Fantastic Mr. Fox

It may come as a shock to you that The Incredible Suit actually has some kind of qualifications; specifically, I got a C in A Level Film Studies at South Cheshire College. So forgive me if I go all academic for a moment. Don’t worry, it won’t last long.

Wes Anderson is an auteur. His films are characterised by dysfunctional families failing miserably to connect with each other and characters so arch you could put a church on them and call them a doorway. While I respect and admire him for his offbeat filmmaking and great use of music, his films leave me completely cold, with the exception of The Darjeeling Limited, which – for reasons I have yet to fathom – I really like. I think it’s because I’d quite like to trundle across India on a rickety old train, although not with my face rearranged in the style of Picasso like Owen Wilson’s.

Despite being a stop-motion animated adaptation of a Roald Dahl story, Fantastic Mr Fox is no exception. It’s full of characters who don’t like each other, probably because they’re all so unlikeable. They all feel like they’re just words on a page, even with the likes of George Clooney and Meryl Streep providing the voices. In fact if anything, Clooney is a complete distraction as a voice actor because his voice is so recognisable. Part of Up’s success is that the voices are provided by unknowns, so you focus on the characters more than the actors, and you don’t spend the first 15 minutes picturing George Clooney in a perspex box wittering into a microphone.

Having said that, and although Fantastic Mr Fox feels like an unsympathetic Wallace and Gromit film, it does zip along with some panache, to the point where The Incredible Suit can bring you this great news:

What I would most recommend it for, though, is that it includes more alcoholism, smoking, cussing, dismemberment, spousal abuse, theft, knife violence, drugs and animated banjo-playing machine-gun-toting Jarvis Cockers than any kids’ film I’ve ever seen. And that can only be a good thing.

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London Film Festival: Ajami

The problem with the London Film Festival is that there are always going to be some proper stinkers. I don’t know what the BFI’s criteria are when they book some of these films; maybe there has to be a certain number of incomprehensible, overlong snoozefests to fulfil some quota otherwise they won’t get enough funding to employ overexcited copywriters to hype all the Festival’s films into oblivion.

The other day I saw Ajami, an Israeli film about something or other. Gangs, possibly. Drugs, too. Yes, there were definitely some drugs in there. And some shooting. There were some people, although I’m not sure who they were. In fact there were two characters who were so similar that I thought they were the same person until the last ten minutes when they suddenly appeared in the same scene. I looked around to see if anyone else was surprised by this but they had all died of boredom.

I followed it OK for the first 15 minutes, but when a whole new story thread started with entirely new characters I was lost and never found my way back. After 45 minutes I started to think I might have the faintest whiff of a clue what was happening, but by the hour mark my old friend Fidget had turned up and that was it. Game over for Ajami.

(If you require an explanation of the Fidget Factor, you don’t read The Incredible Suit often enough. See this post)

***STOP PRESS***

The Incredible Suit has just learned that Ajami has won The London Film Festival’s Sutherland Trophy, “for the most original and imaginative first feature at this year's festival”. So congratulations Ajami, you can pop that on the mantelpiece next to The Incredible Suit’s Southland Tales Trophy, awarded to the dullest, most impenetrable film at this year’s festival.

***STOP PRESS AGAIN***

In further ludicrosity, A Prophet, which The Incredible Suit roundly slapped about yesterday, has won The London Film Festival’s Star Of London award for Best Film, which “celebrates creative, original, imaginative, intelligent and distinctive filmmaking in the Festival”. So congratulations A Prophet, you can pop that on the mantelpiece next to The Incredible Suit’s There Will Be Blood Trophy, which celebrates overlong, tedious, overrated tosh with an excessively high Fidget Factor. Hooray!

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London Film Festival: A Prophet

I’d like to introduce a new addition to The Incredible Suit team today; none other than Fidget from Time Bandits. Hello, Fidget!

I’ve decided to employ Fidget on a freelance basis (i.e. I’m not paying him) after his relentless mithering during various films I’ve seen recently that have failed to hold my attention for very long. It’s at the point in a movie when my mind wanders and I start thinking about why there’s always one teaspoon left in the washing up bowl when you empty the water out that Fidget appears and starts prodding me, making me shift about in my seat, or sprinkles magic sleepy dust in my eyes, making it difficult to stay awake and keep track of what little is going on on screen.

Fidget’s contribution to The Incredible Suit is The Fidget Factor, a measurement of what percentage of a film’s running time is taken up with daydreaming, restless twitching and involuntary drooling from the corner of one’s gobhole.

To illustrate, take Monday’s London Film Festival screening of Un Prophète (trans: A Prophet. Fluent, me). Now it’s a dangerous thing to describe a film in your Festival bumf with words like “astounding”, “crime drama of the year”, “visceral intensity”, and especially the phrase “More exciting than Mesrine”, because a) that is a lot of exciting thrillery to live up to and b) Mesrine had me on a diet of fingernails for the best part of four hours.

