Hypocrisy is a wonderful thing, and thanks to the medium of social networking, it is a much easier thing to achieve. Every time Facebook chisels away at the privacy settings of the least private private network in the world, or Google adds another prohibitively anti privacy line to its terms and conditions, I do the little shudder that will be familiar to most users of the internet, then I open my Gmail anyway and post a YouTube clip to Facebook. I might also grumpily link to an article on some well meaning blog bemoaning the gradual slide into the dystopian future we are all party to, or grumble on Twitter a bit. Maybe sign a petition. Down with this sort of thing.

But, having bemoaned my personal information going to places not of my choosing I them completely undercut my own indignation by taking all of my information and spitting it at the internet like an excitable toddler might a particularly tasty pudding. Not only do I have not one but two blogs dedicated to churning my every waking thought into something vaguely readable, and I’ve spent the last three years on Twitter, where I have posted a quite alarming 12,000 tweets, most of which were probably revealing of myself either in their tedium or otherwise. I joined Last.fm, which takes note of every single song I listen to and turns them into spiffy charts, which it then spews out onto Twitter, as though anyone has the remotest interest in what the three bands I most listened to were over a seven day period. () I’m not alone in doing this, and I actually love to look at other people’s charts and compare their ‘musical compatibility’ with my own, even though it often leaves me feeling oddly voyeuristic even though they too have blurted their own taste out to the world, just like me.

It doesn’t stop their either. About six months back I joined a service called Miso, which you can use to log every single thing you watch and leave a little comment. It also then asks you if you would like to post it just to your friends on Miso, or your Twitter feed, or Facebook, or all three. It then gives you points based on who you tell. I gave up using it for a while based on the fact that I found it a step too far, but then I decided it would be a good idea at the beginning of the year to see just how many films I watch in a year. Because, well, why not. It’s the sort of thing someone as geekily anal retentive as myself might want to know at the end of the year. ‘Oh look Ethel this year I have watched 174 films, wasting an average of 350 hours of my life, roughly meaning I could have spend an entire fortnight doing something more productive. Isn’t that interesting? Ethel?’

But then I instantly fell back into the trap of broadcasting my every episode of Sherlock, or Desperate Housewives, or Coppers, blurting to the world like some kind of broken foghorn, spluttering meaningless titles at the void and hoping people will look at my viewing habits and somehow decide that I am so utterly and comprehensively amazing that they should give me a research grant. Or a medal of some kind. Quite disappointingly, it turns out that in the whole of January so far, I’ve only watched 6 films as well. Gutted.

Then, yesterday, this happened:

I need more! More ways to rivet you all with my every move. Well actually, I thought it would also be interesting to see how many books I actually manage to read in a year, but nonetheless, this needs to stop! Well actually, more than one person pointed me in the direction of GoodReads.com, and having signed up and listed my first books of the year maybe I won’t stop, thank you very much. And I love my last.fm, it listens to me far more than most human beings do and has a lovely recommendations page that isn’t a ‘You like metal?’ Have you heard of Metallica?’ exercise in obviousness. Every month I take heed of its recommendations and find at least two or three new bands that turn out to be pretty good. Also, my charts are too in depth, too complex, too massive to abandon now.

So if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook and find my constant need to transmit objectionable then I apologise. But not all that much. Your choice. I’m not going to change. Next month I’ll probably find something that broadcasts my every idle thought and I’ll sign up for that too, and link it to my Facebook feed and my Tumblr, just for kicks. But the next time you see me crying over privacy settings on the internet, please do give me a virtual punch on the ear, and tell me to stop being an idiot. I’ve lost all right to do that.

Oh, and if you are a fellow obsessive, you can find me on Twitter, Last.fm, Miso, Goodreads and Tumblr.

After my last post about discographies (go here if you haven’t read it, you a bad bad person) it seems somewhat appropriate that this week’s thrilling instalment of Gym Films is in itself a kind of Discography, except for films instead of albums, and Vin Diesel’s muscles rather than songs. I saw a review (by the excellent Mr Cairns) of the fifth instalment of the Fast and the Furious franchise, and thought it’d be perfect gym film fodder. But oh noes! I haven’t watched any of the others since the original film! How was I going to keep up with all of that plot and character development that I’d missed out on? There seemed only one solution; I had to indulge in a Fast and Furious marathon.

