Seeing "First Man"

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Cinema Wmm

 

On the 21st of October 2018, I went to see First Man which I considered to be a slightlystrange film for me to see, I am a fan of space rockets and exploration having been born around the time of the first Lunar Landing. However this film featured lots of extremely boring moments of down to Earth human drama where it seemed that Neil Armstrong (played by someone who looked remarkably unsimilar to the actual man) was someone with slight difficulty communicating his inner feelings, peppered with moments of life and death situations in rocket ships.

Trips through the darkness of space often looked mysterious and occasionally pretty. The final moonscape might inspire some people who see little or no reason to go back to the moon. 
 
I wanted to see things to perceive as lunar ruins or robot heads in craters and there was no chance of it, there wasn't even the feint shimmer around the moon that some blame on a supposed atmosphere around the surface that instead might be a ruin of glass canopy placed there by an ancient cicilisation or was there something extra for iMax audiences because I only got to see it in the X-Screen. Perhaps a lot of a sense of the details in the rather grim looking spaceship interiors might have seemed lessened.

However my creative thoughts started to kick in to try to alleviate the utter banality of the film .

The child's bracelet that Armstrong left on the moon,  I mistook for a bracelet of teeth when it was first shown in the drawer and wished that it actually was supposed to be.

There was small window that the Armstrong character pulled the curtain/drape across at a funeral that I wished was a long hundred metre shaft or one going off into infinity with multiple curtains/drapes being pulled across it at the same time and he realised that this would never be so.

When the Neil Armstrong character suddenly played with one of his sons holding him horizontally and doing things such as sticking his head in the fridge etc, I thought that the boy needed a docking port on top of his head and various other places such as the fridge interior to make it seem as if Neil was practising his Apollo docking with the Eagle routine. 

Perhaps a test rocket capsule in the film could be used as an oversized kitchen oven for cooking astronauts. Perhaps, the story every night would be that the Neil Armstrong should fear the idea of astronauts being baked inside the kitchen cook and then one day wake up in the middle of the night with the urge to open the oven door, crawl inside and find himself in the Eagle 11 capsule connected with the Eagle lander.

Certain papers that the Armstrong character was being handed all were blurred to the camera lens and I hoped that this meant he was living in a fake reality loosely created by extra-terrestrials based on his existence on Earth that saw no reason to make the contents of the papers clear in this loose reproduction.

The moments of fear took the form of astronauts caught in spinning rockets and the hideous shaking of the rocket as it headed up through the heavens into the darkness of space accompanied with thunderous noise

People who bring very young restless children who keep loudly asking questions such as why so-and-so is crying etc and have no interest in rocket ships, might be advised to choose another film for the sake of the child because the film is not very entertaining in that way and the rocket ship scenes area often very very noisy and nightmarish. I was thankful when a couple with their daughter sitting nearby did finally leave half way through.

Obviously I'll have to see it again but on the iMax, especially to make sure that there was nothing of the slightest bit of interest on the moon. Perhaps I need to take a dozen year restless five year old children with me just to see make sure there isn't one of them who would enjoy the movie.

The Road to Mandalay continuum

Dream Like Confusion Wmm

29th September 2017 A Tiawanese movie "The Road To Mandalay" finally gets a nationwide release in England over a year after it was initially released in its own country

30th September 2017. It's revealed on video that Boris Johnson embarassed himself by quoting lines from the Rudyard Kiplings poem The Road to Mandalay before live camera, while visiting a temple during a state visit Myanmar.

1st October 2017. A mass shooting takes place in Las Vegas from the Mandalay Bay hotel, where one man is believed to have shot 59 people dead amongst a crowd of concert goers.

2nd October 2017: I made the comments on Twitter:

• 2 Oct 2017 : "Boris Johnson revealed to be waffling The Road to Mandalay while in Burma on one day and a mass shooting from Mandalay Bay Hotel another."

• ‏ 2 Oct 2017 : "Lars Von Trier is still very much alive probably because the film of a similar name that he made was actually spelt Manderlay!"

11th October 2017, I began looking further into the Mandalay business to see if anything else was happening and noticed the information about the Taiwanese movie

• ‏ 11 Oct 2017 "Oddly the 2016 Taiwanese movie "The Road to Mandalay" film directed by Midi Z had a British release on September the 29th of this year"

16th October 2017, Bjork takes a potshot as Lars Von Trier accusing him of sexual harrassment, and the following day, Von Trier denied the allegation. I don't wish to really say that this has anything to do with the Mandalay shootings but in a dream like way it's a bit odd

Seeing "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom"

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Cinema Wmm

a) Before hand
When I watched the trailer, I  started wanting to fuse dinosaurs with helicopter wreckage, and soon began to notice how the posters echoed the layout of some of the HR Giger paintings and as I began to compare them to Giger's Necronom series, I found that nearly all of them in some way did. What was this all about, was there a secret relationship between the work of the artist and the intentions behind the film, or was it just, of course in this lost reality of the modern world, there's very little to cling onto as a cultural backbone, and looking for that in the works , namely the Necronom series,  of the now deceased HR Giger is the way to keep on going, until a new visionary begins to appear

b) Seeing Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
On 10th June 2018, I managed to see Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and almost enjoyed on certain levels, but my mind was taking me to another level of the movie trying to escape from the banality of the film. I've never really taken that much to these Jurassic Park and World films, although I very much like the scene in Jurassic World where a man travels on his motorcycle through the forest along side the Velociraptors, hunting for the new hybrid giant dinosaur

It might be pretty much pointless in having me describe the film itself because talking about it seems pointless, other than it becomes one scenario that ridiculously transforms into another scenario which transforms into another scenario following an idiot plot strategy. I felt sorry for all of the dinosaurs, even the most vicious ones such as the imitation. Tyrannosaurus Rex for having been born into this world with nowhere much to go. As we know from the Jurassic Park movies, they're merely genetic composits based on the original creatures rather than real dinosaurs resurrected from those ancient times.