Needless to say it was a bit rubbish. A French prison drama about a petty crook who comes under the wing of a mid-level Corsican mobster in chokey and eventually starts to take charge of his own blood-soaked destiny, A Prophet is about 45 minutes too long and severely lacking in anything approaching the “visceral intensity” or “fingernail-biting anticipation” promised by the LFF. If Jacques Mesrine had been incarcerated in this prison he’d have broken out for a café au lait and broken in again before anyone had noticed he’d gone.

Despite an excellent performance by Tahar Rahim as the French Arab criminal around whom the film revolves, I lost track of who was Corsican, who was French and who was Algerian after about an hour, and it was at this point that who should pop up but my old chum Fidget, with a colander on his head, poking me with his little sausage fingers and asking for a job.

So The Incredible Suit gives A Prophet an uninspiring five out of ten, but more importantly, what does Fidget say?

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London Film Festival: Underground

Last Friday the London Film Festival justified its existence by showing Anthony Asquith’s Underground, a 1928 silent film about a love quadrangle between four London folk whose paths cross on the London Underground. Kate loves Bert, but Bert loves Nell, only Nell loves Bill. Nightmare! To further complicate matters, Bert is as nutty as a deluxe gift box of Ferrero Rocher, which is presumably why he’s been given a job at a power station working with gazillions of volts of electricity.

What starts off as a charming, funny romantic farce soon descends into madness and murder, culminating in a thrilling, Hitchcockian chase around the Lots Road Power Station. In fact the whole film is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s work; Asquith could have gone on to be as great as the master himself if he’d turned out more gems like Underground instead of adapting stage-bound plays for the screen. Also that nasty alleged business with the mask and Christine Keeler probably didn’t help.

What was particularly great about Friday’s screening was that it was the result of a massive and eye-wateringly expensive restoration by the BFI, who The Incredible Suit would like to give a gentle pat on the back for being so super. They showed examples of the old footage, which looked like it had been dragged round the Circle line behind a train a few times, and the spanky new print, which was like comparing vinyl to CD. The new version, pristine as it was, was almost too good; it could have done with a few more scratches and hairs in the gate if you ask me.

Anyway the film itself was a lovely surprise, as are all films you’ve never heard of that turn out to be good. It was great to see a document of city life in the 1920s too, if only to be reassured that your fellow tube passengers have always been annoying, self-centred idiot faces, even when they wore hats and buttonholes. They still moaned about standing up for a lady even in those polite days, although what 90% of them did that 90% of us now don’t is walk up the escalators instead of being lazy fattards.

The other highlight was the live musical accompaniment, courtesy of the legendary Neil Brand and his five man band, The Prima Vista Social Club. I’ve banged on before about Brando (not that one) and his magic fingers but when he gets together with his obscenely talented musician chums it’s like sitting in a hot bath of brilliance with 500 strangers. Fully clothed, obviously. Their music fit the action on screen like a beautifully tailored suit, to the point where one of them produced a tin whistle from nowhere and played it at the same time as a character in the film.

So hurrah for Underground, huzzah for The Prima Vista Social Club and huffah for the BFI. ‘Huffah’ will be appearing in an Oxford English Dictionary near you soon.

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London Film Festival: Mother

The London Film Festival trundles on like a great big convoy of films driving through the middle of London honking their airhorns and leaving behind a choking fug of reviews all saying much the same thing. In today’s case that’s especially accurate, because I saw Mother, another slightly unhinged Korean film, the day after I saw Thirst (see Friday’s post), and I can pretty much just copy and paste the review from Thirst and swap the vampire priest for an over-protective mother.

Mother is the story of a woman whose 27-year-old mentally retarded son is framed for the murder of a local girl, and who goes to extreme lengths to prove his innocence and find the real killer.

The film begins with what I was sure was a lengthy scene of former BBC newsreader Moira Stuart dancing in a cornfield, and things didn’t really get any less weird from then on. Although not as supernatural or surreal as director Bong Joon-ho’s previous film The Host, Mother still firmly inhabits that world of Asian cinema where everything’s slightly skewif. The mother and son relationship, for example, is surprisingly close in more ways than one.

Like Thirst, the black comedy’s there, the cinematography – while not as impressive as Park Chan-wook’s – is excellent, and the two leads are convincing as an obsessive mother and a troubled son, but the longer the film went on the more I was fidgeting in my seat waiting for it to end. The mystery is eventually solved unnecessarily late, resolving itself primarily by having characters suddenly remember something which could easily have been remembered about half an hour earlier.

Still worth watching, then, but I’m still waiting for the next Oldboy to burst out of Korea and gobble up its contemporaries like a reluctant live squid.



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Thirst

It feels like there have been a bajillion vampire films released this year. You can’t walk into a cinema right now without some undead bloodsucker chomping on your jugular. Although it’s always been like that at the Shepherd’s Bush Vue.

I don’t care much for vampire films, which is why I was so surprised when Let The Right One In turned out to be such a moving, beautiful and breathtakingly great movie that it’s been spreading its batwings at the top of The Incredible Suit’s Best Films of 2009 since I saw it.

