Posts from February, 2007

Until yesterday, there had only been two acts to have been number one this year in the popular music charts. For most of January, we had to listen to the gawky-looking lass from X Factor. Maybe it’s our judgement, but she seems to have faded into the hole she crept out of.   

Knocking her from number one was the guy who we would compare to Marmite - Mika. You either love him or hate him so much you want to start some kind of violent fight. Before approaching the gig, we did wonder what it would be like. After listening to the album a good few times, we came to the conclusion that it was at times sickly sweet but also full of Mika’s personal feelings. Hecklerspray approached with caution. 

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By now even the world's most mild-mannered person is so sick of hearing about The Oscars that even the vaguest, most cryptic reference to Kate Winslet's frock is enough to spark off violent killing sprees - and The Razzies are the antidote to all that.

Popping all the smug, self-satisfied 'Blood Diamond made the world a better place, you know' smarming that goes hand in hand with The Oscars with impeccable timing, The Razzies took place on Saturday night. Charged with picking out the worst movies and performances that Hollywood is capable of making, this year was one of the most controversial Razzies ceremonies of all time - in short, The Razzies decided that Sharon Stone and Basic Instinct 2 were worse than Nicolas Cage and The Wicker Man, even though one of those movies features a bee-fearing policeman dressed up as a bear punching a woman in the face and the other one has boobies in it.

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As we all know, the Oscars isn't about winning awards at all - in fact, we've already forgotten who hosted the Oscars, what movie won the Best Picture Oscar and what an Oscar actually looks like - because the Oscars is all about lovely dresses and stuff.

Oscar night is the one spot on the movie-making calender when actresses can swap the dirty rags that they wear for the rest of the year while playing impoverished drug addict victims of domestic violence for a selection of glamorous dresses with plunging necklines, figure-hugging cuts and other stuff we've read in girly magazines that we don't fully understand. For the Oscars, actresses can make themselves look a million dollars, fashion designers can earn themselves a million dollars and the majority of rational people at home would pay a million dollars to watch something that isn't about the fucking Oscars just for a single blissful second.

But who wore what at this year's Oscars? We're no strangers to sartorial elegance here at hecklerspray, so we've compiled the world's most definitive Oscar night fashion rundown for you, right after the jump…

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On the night of the Oscars, it's only fitting that the movie at the top of the weekend box office reflects the hard work and nuanced artistic vision that goes into making a culturally important piece of cinema - or, failing that, Ghost Rider will do.

Ghost Rider - easily February's best movie about a man with a flaming skull for a head riding a motorbike up the side of a skyscraper while twirling some chains around - is the number one movie at the weekend box office for the second week on the trot. Hopefully the commercial success of Ghost Rider will mean that next year Oscar contenders will take a leaf out of its book and try and make their highbrow movies more accessible to a wider audience. Yes, we're saying that when The Queen II gets made we want to see a scene where Helen Mirren sets her head on fire and rides up Big Ben on a burning motorcycle. And, really, is that too much to ask?

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Hear that relieved sigh? That means that awards season is finally over - ending with everyone you expected to win an Oscar winning an Oscar last night in a ceremony that was so long that conventional stopwatches actually melted under the strain.

In the least surprising Oscars for longer than we care to remember, Dame Helen Mirren won the Best Actress Oscar for The Queen, meaning that she finally has enough awards to use them to spell out "Who's the best Dame now?" in her garden so that Judi Dench can see it next time she's on Google Earth; Forest Whitaker won the Best Actor Oscar for The Last King Of Scotland and Martin Scorsese won Best Director and Best Picture for The Departed. But the Oscars really only belonged to one man - Jack Nicholson, who didn't win anything but had shaved off all his hair, presumably in some kind of warped tribute to Britney Spears.

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Stupid aliens - they come all the way to earth to colonise it and they only bring their crappiest green laser cannon that can only shoot straight down to do it. And then they decide to land in a city, when there are plenty of decent deserts and parks around to do it.

This is Killer City UFO in a nutshell - you're a UFO and you need to smash all the buildings beneath you into rubble or else you crash into them (oh yeah, the stupid aliens forgot to build spaceships that go up as well as down). In actual fact Killer City UFO is great fun - it's like Space Invaders in reverse. Instead of trying to kill the flying saucers, in Killer City UFO you need play the flying saucer trying to clear enough room to land. You'll need sharp hand-eye coordination to play Killer City UFO but, since the game only involves the space bar, not much else.

