Invaders Must Die!

Bikes ahoy!

You might know Joe Cornish as part of Adam and Joe. You might not. What's clear when you see Attack the Block is that Cornish is emerging from the shadow of close pal and collaborator Edgar Wright.

Wright acts as one of a cabal of Executive Producers on Block and while there have been comparisons to the films of John Carpenter and Shaun of the Dead this is no cut-and-paste job.

The premise is simple and fantastic. Alien spaceship crashes while kids mug a nurse. Kids kick the crap out of alien. More aliens turn up. Kids and aliens kick the crap out of each other in equal measure. Throw in some astute social commentary, dark humour and a bit of gore and you've got a film, boi!

The trailer made Block look like a laugh-a-minute comedy but the finished work shows an ambitious use of light as the gang of five use their home-turf advantage to take it to the invaders.

The gang, led by a superb John Boyega (who is sure to see his twitter followers multiply), give the film its emotional core. Cornish spent time with a group of teens to make sure he got the slang perfect, to show the boredom that leads to posturing and mugging. The kids love the block, does the block love them? Cornish uses the rare moments when the boys connect outside of their own world to show how they're really disconnected from everything.

There have been a few murmurings about the slang being irritating but while it grates for the first few minutes, it comes to feel right. This is how a lot of teenagers speak today. Seeing as a lot of teens go to the cinema because they can't go to a pub or club, why alienate them from there. You're a bit of a snob if you decide these kids are punks who can't talk properly.

The characters make this film, from Pest with his rudeboi schtick to the smaller kids who want to be part of the gang but can only bring a cap gun and a super-soaker to proceedings - "Water ain't no good against dem tings" - "It ain't water..." Props indeed. Boyega's Moses is the root of the film's appeal as he realises that with great power - or lack of therein - comes great responsibility.

There's your token moron hipster who hangs around in places that would shock his trust-fund parents who eventually proves he's more than a haircut. Jodie Whittaker is quite sweary as the mugging victim who has to help her attackers - "You got a potty mouth love." You understand her attitude to the kids at the beginning and her interpretation of the culture - "So it would have been alright to mug me if I didn't live here?!" - and we soften as she does. If you want a social barometer, you got it.

The use of darkness (or the lack of light) is the key to Block's success, in fact, the monsters resemble something from Abe's Oddysee or Heart of Darkness on the PSone eons ago. The constant on-off of Wyndham Court's lights gives off that Carpenter impression. Hopeless against a superior enemy, the survivors use their knowledge of the territory to their advantage.

Whether police (or feds, even) getting mauled by gorilla-dog-aliens is more shocking than the initial violence in Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 is a moot point. These kids don't have guns or a bike gang swarming around to get them. They are the bike gang. They've got fireworks, kitchen knives and baseball bats against fluorescent blue fangs. They don't stand a chance. But that's what makes Block half the fun it is.

The film even has a more satisfying conclusion than Shaun of the Dead or Precinct, although quite how you expect Shaun and friends to defeat the zombie apocalypse without the army's help is a debate for the pub. The gang solve their own problems because, in this world, who else will do it for them?

The stand-out sequence involves a smoke-filled corridor, light dimmed by the swirling suffocation and the loss of comrades in front. Absolutely bloody terrifying. Cornish shows you don't need naff, jumpy music to cause a scare - the score is superb - it's all achieved through clever cinematography, atmosphere and great acting.

It sounds straight-forward but there are enough schlock-horror films these days it's a wonder films like Block get made at all. Another triumph for the now-departed UK Film Council following The King's Speech and several others - it's abolition is nothing short of a national disgrace - sees Cornish enter the new Brit school of film-makers with Wright and Matthew Vaughn.

So can you finally make Ant-Man now, Joe?

Throw Away Your Television

How queer that after watching the second part (television) of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle on iPlayer yesterday I chose to watch the venereal stain that was The Sex Education Show vs Pornography on Channel 4. I ought to explain. Lee dismissed Channel 4 as a deluge of faecal matter that descends upon people, as shown through the sketches that interject between his missives (the majority of which are performed by Kevin Eldon and that fat man from the Little Britain Fat Fighters sketches who wasn't funny then and still, wow, isn't); Anna Richardson seems to be making television programmes to support this view.

