Last week I did something I'd never done before, indeed something I never thought I would. Sure, I'm now of advancing years and yes, if you live long enough the chances are that the day will come that even the most implausible predictions of the future - personal jetpacks, meals in pill form, robotic companions, Souths to win another game this year - may be realised. Last week, another vision of the future came true which only five years ago would have seemed as likely as that epileptic slaphead greenie from the Oils becoming Federal Minister for the Environment.
Last week, for the first time in the history of the universe, I paid more than $2 a litre for petrol.
The price of 91-octane unleaded hit 200.9 New Zealand cents per litre on the afternoon of Thursday, May 22nd. To be fair, if you were on a BP forecourt, it happened the day before, because BP New Zealand are cunts like that; if anyone's putting their prices up first, it's them. I should point out that fuel prices in NZ are broadly set by the distributor rather than the individual franchisee who runs or owns the petrol station, and prices are pretty much the same nationwide, apart from out in the stickiest of the sticky sticks like out on the West Coast and other places in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere that you didn't really want to go anyway. So rather than traipsing around the city trying to find the cheapest fuel (usually wasting more than you save in the process), you know to refuel as soon as BP starts tacking three or four cents onto their advertised prices. In fact it usually makes the nightly news when it happens (yes, TV news here is that yokel - sometimes it's so yokel I start getting flashbacks to Prime Local News and half expect Prime Possum to turn up. Prime Possum, sitting in a tree... Prime Possum, just molested me... Prime Possum loves every boy and girl, so... Ahem.) Anyway it's hard to miss.
So as of 6pm on Thursday every petrol station in Dunedin was charging 200.9 cpl. Other than the independents down the street from my house who were still charging 196.9 because they hadn't figured out a way to make their dodgy old sign read a '2' in front yet. And they were shut anyway. Despite this, there was seemingly no sign of England-style panic buying of fuel, a practice so astonishingly fucktardian that no words of mine can approach a description - best left to the great Sniff Petrol to do justice where justice must be seen to be done. As for me, I wasn't on a BP forecourt, because they, as observed, are cunts. I was on a Caltex forecourt, because they're obliging (read slutty) enough to accept supermarket fuel discount vouchers from anyone who waves them under their nose. Which is where you go 'Hang on, if he's paying with a discount voucher he's paying less than two bucks a litre'. Or you go 'Fuck me this is tedious, he's lost the plot, I wonder whether they still have porn on the internet, better check.' Well, no. Even with the 4c/L off I was still paying 201.9 because I was in the Astra which predominantly gets treated to 95-octane premium, being a clever little Euro car with an ECU which can figure out when it's running on higher quality fuel and advance the ignition timing etc to suit, such that you end up with fuel economy gains which usually outpoint the extra five cents a litre you have to shell for. A top fuel efficiency tip: it's worth finding this out (i.e. whether your car will turn out better economy and/or performance on the better juice) as the more expensive fuel gets, the smaller the jump to premium becomes, as a percentage of the overall spend. (Actually our toppest fuel efficiency tip is: stop driving like a fucking arsehole. This is why Toyota Camrys get such good fuel economy. They're no more economical than any other medium car but they're driven exclusively by bowls ladies and others on the precipitous verge of death and as such are no great friend of the OPEC cartel.)
Like in most countries, there's been the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth ref. fuel hitting the latest in a series of psychological tipping points - do you start leaving the car at home at $2 a litre? $2.50? - but at least it gives NZ something to giggle about when the Strayans are internally haemorrhaging over $1.50/L petroleum extract, and (Apparently He's A) Doctor Brendan Nelson is straightfacedly proposing binning an infinitesimal fraction of the federal fuel excise in order to keep petrol affordable for at least another 15 minutes before OPEC cranks the handle again, or until he gets the arse as Leader of the Leftovers, whichever comes first.
