Hope You Had A Merry Christmas, and Wishing You A Happy New Year

I probably won't be updating this blog anymore. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my writing. I'm gonna spend some time looking after myself before I devote some serious time to writing. Christmas was good though (and I hope it was for you too), Santy was very generous. So here's hoping for a great New Year's party I'll be too drunk to remember and a year much better than the one I've just had.  

Charlie

The Kooks - Listen

In 20 years the only people who will be listening to The Kooks are the people who are currently listening to The Kooks. Only they will now be mums and dads and forcing The Kooks onto their kids using their car stereos. I would never have heard of Erasure if my dad didn't play them every time I get in his car; and even if I'm not very grateful, I still get a slight jig on hearing the opening bars of A Little Respect. And using my crystal ball, I've managed to deduce a similar, not unjustified fate for The Kooks.

I imagine the reason me and many similarly aged people are still listening now that we're on album four is just a matter of loyalty, of wanting to have as much music to call our own as we can get. Which is my way of saying The Kooks have frequently been good, never great; the albums serviceable - the first two maybe even a little more than that - but never brought up in snobbish conversations about great albums. The Kooks were a bi-product of the music that sprouted up in the mid-naughties - a sort of post-BritPop or indie Madchester with less of the disco and more of the feelings - not the creators of it.

Listen is worrying because it makes me think The Kooks have started to make their albums the way I listen to them; focusing on a few great tracks and not putting much brain function towards the rest. Listen is less of a coherent set than a salvage job. It does (like all their previous albums) highlight a new Kooks sound: funkier and with a lively beat where there was once a lot of empty space. The album's general sound reminded me of the last Foster the People album, or at least someone trying to imitate it; The Kooks' usual focus on a tuneful rhythm guitar has been replaced by something flashier. It's a wider sound for a band used to conjuring up images of the same seaside-fish-and-chips Britain that The Kinks once conjured up. On opener Around Town there's a backing choir to go with the dancey guitar work and heavy-handed lyrics like, "You can choose the life of a bohemian/Or you can choose the material world". It's a strange fit but a fit nonetheless.

The best track is See Me Now which is written as an open letter to frontman Luke Pritchard's now deceased father. It's one of those rare songs that come from such a genuine place that you get floored by the sentiment in every line, and is justification for the album alone. It reminds me a lot of when The Rolling Stones would fit in a gloomy ballad somewhere near the end of a sex-and-bravado rock'n'roll album - it sticks out in a good way. The rest of the album: not so much. The tracks all have the band's new groove and sentiment. Pritchard sings "But all I need is somewhere to lay/Somewhere to lay my hat up/I need someone to love in the middle of the day" and it would be impossible to deny this is a band that can make real, rip-out-your-heart-and-hand-it-over beauty. But most of the tracks sound like early demos, recorded to highlight the new Kooks sound instead of making good songs with it.

A Goodbye to HTMLGiant

When you're really engrossed in something it can be hard to tell if everyone else is engrossed or if it's just you. Something about the forest for the trees. Because, what does the rest of the world matter when you've got this tiny, personal thing that covers your whole vision? And yes, I'm aware that's a pretty deep way to open what is more or less just a send off to an online blog; but I'm aware that despite the outpouring of what one might call a deeply appreciative, weird sort of love from all the scattered different alcoves of the web for HTMLGiant over the last few weeks, you, dear reader, may not even know what an HTMLGiant is.

If you never, in the early hours of some lonely morning, stumbled (clicked) your way to this particular dark side of the web, then at its simplest: HTMLGiant was a blog that ran from September 2008 until sometime last week, written under the guise of being an "alt-lit" blog, a "movement" (if that's what you'd call it) just starting up at the time, although really just a blog where a handful of contributors wrote book reviews, alt-lit and not, trash talked each other, posted funny images and pointless status updates when they were too bummed-out to write something proper, and had a place with a fairly big audience to write out all the usually thought-up-then-forgotten manic ideas that flooded up their craniums, where they might have otherwise just become background dressing on personal blogs no-one would ever read. And for that they deserve some thanks. 

I wouldn't know where to point someone wanting to "get into" the site. The archive's been there for reading for the three or so years I've followed the site but I simply chose to read the posts that came up on my blogger feed and nothing else. Which opens up the trail of thought about how a place like HTMLGiant will be remembered. Your grandad probably read an article in an obscure magazine in his twenties that he thought was the greatest thing he ever read, and it's very probable that that article is on some online archive now, preserved by some small-name publisher. Many times reading HTMLGiant I wondered if it was the greatest thing I'd ever read. Maybe it wasn't, who cares? Memories make everything look shiny and clear, surely the only really great writing to matter to you is the writing that you're thinking is really great right now? The archives will be shut off at some point, and then only the people who were there will have been there. Sad, since HTMLGiant is as good and as worth treading through as any 'movement" or grouped-together cast of writers that I've ever heard of.

Jimmy Chen was my favorite writer there - look through his archives if you're new. I once saw his writing described (in the comments of one of his posts) as every stoned conversation you ever had in college somehow connected together. He eventually got tagged around the site with the word "misogyny", a reputation the whole site straddled with, probably why the recent news of arrests of many high profile alt-lit figures over sexual charges, Tao Lin being the "big one" of alt-lit and covered on the site frequently, was what pushed the site over the edge and what made those running the site decide it was time to pack up.

I don't really feel I need to say more. Others have said multitudes more. Good wishes to all contributors. I hope the archives are up for a long time more. It was a weird little corner of the web that felt like it was doing something so original and doing it with the sort of confidence that made you feel like all the writers' different brands of crazy were so good they'd be the mainstream one day, once everyone caught on, a sign that it was a good enough place that it made you so engrossed you forgot, or maybe just stopped pretending it even fucking mattered, that it wasn't cool and you were the only one in your real life who had even heard of a place called HTMLGiant, but surely that was all part of the fun.

The Double (2014)

Either because he's most well-known for a role in a sitcom or because he makes regular appearances on panel shows like The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, I find myself - and I doubt I'm alone in this - expecting less of Richard Ayoade's movies, maybe just stemming from a prejudice belief that the skill sets of funny panel show guest and quality movie director (an endless wormhole of a phrase I see no point in getting into now) couldn't possibly be found inside the same body. Yet The Double is enough to convert me. I haven't read any Russian literature (I know, shame on me) so don't know how The Double translates as an adaptation of Dostoyevsky: its coming 168 years after the book's publication so any crazed fans might not want to expect a one-to-one, page-to-screen adaptation.

Instead, I kept forgetting I wasn't watching a Kafka adaptation. I'm well aware no-one seems able to (or maybe just don't like to) agree on what Kafkaesque means, although The Double makes the grade. Simon James, introduced with some clumsy, Buster Keaton-type comedy to show what a cowardly underdog he is, spends his time alone is his room, staring out of a telescope Rear Window-style into the apartments opposite him, usually at Hannah, a girl he thinks too out-of-his-league to do anything more than mumble a few sentences to everyday. It's always night time, and apart from the few locations Simon goes to, the rest of the world need not exist. It's a work orientated world, and he has an office job (it's adapted from a modernist book - what else?) so mundane we never even find out what it is exactly he does. It's not only Kafkaesque in the constantly rattling away machinery of the setting, but in the mind of a character who sees the whole world as violently trying to dismiss his personal melodramas.

The 'inciting incident' that gives Simon's life a jolt is the introduction of James Simon, a man who looks exactly like Simon (not that even Simon's co-workers notice) only... different. He's suave and cool, and to paraphrase Fight Club: he's free in all the ways Simon isn't. And at first it seems like a win-win: he beats up the tough-guy at the bar picking on Simon, he shows Simon how to pull the ladies - our little man starts to loosen up. Then it all starts to go wrong: James starts dating - and cheating on - Hannah, taking credit for Simon's work, even using Simon's apartment. Simon feels trapped again, only now even the life he used to have has been taken over by a smoother-talking version of himself.

