Cockney Mackem

Ms Pacman finds out she loves masochism and bad dialogue in her lover's sex dungeon

PAUL FUCKING SCHEER!

Whoa, that was a hard watch. Like Tommy Wiseau trying to do a musical remake of Sin City

I'm sure everything has been said, but can I just add: hello, mid eighties Diane Lane!

So one person gets a grammargate T shirt! The lucky bastard, what a collector's item

The problem for a filmmaker in the 90s is that computers, hacking, cyberpunk kids and the internet were clearly the next big thing but there wasn't really a way for them to make it look very cinematic at that time. War Games managed it by making hacking only part of the story (and it worked really well). Sneakers took it up a level but for all the then very current computer references and ideas, it was really just the stopping off point for a spy story of sorts. Hackers was trying to be all about hacking and found there was a big visual gap to be filled. The other problem was the most influential stories about hacking at that time were Gibson's Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, both of which were set in the future with very different societies and technology than the present day. But obviously the filmmakers were trying to reference that with the fashions and the tribalism of the kids, except that doesn't seem quite so exciting without actual virtual reality and AI. These hackers are just using 128k of RAM or something.

She's the gif that keeps on gifing... Thanks for all the recommendation everyone, any DC recs also welcome

Tremendous, thanks

I'm not going to commit to reading everything in the canon but I do like reading a good comic book series now and again (got some of the classic Daredevil story collections on my wishlist). I tried some New Avengers storylines but got hopelessly confused by the constant references to other events that weren't in the collection I was reading. Any recommendations for good self-contained collections I could read from the Marvel universe? Any character(s), any era. Also DC actually, I'm guilty of not looking past Batman when it comes to their stable. In a completely unrelated topic, I think there are people out there who redraw action pictures from DC and Marvel comics with male characters in the poses that are normally drawn for the female ones. It leads to some preposterous poses and suggestion butt action and is a very witty way of showing how the depiction of male and female characters differs.

I'm a relative latecomer - I've long been a fan of Zardoz and its sublime madness, and during a quick Google for pictures of Sean Connery in a red loincloth (to, uh, tell other people about the film), I stumbled on the podcast and was in instantly hooked...

This is definitely not a 2061 London bus, that's a bus from the 80s

The original novel is by Colin Wilson, a British writer who was associated in the fifties and sixties with a fairly highly-regarded literary movement in the UK known as the Angry Young Men. He didn't entirely fit in to the rest of the writers though because they were mostly associated with political and social themes and plays starring Olivier, while he was more interested in philosophy, religion and supernatural stuff as well as science fiction. He actually wrote a lot of philosophy and other material that pretty serious academics got involved with, but at the same time he liked writing about wild, occult, horror sci fi stuff as well. He was kind of like a cross between one of these new young writers with crazy visionaries like William Blake and HP Lovecraft. He didn't think HP Lovecraft was much of a writer but he was influenced by some of his ideas which led to an absolutely amazing book called The Mind Parasites, which is really thought provoking as well as one of the most frightening and disturbing things I've ever experienced. Totally freaked me out. The Space Vampires was his fifty-first book, if you count everything he did like philosophy, theology as well as sci fi novels, and had a real cult following. They changed it a lot for the film, because the original didn't have quite as much full on giant muff nudity and cheesy B movie tropes, and they weren't quite so literally like vampires with stakes through the heart and that shite. It was also set over a hundred years in the future. I thought it was set in much more like 1986 London. Are you sure modern doesn't look like it's a hundred years in the future because you're expecting it to look like Downton Abbey?

I'm going old school this weekend, Jason Vorhees

They should do Bloodsport and try to explain what the hell Forest Whitaker is doing in that film

Jizz player you say? Is his instrument the spunk trumpet?

Extensive rehearsal will be required

Hmm. When you search for aerobics gifs, it brings up a LOT of porn.

