6 Lessons learned from tv and films featuring Bromance

This week I had an interview and completed guitar hero world tour on bass (on expert). Other highlights included me watching “Pineapple Express” and “I Love You, Man”. I think its safe to assume my life has hit a rut.

Anyway, these films are both swathed in a healthy amount of ‘bromance’, and much like the piece I did a few weeks ago about romantic comedies, I think there are lessons to be learned from these films about the nature of true male friendship. Because this post would be very short if I didn’t.

1: The Lesson: Wives and girlfriends don’t matter.

Learned from: Scrubs, Flight of the Conchords

As Confucius once wisely articulated “Bro’s before Hoes”. Ok, perhaps not Confucius and perhaps not even one of the lesser philosophers, such as Jagger or Lennon.

Nonetheless, the saying seems to have been around for an eternity, uttered from friend to friend in bars, usually close to closing time. The essence of this phrase is that a bro will always place the needs of his fellow bro above the needs of his hoe (or is that perhaps ho?). This means opting for a night out with your bros rather than spending the night in playing Monopoly or whatever people in a committed relationship do.

It almost feels like cheating to include Scrubs in this list; the bromance between Turk and JD is one of the most enduring and well-known bromances in the world of tv and film. Its duration and the ups and downs experienced within it allows it to fit into almost all of the points on this list. Still, despite Turk and Carla being engaged and later married, and later still, with kids (Scrubs went on a long time), Turk and JD nearly always made time for each other.

Some films don’t even bother with girlfriends- Pineapple Express removed the girlfriend from the picture fairly quickly to enable the remainder of the film to be a celebration of the burgeoning bromance between a man and his dealer.

2: The Lesson: Wives and girlfriends do matter.

Learned from: I Love You, Man (spoiler alert!), You, Me and Dupree (or many other films featuring Owen

Wilson), Scrubs.

Watching I Love You, Man, the other night, I noticed some striking resemblances between the general arc of the plot and plots from romantic comedies. Only with 2 blokes. And less kissing. Slightly.

Obviously this was the intention of the writers, and it was well executed. I laughed a lot when they even incorporated the stereotypical ‘dating’ phase of a rom-com. The only noticeable difference in the catalyst which resulted in the reuniting of the happy couple (of bros) was the girlfriend.

Typically in romantic comedies it is an epiphany triggered by seeing a falling blossom land on a perfectly still lake whilst walking a dog through a park, or some previously unmentioned daddy issues (thank you very much Made of Honour), which causes the couple (actual couple this time) to get back together.

In brom-coms (yeah I’m coining it), if they fall out- and the typical trajectory of the plot suggests that this is likely to happen, it’s typically the girlfriend or wife who sees how sad her spouse is without his brethren, and gets them to start talking again (usually to ask him to be the best man at their wedding or something).

3: The Lesson: Three-ways (or more) are ok.

Learned from: How I Met Your Mother, The Hangover

Another notable difference between Bromance and regular Romance is the fact that with the former, it’s perfectly legitimate to have more than two bro’s. Whereas a archetypal love triangle in a film or tv series is always going to leave someone crying at the end (be it one of the actors, or, if a Hollywood producer allows them to indulge in polygamy, a large part of middle America), its not the same with bromances.

I would like to use friends as an example, but Ross (the one I probably associate with the most due to knowing the difference between a Therapod and a Sauropod without checking wikipedia) always seemed on the outside of the bromance between Joey and Chandler.

However, the (in my opinion far superior) sit-com How I Met Your Mother, the three central male characters are all really close, and regularly go off on adventures as a group or even just two of them. There are debates regarding who is who’s best friend, but these are often short lived. Go and watch it if you don’t understand what I mean.

4: The Lesson: Bromances always have a sweet indie rock soundtrack.

Learned from: Scrubs, How I Met Your Mother, I Love You, Man, House

A smaller point here, traditional romantic comedies often seem to have a specific kind of soundtrack. This usually contains a mixture of upbeat contemporary pop music (Cliché ridden Bridget Jone’s Diary features Gabrielle’s “Out Of Reach”), and a lot of soul music (Aretha’s “Respect”) and a few 80s standards (The Weather Girl’s “It’s Raining Men”- although in Bridget Jone’s Diary it is the Geri Halliwell version, satisfying both the first category and this one).

