Mindless Ones

• Still thoroughly brain-blown by last week’s viewing of Adam Curtis’ latest film, ”It Felt Like a Kiss’, I’ve gone a bit doolally and found links for a whole Curtisathon. Old hat, good hat:

• First, two recent bites from Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe/Newswipe shows. This one covers the abasement of  TV journalism as a career path for people who like to bear the sight of their own reflections; and this one on the geldoffisation of event politics. When people say Live Aid killed Rock ‘n’Roll, previously the world’s last best hope of cultural salvation, this is what they mean, and why it matters. (b)

• And going back a bit further, The Living Dead from 1995 (Parts One, Two, Three), a haunting three-hour tale of WWII necromancy and voodoo propaganda, a political Zombie fest of the lowest order. (b)

All that and some links to comic related stuff too!

• Sean Witzke recently wrote a piece on this, a Dr Strange screenplay written by the odd couple paring of Stan Lee and Alex Cox. For those of you who don’t know, Cox is about as idiosyncratic a creator as cinema has ever seen, known for dirty, profoundly unconventional films like Repo Man, and Walker (director), and his screenplay for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and as such is about the unlikeliest candidate for this gig that I can imagine, and yet somehow someone somewhere thought that it might just work. Personally I would love to see what Cox could have done with this material – at worst his weird-ass synthetic approach to storytelling would have produced something very interesting indeed, and at best, well, who knows? What’s for certain is that it wouldn’t look much like the deeply conventional blockbuster pap that we’re served up today. (z)

Linkblogging continues after the jump

A new, regular linkpost. Check it every Thursday

Look! Links, look.

This is what last Friday afternoon looked like if you are a Mindless One (macrophageous Gary Lactus and the doughty, doughy Tymbus excepted, for some reason.) It was one of those doldrummy days, and this is how we killed the time: Email Style! I’ve caught a few of the bigger tyops, changed names, put a few links in, cut  mean or downright slanderous comments, and excised one-and-a-half shitloads of Ron Smith jokes for reasons of taste and such, and the following cascade of slurry is what remains.

Read the rest of this entry »

The mindless crew were recently interviewed by our friend Pillock of Trout in the Milk fame. The first instalment is to be found deep within a glass of milk

Patrick McGoohan 1928-2009

He taught the whole world how to be cool.

So we thought we’d try linkblogging… I have no idea how Graeme McMillan or Dirk Deppey did and do do this on a daily; this is about a week or so’s worth of what I remembered to put in here, seemed interesting at the time…

More after the jump

Check this out. One of the greatest icons in the Mindless Hall of Fame and Mirrors writing a teeny-Beebies cartoon, with interactive online games and super-psychic timetraveller vampire detectives in a flooded future London.

It’s called Meta4orce, and you can watch the whole lot here (possibly. I gather some geographical limitations may apply to BBC stuff.) The intro graphics and that are nice, but the animation’s kind of flat and cheap, not going much beyond stand-blink-talk. However, the inevitable themes are all present and correct: gorgeous gamine adolescents unsure of their bizarrely sprouting new abilities and the wrenching existential crises wrought thereby. Violent introspection and doomed identities sure to follow, as well as some witty wordplay, a few crushing put-downs, and a lovely, tragic-romantic sensibility.

In case you are truly mindless and that didn’t give it away – it’s written by Peter Motherfuckingilligan.