I ♥ Evil Old Lesbians.

This blog really is cursed. As I was starting to write the last post, my chest started to hurt and within hours my light cold had become a mild flu. I hurt, yet I write, I write for you. Assuming you're one of the people who read my blog because we're friends, not one of the many who drift in looking for Batgirl rape which is still my top search term which has helped motivate my current prolific output.

From Russia With Love is where we start to get more of the Bond stuff. We get our first Bond theme, first title sequence with scantily clad women, first scene with Desmond Llewelyn as Q, first totally convincing rubber mask but most importantly, we get our first evil gay character. And it's my favourite evil gay character, the murderously bitter old lesbian. This one's called Colonel Rosa Klebb and she's played by the wonderful Lotte Lenya, best known otherwise for her work with Kurt Weill. With her lemon and onions facial expressions, her perving over the female lead and her forthright approach with a poisoned toe knife you can either be offended by the homophobic stereotype or you can spend the whole film rooting for her.

She is hamstrung by working for the crappiest evil organization ever. SPECTRE's main raison d'être is to get the Soviets and the west to fight and they can't even manage that. At the height of the cold war, they launch a series of insanely overcomplicated schemes that are all defeated by a mangy date rapist. No wonder Klebb looks like someone's pissed in her cornflakes.

Speaking of rape, watching the old Bond films has really helped clarify why our culture can't get a grip on something as simple as what constitutes sexual consent (someone saying they want to have sex with you and really meaning it). Connery's Bond is supposed to be the ultimate ladies man, no woman can resist him and this is partly true. No woman can successfully resist him, they'll try but he'll smack them around a bit till they give in. The level of casual violence against women is really quite jarring, it's strange that they still show these films as Saturday matinees on ITV.

The Bond Girl in this one has been conned by Klebb (which I admit to finding pleasing to say) into pretending to defect so she can be a double agent for Mother Russia only she'll really be reporting to SPECTRE. Fortunately Bond is there to shag her, rough her up a bit and then shag her again. This treatment results in both love and a desire to defect for real.

So that's the brutal misogyny taken care of, how are we for racism. We have a stereotypical Gypsy (ie brunette) camp. Does it have quaint wooden caravans and dark, tempestuous women with heaving bosoms? Of course it does.

This one had a decent budget and it looks terrific. The famous train fight scene still holds up well, it actually conveys better than most contemporary action films that a life or death fight is an exhausting, terrifying struggle. The catfight in the gypsy camp is simultaneously pure titillation and surprisingly close to how people I see fighting drunk on a Friday night go about things.

Sadly, when it comes down to it, there's only so much a poisoned toe knife can do for you. Klebb's defeat is certain but luckily she isn't young and photogenic enough for Bond to rape her to the side of good so she gets the dignity of being treated as a serious threat and killed. But I'll always remember her as she was; bitter, manhating and venomous.

She was the people's evil old lesbian. She was the evil old lesbian of our hearts.

The bikini that built an empire.

The first thing I noticed about Dr No is how cheap it looks. The sets look like painted plyboard (almost certainly for a good reason) and not much happens. I don't get this worship of Sean Connery. He mostly smirks, punches people and uses the same facial expression to express anger, exertion and disquiet. It's also either his O face or the face he makes while straining on the toilet.

The famous bit where Ursula Andress rises from the ocean is remembered for a reason. It's the only really memorable bit in the film. You'd think the bulldozer with a flamethrower on it that incinerates Bond's islander sidekick would be memorable but it's not. It's painted to look like a dragon so all the natives believe that it really is one because people who aren't white are stupid. Except when they're evil. The film's set in the Caribbean and this was prior to the civil rights movement so it's about what you'd expect in terms of ambient racism. I think there's some reason that a Nordic blond woman in her late twenties is being portrayed as a wild girl of the islands. I mean a plot reason, the real reason is so that the audience can indulge in vicarious fantasies of sex with childlike savages without the main romance of the film being a mixed race relationship.

Also I got really sick of that bloody song about the mango tree. We never seem to get past the first verse and it's really irritating.

Ten years later she'd be trying to seduce Edward Woodward with her naked pagan butt-slapping.

Oh god, it's a New Year. Why does this keep happening?

If you're reading this, it means we both made it through 2012. I'm slightly surprised. How did you manage it? And do you have any tips for stopping times nightmarishly swift course?

My method involves herbal medicine and espionage. I've had a certain fascination for this ever since I realized that the Moscow Rules are the ideal survival guide for the queer teenager (I may write more about this later) and it turns out that, in certain mental conditions, spy nonsense becomes strangely fascinating to me. Unfortunately, I'm allergic to just enjoying myself so I decided to attempt to study the cultural significance of the James Bond films. In order.

Why the hell would anyone in their right mind want to do that? Well firstly I'm not in my right mind but secondly, the Bond films have been running since 1962. They're like a time capsule of how political movements and world events have shaped popular culture in the last fifty years. The civil rights movement, feminism, the fall of communism and the rise of the internet, all can be viewed through the lens of the Bond movie. You can also see how the language of cinema has changed in that time. Getting toasted was necessary in order to sit through and write about them though.

I'm cold, I'm hungry and I have only the most tenuous grip on reality. It's time to WRITE!

Can I meet the challenge?

Can I write more blog posts this year than last year?

