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East Oxford Community Centre

This year I attended Caption on the 5^th of August (my birthday). I was still assembling the Anarchy Annual at lunchtime that day (a great way to spend your birthday morning). Caption is a small press comic convention, a meeting place for people who make their own underground comics. So it was an excellent birthday treat, but I couldn’t go without my own comic! Of course the Annual was created using all the latest comic techniques, Photoshop, Illustrator, proper PDF’s. But I was able to maintain the essence of hand made comics by mass producing it in the Cowley Road Oxfam photocopier next door to the East Oxford Community Centre where Caption was taking place.

Caption was enjoying its 15^th year in the new venue, having previously been held at the Oxford Union and then Wolfson College. I felt that the seedy environs of the Community Centre enhanced the Caption experience in a very appropriate way, particularly its subsidised bar. I usually only stumble into the place very late at night – it’s an excellent place to drink cans of Red Stripe and observe the weirder side of Oxford life.

The best thing about an event like Caption is you meet other people who are just as obsessed as you are with comics, art, manga, anime, computer games, printing, sci fi, fantasy and all manner of other interests. This year I met Matthew Craig who had sent me a script via an excellent piece of blogrolling on Bugpowder (the premier Small Press comics news site). I also met a chap called Kieron Gillen who had just returned from the San Diego comic-con (Caption x1,000,000) promoting his brand new comic Phonogram (which is reviewed here on Shiptonblog). I also attend a seminar on the subject of Cutting Edge Comics presented by Dan Goodbrey hypercomics pioneer. I was able to contribute several fantastic comments and questions, aided by my three pints of cider on a relatively empty stomach. After which I had to leave to continue an evening of traditional birthday binge drinking.

I am already looking forward to next years Caption, where I plan to leave a comic on the ‘For Sale’ table rather than the ‘Free’ table.

Caption – official website
Bugpowder – small press comic portal
Anarchy Annual (link and annual not present due to me being unable to upload anything in La France)
Matthew Craig – prolific comics chap and now Anarchy Annual contributor
Kieron Gillen – very interesting Blog
Phonogram – comic by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie
Dan Goodbrey – hyper comics pioneer

Imdb link
Dir: Gore Verbinski
Date: 2006
Length: 150 min

For the first hour and a half I had absolutely no idea what the fuck was going on, until a pirate explained the entire plot to another pirate while rowing a boat. The film then effectively repeated itself for what seemed like another 3 hours. I was of course backing the baddies, as Tom Hollander who played the No1 baddie is my old biology teachers’ son.

It’s my mother’s opinion that none of the actors actually met each other and were all bluescreened in. She said “it would have helped if they had actually acted”. Johnny Depp was great, although his Kieth Richards impression was not as good as the first film. Kiera Bloody Knightly and her big anorexic head with stupid eyebrows pissed me off more than you can possibly imagine. Her film presence of “ooh er Im Kiera Knightly you will have read about me ad nauseam in the mags gutter press etc so I don’t have to act” was grating beyond belief and actually made Orlando Bloom look acceptable! Everyone else was completely irrelevant and was clearly just there for the cash.

I was momentarily interested when they had a load of new Asian and Indian crewmates at the beginning of the film. However they were immediately put in a cage of human bones and thrown to their deaths. More or less everyone else in the film was white, strange that. The sailors of the high seas in the ‘pirating era’ this film is supposed to be set in were very ethnically diverse. Pirates of the Caribbean 2 is a film that is confused about whether it’s a fantasy film or a pirate film, and could not define its own boundaries. Are people actually in danger of death? No, so why should we be worried when a big fucking cgi squid comes along and kills everyone who had no lines until “aieeeee”? It won’t get the main characters, and even if they do it doesn’t matter, they’re needed for the next film! So facts like “it takes 130 men to crew a square rigged ship such as the black pearl not 6″ can be flagrantly ignored. No doubt this explains why the idea of picking up a diverse crew from the worlds ports can be forgotten too.

Pirates of the Caribbean 2 is a typical Hollywood cash-in rip-off. It has the hall marks of a film having experienced development hell in every aspect apart from that of the budget. I love films that have undergone development hell and have been butchered in the editing room, had stroppy actors and sinking sets. Werner Herzog’s Klaus Kinski experiences and films such as Aguirre Wrath of God and Fitzcoraldo are incredibly important to me. Alien3 is a marvel as David Fincher’s genius shines through, as does the malevolence of the main character, the alien, despite the films troubles. I also have a taste for the post apocalyptic and as a result I liked Mad Max 3 and actually stopped hating Hook when I realised how much Spielberg had ripped MM3 off (scene for scene).

Pirates of the Caribbean 2 is not as intrinsically fascinating as Herzog’s work, nor fascinatingly flawed as Alien 3 and neither is it as an appalling a cash-in rip off of the Hook variety. All of these routes to liking a film were cut off to me. And worst of all I could not appreciate it purely for its special effects. There were too many! I loved the fishy seamen, but they were over done, I spent the whole time trying to work out what sea-life the one on the left was related to, rather than listening to the plot and characters. I suppose the fact that as there were no characters or plot it didn’t matter too much.

This film needed someone with balls to come along and scissor it to death in the editing room. But it’s made its money back, so who gives a shit?

3/10

Imdb link
Dir: Bryan Singer
Date: 2006
Length: 154 min

This film was OK. I would recommend seeing it for the first half, especially the bit with the plane. You will see the ultimate Superman action possible. The rest is pretty much rubbish. Some points:

• Not as good as the first one.
• Metropolis was a simple New York rip off unlike the entirely new Gotham of Batman Begins
• I was pleased to see Gotham name checked
• Louis lane was a miserable cow, Teri hatcher and Margot Kidder are a pair of Vivian Lieghs in comparison
• Sad to see the Daily News building no longer used for the Daily Planet
• Louis Lane’s Metropolis riverside house would be a disused dock/hipster wine bar in Redhook Brooklyn in real New york
• Why did Superman have a Kid??
• Supes’ sprog is going to have major issues due to discovering a surrogate father, killing a man and witness his mother nearly die in traumatic circumstances, a ticking emotional time bomb denied the stability of his fathers all American/cosmic crystal upbringing
• There were hardly any black people in it
• Clearly influenced by the work of Alex Ross, which is a good thing

Score: 7 ½ / 10