No, really. I didn’t actually mean to abandon this blog. I never actually do, but these pesky life-type things come up and my words dry up and before I know it it’s been a year or some such ridiculous time. I’d apologise, but I have one pretty lame and one pretty awesome excuse this time…

The pretty lame – and not well out-of-date – excuse is the amount of writing I was doing elsewhere. Most of it was pretty short-form and newsy, and only tangentially related to the kind of stuff I want to be writing about, but it did give me a little bit of discipline that blogging for yourself doesn’t. It was writing for an audience bigger than just me – and I enjoyed it a lot, but it did tend to use up a lot of energy I used to put into writing here, especially when combined with my second, and much more awesome excuse…

We’ll call him Flash. He’s four months old and very, very cute. Currently, he’s in his cot by my bed, getting focusing intently on rolling himself off his back and onto his stomach. He’s not quite got there yet – he keeps his legs bent up to his chest, and I’m not sure he realises why that’s a problem – but I think it’s going to happen pretty soon…

I’ve got a few things to say about the whole pregnancy and birth and baby-raising thing, but I’ll get to them in future posts, for fear of this one going on for pages and pages. And also because when I started writing this, the wee’un was asleep, and now he is not, and I doubt he will afford me the luxury of a nice long post today.

Suffice to say that it’s all awesome, but it does take a lot out of you. I almost completely lost my will to write while I was pregnant – along with my will to exercise, and both before I had any inkling that I was. I’m still struggling to get my mojo back in either area, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a shot, right?

And don’t worry – I may have a few baby-related posts in me, but there is no danger of this becoming a mommyblog. I have plently of television to catch you up on, and even the odd soapbox to climb up onto.

But first, I have to go play This Little Piggy for a while…

Tron: Legacy
Having not seen the Original Tron, and mostly going in out of Chuck-loyal curiosity and because I had to, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Tron: Legacy – but I ended up being pleasantly surprised.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not good. The writing is all over the place, with just the kind of dialogue that you’d expect from writers who come from One Tree Hill – no, really; they do – and plot points that get picked up and dropped seemingly at random. Tron himself, for example, shows up a couple of times, causing other characters to exclaim ‘Tron!’ in either glee or anger, and then disappears again. Especially given the name of the movie, it’s a plotline you assume will go somewhere, but it doesn’t. And it’s not the only one. I don’t know if the script was just too long and someone who didn’t really understand what was going on came in and cut stuff out, but that’s almost how it feels.

The acting is also just barely ok. Jeff Bridges the elder is awesome, as always, but the CGIed younger Bridges is … well, CGI. It’s a decent enough job, and it actually took me a couple of scenes to realise that it wasn’t just that Bridges suddenly couldn’t act to save his life. But still: wooden and stiff, which is unfortunate. Garrett Hedlund is unfortunately also pretty wooden, without having CGI to blame, and he just lacks the charisma to hold his own as a lead. Olivia Wilde won me over by the end, but it took a really long time and I couldn’t help but spend the first part of the movie thinking she was horribly miscast. And I usually like her a lot.

Yes, even on The OC.

But … it’s still a lot of fun. And I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy myself. Sure, it was silly and clunky and a teeny bit too long, but it was also stylistically awesome, with great music and visual effects, and lots of cool toys that I now want. The game scenes were lots of fun, and the whole thing was just too cheesy and over-the-top not to love, just a little bit.

Unstoppable
Another one that I think was more than the sum of its parts, albeit in a different way.

There’s a really old-school feel about Unstoppable, and not just because it’s about Ye Olde Trains. Almost everything about it is trope-tastic, from the pairing of the young, unproven apprentice with the old, bitter but loveable elder in a tense working situation, through the train full of schoolkids hurtling towards danger, to the evil and inept big-business middle manager, and even the shots of everyone’s loved ones watching the action play out on TV.

But I was also impressed by the trope that it avoided, because I honestly can’t remember the last impending mid-level disaster movie I’ve seen where the cause of the disaster is not an evil, icy, terroristy villain, pulling the strings from the other end of a phone. And Unstoppable doesn’t go that way. There’s no bomb. There’s no evil plot. There’s no mastermind. There’s just Randy from My Name Is Earl being the same screw-up he always is.

It’s a welcome change, while making for a really simple, straightforward movie: There’s a runaway train, and two guys go chasing after it, trying to stop it before it kills a whole bunch of people and destroys a bunch of stuff.

And it works. Tony Scott ratchets the tension up nicely throughout the ninety minutes, and the ‘human stories’ give the story enough emotional stakes to make that tension mean something. At ninety minutes, it also sticks to what I call the Passenger 57 rule: if you don’t have a lot of story to tell, it’s better to make a short, snappy movie than to pretend you do and bore people for two hours.

The cast is rather testosterone-heavy, with only Rosario Dawson doing enough to get any sort of main credit. Thankfully though, her character avoided becoming any sort of damsel in distress and/or romantic throwaway – but was instead competent and intelligent, if inhibited in what she could actually do.

Of course, it’s not perfect, mostly I think where Scott goes for dramatics. The writer’s complete misunderstanding of the term ‘evacuate’ started to grate by the end, as the crowds of onlookers lining the tracks in supposedly ‘evacuated’ areas just made my inner safety freak want to cry. And it is all totally predictable, so if you’re looking for something that will keep you guessing, you might want to look elsewhere.

All in all, though, an entertaining way to spend an hour and a half.

Salt
Oh, ye gads! The silliness! I’d heard it was better than expected, but oh! It was just so silly and so over-the-top and did I mention the silliness?

Now, usually I’m down for a bit of the silliness – see above, if you haven’t already – but in this case it was just … too much. I think I was hoping for something more of a physchological thriller, whereas this was just a weird Cold-War throwback with evil Russians and good Americans and lots of hand-wavey piffle.

There’s a scene really early on, where Angelina Jolie walking into her L-shaped kitchen and reaches along a length of bench to get herself a cup of coffee. It requires her practically lying across it awkwardly, and both the husband and I snorted, because has she taken one step to her left, she could have taken one forward and then reached for her coffee like a normal person. That scene pretty much sums up the movie: it’s all much, much more complicated than it needs to be.

