ONLY 56 MORE SLEEPS TILL CHRISTMAS

And so it begins again. Actually, it began about half way through September. The run up to Christmas. I could remain true to type and baa-humbug my way through this post, but I'm going to surprise you all ('you all' of course being that one Austrailian kid who's computer is on the blink and has left him with this bog as his homepage) by saying that I love this time of year. Love it. Even with lots to do betwixt now and then, such as two holidays and oodles of days at work, the power of Christmas is a wonderful time. The shortening of the days, the lengthening of the nights (obviously) and the chill in the air. then we have the wonder of the German Christmas Market, with all it's mulled wine and preserved meats, far too many people crammed into a small area, but hey! it's Christmas so everyone's happy dispite the crush.

Whoops, gotta go, leaving this piece unfinished and with probably terrible prose, but my time has come to an end and there is drinking to be done...

3 THINGS THAT PISS ME OFF

Lets get one thing straight, right off the bat here. Lots of things piss me off. Granted, not as many as there used to, not since 'Simon's Philosophical Enlightening' (I may tell you of that someday, but then again, probably not) but still quite a few things. In fact, the number may well be growing once more with the onset of a new 'age decade'- hitting the 30 barrier commences the mind set of a grumpy old man and with it the feeling that you are right and everything else is too loud.

So, three things that piss me off. Why? Pretty much only because I'm sat at home on a wet and miserable day trying to kill the hours before trudging off to work. And the porn isn't working. Let's face it, why would I be sat here, typing inane paragraphs for you to, in turn, waste your time on if there was pornography to be a-viewing?

These aren't really the main things in life that piss me off, just a trio that I happened to get to thinking about yesterday while sat in work. There's none of the normal boring stuff I usually spout off about, such as organised religion or rap music, and in fact, two of these things more freak me out than piss me off. So already we can ascertain that the title is misleading and the content matter isn't terribly important. Oh boy. I really think one of two things should happen now. Either I should stop typing this drivel, or failing that, you should stop reading. If both of these fail, then I must set down the disclaimer:
"The author of this text does not accept any liability or responsibility should the passage be deemed woefully boring and not in the least bit funny."

Item the first:
Tails on people. Not so much a piss-me-off sort of item, but more something that really disturbs me, brought to the fore while watching the preview for James Cameron's new movie Avatar. Sure, it may be computer generated, and the fictional beings are actually alien life forms, not people, but the fact they are humanoid forms, walking around with tails on display is rather unsettling. Don't get me wrong, I love monkeys. Watching the cute little fellas, no matter what the species, is fun. But a different matter altogether if you put a man in a monkey suit. No sir, I can't be having that. Think of the kid from Jumanji, the one who turns into a monkey as a penalty for messing with the board. That section of a pretty harmless film is hard to watch. Because he has a tail.
Avatar, for all it's 'years in production' and 'moving boundaries of cinematic technology' is going to be an absolute nightmare to watch. People do not, should not have tails. It is wrong. So very very wrong.

Item the Second
Reproducing cartoons. I don't mean taking a cartoon character and making lots of copies of it, I mean a male character and a female character and cartoon kids being the end product. How sick must the cartoonist's mind be, imagining his creations with full functioning, anatomically present 'bits'? A recent example being the third Shrek installment where the two ogres start a family. Not only is that copulating cartoons, but it's obese, ugly cartoons having it off. Makes the skin crawl. And don't get me started on animated animals settling down to start a family, there is just way too much filth to comprehend!

Item the Last
A funny one this, as I've only just hit upon the fact that it irks me. Dream sequences in novels. Stay with me on this, let me explain. I'm a great lover of reading, nothing gets the cerebral juices sparking like a good book. But when you hit upon a great chapter, perhaps the pace picks up, maybe an important plot point comes close to being revealed, when all of a sudden the author chucks in a bloody dream passage. Very lazy and frequently filled with devices that have no bearing in the physical reality of the story. I don't remember my dreams. Dreams are not important for progression. They should not be used to, for example, show the lead character which way to turn or the next person that should be spoken with. It holds up the story and is a slack method for the author to try his hand at fantastical musings. Stop it.

Thought for the Day

I wish I was caught up in a robot war with Megan Fox.

TERMINATOR SALVATION (proper review)

"This was not the future my mother told me about..."

The groundwork had already been carefully prepared by Messrs Cameron and Schwarzenegger, the plot devices and story development penned masterfully. Even the blip of the not-so-great-but-still-enjoyable third installment didn't subtract from this rock steady franchise. We knew what the future held. It was going to be bleak but it was going to be an exciting, thrilling ride. Nothing could possible go wrong.