Probably not, but with this one I break even. That's a bit crap though. I shall embed a youtube video to make up for it, as all very lazy bloggers do.

Transgender Day of Remembrance

It's the time of year again when we take time out to remember everybody who's been murdered for being trans. I'm also thinking about those like Fernanda Milan and Cece McDonald who are punished for surviving. I don't have words. What the hell is wrong with the world. Not just the pathetic killers and rapists and torturers but the bastards who are actively trying to prevent transfolk from having any refuge at all.

Here is a video that includes photos and names of as many of the victims as possible. It's not exactly easy to watch but watching seems like all I can offer the dead. That I will see their faces, read their names, mark their passing and write this, praying to nothing in particular that next years list will be shorter. Safe winter everybody. Stay warm, keep going.

Transgender Day of Remembrance 2012 from StormMiguel Florez on Vimeo.

If I had all the weapons I needed, you'd need new kneecaps.

Writing this was like trying to pass the biggest, stankiest, greasiest yet most unpleasantly-dry-and-full-of-partially-chewed-brazil-nuts-est shit ever WITH MY MIND! I feel like my brain has haemorrhoids. I've seen a lot of so bad they're good films and even more that are so bad they're horrible but this is the first film I've encountered so bad that it's actually evil. This film shreds your critical faculties while you watch it. This film reduces hardened feminist critics to inarticulate rage. If you still haven't guessed it rhymes with Trucker Funch, which, by a curious coincidence, is the only sexual act that can still bring Zack Snyder to orgasm.

Snyder's here. We need a pint of engine oil, a lubricated chain, a full English breakfast that's been left in an airing cupboard for 3 weeks and get the girls to glue boar bristles to their noses. Remember, it's OK to vomit.

 I don't think you're stupid if you find Sucker Punch empowering. As a small child, I managed to take a message of gay equality and feminist empowerment from 'Allo 'Allo and you have to push your brain into a very strange shape to do that. Learning to almost automatically extract the meaning you want from the culture surrounding you and firmly ignore the bits you don't like is a valuable life skill for the marginalized, which still mysteriously includes 52% of the human population. If you're able to quarry some joy out of Sucker Punch then I'm happy for you but...

There are really good reasons not many people will share your viewpoint.

I'm not going to critique the cast, they're all terrible but they really never had a chance. The film is glossy but all it's shiny images just remind me of better films they're cribbed from. There's some OK music on the soundtrack. The action scenes are mediocre and manage to make the most interesting things unexciting but I don't think any of this is why Sucker Punch flopped. It flopped because this film is the distillation of everything that's slimy, pandering and dishonest in nerd culture and being so overtly pandered to can make people feel uncomfortable. The nerd backlash against this film may be the result of giving the straight white cis male demographic that it's aimed at a "Naked Lunch" moment.  Stuff like this gives masturbation fantasies a bad name.

The opening music video shows Babydoll's mother dying, followed by her wicked stepfather finding that her estate has been left to Babydoll and her sister. He tries to kill them (with rape heavily implied). Babydoll then wins the William Burroughs Memorial Award for outstanding marksmanship when she tries to shoot her stepfather in the head,

 misses

  and somehow manages to kill her sister who was lying on the ground.

Which is one hell of a trick shot. Unless she'd already been killed by her stepfather somehow. It's only the most important event in the protagonists life that will drive and motivate everything she does so it's understandable that Snyder doesn't want to waste a lot of time here. There's shots of woman crying in fear and/or despair to get to.

Women crying in fear and/or despair for various reasons form an important motif in Sucker Punch and each character gets to do her own variant or "look". This is so you know it's empowering. For example, here is Babydoll doing her best "My sister's been killed and I've been falsely imprisoned in a lunatic asylum".

I'VE NEVER FELT MORE SELF-ACTUALIZED.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. After her sister dies, Babydoll's stepfather has her committed to a hospital for the mentally insane.

At least he didn't put her with the physically insane people. Those guys are mean.

This is presumably because if it was for the criminally insane (you know, people who shoot their relatives), we might question if helping the other girls to escape is a good idea. If the other girls actually exist - but more of that later.

Anyway, her stepfather has conspired with the corrupt orderly Blue to have her lobotomised in a week. While they're quibbling over the details, Babydoll gets to overhear the asylum head Dr Gorski giving another patient (Sweet Pea) a treatment session (curiously, the asylum seems to offer only two forms of treatment, psychodrama and lobotomies). Inspired by Gorski's platitudes about imaginary worlds she can control, as the icepick descends, Babydoll (maybe) creates one for herself.

In this world she's a ingénue sex slave imprisoned in a high-end bordello that also functions as a burlesque house. She's got a week before the fabled High Roller shows up to rape her. Exactly why she's decided to retreat to this fantasy world which is possibly even more depressing than the one she's stuck in (if a bit gaudier) is anyone's guess.

It's important in a film that deals with multiple layers of reality to have some way to keep track of where the story is at any given time. In Sucker Punch, each layer of reality is signified with a layer of eyelashes on the main character. Incidentally, the film does make a point of telling us that Babydoll is 20 so although she's supposed to look like a heavily made-up schoolgirl it's totally OK to want to fuck her. Seriously, the Snyder's down with that.

Ohhhh yeeaaahhh!