You don't have to have met your Doppelgänger to relate to what's happening to Simon. I imagine if everyone was a bit more philosophical - and read a lot more self-help books - then New Year's resolutions would be a litter of people vowing to stop comparing themselves to others. It's an epidemic. The thing everyone falls back on is their differences to the people doing better than them - they had rich parents, they went to university, they weren't born with eight toes - yet Simon can't use any of those excuses because there's a man who looks exactly like him, who seems to only have what he has, doing a lot better than him. A face walking around like a living symbol that he should have done a lot more with his life. And real people feel this pain all the time: there's enough blog posts from single people entering middle age trying to make it clear how not bothered they are that all their friends are getting married and having kids while they're still jerking it twice a day to movie scenes they first watched when they were a teenager.

There's a lot to praise. Ayoade gets the pitch just right: you can't really comment on a director - beyond the formalities of if they're good at staging a scene and etc - from just one movie, and Submarine pointed to Ayoade going for a British, more heartfelt version of Wes Anderson style conventional quirkiness. The Double makes the case for the man as much more ambitious: both in adapting a classic and in creating a whole setting and atmosphere to try and create what the original author was getting at. Jesse Eisenberg - among a cast who are all great - playing both Simon and James, should be praised: most would probably play the difference between the doubles as something subtle, like the difference in personality that could have happened because of one slight change in childhood, like getting rejected by a girl when he was young instead of having her kiss him, which would spiral into him being a confident ladies man in later life - yet Eisenberg comes on strong with the performance. The contrast between the doubles is huge. At first this seems overdone yet by the end of the movie it makes perfect sense, and drives home the point of how common it is to look at other people and imagine how easy it would be to become just like them, before having to the face the reality of it.

The ending is a disappointment, mainly just because for a film that raises questions that I'm betting most viewers will have asked themselves, the film only answers the problems of Simon James. Which is a pretty self-centered criticism to make - which I guess also works as a compliment to the film on how easy it is to relate to Simon's struggle. The ending's so abrupt I hardly remember anything about it; but The Double is one of those films that works up so much good will - one of those films you want to like (and for the most part I did) - that a lousy ending is forgiven.

Catfish and the Bottlemen (and the Current State of Things)

If you were ever a punk rocker or hippie chick or even just a cardigan-wearing grunge fiend (guilty) then you'll know the whole idea of a "musical movement" or scene or whatever you want to call it is actually just made up. A marketing term. The description of Grunge is really just a description of Nirvana; the movement that sprung up around it just an easy way to market imaginably hard sell acts like Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam (and many others) despite some gaping wide differences, on the basis that all were young, angry and from Seattle. Punk isn't really a good way to describe The Clash, but it made sense to in that they had the rebellious, DIY message of the other music coming out at the time.

A few years ago, hearing rumblings of a new scene emerging, a music mag, say Rolling Stone, would have sent their reporter to whichever city this sound was coming from (most likely a small, never-heard-of-before city that would now be remembered forever more) to make sense of things. Said reporter would listen to the scene's music, try and find some similarities to label the scene's artists (a few greats - many clingers on) together, and at least try some of the scene's drugs.

But we're in the future right now, apparently, and musical movements aren't really working like they used to. We're all interconnected now, so my Sociology teacher keeps telling me, meaning some kids in a rural town in France couldn't land onto some new sound without some old guys in Alaska joining in and putting their own spin on things. Rolling Stone have no physical place to send their reporter; labels are becoming more broad (and even more pointless) and who listens to what music even harder to spot; not even any officially associated drugs anymore.

Lets call the current, modern-equivalent of a movement 'moody, guitar-lite, indie disco pop' (you need to leave some work for the marketing team). The 1975. The xx. HAIM. Vampire Weekend. London Grammar. Bombay Bicycle Club. Tokyo Police Club. (I'll leave it up to you to label the big players and the cling-ons). A movement in the sense of many overlapping sounds - you like one and they all come recommended. Lots of overlapping fan bases of mainly young people.

Catfish and the Bottlemen are like a confirmation that there is a movement out there right now - they have a sound that wouldn't have existed without lots of other bands digging the same well. The best compliment I could give them is they're competent. Wavy, longing vocals; optimistic, jumpy guitar hooks; a production of wide open, lonely space in what is the album of some twenty-somethings who spend most of their time at parties and who think mostly about different variations of relationship - and non-relationship - problems (the lyrics say so). It's like they're running through a checklist - the band do all of these things well, so much that my ears had the tendency of simply switching off for most tracks on their debut The Balcony. It's not talent Catfish lack, it's passion.

There are moments of emotion that slice through The Balcony. Ryan Van McCann's screaming in the choruses of Pacifier: 'But, you just don't know how it feels to/Lose something you never had and never will/But, babe you know I've tried and failed'; The sudden explosions from silence to blaring guitars in Homesick. I don't want to get all mushy but emotions are still something that you have or don't have regardless of the scene you find yourself in. I've heard so many people call Catfish and the Bottlemen the next big thing, and they surely sound like what's hot right now, but that's their biggest problem. Talented guys, but an album that sounds so familiar it fits around the earlobes as firmly as the lost glove you just embarrassingly realized has been on your hand the whole time.

18

It was on my birthday night, we were walking home from the pub and my dad was telling me about his different birthdays. 18 was great because he was at that rave. 30 was shit because he wasn't in his twenties anymore. 40 was great because, as he'd told me earlier in the night, everyone (all the old gang) had shown up at the bar him and me had just left, and had all agreed it was just like 'the good ol' days' (said unironically). I never know whether I should believe people who say they feel different on their birthdays - he said he felt different when he woke up on his 18th birthday - I certainly didn't feel any different that morning. Don't even know what it is I was supposed to be feeling: added maturity? greater intelligence? the horrible throes of responsibility?

I didn't feel older but I did (do) feel old. I have a feeling when I finish school I'll feel younger again - the beginning of something else and not the end of something like I'm at now. It's why so many people seem to drop out near the end of education. It got me thinking about a section from the newest Tao Lin book, Taipei, where Lin describes how the years of school, the actual segregated blocks of 'year 3' and 'year 4', create a sort of easily quantifiable set of stages back to birth. Like levels in a video game (probably the reason kids like this); easily being able to say I was there, now here, and there next (something I imagine adults would like too). And then, as Lin puts it, you're left to drift off into an endless stream of year after year, no clear way to trace how you got there. It's probably why people cherish their 'milestone years' so much: being able to have sex at 16 (I'm from the UK so obviously so are these); 18 and you can drink (yah!); and then 21 and from what I can tell you celebrate and call yourself an adult (a real one; not the one I currently am, apparently) for no other reason than that your milestone years are over.

It's a pretty gloomy way to look at things but celebrating being young makes me think about being old. I remember reading that Pete Townsend wrote My Generation during a train journey on his 20th birthday. It makes sense actually, there's such a fear in that song, clearly Townsend's fear that soon he was going to be too old to rebel and make a statement and even be a part of the generation that was making all the noise. He was 20 and picturing himself as a zombified white-collar old man. And who even cares that he still sings that on stage as an old man who plays nothing but old hits, because when he wrote it it made sense to yell out 'I hope I die before I get old'. Me too; maybe I don't hate the thought of being old, just the thought of being an old person.

I guess talking about turning 18 is really talking about drinking. Some of my friends have been talking online with their American Exchange students that they're going to be visiting later this month; some of the Exchanges said they'd never tried a drop of alcohol. Basically our version of blasphemy. My friend works as a barman at a gentleman's club and me and some friends have made it a weekly thing going out drinking there (we have our own spot in the corner and a friend of mine joked we now count as 'regulars'). I've hardly used my new 'freedom'. I guess the most ironic thing about being able to drink whenever you want is that those who haven't drank because they aren't 18 are probably the least likely to once they are (or, conversely, anyone who was going to 'go off the rails' as people I know call it, would have already done so). The freedom of being 18 is so easy to see as romantic when you're a little kid but not quite as magical when put into the context of your 18 year old life.

