This evening we returned to Birmingham after spending the last few days visiting Clare’s family in the South Kent coastal town of Hythe. It’s a 400-odd mile round trip, so forgive me if I sound exhausted. My Kerouac gland ain’t what it used to be.

As well as being a pretty town that’s been steeped, soaked and marinated overnight in history, Hythe is also home to the legendary screen actor Christopher Lee. At least, that’s what Clare’s parents have told me.

Lee, of course, has had a long and distinguished career. According to The Oracle of Bacon – the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon people – he’s the highest placed living actor in their Centre of the Hollywood Universe chart (second only to the late, great Rod Steiger). In case you don’t know (or can’t be arsed remembering), Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon was a trivia game popular amongst film geeks in the late-90s. Its purpose was to connect any given actor or actress with Kevin Bacon in as few moves as possible.

For example, only three films separate Kevin Bacon from Laurel & Hardy:

Kevin Bacon appeared in 2008s New York, I Love You with Cloris Leachman, she appeared in Herbie Goes Bananas (1980) with Iris Adrian and she appeared in Our Relations (1936) with Stan and Ollie.

That’s impressive. The Centre of the Hollywood Universe was an attempt to refine the methodology and find out which stars had an even greater gravitational pull than Mr Bacon. In the case of Christopher Lee, only two films stand between him and Laurel & Hardy:

Christopher Lee appeared in 1958′s Dracula with Peter Cushing, who previously appeared in A Chump at Oxford (1940) with The Immortal Duo.

I used to have a theory that Lee was something of a real-life Forrest Gump based on the number of historically significant people he seems to have come into contact with. He was, after all, a step-cousin to Ian Fleming and the only member of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings cast to have met JRR Tolkein. The theory was subsequently abandoned, however, after I couldn’t think of any more examples.

In any case, according Clare’s parents the great man lives just around the corner from them. Now, I’ve visited Hythe on numerous occasions and have yet to catch a glimpse of the erstwhile Prince of Darkness. I haven’t even seen him at the local Waitrose.

I’m starting to think they’re pulling my leg.

Despite my numerous misgivings about the soon-to-be released movie adaptation of Watchmen, its ingenious viral marketing campaign continues to bring out the worst out in me.

The latest is a an 80s-style, 8-bit, beat-em-up arcade game manufactured by Watchmen’s fictional Veidt Industries. I shouldn’t like it, but I can’t stop playing it.

Insert Coin HERE.

Here’s my somewhat ridiculously overdue Top Ten Films of 2008, the disappointing sequel to Top Ten Films of 2007. To make up for my tardiness, each one comes with a lovingly hand-crafted haiku summary.

I thought the haiku was an original touch, until I realised that sites like this have been doing this sort of thing for ages.

Never mind, eh?

10. Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

Stateside Guillermo
But Hellboy goes to Ulster
Red Right Hand, indeed…

9. The Orphanage

Twisty Spanish yarn
With a very sad middle
Behold the sack mask!

(Thanks to Clare for that one!)

8. Burn After Reading

Coen’s strike again
Dumb idiots hatch dumb plot
It’s sadistic fun!

7. Tropic Thunder.

Actors’ film folly
As they stumble into war
Year’s funniest film

6. No Country For Old Men.

The Brothers Coen
Go bleak and nihilistic
Beware cattle gun!

5. There Will Be Blood

Fictional oilman

Think: ‘Charlie Kane Does Dallas’
Dan Day Lewis shines!

4. Iron Man

Wealthy arms dealer
Finds redemption in tin suit
He’s Invincible!

3. Wall*E

Little yellow box
Dreams of love and musicals
Then clears up our mess

Oh God, not again.

Only a day after I wrote a post about the late Patrick McGoohan, I now find myself writing about another cherished actor who has sadly passed away. Like most unrepentant fanboys, I’ll always remember Ricardo Montalbán for his portrayal of my favourite screen villain, Khan Noonien Singh. However disillusioned I might have become with the franchise over time, Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan remains one of my favourite guilty pleasure movies, and that is due in no small part to Montalbán’s incendiary performance.

Montalbán played Khan on two occasions, in the 1982 movie and in the ‘Space Seed’ episode of the original Star Trek series (which, ironically enough, I watched over Christmas for the first time in years as Clare had bought me a Season 1 DVD boxset). In non-Star Trek circles he was probably best known for playing the white-suited Mr Roarke in the 70s series Fantasy Island.

