An Ugly start and a tough Break

Ok ok ok, I know it's a horribly punny title. But while I work on the multiple entries regarding my recent trip to NY, I wanted to pause and discuss the return of two of my favourite shows from last season.

In the UK, we don't usually start the US imports until January at the earliest as the crazed hiatuses American networks take means starting in the new year means we can run the season uninterrupted and finish only a little later than the US. But some channels here have brokered new "no delay" deals with networks in the US and we now get some of the shows very shortly after the US airdate. So two weeks before I left, Prison Break started here and the day I left, Ugly Betty returned.

Now, I awarded Betty my show of the year last year, but was furious at the unnecessarily grim season finale, especially the possible death of Santos. So you can imagine how much I fumed at the mean mean MEAN trick they pulled in the opening episode. So fucking cruel. They gave Santos such a great arc and made him so very sweet so WHY did they kill him off? While it was, in my opinion, entirely evil to do what they did in the opening episode, at least it gave Kevin Alejandro some closure (and I guess also left the door open for future appearances EVEN IF HE IS DEAD!).

The same cannot be said for poor Sarah Wayne Callies on Prison Break. Dr Sara Tancredi was easily my favourite character on the show (the other, Paul Kellerman met an expected death at the end of the last season). She was a much needed reality check in a totally ludicrous show and I just loved her. Well, apparently Ms Callies had herself something of a falling out with the producers of the show which led to her not returning for this season at all. A double in a wig was used for the few scenes Dr Tancredi was in before she was killed off, her head delivered in a box, which presumably has Andrew Kevin Walker talking to his lawyers.

Both shows have returned only to disappoint and depending on how they play out, I may not stick with them. What a shame.

Back to life, back to reality

Well, got home yesterday morning from two fun filled weeks in NYC. I took a few pics here and there and I will be uploading them with more detailed entries over this week. Watch this space.

Back in the US, back in the US, back in the US of A

Well here I am, back in the Big Apple for two weeks to take the city by storm. More likely I'll just spend a fortune and eat myself into a coma when I'm not watching a show or a concert, but hey.

So glad I have nothing show type booked for today so I can be mildly jetlagged and hang out with friends which is just fine with me. The flight was fine, I read a book called The End Of Mr Y which I only started on the plane and it's SO FUCKING GOOD I only have 50 pages left as I pretty much devoured it whole. Great book. Only thing I could have done without was the passive aggressive guy in front of me who kept turning round and throwing me pointed looks every time my knees brushed the back of his seat. I'm tall and there's no leg room. Deal with it.

In other news it's insanely hot in the city. When I landed, I thought it was the middle of August rather than the start of October. Today is roughly the same too. Madness.

PJ Harvey, I love you.

Attended PJ Harvey's solo acoustic performance at the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday night. It was, without question, the most amazing concert I have ever been to. She played:

To Bring You My Love
Send His Love To Me
When Under Ether
The Devil
White Chalk
Man-Size
Angelene
My Beautiful Leah
Nina In Ecstasy
Electric Light
Shame
Snake
Big Exit
Down By The Water
Grow Grow Grow
The Mountain
Silence


Rid Of Me
Water
The Piano
The Desperate Kingdom Of Love


It was 85 minutes of utter joy and adoration that also left me wide eyed and slack jawed at just how fucking talented she is. Her vocal range, the amount of instruments she can play, it's truly staggering. She was warm and funny when chatting to the audience too, which was really lovely, in particular when she broke her drum machine that she'd had fixed specially for the gig. I'm kicking myself for not getting tickets for her NY gig on October 10th now, I can tell you.

Hot Guy (and cute dog) Monday: Paul Walker

I have, I'm fairly certain, featured Paul Walker before. I'm too lazy to check though and even if I have,



I would have featured him again just for how fucking cute that dog is.

a little something for the weekend

I found this on queerclick ages ago and kept forgetting to upload it to my blog. Until seeing this pic, the delightfully named Rusty Joiner was a stranger to me.



and yet now I already know his religion.

a heartbreaking work of staggering genius

Note the use of lower case. I'm not talking about the pretentious Dave Eggers novel, rather it's the most fitting way to describe the new PJ Harvey album, White Chalk.

It is, in my opinion, the finest album she has ever produced. It is stark, it is gothic and it is relentlessly downbeat, but it has an incredible sense of focus and she sounds very assured in her new sound. At just 34 minutes, there is not an ounce of fat here, not one track outstays its welcome nor do you find yourself thinking "well this could have been left off the record" (Tori Amos take note).

