And yet again I don’t post for weeks and start this one off with an apology for the fact. Terrible, I know. Blame Twitter. Which I do, copiously.
So! I went to Vancouver a few weeks ago on a press trip to the Stargate Universe studios. I flew out on a Wednesday, arrived at 2pm and spent the rest of the day re-discovering my favourite city, spent all of Thursday on set and then had Friday, Saturday and most of Sunday free to do what I wanted. Because it was a work trip, I had my flights paid for, was put up in a swanky hotel and had my meals included. I spent an extra night staying with a friend, got to hang out with her and eat honey doughnuts and, in total, spent £35 during my entire stay.
HAVE I MENTIONED RECENTLY HOW MUCH I LOVE MY JOB?
Here, have a few pics:
The view from my hotel room.
The Stargate and me.
A very purple me with Stargate Universe star David Blue.
The glorious view from Prospect Point.
Star Trek fans (there was a convention).
To sum up: I love Vancouver. I’ve loved Vancouver since I first went there in 2004. This is my third visit and I’ve decided I want to live there. Alas, I have no job to go to, no money and no chance of being able to do it. Piffle and balderdash! Still, at least I’ve visited enough times to know I love it as much as – if not more – than London.
Also?
RACCOONS!
I’d never seen them in the wild before, so coming across this chittering, chattering little family in Stanley Park made my day! Of course, by the time I’d finished strolling around the park I’d seen so many raccoons I wasn’t that thrilled any more, but… CUTE!
You’ve probably seen this poster before, a relic from the old days when Brits had terribly stiff upper lips and weren’t going to let a little nuisance like a World War from keeping them going about their daily business. The first time I ever saw this poster was on the wall on one of the magazines I work for, but I’ve noticed variations going up during the course of this month on other magazines…
This is Classic Rock’s poster:
Here’s the poster for Prog Rock:
And, best of all, here’s Total Film‘s effort:
I want one myself now. I’m thinking of “Keep Watching Supernatural And Eat Cheesecake.”
I posted the other day about how much I hated Sex And The City 2. It seems just about every other film critic under the sun agreed with me but not, tragically, the cinema-going population of the UK. (At least it didn’t do very well in America. Small mercies.)
I’ve been thinking about it a lot ever since, and have had many conversations with my thinky friend Paul, who loves to analyse stuff in a way I don’t. He hated it even more than I did, if that’s even possible, and we’ve been batting SATC 2 insults between us for weeks now. He made a good point yesterday during our latest bitch-fest: about how many of the critical reviews have focused on the general appearance of Sarah Jessica Parker et al, pointing out how old and haggard they look. What’s infuriating about this is that it’s something you’d never see if the critics were discussing a film starring a good-looking man who just so happened to be getting older. And, horribly, a lot of that personal criticism has been coming from female critics: the very worst kind of reverse sexism.
I’ve been reviewing for over a decade now and in all that time, unless I’m hideously mistaken, I don’t think I have EVER criticised the personal appearance of an actor or actress. If someone’s starred in something and given a bad performance – well, that’s fair game. If I’d written something and it was crap, people would call me on it, so why shouldn’t I call out someone who’s phoned in a star turn? But I wouldn’t dream of insulting the way they look. It’s bitchy, unnecessary and one step up from name-calling in a playground.
Of course, part of the criticism of SATC 2 is that these are women are almost inviting the nasty comments because they aren’t growing old gracefully; they’re wearing clothes too young for their years and behaving the same way. There’s even a moment in the film where a shop assistant tells Samantha that a dress she has her eye on is ‘too young’. But it’s glossed over: rather than making their ageing a theme of the movie – one a great many women can identify with, and I’m saying that as a 38-year-old who’s starting to realise that my looks aren’t what they used to be – they went off on a tangent and decided to explore other things, such as how married life when you’re rich beyond your wildest dreams can be boring, or how women in Abu Dhabi eat chips while wearing veils over their mouths.
Instead of treating the audience like idiots and insulting us, why didn’t this film focus on some themes we might actually empathise with?
It’s a shame that our culture has this terrible double-standard. Truth be told, I think SJP, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis look amazing and probably always will. But throw them into a film in which looks are everything and they’re doomed – particularly when they’re 20ft high on a cinema screen, showing off every laugh-line, vein and wrinkle. As much as I hated that damn script, I really feel for them as human beings, being ripped to shreds by a press who can’t draw the line between a terrible movie and four women being called ‘ugly’ just because it suits the purpose of the reviewer.
And bloody hell, if these women are fugly, where do the rest of womankind stand?
