Peter Sutcliffe is dead which is a good thing, but during all the talk of his and the women he murdered abanned sketch from Brass Eye came to mind. Brass Eye was a TV series produced by Chris Morris and a team of exceptionally talented team of writers and actors for Channel 4 in 1997. It is by far one of the great bits of TV satire/comedy ever produced in the UK, but during the first broadcast it suffered heavily from censorship, especially in Episode 6 which saw whole sketches lost including one about Peter Sutcliffe starring in his own West End musical.
At the time a Jack the Ripper musical was proposed, plus ‘Ripper tours’ of the murder sites were pulling in the money in the East End of London, which back then hadn’t gentrified to the state it has now so it wasn’t ironic hispters being mocked, but working class women. There was also a glamourisation of old gangsters, some of which commited crimes as bad as Sutcliffe. The idea this sketch was supporting Sutcliffe was a joke, but it was one pushed by the usual suspects.
Sacha Baron Cohen has come a long way from being the only actually funny person on Channel 4’s mostly long-forgotten The 11’O Clock Show in the late 1990’s. Here’s one of the better examples of that programme and a reminder why much of it remains forgotten.
Baron Cohen’s skill became to take on the powerful and not just try to get famous people to wonder what was going on, which made Ali G so much fun til that character got out of control, hence why Borat worked so well in the first film as folk in the West didn’t have a clue about Kazakhstan, so a sense of western ignorance mixed with racism meant he could get away with a lot in his uncovering of the darker side of American society and culture. This film isn’t as random as the first film this time choosing to focus on Donald Trump, the hard right Americans who follow him and that entire culture just that this time he brings a trump card as it were.
Maria Bakalova has been unknown to people til now but after this amazing, fearless performance there’s talk of her winning awards, and even though this is a fallow year for film, she should be nominated because I doubt they’ll be anything better in terms of performance this year. With Baron Cohen they make a formidable couple and seeing them take on the bigotry, and lunacy, of the Trump supporting hard right is a joy, and a nightmare as one realises this is real and happening right now in America.
What the film does is dissect modern American life in a way you’ll rarely see in news programming let alone comedy and in doing so lays open the open sores of the USA that won’t just be healed when/if Donald Trump is voted out of office next month. For me this is Baron Cohen’s best work so far as there’s a real purpose mixed with fury at the state of things as democracy itself is threatened in a way we’ve not seen in our lifetimes. If it takes Borat and his daughter to make things better then so be it.
Evil Dead 2 is one of my favourite films. It is an almost perfect sequel but when it came out in cinemas here in the UK it wasn’t anything like the success the first one was which was a shame. The first Evil Dead ran in parts of the UK for years, with it running in Glasgow in various cinemas for five years.
The second one suffered from the wave of censorship still washing over the UK and also I don’t think people outwith of the fans got it, but time has shown it to be a classic. It did however have a great marketing campaign here in the UK with Raimi working his arse off in terms of publicity, and this advert with Jonathan Ross just sums up the campaign well, and sets expectations for what you’re going to see.
The daily UK government Covid briefing is at best, a waste of time, at worst it’s a desperate attempt to spin what is a public health disaster into just another bit of politics which of course, is costing thousands of lives. It isn’t helped by a week and compliant UK media only too glad to massage Tory ministers ego.
Of course we’re now at the point where no real information is being given out, and the day-to-day briefing is something to be mocked which brings me to this great video from comedy duo Larry and Paul which is exactly like every Covid briefing ever…
One of my guity pleasures in the very porny, very gory, very bizarre 1979 film, Caligula.
This was my introduction into the world of Tinto Brass, not to mention seeing actors like John Guilgud who in this film seems to be walking around in a haze counting how large his bank account is going to be once he gets through everything. It is also a mess as producer Bob Guccione rewrote scenes, not to mention inserted hardcore sex scenes filmed on set at night when the actors were away, as he felt it needed more sex to perhaps offset the violence.
Anyhow, the film is a mess but like one of the setpieces, it’s a mess one can’t help but be intrigued by, depending on what version of the film you see as there’s multiple versions depending how how much porn and gore you want. However imagine a line of toys to go along with the film that was made in 1979? Didn’t happen of course but what if it did?
At this time when tens of thousands of us will die thanks to the Coronavirus, we need a laugh so thanks to the bloke walking around Leicester Square in a plague mask looking a bit odd and creepy but in a fun way.
All quiet in London…apart from a man in a plague mask that is.
It is 2020. People are still blaming South Park for all the ills of the Western World. This time instead of the rabidly illiberal censorious right screaming about the show, it’s the rabidly illiberal censorious left in the shape of writer Dana Schwartz.
There’s a series of Tweets, with above being her first, and the next being her last, but she’s ploughing a furrow dug often since the programme started in the late 90’s.
The problem is her final message is wrong. Yes it is a very political show, but the message is that often there is nothing that can be done in terms of a simple, easy solution. The character of Kyle especially (often to be said to be the closest in terms of actual beliefs for the creators) pours out hard solutions but is mocked by others because people from the left and right don’t want complex answers but easy ones that fits their own worldview. Which is where Schwartz is as the show doesn’t fit her worldview so she threw out this attempt to basically ‘cancel’ it.
