Not so Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer - My Late Review

“You always have a choice.” These wise, nay cosmically profound, words are spoken by the Invisible Girl, Sue Storm, to the Silver Surfer in the Fantastic Four sequel I paid good money to see last night. They are the words that convince him to abandon Galactus, Devourer of Worlds, and save the Earth. It may seem somewhat odd that, after he assisted in the destruction of dozens of other worlds, the surfer would be so easily persuaded by what some may unkindly call a sentimental platitude. It may have helped that Sue looked like his long-lost love from his homeworld. Maybe all the other planets just didn’t have any hot chicks on them?

That little turd-nugget is typical of an entire film heaving at the seams with lazy plotting, simple-minded irritating characterisation and tedium. Even if I try to put aside my comic fanboy objections to the film (Galactus as a CLOUD for fuck’s sake?!!), I can’t find anything good to say about it. Long periods are dominated by clunking interplay between the members of the Fantastic Four. I suppose this is to help us ‘identify with them’, but I was simply bored and ended up feeling intense hatred for Johnny Storm. He’s supposed to be a cheeky, flawed maverick, but I just thought he was a cunt. At one point, he asks of the others “what have you got against capitalism?” Er, where would you like me to start, you shallow shitbag?

I could go on and on, but I’ll just highlight one more thing. Johnny spends a lot of the film pursuing and being rebuffed by a sexy female soldier. A soldier who happily stands guard while the Silver surfer is tortured (in a bunker in Siberia – I didn’t realise the US had a presence there!) In a twee ‘tying up loose ends’ effort, she appears to have got it together with Johnny and attended Reed and Sue’s wedding in the closing scene (I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that the Earth is NOT destroyed by Galactus). This seems to be sending a bizarre moral message to kids – she may have collaborated in torture but, hey, she’s actually a really nice person! Let’s invite her to the wedding!

No wonder the Americans are getting it wrong in Iraq with those kind of moral standards…

Our film is rubbish

Creatives! Cartoon Episode 2: Transport

Click to see it in glorious detail

Having a Great Time Outdoors, Even in a Shithole

I was reading my less talented but infinitely more successful contemporary Charlie Brooker'seffete account of Glastonbury on the train this morning. All those people having an amazing time despite the rain, mud, bad drugs and worse toilet facilities. Then, as I cycled up the polluted, filthy Euston road I saw there were people happily sitting outside Costa, enjoying their coffee in a pavement seating area, as if the trucks and buses weren't thundering past. It was like they imagined were on a secluded piazza in Florence.

This was when I realised that one of the great abilities of Homo Sapiens is the ability to completely ignore one's surroundings and doggedly have a GOOD TIME OUTDOORS. I would even postulate that there's a part of the brain devoted to filtering out hideousness when having a GREAT TIME OUTDOORS. In fact, I've decided that this cognitive centre is called Al Fresco's Winnet.

Al Fresco's Winnet is especially developed in the British, for whom HAVING A WHALE OF A TIME OUTDOORS is especially challenging. It's either pissing down with rain or so global-warmingly hot that our pasty skin gets fried after 5 minutes in the sun.

No doubt when we have completely fucked up the planet and have to live in survival-fridge-domes to protect us from pollution and a boiling atmosphere there'll be Britishers sitting outside laughing, drinking frapuccinos as their brains boil.

Virgin Media Again: a Few Thoughts on Copywriting

I was thinking about Virgin Media again this morning (yes, I’m obsessed!), having passed a few of their ads during my commute. As a copywriter, I’ve always liked the Virgin tone of voice, which is consistent in its clarity and humanity.

However, having fallen foul of some of the promises made in Virgin Media ads and misleading simplifications in their instruction booklets, I’ve come to the conclusion that rather than demonstrating true clarity, the tone of voice actually creates falsehoods through omission. This isn’t good copywriting. Good copywriting is communicating the true facts in a clear and succinct fashion. It's easy to make thing sound simple by missing the difficult bits out.

It’s a bit like being seduced by a good-looking (I can't deny the new brand looks and sounds good) but dishonest lover. They’ll promise you the stars in order to shag you, but then fuck off at 5 in the morning with your wallet.

Not a basis for a sustainable relationship…

Hahaha! I'm off to the bookies with your cash!

My Review of 'A Scanner Darkly' Which I Finally Watched on DVD

Eh?!

Creatives! New Cartoon Series from the Realm of Above the Line

Click on the cartoon to see it big

Virgin Media Rant: Lots of Swearing

I'm sitting in the living room with rain lashing down outside and Stan asleep in his pushchair. Emily's away for her sister Lucy's Hen Night and I'm babysitting the boy. As I sit here, I'm looking at my Virgin Media set-top box with loathing (well, glancing at it in between typing, but why ruin the dramatic effect?)

