Visible Monsters II

Ineffective anti piracy campaigns are a dime a dozen - have you ever come across one that was effective? This one from India is the lamest I’ve seen in a while:

1. That’s the first time I’ve seen Dan Brown put in the same circle as Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens.

2. I doubt that Charles and Virginia feel quite as disrespected as they do DEAD. And Dan Brown has enough fucking money.

3. If someone’s reading Dickens and Woolf who gives a crap how they got hold of it? If they’re reading The Da Vinci Code I agree that they should be stopped. With tasers.

4. Who the fuck ‘buys’ pirated books? I download Dan Brown’s entire ouvre every time we run out out of kitty litter.

5. Vagina Woolf? Why do I doubt the ‘creatives’ behind this campaign have ever read anything more challenging than JK Rowling.

via

[Music: Manics]

Be very careful what you say to fans:

At a recent reading in El Cajon, California, someone asked Chuck Palahniuk to name the one thing he couldn’t make funny. “Cruelty to animals,” he replied. An hour later, as he sat inscribing copies of his books for queuing fans, a blur passed before his eyes. And then another one. A small group of men had shoved through the crowd and was pelting him with white mice from a pet store down the street. “They were throwing them so hard their necks were breaking,” he says.

from Radar online.

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In London the streets are paved with gold.

Meanwhile in California, Eve found a vagina on the beach:

Somewhere in San Francisco there’s a very interesting LOST poster taped to a post.

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LA Times:

“I once dug a whole plane out of a swamp. The pilot was sitting in the cockpit. His leather jacket was pretty well preserved even after all those years, but he was burned,” said Kowalke, a volunteer who has excavated the remains of 20,000 people, most of them German and Russian soldiers killed in fighting as Berlin collapsed toward defeat in the final days of April 1945.

[Music: Polysics]

Yesterday I stepped down as co-editor of Londonist. No big deal really, but I got a lot of shocked emails about it following a mention on Twitter. So allow me to clarify a few things.

Running Londonist is a part time gig requiring full time endeavour and right now I’m way too busy to give it the attention it deserves or indeed support M@ with all his plans for the next 12 months. Plus I’m a bitter old bastard and these days London does a far better job of annoying the crap out of me than making me smile. I wish 28 Weeks Later was a documentary.

It should also be noted that I’m not quitting Londonist completely so the 1199 will crawl a little further yet, but gone are the days of my daily posting.

Congrats to Hazel who will be stepping up as co-editor.

A real world new chapter also means an online world template re-jig. And Ajaxed to fuck too. More about that later.

Now I can concentrate on the Long Walk. I have some interesting people ahead of me; Rob, Eve and of course Jackson. And a bunch of new stuff to get my teeth into.

Should be a fun year.

[Music: Megadeth]

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I meant to post something about Pan’s Labyrinth a while back, but forgot all about it rather quickly. Jess loved it. I hated it.

That’s not quite right. I loved the ‘real world’ stuff. Just couldn’t stomach the fantasy crap. In fact it would be a great short, brutal movie if you were to recut it without the Gaiman turge. Girl moves with her mum to Camp Fascist. Mum dies, she gets shot and bleeds out. The End.

Also something wrong when the bad-guy’s wardrobe and mouth wound are the most memorable things in the film.

Warren nailed it in a Bad Signal a few days back:

A lot of people recommended PAN’S LABYRINTH to me, but I looked at a trailer, and, you know, goth muppets. And if I wanted goth muppets, I could download an ep of FARSCAPE (”In space, no-one can hear your safeword in an Australian accent”)

I love Farscape, but I know what he means.

And now Hellyboy II is going to perhaps somehow link to the world of Pan’s Labyrinth. Cue fanboy and fangirl’s Sandman underwear starting to twitch and grow damp at the prospect. Pity Hellboy was crap. I honestly think Guillermo del Toro peeked with Cronos.

Or Blade II if I’m drunk.

[Music: Dropkick Murphys]

I love this movie.

I had the privilege of hanging out with the director, Will Kaufman, and the cast at Raindance a couple of years back. What struck me most about the movie is how no-one took the ‘first movie’ fast track on this one. Normally you watch how Sam Raimi did things in The Evil Dead, find some girls who don’t mind running around in their underwear and throw a lot of blood at them. Next thing you know you have a hit on the horror circuit and start hanging out with Tarantino.

Will decided to tackle the harder route of making an action movie. He’s the first guy I’ve seen pull it off since Rodriguez and El Mariachi. Instead of using Bruce Campbell as a touchstone, Will took all his inspiration from Luc Besson and James Cameron.

Ballsy move.

But it pays off big time with The Prodigy:

2007 US Release Trailer

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The cut I saw was maybe a little long and a tad rough around the edges, but it was one of the best films I saw at the festival that year and the fact that it’s taken this long for a DVD release is fucking criminal. Will should have by now been cutting his own trailer for Grindhouse.

Still, now is your chance to support some kick ass low budget ass-kickery and buy the movie. I need your money transferred to Will’s pockets so I can see what he comes up with next… plus I owe him for introducing me to an honest-to-God Buffy The Vampire Slayer stunt double.

[Music: Across 110th Street OST]

Remember your heroes, before it’s too late:

From The Caricature & Cartoon Museum, Basel.

[Music: Arctic M]