I was 'Buried' for '127 Hours' and then I got 'Wrecked'

Buried trailer.




127 Hours trailer.



Wrecked trailer.

I presume 'Wrecked' isn't about going out and getting blocked which is what the name would suggest in Irish markets. Maybe it's the scripts that make the rounds in Hollywood, does this constitute a genre? What would you call it 'Mantrap movies?' 'Restriction cinema'. In any event I smell film studies thesis material for someone in the future: 'Trapped White Masculinity' and blah blah blah etc.

V for Vagina

Inspired by the io9.com story: The weirdest, wrongest and sexiest new costumes for 2010

What was Udo's Choice in the end?....

Udo's choice which I presume would be different to....

Odo's choice, which would be to change into a desklight and whine about things

So my guttywuts are tying to kill me, although in thinking about it I started the war, and the "gut fire" to paraphrase William "Billy" Joel. I have acid reflux and various gut-related things through years of stress and misuse and also from going from PhD to stand up comedy, two fields synonymous with stress, cigarettes and bad diet. I am also back in Ireland where coleslaw and cheese counts as "salad", chips are vegetables and thus one of the "five a day", and Guinness and Baileys are the "health drinks" you have when you are not meant to be drinking. Plus I am 34, when in evolutionary terms I should be fathering and minding children rather than worrying about when I can get the time to really play Halo:Reach properly, although as Scottish comedian Gary Croft pointed out the other day, having kids normally makes you want to drink and smoke more.

I recently had a Esophagogastroduodenoscopy (EGD) with biopsy or 'gut scope' as it is more scientifically known. The nurse said not to worry as the camera was 'only the size of a chip', my geek mind went into overdrive and explained to me internally that while the camera end may have roughly the diameter of a chip, chips normally aren't 2 foot long with a plug hanging out the back and get washed in wee sinks like the tail end of an 'Alien' space hugger. I got sedated which was awesome, some people I knew went, 'don't bother with sedation, you'll feel drunk all day', yes, but what if you want to feel drunk all day. They accidentally wrote "colonoscopy" on my paperwork but I didn't need one, which was a shame as I had lubed myself up as precaution, as one does in any situation where women are approaching you with rubber gloves on. People think the dentist is expensive but you can pay a lot more for having two women approach you with vibrating equipment.

Only joking I was a bit worried for two reasons:

1. I had not prepared and had not drunk the four liters of licorice flavored 'shit yourself juice' or 'laxative' as I believed it is called, and..

2. Stewart Lee has already done pretty much the definitive 'comedian gets a colonoscopy' routine and it would be churlish of me, with the best will in the world, to claim that the last ten years or so of bad diet was an elaborate tribute act.

So now I have to start eating healthily, I thought I'd start slowly by going to the health shop and asking for the unhealthiest thing in it, turns out it was the proprietor (haha sorry). I now have a fondness for Nairns oatcakes, Whole Food's 'Wake Up' coffee alternative, which is thankfully made with guarana and not guano as I had originally thought upon reading the label, and rice cakes. And the afore mentioned Udo's Choice which seems to me to be like a bad sci-fi movie, like he has to choose between a sexy alien and sexy cyborg but he loves them both! what will "Udo's Choice" be....

It was a shame as I had my vice equilibrium finely tuned:

and now look at it!

It's alright though as I now fantasize about an huge meteor coming to destroy earth ala the great Canadian film Last Night or Mick Farren's great short story 'Fun in the Final Days' when I can smoke and drink with abandon, either that or whenever I have sex again, although, it will probably be the meteor thing first. In the meantime, that'll be me crying and jamming rice cakes into my face and masturbating outside the window of your local fast food joint....

Spot the difference...

Chatterbox (1977)

Chatterbox (2010)

don't know which is worse

BBC Radio Ulster/BBC Radio 1, Voicebox and Sunday Strip Club

It's go at Lorcy central or 'Lorcom' as I refer to it, in my head. Last night was on Hotrod McCaughan's Hot Rod of Comedy, a regular segment on BBC Introducing in Northern Ireland with Rory McConnell.