Anna decided to ignite a debate by visting a school made up from the mongoloid handfuls of Sheringham, which is in Norfolk (hey... I used to live there!) She spent the next fifty minutes (I turned over before the end, sorry) disecting the seedy world that school children inhabit on the internet. Well, she might have called it seedy, she spent a lot of time repeating herself which was pretty pointless as I think most people spent their time watching it hoping to see some wank material.

The best bit was her reporting a child pornography website after she clicked on a link whilst watching some other porn. She must have mentioned that it shocked her at least five times in twenty to thirty seconds. It grated so much that I answered her aloud, "I get it, you're shocked", then again, I talk to myself a lot, conducting imaginary pre-match interviews for Football Focus on Football Manager, so I suppose an analyst would call talking at an animate object a 'breakthrough'. She also spoke for the crew (of course, if she hadn't, I'd have assumed they were all massive raging paedos spaffing off into the boom, so I applaud her for this) and questioned whether children were being exposed to this.

I question whether Jacqui Smith is being exposed to it, Anna.

The answer is quite obvious, for this is Channel 4. Don't click on it. She's talking to a bunch of porn vets and wonders if they're being exposed. Probably not, Anna, people know not to click on those things because they're not as stupid or weird as you are. Apart from in Sheringham, where The Darkness still seem to be de rigeur in the style stakes. Or was that the Welsh porn star she interviewed? Sorry for not giving a solitary spazzy fuck.

Don't show sixteen year olds naked grown women and be surprised they don't like how they look. You can be surprised at the boys' shit hair styles and the silly things the girls say when looking at tits (even they like the fake ones!) but being flabbergasted that kids don't like saggy boobs of a woman who has had two children is thicky on a bike at the post office. I don't even know what demographic they're going for. The same people that watch all the spew that Channel 4 gag on as they brush their tongues with their toothbrushes, I expect.

Anna visited three computing retailers and was shocked to find that the filters inbuilt in all mobile phones were available on computers but had to be activated by consumers themselves. She was also shocked (there it is again) that each retailer gave her different advice. Welcome to the modern high street, Anna. The obvious answer, from someone who can't even hyperlink or fix their DVD drive, is google. I wonder if she's heard of it? Ah, she fucking has as well! She used it to find porn sites! Hooray. Why not google admin and filters as well then? ARGGGGGGH. Like cutting yourself with a knife to test the sharpness of a blade. I assume she does that too. Just get AVG free, Anna, and sit down.

So, then... Risible, ugly and pedantic television with a bizarre number of ad breaks. It made me sad that my phone was too shit to browse for porn to pass the time while I wait for Stewart Lee to start on BBC2. The entire experience made me feel the need to dig a moat around my house, fill it up with petrol and spend my remaining days tending to a wall of flame to keep these idiots and their mutant spawn from posting me my letters.

Then I watched the aforementioned Comedy Vehicle. Calling it a vehicle seems about right as it seems to exist to propel Stewart Lee in to the same bracket of 'modern life is shit and this is why' as Mitchell and Webb and Frankie Boyle blah blah blah. This would work better if Lee didn't repeat himself so often to make the jokes last longer (and less funny) and if the programme's theme music wasn't that piece of filth that Bolton Wanderers play when (!) they score a goal at home. I watch comedy to be entertained, not to be reminded of the existence of Gavin McCann, Gary Megson and Sam Allardyce. In fact, Sam Allardyce's interviews on why he should be England manager were funnier than the entirety of last night's Comedy Vehicle. Stewart Lee is like Morrissey; only half as good as he thinks he is. He has some wonderful moments which you can forget as soon as he opens his mouth to spout out the next bit of rubbish. For every How Soon Is Now? or diatribe against Dan Brown (from the first programme, on Books) there is some shit about veganism or a shit joke about a maudlin, solitary ballet shoe which culminates in a poor joke about people complaining to the BBC about everything.

He also looks a bit like Morrissey, which is really where the comparison came from in the first place.

However, The Wire started last night and if you missed that you're fucked, well and truly. There's no more to say on that, in all honesty.

Come back later for some appalling creative writing and a one-word review of Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, if you fancy.