Sideways joins American Beauty as a quiet, bleak comedy that came out of nowhere and surprised a lot of my friends with its quality. Said friends subsequently recommended it quite highly, only for me to discover that, while it is amiable enough (and certainly very funny in places), it certainly isn?t the sort of film which watching on video would reduce one iota (it might improve it, given that you wouldn?t be paying £9 for the privilege). Such is the subjectivity of expectation. It?s a diverting enough ride, but is nowhere near worth all the plaudits which judges from Cannes to Canada seem to be heaping on it (I would say it?s about as good as an above-average episode of Six Feet Under).

Sideways is a tragicomedy. The comedy comes mainly from the excellent Thomas Haden Church, who I?ve been a huge fan of since his completely underappreciated and subversive turn in the short-lived Ned & Stacey. Church plays Jack, a has-been soap opera actor who now does voice work. Jack is a scoundrel who intends to shag as many women as possible in the week leading up to his wedding. But he?s also a very charismatic and funny scoundrel (as the all best ones are), and most of the laughs, certainly the bigger ones, come from something Jack says or does.

With him on his stag-week is his friend from college, Miles (representing tragedy). Miles is a divorced school-teacher* with a novel nobody will buy. He also has anger management issues, issues with his sister, issues with his ex-wife, steals from his mother, and generally struck me as?kind of a jerk. This is a warning sign for a movie. I mean, I don?t want my lead characters to be perfect, in fact I hate that, but nor do I want them to be the sort of person I?d try and escape from in boredom if I engaged them in conversation. Miles? life is pretty pathetic, a point the film rams home on more than one occasion (approximately half the film consists of Miles looking glum).

?I can?t even commit suicide.? he laments. ?I haven?t written a successful book.?

?What about that guy who wrote A Confederacy of Dunces? He killed himself. Look how famous his book got!? says Jack, trying to cheer him up.

?Gee, thanks, Jack.?

The film follows a pretty typical course for a romantic comedy: Things start bad, then they get worse, then they get incredibly bad, then?the guy gets the girl and the movie ends (sorry for the spoiler, but all romcoms end like that, you should know better by now). This follows a fairly common Hollywood fallacy that the solution to everything is to get the girl. Are you a manic-depressive? Do you have a dead-end job? Will nobody buy your book? That?s okay! Get the girl and everything will be alright. The movie, of course, doesn?t go on to show how all of Miles? deep-seated problems, that the movie takes such care in establishing, will go on to affect the subsequent relationship- it just gives you a happy little note to go out on. I know that?s how movies have to be, but for a movie that repeatedly felt like reality impacting (Who doesn?t feel, sometimes, that there life isn?t what they wanted or planned? Help me out here, folks), it had a pretty pat answer.

Sideways is a lot of fun**, and I'd recommend that you check it out when it comes to video. There are some great sight gags, and some great lines (?I am not drinking any FUCKING MERLOT!? has already been screamed multiple times amongst my friends, whenever we go into an off-license...which is often), but I didn?t find, ultimately, that it was a great film. It raises some fairly depressing questions that, as a comedy, it isn?t entirely equipped to handle, and instead settles for one of romcoms oldest clichés as an answer.

d

The most impressive thing about Vernon God Little, I found, was the narrative voice, which was first person- nothing special about that (although I am finding, more and more, that it's my favourite kind of narrative perspective and third person voice-of-god narrators are starting to bug me a little bit), but typically first-person narrators are somewhat obviously the voice of the author themselves. Not literally of course, but you usually get the sense that the narrator has more-or-less the same temperament and intelligence as the author. I'm always impressed when an author chooses their narrator to be, well, different in some way, and then consistently writes with those differences in mind throughout the length of the novel. A stark, recent example of this is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, but even in that case, the author had trouble keeping within the (admittedly very difficult) limits which he had prescribed himself**. VGL's limits aren't quite so restrictive, and consequently the voice does not stray outside of them so much, if at all. I appreciated this very much, and it was one of the principal joys of the novel, for me.

