Or, wait. Maybe it was them!

(Via Oddly Specific)

My fellow X Philes are hopefully in hysterics right now. Anything else would mean I’m way beyond weird.

All non-nerds please click here.

1. Nine stars Sophia Loren, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, Kate Hudson, Marion Cotillard, Fergie and Daniel Day-Lewis. That’s about as many grand names as you can fit on a movie poster. (With exception of the upcoming Valentine’s Day, maybe.) And that exactly is its curse, too. Packed with so much fame and talent, it has to be amazing. Otherwise it will just be “hmm, well, bit dissapointing, don’t you think?” The missed chance here? Well, let me just say it wasn’t amazing.
2. Despite the high density of talent, charisma and glamour on the screen, this film manages to be exceptionally bland. And “bland” is by no means a lazy writer’s comment. I’ve tried for the last two hours to come up with an adjective that describes the experience. Nine is definitely not amazing, great, cool, good, decent. But the thing is, it’s so…well, bland, that I can’t even call it bad. It’s just sort of neutral. Like the colours of the iconic Italy it’s trying to bring to life (not very successfully so).
3. It suffers from a distinct lack of plot. I know, I know - that’s the point. The Maestro doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing when trying to make his new film. But we would also get that without the film itself demonstrating that it doesn’t have a clue as to what it is doing either.
4. In a way following on from 3., the film is of course based on a musical. And musicals tend to get away with being a bit light on the storyline side, mainly because they’ve got all that singing and dancing and being glamorous and stuff. But there are also things that musicals aren’t very good at, one of them being the subtler notes and the more intimate acting. When a musical gets transformed into film, you’d kind of expect them to make use of the chances offered by the medium (as Chicago and Phantom , for example, have done rather impressively.) Nine just sort or randomly puts people into costumes and makes them burst out into song right in the middle of what otherwise could have been nicely done non-musical scenes.
5. The characters are exceptionally lifeless. Except for the Maestro (Day-Lewis) maybe, but even in his case you get bored of all the eccentricity and torturedness after the first hour. And the women are basically just assorted puppets:
   • The loving, faithful, silently suffering little wife (Cotillard) loving and suffering so faithfully and silently that it just makes you wanna be sick.
   • The hyper-sexy, naive mistress (Cruz) being so over-the-top pouty and clingy that she’s almost comical - sadly without being the least bit funny.
   • The whore (Fergie) who was apparently the Maestro’s first temptation (and brings us the only really impressive musical number) but somehow remains shockingly unattractive in all her aggressive sexuality and completely loses out on the temptation bit.
   • The muse (Kidman) who’s sort of elusive in a trademark Kidman-esque way, but the film fails to turn that elusiveness into her character’s significance - which means she’s basically just irrelevant.
   • The maternal best friend (Dench) who’s mainly babbling good advice in a maternal best friend sort of style and therefore loses most of the impact she could have had.
   • The late mother, whose absence apparently accounts for the Maestro’s tortured soul and screwed-up love life - but since the film somehow forgets to tell us how and why, she also becomes pretty much irrelevant.
   • And the slutty fashion journalist who’s entirely irrelevant from the start and probably serves the sole purpose of suggesting that fashion journalists generally flash their hold-ups at/hand their hotel keys over to anyone remotely famous.

   (They all look hot in their little song and dance outfits though.)

6. Even though being some of Hollywood’s most worshipped beauties, the women appear flawed. Penelope is a bit wrinkly, Kate looks like her mum, and Fergie’s got some horrendously bad skin and seems to be missing a neck. Now don’t get this wrong. I’m all for real women and a revival of un-Photoshopped magazine covers and stuff. But this is a musical, and in musicals people just have to be shiny and beautiful and perfect and a bit unreal. That’s just, ya know, unwritten musical law. Musicals just aren’t the place for harsh reality and the scolding finger of ethics.
7. The singing ranges between moderate and awful. Even Fergie’s song (Be Italian), although choreographed and shot beautifully, occasioually wanders along the edge of borderline painful.
8. Kate Hudson kind of looks like Goldie Hawn. Which is kind of distracting. (Okay, so I was short of one reason for my list.)
9. And then there’s Sophia Loren. Which, in principle, is tremendous, amazing, wonderful. Except that she’s somehow not really there. And I don’t mean because she’s playing the Maestro’s late mother. It just seems as if they weren’t really sure what to do with her in the film, so she just makes a few random appearances. It’s kind of like they cut out a photo of Sophia Loren and stuck it onto some of the scenes. Which is not only a total waste of Sophia Loren, but also quite a big disappointment when you’ve been looking forward to seeing her in a film for months.

Verdict: Does make you wanna sing and dance though. In your underwear.

Here in the house where I live, we’ve got a shared washing machine and tumble dryer for all the tenants to use. Everybody’s got their assigned time slots, which are approved by the landlord and clearly stated in a timetable next to the washing machine.

