I'll tell you what does my head in: Number 1

The first of a continuing series addressing things that do my head in.

People who hold mobile phones in front of their face to speak, put them to their ear to listen then hold them back in front their face again to reply.

I've started noticing this recently but I can't figure out why it's happening. I'd just about credit it from a confused octogenarian wandering the streets in an open backed hospital gown. But it seems to be young kids that are doing it.

I've seen about six chavs this week wandering round roaring like Captain Kirk trying to get beamed out of a hurricane. One girl in Liverpool Street looked like she was dialling in an airstrike. She actually shouted "Say again!?" as if re-checking vital co-ordinates. The illusion was shattered when she screamed "Because it's fahkin' pissin' dahn an' I just dan me 'air in I".

Why do they do it? Have they watched too much Apprentice? Are they so dim that anything more complex than a knife generates Victorian time traveller levels of confuddlement? Is there a major design flaw in one brand of phones?

Whatever it is, it does my head in.

The Incredible Hulk (2008)

Hulk, yes. Incredible, no.

The Watchable Hulk, the Bearable Hulk, the Acceptable Hulk.

Since the weekend I have been trying to figure out what was wrong with it. I remember the Ang Lee version was too long and arty and slow. It didn't have enough of Hulk smashing things up. And Nick Nolte turned into a giant jelly fish at the end.

This version doesn't have a giant jelly fish and Hulk does smash, which is great. But then he just starts to over-smash a bit. It's like you get smash blindness he smashes so much.

So what do I want for fucks sake? Less smashing? More smashing? Well, the problem isn't really the smashing. It's the Hulk. What I learnt from watching the Incredible Hulk is that Hulk is a bit shit.

In Planet Hulk (a 2006 Marvel comic) Iron Man, Reed Richards and Doctor Strange decide that after he wrecks Las Vegas, Hulk poses an unreasonable risk to Earth. So they fire him into space, to an uninhabited moon, washing their hands of him.

I can sympathise.


When he is Banner he has zero charisma. He is unable to form any sort of lasting relationship or attachment and mostly spends his time being either sad or guilty because of what Hulk has done.

When he is Hulk he just smashes stuff to bits and occasionally hurts or kills people. If it wasn't Hulk how would you even pitch that?

A movie about a sad, lonely, guilty Physicist isn't box office gold.

But wait, sometimes he turns into a monster! Great! What does the monster do?

Er, well he just smashes things up, y'know like an oversized vandal. Sometimes he kills people accidentally but mostly he just vandalises stuff and shouts at the sky or bellows at inanimate objects.

Hmmm, ok.

Sooooo... what does Shouting Guilty Sad Vandal Man want to do? What is his ultimate goal? Who is he saving? Why?

Himself! He wants to become Boring Physicist Man! No more guilt and sadness and no more smashing and shouting.

And Boring Physicist Man is better than Shouting Guilty Sad Vandal Man... why?

Therein lies the problem, the actual idea isn't that great. Once you've seen Hulk smash more than twice there isn't much more that you really want to see him smash. Although when you've seen Ed Norton as Banner for longer than 5 minutes you realise there is something else you'd like to see Hulk smash - Nortons head, like a grape under a boot.


The story is as thin as the general premise. Banner is hiding in Brazil but he wants to find a Hulk cure. To figure out the Hulk cure he needs data from his lab so he must meet Betty Ross and then the secretive Mr Blue.

But General Ross wants to find Banner so he hires a commando, Blonsky, to chase Banner while he does all of the above.

No cure is found - obviously. Blonsky gets more and more drugged up and eventually becomes the Abomination - cue big fight, Hulk wins, Hulk runs away. End.

On the plus side Tim Roth is fantastic as Blonsky, effectively snarling his way through a different movie. He lifts every scene he's in. His face off with Hulk, after being dosed with Super Soldier Serum, was big stupid fun. Meanwhile Liv Tyler does a good job of playing Sarah from Team America, which is a shame because she should be playing Betty Ross from Incredible Hulk.

Most of the other actors do a reasonable job but they could be swapped out with pretty much anyone and not be missed.

For the first half the movie is fun. There is a fantastic Bourne-esque rooftop chase across a favela, a great Military vs. Hulk showdown on a college campus and some compelling stuff from Roth. Unfortunately toward the third act it deteriorates into little more than cgi WWF.


Yeah, it was fun to see Hulk rip a police car in half then use the two halves as boxing gloves - but it didn't connect. It just sort of washed over me. I didn't really care if he won or lost, then when he did win he just ran off. Probably to feel guilty and sad somewhere on his own.