I was never going to see Twilight last year, or the 2009 sequel New Moon, because – like boy bands, The X Factor and alcopops - it’s aimed largely at teenage girls, of which I am not one. Lesbian Vampire Killers wasn’t on my radar because it starred the unfunniest double act since Les Dennis and Dustin Gee, and appeared to have been made about 15 years too late to catch the ‘readers of Loaded magazine’ market it was intended for.

However I was always going to watch Thirst, the new film from South Korea’s Park Chan-wook, because I would watch anything that he made – despite the fact that he’s South Korea’s answer to Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam; someone who makes exceptionally extraordinary-looking films, only a tiny amount of which are actually any good.

Park’s Sympathy For Mr Vengeance and Oldboy are two of the most goggle-bogglingly great films made ever, never mind in South Korea; the third film in that trilogy – Lady Vengeance – was fine but not as good as its predecessors, and Park’s other films (JSA, I’m A Cyborg) looked incredible but failed to deliver as a complete product.

Sadly much the same can be said for Thirst, the story of a priest who becomes infected with vampire blood, making him unspeakably horny for a childhood friend, and has to balance his newly acquired bloodlust with his raging libido and his desire not to kill anyone in order to survive if he can help it. Needless to say it doesn’t work out all that well, and by the end there’s more claret been spilled than at a gathering of nervous Mouton Rothschild lovers.

Thirst features some typically (for Park Chan-wook) blackly comic sequences and dazzling camerawork, and its two leads, Song Kang-ho and Kim Ok-vin, are excellent. The final scene, featuring a clifftop, a car boot and two bickering vampires is simultaneously hilarious and touching, and visually stunning. However the whole story lurches uncomfortably from scene to scene, with little in the way of a narrative core to hold on to, so you’re never really sure what the aim is for these characters or why you should care.

That said, Thirst isn’t terrible, and there’s enough there for fans of Park Chan-wook, Korean cinema or vampire films. I’ll still queue up for Park’s next film, whatever it is; I just hope it’s better than Thirst, because if not, there will be blood.

Thanks to Ultraculture for the graph idea which I pretty much pinched wholesale there.

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Geekazoidal

“The Incredible Suit”, I hear you cry, “I loved your post about casting Bernard Hill or David Warner as M in the next James Bond film, but I just don’t know who should play Q! Please help!” Well, stop crying you big babies, it’s not becoming. But since you ask…

Let’s see. We could go one of several ways with Q:

a) Make him the same curmudgeonly lovable old goat Desmond Llewellyn played him as, which would be silly in this whole ‘reboot’ stage we’re in. However if it has to be done like that, let’s have someone curmudgeonly, lovable and goatesque like Bill Nighy.

b) Make him a bit younger, closer to Bond’s age, and a bit geeky as he’s a technology nerd. In which case go for someone like David Morrissey.

c) Make him a lot younger, twentysomething in fact, someone who knows all about the latest technology, someone who’s excited by his work and eager to see how it plays out in the field, but takes the piss out of Bond for not being nearly as geekazoidal as he is. This approach would gain The Incredible Suit’s endorsement, and I vote for Noel Clarke in the role.

***Official Warning: On no account is
David Tennant to be linked with the role of Q***

So this new Bond film is shaping up quite nicely in my mentally deranged fantasy world. It looks like it could be an absolute corker; it’s just a shame that you’ll only be able to see it by entering my dreams like Dennis Quaid in Dreamscape. Admission is £8.00, please don’t drop any popcorn in my cerebral cortex, it’s a bugger to pick out.

Now watch this. It’s nearly ten years since Desmond Llewelyn sat in the ejector seat of life and popped through the roof into the great R&D lab in the sky. The Incredible Suit gives you permission to resume crying like a baby.



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Joseph Wiseman 1918 - 2009

"East, West, just points of the compass, each as stupid

as the other. I am a member of SPECTRE"

(Dr No, 1962)

Sir, The Incredible Suit salutes you.

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Up

This week’s Top 10 greatest Pixar films, like, ever:
(Last week’s positions in brackets)

1. (1) The Incredibles
2. (2) Toy Story 2
3. (3) Toy Story
4. (4) Monsters, Inc.
5. (New Entry) Up
6. (5) Finding Nemo
7. (6) Ratatouille
8. (7) WALL•E
9. (8) A Bug’s Life
10. (9) Cars

I couldn't write a review of Up because I was too busy crying like a baby, so here's a pictographic appraisal from our guest reviewer:

I did, however, have to endure this exchange with the chap at the box office (which took place at about 5.30pm):

The Incredible Suit: “Can I have two tickets for Up at 8.40, please”

The Chap At The Box Office: (incomprehensible mumbling) “…We only have tickets for 6.40 or 9.10”

The Incredible Suit: “Really? Has it sold out already?”

The Chap At The Box Office: (slowly, as if talking to an imbecile) “Nnooo, we just… don’t have a showing at 8.40”

The Incredible Suit: (slowly, as if talking to an imbecile) “This is Up we’re talking about, yeah?”