Today, and not for the first time, my laundry and I arrived at the washing machine at the start of our time slot, only to find somebody else’s laundry doing happy rounds right there, with about an hour remaining for the programme to finish.

After dragging my laundry basket up the stairs again, I decided to post a note for the Laundry Time Thief on the washing machine to sort out the issue. Without thinking much about it, I started writing down a simple and straightforward: “Dear XY, you could at least have asked before using my assigned time slot.”

Then I remembered that I was in England.

So, now instead the note says: “I’m sorry if there was some kind of misunderstanding. I might be mistaken in assuming that this particular time slot was supposed to be reserved for me…”

Don’t say I haven’t learned nothin’ in my 16 months in this country.

Either way, it didn’t exactly improve my current laundry situation.

The five-colour flashing lights in your window are a cause of epilepsy, not a Christmas decoration.

Here, have a bit of good taste. Apparently, it doesn’t come for free.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for giving me a gift box of (apparently) 60 quids’ worth of Stuff I Did Not Ask For And Do Not Need. Especially the yo-yo and the neon stickers of Nintendo controls and ghetto blasters. (Tip for your marketing team: You might want to do some sort of survey of your customers’ average age next time.) And thank you also for the many little bags full of little cards advertising Orange extras I already know about thanks to you pestering me by text all the time. And finally, thank you for the ugly headphones, which I can’t even use with my new phone as you’ve been considerate enough not to include an adaptor. So basically, thanks for a whole bin bag full of pormotional rubbish, and for the pleasure of carrying it all home in a ridiculously oversized box during Tube rush hour.

I really, really appreciate it.

I would have appreicated it even more if I had been sold my new Tocco Lite at the price at which it was actually advertised in your shop, rather than being offered a phone for £79 and then, after spending half my lunch break going through all the paperwork and stuff, being informed just as I was about to pay, that actually the price had gone up to £89 this morning. Which, apparently, nobody in your lovely Fleet Street store bothered to check before or while offering me said phone at the old price.

But never mind. At least you’ve made up for it all with a big box of useless things.

Here we go with Picture of the Week #3, and once again it wasn’t really possible to actually keep it down to one picture.

Steve Bloom is another of those People I Shoulda Known About (but didn’t until I had to look them up for work). He currently has a new book coming out, titled Trading Places - The Merchants of Nairobi and has also got a massive portfolio of absolutely stunning wildlife photographs. If you have a look at his ‘Animals’ galleries, don’t miss ‘Water’ and ‘Elephants’!

I love animals (as you’ve probably guessed from my rants about live duck bags and squirrel kebabs), so of course I instantly had a whole list of favourites when I looked at Blooms’ project galleries. Here are my top three:

A chimpanzee photographed at Monkey World ape rescue centre in the UK, from the Water collection. I love how he seems to be catching raindrops in his hand in this thoughtful pose while all the others are huddled together to shelter from the rain.

Stampeding wildebeest crossing the Mara River in Kenya, also from the Water collection. This photo looks like an elaborate painting to me. The powerful movement of the herd seems to be frozen onto a canvas, with the dozens of horns rising out of the mist creating a pattern that’s at once beautiful and unsettling. Makes the animals look like the spirits of all the wildebeest that have migrated there over time rather than one actual herd. (Or maybe that’s just me seeing ghosts everywhere again.)

And, of course, this selection wouldn’t be complete without a bit of ‘Awww, fluffy!’ These three Polar bears, photographed in Manitoba, Canada, are just too cute. The one that’s looking at its hand makes me squee every time I look at the picture. Also makes me wanna paint its nails! The one lounging around next to it looks like it just needs a remote control and a can of coke. And the third is just kind of, ‘Meh, this sucks. Can we do something fun?’

I’ve always loved photos that bring out animals’ personalities - and Steve Bloom is clearly a master at it. I only wish we could all spend more time studying animals and less time driving them to extinction.

Girl With a Pen Obsessions™ presents: The beginning of the greatest love story ever seen on television. In pretty, pretty pictures. And with music.

Just because it’s Friday, and because I just watched the X Files pilot for the eleventeenthousandth time. I actually might have watched it eleventeenthousand-and-two times by now if you count the two screen-capping runs I did for this slide show. And in the process it struck me once again how amazing the chemistry between Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny and their characters is from the first second. Especially when you go back to this one after putting yourself through seasons eight and nine (I still watch it all in original airing order - no fast-forwarding, no skips, like the tough X Phile nut I am) it’s absolutely refreshing and heartwarming to see how it was all there from the start. And to be reminded how good this show once was. Well, not exactly the first couple of episodes. In retrospect, Mulder’s emotional outbursts and Scully’s fearful face are just comic. I mean the cult kind of comic. The Twin Peaks kind, if you like. Which is good after all. And, no, this point is not up for discussion.

I know there’s been X Files stuff posted all over the web for years and years and, as you will see, this is certainly not aiming to be the best fan vid ever made - it’s just a sort of mental note to self about why it is perfectly legitimate to be obsessed with this show.

