Lovely, thanks. Yours?

So in advance of Xmas, I announced my intention to get some seriously shit films to watch during the festive season. Films of the calibre of Beverly Hills Cop II. Did I get my wish? Well, in the end the closest I got was Beauty and the Beast, unfortunately, which is emphatically NOT shit. And not just because Disney decided that a psychosexual fable that involves the use of Stockholm Syndrome and elements of Bluebeard (and hence legendary paedophile child murderer and neckhole fucker Gilles de Rais) was a suitable subject for a children’s film. Also because a talking clock called Cogsworth says ‘If it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it!’

So what was my xmas viewing, I hear you cry? And where’s that cartoon you promised? Well my dears, as to the first: coming right up. As to the second: shut up.
Firstly there was an ace Doctor Who. Combines all my favourite things about Christmas into one neat package. A Christmas Carol had some lovely singing, a message of hope and redemption, and of course an intricate time-travelling plot and a flying shark.

Then there were the little shiny discs I got from my adoring public. I may not have sat through something as dire as Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but I did have some genuinely harrowing festive experiences.

First out of the giftwrap was Deep Water. This is a documentary about Donald Crowhurst, who in 1968 got in a boat, tried to sail around the world by himself without stopping, started lying about how far he’d got, got drunk, claimed he was some kind of supernatural entity and killed himself.

Next out of my big comedy stocking and covered in holly leaves and sellotape, we have The Wave, the film in which a well-meaning schoolteacher accidentally turns his kids into the Hitler Youth within a week. With hilarious consequences, it would say on the box, if it were more than usually dishonest.

Anxiously tearing at an infinitude of ‘Merry Christmas’es in a variety of fonts, I then uncovered Hidden Agenda, Ken Loach’s film about the abuses perpetrated by the security services in Northern Ireland and containing a fictionalised version of the coup that nearly happened, to oust Wilson’s last government. With assassinations, grubby politics and the kind of aristocratic nastiness you associate with Thatcherite Establishment types, Time Out didn’t call it ‘More laughs than a barrel of monkeys with kuru.’

What’s this, hiding beneath my lump of coal? Why it’s harrowing docudrama Threads! I’ve used the bit where Sheffield blows up in lessons on War and Peace, but this is the first time I‘ve seen it all the way through. Who’d have thought the nuclear holocaust could be the least distressing part? Anyone who thinks self-important vacuity-fest The Road is a disturbing piece clearly hasn’t seen Threads. Although after you have, you will probably wish you hadn’t.

So that was my Christmas viewing. Paranoia, peer-conformity, corruption, the end of the world and the hell of survival. If you think about it, it’s what the baby Jebus would’ve wanted.

Happy 2011 everybody!

Shit TV: But How Shit?

I've been contemplating obtaining some proper shit-but-fun films for xmas, to provide relief from my lowly, lonely, pointless existence. I've got the beginnings of a list, but I feel there must be more. I therefore solicit suggestions to function as addenda to this compendium:

• Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
• Lethal Weapon
• Lethal Weapon 2: Diplomatic Immunity
• Beverly Hills Cop
• Beverly Hills Cop 2
• Die Hard
• Die Hard 2
• Ghostbusters
• Ghostbusters 2
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

I know I'm missing some obvious ones, but what?

Daily Mash in cultural reference missed opportunity blunder

The Mash had a news briefly about this article speculating on the possibility of one day being able to record your dreams.

Moran Cerf, a researcher at New York University who is currently working in the field of consciousness and emotions, believes he has a system that could one day detect and record the subjects of your dreams.*

However, as any fule kno, the correct auteur to use in this reference is Wim Wenders:

As this linear chase snakes itself around the world, the nuclear satellite is shot down, causing an EMP effect that wipes out all unshielded electronics worldwide. The characters wind up in a hidden cave in the Australian Outback, where the recordings are played back. After the death of the hitchhiker's mother during the transition between the first and second phases of the plot, his scientist father discovers a way to use the device to record human dreams; by this time the second phase of the plot has fully commenced. Several of the central characters become addicted to viewing the playback of their own dreams

No need to thank me, I'm just happy to be of service. I do recommend you see it if you ever get the chance, it's one of the strangest and most beautiful films you'll ever see.

