Scary movie

Zombies, ghosts, vampires, Satan, exorcism. None of these scare me. They don't exist, so they're not scary. That simple. I love a good horror but probably more for the dark humor. Sometimes even the over-the-top gore is so ridiculous it can be nothing other than funny. But you just don't know what you're going to get sometimes; you might end up watching one of those execrable Scream movies or a rubbish remake like the Hills Have Eyes. Not only are they not scary, and not entertaining, they can be pretty annoying. The characters in Scream are as irritating as the extras in Billy Piper's first music video.

So. If you asked me to name a genuinely scary horror movie, the first on my list would be "A Soft Touch", (One of the shorts in The Acid House, by Danny Boyle and based on the Irvine Welsh book of the same title.)

Johnny is the soft touch, a cowardly pleb who gets shacked up with a life-sucking wench, and inherits her nutcase family after a sawn-off-shotgun wedding. They're all scary monsters but the biggest fiend arrives in the form of new neighbor Larry; another lowlife nutjob who sizes up johnny's softiness right off, gleeful at the prospect of taking the piss proper. With the equivalent of a horror heroine running back upstairs, you have to peak through your fingers as Johnny keeps going back for punishment rather than standing up for himself. The ending really is the stuff of nightmares, a far worse prospect than waking up in a coffin, or getting bitten by the head vampire.

Last night, I watched Eden Lake, which goes straight to the top of my charts of genuinely scarey movies. The premise isn't new; some nice people go away and encounter some not so nice people, then things start to go wrong, that's the general plot for hundreds of horror movies. But I find a lot of these films just that bit too other-worldly (American) to be genuinely frightening. It takes a film set a bit closer to home, with recognisable monsters, to make it feel authentic to me. And there's nothing scarier then a teenager with a Stanley knife in his pocket and little activity between his ears, let alone a conscience. This is the happy slap generation, an age when someone can make their parents proud by urinating on a girl having a fit just to put it on youtube. So the horror we're faced with in Eden Lake is all too plausible and very very scary.

(If you're a This Is England fan, two of the guys are in this too, Thomas Turgoose has a small enough part, but one of the other guys, James Burrows is completely unrecognisable without the skinhead. I recognised the voice and the swagger long before making out the face. )

Somers Town

Got home last night with no keys, and her indoors wasn't indoors. So that's me off on a me-date, woohoo! Straight down to the cinema for something that 'looks good and starts soon'. Shane Meadow's latest, Somers town is just about to start, score!

Movie over. Ring Ring. Missus still out. Oh no, I'll have to continue the me-date. Straight in to one of those little Chinese places on Parnel street for Pork and Chinese beer. Poor me. Ring Ring. She's back. Doh! So I don't get to end the me-date with a pint and a Crossaire.

Somers town is nice enough. It's about a teenage runaway down from the midlands who befriends a lonely Polish boy. And they both want to get into the knickers of a gorgeous French waitress. It's low-key, low-budget, low-script. It's exactly how you would expect it to be. Doesn't pull the same punches as This is England or Dead Man's Shoes. But it's not trying to. It's a lot quieter and quite funny in places.

Uncanny valley

There's this theory in robotics called the Uncanny Valley. It's now well acknowledged in computer graphics too. It's when a human character looks and moves almost realistically lifelike yet not quite perfect. And this somethings-not-quite-right can be a bit jarring to watch. So in 3D animation, unless you can depict a human in flawless reality, you shouldn't even bother. Take a step back.

Pixar know this. They can do perfectly realistic landscapes, seascapes, objects, hair etc - but they keep their distance from lifelike humans and instead have fun with caricatures. Many feature length movies have completely flopped because they dared to walk the valley, like Final Fantasy.

Now meet Emily.

The first question is has she climbed out of the valley. And the second one is, what's the point? Why not use real actors? Unless you're talking about actual in-game playing. That could be pretty amazing but I reckon it'd be fad you'd tire of quickly. Of course this technology will most likely be used for some weird-assed porn.

It's a bit like photorealistic paintings? What's the point? I still wow at the technical ability of photorealistic paintings but they're a bit pointless really.

I do enjoy a good dose of twisted hypereality though. Like that Spanish guy who does it all in biros. Juan Franciscoasas, and of course Ron Mueck's sculptures fucking rock. And there's a huge photorealistic painting of an old woman in some gallery in Washington DC that I love - it's made from nothing but thumbprints (and can *not* be found after twenty frigging minutes with Inspector Google).

But when it comes to straight up painting, give me Kandinsky's bubbles, De Chirico's dummies, a fractured nude descending a staircase, or Bacon's twisted torsos any day of the week. Hell even hit me with some Rothko. And what do you mean you could paint that!? Well you didn't! And more to the point, you couldn't. Unless he picked out the colours and mixed them for you but you never even considered that monumental part of the process, did you dipwad!?

Way to go on a tangent AND state the obvious.

ET + Johnny Five = WALL-E

ET + Johnny Five = WALL-E, originally uploaded by jbraine.