Snow White Smackdown

As Hollywood is wont to do from time to time, two more than similar films are coming out quite close to each other next summer. We've had Armageddon vs Deep Impact battle for Asteroid Film Of The Year, Friends With Benefits vs No Strings Attached tussle for Friends-Who-Ride-Each-Other Film Of The Year and soon we'll have Mirror Mirror vs Snow White and the Huntsman bate the heads off each other for Snow White Film Of The Year. On one had, Mirror Mirror features Lily Collins (daughter of Phil!) and Julia Roberts as the princess and the evil Queen, while Kristen "I'm delighted to be a highly paid actress, no really I am" Stewart and Charlize Theron are squaring off and throwing dirty looks at them as their respective rivals.




Each film has a very different feel, Mirror Mirror is decidedly lighter, fluffier, funnier and Nathan Lane-ier, whereas Snow White and the Huntsman is an altogether darker, grittier and really rather deadly looking take on the story.


Lily's Snow White probably looks more like what you'd expected from a classic princess story, but Sourpuss Stewart definitely has the look of a girl who's about to do some damage rather than burst into song.

Sorry Julia, your red peacock ballgown loses out to Charlize's pointy black getup. Not least because she looks like she'd stab you in the face just for the craic.

In the Evil Queen category, Julia Roberts is playing her as a neurotic, insecure diva, which is all well and good, but to be fair Charlize Theron wipes the floor with her as a malevolent, properly wicked and scary witchy woman. She's eating someone's soul right out of their FACE in the trailer for flip's sake! No contest!


In the Obligatory Handsome Bastard corner, we have Armie Hammer with the big Disney prince head on him playing...twist!...the prince. The handsome bastard of Snow White and the Huntsman is none other than the Hunstsman himself, played by Kim from Home & Away. Or, y'know, Thor.


I have to say, I really like the look of both of these films. Snow White and the Huntsman looks great because of the big medieval style battles, the armour, the injection of darkness into a previously sweetened fairytale and the fact that Charlize's Evil Queen looks like she's going to be an utter DELIGHT to watch, what with the soul eating and milk bathing and general sultry divilment.


Whereas Mirror Mirror looks great because of the GIANT ASS DRESSES, the Nathan Lane comic relief and the fact that it's all so shiny and fun looking. It's also got Sean Bean in it as the king, which means he's probably going to die at some point, because it's Sean Bean and that's what he does in EVERYTHING. Seriously. Just watch THIS if you don't believe me. You just try to name something that he doesn't die in and I'll call you a damn liar.

Puts The Sexism Into Tea

There's a certain ad campaign of late that manages to instill a huge amount of annoyance and anger in me. It's not Ivan Answer (this time) and it's not even that awful, insipid "I love shopping.ie" radio jingle, even though that does send me into a panicked lunge for the mute button with a speed that could only be matched by my haste for the remote when the Hollyoaks theme tune starts.

But I digress somewhat. It's the most recent Lyons Tea tv and radio ads. Their whole "Richer Talk" campaign was all fine by me up until the point that they decided to air ads with such a passive-aggressively misogynist undercurrent that every encounter with them results in me thinking "FUCK YOU, LYONS TEA. FUCK YOU RIGHT IN THE EAR".



This is one of the tv ads in question. There's another one where the HILARIOUS Dad character makes a crack about his wife having the utter cheek to spend money on her hair. HA HA HA. Sure don't women only care about shoes and hair anyway! And if someone does decide to get her hair done, then OF COURSE she should be undermined in front of her child for doing so. HA HA FUCKING HA.

Fuckface.

Even worse is the radio ad that begins with Hilaro-Dad reading Mary Had A Little Lamb to his daughter, which prompts him to wistfully lament the fact that his white Ireland away jersey is now pink because "your mother" put it in the wash with red socks. Hey Mr. Dad, here's a revolutionary thought: why don't you do your own fucking washing in the first place and maybe then you won't be so traumatised you COCK.

In short, fuck you Lyons Tea Man.

