BETAMAXNOMATES

Quote of the day, from some captionless talking head on the The Fabulous Life of The Olsen Twins: ‘The girls are very spiritual. With them, it’s what you see is what you get’.
Well if what I see is two coked-up, duck-faced anorexics who dress like they ramraided the bins outside Chloe Sevigny's house then I think we need a re-definition of ‘spiritual’ for a post-thinking society. Y'see, this is why I shouldn’t watch T4 on Sunday morning: as much as I welcome the comforting inanity it brings, the occasional moment of sheer, inexcusable stupidity will pierce through my stupor and put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. I’m also still mildly hungover from last night where I was bizarrely invited (and even more bizarrely, actually attended) a party for my sister's boyfriend and his family. Now, I don’t delude myself into thinking I’m some kind of ‘man of the people’ - a homme lu peuple, if you will. I realise that I am a man only of a very specific people, people more or less identical to me in every single way - anything else and I'm left hopelessly confused. So you could say a bar full of working class suedeheads wearing Fred Perry shirts with upturned collars and Argos jewellery was not exactly my typical social milieu. Added to this was the problem that all of them, without exception, were so very, very small. In my socks I'm 6' 8" and I always feel vaguely guilty around small people, as if I over-indulged at the chromosonal buffet leaving them wanting. Someone I had known from school last night observed that I was 'still tall', height, it would seem, being a difficult thing to maintain over time, what with that pesky gravity and everything.

Anyway, I refused to acknowledge St. Plastic’s Day this year, the day when everyone is little bit Irish/inebriated and secular saints chase asylum seeking snakes from our shores. Instead I stayed in and subjected myself to rewatching Lost In Translation, a tedious and ultimately superficial film with all the profundity and emotional resonance of a Nescafe ad. I didn’t care much for this movie when I saw it first and (remarkably) have an even lower opinion of it now. Bill Murray is a good comic actor but in recent years it seems to have become compulsory to hail him as some kind of god-like genius. Esquire recently raved about Murray's ‘unique and singular screen presence’, another way of saying that he basically plays the same character in every movie he’s in - now with added pathos. Still, enough people loved this movie to propel it to the top of nearly all critic’s top-tens and secure an Oscar for Sofia Coppola. One of these kind of films comes along every year - a poseur lifestyle accessory that wears its quirks on its sleeve and earns immediate classic status by the combined strength of a hipster director, a name star OMGWTF ‘subverting’ their image and a soundtrack cobbled together from Drowned In Sound’s end-of-year list and a MVC Hits of The 80’s compilation. Last year it was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in 2002 Donnie Darko. Although we would doubtless disagree over Eternal Sunshine, the estimable Zoomtard (or Estimable Zoomtard as he shall henceforth be known) already gave a funny and perceptive critique of this years Oscars so I’m not going to bother. Anyway, I only actually saw two or three of the films nominated in most categories; suffice to say that my three favourite films of last year (this, this, and this) received no nominations.
Very little else rattling around upstairs compelling me to type any further. The Fametracker forums closed this week much to my sadness and disappointment. Websites close down all the time but, until now, none of them had really been important. I posted there regularly and the forums were one of the very few (along with Dissensus) where I held the opinions of the other posters in any kind of esteem. I’ll genuinely miss those forums. Something else that finished this week, but that I won't especially miss, was Nathan Barley, a show that could be generously described as an almost complete disaster. Excepting some brief moments of comic brilliance, the series as a whole was poorly-directed, plotless, and populated by by inconsistent and underwritten characters. I’m not sure where Morris will go from here, possibly retreating further into the surreal and ‘difficult’ territory he explored in My Wrongs. This is the third failed TV series Brooker has been behind; maybe it’s time he went back to satirising the insulting garbage that passes for TV entertainment instead of adding to it.

I've just read over what I've written already and decided that I sound like a cunt. If I read this on somebody else's site I'd probably be vomiting with derision. So I'm going to stop here and see if I can manufacture myself a new personality for next week. Good day, and God bless.