From the head of the Hollywood film studios association: “These people are parasites leeching off the creativity of others.” (No, he’s talking about bittorrent users.)

Sooooo…moving on.

I went to see Trail of Dead the other night for the first time in ages. I went along with some trepidation since I had heard rumours the new album wasn’t very great (and thus avoided hearing it til after I had seen them to avoid any difficult conversations, hah). Luckily they played lots and lots of old stuff which sounded better than ever, thanks to new two drummer action (is there any band that hasn’t sounded better with two drummers?). Some of the new songs sounded okay but they seem very unmelodic which has always been TOD’s strong point for me, I’m listening to the new album just now and, well, hmmm. The first single off it is shocking bad. Oh dear. I then managed to get lost in the fog during a 4 block walk home. It was very thick fog and it was dark and I had been supplied with beer, what can I say?

I was more successful going to see The Incredibles the next night, apart from the six hours of adverts and Disney trailers beforehand. Not to mention the horrifically awful short film beforehand which I can’t bear to remember enough to describe. Pixar, what were you thinking? Luckily the proper film was good enough to block out the horror so that I’d forgotten about it until reminded by Nic after. Arrive 30 minutes late and you should be okay to catch the beginning. There was even a trailer for a CGI film called ROBOTS which sadly looked rubbish. What a wasted opportunity.

But, aye, The Incredibles was fantastic fun with some amazing animation. The plotline was pretty good, if a little cliched, a kind of Spy Kids (if it was good) meets Spiderman. And stay for the credits which are brilliantly stylised snapshots of various points in the film. I was agape at them.

I’m now half way through the TOD album and the best thing yet is still the stupidly fun Lord of the Rings epic intro music. Fred Durst, I’m blaming YOU.

For some inexplicable reason (Simon forgot), we haven’t linked up Dave Stockwell’s hilarious column about the Metallica documentary. I went to see it myself last night surrounded by metal fans wearing band tshirts and enjoyed myself tremendously. I was hoping the Metallica fans were going to start headbanging or screendiving but sadly not. I wonder how much they enjoyed watching the band look like total idiots. Maybe I should have hung back and eavesdropped but I was too busy trying to stop smirking.

There’s not much I can add to Dave’s review – he does cover all the greatest bits. My favourite was when their manager told them that if they didn’t do the crappy ‘Hi, we’re Metallica!’ things for a radio station then basically their next album would be boycotted by everyone in the world and they would become bankrupt IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT? so they immediately gave in and then wrote a song about how unfair it all is. I was half convinced there would be a segment later on where they admitted they were only kidding and none of these songs ended up on the actual album but no, they were serious. Marvellous.

You might also have missed Jon Goodwin’s Guide To Leeds, the first in our new series of Talentspotter Towns. If you’d like to write about the best bands, labels, venues and stuff in your town then let us know and we might let you.

I have been forgetting to post about the films I have seen of late. Sadly no Trailerwatch as there has been nothing very interesting being shown (other than THE WORST TRAILER EVER, for L4Y3R CAK3 or however the hell they’re spelling it, which I have erased from my memory).

So, films. A couple of weeks back we rushed to the cinema to see OPEN WATER and were astonished to see how popular it was. Okay, we went on Friday night but it was in the big big room and still sold out. I thought we were the only people who cared enough about ridiculous shark movies but maybe not. The story, in case you’ve been abandoned in the middle of the ocean for a while, aha ha, is the (based on a) TRUE STORY of a couple who go diving and get forgotten about and are thus stuck in the middle of the ocean for two days while some sharks consider eating them, OH NO. All shot lo-fi for that realistic home video feel and with real live sharks and none of those fake or digital sharks (boo). It all trundled along interestingly enough for the first bit where nothing much really happened and even once they got to the abandonment in the sea bit, it continued to be quite mundane rather than ACTION and DRAMA, which was good and unexpected and realistic. In fact, the whole thing was much better than I expected except for the most important bit – the sharks! I guess understandable since they were real sharks but there wasn’t really much shark action at all. No sharks jumping out of the screen at you or biting chunks out of people. Instead there was just the sudden fin above water to make you jump and some footage of the sharks underwater. We soon realised that lots of people are scared stiff of sharks as half the audience would shriek or gasp in horror whenever any shark appeared on screen, whatever it looked like or was doing. This was most amusing when a group of people gasped in horror as footage of A LARGE TROPICAL FISH was shown. Scary. The ending was strangely ambiguous as well, or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. So, aye, worst shark movie ever. Although it’s difficult to beat the wonder that is Deep Blue Sea, that’s for sure.

