One for all your business owners...

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that fact that I had a lovely little compnay helping me with all my Google Analytics, SEO etc which has made my web traffic and blog visits sky rocket......not to mention increasing my sales which is amazing but also knackering as I have spent the past few weeks making underwear and wrapping up dresses to be sent out....but I digress.

After I posted the blog I had quite a few of peopl asking about the company and whether it could help them. I told my Analytics Gurus all about it and now they are organising either a conference call or meet + greet so they can tell you in person what they can do for you.....how lovely.

So...being the lovely lady that I am I have offered to organise this so if you are interested please drop me a line at lucy@hummingbirdvintage.co.uk and I will arrange xx

10th New York Asian Film Festival: The Chaser & Ninja Kids!!!

Now in its tenth year of providing New Yorkers with a more robust and complete picture of the cinemas of contemporary Asia, thanks to its emphasis on the multitudinous entertainment-first forms that have remained mostly outside the purview of the City's annual autumnal art cinema showcase, the 2011 New York Asian Festival will accelerate its focus on one of the more vital channels of the continent's popular modes, the Korean action thriller. Grouped under the heading, "Sea of Revenge: New Korea Thrillers," the NYAFF will be presenting a half-dozen features made in the wake of the extraordinary, industry-saving popularity of Na Hong-jin's The Chaser (Chugyeogja, 2008), along with the genuine article (for the first time at the Manhattan event). Na's handsome, if brutal 2008 debut fits the NYAFF's specific cultural imperative: highly accessible, and, in the case of The Chaser, well-crafted popular film art that the parallel cineaste culture has long had the habit of overlooking in its continuing (though laudable) search for new global forms and distinctive auteurs - a pursuit that has favored the 'twice-told' singularity of Hong Sang-soo's idiom, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the conspicuous humanism of Lee Chang-dong's novelistic, mid-level work. Whereas festival-heavyweight Hong's closed system derives foremost from Eric Rohmer's overtly verbal, art-house body of work, for example, The Chaser emerges from a set of more popular sources including the double-chase story structures of Alfred Hitchcock, the abject serial-killer narratives - and under-lit spaces - of David Fincher, and especially from the revenge archetype and predilection for cross-cutting of Don Siegel's classic Dirty Harry (1971), which Na further references in his own hillside neon cross and a last-minute rescue plot-line that resolves itself in a similar fashion to the Eastwood vehicle.

While The Chaser accordingly proves a comparative bleak portrait of sadistic violence and revenge short-circuited, Na nevertheless manages to incorporate a sly sense of humor within his pulsing prostitutes, pimps, crooked cops and killer johns story-line. Na generates comedic effects both on the level of form, as in one especially adept elliptical hard cut where a relatively placid police house is replaced by a teaming space of screaming officers, and through his character's behaviors, with the eponymous detective-turned-pimp Kim Yun-seok's immediately callous treatment of the young daughter of his missing call-girl (Seo Yeong-hie) a particularly memorable example. Kim, whose performance propels Na's film in much the same way that Yang Ik-joon's does in the actor-writer-director's 2009 NYAFF peak Breathless (Ddongpari), ultimately comes to serve as a guardian for the young girl, which in turn infuses The Chaser with the same sentiment that Lee Jeong-beom magnifies for his comparatively lesser, surrogate father-daughter 'Sea of Revenge' offering, The Man from Nowhere (Ajeossi, 2010).

If The Chaser therefore offers comparatively old-fashioned pleasure within an essentially conventional narrative form, Miike Takashi's Ninja Kids!!! (2011), based on the extremely popular and exceedingly long-running animated series Nintama Rantarō (1993-present), suggests a newer mode of digital-era storytelling, wherein the act of telling increasingly has come to supersede more traditional modes of showing. Throughout Ninja Kids!!!, Miike's narrative frequently stops in order to identify the film's many would-be ninjas and the school's instructors, as well as to explain their off-beat training regimens, with pre-pubescent, bespecled superstar Katô Seishirô, in the Rantarō role, providing the consistently humorous, Wes Anderson-brand informational voiced-off commentary. (Given that Miike is, in essence, adapting a 1,450-plus episode animated series makes Ninja Kids!!!'s emphasis on information all the more understandable.) Miike does no less violence to the naturalism and integrity of his film's spaces, whether a warrior is tearing through a digitally composited background or one of his many figures is sporting a pink, solid plastic bump on his head. Indeed, the film's animated origins often return to the fore, with Chuck Jones especially emerging as a key influence on Miike's over-arching self-reflexivity.

