'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

Just tried watching Alex Cox's Repo Chick. Now, bearing in mind that I consider an evening watching the Blu-ray extras of Repo Man to be a good evening (especially the Harry Dean Stanton interview)...just no. The idea of using Matchbox cars and model railway sets (plus green screen) in order to do your film on the cheap is quite heroic, but the feeble satire of the Paris Hilton/Kardashian/whoever lead just leaves a void at the heart of it all, and not in a good way.

I've not written anything about films I've seen on here in ages, have I? Some of them don't really need it - it should be easy enough to guess that I've seen Guardians of the Galaxy and loved it, because demographics. Ditto The Lego Movie (genuinely an incredibly smart film as well as a thoroughly fun one - layers within layers, and a desire to interrogate itself of which most 'serious' films can only dream). Then you get stuff like Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, or X-Men: Days of Future Past, where it's worth going to the big screen for the spectacle, even if the film doesn't quite hold together. Or, in the latter case, is about 80% nonsense. As against the first Hunger Games which I saw pretty much by accident, but made a very coherent job of surfing the zeitgeist, at least until the last ten minutes. Oh, and finally got around to Frozen which is...OK? Better songs than Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, but I'd otherwise rank them pretty similarly - passable, but no Pixar. Some cults I can parse; other ones perplex me.

A little less obviously:
Chronicle, Max Landis' found-footage superhero film. Very compelling, if slightly derailed the second you realise one of the newly-empowered teens is clearly a men's rights activist avant la lettre. Also on a skewed superhero tip: The Specials. Rob Lowe, James Gunn, next to no budget, fake documentary style. Flawed, but fascinating. I hope the superhero cinema boom will enable more of these odd little subgenre pieces, rather than swallowing them.
Becket: only the second best film in which Peter O'Toole plays Henry II, but given the other one is The Lion in Winter, that's still no small accolade.
Sightseers: my least favourite Ben Wheatley film. But again, when you consider the competition...
The Philadelphia Story - I saw this on stage years back, with Kevin Spacey and some other people of note, none of whom I can now remember. They were fine, but they weren't Katharine Hepburn, or Jimmy Stewart, let alone Cary Grant. What a cast. What a film.
This Is Tomorrow - Saint Etienne's documentary about the Royal Festival Hall. The most profoundly restful film I've ever seen.
'His Heavy Heart' - the concluding segment, for now, of Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins' short film cycle. Essentially, David Lynch directing Vic & Bob. I hope a DVD release will get the whole project the wider audience it deserves.
Charlie Chaplin's The Circus went round at least twice as a backdrop in a restaurant. I don't really get most of the silent clowns at all, but Chaplin always makes me smile if not laugh, even in such a chopped-about setting.
Tarkovsky's Stalker - so this is the shared source Jeff Vandermeer, M John Harrison and the rest have all been 'homaging' lately. On the other hand, I tend not to struggle to stay awake in their versions, so they certainly bring something to the party.

Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon is perhaps best known as the source of "It's in the trees! It's coming!" on Kate Bush's 'Hounds of Love', but Mark Gatiss' recent history of horror made some mention of it, and got me rather intrigued. And yes, it's very good, a proper old-fashioned frightener like Dead of Night. It's an expansion, adaptation and updating (albeit only to the fifties, when you can smoke in airports and board moving trains and shoot mentals up with speed and not get in trouble when they run out of a window - happy days) of MR James' 'Casting the Runes', and like so many screen takes on his stories, it works a lot better than you might expect. This in spite of the producer overriding the objections of screenwriter, director and star and showing an actual demon, which is clearly a cheap and dated model effect - yet somehow still works.
(As in the James original, the sorcerous villain is named Karswell, which in fifties accents sounds quite like Carsmile, leading one to occasionally wonder what carsmilesteve is up to. This becomes particularly acute at one seeming mention of Carsmile's Demon, which I could only picture as an indie cousin of Maxwell's Demon)

