Outside the Gielgud a sign read: Equus On The Buses starring Mr Ed
2008-05-11 ~ 2:11 p.m.
I finally got CSI: Ambleside, the new Half Man Half Biscuit album. It's not up to the standard of the best of their work (probably Achtung Bono and Trouble Over Bridgwater) but as always there are some excellent tracks and great jokes.
Evening of Swing (Has been Cancelled) is a pleasantly apocalyptic vision. "And the christening party arsehole who hitherto had blurred / my conception of man as nature's final word / was fleeing from the lava, his satnav pleading thus / 'I'm not from round here mate, you should've got the bus.'"
Track 2 is the rather specific rant of Bad Losers On Yahoo Chess, which namechecks Deep Blue and Ernest Shackleton but is full of righteous indignation.
The standout is track 3, which starts out sounding like The Minutemen (nice bass playing) but features ace cheap synthesiser on the chorus. Took Problem Chimp To Ideal Home Show is self-explanatory, even unto its genius. Also comes close to nu-metal-style rapping. "Don't tease him. It don't please him. What's that? You want me to appease him? How so, sir? With Tetris? Not possible! Didn't bring the Game Boy!"
The final track, National Shite Day is excellent too, a wonderful narrative of crap things happening from the mundane ("Primark FM") to the improbable ("overhead a rainbow appears - in black and white"). After a few repetitions of the weird high-pitched chorus it turns into a bizarre story about a mentally ill prisoner who saw an advert for a keyboard player in a rock band saying "must be committed" and took it the wrong way.
Other tracks are a bit less musically strong. Totnes Bickering Fair is about divorce, Blue Badge Abuser is about people using disabled parking despite not being disabled, Lord Hereford's Knob about gentrification in Merseyside, and Ode To Joyce is a Buddy Holly-style ditty about a girl called Joyce. But I can't help feeling that for all their references to Facebook, Youtube and of course online board games, they're behind the times with Give Us Bubble Wrap - musically pleasant but the bubble-wrap-as-solution-to-all-the-world's-problems thing has been done to death; there's probably an institute in Africa with billion-pound funding from Bill and Melinda Gates. And On The 'Roids is not something you want shouted repeatedly on a song.
I went to see Forgetting Sarah Marshall yesterday. I was feeling quite depressed beforehand (sleeplessness, hayfever, vandalism, lost wine) but it cheered me up. Jason Segel is great - he was hilarious in Freaks and Geeks as Lindsay's worryingly intense and clingy boyfriend Nick, serenading her to Styx's Lady and similar crimes against nature and/or romance, and this film continues in a similar style. Segel plays a musician/composer working on a tv crime show who's dated the show's star Sarah Marshall for 5 years, but she dumps him for a rock star played by Russell Brand.
Russell Brand is also very good as the twattish but actually fairly nice English singer. There's a long speech in which he attempts to explain to a hotel employee that he's lost a shoe that matches the one in his hand, except it's not exactly like the one he's holding, it's the opposite way round, otherwise he'd have two right shoes, etc, etc. And other moments play nicely off Brand's combination of charm and utter detachment from the entire human race.
They should have made the film a musical. Brand sings a song, and there's a lengthy clip of one of his band's music videos, plus Segel's character is working on a rock opera about Dracula and we hear some of that. And musicals are always good.
It does go very full-on with Segel's patheticness about being drunk, this isn't the sort of film where a character breaks up, has a few drinks and then feels better. He weeps pitifully, he stands around naked and crying, he has lots of very bad one-night stands, he's genuinely pathetic far beyond the bounds of romantic comedy.
Another nice comic thread is the mocking of American TV, with the cop show that Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars) is in; Billy Baldwin stars as a detective who makes incredibly crude sarcastic comments as they investigate murderous dog masturbators and similar CSI-esque nonsense, examining semen samples and inspecting headless corpses (not shown on screen, fortunately). I was also wondering about similarities between Marshall and Bell, who also came to fame on a popular TV drama. Wait a minute after the end credits start for another great TV parody.
So, a lot better than I expected. I think it fulfils the Judd Apatow method of being a little more realistic than most mainstream films. Well, realistic except for the absolutely gorgeous love interest played by Mila Kunis (who I only knew from her work as Meg's voice in Family Guy - weird to hear the same voice coming out of a beautiful woman.)
List of problems solved by MacGyver, from Wikipedia.
General legal question: is there a law to prevent misleading statements on gravestones? Also, is there a law to prevent Virgin Media's movies on demand from claiming to have "all the new releases" when they're plainly not showing Albert Serra's Catalan deconstruction of the Don Quixote mythos, Honour of the Nights. On the other hand, they do have Chinese Civil War epic Assembly, so fair dos.
| (or notes)
RECENT COMMENTS ON MY DIARY
Outside the Gielgud a sign read: Equus On The Buses starring Mr Ed - 2008-05-11
Do Del-boy impressions with your Corgi-registered friends - 2008-05-06
Until we destroy we'll only have ruins - 2008-05-02
Her atheist tracts are certainly persuading - 2008-05-02
punk rock prom queen / brown paper magazine / hotter than you've ever seen / everywhere and in between - 2008-04-28
mail note tunes cabbages sprouts
NYRB LRB Guardian Popjustice Missprint Popbitch Playlouder Honest facade Straight Dope Bad Science Ehrenreich Overheard in NY BPS Research Digest Engadget B3ta Britney's naked cat-a-phone Filmhouse S1play IMDb Everyhit LJ
