At last(fm), it's Saturday

I love Saturdays. The simple fact that I don’t have to haul my sorry carcass out of bed at six o’clock in the morning, the knowledge that when I wake up I don’t have to budge a sodding inch if I don’t want to is something like touching heaven.

I am sometimes profoundly struck by the nature of relativity and how it transforms an utterly trivial detail such as not having to get out of bed straight away into one of the greatest pleasures life has to offer. The flip side is the thought that if all it takes to send me into a state of divine euphoria is a lie-in then, relatively, the rest of my life really isn’t up to much.

Still, it’s Saturday so I have time to start doing something about that.

You may have noticed a couple of things on the right-hand sidebar. The first is a link to help raise money for the East Asia Earthquake Appeal. I’ll let Mr. Peter Gabriel explain:

“This is a request for help. We've had ties with Pakistan from many years, particularly with Qawwali music and the extraordinary voice of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. His family have generously agreed to allow us to make available two tracks - one a collaboration with Massive Attack , 'Mustt Mustt' and one with myself 'Taboo', as a download to raise money. So basically you are getting two extraordinary pieces of music for the price of one!

“We need a lot of downloads and we need you to do a bit of marketing for us. So, if you could persuade say 10 of your friends to do the same download we can get real money to real people really fast. Please help us to help them!"

So, if you have the means to, why not donate and download.

The other thing on the right is the “This week I have been listening to…” chart powered by Last.fm. Last.fm is a rather wonderful online radio website. One of the things that makes it wonderful is that you can enter the name of your favourite band and Last.fm will build a playlist of similar artists for you. They have a huge catalogue of streamable music in all genres and, because users have the ability to tag music and specify similarities between artists, the odds are that you will discover lots of cool artists you have never heard of.

Another thing that makes it wonderful is the ability to skip tracks, ban tracks altogether or indicate that you love a track; Last.fm will remember all these preferences and bear them in mind when building future playlists for you. It also compiles charts of every artist and track you listen to which you can add to your website.

You can also add a plug-in to your favourite media player called Audioscribbler that makes a record of every CD or suitably tagged audio file you play on your computer and sends that information to Last.fm when you go online so that it can be used when compiling your personal charts.

Yet another wonderful thing about Last.fm is that the actual radio player application is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and as a FreeBSD Binary Package so it will run on almost any computer.

Best of all, no annoying, chirpy, fuckwitted DJs. Bonus.

So, if you love music and have a decent internet connection, I’d strongly recommend that you hop over to Last.fm and get listening.

So, Saturday… I’m going to have some scrambled eggs with German sausage in a minute and later I am going to the cinema to see Michael Haneke’s Hidden. And I need to make a start on several things that might help improve my relatively lacklustre existence.

Nice Guy Eddie, R.I.P.

Actor Chris Penn, younger brother of Sean, was found dead at his Santa Monica Home. He made his film debut in Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumblefish in 1983 but was probably best known as Nice Guy Eddie in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.

The most curious thing mentioned in all the news reports of his death is the fact that nobody seems to know for sure exactly how old he was: somewhere between 40 and 43 is the rough estimate.

Anyway, he was a talented character actor who still had a lot of interesting parts to play.

“OK, first things fuckin’ last!”
- Nice Guy Eddie

Maybe one day...

... I will find a purpose for this blog.

I could tell you about every little damn thing that happens in my everyday life but the world hardly needs any more of those kinds of blogs.

There are some potentially interesting developments shimmering on the horizon that might, A) drag my life from the dormant state it has been languishing in for far too long and, B) actually provide me with something worth writing about on this blog (and, therefore, give you something worth reading).And yet people still drop by here anyway. Curious. What compels you lot to return? The hope that I have finally posted something of interest?

I really need to do something about my car.

And why isn't the word "blog" in Blogger's spell-checker?    

Sundry... what day is it? Thursday? Sundry Thursday Guff

This is how much I hate my temp job: Yesterday I woke up feeling really shite with a runny nose and sore throat and dizziness. And I was so happy because it meant that I didn't have to go to work. I didn't even care that I would lose a day's pay. I have never felt so happy to feel so shite.

