The Living Deadbeat

“[November Second]. I gotta get in shape. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on there will be 50 push-ups each morning, 50 pull-ups. There will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on will be total organization. Every muscle must be tight.”

I don’t have a pull-up bar, and I don’t have a pill problem, but everything else that goes for Travis goes for me too. I’m thinking of getting back on the vegan wagon as well, provided I can find a source of protein that’s not soya-based. I have had enough of feeling like crap all the time, and dairy food, factory-meat and my 3 week absence from the gym are taking the hit for it. No more living like a pig.

(Obviously I’m not giving up alcohol).

I saw this for the first time this evening. It’s extraordinary, and there’s really no way it should work, but somehow it does. Mr. Malkovich is a very fine actor, and the rest of the cast is solid too (although the Cameron Diaz character takes some getting used to; she’s very much playing against type in this movie). I don’t really have anything else to write about it. Just try to see it, if you haven’t already; it’s very rare to see quirky film ideas realised this well.

This post is going to read as all kinds of ignorant, perhaps, even, as the uneducated jabberings of a know-nothing rube, but I hate watching old movies because the music in them absolutely stinks. I’ve just been driven away from Hitchcock’s 1964 film Marnie on account of a typically awful soundtrack that was laden with shrill soaring strings at every turn. Sometimes it genuinely seems like there was some kind of law back in the day that required every bright outdoor scene to begin with some startling, ear-piercing violin progression, as if that’s the sound that sunlight makes when it’s recorded on camera. It’s just too much to bear.

There’s a lot about old movies that I dislike but can tolerate: the lousy picture quality; the over-use of wholly inorganic sets during outdoor scenes; the totally unnatural speech patterns and accents; the staid, uniform beauty of the most of the actresses; the obsession with the bullshit romantic entanglements of the over-privileged. These are all ticks and idiosyncrasies that I can endure in isolation or in combination with each other, but when some archaic violin soundtrack is lashed across this then it all becomes too much for me.

Obviously this is a gross over-generalisation, and obviously I know of strong counter examples, but 2001 is really the only old film I know of with a soundtrack that I consider worth listening to, and that’s full of classical music and not the typical high-pitched fare.

I love movies, and I love seeing movies at the cinema with the sound and the ambience and the giant screen, but lately I’ve very seriously fallen out of love the whole experience because cinema owners seem determined to ruin the cinema for everyone. I’m thinking specifically of one cinema here, the Omniplex in Mahon Point, which is quite good in many respects but falls down badly in terms of overall experience because:

1) The projection equipment is not focused properly in many (possibly most) of the screens.

2) The ads. This is real issue that drove me to blog. If I’m going to be charged through the nose to watch a movie that’s free on the internet then I had better not be forced to sit through 10 minutes of mind-numbingly stupid advertisements before the film starts. Are cinemas really so hard up for cash that they have to whore out their screens to Coco-Cola and Caburys for a full 10 minutes before every single goddamn screening of a film? I wouldn’t mind so much if the ads weren’t so bloody awful (like that fucking stupid one with the two dolls – I can’t remember what it’s for, which is a good thing for the company responsible), or if they were changed every few weeks, but no, instead the audience is forced to watch the same dumb ads for the same crap products again and again and again.

What makes the whole ordeal even worse for me is that the rest of the audience doesn’t seem to mind. Once the sound comes on and the lights dim a hush descends over the room, and everyone stops talking, as if it would be disrespectful to continue their conversations while the ads are on. The ads aren’t part of the film; it’s okay to talk through them! I can understand people remaining silent during trailers, and I don’t mind sitting through a few of those (even if I’ve seen them before), but to obsequiously shut up and gape at the screen while some vacuous commercial sloganeering washes across it is just downright appalling.

While it’s not exactly an ad, the cinema’s ‘viewer’s guidelines’ cartoon at the Omniplex is also wholly without merit. In case you’ve never seen it, it’s a silly cartoon with anthropomorphized confectionary items acting out the same scene over and over. It’s meant to illustrate why the basic rules of the cinema must be upheld, but a simple still with bullet pointed rules would be equally sufficient and would shave about 50 monotonous seconds of drudgery out of the pre-film cinematic experience. Of course, the cinema manager would probably fill those 50 seconds with chocolate advertisements if he didn’t believe in the supreme importance of the singing confectionary, so maybe I shouldn’t complain too much about it.

Someone will suggest, not unreasonably, that maybe I should just turn up at the cinema 10 minutes after the film is scheduled to start and dodge all those nasty adverts in the process, but this measure is inadequate for three reasons, namely:

1) Unless timed absolutely perfectly (which is impossible without inside information, given the vagaries of cinema procedures), I’ll end up either missing the start of the film or catching the end of the ads.

2) Unless the cinema is almost empty, I’ll get a lousy seat if I show up 10 minutes late.

3) Dr. Deadbeat likes to watch the trailers, and more often than not I see films with him.

So really, there’s no solution.

This all might seem like the neurotic ranting of a film fan pushed over the edge by witless Toblerone ads, but I’ve had enough of this nonsense and abuse. There are ways around paying €9 to see a film and I’m going to start availing of them sharpish unless this policy of showing ads at the cinema ends.

Come on film fans, rise up against this tyranny!

I saw two films in the last two days. One was a multimillion dollar non-event featuring Christian Bale acting all pissed off and grumpy about having to contend an absolute mutt of a script, and the other was shot with only a basic hand-held camera, a very limited budget and a talented band of unknown actors, one of whom is the amazing/beautiful/awesome/zOMG-I-LOVE-HER Manuela Velasco.

[●REC] follows the basic formula of horror/action POV films such as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield in that the film starts out as a mundane documentary of something inconsequential and then camera crew suddenly find themselves thrust into something unexpected and unwelcome. In [●REC], Velasco and her cameramen are shooting a documentary of a disappointingly boring local fire department when a report comes in of an old woman trapped in her apartment. Starved of anything better to do, the two reporters accompany a team of firefighters to the building and wind up desperately trying to fend off…

For once I’m going to be discreet in a film review, because I really think that people ought to see this movie. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, sure, but as these films go it’s exceptionally well-made. The camera style is employed creatively and is never abused by the director, and the film feels incredibly real, especially in the middle section when Velasco and her cameraman spend their time interviewing residents and recording the disputes and the general confusion surrounding them. Then, when [●REC] finally ratchets up the anxiety for the finale, it’s pretty much no-holds-barred brutal. I usually hate films that rely on suspense, and the final 15 minutes of this are as stressful as anything I’ve seen (bar The Blair Witch Project, which is so effective it almost made me sick the first time I saw it), but the tension is mingled with a possibility (hope?) that maybe Velasco will escape her predicament.

She really is magnetic (and not just because she’s in almost every shot, since her cameramen is tracking her). I would have watched her spend 74 minutes dragging out a documentary of a sleeping fire department, in Spanish subs. The rest of the cast is good too (the bald fireman who looks like Dan Andriano from Alkaline Trio deserves particular mention), but she’s really the beating heart of this gem of a film, and you all should make an effort to see it.

Rotten Tomatoes likes it too.