Words With Friends

I actually meant to post this video ages ago, but was most likely distracted by something shiny. And/or chocolatey. Shiny chocolate, perhaps. The following video is for The Friend Song by EleventyFour. It was filmed on a drizzly Sunday in Rathmines, where the Bear and I joined an assortment of Eleventy's friends and partook in some frisbee throwing in the rain, eating so many Refresher sweets that our jaws were temporarily glued shut (that might just have been me, actually) and frantically miming our way through a game of charades.



The charades game was particularly fun, as I hadn't played it in years. The Bear and I weren't allowed to be on the same team though, as the others had decided to hold our track record of being really good at Cranium together against us and so we ended up on opposing teams. Those jerks. Each team was then given the task of coming up with the things the other team had to mime. Which means that it was ENTIRELY the Bear's fault when I pulled out a piece of paper for my turn, unfolded it and froze in horror.

THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES.

Are you fucking KIDDING ME. As I steeled myself for what was going to be the most embarrassing miming ever, two more friends of Eleventy's arrived, whom I've NEVER MET BEFORE IN MY LIFE. They sat down, joined a team each and looked at me expectantly from the couch.

And so I began.

Play....three words....first word....the!....third word....three syllables....

................

................

................

I had nothing. I was drawing a complete blank as to how I could possibly convey the word "monologues" with my increasingly erratic gesturing. With a resigned sigh, I signalled that I was moving on to the second word.

And pointed at my crotch.

They got it immediately. Thanks a lot Bear, you ASS.

Dial M For Moneypenny

I'm sure you're all aware by now that the next James Bond film is to be called Skyfall and that Javier Bardem will appear as a villain. All well and good, but what I was happiest to hear is that the (previously missing from the Daniel Craig reboot) character of Miss Moneypenny is back. Yay! English actress Naomie Harris is taking on the slinky secretary role, who turns out to have played the very cool Tia Dalma in two of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. Well, she was cool when she was a Jamaican voodoo priestess at least, I wasn't crazy about the part where she turns out to be the goddess Calypso, grows eighty feet tall and turns into thousands of crabs, but there you go. (Insert your own STD joke here. I won't judge you for it. Ahem.)


Apparently Moneypenny is based on a few different women that Ian Fleming knew. In his first draft of Casino Royale, she had a completely different name and was called Miss Pettaval, inspired by the director of MI6's personal assistant Kathleen Pettigrew. Another possible inspiration was Joan Astley, a pretty badass old girlfriend of Fleming's who ran Winston Churchill's Secret Intelligence Centre during the war and was renowned for being warm and welcoming when senior officers came to her office to view top secret papers.

The first actress to play Moneypenny was Lois Maxwell, who flirted her way through a massive fourteen Bond films with Sean Connery and Roger Moore. Although you may think Moneypenny is little more than a lovestruck assistant, the character is actually a Lieutenant in the Women's Royal Naval Service, so clearly she can kick some ass when she needs to.


Caroline Bliss took over the role of Moneypenny in the two Timothy Dalton Bond films, The Living Daylights and Licence To Kill. Bliss was a much younger actress, but hardly appeared in either film at all, with her role essentially reduced to a cameo. Boo.


When Pierce Brosnan became 007, the aptly named Samantha Bond took on the Moneypenny mantle in the next four films. I always had a soft spot for Moneypenny, particularly when I was in college and utterly sick of being single, as I identified with her as being the girl who never got the boy she liked. Of course, that's all changed now, but I was still disappointed when there was no sign of my girl in Craig's Casino Royale.


There were two other actresses that portrayed Moneypenny, but they're deemed unofficial, as the films weren't real Bond movies per se. Barbara Bouchet appeared in the 60s spoof Casino Royale as a frankly outrageously sexy sixties kitten style Miss Moneypenny and Pamela Salem played her in Never Say Never Again.

Look at Barbara here, for feck's sake. She's wearing what appears to be a see-through bejewelled nightdress when she's meant to be ON BUSINESS. MOST unprofessional. Get your head in the game, woman!

Apparently, the shiny new Miss Moneypenny will start out as an MI6 field agent, before becoming M's go-to girl, so it sounds like she'll be doing more then sitting at a desk looking pretty. A more than welcome update of the character, I'm sure you'll agree.

