Month: November 2023

RIP Verona

This is kind of sad news. I have not been a regular filmgoer since the stroke happened and have only seen the inside of a cinema a handful of times since then (with The Babadook in 2014 being the last actual new release I’ve seen on the big screen; everything else has been home viewing)… but back in the days when I was, the Verona was a reasonably regular haunt of mine (I remember seeing Hugo Weaving in the queue there once), it always had interesting stuff on. Even if I haven’t been there for about 15 years, I shall miss it.

On the other hand, though:

When the Verona closes in February, the chain plans to simultaneously reopen a venue that Hoyts operated as Cinema Paris until just before the pandemic at the Entertainment Quarter.
“We’ve been asked by our customers for many years ‘can we please have a Palace cinema in Sydney with ample parking?’,” Zeccola said. “We were looking for exactly that when we remembered there’d been a four-screen cinema at the Entertainment Quarter that had fallen into disuse.”
Palace plans to rent that cinema, spend $500,000 to move in and refresh the amenities then reopen it as Palace Moore Park.

Glad to know that Cinema Paris is going to be a thing, cos I also saw a bunch of interesting stuff there too way back when (if I remember correctly, that was where I saw Bringing Out the Dead and I was the only person in the cinema). The only thing I have against this plan is that, well, it’s not the most accessible cinema in town, is it? Even back in the days when that wasn’t a concern for me, it still took more effort to get to than most cinemas, cos it was some way off a main road; fine if you’re going by car, but going by public transport involved a fair bit of walking from Anzac Parade. I mean, the Verona did too but it never felt like it somehow cos you were still on a major road… Entertainment Quarter, frankly, always took more effort, and evidently still will. But I’m happy to know it’s still going to be around.

Bye, Heinz

Turns out the old cunt only seemed immortal after all; death took his sweet time but he got there at last.

I’m sure there’s many things that can be said for and against him, but I did recently discover this in his Wiki entry, and it just hit me as, you know, one of the most revolting pieces of foreign policy I’ve ever read about so I wanted to highlight it:

In 1973, Kissinger did not feel that pressing the Soviet Union concerning the plight of Jews being persecuted there was in the interest of U.S. foreign policy. In conversation with Nixon shortly after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir on March 1, 1973, Kissinger stated, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy, and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Kissinger, lest we forget, was a refugee from Nazi Germany, who you might recall put Jews into gas chambers. Apparently he didn’t care too much if Brezhnev tried to do the same. Maybe it would’ve been a humanitarian concern. Maybe it wouldn’t. Either way, it looks like Kissinger would’ve had no undue issues with the Holocaust being carried out again, this time upon Russian Jews… and I know there’s apparently always been some tension or something between German Jews and Russian Jews, but Kissinger’s words above are a complete ghoul’s statement. As I may have said before, I dislike celebrating people’s deaths, but damned if I’m mourning his. Whatever actual positive things he may have done while he was in this world (cos I presume there were some things), it’s not poorer for him having left it.

Bitchin’

Have The Prodigy changed the lyrics to their most controversial song?

Twenty-six years on from its original release, The Prodigy appear to have changed the polarising lyrics to one of their biggest songs, Smack My Bitch Up.
The track, featured on the British electronic group’s breakthrough album The Fat Of The Land, was released in 1997 and immediately provoked backlash for its title and central hook, which were interpreted as glorifying violence against women.
In 2010, the track was voted by the UK public as the most controversial song of all time in a poll conducted by the Performing Right Society (PRS).
However, The Prodigy are currently on tour through the UK and Europe and have omitted the problematic lyrics during recent performances.
Performing at London’s Alexandra Palace over two nights (on Friday 24 and Saturday 25 November), fan-shoot footage shows vocalist Maxim – who’s taken on full frontman duties following the death of Keith Flint – omitting the titular lyric and instead repeating the line “Change my pitch up”.

Actually he says “switch up, change my pitch up”, but that’s not the point. Are you trying to tell me The Prodigy have potentially had second thoughts about a song they put out 26 years ago? Maybe Maxim’s not comfortable with the lyric any more? Maybe they’ve grown and even matured? Honestly, it’s political correctness gone mad, I tell you. Next thing you’ll be wondering why Robert Smith has regrets about “Killing an Arab”… And I’ve still never been able to found out if there was ever a backlash over the Ultramagnetic MCs track that they sampled the lyric from in the first place…

Nevertheless, they persisted

This turned up in FB memories:

And I remembered it being celebrated at the time as possibly the greatest band break-up of all time, particularly thanks to the kicker at the end. But I knew nothing about the band, never knew anything at the time or now—indeed I’d kind of forgotten the incident until I got this marvellous reminder—so I decided to do a bit of research, see if they’d amounted to anything after that… lo and behold, not only are they still thriving, they never actually broke up in the first place and the drummer’s not dead after all:

