the joy of eating and the folly of thinking

Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) – Dir: Shane Meadows (This is England, Twenty-Four Seven)

Shane Meadows is an interesting voice for British film, and this is one of his best works.

Richard (Paddy Considine) returns home from the war to find that his little brother has killed himself. But there is more to the story, and Richard knows the truth.

Led by Sonny (Gary Stretch) a low level hood drug dealer/enforcer, a bunch of users and small-time dealers bully the retarded boy, Anthony. They urge him on to smoke weed and they force a girl to fuck him. When Anthony is high, Sonny starts screwing with his mind, verbal/mental torture. Sonny tries to get the kid to suck his penis.

All of this Anthony is unprepared for, he wants to go home. But these degenerates are pretending to be his friend, just so they can see what they can make him do.

How does Anthony end up killing himself? The crew get into a van and decide to drop acid. Sonny gives Anthony some as well. And then starts to really mess with his head. They take him to the devil’s house and wrap a noose around his neck. They force him to eat another tab of acid and they leave him in this empty, dead building, to rot in the mush of his mind.

Richard hunts down the men that attacked and tortured his little brother. He spikes their tea kettle with a huge amount of a-class drugs. Walks in while they’re high and shoots one of them in the head.

His plan is to hunt down, torture, maim and kill everybody who was involved. He’s a soldier, so killing is not new to him. His mourning soul feeds his rage, and ticking each villain off the list provides a satisfying relief. But there is a line between revenge and explosive raw violence; this line is murky for Richard. He still feels his loss so strongly, he still talks to Anthony. At some point, Richard begins to find that the villain of this story is not so clear.

Meadows has achieved a powerful, emotional story with interesting, shocking action and genuine reactions from the characters. When the men who tortured Anthony are being hunted, they realise as we do, the shift in the game; that now they’re the victims. As a viewer, we are given the opportunity to feel sorry for these men, despite what they did. And we start to see some vaguely interesting personality clashes, as the people beneath Sonny in the drug business hierarchy finally think for themselves and struggle to react to the situation.

The only obvious weakness of this piece is that most of the character development for the underlings doesn’t come about until the end of the story, so we don’t care very much as each victim is hacked and slashed, then disposed of.

Paddy Considine who co-wrote the script and plays the star of this film – Anthony’s big brother Richard, is able to sell the pain of losing a little brother, and of the cruelty at their hands; and attempting to stifle the anger of it all. He’s also able to sell how dangerous Richard is, that he stands up to Sonny, and everybody else. He’s fearless, callous, a walking weapon – and this time they’ve really pissed off the wrong guy.

3.5 stars

Bottom Live: The Big Number 2 Tour (1995) – Dir: Dominic Brigstocke (Smith and Jones, Ricky Gervais)

Rik Mayall as Richard Richard and Adrian Edmondson as Eddie present to the audience in this live format pure toilet humour and slapstick at its very best. The story is about two friends who share an apartment in England and have no money. Unemployed, pathetic, disgusting, and horny, but loyal friends – they have a strong bond, but no integrity (so either of them would sell the other for a blow up doll or a pint of beer.)

Neither of them is particularly brave, although they would both fight to the death for that one thing they value – for Rich that would be getting laid, for Eddie it would be alcohol.

Richard is Mayall’s very basic character, a thirty-something virgin with a small penis. He’s getting saggy and fat, not particularly good looking with no redeeming qualities. Eddie is a bit of a prick and revels in beating up Richard. They have been friends for most of their lives. What money they get on welfare doesn’t keep them going from week to week. Eddie is obviously a bit of an alcoholic so he manages to buy liquor.

Richard is the kitchen bitch, so he’s in charge of making food for them both. But the fridge is empty. Well, it’s empty of food. Anything that lives in there, is years past its use by date and growing a good length of mold.

Bottom is not The Young Ones, although Mayall’s character is similar to the anarchist wannabe he played in The Young Ones. They are both older, grownups with immature priorities and attitudes. Life moved on, and they got left behind. I would go so far as to say that Bottom is better than The Young Ones, the humour is more base, but the style is more fun and interesting. The Young Ones was punk and surreal, absurd storylines inspired by stoner sessions and student poverty. Bottom is minimalist theatre – we as writers challenge ourselves (says Mayall and Edmondson) to write about nothing.

