Staggeringly-Bequiffed Legend

In 1973, Stanley Kubrick’s crackers, overlong work of ultraviolent mentalism, A Clockwork Orange, was banned by its own director because its ultraviolence proved to be a bit too ultra. It’s now Number 51 on the Internet Movie Database’s Top 250 films.

In 1986 The Exorcist was banned under the wacky and misguided Video Recordings Act. It’s now widely regarded as one of the most important horror films ever made, and staggeringly-bequiffed legend Mark Kermode believes it to be The Greatest Film, Like, Ever.

And now, in 2009, word reaches me of another distinguished work of art banned by an ultra-conservative society too afraid to face the harsh reality of a ruthless world. Yes, one of The Incredible Suit’s loyal viewers (hello Stu) informs me that the blog is no longer available to read by employees of Halfords Group PLC in their totalitarian state, oops, I mean, place of work. Presumably this is the price I must pay for my reputation as a vociferous opponent of affordable wing mirrors and Homer Simpson air fresheners. It may also be because all blogs are banned under Halfords’ oppressive internet censorship regime, but the former reason is more sensational so that’s what I’ll be going with when Amnesty International get in touch.

Well it’s their loss, because they’ll never know that The Incredible Suit viewers have warmed the deepest, darkest recesses of my dank, clammy gizzards by agreeing with me and voting Timothy Dalton The Greatest James Bond, Like, Ever in my weekly poll. Good for you, and especially those of you who made the journey from Debra Best’s Timothy Dalton Chat Group to vote. How you found out about this humble blog will remain a mystery to me until the day I finally log off. It certainly can’t have been anything to do with the shameless recruitment of Timothy Dalton fan site operators I undertook in a desperate attempt at vote nobbling.

This week’s poll will, I hope, remain as untainted and impartial as the Eurovision Song Contest. While the world remains blissfully unaware of the impending asteroid of Avatar-hype about to shatter it into its component atoms (see this post), The Incredible Suit asks: What’s The Greatest James Cameron Film, Like, Ever? I’m not including Piranha II: The Spawning for obvious reasons:



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Mr Hammer Is Supper Nice

About 90% of my DVDs are currently cheesed off, sitting on the shelf gathering dust and complaining that they’re not getting the airing they deserve. It’s the 90% that was made after about 1923 and I think they’re planning a revolution against the old folks.

The thing is, I’ve suddenly got no desire to watch anything longer than about half an hour and that doesn’t feature Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd falling over, getting kicked up the arse or failing to impress a lady. And as The Incredible Suit is a public service I’m sharing the joy of silent comedy with you guys, by which I mean I’m going to relentlessly force it down your throat till my blog has fewer readers than Vanilla Ice’s. Although having said that, it is almost certainly already the case.

Incidentally, Vanilla Ice’s blog is every shade of amazing. Here are some highlights from his recent meeting with former rapper and proponent of the Hammerpants, MC Hammer:

“Hammer and I had a nice talk backstage. He was supper nice and cool and I now have new respect for him.” Good to know that Mr Hammer is supper nice, which I think means ‘as nice as a late evening snack of biscuits and Ovaltine’.

“We did talk about doing a WORLD TOUR, and he said he was all in 100%. I think the world need's it. There has been nothing hit on the impact level of what we did 18 years ago.” Damn right, Iceman. I can literally think of NOTHING AT ALL from the last 18 years as important as Ice Ice Baby, U Can’t Touch This and all those hundreds of other epoch-defining records you guys made. The world need’s a WORLD TOUR more than it need’s lesson’s in how apostrophe’s should be use’d.

Almost as hilarious as Vanilla Ice’s blog is A Dog’s Life, one of Charlie Chaplin’s 1918 shorts which I watched again the other day. Chaplin got a bit mawkish in later films but he kept his shorts (films, not trousers) light, zippy and crammed with gags till the seams popped, especially in those he made between 1916 and 1923 when he was under unimaginable pressure to succeed - at this time he was probably the most famous person in the world; kind of like a Vanilla Ice for the 1920s.

You can watch A Dog’s Life on YouTube (in four parts), but if you haven’t got half an hour to spare then a) you work too hard, and b) here’s a 2½ minute master class in comedy timing to take away the acrid taste of all that Metal Molten Hip Hop, as Vanilla describes his parpings.


I’ll be lobbing more silent comedy grenades your way in the future, so get yourself a sturdy chuckle helmet, dig a giggle trench and pile the guffaw sandbags high.

Apologies for stretching that metaphor out to Partridgesque lengths.

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Grand Poobah Of The Cosmos

Self-proclaimed King Of The World and crackpot genius James Cameron has announced that he's going to give us the chance to watch 15 minutes of his new film, Avatar, for free. Make no mistake, Avatar will be the most hyped movie of the year. Forget Bruno, forget Harry Potter, forget Satanic Sluts III: Scandalised; Avatar will be the film of 2009, because it's Cameron's first film for a decade, it'll have groundbreaking effects that'll make your eyes dribble out of your face and it'll cost 700 bajillion dollars and make a wazillion times that much back.

