Sweet Nothings

I seem to listen to less and less music as the years go by. In 2010 I’ve watched loads of sport , and been to more movies and radio recordings (mostly free, coincidentally) than gigs. Even my iPod listening is increasingly dominated by podcasts. Nonetheless, here follows some brief musings on music from this year. Hopefully all these Sound Of... polls of “tastemakers” and Critics Choice awards won’t go on for too much longer. This year’s HOT TIP~! was Ellie Goulding , who’s only really made the cultural impact that all the breathless hyperbole suggested she would now she's done a seasonally-friendly cover and stuck it on an advert. The problem is that everything about her betrays her origins as a marketing project, artificially born out of target market analyses and box-checking exercises. Take her singing voice: with someone like Bjork, for example, you don't have trouble believing that it's her natural voice because she's such a bonkers character. Goulding seems li...

Apparently there was a World Cup this year. I know, me neither. They kept that one quiet didn’t they? Meanwhile, domestic football has reached the point where success or failure is dictated more by the global economy than anything else. The recession was blamed for the English clubs’ lack of success in last season’s Champions League, Man Utd and Chelsea’s owners now unwilling or unable to spunk huge sums on the new players needed to keep them dominant. This season’s bonkers Premier League is further proof of this, although you’d have thought Chelsea already had it sewn up by October judging from the media’s over-reacting to their successful negotiation of what was a pitifully easy opening schedule. Finance dictates everything – the most dramatic events of this season so far have been Liverpool’s tortuous courtroom ownership battle, the ridiculous sackings of two perfectly good managers because of the unrealistic expectations of their chairmen, and the shock exit of another just bef...

One thing that’s really hit home this year is that expectations can be a real killer for movies. Take The Social Network   I adore The West Wing and most of Aaron Sorkin’s other work (stepping gingerly around Studio 60), and therefore I was almost indecently excited when I heard he’d written a tale about the creation of Facebook and even more so when I heard early reviews. It’s a highly accomplished film for sure, but I found myself constantly thinking “this isn't quite as good as the West Wing”, or “not sure about that sequence”, or “this cinematography is too darn dark!”, thereby ensuring that my colossal expectations were never likely to be met. Conversely, I went to see Toy Story 3 in Durban after a month in South Africa during which I’d been largely cut off from movie hype. Even though I expected it to be good, there was always a feeling that surely Pixar were milking the franchise slightly, as the third film of any series is wont to do (assuming a trilogy wasn’t the ...

In the style of a 3-2-1 clue, Taking a Leak=Taking a Piss, substituting a word gives you Taking the Piss, which brings you to >>>>Wikileaks. About half of yesterday's Guardian  was devoted to reports of the latest revelations from Wikileaks' hoard of ill-gotten US embassy cables and their wider impact. I imagine the paper has been like this for the entire week. As a Grauniad reader (on Saturdays at least) I should probably approve of these leaks and revel in the embarrassment being suffered by the nasty ol' US administration, Prince Andrew and such. But, as is so often the case with me, I find myself going completely against the accepted grain on the issue. In much the same way as I am ignoring this weekend's Facebook meme of changing one's profile picture to a cartoon character from my youth, which in my head defines me as a rugged, single-minded, lone wolf kinda guy whereas in reality everyone probably thinks I'm just a contrary prick. Noneth...

Three movie previews in as many days! When will this breakneck excitement ever end? Firstly, to the Empire Leicester Square on Sunday morning. A new cinema for me, and I quickly discovered that Screen 2’s screen begins at ground level, thereby ensuring that the heads of everyone in front of you will be visible throughout the film. Meanwhile, the pre-film easy listening soundtrack abruptly turned into Ice Cube’s Check Yo’Self without warning. What a curious place. The film was a Brit-flick called The Be-All and End-All . What starts off as a standard-issue coming of age comedy with Robbie and Ziggy, two 15 year-old Scousers, holidaying at a seaside caravan park quickly turns into something very different when Robbie collapses and - in time - finds out he has a terminal illness. From this point it becomes more of a romp wherein they try and arrange for Robbie to lose his virginity before he expires. As you might suspect from that synopsis, tonally the film is all over the place - f...