Now, this is going to get spoiley, so if you care, don’t read the next bit, but when Salt killed the President so early in the movie, it was quite clear that something was up. This was her movie, so she couldn’t be all evil, because, for the whole thing to work, we had to be rooting for her, at least a little bit. So … yeah, maybe the assassination was staged but it was hard to look over the dozen or so guards and agents that she’d killed along the way, which obviously weren’t. And come to think of it – why did Orlov blow her cover in the first place? Was he just trying to make it so much harder for her to carry out her mission? Had he not, she could have walked right in the front door and killed the Prez without any fuss or muss or collateral damage. It was just unbelievably stupid.

Now, I watch plenty of crap, and in theory, I wouldn’t object to watching Angelina Jolie run around being a badass in crappy wigs for two hours. But if that’s all you want your movie to be, go light and simple on plotting, and avoid this overwrought mess of crosses and double-crosses which stop making sense twenty minutes into the movie.

Even the action scenes were a let down. I hate to say it, but Angelina Jolie is barely a shadow of her former kick-ass self, and she just seemed too frail – both in appearance and in movement – to be doing half of what she was.

And I’m not even going to mention the utter ridiculousness of the ending …

I do have a whole folderful of half-written, ranty posts that will I will hopefully get up here over the next couple of weeks. It’s just that, for a range of complicated reasons, my brain has turned on me and I just cannot, for the life of me, get anything finished enough for me to post it.

And while the husband blames Alias, I think it’s also noteworthy that I have watched hardly any television at all this past week. My download limit is going to waste in a scary big way. I have also lost the ability to read anything more challenging than Gossip Girl novels (which I may actually just be re-reading) and while I did see a movie yesterday I’m reviewing it for a proper publication, so cannot afford to use up the few words I will be able to muster up about it for this site just yet.

Apologies. I’m hoping now that the causes of this funk are being dealt with posting – and televisual viewing – will go back to normal.

There’s a point right at the very end of many a teen romance flick, not long after our heroine has finally captured the heart of the super-cool dude she has been chasing from the second scene in the movie, where she turns her back on him and realizes suddenly that the boy she really wants is her geeky-but-loveable best friend. Sometimes the dude has dome something to deserve this clichéd dicking around – he’s turned out to be sleazy, or shallow, or mean, so it’s ok – but sometimes, he’s a perfectly nice super-cool dude, but it’s just all about the lesson, and the lesson is this:

Settle. You’ll be happier.

The closing moments of Scott Pilgrim Versus The World have Scott making a choice between Knives – the Japanese schoolgirl he was with at the start of the movie, but never seemed all that besotted by – and Ramona Flowers – the super-cool chick he’s just spent most of the preceeding two hours fighting for. For a minute there, it looks like he’s going to choose Knives, and I am going to put this movie down as one great big long disappointment.

But he chooses Ramona. And, as well as being awesomely refreshing, it’s the only point in the movie where this really felt like the guy flick it’s been marketed as. Guys – at least in fiction – don’t get lessons about settling. If Ramona had been a horrible person, then it would have been ok for Scott to choose Knives, but all Ramona is, is risky. And what Scott has done in this movie is grow up to a point where risky is fine.

It’s this choice that does more than any other to redeem this movie: one I really, really, wanted to love, but just found myself getting annoyed at. But sadly, a moment isn’t enough.

Fault doesn’t lie with the cinematography, which is wonderful. The moonlit swingset scenes in particular blew me away with how much they looked like something out of a painting, and how much they managed to capture the exact mood of the movie at those points. The comic-booky visual effects weren’t strictly necessary (obviously), but they really added something to the style of the movie, and I think that without them, this would have been a far flatter and duller experience. Visually, this movie is over-the-top and cheesy and sometimes a little hackneyed, but it works, without exception.

And the performances are fine – if, at times, a little over the top, Knives. Michael Cera I can take or leave but he is not without his charms – the problem being more that his charms are used in exactly the same way in each and every performance he gives, and that dulls their effectiveness. He’s just Michael Cera: endearing, but a little too bumbling and ineffectual to take seriously, and it’s nice to see other characters basically call him out for that here. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is lovely as Ramona, and manages to do what she can with what isn’t the world’s most challenging role, and the support cast: eh. All either competent but unremarkable, or annoying, Knives. Also, Jason Schwartzman (but that’s a personal preference more than anything).

Similarly, the dialogue is everything you would expect from this movie as spoken by these people. Plenty of deadpan snark. Plenty of underplayed wit. Plenty of too-cool-for-school pop-culture references, mixed in with enough old-school stuff to make the whole thing feel lovingly retro.

And the thing is, all of that is fine, because that is the movie that this is trying to be. It wants to be a cool, comicky, slacker film with lots of cool music, made for a generation that grew up being sarcastic so often that half the time they don’t even know anymore whether they are or aren’t, a generation that reads comic books and plays video games and probably either are or were in a crappy band with their friends, and who get the myriad random Smashing Pumpkins references that litter this movie (which I did but … I didn’t quite understand, because yes, the Pumpkins were cool, for a brief time in the 1990’s – when these particular characters were children – but most of the credibility they built up back then has been decimated by Billy Corgan’s exploits since). Closing scene aside, I tend to disagree with the standard argument that this is a movie for the males of that generation – it’s geared toward geek, but … it’s a love story. That gives it an inherent chick-appeal.

Now, I may not completely fit the demographic, but I’m close enough to it that I can appreciate everything this movie is trying to do. And most of it, it does really well.

But.

BUT.

For such a cracking movie in every other sense, the plot just limps along. The story gets too bogged down in the fight scenes, which look really good, but often make little sense. The first fight, before Scott really knows what’s going on, doesn’t fit the story told by the others, wherein he has to actually use brains and knowledge in order to win. It’s just … a fight. That we know he’s going to win. And, as such, it’s boring. The latter fights – right up to the sixth ex – have slightly more purpose, in that at least Scott is thinking and learning and gaining confidence, but the same inevitable outcome, and each one seems to go on for much too long. I was just grateful that there was a set of twins in there, to be honest. And the final fight, nay, the whole Jason Schwartzman thing, didn’t really do it for me.

The bits between the fights were fine, I think, but once the fight plot kicked up, they just ended up feeling like the bits between the fights, and little more.

