Friday, August 10, 2007
Stupid Running In The Movies
I had a really bad back over the weekend. I think it was a combination of a massively sedentary lifestyle and sleeping awkwardly on Friday because a: I was drunk and B: The Cat With Which You Do Not Fuck was sleeping in the middle of the bed. I was walking with a bolt-upright, immobile spine and a sort of backwards-armed waddle in an attempt not to wrench my lower back muscles. 'Hey', I thought, 'That's like Harrison Ford in most of his movies! What an incredibly thin excuse for another list article for The Fake Life! How many more days to go again?'
So here are some fine examples of really stupid perambulation in cinema:
The 'Get Off My Lawn' award goes to Harrison Ford in Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
Even from the first sequence you know something is up. As he's running away from the Hovitos, dust flying off his clothes, you can clearly see the old man emerging. His spine is bolt straight and seemingly without mobility while his arms are doing that high, backwards pumping motion and his little legs are trying to do all the work. This is a clear sign of an action hero who's lower back is giving him gyp.
Compare this to the Harrison from Star Wars.
Here, while running around the Death Star trying to rescue Carrie Fisher from the nearest pile of drugs, you can see him leaning in to the run. His whole body is working as one to create forward momentum. It's dynamic. By god, it's sexy. Look at those hips:
But by the time of Indy, however, his back is having none of it.
No wonder he's so grumpy. I complained for half an hour yesterday just going to buy some teabags and milk from the local shop.
It's interesting to note that in Last Crusade the only noticeable running he does is a short hop onto a boat in Venice. Let's see how much he does in next year's Indy 4.
The bonus 'Get Off My Lawn' award goes to Sigourney Weaver in Aliens.
Maybe 55 years in hypersleep atrophied her muscles but come on. When she's running about the Sulaco hanger fighting the Alien Queen you can clearly see the backward-armed waddle of someone who needs an osteopath and a cup of Ovaltine.
These are supposed to be aspirational forms of human heroism but they look like they could be happy-slapped by my niece. Sigourney and Harrison were only in their mid-thirties when they made these films, and it's not like they had X-boxes to tempt them into entirely sedentary lifestyles. Pussies!
The 'Trying Not To Trip Over The Camera' award goes to Jena Malone in Contact.
This is a perennial problem in movies stemming from the technical limitations of heavy cameras and the DP's need to keep everything in focus. The camera has to move relatively slowly, so the actors who are 'running' in the shot have to move really slowly to stay in shot. The solution involves the actor pumping their arms vigorously up and down, huffing and puffing a lot and hoping like hell that the audience doesn't notice what a fool they are making of themselves. We, of course, don't notice the good examples, but the bad ones look like amateur pantomime and, in one of Robert Zemeckis' typically tricksy shots, young Jena has to run up the stairs and along the upstairs hallway while the camera reverse dollies just in front of her. Moving a heavy steadycam backwards in an enclosed space while actually keeping it 'steady' meant it had to be slow, leaving Jena to seemingly run on the spot for a few moments.
The 'Running Like A Little Girl' award also goes to Jena Malone in Contact.
I'm sorry to pick on her, what with her being a little girl and all, but I just watched Contact again recently and she really does run like a little girl.
The 'Jogging For Your Life' award goes to Gwyneth Paltrow in Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow.
I don't know why people don't like Gwyneth, but one of the main reasons given on messageboards for not liking the movie is her performance as intrepid reporter Polly Perkins. You know, as opposed to the actual film being a bit crap. Maybe, deep down, movie geeks have more love for giant robots than incredibly beautiful women. And the bit of really stupid running she does while New York is being attacked by the giant robots isn't her fault either. 100ft monsters bear down on her and she gently shuffles to the side of the road to get out of the way of all that imminent, painful death. Hurry it up, love!
Part of it is her pencil skirt, which is the fault of the objectivisation of women by a male dominated society (but, hey, still looks great). The other part is that this movie was filmed on tiny green screen stages (with all the scenery added in with CGI later) so if she ran more than 3 yards she would have bumped into a wall.
This problem also afflicts many of the other action scenes in the movie. The sets are huge, but all the characters are stuck in a tiny square in the middle, which both makes the action feel stilted and the CGI backdrops even more fake. To be fair to Sky Captain (which I feel was an honourable failure and a film I still really want to like), this problem also afflicts much bigger and shittier films such as Attack Of The Clones and The Polar Express.
Ironically, the only scenes this '100% green screen' technique works in are the quiet conversation scenes set in small rooms, with the actors in close up and the backgrounds out of focus. Which renders the whole thing a bit daft.
The 'You Try Doing That In The Playground, See How Long You Last' award goes to Robert Patrick in Terminator 2.
Robert Patrick plays the T-1000, a killer robot made of super-mimetic poly wolly got a ding dong pseudo science. Or liquid metal, if you prefer. It had to be tougher than Arnold Schwarzenegger - faster, stronger, scarier. Robert achieved this by clenching his jaw, never blinking ever, and running like a stamp collecting ten year old.
I mean it - most kids will run like big spazzers with the complete lack of co-ordination that comes from gleeful abandon, a few will run with cat-like natural grace, but there are certain little kids, the type that iron their own shirts, that will take this running business really seriously. Remember playing soldiers when you were a kid and you were all running about going 'RRAARRRGHH BANG BANG YOU'RE DEAD BOOM!'? There was always one kid who wanted to hold the gun correctly, practice those parade ground maneuvers when you put the gun on your shoulder and stuff. Him. He wanted everyone to do it properly.
The back is upright, the joints are stiff, all the lines are straight and all the movements sharp. There is no smiling. It's a child's idea of running like an adult. A child who doesn't want to be a child. A child who's room is really tidy. It looks really, really stupid.
But, just like that kid, it's also really scary. Yes it's dumb if you tried to do it in real life, but in the movie you believe he can outrun a car, you believe that it is simply the most coldly efficient way to move quickly, you believe that he is made out of knives.
Some things just work in movies, no matter how silly they are in real life. It is a continuing shame that Edward Furlong isn't one of them.
The 'Supersize Me' award goes to Steven Seagal in Under Siege 2.
The martial artist, Buddhist, legendary bluesman and ecologist Steven Seagal seemed like he could take up the action hero mantle from the Stallones and Van Dammes in the early 90's, but while the former respectively used steroids and coke to stay in shape, Seagal seemed to prefer Big Macs.