Wow, almost an entire month without posting anything! I shall hang my head in shame. As I’ve said before, however, in this age of Facebook and Twitter it’s sometimes difficult to gather the energy to write an entire blog post when you can sum things up in 140 characters…
…Yes, I’m getting old, lazy and brainwashed by social networking. Fie on my rubbishness!
So, the good news since I last posted is that I’ve lost 9lbs in weight since February, my poorly back has improved massively thanks to the miles and miles and miles of walking I’ve been doing and, fingers crossed, an operation might not be necessary for a long while. Phew! I’m not yet fitting into all those too-small-for-me clothes hanging in my wardrobe, but at this rate I will be in a few months’ time, so I’m very happy about that. Plus I can do my belt up three notches instead of one, so I’m definitely smaller! Hurrah!
A couple of weeks back I met up with my best friends Biddy and Sam, plus many others, and spent a fabulous weekend at the Asylum 4 convention at the Birmingham Hilton. I had an absolutely wicked time and, unlike last year, there were no car crashes to be found! Unless you count costumes:
I think these guys were zombies or something; that’s Jim Beaver in the baseball cap (Bobby in Supernatural), looking suitably bemused/amused…
Although, speaking of car crashes, I did somehow manage to end up singing with guest Mark Pellegrino (Lucifer in Supernatural and Jacob in Lost) after he mentioned he was going to be playing Frank’n'furter in a production of The Rocky Horror Show this year:
I sound like a bag of cats being electrocuted – holy crap, was it nerve-wracking singing in front of 1,000 people! I’m glad I wasn’t on stage, although once they shone a spotlight on me and put me up on the big screen I nearly lost it…
Never let me near an open mike. NEVER.
Anyway, the convention was fantastically fun and, unlike last year’s con, well-organised. I had a blast. My favourite guest was definitely Kurt Fuller, who plays angel Zachariah on the series, because he was twinkly and funny and warm and had appeared in just about every show imaginable, so he was full of great stories. (My favourite being the one about how Bill Murray nicknamed his character ‘Hard-on’ during a scene in Ghostbusters II, before stopping the filming and saying, “I can’t call you that or people will be shouting it at you for the rest of your career.” Kurt is still grateful to this day!)
I’m already saving up for next year’s Asylum 6, although I’m saddened I can’t afford Asylum 5 this autumn, particularly because the awesome Misha Collins is attending. I wish they’d hold these damn things in London so I don’t have to pay hotel and travel!
Other news of import: I hated the finale of Lost. I know I’m not alone. It was beautifully acted and Michael Giacchino rocked it with his score (as always; three piano bars and he always has me snuffling). But The Big Twist was plain dumb after six years of build-up, essentially negating all of the ‘sideways universe’ flashes of this season, and it took me an entire day afterwards to figure out what the hell was going on. I wasn’t expecting total closure, of course, but I felt completely robbed by what we got. And that whole ‘there is a light and it never goes out’ crap? GET OUTTA TOWN. Too little, too late.
Although the final episode of Lost was bloody Shakespeare compared to Sex And The City 2, which I saw last night. Since when is it okay for a mainstream Hollywood film to be racist, homophobic and Islamaphobic all at once? I loved the series so much and didn’t mind the first film, but this was an exercise in hideousness (one touching scene between Charlotte and Miranda aside).
It didn’t help my mood when I ended up on the last train home from Waterloo – it was a very late screening – with a woman so drunk she asked the guy sitting beside her if she could eat his sandwich. Bizarrely, but very sweetly, he said yes, and she chomped away at it until she drunkenly folded over until her head was in her lap and threatened to fall off the seat for the entire journey. I ended up chatting to the sandwich-giver, who turned out to be from New York, and he informed me he’d just seen Colin Farrell in a nightclub getting a lapdance.
Man, I wish I’d spent my evening with him instead of at that stupid bloody movie…
A couple of years ago I had to get a scary man in a white boilersuit to come round and destroy the wasps’ nest outside my bedroom window. It was a very messy massacre and I have residual guilt. Now the wasps, damn their stripes, are back. This time they’ve made a nest somewhere I can’t figure out around the back of the house, which means that every time I open my lounge window I get a room full of ginormous stinging critters spoiling for a fight because they can’t find their way home again.
I have to open every window in my flat when the weather warms up, because I live in an attic and I’ll fry otherwise. This could be a very painful summer…
In other annoying and painful news, another foe from the summer of 2007 has returned with a vengeance, too: my sciatica. I had an MRI scan a few weeks ago and my disc has herniated again, which means I’ll more than likely be having more spinal surgery at some point this year (or next year or 2018 or 2027, depending on when the NHS can see me). I’m obviously pretty gutted about this, but the good news is that I’m keeping the pain at bay with exercise and a ridiculous amount of walking – unlike my last bout of sciatica, I can stand up for more than six minutes at a time, yay me! – and I’m hoping this will help in the long run. I’m losing weight, too, and the joy of being up to pull a belt in an extra notch almost counterbalances the pain!
