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23 November 2003
[film] Love Actually — amusing review of Richard Curtis’ new film … ‘Does Mr Curtis have special screenwriting software to produce this sort of thing? Using a Q-tip and bodily fluid, he must have impregnated a disk of the Final Draft programme with his DNA, so that all he has to do is type, say, control-shift-NUPTIALS, to get a complete quirky-yet-touching wedding scene. Or maybe control-shift-PRESSCONF, and we get one of his press conferences with a coded public declaration of love. Perhaps apple-control-SIBLING generates a scene with a trademark disabled sibling or loved one, or maybe he just types alt-ROMCOM and the entire movie comes chuntering out of the printer…’
1 November 2003
[fim] Alien: the Director’s Cut — a review of the re-released sci-fi horror film … ‘It is a genuinely frightening movie which makes splatterfests like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre look juvenile. With style and intelligence, Scott absorbs the influences of Kubrick and Spielberg, together with movies like Westworld and The Stepford Wives, but makes a movie quite distinct from any of these. He puts together a white-knuckle intergalactic ride of tension and fear, which is also an essay on the hell of other people, the vulnerability of our bodies, and the idea of space as a limitless new extension of human paranoia. Alien also functions as a nightmare-parody of the Apollo 11 moon-landing, which had happened just 10 years previously, with all its earnest optimism about human endeavour. And perhaps most stunningly of all, this new version of the movie reveals how it works as a conspiracy satire about state-corporate complicity in manufacturing biological weapons of mass destruction.’
31 October 2003
[redrum] 100 Greatest Scary Moments — Channel 4 were wrong. This is the greatest Scary Moment… 
Come and play with us, Danny …for ever, and ever, and ever.Shining Script: ‘On another of his exploratory bike rides as he comes around a corner in his inexorable progression, Danny is petrified when he confronts the two undead girls at the end of a hallway blocking his way. In unison, they beckon to him in metallic, other-worldly voices with an invitation: “Hello Danny, Come and play with us. Come and play with us, Danny.” For an instant, Danny is horrified to “see” another slide-show flash with horrific images of the carnage of past murders – the two mutilated girls lie in large pools of blood in a blood-splattered hallway, with an oversized axe lying on the floor in front of them. And then they add as they appear to get closer: “…for ever, and ever, and ever.” He covers his eyes to shut out the deathly apparitions. As he slowly uncovers his eyes, it appears that they have vanished.’
28 October 2003
[movies] Scarface Soundboard … ‘You Wanna Fuck With Me? Okay. You Wanna Play Rough? Okay. Say Hello to my Little Friend!’
25 October 2003
[film] You Do Have To Be Mad To Work Here — review of Mike Judge’s film comedy Office Space … ‘Everyone who’s ever worked for a corporation will feel the chill of recognition: “Hawaiian Shirt Fridays”, miserable gatherings where the whole office mournfully sings Happy Birthday to a boss they despise, parking space wars, vanity license plates, traffic snarls, ID cards, swipe-cards, moronic corporate pep-rallies, performance evaluations, receptionists who bleat the same company phone-greeting hundreds of times a day, temp wage-slavery, credit-theft, blame-delegation, and the upwards redistribution of all initiative and decision-making power.’ [Related: Office Space Soundboard]
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8 October 2003
[film] Tarantino on Comic Fans … ‘The reason I’ll never do a comic-book movie with, like, The Flash or something like that is fuck those comic-book geeks, man. You can’t please them. I might do a comic-book movie, but I’d come up with my own characters where I’m God and I’m the expert and not you guys’ [via Neilalien]
28 September 2003
[comics] Studio sued over superhero movie — 20th Century Fox sued for stealing the idea for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from two Hollywood insiders. ‘…the lawsuit alleges that Mr Cohen and Mr Poll pitched the idea to Fox several times between 1993 and 1996, under the name the Cast of Characters. It goes on to allege that Fox commissioned Mr Moore to create the comic book as “smokescreen” for poaching the idea, and cutting the pair out of the production.’