My actual experience of being drunk is an immense topsy-turvy-ness; not just of my body (which looks like a rag-doll being thrashed from side to side by invisible forces) but of my thoughts too (which my mouth then transmits out to the whole world). I actually see this as a virtue to being drunk; especially when I spend so much time sober second-guessing what I'm going to let out of my mouth. I wish I could get 'lost in the moment'. I imagine some can do this without alcohol - those annoying people who claim they're getting 'high on life' must be lost in something just to be spurting such crap. But people who get lost in being drunk: spouting gibberish to the people carrying them home (who, unlike the person being carried, will actually remember this the next day), they're the lucky ones. I once read an article on the show Girls - it was about a sex scene where Adam Driver's character gets completely lost in the sexual fantasy he's acting out, while Lena Dunham's character, the plaything of this (somewhat twisted) fantasy, and also a writer, can't let herself forget what's really happening. If Dunham's like that in real life then she's probably like me: the sort of person who even remembers everything from the night where you ended up passing out at the end. It's a blessing and a curse.

I was actually a little worried about turning 18. I felt like a Friday night in when I was 18 - and had no real excuse for being stuck in the house - would feel like a much bigger disappointment than a Friday night in the house at 17. Although who I would be disappointing I'm not even sure anymore. I like the thought of being 18, even more of being 19 (although maybe that's just the start of a pattern) but like I'm saying: growing up and feeling older are very different.

Damon Albarn - Everyday Robots

I have this theory that most artists who get gushed about like they're something real special earn such gushing because they've made so much good stuff that to even call yourself a "fan" of theirs is too broad a term. It's obviously easier for people to praise something that's too large for them to even see in its entirety. Damon Albarn already qualified for such praise because of his double combo punch of Blur and The Guerrillas, and now making his name from his solo work, Albarn's become such a broad entity that he can't even be described as this type of artist or that. Which is also a way of saying that not being a fan of his previous bands (I wouldn't describe myself as one) shouldn't put you off giving Everyday Robots a spin.

The fact that Albarn's turned out to be a crank shouldn't be that surprising (doesn't everyone?), although the only reason his cynicism doesn't ruin the whole album is that he seems to know how old the whole fear-the-future thing is. The lyrics are all Kubrickian-style future warnings, only for the future we're all living in right now. It would be enough to say that Albarn's ran out of ideas and is just complaining for the sake of complaining if his misery over all of us internet obsessed, technology-for-happiness, TV whore robots wasn't so consistent - just look at some of the lyrics (all from different songs):

We are everyday robots on our phones/In the process of getting home

Hoping to find the key/To this play of communications/Between you and me 

When I'm lonely, I press play

When the photographs you're taking now are taken down again/When the heavy clouds that hide the sun are gone

It all sounds a bit depressing in theory, although just look at that last example: comparing the pictures on your Facebook to clouds stopping you from seeing the sun. There's a romance to the whole album. It's like an acceptance that technology's already corrupted us all and it's here to stay so the best someone like Albarn could do now is salvage some playful tunes from the rubble. Radiohead might have made a similar album in the late 90s if they'd cared more about the music than the message - sadly they didn't (still don't - even more so now); Albarn does.

The music here is slow; backing tracks built on slushy, mellow beats. The sort of tracks you can't quickly dash on to see if you like them or not because they offer no immediate satisfaction - the arrangements are slowly building beats which only really work when looked at as part of a three, four minute long track. Seven minute track You and Me brings to mind The Stone Roses, who were great at building funky, endlessly repeating rhythms that worked (where most artists struggle the most) in longer tracks. The best track is Mr Tempo, so out of place optimistic it sounds like a digitized Bob Marley reborn on the internet, it even has the sort of simplistic, just-happy-to-be-alive type rhyme at its center that Marley would have given us: "Mr. Tempo is on his way up the hill/With only this song to tell you how he feels/But to get there he will need a helping hand/It's where he is now but it wasn't what he planned". It's a sign that Albarn's too big in scope for any of us to see him whole, and third career around he's still the best at whatever it is exactly he's doing.

Lana Del Ray - Ultraviolence

Lana Del Ray's last album, her second (first, as far as most are concerned) got her a lot of fans because of its melodramatic production. It sounded what I imagine an angsty fourteen year old would picture as the perfect soundtrack to a dramatic movie, which is probably the reason I've never managed to listen to it all the way through. But it brought her into the mainstream: the same woman who was name dropping Kurt Cobain as a key influence in interviews was being placed on radio line-ups alongside Rihanna, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj etc. The fact that Ultraviolence doesn't paint her as a 'tortured pop diva' but is moody and introspective, is both much more fitting a skin for Lana and also very likely to piss off a lot of the people who bought her first album: I've already seen crazed fans denounce Ultraviolence like it never happened.

I guess it's one of the virtues of not being a crazed fan then that I could listen to Ultraviolence for what it is, while also not exactly going ga ga over it. What it is is a 'personal album' in the same style as Frank Ocean's and Lorde's most recent releases: slow paced, meandering, bass heavy mood pieces that back up mostly self-questioning lyrics. All three of these albums sound like a wall of sound crashing through the speakers, stopping one from calling this music 'minimalistic' - although the compositions are simple enough that you focus entirely on the lyrics. Which is obviously the point: here is three artists in control of their albums, or at least making the producers calling the shots seem more invisible than usual.

Yet both Ocean and Lorde sold themselves on having unique personalities inside their genres - their stripped down albums, getting up close with the artists, was exactly what their fans wanted. Del-Ray doesn't invoke the same excitement on her own, which is probably why the best moments on Ultraviolence are the most self-obsessed. Highlights sound like angrily scribbled diary entries. Take the lyrics of Brooklyn Baby:

Well, my boyfriend's in a band/He plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed

 I've got feathers in my hair/I get down to Beat poetry

And my jazz collection's rare/I can play most anything

 I'm a Brooklyn baby/I'm a Brooklyn baby 

I'd slant most singers for such self-indulgence but for Lana it seems like her biggest selling point. All of her vocals sound hollow and dampened under a veil of production, a risky move for a singer who's most noticeable virtue has been her melodramatic choruses. The whole thing shouldn't work actually, but managing to hold the mood for the entire album creates a space in which all tracks make sense, even if most are worthless on their own.

Obvious miscalculations: a song that takes a sarcastic jab at some well known rumors about the singer titled Fucked My Way Up To The Top and a purposefully self-obsessed piece of boasting titled Money Power Glory which I imagine Lana expected to work out as a Kanye-style ego examination; both jokes that (because they both come in the middle of an album that spends its time creating a claustrophobic atmosphere that includes no fun or adventurousness) don't land. Actually most tracks don't land, they only hold up the mood which Lana wants to convey. Ultraviolence doesn't make a showcase of Lana Del-Ray's talents, only shows what talents it is she wants to possess.

Gravity (2013)

My friends wouldn't trust me with a twenty pound note so I doubt it would be smart for either Alfonso Cuarón or Warner Bros Pictures to listen to my financial advice, although that's what follows anyway: if Cuarón wanted to hold my attention and childlike sense of awe (and most likely make a lot less money) then he should have 1) cut down what stands as a 91 minute film by at least half an hour, possibly more - anyone who's seen the movie will know this wouldn't cut out anything crucial to the plot, and 2) market it as an "experience" not a movie. Watching Gravity reminded me a lot of a 3D animated short about talking robots I saw at Disneyland when I was a kid (over 10 years ago so red-green glasses 3D) only with a lot of un-needed material turning it from an experience into a film.

Which is a way of saying there's some good movie in here (enough that not seeing Gravity would officially count as "missing out" although not enough to watch it again after that). It's a film so excited in itself - a film of pure visual splendor - that it captures the magical aura of being a kid in Disneyland and being ushered into a dark cinema to view the red-green future of technology. Some images will stick with you: one astronaut tethered to another, pulling the other along; the camera panned back so the tether stretches across the center of the earth, itself now a giant black orb with the seams of sunrise coming over the top. Beautiful. The visuals work so well because the technology, seamless, gives the impression of a film actually filmed in space, not just bringing to life the imagination of some over-fantastical director (like, say, Avatar).