Long-standing readers of my blog will know that I've been consistently pissed off with Virgin Media ever since it stopped being NTL. They've charged me twice for months, made reconnecting after moving house into a gruelling endurance test, repeatedly miscommunicated or simply failed to communicate at all.

The latest bit of corporate cuntery from Branson's operation is taking on-demand services away from me and trying to charge £5 for the honour. Most of the time the services didn't actually work anyway, so it's no great loss. What infuriates me is that I signed up to the TV package on the understanding that on-demand was part of the deal. There was FUCK ALL in the advertising that suggested that it would be taken away. It's so shitting duplicitous.

The worse thing is this: as a customer, THERE IS NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT IT! Is a rant to a phoneline drone going to make a difference? Is writing a letter going change Virgin Media's ways? Are they bollocks going to. What's left? Go over to Sky? Will they really be better?

There's plenty of marketing theories about the consumer being king these days, but Let's face We are all powerless in the face of these capitalist behemoths.

Stardust - My Star Pun-Free Film Review

I went to a preview showing of the film Stardust last night (it’s in cinemas from October, apparently). Don't worry - you won't any crap star puns - "it's a star turn" etc etc. I promise.

It’s a fantasy film based on the illustrated fairy tale by comics megastar Neil Gaiman and artist Charles Vess. Designer colleague Rob and I were invited along as we’re working on a project involving the film. Having visited the website, we went to the preview feeling the film would be a bit naff. Luckily, it was a really entertaining, gorgeous-looking movie and less simple-minded than most films aimed at a crossover audience of adults and kids. Admittedly, the hero being named Tristan may have softened up my critical faculties…

The plot involves this Tristan, a humble lad from an English village named Wall. There is indeed a wall near the village (the town founders must have been particularly unimaginative with words); a wall between the human world and the fairy realm. When a star falls beyond the wall, Tristan swears to enter the fairy kingdom to retrieve it for the feckless cow he’s got the hots for. This, needless to say, leads to a quest full of peril and enchantment.

The thing that saves it from being twee is the gallows humour that permeates the script. I also liked the fact that – unusually for a fantasy movie – there was actually a gay character in there. In fact, Robert de Niro’s turn as the gay pirate Captain Shakespeare was, for me, the highlight of the film. Yes! Travis Bickle as a homosexual freebooter! What brilliant casting! His performance shit all over Ricky Gervais's cameo as David Brent in a funny hat.

Anyway, October’s a long way off, but I reckon you should see Stardust when it twinkles into UK cinemas…Shit! Sorry...

"Look, Ricky - don't try and fucking tell me that Extras is as funny as the Office"

The Death of Facebook?

Facebook was on BBC Breakfast this morning, with the hosts making the same joke about ‘poking’ that’s always made when the site is reported on TV. I’m guessing that augers the death-knell for the site. In fact, I can hear it ringing out across the land now. As soon as these things hit the mainstream media they become terminally uncool and die.

Or do they?

Am I being a digital agency snob about this? Just because something becomes the Internet equivalent of a Wetherspoons pub to people like me doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to die. I’m sure that most of the webarati wouldn’t be seen dead on MySpace, yet over 100,000000 accounts have been created there. That’s an awful lot of teenagers and pop stars. So its likely that when Facebook fever has died among the AKQA diaspora, there’ll be plenty of other people to take our place.

Scott Walker Made Me Cry

To say that music can have a powerful, often irrational, emotional effect is not an original observation.

After all, it’s the principle behind every single male’s ‘Shag CD’ (or Pooching Playlist for the technically savvy); the hope that a bit of Luther Vandross and Lionel Richie will act like an aural Rohypnol when they’ve got a woman back to their fetid man-pad. However, when music does conjure up a big emotion from deep inside my brain it always catches me unawares.

This morning I was on the 08.14 from Welwyn Garden City, listening to my iPod on shuffle. In between Alexandra Palace and Finsbury Park ‘If You Go Away’ by Scott Walker began to play. For some reason the melancholy tune and Jacques Brelle’s poetic lyrics made me pause and cry.

I must have looked slightly bonkers and have no idea what emotional connection had been made in my head. All I can say is that, for a moment, I was watching London rush by and living that song.

Baby Recycling

The irresponsible, selfish throwaway ethos of our society took another turn for the worse today, as you can see from this photo of my office. I am, quite frankly, outraged. The sign clearly says the recycling bin is for aluminium cans only.