I read a piece in the paper about Patrick Keiller's Robinson films shortly after reading an essay by him which was one of the better contributions to a somewhat disappointing anthology called Restless Cities. The two I watched both consist of Paul Scofield narrating the thoughts and journeys he takes with this Robinson, over (mostly) still camera shots of...nothing in particular. London feels very Saint Etienne - at one stage Robinson wishes, like 'Finisterre', that the 19th century had never happened - but where St Et love London, Robinson is more pessimistic even than his fan Iain Sinclair, thinking of it as "a city full of interesting people, most of whom...would prefer to be elsewhere". "As a city it no longer exists" he claims, in 1992, seeing only the worst in the future. And of course we know that the fears of 1992 were misplaced then, but they seem more applicable now. One can only hope that this is the human tendency to forecast doom again, and that they are once more misplaced*.
Robinson in Space, the sequel, roves further afield, making "a peripatetic study of the problem of England", looking at the out of town shopping centres and the container parks, talking about the present of a country whose past includes the Martian invasion of the late 19th century, Sherlock Holmes and Dracula as surely as it does Thatcher and the dawn of the motorways. The library's DVD seized up at the end, but somehow it didn't much matter.

If you'd told me ten years ago that Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie could make a film together that would look boring, I would not have believed it, yet trailers for The Tourist entice me not at all. And yet, Depp remains a hero.
"I think it was Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time, who was quoted as saying, ‘[Jack Sparrow is] ruining the movie.’ Depp reveals to Smith, however, that he remained unfazed by the studio’s hysteria. “Upper-echelon Disney-ites, going, What’s wrong with him? Is he, you know, like some kind of weird simpleton? Is he drunk? By the way, is he gay?… And so I actually told this woman who was the Disney-ite… ‘But didn’t you know that all my characters are gay?’ Which really made her nervous.”

Bit of a misfire of a weekend, all told. One party I'd intended to rendezvous with relocated, and if ever there was a night when you didn't want your boots to somehow extrude an internal nail, it's got to be one where you're attempting a glam stomp. Which then of course left me unfit for Tubewalking on Sunday. Oh, and These Animal Men's new incarnation is distinctly samey, but that may be because all their effects pedals were snowed in. Still. One goes on.

*Speaking of things misplaced, Michael Bywater's Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost & Where Did it Go? is not the book one might expect. At first it seems a little fogeyish in its laments for Meccano, proper doctors, the rubbishness of modern music - but Bywater knows that for all the arguments he can muster against modern music, they're also a generational obligation, not to be trusted. He knows that the proper doctor may have had a reassuring manner, but that most of the time he couldn't do much to stop you being ill. He knows, in short, that the past was often not all it's now cracked up to be. Many of the entries have a sting in the tail, as when he moans about how everywhere in Europe smells the same nowadays - but then twists and says how much better that is than the smell of fire and burning flesh 60 years ago. And he writes beautifully: "The gifts of life do not turn to dust, nor does loss cast a shadow. Loss sheds its light on what remains, and in that light all that we have and all that we have had glows more brightly still."

Here's a bit of a join-the-dots: sadly I can't make it myself, but on Saturday, Stewart Lee is reading from one of the founding texts of psychogeography, Arthur Machen's 'N'. Which is also a very good horror story. The story is about Stoke Newington, and so it's an appropriate part of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival, which also has an appearance by China Mieville. China Mieville was apparently meant to be reviving Swamp Thing, and work on the comic was well advanced, but has now been binned - because rather than a Mature Readers series, DC want Swamp Thing back in their main superhero universe. Even though most of that universe has lately been telling 'mature' stories anyway, in the sense meaning 'immature', all blood and guts and angst. Even though Swamp Thing going Mature Readers was where America discovered Alan Moore, where the groundwork was laid for Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison going over there, where - to simplify ever so slightly - American comics became worth reading. And they're backing away from the chance to do that again (edit: here's more on what we've lost). Which makes me worry that DC is still on the wrong lines. Which is particularly unfortunate given Paul Cornell (a name Doctor Who fans should know) is apparently about to sign an exclusive with them. I already felt some trepidation - his best comics work all having been at Marvel, most notably the cancelled, glorious Captain Britain & MI:13 - but looked forward to what he was going to do with Lex Luthor in Action Comics. Still, I don't want him trapped in a company which makes such reliably bad editorial decisions lately. On the other hand, his most recent output elsewhere was BBC medical horror pilot Pulse, and that wasn't very good. As a massive hypochondriac, I expected it to make difficult viewing - but because I would be getting freaked out, not because I was so bored by the parade of cliches, played mainly by actors you recall being quite good in something a few years back but not having seen much of lately. I don't know, maybe people who like medical drama - and I know there are plenty - will enjoy it more. I did notice that contrary to advance hype, while Cornell scripted, it was based on an idea by someone else. That may explain it.