People love to throw the term 'like a roller coaster' at films, cliché as it is it fits Gravity; Cuarón's focus on shooting in unbroken tracking shots giving the feeling of being strapped in. Sit back and enjoy. But roller coasters are moving while the rollercoastee stays static; movies - through process of adaptation - have become something we dissect and try to participate in (it's why people pay for a movie then feel the need to pick out continuity flaws). This is where Gravity fails: in one moment as our lead is trying to repair part of a space station the camera looks from behind so we can see one of her tools, crucial for the job, slowly start to float away without her noticing. I imagine in 3D it floats dangerously far out of her reach. She turns round and strains to grab it just in time. Any pleasures here are purely aesthetic. Gravity works in its grandest moments; extended sections of watching Sandra Bullock do very little feel like padding.

The story is simple: a group of astronauts doing what seems a routine job on some space equipment. A storm hits, killing one crew member and leaving Ryan (Sandra Bullock) - technical expert but pretty unexperienced with the general rules of space survival; and Matt (George Clooney) the laid back safety man. Clooney's presence, frequently annoying, is the warmest thing in space. Things mostly follow Ryan as she tries to make her way to a far off station to get to the escape pods. As I say, there's a lot of good stuff in Gravity, just not enough to make it a great movie (although it should go on the list with Lawrence of Arabia of films to see on a cinema screen).

Results Day

Have you ever said you cared what happened on your results day? Did you ever get their and not care about your results. No and no. Results day is another one of those school ceremonies which when you really think about it, doesn't fit in with the rest of rational reality. Not when school could send you the results straight to your home the minute they got them. But instead I found myself going to school in the middle of the holidays on some early morning so I could sleepily open my results in front of everyone I know and share them out. Then just waddled back on home to my parents who were probably just as built up about the whole thing as I was.

I'll be honest: I hardly even remembered to go to my results day. A few days before, I told my friend the best thing about results day would be I could try pick up girls who were over excited by their good grades; I said this half-jokingly but one of those half jokes where you believe in the other half. Only I turned up late and the only girls left were the ones who'd gotten better grades than me and wanted to stick around, probably to drill their superiority into any other late comers they hadn't snatched up yet.

My results: two Bs, a C and a D. Better than average; nothing to boast about. At first I didn't even know whether to be pleased or not. Two friends grabbed me as I was leaving; one said 'those are really good results' and I just accepted that's what they were. But really results day left me with an empty feeling; I didn't even start thinking about why that was until a few hours later. It wasn't the results, maybe the fact that I would have gotten the same reaction from everybody as long as I didn't fail everything, or maybe it was just the disappointment of still looking at pieces of paper with the same misguided belief as everyone else there that my future will be written on it.

I was talking with a friend about grades the other day, he said 'I wish I had done maths or something, something that would make me seem smart'. I knew what he meant: maths is the only subject taught in schools where good grades seems to easily quantify your intelligence. Or at least seems like it does. Could anyone say I was a smart guy for getting a B in sociology? Or: could you put into words, based on results, the difference between the kid I know who was told he couldn't come back because his grades were too bad and the kid who took five subjects (FIVE!) and got straight As? It does mean something, I'm neither stupid or bitter enough to think it doesn't, it means a lot for universities and immediate jobs; but this media-instilled belief that you can look down at your results and depending on what you got look up 20 years later and be a completely different person is poisonous, and downright stressful.

Later on that day me and friends Jack, James and Ross went out drinking to the only pub in town that'll serve us. My dad gave me the beer money for getting good grades. We talked a little about results: James had been worried he'd be joining the RAF by now but he passed pretty well; I hadn't seen Jack worry much but he failed two of three subjects. We talked like it was anything else then forgot it and enjoyed the night. I didn't have the same drink the whole time and by last call I was too pissed to sit down straight. James and Ross left earlier than that and me and Jack congratulated ourselves on being so fun. It took about an hour and a half for the two of us to walk home; we sat along the streets at some points making drunken phone calls to people we don't usually talk to and to a girl I like. He eventually went into his house and I walked the last ten minutes home alone. I walked too far past a hedge bush at one point but in the state I was in decided to just jump over it; it was so big I landed in the middle and had to roll off - I could still feel the nettle stings in my hand the next day. When I got home I sat stumped on the floor drinking tap water in pints (my usual ritual to suppress the inevitable hangover) and on my laptop scrolling through Facebook friends in the belief that I'd be drunk enough to send some girl a message saying all the things I could never say sober but I chickened out in the end.

The reason I'm sharing this: because I'm betting you know more about me from the last paragraph than from the results I gave. And because picking up a girl on results day would have been a good enough consolation had I even failed every subject. And because I'll remember that night long after I've forgotten most of the stuff I was taught this year. If you were someone still young enough to open results this year then I'll guess more than being pleased or disappointed you felt a horrible emptiness; that didn't have to do with your results, more just the horrible feeling of once again being summed up by a few letter decided by structured exams you sat months before.

R.I.P. Robin Williams (1951 - 2014)

I'm well aware that, being 17, I'm not part of the generation that was most attached to Robin Williams. The same generation that has spent the last day outpouring its love for the actor. But that doesn't mean I didn't feel sad over the news of his death; the death of someone who was genuine enough that he felt real despite me only knowing him from my TV screen.

I think the first Robin Williams' movie I ever saw was RV. I would spend odd weekends at my grandparents house and RV was part of small, seemingly well selected list of films that my grandfather would put on for me. Williams plays a dad who takes his family on a cross-country trip, not telling them the trip is really to the location of an important meeting which puts his job at risk. Looking back, this isn't the greatest movie ever, but it had the sort of warm heart to it that Williams brought to everything. There was an expectedly soppy moment at the movie's end, where Williams turns down the job and chooses his family instead; I imagine from most actors, even good comedy actors, a moment like this wouldn't feel remotely genuine, but from Williams it seems so real. His comedy persona: over-active, self-indulgent yet ultimately good natured kid turned adult, wasn't a put on. He could be as wacky as he wanted to be on screen - people believed it - because he really was that wacky.

It's that genuineness that most comedians lack. Most just want laughs; only a comedian as good as Williams would know that the laughs are much better when not ignoring the stuff that isn't funny. Sure, this did give a sentimentality to his films (the ending of Mrs Doubtfire, for example) that put a barrier between him and some adult viewers; but this was what allowed him to act out some truly genuine moments. The one that comes to mind is in Good Will Hunting, my favorite film of his, in which he plays Matt Damon's psychiatrist. Damon's character, uninterested in therapy, tries insulting William's character. He hits on the soft spot of his wife to the point where William's cracks, shouting at his patient, coming close to giving up on him. It's showing this vulnerability that makes his triumph in that movie, finally talking Will Hunting into facing his problems, that much better.

One thing that has surprised me about Williams' death is the response to him having depression. Upon hearing that he had allegedly killed himself I instantly prepared for the usual response to celebrity suicides: people questioning how someone who has all that could be depressed. Another national outcry of how money must be able to solve everybody's problems. The response to Williams' death has been different, in a good way; people talking about the struggle depression can be for anybody. If nothing else, his death will hopefully continue the ongoing awareness of the fact that depression doesn't just affect our tortured artists (or those people you know who are very outgoing about their problems) but can affect anyone, all the way to a man who spent the majority of his career making people laugh (or, conversely, any of those friends of yours who seem to have everything together).

But that's a bigger conversation, and one that will be going on for a long time more; for now my heart goes out to Williams family. A fantastic comedian and one we'll be talking about for a very long time.

Lost in the Dream - The War On Drugs

These sure are indecisive times. Eight months in and not one publication seems able to point out 2014's future classics. It doesn't help that most major (highest selling) artists, who critics love to turn to, have been dormant these few months. Which is why Lost in the Dream, an album practically born a sleeper hit, has become the unofficial album of the year; if you're listening to it with the hype in mind - and that's basically the reason we're all listening right? - then that title works against the album more than for it.

