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The Return’s a stunning yet bleak world, with many loose ends. The brother’s perspective on an inexplicably absent father’s sudden return, builds a picture of opposite reactions to his reassuming authority. Yet while hints are dropped, the usually crucial questions – why leave, why return – remain unasked. And what did mother know?
A fine 7.5 out of 10.
Capturing the Friedmans……Sarin ui chu-eok (Memories of Murder)
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16 August 2004
Vozvraschenie (The Return): Films in 50 words-ish
‘Aren’t you going to spank your naughty boy?’
The paperboy got it wrong yesterday and somehow substituted the Observer for the People yesterday. But hey! It’s good to keep in touch with the tabloids and I can’t not comment on Dr Pam’s picture casebook (sadly not online).
In ‘I WISH MY GIRL WOULD SPANK ME’, Phil (probably not his real name) explains; ‘Lately I’ve found I can only get turned on if I think of being spanked or whipped’. Just in case we don’t get it, actors recreate the scene. A short skirted blonde plays Phil’s girl. ‘ERE, WATCH IT!’, she says, when tries spanking her. ‘THIS LOOKS LIKE IT COULD HURT’, he says slapping a trainer against his hand, but she looks ever so blank in the dumb-blonde-style.
Anyway. Dr Pam says to take her on a shopping trip to an adult store and gently lead her in the direction of the smacking paddles, whips etc. I don’t think so. If he can’t bring himself to say, ‘Aren’t you going to spank your naughty boy?’ (or whatever), he’s hardly likely to be able to summon the courage to take her into a sex shop.
Winding-up the Observer
14 August 2004
Avril Lavigne songwriters paid by the word?
You have to have a small ego to (co-)write songs for Avril Lavigne, because you’ll struggle to find your name clearly credited. Having heard My Happy Ending many times now, I reckon Clif Magness and the Matrix might be paid by wordage. This would explain the excessive echo, which turns a passable pop song in the virgin angst style, into something most irritating…
…On such a breakable thread (breakable thread)/…/You were everything, everything that I wanted (that I wanted)/We were meant to be, supposed to be, but we lost it (but we lost it)/…/You’ve got your dumb friends/I know what they say (they say)/They tell you I’m difficult/But so are they (so are they)/But they don’t know me/Do they even know you? (Even know you)/All the things you hide from me/All the shit that you do (shit that you do)/…/Etc.
I caught an Avril interview recently (Top of the Pops?) in which she made out that in the two years since Let Go she’s really grown-up and like all the stuff on Under My Skin is just sooo mature and like, mostly her own work. But then as long as the wrtiters get the royalties, I guess you may think that’s okay, but it’s a practice that only helps to put the writing profession down.
Also: Katharine thinks she looks like a Nazi on this album cover.
Virgin angst music……Britney sinks to new low……Write songs like Pink
13 August 2004
Peggy Hill dead shocker
Turns out I’m five years late with this, but that didn’t make last night’s King of the Hill any less shocking. Peggy plummeting to what looked like a near certain death in a twentieth wedding anniversary sky diving accident. I thought she was a gonna, but it turns out this was the climax to season three and she’s now going strong in season eight. This is one of the peculiarities of multi-channel TV. For example, our TiVo reckons there’s around a dozen opportunities to watch the Simpsons each day. But it’s all over the shop so you’ve no hope of seeing anything in it’s intended order, so when characters mature (as Hank has considerably since the pilot) it can be quite weird. He kind of oscillates randomly on a scale running from stressed-out-Texan-bigot to okay-guy-putting-up-with-it-all.
Anyway, it had me going for a minute and, after watching the credits role to a countrified version of Tom Petty’s Free Falling, Katharine went to bed in a state of shock.
Who killed Saturday night TV?……One in the eye for the early adopters……Selling out British TV
12 August 2004
What if a couple of street prostitutes gatecrashed your party?