Vernon Little's best friend, Jesus, has just gone on a Columbine-style rampage through his high school, ending in his own suicide. While some of Vernon's thoughts and turns of phrase border on insane genius, his unique thought-process often results in actions that are galactically stupid, in no small part due to his catastrophic home-life. The media, in this book personified by sometime cable-repairman Eulalio Ledesma, needs someone to blame for the killings, and Vernon is that someone. This is the story of Vernon's reaction to being accused for participating in a mass murder.

From this brief synopsis, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this book delivers some level of analysis or insight into the society that produces and then crucifies the sort of teenagers who go on gun-rampages. You'd be wrong. The author establishes a great set-up, and seems to be leaning in that direction, but then doesn't seem to know quite what to do with what he has created. About halfway through the book, Vernon flees to Mexico, where events become so surreal I swear I kept expecting him to 'wake up' and find, Dallas-style, that he was dreaming it all (to the books credit, this doesn't happen).

About a quarter of the novel is in Mexico, but this is merely an aside, a distraction (added, I felt, because the author really wasn't sure where else to go) from the actual point of the book. Even when the book gets 'back on track' and back to America, it fails to shake off the surrealistic effulgence it took on down South, and descends into arch-parody (a Big Brother-esque death row where inmates are executed by popular vote- I'm still rcovering from repeated blows to the head from the allegory-mallet), and never really revives from it.

d

Have you heard the new NIN single? Apparently there is a new vid around on the website... you seen it... I was looking but couldn't track it down... what am I saying of course you have seen it!

I had to respond to my friend that I haven't seen the new Nine Inch Nails video, or downloaded either of the two new songs, even though they've both been available for some time now. Part of the reason for this is that I don't want to hear the new songs for the first time at anything other than the highest quality they can be heard at (in much the same way you wouldn't want your first time with a new lover to take place in a smelly alleyway), so I'm waiting (excitedly) for the CD single release.

The other reason is...I'm a little bit scared.

NIN's last release was the execrable 'Deep', which wasn't just disappointing, but was out-and-out awful. I'd find a second such fall from grace quite painful. After six years of silence...I'm expecting something quite special, but now that it comes to the moment, well, let's just say 'The Phanton Menace' has a lot to answer for.

Fingers crossed...

The world?s only British matador is, apparently, retiring. Asked why he was retiring, he responded:

?Well, in order to be a matador, you need 100% of your faculties...well...90% of your faculties.?

That made me giggle, for some reason.

Happy dude-getting-nailed-to-a-tree weekend! As Bill Hicks was fond of noting: "Where in the Bible do they mention a giant bunny that hands out chocolate eggs? You'd think I'd remember that bit."

Anyway, I'm in Hampstead Heath on Friday, enjoying the sun with a bit of red wine, cheese, `n friends. At one point I look up and point out what appears to be either a bin lid or a very large frisbee, twirling in the air at some great height. That's interesting, I thought, rather taken aback by the exclamations of astonishment and fear emitted by my friends.

This is because I was still looking up, rather than directly ahead.

On correcting this angle of neckage, I saw something that was really quite amazing. I have six independant witnesses to confirm this actually happened, should you find it rather incredible. I saw, or rather I should say, since whirlwinds are largely invisible: I saw the effects of a whirlwind, directly ahead of us. Paper and grass and twings were all swirling around a central point. This central point was visible as an intense flattenning of the grass in front of us, all the blades of grass pointing outwards from the center of the vortex. The scary/cool thing was- this center was moving towards us.

At this point, my friend Graham leapt up and jumped into the whirlwind. His clothes fluttered and flew around him, whipped around by the spinning of the wind (it looked really cool). He danced about as the whirlwind veered to the right and went directly into a tree that was covered with dead leaves, each of which was stripped from the tree and swept up into the whorl, at which point we finally saw the full shape and extent of the whole thing. Graham later said that he looked up, saw leaves extending up into the air a good two or three hundred feet, thought: 'Maybe this isn't such a good idea.' and quickly evacuated.

