millionreasons | 2010 in Twelve Days

Song: Dum Dum Girls - Jail, la la. Much better than those young pretenders The Pains Of Being Pure at Heart. Sassy!

Film: Hollywoodland

I loved this film. It featured some of my favourite things: Old Hollywood, the sleazy underbelly of Old Hollywood, and noir. Adrien Brody played a detective investigating the mysterious death of George Reeves, the first Superman (no relation) in 1959. Brody was slightly irritating; he seemed to be playing the character through a series of facial ticks and mumbling, but on the other hand, Ben Affleck, as Reeves, was just wonderful. Perhaps the character of a washed up Hollywood star resonated with him (remember when it was Ben that was the star and <Team America voice>Matt Damon </Team America voice> his sidekick?). Brody investigates a world of corrupt studio men, unfaithful studio wives, the obligatory Femme Fatale and the dark downside of fame without, of course, coming to any conclusions about Reeves' death.

Book: The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. If Carson McCullers had written a murder mystery, this would be it. Instead of the claustrophobic group of overly intellectual young men at a liberal arts college of Tartt's first novel, we have the cloistered and faded gentility of a female family in the deep south where the men have either left or died. The Scout-like younger daughter Harriet attempts to solve her brother's murder using books from the library (in classic two birds/one stone fashion, she also wants to win the Young Reader of the Summer award) which leads her to a redneck religious revivalist family straight out of a Flannery O'Connor novel. Interestingly, the book breaks all the writing rules; adverbs are used liberally, characters are told rather than shown and they "mutter" and "call" and "shout" rather than "say". This gives the book an old fashioned ambience; even thought it's set in 1977, it feels as if it could be in any time during the last 60 years.

Days Out - The Secret Nuclear Bunker, Chalfont St Giles

Holiday - Paris