Anyway, by far the funniest film I saw was Winnebago Man, which charts the efforts of filmmaker Ben Steinbauer to track down Jack Rebney. This erstwhile star of bootleg VHS tapes and latterly YouTube achieved foul-mouthed infamy in the early 1990s and has been labelled the angriest man in the world. Initially he seems reluctant to accept his cult stardom and dismisses those who are interested in his life. But as the film unfolds he appears genuinely touched by the enthusiasm. One of the highlights of the festival was when Rebney took questions via Steinbauer’s mobile phone, which resulted in some predictably unpredictable responses.

If you’ve never seen the original YouTube video, have a look at this. It is very sweary but also contains a number of stone-cold classic catchphrases (“Accoutre-mah”, “Would you do me a kindness?”, “My mind is just a piece of shit this morning”) that I intend to use in my daily discourse henceforth.

Film

I thought Wall-E was surprisingly deep for a kids film and was also technically flawless. But There Will Be Blood blew me away.

1. There Will Be Blood

2. Wall-E

3. Jar City

3. The Dark Knight

5. No Country For Old Men

TV

Absolutely no contest for the top slot, while Top Gear remains the most entertaining programme on television even when watching a repeat for the seventh time on Dave.

1. The Wire*

2. Top Gear

3. Wallander

4. The Apprentice

5. House of Saddam

*NB I’ve only watched a couple of episodes from Season 5 so far so if you’re leaving a comment, please NO SPOILERS!

Music

I don’t think it was a vintage year but perhaps I’m just turning into an old fart. Hercules and Love Affair was the only album that genuinely excited me but the rest of these are all pretty good.

1. Hercules and Love Affair – Hercules and Love Affair

2. Hot Chip – Made in the Dark

3. Duffy – Rockferry

4. Beck – Modern Guilt

5. Fujiya & Miyagi – Lightbulbs

Miscellaneous

1. The discovery of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö and their Martin Beck books

2. The use of the word “ASBO” as a noun. eg “Dave, you asbo!”

3. Pro-Evolution Soccer on Wii

4. Peanut Butter & Co’s “Crunch Time” peanut butter

5. The Barclaycard advert where the guy slides down a massive water chute

Firstly we saw Justin Moorhouse’s show, Justin Moorhouse’s Ever Decreasing Social Circle. It’s got elements of that slideshow comedy popularised by Dave Gorman, although this is more northern and foul-mouthed, with fewer slides. Essentially it’s about Moorhouse’s Facebook friends (See? Zeitgeisty) and his attempts to whittle several hundred hangers-on down to one true friend by way of questions such as “Do you hate Morrissey” and “Do you like motor sports?” (The answers to these are no and no if you want to be in Justin’s gang.) It’s all rather pleasantly done and gives Moorhouse a chance to hang a show around a coherent theme while entertainingly venting his spleen on a wide range of personal prejudices.

Subsequently, we managed to get tickets for a John Shuttleworth show. At five quid a pop we thought this was a bargain until we got to the venue and realised it was a test screening of Graham Fellows’ new Shuttleworth film, Southern Softies, with no actual live show attached.

Our initial thought as the comment cards were handed out was that Fellows should have been paying us a fiver to watch it. But we soon came round because, even in rough-cut form, Southern Softies is very funny indeed. It was especially charming to have a sandal-wearing Fellows bellowing stuff out from the back, such as “we need to sort out the sound on this bit”.

The film is a follow-up to It’s Nice Up North and follows Shuttleworth as he attempts to decipher whether southerners are “softer” than people from the north. The Sheffield-born “versatile singer/songwriter” starts his quest in the Channel Islands but ends up getting side-tracked by producer and neighbour Ken Worthington who vanishes early on. In the end, Shuttleworth doesn’t actually escape the Channel Islands and ends up financing the film via a series of local product placement agreements.

My favourite bits were where Shuttleworth goes for a walk at a country fair and ends up wandering through the middle of a marching band, a recurring joke about noddy-shots and a scene in which Shuttleworth takes to the stage to entertain some bemused hotel guests.

Fellows is putting the whole thing together himself and apparently wants to get it finished by next year. I’m not sure of when/how it will be released and I’m not sure if he was joking when he said the film has been selected for the Channel Islands Film Festival.

There was a bit towards the end, though – involving two boats – where I knew what was going to happen in advance because they gave it away on Newsnight Review last Friday. I watch this programme fairly often and for some reason they quite regularly give away the plots of movies. I’m not sure why – there’s always a moment where Kirsty Wark begs the critics not to do it but it’s almost as though these brainy types get so excited by their own opinions they can’t help it. A spoiler alert wouldn’t be helpful either – what’s the point of a film review with spoilers in it?