The problem with 'album of the year' is that it means, supposedly, this album should answer 2014. Should answer the current state we all find ourselves in. Should answer all our other shitty music. Should be good enough to answer something. Which, regardless of its quality, it doesn't: handing this album out to all your friends in hope of igniting some shared realization is like giving them all printouts of the failed love letters you wrote in high school so they can see how much you've matured. Lost in the Dream looks inward, makes no reaction to any other music, holds no answers - will, if anything, give you more questions.

Apparently inspired by a breakup, the tracks here are long, slushy, barren landscapes. The tracks - hardly distinguishable from each other - are smooth running mood pieces. A dreary mood. Picking out individual tracks just highlights how featureless each one is; best listened all at once, and more than once. The album's greatest asset is the way each individual element of the band blurs together, Adam Granduciel's vocals sound calm, and rendered hollow under the production they don't intrude on the guitars at all, meaning you never feel like your missing anything by not paying attention to the lyrics. One element not here - on all previous TWoD albums - is Kurt Vile's electric guitar, before he left to go solo. It could be argued this is why the album feels more like it's playing with itself than the audience, although you could also counter that it gives the tracks a flowing simplicity. I was more impressed with Lost in the Dream than moved.

There are moments of real fire, though: the first two tracks, the only two I'd be able to pick out of a line-up, are far more lively than the rest. In Red Eye, Granduciel screams and the guitars explode into motion. There's even a pop hook. So maybe this really is an album of the times: a band showing they've got power and talent to burn, only so numbed out they refuse to use any.

Royal Visits and Possible Stabbings: thoughts on my hometown

• I arrived here a few days after I was born (a hospital a few towns over) and have stayed ever since. I don't quite know the rules: am I supposed to wait til I've left this place long enough to feel homesick before I give it a write up? Or is it when I come back and realize there's just not that much to feel homesick about?
• I love all those 'I gotta get outta' this town, it's been keepin' me down too long' clichés - I plan to leave first chance I get. Make it next September. I've left it only infrequently over the last almost-18 years, usually just to bordering towns. Lying in bed I can see one of the plane routes from a nearby airport through my window (all going West so I'm guessing to America); I'll lie down and watch people escaping this place - like some romantic real life mise en scene. 
• I'd call Cramlington a nowhere town but that brings to mind sandy, deserted dust bowl America town, when really it's moderately busy, usually cold and rainy Northern England. Everybody doesn't know everybody. 
• The entirety of my knowledge of "The History of Cramlington": it used to be a mining town and helped, to what extent I don't know, in WW2 - housing a medical center that would become my middle school. 
• During the time as a mining town the coal was thrown onto one huge, main heap - this eventually formed into a hill, Nelson Hill: Cramlington's sole natural beauty. 
• The five main estates (and corresponding stereotypes of anyone who lives there) are as follows: Beacon - the rough neighbourhood, good if you want drugs or stabbings, good anecdotes from everyone there; Northburn - the "posh wankers" with the big houses and fancy cars, the model image of suburbia, "The Burn" river runs through it, hence the name; Parkside - where I live, in the middle of everything, and too small to have any discernible characteristics; East Crammy - a mixed bag, class wise, there's run down neighbourhoods a few streets down from houses I know that house Ferraris; Cragside - where the school, park and football fields are, hence used by everybody too much to be given any bad judgment, although I have seen some drug arrests there.
•  I girl who lived, possibly still lives on my street once told me that one night during a family and friends get together at her house, her dad's friend went out for a smoke and while outside was stabbed by a hoodie walking past. I don't know if this is true, but ever since I've told people that someone was once stabbed on my street. Because, y'know, that's the image I want to send out about my street. 
• ...a further example of my street: I was working the other day, just a patch of grass from the stabbing house, when a door opened, a woman's voice screamed "DON'T" and then a pregnancy test flew out of the door, which then slammed shut. It had a lighter atmosphere to it than it comes out as in writing. 
• I've heard stories about the Queen visiting years ago. She apparently opened our Concordia. My year four English teacher once said when she was younger - I'll take a stab this story dates the 50s or 60s - the Queen went past the school in a fancy car and all the kids ran to the fence to wave at her. I can't think of any reason she'd visit now.
• Everyone I know who lives here, or went to school here, gives this place a much worse rep than it deserves. One of those moderately decent towns - maybe you know the type - that you just want to make seem worse than it is. 
• It always perplexes me a little how adults end up in nowhere towns like this. Kids are stuck where they land; I thought the freedom of adulthood was all that grasping the nettle stuff - finding something in the world. I don't know what is to be found here. 
• I do wonder how I'll write about this place when I'm old and living some place else. I couldn't stay here. Then again, most people can only see what a place is once they've left it.  

CLASSIC? Aguirre: the Wrath of God (1972)

(My first CLASSIC? post, where, instead of reviewing movies and albums that have undoubtedly been over-reviewed already, I'll question whether they really are classics from the perspective of someone watching in 2014)

I bet you never thought Apocalypse Now, that symbol of artistic freedom and ambition, was actually just the beefed-up Hollywood counterpart to a much more artistically-pleasing foreign predecessor, did you? Well it is, really. In truth, there's very little connection between Apocalypse Now and Aguirre: Wrath of God, unless, like me, your looking for a metaphor to open a review with to show how great you think Aguirre is (or how sub-par, if not terrible, Apocalypse is).

Aguirre, the better mission-down-a-river movie, is the definition of anti-Hollywood. Herzog doesn't use the trip down the river as an excuse for stopping off at as many exciting incidents as he could think of; instead the trip is the whole of Wrath of God - a film that emphasizes the maxim that the journey is more important than the destination. The journey here concerns an expedition - some knights and people of importance but mostly unimportant droogs - in the 16th century, in search of the much talked of, but never seen in the flesh city of El Dorado. Of course, we as an audience know such a city doesn't exist; Herzog's movie a look into how the promise of greatness - the city of gold, after all - can drive people to disregard everything, even themselves and those they care about.

The title character, played by Klaus Kinski, starts off as a second in command, although through mutiny and the slow toll the environment, and attacking aboriginal tribes, take on the crew, ends up the leader. He's the looniest of the bunch; his wife and daughter both part of the expedition and both carried in separate carriages by less fortunate crew members. It's hard for me to say how good Kinski is in the role having not seen him in any other movie - hard to know completely what is actor and what is character from just one role. But he deserves praise anyway; his performance a great caricature of growing self-grandeur and insanity. Kinski's body is constantly swiveled around, as if he feels the powers of gravity pulling him down greater than anybody else. It makes him look less like a human and more a sneaking Gremlin trying to break free from his own flesh.

It's fun to actually just watch Kinski; in one speech, in which he gives himself the film's moniker, he lays flat his character - we, the audience, need not to do much further analysis. It's a film all about observing. And beautiful stuff to observe too, with such a mysterious quality: fog shrouding around the sides of great mountains; the dream-like quality by which one scene seems to meld into the next; the search for a city we know is complete myth. The way Aguirre is filmed is just so natural; natural in the sense that its world is seamless - realistic looking costumes and locations - and also that everything was filmed for real, no Hollywood wizardry here - which gives the impression that the events of the movie were going to take place no matter what and that Herzog was simply lucky enough to be there to capture them. I have a soft spot for directors who fit their own interests and personalities into films - Herzog shows his interest in nature with extended shots of crashing waves and animals scurrying about. The fact he would become a successful documentary filmmaker is written in code here.

The fact that everything was filmed for real is worth noting, at least the difficulty the crew would have faced filming on the river (not being able to fit sound equipment on the rafts being the only explanation why a German film has an English dub - and by the original actors too). The danger should be noted too: the most famous story surrounding the film is of Herzog pulling a gun on Kinski who was refusing to do a scene due to the conditions. The reality of things gives them a unique quality, too: in one scene a horse, causing a nuisance to the emperor, is ordered overboard. This was filmed for real, you can tell; watching the horse run about in the river with only the front of its face visible above water while it hurries to land. There's obvious ethical problems here but just watching this shot is better food for your eyes than any billion dollar special effects porn.

