A prophet

A Prophet

Jacques Audiard doesn't do fluffy tear gland itching prison dramas. Jacques Audiard doesn't do easy to disgest characters spurting out motivational one liners like a buffed-up broad in an exercise video. Jacques Audiard doesn't do Morgan Feeman. And most importantly, Jacques Audiard seemingly doesn't do crap films.

Top 5: Sergio Leone

1. Once Upon A Time In The West

Leone threw a curve ball from the poncho-wearing nameless-one to direct this showboat opera piece of violence and fading frontiers. Sure, it's not an airy light hearted horse-trotting western involving the sheriff and his merry men clonking off into the distant sunset like galloping herds of turd, but things of beauty rarely are.

Instead, the film plays out like the wise old man squinting at the world through the bottom of his whiskey glass, guarding his words like they're the only thing worth giving a damn over anymore.

So if the eye-gazing foreplay and the thick to thin length to dialogue ratio doesn't induce cold sweats in you, it's a must viewing.



2. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Elli Wallach's perfomance as the mother-cursing starpin sleazeball is the mantlepiece role of the trio. Fact.

3. For A Few Dollars More

4. Once Upon A Time In America

Leone took a break from slugging it out in the desert sand to throw his hat into the gangster genre ring. And my, did he throw it in with some force.

5. For A Fistful Of Dollars

Playlist

I'm having a K'Naan jamming session. So sue me.

Humpty Dumpty of the Field

Hercules vs Barcelona 2-0

After having his face gnauled on by wayward studded boots and being sterilised by a jabulani laying attack on his private ryan barracks, the official world cup cat scratching post has done it again.

Stirring up his pot of Mr Bean lady luck, the Barcelona centre back made a gruesome acquaintance with the keeper's jawline only to be left soaking like a dishevelled prune in the red stuff.

If ever there is a flying ninja kick, an outstretched elbow or a hovering football boot, Pique is more than likely to be itching his lothario chin against it.

 

Call it injury proneness. Call it sadomachism. Call it the 'special one' playing around with his hocus-pocus abacadbra voodoo.

But there's only one solution Pep, a bubble boy outfit with more padding than you can shake a stick at.

Clint Eastwood As Bond

After Clint Eastwood's revelation of turning down offers to play James Bond, I present you with the what-could-have-been scenario.

Oh, James Bond. I see you've caught me having an awkward fondling moment with the cigarette case.
Please don't file for sexual harrasment.

Scowl

James Bond, we have a smidgen of a problem.
A rich-off-his-clogs foreigner armed with a heavy accent and enough uranium to upturn the world entire wants global domination.

Scowl

This is a pocket sized explosive, Bond.
 Use it only when you're outclassed in a fist fight.
Which is pretty often for someone who has to rely on gadgets schamdgets to blast their euro-trash villains to high heaven.

 Scowl

Look into my eyes, look into my eyes, the eyes, the eyes, not around the eyes, don't look around my eyes, look into my eyes.

Scowl

Sleepover time, Bond.
And please remove the pocket sized explosive from your trousers before you give a new meaning to 'finishing with a bang'.

Scowl.

Gone With The Wind Review

Gone With the Wind

 My relationship with romantic epics can usually be summed up to a fine-tuned accuracy by solely one word; constipation, my friends, constipation.

That is to say that whenever I'm blessed with a hollywood romance to gaze over, it's close to a sure shot that it will be a long and painful affair involving a bucket load of groaning, moaning, sighing and clenched angry faces on both sides of the screen.

 So finding myself actually juicing some pleasure out of the mother all romance sagas was a surprise on an equal notch to the snooping children discovering Narnia where the back of their wardrobes ought to be.

 And after much grunting and pondering over as to why I actually liked it, I've come to a swift conclusion that there are exactly two things that glosses over the 'spare me the tears' falling south sentiment and the tangerine orange background that suggests that the set designers caused a global dulux colour shortage during filiming.

 And these two things come in the thespian form of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh.

 Vivien Leigh for her unrelentness queen bitch act that's she carved down to a fine museum centrepiece and Vivien Leigh again for her pseudo-innocent smirk that makes you want to punch her in the ovaries to knock some sense into the curtain-wearing broad.