The other film I saw recently was HERO which is one of those Chinese “wire-fu” martial arts movies with ponderous historical themes. Like, yes, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Sure, if you hated CTHD you’re not going to like Hero but I didn’t find them that similar as Hero seems much smaller, shorter and down to earth though lacking some of the humour and vastness. Hero tells the story of a plot to kill the king by a group of assassins and each part of the story is re-told as the hero and the king have a kind of battle of wills and work out the truth. I didn’t really make the connections at the time but each telling is colour coded with different colours for truth, fiction and perceived truth and the acting often seems to mirror this, with the fictitious scenes seeming slightly over-acted and the true ones having much more depth of feeling. There’s also the usual beautiful fighing scenes in a variety of fantastical locations including the surface of a lake and the rooftop of a building with thousands of arrows flying around. My favourite scene was the fight in an autumnal forest, the ground strewn with leaves that whirled about through the battle and you see the scene through the dying eyes of one character, the orange trees, slowly fading red. I nearly cried, it was so lovely. The story does drag a bit in places and the political parts grate a little but it’s short enough that it doesn’t matter too much.

Commentators! Recommend me some films that I would like of a similar type to Hero/CTHD/Spirited Away/Princess Mononoke etc etc. – historical, fighting, looks amazing. Cutesy monsters a bonus.

Russ Meyer has passed away. I know/realise he hasn’t made any films for about thirty years but his movie Mud Honey did give birth to the band of the same name, so there is one tenuous link to our little music land. And generally on a personal note, back around 1995/1996 I had the greatest time discovering his movie stuck on the early hours of Sky Movies Gold where Sky rightfully almost seemed to be embarrassed to be showing them (a move later repeated by Channel Five years later).

Russ Meyer films are utterly tacky, tasteless and exploitation but at the same time pretty funny (in a giggle way) and the sort of films you felt/feel at the same both dirty and hip time watching. My personal favourite is Beneath The Valley Of The Ultravixens, complete with regular appearance of Charles Napier who later turned up as one of the pursuers in the A-Team and cameo by AWOL Nazi Martin Borman. The film is question features a nutty town in smallville America where everyone is at it with eachother to disastrous consequences all narrated excellently by an Uncle Jesse (Dukes Of Hazard) style character delivering a basic “this is the state of the nation” address on small town America, the theme of which, albeit done completely differently, seems to be the main subject of so many of the fantastic US independent films.

The most famous two Russ Meyer movies are probably Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! which is basically everything the band The Cramps ever stood for on screen and Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, pretty much the story of Courtney Love and Hole done twenty years early.

Anyways, whatever, I’ve just always enjoyed watching (the good) Russ Meyer movies is all.

1. I got the new issue of Plan B yesterday and it’s ten times better than the last issue (except for the lack of a fantastic Andrew Clare cover) and and about 50 times better than CTCL. The layout now no longer looks like a slight CTCL update and neither does too much of the content. As well as the full length articles and lovely photos and illustrations there’s now lots of smaller chunks of text and little things to read which makes it seem much less daunting and much more accessible. I like a lot.

2. A downloadable trailer for the new Miyazaki film, Howl’s Moving Castle (more info at Nausicaa, as always). It is indeed a moving castle and it all looks very very Miyazaki right down to the cute little flame monster at the beginning. I am already excited, even though it’s not even out in Japan until November.