Herzog's art of "showing" is amazing: in one shot we see the emperor, a pompously dressed caricature of greed, munching on his vast meal while his men fight over rations. This shot needs no follow-up or further story thread; inside this shot is one million arguments and deeper feelings all there if the viewer wants to unpack them herself. That's how one should look at the final shot of Aguirre too: I won't describe it, but that wouldn't spoil anything anyway - where this film arrives is more a feeling, a frame of mind, than any describable location. Some people won't like this, finding it gives no real purpose to the journey that precedes it - although Aguirre is less a progression of events and more just different stylistic choices to stir different moods and feelings. If you get to the end of Aguirre and don't think you've went anywhere then you've missed the point somewhere along the river.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

I'd like here to highlight the rare yet slowly growing phenomenon of writer-directors including lines in their movies clearly about themselves. The most obvious one I can think of is Quentin Tarantino's boast that "this just might be my masterpiece" which I'd slant him for if it didn't come at the end of his best film (Inglorious Basterds). I'd slant Wes Anderson too, for how obviously a line of dialogue at the end of his newest movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is about him if I didn't agree with every word of it. It comes from the humble, weathered voice of F. Murray Abraham: 'I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it, but I will say this: he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace'.

That isn't to say that Anderson's world ever quite existed; his movies are a pastiche of French New Wave gloss and weirdness, combined with the emotionally stern yet heartwarming indies of the 70s. You could say it's a 90s movie brat's take on a romantasized combination of François Truffaut and Hal Ashby. Just not the way that François Truffaut or Hal Ashby would have actually done things. Anderson's movies are nostalgia for a time that's more real to him than was actually real. He's not the first artist to do this: The Kinks sang of an old fabled Britain more homely and picturesque than it ever was; Jack White recreated 60s London with such eccentricity it could only have came from an American; Lou Reed was getting all bitter about older times in his 20s; and Anderson's almost childlike affection for how he thinks about bygone eras has always lent his films a real warmth.

Grand Budapest's story is a story inside a story inside a story, which runs smoothly on screen but isn't important enough for me to explain in detail here. Just know that the main plot begins when Zero (Tony Revolori) arrives at the Budapest as the new bellboy, under the service of slick hotel owner M Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) who that opening quote was really meant for. The story is put into motion when one of Gustave's most revered guests (Tilda Swinton) dies and in her will leaves Gustave a priceless painting - all to the dismay of now disgruntled relative Dimitri (Adrien Brody) and his henchmen Jopling (William Dafoe); starting off a case of framing of Gustave and the hunt for other suspect Serge (Mathieu Amalric). Not that plot is everything here, Anderson's quirks and excited tangents into the world he builds around the Budapest take up just as much time.

All of this is another way of saying what will likely always be the moniker of Anderson films: if you like Anderson's style then you'll like this; if you don't then there's not much for you here. Not that you can just lump all of his films into a pile together. I've considered almost every Anderson movie to be better than the last: early features like Bottle Rocket and Rushmore felt too indebted to his influence, and not featuring enough of his soon-to-be trademark weirdness, while also borrowing more autobiographical elements (mainly in Rushmore) as if Anderson was still getting personal story elements off of his chest. His last film, Moonrise Kingdom, a more wholly original creation, is much harder to put to specific influences, built more out of a now identifiable Andersonverse. I'd also gauge that his work on an animated film (well, stop-motion) with Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2009 - another favorite - gave Anderson the realization of just how much he can control the aesthetics of his films. And, visually, the location of the Grand Budapest is Anderson's perfect location: a world of posh wine connoisseurs and wardrobes filled with more suites than the owners could ever wear - it's a world of artifice and it makes perfect sense to have Anderson's perfectionary, obsessive focus on smaller details colouring it all in.

Not everything's perfect: Anderson's Andersoness becomes a bit of a sensory overload before Gustave's adventure is over. There's so much (and I'm not really going to stick it to the guy for wanting to give viewers too much, which is all this is) that some elements don't get their time to shine: Adrien Brody, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Owen Wilson, Harvey Keitel and others all appear, with interesting characters to boot, only to get little more than extended cameos. Saoirse Ronan also appears as Zero's lover although too feels unimportant to the plot. But that's just nitpicking: Wes Anderson runs on childlike warmth the way Owen Wilson runs on enthusiasm, and you can sense Anderson's warmth and affection for the world of Grand Budapest in every frame. I used to think Anderson's movies were more homages to the past than orginals, but now I see Anderson really is holding up values no-one else bothers to. Framing each shot with such exactness and paying attention to such tiny details. A scene where Dafoe's shadowy henchmen turns up at the door of an innocent woman, the sister of someone he's looking for, in a dark alley where snow is falling on him, should feel cliche and simply part of a long movie tradition; but put into Anderson's world and these aren't cliches or tropes anymore but have all the power and excitement they once had when old movies first did them. His images fight against most modern movies and their acceptance of not aiming for something great. Anderson's world may well have vanished, maybe not truly have existed, but I agree, he certainly sustains the illusion with marvelous grace.

I Want to Make Films (A Fan's Memoir)

I can trace my film fandom (Obsession? Career ambition?) to Christmas day 2009, when I was 13. My family's obligatory Christmas Day movie was the family friendly Inglorious Basterds - which I absolutely hated. The trailers painted it as a guts and glory Brad Pitt Hollywood action movie. It was a present to my dad from my uncle - who advertised it to him only with mention that he'd finally see "the baseball bat scene" with the feverish excitement I'd imagine an of older brother promising his younger sibling a look at a porno mag.

I sat there, bored out of my mind, watching a very long movie filmed with subtitles and very little action. Something fucked up: the only scene 13 year old me enjoyed was when the cinema burns down and the "basterds" bust in and start slaughtering the audience. At the time, I thought The Dark Knight was the greatest movie ever made and, with its dark devilish aesthetic (and undeniably the aura that existed around Heath Ledger's last finished role) I thought that movie was the very definition of a serious, sophisticated movie. Basterds must have just been an anomaly.

Jump ahead a few months and I was at that age when I was finally allowed to stay up as late as I wanted and I ran out of films (or thought I did). I decided to check out Inglorious Basterds again on some online streaming service late one night - by the next day I'd ordered the Tarantino box-set. It's Pulp Fiction that I usually attribute to really becoming a film fan. It's weird actually, when you start watching serious films and not just blockbusters and teen movies (is there any way to write this and not sound snobbish?) it feels like a bubble bursting. It's so fucking cool. After, it feels like your part of some elite, underground brotherhood. I remember talking to friends and saying Pulp Fiction was my favorite movie and knowing none of them knew what I was talking about. If someone does know what your talking about - at that age - it means you've managed to spot a fellow nerd and you should quickly go out and nerd chat/procreate.

Even then I'm sure it took me over a year to realize that I could actually do this for a job (I can do something I enjoy for a job?) Before that, my ambitions to not have a normal job had lead to: over four years of (in the end) failed guitar lessons; multiple beginnings of - never finished - novels; and a forests worth of paper drawing artwork and level designs and fake front covers for video games I wanted to make. It's weird for me to think that at the time I had already decided which university I wanted to go to for game design, when I don't even play the things anymore.

A beginners guide to anyone wanting to become a film fan (at least the way I did): watch (or be a good member of society and BUY) whole box-sets of directors Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Coen Bros, Stanley Kubrick, Danny Boyle, Martin Scorsese, Stephen Spielberg, Robert Altman and David Fincher - and at least make a dent in the filmographies of Hitchcock and Kurosawa; tell everyone - especially parents and best friends - that your now a film fan and make that your "thing", manifested mostly by film posters on your walls, reading film critics books and a film collection so big it makes at least one parent wonder which bank you robbed in secret to pay for it all - and from then on expect lots of pseudo-intellectual film discussions and film related birthday presents; join lots of movie sites, IMDB is required, and start chatting on forums, all of your first posts being very serious, well thought out arguments on your detailed knowledge and respect on the art of film, which over the course of months and years will simply (and, sorry, inevitably) descend into numerous troll posts and nothing but off topic threads asking the other forum members things like when they first groped a girl so you feel better about yourself; and going through the course of being first excited about your new found hobby, then very ashamed and trying to hide it by taking photos of yourself doing weights and playing games of football, until eventually realizing your a film fan at heart, and it really is your "thing" and deciding its what you want to do for a fill time job.

