Bondage

So, ladies and germs, things are not optimal chez Xtin at the moment. The new year has failed to live up to its New Start, New Me promises and so Pluvialis and I have agreed to plump for the Chinese New Year, which will be one of the Rat. Bringer of material wealth but also pestilence and death. Excellent. Better to be rich and poxy than poor and sterile, I always say.

I, did, however, laugh out loud a minute ago upon discovering that the title of the new Bond flick is: Quantum of Solace.

Um ... what?

Bwahahahaha! Oh, that is just so magically, operatically bad. It is bad like mayonnaise is good. It is bad like novelty socks with an expensive suit. Bad like salesmen who say "utilise" and "my colleague and myself" a lot. So expansively, generously, exhilaratingly bad.

God, I fucking love it.

Treasure

A few years back, after one of those desultory wanders around the video shop that afflicted millions of poor little Westerners before the advent of Netflix and Amazon DVD rental, Pluvialis and I ended up on the floor of the living room with two Ben & Jerry Wiches, watching National Treasure.

We were really ready to enjoy this movie, you understand. After the Half-Hour Browse Of Death in the video store, your standards are as tenderized as minute steak.

Pluvialis and I laugh quite a lot. There was the time that the birdoole fell backwards off the bedroom curtain. Then there was the time when we were in Waitrose and she decided to mess with my head over the pronunciation of "gravadlax". Then there was the time that I faux-swatted at the parrot with a pillow because he was chewing the bedhead, and accidentally whacked him under the bed instead, with bemused tweeting emerging from the depths. That one went straight into the Pluvalis--Xtin mythology.

National Treasure put all of these into the shade. I don't remember anything about it except for the part, close to the beginning, when Our Hero Nicholas Cage unearths a ship that's supposedly been under the snow in Antarctica (!!!) for more than 150 years by dusting a couple of inches of powdery snow off the surface of ... gadzooks! The ship's nameplate!

OK, no, I remember there was some stuff about the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well. And, um ... the FBI.

After the snow-dusting escapade Pluvialis and I started laughing and yelling at the screen at the same time. Every thirteen seconds or so we would yell the next wild plot development at the characters and then high-five our preturnatural screenplay prescience. Pluvialis kept saying, damn, Xtin! We should write one of these! We can put Diane Kruger into a pink Vera Wang! That totally counts as a plot development!

A couple of weeks ago, I sent her the link to the latest in the franchise: National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Seriously. You don't even have to go and see it to get all the health-giving laughter. Just watch the trailer. Maybe twice. And in case you needed anything further, herewith a plot summary from the New York Times critic Matt Zoller Seitz:

"To acquire the cleverly named Book of Secrets, Ben plots to kidnap the current president and blah, blah, blah purple monkey dishwasher."

To that we say, amen.

A Monday darkly

I cannot get my brain to engage today. The mental clutch is fully depressed. The gear teeth hang apart like a broken jaw.

As per usual, I am minimising efficiency by considering why this might be, which is the intellectual equivalent of heat loss. But you know, whatever. So far, I have identified, not to say reverse-engineered, still less to say generated in a hopelessly ad-hoc manner, the following factors:

(1) last night, I watched part of A Scanner Darkly. I didn't make it to the end. OK so Philip K Dick not the most soothing of thought-mongers, but that wasn't it. The rotoscoping gave me profound ontological anxiety. I think my thoughts are partially rotoscoped right now. Plus, Robert Downey, Jr. Yeah. Exactly.

(2) this morning, I had coffee in Not The Usual Location. So either or both (a) I was deprived of the routine context in which my brain usually boots (b) the coffee was different.

(3) I am wearing my new red canvas Converse All Star low-tops. So either or both (a) the incongruent coolness of same has caused my brain to seek a new identity since the usual one is patently inconsistent with new red shoes (b) thought actually depended on my Birkenstocks.

There might be something hormonal, too. Not to mention last night's full moon. I'm not ruling anything out.

