Bit of a bargain too – only twelve quid for that, The International and Wayne’s World 1 & 2.   I wonder if WW has aged well.  It was very much of its time, but hopefully a few of the jokes will still wrok.

The most amazing thing was probably the set list.  It is 18 tracks long, as it was in London, but only half of them were the same tracks.  I remember seeing Pink Floyd towards the beginning of a world tour in Australia and then again about six months later at the end of the same tour at Wembley and I think the set list was identical, or very nearly.  Changing the set list around so much within a tour is admirable really, and prevents the band getting bored. It must also be a testament to their catalogue that they have so much choice, and it means having a much larger repertoire rehearsed – not just by the band but by the lighting, sound and effects crews – but from my selfish perspective it is a bit of a shame that only half of it can act as a semi-memento of my own experience of the tour.

Having said that, the DVD does include the song Cyanide from the Death Magnetic album: possibly my favourite off the album.  I can remember being a bit miffed that when I saw them there were about six tracks from the new album but not that one.  The obligatory cover version was not Motorhead’s Overkill that they did at the O2 but Queen’s Stone Cold Crazy, and an unlisted extra track was a short blast of the Marseillaise in deference to their French hosts.

In further deference to the French, the whole concert was apparently filmed by a totally French crew and the DVD box is all in French.  This nod to the French is only slightly undermined by James Hetfield repeatedly pronouncing the S in Nimes…

There is one major problem with the whole thing, and that is the camerawork.  I am not talking about the choice of shots or the editing – they could have been better but were not terrible.  Not as bad as, say, Mike Mansfield’s Jean-Michel Jarre concert films. I am talking about the actual shots from one of the cameras.  There was a remote-controlled camera on a dolly on tracks going across the front of the stage and all the pictures from this were wrong.  They were going in and out of focus, which is very annoying.  Unfortunately that camera was often giving the best shots so they had to use a lot of footage from it.

I don’t know whether it was just a malfunctioning camera, or some instability in the trolley, or vibrations from all the noise not getting cancelled out properly, but it was truly awful, and I am genuinely surprised they let it go out like that.

It was still an enjoyable concert film though.  There is a lot to be admired about Metallica.  They may be huge in terms of popularity, the venues they play and the stage they play on, but they are still a very basic band – just the drums, bass and two guitars: no extra musicians playing in the wings, choirs, dancers, horn section or anything like that.  You could imagine them being able to play in the local pub or community centre if they had to.

Mind you, they would have to overcome their addiction to showing off their guitar collection by changing instruments for just about every song if they played the local pub.  Normally it is just lead guitarists who suffer from this compulsion, but even Rob Trujillo used at least three of four different bass guitars.  It must be a real frustration for Lars to be stuck with the same drum kit all evening.

The dodgy pictures from the main camera almost make this one to avoid, but I doubt there will be another film from that tour coming out, and it is the first full-length concert film to feature Rob Trujillo so a must-watch DVD for anybody even marginally interested in thrash metal.

I should give a spoiler alert here, but there really is no point.  Knowing what is in the film really isn’t going to spoil anything by telling you what happens.  I have seen the whole thing and have no idea what happens!

There is so much to like about this film and so many ideas in it: the man who keeps killing his wife only to return from burying her in the woods to find her back at home like some kind of attractive terminator, the salaryman who gets hypnotised into thinking he is a bird and gets stuck like that, the assassins’ agent who acts as interpreter for Vinnie Jones, the young burglars who look like they survived an explosion in the Play Away dressing-up box, the amazing sets for the houses, the well-chosen soundtrack music, the terrible, terrible adverts and ideas for adverts that Yoko, the advertising executive, keeps coming up with and the costumes – especially those worn by the frequently-killed wife.

Here is what I wrote about it on Amazon:

I could watch this film over and over again…

…and I still wouldn’t have an idea what it is all about, but in spite of that it is thoroughly enjoyable.

The most common comparision, also made on back of the case, is with Pulp Fiction and I think it is fair to assume the director has seen a few Tarantino films, but it also reminded me a bit of early David Fincher and Robert Rodriguez films where the director is not afraid to be unsubtle. Some directors aim to be invisible, so that you get wrapped up in the story, characters or atmosphere and don’t notice the direction, but this is a film where you find yourself admiring the camera tricks.

The structure is one with a number of different strands that keep intersecting in different ways. This means that there are lots of little cliffhanger moments as the story jumps to one of the other strands. As it approached the end I was half-expecting all the strands to come together and make sense and I was half right: they did come together but it didn’t make a lot more sense.

The look of the film is fantastic, with much of it on sets that make a pre-school children’s programme look dowdy. Even the dull salaryman lives in a house with an orange exterior and has things like unicycles laying around in the kids’ bedrooms.

On top of that the film sounds good too, with a soundtrack Tarantino himself would be proud of.