The live version of Bottom is possibly in some ways better, more fresh. It’s funny when they screw up their lines, improvise for a few beats or break character. It being the length of a feature film, you get more substance than can be afforded in a 30 minute TV show. This sequel to the first live show is just as good as the first.

Some of my favourite jokes are improvisations that Edmondson does when Mayall screws up some lines. Edmondson is the clever one, but Mayall has the attitude. They are a wonderful team and they have provided here a gloriously entertaining story, well worth watching to the end.

The overall Bottom plot follows Eddie and Rich as their empty lives continue in a crap hole in a horrible part of England. British humour, it travels though. You don’t have to be an intellectual, English or an idiot to appreciate Bottom.

In this feature-length story, Rich is preparing for the Queen to arrive, and Eddie is helping – she is scheduled to appear on their street and Rich optimistically thinks that if he gets his willie out and flashes her from the window, and attracts her with fireworks she will take the time to visit their flat.

Everything that can go wrong potentially often does in Bottom, but the way it finally explodes is rarely predictable – you’ll guess some things but only the parts that they want you to.

This play feels like a typical stage play, though I would compare it more to a movie or to the series that it’s based on. Some of the production design is very clever, with fart smoke and the odd prop. The jokes are literally more than a laugh a minute even if you don’t easily laugh out loud.

3.5 stars

Tromeo and Juliet (1996) – Dir: Lloyd Kaufman (The Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke’em High, Sgt Kabukiman NYPD)

Lemi from Motorhead narrates a 90’s punk retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in true Troma films fashion – with lots of gore, deviant sex and silly humour. Feeling like America’s response to our own Bad Taste (1987) – but with a more thorough plot which arcs on our satirised heroes and feeds off the original play.

Tromeo Que (Will Keenan) is the hero of the story. In love with being in love, he must be a Pisces. He gets off on interactive CD Roms of naked ladies professing their love for him. His latest girlfriend is a slutty porn star-esque airhead with big boobs. She’s cheating on him with a Fabio lookalike. One wonders for what reason she is even bothering to date our Tromeo – he isn’t her type, he doesn’t have an incredible sex drive, he isn’t rich or famous.

Tromeo’s father is Monty Que (Earl McKoy) He’s black (Tromeo is white) and this isn’t discussed until late in the film in time for the big reveal. Benny Que (Stephen Blackehart) knows the history of the Que and Capulet war of the families. And Murray (Valentine Miele) pushes him into leaking the story when he’s really drunk one night.

Juliet Capulet (Jane Jensen) the daughter of Cappy Capulet (William Beckwith) has regular sex with the house cook, a skinny, young and attractive gothic lesbian with lots of piercings and tattoos. Juliet wants to be with a man but she is afraid of penises – monster penises fill her nightmares. But when she wakes up screaming she gets locked in the time out box by her abusive (and kinky) father.

Her mother (Wendy Adams) is barely a character – only chimes in at the end to finish the reveal – the mystery, the secrets of house Capulet and house Que.

My favourite scene is when Juliet’s cousin Sammy (Sean Gunn) gets his head trapped in a car window and is horribly injured when he breaks free – as the car is by this time going very fast.

The decapitated heads don’t look very realistic, which is a shame because a lot of the other gory effects work really well. They are disgusting and really sell the jokes.

Low budget FX movies are out there but the best and hardest working filmmaker of this niche is Lloyd Kaufman. Other heroes include Roger Corman and Brian Trenchard-Smith.

Sexual deviancy is a flavour refined in this film – though not as shocking as for example, Tim Roth’s The War Zone (1999) – it is merely played with here for the fun of it. Homosexuality, gay rape threats, incest, kinky abuse. But we only get a taste of it, perhaps because the plot is felt to be more important than the ‘exploitation.’

Lemi’s narration and the occasional old English prose dialogue is thrown fast and loose and can be at times difficult to understand. Much like live theatre of Shakespearean plays. However, these are dramatised so wonderfully that you can start to learn the language because you get the emotional context.

