Various Titbits #7

With money comes great responsibility. By that profound reasoning being broke leaves you free to do whatever you want. Which makes me feel perfectly fine about spending the last couple of weeks venturing to see friends, family and others all over the country living out of a ruck-sack and sleeping on sofas all the while staring at a bank balance of 72 pence. However, now is the time of crushing realisations of impending deadlines, undone tasks and a return to Cornish parishes. Although a full student loan installment lessens these woes. Already splurged it on Scene It Box Office Smash for the 360 (it was only a fiver with the buzzers!) and a plethora of music I've been lusting after for a while (The National's back catalogue, J Dilla, Jaylib, Johnny Cash, Fionn Regan, Aphex Twin, Dark Was The Night & Monsters Of Folk). One thing I made sure I didn't miss while I was adventuring was the leak of the new LCD Soundsystem album. "Dance Yrself Clean" kicks like a mule and "All I Want" is "All My Friends" after listening to David Bowie's "Heroes" for five days. It sags in the second half a little but the opening four tracks are blisteringly brilliant. Now they've been confirmed for Glastonbury too. I'm so excited I could shit rainbows.

Caught a few films while I was away too. Kick-Ass is thoroughly fantastic and is easily my best film of the year so far. Violent, sweary and a genuine cinema experience. Almost as good as Chris Tookey's review then. The Hurt Locker is as tense and brilliant as everyone says it is, walking the Top Gun line of homoeroticism just on the right side of acceptable. Although it's still more manly than the front cover of Men's Fitness. Synecdoche, New York is better in retrospect than it is at the time. I'd forgotten what it was about until I spotted it in a dimly lit branch of Blockbusters. "Comedy of the year!". "Laugh out loud!". The box certainly lies, it's thoroughly long, good and depressing in equal measure but not funny. Finally, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a Swedish mega-hit in the world of books and now in the world of European cinema. Haven't read the novel, I can only afford those cheap green Penguin books in the classics section of Waterstones, but the film is a lot more involving than I expected it to be. Certainly got a lot more to it than your usual thriller affair. Worth seeking out. Kick Ass is the best of the lot though.