It’s also not too excruciating at the moment, either, merely uncomfortable. I’d rather be ‘uncomfortable’ than on morphine any day of the week, so long may this continue.
So while I contemplate the possiblity of a summer stuck in a boiling hot flat with a horde of angry wasps because I could be in too much pain to go outside, I shall enjoy whatever excuses I DO have to leave the house at the moment. In a few weeks I’ll be heading off to Birmingham for the Asylum 4 Supernatural convention – I’m going by train this year, anxious to avoid a repeat performance of the car crash that ruined last year’s – and I’m hugely excited at the thought of hanging out with my best friends, my not-quite-as-best friends and all the other people I know who’ll be attending. The guests look fun too and, hell, it’s the first time I’ve been anywhere in a year and could be the last time I go anywhere for ages, so I’m going to enjoy it! The show itself has been utterly phenomenal of late, too, so this is the icing on the cake.
Last week I went to see The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. True to form, I blubbed (it’s the violins! I can’t help myself!) and yet again marvelled at how the sight of a live orchestra playing their hearts out in front of you is still less interesting than the sight of Aragorn kicking Orc ass on the giant screen behind them. Mmm…. Aragorn…
I also seem to be writing a lot of silly ‘poetry’. I have no idea why. It just happened. And keeps happening. Sorry about that.
And finally, I had five serpae tetras in my aquarium last week and this week I have six. They’re all the same size, not a baby fish among them. A baby wouldn’t have escaped from all the other baby-chomping fish in the tank, either, or escaped my attention as I sit beside the tank all the time, so quite how I gained an extra fully-grown fish I HAVE NO IDEA.
I feel like someone is playing a trick on me, but I have no idea who or how. It’s those elves from that shoemaker story, isn’t it?
One last thing – how’s this for the bargain of the century?
I’m sitting in my lounge with the window open listening to birds singing in the sunshine outside. I love planes; I don’t mind living on the Heathrow flightpath; I get a thrill when I look up at the sky and see a giant metal monster zooming overheard. But right now I don’t miss them at all.
Nothing is better than the sound of a robin singing its little heart out on a sunny day.
Just got home from work. Before walking into my house I stood in the street feeling strangely freaked out without being able to put my finger on why. Something felt… weird.
It took an entire minute before I realised what it was: NO PLANES. I live on the Heathrow flightpath and Heathrow, of course, is closed, thanks to that ash cloud from the volcano in Iceland. Obviously I’d been aware all day that I’d get home and find everything quiet, but I’d completely forgotten about it until my Spider Senses told me that something was off.
I missed last night’s episode of Doctor Who because I was watering my plants. I have a lot of plants. It took an entire hour. By the time I realised what I’d done I felt so stupid I think I should hand over my geek credentials and go off and retire in a cave somewhere.
Oops.
But anyway, I watched ‘The Beast Below’ today, and I really liked it! The music wasn’t annoying (also, am I the only person who actually doesn’t mind the new opening sequence and theme?), I thought Eleven was wonderful and I adored the concept – even though the space-whale kind of reminded me of the meat-monster thing from that episode of Torchwood a while back. Is new Who and its ilk sponsored by the RSPCA?
One thing confused me, though: if all the other nations on the Earth were clever enough to build their own spaceships and fly off into space, why didn’t Britain? Why did they have to harness a flippin’ whale when everybody else built their own engines?
I have a theory. It’s because the Tory/Labour governments have spent the last few decades shutting down all our steel works. Clearly in the future there’s absolutely nothing in the way of industry left in the UK and so, when the end comes, we had to depend on the kindness of strangers (in the shape of a giant whale who likes kids).
I urge you all now: in the upcoming election, vote Saxon for anybody who wants to keep our factories open! It could save our country one day!
Oh, and Scotland’s full of engineers. That’s why they built their own ship with a fully-functioning engine. Wow, they must have been so smug.
Spoilers for ‘The Eleventh Hour’ if you’ve not seen it yet!
Why, hello there!
I wish I could have loved last night’s episode of Doctor Who as much as everybody else seems to have liked it, although I will admit that most of my dislike came from the fact I couldn’t hear what people were saying over the loud and intrusive (not to mention ridiculously over-the-top) music score. Seriously, guys, TONE IT DOWN. I don’t have the best sound system on my TV, true, I’ll own up to that, but it’s still a new TV so the sound can’t be that terrible – and besides, there’s no way I should be noticing music at all. It’s there to underscore the action, not drown it out. Dreadful!
