Clever Words About Films And That

It’s been a while since I did something as uninspiring and pointless as put up a new trailer you can find anywhere, so here’s an uninspiring and pointless new trailer you can find anywhere:



However I couldn’t give a barrel of monkeys about Toy Story 3; obviously I’ll go and see it, duh, but I’m no more excited about it than I am about Avatar, which, on a scale of 1 to 10, is 'not very'.

What’s far more intriguing is this cheeky little tinker:



I don’t know much about Exam at all, except that it got some good press after showing at the Edinburgh Film Festival in June this year, and that it’s small, cheap and looks devilishly entertaining, like Fidgit from Time Bandits on a bungee rope.

There’s no point in me giving you a synopsis because it’s all in the trailer, but what I can and will give you is a solid gold guarantee that The Incredible Suit will be seeing Exam when it comes out on January 8th and sharing its thoughts with you, the viewers. I might even do something original and witty like give it a grade, you know, like ‘A’ or ‘C minus’ or something, what with it being called Exam and all.

The Incredible Suit: at the cutting edge of dead clever words about films and that.

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Robocop Unicorn

At something of a loose end, I recently typed “Robocop unicorn” into a Google Image search. The results suggest that there’s an alternate universe encroaching on ours in which it’s seen as not just perfectly normal, but actually important and worthwhile, to spend your time creating stuff like this:

If anyone can explain this to me I’ll be lying down in a dark room while King Noffin of the Fens mops my brow with a damp rat.

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By Obi-Wan's Beard

There are many, many things I should probably be ashamed of, my treatment of Fidgit from Time Bandits being just one. I don’t even pay him minimum wage yet I get him to perform all sorts of demeaning tasks to ensure the smooth running of The Incredible Suit.

One thing I’m not ashamed of, though, despite constantly being made to feel so, is that I really, really enjoyed last year’s animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars film. There, I’ve said it. It’s out there. Do your worst.

Of course it’s not ‘proper’ Star Wars, nothing is except the first three films. Of course the battle droids are almost as annoying as Jar Jar Binks. Of course it’s irritating that Ahsoka Tano keeps calling R2-D2 ‘Artooie’. And of course it’s odd that each character looks like it’s being played by Kryten from Red Dwarf.

But watch it big and loud and, by Obi-Wan’s beard, it’s breathtaking. The opening battle, which goes on for about half an hour, is astonishing. The direction of the animation puts you right in the middle of it all and doesn’t stop till the last wisecracking battle droid has had its wise well and truly cracked. The sound effects are incredible, the music – rearrangements of John Williams’ perfect score – is energetic and exciting, and the action is stunning. And then, just when you’ve caught your breath, there’s another massive battle that takes place vertically, up the side of a cliff.

I mention all this now because I just bought the first series of the Clone Wars TV show, and it’s just as good. Not only that but it comes on four discs in one normal-sized DVD case, which is more welcome than a last-minute rescue by a roguish Corellian, and comes with a beautiful booklet of production designs and illustrations. AND it features absolutely no trailers before the main menu, which - if you can remember as far back as yesterday's post - puts it in the Top 10 Greatest Things Ever.

If you too are ashamed to show your Clone Wars love in public then feel free to do it here, under The Incredible Suit’s umbrella of tolerance. All are welcome, unless you’re a battle droid. You lot can boil in the fires of Mustafar for all I care.

Being an adult means I can't own one of these.

I hate being an adult.

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Promogasms & Adspasms

Remember when DVDs were introduced? Great days. Here’s a disc, stick it in, there’s a menu, press play and Bob’s your uncle, you’re off and watching something disgusting and a bit phallic plop out of John Hurt’s guts in nauseatingly gross detail and super-squidgy-sloppy-squealy 5.1 digital surround sound. All well and good.

But at some point some Hollywood marketing drone realised there was a small oasis in our lives that wasn’t crammed to bursting with adverts, and as a direct result most DVDs now feature about six days of trailers before you even get to the main menu, and this makes The Incredible Suit very very cross. I have a suspicion that Blu-Ray was introduced because standard DVDs no longer have the capacity for all the promogasms distributors want to force into our faceholes every time we watch a film.

Take the following examples of a few DVDs released in the last twelve months:

The Dark Knight – Four ads before the main menu, one of which is for Warner Brothers’ Blu-Ray range, a pointless exercise if ever there was one. Not only can you not see how much sharper the picture is or spangly the sound is because you’re watching it in standard definition, but the standard definition pictures look chuffing magniferous anyway, so why bother? The Dark Knight also features a trailer for Get Smart, in which Steve Carell is extremely unfunny, only this time in a phone box.

