First movie of the millennium: I love those goofy bastards

The first movie I ever saw in the new millennium was There's Something About Mary, and I do not have a problem with that. There were worse ways to greet the 21st century.

We were out in the middle of nowhere, somewhere on the shores of Lake Tekapo, at midnight on 31 January 1999, and me and my best mates were all tripping our butts off. We'd tried to get into a bar in the town, but it was overpacked, so we went out to nowhere to see in the big day.

(And yes, I know the 21st century doesn't actually start until 1 January 2001, but that pedantry got boring more than 25 years ago, and the mental leap from years that begin with 19- to ones that start with 20- was always bigger than the actual maths.)

And when the clock ticked over to midnight, there was no Y2K apocalypse, although I did see some weird lights in the sky over the Southern Alps in the middle of the night, strange flashes through the mountains, which can be 100 percent attributed to the drugs.

We ended up crashing at my little sister's place in a town called Fairlie, that was as far as our sober driver would take us and that was fair enough, because we must have been goddamn nightmares.

It was well after midnight, and I couldn't sleep, so I stayed up and watched up and watched the millennial fireworks and lasers as the rest of the world caught up with the new century, and none of it was as impressive as that Strange Days movie had promised. 

I also watched some broadcasts from Europe that were utterly incomprehensible and were genuinely doing my head in, and the only movie that my sister had on tape was, for some reason, There's Something About Mary, and so that's what I watched in the early hours of the new century.

And it could have been so much worse. It's an utter trifle of a film, but it's also bright, colourful and gloriously stupid. The main characters are gorgeous as fuck, and its central message was that maybe we shouldn't be total dicks to each other, and that's a message we could have listened to more in the past 24 years.

The drugs wore off and life went on, but I've still got that message imprinted on the inside of my skull, because it was my first message of the millennium.

(The first song I ever heard in the 21st century was a Robbie Williams tune, because we had to listen to the local radio station to be certain of the time, and that's what they played in the immediate aftermath, and I don't have anything more to say about that.)

This is a House of Stelfreeze (part 4 of 4)

It's the 16th hit of the frying pan that makes it so funny

Several times in Adrian Edmonson's excellent Berserker autobiography, the great man points out that The Young Ones only took up 14 weeks of his life, but that it's all anybody wants to talk about. 

He does go into the making of that series a little bit in that book, but while reading it recently, I was pleasantly surprised to see him spending almost as much time talking about this one gag in Bottom, and why it was so funny.

If one hit to the face with a frying pan is always going to be funny, hitting them sixteen times in the head with the pan is going to be sixteen times more funny. It's just science.

The sound of Heat

Like far too many film dorks in this world, I've watched Heat dozens of times, and still thrill to the cops and robbers action, the extraordinary acting right across the ensemble, and the way Wes Studi blows the bloody door hinges off with his shotgun.

But it is also full of incredible noises, beyond that pulsating score, with some of the best sound design heard in modern films. The LA that Hanna and McCauley and all their crews inhabit is a dark one, even if the cold glare of daylight. It has streets and industrial areas full of treachery and danger, and you could feel it even with your eyes closed.

It's there in the buzz of a neon light as a camera pans over yet another violent crime scene, or the lazy flap of bunting that is coming down after truck has just smashed into another vehicle. And it's there in the ominous throb whenever McCauley is confronted or feels threatened, and the way it ebbs away when he realises Amy Brenneman really is just a nice person, who only wants to know what he picked up at the bookstore.

And as impressive as the big gun battle after the main robbery is - and it remains deeply impressive, all these years later, with vivid editing giving it a realistic intensity - it's the sounds of the shots booming around the modern skyscrapers that really lingers. It's not just the bangs, it's the endless echo.

Mann uses sound like no other action filmmaker in the world, and not just in Heat. Every sound in Thief is as efficient as James Caan's movements, the eerie silence of the frontier is broken by the booms of cannon in Last of the Mohicans, and the pings of high caliber bullets sparking off metallic gravel in Miami Vice's big gunfight. 