Which you can listen to here, it's about one hour and 25 minutes in.

Myself and Hotrod at Palookaville at the Oh Yeah Music Centre

Telephone interviews are always a bit weird because you don't know if you are going on too long or not enough, I end up pulling Tim and Eric style faces to myself after each sentence....

I also always immediately think feck I should of said this that or the other. Will be doing some new character madness at the Voicebox Comedy on Friday, at the awesome Safehouse Gallery which I can't wait for, Marcus Keeley's Voicebox nights have been growing steadily in popularity month after month, this one I think is the biggest line up yet, with about 20 acts with 5 minutes each, and us regulars will be doing character bits/sketches and videos in between, I made and overelaborate photoshop thing for it

One of Marcus' most recent videos from his youtube channel

With great outtakes.

and I'm doing a best of powerpoint things: "Sex and Superheroes and The Story of Poor Auld Jesus: The Highlights" at The Sunday Strip Club at the Pavilion on Sunday 9th May

The Revelation of St. Christopher of TooKee...

If you are a resident of the UK and Ireland you will no doubt be aware of the Daily Mail, now available in Ireland..kinda. For non-UK and Ireland readers, if you can image Fox News as a film of putrid bile thinly spread over newsprint you get the gist. Now the Daily Mail is an easy target, like a BNP graphic design* shaped fish in a barrel of boke. I don't want to slag it off per se, it's clever in what in does. What it does however, is waffle on until you almost fall asleep and then sticks the boot in with a sexist, homophobic, or racist phrase that gives you a feeling of peering into a parallel dimension, thinking, 'wait? did I just read that'. It's become a veritable sport among comedians to make fun of it. The best is the Daily Mail list of Things that give you Cancer.

But I digress, fundamentally, their film critic Christopher Tookey does not like films

Update: see comment below, he does like films:

Check out Tookey's Tops

verus

Tookey's Turkeys

"I have awarded marks of 6/10 or more to 2910 films so far, out of a total of 8,550 movies I have reviewed"

Now, lots of critics from Alexander Walker to Mark Kermode to Charlie Brooker , all don't like some films or tv shows, that's their job, to critically assess things in the context of their culture, but fundamentally they love the medium they write about, and arguably Brooker has actually made more TV shows, and extremely good ones, despite what this mook has to say, than most film critics have made films.

Similar to the fact that most comedians rag on the Mail, and rightly so, for easy laughs, there was a almost urban legend that Kick Ass was going to cause a Daily Mail fuss when released. This is almost nostalgia for our generation brought up on Video Nasties and seeing it's pale mirroring in the 'Crash debate', the anticipation of another tussle of censorship and moral outrage like wot we know and love, of course nothing of the sort happened. As Kermode pointed out, the BBFC certificate had a sense of the humor and irony involved...

Unlike Mr. Tookey,

Don't be fooled by the hype: This crime against cinema is twisted, cynical, and revels in the abuse of childhood

with one of the most hilarious film ratings in the world

Verdict: Evil

Rating:

?

how can a film be "evil", the majority of those killed are bad guys and drug dealers, by vigilantes no less, surely that's a demographic the daily mail can get behind when it suits them? Evil is such a metaphysical concept, it's a word created by people who don't want to comprehend the horrific capacities of humanity. Kick Ass, in contrast, is an amazing smart funny movie. It would be churlish not to admit that I only went near the mail site because I knew it would slate Kick Ass but the amount of one star reviews yer man dishes out is unbelievable, Nanny McPhee is the only recent film that has has a positive review, god help us all surviving in this world where fictional characters some how want (need!?) to destroy our very souls. Quantum of Solace get's two stars, Law-Abiding Citizen get's three?

Clash of the Titans: Back to Argos, the whole lot of you

Verdict: A horrible myth-take

Rating:

Steer clear, unless your a teenage girl

Verdict: Forgettable and regrettable

Rating:

RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN and DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION: These two should be burned at the stake

Obviously he love's Gran Torino...