Quantum Of Solace – Three trailers, two studio stings and that bloody anti-piracy thing, which – thanks to hairy genius Adam Buxton – now has lyrics and is finally bearable:



Star Trek – Thankfully only two ads, but both for awful films, GI Joe: Rise Of The Cobra and Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen (known to normal human beings as GI Joe and Transformers 2), the latter of which features Shia LaBeouf uttering the open goal: “Megatron wants what’s in my mind!”

The worst offender, however, is WALL•E, which relentlessly beats you – and, crucially, your children - around the head with so many adspasms it’s a wonder any of you can stand up. Before you can even get close to the menu there’s a generic Disney promo; a short and very rubbish teaser for Up; another futile Blu-Ray con; a trailer for Pinocchio, and last but by all means least, an ad for the unspeakably awful-looking and badly dubbed The Secret Of The Magic Gourd. Yes, really. And no, I’ve no idea what a gourd is, but on the evidence presented in this trailer it’s a walking, talking turd.



Now you might like to counter my argument by suggesting that you can skip all this shizzle and just go straight to the main menu, and you’d be right. But that’s not the point. I don’t know what the point is, but that’s not it. If anyone knows what the point is, please send it to me along with several commercials for other points I may be interested in.

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Darth Hattersley

The other day I was watching BBC2's informative, educational, entertaining and extremely well-shot lunchtime programme "The Daily Politics", when up popped former deputy leader of the Labour party, Roy Hattersley. Now I don't know what your immediate thoughts might be upon laying your eyes on Mr Hattersley, but if you're anything like me they probably look something like this:

Uncanny.

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Hairy Faced Lunatic

Books. Hate ‘em. Too many words.

Thank Alfred, then, for The James Bond Omnibus, a collection of comic strips that ran in the Daily Express between 1958 and 1962. This book, which is made of 100% recycled groovy, is the perfect thing for a dangerously obsessive Bond freak who’s watched the films and read the novels so many times that he introduces himself with his surname first, then his first name and surname together, even if he has a name that doesn’t sound remotely cool when spoken like that. Fortunately I don’t know anyone quite that obsessive, and I certainly wouldn’t be caught doing that myself, oh no.

Anyway. Ian Fleming’s original books were serialised in the Express in the days before it became the Daily Diana Conspiracy Theory, and if you’d been around then you would have been alternately entertained by the zippy plots and fantastic artwork (by John McLusky in this book; other artists such as the peerless Yaroslav Horak - surely a Bond villain name if ever there was one - would take over later), and frustrated by the fact that it took about four seconds to read and then you had to wait till tomorrow for the next four seconds. But the majesty of this book is that that frustration has been banished – banished, I say! – by squidging them all together into one continuous story.

One thing I love about Fleming’s novels is that Bond can often be found spouting the most ridiculous put-downs to the villains which even Roger Moore would have trouble saying out loud, and I’m pleased to see they’re carried through to the comic strips. Here’s my current favourite, from 'Moonraker':

Furthermore, when they ran out of original stories, writer Jim Lawrence came up with a bucketload more, which I haven’t read but am very excited about, despite them having Harry Potteresque titles like ‘The League Of Vampires’, ‘When The Wizard Awakes’ and ‘The Xanadu Connection’. And I shudder to think what ‘Doomcrack’ is all about, but I look forward to finding out.

So well done to Titan Books for parping out this beauty, keep ‘em coming and have a free plug on The Incredible Suit for your troubles.

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Darth Vader’s Coal Scuttle

Sometimes I can tell by the way that you’re gazing blankly at your screen that you’re not interested in a single word I have to say. That’s quite understandable; most of it is complete and utter codsbobble. In fact, a lot of the time I think that it would be better for everyone if I just shut up for a moment and stick some faintly chucklesome clips up for you to watch in your lunch break.

So, in a public service to all of us, here’s some stuff that doesn’t require any effort from anyone:

Speed 3 Currently Filming In Russia:



Shia LaBeouf is asked if he thinks a) if his contribution to the arts is worthwhile, b) if he should make any more films, and c) if he is any good:



And finally, something for Pixar fans whose hearts are blacker than Darth Vader’s coal scuttle:



Happy weekend, and don't forget - if you're terribly down with the kids, you can become a Facebook fan of The Incredible Suit! Yes, really! I know!

