All posts by Armand

Media & Marketing, Miscellany, Personal, Television

The one with the tribute

(or, the one where Armand avails himself of the ire of every female reader of the inter-web through an act of extremely childish and superficial and purposeless misogyny, poorly masked as aestheticism)

Friends came to a close. It saddened me, despite how average I thought the series had become by the 10th season. I have limited hopes for the spin-off, Joey, but I do hope it surprises me pleasantly.

Inspired, though, by a wonderful and silly anecdote from one of its episodes, and by a game I was encouraged into playing at a particularly embarrassing party for me, I have a compiled a list of my top 5 actresses.

So; not in any particular order, and selected for a plethora of, often random, and only slightly superficial criteria, here they are:

Kate Beckinsale
Sarah Chalke
Jennifer Connelly
Kirsten Dunst
Jennifer Aniston

I should point out at this point that their IMDB photos don’t do them the greatest justice, but they are nonetheless all very beautiful.

[Listening to: Already There – Goo Goo Dolls – Superstar Car Wash (02:46)]
Current affairs, Media & Marketing, Technology

The one where I try to catch up on all the things I’ve seen on the web for the last two weeks and fail

Since my recent silence began, this site has been visited by people from 27 countries, enabled by Google blogging, which has given a hundred mini- and un-optimized archive pages for each of my posts, and the friendly men at ‘G’ have also offered a terabyte of storage to selected Gmail users (not me). I’ve also audioscrobbled a fair number of songs, and have discovered a great new way to discover music based on music I like already, thanks to the mysterious ‘Bob’.

Tom has launched THE FIRST GLORIOUS TURKMENBASHI SHORT NON-FACTUAL WRITING CONTEST, Chris has been blogging in terms too geeky for me to understand although I still try, I’ve started reading the Economist Country Briefings to rid me of my occasional ignorance of events of world import.

Phew. And I haven’t even mentioned Tony Blair being attacked by a condom.

Oh. D’oh.

[Listening to: Girl Right Next to Me – Goo Goo Dolls – Superstar Car Wash (03:45)]
Personal, Technology, Work

Where’s my brain, again?

So, near complete silence for two weeks? Ya-huh? That’s what gainful employment does to you, I guess. Yup, I am now a full member of society, I have colleagues (who are all very nice), a job I enjoy and the world of pain that getting up at 7.15 every day gets you. But its going well, and its funner than an evening with Michael Eisner, as they say.

That’s not to say that my mind has been idle; the reason for the emptiness of the blog has entirely been due to exhaustion and not at all to do with an under-active mind. In fact, the new people, the new stimuli, are great for my grey matter. Don’t expect genius from this blog, though; in fact, lower your expectations as far as you can, and prepare for a veritable onslaught of blog-entries.

[Listening to: We Are the Normal – Goo Goo Dolls – Superstar Car Wash (03:39)]
Film, Media & Marketing

B[ad] movie?

So I saw Van Helsing last night, Stephen Sommers’ new monster flick; a veritable beast-fest, in which an amnesiac monster hunter, Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) is deployed by a special order of the Catholic Church to find and destroy Dracula, in Transylvania, and rescue the beautiful Anna Valerius’ (Kate Beckinsale) family from literal damnation. So far, one might think, so good. Or not.

In Transylvania, he fights a werewolf, rescues Frankenstein’s monster, punches Vampiric Oompa-Loompas in the face and comes toe-to-toe with Dracula and his three ‘brides’, as well as a near-infinite number of highly explosive vampire-babies. All accompanied by his very own version of Sancho Panza, the comical Carl, played by David Wenham (last seen being ever-so-slightly more manly as Farramir in the Lord of the Rings movies).

The film is hysterical. It can’t be judged by any objective aesthetic criteria; as a movie it is flawed; the plot is slightly convoluted, it has deus ex machina written all over it, characterisation is shallow and the resolution couldn’t be more cheesey if it was an excessively ripe gorgonzola with a best before date sometime in the last century. The one-liners are terrible (and therefore excellent).

As a pastiche, though, its brilliant. Reviews have slated it for demeaning the monster flick oeuvre (please!), and for its poor characterisation. But if you go in expecting silly, full-on entertaining hero-slaying-monster type action, and don’t suffer from any kind of cinematic lactose intolerance, you will be entertained.