Bromances on the other hand typically have a far cooler soundtrack, consisting mostly of indie music. I Love You, Man features Vampire Weekend amongst others. Scrubs and How I Met Your Mother have a whole host of various indie bands throughout their 12 collective seasons, and The Hangover features a load of indie guitar bands I haven’t heard of. And also Phil Collins.

Music in bromances isn’t simply limited to the soundtrack though…

5: The Lesson: Bromance automatically leads to prolific bands, or at least an abundance of impromptu songs.

Learned from: Flight of the Conchords, The Mighty Boosh, I Love You, Man, Scrubs

This is one which I think has certainly applied to me in the real world, I play guitar, and have gigged with all of my best male friends. We have even formed bands that have lasted three or four years (a very long time as far as secondary school is concerned). Whilst in my first year at uni there was even one dynamic pairing that wrote an entire album (still unreleased) based around a housemate’s voracious sexual appetite. Towards rabbits.

I guess it’s quite an obvious outcome for men who are into music to the degree where they play instruments to be friends with other men who play instruments, so the next progression is likely to be jams, and perhaps even bands.

And it seems a staple part of the bromance diet to portray struggling musicians, Flight of the Conchords and The Mighty Boosh both show the ups and downs of being in an unsuccessful band (only watched by millions of people on television). The Mighty Boosh’s ‘crimping’ and a lot of the songs performed by Flight of the Conchords are good examples of impromptu songsmithery (only, you know, pre-written).

Possibly the greatest number of impromptu songs comes from Scrubs, despite the fact that neither Turk or JD play instruments with any regularity (not onscreen at any rate- there is a guitar in their apartment), there are still plenty of songs which they perform together, including the seminal song about guy love entitled, erm, “Guy Love”.

Clearly guy love can even overcome a lack of instrumentation and any semblance of writer’s block during spontaneous songs. But not Yoko Ono.

However…

6: The Lesson: Guy love conquers all. Including bullets, explosions, smoke inhalation, zombification, blood loss and much, much more bullets.

Learned from: Pineapple Express (watch for spoilers again), Shaun of the Dead (and more spoilers)

Shaun of the Dead has everything that anyone could ever want from a bromance film. It has suspicions of more than just bromance- “He’s not my boyfriend”- it has the protagonist having problems splitting his time between girlfriend and not-boyfriend. It even has the eventual zombification of one of the bros.

However, despite this, Shaun still keeps the zombified Ed in his shed and by the end of the film they were still playing Timesplitters 2 (and yes I did recognise it from the brief glimpses onscreen).

So what about the far more realistic plot of Pineapple Express, where a couple of stoners survive frequent attempts made by drug-ring bosses to kill them, and manage to escape with their lives. Ok, marginally more realistic.

Anyway, in the action packed ending of the film, in which a new bro joins the pre-existing bros, he is riddled with bullets (around 7 according to the film), whilst another had his ear shot off. Despite these impediments, they shared a meal before going to the hospital.

Perhaps this is why they don’t want to legalise pot. It turns you into a bullet absorbing superhuman.

6 Lessons learned from a recent spate of alcohol fuelled nights out (or a needlessly wordy recounting of last weekend)

So, after managing three posts in as many weeks, I have gone silent for a couple of weeks, due mainly to being quite busy. And lazy. This (the busy part) included visiting relatives, and then (with the intonation differently placed to imply me going to them) visiting relatives. Then, after going out for the first time in my now-native city of Peterborough last Friday, I went to Norwich on the Saturday, leaving on the Tuesday. Busy times indeed.
During this time I took in a party, a pub quiz and a rather long and enjoyable night clubbing. Whilst partaking in these activities I thought about the nature of alcohol and how awesome and frightful it is.
Or, more accurately, I thought about it when I got home fatigued and slowly sobering up, seeing and fearing the hangover that was looming- like catching sight of a prospective murderer’s feet poking out from beneath a set of curtains.
Actually, that is an oddly appropriate metaphor- anticipating looming violence, considering the first point. So I’ll get on with it. 6 Lessons learned from a recent spate of alcohol fuelled nights out…


