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Monday, 9:39 am in Entertainment

So, those of you who are semi-long-time readers will know that for a while I used to do a meme called Music Mondays, in which I’d post five songs every week.  Well, I’ve decided to revive Music Mondays, for the next three weeks at least, and this time spin it with an Urban Nordica theme.  That’s right, kids, one book a week, five songs per book.  Enjoy!

#1.1. Love and Rockets, “Holy Fool”

I could pick up the pieces
And try to play by the rules
I could dig down deeper and deeper
Like a holy, holy fool

“Whatever you’ve heard about me is true and more besides. But it’s also utter crap. So while you’re sitting there, thinking bad thoughts about me, remember that I was bound to the Aesir like I’m bound to you, and everything I did, I did because I had to. I shovelled the shit no-one else wanted to, and I was fucking good at it. So doubt my honour all you like, but never ever doubt my loyalty. I’m bound to help, and so help me but I will. Whether you like it or not.” (“Teatime of the Gods”)

#1.2 LUXT, “Archangel”

I’ve held this blood, held my tongue
Till I was rotting and stripped.
I’ve gotten bored with the gun,
I’m even over the fist.

I launch myself at the least injured angel, who’s not quite prepared for such a viciously feral attack and falls over backwards, sliding along the lino-smooth floor until his head is all-but hanging out the hole in the back of the car. He has just a second to look worried, just a second to try and stammer out a deal, when my jagged teeth close on his neck. (“Eaten”)

#1.3 VAST, “Here”

Have I been telling lies to myself?
Hold me now
You know I’m so afraid to love
At all

It was a short arrow, little green leaves fletching one end, and blackish-green blood slowly corroding the other. Sigmund’s heart stopped, just for a moment, which was when the earthquake started. It was brief, and none-too powerful – enough to rattle china from the shelf and send the unwary to the ground, but not much more – but it had been enough. Loki was here, somewhere, and he was both underground and in pain. Sigmund gripped the arrow tight enough to send his knuckles white and blood oozing from between his fingers. (“Don’t Look”)

#1.4 Hairspray, “You Can't Stop the Beat”

Cause you can’t stop the motion of the ocean or the sun in the sky
You can wonder, if you wanna, but I never ask why
And you can try to hold me down, but I’ll spit in your eye and say
That you can’t stop the beat!

I drag myself across the floor, away from the bar and down the length of the Drif’s nave. A long slimy black-green trail follows me; my blood is barely clotting, so I can forget about any of the wounds healing any time soon. If I’m not careful I’m going to start rotting, as well, which I’m sure will be hilariously fun. Despite everything, I grin at the thought; of me, broken and bloodied and dragging my sorry carcass across the dim red light filtering in through the Drif’s stained-glass windows, armed with only a box of chalk and an idea. Like a fucking beat-down action hero; and everyone knows it takes a whole world of hurt for the Hero to get mad enough to finally end everything. There’s power in that idea, fleeting as it is, but I grab at it like a child at butterflies. (“To the Church”)

#1.5 Archon Satani, “Session I Untitled”
The manhole opening hung above Miriah like a tarnished moon, greyish mist closing over to the point that she grew increasingly uncertain as to whether it was still the open manhole. Whether the silvery wisps around the edges were the ghostly light reflecting off bricks and concrete, or off the edges of thin clouds in an otherwise clear black sky. She was hanging from one slimy metal rung – bolted to a concrete wall or perhaps into the sky itself – and an eternity more seemed to stretch out below her. Far, far down the bottom, she could almost see water. (“Halfway Between the Sewer and the Moon”)

Oh, and some answers to the movie meme?  Don’t mind if I do.

The first film no-one got was Videodrome (#1. Surrealism, Snuff Film, Satellite Dish), a cult classic about the dark obsession with televised brutality from Canadian body horror master David Cronenberg.  Stomach-opening vagina-like VCR slits, a man with his head (literally) in the TV and organic fingerpistols.  Even if you’ve never see it, you’ve probably heard the catchphrase at least once; long live the new flesh.

The next film everyone seemed to think was Bride of Chucky (which I’ve never seen), but was in fact Beetlejuice (#5. Yuppie, Hell, Child Bride).  Honestly, kids, yuppies live in the 1980s, not the late nineties.  Bride of Chucky, really… does no-one watch decent films any more?

