Kill Everybody In The Whole World

Random pop-culture musing 3

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 23:21:00 +0000

When I saw the trailer for Colombiana, my first thought was "Finally someone realizes the danger amnesia poses to high-level assassins."

My second thought is that I've started going to films tactically. It looks godawful but it's the first major action film headlined by a woman of colour since Catwoman so I feel like I should go and see it.

Cleavage alone is quite capable of every wickedness.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 07:50:00 +0000

I may have to amend that to swearing to write something every day I'm actually awake. I'd forgotten how long this takes. With apologies to those concerned.

I'm used to bad films. I've most of the best known examples (Manos The Hands of Fate, Showgirls, Birdemic, The Room, Catwoman, etc) and gained the usual slightly masochistic pleasure from them. I'm also used to being offended by films, to the point where it sometimes barely registers. Earlier this year however, I saw a film so bad, so infuriating, so offensive on almost every possible level that I can't even review it yet. I'm going to have to review another couple of quite terrible movies first just to warm up.

There are ways of proofing your film against bad reviews. One is to make a film of clear outstanding excellence but this is very difficult and not always successful in the short term. Lots of films now considered classics were initially slated by the critics (what does that even mean, they were metaphorically covered in roofing tiles?). A much simpler approach is to call your film something like Bitch Slap. Really anyone who watches it clearly deserves what they get. Like me.

So why was I watching it? The first on-screen reunion of Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor since Xena went off the air plus Zoë Bell cameoing and choreographing the fights. As the main characters were introduced cleavage first I got an inkling that I'd made the wrong decision.

Bitch Slap bills itself as smut for the Thinking Man. Pleased with yourself aren't you Thinking Man? Too good to jerk off to porn like everybody else aren't you Thinking Man? Need a bunch of quotes from Joseph Conrad, Cosimo de Medici and Sun Tzu's Art of War to help you get off, don't you? You make me sick. Also you need some intelligently non-pc comedy. Mustn't forget that.

This is about as intelligent as it gets. In fairness, this was one of precisely two laughs I got out the film. I'm pretty cheap really.

As a sidenote I'm sort of tired of everyone acting like being non-pc is in some way a courageous stand, as if angry lesbian vegans of colour might descend upon them like ravening maenads (actually that might make a pretty decent exploitation flick, if you want me to write one send me a few grand and I'll have it done by Tuesday). It was brave when Bill Hicks did it, you are risking nothing with your tired little provocations. The worst of which is probably the sadistic Asian schoolgirl Kinki who talks in broken English. Bitch Slap, you're racism is so ironic. A lot of the dialogue is supposed to be daringly offensive but come across as kind of baffling. One characters exits the film with "The woman's movement will hoist my skirt for all eternity!" What is that supposed to mean?

I'm not even angry, but I'm weary, oh so very weary. I spent most of the film feeling like a primary school teacher (elementary my dear Americans) confronted with a precocious 7 year old trying to get them to spell ICUP.

The film has a plot which isn't precisely good, but it is surprisingly complicated. Hel, played by Erin Cummings, is a glamorous conwoman and sex-toy tycoon (or is she?). Trixie, played by Julia Voth, is an innocently naive stripper (or is she?). Camero, played by America Olivio, is a sadistically violent pill-popper and borderline psychotic (or is... actually she's pretty straightforward). They're in a remote desert location are looking for a fortune in diamonds (or are they?). Nothing will stop them, although they'll maybe have a sexy waterfight (or will they?).

Of course they will. All hardened criminals have sexy waterfights.

It's got violence (and cleavage), betrayal (and cleavage), non-linear storytelling (and cleavage), ridiculously purple dialogue (and cleavage), green screen (and cleavage), soft-core lesbian fondling (look you see where I'm going here OK). It doesn't have attractive male characters or in fact any nudity but if you like cleavage, this is the film for you. Being pretty uninterested in cleavage I'm clearly not the ideal audience.

I do like violence and Zoë Bell and the cast have done their best but when you've only got a weekend to train, it's best not to plan a 14 minute fight scenes. I actually fast-forwarded past most of it. Also she doesn't get any lines and her cameo amounts to less than 20 seconds. Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor do have a pretty funny cameo as nuns in the convent where Camero is hiding out under the moniker of Sister Prudence Bangtail, leading to the second laugh I got out this film.

Nunsploitation is a beautiful word. The films are mostly shit but it's a great word.

Unfortunately it does draw attention to the difference between a performance that is comically broad and exaggerated and one that is merely terrible. I feel pretty bad saying this as when I was writing this I found an interview with America Olivio and she comes across as funny and likeable. Her story of being cast for the film is funnier than anything she says in it, although I doubt Judi Dench could give a line like "You ruined my boobs skank twat!" a convincing reading.

I just mentally recast this with Judi Dench as Camero, Vanessa Redgrave as Hel and Helen Mirren as Trixie and Bitch Slap suddenly got a lot more entertaining.

I know what boys like. Patrician British actresses with long distinguished careers, am I right?

In fairness the woman may be ludicrous fantasy figures but they do drive the film, have agency and have sex with each other for fun and not attention. The Bechdel Test is easily passed and the crowd at AfterEllen seemed to like it, heaven knows why.

Depicted: Why.

Interestingly for this review I got the unrated version and the only difference I noticed is an innocuous short scene where you see that Trixie has a daughter. Lesbian strippers are OK but lesbian strippers who are single mothers clearly need to be censored.

To conclude, I never expected to type the word cleavage into my computer so many times in quick succession. I am tired now.

Sometimes a cigar is just a carcinogenic fun tube.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 00:33:00 +0000

For reasons that are too complicated to go into right now, I'm suddenly honour bound to write something daily. Fortunately, I'm not bound to write something long, complicated or even halfway-readable thus my goal remains within the realm of the possible.

So I was writing a review of when I got distracted by the memory of something I read about a completely different film, Kick-Ass. The films most notorious element was Hit-Girl, an 11 year old who says cunt a lot and has been trained as a brutally violent "superhero" by her father. The reviewer complained about how sexualized the character was, noting that at one point she even wears a "fetishistic schoolgirl uniform".

I'm not going to bother reviewing Kick-Ass myself, a film that I didn't like very much and that clearly thought it was so cool. But one thing I wouldn't accuse it of was overly sexualizing Hit-Girl, when she does disguise herself as a schoolgirl the only layer to the costume is that it's supposed to point out the difference between the child she's assumed to be and the killer she actually is, a symptom of the film never getting round to deciding if a child whose been conditioned to viciously murder people without remorse is tragic or fabulously awesome. It never felt like moral ambiguity, more sloppy storytelling but it's not, you know, a sex thing.

This is a long preamble to my main point which is that adult (or at least late teenage) woman dressed as schoolgirls have become such an ubiquitous fetish, a fetish so mainstream it barely counts as a fetish, that people have forgotten that schoolgirls also dress as schoolgirls because they actually are schoolgirls. Suddenly depicting schoolgirls is automatically sexual. Also that swearing a lot and killing people is automatically sexy. That seems somehow indicative of our cultures fucked up attitudes but maybe it's just that I'm trying to cut down on caffeine and everything feels very far away.

PS: As creepy as I find parents who put their kids in child beauty pageants, I find parents who arm their children and get them to kill people a lot creepier. This may also explain why these characters are almost always girls, if they were boys they might remind people too much of real child soldiers used by drug cartels, the Khmer Rouge, various other genocidal groups, etc. That would definitely push the story towards tragic.

PPS: Yes I know that they sometimes use girls as soldiers too.

It's a riot sheer criminality.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 01:40:00 +0000

So the riots. You may have noticed something about them in the news. Or if you live in the right area, by which I mean the wrong area, you may have noticed people rioting. "But why did this happen" is the call from people who apparently aren't that perceptive or skilled with grammar. Although to be honest that's a needlessly archaic rule, I mean everyone starts sentences with "but" these days and how did we get onto this? I'm supposed to be delivering trenchant political analysis.

The obvious answer is that smashing shit up is fun. David Cameron and Boris Johnson should certainly be able to remember that from their Bullingdon Club days, although unlike the rioters they left large checks behind to cover the damages (it's perhaps unworthy of me to speculate if this was how they approached dating). Even little Nicky Clegg (or Cleggums as I plan to refer to him for no particular reason) has apparently spent some time arson about (that doesn't seem to scan that well, it's supposed to sound like arsing and therefore be funny although it's actually quite a weak pun, sorry I brought it up, should I change it, too late anyway).

Look, it's been a while since I've written anything.