Play Killer City UFO 

Lord alone knows how much we love Drone. We've tried to convince you to love Drone as much as we do in the past, but we've only had words at our disposal, and they only have a limited impact. Now, if we could somehow use sounds and moving images…

But wait! We can! Even though we went doolally over Drone's album colourformoney when it was released - banging on about its warm pastoral electrofolk and the way the tunes never quite leave you once you've heard them like a right bunch of daft idiots - we've never been able to show you what Drone's music is like. Until now. We've got hold of a video to Drone track Hopscotch for you, and it's a doozy. Hopscotch does Boards Of Canada better than Boards Of Canada have done for the last couple of albums. It's soothing. It's mesmerising. It features a Roman centurion playing schoolyard games on an Open University set. Click the big button above and enjoy Hopscotch by Drone in all its wonderful glory. 

When it comes to spooky-looking boys with terrible hair who play demented indie music, The Horrors are close to the top of the list - so you'll be pleased to know they're doing signing sessions today, as this email we've just received is keen to tell us:

The Horrors have confirmed that they will be holding two 'Gloves' signing sessions today, the day of the single's release (Monday February 26).

Catch the band at Fives Records in Leigh-on-Sea by their hometown of Southend at 12.30pm, before they hot-foot it over to Rough Trade Records in Covent Garden, London for another signing session 5.30pm.

Both appearances are sure to be well attended so we suggest you get there early and form as orderly a queue as the situation will allow. There will be a few ultra limited pairs of Horrors leather gloves that aren't on sale anywhere to giveaway to some lucky fans randomly chosen at the instores, so come on down!

12.30pm - Fives Records
www.fives-records.co.uk
103 Broadway
Leigh on Sea
Essex
SS9 1PG

5.30pm - Rough Trade Records
www.roughtrade.com/site/instore.lasso
In the basement of the Slam City Skates shop
16 Neal's Yard
Covent Garden
London
WC2H 9DP

Free gloves? We've killed for less than that. Remember, though, that The Horrors will only be signing stuff and not actually playing any music at these instores. If you're lucky Samantha Morton might turn up to explode another alien out of her vagina, but don't come running to us if that doesn't happen either.

Charlotte Church turned 21 last week, and she celebrated it with the time-honoured Welsh tradition of possibly letting a fake-tanned rugby chickboy knock her up - according to reports, Charlotte Church is either pregnant or not pregnant.

Why does everyone think that Charlotte Church is pregnant? Simple really - Charlotte Church didn't mark her 21st birthday by downing a million alcopops, lurching out of a nightclub at 3am, showing her knickers to the paparazzi, starting a fight with a kebab shop and slurring selected verses of Crazy Chick while laying face down in a puddle of her own liquids like she usually does. So, all said, yes - Charlotte Church probably is pregnant.

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We all boast from time to time.

You know the score - little white lies on your CV that pitch you as having 'exceptional computer skills' when you actually mean you're quite good at playing Grand Theft Auto. Or describing yourself as 'average build' on a dating site when you're actually so fat you require planning permission to step outside.

None of us can hold a candle, however, to film director-type James Cameron: quite possibly the most self-aggrandising man on the planet. Cameron - who once proclaimed himself the King Of The World because he made a movie about a posh girl and a ladyboy trapped on a sinking ship - is now officially pushing aside all pretenders to the throne by blurting out his most ludicrous statement yet.

Something about finding Jesus's coffin.

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Now sit down, grab a paper bag if you need it and take several deep breaths; hecklerspray is the messenger of bad news today - the new, decade in the waiting, Guns N' Roses album Chinese Democracy has unsurprisingly been pushed back to some undecided point in time again. Probably 2036. 

So what’s the reason this time? Well, to be quite honest, we don’t really care much anymore. It's here today in fact that hecklerspray launches its own band Guns and Pansies. The band - made up entirely of hecklerspray staff - aims to write,  record and release two albums on the same day, replace Shawn with some bloke who wears a KFC bucket on his head, split up, get back together, throw hissy fits, make outrageously stupid demands and tour our as yet unnamed albums before Guns N' Roses release Chinese Democracy. We think we can do it. 

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In theory Saturday's Dancing On Ice was the first show where any of the contestants were potential winners - but that theory overlooked one huge issue; the issue of Lisa Scott-Lee being desperately unlikable to the actual point of madness.

Lisa Scott-Lee was knocked out of Dancing On Ice on Saturday despite getting a pretty good score of 23.5 for her routine to some old Santana song. Sure, Lisa had a wobble or two on the ice, and the routine was out of time with the music, but it probably wouldn't be too wide of the mark to suggest that Lisa Scott-Lee got voted off Dancing On Ice because her constant annoying stage school attention-seeking is just irritating beyond belief, not to mention the tossy little tantrum she threw during training when she couldn't do a little move properly. So it'll be back to selling 'accidental' nude pictures of herself to make a living, then.

But who's going to win this series of Dancing On Ice? As ever, here's part one of our Dancing On Ice betting odds - for Lee Sharpe, Emily Symons and Duncan James - with betting odds from Paddy Power…

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