The Chap At The Box Office: (pauses, as if world has been turned inside out) “You said District 9”

The Incredible Suit: (slowly, because definitely talking to an imbecile) “Nnooo, I said ‘two tickets for Up at 8.40’”

There then followed a lengthy pause in which The Chap At The Box Office stared at me very hard while he tried to work out if I was taking the piss or if there had been some kind of ripple in the space-time continuum. He then grudgingly gave me my tickets for Up and went, presumably, to get the popcorn removed from his ears.

Say it out loud to yourself. Up. District 9. Up. District 9. Up. District 9. Is there even the most microscopic phonetic similarity in those two film titles that could cause one to be mistaken for the other? Of course not. This is why God invented online booking.

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London Film Festival: Tales From The Golden Age

On Saturday night The Incredible Suit and Mrs The Incredible Suit ventured into London’s Leicester Square, which is just about the last place on Earth any sane human being would want to be on a Saturday night. Despite it being October, and therefore cold enough to freeze the nethers off a Balrog, the place was still teeming with tourists at 9pm. Why? Nothing touristy is going on there, unless you count sitting outside an overpriced restaurant wearing so many layers that you can only waggle your fingertips, or getting a “hilarious” caricature done of yourself by someone who has apparently also done them for Tom Cruise, Posh Spice and Barack Obama, and that’s why you’d need to take out a mortgage to pay for it.

But I digress. Obviously we were there for the London Film Festival, specifically a screening of Tales From The Golden Age, or Amintiri Din Epoca De Aur as the Romanians insist on calling it, apparently because it was them what made it.

Passing the red carpet (which, disappointingly, didn’t seem to have been laid for us) and the crowd of idiots who had amassed to bark like seals at any old berk wandering down it whether they were famous or not, we located the plebeians’ entrance and settled down for the movie. Tales From The Golden Age is a portmanteau film of five stories set in 1980s Romania – the laughingly named (by dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu’s propaganda machine) ‘Golden Age’ of the title. Each vignette is about a microcosm of life under Ceauşescu, and each a touching personal story representative of thousands struggling to get through a restrictive and repressive dictatorship with humour and self-respect.

The first story - set in a small town preparing for a state visit which nobody is even sure will happen, but about which everybody is on edge, especially with all the petty specifics required to please the great leader – is the most enjoyable. Funny and warm, it sets the scene for a light-hearted but simultaneously serious film which, sadly, never transpires.

The second story isn’t bad; a peek into the spin employed by the Romanian press to make Ceauşescu look good at all times. Essentially a Romanian version of The Thick Of It, but with 99% less profanity. From then on though, each story seems to get longer and less interesting, with only a butane-filled exploding pig providing a highlight in the fourth tale.

It’s fair to say Tales From The Golden Age is the best Romanian film The Incredible Suit has ever seen, but its competition is limited. In fact there is no competition. So I’d have to say that although it brought to light the challenges faced by the people of that time, and certainly educated me in the way they faced those challenges with their sense of humour and pride intact, it might have been improved by giving the first story 90 minutes of its own and losing the latter, less golden tales.



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London Film Festival: Double Take

Yesterday I watched my first film at the 2009 London Film Festival, Double Take. I’ve been so busy recently that I don’t know if I’m coming or going or standing on my hands in a lake of ketchup half the time, so perhaps it wasn’t the best time to go and see a Belgian / German / Dutch co-production from the ‘Experimenta’ strand described as “part mock-documentary, part conceptual provocation” and directed by a man called Johan Grimonprez. But see it I did, and it was, unsurprisingly, quite peculiar.

I’ll attempt to describe it but anyone who’s ever seen anything remotely avant-garde knows that you have to see it for yourself to have the foggiest idea what’s going on.

Double Take intercuts scenes of Alfred Hitchcock doing his droll links from his TV series Alfred Hichcock Presents, as well as the groundbreaking trailers for his films, with newsreel footage of the development of the Cold War in the late 1950s and early ‘60s and the rise and perceived threat of Communism. In amongst all this are scenes of professional Hitchcock impersonator Ron Burrage bimbling about, and a fictional voiceover in which Hitch describes how, in 1962, he met his future self from 1980 and killed him.

All of which was like being served a dinner platter of roast beef, a telephone, four crayons and a lamppost, and was almost as baffling. However it soon became clear, even to a dunce like me, that the film was drawing parallels between the growing threat of the 'Red Menace' and the impending catastrophe due to be wrought on Bodega Bay in Hitchcock’s The Birds. As well as this, Hitch’s famous definition of suspense as two men chatting at a table, oblivious to the bomb underneath it (which the audience knows is there and so is going frantic shouting at the screen) represents the West’s fear of nuclear armageddon during the Cold War, and his ‘Macguffin’ theory is compared to the superpowers’ excuses to blow each other to cornflake-sized smithereens.