The whirlygig continued on its way, and while I ignored the rather strong urge to pursue it, we continued to see the bin-lid/frisbee dancing around in the sky at the top of the cyclone for some time hence. Graham tried to explain how whirlwinds form from bubbles of thermals or something, but nothing he said really explained it, I mean, it was just incredibly wierd and fascinating, I've never seen anything like it.

`sa funny old world.

d

NOTE: This was written for the online magazine Pick Me Up, which last week asked its readers the question: Have you ever almost died? (along with: What is the best relationship you never had?), but I thought I'd blog it, as well. Enjoy.

There have been three occasions on which I have almost died, all of which (rather suitably) make pretty neat stories, but probably would have made rather unimpressive obituaries.

The last time I went back to New Zealand, in the Christmas of 2002, I spent the majority of my time there in a little beach town called Whiritoa, on the eastern coast of the Coromandel Peninsula. My family owns a batch (beach house) there, in one of the most beautiful locations in the entire world. Around Christmas/New Year, the beach house gets absolutely packed with people, as me and my three siblings invite all of our mates over for beach-time fun (swimming, kayaking, taking the boat out, sunbathing, walking along the coast, visiting the blowhole, barbeques every day).

One day (New Year?s Eve, in fact) I decided to go for a walk with two of my best and oldest mates, Troy and Guzzo. The plan was to do some cliff-jumping. Cliff-jumping is one of my favourite things in the world, ever. It basically (astute readers will have seen this coming) involves climbing to the top of a very tall cliff, and then leaping off it into the ocean below. There?s a fantastic little island just up the coast from our batch which has a really great cliff on it, because the top of the cliff descends at an angle, which means you can choose to jump off from virtually any height you like, ranging from about fifteen feet to well over sixty (I go for the upper register- the more time I spend flying through the air the better, as far as I?m concerned). We usually kayak out to the island (another cool thing to do is to hurl your kayak off the cliff and then leap after it), but all the kayaks were all in use out on the ocean (important plot point!), so I suggested we just swim out to the island, then swim back.

The walk out to the island was uneventful, we rock-jumped (also one of my favourite things) along the coast until we reached the edge of the shoreline that was physically closest to the island, which was about 200 feet offshore. This edge was also a cliff, so we naturally leapt off this and into the ocean. Even as I did this, I knew that we wouldn?t be able to return to the mainland by this route, as the cliff face we were leaping off was sheer, and would have been virtually impossible to climb. However, there was a beach about a kilometre up the shoreline, so I figured we could just swim to this from the island once we were done.

We spent several hours on the island, leaping from the cliffs, wandering along the rocks, dodging seagull attacks (the top of the cliff we leap off had a nest of seagull chicks in it, and momma wasn?t too happy about our proximity). The sun was shining, the weather was sweet, and I did some of my best cliff jumping yet. As potential last-days go, it was a good one. When we?d had our fill of cliff jumping (hitting the water at velocity is actually pretty physically taxing, and it?s not uncommon to have bruises the next day. There?s this one injury you can get when the water shoots up your togs?.youch), we decided to swim for the mainland. The kilometre of land between us and the beach was a bay with sheer walls, and filled with jagged rock- not the sort of thing you?d want to try and climb onto, so we had to swim in a sort of diagonal line across the ocean, towards the beach. The water was so clear that, if you had been watching us from the island, we would have appeared to have been swimming through the air.

My troubles took a while to dawn on me. As I approached the shore, the swell (which was gentle near the island) began to form into waves, and quite big ones, at that. I had been swimming for a while when I realised that the drag on these waves (if you?re unfamiliar with ocean-swimming, a wave creates itself by sucking water from immediately in front of the crest, creating a ?drag? effect) was quite strong, and that I had been making zero forward progress for several minutes- I was just swimming on the spot. I?m a fairly strong swimmer, but I have asthma and tire easily as a result, so I was a little worried about running out of energy. I then did something which you should never, ever do at sea: I began to panic, and, not thinking clearly, decided I should quit with my diagonal course, and head straight for the coast- once on the rocks, I could walk along them to the beach. It?d be tough, but doable. I put all my energy (again: NEVER make a ?throw all your energy into one last ditch attempt? manoeuvre while at sea) into making a beeline for the rocks. It worked: I made it to the rocks.

