Nirvana: 10 Songs

About a Girl

Smells Like Teen Spirit

Come As You Are

Lithium

On a Plain

Scentless Apprentice

Heart-Shaped Box

Dumb

All Apologies

You Know You’re Right

Any Other Business: Part XXVI

What is one to do with thoughts that are far too long for Twitter but not nearly long enough for a blog post proper? Why round them up and turn them into a twenty-sixth pormanteau post on matters of course!

Is this about Brexit?

Two commercials keep catching my eye on television at the moment, and both seem to be about Brexit without saying they’re about Brexit. One seems to be an implicit rebuke to the Little Englanders by playing Elgar’s Nimrod Enigma Variation over Richard Ayoade reminding everyone how hopelessly connected with and dependent on the rest of the world the small island is, while the other appropriately enough features recent Churchill impersonator Gary Oldman in a spirit of ‘keep buggering on’ as it attempts to cheer up the British that they have done good things in the past and so might survive this folly.

Notes on Cold Pursuit

Liam Neeson’s thriller Cold Pursuit was the film of the week the other day on Sunday Breakfast with Patrick Doyle.

Cold Pursuit is a curious exercise in repetition and variation, being a remake of the tremendous Norwegian black comedy In Order of Disappearance with Neeson taking on the Stellan Skarsgard role, and the same director Hans Petter Moland directing the same scenes again. And yet often they aren’t the same scenes. The original showcased rambling absurdities to do Martin McDonagh proud, a highlight being two gangsters so distracted over an argument about whether it was better to be poor in Africa than Scandinavia; because at least you’d have sunshine; that they fail to notice Skarsgard kidnapping a child in the background. That discussion is gone, as is the subtext about immigration involved in a Swede being citizen of the year in a Norwegian town while he accidentally starts a turf war between a Norwegian drug gang and a Serbian drug gang. This remake instead showcases unpleasant vulgarities, and an odd fascination with the mundanity of cranking up platforms in warehouses and morgues. Neeson in a rampage role is also inherently less funny casting than Skarsgard.

Listen here:

.

Any Other Business: Part XXV

What is one to do with thoughts that are far too long for Twitter but not nearly long enough for a blog post proper? Why round them up and turn them into a twenty-fifth pormanteau post on matters of course!

Reruns receiving runaround

I’ve previously lamented the attitude of millenials who veritably trashed a screening of Halloween in the Lighthouse with their stunning contempt for anything dating from before last Tuesday never mind anything dating from before they were born. I had a sudden realisation the other day; perhaps their attitude is born of ignorance in more ways than one – to wit, they were never exposed to anything from the past when they were children. The rise of reality TV has filled acres of airtime with witless trash in the mornings, afternoons, and evenings. (And night too sometimes). Look at the location location location of someone coming to dine in an escape to a new home abroad while flogging antiques on an Alaskan trip from a survivalist farm to the lobster pots. All those hours used to be filled with reruns. That is where as a child I soaked up the culture of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s: The Phil Silvers Show, The Twilight Zone, Rawhide, Hogan’s Heroes, Star Trek, The Man from UNCLE, The Champions, The Avengers, Land of the Giants, The Prisoner, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island, Batman, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, The Munsters, My Favourite Martian, Lost in Space, The Addams Family, The Brady Bunch, Flipper, Mission: Impossible, The Flinstones, The Invaders, The Time Tunnel, Gentle Ben, Thunderbirds, Joe 90, Stingray, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, The Fugitive, Dad’s Army, Columbo, The Incredible Hulk, Happy Days, Fawlty Towers, Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em, The Two Ronnies, Shoestring, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Minder, Benny Hill, Citizen Smith, Three’s Company, The Bionic Woman, Mork and Mindy, Battlestar Galactica, Diff’rent Strokes, Grizzly Adams, The New Avengers, Doctor Who, Blake’s Seven, The Dukes of Hazzard, The Muppets, Tales of the Unexpected, Wonder Woman, and later Hancock’s Half Hour, Steptoe and Son, The Prisoner, The Rockford Files, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Sykes, Kojak, and Starsky and Hutch. By the contemptible logic of ‘Ugh, I wasn’t born then’ I shouldn’t have bothered watching any of those shows. But those shows informed me to a huge degree: I remained aloof from general hysteria about The X-Files because I saw Mulder and Scully investigating bizarre murders as an American reworking with less suavity and more seriousness of Steed and Mrs Peel investigating bizarre murders. And I don’t think possessing a mite of historical objectivity to avoid passing moments of total hysteria is a bad thing to absorb from TV.