Wednesday was always going to be interesting; Dickon's new event, Against Nature, at Proud, with The Vichy Government and the Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra on the same bill. Proud's South Gallery turns out to be significantly less vile than the other bit; it could still have done without the staff pointedly rearranging the furniture while Dickon and retro_geek were trying to keep people dancing after the acts, but those who did stay were treated to the unexpected ballroom dance skills of keith_totp. Vichy were distorted to fvck - which is how I like them best - and MFMO were deeply numerous, appropriate given they had two new songs about fleas. Plus, improvisational tales of Empire and derring-do from Jingo & Butterfield, who apparently caused one walk-out, clearly from humourless nitwits. All in all, a good night, which is not something I ever thought I would say about Proud.

A venue I used to love was the Garage, which finally reopened about a year back now, but to which I'd not been until a surprise trip last night. It's disconcertingly clean and shiny now, and has a higher ceiling, but that's probably for the best because it was always a bit of a sweatbox so yesterday could otherwise have been Hellish. I was there to see the Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, always a band where I've quite liked what I heard but failed to investigate further. And after last night, I possibly understand them even less - which is not a bad thing. I had them down as, more or less, the slightly less daft Horrors - but at its finest moments, the gig could almost have passed for the Sisters. The singer reminds me of that kid everyone vaguely knew who wanted to be Dave Wyndorf, and almost made it work. The crowd were a real mix - punks, psychobillies, retro chic kids, and one man who looked like Mugatu from Zoolander modelling his new 'scary clown' look. Also, much more mixed-race than rock crowds tend to be. I enjoyed it, but I still didn't entirely feel it, if that makes sense. The best explanation I can manage is that they sound quite Earthbound, something I've only experienced once before, when seeing of all people Eric Clapton (don't ask). I think all the bands who really sing to me are trying to escape the sublunary sphere - whether through traditional transcendence, the reflection in a nightbus window or just via someone else's pants. And here I don't hear that.

Withnail & I cast, director reunited for self-indulgent but fun radio show in which they talk about the making of the film. Bit of a disconnect for those us who now mainly associate Paul McGann's voice with Doctor Who audios.

The only downside of weeks off is not having 52 of them a year. Have been contentedly moseying around London, reading in parks, being inexplicably good at bowling and watching others prove somewhat disappointing as trappers. Only the North so far - from Golders Green to Barnsbury, but even that has so much in it (Arthur Machen knew that London was a sort of infinity, even if he was hampered by not having the word 'fractal' yet and having to talk around it); I think I'll head West later, that being my terra incognita and my having no plans today past the haircut.
The MP3 player is really coming into its own on these wanderings, too - whether it's Stars on the nightbus, or Beirut and St Etienne in the sun. Not Los Campesinos! so much, though; they were my most-played for a while, but since I got them on the DLR as we emerged from the Bank tunnel and into the sunshine pre-Tubewalk...well, that was just too perfect.

Finally saw Robin Ince last night; I realise I'm a couple of years behind the comedy curve here but he's bloody brilliant. And before the gig, our new leader cycled past the venue. It may have been for the best that none of the acts saw him.

Another day, another attempt to undermine the BBC - this time by claiming that Head of Fiction Jane Tranter is some form of localised Stalin, intent on asserting control over all BBC drama and comedy output. Nobody seems to have noticed the key flaw in this scenario; almost every piece of British TV fiction worth watching comes from the Tranter empire, and it's not as if there's a uniformity among them. A little too much emphasis on 'feelings' and 'human interest' in shows which should be about something more interesting, perhaps, but that's endemic across UK and US TV, so I'm hesitant to blame its expression in BBC programming on one woman.