So while Double Take suggests some interesting (but hardly earth-shattering) metaphors in Alfred Hitchcock’s work, it does it in such a disjointed way that it doesn’t really satisfy as a film experience. All the stuff about Ron Burrage, the voiceover and the ‘doubles’ motif left me perplexed, but then such films are designed to leave the audience pondering, so ponder I will, and if I have a sudden revelation I’ll be sure to let you know.

Double Take is on again tonight at 8.30 at the NFT, and on Monday 19th October at 4.30 at the ICA if you fancy going along and explaining it all to me. For reasons too stupid to go into I’ve got a ticket for Monday’s show you can have if you can find me. I’m the one standing on my hands in a lake of ketchup.



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Magic

The Incredible Suit is part of The Cineastes, a group of bloggers who review a film a month and link blogs in the hope of spreading the word of whatever it is we’re on about. October’s film is Magic, directed by Richard Attenborough in 1978.

Magic stars Anthony Hopkins as Corky, a struggling magician who incorporates a ventriloquist’s dummy, Fats, into his act in order to achieve greater success. Corky’s agent lands him a pilot for a TV series but the studio demands he undergo a medical examination before they sign the contract. It turns out they were quite right to do so; Corky’s as mad as a parachuteful of badgers, his personality split firmly down the middle with Fats taking the confident, aggressive side and leaving Corky the timid, hopeless loser half. It’s only a matter of time before one of them takes things too far…

…and that’s it. This might have once been an edgy thriller with a few shocks and a terrifying dummy, but now the scariest thing about it is Anthony Hopkins’ jumper. It’s a passable 100 minutes but it’s all quite predictable and ordinary and lacking in, well, magic.

Hopkins delivers an admirable performance, something he’s stopped bothering with these days. Yes, I know he’s a national treasure (especially having abandoned Wales to become a naturalised American), and he was good in The Silence Of The Lambs, but since then he’s only ever been Hannibal Lecter in a series of inappropriate situations. The Remains Of The Day: ooh look, Hannibal Lecter’s serving tea and cucumber sandwiches! Nixon: ooh look, Hannibal Lecter’s the President! Hannibal: ooh look, Hannibal Lecter’s playing Hannibal Lecter, how postmodern! Anyway, in Magic he gives a convincing portrayal of a movie schizophrenic, but a sympathetic depiction of mental illness this isn’t. And his accent, like the man himself, can’t decide between Welsh and American.

Speaking of indecision, as I may or may not have been, there’s some debate about whether Fats actually had a soul and was a separate entity to Corky, or if he was just Corky’s hatstand alter ego. The story waits until the last few minutes to decide, and it probably made the right choice because a sentient homunculus would have been a step too far down the ludicrous path for The Incredible Suit. Which, coincidentally, is my mentally troubled other self.

There is one excellent scene, in which Corky fails to prove he can exist without Fats for five minutes - a truly great shot shows Fats taking over with just a simple camera move - but Magic’s only other noteworthy aspect is that it features possibly the least sexy sex scene ever between Hopkins and Ann-Margret, both notoriously shy actors. It looks like they’ve bumped into each other in a corridor and are awkwardly trying to get out of each other’s way. Only naked.

On which queasy note I’ll leave you, with an “average” judgement hanging in the air like an indifferent, dispassionate cauliflower.



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You can read the rest of The Cineastes' reviews of Magic by clicking the links below:

The Third Act

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An Incomprehensible Robot And A Massive Hairdo

Now I’m not one of those people who says, “If I had a time machine I’d go back and do blah blah blah”. Having said that, if I had a time machine I’d go back and nail Shia LaBeouf’s doors and windows shut on the day he was meant to audition for Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, but that’s neither here nor there.

The thing about time travel is it’s a goldmine for telling great stories, as proven by the fact that even a load of slushy old chickery flickery like The Time Traveller’s Wife is surprisingly unterrible because Eric Bana’s lurches through time give it a cerebellum-exercising twist. In fact the films that focus on the effects and possibilities arising from time travel, rather than an FX-heavy display of how it happens, tend to be the better stories.

For, as they say, example: The Time Machine isn’t about time travel, it’s about where we’re going as a species. Back To The Future isn’t really about time travel, it’s about the unbridled horror of meeting your Mum as a teenager and having her drool all over you like a rabid mastiff. And The Terminator just uses time travel to kick start a relentless game of cat and mouse between an incomprehensible robot and a massive hairdo with a small woman underneath.

What’s great about these films is their inherent re-watchability. You simply have to see them more than once because the knowledge of how it all fits together only enhances an already mind-squootling experience. Now there are loads of cracking time travel movies that not enough people have seen, and it’s my duty and my honour to make you aware of a couple of them.

Primer

Just about the lowest-budget time travel movie ever (it cost $7,000), but it doesn’t matter because all the genius is in the story. Two mates build a time machine, try and use it to make a fast buck, but double-reverse-counter-cross each other all over the place until nobody knows where they live or what their name is. The mechanics of their time travelling are so labyrinthine that to explain it would be like turning your brain into spaghetti and noodles and then trying to work out which is which.

