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Cockney Mackem

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Posts posted by Cockney Mackem

  3. Posted

    Hey Everyone

     

    Just a quick update about GRAMMAR-GATE!

     

    Yes, we realized there was a grammar error. Unfortunately we didn't realize it until after the 8PM on Saturday night. All of us missed it at first, Jason, June, The Designer, The T-Shirt Printer, 2 Interns and Me.

     

    In between shows I started to get a plan in motion to swap out the shirts for the correct version. I spent most of the day on set trying to make it right. Thankfully the way we are producing these shirts is on a produced by order basis. So it's not like we are stuck with a room full of misprinted T's. Our designer fixed the image. Then we held all the orders, replaced the shirts, and now we taking the orders off hold. It looks like it's all good for orders that were made yesterday.

     

    So everyone that ordered will be getting the shirt with the correct Grammar (except 1 person). His/Her shirt was processed before we were able to catch it. So he/she has the rare misprint.

     

    Thanks to everyone for being cool about this error. Apparently we only recieved 2 emails about it. Which I'm relieved about. Thanks for your patience.

     

    We wanted to do something special for all of you that listen to the show- so this has really been a labor of love on our part setting up this shop learning about Printful and Big Cartel and putting this all together in our spare time. I think we make like .88 cents per shirt, so just know thins't about $$ we just wanted to make it because we thought it was fun and I love the design too.

     

    I know there was hesitation here on the board about buying it with the incorrect grammar. So I'm here to assure you it's fixed.

     

    So buy away

     

    howdidthisgetmade.bigcartel.com

     

    Thanks again, you are all the best listeners in the podcast world.

     

    -Paul

     

    (I'm sure their are Grammar mistakes in this email and I'm okay with it)

     

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

  4. Posted

    I think some people need to take Hackers a lot less seriously. I know it's a cult movie, but it's also a really ridiculous movie, which is part of what makes it enjoyable to watch.

     

    There are some things about the 90s hacker culture that the HDTGM crew clearly doesn't know about (and which they freely admit). However, it's obvious that they had a good time watching it and that most of the points and jokes they made about the movie were in good fun. There's a lot of shit that just doesn't make sense in this movie, but it's still one of the more fun movies they've done. I felt the episode had a similar vibe to it as the ones for movies like Con Air, Face/Off, Deep Blue Sea, or Demolition Man.

     

    Personally, I'd rather they did more movies like this and far fewer like Perfect.

     

    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.

    • Like 6

  6. Posted

     

    As far as recent stuff goes, I fell off keeping current around the time of AvX, so I can't really speak to any of the new stuff. But I'd be happy to list some of my favorite runs of the past ten years or so!

     

    (These are in no particular order as they probably change depending on when you ask)

     

    1) Immortal Iron Fist by Matt Fraction, and friend of the show, Ed Brubaker.

     

    2) Nova by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning (It would be ideal if you started with Annihilation and worked your way forward, but I didn't when I initially read it so it's not crucial.)

     

    3) Guardians of the Galaxy by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning (Again, you can start with Annihilation: Conquest, but you don't really need to.)

     

    4) X-Factor by Peter David

     

    5) Runaways by Brian K. Vaughan

     

    I'm sure there's a lot more I could suggest, like Matt Fraction's Hawkeye, but I'm sure someone else will bring it up. :)/>

     

    I don't read any DC anymore, because anytime I would get into a run of whatever, after a few issues, it would end up shitting the bed. I hope some of these suggestions are to your taste!

     

    Tremendous, thanks

    • Like 1

  7. Posted

    Yeah, it drove me nuts with Marvel re-starting their numbering whenever the hell they felt like it, like how it would affect some books, but not others, which themselves would get revamped the next year anyway. I think it's most frustrating now, because comics themselves are probably the LEAST important thing that Marvel has going on. They're so far ahead of the game and making BILLIONS on their movies and other merchandise that they could stop publishing individual comic books tomorrow and they'd still be set for life. That's not to say that they should go away entirely, but I'd be more inclined to buy a single yearly volume of Avengers or something if it was presented as new material, kind of like they're sort of doing with their Netflix TV shows.

     

    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.

    • Like 4

  9. Posted

    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 mean, we're all in agreement that this movie takes place in the future, right? If I were to hazard a guess, I would say this movie takes place in 2061--the year Halley's Comet is scheduled to return.

     

    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? :P

    • Like 3

  13. Posted

     

    If the Force exists, and it is the power behind all things good and just,then I hope against hope that all the trailers we've seen thus far have just been red herrings and the new Star Wars movies will be straight up musicals.

     

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    Extensive rehearsal will be required

     

    tumblr_mkldk9z2Dn1s7ilg9o1_250.gif

    • Like 2

  16. Posted

    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.

    • Like 3

  17. Posted

    One of the issues I had with the movie is, aside from the fact that many of the Sports Connection (especially Lorraine Newman) seemed to be suffering from severe self image issues, I didn't have a ton of sympathy for them once the story is published. Aside from Curtis, Travolta's character is extremely forthright in regard to what his story is going to be about. He asks them explicitly if Health Clubs are the singles bars of the 80's, he requests the numbers of all the couples at the gym, and I believe he even tells the mustachioed guy outright that that is the topic. Not only that, we find out early on that one of the trainers is a fan of Travolta's work and compliments him on his article on Carly Simon! Given that we know his story on Carly Simon was obviously unflattering, and all his questions seem to be seem to be of a superficial nature, should they have been really surprised that his story ended up less than complimentary?

     

    However, I did love when Travolta is trying to escape the angry trainers at the end and one of the dudes (either ersatz Roger Daltry or "exotic dancer" guy) yells out, "He called me an airhead too!" I just liked that this seems to imply, had the story just called his girlfriend an airhead, he would have been totally cool with it.

     

    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.

    • Like 2

  18. Posted

    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?

    • Like 5

  19. Posted

    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.

    • Like 5

  21. Posted

     

    Yes, watching the movie after the episode is always good, but in this case, I would say just barely. I mean, while there are crazy elements of the movie, it's not really that crazy. It's just poorly made. As I wrote in the mini-sode thread, this movie feels like you are stuck in the B plot of a much more interesting movie.

     

    If anything, this movie actually made me feel bad for Travolta (something I didn't think possible) when I discovered Paul Barresi, the guy on the far right, is the guy who gave an interview to the National Enquirer and basically started the "Travolta is gay" rumors in the early 90's. I researched it further and found this Huffington Post article. That article made me feel horrible for Travolta. To be clear, I don't care if Travolta is gay or not. If he isn't gay, who cares if people think he is? In my opinion, anybody who would think less of another person based on their sexual preference is a person whose opinion means less than nothing--fuck that person. But if it is true, and he is gay, goddamn that's just fucking tragic and breaks my heart that he can't just be himself.

     

    PE113_150WM.jpg

     

    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.)

    • Like 5

  23. Posted

    I'm surprised no one else other than me and Cameron H are willing to talk about "Perfect". I'm guessing everyone is considering this to be the most forgettable of the bad John Travolta movie canon that was done on the show. While Cameron thought it was boring, the Razzie Movie Guide begs to differ, as it does have unintentionally humorous moments I feel. But who knows, once everyone watches it before the episode goes up, replies will be off the roof!

     

    I want to join in the discussion but I haven't found a way of watching the film yet so I'm a bit behind. I vaguely remember seeing about half of it years ago but that's not the standard these great people are used to.

    • Like 3
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