There aren’t many. Today there were two. Both involving death on the roads.

(1) Road kill. Cars kill beasts, and cyclists are left to ride through the miasma of their rotting corpses. This morning it was a fox, and it had been fairly thoroughly shredded: probably in the wee hours of this morning, judging by the smell. The day was just beginning to heat up so it hadn’t had time to get going properly on the whole festering lark.

(2) Probably not one for the men: getting home and removing one’s bra to discover bugs killed by being squashed between boob and bra. I mean, I suppose some men fantasise about being crushed to death by 32DD bosoms, but I’m fairly sure that the flattened aphid I discovered had met its untimely end in my cleavage didn’t have the brain cells for pornographic fantasies.

Heads up, folks.

Twitter appears to have had a brainfart over the last few hours and you may find that your following/followers data have been lost. I’ve just had to go finding all mine again.

If I’ve not found you, just, you know, ping me and I’ll fix it.

Here was me thinking that Mars Phoenix wasn’t talking to me any more…

Fixed gear commuter racing. Against a reasonably attractive young man. Normally I’m the one in front providing the view. He was up for a bit of a burn, though, and I could not catch him until the roundabout above the bypass, where my approach coincided with the lights changing and he thought he’d dropped me so didn’t accelerate very hard.

That’ll wake you up in the morning.

If you were the rider of the orange fixed gear with the orange messenger bag (Crumpler?) travelling in the direction of Heriot Watt this morning along Calder Road being followed (then passed) by a red-head in a Sugoi Manga Jersey on an Il Pompino with Midge bars carrying a silver and black Timbuk2… Tighten your chain, man!

Lack of biscuity hug was disappointing today, though. I think it was vanilla shortbread on the way home yesterday.

The Cottage.

Run. Don’t walk. Put the DVD down and flee. Don’t even touch it. Don’t pick it up. Do not expose yourself to the teasing lies that adorn the back of the box. You will thus be spared reading “The Cottage isn’t just the funniest British Comedy in years, but the horror event of 2008. Don’t miss it.” That’s all right. It’s fine. If you had picked up the box you might have spotted that this review comes from The Daily Mirror, even though they’ve carefully made that bit grey and blurry and very, very small so you might think it came from someone worthwhile. If you leave the box on the shelf you will not be tempted by the presence of one of the cast of The League Of Gentlemen.

The description on the back of the box bears little relationship to the film itself. I once bought a low-fat, low-sugar recipe book. In it was a recipe for custard and jelly that used polenta and fruit tea. I kid you not. The author said that the yellow colour of the polenta “bore a comforting resemblance to custard.” The entire book bore a displeasing resemblance to food.

This film bears a displeasing resemblance to something for which it is worth losing 90 minutes of your life. Roll up all the zombie/Texas Chainsaw Massacre/Evil Dead/Lock Stock Dog Soldiers Britflick tropes, stick ’em in a blender, sieve them to remove the lumpy bits then water it down for people who can’t take anything stronger than dilute Ribena.

I haven’t seen anything that tries so hard and fails so miserably in a very long time.

From now on, all Mars Phoenix tweets are to be read in the voice of GLaDOS.

That is all. Carry on.

St Trinian’s

Let me get this straight, right from the start: I am a massive fan of the original Ealing comedies. MASSIVE. My adoration for the original films is right up there with my love of The Importance Of Being Earnest and the Miss Marple movies… Hell. Anything with Margaret Rutherford in it. It was because of those films I wasn’t entirely dischuffed with the idea of boarding school.

Now that I’ve made that clear, I’ll explain how DVD swapping works in my family. Mum and I buy DVDs and swap them after we’ve seen them. If we don’t like them we don’t want them back. Hence I have a number of movies in my collection that frankly I would prefer not to own. So when Mum handed me this DVD and explained she and Dad had only managed twenty minutes before having to turn it off because it was so awful, I didn’t hold out much hope that it was any better than I’d been led to believe.

With that in mind, we put it on 20 minutes before bedtime the other night, expecting to be ready to turn it off in disgust by the time we’d finished our mugs of tea.

We went to bed unreasonably late.

Watch this film expecting it to be like the originals and you’ll be disappointed, however I think that if the originals hadn’t been made, and this was the first adaptation, Ealing wouldn’t have made it any other way. It’s aimed at those who are familiar with internet subculture, and the sense of humour is such that I’m not surprised my parents hated it. But from the moment I saw Rupert Everett doing an utterly superb job as Camilla Fritton, I knew I was in for a surprise.

There is a scattering of familiar faces from the great and the good of British comedy, including Celia Imrie, Kathryn Drysdale (of Two Pints… fame), Russell Brand, Fenella Woolgar (recently seen playing Agatha Christie in Dr Who) and Stephen Fry; and they all seemed to be having a marvellously good time. Relative unknown Gemma Arterton puts in an accomplished, confident performance as headgirl Kelly, showing more capable than the rabble of teachers who spend their time drunk on matron’s frightening cocktail concoctions. The scene in which new girl Annabel is introduced to the various cliques — which I particularly enjoyed as a survivor of the hothouse environment that is boarding school (“We’re not Goths, we’re Emo!”) — shows that this school isn’t just about social groupings but specialist squads all keen to use their criminal initiative.