What ho, Clive Exton!

Well knock me down with a feather but I’ve just discovered that Clive Exton more or less decided what I was going to read for a good chunk of the 1990s and I never even knew. It turns out this Exton chappie was not only the scribbler who adapted PG Wodehouse all by his lonesome for all 23 spiffing episodes of Jeeves & Wooster starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, but before that he also was the main writer for David Suchet’s celebrated Poirot. Blimey! I mean once one knows the connections jump at one, don’t you know? The absurd moments of physical comedy with Hastings, the mischievous poking fun at Poirot’s vanity, above all the double act of the man about town who hasn’t a clue and the fussy man behind him who knows everything. You could almost view some of the funnier episodes of Hastings being a nitwit while Poirot solves everything as a dry run for Exton’s next series. And I lapped up both those shows as they ran simultaneously, without ever noticing it was the same Johnnie behind them both! Well, I mean to say, what? I might as well have taken Exton’s correspondence course on what to read for five years as just plunge in to Christie and Wodehouse as I did.

Pixies: 10 Songs

Levitate Me

Where Is My Mind?

Caribou

Debaser

Wave of Mutilation

Monkey Gone to Heaven

Rock Music

Velouria

Alec Eiffel

Motorway to Roswell

Alas the Screen, I knew it

Hope springs eternal, but after three years hope has run out – the Screen cinema like the Classic in Harold’s Cross is now merely a hole in the ground awaiting development.

This familiar sight will in future only exist, increasingly bafflingly, in the pages of Ed O’Loughlin’s novel Not Unkind and Not Untrue.

It is a sad day, and comes about a year after the equally lamentable destruction of the immense screen 1 of the Savoy; the Screen’s bigger brother. In both cases it had been a while since I had been to either institution but they held fond memories for me. As a blow by blow description hereabouts back in 2010 recorded my team twice won the Screen Cinema Film Quiz (held in Doyle’s pub the second time, and the now transmogrified MacTurcaills the first time) and its prize of a free private screening in the cinema – but the film to be finished by 2pm. A prize put to excellent use the first time, with a glorious screening on their biggest screen of Apocalypse Now. Repertory outings in 2010 and 2011 were my last visits to the Screen, and it must be concluded that their programming of 1980s and 1990s seasons and showings of the likes of Casablanca and A Shot in the Dark failed to keep them in business against the Lighthouse, while, for my own part, from 2011 on I opted for the IFI over the Screen because of cheaper prices (and free tickets accruing) by way of the IFI membership card. I’ll miss it.

Notes on Happy Death Day 2U

Sequel Happy Death Day 2U was the film of the week on Sunday Breakfast with Patrick Doyle much earlier today.

Having finally caught up with Happy Death Day recently I was greatly looking forward to its hasty sequel. What could be better than Scream meets Groundhog Day: Part II in which Jessica Rothe’s Tree having attained the mastery of her time loop and become a better person gets to help someone else thru the same nightmare with hard-bitten savoir faire? Funny you should ask… My suspicions were flagged when I saw on the poster on the way in ‘based on characters by’. The problem with hasty sequels is that while you can re-assemble your cast, sets, VFX team, stuntmen, cinematographer, and composer quite readily, you will then usually find yourself doing your best Chico Marx – “Whaddya know? We forgotta da script!”. In this case, whaddya know, we forgotta da scriptwriter, as Christopher Landon decides he can both direct and write at the same time. Like Gerald Ford, walking, and chewing gum, he is badly mistaken. By the end of Happy Death Day 2U you have only the memory of a slasher flick, buried under slapstick.

