Modern Day Renaissance Man

  2011.

 It's been almost 6 years since cinematic genius and hairstyle master David Lynch last released a feature film. "Inland Empire" is about a woman in trouble. I could tell you more, but that's all Lynch would want me to say.

 No, really. 

 The film represented two firsts for the acclaimed director; the first time he had a film breach the three hour mark, and the first time he shot an entire feature on digital video, afterwards stating that he will never again shoot on film. Despite many people not knowing exactly what the film was about ( and I include before viewing AND after), Lynch decided to promote it, and especially Laura Dern's fantastic performance, in his own inimitable way.  While traffic slowed to a crawl and people stopped and stared, Lynch hung around Sunset Boulevard with a large banner bearing the slogan:

"Without Cheese, there would be no INLAND EMPIRE" 

Right......

....Oh, also present was eh, ahem, a live cow. 

I'm sure it was like a scene from one of the great man's films.

It was NOT the first time Lynch had displayed his wacky sense of humour and/or (?) erratic and odd behaviour. None of it anti-social of course. Just a bit odd. 

And I think that's great. Lynch is a man who is not afraid to take chances and risks. He actually just does whatever he wants, in order to express himself. And it's very refreshing to see a figure in the world of cinema do that. To not worry about media scrutiny, or how they look, or what they should do to appeal to the masses. I think Lynch's creativity and passion for expression even at the simplest level really is epitomised by his comic strip " The Angriest Dog in the World" which was published every day by the LA Reader from 1983 to 1992. The cartoon has to be one of the simplest ever devised. It consists of 3 identical frames. The 4th frame is the same except it is now nighttime The only things that change are the speech bubbles from a couple inside the house, usually in the form of a non-sequitur or an aphorism or adage.  Their nonsensical palaver is heard every minute of every day by their dog, who is chained to a post. He is a very angry dog. Here is an example

The Dog who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis

I think it is genius in it's simplicity!

Lynch relationship with music in his movies has always been a cornerstone of his film-making style, and in almost of all of his films there is a strength behind the music, or a piece of music. For an artist who doesn't reside only in the world of cinema, the next logical step ( if someone can ever use the word logically and David Lynch together) was to create an album. 

And so David Lynch's latest venture to express himself is his debut album "Crazy Clown Time", which was released just last month. The really decent opening track, entitled "Pinky's Dream"  has some really odd, minimal and seemingly dull lyrics ( the word Pinky is heard over 40 times in a 4 minute song!) but somehow they work. Thankfully Karen O ( you'll hear in trailers for Fincher's upcoming little film) has a great voice, so I don't mind listening to her sing about Pinky so singularly and effusively. Lynch's voice probably wouldn't be as quite as pleasant, which is fair enough. Perhaps he understands this himself, which is why when he sings on tracks it's usually through a vocoder or modified by some sort of modulator. Or maybe he just wants it to sound different. Bear in mind, however, that if someone ever uses the word "different" to describe something to do with David Lynch, they are understating. Just like Lynch himself does when describing his own works.

 You just have to experience them to get them. And if you do get it, you're one of the lucky few. 

And if you don't get it, it's ok... Just always remember, that Cheese is made from Milk. 

3D Films – Why we don’t like them. And how we could.

I’ve heard a lot of complaints about 3D films over the last couple of years. “3D is shit”, “Fucking gimmick” and “it won’t fucking last” are just a few of the things my mum has told me about it over a wholesome family breakfast.

But I think I know why 3D is so terrible that even though so many of us pay the extra money to see it, we rarely enjoy it.

1. The Directors

The Directors making 3D movies from scratch, not just doubling the film up later, are tired old men who just want to look cool for keeping up with technology but don’t bother updating how they film anything for the different medium. Same angles, same people walking in and off screen fucking with our perspective and still going for that artistic blurry shot that makes an audience’s eyes water

...in pain not at the beauty. 

I’m basically saying these film makers are having a mid life crisis and we would all be better served if they would just buy a super car and bang some hookers.

2. Perspective

As mentioned above the film makers don’t really change their tune. We the audience are expected to sit there and look at what they want, how they want. It doesn’t matter if they’ve used perspective to have a dragon less than 2 feet from our faces looking hungry. If they want to bring firey death slowly into focus as our eyes desperately strain to see the potentially lethal situation, they will do.

 This is how they see us.