Tromeo and Juliet is punk and fun and silly and quite funny at parts, considering its low budget and the integrity behind the production – in a way, it is a perfect film for what it is. It serves the purpose of being silly and fun, grotesque and honest, introducing a new, A.D.D./MTV audience to the best of the oldest playwrights.

4.5 stars

Crash Cancelled

A video on Youtube brings us the first peek of Crash Landed – the unreleased demo of a cancelled Crash Bandicoot game for DS by Renegade Kid studios. Other games by the studio: Moonan FPS that looks like a cross between Doomand Alien Trilogy (PSX) and yet has a very slick and cool feel to the movement, which elevates it somewhat from the difficulty of making an FPS work on the DS. The Nintendo DS is not designed for first person shooters. The screen isn’t big enough, the controls are too small, the system was designed to be portable not cinematic. Dementium II – a horror FPS sequel, (with echoes of the House on Haunted Hill 1999 movie remake,) has creepy and volatile visuals, but is lacking in freshness. By now you get the idea of the kind of game these guys like to make – first person, walk around and be engaged (shooting or jumping.) So not thinky games, like Braid and Limbo – which is surprising because the xbox would be a perfect home to a cinematic FPS and the DS would be a good home for a cerebral 2D platformer. These games were switched at birth.

As far as the video of the cancelled game, leaked by the studio onto Youtube, Sonic springs to mind – with the precision jumping, collecting objects, ricocheting enemies to defeat them. The tone of a classic platformer, but with an added dimension. The genre never really succeeded in transitioning from 2D to 3D back in the days of the original Tomb Raider, where navigating 3D space just feels awkward. Except in the PSX game Tenchu which simulated all the slippery mischief ninjas enjoy – turning a rope and grapple hook into a flying fox, sneaking up behind people and slitting their throat, creeping alongside walls (somewhat reminded of another great game about creeping, Metal Gear Solid – especially in the VR Training.) In Tenchu, your ninja negotiates 3D space with ease, but then movement is so important to the mechanics of that game. Tenchu is about moving like an assassin, it would not have worked at all if its Japanese developer, Acquire hadn’t figured out a way to make the movement a fun process.

The results of the 2D to 3D platform transition experiment were the weird hybrids of Spyro and Crash Bandicoot which did manage to find their own audience among a certain type of hungry gamer. This was before games like Lego Star Wars began to address the problem with navigation in 3D space.

Wall E DS would be an exception, but that’s because he moves slowly, wheel tracks instead of legs. Crash of Crash Bandicoot walks and runs faster than the time it takes to ingest the environment. It would require tiny taps of movement – small spurts to be as effective in 3D as Sonic is in 2D.

What do fans think of the demo?

There seem to be two schools of thought on the demo. One thinks that the demo is harking back to the classic platform style – which seems to be a good thing according to fans.

The other thinks that it looks drab, clunky and that only Naughty Dog should do Crash games. Which I think is a little unfair, considering the demo was built in two weeks.

Nintendo Dreams – Bionicle Heroes DS

Learning to jump, I feel like a baby deer learning to walk. What’s a baby deer called? Venison.

The enemy robots roll up in ball form. So far I have been unable to emulate this maneuver. They also come at me incredibly quickly, which would be menacing if they weren’t so easy to destroy. The next enemy I meet is a humanoid like me. I shoot him, (which is probably the one simple action a robot performs.) And he dies.

I’m not even sure that these robots are alive. But I am, so I treat them as such. And yet I kill them, go figure. It is the nature of the game. They are very eager to kill me so I consider it self defence. A few more advance on me, but I stand well back and shoot them while they are balls.

I hear a strange noise. Not exactly a buzzing. It sounds like car radio static doing an impersonation of a buzzing bee. It’s not in my ear and I’m not sure if it’s coming from above, though you’d expect as much. The field and sky are filled with this noise and it has no centre. Finally, I find the culprit – a robot locust with guns. Well I assume it has guns because all of the other robots do.

Except it isn’t actually shooting at me yet. I very slowly aim at it, because that involves looking up. Because I take so long, it shoots first. But when I blam my guns, I kill it quickly.

