Archive for October, 2008

“He fucked your granddaughter!” Jonathan Ross.
The above is what all the fuss is about. Russell Brand has resigned and Jonathan Ross has been suspended.
“The Satanic Sluts are a dance troupe, sort of burlesquey, who you can see dance or, if you are me which I am, have casual sex with.” Russell Brand.
This was said about a week before on Brand’s radio show and garnered zero response.

What is the issue?
What’s happened here is that Brand and Ross, two of the most loved (and highest paid) broadcasters in Britain got carried away with themselves. Brand trying to out do Ross and Ross in turn trying to out do Brand. As personal friends of each other and mutual admirers they have a great chemistry and spark off each other, Brand, in my worthless opinion is constantly trying to impress Ross with his outrageousness. Between them they embarrassed (Not humiliated as most media will have it) a much loved and respected comedy actor. Was it an unfunny prank by these two usually funny men? Yes. Was it something of a double standard from Ross, notorious for having his lawyers on speed-dial to stop photo’s (such as him and David Baddiel playing tennis) and stories he doesn’t want getting to the press? Yes. Was it intentionally hurtful? Almost certainly not. Should anyone lose their job? Absolutely not.

Georgina Baillie
She seems awesome. Her myspace (Which I’m not going to link because I think that would be an invasion of privacy) tells us more about her and the way she lives which, to be fair, I am somewhat jealous of. She dances for a living, parties and loves her life. I wish her nothing but the best of luck and am sure this must be embarrassing. But you must question the motives of someone who says she feels exposed and violated by this issue-

Voluptua getting a spanking, yesterday

(If you wonder how I can reconcile posting this picture which I stole from Popbitch with what I said earlier about privacy, then you are a fucking idiot. These are stills of a film that has been released to the public, myspace isn’t exactly the same.) -and then goes straight to “PR Guru” Max Clifford (By the way, pal, if you’re so good at PR then how come everyone thinks you’re an utter cunt? You utter cunt.) and sells her exclusive story of pain and suffering to  the Sun. There are a few things which we can be sure of after this, Satanic Sluts will get more bookings, Gerogina, or Voluptua will get many more searches done on her name and become very popular among teenage boys, and she will make a great deal of money. I hope she makes stacks of cash from this. If people are dumb enough to want to know about her escapades and pay her for stories of them then she should exploit them for all the cash she can. All she had to do was get poked by Britain’s most sexually active scarecrow. (Incidentally, is there a faintly insidious undercurrent to this whole thing that seems to be trying to drag the largely blameless Gerogina down into the mire? Am I contributing to it by posting the above picture and my questioning the veracity of her embarrassment? Discuss.)

The people versus
Two people complained about the show immediately after. Two. According to the BBC it had around 400,000 listeners. As a percentage that is…fuck all. One of the complainants was Andrew Sachs, the other was a listener who we must presume had never heard of Russell Brand or Jonathan Ross before and had no idea that they were ‘outrageous’ and ‘shocking’ DJs. Andrew Sachs and his grand-daughter are the only two people here with any right to be offended, everyone else just wants to get involved, they want to belong, and they want to be a part of something. It has been likened it to the outpouring of grief surrounding Princess Diana’s death and I think that is true. How many people really care? Did it really warrant being called “Our main news item” on the BBC news? Isn’t there some sort of global credit crisis going on or has that blown over now (while I’m on the subject of that, I am championing the term “Dollarcaust” to refer to this from now on. I hope some of my viewers will join me.)? One person comes out of this clean, Andrew Sachs, who has carried himself with dignity throughout. An apology has been offered by Brand and accepted by Sachs. Shouldn’t we put it behind us and move on?

Julian Clary
Remember when Clary said he had been backstage fisting Norman Lamont and he disappeared from our screens forever? Let’s hope this doesn’t do the same for Brand. Yes, he’s a much higher profile entertainer than Clary was at the time of his faux pas but with the moral minority demanding that heads roll it is a genuine concern. This would be a tragic loss of an incredibly gifted comic talent.
In support of Russell Brand I am producing a range of “I Fucked Your Granddaughter” badges. Available exclusively through me. All proceeds to go to Georgina Baillie. By way of me buying tickets to their next show so I can sit at the back and rub my willy. Dressed as a scarecrow.

