Meet The List

If there's one thing I should really get round to doing it's writing these posts more than two days in advance, because as soon as anything gets in the way of my writing, then all shit goes to hell or something similar.

However all dogs do definitely go to heaven.

The person that I'm going to use as a scapegoat for my not finishing off the long awaited Film Facts Part 2: The Factening, is Gabe Newell. He founded Valve. Valve runs Steam. Steam has sales. The Steam Christmas Sale had FTL: Faster Than Light on it for under a pound. And now I can't stop playing it.

Upgrade screens: The crystal meth of video games.

This along with my constant tweaking of the blog layout, as you can see by it's now greatly improved sexy sexiness (it's so sexy), and the creation of an unhealthy number of favicons that I intend to cycle through has led to a certain downtime in my usually industrious writing escapades. It's not that I'm saying I was distracted by pretty shiny things but yes, I was. Also by the agonising frustration of being lasered to death by fucking drones for the 60th time. Hours of epic battle followed by my poor spaceship being laser-raped by robots really sucks the time out of your day.

Drones: The malaria-ridden mosquitoes of video gaming.

The other little thing I've been working on is this. That's a cue to click the hyperlink, by the way. If you're allergic to bluey-purple text, just look at the shiny new page bar at the top of the blog and click on the enigmatically titled "The List". Go on; I'll wait.

If you're still having trouble, please ask a parent or teacher to help you.

I've compiled a little list of 50 movies I aim to watch in this fine year of 2014. Not review, mind. These are films that I've either been meaning to watch, had recommended to me by my very select group of cinema confidants (read in a French accent for correct pronunciation), or I happened to stumble across while reading the IMDb Trivia page for Sex and the City or whatever I was doing last night while high on power bar upgrades and cheesy nibbles. Excuse me a moment.

*snort*

Ah, better. So yes, just letting you know about the list. Each movie comes with it's name, year of release, rating and my interpretation of what it'll be about entirely by looking at its poster and nothing else. Check back regularly to see how many I've managed to watch and also for other little bits on what I've thought of them post-viewing. Now I have lots of things to be doing, very busy, must dash, let yourselves out.

Top 5 "Oo, That Looks Good" Movies of 2014

The new year has arrived at long last; we only had to wait 365 days or so for it. And with the new year comes the long wait for the inevitable wave of summer blockbusters that arrive every June with the timing and grace of only the most punctual and voluminous menstrual sloughs.

There is never not a good moment to use this image.

Summer this year seems to be set to flood us like so much body-temperature uterus lining with a veritable smorgasbord of exactly the same movies over and over again. With lots of lasers and jumping and looking seriously into the distance, sci-fi and alien invasion seem to be the aim of the game, so be prepared for, well, lots of sci-fi and aliens; along with the obligatory kids animated movie sequels and another superhero movie, because we're totally not tired of them yet. Yay.

Why can't we all just wait patiently for Ant-Man?

That said, there's still plenty to be excited all through the year so, without further ado (or adon't), I give you my top 5 list of movies that, as the title suggests, make you lean over to your mate in the cinema and shout-whisper, "Dude, we need to see that." Let us begin with:

5. Nymphomaniac: Volume 1 (Release: 21st February)

Subtle...

Oh Lars. What are you like? First Antichrist, now this. What with these, your porn films and that Nazi joke at the Cannes Film Festival two years ago, I almost feel like you're trying too hard to be controversial. And after the cataclysmically awful melodrama of Melancholia I'm starting to worry that you've actually lost your film-maker's touch. What happened? Where's another Dogville?

Won't you think of the children?!

I'm not a man to give up hope, however, and so this is your last chance, Lars, to restore my faith in you. I'm always a fan of the films that steer a little closer to the bone and sexuality has always been something that the film industry has shied away from like a young actress from a Hollywood producer's fly (who said that?!), so I commend the steel balls it must take to make a film that's essentially a two-part, five hour long mainstream porn movie. Whether it'll actually be any good of a film or just there for the shock factor (see Antichrist again) will only be a matter of time. I just hope Trier has realised that a little bit of subtlety and room for interpretation can go a long way.

