Clueless.

I had the inclination to watch it for the umpteenth time after seeing Elt-uhhhn in the season finale of Six Feet Under. (I had missed his couple of previous appearances in this season and the entirety of season 3, because past midnight I tend to zone out and need to sleep. Hello, shite Channel 4 schedulers!).

Seriously, this is very much in my top five films ever, if not the top two. It goes up every time I watch it. Why?

• On each viewing, I keep noticing more and more details. Good ones (the very crap background cheerleaders in monochrome outfits, matching the P.E. outfits), and surely ones that are mistakes (Elton and Cher both wearing rings on their wedding fingers in the post-Val-party car scene?*). Yes, I usually miss huge gaping plotholes in every film I see, and yet I notice that. And the surely intentional mistake: Tai suddenly acquiring a glowing snowman whilst sat inside Summer’s car, complete with electrical lead trailing out of the window. So class. Made me snort when I noticed it on last viewing.

• Mona May, the costume designer, was also responsible for Romy & Michele, The Wedding Singer, and Never Been Kissed. That’s a fine amount of PVC and lace committed to celluloid right there, that is.

• There is not a crap line in the entire script. Just reading most of the lines makes me giggle. Naming the ones that were favourites from the very first cinema viewing...

Travis’s acceptance speech for most tardies: “I’d like to thank the LA city bus driver who took a chance on an unknown kid...”

Murray’s mate who says “It’s the bomb!” and the “Cos I’m keeping it real! Cos I’m keeping it real!” Thank goodness Donald Faison finally got a decent gig on Scrubs.

...and the one only noticed on last viewing: Cher’s dad, upon hearing the sound of helicopters over the phone; “Where, in Kuwait?” Cher: “Is that in the Valley?” and, "ugh, I'm having a Twin Peaks experience."

• Dan Hedaya: best teen movie dad ever; “Get outta my chair.” With second place going to Larry Miller in Ten Things I Hate About You.

• Stacey Dash, of Dionne fame, is now 38. She was 29-playing-15 during the filming of Clueless. Someone tell me what vitamins she was taking.

• You know you were rocking the mini-backpack circa 1996. Mine was silver. Oh, the shame. Or trying to pull off the over-sized shirt underneath a tank-top (or just watching your GCSE English teacher rip into a passing sixth-former who had dared to attempt such a thing while under draconian uniform rules).

• And we try to forget the bleach-blonde famewhore that Brittany Murphy has now become.


*Doing some research: Jeremy Sisto was married at the time of filming (at 19?! Jeez, I feel old), so that may be the cause of the wedding ring. But then that’s just really crap behaviour on the costume people’s part, and I can’t see it mentioned on either IMDb or MovieMistakes. And there’s even less excuse (or more, depending on how you look at it) for Cher to be wearing a ring. Hell, on a certain itty-bitty British film (coming to a screen near you soon!) the newly-married (like a matter of days) lead actor lent his wedding ring to various characters. A sodding wedding ring on a 15-year-old character should be slightly noticeable during filming, surely? Am I getting slightly obsessed by a mistake that it seems only I have noticed? Uh, yes m’lud. And have I abused the use of the parenthesis? Guilty, m’lud.

Someone please stop me watching every Strictly Come Dancing programme that exists. It is not healthy. But pretty, pretty sequins!


Oh, and I forgot reason 4,322 why temping sucks...
Having to use a sodding PC with sodding Word and sodding Outlook and sodding Excel. What's with all the symbols for actions? Are we considered to be so illiterate that we can't read a menu command? Cue lots of me squinting at the screen trying to work if those 16 pixels translate to 'copy' or 'e-mail'. It's a miracle how I got 67% on my Word agency test. There was a lot of blind clicking. I don't think I learnt a thing about how to use a PC at school. I remember drawing graphs on a black screen and doing IT lessons with the headmaster where there was a lot of instantaneous pressing of buttons with my mate at the neighbouring computer in case we'd got it wrong. That way we'd both be doomed. Looking back, that wasn't really the greatest idea, wass it? But at least it was fair. All I've been using is my Mac knowledge, hoping that it vaguely correlates.

And reason 4,323: the agency can't spell my name. It's unusual, but not that unusual.

Now I remember reason 4,324 (once you start, you can't stop): the agency gets pretty much twice what I'm paid from my temporary employer. That's gotta suck. To both parties.

As the veteran of one day of it, I can obviously conclude that...

Man, temping sucks.

