Miral
Julian Schnabel has more than impressed, actually he has excelled in his past features, all biopics of wildly varied personalities and very different nationalities. First there was his contemporary, and fellow New Yorker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, for whom he made 1996’s ebullient Basquiat. He followed up with an Oscar-nominated performance from Javier Bardem in the Cuban-set Reinaldo Arenas biography, Before Night Falls (2000), before picking up more Academy award nominations and the Best Director gong at Cannes with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).
Now Schnabel has transported his considerable skill to the Middle East. And unfortunately, it is with little or no impact. Too poorly informed to be a serious political film, too aware of its own possible significance in having any impact, and too clumsily written to be a comprehensive biography, Miral is simply a disappointment for what could have been a great cinematic statement. It’s like Schnabel finally wants to claim an Oscar for himself, by making a film that looks brave but only on the surface.
22 Oct 2010
Films opening today in London
Benda Bilili !
Africa United
Alpha and Omega
Easy A
Legend of The Guardians : The Owls of Ga Hoole
Mary & Max
Paranormal Activity 2
Red
22 Oct 2010
US president Barack Obama makes It Gets Better video
Dan Savage, our agony uncle, has a new supporter for his It Gets Better Project, one Barack Hussein Obama.
David Cameron, whaddya think?
UPDATE
Here’s Dan Savage’s reaction:
UPDATE 2
The BBC has done a story on It Gets Better.
22 Oct 2010
Sea Of Bees
A nice wispy, echoing piece of emo-folk from Sea Of Bees today. Sounds a bit like a Devendra Newsom would, if that were a real person.
22 Oct 2010
Snipe Top 5: The best of the week
This week Snipe bigged up Hunter S Thompson, a clock that looks like an eye, the most interesting buses in town, and Pepys on Twitter. Check out what you missed.
Messed up elections in the Tower Hamlets style
London’s coolest clocks
Tourism for cheapskates
The city’s best online history resources
22 Oct 2010
22 Oct 2010
22 Oct 2010
How to date European men by a very annoying American
As a woman with a healthy interest in men – well that’s if you count my current obsession with fucking a guy anally with a strap-on – I’m always on the lookout for sound advice from other women of the world to guide me through the minefield of gender relations. The truth is I haven’t had much action of late – perhaps blurting out the aforementioned obsession five mintues after saying hello to a new man accounts for my current dry spell? – ‘dry’ did you see what I did there? It’s so confusing, men are always whining about the games women play but tell them straight what you’re thinking and they run for the hills! What’s a girl to do? After a good long think I recently decided that I need to become less intimidating, less ‘full-on’ – I must cultivate coyness! Yes, that’s it! I must affect a girlish innocence so as not to scare away the fragile males of London. I must learn not to embody what a Jane Austin character once observed was the most unflattering trait a young lady could possess – ‘conceited independence’.
My quest for help began with the obligatory internet search and I did, I am pleased to report, find much of interest, except that it is all a bit ‘Cosmo’, all a bit, ‘you can demand what you want in bed’ which, as I have discovered, simply frightens off the modern man, at least the ones I want to meet. Oh yes, I know in some quarters binge drinking is the thing and anything goes but I want a guy with a certain measure of discernment and I fear this type’s ardour may cool after he’s seen me pissing in the gutter.
As I have revealed, even speaking my mind on sex has them making their excuses. But I have seen the light!
But could I find a coyness guide? I could not. Why can’t my sisters in the advice business accept that we must flatter them before we fellate them? Yes, we must laugh at their jokes with a giggle like the tinkling of fairy bells remembering never to crack a joke ourselves – so unfeminine, and we must look away frequently when we converse with them as though the strength of their gaze is simply too overwhelming for us.
Continuing my search I happened upon what I can only describe as a miracle! God works in mysterious ways and in my desperation I was offered the gift of author Katherine Chloé Cahoon. Miss Cahoon is a vision of the kind of non-threatening charm I now aspired to. Dressed like a late 30-something Alice in Wonderland complete with hairbands and pastel-shaded garb she exudes a cloying coyness I know men will find irresistable if only I can emulate it. Katherine is all the more astonishing because she is American. Yes, the land of such blatant hussies as Madonna and Samantha from Sex and the City! But she has risen above all this to emerge as a paragon of prudence. Her book, The Single Girl’s Guide to European Men has been reincarnated as humorous video snippets (see above) packed full of realistic advice for her stateside sisters but is also useful for us Britishers in that it gives a refreshing outsider’s take on how to interact with the males of multi-cultural London. We learn that what all of them want above everything else is ‘romance’ I knew it! But the most invaluable aspect of the videos is the example of Katherine herself. Sashaying down stone steps as if she’s trying to keep a tennis ball between her thighs she would have Miss Jay from America’s Next Top Model squealing with delight. And the voice! It’s mesmerising! A slow drawl one might use when talking to a particularly dense five year old is exactly what’s needed when reassuring a man of his superiorty.
