Look At This Beautiful Thing

This is a box. Isn't it pretty? As boxes go, it's up there with the best of them. What makes it special is that it's called The Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Music Box, and here are some of the things in it:

That right there is sixteen CDs, including expanded and remastered versions of the thirteen scores Danny Elfman has done for Tim Burton films, as well as music Elfman's done for TV, demos, rarities, obscurities and Christ knows what else. The covers were designed by Tim Burton; have a look at these beauties:

Also included in the box is a DVD of Elfman and Burton having a nice chat, a 250 page hardback book chronicling their partnership and a USB flash drive with the entire contents of the box on it in mp3 format. The only thing missing from the box is your very own Helena Bonham Carter.

I mention all this not as free advertising, although it obviously is, but because I don't think I've ever lusted after a piece of film merchandise as much as I am doing right now over this. It's just beautiful. Tim Burton's films might be hit and miss but Danny Elfman's music is amazagoggling, even if most of it sounds exactly the same. And this box would take about a year of my life away as I pored over every note, every word, every frame, every picture.

Which is where the bad news happens. There are only 1,000 of these babies and each one is a sphincter-tightening 500 dollars plus shipping and handling, which is another fart-incarcerating 42 dollars. That's $542, or about £340. And I don't think I'm going to have much luck requesting a "review" copy, so you're just going to have to buy it for me. I calculate that if every reader of The Incredible Suit chips in it'll only cost £170 each, which seems reasonable to me.

While I wait for it to be delivered I'm just going to drool over the website for a bit longer. Feel free to join me, just mind where your own drool lands.



Er, wait a minute... they've put extraneous apostrophes in 'CDs' and 'MP3s' in that video? Forget it then, I'm not interested. Amateurs.

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Alice In Wonderland

So I saw Alice In Wonderland. It was alright.

Here's how I reached that earth shattering verdict:

I liked the plethora, nay the cornucopia, of well-realised, totally mentile characters. HelBo and her spectacularly massive noggin were a joy to behold. Tweedledum and Tweedledee were also great, so well done to Matt Lucas and Matt Lucas. I also liked Mia Wasikowska as Alice, especially in that suit of armour. I don't know why but I found that a surprisingly pleasant sight.

I didn't like The Mad Hatter though. He kept slipping into a Scottish accent for no clear reason except that he's mad, and it got on my wick very quickly. Also, I've said it before but animated characters voiced by famous actors is massively distracting. Alan Rickman and Stephen Fry are Alan Rickman and Stephen Fry, even if they look like a blue caterpillar and a floating cat respectively. And I spent the first half of the film trying to place the mouse's voice, and when I realised it was Barbara Windsor I spent the second half waiting for it to scream "GERRAAAATAMOIPAAAB!!"

The whole film doesn't quite settle down and hang together properly for some reason. I never felt part of that universe and couldn't get emotionally attached to any of the characters (unless they were wearing a suit of armour). As a result I had no interest in the final battle, the outcome of which was foretold in the first 20 minutes by some nondescript prophecy. And where was the Tim Burtony gothic darkness? It used to be that 'A Tim Burton Film' meant massive literal and textual contrasts of light and dark; now it means 'starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter'.

Anyway, none of that was awful, it just meant that it was the very definition of 'alright'.

Some bonus thoughts:

• Alice In Wonderland challenges Avatar for worst and most inappropriate end credits song. How is Avril Lavigne still getting work?
• Renowned crackpot Crispin Glover, in a film full of nutcases and oddballs, is remarkably normal in this. Surprising when you take this into account, which was brought to my attention by The Incredible Suit viewer Adam Barnard:

I'll leave you to gather your jaws up off the floor while I continue to sulk in a corner about how comprehensively average 2010 is turning out to be.

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A Big Pair Of Funbags With Cherries On Top

Well if there’s one thing that Movie Santa delved deep into his sack for over Christmas, it’s a sleighload of trailers for filmy delights we can look forward to, or look forward to ignoring, over 2010. Let’s have a look at some of them together, shall we?

Clash Of The Titans

Everything inside me tells me this is going to be so awful that I’d rather have carnal relations with Medusa, but this trailer’s quite good isn’t it? I can’t be doing with all that rock music, and I think they’ve blown it by showing the Kraken, but this looks like silly fabness on toast to me.

Iron Man 2

I can take or leave the first one, but Iron Man 2, or Iron 2 Man as it appears to be called at the end of the trailer, looks like it might be taking things a bit more seriously. Let’s hope it’s more Spider-Man 2 than The Dark Knight, eh? Oooh, controversial.

Robin Hood

It’s Gladiator 2, set in the East Midlands! Groovy. I can’t bear Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott doesn’t do it for me any more, but I’ll go and see this because you have to go and see a new Ridders film, it’s the law. Rubbish trailer though.

Alice In Wonderland

New Tim Burton films must also be seen by law despite their decreasing quality levels, although this one actually looks quite spectacular. In a hallucinogenic acid trip kind of way. I imagine.

Knight & Day

Cruise and Diaz are slowly edging away from ‘must-see’ to ‘barely tolerable’, but this looks like a big pair of funbags with cherries on top. And no, I’m not referring to Cameron Diaz’s hooters.

Cop Out

I don’t know what in the name of John McClane is going on here. Bruce Willis appears to have regressed to Hudson Hawk levels of comedy, and that other guy, who seems to be called Tracy, is about as funny as medieval methods of haemorrhoid removal. Has Kevin Smith made a good film since Clerks? No.

