When It Was Hip To Be Hip He Was Hep

Like a character from a William Gibson book, I have certain talents when it comes to identifying true, underlying, structural coolness.

I don’t have any cool myself. When I was a teenager I worked out that I was never going to be cool. I have too many clashing, un-unified personality traits mixed in with fussy tendencies and blended with a propensity to giggle to ever be a cool person.

It is actually an enormous relief when you work out you aren’t cool. It allows you to get on with doing fun stuff… like giggling. Sadly, unlike a William Gibson character, the cool does not rub off on me. I can only point at it and say “yay” or “nay”.

I never go looking for the genuinely elusive cool, so my opinion is always going to be lagging behind the people who aim to industrialise it by marketing, producing, recording, filming, programming, coding or cooking it. Doesn’t make my opinion wrong, though. In the 90s, someone in New York said to me, “Hey, come and see this band. They are the best. They’re going to be bigger than U2.” And I thought that sounded like something fun to do. Tiny little music venue near the Lower West Side of Manhattan. Cool. Thirteen seconds in the same room as Matchbox 20 and I knew they weren‘t. I told my host that they might be big, but they were never going to be “it”. He didn’t agree. I stand by my judgement.

The upcoming review is well behind the release date. I just want to say that I have witnessed it and it pinged away at the cool gland in my brain like no other film in the last twelve months. It wouldn’t matter what decade you watched it in.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: White-hot-cool.

The first time I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I got this excited, wee-wee charge in the pit of my bits that let me know I had seen something very cool. Something that was going to be defining. I wasn’t first on the bandwagon but I certainly wasn’t late, I was smack in the middle of its arrival across the English speaking world.

Scott Pilgrim gave me that kind of kick. It fits together, it looks a bundle, everybody’s gorgeous and it is funny. Oh, and cool. Don’t forget cool.