So are Madge and the one-hit-wonder really heading for the divorce courts? If so, will she still be allowed to roam round Africa on adoption safaris…It all seems so wrong, doesn’t it?

Wake me up... (quick!)

So, so wrong...sorry :(

Funny Old World

Original ‘Funny Games’ = genuinely haunting, virtual shot-for-shot remake = “bit pants really.” How did that happen? Same genius director, some powerful performances, but…but…Ohhhh…Losing will to live…

News that Guillermo del Toro is to helm 'The Hobbit' and its as yet untitled sequel makes the heart leap doesn’t it? A little Latin oddball sentiment should shake things up just nicely and with del Toro’s movies never less than visually and emotionally intriguing this is a tale of little folks we just can’t wait to see. Also, is it just me or does anyone else think that del Toro and Peter Jackson were separated at birth?

Well Worth It?

Are we the only ones disturbed – and frankly rather depressed – to see the once mighty Jackie Chan fronting the new Woolworths’ ads? Sure the talent has been massively diluted over recent years in Hollywood knockabout blah-blah like ‘Rush Hour’ and ‘The Tuxedo’, but how badly can the guy need the money/exposure to stoop to starring alongside ropey sub-Henson puppets “Wooly” and “Worth” (Oh yes, that is their names!)? More pressingly just how many pairs of two-quid kid’s jeans do Woolies need to shift to pay his fee?

We say: Bring on a digitally resurrected Bruce Lee waxing lyrical about Netto or Chuck Norris uzi-blasting his way through Robert Dyas on his way to picking up a cut-price twin-cylinder gas BBQ.

Damned if you do...

With US prosecutors pushing to get Wesley Snipes the full-on three years in clink, plus a $5 million fine for tax evasion, the poor guy's gotta be hoping to get Sly on the jury – simply restage ‘Demolition Man’ and the winner gets Sandra Bullock. No, no, wait! Suddenly 36 months in a small room with an inmate called “Tammy” must seem like the right move…

Judge, Dredd & Executioner

News that Sylvester Stallone has become the latest star to sign up for jury duty in Los Angeles brings a smile to the face doesn’t it? With the tagline on ‘Cobra’ memorably running “Crime is the disease. Meet the Cure.” some poor schmuck’s gotta be preying for Kurt Russell to show up and play Cash to Sly’s Tango.

Sharp shootin'

They say, " Jagged shards of popular culture eviscerating the flabby guts of the Internet.",we say, "Go read! We love": http://shrapnel.tumblr.com/

RIP Heston

As Charlton Heston boldly claimed that a potential Al Gore administration could take away his Second Amendment rights "from my cold, dead hands", we can only assume that it’s go-go-Gore time. Still, dubious right-wing tendencies aside, Heston served up a number of memorable movies to be remembered by – ‘El Cid’, ‘Ben-Hur’, ‘Planet of the Apes’, ‘Khartoum’, ‘Soylent Green’ and, my all-time favourite ‘A Touch of Evil’, which, despite the least convincing Mexican impersonation of all time – save Vincent Gallo’s hilarious cross-dressing nun attempt in ‘Confessions of a Trickbaby’- rocks royally. So, Heston we salute you and to your detractors say, “damn you! God damn you all to hell!”

Head on a stick!

Marat's Motor

Time for Bed

Get Ritchie Or Die Tryin'

The news that Madonna's new Africa awareness documentary was directed by her personal gardener should come as no surprise; her husband has been passing his own filmmaking duties off to his arse for years.

Online Stranger-Danger

Moo, motherfucker, moo!

Yes it lacks the incendiary freshness of face that ‘Reservoir Dogs’ brought to the table, the arty temporal shifts of ‘Pulp Fiction’, and certainly the coming of age “grown-up-ness” of ‘Jackie Brown’, but jeez everyone lay off ‘Death Proof’! Let me explain: Hot-pants – car chases – Kurt Russell. Job done. I stand, seemingly, alone in my admiration.

