Hello everyone. This blog will continue here:

http://richardpeel.wordpress.com/

With a new home comes a new mandate. I will post movie reviews as regularly as I ever did here. Also I will post comics, videos, music and news of upcoming events and performances. It will be your one-stop all-purpose way of keeping in touch with the amazing world of Richard Peel.

In the world of film criticism, there is no such thing as a perfect film. But a film can get close. I'd say Citizen Kane gets close. Eraserhead and The Holy Mountain. Miller's Crossing. Some films are just neat and tidy. They get in, spend two hours being perfect, and get out again. It's hard, but near-perfection is possible.

TV shows, on the other hand? How many duff hours of Heroes did you have to sit through for the mildly exciting future-episode in season one. And then you had to stop watching season 2 because it became swiftly apparent that the actors' contracts had trumped even the tenuous logic of superhero comic-books, and everyone who had died was immediately alive again. I'm all for topsy turvy, but glossy aspirational pap? Not so much.

Lost deseves a mention. It's a textbook example of what's wrong with big-budget television shows. Do you remember the advert that they showed in cinemas and on channel 4. "One of us is a millionnaire," "One of us is a murderer." And all the cast members are dancing round on the beach in slow motion. It was like an advert for perfume or watches or guinness. If I could get past the lack of actual content, I'm sure I'd find Lost riveting.

The West Wing. Now there's an intelligent show. They get stuck in with the abstract details of government, and some loveable characters. Yeah, I'd say The West wing is getting closer to some kind of perfection. But it was shmaltzy. It was Star Trek: The Next Generation in the white house.

Because It's hard to approach perfection. Different horses for different courses and all that. If it's rare for a film to stay perfect for two hours. Much, much harder for a TV show, which comprises upwards of 12 hours per box-set, not to hit plenty of bum notes.

The Wire is perfect.

Okay, I'm only just finishing season 2, but that's 20 hours of perfect TV! Why is it so good? On the surface, it's just a dry cop-show. Some cops get put on a detail to bring down a major drug dealer. They use a wire-tap and, SPOILER ALERT! - - - They do. Sort of. That's season 1.

Exposition annoys a lot of critcs. (personally, I think every shred of every work of fiction could be considered to be exposition, but let's ride the proverbial tiger...) On the rare occasion they do use exposition in the Wire, you're grateful for it. There's no "Previously on The Wire..." There's no ranch to be meanwhile back at. There's just a string of scenes, each with an interesting angle. If you were paying attention a few episodes back, you might make a connection to something happening in the current scene. These are rewarding glimpses of how tight and complex and labyrinthine the show is. If you miss it, don't worry, there's another glimpse, and another...

That's it, I guess. It's a show that cuts out all the wasteful rubbish that producers normally assume the audience needs. Then they have more time to devote to the proper business of a beautiful work of fiction.

The Wire meets my needs. It will survive my forthcoming purge.

Didn't I tell you? I'm going to rain metaphorical fire down upon culture, in the form of a nine-hour funk album. It'll be revolutionary. Literally revolutionary. It won't physically destroy anything. Violent revolution is not a revolution. It'll just make all the old things redundant. We will no longer need Hollyoaks or Sunday afternoon Radio 2 or computer-games or Noel Edmunds or wallpaper. People will hear my funk and see how silly all those things were (even Noel Edmunds.) And everyone will watch The Wire and Akira. And listen to Portishead's brilliant Third album. They might even leave their houses!

The Coen Brothers latest film, Burn After Reading, is good. It's funny, you know, and it's got Francis McDormand and the Malkovich. It's not quite The Big Lebowski, but it's still funny. The shocking moment half way through is brilliant in a crowded cinema.

What else... Oh yeah, The Wire. Well, we're only at episode 5 in this house, but it's turning out to be quite the most fabulous thing. Witty as the West Wing, but without the Sentimentality. Dark like the Sopranos, but not as showy. Complicated and meaningful. Well done! Well done to the Wire!

Watched The Fog last night. The Carpenter original, of course. If pirate zombies have to menace a small town, the resulting film will always be rubbish. It's not a great film, but it isn't utterly terrible, and that's quite an acheivement.

