1. WE'VE GOT A TICKET TO RYE (AND WE DON'T CARE)

Yes, I booked tickets today for the - boo, hiss! - Vincent Gallo curated All Tomorrows Parties in April.

In stark contrast to previous years, in which we've struggled to round-up the necessary four people in time to get a chalet, this time I'm led to believe that the party departing from Leicester is filling at least two chalets and hiring a bloody mini-bus! You'd think something like that would point somewhat toward a fulfilling social life, wouldn't you? Well it's a funny old world. On the off-chance that you're going too, don't hesitate to drop me a line.

2. AN EXCITING NEW VENTURE!

I've been getting a bit back into the old routine of making mix CDs this week, as, after a positively ridiculous delay, I finally feel inspired to put some music together for the great Jack Fear (see 'Fear' on the list of links to your right), who was kind enough to send me a couple of superbly assembled discs a few months back.

Endlessly and fruitlessly compiling great mix tape/CD track-listings is probably my most geekish and obsessive pass-time (which I guess is saying something..), and one of my few genuine talents. I was thinking this week how cool it would be to make a magical and mystifying compilation with suitably cryptic cover-art, and then just leave copies of it around the place, like flyers or something, for the unsuspecting to stubble across…

After a few minutes thought, it becomes clear that that probably wouldn't actually work very well, but what I think WOULD be a cool idea would be to irregularly make a CD of strange and wonderful music I've been listening to, and sort of assemble a mailing list of people to send copies of it to, kind of like issues of a magazine. Free of charge, obviously. I'd certainly get a kick out of it, and hopefully the recipients would too. Could make a nice old fashioned alternative to the daily barrage provided by MP3 blogs.

So what do you think? Comments please: thingonthedoorstep@yahoo.com

3. SOME MOVIE REVIEWS FROM BACK IN NOVEMBER THAT I MEANT TO POST HERE BUT FORGOT;

7/11/04
The Mindscape of Alan Moore (Dez Vylenz & Moritz Winkler, 2003)

Went to see a screening of 'The Mindscape of Alan Moore', a film about, well, Alan Moore, obviously. It's basically just a glorified 90 minute interview with the big man. He talks about his upbringing in Northampton and how he ended up writing comics, which is quite interesting, then they go through a few summarised explanations of his major works and then smash straight into the precise details of Moore's myriad thoughts concerning history, politics, sexuality, science, metaphysics, religion, magick, imagination, evolution, cosmology and Mithras only knows what else. Much of what he has to say is well worth hearing, although the film's attempt to cram 25 years worth of weird notions and paradigm shifts into just over one hour of screen time makes for a bit of a headfuck. Moore just drones on and on in his comfortingly thick, rumbling midlands accent (forget spoken word, he could make a killer avant garde drone album just by humming for a while) whilst the filmmakers, clearly out to avoid the monotony of a long talking head interview, and clearly having been granted a bit of a budget to waste, go completely off their rockers, bombarding us with a seemingly endless assault of brainmelting visuals, featuring everything from spiralling extreme close-ups of comic book panels and flying occult paraphrenalia to CGI zooming-to-the-heart-of-the-atom science documentary wigouts, and even distinctly dodgy live action reconstructions of scenes from Moore's comics. Which is all rather off-putting to be honest. Moore's relentlessly Mercurial, dope-addled magickal/intellectual headspace, in which BIG IDEAS clash like titans over smouldering heaps of dense pop culture esoterica, is enough of a sensory assault in itself without all the visual ramalama. And anyway, nothing they're able to conjure up can possibly compete with the psychedelic glory of Alan's mighty beard and scary bloodshot eyes. Or maybe that's just me.
Well whatever, I await 'The Mindscape of Grant Morrison' with baited breath and a stash of headache tablets.