Another thing that struck me (about the film this time, rather than Newsnight Review) was the comparison with the Tim Burton film from 1989. At the time this was seen as a departure into much darker territory for the Batman franchise and I became mildly obsessed with it for a time. But nineteen years on it looks tamer than an episode of Neighbours in comparison with the new one, where the Joker is turned into a knife-wielding anarchist psychopath. Then again, I suppose the world is a bit of a darker place now than it was in 1989.

As for the Oscar buzz, whether an actor in clown make-up is ever going to win one is, I suppose, debatable but I reckon Heath Ledger’s performance was worthy of the hype.

I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else… I don’t like that. I’ve been concerned about, oh, how should we deal with the Olympics, because they are not being nice to the Dalai Lama, who is a good friend of mine… And then all this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and I thought, is that karma – when you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?

Hmm. Savour the deep political insight. Go on, lap it up.

Shaz doesn’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else… yet inflicted the films Basic Instinct, The Quick and the Dead and, um, Basic Instinct 2 on a blameless public. Something’s not right here. She continues:

And then I got a letter from the Tibetan Foundation that they wanted to go and be helpful and that made me cry. And they asked me if I would write a quote about that and I said that I would, that it was a big lesson to me. And sometimes you have to learn to put your head down and be of service even if people who aren’t nice to you [sic] and that that’s a big lesson for me.

I’m lost. She makes George Bush sound eloquent. And that includes his hard liquor period. I have a basic understanding of the Tibet issue but I doubt I would be less enlightened if one of the Clangers was explaining it to me. What quote? What lesson? What service? What in God’s holy name is she blathering about?

Have a watch:

Aside from the font, and the poster’s use of exclamation marks in inappropriate places in order to denote a false wackiness, there are other clues to the film’s status at the front of the poo queue. Mackenzie Crook, in an unflattering woolly hat, takes the lead role, which is hilarious in its own right (I mean, look at him for Christ’s sake). It’s got that bloke who plays the annoying fat bastard bank clerk in the Nationwide TV adverts in it. Kerry Katona also makes an appearance. This is the territory we’re in.

I can’t imagine Spielberg was banging down the door.

Then there’s the storyline, which involves a Tube driver who kills two people after they jump under his train. He finds out that if three die in such circumstances within a month he gets pensioned off with a massive pay-off. So he goes on the hunt for a suicide case to help him out. Hmm, a rich vein of comic territory there, no doubt about it. No wonder Aslef, the train drivers’ union, wasn’t very keen. (They hadn’t seen it either but had, like me, noticed the font.)

Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian gave it one star and speculated that a bizarre shift in setting to the Lake District halfway through could have been a condition of funding. Seriously. Mark Kermode on Five Live yesterday was similarly baffled and described the film as “just awful”. He repeated the phrase about seven times, appearing to exaggerate the word “just” rather than “awful”, for some reason.

Neither mentioned the font. However, Kermode got into a discussion with Simon Mayo about the word “Lacanian”. Mayo didn’t know what it meant, neither did I and neither did Mayo’s newsreader, who got embroiled in the debate. Turns out it relates to the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan and formed the basis of an allegedly hilarious joke in Basic Instinct 2. Which caused me to wonder how many people in the world fulfill both of the following criteria:

(a) Paid to watch Basic Instinct 2 at the cinema

(b) Are familiar with the work of Jacques Lacan

There really can’t be that many, can there?

Cage’s solicitor Simon Smith, of Schillings, said:

My client is extremely pleased with the outcome, which sets the record straight, since he has never been arrested for drunk-driving, dog theft, or anything else.

Which is all very unequivocal and shows that if you are thinking of labelling the Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage as a dog thief, you really shouldn’t bother. Because he isn’t one.

The story puts me in mind of that episode of Knowing Me Knowing You, where Alan Partridge gets into a confused debate with Hollywood actor “Gary Barker” over cat abuse.

Alan: You threw Whoopi Goldberg’s copper kettle at a cat?

Gary: No, I threw a copper kettle at Whoopi Goldberg’s cat.

I wonder if Nicolas Cage has ever done anything bad with a cat? I can only assume he hasn’t.

I was taken aback by three trailers that preceded the film, all of which were for ludicrous looking movies in a similar and possibly hitherto undefined genre which I’m calling “high-concept teen techno horror (shit)”. They all involve the possibility of hideous death upon twenty-something hotties in tight t-shirts. But in each case the terror is caused by the injection of implausible supernatural/horror phenomena into an everyday scientific/ technological concept, like a mobile phone or a hospital operation.