* I have a theory that right-wing Christians and political Web sites see graphic designers as a heathen band of homosexuals, atheists, and general reprobates so they deliberately make all there Web sites look like shit.

Don't believe me?

Jesus, Dinosaurs and More (gee I hope the 'more' is reasoned evidence based on physical reality)

John Hicklenton (8 May 1967 – 19 March 2010)

I have foresworn twitter, and only found out today via a comment on Facebook by the great Liam Sharp of the sad passing of one my favorite 2000ad artists, John Hicklenton. In my mind, it's the kind of news that should have been on ITN, BBC, and Sky all at once instead of something about Lindsay Lohan going on a holiday to find out that bad things happen in the world:

From the 2000 ad forums "We have just been informed by Pat Mills that John Hicklenton has sadly passed away. Here are a few words from Pat: John Hicklenton passed away peacefully last week. His ending was an expected one and he saw it as a triumph over his illness MS. Amongst his final words to me were "MS - you have a week to live, you've met someone you shouldn't have f***** with". A great artist and a true hero. Pat Mills"

There was always a weirdness creeping around the edges of 2000ad, and once you got used to its standard of amazing art and writing, even more weirdness crept in. Like when you got used to Ron Smith and Carlos Ezquerra every week, and then out of nowhere BAM! there was a couple of Brian Bollands. I think every 2000ad reader has their 'golden age', a period of unrivaled quality and unbroken consumption of the comic. For me it was around 1988 to the early 1990s, not surprisingly coinciding with a rural Irish lonely adolescent geekdom. (compared with a lonely geek adulthood). I got to do Media Studies at the University of Ulster at Coleraine and wrote a thesis on Dredd in 1996(! shite that's ages ago), with a Hicklenton depiction of Dredd on the front cover, called:

"Fascism, Fetishism and Fandom: Political and Psychoanalytical aspects of Judge Dredd".

with a description of his depiction of Dredd,

Figure II: Dredd as Phallus - John Hicklenton, from ‘Heavy Metal Dredd’, in Judge Dredd the Megazine, 23/1/93 - 5/2/93. Hickleton appears to be an artist very much aware of Dredd’s fetishist like appearance and plays it up more than other more conventional artists.

"It was a time of Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns", I suppose, would be a pop culture shorthand "when comics grew up" to use another cliche. There was an attempt to try something new when the likes of Brendan McCarthy, Brett Ewins, Shaky Kane, and Rian Hughes expanded from 2000ad to'adult' titles in the anthology boom : Crisis, Revolver, Deadline and many others (Heartbreak Hotel, Overkill, Expresso, Strip, Meltdown.) Not to mention Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, Mark Millar, whose intelligent subversion you may no doubt be aware of.

For someone reading comics in Monaghan in the late 1980s and early 1990s this world, this was my equivalent of being invited into a trendy punk rock scene. One could imagine the above hanging out at some cool SoHo haunt with Jonathon Ross, Neil Gaiman, and Lenny Henry, and Paul Gambaccini, and Tank Girl, Transvision Vamp, and Fuzzbox (believe it or not this would have been a cool scene) and Zenith probably or something, but who was that dark shadow in the background....

John Hicklenton was always a mysterious figure to place among this first wave of "comics are for adults and cool now" blah blah chatter. A Hicklenton story in 2000ad was a jolt of darkness and eroticism that was very other from the more popular strips. My teenage mind always wondered why they were so rare, and so odd and beautiful and unforgettable when they did appear. Why was he not in the comic more? did they have to go to a different dimension to get the artwork?

His bio pic, and it's 'sisters of mercy' makeover version appearing on the back of the Nemesis Titan editions, such as Book 9, (you'd only need to go up to a 2000ad fan at the time and go 'Nemesis Book 9?!?' to get a knowing response), didn't help to dispell the myth. And yet his work was both intrinsically comic book and realistic Nemesis the Warlock is within the ranks of those comic characters that just work perfectly in comics yet seem ridiculous in 'real life' (how does he speak? what does he sound like?in what way does he float?) as a few Nemesis photo stories attested.