I consider myself a rational person who denies the existence of any kind of God/higher power/Flying Spaghetti Monster etc who might be controlling my insignificant little life. However, every so often little things occur that feel like nothing so much as the universe having a right old chuckle at my expense. It's my own fault really. At the beginning of 2009, one of my resolutions was not to play Football Manager on my PC. If your reaction to this is a hearty scoff, all I can say is you've obviously never played the damn thing. As Danny Baker might put it (get well soon, Candyman) - I am an addict, FM is my crack and my lips are welded to the pipe. Despite this, I managed to make good on my promise right up till December 31st. Then that night, which I spent in my flat with nought but a bottle of wine, my 2009 iPod playlist and Jools Holland and his Hootenanny for company, I succumbed again, firing up the game and starting a new managerial career that lasted all the way until ...

This post is really just to rave about a couple of things. The first being new US sitcom Community, which for whatever reason is currently languishing way down in the Sky/Virgin EPG on the Viva channel. This means  many people won't have  seen it and I can therefore feel all smug and superior as I urge everyone to check out what for me is one of the funniest US sitcoms I've ever seen, certainly on the basis of the opening few episodes. The trailer, which tells you the basic setup, is below. What is doesn't show is how pacy and sharp the show is,  whilst still managing to develop the characters and their relationships wonderfully well. Give it a watch, would be my advice: #2: On a slightly more worrying note, I've somewhat fallen for Take That 's new song (OMG! screeeeeam!! etc). Theirs is one of the most remarkable artist's stories of recent times, the really remarkable thing being how a group who could only draw intense hatred from any males of my genera...

Three recent incidents which have made me realise how far behind the stereotypical modern, perma-connected young professional I am: 1. Reading  this   Douglas Coupland   article .  Most folk are networked to the gills already and will be even more so in the future. It scares me. 2. Listening to some walking companions on Saturday avidly discussing their iPhone addictions. Is it wrong not to want one? (By the way, how do you know if somebody owns an iPhone? Don’t worry, they’ll be sure to tell you. Repeatedly.) 3. Saw an advert for HTC on telly. Dawned on me I'd no idea who HTC were.  Wiki’d them – they do Google Android thingies. None the wiser. I don't see the need for constantly Facebooking/Twittering or Hotmail whilst on the move. What happened to enjoying the physical world? In truth I secretly think the world would be a better place sans mobile phones. Maybe I’m a dangerous heretic. Or maybe I need more friends. And don’t get me starte...

We’re currently in the middle of the BFI London Film Festival, and I thought I’d better make an effort this year and catch a couple of films. This is trickier for someone who holds great stock in reviews, as I’m reluctant to pay to see anything that I know nothing about. And of course the really high-profile movies sell out instantly.  Still, I managed to nab tickets to the gala screening of Miral , Julian Schnabel’s new film centered around the Israel-Palestine conflict. This being from the director of the astonishing Diving Bell and the Butterfly and starring Freida Pinto, currently “hot”, as I believe they say in Hollywood parlance, after the success of Slumdog, I had quite high hopes. Not to mention that at £17.50 a pop, this gala screening would surely include a swanky drinks reception and the chance to mingle with slebs and that. Well, there certainly was a drinks reception, but not one to which the hoi polloi were invited. Furthermore, there were two screenings in ...

Please forgive the appalling self-indulgence - this is an article about my South African experience that was written for an in-house newsletter. I got far too carried away and failed miserably to stick to a reasonable word limit, and it will not be included in its full-length form in the newsletter because - the editor-in-chief assures me - it was just TOO DAMN HARD to cut it down whilst still doing it justice. That's what I choose to believe anyway. She also told me the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary, how strange. So here it is in all its glory, and obviously this is copyright (c) Ben Gould, 2010 in case anybody was thinking of appropriating it (stop laughing at the back). Some sections may have appeared in similar form in blog entries at the time - deal with it. ........................................................................ My favourite World Cup-related memory is of a high school food technology lesson back in the summer of 1994, during wh...

So Peter Boatman, the bloke in charge of the firm who wrongly supplied unlicensed taser guns to the police, one of which was used in the final stand-off with the murderous yet bizarrely popular nutjob Raoul Moat, has just killed himself. The Daily Mirror's headline this morning? MOAT KILLS AGAIN FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE Brilliant. This in the same week as the segway chairman guy's tragic death in - but of course - a segway-related accident. It doesn't appear as if Mr Boatman killed himself with one of his own tasers - although to be fair, he might have tried that already. It probably just didn't work.