Let's imagine for a , that you're one of the rioters. I want you to imagine a boredom, almost since birth. Not your regular Sunday afternoon boredom, the corrosive bone-deep tedium that comes from not being part of the world. Not really. Boredom is perhaps the wrong term, like referring to crushing depression as feeling a bit sad.

Think of it as a continuous low-grade sensory deprivation like a thick blanket of pointless. You're maybe not very politically minded but you see that there are two kinds of people. People who have meaningful lives, filled with attainment and purpose, who matter. Then there's you, your family, and pretty much everyone you know.

No future for you.

Of course if you happen to be from an ethnic minority that won't sharpen your sense of resentment at all. There's no racism anymore it's just that immigration is an enormous problem and clearly multiculturalism has failed. The Daily Mail says so. What do you mean that black teenagers are 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched, don't start playing the race card.

Recently though, the future you don't have has been looking bleaker than ever. Class warfare is a term that isn't used much anymore but the demonisation of claimants of all kinds and the incoming regulations that will make the task of scraping your frugal income out of the government an ever more lengthy humiliation for even less.

"But" you are thinking dear reader, still not caring unduly about sentence fragments, "some of those rioters were totally middle class, students and people with jobs and careers". True enough but these were specific examples ie not the majority of rioters. We'll come back to them later. Try to stay in character.

Did you even know about Mark Duggan's murder (writing from a veiwpoint dear reader, writing from a viewpoint)? Was it a sharp reminder that you can be killed without anyone caring, the way they would if you were a real person. Did you even see the initial protest where it all kicked off? Does it matter? Let's skip to the action.

The city has been where you lived but it's never been yours. Tonight that changes. You're wearing your ritual uniform of hood and mask and you run with the sound of breaking glass in your ears and the stink of burning cars in your nostrils. They've lit the sky.

The breath rasps in your throat but you feel superhuman, you've stepped into how the world is supposed to be and anything is possible. Nothing you've experienced, sexdrugsrockandroll, all the little petty distractions from how fucking tedious your life really is has ever matched up to this.

You round a corner and see a double-decker bus, a black skeleton wrapped in fire. Smoke and flame billowing up to heaven. The headlights are still on. It's the funniest, the most beautiful thing you've ever seen.

A text, a mob, an instinct(?) leads you to a street of shops. Other hooded and masked figures are smashing in the windows. You love them instantly. A love tinged with fear because anything is possible. Except stopping.

But don't worry about that now. If this is the haves vs the have-nots then shopowners are inevitably the haves. Look at all the stuff they've got. The reason some trainers, some clothes, some hi-def plasma TV's are better than others isn't that they're all that great. It's that the people who buy them know you have to make do with cheaper ones. Not tonight. See it before you. Reach out. Take. It's all yours.

Cops appear, you're natural enemies. Think of all the times you've been stopped and searched and "sonny"ed (is it only Edinburgh cops that still do this?). Run and circle. Throw whatever you've got to hand. If you're not human to them then they're not human to you, especially now. Riot gear does not encourage empathy. They may be dressed up like sci-fi stormtroopers but they're scared of you now. They can't be everywhere at once. And you are.

Let us leave our hypothetical rioter chucking molotov cocktails at the police and move on to pastures new. It's perhaps clear how the odd middle-class kid may have been swept away by the glamour of the riots (bright lights, big city). And the initial protest may have been where the violence kicked off but attempts to connect that to the protests there have been over the summer is pure spin.

Considering that they've been large groups of angry teenagers and the police use of agent-provocateurs in protest movements is an open secret the student protests have been amazingly peaceful. A few broken windows, a couple of inconvenienced royals and an idiot throwing a fire extinguisher who'd probably have been horrified if he'd actually hit someone. Most of the protesters have been essentially nice middle-class kids who were genuinely startled to be pilloried as a violent mob.

That doesn't mean there might be a connection of a kind. If they're willing to kettle and club and cavalry charge those well meaning kids with their non-violent resistance, if it's made as clear as possible that peaceful protest won't be tolerated it sends a message of hopelessness all the way down to people too dispirited to ever protest but who might be up for a good night of fire and loot and pillage. It might be worth bearing in mind if they really want to prevent more riots. It might be worth trying to provide a possible future that wasn't even worse than a shitty past.

Random pop-culture musing 2.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 09:00:00 +0000

If you change "amore" out for LSD, not only does the song still make sense it becomes a great deal more factually accurate.

When you dance down the street with the clouds at your feet, you're on drugs.

Relationship problems.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 23:01:00 +0000

I have a friend who used to be one of those people who'd get serious about relationships way too quickly. She'd meet a girl and then two weeks later she'd be shopping for engagement rings and asking her to move in. Telling her that she was being too careless with her heart, in love with love and embodying an embarrassing stereotype did nothing to bring her back to earth. Neither did politely trying to change the subject when she was rhapsodising about the maid of the moment's sky blue peepers. Her mind was fixed monomaniacally on someone she barely knew . The only reason she was hanging out with us was that she whose smile made the sun rise and the dew moisten the grass (which was a hyperbole too far in my opinion) was currently off somewhere or other.

Then, inevitably, things would start to go pear-shaped. The current centre of her universe would stop being some mythic embodiment of all goodness and light and start to turning into a real person with real problems. There would be crying phone calls where she'd sob that her girlfriend wasn't coming round when she said she would, that she was screening her calls and even when she was there she wasn't there if we knew what she meant.

The early bonding had been founded on deception, her girlfriend had used the word "campy" to describe the stage presence of Horse McDonald. It turned out her girlfriend had musical tastes she didn't share, sexual kinks she wasn't keen on, a large collection of weaponry and passports she hadn't known about and why wouldn't she say where she kept vanishing off to. Of course it had been obvious to the rest of us for ages that she'd been dating La Zanzara, former Red Brigade terrorist turned international mercenary and assassin.

Again.

I mean fair enough there was the whole "as beautiful as she is deadly" thing going on but it's not even as if she was particularly good at disguises. Wigs and a selection of oversize novelty sunglasses, that's about it. After the third or fourth time it was hard to be sympathetic, "You want to be fooled" we'd say to her as she came round for the first time in weeks with her eyes red and swollen with tears and the CS gas La Zanzara had let off in her apartment as part of another daring escape from Interpol and intimacy.

Anyway, eventually she outgrew the whole thing and now has a nice girlfriend and some dogs that aren't perfectly housebroken.

My New Years resolution is to either write more regularly or give it up for good. I'm not sure which.

The morality of beating transwomen.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 21:16:00 +0000

It's International Transgender Day of Remembrance when we honour the murdered and unavenged. Therefore it's a good time to break my no-blogging rule and revisit the case of Duanna Johnson, the transwoman who was viciously beaten by the Memphis police, sued them and was shot to death on her corner a few months later. Seems her case against the police officers who beat her finally came to trial in April. Despite overwhelming evidence, the jury debated for 5 days before being stalemated by one stubborn juror who said that he could not impugn "the morals of an officer of the law". The judge had to declare a mistrial.

Seriously Tennessee, what the fuck?

Fortunately, the case came up again in August and this time Bridges "Womanbeater" McCrae pled guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence. Meantime the police are looking really hard but haven't managed to find Duanna's killer. Reflective surfaces are apparently in short supply in Tennessee.

Here's an interview with Duanna before she was murdered. I'm not sure if you should watch it but it made her more of a real person to me, as opposed to one of the endless, faceless dead. It shows the video of her beating so do bear that in mind.

She wasn't the first, she won't be the last so take a moment to remember and stay safe everybody. It's going to be a hard winter.

The Not-A-Lesbian way.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 07:37:00 +0000

A long time ago I was friends with a woman who's mother actually was a Jewish Stalinist lesbian child abuser. This unlikely escapee from a Daily Mail reader's wet dream had long since passed on leaving her daughter poor in money, but rich in mental health disorders which manifested in unusual ways. For a party she'd stapled bin bags stuffed with newspaper to the ceiling to create a padded cell effect and it took her several years to take them down. Despite her questionable interior design choices she had a razor sharp brain, a fiercely feminist outlook and about half a dozen copies of Bridget Jones Diary: A Novel, the well known chick-lit trendsetter by Helen Fielding.

This was the result of her ex-girlfriend (who I years later became friends with) being given a copy by every member of her family, this being that years gift to give female relatives whose tastes you remain wilfully ignorant of. When they broke up and she moved out she neglected to take them with her for some unknown reason. With that many copies lying around and the zeitgeist causing insomnia and mild indigestion it was inevitable that we'd end up reading it. The results were predictable.

