The Guardian has its usual prize for bad sex in fiction up for grabs. Notable presence: that Giles Coren off The F-Word. Oh dear. That’s some mighty bad writing, Giles.
Year: 2005
Layer Cake’s success nothing to do with James Bond?!
No surprise: Layer Cake is doing good trade in the DVD market in the US after doing bad box office. Who’d have thought the one recent movie starring the next James Bond would begin to do well once distributors started publicising that fact?
Surprise: The article in Slate pointing out this phenomenon singularly fails to implicate James Bond in this and instead tries to put it down to the movie itself.
Bigger surprise: Apparently, Americans can’t cope with cockney accents and can only deal with approximately one-third of the dialogue.
Seriously? Weird. It’s not that hard. One of the easier British accents out there. Try Glaswegian if you want a hard accent: cockney’s a doddle. Not that the faux London accents on display in Layer Cake were anything to really test your ability to understand British accents. They were actors, darling, not proper salt-of-the-earth Londoners, love.
A critique of the Washington mall
Slate’s How Good Is the Washington Monument? is an interesting but brief look at the monuments of the Washington Mall. It’s jam-packed with facts and veers occasionally into Pseuds’ corner, but is an interesting re-evaluation of works that most people take for granted now.
The Power of Nightmares hits the US
Just in case you missed The Power of Nightmares on the BBC last year, Salon is offering a handy summary so that Americans get to know what it was all about. The review’s mainly positive and clarifies the many distortions of Curtis’ arguments that have appeared in the media.
Events
Muso fun
This piece of viral marketing on behalf of Virgin Digital has been doing the rounds, but it’s fun enough that I’m willing to put it here. There are 72 bands in the picture (eg Guns n Roses bottom left). Can you find them all? Click on the picture for the full size version.
