Harold Lloyd: Number, Please?

Yes, it's in two parts. But look at the quality! It's like some kind of 1920s Blu-ray! Don't tell me there isn't half an hour somewhere in your Sunday that could do with this.

Saturday Playlist #17: The Songs Of Edgar Wright

This week's Saturday Playlist is another bunch of actual songs with words, which I know seems like a weird concept but it's for those poor people who don't necessarily get on with film scores, the sad, deluded freaks.

Anyway, as we all know, Edgar Wright has made some good films and whatnot, and despite spectacularly failing to appear on The Incredible Suit in interviewee form, I thought I'd air a few of the songs he's used over the years to soundtrack his ludicrously enjoyable product.

So (prepare yourself for tedious and inappropriate references), move into a flat with a stranger you're unavoidably attracted to, get red on you, watch Point Break and Bad Boys II and buy a prohibitively expensive Rickenbacker bass despite being a twentysomething slacker, as you...

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO

SATURDAY PLAYLIST #17:

THE SONGS OF EDGAR WRIGHT

First Images: An Exercise In Polar Opposites

Two upcoming sure-fire blockbusting megabastards have released their first official images this week, and one of them is a very good example of how this kind of thing should be done. And one of them is Footloose.

Craig Brewer, director of the remake nobody asked for (no, not The Thing. Or Brighton Rock. Or The Birds. etc), has released the first still from his version of inexplicably popular '80s Bacon roll Footloose, and frankly it takes the piss like an industrial vacuum cleaner attached to your cock.

Now it's one thing to release the most boring shot from your film as the first 'official' image - even the Harry Potter films aren't afraid of doing that - but it's another thing entirely to just release a photo of that image on your telly, even if it does feature the majesty of The Quaid in full glower.

Of course the real reason behind this is so that when Footloose inevitably sinks like a puppy on Boxing Day, Brewer has the ultimate get-out clause:

The man's clearly a genius.

At the other, dare I say, shitloads better, end of the scale, comes this:

Who remembers that Footloose remake that was supposed to be happening?

The Green Hornet

The whole world knows by now that if you're going to make a superhero movie, make it different. Make it stand out. Make it special. So who better to direct potentially ordinary-as-cornflakes The Green Hornet than über-barmlord Michel Gondry, of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and The Science Of Sleep fame, and director of more crackers music videos than you can shake a hammer and tongs at?

Well, probably anyone. In fact The Green Hornet feels like it was made entirely by the second unit director, except for two or three visually staggering sequences that Gondry was woken up for to justify his hiring. Apart from those, all you're left with is an adequate but entirely predictable, seen-it-all-before, non-super hero film.

It's not all bad: Christoph Waltz is massively watchable despite being saddled with the one-dimensional villain role, and Jay Chou as Kato is a laconic genius, although his ass-kicking displays occasionally get lost in amongst the FX. Still, he does possess some miraculous skillz:

Now I'm not the biggest Seth Rogen fan in the world (that would probably be Seth Rogen), but it's pretty obvious to anyone with eyes that he's tragically miscast in this. His grating, growly shouting thing becomes tiresome pretty quickly, and for an action-comedy with one of the world's highest-profile comedy stars, it's a bit of a LOL-vaccuum.

As for Cameron Diaz, the world's least believable temp secretary and pretty much the only woman with a speaking part in the whole film, well, she gets the most thankless role going. She gets no action (literally) and no laffs, and even McG knows she's perfectly capable of both.

Oh and unsurprisingly the 3D is utterly pointless until the animated end credits, which are amazaboggling.

Still, ain't none of it as bad as the IMDb's The Green Hornet page which, to promote the film, has been rendered completely unreadable by the design monkeys, who've gone for a clever green-writing-on-a-green-background theme:

In short: This week's second-best film with a colour in the title. Blue Valentine doesn't have super-slo-mo smackdowns but it is funnier.

YYYEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHH!!!

Now The Incredible Suit isn't normally one to regurgitate news you can read anywhere, but here's some news so competely delicious and flambasmic and tremungous that I just had to chew it 25 times, swallow it, semi-digest it and then bring it back up for another look just to make sure it was true.

And it is true! After an embarrassing and incapacitatingly annoying amount of ups, downs, oohs, aahs, whats, whys and HOW MUCH?!s at MGM, they've finally got their shit together, found a few quid down the back of the sofa and officially announced that...

Before you explode with incontinence like I did, you should probably bear in mind the release date for the 23rd official James Bond film is November 9, 2012. That's 667 days away. That's a long time to be in a permanent state of tumescence. However, it is less than a couple of months before the end of the world, so at least we'll be going out on an All Time High (© Woeful Obscure Bond References Inc).