Prior to applying for it, and doing it, I thought that I could play the part. Literally. Whack the clothes on like it's a costume, make nice conversation and perform like the professional office person who can shut her mouth and type in office-lingo. But then I found that my hair really won't go into a neat twist, the shoes that I haven't worn since I hit the local Reading clubs circa 1996 really do hurt to wear all day, and I'm just embarrassed to be wearing a decent skirt/trousers with accompanying decent top. Of which I only own two combinations of the straight non-arty/liberal persuasion, so I'm going to run out of clothes by Tuesday next week.

My prior impression of myself as a polite, straight-A, 70wpm touch-typist, and eminently employable young lady, have kind of gone out of the window. I never thought I'd long to be doing 12-hour days for diddly-squat money while covered in paint, whacking my back every two seconds, and basically just gluing or painting stuff, rather than sitting in a nice converted Tudor office building with heating and not much to do. Staring into space because there's nothing to do apart from panic every time the telephone rings because there's no way I can answer someone's enquiry because I'm only a SODDING TEMP and have been here for LITERALLY TEN HOURS so, no, I haven't quite yet got round to familiarising myself with the business's entire operations and regular clientele. How I actually really want to be lugging furniture and steel-deck around that I really have not the arm muscles to be hauling.

I don't want to take an hour's lunch break for which I'm not being paid. Jeez, I'll take half an hour or less and get home earlier if you can't cope with a person doing more than 8 hours work a day.

I don't like travelling when everyone else is travelling. Now I appreciate the joys of swinging along London's highways prior to 7am, because you're not wailing like I did this morning when my bus decided to take a detour through the whole of Harrow instead of going along the Damn. Straight. Road. to my bus-stop.

I don't like being treated as my job. Which I realised at camp, when the camp director would introduce me as "McCy, a very talented artist", thereby meaning that I could draw in a vaguely recognisable manner, which had some relation to the job for which I was training, but was very belittling when people didn't understand the extent of what I actually did.

I don't like talking to my temp agency because....
• they don't listen to me (somehow the whole "I'd rather do shorter assignments than do 3-month temp-perm jobs because then I'd have to lie about how long I'll be available for" conversation has had to be repeated 3 times.)
• they don't ask questions, especially referring to my availability (unlike the very nice people at the assignments I've been up for or assigned to who actually have the humanity as to enquire what I've been doing before, and the essential question as to WHY AM I TEMPING?)
• they don't actually speak to each other (cue one of them ringing me this morning while I was already on a job that their colleague had assigned to me).
• Too. Damn. Perky. As much as I like to be wished "A Great Weekend!" twice, having already spoken to the person and having already received their GreatWeekend wishes within the last hour.

Woah, that's a lot of "don'ts".

I am actually yearning for the tourists of Soho. (Well, rather the freedom to sit there and attempt 3 cryptic crosswords a day, blast out whatever music I liked, have nice working neighbours, and vaguely know the job that I was doing).

Long time, no blog, but doing 100-hour weeks on low-budget film, then computer explodes into the ether, then possibly getting fucked over by SFX company while working on big studio film, then get a new computer that I can’t afford due to aforementioned fucking-over. *crosses fingers that at least one cheque gets through before bankrupcy/liquidation*.

So, you start to appreciate the computer. You start to appreciate the internet. And appreciate operating both with enough time (i.e. more than 5 seconds) before your 1-year-old niece thumps over with a determined look in her face to batter keys and screen of borrowed laptop, thereby logging you out of your e-mail and somehow dialling up a dodgy website just with one contact of her fist on a keyboard. I see a young programmer in there somwhere. Talented girl.

And so I have a new eMac. It’s a big old lump and it’s not the prettiest Mac in the world, but somehow I’m finding that gawkiness gradually appealing. And dammit, it shifts like a gazelle compared to my old iMac. I blink, and it’s started up. Also, it has accepted a slightly ancient Photoshop 6.0, my printer, and my zip drive. Finally, OSX is pretty, yo.

Although the User’s Guide says that if you will be away from your eMac for less than a few days you should put the computer to sleep, that is not a wise idea. ‘Cos the sodding ‘pulsating light’ on the front makes my sleep-addled mind think that there is a search light sweeping across my bedroom window during the night. Coupled with the constant police sirens in the local area, it is a worrying sight.

Now I find out that in my internet absence, Jon Stewart has been causing a bit of a ruckus, what with a number one bestselling book and telling the presenters of Crossfire where to stick it. On which subject, a slightly surreal picture.