Iron Man Prequel Out Tomorrow!

Oh come on, it was either that or Ronclad, and I've officially retired the Ron Weasley gag.

Late Review: Inside Job

Inside Job has been out for over a week and was probably about to disappear from cinemas forever until it was proclaimed as the Greatest Documentary Of All Time Well Of The Last Twelve Months Anyway on Sunday night by Team Oscar. It must be counting its blessings (and its takings), being as it is a documentary about the global economic crisis and therefore unlikely to have caused the kind of queues we saw when E.T. was released.

In order to attract a wider audience, it's narrated by Matt Damon. It's almost as if a line-up of near-identical men in suits talking about Credit Default Swaps and Collateralised Debt Obligations isn't exciting enough for modern audiences.

Sadly at no point does Matt Damon beat a Wall Street banker into a bloody pulp with a lollipop stick before leaping out of a 78-storey high window onto a moving train which he then commandeers, drives straight into the Federal Reserve Bank and causes to explode before banging his head on the corner of a desk and forgetting everything that just happened. It's really not that kind of film.

However, if you're interested in how the "current climate" that people keep using as an excuse not to have dessert in restaurants came about, who's largely responsible for it and why it's not about to get any better, then Inside Job has all that and more.

Sadly, as with most documentaries trying to prove a point, it's edited in such a way that anyone who's suffered as a result of the crisis gets their point put across clearly and succinctly, whereas anyone deemed to be A Bad Guy gets all their ums, ers, awkward twitches and shifty glances left in so we can watch them squirm. That's not to say they don't deserve such treatment but it makes it difficult to believe you're watching a balanced depiction of events, which is a shame because producer / director Charles Ferguson is clearly an intelligent man who knows what he's on about.

Still, its 120 minutes go by in what feels like about 109, and if you can tell when you're being manipulated by a filmmaker and can keep up with what you're being told and not get distracted by the man two rows behind heartily snoring, then Inside Job is probably worth a watch.

Neil Brand: Going Underground

It seems like only sixteen months ago that I was at the 2009 London Film Festival watching Underground, Anthony Asquith's quite brilliant 1928 silent film about a doomed love quadrangle set in and around some of London's most recognisable landmarks. The screening was accompanied by The Incredible Suit hero and interviewee Neil Brand and his five man band, The Prima Vista Social Club, and if you need further proof of how great the evening was you can find it in this post.

Branders, as he probably doesn't like to be called, gave me and nearly two thousand other lucky punks another memorable evening when Alfred Hitchcock's silent version of Blackmail was screened at London's Barbican last October, with a full and tear duct-troubling score performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Further gushing can be found in the aforementioned interview if you like that kind of thing.

Like you, I've often lain awake at night wondering what would happen if those two events were to meet, fall in love, get married and have a baby; what heavenly form would that baby possibly take? Well, the answer has presented itself in the form of what I believe I may be entitled to call An Exclusive, which is a first for The Incredible Suit and no mistake.

So get your diaries out and write all this down underneath where it says Wednesday October 5th:

Only try not to spill over to the next day.

That's right, The Brandinator has been commissioned by The Barbican and the BBC SO to write a new, full orchestral score for Underground, to be conducted and orchestrated by shit-hot baton-waggler Timothy Brock. And as if that wasn't enough, it's due to show up on BFI DVD soon after, and possibly have a little cinema run all of its own.

I just thought you might like to know. See you there.

The Oscars: A Photographic Odyssey

Despite being almost perversely determined not to enjoy the Oscars, I did attempt to actually enjoy myself last night. I stayed up till 5.30am and everything, armed with a laptop and a mobile phone and ready to blog the shit out of those Oscars. Unfortunately they were as predictably tedious as I tediously predicted, and innumerate technical failures during the evening caused me to use language that would have made Melissa Leo blush.

Nevertheless, here's a vague representation of the evening via the magic of the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music's on-board camera.

First things first: provisions. Almost everything you see in this picture had been consumed before anyone set foot on the red carpet.