Except it did. It went very wrong. The first mistake was hiring a hack like the idiotically named 'McG' as director. Then running with a script that was a mess of ideas stolen from almost every other blockbuster in the last 10 years.

There really is very little of this film that could be praised. Set in 2018, the nuclear apocalypse and subsequent war with the robots which the first two Terminator installments whet our appetite for, is rudely crammed into a few very brief paragraphs at the beginning. John Connor, the hero of the film (portrayed by Christian Bale, still with the frog in his throat left over from playing Batman) is two dimensional and thoroughly unlikable and manages to come across from the outset as quite a inept soldier instead of the saviour the character is meant to be. Sam Worthington is Marcus, an executed prisoner who pops up in the ravaged future as a cyborg prototype (which strangely doesn't strike him as weird- I know if I were to suddenly wake up naked and covered in mud in a desolate war-torn environment, I might ask a question or two) but fails to inspire any feeling whatsoever. The story is based chiefly around saving young Kyle Reese from Skynet (the evil company-turned-humankind-destroyer), as Kyle needs to live in order to get sent back in time by Connor in order to be Connors father. All perfectly clear.

One main stumbling block about this whole scenario is the lack of a decent villain. There is no one to grip the viewer, to heighten the tension, which is precisely why the previous installments were so effective. The struggle is awfully one sided emotionally, and we can't really care about an angry, shouty John Connor. For a story that is about trying to save humanity, this film shows a notable lack of it.

There are many things wrong here, from the poor pacing of the story to the laughably inadequate defences Skynet has to offer, the lack of thought given to scenes (why would killer bike robots need a USB port on them anyway?) to bad dialogue- they also reuse key lines from the previous movies.
On the plus side, though, there were some pretty good explosions.

Terminator Salvation cheapens the franchise, and seems to assume that film goers are braindead morons by tacking in a shameful script around big set-piece action scenes. This film should be forgotten, and fast.

TERMINATOR SALVATION (false start review)

Killing My Childhood, 1 Franchise at a Time.

That's what they're doing. And they aren't stopping, in fact the pace is picking up.
Where have all the ideas gone? It doesn't have to be an original idea, just as long as some movie hero or icon from my youth isn't defiled, rolled in dirt and shoved in my face.
I suspect, though, that the reasons for making these sorry excuses for movies are not just to piss me off. The bad news is that they make money, lots of money, and people will always come from far and wide to sit through the tripe. Hell, even Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Shit Script (or crystal skull, something like that) made a shed load of dough.

I have to moan about these things before getting to the actual review. This disease is bigger than just one film. Bad scripting and hopeless direction frequently plague what should be a triumphant return to the big screen for old favourites. When one of these ideas is being penned, would it not be a sensible thing to sit down first of all, think about the history of the film, think about those that have grown up with it, those who made it a success in the first place by going to the cinema and buying the VHS and perhaps the soundtrack and other merchandising. Is it too much to ask for the writers to think, "Why don't we write a good movie to continue the franchise?".
There is also the case of studio involvement, when the money men get their teeth sunk in. Personally, I think the best example of this is in Terminator (I seem to have abandoned the review for now, but will endeavor to churn it out soon) where a small, curly haired, mute black kid keeps popping up, only to get shouted at every now and again and hands a few items to other characters. I reckon that this kid was originally in the script as a dog. Stick with me now, it makes sense- a dog doesn't speak and can fetch things just as well as any kid, and would fit a whole lot better into a post-apocalyptic environment. So here we have a case of some suit demanding a black kid instead so he can tick his minority boxes. Possibly to keep at bay the crazy Americans who would have seen this as a glaring affront to their civil liberties and tried to sue. Or something equally silly.

Sometimes the flip-side is true too, however, and a stale franchise is reworked to positive effect, bringing a fresh, more up-to-date approach. Films such as the recent Batman movies, Star Trek and even The Hills Have Eyes, but these exceptions are more re-envisioning of the originals, and its plain to see time and effort have gone into the story and a director who knows what the hell he's doing, and knows the previous movies is taken on board.

With so many more remakes and reigniting of franchises in the pipeline, I fear that my childhood and adolescent movie experiences will be further dented as time marches on. Sometime in the future, even the remakes of those great films will be remade. This is the way of the Hollywood machine I suppose, and anyway, the greatest hurt has already happened, the greatest betrayal that could have befallen a boy who grew up though the 1980's. The magic of Star Wars has been killed off well and truly and still they flog the corpse.
We can now put a name to this infliction.
We can call it George Lucas Disease.