The Fast and the Furious: So we start at the beginning. It’s been ages since I’ve seen this and the film hasn’t really held up that well. Paul Walker, a man utterly devoid of the ability to do anything that involves moving his facial muscles, is a man trying to infiltrate an underground street racing circuit, because not only is he a man of no facial expression, but he’s also a po-po officer! Who would have thunk of it? Anyway, he infiltrates the gang led by Riddick from the Riddick films, who is a gravel voiced sweetie pie who once beat a man up and this makes him a very bad man. But then he also robs trucks in massively convoluted daring robberies, so he is a bad man, except he’s still a nice guy who looks after his Crew. It’s all very ambiguous. Paul Walker then sees that Riddick’s sister is someone as bland looking as himself and they get it on, which is a bit like watching furniture mating. Anyway the whole plot is lifted wholesale from Point Break, there are some car chases and some unbelievably clunky dialogue and in the end Keanu lets Patrick Swayze surf off to his death. Much fun.

2 Fast 2 Furious: The one without Riddick. Having realised that Riddick was the only thing about the first film that even remotely worked, the franchise then loses him when he thinks he’s about to become the next Arnie and instead they keep Paul Walker on, which must have been a shock to everyone, even Paul Walker. Of course Paul Walker can’t actually register surprise on his face, so they probably just thought he was playing it cool. This time the action relocates to Miami, and Paul Walker is now a bad guy, except he’s still a good guy, and he runs into a spot of bother and ends up being a good guy again, etc etc. With Riddick gone they bring in Tyrese Gibson to play a wisecracking sidekick and general irritating buffoon, except he’s also all cool and hard and carries a gun around and stuff. More of a straight action film than the first, this is actually not as disappointing as the title would suggest, what with the title being a total affront to anyone who lays eyes on it. But it’s only a passably entertaining action film, nothing more, and has Cole Hauser as the least convincing Latino drug lord you can imagine.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift: No Paul Walker for this one, or indeed any relevance to the series so far, seeing as there’s no undercover po-po element to the plot. Instead we have Lucas Black, who used to be Caleb in the American Gothic series when he was a youngling, except he seems to have forgotten how to act or emote, which is presumably down to him method acting as Paul Walker. It’s all fairly tedious, he gets in trouble for racing, then goes to Tokyo for some unfathomable reason, then he gets in trouble for racing, then Mr Miyagi takes him under his wing and teaches him how to ‘drift’ apparently something to do with cornering), except Mr Miyagi is now in fact Sung Kang, who actually tells Paul Walker Jr that there’s ‘no wax on wax off for drifting.’ Kang is pretty much the best thing in the film, looking very much like a man who couldn’t give a monkeys what is going on until he gets killed by a Yakusa guy blah blah revenge blah blah blah racing blah blah triumph over adversity. Then it’s just time for a quick cameo from Riddick (!!) who apparently knew Mr Miyagi and then the whole tedious chapter is done, then it’s time for….

Fast and Furious: Riddick’s return. This film is so fast, so furious in fact that the title can no longer hold any definite articles in it. Riddick is back! So is Paul Walker! Riddick, having been in another franchise that didn’t work out so well and then ending up not being the new Arnie after all, seems to have been on the run, where he seems to be friends with Mr Miyagi from Tokyo Drift pre-death-by-killing. When his girlfriend from the first film is killed he comes back. For revenge. As you do. But it turns out that (small world) Paul Walker is hunting for the same guy, because he’s now an FBI agent (of course, why wouldn’t he be?) and they both have to go undercover as street racers (of course) to catch the real bad guy. So of course they start off as enemies, but then they are friends again, and soon Paul Walker is dating Riddick’s unfeasibly dull sister again and they end up getting on ok and racing each other to find out who is best even though Riddick is obviously best, and stuff. The whole thing is as tedious as can be, until the very end, when Riddick is sent down for being generally a bit Riddick and then there’s a big cliffhanger to set up…

