Sex and/or the City

HBO is an American television network which deserves some credit.

They are basically the last bastion of greatness in American TV.

They showed George Carlin and Bill Hicks specials before both of them went and died.

Virtually every good TV show in the US (including The Wire and The Sopranos) is shown on there.

And one such show is Sex and the City.

Long dismissed by many people as a chick show (focusing too much on the 'City' portion of the show, i.e. shoes and clothes), it's never quite got the credit it truly deserves.

The show is sharp, smart, funny and has some brilliantly written dialogue to boot.

The ups and downs of these four women, three interesting and the main one often incessantly annoying, are surprisingly fascinating.

But the show is worth watching, especially by men, because despite being mostly written and directed by Michael Patrick King, it provides vital insight to womenfolk.

It's also very edgy. It discusses things which most other shows - particularly in America - wouldn't dare discuss.


I'm not sure that on a uni-sanctioned blog I should go into more detail than that.

But their frank discussion of relationships from multiple angles - Miranda's relentless logic, Charlotte's fairy tale dreams, Samantha's libidinous attitude - is truly fascinating.

It also covers the post-relationship blues and on-again/off-again partnerships in a far more convincing way than virtually every other show.

Most of the characters are truly compelling; you can really see where they're coming from and even the less likeable ones - like Carrie. Yeah, I said it - have real motivations that you can understand and sympathise with.

It also features Harry Goldenblatt, for my mind the most likeable, ordinary bloke on television; a genuine role model in some ways.

The movie is a different story, mind. With all the hard edges sanded off and the girl factor upped by a mile, it ties up a lot of necessary plot points and is perfectly watchable. It's also at times genuinely romantic.

But it has nothing on the show, which is brassy, original and realistic. It's also more than wel worth a watch.

Pictures courtesy of Alan Light via www.flickr.com

Wrestling's not gay.

Wrestling is not gay.

Okay, wrestling is extremely gay.

But not all the time.

I can't exactly deny that a pair of greased-up, musclebound roid-heads rolling around on the mad touching each other inappropriately isn't gay.

However, not every wrestler looks like Ted Dibiase Jnr.

Take, for example, my favourite wrestler - and one of my favourite authors - Mick Foley.

It's not particularly gay to fall off and then through a cage that's a legitimate sixteen feet tall.

TWICE.

Foley is not one of the gay-looking, wrestle-on-the-floor kind of wrestlers. He's an "I spend most of my time falling onto barbed wire" type wrestler.

And by the way, that's all real blood streaming down his face. Feel free to root around on youtube if you don't believe me, but unless Foley spends his whole time covered in blood packs, I think he's shed some real blood.

Oh, and he's MISSING AN EAR due to a match in Hamburg in 1994, against a guy called Vader. Vader is a wrestler who's known for being tough in the ring, and he demands no less from his opponents - to the extent that he once almost got his eye punched out in the ring.

Then he finished the match.

But enough about the tough stuff of wrestling. Wrestling's not all about barbed wire, blood and setting each other on fire.

It's also about being utterly, utterly daft.

It's like Eastenders in tights, it's the height of ridiculousness. And it's just stupid fun.

If you can't enjoy watching a 25-stone man throwing a bin at a midget funny, then there's something wrong with your very soul.

Wrestling's not gay (all the time), it's just stupid. It also features pretty staggering displays of athleticism at times and every once in a while, genuinely emotional moments.

As far as the 'it's all fake' arguments, I have two things to add.

Firstly, find a metal folding chair and get hit with it. And before you go on about a 'fake chair,' watch some original ECW. Is every damn chair in that arena fake? Because they all get used.

Secondly, everything is fake. TV is fake. Movies are fake. Actors don't do their own stunts (much). It's all fake emotion, fake entertainment.

There's nothing wrong with wrestling. It's not gay, it's just dumb.

And it's also incredibly entertaining.

Outstanding American visual media

I'm going to be positive about something today.

I feel like I've been negative for a while, so I'm going to talk about nice happy, shiny things.

Today's nice, happy, shiny thing is Little Miss Sunshine.

