Godzilla: King Of The Monsters: What the fuck

Godzilla: King Of The Monsters is a fucking disgrace. It is boring, messy and galactically stupid. It is not so much written as shat, and less directed than allowed to splatter onto the screen with all the nuance, skill and visual flair of a bucket of sick dropped from a great height. It is the worst film I've seen for at least three years. With a budget of around $200 million, it is a convincing argument for the cessation of all filmmaking. It has spunked an absolute fortune on making the world a worse place, and when you think of what could have been done with that money it seems only fair that the team behind it should be jailed for life. Its setup and exposition are so rushed and garbled that it is impossible to understand what the point of any of it is. The characters are all idiots, written so badly that their aims and intentions are a mystery for the entire duration. What the fuck. They make stupid decisions and do not deserve to survive. None of them are remotely sympathetic or realistic and I hate them all, especially the one who is just there to say something funny every now and again. What a cunt. There is a dysfunctional family because there has to be, and it consists of Stoic Dad, Cold Mum and Brave Daughter. Stoic Dad makes all the decisions based on how he is going to save Brave Daughter. Nobody else in the film is allowed to have any input based on their own familial needs. This is a film about a global catastrophe and there are about twenty people in it. I literally had no idea what any of them were trying to do, or why, or even where they were. What the fuck. Every scene is set in a different location. I think the film visits every country on the planet. Every time we go somewhere new we get a little caption telling us where we are, then we immediately cut to a different location. This is bad and confusing and annoying, don't do that. Also every location looks the same, i.e. dark and rainy and grey and brown and shit. Anyway the humans have invented a device which somehow communicates with monsters. How this device works, and what it does, have not been thought through for more than four seconds. Everybody wants it but nobody can explain why. Maybe it will stop the monsters. Do they want to stop the monsters? Unclear. One character thinks that all human life should be extinguished because the monsters were here first and I am inclined to agree with that because then there would be no more films like this. Anyway there are a lot of monsters and they are also stupid. One is a giant fucking moth. I am aware of Godzilla lore so understand that there has to be a giant fucking moth but this is 2019, a giant fucking moth is a stupid fucking monster. A MOTH. Nobody says "Wow that moth is ridiculous." What the fuck. The monsters fight a lot, for a very very very long time, in some of the worst monster-fighting scenes I have ever had the misfortune to watch. The set-pieces are choreographed and shot with such a staggering absence of wit and imagination that you may as well watch an angry toddler smash two potatoes together for hours on end. It is so dark and rainy and cloudy and muddy that it is impossible to tell what the fuck is going on. There are about five wide shots in the whole film. This is a film about monsters. Show me the fucking monsters. Stage a scene in fucking daylight and let me see what I'm meant to be seeing, because all I can see is dark grey arms and legs and tentacles and heads flashing past like subliminal messages. Some scenes actually start in daylight, then some monsters turn up and it all goes dark, then when they've finished fighting ten minutes later it's daylight again. What the fuck. Anyway the stupid people are still being stupid and saying stupid things like "You are meddling with forces beyond our comprehension" and "Moscow, London and Washington DC are all under attack" because even in 2019 monsters only demolish capital cities. A newsreader delivers forehead-slappingly obvious exposition like "This is the single greatest disaster in human history," which is actually very funny because she is describing the film, do you see. The humans realise that humans are bad and Brave Daughter realises that Cold Mum is not a good mum, in fact she calls her "a monster". It turns out that guess what, the humans are the real monsters. What the fuck. It is 2019. This is not how to make films. This is a film made by idiots for idiots and it should not have been made. If you like it you are a bad person. Please unmake it. I do not like it, it is awful. Go away film. What the fuck.

Kubism, Part 5: Spartacus (1960)

Longer, wider and more colourful than anything Stanley Kubrick had done up to this point, Spartacus saw The Kube go EPIC. 198 minutes long! A four-minute rousing Alex North overture! A Saul Bass title sequence! An intermission and entr'acte, whatever that is! A $12 million budget! Super 70mm 2.2:1 Technirama! Between 10,000 and 50,000 extras depending on who you ask! If bigger means better, then Spartacus is The Greatest Movie Ever Made Ever. However, of course, bigger doesn't mean better at all, and Spartacus is in fact pretty rubbs. And here, in the latest instalment of my gentle fondling of Stanley Kubrick's oeuvre, is how and why. Let's fondle!