It was 1995's Under Siege 2 where the weight started to show, despite his character wearing a lose fitting, black (slimming!) suit. Already a lot of his fights were filmed from the sternum up, or consisted of him shooting lots of baddies in very wide-shot while walking very slowly down a train carriage. One scene, however, demanded he run along the roof of a carriage and his huffing, unconvincing waddle was probably the most exercise he'd had all year.
These days Steven spends most of his time standing in the middle of rooms while strategically doped stuntmen run at his fist. And rocking the fuck out.
The 'This Was Stupid 70 Years Ago' award goes to Ed Burns and Jemima Rooper in A Sound Of Thunder.
In a film so terrible even Franchise Pictures delayed it for years, Ed and Jemima walk down a street in Future City and talk about some shit or other. Not having the budget to create such a lavish set, they imported a Playstation 2 cut scene and superimposed the two actors walking on a treadmill in front of it.
Their steps do not match up with the movement of the pavement, so giving us that 'skating' look computer games managed to solve a half decade ago, the grain and the lighting of the various elements don't even begin to match and it is a nakedly obvious camera trick that went out of favour for being 'really crappy' around about the time of The Jazz Singer.
I'd give the two actors awards for not simply curling up and dying out of shame, but has anyone seen this Jemima Rooper since the film was released?
The 'Most Judicious Use Of Celluloid' award goes to Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 3.
The climactic action setpiece of one of last year's big summer action movies consists of Tom Cruise running a quarter mile down a sidewalk.
Possibly this was a result of starting to shoot before they had a script and simply not having the ideas or money or time to come up with something fancy, but more likely it was the result of Tom thinking that his presence was so magnetic, his physical acting so intense and the American audience's ability to be impressed by regular exercise so strong that he could create all the excitement and tension necessary for the final act just by running really emotionally.
Interestingly, a lot of the PR for the movie concentrated on the fact that he was really running in this scene, not just relying on clever editing (it was all in one shot) or camera tricks like sped up footage (though there were some fancy tricks to make him not look three feet tall). I guess that the PR department realised that this was a pretty crummy finale to a movie to and so tried to 'amp' up, or at least prepare, the audience for it. A shame that the PR department showed more common sense than the film-makers.
I guess one could commend director JJ Abrams for turning this total non-ending into an attention grabbing scene as best he could, but sod that: this is hugely cynical, hubristic and, above all, dumb movie-making. Rumours are the finale of Mission Impossible 4 will consist of Tom doing push-ups for half an hour.
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Continue reading Stupid Running In The MoviesTFL's Greatest Hits - Part 5: Pixellated Rebellion
Next up, Carlton Stevens did a regular column for The Fake Life covering computer games called Pixellated Rebellion. I've chosen this particular column as it contains a great break down of the fanboy console wars still raging retardedly over the Internet as we speak.
Here's the link:
Right here!
I also like the way he was forced to write an entire paragraph for the computer game of Desperate Housewives. Welcome to the suck of writing, Carlton.
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Continue reading TFL's Greatest Hits - Part 5: Pixellated RebellionThursday, August 09, 2007
Why Arthouse Movies Suck
Like it or not, there is still a distinction between arthouse and mainstream cinema. The war was perhaps won in the summer of 1977 with the release of Star Wars, and whatever vestiges of resistance were slowly co-opted through the Indiewood 90’s and the creation of the salon mini-studios like Fox Searchlight, but the rhetoric is still there, even if the guns have been put down. Notions of ‘real’ movies still get bandied about, the idea of ‘too good to be popular’ is often behind a lot of critiques, and ‘selling out’ as a phrase still has cultural weight, as do words like ‘serious’ and ‘prestige’. There is still a thing as the concept of an ‘arthouse’ movie, and the term is often conflated with the word ‘good’. Well balls to that.
Before things get to iconoclastically contrarian, of course these are generalisations, of course a lot of mainstream movies are barely lowest common denominator product, and of course a lot of the greatest movies ever made are ‘arthouse’. I’m here to have a go at certain concepts that crop up from this, often purely political, distinction between arthouse and mainstream. The main one I’ll be tackling here is the fetishisation of obscurity.
When you are a kid, picking your nose in school, you are given examples of ‘great literature’ and, I’d wager, it’s all pretty boring and difficult to understand. Most (good) teachers will admit that most teenagers are not going to get the subtleties of Shakespeare, even when they can be bothered to parse the language. Romeo and Juliet maybe, but the old man ruminations of Lear or The Tempest? Come on. Kids are exposed to this adult literature so that they are at least exposed to the possibility of that richness, so when they encounter it as an adult they’ll have a better grounding for appreciating it fully. If they are exposed to that level of depth, even if they don’t understand it, they will at least know it’s possible and, hopefully, have a desire to seek it out in the culture they consume when they have had enough life-experiences to get it. If they grow up eating only McDonalds, how will they know why a perfectly cooked steak is so good?
'Eat your greens!', says your mother. You know that idea that if it tastes bad, it must be healthy? I love Broccoli now.
Anyway, this idea of ‘what is good is difficult’ comes to us early. The idea that quality is defined by a work containing things we don’t understand is an inherently immature one. Yet look at the lyrics of a thousand Dylan wannabes. Look at the drivel that came out of Jim Morrison’s ‘muse’. Teenagers will spend hours looking for the deep meanings in it as they are still under the belief that, if it is obscure, it must be deep. He was on drugs, kids, and a twat.
But these are just a child's mistakes, surely. Maybe the first film/book/album by a posing teenager will be vague and obfuscationary just because that’s what they think ‘good’ is, but adults wouldn’t do that, right?
There was a contemporary dance conference attended by a friend of mine where a piece of work was criticised for not being obscure enough. In the piece, a grid was on the floor and, as the dancer moved over the squares, they would be lit up and the order in which they were lit revealed a poem. It was too obvious, said the luminaries. There should be a couple more levels of abstraction before the piece could be really good, as if a work of art were a logic puzzle or crossword clue.
And here is the break from any sense. It is not that the increased abstraction would reveal nuances of the meaning of the piece – let’s say if someone always gets angry when talking about authority it reveals a psychological block about his dad, which is better than someone saying, on the nose 'I have issues with my dad' – no, it was just an arbitrary rule that equated opaqueness with quality.
So – forced symbolism, empty surrealism, arbitrary non-linearity, dense, random, referentiality. It happens all the time.
Complicated things are difficult to understand, but that doesn’t mean that the difficult to understand is complicated. Sometimes it very simply doesn’t make sense. And if you have an artist functioning under that second, false premise, they will look at something they are working on and think ‘Let's throw some wierd shit in there. I don't know why, but it'll make it seem more 'arty'.'