Los Cronocrimenes (Timecrimes)

Much less boggling than Primer; it will only turn your brain into spaghetti. One man has the most bonkers afternoon of his life when he spots a naked woman in the woods behind his house and - obviously - goes to investigate, a course of action which will leave him bloody, battered, and with various duplicates of himself mucking about in the space-time continuum causing all sorts of monkey business. One of The Incredible Suit’s best films of 2009.

And so, my duty done, I’m off to Hollywood in my DeLorean with a hammer, some nails and a map of the stars’ homes.

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BUNSFABB Day

It’s Tuesday, which – as we all know – is national Be Unoriginal And Nick Something From Another, Better Blog day. Or BUNSFABB day as I’m really, really hoping it’ll soon be called.

In the spirit of BUNSFABB, therefore, I’m saving you the trouble of reading the Guardian Film Blog, where I found this, and willingly redirecting you to someone else’s site which is much more original and clickworthy than The Incredible Suit. Although in a direct comparison it has to be noted that it doesn’t update every single weekday, a service which would require staggering commitment and dedication, exceptionally commendable effort and utmost respect for the viewers.

Just saying.

So pop over to the “I Can Read Movies” page on flickr and frottle your eyeballs on a shedload of geekgasmic fake book covers based on movies, designed by irritatingly talented genius wizard-boy Mitch Ansara. As if he - or indeed anyone - cares, here are The Incredible Suit’s favourites:

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Nogginboggle

It’s at least twelve minutes since my last post about what the 23rd Bond film, Blood And Thunder (title to be confirmed*) should be like, so I thought I’d allow you another brief peek into my nogginboggle because I know how crucial this is to your wellbeing.

Someone said, at some point, in some place or other (sorry to be so painfully specific), that Q and Miss Moneypenny should return in the next film, having been absent since Die Another Day, in which John Cleese was alright but a bit grumpy as Q and Samantha Bond, as Moneypenny, took part in a colossally misjudged virtual reality sex scene with James Bond which almost single-handedly killed the franchise for the next four years, although it had plenty of help from the INVISIBLE BLOODY CAR!!

Anyway, before we start thinking about a new Q and Moneypenny, can we please get rid of Judi “Dame Judi Dench” Dench as M, preferably in a pre-title sequence in which she’s bumped off by the bad guy (Vincent Cassel, with any luck), thereby setting Bond off on revenge and immediately putting him at odds with the new M. Speaking of which…

The new M should be a man. An old bugger who Bond immediately dislikes but grows to respect and admire over the course of the film, so that by the time the credits roll you believe he’d actually die for him. A bit like how you lot feel about The Incredible Suit. That’s the M of the books, and that’s what Daniel Craig’s Bond needs.

M needs to be played by a recognisable actor who looks like a scary headmaster, and should be sufficiently old and weatherbeaten, but not so ancient that he might cark it before the 24th film. The Incredible Suit’s shortlist is (click the pic to embigulise):

Having carefully studied their mugs, I think I’d have to plump for Bernard Hill, because he has the face of a salty old sea dog who hates everybody, or David Warner, who looks like he might fire lightning from his fingertips if a minion ever dared to question his orders. Which is in fact what he did in Time Bandits, so at least he’s got that on his CV.

Next week I’ll bleat like an attention-seeking lamb about who should play Q and Miss Moneypenny, and I’ll start my campaign to get her renamed Miss Funnyfanny, like in the woefully unhilarious ‘Basildon Bond’ sketches from The Russ Abbot Show. If you genuinely find this funny I will personally pay for your psychiatric treatment:



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*i.e. I made it up.

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Realistic Intestines

It’s my birthday soon, viewers. I’ve been struggling to think what I want, but the search is officially over. Not only is this the only thing I want for my birthday, it’s the only thing I want full stop. If I had this I’d burn all my other possessions. It’s all they deserve for being so utterly inferior to this truly, truly awesome product. By far its most fantastic feature is its realistic intestines.

Thanks to thinkgeek.com for being the second greatest website in the world.

Tauntaun Sleeping Bag

If you’re looking at this thinking: “That’s it. The Incredible Suit has finally started coming apart at the seams”, you’re probably unfamiliar with The Empire Strikes Back, one of only 15 pure and perfect films ever made. Firstly: you poor, poor wretch. Secondly:

And while we’re in a Star Wars frame of mind, and seeing as it’s Friday, here’s something so unspeakably brilliant that you’ll start to hate weekends because The Incredible Suit isn’t there to pump Friday goodness directly into your happysockets:



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Nipple-Twistingly Insane Camera Moves

Watch this. It’s brilliant.

Good news, everyone! Martin Scorsese is making an unashamedly audience-friendly popcorn thriller. I’m excited about that even though the last time he did it the result was The Departed, which deserved its Oscars about as much as The Incredible Suit deserves to be awarded ‘Best Russian Dumpling Recipe of the Year’.