Hicklenton brought and unsettling and beautiful realism to Nemesis you could imagine this thing existing, especially transposed onto the V for Vendetta-like fascistic background of the reapers and oi oi boys. It was only later that Hicklenton's battle with MS was more widely known, through the great documentary Here's Johnny . There has seldom been such a heartbreaking yet grimly humorous depiction of the battle between the creation of art and the body that produces it. I'm reminded of Rorscharch's line 'None of you seem to understand. I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me!' with any disease that would attack Hicklenton. The quotes from him on the transcendent nature of art are inspiring:

"Drawing is my walking now, I run with it, I fly with it. It's keeping me alive. I have a thing with it. I can't wait to get a piece of paper with a pen because it's what I can control.

"I haven't got MS when I'm looking at my pictures and I haven't got it when I'm drawing them either. It gives me an ability to express that fear."

I'm sure many teenagers of the period annoyed many an art teacher, mine included, with endless 2000ad and sci-fi inspired opuses, many of which would probably get us sent to school psychologists in these current times, but we didn't have those then so we got to draw. I distinctly remember one project where there was some quote about a circus and something behind a curtain and I more or less drew the below, from a Megazine story called the Black Widow, with an almost unrecognizable curtain as a border around it.

one last bit, for what it's worth, it might sound like wank, but just a way of saying how an artists work can affect a comic fan:

When I'm wandering around with my ipod (or walkman as it was back then, still a lot of the same tunes, mostly Frank Black's Teenager of the Year) I am usually thinking of really great potential 2000ad movies, like if they'd ever make a kick ass Judge Anderson movie or Judgement on Gotham. Anyway I always imagined a Necropolis film would be amazing if combined with Judgement Day's Magnificent Seven aspect of having all the judges from around the world (in my mind I was just trying to jam Judge Joyce in there) involved. Before they are dropped into a screaming mad cesspit of zombie violence though there would be a Q type character (cameo by Hicklenton)

"Sorry lads, you can't go down there unless you're wearing "Hickle-Suits"

And on saying this pressing a button with insane Mech-versions of his characteristic designs specific to each international Judge. For me Hicklenton's Dredd designs would have been the hardest to replicate in any film version, the scaled down versions in the Stallone film (both in terms of costumes and the so-called perps/ random people in eye make-up) attest to how difficult bringing the true madness of Mega City One to the screen is.

I am genuinely shaken and sad at Hicklenton's death and my thoughts go out to those who knew him beyond his amazing body of work, which truly affected the history of British comics. It even inspired some goon to stick flower pots on his head to get the requisite 'highness' to attempt to replicate a Hicklenton-style Dredd luck

some articles:

Comic Book artist ends life at suicide clinic after battle with ms, The Telegraph

BBC news

John Hicklenton passes away Forbidden Planet

Vicious Imagery blog

Ms Trust

Bristle's Blog

digital spy

mindless ones

Ode to a Magnum 6D....

...as opposed of course to the disposable lighter-esque Magnum 6G Personal Defense Weapon System, or god forbid the plasma pistol, the 5 for a pound neon plastic purple disposable lighter of the Halo world.

To help escape the horrible winter that has only recently seemed to let go its grasp, I finally got an Xbox 360 after much hmming haaaing and played Halo 3 on legendary. During Halo: Combat Evolved on legendary there is much walking about looking for ammo and I developed a Sledge Hammer! like fondness for the M6D and it was one of the surprises that this lowly weapon became the weapon of choice and was a nice friend to talk to and say things like 'yeah you better run' and 'you better wait right there I'll be back in like an hour with some sniper ammo'. Which reminded me that first post I ever wrote on here was about Halo, 'Needler Dreams'

During Halo 3 when waves of feckers were coming at me, was to say in a very quiet voice..'well, that was quite the inconvenience'. It's strange the way 'realism' gets bandied about as a term. I would deem Halo 3 as realistic in that things feel real within the universe they have created, holding two weapons at a time and four grenades and health reviving etc. It's when you have to score points to buy abilities and such it gets to be a bit of a nightmare.