The Curious Case of Madame

Over the Halloween weekend, between watching copius amounts of films and a sunny Sunday morning trip to the Hellfire Club, the Bear and I went charity shop shopping along our usual route. On this particular venture, we were on a mission to find Ross O'Carroll-Kelly books for my brother, although seeing as this meant intently perusing the bookshelves of all the charity shops on Capel Street, we ended up with enough books for ourselves to almost break the plastic bag that held them. However, as we made our way through all the second hand James Pattersons, Alexander McCall Smiths, Patricia Cornwells and Cecelia Aherns (SO MANY Cecelia Aherns) in the first shop, a certain book in perfect condition grabbed my attention.

THIS book, to be precise:


So many questions. Such as the back to front Es and WHY? They bewilder me entirely. They make me want to shake the book until they rattle back into their rightful position. What's the deal with Miss Floating Cloaked Girl here, out of proportion with everything around her? And why is there a tiny glowing map of Ireland hovering above the larger of the confused Es? As if all that wasn't perplexing enough, check out the back cover.


What the HELL is going on here? Did they copy and paste the text in and then forget to finish it? Also, I hate to sound like a mean and snarky bitch here, but that author photograph is HILARIOUS and missing an exposed chest and gold medallion. I'm sorry.

Anyway.

Having replaced the book on the shelf after shaking my head in puzzlement at it for several minutes, I noticed another copy. Like the first, it was in no way second hand. The spine was flat and smooth, the pages unthumbed and the cover all shiny. I thought it was a bit unusual, but off we ambled to the next shop. And the next. And the next. There are at least five charity shops on Capel Street and this book was in EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. Multiple copies of it in fact. Scattered throughout the shelves, all of them in mint condition. It was only in the second shop that I decided to take a picture of each sighting in each shop. And check this out:


It was EVERYWHERE! It's all so MYSTERIOUS! Are they haunted books, planted in charity shops to trick the elderly and those who dig bargains into bringing one home and slowly take over the world with some manner of spooky book ghost mind control? Theories are more than welcome, but if anyone has Jessica Fletcher's number, you get her on the case quick smart before we're all doomed, ya hear?

Your Kids Are Gonna Love It

Way back in April, I was regaling you all with tales of a weekend spent cutting something like two hundred fish shapes out of coloured paper, sacrificing faithfulness to original film set design as my instinct to stay inside the lines while painting a banner took over and generally dancing till my feet were about to explode. It was all in aid of a terrifically fun video shoot for The Dead Flags and if you managed to somehow bypass me enthusing about the finished result on other quarters of the internet, well WORRY NOT.

But first some stills, as I'm super delighted with how the room looked in the final video and so glad that the wrist pains from all the scissors action and steady-handed letter painting totally paid off.


The Bear and I managed to pop up a fair bit in the video, jiving up a storm and doing our best not to trip over. There's also a bit where the lower half of my red dress looks quite cool and swishy, if I do say so myself.


Now, for your viewing and listening and Back To The Future loving pleasure, You Got It Wrong:

Day Of The Deadly

At this spooky time of year, when pumpkins are the decoration du jour and dressing as a sexy {insert random profession/ fictional character here} is the default option for far too many, the people of Mexico are gearing up for Día de los Muertos. On the 1st and 2nd of November, family and friends gather to honour those who have died, with sugar skulls and flowers playing a large part in the tradition. La Cavalera Catrina (The Elegant Skull), an etching from 1913 which portrays an upper class woman as a skeleton has since become a staple of Day of the Dead imagery and is one of the most popular figures associated with the traditional holiday. She's also a fantastic character to take on for our own autumnal celebration, Halloween.

The original 1913 etching and Catrina figurines. Eat your heart out, Tim Burton. What an odd and Halloween appropriate phrase that is.

There are some really beautiful takes on the Cavalera Catrina look, with the illusion of sewn lips and a painted skeletal face executed in a very elegant and decorative manner. It's almost like an intricately floral voodoo zombie look, with a bit of New Orleans Mardi Gras and gypsy fortune teller thrown in for good measure.


In terms of a Halloween costume, I'm determined to take it on some day, as it makes for a gorgeous and creative look and just going back to the unnecessarily sexy costumes, anything's got to be better than this, right?

