Scott Pilgrim vs. Me

Now I like video games, of many shapes and sizes, I am also not emphatically opposed to reading a graphic novel every now again (though a solid book will always be my preferred medium of story-telling), so, you'd think that the premise of the summer film "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" would be a very enticing concept to me. It is not. 

The Star of This Film...yes REALLY

I am vaguely aware that Scott Pilgrim is a character from a series of graphic novels by Brian Lee O'Malley  which have a respectable following among the comic book set. In these comics (which I readily confess I have not read) I understand from second hand sources that retro-video game devices and techniques are use to add humour and ambiance to the story. Again, no trouble there, I have no issue with that whatsoever.
Now, my problem comes when I happened to see the trailer for said film. I must press on my audience that I have not seen the film or read the comics so I'm purely recording my current opinions which may, for all I know, change in the future. 
The trailer consists of a montage of a squeaky-voiced buck-toothed jellyfish drooling after a stereotypical emo/goth/grunge hybrid masturbatory aid and the "humorous" events that supposedly lead to rodent-face boy winning over bad-ass-but-my-true-love emo slag.
The films extremely liberal attitude towards homosexuality was also an instant turn-off.  One of emo-whores "evil exes" is in fact a woman, this, from what I can see, is neither remarked upon nor elaborated furthering a care-fee attitude towards "trying" the homosexual lifestyle. Equally disturbing is rodent-boy's sharing a bed with his "cool" homosexual room mate. As a 12A certificate film I would be extremely angry having taken my 12/13 year old child unknowingly to a film of that rating which contained blatant and overt homosexual themes. 
Aside from these gripes, the trailer only leaves me with the impression that all this film has going for it is a non-stop torrent of pop-culture references and geek-in jokes that may alienate even some who self-identify with the nerdier side of life. 

The Jail Bait from Lazy Town is back

I fail to see why this film is provoking such a gushing of geek-gasm from many quarters. It seems to be little more than a conventional rom-com with a few "wakey" elements thrown in to appeal to the Myspace/ X-Box Live generation (of which I am part). The fact that this film is blatantly trying so hard to appeal to me instantly makes it very unappealing. "Look" it cries, "video games jokes AND young relationship problems, how can you NOT like this?!" which instantly makes me want to reply "fuck off Scott Pilgrim you effeminate little wank stain".
I'm not saying if I was taken to see this film I would hate every second of it, I may even have my opinions and fears totally reversed buy it, but from seeing the trailer, Internet chatter and the more general gossip about how "amazzinglly ZOMG Scott Pilgrim" this film/franchise is, the more dubious I become.         

CSI, NCIS, CISM, KGBSFA, CKIVJKEUTJUS10450#!! and other acronym fetishes

Crime is Fail, We are Win

I recently acquired a 23" flat screen HD television with build in Freeveiw channels. Delighted to be rid of my 90's monstrosity I happily sat flicking through the many new and exciting stations (Russia Today!) and having had my new TV for a weeks I notice a pattern emerging. America has been gripped and erotically asphyxiated by crime acronym fever. 
Television moguls seem to have decided that words, you know the sounds we as humans use to communicate complex emotions and ideas, are just too damn old hat. What johnny public retard needs to an ACRONYM for his favourite cop show. Beneath the mind boggling array of titles all featuring "crime" and "investigation"  just in case you didn't get the premise is a menagerie of impossibly low-lit rooms and super high-tech labs with "edgy" scientists who are just too cool to do things like follow basic investigation procedure. 
Zooming in can seemingly solve ANY crime and bleeping light-speed computers seem to have EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER LIVED EVERRRR stockpiled into their databases like some weird Bolshevist wet dream.
This is police work air-brush style. Impossibly attractive legions of civil service staff bustle around insanely new and clean looking sets without so much as a paper clip straying on the desk. Strip club mood lighting is ample for the dodgy science montage sequences with culminate with everyone looking like a self-satisfied serial masturbator or in a state of Shakespearian exasperation. 
As always, quirky lab goth girl or lovable rouge detective dredge up some piece of pop culture dross to solve the latest epidemic of trendy murders or rapes. A Scooby Doo "meddling kids" moment is a must at the end of each episode when the pantomime culprit is brought to a far too-perfect American justice. What's with these rapists getting life and murders getting the death penalty? where's the snivelling human rights advocate who gets Ed Gein's copycat a spell of community service and "rehabilitation" with a free holiday? 
All these programs are a symptom of America's desire for an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful justice system when it fact is has one of the most ineffectual and problematic (minus the current British one of course), this fantasy world where cops always win and no crime can possible go unsolved thanks to "science" is a reaction to a situation in which people feel powerless in the face of crime and unsupported by the authorities.
Godlike characters with unimpeachable virtues gallivant across America solving crimes and bringing justice to the masses with sunglasses and designer gloves, and this is how people want to imagine their nations emergency services really are. The harsh reality of dull 1970's office blocks housing boxes of coffee stained files and dusty labs in constant need of cleaning and better funding doesn't make good television, and this is why "insert acronym here" has to take detective work to a near science fiction level.
Until we get an army of RoboCop's to slap ASBO's on chavs and gun down would-be rapists with gusto, VNDJVPOCOCCIS and it's fellows will be with us for some time yet.