I plan to go to film school - no particular one decided on just yet - next September. I'll admit there's arguments on both sides. Ask Google about the merits of film school and it will most likely tell you that it's a lot of money for stuff you can learn for free on the internet. On the other hand? College campuses look fun, my family says university is just one big party, its good to have on a CV that you did "something" in those years, and the TV show Fresh Meat has made me believe that my room mates will be a colourful clash of personalities I will slowly but surely become best-friends with over a barrage of mostly sex related adventures. It's pretty 50-50.

I won't pretend to be an expert but I do believe those who say you don't need film school to know what you're talking about - you just need the internet, lots of films and a camera. I will try and to put into words something of what I've learnt (none of which, I think, I've learnt from media class): if you're just starting your interest in film then you're probably thinking things still work on a points based scale: one way to do things is better than another way. Shoot a scene like this, not like that. Although the more time that's passed the more I've realized how lucid the clusterfuck of filmmaking really is. Want to be a screenwriter? You'll hear: write in three acts and make every scene a conflict. True, to an extent, but eventually that just goes into the background. Writing a script is more like a having an excited conversation - ideas bouncing off each other, beat beat beat. Keeping things moving, not letting threads just be ignored. I have believed for years - still believe now - that Stanley Kubrick is the greatest director ever (greatest? my personal favorite? There's a popular film fan argument) and I used to think it was because he held shots for long times, or because he didn't cut to reaction shots all the time - but now I realize there's something great about him that can't be quantified or even written about, or at least can't be written about like some sort of guide or how-to, could only be written about in poetic prose trying to capture the power of these movies, but never explain them

I want to make films. That's my thing. I don't know which university I'm going to go to, if I'm even going to take a film course. Confusing times. But I know that out of all my artistic aspirations (god I would hate an office job) this is the one that fits most. Mostly just because years on I still love films just as much. I have a friend who, during that obligatory chat about futures, said he was going to do a video game course in Uni. I know that he doesn't play video games much, hardly ever, and has just picked this because of good grades in IT. When he told me I just nodded and made that noise which signals agreement and didn't follow it up. So many people don't do the stuff they love doing - even smart people do stuff just because it fits or because they feel like they have to - but I've made a promise to myself that I won't do anything else.

Bedroom Confessional

Here's another blog name change (because I'm just so indecisive) and update on where I feel like I am right now:

I've never actually met anyone who's said they wanted to be a writer. Maybe it's just where I live, or maybe it's just too broad a term for my generation. Want to be a writer? Ok, what you want to write about? You can say novelist or journalist, say you want to be a music critic or whatever you like, but those things are those things, not just being a "writer".

When I hear "writer" I think Jack Kerouac. Not even him writing, just him outside, with nature. In open farmer's fields with arms outstretched, searching for something. He wrote it all into a typewriter, each letter making a big jolt sound as the thoughts inked onto paper. You can only imagine big, weighty thoughts from such an image. Reading Kerouac isn't really about whatever he's writing about - I wouldn't call him an adventurer or jazz critic, I'd just call him a writer. All the things he saw in life filtered into that typewriter. 

People don't write on typewriters anymore - I sure don't, I write on a computer in a spare room that houses gym equipment and unwatched DVDs or on a laptop in my living room in front of a TV. You ask most people my age what they do in their spare time and they'll say they spend all their time in their bedrooms. I do. All those people you thought had really busy lives too. It's my generations thing. 

I think my biggest problem has always been writing like me - that whole thing about finding a "writer's voice". I'm gonna start writing about different things, about myself and the thoughts I have, and not doing as many reviews. I guess I'm a cliche: want to be a writer but don't know what to write about. So I'm just going to write about the world and filter it through the keys on my laptop. 

Bedroom Confessional 

Charlie

We're the Millers (Rawson Marshall Thurber, 2013)

This one right here is the very definition of an "afternoon movie". You may, like me - an easily diagnosable film fanatic - watch most movies in a dark, dungeon-like setting that promises the least social interaction possible, but it's movies like We're The Millers that are best viewed mid-day, with people walking in and out of the room and distractions abound. I started watching it for the first time half way through, my parents in the middle of watching it, and picked up the plot as things progressed; then caught the first half on the multiple rewatches that occur when simply looking for something to fill the big black void in the middle of my TV screen. It's lazy viewing; afternoons are lazy; "afternoon movie", get it? Despite this category being well known - even in the back of the minds of all the people who've never put much thought to it - critics still downrate movies like this on the basis they aren't as good as the much hyped auteur work (the equivalent of calling a McDonald's 'shit' because it doesn't compare with last week's gourmet dish). We're The Millers, rated on this separate little scale, ranks very high.

A movie where the characters were most likely thought up before the set-up that brings them together. Small time drug dealer David (Jason Sudeikis) gets mugged, putting him in trouble with his supplier (Ed Helms), so agrees to smuggle a "smidge" of weed back from Mexico. In need of a believable story he cobbles together a fake family out of Rose (Jennifer Aniston), Kenny (Will Poulter) and Casey (Emma Roberts) and sets off. The poster even gives each character their own personality tag: "drug dealer" "stripper" "runaway" and "virgin", hence four personalities clashing on a cross-Mexico road trip, all the while with drug dealers chasing them, another family driving alongside them, and in a vehicle which doubles as a constant threat of arrest.

I won't try and dissect any deep meaning for why I enjoyed this one: surely there should have been some rule about looking too deep into things which aim only as pure entertainment; afterall, good comedians know not to explain the joke - although then again, a great comedian could do it anyway and get a laugh. Movies like this, restrained mostly to the confines of an RV, depend mostly on chemistry. The gang of four here have it - each worthy of praise - although it's Sudeikis who's the revelation here. It's surprising he still hasn't got that many jobs in Hollywood yet, his personas as crazy enthusiastic as you could want from a comedy hero: he plays cocksure and confident almost in overdrive, in one scene I actually thought the gag was going to be that he'd smoked some of the weed due to an argument with the gang (or run into a coke dealer in a deleted scene, which would have been even more fitting). This movie works on like-ability alone, and going off the "afternoon movie" scale, that's about as recommendable as they come.

Ghost Stories - Coldplay

It's possible I'm just going against the crowd: I loved and defended Coldplay when they were just moderately popular and hated by critics, although started to really hate them the second they became really popular and the critics started to ignore them. I do swear this isn't on purpose and only follows the pattern that the broader something is the more popular it is, and conversely the broader something becomes the more the personality just starts to seep out of its sides. Coldplay peaked with A Rush of Blood to the Head, emotional large yes, but good fun too. By the time the band got around to Mylo Xyloto, their 2011 album, the music was so large the songs sounded like over-sentimental pop radio tuned slices of a poorly made film score.

I did recently find a Coldplay song I like, maybe their best, No More Keeping My Feet On The Ground, a B-side from early single Yellow. I could imagine listening to it on release - this young band could go either way: the vibrating guitars forming into a lonely, sonic exploration of a wide open space. It would be wrong to say that Coldplay never "managed" this type of restraint again when they never even attempted it. Yet the lyrics sort of prophesied the bad side of Coldplay, too: 'Sometimes I wake up/and I'm falling asleep'. Most would just call such a line a "contradiction" although I imagine Chris Martin would call it something like an "impossibility" which in this case is another way of saying something that sounds cool but has no real meaning.

It would be stupid to rate Ghost Stories on how similar it is to an early B-side I like, although less stupid to want Coldplay to stop the upward trajectory they've been on since their first album: a very unsuccessful testing out of the belief that bigger is undeniably better. Bigger or smaller isn't what's good or bad, what your making bigger or small is. Ghost Stories, a horrible album, as uninspired as Mylo Xyloto but without even that album's pop sense of enthusiasm, has flashes of a smaller, more restrained sound, but comes from a band so uninterested in doing anything different that they never become more than brief flashes.