I?d just clambered up them, thinking myself safe, when an ENORMOUS wave came crashing over me, tearing me off the cliff and casting me into the razor-sharp-rock-filled bay. I was racing along underwater at wave speed (which is bloody fast), tumbling and turning, thinking: ?If my head smashes into a one of those rocks, at this speed, that?s it. If I don?t die instantly, I?ll be knocked unconscious and I?ll drown.? My life didn?t flash before my eyes, and I can?t tell if time slowed down, because I may genuinely have been under water for a good long while. As it happens, I did smash into a rock, and died right then and there. Just kidding! I did smash into a rock, but it was my leg, not my head, that took the blow. The rock tore my toe and the ball of my foot open to the bone, but I was too adrenaline-filled to notice the pain (yet)- I grabbed onto the rock and scrambled up it for dear life.

My first action, the moment I was at the top of the rock, was to check my teeth. I do this after every life-threatening accident. I am dreadfully afraid of having my teeth knocked out. But they were all there, un-knocked, and I breathed a sigh of relief (I figure, if your teeth aren't knocked out, you're in pretty good shape). So: there I was, stranded on this rock. Troy and Guzzo were nowhere to be seen. The waves were far too big to risk getting back into the ocean, and the amount of blood pouring from my foot quickly ensured that the rock I was clinging too was coloured almost entirely red. I knew I wasn?t going to die, but I really didn?t know what I was going to do, other than sit there and wait for someone to notice my absence.

Fortunately, my sister-in-law, Linda, was out on the ocean in one of the kayaks. She was some distance off, and I struggled to catch her attention by leaping up and down on the rock. When she noticed me and started heading for me, I realized that, if she kayaked into the bay, the waves would knock her off her kayak and send her throttling into the bay, as surely as it had done to me. So I tried very hard to make a ?don?t come too close? gesture which, from a distance, looks remarkably like a ?come over here? gesture. All my fears fulfilled, Linda kayaked into the bay, a wave lifted up her kayak, and rolled them both into the bay. Linda swam over to my rock, and we had a short conversation:

?Okay, you swim to the kayak, kayak out past the waves, and I?ll follow you.?

?There?s no way you?ll swim out past these waves.?

?I?m a professional swimmer Daniel, I?ll make it.?

?My foot?s bleeding. Won?t it attract sharks??

?Sharks couldn?t swim in these waves!?

?...?

So that?s what we did. I swam to the kayak, paddled out past the waves, and Linda swam out through the waves. We rendezvoused on the beach, Linda took the kayak back via the Ocean, and I walked back over several kilometres of hilly farmland. Little note to non-farmies: Walking over farmland with a gaping great hole on your foot is incredibly dangerous, mainly due to hookworm, which lives in pasture and can only enter a human through an open wound. You have NEVER heard such swearing as I screamed (the pain came when the adrenaline wore off) all the way back to the batch. There was no-one about for miles, so I just let rip a torrent of profanity, so loud it echoed around the hills. I kept it up for about two solid hours.

When I eventually limped back to the batch, Troy and Guzzo were sitting on the lawn, playing Risk.

?Oh, we wondered where you?d gotten to.?

