Brunettes aren't always what they seem (Controversial nsfw!!!)

It turns out this week I've encountered three cultural products I would have fairly quickly dismissed by a flick of the wrist and eventually ended up enjoying pretty much... which goes to show once more that prejudice is crippling and highly dangerous... first case in point is The Pipettes... In case you have never heard of them, they're three pop singers from Brighton, UK (well, two of them at least are from Brighton, there's been some lineup change at some point in their short history, I won't go into details) who have embraced the artistic standpoint of going back to the Phil Spector-era girl groups and sightly (emphasize slightly) update their sound for the 21st century... Their own-penned songs are infectious to say the least but their first full-length album is globally a bit bland and drawn-out... Yet where their true magic happens is on stage, and I'm grateful my girlfriend insisted that we go see them live this past saturday... their self-knowingly passé 50's look (hairdo's, polka dot dresses, silly-bordering choreographies) does not hide and rather enhances their incredible energy and feelgood vibes... I challenge anyone with a deeply-rooted nervous breakdown to attend a Pipettes concert and not come out of those 50 minutes packed with 20 songs feeling ready to take on any adversities...
Second case in point, two movies bought on DVD on a whim and on monday afternoon... Granted, it was lots of fun when my girlfriend and I found out back in the first months of our relationship that during our teen years we both were Pauly Shore fans (which, believe me, is quite a feat here in french-speaking Belgium where Pauly Montgomery Shore is a virtual unknown)... This lead to the compulsive buy of the DVD release of "Pauly Shore is Dead - You'll never Wiez again in this town"... We have no idea how many people have actually seen that movie and they're probably even less to have enjoyed it but, wow, I have to say it, its running theme of self-centered pessimistic narcissism mixed with very dark deprecatory humor has definitely rung a bell with me... "Pauly Shore is dead" a five-star post-modern classic borderline-masterpiece study of the cynical way Tinseltown really works ? Yep, I could say that...
Second movie in point was bought on the same day as Pauly's shoot-to-kill mockumentary but viewed last night on the very surefire feeling that we would be faced with low-brow below-the-belt sanitory-filled tripe... Oh how wrong we were... Flick in question, Joe Dirt, ended up giving us all kind of funny feelings in our stomach, mostly smiling between close outbreaks of riot laughter and uncontrollable sobbing... of course we weren't spared a couple of poop&vomit jokes but the overall script is tight and the acting is so surprisingly good that it turns what seemed from the outside like a parade of bad humor into an actually very decent slightly-romantic comedy...