Every creative person I’ve ever spoken to has admitted to this activity. The good ones admit it a little shame-facedly, thinking it a mistake of youth.
This is all very negative so far. What then, would I use as a definition of ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’? I’ll step up. here goes:
All creative work is there to communicate with its audience. Entertainment is there to tell the audience what it already knows. Art is there to tell them something they don’t. It is the artist’s responsibility, therefore, to have something to say and to say it as clearly as is possible.
Generalisations are great, aren’t they? But then all definitions should be regarded as ‘rules of thumb’ and judged on how useful they are rather than how ‘true’ they are.
‘Mainstream’ movies can be art and ‘arthouse’ movies can just be product, tailored to appeal to the prejudices of arthouse film goers. The accepted distinctions are unhelpful and inaccurate, so reacting against them (i.e. ‘Fuck Hollywood!’) will only lead to defining yourself as the opposite of a phantom – an enemy that doesn’t quite exist.
Ingmar Bergman’s films, for example, are commendably clear headed. They know what they want to express and they do so as straightforwardly and efficiently as possible – it’s just that he wanted to express some fairly abstract, usually metaphysical, ideas.
There’s an argument to be had whether his overly rational films are truly suited to the medium. Reason functions outside of time, being purely abstract, and so best suited to artworks that can be appreciated outside of time, like paintings or, perhaps, books. A medium so wed to the unstoppable passing of moments is more suited to experiential subjects, and the hurtling trajectories of emotions, than the stiff formulations of intellectual ideas. But hell, at least it’s an argument. A genuine discussion. It is not a question of ‘what the fuck was that all about?’
Nicholas Roeg, I feel, despite being awesome in many ways, fannied about with opaque symbolism a little too much. That recent French western, Blueberry: what the fuck was that about? Anime and, yes, The Matrix sequels. Coppola, whose Apocalypse Now (his ‘Hollywood Art Film’) is desperately opaque at times, I feel, doesn’t really fall in to this trap as it’s fairly obvious he was desperately trying to communicate with the audience at all times. It’s just that he was trying to say so many things at once, on such a huge canvas (and the sets Marlon Brando was on, lol), that he got lost.
Akira Kurosawa, famously, was always very specific on set. He spoke with his crew on of practicalities. He never used vague terms like ‘I want it more intense! More, you know, like drinking water with a hangover! Kind of!’ He knew exactly what and how he wanted to communicate.
Yet I had ‘Fuck Hollywood!’ thrown at me just this week at work. Blowhards, ‘artists’ and academic received wisdom still contain these useless distinctions. If debates over the most important things in the world can be de-railed by partisan ‘us or them’ line-drawing, leading us down deadly, stupid cul-de-sacs, it can happen in art too.
It is about communication in the end, I’ll argue, and if you believe part of your job is not to be as clear as possible about what you are trying to express, or that if you just throw some vaguely ‘arty’ stuff together it will kind of say what you want it to, whatever that is, then fuck you – stay in film school. The world does not need you.
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Continue reading Why Arthouse Movies SuckTFL's Greatest Hits - Part 4: Dawn Of The Dead Movies
One thing The Fake Life was good for was coming up with really good ideas for recurring articles, and then never doing them again. Charlie's Dawn Of The Dead Movies was to be all about the great unmade movies of Hollywood's past, and he started it off with Jaws 3 People 0, the movie that wasn't made while Jaws 3-D was. The movie sounded great, and the article was pretty awesome too.
Click here for the whole thing.
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Continue reading TFL's Greatest Hits - Part 4: Dawn Of The Dead MoviesRiding A Unicorn Over The Lolipop Rainbow: The Bestest HAPPY Endings!
Everybody loves a happy ending, right? The 80's are known for a glut of feel good films. The geeks of my generation, raised on the nihilistic shit of the 70's, came to reject these artificially manufactured happy endings. The geek audience now has a knee-jerk reaction against any kind of happy ending, it seems. We reject a joyous conclusion as less valid than a tragic one. Our version of a happy ending is smothered in moral ambiguity. Fight Club, for all it's damn-the-man posturing, ends on the most old fashioned of happy endings as the boy kisses the girl... to a backdrop of mass urban destruction. It's hard to find a thoroughly unironic happy ending these days. I would dare say it's always been hard to find a legitimately good happy ending. And that's because a good happy ending - one that is heartfelt and, most importantly, one that is earned - is the hardest thing to pull off.
Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind/Annie Hall - I guess the greatest romantic stories, from Romeo & Juliet to Casablanca, end on a sad note of thwarted love. A romantic comedy, however, is preordained to deliver a happy ending. It's the predictability that sinks most romantic comedies. What makes Sunshine and Annie Hall so unique and beautiful is that they both present doomed relationships and yet send us home feeling elated about the very notion of love itself. There are no outside forces conspiring against Alvy and Annie. No wacky misunderstandings sabotaging Joel and Clementine's relationship. Both couples dive head first into the tempest but fail to maintain due only to their own shortcomings. And yet, at the end, Alvy says it's all worth it. The good times will always outweigh the bad and he will always "need the eggs". When Clementine warns Joel that they will inevitably crash and burn if they attempt to reboot, his simple response - "Okay." - celebrates the beauty of love better than any extravagant Baz Luhrmann set piece ever could. Ironically, these two closing scenes demonstrate that love and happiness aren't defined by how the relationship ends.
Maximum Overdrive - A shining example of the triumphant FUCK YEAH happy ending. I would have said Jaws, but that one's way too obvious. Our heroes have been chased, imprisoned, run over and generally hassled by a slew of asshole trucks. The lead truck wears a giant Green Goblin face that mocks Emilio's every attempt at escape. But eventually the crew finds it's way out and hoofs it to the docks and precious freedom. The Goblin truck races down the road in hot pursuit, intent on slaughtering our ragtag gang of southern white folks. As the climax swells, the Goblin truck, having just run down another faceless extra, barrels towards our heroes. Emilio runs right in front of the 18 wheeled killer, spits out an "Adios, motherfucker!",and fires a missile straight into it's grill. The AC/DC music swells as the truck explodes gloriously and our heroes cheer. Roll credits! FUCK YEAH!