23 September 2003
[film] So Has Quentin Just Shot Himself In The Foot? — another Tarantino Updater from the Observer … On Kill Bill: ‘It means samurai warriors who can balance on the blade of a sword despite the distraction of a thunderously intrusive soundtrack. It means a thin plot line that follows faithfully the honour-through-revenge motif central to the martial arts genre, and features Uma Thurman as an unlikely ninja, who awakens from a four-year coma, dons a nifty brown and yellow tracksuit, borrows a samurai sword, and sets out to dispatch the former friends who betrayed her. Imagine Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon made by Scorsese during his cocaine phase, and you’re halfway there.’ [Related: Kill Bill Website | via I Love Everything]
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19 September 2003
[film] Tarantino Assessement — update on Quentin Tarantino … ‘It’s that kind of careful attention to the quotidian and the banal that led critic Ron Rosenbaum, in a 1997 Esquire article, to herald Tarantino as a 1990s F. Scott Fitzgerald. “His tough-guy act, his tough-guy actors, and his blam-blam moments may disguise it, but Tarantino is an aesthete, a Fitzgeraldian observer of the delicate dance of social interaction,” Rosenbaum wrote. “Because, at his best, in the interludes between the blam-blam, he’s a genuinely curious philosophic investigator of manners and morals, more akin to a novelist of manners such as Jane Austen, say, than even to Fitzgerald.” But Jane Austen never made a kung fu movie.’ [Related: Kill Bill Trailer]
5 September 2003
[film] Joey Pants.com — Joe Pantoliano’s Website. [via Die Puny Humans]
21 August 2003
[quote] Charlie Kaufman: ‘Do I have an original thought in my head? My bald head? Maybe if I were happier, my hair wouldn’t be falling out. Life is short. I need to make the most of it. Today is the first day of the rest of my life… I’m a walking cliche. I really need to go to a doctor and have my leg checked. There’s something wrong. A bump. The dentist called again. I’m way overdue. If I stop putting things off, I would be happier. All I do is sit on my fat ass. If my ass wasn’t fat, I’d be happier. I wouldn’t have to wear shirts with the tails out all the time. Like that’s fooling anyone. Fat-ass! I should start jogging again. Five miles a day. Really do it this time. Maybe rock climbing. I need to turn my life around. What do I need to do? I need to fall in love. I need a girlfriend. I need to read more, improve myself. What if I learn Russian or something? Or took up an instrument? I could speak Chinese. I would be the screenwriter who speaks Chinese…and plays the oboe. That would be cool. I should get my hair cut short. Stop trying to fool myself and everyone else into thinking I have a full head of hair. How pathetic is that? Just be real. Confident. Isn’t that what women are attracted to? Men don’t have to be attractive. But that’s not true, especially these days. Almost as much pressure on men as these is on women these days. Why should I be made to feel I have to apologize for my existence? Maybe it’s my brain chemistry. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me — bad chemistry. All my problems and anxiety can be reduced to a chemical imbalance or some kind of misfiring synapses. I need to get help for that. But I’ll still be ugly, though. Nothing’s gonna change that.’ [via Linkworthy]
19 August 2003
[comics] Humdrum Hero — preview of American Splendor – the film about Harvey Pekar … ‘The beauty of the comics and the movie lies in the mundanity of Harvey’s life. He worries he doesn’t meet any women, moans about his job, turns his co-workers into characters and chronicles the ups and downs of life with his third wife Joyce, who evinces none of the quality spelt out in the first three letters of her name, only an almost luminous drabness. But as one fan notices: “This is great, man! There’s NO idealised shit in here!”‘
7 August 2003
[24] The Second Coming — a profile of Kiefer Sutherland. ‘…he met the actress Julia Roberts and they became engaged, but she jilted him shortly before their wedding and fled to Ireland with his best friend, Jason Patric. His life spiralled downwards, with rumours of bar fights and drinking bouts. Later his film career fell into the doldrums, with a string of instantly forgettable movies. So he made the radical decision to take time out and became a cowboy on the rodeo circuit. After a few years and several trophies (he won the United States Team Roping Championships twice), the allure of Hollywood drew him back to acting.’ [Related: BBC’s 24 Site | 24 Weblog]
5 August 2003
[film] American Splendor Trailer — Quicktime Trailer for a film about comic-book writer Harvey Pekar … ‘Ordinary Life is pretty complex stuff!’ [Related: American Splendor Official Site]