Anyway, in the imaginary bordello, Babydoll will have to perform menial chores and attend mandatory ballet class, like all sex slaves.

Lingerie clad ballet is absolutely integral to the smooth running of this hell brothel.

She meets the other girls: Rocket (the nice but spunky one), her sister Sweet Pea (the head girl), Blondie (who isn't blonde, how clever) and Amber (the Asian one). Fortunately, as we live in a post-racism society, it's not necessary to give Blondie and Amber any further characterization.

We look forward to dying on your journey of empowerment, noble white heroine.

The other girls are catty and hostile (as all women are) but Babydoll saves Rocket from being raped by the piggy cook and this gives her an in. Then, when she's nervous at her first dance practice, Madame Gorski (in this world she's a brothel madame who works for Blue) gives her a pep talk that basically amounts to "Empower yourself with your coerced sexy dancing". With this motivation, Babydoll promptly drops into another level of reality where she's a mangaesque ass-kicker by way of Showgirls. She meets an old Wise Man who speaks in clichéd aphorisms (which Snyder seems to find hilarious). He tells her she'll need 5 things: A map, a knife, a key, fire and a mysterious sacrifice (which is obviously going to be her). Then she battles three robot samurai that painfully remind you that you could be watching Brazil instead.

BUT OUR FX ARE TECHNOLOGICALLY SUPERIOR!

This is still the best action sequence in the film, mostly because you might harbour some hope that this means something, some sort of inner demons that she has to conquer or a symbolic representation of her escape plan (spoiler:it doesn't). She comes back up to the brothel at the end and finds that her sexy dancing has the power to completely hypnotize all the men who see it's magic eroticism (no, seriously). We never see this dance but as she was jumping around killing imaginary monsters in her head, I'm guessing it looked a lot like the magically erotic dance of the Star Wars kid.

Now she has a plan to present to her fellow sex slaves. She'll use her ability to do hypnotic sexy dancing while imagining heavily CGI dependent sci-fi/fantasy scenarios, to distract the men while the other girls steal the required items. Rocket, being the nice but spunky one, is all for it. Sweet Pea being the bossy, grouchy one, is against it but reluctantly agrees. Blondie and Amber are not white and therefore will go with the majority, rather than risk character development.

The first item is the map and the scene where Sweet Pea breaks into the office to copy it is in serious danger of becoming suspenseful so we move to what's happening in (maybe) Babydoll's head. She's imagining a steam/dieselpunk version of World War One (or Two, it's unlikely Snyder knows the difference). This sequence is filmed in a stuttering sepia that lets you know that Zack Snyder has seen Saving Private Ryan. There's a bunch of steam powered Nazi zombies and a bad guy who looks like Freddy Krueger dressed as The Red Baron and the girls (women just doesn't seem to stick as a term here) are some sort of strike force sent to grab a map (see it connects, not in any meaningful way but it connects).

Shall we take a moment out to discuss the costumes? Not just costumes; sexy costumes. Babydoll isn't just dressed as a schoolgirl, she's dressed as a sexy schoolgirl.

The slit skirt is for empowerment.

Rocket isn't just dressed as an WW2 infantrywomen, she's dressed as a sexy WW2 infantrywomen.

This is what right-wing men see when someone talks about women in combat.

Sweet Pea isn't just dressed as Joan of Arc, she's dressed as sexy Joan of Arc.

The Maid of New Orleans?

Blondie isn't just dressed as...

Sexy cowgirl? Sexy Biggles?

Actually I have no clue what this costume is supposed to be. But it's supposed to be sexy. Because, for a women, being sexy is the key to empowerment. Intelligence, talent, inner strength; all require a solid basing in sexy.

You may have noticed I haven't mentioned Amber. As the groups pilot, she doesn't get to show off her sexy outfit as much so she gets less to do. She gets a mecha, a plane and a helicopter but these are only cool, they're not sexy.

So there's a bunch of fighting and Babydoll shoots down a zeppelin

Oh the humanity.

and gets the map. that's about it.

Back in the the brothel, Blue wants to put Babydoll on stage. Madame Gorski doesn't think she's ready so we get a scene of him humiliating her. Who's supposed to be imagining this or how it relates to the "real world" where she's actually his boss is anyone's guess. Blue then returns to his office and realizes the map has been copied at which point we realize that everything they're going to do will be noticed immediately. This is the shittest plan ever.

As the girls haven't realized that this is the shittest plan ever, they're gearing up for the next step and we have some character development for Amber after all. She's scared she'll be caught stealing the lighter. Fear of death is a character trait (sort of).

They talk her into it and Amber's rich client is introduced in an annoying music video accompanied by a truly vile track that does terrible things to helpless, vulnerable Queen songs. This is in no way meant to glamorize forced prostitution.

Dehumanising women is just plain wrong.

Babydoll dances and imagines a cod-Tolkein battleground where the gang have to retrieve two crystals from a baby dragons throat that make fire. The mother dragon objects, which actually seems pretty reasonable. It all ends in Babydoll stabbing her in the head. When this kind of thing can happen

without it being even a little bit exciting something has gone terribly wrong with the universe.

As the girls are sitting congratulating themselves on the succesful theft of the lighter, Blue comes in to tell them he knows they took it, menace and rough them up a bit, without actually making them give it back. Sweet Pea wants to stop the plan now but a crying Rocket insists on going ahead. Here she is doing her "I'd rather die than live like this".