Listen here:

.

Any Other Business: Part XXIV

What is one to do with thoughts that are far too long for Twitter but not nearly long enough for a blog post proper? Why round them up and turn them into a twenty-fourth pormanteau post on matters of course!

The Valley of the Short

National Geographic’s Valley of the Boom has been an odd watch. Coming off the back of 4 seasons of The West Wing re-runs on TG4 it’s been quite nice to see Bradley Whitford in light suits walking around corridors again, but this time affecting a drawl and dispensing gnomic wisdom. Elsewhere it’s been fascinating learning about Facebook before Facebook in the shape of TheGlobe.com, but there’s no compelling reason this couldn’t all have been a documentary; even if that would mean losing Josh Lyman himself. Making it a docudrama is a baffling decision, and one which ‘creator’ Matthew Carnahan seems to have interpreted as license to war on the fourth wall to make sure we understand that what little drama there is is not as factual as the documentary surrounding it. Interestingly enough in light of Vice’s suffering the law of diminishing returns when employing the tricks of The Big Short the deployment of those self-same tricks here actually work reasonably well, and even include a musical number; something filmed for but dropped from Vice.

You Don’t Know Dick

All roads lead back to Vice… The more I’ve thought about Vice the more uneasy I am about it. McKay’s interest in Dick Cheney is that which animates all Presidential biographers – the years in the Oval Office. So why bother making a film about the years leading up to it as well, and not just zero in on those eight years? Those eight years, after all, are what really (and clearly) gets McKay’s goat. And yet Vice gallops thru them, offering Cheney’s infamous (and cheerfully repeated by myself and Emmet Ryan during writing sessions, explicitly mentioning that Vice-Presidential imprimatur) “Go F*** Yourself” to Senator Patrick Leahy, and his accidental shooting someone while hunting, almost totally decontextualised, purely because they had to be included; because they’d been fodder for the SNL writers, as McKay once was. The scene in which Cheney demands to see all intelligence, no matter how flimsy, is presented as his quest for a fictional casus belli to invade Iraq. I’ve been thinking though of how that scene could be written, with the same misgivings by the agency directors, and the same outcome, but an entirely different and equally plausible motivation for Cheney’s actions. The truth is that is possible for many scenes in Vice, because McKay always assumes the absolute worst of Cheney, usually in the absence of any information whatsoever. So try this on for size as reason for trampling the constitution beneath his feet:

CIA: There’s only one source for that, Mister Vice-President, that’s why it’s not included.

CHENEY: I want to see everything.

FBI: But, Mister Vice-President, we have to sift thru the intelligence to determine what’s credible.

CHENEY: Do you? Is that what you did when you dismissed as ‘racial profiling’ a flag on an Arabic man saying he didn’t need to learn how to land the plane, just how to fly it? 3,000 Americans are dead because we dropped the ball. We dropped the ball, and they died. So from now on I see EVERYTHING. I don’t care how ‘credible’ you think it is. I need to see EVERYTHING. We are not going to have another 9/11, not on my watch. Now get out of here, and don’t fumble the f****** ball again…

And now perhaps imagine how McKay would handle a similar scene involving President Obama justifying lethal drone strikes on American citizens without any due process.

 

Our long national nightmare is over

And once again with The West Wing re-runs on TG4, because Declan Rice’s statement last night contained a fatal phrase that immediately had me humming Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore ditty. I have felt, almost from the beginning of this will he/won’t he saga, that it was unseemly. And as it progressed I felt it was increasingly humiliating for us to be so desperately begging someone to play for us. Especially as he is ‘a proud Englishman’. Sing it!

But in spite of all temptation

To belong to other nations

He remains an Englishman!