Written in black and white

This blog is rated 12A for infrequent strong language.

Last week, in preparation for watching Octavia Spencer get her Gone Girl on in Ma, I watched Black or White. The film itself was extremely forgettable, with aspirations of Oscar glory but not enough quality to realise those dreams, but the thing that did stick out about the film, to me, was this line:

The BBFC have stated in previous podcasts that the 'MF word' is considered a 15-rated term. It's why Eat Pray Love, a PG-rated film in every other sense, was 15.

Restaurant review: PLANET HOLLYWOOD (Piccadilly Circus)

Hey readers! Sorry I’ve been MIA for the last two months; I recently started a job in Finance and absolutely adore it! However, I’m also putting the finishing touches on my PhD, and between that, the 9 to 5 job (where the 5 often extends to much later than 5) and studying for exams that accompany my job, I have had very little time for anything else! Hence the non-existent film discourse. 

My coverage of the 2019 Oscar race will sadly be minimal compared to my extensive coverage this year, although, rest assured, I will find time to watch the key Oscar players, come hell or high water!

Until then, here be a review of Planet Hollywood, a cheery-looking place just of Piccadilly Circus that I have long wanted to visit, if only for its enticing name!

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I bought a deal for a two-course meal for 2 at Planet Hollywood on BuyAGift.com. I got the voucher with a discount, but I will be assessing the dining experience had I paid the price been what it’s retailing at on the website, without a discount, of £40.

With the deal, you’re entitled to two courses out of a starter, a main and a dessert. This is good because it affords flexibility, with those with a fondness for the savoury dishes given the option of starter, and those with a sweet tooth can choose dessert. What’s more, because the portions are quite large (think American-style portions), two courses will fill you, in the same way that it usually takes all three courses of a Café Rouge-style set menu to fill you.

Because I’ve always loved the sour more than the sweet (my personality in a microcosm, right there. #GoneGirl), I opted for starters instead of dessert. I had nachos: 

Restaurant review: THE BREAKFAST CLUB (Soho)

The film is iconic, setting the bar for talky-dramedies channelling teenage angst for years to come. So famous is it, that is has been name-dropped or riffed on in several teenage-orientated movies, including Easy A and The DUFF, and most recently, Ready Player One.

The restaurant was established a good 20 years after the film was released, but such is the goodwill and strong reputation it has forged, that The Breakfast Club is as crucial to any London-based foodie’s itinerary as the film is to a movie buff’s viewing list.

I had long been scared off eating here, however, because on any random walk past the restaurant, it had always had a massive queue outside it. Having succumbed to the marvels of Eat Tokyo and On the Bab, my favourite Japanese and Korean restaurants in London, respectively, however, I modified my outlook on queuing.

Both these restaurants don’t take reservations, yet the food has been worth the wait, so with my fingers crossed, I hoped The Breakfast Club was another example of this.

As it so happened, I needn’t have thought about it so much. Whilst the restaurant is hot property during brunch times of 12pm – 3pm, we went a little after this, so we were seated straight away. So if you have an aversion to queuing, worth bearing in mind!

Between us, we had ‘Huevos al Benny’ and Korean fried chicken pancakes. With both priced at £10.50, I considered the portions to be very reasonable: -

Review: ALL SHOOK UP! (Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes)

Fun night outs dancing in London were a staple of my late teen and early-20s, and I wished this to be the same for my brother. So last night, me, Tom, and two of my friends hit the London’s 1950s & 60s Party at Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes for some good old fashioned rock n’ roll and jive-style boogying.

Restaurant review: TGI FRIDAY'S (Covent Garden)

I've been to several TGI Friday's across the UK (Reading, when my family and I were checking out universities, Bath when I was there doing my undergraduate degree and Leicester Square just for an impromptu delicious meal one evening), and it's a chain which I have never been disappointed with.

Last Tuesday, me and three others were dithering over where to get dinner (Belgo was being suggested as an option, but I wasn't enamoured with it when I'd visited Belgo three years ago) in Covent Garden when I clocked a TGIF, confident that that represented a much better option.