Breaking The Waves - I swear I didn't even see this ending coming. I thought this was a beautifully poignant story about tragedy and friendship. Up until the final scene, it's basically a take on The Monkey's Paw. An eccentric woman, who could only be played by Emma Watson, terrified of being without her husband, prays to God to bring him home from his job at an offshore oil rig. God delivers, but as we all know, God loves irony more than Generation X and the internet combined. The victim of a tragic accident, the husband is sent home a cripple from the neck down. What follows is a thoroughly depressing exploration of grief and guilt. Now we all know Watson really didn't cause this, right? And yet she is convinced this was God answering her prayer. And when she prays that God takes her in exchange for restoring her husbands health we all know that nothing can- HOLY SHIT HE'S WALKING AGAIN! WTF! And still I'm a cynic. Still there's some sort of explanation for this. Until the final scene, that is, when I am given no other choice but to believe that the clear, loud music of church bells emanating from the clouds for her husband to hear is unmistakably her soul singing the power of faith and conviction.
Planes, Trains & Automobiles - It's no surprise such a crowd pleaser from John Hughes would have a happy ending. By the time this came out we fully expected it from the man who had Ferris win the day and Molly win the weird looking guy with furry eyebrows. No, not Judd Nelson, the other one. But what elevates this ending, what makes it more than perfunctory, is the work of Mr. John Candy. This movie is a magic trick. We think we are following Steve Martin as he attempts get home. He's saddled with your average obnoxious American who's good for a few laughs, but you wouldn't want to spend three days with him. Candy, as the traveling shower curtain ring salesman, strikes the perfect balance of gut-bustingly funny and annoying. He pulls it off enough so you can accept the fact that Martin wouldn't have run screaming from the guy within a few hours. But Hughes performs some kind of brilliant misdirection here. While we're busy enjoying the story of Martin's journey, what we're really watching is Candy's story unfold. We're watching him attempt to cobble together a friendship. By the end of the film, we realize it was never about Martin. Of course he would eventually make it home with or without Candy's help. It's all about the traveling salesman looking for some kind of home of his own. It's at the end, when Martin takes Candy home and introduces him to his wife and family ("This is my friend."), that the trick is revealed. Candy's wacky bravado falls away and his look of bittersweet joy closes the film. Makes me cry like a girl every time.
An American Werewolf In London - Yay! The naked American man is dead! London's balloons are safe once more!
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Continue reading Riding A Unicorn Over The Lolipop Rainbow: The Bestest HAPPY Endings!Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Geek Pin-Up #19: Helen Mirren
So who would be the best choice for the last Geek Pin-Up? We could have gone for something 'funny' like Dakota Fanning, or a more tragic choice like Lindsey Lohan, a 'not quite enough movies to justify it yet' Eva Green, or a choice more suited to the sexuality of most of our readers like Christian Bale or MODOK. Instead we've gone for the most terrifyingly sexy lady on the planet - Her Royal Highness Helen Mirren.
Helen Mirren could rip your head off and shit down your neck hole. Then she'd steal your cigarettes and drink a bottle of whiskey before playing Lady Macbeth starkers in front of Wembley stadium. Helen Mirren is an alpha-female and she is hard.
Helen was very much one of those massively ambitious, deeply serious, English actors whom were dead set on marking out the entire legacy of English acting as their own. And with that much determination, ruthlessness and flat out competitiveness, not to mention being hot and being able to act, nothing was going to stop Helen Mirren making it. While others were talking about doing their best, Helen was already fucking the prom queen.
She was in Caligula, that doomed mix of high and low brow tastes, written by Gore Vidal and funded by smut merchants, starring the cream of British acting talent and lots and lots of titty. It's a terrible film to be honest and not even worth the attentions of randy 15 year olds (possibly worth the attentions of randy post-ironic cineastes in their 30's though), but it does have the best IMDB keywords page in the world. I checked out pages for The Devil's Rejects, Salo and Cannibal Holocaust and even they don't compare to this endless list of filth. Dead woman, dead man, voyueristic, penis, peverse, moral corruption, sex orgy, bloody, infamous, incestuous desire, mutilation - the fun never ends! If I was an English teacher, this is the creative writing assignment I would give the little fuckers. Caligula is not really a high point (the plot page, hilariously, is 'empty'), but she does look like Jane Seymour with a brain, which is fairly hot.
Far better was her role as the evil Morgana in John Boorman's Excalibur. I'm not much of a fan of this film, mostly as any Arthurian movie automatically falls prey to Monty Python And The Holy Grail, especially when lots of mid-shots of generic British woodland are used to keep the budget down. Plus the bloke who played Arthur always seemed a bit wimpy to me.
Helen's Morgana however, was blisteringly hot. Obviously evil and still irresistible, you would have let her birth an illegitimate son who would go on to bring down your empire too.
Now, Helen has a slightly long, possibly even equine, face and of course that ferocious intelligence and focus behind the eyes. Though she played a few, she was not entirely suited to the pretty-but-vacant 'characters' of Hollywood leading lady roles. It was when she got old enough to play mothers that she got really interesting. Other pretties have nothing to offer once their smooth skins give way to lines and sag. Helen grew into her age, and just got more awesome.
She was strong yet supportive opposite Harrison Ford in The Mosquito Coast. She was monstrous in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. She was heartbreaking in The Madness Of King George ('goodnight Mr King'). Dammit, she managed to mix military efficiency and human compassion with a perfect Russian accent in 2010, a film which really isn't as bad as comparisons with 2001 can not help but make it look.
She even played, essentially, God, as the voice of Deep Thought in 2006's Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
And what could be bigger than God? The Queen, of course. She made Lizzy cold, tradition-bound, often utterly contemptuous of the normal folk, but still hugely warm, compassionate and principled. She made a country to whom the royal family was mostly a joke fall in love with their queen all over again. When she was taking the piss out of Tony Blair we were on her side, and considering there are amoebas on Mars dead millions of years who have more in common with the average Brit than we do with the queen, that is quite some feat of acting.
Plus that spark is still in her eyes - the mischievousness, the competitiveness, and the comfort with her own sexuality - so giving the world a queen we would also, if we were honest, quite like to shag.
Now The Queen and its attendant Oscar have given her a higher Hollywood profile than ever before we can look forwards to seeing her in more films, though it remains to be seen whether the usually age-averse industry will know what to do with her mature charms. Look for her to be way too good for the upcoming sequel to National Treasure.
Please dig through our entire archive of Pin-Ups here, my favourite [mine too - George] being Soledad Miranda.
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Continue reading Geek Pin-Up #19: Helen MirrenTFL's Greatest Hits - Part 3: What's Left?