Die die die die

I loves me a good action flick. I love the noise and excitement and the lovingly shot pyromaniacal fetishism of explosions. I love the hysterical horn-heavy soundtracks and the panting, fricative cello low-notes that accompany angry men wearing resolute expressions of vengeance. I love the henchmen and the hot deconstructed-Catwoman outfit that the Evil Chick always wears. I love that once, the bad dudes were the ones with no hair, but now the best indication of evil is a very expensive haircut.

Usually, though, stunts leave me cold. I like the sounds. Smash! Kapow! Crash tinkle tinkle tinkle as the hero is propelled through a plate glass window. Doo'oof as the karate block hits the ninja chick in the chest. VrooooOOOm! as the car leaps a fifty foot gap in the obligatory unfinished bridge. Klklklssskrcksssftft as the protagonists wander through the smouldering wreckage of another inflagration. And best of all, fffs-ga-BLAM as yet another something apparently made of 99% accelerant blows up. But I'm tapping my fingers waiting for the dull, frantically edited boredom of the visuals to be over.

Die Hard 4.0, to my fantastic and enduring delight, contained the most inventive, creatively shot and witty 129 minutes of stunt material I've ever seen. I was even distracted from the cellos and injury-chic sported by Mr Willis and the oh-so-hot brushed steel belt buckle on Timothy Olyphant's all-black Evil Dude ensemble. And even Maggie Q's FBI bullet-proof vest. Which, seriously. If you want to know if a woman is completely unnaturally spectacular looking, put her in a bullet-proof vest and see if she becomes hotter. If yes, she is Not Normal. But I digress.

Stunts, man. If you want to see a helicopter-mounted gunman expelled towards the camera at high speed in close-focus after a car is ramped into aforementioned helicopter, which is (naturellement) exploding in the background of the shot, get thee hence to the multiplex immediately. Because you know what's cool? What is cool is when a helicopter is exploding in the background.

Long live the blam.

Be prepared

Naturally, I don't have to say anything about the genius of North by Northwest. It's a truism of modern culture-vulturehood that it is a work of genius, so it would be interesting for me to get all controversial on yo' asses and contest this assessment. Only that would be insane. Of course it's a work of genius.

This here is just a wee fragment of worship for Cary Grant and his everyman alter-ego, Roger O-stands-for-nothing Thornhill.

Late in the movie, Thornhill has learned that The Icy Heroine (the gorgeously attired Eva Marie Saint) is going to be leaving the country with The Villain (James Mason, usurped as the world's greatest and most paradigmatic bad dude only by Basil Rathbone). Right now, Mr Thornhill is in a hospital room with the CIA man who's been masterminding the whole thing that got him ensnared in the first place.

He's playing along with the government man, innocence smoothing the lines in his immaculate tan. He casually and efficiently gets into the new set of clothes he's been brought. Even more causally still, he gets rid of his chaperone on a pretext (he asks for a quart of scotch. Only in 1959!).

Quick! Now's his chance! He grabs the first new shoe from the box, pulls it on without bothering with the laces, hopping up and down on one leg. On with the second shoe, smacking the heels against the hospital linoleum.

And is he out the window the second his shoes are on? Is he hell.

He picks up a white handkerchief, folds it, and puts it in his trouser pocket. Now out the window.

Oh, yeah. That's what I call a man.

It happened one knight

Yesterday while stitching together the rich textures of the tapestry of procrastination, I watched First Knight. I love this movie. I'm not at all sure why. Or more exactly, all the reasons I can think of put together seem insufficient to explain why I should love it in spite of its cringe-worthy anachronisms in speech, costume, battlecraft, gender politics or indeed, politics of any kind. Of course, it's not taking itself that seriously and Arthur is the stuff of legend anyway -- it's not like they were recreating a historical event or something, so no need to be churlish about the fact that Camelot looks like a part of Legoland. So maybe I love it because it's so bad. And because Julia Ormond's hair is so good.

