In our first installment of Buy Me You’re Sick we looked at products that offer to serve the same psychological function as high-end prostitutes. Today it’s about consumables whose commercials basically say “our loyal customers have mental health issues.”
Please note the distinction with Crazy Eddie’s Used Cars – “I must be insane to offer prices this low!” No, these products tell you that you’re the insane one. These products are so great – they inspire such fervour and loyalty – you will pride them over family, over friendship, over even sex or sleep.
In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Russell Brand had it easy playing Aldous Snow. His was a bit part, ripe for scene stealing and he played a stereotypical British rock star, all excess and showboating. All he had to be was more exciting, interesting and funnier than Jason Segal, which isn’t all that hard. He performs one song in the film, Inside Of You, which is just a trojan horse for crude innuendo, pleasant enough but easily written off as a slapdash track written for his girlfriend watch it below. But the song is played straight. This will be important.
Aldous Snow returns in Get Him From The Greek, as a lead character, and the film does not quite know what to do with his music. more »
At some point ages ago I tried to write a thing about comfort pop, after listening to ‘Fight For This Love’ 28674987 million times on repeat but ultimately, saying ’some songs are quite pappily nice and occasionally necessary to avert a mental breakdown’ is nothing new. There may yet be some distance in the genre, though: I read an article awhile ago about Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’ which said that in times of economic strife songs with more uniform beats chart, making the success of such a steady song a major indicator of the recession (as opposed to, y’know, the recession being a major indicator of the recession but nevermind) and I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong. Equally, it’s probably not statistically unlikely that the biggest popstar to emerge out of dire times is not some miserabilist twat with a guitar moaning about having to get a real job but a great fairy godmother who calls her devotees ‘little monsters.’ And one of the biggest songs for the last 18-months has been the decades-old ‘Don’t Stop Believin” by hoary rockers Journey- not necessarily because of, since it seemed to be having a slight renaissance before it but certainly in association with a show about losers. more »
I completely fell for Tina Fey when she pulled her sweater off as a schoolteacher in Mean Girls, accidentally lifting her shirt with it. This of course was strongly reinforced by the wonderful 30 Rock, and she was soon by far the biggest celeb crush I have ever had. I would marry Liz Lemon tomorrow, given the chance, and that may be true of Tina Fey too.
So I didn’t care about whether any reviews said Date Night was good or not. An hour and a half where I could reasonably expect Fey on screen most of the time => I wanna see it. Frankly knowing more might have put me off a little: the idea of an ordinary couple getting drawn into big-league mob violence sounds like a ’70s movie version of a British sitcom, The Terry and June Movie or some such. And do I really want a big car chase starring Fey and Steve Carell?
The plot is ludicrous: mistaken identity, killer cops, mob bigwigs, corrupt politicians, and our heroes battling to survive them. It is hardly plausible, but in the way that Bringing Up Baby was barely plausible, so that was fine with me. more »
Among the millions of ways to convince people to buy things, two strategies have really taken off in the last several years. The first is when a product promises to be so great that it will make you literally insane. We’ll get to that one in a bit. For now let’s talk about the other one – when a product promises to play the role of a sex worker in your life. more »
What can we expect from the new-look NME? Inside gossip about Hollywood, duh! With the news that Sam Mendes might be directing the next James Bond movie, it’s worth considering how different the Bond series might have looked if Mendes had applied his careful deconstruction of American ennui to the entire project. Instead of just a thuggish ladykiller with clever gadgets, Bond might have spoken to an entire generation’s pissy dissatisfaction with this Winesburg Ohio we’re all trapped inside of. Just think of what might have been:
- “My Job Is Not Enough”
- “Dr. No, I’ve Got a Headache”
- “From Russia With Vague Longing”
- “The Bitch Who Loved Me”
- “Octopissy”
So why haven’t I seen any films this year*? Beyond the FilmX reason, I blame James Cameron. Perhaps it is a bit of an over-reaction to boycott ALL films because the self styled King Of The World finally deigned to make a film after ten years, but what a film. Avatar, and its rubbish font, has been so all encompassing that someone has to take a stand. And don’t scoff, I didn’t see Titanic in the cinema, and he didn’t make a film for ages. So me boycotting Avatar has form.
What I am boycotting is not so much the blue anthropomorphic noble savage bobbins of the extravagantly long movie. I am not even boycotting Sam Worthington not being digitally edited out of the film, even though it was clear from Terminator Salvation that he was as wooden at Harrison Ford’s pre-movie career material of choice. more »
I have not seen a single film in the cinema this year*. There are a number of reasons for this, many of which I will approach in this hopeful series of posts about my somewhat oddly dependent relationship with film. But just to make it clear that this is an unusual state of affairs, I saw 132 films in the cinema last year. This year none. I’ll probably tell you what the ten worst ones were over the next few weeks. But I really, really like going to the cinema.
So the real reason I have not been to see a film? I was ruling myself out of the Film 2010 job. It was not a job I wanted and it struck me as someone who occasionally sees the odd film and reviews them, I was clearly top of the bookies list. Turned out that when I went to the bookies I wasn’t. Mark Kermode was. Well he hasn’t got it (not that he wanted it as he said effusively last week on his podcast in the manner of a man who knows he has not got it). But I, like the bitter grape eating Kermode, would not want to do it. The Film Programme, as it is nominally called, deserves someone better that Barry Norman (a rather dull pedantic reviewer as you can see below the cut), Jonathan Ross or indeed Mark Kermode. And Claudia Winkleman may just be it. more »
Cam Gigandet (did I stutter?) started out as a young hunk on the Young and the Restless, moved on to playing a young hunk on the OC, kicked off his movie career as young hunk James in Twilight, and now turns up as a young hunk with blindingly white teeth in Pandorum, a pleasingly second-rate sci fi action horror flick set far in the future when Earth has finally groaned and broken under the weight of all its pesky human inhabitants and one last, colossal spaceship has taken off with the last of the human race.
Yes this is also how Wall-E starts. But where Wall-E gave us a good 30 dialogue-free minutes on the desolation of a post-human Earth, this movie starts deep in the bowels of the de rigeur giant spaceship where everyone except rotating teams of flight crew are deep in “hypersleep”, waiting to touch down on a pre-identified Earth-like planet that lies several thousand light years away.
A member of the flight crew awakens fitfully, his memory a fog. He peers around. No lights. He snaps a glow-stick. A thick layer of dust covers the room. Suffice to say, he doesn’t yet know about the evil alien clowns aboard who can run like greased lightning and who like nothing better than snacking on fresh human. more »
If you can see it, then you can read about it here. Do You See? is the visual media section of Freaky Trigger. Cinema, TV, videogames, adverts, flash animations which really slow down your computer - are all covered by our wide ranging team of writers.
In 
(It takes three to be banished from my sight)
I have not seen a single film in the cinema this year*. There are a number of reasons for this, many of which I will approach in this hopeful series of posts about my somewhat oddly dependent relationship with film. But just to make it clear that this is an unusual state of affairs, I saw 132 films in the cinema last year. This year none. I’ll probably tell you what the ten worst ones were over the next few weeks. But I really, really like going to the cinema. 