And by the end, I was just wondering why. Why any of it? Why does Scott have to fight the exes? And why is there a band of exes to begin with? And in a movie like this, where there really is no why because that’s just the plot of the movie, that’s a really bad thing for the audience to be asking.

I think maybe there’s just too much of disconnect between the breakneck visuals and dialogue – and the kind of movie that those stylistic things suggested this would be – and the strange, choppy pace of the storytelling. While I was watching it, I thought it felt really slow, but I think maybe it’s actually just too ambitious, that the source material is just too much story to fit into a single movie, and the bits that have been left out are the little bits that link the bigger bits together and carry a viewer or a reader through the story. So it’s not slow, as such, it just doesn’t flow. In any case, it all just ended up feeling a little bit cumbersome and, to be honest, I spent a lot of it just teetering on the edge of outright boredom, which was most disappointing.

Despite that, there’s enough here to like that I can’t recommend against it. I think with lowered expectations and maybe a couple of alcoholic beverages, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World is probably a fun way to spend an evening. And it is worth seeing, I think, simply for the stylistic spectacle. If only that style was matched by substance.

61. A Certain Chemistry – Mil Millington
A Certain Chemistry is yet another book that, if it were written by a woman, would be labeled chick lit without a moment’s hesitation. It’s not even a particularly blokey variation on most garden-variety chick-lit. Switch the genders and it’s classic Marian Keyes – right down to the quirky-but-loveable partners, the ‘glamorous-but-actually-not’ career angle and the richly drawn secondary characters.

And none of that is a bad thing. When Marian Keyes is good, she’s very, very good, labels be damned. She’s fun and readable and much more intelligent than she gets credit for. When she’s good. When she’s not … well, she’s everything everyone hates about chick lit, just with a more serious message.

A Certain Chemistry is definitely more like good Marian Keyes than bad. It’s very well written and actually regularly funny. Millington is a Guardian columnist, and it shows: the text is scattered with little bits of commentary on lots of different topics, and the jokey tone mostly works. It’s not wall-to-wall laughs: sometimes the humour falls a bit flat, but given how notoriously difficult I am to amuse in writing, this amused me quite a bit.

Stylistically, the biggest problem lay in the use of the ‘God’ device. Every few chapters Millington hands the narrative reins over to ‘God’, so he can explain to us why this is all happening and how it’s his fault because he stuffed up on the sexual attraction stuff. The passages aim for fun but land at annoying and unnecessary.

Those passages aside, this is a well, written and entertaining story, and yet I found myself struggling through great parts of it. As someone who has been cheated on in the (thankfully far distant) past, there’s a big part of me that just doesn’t see the funny side of infidelity. Tom – our anti-hero – spends a great deal of this book trying in vain to make us feel bad for him, because, of course, cheating on your partner isn’t easy. It requires you to keep lots of secrets and have a good memory for lies and be quick with them when they’re required and you always want to be off having sex with the person you’re cheating with but you can’t be because – woe is you – your partner might find out. It’s hard work and Tom would just like us to acknowledge that and not go straight to feeling sympathy for his girlfriend. Which: bullshit. And to his credit, Millington knows this is bullshit and writes it as such, which actually makes the ‘God’ passages even more baffling, as their sole purpose seems to be to justify Tom’s behaviour as nothing more than human nature. Tom might want us to feel for him, but Millington – when he’s not playing ‘God’ – definitely doesn’t.

… Right up until the end, where I think we are asked to decide that a couple of years of solitary is enough and he should be forgiven. And, sure, maybe that’s true, but there’s a big difference between being forgiven and being taken back, and … I like to think she didn’t. Which kind of kills the romantic inside me to say, but makes the adult in me sing.

62. Faithful Place – Tana French
Tana French has been one of my favourite discoveries of the past year. She’s got a knack for infusing the mystery-thriller with some of the best character writing and dialogue I’ve read in recent times, and creating these heady, involved stories where you care about the outcome in part because you care so much about the people involved.

It’s a delicate path to take, and, at times, Faithful Place sees her just missing the mark by going a little too far with the emotions. The risk you take when you make your mysteries this personal is that you will end up with a Law & Order: SVU-style mess, full of self-righteous cops out for justice at any cost – and while, thankfully, this is a fair way off hitting that low, it does drift a little closer to it than either In The Woods or The Likeness did. There’s just a little bit too much family drama woven into one too many family-related subplots – and at times, the central mystery seems to take a little too much of a backseat to the Mackey family nightmare.

The result is a story that just doesn’t feel as tightly and impeccably plotted as it could be. It’s just all a little bit too busy, with all these things going on at the periphery that cross the line from enriching the story to just becoming distracting.

I have to confess, also, that I pegged the real killer quite early on – although I did so totally by chance and without any real reason. To her credit, French had me reconsidering that position through the second half of the story, but unfortunately one of the alternative scenarios she seemed to be suggesting had me preparing to be hugely disappointed in this book as a whole – bringing it right down past SVU territory and into the most clichéd kind of soapiness. The scenario didn’t play out, and to be fair, the main element of it was never actually mentioned in the book, but it felt a little cheap and obvious to even let it get as far as it did.

None of which is to say that this is a bad book. At all. Faithful Place has a lot of the same good points that French’s previous books have – it’s well-written, constantly absorbing, with richly drawn and multi-dimensional characters whose actions stem from somewhere inside them, instead of just serving the plot. The communities she creates are compelling and welcoming, even while more-than-slightly unnerving. She’s got a great sense of pace and just enough wit to keep things from getting too relentlessly bleak; this is a good book and definitely worth a read, but I would recommend In The Woods and The Likeness above it.

58. Hey Nostradamus! – Douglas Coupland
I always feel like I should like Douglas Coupland more than I do, given that the he’s often pegged as the definer of my generation. I did enjoy JPod, at least until the self-insertion and the lists of numbers and words that dominated the second half and turned what looked like it was going to be a good weekend of reading into barely an hour’s entertainment and left me feeling ripped off more than possibly any book I’ve ever read. And I’ll admit right here that I’ve never read Generation X; it’s on my loose mental to-read list, but every time I see it in a shop I’m put off by both the garish pink cover and the page:cost ratio.

