Dennis Lee Hopper (May 17, 1936 – May 29, 2010) was an American actor, filmmaker and artist. As a young man, Hopper became interested in acting and eventually became a student of the Actors Studio. He made his first television appearance in 1955, and appeared in two films featuring James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956). Over the next ten years, Hopper appeared frequently on television in guest roles, and by the end of the 1960s had played supporting roles in several films. He directed and starred in Easy Rider (1969), winning an award at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay as co-writer of the film’s script. [also starred in Apocalypse Now, RumbleFish, Hoosiers] and played the villain in Speed. – Wikipedia
Also best known for scaring the s*** out of a generation of film-goers as the gas-sucking ultraviolent psychotic in Blue Velvet – a film I always deeply respected but was never quite sure whether I actually liked or not. In a sense, it was immaterial: it was a towering performance in a highly effective chiller. Even if he is only remembered for that role – often voted one of the scariest ever movie moments – it’s something of which he could have been very proud.
A tweet yesterday asking for mood-improving music made me think about the subtle differences between things that can make you feel better and things that can make you feel worse. Everybody is different, so what works for me might not work for you, but broadly these are the things that really help if you’re feeling a bit Mondayish.
MUSIC
I generally look for “someone who’s more unhappy than I am”, but Liz’s link to Swans made me feel about a billion times worse. That’s probably why I never really got into them, even though I think the music is good.
The trick is for there to be an “up” in the “down”. The reason why tracks like NIN’s Hurt are so popular is because they end on a note of optimism – yes, life sucks, but we’ll get through it. I love Pink Floyd, but that’s because after enough guitar solos you’ve forgotten whatever it was you were upset about in the first place. I basically love music that jumps right down into the hole with you and then pulls you up by the heartstrings.
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I used to listen to Nick Cave a lot because “he’s someone more miserable than I am”, but really the appeal is that there’s an element of parody to what he does. Take a song like (my favourite) Weeping Song. For a song about crying, they actually look extremely bloody cheerful. He’s so completely enjoying himself there that you can’t help but smile.
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Yes, The Cure work too, for exactly the same reasons. Even better was The Mary Whitehouse Experience‘s take on Robert Smith.
Kateri tweeted a link earlier to an Angry Black Women blog post about women in rock. It was a great list, with some of my favourite musicians represented, but it was a list of mostly Western-sounding British and American artists. It got me thinking about how you can go pretty much anywhere in the world and hear a pretty racket by a pretty woman …
Aylin Aslım: Gülyabani
(Turkey)
This one has a great video, and is just a fantastic song
Kolrassa Krókríðandi: Gammagarg
(Iceland)
There’s more to Iceland than Bjoerk, you know
Him Indoors is so meh about the recent episodes. Seriously, what’s to to be meh about? OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG! It kicks the squidgy parts of Lost in so many ways! Can not wait for the last few episodes! Seriously, I’m going to miss this show so much once it’s gone.
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What’s the fuss about? OK, mostly the reason that it’s good is that it’s almost gone. Very, very few shows that continue for a long time retain their level of excellence. The X-Files remained watchable, but was pitiful at its last compared to its earlier episodes. Buffy completely lost it in season 6 and only barely pulled it together for the end. Angel went south in the third series and had a deeply unsatisfying final season that only barely improved on the fourth. Battlestar Galactica remains the finest television show I’ve ever seen, but most of the last series sagged with only the final episode reaching the heart-pounding heights of season one. Even so, it never topped the unbelievably good second series.
If I have to think of a long-running show that retained its edge to the end, I’m really stuck with Friends and Star Trek: Voyager – and the latter only hit its stride in the third year or so.
The really great shows are short and sweet. Fawlty Towers had only twelve episodes … ever. Spaced and Extras were mercifully short-lived pockets of comedy perfection – any more would have killed them. American Gothic left everyone wanting more, but I was delighted that it ended when it did: it had nowhere else to go. Twin Peaks should have ended partway through the second series. OK, we could have done with more Firefly, I’ll give you that.
FlashForward, though? It took a few episodes to find its feet but when it got there, it was almost unbearably tense, high-production-value television with characters you care about and a labyrinthine plot that remains interesting. I can’t wait to see how it ends but I’m glad that it will end. I hope to enjoy it with the same feverish excitement that my friends had towards Lost – a show I felt had outstayed its welcome, but – like FlashForward - was one hell of a great idea.
Just caught this awesome piece on Twitter, and it’s one of the things I find really exciting about game development in general: the never-ending quest to bring more verite to the entertainment.