It's all so immersive, while remaining inherently cinematic, like the battle between chaos and efficiency seen throughout Mann's films. And even after watching Heat dozens of times, I'll still hear a new sound that I never noticed before, invisible in its perfection until you go listening for it. 

Action figure remixing on a multiversal level

Back when I was 12 and obsessed with all things GI Joe, I would try to get the most out of the few action figures I could get my hands on, by taking to them with a small Philips screwdriver, pulling them apart and mixing them together. I would take bits off the armoured Cobra Commander and meld him with the Techno-Viper, and give Sci-Fi the legs and arms from Iceberg.

It was a fun way to make new characters out of old ones, but I ended up breaking a lot of them by clumsily pulling them apart - that fucking rubber band was always the first to go - or would lose vital legs and arms when they weren't being used.

While I can understand that zeal for something new created from familar elements, it's always just a novelty, not really anything truly new. While I did dig it when DC and Marvel did their Amalgam thing back in the 90s, I was grateful it was only for a week or two, and not a serious ongoing thing.

Marvel have been trying to spark something up with this kind of creative remixing in the past decade, but it can be hard to see what the likes of Cosmic Ghost Rider and Weapon H really bring to the table that's new.

It's obviously a lot easier to take bits and pieces of other characters and try to make something out of them, and sometimes it works and they catch on, with the first appearances of some of these remixes going for shocking dollars. But it's also easier to end up with a lot of broken toys that are missing vital parts, instead of the one thing that actually worked in the first place.

Through the Black Hole

I only saw The Black Hole once when I was a little kid, and watching it again for the first time in 40 years, I found I remembered a lot more than I thought - the design of those robots, the incredibly dull laser fights, that huge ball of fire rolling down the massive corridor towards our heroes.

But I had absolutely no memory of what happened when everybody fell into the actual black hole at the end, and the villain merges with his robot and ends up in some hell dimension, while the heroes are guided by a literal angel to a shining new world

It's striking imagery that never took hold in my head for some reason, but now I can't help wondering what other existential trips are waiting at the end of other films I saw as a kid. Do things get metaphysical at the climax of  Herbie Goes Bananas? Does the Black Stallion end with the horse contemplating its own short existence? Further research is needed.

I just like looking at Zatanna

I get just a fraction of the amount of regular monthly comics that I used to get, and it's usually old favourites like Love & Rockets and Grendel (Prime 4ever). But I also like to get some kind of mainstream superhero book, because there is nothing quite like a new and shiny superhero comic that is a little bit smart and has good pictures.

It's mainly about the pictures these days. The older I get, the more I just want good art over good writing. I can not accept a brilliant script with pug-ugly art, but will inhale as many gorgeous art pages as I can, no matter how mediocre the plotting can get.

At the moment, the only superhero comic I get is the latest Zatanna series from DC's Black Label line. Zatanna: Bring Down the House has a story by Mariko Tamaki that is fun and punchy, but there really is only one reason to get it - the art of Javier Rodriguez.

With all due respect to his talented collaborators, I will buy anything Rodriguez is involved with, and am never disappointed. His sense of design on the comic page is always playful and inventive, without compromising the coherence of the story; his use of colour is incredibly inviting and warm, and he draws really, really good trippy shit.

All of these traits are on full display in the new comic, along with some absolutely brilliant character work, with Zatanna's grim determination and naked doubts wonderfully presented. The fishnets and top hat are, of course, always welcome. 

Just beautiful comics, in every way. 

All The Asterix and all the Tintin

There was no graphic novel section in any library I ever got to join as a kid. There was no Dog Man books, and certainly nothing as vulgar and crass as Marvel or DC super-hero comic books. No comics for the kids. 

Except of course, for all the Asterix books, and all the Tintin books. They had all of those.

Me and all my mates at Temuka Primary School absolutely devoured all the albums in both series, and they were just brilliant comics to be reading as a child, helping to build a love of the medium that has still never faded. 