Advertising Agency Manners

Something occurred to me this morning as I got to the entrance of Saatchis shortly after a co-worker and found the glass door swung shut in my face. What does it say about the advertising world when I’m always mildly surprised when someone actually holds a door open for me after they’ve gone through it? Is it lack of manners, an endemic selfishness or is everyone immersed in their own world?

Yes, I Admit It, I Liked the Sisters of Mercy

My friend Steve has pointed out that in a comment that I had a soft spot for the Sisters of Mercy in my youth. I cannot deny it. Any band that calls its drum machine ‘Doktor Avalanche’ is cool with me. I particularly loved the Floodlands album, which was when ‘ver Sisters’ went mainstream I suppose. I remember wanting Andrew Eldrich’s white suit in the Dominion video. My god, I thought he looked cool. 20 years on, I now see that Steve himself actually adopted the facial hair and glasses ‘look’ of Eldritch!

Heavy Metal Memories and Pat Mills' Requiem

One of the illicit pleasures of my childhood was buying (or indeed shoplifting) Heavy Metal comic from unwitting newsagents in Leamington Spa. Heavy Metal is the US version of the French comic anthology Metal Hurlant, full of translated European fantasy comic strips, which was cool in itself, but the best thing was that it was also littered with beautifully drawn nude women and sex. Horny 12 year old sci-fi nut nirvana! As it was a comic, the newsagents would stick it next to the Beano and I could legitimately buy it. Hurrah!

As an adult, I haven’t often shelled out for Heavy Metal as it’s generally full of nonsensical beautifully drawn rubbish – and the allure of nude cartoon women isn’t quite as powerful. However, recently I have started reading it again for one comic strip – the utterly deranged ‘Requiem Vampire Knight’.

Requiem is a Franco-Belgian comic written by the British visionary Pat Mills (the bloke who started 2000ad) and drawn by French artist Olivier Ledroit. It’s best summarised a mental vampire goth headfuck set in a bloodsoaked Hell.

Its protagonist is a Nazi soldier reincarnated as a Vampire in a nightmare world where time runs backwards. I can’t really make head nor tail of the plot, but it seems to involve Requiem searching hell for his lost love who was a Jewish woman sent to the camps. Loads of over-the-top bonkers stuff is thrown into the mix – Dracula rules a kingdom in this hellworld, Tomas de Torquemada has been reincarnated as a werewolf and there’s an extreme politically correct feminist tyrant from Venus who’s been brought back as a pirate. There’s also plenty of sado-masochistic sex and gory ultra-violence.

There’s no doubt that Mills has several screws loose and writing for an adult European comics publisher allows him to let those screws scatter all over the shop in a very disturbing fashion. The madness is brought to life by Ledroit’s feverishly detailed psychopathically exuberant art.

Mind you, if Mills is mentally ill, I must have a morbid side to seek this stuff out. It’s funny – I used to look down my nose at Goths as a teenager and now I’m turning into one…

Charlie Brooker - Allied to C***s

I have been, along with everyone in the ex-AKQA diaspora, dabbling in the world of Facebook for a few weeks now. I usually check in once or twice a day and feel stupidly happy when someone puts a message on my ‘wall’. Coincidentally Charlie Brooker wrote about his social ineptness on Facebook in the Guardian last week. This is a good enough excuse for me to haul out my very own Charlie Brooker anecdote.

Many years ago, when the Internet was young and I was somewhat thinner, I worked at a (now defunct) new media agency named Zinc. Every week the creative dept. would look forward to the latest online TV listings spoof ‘TV Go Home’ written by Brooker. A series in the imaginary listings was ‘Cunt’, which was, ironically enough, about a feckless new media wanker just like us named Nathan Barley. Thankfully he was public school and had a trust fund, so the parallels weren’t too painfully direct.

Then one week the TV Go Home e-newsletter featured a link to the site of a man declaring himself to be the ‘Real Cunt’. He used this ego toss-space to boast about his agency work, film script efforts, gorgeous aristo girlfriend, not to mention the Notting Hill flat funded by Daddy. You get the picture. The idiot foolishly put an email link on his site. This tempted half a dozen of us to write abusive emails to the dolt.

My email was pretty reasonable – just asking him why he was proud of his similarity to a self-obsessed, ignorant, lazy, pretentious, venal Thatcher’s child arsewipe. I got an irate reply and a frank email ‘exchange of views’ ensued. Meanwhile we’d sent his URL to people elsewhere and sending him abuse went viral. He blamed me and it all got a bit silly, with him threatening lawsuits (I still remember the threat of ‘my dad’s a lawyer’).

