What with my sleep pattern being so screwed up of late and it now being 3:41am, I've decide to hell with it, it's staying up all night and all day tomorrow in an effort to actually be tired at something like a sensible time tomorrow night. New Zealand are 27 without loss against Sri Lanka A, the trailer for Kill Bill is nearly half downloaded and the 'movies Ben has seen' list is up to 880. I just looked up the movie I remember seeing with James T. in which Clint Eastwood invades Grenada, virtually single-handedly, or with only the aid of the lovable screw-ups he has moulded into an efficient fighting force (for some reason I thought it was Guam they were invading instead, but then just about the only thing I remember from the movie is the line "That, sir, is the sound of an AK47, the preferred weapon of our enemy" ) which is called Heartbreak Ridge if anybody wanted to know. I also came across mention of Suicide Kings which was something I had forgotten I'd seen, but more important than this discovery was the learning of the fact that Christopher Walken starred in a movie called McBain, as the character 'McBain'. As good Simpsons fans I believe we must track this movie down and give it a jolly good watching, if for post-modern ironic purposes only. The date given for the flick is 1991 which is about right for the start of The Simpsons, so I wonder if the writers saw it or if it's just a very funny coincidence...
For those of you I haven't explained this to yet, I decided to create a list of all the movies I can remember seeing all of - parts of movies not to be included, too hard to remember and far, far too long. As I say, I'm up to 880 now and I'm just remembering things as big budget as The Bone Collector and Contact (OK, so neither of these movies was obviously very memorable, but still fairly prominent you would have thought). Mostly simply because I could, but also because it would act (in a negative image kind of fashion) as a list of movies I should see, and because I thought I might find it interesting to work out what sort of percentage of my life has been wasted on, for example, Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. Legionnaire, anyone? Sudden Death? Maximum Risk? Oh dear oh dear oh dear. And let's not forget The Quest, Timecop, or Universal Soldier II: The Return. Dear God, there's half a day gone right there. And I'm sure I could have spent the 97 minutes I used up viewing even Hard Target - IMDB rating 5.7 out of 10, if you like this movie we also recommend: Lethal Weapon 4 (???) - better occupied, John Woo or not. So it could end up depressing reading, but hopefully an interesting tool of comparison for people, and I will stick it on here at some point. Anyway, if you remember seeing an obscure video with me - and I'm definitely struggling to remember some of the bad, BAD videos we deliberately watched at Xanadu - then send me an e-mail and I'll check it on the list. All kinds of incredibly exciting facts are already emerging. So far, for example, I've seen 159 movies beginning with the word 'The'. (Second most popular first word / syllable: 'Star'.)
Is it perhaps clear to people that perhaps I should be spending a lot more time on my thesis? Oh God yes.
I can report frm tonight's trailer viewing that Kill Bill looks pretty cool in a retro-throwback-deliberate-homage-to-70s-Hong-Kong-cinema-everyone-has-a-samurai-sword kind of way, that Johnny Depp and Geoffery Rush make authentically silly looking pirates, and the remake of The Italian Job that replaces Michael Caine with
The IMDB filmography of crazy Jack Nicholson reminded me of Mars Attacks at 894. Now why did it take me that long to remember? It's a great movie. Funny the way the brain works (or doesn't). Damn this all-consuming quest for movie titles, it doesn't get a lot of blog written. Now what was I going to rant about? Some sort of account of the weekend is probably in order. Friday night saw Dan and myself beating up on Nazis as Indy on Xbox in Indiana Jones and the Emperors Tomb, a game that would draw comparisons with Tomb Raider if it weren't of course for the fact that Indiana Jones was Lara Croft well before Lara Croft was (so to speak). Considerably more whipping things and square-jawed two-fisted (and elbow and head and bottle and chair and revolver and MP40) bar-brawling action than in your average Lara outing though. And more Nazis, of course. You know that the Nazis in Indiana Jones are most probably right bastards too, because according to Indy chronology, it's 1936 (or '38 or '35 depending on which movie you're watching or game you're playing), which means they've joined the Nazi cause (I assume) before conscription, and because who's Hitler going to send on his top-secret projects to insanely uncover and obtain for him occult powers that were never meant to be wielded by man? Some run of the mill career army officers who are just doing their job? Hell no, he's sending the most vicious fanatical sadists he can find, so there's no moral dilemma at all when you throw them over bannisters, mow a bunch of them down or kick them over cliffs into the croccodile infested river, as you can rest assured Dan and I most certainly did. Damned good stuff, and certainly something to do until Indy 4 comes out on July 4, 2005 (apparently).