Despair and defiance. That's like double empowerment.

Blue has been partly successful as in the next scene the pressure of living a lie has gotten to Blondie. Madame Gorski finds her crying in the rehearsal room doing a very creditable "The fear of discovery is more than I can bear".

I'm not even white!

She decides to confide in Madame Gorski, too empowered to notice that Blue is there as well.

Meantime the rest of them are off trying to get the knife from the cook. Just as the highly recognizable customized lighter was the only source of fire, the only knife in this kitchen that is designed to service all the slaves and clients of a luxury bordello is the one in the cooks belt. Fortunately as well as being a rapist, the cook is also extremely gullible so doesn't question their sudden need to give him a lap dance. This time, Babydoll's imagination has them trying to defuse a nuclear bomb guarded by killer robots on a monorail on an alien planet. What has that got to do with knives you ask? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

My existence was meaningless.

Unfortunately, the radio Babydoll is dancing too shorts out and the cook notices Sweet Pea taking the knife. He's so enraged, he ends up stabbing Rocket to death. As he's also the cook in the asylum, does that mean that Rocket actually has been stabbed to death (this is not real remember). Blue arrives and gets everyone to the dressing room for dramatic confrontation purposes, where he finds the list of items still on the back of the chalkboard. Presumably because their little womanish heads would've forgotten everything if they hadn't kept it written down in the most obvious place. Empowerment abounds in this scene. Here's Amber's impressive "I'm about to be shot in the back of the head".

At least I had a richly drawn character arc.

Blondie doing "If only I hadn't betrayed myself and all my friends with my dark haired weakness".

This kind of challenging role is why I became an actress.

Even Madame Gorski gets to cry, proving that Zack Snyder respects mature women. A lovely "If only I hadn't collaborated, I was fooling myself all along."

Empowerment for everybody.

None of them can do anything because women are only powerful in dreams. Actually even in dreams they're not powerful, women are only powerful in the dreams they have when they're dreaming.

Blue orders everybody out but Babydoll so he can give in to temptation and rape her. She stabs him with the knife which makes me wonder why her plan wasn't simply 1) Steal knife 2) Get Blue alone 3) Stab him and take his key. She and Sweet Pea leave the bordello but there's a crowd of men standing at the gate. Rather than try to think of a distraction, Babydoll decides to sacrifice herself by kicking one of the men in the groin, providing a distraction so Sweet Pea can escape. Him punching her in the face corresponds to the icepick lobotomising her.

Back (finally) in the real world Doctor Gorski realizes that Blue faked her signature on the lobotomy order and has him arrested as he is about to rape the lobotomised Babydoll. This points up the obvious flaw in the films "your mind can set you free" bullshit, in fantasy brothel world Blue is all powerful and Gorski is his helpless subordinate. In the real world, he's just an orderly and Gorski's the boss and sympathetic to the girls. If she hadn't been so busy with imaginary battles and had just talked to her, Babydoll could have avoided being lobotomised.

Anyway Sweet Pea escapes on a greyhound bus thanks to the kindly driver who is the wise man from Babydoll's dancing trance. The whole thing was in Sweet Pea's head all the time. How does that make any sense? Did we ever find out if any of the girls was actually killed in the real world? What kind of asylum requires mandatory fake eyelashes?

Snyder's die-hard nerd supporters* claimed that the editing necessary to get the film down to a PG-13 rating from it's original R is why it's a mess. In the interest of being fair and finding answers, I watched the director's cut when it became available. There's a few extra bits and pieces, a fight scene in Tolkein world that's better than most of the ones that got left in but nothing special. The really important extra scene is the one at the end between Babydoll and the High Roller. In interviews, Emily Browning had bemoaned the loss of a scene where Babydoll got to "actually take control of her own sexuality."

It turns out that in the film as planned, after being knocked out Babydoll wakes up to find herself in the High Roller's bedroom. It turns out that the High Roller is Jon Hamm doing his best imitation of a pick-up artist. This sterling fellow disavows any interest in forcing himself on Babydoll, claiming that all he wants is "one honest moment". Won over by his eyelinered charms, she breathlessly gives herself to him willingly, in no way coerced by the fact that this is her only way of escape from the hell brothel. The moment he kisses her is what now corresponds to the icepick. Am I the only one who thinks this actually makes things worse.

In Snyder's world, taking control of your own sexuality for a young woman means selling it. I say Snyder's world advisedly because it was the the director himself who finally explained the film to me.

It’s funny because someone one asked me about why I dressed the girls like that, and I said, “Do you not get the metaphor there? The girls are in a brothel performing for men in the dark. In the fantasy sequences, the men in the dark are us. The men in the dark are basically me; dorky sci-fi kids.”

This quote explained everything that's wrong with the film to me. I know I've already mocked the costumes but a simple image search for cosplay shows that lots of people, of all genders, like imagining themselves as problematically sexualized asskickers in impractical outfits. For the films real problem, let's go back to the first shot of the film, Babydoll sitting in the stage set of her room.