Ultimately, Ninja Kids!!! represents the latest entry into the international, boarding-school sub-genre that Harry Potter has come to define over the previous decade, albeit with a much greater quotient of fart-jokes, piles of animal excrement and gleefully irresponsible moments of slapstick violence. Ninja Kids!!! likewise distinguishes itself from the far (and needlessly) darker Potter pictures in its consistently on-point sense-of-humor, whether Rantarō is racing through a watery battlefield with arrows whizzing past his head, playing up the melodrama as a comedic cut changes the perspective on the mountain that he and his classmates are scaling, tossing his throwing stars in a game of catch with his unsuccessful ninja father or whether he is insisting simply that all ninjas love Ramen. Though the episodic Ninja Kids!!! does at times lose its early comedic verve, there are more than enough highlights to recommend the ever-prolific and sadistic Miike's enjoyably misguided attempt at making a children's film.

The Chaser will screen once at 3:15pm, Thursday, July 14, at the Walter Reade Theater, while Ninja Kids!!! will received its world premiere at 7:00pm, Sunday, July 3 at the same venue, with an encore presentation at the Japan Society on Saturday, July 9 at 6:00pm.  

Fatty in Ibiza...

I am sure some of you remember that about a month ago I embarked on a radical diet in order to get to my dream shape for my upcoming Ibiza hen do (not mine by the way), my 30th birthday and my wedding which is far `way but it is never too soon to start.

By now I hoped to have a body like this....

Sadly I have failed as I love food and socialising far too much.

I often buy magazines on the basis that there is a miracle diet inside or that a Z-list celeb has lost three strone in a week on a bootcamp.

Well....I now have 22 days until Ibiza and I am going to embark in an almightly bootcamp....maybe I will call it the Hummingbird Bootcamp and offer it in the shop along with the vintage dresses and bridal services.

So....for the next 22 days as well as my normal witterings about all forms of fashion I will also be giving you a small update on my mission.

Tonight is my weigh in...this includes body fat and my metabolic age.....I am gutted that alcohol will be off the menu as I think I will need a large gin after the results!!

Over the Edge: Tsui Hark's The Blade (by, Lisa K. Broad)

Tsui Hark’s The Blade (1995), which will receive a rare 35mm screening at this year’s New York Asian Film Festival, is a mythical beast of a film. Cheng Cheh’s steel-plated revenge tale The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) provides its underlying narrative skeleton, and the rest is stitched together from marked flesh, mud, blood, smoke, fire, flashing lights, and shifting shadows. Much of the film is told from the point of view of the spoiled and cloistered young daughter of a sword factory owner, who lusts after two of her father’s employees, On and Iron Head. Her hothouse subjectivity lends the early sequences in the factory a vivid, sadomasochistic tactility that persists throughout the entire film. Tsui’s camera draws out the contrasts between the soft, pale hands of a monk and the tanned, scarred bodies of the sword factory workers who cut their muscled biceps in a Buddhist ceremony; it takes in the tattooed visage of Lung, the flying über-assassin who killed On’s father. The Blade also draws a series of parallels between men and animals, equating human flesh with raw meat.

Like Sam Peckinpah, Tsui pursues his genre-revisionist ends by juxtaposing brute physicality with disorienting stylistic abstraction. (An early sequence in which a group of laughing young men lure a dog headfirst into a bear trap recalls Peckhinpah’s The Wild Bunch [1969] while also foreshadowing On’s maiming at the hands of bandits.) Discussions of the film’s visual style often make reference to its use of frenetic cutting during the action sequences, but montage is not the only weapon in Tsui’s cinematic arsenal; every stylistic element is a freely moving part. Tsui consistently juxtaposes spatially and temporally disjunctive editing with teeming multi-planar compositions filled with whirling-dervish swordsmen, complex and frequently erratic camera movement, hallucinogenic primary colored lighting, and a bombastic musical score. The result is a kind of infernal overtonal-montage; a deranged work of film art that can only come to life in the projector. The Blade also makes extensive use of shadows, lens-flares, and reflections that – as a result of the rapid movement both within and between the film frames – often feel as real and solid as the objects photographed. In particular, a vertiginous action sequence set among ruined bamboo shelters creates a graphic lattice-like pattern of light and shadow that is truly avant-garde. After a while, the sensory overload is so extreme that the eye can no longer ‘look into’ the image-space; the illusion of depth is completely destroyed, and the motion-picture is revealed for what it is. A heady mixture of flesh and phantom that far exceeds the sum of its parts, The Blade will break you down.

The Blade will screen at 6:00pm, Saturday July 11 at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater.  Filmmaker Tsui Hark will be in attendance.

