I Should Be So... (au cinema, bis!)

I had difficulty with The Artist. Everybody loved it and I so dearly wanted to, too. But it was just so pleased with itself, so brimming with self-regard about its black-and-whiteness and its ooh-there’s-no-wordsness and its just-like-the-1930s-ness, that I simply couldn’t love it. I could admire it, but that’s not the same. That’s like telling a girl who’s spent ages trying to get you to go out with her that you have high regard for her literacy skills. 

So I wasn’t overwhelmed with anticipation when The Lodger ripped open one of those Amazon packages that he buys instead of paying me any rent and waved the enclosed copy of Lucky Luke at me. 

Lucky Luke. It’s French, it’s set in a romanticised past (and given that it was made in 2009, it comes from a romanticised past), it stars Jean Dujardin. Three things that make it very like The Artist. But I refuse to dismiss anything out of hand without giving it a fair try (this is untrue. I dismiss a great many things out of hand without giving them a fair try, simply because it’s easy, it’s fun, and leaves me untroubled by any of that awkward ‘ooh blimey I quite like this even though I really should be sneering at it’ business that probably blights the life of the average Guardian Guide contributor). 

And you know what? Within ten minutes I’d fallen in love with it. 

You can argue with me, but you can't argue with status

It’s one of the best comic-book adaptations I’ve seen; faithful to the original drawings, faithful to their sly humour and knockabout slapstick. It’s certainly the best I’ve seen this year; yes, it’s knocked Marvel The Avengers Assemble (or whatever) off top spot, but it’s done that by being an entirely different type of film. Where Avengers was very much a loud, look-at-me-NOW! blockbuster tentpole movie, Lucky Luke, despite being the most expensive film to be made in France (I’m told), is small and charming and unassuming. 

At the same time, it’s almost in awe of the old American west and the men therein, and it invites us to join us. It has an astonishing visual texture; the cinematography literally glows, even in the darker scenes. And it has no shame whatsoever in indulging in any number of visual puns, trompe l’oeil, verbal puns (in French when spoken, but as nearly all of the on-screen text - store signs, etc - is in English, it’s not shy of bilingual wordplay as well) and snappy doubletalk. 

There’s also a hugely pretty production design; the town Luke cleans up is very much a platonic ideal of the Old Western Town, as are its ne’er-do-well inhabitants, and the final act is set in - well, I’m not telling you what it’s set in, but if you don’t applaud the way it looks, we can’t be friends. 

Jean Dujardin, who was so very slightly over-smooth in The Artist, is a superb Luke; stupidly handsome, knowing it but not using it. It’s a better all-round performance than in The Artist and one that he looks like he’s enjoying a lot more. And although the Lucky Luke character as drawn is relatively simplistic and as such should be easily portrayed by almost anyone - it’s a quiff and a cowboy outfit, in essence - Dujardin looks the part. Not just visually; he’s got the hair, he’s got the squint, he’s got the cigarette, but underneath the props he’s got the attitude and the feel of Luke. 

If there’s a down side to Lucky Luke, it’s that the plot can feel less than original at times; it’s fairly obvious who the bad guy’s going to turn to be, equally so for the mysterious saloon-bar siren Luke falls for. 

But that’s forgivable. Don’t argue, it just is. 

Go and see it. Buy the DVD. If you want to justify it on an intellectual basis, see how many references to other films you can recognise (or, if you’re a miserable sod, ‘see how many shots have been stolen from other films’). But really, you owe it to yourself. If only for the horse. 

au cinema!

It strikes me as odd that this thing gets a number of page views from China. I’d like to believe it has become some form of rallying-post for the disgruntled and disenfranchised, some clarion call that kickstarts a new Tianenmen Square. But it’s more likely to be some poor sods who have Googled what limited selection they're allowed to Google and been offered this as an alternative to whatever anti-Party subversion they were after. 

Still, it’s for their own good. 

Anyway: if I may misappropriate something from someone on Twitter: what if there was an upside to Orwell? What if, in 1984, that boot stamping on a human face, forever, was stamping on the face of someone who deserved it? Paddy McGuinness, say? Or that git who lights a bonfire every time I put washing out? Or the people who made the Green Lantern movie? 