Much has been made over Marty’s inability to win an Oscar until The Departed, which made that win a clangingly hollow one, as it was startlingly average. If I was him I would have shoved the award firmly up the Academy’s collective poopchute and asked that it only be returned when the words “Whoops, in 1991 we meant GoodFellas, not Dances With Wolves, silly us!” had been engraved on it. And it had been thoroughly cleaned and sterilised.

In actual fact it has been scientifically proven in a poll carried out exclusively for The Incredible Suit, by The Incredible Suit, of The Incredible Suit, that Martin Marcantonio Luciano Scorsese hasn’t actually made a great film since GoodFellas, so each new one carries the weight of expectation around its shoulders like a rucksack full of photocopiers.

Anyway, Shutter Island looks like it might be a cracking psychological / supernatural nuttyfest, even though it does star Leonardo DiCaprio and his big, constipated face. Somebody get that man a laxative mint before he bursts! At the very least it’ll look lovely and have some nipple-twistingly insane camera moves, which Marty does so well.

The infuriating thing about Shutter Island is that it was supposed to be released this week, but has been unceremoniously booted back to February because, according to Paramount CEO Brad Bigbucks: “Our 2009 slate was greenlit in a very different economic climate and as a result we must remain flexible and willing to recalibrate and adapt to a changing environment.”

I haven’t got the faintest idea what that means but I’m remaining philosophical because Up and Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee (the irony!) are both released this week, and if I’d had to squeeze Shutter Island in as well I would have had to move in to the cinema and they don’t like it when I do that. Something about how going to the bathroom before I get dressed upsets the customers.

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Silence, Pipsqueak!

The Earth stopped rotating for a brief moment earlier today when this newsparp was uncorked: there’s going to be a new National Lampoon’s Vacation movie.

Remember the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies? Not very good were they? There were about four of them and some more that were made for TV (that’s how good they were), and were a showcase for the great Chevy Chase to hide his comedy talent behind a big wall made of humourless bricks, held together with papier mache made from old Christmas cracker jokes and Russ Abbot's saliva.

The hilarity-free premise is that the new films will centre on Chase’s character’s son Rusty Griswold, and Empire reports that “there will reportedly be "room" for Chase and his screen wife Beverly D'Angelo to appear as the Griswold grandparents.” I’m not sure why the word ‘room’ is in quotes; perhaps it’s a get-out clause whereby they can later say “when we said ‘room’, we obviously meant ‘absolutely no chance in Hell.’”

So how does a non-idea like this come about? Well, you may be surprised to hear that The Incredible Suit has eyes and ears all over the movie industry, and I can exclusively bring you the transcript of the very meeting in which this winnit of an idea was untangled from the bum hairs of Hollywood:

An impoverished screenwriter enters the office of a studio bignob, and is forced to spend the duration of the meeting on his knees. He is forbidden from looking the bignob in the eye (if you’ll forgive the expression).

Screenwriter: “Please sir, I’ve cobbled together a script for a comedy. It’s a bit like those National Lampoon’s Vacation films, only not as good. In fact it’s rubbish.”

Bignob: “Silence, pipsqueak! Leave it to me, we’ll slap the National Lampoon name on it, offer Chevy Chase a one-scene cameo – he’ll take anything these days – and people will flock to see it like idiot sheep attending an idiot sheep convention!”

Screenwriter: “Oh, sir, what a splendid idea! It’ll make a fortune and I can finally buy some shoes!”

Bignob: “Silence, pipsqueak! I’ll be the one trousering the cash, thankyou! Now bugger off back to your one-room bedsit with the bucket-toilet. Your rats must need feeding.”

And with that the screenwriter shuffles backwards on his knees out of the office, keeping his head bowed. As he is ejected onto the street by a burly security guard, a single tear falls from his filthy face onto his bare foot. It’s the only wash he can afford.

So, when the new National Lampoon’s Vacation movie comes out, do make sure you go and see it, for your hard-earned cash will keep the wheels of Hollywood greased and turning so that more films of this quality can be made. Hooray!

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SHEER STAGGERING EXTREMENESS!!!

Next year’s SUMMER BLOCKBUSTER season includes EPIC ACTION in the EXPLOSIVE THE A-TEAM, with THRILLS, EXCITEMENT and ADVENTURE as four HARDENED RENEGADES ON THE RUN from the military FIGHT for justice and BLOW STUFF UP at EAR-SPLITTING VOLUME!!!

With AWESOME STUNTS, EXHILARATING CHASES and EYE-POPPING AMAZITUDE in every frame, you’ll be BLOWN AWAY by this BREATHTAKING EXTRAVAGASM!!!

Just leaked onto the internet is this INCREDIBLE shot of the A-Team IN FULL EFFECT!!! Be careful your EYES don’t BURST with the SHEER STAGGERING EXTREMENESS contained within!!!

Left to right: MARTIAL ARTIST and ULTIMATE FIGHTING CHAMPION Quinton “RAMPAGE” Jackson as B.A. “BAD ATTITUDE” BARACUS!!!