Interestingly there are some geeky suggestions at an evolving Marvel Movieverse, for example Blonsky is dosed up from a dusty canister bearing the name of Dr.Reinstein. For the uninitiated (or people who have a life) he's the doctor who originally administered the Serum to Captain America in WWII. The excellent opening credit recap shows weapons being bought from Stark Industries. Then later on the government uses a SHIELD interface to track down Banner. Finally near the end we get Downey Jr. as Tony Stark in a cameo nod to the Avenger initiative.

Presumably we'll get various pay-offs to these hints in the upcoming Captain America, Iron Man II and Avengers movies.
Nevertheless most normal people will find these references as interesting or rewarding as standing in a queue to hear an old man sigh. In the end Downey Jr. only reminds us of the wit, charm and excitement on display in Iron Man that is sadly lacking in Hulk.

Thank you? Fuck you.

Fuck you, fuck your cars and fuck your stupid bland advert.

Maybe it's the cloying Donald Sutherland voice over? Is it the wistful folky fucking accoustic guitar? Perhaps the feeling of no real message? Or the feeling that something interesting has been made dull? Or the fact it seems like a re-dub of some previous vapid vanilla Euro nonsense?

Possibly all of the above? The end result is a bland, mawkish, lobotomised drool of an ad. Even Don sounds like he's about to doze off. When he says "Further, furtherrrrrrrr" I half expected to hear a snore followed by a sleepy accidental fart.

An utter waste of everyones time including that of the viewer. Worst of all - it sort of feels like this...



...but with cars instead of dogs. 

For BMW to be happy with this is just plain lazy, laaaaayzaaaaaaay...zzzzzzzz....parp.

Still on a car tip the new Mercedes brand ad has a more blurry, artsy Michael Mann approach. Rain spots blur out of focus on the lens. A cityscape. A man sits in a café alone. Now he stands in the rain, a Mercedes powers through a desert at night, a black dog runs through the evaporating dust trails.

The moon turns into his eye, then becomes a tunnel out which is stalking a dog whose glinting eyes morph into headlamps, leaving streaky traces they swerve away. The scene melts out of focus. Aa glassy chrome cityscape dissolves in, reflected in a car bonnet. A stubble chinned business man stands on the bonnet wanking furiously and staring intensely at himself in the windscreen. An ominous bass tone, building in intensity, plays throughout. Climaxing with a bit of freestyle jazz trumpet and an agonised scream of "I AM MERCEDESARRRGAAAHH"



Alright, I made the last bit up. I actually quite like this, I like the mood and the music is very menacing. Unfortunately the interesting bit of the script was done better here...



...he was talking about experience. Plus since he's Bruce Campbell, this is instantly elevated above and beyond pretty much anything else.

Devil May Care (2008)

Just over thirty years ago, on a beach in Hawaii, George Lucas sat with Steven Spielberg. They built sandcastles while George worried if STAR WARS would be a success that opening weekend. The conversation turned to dream projects and Speilberg said "I'd love to do a Bond movie". Lucas replied "I've got something much better than Bond" and proceeded to lay out his idea for an archaeological adventure called Raiders of the Lost Ark.

So it seems fated that hot on the heels of Indy, BOND IS BACK! Or so say the shouty promo posters, albeit in tasteful silver typography. In a plot sounding more at home in an Indy movie, the Fleming Estate has drafted in Sebastian Faulks to perform some literary voodoo; re-animating and possessing the corpse of Ian Fleming in order to produce one last Bond book. Written in six weeks, the same amount of time Fleming alloted per book, Faulks first spent an extra six weeks reading the original Bond adventures in chronological order.

The result is a fast paced, easy read weighing in at around 300 pages. I'll have to admit that I'm coming at this whole thing arse about face - not having read any original Bond novels. Nevertheless this offers some advantages to judging the book on its own merits.

The novel begins, sans Bond, depicting a grisly murder in a rainy Parisian slum. Someone is extracting (in every sense of the word) a gruesomely literal revenge for 'talking too much'. Bond is not hot on the heels of the murderer nor is he coiled ready to pounce on the next page. He isn't even holed up with some preposterously named lovely. He is on a forced sabbatical.

He stood naked in front of the mirror and looked into his face, with a distaste he made no attempt to soften. 'You're tired' he said out loud. 'You're played out. Finished'

Melancholy and somewhat listless, Bond is idling in Rome when we first meet him. Banned from drinking and then turning down an easy night with a stunning girl, Bond isn't himself. Vulnerable, tired and in his own words 'Finished' he fears that soon the fastest thing he'll be driving is a desk back in London.