1: The Lesson: Intoxicated people are immensely difficult to reason with

If you’ve ever tried to usher some thoroughly inebriated friends into a cab home, or been the most sober or, failing that, most socially responsible person partaking in a pub crawl you may appreciate this.
However, I don’t just mean that drunk people are hard to reason with when it comes to shepherding them around, I mean the people who get angry and begin desperately seeking a fight.
Yes, in a move that made no attempt to dispel my feelings that Peterborough is an awful, awful place compared to Norwich, someone made a desperate attempt to start a fight with me this weekend. For having a conversation with the DJ’s 28-year-old girlfriend.
Now while I admire the fact that the friend of the DJ was so adamant in protecting the integrity of the DJ’s girlfriend, I turned 21 this year, and I’m pretty certain that 28 year olds aren’t the typical demographic of a 21 year old, and I’m even more certain that the average 21 year old’s topic of choice whilst attempting to woo a woman is talk of said woman’s children and what goes on at christenings.
These were points I made at least three times, along with a smattering of complaints that the art of conversation had been bastardised by people using awful chat-up lines (which probably only hindered my case) whilst he was imploring me to go outside so that I could fight with him. Suffice to say, I spent 5 minutes declining his invitation before one of his friends thankfully stepped in, made apologies on his behalf, and took me to the bar and bought me a drink, making it the best fight I’ve not got into.


2: The Lesson: I am utterly useless at chatting women up

Whilst on the subject of chatting women up, I feel I should share with you the greatest thing anyone has ever drunkenly said to a woman in the history of clubbing (probably). I like to think that I have the capability of turning a phrase (I probably wouldn’t bother with this rather self-indulgent blog were it not for that fact), but it typically fails in a hilarious manner when it comes to talking to women in a bar or club, it is car-crash conversation, much like Hugh Grant, only without the charm. Anyway, I had just purchased a drink at the bar and turned to see a lady behind me wearing a nice dress. I figured I should tell her, only it came out like this:

“That is a very nice dress, I don’t mean in a pervy sort of “I’m using it as an excuse to look at your breasts” kind of way, but in an “it is actually very pretty” sort of way. And the belt brings it all together very nicely. I’m not gay, by the way”.

Although from this point, we somehow struck up a reasonably long conversation about universities and life after it in general, so I guess it can’t have been that bad, although her friend informed me that she had a boyfriend sometime later in the evening, so nothing came of it anyway.
And I feel that I should stress at this point that the women mentioned in these first two points are not the same.


3: The Lesson: The differences between parties at university and parties after university.

So with Friday evening’s events out of the way I moved onto the far more pleasant climes of Norwich to go to a party of the friend of a friend. This was the first house party I had been to since graduating from university, and I had no idea what to expect. With my head still reeling a little from the previous evenings proceedings, I was hoping it wouldn’t be too much.
I knew as soon as I entered that it would be nothing like the house parties I was used to, the hosts of the party have both been out of university for a couple of years, so have had an opportunity to establish themselves with jobs and recreational activities which don’t revolve around drinking.
There were large canvas prints on the walls of photos taken by the male host, there was a 42-inch LG television carefully placed on a smoked glass tv stand, along with HD DVD players and sundry other new and expensive high tech items. There may even have been a vase on the mantelpiece.
Our group was the first to arrive, so it was relatively quiet when we got there, with my friend catching up with the host and other early comers whilst I attempted to hold my head together for the coming onslaught I was anticipating. Eventually the alcohol started flowing more liberally- from bottles that had been left unattended in the kitchen rather than from a bottle kept by on one’s person at all times to prevent alcohol theft- and rather than partake in one of the myriad of drinking games we’d picked up as students, we merely discussed the merits of some drinking games over others. Then we talked about god.


4: The Lesson: Drunk people- particularly atheists- are pack animals

Drunken philosophical arguments are a large part of student parties, and it usually involves making the same points over and over again with no-one willing to back down over their firmly held views that there is/isn’t a god. They also seem to insist that he accepts, or even condones the fact that they are drinking.
This party was no different; the group involved around 6 atheists (sporadically dropping in and out of the conversation) and an agnostic. Perhaps it was the blunt way in which he argued his point, or the fact that he was the only person willing to entertain the notion that there was a god, but everyone rounded on him like a pack of hungry dogs, spouting sound bytes of Richard Dawkins (or in my case, Tim Minchin). By this point in the night, everyone was defying my expectations and getting rather drunk; although it was hidden better- no one had passed out or thrown a mattress out of a second storey window by the time that we left.