Best short haircuts fashion for 2011

Best short haircuts fashion for 2011

 Full Finding Haircuts Pictures Online There are many hair styles that are available online to choose from, which canp rovide you with the inspiration you need to choose the most suitable hair style to your appearance. When it comes to choosing a hairstyle, more and more people choose.Although there are many images are available, know where to look and how the view can be important. Choose between the popular hair style can be difficult,because there are thousands who can see. Knowing which style you're lookinghair, and hair styles that will suit your face shape and hair type you have can be an effective way to ensure that you can find the right style - but also ensure that the force is feasible.While it may be difficult to determine the appropriate style your hair the best, there are many people who have decided to take advantage of short and wavy hair styles. Through the hair style, you can find many styles to suit you, through the use of hair gallery you can find lots of wavy hair styles that are available, whether you are looking for long wavy hair, or wavy hair cut short. Regardless of hair length, there are many techniques that can be used to make the ends of the hair appears choppy.
Look for images that have a face similar to themselves, as well as hair styles thatwere created from the same country of hair, including hair style that has beencreated for thin hair, and hair that was created for thick hair.When it comes to styling hair, most people choose to wear hair pieces have been made straight, wavy, like wearing straight hair style is the best way to ensure that you can use the tip of the hair arranged in the order. Through the end you can see the style, you can easily use the end product to create wavy hair, and use a finger to emphasize the choppy nature of the tip that can be created in the hair. Using hair oil is the best way to get a wavy look so popular in this style hair style.

 Best short haircuts fashion for 2011

Short but sweet....

Today's blog is a short and sweet one as have just launched a  half price sale on everything inHummingbird Vintage (http://www.hummingbirdvintage/) and now I am slightly manic and panicking...!!

However if you do see anything you like on there then drop a quick email and I will send you the discount codes....!!

So today I am going to do a quick round up of my today's holiday lusts as Ibiza is approaching and I need all the help I can get to face the Island of Beautiful People....enjoy!!

ASOS - £50

River Island - £16.99

River Island - £7.99

Internet shopping....Friend or Foe..?

This weekend I have yet another wedding.....I am actually quite happy about this as I love a chance to get dressed up and have a dance.

However the lead up to this wedding has been marred with what I like to call the 'Bastard Internet Shopping Situation'.

You see I decided to treat myself to a nice new dress for the wedding under the guise that I don't really know anyone at this wedding so would be able to wear it to another one without anyone noticing.

After careful deliberation I choose this beauty from Monsoon.....



£130

I ordered it last Friday and was assured that it would be with me by mid week.

Unfortunately they mucked up my delivery address to rather than it coming to work my lovely dress would be delivered to my house where there would be no one to sign for it.

I rang up Monsoon to explain this and was told that there was nothing they could do and I would have to find a way to making sure I was at home....!!

So for the past three days I have been running home at lunch and on breaks to see if it had been delivered or if there was a delivery card waiting for me....but alas...there has been nothing.

So today in a panic I rang Monsoon again who told me that the dress had tried to be delivered several times but there was no one in....when I mentioned the lack of delivery card I was told that the courier will not leave a card but just keep trying until he finally delivers it.

So this leaves me a. Mad as a fish as I WANT MY DRESS and b. Potentially without anything to wear for the wedding....TOMORROW.

So on a mad hunt to find same day delivery dresses I stumbled across Oasis who do a 90 minute delivery to certain postcodes.....and clearly the delivery Gods were smiling upon me as my postcode is in the delivery area.....HURRAH.

So now I have this baby on the way.....

£150


So although this experience has made me long for the god old days where I went to a shop, tried something on and then bought it (rather than being lured by the simplicity of internet shopping and spending waaay more that I can afford) it has shown me that the internet world of shopping can also be a lifesaver!!

A Mexican Kitsch Fest....

Last night I met up with some old work friends for an evening of Lebanese food.....well that was the plan anyway.

Infact it was more a case of eating anywhere we could as London was packed last night for some bizzare reason so everywhere we tried involved waiting for a table for a good hour. In the end we admitted defeat and put our names down at possibly the nicest Mexican restaurant ever (back in Essex Mexican restaurants involve wearing a sombrero and downing tequila shots....classy!!) and then went to the pub to wait.

By the time our table was ready I had drunk a bottle of red wine and was very happy indeed which may have led to my huge excitment when I saw these little beatuies in a shop window....

The brand is Les Nerieds and I am totally in love with everything....especially the heart locket with the little pop-up figures and of course the hummingbird neckalce for obvious reasons.

So....if any of you think I deserve a treat then it is my thirtieth birthday coming up so please feel free xx

A day at the races...

This weekend saw my first venture into horse racing at Royal Ascot.