On Saturday a few of us decided to spontaneously pop over to Lyttleton, as it's so handy, and of course 10 minutes from anywhere, including Peru. Imagine our surprise when we discovered Si just happened to coincidentally be having a birthday party. Lucky I was popping past with beer. Antics ensued. Cats were repelled, guitars were a-janglin', Tim McLennan claimed the most drunk prize, and I managed to climb through the mysterious gap at the top of the bathroom wall not just once but twice. Photos to follow, except of Sarah, who ran away from me like I was the paparazzi. Which of course I am, and I can assure you all that 'The Daily Mirror' paid me more than a fair price for the exclusive use of images of you all inebriated...'Saucy Simon in Sex Shocker' etc. Oh yes.
Oh, it's Wednesday now by the way, just in case this starts getting confusing. I was indeed up all Monday night but blogging gave way to surfing. I started the entry back then, and now after just 2 paragraphs New Zealand batting in colombo have progressed from 27/0 to be 283 all out, a sad total against Sri Lanka A to be sure, but a pretty impressive run rate of 128 runs per paragraph. Meanwhile, Mark Richardson continues to be the man. Somebody put him back in the one day side, for God's sake.
After spending the night at Hotel Desandsi on Saturday (the hosts were very friendly, the rates are very reasonable, the room had a harbour view and of course it's ten minutes from anywhere...so handy!) we toddled round to exotic Mount Pleasant, where I immediately recommenced work on my hangover, having taken a brief non-lunch break after some solid progress in the morning. After about an hour or so's good labour in the sun construction seemed complete, so I sent the crew home and rejoined the ranks of people who eat things. Drinking only beer of an evening seems a sensible way of doing things at the time for me, but it does seem to make my head rather sore in the morning. Curse you beer, can't I get something for nothing? Apparently not. But the price to pay on this occasion was minor, and no toilets were psychologically scarred. The afternoon was then duly whiled away in some excellent company gazing out the window and discovering I suck at Twister (who would have thought? Me, the guy who's high school flexibility rating was -10? That's 10 centimetres away from touching your own toes.) I enjoyed more success in Balderdash (what a good game), although I still can't believe that 3 people bought into S.B.A.A. standing for 'Student Bakers Against Apartheid'. As I was writing that down I was thinking 'Student bakers? No-one is gonna believe this.' But they did. The fools. Best answer of the game though went to Heidi in writing a synopsis for some film called 'The Crime of Dr Crespi', I can't recall it exactly but it went something like this:
"Dr. Crespi is not really Dr. Crespi, but in fact Amanda Monohan. But despite this, this mysterious person kept appearing in newspapers, on radio and on television. Why? What did they want? Who was the real Dr Crespi and what was their purpose, and who would solve the mystery?"
Despite receiving zero votes as a possible correct answer, all agreed that it sounded a much more interesting potential film than the actual correct answer, which was something about a mad scientist injecting a rival with 'suspended animation fluid'. I and others need to know now, who was the real Dr. Crespi? Why the continuing public appearances? Were the media simply a tool of his / her nefarious schemes? Who was the sinister woman in the red dress, Amanda Monohan, and why were she and Dr. Crespi never seen together? Why were scientific equipment lorries seen driving late at night towards Smuggler's Cove? Why had Mayor Fitzgibbon's beautiful daughter Jo-Beth disappeared without trace, in the same week that the rate of cow-tipping around the town had tripled?