Fast 5: Riddick v Rock. God it’s been a long time coming. Watch a film series as banal as this in one long go and the cracks really start to show. Not on Paul Walker’s face though, of course, that remains as uncrackable as ever. Anyway, we pick up where we left off, and now Riddick and his sister and Paul Walker are on the run together, and they’ve gone to Brazil, not entirely sure why. Anyway they get involved in a job that involves stealing cars in a manner so utterly preposterous as to make the heists in the first film look positively routine. This being a step up in the franchise, they then decide to bring back everyone who has been in a previous Fast and the Furious film who isn’t either dead or Lucas Black. Poor Lucas Black. They even brought back Tyrese Gibson even though he’s just as irritating as Lucas Black was. They even bring back Sung Kang even though he dies two films earlier. Although hang on, it may be that this is all set before Tokyo Drift, in which case Lucas Black isn’t even… oh whatever.

Anyway, then The Rock turns up as some kind of combination of Dog the Bounty Hunter and The Terminator, and suddenly the whole film moves up a gear (ho ho, oh god, did I just do that? Sorry) and becomes absolutely amazing. When Riddick finally faces up to The Rock and they do a fisticuffs fight, it is quite possibly the most homoerotic thing that can happen short of someone putting a willy in your bum. Suddenly there’s action sequences that are mind boggling in their pomp, and car chases that finally live up to the promise this franchise has previously never really fulfilled. There’s a climactic car chase (with a safe) that is so utterly ignorant of how many innocent bystanders would have been killed that if it were real life Riddick and Paul Walker would be considered on a level with Bin Laden. It’s no surprise that there’s now going to be a sixth instalment, although personally I’d just jettison everything else and have the teutonic twosome hitting each other in their slap headed skulls for two hours, until they are sated and curl up naked by a hearth fire and do the nasty.

No more Paul Walker though, eh?

Yes, it’s true, I’m still going to the Gym. And no, I’m not just sitting in the lounge area for an hour drinking the free coffee. Oh no, I do all sorts of manly running and cycling and weights type things. I’m even starting to enjoy it, sort of. Not in any kind of ‘actual’ or ‘tangible’ sense of the word of course, but I do like the fact that my arms are starting to develop some kind of musculature that stays firm when called upon to do so. Not a lot of it, but my arms are no longer so skinny that when put next to my belly I look like a lost species of dinosaur. Now, if only I could stop gorging on chocolate the rest of the time that I’m not actually in the gym, maybe I might get somewhere with the whole thing.

A lot of what drives me on is the fact that I can distract myself from the fact that I am physically exerting myself by watching films, which then also give me something to talk about on here. I have done so once already, which if you missed you can find here. As you can see, my first few films were possibly not the wisest of choices, seeing as they were largely, well, a bit shit. Oh, and then there was Tron:Legacy, which was so hideously bad I nearly slipped into a coma on the treadmill. So let’s see how the next batch of films fared.

Battle: Los Angeles

In the last thrilling instalment of Gym Films I rounded things off watching the dullest alien invasion film since Will Smith smoked a cigar with Jeff Goldblum. Given that all I knew about this one was that it was considered a less interesting treading of the same ground which had almost identical special effects. So colour me surprised to find this little gem was in fact a rather exciting little war film, largely unburdened by the half arsed characterisation that befalls most of these films, There’s a cursory ‘hey, meet the guys, and look, it’s Harvey Dent!’ intro for all of ten minutes and then it’s slam into Black Hawk Down with Aliens. Of course it is all fairly predictable, but there are some quite spectacular set pieces and even a vaguely unexpected ending. Huzzah for unpredictable action films. Anyway, the whole thing is fairly adrenaline pumping, which is just what you need for the gym. Loses half a point for quite unnecessary Colon use in the title though.

7.5/10

The Lincoln Lawyer

If B:LA was a welcome shot of adrenaline, trying to muster any enthusiasm while watching this turgid lumpen weight of a film is the equivalent of trying to do the Great North Run while carrying the accumulated judging panels of X Factor and Dragons Den on my knees and a vat of cheese on my back. It took me about twenty minutes to realise that I had in fact read the book some years back, and the plot (such as it is) remained unchanged, so in the end I remembered everything that was about to happen about five minutes before it actually did. Not that going in blind would have been much help, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that Matthew Mahogany is such a detestable screen presence that you actively hope for a major traffic accident every time he climbs into the back of the aforementioned Lincoln automobile. If that’s not bad enough he’s set against a main villain played by Ryan Phillipe. It’s like watching a judo bout between two dollops of wallpaper paste.