The most interesting thing about this is the bipolar effect that exponential fuel prices are having on the Australian and NZ new vehicle market. As one might expect, sales of large family sedans - Commodores, Falcons et al - are down, and sales of Corolla-class hatchbacks are up. Indeed Commodore's 15 year market leadership is beginning to come under threat from the Corolla, basically a piece of whitegoods with a steering wheel, which indeed proves that the majority of the vehicle buying public are as discerning and intelligent as the fucktards who watch Big Brother (and may indeed be the same people.) Actually that's slightly left of the truth because the real figures on car sales get obscured by the manufacturers - the overall figures include sales to governments and fleets, which obviously don't necessarily indicate whether a particular model is desperately desired by the people who purchase or drive said vehicle, other than it being cheap enough to keep the departmental beancounters happy that week. The best-selling car in Australian on the basis of private sales only - i.e. members of the public putting their own hard-earned onto the dealer's table - is, in fact, the Mazda 3. Not that Mazda are allowed to advertise it.
Anyway, the interesting thing (I promise it's at least a bit interesting) is not the predictable response from dullards and personality-bypass recipients to dive headlong into an ugly beige econobox with a Toyota badge where the Westinghouse sticker should be. It's the response of more than one in five customers who buy a Commodore or luxury derivative thereof, who tick the box marked 'Massive great fuel-sucking carbon-plume-emitting six litre V8' on the engine options list. Holden have never sold as many V8s in their entire sixty-year history as they are doing right now. The sales proportions for V8 Falcons are similarly as warped. Depending on your viewpoint it's either a supremely selfish act of heinous environmental and social vandalism... or a fucking good idea to get in now before the getting stops being anywhere near as gettable. Aforesaid viewpoint depending how punishing you are and whether anyone talks to you at parties, of course.
This, regardless of what ludicrous heights petrol prices hit, proves that performance and quality of driving experience won't necessarily be casualties of OPEC's profiteering at the expense of the petrol motor car. Because people won't sacrifice these things - or at least 20% of Commodore and Falcon buyers won't anyway - and probably won't have to. Turbodiesels and petrol-electric hybrids might have the reputation they do from dull shitboxes like the Toyota Prius, but the fastest car Toyota's luxury brand Lexus makes is the hybrid GS350h, which goes like several shades of shit off a shovel and uses less fuel than a Camry. And as for diesels, other than the M5, the fastest 5-series in BMW's range is their top-end turbodiesel - again with minimal carbon footprint, again with hatchback-scaring economy, and again with the poo-off-garden-implement performance reputation. Holden will have turbodiesel and/or hybrid Commodores available inside two years, Ford probably not far behind. And to be honest, the fuel economy figures which the existing Falcodores are capable of are quite astonishing for the size of the car (as are the performance figures - 15 years ago a 0-100 km/h time of seven seconds was minor-league-supercar territory, now you can do the same thing in a base model Falcon).
So the spike in fuel prices won't kill off performance cars, and in all likelihood probably won't kill off the big, breezy Strayan family car either, despite the Hanrahan-esque doom-harbingering of various motoring 'analysts'. During the fuel shortages and price spikes of the '70s and '80s similar downturns in large car sales were seen, but the market recovered (despite the same dorks blathering on), and for one good reason: Falcodores make a fucking lot of sense for Australia, where outside the Relatively Large Smoke, what meagre outposts of civilisation prevail are usually separated by a hundred or more kays of straight single carriageway with lots of B-doubles to navigate around in the interim. Drive Sydney-Brisbane, or any subset of the Pacific Highway therein, in a current Falcon or Commodore (or 380, or Aurion, or whichever family six or eight the Avis people have around the shop), then drive back in one of those beige econoboxes. And be sure to tell me which fucks you off the most and/or earliest - the leg cramps and lower back spasms from being contorted into a seat designed for bonsai Japanese housewives, or the face-melting frustration at not being able to pass anything other than road-food flatulence when challenged with anything more than a minor incline.