This cat spent vast swathes of the evening showing me his arsehole. I wouldn't normally share such a private moment but, unbelievably, the cat's name is Oscar and I felt like he was making an erudite comment on proceedings.

There were some serious bow tie issues as far as horizontality was concerned. I was pleased to note that Mark Ruffalo and Jude Law had the same problem.

Several times during the evening our live stream froze. On the first such occasion we had to stare at AR Rahman for something approaching six minutes. After four we noticed that his ears were unfeasibly massive.

With the excitement building to almost bearable levels, we made our predictions on a handwritten form that felt like completing a complex tax declaration in a foreign country:

And then my laptop crashed, my phone chose to connect to the internet only when Natalie Portman appeared on screen and the live stream stopped and started more often than Colin Firth in The King's Speech. I managed to squeeze a few tweets out, and if you were lucky enough to miss them, here's the one that got retweeted the most and therefore wins the Oscar for Best Tweet by The Incredible Suit:

I'm not sure I understand it myself and I wrote it, but then it is 6.09am and I could do with some kip. Goodnight.

Everyone's Excited About The Oscars

It's the Oscars tonight, hooray! And when I say "hooray!" I mean "oh God, the Oscars. How I hate them and everything they stand for." Yet despite my curmudgeonly view of this annual orgy of self-congratulatory pizzle, I shall be attending an Oscar party, if only because it gives me an excuse to wear a bow tie for the first time since the sixth form summer ball. With any luck the evening won't end the same way as that one did, because that would be horrific, painful and socially awkward for everyone involved.

If you'd like to have your enjoyment of Oscar night brought down by the blogging equivalent of Marvin the Paranoid Android, you can do so in a variety of thrilling ways:

1. Sit next to me all night and listen to my incessant, foul whining. Spaces are limited.
2. Keep across @IncredibleSuit on Twitter for incessant, foul whines of 140 characters or less. Expect a steady decrease in coherence throughout the night.
3. Keep an eye on the Picturehouses live video stream, for whom I will be appearing in increasing states of distress (and possibly undress), as the evening progresses. That is if we can get it to work. Expect lots of this:

Of course the one mandatory exercise even the most indifferent observer must undertake is the annual attempt to guess which backs will be slapped the hardest on Oscar night, and inevitably The Incredible Suit is no exception. I hauled my Oscar Predict-O-Matic out of the shed, filled it with high-octane fuel (some of which I set aside to drink just before the Best Documentary Short Award) and fed it a gutful of stats, but I'll save the resulting predictions until later on. Suffice it to say that if The Social Network, David Fincher, Colin Firth and Jennifer Lawrence don't walk away clutching stiff little men then I will have wasted some perfectly good isopropanol and the Predict-O-Matic will be on eBay before Monday lunchtime.

Wish me luck, and don't expect too much from me in the way of articulate analysis of cinema as an art form tomorrow. Or any day in fact.

Saturday Playlist #20: Oscar's Greatest Scores

One category in tomorrow's Oscars that I'm actually interested in is the one the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences don't call "Best Score", but just "Music (Original Score)", the word "Best" deemed unsavoury in these modern times when it's all about the taking part, not the winning. Unless it's "Best Picture" you're after.

What better way to prepare for Hans Zimmer being crowned King Of Brrraaaaaaaaaaahmmmm, then, than by casting our hearholes over some of the bestest tuneage to win an Oscar from the last seven decades? No better way, that's what better way.

So sit back, turn up the speaker devices and pray for Der Zimmer as you...

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO

SATURDAY PLAYLIST 20:

OSCAR'S GREATEST SCORES

I'm A Bit Busy At The Moment

But here's a new trailer for Source Code, which I found on Empire Online and which still looks to be the knees of the bees:



Here's The Social Network distilled into a single .gif, which I found on Filmdrunk:

And here's a lovely portrait by Anthony Pedro of, in his words, "Janine, the cute and witty receptionist from the classic 80's comedy The Ghostbusters" that I found on Slashfilm:

This blogging malarkey is a piece of cake.