Puffball? Puffball!! Puffball, handbastards and the rainbow gang....

Ah, well here I am back to broadband land and the batcave, ah the homely batcave with it's amber leaf, diet coke, and carling, with three phrases ringing the noggin.

1. Puffball
2. Hand Bastard
3. The Rainbow Gang

I will try and explain as quick as I can some the meaning of these phrases, although only those who were in the rainbow gang can ever know the real meaning of the rainbow gang.

During a week and a half of being at home in Rockcorry, I think the earliest I got to bed was like 3am, think of that ye cyberbottlesquatters, about 14 days of 5am drunken Irish madness to celebrate my sister's wedding, in attendence the Badbrute and Petey B we watched DOA an almost spiritual 'undercracker' (to use the 'brute's phrase) experience...'do me up'...a screen grab, or should that be 'screen grub', review of that particular piece of celluloid brilliance in due course.

Puffball is, apparently, a bad auld film set in rural England but filmed in good ole Monaghan that my sister and her friend knew about, but we couldn't get our heads around the name, we were like 'a film called Puffball?, with Donald Sutherland? directed by Nicholas Roeg?, filmed in Monagahan? we were there just going 'puffball??? puffball!! paffball'. I thought this was a demented fabrication on behalf of my beloved young sibling, but no, and lo and behold, and see below, a painfully transcribed entry in the local paper The Northern Standard, telling the whole story.

The day after the wedding, which was basically about 48 hours of continous drunkeness the only thing the brute, my wee sister and her friend could concentrate on at 6 am was one of those terrible cash call quiz shows, the clue was "hand" something the answer that we repeatedly shouted at the screen was of course "hand...job" but as that didn't win, we resorted to shouting "hand...bastard" over and over, little did we know you have to ring in to win and then I fell for the schoolboy error of drinking baileys and lime and then the brute flipped me like Fenster and I went to bed in the huff.

I was probably emotional after a a prolonged regaling to the 'brute telling the tale of 'The Rainbow Gang'. In a nutshell, when I was at school if you didn't play football you were nothing.I joined a rag tag band of nonfootballers who spent every lunchtime for like five years walking around our school aimlessly, some of use talked comics, the rest of the class called us 'The Rainbow Gang', I'm sure there was some gay implication, but I am hereby reclaiming 'The Rainbow Gang' as 'the coolest kids on campus'. In years hence potbellied bank manager GAA fuckers will be approached by breathless hip journalists and be asked 'you're from Monaghan, were you one of the 'Rainbow Gang'?, were you part of that vibrant and hip precoursor to our current geek orthodoxy?' and they will have to dolefully anser 'no I spent every lunchtime trying to grab the pants of other men while using a sphere of inflated air as an excuse, try hollywood, london, new york, or I dunno, norwich, you might find some of them there....'

What took so long to tell the story was not adolscent indignance but one of the most fondly remembered conversations of my school days were where myself and John Clerkin and Christopher McAree discussed Transformer comics in the Marvel UK universe when Doctor Who shrunk Death's Head down to human size, then when Death's Head II turned up in Marvel UK anthology comic Overkill, he met most of the 1990s Marvel Universe, thus making The Transformers, Doctor Who and all of the Marvel superheroes de facto all part of the same universe, kinda like that autistic kid in St. Elsewhere, bite on that fanboys.

The day after my sisters wedding I had an hour to kill, the hotel it was in was beside my Alcatraz like school, and it was a bank holiday so I decided to have a wander around it and recreated a lone rainbow gang route, then there was a downpour and I took refuge in a delirect sports room, smoking amber leaf and listening to Frank Black's Threshold Aprehension and found an old handball which I retrieved and now carry round as a improvised stress ball and to launch at the heads of those who give me grief.


So beware, I now have in my possession a hand bastard rainbow gang puffball which contains multiverses.....watch your heads....

Panned Puffball to preview in Monaghan, The Northern Standard, Thursday August 9th, 2007

The Nicholas Roeg film Puffball, which was partially filmed in the Monaghan area last year, will be previewed in the Diamond Screen Complex in Monaghan Town on Thursday night next, August 16.

The preview attendence is being confined in the main to invited guests and those from the locality who participated in the film. A limited number of other tickets will be available from the Market House in Monaghan.

Prospective viewers are being asked to take note of the film's strong adult content. Based on a novel by Fay Weldon, Puffball is a supernatural thriller which embraces themes that will be familiar to those who have seen the earlier film of its director, such as Performance, Don't Look Now and Bad Timing, and includes similarily frank depcitions of sexual activity and violence.
Initial critical reaction to the fillm has been extremely negative, and it has not yet been assigned an official release date in either the Uk or the United States.

"...the worst kind of unadulterated nonsense I have seen for a long time..." is one of the choicer comments from a review submitted to the IMDb internet movie database. It adds: "It's a complete mess of a film, highly insulting tp its audience's intelligence..."

A Romanian contributor to the same site, who says they have seen Puffball at the Transylvania Film Festival, is kinder:"It strongly relays on Don't Look Know's and Straw Dog's flavors (intellectual young couple in a new, strange place), but with more psychedelic and sometimes thriller elements. And it's got a really hot sex scene in it. It's old paced and sometimes quite nostalgic, but it's a treat for the eyes."

The professional cinema critics who have viewed Puffball at festival screenings such as that it received at the Galway Film Fleadh have tended towards the unkinder assessment above, an a "So bad it's good!" reputation is already building for the film.

It should be bourne in mind, however, that Nicholas Roeg is a very highly regarded director whose earlier films were often critically disapraged on their initial release only to attain elevated status in retrospect.

Notable for having its three leading roles played by women-Kelly Reilly, Miranda Richardson and the veteran British actress Rita Tushingham-Puffball tells the story of a couple building a home in an isolated rural location in the English countryside whose unborn child becomes the focus of superstition-fuelled enmity among the local community. The main role is taken by Donald Sutherland, reuniting with director Roeg to explore again the supernatural territory they entered in Don't Look Now.

Local actor Pat Deery plays the prominent role of Dr Holmes, while Declan Reynolds is cast in the supporting role of an estate agent. A substantial number of people from the local community feature in the general cast of the film.

Next Thursday's preview takes place at 8.30pm.