Ah.

So, for those of you looking for plenty of sex, hamfisted imagery, disturbed characters and a little dash of Rammstein, this looks like the movie of the year for you. Here's the trailer (one of them was originally banned from YouTube), see if you can spot the subliminal vagina at the beginning:

4. The Lego Movie (Release: 14th February)

If you went to see Nymphomaniac and you now need a way to stop your children from crying inconsolably or worse, copying what they saw, you could take them to the next screen to see The Lego Movie. Yes, The Motherfucking Lego Movie. I'm a little too excited for this one as it's directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the directors behind the glorious 21 Jump Street remake (the sequel is also coming out this year, but sadly ranked at number six on my list) and the solidly alright Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, features Morgan Freeman as God, co-stars Will Arnett from Arrested Development as Batman and Liam Neeson is in there somewhere too. There's not a single part of the production or casting line-up that makes me too worried about this becoming yet another all-too-formulaic kid's movie and thank Morgan Freeman, because Warner Bros. have the imaginations of countless children and former-children at stake here.

"Put all your money in a bag and hand it over or another beloved household name gets ruined." - Warner Bros. Marketing Department

Almost all of us have fond memories of ourselves or a sibling spending a rainy Sunday afternoon meticulously building a world of colourful blocks complete with characters, stories, drama and heaps of action; then destroying everything with an alien invasion or massive Godzilla earthquake or with whatever other characters or toys you happened to have lying around. The trailer for this movie evokes exactly the same kind of sense of boundless fun and joyously nonsensical carnage of the childhood imagination. Even the animation style is reminiscent of a kid moving Lego men around like hopscotch players before making the calculated executive decision to curtail the hunt for the secret cave of awesome and swallowing the pieces instead.

"Oh my god, it ate the General! All is lost!"

If all goes well, this will be one part loose "save the world" story, a hundred parts hilariously unhinged chaos and all made from the brightly coloured little blocks of nostalgia that we all know and love. Hit it, YouTube embed:

3. Interstellar (Release: 7th November)

Never before has a poster looked so...Nolany.

Let's go all the way to the end of the year and look at Christopher Nolan's next pet project, Interstellar. It's no surprise that pretty much all anyone outside the production team and cast knows about the movie is that it's something to do with astronauts and wormholes. The cast have stayed tight-lipped about any further details, as is customary with a Nolan movie, so all we can do is wait. Something that will obviously build speculation, and hype, and money. You cheeky bastard, Nolan. You wouldn't get away with this if all of your movies weren't so bloody good.

Nearly all of them.

Looking at the crew, it's certainly going to make for an interesting film. There's the production designer from The Dark Knight, the editor from Inception and Elysium (expect lots of fast shots and not a lot of knowing what's going on) and the cinematographer behind the chilling Let the Right One In, which means we're probably looking at a complicated, fast-paced, creepy movie with lots of twists and turns. So, yeah, a Christopher Nolan film. I canny wait! We'll just have to wait and see what he churns out, as the trailer doesn't really shed any further light on things:

2. The Wolf of Wall Street (Release: 17th January)

I'm kind of cheating here seeing as The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese's new biopic of another Henry Hill-type sleazeball called Jordan Belfort, came out in the good old US of We'll Show Our Movies a Month Before You Get Them Ner-nee-ner-ner on Christmas Day, but it doesn't come out over here until mid-January, so I think it still counts.

You wouldn't look so happy without all of your missiles and stupid premiers, would you? Noooooo.
Dick.