Best of all is the humour which comes in all forms. There is subtle humour, broad humour, visual humour and quirky humour. The scenes in the assassins’ office deserve repeat viewing to catch all the little touches. Everything in it is labelled. The chair has “please sit here” stencilled on it (in English), the safe has “safe” written on it, in fact I haven’t seen a set with so many labels on everything since the original TV show of Batman when the Batcave had similar labels.

Not much in the way of extras, although the ‘making of’ feature is mildly diverting.

The director seems to have not made another film since this came out in 2004, which is a shame because it is an audacious film which looks good and provides some genuine laughs.

Oh – did I mention that it is also a Christmas film – sort of?

I don’t know why this is only gettnig a release now, six years after it came out, or why the director has not (according to IMDb anyway) made another film since.   The interesting thing about the age of it is that the huge changes in technology in just the last six years give it a sort of retro feel.   The family are having a singalong to the in-car MiniDisc player, the advertising pitch is given on a VHS tape, and the chairman of the company takes his ;important’ call on a pre-DECT cordless phone the size of a brick.

Right now this film is only four quid on Amazon and is easily worth four pounds of anybody’s money for the costumes alone.

I was chuffed because it is from the Tombola tour and so effectively the same show that Jayne and I saw in Kentish Town.  I have ripped the audio to the PC so I can listen to it on the Zen, and had a quick look at the DVD – only on the PC, so no 5.1 surround or anything.

The show is in an outdoors arena so the atmosphere is quite different to Kentish Town anyway, but while flicking through it somthing seemed strange, then I realised that it was because the majority of the crowd were dressed the same, with white shirts and red neck scarves.  Manu Chao and Gambeat also had red scarves on.

I don’t like not understanding something so I did a bit of Googling and found that the concert was in Bayonne, which is in the Basque region of France, right near the border with Spain which makes it a perfect venue for a Manu Chao concert, being as much Spanish as French.   The red and white combo is a sort of national dress for the place and at the main festivals everybody wears it.

The concert was recorded right at the start of the big festival when the town would have been gearing up for a week of celebrations, drinking and (unfortunately) bull fighting.  Must have been one hell of an atmosphere around the place.

I feel my mind has been broadened just a little bit today.  This morning I had never heard of Bayonne/Baiona and now its on my mental list of interesting places that would be nice to visit but I know I never will.

If I’m honest, the concert itself is pretty bloody relentless.  Non-fans would be advised to take it in small doses rather than one session.  I was just glad to see than band back with percussion and a trumpet: the second time I saw them they were down to a five-piece and lacked a bit of depth I thought.

I much preferred the 10-man version I first saw, with the trombone and accordion as well as the second vocalist, but the current line-up will do, and having the old Mano Negra percussionist returning is a distinct bonus as it means the band can add Sidi ‘h’ Bibi to the set list.

Does it show that I am chuffed with how much entertainment, education and nostalgia can be wrung out of a mere nine quid these days?   Now waiting for Jayne to be out one night so I can put the DVD on loud, fire up the bass guitar and try to emulate Gambeat’s basslines.

Any regular visitors here will know that I do enjoy comedy, but I didn’t really enjoy this one much.  For a start Gottfried has a style of delivery that on the irritation scale is up there with Pasquale.  It can get to be a bit wearing.  This is one of those DVDs where you keep glancing at the timer on the player, hoping it will not go on too much longer.The defining aspect of the whole performance is that nearly all the jokes have either a sexual or scatological subject or contain lots of bad language, and most of them tick both boxes.  The regular visitors alluded to above will know that I am not offended by bad language.  Far from it.   I just like it to be strategically and sparingly deployed for maximum impact and amusement.

It is like jewels (bear with me here).  A single precious stone that is well set in a good ring can be beautiful, impressive and classy.  Wearing a whole suit of diamonds as you sit in a car encrusted with rubies might be expensive, but will never fail to be tacky.  In the same way, a prolonged and inventive story with a a well-timed expletive dropped towards the end has more punch than a string of swearing.  Used well it is big and it is clever, here it is merely dull and it devalues the currency.

But, of course, there are exceptions, and it all depends on context. The Thick of it (which I have never seen – really) apparently makes a feature of the cumulative effect of swearing, and Gerry Sadowitz , who I saw earlier in the year, has made swearing an art form as part of his stage persona – and I really do hope it is just a stage persona.

By coincidence, after watching this I saw Richard Herring on Newsnight, discussing offensiveness in comedy with Paxo and I think he may have made a similar point, but with more hair.

This is what I actually wrote about Dirty Jokes:

Gottfried has a ‘marmite’ style of delivery: you either love it or hate it. With a permanent squint screwing his eyes closed and often keeping his hand over them anyway while barks out jokes it can be difficult to see beyond that to the material.  I don’t like marmite by the way, and find Gottfried’s delivery annoying, having seen him in short spots on the TV before.

The good news is that, after a while you get used to it.  It doesn’t get any better but at least it doesn’t get any worse over the approximately 50 minutes of the main feature.  So having got that out of the way I could concentrate on the content.