Some of the best writing done for this site was inarguably done by Chris Oliver, especially in his series of articles about those half-forgotten films that have yet to receive a DVD release: 'What's Left?'.
Here are all the links:
Part 1
Part 2
Ace In The Hole
Going Ape
Song Of The South
Get Crazy!
The one on Song Of The South, I think, is probably the single best thing that ever appeared on this site.
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Continue reading TFL's Greatest Hits - Part 3: What's Left?Tuesday, August 07, 2007
TFL's Greatest Hits - Part 2: The Halloween A To Z
Last October we did a whole bunch of stuff for Halloween, mostly centered around a (mostly) daily list of the coolest horror stuff. I think it turned out rather well. Click below for a full run down.
Here's the list, some of which are distinctly NSFW:
A
B
C
D-F
G-I
J-L
M
N-P
Q-S
T
U-W
X-Z
And as a bonus, here's my article about real animal deaths, which is most definitely NSFW.
86 more days Halloween, Halloween, Halloween,
86 more days to Halloween, Silver Shamrock!
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Continue reading TFL's Greatest Hits - Part 2: The Halloween A To ZMonday, August 06, 2007
Top Ten Movie Endings With A Cruel Twist
Life is complicated, messy and contingent. We are very rarely the central character in our lives (that honour usually going to our bank managers), very little happens during most of the 2nd act, the credits do not roll after our greatest victory (which was probably squeezing that girl's tit without getting slapped when we were 16), and it ends suddenly in the middle of a scene with you dead. This is why the neat, all-loose-ends-tied, happy endings of Hollywood movies are so hated. They are lies and they mock us with their rainbows.
The 1970's (the entire decade, you understand) dealt with this by leaving unresolved, ambiguous endings like that of the did he/didn't he catch him French Connection. And that's great and stuff, but they also remind us of the unfulfilling drudgery our lives ultimately consist of.
Movies are escapism too, after all, and that's kind of the point of those neat, happy endings.
So - surely the best of both worlds are the films that keep the neat, unrealistic endings, but just make them really, really bad for the hero. This list celebrates the the grand tradition of the cruel twist ending.
Huge spoilers throughout.
The Evil Dead Trilogy
Sam Raimi realised very early on with these films that the audience's enjoyment was directly linked to the amount of pain inflicted upon the hero, Ash. As such the films are filled (as pointed out in the endlessly re-listenable commentary tracks) with 'it's all right now' moments where Ash seems to have won, only to have the rug pulled out from under him as everything gets even worse.
The first film ends with Ash as the last survivor, walking out into the new day, only to get gobbled up by the 'Evil' in the final shot. the 'real' ending of the third film ends with him waking up from hibernation to a dead, post-apocalyptic world. But, for me, the best ending is part 2, where he is thrown back in time to be stuck forever in a deadite infested medieval hell. The final image starts as a hero shot of Ash towering over the frame and pulls out until he is a tiny figure lost amongst the smoke and ruins of a battlefield. The shot is actually a perfect encapsulation of the move from the male sublime to the female sublime and captures the gleeful undermining of the idea of the 'Male Hero' that the entire trilogy is thematically pinned on. But I'm usually too busy laughing at that idiot Ash to care.
Evil Dead 4 is actually one of the few geeky sequels I'd actually like to see. Those bits with 'evil' Peter Parker in Spider-Man 3 suggests that Sam still has a gleefully malevolent side and I'd love for him to take it out on Ash one last time.
John Carpenter's Entire Career
Geeky sequels I would not like to see include Escape From Earth and The Thing 2: Things. The first films were perfect as they were and, as evidenced by Escape From LA, John Carpenter does not have any more good movies in him.
The Thing ends with a good victorious explosion that kills the beastie and, in a lesser film, sorts everything out just in time for the pretty sunrise. In this film we are suddenly reminded that the survivors are stuck 100 miles from anywhere in subfreezing temperatures with no transport, power or heat. Add to that the realisation that the paranoia that anyone could be 'the thing' still hasn't been solved. Our two heroes are dead and the world is still probably doomed. My money, by the way, is on McReady being 'the thing'.
Escape From New York reverses Evil Dead's 'shit on your hero' approach by ending with Snake Plisskin shitting on the entire world just because he's in a bad mood. After the final, victorious rescue, the audience realises that the day is not saved and our anti-hero hasn't miraculously turned into a do-gooder in the final reel as per Hollywood business-as-usual. It turns out the bastard we can root for is, in fact, just a bastard. I know that Escape From LA ups the ante with Snake plunging the world into a new dark age, but it's still a shit film.
Prince Of Darkness ends with the heroine getting trapped in hell and returning as the angel of death (or something). In The Mouth Of Madness has the double twist of Sam Neill going completely mad and then having his madness become reality. And Memoirs Of An Invisible Man continues Carpenter's world-fucking theme by having Chevy Chase survive.
Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978)
Bloody hell but the 1978 version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. And I was so excited because it had Spock in it. The unremittingly bleak and paranoid film ends with our few survivors creeping about a defeated, alien-infested world when they spot our lead hero, Donald Sutherland walking about and they say:
'Hey Donald! Nice hair! Good to know you managed to survive! I guess there is hope after all, hey? Phew!'
And he turns to them, raises an accusing finger and calls to his fellow aliens.
'AARRRRAAAGGHHRRAAAAARRGGHHH!'
He says, so proving that we are all, truly, fucked.
Don't Look Now
In the second of Donald Sutherland's appearances on this list, he plays a grieving father of a drowned girl, trying to deal with his grief by moping around Venice and doing Julie Christie.
Now I'm not a big fan of describing things as 'pretentious', mostly out of self defence, but this film is certainly very 'arty' and 'slow' and ramjam full of awfully meaningful 'Symbolism'.
The film is so full of portents of doom that the ending can hardly be described as a twist but, nonetheless, Donald becomes obsessed finding a mysterious figure he keeps seeing sporting the same red coat as his daughter did when she died. He catches up to her, she turns out to be an old woman, and she kills him with a knife. The end.
It's about the mortifying obsession of grief and how not accepting the past will ultimately lead to you not being able to live in the present and, as such, is probably a bit obvious for our subtle tastes. Hell, I bet film-buffs only made a fuss over it back then because it had a totally hot sex scene in it and, godammit, it's really pretentious. That said it kept a 12 year old me interested (if a little confused) for its entire length and I used to think A Nightmare on Elm Street was the very height of horror back then.