5: The Lesson: Alco pops are acceptable to drink. Even if you’re not a 15 year old chav.

By the time Monday rolled around I was (I’d like to think) understandably quite tired. Over the previous 3 nights I had amassed a total of 14 hours of sleep, although admittedly it was the deep sleep that comes with alcohol.
Tom, my friend who was kind enough to allow me to use his couch hadn’t had much more, and our other fellow conspirator in dancing, Matty, had managed no sleep the night before in order to complete an essay- instead snatching a couple of hours on the train from Derby to Norwich.
Nonetheless, the three of us- along with Tom’s girlfriend Rachel- started drinking and eventually went to the club. I ordered a VS, a vodka-based drink that is beloved of underage chavs for its cheapness, alcoholic content and general taste- a hideous amount of sugar covers any taste of alcohol. In the words of one of my friends from the first year of uni, although numerous people have claimed the phrase since “you’re more likely to get diabetes then get drunk off that”. All in all I found it quite refreshing.
After an hour or so our group, with the exception of me (riding on a sugar high) began to falter, Rachel left- although in fairness she did have work the next morning- and Tom and Matty sat in a corner, exhausted by the heat of the place. So I suggested that they joined me on my VS cloud. We stood under an air conditioner for the rest of the night and danced the remainder away, ordering further sugar hits from time to time. Then went onto another club.
Due to the wonderful and surprisingly sustaining effects of it, I’m considering rebottling and rebranding VS as an energy drink for the athlete who doesn’t really care too much about his performance or the welfare of his liver. Or teeth.


6: The Lesson: Hangover cures. Sort of.

So inevitably, after a brilliant night out, there will almost certainly be a hangover. There are things we can attempt to do in order to prevent them, but its merely damage limitation when you attempt to do it after a certain point (usually around the point at which I begin drinking spirits it is too late). Here are 6 things (of course) I have found a modicum of success with in the past:

1) Staying up: There are few things worse than going to bed with the spins. If I get to the stage where I can’t even shut my eyes without feeling giddy, then I will probably stay up and at least see them away. Or read a book, and then have to reread it the next day, as I couldn’t remember anything that I’d read the previous night.

2) Gravy, on anything: Stemming from student days, when I would often stagger home to find the cupboard bare save for some gravy and a loaf of bread. So I combined the ingredients- the thicker the gravy, the better- into something relatively edible. Although on one occasion I spent an hour cooking bangers and mash on which to put gravy, which was possibly one of the greatest meals I ever cooked at uni.

3) Dr Pepper: The ‘cures’ I’ve listed so far have been preventative measures that I have had to enact the night before, but this is something I’ve typically done on the morning- or more likely afternoon- of the hangover. Somehow, in the typical post-club kebab or chips run, I always remember to pick up a can of Dr Pepper, which despite intolerable thirst, I manage to save for the morning after. There have been many occasions I’ve quietly thanked my drunken self for not only picking up a Dr Pepper the previous night, but also having the foresight to put it in the fridge.

4) Bacon: Bacon is scientifically proven to help people get over hangover cures. I’m not going to go into details, but its something to do with amino acids or something. Also it smells nice. Here is the article.

5) Exercise: This is something that many of my friends have disagreed with me on in the past. It comes from Saturday morning badminton sessions at uni, but I would usually find that on the occasions I successfully got up, braving the risk of unbridled sunshine outside, and went to badminton, after the initial shock of attempting to run about whilst still a little drunk, by the end of the session I had typically seen off the hangover.

6) Hair of the dog: I only employ this if I see myself going out again the night after the morning after the night before, but it does tend to work. My record is 6 consecutive highly inebriated- and cumulatively speaking, highly expensive- nights out, and I’m fairly certain I’m not going to do it again.

Still, these are things that apply to me, and I imagine that they would be met with disbelief and disgust. Usually a combination of them works quite well.