Asterix comics were always funny as hell, with gorgeous clear storytelling and a wide range of settings that saw our heroes travel all over the ancient world. And while the crude generalizations of the peoples they meet on their escapades really stand out to an unfortunate degree in the year 2024, I still wish I could eat something that looks as delicious as those boars they would roast up for the big feast at the end.

The Tintin books didn't have the kinetic energy of the Asterix albums, and the title character was always more white-bread than anybody in that one small village in Gaul, but Herge's comics were more snidely funny, (especially when the Thompson Twins got involved), and the action was always more precise, more detailed, with occasionally stunning vistas on the turn of the page

Besides, while Tintin was a bit of a dweeb, so was Asterix, and everyone knew the greatest characters were the best friends - everybody cared more about Obelix and Captain Haddock than anybody else.

The hardest part of getting your hands on particular books was that other kids would always have them on loan. Everybody read them, so you got what you could get, and it might be an eternity before you get to The Shooting Star, or The Mansions of the Gods.

But all the books maintained a ridiculously high quality, so every one was a treat, although some stood out for obvious reasons - the Tintin books featuring space travels and pirate treasures were total highlights, while any Asterix book that had them face off against Julius Caesar himself were always the best.

Remarkably, I still have some of those actual copies that we all got out from the primary school I went to -  a mate of mine snapped them up when they were sold off for fundraising purposes and passed them on to me when he upgraded. 

And they are beat to hell, man. The cardboard covers are so crinkled and thin they are almost see through, and The Castafiore Emerald is missing large chunks of its cover, leaving it looking like a cat has been eating it (which may very well have happened at one point).

But they are still just about intact, and just as much fun to read as they were when I picked them up off the primary school library shelf, all those years ago.

This is a house of Stelfreeze (part 3 of 4)

Hook Jaw: This was not the way

This single panel is one of the greatest in British comics. It's a moment from the exceptionally charming Hook Jaw comic strip by artist Ramon Sola, and could be seen as a giant metaphor for many things. I know I can't look at it without seeing a great big metaphor for humanity in general in the 21st century, blithely swimming straight into a sudden, horrific death that it really, really should see coming.

The shark can also be read to represent capitalism in its purest, meanest form. It can eat anything, and those black eyes will never be satisfied.

Or maybe it's just a great panel because that is one mean-looking shark. Who needs metaphors when you've got that?

You can't skip the overture

It's another old man complaint, but I will not stand for the streamers that automatically skip past the opening credits of a TV show. 

Most of them are actually quite skippable, especially when you are binge watching the shit out of something, and see the same starting sting over and over again. But sometimes it feels like it's almost disrespectful to skip past - I wouldn't feel I've watched a proper episode of Twin Peaks - either series- with rolling in through Badalamenti's slow groove, and the camera soaring over those trees and waters. 

I never skipped past any of the opening credits for Game of Thrones, both because Ramjin Dwivedi's theme is always a thrustingly powerful beat to kick off on, and because it always helped to to get the head around this world, through the map of the original series, or the tapestry of the latest series.

Sometimes it's just a smashing piece of music that never fails to get you going, like in the credits for Warrior. That's all you need.

A lot of shows don't even bother with credits, or hit you with a quick sting, like Breaking Bad or Lost, or even the Venture Bros (although when they did do the full Venture Bros opening, I never skipped it). 

But The Sopranos without a morning wake-up just doesn't feel like proper Sopranos. It's essential.

The slow apocalypse behind Mad Max

Each Mad Max film gets further and further away from reality, becoming increasingly baroque and operatic. But one of the most fascinating things to come out of the entire saga is the quietly existential horror of the slow apocalypse unfolding in the background of the first movie. 

While it's absolutely a white line nightmare in the original Mad Max, there is also still a society behind the carnage, at least at first. There are still cafes, and ice creams and milkshakes. There are still lawmen out on patrol, and hospitals full of machines that go beep. 

But while we're not in the full post-apocalypse of the Road Warrior, things are falling apart, with the law enforcement system barely existing by the end of the film.

