Jesse & Andy's "Great Telly Moments"

Welcome to the first in an unlikely-to-continue series of posts in which The Social Network stars and bezzie mates Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield, via the medium of animated .gifs, recreate their favourite moments from British television.

Episode 1

THAT TIME ANT AND DEC WON THAT

BAFTA THAT TIME, REMEMBER?

Tune in next week for Episode 2: That time those two fat girls had that punch-up on The X Factor that time, remember?

Two Tired Old Jokes For The Price Of One

Yes, I'm aware that I should have done something about the BAFTAs today, but frankly I couldn't give a shit. Um... Rosamund Pike was good wasn't she?

Saturday Playlist #19: John Powell

If I had a pound for everyone who's ever emailed me and said "Why haven't you done a John Powell playlist yet? Love, Simon Renshaw" then I'd have a pound. You may be aware of Simon's work from the ROFLacious Picturehouse Podcasts he does with his young ward Sam Clements, but what you may not know is that a) he's the world's biggest John Powell fan and b) he owns Europe's largest collection of identical blue jumpers.

So what better way to silence his foul whining than to get him to compile the playlist himself and pass it off as my own, especially as I know next to nothing about John Powell's work? Simon gets his playlist, John Powell gets a bit of publicity, you get to hear some music you otherwise wouldn't have heard and I get the day off. Everyone's a winner, petit dejeuner.

If you're a bit simple and still haven't downloaded Spotify FOR FREE, Simon has kindly linked to some of Powell's movie tunage on the interwebs, which I include here for the sake of completeness, especially as I dumped several tracks off his playlist for being a bit dull.

"Helicopter Dance" from Rat Race


"Furniture" from Face/Off


"Tango De Los Asesinos" from Mr. & Mrs. Smith


So sit back and do something that pertains to something that happens in the films that John Powell scored, I don't know, train a dragon or something, and...

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO

SATURDAY PLAYLIST #19

JOHN POWELL

Brilliant Book Is Brilliant

Although The Incredible Suit is primarily known as a film blog, it would be remiss of me not to mention the odd TV programme, especially if that TV programme is my favourite in the entire history of televisual entertainment, and certainly if an amazing book about that TV programme has recently been published by the quite staggeringly super chaps at Titan Books.

So here's a review of a book about a TV programme that was once made into a film that nobody liked. The show is called The Avengers, the book is called 'The Avengers: A Celebration' and the film is called a massively misjudged pile of decomposing, fly-ridden horseshit, but that's not important right now.

Subtitled '50 Years Of TV's Most Stylish Show', it comes as no surprise that the book consists mostly of photos of its dapper leading man, Patrick Macnee, and his various female co-stars looking so chic that the word "stylish" looks shabby in comparison. If it's words you're after there's a concise history of the show's complex origins and brief but sufficient introductions to each markedly different series, but 'The Avengers: A Celebration' is primarily interested in taking your eyeballs on holiday and making love to them on the beach every day at sunset while a swarthy waiter mixes an expensive cocktail for them to enjoy when they've cleaned themselves up.

It's mostly production stills and publicity shots with a few candid rehearsal snaps thrown in, but nearly all of them are new to me and I thought I'd seen every frame of Diana Rigg in a leather catsuit that ever existed. All the photos are so pin-sharp you could cut yourself on them, and with some of them taking up a full 26 x 30cm page it's often like swimming in Honor Blackman's big black and white eyes.

By far the best thing about the book is the chance to pore over Patrick Macnee's incredible suits, after which somebody should name a blog or something. He designed most of them himself until Pierre Cardin came along to do it for him, and they're all beautiful creations.

Of course no book of photos from The Avengers would be complete without a shot of Diana Rigg in her notorious, self-designed 'Queen Of Sin' outfit for the episode "A Touch Of Brimstone", which had 1960s Britain gasping for breath and loosening its starched collar, and this book doesn't disappoint in that department either.

Sadly the one thing a book can't offer that an award-losing blog can is this astounding nugget of pop cheese "sung" by Macnee and Blackman in 1964. Your ears won't thank me but if boots are your thing, it's your lucky day.

Paul

What happens when two massive sci-fi geeks write a film about two massive sci-fi geeks that's aimed squarely at massive sci-fi geeks and is packed to the sprockets with massive sci-fi geekery? In the case of Paul, the answer is a big bag of nerdy funballs which scores higher on the ROFLometer than any other comedy from the last few years. Especially if you're a massive sci-fi geek.

In all honesty, the thought of another comedy from the director of Superbad and Adventureland, both of which failed to withdraw anything other than boredom from my emotion bank, combined with the prospect of Seth Rogen freewheeling his way through another tediously unfunny performance (cf. The Green Hornet) filled me with overwhelming ambivalence. But the fact that it's written by and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, the two most-difficult-not-to-like people in British film, plus the casting of god amongst men Jason Bateman, was enough to make me semi-aroused.

Pegg and Frost's script - essentially a guffaw-laden love letter to Star Wars, E.T., Close Encounters, Aliens and a million other life-shaping movies - squeezes in so many references to the films they adore that it's occasionally in danger of disappearing up its own thermal exhaust port. Thankfully there are more than enough LOLs and action to back up the nerding, and by the time the perfectly-located climax comes around you're prepared to forgive the odd shoe-horning in of yet another Star Wars gag.

Unavoidably a few jokes fall flat - why obscure 1992 melodrama Lorenzo's Oil is targeted for a major pun rather than another geek touchstone is a mystery - and Greg Mottola's direction fails him in a couple of crucial but annoyingly bodged scenes towards the end, but these are easy to forgive when the rest of the film is more fun than an unsolicited anal probing.

Obligatory gush over David Arnold score: It's fantastic.

True Grit

True Grit has, quite justifiably, been Oscar nominated for outstanding achievements in directing, writing, acting, sound, costume design, make up, art direction and cinematography. It's technically stunning to the point where it feels like it was made specifically to win awards. If you look closely you can even make out a Hollywood heavyweight playing a character with a disability in a fondly-remembered genre set in a legendary period of US history. Only a couple of important boxes remain unticked:

Yet despite all the technical brilliance on display, True Grit doesn't really resonate as its pedigree suggests it should. Maybe it's the fairly straightforward revenge / road movie storyline that holds nothing new or exciting. Maybe it's my attitude to westerns generally (it's not a patch on Back To The Future Part III). Or maybe it's because I couldn't work out what Jeff Bridges was on about half the time because it sounded like he was gargling marbles.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I miss the old Coen Brothers.

It's The Incredible Suit's 500th Post!

To celebrate, here's a joke that's been made 500 times already:

"I beg to differ!"

Ah, dearie me. *wipes eye* In other news, last week I squatted on the faces of the Picturehouse cinema chain's very own Krankies, Sam Clements and Simon Renshaw, and loosed a steaming stream of drivel all over them for the benefit of their very excellent podcast. And even though they edited out my beautifully finessed "Snyder-Man" joke, it's still worth a listen.

Picturehouse Podcast 34: Down The Rabbit Hole by Picturehouses