Midnight Special

It must be the season for movies about people with potentially catastrophic superpowers being seen as either a saviour or a weapon depending on your point of view; fortunately for Midnight Special, it's directed by Jeff Nichols instead of Zack Snyder, thereby rendering it several million percent more watchable than Batman v Superman. It doesn't have Hans Zimmer's Wonder Woman theme in it though, so I guess you can't have everything.

Despite those superficial similarities, Midnight Special is nothing like a superhero film. It's a fairly self-contained and muted affair about Alton, a boy with initially unspecified but frankly alarming issues, who's been held captive by a mad religious sect until his pop Roy (Michael Shannon) breaks him out. The clock's ticking though: for reasons best not divulged here, there are just four days for the cult to snatch Alton back, and the same amount of time for Roy to get him to safety, before... well. Before something.

Nichols' film is a low-key mood piece, in a similar vein to the bits of Looper set at Emily Blunt's farm. In fact if Looper had been told entirely from that scary little brat's POV, the result wouldn't be far from Midnight Special. But it's not Rian Johnson that Nichols is channeling the most here: there's another huge presence looming over proceedings, and that presence has a beard and wears a baseball cap and is married to Kate Capshaw. OK fine, it's Spielberg. I'm talking about Steven Spielberg.

Specifically, though quite possibly coincidentally, Nichols appears to be homaging The Berg's early career: the cross-country chase evokes The Sugarland Express, there's an otherworldly Close Encounters vibe going on, and E.T.'s military pursuit of that which they do not fully understand also figures strongly. It's a darker shade of Amblinism for the most part, unshowy and stripped of its trademark sentimentality, although Nichols can't resist throwing in dazzling shafts of white light and dysfunctional parents just to be sure of a full house in his game of Spielbingo.

The danger of evoking these kind of touchstones, as was also apparent in JJ Abrams' Super 8, is that if the end product doesn't turn out to be one for the ages then you probably shouldn't have made the tributes so obvious. And while Midnight Special is definitely worth your while, it never quite fulfils the promise of its best scenes, in which Alton's troubling powers are revealed. The otherworldly elements here play second fiddle to a road movie which takes in Kirsten Dunst (in a fairly thankless and inconsequential role as Alton's mother) and Adam Driver as The One Good Government Guy, and while I'm all for character-based sci-fi I prefer it when the characters aren't quite as thin as they are here.

All credit to Jeff Nichols, whose output is consistently varied (if you don't count the ubiquitous Michael Shannon) and interesting; he's a director well worth watching and almost certainly has a masterpiece in him somewhere. Midnight Special isn't it, but it'll do for now.

Captain America 2 vs Close Encounters: Spot the difference

Me neither.

Last Exit To Nowhere

I can't believe I've been writing this sack of sprouts for eight months now and I still haven't plugged Last Exit To Nowhere.

Some of you will be living in a wonderful, happy place where you already know about LETN and their galactically humungous range of geeksplasmic t-shirts, hoodies and caps, in which case carry on as normal and go and buy some more.

For those poor, pitiful souls sploshing about in a filthy, squalid pit of ignorance and hopelessness, Last Exit To Nowhere make the greatest clothes known to geekkind, and you should have already stopped reading this in order to go and buy at least four t-shirts.

Each design is based on a different film, but not in a "look at me, I'm wearing a Back To The Future poster on my flabby guts" kind of way. The shirts are based on subtle elements from within the films; so subtle that only your fellow geek will know what you're saying with your sartorial choices. So if you know that Hill Valley High School is where Marty McFly consistently turned up late because he was blowing up Doc Brown's gaff with a comically tiny guitar, you'll spot your fellow BTTF-freak a mile off when you see them in this baby:

The Incredible Suit has purchased no less than five t-shirts from these agents of awe-inspiring apparel, and suggests you do the same. It's like having a secret handshake only without all that unhygienic handshaking business. I look forward to the day when it's possible to buy a pair of Universal Exports underpants, but until then, may Last Exit To Nowhere keep up the good work and may you click here now and dress yourselves properly for a change you scruffy buggers.

***STOP INTERNET EQUIVALENT OF PRESS***

Last Exit To Nowhere have just announced this as their next masterwork, in case you wondered what to buy me to thank me for all the free entertainment I've given you:

To comment on this post, click here

Star Wars And Other Galactic Funk

Following last Friday's noodle-frazzling clip of multiple C3P0s and Darth Vaders having some kind of nightmarish eurodisco wig-out, the worlds of Star Wars and Disco have been colliding before my eyes and ears like something from, well, When Worlds Collide, only with more slap-bass and less destruction of Earth.

Now many of you probably know exactly where the music came from and, seeing exactly where this post is heading, are right now popping off to read real movie blogs like UltraCulture or SlashFilm, and frankly I don't blame you. But for the uninitiated idiots, in which I include The Incredible Suit, the music you heard (assuming you bothered to play the clip) was from this album:

I don't know what those two are up to on the cover but one of them is certainly feeling a presence in the force.

Anyway this chap Meco was also responsible for this, which is well worth turning your speakers up for:



He also did the funky disco business with Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Star Trek and Superman, but they're not very good I'm afraid. Look for them on YouTube if you want but you'll only be disappointed. Better to leave The Empire Strikes Back tune in your head and not spoil it.

If anyone has a vinyl copy of 'Star Wars And Other Galactic Funk' lying about the house that they don't listen to any more, please wrap it up carefully and pop it in the post addressed to:

The Incredible Suit

c/o The Interwebs

Thanks!

To comment on this post, click here

A Big, Cheesed Off Fish-Man

Good news, everyone! Not only has this week’s poll seen a record-breaking TEN votes, but the winner is a film of which The Incredible Suit heartily approves!

Yes, you, The People, have voted in numbers to rival viewers of The X Factor, and by crikey it was close. The search for The Greatest Remake / Reboot / Re-imagining, Like, Ever has seen Moulin Rouge!, Casino Royale and Something Else I Hadn’t Thought Of come an excruciatingly close joint second place to Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan’s unspeakably good update of the Batman franchise which was left twitching in a puddle of its own liquid faeces by master job-botcher Joel Schumacher in 1997’s Batman And Robin.

This was a difficult vote because, as Satine pointed out in her comment, I failed to specify whether you should be voting for your favourite film from the list or the film which most successfully updated the original / previous version, and in the end I just left you to it. You’re big boys and girls after all.

And while I believe that Moulin Rouge! is a better film overall than Batman Begins, I do think that Nolan’s film performed a near miracle in resurrecting a franchise so devastatingly rogered into oblivion that nobody expected to take it seriously until some time in the 2030s.

So well done Bats, and on a personal note I should like to open myself up (not literally you understand, that would be horrible) and tell the world that the scene in which a young Bruce Wayne tells Alfred that it’s his own fault his parents died, my vision goes a bit misty and I feel a sudden urge to breathe in sharply through my nose. Make of that what you will.

With my recent witterings about aliens in the movies fresh in your minds, this week’s poll is: What’s the greatest movie about aliens, like, ever? The Incredible Suit’s Top 5 (and therefore the only five that matter) are:

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Alien
3. Aliens
4. E.T.
5. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind

I would have put Cloverfield in there but there’s some debate over whether or not the monster is of alien origin or just, you know, a big, cheesed off fish-man.

Happy voting!