After numerous viewings I was ready to try out my new fragrant persona on the unsuspecting men of London. Last Friday night was the occasion. Tottering into a swanky bar in heels rather than a pub in biker boots was empowering and I noticed immediate attention from the males present. I slid onto a stool next to a well-built young gentleman who was very appreciative of my simpering tone as I accepted his offer of a drink. I took a modest sip and then, with studied shyness as he leaned in, asked him….well, I meant to ask him if he went to the gym a lot he had such big muslces, but somehow what came out was ‘have you ever thought about being fucked anally by a woman with a strap-on?’ Damn! I was doing so well! I guess I just can’t take the ‘cock’ out of ‘coquette.’
22 Oct 2010
After the spending review, Guy Fawkes had the right idea, says the Demon Blogger of Fleet Street
In my mind I can see David Cameron and George Osborne reading George Orwell’ s prophetic classic 1984 and laughing maniacally, like petrol-huffing retards, when they come to the line, “ If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
“ Our boots! Our boots! Our boots!” Cameron and Osborne chant, gleefully high-fiving.
When the details of the government’ s Spending Review were divulged to Lady Thatcher, on Tuesday, the former Prime Minister got so excited she managed to pop a hard-on (sans Viagra) for the first time in donkey years. So excited was Thatcher that she decided to celebrate by giving her Cuban pool-boy, Pedro, the kind of Rasputinian ass-thrashing she hasn’ t administered since the glory days of the Falklands War, then scurrying down the pub to knock back a half dozen pints before rushing up to Highgate Cemetery and pissing all over Karl Marx’ s grave.
Alas for Thatcher’ s poor, deprived Pedro, when the old battleship attempted to get out of her wheelchair to begin the hunt, she fell on the floor, face first, and broke her dick. Thatcher is now recovering in a private hospital bed in Belgravia. Although heavily sedated, Thatcher awakens from time to time, points a gnarled finger at all in attendance and cackles, “ You’ re all gonna get it now, you pathetic fuckin’ worms! Do you hear me? Every last fuckin’ one of you!”
What looked to be, during Thatcher’ s reign, the beginnings of a protracted war of attrition between the equestrian class and the filthy tax-paying rabble has fizzled into a let them eat cakewalk for the gentried overlords of Bumblefuck.
While France’ s Lumpenproletariat threaten to march Emperor Sarkozy to Madame La Guillotine for his cheeky attempt to up the retirement age to 62, Britain’ s lower castes seem more concerned about Wayne Rooney’ s comical debauches than they are about the fact that they now stand at the brink of a new age of feudalism and indentured servitude that will be ushered in courtesy of their silent complicity. It seems that the spirit of Maximilien Robespierre lives on in France, while the ghost of Oliver Cromwell wanders this soggy island, completely ignored. For shame, Britannia, for shame.
As Cromwell and the Roundheads vomit in their graves over this betrayal of their people-power revolution by our elected representatives, the Kingdom’ s union leaders huddle and ponder just how this latest and greatest salvo in the perpetual war on the poor can somehow be turned to their own personal benefit, wilfully oblivious to the lessons being taught in the dog shit littered streets across the Channel.
Even the decrepit old Queen and her reptilian Court are guffawing to themselves over the savage attack on the neutered masses by Cameron and Osborne. One day, not long from now, the neutered masses may even demand to once again be ruled by monarchs who, unlike the Prime Minister and Chancellor, understand the sanctity of nobleese oblige.
Should that day come, the cold-blooded Windsors will undoubtedly celebrate by once again digging up Cromwell’ s grave, reattaching his severed head, hanging him in chains and beheading his despised, treasonous corpse, an act that will surely elicit wild cheers and whoops of cacophonous laughter from the Emerald Isle and the highlands of bonny Scotland.
It would, in many respects, make a fitting opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympic Games in no-longer-working class East London.
The audacity of Cameron is unparalleled. To stand before the nation and attempt to win the affection, support and loyalty of the beleaguered and trampled-underfoot poor by claiming that his own baby daughter sleeps in a cardboard box is such a heinous, scurrilous, and transparently absurd fib that he should be chased from 10 Downing and banished to Canada forever more. That incredible whopper could only have been dreamt up by a soulless spin doctor who inhales great blasts of nitrous oxide while communing with Joesf Goebbels.
Cardboard box? Pffftttt. STF up! Why didn’ t you also say that baby Cameron was born in a manger, you Nazi bastards?
As we approach another Guy Fawkes Day, perhaps it’ s time we admit that he had the right idea, although for all the wrong reasons.
The horror. The horror.
22 Oct 2010
London agenda for Friday 22 October
London agenda for Friday 22 October
1. Watch the doc, Histories of Hatred in Bloomsbury [Le Cool]
2. Uunderstand the gender politics of Sharia law at The Stoning Of Soraya M. [Run Riot]
3. Consider this a cultural anthroplogical study: Trouble Vision 2nd Birthday [Spoonfed]
22 Oct 2010
Snipe Highlights
Some popular articles from past years
- London has chosen its mayor, but why can’t it choose its own media?
- The five best places in London to have an epiphany
- An interview with Desiree Akhavan
- Margaret Thatcher statue rejected by public
- 9 poems about London: one for each of your moods
- A unique collection of photos of Edwardian Londoners
- Silencing the Brick Lane curry touts could be fatal for the city's self-esteem
- The five spookiest abandoned London hospitals
- Nice Interactive timeline lets you follow Londoners' historic fight against racism
- Hope and despair in Woolwich town centre
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