The Saturdays - Just Can't Get Enough

I can't decide if the video for the Saturdays' Comic Relief single is chic, stylish and ironic, or appalling sexist and entirely inappropriate for a charity single? Possibly both. I will keep checking feminist blogs for help with this problem.

New angles on “Confessions of a Shopaholic”

Isla fisher proves herself to be a wonderful comic actress in this fun movie. It’s full of eye candy (Hugh Dancy, the purple and orange checked cape etc.), but it’s also bubbling under with meaning if you dare to look for it.

The credit crunch personified
With perfect timing, here is a movie about Becky Bloomwood’s own personal credit crunch. Her life is changed when her debts catch up with her, just as the world has changed over the past months. Isla Fisher hacking away at a block of ice with a stiletto heel to get at the credit card trapped inside is an iconic image of our time.

Madness
The scenes where Bloomwood is tempted to buy certainly tap into something which lies deep in the soul of every woman with a passion for fashion – this is a perfectly crafted work of art. My life will be better if I own something this magnificent. When Becky admires a very expensive green scarf at the beginning of the movie her decisions to buy is reached through conversing with mannequins. This stylistic psychosis hints at a major theme of the movie – mental illness. There’s been much controversy in the media over the last few years about what constitutes an addiction. Drugs, alcohol – yes. But sex, computer games and.... shopping? Becky repeatedly talks about shopping as a drug-like experience. She craves new purchases, she’s unsuccessfully tried to give up her habit many times, she loses her friends and the man she loves because of shopping – it ruins her life. All hallmarks of an addiction. So should shopaholics be in the DSM?

The anti-feminist Working Girl
The film in reminiscient of the 1980s classic “Working Girl”, both being about young women who decieve their way into a great career. Both films also feature Joan Cusack. Working Girl was driven by the capitalist/feminist mantra “I make it happen”. Melanie Griffith’s Tess McGill is an ambitious, smart heroine who claws her way to the top through cunning, hard work, and gall. 20 years later, Isla Fisher’s Becky Bloomwood is an incompetent who secures a great job that she doesn’t even really want though pure luck. Most of the comedy arises from her incompetence. But are we laughing at a dumb woman, as always, or are we finally allowing attractive women to be funny? The ending of the film is unsatisfactory. Becky’s happy ending is getting, and working for, her man - with disregard for her job satisfaction. Worst of all it forces her to give up her passion. People will dismiss this film for being about the joy of something as superficial as fashion but, as I hope this review has shown you, things are only ever as superficial as you want them to be.

Oscar dress analysis.

Don't you think that Miley Cyrus's mermaid inspired dress is Marion Cotillard's 2008 gown ad absurdam?






Freida Pinto looked like a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing. Which I'm not entirely sure is a bad thing...

So life is disappointing?

Cabaret, Theatre Royal, Brighton. January.

Samantha Barks is in town. She came third in BBC's I'd Do Anything competition to win the role of Nancy in Oliver!, and I'm excited about seeing her in the stage version of one of my favourite films.

Samantha Barks is fantastic, incredibly talented and charismatic. In fact her only flaw is the same as Liza Minnelli's - she's too good to be playing a character working in a crummy Berlin nightclub. Here's the terrible Judi Dench playing Sally Bowles as she was meant to be, in the original London production.



Barks aside, I was particularly taken with the actress playing landlady Fraulein Schneider, and I look her up when I get home. Turns out she's most famous for this Shake n Vac advert.



She's moved on to much better songs since then such as the hauntingly apathetic "So What?", one of the many fabulous numbers not included in the film.

But, like the film, this is a piece about the seperation (or not) of entertainment from real life. Even the most basic, shallow areas of popular culture (e.g. musical theatre) reflect society and psyche.

That’s entertainment!

