Basically, when it gets to June, the midway point in the year, even if you don’t actually sit down and write it, you tend to think which songs are going to be in your personal top ten of the year by the end in December. The problem is that sometimes you hear a song and don’t realise how much you like it straight away, and so it will probably miss the list, and it won’t make much sense to include it in next year’s list. For whatever reason, this year it happened to me more than any other time. There were lots of songs from 2012 I ended up listening to more in 2013. So I’ve decided to make a top 5 of songs which fall into the Mid-Year Limbo, too late to be included in my 2012 list, but far too early to be included in my 2013 list as well.
5) Metric – ‘Breathing Underwater’
I first heard this song by Canadian band Metric in December 2012, but it’s much more suited to summer and warmer weather. It makes me think of cooling off in a swimming pool, possibly because of the underwater references in the title, but also the languid electro-indie backing track.
4) Christina Aguilera – ‘Your Body’
Oh, music buying public, why did you make that awful Pitbull collaboration a hit and overlook this? An energetic Max Martin penned electro-pop track, with an almost Quentin Tarrantino-ish video featuring multicoloured breakfast cereal, a spacey retro video game complete with arcade controller, and TV showing an old cartoon with 3 Big Bad Wolves and a Lucille Ball film. Then there’s Xtina herself, all leopard print leggings, silver star earrings, a necklace saying “Rich Bitch” and pink, purple and blue hair. That’s before you even get to the serial killer plot with bright pink explosions and blood and gore replaced by blue paint and pink confetti. It’s gloriously camp and all the better for it.
3) A*M*E – ‘Play The Game Boy’
British-Sierra Leonean solo singer A*M*E was included on the BBC’s Sound of 2013 shortlist and was the vocalist on Duke Dumont’s number one single ‘Need U (100’%)’ earlier this year, but I still think this fun electro track released in late 2012 which references ’90s games console Game Boy is her best work to date. I don’t know if Badass Adorable was what A*M*E was going for, but she achieved it with this track.
2) The Getaway Plan – ‘Phantoms’
OK, this one is a bit of a cheat as it was first released in 2011, but I first heard it in 2012 and I’ve listened to it mostly in 2013. Anyway, this track is by Australian rock band The Getaway Plan and is from their second album Requiem. This is a rather classy track with powerful guitar solos and lyrics creating an eerie atmosphere speaking of ghosts, monsters and nightmares.
1) Ed Sheeran – ‘Give Me Love’
For me this is Ed Sheeran’s strongest single since ‘The A Team’. Much like that song, the video features a troubled fallen angel type young woman played by an actress who manages to express so much about a character despite having no lines to speak. In ‘Give Me Love’ the actress is Isabel Lucas. She plays a lonely woman who becomes Cupid and starts giving love to people while feeling unable to find it herself. I love the video for Isabel Lucas’ performance, as she shows the sadness of the character, and the Black Swan inspiredartistic direction by Emil Nava. Another thing I love about the video is that it features same-sex couples and interracial couples, and it is refreshing to see that, as it is still all too rare that happens.
The Breakfast Club has long been seen as the definitive ‘Brat Pack’ film and one of the best works of its writer and director John Hughes. As time has gone on it has increasingly been seen as both an essential teen movie and an essential ’80s movie.
I have a love-hate relationship with this film. Reasons for the ‘love’ I have for it include that it came out in 1985, the year I was born and it’s always the film I kind of date myself with. Other reasons I love it are that John Bender was the inspiration for Bender the robot in Futurama, and it has ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ by Simple Minds as its main theme song. There’s also the fact that a lot of people can pick their favourite of the 5 teenagers and say which one they were most like in high school. But there’s one particular character that I always related to and the closest I’ve felt any work of fiction show what I was like as a teenager.
That is Allison. Wearing a big heavy coat, scribbling and doodling away on a pad, feeling isolated from the other kids. There are also little things she did which when I first saw this film I was saying “I did that!”, like when she was tying a thread around her finger for instance. I never had sandwiches as interesting as her Cap’n Crunch and Pixie Stix one though. I’m not alone in identifying with Allison either, indeed looking at forum posts on this film with a “Which one were you?” title, I’m surprised at just how many people said they were Allison in high school. Now if you’ve seen this film, you can probably guess where the some of the ‘hate’ I have for this film comes in, but we’ll get to that later.
The film hasn’t much plot. Indeed the entire plot is five teenagers in detention. It is more to do with the personalities of the characters. They all fit classic high school stereotypes. We have Claire Standish “the princess” played by Molly Ringwald, John Bender, “the criminal” played by Judd Nelson, Brian Johnson “the brain” played by Anthony Michael Hall, Andy Clark “the athlete” played by Emilio Estevez, and Allison Reynolds “the basket case” played by Ally Sheedy. The main focus of the film is the clashing, contrasting personalities and them all learning about each other. What works so well is that they come across as closer to real people than one dimensional stereotypes. That is kind of the whole point of the film, showing that there are real people behind the stereotypes we automatically file them into. But it is shown well as the costume department haven’t gone over-the-top with any of the characters, the geeky lad doesn’t have glasses for example, and the acting is good from all of them.