I found it a bit irritating but she was infuriated by it and ranted late into the night, spewing venomous but surprisingly well articulated and thoughtful bile (Thoughtful Bile would be a really good name for a punk band), fixating particularly on one line:

"Suddenly think I might love Perpetua, but not in a lesbian way."

After a long rant on this, a short discussion on the merits of book burning (reluctantly against) and a medium length debate on setting fire to the building (in a surprise reversal, I was con), she decided to fall unconscious. I could of hung out and slept on the sofa but if you spent any time in her house, your eyes would inevitably be drawn up to the lowering black ceiling, it would start looking like it was somehow breathing and pulsing and it would start to do your head in so I walked the couple of miles back home. I spoke to her again a few days later when she asked if I'd seen our mutual ~~friend~~ acquaintance Ben. I can use his real name because there were so many boys called Ben in those days that we eventually had to have a cull, now remembered as the Great Clone Massacre of '99.

"I ran into him at CC's last night" I said "but not in a lesbian way."

Such an apparently innocent beginning. From there it snowballed, initially using it to pointedly underline the absence of sexual activity we eventually started using it for almost anything, except of course a lack of attraction between two woman. When I think about stuff like this, I realize that the number of people who've tried to kill me is amazingly low.

"I think government by consensus could work but not in a lesbian way."
"Beetroot stains are impossible to shift but not in a lesbian way."
"I fucked her brains out with my new dildo harness but not in a lesbian way."
"You have to soak it in cold water or it'll be like cement but not in a lesbian way."

I wrote this because when I was asked if I'd seen someone I knew from Queer Mutiny I said yes, but not in a lesbian way:

total silence except for the chirping of crickets and the eerie rustle of a tumbleweed rolling through the foreground

None of my friends now, old and valued as they are, knew of the not-a-lesbian way and that truly saddened me. It's so poignant when people drift out of our lives. ~~Anyway~~ Anyhow, I've been thinking of writing more recently but I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

Beyond the bounds of prudence and good taste.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 22:13:00 +0000

I've been letting a lot of things slide. I sometimes wondered if anything would drag me out of my self-imposed exile from blogland but happily, Final Girl has selected a film I wanted to see for Film Club this month. The immortal classic, Spider Baby. What do you mean you've never heard of it?

Spider Baby occupies a strange niche between The Addams Family and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I'd like that to be an original observation but to be honest everyone (who's seen Spider Baby) thinks that so I'll impress you by saying that it's a lot more like Shirley "The Haunting of Hill House" Jackson's lesser known novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Both feature two weird sisters living in a world of childlike insanity who's existence is interrupted by a greedy distant relative. See, I've read something.

In Spider Baby the sisters are Elizabeth and Virginia Merrye who are as dainty and demure as you could wish.

We strive to be decent, normal, sensible girls like God intended.

Err, sorry wrong photo, we'll try again.

This was the strangest production of Swan Lake I had ever attended.

Much better. They live with their brother Ralph in the rambling old Merrye House being cared for by the family's long suffering chauffeur Bruno. All three children suffer from a progressive brain disease unique to the family which will eventually cause them to lapse into primordial savagery. The children while away their time playing games and occasionally killing someone who's unlucky or foolish enough to wander onto the grounds when Bruno isn't there to stop them. These victims go down to feed their aunts and uncles in the basement who've already succumbed to the Merrye Syndrome.

Sadly their distant relatives, grasping Aunt Emily and hopelessly straight-laced Uncle Peter, arrive bringing a their lawyer, the awesomely named Schlocker, with them. He also has a secretary because it was the rule at the time that every film needed a love interest. Things start to get very nasty, very fast despite Bruno's attempts to keep a lid on things.

Keeping a lid on things: How not to do it.

Eventually Bruno accepts that there's only one way to keep his beloved kids safe. Of course first the unwelcome guests have to be... disposed of.

I'd heard a lot about this film and it actually turned out to be as good as I'd hoped. This is rare with unseen cult classics who's reputation usually grows with obscurity. You can see echoes of it in so many films (I was particularly reminded of The People Under The Stairs) and it echoes so many films before it (The Wolf Man, The Fall of the House of Usher) that it has an odd resonance beyond the simple exploitation flick that the makers probably intended.

It's helped by a strong script and competent direction from Jack Hill, beautiful cinematography by Alfred Taylor and terrific performances. Jill Banner's eerily sweet and homicidal Virginia is a memorable character and a young Sid Haig is sinuously unnerving as the even more regressed and sexually creepy brother Ralph. He's like a pervier Pee Wee Herman but a Pee Wee Herman who could pin you in a wrestling match.

I could sense that my attempt at witty flirtation had somehow gone awry.

Best of all is Lon Chaney Jr. as the devoted Bruno. A lot of the early horror greats mined a deep sense of tragedy in their later performances (if you haven't seen Boris Karloff in Targets then I suggest you do so now) and Chaney, who was battling alcoholism when this was made, brings real pathos and desperation to the film which stops it from being a simple farce.

I could probably spraff on a bit more but it would probably be better if you just looked the film up on the Internet Archive and watched it yourself (if you're a good technical person you could take the hiss off the soundtrack and repost a clean version. Just saying).

Their escape could only be temporary. Soon the aphids would be mine.

Hooray it's a new year.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 21:23:00 +0000

I survived Hogmanay (seriously it wasn't 100% certain I would) and will be continuing to produce semi-coherent blog posts in the future.

I'm not making any resolutions on account of the whole doomed to failure thing which seems to afflict them. I do have stuff I want to get done in the future though (improve mental stability, do more Queer Mutiny stuff, write a bit, workout, etc) but I'm keeping it vague and fuzzy. Apparently what I should do is have definite goals, split into smaller sub-goals with appropriate rewards for accomplishment. That sounds like fun. Fun in the sense of baffling and frustrating drudgery.

The rewards thing is particularly confusing. Your supposed to come up with little treats and presents for yourself and then threaten to withhold them if you don't do what you're telling yourself to do. I know perfectly well that if I come up with something I want, I'll get it/do it whether or not I do what I'm supposed to. Not only that, but I failed to follow my own explanation of how it's supposed to work. This might be why I don't get much done.

Maybe I should resolve to work on my flirting skills, my current approach (ignore cute guy, if cute guy approaches make hostile remarks then leave the area) isn't working as well as I'd like. I should try something more pro-active (take-off and nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure).

The best resolution though is to be more radical. The last year has shaken up my ideas a lot, this seems like pivotal time in history (although what time doesn't really, I've already lived through countless pivotal historical moments) and what's needed isn't to be cautious and polite. Now that the bloom has worn off Obama's rose (more inadvertent filth) I'm hoping people will realize that it's not enough to vote and join Facebook groups. What is enough is always the question. I'm pretty sure that demos and placards and protest sites aren't enough either. The people most directly responsible for the mess the world's in get happily rich of the proceeds. Will anyone hold them accountable? Probably not, bit depressing really.

My predictions are: The Torys will win, Scottish independence will consequently start being given serious discussion. Obama will continue to disappoint all liberals, progressives and those of us further out than that. Any US health care reform that eventually gets through will mostly benefit the insurance industry. UK, US and allied powers will continue to quietly be involved in human rights abuse. There will be a major Israeli/Palestinian flare up in the next year. Promising new developments in renewable power will be debunked with suspicious speed. Queer Mutiny will have another party at which I will unfortunately be myself.

I think what I'm saying is that the future kind of sucks.

Actually I haven't been up 24 hours.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:35:00 +0000

News, news, news. That's all they ever seem to print in the papers, I don't know, end of print medium, Bambi, etc.

This week brings adorable news: first gay marriage in Latin America. It's apparently still illegal, they've just given this couple special dispensation. Weird.

Sad news: Vic Chesnutt has died. I'd just started to listen to his music which had the wonderful quality of being instantly dislikeable and then slowly convincing me it was some of the best music going. To put it another way, not destined for mainstream chart success. A paraplegic, he seems to have killed himself with an intentional overdose of muscle relaxants. I could make a lot of points about medical marijuana or the failings of the US health care system but I'm sure they'll occur to you as well. There's an interesting interview with him at The Quietus and his friend Kristin Hersh has set up a tribute and donations site to help his family cover his medical bills.

Further sad news: The actress, Zelda Rubinstein is dying. You're most likely to remember her as Tangina the medium in Poltergeist but she was also (among other things) a commited AIDS activist long before it was fashionable, starring in one of the first ever series of safe-sex ads in America. May it go easy for her.