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*

But before you get too excited about playing back last night’s slumber-vision in high definition, Cerf’s system is far, far more humble, and is a far cry from the systems seen in science fiction movies. Instead of watching your dream on a display like Red Dwarf's "dream recorder", the method simply monitors neural activity in your brain.

In Other News, Braaaaaiiins.

I will be seeing this in 3D. That is all.

Rock n Roll Communique #2

You have sealed orders. Go see Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

It will make you want to fall in love if you're not. It will reaffirm your faith in love if you already are.

Report back to HQ when you have achieved this objective.

That is all.

Remember This?

I don't like memes. I think it's a clumsy and facile concept that aims to give a scientistic account of data that doesn't hold water.

That said, remember this?


And then Delboy fell through the bar, I know. But still. It was a funny meme. If memes existed, which they don't.

Toy Story 3 - Why Lenin is Only Half-Right

Lenin wrote an interesting view on Toy Story 3 yesterday. As usual it's perceptive and belligerent, and I think a lot of what he says is correct. His thesis is, broadly, that Toy Story is a tale that encourages us to embrace our alienated, commodified relationships with the world produced by capitalism by encouraging us to think of toys as servile chattel, in which we the audience identify with entities inherently commodified and subject to a master-servant behaviour whose highest ideal is a Stevens-like devotion to duty and subsumed heteronormative, male-dominated white-supremacist social relationships.

As a Marxist analysis this makes sense, and puts Toy Story firmly within the tradition of mainstream Hollywood cinema and particularly in children's features.

Where I think it is not complete is that it rather ignores the reason why so many people have been critically admiring of it. As a criticism it looks at the fundamental structure of the narrative and characters rather than the plot.

The thing about Toy Story 3, and what makes it a blub-worthy* film, is that it is a coming-of-age tale, or perhaps more specifically a rite-of-passage movie. The story is of the toys coming to terms with the loss of their owner, because the owner has outgrown them. Of course, as adults we recognise our own experiences of finding oneself too old to play, of having to put away childish things. In Toy Story 3, Andy does so without regret but with a sense of loss - which I know I could identify with. And as with Andy there was one toy which I didn't want to leave behind me, and which has survived all the moves back and forth around the country more or less intact, though usually just stuffed in a box somewhere and never actually out on display.

For Lenin, our attachment to toys is a symbol of our sick late-capitalist culture, where we attach affection and recognisable cultural tropes to inanimate, mass-produced objects - things incapable of returning our love and identical to the playthings of millions of others around the world. There is some truth in this of course, but not a whole truth.

Humans, I think we can all agree, are natural anthropomorphisers. You can see this in the polytheistic societies of ancient Greece, the medieval anthropomorphic personification of Death, and in what Daniel Dennett calls 'the intentional stance' (the idea that we adopt towards people an expectation that they will behave as though they have beliefs and desires and that this is a stance that can be adopted towards non-human things as well, on occasion). So in the way in which people play with toys Pixar have it right - especially as children we simply do bestow inanimate objects with intentionality and personality. The fact of the means of production of these objects is not relevant as an object of conscious experience to the child playing with them.

Some Marxists deny that there is any such thing as 'human nature' and of course human nature is a lot more flexible than is sometimes assumed.** Nevertheless there are some behaviours that humans engage in pretty much universally, and one of these is play. The actual form of play is culturally determined, but the act of play is not (although the extent to which play is encouraged or denied is - the point here is that given the opportunity, children play, by themselves and in groups). In American and other late capitalist cultures the form of play is recognisable in Toy Story and therefore provides the familiar cultural context to the theme of maturity and loss to engross an audience in the story.

Some reviewers have pointed out the comparisons with Winnie-the-Pooh in this theme. Winnie-the-Pooh offers a similar, though notably less commodified theme when Christopher Robin tells Pooh that he will have to go off to school, and won't see so much of him any more.

Vygotsky, in his essay on play, says that

play is such that the explanation for it must always be that it is the imaginary, illusory realization of unrealizable desires. Imagination is a new formation that is not present in the consciousness of the very young child, is totally absent in animals, and represents a specifically human form of conscious activity. Like all functions of consciousness, it originally arises from action. The old adage that children’s play is imagination in action can be reversed: we can say that imagination in adolescents and schoolchildren is play without action.

