When British Comics Attack: Simon Pegg vs. Ricky Gervais

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

One item I didn’t mention in our box office roundup earlier today: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People starring Simon Pegg was a resounding flop, barely finishing in the Top 20. A couple of weeks ago it was Ricky Gervais in Ghost Town opening to disappointing results here in the colonies. America, why do you hate British funnymen? And more to the point, why do they hate each other?

OK, hate is overstating the case dramatically, but Pegg and Gervais did recently participate in…not so much a war of words as a skirmish. Via Defamer comes a piece from the U.K. Telegraph with the eye-catching headline “Simon Pegg brands Ricky Gervais a 'fat idiot'.” That’s not an exact quote – Pegg actually said of Gervais, “He said there'd been no good British films since 1950. What an idiot. If you go to LA, you can get sucked into that. I've seen people go there and suddenly become rake-thin because there is a slight pressure on you to be thin. I've seen a lot of fat people there.” When pressed, Pegg conceded that, yes, Gervais counts as one of the fat people.

Gervais responded briefly on his blog. “This, from the Daily Mail Online, is not so flattering... ‘Simon Pegg calls Gervais a fat idiot.’ Loads of journalists called for a response. This is what I gave them. ‘Simon is not only one of my favourite British comic actors but he is also quite astute, as according to my last medical, I am approximately 22lb over my ideal weight.’”

What choice did Pegg have at this point except to respond to the response via his Myspace page? “So apparently I have ‘slammed’ Ricky Gervais in the press as being a ‘fat idiot’. Oh dear. Ricky's comments about the British film industry were definitely a little unfair but whatever I said on Heart FM was intended in the spirit of mutual teasing that myself Ricky have always indulged in. I am not in a position to genuinely accuse anybody of being fat, or for that matter of being an idiot. Whatever public feud is subsequently encouraged/fueled/blown out of proportion as a result of this, it is entirely the doing of those gleefully stood around clapping their hands and shouting ‘fight’. It is true however that we used to be lovers.”

That’s not really an image I needed in my head, but at least the matter appears to be settled. This is no time for funny Brits to be feuding. In fact, I think the foundation has been laid for a hilarious buddy movie.

Related:
Trailer Review: "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People"
Truth or Dare with Ricky Gervais

Forgotten Films: "Demon Lover Diary" (1980)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

With George Romero's Diary of the Dead, the "horror movie as pseudo-home video artifact" category that already includes The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield (and, in a way, Brian De Palma's Redacted) is an official subgenre, one that has been handled by spirited amateurs, old masters, and slick, gimmick-seeking pros. Yet the unacknowledged granddaddy of this type of film may be an actual documentary that, despite having developed a healthy cult status from festival appearances, has never been legally distributed or released on video. It's the 1980 Demon Lover Diary, a record of the making of a no-budget fright flick in the mid-1970s. That movie was released in 1976 and alternately known as The Devil Master and The Demon Lover. (Not to be confused with the 2002 Olivier Assayas film demonlover or the 1987 Scott Valentine vehicle My Demon Lover, though now that we mention it, does anybody know what ever happened to that movie's lead actress, Michele Little? She was cute as a bug's ear.) The documentary was shot by Joel DeMott, the girlfriend of Jeff Kreines, who had been hired to work on the horror picture as cinematographer. (DeMott and Kreines were both MIT grad students who had studied with documentarian Richard Leacock.)

Kreines and sound man Mark Rance were induced by director-writer Donald Jackson and his star and co-director and co-writer, Jeff Younkins, to sign on to help them realize their labor of love, partly with an agreement to allow DeMott to record the process. But it soon became clear that Jackson (who installed his new friends in a room at his mom's house) and Younkins were flying by the seat of their pants and that they didn't exactly love having their incompetence preserved on film for posterity. From what we're shown, Jackson and Younkins have no visible talent of understanding of the craft of film, but they do have something at least as important to anyone hoping to make a career in The Industry: a scary, mesmeric ability to get their way, at least temporarily. (The cast of their movie included Gunnar Hansen--"Leatherface" from the original Texas Chain Saw Masssacre--as a professor of the occult, and Marvel Comics artist Val Mayerik. They also somehow talked Ted Nugent --no relation, thanks for asking!-- into lending them the use of his house and some of his well-stocked arsenal.) Jackson appears the be the more convincing talker, but Younkins really puts the "labored" into "labor of love". His character in the movie wears a single black glove throughout his performance; it turns out that this is because he lost a finger in an industrial accident, which, it's strongly implied here, was staged deliberately so that he could plow the insurance money into the movie's budget.

The ghouls in The Demon Lover are pure plastic, but the galloping paranoia, delusion, personal resentments, and general sense of festering mania captured in Diary are the real thing. Anyone who's spent time around no-frills filmmaking sets will experience a shiver of recognition as the outsiders, who have ceased to hide their contempt for the true believers, hole up in their corner of the house where they are not welcome, begin to feel the effects of sleep deprivation, and snicker and giggle while chanting, "The Demon Lover sucks, The Demon Lover sucks, heigh-ho the derry-oh..." The movie ends with our heroes getting the hell out of Dodge, fleeing Ted Nugent's property by car and convincing themselves that they're being followed and can hear gunshots. The strangest thing about all this may be that it did not signal the end of the careers of the central players. More than half a dozen years later, DeMott and Kreines made Seventeen, a cinema-verite film about teenagers that was deemed too gritty for PBS, which had commissioned it, but which went on to win the Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 1985 Sundance Film Festival. More surprisingly, Donald Jackson has subsequently forged a long career for himself as a writer, producer, and director of movies with such eye-catching titles as Roller Blade Warriors, Lingerie Kickboxer, Rollergator, Guns of El Chupacabra and Hell Comes to Frogtown, which starred Rowdy Roddy Piper and Sandahl Bergman and which I once watched most of on USA Up All Night while blitzed out of my mind!. As for the nine-fingered Jeff Younkins, he is the author of the well-regarded Combat and Survival Knives: A User's Guide.

The Screengrab : scott valentine

When British Comics Attack: Simon Pegg vs. Ricky Gervais

Forgotten Films: "Demon Lover Diary" (1980)