Beginnings

With the 50th anniversary rerelease of Bergman's The Seventh Seal, notable for its iconic opening, this week The Guardian did their top 10 film beginnings.

I've had a dig around; here are some I'm particularly fond of. (I would've had Manhattan in there, but it ain't online.)

Sched fool

"The first Big Brother programme went out five days after they’d gone in the house, was half an hour long, and was shown at eleven at night."


As pointed out by Peter Briffa

Fakes and pains

I have perpetrated a fraud against my friends.

It was supposed to be all in the interests of curiosity and experimentation, but now I just feel guilty. Basically, all I did was change my listed birthday on Facebook to Thursday 12 July (it's actually in April). Unfortunately, I'd underestimated how much people now rely on Facebook for truth and fact, and the birthday and anti-birthday messages started flooding in.

"Happy birthday!! (I admit, I wouldn't have known if facebook didn't tell me!!)" wrote one on my wall. "Fuck off is it your birthday" added another. More abuse/congratulation followed.

Then it started getting worse - the messages moved away from the enclosed sphere of social networking and into the 'real' world. An old school friend now living in Australia appeared on Instant Messenger and wished me numerous happy returns. My old flatmate Jamie sent a birthday text (even though he had offered to buy me concert tickets for my real birthday just a few months before). The next day, my mate Dan emailed with some "things to do before you're 30" advice. Then my boss came up and told me she'd made a trip to WHSmiths the previous evening and bought me a card, before remembering she'd bought me one back in April too.

I started 'fessing up. Jamie texted back, "You are a sick fuck. Tho a sociologically interesting one, I grant you." A work colleague admitted on IM that she found out late in the day, then "went home and thought 'you utter shit, you didn't do anything' and felt really guilty". Dan emailed: "dam, can't believe i fell for that one, i knew when it was, how schoolboy of me, didn't even think to question it."

Oh dear. Sorry everyone. In my defence, all I can say is this: if Facebook told you to jump off a cliff, would you?

Fruity

Just finished reading Jeanette Winterson's 1985 classic Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. Great book, and a striking cover too, despite it being a "NOW A MAJOR BBC TV DRAMA" edition.

However, I was rather taken aback to find that on the final, blank, page of the book - this was a second hand copy, which Sarah picked up from a Brixton charity shop - a previous owner had scrawled this:

Loud and clear. It's clearly not a comment on the text; why was it written? Who by? And for whom?

Film review: Molière

Originally published in Total Spec magazine, June 2007

The 17th century French literary biopic – now there’s a genre guaranteed to keep da kidz away. Particularly when the hero has the kind of bitter, scrunched up face more suited to a League of Gentleman character than to the flowing Byron hair that pours from his head and the flouncy Russell Branded garb he prances around in.

In order to shoehorn this film into existence, writers Laurent Tirard (who also directs) and Grégoire Vigneron have conveniently located a hiatus in the biographies of France’s most feted playwright when he disappeared for several months – disputed by some academics, but hey, fuck them. This gap also coincides with the beginnings of Molière's greatness. Perfect! This gives them the chance to do some Shakespeare in Love-style theorising along the lines of the question: what if Molière's plays were based on his own experiences? And so the playwright finds himself planted right at the centre of a series of events resembling one of his own plays.

We begin with both the success and frustration of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Romain Duris), aka Molière. The playwright is famous and loved, but dreams of elevating his art to a higher level. How to escape the typecasting rut? As he struggles with writer’s block, and before we’ve really found our footing, we’re plonked back to 13 years earlier - and it’s here we stay for almost all of the film. An audience are cracking up at a performance by the young Molière, but for all the wrong reasons – his ponderous tragedian is bloody awful. When a pair of bailiffs turn up, Molière gets the crowd on side with a display of artful buffoonery. Unfortunately, he also gets chucked in a debtors prison. He’s fished out by eccentric but loaded aristocrat Monsieur Jourdain (Fabrice Luchini), who's attempting to woo local sharp-tongued diva Célimène, a sort of cruel, ginger Lauren Laverne for the 1600s - and behind his beautiful wife’s back. Bungling Jourdain promises to pay off Molière's debts if the writer helps him stage a play, designed to dazzle Célimène with its brilliance. Molière, disguised as an inept priest called Tartuffe, stays at the mansion and, as he falls for Madame Jourdain, finds himself embroiled in the kind of farce he would end up writing…

The humour all sounds quite dated – all cuckolds, pratfalls and dowry-chasing scoundrels – but when it comes to laugh-out-loud moments, Molière actually succeeds in bringing home the comedy bacon. It's not always quite as funny as it thinks it is, with Duris's clowning missing the mark at times, but pitch-perfect performances from the cuckold and the cad (the toothy Luchini and a devious Edouard Baer) save it from its surfeit of slapstick and sentimentality. There are a few good moments of pathos, most memorably Jourdain's physical fall as he discovers that his wife has cheated on him; a heartbreaking minute that lifts him from the status of bumbling fool to the level of real human being.

Overall, however, the film's general notion – that Molière's experiences in the Jourdain household show him how to elevate his writing from mere silliness to a new comedy of human suffering – doesn't quite work, because the events we see acted out are mainly farce and don't plumb the depths of profundity.

Too many laughs, then? That was probably the last thing you were expecting from a 17th century French literary biopic.

Rhet off the bat

With yesterday's Live Earth concert going on yesterday, Lauren Laverne and Zane Lowe were on the graveyard shift, presenting Auntie's T in the Park coverage on BBC4.

This in no way quashed Laverne's zeal; you do really get a different class of presenting when she's in town. I'm thinking of this bit of seemingly spontaneous dialogue, in particular:

Laverne: It's been a fantastic day for rock, and indeed, roll, here at Tea in the Park.
Lowe: So we've established that it's two things or one thing? I'm confused still.
Laverne: It's a hendiadys, technically.
Lowe: It's a what?!
Laverne: A hendiadys - two disparate concepts expressed in one unified idea. So Calvin Harris was amazing, Klaxons were brilliant, CSS were fantastic...

[she continues as Lowe mutters to himself, looking a bit ashamed]

Pun of the century

...and it's all mine. Seriously, I think this may have been my greatest moment.

Pun of the week

Cracking advert from the Weetabix crew - the stunning pun appears right at the end. It's worth the (26-second) wait.

Ooh-er

"Identify young men and then penetrate them."
PC Pat Mercer suggests the solution to the terrorism problem on Newsnight

Spotted by Jon T.

The joy of Saxon

AHAHAHHAHAHHAAA! Look at the side-splitting trick I'm playing on Sarah!

When she gets home and looks through the kitchen window, she'll think I'm advocating a vote for Harold Saxon, the epitomy of evil and the man who wants to enslave the entire human race!

I think the only way to describe me and my role in the world now is by using the phrase "an hilarious prankster". Yes, "an".