And another thing. It's a serious problem for this film that the health clubs as singles bars is not in the least contentious. The real life article wasn't either, because half the people featured in the article actually appear in the film so there can't have been any hard feelings. Marilu Henner's character completely sums it up. The old way of meeting people in bars was the sleazy option, and people didn't meet anyone nice and ended up feeling like shit afterwards. Health Clubs so far as you see in this film are a big improvement. People get healthy, make loads of friends and quite a few of them seem to have found relationships that make them happy. Travolta doesn't find any proof of eating disorders, doping, negative behaviour or any of that, apart from the Linda character. But that's just one person, and I suspect a character like that would have had the same issues in the singles bar scene. Surely the problem with her is personal stuff like self esteem and not much at all to do with the health club.

It's a fatal flaw that the Mckenzie story was more interesting, significant and dramatic than the shitty aerobics story. It's baffling that (to everyone's point) a film that leaves in all kinds of dull detail will leave out all kinds of more interesting stuff about the Mckenzie piece. On the face of it, it's another Watergate in terms of the government framing its own citizens and awkward questions about the ethics of trading with the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. But it's downplayed so much that even when he's being followed and threatened by faceless government agents, it lacks any sense of drama or suspense. Seems to me a film just about Mckenzie would have been much better, but then you have the problem (like when Travolta did the excellent but hardly seen Blow Out) that people didn't want dark political thrillers. The pitch for the film was all about health clubs, lycra and Travolta sexing it up with Jamie Lee Curtis. Which is in my humble opinion why the director and writer struggled with what to put in and leave out, and the awkward mix of plot. It wouldn't have solved some of the other flaws, like the flat dialogue and the fact that Adam Lawrence writes like a fucking village idiot, but you might have ended up with a pretty decent film if Travolta going to the health club was in some way a cover, a way for him to get close to someone connected with McKenzie. Like maybe this LA health club had a bit of a celeb connection, personal trainers to the stars, or it was another of McKenzie's business ventures. All of a sudden you've got a much more focused plot, and being followed and harassed for details of the story are central plot points. The battles with his editor and the suspicion of Jamie Lee about reporters wouldn't seem like it was forced into the story with a crowbar, and you could put more of a sense of danger and tension into the whole thing. You could still have the aerobics and the social world he encounters, and his ethical dilemma about using them to get a story would actually make sense.

I just can't leave this alone. Of all the extraneous nonsense in this film, I was fascinated by him just showing up in Morocco. But the scene features a belly dancer, so I wondered - since this is another woman in revealing clothes gyrating to music, is she running the local equivalent of an aerobics class, and is that why Travolta's there?

The team mentioned the Carly Simon and Lauren Hutton cameos, and the editor of Rolling Stone playing himself, but there are some other strange cameos and appearances in Perfect as well. Nanette, the owner of Sports Connection who Travolta interviews when he first gets to LA, is playing herself. She is the real life founder and owner of Sports Connection. "Bobby" (the guy with the blonde hair and moustache, woodenly playing the manager of Sports Connection who shows Travolta round) - that's the real manager of Sports Connection. And last but not least, one of the women at the birthday party - the one in the conversation about the singles scene at the health club who says some people just go there to work out. I was reading up on this film and I believe that is the real life woman from the original Rolling Stone article who inspired the Linda "Ms Gangbang" character.

And another strange HDGTM connection in this film: the Roger Daltrey lookalike with the strange groin pants. He only has a few film credits but he went on to become personal trainer to NIC CAGE!

I was just about to post about Paul Barresi and his claims to have had a relationship with John Travolta. But the HDGTM connection doesn't stop there. Barresi was also occasionally employed as a private investigator, and was paid to find dirt on Sylvester Stallone. Later he was paid to look for any information that could be potentially damaging to Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was running for governor. (You could do a whole movie about this guy and his associate Anthony Pellicano, who is now in jail for illegal wiretaps and firearms offences. Pellicano was embroiled in a lawsuit concerning Steven Seagal's dispute with a reporter, and film director John McTiernan actually went to prison for lying about his relationship with Pellicano.)