Blade recut: the cult Vampire flick gets a homoerotic makeover on YouTube.
In the wake of last weeks Oscars and a harrowing two hours in the company of a tragically credulous group of twentysomethings (they believed in ghosts, God, flying saucers and other garbage), I thought I would dedicate this week's web trawl to those who nobly and often hilariously use their time to expose, debunk and ridicule the heaps of nonsense that are nowadays allowed to pass for art, medicine and science. If having read this you feel I have been overly hard on aromatherapy, ESP or James Cameron's bloated tear-fest, Titanic, then please post a comment. Only don't make it too negative, because as one of those twentysomethings remarked, "negativity kills" (even apparently when you are being negative about stuff that really does kill).
1. Lying Movie Trailers
The trend to remake movie trailers, (something that began as a film school project) reaches its apotheosis in these three wickedly convincing adaptations of blockbusters. All employ only footage from the original movies, but, thanks to the use of music, voiceovers and ingenious editing, they present us with an entirely different and wholly false idea of what the original was actually about.
Thus Stanley Kubrick's horror movie The Shining is re-edited to look like a feel-good family comedy. The vampire action thriller Blade is suddenly transformed into a touching homoerotic love story a la Brokeback Mountain. And best of all, Alan Parker's cheery, exuberant musical Fame is made to look like a latter day version of Cannibal Holocaust and retitled FAME, For All Must Eat. All of them make you realise you should never trust another trailer again.
2. Quackwatch
A vast and forensically detailed demolition of homoeopaths, aromatherapists, chiropractors and all other fashionable snake oil salesman. A vital resource for scientists, doctors and any one else who thinks that people like Prince Charles and no-longer-doctor Gillian McKeith are, frankly, full of shit.
A very funny site devoted to the collection, preservation and exhibition of terrible painting. Landscapes, portraits and abstracts are all covered and many painting are accompanied by painfully fawning appreciations. Brian Sewell would love it, though he might want to expand its remit to encompass artists slightly better known than the colourful obscurities featured here.
4. CSICOP
With Jim Carrey starring in The Number 23 (wherein all sinister things add up to 23) and ever more important politicians lending credence to Intelligent Design (Tony Blair claimed it encourages diversity in science, which is rather like saying that teaching 2+2=5 encourages diversity in arithmetic) someone had to start kicking back. Step forward CSICOP, a team of sceptics whose critical investigations into the paranormal and fringe science are no longer just amusing, they are vital. Read it and weep, Joel Schumacher.
5. Titanic 2 (Two the Surface)
If the fake trailers featured above attacked Hollywood's mendacity then this brilliantly satirises the big studios' love of sequels. Once again, real movie footage is used to show Titanic star Leonardo Di Caprio lifted from the ocean in a block of ice and reanimated. Leo is then seen tear-assing it around the streets of Manhattan, seemingly determined to wreak revenge on those who caused the Titanic to sink almost a hundred years earlier. Looks a whole lot more fun than the original.
I include this as a small illustration of the sort of indignities suffered by both those who ring computer tech support lines and the techies employed to help them. Not all of us will ever be foolish enough to visit an aromatherapist, but we will all surely at some point have a computer problem that initially appears unfathomable but is in fact so humiliatingly easy to solve we feel like killing the guy who helped us to crack it.
For similarly strange tales of just how rubbish modern life can be you may also want to look at the parent site.
A lively, simply written and beautifully presented site that allows adults and children to brush up on their anti-theist arguments. I like the fact that it has borrowed much its of look and feel from Christian Evangelical sites.
Practically everything the provocative commentator has written in the last four years. Meditations on Saul Bellow and George Orwell sit alongside attacks on George Galloway and the torturers of Abu Ghraib. Guaranteed to infuriate as many as he pleases, Hitchens is nonetheless a model of clear thinking.
Avant News, a site whose central conceit is that it is being written two years from now, here presents us with the ten worst ideas of 2008. These include the Halliburton War Prize and the One Legged Bar Stool. For more news about the present, written from the future, go here.
10. The Onion
This week, America's answer to Private Eye takes on Condoleeza Rice, Norah Jones and Simon Cowell. If you have unaccountably never visited the Onion before then check out their archive. It's savage, surreal and nearly always right.
