Feminist comedian to take centre stage at Wandsworth Arts Festival

This feature can also be found on the South West Londoner, here.

Rosie Wilby has been putting in an appreciated queer feminist angle into stand-up, music and filmmaking since she was at university, and her experiences are coming together in her new performance at the Wandsworth Arts Festival this Thursday.

Called Nineties Woman, she talks about her self-identification as a feminist and the newspaper she worked on at university, in a mash up of live performance and documentary.

Studying at the University of York, the campus fostered a wide range of student publications, and started working on Matrix, a 'zine' for women.

Zine culture (short for 'fanzine') revolves around amateur production magazines dedicated to specific interests. Because of the low barrier to entry, it meant that people who felt that their demographic or interests weren't reflected in professional media could still get their voices heard.

"It was very much put together in a lo-fi DIY style which seems appropriate, as there was a huge fanzine scene at the time which has now come back," she said.

Matrix featured a mixture of heavy topics of body image and sexual harassment, but also had cartoons.

At the time, the riot grrrl movement was popular in the feminist scene and heavily related to zine culture. Taking a harder, punk rock edge, riot grrrl media focused heavily on sexuality and empowerment in a counter to the endless reams of boy band pop at the time.

"We weren't really listening to riot grrl bands when we put [Matrix] together," said Rosie. "It was more folk lesbian acts like the Indigo Girls.

"When I got to London after graduating, I realised that some really exciting challenging musical things were going on."

Beyond Nineties Woman, Rosie Wilby works in her self-identity into most of her stand up. She said that, coming from a generation where being gay defined who you were and the company you kept, it featuring in her comedy was inevitable.

She noted that things have changed and sexuality isn't so much of a core identity issue these days which, in her opinion, is both a good and bad thing. Still, she wants to keep her stand-up accessible to everyone, regardless of sexuality and gender.

"Love is universal, after all," she said.

Outside of her performances, Rosie is still heavily involved in queer media. Back in 2011, she co-wrote and co-stared in The Bride and Bride, shown at the BFI Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Her radio show, Out in South London, was one of the sponsors for this year's festival.

She said: “I enjoyed it, particularly the widening focus to include more trans and gender queer work. Though this may mean they need to change the name of the festival.”

In the future, Rosie looks forward to a resurgence of queer voices in media, both from zines and larger-scale publications. She said that a mixture of both in-depth writing was needed among more lifestyle and entertainment publications, though they still have their place.

Out in South London airs on Resonance 104.4FM every Tuesday at 6.30pm

Ape Escape (DVD)

This review can be found at Shadowlocked, here.

I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting when I popped Ape Escape into my DVD player. My frame of reference of the series was the original Ape Escape on PS1; the pioneer software for Sony's dual-stick Dualshock controller; a sweet soundtrack filled with poppy drum 'n' bass, and more ridiculous monkeys than you could count - trying their hardest to put their IQ-giving 'Pipo Helmets' to good use.

Plot-wise, the Ape Escape DVD provides the last of those three. A series of two-to-three minute episodes that largely focus on Specter - the villain of the Ape Escape series. He's an evil ape granted a genius intelligence though an experimental helmet. With his army of fellow apes (given helmets of their own), he intends to take over the world... but never manages to succeed.

At the very least, I expected an animation of the Ape Escape series to be an anime. Anyone would with such a 'typically Japanese' source material. But upon watching, these expectations were heavily subverted! Ape Escape is animated by Frederator, an American animation team, most notably responsible for The Fairly Odd Parents, but have more recently had a hand in the production of Adventure Time and Bravest Warriors. 

A More American Monkey

There are two issues with this, one an outright problem and the other... more of a thinking point. The problem here is that Ape Escape was very much a side-project for Frederator. Written to fill Ad-break slots on the Nicktoons channel in 2009, the animation was produced in Flash, leading to a cheap and loose-looking finished product. That would be perfectly fine when watched on TV, but packed together like this, it stands out much more.

That's not to say Frederator didn't put in any effort into the production. The writers and directors of each episode shuffle around and are recognisable from the team's larger projects, and the voice cast (Greg Ellis as Spectre and Annie Mumolo as the kids out to stop him) are well-established in doing voices for cartoons and video games.

The show's writing is my second issue, but not necessarily a complaint. With an American studio handling the project, the writing is very typical of a Western show aimed at children, rather than a Japanese one. Since, as said before, the source material is full to the brim of Japanese-specific wacky humour, the absence of that is a surprise.

Here, you'll see slapstick reminiscent of Dennis the Menace; Sound effects just like a Hannah Barbera cartoon, and the visual gags of Dexter's Laboratory. All of it is aimed at someone at least a decade younger than me (I'm 22), but every so often a gag would be absurd and timely enough to get a chuckle from my cold, dead heart.

A Good Catch?

Still, the biggest question lingers: who should buy this? Animation fans aren't going to get much entertainment from a show that could be technically compared to Johnny Test. Fans of the Ape Escape games are likely to want the Japanese humour of the source material. Young kids would enjoy it, but Ape Escape is barely a recognisable name in the West these days, and as a kid your watching habits are very much franchise-driven.

For those who want to give Ape Escape a shot, the DVD will go on sale on February 18th for a reasonably cheap £7.99.

Author in Profile: Jasper Fforde

You can find this feature at The Yorker, here.