8/11/04
Switchblade Romance (Alexandre Aja, 2003)

Krist almighty.. in retrospect, I really, really could have done without going straight from a horrible day at my horrible new work to see this French horror movie. Somebody once said of Hershal Gordon Lewis' hilarious b-movie classic 'Bloodfeast' that “if the violence was in any way realistic it would be utterly unwatchable”, and the makers of this nasty and dismal picture seem to have set out to prove that point. Starting off like a thoroughly professional contemporary Euro-art film - crystal clear footage (with obligatory drained colour cinematography), lots of lingering close-ups and can-hear-a-pin-drop-a-mile-away soundtrack. And then an utterly ridiculous axe-wielding maniac turns up a few minutes in and, oh fucking hell, this isn't heading anywhere pleasant, is it?
If you're the kind of film viewer who gets off on brutal, unremitting carnage, terror and misery - a Takashi Miike fan perhaps, or somebody who rushed out to buy Salo on DVD - then you'll love this one. By any standard you may care to apply, the parade of bloodcurdling atrocities presented here is intense and gruesome to the point of being difficult for even horror fans to sit through without squirming. Lurid close-ups, relentless screaming, rusty, blunt instruments and blood-spewing, gaping wounds are the order of the day.
Which would be dandy if the film was in any way engaging or, god forbid, made some kind of a point. As it is though, despite it's delusions of art and hamfisted attempts at Hitchcock style tension, it's basically ludicrous, exploitative, misogynistic, boring and - I can't stress this strongly enough - so utterly, utterly brainless that any viewer with an agenda beyond stomach-churning violence and sadism might as well be watching Friday the 13th part XII or something. It gave me a godawful headache (so LOUD!) and taught me nothing except what happens when you repeatedly batter somebody's face in with a barbed wire covered fencepost. And, oh look, here comes a totally nonsensical M. Night Shawaddywaddy style trick ending! Didn't see THAT one coming!
I'm sure 'Switchblade Romance' will find itself an enthusiastic audience amongst 'visceral cinema' fans and the ever-reliable gore fraternity, but from my perspective it's garbage, quite frankly.


9/11/04
Queimada! (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1968)

Now this is an interesting one. Ostensibly an old school cast of thousands historical epic relating the bloody colonial history of the Caribbean island of the title, and staring a mid-period Marlon Brando as a charismatic English rabble-rouser of uncertain loyalties, it's a film that doesn't get shown very often. The reasons for this are abundantly clear; Firstly, in cinematic terms it's pretty flawed - it has that inconsistent, slightly confusing quality that suggest they filmed as much as they could before the money ran out and then went home and cobbled it together into something vaguely coherent in the cutting room. And secondly, it presents a heavily political anti-colonial tale in a grimly realistic manner devoid of empty rhetoric or easy answers. So for the casual '60s cinema-goer: dull, hard to follow, dispiriting and a little uncomfortable. But to the discerning modern viewer prepared to overcome such obstacles, the spirit of an ambitious and uncompromising film is just sitting there waiting to be appreciated.

Brief plot summary: Mid-Nineteenth Century, Quimada is essentially a big Portuguese slave labour sugar plantation. Brando's two-fisted, straight-talking ex-Navy aristocrat turns up and swiftly establishes contact with the island's scattered network of proto-socialist types who are trying to organise a slave uprising. Not one to fool around, he swiftly picks out a black man with the appropriate look of defiance in his eyes and, before the poor guy knows what's happening, Brando has helped him and his mates undertake a gold heist and flee across the island and has appointed him the new rebel king.
“We'll die if we stay here, won't we?” asks the nervous rebel king.
“Yes,” deadpans Brando between sips from his hip-flask, “be a bloody massacre most likely.”
Cut to footage of women and children celebrating their new freedom and the blood runs cold.

So anyway - a bunch of other stuff happens, the rebels eventually take bloody control of the island and set up camp in the governor's mansion. Having won their friendship and trust, Brando quietly reveals himself to be an agent for British intelligence and says cheerio, leaving the island as the smiling Englishmen with chequebooks descend to negotiate terms for reopening the plantations. Cut to ten years later and our rebel king has decided he dislikes British exploitation as much as Portuguese. He's taken his men off into the mountains and war has been declared. Brando is tracked down by the sugar company and called back to sort things out. The liberal white prime minister is swiftly assassinated. The army is in charge. The deadeyed 'citizens' are herded into concentration camps. When initial overtures of friendship towards his old revolutionary pals are brutally refused, Brando finds himself wading into a self-destructive guerrilla war against the rebels he created, and that's when things really start getting unpleasant.

