Unexpected Audience Member On Question Time

Here's a still from Stanley Kubrick's somewhat overrated satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:

And here's a shot of the audience of last night's Question Time on BBC1:

So that was weird.

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It's Coming...

I got an email on Wednesday that may be the most exciting email anyone ever received ever:

What this basically means is that I can now help justify Tesco's decision to spend a great deal of money advertising an unheard of DVD in the national press, as detailed in tedious length here and here.

As the whole blogosphere must be hanging on The Incredible Suit's every word, desperate to know the verdict on The Marine 2 and what its effect on humanity might be in the aftermath of its straight-to-DVD release, I promise to waste almost no time in watching it and reporting back. Unless I've got something better to do, although I can't imagine what that could possibly be.

Here's the trailer so you've got some idea of how amazing this is going to be:

Note how they're so confident of the film's success that they didn't even need to include Voiceover Man's first sentence. He just kicks off with "BUT NOW... A TRIP TO PARADISE... BECAME A MISSION... ONLY A MARINE COULD HANDLE". You've got to respect that kind of maverick marketing.

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Worful

After watching JJ Abrams' quite amazing Star Trek reboot when it came out last year, I decided to delve into the back catalogue of Treks to see if they were all as rubbish as I remember them being. As it turned out, they weren't, except for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which is the Moonraker, the Alien Vs Predator and the Die Hard 4.0 of Star Trek films all rolled into one cheesy, dripping, sweaty tribble.

Anyway this Trek trek has so far taken nearly a year and I'm up to Part 8: First Contact. I haven't seen any of these Next Generation ones before so I'm boldly going blah blah blah etc etc. Nevertheless I think I can safely say that I've come across the most Wildean piece of dialogue, delivered in the most heartfelt and emotionally powerful manner imaginable, in the entire series.

Take it away Lieutenant Cornishpastyface:



Zing.

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Star Wars Cut Into 473 Little Pieces

Star Wars Uncut is a project in which the popular movie about a young man desperate to fire his torpedoes into his sister's exhaust port has been chopped up into 15-second chunks, which have then been remade by people all over the world with nothing better to do. The result is the movie equivalent of one of those awful charity singles where one idiot after another takes turns to ruin individual lines of perfectly good songs.

Having said that, this might just be the greatest idea in the history of great ideas. Have a wookiee:


Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

I can't help but think that:

• This is going to be exhausting after about four minutes
• 'Star Wars Uncut' is just about the least accurate name it could have been given. 'Star Wars Cut Into 473 Little Pieces' would have been more appropriate.
• I'm slightly annoyed with myself for not joining in and might have to start 'The Empire Strikes Back Cut Into 496 Little Pieces'.

Star Wars Uncut was due to premiere at some film festival or other in Copenhagen last week but I can't find any mention of it on t'interwebs, which means it was either a complete disaster or it was so utterly gobsmackular that it rendered the entire audience incapable of communicating with the outside world.

Were you there? Have you seen it? Can you speak? Let us know!

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I Think I've Invented A New Regular Feature

Some jokes just never stop being funny.

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Claudia Winkleman's Competition

Seeing as how the BBC has a Political Editor, a Business Editor, an Economics Editor, an Arts Editor, a World Affairs Editor, a Europe Editor, a Middle East Editor, a North America Editor, a Home Affairs Editor, a Sports Editor and probably a Volcanic Ash Cloud Editor by now, isn't it about time they got a James Bond Editor?

Then we wouldn't have to put up with complete interest-vacuums like the one Alison Harper delivered from last weekend's FanFest event at the London Film Museum, in which she wittered with former comedy Bond villain and tragic actor clinging desperately to a single part he played in two films over thirty years ago Richard Kiel, forever known to an uncaring world as Jaws.

You can watch the report on the BBC's website here, although I don't advise that you do because your brains will trickle out of your nostrils at the sheer lack of any enlightening content. Here's a handy transcript of Ms Harper's opening pitch, in which she makes a curious statement:

Now, what exactly does she mean by that? That Jaws is one of her favourite, favourite James Bond films? Because it's not, strictly speaking, actually a Bond film is it? It's a film about a shark that doesn't feature James Bond, even in a cameo role.

Or does she mean that the James Bond film with Jaws in it was one of her favourite favourites? If it is, you'd think she'd be aware that he was in two Bond films, no? She later refers to Moonraker, firmly placing her in a certain subset of Bond "fans", so one can assume she hasn't seen The Spy Who Loved Me.

To be fair to Ms Harper she did have to put up with Kiel looming over her and creepily asking "Shall I bite you on the neck?" and referring to one of the rustiest nails in Roger Moore's Bond coffin by mentioning how, in Moonraker, he "had a girlfriend about your size". Sadly Alison responded to this last abysmal chat-up line by wiggling a lot and squealing "Oooh! That'd be wicked!"