With a lot of Science Fiction and Fantasy works, there's a heavy emphasis on world-building in lieu of character development. Call it an artefact of Tolkien's impact on the genres, but in many cases it results in a feeling of extreme padding, getting in the way of story. It's not a problem for everyone, but for me it can be a real deal breaker.

There are authors who get the balance right, however. Many are familiar with Douglas Adams and his devoting of whole chapters to fantastical encyclopaedia entries; but in his passing we now have Jasper Fforde and his wonderfully meta takes on getting us involved in his worlds.

Jasper Fforde (51) has a knack for taking a ridiculous idea, turning it into a straight-laced aspect of his fictional worlds, and just rolling with it. Did you know that talking bears have an underground porridge and honeycomb criminal ring? The Fourth Bear will tell you all you need to know. Did it cross your mind that British society in the distant and/or parallel future consider dancing a sordid and saucy act (not to mention a society where everyone is ranked by their ability to perceive colours)? It's common knowledge in Shades of Grey.

His main series, the Thursday Next novels stand out as both his strongest writing and the biggest display of his love of literature, if not just his love of the Meta. The series, starting the The Eyre Affair are centred around the idea of writing and storytelling having otherworldly production and mechanics beyond the authors that wrote them. The process of reading is powered by Operating systems, characters have to physically act out a book as it's read, and best of all, there's a police force - Jurisfiction - to keep the Book World in safe running order. Move over Steampunk, this is a Book-punk setting through and through.

And of course, I can't avoid mentioning the glorious torrent of puns. This may be something of a personal bias, but I adore the use of puns for names, and in that regard Fforde definitely doesn't disappoint. Where else would I find a villain called Jack Schitt; or a side character called Floyd Pinken; or a pun set up that takes half a novel and is so awful the characters themselves complain about it?
 
As with any popular Science Fiction Work, it would be disingenuous to not mention the fans. My earlier comparison to Douglas Adams is apt, as there's the die-hard subsection of the readership; to the point where a fan-made convention, the Fforde Ffiesta (har har) that happens every June. Held in Swindon (the setting for the Thursday Next novels), they're as off-beat and pun-filled as you'd expect.

Unfortunately I haven't read Fforde's other independent series The Last Dragonslayer (due to them being Young Adult novels, though I shouldn't let that stop me), but I would be very surprised if they lacked the fast-paced wit, quirky settings, and unabashed dorkiness that makes his other works shine.

Film Review - Bad Teacher

This review can also be found at the Yorker (where it was uploaded ages ago, and I forgot to mirror it here...)

I never go to the movies alone. The idea of sitting in a theatre - especially a near-empty theatre - with no company and everyone else wondering why you've shown up alone is incredibly creepy and sends shivers down my spine. When I mentioned to my friends that I was going to see Bad Teacher, and if any of them wanted to join me, they all looked at the floor and made polite excuses. That should have been my warning to ABORT ABORT ABORT.

It turns out that going alone to a movie that has nothing of content aside from Cameron Diaz painfully posturing definitely makes you look creepy.

To fill you in on what little plot there is; Elizabeth (Cameron Diaz) has recently divorced from an apparently week-long marriage, when the other half realises she's only with him for the money. Without a sugar daddy she's forced to work at a junior high school, where the teachers are uncool but well-meaning, and the students are... not really focused on. At the same time, she decides the best method to get back on track is to shell out for a pair of $9000 breasts - and 'wacky hi-jinks' follow.

Unenthusiastic? I don't blame you. The idea of an anti-hero protagonist working as an incompetent teacher is something we've definitely seen before, and much of the movie reminded me of School of Rock in all the wrong ways. You could even describe Bad Teacher as “School of Rock, with Jack Black now sporting breasts, bleached hair and being dry-humped by Justin Timberlake”. Oh great, now I feel physically ill.

While I can put up with a movie that exists for the sake of peddling "T 'n' A", or a premise that rides on the concept of other successful (though not necessarily good) releases, what gets me is how the story almost wilfully goes nowhere. In addition to the Quest for Fake Mammaries, Elizabeth is lucky enough to get a subplot where she competes with another - more competent, but rather anal - member of staff for substitute teacher Scott (played by the aforesaid Justin Timberlake). Both plot threads resolve; but they happen so close to the end, you almost don't notice. Indeed, you could potentially remove the film's finale and watch the second act over again, and the character and plot progression would still make sense. But I don't recommend anyone tries that.

"But Nathan!", I hear you cry. "Easy-to-watch films with puerile humour can be fun to watch, especially with friends. You just have no sense of humour!" What a hurtful thing to say! Bad Teacher offers little in the way of legitimate humour, even when trying to be risqué. It readily throws boobs and weed and the F-word at you, but it doesn't actually try and do anything witty with them, and definitely feels like it's refraining from offending anyone. The film vaguely hints at Scott having a character flaw in his 'white privilege' making him unintentionally racist; but they bury that quickly, and don't bring it up again. A missed opportunity for humour at his expense, but maybe them not elaborating on it is a bullet dodged.

If you want an easy 'n' cheesy American comedy, then I recommend you Green Hornet. It has all the perverted jokes you could ever want, backed up by some good actors and action sequences. If you want grown women being mean to each other, look no further than Desperate Housewives. Not a movie, but that just means it lasts longer.

Bad Teacher is a film about wasting $9k on cosmetic surgery. And I just wasted £5.50 watching it.