I was surprised no-one got the next film, which was the new TMNT (#6. Tech Support, Rat, Sibling Rivalry).  Fun film, incidentally, but probably better for those of us who’ve kept up with watching the newer cartoon series, since it’s pretty far distant from the show we all remember as part of our childhood nostalgia.

The next film I was not surprised at all that no-one got (though considering randomredux guessed Gozu correctly for number 1, maybe not).  It was seminal Japanese horror classic Kairo (#8. Apocalyptic, Internet, Isolation).  Forget the brain-dead US remake and go straight to the original; tense, claustrophobic and nihilistic.  The film you’ll be watching at the end bears little similarity to the film you were watching at the beginning.  Most people who guessed for #8 picked The Matrix.  I maybe would have accepted 28 Days Later, but…  The Matrix?  Buh?  What part of that film screams ‘isolation’?

And finally I was really surprised no-one got the final film, since I’d be highly surprised if there was a single reader out there who hadn’t seen it.  Maybe that was the problem, maybe Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (#10. Nazi, Poetic Justice, Latin Grammar) was just too obvious.  Nevertheless, it’s still one of my favourite films.  And it has Connery.  Connery!

And while I’m talking about films, we went to see Sunshine last night.  ~Mat [h] chose it, apparently forgetting the trailer we’d seen previously which I described as being like “Event Horizon, but in the sun”.  Poor ~Mat [h] thought he was going to see another Armageddon, which makes this the second film he’s seriously misjudged lately (Apocalypto was not a space opera)… actually third if you count me warning him off French rape-revenge film Irréversible (not a film about football).

Let me just get this off my chest right now, since I spent the whole duration of the film thinking it: the sun takes billions of years to die.  Even if we noticed tomorrow that the sun was dying (technically, it actually is), then we’d still have more than the entire duration of life on planet Earth up to this point in order to do something about it.  One expects than in 5 billion years’ time the human race would either have a) evolved and/or died out, and/or b) invented interstellar travel.  So the point is moot.  Not only that, but stars get bigger and hotter before they get smaller and colder.  In its death phase the sun will expand out to approximately where the Earth currently sits, effectively boiling off all our oceans and scattering our atmosphere before it eventually collapses and plunges us into permanent winter.

If you can ignore the science of it (and I suspect most people can, not having bothered to read My Big Bumper Book of Space as children), the rest of the film is… okay, I guess.  Except it’s not anything we haven’t seen before.  Event Horizon did it, Solaris did it, Pitch Black did it, Alien did it… I think you get the picture.  The essential set-up is this:  A group of isolated and disparate people exist in a small and unfamiliar space.  The people encounter something slightly odd.  Disaster happens!  The crew blames each other.  Turns out the disaster was not, in fact, caused by existing crew but rather by mysterious sinister force brought on board by previous odd encounter.  Everyone dies.  The end.

It’s not (a-har) rocket science.  Danny Boyle (28 Days Later) handled the scenario competently and the film certainly looks beautiful in parts, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t watching anything new.  As ~Mat [h] said, there’s not much difference between not being able to see anything because it’s too dark and not being able to see anything because it’s too bright.  The film is certainly tense but the tension is more caused by the fact that the audience has seen this before and knows that it’s all going to go wrong rather than anything else.  The whole plot is almost identical to that of Event Horizon (which is one of my favourite films) right down to the encounter with the previous mission’s ship, and the rogue crew member that goes insane and murders everyone (which is hardly a spoiler since it’s obvious from about the first scene what’s going to happen and why).  The first half of the film is filled with diligently pointing out to us all the various different things that will turn fatal in the last half of the movie, including a scene which is eerily reminiscent of one from the new Doctor Who.  There just aren’t any real surprises.

On the plus side, it was good to see Hiroyuki Sanada again; J-horror fans will recognise him (or rather his beard) as Ryuji from the Ring films.  On the minus side, he dies way too early.

Overall, I wouldn’t be holding my breath for this film.  It’s probably worth a watch, but on DVD where the thin plot is less obscured by tired cheap shock tricks.

On the other hand, we got to see a preview for this and…  how the fuck did I not know it was coming out?  Holy shit!  Must.  See.  Right.  Now!

Less exciting was this.  Of all the fucking inane superheroes to bring to the screen… sheesh.  It’s not like the original film was all that great, either.

• Tags » answers, imdb, meme, movies, music monday, reviews, urban nordica
• Comments By » ~Belinda [h], ~nounbeast [h]