2/10

Paul

After the shock to the system of the world’s most tedious film, I opted next for a little light relief in Paul, the brainchild of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. That I ended up watching this on a small screen some months after its release, rather than queuing up to see it on day of release speaks volumes for how these two have dropped in my estimation over the years, the immense goodwill they earned after Spaced and Shaun of the Dead eroded slowly over the years by increasingly bland Pegg performances and, well, the other blanbd Pegg performances. I didn’t have much expectation for this, and it met that expectation admirably. It isn’t a bad film by any stretch, it’s quite funny but never really LOL, let alone LMAO, and certainly never near a ROFL.

Excuse me. I’m so sorry. Just typing that made me vomit everywhere. I’m so sorry.

Back to the film. It passed the time well enough. It was cute. Oh fuck it, it was a bland mainstream comedy, and I expected more, but at the same time I expect nothing less.

5/10

Limitless

If a face ever achieved a smugness beyond this, it might actually implode in a cloud of self satisfaction.

Ah Bradley Cooper, the purveyor of ultimate banality. A man utterly incapable of any other facial expression other than overwhelming smugness, like some kind of Hollywood Fearne Cotton. Quite how he has managed to luck into this career is beyond me, but I imagine the overwhelming sense of self entitlement he consistently has plastered over his grinning face convinced people he’s worth employing with alarming regularity, the final product being this, a film that is essentially a Greatest Hits performance from an actor with only a handful of mediocre movies under his belt. For anyone who remembers him turning up on a regular basis as the most annoying character in Alias, this film will be nothing of a shock. He plays a writer (like in Alias) who is a bit of a loser (like in Alias) until a chance encounter with a narcotic (um, the Hangover) makes him all super brainy and able to do mad stuff (like, um, Alias again.) He gets rich and becomes a bit of a dick (Wedding Crashers) until it all goes a bit wrong and he’s on a mission to find out what happened (like the Hangover) and eventually he ends up kicking a load of people and shooting at them and stuff (The A – Team) until he finally learns a valuable lesson. (All of the above) It’s watchable enough, largely to see Robert De Niro trying to look interested and not utterly disdainful of this upstart prick who he now has to sit opposite and condescend to act against. He doesn’t do a very good job.

5/10

I’m still not doing that well, am I? Oh well, maybe I’ll have better luck with the next lot. Some of them have Paul Walker in, surely the highest possible guarantee of success?

Hey look! It's that guy! You know, that guy! He was in that thing! You know, with the other guy?

As I mentioned before, I am now trying to balance out the massive amounts of chocolate I consume by going to the gym. Also known as huffing and puffing for a bit while feeling self conscious about how much better shape everyone else is in, before doing a frankly embarrassingly round of weight machines and then going home to feel ruined. Quite astonishingly I’m still going, spurred on by the fact that I hate paying for something I don’t use and I’m tied in to a year’s contract.

What has so far been making the whole thing more tolerable is the discovery that my lovely phone is pretty good at playing films, and has a screen big enough to ensure that watching them does not cause my eyes to fall out of their sockets to dangle limply on my sweaty t-shirt. Stick some headphones in and hey presto, I have a fantastic way of both distracting me from the fact that I am doing wholly unnatural amounts of running and cycling, and a way of avoiding the frankly nauseating social awkwardness brought about by lots of people exercising together. I mean, I like my gym, but the fact that everyone is facing the same direction which happens to be facing a massive wall sized mirror is not great if you don’t like making eye contact with strangers.

So over the last few weeks I’ve been catching up on a few films that I have previously deemed not quite enticing enough to seek out elsewhere, or films to which my lovely partner would roll her eyes at the prospect of having to sit through. Action films are perfect for gym watching. The lack of any real plot means you don’t have to pay too much attention, the dialogue is never likely to have you laughing out loud embarrassingly, and the action sequences can actually get you a bit pumped up and encourage you to push yourself, or at least that’s what I have found. So I thought I’d give you a few quick capsule reviews of the films that have been keeping me company, in a ToWatchPile stylee.