Spartacus had a difficult birth, and with the benefit of hindsight it's clear it would have taken a miracle for it to grow to be a healthy, bouncing baby Hollywood epic. A passion project for star and producer Kirk Douglas, the film lost original director Anthony Mann after two weeks because Mann kept inserting peas into Douglas' chin-dimple while he was asleep (note to self: check this before publishing). Douglas approached Kubrick, who agreed to direct on the condition that he could extract himself from a five-picture contract he'd somehow got himself into with Douglas after Paths Of Glory. Now maybe I'm being naive, but if the primary reason for a director agreeing to make a film with a star is that he never has to make another film with that star again, chances are the resulting partnership isn't going to be a lusty tumble on a bearskin rug in front of a roaring fire. More like tumbling into a roaring fire with a skinned, lusty bear.

That's not to say Stan didn't make an effort, and there are a handful of examples within Spartacus of him absolutely smashing it. But (according to Kubrick) Douglas, writer Dalton Trumbo and producer Edward Lewis poo-pooed all his decent ideas because he wasn't yet The Stanley Kubrick. He was just a 31-year-old New York punk splashing about in the deep end of Hollywood, at a point when it was so terrified of the popularity of television it thought it would die if it didn't have a safe pair of hands throwing as much cash at the screen as possible.

The first of Spartacus' three and a quarter hours is pretty patience-testing stuff, especially if you're as swords-and-sandals-phobic as I am. Anyone playing Kubrick Bingo can cross off 'Opening Voiceover' (that's five out of five so far), which introduces us to our titular hero, his perfect white teeth standing out from his mahogany tan and his broad chest glistening like tectonic plates fresh out of the tectonic dishwasher. A slave with biceps of granite but a heart of gold, he's purchased by the deliciously camp Peter Ustinov and forced to train as a gladiator. "You'll be oiled, bathed, shaved and massaged," Ustinov promises him, neglecting to mention that he'll also be repeatedly attacked by massive blokes wielding spiky balls on long chains. Ustinov tests Sparto's intelligence, virility and skipping skills while we meet improbably fit soft-focus love interest Varinia, over whom Sparts moons like a simple puppy whenever he gets a break between training montages.

All of this drags on forever in dire need of a ruthless editor, until at the hour mark the slaves revolt, and it looks like everything's about to get knocked up a notch. It is here that we should spare a thought for actor Charles McGraw, who plays bastard slave trainer Marcellus: in a messy fight scene, McGraw clearly receives a real cut to his eyelid before having his face genuinely smashed into the edge of a cauldron of slop at the hands of an over-enthusiastic Kirk Douglas. We should also pay tribute to the integrity of Douglas' tiny slave underpants, because despite the impressive amount of acrobatics he performs, at no point do his boys leave the barracks. It's a stark contrast to that P.E. class I did in loose-fitting shorts and boxers when I was a kid that has haunted my nightmares for the past 30 years.

Just when it threatens to get interesting, we find ourselves in the Roman Senate listening to Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton parping guffs of political wind at each other. This they do in three camera angles that will be repeated throughout the film's many Senate scenes, making you wonder if the Stanley Kubrick who shot Paths Of Glory with spellbinding ingenuity and chutzpah just set the cameras up in the morning and went home while Britain's acting royalty went at it. In fairness, when Laughton and a shifty-eyed Peter Ustinov get together you could shoot them with a VHS camcorder and it'd still be gold: watching these two waggle their flabby jowls, burble Machiavellian plots and make self-effacing comments about their own repulsiveness ("You and I have a tendency towards corpulence") is arguably Spartacus' greatest gift, and Kubrick knows it.

While old men argue and Tony Curtis looks gorgeous but confused about Laurence Olivier's ruminations on the snail and oyster diet, Spartacus is leading an army of freed slaves across Italy, past an endless variety of unconvincing cycloramas and ambitious matte paintings. For reasons, once he's done this he turns his troops around, heads back the way he came and gets most of them killed when they run into the Roman army coming in the opposite direction. Poor leadership skills, certainly, but at least he does it in an impressive battle sequence that begins with those ten (or 50, who knows) thousand extras being herded around by Stanley Kubrick in a shot so mind-bogglingly wide you can almost see the curvature of the Earth. The battle itself doesn't stand up to Paths Of Glory's No Man's Land sequence, but it does at least contain some fun cross-cutting between both leaders' motivational speeches and an amusing spot of limb-lopping.