The film's "real world" explicitly isn't the real world. Sucker Punch doesn't take place in Babydoll or Sweet Pea's head. The only head this film takes place inside is Zack Snyder's. There's a fourth level of reality we don't see where Snyder is watching this, watching us watch this, and he's got his hands down his pants. Everything in this film, including the constant threats of rape and shots of crying women, is only in it because Snyder wants to see it and wants us to watch as well. He's got no interest in telling a coherent story, let alone artistic truth. If the bordello can't make up it's mind if it's horrific or sleazily glamorous, that's because Snyder can't either so it switches back and forth.  This is a film about the value of an inner world that refuses to let it's characters have one, they have precisely the same depth as Snyder's collection of real dolls (which I imagine he owns but never cleans).

I think that's why Sucker Punch got so far up my nose. I've always been fascinated by stories where people carry their own universes around with them in their heads that interact with reality in unpredictable ways and, despite how problematic, silly or poorly realized a lot of them are, I still feel that action heroines have an inherent subversive potential. Zack Snyder has taken both these things and metaphorically smeared his swollen, intentionally pus-leaking, scrotal sac over them. I'm not saying that he gets off deliberately infecting himself with rare venereal diseases then passing them to as many unwitting people as possible

Who could believe such a thing of this face?

just that Sucker Punch is the closest filmmaking equivalent.

Anyway, that was ridiculously long but better out than in and now I never have to think about this film ever again.

Not in this film you can't.

*Nerd supporters are the least flattering underwear ever.

Bikini girls without machine guns.

Dead or Alive is a series of video games famed partly for it's intricate fight mechanics but mostly for it's pioneering of what is known in the trade as jiggle physics. Yes, these games are best known for groundbreaking animation of the characters breasts. It follows that the film adaptation of these games will be...

...surprisingly enjoyable.

I was going to describe it as terribly male gaze-y but then I felt I should actually research what that meant so I looked it up. Here's an extract from the wikipedia entry on Laura Mulvey:

The main idea that seems to bring these actions together is that "looking" is generally seen as an active male role while the passive role of being looked at is immediately adopted as a female characteristic. It is under the construction of patriarchy that Mulvey argues that women in film are tied to desire and that female characters hold an "appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact". The female actor is never meant to represent a character that directly effects the outcome of a plot or keep the story line going, but is inserted into the film as a way of supporting the male role and "bearing the burden of sexual objectification" that he cannot.

In the gracefully titled DOA: Dead or Alive the women may be coded for visual and erotic impact but they are not passive, they are the ones who initiate the plots and drive the story onward. If you are interested in possible routes to transcend the dichotomy between being the active subject of a film while still being the passive object of sexualized interest then you are in completely the wrong headspace to enjoy DOA. May I suggest doing a few beers, bong hits or maybe discreetly braining yourself with a rock. I'll wait.

(I will allow that in DOA the men do not share the burden of sexual objectification. Even the guy playing Hayabusa who's terribly cute. I was mildly vexed.)

But not, sadly, at bikini volleyball.

The plot (although why in heaven's name you would care is quite beyond me) is that there's a secret martial arts contest for the greatest fighters in the world. To get there, you have to do something noticeably badass at which point a sharp and pointy invitation will be hurled at you from somewhere

Perhaps email might be safer? Just a thought.

and after that you'll be on a plane somehow to the secret island that for some reason the contest takes place on. Should you lose a fight, you will have to leave except that actually you'll still be hanging around the place days later. Expect your sleep, bathing and friendly games of volleyball to be interrupted by impromptu fighting, not necessarily with the other contestants. The man overseeing the contest is obviously evil. You will be suspicious of him from very early on but he will still manage to surprise you at the end when despite his painfully awkward movements you will still struggle to defeat him.
 

People who are unfamiliar with Hong Kong martial arts films assume that they're all either artistic Crouching Tiger/House of Flying Daggers "historical" epics or Jackie Chan's kung-fu Buster Keaton routines. This is not exactly the case. For a while Hong Kong was one of the most active filmmaking centres in the world and churned out dozens of films on a weekly basis. DOA, although made with Hollywood money and western actors was filmed in (technically just outside) Hong Kong with a Hong Kong crew and director and has the traditional shamelessness of the martial arts potboiler.

You might wonder how the invitations are sent out, why ninja princesses aren't allowed to go on holiday, how it is possible to sleep and shower without ruining your makeup

All assassins are trained never to smudge their eyeshadow.

or even why everyone is chummily bonding over volleyball and acupuncture when they're expecting to fight each other in no-holds barred death matches. DOA hears your concerns, looks you dead in the eye and asks "Do you really give a shit?" and it turns out you don't. DOA knows what you want: some niftily choreographed fight scenes, some cheesy humour and some pretty people (let me restate, this film could have done with more objectified men) playing tissue thin but likeable characters. All this is served up with no care for the laws of physics or continuity, and dispatched in less than an hour and half so it doesn't outstay it's welcome and you can get on with what you were doing (probably losing consciousness).

Before the MMA brought in weight classes, this sort of thing used to happen all the time

As to the pretty people, Holly Valance is surprisingly likeable, Jaime Pressly is surprisingly good at fight scenes and Sarah Carter and Natassia Malthe made almost no impression at all I'm afraid. My favourite, though, was Devon Aoki as Kasumi. The closest the film gets to subtle humour is making her character a escapee from an old ninja movie. She's even got the facial expressions down.

The key is to edge as close to looking constipated as possible without ever quite crossing the line.

