If you want to read a review of a film on the internet you’re fairly well catered for. The same goes for an album, or a phone, or a car, or pretty much anything. But, crucially, not everything.
What about reviews for some wool you found? Or a photo of a schnauser in a motorcycle sidecar? Where do you go if you need to see the smell of burnt hair rated empirically out of ten? This is what #ReviewAnything is for.
Every week we ask for your suggestions for things to review, and then we review them silly. It’s a public service, and definitely isn’t solely to give you something stupid to read on Fridays while you’re waiting to go to the pub.
So, without further ado, 321 REVIEW:
Romance
A drawing a man did of his girlfriend – reviewed
If your partner created a portrait of you, would you be flattered? Unnerved? Furious? Well, that would depend on the nature of the portrait, wouldn’t it? They say you aren’t truly in a relationship with someone until you’ve seen the day-to-day reality of them. With that in mind, there’s a charming, time-worn intimacy to this piece, a hint of quotidian exasperation, the suggestion of a relationship entering its years of thumb-twiddling entrenchment.
There she is, in her work clothes and her sensible shoes. She’s arrived home, after a tedious work shift and an aggravating commute, to find that her partner has, during the course of his day of “working from home”, managed to accomplish a move from bed to sofa and a protracted shift of watching Homes Under The Hammer and Pointless repeats. He hasn’t even got the bloody tea on. In fact, he hasn’t even washed up last night’s plates.
But there’s hope too. There’s a twinkle in the eye. This scenario is anything but unfamiliar. Eventually, she’ll grudgingly accept the pizza her beloved is about to offer to stick in the oven, let her hair down, and relax. She might even agree to a trip down the pub. Until the next time at least, this moment of flat-shoed infuriation will be forgotten. Until the next time. Or until she realises he’s let a mildly quizzical caricature of her fall into the hands of a national newspaper. Whichever comes first. 8/10.
PH
Affable Idiocy
Peter Andre – reviewed
I put it to you that hating housewives’ catnip and frozen slop enthusiast Peter Andre is a physical impossibility. Look at him, with his face. That face has never known a scowl, or a grimace, or a juddering salacious gurn – when Peter Andre procreates he does it gently, and silently, with nothing but placid yet almost entirely vacant devotion in his giant brown eyes.
When I was in school and Mysterious Girl had just dropped, spurious rumours swept the playground claiming Andre’s abs were in fact muscular implants. This was early evidence that the antipodean shirtophobe was something special – such a ripped physical specimen that biologically improbable lies were the only thing that could make the rest of us – wobbly, pasty, scrawny – feel better about ourselves. And then Andre dropped Flava, which, however you look at it, is an actually brilliant mid-nineties pop tune. His legend was secured.
Now, almost twenty years later, Andre exists in a cosy demi-monde of Saturday night television, advertising contracts and decreasingly lucrative public appearances. He’s somewhere between Olly Murs and Daniel O’Donnell, like a perpetually baffled Brits’ version of Josh Groban, only less good at actually doing things. Andre is up against O’Donnell on this year’s Strictly Come Dancing. Mums across the nation soon face a decision of such magnitude it makes Sophie’s choice look like choosing between normal tonic or slimline.
You get the feeling Peter Andre is totally fine with his lot too, if only because he lacks the higher brain functions required not to be. He doesn’t know hate – he probably still thinks Katie Price is a good person, despite her entire existence being evidence to the contrary. And this is what makes him special. He’s a statue of the joy of obliviousness; a lesson in how being nice while also being ripped can get you far in life as long as you’re a bit dim.
Kay Burley made him cry once during an interview. For shame. I hope she did some serious soul-searching after this. Making Peter Andre cry is like punching a baby in its stupid pudgy face. Someone on Twitter the other day also called him “an oily flat-nosed twat”. This too is unacceptable. He’s a beautiful human being, and all he wants to do is be nice to you, like a particularly dense puppy. Isn’t this what we should all strive to be? Peter Andre is better than me. He’s better than you. He’s better than pretty much anyone. He’s a glorious idiot.
That being said, Mysterious Girl is utterly appalling, so I can only in all good conscience give Peter Andre 6/10.
LH
Biology
A sex bell – reviewed
Me, I love sex. Can’t get enough of it. Come round my house of an evening and there I’ll be, having some sex. And maybe washing it down with a nice glass of Green Coke. In principle therefore I am totally behind the idea of a sex bell. Imagine all that meaty goodness in your mouth (and a bit of dribble!) whenever you wanted it [editor’s note: Paul appears to have confused sex with Rustlers microwaveable burgers, “hot, satisfying and prepared in seconds”].
But I have to confess that in practice the bell confuses. The problem is this: who is ringing the sex bell, and who is providing the sex? It makes most sense if someone else rings the bell and you provide the sex but, in that case, the bell needs to be a) in a place where those in need of sex can get hold of it and b) close enough to you at all times to be able to hear. Seems tricky. The other way around, that you ring the bell and someone else provides the sex seems a) to render the reminder on the bell redundant and b) raises the question of what happens if you get more than one sex at once? I just don’t have the answer! Nice idea, confusing execution. 5/10.
Existentialism
Ennui – reviewed
You might think ennui is just boredom for pretentious people – and you’d be right, because it is French for boredom. In that spirit, I’ll give the first word to Oscar Wilde: “The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian,” says Lord Henry Wotton in Wilde’s Picture Of Dorian Gray. “That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.”
Harsh words there from Wilde, although not particularly helpful considering he was a man who endeavoured to render all statements completely meaningless whenever possible. Although what he does do earlier in the book is define ennui as a disaffection with the entire contents of the world – “that terrible tedium vitae” as Wilde’s novel has it “that comes on those to whom life denies nothing”.
Ennui is, therefore, the feeling for people who have everything. Wilde was potentially one of the first people to talk about this sensation, because amazingly for something that seems to be a core part of the human experience, the earliest use of the word boredom was in 1852, in Bleak House, Dickens’ novel about a really long court case. Which was probably handy for the people that had to review it ;)
It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that the rise of ennui came with the rise of the middle classes, for whom the good old fashioned fight for survival was a game it was tediously easy to win. Ennui, then, is what happens when you apply cushty privilege to misery – a gentrification of sadness if you like, which, like all gentrification, is a sickening bastardisation of things that were functioning in completely organic and meaningful way before, enacted by posh people just as a way to pass the time.
So the privileged co-opted unhappiness, and made it their own. And, yeah, they sucked all the life out of that too. And gave it a pretentious name, as they are wont to do. All of which makes ennui worse than a expensive pop-up street food enclave made of shipping containers plonked down in a grimy south London market. And that’s really saying something. 1/10.
RA
