Once again, I’ve fallen prey to radio silence and left the blog unattended. The thing is, it’s normally proof that life has decided to flatten me with activity- and that’s definitely been the case recently. The preperations for Christmas are almost complete- in short, it’s got to the point where I can stop working, and start actually enjoying it and relaxing. I’m not quite there yet- I’ve still got a day or so of work to go, and George has already headed down to Hampshire, so I’ve got an evening on my lonesome. Sniff.

Very tired at the moment- and feeling very incapable of writing anything witty, urbane- or, in fact, anything at all.

More details soon. Just not right now…

It’s here. I’m listening to it right now. And it’s great. Go get it. It won’t be around for long.

Follow the trail to the ‘American Edit’ mash-up album. Now!!!

For all those who love mash-ups… Dean Gray day starts in just under eight hours.

For full details of how to get the ‘American Edit’ Mash-up album (for a limited time only), go here.

Enjoy…

Some additional stuff- the trailer for Mission Impossible III is up at Yahoo movies, and looks potentially good. It’s directed by J.J. Abrams, it’s got the scrummy Michelle Monaghan (who described my name as “beautiful” thus earning me a moment of pure English ‘did she just say that?’ embarrasment), and the trailer has a nice dark opening with Phillip Seymor Hoffman in scary mode. Certainly better than Tom and his cruciform climbing pose from M.I.2- and no sign of any slow-motion beautiful hair.

Also, is you rummage at BacardiLive.Com you’ll find the trailer for the Miami Vice. It looks… well, it looks very Michael Mann. Boo hiss for not using the theme, and instead going for somewhat anonymous (and not very contemporaneous, considering it’s set in the Eighties) gangsta rap.

Plus- to tie in with my rant about self-referential fairy tale cartoons a little while ago, here’s the trailer for a diabolical piece of swamp-bilge called Hoodwinked that looks to be darkening cinema screens fairly soon. It doesn’t even look like it’s well animated…

And- just while I’m at it- some reviews have turned up on Aint It Cool News here, here and here of V For Vendetta (you’ll have to search for them in the BNAT7 run down)- and they’re gigantically positive. Being a huge fan of the original comic, and having seen the complete fuck-up made of From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I was more than willing to believe this was going to be a disaster, but I may be wrong. I’m withholding judgement until actually seeing it, but even if it’s a halfway decent version, I’ll be happy.

Just realised, I didn’t say a word about interviewing Guillermo Del Toro last week. It was another interview for Hotdog where they want specific things- in this case, his golden rules for making a horror movie. I’d already done something like this with Ray Harryhausen a couple of weeks previously, and it hadn’t gone smoothly- but the guy was an absolute pro from start to finish. I explained the set-up- and basically just sat back and let him talk for about twenty minutes. Intelligent, funny, and one of the easiest and most enjoyable interviews I’d done for ages. The man’s a star.

More soon. I’m currently tinkering with a review, and I’ve got to get it finished before I can think straight.

So, this is Christmas. And what have we done?

I think I’ve realised that I’m terribly cyclical in the way I do things. I go through intense bursts of activity, and then I’ll leave whatever it is happily alone for the next three months before having another intense, mad burst of activity. It can’t be good for me, whatever it is.

I’m getting to the end of a major burst of writing- one of the main reasons for my blog silence. Any time away from typing is often a blessing. I’ve got two more reviews to write (one of which is a very long review on a decidedly uninteresting book), but almost everything else is wrapped up. I’ve also got to nag Highbury (the owners of Hotdog magazine) about the fact that it might be nice if somebody paid me some money for the insane amount of work I’ve done for them over the past few months. I’m such a card for actually expecting to get paid, but hey…

George went out for a wild night on the tiles last night at her work Christmas Party. Said before going, “I’ll definitely be back on the last tube.” Actually arrived back by Taxi at 3AM. I didn’t sit dramatically in the dark, waiting for her to turn the light on so I could exclaim “What time do you call this?” because, frankly, I was asleep. It can be a little disconcerting when she doesn’t call to tell me she’s going to be late, but it’s usually just a sign that she’s having a wonderful time.

I’m looking forward to Christmas, and the chance to actually sort some stuff out in my life.

There’ll be some more fun stuff here soon. Promise.

(If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.)

Late at night on a strange, work-heavy day. Spent most of today staring at the article I’m working on at the moment, but I’m also quite proud that I managed to do an hour of writing this morning, which was quite the most rewarding thing I did all day. On top of that, I managed to finish off a review and do a rough version of another one, so, all things said and done, I’ve actually gotten a ridiculous amount done. I had dinner at 7ish, kept going until nine-ish, and then my brain officially shut down.

I’ve now got two days of subbing at IPC- which will either be utterly boring, or a nice change from spending 90% of my time in my flat. I’ve also realised that I need to be a hell of a lot more regimented with my time. And that completing the book I’m working on is something that I genuinely, genuinely want to do. It’s a strange realisation, but a very nice one.

I’m reading a fantasy/historical epic all about Dragons in the Napoleonic War at the moment- the frustrating thing is that I really want to read The Seven Basic Plots, but it’s one of those heavy-duty books that’s going to take me a long, long time. And I’ve got the new Neal Asher to write. (And I’ve got Guillermo Del Toro to interview about his first film next week. The phrase “Gulp” comes to mind). I need a 27 hour day just to be able to fit everything in.

