Claire Tayler, or just Claire. Works as a social media writery type. Sometimes words make it onto this blog too. Her own views obviously. It would be ridiculous to have a blog otherwise.
Likes digital media, tech and advertising. Also likes adventures, music, making colourful food stuffs, and knitting socks, so content's a mix.
In her other bits of spare time, writes things for Bitchbuzz and Bored of Brighton, a one-a-day guide to Brighton.
Saw the Pixies on Thursday. They were pretty good.
It made me realise how many folk and indie gigs I go to though, where everyone’s polite and it’s not all about ME ME ME. Maybe I’m bias. But I got annoyed at a pushy girl’s mass of hair in my face and a sweaty guy rubbing all over my arm. That made me feel old.
Half the audience were kids and half were middle-aged people with double necks. It made me smile. Especially when the obscure tunes (read: not on the best of album) came on and the kids went quiet whilst doublenecks got dancing. I can’t talk though as could be heard loudly asking “How long’s a chick been in the Pixies?” I got laughed at.
They played Where is My Mind? as a good first encore song. It was all ace though. The video’s in HD but you have to press the magic HD button. This is them waving: wave wave wave.
It is very easy to poke fun at Nicholas Cage, but I am not one to sway from such a practice.
I saw Kick Ass yesterday – and when I say yesterday, I mean around Saturday but I have been distracted from writing about it by other more unimportant things. Kick Ass is a perfectly good film to accompany a Friday night of gorging on popcorn, which was main our goal of the evening. Cage, generally known for wearing the same expression in such films as Lord of War and many others (that I have not seen but many claim to have done), appears at one point. I leapt in my seat. Glee, thought I, it’s Cage! I will be able to write a review – a hilarious anecdote explaining why Nicholas Cage is rubbish, and how even I would make a better and no doubt far superior actor.
He plays a thin faced beige-wearing father with an eagerly acting daughter, a bit in the realm of Leon‘s Natalie Portman but with a higher neckline. It’s a strange film from the production company behind Layar Cake that borders on Fox Searchlight’s version of not-particularly awkward indie (say 500 Days of Summer) and in the same sort of way there’s lots of faux awkward scenes that aren’t at all so.
Undoubtedly the worst parts were the painful advertising swipes of Pepsi cans and Pepsi-filled phrases hitting the screen. We collectively shuddered.
The mystery is that Nicholas Cage is in no way irritating. It’s all really quite pleasant once you get used to it, and for some reason they’ve also stuck in some South Park-style Jewish accents throughout the cast – which may in fact be typical New York – which makes it all quite snigger worthy. As intended, it’s a jolly, and escapist feel-good film with no risks attached to watching it and in this way I feel barely warrants a review because it is as good as you’d expect. It’s is appropriately accompanied with a good music-filled ending as the genre dictates and unlike Bruce Almighty’s “that’s the way the cookie crumbles” they’ve also pulled off the one take-away quote: “With no power comes no responsibility” now popping up on a mass of social networks.
The biggest downside? There was a 2.0 joke which I laughed at. It was shameful but I reveled in it.
I was watching Eagle vs. Shark yesterday, which is good and essentially negates all the subtle bits of conversation with a summary of how most romantic conversations go. It’s rather good, quite unsubtle, but not a Napoleon Dynamite sort of film. Napoleon Dynamite essentially works as a perfect benchmark for comparison.
“I have to keep creating, otherwise I’ll juse die” says Jemaine Clement as Jarrod.
How embarrassing, thought I. Often I find that days without doing or making things are horrible. What a painful comparison.
I finally saw Fantastic Mr Fox this week which gives me the excuse to post Wes Anderson’s stop-motion acceptance speech from the The National Board of Review awards. I liked the film – a bit of George Clooney adventure romp in quick pace (i.e. ocean’s Eleven) and it was subtly different from the books, or what I imagined but captured the rompishness pretty well. I’m a bit of a die hard Roald Dahl fan (idly muttering “Bogis and Bunce and Bean, One fat, one short, one lean” before it came on, which seems to have embedded itself into my memory from a young age). But it was very good, as you have no doubt seen.