Save the dinosaurs from the volcano plot transforms into someone wants any old excuse to get hold of the dinosaurs and make money out of them transforms into suddenly the dinosaurs get released unto the world.  Why hadn't the people who were planning to transfer the dinosaurs to a safe location examined the progress of the volcano earlier? The plot might as well have an abstract dream like relevance that doesn't necessarily need to make sense other than get the film flowing, near enough playing with the audience's mind and pulling emotional strings for the hell of it.

Perhaps they did it far better with the first Alien movie where the final script after having gone through numerous bizarre transformations had to be pulled together by Dan O'Bannon from a mishmash of various pieces rewritten by Giler and Hill. Where the attempt to answer an SOS turns into the Company plot where an android is trying to smuggle an alien life form back to Earth for commerce before that scenario goes out of control. Here the surprise is that the child pushes the button to unleash the dinosaurs onto the outside world, believing that these genetic constructs based on dinosaurs have the right to live.

One male character appears to scream in a high voice every time a dinosaur starts trying to chase him, and I really found this irritating.

James Cromwell plays the brother of the character played by Richard Attenborough in Jurassic Park. Perhaps this made me cringe although Cromwell is a fine actor, but the way he becomes part of the plot seems ridiculous.

I have to say that the moment we are introduced to the Indoraptor and see the whole thing lit up, I was rather bored by its design. and I was bored to see how an idiot man opens the cage to extract a tooth for his necklace and in turn gets eaten.

Later we find that the Indoraptor is being envisioned as a sort of Nosferatu by the film maker who appears to certain scenes on the film by that name , this idea made me cringe because, there was the young girl after all she had been through running away from this beast, hiding upstairs under a blanket without taking any action. But when the creature entered her house, I noticed that we started to loose understanding of which was was up and down. (Afterwards I noticed that there's the new poster for the film Hereditary which seemed to show a house with no up or down and the roof on both sides)

Death of the Indoraptor

Detail of the corpse impaled on the tricerotops skull

Giger's Necronom V

I found the final fight between the Indoraptor and the humans to be rather uninteresting, as if it showed the creature off to be another moronic creation, once it finally was killed impaled on the horns of a tricarotops skull, it didn't interest me to see it but as memories became distant, perhaps I wanted to imagine that this Indoraptor was another loose Alien ripoff monster, but this scene of death,
I wanted to imagine this as strange idol formed from multiple non human bodies, and perhaps loosely thoughts would start to want to reshape it into an imitation of Giger's Necronom V with body parts being pierced by horn like structures, before becoming a hideous tableau of trophies to be shoved into the corner of a Predator ship, and someone will have been trying to plan this for longer than anyone could imagine as a sacrificial ritual to release an unnamed god. If no one else out there wants to biomechanise this scene, perhaps it's up to me to produce endless sketches of such a thing as the most terrible of faux-Giger drawings designed to lead nowhere and interest no one for more than five seconds

It didn't interest me to know that the young girl was a clone of the daughter of the James Cromwell's man who gets suffocated by Ralph Spall's character who spoke with an American accent that belonged to some sort of British comedy show.

I'm afraid that I find it hard to sit back and enjoy this sort of thing, while perhaps I might realise that I'm surrounded by numerous dozens of people sitting back and enjoying it all the way through, as if they've already been hypnotised into accepting everything that they see in it. Perhaps there's something that they put in the diet soda and the popcorn, neither of which I bother with.


c) Conjuring inner stories out of the darkness
When a young girl is glimpsed in the film running around upstairs, my first idea was that she ought to be a mutant child who was part dinosaur and this would be obvious later, and once we get to see this, this should ruin the film completely.

When they showed the dinosaur museum, my biggest fear perhaps was the idea of one of these dinosaur exhibits coming alive rather in the manner of some sort of ghostly waxworks museum instead of the creatures that were supposed to be actual dinosaurs running around the mansion.

Later we see the girl behind the glass and the jaws of the Indoraptor coming at her reflected on the glass before her face, as if for half a moment she were transforming into this mutant dinosaur child I had half imagined.

When she discovers the photo of the woman that she believes to be her mother in her grandfather's journal, perhaps I expected her to find photos of half fossilised dinosaur/human mutants painfully fused together in absurd sex positions , it's difficult to work out whether a limb from one should be a jaw, spine or rib of the other, and this turns out to be the truth of what her grandfather must have been shockingly into in his private life, bringing together people form across the world to pay money to see these mutant orgies, or coming long distances to see drawings of the grandfather explosing his male member as it transforms into some sort of body scaly spiny part of a vast ancient reptile.

Trump interview by Piers Morgan as a secret Carmen Miranda revival night

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TV Wmm
and
Paranoiac Critical Wmm

Many thanks to Mr D. Hughes for pointing out on Twitter the silliness of the "ITV Exclusive" symbol.