Reasons to be cheerful #5

Stevie Wonder once performed a six-minute Superstition jam, on Sesame Street. The mind-blowing excellence of this needs no further explanation. Love the wee hip kid with the fantastic ‘fro.

the word is now a virus: Pontypool

Pontypool is in one way a simple satire with a single didactic message: English-speaking media is turning citizens into empty-headed and desperately violent zombies, and the only way to save yourself is to excise the language entirely. Metaphorical tumor and healthy flesh must be sacrificed together, and refuge is to be found in the less id-baiting vocabulary [...]

Scott Pilgrim vs my brain

I don’t know where to start with this movie. It was intolerably irritating, and also one of the most enjoyable films I’ve seen this year. Often at the same time. It has a surly blue-haired girl wielding a giant pixellated sledgehammer, which alone should quality for a special award. It often feels like Wonderfalls, a [...]

Reasons to be Cheerful #4

Mnahmnah! (Doo doo do do do!) Rings a near-subliminal bell, doesn’t it? Classic Muppet Show nonsense, the plush hepcat scatter versus two punctilious whatever-the-hells, and coming out with the most stubborn earworm since ‘Tenser’, said the Tensor; ‘tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun’: two minutes of pure childhood. Ironic,  in the Alanis Morissette sense of [...]

An Evening with Dementia

Trevor T Smith was a familiar figure on the Royal Mile in August, meandering through the Fringe Festival hooplah in character as an elderly man who was no longer himself, trailed by a protective woman (his wife, I believe) who explained the purpose of his appearance and one-man play, An Evening With Dementia. (See a [...]