Like McGoohan, he had a long life and career – his first film role was in 1943 and his last was in 2006s CG animated flick, The Ant Bully. However, despite the fact he was multi-talented, had an amazing screen presence and exuded ridiculous amounts of natural charisma, as a young man he never got the leading roles he seemed almost genetically predisposed to play. Of course, this was the 1940s and 50s, and back then racial equality wasn’t exactly high on Hollywood’s agenda.

At the time, Montalbán was one of only a handful of Hispanic actors working in Tinsel Town, and on those rare occasions when a movie featured a Latin American protagonist, a North American A-lister would normally get the role. As much as I love the film, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) is a good example of this: we can only wonder how different the film would have been if the Mexican cop protagonist was played by a Latino actor like Montalbán instead of Charlton Heston.

To say that Montalbán delivered the greatest performance ever to grace a Star Trek movie may sound like I’m damning him with faint praise. Far from it. Any actor who could convincingly portray a genetically advanced, physically intimidating superman at the age of 61 (without, I might add, any prosthetic enhancements), was a talent to be reckoned with. The New Yorker’s legendary film critic Pauline Kael – who never suffered fools gladly and could hardly have been described as a convention-going Trekkie – had this to say about Montalbán’s Wrath of Khan performance:

“Montalban is unquestionably a star in ‘The Wrath of Khan’ (and his grand manner seems to send a little electric charge through Shatner). As a graying superman who, when foiled, cries out to Kirk, ‘From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee!,’ Montalban may be the most romantic smoothie of sci-fi villains. Khan’s penchant for quoting Melville and Milton (which goes back to ‘Space Seed’) doesn’t hurt. And that great chest of Montalban’s is reassuring. He looks like an Inca priest. He’s still champing at the bit, eager to act: he plays his villainy to the hilt, smiling grimly as he does the dirty. Montalban’s performance doesn’t show a trace of ‘Fantasy Island.’ It’s all panache; if he isn’t wearing feathers in his hair you see them there anyway. You know how you always want to laugh at the flourishes that puncuate the end of the flamenco dance and the dancers won’t let you? Montalban does.”

Ricardo Montalbán – 25th November, 1920 – 14th January, 2009.

God, I hate it when my blog turns into a bloody obituary column.

It saddens me that we’re only a couple of weeks into 2009 and already I find myself writing about the death of one of my cinematic heroes.

Patrick McGoohan passed away after a short illness in his Los Angeles home yesterday. McGoohan, of course, will chiefly be remembered as the writer, co-creator, producer and star of the seminal, subversive and staggeringly brilliant 1960s TV show The Prisoner. As I’ve probably mentioned elsewhere, The Prisoner was, is and probably always will be one of my all-time favourite television shows and over the years I’ve watched the each of those 17 episodes – from Arrival through to Fall Out – more times than I care to admit.

In February last year Clare and I spent a lovely weekend in North Wales (which I wrote about here, here and here), and on the way back took a ridiculous detour so I could make my first, long-overdue pilgrimage to “the Village” itself, Portmeirion:

“In the popular imagination – well, in mine, at least – Portmeirion is the place where Patrick McGoohan’s famously numerophobic, former-government agent was sent to prison for a resignation he didn’t explain. As a huge fan of the cult 60s show The Prisoner, it was weird walking past all those odd buildings, so many of which have been hard-wired into my imagination since Channel 4 repeated the series in 1985. I was pleasantly surprised at how little The Village had changed in the 40-plus years since the show was originally made: Portmeirion’s Pantheon, for instance, was still recognisable as the green domed home to Number 2, while the stone boat on the shore still looked as mad and as incongruous as it did back then. Then again, it’s a boat. It’s made out of stone. How could it not look mad and incongruous?”

Like I said, I’m a fan.

Clare had never seen The Prisoner, and as we walked through Portmeirion’s Italianate grounds I told her all about the show. She couldn’t believe that somewhere as gorgeously ornate as this could serve as a fictional penitentiary and insisted on watching the series with me at the earliest opportunity. Now Clare’s a fan, too, and even little Lily seems to be getting in on the act. Instead of saying “Goodbye”, “So long”, “Auf Wiedersehen” or even “Adieu” she’s become rather partial to that weird and ubiquitous leave-taking phrase from the show, “Be seeing you.” She’s even mastered that weird salute – where the thumb and forefinger form a circle around the eye – that normally accompanies the phrase. It’s quite a thing to see.