I feel the need for a distraction and fortunately Iran has provided. Monday, David Miliband, the British foreign minister criticised the Iranian crackdown on anti-government protesters so their foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki summoned the British ambassador to whom he gave this statement "If this country does not stop its prattling, it will receive a slap in its face."

That is the single funniest thing anybody's said in international relations all year.I know this is a deadly serious business, that human rights are being abused and that this could indicate that the Iranian will decide to start openly sponsoring terrorism and so forth but that only makes it harder not to laugh. Anyway corruption and pomposity always demand our laughter. Footage from a future meeting between representatives of the British and Iranian government is included below.

I guess I should be doing a big end-of-the-decade thing like everyone else but I can't be bothered. After 2000 turned out to be a big anticlimax, I'm having a hard time getting excited about this one. Of course I could just be bitter as it looks like I'm shaping up to spend Hogmanay with the cats and they're not even my cats, they're Mum's. The next decade will be an artificially demarcated interval of time. I'm not making a lot of sense so I'll let Utah Phillips explain it.

Rape-rape are you fucking kidding me?

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:18:00 +0000

I'd managed to avoid writing anything about Roman Polanski and I wasn't going to bother but to be honest, his Christmas message to his supporters rankled. Everything about how widely he's been supported, by people that you would expect to know better gets on my nerves. Personally, I believe that retributive justice is a luxury we can't afford, that prison should be only for people who present a physical danger to the world. This would be more humane in most ways, harsher in others (none of these people would be wandering around if I could help it). According to my own logic then, putting Polanski in jail would be pointless and it looks like they're not going to. I just kind of want him to be in jail forever and ever. Somehow I just can't feel any sympathy for him.

I got partway through trying to summarize my position on teen sexuality when I remembered I don't need to. It was rape, clear and simple. Whilst he was licking her, penetrating her vaginally then anally, she was begging him to stop and take her home. If she'd been a 57 year old hooker it would not matter because she was not consenting. The acts are upsetting enough in the denatured language of the court deposition, to commit them suggest that Polanski had very little compassion in him. If Polanski had taken advantage of a 13 year old with a crush on him that would be deeply skeevy behaviour but the girl actually didn't consent or want to have sex with him. Trying to posit this as American's lack of sophistication about the European tradition of sexual mentoring is beside the point (incidentally most Europeans were surprised to hear it was considered traditional to be sexually initiated by a man almost old enough to be your grandfather).

Reading the deposition also made me angry at the way responsibility keeps being put on the victim. Why did they ask about her sexual history or about her previous drinking and drug taking? I hope the way they question minors has at least improved (I'm pretty sure the way they question adult women hasn't). You might say she was stupid to take the drink and drugs he offered her but that's not the point. Rape isn't a natural phenomenon. If you get drunk and wander outside in a g-string and freeze to death tonight it's your own silly fault. If you get drunk and wander outside in a g-string and somebody rapes you it's their fault. They're thinking beings, they make the decision to rape (as opposed to suggesting you stop lying in that snowbank).

So strike one for sympathy. It was rape-rape, Whoopi notwithstanding.

Some say he's been punished enough, having to live in a series of beautiful chalets and château set in their own grounds and working with some of the biggest names in film. I haven't raped anyone but I'm sure I've done something that merits some of this brutal treatment. I've not paid my council tax, is that not enough? No? Oh well.

Strike two.

The judge was unfair to him, trying to give him an unusually harsh sentence. A situation akin to people wanting Paris Hilton to do serious jail time for a DUI even though the punishment is normally a slap on the wrist. The thing is, although raping a 13 year old was a slap on the wrist type thing in the 70's (unless she was a good girl of course), Polanski was probably right, if self-serving, when he asserted that it was common practice but that is not important. I personally like the current standard where it's a more serious offence. For that matter, DUI should have more penalties, you could kill someone?

Strike three. Is baseball like rounders? We used to get just the three goes but I suppose he is famous. Why am I using sports metaphors? One more for luck?

He's has had a hard life. This is the most common and the only one that has much merit. Having lived through the holocaust and having your wife, with whom you were expecting a family, murdered in a spectacularly horrific crime will do things to you. Polanski had apparently spent most of the time between then and the rape on a nightmare descent into booze and pills in the rarefied and consequence free environment of Hollywood. It's possible that that could make even a basically decent man go into a moral freefall where sodomizing a frightened teenager doesn't seem like a big deal. History shows that most people if shaken up the wrong way can do terrible things. Deserving of punishment perhaps but also understanding.

The thing is, if that were the case, you'd expect him to feel kind of bad about it. In the famous 1979 interview with Martin Amis he said.

“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!”

He hasn't said anything in the intervening years suggests he's changed his attitude. That's what finally stops me from having any sympathy at all with Polanski. As far as he's concerned he's done nothing to feel bad about. Come to think of it, his lack of remorse for his crime and his continued fondness for young girls maybe justifies keeping him inside. Not that they will.

That was no fun at all to write. I've remembered why I stopped talking about the news.

Gucci flesh eaters.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:09:00 +0000

Do you remember that episode of Sex and the City where Carrie sees a plump woman walking down the street and has a quasi-erotic fantasy of tearing into her with teeth and nails then devouring her still living flesh? It's in the book.

I mention this because Naomi Wolf has decided that Carrie Bradshaw is the most important female icon of the last decade. She writes:

Rather, the core of the tale was always the life-sustaining friendship among four women, as the men in their lives came and went. This break from narrative norms was remarkable not just because Bushnell was insisting that four women – no longer in their first youth – were renewably compelling on their own terms; it was also radical because, in a very un-PC but admirable flouting of feminist norms, Bushnell was brave enough to lay bare the secret – that for many women the search for love is the same urgent, central, archetypal quest story that for men is played out in war narratives and adventure tales.

This suggest that she only watched the show and never got around to reading the book. The whole female friendship thing? Not in the book at all. How do I know? Because unlike Ms Wolf I have read the book. I picked it up for 15p in a charity shop because anything that makes that big a cultural splash engenders a certain curiosity, even though the show had always bugged the hell out of me. This is the bit where someone normally say that it's a guilty pleasure and that people (sometimes they just say men) complain about it but always watch it when it's on. I don't find it even a guilty pleasure, it grates on my nerves like a rusty saw.

The book, however, is something else again. I'd be interested how many woman picked it up expecting a nice dose of chick-lit to lift the spirits and confirm gender norms while pretending to flout them. From the looks of my copy, whoever had owned it previously got no further than the first 10 pages. It's funny how people have generally overlooked the massive difference in tone and content between the book and the series. Much funnier is that since the massive success of the latter, Candace Bushnell has gotten stuck writing books that try to ape the series that's supposedly based on her first book.

It's a deeply disturbing book and not just for it's occasional cannibalistic reveries. Originally serialized in the New York Observer as a cross between roman à clef and gossip column, it's set in a dystopian Manhattan where concern for status and appearance have totally consumed all genuine emotion. The authorial "I" gives way to her stand in, Carrie, but it doesn't really affect the plot because there isn't one. The cold harshness that sometimes undercut the TV show is pretty much the whole of the book.

People called Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte turn up but they're talking heads who make one or two appearances, not particular friends of Carrie or each other. They bear no more resemblance to the TV characters than any other woman in the book. Female friendships in the book are mostly depicted as long-running attempts to subtly undermine each others relationships and jostle for status, the most important status symbol being an appropriately wealthy male.

One character who does get a substantial appearance is Stanford Blatch. On TV Carrie's chubby little gay friend, in prose a freezing A-gay who pours withering scorn on others plastic surgery and tries to buy the affections of a straight underwear model who he decides he's in love with although really he feels nothing. Another episode concerns men who find women they're deeply compatible with, and love as much as their foetid little hearts allow, but who they judge to be not attractive enough to be acceptable mates for men of their status. So they avoid being seen in public with them and eventually dump them for prettier woman for whom they feel nothing. There's also the famous depiction of a group of women having lunch discussing how comfortable they are now having sex with men for whom they feel nothing.

You may have noticed a theme developing. Incidentally, I can't be the only one who thinks that setting the next Sex and the City movie after a zombie uprising would be beyond fabulous. I can even see the tagline "They Shop, They Fuck, They Kill!!!"

It's obvious who Candace Bushnell models her prose on and as I put the book down I silently said to myself "You, my dear, are no Dorothy Parker". Interesting as it was to spend the hour or so it took to read the book in the company of people who know their pursuit of designer label status is destroying their souls, afterwards it was necessary to spend time with my friends who are still capable of human feeling and are all remorselessly non-aspirational. Thank God.