For a 2D film thats fine. Our eyes are only focusing at a single point so its not a strain to have blur here and there for artistic effect and to isolate a subject. But for 3D it just wont do. The human eye likes to look around in 3 dimensional spaces and it gets awfully confused when the thing your looking straight at isn’t in focus and something you have no interest in off in the corner is crisp as the morning frost. You may have heard a lot of people, maybe even yourself complain about their eyes hurting a bit during and after watchign a 3D movie.

Filmmakers haven’t twigged that in real life, which I have on good authority from a scientist is in 3D, people choose what to look at and what not to. We automatically blur what we aren’t looking straight at and instead of acknowledging that fact and making use of that art history course they all were forced to take in college that tells you to use lines and objects to draw the eye towards the subject , the filmmakers turn round with a big FUCK YOU and say

 

3. Frame Rate

The cinema is guilty of this far more than the home Blu-ray. I remember watching Avatar at the Imax and finding it a bit jumpy. There were a lot of epic looking scenes that suffered from the motion blur caused by moving the cameras too quickly and bear in mind that the cameras were collecting 3 dimensional imagery so when it blurred it blurred across dimensions. I later learned this was because James Cameron (The dude having both a mid-life crisis and the menopause) had decided that we really didn’t need more than 24 frames per second, the standard for any "Normal" movie.

I want to say right now that 24fps is fine for 2D but not for 3D, there are far too many perspective shifts and panning issues for 24 little frames to keep up. A lot of TV’s will make this up now by inserting frames made up from the next and previous frames and this whilst not a perfect solution it does make you wonder. 

"They had how much fucking money and it took days to render a single frame but they couldn’t afford to just stick a couple of extra ones in there when a TV will do it for free?"

You see once again we’re back to my first point about directors being assholes because whilst they happily adopt new technologies, they rarely adapt themselves to it.

4. Rebuilding Collections

Lets see, when VHS came out we were promised the most amazing movie watching experience ever (or at least a cheap way to record the telly). When DVD came out we were promised the most amazing movie watching experience ever. When HD DVD came out.....When Blu-Ray crushed HD DVD.....When they realised they could fit 3D on a Blu-Ray and started converting every movie they could find that was never meant to be watched that way. 

Theres a pattern here and seeing as technology is already moving beyond 1080p we can be guaranteed that you’re just going to repeat the cycle. Essentially dear greedy studios, we’re tired of rebuilding collections of movies we already own just because you’ve added pixels, extra dimensions or a few minutes of film you didn’t think were good enough to be there the first time. I really cannot blame internet pirates for stealing your supposed sales because as far as I’m concerned updates should be free and by the laws of physics an equal reaction is due in response to your greedy actions.

Advice for consumers
 Some new TV’s will convert and upscale your old DVD’s to 1080p and make them 3D and probably do just as good a job as the studio re-re-releasing it bothered to do. Let’s not fall into the trap.

You’ll also find if you fail a few times and have to purchase a repurposed movie that computer animated movies make the jump better to 3D than regular movies as they were created in a way that should allow their makers to go back and just add an extra camera and tweak the virtual spaces to make a decent 3D image (Assuming thats what they do). I actually quite enjoyed Shrek 3D even if the textures did appear flat and layered.

An open letter moment to directors and studios
 Please change your game if you want 3D to succeed. You can’t call it a more immersive experience and expect us to sit there doing nothing whilst you make our eyes bleed by using old filmmaking techniques and you cannot expect people to buy 3D movies when they were never designed to be shown that way....Which technically at this point is all of them and will be until one of you roots out the fixed f/11 lenses.

5 Actors That Made Men Hit the Gym...Final Part

1.  Bruce Lee

5 Feet and 7 Inches of pure awesome and even I can’t be sure if we’re talking about the man or what he kept wrapped around his leg to help deliver those lorry sized sidekicks. Bruce Lee doesn’t make the top of my list just because I relegated Schwarzenegger to 5^th place. It isn’t because he’s credited as the man who gave the world the gift of martial arts movies, it isn’t because the name Bruce is synonymous with Batman and angry Scotsmen and finally it isn’t because the man embodied a philosophy of body, mind and soul that not only calls out every man for not aspiring to his potential, it one inch nut sack punches them. 