“Daddy, you can’t expect me to stay here. It’s like Hogwarts for Pikeys!”

As well as random shots doffing the proverbial cap to English popular culture past and present (“You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”) there are plenty of references to current political arguments about how to run the UK education system and the tendency of the press to go for headlines rather than actual news.

This film isn’t just puerile comedy: it’s genuine satire. It may not be intellectual satire, but it is satire nevertheless.

It’s not as good as the originals, and to be honest I don’t think they ever thought it would be. The bad-girl-comes-good was never going to be an option with this film, and I did find the stupid-girl-gets-clever equivalent deeply annoying for making the tired old mistake of conflating intelligence with general knowledge. It is, however, a fun way to spend 90 minutes or so and if you can forgive the makers revamping a time-honoured classic for the internet generation, you could do a lot worse.

Me, Frood

My car has been away in Fife for a week having its suspension replaced. I’ve been borrowing my Dad’s car, because I’m contractually obliged to provide a vehicle for work (chiz chiz). Phone call last night: car’s ready. Yay! I’ve missed Claude. I need to go across to Fife to fetch him, on Tuesday after work.

I was thinking that I could take the train across to Kirkcaldy and ride Shackleton the 11 miles to my parents’ house, then drive home with Shack in the back.

Then one of my invisible friends observed that I need to give my Dad his car back.

Um. Yeah. I’d sort of forgotten that in the whole “But it’s only 11 miles from the station” part of the equation.

Jumper.

I’ll say from the start that it was a toss-up between this and 30 Days of Night (which I’ve got to watch tonight) and Munky chose Jumper on the basis he thought it would make excellent rant-fodder for Frood and myself. You know, get us (well, me) shouting at the tellybox the way we did at the execrable Core (long since out-shited by Sunshine).

For some reason he left it behind when he went down south again. I’ll put it in the post.

The film starts by making it quite clear, from the start, that our “hero”, played by Barbie-boy Hayden Cristiansen, is an utter wanker with no redeeming personality features who really needs a good smack round the face with a studded 3 by 4. It then moves into flashback mode to set out the unrequited love trope of young David and the girl Millie, during which there is an unfortunate river-ice accident and David finds himself involuntarily teleporting himself to the local library to avoid hypothermia and drowning. No hilarity ensues.

Young David, demonstrating that the cliché of boy hates father even though father is just trying to do his best in difficult circumstances is alive and well, then does a runner, just like his mum did. Frankly if I’d been his mother I’d have fucked off sharpish as well. He goes to the Big City [TM] and sets himself up as independently wealthy by using his new-found power to rob a bank. Henceforth he spends his time jumping around the globe, surfing in Hawaii after breakfast and lunching in London before enjoying the sunset from the top of the Sphinx. As you do.

At this point the plot thickens. Roland, played by Samuel L Jackson paying the rent with stupid-ass painted white hair, turns up and makes it clear that what could have been a semi-decent action flick has ruined all hope of identifying with any one of the main characters by killing some oriental bloke in a jungle and justifying it by saying only God should have the power to be all places at once.

Roland is head of a bunch of people going by the name of paladins, who apparently were responsible for the witch hunts (all witches were really jumpers, dontcha know) and their job is to kill jumpers. He goes after David and David heads home to pick up Millie and take her on a dream date to Rome. By plane. Because obviously he can’t tell his childhood sweetheart that they could just teleport there.

In Rome he meets up with Brit Boy Griffin, played by Jamie Bell, who is the only character in the film worth any split second of screen time. Griffin’s mission in life is to kill paladins. Henceforth the film devolves into a boring take on the reluctant buddy-movie, with much chase action involving jumping through each other’s “jump scars” and Griffin’s evidently superior personality being devalued by a trite moral bankruptcy that they didn’t even have the decency to justify adequately.

You know, I hate bipolar movies. My Dad loves them. He likes it when all things turn out right in the end and the good guy gets the girl. He’d really like this film if it were not for the fact that the plot, despite being straightforward and simplistic, is rendered disjointed by a complete failure to join the various sequences together in any way resembling a coherent picture. The continuity relies on the viewer having the attention span of a hamster overdosed on Sunny D and ephedrine and absolutely no interest in anything involving exposition or storytelling. You know exactly where the film is going to end up and yet the method of getting there seems to be a waste of screen time.

Verdict: dull as dishwater and thoroughly disappointing. They could have made so much with the premise, but apparently couldn’t be arsed. Zero chemistry, no humour, and a bunch of characters I’d quite happily lock in a room together until they’d killed each other.

Found on Dooj‘s LJ page. I thought this was utterly brilliant:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSed1K-QNMc]

Takes me back, you know, to Vague Stevie’s poster of Kate Bush and, indeed, his obsession with the woman herself.