I try not to get too drawn in to discussions on “feminist politics”, considering how strongly I associate it with the history class I took in school and my unending disappointment that the entire human race didn’t take one look at the Spice Girls and mutter “you gotta be f***ing kidding me”. Yes, kids, it’s all your fault. If you hadn’t wondered what zig-a-zig-ah meant, we’d all be living in the parallel world I’ve comfortably inhabited since 1976.
Anyhoo, I’m, like, totally a woman and stuff, and that gives me a unique insight shared only by a select 3 billion other people that girls with big boobs can’t run and jump and do other fast-people things. Honestly, I don’t mind game characters with big T&A, but make them lumbering and slow: women like me (and it is The Idealised Me) can only use our charms and the strength of a single punch and then we’re quite frankly out of options. Similarly, girls with small boobs and tiny butts can run fast and do impressive moves – that’s what makes Faith from Mirror’s Edge so impressive – but give her big boobs and we Don’t Believe It. That’s, after all, what it comes down to.
The article is awesome because I can believe the characters she comes up with. They are, after all, facsimiles of their male counterparts. I can believe that. I can believe that a girl in a game with big boobs in a low-cut top can charm the hero. I can believe in a game that the hero can be the big-boobed heroine, wielding a semi-automatic and using sheer brute strength to save the day.
What I absolutely cannot believe is that a huge-boobed, curvy woman can pull off Faith-from-Mirror’s-Edge‘s moves. The devs had it right all along. Anyway, I always feel disappointed when The Idealised Me is not represented in a video game. Granted, it is in most of the ones I play, but not all. (I don’t mean Curvy Me – I can be tall, short, fat, thin, black, white – but I’m always female.) Sure, I’ll still play your game if I have to be Garrett from Thief, or thingy from GTA IV. It’s just the unspoken reason why your game will never be as good as Fallout 3 or Mass Effect 2: sure, your adventure was great, but I was never quite a part of it. It’s a reason why, when it works, it works so well. Total suspension of disbelief; the ultimate fantasy.
… otherwise known as Harold & Kumar Get The Munchies might just be the funniest film I have ever seen.
It’s basically a cross between Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Withnail & I – a comedy caper about a couple of stoners trying to find a burger bar.
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The cast – John Cho from FlashForward and Kal Penn from 24 – are just fantastic, and really make the film. It’s just incredibly underrated. You really need to see it – if only to see Doogie Howser snorting cocaine off prostitutes in a stolen car …
Pretty much all you need to know about this one is in the trailer.
Some comedies have great trailers and no other jokes; this one is laugh-out-loud funny from start to finish. It’s essentially Hitch meets How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days – more aimed at women than men, but entertaining enough not to bore anyone forced to watch it by their control-freak girlfriend. Be warned it’s not family viewing: there’s a lot of strong language and crude references. It’s fun in a predictable sort of way – a perfect date movie.
:edit: In light of discussion below, the central premise and irony of the story and the critic’s reaction to it is this: if you’re basically fun, you can get away with a huge amount because people enjoy being around you so much they’ll put up with all your s***. If you’re not fun, it doesn’t matter how worthy and noble you are, because nobody’s that interested in anything you have to say.
So, it’s our anniversary this weekend, and I stocked up the house with food and wine, chocolates and rented movies. Him Indoors bought the Harold & Kumar DVD (one of our favourite movies), but thinking that it wasn’t going to be more than a two-star film, we watched Dorian Gray this afternoon, planning to see the better films later.
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The first thing I noticed was the magnificent cinematography – it’s beautifully filmed in shades of blue. The casting is absolutely perfect – I didn’t think I’d heard of Ben Barnes before (he’s actually “Young Dunstan” (the guy from the prologue) in Stardust), but he’s both exquisitely beautiful and can look creepy on cue. Colin Firth, Rebecca Hall, Ben Chaplin and Rachel Hurd-Wood are the main supports and they’re all great.
The best way I can sum up this version of Dorian Gray is that there’s nothing wrong with it. The plot does deviate from Oscar Wilde’s original story, but both the sparkling wit and gothic horror are intact. All in all, a welcome surprise.
“Julian Beeston, he’s quite rock’n’roll. He’s been on Depeche Mode tours with Nitzer Ebb. Jools lobbed a TV through a window. Rock’n’roll cliché to the max. That was the worst. Jools said, “Guys, we can’t be wusses. We’re just not wrecking hotel rooms. So we all pooled together some money, lobbed the TV set out the window, just did the standard things, just so we could say we did it. Roddy wanted porn on his TV that night. He paid twelve bucks to get the porn channel and then complained to the hotel management that it wasn’t giving him an erection, and got his money back.”
