Ok, so this week sees the release of the first of the major, alien invasion wildly overblown effects movie with Aaron Echart playing a soldier on the ground in Battle LA, a la Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds. But with weapons. Chances are it will be terrible. Chances are I will be utterly disappointed and it will not revive the giddy joy I felt when I first saw Independence Day destroy everything and yet still clap along. And yet still, like all guilty pleasures, I will be secretly(well, not so secretly as I’m writing about it here) sneaking along to a cinema to get my irises abused and my ears attached by all manners of explosions and alien beasties! But that’s not of course, the only guilty pleasure, there are others, and I share them with you now. Oh, but here’s the trailer for what will no doubt be the first let down of the summer.
CHARLIE SHEEN
Ok, so we shouldn’t be watching him. At this stage we’re not even rubbernecking at the scene of an accident, we’ve walked over and are now doing an etch a sketch of the body, only in this case, he’s waving us over to come have a look, so we don’t all feel that bad. But here he is, unleashing his new cookery show.
JENNIFER ANISTON
Ok, so it’s a sell out, but it’s a funny sell out, and it’s the funniest thing she’s done since friends. Bounty Hunter anyone! It’s nice to see her finding her comedy chops again and this is quite entertaining even though you know you’re being manipulated, you go with it anyway, and that is truly the key to a guilty pleasure.
HOW TO GET DOWNHILL. FAST.
Vicariously living through others experiences is less of a guilty pleasure and more of a reason to own an Xbox really. But this is possibly as close as you’ll ever get to being hurled down the side of a steep ass town on a bike, without ramming into a wall or something else equally horrible happening to you.
LIPSYNCING WITH YOUR HERO
Again, you know you’re being manipulated by the machine that is the music industry when it arranges for a fan to have 50 Cent pop out of his bedroom door and sync along with him, and it opens up this part of your heart where there’s room for nowt but cynicism and it throws in a little hand grenade of fantasy and you smile a little bit to yourself, if for no other reason than you’ve used a phrase such as hand grenade of fantasy!
THE BOND
There’s not been anything that funny about men dressing up as women since Some Like it Hot, that kind of set the bar too high for most, so in this case, you don’t really get to laugh, you get to listen to Judi Dench give you the run down on the way the odds are still stacked against women. There’s no really guilty pleasure here, just a sense of guilt that maybe we’re not all doing enough, and a fitting end for this week that saw the world celebrate International Womans Day.