Warning, though: if you are serious about your monster movies, don’t go. You’ll be upset at apparent flaws in logic, the comic lovability of Frankenstein’s monster, the cute yet explosive creatures, the terrible, but wonderful dialogue, and the Valerius family in the sky. Still, I had fun, and wanted to write something in defense of the film when everyone I went to see the film with came out saying it was “terrible, but I enjoyed it.” I think its more than just comically entertaining; I think they went for exactly what they got; a B-movie for the 21st Century, and a damn sight more entertaining than Mars Attacks (admittedly made in the 90s).

Oh – it has a soundtrack by the awesome Alan Silvestri (of minor fame from the Back to the Future soundtrack), which I also liked. And there was another deeply weird trailer – Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law and Angelina Jolie in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a 1940s SciFi flick (oh yes). Can’t wait, now.

[Listening to: Staring at the Sun – The Offspring – Americana (02:14)]
Film, Media & Marketing, Television

The good, the bad…

The good: the M*A*S*H finale. For those who didn’t know, M*A*S*H was a TV series that ran from 1972-1983, spun off a 1970 movie of the same name. It stands for “Mobile Army Surgical Hospital”, and the series (and the film) is a satirical take on the Vietnam war, set, appropriately enough, during the Korean war.

Struggling through a mediocre first few series, the characters and storylines matured into genuinely profound reflections on war, wartime morality, and how individual characters struggled with the lunacy of their situation. As with all good things, though, it came to an end in 1983 with a two and a half hour special, outlining the end of the war, the main character (Alan Alda, playing Captain ‘Hawkeye’ Piers) having a nervous breakdown, and each of the other major members of the cast dealing with their own drama.

I started watching M*A*S*H on my Dad’s inspiration a couple of years ago, the repeats obligingly running on Paramount Comedy twice daily and Tivo carefully picking them up for me, and have been moved by various episodes. It’s truly well written at times, and absolutely brilliant in general. The finale was no exception; watched on its original screening in 1983 by 106 million people, no sitcom has, in the intervening time, got close to those numbers, not even the up-and-coming Friends finale. I think they’re starting to release MASH on DVD now; if you haven’t seen it, you should really try to get hold of some.

Oddly, I hadn’t seen the finale at the time I had my dream about it. Peculiar.

The bad: Secret Window, Johnny Depp and Stephen King’s new film. Utterly mediocre, despite a decent performance from Mr Depp as a heartbroken novelist, the twist was genuinely completely predictable (and I normally don’t get these at all), and not really entertaining in any real way. Unless you want to see Mr Depp put on a Mississipi accent and wear a funny hat….

[Listening to: Miami – Will Smith – Big Willie Style [UK] (03:18)]
Music, Personal

Ain’t talking about riffs

I’ve always had trouble describing my musical taste to people. It always comes out as ‘eclectic’, but now, with this list, Total Guitar Magazine has hit the nail on the head of one of the most important things for me: wicked guitar riffs.

Of their top 20 tracks, I’ve got 17 on CD somewhere. That’s some major riff action.

[Listening to: Whole Lotta Love – James Taylor Quartet – Greatest Acid Jazz Hits (04:36)]
Current affairs, Media & Marketing, Personal

The girl all the bad guys want

Writing and therefore thinking, once again, on altruism – and trying to understand more fully some of the things that supposedly tie in to my world view.

I believe, in a nutshell, that humanity is predisposed to altruistic motivations (and therefore altruistic behaviour, on occasion when akrásia fails). And I believe there’s an evolutionary basis to this (and all other) morality.

What, then, is my view in light of the obvious and evident acts of torture and brutality that’s been going on, by the supposed good guys?

I guess, and this is something that Michael Madsen (Mr Blonde of Reservoir Dogs fame) says when talking about how to best play the bad guy: the bad guy never believes he’s the bad guy. Although this is not the most original thought there’s been, I think nothing could be more true than for the ‘crusaders’ in Iraq – watching their friends die in what they’ve been told is a war on evil, a war on terror.

The travesty, of course, is that no-one is quite speaking in terms of these acts of atrocity as acts of terror, acts of evil. They are atrocities, but somehow one accepts atrocities in war and we remain entrenched in the rut. I think someone needs to through the hyperbole back into Bush’s face and then we’ll see how grey his black and white universe is.

[Listening to: One Last Shot – Klaus Badelt – Pirates of the Caribbean OST (04:46)]