Quazkark Farklebrot

Back in July I banged on about District 9 like it was going to be the film that ended war, cured cancer and revoked Shia LaBeouf’s Equity card. Well, it isn’t quite all that, but it is very very good and you should see it as soon as you’ve read this, even if you’re a brain surgeon and you’re in the middle of operating on a patient. Although why you’re on the internet while fixing someone’s head jelly is a mystery. You should be struck off!

Anyway, this is how I described the plot in July and it hasn’t changed since then so I may as well just quote myself: “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.” There’s obviously more to it than that but I don’t want to be Johnny Spoilerfeatures so I won’t blab the rest.

Things that were great:

• There are no stars, just talent. Which means the film stands on its performances and writing, which fortunately are excellent.

• The special effects are seamless. All the aliens are CGI but they don’t scream “Look at me, I’m an expensive effect!” They’re just there, interacting with everything else in what I assume to be a realistic fashion if I knew what aliens living in a slum and wearing pink bras actually looks like.

• The central alien is called Christopher Johnson. He doesn’t look like a Christopher Johnson, he looks like a Quazkark Farklebrot, but the fact that he’s called Christopher Johnson is brilliant.

Things that were not so great:

• It starts off as a mock-documentary but then swerves into “conventional” movie story-telling mode, then keeps changing its mind and swinging back and forth between the two styles, which was a bit distracting to be honest. Must try harder. Cloverfield did it better.

• It goes on a bit and gets a bit silly. But then it’s got aliens in pink bras so I’m not sure if “a bit silly” is a valid criticism.

Anyway District 9 is better than Mesrine: Killer Instinct but not as good as Star Trek, so it slithers in at Number 3 in this year’s Top 5 Films as decreed by The Incredible Suit.

If you’ve watched the trailers a bazillion times but aren’t about to rush out of the door to see the film because you’ve got your hand inside someone’s noggin, you may want to watch director Neill Blomkamp’s short film Alive In Joburg, on which District 9 is based. It’s not as good, obviously, but what do you expect? You guys are so demanding sometimes.

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A Poo In A Teacup

Imagine walking into your bathroom and finding a load of toenail clippings in the sink. Pretty grim, right? But imagine if the sink was the interweb, and the toenails were actually little nuggets of noteworthy movie news. Now you’ve turned a revolting imaginary scenario into one that’s almost worth blogging about. Hooray for you! Well, hooray for me actually, I wrote the thing. All you do is sit there and read it while shovelling chocolate digestives into your face.

Here are the toenails I found in my sink today which I thought share-worthy:

Nicolas Cage won’t star in Green Hornet!
While it’s hardly news to say that somebody isn’t going to be in something, unless it’s “Shia LaBeouf will not star in anything ever again,” it’s always good to know Mr Cage and his wig of the week won’t be in a movie.

I’ve been alternately interested by and apathetic about Green Hornet since it was announced. My thought process went something like this:
Michel Gondry's making a Green Hornet movie: That sounds good. Seth Rogen’s in it: Oh. Not so interested.
Stephen Chow will play Kato: Groovy. Stephen Chow was ace in Kung Fu Hustle.
Stephen Chow won’t play Kato: Oh for heaven’s sake.
Cameron Diaz will be in it: Well that’s slightly better.
Nicolas Cage might be in it: That’s it, I’ve had it with all these Green Hornet shenanigans.
Nicolas Cage won’t be in it: Right, good, but just make the film and stop announcing who isn’t in it! This is becoming tedious.

Alex Garland is writing a new Judge Dredd movie!
I thought I was excited about this but then I realised I was just mildly curious about a new Judge Dredd film. After all a poo in a teacup would be better than the 1995 Sylvester Stallone version. I mean, hello, he takes his helmet off! Wrong, just wrong.

Alex Garland has only actually written half a good movie, The Beach. The rest have been a bit rubbish, so this particular toenail goes in the ‘Wait And See’ cupboard.