Daniel Craig returns, which is obviously great, and Sam Mendes is directing, which bodes well for the charactery stuff. The script is by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who wrote the last four Bonds and as such have about a 50/50 track record of awesome, balls-out brilliance and unfortunate, invisible-car-related crappery. They're being joined on this one by John Logan, who'll remind you he wrote Gladiator and The Aviator but will probably forget that he wrote 2002's The Time Machine remake. The jury's still out, JoLo.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to reboot my campaign to get the film called Blood And Thunder, and to get Vincent Cassel cast as the villain (though I have it on good authority that he said he'd never do it, the bastard), Bernard Hill or David Warner as M (sozzles Dame Judi), Noel Clarke as Q, Emilia Fox as Moneypenny, David Arnold doing the music, Daniel Kleinman designing the titles and Muse doing the theme song. Surely that's not too much to ask? I've already designed the poster.

And I'm sure you won't mind seeing this every day for the next two years:

COUNTDOWN TO BOND 23:

667 DAYS

Good. Now let's get on with it.

What The Hell Do NASA Know About Anything?

Those crazy kids over at NASA have proclaimed 2009's steaming apocalyptic turdcake 2012 to be the most absurd science fiction film ever, due to its 158-minute eruption of scientifically implausible events and, of course, its massive shitness.

Well excuse me, but I'd prefer it if NASA would stick to building rockets rather than ripping apart rubbish films for their own entertainment. That's my job. Besides, I bet I could pick five science fiction films at random that are more absurd than 2012. What's that? You want me to do just that? Oh OK. Jesus, anybody would think I was just desperately looking around for something to blog about.

Back To The Future

A teenage boy spots another teenage boy watching a teenage girl undressing and, rather than hoofing up the tree and joining him, looks on in disgust? ZAZEEV.

Absurdity: Heavy

WALL·E

He spends the entire film calling his girlfriend by the wrong name and at no point does she get so pissed off that she fires red hot laserbolts into his stupid, massive, undeniably adorable eyes? That woman must be some kind of robot.

Absurdity: MIGHT·E

District 9

There's an alien mincing about in a pink bra. PINK. With those shoes? Bitch please.

Absurdity: Intergalactic

Transformers

Megan Fox is sexually attracted to Shia LaBeouf? Er, HELLO? Have you looked at his face, love?

Absurdity: Astronomical

The Thing

A man puts his hands through another man's chest, gets them bitten off by a gigantic set of rib-teeth, then a tower of guts shoots out of the chest cavity with a set of tentacles and a really ugly wailing head on top which Kurt Russell immediately sets fire to, only for the chesty rib-teeth guy's own head to pull itself off and along the floor with a four-foot-long tongue before sprouting spider's legs and antennae and scampering out of the room, and NOBODY says "You've gotta be fucking kidding"?

What's that?

Oh.

Absurdity: Zero. Totes plausible.

The 8th London Short Film Festival

Last Friday saw the launch of the London Short Film Festival, which runs until January 16th at various deliciously sexy venues across this great nation's wonderful, though slightly crowded and frankly a bit noisy, capital.

This is a good thing because a) I like films and b) I have limited patience, so any movie lasting under six minutes is fine by me. The festival will show over 250 shorts from UK-based filmmakers over its ten-day run, with a mouth-watering selection of strands. If you can't find something in there to tickle your pickle then there's every chance you've died without realising it. There are also discussions, industry events, live events, installations, retrospectives and all that gubbins that people like at their film festivals.

I hauled my lazy ass to the Soho Curzon on Saturday to see the "Fucked Up Love" programme: nine films based on a romantic theme, but not in an Owen-Wilson-Kate-Hudson kind of way, thank Christ, more in an Isn't-Love-Simultaneously-Great-Rubbish-Unpredictable-And-Occasionally-Planet-Saving way.

In all honesty I expected a Watchable to Unwatchable ratio of about 2:7 but was delighted to get a Really Very Good to Perfectly Reasonable ratio of 6:3. It would be difficult to pick a favourite but Ian Hothersall's Edgar Wrightesque Once Upon A Time On Earth had aliens, robots and explosions (I'm easily pleased), Jack Herbert's Now Or Never was as packed with unlikely action as it was with stolen-pen-based LOLs and Joe Rosen's Blind Date had a hilarious script but would have benefited from a tripod in its early scenes.

The Incredible Suit heartily recommends that you too haul your lazy ass to your nearest London if at all possible in order to have a good time while supporting upcoming British filmmakers. Who knows, you might see something by the next Douglas Bubbletrousers.

Here's a trailer for a short you've already missed called In The Meadow; it was very good so I'm assuming everything else will be too.



Newsnight Review Corner: Lots of these films were made with the support of the UK Film Council, thereby proving its vital role in supporting new British filmmaking talent. Now that it's been murdered and dumped in a ditch and its work now has to be done by the BFI, will that support continue? Will it increase? Or is it all about to get even harder for struggling British directors? I don't know. I'm not Mark Lawson, am I?