It’s not on the Radio1 playlist, but I keep hearing Eve & Gwen Stefani’s Summer 2001 hit, Let Me Blow Ya Mind, which I don’t mind. But I always had a problem with the video (which I also saw again very recently). It’s one of those ‘hey, look how cool we are!’ tracks: a bolshy little number to put everyone else in their place. Here’s some advice: ‘Jealousy, let it go, results could be tragic/Some of y’all ain’t writin’ well, too concerned with fashion/None of you ain’t Gisele, cat walk and imagine’.
The thing is (double negatives aside) I’m left thinking the girls have made a terrible mistake. They’re dressed like the Liverpool prostitutes you see on TV lately being interviewed about that city’s proposed Vice Tolerance Zone (except they have their front teeth) and nothing like Gisele Bundchen. They then gatecrash this party for people much older than them who may be square and boring. But, hey! It’s their apartment and if they want to be square and boring that’s their business. And if they’d showed up like that at my recently hosted gathering of film buffs to watch a Derrida documentary, I’d have asked them to leave too.
11 August 2004
On animal fashion, morality and suffering
Just as some of the latest research suggests other animals are capable of emotions previously assumed to be exclusively human, government cracks down on animal rights activists and Vogue mounts a campaign to support the fur trade. Our relationship with other animals has always seesawed between traditionalist Judeo-Islamo-Christian ideas that the beasts are, like the rest of nature, resources to be exploited and humanistic ideas that, at the extreme, argue for almost equal rights. As tolerance of vivisection increases, other animal users – like the fur trade – also find the climate’s warming.
Of course, there is nothing in nature to suggest that suffering of any kind, by human or beast, is wrong. Abhorrence of suffering is a human invention and many of us fail continuously in this respect; we torture each other and other animals daily.
Government diverts the debate by stoking hysteria on whether animal rights activists are terrorists, when to terrorise someone with threats of violence or to damage their property is illegal anyway. Writing in the New Statesman, Peter Tatchell is also diverted. This time by the argument that animal research is bad science, which is almost traditionalist; implying, as it does, that if it were good science it would be okay.
The more important issue is our on-going relationship with the beasts and whether Roy Hattersley’s right when he says in the Guardian that, ‘Experimenting on living animals – although sometimes necessary – is an activity that a civilised nation should find distasteful.’
Hattersley goes on to turn an anonymous pro-vivisectionist on their head after they claim anti-vivisectionists are guilty of anthropomorphism; that they project human values onto the animals that suffer, when those animals own values (as revealed by their treatment of each other) allow them to inflict suffering without a thought. As Hattersley says, it’s the pro-vivisectionist who’s fallen for the anthropomorphic fallacy by assuming the beasts have an ethical code at all. However, even if they have, we’re under no obligation to follow it. Moreover, this is to fall for the naturalistic fallacy; there’s nothing in nature to suggest that suffering is wrong and so it’s okay.
While an experiment on a group of humans might yield results that would prevent the future suffering of many, many more people, we arbitrarily say that is wrong. We recognise that the experimentation would never end; that there will always be something more to discover. And on this same basis – that suffering is wrong, whatever nature says – experiments that cause other animals to suffer should end too.
If we truly aspire to moral superiority over the beasts, we’ll end vivisection and stop wearing fur now.
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray……Critter’s hunting, fishing & doing drugs……Pet owners aren’t simple……Myth of moral superiority
10 August 2004
V Festival appears through the rain
This morning’s dilemma was pretty mundane. Whether to risk the rain which has poured non-stop since late last night and is only easing off as lunchtime approaches its end, in order to claim the mysterious special delivery that arrived while I was at the gym. I even tried a track and trace to see if I could work out whether it was worth the effort, but the postie’s handwritten number was illegible. I’ve been peering constantly through the window and trying to convince myself it would be something boring. Critter picked up on this restlessness and more than once demanded the front door opened so that he could come to his own conclusions as to weather’s clemency. (If he had thumbs they’d have been pointing down.)