The A-Team movie has found its BA Baracus!
Liam Neeson is Hannibal. Bradley Cooper is Face. And now it appears the ludicrously named (although I probably wouldn’t say it to his face) Quinton Ramone “Rampage” Jackson is BA Baracus. I’m still looking forward to the film but I can’t help feeling like the best BA would have been Blighty’s own Matt Lucas:


And the big toenail in the sink is…
The announcement of the programme for the 2009 London Film Festival, on which I am duty-bound to report now that I run an award-winning blog*. There are about 20 films I want to see so it looks like I’ll have to resign from my job for the last fortnight in October. I’m sure they’ll cope without me, all I do is use their facilities to write my blog. Ssshh!

*Blog not actually award-winning

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Reconstituted Pork Content

Time and time again I’m asked the same question, and quite frankly I’ll vomit sausagemeat if I’m asked it again, so I shall attempt to answer it here in the hope that when the next person to ask has wiped regurgitated reconstituted pork “content” from their shirt I can direct them to this post.

So: Who is The Incredible Suit’s favourite Conti? Is it:

a) Actor Tom Conti, from Shirley Valentine and whatnot
b) Composer Bill Conti, creator of musical scores and that, or
c) Crazy Legs Conti, “star” of Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating?

Well, let’s take each of these legends of the silver screen in turn:

Tom Conti is best remembered (by me) as Costas the Greek in Shirley Valentine, which I had to see when I was a sulky teenager because my Mum wanted to see it and it was payback, I suspect, for me making her watch Licence To Kill, which she complained was “very loud”. Although I remember Shirley Valentine being quite good, we both suffered in the end because there was a noisy sex scene in it which you really shouldn’t be made to sit through with your Mum, or with your teenage son for that matter.

So Tom Conti wins points for being a comedy Greek lothario in the one film I remember seeing him in, but loses points for the mentally scarring sex scene.

Bill Conti is probably best known for his music for the Rocky films, and quite rightly. It’s ace. However I know him best for his score for For Your Eyes Only, Roger Moore’s second-least-worst Bond film. It was 1981 and Conti wrote a bonkers score which kept all the wah-wah guitar and funky bass of the ‘70s but shoveled skipfuls of brass in as well, making it painfully unlistenable for some but somehow fresh and exciting for other, deafer types, like me.

So Bill Conti wins points for Rocky and For Your Eyes Only, but loses points for the fact that he composed something like 136 scores and I only know two of them.

Crazy Legs Conti is, according to his website, “an eccentric New York window washer, nude model and sperm donor, and huge fan of the annual July 4th hot dog eating competition.” Evidently he’s made a film about stuffing his face with food. I know little else about him but based on this evidence he appears to be a knob.

So Crazy Legs Conti wins no points for anything and loses points for everything.

Therefore I think I can safely put this matter to rest and avoid any further semi-digested meat expulsions by declaring my favourite Conti to be Bill, the fella what did that music that time. Now please stop asking.

This here videclip is not how Bill Conti scored For Your Eyes Only, but it would have been if Roger Moore had his way. I imagine.
Thanks to green14m for the video!

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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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Crackers Hairpieces And Improbable Moustaches

If there’s one thing the French do well, it’s knocking out a good action sequence in a movie. Actually there are several things the French do well, including making wine, being generous with garlic and confusing foreigners by signposting a town from 200 kilometres away only to remove all signs pointing to that town within a 5km radius of its centre, thereby throwing the visiting driver into a sheer vertical panic because he thought he was doing quite well at this driving-on-the-wrong-side-while-reading-a-funny-language malarkey only for his destination to apparently vanish off the face of the Earth at the last minute.

But I digress. You only have to wrap your peepers around stuff like Nikita, Leon or Tell No One to see that Monsieur Francais knows his oignons when it comes to constructing a finger-chewingly tense chase scene or a tautly edited shootout.

