Sound and Vision

I meant to do some kind of review catch-up round-up before switching off the lights, but suspect my chance has passed. Still, there’s always time for a quick run-through. My reading has been too sparse and unfinished to mention, but here are some albums worth a plug—recent obsessions only: Badly Drawn Boy’s Born in the U.K. and the Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible (already mentioned); Charlotte Gainsbourg’s 5:55 and Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black (a year late to both); Laidback’s Frequency Delinquency (even older, but it’s great); and the Manic Street Preachers’ Send Away the Tigers, the Chemical Brothers’ We Are the Night, Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Interpol’s Our Love to Admire and Midnight Juggernauts’ Dystopia.

The Greatest Show On At 3 A.M.

Given my longstanding fondness for hacking movie titles, I couldn’t resist this concept when I heard it: changing titles to make them “humorously bathetic” (a.k.a. Honey, I Shrunk the Impact). Already mine span the decades...

The Great Contender

We had a Lovefilm DVD of On the Waterfront knocking around the flat for a week; I’d put it on our list because in all these years I’d never seen it. I wasn’t in the mood for an old movie, though, so almost sent it back unwatched, but figured I should try a few minutes to see if it was worth it.

Captive Audience

Hmm, kicking off a new year with an entry about being ill really wasn’t the best plan. All my subsequent ideas for posts have revolved around illness: severity of, duration of, memories of, patheticness during. But when you’ve finally recovered from six days during which you didn’t even leave the flat once, and a further six spent getting back to normal, the last thing you want to do is relive it all in writing. It’s not even like you have a backlog of stuff written during the break, because all you’ve been capable of is reading. And listening to music. And watching DVDs.