I'm sorry to say that your eyes are not in fact deceiving you. That is indeed a "sexy" Brian from Family Guy costume. A SEXY VERSION OF A CARTOON DOG. STOP IT.

Fair City's Finest

You may remember that some time ago I designed EP artwork for the very lovely EleventyFour. Part of that design consisted of her new logo, a depiction of Eleventy driving a forklift against a Rubik's cube background in honour of her song Forklife, which concerns her stealing a forklift and using it to do good deeds.


Since then, the wheels of EleventyFour's plan for world domination have been well and truly set in motion, with her whimsical influence most recently reaching as far as...


FAIR CITY


I have been reliably informed that this charming young man is called Wayne. As someone who doesn't actually watch Fair City, I can only assume that he's something akin to Carrigstown's version of The Fonz.

Here we see Wayne heroically consoling his friend who is quite clearly distraught over his choice in cushion pattern. If Wayne had been there at the time, his cushions would be amazing. Because Wayne knows the entire Ikea catalogue off by heart.

Wayne about to rescue a barrel of puppies from rolling down a hill.

Considering I was excited to see something I designed on iTunes, I can safely say that it now pales in comparison to to the brilliance of SUPERWAYNE and his excellent choice in logo t-shirts.

Storm In A Cupcake

Girls bursting out of huge cakes is such a common trope in films and TV at this stage that I reckon if you wheeled a giant cake into a room full of people and it turned out to be an actual cake the whole way through, the disappointment would be palpable regardless of demographic. I'm certain of it. In fact, if anyone wants to bake a giant cake for me to prove my point, please go ahead and I definitely won't eat it all instead of doing what I said I would. Definitely.

Ladies in varying states of undress (or gender, in the case of South Park) have popped out of cakes in everything from Singin' In The Rain, Boardwalk Empire, Cheers and even Xena: Warrior Princess.


What immediately comes to mind for me though is Erika Eleniak and if the name doesn't ring a bell then simply saying "that scene in Under Siege" certainly should. There must be VHS tapes of Steven Seagal's finest work strewn across homes in which Erika's interrupted cake dance has been reduced to fuzzy static due to excessive pausing and rewinding.

There she is now, with nobody to look at her bottom only Casey Ryback and he's got a battleship to save so put some damn clothes on, woman!

Anyway, in case you've ever wondered where this propensity for oversized cakes with a sexy girl filling came from, allow me to inform you. Towards the end of the 19th century, Gilded Age New York was rife with ridiculously wealthy gadabouts and grande dames, all trying to outdo each other with hugely elaborate dinner parties and soirees for the city's elite. Mamie Fish, a legendary hostess with a flair for divilment once held a dinner in honour of a mysterious prince, only for her guests to arrive and discover that the prince in question was a monkey dressed in white tie and tails. Equestrian enthusiast CKG Billings celebrated the opening of his stables in 1903 with a dinner on horseback in the exclusive Sherry's restaurant. For real. A room in the restaurant was decorated to look like the countryside, complete with grass on the floor, waiters dressed for a fox hunt, sterling silver menus shaped like horseshoes and specially designed saddles that incorporated trays fitted to twelve live horses.

Look at these mad bastards! Steps up to the horses and everything.

However, the most notorious stunt by New York's wealthy ne'er-do-wells was what transpired the night of a stag party organised by Stanford White, a well known architect. The dinner was attended by a host of American impressionist painters, Wall Street brokers, photographers, illustrator Charles Dana Gibson (creator of the Gibson Girl) and badass inventor Nikola Tesla. Apparently the dinner was a twelve course affair, with four banjo players and four singers providing entertainment and two girls to pour the wine, a brunette for red and a blonde for white. Classy. When dessert rolled around, the singers began to chant "Sing a Song of Sixpence" as a huge pie was carried into the room. At the line "Was that not a dainty dish to set before the king?" sixteen year old Susie Johnson burst out of the giant pie, accompanied by four and twenty actual birds and danced up and down the table with a stuffed blackbird on her head, feathered toe rings on her bare feet and while some accounts claim she was dressed in sheer black gauze, other stories say she was "covered only by the ceiling".

An illustration that appeared in a newspaper afterwards. I see they went with the non-nudey version of the story.

