Posts from August 2010

Sex Bob-Omb: The Scott Pilgrim Musical!!!

Scott Pilgrim vs The World is a musical. It is a therefore somewhat of a pity that much of the music in it is pretty anonymous, there are no showstoppers here. It is exactly of a sort, though, the sort that you might imagine no mark Toronto indie bands making. This should therefore be successful within the movie, since the movie is partial about the travails of a no-mark Torontonian (Torontian? Torontoed? Torontinoed?) indie band. And thus, happily in the music within Scott Pilgrim vs The World (The Movie) we have a perfect metaphor for the problem with the film Scott Pilgrim vs The World. It is too faithful to its source, its internal world and its own sense of doing its on story justice to succeed. Edgar Wright has delivered a stupendously entertaining movie, but one which you know could have been better. Just as the music played by Sex Bob-Omb in the film is good, and correct and accurate could also, in a perfect world, also be catchy and fun and sing along on the way home.

Time Reconsidered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Who Eps: #7 PLANET OF EVIL

or “i’ve got a very unpleasant theory!”

… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community and from now on also crossposted at FT.

After dramatically qualified location CITY OF DEATH, we’re off to PLANET OF EEEEVIL (my home burg, in similar vein, is known to the tourist board as “town of flowers”). Anyway, it’s 1975+30,000 years and the BoringBaker and a frighteningly young-looking SJ are distress-called to the WELL AT THE END OF THE WORLD edge of the known universe, to a planet that resembles a boiled and scabby bald head, where a frightened encampment of scientists is being caused to dwindle and corpse by a JUNGLE THAT SUCKS. Now read on…

Time Reconsidered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Who Eps: #6 CITY OF DEATH

or “most important punch in HISTORY!”

… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community and from now on also crossposted at FT.

taking us back to the first worst baker — lovefilm takes its approach to time from the TARDIS hurrah — we now arrive in the 4-ep CITY OF DEATH, so-called bcz er er i’ll come back to that. The most irritating timelord is touristing with schoolgirl-fetish the Future Mrs Professor D4wkins in Paris in 1979 of all years. Where squigglyfaced aristocratic Elder-God art thieves quaff creme de menthe and plot the unbirth of all life on earth, via experiments with CHICKENS. K9 has been left in the TARDIS, hopefully in the hot sun with the window rolled shut — now read on…

i: just as the art villain is based on that timeless green elder ugly CHTHULHU, the art detective DW4 and FMPD team up with is based on eternally youthful blond fist-happy belgian scribe TINTIN
ii: the fellow playin the Russian professor — named KERENSKY for those who appreciate haha RED herring links with the Revolution, tho actually the Aristos in Exile atmos is quite relevant — manages to surpass his oscar-nomnomham spasm as a RUSSIAN with a prizewinning GOLDEN PIGSBUM for being murderously fast-aged…
iii: … which scene i believe features in the terrors of certain small DW watchers? Reduced to skeleton-dust is today a bit pro forma — Hammer having gorily invented it with Dracula, Buffy has efficiently routinised it, and this kind of FX was already pretty standard uk kids-TV horror… i recall something very similar in TIMESLIP in 1970 when i was small myself…
iv: THE EEEVIL PLAN is — of course — crap, but at the least last living Jagaroth has the excuse of being traumatised psychologically — ftb last living ect — and physically, having been splintered into 12 psychic parts scattered across time: and it has nice make-do touches, given that he is an super-advanced being trapped alongside the bloody pharaohs among others, and it must have been MADDENING tryin to get them to hurry up and discover INTERSTITIAL TRANSMAT STABILISATION and etc… certainly he is very mad
v: minor lovable details: that Squigglyface Scarroth favours chartreuse green and looks HOTT in an expensive loungesuit; that the giveaway to his best art-thief girly that she has uh oh ew noez noez been SHAGGIN A SHOGGOROTH is a Tintinesque Egyptian scroll feat., alongside dogheaded Anubis and etc, a BRIGHT GREEN TENDRIL-HEADED ELDER GOD; the way the Jagaroth ship tidily folds its legs up just before it explodes; all the other Jagaroths basically shouting at Scarroth from the back of the bus pre-explosiion, so it’s no surprise he gets flustered and cross and presses the deadly button; when Romana is guilelessly building some shortcut tec for the monster we see her unscrewing a standard three-pin plug from same ftb FRANCE!
vi: hee tiny unexpected easter egg cameo, as art connoisseurs admiring an YBA-esque installation at the Louvre, viz an blue police box, by long-since past sell-by J.Cleese and NEVER NOT AWESOME Eleanor Bron, who murmurs “exquisite!” as it dematerialises. I could write a million words on why the joke is actually on anyone who considers her character in any sense mistaken in her judgment — she should TOTES POST TO diggerdydum
vii: so why the “CITY OF DEATH” — well in my opinion, this is the state induced in the viewer by the vast amount of content-free wandertime doc and comp have in the boulevards and parks and iconic metal towers of dreary parEEEEE, presumably to prove the licence fee well spent on DW’s first-ever foreign location. Without outside shoots this would have been no worse, and just two eps long. Apparently it was rewritten and heavily edited by a largely pseudonymous D’Ugg L’ass O’Dumms, b4 he ripped off his plasticated face to reveal the writhing tendrils of ETERNALLY BORING NON-AMUSING LAMENESS…

