alexsarll: (howl)
[personal profile] alexsarll
Couple of BBC radio shows of possible interest: a documentary on Banshees and Magazine guitarist John McGeogh, with contributors including Howard Devoto and, as of tomorrow, one about the mighty HBO, with Stroud Green Road habitue Aidan Gillen taking part. I should also have mentioned the Paul Morley programme about celebrity culture, but forgot after the first part, and the second wasn't nearly as interesting.

It's worth seeing Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum in David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow simply because it's a script that gives two great character actors a lot of opportunities to have a whale of a time shouting good lines at each other. But that's not necessarily to say it's a good play. Mamet is much better at writing men with men than women, so in the second act, when it's Goldblum and Laura Michelle Kelly, everything sags rather. I don't know her - apparently she's mostly done musicals - and I wouldn't say she's a bad actress, but she doesn't grab the attention like Spacey and Goldblum do - though with the material Mamet gives her, can she really be held to blame? If you want to consider this play as a story, not a vehicle, I think it's fundamentally flawed.
Summary of plot:
Spacey wants Goldblum to make a prison blockbuster starring a hot property actor. But should Goldblum instead make a film of apocalyptic Great American Novel The Bridge?
Flaws in plot:
- The Bridge is rubbish. We hear plenty of excerpts, and I'm not sure whether Mamet has deliberately written it as a parody of the sort of impenetrable toss which a certain type of critic loves, but that's what it is.
- Apparently the problem with filming The Bridge is that it's about the end of the world, and Hollywood doesn't like films about the end of the world. Is this play set in some bizarre parallel universe, or just incredibly dated? If the latter, what period would that be? Because I am hard pressed to think of any long period without a big doomsday film. If anything, The Bridge sounds like a rubbish version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the big-budget film of which is already in development.
- Goldblum has just been promoted - he's about to make his first film as co-producer. At no stage does anyone suggest hey, let's do the prison blockbuster and *then* make The Bridge! Even though the blockbuster already has a script, while The Bridge would need rights bought, an adaptation commissioned...a delay, in other words, during which Goldblum can easily cement his position with the more commercial film.
Nonsense, in other words, but entertaining nonsense. Much like the power ballads night I attended afterwards at the new Monarch, which used to be the Misty Moon and before that the Chalk Farm Road Wetherspoon's, and as such shouldn't work at all as a venue, but sort of does.

I can't imagine why Woolworths could ever find its market position threatened when it's selling such well-conceived items as the Lolita bed for young girls. Which reminds me rather of Alan Moore's comment re: Lost Girls that "It's a stick and a carrot combined, that for the purposes of commerce it can flood your mind with the most licentious ideas and imagery but woe betide anybody who actually finds themselves in this inflamed state and responds. Because then they are a dirty, filthy person who responds to p0rnography", and makes me want to write something about Lost Girls, which I started reading during its abortive serialisation 13 years ago and eventually got to finish a couple of weeks back, on what happened to be the night before the More4 broadcast of Chris Langham's apologia. The problem is, I'd still feel fundamentally uneasy because I would be blogging about p0rn, an unease only emphasised by how many words I'd have to deliberately mis-spell to avoid blocking the friendslist of those people who read LJ in monitored workplaces. We're none of us quite free, are we?

Date: 2008-02-04 07:44 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] pippaalice.livejournal.com
Aidan Gillen lives on SGR? Cor!

Date: 2008-02-04 07:48 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] barrysarll.livejournal.com
We have no evidence for that, but [livejournal.com profile] moleintheground saw him cycling down it once.

Speaking of the gays (and by that I mean AG in QAF, not Ed. Honest): Ianto's predecessor on the door of Torchwood during the Second World War was called Rhydian.

Date: 2008-02-04 07:54 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dickon-edwards.livejournal.com
I took great pride in finding out that my own blog is filed under one LJ user's F-list group as 'Safe For Work'. What with that and the knowledge that my mother reads it, it helps me write better and more honestly, rather than feeling the need for censorship.

Surely you can review Lost Girls using creative euphemisms?

I think I've said this before, but once you have to second-guess the word-sensitive filters of readers in workplaces, I feel you may as well not write anything at all. I mean, some filters treat my own first name as naughty. Along with anything by Dickens.

Date: 2008-02-04 07:59 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] barrysarll.livejournal.com
I think when the author is going into considerable detail about precisely why the work should be classed as [name of genre which itself trips the filters], one has to admit defeat. With the Black Dossier, say, one can note in passing that it has some rather explicit content, but with Lost Girls where there's nothing but, I think at best one would end up writing something horribly coy, like a bad Beardsley pastiche.

Date: 2008-02-04 09:25 pm (UTC)
superba: (ghost)
From: [personal profile] superba
Lost Girls is bloody £37.49 on Play! Omg. Why so expensive?

Date: 2008-02-04 09:34 pm (UTC)
superba: (beautiful killer)
From: [personal profile] superba
...Ahh pardon my ignorance, the "collected" is actually three books? I suppose that explains it. Still, boo at the expense.

Date: 2008-02-05 09:22 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] barrysarll.livejournal.com
It is pretty lavish. In part I think that's to make it look like an old-fashioned children's storybook, which makes sense given the content. Against which potentially risky (if artistically justified) strategy, pricing it as a premium artefact probably reduces the risk of controversy. It's always been fine for the rich to have limited edition filth; it's only once it's accessible to the masses that people start getting worried...