 What your testicles see moments before they die

No Bruce Lee is number 1 because he was every bit and more the warrior we saw on screen. He wasn’t some actor just putting on beef for a role or posing for adulation. He was a warrior poet who strived to share his passion with the world and used film and philosophy as his medium.

Every muscle in the man’s body was real and every one of them was a powerhouse in a fighting machine. Bruce developed lightning fast reaction times that were too quick to film and made a conscious effort to train his mind just as hard as his body.

Arnold himself said that bodybuilding for him was about sculpting the human body into a piece of art and based on his results we cannot say that that is an unworthy goal. But whilst a finely sculpted work of art such as Arnold’s biceps is a thing of beauty to behold and inspiring to all the guys trying to lift their body weight for just one more rep, what it is not is usable fighting muscle or making you any smarter or wiser.

Don’t get me wrong I’m sure most bodybuilders have a nice solid punch...but only if the target is still there when the fist reaches its destination, which compared to Lee is a horse and carriage versus the bullet train. Lets also bear in mind that Lee’s one inch punch was declared on Mythbusters to have a force greater than being hit by a car at 30mph. Think about that, the man could do more damage to you with one inch than a car could with a run up.

Perhaps the real tough guy was his wife’s vagina

Bruce wasn’t as big as Arnold or a car, hell he wasn’t as big as anyone on this list but if you had to list the order that you’d prefer to fight all these guys, Lee is not just at the bottom of this list, he’s at the bottom of the list of people who’ve ever existed and for one simple reason, he’s the only one we believe could pull off that Tom Hardy first punch knockout (which is appropriate as the UFC consider him the father of MMA) and he’s the only one with the speed to avoid everything you can throw at him. We men may want to look like dear old Ryan but who do we want to fight like?  And whose determination and tenacity towards life itself would you want to have? 

Just ask the street gangs I used to beat up for fun

No, Bruce Lee is the man to be and he not only inspired men into the gym he made them go there to do his version of the martial arts as well. What a guy!

Rare Exports and the Spirit of Christmas (Movies)

I would openly admit that over the last few years, Christmas has started to mean a little less to me than it did. It's maybe just the nadir of my mid-twenties as I get to the point that I've seen a lot of them now, it could just be that this time of year doesn't play well with cynicism. I don't know. It's just where I'm at right now. But despite this, the one thing that I do love about Christmas is the movies.

I doubt this is surprising: I mean, I'm writing this article for a film and TV blog called Literally Geeking. If that doesn't suggest a certain amount of nerdiness about the medium of film then what would? But even then, when you look at the kind of shows and movies that I would normally watch over the course of the year, there's not a exactly a strong streak of sentimentality through them – and that's something you normally can't move for in Christmas movies.

Even Die Hard is essentially a story about an estranged father trying to spend the holiday with his family. John McClane can shoot all the terrorists and walk through all the broken glass he wants, but the giant teddy bear in the back of his limo still marks him as a soppy bastard. Ho Ho Ho he just wants his kids back.

This is one of the two most common features of Christmas movies: family and learning. One of the two always has to happen – a family (whether it be blood relations or just a group of friends) has to come together; or someone needs to learn about the true meaning of Christmas. All of the classic holiday films share at least one of these elements: It's A Wonderful Life; Miracle on 34th Street; Home Alone; The Grinch. Many of them have both.

The weird thing is, you can't even put this pattern down to typical Hollywood syrup. The clear start point for it all was that bleak bastard himself Charles Dickens. If Ebenezer Scrooge hadn't seen the light all the way back in the 1843 then who knows what kind of entertainment we'd end up turning to on these dark December nights.

Anyway, this has been a long, roundabout kind of way to get to the point I particularly wanted to make: Finnish film Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale may well be my new favourite Christmas movie.

For those of you who haven't had a chance to see it, the film tells the story of a young boy Pietari whose Christmas takes a strange turn when excavations on a nearby mountain turn up a strange discovery.

Although you'd be hard pressed to call the film traditional in any way, shape or form due to it's unrelentingly dark sense of humour and it's copious amount of full frontal male nudity, it shares the same warm, beating heart as all the greats of the form.

The success of the film comes from the fact that despite all the batshit crazy shenanigans and blood-soaked imagery, the really truly important thing going on here is the relationship between Pietari and his father and how, through the events of the film they grow that much closer and come to appreciate each other all the more. What's more, you really come to route for Pietari in his quest to make everyone understand what they have gotten themselves in for.