I’ve been to see some films at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Two of them were really good. Red Cockroaches is a SF film made for $2000, shot in NYC and edited on a home computer. I thought sounded a bit like ? and as everyone at diskant likes pie I thought I should taste it. It turned out not to have a huge amount in common with Aronofsky’s film, beyond no budget and an early scene on a subway platform. Apart from the obvious (it’s in colour), the pace of this film is more measured and it’s (arguably) a lot weirder. Like Star Wars (stolen line alert) it’s the sensitive tale of a boy’s attempt to sleep with his sister and the ensuing adventure. It’s thoughtfully shot and edited so well that although the effects are obviously digital, it looks better than films costing 1000x as much. No honestly, it’s fantastic.

Incident at Loch Ness is another film whose inventiveness makes up for its low budget. It’s the story of legendary director Werner Herzog’s attempt to make a documentary about the Loch Ness Monster. You might remember it being in the papers last September. Saying much about it would spoil the story so suffice to say not all goes to plan. Relationships in the crew are fraught to the point where the producer mutters to camera (after an argument about the boat), ‘at least we’re not dragging it over the mountain’.

The other film I saw was War, a moody post-apocalypse thing. When I was younger, post-apocalypse films were a lot more fun. They had punks and weird cars and guns. Here we have much mud, toil, graininess and confusion. Which is probably more truthful but unfortunately I’m no less confused about the film than I was before it finished. Some beautifully stark black & white photography didn’t make up for a lack of empathy with the characters and if I was feeling cruel I’d say that the film is plain boring and confuses moody with meaningful.

I finally got round to seeing some films last week after too many evenings organising records and/or being ill in a coughing way, which means trailers!

I, ROBOT – still looks really really dumb. Now starting to edge into the ‘so ridiculous maybe we should go see it for a laugh’ but NO. Also seems to have almost exactly the same plot as Minority Report. With robots.

CATWOMAN – this looks terrible, particularly the ‘hilarious’ cat-related jokes.

KING ARTHUR – was starting to actually look okay (if you can stop thinking about how cool a LOTR style King Arthur fantasy film might be) until the actor playing King Arthur said something. What kind of an awful accent is that? Urgh.

3 (or maybe 4, we were a little late) part trailer for HELLBOY – does anyone really care that much? Failed to move me to any emotion whatsoever, good or bad. Small child in front of us seemed confused also.

Not much to say about the actual films we saw. Spider-man 2 wasn’t really as good as the first one but was still very enjoyable (apart from several shouting at the screen type moments (STOP TAKING YOUR MASK OFF!, why didn’t you notice Spider-man and your best friend had THE SAME VOICE?) and the worry that all goes downhill now that some people know who Spider-man really is and he spoiler spoiler at the end. I really liked the opening credits though, all comic book style and nice flashes of the previous film for dumbasses like me who suddenly realised they’d forgotten everything that happened previously.

And Fahrenheit 9/11 was much better than I expected, what with all the furore and dismissiveness and OH NO LEFTY BIAS etc. Much less stunts and use of 9/11 than expected and very funny with a few utterly shocking moments. In this cynical old world it’s weird to find myself gasping in disbelief of what I have just seen. The weirdest thing for me though was being shown lots of footage of major players in the US government and me not recognising them, thanks to not having watched much TV in the past year! That’s one unexpected downside of getting all your news from the internet.

I haven’t got round to seeing Shrek 2 yet, thanks to my bandmates telling me the “twist” (no doubt obvious to a 4 year old) after someone spoiled it for them. Thanks guys. The gingerbread man is my new hero though so I will sometime. Also, why did no-one ever mention Shrek is Scottish? Sorry, I mean “Scottish” (cue Stu and his his Amazing Terrible Scottish Accent).

I’m hoping other people will join me in over-opinionating on the new trailers they see. Last night’s was possibly the best selection of trailers ever! Firstly (seemingly) 20 minute long Spiderman 2 trailer which gives away so much plot that I’ll now be able to turn up for the last ten minutes of the film and understand perfectly what is happening. Except it looks great so I’ll be going to see the whole thing. Then the new Harry Potter. I have not seen or read any Harry Potter and spent the entire trailer going “What? Whaat! WHAAAAT?!” It makes no sense. It is mental. I quite want to see it. Then I, Robot. This looks like the worst film ever! Robots with human faces! GONE MAD! Fantastic. Oh, and Shrek 2. That looked okay.

