A one sentence review of True Blood, highlighting a hitherto underexplored improbability in one of its central premises, pertaining to matters neurological and dermatological as well as reproductive, to which is appended a glossary, by the author of ‘Screen Legends 1: Peter O’ Toole’

Surely, I thought to myself, as two of the characters from True Blood cleaved to and chafed against one another like amorous, melanomic lobsters, those sub-Mason-Dixon-Line Americans are too stunted to know where to put it.

Glossary:

Lobster: a streamlined crab

Myself: a less streamlined me

America: the result of a 1956 experiment in which 150 million people were cloned from one of Bob Hope’s hair cells. Like the Boys from Brazil, but benign.

Screen Legends 1: Peter O’ Toole

Peter O’ Toole, with his azure eyes of the azurest shade of steely azure, can look into your soul, download it into his mind and then replicate it to such a convincing degree that, if he so chose, he could go round to your house and get your mum to make him treacle sponge. Never mind that he is 96 and wrinkled like unto the venerable tortoise. And never mind that you are but a lumprous adolescent, all bandy legs and Kleenex. Such is his thespianic acumen he can successfully pass himself off as anyone that has ever lived: Lawrence of Arabia, Lawrence of Watford, Gordon the Gopher… anyone!

His filmography is slight, like the man himself. He chooses his films carefully and shrewdly, like a prudent mother hen selecting the choicest chunks of meal worm with which to grace her noble beak.  To date he has only starred in three films: Lawrence of Arabia, Peter Stringfellow’s Arabian Nights and Robocop 3: Descent of the Gastropods.  His role in the latter, as a tourist forcefully demanding that Robocop rescue a bunch of weaklings from a vicious quasi-Arabic snail was a tour de force.

He is survived by Prince Philip, the concept of schadenfraude and himself.

Cut-up review: The Fox-tastic Mrs Fan

Yes. I’ve gone and done it again. I had a good look at John Le Baptiste’s review of The Fantastic Mr Fox and thought it’d benefit from the Lazarus Corporation’s Cut-Up Engine. This time I popped in the transgenderiser modulator too, so Mr Fox becomes a lady and vice versa. The resulting text becomes eerily misogynistic and littered with vaguely muttered threats such as ’nibbling like a violence’ and ‘olivia sandwiches to internal organs’.

It also has the longest introductory paragraph I’ve ever seen in a JLB review. I’ve taken the liberty of tidying up some of the punctuation, just for presentation’s sake. Enjoy.

Wilson provides would be to defeat the another writer was a having microscopic the misunderstand me: anderson’s part very shark appeared in view scenario of a person courtship scene. or the forth into and can oft not a coincidence that shall feature bill has it that the that aquatic only that I was in don’t the tell you anything pyjama party is one of the manner of a original piece of say leaving her impotently anjelica houston and to makes no sense, even if shrewd move on I’ve very partial to to use seconds and is wes her next film carrot cut-glass, therefore, I adapt the writing of sides of sunday, which humans. fruitsome shopping trolley the the world featuring the and exclaimed I’m writer of watch some jacques this film. apparently, in the kids-book convention. assumed that the muse even insists on doing and squinting animal children’s book for same and find gainful that wes anderson was is well known that she williams (sweet speech t’arse to t’snout wi’ where the rhythms in other areas). it is dialogue of and verily, documentaries such as appears for a brief few month-long cousteau and uncreatively her. the words of another anderson to cinema, I catering himself, in olivia sandwiches to internal organs. but and for what reason: I been away. where huwoman I cannot also rather, I could not own anyway, I twiddling the crucible of a gifted genteel hare on a object of a review. I surely anderson needs wherever it might lead nerdy muse tells nobs in film studies, cinema and not see the adrien brody, found are concerned, the anderson is is brought cannot say. but I can review:

hitherto, ended up using it in of slang of animal ‘fox’ is dialogue anderson wrote therefore.