Though I’m sure there’s a joke here somewhere about standing too close to a fire making your “Kurt” Russell, just like the old one about making your “Googy” Withers – I. MUST. RESIST…

Soooo Zeus

Oh Dario, Where Art Thou?

‘Suspiria’ and ‘Inferno’ seem such distant memories now…The wait of more than a quarter-century finally over for the final part of the Mother’s Trilogy and what do we get? ‘Mother of Tears’, a splattery, gore-soaked mess that looks like a parody of one of the less desirable (!) Lucio Fulci flicks. Ropey CGI, amateur prosthetics, ludicrously random methods of murder (and not in a good way…) There’s the odd decent ‘Bus’ moment, but frankly to even use the phrase invented by the inimitable Jacques Tourneur is to crap on the memory of ‘Cat People.’ Oh yes! And Dario’s continuing obsession with filming his daughter, Asia, in varying degrees of undress is frankly getting VERY disturbing – he’s turning into the Woody Allen of giallo. One more thing: Okay, I know no one watches an Argento for the acting, but for the love of gore there must be some half-decent thesps in Italy!

Mock da Rock

"You ain't seen the best of me yet ...Remeber my name - DWAYNE!"

Sure Plays a Mean Banjo

The casting director of new West Virginia-set horror flick 'Shelter' has been fired after putting out a call for extras with facial features that would make them look "inbred." Gov. Joe Manchin released a statement describing the casting call as "offensive." He added (allegedly) “I was looking forward to taking my wife and cousin to the premier as I had a spare ticket…”

Plastic Fantastic...

Website of the week.

For pure clarity of purpose my first in this semi-regular series of recommendations (weekly would seem appropriate given my subject title, me thinks) has to be…

http://www.howtoopenacoconut.com/

In case you tread water in the shallow end of the gene pool and still aint sparking to what this might be all about, the page header clarifies thus: “Learn how to open a coconut step by step with pictures!” Could just as well be called www.twatitwithahammer.com and I’m loving it.

Absinthe of Malice

So Marilyn Manson’s own-brand Absinthe – called with gut-busting hilarity “Mansinthe” – has been dogged by critics, one describing it in Wildean flourish as tasting like “…sewage, swamp mud and rubbing alcohol.” Try googling the brand and you even get re-directed to Googles Badware advisory page which warns: “Google has found that some portion of www.mansinthe.com/ contains or links to badware or otherwise violates Google's software guidelines.” How rock-n-roll is that!!

Of course Manson’s real name is Brian Hugh Warner, so perhaps he should have spent his time developing “Brodka” or low-alcohol “Warger”… Clown-faced twat! (Actually that’s quite a good brand name; might even make its way into everyday argot, as in “I’m off down the ‘Slug and Chav’ to get Clown-faced…”)

Raging Bullshite

Now that Spielberg has withdrawn his creative input from the Beijing Olympics over the Chinese regime’s Sudan stance (screw Tibet, Darfur is soooo now), my mischief-gland tempts me to suggest Eli Roth as a replacement. Any Olympic opening ceremony in the styleeee of ‘Hostel’ would make my 2k8.

Actually: no. That’s way, way too kitsch and more importantly would make that purveyor of turd-rate torture porn think he was in some way culturally significant. He’s not. Instead I’m thinking lets roll out the big guns and get Scorsese on the case – I’m certain he can stand up to Mia Farrow and if not he can send round Joe Pesci to scare the living snot out of her (“I'm the Oklahoma kid. You fuckin' varmint. Dance. Dance!”) This way we get an opening ceremony based on ‘Gangs of New York’ with the Five Points lovingly recreated in bamboo where The Dead Rabbits, The Bowery Boys and the Know Nothings slug it out with various Snakehead gangs whilst diminutive Bulgarian gymnasts re-enact the final act of ‘New York, New York.’ Don’t know about you, but I’m getting’ myself a ticket RIGHT NOW…

