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If “graffiti artist” wasn’t the contradiction in terms it so often is … 
This picture was a contribution to the Artwiculate word game on Twitter today. The Word of the Day was crass and that took my mind back to a certain punk rock group from my youth. (Turns out they’re still going – sort of.) A fellow Artwiculator from Japan had also tweeted about the death of punk and the death of samurais … that was enough. (With a bit of luck, the Japanese actually reads “Crass punk samurai”!)
You may be King Arthur, sir, and that may be Excalibur, but the law still doesn’t permit you to carry it down the High Street. A submission for Artwiculate (WOTD: Ignominious) and Loqwacious (WOTD: Excalibur)
I don’t know when I first saw Fantastic Voyage. I’d like it to have been at a matinée performance when it was released in Britain in the autumn of 1966, but I suppose that’s unlikely. (I would only have been 8 years old.) In all probability I saw it first on television sometime in the early 70s. The puzzling thing is, though, I think I remember the colours, but I don’t think we had a colour TV at the time. Now the Oscar-winning special effects seem dated. The sea of arterial red corpuscles looks suspiciously like a back-projected close-up of a lava lamp. But lense flares (for example in the picture below) do hint at one of the effects JJ Abrams was trying to recreate in his recent ‘re-envisioning’ of Star Trek. (See here.) Still, the scenes with the miniaturised submarine voyaging through a human body to deliver a surgical team to an otherwise inaccessible blood clot impressed me no end. It was one of the things that motivated me to achieve the high grade I did in my Biology O-level when I was 16. (Grade 2. I did better in Biology than in English Language. Which may not surprise any of my former students who have had the pleasure of studying English with me!) Here are some of the great lines from the film I could have used but didn’t:
One other thought: In American films and TV series, 80% of the time, if one of the characters speaks in a British English accent, you know that’s the villain. Fantastic Voyage is no different. As soon as Donald Pleasence opens his mouth you know he’s the bad guy.
Taking this film as my subject here also gives me an opportunity to brush off and republish my original review. (‘Review’ doesn’t seem quite the right word, but judge for yourself here.) Star Trek is a film with a wonderful flora of quotes, but so many of the good ones are in-jokes for fans of the original series. I choose to illustrate instead one of the most puzzling features of the future. The lack of development in prosthodontics. Poor Leonard Nimmoy, the original Spock, reappears (through one of those handy wormholes in the time-space continuum that Science Fiction films thrive upon), sucked away from 24th century, and masticates his lines through what appear at times to be rather ill-fitting dentures. In my imagination I hear him advising his younger self.
————————————————————————————- The official site for Star Trek (2009) here.
As chance would have it, the first film I watched was Tim Burton’s remake of The Planet of the Apes from 2001. It’s not a better film than the 1968 original, but it’s not nearly as poor as the reviews made out – those I read when it first came out and which put me off seeing it on the cinema screen. Some of the actors behind the mask produced some really fine performances. Tim Roth and Paul Giamatti were outstanding, I thought, and Helena Bonham Carter was pretty damn good too, though her mask was less convincing. Anyway, my nomination for the best line from the film has to be this one. Spoken by Paul Giamatti as the orangutan slaver, Limbo, who is selling humans as slaves:
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