Like the other day, I started Fallout 3, where you have to choose important things like your sex, race and bad haircut etc about six seconds after your born. Now, I was balancing up options whether a heavy set black man would be able to survive the harsh post-apocalyptic more than a hot Asian lady, who might either bamboozle the mutants with sexual wiles or get killed easily. Then I thought I was over-thinking the game and chose a generic Caucasian goon. Plus, my name in the game is ‘Cuntybollix’, only because I wanted Liam Neeson playing my da to say it. He did say it was a lovely name though and I look forward to the day when the dread king Cuntybollix rules the postapocalyptic wasteland with and iron mutoid claw. I gave up and am still wandering around the vault looking for fucking bobby pins to open a door and getting pummelled because you have to pull up a computerized system and click loads of options to get a gun to fire and then you end up in your pants for no reason (mmm achieving nothing and ending up in my pants for no reason, maybe Fallout 3 is like real life.)

Where to start with Bayonetta! As per usual Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Puncuation gets it right:

See I really was more first person shooter kind guy, it had that lovely fluid quality and movement compared to watching the arse of some thick soilders are they give each other high fives and blow up terrorists (I'm looking at you Army of Two, idiots). But Bayonetta is like 8 foot tall and has guns attached to her high heels! If I am to play a third person game, at least make it something interesting to watch.

I had not really experienced quick time events before, it's like you're watching a cut scene that you can get killed in repeatedly for no reason. Again there are certain 'realism' rules, you fight flying upsidedown angel things, some shaped like ships! some just a big weel on fire or a gigantic pixalated planet with a red fiery ball inside it but when you get a pair of haunted ice skates you can only wear them on your feet, I mean I can already fly a bit and turn into a panther and my body hair comes off and turns into a parrot the size of a double decker bus to eat some angel gobshite why can't I wear haunted ice skates on my hand if I want to? Check out the madness:

Some special puddings...the artwork of Gentlemen Broncos

For those of a geeky sensibility Jared Hess's Gentlemen Broncos is a cult treat with a similar timeless setting and awkwardness to Napoleon Dynamite. For some odd reason, it has taken a critical fecking and been accused of 'bully porn', but I feel it is full of sympathy for the outsider geeks that inhabit it. Similarly to Art School Confidential, though I felt it could have reveled in and spoofed its milieu even more. As Darkplace shows in comedy, and Shaun Hutson shows in reality there is endless comedy to be had in the character of a totally unself-aware writer who feels that his mind-bending visions are almost to much for the human mind to comprehend.

A highlight is the great sci-fi book covers 'In the Year 2525' title sequence. One of my favorite books growing up was David Kyle's A Pictorial History of Science Fiction and I noticed some of the covers straight away but presumed some were mocked specifically for the film.

Anyway, I thought it would be cool to reproduce them here just as covers with the originals I could find, which were a lot less than anticipated.

Frank Kelly Freas

This one was a surprise, an uncanny likeness of Sam Rockwell, not created specifically for the film but by David Lee Anderson :

"This was the first science fiction painting that I used myself as a model, painted in 1989. The background is taken from a shopping mall in Dallas called The Galleria. It had a nice perspective, which had become one of my specialties, and I developed the shuttle-like craft as if they were in a large hangar."

Dentistry and Doofuses

"ooo look at me with some fat people, I'll knock them into shape with my pie regime.."

"bit more suction here please..."

Not one to be adverse to having two ladies approach one of my orifices with vibrating equipment, it was an interesting experience going to the dentist today to get a filling, although the most painful part was the fact that Gerry Ryan was on in the background, not to be confused with this Jeri Ryan, God no. Admittedly my notions of dentistry, as with most of my life's experiences come from movies and science fiction:

When most people think of famous dentists I always think of Judge Death's da.

But to have Gerry Ryan warbling on about a lady caller's bed bugs and saying "and I suppos' they creep up your thighs and emmm into your 'how's your father'' made me a 100 times more uneasy than when the drilling started. For those of you who don't know who he is, this is his Uncyclopedia entry, which I can't stop laughing at.