6 Lessons learned from the Daily Mail

I’m feeling fairly lazy this week, so I’m choosing something it’s easy to write about with a certain amount of vitriol: The Daily Mail. Unfortunately, I fear that this article will be able to be summed up in a single line. So for those who have better things to do than read the rants of a former student can read the abridged version (complete with capital letters to denote scandal):

The Lesson: “IMMIGRANT chavs MAY or MAY NOT be responsible for causing CANCER, so take your mind off it with a FREE DVD of a Harrison Ford film which no-one cared about when it was released and hasn’t since.”

Still here? Suit yourself. 6 Lessons learned from The Daily Mail (complete with sensationalist headlines)…


1: The Lesson: The country is full of immigrants.

I’m going to start with an obvious thing that people typically associate with The Daily Mail. Illegal immigrants. Typing the word ‘immigrants’ into the search bar on the Daily Mail website yields 2304 results. Including this chestnut:

“Hundreds of illegal immigrants armed with knives and crowbars swarm around Calais trucks heading for Britain”.

I have no intention of picking apart the headline to comment on its overtly provocative language (or the parallels drawn between immigrants and locusts), but this conjures images of a dystopian future. In fact, I’m pretty certain I saw this scene in V for Vendetta.
Whilst I can understand the concerns over the influx of migrant workers into the UK, particularly when they are illegal immigrants and hence it is difficult to regulate or even calculate their numbers. I still cannot see how it is necessary or constructive to use headlines such as the one above to voice said concerns. Except, of course, that it sells more papers.


2: The Lesson: Everything causes cancer.

If there is one thing The Daily Mail loves more than immigrants, its cancer. Again, using the search bar on their site to see how many results can be found, Cancer gives 11000 results. A large amount of these are telling you things that will give you cancer.
There is a list of 20 of the oddest here, and this list includes: wine, oral sex, chips, sausages, burgers, chocolate, Pringles, sun cream and vitamin E.
And in a move proving that The Daily Mail is not afraid to embrace the 21st Century, it published this article:

“How using facebook could raise your risk of cancer”

Being an avid user of facebook, I simply had to read this. What if I found that every minute on facebook was equivalent to spending a minute out in the mid-day sun in Corsica? What if I discovered that every time I logged onto facebook, my life was reduced by 5 minutes?
Well it turns out that the situation isn’t as bad as the headline suggests- its not just facebook, it’s a general lack of face-to-face contact that causes health problems. So officially this blog causes cancer.
According to the article- which despite the shocking headline seems to focus as much on social effects on children as facebook's cancer giving credentials- “[‘socially regulated’ genes] activities may account for higher rates of inflammatory disease and other health problems seen in socially isolated individuals”. Note the use of the word ‘may’, which absolves The Daily Mail from blame should it be proven later (after further research) that social isolation has no link to cancer. The rest of the article lacks much in the way of research evidence actually linking said genes to cancer. In fact, the only quantitative figures quoted are regarding the social implications caused by electronic media.
Sadly it is not atypical for a scientific article in The Daily Mail to lack conviction…


3: The Lesson: Scientific articles can be about as scientific as a L’Oreal advert and still be published.

As it seems to be my benchmarking tool for this particular post, I again used the search bar on The Daily Mail website to search for the word ‘could’. Limited to the health pages, the search found 10600 articles. Half of these were dangling the tantalising possibility of miracle cures for cancer, motor neurone disease, Alzheimer’s or pretty much any other ailment you care to mention. Meanwhile, the other half suggest that a particular study has linked one of the above diseases to an utterly banal cause, or sometimes even a cure for something else- such as MMR vaccines causing autism, which was later proven not to be the case. For the record, searching a less ambiguous term such as ‘proven’ returned only 482 articles.
Thankfully I do not suffer from an incurable disease, and I’m not related to anyone with a severely debilitating illness such as multiple sclerosis, but I’m fairly certain if I was either a relative or sufferer, I wouldn’t appreciate having a potential cure waved around in front of me by a newspaper, years before it could be brought to market, or before the efficacy of it could even be proven.
On the other hand, the widely publicised ‘link’ between MMR and autism has caused damage to the image of the jab, causing many parents to forego it, putting their children at risk. Apparently the rate of children affected by measles is increasing and I’m going to suggest it could be linked to the reduced levels of children being inoculated against it.
Surely it would be better to ensure that a link is definitive before going to the trouble of telling millions of people about it, particularly when it can heavily impact their lives.


4: The Lesson: Everyone in television is evil. Grab your pitchforks and torches and march on their ivory tower.

