So, the Kate Moss range for TopShop has appeared in droves on eBay, and is pretty much failing to sell. Well colour me shocked. Maybe people are finally starting to wake up to the fact that celebrity designed clothes ranges aren't very good. Yes, Madonna and Kate Moss are heralded as fashion icons, but lets face it, they sure as hell don't design the clothes they wear and half the time they're dressed by a stylist. I mean come on, Kate Moss is shagging Pete Doherty, you can't tell me the woman has naturally good taste, getting all up close and sweaty with a man most women would only touch wearing an isolation suit and with a ten foot barge pole.

The Madonna range was dull and cheaply produced. The Kate Moss range is ugly and cheaply produced. The Lily Allen range is only good if you want to go the Chav Princess route, and is cheaply produced. We're being taken for a ride by the high street stores, and I really hope this Kate Moss backlash causes people to wake up from it. I loathe the trend for disposable fashion, it's the epitome of how wasteful and shallow our culture is. A couple of years ago I was suckered into it, I would happily have bought four H&M items for £15 and have been proud of my cheap, uncomfortable, sweatshop produced wardrobe. These days I'd rather spend £60 on one thing in the knowledge that when I put it on it won't be so cheap that it's nearly see through and falling apart at the seams, and will last me more than one season. Imagine if everyone saw clothes as an investment, how much would we save the world in fabric, factories and sweatshop labour?

Not to mention how ridiculous fashion is at the moment. Remember when a few years ago you would look back at photos of folk in the eighties and laugh at their leggings and leopard print clothes, and say 'I know it was in fashion, but HOW could they not have seen how stupid they looked?'. And now hordes of girls are roaming the streets in the same stuff.

I'm not saying I'm a perfect example of classic elegance. Hell no. I'm a jeans and t-shirt sort of girl, I like my clothes to be a little rock and roll. But I would hope that, if tomorrow all the designers in the world declared bright purple PVC leg warmers to be the rock and roll item of the century, I would have enough common sense to stay away from them. Sadly, I suspect thousands wouldn't.

When I was fourteen, we had a long stretch of English Literature classes with nothing to fill them. We'd had our mock GCSEs, and there was nothing left to revise. So when we turned up to English, our teacher suggested watching videos (ones related to English of course) to fill our time. She wanted Pride and Prejudice, we didn't. Who wanted to watch some fussy, dull costume drama based on a fussy, dull, and old novel? So, with much moaning and groaning, we sat down to watch it, one episode every class.

After about two episodes we constructed, on our class noticeboard, the 9K Mr Darcy Shrine version 1.



Now I went to an all girls school, so perhaps if there had been boys to mock us we would have hidden our love, but as it was we were hooked utterly. We cringed at Mr Collins, we laughed at Mrs Bennett, and my god did we swoon over Mr Darcy. And a lot of us even went and... read the book. Which was over 100 years old people! When you're fourteen that's a big deal (unless you were one of the smug girls who had already read the book, in which case, shut up... even if all of you go to Oxford and Cambridge now).

To this day it remains perhaps the only six hours of film I'll happily sit and watch without ever getting bored, and even one Lord of the Rings movie tests my attention span to its limit. And I do still get a funny, giggly, swoony feeling every time Colin Firth's Darcy glowers at the camera. It's just so perfect. The settings are perfect, the casting is excellent... Jennifer Ehle is brilliant, but you have to give it to the actors who play the really awful (in a good way) characters, like Mr Collins, Lady Catherine and Lydia etc... they really go all out and provide some of the most entertaining moments.

I didn't actually mind the new Keira Knightley version (blasphemer that I am, also that Mr Darcy was awesomely broody hot as well), but it was as nothing next to the 1995 version. And in an adaptation lecture a couple of weeks ago we were played the alternative ending that was only shown in America. Which was appalling, and makes me worry about what Hollywood studio execs estimate the intelligence of their fellow countrymen to be.

I'm not really a period drama sort of person. I confess, I like there to be explosions in my films. Or a brilliant battle scene. Or some harrowing human drama. Or some supernatural dealings. Not so much with the lace and complex social etiquette, but with Pride and Prejudice I find myself cringing along with every little breech of society rules. Of course the big event is what happens with Lydia, but frankly compared to the stuff I saw on the Jeremy Kyle show just this morning that's nothing, and yet there I am, hand over mouth, gasping at the scandal of it all.

I love it so much, and I love all the crazy middle aged ladies who love it to a terrifying level. I have, with my mother, visited the Jane Austen museum in Bath (utterly boring by the way), and there's a tea room upstairs where, if you're willing to part with some money, you can 'have tea with Mr Darcy'. We didn't do it, but my lecturer who lives in Bath has (for a joke, or so he claims) and says basically it's a bunch of middle aged ladies sat around drinking tea and eating biscuits, while a bloke dressed up in breeches etc wanders from table to table insulting people. Awesome.



Sorry. There had to be a totally gratuitous shot of Colin Firth. Just be thankful he isn't in a wet white shirt.



Sorry.

O holy crap, today is the last day for Glastonbury registration... and how the hell have I left it this late?

I can't even register until my housemates get back, because I need one of them to take my photo for registration. Although I know they haven't registered either yet, so we can all have a great big blind panic together.

It should be alright. But I'm worried the registration site will overload when it gets later and we'll be screwed. It's working now... why don't I have a picture? Why am I chronically disorganised? Damn me!

EDIT: Hell yes! I am registered. All was well. My registration photo looks like a mass murderer's mugshot, but you can't have it all.