I was slightly overzealous in saying earlier that there was no guitar on this record. There is both bass and acoustic guitar but they are not the main focus by any means. A crazy array of instruments are listed on the sleeve notes, zither, banjo, mellotron, broken harp, even a wine glass. The lyrics are dark, twisted and beautiful, for the most part delivered in the higher range of her voice. For me the outstanding track is "The Piano". I was listening to the song on my iPod walking to work and it took me by surprise. The start of the song, she seems to be talking about someone she killed with a hammer. Suddenly out of nowhere, she sings "oh god I miss you" over and over with the most beautiful swell of music behind it. I actually welled up walking along listening to it.

I cannot wait to see her in concert tomorrow night now.

Oh Ms Harvey, you crazy

I love me some PJ. I got into her way back in 1993 when you couldn't move 50 yards in any direction without coming across an advert for this.


I had no idea who she was and a friend had bought the album so I borrowed it from him. There are not many albums I can truly describe as being life altering, but Rid Of Me is one of them. It blew my tiny mind. To this day, I count it among my favourite albums of all time.

With that album, she was still critically adored but resolutely not mainstream. While she sold ok numbers and could fill your average concert hall, she never really troubled the radio or the charts. And that was fine with me. Her next release saw her fanbase increase and To Bring You My Love was the first time I saw her perform live.

It was, to be brutally honest, average. I was so excited and was right at the front but it wasn't quite the sum of its parts. I still went back when she veered off into the experimental with Dance Hall At Louse Point.

The only gigs performed for this were with a dance troupe in tow. I can't remember the name of the troupe but they put together a dance piece to the whole album and PJ with her band performed the songs while the dancers danced. Neither the dance piece nor the album were well received but I loved it, even if when I saw that gig I was frightened for her as she was so clearly anorexic at the time.

The physical and psychological effects of that illness manifested themselves on her next release, Is This Desire?.

Bleak and desolate, it's the wrong side of no fun at all and it's the album I listen to least. It still has some outstanding stuff on it, but to listen to as a whole, it's a tough call.

A scant two years later, and the mainstream success that had up to this point eluded her came rushing in.

Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea is easily her masterpiece, with awards and plaudits in no short supply. Furthermore, the tour that followed saw a relaxed, happy and healthy (and scarily resembling Liz Hurley) PJ clearly enjoying herself for the first time in a very long time. I went to both London dates and was awestruck both nights. I also remember being highly amused when she forgot the words to "Down By The Water" and had a fit of giggles mid song. When it was over she simply said "well I don't know what happened there".

But greater things, gig wise, were to come. If I thought i was seeing someone on the top of their game then, well more fool me. In the lead up to releasing Uh Huh Her, PJ Harvey was the first artist to perform a concert at Tate Modern. I went to that concert and was simply astonished at how much better she had become since the last time I'd seen her. Later that summer, she performed two outdoor gigs that were even more astounding. The first one, in particular, I remember feeling so fucking lucky to witness it. Genius.

So it was a shame that the album didn't live up to those gigs and was a little Mmm Hmm Blah. Drawing heavily on what was presumably a nasty break up with Nick Cave (several songs could be retitled "In Your FACE, Cavey") something feels like it's missing from the album as a whole, but I don't know what. And it's a real shame that the exuberantly and joyous live performance of "Who The Fuck?" is not present on the lifeless studio cut. Again, I don't hate the album and a recent re-listen proved it's actually getting better with age. But still.

And now? Today saw the UK release of her 9th original studio album. For her entire career, her sound has been guitar driven. White Chalk pulls a most spectacular volte face and doesn't contain a single guitar.

It's a very spooky and chilly album. The fact that on the front cover she looks like she is auditioning for the sadly non existent third season of Carnivale is no mistake. I need to listen to it properly before I can review it in any depth but on a first listen, I was glad it was a brief 34 minutes. It's very intense and any longer would perhaps be too much.

Hot Guy Monday: The Return

It's been a while since we had some hot guys up in here. Dreadfully slack of me, I apologise. To bring the hotness back, the first HGM entry goes to someone I have only recently discovered, even though he's been around for at least six years. I recently got very addicted to The Shield. I have had the first season on DVD since 2003 but never watched it. Recently I finally got around to it and suffice to say I now own all five available seasons of the show and am frothing at the mouth to get hold of season six. As Curtis Lemansky was my favourite character and the finale of season 5 saw him exit the show (which I watched last night), today's Hot Guy is Kenneth Johnson. Hot Guy. Not pretty boy, not skinny mini bum boy. Hot.

Audience Proof

Last weekend I attended a preview screening of the new Tarantino movie, Death Proof. As everyone knows, it is a newly expanded version of his half of the failed Grindhouse experiment. I have to say, having seen this, it is no longer a mystery to me why the experiment failed.