            

A Review with many R's

These days, in the world of hyper-advertising, viral advertising and Jane Fonda selling you moisturiser, everything is uber-touted as the best "insert product" evvvarr. Needless to say, I, like many others, am momentarily seized with a mental illness  whereby I absorb every microbe of this bullshit and, like a meek lamb at a Satanists birthday party, await my reward in blissful ignorance. 

However, 9 times out of 10, the thing you couldn't live without and which was going to change the way you thought about entertainment like Flying Spaghetti Monster changed the face of teh Internets, is in reality a mass-produced heap of genericism masterminded by Jew capitalists gleefully sucking at the teat of the cash-cow.

Thankfully, I had missed all the advertising campaign for Red Dead Redemption, RockStar Games latest effort for the video-game market after a decade making graphical interpretations of a Saturday night in Hull town centre (GTA and family). But I digress, having let RDR slip under my game radar I bought it with little or no expectations other than it was going to be a sandbox Grand Theft Auto with horses. 

What I got however, was one of the best games of the past few years and certainly a mile-stone game in the same vein as The Legend of Zelda for the N64 or Halo for the X-Box. The genuinely beautiful backdrops teeming with authentic wildlife (all of which which you'll spend many happy hours riddling with buck-shot) provide a rich stage-set for the character of John Marston, the only video game interface devise I have ever felt any sort of emotional connection to or truly worried for the well-being of. A vast map gives you free scope to explore and complete a range of missions in the GTA fashion, with multiple "jobs" available across the map from different NPC's all the time and any time.

Far from being merely a "Western-style" GTA, Red Dead Redemption unravels its intelligent if well-worn story arc with some of the deepest character development to be found in the video game media. Realistic voice acting, dialogue, music, ambiance and background noise all add to the feel of this game. While the constant horseback riding can at times border on tedious, the cleverly disguised option of map travel is available should you not wish to spend 3-10 minutes of real time cantering though the truly breathtaking scenery RockStar have created. The dying days of the Old West are brought to life in a level of detail hardly conceivable only a few short years ago. 

RockStar's notorious "myth" (i.e. Bigfoot from San Andreas) elements fuelled no doubt silently by the game designers themselves and fed on by players imaginations are present in RDR in a dynamic and truly spooky way.

Mysterious Strangers, possible ghost sightings and  legendary beats (the latter are defiantly real) all add a level of mystic realism, a level of worldly uncertainly not present in other games giving it the unique and endearing atmosphere so well-loved in GTA games. In all, a truly fantasic gaming experience up there easily with any of the established "greats".   