Still, when you live on a hill in the Antarctic (or on the Riviera of the Antarctic), a four-wheel-drive Subaru makes a lot of sense too. Even if around town it uses almost as much fuel as one of those massive great fuel-sucking carbon-plume-emitting six litre V8 Commodores. (And who needs 4wd when you can just melt the morning frost with judicious use of the loud pedal?)
The Doctor is OUT (to refuel the Impreza, again.)
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Monday, May 26, 2008
Solo man
Concept-rich but time-poor at the moment; heaps of stuff in here which You Need To Know About but given this is Single Parent Week in our household, Mystic Meg having nicked off to northern California for a conference/junket/week of doing bugger all, time is of the essence (probably vanilla.) No excuses however for the several slack weeks preceding Solo Man Week (cue badly moustachioed sweaty bogan in safari suit pouring lemon squash down half his face).
Rather than type at you ref any of the half-chewed ideas already bouncing round the temporal lobes, instead I'm just going to rip off appealing subject matter from the blogs from Fairfax's northern outpost, the online-only Brisbane Times. Even limited to web it's still the best paper in Brisbane, with only Murdoch's execrable Courier-Mail for comparison. Partly because they employ the genuinely tops John Birmingham - he of the felafel-wielding flatmate - to write stuff for them. Admittedly they also have Rupert 'Green and Gold Malaria' McCall on their books, who's an absolute twunt, but you gots to give the banjos something to read if you're serious about the Quoinslaaand market.
Anyway JB's weekend The Geek blog (one of two he writes for BT) hit upon the topic of songs which would make interesting film fodder, on the back of 'revelations' from mentally challenged arsewit Quentin Tarantino that he often designed scenes from the music forwards, rather than drafting the screenplay and adapting tunesmithery to match. Swathes of suggestions for screen treatments were put forward, from the fairly predictable Khe Sahn and I Was Only 19, Nick Cave's Murder Ballads album, various anecdotal Paul Kelly tracks and Tenacious D's Tribute (seeing as though it was actually made into a film - a fairly shit one but a film nonetheless) to some slightly left-of-centre suggestions that probably made complete sense when as stoned as the munters who proposed them. For my ten cents:
- As previously mentioned here, I reckon the film version of Iron Man would have been better had it been based on the Black Sabbath song rather than the Marvel comic, though Hollywood always leave plenty of wiggle room for sequels.
- For a gritty, dishevelled, warts-and-all look at inner-city life, love, booze and venereal disease may I propose the combined works of Frenzal Rhomb of Newtown. For instance, Dugadugabowbow (subtitled 'I think you're really nice but I don't want to fuck you') for the ultimate anti-rom-com.
- Presumably the 'Walking With Dinosaurs' BBC Natural History people, if not the makers of Jurassic Park, could do something with I Know Why Dinosaurs Became Extinct (It's Because They Learned How To Suck Their Own Cocks).
- And All Your Friends (Think You're A Fuckhead) just aches to be turned into the John Howard story. Or possibly a short film about Brendan Nelson's time as opposition leader. Looks like being a very short film.
- Last of the Frenzal suggestions, the one-minute-14 rock opera Russell Crowe's Band Is A Fucking Pile Of Shit: change 'band' to 'team' and make it the story of the Rabbitohs' 2008 season. Have Matty Johns play Rusty, and have the Lower Clarence Magpies under-15s play the Rabbitohs. My money would be on Lower to win on current form.
- Pretty much any song by the Donnas would be ideal, provided you're looking for a script best suited to something filmed in Fyshwick (Take Me To The Backseat, 40 Boys In 40 Nights, It's So Hard, Love You Till It Hurts etc etc etc). They're not exactly the sort of girls one would take home to meet Mother. Unless Mother is Jenna Jameson.
- Frank Zappa's Titties 'N' Beer. 'Nuff said.