I would love to do a detailed review of Winter's Bone , this season's critical darling movie which I went to see last night. Unfortunately, whilst I did indeed pay for my ticket, took my seat and watched the first half hour or so,  wherein the basic premise was established (teenage girl living in Midwestern wilderness and looking after her semi-comatose mother and younger siblings must find her absent dad who's put their house up as a bail bond), I did not manage to catch the whole thing. Don't get me wrong, I was there in my seat for the duration. It's just that getting older appears to have bestowed unto me the ability to nod off whenever I find myself in a cinema after a certain time of night. It doesn't matter how entertaining the film is, nor how noisy. I managed to snooze during Inception  and even near the end of Star Trek , for goodness sake (and I love Star Trek). So Winter's Bone unfolded for me in a somewhat hallucinatory fashion as I drifted...

It's not often that the Pope and Mick McCarthy appear in the same sentence. After all, one is the revered figurehead of a powerful organisation, and the other is some old German dude. But this post deals with them both. Bear with me. So, the Pope is touring Britain at the moment. You may not have been aware of this, as they've kept it fairly quiet. Anyway, he was giving an address at Holyroodhouse earlier (was there a shortage of spaces when they named that place?) and made some interesting remarks which appeared to be associating atheism with Nazism. Well, I say "interesting". I must admit, my instinctive reaction was "Fuck off", but this very quickly transformed into utter give-a-shit indifference. The Pope is completely irrelevant to me and my beliefs, in the same way that he is irrelevant to the vast majority of Britons, including much of our ever-dwindling Christian population, most of whom aren't actually Catholics. The only aspect of his li...

Read a really good article the other day about introversion and extroversion. I've lost the link, so apologies for the impending glut of paraphrasing, but the basic point was this: if an extrovert can be seen as someone who is energised by the presence of people (and indeed finds it boring to be alone for too long), then an introvert by definition is tired out by others. This in no way means introverts are misanthropes or loners - on the contrary, they (oh ok, we) can enjoy socialising with close friends or partners, and be perfectly outgoing and chatty while we're at it. But we find it an effort to do so, and after a few hours start we longing for some quality time alone. And don't get us started on parties and other situations where we suffer prolonged exposure to people we don't really know! It may sound daft, but I'd never previously considered how introversion and shyness might differ from each other, and it does explain an awful lot. Because, while I'...

My flat is on the southern side of Palmers Green, which means I live in the borough of Enfield despite probably spending more time in the shops and cinemas down the road in Wood Green (in Haringey, as any fool knows) than I do in my own borough. However I am embarking upon a vague quest to be more of an active part of the community - this includes visiting the library, buying second-hand books in charity shops, and taking part in a 10K “fun run” in Enfield in a few weeks. I also attended the Enfield Autumn Show on Sunday lunchtime. The place wasn’t exactly busy when I attended, and I felt rather sorry for the local schoolkid bands playing on the main stage in front of about five people, one of whom may only have been there because their wheelchair had got stuck. There was plenty of entertainment on offer, though - funfair rides and inflatable gubbins to keep kids entertained, punch and judy shows, entertainment all day on the main stage and a smaller “alfresco ballroom”, plus regular...

I've never been a huge fan of horror films. Due to chronic lack of popularity, I didn't spend lots of evenings in darkened rooms full of friends trying to prove how hard and unshockable they were in the face of the latest gore-fest (obtained via dubious means from the Bewdley's sole video store). Still, I understand the attraction of being scared - despite being something of a coward, I enjoy the adreneline rush of rollercoasters, particularly the palpable relief when the ride is over that it didn't get stuck upside-down on that big loop, or collapse, or explode, etc. In the last few years, the much-discussed Torture Porn genre seems to have become the norm for mainstream horror. My experience of this sort of thing only extends to the first Saw movie, which I actually found fairly clever and tense. Despite this, though, I've had no great desire to see anything else, especially the seemingly endless conveyor belt of Saw-quels . Meanwhile, there are smaller films be...

Saw a preview of Scott Pilgrim vs the World last night. Yes that’s right - a review of a film BEFORE it’s properly released! TREMBLE at the novelty of my opinions. So? Meh. It’s alright . Nothing wrong with that per se, lots of films are perfectly enjoyable without coming close to greatness. Unfortunately, the buzz and trailer for this, combined with Edgar Wright’s track record, very much suggested this would be an eye-popping game-changer of a movie. Depending on whether I bought into the concept or not, I was expecting it to be a film I’d either fall in love with or absolutely hate. The fact is, I enjoyed bits of it and appreciated some of the one-liners without ever being able to immerse myself. One reason for this would be unfamiliarity with the source material - adaptations always lose something in translation and I’d guess the comic books go into more detail about the backstories of Scott, Ramona and the Seven Evil Exes, something which Wright understandably sacrifices in o...