Temporarily Named Saturday Playlist #3: Batman

Despite the continuing lack of a snappy name and a says-it-all logo, the temporarily-titled Saturday Playlist rumbles on in a persistent attempt to do things to your earholes that other blogs can only dream of.

This week's theme looks like this:

...and features the work of Neal Hefti (little-known composer of the TV series theme), Danny Elfman, Shirley Walker, Elliot Goldenthal, Christopher Drake, Robert J Kral, Kevin Manthei, Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, each of whom bring a different but entirely appropriate bat-sound to their respective incarnations of the pointy-eared grumpychops.

So pull on a pair of black tights, growl like a laryngitic lion and hang around with a skimpily-dressed boy half your age while these fine tunesmiths take you to Gotham City and back in an improbably ostentatious car. Pow!

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO

TEMPORARILY-NAMED

SATURDAY PLAYLIST #3:

BATMAN

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Christopher Nolan's Parting Shots

If there's one thing Christopher Nolan knows well, it's how to finish a film. Not in the sense that his ability to sit through the whole of a motion picture is exemplary, even I can do that. What I mean is that nearly all his films have great endings.

Instead of wrapping everything up neatly in the final act before adding a cosy epilogue just so you know the story's definitely over, Nolan uses his final scenes to take the plot somewhere else entirely. A showboating Shyamalanesque twist is one thing, but Nolan's denouements are so much more than that - either extending the story beyond its own boundaries to the point where it feels like the credits are intruding on the rest of the film, or squirting the whole thing back up its own bottom, forcing you to reappraise everything you've just seen.

So here are six great Christopher Nolan films with six great endings, plus the coffee-flavoured chocolate in the packet of Revels that is Insomnia, which buggers up an otherwise perfectly good hypothesis.

*** Obvious statement: CONTAINS SPOILERS, duh. Including a
little one for Inception, but nothing too fun-destroying.***

Following

It's only in the film's final minute that we discover what the whole plot's been leading up to, and it's a far more devious and sinister double reverse counterbluff than we thought it was. In the final shot the bad guy literally disappears into the crowd and you can't quite believe that's how it's going to end. But it is.

Memento

In a film so back to front, upside down and inside out, Memento's ending isn't even anything as simple as the beginning of the story - in the chronologically re-edited version this shot comes over half an hour in. But it's in this scene that our absent-minded hero does the unthinkable to himself, setting up the action for the preceding two hours and leading up to the very first (literal) shots. And that final line: genius.

Insomnia

As if being a distinctly average thriller and, ironically, a good cure for insomnia wasn't enough, Insomnia is the only one of Nolan's films not to follow the pattern that forms the entire basis of my incisive observations. There will obviously be repercussions from the events of the last scene, but they're pedestrian in comparison to, say, Memento's mind-squootling finale. Bad Nolan.

Batman Begins

It was always Batman Begins' job to set up a sequel, and after seeing what Nolan did with a lesser villain like The Scarecrow, to tease The Joker as the next bat-villain was only ever going to cause uncontrollable fanboy tumescence for three long years. No superhero origin film would be complete without a final shot of a man in tights zooming towards camera, and Batman Begins does its duty in a classic shot that, as you can see, doesn't work as a still at all.

And take note, Marvel - this is how you tee up the next chapter: before the credits.

The Prestige

The final reveal through a room full of drowned Hugh Jackmans reveals the terrifying extent of his character's desperation to be a better magician than Christian Bale's, and is so disturbing that you almost forgive the clichéd scene that precedes it in which Bale shoots Jackman and then explains the whole plot to him in the exact amount of time it takes for him to cark it. Almost.

The Dark Knight

Commissioner Gordon unwillingly sends the entire police force after Batman when he sacrifices himself for the good of Gotham by taking the rap for Harvey Dent's dastardly deeds, and the dark knight goes on the lam for what looks like four more years of geek frustration. In the space of a couple of minutes you realise this superhero is even more heroic than you thought, and you just want to give him a hug. And a Strepsil.

Inception

Everything's wrapped up, Ellen Page has stopped asking silly questions and you can finally stop frowning like Leonardo DiCaprio in Shutter Island. And then, just as you're reaching for your coat and accidentally tipping the remains of your popcorn over your neighbour, Nolan drops that final shot on you. What a bastard.

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The Iron Man 2 Manifesto

Hi! I'm Iron Man. Of all the films coming up in the blockbuster season of 2010, I'm here to tell you why you should watch Iron Man 2 rather than anything else, with my 7-point Iron Manifesto:

1. I pledge to get rid of my friend Rhodey from the first film because he was too interesting and a bit fat. My new Rhodey will be a slimline version who can easily fit into one of my spare suits, will immediately know how to operate the suit even though it took me about an hour of screen time in the first film, and will be entirely devoid of character so as not to show me up.