Meanwhile BT's sports writer Phil Lutton must have been short of ideas this week (cue pot-kettle comparisons) for his Magic Spray column when he hit upon the well-mined seam of gold that is Stupid Sporting Team Names. The University of Arkansas Boll Weevils were singled out for a guernsey, while the Western Quokka-Related Farce got a spray and the NZ badminton Black Cocks just got giggled at. It's well worth a read.
My take on this is that if you want to find the lamest, most insipid squad names, look for newly-established or relaunched competitions. The Queensland Roar in the A-League is a no-brainer here - naming your team after a noise (what English teachers and dullards call onomatopoeia) brings you dangerously close to having teams called AFC Screech, Boing United, FC Burp or Deportivo Fart (interestingly there is actually a Deportivo Wanka, for whom Cristiano Ronaldo will presumably one day turn out.) And even after ten years and two premierships, the Melbourne Storm is still the fucking dumbest name for a (male) sporting team in the history of land-based mammals. Particularly in a comp like the NRL, which retains some great team names echoing right back to the origins of rugby league in the streets of Sydney, and speak to the origins and the philosophies which underpin the fabric of the clubs themselves - like the South Sydney Rabbitohs, who despite years of struggle have kept faith with the name and traditions with which the club began. Other, obviously, than the tradition of actually winning shit. The Cronulla Sharks and Parramatta Eels make reference to the sealife native to each area, while foundation club the Roosters also take their name from a commonly-found species of the eastern suburbs: complete and utter cocks.
In terms of shit team names, the new Indian Premier League almost deserves a column on its own. Actually it's not that they're shit, it's that they're desperately derivative of one another. Every second team has a lion on their badge and it seems IPL policy for at least half the sides to have some sort of royal connotation to their name - the Rajastan Royals, the Bangalore Royal Challengers, the Punjab Kings XI, the Chennai Super Kings etc. Although to be fair the Royal Challengers are named after a line of spirits marketed by that bloke from Kingfisher, while the Super Kings are named, quite brilliantly, after a brand of cement. FACT. For their part, the Kolkata Knight Riders are named after David Hasselhoff, and as such are fucking rubbish.
It's pretty obvious though that the worst names however usually end up stuck onto girls' teams. - the usual macho-bullshit team names like Titans, Stormers, Bombers, Thugs, Mercenaries, Arsekickers or Baby Eaters don't really sit that well on a womens' sporting franchise sponsored by a tampon manufacturer so you end up with toothless, pissweak, pox-flavoured rubbish like the American WNBA's Shock, Sparks and Dream (not an Olympics-related TV show with Roy and HG, nor a chick-friendly block of white chocolate.) Or, closer to home, the West Coast Fever of the new trans-tasman netball comp, which also gives us the Firebirds/Thunderbirds (anyone know the difference? Anyone care?) or what has to be the worst name ever to be given to an international sporting franchise.... ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Canterbury Tactix.
Anyone who can explain who or what the fuck is a Canterbury Tactix by the close of business wins a free Thing to the value of Stuff.
The Doctor is OUT.
Rather than type at you ref any of the half-chewed ideas already bouncing round the temporal lobes, instead I'm just going to rip off appealing subject matter from the blogs from Fairfax's northern outpost, the online-only Brisbane Times. Even limited to web it's still the best paper in Brisbane, with only Murdoch's execrable Courier-Mail for comparison. Partly because they employ the genuinely tops John Birmingham - he of the felafel-wielding flatmate - to write stuff for them. Admittedly they also have Rupert 'Green and Gold Malaria' McCall on their books, who's an absolute twunt, but you gots to give the banjos something to read if you're serious about the Quoinslaaand market.