Also saw a Hong Kong romantic comedy called Drink Drank Drunk last night, which was frothy, nutty and wonderfully sweet in a way that Hollywood romcoms never seem to be able to manage. There’s an energy to Asian romcoms that occasionally is terribly disarming, and their ability to demolish traditional gender roles is quite nice. It was also an extreme surprise to see the woman I’d previously seen in the amazingly icky horror movie Dumplings playing the lead role- another thing about Asian stars, is that they’re often prepared to do stuff that’s totally different from their usual image in a way that just doesn’t happen in Hollywood. More please!

Another Sunday morning screening- and in this case, it was the new Disney movie CHICKEN LITTLE. Virtually everything I’d seen and heard about the film had prepared me for a pretty painful time, but I really wasn’t prepared for how horribly cynical a move for Disney this really is. Chicken Little is their first all CGI movie, their first computer animation without Dreamworks, and has been widely held up as one of their last chances to try and grab back their positions as a major Animation Studio to be reckoned with, and not just a factory for churning out substandard sequels to much better movies.

Well, it’s pretty obvious the main thought that was going through the head of Disney Executives- fear. Naked, unquestioning fear.

DISNEY EXEC: Oh crap! What are we going to do? We’ve lost Pixar! Our last movie was Brother f£%@ing Bear! If we don’t get a hit, we’ll be in serious trouble!

DISNEY EXEC 2: Yeah, and those Dreamworks animations have been doing really well- the Bastards!

DISNEY EXEC: That’s it! That’s the answer!! All we have to do is exactly what Dreamworks are doing, and everything will work out fine!

As a result, we’ve got a Disney film that’s shrill, obnoxious, and crammed full of pointless pop culture gags. It’s like being stuck in a lift with an epileptic, attention-deficit Clown on anphetamines, and it’s so desperate to please that the whole thing gets monstrously wearying. The character designs (apart from the slightly creepy Chicken Little) are all plasticy and rather unpleasent to look at, and the story isn’t actually a story- it’s an excuse for a lot of noise, running around, screaming and falling over. Nothing in the film adds up to anything, and it’s all done with the bane of modern animated movies- the post-modern wink at the audience.

Of course, it’s Disney who started this all back in 1993 by letting Robin Williams loose as the Genie in Aladdin to do Robert DeNiro and Jack Nicolson impressions. Back then, it was new, it was shocking, and it was hilarious. Now, it’s invaded the texture of US animated movies to such an extent that they’re virtually becoming unwatchable. Chicken Little is stuffed full of this stuff, where it doesn’t even need to be a gag, it’s enough just to make a reference to a movie or a pop song because- hey- imagining that Nursery Rhyme and kids story characters might be “hip and happening” is, like, really funny! There are references to things like King Kong and War of the Worlds that are just pointlessly thrown in with no rhyme and reason- and even the frankly rather appalling emotional subplot involving Chicken Little’s relationship with his disbelieving dad has to be treated with the same “hilarious” post-modern winking, actually drawing attention to the fact that they bring the movie to a complete standstill just so the characters can have a heart to heart!

It’s crass. It’s loud. It’s noisy. There are piss jokes. Burp jokes. There’s a joke “Hey, isn’t Once Upon a Time such a dated, non-hip way of opening a story?” opening that’s almost directly ripped off from Shrek (as is the non-stop pop music that’s slathered over the soundtrack). Once the alien invasion plotline becomes more prominent, there are a few cool bits of animation and some funky ideas, but not enough to outweigh the monstrous soullessness of it all. They’ve torched the idea of traditional animation- but they aren’t carrying anything over, they aren’t using the methods used in films like Beauty and the BEast, Cinderella or The Lion King. They’re just doing what everybody else is doing because they know it will sell. If you make it loud, colourful and market the fuck out of it, they will come. And, what really upsets me about this kind of thing, is that its burying the art of decent storytelling further and further under a mountain of self-referential humour. Fairly soon, US animated films will be self-referencing themselves out of existence- they’ll just be collections of pop culture gags that will make no sense whatsoever to anyone in ten years time. They’ll be the norm. As long as it’s bright and loud and people fall over, nobody’s going to care if the story is good. And that makes me very, very sad.

I also couldn’t help notice that despite plenty of laughter (mostly at the gags I didn’t find funny), the cinema never completely quietened down, which didn’t surprise me that much. Of course, there are still people like Pixar who place storytelling above everything else- but the latest trailer for the new Pixar movie Cars has me a little worried- the big-toothed yokel car isn’t filling me with a huge amount of confidence.

Right. I feel like I’ve got that off my chest. I also picked up The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker, an excellent book that kind of leapt from the shelf into my hand and said “Buy Me!!” I’m also determined to try and get back to learning Japanese. There’s lots to do this week, and I’ve got to try and fit everything in. I’m determined to make it, but getting it right will be a little difficult. More writing will be done.

Okay. I’m all talked out for the moment. More soon.

The “Shining Redux” trailer is getting everywhere- and here’s a couple of other corkers.

West Side Story- with added Zombies

The Parent Trap- with added lesbianism. I kid you not…

Enjoy…

A quick afterthought- but there are moments when it would be really nice to have more money than sense.

Santa, all I want for Christmas is Robby the Robot!

If anyone wants to lend me the money, you know where I am…