1 August 2003
[film] Shinto Daydreams — Nick Park on Hayao Miyazaki and ‘Spirited Away’ … ‘Miyazaki’s work is reminiscent of Tintin. His simple graphic style and attention to detail reveal great imagination: the smallest movement on the girl’s face conveys a whole series of emotions. When Tintin creator Hergé drew cars, ships or planes, you could see a love for the subject itself. You see that with Spirited Away. There is a love of the process of animation. Each shot is composed and looks gorgeous.’ [Related: Official Site, Spirited Away Trailer]
27 June 2003
[film] ‘After 100 takes, they asked me: What the hell are you doing?’ — interview with Ang Lee … ‘One of the rules that govern comic books is that each page is broken into panels, which enable the artists and writers to approximate in print the kinetic quality of film. Lee chose to break the screen into multiple images as his way of reversing the equation. Even the size of the screen alters from scene to scene; the frame expands to exaggerated widescreen for some portions. “I had to find my way of translating the excitement you get when you’re reading comic books to the big screen,” says Lee. “Not just lining things up with montage, but choreographing multi-images in the same space’
16 June 2003
[film] Mescal and Madness — behind-the-scenes at the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest … ‘The most moving moment of Kiselyak’s documentary comes from Bo Goldman, the film’s eventual screenwriter, who argues that, as in every great story, there are no choices as to what the outcome is. “If a man lives a good and honest life he’ll come out OK,” says Goldman, reflecting on the way McMurphy finally sacrifices himself. “Even if he loses his wife, or loses his children, or destroys his career, he’ll come out OK. Because he’s written the right script for himself.”‘
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21 May 2003
[film] An Auteur Packs His Bags to Venture Onto the Web — preview of Peter Greenaway’s New Project (which sounds interesting intriguing amazing) … ‘”The Moab Story” and the Web site are part of the first phase of what may become Mr. Greenaway’s magnum opus, “The Tulse Luper Suitcases.” The project is as unusual for its scale as for the Internet’s prominent role in it. As now conceived it would eventually include three to five films, a 16-part television series, a touring theater production, several books, DVD’s and Web sites and an online computer game. Mr. Greenaway acknowledged that the project’s scale was “megalomaniacal.”‘ [via Fimoculous]
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30 April 2003
[film] Strip Mining — the rivalry between DC and Marvel feature films … ‘Meanwhile [in 1996], DC was treading water. Insiders cite “temperamental” Batman producer Jon Peters as one source of strife. In charge of resurrecting a long-dormant Superman, he wanted to take the franchise in a darker direction. The ex-hairdresser reportedly infuriated scripter Kevin Smith, who worked on the abortive Superman Lives! incarnation, with seriously bizarre suggestions. He decided the film’s villain, Brainiac, needed a “gay R2D2” sidekick. Apparently colour-blind, he felt the man of steel’s traditional costume was “too pink”.’
11 March 2003
[film] ‘You need the taste of blood in your mouth’ — interview with Paul Schrader … [Related: Auto Focus Trailer] ‘Inescapability is central to Schrader, as is emotional coldness: think of the slick hustler played by Richard Gere in American Gigolo – inhumanly cold, impenetrably opaque. It is Schrader’s one big commercial hit – and evidence that it’s not his subject matter so much as his treatment of the subject that puts him outside the mainstream. There is no trajectory in a Schrader film that leads to a happy ending or a neat solution. “I don’t believe life is about problems and solutions. I believe it is about dilemmas, and dilemmas don’t have solutions; they have resolutions, which then morph and lead you into future dilemmas.” So he takes his human dilemma, writes it large, abstracts it from the rituals of daily life – his people don’t function in a “normal” world, nobody is having breakfast with their kids, mowing the lawn, or meeting a friend for lunch – and plays out their inevitability.’
26 February 2003
[film] In Your Dreams — interview with Steven Soderbergh … ‘My theory is that he has never figured out what it is in his movies that works – what it is that his audience looks for when they come to a Soderbergh film. I don’t mean technically. Clearly, he has a visual sense that never flags, and any director who could orchestrate Traffic, shot in nine cities largely by himself with a hand-held camera and combining 110 principal parts, has to be something of a technical maestro. But what is his personal component?’