You have to write the rest of this screenplay, Heidi. We'll make a jillion dollars, I'm telling you. We'll get Gary Oldman for Crespi and Anjelica Houston for Amanda. Or possibly Sigourney Weaver. Matt Damon will play the intrepid young cub investigative reporter who starts to suspect something is amiss when Dr. Crespi keeps appearing in newspapers. Stephen Fry will reprise his role from Gosford Park as the incompetent policeman who can't grasp the truth even as evil closes in. Or possibly Keanu Reeves, they're interchangable. We'll get some starlet for Jo-Beth. I like Sarah Michelle-Gellar. (I'm not saying she should be in the film, just that I like her.) I'll produce, we'll get Steven to direct, Jim Henson's Creature Shop for the cows, and I'll call Weta and they'll do us a SFX scene of Crespi transforming into Amanda like you won't believe. Awards galore, we'll have a licence to print money, it'll be bling bling baby, believe it.
That was Sunday. Monday was full of chocolate and my Dad concussing himself. Ah, Easter. An otherwise lovely Catholic girl I knew once told me I would go to hell for jokingly suggesting that Jesus must have been nailed to a chocolate cross, but where else do we get the link? OK, hot cross buns, fair enough. But eggs and chickens and bunnies? Made of chocolate? I'm always curious how this evolved; Jesus died for our sins and thus we eat chocolate. The symbols of Christianity are the crucifix and the little fishie. Easter should therefore be filled with chocolate fish - which of course we already have, (Why do we have them? One day in the Cadbury boardroom: what if, I dunno, shoes were made of chocolate? No, that'd be silly, they'd melt on your feet...OK, what if, say, fish were made of chocolate?...Brilliant!) so it wouldn't be hard. Maybe chocolate fish are less profitable and thus hollow bunnies and eggs mean chocolate salesmen are beloved of God, or something. How convenient however that Easter falls around that sort of millennia-old Spring Rites sort of period. Pagan fertility symbols, people! Don't get me started on this, I've got a degree in medieval history and I can tell you all about the Catholic church running around cunningly imposing itself on older religions, not to mention the Diet of Sour Worms of 766AD, at which the Pope at the time (Pope Jeff III) aligned the church forever with a Satanic cabal of confectionary manufacturers. So just remember next Easter that that marshmallowy goodness you're eating is secretly funding the machiavellian machinations of the Knights Templar, who as we all know are preparing to take control of the World Government in league with the Freemasons and Starbucks when they are ready to finally institute the New World Order. Don't say I didn't warn you.
A thought: nobody's enslaved Nic, have they? Do you know what that makes him? He can't be trusted! Somebody search the Chateau and see if you find an apron.
Sorry, went mad there for a second.
Arc has leapt to the rescue with an explanation of 'The League of Extrordinary Gentlemen', good work Arc, although having had my curiosity pricked the other week I did go ahead and look it up myself, and though I've ranted about it to people talking wise i must take up some blog space to note it sounds like just about one of the potentially best concepts ever. As Andrew says, it was a comic from the same guys that came up with 'The Watchmen', which is something else I have heard is very good but haven't seen myself (I seem to recall the basic premise is a superhero group with members who are vulnerable, so that every so often one of them is killed off and replaced, a la Blakes 7, and it emphasises the more human side of things as well. I could be totally wrong though). Anyway, the League is made up of a whole lot of existing fictional characters from late 19th century literature, including Mina Harker from Bram Stoker's Dracula, H.G. wells' Invisible Man, Mr Hyde of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde fame (Robert Louis Stevenson), Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, Indiana Jones prototype Alan Quatermain from King Solomon's Mines and Dorian Gray from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Other charcters pop up from all over the place as well, with James Bond's grandad (who Ian Fleming wrote a bit about, I think he's called Campion Bond) heading up some kind of primitive MI5, and the movie version will apparently also add the grown up Tom Sawyer (who Mark Twain did write some stories about: he grew up to become Detective Tom Sawyer). How cool is this? Answer: very, for a number of reasons. Firstly, because the fiction of this period is so cool. War of the Worlds, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Frankenstein, Treasure Island, Moby Dick, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, HP Lovecraft (he