Thursday, April 01, 2004
April Fool
If you're brought here by this.
NJS
4/01/2004 09:54:00 am
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
More Beta Band
On second listen the last track is absolutely every bit as beautiful as I thought it was.
NJS
3/31/2004 02:20:00 pm
Fuckd
Cookd And Bombd
You know how much I love Chris Morris. Or you should.
NJS
3/31/2004 10:17:00 am
Pictures
I'm still not sure whether this is good or not, though. I had a brief comic fetish last year when I got League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen (when's vol.2 out in softback?!). And has one of them left? Or turned into a robot? If the latter, he's in good company (see my giant mechanical body somewhere below, courtesy of Lynskey).
NJS
3/31/2004 10:00:00 am
The Beta Band
Heroes To Zeroes
First thoughts = lovely. But then again I could listen to Steve Mason sing his shopping list and be happy (imagine "went down to the shops / to buy a bag of lemons / came back home again / made some lemonade" in that blissed-out, faraway Scottish burr; it'd be fantastic). They've made the modern, technologically aware, thoughtful record full of ideas that they- that everyone- has been promising for so long.
NJS
3/31/2004 09:09:00 am
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Back
Hunched over like a little old lady, at least for an hour or so. It always seems as if the sunniest days on campus occur when the fewest people are about. Why am I not working in advertising, earning loads of filthy lucre? We will never write for proper money, us. Vlao is the only one to have started making it. And good on him! I am 25 soon.
NJS
3/30/2004 04:21:00 pm
Trains
I want to go to Leeds in two weeks. I want to take the train. It would cost me £95. £95. Ninety five pounds. Nein Tee Feyv Pownds. I think I'll drive.
NJS
3/30/2004 03:59:00 pm
And of course...
RIP Peter Ustinov. I don't get upset when celebrities die, because I don't know them, and what's the point in getting upset over someone you don't know dying? (unless of course it's lots of innocent people being needlessly killed, but that's a different matter to rich old men and women passing away of gout or whatever)- but there was a definite touch of sadness when I saw the news last night that Ustinov had departed this world. A big man in every sense of the word, he was revered in Europe for his talent and intellect, and loved in the UK for being funny, which says a lot about us. If there's a heaven, and I doubt it, I like the idea of Ustinov quaffing cocktails with Niven and various others whilst regailing everyone with outlandish tales and insightful thoughts in equal measure.
NJS
3/30/2004 01:35:00 pm
Agreeable
David Stubbs now has a blog. I seem to remember him not being a stupid idiot.
NJS
3/30/2004 01:22:00 pm
Last Night's Television
As much as I hate the phrase, Passer By actually was a moral fable for our times. I missed the first part on Sunday night due to not giving a shit, and missed the first five or ten minutes of the concluding part last night due to being out watching Dawn Of The Dead. Even so, me being me, I saw enough to form an opinion, and it was not good.
Trailers and previews of Passer By painted it as a thoughtful rumination on guilt and responsibility in modern times. Had I not seen something in the paper this morning about it being a BBC drama I would have assumed it was ITV, possibly because of the presence of James Nesbitt (not that I have anything against him, but post Cold Feet or whatever it was called, he is indelibly linked with ITV in my mind), and possibly because it was utterly morally vaccuous, bordering on reprehensible.
The Story.
Nesbitt, tired from his job as a radiographer in an A&E department (emasculated masculinity! he's not even a doctor! he's barely above the status of a nurse! and all nurses are girls! however is a man to cope in these troubled times of strong women and uncomfortably re-aligned gender roles?! eh?! long hours and not even £40k a year to show for it OH NO!?!) and travelling home on the train, witnesses two youths harassing a women. Initially innoccuous, the situation slowly develops into something more sinister (presumably because the youths are drunk! but I don't know, because I didn't see the first part). The carriage is empty but for the youths, the women, and Nesbitt. Tired and believing that it's none of his business (urban alienation! we're packed so close together but are yet so far apart!), Nesbitt chooses to get off at his stop rather than stay on the train and hopefully, via his mere presence, prevent the incident with the youths becoming anything more than the harrassment it is. Of course he gets of, turns around to look back at the carriage he's just alighted from, and sees the youths raping the woman. OH NO! He's not a good samaritan. And what's worse, in court he freezes, sounds unconvincing, and fails to assert to the jury the guilt of the men. Add to this the fact that the woman remains calm when giving evidence, and the jury let the offenders off. But I saw none of this, as I didn't give a shit.