2. In fact I pledge that all my fellow characters will be as weak as possible so that I'm the only one anybody remembers. I'll waste Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell as rubbish one-dimensional villains, I'll give Scarlett Johansson a figure-hugging suit and one fight scene but nothing else and I promise to use the mighty Samuel L Jackson to turn up, deliver expository dialogue and bugger off again.

3. Despite having the most technologically advanced and downright incredible suit ever made, I pledge to resort to punch-ups in most of my fight scenes. If I do suddenly reveal a very cool laser that you've never seen before as - inexplicably - a last resort, I pledge to explain why I don't just use it all the time by muttering something about how it can only be used once. I also promise not to bore you with why that's the case.

4. I pledge to introduce an irrelevant subplot about how that thing on my chest that keeps me alive is also killing me, and furthermore I pledge to solve this problem with a further pointless subplot about my Dad which will be one of the most ridiculous contrivances in modern cinema.

5. Remember that cute scene from the trailer where Pepper Potts kisses my helmet (fnerk) and I jump out of a plane saying "you complete me"? Well I pledge not to include that in the film. I do, however, pledge to kiss her in a scene that is supposed to carry some emotional weight but is in fact about as emotionally charged as a tin can kissing a stick can be.

6. I pledge to include an obligatory final scene after the credits that means nothing to anyone except the most hardcore Marvel Comics fan.

7. Finally, I pledge to do absolutely nothing for the superhero genre, despite recent envelope-pushers like The Dark Knight and Kick-Ass, and I promise to do it with as vague a story and script as possible so as not to confuse the kiddlywinks.

So that's the Iron Man 2 Manifesto. I hope you'll choose my film as the one to spend a tenner on because we need all the cash we can to parp out another one of these in a couple of years.

Thanks!
Iron Man
x

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Promogasms & Adspasms

Remember when DVDs were introduced? Great days. Here’s a disc, stick it in, there’s a menu, press play and Bob’s your uncle, you’re off and watching something disgusting and a bit phallic plop out of John Hurt’s guts in nauseatingly gross detail and super-squidgy-sloppy-squealy 5.1 digital surround sound. All well and good.

But at some point some Hollywood marketing drone realised there was a small oasis in our lives that wasn’t crammed to bursting with adverts, and as a direct result most DVDs now feature about six days of trailers before you even get to the main menu, and this makes The Incredible Suit very very cross. I have a suspicion that Blu-Ray was introduced because standard DVDs no longer have the capacity for all the promogasms distributors want to force into our faceholes every time we watch a film.

Take the following examples of a few DVDs released in the last twelve months:

The Dark Knight – Four ads before the main menu, one of which is for Warner Brothers’ Blu-Ray range, a pointless exercise if ever there was one. Not only can you not see how much sharper the picture is or spangly the sound is because you’re watching it in standard definition, but the standard definition pictures look chuffing magniferous anyway, so why bother? The Dark Knight also features a trailer for Get Smart, in which Steve Carell is extremely unfunny, only this time in a phone box.

Quantum Of Solace – Three trailers, two studio stings and that bloody anti-piracy thing, which – thanks to hairy genius Adam Buxton – now has lyrics and is finally bearable:



Star Trek – Thankfully only two ads, but both for awful films, GI Joe: Rise Of The Cobra and Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen (known to normal human beings as GI Joe and Transformers 2), the latter of which features Shia LaBeouf uttering the open goal: “Megatron wants what’s in my mind!”

The worst offender, however, is WALL•E, which relentlessly beats you – and, crucially, your children - around the head with so many adspasms it’s a wonder any of you can stand up. Before you can even get close to the menu there’s a generic Disney promo; a short and very rubbish teaser for Up; another futile Blu-Ray con; a trailer for Pinocchio, and last but by all means least, an ad for the unspeakably awful-looking and badly dubbed The Secret Of The Magic Gourd. Yes, really. And no, I’ve no idea what a gourd is, but on the evidence presented in this trailer it’s a walking, talking turd.



Now you might like to counter my argument by suggesting that you can skip all this shizzle and just go straight to the main menu, and you’d be right. But that’s not the point. I don’t know what the point is, but that’s not it. If anyone knows what the point is, please send it to me along with several commercials for other points I may be interested in.

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Meh

Following last week’s entirely unshocking news that readers of The Incredible Suit voted Pulp Fiction the greatest Quentin Tarantino film, like, ever, I fully expected you to vote for The Dark Knight as the number one Christopher Nolan movie, if only because I thought you were all as predictable as the quality of Shia LaBeouf’s future career.

However, you proved me to be a cynical, imbecilic bumwit by voting for Memento instead, which was a very splendid thing of you to do, even though any sane cynical, imbecilic bumwit knows the correct answer is Batman Begins. So I phoned Chris, great mates that we are, to give him the good news, and guess what he said? He said, right, get this, “Suit Incredible The of readers, much very thanks!” Geddit? DO YOU GET IT?!!