Actually I’m being mean: there’s a bit too much Tom Quirk, and half the dialogue seems to have been improvised on the spot bcz they forgot the actual line, but TB is actually NOT the worst ham, see ii, and LallaW not the worst actor, which is the Tintin man. This story was enormously entertaining and demonstrably unwreckable even by stuff I am usually a bit allergic to; it has several silly-fun elements, including the fact that the alien’s lair is full of loads more GENUINE mona lisas, the whole jaunt into da vinci’s studio, inc.hilarous jobsworth minion action, the “felt tip” joke… and of course the utter end of a whole alien race, though it was largely their own fault

MADONNA – “Like A Prayer”

#625, 25th March 1989

A wonderfully simple, wonderfully dense record. “When you call my name / It’s like a little prayer / I’m down on my knees / I want to take you there”. That’s just the chorus: 21 words, and what’s happening in them? A pun on Madonna’s name, setting up her dual role as divinity and supplicant, receiving a prayer while on her knees, drawing a parallel between the (apparently) fixed relationship of worship and the mutual shifts of self and role in sex. Which is all “Like A Prayer” is, even before you look at the video: sex and religion, entwined like lovers all through the song, their identities melting.

Colston Bassett Stilton (cheesy lover #93)

A soft-ish blue cheese from Nottinghamshire, bought from Neals Yard Dairy

Coming south from hence we pass’d Stilton, a town famous for cheese, whch is call’d our English Parmesan, and is brought to table with the mites, or maggots round it, so thick, that they bring a spoon with them for you to eat the mites with, as you do the cheese.

So wrote Daniel Defoe in 1727.¹ Maggots and mites! Our wedge of cheese – bought to savour with a piggerish civilised after-dinner port – harbours no visible wildlife, unless you’re counting the mould. The rind’s a crusty pale biscuit, with a soft white bloom. Inside, the pale yellow paste’s scored and splattered liberally with green-grey Penicillium roqueforti. (P. roqueforti is guaranteed a place in my Top Ten Fungi List, if I ever make a Top Ten Fungi List.)

Fun with acid!

This is what happens when you dip a cheeseburger in hydrochloric acid. I want to try this at home!

“If John Grisham had written Jurassic Park, he couldn’t do better than Tyrannosaur Canyon”

(Stephen Coonts, apparently)

I like to browse charity shops in search of amazing books. As I’m a bookseller if not by trade anymore then by something possibly stronger than genetics or space-time, this is not necessarily just a case of being pleased to find an unproofed review copy of the new China Mieville six weeks before it’s meant to come out, since the YMCA clearly don’t check that sort of thing. No, it is not just good books that I am interested in. In fact, I think I’ve possibly passed some sort of event horizon where I no longer care about “good” books because all books are part of the whole sort of general bookish thing and so it’s beyond an investment in my own literary pleasure into an investment in this whole sort of general bookish thing. All books, especially the waifs and strays, are relevant to my interests. Especially, sometimes, the really, really bad ones.*

Which is how I found myself in the aforementioned YMCA shop, West Ealing, idly browsing the racks and happened across a spine that immediately set my ‘this is unlikely to have been nominated for the Booker prize’ senses tingling. ‘TYRANNOSAUR CANYON,’ t’was. I know, with the ambiguous quote at the top of this entry, you’re probably thinking that this book doesn’t sound very amazing at all. After all, if John Grisham wrote Jurassic Park there’d probably be a lot of courtroom drama regarding the massive number of personal injury claims possible if you’ve had your legs ripped off by a velociraptor and it wasn’t your fault and then some coffee-drinking. That, though, is because I’ve deprived you of the rest of the blurb, as in actual fact the book contains-

Time Reconsidered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Who Eps: #5 THE TWO DOCTORS

or “fruit-soft flesh peeling from white BONES”

… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community and from now on also crossposted at FT.

So to follow a beloved early-doors gamechanging story, loveFILM now send me a much-reviled maximum-decadence shark-jumping fattcolin story: viz 1985’s THE TWO DOCTORS, feat. DWs 2&5, plus Jamie and Peri. This was the longest story I rewatched in this exercise so far: 3 x 45 min eps. OOF.

Terschelling Schapenkaas, Oude Remeker (cheesy lovers #91 & #92)

Terschelling Schapenkaas

A hard, pasturised sheep’s cheese from Terschelling, in the Netherlands, bought from Boerenkaas.

We have a wedge of this hard sheep’s cheese. Its interior is an opaque pale creamy white, smooth-looking, and dotted with uneven little holes. Towards the rind it becomes translucent and a little darker.

Time Reconsidered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Who Eps: #4 THE TIME MEDDLER

or “nor would we be hampered by the MEAD”

… being a show-by-show TARDIS-esque (ie in effect random) exploration of Doctor Who Soup to Nuts, begun at LJ’s diggerdydum community and from now on also crossposted at FT.

It was a simpler age: loveFILM has quit its BadBaker jag and sent me THE TIME MEDDLER, from mid-65, feat. DW1, Vicki and Steven. Verity Lambert is the boss, it’s a HISTORICAL — 1066! — and the main non-spoiler issue is that I realised, as I was cooing over the fact that Hartnell was a kid when Scott went off to the Antarctic, that he took on the role of OLDEST MAN IN SCIENCE FICTION AND LOOKS IT when he was just five yrs older than I am now. hmph