All this was an excellent pre-cursor to the film we were seeing, which was The Day After Tomorrow, oh yes. Anyone having read my previous over-enthusiasms on The Core will know what we were hoping for. We didn’t exactly get it. The Core is great because it is a ridiculously stupid disaster film which the characters take entirely seriously. The Day After Tomorrow tries too hard to make things believable but it is just too very very stupid. There are so many best bits in this film that it took us about an hour afterwards to list them all.

Possibly the highlight was the Glaswegian audience’s reaction to the ‘Northern Scotland’ weather monitoring station in Glasgow (a Glasgow which seemed more like Orkney) and the Scots staff working there who were fans of Manchester United and made their solemn final toast “to England”.

But no, the undoubted best bit involved three young men going outside (despite previously insisting anyone going outside would freeze to death instantly) to board an enormous abandoned Russian ship (which just happened to make its way up their street when New York flooded) in search of Penicillin for The Girl who had contracted blood poisoning (while saving a woman’s passport) and were then attacked by WOLVES who had escaped from the zoo earlier and had obviously made their way to the nearest ship in search of flesh despite all the dying frozen people everywhere and of course the instantly freezing air (which obviously doesn’t affect wolves).

As this scene started, a man in our aisle (with great foresight) stood up, said ‘this is Appalling!” in a loud voice and walked out.

Funniest film I’ve seen in ages.

Some of them were even at the cinema and everything. Along Came Polly was about as funny as you would expect really. That’s the thing with Ben Stiller films, they’re always precisely as funny as the last one (which means the odd chuckle here and there, and a general feeling of indifference once it’s over). Phillip Seymour Hoffman was the best thing about it unsurprisingly.

Monster was a weird one. What could have been an interesting tale of a female prostitute turned man-hating serial killer was told in a pretty boring and lacklustre way, which is saying something considering the often graphic violence. Christina Ricci was fucking dreadful as always, how does she have a career? By far the best thing about this one was Charlize Theron’s astonishing transformation into a real skank, which was very convincing, and probably worthy of an Oscar (if anything really is).

A recent trip to Blockbuster yielded some interesting results. Versus was a crazy tale indeed. Clearly very low budget, it looked like some film students got together and said “Lets film a bunch of people chasing each other round a forest. We’ll give them guns and there will be some Kung Fu. We’ll also throw in some zombies, and give them guns also. There definitely needs to some samurai fighting action too. Ooh, and we should probably do something with dark magical powers and trans-dimensional weirdness too. Fuck storyline, let’s make a fucking MOVIE!” That’s what they said (word for word) and it worked very well indeed. Frequently absurd, often cool, and always a lot of fun. There wasn’t an original idea in there and it didn’t matter, it was just made by people who enjoy film and don’t mind completely disregarding The Rules.

Not quite as fun was Naqoyqatsi. I mistakenly picked this out thinking it was one of the earlier films of the series, Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, which I’ve always meant to see. Unfortunately the one we got came out in 2002 and was lame. I guess some people enjoy watching an hour and a half of terrible CGI of mathmatical equations floating in space, and slow motion footage of the sea, but I don’t. I guess some people see this kind of thing as avant-garde since it comes from Hollywood, but I thought it was about as avant-garde as a Scottish Widows commercial. Tripe masquerading as subtlety and insight, avoid.

Happy birthday to John for last Saturday. I agree that the way birthday cash slopes off is highly depressing. It seemed to happen far more abruptly for me, I swear one year, maybe 18 or 19, they just didn’t come any more. Granted, I hadn’t seen most of the parties in question for a number of years, let alone remembered their birthdays, but it’s just something you come to expect from childhood, birthdays=money. And John, you should count yourself lucky, I’m younger than you and I got about 3 cards last birthday. Oh, the pain!