I'll stop there so that I won't spoil it any more that I need to, but if you want to watch something a little different this Christmas, this one comes highly recommended.

An awesome addition to the pantheon of great, sentimental, Christmas movies.

Check out the trailer below:

The Hobbit: Part 1

So I have stayed up until 4am eagerly anticipating the release of the first Hobbit trailer. For your viewing pleasure I give you the latest poster, a few screen stills followed by the trailer itself:

The Great Gatsby...in 3D?

So Baz Luhrmann is currently adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel (and remaking Robert Redford's 1974 effort). Known for his epic tales of romance, tragedy and unique visual style - see Romeo and Juliet and Moulin Rouge - is The Great Gatsby IN 3D really necessary??

The first few stills from the set, featuring Leonardo Dicaprio as Gatsby and Carey Mulligan as Daisy, look beautiful. Shouldn't 3D be kept for kids films, cheap thrill horrors and the work of Michael Bay? Although I am mainly averse to the three dimensional 'art form', when done right it can add something breathtaking which certain films would not be the same without, such as Avatar...and I'm highly anticipating The Hobbit, also shot in 'real' 3D rather than the scores of films which have been shot, then converted later on in an attempt to cash in.

In terms of remakes, which has recently been discussed below, I don't think Redford's film really stood up to the merits of the original text (and at least he has waited almost 40 years). Seeing as Luhrmann does have such a rare ability for telling great love stories in a stylish and original manner, I think he is more than up to the challenge...but I'll be watching in 2D.

5 Actors Who Made Men Hit the Gym...Part 4

2. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

With a name like Dwayne your life can only go one of two ways. You’re either going to get beat up all the time or you’re going to develop mondo sized muscles and exceptional fighting ability. Personally I like to believe that The Rock did get bullied but gave each and every one of those alcoholic daddy’s punching bags the toilet swirly of the millennium. Hell that idea alone is worth more than most of The Rocks films at the box office but if there is one thing you cannot deny it is that the man is a hell of an entertainer and he’d probably sit down for a brew with you (I honestly class his performance in ‘Southland Tales’ as one of my favourites, even though I hadn’t slept in two days at the time I watched it).

With old Dwayne however it’s difficult to pinpoint that moment he really made us need to get out and sweat blood. He came to us an already well muscled man that’s for sure but he was also a pro wrestler and for many that’s just well choreographed ballet for the big and tall man. We can’t even be sure if he was responsible for his own catchphrases or if the people’s elbow was some kind of fungal infection. 

I like to think he at least plucks his own eyebrows

If I had to narrow it down...which I kind of do, I would say that whilst The Rocks bod has always been inspiring I never felt truly tiny enough in the Gonads to go do some lifting until I watched ‘Faster (2010)’. Perhaps it was just his character catching up to his body but I truly believed he was a merciless killer and every moment of the movie from his first kill on I was gripped. Finally a movie character that has seen the other movies where showing mercy just gets you shot in the shoulder. No this time it was balls to wall 38 Magnum to the face and we just about shot our own loads as he racked up the kill count and still managed to be a redeemable hero figure (and the car right... who didn’t love the car). This was right up until he spared the preacher. Obviously a small spot of pandering to the American masses about Christ and Redemption but I like to think that after the credits rolled he saw some crazy right wing What Would J-lo Do? Blog and he went all 21^st century flag waving machine gun toting Jeebus on that preacher’s ass.

Requiescat in pace...Mother F@*#er

Final Part...Tomorrow

New trailer for The Dark Knight Rises arrives!

5 Actors Who Made Men Hit the Gym...Part 3

3. Tom Hardy

Tom Hardy...WTF? I hear you all saying, but you know it’s true. He graced us with the sight of his penis and solitary confinement honed muscles in Bronson a few years back and since then he’s made us wonder about the need for vertebrae in the neck when you can have grid iron holding your head up instead. 

Now, fantastic moustaches and rippling cock muscles aside (you heard me...rippling), the moment he truly destroyed our sense of manliness was in his latest buff outing, ‘Warrior (2011)’. Here we have a man playing the role of a reincarnated undefeatable warrior. He summons forth the power of Thor or something and destroys Tanks for kicks (I wasn’t paying much attention to things that weren’t violence).

Did anyone else cringe when the commentators said?