Prototype badges, yesterday

The Great Big Hollyoaks Musical Christmas Spectacular.

Due to incredibly popular demand, I have decided to plot my own show. It will most probably be on your screens this Christmas as I have submitted it to Channel 4 and I merely await the arrival of a wheelbarrow full of cash. There are almost certain to accept it. I will keep you updated.

Opening sequence: Kind of a bit like Scrooge. All snowy, people in Victorian dress, carol singing. Fades to traditional British Christmas scene of greyness and rain.
Christmas.
Mercedes gets the AIDS for Christmas.
Hannah Ashworth (her odd flexitime work schedule permitting) eats everyone’s christmas dinners, bloats, then pukes it up everywhere. Everyone thinks she’s gone all bulemic and that.
Cindy hatches diabolical plan to become empress of all Hollyoaks village (I have not yet thought this on through properly).
Lauren and Newt slash their wrists together under the stairs to the Loft.

Some slit wrists, yesterday.

Niall blows up The McQueens house, everyone except Mercedes dies as they sit around with glum faces and wear party hats. The explosion is timed to go off at the exact same time as a cracker snap so no one notices. Jacqui expires in excruciating agony (huzzah!).
Ravi bums Russ, the town doormat.
Elliott gets a new hat. Keira Knightly pops into the student bar and, continuing his bizarre talent for punching above his weight, Elliott pulls her. His new hat comes to life in rage and tries to strangle him as he tells her that he doesn’t want to sleep with her. Right thinking men the world over grind their teeth to a powder as he settles in for a Christmas day of solitary pursuits such as building a model of the Death Star out of wrapping paper and he later wanks himself senseless over a DVD of ‘Atonement’, cursing his own idiocy and lubricating his penis with bitter, bitter tears. Knightly goes home alone.

Keira Knightley at home relaxing, yesterday.

Nancy wins Charlie in a raffle at the pub. Raffle is to raise money to free Jack and Darren. This leads Nancy to smile briefly. She then pursues Gilly as the next in a line of comically unsuitable men.
After the explosion everyone runs to hide in the pub for safety. As the booze flows everyone starts saying what they really think about everyone else. The unnatural obsession with telling the truth leads everyone to admit to unsavoury things they have done in the past.
Warren becomes the new priest and admits everything.
Interspersed with number ones from Christmas past performed by the cast. The songs to be included: Westlife - Seasons In The Sun, Gary Jules - Mad World, Bob The Builder - Can We Fix It?, Spice Girls - 2 Become 1, Michael Jackson - Earth Song, Mr Blobby - Mr Blobby, East 17 - Stay Another Day and Flying Pickets - Only You. And only these ones. Other songs will not be tolerated.

Me, I fucking love Max Payne and the two games stand out as two of only five games I have ever completed (the others being the first three Broken Sword games) and therefore they must be ace. They are dark, cinematic, noirish, comic book style thrillers that look amazing, have gripping story lines and excellently rendered graphics. Emotionally charged games that drag you inside the character, chew you up and spit you out on the other side. What other game has levels with no purpose other than to show you how fucked up the anti-hero is (shown in this instance by running around a black screen on a dripping trail of blood trying to get closer to the screams of your murdered wife and baby)? Even the way you would knock back pain killers instead of medipacks or what have you to repair damage always seemed slightly unwholesome to me. But it was brilliant, it was compelling, you wanted to get to the end and you wanted him to be alright. They were games to make you care about the character.