The problem with all this is that Stanley Kubrick isn't really interested in widescreen spectacle or billions of men repeatedly twatting each other; he's all about the close-up, the personal, the struggle in microcosm. Sorry to keep banging on about Paths Of Glory (not actually sorry, Spartacus invites comparisons on account of Kirk Douglas leading an army into war and struggling to find a morsel of humanity), but that film used its big set-piece to kick-start the drama that followed, whereas for Spartacus the battle is the drama. Perhaps this is best illustrated in the oft-parodied but beautiful "I'm Spartacus" scene that follows the battle, in which Kubrick wrings eye-moistening emotion from an ostensibly daft gesture of brotherhood (that one guy who isn't claiming to be Spartacus? Maybe you should check him out, Centurion?).

The last half hour is a total downer, challenging you to stay awake while it wraps up its themes in confusing fashion. The script, written by open Communist Dalton Trumbo and based on a book by open Communist Howard Fast, wants to promote the idea of the labouring masses rising up against the ruling classes, but given that the labouring masses all end up hacked to bits or nailed to a cross it's hardly a rousing argument for revolution. The only hope is represented by Peter Ustinov rescuing Spartacus' infant son, but even that just made me wonder if I wouldn't rather have watched an entire film about Ustinov's character: a morally vacuous black market racketeer who, through exposure to politics, becomes a better person and is given a noble conclusion. Plus he's played by Peter Ustinov, who may not have a chin that looks like a small child plunged its fist into a ball of dough, but he can roll his eyes like a total motherfucker.

As humdrum as Spartacus is, we should thank it for girding the Kubrick loins. The realisation that not being in total control leads to colossal dissatisfaction was an immeasurably significant one for Stan, and never again would he allow anyone else to tell him what to do. From here on in he disavowed what Kubrickologist Thomas Allen Nelson called the "trite, simplistic, sentimental morality" of Spartacus and plunged himself into the complex, murky waters of human foibles, emotional subtlety and Peter Sellers fighting his own right hand.

Come back soon (please) for more Kubism with Lolita, a film about a middle-aged man falling in love with a teenage girl, which Kubrick somehow managed to make before Woody Allen got his hands on it.

← Part 4: Paths Of Glory

Part 6: Lolita →

Booksmart: Nerds of a feather

Kids today don't know how lucky they are, what with the internet having been there since before they were born, social and political equality becoming ever closer to a reality, and not having to worry about destroying the environment because we've already done that. As if all that wasn't enough, they've now got their own defining teen movie: one they'll watch a thousand times in secret before they're old enough, another thousand while they're the same age as the characters, and a thousand more as they barrel through middle age, complaining that kids today don't know how lucky they are.

But the beauty of Booksmart, like all the best high school movies, is that its appeal is wide enough even to cater for knackered old fuckers like me. And that's because while it embraces all the tropes of the teen flicks that so clearly inspired it (The Breakfast Club, Dazed And Confused and Clueless are huge touchstones), it does so with morning-dew freshness, casually and effortlessly updating the genre for a new and woke generation who should, by rights, never find it unusual when popular film protagonists aren't straight, white males.

Amy and Molly are two proudly feminist LA high school nerds whose heroes are Michelle Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Malala Yousafzai. They are also fused together in friendship, as unequivocally displayed in their first scene together: a lift-to-school-slash-dance-sequence that tells you exactly who they are and whether you're going to love them unconditionally or be driven up the wall by them. If it's the latter, leave the cinema at this point, this film is not for you. Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein sell their characters and their relationship so hard that it's unfathomable to imagine the two actors haven't been besties forever, and that's a theme throughout Booksmart: characters are introduced as if you've started watching a TV show in the last episode of the last season, and it's up to you to fill in the backstories. It's a technique that's key to the script and to Olivia Wilde's breathless, high-energy direction, and does exactly what films like this should do: it makes you desperately want to be friends with a bunch of made-up people.

