Right, so it's the Oscars on Sunday. As you are painfully aware by now, The Incredible Suit actively despises movie awards to the point of frenzied violence, and so should you. Nobody tells you what the best film of the year is except you (and, under certain circumstances, The Incredible Suit), so I recommend you all take as much interest in the Oscars as you would in a documentary on Radio 4 about the porridge mining industry in 13th century Peterborough.
However seeing as, come Monday morning, the entire planet will be either saying "Ooh, fancy that Avatar winning every single award, even the ones it wasn't nominated for" or "What's The Hurt Locker?", it would be churlish of me not to expend a small amount of energy blogulising about this cavalcade of cack. So for now I'll just pop down my predictions for the only awards that 99% of people care about, so that I can be insufferably smug about it / conveniently neglect to mention it on Monday:
So there you go. Possibly the most hypocritical blog post ever written. To make up for it here's a short compilation of clips featuring Humphrey Bogart, winner of the Best Actor Oscar in 1952, and the lesser known Sour Apple Award for Least Co-Operative Actor in 1949. God damn it!
Last week you may recall I nearly had a little accident in my nether garments after laying eyes on this month's subscribers' issue of Empire Magazine. Here's the vastly inferior plebs' cover:
The beady-eyed amongst you will notice they claim it's their "Sensational 250th Birthday Issue". Now by my reckoning, and I've got a B in GCSE Maths, that means they've been going since the year 1760. As received wisdom suggests that cinema as we know it was invented in around 1896, what did they find to write about for the first 136 years?
I have a strong suspicion it contained pretty much the same old stuff:
Er... obviously Photoshopping was in its infancy then, hence the appalling design work.
The 30-Minute Freeze-Frame Challenge is a futile, inane experiment which judges a film's merits entirely on how good it looks at 30-minute intervals according to arbitrary and indistinct criteria applied by The Incredible Suit. For previous challenges, click the links on the right.
Anyway to fail to cut a long story short I decided to combine the two suggestions and do Twelve Monkeys, Gilliam's re-imagining of the French short stretched out to feature-length and with added Bonkers Brad Pitt waving his hands about in an over-exaggerated fashion.
Christ that was a tedious introduction. Better put some pictures up sharpish.
0:30:00 Here's Bruce Willis, locked up in a loony bin for crimes against music, ho ho. As if that wasn't annoying enough, Bonkers Brad Pitt is waving his hands about in an over-exaggerated fashion and there's a massive out-of-focus ear blocking his view of the telly.
1:00:00 Here's Madeleine Stowe checking the recently-decommissioned body of her would-be rapist, although in this gloom she could just be sorting through her washing.
1:30:00 Here's Bonkers Brad Pitt waving his hands about in an over-exaggerated fashion for a change. If you haven't seen Twelve Monkeys, a) you should, and b) he does this quite a bit and you really just have to go along with it. He had a lot to prove in those days. Oh and excuse me sir, you're blocking the shot with your big fat back.
2:00:00 Aah look, it's young James, being all cute while watching something so mind-bogglingly terrible that by the time he becomes Bruce Willis his eyes have turned green.
Result:
Really only one of these shots is good enough for the 30MFFC; the rest are either obscured by foreground irritations or feature scruffy women in a dodgy back alley. So soz and all Terry Gilliam, you join fellow shamed losers Ridley Scott, Michael Curtiz and Francis Ford Coppola in the Fail bucket. Also I haven't forgiven you for The Brothers Grimm.
Keep those 30MFFC suggestions coming, I've had loads but I can't get access to them all. Try suggesting something I'm likely to have on my shelf will you, and remember they don't have to be classics - any old cackapoopoo could pass the 30MFFC; it's just a matter of luck. That's what makes it so phenomenally pointless.
Worthy mini-documentary to balance out inanity of post:
I just finished reading Mark Kermode's book, 'It's Only A Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive'. It's supposed to be some kind of an autobiography but don't people usually wait until they're nearly dead before they reduce their entire lives to a few scraps of paper and a massive cash advance? Perhaps Mr Kermode thinks his quiff has reached its maximum density and the next drop of Dax could be the one to cause his head to finally cave in and leave him looking like Adam Buxton in Hot Fuzz.
It used to be the case that I couldn't bear Mark Kermode. I don't know why but I think it might have been his face. Now I'm no Zooey Deschanel but this guy looks like Hellboy with a pompadour. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the 'do was grown and designed specifically to disguise two sawn-off horns.
These days though, I've grown to like him. He is mildly amusing and he does know his onions and he did shake my hand in the street and let me bleat about The Incredible Suit which he then singularly failed to mention in any of his media outlets, but I won't hold that against him. He did, after all, deliver this fine rantsplosion about Pirates Of The Caribbean 3, in which he literally doesn't draw breath for ten minutes:
So I was prepared to give his book a go. It's very readable - if it was a film it would have a nice low Fidgit Factor - but it's sadly not very interesting. He tells a lot of stories but only a couple of them are particularly out of the ordinary, and the rest are along the lines of how he thought he'd done something very badly but actually he'd done it very well.
He also devotes a lot of time to his working relationship with Simon Mayo as if they're the greatest double act since Laurel & Hardy, when in fact they have little to no chemistry at all. In fact I look forward to the day when he parts ways with Mayo to concentrate on presenting the BBC's Film programme. In my list of preferred presenters of that show I would happily place him below Barry Norman but above the double-glazing salesman.
If you fancy reading 'It's Only A Movie' yourself but can't be bothered, here's The Incredible Suit's abridged version:
"Hi, I'm Mark Kermode, film critic. I once had a bad experience in a car in Russia, and another time I was interviewing Werner Herzog when he got shot."
There you go, I've saved you £11.99 (RRP). If you like you can just send me a cheque to The Incredible Suit, c/o The Internets.
French mentalfest Micmacs is out now; here's an ad from the film's current print campaign:
"Every frame is a masterpiece", says Sight And Sound's Sue Harris. I can only assume that Ms Harris has had this independently tested and verified by a renowned figure in the field of random frame-testing, although I don't know who that could be because Micmacs caertainly hasn't passed through the grubby hands of The Incredible Suit's 30-Minute Freeze-Frame Challenge, I can tell you.
This post will require 10 minutes of your time to fully do it justice. And some speakers. And a cup of tea if you like, maybe a biscuit or two as well. Think of it as a little bit of Me Time.
If you're a tedious film dullard like me, you'll know all about the Wilhelm Scream. If you're not, a) will you be my friend? Thought not, and b) you may not know about it but you WILL have heard it.
Essentially it's something everyone who's ever watched a movie should be aware of and be able to bore people to death with at parties, in the unlikely event that you are ever invited to any. Consider this post part of The Incredible Suit's National Curriculum For Filmular Education.