And Clark Gable for his athlete-mobility rubber moulded facial muscles.
No, seriously, if I had anything to say about the matter, his eyebrows would actually get top billing. And an oscar nomination. And a star on the hollywood walk of fame.
And obviously a restraining order from me.

Look at me, all dashing and shit. Call George Cukor. I feel like a stairway musical number is in the works.

Self Help Books Suck

The words 'self improvement' are gag-inducing. They instantly conjure up images of one-size-fits-all self-help books penned by the type of people who hold conversations with their garden plants and claim to communicate with your aura.

My theory on this paperback 'happy-trail' boom is that if you can't define happiness in one sentence, then whatever turd you're smearing across each page doesn't add up to squat.

Chick Flick Drinking Game

Knock one back every time:

1. The serial reluctant shirt wearer that is Matthew McConaughey, plays lead pied piper to the chest baring parade by draping his greased-like-a-BP-oil-slick torso gratuitously onto the screen like some five dime hooker.
2. You hear fluffy sugary bubblegum pop that has the combined musical merit of the drone of household appliances.
3. There's a makeover scene involving the hollywood equivalent of a buck toothed billy being pampered, plucked, pruned and preened to high sweet chick flick heaven.
4. Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lopez, Hugh Grant or Richard Gere stumble onto the screen.
5. There's a montage scene involving an intense jamming session set to songs that can best descrived as the love child of elevator music, screeching vibrattos and lyrics penned by a cheap trick optimist.
6. You witness aggressive capitalism propoganda with brands names up to the wazoo.
7. The lead female works as a paper-pusher for an all-gloss-and-high-cost magazine and spends most of her time grazing on a fluffy pink pen.
8. There's a schmutzy fairytale wedding with a bitch-fide stampede for the bouquet.
9. A hyperhomosexual man gives out advice and acts like a campy hand-flailing yoda.

Playlist

I've replayed this eargasmic song a psychotic amount of times.



It's a scientific fact that her eyes can rape your soul.

The Dim-Witted Adventures of the Microwave Meal Girl

Hunched over a cookbook, salivating like a Pavlov's Dog at the full spread gastronomical porn displayed before me, I came to the swift conclusion that my inner michelin star chef is one baking rampage away.

So I trodded my burnt-toast-speciality ass downstairs and began mashing, bashing and whiplashing a poor excuse of a dough.

Which was all hunky-dora until my inner-domesticated-self shriveled to a pulp when it discovered that the recipe called for use of a piping bag. A piping bag? The most sophisticated piece of cooking equipment present in my household being a cheese grater.

And after much huffing and puffing, I gave up my girl scout creativity skills and just spooned the dough onto the oil to form churros resembling floating pastry lumps of turds. Some mother-effin Delia Smith I am.

England vs Bulgaria

England vs Bulgaria             
4 - 0



Suck on that quartet Bulgaria



 



The Idiot's Guide To Pedro Almodovar

Who is he?

Straight-as-a-parabola Spanish director with horizontally generous hair caused by either a surge of high voltage electricity or a hedgehog permanantly residing on his head.

Directing style

• Alfred Hitchcock on acid.
• Bubble-gum pop scenery with hallucogenic colours every which way you look. It's like gawping at an animated Andy Warhol potrait.
• A restraining-order-level obsession with Penelope Cruz
• Soap opera-esque plots filled to the brim with drag queens, transvestites, psychopaths and menopausal crying women.

Talk to Her - Male nurse has his heart set aflutter by a comatose patient. Male nurse rapes said comatose patient. Male nurse plugs himself out as some grease-ball creep of a casanova burdened by unrequited love.
Shudder.

Tie Me Up Time Me Down - Ah, the age old love story dished out time and time again. Boy is released from mental institution. Girl is a drug snorting porn-star. Boy meets girl by breaking into her appartment and proclaiming his unrequited grease-ball creep love by tying her to her bed and keeping her hostage in her house until she gets all Stockhol Syndrome swoony.

Overall opinion: as empowering as watching an aproned housewife get anxiety attacks about chicken marination.