I'm always the last to know.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 16:42:00 +0000

More news that everyone else had already heard is that Demonoid is back online. Torrent sites like this are a valuable way for creative people to reach new audiences and distribute their content and that's all I use them for. Allegedly

I'm still foggy from Christmas which went much better than expected. I walked home past a nightclub which had a lot of people standing outside as if it were any other Friday night. Is it just me or is there something inexpressibly sad and pathetic about going out on the pull on Christmas? It just seems wrong somehow. I don't know. I think I'm the only person who loves sodium vapour streetlights. The short ones with the little hats, you know the kind of thing.

Brain should be back online tomorrow. In the meantime, there is always Youtube.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 15:51:00 +0000

You may have noticed that I haven't done much in the way of Christmas content. Christmas is a bit of a lose-lose proposition for me (spend with family=miserable, spend with other peoples family=lovely then get depressed about not being able to have nice Christmas with own family). This year it's my own relatives and I'm trying not to think about the meal ahead. I just hope I can get the hell out before the Eastenders Christmas Special.

For my US readers, British soaps are not like American ones, they're not about beautiful people with chiselled physiques leading glamorous lives. They're about subhuman animals who appear to have been sculpted from leftover mashed potatoes leading lives of melodramatically bleak despair. Eastenders is the most popular and consists entirely of angry drunken middle-aged criminals with receding hairlines punching people while hatchet faced woman announce that Roy's their family now.

I'll cheer myself by thinking of better things. Mexico just became the first country in Latin America to legalize gay marriage (an issue I have mixed feelings about but I'm pragmatic). The new Detective Comics came out and while Batwoman's origin was underwhelming as predicted, they lampshaded the heels she wore in 52, which made me happy.

So whilst I spend time with people who share worrying large quantities of my genetic code, I will be off in my happy place. Which looks a lot like this.

Retcon of the previously damned as misogynist assholes.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 23:33:00 +0000

I'm a little bit of a comics nerd but I don't keep up with them all that much because it's impossible. Even if you're getting them for free, trying to keep track of all the titles by either of the major comics companies is impossible. It's not even possible to keep track of all the Batman related titles. This leads me to the rule that all crossovers suck. Guest appearances are one thing but when every comic seems to end with "continued in Kneetrembler #57" and you've not only never heard of Kneetrembler but don't want to, it gets tiresome.

So I'm a little out of touch but as I'm still sentient, I had heard of the new Batwoman, whose status as the most high profile lesbian character in comics concealed that she was a supporting character in her ex-girlfriend Renee "The Question" Montoya's story and that almost nothing about her had been explained. So I've been eagerly reading her headlining run on Detective Comics and so far, so good. Not only is the art spectacular but they've actually lampshaded the silliness of superheroine hair. Wigs are the future (for your comfort and convenience I've made these images clickable).

Sadly her Alfred equivalent isn't a sassy drag queen.

Plus they've put her in a tux which should cheer up the commentators who thought she was too conventionally femme (as a further note, her ex is a fairly butch lesbian who fights in practical shoes and she's Detective Comic's co-feature).

I can think of two people who just became a lot more likely to read this comic.
You know who you are.

Admittedly even if they acknowledge it, there are already too many Alice in Wonderland inspired villains floating around and I have a feeling that her origin story is going to turn out a bit underwhelming although having her kicked out of Military Academy under "don't ask, don't tell" was a nice touch.

While all this has been going on, I've managed to miss something. Stephanie Brown has been resurrected! For those of you who don't feel like reading the wikipedia entry, Stephanie Brown was the daughter of a reformed supervillain who became a vigilante called Spoiler to stop her father when it turned out he wasn't reformed. She was Tim "3rd Robin" Drake's long-term girlfriend and when he retired, Batman made her the 4th Robin. For 5 minutes before he fired her and trying to get back in his good graces ended up launching a gang war that nearly wiped out Gotham City (Gotham City seems to be nearly wiped out at least twice a year) and got her horribly tortured. She then died of her injuries. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Annoying them even more was that almost everyone instantly forgot her. No memorial in the Batcave, even her boyfriend spent more time grieving for Superboy (yes, you're not the only ones to think that and yes, rule 34 is in effect). The only one who seemed to remember her was her friend Cassandra Cain (Batgirl 3) who tended to see her whenever she had a near-death experience.

However people got really, really angry when the writers decided that she'd actually been killed by Dr Leslie Thompkins to teach Batman not to use kids as his sidekicks. Again if you don't feel like reading the wiki, Dr Thompkins runs a free medical centre for the poor and the caped and was Batman's surrogate mother and Catwoman's occasional therapist. She got the largely thankless task of being the most compassionate woman in Gotham. And now she'd cold-bloodedly murdered a helpless teenager in her care to score moral points.

There's a reason people sometimes wonder if comic writers have a problem with woman.

This did have the positive outcome of causing the unexpectedly large numbers of female comic nerds to come forward and say "Um no" in clear unambiguous terms and happily it looks like someone (Chuck Dixon most importantly) listened. They've now retconned it so that Dr Thompkins faked Stephanie's death and they've been living in Africa together which relatively makes good sense by comic retcon standards. And guess what she's doing now.

Gotham City: Come for the weather, stay for the psychopathic costumed criminals.

Yep, she's the new Batgirl and I'd missed it. Cassandra quits and gives her costume to Stephanie. This does mean that the first non-caucasian Bat has retired so minor loss in terms of DC diversity but considering everything the writers have slung at her, this is the first in-character thing she's done in years.

Never patronize a superheroine.

Also it does give us a Batgirl who's much lighter on the angst. I also like that she has Barbara Gordon (Batgirl1 and now Oracle) as her personal mentor, as since Birds of Prey ended she hasn't had a lot to do except star in a notably poor mini-series. They feel like a good fit as Stephanie's enthusiastic amateur status is reminiscent of Barbara's time as Batgirl. I like that the art has avoided portraying her as either Boobs of Doom or Muscular Anorexic or Musclar Anorexic with Boobs of Doom (for worst case scenarios see Rob Liefeld). I like that the new costume looks more bulletproof than fetishy. The loose hair is a bit silly but maybe it's a wig.

I'm just hoping they don't kill her off in issue #8.

Stick it in.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:25:00 +0000

Sometimes low expectations work in a film's favour. I can't even remember how I heard of Stiletto now, but I had an hour and a half to kill and I heard it had a female assassin and plenty of violence. I have few needs and sometimes those needs are fulfilled by disembowelment. Does that make me a bad person?

The film starts with mafia boss Virgil talking to a recalcitrant gang leader in the sauna of an exclusive health club (I thought the crimes organized in saunas were of a rather different sort but never mind). He's just beginning to lose his temper when his girlfriend Raina suddenly appears and slits his associate's throat before gently indicating that the relationship is over.

It's not you, it's me.

Feeling hurt, even after his intestines are repacked, Virgil asks reluctant crooked cop Beck to find her. There's also the matter of a missing $2 million which gets the rivalry up between Virgil's main henchman Alex and Lee. Not to mention some neo-nazi's, Beck's suspicious partner (an underused Kelly Hu) and Lee's girfriend Penny who is succinctly described by Virgil as "that psychotic cockney bitch".

♫Give me a London girl every time♫

Tom Berenger, William Forsythe, Michael Biehn, Tom Sizemore, this film has an impressive cast for an eighties film. Sadly it was made last year and so serves as a testament to the cruelty of the aging process. You remember how cute Michael Biehn was in The Terminator and Aliens? Those days are gone my friends. Their performances are all pretty decent though.

This film seems to have been pretty much savaged and I was surprised by that until I saw the box art which makes this look like a Bikini-Babes-With-Big-Guns type of movie which it isn't. I was expecting a gratuitous shoot-'em-up and the film caught me by surprise by having a plot that required paying attention. It has scenes that are there not to service that plot or to provide extra violence but to add depth and complexity to the characters. The setting suggests a world of various criminal organizations all in uneasy co-operation and competition with each other. I don't want to make the film sound like a masterpiece but real thought went into this.

I was reluctant to get my flu shot this year,
but the nurse insisted.

Having said that, the writer Paul Sloan also plays Beck and while he's not bad exactly he does bear a striking resemblance to Simon Cowell. Just saying.

Still, the star of the show is Stana Katic as Raina and she's a memorable character. Even though the blurb calls her a "sexy femme fatale" she comes across as oddly neuter. Characters like this are often portrayed as vagina dentata on legs, their carnality and violence linked but Raina only acts sexy specifically to get close to a target. The rest of the time she slouches about in a hoody and sweats (and admittedly the evil eyeshadow). It's an intense, tormented and coldly vengeful performance and probably better than the film deserves. Ms Katic had a small roles with return potential in Quantum of Solace and Heroes and I hope to see more of her in future.

