Book review: ACTUARIAL FAIRY TALES (John Lee)

John Lee, who gave us the eccentric joys of Confessions of an Actuarial Tutor, turns his brand of nerdy humour into re-telling well-known fairytales, such as The Three Little Pigs, Sleeping Beauty and Goldilocks, with an actuarial slant. The results are cerebral, engrossing and often laugh-out-loud hilarious.

8 Lessons Learned from the 2019 BBFC Annual Report

The blog is rated 15 for strong sex references and drug references.

On Thursday, the BBFC dropped their 2019 Annual Report, which for film classification nerds, is also known as 'Most Complained about Films to the BBFC Day'. I spent Friday evening poring through the report, looking for clues and new information, and psycho-analysing every adjective used in the report. In short, I was in heaven.

Here were eight prominent things I noticed from reading it:

01. Emma knows her BBFC…

Tale as old as time… that the first point I make every year when discussing the BBFC annual report, is not an observation, but rather, a shameless display of braggadocio. The three most complained about films in 2019 were Joker, The Favourite and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, and I'd predicted all three of these in my prognostication blog.

Emma's favourite songs, 2020

1. Homecoming (Kanye West ft. Chris Martin)
2. Son of a Preacher Man (Dusty Springfield)
3. Alison (Elvis Costello)
4. Truth Hurts (Lizzo)
5. Off to the Races (Lana del Rey)
6. That’s Life (Frank Sinatra)
7. Sinnerman (Nina Simone)
8. Rocky Raccoon (The Beatles)
9. Hallelujah (Rufus Wainwright)
10. Sexy! No No No… (Girls Aloud)
11. Talk Show Host (Radiohead)
12. Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie (Joanna Newsom)
13. What Makes You Beautiful (One Direction)
14. Fancy (Iggy Azalea ft. Charli XCX)
15. November Has Come (Gorillaz)
16. Samson (Regina Spektor)
17. Romeo and Juliet (Dire Straits)
18. Stuck in the Middle with You (Stealers Wheel)
19. Run this Town (Rihanna, Jay-Z and Kanye West)
20. Power (Kanye West)
21. Untouchable (Girls Aloud)
22. Paper Planes (M.I.A.)
23. Make Me Feel (Janelle Monáe)
24. All These Things that I've Done (The Killers)
25. Control (Janet Jackson)

26. Wild Boys (Duran Duran)
27. Love the Way You Lie Part II (Rihanna ft. Eminem)
28. I Knew You Were Trouble (Taylor Swift)
29. Head over Heels (Tears for Fears)
30. Boys Don't Cry (The Cure)
31. Na Na Na Na Hey Hey Goodbye (Steam)
32. Problem (Ariana Grande ft. Iggy Azalea)
33. Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy (Queen)
34. New Rules (Dua Lipa)
35. Million Dollar Man (Lana del Rey)
36. We Are Never Getting Back Together (Taylor Swift)
37. Glory Box (Portishead)
38. Empire State of Mind: Broken Down (Alicia Keys)
39. How Do You Like Me Now? (The Heavy)
40. Tiny Dancer (Elton John)
41. Baba O'Riley (The Who)
42. The Loving Kind (Girls Aloud)
43. Thank U, Next (Ariana Grande)
44. California Dreamin' (The Mamas and the Papas)
45. Cat People (Putting Out Fire) (David Bowie)
46. Chelsea Dagger (The Fratellis)
47. My Father's Gun (Elton John)
48. You’re Such A (Hailee Steinfeld)
49. Magnets (Disclosure ft Lorde)
50. What I Go to School for (Busted)

51. Bang Bang (Jessie J ft. Ariana Grande & Nicki Minaj)
52. When She Loved Me (Sarah McLachlan)
53. Royals (Lorde)
54. Cell Block Tango (Chicago OST)
55. 2am (The Saturdays)
56. Rewrite the Stars (The Greatest Showman OST)
57. Hey Jude (The Beatles)
58. Can’t Hold Us Down (Christina Aguilera ft Lil’ Kim)
59. Brandy Alexander (Feist)
60. Let it Go (Idina Menzel)
61. Girls Like You (Maroon 5 ft. Cardi B)
62. Defying Gravity (Idina Menzel)
63. Sueños (Diego Torres)
64. Love Affair (Regina Spektor)
65. Video Games (Lana del Rey)
66. I Don't Want to Go to Chelsea (Elvis Costello)
67. Juice (Lizzo)
68. Under Pressure (Queen ft. David Bowie)
69. Adia (Sarah McLachlan)
70. Brown Eyes (Lady Gaga)
71. See You Again (Wiz Khalifa ft. Charlie Puth)
72. It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference (Todd Rundgren)
73. Everybody Wants to Rule the World (Tears for Fears)
74. Good As Hell (Lizzo)
75. Underneath Your Clothes (Shakira)