My revenge on those two bastards is another story entirely. But I actually, and this is no joke, I actually went through a pretty profound change that day. I?d almost died, and I know it sounds corny, but it really did make me realize how great it is to be alive, and I?ve not had a single regret since that day. I used to be the king of saying: ?I should have?? or ?I wish I had??. I?ve never used those expressions since that day. It?s just a waste of time. It seems to me that at least 90% of all the problems and stresses in this world are artificially created by people, generated, for no reason that I can discern. People just create problems for themselves. I try not to do that. Life?s for the living, and I can find enjoyment in almost any moment, just by thinking to myself: Hey man, you?re alive. You so easily might not have been, and you?d be missing out on all this opportunity for joy. I make mistakes and I get sad and I may not be everything I dreamed of being as a youth- but I don?t regret a thing.

d

click below for a map of the adventure! (not to scale!) My other two NDEs are available on request- they're rippers! Well, one of them is. The other is actually kind of mundane, if you're me! But that has teeth-checking fun, as well, so you know it's suitably violent.

I was just now sound asleep when I was awoken by a phone call (which was good, because I was not meant to be sleeping). After I had approximately a one-minute conversation with my sister, I turned on the light and rubbed my face and generally returned to full consciousness (well, full awake-ness) and began to remember fragments of the dream that had just been interrupted.

Most of the dream was already lost by this point, but the premise seemed to be that there was this Irish rock band that were essentialy the Cranberries, if not officially the Cranberries, whose latest album, or project, was to have a song about every place (town?) in Ireland.

This involved, in the first place, identifying every place in Ireland, which required a gigantic illuminated map in one of those rooms like you always see in movies about the space program or nuclear war, where there are long rows of desks facing a huge screen along one wall of a room. Except the only thing on this map was Ireland which was, in the dream, vast and uncharted, with lots of tiny towns that nobody had ever really been to.

At the particular moment of the dream when I woke up, the band was on some kind of radio program explaining that their song "O' Maigh Trareyha" was about a town that none of them had ever been to and no one they knew had ever been to and most people had never heard of. Someone had apparently called in to let them know that it existed, and they had found some independent verification that it was a real place and they had located it on the map (a tiny glowing dot on the giant screen, among lots of brighter dots) but basically no one had ever been there and the band just sort of had to imagine what this most-forgotten of tiny Irish towns was like.

This ties in a bit with a major recurring topic in my Travel Narratives and Ethnography class, about how no one ever really goes any where real, they only go to places that they imagine. Which is to say, if you go to Tahiti, there's no notion of seeing "the real Tahiti," you're always just going to find sort of what you expect to find there, some version of your own imaginary Tahiti.

The band was actually performing their song about O' Maigh Trareyha at the moment I woke up, and I had some dim notion of the song being exceptionally beautiful, although the words just seemed to be "O' Maigh Trareyah" song with dizzying gusto over and over again. Did I detect a slight pleading note? The spelling I've given here is approximate, although I could see it clearly in the dream. The issue of gaelic spelling seems to tie in to the fact that, just before I went to bed last night, I was reading something about, among other things, how hopeless it is for an English speaker to try to figure out how gaelic words are pronounced using Roman characters.

In any case, it occurred to me, on reflection that, however you might actually spell it in gaelic, the words that I heard in this song over and over again were, for all intents and purposes, "Oh, my tarea." Which is to say, "Oh, my homework." Which is, of course, what I should have been doing instead of napping.

As Freud would observe, dream distortion is the "guardian of sleep."
As Calvin would observe, "my dreams are getting way too literal."

Just when I thought life couldn't get any better! AQA has returned to znaddancemotherfucker.com and delivered great news: you can get any one question you like answered FOR FREE!

This is your chance, blog-readers! With the power of all of my readers combined, why, I could get.....up to FOUR questions answered! So what are you waiting for? Get over there! The secrets of the universe are waiting! Report all answers back to znaddamnyousirineedanswers!com

I've not been idle. Even though I have already used my free question some time ago, I got them to send a free one to my boss' cell, then snuck into his office, read it, and deleted it. These are the lengths I go to for fresh AQAs.