The Wraith



Everyone knows those sorts of movies. The ones that are utterly horrendous, badly acted, badly written, badly directed... and yet somehow the whole thing is so bad that it reaches a level of... perfection. It becomes a sparkling crystal of bad. You keep on watching out of sheer fascination, because you just can't believe what you're seeing, and you want to know what ridiculous place it's going next.

For me, nothing epitomises this as much as 'The Wraith'. A 1986 film staring Charlie Sheen, about a guy from Hicksville USA, who is murdered while shagging his girlfriend, and who then comes back from the dead to avenge himself with a supercar. Not once is there any explanation of why God is handing out supercars at the pearly white gates, so don't hold out any hopes.

It's terrible. It's like it was directed by a five year old (according to IMDB there's a shadow of camera crew in nearly every car race scene), it's horribly, horribly acted. It's got the most... eighties soundtrack I have ever heard (by some really good artists, god alone knows how they managed that, blackmail would be my first suspicion). But the thing that really, really boggles the mind is who wrote this? IMDB tells me it was Mike Marvin (who also directed it) but that can't be right because it also tells me he's still alive and hasn't killed himself out of shame (although he has, heh, changed his name to 'Jake Kesey').

The badmovies.com entry lists everything that is so very bad about this film much better than I ever could. But here are a couple of highlights...

How does 'The Wraith' use his supercar to destroy his drag racing enemies? Simple! He steers both cars into a fiery explosive crash. No fancy driving, just crash... boom. For some reason this also sucks the souls out of the (unscathed) corpses. And the supercar from the beyond magically reappears afterwards. Although he does mix it up a bit later on, when he goes and massacres a bunch of people with a futuristic gun (also, presumably, from the afterlife).

'The Wraith' gets back together with his old girlfriend, who doesn't recognise him (because for some reason he didn't look like Charlie Sheen before he died). Except they have to overcome the little problem that she's now seeing his murderer. Who murdered her boyfriend while they were right in the middle of having sex. Jesus woman, fickle much? Also she gets her boobs out at the drop of a hat.

Now please don't think I'm discouraging you from seeing this film. Quite the opposite. If ever you get the opportunity to watch it then you really, really should. It's bad, I don't deny it. But it's so, so, SO bad it's entertaining in ways it could never be if it were merely mediocre. It makes 'Catwoman' look like an Oscar contender. It has to be seen to be believed. So should you be awake at 2am, as I was so very long ago, flicking idly through the depths of satellite TV, and you happen to spot this, then I encourage you to watch it. You will never forget it.

There always seems to be someone doing washing in this house. You have to be fast off the mark if you want to wash your clothes, best to lurk in the kitchen then immediately get in there when the last load finishes, because if you leave it too long someone else will get there. I'm surprised it hasn't broken down it gets overused so much.

But I admit, I never thought I'd get in at 3am after a night out to find the washing machine going. Who the hell is washing their undies at this hour? Not that I can talk, I'm updating my LJ about it instead of going to bed. Somehow that is a lot sadder.

If The Devil had a favourite food, this would be that food. Forget the still beating hearts of sacrificed virgins, Lucifer would be all about the cookie dough/chocolate brownie mix. The mix of dark chocolate ice cream, and light vanilla is a perfect symbol of the war between light and dark in men's souls. It's more tempting than any succubus, when it's sat in your freezer you can hear it calling to you, with rich words promising nothing but delicious things. It's also expensive stuff, whispering influence in the ears of the wealthy, and taunting those who can only afford to taste it once in a blue moon. It is what we indulge in during our darkest times, times of misery and rejection, and then it offers us false hope and false renewal. In so many ways it works like The Devil, tempting, sinful, and always turning up when you least expect it. Down in the deepest, dankest valleys of Hell, Satan is sat on his dark throne, listening to the screams of the eternally damned, and devouring a tub of Ben and Jerry's Half-Baked.

I guess what I'm trying to say is... I've found a new kind of ice-cream, and it's like, really really good.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog



This is one of my favourite films ever, and the film that Hitchcock considered his 'true' first film. It's the story of a mysterious man, played by Ivor Novello, that takes lodgings in a London house during a time when the streets are covered in thick fog. The same thick fog that a murderer, 'The Avenger', has been taking advantage of, killing innocent people under its protection. The lodger is a strange man, with strange habits, but the daughter of the house finds herself drawn to him. But as the murders draw nearer, the owners of the house, and the daughter's detective suitor, begin to suspect the lodger has horrible fate in store for her.

It's a silent film, but that makes it even better. The great score builds tension where dialogue wouldn't be nearly as effective. And the visuals are great. It's all so dark, shady, and noir. The script was heavily influenced by the Jack the Ripper killings, and the mass hysteria and tension is palpable, and strangely made even stronger through the limitations of black and white. Ivor Novello is great as Jonathan Drew, the lodger, although he does appear to be wearing half the Max Factor range. He also manages to invent emoness a full 80 years ago, but combines it with creepiness to great effect.



I really feel like more people should see this film, but sadly it's very hard to get hold of, and I only saw it after staying up into the small hours with insomnia (I see a lot of strange films this way) and catching it then. It's been listed as 'awaiting release' on play.com for bloody ages.



Also black and white, and especially silent, really isn't a lot of people's thing. But the storyline and visuals really are fantastic, full of atmosphere and stylishly creepy. I would love to do an adaptation of this one day.

I deleted it all. It took ages, and I'm not sure why. This isn't a big melodramatic
I-am-so-tired-of-the-internets-it-is-so-lame thing. It's just a fresh start.

Also this post shows there is some seriously odd layout issues involved here.