Fuzzy Logic
And welcome to the 43rd World Stare-Out Championships
Kevin Clash holds a rare distinction – a man famous throughout the world, beloved by children, yet able to walk down the street completely unrecognised.
An unassuming 50-something from Baltimore, Clash is the man who gives voice and movement to Elmo, the plush red monster who has become the latter day star of Sesame Street, and whose likeness appears everywhere from lunchboxes to tickle-sensitive toys.
The muppet had been around for years on the show, never really finding much momentum, before Clash took over puppeteering duties in the mid-80s, finding a new falsetto, childlike voice and character for the creation which took it from also-ran to a central figure on the show.
Being Elmo, which won the special jury prize at Sundance last year, closed the Glasgow Youth Film Festival last night with perfect timing, as the city – if not the whole country – goes Muppet daft thanks to the new Jason Segel movie out earlier this month.
A relentlessly upbeat film, it is the ultimate rags to stitches story of a boy who grew up a Sesame Street fan, started making his own puppets to entertain local kids, and rose up through the industry to become one of the main figures in the post-Henson empire, executive producing Sesame Street,
It’s hard to not love Being Elmo. Everything about the film is designed to give you a warm, fuzzy glow, telling the heartwarming tale of a man responsible for bringing joy to kids everywhere.
But at the same time, there’s hints of a darkness around being Elmo that the documentary – understandably, but regrettably, skirts around. Not least of which is the heavy implication that Clash’s role as puppeteer and producer on Sesame Street, and the heavy touring schedule that performing Elmo around the world carries, caused the end of his marriage and leaves him little time to see his daughter.
We see Clash’s daughter’s sweet 16th, where his Sesame Street contacts book has helped him secure birthday messages for her from Jack Black and LL Cool J, but even then Elmo pops up. Obviously the character has a special importance for Clash, but there’s times – including in archive footage when he’s taking his pregnant ex-wife to hospital to give birth – that his dropping back into character seems just… odd.
Pressure
And there’s a flip side to Being Elmo, too. Not only the personal cost to him, but a strange pressure which, again, the documentary only hints at. Meeting Elmo is one of the most requested dreams the Make A Wish charity brings to fruition for dying kids in the States.
We see Clash interacting with them, and their families, in character, but what kind of pressure does it put on a man – an estranged father, no less – when he has the responsibility of bringing a final moment of happiness into these childrens’ lives? Dwelling on that may seem mawkish, yet it hangs over those moments heavily.
Elmo is a divisive figure, particularly among Sesame Street fans – where he’s seen as having taken over the show at the expense of previous crowd favourites such as Oscar and Big Bird. Part of that has been the heavy commercialisation of the character, aimed at the teeny audience. The documentary touches on that briefly, but only in his incredulity at the popularity of those Tickle Me Elmo dolls. Any critical analysis of his impact goes right out the window. Largely because it’s quite hard to be criticial when you see Elmo hugging a dying child.
Frustratingly, once we reach Clash joining the Sesame Street team, we get little else. Understandable, given the popularity of Elmo, but we don’t really see any of his other work – such as performing a variety of Muppets, his time on Dinosaurs (he was the voice and puppeteer of the Baby) or even doing Splinter on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies.
But we do get some remarkable behind the scenes footage, not just of his work with Henson but of Clash’s early days on local TV and Captain Kangaroo. And some fantastic archive newsreel footage following him as a schoolboy puppeteer, meeting Kermit Love and working on creating his own characters which are notably very Henson-esque.
It’s clear the fanboy love that Kevin Clash has for his work – talking about how nervous he got working with Henson and Frank Oz on a commercial, or being ready to walk away from two network TV shows and steady paycheques in order to work on The Dark Crystal.
And we see Clash passing on his skills and enthusiasm onto a young kid who, like him, has grown up idolising the backstage performers as much as the puppets themselves. One suspects, post-Muppets, he might be even busier in that regard, but it’s a lovely – if slightly cliched – way of bringing the story back full circle.
