Marie Phillips

Dancing in the Street: Fame

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:10:57 +0000

This might not be the first dancing in the street scene, but it’s the first one that made an impression on me and made me really, really want to go to the kind of school where someone would pull up in a car outside and start playing some music, and we would all run out into the street and block traffic with our dancing. Alas, this never happened.

Watching it again now, I am mainly fascinated by the CLOTHES. Fame came out in 1980. This is what people were wearing in 1980. People in a film about a performing arts school, but even so, they are not aliens. Men, you should pay particular attention. Your current look could be spruced up a bit, I think, by some green satin micro-shorts. True, the whole thing looks like a Dalston hipster nightmare, but we could take this mainstream.

Dancing in the Street: Enchanted

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:12:00 +0000

Unless you have daughters of a certain age, chances are you haven’t seen Enchanted. I don’t have daughters of a certain age, but as there’s a part of me that remains forever twelve (same part that’s going to see The Muppets for the second time tomorrow) I have seen Enchanted, a few times, and this song is one of the highlights. Amy Adams plays a cartoon princess who is by magic transported to modern day real New York (I mean, I can’t remotely see why I might have taken an interest in this film) and who carries on doing her princess thing in the face of the cynicism of the New Yorkers around her. In this clip, she’s just tidied up Patrick Dempsey’s apartment using some adorable animal helpers - cockroaches, deformed pigeons and rats - and now she’s trying to help him find true love. The good people of Central Park can’t help but join in the song. I highly recommend this film, regardless of age, gender, and presence of daughters or sons.

Dancing in the Street: Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:42:15 +0000

And so begins my tour of great dancing in the street movie moments. We’re kicking off with Ferris because some of you may have been unlucky enough to see the unspeakably awful Superbowl advert featuring an adult Ferris Bueller taking a day off work. A more cynical, dead-behind-the-eyes, triumph of cash over soul stunt you have never witnessed, and I implore you not to look it up, even out of morbid curiosity, because once seen, it can never be forgotten. And quite aside from anything, it squanders an idea which might have made a beautifully judged, painfully nostalgic full-length feature film. Which I would have written if anybody had let me. Too late now.

Here is the original Ferris, taking time during his famous Day Off to join in a parade for, if I recall (central park in fall), German culture. This is wonderful for many reasons: the lovely double whammy of segueing Danke Schoen into Twist and Shout; the construction worker boogieing on the scaffolding; the window cleaner swinging his arse in mid air; the group of people formation dancing on the steps, and the way they first come in so smoothly that they look like they’re on rails; the women on the float shimmying backwards, arms out; and a great piece of dialogue between Cameron and Sloane about college, which reminds me so much of that awful time at the end of school when you knew you were going to have to get on with life, but what life?

Here is it. Enjoy.

The Muppets

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:18:00 +0000

The other day I tweeted saying that I’d been to see a preview of the new Muppet film and it had moved me to tears. Later I was talking to a friend who saw the tweet and assumed I was joking. In fact no, I wasn’t joking, and neither was the girl I went with who if anything cried more than I did, and nor were probably a fair bit of the rest of the audience, if only I’d thought to get up, shine a torch and have a look around.

The new Muppets film - simply titled The Muppets - is, as you’d expect, fun and funny and madcap and capery. It is also, if you are of a certain age (I’d say approximately 35-45), desperately sad. Gary (Jason Segal) and Walter are brothers, the closest of friends and similar in every way except that Walter is a Muppet. To celebrate their ten year anniversary, Gary takes his girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) to LA, and Walter comes along to visit the studio of his beloved Muppet Show. Only the Muppets have disbanded and the studio has fallen into disrepair, and is about to be bought by an evil oil baron. Can Walter get the Muppets back together for one memorial show to save the studio?