The only casting choice I think is a bit strange is Emilio Estevez. He looks a bit slight to be a wrestler, and he’s shortest of the boys. Reading up on the film I found out he was only cast as Andy because they had difficulty finding someone to play him. I’m not surprised at that, Andy is the least interesting character to be honest. I am surprised though that Emilio Estevez was originally going to play Bender! Similarly Molly Ringwald was originally cast to play Allison. I do wonder how she would have played her. With Claire she gives her a lot of charm and likeability which balances out the character’s shallow and spoilt traits. Claire also makes the point that after the detention they won’t be friends afterwards as they all fit in different cliques. This is a good point, as while for this very film and in TV shows you get groups of people with very different personalities, simply because it makes it more interesting and broadens the potential audience appeal, in real life birds of a feather flock together.
Bender is many people’s favourite character, with his air punch at the end being one of the most iconic things about the film. He is definitely the funniest, the film is peppered with his snarky comments and one-liners. Having said that, Brian has his comical moments, mainly due to how perfectly Anthony Michael Hall played ‘adorkable’.
I can see the flaws in this film despite the fact I enjoy it. The film is very silly in parts, and it just gets sillier watching it as I get older. I don’t think it’s because it has aged, rather because I’ve aged. Reviews of this film from people who were adults when it came out tend to dismiss it as pretentious and self-pitying. To its credit, the film addresses the fact that adults and teenagers tend to view the world differently. Allison has a line saying “When you grow up, your heart dies”. I have noticed that I’ve mellowed and my view of many things has changed as time has gone on. The Principal and the janitor have a conversation, the upshot of it is that they weren’t much different when they were their age, it’s that they’ve changed because they are now older.
There has been criticism that the characters don’t have any real problems. I’m not sure that’s entirely fair, as parental pressure to succeed and parents fighting all the time are a big deal to kids who are going through such things, and I’d say it’s very harsh to dismiss Bender’s violent, abusive parents and Allison’s lack of friends and possible mental health issues as “not a real problem”. But I can see where those people are coming from to an extent. Andy is basically feeling sorry for himself for bullying another kid, Brian was going to commit suicide because he got an F, and Claire is very privileged in many ways compared to the rest of them. While it’s more complicated than that for all of them, I can see how it may come across as a bit wangsty for some viewers.
Now here comes what I really dislike about this film. After they spend the film trying to debunk stereotypes, the geek boy has to write the essay while all the others hook up, the popular girl with the bad boy, and the weird girl gets a make-over to look just like the popular girl so she can date the jock. It isn’t so much what happens, it’s that it’s clearly framed as something we’re all meant to be happy about. In some ways I think it illustrates just how conservative a decade the ’80s was.
Brian being left alone I think annoys people because it’s difficult to shake off the idea he’s left out just because he’s “the geek”, which obviously will get peoples backs up. Interestingly, there is a rumour that Molly Ringwald would have liked Brian and Claire to pair up, which would have been different. In real life Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall dated for a while after the film.
While I wouldn’t say I like it, I don’t so much mind Brian being left unattached, mainly because the character himself didn’t seem that cut up about it. Apparently Brian’s personality was based on John Hughes himself, so I doubt he disliked the character and had contempt for him. From what I’ve seen it doesn’t seem to have effected Brian’s popularity as a character with fans of the film. He gets to write the essay which is shown as a big speech at the beginning and end of the film, and it leaves him open to fans giving their own interpretations. He has been called “the heart of the film” by quite a few. There is a popular theory that Brian was gay. I don’t think that was the intention of the filmmakers at all, but I quite like it as an alternative character interpretation.
When I first saw this film, I was shocked about Claire and Bender hooking up. Since then I’ve become more familiar with the “girls love bad boys” cliche. But even then, Claire and Bender seemed to hate each other. Bender was basically bullying her throughout the film, and there is an implication she wants to go out with him partly because it will piss off her parents. This isn’t helped by finding out that Judd Nelson stayed in character throughout filming and picked on Molly Ringwald to the point where John Hughes almost fired him. It’s presented as the great romance of the film, but for me I’ve always thought that relationship could only lead to disaster.
