I say that about pretty much every music-based video I come across on the internet, but holy moly this one’s good. Not sure if it’s the rag-tag assortment of frat boys breaking into Gaga song and dance, the questionable ’90s teen movie style choices or the fact that pretty much all of them are wearing flip-flops that makes it for me, but I just love it.
Eat your heart out, Glee. Amirite?
Where the Wild Things Are was the film I was most looking forward to last year (which says a lot, seeing as 2009 was a freakin’ fantastic year for films – Fantastic Mr Fox, MOON, Inglorious Basterds, Up, Watchmen, Paranormal Activity, Let The Right One In and a whole bunch of other films I haven’t even seen yet) and I personally felt the wait until Dec 3rd was worth it.
Careful now, here comes the gushing: aaah, what a magical film – it managed to simultaneously entertain and unnerve, reminding me of exactly how I felt as a kid, not always getting the attention I thought I deserved and retreating into elaborate fantasies, stories and sometimes straight up lies.
It’s out this week on DVD and BluRay and, while I rather smugly already picked up a copy in the States (smugness wasted on literally everyone I know, not one single person of whom cares about the film at all), I’d super recommend you invest in it.
Perhaps you saw WTWTA at the cinema and were underwhelmed – try it again. But this time, try reading Maurice Sendak’s book again first. Or even Dave Eggers’ The Wild Things which I just finished reading – it’s like a cheat sheet, spelling out more of what’s going on in Max’s mind so it’s much darker and scarier than the final theatrical release was. Marvel at how Spike Jonez and Dave Eggers took that little story and ran with it, and look closer at the incredible world the film creates – the stunning visuals, the beautifully simple muted palette.
And if nothing else, you must be in awe of Max Records and his turn as wild little Max – he’s hands down the coolest kid ever to make a movie and does so with such heart. If nothing else, his name is Max Records for sobbing out loud; a life of hipster-dom surely awaits.
I’ll admit that you won’t watch WTWTA once a month for the rest of your life – I mean, it’s no Bring It On or Breakfast Club. It’s more of a sudden-urge film – when the mood takes you, you’ll be glad you have it there waiting patiently on the shelf.
In conclusion: I think it’s ace and I’ll do my damnedest to get you to agree.
Christopher Nolan, Leonardo diCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy, Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard – that right there is what we call a dream team. I’m so freakin’ excited about Inception I can’t even tell you.
Here’s the latest trailer. Get excited (if a little confused):
Here are all the DVDs that are in my flat that have been bought, borrowed, given or otherwise acquired and never actually watched. Jeez.
SPOILER ALERT: They all live happily ever after. Soz.
The kind people at Way To Blue and Sony Pictures invited me along to a screening of The Back Up Plan, in which Jennifer Lopez and some guy get together and there are babies and stuff. Whatever, they promised me cocktails and a plus one – I’m telling you this not to brag, but in the interests of fair disclaimer. Provide me with free cocktails and I’ll basically love you forever (hi LG, your 3D TVs are ace!).
So what’s old Jenny from the block up to these days? Well she’s popped out a couple of kids and she’s back to spread the word about the joys of pregnancy. Enter The Back Up Plan.
Here she plays Zoe, a getting-on-a-bit (aka over 35) single gal who ‘has dated hundreds of men in the past few years’ and is sick of all of them turning out not to be her one true love. The tick-tock of her biological clock sends her running to be artificially inseminated (with ginger sperm, for some unfathomable reason) and before you know it she’s up the duff.
Of course, in between the procedure and the first bouts of morning sickness, she meets a man. He’s THE man, naturally. They meet, they fight, they meet again, they eat hotdogs, they have a waterfight, they talk about cheese, they make love and then she drops the bombshell.
I’ll cut a long story short for you here: it all works out. They break up a couple of times but, essentially, he buys a double-stroller and makes friends with a black man in the park and that seems to make everything all right.
Ah, I hear you sigh, so she gets her kids and her man – but what about a career? Poor lamb doesn’t have her own career, does she?
Of course she has a career! In fact, she’s had two – and both have been more successful than yours! She was a “very important person” at an “internet company” before she quit the corporate life, cashed in her stock option and bought herself a little pet shop (which, conveniently, runs itself).
How marvellously satisfying; a beautiful, successful woman finally gets what she wants and we can all go home happy.
