10 Finest Fellas in a 2009 Film

Happy Hump Day! My picks for male babes of 2009. If you were wondering if I had a 'type', feel free to peruse my lists from previous years!

10. Michael Fassbender, Inglourious Basterds

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.

Book review: DAUGHTER (Jane Shemilt)

Although Jane Shemilt writes in lucid, gripping prose, her first novel suffers from several flaws.

Pious BAFTA grandstanding is exactly why I won't be watching the Oscars this year.

I didn't do too well in my BAFTA predictions, although at least I beat my performance last year, where I barely got anything right (as it was on Valentines Day last year, I took it as a sign that Carol would win the categories it deserved to win. That delusion).

Fantastic Virtue-Signallers and Where to Find Them. I heard JK Rowling is retrospectively writing yet another Harry Potter spin-off, about Professor McGonagall's uncharted secret past, where she had a Chinese girlfriend. Emma Stone is favourite to get the role of said Chinese girlfriend. 

Fantastic Oscar-beggers and Where to Find Them.

Glaring mistake is glaring. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, starring professional awards-chaser Eddie Redcarpet, is a 12A, not a PG. Frankly, a PG certificate wouldn't be enough to contain all of Eddie's Oscar thirst and all of JK Rowling's virtue-signalling hypocrisy.

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The BBFC replied to my email on Someone to Talk to, by the way. It's a lot more satisfactory a response than the one they sent me about So Young 2 Never Gone:

Dear Emma

Thank you for your email.

BBFC classification decisions are made in line with available research and our Classification Guidelines which are a product of an extensive public consultation process. This process is repeated every 4-5 years and over 10,000 people contributed to the creation of the Classification Guidelines 2014, which are available here. 

They state that: 'Portrayals of potentially dangerous behaviour (especially relating to hanging, suicide and self-harm) which children and young people may potentially copy, will be cut if a higher classification is not appropriate. '

The level of detail depicted in both films with regards to the suicide attempts is permissible at 12A. However the suicide attempt in Two Days, One Night is shown to have little in the way of consequences. The lead character is shown to gag but otherwise does not seem to suffer any ill effects. She looks serene and healthy in her hospital bed and the doctors seem unconcerned about any possible long term damage. The scene is therefore better placed at 15.

In contrast, the character in Someone To Talk To is shown weak but recovering in hospital. Suicide is not presented as an attractive option and so this content is permissible at 12A.

The references to suicide in Someone To Talk To start early in the film and occur throughout, becoming part of the theme of the work. They were not considered to be a 'spoiler' in that it's not an issue that suddenly and unexpectedly comes up later in the film. Also, given the prevalence of the references - which are not simply an isolated moment or element in the work - it was necessary to warn people about them, even more so because this is a 12A film on which parents may want clear advice.

We have an FAQ about spoilers on the black card on our website which explains our policy http://www.bbfc.co.uk/about-bbfc/faqs#insight-spoiler You may also be interested in Podcast Episode 20 which covers how the BBFC approaches classifying self-harm and suicide http://www.bbfc.co.uk/case-studies/podcasts/bbfc-podcast-episode-20-classifying-self-harm-and-suicide 

Yours sincerely

Joe

 BBFC Feedback Team

From this much better, detailed email, I've inferred that the BBFC spend more time on a query if you complain that the film should have been higher than it was, as opposed to lower. The speed at which they respond to you is almost halved, too - my So Young 2 Never Gone email took exactly 2 weeks to reply, the maximum time they stipulated, whereas this took just 8 days.

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Finally, look who blocked me on Twitter:

Not the first time Jamie Vardy's been abrupt to an east Asian person, now is it?

(admittedly, a lot of my festering anger at this whole affair isn't just the fact that Vardy racially abused a Japanese man. It's the fact that he racially abused a Japanese man and esteemed football writers who purport to care about racism, like Henry Winter and Daniel Taylor, wrote sod-all about it).

#ByeFelicia

The Casual Vacancy (JK Rowling) review

 

Released last year to bated breaths and eager eyes, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling’s first foray into the adult-book market. Having held back from reading it when it first came out so I could savour every page and give the book the measured, impartial critic it deserved (the worry was that, had I devoured it so quickly like I did with the final Harry Potter book, I would miss nuances like I did with my first time reading of HP VII, so keen was I to get to the end of the saga), I found myself extremely disappointed with The Casual Vacancy, which was, at best, overly-detailed and ambitious, and at worst, a self-satisfied, muddling mess.