Hey Nostradamus! I picked up in a cheapy bin, and tore through in a couple of days. And I honestly can’t say that I felt very much for it at all.

It’s not that it lacked emotional punch – because it had that. I felt sad for all these people and for the places they’d come to in their lives. But that wasn’t really enough. It was trying, I think, to use these sad personal stories to create something larger – to offer comment on religion and family and adolescence and love and the media, but that comment felt very incoherent and vague.

Now, not all books need to have a ‘message’. This could have worked as just a story of some people who were hugely affected by this horrible tragedy and what that did to their lives, but – and I may well be reading it wrong – I don’t think that was what Coupland was going for.

I think this was supposed to be a commentary, but the story just got away from him and became something else and the message got lost in there. Narratively, it feels a little over the map. Subplots are introduced and then dropped, while things that aren’t given all that much attention end up being critically important, and things that do get a lot of attention end up feeling like time-wasting sideplots. And the ending – where characters get paired off seemingly at random – just feels a little too plucked from thin air.

Structurally, the story is broken up into four sections, each narrated by a different character and each covering a different period of time, with some crossover. Coupland also finds the need to break the fourth wall throughout the book; Characters stop telling the story at points to say that they were writing “this” and then something happened and they put it down and now here’s what happened next, as though these are diaries, except that they’re not, and except that the thing that happens when they put the writing down always manages to be directly relevant to the exact point of the story they’re at. It’s all very hamfisted and distracting and unnecessary.

By drawing attention to this as a book, rather than as a story that I am being drawn into, Coupland manages to completely break the spell that, as a storyteller, he should be casting. The meta scuppered any emotional attachment I was building up, and made me question the reasons the story was being told in the first place (because really, Jason – this is not a bombshell you really want to be dropping on your nephews in writing, and certainly not without first discussing it with their mother).

For all its flaws, Hey, Nostradamus! isn’t a bad read, if very frustrating. It’s just trying too hard to be something that it’s not.

59. John Dies At The End – David Wong
I don’t usually do this, but when I finished this book, I went and checked out the Amazon reviews, mostly because I was just so unusually unsure of what to make of it. The first thing that struck me was just how many friends David Wong has on the internet, and how … irritatingly protective … they are of him. Which kind of worries me a little bit, to be honest. Because, well, I may be about to enrage them.

John Dies at the End is not a bad book. It’s just an incredibly uneven one. Sometimes, it’s a really good, enjoyable read and I could rollick happily through fifty pages in one sitting without blinking. At other times, unfortunately, it’s just a turgid, impenetrable mess.

David Wong is up against it here. Comic horror isn’t the easiest genre to nail without descending into eye-rolling silliness, and, really, writing about hallucinations is not without its risks either. You’re trying to take your reader on a journey into something that by definition, doesn’t really make any sense. To do so takes a lot of skill. And I just don’t think Wong has that skill.

Nor has he really nailed that whole comic horror thing. This book manages to be simultaneously not scary and not particularly funny. There are some jokes, and they sometimes work, but mostly the ‘funny’ seems to be coming from attempts at off-the-wall weird, and most of the off-the-wall weird just comes across as trying a little too hard to be off-the-wall weird.

Now, the second thing I learned from reading the Amazon reviews was that John Dies at the End started life as an online serialized story. Which explains a hell of a lot, because as an online series, I see how John Dies At The End could work.

Online, you’re not, usually, asking someone to sit down for hours and read a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. You’re asking for chunks of their time, now and then, and it’s very possible for people to come into the story in a non-linear fashion. I’d imagine writing fiction online is more like writing a TV series than it is a novel: each post akin to an episode of TV, needing to be satisfying enough to stand up on its own while working well with the rest of the season.

Novels just aren’t like that. They need to tell a complete, cohesive story, and they need to read as one solid body of work. No-one ever comes into a novel at Chapter six, decides that one is really good and goes back to the start. No-one just skips a chapter because they weren’t around that week. Sometimes a reader will get through five pages in a sitting, sometimes a hundred – setting their own pace. For a novel to succeed, it needs to allow for that.

John Dies At The End might have been a fun thing to write online, with the format giving the writer a good way to throw a whole mess of ideas at the world within a loose framework and see what sticks. It would probably have been an enjoyable thing to read online too, but, as a book, it just doesn’t work.

Which is a shame, because when the writing is good and the ideas are coherent, this is a really enjoyable read. Unfortunately, that’s not the case often enough, or for long enough, to get me to say it was any good.

60. Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin
Rumour has it that Tales of the City also started life in serialized form, but it works in a completely different way to John Dies at the End. Tales of the City feels very episodic, with its short little chapters, but with overarching themes and storylines that keep the reader engaged throughout. It’s also a very easy read, written in very straightforward fashion, and I raced through it in a day.

Tales of the City is set in 1970’s San Francisco – possibly the gayest place on earth, complete with a fondness of mustaches and fag hags and liberal quantities of drugs consumed by anyone and everyone – and very page exudes such a strong sense of time and place.

Maupin leaves a lot out in his storytelling. Description is mostly very spare, in favour of great chunks of dialogue, so the book feels very chatty, but, at times, you feel like you’re missing out on the kind of context that would usually be forthcoming. Some of that is deliberate, allowing for a few ‘big reveals’, but it can feel like being at the pub with two friends who’ve known each other for much, much longer than you’ve known either of them – sometimes the conversation gets away from you.

To his credit, Maupin doesn’t play games with his reveals. There’s the usual soapy reliance on coincidence, but it’s mostly handled without these big, heavy-handed scenes where characters run into each other in some unlikely place and start screaming about all sorts of personal things on a street corner. In fact, most of the big emotional conversations take place off-screen, as it were, and we just hear of them afterward. The overall effect is very gossipy, like that aforementioned trip to the pub. Mostly it’s fun, but sometimes you learn things you really would rather you hadn’t, or you find yourself all too interested in the gory details of someone else’s personal life, or too amused at what is really another’s misfortune. You’ll be enjoying yourself, and then suddenly feeling guilty for being there at all.

There are some narrative missteps: a couple of the storylines reach a little too far in the direction of over-the-top cheesy, and some are just not fleshed out as well as I would have liked them to be, but given that this is the first in a series, there’s nothing to say they won’t be down the line.