The other Sunday I posted on Witchrot’s Facebook page that the band was taking a break. Two people I cared about stabbed me a trillion times in the heart with betrayal and that resentment scars like hell fire. It obviously left me feeling wretched. I always hate it when bands stop dead without any updates and I felt, well, might as well let the people know.
After writing, I asked Simon, our drummer who quit a couple weeks prior (due to the fact that he has become increasingly busy drumming for Crazy Bones, Gloin, and Brenda), if that was a good idea. He said ‘Yeah, but say I died, no one will give a shit’…… Clearly they did.
I am floored by the fact that this post received so much attention, considering we had only around 300 likes on Facebook when I wrote it. The amount of positive feedback people expressed, with regards to my situation along with the praise for our music, was touching to say the least. I thought maybe a couple people in Europe might care or ‘like’ the post but instead it reached nearly every news source on the planet……..Fuckin eh.

Fucking phenomenal. Looks like the guitarist cheating on the bassist was the best career move he could’ve made for them.

RIP Geordie

What damned awful news this is. I was stunned when I read about it this afternoon. I’m guessing this means the end of the band, too, cos without his particular guitar grunt it’d never sound the same again. Currently playing Hosannas from the Basements of Hell, which is my favourite by Killing Joke, and features Jaz Coleman at his crankiest. The total experience of it all blows me away indeed.

Doctor Who and the Disability Discourse

I know all the meltdowns on social media were about the trans character and actress on the new Doctor Who, but what about the disabled one? Cos Shirley Anne Bingham is evidently cis and played by a cis actress, Ruth Madeley, but still, casting a disabled person as a disabled character is as “woke” DEI representation as a trans one, right? Someone’s got to be aggravated by that, surely? Twitter did not disappoint:

Cue a bunch of people advising his majesty that some people in wheelchairs are actually capable of doing that, including me:

Which was a slightly… aggressive response, perhaps, and it drew a response from someone that went “Ew no, I don’t want people like this in my community” which I’m still not sure if that was aimed at me or him, though I suspect it was the latter, i.e. she was more appalled at this clown potentially becoming part of the disabled community than at the clown wishing disability upon him. Anyway, I stand by it, and as you may see I’ve had an awful lot of likes on my tweet, more than I can ever remember having (except maybe for one I made after 2013 when I congratulated News Corp for winning that year’s federal election).

As for Garbageman, he’s since deleted his account. Which means that, however inadvertently, I took part in one of those Twitter activities I’ve always abhorred, i.e. I participated in a pile-on that drove someone off the platform. Somehow I feel less bad about this than I suspect I should, I’m actually kind of OK with this. Oh well.

Anyway, our next subject is still there; after asking a similar question the mobility of Shirley Anne’s legs, someone whose posts are private replied and then he said:

Because—as he actually said to someone else who called him out on this shit—a fully disabled actress would be “more representation” as if representation were something you can actually quantify and measure. Just how disabled is “fully”? Would you settle for the character and/or actress being paraplegic? Quadraplegic? Dead? Cos you don’t get any more disabled than not being alive at all. You tell me. I mean, Ruth Madeley needs those wheels to get her around, but she’s not completely paralysed. Not only does she have spina bifida, she has the fucking nerve to only be disabled to a degree that these goombas find insufficient. I mean, FUCKING LOOK AT THIS:

Being disabled and flexible enough to do that? Political correctness gone mad, obviously. What a cow.

And he called me a “mozza” when I called him out. What was that even supposed to mean? Did he compare me to Morrissey? Good grief. I haven’t been this insulted in a LONG time. He is, of course, whining about being called “ableist” and such things… honestly, just accept the fuck-up and that some people know more than you about some things. It’s OK to learn.

The funny thing is, I never even noticed what Ruth Madeley’s legs were doing in the first place. It was these dickheads going off about it that drew my attention to it, and got a bunch of people snapping back at them. All I know is that, if the day comes when I have to rely on a chair to get around, I want it to be packing heat like Shirley’s…

“The Star Beast”

Goddamnit, this having to wait a whole week for the next episode is going to be more irritating than usual, isn’t it?

This grifting cunt has never seen the show, has he? I mean, apart from it not being Korean enough, it’s been “woke” ever since the show decided evil was bad and something the characters should fight against. “Dislike for the unlike” has somehow never been such a pertinent line from the show…

Wokeness gone mad, I tell you. Anyway, the reaction I’ve otherwise seen on the socials before watching the episode has been 1) generally hugely positive and 2) specifically that the anti-woke mob were going to hate it. I completely understand both those points now that I’ve seen it. It really does feel like a throwback to oughts Who, which I suppose is understandable given the people involved, although the story actually goes back even further; it’s essentially adapted from a 1980 Doctor Who Weekly comic strip (THAT’s how old it is!), which was actually kind of “woke” itself in that Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons gave the Doctor a black companion in the strip, long before Martha Jones was a thing in the series… though the show one-ups that by making Rose (not Billie Piper’s Rose) both mixed-race and trans.