NOT.
Judging it solely as a film, The Back Up Plan is your average Hollywood J-Lo Rom-Com vehicle. It’s not very funny, it’s not particularly well made, the characters are rubbish and the whole thing is entirely predictable.
It’s a dangerous film, though – the worst form of escapism. Without even giving you the satisfaction of an emotional connection, it screams your own inadequacies out at you and makes you feel like you must strive to have it all immediately. Go on! It’s so easy! Why aren’t you out there doing all these things already?
Want your own business? No problem. Want an amazing apartment in NYC? Go ahead! Want to wear six-inch heels every day, have limitless funds and men falling at your feet everywhere you go? Done, done and done. Want a baby? Here – have two!
By the end of the film, Zoe has all this and more, and barely worked for any of it.
The thing is though, no matter how much we may want a different life, most of us have no choice but to slog our guts out for years at jobs we hate. We earn a pittance and we’re not left with stock options to cash in and pursue our dreams with when we’re barely out of our twenties.
If we’re lucky, we’ll only have to work our fingers to the bone for another 35 years and then we can retire and live on the meagre pensions we’ve managed to put aside, without even having the security of a property to fall back on because buy-to-let landlords and crappy little new builds have priced us entirely out of the market.
And when we fight with our boyfriends, it’s over deep-set and complex issues – like whose turn it is to put the bins out or what channel to watch. These can be night-long arguments, mountains out of molehills, shouting matches and crying sessions. That’s real life. That’s what you do.
But every time Zoe and Stan break up, it’s over the same thing. And each time, it takes nothing for one of them to walk away and nothing to fix the problems simply because they are so utterly head over heels in love. The biggest hardship Zoe had to endure during the course of the film was losing her special pregnancy pillow (do these really exist?). Cry me a river, lady.
Setting The Back Up Plan up as a film for women was a misleading move. The gentlemen among you may be pleased to hear there’s no shortage of long, pointless, lingering shots of Jennifer Lopez in an array of frankly unsuitable bed garments. There’s also a token black guy who cracks a few jokes and offers advice, another nod to the male audience.
Rather more deep-set than that, though, is the fact that we see the entire pregnancy from Stan’s point of view; to the point where the fact that Zoe is pregnant is little more than a plot device. We barely see any positive effects on Zoe – so wrapped up is she in Stan that she doesn’t even seem particularly bothered that she’s finally having her babies that she’s apparently been longing for. The only positive is that the pregnancy hormones make Zoe insatiable in bed – a little fringe benefit for Stan there too.
What’s more, the film has more female stereotypes thank you can wave a chocolate coated granola bar at; the devoted best friend, the kooky single-mum club, the spritely grandma/mother-figure et al. These poor ladies are constantly made fun of and mocked, then brushed unceremoniously aside when Stan is back on the scene.
Perhaps I could overlook the two-dimensional characters, the never-ending stereotyping and the ridiculous, patronising storyline if I could trade it in for that surge of happiness, that tingly feeling in my eyes and that little lump of happiness in my throat when everything worked out well for Zoe. But I didn’t feel even a hint of that satisfaction – there was no heat, no humour and no heart.
SPOILER ALERT – I can’t seem to help myself on the spoiler front at the moment. So if you haven’t seen Kick-Ass yet, then you might want to steer clear.
There’s taking films seriously, and then there’s taking films too seriously.
You can’t have missed the buzz around Kick-Ass. It tells the story of normal, cliché-less teenager Dave. He gets a bee in his bonnet about fighting crime and decides to take on the criminals of New York, armed with nothing more than a wetsuit and a couple of batons, to varying degrees of success.
Along the way he meets eleven-year-old Hit Girl (aka Mindy) and her father Big Daddy, vigilante crime fighters with real skills and a more varied arsenal than lowly Kick-Ass. Shenanigans with bad guys ensue. There’s violence, there’s gore, there’s swearing, and there are most definitely laughs.
So it’s really a shame that Roger Ebert couldn’t see past the caricatured violence in his one-star review.
He credits the audience with very little intelligence if he thinks we’re going to take the whole film literally. I think we can all agree that we get plenty of real life from real life so when we pay the best part of £10 to go to the cinema, the last thing we want is the tedium of our own lives shining back on us. Ebert appears to have forgotten when he wrote his review – we know it’s not real! We’re suspending our disbelief, it’s not like we’re about to go out and live our lives according to the word of Kick-Ass.