For all the glorious histrionics of the series, this might be the most chilling aspect of it, and the most real. For all the talk of WW3 being over in a matter of hours, as global superpowers annihilate each other with their megadeath weapons, the end of the world as we know is unlikely to come with the sudden impact, and more likely to creep up on you like a sucking gut wound.

Human history is full of  great civilisations collapsing with alarming regularity and while the end seems to come at great speed in the sprawling context of history, for the people living through them, it can be decades of things falling apart before the streets are abandoned.

By the time Mad Max is travelling to barter towns and bullet farms, it's all over, rover. But that slide towards an abyss without any kind of ice-creams begins in the first film, and is worryingly familiar for us mugs in the real world. 

'Fuck off, Mr Postman!'

I don't think I deserve an award or anything for not shouting out 'Parklife!' every time Phil Daniels pops up on an episode of House of the Dragon, because it's only polite.

But I do think I should get some kind of accolade for not crying out 'You've killed me scooter'! every time Phil Daniels pops up in an episode of House of the Dragon, because I'm only human.

Beetlejuice sings the hits of the 60s

When it comes to the best needle drops in movies, it's the songs you don't see coming that always have the biggest impact.

The new Beetlejuice movie is a lot of fun - it's goofy and gross and gloriously garish. Michael Keaton is as magnificent as ever; Catherine O'Hara remains an absolute goddamn delight; Willem Defoe knows the assignment; and Winona Ryder still does the kind of horrified bafflement that nobody else can ever manage, while also finding new depths in middle aged regret.

It's also weird as hell, and I deeply appreciate the use of the particular song that rolls out of everybody's mouths during the big climactic sequence. It's easy to overlook how strange it was for everybody to start singing Harry Belafonte during that dinner party in the original, because everybody watching that movie knew it was coming - it was a major part of the promotion, and kickstarted a whole calypso revival.

It's a very different song in the 2024 film, and thank Beelzebub that they didn't try to keep the calypso theme going, and went for a completely different kind of song. It's also pleasing to see the filmmakers really commit to the whole thing, and let it all play out. 

Despite it bouncing around in my skull all week, I haven't been able to sing that tune around the house -(and I'm not going to name it here), because the lovely wife hasn't seen the movie yet, and I don't want to spoil the surprise of the song, and the satisfying weirdness of its use, for anybody.

Adventures in bookclubbing: Trends and portents

My one-person book club fell by the wayside when we moved down south, but I picked it up again recently because it really is immensely rewarding, and I've been able to find all sorts of new literary thrills, no matter where I live in the world.

I've been sticking to the rules of the club for years now -  I try to get into as many non-white guy English-speaking writers as possible, I try to stick with something that has come out in the past few years, and I insist that it is something by a writer that I've never heard of before.

For all that, it is also very nice to break the rules, and I have done that with the past three books - they were all still by authors that I never heard of, and were all by women or non-English writers, but they were also all written and first published decades ago, and have been reprinted in all new editions. 

The first was Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns, which I 100 percent got just because I loved the title; the next was Arto Paasilinna's The Year Of The Hare, which answers the eternal question of what happens when you abandon your life to wander Finland with a hare; and the latest was The Strangers in the House by Georges Simenon, which was very, very Belgian.

They're full of strange perspectives and dated language, but the ones that get the flash new reprints do tend to be seem to be a certain type - they are thoroughly middle class concerns, with the main characters often having to deal with unruly maids and other useless staff, even as the old world rots around them.

They can still come with remarkable imagery that sticks in the brain - the fate of the baker in Comyn's book is particularly rough and something I'll never forget, because it's such an awful fate for a poor bastard who just wanted to make nice bread for people, while the protagonist's use of alcohol to get through the day in the Simneon book is particularly cutting. 

The funny thing about the Finnish book is that it's about someone who hates their life and wanders away from it to find themselves, and that's the plot of a lot of the contemporary books I see as I browse for the next selection. 