Wot Happened Next.
Nesbitt's character is wracked by guilt. This manifests itself as an emotional distance in his family (wife and two kids and a nice semi with a partially built extention), causing his insecure, adolescent (at about 12 - when I was young we waited until at least 14 to begin being narky little shits [or maybe not]) son to start dressing like Ice Cube and packing a flick-knife to school. His teenage daughter, who barely features, might have some 'hormones', but we're not quite sure. His wife feels pushed away by his growing emotional distance and preoccupation with letting down the woman not once but twice (on the train and in court). Blah blah blah. Nesbitt wanders around a lot, looks miserable, takes on extra shifts at work despite his management status meaning he doesn't have to, visits the woman and tries to atone for his sins, and then has an encounter at work with one of the offenders, who is brought in for an x-ray after (presumably) a drunken brawl leaves him with a nastily bloodied head. Nesbitt then takes it upon himself to get some kind of revenge, wanders around some rough estate (not like the nice, tree-lined avenue he lives on, oh no), finds a pub, sits in it, gets pissed, sees the other youth, and then shoves a glass in the side of his head before kicking the shit out of him. While the other patrons of the pub stand and watch. And don't intervene. In a moment of exceptionally profound insight, Nesbitt observes "You just stood and watched. You didn't stop me," as if it were the most sad and true and damning thing anyone has ever said about the state of society today and the way we live now. The thug threatens to press charges, Nesbitt is arrested, his job and family are both hanging by a thread over the threat of imprisonment for brutally and drunkenly assaulting someone in the street, Nesbitt turns to drink and sleeping in railway stations, blah blah blah, his wife shouts at him in the street in front of his neighbours (one is a man cleaning his car, thus showing how much of a man he is [cleaning the car basically being 'wanking', eh?]) thus emasculating his masculinity even bloody more ("You're just a radiographer!" she yells, marvellously, and with spite - I must remember that one). And then...
Nesbitt gets off. The police persuade the thug/youth/rapist/victim of a brutal assault not to press charges by "appealing to his ego" (he, as another emasculated [by economic and social circumstances, presumably - after all he lives on a council estate and rapes women on trains] man, does not wish to be seen as 'a victim' - "I really hurt him, you know," says Nesbitt, evidently proud of the fact that he knows he's a man because he glassed some twat's head). "Some things aren't in the public interest" and "some things are in the opublic interest", you see.
Wot I Fink.
It's a cop-out. A complete cop-out. Morally immature and socially irresponsible. Justice is not served on any level. The viewer is given some kind of hollow, happy-ending pay-off for sitting through it, the thugs are seen to be bloodied by various forces (thus not escaping 'punishment' even if they do escape prison), Nesbitt's son gets picked for the football team because his schoolfriends are in awe that his dad is a psycho who glasses young men in pubs, his wife welcomes him back into the family fold with loving arms, Nesbitt doesn't lose his job and he gets the sense that he somehow made amends for not stepping in and preventing the woman being raped in the first place. As for the woman herself, in an encounter with Nesbitt's wife, she says "the way you want him; one day I'll want someone like that too," the inference being that time heals all wounds and one day she'll be OK to trust men again and have sex and raise a family and all's well that ends well blah blah blah cop-out cop-out cop-out. The two rapists are still free, the woman still has to live with that, Nesbitt still pussied out of his social responsibility not to let other men go around assaulting and raping women on trains, he was still a shit father and husband, he still did the wrong thing, even if he now has the strength of character to intervene with an arguing couple on a trainstation when it looks as if it might turn nasty, as we see in the final scene. It's OK to commit horrendous acts of vengent violence as long as it's a rapist who made you look like a wimp that you beat into unconsciousness.
"It's no wonder the women never come forward." It's no wonder BBC1 is rubbish.
Perhaps more later when I've read this through and thought some more.
NJS
3/30/2004 11:40:00 am
Oh Yeah
American political spammers, please STOP SENDING ME MAIL TELLING ME HOW NASTY GWB IS. a; I know how nasty he is, and b; I'm English and cannot vote in your election. You're wasting precious time adding me to mailing lists.