Hot Tub Time Machine

John Cusack! Time travel! The 1980s! Chevy Chase! What’s not to love? Nothing, that’s what. Best film of 2010. That’s a cast-iron The Incredible Suit guarantee.

Inception

OK, so obviously this is clearly going to be the best film of 2010. I never said the Hot Tub Time Machine guarantee was cast iron, did I? I did? Oh. Well forget it. Inception is going to be a mind-blowing cake with brain-frazzling icing and hundreds and thousands made of tiny shards of holy crap that's amazingness. That’s a cast-iron The Incredible Suit guarantee.

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Les Petits Bastardes

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. September’s film is L’Enfance Nue, directed by Maurice Pialat in 1968.

The lovely folks at LoveFilm failed to send me a copy of L’Enfance Nue in time, so this article is based entirely, and rather fatuously, on the poster and trailer for the film. It might be best to watch the trailer before reading any further, otherwise this post is going to make even less sense than all my others. And that’s saying something.

***WARNING: THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE CONTAINS MASSIVE FACTUAL INACCURACIES***

If you were to base your opinion of L’Enfance Nue entirely on its poster, you may believe it to be about two boys; one who’s incredibly smug because he’s stolen his grandad’s war medals, and another who intends to wipe that silly grin off his face by lobbing a Twix bar at him. Only one Twix bar, mind – the other he’s saving to give to a girl in exchange for a glimpse of her jumper bumpers.

However, having closely studied the trailer, it’s clear that medal theft and justice by confectionery-hurling is but one small aspect of this complex work of art.

A young scallywag – let’s call him Pierre – has got himself involved with a rum crowd of tinkers who force him to drop a cat down a stairwell as part of an initiation ceremony to their gang, Les Petits Bastardes. But all Pierre wants is to act out scenes from his favourite movies. He takes a girl to the countryside to educate her about the finer points of Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd and its throat-slashing fun, but she’s unimpressed. In fact she slaps Pierre before falling over for no apparent reason.

After overhearing an adult conversation about how great Forrest Gump was, Pierre attempts to run across France in an attempt to emulate the legendary simpleton. When he reaches his destination he celebrates by kicking a door down in the style of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, but he’s captured by grown-ups and plonked on the next train back to wherever he came from. Probably Paris.

On the journey he thinks about all the great movies that have featured trains, such as Strangers On A Train, North By Northwest and From Russia With Love. Pierre even attempts to recreate the famous James Bond / Red Grant fight on the Orient Express by paying a bigger boy to whack him across the chops with a pair of dirty underpants.

Back at school, Pierre is given a small child in an orange turtle neck to look after. Tragically the child reminds Pierre of Steve Buscemi’s character from Fargo, and Pierre promptly feeds the boy into a woodchipper (not shown in the trailer). The End.

The moral of the story is a universal one: Never trust LoveFilm to get a DVD to you on time.

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You can read the rest of The Cineastes’ reviews of L'Enfance Nue by clicking their links below:

Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second

The Bronze

Trouser-Browning Terror

Glorified Hovis salesman Ridley Scott is apparently preparing a prequel to his masterpiece, Alien. As you know, Alien is a completely perfect film, which clamped itself to the face of moviedom, shoved a tentacle down its throat and left a little something in its belly, which burst forth from the very ribcage of cinema in the shape of Aliens, another completely perfect film.

Aliens then went on to do a big sloppy poo on the lounge carpet, which appeared to be called Alien Cubed, and that poo had a little worm living in it which became Alien Resurrection, but we do not speak of such things here at The Incredible Suit.

Having put you off your lunch, let me get on with this prequel nonsense. Much as I love Alien, Ridley Scott is one of those directors – like Tim Burton and Martin Scorsese – whose films I blindly look forward to and hope will be fantastic, despite knowing full well that they frequently turn out to be a bit cack. Blade Runner? Not bad, but hardly the second coming it’s made out to be. Gladiator? Overrated. Hannibal? I’d rather eat my own brains.

So I’m afraid I can’t get excited about an Alien prequel. If it absolutely must be made (it mustn’t) then I suppose Scott’s the man to do it (or James Cameron), but I can’t see how it’ll work. Alien and Aliens succeed because we identify with the humans and share their trouser-browning terror at the prospect of an unsolicited trepanning at the hands of a vicious space beastie. But for a prequel to work it would have to show how the Aliens got involved with the ‘Space Jockey’, the fossilized, horribly violated creature we see near the beginning of Alien in the derelict spacecraft. Personally I’d rather not know; I can make up my own backstory for him. Maybe he was an intergalactic pizza delivery boy who turned up at the Aliens’ house 45 minutes late with the wrong topping and forgot the garlic bread, in which case he got everything he deserved.

My point is, the story would require the complete absence of humans to remain plausible, and the only successful movies not to feature any actual, genuine, living, breathing people are the High School Musical films.

There are dozens more obstacles in the way of this project, so if Ridders pulls it off it’ll be a minor miracle. In which case I’ll be only too happy to blog about it and say, “I told you it would be brilliant”, and that’ll be the poster quote you’ll see at bus stops and train stations the world over.

The Incredible Suit's Top 5 Ridley Scott films:
1. Alien
2. Blade Runner
3. Thelma & Louise
4. Er…
5. Hmm.

Of course what I really want to know is: What’s your greatest Ridley Scott film, like, ever? I know, let’s do a poll! Which reminds me, The Breakfast Club was your favourite John Hughes film. You’re wrong. Weird Science is tiptops.

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