That’s the story, anyway. What the film is really about - for we grown-up Muppet fans of yore - is the loss of childhood and of innocence, the way that things which seemed so important when you were a child cease to matter in the cold reality of adult life, and how money trumps art every time. And it’s about how growing up is hard and entails hard choices (see the film’s climactic power ballad ‘Man or Muppet?’). I’m still not joking by the way. This film isn’t really for kids, although kids will love it. It’s for parents who have no idea how they became parents, aside from the obvious stuff they teach you at school (until Nadine Dorries gets her way, anyhow). It is a film that could only have been made by people who truly love Muppets, and can’t believe that the Muppet Show isn’t still on every Saturday night. If you are one of us, and you are not weeping by the time Kermit and Piggy are finally reunited to sing Rainbow Connection, I am in serious doubt as to the validity of your soul.

Anyway, heartache aside, it’s brilliant. It’s got the hands of Flight of the Conchords all over it, a perfect match of lo-fi lovability past and present. James Bobin, the director, directed FotC, and Bret MacKenzie wrote the songs (the Oscar-nominated ‘Man or Muppet?’ is of particular genius, but please don’t look it up before you go - you will spoil the surprise). Crazy fan Mel turns up as Animal’s anger management coach - one of a number of often hilarious cameos which I will also not spoil by listing here. As with Conchords, the humour is gentle but genuine. I love the characteristic periodic knocking down of the fourth wall - (Statler and Waldorf: “That sounds like it’s going to be a really important plot point.” “I hope so, otherwise I’ve just bored the entire audience”). And there is dancing in the street! (In future blogs, I intend to do a series of favourite dancing in the street moments from films. Dancing in the street moments are basically what propels me from liking to loving a film. I am a total sucker for them.)

Here’s the trailer:

Finally a quick shout out to the first ever London Comedy Film Festival who organised the screening and were kind enough to invite me along. Loco exists to shine a spotlight on comedy films (as you might expect) which tend to be overlooked in event season in favour of weighty, serious work. As well as the film festival, they run year-round education programmes for aspiring comedy writers, and as such are a very good thing indeed.

Attention North Londoners! For the next fortnight, the Book...

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:42:34 +0000

Attention North Londoners! For the next fortnight, the Book Barge floating bookshop will be docked on the Grand Union canal between Angel and Hoxton, about five minutes east of the Angel entrance. On the scale of One to Cool, it scores an eleven.

Letters of Note: Nothing good gets away

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:46:00 +0000

Letters of Note: Nothing good gets away:

Read it and weep (in a good way.)

(NB click the title to get through to the link)

The Iron Lady

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 19:48:37 +0000

My expectations of The Iron Lady were pretty low - I only went because friends were going, and for lovely Harry Lloyd (who was a delightful Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations and did a memorable turn as a villain in one of my favourite Doctor Who two-parters, Family of Blood.) Usually I’m a Meryl Streep fan too, but I wasn’t sure I could take her Thatcher seriously having seen Jennifer Saunders as Meryl as Thatcher in Strike! (astonishingly the whole episode is available on 4od via YouTube here).

In fact I really enjoyed it. It’s a beautifully-made and, particularly, beautifully-performed film - Streep is as good as they say, and I only got an attack of the Saunders in one scene, when Maggie’s at the ballot box. The supporting cast are all fantastic too. (Harry Lloyd as young Denis is as edible as hoped. What a smile.) I loved the structure of the film, which is centred on Thatcher’s decline into senility, and the general effort made to show her as a human being, wife and mother as well as politician.

But at first it seems weirdly, perversely pro-Thatcher. To the point that whenever there is any criticism of her - on the TV, say - it is talked over or switched off. Even those who love her acknowledge that she is an incredibly divisive figure, and it just seemed so one-sided. But because of the framing device, this is Thatcher’s story as Thatcher remembers it herself in her old age: where she is the heroine, the centre of everything, the saviour of the country, pioneering feminist, great war leader and so on. She is the only female MP we ever see, even though historically there were others. The British public are only ever shown as crowds - greeting her with adoration or rioting: rabble who need a firm hand. She is frequently found at the very centre of circles of surrounding men. Denis is the perfect, loveable, bumbling househusband, with no visible work or life of his own. Carol (in the past) is little more than a petulant teen. Mark is only ever seen as an adorable child and never the weak, embarrassing adult he grew up to be. Any criticism, as I mentioned, is deliberately muted, obscured or erased. And when she finally leaves Downing Street, the staff gather and weep. This is Thatcher by Thatcher: we are presumably not meant to take this version literally.

