What Happened? Saturday night at the movies

I went to a friend’s place on Saturday night. He cooked up a big roast then we sat down to one of those old-fashioned family dinners, where everyone is laughing and talking and passing the gravy.

Then we played cards. It had been 23 years between hands for me, but it all came back quickly.

Finally we watched the M Night Shyamalan movie The Happening.

Wow. If ever there’s been a mistitled film it’s that one. This was because, over the 91 minute running time, basically nothing happened; and it built to a climax … where … nothing happened.

Mark Wahlberg and the very hot Zooey Deschanel starred as a young married couple who go on the run after people in New York, and then all over the north-east US, start killing themselves.

It turns out – as near as I can gather – that the trees, pissed off because all the bees have disappeared, start excreting a neurotoxin that flips a switch inside people’s brains: specifically the switch that says “don’t kill yourself”.

A few select people do try to do the Moon Walk before they die, but for the most part people just stand stock still, then choose the nearest useful means of self-disposal.

So we get to see people committing suicide in weird and wonderful ways. At the start of the film a construction crew is amazed when a bloke throws himself off an unfinished building. Then another. So the construction worker looks up and there’s a queue of people all walking off the top of the building.

At which point I couldn’t help myself: I broke into a chorus of “It’s raining men”.

And it was too soon for the dying people to be disillusioned audience members. Really, you don’t feel like killing yourself till near the end of the film.

The trees, incidentally, were only sending out a warning, and stopped killing people after about 24 hours. And, mysteriously, they seemed to keep their killing spree inside state and international borders. Which was bloody considerate.

So all was good. Till the end of the film, when the French trees get pissed off and start killing people. Imagine being persuaded to kill yourself by a French tree. I thought that’s what French cinema was for.

Pedestrians – why can't I run them over?

I’ve looked, I swear to god I’ve looked, but I cannot find that bastard anywhere.

I’m talking, of course, about the big sign that's on the front bumper of my car. The one that says: “Pedestrians, please cross in front of this car, you’re perfectly safe”. I know it's there because, whenever I’m in a queue of traffic, there’s a whole line of pedestrians who cross the road directly in front of my car.

It’s not even as if it’s a small car. Gullible me – last year, when petrol prices were surging over $2 a litre, a family member conned me into selling my 1600cc Toyota Corolla and buying a three-litre straight six Lexus Soarer. Bloody nice car, grunty as hell, can’t afford to drive it faster than an intoxicated snail because it sucks more juice than a dehydrated Sherman tank.

The steering is just a little wonky and the brakes are a little soft. Yet people still seem quite comfortable crossing in front of me when I’m stopped in a queue at the lights. AT THE LIGHTS! They should be down there at the bloody button, waiting for the little red man to turn green; they shouldn’t be wandering up the street five metres just so they can cross in front of my car.

Last week I was driving up Willis St in Wellington. It was pushing rush hour, but this one stretch of road was oddly quiet. I floored it a bit to try to make the lights. And when I say “floored it” I mean I was pushing 40k’s here. This dude with a briefcase just wanders out in front of me. I jam on the breaks and hit the horn. The arrogant bastard didn’t even freaking look at me!

Which led me to later tweet the question: When is it OK to run someone over? Surely, based on Darwin’s survival of the fittest, this guy deserved to die. Why can’t you use Darwin as a defence in court?

I guess the problem is that I know the law in this situation. Unless the pedestrian has “set a trap” for the motorist, the motorist will always be held accountable. Which sucks. The law should state that anyone not fast enough to get out of the way, or who doesn’t know what the diamond at a pedestrian crossing means, should be run over as a matter of course.

And I’m just the one to do it.

Top Five Rare Pink Floyd Gems

This is my Top 5 rare Pink Floyd songs which, in my opinion, have never received the credit they deserve.

First off, yes, I’m a huge Pink Floyd fan. I, too, hated their psychedelic stuff, so don’t worry about that. I’m just going to give you great, well-written songs; inventive, strong and attractive but generally overlooked over the years.

Got to say, there’s probably a lean towards the acoustic sounding stuff, but that’s really where the band’s early strength lay. That and Gilmour’s guitarwork – wow. At their best they could out-compose and out-imagine The Beatles; yet they were always under the shadow of insanity, then their trippy rep, anti-war propaganda and later the Watersless days.

My basis for picking the songs was that they not have appeared in mainstream compilation albums nor have they turned up regularly in live sets.

5. Green is the Colour

The oldest of the selection, this song appeared in 1969 on the soundtrack to the film More. It was the first Floyd album to not have Syd Barrett involved in any way. Apparently in 1970 Roger Waters said the song was about being on Ibiza – I guess that must have been before they covered the island in night clubs.



4. Fearless

Pink Floyd was just churning them out as the 70s rolled around. In 1971 was seminal album Meddle – the first of their post-Syd Barrett albums to prove without doubt that the band didn’t need the troubled genius at the reins.

That’s not to say Barrett’s influence wasn’t still there. Roger Waters wrote the song but used an open G major tuning he’d learned from Syd. Mix into that the Liverpool football club’s fans singing You’ll Never Walk Alone and you have a jewel of a song.

Considered a bit of an underground hit for Floyd, it was nevertheless not released as a single and is seldom heard in their live work. It did also appear on the rare 1983 American compilation album Works.




3. Mother

One of the first songs I really enjoyed on The Wall (1979). Yes, the lyrics are a disturbing portrait of a mother smothering her child. But the song's structure and style are so simple. After a killer solo from Gilmour, you can feel the singer’s anger coming through. It’s an anthem of teen angst that carried right through to adulthood. It’s also a bloody good song.




