Le sigh

Dec. 21st, 2009 01:18 pm
alexsarll: (bernard)
Snow ahead of Christmas...it's been a while, hasn't it? Proper blizzards of the stuff sometimes, even if by morning it always seems to be mere ice and slush. Which has slowed me down a little, made me less prone to randomly striding about the place, but is nothing like as claustrophobic as having my laptop suddenly keel over on me. Updating from the library now, I can occasionally get a little life out of it but it still feels like something between losing a sense and having the walls close in on you.

The last normal weekend of the noughties, and I started it by going to a nineties night. Then on Saturday, a glam night. Really Sunday should have followed with a fifties night and Monday be set for a thirties event, but nothing suitable was available (though Eddie Argos was just back from Nuremberg, and come to think of it, if Holland Park yesterday didn't feel quite fifties, it didn't feel like the modern day either. West London is weird). The glam night wasn't all seventies, they played 'Glam Rock Cops' and 'Christmas Number One' too, and Glam Chops are technically a noughties band, but when you have Proxy Music playing, that tends to outweigh other factors. When their James Nesbit-a-like Eno took the mic for 'Baby's On Fire', [livejournal.com profile] cappuccino_kid noted that it was a bit like a Smiths tribute act doing 'Getting Away With It'. Which it is, and that would also be awesome. He also proposed an act who, instead of this emphasis on the early material, only cover the last three albums: Roxy Muzak.

Recent viewing:
Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster is the most straightforward of the three films of his I've seen, the closest to a normal B-movie, but it still has moments of the peculiarity only he could bring, most notably the police chief's budgie.
Dollhouse has finally moved away from 'generic TV action format of the week', and even scaled back the sheer rapiness of the concept (they're all volunteers for mindwipes, for a given value of 'volunteer', and get paid off after five years. So that's OK then). It's even had two consecutive episodes with actual plot and progress and, y'know, *watchability*.
Hung ended with the ex-wife plotline we'd all seen coming months back, and I'm hoping the next season dials down the sex comedy aspects (particularly since our gigolo lead never even seems to get any really unattractive clients) and puts more emphasis on the industrial collapse, the death of the American dream and the rest of the properly HBO stuff.
Misfits demonstrated its distance from Heroes even further by going from strength to strength, ending with possibly its best episode. Can someone please put a backing track on Nathan's big speech? Because I loved it and I want to dance to it.
alexsarll: (bernard)
I thought my policy of always giving a new HBO show a chance might have hit its limits with Hung. Especially since it's on More4 on Thursday nights, at an end of the week already overloaded with Sarah Jane Adventures, Wednesday night's HBO double-bill, Friday's comedy options...but much to my surprise, the first episode at least was excellent. The trailers have been going about it all wrong, emphasising the comedy/prurient angle we've all seen before. Whereas the show itself...in much the same way as The Wire used police and drug gangs as a way to examine the decline of the American city, or Deadwood looked at the birth of the nation by way of a psychopathic publican, Hung examines the squeezing of the middle class through the example of a hard-up history teacher with a really big cock. It's more about the way everything seems to be falling apart, and the sense that our working life is not working out like we were given to expect, than Thomas Jane's endowment.

Wednesday night: [livejournal.com profile] augstone brings [livejournal.com profile] billetdoux along on a mini-US deputation to the Noble, establishing that even if Obama has more sense than to be seen with Gordon Brown, the special relationship is alive and well at the level of indie pubbing. Thursday: a Brontosaurus Chorus show, the first I've seen since [livejournal.com profile] icecoldinalex joined and the first time I've really heard the song for which I spent two days filming - Johnny and I have to resist the urge to re-enact the video on stage. The gig's in a weird little basement venue on Denmark Street called Peter Parker's; there's no Spider-Man iconography that I can see, but the cocktail 'Peter Parker's Cvm Shot' still makes me think 'thwip!'. The support are a noise duo whose name is never announced (my own guess: Sine Cosine Tangent); they're playing in front of a projection of Akira, the subtitles on which provide a perfect excuse to stare at the girl's fairly impressive cleavage. All told, I probably had enough material for a post on Friday, but I had to dash off to catch Seizure (ignore all the pretentious guff in the leaflet, the key details of this art project are that it is very blue and very shiny and quite magical). However, this is probably for the best as it means I can gently draw a veil over the weekend.

I keep hearing good things about the comics of Matt Fraction, so I keep picking them up when the library has them, and I'm still not convinced that he's anything but Warren Ellis's even more try-hard younger brother. All his characters sound the same: "Let's make out and whip up more plans for mass slaughter", cackles the villain. Whereas Iron Man himself gloats "Your tax dollars pay me to beat the Hell out of people like this. (I decline the paycheck, by the way)". Which is identical in tone, and also completely meaningless - he just came up with a line he liked and deployed it even though it required a caveat that then made no sense. The only way I could persevere was by pairing it with the disappointing Micro Men on BBC4, there being a strange congruence of themes. "My biggest nightmare has come true...Iron Man 2.0 is here...and I'm not the one that made it" - the cheap, easy to use and ultimately disposable new technology as plot driver, all made me start identifying Clive Sinclair as a British comedy version of Tony Stark. I don't know what that says about anything but it says more than Fraction's Iron Man.
(Also read something where he at least tried to ditch the tech fetish and the KEWL! - Secret Invasion: Thor. And that was just horribly characterless, in spite of featuring Beta Ray Bill, so maybe the usual mode is the lesser evil for him. The failure of this one was thrown into particular relief by how funny and characterful and cosmic and generally *fun* Secret Invasion: Hercules could make a story starting from a fairly similar premise)

*Although having made derogatory mention of Ellis, it's only fair I acknowledge that the final issue of Planetary was beautiful - the first comic since the end of Captain Britain to leave me both crying and laughing in public. Even if that doesn't explain why it was so ridiculously late. Or why newuniversal is. Or Doktor Sleepless.

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