Sometimes bits of of film-making suspend belief not by being plausible, by drawing you into the reality of the character's world, but by being so wildly, ostentatiously implausible, so inconsistent and internally contradictory by their very own fictional lights, that you cannot help but be beguiled. You can't help but love it, because it doesn't even care whether or not it seems real ... all it seems like is a movie.

First Knight plays this card with a trump so spectacular it commands even my jaded respect. Naturally we all know the canonical love triangle between Guinevere, Arthur and Lancelot. Even today poor romantic sods like me worry about whether or not something like this will happen to us: you marry the fine, powerful, upstanding, brilliant man that you have loved for as long as you can remember, and then bam! Along comes the Real Man and you (naturally) Just Can't Help Yourself. Twoo wuv.

So far, so cinematic. First Knight casts Richard Gere into the role of Lancelot. Now, I don't 'get' the Richard Gere thing, he seems more vacant than any other person whose facial expressions I've ever had more than five minutes to inspect. Still, his face and leonine hairdo have a certain graven-image style masculinity, and since your credulity levels are already softened up by the fact that you're lounging on the sofa watching reruns,you're prepared to accept that this, plus a little sexy sword expertise, would give him the edge over the old, dull king.

Except King Arthur is ... Sean Connery.

I love it. Anyone who believes that any woman, especially one with hair extensions as fantabulous as Julia Ormond's, would rather tear the leather jerkin off the lanky, permanently gawky-looking physique of Mr Gere than leap into the bearskins with Connery, stalking around the FAO-Schwartz Camelot sets with his knightly skirts flying looking as sexy as anything alive, will believe anything.

You almost feel noble having done it.

Bourne again

So I'm watching The Bourne Identity, and I'm deciding that Jason Bourne is the most irresistible representation of of masculinity ever commited to film. It's a great movie. It's brilliantly shot, even more brilliantly cut, and as H pointed out at the time, glamourises Europe in a way that hasn't been managed since the heist flicks of the 60s. But all this is as naught against the hypnotic magnetism of our hero.

He speaks German and French and has bullet holes in his back. He can kill a guy with a ballpoint pen. He can escape from the US Consulate in Paris by flinging a security guard down the stairs and ripping the evacuation map off the wall; lose the gendarmes by doing a handbrake turn into the oncoming traffic at 60mph in a stick-shift mini. And (this is the killer) he has no idea who he is.

He breaks a German policeman's wrist with the kind of masculine proficiency that usually goes with a flinty, Vin-Dieselesque detachment, but instead bewilderment struggles with purposiveness in his eyes. (Sidebar: no mean thespian feat, that. Kudos to the criminally underused Matt Damon). He paranoically wipes the hotel room for prints and then sits quietly in the corner watching the girl sleep. His eyes are limpid with relief upon coming upon the first passport, for it contains A Name, only to have the hurt, betrayed bewilderment return with throat-constricting disappointment in the face of another name. And then another. And another. He takes the handgun out of the safe deposit box as though he has handled a firearm thousands of times, but there is a gingerness about it, because he doesn't want to know this about himself.

He looks at a map like he is the Terminator processing information, he runs as though escape is important but he is afraid of nothing, he drives like the car is an extension of his hands, he fights with the brutal grace of the man thinking of nothing but outcomes, a man unworried by his own power -- he can do anything, but he has no idea what to do.

The completely rampant sexiness of this combination is a stroke of narrative genius. Which is part of the reason that The Bourne Supremacy made none of the fatal missteps that usually make sequels so insipid. Sequels so often screw it up because the bewilderment is gone, the force of not knowing is gone, the whole thing jumps the shark because the epistemological imperatives are all taken away, the motivation withers to nothing and all we are left with is a car chase. Or some SFX. Or another prize fight. Or whatever. But Bourne's second outing doesn't make this mistake. Jason knows the score by then, he knows what to do ... except he doesn't. Bewilderment still struggles in his eyes along with the purposiveness.

He still has no idea what he will do next. This makes for awesome cinema. Especially since it might be using a toaster to blow up a house.