X:Men Origins: Wolverine. Right off I start with a film so mediocre that it could be a Tesco Value biscuit barrel. In fact that analogy holds up quite well. In the Tesco Value biscuit range you will find something that you have previously experienced as quick an enjoyable treat, say for instance a Custard Cream (X:Men) or Bourbon Cream (X:Men 2) but then you buy it and get it home and find that it’s somehow a bit cheap, the biscuits are a bit broken and the flavour is not as nice. But then you remember that you could be eating dog excrement smeared on a piece of soggy cardboard (X:Men 3) and it doesn’t seem so bad. It has explosions, Liev Schrieber is quite entertaining, Huge Ackman is as camp as a man with comedy sideburns and metal fingernails can be, and the plot seems to be written on a discarded Etch A Sketch. But it’s ok. 4/10

Terminator: Salvation. I remember getting so excited when this was coming out that I actually went and bought the dreadfully dreary Terminator 3 on DVD to get myself in the mood. Then all those reviews came out saying how awful this was, and I never even got round to taking the wrapper off the DVD, let alone making it down to a multiplex. Having watched it now I realise that decision was justified. I quite like how Christian Bale seems to be in a completely different film to everyone else, running around like he thinks he is in Apocalypse Now while everyone else sets about making a Transformers film with the colour switched off. 2/10

Iron Man 2: I quite like the first Iron Man but never really saw the fuss everyone else made, and I didn’t find the sequel as objectionable as everyone else did. Robert Downey Jr is still quite funny, the bad guy is pretty terrible, the plot nonsensical, the girls quite lovely. Essentially the same as its forbearer then. 4/10

Tron: Legacy. I didn’t actually think it was possible for an action movie to be this languidly dull. I also didn’t think it was possible for a character not played by Shia TheBeef to be as utterly punchable as the guy who tries to carry this film. And then there’s creepy Jeff bridges. Quite honestly the whole thing made me shudder. 1/10

Skyline. I tried quite hard to like this because I like the premise, and it’s a who’s who of ‘who’s that guy, I recognise him from that thing.’ The poster should have had ‘Starring! The bald black guy from Scrubs! The guy who was in 24 for a bit! The guy from that other show who you can’t remember. A girl who looks a bit like Darla from Buffy but it isn’t her even though you’ll be convinced it is for the first twenty minutes!’ The special effects are pretty good, but it suffers a bit from being essentially Cloverfield if they never managed to get out of the first building they were in. No real characterisations, repetitive action sequences, and a slightly bewildering ending that doesn’t really make a huge amount of sense. 3/10

As you can see I’m doing really well with my film choices.

I’ve been feeling a little blue the last few days, not really sure why. Well that’s not true, I know exactly why. Having been feeling pretty well chuffed with my second draft of the first three chapters the feedback I’ve had from a few different sources it seems the redraft doesn’t work nearly as well as the first draft did, which is a little bit frustrating given that I worked bloody hard on it. Now I’m at a bit of a loss as to whether I should just cut my losses on that draft and go back to the first draft, which was in itself not without issues. The whole thing has me feeling a bit exhausted.

Writing is hard. I am only now beginning to realise just how much I was only ever dipping my toe in the water, all those long years where I was only really tinkering around the edges. The first thing I ever wrote that had nothing to do with school or essays or anything was a short story called Granny Farming in the UK, a title I lifted from a Carter USM song, back when I was about fifteen. It was written over a month or so on school notepads with blue biro. It had a beginning, middle and end. It was a pretty good first effort, and cemented the idea in my mind that this was what I wanted to do with my life. But the truth is that I’ve never really put that same effort in since. I’ve continued to write fairly consistently since then, but I’ve rarely, if ever, put that level of effort in. Most of my ideas fizzled out, and I have folders and folders of first chapters, half screenplays, sometimes only opening monologues. Every few years I knocked out a Nanowrimo novel, which was never really any good. I still harboured the same idea though, that one day I was going to be a writer. Blood On The Motorway itself is actually an idea on its fourth or fifth go around, starting off as a road novel, then becoming a zombie tale, then a vague idea of an investigation into the death of youth culture, and now, finally, an apocalypse tale.