It was with no small apprehension that I watched The Proposition. I had a bad experience with a bleak film recently, so I thought this one would bum me out. But I figured out, watching it, that Nick Cave doesn't actually do bleak. He does surly and sardonic. But he holds short of bleak.

The Proposition takes place in a wounded land, and there's plenty of nasty shit going down. Nick cave's yanking your bleak chain. But all through it, Mike off of Neighbours is hovering about, keeping his nose clean, so no matter how bad things get, you might not dwell on it, but there's this one character whose motives and appetites remain undeclared. In the end, all the bastards get their comeuppance. I don't even feel sorry for Ray Winston and Emily Watson, because they are silly. They drink silly tea and have silly morals. They are old-fashioned and colonial.

Mike off of Neighbours, however, is like The Dude. Sometimes there's a man...etc. He acts at exactly the right time, to ensure that justice is done. Not really Justice, though. More like shootings rape and mutilation, leaving Mike off of Neighbours to walk away scott free (no pun intended).

 Just finished watching Ninja Squad. I got a 4-in-1 cheapo DVD at the weekend with 4 Ninja movies on it. They are punishingly hard to watch. I had to watch Ninja Squad in installments. Everything about it is designed to appall. Each shot is badly framed. The voice-over actors were clearly told to improvise and were clearly uncomfortable with the task.

So there's this guy called Billy, right. And he's a 'Ninja'. He returns home to find Gangsters menacing his mum. He gets in one little fight and the gangsters develop an instant vendetta. They kill his mum and kidnap his sister.

Meanwhile, in another film that has been unconvincingly intercut with the main feature, for marketing purposes, some ninjas have some fights. Ivan the Red is killing all the ninjas (The purple ninja, the black ninja, the camouflage ninja... All of them.)

Meanwhile in the main film, Billy has a big shootout. The police show up. The last gangster picks up a gun with his bloody hand and shoots Billy, then in the ninja world Ivan the Red faces down Billy's mentor, the Pastel Ninja. Ivan the Red is defeated and then 'The End' flashes up on a red screen. The End.

I have caved in to the pressures of the post 9/11 world and bought myself an ipod - Apple's patented total-immersion world-ignoring noise machine. This has afforded me the joy of revisiting and re-cataloguing all my mp3s, which were already arranged in a chronological fashion in a folder of CDs dating back to 2003. Like having my life flash before my eyes. But not quite my life. Just the filenames of songs on the soundtrack to my life. Since 2003.

I only started liking music when I was 16. Purely because I used to tune into Radio 1 to hear Lee & Herring, which meant I caught bits of Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley and Mark Radcliffe.

My first portable cassette player was twenty pounds. I remember fantacising that somebody would invent something that would condense music down, so I wouldn't have to walk around with coat pockets stuffed full of cassettes boggling around like maracas that I couldn't hear because I was stuffing my head full of Placebo or Terrorvision.

I wouldn't buy an ipod as my first mp3 player. Only somebody super-rich like Micheal Winner does that. No. Like everyone else I have been fannying about with 128MB crappola from Argos and, lately, a 2GB Phillips GoGear. First an expensive one which broke inside a timescale which put it's operational cost at somewhere around a tenner a month. Then a second hand one which even now works sometimes. As a result, I'm tired. So tired.

So like a jaded ageing film director, I have invited the i-pod to stay with me. We're in the honeymoon period, but I know it's going to break my heart in the end. Like all the others. Its battery will become selfish and contrary. It'll lend my favourite songs to its mates. I'll find it bumming a waiter. If I have any sense left I'll end up tossing it aside before it can do me any real harm. Or maybe I'm beyond that now. Where do you go after the i-pod? Surely it can only end in bloodshed.

Podcasts are separate to music, right? They're still mp3s in essence, but the ipod has them segregated from my music. But I've also downloaded a load of Lee & Herring radio shows from fistoffun.net. And it keeps these in the music bit, just because they aren't on an rss feed (about which I half understand). This bothers me.

