CLiNT

New comigazine CLiNT "hit the news stands" this month, boasting comic strips from Jonathan Ross and Frankie Boyle, as well as a side-splitting playground-humour title. Hee hee! From a distance it looks like - you know - that word! Maybe that's why it didn't get a mention on BBC News, although it should have done for this strip alone:

Yes, it came out weeks ago, and no, it's not a film, but I mention it because it's aiming itself at the movie geek audience with editor Mark Millar's Kick-Ass 2 strip, as well as the likes of articles about people who dub Cruise and DiCaprio for foreign markets and an interview with man of the moment (three years ago) McLovin'. It even got its own trailer, although zero effort was put into that:

The bits that aren't comics aren't up to much - items like "Top Five Weird Things Real People Have Shouted During Sex" and "Top Ten Hot TV Mums" hardly break new ground, and an entire page about a day in the life of a pot-smoker is as tedious and childish as it sounds.

CLiNT's big selling point is the Ross and Boyle material, so why there aren't interviews with them about their love of comics and how they came to write their own is a mystery. As is the lacklustre cover - Millar's editorial compares CLiNT to Eagle and 2000 AD, but have a look at their front pages:

2000 AD's first cover from 1977 might essentially look like a blue toilet roll, but it does feature the words "SPACE-AGE DINOSAURS!" and "STOP PRESS! GREAT BRITAIN INVADED!" Also, hello, FREE SPACE SPINNER!

Issue 1 of the relaunched Eagle in 1982 boasted The Mekon sitting in a flying bath, phallic rockets and, hello, a FREE SPACE SPINNER!

The first issue of CLiNT gives us a man with a ginger beard, some dull fonts and, upsettingly, NO FREE SPACE SPINNER.

So what about the comicy bits? Well, Kick-Ass 2 is eight pages long and stops just as it gets going; Ross' vampires-vs-gangsters-vs-aliens-in-prohibition-era-New-York bloodbath Turf is entertaining but essentially derivative of all those genres, and Boyle's Rex Royd is baffling but promising. It's Millar's other offering Nemesis that proves the most readable and thrilling, and the opening scenes of massive carnage must already have 20th Century Fox wondering how they're going to afford to pull off Tony Scott's big-screen adaptation.

Given that Turf, Nemesis and (eventually) Kick-Ass 2 are all available separately, CLiNT comes across as little more than a sampler for those titles. Millar's offer to publish new talent is admirable, although judging by Issue One it'll be relegated to three pages at the back while the celebs get the lion's share of space.

So having compounded the problem by giving CLiNT more free publicity, I recommend Issue Two ditches all the content apart from Kick-Ass 2 and gives a few non-celebrity writers a chance to tell their stories.

But will that happen? WILL IT FLiCK.

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The 54th London Film Festival: Ten Things To Maybe See If You Want, I Don't Know, It's Up To You

Having spent the weekend poring over the programme for the American Express American Airlines Mofilm Windows 7 Renault Jameson Empire Lovefilm Vue Green & Black's London Film Festival (apols to the sponsors I didn't have space for), it's painfully apparent that this is a good year for intimate depictions of family life / the horrors of war / people struggling with their sexuality, not to mention five-and-a-half-hour biopics of terrorists. All well and good, but what else ya got?

Well, ignoring the obvious (Never Let Me Go, 127 Hours, Black Swan etc), here's just ten of the flicks I think I'll go and see if the elusive LFF Press Pass comes my way; if not I suppose I'll just have to pay, though that hardly seems right.

Archive Gala: The Great White Silence 

Restored footage of one of history's most tragic wastes of time, Captain Scott's expedition to the South Pole. The kind of thing that makes you truly question yourself when you use the phrase "Brrr, I'm freezing".

Film On The Square: Submarine

Written and directed by The IT Crowd's Richard Ayoade, starring Paddy Considine in a mullet and featuring the words "desirable eczematous classmate" in the BFI's write-up. Who wouldn't want to see that?

Film On The Square: 13 Assassins

A retired samurai has to gather a team of hard-nuts to overthrow an evil warlord in 19th Century Japan. Exactly like The Expendables,

but (I'm guessing) 100% less shit.