A Scorsese movie is really best described by itself, so I present to you the trailer for Wolf of Wall Street and dare you to say that this doesn't have absolutely everything you want from a film in it, up to and including Leonardo DiCaprio's adorable smug-face (see poster above):

1. The Wind Rises (Release: Unannounced)

Hayao Miyazaki is retiring! Why, God, why?! His final movie, The Wind Rises, is a fictional account of the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the man behind the design of the Mitsubishi A5M fighter plane used by Japan during World War II, which eventually evolved into the famous "Kamikaze" A5M Zeros that were in that one good bit of Pearl Harbor. It's caused a bit of a stir over in Japan, what with a story humanising the designer of weapons of war seemingly going against Miyazaki's famously pacifist ideologies. The controversy is only fuelling my hunger for this film even more, however, as it has been hailed as Miyazaki's most personal film and apparently focuses on a healthy dose of adult themes not seen before in an anime that has hit number one on the Japanese box office for the whole of the year. It reminds me of another Studio Ghibli movie set in World War II Japan that featured pretty heavy themes and something about dead bugs...

If I think about it too hard I might start crying again.

Grave of the Fireflies is possibly one of the greatest and most devastating films ever made, and now the best anime director ever (Isao Takahata holds just as strong a place in my heart, mind) has made a new film about the same subject. I think it might kill me if I see this...

Worth it.

I would urge those of you who are a little dubious about watching cartoons (particularly anime) to give this a try, you'll be seeing the work of a master of an industry at his very best. Everyone loves him. As for me, I'll have to watch the trailer at least another 5 times before I can get through the whole thing without breaking the laptop from the resulting efflux of drool and tears of joy:

So, my little band of unholy abominations, what films are you looking forward to this year?

Christmas Crafting, Cooking and, Well...That's It Actually

Merry Christmas, my beloved readers! I hope you're all having a lovely day as we all come together to celebrate the birth of a child into a socio-economic group so crappy that he was likely not to have lived into his early thirties.

This should have been the least of his worries.

I thought I'd take some time this festive day of good will and passive aggressive dinner chat to tell you about all of the wonderful things I made that you didn't. Oh yes, what jolly good fun! This would most likely have been much more useful to post before Christmas Day, seeing as all of these crafts could have been made by you, yes you, in the comfort of your very own home for the people you love hate are more or less ambivalent towards this holiday season, but the chutney (yes, chutney. Patience, young one) was actually a present for people who may or may not be reading this and I didn't want to spoil the surprise.

"Please, take this token of my unquenchable loathing towards your very mortal coil."

There's a lot to cover so let's keep it snappy shall we? First up...

Christmas Decorations/Fuzzy Felt Phone Ffffssock

Home-made Christmas decorations are fun. Everyone loves them and they always get pride of place on the tree. Then you turn ten and no-one cares any more, just like wetting the bed. I lovingly made these very original geek-themed decorations and now they're at the back of the tree or propping up the wonky stand or in the bin or somewhere.

*ffffffwoosh*

The reindeer...

...are always watching.

Production values have increased ten-fold thanks to the lending of my kind brother's camera, haven't they, eh? Ingredients for these are exceptionally simple: just some felt, a glue gun, some scissors and plenty of patience for the portals and a couple of plain black baubles (almost impossible to find, it turns out) and some paint for the bob-ombs and chain chomp. Then just chop, glue and paint your way to adorable geeky bliss. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Now want to see what Fiona made in the same amount of time?

Gameboy games and silver cravat optional.

A flippin' NES phone sock, bitches! And it's all mine, cause she made it for me. 

Suck it.

Again a very simple concept, however it's apparently surprisingly difficult in practice. Putting the pieces together is just a lesson in lots of glue and a steady hand, but it turns out that hand stitching onto felt is an absolute nightmare, so keep that in mind if you're a budding felt mason on his way up in the felting world.

It's the biggest thing since jute.

On to part two...

Super Sticky Sweet Mango Chutney

Mango chutney is a unanimously adored condiment; fact. Indian people eat nothing but mango chutney. Seriously, ask Gandhi; he lived off it most of his life.

Turns out it's not a great nutritional supplement.

