Secret Cinema present Bugsy Malone

(500) Days of Summer. Again.

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.

Heres the audio of the winner of the Official Best Male Karaoke Performance within a Fairly Pointless Film Award 2009

Cut-price Celebrity 'spots'

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*

Chapter 24

Until all good thing start happening to all good people, You have to be satisfied with some good things happily happening to the occasional good person.

My friend Claire Smith is one of the good people. We met in 2007, both working for the same insane Edinburgh fringe venue production company. We ended up spending a week plaster-boarding the walls of a burnt-out building (it was a fairly big room, it was just the two of us most of the time, and our levels of plaster-boarding experience prior to that week can safely be described as poor-very poor). We pushed each other around on scaffolding towers , listened to a little radio and we shared the common ground of thinking most other people were daft or deranged most of the time. Claire was pretty shy when she wasn't ragging on other people in the safety of our sequestered work area, so I was surprised to find out that she was the front-woman and melodica player in a band. Ever suspicious and hyper-critical, I was even more surprised when I got around to hearing them and found out that they were great, she was great, everything about them is totally great. I've been to a couple of their shows over the last two years - the band manage to always sound slick and bouncy, and Claire sings like an angel and dresses like a black magic woman who has twirled through the worlds most incredible clothes shop and emerged with whispers of splendour vaguely attached to her.
They are fun, creative, enchanting, and I cant think of anyone to compare them to, but you can listen on their super-minimal myspace here.

Anyway, the good thing that has happened to them is this review from the NME. It's there, right in the middle. The review above the is The Lemonheads. Thats some hallowed space they are occupying, in my book anyway. Click on it to make it big.



Chapter 24 are playing next Thursday at the Hoxton Bar and Grill, at 8.15, for twenty minutes to the Moshi Moshi A&R peeps. Come and swoon down the front with me.

See, good things can happen to the good peoples.

The Moany-moanarium of Dr Bethassus

So The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a bit rubbish is it? Really? What tipped you off? Was it, perhaps, this trailer

Me - Ohh, Parnassus trailer
Voice of Film Reason (VOFR) - Yep.
Me - Looks cool. Nice. Colourful. CGI.Okay.
VOFR - Yep.
Me - And here's the plot summary. Nice and simple. Okay.
VOFR - Yep.
Me - Christopher Plummer. He's a bit of a budget Christopher, no?
VOFR - l'il bit.
Me - And here's Lily Cole. She's fun looking. Oh, no talking, Lily?
VOFR - No. Remember St Trinian's.
Me - Oh yeah. Good Point. Oh, here's the interesting 'lots of people playing the same part'.
VOFR - It's not really that interesting.
Me - No, not really. Isn't it funny to think that Johnny Depps actually really old? Hey, here comes the blurb clippings. 'Stunning'. Ok. 'Dazzling'. Right. Lots of little words probably relating to production design then, which come to think of it, looks very similar to the Jodorowsky Dune sketches.
VOFR - You can't prove anything.
Me - Christopher Plummer was in Twelve Monkeys. That's a good film, shall we watch that now?
VOFR - You can. I'm just here to facilitate your internet bitching, remember....?

Parnassus is currently rocking a 7.6 on the IMDB. I'll probably really enjoy it. I saw this on Tuesday, and definitely enjoyed it. It's a little too long, the editing is so-so in places, and it mixes amazing performances with ones that sort of make you wince. But it's wickedly fun (and currently rocking a very appropriate 6.6 on the imdab).

There's one shop. Does that make it a town?

Whilst face-booking my way through my day yesterday, I noticed that a face-friend of mine had updated their status to

"Jessica Fox is looking forward to dying her hair red for the last time".

This sent me into a spiral of worry, Jessica Fox dyes her hair red because she plays a character on television who has red hair. If she was going to stop dying it, she wasn't going to be playing the character anymore, and that, my friends, would mean the end of my excuse to watch Hollyoaks.

Hollyoaks first hit our screens in 1995 - it's a soap opera aimed at young people/adults, and is set in the (town? city? hamlet?) of Hollyoakes, Chester. Hollyoaks storylines first centred around the lives of about 10 'young people' but now involves a cast of 50 +, which are frequently refreshed by the HCC (Hollyoaks Community College) freshers intake, which top-up the population after a years worth of carnage has dispatched half the village.

Since 1995, Hollyoaks story lines have included drug addiction (all kinds), murder (planned and accidental), arson(in one case coupled with an attempt at suicide bombing), hit and run palavers, abortion, suicide, car crashes, plane crashes, homelessness, financial problems, interracial relationships, racism, religion, bisexuality, homosexuality, homophobia, sexual confusion, alcoholism, rape (male and female), cancer, child abuse, domestic violence, anorexia/bulimia (and the one character who was fat), incest, sexual harassment, general bullying, what happens when you 'accidentally' accuse your foster parents of abuse, carbon monoxide poisoning, living with epilepsy, hiding your diabetes, HIV, pupil/teacher relationships, self harm, roid-rage,schizophrenia, OCD, gambling addiction, shoplifting, fostering, teenage pregnancy, miscarriage, kidnapping, brain aneurysm, surrogacy, faking your own death, the totally harrowing Cot-Death of Baby Grace and The Claire Cunningham Story Arc.