I had been looking forward to it for weeks and had my outfit carefully planned so you can imagine my dismay when I opened the blinds on Saturday to find it literally pissing down.

It was then all hands on deck to find me a new outfit that would withstand the rain and the cold and yet still make me look ok and sort of dressed up.

In the end I went for an old faithful black and white Oasis dress with a black blazer and huge white corsage. I do have to admit though that my lower half was incased in tights and white pumps from Primark...not the classiest of looks but hey-ho.

So off we set...mini bottles of fizzy wine in hand.

The first thing I noticed about Ascot is the amount of effort the women go to....it is bloody amazing but did make me feel a bit like a tramp for not wearing skyscraper heels, a huge fascinator and for not having amazing hair and make-up that seemed to last all day (I need to find out how and where these women do this!!).

After having a good nosy around I found my outfit of the day...

She looked fabulous and totally different from most people there which is what drew me to her....tot`lly gorgeous.

After I had had a fashion round up I managed to drink my body weight in wine and win £76....so all in all a good day.

I will definitely be going next year but will be armed with non moving hair, smudge free make-up, high heels and a fascinator the size of the sun....afterall if you can't beat 'em...join 'em!!

Monsoon Season...

I thought that was a good title considering all the rain we have been getting....but in fact this blog is a small homage to the shop Monsoon.

I love Monsoon for many reasons....the quality of clothes is very good, the pieces are unique and I am a size eight in the land of Monsoon which, even though I know this is not my real size when I slip on a size eight and it fits it makes me feel very slinky and also makes me want to wear my clothes with the label hanging out (if only all shops could adhere to Monsoon sizing)!!

So as payday is approaching and as per my self inflicted rule I get to buy one piece of good quality clothing each month I have been doing a little (ok a lot..!!) of internet window shopping.

Here is my current Monsoon favourites list....

£60

£130

£75

£55

£65

...all totally gorgeous I am sure you would agree...!!

However....although I am a big fan of Monsoon I am also a big fan of bargains and whilst I was having a little peek through all the lovely dresses I found this one...

£65

...totally lovely dress for a wedding or a day out...however it is similar to this dress from good old Primark

£25

I actually have this Primark dress and wore it to a wedding recently and I have to say that this pic doesn't do it justice as it is simply gorgeous on and at under half the price you is a total winner!!

New Film: Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, the writer-director's era-bending perambulation through an unceasingly picturesque City of Lights - Darius Khondji (Se7en, 1995) and Johanne Debas deserve immediate citation for their deeply alluring lensing of the shifting French capital - manages to speak unerringly on the level of and to its assumed audience member (urban, liberal, upper-middle class and late middle-aged), without ever threatening even a hint of discomfort for the same bourgeois viewer. In a profound sense, Midnight in Paris is a work by and for America's complacent elite upper classes, for those who would deign to wonder aloud 'why anyone would live anywhere else when they could live in Paris,' or who still imagine that the nation's power-brokers consist predominately of French-hating, aesthetically insensate Republican W.A.S.P.'s, who (against all odds) still live in California. In this latter sense, the 'Marie Antoinette' Allen's cultural-cum-demographic politics belong squarely to the director's formative 1960s and 1970s, with just a dash of a more contemporary, Bush and Tea Party-hating variant of the director's signature 'bigotry for the Left.' Though the spectator is reassured that Allen's Owen Wilson surrogate is the one who always stands up for the help - of course does, don't all our betters? - Midnight in Paris has a serious class-problem, which ultimately manifests itself in Allen's extraordinarily anesthetized tourist's portrait of the French capital. Where Whit Stillman's similarly luminous, romantic and exceedingly verbal Metropolitan (1990) did manage a lower middle-class outside, Midnight in Paris remains squarely within the latter-day equivalent of the haute-bourgeoisie that Luis Buñuel skewered in the same Exterminating Angel (1962) to which Wilson's writer lead Gil refers in a fantastic encounter with the Spanish-born director. Of course, Allen, forever in his echo chamber, misses the irony that it is exactly his social class that Buñuel would ravage at present.  