Although the guests and staff were sworn to secrecy, the story eventually made its way to a newspaper office and what became known as the Pie Girl Dinner exploded, lifting the lid on the shenanigans of the city's VIPs, scandalising the rest of the town and setting a precedent for dramatic desserts that has endured and adapted all the way to now.

Fuck Yeah Daenerys Targaryen

So, Game of Thrones eh? The Bear and I have just rocketed through the first series in a matter of days and have now joined the hordes of beleagured fans waiting impatiently for the next season. Although it's a bit confusing, (e.g. Hang on, who were their parents? So, who's after dying? Wait, that's her BROTHER? That dirty BITCH!) it's also riveting and bloody and sexy and brilliant. As Trace Dogg so cleverly put it, "it's like Lord of the Rings but set in a brothel 48% of the time". There's many a character I want to punch in the face, due to them being such complete and utter BASTARDS all the time. However, there are also fantastically likeable characters such as diminutive chancer and charmer Tyrion Lannister, fiesty nine year old tomboy Arya Stark and my definite favorite (and flipping nightmare to spell) Daenerys Targaryen.


Aside from being the ethereal, silver-haired and otherworldly RIDEBAG that she is, I seriously loved her transition from fragile, subservient bride, taking shit from her dickhead brother, powerless to stop the events determining the course of her life, to kickass, fearsome tribal queen, taking no shit from nobody, as it were.

Are yeh startin'?

She's also well able to rock an ensemble that looks like it was made out of some manner of potato sack as well as she rocks flowing silky maxi dresses, a rather impressive feat, I'm sure you'll agree.


So she's ridiculously gorgeous, a fierce (in both the Tyra and regular sense) queen, has a killer wardrobe to boot and ALSO has a trusty troupe of sexy handmaidens for backup. One of whom is rather well versed in the art of fucking and with a quick spot of educational dry humping, instructs lovely Daenerys how to cowgirl-shag her way to authority. Handy handmaidens indeed.

Handmaidens....ASSEMBLE!

I won't go into the other reasons that she's the silvery bomb, as it would mean enormous spoilers for those of you who may not have seen it yet, but she's one ferociously badass lady and I can't believe I have to wait as long as I do for them to hurry the fuck up and make the second series.

You Got It Wrong

A few weeks ago I was delighted to be asked by Billy Flag to design an EP cover for The Dead Flags. Seeing as I had so much fun designing one for EleventyFour not so long ago, I jumped at the chance. The band wanted something a bit Hitchcock, a bit Saul Bass and a bit retro in style. After a few listens to the tracks I zeroed in on the idea of using hands in the design, as each song is linked by references to either hands, touching or holding. And here's what the result was:


The finished CD case is a much brighter blue than the photo suggests (empty cider cans from last night's Presidential debate drinking game are just about out of shot) and I'm really happy with how it turned out. The EP features the bouncy, fifties rock 'n roll-tinged title track You Got It Wrong, the supremely sing-a-long-able What's It All About and a terrific funk-drenched remix of Let's Start A Fire Tonight by electro sexfunk overlord Jack Samson.

It's already been clocking up mighty favourable reviews on Pop Culture Monster, Boob.ie and MutantSpace, but don't just take their collective words for it, come along to the launch gig in Whelan's on the 26th of October! If you click attending on the Facebook event page here you'll even get a discount on the admission price and you can hardly say fairer than that now, can you? Head over to their website for more tour dates and a listen to the tracks. They're a tremendously fun live band and I for one will be found in Whelan's on the 26th, drinking on a school night and dancing my socks off.

Stormageddon Style

During last week's episode of Doctor Who, while the Doctor and James Corden were dashing around the place dodging Cybermen, I noticed that baby Alfie (or Stormageddon for fellow nerds) had superb taste in rainwear. For a character who didn't utter a word, he managed to steal the show entirely thanks to the Doctor's ability to speak Baby and a dynamite choice of coat.

Baby Alfie working that star pattern.

Of course, this has nothing to do with the fact that I happen to own what is essentially THAT VERY COAT myself.

Me acting the maggot in my Dunnes raincoat after a bellyful of Odessa french toast.

You see what's happened here is that Alfie liked the look of my coat and got his own version, it's not that I dress like a giant baby. Just so's we're clear.