It’s gossipy and soapy and oh-so-frothy, but Tales of the City also a series of very successful character studies, and an insight into how and why we create (and destroy) the relationships that we do. I liked a lot of things about this book but, overall, I didn’t love it – and the only reason I can point to is that post-gossip guilt. I don’t know that I’ll be back for the sequels.

The term ‘guilty pleasure’ is, when stripped of its most commonly ascribed context, perhaps best suited to describing an affair, or taking a stolen car for a joyride: something that makes you feel good, but that you should probably feel bad about, at least a little bit. It’s a naughty cigarette after a few drinks, long after you’ve quit, or laughing when you see someone trip over their own feet, or sending that ‘oh my god, what is she wearing?!’ email about your co-worker and sometimes friend; you enjoy it, but you also feel bad, because it’s not really very nice, and probably there’s that person that you know that if you told them you did that, they might think a teeny bit less of you, if only for a minute.

It’s when it’s applied to pop culture that the very idea of a guilty pleasure become problematic – suggesting, as it does, that you should feel bad for enjoying something, as though that enjoyment is somehow damaging to you or to someone else. Incidentally, it’s the same when applied to food. Cheese? Not a guilty pleasure. Just a pleasure. Sure, if you eat a whole wheel of double brie, you’ll likely feel bad – gassy and bloated and queasy and slightly greasy, even – but that’s just your body reacting to the excess influx of lactose. Have a salad and it’ll all even out.

This week, I had a chance to see Bon Jovi live, for the first time in 15 years. Bon Jovi are pretty much the gold standard in so-called guilty pleasures. I believe Livin’ On A Prayer has actually topped an international guilty-pleasure poll.

Now, I am not going to try to convince you that Bon Jovi are a much better band that you think they are. You have, I’m sure, heard of them, heard a few of their songs, and come to a conclusion about them and their music all on your own.

But I will say this: as entertainers, they are very, very good at what they do. They have been doing what they do for quite a long time now, and they have it down pat. They can put on a really good show, even when working without the pyrotechnics and video screens and built-in stadium experience. They are very good at making sure that their audience is having fun, and that makes for a good time.

And the thing is that it feels effortless. They are working their butts off, but the crowd doesn’t see the wheels spinning, or feel the determination. To us, they’re having just as much fun as we are. And a big part of it is that they have reached a level of self-awareness and confidence where they don’t feel the need to be teaching the audience a lesson, or giving us what they want us to have, or pretending to be anything they’re not. They are, to put it one way, obliging. It’s quite possible that they would much rather go out there and play their latest album from start to finish, then some obscure B-side from 1992, then a cover of a Leonard Cohen song no-one knows and some experimental instrumental thing that goes for 32 minutes, but they know that what the crowd wants is Slippery When Wet – and they will give it to us without ever making it feel like it’s not 100% what they wanted to give us.

Their music appeals to some, and not to others – which is true of every single person who has made music from the beginning of time to the present day. It’s true of Mozart. It’s true of John Lennon. It’s true of Prince. It’s even true of Britney Spears. That does not make all performers and writers and composers equal. It is not an indicator of their talent, but rather an indicator of the freedom that we have to enjoy what we want to. It’s kind of awesome, when you think about it, that we all listen to music slightly differently – that there are six billion people in the world and every single one of us evaluates what we hear slightly differently, and even when we enjoy the same thing – the same band or song or album or genre – we are enjoying it for slightly different reasons.

Music is so deeply personal, and so capable of creating and evoking memories, that sometimes the reason we like a song has nothing to do with how it sounds. I appreciate, for example, Nelly’s awful Hot in Herre because it was playing the very first time I spoke to a now dear, dear friend of mine, and she did a silly little chair-dance to it that made me laugh and determine instantly that she was going to be one of my favourite people in the world. It’s a terrible song, with a terrible name, but it is indelibly part of that moment – but only to me. She has no memory of this at all, but will remind me of another song we heard when out one night that I totally missed.

I am not a music nerd. I can pick apart why I do or don’t like a book or a movie or a TV show, and discuss it with some level of intelligence and detatchment. I can not do that with music, and so I react to it completely emotionally. What that means is that my tastes are pretty eclectic, but very, very specific. Some of what I like is not what is generally considered ‘good’ music, a lot of it is based in memory, and a good chunk of it probably falls under this banner of ‘guilty pleasures’.

But … I don’t see why I should feel guilty. I am not, for example, commercially supporting ‘bad’ music while denying ‘good’ music my hard-earned cash. If anything, I am more likely to pay for something that I a) consider objectively ‘good’ and b) is released on a smaller label by a smaller band to whom each individual sale is more likely to make a difference.

Nor do I regularly subject others to the music I choose for myself. 99% of my listening is done through earphones. I am not assaulting the ears of friends, family, co-workers or strangers with objectionable music at all hours of the day and night.

And I’m certainly not listening to music that is being made to further any sort of nasty agenda. I do not listen to skinhead bands singing about the KKK. I do, on occasion, admit to enjoying songs that have a somewhat sexist message, and yes, then I do feel a little bit guilty for betraying my gender.

But feeling guilty for enjoying Toto’s Africa is akin to feeling guilty for masturbating. It’s 2010 – it’s time to embrace joy and be grateful for the freedom we have to experience it. And part of that is taking the term ‘guilty pleasure’ out the back and shooting it, once and for all.

I can pinpoint the exact event that turned me off reality TV, and I’m almost ashamed to say it had nothing to do with the infamous Big Brother Turkey Slap.

I was a huge fan of the first Australian season of So You Think You Can Dance – so much so that I gave over hours of my life to recap it for fourteen people on the internet. So much so that I forked over my hard-earned to see the Top 10 perform live, and it was awesome. The show was just so great and entertaining and fun and warm, and on the back of a Big Brother franchise that had just been murdered by twists and production missteps and Kyle Sandilands, it was a breath of fresh air. Then the second Australian season rolled around, and we all got to meet Penny – the cheerleader with the heart of gold.

