Blood Nose

- My Review of a Blood Nose I got -

I had this killer blood nose the other week.

Who the fuck gets blood noses? Nerds. That’s who. Just from standing around.

But then a few weeks ago I was looking at my fingers, and there were these brown splotches all over them. And I’m like, woah, that’s blood. Then I wiped my face and I had a solid nose bleed. It had been bleeding so long parts had dried up.

And I was around, lots of people. I asked somebody why no one told me I has a nose bleed. And they were like “oh we thought you knew”. It was then I realised I was that guy. He’s so far gone you just assume the nosebleed is part of his thing. Like the crusty homeless guy mutilating himself, he’s just best left alone. And that is fucking true. Best left alone. Let them figure it out. If they don’t make it, well hey, at least they hire hotel rooms when they hang themselves. They don’t just leave themselves to rot away for needless, expensive, inconsiderate decades. Its time to go hunting old man. You won’t need to bring food.

But then others make shit happen, like those who are reading or writing this. Booyakasha.

The Monuments Men

I’ll break down the plotline for you. One day George Clooney wants to rescue art. So, he goes and rescues art. His friend gets shot, George Clooney sad, but rescues more art. Then he turns into a Hobbit (more on this later).

Monument men looks like a war movie, but is not a war movie. This is an old man talking about how important culture is movie. If culture is so important to you, why don’t you fucking make some? Monuments Men is a collection of scenes, all comprised of Hollywood’s most likeable and non-threatening middle aged male actors, posing and looking cute in world war two costumes. These are sandwiched in between George Clooney repeating ‘I know is just art but art important Hitler bad man goddammit’ ad nauseum.

Not to mention, the whole movie is a watered down version of The Simpson’s Hellfish Bonanza episode. Except not as funny or exciting, and with much more two dimensional characters. The Americans are the heroes, the English are nice chaps but would much prefer to write a letter or have a cup of tea than shoot anybody. The Frenchmen are rude cowards, the women perfumed soaked jezebels. The Germans and Russians are moustache twirling cartoon villains, all cartoonishly evil. I suspect the target demographic of Monument Men is actual survivors of World War 2.

If you are looking for a movie to watch with your great grandmother, who has just gotten out of brain surgery, is very easily offended, hasn’t seen that many Simpsons episodes, and likes Hobbits, this is probably a bit too vanilla for her.

* The Hobbit thing; there's a bit at the end where they show George Clooney in the future as an old man chuffing about art some more, but the guy is like four feet tall and looks nothing like him. The End.

An actual still from the movie. 

HER

HER

I saw this at the movies. The cin-ema. Specifically Nova in Carlton, Melbourne.

What the fuck is with this place? First up, to buy tickets, you need to be nowhere near the actual
cinema. You need to embark on an epic quest to find the ticket counter, hidden behind a book shop and underneath a staircase. Wave as you pass Harry Potter's old bedroom. Maybe this was a clever marketing tactic to get people excited to see the Hobbit. Maybe not though, cos I don't want to see the Hobbit.

THEN at the ticket counter, after slaying the dragon or whatever, they don't take eftpos. What kind of fucking world is this. The tickets are already exorbitantly priced, just factor in another three cents for whatever the eftpos costs. Are you avoiding paying taxes? Well fucking factor your tax dodging in to the ticket costs. Or the beer costs. Oh, another thing. The beer. I got a beer, a Heineken I think - and the writing on the bottle was Israeli. Or Hebrew. Nothing wrong with that, but goddammit nine dollars for a beer, can it at least not be from the middle east? I mean ze Jews are great at many things, but I'm not sure beer brewing is one of them. I can pretty much taste the blood of Palestinian children in my Heiny. Alright enough.

HER is really beautiful. The colours, the pacing, Spike Jonze is a real master at making cool films that
aren't up their arse trying to be cool. It works because all of the elements have a purpose, the
film is stylish but not for the sake of being stylish. The hipstery (for lack of a better word obviously)
theme makes sense, HER is set slightly in the future so the 30's clothing scheme fits with human's cyclical clothing trends, etc.