Never mind, Allen wants you to know that he knows that Buñuel was a Surrealist. And that Ernest Hemingway wrote brusquely about the war and traveled to Mount Kilimanjaro, that F. Scott Fitzgerald married a ball-of-fire named Zelda, and that Auguste Rodin sculpted. Of course, Allen is no less inclined to ridicule Sorbonne-lecturer Michael Sheen's pontifications on any and every work of art that the Americans encounter, with Gil finally silencing the aforesaid with a bluff about Rodin, taken from an invented two-volume biography. Sheen's blowhard Paul, no less apt to resort to fiction presumably, responds to the writer's incantatory citation of authority, which Allen seems to suggest is all that matters to those egg-head academics. Allen's artist Gil, on the other hand, really cares about the art; he's the one who dreams about the past, and who is enraptured by meeting the Hemingway's and the Fitzgerald's and the Gertrude Stein's (which presents an undeniable, if shallow parallel pleasure for Midnight in Paris's acculturated viewers). The bourgeois Allen's surrogate truly treasures his Cliff Notes experience of "Lost Generation"-era Paris.      

Fortuitously, Stein, Hemingway et al. appreciate Gil's literary gift, just as we are asked to imagine the early champion of Henri Matisse and the author of The Sun Also Rises (1926) would value the work of our own age's evidently no-less gifted auteur. However, Allen's own writing in Midnight in Paris happens to interfere with this assumption, given how screamingly bad 'everything anyone ever says' actually is in the director's latest - a mouthful to be sure, but then again I would never assume that André Bazin or Manny Farber would be impressed by my prose. A self-deprecating Albert Brooks Allen most assuredly is not. Nor again he is a Stillman whose Jane Austen fascination has been digested in a manner that contrasts sharply with the writer-director's much too on-point, surface-level treatment of his own professed heroes. Nor is he a Buñuel or even more appropriately given his squarely middle-brow ethos, a Mike Leigh, whose strong sense of class indeed extends beyond his own current well-healed place. The latter director's exceptional 1976 tele-film, Nuts in May, in fact does impressive, if virtual work in sending up the American bourgeoisie of the early 2010s. Allen, on the other hand, seems to have no insight into his own moment, and no awareness of his socio-economic place, even if his film abounds with unintended sociological insights. When finally he does choose the Parisian present, it is for the continued existence of the boundlessly nostalgic boulevard café and, commensurate with another of the director's personal and artistic signatures, for the pretty (and notably) young-thing who shows an interest in the Allen surrogate.

Shoes....

Now...whilst I think it is fine to spend alot of money on vintage dresses, underwear and make-up, I don't actually spend alot of money on shoes.

I am a Primark pump sort of girl. I wear these shoes come rain or shine....although after a couple of trips in the rain they start to smell.....bad!!

So after I awoke on this fine June day to rain of biblical proportions I realised that I need to fine some more solid shoes (I am currently typing this whilst wearing wet shoes....it is not fun).

So I am on the hunt for shoes....but a few things you need to understand first.

I have legs of the tree trunk variety so shoes like converse and brogues do not do me any favours and only make my legs look dumpier. I need to have flat shoes as I can't walk in heels for long periods of time and I don't have the wardrobe to compliment lovely heels. And last but by no means least they need to be on the cheap side as I have many other addictions so expensive shoes can definitely not be one!!

Unfortunately I paid no attention to the last rule and have now fallen in love with these beauties....

French Sole...

GOLD BALLET PUMPS....who could resist...??

Sadly these gorgeous creatures cost £98 and that is slightly more expensive than my usual £4 Primark pumps so I am unsure I can justify it both to myself and the boy who is unlikely to approve of expensive shoe purchases when we have a wedding to pay for.

So sadly these French Sole shoes of delight are going to have to stay in Topshop for now until I either save up enough money by not socialising as much (unlikely) or until I convince the boy that these are an integral part of the wedding and therefore I have to have them immediately....I like the second option a lot more!!

Today I am loving....

This amazingly beautiful lingerie set from ASOS.....

£20

£12

...and Stevie Wonder.....

I am not loving the fact that after practically starving myself for a week (ok, yes I fell of the wagon in spectacular fashion on Sunday but still...) I am no lighter on the scales and have now bought the lingerie set above and a new camera to take the edge off.....retail therapy I LOVE YOU xx

Life is too short....

I always knew that I would get to an age when bad things would start happening to both my family and that of my friends.

And now...it would appear that I am at that age.

Last year Mother Hummingbird was diagnosed with cancer (she is doing ok and is loving her wig collection) and last week the Mum of one of my oldest friends was also diagnosed......totally rubbish.

It does make you realise that life is too short to worry about the crap that doesn't need worrying about and also too short not to do the things you really want to do.

So I have decided that one afternoon a week I am going to go off and do something I really want to do...whether it be...

Afternoon tea with the girls

A random tourist attraction....I have always loved the crown jewels

a dance class

....or just going out for an afternoon of gin in a fine London establishment..!!

I am going to have a purely selfish afternoon every week as I am sure there will be a point soon where this will be impossible and also...I have decided that life it waaay too short not to have the odd selfish moment.