I got tardy with blogging this week. Apologies. More freeform nonsense today—I can’t think of single running theme, so I felt inclined to up whatever’s interesting to me at this hour in time. Football magazines, meditations on a Japanese family, Bobbito and humanoids are floating around somewhere up there, and it all makes a sort of sense somewhere in my psyche. Hunger leads me to ponder the Criterion edition of Kore-ada’s ‘Still Walking’ next February. I have a fragmented relationship with films like this—one part of me wants to watch Jeff Speakman in ‘The Perfect Weapon’ and the other wants to let slow-moving, periodically powerful films like this wash over me. To be honest, it could bore me to deep sleep some days, but with the right removal of distractions and at least 9 hours sleep prior and I’m lost in this day in the life of a family still in a state of mourning. But as with ‘Tampopo’ over two decades before, I’m infatuated with the food. Sweetcorn tempura? Pork belly kakuni? Delicious. I just watch it for the food. The Blu-ray even comes with a new essay on the film featured in the film—that ritualistic, painstaking preparation is hypnotic. ‘Still Walking’ is one of the ultimate moments in gastro-cinema.
Just as being teetotal is a guaranteed route to tiresome conversations based around provincial British expectations of how one should carry on, not being preoccupied with football has been the bane of my smalltown existence for years. Yet I am preoccupied with the sport’s nature of obsession and sadder stories…or Edmundo getting a monkey drunk…or Carlton Palmer’s appearance in the Guiness Book of World Records as part of a Cub Scout hopscotch team. ‘The Green Soccer Journal’ is both hardcore, wonderfully presented and—at £5—it can’t be accused of being the publication of the Rolex and prawn sandwich brigade. The articles on the sad story of Justin Fashanu and the apparently mad yet brilliantly sane John Portsmouth Football Club Westwood are brilliant, appealing to my taste for the darker and more eccentric side of the game. Mr. Neil Bedford and Mr. Stephen Mann’s work in there is good—kudos to Adam Towle and James Rope for getting ‘The Green…’ together.
Taken from the blog of Haunted Fire Studios. Their work is excellent and this sums up the film perfectly.
Trailers From Hell keeps on bringing it too. I loved Piranha 3D. Alexandre Aja answers the Cramps’ question ‘How Far Is Too Far?’ with a Gallic shrug and just turns more and more teens into mincemeat. the propeller scalping was a work-of-art and while it’s a remake of Joe Dante’s (who started Trailers From Hell in the first place) ‘Piranha,’ I think there’s a substantial influence from the ultimate Roger Corman production—the gloriously named ‘Humanoids From the Deep.’ It’s one of the most distasteful films I ever saw, yet it delivers on female nudity, splatter and absolute mayhem, forsaking plot for relentless limb tearing. If you want more of a sell-in on this b-movie masterpiece from the fantastic New World stable, Mick Garris commentates on the trailer here. Rape monsters aren’t to all tastes, but it’s too relentlessly trashy for me to sit back and ponder the non-PC nature of the production. Doug McClure—who inspired Troy McClure—has a substantial role too. Slime, Doug and exploding bellies. What more can I say?
From initial reactions, I’m not convinced by Sneakerpedia—it’s not the exhaustive nerd search engine I’d been hunting for. At all. Woody upped the ante with his Sneaker Museum site, which at present, appeals to my personal level of strangeness (I need all those Air Apparent colourways—did they all make production?) but at least, via Foot Locker folks, I got to talk to Bobbito about his mysterious gold swoosh AF1 highs from the Source feature back in 1991 yesterday for Crooked. Check it out here. Bob is a good guy.
GWARIZM 