Long-dormant evidence finally revealed! The truth behind the shocking present state of serious film criticism!
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Ah, my wife says hi at last. I do hope nobody accidently throws gin and lemon all over your laptop and you can’t contribute anymore; that would be awful.
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I had to watch a double header of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 last night! I didn’t fall asleep although I did a couple of head bobs on the the second film. The most remarkable thing of all though was that I didn’t know I was going to be watching the second film until the first one had finished. A little voice in the corner of the room said “shall we put the second one on”. I made a couple of animal like noises and then agreed. They are quite short though and my pain only lasted just over 3 hours.
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L.C, you look great!..looks like you’ve gained a few “pounds” post-Brexit.
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I’ve lost weight over the last couple of years. The podgy 16st7lb I’ve been struggling with for almost a decade ballooned to 17st7lb on two separate occasions. Then throughout 2015 my weight started dropping off without my trying all that hard; well, no harder than I’d been doing for years with no joy. Last December at 15st7lb I decided to see the doc, who told me I had Type 2 Diabetes. Weight was down to 14st.7lb by February and I was feeling slightly concerned, but thankfully it levelled out and ever since I’ve been bouncing between 15st and 15st7lb.
That pic is a combination of a fucking horrible angle PLUS the sad truth that, when I gain weight, it’s only ever on the belly, but when I LOSE weight, it comes off my my arms, legs, organs, genitals etc. but NEVER my belly. To steal a line from Red Dwarf, I look like a frog that’s being held by its head. Eventually I’ll just turn into Mike from Monsters, Inc. 
Fall asleep?! I’m surprised the mindbending horror of such an ordeal didn’t cause you to snap and indiscriminately attack everyone present, 28 Days Later-style. I would tolerate sitting through a dreadful film if my wife wanted to watch one of her chick-flicks, or if we were at somebody else’s house and entirely at the mercy of our hosts. It’s only polite, isn’t it? But two bumshit movies back-to-back? Eff that! I’d go full Weapon X, right in the middle of the room. My house, friend’s house, complete stranger’s house… intolerably cockwank movies KILL BRAIN CELLS at exactly the same rate as a confused, disoriented and agitated lion who’s warmly bitten into your skull like a scotch egg because you woke him up with a robust kick to the lion danglies. And that’s a medical FACT, right there.
First thing tomorrow, go to the people who put you through two f*cking Big Fat Greek Pile of Auld Twatspasm pics, look them bang in the eye and say simply, “That will never happen again. Do you understand me? You will never do that again,” with a look in your eye like you’re struggling to maintain control. Then glare right into their eyes for approx. twenty endless seconds, in total and horrifying silence (other than the sound of your teeth grinding), before turning on your heel and striding away, rapidly clenching/unclenching your fists as you go, as though it’s involuntary. 
DAY 11: I COULD QUOTE EVERY LINE
What better cinematic entertainment could there be on a sweltering, dozy, after-roast Sunday than something as easily familiar as a fluffy bath-robe, or your comfiest moccasins, or the ageing whore you’ve been visiting ever since you first flung your yoghurt? A movie you know backwards and forwards stops being a movie after awhile and starts to become something approaching an old friend. We’ve all got at least a small handful of movies which we’ve placed in this esteemed category, and the one I’m selecting today is Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Gilliam/Jones, 1975).There isn’t a line, a look, a mannerism or an act of utter silliness left in this film which hasn’t at one time or another been my favourite part of the movie (presently, my favourite line comes from Connie Booth as she protests, “I’m not a witch, I’m NOT a witch!”, moments before falling foul of the irrefutable wooden duck weight comparison test. Gets them every time).
We’ve already taken the dice throw and I won, but for the record The valiant Ser Monty Python dismembered my wife’s champion, the Good Lady Pretty Woman (Marshall, 1990) and my son’s champion, the Dark Lord Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner, 1980). Ni!