This navel gazing doesn't last long though. Soon Bond is in London and rather than retiring him, M wants him on the job. He briefs him on Dr. Julias Gorner. A chemist who not only has a massive legal business in pharmaceutical production but, almost certainly operates an even bigger business in heroin manufacture.

At last, he heard the voice - distorted, distant but unmistakeable - of the man he most respected in the world.

'Bond?'

'Sir'

'The party's over'

Things start rolling immediately and soon all the usual ingredients come tumbling across the pages. Car chases, shoot-outs, shoot-outs during car chases, flights abroad, shoot-outs during flights abroad, unsporting contests, henchmen, exotic cuisine, foreign locations, one liners and alluring women. All of which of course culminates in Bond attempting to stop the villains evil plan.

Once back to work Bond is drinking at least a bottle of whiskey a day and smoking in excess of 40 cigarettes before supper. In addition, and I'm not sure if this is classic Fleming or a baffling obsession of Faulkes, Bond appears to eat nothing but eggs. I lost count of the number of times he ordered omelettes in hotels. I'm not sure whether the Bond girls 'fell for him' or simply fainted due to his stench. Less "oh James" more "Ugh, Christ James! Was that you?, Urgh, I can taste it, oh it stinks - and Jesus did you brush your teeth with dogshit this morning?" Still, it doesn't seem to bother them.

Larissa raised an eyebrow and crossed her legs. It was a way of bringing them to his attention, Bond knew, and he couldn't blame her. They were long, with a supple shapeliness and elegance: not the result of exercise or dieting, Bond thought, but of breeding, youth and expensive hosiery.

In terms of evil schemes Gorner has not one, but two plans to take his revenge on the British. The two plans have no logical connection whatsoever - although I'm not sure this is much of an issue. It's big it's bad - Bond has to stop it.

What is more of an issue is Gorners motivations. Gorner, like many a Bond villain, has a deformity. And it's a beauty. Instead of a left hand, he has a monkey's paw. Not a detachable one like Mr. Han in Enter the Dragon, an actual monkey's paw - a big hairy non-opposable thumb having monkey's paw. To hide this he wears one white glove all the time like an evil, white version of Michael Jackson bent on exploiting the young and naive. Or like Michael Jackson, depending on your point of view.

Gorner was teased about this relentlessly in his youth at Oxford University and it seems that this is where his hatred of all things British stems from. Frankly it's a bit of a stretch, still Gorner is very entertaining throughout. There is also a evil henchman who has such an unusual 'tic' and Achilles heel that it is a shame to give it away. One of his torture scenes had me holding the book as far away as I could and grimacing in case he somehow leant off the page and did the same to me.

'Yes, indeed,' he said. 'London going up in nuclear smoke. The Houses of Parliment, jolly old Big Ben, the National Gallery, Lords's cricket ground...'

'This VC-10' said Bond, 'who's going to be the fool to fly it?'

'Why, that's very simple, Bond' said Gorner, taking a few paces toward him. 'You are.'

The period, gadget free setting is a refreshing change and helped the story along no end. To be honest I doubt I'd have even bought it had it been set in the present day. I haven't read Flemings Bond so I can't compare the two styles but the book read like an early Sean Connery Bond movie, at least that's how I imagined it. So make of that what you will.

Again, like Indy the other week, it spent a lot of time referencing previous adventures and trying to weave in old favourites such as Felix Leiter. So it's essentially it's another greatest hits album with a new song - this time in the shape of a location rather than a finale, Bond has never visited much of the Middle East in previous adventures. Here he spends the majority of time in Tehran which is brought vividly to life via a combination of earthy characters and dusty bustling locations. All sprinkled with luxury, indulgence and life threatening danger.

If you want more Bond then here it is.

But do people want more Bond?

Isn't is essentially the same thing we've seen countless times before?

Well, yes and no. At the time of writing Devil May Care is No.1 on the Amazon best-sellers list and placing a world weary Bond back in the sixties brings a freshness that no amount of invisible cars and cgi can accomplish. I blasted through the book in three sittings on the way to work. I actually found myself disappointed whenever I had to close the thing to get off the train.

It reads like a long lost Bond film. Tons of fun, plenty of thrills and all the usual Bond ingredients minus the cheese. Why Faulkes replaces the cheese with eggs remains a mystery.

Winehouse talks to husband (through baby mouse)

I don't know where to start. The blue light? The filthy hands? The talking? All the way through I was never sure if they were going to squish them like grapes, smoke them, eat them or all three. It's like some sort of Lynchian You Tube nightmare.