Ebert argues that Kick-Ass’s high rating (15 in the UK) is going to make six-year-olds want to see the film. Six-year-olds, well known for the ease with which they can pass for 15, will obviously take to the streets with bazookas after seeing the film, and then who’ll be laughing? Honestly, you might as well condemn Oliver Twist for showing young boys picking pockets.
I’m prepared to accept that some children are influenced by violent movies to commit violent acts. But countless more children do not take movies in that way. And savvy little Mindy isn’t gunning down innocent passers-by but dishing out justice – just like a million movie characters before her. Bad guys drop like flies in thousands of films and TV shows, and big budget action epics of the same rating as Kick-Ass do away with good and bad minor characters by the truckload. I don’t see why one fictional young girl should be required to feel remorse when we readily accept that hundreds of fictional adults don’t.
He does raise some points I agreed with to a certain extent – I did feel a soupçon of concern when the generally non-violent title character gunned down a room full of people and thought little of it. Similarly, Mindy probably should have been more emotionally affected by certain events in the film.
Ebert places the blame for Mindy’s emotional detachment on her upbringing – her father, he complains, never sits her down to talk about death and the fact that what they are doing isn’t a game. But surely that’s the point; she’s been raised as a crime-fighting ninja. She knows it isn’t a game because it’s her life.
If Ebert is going to be outraged that Hit Girl is a product of her upbringing, then he should take more issue with Chris aka Red Mist – a nice but lonely boy who is desperate to follow in his drug-baron father’s footsteps. That’s apparently acceptable. By the time the film ends, Chris is set to become a super-villain in order to avenge his father’s death. But it was this semi-baddie who expressed the most grief over the myriad deaths, so I guess that made him ok. Oh, and the fact that he’s a boy, of course.
It’s funny, because the things I liked about Kick-Ass – riffing on violence, pastiched pop culture references, potty mouths and obvious jokes – are the very things I tend to dislike about Tarantino films.
Tarantino, the film critics’ darling, seems engaged in a serious love affair with violence – and not just a spot of fisticuffs here and there. It’s always full-on, wince-inducing, blood-spattered, resulting-in-death-if-the-character’s-lucky violence. While Tarantino dabbles in a rather more high-brow kind of film making, why shouldn’t his output be judged by the same standards as any other filmmaker? After all, there’s really no situation in life where the kind of violence portrayed in both Kick-Ass and Tarantino films is acceptable.
I’ve taken a lot of words to come down to basically this: some people want to take every film super seriously. Fine; as you can see, I can do that too. But Kick-Ass – which I actually applaud for having such a strong female character, no matter her age – doesn’t deserve outrage and is certainly a film worthy of more than one star.
Save those one-star reviews for the really bad movies; the identikit Hollywood fare, the films that are shoddily made despite enormous budgets, shedloads of CGI, tacked on 3D and supersonic star power. They’re the real one-starrers and, in the long run, they’ll do far more damage to the kids than Kick-Ass ever will.
I holiday therefore I read.
Eclipse by Stephanie Meyer
SPOILER ALERT! If you care even vaguely about Twilight books or film and don’t want to know anything about anything, then don’t read this.
I fear that I’ve given some people the impression that I read only tragic teen-schlock about vampires and werewolves and demon children. Well, that’s fair; I do read that kind of crap. Ever since I discovered Point Horror (a natural graduation from the only book that’s ever truly scared me: Bizarre Cats) I’ve been partial to a terrifyingly bad tale or two.
So yes, Twilight was right up my street. I know – I really do know – that the writing is really, really bad. And I also realise that I’m basically paying my hard-earned cash to encourage this terribly bad writer and show the publishing world that it’s ok to write rubbish and market it to impressionable young girls.
But it’s that pesky Edward Cullen – like most other girls who’ve encountered the literary or filmic Eddie C, I’m completely besotted. I’m not sure how it happened; it’s not as though the descriptions of him are subtle, gently bringing you to the realisation that he’s the only person who’ll ever do for you – the hyperbole whacks you round the head from his very first appearance onwards.