As such I decided to make some of my own miracle juice as Christmas presents for various family members and friends this year. You can find the recipe I used here, but if you have a sever hyperlink allergy don't fear, because I'll walk you though it anyway. First off, ingredients:

- 4 mangos, the biggest you can find (that's right, ladies)

- 4 cloves of garlic (cloves, not entire bulbs)

- 450g/1lb caster sugar

- 2 mahusive baking apples

- 1 tbsp English mustard/mustard powder

- 1 tbsp fresh grated ginger

- 600ml/1pt white wine vinegar

- 1 tbsp cayenne pepper

That amount of ingredients should make up just over three 250ml jars of chutney, so multiply as you see fit. The mangos will probably be your most expensive ingredients, setting me back almost two quid a mango, but the rest you'll likely have hanging around the house already.

Pro tip: save space and double your cot as a spice rack.

A quick note on mango picking: be very careful which mango you choose. I, in my child-like naiveté, picked up the last four mangos in Lidl and was done with it. When I got round to making these pulpy blobs into sticky goop, I found that two of them looked like this.

It looks like an aubergine after the very hungry caterpillar has eaten through it.

 This is apparently what happens to a mango when it's picked too early before it's had a chance to go ripe. The brown parts have a nasty bitter taste and all you can do is cut round them or throw the whole fruit away. I lost two good mangos to this abomination. We had to salvage their mangled carcasses for scraps. It was...it was horrible...

Now I know how the Uruguayan rugby team felt. 

You can usually tell if this has happened to your mango by looking for little black patches on the skin of the fruit, but most of the time you won't know until you cut into it, so choose carefully. A nice, squishy, predominantly red mango will be your best choice.

Left: good mango; Right: bad mango

So you've got your mangos, now peel them and chop them up into little chunks, putting all the adorable chunklets into a big bowl. Sprinkle with salt and leave the bowl overnight. Just cover the top and leave it on the side, not in the fridge; you want the fruit to mush up a little.

Dream squishy dreams.

The next morning you're ready to do some actual cooking-type stuff. Turn on your oven to about 120 degrees Celicius (thats 248 Fahrenheit for those of you still using crude flint tools and ignorance) and throw in your jars with their lids to sterilise. Note that you'll also need to take out anything that was already in the jars, so find someone who really likes jam. Measure out all of the other ingredients and put them in a big saucepan. Peel, core and chop your cooking apples. And here's where lesson number two comes in; this is what one of my apples looked like:

"It looks like he was indeed very hungry.  Book him, Lou."

First off, caterpillar. That's just like, so ew! But then, then, it turns out my apple is as bad as the mango. See those brown spots?

Do you see?!

This is a common apple condition (along with ADHD) called bitter pit, where your poor apple wasn't nurtured as a child with enough calcium so he's grown up dark and bitter on the inside, and now he's buying bicycle locks off the internet and learning how to use a crossbow and collecting computer viruses and dear god, I think I'm scared of my own son...

"If only we'd got him that hockey mask for his Christmas instead of fucking mango chutney!"

Again, the best thing to do is cut around the offending areas and make the most of a bad situation. Luckily you can usually spot this one by looking for little holes, or the titular "pits", on the outside of the apple or by simply avoiding Bramley apples, which are the most commonly affected type of apple.

Racist.

Throw your apples in with the rest of the mixture and heat the lot on a low heat until all of the caster sugar has dissolved. You might also want to open a window; the smell of vinegar gets a little overpowering. Once the sugar has dissolved heat the pan until it starts boiling and add your big bowl of mangos. Obviously don't add the bowl, just the mangos, but...yeah. You know what I mean.

Observe, no bowl.

All you need to do now is simmer the mixture for about half an hour, which in practice is actually closer to an hour, until everything starts to thicken up nicely. Now the recipe didn't think to tell me this but the mixture does thicken even more as it cools down, so don't start expecting a proper sticky chutney consistency yet; you'll want something on the same lines as a particularly thick gravy. Think after elevator full of blood but before free-floating full-torso vaporous apparition ectoplasm. Once it hits that thickness (don't be afraid to drain off some excess vinegar if it's taking too long), decant the lot into a big jug and from there into your hot sterile jars. As soon as the jar is full, screw the lid on tight and leave them on the side to cool.

