"The Wrong and Future Song " - a music video

 

 

This is a video for my track "The Wrong and Future Song" by Jimmy Andrex. It's from my album "Lawns of a Better Place".

Jimmy Andrex is a Northern Beat Poet of wit, insight and generosity. You should check him out.

Does the hand of fate prevent you from getting what you want?

 

The Wrong and Future Song

There’s a rock I thought I would throw, he said

There’s a whole mountain of shit I thought I would know

I expected a franchise that would never let go, he said

Then he played the wrong song.

 

There’s a piece-of-mind I thought I’d misplace

Tides of inspiration and ricochets of grace

Punching holes in the moon when I’m just fed up, he said

Then he played the wrong song.

 

“Where’s my Cornish cottage

By the edge of the sea?”

Living atop a magnum opus, by the sea

Daydreaming… daydreaming…

And then he played the wrong song.

MadS

 

Mads

Writer & Director ~ David Moreau

2024, France

Stars ~ Lucille Guillaume, Laurie Pavy, Milton Riche

 

Well, it had me fully interested as soon as I realised it was a One-Shot Wonder, but then gave a quite jaw-dropping title credit sequence. I went in not knowing which direction it would take, and the allure is in the angle David Moreau takes to a familiar subject. Just like the ‘V/H/S’ series conceit can give an immediacy and veracity to regular tropes, or how ‘In A Violent Nature’s approach provides a little deconstruction of the Jason Vorhees’ style of slasher. ‘MadS’ isn’t trying to reinvent any wheel, but just taking a certain route to make something well-worn exciting again.

 

Of course, the technical achievement of a One-Shot Wonder is alone worth watching – it’s all that driving alongside vehicles, the choreography, the dedication of the actors – the logistics dazzle and Philip Lozano’s gliding camera is rarely incomprehensible. Rather, the gimmick tracks the route of infection, and just seeing a familiar trope done at a slightly different angle of intimacy and subjectivity invigorates it. One night out becomes a nightmarish descent into martial law. The trip into chaos is tightly steered.

 

It's not about narrative, but just the sheer careening into increasing fear and craziness in real time. One of the best sequences is Romain (Milton Riche) just getting home, already high for a night out and with a corpse in his daddy’s car, trying to make sense of how he deals with the situation: it’s here the subjectivity has the most resonance, with the character being duped into a WTF?! horror moment and wondering what to do next (just carry on as normal?).  

 

As a victim’s-eye-view of an End-of-the-World event, ‘MadS’ makes an effective evocation of the confusion with a punkish, pell-mell energy that complements its tag-team structure.

Heretic

 

Heretic

Writers & Directors ~ Scott Beck, Bryan Woods

2024, USA-Canada

Stars ~ Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East

 

It’s obviously Hugh Grant’s tour-de-force, but Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East are just as impressive. All three could have been 2D and that would have served the purpose of a Fun Thriller, but Beck and Woods script is more interested in these characters struggling with their beliefs. They are all trying to impose their faith on one another, but it’s the girls that are seemingly aware of the flaws in their Faith and absorb them.

 

Beck and Woods’ script goes through Gothicism, philosophy, twistiness, social commentary, Escape Room dilemmas, parlour games, clues and straight-up horror motifs (what’s in the basement?). It’s all to the power of keeping the audience on their toes through speeches on Monopoly and theism. It’s a bold film that halfway through tells the audience to settle down to hear a lecture of derivations and reiterations (which is fascinating).

 

Grant pulls out the Goofy Britishness to winning effect, but he conveys something frighteningly lost deep within his character, something that makes him a mansplainer of the most toxic kind. It’s a self-aware performance that says, “All this charm? It’s a mask.” His character is one of those people that hold you hostage and batter you down with passive-aggressiveness and the righteousness of their (conspiracy) theories under the guise of having some salient points and criticisms. And moving goalposts where necessary. And in the age of toxic social media interactions, this feels a particularly zeitgeisty villainy.

 

Yet ‘Heretic’s aim is also obviously for genre pleasure – whether mystery or horror or whatever – so it never feels preachy or slacking. Even so, it’s the debates that are the strength – it’s very talky. Of course, it has a cast that can keep up, from Grant’s posh boy passive aggressive menace to Thatcher and East’s fully believable and sympathetic Mormon girls. Their vulnerability and ordinary is tangible. There’s a criticism of trying to forcibly impose your view upon others under the facade of debate, a criticism of evangelism, and if the ultimate effect is fun over disturbance that’s why it’s attracted allegations of shallowness. Even so, that’s also surely going to propel it as a cult favourite.