I've actually been wondering about this one for a while, and was going to put the question to you, the reader, because I've always believed that if you're ill, you should avoid exercise to let your body recuperate (which I've been doing with gusto). But my colleague Dan Solomons (whom everyone refers to as 'The Don', much to my amusement), who is ludicrously intelligent and seems like the sort of guy who'd know about these things, told me recently that going to the gym actually helped to fight colds, by, like, re-energising your metabolism, or something. Shows what he knows!

If you have a cold, does it make it better or worse if you go to the gym?

From AQA [63336]:

Exercising while you have a cold can cause cardiac rhythym problems. A better bet is to wrap up warm and go for a short walk.

Awesome! I'll do that.....on my way to Nandos.

I'm currently looking for somewhere to live, which means I spend the greater portion of my working day staring at the gumtree, looking for flats that fall into my very specific criteria: location, price, size, convenience, shower pressure, the usual.

However I'm finding that, while I'm reasonably flexible in all of these areas, I immediately discard any advert that contains the following heinous writing mistakes:

++ WRITING EVERYTHING IN CAPS!!! WITH LOADS OF EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!!!! CAUSE FLATS ARE SO EXCITING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
++ txt-msg spk whl typng. I can't even stand this in text messages, let alone on screen. Look, it's great that you've figured out that the letter 'c' sounds like the word 'see', likewise u = you. And I'm sure you're saving yourself some mighty precious seconds* by not having to type those two extra letters. But you also come across as a mouth-breathing moron.
++ and, well, and I apprciate i may be throwing black ketles here, but pretty much any knid of speling mistake. Except for 'thier'. Cause anyone could make that mistake, it's totally understandable. Hush.

I'm sure the people who write like this are great, friendly people, who are a lot of fun to live with. But if my first impression of you is: "Wow, this idiot can't even string a proper sentence together."; I don't have a lot of positivity about our future cohabitation prospects. Is that wrong?

d

First things first: I loved this movie, and came out with a really big grin on, just as I did coming out of Rushmore and The Royal Tenembaums, the directors previous two films, with which this film shares the same kind of deadpan, laconic humour, in which very little is laugh out loud funny, but there's an almost constant level of quiet bemusement. I found The Life Aquatic to be superior to both those films, because while they were straight drama-comedies, this film also contains elements of action, musical, and even (a smidgen) of sci-fi.

It's not often that the set of a film, particularly one set in contemporary times, will strike me as being particularly impressive, but I have to give special mention to the insanely cool set of this film. They've made a complete cross-section of the Belafonte (the ship the film is mostly set in) so that the camera can see into all the rooms. When I first saw this enormous set, all displayed at once, I assumed it was some kind of special effect in which they'd spliced various different rooms together. However, as the camera roams around the ship, often following characters as they travel from room to room, you rapidly realize that they've constructed the entire thing, from stem to stern and it's fantastic. A surreal effect that somehow slots in quite nicely with the often surreal comedy.

Apropos of surreal effects, the creature effects (which I've been told are CGI but for the life of me looked like stop-motion animation) are neatly done- everytime the crew descends below the surface of the ocean, they enter an obviously fake undersea world (sort of like a fish tank?), populated by these charming, bizarre little fish and, somehow, it works- it really complements the rest of the film, moreso than if they had used real undersea footage, or more convincing effects.

I also have to give a shout out to the film's soundtrack, which is composed almost entirely of David Bowie tracks, played acoustically in Portuguese by one of the cast members. While you get the sense that this is something of a running joke, it also fits in nicely with the rest of the bizarreness. There's also some awesome mad-synth tracks for the documentary scenes, which are hilariously fun. The only non-Bowie song is near the conclusion of the film, and I have to admit that, partially due to the context of the film, partially to the song itself, I found it incredibly affecting (and got a bit teary!). The song was Staralfur and it's by Sigur Ros, and (unless you're planning to see the film in the next week or so) I'd highly recommend that you download it and give it a listen, it's stunningly beautiful.

Right, so, in summary: surreal comedy, light romance, tragedy, pirates, hundreds of Siamese cats, great soundtrack, cool set, gunfights, submarines, this movie is great: go see.