The Parallax View
In a rare case of a 70's film actually having an ending (fuck the Nouvelle Vague - it was just the drugs they were all taking), this Warren Beatty conspiracy thriller has him as a reporter investigating a secret organisation that trains assassins to kill politically unpopular people so as to manipulate world events in favour of the military-industrial complex. Warren finds out the secret, runs to tell the world, and gets shot in the back of the head. Warren is set up as a patsy, the bad guys win and go on to invade Iraq as often as is necessary. Tough shit Warren, liberals are losers.
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
After being as suave as an Aussie ski instructor can be for two hours, George Lazenby infiltrates the baddie's hideout, fights some people and saves the day. As a reward, in the final scene he gets to marry Diana Rigg, who promptly gets shot to death by Blofeld. The end. That'll teach you for trying to be James Bond, George - what's it like being not as successful as Roger fucking Moore?
The latest Bond film, Casino Royale, pulls a similar trick while also being a really good film. The bad guy is killed, the poker game is won and the girl is saved, leading to a final romantic scene in Venice where Bond quits the service and accepts true love for the very first time. Which then goes on, and on, and on until the girl turns out to be a traitor, runs off with the money, leads Bond into a trap and then kills herself out of shame. A cruel twist for Bond, but it does mean he spends the rest of his life a bitter, emotionless sadist who gets his kicks drinking, fucking and killing. Result!
Brazil
I think I've decided that I don't like Brazil. It is an extraordinary film; visionary, unique, imaginative and bold. It is also a mess, cluttered in frame and structure, set at a constant tone of shrieking hysteria and has an undertone of spiteful misanthropy. Ultimately it is exhausting rather than satisfying. The ending is still the shit though.
After being beaten down by bureaucracy, corruption and totalitarianism the entire film, our meek hero is finally roused to rage against the system, break his chains and run off into the sunset with his terrorist girlfriend. Then he wakes up in a torture chamber run by his best mate. The last 20 minutes have merely been another of his pointless, fruitless fantasies. He is lost, and ends the film singing a half remembered tune over and over, dead eyed, as the camera pulls back from his torture chair until he is a tiny figure lost in a massive, vaulted room.
No hope; no joy; imagination and individuality provide no transcendence; we must become cogs in the machine or be destroyed by it. How depressing! And pretty rich from a guy who has, in fact, made a career out of his imagination and individuality. Hard though he had to fight, he still got the films made, and I bet he has more money than I do. Artists may be the soul of a society, but they can be whiny little bitches too. Still, great ending.
Friday The 13th
All of these sorts of movies end with the survivor drawing a sigh of relief as the sun finally rises, only for the presumed-dead killer to reappear and drag them down to hell! What a surprise!
Only they are barely twists because everyone expects them. Equally, by the third installment at the very latest, the killer has become the hero, and is basically the only character audiences care about, so his re-appearance is more like a cheer-worthy victory than a shocking downer. Plus they're all just nakedly set ups for sequels, rather than comments on the cruelty of fate.
I'll include Jason leaping out of the water, as well as Carrie's 'hand from the grave' on this list because it needs an example of the form and because they were the only ones that ever actually 'got' me.
The Graduate
You should have copped off with Anne Bancroft, you cretin. She could have made you cum for a week.
The Vanishing
For the final entry here's the coldest, bleakest, nastiest, cruelest ending of them all. Man loses girl. Man meets another man who promises to show man what happened to girl if he will just drink this cup of coffee. Man drinks coffee. Man wakes up in a coffin, six feet underground. The end.
What makes the ending hit home hardest is the uniquely low-key, matter of fact, rainy-Wednesday tone that only Northern Europeans can master. Glitzy Hollywood could never do an ending such as this, as its heroes will break out of a coffin and kill a hundred bad guys before the first reel is over. And, indeed, in the Hollywood remake, the hero not only breaks out of the coffin, he saves the girl and kills the bad guy. The film, thankfully, woke up in a coffin when the box office returns were announced.
So what are these really, really mean endings for? Schadenfreude? That works for The Evil Dead, but not for most of these other films that have really rather nice people getting shat on. Morality tales? Possibly for Don't Look Now's 'perils of ignoring Julie Christie' plot, but doesn't that make them awfully preachy and therefore unbearably dull? Surely the films aren't suggesting that this is how life really is? After all the very existence of Brazil the film makes an hypocrisy of its final lesson that all imaginative action comes to naught. Are they there to punish the audience or, worse, laugh at them for wanting the naively happy ending? And isn't catharsis just a lie perpetrated by greedy psychoanalysts? Is it all just darker-than-thou teenage posturing?
It all seems rather depressing, now that I think about it. What we really need is, I don't know, to have some films that have happy endings that are genuinely earnt. Don't you think?
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Continue reading Top Ten Movie Endings With A Cruel TwistTFL's Greatest Hits - Part 1: Tits In PG Movies
So here's the bit where we blatantly try to pad our content by republishing old articles that we really liked. First up is our most popular set of articles ever - Tits In PG Movies. These were 'digged' and apparently read by literally thousands of people, which is nearly twice the population of the entire Internet.
The following, I would hope you realise, is NSFW.
Part 1: Tits In PG Movies
Part 2: More Tits In PG Movies
Part 3: No More Tits In PG Movies
And for a bonus, here's another bit of tittery I found, from Milos Foreman's 1984 masterpiece of Oscar baiting middlebrowery: Amadeus. In this scene Salieri has forced Mozart's pretty young wife to 'visit his quarters' after dark if she wants him to put in a good word for the wayward 'Wolfie' with the Emperor. She turns up and duly gets them out:
It should be pointed out that this shot gained the film an 'R' in America. Look at the candles, America, this is obviously art! In England it is still available as a PG. Pussies!
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Continue reading TFL's Greatest Hits - Part 1: Tits In PG MoviesArgument Of The Dead
Andrew Clarke thinks Land Of The Dead, George A Romero's 4th entry into the zombie genre he all but created with 1969's Night Of The Living Dead, sucks. Doug Slack thinks Andrew Clarke is a fucking idiot. It is on.
Doug: Don't know what your beef is, but here's why it doesn't suck:
It's easy to fault LOTD for it's obvious metaphors and some cliched horror movie set-ups. But the series was never subtle. We're talking about an over-the-top, end of the world, eat your face kind of story. If anything LOTD looks downright subtle compared to 28 Days Later and James Gunn's (superawesome) Dawn Of The Dead remake. And yet, once again, George manages to subvert the cliches he helped establish. He actually has the gall to make the flesh-eating zombies not just sympathetic, but actual heroes. They are no longer clueless consumers or sad little domesticated creatures. They are punk rock rebels smashing the state and claiming their turf. Surely even you can see how this follows Romero's "They're us!" philosophy to it's logical conclusion.