There are two others, so I repeat the tedious process and arise the victor. Suddenly, I begin to shake violently. Again. And again. I’m being shot at, but I can’t see the perpetrator of this heinous crime. I use my radar and gradually turn around to view my enemy. It’s a green spider-crab thing. I’m concerned about my health, because turning around has taken a long time and the spider-crab thing is a fast shooter. But it dies just like the rest.

The enemy squads seem inexhaustible. As soon as I finish killing the next batch, new balls roll up. But less than a second after they transform into humanoid form, they fall to pieces because I’ve been shooting at them since they appeared. It’s only the high and low robots that seem to be giving me trouble.

Looking up and down is unfortunately the only complex challenge in this entire experience. Whenever a robot falls to pieces, it drops a number of cogs. Collecting the cogs recharges my health. Apparently cogs heal robot wounds.

I find myself in a room alot like all of the other rooms, fighting enemies that look alot like all of the other enemies. Enduring a process of slowly aiming and quickly killing which is becoming all too familiar. Only somebody shoots me and it’s all black again.

I do remember dying. Neglecting to keep an eye on my health report and pick up cogs to compensate probably made an early death inevitable. But because I’m a robot, it didn’t hurt. Come to think of it, I haven’t felt physical pain since this journey began. I guess I could say that a robot’s death lacks gore.

It isn’t very interesting, either. So I won’t go on about it.

Nintendo Dreams – Star Trek: Tactical Assault DS (part four)

There is a destination on the warp screen called The Neutral Zone, which means I’m not actually in the Neutral Zone, like I thought I was. So I hit the warp button. It’s becoming less fun now. As soon as I arrive, we receive a distress signal from some planet that’s being attacked. We warp over there, slickity-whip. I hail the green planet and the citizen tells me that the enemy are based on the moon. And guess what? We have to warp over there.

We finally reach the enemy ships. I can see one coming out from behind the moon. I hit L to lock on. It starts firing at me. Uh oh, I realise it’s a freighter, but guess what? It’s been customised with bigger guns. And there are two of them. This is not going to be easy. Because I don’t know any better, I apply the same strategy as every other battle I’ve had so far in Star Trek Land.

Get close, shoot phasers. Tilt, swing by, side phasers. Turn, photon torpedo. Fly away, other side phasers as I retreat. Get the heck out of range while I recharge. I even over-clock my photon torpedo. Then repeat.

The problem with this strategy is that while I’m systematcially bruising one of the freighters, the other freighter is blasting me in the bum continuously with some kind of mega phaser. My shields are down pretty quickly. I’ve lost one of the ships tails, and I’m pretty sure I need that.

Now the rest of the ship is falling apart, beneath me. Mission Failed. Everything is dark. Darker than Space. Again.

That’s the only life I’ve lost in this game world. So either it’s random, which from what I know about Nintendo, is unlikely, or it’s on some kind of timer. I spent about five minutes in training, three minutes foolishly wandering through Space. And I lasted two minutes in my first real battle. I probably was in Mech World for about ten minutes as well. I wish I knew how many game worlds there are, then I could calculate how long I have to live.

I’m a robot. Not inside a robot or a robotic suit like last time. I’m an actual robot. And the differences in the way my mind now operates are very confusing. For example, if I want to move any part of my body to my right, I move it to the right. It’s the same with the left. As one might guess, this is normal.

But if I want to look up, I actually have to move my head down, and vice versa. This is very confusing and so it is also annoying. Walking is easy. Battling is not. The other robots are positioned all over the place, so this takes a lot of looking around and it’s awkward. I do have radar. For this I am grateful, otherwise I would simply sit down and wait to die.

Except that I can’t actually sit down. Or crouch. I can jump. But this is is also confusing…

Nintendo Dreams – Star Trek: Tactical Assault DS (part three)

I hit him. He’s damaged. But my ship is almost a wreck. I back out of range while my photon torpedoes recharge. I decide to chance it and overclock them, (overclocking increases their power, but also increases recharge time.) Once recharged, I can’t afford to get hit anymore, so I swoop in on tilt. Carefully centre the front of my ship (where the guns are) on the drone. And fire, destroying it. I let out a whoop, because this time I earned it. I won. But my ship is black and blue.

I can see really blackened damage on my ship’s hull. But there’s an emergency. Without repairs, I have to go into an actual battle to rescue a vessel from a rogue freighter. Apparently the freighter has small guns, but it’s big and hostile.