Date: 2008-02-04 09:29 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] miss-mcq.livejournal.com
I've read Lost Girls. I liked Neil Gaiman's comment that the 3 volume graphic novel version can't really be called pornography as it is "too heavy." I suppose the reader could get a lectern though...

Date: 2008-02-05 09:26 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] barrysarll.livejournal.com
Yes, no good for one-handed reading, but that just means the reader might wish to solicit assistance. Or indeed a lectern, which nobody ever said had to be inanimate...

Date: 2008-02-05 10:13 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] miss-mcq.livejournal.com
I'm suprised Lost Girls didn't include someone reading an enormous hardbacked book propped up on a lecturn made from some body part or other...

Date: 2008-02-04 10:39 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com
I reviewed it (http://amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com/93431.html) and nothing particularly bad happened. It turns out that girls like nothing more than the thought of Wendy's brothers wanking each other off.

Date: 2008-02-05 09:27 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] barrysarll.livejournal.com
If only you could set up some sort of twincest exchange scheme, you'd be in clover. If you had a twin.

Date: 2008-02-05 03:43 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] oneofthose.livejournal.com
Laura Michelle Kelly plays the beggar woman in Sweeney Todd. She also made a solo album with contributions from Neil Hannon. But, like everything she does, it was shit.

Date: 2008-02-05 09:28 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] barrysarll.livejournal.com
I just went to see Sweeney and what should the trailers include but Mamma Mia - a rather mistaken assumption that the crowd were there because it's a musical, I think. It looked even worse than I expected, and that's saying something.

Date: 2008-02-05 09:40 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] oneofthose.livejournal.com
*SPOILER WARNING*The change that bugs me the most about the film, even more than Todd not realising it's his child before him in the chair (which in the stage version makes it so much more tormenting) is that the beggar woman is supposed to be a prostitute and offers her former husband (unbeknownst to both) rancid sex for money. It's pretty depressing to think Burton went for the "American audiences wouldn't like that" option.

Her original verse interupts the cry for alms with:

"Ow would you like a little muff, dear
A little jig jig
A little bounce around the bush?
Wouldnt you like to push me parsley?
It looks to me, dear
Like you got plenty there to push"

Nice to see Sondheim researched the correct euphemism for that first three lines. But parsley? Whichever schoolkids he asked were having him on there.

I still like the film though, despite my niggles. It's really thrilling - whereas the stage version is merely comic then sickening.

Mamma Mia. Sigh. Still, the script for We Will Rock You II is, apparently, ready and waiting on Ben Elton's laptop. What a bastard.
Edited Date: 2008-02-05 09:42 pm (UTC)

Date: 2008-02-05 09:49 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] barrysarll.livejournal.com
I'm just looking forward to his commemorative Gawd Bless 'Er masque script for Thatcher's funeral...

There are a lot of Victorian sex euphemisms that have fallen by the wayside - 'Herefordshire' and 'pestle', for instance. Indeed, pestles and pushing parsley would go together quite neatly, no?

Do you know for sure that 'American audiences' was the reason Burton made that change? Because from what you say (I don't know the musical at all), it's not as if he's softened the overall tone in line with that.

Date: 2008-02-05 10:00 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] oneofthose.livejournal.com
No, I'm merely speculating. But it seems the only reason as he kept her song in and just snipped those lines (replacing it with a slightly suggestive touch but nothing more). It is pretty tough to stomach when you think about it: his own wife now a mental fleabag whore, offering him her trade. It's not going to endear the film to an average audience!
And I think not having him realise it's Johanna (despite the fact he was expecting her) is another pulled punch. As if he's said, look he's going to kill his 'lover' and his wife - let's not make it any worse by having him tormented by the fact he denies himself the only oportunity he has to tell his daughter who he is.

He doesn't soften the violence - but I guess American's can do violence. But he does shy away from the sexual elements (even the rape is hidden).
Edited Date: 2008-02-05 10:02 pm (UTC)

Date: 2008-02-05 10:06 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] barrysarll.livejournal.com
It's true, they are much softer on violence - particularly when it's that close to cartoonishness. But - and again, I don't know the original here - from how you describe the original, it sounds more as though Burton's just going for a subtly different sort of horror. The wife barely noticed and then unwittingly slain, as against noticed with repugnance. The daughter never known, as against never told. The nightmarish, almost hallucinatory quality of the rape. I get the impression it may have more to with Burton's own psychological profile, fears and fascinations than the audience's sensibilities.

Date: 2008-02-05 09:11 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] renegadechic.livejournal.com
is the John McGeogh doc very good? i havent heard much of his banshees stuff but i love the first two magazine albums (and the others though he wasnt in the band then)

Date: 2008-02-05 09:33 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] barrysarll.livejournal.com
The main script/narration is a bit naff, tbh - very cliched, and not that insightful. But it's worth a listen for the contributors - Devoto, Formula, Roddy Frame, Johnny Marr...
Also, I imagine for you as a maker of music, some of it would be more rewarding than it was for me - it's a little technical in places, very much about what it was in the playing which made McGeogh, in Roddy Frame's rather wonderful phrase, 'a guitar anti-hero'.

He was on the third Magazine album too! Albeit not their final misfire. The bit which was news to me was his PIL membership, I totally missed that.

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