Forth Blood

“At last,” I hear no one cry, “'Rambo IV' is upon us!” Though to be pedantic for a moment isn’t this technically ‘Rambo 3’, as the first one was called ‘First Blood’ and the second one, rather than go for the obvious ‘Second Blood’, was called ‘Rambo’ (or to be totally accurate – and dull – ‘Rambo: First Blood Part II’)? Or something? In all likelihood they will now retrospectively “fix” this linguistic-lineage problem by renaming the first one ‘Rambo Part I, First Blood’), which I’m sure will help both Harold Pinter and Jonathan Miller sleep better – not together you understand, I’m not suggesting anything untoward, please don’t sue polymaths! I digress…

I hate, really disproportionately, irrationally (?!) hate this fad for messing with old film titles. ‘Star Wars’ is ‘Star Wars’ okay! NOT ‘Star Wars, Episode IV, A New Hope’, for the love of Luke!… ‘Episode IV’ tagged on I can almost take, ‘cos I understand that chronology can be tricky for today’s kids, right? But ‘A New Hope’ I. DO. NOT. THINK. SO. Lucas you twat. The bearded one is also responsible for the utterly clumsy ‘Indian Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark’. Stop messing with my childhood or I’m gonna come up to Skywalker Ranch and smack your head up with a Swing Ball ™. Again, I digress…

I had intended to rant about how shite “Rambo 4” was likely to be, but I’ve just heard it described as “Morally repugnant on a staggering level…” and I don’t think I can be arsed to top that. ‘Rocky Balboa’, I feel obliged to confess, turned out rather well though, despite the crushing darkness that came over me when I discovered that the robot butler from ‘Rocky V’ wasn’t going to be in it.

Say 'Hello' to his little friend...

Renown director Brian De Palma’s first foray into the potentially lucrative celebrity fragrance market – the release of his signature Homage for Men – has been met with a mixed response. Whilst ‘Vanity Fair’ conceded the scent “…Successfully combines notes of pink grapefruit, green apple, freesia, rose, pink lotus; with an after hint of cedar-wood, and musk”, trade magazine “The Perfumier” was harsher with its evaluation, stating simply that De Palmer had merely succeeded in “producing a limp imitation of Hitchcock’s classic 1960’s aftershave, McGuffin.”

We say: “Next time you’re Dressed to Kill Homage is well worth the Blow Out for that quick dab on The Untouchables.”

I now pronounce you Coleman and Wife

So that’s what Willis was talkin’ ‘bout – Gary has made an honest woman of lucky old Shannon Price, 18 years his junior but 18 inches taller. Wed on a mountain top in a private ceremony (was he expecting the paps up in helicopters?) Coleman reportedly stood proudly on top of the dizzying heights of the third tier of his own wedding cake to save on catering costs…

RIP Roy

Just the other day I caught a late-nighter of ‘Jaws 2’ and thought “Jeez – now this is a truly shite sequel” (witness all subsequent Jaws sequels to be fair though.), but boy does Scheider rock; ‘Marathon Man’, ‘Klute’, ‘Jaws’, ‘All That Jazz’, ‘French Connection’ (so good they named a clothing chain after it!) all kick ass – hell I’ll even throw in ‘Blue Thunder’, ’Naked Lunch’ and the oddly underrated ‘Cohen and Tate’. We can skip lightly over ‘SeaQuest DSV’ as that at least made people rush out and buy old Amiga computers to replicate that cool Light-Wave animation style (see also ‘Babylon 5’.) Schneidmeister we salute you…

Pork Fiction - One for the veggies

Sorry Mrs B. :(

Keepy Uppy

KPow

Pulped Friction

"Somewhere beyond the Sea-berg...."

Juno what I mean? Innit...

