Even George Alagiah Got Aroused

What with all this London Film Festival nonsense and other assorted tedious toss, The Incredible Suit is ashamed to have been somewhat remiss in keeping up on blogworthy movie news to report back to you, the loyal viewer. I hope to put this right with a couple of typically belated and inane observations:

Firstly, you may recall that I was left wholly unmoved by the first trailer for Avatar, which even George Alagiah got aroused by on the BBC Six O’Clock News. If you’re an incurable insomniac you can read my previous witterings here.

Anyway, a second trailer has been squirted all over the interwebs, and it looks like this:

No doubt George required a complete change of underwear after that, but The Incredible Suit remains stubbornly flaccid. This film is not just going to have to be an incredible 3D experience to impress me but it'll have to dance a jig, remember my birthday and make me toast every day for a week before it even comes close to reaching the dizzy heights of astonishery that the rest of the world seem to think it's already attained.

Secondly, some time ago I posted a picture of the cast of The A-Team doing what appeared to be absolutely bog all:

Perhaps they were waiting for a plan to come together so they could love it, or maybe they were scouring the ground for a couple of sticks with which to make their own Large Hadron Collider.

Anyway, as The A-Team director Joe Carnahan is an avid viewer of The Incredible Suit*, he’s evidently realised that he’s taken the eye of the ball somewhat, and within seconds of my original post** he let rip with this slightly more interesting shot:

What’s most uncanny about this new picture is not that Bradley Cooper, as Face, has apparently been photoshopped by someone with the picture editing skills of a limbless orangutan, but that Liam Neeson, as Hannibal, looks almost exactly like my father-in-law.

See? Weird.

*I am 99% certain this is a lie, but you never know
**Approximately 1,209,600 seconds

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You Couldn't Tell Me Where I Am, Could You?

Earlier this year I wrote a post about Roger “Sir Roger Moore” Moore, having just finished his autobiography. You can read it here (the post, not the autobiography) if you’ve really got that much time on your hands and there’s literally nothing else on the internet, but the gist of it was that I finished the book in such an apoplectic rage that I nearly had a stroke.

The Incredible Suit would now like to take this opportunity to say to Sir Rodge, as he evidently now wishes to be called, that – on the evidence given below - all is forgiven.



What's that you say? An advert for the Post Office starring a confused octagenarian isn't 'Friday' enough for you? Well in that case you'd better turn up your speakers and start the weekend with this utterly potty spasm of YouTubular marvelosity:



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One Night Of Saucytime

It’s Week 1,347 of The Incredible Suit’s campaign to have the next James Bond film, probably not to be called Blood And Thunder, cast entirely by a mentally unhinged blogger.

Today we’ll look at the new Miss Moneypenny, by which I mean I’ll tell you who I think should play her and you’ll be so uninterested that you’ve probably already turned your computer off, buried it at the bottom of the garden and made a cup of tea.

The criteria are simple:
1) Be attractive but slightly bookish.
2) Don’t moon after 007 like a dim-witted puppy, but
3) Give the impression that Moneypenny and Bond had one night of saucytime a while back.

Here’s the selection:

Interestingly, which is to say that I find it interesting, which means you really should too, all of these actresses could be a Bond girl just as well as a Moneypenny, which is one less blog post about my fantasy cast for you to have to ignore. Hooray! Anyway I think I’ll go for Emilia Fox as Moneypenny because she’s the closest to Daniel Craig’s age. That way we won’t have to put up with the kind of borderline kiddy-fiddling that went on with Gemma Arterton in Quantum Of Solace.

So just to keep you updated, so far the main titles are looking like this:

Albert R Broccoli’s EON Productions and The Incredible Suit present

Daniel Craig as James Bond

In

Blood And Thunder

(thanks to The Incredible Suit for the title)

Vincent Cassel as the Bad Guy, which was The Incredible Suit’s idea

Bernard Hill or David Warner as M (also The Incredible Suit’s idea)

Noel Clarke as Q (The Incredible Suit again)

Emilia Fox as Miss Moneypenny ( "              " )

Some other people, yet to be decided by The Incredible Suit

Oh and with music by Muse, which wasn’t The Incredible Suit’s idea as such but is heartily endorsed thereby.

Furthermore can we make sure that David Arnold composes the score again? The only way I’ll be happy if he doesn’t is if John Barry does it instead. Oh and bring Daniel Kleinman back to do the title sequence, that last one was a load of old Moonraker.

My work here is done.



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The Back To The Future Birthday Bonanzagasm

I recently celebrated the anniversary of the day I emerged into this world, screaming and yelling because I’d just missed the release of The Man With The Golden Gun and would have to wait another three years for The Spy Who Loved Me, by having a Back To The Futurethon at my favourite cinema, the Joeyplex.

By crikey I love Back To The Future. It’s a perfect film in every way. Each time I watch it I find something I hadn’t noticed before. Today I realised how sad it was that George McFly’s lifelong bullying at the hands of Biff Tannen had completely stifled his creative urges. At 17 years old he wrote science fiction stories that he was too shy to show anyone because he couldn’t stand to be rejected, and by 47 he was wedged in some crappy job doing Biff’s work for him. Marty’s fannying about with the space-time continuum may have given George all the material rewards a 1980s family could hope for, but it’s the fact that he’s a published author, living his dream, that brings a lump to my throat. I’m just not sure why it took 30 years for his first book to be released.