New British Cinema: Edge

Character drama about a bunch of lost souls in a hotel located on the edge (geddit?) of a disintegrating clifftop. Features amazing wallpaper.

New British Cinema: Upside Down

Yes, it's a music documentary, but sadly no, it's not about the 1990s boy band who hit the heady heights of No. 11 in the UK charts with "Change Your Mind". It is instead about the rise of indie record label Creation, responsible for some of the songs that CHANGED YOUR LIFE. If you're me.

French Revolutions: In Your Hands

Nobody does taut, intense, claustrophobic, psychological thrillers like the French, and when it stars Britain's Most Famous Bi-lingual Actress Who Was In Four Weddings And A Funeral, who could say non?

Cinema Europa: The Temptation Of St Tony

I know literally nobody who's ever said "I'm not interested in a completely mental Estonian-Swedish-Finnish film about severed hands, dead dogs, gravity-defying priests and chainsaw-wielding surgeons". NOBODY.

World Cinema: Catfish

I'm there.

World Cinema: The Parking Lot Movie

The documentary that may go some way to explaining why Steve Guttenberg's character in Police Academy hated the customers in his car park so much. And if that's all it achieves, it's succeeded.

Treasures From The Archive:

Man With A Movie Camera

The film I was made to read the most about without actually seeing

as a student arrives at the LFF in all its 1920s Russian experimental glory.

If you've ever enjoyed a special effect of any kind, watching this

would appear to be the respectful thing to do before commenting on

the blue guys in Avatar.

Obviously there are a bajillion more films worth seeing this year, and it's entirely possible that some from this list will be complete cack, but when else are you going to get the chance to find out? Exactly. See you there.

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Shameless Plug For A Mate's Film

My friend Adrian and his friend Tim have been done made a movie as their entry in the 28 Days Later Film Challenge. Participants had, believe it or not, 28 days in which to make a 70 minute feature film having been given only a title to work from. This is their excuse for the otherwise unforgivable name The Invisible Atomic Monsters From Mars.



You can take it from me that it's good, it's got gallons of fake blood and more geeky movie references than a geeky convention of geeks geeking geekily till their geekicles drop off.

Adrian and Tim would very much like someone to give them a bundle of cash to make a longer, fuller version (presumably with a better name), so if anybody out there would like to see the whole thing or help them out, you can contact them through their rather good website Zombies Alive, or email them here.

Shameless plug ends.

Saturday Playlist #5: James Bond In The '70s

If Bond music in the '60s was all about the sleaze, in the '70s it was all about the cheese. From John Barry's Vegas of Diamonds Are Forever, through George Martin's funkalicious blaxploitation-esque wah-wah of Live And Let Die, to Marvin Hamlisch's whatever-the-hell-you-describe-it-as version of the Bond theme for The Spy Who Loved Me, well-past-its-sell-by cheddar runs through these scores like massively-collared safari suits run through Roger Moore's wardrobe.

So get out the cream crackers, raise a solitary eyebrow to the heavens and suck your cheeks in as you kiss a series of ladies in a horrifically unwatchable fashion, because it's time to...

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO

SATURDAY PLAYLIST #5:

JAMES BOND IN THE '70s

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Professions You Are More Likely To Find In A Silent Comedy Than In Real Life: No.1 In A Series Of 1

From Buster Keaton's Cops (1922)

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"Boo Hoo I'm Trapped" Is The New "Boo Hoo I'm A Vampire"

Now that the entire cosmos is thoroughly sick to the pointy back teeth of vampires in movies thanks to a pasty, sparkling glut of them over the past couple of years (Let The Right One In being the only acceptable example), it's high time we had a new trend to exhaust very quickly.

And so it falls to the brand new "stuck somewhere claustrophobic for most of the film" sub-genre (which I hereby christen Claustrocore) to provide all the confined-space ROFLs we could ask for, so that in six months' time we'll all be fully aware that the real demons aren't outside... THEY'RE WITHIN OUR VERY SELVES, ZOMG!

September 17 2010: Devil

The bad news:

Five strangers are trapped in a lift. One of them may or may not be

The Prince Of Darkness (The Devil, not Ozzy Osbourne).