I know many people linked Chris Martin's recent divorce, sorry "conscious uncoupling", to finally getting a more personal Coldplay album (afterall, divorce has worked wonders for music in the past) but that really isn't the case here. Listen to the lyrics of True Love, what will probably (hopefully) forever remain Coldplay's lowest point, to see the laziness on display: 'So tell me you love me/If you don't then lie/Oh lie to me'. Bouncing off lovers cliches like this just a reminder Martin doesn't really have anything real to say about love, or anything else.

I will at least thank the producers: following the forward trajectory of all of their previous albums and making this one even more vast and melodramatic than Xyloto would have been the album equivalent of the 2011 Oban fireworks display (look that reference up for some laughs if you don't know it already). The songs are quieter, not quite movie score stuff, but they lack any real personality; it's an album so slight that on your first listen you'll recognize every track, Ghost Stories matching every basic prediction your brain made for what a slushy, sorrowful pop album would be beat-for-beat.

The only song that has any real magic to it is Midnight. The mournful tapping of the drums in the back, Martin's vocals muffled and hard to understand and the track itself, for all its feeling of a vast wall of sound, sounding stoic and lonely. It points to the themes of male heterosexual loneliness, a theme that Coldplay - Martin in particular - has always felt on the edge of, but has never really tapped into. On No More Keeping My Feet On The Ground it sounded exciting, a band with something to tap into - on Midnight the sadness of the song fits it well though, a band who had potential but now can only show slight glimmers of talent, like this one good track on an album of nine. I would say Coldplay could change, but if a divorce and a shitty album haven't woken them up then I don't think anything will.

Playlist (17/07/14)

So the summer holidays are nearly here; no plans whatsoever. My uncle's taking me skydiving and I'm trying to persuade my parents to let me take motorbike lessons (because, quite honestly, what great purpose does a car serve at 17), so my chances of surviving the summer are patchy. Other than that it's going to be a lazy one.

The sun is finally back in my hometown (it's been a while) and as I stood in the shower for about half an hour on freezing temperature I remembered just how much I like the cold. The first good homework of my life, though: watching films and reading books (for media and English), and not bad choices either: Wuthering Heights and Se7en the highlights so far. 

I'm going to try and start blogging everyday now, or at least every other day. Things have been weird lately, my mind in too many other places to actually focus on writing. Although I am a world class procrastinator - my school can attest to it - so maybe that's just an excuse. Expect lots of film and music posts, and a video game essay I've been trying to write for a while. 

Anyways, here's what I've been listening to: 

Pools - Glass Animals. Every Sunday morning my mum watches a show called Sunday Brunch (it's on British TV  - avoid at all costs), the only highlight being the random song selections of up and coming artists they play. That's how I found Glass Animals. They're debut album is all lush, free-flowing rock music, and Pools is the highlight. Chilled but powerful. 

My Motive - Knytro. Gangster rap is so hard to pull off now, to actually sound threatening; most of the time it comes off sarcastic or over the top campy. My Motive actually sounds threatening - 'like a sniper in the trunk' - without being campy. I still don't know anything about Knytro which is always exciting.  

Love Lockdown - Kanye West. I keep thinking I've overplayed all of Kanye's library only to find something I skipped by. I skipped by most of 808s and Heartbreak, a good sometimes difficult album. This track sounds bare and primal, the tribal chant vibe sounds like a prelude to Lost In The World. The hook is so brilliantly addictive: 'so keep your love locked down'. 

Ghost - Ella Henderson. One of those millions of pop songs which when first heard sound like they could be something else, something really special. It's not the flush of emotion after re-listening so many times, but deserves credit anyway. 

Be Right - Asher Roth. I'm still indifferent to the album; I wished Roth would have just settled on a style that suits him by now. This track's great though; such a positive message, about seizing the moment and doing something with life - reminds me of early non-murderous Eminem. 

Overgrown - James Blake. The album of the same name makes me think of an EDM version of Jeff Buckley's Grace. They both have that beautiful floaty sound to them, although don't really sound that similar - but they have that same feeling: so full of emotion and life, yet perfectly encapsulating the feeling of not having found yourself yet.

Homecoming - Kanye West. I've been listening to a lot of the more soulful Kanye tracks (see also: Heard Em Say). Well ok, I'm always listening to the more anything Kanye tracks, but these ones especially. This was the last era of his music where he was really trying to make people dance. And you gotta love Chris Martin's chorus (better than anything else he's done since): 'Maybe, do you remember when, fireworks at lake Michigan'.

People Who Died - The Jim Carroll Band. A web page celebrating the life of Tommy Ramone linked to this. I'd heard in films and stuff but never thought to actually sit down and give it a listen. Amazing when I found out the singer was little Leo from The Basketball Diaries (brilliant, by the way). Now one more time: 'Those are people who died, died!'.

I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair) - Sandi Thom. This reminds me of my childhood - this was always bouncing around the music channels when it came out. There's something so appeasing about a song asking for a return to rock revolution yet done in such a minimalistic style, Thom's voice bigger than anything else. Anyone ever hear from her again, though?

Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On) - Talking Heads. How could I have never heard this album - Remain in Light - before? You know when something just knocks you over so bad that the reasons you love music just morphs around it a little. I should put the whole album here, but the opening track is just so great. You can hear their African influences (and David Byrne's craziness) literally leaking out of the speakers.

Safe European Home - The Clash. The moment The Clash started making real Clash songs? It has such a rhythm to it, they were certainly straying further than Europe. See Greil Marcus' Rolling Stone review of Give 'Em Enough Rope (one of their best) for a better analysis of the lyrics than I could ever put down.

Happy Valentine's Day - Outkast. As fantastically weird as Outkast, and only Outkast, could be: 'There's so much fuss about Santa Claus, but see Cupid will not be defeated!' And you just want to climb into that hook and live in it. 

Bad Grandpa (Jeff Tremaine, 2013)

Even before watching Bad Grandpa I'd seen one of the skits: the Grandpa in question (a heavily make-up'd Johnny Knoxville) gets his penis stuck in a vending machine and awkwardly asks for help from the passers by of a nearby gas station (squishy penis prop included). I'd been shown it by a friend the usual way: along with a long list of other online funnies, the fact this one was from an actual movie making it no different. All a sign that the rest of the world has finally caught up to the Jackass boys (weird to think that all technological progress was one big squishy penis gag).

It's actually Knoxville and Co.'s apparent knowledge that their usual antics now resemble binge watching your favorite Youtuber that explains the change of formula this time: it's not as random as before, the gags all acted out by the same two characters and connected by an actual story. And don't let the moniker 'Jackass Presents' fool you; there's no death-defying stunts, just Borat-style real world awkward situations acted out by an old man and a young boy - probably the two most perfect outputs for social awkwardness there is.

The story itself is simple (and told during the real world gags): the young boy, Billy (Jackson Nicoll), ends up with his Grandpa while his mother does prison time, the two setting out on a cross country road trip so Grandpa can hand over Billy to his stoner father. Grandpa's wife recently dead, he doesn't need the kid ruining his return to the land of freedom. Both actors deserve praise, especially Nicoll; the success of the film rested on finding a young actor who could actually pull off these pranks, which I imagine was no easy task.

Bad Grandpa isn't as devilishly funny as Jackass as its best, although it doesn't try to be; Knoxville, in his few leading roles in Hollywood, has always had a tenderness to him that you might not expect from a jackass. See The Ringer, him playing an impostor in the Special Olympics, for a film more sweet than you'd think its premise would allow. Bad Grandpa, funny more often than it's not, with a few missed gags, has a real heart to it; watching a gang of bikers, unscripted, defend the grandpa in the face of the abusive father is both a highlight, and a sign that Knoxville and the gang are more interested in the real world than a few 'old man shit himself' jokes. Although it has them too.