As it turned out, my supervisor took me aside today and told me to fill in my timesheet as normal for the day I was off sick and he would sign it, thus I would not lose a day's pay after all. Very kind of him. Unfortunately, this altruistic gesture is an indication of how happy my superiors are with the job I am doing for them. They want to keep me on as a permanent member of staff. Damn it... I need to make a huge fuck up soon so as to get such silly ideas out of their heads.

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Why am I still surprised when friends tell me they read my blog in order to see what I am up to? I feel slightly guilty that I don't lead a more interesting life for them to read about.

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Could it be...? No, surely not. It appears that Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman's fantastic film Mirrormask is finally getting a theatrical release in the UK - 27 February - or so it says on the Empire website. 'Bout bloody time. All we need now is for some UK distributor to put Terry Gilliam's Tideland into cinemas.

Other films I am interested in seeing: A Cock And Bull Story, The New World, Hidden, Lady Vengeance, Capote, Seven Swords. Of course, how many of these films make it to Oxford remains to be seen. I was a bit annoyed my favourite little cinema, the Phoenix Picturehouse, showed Atom Egoyan's Where The Truth Lies for one week only and I missed it. Hmph. I may go and see Woody Allen's Match Point at the weekend.

Mad Hatters' Review IV - now online

Uh... I kinda' shot my load right there in the post title: Mad Hatters' Review IV is now online and packed with mind-boggling words, eye-boggling pictures and ear-boggling noises, some of which I wrote.

Because there just aren't enough movie reviews on the web already... Episode III

Other Most Disappointing Movie of 2005: The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

After some twenty years in development hell - and four years after Douglas Adams' sadly premature departure from this world - The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy finally made it to the big screen.

I really wanted to love this film, I really did. I was not going to be one of those hardcore fanboys who would be horribly upset at every little deviation from the novels that I love so much; after all, the novels deviated quite a bit from the original radio series - the plot to Hitchhiker's has been nothing but maleable over the years.

Early statements and reports from the filmmakers demonstrated that everybody involved was in love with Adams' creation and wanted to remain as faithful to the spirit of his work as possible without sacrificing too much to Hollywood conventions.

The resulting film was, indeed, different from the novels and the radio series. I didn't mind that Ford Prefect was played by an American; I didn't mind the way that Zaphod's secod head was realised; I didn't mind the new plot strands and characters that were introduced. And the whole thing looked fantastic.

But the film didn't work.

The charm of Douglas Adams' writing is in the tangental ramblings, the imaginative and absurd linguistic riffs. That is a difficult thing to translate to a two hour movie. Obviously, a lot of material would have to be ditched but instead of picking a handful of the best bits and letting them play out in full, the filmmakers picked lots of bits and severely truncated them. The conversation with Prosser as Arthur Dent lies in front of the bulldozers at the start, the explanation about Babel fish... many of these classic scenes were present but horribly cut short.

The pacing was too fast. The gags did not have the time to breath. The actors' performances suffered because they were trying to get through the dialogue as quickly as possible so that they could get to the next scene. The whole thing needed to be taken down a gear.

And the romance between Arthur and Trillian? I was ambivalent about that. On the one hand, it was understated and not too schmaltzy but, on the other, the whole point about Arthur Dent is that he has lost his home and is hopelessly out of his depth in the wider universe. Baffled, confused, frustrated, anxious: Arthur Dent is a loser, an essentially nice man who is embittered by the more exciting and dynamic people who succeed where he fails. And for him to decide that he doesn't actually need to return to that mostly harmless little blue/green planet simply goes against every incarnation of the character that has gone before.

In fact, Arthur Dent as portrayed my Martin Freeman doesn't leave much of an impression at all. He sort of bumbles around looking surprised and a bit confused and... that's about it. The banter between him and Ford that was central to previous versions of Hitchhiker's is almost entirely absent. Many people criticised Mos Def's performance as Ford but I think he could have been fine if he had had the opportunity to take more time over delivering his lines. Even the usually faultless Bill Nighy - the perfect actor to portray Slartibartfast, you would have thought - gave a rather flat peformance.

There are some fine moments: Arthur's reaction to the spectacular planet factory is genuinely affecting and real; Stephen Fry was the perfect choice as the voice of The Guide; the graphics that accompany the Guide entries are simple, inventive and very funny; Bill Bailey as the voice of the whale; the "So Long And Thanks For All The Fish" song.

All the ingredients were there for a great adaptation but, despite the obvious love that went into the making of the film, they botched it.