It has games on it too. Given that the contols are simply a wheel and a clicker, this also angers me. Oh how the wheel frightens me! How does it know? Where are the moving parts? What spins when you rub it? Or is it spinning anyway, and do our rubs simply alter the relative speed at which it spins. What is 'it' anyway.

I will end this machine-bollocking missive with something positive. The reason I got an i-pod, in fact. That is The Mondo Movie Podcast (www.mondomovie.com). Hosted by a pair of nerds who, by virtue of being London media-types don't sound like nerds at all. They sound like actual real critics.

Now, I also subscribe to the Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo podcast in which skiffle-beefcake Kermode struggles his unpopular but entertaining opinions past the witless bickering of not-'alf radio cheeseball Simon Mayo. Imagine the same setup, but with two Kermodes instead. Ben Howard and Dan Auty, The Mondo Movie hosts generally agree with each other and frequently finish each others' sentences. Not in a creepy way, mind. No, the whole thing is slick, amiable and genuinely loveable.

As the title suggests, they concentrate on Mondo Movies. This term, I believe, originates from a series of sleazy snuff-like exploitation films and documentaries, the first of which, Mondo Cane translates to mean Dog's World. The word Mondo was coined to describe a genre of shockumentaries such as the infamous Faces of Death. The term then morphed, it seems, to include all world exploitation cinema.

Actually, they talk about all films ever, but they give special credit to the bizarre and avant garde. They cite Eraserhead as being the very model of a cult film - which makes them kings.

Crucially, they avoid the whole Ghost World thing of bored nineties hipsterism. They perform the true role of critics which is to stimulate interest excitement and, yes, love. Never have I been so interested in cinema. Not even in my adolescence. Yes, most cult films are boring and cruddy, but there exists at the heart of all art some spark of human ingenuity. Some evidence that the viewer is not alone, something to relate to. The Mondo Movie Podcast unlocks a shower of such sparks.

I saw a DVD of a Cirque du Soleil performance. I hate the Cirque du Soleil as much as you do. But have you thought about why we hate it so much? Because really, it's just an old-fashioned circus. It costs a lot to make, so tickets are expensive, but the crowd seem to enjoy it. It's harmless fun.

I think what winds us arty-types up about it is that the people who enjoy it mistakenly believe that it has some cultural weight. Really, it doesn't even pretend to. Sure, there's a gaudy rhetorical pretentiousness about the whole thing, but it doesn't explicitly claim to be anything more than a circus. The problems all arise from the fact that art has created its own camp (both senses of the word. Note to self: look up the etymology of the word 'camp'). An erronious notion of high and low culture which is wafer thin and totaly vulnerable to subversion.

I care about whether art is good or not. So do you. But remember that the world at large really doesn't. It seems like an arrogant thing to say, but it isn't. People have more important things going on in their lives. People care about other people. They realize that spending time worrying about whether Gilbert and George are crypto-facists is such a pointles and indulgent excercise when contrasted to the miracle that is each breath and flutter of the heart. Pity us, the art-nerds. We really believe that culture has some effect over the vast unknowable forces at work in this baffling modern world.

So we get sniffy about the Cirque du Soleil, because it uses fine-art-camp as a means of obfuscating its lack of content whereas, say, Craig David doesn't.

Moving on: I got Charlie Brooker's book of collected collumns. He is my guilty pleasure. Who knows, maybe he's good. But really, isn't it fun to read a bit of bile journalism now and then? Collected together, the constant references to suicide start to grate, but it's all dressed up in the most beautifully inventive comic language in the vein of Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci. It's full of terrific quasi-swearing and spluttering misanthropy, with tiny glimmers of reasonableness to get you on-side.

Brooker co-wrote Nathan Barley which was excellent, but poorly received at first by critics and me alike. Repeated viewings have revealed it to be a worthy bit of telly. Too dour to be a great sit-com like Father Ted. Too surreal to be a great drama like...ummm...Mike Leigh or something. Good, though. Interesting and unique.

I thought the cell membrane came first, followed by DNA as a later development which set plant and animal cells apart from bacteria. Yeah, I know, "duh!". So imagine the effect on my silly mind when I learned all about RNA this week.