Leave by fish tank for added aesthetic.

Once they're cool you'll know you've sealed the jars right if that little poppy bit on the lid has sucked back in again and the jar is able to turn on a jukebox just by punching it. And that's you done! The end result is a sweet, tangy chutney that goes great on papadums...

Om.

...humans...

Nom.

...and a variety of other animal species. All you've left to do is label...

...wrap...

...and you've got yourself a lovely 100% bespoke yummy gift for a loved one, friend, or moderately competent delivery guy.

Merry Christmas!

Love from Ben x

Don't Look Now, Donald Sutherland Isn't Dressed!

Great, you looked. That's just fandabbydozy...

You know what must suck? Your child dying. Like, seriously, that must be the worst. Unless infanticide happened to be your goal when you stuffed your child into that python-laden crate and drenched it in hydrofluoric acid in which case you're the newest member of a very exclusive club.

They meet on Sundays; Mr. and Mrs. West are bringing finger food.

Our film for today deals with the very tender subject of the loss of a loved one, something that's very difficult to portray well in cinema. It's likely the only thing you've ever really heard about Don't Look Now is the controversial sex scene (yes, that link is NSFW) between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie and something about people in red macs. If that is the case then I implore you not to Google this movie until you've watched it; spoilers are aplenty in these waters, they are.

"Arr, he dedicated his life to preserving the ending to The Sixth Sense, he did."

So, a quick wee plot summary is probably in order: Julie Christie and a moustache wearing a Donald Sutherland are John and Laura Baxter, they've moved to Venice some years after the tragic drowning of their young daughter at their home in England. The two of them are still coming to terms with the death while trying to get on with their lives when a pair of sisters (one of whom is blind and claims to have "second sight") inform Laura that their dead daughter is attempting to contact them from beyond the grave to warn them that John is in danger. So far so occult/gothic horror: you've got yourself a dead relative, a troubled romantic relationship, a seance, a dash of clairvoyance and all of it taking place in a hauntingly beautiful city filled with crumbling statues and dark corners.

Perfect for doing dark dee-gah, no! She's too creepy.

This all might sound a little too formulaic, but from the opening scene it's very obvious that this is a film in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, in this case that person is Nicolas Roeg of the oddity that is The Man Who Fell to Earth. We're treated to the harrowing death of the couple's daughter, Christine, immediately introducing the driving force behind the rest of the events of the movie and dropping us right into the emotion. Really lathering us up in it proper good. The pacing is impeccable, with an extended sequence of John fighting his way only too slowly through the mud to his daughter and carrying her lifeless body away from the water's edge. It's really testament to the willpower of Roeg that he didn't choose to ham up Sutherland's acting or add dramatic music, instead letting the scene speak for itself.

"Hi, my name's Scene. I like long walks and swimmi-oh, shit, sorry."

Water continues to act as a recurring motif throughout the film which, incidentally, manages to hit that perfect sweet spot when it comes to artistic metaphors and imagery in cinema. They're neither blatant nor obscure, but just obvious enough and used within the film in such a way that their presence actually impacts on the overall tone, rather than just as a talking point for smug movie obsessives at film-talking parties or whatever it is they socialise at. Maybe some day they'll invite me... But yes, water. It's heavy role in (read: literal cause of) Christine's death means that it acts a representation of John and Laura's grief and the way in which it shapes their lives. Obviously, the use of Venice as a backdrop for the story lends itself quite well to this idea, with the characters literally surrounded by their own grief. At one point in the film, John finds himself separated from Laura by the winding labyrinth of alleys and bridges that make up the city, obviously representative of the way in which the pair's inability to move on has begun to create a divide in their relationship.

Naturally...