Well, what of it? I gave in and it was V Festival tickets, which gives me an excuse to blog on last year’s event which was, for me anyway, before blogging. V has become an almost regular event for Katharine and I, because it’s commuting distance from Manchester and there’s no way we would ever, ever camp. (Although Dido’s presence this year almost put us off.) Last year we spent a lot of time in the JJB Puma Arena, were Dirty Vegas, Goldfrapp and Moloko were particularly outstanding and energetic. Also here were Appleton proving that while they were certainly the eye candy, Shaznay was the real talent behind the seminal Saints and Sinners (that said, it’s teamwork – innit? – and none of the parts add up to All Saints). I regret not sticking around for Mis-teeq, but then their troubles may be over now they’ve elbowed Britney off the Catwoman soundtrack.
The V stage was let down by the sound. It actually dipped out for The Hives and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers sounded like they were coming through a wall. Ash, a band I’d forgotten, were good fun in a strangely nostalgic way as were The Cardigans (strange how quickly some people date). On Sunday the sound was a little better so David Gray and Coldplay could do the business in proper stadium style.
This year I am mostly looking forward to: The Strokes, N.E.R.D., Basement Jaxx, Scissor Sisters, Jamelia and the Human League.
Spare a thought for#1: the Mis-teeq ladies……A flash of Darkness
9 August 2004
Films in 50 words-ish: Capturing the Friedmans
When teacher’s dark side’s revealed, mass hysteria grips the small community and truth (who abused whom, when, how and whether) slips away. Memories (some accessed only post-therapy) fail to match physical evidence and stories are created to suit circumstance. Somehow the accused family’s contemporaneous video diary draws us in, but reveals nothing.
An incredible 10 out of 10.
Films in 50 words-ish: Uzak (Distant)……The Return (Vozvraschenie)
If you found my comments useful, let Amazon know by clicking Capturing the Friedmans and hitting the ‘yes’ button underneath their copy of this review. You may buy while you’re there.
7 August 2004
Leave it out, sickly poo lady!
Everywhere I turn lately is Dr Gillian McKeith, the sickly poo lady. First, waiting for Wife Swap, I caught part of You Are What You Eat, then she turned up in the Guardian Weekend magazine and then, as I settled down to write this, Vernon Kay announced that she’s on his programme tomorrow and will be studying one of his stools.
That’s right. That’s what she does for a living. Not that Dr Gillian McKeith is a picture health herself; she looked pale, sallow and a little sweaty on TV. She was charged with changing the lifestyle of grotesquely obese couple John and Lisa Drake who have an incredibly poor diet. (This is reality TV so they happily discuss their sex life for the ratings; neither can be bothered and they’re infertile anyway.)
Inevitably, McKeith says it’s all in the poo and whisks ’em away for colonic irrigation. She insists on showing us the poo being washed out of the fatties bowels. Worse, John’s stomach ‘has no teeth’ and they have to massage the poo out of him. All of this is before the 9 o’clock watershed. Then she stupidly prescribes these ultimate couch potatoes an ultra-hippy diet. As if John’s going to stick to a weird (tofu?) porridge breakfast over a couple of cans of Red Bull. It’s so obviously too much too soon. If she really wanted to make a difference she’d start small – cereal, toast and fruit juice, say – and build towards health in a sustainable way. But no. She’s a nutter.
5 August 2004
How does Jo Whiley get away with it?
I’m talking about that incredible ability to back so much dross, while retaining an aura of musical credibility (indeed going so far as share that aura with Radio 1’s daytime schedule). Jo Whiley heavily pushed The Darkness whose inevitable quick descent is now well underway and the Streets, whose façade will collapse very soon.
What’s wound me up is the weird support for new band Easyworld’s cover of Candi Staton’s 1976 hit Young Hearts Run Free; dreariness masquerading as melancholy (‘Now they’ve slowed it down you can really hear the meaningful lyrics’). It’s just wrong.
But that’s not all. Pet sound this week is Fatboy Slim’s Slash Dot Slash, which is in danger of exposing him as one trick pony. I don’t intend this ironically: it’s just sooo ’90s (and I’d have liked it then, but hey, I’ve heard it now, where’re we going?). Look what he did for Cornershop, turning Brimful of Asha into the first Asian cross-over track. Now it looks like the Bhangra thing might just happen without him.
A flash of Darkness……Even Christina Aguilera outsmarts The Streets……Integrity of Top of the Pops