All right, look, it’s Friday, I’m tired. I couldn’t even think of a good idea for this week’s poll, so to celebrate the awesome averageness of The Hurt Locker (see this post), I’ve randomly chosen five perfect examples of mediocrity that you’ve hopefully seen, and you can vote for the most average of all of them. Not the best, not the worst, just the one that makes you go “meh” with all the enthusiasm of Sean Connery by the time he made Diamonds Are Forever.

Now a while ago I posted a clip from Charlie Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life, which I expect enriched your lives to the point where you thought, “it surely can’t get any better than this. Thanks to The Incredible Suit my life is as perfect as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo”. Well, if that’s the case my work here is done, but because you can never have too much slapstickery, here’s the end of Chaplin’s 1916 short The Pawnshop, in which Charlie gets his head stuck in a double bass. I got my head stuck in a kettle once. It was quite painful but I was in my element.

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Mildly Crackers Weirdery

I’m well aware that this blog is fast becoming little more than an excuse for me to have a geekgasm every time a new trailer is released, but it really isn’t my fault if people keep puking out exciting trailers is it? IS IT?! No. So stop going on about it.

Today’s miniature slice of microtainment comes in the shape of one solitary minute of mildly crackers weirdery from Batman Begins / The Dark Knight director Christopher "Yet to make a bad film, although Insomnia wasn't all that" Nolan. Imagine the trouble he has squeezing all that onto his passport.

His new film, Inception, is probably so called because it’s so far from a cinematic release that it’s practically still at the inception stage. In fact it’s not due to wallop your nearest big screen for 11 months, so don’t get too excited after watching this:



Described in possibly the most pretentious sentence ever written as a "contemporary science fiction tale set within the architecture of the mind", Inception looks to be just as spanky as Nolan’s other non-Batflicks (Insomnia excepted). Memento is endlessly rewatchable thanks to its barking backwards-forwards-backwards structure and The Prestige, despite having a twist you could see from the cinema car park, was also an atmospheric and disturbing winner. Even Leonardo DiCaprio, who’s sporting that expression that looks like he's trying to calculate a complex equation while holding in a potentially violent fart, might not be able to sink this one.

The filming of Inception is so secretive that rumours started flying round that Nolan was actually making a third Batman film, which is so outrageously mental that it could be true. However, this trailer seems to have dispelled that idea… unless it’s all a cunning ruse; an Inception deception, if you will (you won’t), a magic trick as wicked as anything we saw in The Prestige. Whatever, if it wears a cape and growls like a laryngitic lion it’ll be ace, if it frowns a lot and stubbornly refuses to follow a linear plot it’ll still be ace.

Come back to The Incredible Suit soon for more pointless frothing over ludicrously premature blipverts. I know I would! Well… I might.

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Over-Smuggery

In early 2008 my primary contribution to the enhancement of the lives of mankind was a film review slot I had on a local radio station in Hayes, Middlesex. My first feature of the year was an excitable prediction that 2008 was going to be the best year at the movies since the halcyon days of 1989 (Batman, Licence To Kill, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade… I get a tear in my eye and a stirring in my nethers just thinking about it).

Because I am such an unbearable smartarse I called this feature ‘Two Thousand and Great’, and was so pleased with myself that I pulled several muscles in my face due to over-smuggery. However twelve months later my smug muscles had gone into atrophy and my reputation as a grand soothsayer of the future of movies lay in tatters. Of the ten films I confidently predicted to be truly gobsmackular, only one turned out to be so, and that was Cloverfield. The rest were mildly disappointing (The Dark Knight, Quantum Of Solace), heartbreakingly bad (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) or suicide-promptingly abysmal (Jumper, Vantage Point… I won’t even mention 10,000 BC. Oops).

As a result I am no longer welcome within two miles of the Middlesex boundaries and have had to assume a new identity in order to continue peddling movie twaddle without being arrested by the Serious Fraud Office.

So having well and truly learned my lesson and promised never to make such ludicrous and unreliable forecasts ever again, I thought ‘bugger it’ and can now confidently predict that there is a film that will certainly, definitely, undoubtedly be the best of 2009. I bet my remaining Star Wars figures on it and will eat my appendix if I’m wrong.

District 9 is a documentary-style sci-fi drama about aliens living in South Africa and being treated like slaves and third-class citizens by the people, the government and the multi-national corporation using the aliens’ technology for their own nefarious purposes, mwahaha. It’s basically an allegory about human rights and discrimination, but with massive spaceships.

My confidence in this film is based largely on the fact that it looks a bit like Cloverfield, which is surely a better basis than the ‘evidence’ that prompts other fortune tellers to predict the future. I mean, stars, tea leaves, lines on your palm and so on, as if that’s more scientific than a vague rumbling in my guts that indicates a solid gold classic movie on the horizon (or it could indicate something else distinctly less solid on the horizon, but let’s not go there).

So come back in September (and every day in between, obviously) for my no-doubt-glowing review of this awesome filmic event, and I shall look forward to keeping a firm hold on my reputation, my R2-D2 (with retractable sensorscope) and my beloved, but biologically pointless appendix.