And just watch her face drop as Richard starts banging on about some failure-destined cack he's about to start filming that not even she gives a toss about because he's only ever going to be Jaws and she's feeling slightly violated.

Anyway I don't wish to be mean and I wish Alison Harper all the best in her career, although it would be nice if she'd watch a few more Bond films, preferably some of the good ones.

As for Richard Kiel, good luck with your future career too. Here's the kind of quality you need to aim for to relive those golden years:



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Jessica Biel In The A-Team Causes Underpant Trauma

More new photos have been released from The A-Team, which I'm beginning to feel like I've already seen every single frame of before it's anywhere near being released.

This is my favourite so far:

I think it's fair to say that if I found myself staring down the barrel of a gun wielded by Jessica Biel in a short, midnight blue PVC raincoat, I would probably crap out an Uzi too.

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How To Successfully Remake The Karate Kid For A New Generation In Five Easy Steps

1. Take one film about a bored teenager who discovers love and, with the help of a substitute parent, finds meaning and purpose in life thanks to an occasionally brutal sport, soundtracked by contemporary pop songs and containing a healthy dollop of cheese.

2. Remove the teenage boy and replace him with a teenage girl.

3. Remove the old codger father-figure and replace him with five mother-figures.

4. Add approximately twenty pairs of roller skates.

5. Hey presto! You have a new film about a bored teenager who discovers love and, with the help of substitute parents, finds meaning and purpose in life thanks to an occasionally brutal sport, soundtracked by contemporary pop songs and containing a healthy dollop of cheese.

 

Further Whip It observations:

• Juliette Lewis is now well on the way to becoming a real, actual man
• Andrew "Brother Of Owen And Luke" Wilson is now officially the Wilson brother the others have to beat
• Drew Barrymore is the greatest woman to ever simultaneously wear roller skates and direct a film
• Whip It is very good. Like, 7 out of 10 good

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Three Reasons To See The Lodger, Scored Live By Minima, For Free

1. It's The Lodger.

The Lodger is completely brilliant.

2. It's scored live by Minima.

Minima are completely brilliant.

3. It's free.

Free is completely brilliant.

The Lodger, scored live by Minima, is being screened at the East End Film Festival in London's Spitalfields Market this Saturday, 24th April at 8pm. It's free.

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Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Marine 2 But Were Afraid To Ask

Following Monday's post about the DVD event of the millennium, the release of The Marine 2, starring Ted DiBiase Jr, many of you* have been in touch desperate to know more about the film that Tesco happily shelled out a hefty chunk of their marketing budget for with a quarter-page ad in a national newspaper. How a sequel to the 2006 hit The Marine could just pass you by as if it was some utterly inconsequential straight-to-DVD cacksplosion is beyond me, but if Tesco are getting behind it with such gusto then it must be a quite significant movie, surely?

So just for you, here are eight pertinent facts about the movie I'm calling "the next Avatar":

1. It's ranked 1,766 in Amazon's bestselling DVDs, just 1,751 places below Alvin And The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

2. There are two glowing reviews on Amazon. One includes the following: "There are not really any negatives' for this movie ... Its never going to win an Oscar, the acting is not out of this world and the plot is nothing special."

3. Here's the other review - a five-starrer, no less:

4. The bad guy is played by an actor who Amazon helpfully point out is "probably best known as Boba Fett in the Star Wars prequels." They're talking about Temuera Morrison, probably best known as Jango Fett in one Star Wars prequel.

5. It scores 5 out of 10 at the Internet Movie Database, making it 11% better than its prequel. Here are a few sample comments from the IMDb forum:

6. WWE wrestler Ted DiBiase Jr was second choice for the lead role, taking over when WWE wrestler Randy Orton broke his collarbone. Possibly deliberately.

7. According to the IMDb Parents Guide, it's pretty hardcore:

8. The Incredible Suit hasn't seen it so is in no position to comment on its quality, or complete and total desolation thereof.

*None of you

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Star Wars In Concert: Better Than It Sounds

The other weekend I did my geekly duty and dragged Mrs The Incredible Suit along to The Venue Formerly Known As The Millennium Dome But Which Now Has A Stupid Brand Name I'm Not About To Advertise to see Star Wars in Concert, a performance of some of John Williams' orgasmically amazing music from the films performed by the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra. It was ace.

There's really nothing quite like hearing a full orchestra bashing out film music, and if you've ever owned a soundtrack album or hummed a film theme you really should get yourself along to something like this.