The problem is that, although the Thatcher doing the remembering is senile, and memories are fallible at the best of times, there are very few explicit indications that the way she remembers it might not be exactly the way that it was. The lack of female MPs is one, a moment where the elderly Thatcher walks into a cabinet meeting in the past is another. There is some horrifying archive footage from riots showing police brutality that is at least seen, even if never mentioned. Aside from that, there is no hint that we should interrogate this version of events. You only know to do it if you already have some knowledge of Thatcher. If you don’t, you get little help here.

What we gain from this approach is sympathy. Thatcher is not a heartless ogre. She feels. She cries. The portrayal of her dotage, in which she struggles to rid herself of the comforting hallucination that Denis is still with her, is a moving depiction of the loneliness and fear of anyone’s old age.

What we lose is rigour. Does this film have anything interesting to say about Thatcher, other than that she was a human being with feelings, which I think all but the most virulent of Thatcher-haters would concede? There’s almost no attempt to interrogate the controversies of her leadership at all - the miners’ strike, sinking of the Belgrano etc are presented, but never explored in any depth. Any time there is a risk that we might doubt Maggie, the stirring music comes on and she makes a speech about the good of the nation, and you’re encouraged to think she did the right thing under difficult circumstances. That’s how Maggie might want to remember it, but what about the rest of us? The Thatcher years deserve a complex treatment - not hagiography, not hatchet job - and they don’t get that here.

In the end, I think I’d have enjoyed this an awful lot more if it had been fiction.

Happy New Year!

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:25:29 +0000

Here are some of the things I am doing to motivate myself this year. This is not a comedy list, by the way. It is for reals.

1. I read a book called 18 minutes. It didn’t take me so very much longer than 18 minutes to read. Also, it is the only self-help book (but business self-help, so that’s OK, I swear) which ends with a chapter telling you to ignore most of what it said, which really saves on guilt, as I was planning to anyway. In any case, the bits that I did pick up on include not only making a to do list every morning, which is obvious-ish, but also deciding what I’m going to ignore that day, which isn’t. I am getting so much stuff efficiently ignored, it’s great.

2. I bought a diary where the day sections aren’t too big and that’s where I write my daily to do lists. That way there isn’t enough room for the list to be too long. So I try to do less and I get everything done.

3. I made my browser homepage a picture of some kids jumping into the sea, to remind me to just get on with whatever it was I opened my browser to do. Previously it was the Guardian homepage = very distracting.

4. I don’t switch on my phone or check my email until after I’m up and dressed. Somehow I’d got into the habit of spending an hour on Twitter in my PJs before doing anything else. Not conducive to productivity, although very conducive to getting cross on an empty stomach.

You guys: it’s, like, TOTALLY changed my life. For three whole days so far. I’ve written a thousand words every day, tidied the house, except not all of the house because I decided to efficiently ignore* the mess in my study, made soup, sent some emails, made some appointments, spilled soup, cleaned up soup, not that those were on the list but these things happen, updated my blog, ate soup, bought avocados, AND MORE.

Let’s check in later in the year to find out if I am still doing ANY of those things.

*Did you know that split infinitives are no longer officially considered to be grammatically incorrect? True. Really. True.

Strangely appropriate name for a place specialising in fake tans...

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:52:16 +0000

Strangely appropriate name for a place specialising in fake tans and nails.

As opposed to?

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:16:49 +0000

As opposed to?

The Devil Gets All The Best Tunes

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 10:01:05 +0000

Like musicals? Like me? Like me in musicals? Hey presto!