Before cell membranes there were just polymer chains. complicated molecular robots assembled from the earths ingredients. The process of natural selection began before the cell membrane. These polymer chains replicate themselves by attracting an equivalent opposite chain which is then unzipped by enzymes and acts as a mould. This is the stage which links organic life to the alien mysteries of physics.

The cell membrane is just an advantageous habitat for RNA. Our bodies have DNA, which lounges around in the nucleus and tells the RNA what to do. Before the cell membrane, however, there was just primordial soup. An ecosystem of molecules. Brilliant.

I watched Dead Ringers on telly last night. It's really really good. I'm talking about the David Cronenberg film and not the tepid BBC impressions show. Fans of Crash also have this problem.

The plot is initially confusing until you dig the fact that the twins are interchangeable. Rather than casting actual twins, Cronenberg shoots Jeremy Irons twice. This is often distracting, because little care is taken to mask the fact that one of the on-screen Jeremy Ironses is a stand-in with a wig. However, you can watch the film entirely as if both twins are indeed one person, which is a wish expressed by at least one of them at various points in the film.

Rather than go for the simple twist, where one twin reveals himself to be in fact the other twin at a shocking moment, the film bubbles along ambiguously. The viewer is NEVER sure which Jeremy is which. So it's a film about a divided personality, as well as a shared one.

Cronenberg has this knack of making it seem easy. Just like Peter Greenaway of whose film Z00 this is a remake. Both films are self indulgent. Both are immensely satisfying for it. Z00 is unashamedly arthouse, whereas Cronenburg gives timid viewers the option of reading it as just a slightly pretentious thriller. I think all Cronenberg films are like this. They are accessible enough on their own. But (much like a Cronenbergian monster) they morph together to form a super-destructive arthouse shitstorm.

I've now seen up to episode 8 of the All New Guyver Show. Now, I hate the slick new style of Anime as much as the next pervert, but this must occupy a soft space in my bosoms. 

I'll get the lows out of the way: The character Mizuki is offensive in a similar way to scrappy-do. The bits when they aren't fighting are really really boring, due to the fashion for super-slow panning shots of hospital beds or "well-drawn" faces talking shite.

Sooner or later, however, the men in suits turn up and transform into gory superhuman monsters called Zoanoids. Ordinary high school student Sho Fukamachi must then shout "GUYVER" in order to call upon the symbiotic bio-ninja armour of the same name. The Guyver armour has all the weapons, and each episode, Sho learns how to use a new orifice on his morphing adolescent body. He defeats the Zoanoids in numerous bloody ways to the sure edification of the teenaged (or retarded adult) viewer.

The Zoanoids have brilliant names, like Ramotith or Zerebubuth. They are modified humans, based on alien technology unearthed by the sinister Cronos Corporation, who want to take over the world by infiltrating all the governments of the world with their shape-shifting agents.

Sho got the armour by accident, when one of the experimental Zoanoids escaped the lab, stealing three Guyver units. The units are medals with fleshy bits, that stick onto their host. Sho's just a regular kid trying to grow up in this mixed up world, and having to deal with a parade of monster battles in a body he doesn't understand is really the last thing he needs. I have a feeling, though, that if he applies himself to the job in hand (killing monsters), he will become a stronger and more well-rounded man. A jolly fictional contrast to the world of investigative journalism, where, if teenagers are forced into violent combat, they can often find themselves later committed to institutions, if they're lucky. Otherwise a life of crime, destitution and eventual suicide. I'm being obtuse. Next paragraph.

The second guyver (Guyver II) unit finds its way into the hands of Inspector Lisker, a Cronos agent. He is a trained soldier, so he can easily wipe the floor with Guyver I. Unfortunately for him, his unit was a bit smushed up, so he ain't got a cat in hell's chance of beating Sho.