Such mastery of nail-bitery is the second-biggest reason to watch the Mesrine films, L’Instinct De Mort and L’ennemi Public n°1. Now pay attention, here comes the history bit: Jacques Mesrine was a French gangster, bank robber, kidnapper, murderer, jailbreaker and all-round tinker, who charmed the French public into seeing him as a modern-day Robin Hood, an honest bandit, despite being - by all accounts - a complete and utter bastard.

This two-part film version of Mesrine’s autobiography is little more than a series of episodes in his life, with little to connect them or explain or justify his actions, but it’s directed by Jean-François Richet with such joie de vivre, savoir faire and coq au vin that you can’t help but get carried away with it all.

The first-biggest reason to watch these movies, however, is Vincent Cassel, who plays Jacques Mesrine in a series of increasingly crackers hairpieces and improbable moustaches. In fact he runs the hairy gamut from neatly-trimmed short back and sides to full-on Dave Lee Travis.

Cassel gave the almighty Viggo Mortensen a run for his roubles in Eastern Promises, but as Mesrine he burns up the screen like a chip pan fire, demanding your attention with a searing performance and a mug that looks like he sleeps with his face in a vice while goblins pull his features in random directions. Apparently there are other actors in the Mesrine films but Cassel ensures that you absolutely will not be distracted from him and his magnetic presence.

When the makers of the Bond films ask me who they should cast as the next villain, I’ll be giving them Vincent Cassel’s phone number. He’s got exactly the right amount of arrogance and physical presence to give Daniel Craig something to worry about, and a sufficient level of foreign dastardliness which is an essential quality when applying to be a Bond baddie.

So in summary: Mesrine: L’Instinct De Mort = Great. Mesrine: L’ennemi Public n°1 = Not as great but still great. Vincent Cassel = Incroyable!

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Subtitled F-Bombs

VIEWERS!

Were you DISAPPOINTED by the Avatar trailer?

Did you expect MORE from James “King Of The World” Cameron?

Are you a MAD fascist dictator?

If you answered “Yes I was/did/am, actually!” to one or more of these questions, YOU TOO could gain a quantum of solace from this GENUINE footage of someone with similar interests!

***WARNING: the following sensitive material contains

SUBTITLED F-BOMBS!***

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The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker is a new film about a guy whose job it is to wander around Iraq defusing bloody great big bombs. It is neither very good nor very bad. In fact it's the kind of film the words "six out of ten" were made for. Now I realise that's not a particularly in-depth review, so for those of you who crave intelligent, considered opinion, here are some further observations, the like of which you would only find in something like Sight And Sound or The Observer:

• From various reviews and poster quotes I had been led to believe this film would have my nerves jangling like Jimmy Saville's jewellery. As a result I was unbearably tense for the first ten minutes, but only because I had been told I should be. Then I realised I didn't need to be, so I stopped. The rest of the film left me about as tense as a snail convention.

• It's shot 'documentary-style', which means all the cameras have faulty zoom controls that can't settle for more than a femtosecond without crashing in or out.

• The lead character is played by Jeremy Renner, who looks like a 4:3 picture of Daniel Craig, stretched to fill a 16:9 screen.

See? Uncanny.

• Contrary to the film's title, there are no lockers to be seen anywhere within the movie. I have raised this with Trading Standards as I believe it to be a gross contravention of the Trade Descriptions Act 1968.

• The worst part of the film is that we are expected to believe that a man who is married to Kate from Lost would rather be risking his life every day in a sweaty hell-hole than staying indoors and making sexytime with his ladywife.

• The best part of the film is when a man wanders into a house waving a gun and says "I'm looking for the people responsible for Beckham". Not enough films feature scenes like this.

From scouring the interwebs, it seems I’m the only person not to believe that The Hurt Locker is an event of similar amazitude to the advent of unaided human flight or the invention of a brainwave-operated toaster. I suppose this makes The Incredible Suit either very special or very stupid. You decide.
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