Posts from June, 2007

Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows comes out in a matter of weeks, which is bad news for people who like to move around without gits who think they can walk and read at the same time clattering into you, but better news for others.

That group of 'others' is mainly made up of people who work at Bloomsbury, the British publishers of the Harry Potter books. Bloomsbury today announced that advance orders for Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows are up by a staggering 17% compared to pre-orders on the previous Harry Potter book, Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince. Although Bloomsbury didn't care to place a figure on the amount of advance orders it had received for Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, in real terms it means that you'll be able to annoy 17% more people by running into bookshops and quoting that hacker who claims that Hermione dies at the end of the book.

Oh yeah. Spoiler alert.

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Bloody hellfire! It’s a crazy two-for-one special this week on the old trawl through MySpace, where we try to claw away the spam and leave you with stuff that you would be proud to put on your fruit-based mp3 player.

This week we bring you the psychedelic sounds of The Earlies and on the reverse, a faster and angrier listen from Help She Can’t Swim. This is our rubbish apology for not having one done for last week. We’re sure that tens of you spat out your milk and pelted your PC with cookies in utter shock and disgust. We sometimes do that, but only during our special moments. Both this week's bands are ones we’ve accidentally seen live at some point. 

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If any of you have ever seen Paula Abdul's bleary-eyed unintelligible meanderings on American Idol and wished you could see a show about nothing but that, your prayers have been answered - Paula Abdul now has her own reality show.

Hey Paula starts tonight on Bravo in the US and will probably make it over here as soon as the channel has cleared space between Porn Week and old episodes of Dog The Bounty Hunter. Anyway, the first episode of Hey Paula deals with Paula Abdul trying to stop her dogs from eating a pile of priceless diamonds or something, and it's hoped that later episodes will focus on Paula Abdul's chronic back pain, Paula Abdul's confusing behaviour in interviews and the time that Paula Abdul kept repeatedly trying to walk through a closed patio door for half an hour before breaking down and wondering why the voices in her head had created a forcefield stopping her from entering her own house.

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The Phil Spector murder trial is now focusing on the mental health of Lana Clarkson - probably a good thing, since most healthy-minded women wouldn't have wanted to suck off a kooky old man in a bizarre lesbian wig, as Lana supposedly did.

Again, as on Monday, the Phil Spector murder trial revolved around the testimony of Vincent DiMaio, a forensics expert who Phil Spector is paying $400 an hour. As part of Phil Spector's defence, DiMaio yesterday continued to push the theory that Lana Clarkson killed herself, as opposed to Phil Spector doing it for her. As well as detailing her depression - and her struggles with alcohol and drugs - DiMaio also decided to describe exactly what happens to your tongue when you shoot yourself in the mouth, with the aid of a rubber tongue. Needless to say, it's put us right off the idea of ever shooting ourselves in the mouth. Or sucking off Phil Spector, for that matter.

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Paris Hilton being interviewed by Larry King was a must-see event, as the world eagerly awaited the formless jail-time mumblings of a famously stupid woman when probed by a man who can't even tell Ringo Starr from George Harrison.

And the Paris Hilton Larry King interview didn't disappoint. Well, OK, the Paris Hilton Larry King interview didn't disappoint so long as your expectations were so low that you generally get excited when someone waves a sheet of shiny paper around for you. In fact, the Paris Hilton Larry King interview was so vague and completely unrevelatory about Paris Hilton's time in jail that the shiny paper option would have probably been more insightful. But still, let's not be too hard on the interview; without it, we may never have learnt that Paris Hilton thinks that jail food is "horrible."

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Urban Sniper is a game for anyone who's ever wanted to climb up on top of a big tower and start blasting away at people indiscriminately with a gun. You know, to fight crime and stuff, not to quell the screaming voices in your mind. That'd be weird.

Urban Sniper is, in all honesty, probably the best sniper game we've ever played. The levels are nice and simplistic, yet not so simplistic that you'll easily grow bored of it. Urban Sniper levels include killing five people quickly, killing dogs, taking out cars and people simultaneously and shooting a man hiding behind a piano, and we don't think it could be any more satisfying. And the best thing about Urban Sniper is that, depending on how well you do, you get alternate missions. Perfect.

Play Urban Sniper now

God, this is rubbish.