The thing was that Penny should never, ever, ever have made it to the Top 20. She may have been a great cheerleader, but as a dancer, she was just awful. Even in her specialist style – Jazz – she struggled. Week after week, she completely mangled every routine she had to perform, no matter how easy it was. She was stiff and jerky and just terrible to watch. And week after week, the judges failed to point out any of her flaws. They didn’t pretend that she could dance, by any means, but what they did was sell her as the great underdog – praising her can-do spirit and her personality and glossing over the awfulness of her performances with platitudes like ‘you did the best you could’ and ‘you’re out of your comfort zone, but you’re trying’. Which … everyone was out of their comfort zones, all the time. That was the whole point of the show. Penny was getting praise for trying, while better dancers were dismissed as lacking versatility.

And, of course, what happened was that the viewing – and voting – public bought the underdog story. Penny rocketed to the top of favourite-dancer polls. She was never in the bottom three and SYTYCD forums were full of teenage girls who said she ‘inspired’ them. A minority of fans who valued dancing over personality protested, in our corners of the internet, but those corners tend to be small and consist mostly of people who don’t vote in these contests, so it made little difference. The Penny train was hurtling down the tracks and picking up speed and it seemed inevitable that she would win and get to represent Australia on the finale of US SYTYCD the following season. And wouldn’t we all be embarrassed …

Then, as fast as you could say ‘suspicious’, she withdrew with an injury after the Top 10 results show.

And I was out.

I didn’t care, really, whether the producers realized they’d created a monster and created this whole injury thing as a way to save face. I can’t say it didn’t seem awfully convenient that the extremely popular but terrible dancer was injured, clearing the way for the less popular but infinitely better dancer to win and go on to dance in front of millions of Americans, but I wasn’t there, and I don’t know, and I can’t say.

But what I did realize – and it was something I’d always known, but had never bothered me quite this much – was that in these shows with judges and voting, the winner was always going to be determined more by the wants of the producers than by anything else. And that what the producers – and thus great swathes of the pre-teen voting public – wanted was rarely going to be for the ‘best’ to win. It wasn’t about the dance; it was about the money and the ratings.

And that was ok, but not for me. Reality TV and I were over, and I felt fine.

Until Survivor.

Now, the big difference with Survivor is that while the producers very obviously have their favourites, the final result is always determined by the people who were there. And that’s why, for all his airtime and producer love and hidden immunity idols, Russell didn’t win. Either time.

Whether they do or not, the producers can design immunity challenges to better favour some contestants on the basis of size or fitness or intelligence. They can even tip players off as to the intentions of others, or the locations of hidden immunity idols, and they can certainly introduce twists designed to help some players while hindering others. I don’t think they do do all those things, but they can. They can be the reason that certain players don’t win, certainly; many a player has been screwed by a tribe switch or a merge at the exact wrong time.

But what they can’t do is control that final vote, which is carried out by the contestants themselves. They can skew the game to increase the chances of certain people getting to the final, while keeping others out, but they can’t make them win. If they could, I am sure that Russell would have gotten a few more votes in Samoa, or Amanda in China, or Stephenie in Guatemala. It’s clear from watching the show that the producers do have favourites, and every time those favourites fail to win, it’s reassuring that there is some sort of integrity built into the format.

Generally, it’s a format that makes for good television. You’re watching people compete for a million dollars, but not only do they have to outlast their fellow competitors and which way they can, but they have to do so in a way that will make those same competitors reward them with the money at the end. You can knife people in the back all you want, but if you do it wrong, the best it will get you is second. And it’s a fairly pure format. Each contestant is a character, and each contestant is getting an edit, and those edits are based on the story the producers want to tell, and aren’t always fair, but nor do they affect the final result.

For me, watching the machinations of how people get themselves to the end is the main draw. It’s always satisfying to see players who are in trouble somehow find a way to turn it around, but it’s more the how than the what that keeps us intrigued. Being surprised by a result is great, but it’s best when that surprise is of the ‘damn! They pulled it off!’ variety.

It’s a fine line for the editors to walk. You don’t want it to be 100% clear who is going home each week. Going into tribal council – the final part of each show – there has to be some doubt, or it’s boring to watch. Sometimes, there’s just nothing there to work with to create that doubt, but, for the most part, you want to hope that your cast is good enough so that targets aren’t just rolling over and dying, but are instead looking for options – at least enough so you can present a second scenario as a possibility, however unlikely. What you want is suspense and, to some extent, surprise.

What you don’t want, though – and this is where this current season is failing – is to focus so hard on the element of surprise that you’re effectively blindsiding the viewers. You want the viewers to respond to something unlikely with that aforementioned ‘damn! They pulled it off!’ response, not, as happened last week, ‘ … huh?’

Ten minutes from the end of the episode last week, it was – to the untrained eye –pretty clear that Fabio was going to go. His own alliance seemed on board with voting him out. The opposing alliance was saying they were going to vote him out, and he seemed to be making the same mistake that Brenda made a couple of weeks ago and refusing to even attempt a Plan B (in part because he didn’t seem as worried as maybe he should have been – because for as much as I have been maintaining all season that Fabio is smarter than he looks, it’s becoming very clear that if he is, it’s not by much).

To the Survivor nut, it was pretty clear that we were missing something. No boot is ever depicted as this predictable. Even when it’s unanimous, they at least try to bring in some doubt in the editing suite (and they’re not above using – or even re-using – old footage to do it, Palau editors). And we also heard Benry interview that he felt safe, which in Survivor code means ‘I am being voted out tonight’.

So the result was actually kind of obvious, at least to anyone who watches this show a lot. But it was also very puzzling. It was as though the editors had worked so hard to make the Benry boot a surprise that they’d left out everything that led up to it. So while we saw it coming, because we know how the show works, we didn’t get to see it play out. There was no satisfaction at guessing correctly and … there was actually no surprise, because the editing was so ham-fistedly going for a ‘gotcha’ that we kind of all knew one was coming. And yet, we have no idea where the decision came from and how the vote came together. Was it a last-minute switch? Did Fabio scramble? Was there actually a cunning Cirie-style 3-2-1 strategy in play? Because all of those things, while not affecting the result of this particular episode, affect the way that the events of this episode will be considered down the road (namely, by the jury at the final tribal council).