Because there just aren't enough movie reviews on the web already... Episode II

Two more runners up for Favourite Movie Of 2005 which I completely forgot to mention when writing my previous post and then couldn't be bothered to add later once I had remembered

• 2046 - Wong Kar Wai's follow up to In The Mood For Love. Tony Leung Chiu-wai (who is one of my favourite actors - check out Infernal Affairs if you haven't already) is trying to deal with life after his almost-affair with Maggie Cheung's Su Li-zhen from the previous film. He becomes strangely obsessed with a hotel room baring the number "2046", moves in next door, and conducts a series of relationships with the women who move into "2046". These relationships inspire a short story, a science fiction tale about a place in the year 2046 where you can go to forget and live in eternal happiness. A gorgeous, meandering, dream-like film that takes its time but is definitely worth the effort.
• Team America: World Police - Utterly profane and hilarious marionette fun. A film without prejudice: everybody is mercilessly ridiculed. But there is also a profound insight into the human condition about how there are three types of people in the world: dicks, pussies and arseholes.

Because there just aren't enough movie reviews on the web already...

Yeah, well, hardly original but here are my utterly inconsequential thoughts on the movies I've seen in 2005.

Favourite Movie in 2005: A History Of Violence

Cronenberg was back with his best film since Dead Ringers. I always enjoy his work but the films he put out in the last ten or fifteen years - Naked Lunch, Crash, Existenz, Spider - were all a tiny bit undercooked as if he struggled to find stories that fully engaged his intellectual and artistic faculties. A History Of Violence, on the other hand, hit the bullseye. Read my review (if you like).

Other Favourite Movie in 2005 if only some bugger would distribute it to UK cinemas: Mirrormask

Dave McKean's and Neil Gaiman's beautiful and surreal fairytale. Why hasn't anybody put this onto cinema screens in Britain where it belongs? Why do we have to suffer crap like Fantastic Four but we don't get a chance to see genuinely inventive films like this in our multiplexes? Read my review (if you like).

Runners Up

• Sideways - Funny, smart, painful, brilliantly acted; it felt like a movie from the 1970s or the sort of film that Barry Levinson used to make where people sat around and had funny, smart and painful conversations.
• Batman Begins - The best of the summer blockbusters... Batman regains his cinematic dignity after the Schumacher neon nightmares of Batman Forever and Batman And Robin.
• Kung-Fu Hustle - just... mad.
• Serenity - A curious beast in that it felt like more than simply an expanded episode of its television progenitor (Firefly) but not quite a fully cinematic piece of work. Not that it really matters: it was bloody good fun, well written, well acted and looked marvellous despite its relatively small $40 million budget.

Biggest Cinematic Disappointment of 2005: The League Of Gentlemen's Apocalypse

There were plenty of worse films knocking around than the League's first full blown cinema outing but Apocalypse was disappointing because the Gents are capable of so much better. Their three wonderful television series - and their feature length Christmas Special - are littered with movie references and filmic flourishes in amongst the wonderfully macabre comedy so for them to make the transition to the big screen was a logical thing to do. Sadly, they opted for the tired old postmodern premise of fictional-characters-stumble-into-real-world-and-meet-their-creators. A real shame. Like I said, not an awful film by any standard but it should have been so much more.

Movie That Will Be The Source Of Baffled Ambivalence Until The Day I Die: Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith

Why do I like this? It is rubbish on so many levels. Admittedly, it is better than the first two Star Wars prequels... but I still kinda' like them as well... OK, maybe I only bother to watch two scenes from The Phantom Menace and I skip the excruciating love scenes in Attack Of The Clones... It's no good: I can't justify liking these dreadfully scripted, woodenly acted, CGI-soaked, pumped up video-game trailers but...

What's wrong with me?

Worst Film Of 2005: Sin City

Quite how I have the audacity to condemn Sin City for being a mind-numbingly shallow sequence of film noir clichés after admitting that I like Revenge Of The Sith, I don't know. I realise that I am in the minority by disparaging Frank Miller's and Robert Rodriguez's movie and am expecting an enraged comic-book fanboy lynch mob to kick down my door any second to inflict a little of the old ultravoilence to my person; but that will not prevent me from categorically stating that Sin City is shite - wonderful looking shite, I admit, but shite nonetheless.

Coming as soon as I can be bothered to write it... Films I am looking forward to in 2006...