Anyway JB's weekend The Geek blog (one of two he writes for BT) hit upon the topic of songs which would make interesting film fodder, on the back of 'revelations' from mentally challenged arsewit Quentin Tarantino that he often designed scenes from the music forwards, rather than drafting the screenplay and adapting tunesmithery to match. Swathes of suggestions for screen treatments were put forward, from the fairly predictable Khe Sahn and I Was Only 19, Nick Cave's Murder Ballads album, various anecdotal Paul Kelly tracks and Tenacious D's Tribute (seeing as though it was actually made into a film - a fairly shit one but a film nonetheless) to some slightly left-of-centre suggestions that probably made complete sense when as stoned as the munters who proposed them. For my ten cents:
- As previously mentioned here, I reckon the film version of Iron Man would have been better had it been based on the Black Sabbath song rather than the Marvel comic, though Hollywood always leave plenty of wiggle room for sequels.
- For a gritty, dishevelled, warts-and-all look at inner-city life, love, booze and venereal disease may I propose the combined works of Frenzal Rhomb of Newtown. For instance, Dugadugabowbow (subtitled 'I think you're really nice but I don't want to fuck you') for the ultimate anti-rom-com.
- Presumably the 'Walking With Dinosaurs' BBC Natural History people, if not the makers of Jurassic Park, could do something with I Know Why Dinosaurs Became Extinct (It's Because They Learned How To Suck Their Own Cocks).
- And All Your Friends (Think You're A Fuckhead) just aches to be turned into the John Howard story. Or possibly a short film about Brendan Nelson's time as opposition leader. Looks like being a very short film.
- Last of the Frenzal suggestions, the one-minute-14 rock opera Russell Crowe's Band Is A Fucking Pile Of Shit: change 'band' to 'team' and make it the story of the Rabbitohs' 2008 season. Have Matty Johns play Rusty, and have the Lower Clarence Magpies under-15s play the Rabbitohs. My money would be on Lower to win on current form.
- Pretty much any song by the Donnas would be ideal, provided you're looking for a script best suited to something filmed in Fyshwick (Take Me To The Backseat, 40 Boys In 40 Nights, It's So Hard, Love You Till It Hurts etc etc etc). They're not exactly the sort of girls one would take home to meet Mother. Unless Mother is Jenna Jameson.
- Frank Zappa's Titties 'N' Beer. 'Nuff said.
Meanwhile BT's sports writer Phil Lutton must have been short of ideas this week (cue pot-kettle comparisons) for his Magic Spray column when he hit upon the well-mined seam of gold that is Stupid Sporting Team Names. The University of Arkansas Boll Weevils were singled out for a guernsey, while the Western Quokka-Related Farce got a spray and the NZ badminton Black Cocks just got giggled at. It's well worth a read.
My take on this is that if you want to find the lamest, most insipid squad names, look for newly-established or relaunched competitions. The Queensland Roar in the A-League is a no-brainer here - naming your team after a noise (what English teachers and dullards call onomatopoeia) brings you dangerously close to having teams called AFC Screech, Boing United, FC Burp or Deportivo Fart (interestingly there is actually a Deportivo Wanka, for whom Cristiano Ronaldo will presumably one day turn out.) And even after ten years and two premierships, the Melbourne Storm is still the fucking dumbest name for a (male) sporting team in the history of land-based mammals. Particularly in a comp like the NRL, which retains some great team names echoing right back to the origins of rugby league in the streets of Sydney, and speak to the origins and the philosophies which underpin the fabric of the clubs themselves - like the South Sydney Rabbitohs, who despite years of struggle have kept faith with the name and traditions with which the club began. Other, obviously, than the tradition of actually winning shit. The Cronulla Sharks and Parramatta Eels make reference to the sealife native to each area, while foundation club the Roosters also take their name from a commonly-found species of the eastern suburbs: complete and utter cocks.
In terms of shit team names, the new Indian Premier League almost deserves a column on its own. Actually it's not that they're shit, it's that they're desperately derivative of one another. Every second team has a lion on their badge and it seems IPL policy for at least half the sides to have some sort of royal connotation to their name - the Rajastan Royals, the Bangalore Royal Challengers, the Punjab Kings XI, the Chennai Super Kings etc. Although to be fair the Royal Challengers are named after a line of spirits marketed by that bloke from Kingfisher, while the Super Kings are named, quite brilliantly, after a brand of cement. FACT. For their part, the Kolkata Knight Riders are named after David Hasselhoff, and as such are fucking rubbish.