The Daily Mail once called Brass Eye ‘the sickest TV show ever’ in a master stroke of life imitating satire. Like most people my age I’m not easily shocked or offended by anything on TV (or radio, see Sachs/Brand/Rossgate) but Vanessa Feltz’s latest vehicle has managed it. No, it’s not the curiously entertaining Cosmetic Surgery Live (may it rest in peace), but a program called Top 50 Celebrity Breakdowns on Sky. The mental health problems of celebrities are constantly being exploited for entertainment but the honesty of the title of this show is outstanding. Perhaps television producers finally ran out of ideas for “Top 50” shows and so resorted to making a program about the Best Ever Nervous Breakdowns. Feltz even has the nerve to use phrases like “lose the plot” and “moments of madness” while beaming at the camera, before introducing a bunch of talking heads commenting on celebrities like Amy Winehouse – drug addict, former eating disorder sufferer, and likely candidate for having borderline personality disorder. The sectioning of bipolar Britney Spears also scores highly. “Doesn’t it make you feel good to see celebs paying the price for fame?” Concludes Feltz, salaciously. I’m sick of mental health problems (and that includes addictions) being portrayed in the media as some sort of joke, and not real illnesses.

Love, lulz and space ships

girlhuntballet went to see Wall-e. 6:15pm isn't that late at night, and yet there are only three children in the audience of this popular children's film. I feel a bit sad when I think about how the very long Cbeebies advert that we're subjected to isn't even reaching a significant number of its target audience :( Still, I'm glad the BBC is still employing the voice of Otis the Aardvark. The adverts and trailers are almost the best thing about going to the cinema, the actual best thing about it being the film itself. All the trailers are for childrens films and they all look terrible. Wall-e had better be as good as everyone says, I think, shaking my fist at the screen.

Before the main feature there's a short film about a magician, his rabbit and his "hat of wonder". Wow, I don't think a short has ever been shown in a cinema during my life time. The short is very good silent slapstick. And because its all computer generated animation, no one gets hurt! I'm very impressed by the bravery of having a silent short (when I say silent I mean that there's no dialogue, obviously there's music and sound effects). When the visuals are so advanced, there's no need to overdress a film with dialogue.

Wall-E is also mostly silent for the first half an hour. Who would have guessed that children would have the patience for that? But they do! The establishing (opening) shot is of the entire universe - quite ambitious, as establishing shots set up the theme and location of the film. Wall-e is a meditation on loneliness. Most of the universe is empty, nothing, but its also all there is. Over these shots of outer space plays "Put on your Sunday clothes" from Hello, Dolly! which has lyrics that say something like "out there...". This opening scene ticks so many of my boxes that I begin to tear up a little.

Wall-e is the only robot that the humans forgot to turn off when they left Earth. He lives a futile existence compacting and piling up rubbish. But he has a collection of interesting things he finds in the rubbish and takes 'home'. His favourite of these is a VHS of Hello Dolly, and he listens to his favourite showtunes as he works. One of my favourite bits in the film is when Wall-e finds a hubcap that he uses as a makeshift hat so he can attempt the "Put on your Sunday clothes" dance routine.

Wall-e, both the character and the film, seem to be based on silent comedies. He uses objects for other than which they were intended like Buster Keaton. He has round, black framed eyes (cameras?) like Harold Llyods glasses.

































There's always a girl to be pursued in silent comedies, and in Wall-E she is called Eve and she looks like an i-Pod. She's not so much frigid as a soulless robot. But of course he wins her eventually. There's also plenty of slapstick - Wall-e gets blasted by the flames of a space ship, Wall-e gets electrocuted, Wall-e falls over - to give us epic lulz. And there's nothing funnier than a fat man falling out of his chair. Love, lulz and space ships... to coin a phrase.

No one can help but relate to the character of Wall-e as he breaks out of his solitary life, stops hiding behind rocks, and finds love. Even the little girl in the row behind me remarks "just like me in the morning!" when Wall-e's solar charge runs down.

This is one of the most sweet and touching films I have ever seen. It's as good as Life is Beautiful, seriously, it is. And it's the best thing Disney has done since er... Enchanted, six months ago, which I also loved.

At the end of the film, the fat (lol) captain of the space ship thats been keeping all humans from Earth for 700 years brings everyone back to their planet to clean it up, and start living without technology doing everything for them. Thats how they got so fat, you see.
The Captain does this because, as he declares, he doesn't want to survive, "I want to live!"

"And that is all that love's about..."

Everything old is new again...

Everyone's getting freaked out by this Lynx advert, and posting their own attempts on youtube.



Silent film Comedienne Colleen Moore was doing it way back when - its just simple split screen technology.



Well done Colleen!