The deeply cynical (and essentially realistic) way in which Queimada portrays the cruelty, confusion and mindless greed of Empire is pretty radical for a film of it's period - even these days you'd be hard pressed to find a political critique this harsh anywhere outside the realm of documentary.
Inevitably, 20th century comparisons abound - South America? Haiti? By far the most striking parallel is with Britain's war against the Mau Mau guerrillas in Kenya I reckon.

Queimada was filmed on a real Caribbean island (don't know which one), and the epic crowd scenes featuring the massed hordes of recently 'liberated' slaves engaging in celebrations and street parties, riots and battles are impressive and authentic, although it's sad to realise that they probably didn't have to issue any costumes or build any sets to make the island and it's occupants look the way they did over a century ago.

Brando turns in a pretty good performance - the key scene towards the end, when his hard-nosed exterior nearly breaks down in the face of creeping doubt and confusion about what he's doing, is stunning - you can see the birth of the energies he would dredge up for his portrayal of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now a decade later.

Nobody in the film is the hero, nobody's the wise man. Nobody learns anything, and everybody loses out (except the cheery stockbrokers back in London who are briefly shown discussing turbulence in the price of sugar). The film's conclusions are staggeringly bleak.

28/11/04
Battle Royale II (???)
As a big fan of the first instalment, I had high hopes for this one, but am sad to report it's pretty awful to be honest. Proof the Japanese can make a sequel just as dunderheaded as any American one. The plot initially sounds promising :- the boy who survived at the end of the last film (Nanahara) has become a terrorist / freedom fighter leading a gang of other BR survivors/escapees in a quest to bring down the government that developed the whole crazy scheme in the first place. So far so good - you'd think some gnarly urban warfare and further examinations of a diseased political system which forces it's children to kill each other would be on the cards. But the film is lame and ignores these interesting possibilities. The plot barely makes sense at all - “Hey I know,” decides someone at the government, “our crazy scheme to make school kids kill each other has backfired and led to the creation of a deadly network of terrorists who threaten the security of the world! So let's send another force of terrified, untrained school children out to get them! That's sure to work out nicely!” And the 'terrorists' are conveniently holed up on another abandoned island, so it all starts off as a rather ridiculous 'this time it's war' re-run of the first film. And then the surviving kids eventually meet up with the terrorists, who it turns out blew up two skyscrapers and now prefer to skulk around not doing much and releasing the occasional video tape. You can see where this is going. Yes, in an attempt to make something of a film completely devoid of intelligence or purpose, they make it into a big and rather nonsensical metaphor for Al-Qaeda and TWAT. At one point, the Prime Minister of Japan even turns up to warn rather vaguely that “that country” is on the verge of bombing Japan unless they get rid of their resident terrorists, and Nanahara reels off the familiar list of places that “that country” has bombed in the past, accompanied by grim stock footage of them in case we'd missed the point. Quite how/why he seems to have ended up being so anti-American (sorry, anti-“that country”) is never explained, and neither is the exact nature of the political situation in the film's world. But then as I say, the film fails to engage with the issues it purports to explore to such an extent that it's completely farcical.
But anyway, lots and lots of people run around and shoot each other in an attempt to outdo the violence of the first film, but because of the 'war' scenario there's no tension or variation at all, and it quickly gets tedious. Lots of characters who have barely even been introduced are granted histrionic death scenes (plenty of excessive shouting of each other's names in the traditional Japanese manner), and the dialogue is atrocious throughout.
It's a testament to the filmmakers' incompetence that a film that initially seems to feature so much of my favourite kind of stuff ends up being such a waste of everybody's time. By trying to be a serious political tale it loses all the stuff that made the initial concept so gleefully entertaining, but it's so dumb and devoid of style that in the end it fails to make any kind of point whatsoever and is just thoroughly monotonous. Next time let's have less empty political hamboning and more schoolgirls with scythes.