Let's face it: any movie which leaves you almost nostalgic for Eli Roth's original Hostel has got some serious issues. As turgid, juvenile and derivative as the first instalment was, this rushed-out follow up makes Part One look like it had Fellini on camera and David Mamet on scripting duties.

The story? Well, we'll cobble together what pieces we can find. Basically Hostel Part II is just a retread of the first film, in which a group of spoilt American students get tricked into staying at a resort which doubles up as a handy torture chamber - a place where rich people pay extortionate amounts of money for the pleasure of sticking power tools into screaming backpackers. The 'twist' this time around, however, is that our protagonists are exclusively female - meaning that Roth can play that all-important misogyny card to his heart's content.

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It's probably not an overstatement to say that the Spice Girls were The Beatles of average-looking, questionably-talented, ruthlessly-marketed lowest common denominator forgettable pop music - and now the Spice Girls are back!

Well they're not back yet, but from midday today the Spice Girls are back! All of the Spice Girls - Dumpy Spice, Depressed Spice, Uppity Spice, Overbearing Spice and Slaggy Spice - are about to hold a joint press conference in London's O2 Arena where it's expected that they're going to announce the return of The Spice Girls, for one album and six concerts only. Of course, all the speculation could be wrong - the Spice Girls could just as easily be announcing that they've kidnapped a vanload of children and they're going to drive it into a lake unless people start taking their solo careers seriously again - but we'll just have to wait and see.

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Cast your mind back to the so-called 'Celebrity' Big Brother from last year. No, we aren’t thinking of the epic 2007 series where Jade Goody along with her sisterhood of big bad racists said nasty and spiteful things to Shilpa Shetty.

We are thinking of the Celebrity Big Brother from back in the good old days of 2006, when the show was mildly entertaining and didn’t spawn multiple complaints to OFCOM. In what seemed a whirlwind romance, Preston from The Ordinary Boys – the band not quite as good as any other band ever, fell in love with Paris Hilton lookalike Chantelle Houghton. Cue Preston ditching his other bird for Chantelle and getting a quickie marriage. And now that’s all over. 

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Big Brother's been in rare form this week - first Big Brother has forced the housemates to stay awake for three and a half days and, now that they've failed, it's forcing them to only eat what looks horrifyingly like wallpaper paste.

Perhaps if Jack Bauer had been taking notes from Big Brother, the last season of 24 wouldn't have been so useless. Or maybe it's the other way around and Big Brother has been taking torture notes from 24. Either way we couldn't be enjoying it any more - at least until next week when, having failed the Big Brother 'kill the youngest member of your family with the back of a shovel' task, Ziggy, Laura and Brian are forced to sit down with their feet in buckets of water while men hold electrical wires from household appliances to their temples and the other Big Brother housemates are stripped naked and forced into human pyramids. Yes, we'd like that.

Billi, Carole and Tracey are up for Big Brother eviction tomorrow, so here are the Big Brother betting odds for Carole and Tracey, with betting odds coming from Paddy Power…

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If you're like us, you've probably often wondered what the life of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner would be like as seen through the eyes of the genius who directed all three of the critically-acclaimed Rush Hour movies.

And now you're going to get your chance. Hugh Hefner has approved a script to the movie of his life, and Playboy: The Movie is to hopefully go into production in the very near future. However, since Rush Hour director Brett Ratner is directing the Playboy movie, we can expect to see the moment when a young Hugh Hefner decides to create a new system-shaking magazine with a brave taboo-busting ideology recreated cinematically into a scene where Hugh Hefner runs into a gangster's lair, accidentally insults everyone and winds up in the middle of a hare-brained gang-fight that only his nimble Asian partner can rescue him from.

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Now, far be it for us to suggest that all vegetarians are gaunt, lifeless, protein-deprived morons who don't realise that chewing on bleeding lumps of dead animal is both cool and sexy, but there's a definitely a lack of sexy vegetarians around.

Why do we say that? Because animal rights group PETA has named its annual 'World's Sexiest Vegetarians' list - a little like trying to find the world's tubbiest anorexic or the world's most interesting envelope - and the results are so depressing that we're planning to visit the winners' houses and frisbee lamb chops into their mouths just to get them disqualified. Why? Because PETA has decided that this year's World's Sexiest Vegetarians are Carrie Underwood from American Idol - who was also the World's Sexiest Vegetarian two years ago - and a bloke so startlingly anonymous that we're not even sure his mother knows who he is.

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