76. Blank Space (Taylor Swift)
77. Lovely Head (Goldfrapp)
78. Bad Girls (M.I.A.)
79. Shape of You (Ed Sheeran)
80. I Wish I Knew How it Feels to Be Free (Nina Simone)
81. Shout (Tears for Fears)
82. Gaston (Beauty and the Beast OST)
83. She (Elvis Costello)
84. Fighter (Christina Aguilera)
85. Vincent (Don McLean)
86. Lullaby (The Cure)
87. Born to Die (Lana del Rey)
88. The Other Side (The Greatest Showman OST)
89. Ay Vamos (J. Balvin)
90. Kill 'em with Kindness (Selena Gomez)
91. Pennies in my Pocket (Emilio Estefan)
92. Airplanes part 2 (B.o.B, Hayley Williams & Eminem)
93. All That Jazz (Chicago OST)
94. Skyfall (Adele)
95. Hey Mama (Kanye West)
96. O Saya (A.R. Rahman ft. M.I.A)
97. Work (Kelly Rowland)
98. Notorious (Duran Duran)
99. This is What Makes Us Girls (Lana del Rey)
100. We Are the Champions (Queen)

10 Most Attractive Women in a 2019 Film

Hey readers, hope you're all well and not going stir-crazy due to the lockdown!

I've decided to make lemonade out of lemons, and use this mandated stay-at-home period to spend more time blogging, something which I have done embarrassingly little of in 2020.

Thus, what better way to get back into it than by compiling one of this blog's yearly staples: most attractive women in a 20XX film?

Here is 2018's list, and as has become my habit, I will record next to each lady whether she was present in the previous year's list, or if she is a recent obsession!

10. Lili Reinhart, Hustlers (new entrant)

Product review: 100 MOVIES BUCKET LIST POSTER

My love of films is one of the things which define me, so I was ecstatic when my colleagues got me this 100 Movies Bucket List poster, which now sits proudly on my door. At the start, all the 100 movies are covered with grey foil-type material, and you scratch off the foil using your fingernails or a coin, if you’ve seen the film, as I have duly done.

In assessing this poster, I looked at two main areas, design, and choice of film.

The Consistency Act

This blog is rated 15 for infrequent strong sex references.

The new Fionn Whitehead film, The Children Act, is one of those curious cases where the film is rated 12A in Britain and Ireland, yet got an R in America.

The Worst Acting Performances of 2017 [5 to 1]

Emma’s shade-throwing at bad acting continues! Read 10 to 6 here. I like to think I was relatively measured in my snark before. As we’re now onto the bottom five, I can’t promise to be so kind! Ehehe.

05. Johnny Depp, Murder on the Orient Express

As the sketchy art dealer Ratchett, Depp’s character is killed off early on, leaving Kenneth Branagh’s sleuth the rest of the film to piece together whodunit. The Johnny Depp of old, the Depp we saw in Pirates of the Caribbean (the first one, not the 34897 laboured sequels after), Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands would have seized this role with aplomb and made an indelible impression in his limited screen time.

10 Most Attractive Ladies in a 2010 Film

The prettiest ladies in a 2011 film list, here. As ever, the list is constrained to only movies I've watched.

10. Ellen Page, Inception

I think Christopher Nolan is partial to actors and actresses with brown hair, but I'm not sure... Incidentally, I think 'Ariadne', Page's character, is the only well-written female in a Chris Nolan film. (This is partly why Dunkirk was so good; there were no women in it for him to invent just to kill off).

Remember Me (and my country's classification issues).

Me after watching Timothée Chalamet's fantastic musical skills in Call Me By Your Name!

I watched Pixar's latest creation, Coco, on Friday, and was utterly charmed by it. Funny, colourful, inventive, and featuring an exquisite score and some moments that had my eyes flooding with tears, it's a return to form after some phoned-in sequels (Finding Dory, Cars 3).

Bar review: PIANO WORKS BAR (Farringdon)

I love singing. Whether it be Disney songs, RnB, Broadway showtunes, power ballads, I’m happiest when I’m warbling along to music (and often getting the lyrics wrong in the process). Piano Works allows you to do this to live piano music, along with a percussive and jazz band, and a lead singer, whilst dancing in a night-club-style venue. That was my Friday night sorted, then.

The band played their instruments really well, with flamboyance from the electric guitars when the occasion called for it, and more nuanced accompanying for other songs. The band shrewdly rotated singers depending on the flavour of the song. Sometimes, as was the case with Kanye West’s Goldigger, more than one person sang at a time. They had a fantastic female singer who belted out How Far I’ll Go from Moana. Given I have recently just watched Moana and the song is fresh in my mind, that in itself made that Friday one of the best nights out I’ve had in a long time.

The song choices at Piano Works were on point. They played Uptown Funk, Piano Man, American Boy, Grace Kelly… basically, crowd pleasers. And the crowd was very pleased. Here’s a clip of their performance of What Makes You Beautiful. The One Direction song is only my fourth favourite of all-time, so I had a whale of a time dancing to it!