(And with that ‘dreadful’, suddenly I feel like an old lady writing to her local newspaper about the terrible thing she saw on her television set last night and how it wouldn’t have been allowed in her day. I’m getting old, aren’t I?)
The good news is that I adored Matt Smith – not that I ever doubted I would! I liked how wacky he was, and expressive, and how he still has Ten’s excellent sense of humour (“Who da man? Okay, I’m never saying that again…”). He’s like an eccentric but desperately cool university student who knows even more than his professors and never turns up for lectures, yet somehow aces all his exams and even teaches the exam board a thing or two in his replies. There is nothing about him I didn’t like, absolutely nothing, and I am thrilled to pieces that he’s going to be our new Doctor.
I’m going to reserve judgement about Amy Pond until she’s done more than the obligatory “I’m going to look amazed and freaked out by all the things this man is showing me, and then I’m going to run after him a lot” new companion thing. I may also reserve judgement on the interior of the TARDIS, which at first glance seemed oddly similar to how it was, even though it’s different. Would a totally new colour scheme have hurt, or am I missing something there? Still, I liked all the hints about the interior – there’s a library and a swimming pool! – and I hope we get to see it one day. Better bring lipstick.*
***
After the episode aired last night I went to the cinema to see Kick-Ass, or at least, that was the plan. Twenty-five minutes in, the projector broke. The crowd – who’d been laughing and hollering and whooping like I haven’t seen in years – booed and howled. We ended up with refunds and a free ticket to see it again whenever we wanted. I feel cheated, but at least I know the first 25 minutes are great!
I have just been reliably informed that the episode of Spaced I referred to in my previous post aired AFTER I left my job at Suttons Seeds, and so my memories are clearly completely wrong.
And yet I still have them. They’re absolutely burned into my mind.
This is really bleedin’ weird!
I wish I could blame it on all the drugs I took at college, only I never took any. Clearly it’s an alternate universe kind of thing. Yes. Yes, that must be it. It’s that alternate universe where I’m married to George Clooney, isn’t it? I love that alternate universe…
At the end of the ’90s I worked for Suttons Seeds, one of Britain’s largest horticultural firms, in my hometown of Torquay. I was a Marketing Assistant (a bad name for a job that was actually more PA/Sub-Editor) in a Design Studio just across the road from the company’s main building. There were four of us in that house and we listened to Radio 1 all day, went to the pub at lunchtime and had a hell of a lot of fun (and we worked a bit, too).
One morning we all came into work and started discussing the previous night’s episode of Spaced. Before we knew it we were pretending to shoot each other and flailing in slow-motion pantomine to land sprawling over our computers, on desks and floors. Anyone who’s seen that episode of Spaced will know exactly what I’m talking about; if you haven’t, here’s a clip. The premise is that if someone points an imaginary gun at you and fires it, you can’t help but pretend you’ve just been shot in the most dramatic fashion possible.
We kept doing it. For months. Every now and then, if we were having a dull day and nothing else was going on, one of us would pull out an invisible gun and shoot our companions. And they always, always responded in kind.
Good times.
I was busy yesterday writing a feature about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (I’ve come a long way since Suttons Seeds!). If I hadn’t been working, I would absolutely have been here for this special Spaced flash mob in Trafalgar Square:
I love how this has become part of popular culture. If I wore a hat, I’d be doffing it to the writers of Spaced right now. Thanks for this, guys – now if only we could make it an Olympic sport, I’d be really happy.
A while back, I posted a link to this YouTube video of what purported to be ‘The World’s Greatest Head Massage’:
This month, the clip hit over one million views. I’m oddly proud of it: I was there almost from the start, when it only had a few thousand, after finding it one night while surfing for head massage videos. It blew me away. It’s so funny (“Note the application of cosmic energy” still cracks me up), the song in the background is catchy (I’ve even downloaded it off iTunes) and – most importantly – it’s astonishingly relaxing. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched it at the end of a long day when I need to de-stress; it’s like I’m having a real massage through my computer screen.
Well, to my surprise, it turns out that I’m not the only one who loves it. In addition to those one million views, the song blaring over the radio has been downloaded by countless other souls and this has become THE video to watch if you need to relax. The masseur, Baba, has actually become a cult figure.
It’s been so popular that the nice man who filmed it recorded this a few weeks ago to discuss its background. It seems he’s as amazed by its success as I am…
BUT! That’s not all…
This week I discovered another video, posted by a lady who’d travelled to India to get her own massage after watching the original. It took her a while to track down the correct barber shop in Pushkar, and even longer to find Baba, but here he is in all his cosmic glory… only this time he’s playing to the camera!
Watch. Enjoy. Relax. And wish that Baba would go on a world tour so that we, too, could note the application of cosmic energy to our own heads.