2. Two Suns in the Sunset

“Like the moment when your brakes lock, and you slide towards the big truck, you stretch the frozen moments with your fear. And you’ll never hear their voices, and you’ll never see their faces, you have no recourse to the law, anymore.”

As his official swansong from the band Roger Waters gave us a wonderful song about being caught in a nuclear blast. It appeared on an album considered the band's first flop. True The Final Cut (1983) is largely inaccessible, and apart from this the Fletcher Memorial Home (for incurable tyrants and kings) is the only decent song on it. Yet I’m still hypnotised by the farewell sax solo. Just beautiful.




1. Wot’s … uh the deal

In 1972 Pink Floyd released super-smash album Dark Side of the Moon. A classic in all respects that fully deserved its 11 years on the Billboard charts. However, it was not the only album the band released that year, the other was a movie soundtrack called Obscured By Clouds. Perhaps Obscured by Dark Side of the Moon would have been a more appropriate title.

This song was a stand-out on the album and in fact was resurrected by Gilmour and Mason in some of their 2006 sets. OK, the production values are still very 60s but you can see the strength of the Gilmour/Waters songwriting team shining through without the distraction of fancy synthesizers, sound effects, or temptations of the psychedelic.

Welcome to the Jungle

Another Top 5 for you. I was inspired to write this one while watching Underbelly on TV last night. The theme song included a sample line of "It's a jungle out there", which I particularly noticed because it reminded me of an old 90s song that used that exact same sample.

So I thought: Top 5 songs with the word "Jungle" in the title or lyrics.

Now I could have gone for the obvious – Guns n Roses or Kool and the Gang – or even gone Disney. But I decided to let that lion sleep tonight. Instead I did some research and came up with these:

5. The song that inspired it all. From their album Broadcast, Strawpeople's track – allegedly inspired by a certain amateur surgery performed by Lorena Bobbitt – Trick With a Knife.



4. The Vines came up with this offering. OK, so the opening guitar riff rips off Blue Oyster Cult and they have this belief that changing tempos three or four times a song and screaming into the mic somehow gives your music credibility. Nonetheless, quite a good track.



3. Probably the most commercially-recognised on the list, Steve Miller's Jungle Love, from the 1977 album Book of Dreams (and you'll never guess how I knew that!). This would have ranked higher if it wasn't for the "Hey, I've got a synthesizer and this is what I can do with it" wank at the start.



2. Alphabeat offers this cool rock/pop track. There's even a bit of jungle drumming in the mix.



1. I tend more towards punk than jazz, but this is a neat track by the Cafe Soul All Stars featuring Kenny Garrett and Roy Ayers. It's called Urban Jungle and has a nice long "sounds of the big city" intro before running into a modern jazz groove. Listening to this you can convince yourself you're in a Shaft movie. I even rated this ahead of contenders Kool & The Gang's Jungle Boogie, the Meters' Jungle Man and even Bob Marley's Concrete Jungle.



Oh and a special mention to Emiliana Torrini for her very odd track Jungle Drum ... dunka dunka dunka dunka...

Top Five - Happy Together

I was watching High Fidelity at the weekend and enjoyed the "top five" lists the guys kept creating. So I thought I would do a few of my own from time-to-time. I was going to start with Top Five covers of great '60s songs, but flagged that one when I started looking at just the first on my random list.

So here it is, the Top Five covers of the Turtles' old classic, Happy Together.

5. I'm not a fan of dance mixes, which is why this version by Supremacy Studio is further down the ranks.



4. Well, the next few are kind of pop-punk. Fastest version was by New Found Glory, but I'm a bit of a Weezer fan, so chose their version instead.



3. Despite it being used in a Lindsay Lohan flick, I quite like Simple Plan's cover.



2. Oddly enough, another dance mix. I liked what DJ Kicken did with the song. Somehow sticks with the spirit of it without going OTT.



1. They got off their bicycle and produced this excellent cover. It kind of colours within the musical lines while still doing its own thing. Here's the Flobots:

The Final Frontier

When humankind finally goes exploring into deep space, who gets to decide which way we go?

It occurred to me at the weekend, while I was listening to some people taking the piss out of Star Trek. And I got to thinking: OK, they're on a five year mission to explore space. Now, given the size of space, how much of it are you going to explore in five years? Because space is big. Ginormous, even. When we measure ourselves against space, well, the Earth is barely one particle of a gnat's fart in comparison.

But, I guess, we've got to start somewhere. The other thing that occurred to me is that we humans live a flat plane existence. Oh sure, we know the Earth is round, but it's so big that we perceive it as flat.

In reality, if you were to launch the USS Enterprise into space, there would be more than just a choice of left, right, front or back; there's up and down as well. So which way do we go? And how long do we go in one direction before we go a different way?

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the USS Enterprise. Its five year mission to seek out a new wig for William Shatner, to explore vast expanses of nothingness, to boldly go and go and go and keep going till we find something vaguely interesting. Then Bill's gonna kiss it and we can all go home.

Based on a True Story

The second series of Underbelly has hit New Zealand TV screens. The ads for the show say it's a true story, but now a journalist involved in breaking the Terry Clark story has come forward and said Underbelly's version of events is a heap of shit.

It's an interesting issue this whole education versus entertainment question. The series' creators will say they have bent the truth a bit to enable them to tell the story better. Maybe just so they can give Anna Hutchison's breasts more airtime. And anyway, they never said it was going to be a documentary.

This is true. But then, are they entitled to advertise it as a "true story"? It seems to me that filmmakers get around this by saying: "Based on a true story". But the idea that it's "based on a true story" is so tenuous that it would be more accurate to say "not complete fiction". Or "we got one of the name's right ... but it's spelt differently".

The best of these was admittedly the Cohen brothers' Fargo. The start of the film says the events are based on a true story. In fact, it wasn't. But who was to know?