Tomorrow The Incredible Suit celebrates its first birthday. Hooray!
The entire team are currently working on a massive overhaul and redesign of the site, which is to say that I am looking for a different Blogger template, and to be honest it should have been done by now but I was distracted by some pictures of kittens looking bedraggled, or whatever was popular on the internet that day.
Anyway a lot has happened since then, and in a staggering act of monumental vanity I thought you might like to celebrate with me by remembering some of the less cabbagey posts gone by. In fact, I'm going to bring back the poll that nobody looked at in those first desolate months so you can vote on which of these five efforts was your favourite:
I’ve recently become aware of a truly wonderful, but little-known corner of the crazy world of movies, and I wanted to share it with you in the hope that you don’t know about it already and I don’t look like the last person in the world to discover it and everybody says, “Oh dear, he’s lost it you know, his blog was much better in the early days when he told us how great Chicagois only seven years after it came out”.
By way of a meandering introduction though, here’s a fact: A great trailer is in no way a clear indication of the quality of a film. Now this is clearly as obvious a statement as announcing that Shia LaBeouf single-handedly renders any film he’s in ghastly, and deep down I’ve always known it. However in my innocence I have for a long time allowed my excitement about a forthcoming film to be entirely dependent on a three-minute clipgasm edited together by an 8-year old with ADHD high on Sunny D and desperate to finish before he wets himself.
Because these little works of art do such a fantastic job of making even the turdiest movies look like the greatest thing since cinnamon flavour Jelly Belly, somebody (who deserves a Nobel prize for being ace) came up with the Golden Trailer Awards, a celebration of all that’s short, flashy and exhilarating, not to mention misleading and ultimately dream-smashing. Held annually, the GTAs celebrate the best of trailers from the world over. There’s even a category for Best Voice Over, recently renamed the Don LaFontaine Award for Best Voice Over after the legend that is this man:
I was very pleased to see that the spectaculous trailer for woeful cackfest Vantage Pointwon an award last year, because it did a bang-up job of convincing me the film was going to be the next Die Hard, when in fact it was the next Die Hard 4.0. In fact there are so many films that I would rather just re-watch the trailers for than the actual flick that I think film studios should stop all this feature length movie nonsense and just keep making cool trailers, then release compilation DVDs every six months, calling them something like Now That’s What I Call Short, Flashy And Exhilarating But Misleading And Ultimately Dream-Smashing. I mean who wants to sit through 3 hours and 6 minutes of a director’s cut of Watchmenanyway when the trailers are incredible and still leave time for a nice walk in the park or a leisurely browse of a pioneering, soul-enriching blog? Nobody, that’s who.
So hooray for the Golden Trailer Awards. Long may they celebrate all that is brief and erratically edited, and by the way did I mention that District 9 looks absolutely amazing from the trailers?
So last night I watched Chicago, which is officially A Great Movie. I don’t generally go a bundle on musicals, although having said that I do like Greaseand Singin’ In The Raina lot and I love Moulin Rouge! as if it were my only child. Maybe I do go a bundle on musicals after all. That’ll teach me to kick off with a rash statement. I must make a mental note to carefully consider my opinions before releasing them into the wild like that. Who knows what might happen?
Funnily enough Chicagohas little going for it in my fascist book of what makes a good movie. I can’t stand Catherine Zeta-Jones, Renee Zellweger or Richard Gere and there’s really very little story of which to speak. However it is a musical and therefore its USPs are its songs, and this is where it wins almost all the furry toys at the coconut shy. I say almost because the song "All I Care About", which Gere sings, merely glances the side of one of the coconuts, causing it to wobble slightly but remain firmly in place as if it was suspiciously glued there by the lethargic pikey running the stall who hates the coconut shy and can’t wait to go and take charge of the waltzers where he can hang onto the cars of teenage girls, looking swarthy and making sure they get spun REALLY fast while geeks like me get a cursory shove which serves only to give a less thrilling ride than you might get in a reclining armchair.
"Cell Block Tango" and "We Both Reached For The Gun" are the winners for me; Zellweger looks worryingly sexy dressed as a ventriloquist’s dummy, which may explain all those strange feelings I had watching Keith Harris and Orville all those years ago. As you can see I’ve chosen a very bad picture to illustrate my point. I couldn’t be bothered looking any further than the first page of results when I searched for that shot. Sorry.
There’s also lots of dancing in Chicago, as you might expect, and that’s quite good too, especially in the last number which CZJ and the ‘weger perform together. Sadly CZJ is just a touch too toned and manly while Zellweger is too skinny so I can’t give either of them the special treatment I would give Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge!, that is if she would stop coughing up blood all over the place because of her pesky consumption. I mean it’s hardly a turn-on is it?