Here are a couple of things what I liked about it:

• Due to The Venue Formerly Known As etc etc's massively optimistic attendance expectations, our £30 seats up in the clouds were bumped up to £100 seats on the floor for an additional cost of nought pence, which was a good job because we'd have been hard pressed to make out Jabba The Hutt if he'd slithered on stage from that distance. Neechawawa!

• They played some arrangements I hadn't heard before, which is a bonus when you know each soundtrack album backwards. They even played that daft jazz number from the cantina scene, which I've never seen a live orchestra do before. Thank the maker!

• There were loads of kids there, which is normally the kind of thing that would drive me up the wall but I'm all for brainwashing the little buggers into an appreciation of film scores, especially performed live. Forteeny!

Here are a couple of things what I disliked about it:

• C3P0 actor Anthony Daniels kept striding on stage between each number being even more camp than C3P0, which was only to be expected because he whores himself out so much these days that he'd probably turn up at your house and press play on your Star Wars DVD if you chucked him a few bob. How wude! 

• There was a mind-bogglingly huge screen looming over the orchestra showing clips from the films as the music played, which was all very well but I'd gone to watch the guys playing the instruments, not clips I've seen more often than my own reflection. All too briefly we were treated to some swooping shots of the orchestra on the screen, and those were the best moments for me. When you can see the strings of a violin vibrating in high definition three storeys high you really start to appreciate just how good this stuff is. Poodu!

Star Wars In Concert is playing until July, but only in the US. Which means you've probably missed your chance, unless you're that one American guy who reads The Incredible Suit.

 

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Bond 23: In Memoriam

If you were as inconsolably browned off as I was about this morning's Bond bombshell, why not postpone self-harming for a few minutes by reminding yourself of all the great ideas I had for the next movie, which for some reason Ms Broccoli and Mr Wilson are still to respond to:

What to call it

Who to cast as M

Who to cast as Q

Who to cast as Moneypenny

Who should do the theme song

If anyone can lend me $4 billion to buy MGM we could get this sucker made tomorrow. Who's with me?

Hello?

Oh.

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Bugger.

You may have thought it unlikely that a titanic cloud of ash and ice could close the entire airspace of the United Kingdom for the best part of a week. You may have found it improbable that the Liberal Democrats could be serious contenders in the forthcoming general election. You might even have scoffed at the suggestion that Tesco would fork out for a quarter-page advert in a national newspaper for a DVD of a film that nobody knows anything about.

But what The Incredible Suit finds totally and utterly incomprehensible beyond all belief is that a film studio like MGM could be so catastrophically inept with its finances that it couldn't pay for another instalment of its biggest moneyspinning franchise, like, ever, resulting in the following press release:

It's difficult to put how I feel about this into words, so for now this will have to do.

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All This And Double Clubcard Points Too

Remember how, during the First World War, thousands of people had to queue for days to get a loaf of bread in Russia? Well add to that the lines of people who stood waiting for that gargantuan Primark store to open on London's Oxford Street, double it, add a couple more for good luck, and you'll have some idea of what it was like at every Tesco in the land this morning after this advert appeared in this morning's papers:

And at the bargain price of £11.97 you'd be mad not to.

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Oktapodi

Have you noticed how The Incredible Suit is swiftly becoming a site that can't be arsed with original content and just embeds fantastic short films from the YouTubes?

No?

Good.



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April's BIG MOVIES: The Joneses & The Heavy. No, Me Neither

You know it's the worst year for movies, like, ever when posters for films due for imminent release that you've never heard of appear in tube stations. I'm on Twitter, I read all those websites that fall over each other to bring me scoops, I've got my virtual ear to the virtual ground, so where the hell did these come from?

Actually never mind. They both look awful. When's Inception out?

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The Bravest Actor In The History Of Cinema

Who would you say is the bravest actor in the history of cinema?

Is it Robert De Niro, who bravely gained 60 pounds to play lardy punchbag Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, valiantly had his teeth ground down for Cape Fear and selflessly agreed to star in The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle?

Is it Christian Bale, who courageously ate real worms during the filming of Rescue Dawn, heroically lost 63 pounds for The Machinist and willingly agreed to be in a film directed by McG?

Or is it Sylvester Stallone, who has fearlessly endured the pain of a broken neck filming The Expendables, the agony of a compressed heart caused by a good whack from Dolph Lundgren during Rocky IV and the derision of the entire world for playing a helmet-free Judge Dredd?

Nope. It's Ilan Mitchell-Smith, who, at the age of 15, wore a ludicrously cropped t-shirt and a pair of barely visible pants in Weird Science.

As if that wasn't plucky enough, Mitchell-Smith gave up acting shortly afterwards, ensuring that it would be the image for which he would always be remembered, and went into teaching, the bravest move in the world for someone world-famous for flouncing about in ladies' skimpies.