So who is Gerry Ryan? Well we all know RTE, Ireland's major state-and-advertising-and-your-money funded broadcaster has a sense of humour, listen closely to the poor fella saying 'oh shit!' at the end of the below 'news' report. I would say something like, 'oh, swearing, the priests won't like that', but they have recently lost all claim to moral authority by fucking kids. In your face Popey! You've got a celibate workforce of deluded oddballs in a hierarchical system that favors secrecy who think they can 'absolve' sins that are in constant contact with vulnerable children! What's the worst that can happen? Oh yeah, what did.

Anyway, to add insult to injury, RTE have a show called Operation Transformation where a fat rich person tells fat poor people how they are going wrong in not being fat. When I saw it first in the listings, I thought it might have been something fun like this but no, it's like The Biggest Loser. You see, RTE's R&D department is like a simple child with a crayon and notebook looking at other TV shows like they're toy ads and RTE commissioners are like their mammy and daddy and when the R&D kid sees something it likes it goes "mammy! daddy! can I have one of those?" and the parents reply, "yes, but we can only afford a really cheap shit knock off version will that do", and the kid laps it up and goes "yep I'm delighted and excited"

Now I don't want to criticise RTE too much, for the size of our country they do a great job with news, documentaries and arts programs but when they attempt reality shows, light entertainment and comedy the results are sometimes excruciating. As a small country we don't really have celebrities, so anyone on RTE claiming to be a celebrity is clinically insane, also as everyone knows each other and they don't want to piss off the main broadcaster there is no genuinely satirical comedy although this one tries but there is nothing genuinely critical, so all the chat shows exist in this odd feaful vacuum, worrying in case someone has a negative opinion on the broadcaster, admittedly some, hilariously break through...

Gerry Ryan seems to have some sort of blackmail-like hold on RTE as they keep giving him shows that no one likes and pay him astronomical amounts of money for doing so. We had (eight seasons of!) Ryan Confidential, where he came across as more of a dick than Gordan Ramsey, in a horrible moment of television, captured forever, below:

He got to interview Conan O'Brien and failed to get any of the comedy master's jokes, it was like watching a master archer hit wee hilarious darts into a bemused zeppelin.




In Operation Transformation, this overweight, overpaid imbecile gets to judge other poorer people's attempts to lose weight, its like people who can't sing judging singing competitions, or people with no discernible talent judging talent shows...oh wait we have that too...

Lorcranium...

I started a Tumblr called Lorcranium, a name inspired by the likes of "Magic" George Quinn who occasionally calls me Lorcan McGranium or some such, which I am really enjoying. Had a twitter account but deleted it as it all looked like random syllables and bits of punctuation dipped in hero worship and reminded me of the line in Idiocracy

Pvt. Joe Bowers: Why me? Every time Metsler says, "Lead, follow, or get out of the way," I get out of the way.
Sgt. Keller: Yeah, when he says that, you're not supposed to choose "get out of the way." It's supposed to embarrass you into leading - or at least following.
Pvt. Joe Bowers: That doesn't embarrass me

Plus twitter seems to have been invented by lazy journalists so they can just repeat celebs' and politicians tweets' as research...

In other online news Scott Calonico the Plerplexin' Texan of Scott and Stacey fame has been hard at work sorting out the NI Comedy Web site with all the details of wicked upcoming events at places like Marcus Keeley's Voicebox at the Safehouse, The Pavillion, Lavery's, and now The Black Box, which I am very interested in entering as you can imagine.

Boregasm!!

Ah, I don't want to be down on Irish movies, and like, look at the above mooks, it's not like others can portray Irishness any better, but whenever I go to Tescos, there's all the normal films sitting there in their fun boxes and spaceships and that and then a separate sort of quarantined section for Irish ones that form a bleak wall of worthy depression, Catholicism, 'the laaaand', politics, historical period dramas, gangsters, and of course abuse.