And of course, I wasn't wrong. We were served by a bubbly waitress, who asked us if we were celebrating anything. Although it wasn't the cause of our get-together, I had just passed a critical PhD landmark, and one of the people I was with mentioned this. I didn't expect that to lead to anything, but she very kindly gave me this gorgeous and delicious slice of cake for my troubles!

OOTD: Honourary American.

What I wore to get tipsy in ULU with my American friends:

Earrings: Monsoon Accessorize

Glasses: Red or Dead

T-shirt: Oasis

Cardigan: Primark

Skirt (not photographed): Oasis

Bonus picture: with a UCL Snapchat filter

A few bits of BBFC geekery when I was doing Christmas shopping yesterday.

From the DVD boxset of the final season of The Good Wife. A bit on the descriptive side!

From American Horror Story: Hotel's boxset. Notice the distinction between 'sexual violence' (i.e., rape) and 'sexualised violence' (the conflation of violence and sexual images, e.g. a stabbing during a sex scene).

Not gonna lie, reading this tells me I'm right in my convictions never to watch an episode of this scabrous show!

This is from How to Get Away with Murder. I was quite taken aback by this; all I know about this show is that Viola Davis is in it, and she is typically excellent. I was not expecting it to be an 18 cert! A quick glance over the American TV rating (TV-14), tells me that this might be the BBFC being weirdly strict.

Two other TV shows that I've noticed are TV-14 in the States and 18 over here are The 100 and Scandal. A telltale sign that a show is aiming for the TV-14 market when you're watching is extensive sexual dialogue and maybe even steamy sex scenes featuring nudity, but not once does anyone say the f-word (this also applies to many a TV-14 show that have gotten 15 over here, such as the aforementioned The Good Wife). 

I find it amusing that you can put quite a lot of adult content in a TV-14 and get away with it, but once you say 'f_ck', that's when you cross the line into TV-MA...

From Gotham's boxset. Again, I was just amused because of the juxtaposition of those four disparate classification issues.

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Whilst the BBFC are playing hard to get with regards to their rating of Elle, for which Isabelle Huppert is gaining Oscar buzz (I know I haven't seen it yet but I really hope she wins!), their Irish counterparts aren't so coy, and have released it with an 18. Given that the two awards bodies more often than not align, I'm guessing that this will be my second 2016 release that I've seen of an 18 cert! I've been very lax with watching 2016 releases of this rating; the only other has been The Neon Demon.

By the by, I noticed in HMV yesterday that on the occasions when the BBFC and IFCO don't agree on a film, they just bung the British rating on the front (otherwise, they put both, side-by-side):

Eddie the Eagle is a 12 in Ireland and A Hologram for a King is 15 in Ireland. I think this precaution is sensible; you wouldn't want to confuse buyers!

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Finally, I have no intention of watching this, but, nice wall mural for Assassin's Creed:

This same wall has also hosted Star Trek art in the past as well!

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I adore BBFC geekery. My entire compendium of BBFC posts is here, check it!

Review: TOMMI'S BURGER JOINT (Marylebone)

Oh dear Lord. I just have to alert the world to one of the worst burger joints I've ever had the misfortune of visiting.

The second I walked into Tommi's Burger Joint, I knew something was amiss. The floors and tables looked dirty. The sales staff there barely acknowledged me, and those who did, on seeing I was alone, didn't give me the usual polite waiter smile, as they probably thought they wouldn't swindle that much out of me.

I, however do think they swindled a fair bit out of me. I had the chicken burger, which, priced at £8.90, was certainly not cheap, particularly as you can get something much more delicious at McDonalds for a quarter of the price.

It was one of the most vile, rancid, burgers I've ever had in my entire life. There was a thick slab of chicken in the burger, but on one bite, I saw it was pink inside. Pink!!! It was textbook undercooked, flavourless meat that someone trying to cook for the first time whips up.

The other fillings in the burger were also absolutely horrendous. The onions (one of my favourite ingredients and thus, quite hard to get wrong) that accompanied the meat were uncooked. Who puts uncooked onions into a burger!? The tomatoes were unevenly distributed and soggy, leading me to believe I had the bastard leftovers.