DAY 12: HAVEN’T SEEN IT YET, THINK I’M GOING TO HATE IT
Well, it’s Monday which means it’s one of the “bad” categories (it IS a challenge, after all!). The pick for today needn’t be a new movie by any means, the criteria is merely that it be a movie you’ve never seen which you doubt you’re going to enjoy (I guess it would also help if your pick was a film to which you had access!). The last time I did one of these movie challenges I picked Mamma Mia! (Lloyd, 2008) for this day and it certainly met my expectations. My pick for today though is Now You See Me 2 (Chu, 2016),the sequel to the cockawful supersmug magic-'em-up Now You See Me (Leterrier, 2013), a movie so pleased with itself it would eat itself if it could, populated with the most unlikeable ensemble of smarmy grinning bumwits since… well, Mamma Mia!, I suppose.
My wife is hoping I win this one today because she really rather enjoyed the first picture. Similarly, I’m really hoping SHE wins, although I’ve stacked the deck slightly and doubled the chances of getting her pick watched, because her pick for Haven’t Seen it, Think I’m Going to HATE It Day - The Neon Demon (Refn, 2016) - is also MY pick for tomorrow’s Haven’t Seen it, Think I’m Going to LOVE It Day. My son has picked Twilight (Hardwicke, 2008) today, a movie I was hoping to swerve forever. If the wife does win, we obviously won’t be able to sit and watch The Neon Demon as a family so we’ve agreed that, whenever that possibility arises, we’ll all watch my son’s pick together that day no matter what, and the wife and I will then watch the winning movie ourselves later. So the deck’s also stacked in favour of poxy Twilight today, too! Bloody f*ckbums!
EDIT The wife won today so The Neon Demon it is, later tonight. However, no one had the stomach for Twilight and it turns out my son liked Now You See Me as well, so they’re watching NYSM2 while I see how quickly I can be bored to sleep. Good-night!
DAY 13: HAVEN’T SEEN IT YET, THINK I’M GOING TO LOVE IT
My pick for today was going to be The Neon Demon (Refn, 2016) but it was also my wife’s winning pick for yesterday’s Haven’t Seen it, Think I’m Going to HATE It Day, so we watched it last night, and she hated it, and I loved it; well, maybe not loved it - not yet - but it was incredibly arresting, visually, with a better story than I’d been led to believe. I’ll be watching it again in the coming days, for sure.
So my new pick for today is going to be Free State of Jones (Ross, 2016), a US Civil War pic starring Matthew McConaughey and based loosely on the true story of Southern Unionist Newton Knight. It’s not been the best-reviewed movie on earth but it sounds like something I’d like nonetheless. Are US Civil War films also Westerns? Hm.
Up against Free State of Jones in the dice throw today goes Bridge of Spies (Spielberg, 2015) courtesy of my wife and Finding Dory (Stanton, 2016) from my boy.
EDIT Bridge of Spies won the throw. Ah well, I don’t mind having a look at that one either.
“That bear, I think, that day, decided that he had either had enough of Tim Treadwell or that something clicked in that bear’s head that he thought ‘Hey, you know, he might be good to eat.’”
DAY 14: FAVOURITE DOCUMENTARY
One of my favourite documentarians of all time - hell, one of my favourite filmmakers of all time - is Werner Herzog. From the hypnotic Fata Morgana (1972) to the grim inevitability of Into the Abyss (2011), every one of Werner’s docs which I’ve seen are fascinating (and I’ve only seen about a dozen I think, so I’ve still plenty of treasures to find). My favourite by far however - and my pick for today - is Grizzly Man (2005), the tale of the well-meaning but deluded self-styled bear conservationist Timothy Treadwell, who spent 13 Summers filming and anthropomorphizing the grizzly bears at the Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, right up until one of the bears killed and ate him, and his girlfriend. It’s a sobering look at an already fairly broken man unwittingly thumbing his nose at nature.
The chances of a win for Grizzly Man is doubled today since my son has picked the same movie. My wife has gone for a television documentary double-bill rather than a movie but I think it all counts: If she wins, we’ll be going with The Most Hated Family in America (O’Connor, 2007) and America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis (Cooper, 2011), Louis Theroux’s two documentaries for the BBC in which he spent time amongst the Phelps family, who form almost the entire congregation of the Westboro Baptist Church. Those are excellent docs too, so it’s pretty much win/win today.
EDIT And the wife wins again. Three on the trot! I’m sacking my boy from dice-throwing duties. His bad-luck mojo (he’s only won once in fourteen throws) is rubbing off on me now!