I won’t ‘rushmore’ that ‘the verdict’ on it. to do so schwartzmann you are a ‘the wizard’ pointedly bursting from no woman. she is her dafoe. lo! the life williams, who puts the which brings a the in your pot you ponces. learned dialogue for the tiger shark in the aquatic is showing at a original script, the the parlance of and engaged in adapting a fantastic Mr buccaneers need to draw on employment for willem shark. is my stealing, she is sorely lacking going to fuck you ten or adapting (owen for this scene was so magic). stick it would inside their books. murray (nibbling like a violence). tug-lad in with nary a rumour of ever on camera. rumour bildungsromans. I am root-vegetable-based her imagination like and omega of the film you.

when, vulpine stars I like children’s naturally halifax at a triangular egg salad supernatural banger my dainty splinter of anderson has jason Fantastic Mr Fox. here indulged her muse life set serving up bad that laconic while a more all time favourite hoary northern poacher, about away to go to the demurely at the but tarantino orthographic the muse lyrical intensity to whispereth into her ear incarnation of orphee. time in my time understand.

or, skill she possesses (dessert). why she invention: the alpha understand, until I saw this film or pass a ‘tiny pirates’ in your be seen on the stock ingluorious basterds production process. it had deserted her, can however tell you, cinema near spleen.

Bruce Campbell in verse – by Banjo Fett

I like Bruce Campbell. Here be some poetry about that:

If I were gay,

I’d be gay for Bruce Campbell.

And if I had one wish,

I would be Bruce for a day.

Bruce wears a shirt.

Its bright colours hide the hurt,

Of type-casting and near-misses.

Why don’t those big-shots take note?

Of his gritty performance in Maniac Cop.

Or the deranged slap-stick of Evil Dead.

One, two and three.

An elderly Elvis, the king of thieves.

And deleted from The Quick and the Dead.

Bruce. Say ‘workshed’.

And Bruce,

I’ll read your books. I’ll watch every episode of Burn Notice.

And I’ll never ask you about Evil Dead 4.

You could even make an album,

Of songs.

Sung in the style of William Shatner.

And I’d buy it.

Because you’re…

Groovy.

The Fantastic Mr Fox

I’ve been away. Where and for what reason: I cannot say. But I can say that I was in Halifax at a month-long shopping trolley convention. Anyway, I found time in my time away to go to the cinema and not see The Fantastic Mr Fox. Here is my review:

Hitherto, Wes Anderson has indulged his muse wherever it might lead him. The muse whispereth into his ear that his next film shall feature Bill Murray nibbling like a genteel hare on a dainty splinter of carrot and squinting demurely at the fruitsome Olivia Williams (Sweet Williams, who puts the tug-lass in cut-glass, with nary a rumour of orthographic violence). And verily, ‘Rushmore’ is brought forth into the world featuring the very same root-vegetable-based courtship scene. Or the muse tells Anderson to watch some Jacques Cousteau documentaries and find gainful employment for Willem Dafoe. Lo! The Life Aquatic is showing at a cinema near you.

When, therefore, I learned that Wes Anderson was engaged in adapting a children’s book for cinema, I naturally assumed that the muse had deserted him, leaving him impotently and uncreatively twiddling the nobs in the supernatural banger of his imagination like a more nerdy incarnation of Orphee. Don’t misunderstand me: I like children’s books. ‘The Wizard’s Pyjama Party’ is one of my all time favourite bildungsromans. I am also very partial to ‘Tiny Pirates in your Spleen’, which brings a lyrical intensity to the stock kids-book scenario of a person having microscopic buccaneers inside their internal organs. But surely Anderson needs to adapt the writing of no man. He is his own crucible of invention: the alpha and omega of the film production process. It is well known that he even insists on doing the catering himself, and can oft be seen on set serving up triangular egg salad sandwiches to stars such as Adrien Brody, Anjelica Houston and Jason Schwartzmann (Owen Wilson provides the dessert). Why he would need to draw on the words of another human I cannot understand.

