Good morning.

I suppose I should tell you what's happened then. Nothing too exciting on our part, but one could argue that life is never actually that exciting. In the same way that sometimes I ask myself "Do I really need this DVD?" and the answer if apart from food, you don't really need anything. I'm currently debating if I should buy the gangster classic Long Good Friday on DVD, and have been for weeks. *(Incidentally Guy Ritchie, Long Good Friday is how to make a gangster film).

So Graham turned up, dropped his stuff off, and we went to see The Wonder Stuff (more of which later), at the Forum. Also known as the Town & Country Club. And we came home, and me and Graham and Ellen had one of those chats where he tells us something important, and we sit around til 4am talking about it. It's his job to tell you fellow readers, but nobody in danger, or ill, or anything like that.

To compensate for Thursday night, we slept in today. After one of the typical late-night computer crashes that always happens about fifteen minutes before you want to go to bed and so at 2.30pm I was faced with three lumps of dead space on the screen from where various menu options had frozen mid-process, I yanked the plug out, set the alarm for 8.48, got up exhausted, bought New Order tickets and then went back to bed for three wonderful hours. Maeve sat on my hand to stop me getting up, and purred us to sleep.

Buying New Order tickets was a piece of piss. Insert Web Address > Page Comes Up > Click and Buy. No overloaded servers. No authorisation page web timeouts. Nothing. Just click and buy. And general admission tickets. That's the way that buying tickets should be.

Graham bought with him a boatload of DVD's. Last night I watched Ali, which is Michel Mann's worst movie - like The Aviator - is all bombast and no soul. Will Smith does a great job, but when boxing movies can be as good as "Raging Bull", you really need to match the standards. It does have a couple of great moments, but those do not a movie make.

We had some friends over, and after talking about the joys of 80's Hair Metal (Guns N Roses in particular, their show in London three years ago was brilliant for all the wrong reasons). We stuck on the Guns N Roses DVD - "Welcome To The Videos" - a cheap, contract filling, effort free vanilla DVD of not all of their videos, with none of the hour long documenatries they filmed at the same time. The videos for "Perfect Crime", and "You Could Be Mine" are absent, and the hilarious interviews that comprised the 'making of's mean that you don't get to see the band driving around in limos whilst looking like hobos, or the wonderful moment where Axl reveals most of these videos were going to be part of the "Guns N Roses motion picture", which would've followed a retelling of Axl's life from his birth to his suicide by jumping off an oil tanker and being reincarnated as a dolphin (see above). Think I'm joking? The scene where Axl sits next to a dolphin which is wearing a plaid shirt and bandana and squeaking as Axl's monogrammed white trainer sinks to the ocean floor is worth it's weight in chocolate. There were four adults in the room who were practically in tears of laughter at this stage. The DVD is a practical retelling of Axl's story : how one man who isn't very talented is given a boatload of money to fulfill his vision, and everyone else starts to see that he's full of shit and nowhere near as good or as clever as he thought he was.



You can download some videos here... If you do watch them, try to remember that this isn't helped by the drastic tailing off in quality of the songs until by the end its plain obvious they're on the ninth single from the album and grasping at straws by sticking out any old rubbish. By the end it's ugly on the ears and desperate on the eyes. This incidentally is a fan cartoon about GNR 2002 style, in Japanese.

This morning then, after I woke up again, I stuck on Starship Troopers 2, which Graham bought down for us to watch. It's absolute fucking shit and everyone else agrees. It's straight to DVD, shelf born. In a word a "hangover movie". You watch with a hangover because there's nothing better on. And you don't up to changing the chanel or moving from the couch. Anyway, want to buy a Jackson Pollock drum machine?

And here's an interesting quote from a bad movie I have the soundtrack CD for :
"Going to a nightclub because of a specific DJ is the intellectual equivalent of heading for the cinema because you've heard they've got a cracking projectionist. There - I've said it."

But not as good as this quote from here ...

"The fact that almost every celebrity in the world is an asshole means, quite simply, that I’ve been right all along:everyone is an asshole, secretly. Most of us just don’t have the resources to indulge our asshole tendencies."
- posted by Mark @ 12:23 pm