Also noteworthy is Amanda Brooks as Penny who's supposed to be grating and awful and manages it splendidly (I'm not being backhanded, she was very good). I would like to say however, that I'm tired of self-mutilation as a standard quirk for violent female characters. There's a big difference between cutting yourself and cutting other people and it's lazy characterization.

It said turn your mobile off before the film started.

Direction is decent, the film looks grimy in that Saw kind of way that's become a cliché in recent years. This is assassin as professional murderer rather than kung-fu queen and until the end when Raina's offing bodyguards who seem unable to see outside the frame, most of the extremely nasty violence is quite realistic. There's a tattoo removal that is particularly unpleasant. You have been warned.

Not a great film then but competently written, acted and shot with a standout lead. Again better than most of what's turned up in the cinema this year.

I could see that full contact acupuncture
was not going to become a popular treatment.

2011 note: When I rewatched this recently I decided I'd probably been a little too kind to it. Plus there's a really nasty transphobic scene with a couple of sex-workers. Stana Katic is still great though.

Hooray, let's kill some mobsters!

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:40:00 +0000

The DWP have come through, I'm not going to be made homeless for Xmas. And it's the longest night of the year. What better way to celebrate than to review a couple of low-budget films about mafia hitwomen? Well yes, obviously, but what if I don't happen to feel like being fellated at the moment? Had you considered that?

First up is Angel of Death the story of Eve, a kung-fu fighting assassin whose career is interrupted when she receives a ~~hilarious~~ very serious injury.

The migraine sufferers' support group meeting took an unexpected turn.

Despite her doctor assuring her that it's nothing to worry about, she's suddenly unable to pull the trigger on her prospective victims and starts seeing visions of a girl she inadvertently killed. Yes, she is being called on to right the wrongs she's committed which gives her and her agent/lover a very short life expectancy. Does this sound familiar or is it just me?

Why would you want to see this film? Well for starters it's written by Ed Brubaker whose best known for his comics writing, most particularly his acclaimed relaunching of Catwoman which actually treated the character with some real depth and avoided the soft-core pornification that she's often been subjected to.

I prefer a cubicle to myself.

Second it's got a nice cameo from Lucy Lawless in a small but pivotal role that's very different from Xena and Number 3.

The most important thing though is that this is Zoë Bell's first headlining role and she's amazingly good. Handling stuntwork well was expected but she also manages to be likeable, sympathetic and believable. No small task considering that Eve is not the cuddly of people, being pretty much a hardened killer and adrenaline junkie. It's unlikely she'll be cast in much outside the action genre but I'm hoping she gets the chance. She can wipe the floor with most of the blandly pretty ingenues who represent the current crop of young actors and I don't just mean by hitting them.

I was regretting my decision to visit a holistic proctologist.

There's a little miscasting, everyone refers to Franklin(Justin Huen) as "kid" but he looks at least 30, meantime the big bad Cameron(Jake Abel) looks like a 14 year old. A creepy, sadistic junkie 14 but still 14. I get that he's the mob boss' upstart son and he's supposed to be young but he's also supposed to nearly beat Eve in the final fight and it's just not credible. They both give perfectly serviceable performances though.

The evening was ruined and I insisted on being driven home.

I didn't like the film's look, which is all distorted colours and reminded me of Domino which I regretted watching on many levels but principally for the 2 day migraine it triggered. Your mileage may vary. There are also some comic book style framing panels that seem leftover from the films origin as a webseries. Again I didn't much like them, they felt like they belonged in a 60's superhero film.

I was beginning to suspect she was not the sweet
old-fashioned girl I'd fallen for.

Obviously the selling point here is the action. The director and editor have had the sense to realize that Zoë Bell has major skills and it would be very silly to do the usual mass of close-ups and quick cutting that constitutes most action scenes these days. The fights hit the sweet spot between weightless kung-fu and boring brutality and are memorably intense. They might not have the cinematic flair of true greatness but they're still better than anything I've seen in the cinema or on TV this year.

Our first date was getting off to a rocky start.

So a solid B-picture with A-quality violence. If you want to see some excellent ass-kicking watch this film. If that kind of thing leaves you cold, don't bother.

Fare thee well my bright star.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 01:45:00 +0000

Boring self-absorbed post warning.

One of life's truisms is that lumps are bad news. You don't want a lump in your custard, your pillow or any sensitive portion of your body (as my near-obsessive checking of testicles attests*). Having a lump in my hair then was not a good thing although significantly better than one in my balls.

It formed when I had to cut through my dreads at the back last year. They'd matted together completely, my philosophy being that all knotting was good and would inevitably lead to faster forming of dreads. Instead the mat just began tugging painfully at the short hairs on the nape of my neck when I moved.

Unfortunately when I cut, there was a big bit of mat that was no longer attached to my head and was just stuck on the side of my dreads like a remora. I should have removed it but I thought it would somehow be absorbed. Instead it eventually rolled itself into a ball that began making it hard to lie on my back and itched. I tried to thin it out but I couldn't even get the point of a knife through it. I now know why Vikings cultivated dreads. If you'd swung an axe at me, you might've broken my neck but you'd never have cut through the hair. Boiled leather has nothing on this stuff.

So I had to cut the hairs anchoring it leaving a quarter of my head shorn. On examination, the hairball smelt faintly of a shampoo I'd stopped using a year and a half ago and was yellow inside with some sort of oily soap substance and dead skin. So I cut the dreads on the other side off and they were the same. The ones at the front, having been treated with more care, were OK but would've looked strange on their own.

So I'm now dreadless. I'm not renaming myself the Funky Cockatoo Rhubarb in honour of my new hairstyle though. I will regrow them. This time nothing but coconut oil and baking soda on my precious hair. I'm not sure if I'll let them knit up on their own again or get them backcombed. Until then, I've got a carrier stuffed with shorn locks and my memories to keep me going.

*My own, other people's testicles checked by arrangement.

It's dangerous round here.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:18:00 +0000

I don't remember being particularly traumatized as a child when I found out my parent's were fucking. Admittedly I've never seen or heard them at it, I just realized that they must be doing it, at least occasionally and I was OK with that. As they refused to divorce (no matter how often I asked them to) I guessed that they'd be even harder to live with if they didn't have some means of relieving their frustrations. Knitting, bowling and complaining about your horrible job could only take you so far. Yes, I was a deeply ungrateful incarnation of pure evil as a child, why do you ask? You're just jealous cause Ingrate is cooler than the nickname your parent's gave you.

However, there was one incident that scarred me when I was about 9. My dad had a habit of going round at night making sure all the electrical devices were turned off. I would often wake up, fuming silently at this deliberate ignoring of my desire for privacy, as Dad carefully checked that the sockets that were always off in the futile hope that he'd get the hint and stop. One night a strange quadrupedal beast shuffle-crawled into my room on all fours, bumping repeatedly into furniture. It was the night of the annual piss-up at my Dad's bowling club and he was steamed out his gourd but still following his nightly ritual. He reached the socket, spent some fruitful time trying to work out if it was on or off and then laboriously turned round.

"Dad are you alright?" I ventured. Perhaps realizing that his position lacked dignity he decided to haul himself upright by means of the wardrobe door. As all our furniture was from MFI* it rapidly listed from cuboid to parallelepiped (sorry but I've wanted to say parallelepiped for a long time). At this point Mum arrived and managed by a superhuman effort to get both the wardrobe and my father vertical again. It was some time before sleep came. Everyone talks about how big a trauma finding out that your parent's are doing it is but nobody seems to mention the trauma of seeing one (or both) of them utterly legless for the first time.

Unlikely filmic behaviour 1
Running toward, not away from, things.

I mention this for two reasons. Firstly, I enjoy causing suffering to the people who love me. Secondly, it was the main thing going through my mind when I watched Paperhouse. Originally marketed as a horror film, it's actually one of those children's films that turned out too bloody scary for children.

This is normal. Nothing about this picture is strange at all.

It concerns a sulky 11 year old called Anna who's uncomfortably poised on the edge of adolescence, fighting with her mother and missing her father who's away working abroad. She starts having fainting spells, apparently due to glandular fever and when she passes out, she wakes up in a dreamworld created by her drawing of a house.However the gloomy paraplegic boy called Marc who lives there insists that he's not her creation, he just woke up there too. Back in the real world, her doctor tells her about a severely ill boy she's treating who happens to be called Marc who Anna starts believing is the boy in her dream. Nothing she draws seems to turn out quite as hoped so she decides to draw the person she wants most to help them. You don't have to be a qualified Neo-Freudian to know it's a bad idea.