Firstly let me put all my cards on the table and say I am not a fan of Tarantino the man or the movie maker. I find him unbearably smug and irritating when interviewed and his films have grown ever more painfully self indulgent. I really liked Kill Bill Vol 1 but the second installment bored me to tears. And the fact that what started out as an 80 minute quick and dirty little revenge movie bloated in to a two volume FOUR HOUR movie highlights the biggest problem with Death Proof: It's too long and too dull.

Grindhouse in its original double bill format was supposed to run two hours max. Due to the madness of the directors behind the project it finally clocked in at over three hours. And now, with 25 minutes of footage restored, the stand alone Death Proof runs at close to two hours. Which normally would be fine. But when you only have enough plot and character development to sustain maybe a quarter of that running time, then there's a problem. Whole sequences of the film are made up of uninteresting characters having highly unbelievable and really very boring conversations. And one more shot of bare feet and I was about ready to kick the screen in. Yes, Quentin, you have a foot fetish, I get it. But come on.

However there are two more problems far more fatal than the above. Firstly, the film lacks the courage of its convictions. The first half of the movie is all bad edits, crackly film stock and so on, exactly the retro Grindhouse look aimed for. The second half of the movie doesn't have that at all, it's a "proper" film in terms of editing etc. But even more annoying to me was that having worked so hard to give the film a 70s look and feel in everything from the shooting style to the locations, props and costumes, the film was set in the present, with cell phones and iPods making unnecessary and glaringly anachronistic appearances. And the second half of the film focuses on four people who work in the movie business and their dialogue is so clogged with pop culture references that it eventually suffocates on its own post modern clever-cleverness. If you must see it, pay for another movie and sneak in to watch the last 20 minutes for the only bravura stunt sequence in the film. Other than that, file it under "failure". Shame.

I'm coming back

When I left NYC in January, I was really pleased that the next time I went back would be for good as leaving to come back to the UK was really quite a wrench. As we all know, thanks to visa fuck ups, my permanent arrival is now somewhat, if not indefinitely, delayed. When that happened, I thought long and hard about whether or not I would be able to take a holiday in NYC again.

But who was I fooling? Of course I can. I'm going back for two weeks at the beginning of October. I'll be staying with Eric which will be fabulous. Thanks to working three jobs lately, I'm pretty exhausted and so this time it's as much for a proper break as it is a job hunt. Also thanks to said triple job madness, I'm ok for money right now so I have booked myself some shows to see. My current schedule looks like this:

October 5th: Arrive

October 6th: Recover from the jet lag

October 7th: 2pm - Mauritius (starring previous HGM stud Bobby Cannavale)
7pm - Rent (yes really

October 9th: 8pm - A Bronx Tale

October 10th: 2pm - Pygmalion

October 11th: 8pm - Tori Amos

October 12th: 8pm - Tori Amos

October 13th: 2pm - Die Mommie Die!
8pm - Frankenstein

October 14th: 3pm - Cyrano De Bergerac

October 15th: 8pm - Young Frankenstein

October 16th: 7pm - Curtains

October 17th: 2pm - Xanadu


The rest of the time I'm there is free for now so I can see friends, hang out and be sociable. I fly back home on the 20th. It'll be a blast. I can't wait.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand we're back

Well it’s been a tough time of it here in PCB Land. I almost lost momentum for re-starting the blog in fact. But here I am.

There was some serious upheaval in my professional life. I have blogged on here before about work and been a scooch too candid in my details which led to me deleting a whole load of entries. So I’ll try and say what’s been going on without being too obvious or too cryptic. Should be fun. Basically, the product that I worked on is being discontinued. So this means by the end of this year there will be no job for me. Or 40 of my friends and colleagues. We’re all out of a job. However, I say “worked” past tense, as I already have a new job. It’s in the same company and indeed in the same building but it is in a completely separate area of the business.

As the wind down for the product I used to work on went less than smoothly I am also doing overtime back in my old role when it’s required. Right up to this week, it’s been required a LOT and I am exhausted from it. But I’m also going to be quite rich, so it’s all good. And I need the money as I am headed back to NYC in October for two weeks, as much for a rest and a holiday this time as for a job hunt. I have booked a lot of theatre already and when I have put the finishing touches to it, I’ll post my whole itinerary here. I am really really really REALLY looking forward to it. I’m also going to try and be less rubbish and less boring in my blogging. Can’t promise of course, but I’ll try.