What is explained is that Amy and Molly are about to graduate when they realise they've spent too long nerding and not enough time getting high and/or drunk and/or laid, and their mission now is to party their pants off over the course of one incident-fuelled night. Girls just wanna have R-rated fun, and if you've ever watched a film about American teenagers you'll be entirely unsurprised to discover that this will encompass jocks, bitches, rich kids, parties at improbably large houses, beer pong, fumbling sexual encounters, fights, accidental drug intake, crippling social faux pas and an emotional finale.

There are few structural surprises, but that's OK, because pretty much everything else fizzes with shiny newness. The script, written by four women, is hugely sympathetic to both its female and male characters: everyone is treated like a young adult rather than patronised as a child, and the experiences they undergo which may be unfamiliar feel as painfully real as those we've all been through at some point. Nobody is picked on, or even remarked on, because they're LGBT, or BAME, or is wearing a silly hat, and at least one character is all three of those. There's an ingenious bit of commentary on young women and body image that has to be seen to be believed, and the very stereotypes that Booksmart itself relies on to function are frequently examined and challenged.

If all that sounds unbearably worthy, then know this: it's not. In fact it is funny as fuck. Not every gag lands, but Dever and Feldstein are adorable young comedic actors, and Wilde knows full well how to mine a sequence for maximum lols without resorting to the kind of incessant shouting, swearing and general schoolboy humour that often passes for comedy in these things (this is why Booksmart should be remembered long after its embarrassing uncle Superbad has faded into history). And the whole show is pumped up a level by a scythingly modern soundtrack, the entirety of which was new to my ears apart from one song by Alanis Morisette; a situation which has quite violently prompted me to reassess my listening habits.

Booksmart is, of course, entirely about friendship, and the friends you make when you're young that you think and hope will be there for you forever. It's a coming-of-age film packed full of heart that never descends into mawkishness or nastiness, treating all its characters with love and respect even when they're capable of extreme douchery. It's inevitably going to resonate more with a younger audience than someone like me, but it would be a grumpy old bastard indeed who didn't have any fun at all in Amy and Molly's company. They are teen titans; Go! To the movies. (to see them)

Kubism, Part 4: Paths Of Glory (1957)

Act I of Stanley Kubrick's career is complete: over the course of three shorts and three features we've seen him grow from pretentious faux-intellectual with a keen eye into an accomplished storyteller with an even keener eye. It hasn't always been easy viewing (I refer you, once again, to The Seafarers), but the upward trajectory in quality has at least formed the kind of narrative arc every traditional first act follows. Now, though, it's time to get serious. Paths Of Glory is, objectively, The Kube's first masterpiece: a film that tears the insanity of war a new asshole, dives into that asshole to examine the very rectum of humanity, and emerges caked in the shit of man's most unspeakable behaviour towards his fellow man. I hope it washed its hands.

Things begin with the ever-present (but, this time, mercifully brief) Kubrickian voiceover filling us in on the current state of affairs: it's France, 1916, there's a war happening, and it's not going well for anyone. In the first of several chess references that pepper the film, we discover there's a stalemate situation between the French and German forces, it's nil-nil with everything to play for and both teams are snookered (it's possible I don't fully understand chess). Pompous old twat General Broulard convinces weaselly turd General Mireau that if his men can take a German stronghold known as the Ant Hill - which both men acknowledge is a logistically unachievable task - there might be a tasty promotion in it for him, setting in motion a chain of events that made me so fucking cross about how awful people can be that I immediately tore up my application for the job of high-ranking military officer in a time of horrific global conflict. The hours were rubbish anyway so they can whistle.

Passing the buck as quickly as he can, Mireau assigns the job of taking the Ant Hill (renamed from "the Pimple" in the original novel: both names reflecting the cosmic insignificance Kubrick loved to assign his characters' efforts to control forces beyond their comprehension) to Colonel Dax and his Impossible Missions Force - basically a platoon of knackered soldiers with little to no clue about why they're there or what they're doing. Dax, one of precious few heroic characters in the Kubrick canon, is played by Kirk Douglas and is therefore carved from solid granite; an anchor of decency in a sea of madness and abandoned morality. Like every other Frenchman in Paths Of Glory he also speaks with a broad American accent, which is offputting to begin with, but once you fully appreciate, like, the universality of the film's themes, man, you begin to respect Kubrick's decision not to ask the cast to go all 'Allo 'Allo.