It's pretty obvious though that the worst names however usually end up stuck onto girls' teams. - the usual macho-bullshit team names like Titans, Stormers, Bombers, Thugs, Mercenaries, Arsekickers or Baby Eaters don't really sit that well on a womens' sporting franchise sponsored by a tampon manufacturer so you end up with toothless, pissweak, pox-flavoured rubbish like the American WNBA's Shock, Sparks and Dream (not an Olympics-related TV show with Roy and HG, nor a chick-friendly block of white chocolate.) Or, closer to home, the West Coast Fever of the new trans-tasman netball comp, which also gives us the Firebirds/Thunderbirds (anyone know the difference? Anyone care?) or what has to be the worst name ever to be given to an international sporting franchise.... ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Canterbury Tactix.
Anyone who can explain who or what the fuck is a Canterbury Tactix by the close of business wins a free Thing to the value of Stuff.
The Doctor is OUT.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Rust never sleeps
Has he lost his mind?
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all,
Or if he moves will he fall?
Is he alive or dead?
Has he thoughts within his head?
- Black Sabbath, Iron Man
S'awreet, he's just pissed.
- Mike Myers, So I Married An Axe Murderer
Profound. Which brings us to the latest bowel-shaking dork-pocalypse to strike the nerdosphere, the release of Iron Man, a fillum based not on the thoroughly epic (if thoroughly stupid) Sabbath tune but some Marvel comic or other, and starring professional drugs enthusiast Robert Downey Jr (and had he not laid off the gear he'd have been looking more and more Downey - as in syndrome - by the day) as a Bruce Wayne esque billionaire with a serious complex of the military-industrial type. He makes weapons, nasty pasties kidnap him, he busts out his tinpot arse-kicking skills, shit proceeds to occur, good carries the day, sequels are foreshadowed, the end, mate just park the Armaguard trucks around the back of the cinema to collect the takings thanks Stavros. And so it turned out, save for significant trouser-darkening on behalf of studio officials when it turned out that someone in Nerd Demographic Scheduling had royally fucked up re picking an unencumbered opening weekend: their blessed target audience were going to be forced to choose between the simultaneous launch of Iron Man and that of Grand Theft Auto IV: The Revenge Beyond Thunderdome Of The Citizens On Patrol (or something. I stopped paying attention after Lotus Turbo Challenge II.) However, all was good, at least some of the GTAIV audience found time to decouple from their games consoles, crawl out of their parents' basements and report dutifully to their local megamulticlusterfuckoplex to spent their hard-earned. Or their hard-allowanced as the case may have been.
Ah, it's easy to be cynical. Particularly when you're a cunt. By all accounts Iron Man is a decent movie, albeit one you could have a fairly decent stab at scripting on the back of a damp coaster down at the Frog and Dirigible. I say 'by all accounts' as I probably won't be going to see aforesaid celluloid joy in the ultra-mega-megaplex. Excuses: busy work life, busier home life, young bub, no time. Actual reason: can't be arsed. I stopped going to movies years ago, make it to maybe one a year, two with a prevailing wind and favourable current. And as for Iron Man, I already know everything I need to know about it, specifically that the Sabbath version of the song doesn't get used in the movie (largely because in the song Iron Man goes postal and starts handing out the smackdowns because everyone's left him to rust having saved the world etc.) But, so long as that monster-truck riff got dusted off to scare the kiddies with, all is right with the world.