I am in this musical which is on at the Drill Hall, London from December 13th-16th. (If you want to be sure of getting tickets, the date to aim for is Thursday 15th.) So, for you Warhorses fans out there, is Robbie, and many other of our regular collaborators (not that we’re Vichy France or anything.) It is written not by me or Robbie but by people who write stuff of a remarkably similar sensibility (take a bow, Kate Ferguson and Sue Pearse). Instead of Greek Gods in modern times, or chatty Napoleonic horses, this is Faust in the 1960s. I don’t think it’s crazy talk to say that if you like one, you’ll like t’other. Also, this one has SONGS. I totally think you should come see it, like, totally. And then buy me a gin and tonic in the bar after, with ice and a slice.

The Drill Hall website is a leeeetle beeeeet uncooperative, so if I were you I’d book tickets on their phone line which is 020 7307 5060. That is what I would do.

See you all there, including those who live in Canadia.

Thank you!

Naked Warhorses

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 17:19:31 +0000

Robbie is bloody clever and has figured out how to upload Copenhagen and Marengo’s Gay Times piece onto our Warhorses blog. I got sent it too, but can’t even figure out how to rotate it so it faces the right way up. Anyway, Copenhagen and Marengo are guest columnists in this week’s Gay Times and we hope you enjoy.

In other Warhorses news, our book is close to fully funded, which means that with a few more pledges from you good people it will actually see the light of day. (It is being funded by advance sales, not in the usual way by people buying it after it’s out. This means that if you were thinking of buying it, now would be the best possible time. This reminds me that I need to buy a copy for my mum.) This also means that Robbie and I are putting the finishing touches on the text. THIS means that if you have a burning question that you would like answered in the book, you only have one week left to email it to warhorses@unbound.co.uk. Remember, if we do answer your letter we will upgrade your purchase, so for example, if you have bought the e-book, you will get a hardback copy. If you haven’t bought anything we probably won’t answer your question. THAT’S ECONOMICS.

(That might not be economics. I don’t fully understand economics.)

(In more brackets: there are a few glitches on the Unbound site, which we have helpfully detailed over on the Warhorses site, along with reassurances. Well Robbie has. People who follow both Robbie’s blog and mine might not be astonished to know which one of us updates the Warhorses blog more frequently.)

Superb(ums)

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:06:19 +0000

kevinbolk:

As promised, here’s the Avengers parody (namely of this promo image of the movie) I’d been working on. Those are some strong male characters. Am I right, ladies?

Here’s the original promo shot for The Avengers:

Read More

LOVE this - live action title sequence for Ulysses 31 by...

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 17:55:24 +0000

LOVE this - live action title sequence for Ulysses 31 by dermotcanterbury.

The Killing 2

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 17:48:59 +0000

A weekend of retro pleasures: teaching at my old school, hanging out with my sister and her kids in the seaside town where we used to go for family holidays, shopping in charity shops, playing Simon Says, the yearly ritual of getting wound up at the Old Toupeed Man / Sexy Young Woman presentation combo of Children in Need, and watching The Killing - oh, those heady days of earlier in 2011.

Oh, The Killing 2 aka Frobrydelsen 2! Oh, plot device allowing Sarah Lund the chance to wear the same jumper every day again! Oh, the implausible-suspect-of-the-week, dismisssed-the-following-week structure! Oh, the cruel tease of reproducing the Troels / Morten / Ree triumvirate, only casting a fat moustachioed walrus in the place of sexy Troels! Oh, the other cruel tease of hiring some not-Troels but will-do eye candy and then making him criminally insane! Oh, the fun of thinking I can speak Danish! Oh, takk! Oh, kaff! Oh, the Copenhagen rain! Oh, the shaven-haired strong sensitive types of the Copenhagen police department! Oh, those Danish prisons and their sex sofas! (Really?) Oh, Danish children who are all blond! Oh, emotionally-charged scenes played out while folding laundry in tastefully decorated Danish apartments! Oh, the attempts to make the negotiation procedures of Danish coalition politics thriller-levels of exciting! Oh, the pleasing feeling of an obsession taking grip yet again!