A 2007 film with an all-star cast including Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear, it follows a disfunctional family road-tripping across America to take their youngest girl to compete in a child's beauty pageant.

That plot summary reads like it would be horrifying, and between Carell and Kinnear there have been some truly awful films.

But Little Miss Sunshine is quite unlike the majority of the films I've seen in my life.

Every member of the family, from Carell's suicidal professor to Kinnear's relentless self-help guru has a fully-rounded character.

You can tell where they're coming from even if you don't agree with it (or rather, even if you don't agree with Kinnear, because it's him you'll hate).

The best character by far is the grandfather, played by Alan Arkin, who as well as delivering some truly grand-slam bits of dialogue ("I still have Nazi bullets in my ass!") is genuinely likable despite snorting heroin in his spare time.

It also never goes quite where you expect it to, despite how easy it would be for it to. I won't say any more lest I spoil the rest of the film.

But what truly makes this movie great is that it's understated.

Understated television and film is rare in America. This isn't necessarily a fault of the audience, as the executives have always been pandering to the lowest common denominators.

Little Miss Sunshine is funny without being slapstick or out and out farce, the comedy just bubbles under the surface. The characters don't leave gaps in the dialogue for you to laugh. And it doesn't talk down to you.

Another American production which should be praised for how understated is The Wire.

Charlie Brooker reckons it's the best TV show ever made and similar praise was lavished on it by The Chris Mayer Experience.



If that's not enough, here I am again telling you how great it is.

Although not a comedy, the characters in The Wire again all have motivations and reasoning that makes even the ones you hate a little bit likable.

Little Miss Sunshine, The Wire; America could do with more TV shows and films like this.

Hooters

I'm Nottingham born and bred despite what little my accent may betray. Yet despite this I've never really been on a 'night out' in Nottingham.

On a weekend back to the homeland with the missus and bridesmaids to try our wedding meal, a friend of Cambridge Girl In Preston said he'd show us round a bit.

But we cared not for that. The first thing we wanted to do was go to Hooters.

And yes, by 'we,' I refer to myself, my wife-to-be, two other women and a guy three of us had only just met.

It's always a rowdy night at Hooters, right?

Wrong.

I'm not sure I've ever found a building or its contents as depressing as I did Hooters.

Apart from the fact that one drink cost me £3.55, the place was just awful on every level.

The girls looked like they had somehow been airbrushed in person. And some of them clearly considered this 'their living,' as at least one of them had giant fake breasts stapled onto their beampole frames.

Despite this, they were all utterly miserable. I don't think I've ever been less enthusiastic about seeing a scantily clad woman.

The whole place reeked of sleaze (although that shouldn't have been unexpected). But the problem with it was, it felt quite unlike a strip club.

Strip clubs are a niche market. They know what they're about and what you go there to do, so they carry themselves with a certain level of class.

Hooters is a poor man's strip club. People go there because they haven't got the guts to go to a real strip club, and they ogel women who have no class, but still have enough class not to actually get naked.

It's purgatory, basically.

And I for one don't care to repeat the experience.

3D and other miscellaneous musings

So the new trend, seemingly started by the remake of My Blood Valentine, is 3D cinema.

My best friend Thom reckons that it's going to take over cinema.

And he might have a point; the only reason I doubt him is because it's threatened to do that at least twice before and not done so.

3D originated in the fifties if I remember rightly and has had a few revivals, but it's never become the standing definition of what cinema is in the same way.

Take colour film, for example. I'm sure plenty of people thought that was a fad at the time, but it soon became the norm.

I doubt this will happen with 3D because it's not necessarily a real improvement on the original form.

Saying that, some people my consider it an improvement. They may feel it is somehow a necessity to have it all leap off the screen into their faces instead of laying back and enjoying it.

And it's with thoughts like this when I feel like I am a man born out of my own time.

Unlike a lot of people with similar tastes in music to me, I don't think that good music is dead and was better in the sixties.

I think some things in music were better in bygone eras, but that's another story.

A lot of the new technology that appears these days seems to me to be not just frivolous, but pointless.

I guess this is a very old man 'we didn't need central heating when I was a wee pup' kind of rant.

