'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

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', 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.

It can't be good for Camelot that the week the price of Euromillions goes up by a third is also the week after the biggest UK wins ever (and why on Earth did the winners all go public? Surely they gain nothing from so doing, while making themselves targets for begging letters at best and kidnappers at worst?). Obviously, when you look at the maths then that extra 50p is a negligible investment and the prize is still more than ten million pounds. But, if you look at the maths, you don't play the lottery. It's all about what seems like a tiny enough sum of money to drop in order to take the chance of the fates smiling on you. And two quid, I think, crosses that line, especially in a week when the fates look so stingy compared to last week.

E4's 'young offenders get superpowers' show Misfits is off to a promising start; between this and No Heroics it looks like, on TV as in comics, it needs us to show the Yanks how to do superheroes properly. Though worryingly, the two shows look set to semi-crossover next week with an appearance by Nathan Barley/The Hotness as a rapey policeman. If the police getting younger is a sign of ageing, how much more so when it's TV police being played by the erstwhile epitome of youth foolishness? Like No Heroics, Misfits also looks to have a nice line in in-jokes, with the first episode based around the Wertham Community Centre.

Inez Holden "became a great friend of George Orwell, whose first meeting with Anthony Powell she engineered in 1941. A dinner party involving Orwell and HG Wells, in whose shed she once lived, was less successful. Wells afterwards sent Orwell a note urging him to 'read my early works, you sh1t'."
- from the end credits of Bright Young People

Good Night, And Good Luck: good film. In its loving (and very cigarette-heavy) recreation of the not-so-distant past it has something of Mad Men about it, as well as sharing one cast member - but a lot less of the moral ambiguity. The story of Edward R Murrow's campaign against McCarthyism is one of those rare, straightforward tales of a hero, a man who was in the right place at the right time, did the right thing, and succeeded. A brilliant cast, not all of whom I expected (it was George Clooney's project so I knew he'd be there, but Robert Downey Jr surprised me, and lots of the others are people you recognise as having given good work before but can't quite place). It did leave me wondering, though, how McCarthy ever managed to be taken seriously enough to start his reign of terror - they use archive footage rather than an actor, and he comes across as an unhallowed blend of Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Fred West.
The story of Murrow's triumph is framed by a speech he gives when winning some award or other, in which he expresses his fears for the future of television, worries whether information will survive or whether consolation and distraction will prevail. Which made it rather awkward that it screened at the same time as Generation Kill, a show whose truth I think he would have loved if he'd been able to follow it, meaning I had to use the bugginess that is 4OD to soldier through my weekly dose of Iraq clusterfvcks.

The one upside to the demise of the Observer Music Monthly (reported on a CMU update which doesn't seem to be on their website) is that at least it's taking Observer Woman Monthly down with it.