I warp to the location, which is still fun despite my anxiety about having no shields. I find the freighter and start hitting it with my starboard phasers. And a photon torpedo for good measure. It’s not going down. The vessel I was supposed to rescue explodes. The freighter is still firing, so I continue firing back.

As much as I enjoy certain elements of the experience and everything looks so cool, this battle really is no different from my last battle with the drone, and the one before that with the first drone. The only real difference is that this one is taking a really long time to kill – long enough that even with feeble guns, it might eventually destroy my ship.

I receive a hail from the Admiral, which is almost a relief. He’s telling me to abort mission and return to the Training Facility. I respond that I don’t want to, because I haven’t killed the enemy, yet. He repeats the order, so I comply.

When I return, I am told that the battle with the freighter was a training exercise and I didn’t fail, after all. Far from it, according to the Admiral, I and my crew acted outstandingly, with one exception – I need to learn to follow orders.

Finally, I am ready for my first mission: patrolling the Neutral Zone. As mundane as this sounds, it’s pretty obvious I’ll run into hostiles. This is a game, after all. As I’m leaving the Training Facility, I see a ship, so I hail it. This only results in idle chatter, so I try hailing the Training Facility. The Admiral offers his goodbyes and good lucks officially and that’s the end of that conversation. So I set out on patrol.

I don’t know which direction to go, as patrolling is pretty vague, so I pick one at random. I’m not going very fast, can see nothing but Space, and am unsure if I’m even going in the correct direction. After three minutes of this, I decide warp would speed things up a bit, and I discover my error…

Nintendo Dreams – Star Trek: Tactical Assault DS (part two)

There are drones in space that I need to track, shoot and destroy. But they will shoot back, so I have been informed that we will need to go to red alert to turn on the shields and the weaponry. So I click the ‘red alert’ button. I’m not joking, it’s that simple and obvious.

Tracking the drone is concluded sooner than I expected and the fight takes me by surprise. I can see two weapon buttons, already we’re being shot at. Both of the weapons take time to recharge after firing. My first missile is a near miss. I remember now, a woman on my crew was telling me that firing range is about 46. I’m guessing that’s kilometres.

I steer the ship out of range, watching the number on the view screen. Then I go in for the rematch in melee. As soon as the drone starts firing, I tilt the ship. Click the phaser, direct hit. I notice his shield integrity has been damaged by the blast. My instinct is to fire the missile again, but I don’t want to miss. So I line up just so and fire before he can. I think maybe his shields will absorb the impact but then he’ll lose shields. Instead, the missile goes straight through the damaged shield and detonates on the hull. The drone is destroyed.

I’m so excited, I do a little dance. Then the officer at the Training Facility says, ‘We also have photon torpedoes.’ Cheeky sod. Eventually I realise that the missiles I had been firing actually were photon torpedoes. What I also didn’t realise is that I also have side phasers. So instead of always attacking my enemy head-on and losing most of my shields in the process, I can do drive-bys.

Gearing up for my second training battle, I have time to contemplate my situation (my Star Trek Land situation, not my stuck in Nintendo World situation.) Firstly, I have still not lost a life while being in Star Trek Land. Secondly, I doubt the Admiral will let me die while undergoing training in a Training Facility, ie the drones are non-lethal.

The second drone doesn’t fall for the same trick. His shields are completely unaffected by my phaser strike, which I take to mean that I missed. Meanwhile my shields are taking major damage from the drone’s phasers. Twenty seconds and I’ve lost outer shields. Ten more seconds and I’ve lost inner shields. My phasers are still having no effect. I have no shields. I finally hit him with an overclocked phaser, but his shields are showing green.

Screw it. I fire photon torpedoes…

Nintendo Dreams – Star Trek: Tactical Assault DS (part one)

…When I return to the place where I destroyed the tanks, that colourful arrow reappears on my screen and my superior tells me there’s an enemy Mech nearby. All I have to do is get close to it and attach the claw and I can steal the Mech. That doesn’t sound too difficult.

