FulltimeCasual

I had a very different post planned for the next part of this recently-inaugurated and probably endless Guys Who Get It series, but two things happened that changed my tack. First, the series was gleefully hijacked by Fearless Leader and President For Life of Fulltimecasual Peter Wells. The man’s a whirling dervish of blogging goodness, so now there’s this problem of the bar being raised. It’s getting like a man will have to think before he types or something. And I thought Pete understood the internet!

Second, I went a little ways out of town over the weekend to celebrate the 32nd birthday of a close friend by mercilessly shooting him in the back with a paintball gun. “Happy Birthday!” I cried as we left the battlefield. He left because I shot him, I left because I was so keen on shooting him that I stood in the open to do it and a teenager with terminator marksmanship skills and a reprehensible disrespect for his elders shot me in the face just after I did.

War is hell.

Paintball is one of those things that every man has either tried or has always thought about trying, and embarassing as it is considering my pacifistic tendencies and general horror of actual war, it turns out I have in me both a weekend warrior and an armchair general. Shame I’m such a crap soldier. If you’ve ever wanted to be in Predator, Private Ryan or the Dirty Dozen, then this is the game for you. If you haven’t, then, well… I just don’t know you.

So we’ve talked before – too much, really – about how great Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright are. Sorry to sound like a broken record, but this Guys Who Get It series cannot continue without their early inclusion. These particular Guys, they Get It… they really, really Get It. They lovingly parody pop-culture, mostly their favourite films and TV shows, while also expertly practising the very same techniques that they’re making fun of. There just isn’t high enough praise for them.

Don’t believe me? I give you Pegg, Frost and Wright taking on paintball.

Also, they have scientifically isolated the psychic connection between all males.

And, apologies for the quality of these uploads (it weren’t us!), but here are two bits of youtubery relating to one Mr. George Lucas – One and Two.

There is so much more where that came from.

Okay – before I begin with the ranting, let me just apologise for my long and lazy absence. One thing about this whole blogging malarkey that I never fully realised before Fulltimecasual.com paid me the big bucks to write here is that it’s actually quite tough. And I never realised just how bad my grammar and spelling is until I had to start caring about it.

For example, you may have noticed a tingly sensation just now as a million English teachers suddenly cried out, and there was suddenly silence, because I just started a sentence with a conjunction. Additionally, there is a factual error in my poorly written copy: I don’t get paid shit, nobody here does. Actually, Pete beats us with a clapperboard until content comes out, then the sweatshop children clean off the blood and tears and present it to you here.

But I should stop. If Pete finds out what I’m telling you, he might make me watch Meet the Spartans or something. So on with the rant!

Roger Ebert has been at the center of film criticism in the US forever, but I never realised until this week just how much he gets it. When I say he gets it, I quite arrogantly mean that he agrees with my late-night drunken rants about the many problems of modern blockbuster filmmaking. That particular rant has been going for a good twenty years now and is still showing no signs of concluding (I believe it’s currently up to “Shoot the Glass Part Eighty Seven – Seriously, How Fucking Cool is That Line?”), but Ebert really hones in on one of the big ones: too often, so damn often, the craft of filmmaking is lost because CGI becomes an easy crutch.

One of Spielberg’s finest moments is the air traffic control scene in Close Encounters. It’s full of impenetrable jargon and radar-screens you need to be a trained expert to understand, but it works because it relies on good filmmaking – the understated urgency of calm and professional voices, the growing tension of the increasing number of onlookers, the overlapping conversations, the very opaqueness of the actual situation… you’re a fly on the wall at a real event. It’s a three-minute scene in one set with a few set-ups and some cutaways – they probably banged it out in a day.

Compare that to the whiz-bang of the defense of Zion sequence from the final act of Matrix Revolutions – full of brilliant CG and virtual set-design, thousands of hours of work, but you just don’t care. The place, the characters, the situation are all so manifestly constructed and clumsily presented that you’re just waiting down the time to find out if they have a Rage song playing over the credits.

And Ebert gets it!

Tokyo! It’s one of Japans 47 prefectures, a shining beacon on the tourist map, and according to Flickr is quite a lovely place to take photos. It’s also the eye-wateringly accented movie anthology written and directed by Joon-ho Bong, Leos Carax, and of course Michel Gondry. Tôkyô! comprises of three stories about the city, each of the directors was given a great deal of access to locations and based on the Flickr stream from Michel’s shoot, well, frankly it looks like a lot of people standing around. I guess his film’s about … stuff.

Now the good folk at Twitch have some excellent footage sampling each of the directors segments, go and look. Right now!

I’m just doing the shownotes for the latest Fulltime Podcast, and one of the links i promised on the show was to the Michel Gondry filmclip of Lucas with the Lid Off. Having just watched it again, i realised the song and filmclip are just too fun not to post here.