Black Friday

A few years ago, a friend of mine was planning his daughter's seventh birthday party. He asked everyone in the office if they had any music he could borrow that would keep ten sugar-infused preteens amused for a couple of hours. He didn't admit it at the time, but I know deep down that I was the only person in our team likely to have the kind of music he had in mind.

So I brought in a variety of CDs, carefully chosen to suit the limited, but oh-so-specific needs of his demanding audience. The party was a big hit, and in the months that followed, whenever I got some new music, I'd make a copy for my friend's daughter.

About a year later, I came back from one of my lunch-hour record store trips, excitedly clutching a brown paper bag full of wonderment. As I rattled through the various titles with my friend, I asked if I should burn some disks for him to take home. He looked at me with an expression that blended pity with embarrassment, and said "Thanks, but, er, Abby's kind of grown out of that stuff now." She was eight.

At that point, I had to make peace with the fact that much of my music collection was going to go unappreciated by my friends, peers and contemporaries. My shared playlists on iTunes and Spotify may be a constant source of mockery, but I wear my pop preferences with pride.

I know that good pop music is just as worthy of my time as anything that features a three-minute guitar solo. And just because someone writes their own songs, it doesn't automatically qualify them as worthy of my time. Artists like Pet Shop Boys, Madonna and Lady Gaga have proved that popularity and credibility aren't mutually exclusive concepts.

Unfortunately, because great artists make pop look so easy, everyone seems to think that it is. Find a pretty girl, cobble together a few lyrics about partying, crank the autotune up to 11 and laugh all the way to the bank.

Which is the only logical explanation for the existence of 'Friday' by Rebecca Black. The latest 'discovery' by the musically moribund Ark Music Factory, Rebecca's debut single manages to get everything wrong. And leaves you wishing you'd been born profoundly deaf.

Cynical, tuneless and inane to the point of surrealism, Rebecca's would-be party anthem promises "fun fun fun" but is about as carefree and enjoyable as watching a kitten drown. As she pumps her fists in the air from the backseat of her friend's convertible, the impending weekend she's singing about seems less appealing than a nuclear winter. And then there's that voice. Imagine the guys who 'Autotune The News' getting Stephen Hawking to read out the Tweets of a 13 year-old girl.

Universally recognised as one of the finest pop songs of all time, ABBA's 'The Day Before You Came' sees Agnetha sorrowfully recalling the tedium of her daily life prior to her lover's arrival in her life. Perhaps that's the sense of stultifying ennui that the writers at Ark were trying to convey when they wrote:

"Seven a.m., waking up in the morning

Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs

Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal

Seein’ everything, the time is goin’

Tickin’ on and on, everybody’s rushin’

Gotta get down to the bus stop

Gotta catch my bus, I see my friends (My friends)

Kickin’ in the front seat

Sittin’ in the back seat

Gotta make my mind up

Which seat can I take?"

Hopefully the one without an airbag. 

If any good can possibly come of this aural travesty, it's the fact that weekends will now forever be tainted by memories of Rebecca Black. As I write this on a Sunday evening, the week ahead suddenly doesn't seem quite so bad. 

Acceptable in the '80s (part 2)

I wrote a few months ago about Pete Hammond, one of the lead proponents of the Stock-Aitken-Waterman sound. He's been busy remixing songs for gay-friendly artists using his signature cowbells-and-handclaps style that perfectly recaptures the long-lost sound of the eighties. But this desire to revisit the era of the Rubiks Cube, microwave cookery and Roland Rat isn't limited to pop music - movies are also getting in on the act.

Perhaps the best example of this fun-filled flashbackery is the new movie The House of the Devil. Not only is this old-school horror set in the early 1980s, it's been filmed, lit, scored and edited to look as though it was made nearly thirty years ago. Creaky camera-work, scratchy typography, and a charity shop's worth of bad knitwear - they're all here. Even its poster looks more like a pricey piece of memorabilia from eBay, rather than a contemporary promotional piece.

Movie theatres are constantly clogged with horror movies trying to resurrect decades-old franchises with up-to-date reimaginings. But they usually miss the point that the original movies had a sense of their own time and space that gave them context and meaning. The recent Friday 13th remake is a case in point - trying to make a lumpen-faced psychopath in a hockey mask feel relevant and current. The producers were as doomed to failure as the film's hopeless characters who venture into the woodshed with just a torch and a cry of "I'll be right back."

The House of the Devil might turn out to be unwatchable crud, although early reports suggest it's something of a quirky gem. It's just a shame that, when Mad Men (deservedly) wins shedloads of awards for its astonishing attention to detail in recreating a key period in twentieth century popular culture, little films like this are destined to go unrecognised and unrewarded for similar dedication and vision.

See for yourself...

Of course, there's a landline!

Well, after 18 months' wait, we finally get to see what Platinum Dunes have made of the legend of Jason Voorhees. It's been a week now since I saw it, and I'm still not sure what to make of it.

It was slick, efficient and action-packed. Jason looked cool, there were some fun moments and it fulfilled its own brief to update the whole Crystal Lake mythology.

But in its efforts to race through the key moments of the first three movies, it felt like a greatest hits megamix rather than a film in its own right. There was the prologue with Mrs Voorhees, then the prologue with the weed-hunters, then the film proper. By the time the main characters were introduced there was only about an hour to go. Thankfully this did at least spare us the mind-numbing tedium of 'final girl third act' - a long standing staple of the series. Anyone who has sat with their finger hovering over the fast forward button while Alice boils a kettle and makes tea in Sean Cunnigham's original, will know what I mean.

The film also never touched upon the central plot hole that lies at the heart of any Friday 13th movie - who's avenging who? How can Mrs Voorhees claim revenge for the death of a son who isn't dead? And surely Jason must shoulder some of the blame for his mother's decapitation, since his faked demise was the reason for her going fucking mental in the first place...

Anyway, I've found that it's best not to scrutinise a Friday movie for logic. Although, kudos to the film makers for at least allowing their characters to do what any reasonable person would do in these circumstances. They phone the police. OK, we still get the "I can't get a signal on my cell phone" dialogue, and Jason still knows exactly how to kill a landline dead. But for a brief moment, the phone was working and the meat puppets thought to use it.

Oh, and one more thing. Enough with the fake tits. There's no quicker way to kill my belief in a movie than by casting someone with huge plastic boobs as a regular teenager. Freddy vs Jason made the same mistake and it's seriously distracting.

So all in all, I'd give it a 6.5 as a movie, and an 8.5 as a Friday movie. Have you seen it? What did you think?