Andrew: You're right, of course, Doug, it is easy to criticise the obvious metaphors and cliched horror movie set ups, and that's because they are awful. But we can get to problems in implementation later. I want to start with problems of conception and you start your foolish, doomed defence with the film's most obvious failing: the zombies. Puny human, you have played right into my hands!
The political subtext is usually the first thing offered up when placing Romero above the genre hacks that surrounded and followed him. But I argue that the more overtly political the films become, the further away from their strengths they move.
What are zombies about? Death. This wave of personality-less, mindless monsters move slowly and inexorably towards you as you try increasingly frantically to avoid it. They are slow and few at the beginning, making them easy to avoid, but you will get tired and they will keep coming until they inevitably overwhelm you. There is no escape. This is the fear of death, and it underpins the idea of the zombie movie as set up by Romero (with survivors in an enclosed space surrounded by the monsters).
Political readings of NOTLD, where the ‘ghouls’ represent the rise of minorities against the ruling, abusive, complacent majority, rest upon this more elemental bedrock of the fear of death.
Thus, as the zombies become overt, deliberately comical, representations of consumer addiction in Dawn and end up as talking, unionised, working class heroes in Land, they lose exactly the base power of fear that those political interpretations rely on.
But perhaps I am just more scared of death than of black people. I don’t live in Mississippi, after all.
Here’s the point: when the zombies are just these blank expressions of nothing, we can read our fears onto them. When the political reading is made crudely and unambiguously specific, in the form of talking bloody zombies, the fear and the power are lost. LOTD is the work of someone who watched NOTLD and got it wrong.
So, all this political nonsense merely renders LOTD a horror movie that isn’t scary.
Doug: Your criticisms would have been dead on if only you hadn't missed the entire point of the film. If anything, you've bolstered my argument.
Yes, up until now Romero's zombies have been a source of fear. No matter what other soicopolitical metaphors one could hang on them, they always represented the universal fear of death. But like I said before, Romero has subverted his own cliche. They are no longer death. They are now the future. They strike terror only in the hearts of evil cigar smoking republicans who do indeed fear black men more than they fear death. More to the point, these entitled white folks fear change. They fear anything that threatens their status quo. That's what makes the assault on Fiddlers Green (an echo of Poe's Masque of Red Death and EC comics) so triumphant. Sure there's carnage and chaos and much gnashing of teeth, but revolution is never pretty. That's what makes LOTD so punk rock.
You see Andrew, what your missing is this- Land is not a horror movie. It's a sci-fi allegory. Emphasis on the gory.
Andrew: Ok, so you're characterising the move as 'undermining the cliches' and I'm characterising the movie as 'forgetting what made it work', and I will admit I am personally disappointed by the move away from primal horror. Criticism of a film should not be based on what you want it to be, but on what it actually is, so I guess we can agree to disagree on that point, even though I am currently flipping you the finger.
So LOTD is not a horror movie anymore - fine. What the hell is it, then? If it is a political allegory, it is not fit to lick Animal Farm's trotters.
Its main thesis is nothing more than 'rich white people are bad' and doesn't seem to develop it at all. What possible bite can it have when the various characters are broad-stoke painted out of any relevance? Dennis Hopper could be a representation of the moral values of the ruling establishment, but he is also indistinguishable from a stock 'slimy, double-dealing asshole' character that appears in countless other genre movies that don't have pretensions to political heft.
In fact, the gross simplicities of the film work against the allegory. If the zombies are 'us', to the point of almost being the heroes, what does it say that they are still portrayed as a shambling, only barely conscious, mob, capable only of inarticulate howls and violence to express itself? It's a very right-wing conception of a working class rebellion. A right-winger might find it scary, but how patronising of us (do-gooder liberals) to cheer on the 'them' - the stupid underclass, finally getting a glimmer of thought in their stupid heads. And which of this 'underclass' would proudly identify themselves with these zombies? I bet they'd rather be a running zombie.
I'm sure it's not deliberate, and merely an unforeseen result of keeping the original conception of zombies (slow, stupid, individually weak) intact out of tradition or brand recognition, but it does not speak well of the political acuity of the movie.
So, no, it is not a horror movie and, if it is to be a political allegory, it is far too basic to have bite.
No, what it really is, deep down, is a remake of Damnation Alley, starring that bloke from Airwolf. LOTD is a crappy DTV action movie.
Doug: I agree Romero is painting in broad strokes here. He's ignoring so many details that contribute to class division in this country and saying "Fuck this, let's just go to Canada where they have socialized medicine and you can get all the Neosporine you want without having to raid the slums of ZombieTown." But again, subtlety was never his forte nor his intent. Perhaps you think the direction he takes in LOTD requires more subtlety than "LOL! Zombies in the mall!". Perhaps you're right. But that's unlikely, as you're nothing more than a lute strumming faux intellectual. But I digress.
The representation of the impoverished disenfranchised as snarling zombies could indeed be insulting. But only if you assume they need to adapt to our or Dennis Hopper's standards of behavior to earn respect. I would say their culture (for lack of a better word) is irrelevant. All we need to respect is their desire to simply co-exist in society. Let's not blow them to pieces with our Mad Max tank, let's let them stake their own claim in this world simply because they deserve it as much as anyone else. Of course, their "culture" includes eating people, so that might get awkward.
Andrew: And this, I think, is the problem. He's ignoring so many details, but it's OK because he's deliberately being crude. We must respect the zombies, but they're still murdering animals.
While watching the film again, I found myself making so many exceptions and 'yeah, buts' I finally decided that I was just involved in apologia. There isn't any subversion of cliche here, only the cliche.
The opening credits have knock-off Se7en stylistic ticks over crappy hard rock, but that's OK because it's just to sucker in the kids and appease the demographic hungry, trend following studio.
The characters are thin, stereotypical and never developed, but that's OK because they are genre archetypes being used to set up political allegory.
The political allegory is basic and confused, but that's OK because it's supposed to be bold and simple.
You've got characters doing stupid stuff and frequent uninspired horror set ups - the kid with the skateboard waiting at the docks being the main one that comes to mind - but that's OK because, hey it's still a genre film and we can forgive this stuff, right?
The cheesy, stunt cameos are OK because...of some reason or other.