Film review: MY MAN GODFREY (Gregory La Cava, 1936)

Irene Bullock, a pampered Park Avenue princess falls for her butler Godfrey and is not used to being met with resistance as said butler gives his employers some much-needed schooling in humility in La Cava’s screwball comedy that dextrously traverses themes of love, class and humanity.

Toy review: NICK WILDE FROM ZOOTROPOLIS SOFT TOY (Disney Store)

I like to make my lime green bedroom as me as possible. On one wall, I have Chelsea FC pictures, as well as a still of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's. I've started decorating the opposite wall with personal photos, and a poster of Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman.

Evidently, I like to be reminded of movies all the time. ❤️ And, given how enamoured I was with Jason Bateman's character in Zootopia, it made sense to pop down to the Disney Store on Oxford Circus, and treat myself to a Nick Wilde soft toy for £12.95. 

Here I am the very day I procured the furry dude:

My Seven Favourite Songs from Disney Musicals

I’ve restricted the options to just songs from Disney musicals, as opposed to songs that appeared in Disney non-musicals, such as ‘When She Loved Me’ from Toy Story 2, otherwise it would have made a hard task even harder (I love ‘Le Festin’ from Ratatouille)!

07. Hellfire – The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)

A left-field shout, given the crux of this song is about the sexual frustration a pious priest feels towards the beguiling gypsy Esmeralda. But I had to nominate Hellfire because it’s memorable, taboo, and tonally, so recherché (what other Disney film features the line ‘he made the Devil so much stronger than the man’?)

Essentially, the message of Hellfire is ‘if I can’t have her, no-one can’. It’s every possessive ex-boyfriend, immortalised in a Disney song, and fits in neatly with the plot, as dastard Claude Frollo’s unsatisfied urges are his motivation for a Domino effect that leads to Paris burning. The religious imagery employed in Hellfire only go to compound Frollo’s sense of sinful lust for a woman he both despises, yet will do anything to possess.

I like songs which shine a torch onto the hypocrisy of religion, and Hellfire offers an insight to this holier-than-thou priest’s mindset. Turns out, his thoughts aren’t so holy, and the choir-like vocals accompanying Frollo’s disturbing soliloquy underscores this irony nicely.

(On a slight film ratings tangent, the likes of fluffy Frozen and Tangled getting rated PG when The Hunchback of Notre Dame, by far one of their darkest films, was only a U, is mighty misleading. It ought to be at least a 12 for the creepy overtones in this song alone).

06. Prince Ali – Aladdin (1992)

My five favourite songs from FROZEN (2013).

A good musical has to have more than just one big marquee song. Frozen has several great ones, so I thought I’d do a top 5 of the ones that I liked the most. After all, it's a musical who's soundtrack I'm fairly well acquainted with, shall we say!

For there's no club in town quite as manly...

Four months on from seeing Beauty and the Beast at the cinema, I'm still absolutely obsessed with the 'Gaston' song. Even the most tenuous thing, such as the club photographed above, gets me breaking out in song. It might just be my second-ever favourite Disney song (second only to 'Let it Go', obviously).

Oh, and say hello to what will almost certainly be one of the worst films of 2017:

My top 10 films of 2016 [5-1].

Part 1 of this rundown was here, which also featured five films you ought to avoid like the plague.

05. Elle

10 Fittest Ladies in Film, 2013.

I had a lot of fun screencap-and-gif-searching for this blog post! The top four, of which three women are in joint second place, has the highest calibre of beautiful women since I started posting this list!

10. Marine Vacth,  Jeune et Jolie 

Tale as old as time... (that Emma Watson can't act)

Out of tune singing is out of tune, and clunky guitar-playing is clunky, but at least it's not quite as questionable as the other two Emma's, Watson and Stone.

That was the first take, so a bit rubbish. I preferred this audio recording, but annoyingly, couldn't upload it as a video, so if you're not too bored, give that superior version a listen. 😎

I saw Beauty and the Beast on Thursday, and whilst being predictably bored by Emma Watson's blank, passionless face in all her scenes, actually quite enjoyed it. Some of the musical numbers were very entertaining, especially 'Gaston', a song which aptly sums up the mentality of the vast majority of clown guys who I've had the misfortune of having gone on dates with in London.

Only difference is Gaston has more humility.

Methink the lady doth protest too much.

Emma Watson has been working overtime recently in an attempt to quell rumours about her being too much of a diva to get the lead in La La Land, even saying 'I couldn't care less if I won an Oscar if I didn't feel the film I made said something'.

Whatever helps you sleep at night, sweetie.

Still, I guess she couldn't do La La Land, what with her busy schedule giving shite talks about white feminism.

Another newspaper cutting that attests to my theory that Po-faced Watson is an absolute diva who is completely unabile to take a joke:

10 Fittest Males in Film, 2016.

I’ve gone off Ryan Gosling because I still have ear damage from his singing, Dev Patel’s bad acting in Lion put me off him and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, whilst being an absolute babe in real-life and the best husband ever to his lucky wife, played a vile character in Nocturnal Animals, hence their omissions from the list.

The ladies version of the list, if you were curious.

10. Andre Holland, Moonlight