I still only really have the first third of the novel written in even bare first draft terms, and I don’t yet have any cohesive plot, let alone an end point to drive towards. If I’m honest I’ve only really begun to take the whole thing seriously in the last year or so. I like the world I’m creating, but now I’m riddled with doubts. It is this self doubt, not writers block, which afflicts me the most, and is the biggest obstacle to moving forward. Last night I sat down at the PC and couldn’t bring myself to even open up my writing folder.

Getting feedback is great, and I’m glad that I’ve finally (and somewhat belatedly) made the move to improving what I’m doing. It is the only way to get better, but it doesn’t make it easy, to find out exactly what is wrong with what you are doing. I have faith in myself, in my characters, and in my story, but I have a very fragile ego at times, and I need to get a thicker skin if I’m ever actually going to make it.

The other thing I’ve realised as a result of the feedback that I’ve gotten is that ‘winging it’ in terms of plot is really not going to work. It is all well and good getting a vicarious thrill by experiencing the plot as you write, but it terms of developing this into something really good, I need to be able to have my lot in place to drive the story forward. It is something I’ve been stubbornly avoiding, mostly due to the fact that I don’t have a clue where the end point to the story is, and partly because this story was for the longest time going to be serialised. But I need to do it now.

The whole thing feels rather daunting. Reading back through this blog post shows me exactly how far I have to go, how little I’ve really achieved, save for a few chapters that still need significant work. I cannot let this get me down too much though, and I know that in a few days I’ll feel far more positive about the whole thing. But right now it feels like an impossible task. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to justify that blog title by watching the majestic Inglorious Basterds and pretend that I’m doing it to dialogue tips.

This weekend marked a little bit of a landmark in the life of my lovely little girl, her very first trip to the cinema, to go and see a film about a Blue Macaw who runs Facebook, or something. (We went to see Rio, staring Jesse Whatsisface from The Social Network, who quite amusingly played his role as a Blue Macaw as a slightly more jovial Zuckerberg.) Anyway, it was quite a surreal occasion, with Rosie in turns in awe at the occasion and a little daunted by the whole thing. I know a lot of parents start taking their kids to the cinema at a very early age, using it as a kind of hyper expensive but low maintenance day-care session, but I’ve always been a little bit again this idea, mainly because as someone who still reveres the notion of the cinema ‘experience’ and whose first cinema trip is etched in my memory, I wanted Rosie to be ready for the whole thing. Judging by the general age of some of the toddlers in the room (who couldn’t have given a shit about the action onscreen and made that very clear by talking loudly and crying and wailing etc etc) I am very much alone in this.

I think my first cinema trip, to go and see Bambi back in the days when Disney used to re-release their classics on a seven year cycle, is actually the oldest memory I have, which shows what a powerful impact it had on me. I remember being a little confused as to what was going on, a bit daunted, and crying at the bit you cry at in Bambi. Bear in mind this trip pre-dates even the Video market, so you couldn’t watch films at home unless they happened to be on, and anyway I don’t think I really watched that much telly. Compare that to the steady presence that telly and films have been in Rosie’s life so far (she watched Bambi for the first time a few weeks back, on Blu Ray and on a widescreen TV, as well as Toy Story in the same way) and it is easy to see why the Cinema going experience has lost some of its potency for today’s young uns. This is a shame really, although given that the actual joy of going to the cinema has also been decreasing over the last decade due to ever noisier cinemagoers, constant background light from smartphones and the all pervading presence of 3D perhaps it is not as much of a shame as I think it is, but that is a topic for another time.

With Rosie’s first trip to the cinema though we decided that we wanted there to be a chance that she would properly appreciate the experience and maybe even remember it, as so we waited. Waited for her to show an ability to sit through a whole film without her mind wandering, to start showing an interest in films, and for a time when I could be reasonably confident that she wouldn’t embarrass me by caterwauling like the other mewling bratlings I had experienced whenever I had gone to see a vaguely family film . She has only just started to fit this rather tall bill so as the rain destroyed all our well laid out Bank Holiday plans we found a film with pretty good reviews and off we went. I can’t say that the experience was completely successful, but overall it was pretty successful. Rosie loved the whole thing to begin with but then said she wanted to go home thirty minutes in, although we persuaded her otherwise. By the time the credits rolled though, her face was lit up in wonder at a pretty spectacular visual finale in the jungles of Rio, and she was very enthusiastic about the experience, although she liked the people in the film (rather supporting characters in reality) rather than the actual birds. When we got home I took her ticket and stashed it away in a safe place, hoping that one day, maybe in her teens, Rosie might be the kind of film obsessive who would appreciate being given a greying stub from her first ever cinema trip, even if the film itself was nothing to write home about. If she ends up showing no real interest in films in the way I obsessed about it in my teens then fair enough, but I hope that I can instil in her enough of a love of film that bringing out that small stub may be enough to bring out a smile as big as the one she wore on the way out the door yesterday. A father can dream.

