The Destiny Cube

Here’s a clip of my Leicester Comedy Festival show, The Destiny Cube, courtesy of my new favourite weblog, www.lucypeel.com:

Here I’m being Nigel, and Matthew Smolka is being The Bamboozler.

Naruto

This was going to be a blog about The Wire. I’ve finished watching it, you see. But who doesn’t know how good The Wire is? It’s the only topic of any serious conversation I’ve had in the last six months.

I would just like to correct the common assertion that The Wire is “novellistic”. Sure, you could make a case that it performs some of the same functions as a novel. it has a logical five-season structure, as opposed to other TV dramas, whose plots seem to be dictated by marketing voodoo and actors contracts. But really… when did you last read a novel this good? It’s a safe bet that the last five novels you read had all the depth and resonance of Lost. (I don’t personally like Lost.) There are good novels, but the form is pretty much dead, and when we use the term “novellistic” to praise The Wire, we are guilty of an unhealthy nostalgia, at best. At worst: intellectible snobbism!

Having finished that most uplifting of TV Shows, how can we fill the gap? After The Wire, all other television dramas appeareth as Hollyoaks unto me. One option is to turn off the television and go outside in the spring sunshine.

The other option is to watch Naruto.

Naruto is anime. It’s a rip-off of Harry Potter, but with ninja instead of wizards. The “characters” are revealled through fight scenes in which they overcome physical obstacles in order to grow or learn. Stay with me! It’s good!

It’s got a perfect blend of grisly violence with saccharine victorian sentimentality.  Add a sprinkle of meaningless rhetorical philosophising. I really should hate this show, but I don’t.

An interesting contrast to Harry Potter is the way authority figures work. In HP, some teachers are goodies and some are baddies. In Naruto, The pupils emulate their teachers, so goodies have goody teachers and baddies have baddy teachers. There is markedly less teacher-pupil conflict in Naruto. The conflict is all between rival tribes. Of course this happens in Harry Potter too, but the level of unquestioning conformity to peer values in Naruto will startle you. It’s like Blue Peter.

I lost faith in anime for a while. Miyazake doesn’t count—film critics like him. I’m talking about interminably long television serials like Cities of Gold or weirdo violence shows like Fist of the North Star. One day, I was a teenager, watching Vampire Hunter D and Dominion Tank Police on VHS. Then I took a break for a bit, and when I came back, Anime was suddenly in a glossy baffling hegemony. Everyone’s into anime now. Which, of course, turns me right off, because I am perverse and contrary.

Well, Naruto has worked its magic charms on me. I even like the idea of there being other Naruto fans, which represents a measure of personal growth.

Who’s for cosplay?

Some Stewart Lee

It’s high time I celebrated Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. The first episode was terrific. The second episode was less good, I think. Then again, I remember Fist of Fun used to vary wildly in quality, too. I’ll put up with the duff bits, because they both (Stewart Lee and Richard Herring) consistently invent new ways of being really really good. Being an obsessive fan of Fist of Fun is better than ever, right now. Stew’s on BBC2; Rich does the Collings and Herrin Podcast and we’re going to see his touring show in April.

Here’s Stewart Lee tearing a strip off of Joe Pasquale:

Pi

via whythatsdelightful. Of course, I could easily re-post most of the things on Graham Linehan’s blog, but this one has really gotten under my skin. The creepy wizards make it extra special for me.

Watchmen

Thanks, Tom for spotting this magnificent pastiche. I was holding onto it so I could post it along with a scathing review of the official Watchmen movie adaptation. Then I remembered that I don’t actually have to go and watch the film. In fact, I can still review the movie without watching it. This is the twenty-first century… movies don’t stay in the theatre any more, they sluice out onto the streets and corrode the bottoms of our shoes. In fact, you should only see films after you have reviewed them.

If I want a decent film adaptation of Watchmen, I’ll see The Incredibles. The X-men films were good too (especially the third one!)

I might have even gone to see a really dumb Watchmen movie. At least it would be amusing to see. Remember the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie? Yes it was calamitously bad, but it made the comic better by contrast. From Hell too.

Alan Moore delicately balances his fiction on the edge of a camp abyss. It might even be his secret. He picks ignoble, degraded forms and genres and he wrestles them into the sublime. The V for Vendetta movie was a closer adaptation, but inevitable errors, like the Matrixy fight scene, tip it into the camp abyss and the book gets dragged in too.

In the interests of total disclosure and transparency I should admit that the trailer for Watchmen got me very excited indeed.  But I can remember being similarly excited about all the other trailers too. The prospect of reading the whole book through the eyes of a bunch of Hollywood nerds (and, for once, I’m using that term in the pejorative sense.) I don’t want to do it.

I urge you all. Do yourselves a favour. Read the book. Avoid the film.

American Akira

Jem

Part two here.

Protoculture

I had to post this sooner or later. The title of this blog is a reference to the excellent Macross: Do You Remember Love (AKA Macross Clash of the Bionoids). By and large, the geekdom of Macross is expensive and baffling, but this movie is a camp treat. I discovered it on VHS back in the day, when Anime was harder to find. I loathed it at first for its astonishing sexism and overall tediousness. Luscious creepiness and genuine craft won me over.

Watch the whole darn film if you like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dljDivTE9Vk

Sadly, this is the subtitled version, known as Macross: Do You Remember Love. I’ve enjoyed it plenty of times with subtitles. But the Dubbed version, Macross: Clash of the Bionoids, will triple your enjoyment! I heard a rumour that the dub was recorded as a teaching aid for people learning the english language. This might explain why the lines are all enunciated in a strange way, but I prefer to imagine that the actors were deep into some postmodern kind of theory. Okay, so here’s another bit:

Story From North America

via http://youruddyguys.wordpress.com/

Awesombo

Don’t be surprised if Leicester gets it’s own Mr-Bean-voiced vigilante sometime in the near future. I’m thinking something like this:

Thanks to Sean Rowlands for alerting me to this frightening video.