Despite the beauty, HER's main question is what da fuq is going to happen when AI comes along. Jonze goes with a very believable response, people will try and rub their genitals on it. Joaquin Phoenix's character Theo, gets into a relationship with his OS (Operating system), HER goes in to the ins and outs of being in a relationship with a digital mind. There are cute parts, where they take each other on little adventures, try and fuck using a surrogate woman, and there are the nasty parts, where Theo finds out his computer lady has been less faithful, and him coming to terms with the fact he is punching well above his intellectual weight.

I guess HER lands as sort of a mix between Juno and Space Odyssey 2001, except no space travel or pregnant teens. Another down side, I didn't really buy the fact Theo doesn't own some kind of futuristic space Fleshlight, that would vacuum the nasty out of him light years better than any flesh woman could.

All in all, very good, great soundtrack, go see. 

GRAND THEFT AUTO 5

Well I've never reviewed a video game before and probably won't again. I have no idea what goes in to making a game and don't really like the people that do (that's not true I love errybody). Regardless of my insecurities, I'm glad those wizards are in the world to bring us these little portals into consequence-free realities that stop us from mowing the lawn or talking to loved ones.

GTA 5 is about 1.8 billion years in the making and had a budget of half a trillion dollars, so of course its the best game ever made. Review over. The game is set in Los Angeles (renamed Los Santos), where you play as one of three characters. One of these characters is African American, but thankfully you can choose to be a white guy. I sincerely don't mean this in a racist way (well its a bit racist I guess), but playing as a character that doesn't look like my pasty white self kind of spoils the fantasy. I want to pretend that its me in there. I have similar opinions on pornography.

The story, is about criminals wanting to make money, believe it or not. I'm about 0.0001% through the game so thats all I can surmise. And we're not playing Grand Theft Auto for the delicate prose anyway. I like how all 'sandbox' games, as in games where you are free to roam around the world doing as you please, are all centred around stealing cars and being a rampant murderer. You are free to do anything you want, go travelling, meet a lady, whatever you like. So naturally, everyone who plays immediately carjacks the nearest senior citizen and squashes their skull under the wheels. Saying that video games cause people to act violently is like saying socks cause people to have feet (I'm looking at my socks if you can't tell). We evolved from/still are blood thirsty primates, we just wear shoes and socks and manage not to rip people's faces off and eat them most of the time. Until we play Grand Theft Auto.

However Rockstar like to pretend this is not the case. The very first mission is full of shooting and blood, however the consequent missions are another story. So far I've driven a tow truck (for towing purposes), been told to get a haircut, been invited to watch TV with my aunt and other activities that are dangerously close to resembling real life. I'm sure things will get satisfyingly violent soon enough but for now it feels like I'm playing the Sims. When my character (or actual self) hangs himself from a ceiling fan or gets killed in a grease fire I'll know I'm playing the Sims. I really hate the Sims.

I'm pretty sure this will be the last GTA in this format. Here are my predictions for the next GTA.

- It will involve some incarnation of VR hardware, such as the Oculus Rift / Omni Treadmill.

- The map / world will be a snapshot of the real world, taken from the next Google / NSA all seeing eye camera.

- This will be the last GTA, or possibly last game ever, because no one will stop playing it as long as our feeding tubes are in and our mechanical overlords are satisfied with their new power source.

Speaking of simulated realities, have you heard of Simulation Theory? The idea is that because we will eventually make a simulated reality that is indiscernible from actual reality, it is much more likely that we are in one of the infinite amount of simulations as opposed to the only one actual reality. So maybe we are the imagination of a futuristic race that explored the universe to its full extent, got bored and wiped its memory then reincarnated itself in a simulation for its cosmic entertainment. Oh wait I was doing a video game review right? Yeah GTA 5 is great, what did you expect?   

Drive (2011)

DRIVE (2011)

Drive. I want to say this movie is oozing with style and awesomeness. Or rather I think the film wants me to say that. The score and the opening credits have a real eighties feel to them, the hot pink text and the sexy synth make you feel like your Tommy Vercetti rollin' through Vice City in a Diablo, machine-gunning Cubans. 