The song is I’ve Just Seen a Face by the Beatles. I was gonna go for something Mark Snow-y, but this one just kept popping back into my head as I threw the pix together. It might be the result of reading too much fan fic, but to me thist song perfectly brings out the undertones in the episode. Yeah, I know, I know. Our favourite duo are only investigating alien abductions and trying to outnerd each other in physics. But isn’t it oh-so-obvious at least when you’re watching for the eleventeenthousandth time how they keep checking each other out? Intellectually, of course. Like the total geeks they are.

* If this headline mainly reads ‘WTF’ to you, go stand in the corner for one hour, then look it up or, better even, do your homework. Extra work is available for those who like to collect nerd points (nerd level one - nerd level two.)

Found this picture on the National Geographic Magazine website.

Yep, that’s live ducks. Crammed into a plastic bag - for ‘easy transport’.

Revolting.

A couple of years ago my dad found two tiny little baby ducks paddling in our pool. We could hear the mother calling them from the woods next to our house, but she wouldn’t come out. When it got dark, we gave up the search for her and I looked after the two little ones overnight. They kept trying to communicate with their reflections in my wardrobe mirror and I had to lay streets of loo roll all across my room because they shat everywhere. They kept me awake quacking in their little box next to my bed all night, and when I finally gave in and took them out at dawn, they fell asleep in my hands, nibbling at my fingers in their sleep. In the morning they had a bath in my grandparents’ rainwater fountain. When we took them to the river to set them free, they wriggled out of my hands, plunged into the water and swam off with another duck mother and her chicks. I sat at the river bank crying for hours.

Maybe I’ll just add the bag of ducks to my list of reasons for being a vegetarian. Because, frankly, I’m sick of people ridiculing me for not eating meat anymore because of the squirrel kebabs.

One thing I love about journalism - no, make that the thing I love most about journalism - is that you learn about new things all the time. At the moment I’m doing work experience at the British Journal of Photography and this past week I had the chance to write a review about a photography exhibition. (Going to a gallery during working hours - there’s just no end to the list of advantages of being a journalist except for the part where you don’t get a job.) So I picked Ellen von Unwerth’s exhibition Fräulein, which is currently on show at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London. And then I had a bit of an “OMG” moment when it turned out that she is the artist behind loads of photos I’ve come across and absolutely adored in the past.

Ellen von Unwerth’s story is a really cool one. She used to be a supermodel, but after about ten years it occurred to her that taking pictures is actually much more fun than posing for them. And in no time she became super-famous for getting pretty much much every female icon in fashion, music and film to take off their clothes and pose naughty. The advertising world and all sorts of super-glossy magazines love her, too. And she’s living proof that you don’t need to be a trained photographer to take fantastic photos.

I love the kind of femininity captured in her work. All of her photos I’ve seen so far have one thing in common: The women seem to have a lot of fun with the identity they chose for the shoot. They’ve got this incredibly bold, in-your-face confidence, in a very playful way. Kind of like back in the days when you’d get all glammed up to take fancy snapshots with your girldriends. (Well that’s what her pix remind me of anyway.)

It took me three days to decide which of Ellen von Unwerth’s photos to choose. Even if you limit it down to the celebrities, there are just too many stunning ones. I decided to go for a more recent shoot with Emma Watson. Mostly because she’s been in magazines quite a lot lately, and editorial photos (and features) are somewhat annoyingly pushing the fact that she’s all grown up now. (Okay, so she is. But we got that the first time you told us, dear press. At some point that angle just gets old. And boring.) What I like about this shoot is how it plays with that media obsession with the little Harry Potter girl growing up.

One moment, she’s all innocent little girl, with barely-there make-up and cuddling her retro doll. Then we watch the little girl play dress-up in the bathroom, and she comes out of it as this untouchably confident young lady. And then again, she’s just a dreamy teenager, with tear-smeared mascara, her fragile body almost getting crushed under the load of feminine accessories.

IMHO the best attempt ever to capture Emma Watson’s transformation without annoying everybody with the oh-look-she’s-grown-up angle.

I also strongly recommend checking out more of Ellen von Unwerth’s work. There’s a new monograph, Fräulein, coming out later this month. But that’s 450 quid, so a Google image search might be the better option.

Also, my apologies for once again failing to keep it short. But at least I didn’t mention Gillian Anderson.

If you’re a girl (or a boy, or a hobbit, or a spirit, or an extraterrestrial biological entity) who likes girl stuff or sparkly stuff or geeky stuff, or any combination thereof, I completely independently and without any selfish motives recommend that you click on Girly Sparkly Geek Things, a fabulous new blog brought to you by some fabulous ladies.

Fouding members include the world’s Most Smartest Geekiest Girl Scout™ Feylamia and the Queen of the Written Word™, Hells Bells. Lots more fabulous girl geek contributors to come soon. And, yes, all this also means that I’ve now got a third home from where I can spam the web with totally worthless comments.

Now go, check it out, check it out. We’ve got cake!