***STOP PRESS FOR EXCITING BUT

SELF-CONGRATULATORY MESSAGE***

Hello if you've been sent here from the weekly Popbitch email, and thanks a bazillion to Popbitch for increasing The Incredible Suit's readership by approximately a gajillion times. I had to put 'Gonna Fly Now (Theme From Rocky)' on at very high volume and run up my stairs while Fidgit from Time Bandits circled me with a camcorder, the footage of which you will never, ever see.

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2012: A Review

Mumble mumble, pseudo-scientific techno-babble... nutrinos... CRASH!!! SMASH!!! BASH!!! CHEESE!! WHOOSH!!! SPLASH!!! CRACK!!! AAAGGHHHHH!!! MORE CHEESE!! BOOM!!! BANG!!! CLANG!!! FOOM!!! WHOOSH!!! A BIT MORE CHEESE!! CRUNCH!!! Repeat until head hurts.

Preposterous, instantly forgettable fun. 6/10

Also, 2012 is long. Really long. About 366 days by all estimates.

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A Wheezing Rampage Of Revenge

It’s official. This chap Michael Caine, who has for so long gone overlooked in the movie world, is surely the planet’s greatest actor. I mean he’s just chuffing marvelous, there are no two ways about it, or if there are the other way is that he is fricking amazing.

In Harry Brown, Caine plays an old geezer, which isn’t much of a stretch to be fair, who gets increasingly Harry Browned off with the local scumbags on his estate. When his best mate, who happens to be the caretaker of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, is murdered by the aforementioned scumbags, Harry takes it upon himself to go postal on their asses in a wheezing rampage of revenge.

The first half of the film is almost kitchen sink drama, in which Caine is utterly compelling in every frame. Even The Incredible Suit got something in its eye in the scene where Harry was informed of his friend’s death.

Unfortunately the second half, which is kick started – albeit very slowly – by an overlong and slightly freaky visit to a local gun dealer, loses the plot a bit as it heads toward a big finale which the budget can’t support. Ten hoodies and a handful of coppers do not a riot make. Also the police, bless ‘em, are portrayed as ineffectual plods the whole way through, and although this prompts Harry to take up arms himself, it comes across as lazy characterization. Having said that, Ben Drew is remarkably believable as the worst person in the world ever, which is saying something when you’re sharing screentime with Sir Maurice of Micklewhite.

Harry Brown is depressing, brutal and much better than its American cousin Gran Torino, but perhaps the best reason to see it is to watch a legend doing what he does better than what other people what do it does it. Yeah? As some indication of how convincing he was, the only other people in the cinema were four old ladies who I had to avoid eye contact with on the way out because I thought they were going to beat the living crap out of me.

Back by popular demand (i.e. I forgot all about it until now):

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A Cup Of Reasonable, But Unexceptional, Tea

Irritatingly, I missed Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee at the cinema, although I can’t really be blamed because it was only on for about four minutes at one tiny cinema in some obscure part of London that’s only accessible by dirigible airship. Fortunately, and I have to say quite unexpectedly, it was released on DVD almost immediately, which means it’ll probably be on Channel 4 before you finish reading this and the sequel will be out on theatrical release.

If that turns out to be the case, don’t bother flicking through the Yellow Pages to hire a zeppelin in order to find it, for Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee was merely a slice of OK cake washed down with a cup of reasonable, but unexceptional, tea.

Filmed mockumentary-style by the consistently good but never quite awesome Shane Meadows, this is the flimsy tale of an East Midlands roadie, Le Donk, and his lardy rapping bud, Scor-zay-zee, as they take a very short road trip, work with “The Arctical Monkeys”, strive to realise a long-held dream and, for Le Donk, fail to deal with his ex-girlfriend moving on.

The film perches somewhere on the same comedy ladder as This Is Spinal Tap and TV’s 'The Office', but remains several rungs below both. Le Donk, played by the always excellent Paddy Considine, is an almost David Brent-esque berk who loves the attention of having a camera crew follow him around, and while he shows himself up to be talentless, selfish and unlikeable, he’s never quite funny enough to make us forgive his disagreeable nature.

