6 posts tagged “late night”

Even though I've had an eminently respectable Werner Herzog film out on rental for ages now, last night for some reason I decided to watch Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo - which isn't just a bad film but a SEQUEL to a bad film. And it was so thunderingly, bizarrely horrible that once I'd started watching I SIMPLY COULDN'T STOP.

I have only myself to blame. I could have switched it off after the first two minutes when Deuce is impelled to visit his ex-pimp in Amsterdam because he's trying to lay low having inadvertantly caused a TERRIBLE CETACEAN DISASTER. Or a bit later when TJ the pimp is worried people will think he's gay because he keeps getting caught looking at DEAD MEN'S PENISES. Or when Deuce has to start whoring again in order to investigate the gigolo murders and takes out a woman whose mother worked at Chernobyl and who was born with a PENIS instead of a nose, and I'm assuming she has a little pair of FACIAL GONADS as well because, well, you can guess what happens when she sneezes. Or when another client of Deuce's turns out to be a woman with no larynx who is somehow able to geiser wine out of her TRACHEOSTOMY. Or when I discovered that Deuce's pretty Dutch love interest is played by a woman who is LITERALLY YOUNG ENOUGH to be Rob Schneider's DAUGHTER. Or when TJ drops some chips in a toilet but decides to eat them anyway and then a cat comes in and SAVAGES HIS BALLS.

BUT I DIDN'T SWITCH IT OFF.

I sat through every damn knob, tit and fart joke. Every gag about Asian men's penises being small (which is a stereotype I'd heard of but never actually seen deployed), or how funny it is when men get sexually assaulted by women (or by other men. In prison), or people accidentally eating SPUNK because someone just sneezed it into their soup. HA HA! And Oded Fehr was in it for all of two minutes - which is a ridiculously short amount of time for Oded Fehr to be in something - and most of that time he spent CHOKING. And then it did that thing that ALL American gross-out sex-comedies do, which is to have a completely incongruous sweetly conservative unsubtle message. Deuce is kind of a spod and probably a hopeless lover, but women like him because he TOTALLY ASKS THEM ABOUT THEIR DAY and is all nice to them and shit. And it's sweet and NOT AT ALL CREEPY that he carries his dead wife's prosthetic leg around with him and encourages his clients to get boob jobs.

And I sat there and I watched it and I watched it and I didn't watch the eminently respectable Werner Herzog film that I've had out on rental for AGES NOW and I marvelled at how much skill and time and effort had gone into making this HORRIBLE FILM and I hated Rob Schneider and I hated Adam Sandler but most of all I hated MYSELF.

Bit late for Halloween, but if you're still in the mood for something spooky, you could do a lot worse than check out the hospital hopscotch section at darkpassage.com for explorations of abandoned asylums. Mainly photographs, with a little bit of commentary, it's amazing how creepy the sight of blistered paint and bird shit and discarded wheelchairs can be. Not to mention shots of mouldering underground service tunnels stretching off into utter undisturbed darkness.

I highly advise you to do as I did and view them late at night when you're alone in the house. 

Odd, my recent posts don't seem to be showing up on my main page.

Thoughts on last night's Torchwood and Fear of Fanny.

ETA: Oh, and now they are.

*thumps Vox*

I was determined to watch Fear of Fanny even though the BBC schedulers were making it really hard for me, so I stayed up last night and caught the repeat.

I'm glad I did because it was fabulous. Fanny Craddock was clearly an extremely difficult - at times positively monstrous - person, yet this was a very sympathetic portrayal, not just of her but of the people closest to her. All the characters are deftly sketched; we come to see Fanny as a person terrified of abandonment but unable to stop pushing people away. Her partner Johnnie obviously adores her (and Mark Gatiss was so sweet in this role), but when he's dying in hospital she just can't bring herself to be with him.

I liked it a lot.

Oh, it was so worth staying up for.

*smooches Torchwood*

Damn you Alfonso Cuarón! First you make me like the Harry Potter films, then you make me perv over Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal getting off with one another in a scene which will just not leave my head, thus ruining what might otherwise have been a perfectly good night's sleep (and damn you Channel 4 for showing Y Tu Mamá También so late in the first place).

Why can't you just make shallow films that I have no interest in either thinking about afterwards or immediately buying on DVD?