Friday, January 22, 2010

another reason why I hate tennis...

Some whinging little bitch called Bernard has had a whinging bitch about having to play tennis at “way past bedtime.” Sorry, what? Back in my day, seventeen year olds would be able to make it to 2am and then play tennis and still have enough in them to steal a car and thieve newspapers. Maybe this kid just needs to hang out with Andre Agassi some more.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

James Cameron's AVATARAHONTAS

AVATAR has some highly impressive special effects


No doubt everyone in the world has seen Avatar already; it is behind only Titanic in terms of box-office takings at time of writing, although this might have something to do with the fact that tickets to this puppy cost four times as much as a regular film.

So here’s the flick in a nutshell: Paraplegic bloke gets chance to walk again if he can infiltrate alien species in order for humans to mine the fuck out of their house.

In the mix, he falls in love, rides a big ol’ dragonny-pterodactyl thing and manages to piss off at least two intelligent species. He’s been pretty busy.

The story steals all of its themes from every other good movie, dumbs it down a bit and then beats it in the head until it is made retarded. Somewhere in the future, humans are exploring the planet Pandora, which is home to a race of eight-foot Smurfs, and is also rich in unobtanium, an element that the humans really really want for reasons known only to them. To properly communicate with the Smurfs, humans created the Avatar program, where alien/human hybrids are created and controlled by dudes in a lab. One of those dudes is Jake, who is given a special assignment – move the Smurfs from the mining area, and he’ll get his legs back. Nice idea. Unfortunately…

The way it all unfolds is fairly predictable. Lessons are learnt and a hero is born. If you’ve seen any big-budget movie before, you pretty much know how it’s all going to pan out. That’s not to say that it’s not worth sticking around for, as it is a visual feast that will leave your eyeballs a bit bloated and possibly sweaty. Pandora is indeed a beautiful world in which to live, although I doubt that anyone there would ever be able to sleep, because everything on the planet either glows fluorescent colours or is the size of a small house, angry and hungry. Still, it does look spiffy and is pretty cool in 3D.

As is my regular beef with movies, there’s just not enough to it. For a 3-hour movie that was green-lighted in 1997 and began production in 2004, you’d expect the characters to be nicely fleshed out, the dialogue snappy and plot holes to be filled in. While the alien scenes are without doubt the main focus, the human interaction needs to be sharper, as the humans are the ones who are actually moving the story along. But they’re as transparent, two-dimensional and paper-thin as a transparent and paper-thin two-dimensional character, and the scenes that could have been the emotional crux of this film – the idea that Jake could walk again as a human – were sadly underdone. At least he looks pretty.

I give Avatar two blue whales.

Monday, January 11, 2010

an overdue rant

Sorry for the recent lack of additions to the blog thing – I know how much you depend on me to fill you in on the highlights of the world and I apologise for not giving you frequent updates as to how awesome I am, but I’ve been working on a few outside projects that involve beer and do not relate in any way to being coordinated enough to use a computer.

Things that have annoyed me recently:

TV commercials:

The stupid Ford ad with the chick who’s driving around with her dog and using her voice activated car. I’m sorry, but this is just going too far. Are people that retarded that they can’t drive and adjust the temperature gauge or change CDs at the same time? The only time that talking cars are awesome is if they transform into 50-foot robots or fight crime with David Hasselhoff. And what the fuck kind of CDs does that chick have in her car? “The Best Dog Songs Ever: Volume #4”? I’m also pretty sure that it’s illegal to have a dog unrestrained in the front seat of your car, and even more so if it’s intelligent enough to work the voice controls of your vehicle. Fuck it, Ford should just make a car that is able to be driven by dogs. I’d probably be impressed by that.

Sport:

I still hate Shane Watson. I don’t care how well he’s playing at the moment, I still hate him like I hated Andrew Symonds, like I hate Karmichael Hunt like I hate soccer.

Pop music:

All of it. It’s all rubbish right now. It can all go and get fucked. Whenever I make the mistake of watching Saturday-morning music show (I don’t know which one I watch, it’s hosted by some bright young scamps with good hair and hope for the future), my ear-hairs are greeted by the most absolutely appalling songs I have ever been privy to since I tuned into Video Hits the week before. I try to make an effort to remember the names of the artists, but that information constantly gets replaced by more important things (about dinosaurs), and I doubt that I’ll ever hear the names of any of those people again anyway. Britney Spears brought the “slutty teenage girl” into vogue in 1997. Thirteen years on, nothing has changed; if anything, there are more Spears clones out there than I can poke a stick at. I’ve even got my special poking stick ready to go, sharpened to a point for such an occasion.

Help lines:

Stupid robot voice-activated fucking things. "Press 1 for a kick in the balls, press 2 for a scorpion being shoved into your eyeballs, press 3 for more information about our website, press 4 to have these options repeated." They only ever give you four choices that you can make, and none of them are what you actually rang up about. They also have the most annoyingly-voiced people in the history of the world to speak on them – if they have to have voice recordings to help me through life, it should be the voice of Optimus Prime, Robocop or Sean Connery giving me direction.