I guess some people might find her a little wooden but the hilarious deadpan she brought to D.E.B.S is equally hilarious here. When the dialogue is like this...

Ayane: Before I take your life, will you repent for leaving the clan.
Kasumi: My only goal is to find out what happened to my brother.

...it's a genuine surprise to see their lip movements matching the sound perfectly.

I did note that the film contains one of those scenes where a pretty white woman has to fight a muscular black man who is depicted as an icon of repellent masculinity. Also Westerby, who's supposed to be an appealing nerdy sort of character and an audience identification point, actually comes across as a creepy stalker. Also, never cast Eric Roberts as a martial artist again.

But I hear the final concern that DOA does not answer. Does this film, in which conventionally attractive young women wearing skimpy bikinis fight in a drenching rainstorm, contain an empowering feminist message?

No, of course not. Don't be silly.

It's the only question worth asking really.

Having been given an early release from my vows I was thinking of quitting for good but then I pondered.

It's taken a very long time to clean up the popcorn.

Random pop-culture musing 3

When I saw the trailer for Colombiana, my first thought was "Finally someone realizes the danger amnesia poses to high-level assassins."

My second thought is that I've started going to films tactically. It looks godawful but it's the first major action film headlined by a woman of colour since Catwoman so I feel like I should go and see it.

Cleavage alone is quite capable of every wickedness.

I may have to amend that to swearing to write something every day I'm actually awake. I'd forgotten how long this takes. With apologies to those concerned.

I'm used to bad films. I've most of the best known examples (Manos The Hands of Fate, Showgirls, Birdemic, The Room, Catwoman, etc) and gained the usual slightly masochistic pleasure from them. I'm also used to being offended by films, to the point where it sometimes barely registers. Earlier this year however, I saw a film so bad, so infuriating, so offensive on almost every possible level that I can't even review it yet. I'm going to have to review another couple of quite terrible movies first just to warm up.

There are ways of proofing your film against bad reviews. One is to make a film of clear outstanding excellence but this is very difficult and not always successful in the short term. Lots of films now considered classics were initially slated by the critics (what does that even mean, they were metaphorically covered in roofing tiles?). A much simpler approach is to call your film something like Bitch Slap. Really anyone who watches it clearly deserves what they get. Like me.

So why was I watching it? The first on-screen reunion of Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor since Xena went off the air plus Zoë Bell cameoing and choreographing the fights. As the main characters were introduced cleavage first I got an inkling that I'd made the wrong decision.

Bitch Slap bills itself as smut for the Thinking Man. Pleased with yourself aren't you Thinking Man? Too good to jerk off to porn like everybody else aren't you Thinking Man? Need a bunch of quotes from Joseph Conrad, Cosimo de Medici and Sun Tzu's Art of War to help you get off, don't you? You make me sick. Also you need some intelligently non-pc comedy. Mustn't forget that.

This is about as intelligent as it gets. In fairness, this was one of precisely two laughs I got out the film. I'm pretty cheap really.

As a sidenote I'm sort of tired of everyone acting like being non-pc is in some way a courageous stand, as if angry lesbian vegans of colour might descend upon them like ravening maenads (actually that might make a pretty decent exploitation flick, if you want me to write one send me a few grand and I'll have it done by Tuesday). It was brave when Bill Hicks did it, you are risking nothing with your tired little provocations. The worst of which is probably the sadistic Asian schoolgirl Kinki who talks in broken English. Bitch Slap, you're racism is so ironic. A lot of the dialogue is supposed to be daringly offensive but come across as kind of baffling. One characters exits the film with "The woman's movement will hoist my skirt for all eternity!" What is that supposed to mean?

I'm not even angry, but I'm weary, oh so very weary. I spent most of the film feeling like a primary school teacher (elementary my dear Americans) confronted with a precocious 7 year old trying to get them to spell ICUP.

The film has a plot which isn't precisely good, but it is surprisingly complicated. Hel, played by Erin Cummings, is a glamorous conwoman and sex-toy tycoon (or is she?).  Trixie, played by Julia Voth, is an innocently naive stripper (or is she?). Camero, played by America Olivio, is a sadistically violent pill-popper and borderline psychotic (or is... actually she's pretty straightforward). They're in a remote desert location looking for a fortune in diamonds (or are they?). Nothing will stop them, although they'll maybe have a sexy waterfight (or will they?).

Of course they will. All hardened criminals love sexy waterfights.

It's got violence (and cleavage), betrayal (and cleavage), non-linear storytelling (and cleavage), ridiculously purple dialogue (and cleavage), green screen (and cleavage), soft-core lesbian fondling (look you see where I'm going here OK). It doesn't have attractive male characters or in fact any nudity but if you like cleavage, this is the film for you. Being pretty uninterested in cleavage I'm clearly not the ideal audience.

I do like violence and Zoë Bell and the cast have done their best but when you've only got a weekend to train, it's best not to plan a 14 minute fight scenes. I actually fast-forwarded past most of it. Also she doesn't get any lines and her cameo amounts to less than 20 seconds. Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor do have a pretty funny cameo as nuns in the convent where Camero is hiding out under the moniker of Sister Prudence Bangtail, leading to the second laugh I got out this film.

Nunsploitation is a beautiful word. The films are mostly shit but it's a great word.