There’s only one thing more annoying than someone coming up with a good idea before you do, and that’s someone coming up with a good idea and inviting you to be a part of it, but then you can’t. When my good friend Fozz started his website To Watch Pile, my first thought was ‘damn that’s a good idea.’ If you’re not familiar with the idea, basically it came about when he gave up smoking and decided to reinvest the money he saved into buying DVD’s. This became an obsession pretty quickly and he realised that he had a whole stack of DVD’s that he hadn’t even gotten around to watching yet, which never seemed to get any smaller since he was continually adding to the pile.

Since he and his excellent wife are film addicts, they have turned it into a project, and every now and again Fozz reviews the films that he’s been watching, an idea I love because it frees him from being tied down to reviewing new stuff only. I loved the idea, but my DVD buying has stagnated over the last few years, with only a couple of new additions coming at special occasions. In fact at one point when we really needed some cash it actually got smaller, and I even had to sell my X Files collection, which felt a bit like being skewered in the kidneys with a rusty spike. But it occurred to me the other day that I have amassed a veritable tonnage of movies on our recordable device of late, enough to justify my own small version of the project.

When it got full, after I had stopped crying long enough we cleared off a lot of quick wins, comedies, dramas, documentaries, anything watchable in a small chunk, but this has left us with pretty much every movie we have recorded on a whim since October. Since this is now running at 18 films in total, I figure I have enough to join in on the fun and games. So from now on, Sunday is going to be #towatchpile day. I cleared one last night, but I’m going to be talking about that on a podcast this week so I don’t want to ruin it. Oh, and true to form I’m adding another one to the list, but don’t worry, it’s not Ghost Rider. My Nic Cage obsession does not stretch that far. So from now you can expect a random movie review from a film old enough to have been on telly at some point in the last four months. Don’t say I never get you anything. In the meantime, head over to Fozz’s and see the project in full swing.

My first real hangover of the year today, so it would have been nice to have done nothing, but it’s been another action packed day, as we’ve been looking after a friend’s little baby girl while she moved house, and I’ve had to do all manner of complicated and arduous tasks, such as doing the shopping, and making dinner. I know, you’re jealous as hell of my razzle dazzle lifestyle, aren’t you?

It was strange but quite pleasant to be looking after a little one again, in fact the little girl in question was no problem. She arrived asleep and left asleep a few hours later, having only woken up once the whole time to drink some milk and do a poo. Easy enough, although its amazing how quickly you forget all that stuff once your own child isn’t a baby any more. But it was quite nice.

Last night I went to a  gig, which I will be reviewing in due course for Demon Pigeon, but it really was a bit of a stinker, which was a shame given I was going too see one of my all time musical heroes embark on a solo project, only for them to be absolutely boring. But after the gig the venue was putting on an indie night, so we were going to stick around for a bit, but after about twenty minutes we realized that the indie night seemed to consist of nothing more than someone putting the new Arcade Fire album into a CD player and hitting play, then walking away to go and do something else. I’ve never been to a club night where they only have one CD before, it was interesting, and generally in keeping with the somewhat surreal tone of the night.

On the plus side though, the drinks went down to 99p, so we necked a few of them, then I went back to my friends house absolutely smashed to watch Inception on Blu Ray, only to fall asleep in my chair twenty minutes in. As I say, a razzle dazzle lifestyle.

