The sun may have returned after the sort of prolonged winter you’d only expect to see in an episode of Game Of Thrones, but this morning OnlyForKoolKids couldn’t care less. For today we lost our kool, discovered our inner kids, and have started prowling round the office with fingers arranged in the shape of a gun, à la Alan Partridge, pretending to be the cinematic spy to top all cinematic spies.

What has inspired such silliness? Only the arrival of THE NEW SKYFALL TEASER TRAILER!!! (Wow, all caps and three exclamation marks. We must giddy).

Granted, it may need absolutely no help on the promotion front, but who cares. This looks special. After the disappointment of Quantum Of Solice, the promise of bringing on board director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road To Perdition) looks to have been fulfilled, with the trailer providing a perfect showcase of his visual flair. As well, of course, as Daniel Craig’s ice cool interpretation of MI5′s finest.

Add to that possibly the best cast a Bond film has ever seen, including Albert Finney, Ralph Fiennes, Javier Bardem, Judi Dench and The Hour‘s Ben Wishaw as Q, and we have every excuse to revert to our 10-year-old Man With The Golden Gun and Moonraker-loving selves.

This will be our last fill of footage before Skyfall’s release date, however, whatever other trailers may follow. If the Bond producers learn any lesson from the splurge of Prometheus trailers and virals that have flooded the web, it’s that less is more.

In the meantime, OnlyForKoolKids is gathering up all our old Bond videotapes  in preparation for a meticulously-planned all-day Bondathon, mindful that mixing VHS and Sunny Delight can have disastrous consequences… 

Skyfall hits UK cinemas in November

On April 19, 2010, OnlyForKoolKids paid tribute to one of our favourite MCs, from one of our favourite hip-hop groups of all time: Guru of Gang Starr.

It’s with an even heavier heart that today we say goodbye to another of our favourite MCs, from possibly our favourite group of any genre of all time: Adam Yauch/MCA of the Beastie Boys.

Since we first heard Ill Communication as greasy-skinned 15-year-olds in 1994, OnlyForKoolKids’ love for the Boys has been lifelong. So much so that a picture of all three Beasties, from the Licensed To Ill era, even adorns the top of this website.

Whether it be the greatness of Paul’s Boutique, the sheer cool of Check Your Head and Ill Communication, or the unabashed fun of Hello Nasty (click on the album title to listen to them), whenever a Beastie Boys track came on the stereo it never failed to put a smile on our faces and some groove in our soul.

And although Yauch – one third of the group, campaigner for a free Tibet, film-maker and all-round great human being - may no longer be with us, we will still salute him and celebrate his life. So without further ado, here are just a few of our favourite Beastie Boy moments:

Shake Your Rump (Paul’s Boutique, 1989):

Pass The Mic (Check Your Head, 1992):

Screaming At A Wall (Minor Threat cover, from Sabotage VHS, 1994):

Futterman’s Rule (Sabotage VHS outtakes, 1994):

Three MC’s And One DJ (Hello Nasty, 1998):

Adam Yauch as Nathaniel Hornblower (Interview, 1992):

Adam Yauch, August 5 1964 – May 4, 2012: Namaste!

With an output that lends new meaning to the word ‘prolific’, it’s been a surprisingly long time since avant-garde hip-hop producer extraordinaire Madlib last let his talents loose on the entirety of a fellow artiste’s album (Guilty Simpson’s OJ Simpson in May 2011, since you asked).

Almost a year later, ‘lib has teamed up with powerhouse nu-soulstress Georgia Anne Muldrow for the really rather special Seeds. Right from the eponymous opening track’s lament for future generations ensconced in ten tonnes of funk, the marriage between Madlib’s smooth yet bombastic beats and Muldrow’s conscious, semi-psychedelic lyrics is nigh on perfect.

There’s a good chance you’ve not heard of either of these two before, and if that’s the case Seeds is probably the best way to discover both of their considerable talents. So turn the lights down low, light up some incense, drop the needle on this record and, if you’re anything like OnlyForKoolKids, smile and groove like a loon to tracks like early 80′s-style slow jam “Best Love”.