Book Review: World War Z

I used to think I was going slightly mad when I'd hear my friends at university start conversations with remarks like "well my plan for the Zombie Apocalypse is.....". Everyone I knew seemed to have some sort of contingency plan, not for a nuclear attack, terrorist outrage or natural disaster, but in case corpses started to get up and devour the living. 
What, I thought to myself, would possibly motivate people to enjoy thinking up such macabre and strange scenarios?. It was some time later that I picked up Max Brooks' "World War Z" (actually I saw it in a friend's coat pocket and nabbed it) and began to read. 
The tacky, cheap, pop-fiction horror romp I expected was in reality a carefully constructed, cleverly presented, poignant, enthralling and outright frightening book. Set out as a series of interview transcripts recorded some years after the events they refer to this "oral history of the Zombie War" recounts the beginnings of infection in China, the spread and global panic to world-wide pandemic and human counter-strike that came to known as "World War Z". 
You would think (as I did) that such a fanciful tale could never take root in your rational mind as a serious possibility, but as you read each interview, all realistic to a phenomenal degree, you begin to let yourself believe it could, indeed may, happen. 
Realism is the cornerstone of Brooks' work. The attention to detail and brutal (in)humanity entrenched in the pages of every section bring a stable horror scenario out of make-believe land and very much into our own real world. 
The responses of individuals, organisations and governments to the problem of walking, hungry corpses are probably as close as we will ever come to how we all might actually react to a zombie plague. Each interview is long enough to be engrossing and short enough to hold your attention and in some cases leave you wanting to know more. At times I was actually rueful an account didn't go on longer and into more detail, I felt an urge to know more about a situation or the fate of an individual in that grey, bleak and moan-haunted world Brooks' forces you to visualise.
As a backdrop to his other work The Zombie Survival Guide (which I have not yet read in full) World War Z is an fantastic devise, even tying the two books together into a canon universe that's ripe for further expansion. Any zombie horror fan will enjoy this book, I myself am not a devotee of the zombie genre but I cannot recommend World War Z highly enough to anyone who is fairly open minded literature-wise and wants a gripping read. 
Now I fully understand what my friends were thinking when they were planning escape routes and weapon acquisition. Maybe I'll keep a sharp instrument closer to by bed and make sure all the windows are locked....you know...in case of....burglars... 


Justification Score: 5/5

Honkey Joe's Blaxploitation Review 1: "Blacula" (1972)

Fans of the 1971 hit "Shaft" will not be new to the blaxploitation sub-genre. For those of you who are (shame on you) it's definitive feature is the use of black American culture and dialect in order to deliberately appeal to a black audience and provoke a humorous response from White audiences. Thrusting into this parody rich field of cinema only a year later in 1972 comes the hammer-horror "Blacula". 
Essentially a rehash of the Stoker classic with an "ethnic" twist, our undead hero "Prince Mamuwalde" takes a holiday from resisting the African slave trade (us big bad white folks!) in 1780 to visit Count Dracula in Eastern Europe (roll with it I promise it gets better). With a dash of racial prejudice more pronounced than a Klan member at Sasha Obama's birthday party he takes a bit of a shine to our Prince's missus "Luva". After a slapstick scuffle and some candle magic Drac turns our hero into a blood-sucking vampire and locks him in a coffin, imprisoning his wife in the same vault for all time. Two centuries later two queer queens (sorry male "interior decorators") purchase the coffin at a furniture auction at Castle Dracula (Bargain Hunt does USSR Satellite Sates can be seen on BBC2 at 2pm on Thursday afternoons)   and ship it to 1970's L.A. 
Various racial stereotype hilarity  (White and Black) ensues and we learn that pretty young thing Tina is some sort of reincarnation of Mamuwalde's old lady and he'll stop at nothing to win her back. Things take a surprising turn when Blacula hypnotises doe-eyed Tina into falling in love with him (yes really). Meanwhile Dr. Gordon Thomas, afro and wide shirt collar included, the "rude nigger" cop of the film (i.e. he's bad ass and gets police work done black man style) is busily tracking down the pesky vamp, following the trail of expendable plot exposition characters, and kills his recently created minions before going after Blacula himself. A chase/fight ensues, Tina is killed and a distraught Mamuwalde commits suicide by sunlight, ending 93 minutes of glorious blacktion.


As cult classics go, this one is a gem. Snot-nosed hippies and screaming 16 year old girls might decide it's "racist" but in actual fact the grim realities of racial prejudice are not to be found in this film. All the characters are 2D card board stereotypes including the white ones wokin' fo da Man. The "special" effects and continuity errors add an endearing element of care-free nostalgia to the proceedings  which play out in 35mm technocolour fabulousness. William Marshall actually excels in this role as the dammed African prince as does Thalmus Rasulala as the hard-bitten no-smiling black cop who seems constantly pissed off by everything and everyone who comes under the fearsome glare of his moustache. Blacula slipped under the radar of many niche-culture enthusiasts but retains a respectable cult following on both sides of the Atlantic, earning cameo mentions in both the Simpsons and Futurama.  One to buy cheaply and enjoy for the retro-film fan and curious horror buff alike.