Asia Argento never once gets her tits out but that's OK because...?
All this added up until I felt I was excusing everything and enjoying very little.
Plus the fact that he is no longer using an iconic horror template to build his Subversive Political Allegory TM on but a crappy action movie template, complete with dirtbikes, big guns and a toyline-ready A-Team truck.
I got to the point where I wasn't getting anything else out of it but that crappy action movie. It was very much a case of the emperor's new clothes, compounded by the expectation that this is something 'more' than normal genre gruel, made by a master.
So - maybe I don't see the power or the fun in the broad strokes political stuff. Or maybe there's fun somewhere else that I'm missing. I'll stop ranting and ask where the joy is. What have I missed?
Doug: You know, when I showed this to my wife on DVD she had the same criticisms. Of course, hers were delivered much more succinctly.
"This movie" she said, "...sucks."
She actually had to pause the film to deliver her judgment. It was the scene in the armory when our heroes are getting suited up and trash talking and yeah it's the worst scene in the entire movie and whatever. By then it was too much for her to bear. She couldn't make all the allowances you talk about. I guess Land Of The Dead is where you separate the women from the hardcore geeks.
Andrew: Can I have your wife's number, Doug? Maybe I can get some ice-cream and watch a PG-13 horror with her.
It seems you are saying that, yes, it is kind of balls, but it's Romero, I grew up with him and it has zombies and loads of guts so just leave me alone, OK?
I actually can't touch that. It's kind of pure.
Now, if it wasn't Romero, and if it didn't receive such ready love, I wouldn't be so hard on it, so there's definitely some geek politics in my criticism - it would still be a bad film, but one with a lot of grue and that zips along without getting too boring.
Whether it is because he got old, his glasses got too big or he just couldn't be bothered, Romero is only important by reputation now, not by ability. I'm putting my money on his upcoming Diary Of The Dead being right duff.
Doug (looks up "duff"): How dare you!
I'm positive Romero will pull another grueling tale of terror from one of his many, many vest pockets.
Andrew: In the amazing tradition of Blair Witch! Starring teenagers! Canadian ones!
If I'm wrong I promise I'll eat badly refrigerated pig guts.
Doug: May I remind you of another film Romero made in the woods on a shoe string budget? A film that predates Blair Witch by 30 years. A film called Night Of The Living Dead!
Andrew: Oooooo! I see what you did there! But I'm fairly certain reminding people of Night Of The Living Dead won't make Diary look any better. Night is a classic, which means that, even if Diary is pretty good, it will never have that same 'aura' as Night and will only ever look like some crappy digital video compared to, I don't know, a real film. And has there been a clever-clever meta concept horror movie that has worked?
I actually believe that Romero doesn't much care for zombies, but it's the only way he can get funding for movies. After Land flopped (according to Hollywood standards), he had to go much lower budget, and is hiding that behind rhetoric of 'doing it completely his way, with no interference'. Colour me suspicious. Also the meta-concept just feels like someone trying to distance himself from the actual zombies as much as he can, making a film about anything other than the zombies he knows he is tied to forever.
Doug: Scream worked. And so did The Tingler (Wherein Vincent Price implored the audience to SCREAM FOR IT'S LIFE!), in it's own way.
I've actually met and spoken with Romero before. He strikes me as a laid back hippy type. His refusal to play Hollywood politics doesn't seem to be entirely rooted in some kind of artistic ethos. I saw a guy who has no natural talent for networking and no desire to learn. His portfolio also attests to this attitude. So I have a hard time believing the man is just going for a calculated rip-off/cash-in. Especially at this point in his career.
Or maybe I just have a man crush on him. That ponytail can melt your socks.
Andrew: You've met him? That's not fair! And extremely cool! How big are his glasses? How much hair is coming out of his ears?
Doug: They were like two giant panes of reinforced windows, the kind they install in airports.
This was a few years back. He was appearing at a college for a showing of Night Of The Living Dead (a video projection in an AP hall) followed by a Q&A. Sadly, not a big turnout. He talked to the audience a bit and asked if we wouldn't like to see his new film, Bruiser, instead. Of course we would! So he actually pulled a video tape out of his sweater pocket and gave it to the "projectionist". This was actually the best environment in which to see Bruiser - with Romero and his fans- since the film is... not great. Afterward we were asked to move the Q&A to the student lounge area. There was a showing of What Lies Beneath scheduled next for this room and it would take awhile to add extra seats for the crowd outside. Romero, some kind of geek pied piper, led our meager group out of the auditorium and past a giant line of students eager to see the Hollywood horror blockbuster. Sometimes life provides the best metaphors.
So then we just hung out on some comfy chairs and shot the shit about movies, the industry, and Italian food.
And THAT'S why Land Of The Dead doesn't suck.
Andrew: I am defeated.
Big Daddy: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! RAAARRRGH!
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Continue reading Argument Of The DeadThe End
Hello!
Yes, here it is. This is it. The end of The Fake Life movie blog. We're not doing it anymore. It's over. Kaput. Flat-line. Nil Points. Fin. FATALITY!
I know, but move away from the windows, close the knife draw and don't sell your Star Wars figures just yet. And please, whatever you do, don't cry - emotions scare me.
We started here in April 2006, moving on to publish some of the most incisive, world-shaking and revolutionary writing in all of film criticism; becoming trend-setters in our own small way, coming this close to selling our souls to the great corporate devil, and actually starting to build up a reasonable daily readership. Also: gay jokes.
But, over the last few months, the content has dried up, leaving the blog with only the odd article only every few weeks, which is a particularly undignified un-death for a blog and very frustrating for those who would still click on the site every day. Perhaps, in hindsight, we were doomed from the start.
It turns out that it's a lot of work publishing a blog. It takes time, passion, dedication, a small amount of OCD and a borderline autistic personality to keep this shit up, and I'm afraid we just don't have these qualities in anything like the right amounts. We send our respect and sympathies to those who can make a success of this online malarkey and humbly leave you to it.
But, rather than just sweep the blog under the carpet and pretend it wasn't us, we thought it would be good to give The Fake Life a proper send off:
Over the next two weeks we're going to be re-publishing some of our favourite articles, giving some of our regular features one last airing, and giving out a few last thoughts, discussions and arguments on movies and popular culture in general. We hope you enjoy it, we hope you join in with any discussions that pop up on our message board, and we thank you for being a part of the life and death of the greatest movie blog in the whole of the Internet ever: The Fake Life.
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Continue reading The EndSunday, August 05, 2007
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