Meyer doesn’t leave his personality to fall back on either – the rational person in me (which I keep carefully hidden below the massive Twilight-loving loser) knows that he’s practically a stalker. And a total grump; if his eyes aren’t flashing angrily at the smallest annoyance, then his angsty grip is threatening to pull a table apart or he’s practically screaming at this girl he just met because he’s got issues about being a vampire. And yet still we love him (let’s not even bother addressing the fact that we quite willingly accept that he’s a vampire).
But my love for Edward Cullen, which is pure and true like a fresh winter snow – e.g. I get it Meyer, sex is Bad and Wrong (even in wedlock!) – couldn’t survive the third book, which I read on the plane en route to Tampa. Good god it’s dull. I can barely dredge up the details in my mind, it was such a nothing narrative; something about vampires, something to do with some very blatant newspaper reports, then there are some werewolves and it descends further into implausibility until finally there’s some kind of fight caused by a token character who scares us not one bit and of course no major characters die and it all works out fairly nicely for all the vampires and werewolves that we care about.
Woven skillessly throughout this dubious narrative is Bella, the protagonist, basically begging Edward to sleep with her (quick recap: Bella and Edward are intertwined in the deepest love two people ever felt, developed over the course of book one, tested in book two, back on track in book three). Eventually they make a deal: she’ll marry him if he’ll get down and do the bad thing.
Of course, the deal is hashed out between bouts of Bella kissing Jacob, the sickeningly attractive werewolf who also just so happens to be in love with her. It’s pretty obvious that the reason we all love it is because us ladies can so easily substitute ‘Bella’ for ‘me’ – these delicious specimens of manhood actually adore me, they’re actually fighting over yours truly, I am the one everyone loves, me! Meeeeeee! – cue maniacal laughter and the burly women with the straitjacket.
I forced myself through the 559 pages of tedium during the eight-hour flight. Even with the Kate-as-Bella displacement going on, it was a chore at best. When we arrived at our destination I’d developed a shocking headache – blame for which I’m placing solely on the Muse-loving Ms Meyer.
Coming soon: Part Two – A REAL BOOK, I PROMISE
Last night I went to see a band*.
Well, that’s a bit generous – what I actually saw was a lot of people’s backs, a host of phones and cameras waving about in the air and a rip-roaring light show. In the absence of being able to see anything worth looking at I spent some time analysing the ceiling of the venue, turning to my boyfriend, Matt, at one point to say, “Look, someone’s left a folder up on that netting!” Kind soul that he is, he dutifully looked up and “enjoyed” the moment with me but I could tell there was pity behind his smiling eyes. Pity, and a desire for me to shut up so he could enjoy the actual show.
I saw more of the performers through the digital cameras people held up than by standing on my tippiest toes. On our way home later that night, Matt casually mentioned that there had been two drummers. Oh right. Two drummers, you say. Who knew?
Like most short people, I also possess the uncanny ability to stand just one or two feet behind the place where the two tallest people in the venue will eventually choose to position themselves. And do you know what? They do not take kindly to being tapped on the shoulder and asked if they’d mind just shuffling slightly to the left. Tall people – guys! – cut us some slack here.
Once at a particularly crowded show, a man literally walked into me, looked down in surprise and then said, “Oh! Sorry. But you are very short.” Yes, yes – apologies. My fault entirely – after all, I did have the option of being tall and rejected it because I felt I would better identify with Frodo Baggins this way. I get so much more out of the Lord of the Rings than you.
And, as if all this wasn’t enough, the merch never ever ever fits. Doesn’t bother me so much now, but there was a time when I wanted to wear my musical heart on my sleeve so you could see how fabulously obscure the bands I liked were. I had to make do with baggy t-shirts acceptable only as pyjamas. That impressed no one.
So, in conclusion, being short is rubbish. Next week: a rant about why short people should get a discount on trousers.
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*It wasn’t The Rocket Summer, by the way. The image is from ineffable_pulchritude on Flickr, nothing to do with me.
I’ve forgotten almost everything from when I was a kid – when, how and why did this happen? I must not have been paying enough attention or something, because I can only remember about a day’s worth of stuff from the first sixteen years of my life. And what made me realise this?
Shameful. Thank goodness there are internet-types to remember things like the Little Professor, track them down and re-purpose them as novelty geek-bait for me – well, for me if I’m willing to part with thirty of my hard-earned pounds. Which I’m not.
But still, it’s one less black spot in my mind. Ah, nostalgia.