That said, it’s over in 71 minutes and has some excellent opening titles, so, you know, every cloud…*



In unrelated (and shamelessly self-promotional) news, The Incredible Suit now has what is commonly known by young people as “a Facebook page”, which means you can come out and tell the world you’re a fan of this monumental pile of old cabbages with just one relatively painless click of the mouse. Somewhere on this page is a button that says “Become a Fan”; doing so means you’ll be the first to know when there’s a new post (providing you’re constantly glued to Facebook like a laboratory teenager), and – apparently – you can even have discussions about just how peerlessly professional, staggeringly informative and bum-scratchingly thought-provoking the blog is. All of which you could just do by talking to each other, but nobody does that any more, it’s just tedious.

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* This is a David Brent quote. It’s intentional. I don’t just throw these things together, you know. I bet you didn't notice the Wordy Rappinghood gag either. Honestly, I don't know why I etc etc...

100

Woo hoo! It’s The Incredible Suit’s 100th post! The entire team, which is to say me, Mrs The Incredible Suit (above) and Fidgit from Time Bandits, are in the pub celebrating, so here’s a vaguely century-related clip to keep you distracted until we sober up and remember where we left the keys to the blog.

Banzai, Daniel-san!



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Gagalanche

On a recent day off from whatever the hell it is I do for a living, I treated myself to a triple bill from the holy trinity of silent comedians – Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Not that this applied to me, but if you’ve had the kind of day where it would have been improved by an elephant defecating on your dining room table just after you’ve served up dinner then you could do a lot worse than sit down with these guys for a couple of hours.

Harold Lloyd’s short film Number, Please? is, it has to be said, not one of his best, but it does feature some of his typically inventive gags, especially a scene in which all he has to do is make a phone call, but is prevented in doing so by a cigar, a midget, a stupid woman, a bad memory, a lack of cash, a screaming baby and a Jewish stereotype. The film also features two excellent performances by dogs, which I realise is neither here nor there but canine thespianism is a much-overlooked aspect of cinema these days so I’m just doing my bit to big it up.

Charlie Chaplin’s first feature (although that’s pushing the limits of what qualifies a film as a feature – it’s 50 minutes long), The Kid, is a rare thing in silent cinema – a comedy with emotional depth, featuring as it does an abandoned child, a heartbroken mother, a fiercely protective father-figure and the social services sticking their oar in. Rest assured, however, there are plenty of people getting kicked up the arse and Charlie gets baby wee on his hands, so there’s something for everyone. Chaplin took a year to make The Kid, starting just after his own son died when he was just a few days old, and shot about 44 hours of footage, but it paid off. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll praise the dream sequence at the end for featuring another great dog, this time one that actually flies.

Buster Keaton, as regular viewers of The Incredible Suit will know, is worshipped as something of a god round these parts. His 1920 short Neighbors is a seventeen minute gagalanche* of gobsmackular stunts and astonishing use of props. Here’s the whole thing, but the first three minutes give you a fair idea of what to expect, and if it doesn’t make you want to watch the rest then there’s a small bit of you that isn’t working properly. Get it seen to.



Sadly no award-winning mutts there; in Keaton’s defence his previous short The Scarecrow had a great dog in it but it’s not as good. Conclusion? A brilliant dog does not a great film make. Although Digby, The Biggest Dog In The World is awesome.

* An avalanche of gags. Did you really need that explaining?

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A Fart I Have To Face

Earlier this year I went to an evening at the BFI with David Arnold, legendary composer of film scores. By which I mean that I went to see him talk, I didn’t go with him, we’re not mates or anything.

He was talking specifically about his work on the Bond films, which as I’m sure you’re aware is fantastic (proof here), and he let slip that he was working on a new project which would be of great interest to fans of James Bond music, but he couldn’t say what it was at that time. I set my anticipationometer to ‘quite excited’ and waited to see what goodies would spill forth.

Sadly the answer turned out to be ‘a new Shirley Bassey album produced by David Arnold’. It was a bit like being told you might be getting the complete Bond film collection for Christmas, only to open your stocking and find a VHS of Never Say Never Again.

Anyway, the other day I heard one of the tracks from Shirl’s album and, as has been pointed out elsewhere, was quite surprised to hear what was clearly a possible theme song for Quantum Of Solace, which had obviously been shot in the kneecaps in favour of Jack White and Alicia Keys’ effort. Not only that but I was even more surprised to find that I quite liked it. If I’d had any more surprises that day I probably would have had to have my spleen replaced, as everybody knows that each surprise shrinks one’s spleen by 2%.

So have a listen to ‘No Good About Goodbye’ and see what you think. Is this a Bond theme? Is it a great Bond theme? Is it better than Another Way To Die? And, perhaps most importantly, what does Burly Chassis mean by the line “There’ll always be a space, a fart I have to face now” at 0:42?