Unfortunately it does draw attention to the difference between a performance that is comically broad and exaggerated and one that is merely terrible. I feel pretty bad saying this as when I was writing this I found an interview with America Olivio and she comes across as funny and likeable. Her story of being cast for the film is funnier than anything she says in it, although I doubt Judi Dench could give a line like "You ruined my boobs skank twat!" a convincing reading.

I just mentally recast this with Judi Dench as Camero, Vanessa Redgrave as Hel and Helen Mirren as Trixie and Bitch Slap suddenly got a lot more entertaining.

I know what boys like. Patrician British actresses with long distinguished careers, am I right?

In fairness the woman may be ludicrous fantasy figures but they do drive the film, have agency and have sex with each other for fun and not attention. The Bechdel Test is easily passed and the crowd at AfterEllen seemed to like it, heaven knows why.

Depicted: Why.

Interestingly for this review I got the unrated version and the only difference I noticed is an innocuous short scene where you see that Trixie has a daughter. Lesbian strippers are OK but lesbian strippers who are single mothers clearly need to be censored.

To conclude, I never expected to type the word cleavage into my computer so many times in quick succession. I am tired now.

Sometimes a cigar is just a carcinogenic fun tube.

For reasons that are too complicated to go into right now, I'm suddenly honour bound to write something daily. Fortunately, I'm not bound to write something long, complicated or even halfway-readable thus my goal remains within the realm of the possible.

So I was writing a review of when I got distracted by the memory of something I read about a completely different film, Kick-Ass. The films most notorious element was Hit-Girl, an 11 year old who says cunt a lot and has been trained as a brutally violent "superhero" by her father. The reviewer complained about how sexualized the character was, noting that at one point she even wears a "fetishistic schoolgirl uniform".

I'm not going to bother reviewing Kick-Ass myself, a film that I didn't like very much and that clearly thought it was so cool. But one thing I wouldn't accuse it of was overly sexualizing Hit-Girl, when she does disguise herself as a schoolgirl the only layer to the costume is that it's supposed to point out the difference between the child she's assumed to be and the killer she actually is, a symptom of the film never getting round to deciding if a child whose been conditioned to viciously murder people without remorse is tragic or fabulously awesome. It never felt like moral ambiguity, more sloppy storytelling but it's not, you know, a sex thing.

This is a long preamble to my main point which is that adult (or at least late teenage) woman dressed as schoolgirls have become such an ubiquitous fetish, a fetish so mainstream it barely counts as a fetish, that people have forgotten that schoolgirls also dress as schoolgirls because they actually are schoolgirls. Suddenly depicting schoolgirls is automatically sexual. Also that swearing a lot and killing people is automatically sexy. That seems somehow indicative of our cultures fucked up attitudes but maybe it's just that I'm trying to cut down on caffeine and everything feels very far away.

PS: As creepy as I find parents who put their kids in child beauty pageants, I find parents who arm their children and get them to kill people a lot creepier. This may also explain why these characters are almost always girls, if they were boys they might remind people too much of real child soldiers used by drug cartels, the Khmer Rouge, various other genocidal groups, etc. That would definitely push the story towards tragic.

PPS: Yes I know that they sometimes use girls as soldiers too.

It's a riot sheer criminality.

So the riots. You may have noticed something about them in the news. Or if you live in the right area, by which I mean the wrong area, you may have noticed people rioting. "But why did this happen" is the call from people who apparently aren't that perceptive or skilled with grammar. Although to be honest that's a needlessly archaic rule, I mean everyone starts sentences with "but" these days and how did we get onto this? I'm supposed to be delivering trenchant political analysis.

The obvious answer is that smashing shit up is fun. David Cameron and Boris Johnson should certainly be able to remember that from their Bullingdon Club days, although unlike the rioters they left large checks behind to cover the damages (it's perhaps unworthy of me to speculate if this was how they approached dating). Even little Nicky Clegg (or Cleggums as I plan to refer to him for no particular reason) has apparently spent some time arson about (that doesn't seem to scan that well, it's supposed to sound like arsing and therefore be funny although it's actually quite a weak pun, sorry I brought it up, should I change it, too late anyway).

Look, it's been a while since I've written anything.

Let's imagine for a , that you're one of the rioters. I want you to imagine a boredom, almost since birth. Not your regular Sunday afternoon boredom, the corrosive bone-deep tedium that comes from not being part of the world. Not really. Boredom is perhaps the wrong term, like referring to crushing depression as feeling a bit sad.

Think of it as a continuous low-grade sensory deprivation like a thick blanket of pointless. You're maybe not very politically minded but you see that there are two kinds of people. People who have meaningful lives, filled with attainment and purpose, who matter. Then there's you, your family, and pretty much everyone you know.

No future for you.

Of course if you happen to be from an ethnic minority that won't sharpen your sense of resentment at all. There's no racism anymore it's just that immigration is an enormous problem and clearly multiculturalism has failed. The Daily Mail says so. What do you mean that black teenagers are 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched, don't start playing the race card.

Recently though, the future you don't have has been looking bleaker than ever. Class warfare is a term that isn't used much anymore but the demonisation of claimants of all kinds and the incoming regulations that will make the task of scraping your frugal income out of the government an ever more lengthy humiliation for even less.