Guyver III is the best thing ever, because it is blacker than Batman and never loses and you don't know whose side its on and its true identity is all shadowy and it hangs around behind trees, watching for the most part saying things like, "all the pieces are falling into my cunning plan" in a deep ole Darth Vader voice. In the old series, the revelation of Guyver III's true identity was a shock to me. Mostly cos I was dense back then. it's fairly obvious. But in the new series, it's telegraphed pretty much from the start, which takes some of the fun out of it.

There's mileage in a media studies essay comparing Guyver to David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Sho Fukamachi and Jeffrey Beaumont are both teenaged boys who find themselves drawn into an underworld of monsters. The joy of Blue Velvet is in its rejection of subtlety. Frank, the evil core of the film, is an exercise in grisly, frothing spectacle. I think the Zoanoids are a fair match for this. Both texts have a primal directness.

Finished Emma recently. Jane Austen. She's very good you know. Unlike Guyver, nothing really happens in Emma. I mean, it's rich in incident and all that, but... I don't know... nothing really happens. It's all about the nuance and the subtlety. It's hard to forget that you're reading something from an alien past. That's the appeal. You're reading something that comes out of a society whose prejudices and predilictions are different to ours. And it still fits over everything we have now. Like a brilliant What If..?

I didn't think I could get addicted to pop albums any more. Not that I didn't want to. And not that I thought I'd grown out of them or anything. There was a time when The Divine Comedy's Casanova was so good that I had to limit myself to one listen per day. Like I would seriously consider just playing it through again. Everyone knows that an album you love can't bear that kind of scrutiny. It can be done, but not with an album you consciously love. Like, if you're driving to Newcastle and your manager, say, insists on playing Scissor Sisters on a loop, you might find the experience quite good. If you secretly love your manager, or if you're driving to play in your first sold-out arena pop concert. But generally, as a rule, you need a good night's dreaming as a buffer between one listening of an album and the next. And it's been a while, but I've found an album that makes me consider playing it twice in a day. That album is Mezmerize by System of a Down.

The first barrier is, of course, the Rock barrier. You know what I mean. Hip Hop has one. Jazz has one. Anybody who cannot break the Rock barrier is frankly a phillistine, just like anybody who dismisses all Opera or all Funk. Genre is a nebulous thing anyway. Somebody who dismisses all Rock lives in the same teepee as the one who only listens to Garth Brooks. And nobody wants to live in that teepee.

The second barrier to enjoying mezmerize is probably the silliness. It's a very silly album, and you'd be forgiven for dismissing it at this point. For example:

"It's the violent pornogrpahy!
Choking chicks and SODOMY!
The kinda shit you get on your TV!"

What are they trying to say? It's, like, they're being, like, shocking, but really they're, like, criticizing culture.

And there's the hook barrier of 2 or 3 listens before the catchy tunes take hold.

But then there are wonders and mountains and buzzards and hot rhythmic houries. Not really a fit subject for my blog which is better suited to describing the more profane moments of art.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is excellent. I've been catching it on Channel 4. While you're watching it it almost feels like a straightforward drama like House or Ally Mcbeal. But it's so well constructed and jam-packed, it carries on in your head after you switch it off. My favourite part is how there's a clock ticking down the hours until the next episode that Chandler off of Friends has to script and he gets bugged by reporters and personal life troubles and stuff but he still manages to win through. If you want to be a writer, that's a good thing to see on telly.

Like the West Wing, it's all about the triumph. Catastrophes happen, but there's no bleak endings and the bad guys never do more than cause a spot of bother. The good guys pull together with their spunk and some brand of democratic american values get promoted. It should be sickening, but the writing is so first rate, and the viewer is never spoken down to. We frequently have to rewind the tape cos we crunch crisps or speak over some snappy punchline or smug quip. You wouldn't do that with an episode of Will and Grace. But in Studio 60, the writers don't telegraph and repeat every single revelation, so you have to keep up and if you do you are rewarded with a very good story.

Lastly, I just finished Heartbreak Soup by Gilbert Hernandez, but I'm all out of hyperbole. I'm sure it's had plenty of praise already. But the world is a good place for it. All these things, in fact. Mezmerize, Studio 60, Heartbreak Soup. These are all reasons why the world is a wonderful place. These and half a bottle of wine.