I ask this because, despite my credentials as an Impeccable Liberal, I too can feel hate. Maybe 'hate' is a bit too much. 'Enmity', perhaps. 'Rather strong dislike'. 

I feel it for the people who deserve it; professional politicians of all stripes who screw the everyman while focussing on what’s best for their party; media moguls who profess innocence of their newspapers’ behaviour; media outlets that fill us with inconsequentialities and non-entities while steering us away - nothing to see here, move right along - from the things that we should be told about; bankers breaking laws and bankrupting nations, safe in the full knowledge that there’ll maybe be a bit of an outcry and maybe a slapped wrist or two, but no actual justice, retributive or restorative, for their crimes.

Sometimes, I want to stamp on somebody’s face. 

Sometimes, I want to take a gun. 

Yep, just like this. 

The film God Bless America feels the same way. It’s written and directed by the comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, best known for being incomprehensible in the Police Academy films, but it’s a different, far blacker form of comedy than those, and one unlikely to see a sequel. 

In it, an ordinary Joe reaches breaking point; fired from his office drone job for incomprehensible reasons, enraged and disappointed by the culture of greed and dishonesty, fed up with the celebration of that greed by the media, he takes a gun, intent on suicide, but decides to take one especially spoilt example of reality-show teen queen with him. When that goes slightly wrong, he finds himself travelling America in the company of an awed teenage witness. 

It’s a strange film, in that it doesn’t escalate in the way that, say, Falling Down - which shows a similar man reaching a similar breaking point - did. There’s a climactic scene at the end, but it doesn’t seem dramatic, pacing itself in the same leisurely way as the rest of the film. 

It’s also, for all its strengths and its superb central performances from Joel Murray and Tara Lynne Barr, something of a coward; it directs its anger purely at the media, taking scant aim at the social and political diseases that underly the current thirst for the reality and talent shows that lead to, and eventually finish, the story. I wouldn’t expect Goldthwait to burden his characters with the narratively impossible task of taking down the President or anything equally as cliched; he’s too good a writer for that. I would have liked something a little more astringent applied to the spots he chose to take on. 

God Bless America hits some unexpected targets: sympathies are very much with Murray’s character, but he has to stop - as do you - and question whether the humiliations visited on contestants on a TV show clearly modelled after America’s Got Talent are as much willing celebrants of the genre’s relentless appetite for simpleton as they are its victims. 

The film reminded me in many ways of James Gunn’s Super in terms of the dynamic between the two leads, but it doesn’t quite have that film’s bleakness of tone (both narrative and visual - the cinematography in God Bless America is, at times, positively vibrant) and possibly it suffers for that. 

God Bless America is released here in the UK on July 6th; it’s not perfect, but I’d say you should get to see it. 

Next: au cinema, bis!

Saves You Buying The Observer

In the last couple of weeks we have been Cultured. 

And now I shall tell you about it. 

We went to the theatre, for a start; proper theatre, not a jukebox musical or a comedian’s vehicular revamp of something old (though there’s nothing wrong with either of those), but proper arse-numbing, tiny auditorium, Something Important To Say theatre. And we quite enjoyed it. 

We found one of the actors (of which there were only three) to be pitching his performance a little large for an 80-seat theatre, but he was the one off the telly and may have been the one the punters had come to see pre-arts-section-review, whereas post-arts-section-review they’d have come specifically for the play itself and for another of the actors, who was pitch perfect in a rather difficult role. 

What we enjoyed most, though, was realising, during the interval, that if we opened a certain door we could - and did - step out onto a tiny, narrow balcony some way above the street  but concealed by the theatre’s very own logo, and from there, hiding behind the neon block capitals, throw the ice cubes from our orange juice (four quid apiece, mind you) at the gits below. 

Why should we do this? Why perform so unsocial an act on a balmy Friday evening? If I tell you the play was The Witness by Vivienne Franzmann (her mother’s a friend, so the enjoyment was tinged with duty just as the choc-ice is tinged with future diets), and that it was at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, and that this theatre stands feet from some awful place filled with exactly the type of people you would expect to be drinking in a Sloane Square bar on a Friday evening, and that this Friday evening was quite pleasant, almost balmy in fact, and so these people were drinking al fresco, and were the kind of people who not only drink al fresco in italics but also say al fresco in bloody italics as well... Well, if I tell you that, I’m sure you’d not only sympathise, but offer to buy me more orange juice. Or some knives. 