The action kicks off when well-loved Parish Councillor Barry Fairbrother bites the dust due to a surprise bout of aneurism in his brain. Initially, the townpeople of Pagford, the fictitious West Country town where the book is set, mourn his death, but soon, practicalities kick in. His death leaves a “casual vacancy” to be filled, and three men put themselves forward: Miles Mollison, a lawyer and family man is the frontrunner, being the son of Howard Mollison, the leader of the Parish Council, but there is also Deputy headteacher Colin Walls, who wants to run out of love of Barry, as well as bullying petty crook Simon Price, who, on hearing of the unofficial perks of being on the council, can’t resist the idea of receiving some bribes of his own.

Having penned the source material of the box office smashes Harry Potter, one can’t help but think she’s got half a mind of the movie rights of this book. For, whilst the setting, Pagford, is a small town, the themes of the book are anything but. Adultery, drugs, self-harm, racism, abuse, duplicity, you name it, this book’s got it. There are several families which come into focus, and the actions of each have repercussions on other people, some of these which trigger off a Domino effect into something much larger. But whilst this makes for interesting films, such as Magnolia or Short Cuts, on paper, it harder to keep track of, particularly at the start when she juggles between narratives and it is hard to keep up.

That is not to say the book is a total failure. As with Harry Potter, there are moments of extreme wit – her describing of a teenage boy band that one of the wives in the novel becomes obsessed with can only be sculpted on One Direction, and is an incisive comment on how little there is to live for when the spark goes out of a marriage. Similarly, in the latter act of the book, when the action really takes off and people begin posting on the Pagford town message board as The_Ghost_Of_Barry_Fairbrother, chaos, and dark humour, reigns. As with some of the later Harry Potter books, when Rowling gives the internal monologue of the characters in The Casual Vacancy, she offers a window into their psyches, however dislikeable, and it takes a talented writer to do that.

But even as the most ardent Harry Potter fangirl, I cannot overlook all the flaws in this novel. First and foremost, it strives for so much, and in doing so, achieves so little. I read this book whilst also reading Tampa by Alissa Nutting and Cell by Stephen King, and compared to this book, the narratives of those two are so straight-forward and unpretentious, it made me want to cry tears of joy. Even if we put my inability to follow the plot down to me being a bit dense, there are other things – Rowling’s depiction of a crack addict and the conditions she lives in could be lifted right out of an anti-drugs campaign they made for teenagers, so laden are they with caricature.

Very few characters in the novel are likeable. Sukhvinder Jawanda is one of the few that I liked, and it is credit to the novel that she gets a brief glimpse of redemption. But I despised pretty much everyone else in the novel, so much so that, when tragedy did strike at the end, that I was left with a hollow “so what?” feeling that contrasted with the endless tears I shed in reading the Harry Potter books, and even then, you could feel Rowling desperately trying, to no avail, to pull at her readers’ heartstrings. The teenagers are painted with a general paintbrush, the majority of them being antagonistic, ungrateful to their parents and far more interested in getting laid than studying. I’ve been a teenager and that’s just not how it is. Where has Rowling been getting information, episodes of Skins?

Where the teenagers are whiny little gimps, the adults are described as hypocrites who are only out for mercenary gain. They only think of themselves and aren’t able to see how their own kids are rebelling right under their eyes. Whilst no doubt haphazard parenting exists, for there to be so many poor parents, all so closely linked, beggars belief.

Recently, Miley Cyrus cringed out the world at the MTV Awards by “twerking” and basically just trying to shed her good girl image so much that it reeked of desperation and trying too hard. With The Casual Vacancy, JK Rowling is doing the literary version of exactly the same thing. Sex, drugs and gratuitous swearing (hell, I’m a tetchy football fan with an attitude problem and I don’t even swear as much as the saps in this novel do), I cringed on pretty much every page. That Rihanna’s “Umbrella” was used as a motif throughout the novel just compounds the humiliation that was reading The Casual Vacancy.