However, it's not out till December, and Cameron wants us to be eating, breathing and farting Avatar constantly until then. So he's taken this unprecedented step of, rather than a boring old trailer, granting us a free 15 minute fix of eye-heroin to tide us over until he can provide a full-on, heart-attack-inducing geeksplosion for Christmas. What's more, he's going to do it in IMAX and 3D cinemas just to be sure our brains totally liquify and trickle out of our bottoms.

I suppose it makes sense; Avatar's a massive science fiction extravagasm set on a planet populated entirely by bonkersness, so the last thing he wants is people watching clips on their phone in an office in Grimsby. If you ask me though, this exercise is fraught with danger. What if we don't like what we see? A three-minute trailer is rarely bad enough to put us off something we're probably going to see anyway, but a 15 minute taster could convince us that actually, this all looks a bit silly, I don't think I'll bother thanks. Cameron had better be sure what he's showing us is worth leaving the house for or he might be waving ta-ra to all that moolah come December.

What's more worrying is that I fear a new dawn in movie trailerage. Currently we have to endure 30 minutes of adverts and trailers before a film; if this idea takes off we'll be there for hours, and by the time the movie starts we'll have forgotten what we came to see. People will have to book two days' holiday and pack a change of underwear just to go to the pictures.

I'm looking forward to Avatar but I can't see myself watching 15 minutes of it four months in advance; that's like eating a roast potato for breakfast then having a full Sunday roast at teatime. Pointless. Also, Cameron has a long way to go to impress me. Aliens is fantastic, but T2 and True Lies sag in the middle like a badly cooked souffle, and Titanic, no matter how much cash it hoovered up, is just an enormous pant-pudding.

But what do I know? Avatar will probably be the greatest thing since sliced bacon and the 15 minute experiment will win Cameron a Nobel Peace Prize. As long as he doesn't proclaim himself to be Grand Poobah of the Cosmos when he collects it I don't care.

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Surplus Kiddy Beans

Poll results time, everyone! Now look. I like diversity. I like that everyone has different views on stuff. It’s what makes the world go round. However it does make for a clumsy graphic when equal numbers of you vote a) for The Prisoner Of Azkaban as the greatest Harry Potter Film, Like, Ever, and b) that all Harry Potter films are bobbins. So if you could all be a bit more homogenous in your views in future polls, that would make my life a lot easier. Thanks!

I saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince the other day. It was exactly like all the other Harry Potter films, which is to say that it was 24% rubbish but 76% enjoyable. It had some funny bits (Harry on drugs), some bits which made me glad I’m not a teenager any more (all that unrequited lust) and some bits that made me wish I was Harry Potter (Harry and Ginny playing Hide-The-Potions-Book).

It was also, like a 30 minute episode of Big Brother, about 40 minutes too long. I’m amazed kids today can sit still for three hours including trailers, I had trouble making it through a Tom and Jerry cartoon without belting off up and down the street to burn off some surplus kiddy beans when I was that age.

Also, you’d be forgiven for thinking this film might be about the Half-Blood Prince, what with it featuring rather prominently in the title and all. It’s not. The Half-Blood Prince sub-sub-subplot takes up about 0.07% of the total running time. It may as well have been called Harry Potter and the Irrelevant Quidditch Scene, or Harry Potter and the Dead Headmaster (er… spoiler warning), or – even better:
This week’s poll arrives with the inevitability of an unwanted season, and is based on Wednesday’s post: Who’s The Greatest James Bond, Like, Ever? Obviously the answer is Timothy Dalton but I suppose I should give you, the viewers a chance to tell me what you think if only so I can tell you you’re wrong and brandish the stats in your face to prove it. I might even shout “take stat!” while I’m brandishing.

To help you decide who your favourite Bond is (it’s Timothy Dalton), here's a handy reminder. Daniel Craig isn't included but you probably remember him. He's the fugly one.

Thanks to Andy for the video!

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Judi Dench Drops An F-Bomb

I recently undertook a massive project to discover who my favourite James Bond is. Or rather, to confirm to myself what I keep telling people about who my favourite James Bond is, so that I could back up my argument with empirical evidence.

What this involved – and this is the kind of selfless act I carry out for the viewers of The Incredible Suit – was watching every Bond film and rating them out of 10, then adding all the scores together for each actor, then dividing the totals by the number of Bond films each actor made in order to give a mean average score. Yes, I really did all those things. It just took me two and a half years.

For the sake of keeping the results pure and untainted, I didn’t include Never Say Never Again because a) it’s not an official Bond film, and b) it would put Sean Connery into minus figures.