Seeds is out in the UK on May 21st, but can be heard right now on Spotify. 

As any Armando Iannucci fans will tell you, the trailer for new comedy series Veep bore more than a passing resemblance to a stateside version of The Thick Of It.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that – Iannucci (and fellow Veep writers Jesse Armstrong and Simon Blackwell) have already successfully taken the The Thick Of It’s scabrous brand of politcal satire trans-atlantic with feature film In The Loop.

And if In The Loop passed the proverbial baton from London’s Whitehall to Washington D.C.’s Capitol Hill, then Veep has taken it on and set off at a pretty promising pace.

Which is not to say that it looks like a winner right from the start – there was a huge Malcolm Tucker-shaped hole throughout the entire episode, with the art of swearing that everybody’s favourite fictional spin-doctor took to Olympian levels being sorely missed.

In its place, the fuckity fucking fucks dropped by the cast sometimes came across as forced, as if they were trying to channel the spirit of Tucker without the aid of a professional séance.

But this is being particularly nit-picky – forced swearing aside, the show was almost pitch perfect at projecting the low-level political lunacy that underscored The Thick Of It.

As Vice-President Selina Mayer, Julia Louis Dreyfus (who we will no longer refer as Seinfeld‘s Elaine Benes) used the full range of deadpan ticks, stutters and pregnant pauses to express the frustrations of the office, turning up to a committee function to find just “three people and a fuck-load of quiche”, being ignored by people taking phone calls or typing at their computers and coming into conflict with big oil over a hapless initiative to introduce cornstarch cutlery to government canteens.

The tensions that are set to simmer throughout the show’s run – between Anna Clumsky’s embattled chief of staff and Dan Egan’s devious deputy assistant, and between Timothy C. Simons’  slimy White House liaison and pretty much everybody on the Vice-Presidential team – were set up nicely, and Veep looks like it will be worthy of our viewing time, especially with the knowledge that satirical god Chris Morris has directed some of the forthcoming episodes.

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, all it needs now is a Malcolm Tucker-like figure to put the fear of god into everybody who comes within swearing distance.

Viewers in the US (and anyone in any country who downloads this VPN) can watch the first episode on YouTube here. Otherwise Veep is on HBO in the US at 10pm on Sundays, while the UK sits and waits for it to start on Sky Atlantic in June.

In the late nineties/early noughties, a tall, gangly and fearless Englishman set sail for the Americas, unearthed a previously untapped wealth of bizarre behaviour and made quite possibly the most entertaining series of documentaries television has ever seen.

That Englishman was of course Louis Theroux, and the series was the wonderfully wacky Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends.

Whether it was training ’til he barfed whilst investigating professional wrestling, rapping about his Fiat live on a New Orleans-based hip hop radio station or experiencing the living car crash that was the somewhat troubled (but fantastically named) Lake Palmer’s attempt to find a Thai wife while always having a lit cigarette between his fingers, there was no situation too weird for our man.

Amongst the many treats was Theroux’s journey into Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley to mingle with the producers and performers of pornographic films, so it is with great delight that we discovered he went back last December to find out how the industry is surviving in the face of free access to an infinite supply of smut available via the internet.

The show was due to air on the BBC in March; obviously for whatever reason the bigwigs at the Beeb decided that they couldn’t find room for it in the schedules, but Theroux recently took to Twitter to announce that his two-part documentary on the treatment of autism in the US is airing on BBC Two in mid-April, so hopefully the porn follow-up will, ahem, come shortly after.

In the meantime, here’s a reminder our man’s earlier encounter with porno producer Rob Black (he of such hits as Sodomania 7), whose approach to his craft is so extreme that even the intrepid Theroux is reduced to an apologetic wreck, especially in the face of some pretty cruel criticism of his manhood:

When dance legends Orbital brought the 40th Glastonbury Festival to a rousing close in 2010 with a raved-up rendition of the Dr. Who theme – aided by eleventh Doctor Matt Smith himself - they proved they were still as popular as ever, despite not having released any new material for six years.