Not a good sign.

What makes Paperhouse so disturbing is how it taps a primal fear that's a little too raw for the children's film this was supposed to be. Consciously Anna loves, idolizes and misses her father but on another level he's a terrifying near stranger whose motives she can't fully understand or predict. No matter how outwardly benign, parents hold the power of life and death over children and the possibility they may turn on them is a bit of a worry for most kids.

I'm not going to joke about this.

The film also hits on how even the most lucid dream is never really under conscious control. Draws a house and instead of a cosy cottage it materializes as a chunk of weeping concrete standing in a bleak wilderness, draws someone to be friends with and he's a miserable invalid then draw your father. When the looming paternal figure arrives on the hill it's one of the most effective shock moments I've seen in a film, all the more impressive because it's entirely expected and it still scared the piss out of me. Director Bernard Rose (Candyman) knows not only how to craft striking images but striking images that move, a good example being the scene where Anna wakes up in the field below the house which echoes, without slavishly copying, the famously eerie Christina's World. The acting is good although reminiscent of British kids shows. Unfortunately so are the effects which undercuts some of the drama.

Paradise is a phallic symbol. I always suspected.

I've just realized that I have no idea how to end this review which may be because the films ending is so peculiar, a quarter hour that seems strangely appended to the rest of the film. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. Many questions remain wisely unanswered. We never find out if Marc really is who Anna thinks he is. We do find out that her father isn't anything like the monster of her dreams. Um...

Good film then? Yes, although if you weren't scared of your parents growing up you might not find it so effective.

*For my American readers, MFI is the reason British people think IKEA furniture is wonderfully sturdy and well designed.

If you're not in Edinburgh you can probably skip this.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:42:00 +0000

Not to disconcert you or anything but this isn't actually a film blog (although it would probably get more hits if it was). It's a whatever-subject-temporarily-captures-my-wavering-attention blog. I've been trying to write reviews of things I think are actually good, not ironically enjoyable. It turns out that it is harder to be nice than nasty. Explains a lot. Sorry, I digress.

Anyway, tomorrow the NATO thingummy (you can tell I have a steel-gauntleted grasp of the issues) starts in Edinburgh so if you want to protest it you should turn up at the Hall upstairs from the Forest Café around 10am. More details at the Nato Welcoming Committee website. There's a fundraising punk concert there at night to raise funds and a fundraiser (that isn't a punk concert) on Saturday for the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Woman in Afghanistan have a rough time (north Siberian weather a bit nippy, suns corona quite warm, etc) so it's worth showing some support.

I'll actually write something you might want to read soon, honest.

Google analytics reveals full extent of human desperation.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 06:44:00 +0000

It's something other blogs do but I've never gotten round to. Yes, it's the self-indulgent post where I look at some of the search terms that have brought people here. Not that many people though. Look, it's easier than actually writing something.

kill everybody in the whole world

Amazingly this is the most popular search term. People who presumably were looking for this blog. Unless they were looking for vintage Blackadder episodes. That was probably it.

christien anholt shirtless

Considering all the other sites you'd have to go through first, these people must be unusually desperate to see Mr Anholt's torso. I'm almost tempted to print a sympathy picture.

how to kill everyone in the world

I like to think that somewhere there's a frustrated mad scientist, filled with venom but short on the criminal genius neccessary. Keep trying and don't say "Nothing in the world can stop me now". It never helps.

anita blake sex excerpts/anita blake sex with belle morte/belle morte ardeur

That review is the gift that keeps on giving. Nothing has and probably nothing will bring so many angry fans and happy anti-fans to this site (is anti-fans a word?). It was totally worth the 29 solid hours it took to write. It probably wasn't worth however many hours it took to hack through Incubus Dreams though.

can someone kill every body in the world

I'm guessing whoever asked this question is the nervous type. The answer is yes, don't bother collecting canned goods, it won't save you. Just make your peace with your loved ones, you know the ones you haven't called since you started living in that bunker. Incidentally a proper bunker is more than a tunnel you dug in your garden and propped up with some old 2x4s and corrugated iron.

death is approaxing im gonna kill everybody

I have an alarming feeling that I'm going to have the chance to find out how Marilyn Manson feels. Remember high school doesn't last, soon you'll never have to see these people again anyway. Also it's spelled approaching, I don't like to be persnickety but in these days of easily available spellcheckers...

girl locker room video

Oddly everyone who does a list like this has this as a search term. Somewhere an increasingly desperate pervert searches for the lost locker room video he's no longer sure might not have been a dream. A dirty, filthy, beautiful dream.

how to kill everyone ever in the world

It's the frustrated mad scientist again, even more frustrated because he clicked on the search term having forgotten that he'd seen this website before and it didn't feature any good plans for bringing on the apocalypse. Tell you what, why not try weaponizing ebola in your bedroom? Although if you want to kill everyone ever then some sort of time travel device might be neccessary. You may need to get a day job to pay for materials.

As a minor detail, as a result of me writing this, several very right wing websites just got hits for "how to weaponize ebola". I like to think I'm making people happier.

Probably not that final a destination.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:08:00 +0000

I thought I'd write about something that was still in the cinemas for a change. Then I found out that The Final Destination is no longer being shown in cinemas but fuck it. Why mess with a good thing. Or in this case, not so good.

I expected to enjoy this film and I did but that's because I required very little. All I wanted was that the lead actors would be shirtless every now and then

I see you are conventionally attractive and lying down.
I like that in a man.

and that as many characters as possible would die in elaborately horrible ways.

I know you can't see what led up to this,
but it was pretty elaborate.

Plus it was in 3D. There are lower standards for 3D. I'm not sure why it keeps being used in horror films as it kind of distracts the viewer and the debris in scenes where things are exploding or burning down has clearly been comped in but it's certainly technically impressive. You feel like you can reach out and touch abs (I maintain that the real future for this technology is porn)

So for me it more or less delivered. Although it was a little shocking (in a bad way) to see how committed the writers were to ensuring the most streamlined delivery of my minimum requirements. Name, who they're fucking and one pertinent fact are all we learn about any of the characters and I had to look them up on IMDB to get the names

Name: Janet
Who she's fucking: Formerly Hunt (the douchebag)
Pertinent fact: Alternates hysteria and mistimed bouts of scepticism

Name: Hunt
Who he's fucking: Formerly Janet, now any woman dumb enough
Pertinent fact: Douchebag

That's about it. How do they all afford their spacious homes? Why are they friends? Are they at college or something? We don't know and frankly we don't care. All we care about is that they'll wear revealing/no clothing and snuff it in ways that suggest Death played Mousetrap a lot as a child.

♫I'm in the middle of a chain reaction♫

As I've just savaged the film's writing and cast (they'd probably be more memorable in a more memorable film) I have to compliment it again on technical skill. Not only is the effects work impeccable but it sometimes manages to generate surprising tension on pure props alone as you really don't give a toss what happens to any of these people. This is the third sequel, we all know perfectly well that they're utterly doomed and at best will claw back a year or so before their complicatedly painful fate will befall them. It would be hard to get an audience to invest in them under those conditions and it's perhaps wise of them not bother. This is reheated stuff but, you know,

GORY DEATH
in
3D
SHIRTLESSNESS

That's about it really. The producers said this would be the last one but it made $150 million so this is one formula we'll be seeing again. Quite literally in my undiscriminating case.

The death of young wolves morons is never to be pitied.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:16:00 +0000

I always mean to do the Final Girl Film Club thing but I never seem to get round to it in time and once more I'm a day late and 61p ($1) short. But having got hold of and watched the film, I'm not going to stop now.

Every great monster has its weakness. Werewolves have silver, gorgons have mirrors, even dragons have that soft spot on the underbelly. And I have dorks. Not whip-smart geeks, filled with sarcasm and not vile, skinny-jeaned hipsters who have lain siege to the word nerd. No, it has to be the true, wild dorks in all their badly dressed glory, blinking through glasses that aren't even ironically fashionable, that bring out a reluctant protective instinct. When my bloody reign of terror destroys humanity they too will perish but I'll feel really bad about it.