And it’s not the first time things have played out like that this season. There have been a few times where the entire episode has been edited to build to the boot of one contestant and the vote has gone a different way. As a result, it feels like we’re missing out on the vital bits of information that make the show enjoyable to watch.

Of course, maybe the voting is a lot more random and senseless than usual this season (and, given some votes, I certainly can’t rule that out), but that doesn’t absolve the editors of the responsibility of putting together a cohesive storyline. It just means they might have to work a little bit harder.

This season, at this point, has something that very few have going for it: no clear direction. With six players to go, I can’t see a clear winner or even a clear final three (well, I can, but that’s only because of the emotional music that seems to follow Jane around like a bad smell*). Prior to last night, the field was wide open, and that should be giving the editors a lot to work with in terms of creating a narrative.

For some reason, though, it’s not. As a result, I just don’t care who wins, and while I’m sure I’ll be ‘surprised’ at the result – except not, stupid emotional music – it won’t be for the right reasons. I can only hope that this season is an abberation, and not a trend.

* I’m not spoiled, I’m guessing. If she doesn’t win she’ll win fan favourite at least. And half the reunion show will be devoted to her pluckiness (the rest to Jimmy Johnson).

I’ve tried to read Ulysses. I lasted maybe four pages before deciding it wasn’t for me. On the other hand, I got halfway through the weighty bitch that is Infinite Jest, before it broke the strap of my handbag and I realized I didn’t want to spend another two weeks lugging that brick of a thing around just so I could say I’d read it (which would be the only reason I’d bother finishing it at all, given it was so horribly repetitive and boring).

But both of those things are understandable. I would never look down on someone who couldn’t get into Ulysses, or someone who didn’t see fit to give over several weeks of their life to footnotes and a thousand something large-format pages of teeny-tiny type.

This is not that.

This is also not my dislike for Jane Austen. I’ve read a whole Jane Austen book. I didn’t find the experience in any way enjoyable and as such, it’s not one I would repeat. And it’s not Dan Brown – whose books I’ve never read and never intend to, because while I like dross as much as the next person, I prefer mine with a cheesy teen flavour.

This is … different. This is those authors who, in theory, interest me. They write in a genre I like, or their subject matter intrigues me, or they keep getting recommended to me by Amazon. Theoretical me reads them. Real me can’t.

Let’s take William Gibson, as an example.

William Gibson has written a few books that sound interesting to me. He may sit in the sci-fi palette of the greater literary spectrum, but, generally, on a part of that palette I can get my head around. He’s not sending his characters to other planets. There are no intergalactic wars or aliens. Intelligent people who I like rave about him, and it’s not like his work is inaccessible.

(Well, at least not superficially, which is the only way I can assess it. Maybe he does completely twist up his narrative, and it’s actually all written in some elaborate code, but I’ve just never gotten far enough into any of his books to know. )

And I’ve tried. I started Pattern Recognition and lasted six pages. I started Spook Country and, in what would turn out to be my most successful attempt, I made it about 40 pages. I recently gave Zero History a shot.

… and managed three pages.

Yes, I know. Three pages doesn’t really count as a shot when you’re talking about a three-hundred-page book. But it is what it is.

And it is this: I don’t dislike the writing style. I don’t love the writing style, but I definitely don’t dislike it. I don’t dislike the characters. And I know from reading the cover flaps that the story should be of interest to me. These are not books I’m opening, reading the first few paragraphs of and then putting down with a roll of the eyes. I’m not confused by the story. I’m not annoyed. I put them down fully intending to pick them back up.

But I just don’t. If it happened once, I’d say that maybe my Amazon delivery arrived and there was something in it I just had to read right now, but three times? I can’t explain it because I really don’t understand what it is. There’s just something there – it’s as though between the words registering on my brain and actually being absorbed, the letters are being all jumbled up and turned into gibberish. The words get to my brain fine – or, at least, fine enough for me to appreciate them for being well put-together and moderately enjoyable. But when it comes to actually retaining and making sense of them as part of a greater narrative, my brain fails me.

Which happens with quite a few books, and mostly I make a call. I either stop reading, or I persevere. I have no problem with persevering, especially if I think that there might be a worthy pay-off at some point. Currently I’m stuck sixty-odd pages into A Confederacy of Dunces. I’ve been going at it for close on two weeks and I’m still waiting for the moment where the pieces click into place and the rest of the book just happens. Right now, it’s a slog. I don’t know if it’s a slog that’s going to offer any sort of reward at the end, but I am – however half-heartedly – sticking with it. I have sticktoitiveness. Just … not when it comes to William Gibson.

And not when it comes to Elmore Leonard, either.

Because I can sort of argue that maybe Gibson asks more of me in terms of attention than I am willing to give. I read before I fall asleep and I read on buses. Books that ask more than that, attention-wise, tend to get dropped pretty quickly.

I can’t argue that with Leonard. And even if I could, I can’t, because the first time I tried reading Elmore Leonard I was on holidays, by myself, with nothing to do but read. The book was Cuba Libre. It was good. I liked it. But I put it down after a half hour and never picked it back up again.

I tried harder with Freaky Deaky, recommended to me by the awesome Pomgirl. I started it. I got about 50 pages in. I put it down. I picked it back up a few days later. I read a bit more. I put it down. I picked it up. I realized I’d not been paying very much attention (these were wedding days, I didn’t have very much to give) and I was a little lost on the story.

I started again.

And I probably got back to about the same point, after a couple of sessions, and … I put it down and never picked it back up.

It wasn’t intentional. There was no malice. No dislike. On the contrary, I was enjoying the damn book. It’s crime fiction. I like crime fiction. If I had to have a favourite genre, crime fiction would probably be it. It was well written. More importantly, it was easily written. There were no big words. No big, bold, narrative tricks. There was nothing about it that wasn’t 100% commute-friendly.

But again, at some point it turned into gibberish. It went from being well-written pulpy crime fiction to being written in Ancient Greek. And backwards. And in code.

It’s frustrating, in large part because I actually feel like I’m missing out. I read the blurbs of these books and think they sound like fun, and yet I know that I can’t have any part of that fun. Every time I hit a wall with my reading and go out on the hunt for new authors to explore, I wonder if I should give these guys another go. I know not to – good money following bad, and all – but I consider it, because I don’t like being left out of things I enjoy. I don’t want to be the 17-year-old kid without fake ID at Schoolies week, sitting in the park across the road from the pub. I want to be in the pub having a great old time.