Also, as we were there on what turned out to be The Playwright’s Mother Has Bought Every Seat Tonight And Filled It With Her Friends Night, the theatre was rather full of ladies of a certain age, so making me, for the first occasion in a very long time, something of a toyboy. 

The play? Quite excellent apart from the slight oversizing mentioned above;  asked a few uncomfortable questions about the exploitation of the Third World by developed countries, and whether the crumbs of individual help we throw are tossed purely to assuage our own guilt, and whether those crumbs, once tossed, give us the right to impose our ways onto those countries and then get upset when they begin to reject our guidance. 

That’s what I took from it anyway. 

Oh, and I got one ice cube to land right on some long-haired git’s head. Result! 

Next: au cinéma!

THE WEEKEND REVIEW: FOOD

It’s been called the most exciting place to eat in London ever. Sabina Legge hunkers down at Southbank’s most daring new eatery.

Less than two years ago, Michael Sykes had it all; after apprenticing under some of the world’s greatest chefs, he’d taken them on and, it seemed, beaten them at their own game. His own Sykes@ in the Bentley-driving part of E1 hung its two Michelin stars proudly over its Thamesside terrace; it was easier to fast-track the Honours List than it was to get a Saturday evening table. 

But under the creativity that gave us lamb’s tongue meringues and iced dandelion cassoulet, Sykes’ mind was becoming like one of his own oxtail souffles; a just-brittle outside guarding a whipped centre unable to hold its own shape. After an infamous night during which he attempted to drown AA Gill in a sous-vide waterbath, Sykes disappeared, most of us thought forever, another casualty of the punishing pressure facing those who cook at the very sharpest of sharp ends, ends far sharper than even the sharpest of Japanese Kyocera ceramic boning knives. 

When word emerged that Sykes was not only cooking again, but had re-invented the entire concept of dining, we couldn’t help but both stifle a yawn - after all, how many times have we been fed that particular PR line? - and feel our curiosity being stimulated. A visit seemed not only desirable but somehow our duty. 

No booking? Check. No tablecloths? Check? So far, so tapas bar. But Sykes has taken the stripped-back standard so much further; there’s no tables, no chairs. Open kitchens are so last year - Sykes does all his cooking over a fire that sends yellow flame and bright amber sparks from the oil drum it burns in, out into the London night. This is the most basic of restaurants, so denuded of frippery that it doesn’t actually have a building; all of the cooking and eating takes place in the most intimate space, tucked alongside the river’s edge under Waterloo Bridge. 

The wait for a table isn’t the usual ‘drink at the bar until we feel like letting you sit down’ so common these days; there’s a real element of theatre as other diners, dressed in clothes so outre they make Westwood look like East Ham, bicker over aperitifs - delivered in shared bottles, passed around among those who sit around the great man’s brazier, faces tinged saffron by the firelight. Facial hair seems de riguer, as does a form of communal language that bypasses the need for consonants, and sometimes for anything resembling words, altogether. 

Waiters are also bypassed, as are plates and other non-essentials such as cutlery; the food is ‘served’ into a dish the size and shape of an upturned dustbin lid, and it’s pretty much every man for himself, tearing off hunks of peasant-style roast meats fragrant with the exotic woods burning in that huge unfathomable pit of fire. Behind the scenes Sykes himself is breaking up what look like enormous frames of wood, some of them marked with unknowable foreign markings and designs. 

What is this meat we’re sharing with the others? Sykes remains silent, grunting only as he hauls another slab of it onto the flames - I believe I caught a glimpse of something resembling a rabbit, my companion swears he heard some form of yowling noise as fresh supplies were brought in - by other diners, who then joined the passionate throng waiting for the fire to do its magic. 

There’s also a very set menu of accompaniments; a salad of fresh leaves, unidentified but with the petrichor scent of fresh grass, and I’m sure the heady clout of wild garlic shoots came through somewhere. 