I've got very specific criticisms of certain Irish films, like did Stephen Rea really not know what sort of a pub he was in in The Crying Game, did his reaction not paint Irish fellas abroad as sexually naive, insensitive idiots? Sure a fella's head is all messed up with the troubles, he don't know what way is up...look out for the 'hilarious' twist etc.

I remember thinking How to Cheat in the Leaving Cert would be good, a heist movie to steal exam papers, but inevitably the plot was that one of their classmates had committed suicide because of exam pressure and that's why they were doing it. It had to be some worthy reason rather than a fun heist. I recently saw Middletown (both the town and the film, both equally bleak), viddy the trailer all shouting and classical strings and religious hypocrisy...we know, we get it! This imagined 1950s borderland bleakness must have been terrible. When Brendan Met Trudy inched Irish films into the rom com market but the trailer implies FEMINIST TERRORISTS!...jaysus lads could you be up to it at all...

There's a lot of funny people, smart people, intelligent people in Ireland but once a film project goes through the government sponsored route where half the running time is logos of cross border initiative and EU funding gubbins they get ground down in lengthy boregasms of identity and current issues.

One of my favorite Irish films ever is The Eliminator, an unashamed Peter Jackson/Sam Raimi type low budget horror that's very funny. The only picture I could find was a postage stamp sized scan of a Film Ireland cover, does anyone have any pics/clips of this gem? Surely even the a brief synopsis would pique interest

"Set in Northern Ireland of the future, Computer genius O'Brien is working hard to build the VIPER, a military supercar..."

Which brings me to 8.5 Hours.

When I saw the trailer first (yesterday) I was much more bitter, like this is an affront to sense and intelligence, and movie literacy, but then I thought well, I haven't made a film and my film studies knowledge attests that for any film that even gets made, there are probably 20-30 worse ones that didn't. So for that we should be thankful for 8.5 hours, not its actual running time, this isn't Fanny and Alexander, chance would be a fine thing. Instead I made up a dialogue between the director and the trailer guy:....

Director: We want something classy..

Trailer guy: classy or classs-i-cal?

Director: It's set in Dublin...

Trailer guy: Perfect, shot of Dublin then...

Director: it's about..

Trailer guy: I know, the end of the boom years, when was that? wendesday 4pm wasn't it? everyone's sad, even though some of them are getting the ride, what's that great line in it?...'oh fuck me that was good', perfect, we'll put that in, everyone says things like this during sex...

Director: It's about four working lives...

Trailer Guy: yeah! working alright! Working at the sex and drugs and bisexuality, and that, hohup! jaysus, so yeah they work at an office? I'll show the clock ticking, like Clockwatchers... hey! maybe they'll smash office equipment up like in Office Space...

Director: I wanted to deal with contemporary issues like the property collapse and immigration...

Trailer Guy: Yeah! I know, like a shady Eastern European guy/pimp maybe, he's the reason Ireland's lost its moral soul...plus we get to show ladies in corsets! high five! no, sorry, yeah, it's about the issues.

Director: It's about the emptiness of meaningless sex...

Trailer Guy: Hey! I just saw the trailer to A Serious Man, maybe a bit of headboard banging and an actress looking uncomfortable...perhaps a tough guy, or an office guy who thinks he's tough, with a cool catch phrase like ...'shooting...fish...in...a...barreeeell..."like that cool movie Shooting Fish, with the speech rhythms of genius Maaaat Beerry

Director: It's about sexual emptiness in Catholic Ireland...

Trailer Guy: Fuck yeah! I forgot about the church, a scene in a church where someone gets accused of having sex with a 19-year-old, implies the abuse scandal but won't get us into trouble...genius director dude ..oh yeah and drugs!

Director: It's about four lives that start to unravel....

Trailer guy: Hey, we'll get one of the characters to speak directly to the camera like in the trailer for Magnolia...awesome...hey wasn't there some gayness involved, better include that too as a sign of decadent times...and then we'll end with uplifting strings and people understanding each other...and...bam!! see ya at the Oscars dude! ...I'll be out the back offering my 'services'

Director: ahh thanks, I guess...

CF: Ken Korda's Speeding on the Needle Bliss

and of course...The Room