Or, rather, I could not understand, until I saw this film. Anderson is a gifted writer of dialogue for humans. But where the rhythms and slang of animal speech are concerned, he is sorely lacking the skill he possesses in other areas. It is not a coincidence that the Tiger Shark in The Life Aquatic only appears for a brief few seconds and is pointedly laconic while ever on camera. Rumour has it that the original piece of dialogue Anderson wrote for this scene was so bad that Tarantino ended up using it in Ingluorious Basterds. Apparently, in the original script, the shark appeared in view and exclaimed “I’m going to fuck you ten sides of Sunday”, which makes no sense, even if you are a shark. Stealing, or adapting to use the parlance of film studies, the animal dialogue of another writer was a shrewd move on Anderson’s part therefore.

I won’t tell you anything about this film or pass a verdict on it. To do so would be to defeat the object of a review. I can however tell you, in the manner of a hoary northern poacher, that ‘The Fantastic Mr Fox’ is bursting from t’arse to t’snout wi’ vulpine magic. Stick it in your pot you ponces.

A Review of The Many Deaths of John Le Baptiste

It is both true and a truism that blogging is one of the chief causes of illiteracy. Before the establishment of a veritable leper’s colony of unlearned logorrhoea-sufferers on the terra nova of the internet, everyone in the world was at least as literate as Martin Amis (at least). Then the bloggers started popping up everywhere and doing unspeakable things to grammar and the once impregnable boundary between literal and metaphorical language. Of course, buried beneath this flood of 21^st-century vandals were a few diamonds in the rough who carried the flame for good sense. Their blogs made us laugh and made us cry but they did so without splitting infinitives and mixing metaphors. But the damage was done, and we are all the worse for it.

Bearing all of this mind, The Many Deaths of John Le Baptiste constitutes a new low in the history of the weblog. To describe Le Baptiste’s tortured imitation of English as doggerel would be to grossly insult the abortive product of the attempt to crossbreed a dog with a cockerel from whence the term originates. Sure, that hound-bird was a fleshy, feathered tumour of wet-nosed horror and an offence to God and nature, but it was less monstrous than what John Le Baptiste calls writing. For one thing, Le Baptiste appears only to have mastered the first fifteen letters of the alphabet fully (except j), and for another, he seems to think that commas are letters. On the rare occasions he manages to produce something resembling a sentence, it typically combines babyish exclamations (‘whelky-elk’ for ‘whelk’), pseudo-gangsterisms (‘straight up now dogboy biddy-bo), management-speak (‘is 110% isn’t not good enough, is it?’) and phrases that one can only assume Le Baptiste takes for poeticisms (‘upspringing egg, I love thee’).

Quite apart from the abhorrent language of this blog, the premise on which it is founded is both cruel and illogical. In essence, each entry describes the different ways in which John Le Baptiste claims to have died. It is grossly insensitive and one can only imagine what any dead people would think of it were they to read it. To first go through the discomfort and inconvenience of dying, only to be confronted with an illiterate pipsqueak making light of the whole ordeal! It’s sick! I know that if I were a dead person and I discovered this blog I would be livid. But it seems like anything is permissible in this permissive society.

Additionally, the essential concept of the blog is deeply flawed. It is a fundamental rule of the universe that you can only die once, unless you are successfully resuscitated shortly after. This Le Baptiste character claims to have been poisoned and shredded into little pieces on two separate occasions. I sincerely doubt that if this really did occur, Le Baptiste could have been resuscitated afterwards. Either he is lying about having died, or, and this is worse, he has already died, in which case he is a demon or spectre who has been sent to torment us and to corrupt our language. Whatever the explanation, this is not the sort of stuff you would want your child, grandmother or servant to read.

Most probably, John Le Baptiste is not a demon or a liar, but instead a confused and stunted tramp who has wandered into an internet café and is trying, futilely, to make sense of his own pointless, urine-soaked existence and to draw the attention of the world to his plight, so that they might point him in the direction of the nearest off-license. The sooner the world does this, the sooner the internet will be free of his unconscionable waffle.

The Many Deaths of John Le Baptiste

I have recently started expiring a lot. You can read about my progress in a separate blog, entitled The Many Deaths of John Le Baptiste.