Finally, as though recognising us from the old days, Sykes himself approached us, offering a private view of his worn but still very serviceable chef’s knives. Not wanting to distract him from his new venture, we demurred and set off to find a taxi. As we ambled out into the brighter but more sterile lights of the RFH and Victoria, we could hear approaching sirens and the unmistakable blue lights of a fire engine. Obviously Sykes’ cooking appeals not only to the dedicated gourmet but also to the honest working man in uniform. 

Sykes, under Waterloo Bridge. Dinner Tues - Sat, presumably. Prices negotiable. BYOB, but be prepared to share. Children/pets welcome, but keep hold of them.

How To Spend A Wet Afternoon

Quick trip up into the attic the other day; stumbled across a box that I didn’t recognise. Usually I can tell more or less what I’ve stashed in what box, sometimes I’m helped out in that regard by a big felt-tipped ‘PLATES’ or ‘PHOTOS’ or ‘OLD CRAP’. This time the box was just a box, sealed with tape that had got fragile and unsticky, so it was easy to flip the flaps and take a butchers inside. 

Now then: it took me a minute or two to place these; old comics, probably from the mid-1970s (definitely from then; cover dates reveal all), printed on cheap newsprint, glued spines rather than stapled, pretty much A4 in size, limited colour palette if any. The tell-tale signs of a comic published by AJ Wellbrother & Co, the Rotherham-based publisher who made most of their income in rather bland magazines for the more genteel lady, and who went out of business in the early 1980s. 

I’d love to have scans of the covers and perhaps the interiors, but there’s an IT failure being dealt with at present and I’m already excited enough about the find that it’s been the devil’s own job not to get this post up before now. But although there are, sadly, no pictures, I hope that the couple of days I’ve spent going through the box will aid me in composing a word-picture that will bring the visuals flooding back to all those who will recall these comics.

The majority of the books are copies of Pinnacle, a boy’s weekly that first appeared on April 14th 1973. I have about six month’s worth of these, and I’m not sure if the comic ran for any longer, or was amalgamated into another title (something that caused any reader to dread seeing the words ‘Great news inside, Chums!’ on any cover, sounding as they did the death-knell for that title as it was absorbed into another), or was just abandoned altogether to clear production space for one of Wellbrother’s more popular comedy titles like Wacky or Giggler. 

The front cover of the first issue of Pinnacle features a rather stern man in a polo-necked sweater, aiming a gun at the reader, his image overlaid with a gun-sight. This picture is on the right of the page, with the left side taken up with the words ‘NEW! IT’S NUMBER ONE! OF A GREAT WEEKLY FOR BOYS! FREE GIFT!’ and a representation of what looks like a kazoo made of cardboard. 

The pages are, unsurprisingly, yellowed and rather friable with age; having turned a few of them, though, I’ve noted the following features...

The chap on the cover seems to be Major Peter Secrett, the lead character in the first strip, Secrett’s Army. This begins with Secrett leading a platoon of men into some form of anti-terrorist activity, as they burst into a secluded farmhouse and fire, seemingly indiscriminately, at the occupants. These include a farmer’s wife in a pinafore, and a black cat. Given the era, I can only assume the victims are to be seen as analogous to IRA activists, some form of pre-Thatcher ‘enemy within’. 

By the end of the initial four page episode, Secrett has been court-martialled out of the Army on a trumped-up charge brought by his own commanding officer, General Malthouse, and linked with the farmhouse slaughter, and is wandering the streets alone. He is approached by a shady figure in a long macintosh, who turns out to be - surprise! - Malthouse, who tells Secrett his country needs him...

The next installment shows Secrett being told by Malthouse that the court-martial was purely a device to free Secrett from the shackles of army procedure, so that he can take over a clandestine group of ex-servicemen like himself, who have also been forcibly ejected from their roles, and forge them into a finely-honed fighting unit who can - to quote Malthouse - ‘take down the enemies of our land before they can even begin to put their heinous schemes into play!’ Answerable only to Malthouse himself, who in turn is solely responsible to ‘one far more important to this country than ourselves’, this will be the secret army known as Secrett’s Army.  It’s quite possible that more thought went into the title than into the plot. 