NJS
3/30/2004 10:18:00 am
Last Night's Film
So I finally gave in to the urge and paid money to see this excessively violent film, which is essentially a remake in a tradition of films of which I have seen many examples before and yet still feel a desire to see despite knowing that it will have none of the intellectual vigour or moral subtlety of its forebears, none of the innovation or surprise value, none of the essential wit and humanity that make this most ancient and retold of tales worth telling again. And again. And again. And what's more I went to see it in the worst of Exeter's two cinemas (the Odeon), accompanied (aside from my own lovely companion) by teenage girls summoned by the hype and history rather than quality and tradition, by three of Exeter's most obviously gay fashionistas (who are approx. 18 months behind London's gay fashionistas in terms of how they dress and coiffure), by a couple of middle-aged men and a rag-tag of young couples taking in some 'culture'. Whenever I visit the Picturehouse I invariably see a gaggle of film studies students and staff from the university, there is a bar, reasonably (for a cinema) priced drinks and snacks, better seats, better screens, better parking, nicer environs. And I'm convinced the tickets are cheaper too. Anyway, last night, as I said, I gave in to the urge and went to see this morally questionable, violent film.
And I for one am glad the zombie movie is back! Dawn Of The Dead has none of the consumerist commentary of the original, and little of the "people (men! soldiers!) are our real enemies, not flesh-eating zombies" moral imperative and empty-London apocalypse-catharsis of Danny Boyle's still wonderful 28 Days Later, but it did have a frenetic pace, brief semi-nudity and shagging, characters who (almost) avoided their god-given stereotypes (the young, streetwise black family man married to a Russian woman who was expecting their baby [until she turned into a ZOMBIE and got SHOT IN THE FACE by the little old lady trucker WHILST GIVING BIRTH {which in turn caused the young black streetwise family man to shoot the little old lady trucker, who shot him back, and they both died, and then caused Sarah Polley's "thou shalt not kill" nurse to sanction the shotting-in-the-head of the zombie-baby}], the macho, threat-to-the-group security guard who sacrificed himself, the guy who looks as if he was in Ellen who got bitten and stayed behind because he knew he'd turn into a zombie, blah blah blah... actually, those last two conformed to their clichés admirably, 'bad boy done good' and 'mild mannered martyr' respectively being their roles), and, most importantly, it made me jump out of my seat on at least four occasions, even the really obvious ones, like when the pretty blonde girl with the huge chunk missing from her face disrupts Sarah Polley's utopic domestic bliss (which lasts all of 90 seconds [including showersex!]) by biting the neck out of her faintly recognisable partner and causing him to squirt blood from his jugular like a gushing Dutch cum-fiend in a Chris Morris nightmare does from his tumescent cock.
28 Days Later gave us about 5 minutes of vaguelly-scientific-realist exposition as to why and how the zombiefication occured - animal rights campaigners break into the Cambridge research base, free monkeys infected with 'rage', get bitten, start craving blood - i.e. zombie-as-blood-virus, a kind of cannibalistic AIDS for the postScream, out-with-irony schlock-horror generation. The remake of Dawn Of The Dead gives us about 2 seconds of very oblique referrence to a patient in a hospital who's been "moved upstairs [to X department] because of a bite?" Which is all we get. No how, no why, no rhyme or reason, no cause. Only effect. Brutal, nasty, bloody, high-octane effect. Zombie's being creamed by high-speed ambulances a la the bus-death in Final Destination only without the just-stepped-off-the-pavement shock value of either that film or Meet Joe Black; the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold accidentally chainsawed in half in the A Team-alike bus when it crashes; the guy across the street on the roof of the gun shop picking off zombies who resemble celebrities by request from the principals trapped in the mall ("Rosie O'Donnell!" they holler, like the kindergarten class in South Park given carte blanche with an M16 [Jay Leno and Burt Reynolds lookalikes are first to be capped in the skull by Andy's sniping]). And then, after the brave escape and violent death of the morally unworthy, the survivors literally, Frodo-like, sail off into the sunset in hope of finding an island where there are no zombies, where the young lovers can rebuild the human race by shagging happily ever after, where Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames can be nurse and policeman again, where... well, actually, we don't know, because there is no exposition of this at all. It just ends. 28 Days Later let us know there was hope, that Cillian Murphy and company would be saved, that the zombies would die out in time and that they would be returned to England's green and pleasant pastures, which would in fact be improved immeasurably by not being full of wankers anymore, but Dawn Of The Dead just ENDS. And rightly so. The very essence of a no-brainer. I loved it.
NJS
3/30/2004 10:05:00 am
Monday, March 29, 2004
Monday Monday
Fucking bad back. Fucking trains. Fucking Monday fucking morning.
NJS
3/29/2004 10:30:00 am
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