So here are the results, and you can treat these as official figures from the National Office of Officially Accurate Statistical Figures And Stuff:

1. Timothy Dalton 9
2. Daniel Craig 8.5
3. Pierce Brosnan 7.5
4. Sean Connery 7.2
5. George Lazenby 7
6. Roger Moore 6.7

Many people get their nethers in a tangle when I tell them Timothy Dalton is the Best Bond, Like, Ever, because they think Sean Connery should be the best because he was the first. Tommywaddle. He was great in the first three, maybe four, but after that, come on. Fat, slow and bored of himself. Go and watch Diamonds Are Forever, you’ll see what I’m on about.

Having said that, I thought I preferred Connery to Brosnan, but looking at the official figures, apparently not. You can’t argue with the stats.

Here are some of the reasons why I love Timothy Dalton as Bond:

He can act (remember, he was preceded by 12 years of Roger Moore’s eyebrow).
He looks like Bond should look.
His Bond hates his job but takes it seriously.
His Bond smokes. Cigarettes, not ludicrously massive cigars.
His Bond has no time for incompetent assistants.
His Bond looks really, really pissed off when his friends get hurt.
His Bond bleeds and his suit gets ruined when he’s been in a fight.
His Bond swears. If you can count “horse’s arse”, “piss off” and “bastard” as swear words these days.

Speaking of effing and jeffing, have you noticed what a potty-mouth M has become lately? It’s all “bugger” this and “bastard” that, I don’t know what the world’s coming to. I bet Judi Dench drops an f-bomb in the next film.


Thanks to Cameron Arrigoni for the video!

Malodorous Bowel Movement

Tragic, wretched news reached me last week. I struggled to put a brave face on it but in the end I had to climb into an open sewer and bury myself under the toilet-business of the people of Great Britain for the weekend to get away from the horribility. Even this didn’t help so I set fire to my shoes to distract me from the awfulness. Still no relief, and now my feet hurt. Well, a problem shared is a problem doubled, and as only about one person reads this I can double the problem with you, the viewer.

There’s going to be another Bridget Jones film.

The following headlines from various websites reveal the true misery of the situation, but I noticed that if you shuffle them into a certain order they become an uncannily accurate metaphor. I’ve helpfully decoded what I think the headline writers were trying to say in that clever, journalisty, double-entendre kind of way they have.

From Dark Horizons (appropriately):
“A Third ‘Bridget Jones’ In Development”
i.e. developing in someone’s bowels into a massive, film-shaped poo

From Ananova:
“Third Bridget Jones movie imminent”
In much the same way as a turtle’s head indicates something is imminent

From Tribute:
“Renee Zellweger to do third Bridget Jones movie”
In much the same way as someone might do a third malodorous bowel movement

From UPI:
“Third 'Bridget Jones' movie on its way”
On its way to that toilet in Trainspotting where it belongs

From BBC News:
“Third Bridget Jones in pipeline”
Presumably, the pipeline that runs from that toilet in Trainspotting into the sewage works

From Variety:
“Third 'Bridget Jones' in works”
Yeah, the sewage works I just mentioned

So, miserable news for about 6.5 billion people, but at least the press are getting the right message across.

In other, considerably less negative news, I watched Moon the other day. Here’s what I expect the DVD cover to look like when it’s released:

Hopefully that won't hurt DVD sales too much. It really is very good indeed.

Dumber'n A Bag O' Spanners

Yes viewers, it's that time of the week again when I announce the winner of this week's poll, although the result has been sitting there on the right of the page for a good few hours now so it's not so much an announcement as a protracted, verbose statement of the obvious designed to make an utterly inconsequential survey seem like an altruistic exercise in democracy. Also you've already seen my expertly treated graphic representation above so if you've read this far without working it out you're dumber'n a bag o' spanners.

The winner is, duh, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Well done, you mind-boggling, groundbreaking, absolutely astonishing and quite perfect work of art you.

What's more exciting is that we saw a 60% increase in voter turnout on last week, which makes me very happy. If this continues week on week I calculate that by the beginning of next year there will be over a million people voting. Trust me, I actually worked this out.

So let's try and get at least 25.6 votes next week with this poll, in honour of the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: What's The Greatest Harry Potter Film, Like, Ever? And don't go clicking on the titles below to vote, you need to click the little buttons in the poll over there on the right, capisce?

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
(the one with the dude with a face on the back of his head)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
(the one with the massive snake at the end)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
(the one with Gary Oldman and the Dementors (good name for a band))
Harry Potter and the Goblet Of Fire
(the one with the interminable and pointless tri-wizard tournament)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
(the other one with Gary Oldman where he falls into a mystical open lift shaft at the end)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
(the new one. You probably haven't seen it yet but it's here for the sake of completeness)

I've also added the option "All Harry Potter films are bobbins" for those of you who complained because they didn't want to vote for musicals or alien movies in previous polls. HAPPY NOW?!

The poll closes at 5pm on Thursday, so get voting! This stuff matters, you know! A lot!

By the way, if anyone's interested in what the Bruno DVD cover will look like when they ask me for a quote, here it is:

However it is better than Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which I watched the next day. Seriously, if anyone can explain to me what that dude at the end who was pretending to be God was all about, get in touch. It made about as much sense as William Shatner's syntax.