Also, there was guacamole in the filling. Now, I don't know what kind of weird hipsters dine here, but what's wrong with, gee, I don't know, traditional sauces, such as BBQ or tomato ketchup? BBQ sauce would at least have given the burger some flavour.

I love burgers, and am generally quite easily pleased (I could gladly dine at Burger King for the rest of my life). But I wouldn't wish a trip to Tommi's Burger Joint on my worst enemy. The service was bad, the food was atrocious, and it was overpriced for what it was. Nah, mate.

Grade: F

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard.

Outfit of the Day that I wore to drink an insane banana-and-Nutella milkshake in The Diner yesterday:

Blue vest top: Topshop

White vest top: Jane Norman

Hoop earrings: Debenham's

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

Pretension. It’s a funny thing. I prescribe to the Monica Bing school of thought, that a little bit of pretension never hurt anyone. It is definitely a thing of which, however, too much of can kill. 

Cannes winners have, in the past, gone into one set column or the other for me. Pretty much half of them, I appreciated their artistry, but, even more than that, connected with them on an emotional level, and thus really adored them. The others, I have found frustrating and to be perfectly honest, far too clever for their own good. The Tree of Life is one which firmly falls in the latter camp.

Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain head a good ol’ Christian style family in Texas. Pitt's character is the epitome of graft as he trains his songs to fight, build things and generally toughen them up against the big bad world, which he believes will take advantage of you if give it the chance. Jessica 

Chastain's matriarch, on the other hand, believes in living life through the way of grace, rather than nature. She tries to put a dampener on her husband’s volatile and bullish behaviour, which often has a detrimental impact on their three songs, not altogether successfully. At a young age, one the sons commits suicides, posing questions of faith, morality and existence to all involved.

The Tree of Life is, essentially, Terrence Malick’s soliloquy with God. “Why should I be good if you aren’t?” a character asks, later characterized in Sean Penn, a Houston architect who feels stifled by the heady skyscrapers he surrounds himself with everyday. 

Malick’s brother also committed suicide, leading understandably doubt his belief. And, fair play to him, for getting arts grants from whomever he managed to con into allowing him to film this, because it is, without hyperbolizing, one of the dullest things I have ever had to sit through. 

I wasn’t a huge fan of Lars von Triers’ Melancholia, which touched upon similar themes to The Tree of Life, and some film critics have offered as a complement to this film. But at least that film, for all its flaws, had moments of humour and colour interspersed with the dryness. 

The Tree of Life has colour all right, in terms of vividly CGI-d creation scenes, but very little in terms of emotional core or interest. Brad Pitt annoys and it is easy to see why his sons despised him so, despite his best efforts. Sean Penn features very little (probably the best thing I can say about this snorefest), but when he does, he just channels Penn in 21 Grams with a constantly perplexed/angry/bemused look on his face. Oscar winning this most certainly ain’t. 

The young kids in the film, played by relative newcomers to the acting circuit, do their jobs admirably enough, but the fact that they are speaking Terrence Malick words makes it hard to warm to them. 

The film’s only saving grace is Jessica Chastain, who gives a beautiful performance, full to the brim of warmth and love. She never over or under acts, despite Malick having written her as a kind of “doting wife and mother” archtype. It’s a thankless role, but Chastain truly impresses in it.

And I am trying to find other redemptive features of the film, really I am, but that is about the only good thing I can say about The Tree of Life. My housemate said “I have absolute no interest in seeing THAT” and I have no idea why I didn’t listen to him, because it is two and a half of my life I shall never get back. 

Even Alexandre Desplat’s score, which I would normally appreciate (man is a genius), is tainted by the fact that it appears in this Bible Bash of a film, as does his good eye for cinematography (used to such good effect in films that he has made well, namely Days of Heaven and The New World). 

Want a little taster of Tree of Life? Go to the book of Job, pick a verse, any verse, blast some classical music from your iPod dock and flick through a photo album of images of nature. It will be much, much, much more fulfilling than watching this piece of trash film was. 

If Terrence Malick really loves his "God" so much, one would have thought God would have blessed him with a slightly better movie.

Grade: U