Play therefore is fundamentally developmental, and the leaving behind of a particular way of thinking, which is to say a way of life. This acknowledgement of change and loss is the heart of Toy Story 3, regardless of the bastardised culture that it finds expression in.

Judging from the scale of its box office it seems to do this rather well - although the extent to which people identify reasons for seeing it with this portrait of change is of course arguable - but I do think that any analysis of the film that leaves out this dimension to the story has missed something fundamental.


-----------------------------------------------

* I should probably add my personal attitude to Toy Story briefly. I have a great deal of fondness for a lot of the Pixar films (Up and Wall-E especially) but I have no great memory of the first 2 Toy Story films. I went to see Toy Story 3 and enjoyed it a lot, but not, if I'm honest as much as Up or Wall-E. Still had a (manly) tear in my eye at the end though.

**I don't just mean 'God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve' type moronicism, but rather that without a considered critique of the role social institutions have played in our development we have not really begun to approach what that nature might consist of and are instead lazily applying culturally loaded ideas like 'humans are naturally greedy'. For a good discussion see here.

N.B. I've edited the bit on anthropomorphisation slightly as I realised that the whole paragraph had become somewhat sidetracked into human nature a bit prematurely.

My empty life, and other fables

I really don't like The Road. It's the epitome of American navel-gazing, the peak of a long hill which offers such notable vistas as Six Feet Under, Heroes, Buffy, and, well, pretty much everything except for Knight Rider*. Most American drama justifies itself on one, flimsy premise**: it's about the emotional journey of the character(s). In other words, it's a one-way trip to Narcissism Village, pop: you, the most specialist person in the wholest worldz. The Road is one such 'journey', only because Cormac McCarthy doesn't want to leave it to chance that the reader might not understand this, he's made it a literal journey as well.

Woo hoo, road trip!

Except not, of course. Because this is a trip through a dying Earth, which has no hope, no life and only fear and the inevitable knowledge of death pressing down upon us. A world in which children are a burden, or a curse, or objects of pity. It's rubbish. It's rubbish because it has to go so far to set up its misery-lit premise that it tells you straight away that its concerns are nothing to do with human experience. It's a cynic's mud bath, sure, but bears no relation to real trauma, with its ocurrence in a complex, dynamic world where torture happens down the road from family dinners. It's the worst kind of navel-gazing 'ooh isn't everything really terrible, when you get right down to it, there's no point doing my homework or anything even 'cos it's all so pointless' teenage bollocks. Grow the fuck up.

Sorry, saw it the other night and it reminded me of how much I hated the book. Anyway, made a change from the election, didn't it?

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*At least Buffy killed vampires and had the world's sexiest GBF. Six Feet Under had miserable talking corpses. Jesus, get over yourselves, it's only life for fuck's sake, and you're all missing it!

** [picks almost at random] Oi! The Good Wife! I'm looking at you! No one cares about you or your husband. Or your dangerously perfect kids. The only thing anyone cares about is how Cybil Shepherd's best mate from Cybil is suddenly a high-powered lawyer. Now fuck off.

Mark Kermode on Terminator 4

Sometimes it's nice to see grumping done by professionals. And this professional is at the top of his game.

Blacking Up: Racist or Avant Garde?

Now, here's one of those not-with-a-ten-foot-pole issues: white people blacking up on stage and screen.

Not surprisingly, this is a bit of an emotive issue in terms of racial politics. The classic example is the Black and White Minstrel Show, which was a clearly, unequivocally racist show, as I think very few people would argue with, including one of its stars:

BBC Four: In the programme, one of the show's producers describes the moment when it first struck him that black people might find it offensive. Did you have a similar realisation?
Les Want: Yes. It was during the dress rehearsal for our second Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium. Diana Ross and the Supremes were topping the bill, and we were absolutely thrilled. When Diana Ross saw us she refused to carry on until we'd cleared the auditorium. As we left the stage she gave the Black Power salute. Then it all came home. Three years after that we disbanded.

Yes, 3 years later they realised there might be something dodgy about this:



The broader issue of blacking up is obviously controversial, but it was surprisingly common right up until the mid-70s. Even my beloved Doctor Who has some issues in this regard:



But the reason I bring it up is because I recently got round to obtaining and watching a film that had piqued my curiosity when reading a strange little book some time ago: O Lucky Man!