The last few months have been an interesting time for Britain, many age-old institutions are starting to show cracks; television and radio presenters, bankers, even politicians (I know, I didn’t believe it either) have been found to be lying, stealing and cheating. Fortunately there has been one format that has proven itself trustworthy enough to publicise the awful transgressions that have occurred right under our very noses. Acting as part whistle-blower, part shoulder to cry on (via their forums and letter sections), and several thousand parts mob-ringleader, newspapers have, on several occasions, been responsible for whipping up a frenzied rabble who then abandoned all sense of scope and reason and mobilised to march on whichever institution had crossed them.
A perfect example of this is the ‘Sachsgate’ scandal which affected the BBC, particularly Russel Brand and Jonathan Ross, a few months ago (if you don’t know what it was, go away and google it, I’ll wait), despite going out to a limited number of people- prompting a negligible number of complaints- newspapers such as The Daily Mail got their teeth into the story. Then proceeded to drag it into a river and perform several death rolls. The complaints about the programme started coming in, mostly from people who hadn’t even heard the original broadcast.
All of a sudden you couldn’t turn a television on without hearing a septuagenarian bleating that Ross is overpaid, a young person gleefully exalting the edginess of Russell Brand’s unique variety of comedy, or a politician attempting to agree with one of these two demographics in the hope of securing their vote. Still, its taken our minds off all that cancer we're getting.
In the words of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A Changin’ (presumably not a reference to the newspaper) “don’t speak too soon for the wheel’s still in spin”. This would have been reasonable advice for the newspapers, as the focus has been shifted onto them, and with the News of the World currently mired in accusations of phone tapping, it will be interesting to see who is going to bite the bullet next…


5: The Lesson: A picture is worth a thousand words, and if there isn’t a good one to hand, use an irrelevant one. Or Photoshop one.

A site which I regularly read (whilst giving myself cancer by not talking to real people) recently featured this rather wonderful blog, which helped fill me with enough ire to write this post. Anyway, this blog details some rather ‘creative’ uses of imagery in The Daily Mail, in order to tell a story.

Look at this picture:


and then this...


According to the mail, they are the same event, a vitriol-fuelled Islamic anti-war protest directed at homecoming soldiers. Despite the fact that they took place weeks apart, for different reasons (the bottom picture is in fact a picture of a peaceful event which was in no way linked to the top picture- and the story being printed- other than the fact it contained a gathering of Muslims) the bottom picture was still used in the article.
A complaint was made to the Press Complaints Commission and The Daily Mail issued this response:

“On May 25, 2009, we published an article ‘Nine arrested after masked mob’s march against Muslim extremists turns violent’, in which we inadvertently included an archive photograph of a peaceful unconnected parade held in Luton some weeks earlier. We are happy to clarify that this march had in fact passed without incident and regret our error in wrongly captioning the photograph.”

So thats extremist (and since the Mail sees no distinction between them, rather less extremist) Muslims dealt with. How about something that The Daily Mail actually likes? How about celebrities?


Now to be fair, this isn't a photo taken from a serious article, this is from a lighthearted article showing celebrities that have been made fatter through the wonders of photoshop. I'm not certain that celebrities being made fatter through the wonders of modern technology is news, but at least they're not attempting to apply their photoshop skills to actual news.


Oh.

This photo was eventually taken down after a complaint suggested that it could be misleading. This seems to be something of a trend, The Daily Mail publishes a picture, gets a slapped wrist by the PCC, then takes it down and issues a rather poor apology.


6: The Lesson: All of the world’s problems can be solved with free wrinkle cream and a dvd.

This is the oddest thing I find with The Daily Mail, they report that an army of immigrants is marching on your home as you read this, wielding knives that give you cancer when they are so much as pointed at you. There is very little to feel even vaguely positive about.
Except there is. It transpires that amid the chaos The Daily Mail is a shining beacon of hope guiding us through the turbulent maelstrom in which we exist with free wrinkle cream. And the occasional UB40 cd!
So when that recently released ex-con asylum seeker, currently living on benefits paid for by your taxes, breaks down your door, stabs you, then steals your cd player, at least the last thing you will hear will be the mellow tones of “Red Red Wine” disappearing out of your door. Also, your corpse will be wrinkle-free.