Being Elmo is very much the authorised biography version of Clash – and Elmo’s – story. Everything’s furry and happy and full of love and hugs, and you’ll find yourself laughing out loud throughout. There’s something instinctively funny about the puppets – and the way they come to life almost by accident. But at the back of your mind there’s still the feeling there’s something missing.
We know a bit of what Being Elmo is like. But we don’t know as much about being Kevin Clash.
The Burger Restaurant At The End Of The Universe
"Aye, but are ye a Catholic robot or a Protestant robot, wee man?"
Regular listeners to the podcast may remember we talked a wee bit back about the legendary Buck Rogers Burger Station.
For those who missed it, or who haven’t heard of this minor miracle of culinary marvel, it was a burger bar in Glasgow back in the days when burger bars were a rarity. The pilot for a franchise of restaurants, it opened on Queen Street in late 1982 and closed in fairly short order after being damaged by a fire in the building next door.
Name changes did little to rescue it and eventually it became the Archaos nightclub.
A unique place – the only real competition the town had at that point was a Wimpy – with videos of the first two episodes from the Gil Gerard series running on screens, along with new films made in a studio on the premises featuring Scots acting legend Russell Hunter, and with Kevin Devine – who would go on to find fame as one of Esther’s Boys on That’s Life – as a dancer entertaining diners.
For years the restaurant’s taken on a sort of urban myth status here – not least because of the lack of decent photographs which can be found to confirm the place’s existence.
But some deep hunting online has uncovered something truly beautiful. A scan of a page from Look In! magazine when the restaurant opened. Now, we don’t know whose scan this is – it came up on Google Images without any links to the original uploader – although we can probably take an educated guess. And if it’s yours, please get in touch so we can credit/venerate you appropriately.
But in the meantime, click to expand, sit back, and enjoy the delights of a menu where you have to pay for everything in dribbles and get offered a ‘Happy Landings’ by a dwarf in a robot costume.
Lair Raid Precautions
"No chance. You are not popping my zit with that thing..."
The red-band trailer for Welsh director Gareth Huw Evans’ new flick The Raid caused quite the stir when it hit the web last autumn. 107 seconds of dizzyingly violent action, set to a Linkin Park-esque soundtrack, folk went unsurprisingly tonto for the flashy visuals, gunplay and claret.
The Raid marks Evans’ third collaboration with Indonesian star Iko Uwais – and his second fictional story built around the Silat performer’s incredible skills. The baby-faced martial artist-cum-actor seems to serve as Evans’ kung-fu muse, with the pair reportedly eschewing the inevitable US remake of The Raid in favour of making a new film together instead.
But what of this offering, which has enjoyed cult stardom online thanks to that trailer and some word-of-mouth showings at international film festivals? Can it live up to the Snakes On A Plane-esque hype that the controversial promo produced?
Well, it’s certainly as action packed. The trailer serves more like a precis of the film than a teaser, showcasing – largely in story order – the big setpiece fight sequences, including a stunning machete fight in a corridor, and an innovative use of a fridge.
So we’ll work in reverse order because, let’s be honest here, for many viewers the plot is going to be secondary to the action sequences.
The visceral, hyperkinetic style of martial arts action fits in perfectly with Evans’ direction style, which avoids the horrid flashy MTV jumpcuts that blight so many a fight sequence. Instead, he allows the camera to largely flow and follow the action, ensuring there’s never any doubt about who’s fighting whom, and where.
And while imbuing the action sequences with the sort of energy and pace they require, Evans’ camerawork is perfectly judged when it comes to the quieter scenes – be it the camera drunkenly lurching after a concussed cop, picking out the silhouettes of hidden gunmen on a balcony or even just following a man scraping a knife agains the wall. The brief pauses in the action exist largely to ramp up both the tension and the stakes for the main cast.