"But" you are thinking dear reader, still not caring unduly about sentence fragments, "some of those rioters were totally middle class, students and people with jobs and careers". True enough but these were specific examples ie not the majority of rioters. We'll come back to them later. Try to stay in character.

Did you even know about Mark Duggan's murder (writing from a veiwpoint dear reader, writing from a viewpoint)? Was it a sharp reminder that you can be killed without anyone caring, the way they would if you were a real person. Did you even see the initial protest where it all kicked off? Does it matter? Let's skip to the action.

The city has been where you lived but it's never been yours. Tonight that changes. You're wearing your ritual uniform of hood and mask and you run with the sound of breaking glass in your ears and the stink of burning cars in your nostrils. They've lit the sky.

The breath rasps in your throat but you feel superhuman, you've stepped into how the world is supposed to be and anything is possible. Nothing you've experienced, sexdrugsrockandroll, all the little petty distractions from how fucking tedious your life really is has ever matched up to this.

You round a corner and see a double-decker bus, a black skeleton wrapped in fire. Smoke and flame billowing up to heaven. The headlights are still on. It's the funniest, the most beautiful thing you've ever seen.

A text, a mob, an instinct(?) leads you to a street of shops. Other hooded and masked figures are smashing in the windows. You love them instantly. A love tinged with fear because anything is possible. Except stopping.

But don't worry about that now. If this is the haves vs the have-nots then shopowners are inevitably the haves. Look at all the stuff they've got. The reason some trainers, some clothes, some hi-def plasma TV's are better than others isn't that they're all that great. It's that the people who buy them know you have to make do with cheaper ones. Not tonight. See it before you. Reach out. Take. It's all yours.

Cops appear, you're natural enemies. Think of all the times you've been stopped and searched and "sonny"ed (is it only Edinburgh cops that still do this?). Run and circle. Throw whatever you've got to hand. If you're not human to them then they're not human to you, especially now. Riot gear does not encourage empathy. They may be dressed up like sci-fi stormtroopers but they're scared of you now. They can't be everywhere at once. And you are.

Let us leave our hypothetical rioter chucking molotov cocktails at the police and move on to pastures new. It's perhaps clear how the odd middle-class kid may have been swept away by the glamour of the riots (bright lights, big city). And the initial protest may have been where the violence kicked off but attempts to connect that to the protests there have been over the summer is pure spin.

Considering that they've been large groups of angry teenagers and the police use of agent-provocateurs in protest movements is an open secret the student protests have been amazingly peaceful. A few broken windows, a couple of inconvenienced royals and an idiot throwing a fire extinguisher who'd probably have been horrified if he'd actually hit someone. Most of the protesters have been essentially nice middle-class kids who were genuinely startled to be pilloried as a violent mob.

That doesn't mean there might be a connection of a kind. If they're willing to kettle and club and cavalry charge those well meaning kids with their non-violent resistance, if it's made as clear as possible that peaceful  protest won't be tolerated it sends a message of hopelessness all the way down to people too dispirited to ever protest but who might be up for a good night of fire and loot and pillage. It might be worth bearing in mind if they really want to prevent more riots. It might be worth trying to provide a possible future that wasn't even worse than a shitty past.

Random pop-culture musing 2.

If you change "amore" out for LSD, not only does the song still make sense it becomes a great deal more factually accurate.

When you dance down the street with the clouds at your feet, you're on drugs.

Relationship problems.

I have a friend who used to be one of those people who'd get serious about relationships way too quickly. She'd meet a girl and then two weeks later she'd be shopping for engagement rings and asking her to move in. Telling her that she was being too careless with her heart, in love with love and embodying an embarrassing stereotype did nothing to bring her back to earth. Neither did politely trying to change the subject when she was rhapsodising about the maid of the moment's sky blue peepers. Her mind was fixed monomaniacally on someone she barely knew . The only reason she was hanging out with us was that she whose smile made the sun rise and the dew moisten the grass (which was a hyperbole too far in my opinion) was currently off somewhere or other.

Then, inevitably, things would start to go pear-shaped. The current centre of her universe would stop being some mythic embodiment of all goodness and light and start to turning into a real person with real problems. There would be crying phone calls where she'd sob that her girlfriend wasn't coming round when she said she would, that she was screening her calls and even when she was there she wasn't there if we knew what she meant.

The early bonding had been founded on deception, her girlfriend had used the word "campy" to describe the stage presence of Horse McDonald. It turned out her girlfriend had musical tastes she didn't share, sexual kinks she wasn't keen on, a large collection of weaponry and passports she hadn't known about and why wouldn't she say where she kept vanishing off to. Of course it had been obvious to the rest of us for ages that she'd been dating La Zanzara, former Red Brigade terrorist turned international mercenary and assassin.

Again.

I mean fair enough there was the whole "as beautiful as she is deadly" thing going on but it's not even as if she was particularly good at disguises. Wigs and a selection of oversize novelty sunglasses, that's about it. After the third or fourth time it was hard to be sympathetic, "You want to be fooled" we'd say to her as she came round for the first time in weeks with her eyes red and swollen with tears and the CS gas La Zanzara had let off in her apartment as part of another daring escape from Interpol and intimacy.

Anyway, eventually she outgrew the whole thing and now has a nice girlfriend and some dogs that aren't perfectly housebroken.

My New Years resolution is to either write more regularly or give it up for good. I'm not sure which.