But back to Patrick McGoohan. While he will forever be best known as The Prisoner’s Number 6, there was more to his illustrious stage, film and TV career than just that. In the 1950s, he so impressed another hero of mine, Orson Welles, with his stage presence that The Great Round One later admitted to feeling “intimidated“. In the 60s, besides The Prisoner, he also starred in one of the UK’s most successful TV exports, Danger Man (aka Secret Agent), became the highest paid actor in the UK and reportedly turned down the part of James Bond in Dr No on ethical grounds (or so the legend goes). We should also pause to consider the fact that he appeared not once, not twice, not even thrice but on four separate occasions as the murderer du jour in Columbo.

Some of the films he appeared in that deserve special mention include John Sturges‘ sublime Ice Station Zebra (1968), David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) and Don Siegal’s Escape From Alcatraz (1979). The last desrves special mention as he not only appeared alongside My Favourite Movie Icon of All Time, Mr Clinton Eastwood Jr, but he played Alcatraz Island’s sadistic prison warden. I always loved the irony of that.

Patrick McGoohan is survived by his wife of over 50 years Joan Drummond McGoohan and his his three daughters. My thoughts go out to his family and friends.

Thanks to my partner Clare for alerting me to the following twisted gem:

It seems as though the legendary – and, yes, I do mean legendary – Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has a new film in the pipeline. It’s a “metaphysical spaghetti western of gangsters”, it’s called King Shot, it’s produced by David Lynch and, true to form, it already sounds buggier-than-batshit.

Jodo says:

“I think that gangsters are the most metaphysical characters. Take a look at the presidents, they are all gangsters.”

Then later he says:

“The front elevation of the casino is an Egyptian church. For the Egyptians, the beetle was the symbol of the creator who transports the world in his ball of excrement. That is why I say that this is a film of the metaphysics of the gangsters.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky was the first and only famous person I ever interviewed. You can see why I’ve never bothered interviewing anyone else. What’s the point?

Jodorowsky isn’t the most prolific of directors: when it comes to output he makes Woody Allen seem like Stanley Kubrick. He has, after all, only directed seven films during his fifty – yes, fifty – year filmmaking career, and his last pic was back in 1990. For Jodorowsky fanatics like me, then, King Shot is something of a Big Deal.

Still, I’ve heard so many rumours over the years about Jodorowsky film projects that never actually materialised (coughcough ‘Sons of El Topo’ coughcough) that I’m reluctant to get too excited. If its alright with you, I’ll file King Shot in my Beleieve-it-when-I-see-it file until I actually, um, see it.

I used to say the same thing about Watchmen, of course.

Nick Horner’s article in last week’s Great Barr Observer about the virtual reconstruction of Kingstanding’s former Odeon cinema will be of interest to those odd critters like me who have a weakness for magnificent old cinema buildings. I don’t know what the technical term for this is, but I suppose you could call us necrocinephiles.

Anyhow, I posted about this recently, but in the meantime Nick has since done some proper journalistic legwork and uncovered some additional information. King’s Visualisation Lab (KVL) created their VR Odeon Kingstanding in 2003 and their plan was to eventually construct a comprehensive database of virtually reconstructed British cinema buildings. Unfortunately, one of KVL’s partners pulled out and the database has been on hold ever since.

According to Martin Blazeby, researcher and 3D modeller at KVL, the design team used eye witness accounts and even visited the art deco cinema-turned-bingo hall to take paint samples: “We found a specific type of green, Odeon green, which had been painted over when the cinema became a bingo venue.”

If you happen to be a well-heeled necrocinephile with philanthropic tendencies, then this project needs you. You can contact them via this link.

Here’s a couple of pics of the Kingstanding Odeon in its heyday. Firstly, an exterior shot courtesy of English Heritage’s John Maltby Collection:

And here’s the ornate lobby from Digital Handsworth:

From Variety:

Batman has a new adversary: Batman.

The mayor of an oil-producing city in southeastern Turkey, which has the same name as the Caped Crusader, is suing helmer Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros. for royalties from mega-grosser The Dark Knight.

Huseyin Kalkan, the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party mayor of Batman, has accused The Dark Knight producers of using the city’s name without permission.

“There is only one Batman in the world,” Kalkan said. “The American producers used the name of our city without informing us.”

Yummy.