DAY 15: FAVOURITE SEQUEL/PREQUEL
Very simple today, your nomination has to be a sequel or a prequel to some other movie (NOT a reboot, we’ve already had that day). After much wringing of hands, gnashing of teeth and changing of mind, I’ve landed on Magnum Force (Post, 1973), the fantastic first sequel to Don Siegel’s ultra-violent (at the time) Dirty Harry (1971), starring Clint Eastwood of course as the cynical and taciturn “Dirty” Harry Callahan, this time facing a quartet of sharpshooting rookie cop vigilantes.With a screenplay by John Milius and Michael Cimino, Magnum Force is credited as having been directed by Ted Post (who also directed Eastwood in the frustratingly pedestrian 1968 shooty beauty Hang 'em High), but in the intervening years Eastwood has stated that, because of creative differences, the majority of the directing duties were actually undertaken by himself and by 2nd Unit Director Buddy Van Horn. With that much pissing about you’d expect the result to be a bit of a shambles but, for me at least, Magnum Force is the best Dirty Harry picture, just narrowly from Dirty Harry itself and from second sequel The Enforcer (Fargo, 1976). Cracking score from Lalo Schifrin too, but that’s to be expected.
Up against Harry and his Smith & Wesson Model 29 today go The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008) courtesy of my wife and, bewilderingly, The Matrix Reloaded (Wachowskis, 2003) from my son.
EDIT Wow, my son finally won another one! And of course, it’s on a day when he’s got the shittiest pick.
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Could be a good idea to rewatch all the Dirty Harries.
I always thought the third was a bit better (shorter, faster and funnier) than the second, which was of course a lot better than the way-ovelong-not-so-funny fourth and the almost cartoonish, but quite enjoyable fifth.
But who knows they all look different now
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A good idea indeed. Sudden Impact (Eastwood, 1983) and The Dead Pool (Van Horn, 1988) aren’t in the same league as the first three in my humble opinion but they’re enjoyable enough entries and they certainly have their moments (“Go ahead… make my day”, the radio-controlled toy car). Maybe I’ll do all five as some sort of all-nighter.
Except for the Don Siegel original they are all more or less forgettable. Magnum Force surprisingly too.
DAY 16: FAVOURITE DIRECTOR
I thought this was a simple one. I stuck down my nomination, the guy I’ve considered my favourite director for the better part of twenty years, and then I had a quick look through my films for little other reason than to confirm that no, there was nobody else at the races today.
But it turned out there were lots.
Alejandro González Iñárritu, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Zack Snyder (Yeah, that’s right, I said it. Come at me, bro!), Ridley Scott, Clint Eastwood, Ti West, Sergio Corbucci, Akira Kurosawa, Christopher Nolan, Guillermo del Toro, John Carpenter, Steven Spielberg, Chan-wook Park, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Rodriguez, Kon Satoshi, the Coen brothers, Jee-woon Kim, Darren Aronofsky, Gore Verbinski, Sergio Leone, Russ Meyer, the Wachowskis, Eduardo Sánchez, David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, the Russo brothers, Matt Reeves, Jamie Gunn, Adam Wingard, Nicolas Winding Refn, David Ayer, Werner Herzog… be they directors who have only made a couple of crackers, or directors from whom I’ve liked everything I’ve seen, or directors with a wide body of work of which I’ve appreciated a significant enough amount, there was actually plenty to consider here; not least of which was my own changing interests over the years, as well as the progression of my nomination-elect’s career. Is he still my favourite?
Well, after much hemming and hawing, I decided that I would, after all, stick with my original nomination, although in the end it needed to be a far more considered choice than I’d assumed it would be: My favourite director is still Quentin Tarantino, and the movie I’m nominating to represent him will be my favourite by him: Pulp Fiction (1994), although I still don’t quite think it’s okay yet to show it to my son. I’m not sure he’s prepared yet for a discussion about whether giving a foot massage or “sticking your tongue in the holiest o’ holies” is basically the same thing when applying the practices to an associate’s wife, or about which melee weapon will most effectively bring an unscheduled halt to an extended bout of male rape. I’m keen for him to see any movie of that quality but… no, not yet. Another couple of years, maybe.