In 1996, Hollyoaks was voted "Most Dangerous Place in the World. Ever".

I've been lucky enough to have a few friends take their lives in their literal hands and feature on this chronic mash-up of doom-opera, playing, respectively,

• a bloke who was didn't date-rape someone, but somehow confessed to it, which everyone believed because he somehow had managed to burn down his ex-girlfriends house, was sent to prison, escaped by holding his sister hostage, then burns down the pub with half the cast and himself in it. He dies.
• a guy who had testicular cancer, crabs, and saw his sister raped. he has since disapeared to France(?) having kidnapped some kid who may or maynot be his son.
• a teacher who slept with a schoolboy, had his baby, and was put in prison after he cried rape where she was promptly stabbed to death.

But none of this can possibly be as bad as what Jess must be facing in the run up to her exit, because Jess is Hollyoaks no-hold-barred property. Yep, Jess plays one of the 'Oaks alternative cast members.

As bad as life if for anyone who makes the mistake of alighting at Hollyoaks Metropolis Station, life is a million times worse for the interesting ones.

Sasha the goth and keyboard player in Hollyoak's only band got hooked on heroin in year 9 and started stealing and eventually hooking.
Newt the emo kid (fostered by Jack and co) 'got' schizophrenia and several split personalities which tried to kill various people, and then him.
Zoe (who wasn't even that cool but just looked like a normal person) currently rots in jail after she started dating an old man and had a lesbian affair with his daughter who has just committed suicide during a sky dive.
Chris the transvestite is regularly beaten half to death and sort-of had HIV for a while.
Rhys (who is a total loser, but did form the Hollyoaks band) tried to date the local swimming star, but was then seduced by her mum to sabotage the relationship. His attempt at a new relationship also went tits-up when he found out his new girlfriend was also his half-sister. But it was all okay, because he accidentally killed her later on.

Jess plays Nancy. She's already had a reasonably rough time as her sister was murdered leaving her looking after her sisters son whilst still at college. Then the son was ill, and she started dating her sisters former husband who then abused her. I doubt things are going to get better. Nancy has dyed red hair. The wikipedia for her character notes that she is "portrayed as a less conventional character compared to the rest of the Hollyoaks teenagers". She is in for it. In fact not only is she quirky, shes also one of the characters who moved to Hollyoaks 'from the South'.

Oh dear.

Yeah, Yeah (I'm Not You) ...

I'm a bit of an MTV fanatic. I can get a little addicted to some proper rubbish on it (Made, Switched, The Hills etc) so I felt it was my duty to check out recent a offering, the overly-longly-named Sharon Osbournes Rock of Love Charm School. Now, I'm not so sure that Sharon Osbourne is properly qualified to teach 'charm' to America's young charmless women, in fact, I have a Brownie Guides 'Hostess' badge, so in terms of formal qualifications, I may have been a better candidate. But teaching charm she is, and her loud, hair-extensioned, gum-chewing charges seem to be benefiting from the experience. In the episode I watched, they had to entertain a fake duchess. They seemed to do okay. And it offered the minimum of entertainment value, but was regrettably unquote-able. In between vaguely watching, I channel hopped, taking in some of Dogg After Dark (some kind of chat show, set in a night club, with Snoop Doggy Dogg hosting) and watched a little of a short film, which was on the channel that no-one watches, that just shows short films. The short had a couple of well-heeled super indie US actors in, and just as I was giving up and going to bed, Zooey Deschanel popped up.

The problem with Zooey, of course, is that its all a bit much. Shes very pretty, very well-dressed, gets to be in movies that range from huh? to pseudo-blockbuster to pretty damn good. And she got to kiss Paul Dano in Gigantic. She's in a band that have a record deal, and she's engaged to Ben Gibbard. Of course, on the other hand, she's not a great actress, her band are fairly rubbish (despite having M. Ward as a song-writing partner), and she's engaged to Ben Gibbard (fellow social commentator Samuel Dougherty remarks "that's got to be a totally insipid relationship").

The problem really, and the main issue facing young women today, is that however they look at it, they have little to no real chance of being Zooey Deschanel. She is Zooey, and no one else can be. She even gets to have her otherwise mediocre (but not unpleasant) name (ZOE) spelt in the most uber-cool way possible.

It's such a tragedy for the rest of the world that I (late, sleepy and not Zooey) wrote a song about it. I have stolen the tune from a ditty Kaydence and I co-wrote in June (the instant classic "Yeah, Yeah, I've Got Zips!" - inspired by Kaydence's discovery that my coat had buttons, but hers had zips) and created the mostly inferior "Yeah, Yeah (I'm Not You) ZOOEY!

I have no way at the moment, to share this wondrous piece of song writing, but I can offer a sample of lyrics, for everyone who is not Zooey.

Yeah, Yeah, (I'm Not You) ZOOEY!

I'm told most every machine comes with defects built in, just to keep you buying spare parts,
But I'm fairly sure, yes? that you are flawless,
So smile for the camera, sweetheart.
It's not you, it's just me,
Are you Zooey? No, I'm not. Yeah? but,
Yeah, yeah, I'm not you (ZOOEY!)
Yeah, yeah, I'm not you (ZOOEY!)
Yeah, yeah, I'm not you. Yeah, yeah, yeah...

And thats quite enough of that.