Over the years I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why it is that I don't like movies. Being an amateur psychologist I've come up with theories which base my lack of interest in film in basal causation ranging from frustration with unimaginative, derivative plot development to deep-seated childhood fear from being scared arse-biting-witless by the fucking ignormous rock monster from the Never Ending Story movie. (And why was their a Never Ending Story II anyway? What a lot of wank.) But a few years ago I accepted the real reason - I have an attention span shorter than Tom Cruise's dodger and this, coupled with the recent advent of fucking ridiculously overlong running times, means I... hey, look, a squirrel. Case in point the last of the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, which ran for the best part of three hours despite being the last in a three film series - exactly how many fucking hours do Hollywood screenwriters need to tell a story these days? And it's not like spinning the fucker out to three hours, or even three entire films (thanks v. much Wankowski Bros.) is a new idea. Titanic: three hours to sink the fucking thing? The English Patient: three hours of waiting for something to happen, any-fucking-thing would do, only to find out that fucking nothing was every going to?
Truth is though I'm rarely not frustrated by anything I see. Last thing I saw in the cinema would have been Casino Royale - which was actually pretty good, then again it didn't have much to compete with given Die Another Day was the worst Bond film ever, made by a cross-dressing sheep shagger who thought what Bond really needed was to be air-dropped into a XXX sequel by way of Once Were Warriors. (In case you're wondering, that XXX link IS work-safe... most of the ones which Google found weren't, surprisingly enough.) But the way Casino Royale's director (another Kiwi, Martin Campbell who also helmed Goldeneye, the best of the recent Bonds - and not just because it spawned a kick-arse Nintendo 64 FPS) managed to integrate the story with the original Ian Fleming book, despite the latter being older and less relevant than Fred Nile, was impressive. As was Eva fuckin' Green, man. Jaysus. Feck, arse, girls.
Another potentially dicey book-fillum conversion was pulled off by the team who (finally) brought The Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy to the big screen. Granted, it was probably a lot easier once Douglas Adams had dropped off the twig given how many times he'd pulled veto over film versions of his book which he wasn't liking the looks of, but the balance of opinion seems to run that Adams would have approved of the way his rambling, discursive tale was Hollywooded into the structure of a coherent film. Which ran for just over 90 minutes, thanks very much. If you can't tell your story in an hour and a half, your story is a load of cock. FACT.
Having Box Office on pay TV means not being arsed to go to the cinema doesn't mean you can entirely avoid crap new-release fillums. Such as, in the past year or so, Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby (engagingly stupid) and Tenacious D In The Pick Of Destiny (fairly dismal). But funnily enough, the best film I've seen in the last year or so has been... Kenny on terrestrial free-to-air. For a film about a man who sells portaloos, it was definitely nowhere near as shithouse as it could have been.
Jaysus (again). That's a gots-to-go line. The Doctor is OUT.
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all,
Or if he moves will he fall?
Is he alive or dead?
Has he thoughts within his head?
- Black Sabbath, Iron Man
S'awreet, he's just pissed.
- Mike Myers, So I Married An Axe Murderer
Profound. Which brings us to the latest bowel-shaking dork-pocalypse to strike the nerdosphere, the release of Iron Man, a fillum based not on the thoroughly epic (if thoroughly stupid) Sabbath tune but some Marvel comic or other, and starring professional drugs enthusiast Robert Downey Jr (and had he not laid off the gear he'd have been looking more and more Downey - as in syndrome - by the day) as a Bruce Wayne esque billionaire with a serious complex of the military-industrial type. He makes weapons, nasty pasties kidnap him, he busts out his tinpot arse-kicking skills, shit proceeds to occur, good carries the day, sequels are foreshadowed, the end, mate just park the Armaguard trucks around the back of the cinema to collect the takings thanks Stavros. And so it turned out, save for significant trouser-darkening on behalf of studio officials when it turned out that someone in Nerd Demographic Scheduling had royally fucked up re picking an unencumbered opening weekend: their blessed target audience were going to be forced to choose between the simultaneous launch of Iron Man and that of Grand Theft Auto IV: The Revenge Beyond Thunderdome Of The Citizens On Patrol (or something. I stopped paying attention after Lotus Turbo Challenge II.) However, all was good, at least some of the GTAIV audience found time to decouple from their games consoles, crawl out of their parents' basements and report dutifully to their local megamulticlusterfuckoplex to spent their hard-earned. Or their hard-allowanced as the case may have been.