Yes, I miss Troels (Troels!) and Theis and Pernille, and the way the Danes pronounce Nanna Birk Larson, but Sarah Lund is back and more Lundy than ever (I particularly treasured her taciturn response to Strange’s in-car chit-chat), and with any luck the disparate plotlines will cohere into something as gripping as last year but without the nonsensical ‘forget everything you’ve heard so far’ pay-off (looks like Sarah’s been dumped by her fiance, so at least we won’t get any more spurious ‘profiling’). Also so far: no puppy in a box. That’s got to be good.

What’s everybody thinking so far? Do we have a murder suspect yet? Poised blonde psychiatrist? Colonel Dad? Reverend Green in the library with the lead piping?

Warhorses of Downloads (and books and trekking)

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 19:00:34 +0000

Hey gang! For all of you who can’t believe you missed Warhorses of Letters, or who want to listen to it again and again and again, you can now download the lot on iTunes.

Meanwhile I am busy writing jokes for the book. Robbie hasn’t approved them yet, but I think he’s going to like the one about the Mexican-American telecoms engineer. Or maybe he won’t. If you buy the book and it’s not in there, he probably didn’t. Did you know you can submit questions for the book by emailing them to warhorses@unbound.co.uk? If you did that while we were still writing the book - in the next couple of weeks, say - we would be particularly likely to answer them. Then, if we do answer them, we will upgrade your purchase - so if you paid to have lunch with us, we will take you pony trekking. Or, as seems more likely, if you paid for an ebook, we’ll give you a hardback.

What’s that I hear you ask? Will there be a second series? No decision has been made. But I really really bloody well hope that there will be. Playing it cool, as you can see…

Strictlywatch 2011: Apology

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 12:41:00 +0000

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted a Strictlywatch for this week. This is because I have finally had enough. After fast-forwarding all of Bruce, all of Tess, and all of the training footage, getting irritated with the use of props, being baffled by the inconsistency of the judges’ comments, and being bored by a large proportion of the dances, I realised that I no longer care enough to find funny things to say about this. So unless something dramatic happens, there won’t be any more Strictlywatch. There won’t actually be any more Strictlywatching. I might go on Youtube for Jason and Chelsee but that’s not really worth a blog post. I’m sorry to disappoint, but there are so many other things I could and would rather be doing, up to and including nothing.

I was going to recommend Why Miss Jones for all your Strictly Blogging Needs, but it looks like she isn’t bothering this week either. Which says a lot, I reckon.

Scramble

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:46:02 +0000

So this is fun. My iPhone has scrambled my data. When I listen to Summer Camp, I get the cover of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. For Flight of the Conchords, Devandra Banhart. For Hello Saferide, Crowded House. And when I texted my cleaner to ask her to change the sheets, I got a very confused reply from the director of the musical I’m in. (Which musical? This one: www.drillhall.co.uk/pl389.html)

I can’t foresee anything that could go wrong as a result of this, in any kind of embarrassing way.

Anyone know how I might fix it?

who run the world?

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:30:50 +0000

According to Tears for Fears, everybody wants to run the world (‘Everybody Wants To Run The World’, 1986). Scrutiny of the lyrics, however, reveals that they are notably cagey on the subject of who actually does run the world. I can only conclude that it is Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal, ie Tears for Fears themselves, who run the world, only they would rather that we didn’t know. If this seems far-fetched, do bear in mind that it’s a very very mad world (‘Mad World’, Tears for Fears, 1982.)

Strictlywatch 2011: Culottes Rule

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:19:18 +0000

Well. This is embarrassing. How can I - self-professed Strictly expert - have failed to realise that the Culottes Rule would be enacted this week, in which any female dancing in culottes is automatically voted off the competition? Lulu, OF COURSE, was the one to go. Only getting her grandchildren into the training room could have saved her. Meanwhile I have to go back to Strictly School for rehabilitative training. My apologies for letting you down on this matter.