By this time we've descended from Broulard's opulent chateau to Dax's sewer-like trenches, giving Kubrick the perfect excuse to literally roll out some stunning tracking shots through the carved-out scars in the earth that pass for Dax's workplace. Not only do these shots look incredible, prefiguring 2001's hamstery jogging wheel scene and the corridors of The Shining's Overlook Hotel, but they also lend a sense of doomed inevitability to the soldiers' journey: where Kubrick's camera followed Broulard and Mireau's flamboyant dancing stroll around the chateau, that freedom of movement is entirely absent from the linearity that, by design, characterises the trenches.

Over the top the Ant Hill Mob go, then, with Kubrick unleashing hell in a spectacular three-minute scene that sees Dax, centre frame at all times, lead the charge across No Man's Land. This is the opening-of-Saving-Private-Ryan of its day, and still has the power to drop jaws over six decades later. It's an incredible display of acting, directing and editing, part Hollywood epic and part documentary realism, with extras flailing about all around Douglas while Stan crash zooms into his lead's grimacing face, fixed in grim determination as it's spattered in blood and dirt.

The assault, unsurprisingly, is a disaster, the platoon sensibly scurries back to the trenches rather than risk having their bits blown off, and General Mireau naturally decides to court martial three random soldiers for cowardice as an example to the rest of the army. What has up until now been a thundering war film transforms unexpectedly into a thundering courtroom drama, with the unstoppable force of Colonel Dax (who, as a civilian, was conveniently the "foremost criminal lawyer in all of France") meeting the immovable object of military pig-headedness as he struggles to defend his men in a shambolic kangaroo court. Kubrick's effortless swinging between genres would be a trope of his later career, but it's easy to forget that here he seamlessly blends two narrative archetypes into the same film.

The trial is just as harrowing to watch as the earlier scenes on the battlefield, with the script wringing the maximum amount of hear-tearing frustration out of the army's total failure of common decency and Kubrick repeatedly placing his camera in the absolute perfect spot to tell his story. The dialogue here is glorious (Dax's closing argument, in which he professes his shame at being a member of the human race, is chilling), but if you muted the volume you'd still know exactly what's going down - specifically the three soldiers, sentenced to death by firing squad. Kubrick goes on to tease steel cables of tension out of the run-up to the execution (the constant drum roll is no help for those with high blood pressure), with the chance of a reprieve dangled in front of the viewer like a lifebuoy, and he plays with audience expectation with all the mercy of a bored cat pawing at a terrified mouse.

In the event that you've got this far but haven't seen Paths Of Glory I won't spoil the remainder of the film, except to say that it doesn't have much more to say in the way of positive appraisals of humanity in wartime; if there's a moral to the story, it's the survival of the shittest. This is arguably Kubrick's first fully-formed plunge into his characters' psyches: while his previous films were largely populated with cyphers employed to operate the machinery of their respective plots, the men (and woman) of Paths Of Glory are conduits for some searing psychological evaluation. Look at the convicted soldiers' responses to the verdict of their court martial, for example: incarcerated in the chateau's stables, treated like animals and stripped of their dignity, one turns to God, one to booze and the other falls apart in the face of a total absence of reason. Look at the smiling photographer who snaps them on their way to the firing squad. And look at Dax's reaction in the final scene, as he realises the men he's been trying to save are as "degenerate" as the men who send them to certain death - before, thanks to the future Mrs Kubrick's appearance as a terrified German girl, the soldiers reveal an appreciation of life and beauty that offers a glimmer of hope for the future of humanity.

And let's not forget Kubrick's continual development as a composer of actual works of art on screen. On the one hand obsessed with detail and authenticity, then on the other concocting a five-second theatrically operatic horror in which a nighttime wide shot of No Man's Land is suddenly illuminated by a flare, revealing mangled corpses that were hidden by the darkness, Stan truly finds his visual groove here. He may be schooling us on the worst aspects of mankind, the futility of honour in the face of cold ambition and the travesties of justice that are meted out in the name of patriotism, but at least he's making it look fucking horrific while he's doing it.

Join me again soon for more of Captain Kirk in Spartacus, the story of the slightly-above-average hero of Lazy Town and his quest to get the slaves of ancient Rome to eat more fruit and veg.