Ah, it's easy to be cynical. Particularly when you're a cunt. By all accounts Iron Man is a decent movie, albeit one you could have a fairly decent stab at scripting on the back of a damp coaster down at the Frog and Dirigible. I say 'by all accounts' as I probably won't be going to see aforesaid celluloid joy in the ultra-mega-megaplex. Excuses: busy work life, busier home life, young bub, no time. Actual reason: can't be arsed. I stopped going to movies years ago, make it to maybe one a year, two with a prevailing wind and favourable current. And as for Iron Man, I already know everything I need to know about it, specifically that the Sabbath version of the song doesn't get used in the movie (largely because in the song Iron Man goes postal and starts handing out the smackdowns because everyone's left him to rust having saved the world etc.) But, so long as that monster-truck riff got dusted off to scare the kiddies with, all is right with the world.
Over the years I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why it is that I don't like movies. Being an amateur psychologist I've come up with theories which base my lack of interest in film in basal causation ranging from frustration with unimaginative, derivative plot development to deep-seated childhood fear from being scared arse-biting-witless by the fucking ignormous rock monster from the Never Ending Story movie. (And why was their a Never Ending Story II anyway? What a lot of wank.) But a few years ago I accepted the real reason - I have an attention span shorter than Tom Cruise's dodger and this, coupled with the recent advent of fucking ridiculously overlong running times, means I... hey, look, a squirrel. Case in point the last of the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, which ran for the best part of three hours despite being the last in a three film series - exactly how many fucking hours do Hollywood screenwriters need to tell a story these days? And it's not like spinning the fucker out to three hours, or even three entire films (thanks v. much Wankowski Bros.) is a new idea. Titanic: three hours to sink the fucking thing? The English Patient: three hours of waiting for something to happen, any-fucking-thing would do, only to find out that fucking nothing was every going to?
Truth is though I'm rarely not frustrated by anything I see. Last thing I saw in the cinema would have been Casino Royale - which was actually pretty good, then again it didn't have much to compete with given Die Another Day was the worst Bond film ever, made by a cross-dressing sheep shagger who thought what Bond really needed was to be air-dropped into a XXX sequel by way of Once Were Warriors. (In case you're wondering, that XXX link IS work-safe... most of the ones which Google found weren't, surprisingly enough.) But the way Casino Royale's director (another Kiwi, Martin Campbell who also helmed Goldeneye, the best of the recent Bonds - and not just because it spawned a kick-arse Nintendo 64 FPS) managed to integrate the story with the original Ian Fleming book, despite the latter being older and less relevant than Fred Nile, was impressive. As was Eva fuckin' Green, man. Jaysus. Feck, arse, girls.
Another potentially dicey book-fillum conversion was pulled off by the team who (finally) brought The Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy to the big screen. Granted, it was probably a lot easier once Douglas Adams had dropped off the twig given how many times he'd pulled veto over film versions of his book which he wasn't liking the looks of, but the balance of opinion seems to run that Adams would have approved of the way his rambling, discursive tale was Hollywooded into the structure of a coherent film. Which ran for just over 90 minutes, thanks very much. If you can't tell your story in an hour and a half, your story is a load of cock. FACT.
Having Box Office on pay TV means not being arsed to go to the cinema doesn't mean you can entirely avoid crap new-release fillums. Such as, in the past year or so, Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby (engagingly stupid) and Tenacious D In The Pick Of Destiny (fairly dismal). But funnily enough, the best film I've seen in the last year or so has been... Kenny on terrestrial free-to-air. For a film about a man who sells portaloos, it was definitely nowhere near as shithouse as it could have been.
Jaysus (again). That's a gots-to-go line. The Doctor is OUT.
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