And then there’s Allison’s makeover. It’s a variation on the old “Plain Jane was Beautiful All Along”/”Ugly Ducking becomes a Beautiful Swan” thing, but it misses the mark. Basically, most people seem to think Allison looked better before. Her new look doesn’t suit her (for her part, Ally Sheedy apparently hated the bow she had to wear) and she looks too much like a doll. What the filmmakers couldn’t have predicted is that Allison’s original look would date much, much, much better than her makeover. Her going from an outfit not dissimilar to goth/grungy/alternative/emo or whatever to something that a girl might be made to wear by her mother at a stuffy formal event is puzzling for those of us who first saw the film in the ’90s, 2000s or 2010s. The intention of the film may well have been to bring Allison out of her shell and for her to stop hiding herself away, but it comes off as her being told that she will never be happy if she looks the way she wants to look (she says during the makeover she likes the black eye make-up she wears), and instead has to conform to a very specific type of beauty, and ultimately that her own personality is worth throwing away if it means getting to be a piece of arm candy for a jock. For me personally, and for those of us who identified with Allison, it’s bad because it’s this idea that anyone who isn’t in the most popular clique is just kidding themselves if they say they don’t want to be in it, a view which Claire is called out on earlier in the film by Brian. Not everyone wants to be in the most popular crowd just because it’s the most popular one, and I think the filmmakers may not have realised about real life “Allisons” out there is that, they don’t want to look like every other girl, they don’t want to be the girlfriend of the jock, they want to be appreciated for who they are and they want to find like-minded people. The other problem I have with the makeover is that Allison’s social difficulties aren’t going to dissolve just because she’s wearing different clothes now, and ultimately her eccentricities are probably not going to sit well with Andy’s friends.
If there’s another thing that makes me not feel so bad for Brian, it’s that I can’t see either of the two couples ending well, but then very few high school romances last long.
I’ll always have a lot of affection for this film, and it will probably always irritate me a little too, but it’s a testament to how good it is that it has endured for nearing 30 years, and even if it had been forgotten I’d say it’s an fun film despite its flaws.
One thing I discovered recently is Molly Ringwalds’s nice cover of ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’, which is what I’ll end this review on.
There have been lots of documentaries on dinosaurs, but the path of programmes focusing on extinct prehistoric mammals is not quite as well-trodden. BBC 2 showed a 3 part series about that subject presented by Professor Alice Roberts. The programme used computer animation similar to shows like Walking With Dinosaurs to illustrate examples of what might have gone on back then.
The mammals are ancestors of some animals we still have in the present day, and the ones in the Ice Age tended to be much larger. To misquote the Doctor in the Doctor Who episode Cold War; “It’s the Ice Age, everything’s bigger!”.
In the first episode Land Of The Sabre Tooth the programme goes into what today is Hollywood, Los Angeles and as Professor Alice Roberts called it “an encounter with the most iconic Ice Age celebrity”. That is Smilodon, a type of sabre-toothed cat. It’s probably more well known as the sabre-toothed tiger, although this term is scientifically inaccurate. Just like Brontosaurus (to cut a long story short, they found out that a Brontosaurus wasn’t a species in its own right, but was in fact just a type of Apatosaurus) we have a term that has long been discredited scientifically, but has entered the public consciousness to such an extent that they would probably be mentioned if you asked a random member of the public to name as many prehistoric creatures as they could. The “sabre-toothed tiger” wasn’t related to tigers we see today. I wonder if they are trying to make “sabre-toothed cat” something that is more prevalent as a public name? It does make me think more of domesticated cats though. Actually, it reminds me of Baby Puss, the pet sabre-toothed cat in The Flintstones who always locked Fred Flintstone out of his home in the end credits. We get to see the milk teeth of a sabre-toothed kitten. Big “awwwww” factor there, but those teeth were still as sharp as a knife blade.
I’ve always wondered how so much is known about prehistoric life with so little to go on other than fossils. But it’s surprising at just how much you can tell from them. From mastodon tusks experts can tell the age of the creature when it died, whether it was eating a lot or a little, if they were pregnant and even if they were suckling their calf. The remains of snails and beetles and soil samples can tell us even more about what the environment was like, such as what sort of plants were around and a rough guess of how many of them there were. For instance we know there were traces of buttercups, poppy seeds and bluegrass during the ice age, which are very varied plants, though what all of them have in common is that they are suited to cold climates.
Nothrotheriops Shastensis, the Shasta ground sloth, is long extinct, but it used to live near what is now the Grand Canyon. What it has in common with present day sloths is that it took a long time to digest its food, which is the very reason why sloths are slow. The Shasta ground sloth was much bigger than today’s sloth though, it was as big as a grizzly bear and had 7 inch long claws.