The obligatory guard tanks give me a bit of trouble, but once I’m around the corner, I see the Mech in the distance. It’s big. Really big. But it’s not shooting at me, yet. So instead of flying, which would probably only irritate it, I cautiously make my way toward it, instinctively staying close to the wall. Which won’t help because there is nothing between me and the Mech.

I’m not scared. Just a game. I’m not scared. BOOM!

Every other time I wrecked my suit, I was carted off back to base and put in a shiny new one; most of those times I fainted and woke up as they were strapping me in. This isn’t like that. I’m awake. I’m sure of that, but I can’t see anything. I don’t think that explosion just wrecked my suit. I think I’m dead.

The good news is I’m not dead. The bad news is I’m not a woman anymore. It looks like I’m inside Star Trek. I don’t think I’m teleporting from world to world. I think the game worlds are changing around me. I must have a certain amount of lives in each world. My only hope is that when I die for the last time, in the last world, I am returned home and not treated as just another game character, disintegrated and redistributed among the nets as code.

My crew in Star Trek Land are really quite meek, but that’s okay. I think they think they’re being respectful. My command seems to involve alot of talking – or I should say conversing, as communications with the crew and other vessels appear as readouts. This doesn’t bother me for now, as there is not much to read.

The ship’s controls are cause for some concern considering the fact that I’m controlling a Federation Starship and these controls are laughably simple. Various buttons are used to hail other vessels, detect objects and examine. The ship’s directional controls are merely a set of steering arrows. I would have expected something more sophisticated.

Learning when to squeal the brakes or tilt the ship are both easy, but I’m glad I’m learning all this at the Training Facility. I am getting antsy to see some real action, though.

How to describe how much fun it is to engage warp? Not as much fun as it was for real, when Kirk did it. For me it was like sitting on a tame rhinoceros while playing virtual hackey sack – on a portable console.

Nintendo Dreams – Mech Assault: Phantom War DS (part three)

It’s surprising how many hits the elementals can sustain from me, due to their being so miniature. I haven’t tried stomping on them, mainly as they’re much stronger than humans, they intimidate me. I know they’re killable, though. The first just exploded. I had to unleash a barrage of plasma, but I did it. I have to alternate between shooting the tanks and the elementals; I don’t want anyone sneaking up on me.

That’s it, they’re all dead.

A yellow-green radar on my screen. I decide to follow it. There are tanks in the way, but after the ambush of the elementals, destroying these tanks is easy.

I’ve been given a new suit, God knows why. It’s not like the mechanised robot which I was controlling from my seat in the sky. This is more like an armoured uniform. I’m only slightly larger than the enemy soldiers. I can still kill them by running into them; my armour is not just for defensive purposes, it seems.

I’ve got a few new gadgets with this thing, one in particular – the claw! Apparently I can use it to grab onto things. The problem is pulling the trigger for the claw, (it’s a complex little device,) means taking my attention away from everything else for a second.

I’m told there is a wall here somewhere and I have to get up it. Surely that’s what the jump jets are for. But I realise as I find the wall, a blurry grey monolith, with holes and fixtures, definitely man-made. And begin to ascend, that my jet fuel runs out before I reach the top. Use the claw!

By the time I refuel I’ve fallen. So this time, as I’m scaling the wall, I latch on and wait to refuel. I realise this is all far too easy. It’s not a simple process, but as a player I’m not challenged. There are no obstructions deterring me from getting to the top. No sequence of falling bricks, from an avalanche maybe, or snipers to dodge – like something out of Rambo.

More tanks here. Not a problem. A number of well-placed walls provide me with cover. And by now I’m pretty confident about destroying tanks. I’m still getting used to swiveling the Mech’s head and strafing at the same time. Honestly, I can’t do this at all. So I hide, swivel, then line up my cross-hair and shoot like mad. But while I’m shooting, I run around in case they shoot back. In a few minutes the tanks are burned.

Nobody is in my ear. The radar is blank. The environment before me looks the same as behind me. I think I’m lost. I got turned around after stealthily destroying the last two tanks. I think I’ll go this way. I reach a slate grey platform and jump off it. It’s not until I find another one and jump down from there as well, that I realise these are the walls which I climbed using the claw!

No wonder there are no enemies, I’ve gone back the way I came. If this was a game I was playing from the outside, I would switch it off out of frustration.