"SCOOBY DOO - WHERE ARE YOU?" I now have a one evening a week cinema job up at the Clapham Picture House. Lousy money in exchange for as many movies as I can eat - seems fair enough to me. The manager seems very cool and there's the option of more work if I want it - pretty sweet. Loads of people have emailed me about the mailart project but I'd still like a few more people on board before we kick it off, hopefully on Monday. Check it out and drop me a line if you are interested - looks like Claire will be kicking off the US side of things from Texas but I need more yanks to get in touch about it. I'm in town for most of today but will be updating the mailart page later this evening. Scooby-Doo - What can I say? It�s about as good as you'd expect... Its been carelessly updated and with too little respect for the original show. The CGI Scooby is pretty good and Matthew Lillard as Shaggy is pretty spot on. Velma is ok with plenty of "I lost my glasses moments" but its dumb to put her in a low cut top half way through just to show - hey 'Velma is actually a babe'. Daphne as played by Buffy is just fucking annoying, as is the dumb as a bag of spanners Fred. At times the film-makers seem to be bordering on the kind of savvy reinvention that worked for The Brady Bunch but they don't have the balls to run with it... it seems the fatal flaw of most cartoon conversions is that they take a perfectly acceptable winning formula and then fuck around with it - so in the terrible Flintstones movie we get Fred taken out of his job and familiar garb and transformed into 'business man' Fred who is now at odds with chum Barney - fucking stupid idea... here we have a nice opening sequence that pushes all the right Scooby buttons - dumb plan that goes wrong with Scooby and Shaggy getting in the way and inadvertently capturing the 'ghost' who turns out to be the spooky old janitor guy... nice. But then we find out that Fred is an egomaniac who takes all the credit for the gang's success - the gang splits up and never speak to each other again for 2 years giving Fred time to update his haircut and for Daphne to take martial arts lessons so she can have a dumb Charlies Angels scene later in the movie... Velma seems the same until they throw in a half-written love interest for her (after cutting out a few pseudo lesbian scenes with Daphne)... its only Scooby and Shaggy who remain true to the original show... until Shaggy falls in love and briefly neglects Scooby... lets get this clear... that would never happen in real life. Everyone knows that Scoob and Shaggy are pals for life and that a little bit of pussy would never come between them - they'd probably share like they do with those unfeasibly long sandwiches... I'm not even going to mention Rowan Atkinson. The worst thing about the movie is that its supposed to be a hit (and was in the States and will be here) so every shitty little pop song that needs some promoting gets thrown into the mix... the music in this movie is fucking terrible... that horrible pop punk smiley sunshine shit all the way through followed by the usual sub standard rap song... fuck its annoying. Still, most people probably won't get as offended as me as its 'only a dumb cartoon anyway' - well you can think that but if you do you're a fucking moron. Scooby Doo was an essential part of my childhood and I hate to see it fucked around with this way. It�s fucking sacrilegious. Stu - you need to go see this movie being the Scooby expert that you are... despite all I've said you will love the scene when Velma has her flashback to the good old days and we get a little cameo of "Puppy Power!". Check it out in about 2 weeks in the UK but if you like the idea of Buffy dressed in a mini skirt and kicking a wrestler in the head then be warned that the good old BBFC have cut the scene slightly to get it a PG rating. Also gone are the Velma wants to shag Daphne scenes and some of the more overt Shaggy is a stoner references - that doesn't really bother me as the original got by fine without them - the simple fact that the script writers thought they needed a naked Daphne running down a tunnel in the 1st draft script should really show what fucking idiots were responsible for this movie. Mike has been ranting to: Minor Threat