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25 February 2003
[film] Being Charlie Kaufman — Tilda Swinton profiles Charlie Kaufman … ‘Charlie Kaufman writes about identity. About escapology. About mortality. About monkeys. About the possibility of ‘facing inadequacy as a chimp’. About minds, refracted, inhabited, spotless and dangerous. About loneliness and its relationship to love. About the dance of despair and disillusionment. About what incarnation might actually be. About, as he puts it, the fact that ‘art always tells the truth even when it’s lying’. And above all about our incapacity to know the answers to any of our questions.’ [via I Love Everything]
15 February 2003
[film] Green Party — Entertainment Weekly asks: “Is the Hulk ready for his close-up?” …’the real test of the movie Hulk will come not in the scenes of him smashing tanks, but in his quieter interactions with flesh-and-blood characters. ”In the commercial, we don’t get a sense of whether the Hulk will emote at all,” Knowles says. Given the past work of director Lee (”Sense and Sensibility,” ”Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), some sensitive Hulk moments seem inevitable, and such scenes could show up when a full-length trailer hits theaters Feb. 14 with prints of ”Daredevil.” But even without them, one expert already sees the beast’s softer side. Says Ferrigno: ”I think he’s cute.”’ [Related: Hulk Trailer]
14 February 2003
[film] Let’s Make a Meta-Movie — more on the movie Adaptation … ‘”I guess it documents my failure to do my job,” Kaufman says. The real Kaufman, that is. The real Kaufman is neither balding or sweaty. He is, instead, a wiry man in his mid-40s, hunched inside a black suit, with a tangle of brown curls on top of his head and a faceful of beard. He wears the polite grimace of someone for who all social contact is inherently painful, the only variant how much. “Although it’s not something I’m good at being snappy and quotable about.”‘
9 February 2003
[film] Who’s the proper Charlie? — nice profile of Jonze and Kaufman’s new film Adaptation … ‘…little is revealed about Kaufman beyond what we suspected in the first few minutes; that he is effortlessly neurotic, terminally self-conscious, and spectacularly ill-suited to the latte-sipping, air-kissing, back-stabbing, social snake pit that is contemporary Hollywood. What’s more, the sweating, pacing, fretting Kaufman we see on screen, barely articulate in an interview with an executive, could well be an exaggeration, even a caricature, of the real one. Or, indeed, a complete fabrication.’ [Related: the film trailer, and Kottke’s Adaptation Blog]
5 February 2003
[films] UK Film Release Dates — very useful. [via Sashinka]
27 January 2003
[film] Young and Breathless — profile of Paul Thomas Anderson … ‘Anderson’s main characters talk in just the same way — Boogie Nights’ porn star Dirk Diggler; Magnolia’s earnest LAPD cop, Jim Kurring; Punch-Drunk Love’s Barry Egan, a sex-line-ringing, occasionally violent entrepreneur. These men might seem slow at first glance — even gormless — but all prove remarkable: superheroes whose special power is innocence.’
23 January 2003
[blogs] Tagline: ‘So Gangs of New York. Hey, from what I saw: the street fights, the spaceships, the elephant, the Transformers cameo, the ornate facial hair; it looked great, you should check it out.’
20 January 2003
[film] The Two Jacks — profile of Jack Nicholson … ‘Nicholson has often said that his films are “one long autobiography” – the reason he has no plans to write a memoir. With a little poetic – or comic – licence, you can well imagine many lines from his movies being written about the actor himself. In Five Easy Pieces, his character is criticised for abandoning his pregnant girlfriend: “I can’t say much for someone who’d leave a woman in a situation like that and feel easy about it.” “I don’t think he’s overly psychotic,” a psychiatrist says of his character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “but I still think he’s quite sick.”‘
20 December 2002
[2002] The sheer class of 2002 — John Patterson reviews the best of 2002 … ‘The performance of the year, it turned out, was on TV, not at the movies. In the fourth season of The Sopranos, Edie Falco proved that there’s almost no one out there fit to compare with her. Thwarted in love, insulted, wounded, and finally rising up in rage and anguish against her entire existence, her Carmella Soprano was the richest and most thoroughly conceived performance of the year by man or woman. The season finale was more like Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage than conventional American TV drama, with Falco working every level of her incredible range, from emotional catatonia to screaming fury and back, without a false note.’
18 December 2002
[film] Orchid Fever — article from the New Yorker which was the initial inspiration for Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s film Adaptation … [via lukelog] ‘Collecting can be a sort of lovesickness. If you begin collecting living things, you are pursuing something imperfectible, and even if you manage to find them and then possess them, there is no guarantee they won’t die or change. The botanical complexity of orchids and their mutability makes them perhaps the most compelling and maddening of all collectible living things. There are nearly twenty thousand named species of orchids — it is the largest flowering-plant family on earth. New orchids are being created in laboratories or discovered every day, and others exist only in tiny numbers in remote places. To desire orchids is to have a desire that can never be fully requited. A collector who wants one of every orchid species will die before even coming close.’