By the end of the tour, all you want is a house in the country, picket fence, kids, dog. “You never want to leave the country again,” says Marc, “You want to be settled with 2.4 kids, it really does drive you to becoming an accountant with a Volvo. You do become rock’n’rolled out. One thing about touring, which is always fun, is that there is always a new scene every day. There’s always a new place every day. I think that, at a larger level, if you’re playing stadiums, you don’t see any of the town, whereas if you are playing to 500 people, you actually get to see and meet people, and that’s quite cool.”
This was conducted in 2001. I took over running Cubanate’s website for a bit and did this piece with Marc to give the site some content. It was originally presented in four parts so I’ll split it in half. Marc and I had a lot of the same friends and were both really extravert people, so we found it easy to get along with each other. I was hitting the top of my game in terms of conducting interviews, but oddly it turned out to be the last music interview I ever did. Shame, really, because when I read this back just now, I was just laughing my tail off …
SPARKS, SYNTHS AND SHEEP
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It started with Sparks. Marc was about nine, in that precious short time before punk blew apart our preconceptions about what music was supposed to sound like, and Marc became a Sparks fan. “It was incredibly out there,” he reminisces. “Then it was punk – punk was my first big thing that I was into. I think the roots of what I’ve always been into have come from the music of around that period – punk and disco. It was always punk versus disco.”
Beatles-type parents
“My mother was a professional chorus girl, so she loved big musicals, South Pacific, that kind of thing. The rest of it was all the Sixties stuff. This says all you need to know about my parents: They were definitely Beatles-type parents. I mean, now, I’d come down on the side of the Stones, but I grew up on The Beatles. I like the pompousness of the later albums, I think they got better later on when they started to basically get out of their heads. The early pop stuff, which everyone says is really classic, I think is alright, but nothing special.”
Those formative years were spent in the Middle East, before moving to the South of England. Marc was denied a lost youth, hanging out with the rebel crowd, because he lived in a sleepy village near Haywards Heath in mid-Sussex. He started going down to Brighton to experience his first taste of wild nights on the town. “Down there, there was really quite a cool scene, going to the Top Rank and places like that. Going to some f***ing rough gigs, come to think of it. I mean, there were always stabbings – you wouldn’t believe the amount of violence in those shows then, all the time, things that would create national headlines these days would happen every Saturday. The difficulty when you are isolated, out in the country, is that there’s no real way to meet people who are thinking similarly, because all you have is the village disco.”
In primary school, Marc formed his first band. “At first, none of us could play instruments, so at first we used to put on shows, miming along to records. That was the earliest thing I did.”
A really, really early synthesiser
This encouraged Marc’s fledgling love of performance, which grew as he moved to Leicester, and, later, London. During his teens, however, Marc came into contact for the first time with the one thing that would change his life for ever. “A friend of mine bought a really, really early synthesiser. This would have been about 1981. I was about fifteen or sixteen. Just having a synthesiser and a little, primitive drum machine, immediately made you feel completely special because nobody else had one. It just made you feel good about making music. You could be weird from the word go. You didn’t need to learn how to play chords on the guitar, it was more punk rock than punk, in a way, because anything you did, no matter how s*** it was, at least you sounded different than everybody else.”
West One
“I then got to London, and this is the Eighties, and I said to myself, I want to make it big! I formed a band with a mate and we were doing electro-pop (I suppose is the best way to describe it), very commercial stuff, and then we got signed with a producer called Colin Thurston, who was my idol producer at the time. He produced the early Human League and all the early Duran Duran stuff, so we made an album with him, which was an absolute disaster. But the first inkling I had that I might end up doing what I’m doing was that the guy who gave us our first break offered us a support with Gary Numan. So, we supported Numan in 1987, and it was great. I mean, we didn’t have a record label or anything so that immediately kicked things off. So, we struggled on with that and at some point Bill, the guy I was working with, left, and I took over as lead singer (I was on keyboards before), and we got re-signed in the early Nineties to Music For Nations. We made another album, essentially remaking that first album, which was also a complete f***ing failure. The first thing we did there, moving towards what I’m doing now, is make a couple of dance remixes of those songs which were actually dance hits and scraped into the Top 100 of that scene.”
“So, it was all looking a bit possible, but I realised that something was amiss and by that time I was going down Gossips on a Wednesday to the Hard Club. Techno was becoming a lot harder, and I thought, I can see my way forward here.”