The problem is by blaming South Park from everything from the alt-right, to Trump to the current culture wars is that simple solution. An airy wave of the hand and all your problems are gone. Who needs to understand the socio-economic problems caused by the collapse of industry which has led to an alienated working class who feel isolated and ignored by all the traditional politics out there, hence why many are looking to outsiders for answers. Sadly that gives us Brexit and Trump partly because the left as a whole has advocated the discussion to the right in favour of purity spirals and identity politics rather than creating a narrative where the alienated working class see a way out.
So instead we’re stuck with people being offended by a show nearly 25 years old that’s attacked people from all political backgrounds and while it often misses a point, or gets it wrong, it serves a purpose as a satire of the times where anything is open for debate. Because you don’t like hearing what it has to say is not a reason to ‘cancel’ it, which makes me glad that Schwartz’s attempt to do just that fell flat but these attempts at censorship attack liberty itself, and sometimes liberty means people hearing or seeing things they don’t want to hear or see.
All of this is bullshit, and all of this is designed to shove faces of Remainers in it because we now live in a time so polarised that ‘winners’ (and it remains to be seen what Brexiters have won barring racism and blue passports which are made in France) will have friendship with nations we’ve just told to fuck the fucking hell off?
And to make it worse, we’ve spent millions in melting down the ones which was supposed to celebrate leaving in October thus making it a perfect metaphor for Brexit itself.
Still, the funniest thing is that the 50p piece will be a constant reminder to those Brexiters trying to pretend in the coming years that they were never Brexiters, or this insane nonsense never happened.
Back in the 1970’s I was but a wee boy, and like many folk back then, a Monty Python fan. When hearing that Michael Palin and Terry Jones had made their own series, Ripping Yarns, like many youthful fanboys I was aside myself and to this day I adore every single one of them but Golden Gordon is by far my favourite.
Palin and Jones were their own team within Python, and out of all the groupings that came out of Python these two were the best and the funniest because Palin was just a brilliant performer, while Jones timed the comedy in those episodes to perfection. They were very British, very English bits of humour that now, sadly, will be lost to people because the reference for these stories (pulp magazines and British boys comics) are not part of your average Millenial’s cultural wardrobe.
Jones was never the standout in Python for me when I was younger. It was John Cleese but as I got older and older I’d notice what Jones was doing as well as his sheer comic bravery in getting a laugh with this being one of my favourite Python sketches ever.
Something then dawned on me watching this for the 1000th time, in that if I imagine Python to have a voice, then it sounds like Terry Jones. Not Eric Idle, Cleese or anyone else. Even now if you’re riffing off Python then it’s his voice you’ll be using.
And then I started growing up, latching onto the alternatic comedy boom of the 80s which washed all before it, except for Terry Jones who stamped his approval upon things wonderfully.
And that was it. Jones was my favoutite Python which made his descent into dementia so horrible to see his mind go but his friends stood by him all the way. There’s a point if the DVD of the O2 shows from 2014 where Jones is clearly distressed and confused backstage, but all of them form a shield to protect and to encourage him. It’s a small, tiny moment but it shows you what he meant to his friends, and now, it’s a sad moment because we know this is him slipping away but still able to cling on thanks to his mates.
I’ll miss Jones. He was always fun, always entertaining and always it seems, right. Like everyone it seems I’ll miss knowing he’s not around to make the world that wee bit of a better place a lot.
Now here’s a thing. I’m no fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber. His musicals have been a blister on the arse of modern culture for decades, but the reaction to the film version of Cats is extraordinary and has been since the first bizarre trailer.
There’s something called the ‘uncanny valley‘ and this first trailer was full of it so people were naturally unnerved by something which looked weird at best, utterly terrifying at worst. So for the last six months, the general school of thought is this was a disaster in the making and that people should be ready to hate this film. Now the film is out, reviews are not kind to say the very very least.
But the thing was I didn’t feel involved with the pile-on. In fact I thought the trailer looked interesting in a way where the director Tom Hooper has went for a complete anthropomorphisation of the characters in a neon world. Basically Hooper has done something unexpected, but this uncanny valley problem wasn’t going away mainly as I think this as the first time a number of people encountered it.
Standing alone in the tsunami of hate is Mike McPadden’s glorious review at Daily Grindhouse. It is probably the best thing written about the film so far, and you can read it here. This bit I liked especially;
To wit: any time Groupthink issues a âWORST. MOVIE. EVERâ edict, my instinct is to champion their target. I grew up circling any title rated âBOMBâ in Leonard Maltinâs annual movie guidebooks and then scoured my local TV schedule each week to hunt them down. That was my film school, and it worked. Consider, too, some specific masterworks reflexively bemoaned on arrival by Big Stupid Everybody: EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977), SHOWGIRLS (1995), and THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1996), to name just three favorites. Which do you think is more challenging, more exciting, more rewardingâthose films, or whatever topped the box office and/or mainstream criticsâ lists of their respective release years?
I could add hundreds of films which bombed critically and at the box office which are now genuine classics, which isn’t to say Cats is a classic, but it will be a cult film within the decade. In the meantime people will move onto another film to pile onto leaving me wondering what sort of fucked up society we’ve become where I defend something Andrew Lloyd Webber has touched…