While my girlfriend was out last night enjoying the allegedly excellent Black Swan the plan was to liaise with Jonic on website type stuff and get a lot more writing done. Alas, while I was successful on the first front on the second I was less successful, mainly due to finding the remake of The Wicker Man on Five, starring none other than king of over dramatic arm waving and boggle eyed acting Nicolas Cage. I’d never seen it, although I was more familiar with the reputation for awfulness it has garnered over the last few years. However given that *lowers voice* I’ve never seen the original Wicker Man, I figured I could watch the terrible version and then upgrade to the superior original at a later date.

What I wasn’t prepared for was that I would actually really enjoy the Cage version, despite the fact that its utter shambolic hideousness is there on the screen for all to see, right from the beginning to the fiery end. The plot was paper thin, the acting terrible, Cage unhinged, his fiancé looking as though she had taken a spoonful of acid before every take. But at the same time it was quite endearingly so, and I was gripped from start to finish, giggling at the nonsense unfolding before my eyes.

Ellen returned from her cinema adventure with about half an hour left to run on my film, although she failed to enjoy it even a smidge, despite the fact that she turned up at the exact point where Cage goes from earnest cop mode to ass kicking, bear dressing, bee hating nutbar mode, which I enjoyed immensely. Well, I say I enjoyed it, but this enjoyment was somewhat tempered by the fact that quite randomly Five, the terrestrial channel broadcasting this masterpiece, decided to cut a huge chunk out of the film for no good reason that I could see, including the now infamous ‘Not the bees!’ section that I was really looking forward to seeing. Most upsetting.

I really don’t see why they felt the need to do it though. I’ve seen the scene on the marvel of YouTube, and I don’t really think there’s anything in there that is harrowing enough to warrant cutting, especially not on late night television (by this point midnight was looming) and a channel more widely famed for showing breasts and nudity under even the most spurious of circumstances. I felt cheated, and still do in fact. I want my bees! If I am going to sit through two hours of laughably clunky exposition and Cage gurns, I want my bloody money shot, as it were.Very disappointing.

Today I managed to get embroiled in a small Twitter debate, which is rare for me. Usually I am all about the telling of bad jokes, musing on the music I listen to and boring people with links to this blog. I rarely say anything worth disagreeing with, because most of the time I am evidently talking shit anyway. But today, in the wake of the Oscar nominations I happened to muse that I thought it was a travesty that Christopher Nolan was not nominated for best Director for Inception, which was easily my favourite film of last year, and a terrific job by Nolan in particular, who shepherded every aspect of the film from conception to screen.

Suddenly I found myself engaging in a debate over whether Oscar nominations and plaudits deserve to go to large films, as well as a staunch defending of the film itself, and before I knew it found myself taking up a position that I only half agreed with. Within a few tweets we had both set up rather oppositional points of view, with me as the defender of big budget Hollywood and him the advocate of the smaller independent cinema. Which was very strange, and yet I felt like I didn’t want to back down from a position once I had taken it, even though it only partially covered my opinion.

Here, I think, is the real problem of Twitter and I suppose the rest of social media. If twitter is one huge swirling conversation, it also forces you to take sides on any number of things at once. Sometimes this is easy and without problem. It’s easy for us all to agree that the latest piece of Melanie Phillips’ private psychosis that spills out as a Daily Mail piece on gay maths is nothing but idiocy. You won’t have found many people defending the counter argument to this, or at least not without tongue firmly in cheek.

But people start staunchly taking up positions it doesn’t take long before you have to choose a side. For example during the Frankie Boyle saga I found far too many people wanting to fall down on one side or the other of the argument, but the truth was considerably more complex. And that’s what truth is, by and large. Complex and far too difficult to summarize in a 140 character twitter post. This then, is the shortcoming of Twitter, in that it is so polarizing.

Even in this very genteel conversation between myself and someone who was just having a small debate with myself, I couldn’t help but find myself making arguments that just weren’t me. When I start to find myself arguing against the worthiness of independent cinema, something is off. It all resolved itself in due course as we finally realised we didn’t hugely disagree about much other than whether Nolan deserved a nod, which is just a matter of taste. (My taste being obviously correct in this matter). But if it had gone on much longer I may have had to issue a Klingon Battle cry.

Now if you will excuse me I have to go and drink my beer and watch my football team be a bit shit. Well, quite a lot shit, if I’m honest. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the picture of my face at the top of the page. What can I say, it’s my face, and it’s my 365 post for today. If you’re on Flickr, why not stop by?