Part II is slightly less lovable because Biff, in his various incarnations, crosses the line from great movie villain to completely unsympathetic idiot hole, and also because everyone shouts all the way through it. However I’ve never seen a sequel before or since that goes back into the original and turns it inside out like Seth Brundle’s telepod does to his baboon in The Fly.

Since I first saw Part II I’ve been perplexed by the backwards ‘99’ that appears at the end when the DeLorean is struck by lightning, but it was so enigmatic I just thought it was too brilliant to question. Received wisdom on the interwebs suggests it’s the flame trails, created by the time machine disappearing, spinning off into the distance. I suppose that could be true but I think it’s better left unexplained, like Marty’s failure to notice that his girlfriend and Dad have been replaced by lesser actors. Although I did have a big thing* for Elisabeth Shue at the time, due to a combination of unruly teenage hormones and Adventures In Babysitting.

Part III rediscover’s the trilogy’s heart and perfectly balances the race to get back to the future with a beautiful love story for Doc Brown. And the new time machine appearing at the end is such a “Yess!!” moment – which makes it even more brilliant that it’s topped when it takes to the skies and continues the adventure in a whole other story we’ll never see.

So here’s to the Back To The Future trilogy - a magnificent way to spend a birthday - and to its unsung hero Alan Silvestri, who composed a perfect theme for it that he never bettered. Great Scott!



*You should be ashamed of yourself for thinking what you’re thinking.

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9

9 is a new film about a bunch of old socks in a post-apocalyptic alternate universe fighting a machine which appears to have fallen out of The Matrix. It’s completely rubbish.

I can’t even bring myself to explain why it’s so bad. The writers couldn’t be arsed to provide an interesting and coherent story so I don’t see why I should go to any effort telling you what it is that makes it so crushingly awful. It would have been more appropriate to call it 4, because that’s what it would get out of 10, and most of that would be for the animation which, irritatingly, is jeffing marvellous.

 9 is the third animated film I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, each of which uses voice ‘talent’ in a different way:

• Up – Uses unknown actors to provide perfectly appropriate voices for a grumpy old codger and an excitable schoolboy. 
• Fantastic Mr Fox – Uses ludicrously expensive A-listers to provide perfectly inappropriate voices for foxes.
• 9 – Uses the equivalent of Tesco Value (but still expensive) stars like Elijah Wood and Jennifer Connelly to provide bland voices for sentient rag dolls, which you don’t even realise were voiced by famous actors until the credits roll, prompting you to think that maybe they should have just dragged some homeless people in off the street to do the voices, which would not only have been cheaper but would also have had some humanitarian benefit, I mean, apparently Martin Landau was in it but I didn’t recognise his voice and I couldn’t work out which one he was so what’s the point of that, he was in North By Northwest for Alfred’s sake!

One of these methods works very well. The other two don’t. Can you tell which is which?

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London Film Festival: Starsuckers

Oh my GOD I’m bored of writing reviews. Almost as bored as you must be of reading them, if indeed you are reading them. And if indeed you’re actually there. However, the London Film Festival is finally over so I can hopefully get on with posting silly clips like this:



In the meantime, here’s my final LFF review, which I can barely summon the enthusiasm to write, so I’ll understand if you’re similarly disinterested in reading it. I’ll make it short.

Starsuckers: a self-defeatingly one-sided documentary about our obsession with celebrity culture. Entertaining and well made but ultimately more unbalanced than Mercury and Jupiter on a see-saw.

The Incredible Suit has employed a phalanx of statisticians and mathematicians to examine all my posts about the London Film Festival in an attempt to rate the event as a whole. They have just emerged from their sweaty little stat-shed and presented this final analysis:

Oh dear, that’s not very good is it. Conclusion: Don’t bother next year.

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Fantastic Mr. Fox

It may come as a shock to you that The Incredible Suit actually has some kind of qualifications; specifically, I got a C in A Level Film Studies at South Cheshire College. So forgive me if I go all academic for a moment. Don’t worry, it won’t last long.

Wes Anderson is an auteur. His films are characterised by dysfunctional families failing miserably to connect with each other and characters so arch you could put a church on them and call them a doorway. While I respect and admire him for his offbeat filmmaking and great use of music, his films leave me completely cold, with the exception of The Darjeeling Limited, which – for reasons I have yet to fathom – I really like. I think it’s because I’d quite like to trundle across India on a rickety old train, although not with my face rearranged in the style of Picasso like Owen Wilson’s.

Despite being a stop-motion animated adaptation of a Roald Dahl story, Fantastic Mr Fox is no exception. It’s full of characters who don’t like each other, probably because they’re all so unlikeable. They all feel like they’re just words on a page, even with the likes of George Clooney and Meryl Streep providing the voices. In fact if anything, Clooney is a complete distraction as a voice actor because his voice is so recognisable. Part of Up’s success is that the voices are provided by unknowns, so you focus on the characters more than the actors, and you don’t spend the first 15 minutes picturing George Clooney in a perspex box wittering into a microphone.

Having said that, and although Fantastic Mr Fox feels like an unsympathetic Wallace and Gromit film, it does zip along with some panache, to the point where The Incredible Suit can bring you this great news:

What I would most recommend it for, though, is that it includes more alcoholism, smoking, cussing, dismemberment, spousal abuse, theft, knife violence, drugs and animated banjo-playing machine-gun-toting Jarvis Cockers than any kids’ film I’ve ever seen. And that can only be a good thing.

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