I don't want to have my entire music collection with me everywhere I go. I quite like having a limited choice.

I don't really desire my movies to come leaping out of the screen at me. Seeing them on a hundred-foot-wide screen is spectacle enough, thanks.

I don't want to see the total death of physical media in my lifetime. I don't want to only own binary code stored in a magic box with a screen.

So yes, I am an old man before my time.

But then anyone reading this will already know that.

Twitter terrorism

We've reached a new low, folks.

Yes, someone has been arrested under suspicion of terrorism based on their Twitter account.

Oh dear.

It seems one cannot make a joke without being arrested these days.

The joke may have been in poor taste, but it was also clearly a joke. What good would it do someone to blow up the airport from which they intend to depart?

This alleged democracy we live in supposedly allows freedom of speech, and as the internet is yet to be regulated that should extend as far as Twitter.

To be fair, terrorism is a serious issue (sort of) and so we should try and clamp down on it. But the precedent that this sets is an extremely dangerous one.

In 1989, Bill Hicks, my personal idol, released a video of a stand-up show called Sane Man.

Its opening featured a comedy bit in which he encouraged hi-jacking of planes that he saw on the news and even fantasised about doing it himself (albeit to get the plane to its original destination on time).

Does this make Hicks a suspected terrorist? I mean he's been dead since '94 so digging him up and putting him on trial wouldn't help, but I'm trying to make a point here.

And as far as the comment being on Twitter, this is where we really get into dangerous territory.

The internet has been a safehaven for keyboard bullying for the best part of a decade now.

It allows someone in Alaska to talk to someone in Kamchatca with only a split-second delay between their replies.

Twitter is the hot website to be on at the moment, which will be why this guy got noticed. But I think if the police started trawling the back catalogues of many online forums they'd be horrified by what they found.

Threats of rape, murder, and yes, terrorism, all meant in jest and all arrest-worthy by the standard set in this case.

And this is quite apart from the fact that the internet is a global phenomenon and can't really be policed by any singular set of laws.

So where do we go from here?

Someone innocent has already died in Britain as a result of anti-terror legislation. The only question is how much worse things can get from there.

A short musing upon animé

Japanese culture has had a giant impact on Western culture lately.

I'm not sure why this is. Maybe the arrival of Pokémon and its accompanying television series kicked the door in for animé in general.

Either way, you can't walk down the streets nowadays without seeing someone dressed like they think they're a Japanese animé character.

It wasn't such a problem a few years ago when this was more of a niche thing, and when it was only gamers going to conventions who dressed like Final Fantasy characters.

But these days everyone's into it. And again, this isn't really a problem either.

Trends, be they idiotic or not, come and go and it's not the fault of the few originals that the trends happen.

Just ask Ian Mackaye, who basically invented straight-edge and emo by accident and has spent the ensuing twenty-odd years distancing himself from it.

The thing I dislike about it is how everybody seems to be so completely okay with what goes on in the TV shows and films that most of these people love.

These shows are unrelentingly bizarre and yet nobody seems to notice this.

Down to the very basic elements of Japanese animation, there are things that make no sense to us, like the way they constantly beat each other over the head with fans. I for one don't think a fan would hurt that much, but what do I know.

There's the fact that every single boy looks like a girl. Or at least, they certainly don't look like boys.

And the unsettling fact that every girl is ridiculously proportioned, disturbingly young yet also pubescent, and wearing preposterously revealing clothing.

But it's not even all of that that I'm talking about, it's the weirdness that goes one step further than that.

It's the Cat Bus in (I think) My Neighbour Totero.

It's the weird tree creature projectile vomiting in a film that I think was Spirited Away, but I forget.

I saw on (I think) Cowboy Bebop, blood dripping downwards slowly out of a giant hanging eyeball.

Pokémon, which consists of tiny monsters living in balls that you keep in your pocket, is practically USUAL next to that!

And I could handle all this weirdness were it not for the fact that all of these things just whistle by and animé fans don't react. They don't say 'that was totally weird, but it was awesome nonetheless.' They just accept it.

So stop it. Grr.