You thought Brad Pitt was a cave in Yorkshire

As you hopefully will have noticed, this blog has been following the lead of Sleater-Kinney and global economic stability, by going on indefinite hiatus. Lots of things going on at the moment for me, so writing about music for ten people to read hasn't been too high on the to-do list.

But with Arsenal winning again today and my completion this morning of the MPRE, I've a bit of time, so I can tell you what I thought of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which I watched recently. I've a horrible habit of watching Simon Pegg in whatever shit he agrees to appear in, and with the reviews generally being pretty poor, I wasn't expecting much out of it.

Based very loosely on the autobiography of Toby Young (who was on Have I Got News For You last night, but that's an aside), the film is terrible, overbroad comedy with lots of overdone gurning and falling over for the first hour or so. Pegg's character is idealistic but hampered by his complete arrogance and unlikeability. If you've seen that clip where he's playing with the chihuahua, it's like that for an hour. Then it suddenly takes a sharp twist towards responsibility, maturity, self-awareness and (relative) seriousness with - hoo boy - a rant from Kirsten Dunst. The film hasn't earned the right to become reflective, so it doesn't resonate much, and soon enough we're back to dumb comedy set-pieces (food fight ftw!) and a predictably corny ending. Also, there's a transsexual lapdancer, which is always funny.

It's a big problem for the film when the best reactions are for two of the three people from The I.T. Crowd in brief appearances, a coke dealer who was in ONE SCENE of 'Spaced' (hey, it made me happy), and a pretty decent soundtrack. Guillemots! Robyn! Dragonette! There's some props to 'Con Air', though, so that's good. If you're not a Pegg completist, then I envy you, and don't watch this.