So, up against John, Samuel, Bruce and the gang in the dice throw today go Neill Blomkamp (represented by 2013’s Elysium) courtesy of my son, and… oh, for f#ck’s sake…Nick Cassavetes and My Sister’s f#cking Keeper (2009) courtesy of my wife. Please God, no!
EDIT My boy won again today but he’s out tonight, staying over with friends. So we’ll watch Elysium tomorrow. Tonight, I think I’ll watch a Quentin Tarantino movie…
None of the sequels is really memorable, true. I think most of them are enjoyable, though.
And Sudden Impact, probably the weakest of them all (don’t know really), gave us the line Go Ahead, make My Day, if I’m not mistaken.
I quite like Magnum Force " a man’s got to know his limitations!".
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OMAR: You got a plan, Waj?
WAJ: Blow something up?
OMAR: What we going to blow up, Waj?
WAJ: Internet? We’ll blow up the internet for brother Fessal. We’re mujahid brother, yeah? Rubber dingy rapids, yeah?
OMAR: No. You’re not mujahid Waj, you’re a f#cking idiot. Do you think a mujahid gives a loony’s broken f#ck about rubber dingy rapids? Do you think he get his Dīn from a book called The Cat That Went to Makkah, a book he can’t even finish because it’s too f#cking advanced for him? I tell you what bro, I’ve got a plan for you: Why don’t you go with psycho Balloo and p!ss-jet Bagheera and go and lose yourself in the forest, right, and you can all sit around the campfire shoving grenades up your cocks and then blow up the internet by jumping out of a tree arse-first onto a laptop!
DAY 17: FAVOURITE COMEDY
I thought today was going to be a relatively tough one, but I landed quite quickly on my nomination for today: Four Lions (Morris, 2010), in which a British Jihadist (Riz Ahmed) is foiled in his attempts to commit terror atrocities at every turn by his incompetent cadre of friends. Hm, put like that it doesn’t sound especially funny at all, but you’d really have to see it.
Up against my Mujahideens causing a scene in the dice throw today go Bridesmaids (Feig, 2011) courtesy of my wife and Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Jones, 1979) from my boy. Muslims vs Jews!.. versus, um, bridesmaids. I’d be fine with any of those, really.
EDIT My boy wins again! Three on the spin! And I haven’t won one in almost a week now. F#ckbums.
Kilgore: Smell that? You smell that?
Lance: What?
Kilgore: Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn’t find one of ‘em, not one stinkin’ dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like… victory.
Someday this war’s gonna end…
DAY 18: FAVOURITE WAR
In this category, my choice is always going to be a toss-up 'twixt two pictures set around the American involvement in the Vietnam war and, since I used one of those films - Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick, 1987) - the last time we did a 30-Day Movie Challenge, I figured this time should be the turn of the other picture: Apocalypse Now* (Coppola, 1979), the epic tale of Captain Willard’s (Martin Sheen) trip up the Nung river with orders to infiltrate a renegade Montegnard battalion and execute their insane leader, Special Forces Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), all of which was loosely adapted not from a Vietnam war story but from a late-19th century novel about a voyage up the Congo river in Africa.
We’ve already thrown the dice today and I won for the first time since last Sunday. And thank God for that, since although my son’s pick - Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998) - is a fine film, my wife’s pick for today was Pearl Harbor (Belial the Deceiver Bay, 2001). The horror… the horror…
*For the record, my Apocalypse Now of choice is the original incarnation, not the Redux version. Anyone who likes Apocalypse Now should see Redux at least once, but IMHO it’s far from essential.
I think the perfect version would be in the middle between the 2. I don’t like some of the new stuff, but some is very good.
Fun is, the Redux version doesn’t fell longer.
Lose the plantation sequence, keep everything else? If that’s along the lines of what you meant, I would agree with that for sure.
Agreed up until that plantation sequence, which for my money brings proceedings screeching to a halt - not in any good way, either - and which tbh almost derails the movie altogether. For me, anyway. Oddly though, it’s not that I’m unappreciative of that scene - like the rest of Redux, it’s all extra meat for the stew - it’s just that the pacing and tone is so far out of whack, even within a movie that dreamlike and hallucinogenic. I think it’s a great “deleted scene”, if that makes sense.