Which is why I winced a little watching the start of Slaughter High, even though Marty has to be the dumbest dork ever imagined, naive to a point that even dorks would find annoying. This doesn't make him stand out amongst a group of characters who are not simply the stupidest you will ever see in a slasher film but the stupidest characters you will ever see in anything ever. That includes reality television. The film appears to be set in a parallel universe where humanity has evolved, like the dodo, without even the baseline intelligence provided by a survival instinct.

We open with Marty being lured into the girls locker room with the promise of birthday sex by Carol (I won't bother naming the other characters because what's the point?). As you might expect, when he pulls back the curtain to reveal himself naked there's 11 people pointing and laughing at him. At this point I noted that Marty is uncircumcised (which seems to have upset some people). To add another layer of humiliation they've got an early video camera. To add another layer of humiliation they prod him with a javelin when he tries to cover himself. To add another layer of humiliation when he tries to grab a towel they've electrified the towel rack. To add another layer of humiliation the boys then grab him and dunk his head in the toilet for several minutes, nearly drowning him.

Do you have what it takes to serve your country in the CIA?

Most viewers will have already decided that these kids deserve to die but bear in mind this is only the initial prank. They get caught by the gym coach and given detention. Infuriated by such a disproportionate punishment to their Abu Ghraib antics in revenge they give him a poisoned joint (which he smokes, I said he was stupid). Then while he's retching in the toilet his chemistry experiment, which for some reason requires balancing a gallon bottle of nitric acid on top of the wobbliest shelves possible, is sabotaged resulting in him being set on fire and doused with nitric acid.

Yes, this undoubtedly the best place to store this
highly dangerous chemical.

Marty apparently goes to the school for loathsome teen sociopaths. Wedgies are usually as bad as it gets. Flashforward 10 years and Carol, who now lives in a 1970's porn set, is preparing to go to her high school reunion.

Where did Dirk Diggler go?

When the gang meet up, they're all delighted to see each other, disfiguring a total innocent together doesn't seem to have coloured their relationships at all. This is the point in the movie where you stop thinking how stupid Marty is and get to revel in how stupid everybody is. Only the people who tortured Marty are invited? Not worth worrying over . The school has been obviously closed for years? No cause for concern, enjoy the free food somebody's left and get high.

Why did I have mentos AND diet coke?

Spattered with blood from murdered friend? Take a bath, the killer won't bother you there.

It's the oil of vitrose that gives deep relaxation.

Need to repair an old riding mower to escape? Insist that your friends leave you alone to fix it, they'd only distract you. If a silent figure walks in while your lying prone underneath it don't worry, it's surely only one of your friends who's come back to hand you a wrench.

Extreme manscaping.

Incidentally if your husband is off getting murdered under a riding mower, it's a perfect time to reveal the true paternity of your child to his former best friend. Why not enjoy some impromptu reunion cuckolding. In case of impotence, remember mockery is an aphrodisiac (bizarrely I'm not being sarcastic here, in the Slaughter High world making fun of a limp dick gets it hard again). What can go wrong?

I bet you were expecting a corny joke about the sex
being electrifying. Well screw you, I can't be bothered.

I do have to give kudos to the location scout who found the abandoned school this was shot in. This underscores the characters idiocy as no sensible person would have stayed in it for a second, it shows up the carefully dressed bad places of Hostel and Saw as the slick imposters they are. Sadly it does seem to consist of a three rooms, a staircase and a couple of corridors. Admittedly the gym is a pretty big room but that's all it is which leads to another peculiarity. It's normal for screen killers to be able to go from point A to Point C without needing to pass through point B but in this film the victims do this as well. Either they never hired someone to do continuity or they quit after day 1.

As a final girl, Carol lacks a little something, even though having a nude model as final girl should be an innovation. First she's seems largely indifferent to the suffering of others. Second she's put in a hideous white pantsuit that's actually more disfiguring than Marty's scars. Third she has this thing for dropping perfectly good weapons next to the mildly stunned killer.

"Here have this baseball bat."
"Cheers!"

Lots of final girls do this but she really pushes it.

"This javelin will be handy for stabbing me."
"Absolutely, thanks a heap!"

She's too stupid to live, even in a slasher flick. After she's dead Marty takes a moment to be smug before being confronted with his victims who've become zombies in a very 1980's music video way.

♫It was Thriller! Thriller night! Whoo!♫

We then get the dumbest twist ending (yes dumber than Haute Tension). Marty wakes up, it's all been a dream he had in hospital. He then kills a nurse, dresses up as her for some reason (did the makers of The Dark Knight see this?) and then peels off his perfectly restored face. Presumably a sequel could have shown him killing all these people all over again.

Most of the creativity in this film went into the deaths which are enjoyably ludicrous and quite nasty (Marty still has a thing for acid). Everything else is dumb, dumb, dumb. In fairness they weren't going to ride to safety on the mower, just use it to break down the doors but that's still a dumb idea. Much has been written about the actors being way too old to play high schoolers but most of the film is set at the 10 year reunion when they're supposed to be in their mid to late 20s and they're only about a decade older than that.

The twist ending is so dumb that I actually looked up the film to find out if I'd misinterpreted it. I hadn't but I found out something much more disturbing. Simon Scuddamore who played Marty killed himself shortly after finishing the film. He was 28. To make it that little bit more depressing, he wasn't available for weekend shooting for the film as that's when he volunteered with underpriviledged children. I'm glad I didn't know that before as watching the film would have been too sad. It's upsetting to think that maybe appearing in this piece of crap helped push him over the edge.

It's no wonder my brain's turned to mush.

noreply@blogger.com (The Dreaded Rhubarb) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 18:50:00 +0000

A week is as long as I say it is. Sorry but there really does seem to be a curse on this blog.

Everybody has a secret shame, some terrible embarrassing habit and I'm no different. In fact some of mine are truly indefensible. There's really no way I can justify watching a programme like Relic Hunter. But I'm going to give it my best shot nonetheless.

When you signed on as my assistant,
you agreed to take on the fanservice,
so quit bitching.

Relic Hunter, for those of you previously unaware of it's existence, is a show about archaeology professor ~~Indiana Jones~~ Sydney Fox (Tia Carrere) who finds semi-legendary artefacts, generally of arcane significance. She's assisted by her apparently nerdy assistant Nigel (Christien Anholt, as Hugh Grant was out of their price range) while her sort of bimbo secretary Claudia (Lindy Booth who'd go on to play a serial killer opposite Carrere in the exquisitely stupid Dark Honeymoon, not that you need to know that I just felt like dropping it in) stops her university bosses from firing her for absenteeism (a running gag in several episodes). The show was made for syndication which means that it didn't end up being re-run to fill empty daytime schedules, it was made specifically to fill empty daytime schedules.

So what could possibly be good about it. Well, it is a TV show about an Asian-American woman who is presented as supremely competent, intelligent and courageous. That may not mean much to you but it probably does to someone. Not only that, she sometimes has sexual relationships with men she isn't planning to marry, just casually for fun and she is never punished either for her independence or her sexuality. I can't think of another show about a brave, competent, sexually adventurous woman who isn't punished for it, let alone one with a non-white lead.

This isn't exactly realistic representation of course, no human being speaks 6 languages, knows about apparently every lost artefact ever and is preternaturally skilled in unarmed and armed (but not with guns) combat. But a realistic show about an archaeologist would either be very dull or require thinking which is not what I look for in my daytime TV.

The other good thing about Relic Hunter is it's a lot more fun to watch any 2 episodes of it back to back than to watch either of the Tomb Raider films. That's because Tomb Raider was a serious Big Event film that cost $90,000,000 and starred an Oscar winning actress, and was as much fun as a lead suppository as a result. Relic Hunter is quite open and cheerful about being bargain basement trash. Half the shooting was done in France so there's a lot of beautiful châteaus amping up the production values and it's shot through a coral filter so everything looks pinkish gold like an old coffee commercial but it's still trash. It's just gilded trash

Don't let my qualified praise sway you, this is mind-destroyingly dumb but I enjoy it. Even writing about it like this is maybe giving it too much attention. Also the third season retired Claudia and brought in a more conventional sexy-secretary and somehow although she's only a supporting character, it was a lot less fun without her or possibly they'd just run through their stock of incredibly lame jokes and the plotlines all felt a bit more recycled. It still had the amazingly tinny John-Williams-Does-Synths theme. Oh and the fights.

You remember 80's shows where they'd have a bad-ass Asian character in one episode who'd do a hilariously slow "martial arts" fight. All the fight scenes in Relic Hunter are like that.

I really ought to be a great deal more ashamed of myself than I am. I'm going to try to review something that I think is actually good next but I'm not sure what that will be.

I was a goddess on dancing with the stars! A GODDESS!