Mark Whalberg and the cast of Max Payne, yesterday

Amazingly the movie manages to do the precise opposite. It’s fucking rubbish. It’s a film that expects you to be familiar with the games as you watch the actors sleepwalk their way through a poorly structured shitfight. I have no quarrel with individual actors in this film, you cannot, scientists have recently proved, polish a turd. I would even go so far as to say that I quite like Mark (y Mark) Whalberg. He should have been an excellent choice for this role. It’s the director I take issue with. So many missed opportunities. It could have been a SinCity style film, all greenscreen with everything dropped in after, it could have been shot like The Warriors, comic book style scene changes, it could have been like The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan would probably have been the ideal director, not John Moore, infamous only for his pissing about on the Omen remake.), intense and moody. Instead it’s a feeble piece of flotsam that fails even in being style over substance. It looks alright in places and that’s the best that can be said about it. It fails to capture the mood of the film or the characters but the snow looks quite good.

Snow, yesterday

Whilst watching this film my mind wandered. I started thinking about lots of things. I started thinking about lights. My TV has a little red light on which turns on to let me know that my TV is turned off. Even more ridiculously, my iron has a little red light on. When the little red light is lit, it means that my iron is not yet hot enough to cause any irreparable damage to you if you touch it. When the little red light is not lit it could mean one of a number things. Either my iron is turned off and is cold and can be handled. Or my iron is turned off and is hot and should not be touched. Or my iron is turned on and is roughly the surface temperature of the sun. What fucking idiot came up with that system? But back to the matter in hand, don’t watch this film. Buy the games instead. They are probably pretty cheap now but I can’t be arsed to look it up. How lazy am I? Honestly, it would have taken less time than it has taken me to explain why I’m not doing it.
Be seeing you…

I have, for this week at least, got a new favourite film. I purchased this film, legally, from a shop and certainly didn’t illegally download it from a torrent website (but I’ve lost the receipt and I paid cash and I’ve leant it to someone so don’t bother coming and looking for it.). It is brilliant. It follows three people as they take a road trip through purgatory, a realm which in this imagining is reserved for those who have committed suicide. Zia (Patrick Fugit), our principle hero leads the road trip with Eugene (Shea Whigham - playing a character seemingly based on Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hutz) and  Mikal (Shannyn  Sossamon), a female hitchhiker who insists she is there by mistake that they pick up on the journey.

Mikal and Eugene, yesterday

The film is not flawless, It looks awesome, the dead world being a washed out, almost greyscale place full of beautiful details such as nothing working properly and everything looking old or repaired (think: the original Star Wars trilogy) and an amazing soundtrack. But to my mind there are a few interesting opportunities missed. It would have been nice to have explored why people who have already killed themselves once are so prepared to return to a shittier facsimile of their lives. Why isn’t the world a mess of anarchy and rebellion? Are there consequences to actions?  Is there a structure to the world? What is on the TV they watch? But the most intriguing thing that was missed was very briefly touched upon. Namely suicide bombers. Eugene comments on an arab taxi driver and says that it panics him and Zia shrugs it off. This would have been a fascinating avenue to explore, though completely out of keeping with the rest of the film. I think it just irritated me that they mentioned it at all and whetted my appetite.

There are a lot of things in the film that aren’t explained and aren’t questioned and this adds to the film. You are in a world inhabited only by suicides, why would you question the fact that there is a black hole under the seat of a car? A number of internet reviews I hve read have picked up on these as negative points of the film but, honestly, fuck those retards. They are clearly missing the whole point of escapist entertainment. Something that always needs o be remembered when watching a film for entertainment is that it is not a documentary.

The film is feel good, in the least schmaltzy sense of the phrase. In that it actually makes you feel good, not sickly, or gooey, just good.
Watch this film.

Wristcutters movie poster, yesterday

Be seeing you…

Ravi Roy, a battyman? Who would ever have geussed?

Me. Check out my previous Hollyoaks related blogs. While I’m patting myself on the back you may well notice that I also predicted the demise of Tina at the hands of Niall. I only got the method wrong. I frighten myself sometimes, I really do.

So if you wish to know something utterly inconsequential about a soap usually only watched by teenage girls and the mentally handicapped, comment me up.

Ravi Roy, uphill gardener, yesterday