Diary of an up and coming sociopath

I know I’ve still got other stuff to write about (mainly for my own benefit. I don’t want to forget what I’ve done, after all) but since I got back from this earlier tonight and going to be before 3am on a weekend is far too much like admitting defeat, I’m going to do this now.

So, as promised, some thoughts: 

Pinewood is very easy to get to. Way more so than Teddington, which only appears once a month for a short period of time and can only be reached by the pure of heart. Pinewood even has a fucking CAR PARK. It’s great.

The big Bond stage looks very imposing and stuff, and has a giant 007 on the side in case you missed it. Though, if you believe Cappsy (and it’s my opinion that we can) none of the next Bond film is actually going to be shot there anyway.

Retakes blow. As Nikki pointed out, there’s nothing more horrible than noticing an actor fluff their lines without realising or a boom mic fall into shot because as soon as it happens, you know you’ll be seeing all of this again. We saw almost every scene filmed a total of 3 times pluss additional coverage. It was bordering on torture at points. Thankfully, of the 2 episodes roughly two thirds were VT, so it could’ve been so much worse. They overran by half an hour as it was.

Noel Fielding is one scene-stealing motherfucker. In his first appearance, he repeatedly fucked up by missing his cue to enter the set, leading to them cutting that part out altogether and simply standing him in the doorway. His presence reminds me of Ali G on the 11 O’Clock show - virtually a level beyond everything around him. Of course, his screw ups meant re-watching bits we’d alreadt sceen acted out being done again. Bloopers are much funnier when you remove the context of having to actually watch them get filmed…

We saw two episodes, eventually. One involved a trip to the theatre, and was the funnier of the two, and the second involved a dinner party. Both were excellent, though, and certainly a notch up from Series 1 which was enjoyable, but not side-splitting or anything.

 All in all, not a horrible way to spend an evening, but remarkably draining. I’m not sure I’d want to do it again soon. Cappsy had been to the previous filming which lasted just as long but had onyl one episode filmed. I don’t even want to consider the levels of tedium that would involve…

I’ve done a whole bunch of cool stuff I should write about over the last couple of days and yet all I can think about is how excellent the latest Genshiken was. Better than a thousand Buffy or Galactica episodes. I just finished reading it for the second time today. Sweet fucking jesus, Oguie went from being a mildly irritating new addition to quite probably the best character in the entire series.

I don’t know what’s worse - that volume 9’s not out until NOVEMBER or that it’s the last one. At least it ended before it got a chance to turn shit, I suppose, but god damn, I can’t imagine how it can come to a satisfying resolution in only one more volume. Especially now when everything’s just hitting it’s stride so utterly fucking brilliantly. Art and writing, all of it the best it’s ever been. WHY? WHY WOULD THEY DO THIS TO ME?

If you’re not reading Genshiken, and let’s face it, that’s all of you, I want to know - why do you punish yourselves like this? WHY DO YOU HATE YOURSELVES?

Some time soon, when the fanboyishness has worn off, I will spend some time going over the far more important events of the last couple of days. Don’t stray too far if you like Kevin Smith.

Yesterday, Josh, Sam, Ian and I went to see 300. At the IMAX. We had to go to the cinema in central London because Sam was meeting Lorna later that night, and it seemed like if we were going to pay £12 to buy cinema tickets, we might as well do it in such a way that gets us superior sound quality and sharper images on the country’s biggest cinema screen. Did I mentioned they play you an IMAX infomercial before letting you see the film? Is it that obvious?

It’s a difficult year for films. Hot Fuzz, while good, proved a little disappointing with its lack of world-ending and complete absence of Zombies. Ghost Rider was mediocre, if a little better than expected. Fantastic Four 2, Transformers and The Simpsons are all intensely worrying prospects because they’re all very, very unlikely to meet whatever expectations might be built up, and Spider-Man 3 simply threatens to crush everything else underfoot.

But then, 300. Much like Sin City before it, it’s turned out to be complete fucking genius. It’s not a particularly deep film, but it’s dripping with style the likes of which you don’t often see. I utterly loathe historical epics - Troy, Gladiator, Braveheart, all that kind of thing - but in any year without Spider-Man 3 in it, 300 would undoubtedly emerge as my favourite. It’s a complete pornography of violence, the battle starts about 15 minutes in and more or less continues unabated, and it’s so well-directed that it doesn’t even feel as though that’s the case. I usually hate that kind of film, but it’s utterly gripping throughout. When it ended, I wished it had been longer, and I usually can’t stand long films. Even towards the end of Casino Royale I was starting to lose focus. 

There were some really odd stylistic choices which later make a bit more sense (the battle is depicted as narrated by one of the Spartans, and makes it pretty clear that there’s a bias on the Spartan side which would be worth pointing out to people criticising the film’s politics, and explains why the battle gets increasinly ridiculous until at one point in it, there’s a guy in the Persian army who has swords for arms.) Lack of Spartan armour aside, an extended bout of wiki-ing this morning reveals it to be surprisingly historically accurate, at least event-wise. It seems that their version of Spartan society is a bit more weighted towards the idea of democracy than it should be, but then, they were still shown as reasonably cruel, smacking around children, murdering babies and literally killing the messengers, so it’s not like they sugar-coated things too much. To be honest, the most surprising thing I learnt this morning was that Paolo from Lost was the guy who played Xerxes. You wouldn’t have seen it even if you’d known beforehand.

Anyway, for the next few days I’m going to be interested in learning about Ancient Greece and Wikipedia only gets you so far, so I’m going to go buy a proper book on it next week before my interest fades and I’m back to not caring.