13 December 2002
[film] Menace to Society — profile / interview with David Cronenberg … ‘[He worked on] an abortive sequel to Basic Instinct which, after months in pre-production, finally collapsed amid byzantine legal wrangling. A lucky escape? Cronenberg’s not so sure. “I don’t know,” he says. “I honestly think it could have been…surprisingly good. That’s what I wanted, something that would creep up on people, a truly perverse, erotic thriller. And the script was great, it really was. So the frustration is not knowing. Because certainly logic might point toward it going horribly wrong, but…you can never quite tell.”‘
10 December 2002
[film] Being Charlie Kaufman — preview of Adaptation… ‘”Do I have an original thought in my bald head?” Spike Jonze’s follow-up to Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, opens with this rhetorical question from its lead character, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’ [Related: Regarding: Adapatation]
3 December 2002
[film] The space between us — interesting Solaris preview … ‘[Solaris] is based on the Stanislaw Lem novel, which was also filmed, in an entirely different manner, by the late Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972. Tarkovsky made his version, he said, in reaction to the “inhumanity” of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. It was three hours long and rich in the rhetorical indulgences that Tarkovsky was wont to permit himself. Lem was not its most militant admirer. At 96 minutes, Steven Soderbergh’s version is so wilfully serene that you fear for the patience and sanity of George Clooney’s core demographic.’ [Related: Solaris Trailer and Official Site]
30 November 2002
[film] Truly, a class act. Not a lot of people know that — profile of Michael Caine … ‘There’s a crack in the Caine façade, I think, and you see it in that very cool comic line he couldn’t deny himself. When someone remonstrated with him about having made Jaws: The Revenge, he answered, “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” Now, that is a knock-out line, and characteristic of Caine’s wit (more or less impromptu) at awards evenings. But it is very much the kind of thing that Alfie, or Harry Palmer (from the Ipcress films) or even Carter might have uttered: cynical, knowing, an outsider’s jab at the system, its hypocrisy and foolishness.’
28 November 2002
[film] Solaris, Rediscovered — backgrounder on Stanislaw Lem and Solaris … ‘…this is the source of Lem’s uneasy relationship with American science fiction, and of his inevitable misalliance with Hollywood. Lem’s stories are about humanity in general. Movies – at least popular ones – are about characters. Moreover, when confronted with a beautiful woman who may be a phantom, an alien, or some kind of machine, Hollywood is more or less required to put one question ahead of all others: Can you have sex with it? This is what Soderbergh refers to when he says the movie will be a cross between 2001 and Last Tango in Paris.’
25 November 2002
[conspiracy] Conspiracy Weary — the problem with conspiracy theories … Neil Burger: ‘The Kennedy assassination is this unsolved, confounding mystery of American history. You delve into it because you can’t believe that this public event has so many unanswered questions. There isn’t any definitive, conclusive evidence on anything. You follow these trails of evidence. They are so tantalising, but you never have the answer. It’s enough to keep you looking for more. It’s enough to drive you insane.’ [Related: Interview with the Assasin Trailer and Official Site]
11 November 2002
[movies] Focus Puller — interview with Paul Schrader about his film Auto Focus … Schrader: ‘With Raging Bull, the fights were accurate, but the arguments between the brothers were completely imagined. Of course, Jake LaMotta liked those scenes so much that he started believing they actually happened. My intent with Auto Focus is not to be true or definitive. People’s actual lives are not really that interesting. And with [Bob] Crane I wanted to get at something meaty. Otherwise, who cares?’ [Related: Auto Focus Trailer]
28 October 2002
[redrum] All Work and No Play Make Jack a Dull Boy … ‘All Work and No Play Make Jack a Dull Boy’
21 October 2002
[books] The Rules of Adaption — Brett Easton Ellis interviewed regarding the Rules of Attaction film …  ‘One of my only complaints about the movie was that it was so much colder and harsher than the book. It’s like Kubrick directing a college film. I really thought there was going to be much more of an emotional pull toward the end, and there wasn’t. This is not a movie to bring your Kleenex to. But I think Roger captured that lack of feeling among college kids as accurate. During that age, you’re becoming an adult, and in that process you realize, “Okay, the world works this way, and it’s hurtful,” and you pretend it doesn’t hurt you, and you pose a lot.’ [via Anglepoised]
