almost witty

(Yes, it’s a UK blog post NOT about the damn earthquake that may or may not have happened. For the record, I noticed it but thought it was a rumbling truck along the highway)

The bookshops are groaning and heaving under the combined weight of memoirs from strippers, high-class escorts, prostitutes, vigorously sexually active women. There’s so many of the darn things it’s hard to figure out a good one to read.

Fortunately, Oscar has come to the rescue. It turns out that the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Juno’s first book was a stripping memoir.

She blogs. Amusingly, partly about her outrage to find people were selling their shoes based on the fact she wore them to the Oscars. Or something.

So Skarlett isn’t the only clever witty funny - and gainfully employed - person in Los Angeles…

I’ve just come back from seeing a preview of Beowulf in the best possible scenario - at an IMAX screen in 3D. Let me tell you, it’s a cinematic marvel.

I hadn’t heard anything about it at all until the other day, when Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins swooped in for the premiere. So I kinda knew it was computer-generated using virtual motion capture for the acting - which I had a bad feeling about because I really hated The Polar Express.

But I needn’t have worried. The actors looked like the actors - hell, forget computer graphics. That *was* Angelina Jolie rising out of the water, as sexy as ever. Even if she did have a scaly tail and impossibly beautiful (if spherical) breasts covered in mud. The sooner cinema gets to the point when you can take home your own computer-genreated 3D model of your favourite character as you leave the auditorium, the better. Seriously, the friend I took with me had no idea the acting was computer-animated. She knew something was slightly off, but she assumed it was a side-effect from the blurriness of the 3D IMAX format.

Over here, it seems to have been given a 12A rating. Which is so wrong. The first minute lulls you into a false sense of comfortableness, before it’s all blown apart in five harrowing minutes of gore, up close in CGI.

Once I got home, of course I had to look it up on Wikipedia. And while a lot of it did seem to have the Hollywood treatment, I was surprised at how much of it had been “changed” from the original story. Then again, the original tale has probably been augmented a lot (to say the least) over the years…

Thinking about my previous post on how terrible an American version of Spaced would be, it occured to me that I have seen a film which features two twenty-something pop and sci-fi culture obsessives living life in the late 1990s, with pop culture references shoved in left, right and centre with a few film homages and girls who dig comic books (pah! fantasy I tell you!).

Granted, it being American, everyone is impossibly handsome - it starred the future Will of Will & Grace, had the gorgeous never-to-be-seen-again Lori Lively, the two people live in Los Angeles and have jobs most people would kill for (scriptwriter and editor). And of course, everyone is impossibly attractive looking. Oh, and it features William Shatner rapping.

The film whereof I speak? Free Enterprise. Have you heard of it? Even seen it? Am I the only one who’d draw a reasonable comparison? Obviously it’s not as good as Spaced - what could be? - but take a look, see what you think…

Thanks to a random link I stumbled across, I’ve just spent the last fifteen minutes giving into my inner fascination with apocalyptic fiction and browsing through Wikipedia’s rather substantial list of post-apocalyptic fiction, reminding me of the UK’s relatively substantial contribution to the genre - The War Game, Threads, Day of the Triffids, 28 Days Later and culminating in World War Z, a gripping account of the Zombie World War.

Right now, I feel rather ill, nauseous and sick right now (bit like radiation poisoning, I’d imagine). Which is amazing given that with the notable exception of 28 Days Later and Day of the Triffids, I’ve never actually had the courage to sit through the rest of the above. But I will have to resolve to buy World War Z, not least because the British government apparently starts its fight back against the zombies from Conwy, less than a mile away. So at least I have somewhere to run to when the zombie hordes invade.

Any suggestions on how I can wash my brains out? Because I don’t want to feel like this for the rest of the day!

You would have thought that after 30 years, finding people who had never seen Star Wars would be nigh on impossible. Especially people who ostensibly worked in the media.

But no, it’s not impossible. The BBC’s entertainment reporter Kevin Young claims to have never seen Star Wars - or any science-fiction save The X-Files, for that matter. This I find a tad impossible!

Surely if you have even an inkling of an interest in entertainment or pop culture, then you must at least have an inkling of science-fiction and what it is. And surely in thirty years Star Wars cannot have completely passed you by. That would be impossible. I submit, sirrah, that the BBC has lied to us!

But more importantly, the BBC sits him down to watch Star Wars for the very first time (awooo… awooo….). And some of the quotes he comes out with while watching Star Wars must mean that he’s completely being ironic and taking the piss. Such as:

“Luke seems quite taken by this holographic vision in blue and wants to know more about her. I have a sneaking suspicion that they might end up as this film’s golden couple, but there’s still an hour and 38 minutes to go yet.”

“It’s a light-saber. It looks cool. I wonder how it works, though - does its laser burn enemy combatants or does it shoot some kind of fatal beam?”

“Important plot twist here, I predict - Darth killed Luke’s dad.”

There is just no way one can be an entertainment reporter and not have picked up on what a light sabre does, and who Luke’s father is. It’s just impossible, surely?