It's a Lindsey Anderson film (him wot did If...) starring Malcolm McDowell from 1973, and it's a fascinating, anarchic, hilarious, beautiful piece of work. McDowell plays a young salesman called Michael Travis, and the film follows his fortunes as he goes up and down the country, falling afoul of various official and vested interests, a kind of English Candide. One of the themes of the film is the idea that the same situations play themselves out with the same characters in different roles. So a military interrogator is played by the same actor as a Salvation Army major in a later scene.

And Arthur Lowe (yes, Captain Mainwaring) plays a coffee company boss, a mayor and, well... Doctor Munda:

But here's the thing: given the thematic content of the film, and what all these character changes are meant to achieve, I don't think it is racist. In fact, given the kinds of character Arthur plays in the film - minor players, people with a bit of power but ultimately responsible to people with far bigger desks than his, the character makes a lot of sense to be played by Arthur. Doctor Munda is the President of a small African republic appealing to a wealthy English financier to lend him the funds to purchase a horrific Agent Orange-type defoliant to bring some rebels into line, in exchange for which Doctor Munda will turn his country into a sweatshop for Western capital.

A strong theme in the film is a cycle of oppression and colonialism, which this scene captures rather neatly.

So why bother posting on this at all? Well, for the reasons above, essentially. Blacking up has a long, ignoble tradition, whether it's the Minstrels, Olivier playing Othello, or just Tory councillors. Seeing it was still something of a shock, given what a taboo it has become over the years. But it also seems far from clear cut, in the sense that people's attitudes to it have changed remarkably over a relatively short period of time (check out Les Want in the BBC Four interview above avowing that the entire Duke Ellington orchestra gave the show a standing ovation, whilst a few years later Diana Ross was appalled). Then there's the weird phenomenon of 'Darkie Days' where half a town black up for charidee, and can't see anything racist in it (check the link for the ultimate 'I can't be racist, some of my best lays were black' moment). How do you react to that? I mean, where I'm from we also have a strange annual tradition, although that involves making odd pictures out of petals and seeds and putting them around wells, rather than crassly caricaturing people with more melanin than themselves, but there's a strange normalising cultural context these things often take place in. It wasn't until I moved up North, for example, that I realised just how weird well-dressings really are, and how little sense the idea makes to anyone not from the area.

And whilst I'm more or less happy with my reasoning on this particular film, although I admit the whole topic makes me feel uneasy, that doesn't preclude me being dead wrong - so I'd love to know what anyone else thinks on this.

Cinema Choices

Until Friday it had never even occurred to me that I would want to see Angels and Demons. I mean, it's a Dan 'Fucking' Brown novel. I picked up the Da Vinci Code once and couldn't get more than a couple of pages into it: it's a worse read - stylistically anyway - than Richard Littlejohn's Magnum Opus 'To Hell in a Handcart'. Which is an achievement of sorts, I suppose.

However, after seeing a couple of reviews, like Xan Brooks', in which we are told that Tom Hanks plays an academic 'with a PhD in expository dialogue,' and most particularly Mark Kermode's vivid depiction of the film, frankly how could I not see it? Anti-matter in the Vatican? That's practically Pride and Prejudice and Zombies territory...

Star Trek: WTF

Couldn't think of a punnier title I'm afraid, but if you can, drop me a comment.

I have been trying to think of a post to do on the expenses thing, but frankly it's just too depressing. Although Douglas Hogg's moat cleaning and Eric Pickles' 'the thing about Parliament is, you have to turn up on time' have a black comedic value far beyond even Blears' 'look at my wodge of money, proles!' moment.

So instead, something which has been headfucking me for about a week now - the new Star Trek movie, and how reviewing it for the audience in my head has been a really hard task.

Two warnings:
1) SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
2) GEEKERY GEEKERY GEEKERY

To start with, the whole film is really fucking weird. Just odd. It's being billed as a 'reboot' movie, presumably because 're-magining' is soo Battlestar Galactica. So it's supposed to kick off a new slew of entries into the franchise presumably.

That's fine, as far as it goes, and certainly when I came out of the flicks I felt I had a good understanding of the new ground rules (mainly: none of the stuff from the last 40 years has happened any more, apart from presumably the late, unlamented, Enterprise thing, so pretty much anything goes; but there's probably enough of the future left intact for some cameos and nudge-nudge in-jokes over the next however many movies).