Battleaxe Bertha in is the next (ahem) berth; this two-page comedy strip with comedy violence also has a military setting  - I presume this milieu makes it easier to get young male readers interested in older female characters - and concerns a large, bad-tempered army cook and her continuing war of attrition with the lazy, work-shy privates under her command. Extra depth is added when an external threat - the possibility that Bertha may be cashiered after food poisoning strikes the camp - brings her and her men together to find the real culprit. This on-again, off-again loyalty/insurrection theme brings a fresh dimension to the scenes of Lanky, Smudge and Bazza (the three most prominent in the command) being assaulted with tea-urn and soup-ladle by an irate Bertha after yet another pile of spuds has failed to be peeled. 

Sealboy, the next story, stands out among the adventure strips by dint of its quite beautiful artwork. It’s uncredited, as was usual at the time, and I cannot find any concealed signature anywhere in the first six or seven episodes. It looks very European, so I’m guessing it’s by Jose Cazuela de Atún or one of the Spanish studio artists. Sealboy concerns an un-named orphan who, while on a day-trip organised by his orphanage,  falls un-noticed into the sea and is rescued by seals. The friendly pinnipeds teach him how to swim, eat fish, open crabshells by banging them on rocks, etc. He then uses these skills to combat sea-based crime. Why the orphanage never mounted a search-and-rescue operation, or how Sealboy escaped an early death from exposure, is not revealed. 

I’d have expected another comedy strip to follow Sealboy, given the serious/humorous alternation of themes, but instead there’s the hybrid of Wilkie and his Waxworks.  Wilkie Wilkinson owns or manages (it’s never specified, in that strange way that germane situations never are in British comics. They just are. And we accept them as such) a wax museum in the quiet town of Mulsberry. It’s all very Cotswold-y, very English Heritage, the kind of place you’d expect a Sunday evening BBC1 comedy to be filmed in. Whenever there’s any kind of difficulty in the town - somebody’s double-parked in the high street, or the choir’s bus has broken down on the way to the County Harvest Festival and there’ll be no choral accompaniment to the proceedings - Wilkie gathers together his waxworks and they solve the problem. Some of the waxworks are of famous figures from history and can use their experience to assist in resolving the difficulties, but most are just generic wax figures. Which raises the questions: does nobody ever wonder what Winston Churchill is doing in a bucolic British town, several years after his state funeral? Does nobody ever wonder what manner of scientific or occult wonder has brought about these ambulatory waxworks? Or is the entire narrative just a part of a massive schizoid hallucination on the part of Wilkie, who should by all accounts be in a straightjacket? 

Luckily, we then have the straightforward Skirmish!  An unusual strip only in that it recounts actual tales from actual wars through history. Set one week in the Battle of Thermopylae, the next in Vietnam, Skirmish! can at times be quite violent and may not be historically accurate, given that in the Thermopylae episode (issue 4) both Persian and Spartan forces seem to possess firearms. 

Timmy Tornado is the final comedy strip; it’s about a boy who runs really fast. You’ve seen it before, just as you’ve seen many different variations of rich boy/poor boy. Nothing special. 

And lastly, in these first half-a-dozen issues at least, comes Tramp-Steamer Thompson - not, as I first thought, someone who cleans vagrants with jets of super-heated water, but something slightly more unsettling to our modern eyes. Walter Thompson captains a tramp steamer (or ‘knackered-looking old boat’) in undetermined waters, accompanied by a boy in his early teens - possibly younger - with whom there is no specifically defined familial relationship. Is Donnie Walter’s son? Nephew? Grandson? Where are the boy’s mother or parents? Are the two related at all, or is Donnie some form of possession of Walter’s, or a bought slave? We are never told, and the authorities with whom the two frequently interact - generally after exposing a gang of smugglers, or finding a submarine filled with burglars - seem blithely unconcerned. Why Tramp-Steamer Thompson (and Donnie) never meet Sealboy, given the crossover in their aquatic-based crime-fighting, is never satisfactorily explained. Maybe they live in different shipping areas. 

There’s more to these issues of Pinnacle; a letter from the editor, then some letters to the editor, some letters the editor left laying around, some readers’ jokes, a few advertisements (one for a ready-made stamp collection, one for a long-discontinued ice lolly - the Choccy Smasher Ice Bomb by Lyons Maid). I don’t doubt that the stories I’ve outlined above were, in time, replaced by others, but the few crumbling copies in this box only cover the first couple of months in Pinnacle’s existence. 