All quiet on the PCB front

I haven't updated ONCE in August. Terrible. Well that's because I haven't had anything fun to say and now work has gone insane. I'm currently working seven day weeks, pulling in about 65-70 hours a week. It's madness. So blogging is gon' be very sporadic for a little while. Deal with it.

Officially the worst stunt casting ever

It was announced today that Kelly Osbourne would take on the role of Mama Morton in the West End run of Chicago. Leaving aside the fact that she's whiny and annoying, ungrateful and stupid, she's also devoid of any acting talent and she can't really sing. But let's look at some previous Mama's here:

Marcia Lewis: Born 1938
Roz Ryan: Born 1951
Angie Stone: Born 1961
Jennifer Holliday: Born 1960
Debra Monk: Born 1949
Diane Langton: Born 1947
Lynda Carter: Born 1951
Alison Moyet: Born 1961

While I don't have the exact dates they performed in the revival, it would have been in the last decade. So the youngest any of them could have been at the time they took on the role is 36. Do we agree with that? Yes?

Then can you tell me why Kelly FUCKING Osbourne, who turns 23 on the LAST day of her 10 week run as Mama Morton, has been given the role? Someone? Anyone? Please just close this fucking show already. What was once one of the most starkly brilliant revivals is now in desperate need of being put out of its misery.

PCB's Television Round Up, Part 5

It's been a while since the last round-up, so there's a few shows to be going on with here. I really do watch far too much television.

Heroes

It fought it out tooth and nail with Ugly Betty but ultimately this is the second best new show on television. I absolutely loved it from minute one and as the season progressed, it became quite clear that the writers had thought about every little nuance and detail (unlike the patchwork Lost). The arc of characters like Peter Petrelli and Mr Bennett proved that. Watching Peter go from floppy haired touchy feely girly boy to the coolest person on the planet was thrilling.

They also had the ultimate villain in Sylar. Zachary Quinto did a bang up job of the role too, completely nailing the "aw shucks, who me?" persona as well as the "I am supreme evil and will EAT YOUR BRAIN" persona. Of course, the break out star has been Masi Oka for his glorious Hiro. He's everybody's favourite character and he's totally adorable. All in all, this was a hugely ambitious show with a huge cast of characters and it aimed to weave a dense, rich and intricate tapestry with them. And it succeeded. I can't wait for the DVD.

Medium

I am as surprised as anyone that this show was a hit, enough of a hit to make it to four seasons. It sounds, on the surface at least, both hokey and tired. A variation on a well worn theme. But somehow the show is really involving and gripping.

A lot of that can be attributed to the performances of Patricia Arquette and Jake Weber. Individually, they're both great (Arquette has deservedly won awards for the role) but together they have some of the best chemistry I have ever ever seen. They're a joy to watch and the show manages to strike the right balance between their home life and Alison's work.

This most recent season, the show's third, was by far its strongest. It didn't start out that way, with the opening double episode being a bit fumbled. But it varied things up (Alison didn't always just dream stuff), it ramped up the dramatic factor (the episode "Joe Day Afternoon" was seriously edge of the seat stuff and it pulled no punches either) and it managed to pull off a very ambitious four part (FOUR PART!) season finale. Neve Campbell's guest appearance was not as annoying as I thought it would be and in fact her final scene with Jason Priestley, where it slowly dawns on her how out of her depth she is, was brilliantly played. All in all, this season saw an already good show start to be great. Bring on season four.

Kyle XY

I realise that I couldn't be further outside the show's demographic but I still watched this show and I really enjoyed it.

You could argue that it's cutesy, it's cloying, it's as subtle as a sledgehammer and tiresomely moral and wholesome. You'd probably be right. But the show has a jewel in its crown in the shape of Matt Dallas. His performance in the title role is just pitch perfect and he makes even the most clumsy of episodes watchable. And no, bitches, it's not because he's pretty. Well, not entirely.

A Hallowed Ending

My copy of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows arrived at 7am on Saturday morning. Rather than go back to sleep, I started reading it. My word, JK Rowling certainly saved the best for last. There are 37 chapters in the book and of those, only 4 can really be counted as NOT being edge of your seat intense stuff.

The decision not to set this book in Hogwarts always meant that all bets are off. I never expected the book to be so relentless in its action filled narrative though. Unlike the previous two books, there is precious little meandering in the opening section, it hits the ground running with death and severe injury by the start of chapter 3 to let the reader know that this time she means business.

It was very clever of Rowling to "confirm" the deaths of two characters in the final installment. Multiply by that by 25 and you're somewhere in the ballpark. In the final act of the book when the action is back at Hogwarts, several of the deaths made me pause and say "wow JK, you cold bitch".