You see the trends so easily when you're looking at he blurbs for every single new novel in the book store. There was a whole year of almost nothing but 'I thought I knew my mother, but when I came home to Buttfuck Idaho for her funeral, I found out the real her'; followed by a strange deluge of content based around the Holocaust (obviously raising awareness about this event, while also reeking of crass exploitation).

The next book is unlikely to fit into any of these categories. I can't wait to see what it is. 

This is a House of Stelfreeze (part 2 of 4)

 

Gory madmen behind the camera, very polite in person

I never fail to find it delightful when it turns out that almost all of the directors of the horror films that I got told were warping my brain so much growing up in the 80s appear to be thoroughly nice guys. 

Clive Barker's movies would skin you alive and drop you into the never-ending shadow of Leviathan, but Barker himself was always charming and affable, and surprisingly modest for somebody who had entire universes of different magic rolling through his head.

Wes Craven could drop something as shocking and genuinely upsetting as Last House on the Left, while never coming across as less than incredibly thoughtful and empathetic, and many of the people behind the most outrageous movie shit are lovable dorks.

I know there were still a lot of creeps in the industry, but horror movies directors seem to be the most well-adjusted crowd. Getting all the darkness out of their heads and splattering across a movie screen really does seem to be good for the soul. 

Life without Stinky

After 30 years, you might think you know what to expect from a Hate comic from Peter Bagge, but I still never expected to feel actually feel sorry for Stinky. 

Stinky!

It's been years since the wonderful Hate Annuals slowly faded away, and  Hate Revisited - Bagge's return to the misadventures of Buddy Bradley and the gang - has most definitely been a cause for celebration.

The art is not as slick as it once was, and it looser, thicker and sloppier in an extremely appealing way, but Buddy is still the same old affable loser that he's always been, holding on to his very Gen-X sense of irony in an age of political strife with a surprising deftness (at least in the first couple of issues of the new series).

But then you get to see Buddy and Stinky's first adventure together, and it's weird and fucked up and a little sad, because it's clear that fuckin' Leonard never stood a chance.

Stinky died years ago, and you'll never know if it was a suicide or stupidity, but it still has echoes down the years. It always felt like Buddy was always reacting to Stinky's death with exasperation, and never had the chance to properly mourn his shithead of a pal. It's genuinely pleasing to see him finally tell Lisa, who is just as wonderfully messed up as ever, because if he can't tell her, who could he ever trust?

We all know somebody like Stinky, just too wild to ever grow old, and we can miss them forever, even as they stay young in our memories.

Fucking Stinky, man.

A particularly American gut ache

I got the second worst food poisoning of my life the day they held the 2000 US election. It was some dodgy Burger King, and I was so sick I couldn't really sleep, and could only fade in and out of consciousness, while American news networks breathlessly covered the race between Gore and Bush for the White House.

There was, of course, no result that night, except in my fevered dreams, where I'm sure they announced at one point that the cookie Monster had won Ohio.

And to be honest, looking at the state of US politics over the past quarter century since, where the worst impulses of the American electorate have grown to grotesque and deeply embarrassing proportions, I'm not convinced that fever dream ever ended.

The worst food poisoning I ever had was from some KFC, the night before my big High School science exam. I got a B+, which was pretty good, when I was so queasy I couldn't read the words, but I didn't eat at the Colonel's for five years after that, and then I've been a fiend for it ever since. But the fate of the fucking free world wasn't at stake that night.

Always something new to say about the galaxy's greatest comic

If Tom Ewing's in-depth look at the entirety of Cerebus The Aardvark was right in my wheelhouse, and helped reassure me that there was still some excellent long-form writing about comics out there, his latest series about the earliest days of 2000ad is even more on target.

You can find it on Tom's site here. There's only a couple of entries so far, but I highly recommend it, with Tom finding new things to say about the oldest stories in the galaxy's greatest comic (the discussion of the Volgan War being more open-ended than the real-life conflicts other comic strips were based on is particularly astute, especially as Pat Mills has gone back and turned the Volgan War into the first real forever war, with a clear through-line through to the ABC Warriors and Nemesis The Warlock).