The films are as follows:

1. Awake

Concept: “During surgery, more than 60,000 people domestically each year experience “anesthetical awareness,” a condition when anesthesia fails during surgery, leaving one completely conscious and feeling every incision, but paralyzed and incapable of doing anything about it.” (Yahoo! Movies UK)

Trailer synopsis: Girlish, perma-tanned Hayden Christensen, looking like Jude Law on oestrogen, is farcically cast as a multi-billionaire someone-or-other (mumble mumble) who vaguely “owns half of Manhattan” or some such. He wakes up halfway through an operation to find the surgeon plotting to scalpel his heart deadwards but can do sod-all about it. Creepy flashbacks shot in bleached technicolour, featuring Jessica Alba as the hot girlfriend, ensue. Looks shit.

2. One Missed Call

Concept: “In this remake of the Japanese horror film Chakushin Ari (2003), several people start receiving voice-mails from their future selves – messages which include the date, time, and some of the details of their deaths.” (IMDb)

Trailer synopsis: Immediately it becomes obvious that this is a crapper version of Ringu and its American remakes. Phones ring, screams are heard, weird little semi-humans appear. Young women get dragged away to obvious death. Is shot in permanent bluey half-darkness. You’ve never heard of any of the cast – which is hardly surprising since this looks so shit even Sarah Michelle Gellar would have turned it down. NB This trailer is not to be confused with one of those Orange cinema adverts that inappropriately injects a mobile phone into a movie screenplay with vaguely amusing consequences.

3. The Eye

Concept: “Blind since childhood, Sydney undergoes a corneal transplant in both eyes that allows her to see for the first time in years. But when she begins to see things – freaky things – she suspects her anonymous organ donor passed on more than just a pair of eyeballs…” (Rotten Tomatoes.com)

Trailer synopsis: Jessica Alba (again) is improbably cast (again) as an orchestral honey with unconvincing white contact lenses to show she is blind. Of course, they can cure that these days, but after the operation on her peepers, Jess quite literally “sees dead people”, meaning her eyeballs perhaps once belonged to a murderer. Or a ghost. Or something. By-the-book fast editing and ropey stab-stab music fail to elicit any sense of terror. Alba has dark hair, to signify she is a serious musician and not just the FHM-approved wank siren we have come to know and admire. Unintentionally hilarious.

If you want to be scared ’til your wits bleed by this torrent of high-concept teen techno horror (shit), then all three films are released in British cinemas this spring.

Personally, I find it hard to watch trailers at the best of times because the pacing, tone and predictability of their rhythm kind of makes me a bit uncomfortable and fidgety. Also, I’m one of those people who prejudges the film they are about to watch by the trailers that precede it and, after this trio of humdingers, I was feeling a little perturbed about the two hours that lay ahead.

Luckily, The Orphanage, produced by Pan’s Labyrinth director and cinematic half-god Guillermo del Toro, is really rather good.

The theme only works in Wordpress 2.3 so this was an incentive to install it, although the process very nearly ended in disaster thanks to my limited technical ability. I genuinely think I went into shock as I realised – mistakenly, as it turned out – that I had deleted the entire site, including all my posts.

Thankfully, I managed to sort it out and I now have tags, which are properly supported in the new version of Wordpress for the first time. (Tags and categories are very different beasts so my previous method of using categories in the same way as tags was becoming extremely cumbersome. Now, though, they’ve been handily separated out.)

Anyroad, this is becoming rather navel-gazing and tech-geeky so I will return to my usual terrain with some low-brow observations about Lorraine Kelly.

I switched on GMTV this morning for a change and witnessed the most toe-curlingly dim-witted interview I’ve seen in a long time. Lorraine was interrogating Coleen McLoughlin and, after a sticky opener in which “the face of George at Asda” managed to mention, er, George at Asda, Coleen faced this shocking curveball from her inquisitor:

I think you’ve done so well because you’re so nice and everybody likes you.

There’s not a lot you can say to that so I left the room. When I came back I saw the film review section, where pundit James King (annoying; thinks he’s Mark Kermode but isn’t) was attempting to explain the premise of Cloverfieldto Ms Kelly. I was reminded of my own recent attempts to explain Sky Plus to my nan. “So, you see, it’s not really a documentary Lorraine, it’s just shot in that style, like the Blair Witch Project? Oh, never mind. Have you had your tablets?”

They then showed that dull clip, where an unconvincing CGI version of the Statue of Liberty’s head smashes into an unconvincing CGI version of a bit of Manhattan pavement. Lorraine nearly crapped herself. She actually screamed:

That’s the head from the… the Statue of Liberty!

King explained about the internet-based marketing campaign and I sensed her eyes glazing over. He might as well have been describing Facebook to a polar bear.

I used to think BBC Breakfast News was tediously cuddly-wuddly but this was extreme. Having watched it, I was given a terrifying glimpse into a bizarre alien world, the like of which I had never previously considered. As such, I now know how it feels to be a disorientated middle-aged woman. It was a peculiar start to the day.

Throw in Colin Firth, maxing out his “sheepish rapist” look, and you have a recipe for sheer, arse-clenching terror.

See here:

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