Strangely, I can find no reference to Pinnacle, nor to any other publications by AJ Wellbrother & Co, anywhere I search. I’m almost certain they published Mother’s Helper and Glisten (for curious little girls), but these all seem to have vanished, forever forgotten. If, by any odd quirk of fate, you or anybody you may know have any information about them, please let me know. I shall be eternally in your debt, and shall, in your honour, play a tune on a kazoo made of cardboard. 

Alas, We Hardly Knew You

DP’s cat died.

Actually, she (the cat, that is) was killed. Euthenised after a bad diagnosis. As is the way with cats, an animal that was fine a month ago fell sick and deteriorated quickly. The vet diagnosed a tumour, and DP, who handled this as she does every other matter, with brisk efficiency, accepted that it would best if Ziggy was ushered quietly away. And again as is the way, she stroked the cat gently, saying goodbye as the needle slipped under the skin.

The vet asked if she wanted to take the body home for burial. DP decided she didn’t want the extra emotional stress, and the vet said that was fine, many people chose that option, and would she like the ashes after cremation? DP said no again, and went home, and had a little cry.

Over the next few days she began to reconsider this. Ziggy had been around for eleven years or so, through a couple of jobs, a few boyfriends, many lodgers. And there was a spot in the back garden, just by a bay plant, that would be a nice place for the cat to lay.

So she phoned the vet. Had they actually cremated the cat? No? Good. Could she possibly have her back? Yes? Excellent. So she gathered a cardboard box – the cat carrier seeming the wrong thing for bringing back a cat corpse - popped onto her scooter and went to collect the body.

“You realise”, the vet said “that there are certain procedures we have to take. Health and safety, and all that.” 

“Really? Such as?”

“Well. We don’t cremate on an as-and-when basis, if you see what I mean. We have one big, er, service, once a week. So we have to, er, store the deceased until then.”

And so DP came home with her late pat cat on the platform of her scooter, still frozen solid, laid out as she was when she died. Just too big to go completely into the cardboard box, and with her tail sticking up and out from under the lid.

The grave had been dug beforehand, and it was soon clear that a laid-out, rigid cat would take up more space the curled-up cat DP had imagined she’d be bringing home. So the hole was widened as Ziggy lay on the lawn, and after a while she was finally laid to rest, slightly thawed, slightly less rigid, wrapped in the blanket she’d so often slept on. There were other options that, while allowing a more rapid interment, would have been less pleasant, and so happily were disregarded.

Certain creatures lend themselves to easy disposal; goldfish can be flushed away, hamsters laid on a bier of cotton wool, budgerigars lowered lovingly into the ground inside a small tin. I look at my own cat, a hefty, loud and brutish ‘domestic shorthair’ with a propensity for bringing me live rats in the early hours, and wonder how long it will take, when his time comes, to dig the hole large enough to accept him. I wonder even if I shall be around to do this.

This is what pets do. If we have them in our early years, they act as primers for the inescapables of life; the family dog giving birth to puppies gives us an introduction to the squeamy realities of sex and its consequences; the terrible early morning discovery of the cat hit by a car in the early hours shows us the brutal irrevocable truth of death.

As we grow older and things fall away from us – vitality, friends, relatives, all gradually succumbing to time’s slow poison – we are left with just ourselves, and the comfort of knowing that all things pass.

And then we go and buy a kitten. 

I Know!

Not been here for a while, mainly because I’ve had nothing interesting to say, and if you’ve got nothing interesting to say you should keep quiet, that’s what I reckon.

I’ve been working on a thing, laying out a plot of sorts, but I’m unsure of what form the thing should take. It’s a thing I was spurred to work on after a conversation in a car a while ago; a mash-up of The Killer Inside Me and Carry On Cowboy. Possibly prose, possibly a comics script.

Health: still a bit dodgy. Still trying to find out why the blood pressure and the cholesterol are fine one day and potentially stroke-inducing the next despite careful monitoring of diet and exercise. The truth will out, and with any luck it’ll do so before I keel over.

And this is already getting far too solipsistic for my liking, so let’s knock it on the head for the day.