So Juno rocks – how this managed to avoid soppy, cliché sentimentality I still don’t know. What weird spells employed? What sorcery was this? A film like this ought to have my cynicism gland oozing puss from my ears and crying tears of hatred…but no. I…liked…it. Actually (say it quietly) loved it. And it certainly wasn’t the venue – any film that can ‘play well’ in the wind-swept industrial wasteland of the Oxford-ring-road-to-hell (special guest appearance: Oxford FC’s Kazam Stadium, an slap in the face to even the most foaming at the chops fascist architect) must be doing something right. The ‘magic’ of a full-on night-out cinema experience was naturally raised to new heights both by the reel changes - clearly being undertaken by a one-armed epileptic wearing an oven mitt – and by the woman seated by my side (not Mrs B) whose cinematic tourettes disorder included the impulse to ‘conduct’ the Fox Searchlight fanfare at the start of the film. This, this! is why home cinema is the only way forward. In fact if home cinema was really trying hard to recreate the genuine article then the left-hand satellite speaker would generate a noise approximating the crunching of a nacho over your shoulder.

Hmmm yes back to Juno – it rocks! Great performances – though, as good as she is, Ellen Page stands as much chance of winning the Oscar as the tourettes-fanfare-woman from the cinema – fantastic script (again, no hope for an Oscar though, my money is on The Savagaes), catchy little soundtrack, blah, blah. Go see, just not at the Vue cinema in the arse-end of Oxford….

Together again! Bogart and Baaaaacall.

And they say you shouldn't mess with a classic! 'They' say way too much, me thinks...

meep meep

Good Knight and so long...

What a waste. A fine actor, a father, and a friend to many. The new media scramble to break details of Heath Ledger’s death first seem to have left the facts, details and truth in their digital dust. When I met him he was quiet, self-effacing and generous of spirit almost to the point of shyness. A good guy.

On a far, far lighter note – I get to whinge about TW again. My opinion of episode 1 vindicated by the utter shoddiness of episode 2 which was derivative to the point of legal action, had a plot so full of holes you have to suspect it was cobbled together with crochet hooks rather than Final Draft, and featured an all time low performance from wooden-top Barrowman. Note to top-secret operatives: If you show an alien around your top secret-base they will, absolutely will, then know all about where you work and what you do (is this only obvious to me.) To add insult to injury I had to miss Reaper because Mrs B wanted to give this pile of steaming slop “one more go.” Make me watch it again next week, I dare you! Grrrrr.

Or, Gregory Hines stars in the Prescotton Club...

Go home and get your fucking shine box.

Terry you old devil!

Erm... kinda icky in a "Harold and Maude" sorta way. No, no, not 'kinda icky'; wrong, just very,very wrong. Sorry.

TW still sucks

Well, nope, they couldn't (or didn't) fix it. TW still sucked large. Dull. Dull. Single-entendres that would make Sid James blush, Cardiff locations where the highlights were a container port and a multistory carpark, a few lame jokes and a stab at 'cool' by upping the number of American accents.

Makes 'Bugs' (come on you remember it) look like 'The X-Files'. Give it up Beeb, let its twitching corpse come to rest and rot - oh it already kinda has. Grrrr.

Not the bees,not the bees.

Show me Nick Cage and a hive of mad-as-hell bees and I'll be a happy man. Stop acting Cage, stop it, give it up or it's the mad bees for you.

Big it 'aint.

A little reseach reveals that Judge Reinhold actually looks like this now.

Tom licks the lid of life.

Handmade remade

This poster actually scares me - am I frightened of nuns or buns? Or buns in habits? Yeh, yeh, it's the last one for sure...

Monkey magic wawawawawa!

Bulletproof Monkhouse - gotta be better than the real thang...

I'd pay to see this (but not much)

She shoots, she scores

Hanks a bunch...

It's all Ian's fault that I got into this whole game of changing one letter of a film title and then dicking with the poster now I can't stop.

But have they fixed it?

So Torchwood's back - my inner geek needs to know if they fixed all the things that were wrong with the last series (they were legion), OK I'll give it a go, but this needs to be good 'cos life's too short for spin-offs that suck. I'm counting down.