Go forth

A deliciously creepy animation…

1) Buying a car

A brand new Toyota Yaris will be mine in but a few weeks. Expect news stories of terrorised pedestrians to emanate from across Essex for the next six months. It’s bright red, so I’m a little worried I’ll get it confused with my boss’s Ferrari.

Ahhh, red…cheapest of all the colours. I can use the saving to pay for approximately two teaspoonfuls of petrol at current prices.

2) Camping

With old friends in a small field in the Kentish townstead of Bearsted which, though it is spelt like an ursine’s cuddly toy, is pronounced like a drinks order to a man named Theodore. Too tenuous? Maybe, but I’m in that sort of mood.

Sunny day, rainy night – which was just about perfect really, giving us a whole day for chatting, reclining, frisbeeing and barbecueing followed by the restful patter of rain on ersatz canvas from about one in the morning.

3) Watching films

In Bruges
Brendan Gleason is a world-weary and affable hitman. Ralph Fiennes is a cockney and despicable hitman. Colin Farrell is channelling Dougal from Father Ted, if Dougal were to leave the priesthood and take up swearing, drinking, drugs and hitmanning. Brilliant, brilliant film - you can tell it comes from the pen of someone more used to writing for the stage, but its self-contained nature is all the better for it. Impressive performances from the cast, particularly Farrell who I’m not normally a fan of, and a subtle, cyclical structure.

Very much recommended, plus it makes the city of Bruges look absolutely amazing.

Doomsday
An absolute mess of ideas taken from a whole slew of post-apocalyptic movies - such as Mad Max, Escape From New York, 28 Days Later – and shoehorned into a Scottish setting (but actually filmed for the most part in South Africa). A modern day B-movie which makes no apologies, or indeed realistic justification, for mixing a sexy high-tech soldier with mounted knights and car chases. Fun though, in that same guilty way as eating a whole box of Jaffa Cakes in one sitting, then giving in and opening the second box too.

4) Failing to blog

Whoops. Must do better.

So, watched Cloverfield last night the way I usually watch films: darkened room, cocooned in my bed and the isolation of a good pair of headphones.

It’d be easy to be glib and make cheap analogies - Godzilla in the style of The Blair Witch Project perhaps. But that would be a grave injustice. It’s a genuinely unsettling monster movie filmed Handicam-style from a first person perspective, presented as a real-time documentary of events as they happen; it feels like found footage rather than an orchestrated and directed Hollywood blockbuster. As a stylistic conceit it’s nothing new, but the careful handling of the format is a joy - flashbacks occur because the events being filmed are being recorded over a previously used tape, a perfectly natural way to inject human emotion into what is effectively a disaster film.

And it’s a hell of a disaster. The lo-fi, in-the-thick-of-it style is matched by some of the most impressive special effects I’ve seen, creating a level of reality that, at times, left me rattled. Inspiration (if you can call it that) has come from the citizen journalism and aftermath of 9/11 and other events - streets coated in dust and ash, the human impact and reactions. The internet has become filled with shaky videos of extraordinary and horrific happenings, a phenomenon that Cloverfield taps into. Children of Men’s kinetic camerawork is another touchstone, the dropping of cinematic gloss in favour of raw effect.

I’m gushing like a ten-year-old with a thesaurus, obviously. Cloverfield has really impressed me. I’m not sure if you could even call the film exciting in a conventional way - the level of true tension pushes it out of that realm, and the total lack of any tongue-in-cheekness that you’d typically find in this genre of movie solidifies the realism. It’s certainly not particularly gory either, sidestepping that pitfall in favour of more human but no less visceral fears. I don’t really want to talk about what actually happens in the film - the experience has to be enjoyed in its entirety.

My only worry is the inevitably inferior sequels that it will spawn. There’s no way they’ll be able to maintain the fresh style of the original; that feeling of watching something inherently new and different can’t be replicated. I’d be happy to be proven wrong though.

I have just watched probably one of the stupidest films ever.

Except… let me just stop there, for a quick interjection of honesty. In actuality I haven’t just watched this film. Instead I saw it a couple of nights ago. See how I’m deceiving you and trying to increase the emphasis on stupidity by suggesting that I immediately needed to rush off and blog about it? You’re just absolutely reliant on the honesty of my reporting, aren’t you? I could tell you almost anything and you’d have no idea how true it was. Admittedly, I’d struggle to get away with spinning a tale of a night of passion with Scarlett Johansson (it was actually Angelina Jolie), but for all you know I might be sitting here with my underpants on my head making up every last word as imaginary butterflies spray rainbows through the air.

But despite the temptations, I will try always to be honest, good and truthful, so let’s start again.

Two nights ago, I watched probably one of the stupidest films ever. My grammatically correct heart here wants to write ‘most stupid’, but ’stupidest’ just rings better – you can imagine Elmer Fudd expelling a shower of saliva as he says it.

The title of this film is Shoot ‘Em Up, not an auspicious start if you’re looking for something like a searing portrait of working class life set against the background of the miners’ strikes. But I wasn’t looking for that, because it would be tremendously dull.

It is effectively 83 minutes of the most ridiculously unlikely rolling gun battles and violence with nary a pause for breath. In a bold move, the director has chosen to use the money that would usually be wasted on things like screenwriters and plots to buy in a lorryload of blank bullets and an army of extras whose sole purpose is to die incredibly swiftly. How stupid is it? Well, the lead character, played by Clive Owen, kills someone with a carrot. Repeatedly.

Obviously, Shoot ‘Em Up is brilliant. It is the epitome of mindless entertainment, and there are times when that’s all you need. Switch on television, switch off brain, enjoy, pausing only to wipe the little stream of dribble from the corner of your slackly hanging mouth.

I have a certain fondness for that kind of film – it’s the same joyous cavalcade of stunts that you get in practically every Jackie Chan film. Or in Crank for that matter, which is basically Speed but with Jason Statham playing the bus – if his heart-rate goes below a certain level, he dies. (Funnily enough, if my heart-rate goes below a certain level, I die too, but the point is that he’s got to keep his rate very high. It fails to make any more sense in the movie either, so don’t worry.)

So, you should watch Shoot ‘Em Up if you can. You’ll never admit to anyone that you enjoyed it, and those brain cells won’t grow back, but you can have fun telling everyone quite how stupid it is.