Two years later and at last the latest album from the brothers Hartnoll, Wonky, has arrived. With nine fresh tracks to feast on, the deluxe version of Wonky includes five tracks recorded live in Australia last year, which is good news for anyone too young to be acquainted with classics like Belfast or Chime.

A single, New France, featuring the Florence Welch-esque Zola Jesus on vocals, was released as a digital download last week, and we are delighted to say that it’s an electro-driven stomper. Even better, though, is DJ/producer Tom Middleton’s barnstorming Cosmos house mix, which is why we’ve posted it up below.

Get ready: 2012 could well be Orbital’s year. They are headlining several festivals this summer, including Bestival and Secret Garden Party, while the Royal Albert Hall gig on their forthcoming April tour is already sold out.

If you can’t wait until then, check out the hour-long live DJ set Orbital recorded for Mixmag last month, featuring several tracks from the new album.

Wonky is released on April 1

If, like us, you have been hoping and waiting for a new series of Armando Iannucci’s marvellous political satire, The Thick Of It, sorry folks, we’ve nothing to report on that front.

But wait, put down that full bottle of paracetamol, take the noose from around your neck and remove both shotgun barrels from your mouth, for something just as wickedly delicious looms forth on the horizon: Armando Iannucci’s new US political satire, Veep.

Going through his scathing The Thick Of It spin-off movie, In The Loop, and coming out on the Washington side, Iannucci has chosen to examine the quirks of American governance, although this time not through the hapless head of a minor department but through no less than the Vice President of the United States herself.

Yes, “herself”: Veep is centred around the efforts of Vice President Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who fans of true comedy will know and love as the sassy, sexy and non-sufferer of fools Elaine Benes in Seinfeld), to stay noticed in what is possibly the least effectual post in the most powerful office in the world.

Although it doesn’t feature the White House equivalent of black belt verbal assassin Malcolm Tucker, Veep does reunite Iannucci with fellow The Thick Of It and In The Loop writers Simon Blackwell and Jesse Armstrong, as well as with satirical god Chris Morris for the first time since the two worked together on the unsurpassed The Day Today.

So swap your copy of The Guardian for the Washington Post, your copy of Hansard for the Congressional Record and your dog-eared copy of Razzle for a glossy new Playboy, for what should be an equally irreverent look at the foibles of those stalking the corridors of power on the other side of the Atlantic.

Veep premieres on HBO in the US on April 22 and will be shown on Sky Atlantic in the UK later this summer.

As every man and his dog knows, last weekend France’s The Artist was the big winner at the Oscars. And hip hip hooray, says everybody at OnlyForKoolKids.

In an era where George Lucas is still trying to squeeze blood from the dessicated corpse of the Star Wars franchise, it was wonderful to see a film with almost no sound save its musical score, shot in black and white and presented in the same fullscreen 4:3 ratio used in the silent movie era triumph before LA’s chiselled chaps and twiglet-thin totty. Not because it was a novelty or a paean to the birth of Hollywood, but because it was universally pitch perfect and heart-warmingly charming (to all but the heartless).

However, there was another significant overseas win on Sunday night, when Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation was handed the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Like The Artist, A Separation is markedly different from most mainstream films made today. For a start, it presents us with an objective view of fully-rounded characters. It has absolutely no heroes or villains, just real, flawed human beings caught in a series of domestic dilemmas that rarely get any sort of cinematic treatment without being smothered in ten tons of contrived, icky sentimental slush.

We could recommend it to you for so many reasons. Perhaps for the performances of Peyman Moadi and Leila Hatami (hands down the most beautiful woman at the Oscars ceremony) as a modern Iranian couple on the verge of divorce, of Sarina Farhadi as the daughter caught between them or of Sareh Bayat as the woman whose accusation will drive them all to the verge of ruin.

But more important is the light it shines on life in contemporary Iran, with its schisms between the secular and the religious, the middle and working classes and the application of the law to the society it governs – all without taking any one side – in a time when too many of us in the West equate the country with the wild spoutings of dingbat president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Take for example the words of Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson last week, fresh from a fifth re-reading of Mein Kampf, telling most educationally-challenged Americans that Iran “deserves to be annihilated”. To be fair to Carlson, he was slightly hesitant to go ahead and wipe millions of people from the face of the earth…because of the effect it might have on the price of oil.