The final chapter of the book is, according to a documentary I watched when I was first getting into the books, the first thing she wrote for the series, to prove to herself she could do it. Having tied up all the narrative strands from the series in the chapter prior to the end, it was a fitting and actually very moving end to the book. I may have even cried.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about this book in the coming days and weeks but for now, that's all.

Countdown to The Deathly Hallows

With the final Harry Potter book mere hours away (some people already of course have their copies due to "oversights" by online retailers), the internet is in a frenzy of speculation as to what it will contain. You can find them here, here, here, and here. Also there are predictions here, here, here, here, here,and here.

Judging by the titles of these blog entries linked above, the focus is on who will die, who is good and who is not and the purpose of the horcruxes. I say judging by the title because I am not reading any further than that on any of them. My book had better arrive from Amazon tomorrow morning (especially as they charged me for it LAST Saturday and it's been 'ready to dispatch' ever since) and once I have finished the book, then I will go back and read what everyone was thinking.

Harry Potter and the Um of the What?

I went to see the new Harry Potter movie last night. I'm seeing it again on August 4th at the IMAX and believe me when I tell you that I enjoyed it a lot and will have no problems sitting through it a second time.

However, this was never going to be an easy adaptation. The book is ridiculously overlong and overextended. Boiling it down to two hours twenty minutes makes for some serious editing but it's been edited so much that it makes no concession for anyone unfamiliar with the source material. And while there's an argument that you shouldn't really be starting out with the fifth movie, a scooch more information here and there wouldn't have gone amiss. Two new characters are so diminished in the adaptation they should really have been written out altogether (Tonks and Luna). For the most part though, I had very little issue with the cuts and rewrites, but some of the edits will make adapting book 6 a little tricky.

Which affirms a belief I've been harbouring for a little while that the big screen is not the best medium for the novels. They should have waited until the final novel was published (five days to go!) and then the BBC, for example, should have adapted each book as a five part mini series. The later novels would have had the room to breathe that they really require instead of multiple plot strands and characters fighting for space. Also, starting the films before all the novels are published is a little tricky. How can they be sure that elements left out of the forth and fifth films aren't going to be important points in the final installment? Maybe in the due course of time, the mini series will become a reality, who knows? At least the acting in the fifth film was a massive improvement on the earlier films and the main offender for atrocious acting (Tom Felton's horrible HORRIBLE Draco Malfoy) had barely three minutes of screen time.

Hot Guy Monday: Chris Meloni

I recently re-discovered Oz as I finally got the fifth season on DVD. It reaffirmed my adoration of Chris Meloni. He's not someone you look at and say "wow, you should so be a model" but anyone who has seen him as Chris Keller would surely agree that he is the very definition of hot. In Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, his character and performance are the polar opposite of Keller, yet there's still something about him in that show that makes me go a little weak in the knees. So sit back and appreciate yourselves some Meloni. Be careful scrolling down to the last pic though. It's on here because you gotta love a man who is constantly getting naked for the camera, but it might not be something your boss should catch you looking at.

Ticket trauma

I blame the internet. It's been so long since I booked tickets over the phone that I had forgotten just how frustrating it can be.

A little backstory. I love PJ Harvey. I have since Rid Of Me was released and have been an ardent fan ever since. I have seen her live on several occasions, starting with the tour to promote To Bring You My Love. She has gotten better and better and the pre-release gigs for Uh Huh Her were truly phenomenal. I've been on her mailing list for ages and on Wednesday morning last week I checked my old email account to find out that a solo gig at the Royal Festival Hall has been scheduled for 29th September and tickets are on sale at 9am. You can book on the phone with the venue or with their website.

I ensured I was at my desk at five minutes to nine, logged in, website up and ready to go. At 9am, I refresh the screen, the gig isn't there. I continue to refresh until ten past nine when it's still not there I admit defeat and start calling. Of course, the phone lines are completely jammed and it takes me over half an hour to speak to someone. The entire time I am on hold, a helpful voice informs me every 15 seconds that my call is still in a queue and very important to them, however I might like to book online at their website. Every time they say this I refresh my screen and the gig is still not listed. After doing this multiple times, my temper begins to fray and I start talking to the automated message, saying things like "I can't", "well how can I if the gig I want isn't on the website?" and "for sobbing out loud would you JUST PUT ME THROUGH TO SOMEONE?" By the time I do actually get put through, the whole office is looking at me like I have gone insane. It's possible that I might have.

Luckily, the lady I was connected with was so very nice and helpful, and there were still tickets left, though not that many. So I got two tickets and all is right with the world. All the times I've seen her live, I've never seen her solo. I CANNNOT WAIT!