LEGENDARY HARD MAN and JEDI KNIGHT Liam Neeson as JOHN “HANNIBAL” SMITH!!!

District 9’s HOT NEW STAR Sharlto Copley as HOWLIN’ MAD MURDOCK!!!

And HOLLYWOOD HEARTTHROB Bradley Cooper as TEMPLETON “FACEMAN” PECK!!!






Wait for it...







Here it comes...

WOO HOOOOO!!!!

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Dawson's Creek Fridge Magnet

Yesterday I went to a car boot sale with three other people, one of whom suggested a competition: whoever could buy the best movie-related item for 50 pence or less would win.

I bought this for 20 pence:

Which pretty much screams Gorillas In The Mist, I think you'll agree. Apart from the mist, obviously. Also I think they might be chimpanzees rather than gorillas, but you get the idea. However I was beaten by a Dawson's Creek fridge magnet.

How does something like that happen?

I also bought this LP for a pound:

It wasn't worth it.

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Incredibly Witty And Incisive

Aaaaaaaaages ago, I made an incredibly witty and incisive post about the misery and grief caused by unnecessary remakes. You can click here to read it, but if the thought of reading a whole other post of this drivel fills you with unremitting dread, I basically suggested that remakes are being made so soon after the original these days that it’s only a matter of time before the remake is made first, and the original, better version made later. It makes more sense in the old post, I promise*.

Anyway it turns out, not for the first time, that I was absolutely right. In fact there have already been dreadful ‘retro-makes’ of several classic modern movies, as I discovered browsing YouTube recently when I was supposed to be doing something more productive, like the job I’m paid for.

So here, for your Friday viewing pleasure, are trailers for retro-makes (they’re called pre-makes on YouTube, which I grudgingly admit is cleverer) of two 1980s movies of distinction. Do enjoy them now won’t you!





Thanks to whoiseyevan for the videos!

*Promise not legally binding

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A Week-Old Potato Peeling

Youse guyses have well and truly soiled Patrick Swayze’s memory by ditching his Orange ad in favour of John Cleese’s as the least irritating, like, ever. I hope you’re happy. Incidentally word reaches The Incredible Suit from the mysterious ‘Duncan S’ of a new Orange cackommercial featuring Sigourney Weaver apparently “playing a snake queen in a movie that’s only going to be shown in Spain”, which sounds like the funniest thing I’ve ever heard ever.

In unrelated twaddlism, yesterday I proposed Blood And Thunder as the title of the new James Bond film, which was almost certainly an exercise in pointlessness if ever there was one. But The Incredible Suit exists only to pleasure its viewers, so tell me: what do you think of Blood And Thunder as a Bond title? Does it make you want to soar over the rooftops in unbridled joy, or does it make you weep uncontrollably until your very being shrivels up like a week-old potato peeling? Or, most likely, do you just not care? Vote now! Or go out and live your life. Either is fine with me.

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Blood And Thunder

The regular viewer of The Incredible Suit (Mrs Incredible Suit) will by now be painfully aware of my increasingly frightening obsession with James Bond, and in particular my illogical and virtually insane assumption that ruminating on who might perform the theme song (Muse), who might play the villain (Vincent Cassel) and so on will have even the most imperceptible effect on the actual finished product.

And so it is with those viewers - sorry, that viewer - in mind that I present today’s post. I’ve had a good long cogitate, and yes I enjoyed it very much thank you, and I can now reveal the title of the 23rd James Bond film, if it was made in a world in which The Incredible Suit had even the slightest influence on anything.

I’m calling it Blood And Thunder, which is a fricking magnificent title if you ask me, and you have because you entered into a contract to do so by opening this web page. More fool you. But seriously, imagine Muse belting that out at a bajillion decibels. Astonishing.

Blood And Thunder is the title of a chapter from Ian Fleming’s novel “You Only Live Twice”, and I think it’s appropriate to keep to something Fleming created, even if it’s only the title, because it’s respectful to do so. Also it sounds like all bloody hell might break loose which can only result in ten sacks of awesome. As a brief and incongruous cultural aside, you may also be interested to know that Lord Byron used the phrase in his poem Don Juan, the obvious parallel being that Mr Juan, like Mr Bond, is a dirty old womaniser*.

There is, however, potential for Blood And Thunder (the movie) to stink like a barrel of rotten armpits because so many “people” (it would be rude to call them idiot holes) think the last two Bond films were “too serious” that there’s every danger we’ll see Daniel Craig farting about in space dressed as a clown, in which case I can easily see the title being changed to “Thud And Blunder” by hilarious Daily Mail film critics. So be warned, Bond filmmakers, if that happens there will be blood. And thunder.

Some Bond fans have already created their own fictional posters for the next Bond film using Fleming titles and shoved them onto the interwebs:

However The Incredible Suit, rather than bashing something embarrassingly amateur out while waiting for the kettle to boil, can exclusively reveal the official Blood And Thunder poster here! Now! I know!

*I am blissfully ignorant about, and in fact actively detest, poetry. I almost certainly found this trivia on Wikipedia.

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