It's undeniably the splendidly believable relationship between John and Laura that makes this more than just a very typical slow-burning gothic horror. The two of them bicker, argue and miscommunicate with a sincerity not often found quite as intact in cinema, particularly in 70's horror, while simultaneously interacting with each other with the respect and vibrancy of two people who are genuinely close. This is probably due, in part, to the unscripted nature of some of their scenes together along with, yes, the sex scene. Ok, fine, we'll talk about the fucking sex scene already! At the time it was considered pretty controversial, running for about five minutes and featuring plenty of highly tabboo thrusting, licking and bumping of genitals, but I would probably consider it the best sex scene I've ever seen.

Don't look at me like that, Spock. You enjoyed it too.

Let's stop giving a damn about the "explicitness" of the scene for a minute (mumble, mumble, something about violence being considered more acceptable in films and I'm already bored of flogging these rotten, mutilated equine remains) and look at how the sex is portrayed. There's no Bond-esque moment of steamy fornication or the man leaping on the woman to satiate his base desire; the two of them are chilling on the bed reading a magazine, then sex just sort of happens, the scene interspersed with little clips of the pair getting dressed for dinner afterwards using a then unorthodox fragmented editing style. It's one of the most genuine moments of passion and affection I've witnessed since that bit in Team America, and probably the first time in a film that I've seen people do the old rumpy pumpy like normal folk.

Aaaand, yup, she just knee'd him in the balls.

I've hit a bit of a tangent there so to get back to the rest of the movie and, you know, criticism and stuff. The supporting cast aren't quite as convincing in their performances as the leading pair (the Italian guy playing the police inspector was alright, although we'll let him off with it seeing as he couldn't speak English). The bishop overseeing John's renovations is rather dull and, well, altogether too goddy, which is either perfect or shoddy characterisation depending on how you're feeling when you watch it. As for the blind seance and her sister, the pair work well together as a double team, providing the majority of the movie's welcomingly sparse exposition with a kind of friendly creepiness that makes you feel that there's more to the pair then you're ever properly shown.

She's not actually blind, she's just worn the same contacts for 30 years.

Venice is sublime (I'm coming out with all the wanky sales talk today, ain't I); it's beautiful and serene yet at the same time imposing and ominous, the uneasy balance between atmospheres illustrated nicely through a series of eerie murders that occur during the time of the Baxter's stay in the city. Once again, the images of sodden bodies being fished from the murky water of the canals create a parallel with Christine's drowning, connecting these murders with the Baxters in a way that isn't made apparent until the film's final moments. And that brings us nicely along to my final comment on the film: the overarching creep that pervades the whole thing.

"Seriously? Pervades?"

The movie is slow. The whole story can essentially be boiled down to man and woman meet a seance, everyone is a bit worried for a little while, ten minutes of crazy stuff and cue credits. It beat The Blair Witch Project to the make-us-watch-mundane-shit punch by 26 years (fun fact: the famous final shot of Shaky Cam: The Shakening is actually an homage to the ending of this movie), and that's probably my biggest niggle with the whole thing. But, and this is a big but (I cannot lie), the film is so expertly, if slowly, paced that it doesn't actually matter. You get so swept up in the lives of John and Laura that you don't care that you're spending ten minutes watching John fix a church statue or drawing naked.

"Paint like I'm painting you like one of your French girls..."

The film's genuinely engaging study of a couple's methods of dealing with loss is interspersed regularly enough with tiny drips of mystery, be it in the form of a strange child in a red mac running through the dark or a glimpse of a person where they definitely shouldn't be, that there's always enough to keep you interested but never too much that you aren't distracted from the chilling, uneasy atmosphere, beautiful setting or spotless acting. It takes patience and a little bit of thought at the end, not everything is explained as plainly as it would be nowadays, but it's absolutely worth it for a great film that's as much a touching romance as it is an unsettling mystery and is absolutely mesmerising to watch.

Bonus points for fitting six naked Donald Sutherlands in one shot.

Overall Ben Equivalence Rating

Staring at Donald Sutherland's Moustache - 

Full-bodied, flawlessly well-trimmed and slightly arousing, yet it somehow makes you feel just a little bit uneasy.