Movie Night.

Today marks the launch of the acclaimed violence and social fabric dissolution simulator, GTA IV. I would dearly love to report that I was sat playing said lawyer-baiting abomination, but I am not. I placed an order for it with a certain well-known online retailer, one I happen to fucking work for, and they have failed to deliver it to me on time. I have been to every shop that might possibly sell it in this drab little town, and they have all run out. I am, in short, fairly savagely put out.

I must find another way to occupy my time. So, as promised, it's movie night. Tonight's film will be The Golden Compass, something that I've studiously avoided thus far. The combination of crippling disappointment, a love for the source material, a genuine hatred of the Americanisation of the title and cheap, cheap booze leaves me singularly unqualified to provide an objective review.

Shall we begin?

0.30s: Staggeringly crude exposition.

This continues for some time.

8.14: They seem to have decided to exaggerate the role of the Church in the story, by bringing in a pantomime villain character.

51.10: This is just toss. Pure, unadulterated shit. The combination of depression and boredom means that I can't derive even an iota of twisted pleasure from it.

104.00: Vomitous pile of inadequacy.

1.13: She can't act.

1.32: Horrible, sanitised, unfinished, poorly-written weasel squeezings.

1.34: Artless, graceless, witless.

1.40: Over.

Genuinely horrible, and not in the least bit funny. Sorry about that. I'll try some Boll next time.

Things It Is Not My Turn To Do.

• Hose down the prisoner.


• Check for poison.


• Regulate the telecoms industry.


• Evacuate the area.


• Quell insurection.


• Defrost the squid.


• Activate the device.

Bothersome.

A warning. Death Proof is a staggeringly dull movie. Quentin Tarantino has lost the plot - his fatal error seems to be in thinking that other people find his eccentricities as inherently charming as he himself does. Net result: 2 1/2 hours of in-jokes and references to his earlier movies. Everything else hangs from those precarious hooks.

It's also maddeningly slow. Three-quarters of an hour pass before anything happens. Then another set of protagonists are introduced, and the whole process repeats itself. It was boring the first time. Second time around, it just feels maddeningly self-indulgent.

I don't mind Tarantino's quest to prove himself the biggest film nerd out there. I will even defend the 'Superman' monologue in Kill Bill. I don't mind the patchwork of styles in his movies, I don't mind that every character will inevitably speak in the same fucking style. I can even let the foot thing slide. In short, what bothers most people about him doesn't really bother me. Death Proof is just really, really tedious.

It's Up To You.

Given what some of you folk have said, my savaging of shitty movies brings some light to your drab lives. So. Then. Suggestions.

For the full-on Wicker Man experience on another movie, make your suggestions below. I will give consideration to them all.

Reasons To Be Cheerful.

Things that are currently leading to a bouyant mood:

• William The Fucking Bull will be directing the Hobbit.


• This song. It's the happiest miserable song ever.


• The song 'Voodoo' by Spiral Beach. There's no good version online, as apparently some people still cling to such outmoded concepts as 'copyright'. Trust me though, it's brilliant. There's a crappy live recording on Youtube if you absolutely must.


• This song.

Oh, and this image:



Yes. Geeking the fuck out now. I apologise for the tone, I know it'll have come as a shock to most. I promise the next post will be a particularly bilious spillage.

The Devil Valley Celt.

It would be remiss of me not to, at the very least, provide a link to this wonderful story. I do hate to be remiss.

The worst thing about this story is that it's about a guy attacking a bunch of Welshmen with a length of metal tubing. I can't help but feel that this is my subconcious, made flesh.

Like The Nuremburg Trials, But For Shit Movies.

Brett Ratner. Eddie Murphy. Same place, same time.

Fetch my grenades!

In Any Colour You Want.

There has been precious little zombie-orientated news here of late, and I can only apologise. Profusely.

