of communism – a human with all the humanity distilled out of them, leading a bunch of collectivised drones.

You still have to love it though!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 12.05.14

2010 – The Year We Make Contact

I'm going to commit a few, unforgiveable, burn-me-at-the-stakes heresies here.

This is another of the sequels that is better than the original.

“How can you say that” you ask, as you stack the wood up and soak it in oil. “How can this workmanlike picture starring hammy old scrotum Roy Schneider be better than Kubrick's mindblowing spectacle.”

The truth is, very easily. Everyone likes 2001, because it is Kubrick, because it has got some spectacular visuals, but because IT IS A FILM YOU MUST LIKE IN ORDER TO LOOK INFORMED – AND OF COURSE, COOL.

This is bullshit. Hardly anyone really likes hard sci fi, and this movie is leaden with it. The film essentially boils down to:

Act 1 – Monkey's throw sticks at each other (witness opening of Star Wars Holiday Special for similar Simian grunting fun). For ages.

Act 2 – Endlessly praised match cut leads into hours of boring space ship stuff set to music by proto Nazis. The most noteworthy event here is a man visiting a toilet upside down.

Act 3 – Two very wooden astronauts do very dull things while watching themselves on “BBC12”. Computer eventually gets so fed up it kills everyone until its building block brain is removed.

Act 4 – Man goes down cool space tunnel while eerie Ligeti music plays; eventually he meets an older version of himself with a face covered in plasticene.

The End.

2010 has some cool spaceships, fantastic sequences involving aero braking around Jupiter, a bit of action, some hard sci fi elements that aren't as dry as dust, Helen Mirren, and John Lithgow playing a homosexual space engineer – this element of his character however is excised from the movie, although it is explicit in the book. OK it also has terrible voiceover exposition from Schneider, a horrible hokey cold war plot, and Helen Mirren doing a terrible Russian accent even though she is Russian while other members of the cast opt for Mr Chekov style “Nuklee-ar Wessels” tomfoolery.

But at least things happen!!! It doesn't bore the arse off you. 2001 is the world's most boring film ever, making Solaris look like Toy Story, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

And what other sci fi film can boast having a future Queens of the Stone Age keyboard player in the cast?

The young Natasha Scheider in 2010

And here with QOTSA for "Lullabies to Paralyse"

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18.04.14

Bat Projection

I had a lot of time to think today, and in that time I thought of cinema.

I thought of pre-CGI special effects, and thought of back projection, the means by which car journeys in the movies were brought to life, Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy looking elegant or gritty at the wheel, while we see the road disappearing off into the distance in the rear window.

Inevitably, the actor would be swinging the wheel about like Captain Birdseye trying to pilot his ship in a storm, while the projection would make it clear that the car was travelling in an arrow straight line along an endlessly straight road in New Mexico. Later on, Kubrick used the technique in 2001, Cameron used it in Aliens, and it still gets used occasionally to give a shot a retro feel.

But in an atttempt to halt the decline of cinema visiting figures against the relentless progress of downloading and streaming, I thought of a new process that would really enliven cinema in a way never done before.

It is called “Bat Projection.”

In Bat Projection, cinema is given a stunningly naturalistic, immediate, and yet epic feel. Best suited to the countryside of say, Sumatra or Borneo near a large cave at sunset, Bat Projection involves projecting the movie into the sky onto giant swarms of flying bats – flying foxes are the best – that have been painted with reflective silver white paint.

Obviously bats move a lot, and so the projectors will have to be mounted on fast moving yet rugged jeeps. And so will the audience, who will follow the dramtically shifting on mini motos, BMXs and slave pulled rickshaws as best they can. The more daring may take to the air on hang-gliders or microlights, actually becoming part of the action as Chewie pulls the stormtrooper from the Scout Walker, the scene made all the more dramatic for being two miles wide and spiralling and shifting all the time with added ultrasonic sound effects.

“The Birds” of course would be a real spectacle; menacing black shapes attacking Tippi Hendren superimposed upon sinister white painted black ones, the screams and pecked eyes on a huge scale a thousand feet up in the sky, swirling, swooping, indigo skies filled with flying mammal cinematic action!

Rank, Cannon, Showcase, Reel! Get yourselves to India right away! And bring your best bat wranglers!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 23.01.14

CINEMA - Krell Wonders - The Forbidden Planet

At one point in this classic, vivid piece of science fiction film making, the id-ally challenged Doctor Morbius asks of strong chinned space captain Leslie Neilson "Would you like to see some more Krell Wonders?"

"Hell yes!" he replies, or words to that effect, and off they go to explore more chambers of inconceivable alien other wordliness.

"Hell yes!" I always say too, whenever I see the film.

Promo Poster that doesn't at all reflect the real atmosphere of the film

The child in me never gets to see enough of the Krell; their enormous, mysterious city with its electronically burbling  giant resistors and massive pill shaped "things" moving up and down for no apparent purpose; and the Krell themselves, entities we never know anything about other than the fact they need great broad pentagonal doors and were destroyed utterly by the same psycho-physical terror that Morbius is manifesting.

Yes I know that in terms of the purity of cinema, less is more, and don't reveal your monster blah blah, but my inner child always feels cheated by the lack of actual Krell. And as for their city, well, what else was there apart from the eye searing power source and the great echoing caverns of electricial switching mechanisms? Where did they live? What were their transport systems? Leisure? Agriculture?

The "electronic tonalities" of Louis and Bebe Barron, the first time a film had had such a score, add to the futuristic gloss of the whole production, and leaves you wanting so much more. I love the movie, and I still wonder what the krell world was still concealing from us, when it finally detonated its monsters of the id for good.

Doctor Parnassus and Lily Cole

I watched this movie again this afternoon, in a state of total enjoyment while never quite understanding what the film is about. Which is fair enough, because 1) I'm no superbright student of cinema and 2) I'm not sure Terry Gilliam knew either after Heath Ledger died.

The "Alt Ledger" sequences (Depp, Law, Farrell) do look, understandably, rather rushed. Especially Johnny Depp's sequence through the mirror

It doesn't stop the film from being a highly wonderful piece of cinema just for being there. It just is, and I'm a huge fan of movies like that. It looks amazing, sounds amazing, and is wonderfully cast.

"Wonderfully Cast"? Yes it is. Not for Heath Ledger, who actually with his floating point accent is probably the weakest thing in the movie (HERESY!!!!), but for Christopher Plummer, Andrew Garfield, Verne Troyer and Tom Waits. But especially, Lily Cole.

She can act, for sure, but most importantly she really does look like the sort of god-beautiful-given gift an immortal might spawn as the result of a pact with a particularly suave devil.

I love this film, but she makes me adore it, and if that makes me shallow, then by all means, take a paddle in me.

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.

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.

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.

Dreams of Teide.mp4

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 - 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.