Saturday, October 28, 2006

Transporter 2

Nope. Nothing homoerotic here. Jason Statham is an actor so relentlessly masculine and uncamp that he goes right round the dial and back into gay. Thus any scene featuring him interacting in some way with another man almost always manages to be deeply homoerotic. Transporter emphasised this by having such things as a fight scene in a garage wherein a ~~topless~~ shirtless Statham tussles with a veritable army of baddies and everyone gets increasingly smeared in spilt engine oil.

Sadly, Transporter 2 doesn't really have anything quite so gloriously slashy, although it has its moments: Statham gets at least part of his shirt ripped away before having his arm dragged through something which may or may not be spilt engine oil, and does fight some baddies off using a hosepipe which eventually swells to rigidity. He also doesn't have sex with a woman.

Does this bug you? The story is unimportant, because frankly it's a load of rubbish, all you need to know is that there are baddies, some with vehicles, and Jason will stomp on them, sometimes using a vehicle. There is a henchwoman called Lola who has a gun in each hand and a tattoo at the top of her inner thigh; when she's not shooting people she does things like lick Jason Statham's face, dance around in her underwear and get ogled. She is, in fact, eroticised to the point of utter non-sexiness, a matter not helped by being played, as per usual, by a model cast for her striking looks and not her acting talent.

And yet, I had an unfeasibly good time with Transporter 2. The fight scenes, stunts and set pieces are so wonderfully ludicrous, and pulled off with such conviction, I simply couldn't help but enjoy them.

Jason Statham is also really good at this stuff.

[ mood | lethargic ]
[ music | Erasure - A Little Respect ]

Labels: films, gay as a bag of monkeys

Liz wittered on at 11:22 PM | 0 comments | #

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Three come along at once

*facepalm*

Why do you do this to me BBC? Why? Why have you put Wide Sargasso Sea on BBC1 opposite Torchwood on BBC3? And Fear of Fanny on at the same time as Spooks on Monday?

Now I have to stay up till 1am and catch the repeat if I want to watch Torchwood today. Which I do. And I suppose I'll have to stay up until a similarly ungodly hour later in the week to see Fear of Fanny.

Bah, I say! Bah!

[ mood | frustrated ]

Labels: scheduling devilry, torchwood, tv

Liz wittered on at 4:16 PM | 0 comments | #

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Torchwood icons

Torchwood begins this Sunday, and I have been photoshopping away at some of the promotional shots to make my first icons in ages.

[ mood | productive ]

Liz wittered on at 10:58 AM | 0 comments | #

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Sorry about the squealing, but I've just found some clips of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's forthcoming film Hot Fuzz.

[ mood | excited ]

Liz wittered on at 12:08 AM | 0 comments | #

Friday, October 13, 2006

Finally! TV I'm actually enthusiastic about!

John Barrowman talks about making the upcoming Doctor Who spinoff-series Torchwood:

"We were having lunch and suddenly this very recognisable alien walked by and the child [the son of a crew member] just freaked out. He screamed and his dad grabbed his hand and said, 'You'll be fine – you're with me'. But the kid shouted: 'No! You can't do anything – I have to be with Jack!'
"He literally ran over, grabbed onto my leg and wouldn't let go. And the poor old alien was only going outside to have a cup of coffee and a fag!"

Of course, the above quote has nothing to do with why I'm looking forward to this series, it just made me giggle.

[ mood | hopeful ]

Liz wittered on at 1:23 PM | 0 comments | #

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Gratuitous celebrity-spotting post

I saw Clive Owen today, picking his daughters up from school (I was on a moving bus at the time and had just long enough to do a double take and verify that, yes, it was who I thought it was). This means Clive Owen lives near me.

Ah, how I love living in North London.

[ mood | bouncy ]

Liz wittered on at 8:22 PM | 0 comments | #

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Where's Sydney Bristow when you need her?

One of the things about familiarising yourself with the the phenomenon of the Mary Sue, and all her attendant cliches, is that you start noticing badfic elements in professional storytelling (this may be especially revelatory if, like me, you haven't formally studied literature since you were 16).

In this instance I was watching a recent pilot on ITV called The Outsiders. Ostensibly an attempt to hark back to 1960s-era spy/adventure series, it was about a man being honey-trapped and press-ganged back into the service of his old employers, a somewhat shady mercenary espionage organization run by Brian Cox, who want him to track down and retrieve a priceless painting (said to contain the formula for the elixir of life, of course) that has been stolen from the Vatican.

Now, the dialogue was mostly horrible and the female lead - despite being in the majority of scenes - was given little of any consequence to do, but what really got to me was that the writer had succumbed to that most common of Mary Sue tropes and given our hero a Tragic Past instead of a personality. We were supposed to care about him because he had a small daughter he had never met (although he had tracked her down and spied on her), the result of a failed marriage to a woman - now dead - who had given birth after they split up. He even had a token of angst - a ring on a chain that he would occasionally look at wistfully - which he instructed Female Lead to pass on to aforementioned daughter in the event of his death.

Honestly, it's lazy writing, and it's a shame, because The Outsiders could have been really good fun.

[ mood | amused ]

Liz wittered on at 4:26 PM | 0 comments | #

Sunday, October 01, 2006

The Unearthly Delights of Fandom

I'm not a great one for fan vids, I don't really "get" them in the way some people seem to. Either the visual medium is not one I interpret easily, or I just don't spend enough time thinking about the characters in the telly I watch to pick up the subtleties; either way, it's as though fan vids are in a dialect I don't have all the vocabulary for.

So, when I do find a vid I enjoy, it's invariably of the funny, silly variety. This one, by silversolitaire, celebrates the House/Wilson relationship to the tune of I'm Super! (Thanks for Asking) - a cheerfully, marvellously camp song from South Park: The Movie (which I really should watch again one of these days) - and is sheer joy from start to finish.