The really bad news:

Story by M Night Shyamalan + no preview screenings = satanic turkey.

September 29 2010: Buried

The bad news:

One man is trapped in a coffin.

The really bad news:

All he has with him are a lighter, a mobile phone and a DVD of Devil.

January 7 2011: 127 Hours

The bad news:

One man is trapped in a canyon with a big rock slowly crushing his hand.

The really bad news:

It's his "alone-time" hand.

February 4 2011: James Cameron Presents Sanctum

The bad news:

Fifteen divers are trapped in an underwater cave.

The really bad news:

James Cameron wants them to stay there a bit longer so he

can release a special edition in six months' time.

Some time in 2012: Life Of Pi

The bad news:

A teenager is trapped on a boat with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan

and a tiger called Richard Parker (coincidentally my old history teacher).

The really bad news:

By the time it gets made it'll have missed the "Boo Hoo I'm Trapped" boat
and future movie blogs will be flaming it for not being part of the new

"Boo Hoo I've Been Turned Into Cheese" subgenre.

Sooner than you think:

It's Chile Down Here: The Inevitable True Story

The bad news:

33 poor bastards are trapped in a mine in the middle
of the Atacama desert for four months.

The really bad news:

M Night Shyamalan has already tried to get them all to sign contracts

before they're allowed any food or water, and in the end one of them

will turn out to be dead all along / responsible for the cave-in /

 Father Christmas / capable of making a better film himself.

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The 2010 Raindance Film Festival

With my invitation to today's London Film Festival press launch mysteriously lost in the post, it fell to the Raindance Film Festival to provide my film-festival-press-launch needs yesterday, at a posh hotel in London which on any other occasion would have kicked me out the moment they saw my shoes.

My primary reason for going was that I was told there would be freakin' apes there, which sounded amazing. As it turned out there had been a hilarious error in pronunciation because when I arrived it transpired that the freakin' apes were in fact free canapés. But what canapés they were:

Hand model supplied by Ultra Culture. Shirt: Model's own.

Post-canapés, a man in what appeared to be a pair of 3D glasses failed to introduce himself before talking about the 18th Raindance Film Festival. I'm assuming he was someone who had something to do with it rather than a bloke who'd just stumbled out of Piranha 3D, into the hotel and read out the the press release, but he left quite quickly so we'll never know.

Raindance's opening film is Jackboots On Whitehall, a film whose trailer contains exactly no LOLs despite advertising it as a comedy. It's released on the same day as A Town Called Panic, drawing inevitable comparisons between two comedies starring crudely animated plastic figurines destined to face off against each other in a battle of the box office, which will probably be won by The Life And Death Of Charlie St Cloud, starring Zac Efron, a completely different crudely animated plastic figurine.



The festival's closing film is Son Of Babylon, a "poignant Iraqi drama" about which I have no jokes.

In between there's a skipload of "alternative" (i.e. low-budget) films I've never heard of with brilliant titles like Flooding With Love For The Kid, Hi! Otsuka Drugstore, Lummox, Ollie Kepler's Expanding Purple World, Robert Mitchum Is Dead, The Vice Guide To Liberia and Too Much Pussy.

Raindance's most news-worthy screening is a private showing of cheery laff-blast A Serbian Film, already touted as the most depraved, sick and generally unpleasant thing ever made in the history of ever. You can read a synopsis of it on Wikipedia if you haven't eaten recently, although it'll be all over the Daily Mail before long getting all the publicity it needs.

Raindance's other big draw is the fact that on its jury is none other than Lemmy from Motörhead, whose qualifications for being on a film festival jury include acting roles as diverse as 'Lemmy Von Motörhead' in Airheads, 'Bum In Park' in John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut and 'Good Lemmy / Bad Lemmy' in Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV.

If I get to see anything at Raindance I'll share my brains with you, but if you'd rather see them yourself than have some crap-rambling halfwit spoil them for you, pop along to the Apollo Cinema in London's Piccadilly Circus sometime at the begining of October and hope that A Serbian Film isn't on the day you're there.

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