bounce
Monday, Mat - driven temporarily insane by a poor internet connection and the prospect of a house inspection - suddenly grabbed a pair of shears and started hacking at the garden, while Dave and I looked on, Dave occasionally offering useful advice. When Mat couldn’t quite reach something, for example, Dave said: ‘You need to be taller.’ Later, Dave set fire to all the garden waste he could find and brooded over the fire for many hours, and I hoovered the stairs. After dark, when it came time to go to the cinema, Dave would not leave the fire. ‘Fire good. Multiplex bad’, he grunted, hunched over the flames. He was still there when we got back. The garden wasn’t.
Since I had a week off, I spent a lot of time in the cinema. I saw a couple of movies at Frightfest - an annual horror film festival - in Leicester Square. Pan’s Labyrinth is an adult fairy tale (does that sound dodgy?) which definitely represents director Guillermo del Toro’s best work to date (mind you, he also directed Blade 2, though he had the good grace to look embarrassed about that). Hatchet, based on an idea the director, Adam Green, had when he was eight, is perhaps not of quite the same order. A reasonably smart and funny script is not perfectly realized in a film that looks like a home video. You could probably send scenes in to You’ve Been Framed, if people getting their arms torn off wasn’t considered too extreme for Saturday teatime viewing. Still, it was good to see it with an audience who know the correct response to the sight of a (perfectly inoffensive) minor character getting the top of their head ripped off: which is, of course, to clap and cheer wildly.
On Sunday there was a barbecue in the wilds of Stock, or Mountnessing, or somewhere. Nicki Hunt’s parents held it for no real reason; although, at the same time, no expense was spared. There was a hog roast, Portaloos with hot running water, and an ‘adult’ bouncy castle. It didn’t look particularly adult, until it got dark, and then the cheerful monkeys adorning it started to take on a sinister aspect. Bodies sprawling in the gloom of it’s furthest recesses suggested corpses, or shadowy orgies. I began to visualise a low budget sex-horror film set entirely in a bouncy castle: Frankenstein’s Bouncy Castle of Freaks, perhaps. Surely it would run and run at Frightfest.
I didn’t go on the bouncy castle because, as Mat pointed out, if I ever experience a rush of adrenalin, I explode. This is why the new film Crank is not about me. In this, Jason Statham’s character will die if his adrenalin levels drop below a certain amount. So that - or so the trailer seems to indicate - he has to spend the entire film running around shouting and acting like a character in a bad movie. Conveniently enough. The trailer starts with him marching up to the camera and announcing, in his normal Cockney geezer tones: ‘My name is Chev Chellios.’ Could they have tried any harder to make him look silly? Perhaps he could have strolled up to the camera wearing a ballgown and pearls and said: ‘They call me - the giant hamster of Marseilles!’ In a bad French accent. That might have done it.
Since I had a week off, I spent a lot of time in the cinema. I saw a couple of movies at Frightfest - an annual horror film festival - in Leicester Square. Pan’s Labyrinth is an adult fairy tale (does that sound dodgy?) which definitely represents director Guillermo del Toro’s best work to date (mind you, he also directed Blade 2, though he had the good grace to look embarrassed about that). Hatchet, based on an idea the director, Adam Green, had when he was eight, is perhaps not of quite the same order. A reasonably smart and funny script is not perfectly realized in a film that looks like a home video. You could probably send scenes in to You’ve Been Framed, if people getting their arms torn off wasn’t considered too extreme for Saturday teatime viewing. Still, it was good to see it with an audience who know the correct response to the sight of a (perfectly inoffensive) minor character getting the top of their head ripped off: which is, of course, to clap and cheer wildly.
On Sunday there was a barbecue in the wilds of Stock, or Mountnessing, or somewhere. Nicki Hunt’s parents held it for no real reason; although, at the same time, no expense was spared. There was a hog roast, Portaloos with hot running water, and an ‘adult’ bouncy castle. It didn’t look particularly adult, until it got dark, and then the cheerful monkeys adorning it started to take on a sinister aspect. Bodies sprawling in the gloom of it’s furthest recesses suggested corpses, or shadowy orgies. I began to visualise a low budget sex-horror film set entirely in a bouncy castle: Frankenstein’s Bouncy Castle of Freaks, perhaps. Surely it would run and run at Frightfest.
I didn’t go on the bouncy castle because, as Mat pointed out, if I ever experience a rush of adrenalin, I explode. This is why the new film Crank is not about me. In this, Jason Statham’s character will die if his adrenalin levels drop below a certain amount. So that - or so the trailer seems to indicate - he has to spend the entire film running around shouting and acting like a character in a bad movie. Conveniently enough. The trailer starts with him marching up to the camera and announcing, in his normal Cockney geezer tones: ‘My name is Chev Chellios.’ Could they have tried any harder to make him look silly? Perhaps he could have strolled up to the camera wearing a ballgown and pearls and said: ‘They call me - the giant hamster of Marseilles!’ In a bad French accent. That might have done it.
posted by martin at 8:23 AM
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