Then you notice it. I think a coked up colour grading technician's deadline snuck up behind him, causing him to scream 'OH FUCK TEN MINUTES TO GO, JUST MAKE EVERYTHING BLUE AND ORANGE'. Blue and orange is the go to for so many films nowadays, because your average actor's skin tone is in the orange spectrum, and at the other end of the colour wheel is a bluey teal colour. And putting opposite colours against each other make the colour at the front really 'pop'. So the actors be popping without too much effort. More about this here. 

Despite the orange and blue over saturation, Drive is pretty sexy. Nothing is overdone. For a car movie, the car porn is pretty minimal. There is an awesome Bullitt/French Connection style car chase, with the music score replaced by engines roaring, that works real good. The violent scenes are never overdone, the camera lingers just long enough to tell the audience what has happened, but also lets your imagination do most of the work. The dialogue is minimal, there's no cheesy one liners or verbal genre crutches. And of course Ryan Gosling is sexy and cool as fuck in a totally straight way. He is possibly the only mainstream actor who's band is actually pretty awesome. Listen.  

Drive can sometimes be a bit too subtle, predictable, and the characters don't really make the connection. But I think the style, the action and the mis-en-scene make Drive absolutely worth seeing.  

The Hunger Games

The main issue with books that are turned into films, are that more often than not the films struggle to stand alone, without relying on the audience having some prior knowledge of the story elements. The Hunger Games is no different. I imagine the books were such cash cows that the producers of the film did not want to mess with the formula. For example, when the main girl, Catness or whatever her silly name is, is running around looking for her blonde muscle boy, she just picks up on a spot of blood and finds him dressed up as a rock and lying on the ground in a river bed. Maybe there was some inner monologue in the book that explains how she found her little blonde muscle boy in this giant state forest, why the fuck he had taken the time to paint himself as a rock rather than just hiding behind one, where he had gotten the paint, etc. No explanation in the film, just shut up and watch them kiss, woo-hoo porn for tweens.

Then there is the scene where the little nigglet girl dies. She's in the film for about two minutes before she gets topped, but then the scene with Catness crying and arranging flowers around her goes for about ten minutes. Why was I supposed to give so many fucks about this character who had about two lines of mediocre dialogue before she stupidly gets killed? Just because she's a child? Because of her big brown eyes? The whole scene was really hokey, even for a film aimed at teens.

The actress who plays Catness has usurped Kristen Stewart as the queen of numb faced bitches who seem to have a phobia of showing emotions other than "I'm a serious girl, take me serious, but also a little bit sad." I actually don't have a huge problem with these actresses as role models, I'd rather teenage girls sit in the corner with a stern face than all that other crap they get up to, cyber bullying and shooting bath salts or whatever those dang kids are doing these days.

The film had its good sides. The suspense worked, the sets and costumes were top notch, many other boxes were ticked that a movie with this kind of budget should be ticking. Clearly, I am not the target demographic for this film, but still. The whole thing felt rushed and relied way too much on the audience having read the book.

Tricky Business - a review of the ad, not the show.

Dear Channel 9,

Wow! This show looks amazingly shit. You have really outdone yourselves!

Muster up all your imaginative powers and think of a modern, successful show. Just for example, I'll go with Breaking Bad. The catch is a cancer ridden high school teacher starts cooking meth to pay his hospital bills. Awesome right?

What exactly is the catch of this 'Tricky Business' series? A 'disfunctional' family? Shit.
A couple that break up a lot? A daughter that wants attention? This is 2012 you fuckheads, these 'catches' are not even close to being interesting. How old are you writers, ninety?

ALSO the ambiguous name 'Tricky Business' isn't fooling anyone (well its probably fooling most people but fuck you anyway). You come up with these shitty non-specific names, because you know you have made a terrible show and by using a non specific name (as opposed to the name of a character, or family, or something that would make the show look retarded-even for Australian standards- if they changed it completely - like The Simpsons not having the Simpsons in it anymore) you can kill off all your terrible characters and themes when the audience starts telling you how shit you are or an aboriginal gets offended.

 Like all great essays (hah) I shall finish in a quote, from the late and great Bill Hicks.

Yes replace marketing/advertising dicks with 'creators of 'Tricky Business'' and you get the message. Because when it comes down to it, you are just marketing scumbags, not writers/directors/artists/mimes. You have made another polluting, lowest common denominator product that you will chop and change and huck to the dumbest bidder. Eat a massive dick.