was actually a bit later on, but wrote stuff in the same vein)...it's all such good stuff, especially the early science fiction, in which a lot of entertainment comes from not only seeing what predictions were accurate back then, but which ones were completely wrong as well. I mean OK Jules Verne, so the centre of the earth turned out NOT to have enormous caverns and underground seas and huge dinosaur beasties in it, but all that would be a damn sight more interesting than the boring old molten rock we actually turned up. And the protagonists are all so universally dapper: handlebar-moustachioed men of science who give their gentlemen's club notice that they won't be in for a few months before stocking up on rope, buying a decent leatherbound travel diary, and heading off on an 'expedition', whether it might be jumping into their time machine in tweed coat and braces and ending up having to face taking off their tie in an emergency situation, or slapping a pith helmet on and grabbing their ex-service revolver for some jungle action, or booking passage on a vessel crewed by dubious working-class type chaps in preparation for some kind of misfortune at sea of which they will doubtless be the only survivor. Secondly, the actual time period is pretty amazing. The industrial revolution had gone boom and no-one knew what the hell was going to happen, all kinds of new ideas about society were forming and yet you still had that whole mysterious underbelly Gothic / primitive / Jack the Ripper thing going on big time, empires still existed, and Kings and queens still weilded a lot of power. As the comic promotional material labels it, 'twas a 'period of chaste order and ignoble chaos'. Old and new colliding: fertile ground for people for creative and artistcally talented than I to come up with the excellently labelled style 'steampunk.' For those of you that never played the game Chaos Engine and thus can think back to a very good visual example, think of the retro touches in A Clockwork Orange like the walking sticks and bowler hats, or try to imagine a version of The Matrix in which Neo is played by Stephen Fry (twice in one blog) carrying 2 multi barrelled flintlock pistols and wearing a monocle. OK, it's pretty hard to describe, but it's all about mad scientists and technology that looks old but is impossibly new (a steam powered laser gun, for example) and characters who wear the clothes and talk the talk of the time but have modern attitudes towards things. From what I've seen of the movie in the trailer this is going to be the style of things, and hopefully it will be cool. Thirdly, half those characters are psychotic. The Invisible Man went completely homicidally bonkers as eventually did Jekyll / Hyde, Captain Nemo hated virtually everybody (especially the English, as I recall), Mina Harker was of course casually chewed on by a vampire for half of Dracula, and Quatermain is apparently restyled as a heroin junkie in the comics. Excellent, a gang of barking mad heroes.
The point is essentially I think this sounds great, and I am going to have to try and find the comic and read it before the movie comes out so I can be appropriately massively disappointed by the Hollywood adaption. But hey, it does have Sean Connery. And Pita Wilson from La Femme Nikita. Shut up, Dan knows who she is.
Here anyway is the official comic site. Go, look, make appropriate noises. Or, if you've got the bandwith and the time, go watch Sean and his buddies in the trailer here.
Good to see I've added enthusiasm towards comics to a love of Star Wars and a habit of playing computer games. Hmmm, perhaps it's time to go and buy a pocket protector. I think it's OK though as I still play too much sport. I guess it's never too late until you catch yourself having the 'Kirk was a thousand times better than Picard!' argument. Oh, and speaking of being a grown-up, congrats to Warwick and Bhumi on their engagement, which I found about out this evening in (typical fashion ...after everybody else. No-one's fault though, as usual :) But well done folks, may the happiness continue and by all means go forth and multiply in due course. I have a target of at least 10 children being introduced to me as "and this is your Uncy Ben" by 2020, so someone has to start the ball rolling. If I'm not Mr Potentially Avuncular 2003 around here then I don't know who is. It's not Dan. OK, I'll admit, Dan would be good too.
Right, seeing as how it's now technically Thursday, movies I've seen are up to 912 (Roger Dodger was good with Teens on Tueday night, great acting by the lead guy) and I want to beat Tim off the mark and set Mark on the Tim I had better post this thing. It's 5:22am again which means my previous plan is completely undone. Oh well, what you gonna do, the post must go on.
Or not.
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