This, of course, was the thing that was really going to make the anti-woke mob mald: having a trans performer play a trans character who’s actually presented positively and indeed helps save the day at the end, and yeah, Oli and his ilk do indeed seem to be losing their shit over it, which I’m fine with… I mean, the show handles the issue with, frankly, minimal grace and subtlety and it’s a bit cack-handed when it comes to things like the pronouns scene. It doesn’t always help itself in that respect… on the other hand, giving the disabled UNIT character a weaponised wheelchair? Not bad, Russ, not bad… awfully interesting twist after the discourse about able-bodied Davros from last week, too.

Murray Gold’s music was, well, music by Murray Gold. Still not really a fan.

On the whole, solid comeback for Tennant and Tate, who I always thought were an intriguing duo. Imperfect but one of the better new series episodes. I look forward to seeing how this develops in the next two specials…

The Colour of the Daleks, again

On Bluesky at least, the reception to the colourised Daleks serial has been thoroughly mixed, and… yeah, so’s my reaction now that I’ve actually watched it. OK, let’s get into it… So, the colour itself is not too bad. It didn’t seem quite as extra in video form as the colour stills from a few days ago did. It does have that sort of “1960s” visual character I spoke of earlier, so it definitely has more of an early 60s B-movie feel (further enhanced by the editing). It doesn’t cope very well with dark scenes like when our heroes find the room in the Dalek city with the Geiger counter, but on the whole it’s fairly impressive. I particularly liked the luridness of the petrified forest.

And yet the overal visual feel is still a bit… off somehow? I don’t know how to explain it. Cos we have to remember, all of William Hartnell’s episodes were shot using 405-line video cameras—which were obviously kind of low-res enough as they were, rather less than what we now call “standard” definition (525-line NTSC or 625-line PAL, depending on where in the world you are)—but all the extant episodes only survive as film telerecordings, mostly 16mm, and quite a lot seem to be suppressed-field recordings which means the film only has about half the visual information of the original picture. When you have to blow that up to 1080p… well, I’ve been impressed by the blu-ray upscales of the original series so far, but even so (and there were artifacts of the suppressed-field prints I noticed this time that never struck me before too). It doesn’t quite look like film or video somehow. Maybe it was just the *cough* dubiously obtained copy of the program I had? I don’t know.

Still—like I said, the colour work is generally impressive. How it’s cut and how it sounds, on the other hand…

So, as we were told, the story was cut to 75 minutes, compared to the 171 minutes the original serial (including opening and closing titles of each episode). That’s… a lot to lose. It’s not exactly a massacre on the order of Stroheim’s Greed, but an awful lot of material has been ditched to slim it down. And it means the pacing of the thing is, frankly, kind of indecent; it moves at a clip that feels alien to the original series. It gave me the sense, indeed, that not only had the video been cut, it’d been sped up slightly as well. Which I don’t think it was, but it felt like that somehow. The editing is mostly fine, technically, some of it’s actually quite clever, it’s just… I missed the magnodon. I missed the food machine. And I don’t know that the “flashbacks” worked either (though I did like the new Dalek POV inserts).

But the editing is nowhere near as egregious as the sound. The program wrong-footed me immediately with Mark Ayres’ reprocessing of the opening theme WHICH DIDN’T NEED THOSE EXTRA NOISES MARK IT WAS FINE AS IT WAS… ahem… to say nothing of his actual music, some of which is admittedly effective but a lot is… not. It’s ill-fitting and it never sounds like it fits the visuals, in that it’s obviously been produced six decades after the program was made and it doesn’t sound like the rest of the program. The new Dalek lines are the same, not just because they’re obviously Nick Briggs at work but they don’t sound like the originals did. And I know that it’s a minor thing, really, but cleaning up and correcting one of Hartnell’s more infamous Billy fluffs? Oooh. THAT made me weirdly angry for some reason. Not thrilled by Murray Gold’s closing music, but then I never was particularly thrilled by Murray Gold…

So, a thoroughly mixed bag, an experiment that only partly worked, and one that I suspect actually probably worked well enough for what I’m sure was the target audience, i.e. fans of the revived series who haven’t seen anything of the original and who the BBC thought they might be able to draw in by… well, kind of misrepresenting it. The really important thing now is that I’ve also *cough* dubiously obtained the actual new episode, “The Star Beast”, and the prospect of that is currently drawing me more than colour Daleks. I’ll be back with thoughts on that later…

Important images 14

As we reach installment number 14 of this series, you may be excited to know thata I have only …*checks*… approximately 98% remaining of my image stockpile left to go. The end is in sight! By which I obviously mean the end of civilisation, not this series…

Nudity? I suppose the fumetto cover qualifies and the Jane Seymour picture comes weirdly close. Mind you, the Christian book cover is more disturbing in its way…

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