It all culminated in an anonymous email arriving in his inbox (which eventually turned out to be from my friend John) describing all sorts of sadistic scenarios climaxing with the ‘Real Cunt’ ending up in a full-body cast and being anally raped by hospital porters. He pinned the email on me – again threatening legal action (I could have killed John when I found out he was responsible). He also took down his website, which was sensible really.

This was when Charlie Brooker stepped in and ‘flamed’ me in the TV Go Home newsletter. Here was the supposed enemy of cunts defending one! He even accused me of hypocrisy as the name Tristan sounded suspiciously public school! Oh, the betrayal. Needless to say Brooker lost a bit of cred with me after that. Not that he’d give a shit, the successful bastard.

Bowels Attack!

All too frequently in my life I find that important events are affected adversely by my bowels. In fact, I’m beginning to think that they’re conspiring against me. I don’t know what I’ve done to them to deserve this kind of treatment, but their malevolence knows no bounds. It’s like they’re out for some form of revenge.

Take today. Important client meeting. Wake up with chronic stomach cramps and make two unscheduled prostrate-pitstops before I’ve even made it out of the house. Make the hideous mistake of having a small coffee and spend the entire journey to work fearing that some kind of terrible pebble-dashing accident will occur.

Get to work, go twice more. Stagger into meeting. It lasts for two hours. I spend most of that time agonised by stomach cramps, worrying that the bomb-bay doors are about to open. The entire meeting is literally buttock-clenching.

I rush away after saying goodbye to the clients, desperate to ‘go’. Of course, because the gods like toying with me, the toilets on my floor are out of order. I dash downstairs and have to use the disabled toilet to let nature take its course. Jesus, I’ve never known relief like it.

The Tribe is Over

I emerged from the Saatchi & Saatchi ‘tribe’ yesterday, exhausted but still on a bit of a high. The very word ‘tribe’ makes you think of pretentious adland wankery, but the session was genuinely the best time I’ve had at work for ages. And this isn’t simply down to the free bacon sarnies laid on every day for breakfast.

Considering the number of creative team participating from across Europe, there was a surprising lack of ego about using each other’s ideas and seeing where we could take them. I say surprising because I’ve worked at some agencies where having ideas was a competitive process and the biggest, loudest ego in the room usually won out, even if their idea was shit.

Another interesting thing was how different countries have different styles of idea. For instance, the Italian team’s ideas were always poetic and surreal, while the Spanish ideas were based on very simple, direct insights. The Brit ideas were more about humour and a classic ATL lateral way of thinking that I really want to learn.

So, over all, no cynicism or bile from me. I was happy to be part of the tribe.

Tribe

Not a lot of blog, as I’m in a ‘tribe’ all day. If like me (until I had it explained to me last week), you’d never heard of such a thing, here’s a quick explanation. It’s a kind of Saatchi & Saatchi super-brainstorm in which creatives from all over the world get together to have ideas in one big session lasting three whole days. The thought of being in one of these inspires both fear and excitement. After all, if we Saatchi Interactive people have shit ideas or no ideas, I’ll be gutted. However, it’ll be a fascinating process in which to participate.

I’ll check back in to give my impressions…

No, not the BBC series Tribe with Bruce Parry...

New URL

Hi - if you've made it across from my old URL, welcome to my new one! Here's a nice picture I took of a clown.

Underworld: Evolution Pigshit Debacle

I have low-brow tastes.

I tried to read Proust’s ‘Remembrance of Things Past’, got two chapters into it and ended up devouring a crime novel by Andrew Vachss instead. I buy the occasional classical piece and get bored with it after one listen. I get arthouse DVDs with subtitles and find myself watching ‘Goodfellas’ again. So, in short, I’ve pretended that I’m intellectual in the past, but I just can’t be arsed any more. I’m happy to wallow in the cultural midden.

However, sometimes the pigshit I roll around in is too fetid even for me. A case in point is ‘Underworld: Evolution’, which I purchased as part of one of those ‘5 for £30’ deals. I’ll admit I rather enjoyed the first film. However, the sequel is worse than I could ever imagine. What an unintelligible car-crash of goth art direction, mangled plot, bad acting and pointless ultra-violence. I don’t expect anything better from Kate Beckinsale, but Derek Jacobi should be ashamed of himself for being greedy enough to take the money and run.

On the plus side, at least ‘Underworld: Evolution’ demonstrates that there limits to the rubbish my brain can tolerate. Now, back to that zombie comic I was reading…

OK, I'm in the frockcoat. Now, where's my cheque?