“He ripped the door off a Tank”

“Yea but Tanks don’t hit back”

ARE YOU INSANE COMMENTATOR MAN, YES THEY DO....THEY HIT PEOPLE VERY VERY HARD!

But the moment he truly made us wish to be him was in that first competition prize fight.

“First round First Punch”

One punch!!! It’s a film, so we can forgive the creative licence that a man who believed himself to be capable of fighting in an MMA tournament walked into the Octagon with Tom Hardy and got knocked out in the first second of the first round. But whilst that moment would be utterly soul destroying in a real bout the real blow was to the egos of men...everywhere who knew they would never ever be able to do that...EVER and a that a man who spent half the film crying for all the friendly fire killed soldiers in the middle east was still more of a man than you’d ever be.

Review: SHAME

Last Thursday I went to see a preview of Steve McQueen's latest film Shame, which doesn't hit UK cinemas until next month. It stars Michael Fassbender as Brandon and Carey Mulligan as Sissy, a couple of siblings with a whole host of problems.

 The main focus of the plot is that Brandon, while maintaining a normal career and social life, is secretly a sex addict. We see scenes of him pleasuring himself at work and watching porn on his laptop in his shiny and sterile bachelor pad. When his sister Sissy turns up to stay unannounced, this highlights his problems as he now cannot hide his addiction and this leads to all kinds of conflict.

 Although Shame is generating a huge amount of awards buzz and rave reviews, I cannot say I enjoyed it that much. It was compelling and enthralling to watch, but at the same time rather uncomfortable (particularly in a cinema). The performances were excellent as well as the direction, but there was no background context to the characters to which I could gather an understanding of their actions. The only dialogue which hinted at this was when Sissy assures Brandon "We're not bad people, we just come from a bad place." This seems to indicate some kind of sexual abuse when they were younger. Notably the two share a very open relationship which at times hints towards incest.

 It is obvious that Brandon is unable to have normal relationships with women. One scene involves him asking a co-worker out to dinner where they seem to bond well, then later in the film he takes her to a hotel where he is unable to perform sexually, but after she leaves he instantly calls a prostitute to the same hotel room. The film contains a lot of explicit content, some of which was necessary to the plot, but some (mostly towards the end of the film) which I did not feel added to what the watcher already knew and bordered on pornographic...I think this was meant to reinforce just how much Brandon's life was spiralling out of control.

Overall, Shame was not for me the work of art it is being made out to be. The plot focused on Brandon's addiction but seemed to just show a series of scenes displaying it, with no information on its formation or its consequences. Definitely a one time watch.  2.5/5

5 Actors That Made Men Hit the Gym...Part 2

4. Ryan Reynolds 

When Ryan Reynolds first gleaned onto my radar he was wearing no trousers and trying to get AIDS from Tara Reid. He’s come a long way from Van Wilder and for a while he was truly a Mans Man when he was trying to pass along those AIDS to Scarlett Johansen. 

“AIDS’ answer to Typhoid Mary”

But when did the now clearly homosexual Ryan Reynolds bitch slap us with his huge penis and how many of us wanted him to do it again just because we knew where it’d been. The answer as many of you will have guessed is not that bastardised X-Men spinoff but Blade Trinity. No I’m not kidding and yes it came before The Amityville Horror. 

Ryan had been working out quite hard to transform himself for the truly weighty and gritty role of Hannibal King and gained a fantastic 25lbs of meat steak, but...Nobody really cared...except for...  THE ENTIRE INTERNET, which devoted entire pieces to just one of his glorious abdominal muscles and pettily accused him of getting implants like some floozy with daddy issues and a dependency on sperm, although we may have to revisit that assessment given recent events. 

His transformation was so profound that we discovered how much of a Mans Man Ryan truly was. He didn’t just develop a six-pack. He went straight out and picked up 3 six-packs because only a girly man drinks alone and only a little bitch drinks two beers before driving home. Ryan stocked up his fridge just in case a mate dropped by for a totally straight three-way.

 "I must draw you”

Other than that the only thing Blade Trinity succeeded in doing was increasing the income of the famous vampire hunter and landing him in prison for tax evasion. As a result it’s been Twilight Princess for what feels like a Vampiric eternity. We can only hope he comes out with Prison muscles and mistakes Robert Pattinson’s glittering for a shower with Ryan Reynolds in it.

Part 3....at some point.