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Was Russ Abbot In Time Bandits?

One of the things almost worth thinking about mentioning about having a blog is that people stumble onto it by accident all the time, usually because they’ve typed something into Google like “where can I buy a Mr Incredible suit”, and inadvertently landed on this pile of tiresome pizzle. I’d like to think that these weary travellers might have their curiosity piqued, pull up a comfy chair and stay for a while, but statistical evidence shows they leg it quicker than Indiana Jones evading the Hovitos.

Although it gives me a feeling of some moral superiority when I see what some people are typing into Google, it simultaneously horrifies me that such things bring them here. I can only imagine the disappointment they must feel when they settle down in front of their computer with a very specific intention, only to find themselves staring at the rantings of a misguided berk who’s watched too many Bond films.

As a caring, sharing type, I thought I’d reveal some of my favourite searches that have brought unsuspecting types to The Incredible Suit. I’ve left the spelling mistakes in deliberately so don’t even try to pick me up on that, you pedants.

They fall into two broad groups which, for the sake of argument, we’ll call “Er…” and “Nipples”.

Er…
was russ abbott in time bandits?
if i put you in a dustbin
muse penile suppository review
the incredible machine fishtank target
how to make realistic intestines
turtle bowel magnet
wher can i find emma watson fakes
blogger content warning horny hunk

Nipples
incredible nipples
insane nipples movies
moulin rouge nipple
bonnie wright niple
ann-margret nipple
nipple in the camera
catherine weaver nipple terminator

I’ll keep you updated if any more come in, but if you’ve seen any of your own there I hope you can explain yourself. More importantly, though, I hope you stayed and learned something new and soul-enhancing that might at least postpone your impending blindness. If not, this ought to dampen your ardour:



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James Bond In A Nappy In Outer Space

When The Incredible Suit was several sizes smaller, it was customary to watch anything that starred Harrison Ford, based entirely on the premise that Han Solo or Indiana Jones in any film would still be Han Solo or Indiana Jones. I probably would have watched Gardener’s World if Indy had been in it up to his elbows in geraniums.

Likewise with various other childhood heroes; James Bond in a nappy in outer space? I’m there. Marty McFly coked up to his eyeballs? Yes please. Even now I’ll watch Daniel Craig in pretty much anything, because all these guys have that certain something few film stars have: a charisma that’s carried over from their defining roles and keeps you coming back for more in the absence of another Star Wars / Bond / Back To The Future film.

So what the hell is Pierce Brosnan playing at?

Here’s a man who was so cool as 007 that projectors literally* froze when the film ran through them. Women wanted him, men wanted to be him, and he always wore an incredible suit.

But Brosnan has spectacularly failed to capitalise on his Bond success in just about every film he’s been in since he bungee jumped off that dam in GoldenEye. I only watched The Thomas Crown Affair and The Tailor Of Panama because he was in them, and they were duller than a trip to the Cumberland Pencil Museum. I didn’t expect him to be James Bond, I just thought his presence signified quality. I thought wrong.

Things haven’t improved; here are IMDb’s synopses of three upcoming Brosnan films:

“The Greatest: Drama centred around a troubled teenage girl and a family trying to get over the loss of their son.” Sounds great. Can I bring a book?

“Remember Me: Drama centred on two lovers whose relationship is threatened as they cope with their respective family tragedies.” I actually died of boredom in the middle of that sentence and had to be resuscitated with a direct injection of GoldenEye into my spine.

“Vanilla Gorilla: An albino gorilla in captivity uses sign language to communicate his plight to a little girl, setting in motion an international escape plan.” What? An albino gorilla? Did someone make this up playing Balderdash? Here’s a more sensible plot: “A shy carrot comes out of his shell when a dying telephone catapults him into another dimension populated by unicycling gherkins.”

The Broz-man’s next big flick is Percy Jackson & The Olympians, in which a boy discovers his Dad is Poseidon and subsequently gets involved in all kinds of mythical and legendary shenanigery. Brosnan plays Chiron, Percy’s immortal mentor. It looks OK, although it does feel a bit like someone’s desperately scrabbling around for the next Harry Potter.



So be warned, Brozzo; if Percy Jackson turns out to be less than Olympian, your future might lie with George Lazenby’s in convention hell. Act now – literally!

Mamma Mia! (2008)

*Not literally in the literal sense of the word

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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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