A lot of words have been written about the impact of 2000ad on comics and culture, but after 2400-odd progs, there is always more to say. It helps that Tom's stuff is so sharp, and well worth the effort.

RIP, my King!

Return to Planet Fiction: Writing for fun (and not a lot of profit)

Almost all of the writing I do for fun - as opposed to the stuff I do get paid for in the day job - is for this blog, and after 15 years of it, it remains an enormously satisfying outlet for the rubbish that builds up in my skull.

But I also still write fiction for kicks, outside the howling needs of this daily blog. And while I've shared parts of it here, I'm usually useless at actually doing anything with it, mainly because I lose all interest once I've finished. It's getting the thing done that I'm in it for.

One of the hoariest of clichés is that writers hate to write, but love to have written - but puzzling it out, getting the plot in order, trying to make the characters sound like actual human beings, that's the game for me. Once it's done, I'm on to the next thing, and it's all a good workout for the mental muscles.

I still get enormously stuck on things. I got incredibly mired in a novel I've been working on for a while - a family epic about life in late 20th-century Aotearoa filtered through the lens of one night in 1979 - and was sitting at the 60,000 word mark for almost a year, before I got off my arse and got cracking again.

(It was the tangled weave of the plot that brought it all to a halt - it always is - and it was only one I could get around by slicing 10,00 words that I'd already lovingly crafted and cutting out the bullshit.)

But I'm glad to be on that wagon, and I'm ensuring that I spend at least half an hour every day on it, even with two pre-schoolers, I can usually find 30 minutes somewhere in the day. And when I go to bed at night, I'm always slightly strangely chuffed that I've done something, even if it was a tiny bit of revision, or a hundred new words.

It certainly helps that I have recently been reading some of my very favourite books and comics, the ones that always fire me up to write something myself. Almost all of my (not that regrettable) fan fiction days were written when I was high on 90s Grant Morrison comics, I couldn't finish Flex Mentally without being inspired to do something - anything - to keep that vibe high.

The issue with that is that I have to make an extra effort not to just echo that stuff that inspires me. Things like the Deadwood TV show or James Ellroy's books always make me want to do it for myself, but I've got to be really careful about imitating those very specific styles.

(It's a bit like binge watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I do not recommend, purely because you properly can't help yourself from turning into Larry David.)

But any kind of art that inspires you to put more art into the universe is good and worthwhile, for yourself, if nobody else. Go on and get stuck in.

Seven perfect panels from Brian Bolland: Tired.

 

Seven perfect panels from Brian Bolland: Very good.

 

Seven perfect panels from Brian Bolland: Their ghastly task.

 

Seven perfect panels from Brian Bolland: Do I?

 

Seven perfect panels from Brian Bolland: Crazy.

 

Seven perfect panels from Brian Bolland: Tinged with faint despair.

Seven perfect panels from Brain Bolland: All the contestants nearly bought it.

Seven slices of cinema: What have I done?

This is my life now: Faster than the Flash

When it comes to the perennial question of whether Superman or the Flash is faster, I will 100 percent always maintain that the Flash should win that race, because he's the fastest man alive. It's just a law of the universe.

But I'm still faster than the Flash when the Fatboy Slim album You've Come A Long Way Baby is on the car stereo, and reaches track three. Because when that one kicks off, I'm skipping to number four quicker than Wally West's mood swings.

It's a very, very uncool album to be rocking out on the stereo as we drive around town in the year 2024, but the kids love those big beats of the 90s, and things like Fatboy and the Chemicals provide plenty of that. They love the rap, and definitely like the groove of the Wu-Tang and the RTJ, but there is a lot of questionable lyrics that we can not have them repeating in the pre-school yard.

So we play the Fatboy album a lot, and the kids dig the tripping of gangsters and the praising of you, and while language is a social construct and profanity is always funny as hell when it comes from young mouths, I know I will be judged unfavorably if they start walking around talking about 'fucking in heaven'.

That wouldn't end well for anybody.