This leaves open the question of what kind of movie it is though. As in, what's the genre here? Generally, Star Trek movies have known their place. Certainly with the TNG crew they've felt like extended episodes rather than cinematic experiences, with that oddly televisual feel to the fairly cheap sets (First Contact is definitely the one that suffers the least from this, but check out the exterior scenes on the deflector dish and you'll still be able to see what I mean). Star Trek sets out to be more cinematic. Unfortunately I think it may be the cinema of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystle Skull. By which I mean that the elements of a blockbuster romp are there but no one has any clue why it's been made.

For a start, there's the plot. Or at least, there should be. What there actually is seems to consist of yet another temporal anomaly plot-device, and some stuff. That stuff seems to be largely random, although it does allow a Star Trek IV reference to San Francisco. The Romulans are back, for some reason or another - something to do with the first ship to be powered by demented bluebottles, and a mining ship that looks like a collection of rusty razor blades and Meccano, no doubt for some really good space reason. Weirdly the baddie reminded me less of Khan and more of Frank Sobotka from The Wire. As far as I can work out, the whole thing seems to exist solely to set up a convenient way to explain away whatever its sequels get up to.

The characters were also very odd to watch. None of them were bad, but they were all doing impressions of people we know very well. I won't say they were like a tribute act - it's more like going to the pub to meet a friend and finding James van der Beek there claiming to be him and reminding you of that time you both went arse over tit down Dog Leap Stairs.

The attempt to recreate the spirit of the original series - with the familiar slightly overdone humour between Kirk, Spock and McCoy - clashes so oddly with the high-end blockbuster special effects that for me it added yet another disconcerting element to it, as though it were to-ing and fro-ing between Saving Private Ryan and Galaxy Quest.

Finally, the politics. It's a difficult film to assess, as it often is with Star Trek, pushing as it always does the strange line between some kind of apparently socialist economics and a liberal hegemonic view of legalistic national/planetary power structures. There's some attempt to equate Star Fleet with a UN task force, but as others have pointed out, it's a very weapon-heavy task force if so. A UN with the US military at its disposal, rather than the underpaid 3rd-world soldiers that it usually relies on. So it's at once an imperialist and notionally multilateral world view (interestingly the loss of Vulcan, which has always been the underpinning other tribune of the Federation, implies a newly unipolar Federation). Then there's the odd choice of a suicide-bomber hero in the first few minutes of the film. I don't want to stretch a 9/11 analogy in too strongly here - I don't quite see how an American single-handedly flying a ship into the belly of the beast resonates strongly with the American popular narrative of that event. It does however fit strongly with the more general narrative of American Exceptionalism, the sort of thing the neocons are so keen on. So keeping the franchise's liberal credentials would be a bit of a stretch here, if the film were particularly interested in politics. Luckily it focuses almost wholly on the Kirk/Spock dynamic, making it a personal story in which galactic politics are are a sketchily painted canvas backdrop to make the sets seem somewhat larger than they really are. Much like the saving-the-world bobbins that gets put in towards the end.

In short: This film was one of the weirdest experiences I have had with a mainstream blockbuster release. I don't even know if it was enjoyable or not. I don't think it was a bad film exactly, but I'm really not sure if I could say why.

Watchmen

This was originally written ages ago but I didn't have time to finish it off then, so here it is now...

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Although a lot of what I wanted to say is along the same lines as Mark Kermode, I did have a few thoughts on it of my very own that I've decided to note down here.

First off: I really liked the graphic novel, so I suppose this may have coloured my impressions slightly, but only to the extent that I am aware of the quality of the source material, not in a they-changed-the-ending-how-dare-they way. If it had done something interesting with the story or changed the plot significantly I wouldn't have minded - the important thing is: as a film, is it any good?

Second and final caveat: I went to the film aware that it had been directed by Zak Snyder, he of 300 and the Dawn of the Dead remake. So I already expected it to be stylish but vacuous. Again, in a specatacle, blockbuster type movie that's not necessarily a bad thing, I'm not a prig about pure spectacle (see my unabashed love of the Transporter films for example).