Cliche
Much of the action is driven by Uwais’ rookie cop Rama, who is burdened by a backstory that draws deep from the well of cliche. An inexperienced good guy, effectively stranded behind enemy lines, with a pregnant wife waiting at home, and a familial tie to the enemy, the familiarity of the character almost breeds contempt.
But that cliche works – not only in explaining the motivation of the character but in driving the climax of the film. With the stakes continually being raised for Rama, to the point where in the midst of all the chaos he shrugs off his flak jacket, taking on the armed enemy at the same time as he takes control of the surviving group and faces his opponents man to man, it’s a symbolic growth from boy to manhood.
Against all this, the story mixes together glimpses of a clutch of other sources – a dash of Infernal Affairs, a soupcon of Hard Boiled… And also, strangely, there’s an echo of French zombie flick La Horde, with an armed police action against gangsters in a hostile tower block becoming a battle to escape and survive using any means necessary with little prospect of aid coming their way.
That story sees a SWAT team being sent in to apprehend Indonesia’s public enemy number one from his base inside a Jakarta tower block. The gangster is surrounded by floors of underlings, drug-dealers and the city’s underclass – and when the raid goes wrong, the cops very quickly end up in a battle for their survival in a building full of people who see them as coachroaches due extermination.
While Rama serves as the film’s centre, the best performance comes from Doni Alamsyah as Andi, the quiet henchman of tower block gangster Tama, who provides many of the film’s strongest moments of both emotion and stillness – remarkable amid the frenetic action unravelling around him.
It is, as you’d expect, an unrelentingly brutal film – taking John Woo-esque gunplay and the martial arts wirework of Yuen Woo-pint and adding them into an even more frenetic and visually impressive style. That brings with it its own problems though – while guns and knives are seen to be fatal almost without exception, unarmed combat sees folk having skulls bashed off floors, walls and solid metal like with nary a trauma.
Likewise dramatically there’s issues with the way the story unfolds that smack of someone behind the scenes hoping the fireworks throughout the rest of the film will distract viewers. The whole thing hangs together, just about, thanks to the occasionally implied corruption of the police force, lending the script an easy get-out clause to avoid the question of why nobody else in Jakarta notices the large amount of gunplay taking place in one of it’s most notorious tower blocks. Likewise the somewhat trite ‘and then everything turned out ok after all’ ending jars slightly, feeling somewhat thrown away after Tama’s big reveal.
Ultimately, what you take from The Raid depends largely on your expectations going in. If you’re looking for a visceral experience – an extended fight sequence, a kinetic blur of action and violence – then you won’t be disappointed. But there’s very little going on behind that other than some cliched drama that wouldn’t be out of place in a slightly off-kilter episode of the Bill.
Still, if you’re prepared for that, this is basically one extended, IV drip of adrenaline. And it’s hard not to be impressed by that.
The Raid has its UK premier at FrightFest Glasgow 2012 – part of the 2012 Glasgow Film Festival – on February 25 at 11.15pm.
Any old fucker with an Equity card
"Now then now then..."
Interesting news this morning after Mark Gatiss let slip (sort of) on Graham Norton’s radio show that he was working on a drama about the origins of Doctor Who.
Now this shouldn’t necessarily come as a shock in itself. After all, it’s not that long ago that the BBC screened the magnificent Road to Coronation St docudrama on BBC4, recounting Tony Warren’s efforts to write and cast Corrie, to mark the soap’s 50th year.
And with next year marking the golden anniversary of An Unearthly Child airing to a country still shocked at the news of President Kennedy’s death, it’d be an obvious route for them to go down. In fact, the only surprise would be if BBC4 DIDN’T have some kind of drama looking at the early years of the show – from Verity Lambert landing the producer’s gig to Ray Cusick’s famous designs for the show’s most iconic monsters.
Gatiss is an obvious choice for it – a noted lover of period television and of Doctor Who, with experience of writing for BBC4 (among other channels). And, interestingly, he had a somewhat controversial crack at the secret origins of Doctor Who before…
The Thumbcast
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