In the second episode Land of the Cave Bear one of the created CGI scenes was of a bear and a lion fighting in a Transylvanian cave. Sounds kind of like a wildlife themed Tekken/Street Fighter-ish video game. The event was was suggested to be something that might have happened as remains of both cave bears and cave lions were found in that location The cave bear was very large and was a vegetarian, and needed to consume a great deal so it would have enough energy to hibernate. But falling temperatures during an ice age meant less vegetation, so many cave bears couldn’t get enough to eat and died during hibernation. Within just a few thousand years they were extinct. The cave lion was 25% larger than modern day lions and didn’t normally hunt cave bears, in fact it attempting to attack one at all suggests conditions were harsh for them too, as cave lions preferred to hunt antelope and reindeer. Their numbers also probably fell because of the lack of vegetation.
Some species thrived during the ice ages however. The Glyptodont is one, who lived in what is now Arizona and where evidence suggests that their numbers correlated with the advancement or recession of the ice sheet. The Glyptodont was a very unusual mammal. It had a shell, a furry belly, digging claws, teeth which looked a bit like Christmas trees, and it may even have had a trunk! It was described on the programme as resembling an “enourmous armadillo”. It was suited to swamps, but when the ice age began to thaw the rains moved north, which caused their habitat to be drier turning it into a desert. This is probably what led to the Glyptodont’s extinction.
Two species that were extremely well suited to ice age conditions were the woolly rhinoceros and arguably the most well known ice age creature the woolly mammoth. Both were covered in woolly fur to keep them warm. The woolly rhinoceros was about the same size as modern day rhinos, but it’s horn was twice the size of the horns on the rhinos we see today. The fact that two large herbivores were so widespread during this time, from Siberia to Alaska, suggests that there must have been plenty of plants for them to eat. This is the odd thing about the Ice Age. It was probably quite sunny in this area even though it was extremely cold. The theory is that because there was so much ice which wasn’t thawing it locked up most of the water, meaning that as cold as the temperature was very it was also dry so there would be very little snow. Ironically as the planet warmed up it would have become more snowy, which would have been difficult for both those species to navigate through and to find food.
Woolly mammoths clung on for a while though, there are traces of them as late as 2,000 BC, which was around the time the Egyptian Pyramids were built. They chose to move further north where it was colder, although the newer fossils are a lot smaller. It seems that mammoths may have been evolving to become smaller.
The conclusion drawn in the third episode Last Of The Giants was unfortunately that humans probably have the most responsibility for the extinction of woolly mammoths and mastodons. They were hunted by our ancestors and Neanderthals. Our ancestors used mammoth carcasses for a lot of things. There is evidence that they used mammoth bones and tusks as fuel because trees were so scarce, and the tusks and hides were used to build early forms of houses. It’s unlikely that they were solely to blame for the animals extinction, as they’re simply weren’t that many homo sapiens around at this time, but it’s definitely possible that they set off a chain of events over a long period of time.
A theory the programme puts forward is that fossils show that mammoths may have started attacking one another. In modern day elephants dominant bulls are targeted by poachers because they are solitary and have such large tusks. This causes problems for elephant herds as the large elder bull elephants keep the younger testosterone fuelled bulls in line, and without their presence the younger bulls fight amongst themselves, with the females and their calves getting caught in the crossfire. It’s likely that our ancestors targeted the elder bull mammoths and mastodons with the biggest tusks, so perhaps a similar thing happened to these species.
Of course if our ancestors hadn’t developed to use tools to hunt is probably what allowed humans to survive the Ice Age and become as sophisticated and powerful as we are today., They also left behind cave paintings, such as the famous ones in Chauvet cave in Southern France. We also saw a carving of a bison, which I thought looked very well done considering how primitive the time it is from. There were also animals which benefitted from our presence, horses being an example. The first horses were born in America, but eventually died out there. Luckily by that time they had spread throughout Europe and Asia, and to Africa where they evolved into zebras, and the fact that humans domesticated horses would only have helped their numbers increase.
As tempting as it is to think that one cataclysmic event is what killed off all the extinct Ice Age mammals, it seems it was more many events over a long period of time. There were many disastrous events. When the ice started melting it didn’t just unleash the water it contained, it released any water it was holding back like a dam causing floods which would have killed anything in their path, and even if the ice didn’t melt altogether the icebergs of the time were as big as islands.
There were many Ice Age animals that survive to this day. The ones mentioned in this programme included elk, bison, antelope, Arctic ground squirrels, capybara and of course, us.
But if there is a trend as to what killed the extinct animals it’s that the climate changed slowly but surely, having a knock-on effect. With the talk of ice melting, climate change and in the case of the extinction of mastodons, humans not knowing the long term consequences of their actions you couldn’t help but be reminded of climate change and global warming today, which was a very sobering and grave thought.
This was an interesting documentary, I found out quite a lot from it, including some things about modern wildlife which I didn’t know. Professor Alice Roberts explained things clearly and concisely for people such as myself and I suspect most viewers who aren’t experts in the field of paleontology.
headphonedaydreams 