There were all sorts of problems with it. It was boring and overlong. It had that feeling of weightlessness you get with action films - CGI and choreography combine to make suspension of disbelief harder to achieve. It had a lot of people talking in rooms, to the extent that I started to wonder if it wouldn't have made a better Radio Four drama serial, one that could have been played in Woman's Hour for a week.

In the end though my major problem is not that Zak Snyder makes glossy action films. It's that he makes glossy action films when he's been given material that deserves better. Dawn of the Dead, a brilliant satire and comment on consumerism, was remade as a standard zombie-fest. Fine, but without any of the ideas that made Dawn interesting in the first place. The Battle of Thermopylae - a broad historical drama that could've been given the full Rome treatment but instead was about copper-coloured skies and shouting. Watchmen, a brilliant satire on the narrative conventions of comic-book stories and a comment on the psychological and sociological implications of the phenomenon of the superhero, became hours of leaden dialogue, slick action and a rubbish softcore sex scene (although, it was the one occasion in the film where both I and my companion got a genuine laugh, so there is that to be said for it).

Snyder doesn't seem to understand the language of cinema or his source material. He can put a film together, but that isn't enough. When the Watchmen go into action, there they are knocking out the martial arts stylings of a Matrix junkie, for no reason that I can understand. But then, to show they've got all depth and shit, yeah, he gives them huge swathes of uncomfortable dialogue that with good reason the actors speak sounding like Angus Deayton in his HIGNFY days (i.e. autocued up to the eyeballs). Having them talk about determinacy does NOT give characters depth, it just makes them sound like pretentious sixth-formers trying to impress the common room, and does nothing to help you understand them or their kick-ass fighting powers.

I could go on, but it would get into more subjective territory, such as the decision to glorify the violence that the Watchmen indulge in, something that the source material doesn't do and which undermines the key points Moore is making. In the end, it was Snyder's choice to make his film morally bankrupt and it seems unfair to criticise him for not putting Moore's book straight up there on screen. It is another reason not to bother to see it though, because if you want to see a film that makes ultraviolence look way cool, but without also boring the shit out of you, you can always watch Transporter.

I also won't dwell on the sexual politics of it (tied into the Sin City aesthetics amongst much else). They are hugely retrograde from the source material, but you do expect that with this genre, and especially with this director, who just doesn't seem to understand the meaning of his own work very well.

Please don't misunderstand me, these are all reasons to dislike the movie, but for me its biggest failure was that it failed on its own terms well before it offended my personal sensibilities.

Class Struggle 101, with Professors Zellweger and Connick

On every protest there's someone who earnestly believes that if they can just get everyone to come with them they can storm the palace RIGHT NOW! Regardless of whether the Queen is at home, the protest is in London, or they're talking to a cat at the time.

For some reason, a class warrior from the other side of the divide has been allowed to make a movie that shares similar wild optimism and grasp of the political reality of the situation.

Lucy Hill (Renee Zellweger) is a high achiever shooting to become a Vice President. To show the President that she has the ability, she takes an assignment to restructure one of their small manufacturing plants in Minnesota. From the high life in Miami to the bitter cold, snow, and icy roads, Lucy must endure these hardships to succeed. Lucy is treated as an outsider when she arrives, and the locals give her a week before she leaves. Lucy is a fighter and wants to win. She meets Ted Mitchell (Harry Connick, Jr.) who is the union representative. At first, she has some conflicts with the workers, but soon they begin to accept her. The new product line is a bust, and she is ordered to close the plant and fire everyone. However, she has a better idea of making money for the company and saving everybody's job. Along the way, she finds something she didn't know she was looking for - "Love".

Honestly, who is going to watch this and come out saying 'why can't we all just get along, like lovely Renee and Mr Connick?'

Anyone able to give a detailed answer to the above question is requested to avail themselves of a boltgun, locate the necessary residences and do the right thing.

Klaatu, Barata N-*COUGH COUGH*

The Man, the Myth*, the Boom-Stick, Bruce Campbell is interviewed by Mayo and Kermode here.

Well, what are you primitives waiting for? Do you want to kiil me or kiss me? Blow.

Update: having had a listen now, I can confirm that you should hear about the inspiration for a particular scene involving a disabled man in the upcoming movie My Name is Bruce



Oh, and there's an interview with Terry Gilliam too.



*Not 'the chin' because it's too obvious.