All this and he still got billed below Anthony Michael Hall and Kelly LeBrock.

Ilan Mitchell-Smith, The Incredible Suit salutes you. You are officially the bravest actor in the history of cinema.

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This Just In: Former Child Actors Look Different Now

I recently saw a trailer for The Runaways, starring Kristen Stewart as self-proclaimed lover of rock 'n' roll and frequent requester of putting another dime in the jukebox baby Joan Jett, and Dakota Fanning as The Other One. What struck me more than anything was that an adorable moppet like Dakota Fanning, who I'm sure I only recently saw being carried away by aliens in War Of The Worlds, is now carrying on in all sorts of grown-up ways that surely shouldn't be allowed.

Well, a brief Wikipedia visit told me that she's actually 16 now, roughly the same age as The Other One from The Runaways was, so I suppose I shouldn't grumble and I should stop being a grumpy old fartbox.

Still, it got me thinking about all the other adorable moppets we've seen in the movies over the years, and how some of them disappeared from our screens to grow up in private like normal people, and I thought "I bet if I knew what those little cuties look like now, it would make me feel so depressingly old that I would probably start complaining about how weird the staff of Top Man look these days."

And guess what? I was right. But I'll be buggered if I'm going to feel old by myself so I thought I'd make you feel old too:

Dakota Fanning, the adorable moppet from War Of The Worlds (now 16)

Joseph Mazzello, the adorable moppet from Jurassic Park (now 26)

Ariana Richards, the other adorable moppet from Jurassic Park (now 30)

Haley Joel Osment, the adorable moppet from The Sixth Sense (now 21)

Edward Furlong, the adorable moppet from Terminator 2 (now 32)

Henry Thomas, the adorable moppet from E.T. (now 38. 38!!)

Ke Huy Quan, the adorable moppet from Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom (also 38, Jesus)

Carrie Henn, the adorable moppet from Aliens (now 33)

Danny Lloyd, the adorable moppet from The Shining (now 37)

If this was a competition I think it's fair to say that Ariana Richards is the winner.

It occurs to me that this post is just 'Where Are They Now?' but without the useful information about where they are now. If any of these former adorable moppets are reading, feel free to get in touch and let us know what you're up to these days, eh?

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The Incredible Suit Goes All Paxman

I booked tickets recently for a preview of over-punctuated crackersplosion The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans at London's ICA, starring Nicolas Cage's latest hairpiece.



What's arguably more interesting about the screening than Cage's syrup is the fact that it's being arranged by Ultra Culture, the second best movie blog on the internets. At the risk of driving you all away, Ultra Culture really is quite good, and its creator Charlie Lyne irritatingly young and talented.

You may ask what a blog thinks it's doing holding a preview screening, why that screening should be a Nicolas Cage film, what other excitement might occur at the event and if this is a sign of the future of bloggery. If so that's a remarkable coincidence because, in a first for The Incredible Suit, I actually conducted an 'interview' with Charlie and asked him those very things in the style of Jeremy Paxman, which I carried through right to the final question.

What the hell are you playing at? Whoever heard of a blog hosting a preview screening?
I think Ain't It Cool do similar stuff in the States, but this will be significantly better than that because we won't be showing X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I hope. It wouldn't be happening at all if it wasn't for the amazingly undervalued ICA.

Why Bad Lieutenant? It's got Nicolas Cage in it ferchrissakes.
What the hell are you implying? Sir Nicolas of Cage is one of the greatest actors currently living. It sounds like I'm being ironic but I'm very serious about this: he's a genius. And Bad Lieutenant is absolutely phenomenal.

What other activities can we expect to see? Are you organising a game of Pin The Toupee On The Nicolas Cage?
It's all a bit hush-hush (i.e. I haven't thought of most of them) but we have to find the delicate balance between things that are enjoyable and things that people dub 'forced fun'. It'll all have to be very optional. But I'm definitely going to wear an Iguana costume.

Is this the next step on the evolutionary ladder for blogs?
It wouldn't work for everything, but there's definitely something cool about transitioning it to the real world. You can have a look at your audience for a start.

That sounds horrific. What's next in the Ultra Culture plan for world domination?
What would be great is a very big pile of cash. So I'd like to sell out to a major distributor as quickly as humanly possible. You'll know it's happened if I start raving about Dear John next week.

What's your favourite colour?
#b9e344, obv.

The screening is on Wednesday 5th May at 8pm, and tickets may still be available from the ICA on 020 7930 3647. It's 8 quid if you mention Ultra Culture; you can mention The Incredible Suit too if you like but you'll be met with confused silence.

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