I watched Black Sheep, and it's essentially everything you could expect from a movie about zombie sheep (and were-sheep), even if it's perhaps not everything you might want. It's funny, but not Braindead funny. It's clever, but not Braindead clever. It's gory, and I'm sure you get the idea, bright buttons that you are.

It was always set up as a spriritual succesor to Peter Jackson's gore epics, not necessarily the brightest move. Because, while it is a pretty good film all told, they seem to have been shooting for a 15 (or whatever the backwater equivalent is) and are just not prepared to invest in the sheer volume of high-velocity innards required to satisfy the sort of people that are the habitual audience of such films. Add to this some fairly unlikable characters, and a fundamental failure to grasp the fact that, just for two minutes of act three, your everyman / underdog hero must morph into Arnie circa The Running Man, and you have inevitable dissapointment.

Perhaps I just need to learn to switch off. Or start drinking like I used to.

A Quadradactyl in a Pentadactyl World.

I have royally fucked up the middle finger of my left hand. It is swollen and gross. If I look like I'm swearing at you, I assure you that this is not the case, merely a crude byproduct of swollen joints.

Unless I'm kissing said digit and screaming 'This is all for you!'.

Then you can assume I'm swearing.

Whale Oil Beef Hooked.

Seriously, fuck off.

Bravo.

I fucking told you. I am victorious, and full of tremendous powers.

The coronation must be due any day now.

Speaking of Half-Finished Tripe...

You might remember that a while ago I asked for the help of my loyal readership in navigating the choppy waters of the internet. And you might also remember not lifting a fucking finger to help me. So, I hope you're happy that I decided to use my newfound technologies to watch Torchwood.

BBC iPlayer is a hilarious thing. It's basically what everyone expected digital TV to be when it was first mooted, albeit in a viewable window the size of a small postcard. I do think that it's a genuinely brilliant thing, and so I feel a little disappointed in myself for only having used it for Torchwood. But then, as previously discussed, the blame lies squarely with you.

I originally abandoned watching the show a couple of episodes into the first series, and assumed that it would have maintained the same trajectory it had set out on. I fully expected, a full series on, that the folks of Torchwood 3 would be fighting (sexy) space crime using nothing but their genitalia. That was not the case, so chalk one up for pleasant surprise.

The episode I saw was called 'Out Of Gas' 'Fragments', and those of you that are vaguely culturally literate will already have gathered that it takes place as a series of flashbacks. In the midst of horrendous accident (and explosion set off by the malicious little cube things from Terrahawks), the history of how they all got together as the happy all-singing pansexual brigade of alien-fighting misanthropes. It is exactly the same structure as the aforementioned Firefly episode, but is written with less than a fraction of the elan.

At this point you might be thinking: "Torchwood? I've some puppies for you to kick if you need an easy target." But hold on. It (as is rapidly becoming standard in these rants) wasn't all that bad. Given that I genuinely was prepared for a show in which the most glamorous people in all Cardiff lined up to felate John Barrowman while disinterestedly waving a Luger with whichever hand they weren't using to cup, it was pretty good for the first twenty minutes. Cap'n Bigcoat's drunken ride through time with steely Victorian lesbians was genuinely entertaining. It all trailed off a bit after that though, until James Marsters appeared, playing a character called Peter Fanservice. He looked a bit like a pirate. But a holographic one. Which, by pirate standards, is pretty lame. Long story short - Torchwood is worse than most shows, but better than botulism. It has picked up somewhat.

As if to balance this unceasing generosity, we now come to The Simpsons Movie. I avoided this in cinemas, because I don't take disappointment in the cinema with anything resembling grace. My cries of anguish during Transformers gave birth to a new universe.

I finally picked it up, as it is now very cheap on DVD. This is because it is shit. It's shit of the highest order. There are no jokes per se, just a frantic rush to get a succesion of minor characters shoehorned in so they can have a tiny, unfunny character moment before they vanish again.

If anyone would like a copy, let me know. Otherwise I'm going to grind it up and sprinkle it on my cereal.

I'll be taking those puppies now.