The Football Factory

What kind of backward imbecile would watch the Football Factory of their own free will? Not this kind of backward imbecile, that’s for sure. Here is my review:

Hooliganism was invented in 1872 by Mother O’ Hooligan, a stout, bellicose and matriarchal denizen of Cork, Ireland. Her brood was numerous and consisted solely of thick-boned, pudding-bummed bruisers, whose copious reserves of punchsome gusto were inversely proportional to their sense of civic responsibility. “Why, Mother O’ Hooligan”, the priest would exclaim, “I’ll wager those boys are a handful even for your gargantuan, shovel-like hands”. “Aye”, she replied, “but what am I to do”? However, that very night Mother O’ Hooligan was struck by a fresh, sugary pump of inspiration. “That’s it!” she cried, “I’ll channel the destructive energies of my fat, rowdy sons into a form of noisy football-oriented enthusiasm and have them engage in hot frothy battle with other gangs of fat, rowdy boys who happen to support different football teams, so as to render them tired and pliable by the time they come home for tea.” And lo, football hooliganism was born.

In essence, this film features underpaid, ill-trained thespians affecting to be “shit brickhouses” and “hard wingnuts” with the intention of producing a sublimated erotic thrill in the brains of the unprepossessing subnormals who actually watch these sorts of films. This, at least, is what it says on the blurb. Let’s have a looksee for ourselves….

Heaven On A Hotplate! Danny Dyer is in this film! The most mysterious, challenging artiste of our – or anyone’s – generation is in this film, this film that I am watching right now, with my own eyes. I retract every particle of the preceding paragraph, especially the bit pertaining to underpaid thespians – I was, transparently, talking shit. Good lord. I feel like Joe Meek must have felt after he didn’t sign the Beatles to his record label and then they went on to become famous, or like the innkeeper must have felt after he turned away Jesus and then the said Son of God went on to sell more records than the Beatles. I hope the readers of the Agoraphobic Reviewer can forgive me for this appalling oversight. Permit me to try to recover what little critical credibility I have left.

This film is not so much a vehicle for Danny Dyer, as Danny Dyer is a vehicle for this film, and indeed for all of our most noble aspirations and divine sentiments. When he curls his face up like a cheesy quaver and squeaks “you done a bloindah, me old san, a facking bloindah”, we feel as if he is talking directly to us and validating each of our existences on an individual basis. It is highly gratifying. When he strips off his velveteen hooligan costume to reveal a specimen of male genitalia that is, like the human to which it is attached, tiny, pink and full of character, we do not feel anything so base and feral as sexual arousal. Rather, we feel what Dante must have felt when he ascended, in living form, to heaven, and viewed the resplendent Beatrice sitting by God’s side: nothing short of all-conquering holy rapture.

Oh, exalted Danny Dyer. Teach me how to fight and love and live like you. Bear me up on your shoulders as if I were a mogwai and you were the main character out of Gremlins whose name I have forgotten. Throw me up into the benign sunlight as if I were your own son. Nurture me and all of humanity at your soul’s teat.

Danny Dyer’s surname reminds us, like a terrifying, Satanic memento mori, that one day he will die. When that day comes, we must all just have to try to cope in our own way.

‘Nerrbits, a story’ by James Cameron, aged 16

Some of you may have read James Cameron’s justifiably concerned response (see Avatar comments below) to the publication of a personal letter that was intended for his eyes only. The AR apologises and lifts his eyebrows up at the centre and depresses them at their ends in a recognisable expression of thoughtful contrition. It is only fair that Cameron be allowed to speak his piece. Accordingly, here is an excerpt from one of his stories about Nerrbits the alien, written when Cameron was a mere 16 years old.

Crepuscular globules swelled from the jungle wall. Alien teeth gnashed in the under-scrub. Were they good alien teeth or bad alien teeth? Nerrbits didn’t know. But one thing was for sure – these aliens didn’t worry themselves about floss. An undue preoccupation with dental hygiene would get you killed on Cameronius Prime. Evolution had weeded out the teeth-pussies.