With the rabble of demented dunderheads currently competing for the Republican presidential nomination in the US almost as keen on an all-out assault on Iran, no doubt to prove how virile they are sending more US servicemen and woman to their deaths in the Middle East, A Separation can go some small way to show that Iranians are as conflicted, devout, fallible, loving and moral as any other collection of people on this planet.

It might be beyond those whose attention spans have been irreversibly damaged by years of internet browsing and goggle-box watching, but we urge you to try it nevertheless.

A Separation is available to rent or buy from Amazon, Blockbuster, iTunes and other stockists now.

Last Christmas came a few days early for film fans, as Ridley Scott unwrapped the trailer for Alien prequel Prometheus and made us all very happy children indeed.

We’re not sure what the occasion is this time, but the great Scott has just given us another gift, this time in the form of a viral video on non-profit ideas spreading website TED.

Directed by Ridley’s son Luke, it features the ever electrifying Guy Pierce as Peter Weyland, founder of mega-corporation Weyland Industries, making a presentation at the TED Conference 2023. With his slick-backed hair, exquisitely-tailored suit and razor-sharp cheekbones, Steve Jobs he ain’t.

As anyone who has ever obsessed over the Alien series of films will recognise, it is this man’s company that will go on to become Weyland-Yuntani, owner of the LV-426 colony that settled on the same mysterious planet depicted in Ridley Scott’s Alien (which subsequently became the setting for Ellen Ripley’s heroics in James Cameron’s Aliens) and who made at least two attempts to bring live alien specimens back to Earth in both of its sequels.

Pierce’s Weyland is precisely the hubristic, ruthless industrialist you’d imagine him to be, and the new video gives us some portent of the calamity that is to follow in later years, presumably now starting with the events depicted in Prometheus.

As a piece of marketing, it is also another stroke of Scott’s near-genius (perhaps not surprising for a man who cut his directorial teeth shooting commercials). Take a look at every movie and entertainment website right now and it will have pole position amongst the headlines.

Actually you needn’t bother, as like a best friend that just keeps on giving, OnlyForKoolKids has the video for you right here. Enjoy, and remember: “We are the gods now…”

Prometheus is released in UK cinemas on June 1 (a whole week ahead of the US!)

Every once in a while a film comes along that is so violent censors barely need to blink before slapping an 18/hard R rating on it. Think Cannibal Holocaust, Robocop, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or, if we’re talking violence of  the psychological variety, Sex And The City 2.

Indonesian action flick The Raid has exactly the kind of set-up that screams ‘ludicrously high body count’, portraying as it does the fortunes of an elite SWAT team on a mission to secure a run-down Jakarta tower block that doubles up as a safe house for the city’s most dastardly criminals.

Needless to say, things don’t go exactly to plan, leaving our heroes trapped in a high rise with hundreds of machete-wielding psychopaths for housemates.

Directed by Englishman Gareth Evans, the film looks like a mix between bonkers Thai fight-fest Ong Bak and John Woo’s Hard Boiled, with the latter’s hospital shootout scene in particular providing bullet-riddled inspiration.

Where Ong Bak star Tony Jaa brought muay thai to the big screen in such a bone-crunchingly brilliant way, so The Raid‘s leading man Iko Uwais is set to showcase the equally brutal Indonesian martial art of pencak silat and wow Western audiences.

If all this sounds too testosterone-fuelled to be any good, think again: The Raid won the Midnight Madness audience prize at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, and is already being spoken of as one of the best action films in years.

In an era where Sylvester Stallone reportedly wants a 12 rating for The Expendables 2, it’s certainly heartening to see a movie that hasn’t put box office before bangsmashwallop.

The Raid is released in UK cinemas on May 18.

WARNING – If you are of a nervous disposition and don’t want to see garottings, throat slashings and point-blank head shots, please watch this nicely sanitized trailer:

!

If you are the sort of sick bastard that revels in the mayhem listed above, here is the uncensored version (you mentalist!):