20 October 2002
[film] ‘It seems like exactly the wrong film to make’ — Salon interview with Roger Avery … ‘For Avary it was about capturing Ellis’ Faulknerian storytelling mode, not plot or dialogue. “I worked with multiple narratives on ‘Pulp Fiction,'” says Avary. “And Bret’s novel is composed of multiple first-person narratives, each a chapter told by a different person. And they’re all talking about various events, sometimes the same event with completely different perceptions of reality. “It’s an impossible structure to turn into normal, narrative form. But to strip away Bret’s structure is to rob yourself of what makes him so unique. I wanted that literary device. And if you’re doing multiple perceptions of the same moment and you just cut, the way we did in ‘Pulp Fiction,’ then you sever the characters both in their timeline and psychology. The key isn’t to cut, but to play out the scene and pull back to another part of the room. That way you’re actually uniting the timelines as one and making sure everybody is connected.”‘ [via Sore Eyes]
19 October 2002
[film] The Soiling of Van Der Beek (scroll down page) — brief mention of Roger Avery’s new film The Rules of Attaction … ‘My notes for The Rules of Attraction include capitalised mentions of all the naughty stuff his drugs-vacuuming collegian gets up to: “Dawson deals coke and crack!”, “Dawson has an eye-popping wank!”, “Dawson shags another bloke!” Sadly, he’s not the character who pukes on an unconscious Shannyn Sossamon’s back, at which point the film runs backwards, showing the vomit flying into its owner’s mouth. If that had been Van Der Beek’s up-chuck, the deal would have been sealed: Dawson is Horrid – Official!’
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8 October 2002
[film] Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Shooting Script … [via Kookymojo] ‘CAMERON (grim monotone): 1958 Ferrari 250 GTS California. Less than a hundred were made. It has a market value of $265,000. My father spent three years restoring it. It is joy, it is his love, it is his passion.
FERRIS: It is his fault he didn’t lock the garage.
CAMERON: Ferris, my father loves this car more than life itself. We can’t take it out.
FERRIS: A man with priorities so far out of whack doesn’t deserve such a fine automobile.’
23 September 2002
[film] Back With A Vengeance — update on Tarantino and Kill Bill …  ‘Yohei Taneda, the production designer for the film’s Asian sequences, tried to explain the look of the film and the experience of working with Tarantino. “There is a reality to Kill Bill, but it is not the reality of the world,” he says. “It is the reality of Quentin’s world, and that is a somewhat different place. We are in Tokyo, we are in Okinawa, we are in a Chinese temple, but at all times, really we are in the world of Quentin.”‘
[director] Triumphs that cannot Soothe a Troubled Soul — profile of Sam Mendes … ‘ Can it be coincidence, for example, that the then-bachelor Mendes, emerging from a series of broken relationships in his early thirties and hung up about marriage, chose five years ago to direct the Sondheim musical Company, which is about, er, a bachelor in his early thirties emerging from a series of broken relationships and who is hung up about marriage?’
22 September 2002
[film] This Much I Know – Robert Evans … ‘It’s irreverence that makes things sizzle. It’s irreverence that gives you a shot at touching magic.’
12 September 2002
[books] Warren Ellis on James Bond … ‘In some ways — and I don’t think Fleming was unaware of this — he is what Allen Ginsberg called “bleak male energy,” causing and taking immense damage in single-minded pursuit of what he wants. At the conclusion of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, the front end of his personality essentially rubbed out by torture, drugs, multiple trauma and a sequence of horrible mental hammerblows, there is an almost disturbing glimpse of an amnesiac Bond as gentle, open, devoted, and almost sweet. And his lover dreads the day that he recovers. He is England’s blunt instrument of international assault — the spiteful, vicious bastard of a faded empire that still wants the world to do as it’s bloody well told.’
4 September 2002
[blogs] Lying Motherfucker — various famous authors blog, kinda … Frederick Forsythe: ‘Oh, how different it had all been in the glory days, back when Maggie held firmly the reins of a nation and men weren’t afraid to knock a Big Issue vendor into the gutter where it belonged. When the fuzzy-wuzzies knew their place and everyone stopped for a roast dinner on Sunday. Henry fingered the limp white collar of his shirt. A gentleman couldn’t even get a dependable starch anymore. It all went downhill with the Labour government, when they forced the coolie laundries to stop using child labor.’ [Related: Scott McCloud explains LyingMoFo]
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