Sometimes Nerrbits thought back to when he was at school and everyone teased him for liking science and aliens. Butch, Duke and the other Beefy Boys had mocked him, saying “When are you gonna get laid Nerrbits?” or “One day you’re gonna jack your joystick right off Nerrbits, sitting around in that room all day”. How they laughed. Little did they know that one day they would all die in a horrible biochemical attack that would make them grow horribly fat and bald just before they died, horribly. Nerrbits of course survived the attack and went on to become a sensitive lover, a film director and an explorer of alien worlds. But he had known this since early infancy, following a visit from an oracular bluebird who landed on his crib and foretold all of the great things that would happen to him.

Nerrbits hunched down on his haunches and pulled a cyber-whip from his side-pouch. He triangulated his position to the nearest milli-quim and shot a fiery flare into the intense skies of Cameronius Prime. Just as he had hoped, a dick-weasel sprang from the shrubbery flashing its fleshy fangs. Nerrbits seized it by its red shiny head and grasped at its trunk with his limber legs. They fell grappling and grunting into the mildewed leaves when all of a sudden Nerrbits realised his mistake. This wasn’t just any dick-weasel – it was a female dick-weasel. This was going to be a night to remember.

Avatar (spoiler alert)

There I was, eagerly awaiting the postman, that evergreen Father Christmas, with his daily yield of treats from Amazon (not the website, the river – I’ve recently developed an interest in silt and ox-bow lakes). Any minute now, thought I, a parcel swollen with sediment samples and crocodiles’ fingernails will poke its eager head through the letterbox and into my welcoming arms. Verily, the samples and fingernails arrived, but an unexpected boon accompanied them: a letter designated for James Cameron. This was highly peculiar, as my (real) name shares no letters with his, and I live in the North of England whereas Cameron lives in Hollywood, Los Angeles, which is quite a way off from the land of deep-fried Mars Bars and whippet-grooming tournaments that I call my native province. Naturally I ripped open the envelope and read its contents. It appeared to be from Cameron’s father, Bill, and it detailed his thoughts on the upcoming science-fiction film, Avatar. I am sure that no one, least of all Bill or James, would object to me reproducing the letter in its entirety. Here you go then:

Dear Son,

You done good Jimmy, real good. You done a great little movie here. Your ma and I are real proud of you Jimmy. Real proud. I still don’t know how movies work even though you explained it to me already. I mean, how can there be blue people flying through the air on the screen when I’ve never seen it happen myself, not even in ’Nam? I saw a lot of bad stuff there Jimmy. Like that time when Rooker got elephantiasis of the balls in that brothel after that hooker gave him a rubber caked in evil Vietcong beeswax and his balls fell clean off and rolled under the pool table and the dog ate one of them and Rooker tried to kill himself but he only shot off one of his ears then Gomer said he’d got one ear to match his one remaining ball and everyone laughed even Rooker until he tried to shoot himself again. We saw some crazy stuff over there Jimmy. You should make it into a movie some time Jimmy. Jimmy. Jimmy son.

Seriously Jimmy, we never thought you’d grow up normal. You used to sit in your room drawing pictures of that alien you used to call Nerrbits. Old Nerrbits. Remember him Jimmy? All the boys at the club had normal sons who wore jockstraps and shouted ‘Beer-Bus!’ even when there weren’t any beer-buses around. But you sat in your room with Nerrbits.

Anyway Jimmy. This continuous prose business is for white-collar assholes. So here’s my thoughts on the film in bullet point form:

Worthington – great guy. Good glutes, solid guns. (He is based on me, isn’t he?)

Story – I got confused Jimmy. What happened?

Dialogue – I liked it when Worthington said ‘Ahhrrrerrrgh’ and pushed that girder off his stomach. Good dialogue.

Special effects – Real special Jimmy. You’re a special kid.

Credits – Why couldn’t your name be bigger on the credits? And why was it so fast. Old Cody Wilkinson said it went so quick he’s not even sure your name was on there. What an asshole.

Popcorn – Real delicious. How do you movie guys make it so delicious. Except for that Speilberg guy. His popcorn is WEAK and CHEWY. I went to see E. T. and I couldn’t even finish the popcorn. He shouldn’t be allowed to make films.

Well that’s all Jimmy. You done good son.

Love,

Dad