← Part 3: The Killing

Part 5: Spartacus →

Kubism, Kubrintermission: Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition

I realise I'm only 26.66 recurring percent through my game-changing overview of the films of Stanley Kubrick, but I thought it was time for an intermission so you could either go for a poo or read some waffle about the Design Museum's Stanley Kubrick exhibition. You could always do both I suppose, the toilet is the ideal reading location for this blog.

Anyway last week I was at the press launch for Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition, which was no different from a standard visit except that instead of paying money I had to listen to Alan Yentob introducing it. I am well aware that Kubrick fans have a lot to thank Mr Yentob for, but I've been at two Kubrick events in the last month at which he appeared and I'm not entirely sure that public speaking is his forte.

So what can you expect to get for your £14.50, apart from a Yentob-free experience (unless he's also visiting on the same day as you, which would be unlucky)? Well, the first thing you'll notice is the entrance, which has been cleverly designed to mimic Kubrick's famous one-point perspective shooting style. If you've done any research on the exhibition online you'll expect to see something like this:

But what you'll actually see is something more like this:

Basically stop fannying about trying to get a cool photo of the entrance because there are hundreds of people trying to do the same thing and there's a shitload of stuff inside you need to crack on with.

The first room is a basic introduction to Stanley Kubrick and his working practices, including cameras and lenses, clapperboards, his Steenbeck editing desk, posters, a tonne of stuff relating to his unrealised Napoleon movie, and I've just realised that if I list everything in the room I'll be here until November, so let's just say there is a shitload of deeply cool Kubrick paraphernalia on display. My favourite thing in this room is his Oscar for VFX on 2001: A Space Odyssey, because the inscription plate on the base of the statue is slightly off centre and I bet it drove Kubrick fucking nuts. Hopefully Douglas Trumbull gets some enjoyment from that.

After that, the exhibition is split into areas dealing with each of his films. However, if you're going because you're a fan of any of his first three features you'll be disappointed: Fear And Desire, Killer's Kiss and The Killing are all glossed over in the first room. It's a bit of a shame to be honest, but given that probably not much stuff still exists from that time and that Kubrick himself virtually disowned his first two films, it's understandable.

While there's a clear route through the exhibition, the films are presented out of chronological sequence, which is mildly infuriating for twats like me but in fairness it does stop everyone bunching up in the middle where his best stuff would be. The first section deals with Kubrick's three most straightforward war films (Dr. Strangelove comes later): Paths Of Glory is a little under-represented, but costumes from Spartacus and Full Metal Jacket make up for it, as do Saul Bass's glorious Spartacus storyboards (which are hilariously contrasted with Kubrick's own scrawled versions) and a letter to Kubrick from Kirk Douglas, which he signs "Spartacus" for the avoidance of doubt.

More space is understandably given over to the more popular films: A Clockwork Orange brings you a giant phallus and the Korova Milk Bar's saucy tables; The Shining has a scale model of the Overlook Hotel maze, Jack Torrance's typewriter and his somewhat repetitive manuscript, and 2001 gets a small recreation of the Hilton Space Station's Howard Johnson Earthlight Room, as well as a huge amount of other props and models which I'll leave you to discover(y). Hint: look up.

If you're a Kubrick fan, don't plan to do anything silly like double-billing Spartacus and Barry Lyndon on the same day as visiting the exhibition because you'll want to give yourself several hours to pore over everything (although if you don't immediately want to watch at least one Kubrick film as soon as you leave then you're a monster). While there's an inevitable overlap between what's on display and what you might already know about The Kube, there are exhibits here that will give you chills you can't get from DVD extras. The whole exhibition has been thoughtfully curated to include just enough to satisfy but not overwhelm you, and given how much stuff is in the Kubrick archives that's no small feat of editing.

If you're not a Kubrick fan, you're an idiot, so go along anyway and educate yourself. You might not get nerdthrills from seeing the actual candles used to light Barry Lyndon like I did, but you might at least get some amusement from reading the angry letters Stan received about his more controversial films. You'll also see some of the original scripts, sketches, set photos, costumes, equipment and clips on big screens from some of the most innovative and downright smashingest films ever made, so show some respect and get your ass to the Design Museum in London before September 15th. Otherwise I'll send Alan Yentob round to convince you, and you do not want that.

Here is a link to buy tickets, tell them I sent you and you'll get a 0% discount.

And don't forget to read Kubism, my long-winded look at the films of Stanley Kubrick, because it's taking me ages and I need to know I'm not wasting my time.