This is essentially just a string of jokes of the man-goes-to-the-doctor or salesman-calls-at-farmhouse type, nearly all stuffed full of ripe language, reaching its climax in a ten-minute version of the notorious ‘Aristocrats’ joke.

It didn’t really do it for me for two reasons.  Firstly the over-use of bad language reduced its power. A well-timed swear word in a routine can be a beautiful thing, but when the whole act is full of them that power is diffused. It goes without saying that if you are at all easily offended then this will be offensive to you (so why would you even watch a DVD called Dirty Jokes?), but if you are not then it could well get to be tedious.

Even worse than that, half the jokes were familiar to me, some of them I can remember hearing at school in the 70s, and even then they were old.  I will freely admit that my personal preferences are for the more anecdotal comedians, but I can appreciate joke-tellers.  I just find it hard to appreciate them half as much if I have heard all the jokes.

There are some glimpses of a more versatile performer in the show – the impersonations of other comics are quite good, and there are some small diversions that add something to a couple of the jokes, but such moments are far too rare.

All that goes out of the window for the finale though. The Aristocrats joke more or less depends on you knowing it already, and it also depends on being as crude, offensive and disgusting as possible.

On a more positive note: the extras are good. For me they are better than the actual show.  There are ten or eleven extras.  I watched the first two, where Gottfried is just talking to the camera and being more anecdotal, rambling and inventive. Even the voice and mannerisms are scaled down to a less irritating level.  I expect I will watch the remaining extras quite soon, and may even return to them one day.  I do not expect I will watch the main feature again though.

So if you are in the market for some laddish, unsubtle, un-PC and sweary jokes that you can easily repeat down the pub get this.  Otherwise, try one of the many other comedy DVDs out there.  Just remember that when you do tell these jokes down the pub, most people will probably have heard them already.

Another positive thing to note.  I can’t recall any racism in the routine, except the standard Jewish stuff that Jewish comedians tend to do.  On the other hand there is some very suspect discussion of homosexuality in there.

To give some idea of the nature of the performance, this joke from the start of it is one of the least offensive, and one of the few that made me laugh.  If this doesn’t do it for you then – seriously – don’t touch this DVD with a bargepole because unfortunately it doesn’t get any better than this.

I tattooed “I love you” on my penis.  When I got home and showed my wife she said “don’t try to put words into my mouth!”

Most amazing of all, on Amazon when I look at the product page for this it says that most buyers also bought the Black Books box set and offers a deal on buying them together.  I really can’t see a lot of common ground between them.  It is like buying Titanic and Planet Terror together.  They also reckon there are only 3 copies left in stock, so somebody must be buying this stuff.

I’m sure Stewart Lee will be a lot better on Friday!

Prime example was in the Japanese sub-titles bit where Austin Powers says “Domo arigato Mr Roboto”.   I had never heard the song (Mr. Roboto by Styx) when I last watched the film so it went right over my head.

It was also weird seeing Hiro from Heroes in his first-ever film role as the passing Japanese pedestrian who makes a comment about the Godzilla statue.

It was still the familiar bits, the bits that I can join in with, that made me laugh the most though – the shadow-play on the doctor’s screen, the fountain, “a smoke and a pancake” and the all-time favourite line: “twins Basil!”.

Cameron Romero is the son of the legendary George A. Romero, who gives it an endorsement on the front cover.  A bit of a warning sign really if the only decent quote you can get for the publicity is from the old man.

Here is what I wrote about it on Amazon:

This film belongs in the ‘gross-out horror’ genre – but really the scales tip a lot more towards the gross-out than the horror.

The mutilation/torture scenes are amongst the goriest and most graphic I have seen, but there is no real suspense to them.

The film follows the template for kids-meet-psychos-in-out-of-the-way-location films as laid out in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and copied by countless films since.  The difference is that it has a bit of a retro feel to it.  Apparently it is set in 1969 and it has the look and pace of a 1970s film.   At the beginning I thought this was a good thing, making a difference to the MTV-style editing of many recent films, but it didn’t have the story to capitalise on that.

The director is obviously technically talented, as he should be given his background, so this film should have been so much better – it could not have got a lot worse!

Maybe he should have stayed out of Hostel/Saw/Wrong Turn territory and gone for the zombie genre instead.

This is not a film to watch while eating, in fact it is an extremely gory film even if some of the goriest bits caused some of the biggest laughs.  Some people say that the root of all comedy is incongruity and you don’t get much more incongruous than killer sheep ripping the entrails out of people.  Just don’t take it too seriously: the people who made it didn’t, hence the gloriously funny mint sauce scene.

And do remember to join in when Arnie says “Remember when I said I would kill you last?  I lied.”

Tonight I had a craving for Commando but was shocked to discover that we don’t have it.  I’ve seen it so many times I just assumed we must have it.  I ended up watching Lethal Weapon instead and halfway through I realised that there is a common theme to all three films – apart from high body counts.  In all three films the bad guys kidnap the hero’s daughter.

Is this one of the laziest plot devices ever?

Still not 100% sure how you spell “yippee kayay” though.  Should have put the subtitles on to find out.