Yesterday I mentioned Spike Jonze’s gorgeous looking film I’m Here, a love story featuring 2 robots living in Los Angeles.  Spike, in addition to being a film writer, director and producer is also co-founder and creative director of the news and culture website VBS.TV, you may recall I mentioned their recent Vice Guide to Liberia.

VBS.TV have a new feature coming out on 12 February which is a love story of an altogether different kind.  Swansea Love Story is about the largely unreported heroin epidemic in South Wales. The film takes an intimate look at the lives of a gang of young addicts, their families and their surroundings. It also examines how unemployment, the breakdown of the family and the nature of love contribute to the dilemmas faced by a group of young people.

The film is co-directed and produced by Vice UK’s editor Andy Capper and Mike Leigh’s son, Leo and was filmed between Spring to Winter 2009 after Andy and Leo made contact with a gang of young addicts through the SANDS drugs agency.

Focussing on Amy & Cornelius, Lee & Leanne, Clint, Kristian and Wills; Andy and Leo following them around their daily lives as they struggle to get money to buy drugs, alcohol and for places to live. During the course of the film, characters get clean and relapse, they fall in and out of love and you get to meet their families and drugs workers.   You also get to meet their drug dealers as well as members of Swansea’s mining and docker community who talk about how the city has changed.  In place of industry there are bars, strip joints and cheap booze outlets and racial tension often spills over into public protest and violence.

Here’s a short trailer for the film which will be released over 6 days from 12 February 2010 only on VBS.TV

Funny how it goes, for the past week or so I’ve been keen to blog but I just haven’t had time.  Very often it’s the other way about, lots of time no real idea what to say.  One of the reasons I’ve not had time this past week is also one of the reasons I often have too much time it’s a horrible, nasty three letter word T. A. X. somehow if I spell it out in capital letters my brain won’t register it’s meaning and send me scurrying to the corner of the room.

Like a lot of people here in the UK, I was in last minute panic mode because I had decided to leave doing my tax return until the last 10 days before the deadline for submission.  My brain knows that it would be so simple to just do all the paperwork at the end of each month so that submitting my return will be a breeze but does it listen to itself? Of course not!  So I had a marathon session with a years worth of receipts and bank statements and finally crunched the numbers, filed it on-line and bit the bullet and paid the tax man what I owed…ouch!  Anyway, I’ve decided I’m not going through all that again so it’s definitely going to be month by month from now on, I only have a few months left before it’s technically time to do it all again!

I have an admission to make which may or may not change your opinion of me.  I’m ever so slightly disinterested in the fate of the planet. I really couldn’t give a monkeys about my carbon footprint or anyone else’s for that matter. And most of the time I think it’s ludicrous to assume that we humans can somehow stop the inevitable… the dinosaurs couldn’t stop it, what makes us think we’re so very special and can?

If you’ve been keeping up-to-date with this blog you’ll have an idea what emusic is about.  If not then let me give you the long slow version, then perhaps you’ll pay more attention in future!

It was a dark and stormy night and I was browsing the net, as I tend to do when most people are sleeping, when I came across a website called eMusic.com.  Now, being the cautious net browser that I am, but also one hankering after a bargain, I bored myself looking through the terms and conditions of their offers.  They basically have two deals… sign up to a trial membership and get 25 Free MP3s or take a 1 month paid membership and get 50 MP3s.  Now, as one who finds the idea of paying for music a strange one, my immediate reaction was to click away and cleanse my eyes with either some free porn or free music however I liked the idea of 25 FREE MP3s so…

There are topics, they say, that people should avoid talking about.  Religion, politics and sex seem to be the 3 biggies.  First off, I have no idea who they are.  Secondly, even if I knew who they were, I probably wouldn’t listen to them and thirdly, well…there is no third as I over-exerted myself with thoughts 1 and 2 but if I had the energy to think up up a third it would be something like…No muthafucka tells me what to do!

Right, now that I have that out of the way allow me to give you my take on 2 news stories I just read on BBC News. The first concerns a 77 year old woman who was jailed for 14 years for smuggling cocaine in her specially adapted disablement vehicle.  OK, first off I’m saying 14 years as the story, when published stated 13 and 14 years, I’m assuming that 14 years was the original sentence but UK law says that if you are held in custody, any time spent in jail is taken off your original sentence.  They like to be fair in the UK.  The second story refers to a footballer who killed two kids due to driving while over the alcohol limit.