This isn't crime. This is evil.

[alexsarll]

publicansdecoy reckoned that by walking the streets of Greenwich on a Sunday afternoon, dressed as Noel Coward and swigging milk, I had crossed the line into actually looking like a crazy person. Or at least I think he did, but maybe he was just my imaginary friend and I was actually talking to myself.
(The Coward outfit isn't something I was wearing specifically to lose at Scrabble in; I'd been at a party in Lee the night before. That being Lee the slightly scuzzy district of South London, not a young gentleman, though I can see how my being dressed as a noted homosexualist might be construed as misleading. Not a bad party, either; you can probably get some measure of it just from the phrase "Swingballs of Fire". Plus, two people asked if I was older or younger than my sister, which given she got ID'd earlier in the week is really saying something)

There are aspects I don't buy in the set-up of bleak infertility thriller Children of Men. If the human race has been sterile since 2009, surely immigration would be less of an issue, not more? Isn't breeding one of the main engines both for immigration (people wanting a better life for their children) and for the fear of immigration (the indigenous population terrified of being outbred and overwhelmed by the fecund Other)? And for all the terror attacks and prison camps, I found the elegiac vision of humanity winding down to be strangely soothing - especially since there was no sign of sterility affecting the animals. It's a marvellously directed piece, though - everyone talks about the impressive extended shots, and they are good, but what grabbed me was the determination never to let it get too glamorous or Hollywood, even down to having someone as impeccably cool as Clive Owen get stuck in flip-flops for half the film, just to bring him down to Earth a bit. Also, Michael Caine in one of the roles where he actually acts, which is always pleasant; I'm glad he seems to be getting back to that a bit more.

And I suppose we can segue from there via the far darker infertility thriller Y: the Last Man to Brian K Vaughan's first issue of Buffy. His cardinal sin has always been a tendency to over-research and then drop in undigested gobbets of that - here, this manifests as a Buffy in which every piece of dialogue goes for the show's verbal pyrotechnics, forgetting that it never attempted to keep that pace of patter going *all* the time. Still, it has cameos for the Doctor and Rose, a mention of Alan Moore as an associate of Giles', and of course lovely, lovely Faith. He'll do.
(In other comics news, Dan Slott's final issue of She-Hulk comes up with an explanation for continuity errors which is approximately 100 times better than DC's Superboy punches, and at least 1,000 times more fun. And why do hauls of Mike Carey comics always seem to turn up at the same time as Murcof albums?)

For all the Guardian's sins, I love the Guide - the single best listings source available, it's a masterpiece of formatting. It is pretty much why the Saturday edition is the only paper I still buy. Except this week, it has on the cover Ian Brown, plugging an article inside in which he expounds in his usual fvckwitted fashion on the good ideas the Taliban had, &c. Now, even were it not for the contents of that piece, I wouldn't want his ghastly mug staring out at me all week, would I? People say he looks like a monkey but I have never seen a monkey which looked so hateful, so churlish, so unutterably stupid, so plain ugly. Normally, under these circumstances, I'd tear off the cover. Except the back page of the mag inside is an interview with perhaps the only man in Britain more purely loathsome than Brown - George bloody Galloway.

Fiddy Cent, not content with losing horribly in his chart battle with Kanye, makes an even bigger tit of himself by insisting Kanye must have cheated. That's right, Fiddy, just keep digging - this pathetic wheedling is just the sort of thing to destroy your misbegotten cred even with the sort of knuckleheads who think that getting shot makes you cool. Although he has just announced the 'postponement' of his European tour, so maybe he's not wholly without honour. Either way, he loses, and music wins.

Comments

[tiny-tear.livejournal.com]

Re: Children of Men

The way I felt about the film was that the bit based on the book was good, the bit Cuarón wrote for himself was a bit too action movie...

I quite enjoyed it, even though they changed a million things...

I would recommend the book, though...

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I don't know the book, but reading the Wikipedia summary of it, I got the feeling that it would annoy me far more than the film's minor peculiarities. Non-SF writers doing SF often has that effect on me...

[tiny-tear.livejournal.com]

For me it didn't feel much like a sci-fi book...

I think it kind of made more sense in terms of characters and more details of things like the Quietus and so on

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Mass drowning in the book, right? I thought the nicely-marketed, soft-looking kits were a really good touch.

[tiny-tear.livejournal.com]

Not as blunt as a mass drowning (but yes, it was a drowning) but better described

walking the streets of Noel Coward on a Sunday afternoon

[puzzled-anwen.livejournal.com]

Is that what you meant? I do hope so.

Ian Brown is an actual loony, isn't he? I mean, properly barking. I think you should stick a picture of someone he hates over the top of his stupid face, possibly a crudely drawn stick figure of Ariel Sharon or someone.

Re: walking the streets of Noel Coward on a Sunday afternoon

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I've got it all folded back, which isn't ideal (the paper's tearing a bit), but seems better than the alternatives.

The other was just a bit of method writing playing off my supposed lunacy. Honest.

[strange-powers.livejournal.com]

I thought that in Children of Men, the whole of the rest of the world was far more screwed than the UK, meaning a constant influx that an already paranoid society wasn't prepared to face. I loved it.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

It's hard to be sure really, isn't it? We get the "BRITAIN ALONE SOLDIERS ON", and the rescued art from overseas disasters in the Ark, but given the screwedness of Britain, how much of that was propaganda>

(Geekily, the nuclear explosion in NYC made me think that maybe this was a world where they hadn't saved the cheerleader...)

[darkmarcpi.livejournal.com]

Reading the guff Brown was spouting in the Guide, I do wonder whether he is being totally serious, or just playing up to his image of being a mouthy controversialist and/or a crazy philosophical stoner.

Have you heard his new single, btw? The lyrics are pure comedy gold.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I've seen some of them quoted. Even by his own standards, they're quite pathetically subliterate and simple-minded.

I quite like the idea that it's all an act, but I fear that would be the old liberal failing of being unable to appreciate quite how stupid and vile some people can be.

[tintintin.livejournal.com]

Re. the Guide: agreement. Honourable second place to The Times' The Knowledge.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Really? I've never felt that does quite such a good job of combining going out listings, the TV stuff, and articles one actually wants to read. I think it was Dickon who said the Guide is the magazine Time Out used/wants to be.

[whizzerandchips.livejournal.com]

The Guide's quite good, but will never come close to the concise and unbiased approach of Look-In.

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

True: the Guide would be much improved if it featured the Benny Hill comic strip and a free cut-out-and-keep poster of David Cassidy in every issue.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

True, they had some pretty good talent working uncredited on their strips, but last week the Guide had Bryan bloody Talbot!

[superba]

Heh, I live in Lee! I like to think of it as a no-man's-land between more interesting places (or at least, locations better served by public transport). The rent's cheap though.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

It felt more down-at-heel than actively dodgy (though the directions to the party did assume we'd prefer not to come from Kidbrooke station...), but I did think it strange how you could tell instantly that you were in a different neighbourhood once you'd crossed that little stream dividing it from Blackheath.

[superba]

Oh god Kidbrooke is terrifying! And you're totally right about the stream. Aww, I'll miss this funny little place when I move.