But my brain won’t play along.

It will, however, permit me to read multiple Gossip Girl books. It’s totally fine with being absued with liberal doses of Sweet Valley, or offended by the blatant misogyny and overall awfulness of something like The Lie. Sometimes it even enjoys reading really badly-written stuff, just so it can mock it.

But real, actual good books? It’s picky.

JJ Abrams pretty much passed me by. As we’ve established, I never watched Lost and, although I did catch the odd episode of the latter during it’s weekday mid-afternoon run while I was at uni, Felicity didn’t really make an impression on me either. I did catch the first episode of What About Brian?, but it was completely by accident (I thought Barry Watson was someone else, okay?). Alias, on the other hand, was one of many, many early 00’s shows that I missed simply because I for the first third of the decade, I was either working or doing theatre stuff (read: drinking) pretty much every night – and the technology was yet to catch up with me. It’s not on the Blind Spot Theatre playlist because I expect it to be any sort of great televisual experience that will change my life. I’ve not read amazing reviews of it, nor been urged to watch it by everyone I know. It has but one champion in my greater circle – and he may well be being sarcastic – but, on the right day, that is enough.

For reasons that have nothing to do with the show itself, this did not start well. It seems that my trusty PS3 took issue with Sydney Bristow right away, declaring itself incompatible with her whole show and the format in which I was trying to watch it. So instead of getting to enjoy the action on the big screen, I’m stuck watching it on my 13-inch laptop. It’s … not ideal.

But even on the laptop, one thing is certain: this show is older than I thought. You can tell by the jeans: high-waisted, made of thick, stiff denim, cinched by a big belt and finishing bluntly right on the ankle. And the tops all end just short of the waistband, so you get that little flash of midriff that was such a thing at the beginning of the naughties. Oh, if that bag of clothes that no longer fit but I can’t bring to throw out could talk, it would love this show to pieces.

And I wouldn’t blame it.

Alias is not high art. There are probably a lot of problems with it but – for the pilot at least – I just don’t care.

I don’t really want to compare Alias to The Wire – because I’m sure it doesn’t hold up – but I find it interesting that they sit as opposite ends of the pacing spectrum, and yet somehow they both succeed. The Wire works because it allows its stories to build so slowly that you end up cherishing every little plot development. The devil is in the details and the nuances and the richness of character. Alias, on the other hand, just goes for it, all out, at breakneck speed. It’s been a while since I’ve watched a show with such balls-to-the-wall plotting and, to be honest, it’s kind of refreshing.

So much happened in the pilot that I didn’t even have time to miss the internet, as I usually do when my internet machine is tied up actually screening the show I’m watching. Probably more happened in that hour of television than happens in an entire season ofThe Wire; it was relentless, but in a very, very entertaining way.

It’s an approach that has its risks – when, in the second episode, Sydney is trying to defuse a nuclear bomb, I’m wondering where they’re possibly going to get enough stories to play out a whole season at this rate, let alone five. But I like that it’s not messing around. I like that it’s not spending a whole season establishing the story before letting anything big happen. I do worry about where they can possibly go from here, but I am definitely willing to find out – those pesky cliffhangers they insist on ending every episode with make sure of that.

Alias slots very neatly into the role of Chuck’s older sister (and I don’t mean Ellie). It’s really clear that Schwartz and Co have drawn a lot from this show, both in plot and style. But there are differences – Chuck is much more of an origin story. We met him as a bumbling, underachieving Buy More employee, and now, four years later, he’s only just coming to grips with what it means to be a spy. Chuck plays that – and a lot more – for laughs, whereas Alias may have humour, but it’s much more of a straight action show. It’s got a much stronger focus on the fights and the chases and the espionage than Chuck does. Tonally, also, these are different shows – although the last couple of seasons of Chuck have gotten a lot darker, it’s still a much lighter, fluffier show. That said, I’m not going to argue with the folks pointing out the similarities with the various spy-daddy/mommy storylines. They are what they are.

Overall, I thought the pilot of Alias was pretty damn awesome. So awesome, in fact, that I went on to watch two more episodes. They were also very watchable, although … somewhat more problematic. Marshall was endearing in the pilot, but utterly irritating by episode three (although I do like the idea of an SD-6 “Q”). And I struggled with both the voice-over-that’s-not, and the location title cards, neither of which I found necessary. The voice-over – really Sydney talking to the CIA and explaining the SD-6 mission – was particularly irritating. What I appreciated about the pilot was not always knowing exactly what was going on and piecing it together as the episode went on, and having Sydney read out the mission in the scene right after we see her given it just felt like the kind of dumbing down this show does not need. The title cards did the same thing, and were only really forgiveable because they lasted all of two seconds.

And for all of that exposition, I’m still finding that the supporting characters haven’t really gotten much of an introduction. Bradley Cooper’s character might have a name, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s ‘Bradley Cooper’. I don’t even have that kind of reference for the black couple (so I have to admit to just referring to them as ‘the black couple’). There’s also ‘CIA guy’, ‘old CIA guy’, ‘tubby cop from Heroes’, ‘evil SD-6 dude’ and ‘Sydney’s SD-6 partner’. Ok, I lie. I know that ‘CIA guy’ is Vaughn. But that’s mostly because Sydney and Vaughn get discussed on the internet a lot.

That I know what’s coming up for Sydney and Vaughn should be bothering me, but this is what I was talking about last time. Alias is entertaining enough that it’s not really a problem that I know some of what’s coming up. And I’m sure that there will be OMG!Twists that I see coming because they really happened years ago and I read the internet, but for now, I’m interested enough in the here and now not to be worrying too much about the next five seasons.

The results of Blind Spot Theatre to date have been patchy, at best. But perhaps it’s because I was aiming too high. Mad Men may well be the very best television show in the history of the world, but it’s slow and tedious and requires a whole lot of attention. Alias, on the other hand, is at just the right level of cheesy and trashy to be perfect fare for a Saturday afternoon on the couch.

If only I could watch it on the big screen …