So this is from a TV spot for car insurance company. Its a street in Birmingham which has the highest number of insurance claims in the country. And was covered in bubble wrap for the day. I like bubble wrap and climbing ladders, so this was a good day to be me.
I've forgotten how to blog. I must have done because look, I haven’t done it in ages. It used to be easy. I just read a book or watched a film and then moaned about how stupid it was or how much it would have been better if I had written it. But I haven't done that in ages. I'm sure I've got loads to talk about.... I went to see Dylan Moran and David O'Doherty (I made him laugh. Twice). I saw La Premier Jour de Reste de ta Vie, which is possibly not spelt at all like that but made ME laugh twice...
I read Johnny Magic and the Card Shark Kids, which was awesome, and David Karps One which I should have read years ago. I finally saw The Sure Thing in which John Cusack out-Cusack’s himself.
I discovered Wavves, painted a shop front in Carnaby St for the good people at WeSC and got a Yoda eight-ball for Christmas.
I dipped my TV-watching-toes into the terrifying waters of US reality monstrosity Jersey Shore (Seriously, Hey! America! We have reality TV too... remember when the two girls on Big Brother got upset and threatened to hit each other, and Channel 4 cut its live feeds, called security and police, and took the girls off the show? .... they did not 1) Continue filming ACTUAL PHYSICAL FIGHTS 2) Broadcast the footage 3) Do nothing that would in any way resemble a consequence to peoples actions. America you are so strange. Or right-on... I mean, why shouldn't the little scrappers be treated like the performing monkeys they so clearly are? Jersey Shore is insanity. It’s this unbelievable hyper-escalation of real-time life. Its like the eleventh dimension. That’s the only way I can describe it. Some people go and live in a house by a beach and fall in love with each other and then fight each other and then go into another room and find someone else to fall in love with and fight and each episode is nearly an hour long just to cram in all the loving and fighting and then you find out that the entire span of the show is about three weeks. I have been alive Twenty Seven Years, and have found no one to fight and very few people worth falling in love with, but not only are these guys doing more fighting and loving than entire nations, there’s only seven of them! How does that ratio work? Put me in a room with seven people and it's probably going to be a few hours before I'm comfortable enough to chat, and there could be several years hiatus before I get bored enough to want to kill or kiss someone. Oh look, I remembered how to blog I guess...)
CheatingWhore, Hysterical Whiner, Perky Midget, Departed but Atrocious Human Being.
Anyhow, these are the kids from Jersey Shore. There are eight of them here, but purple top girl (the spectacularly obnoxious Angelique) didn’t manage to hang around for the whole series. If you ever, ever see any of these people coming in your direction, turn and run unless you want to be violated in some unspeakable way.
Its kinda worth looking at the Wikipedia entry for the series, as it details the piles of controversy surrounding the show, and has this to say about Nicole (she’s the shortest girl one) "She is not an embarrassment to Italian Americans – she is actually an embarrassment to the entire human race". This is funny, because as far I've seen in the series, she was a contender for Most Quazi-Human Entity in Jersey Shore. Her or Vinnie, anyways.
No one likes to realise they were wrong about something, so it's nice to be reassured, by what ever fates or mediums come your way, that you were right all the long. I recently had to watch popular indie rom-com (500) Days of Summer AGAIN, but am pleased to report that while I found more things to like about it the second time round, I still disliked it as much as I remembered. At the heart of the problem, of course, is its female lead, the eponymous Summer. The role is played by the doe-eyed ZDC, who've I explained my problems with before. The good thing about (500) Days of Summer is that it also stars Joseph Gordon -Levitt. JGL is a proper acting genius. He was amazing in Mysterious Skin, and completely carried the dribbly mess that was Brick (ask anyone, anyone what they can remember about Brick. Popular answers are 'a payphone' , 'a bridge', 'a sort of warm sunny wall', 'the girl from Lost, but she wasn't Australian' and 'Joseph Gordon-Levitt'). Luckily, no-one asks JGL to hoist (500) DOS onto his back and drag into post-production and for the purposes of this movie, nothing too taxing is really asked of JGL. He wears a very good wardrobe very well (I am sticking to my guns on this - his wardrobe is the best thing about this film by miles) and smashes a karaoke scene with a triumphant Pixies interpretation. If there was an award for Best Male Karaoke Performance within a Fairly Pointless Film, Bill Murray (Lost in Translation) would be passing it over to JGL right now.
The film had the same faults - the most interesting character {the best friend who hasn't had a girlfriend since seventh grade} still only gets four minutes of screen time, the sister still seems to have walked on to the set from a different production and I don't get the bookend voice-overs. Also whats with the title? Is the film really called Days of Summer or just 500? Like 300? "This....is.... Chicago!!"? Was it set in Chicago? I can't really remember, which is weird because wasn't the films protagonist was supposed to be an architect in love with the city? Wasn't he? Oh who cares. Your man wears two different Joy Division t shirts within two hours, for Christs sake, and then wonders why he gets dumped. In fact, I think that's the problem with the whole film. It does have some really good moments. The karaoke (JGL, not ZDC singing that song that sounds like the theme song to The Shoe People), the Han Solo reflection bit, the party expectation/reality split screen. But all the gaps between the clever bits are filled in with nonsense and non-characters with non-backgrounds.
And that is exactly the problem with the film. It's too many Joy Division tshirts mixed in with too many average tshirts. Then your Joy Division shirts stand out too much and show everything else up as tired, mediocre rubbish.
I saw this lady walking down Portabello Road on Wednesday.
Her name is Vera Filatova, and she played Elena on Peep Show. I mention this because I once had an elaborate plan to devote an entirely separate blog to my Crap Celebrity Spots, but considering I seem to be unable to regually update even this blog, its possibly for the best that I didn't extend my evil blog empire. So, I'll cram them all in here.
1) Vera Filatova, obviously. She was very short (shorter than me), had small features and seemed calm.
2) Samantha Mumba, walking along Poland Street, talking on her phone. She is very, very tall, super-smiley and seemed full of energy (so I guess that one number one hit didn't take it out of her too much).
3) Ian Brown. Greasy of hair and slumped of shoulder. He was in an off-licence in Soho.
4) Alan Carr. Oxford St.
5) Simon Amstell, different end of Oxford street
6) Lily Cole, Charing Cross Road. Very nice mittens.
It reads like the guest list for the Ant and Dec ITV Xmas Special. *sigh*
Her name is Vera Filatova, and she played Elena on Peep Show. I mention this because I once had an elaborate plan to devote an entirely separate blog to my Crap Celebrity Spots, but considering I seem to be unable to regually update even this blog, its possibly for the best that I didn't extend my evil blog empire. So, I'll cram them all in here.
