Entertainment

Bittersweet little ditty. I found myself nodding in affectionate recognition basically all the way through it. All that teenage angsty stuff and pubescent existential meaninglessness. Yep. I was apprehensive though, because it was one of several movies I was told would be “right up my alley” (some other examples include The Royal Tenenbaums and Donnie Darko if you want a general indication of my track record in that regard). Of course, in addition to being awkwardly-written, shallowly-characterised, gratuitous pieces of shit, they didn’t have Thora or Scarlett in the cast. Or Scarlett. Did I mention Scarlett? When she mentioned the “miracle of masturbation”, I nearly fell off the couch. Lordy.

*slap*

I’ll be fine. Buscemi bless…

“I know many people in other countries are scratching their heads and thinking ‘What in the world is the big fuss over there?’, but this country takes exposed breasts very, very seriously. We get very exercised about such things.” - Robert Thompson, Director, Centre for the Study of Popular Television (no doubt an international confluence of intellectuals at the vanguard of educational excellence)

I can count on one hand the number of nightclubs I’ve been to in my life. Not just because I dislike dance music (or, for that matter, dance music with the bass cranked up to filling-vibrating levels (not that I have any fillings, but I digress)), but in conjunction with the fact that every aspect of the nightclub atmosphere is a sensorially oppressive experience, from the dark, smoky environment randomly peirced by flashing neon colours, the press of writhing, convulsing, drunken individuals who seem to coalesce into some anonymous, heaving singular organism, at all times punctuated by the crushing gravity of repetitive, thudding tumult assaulting your eardrums from every direction. But it was my friend’s 21st last night, and she decided she wanted to go club-hopping in the city afterwards, so who was I to be a fly in the proverbial ointment? Although I must admit, there is something postmodernly romantic about stumbling bleary-eyed back out into an inner-city street under an azure Sunday morning sky and groggily hailing the nearest availiable taxi, with the prospect of comatose unconsciousness while the rest of the hemisphere goes about it’s business. And there’s a certain tangible uterine mentality underpinning the whole dance scene (a conclusion arrived at during what I refer to as my “observant, introspective philosophical” stage of an all-nighter, where the levels of blood alcohol and sleep-deprivation are such that internal dialogue is congruous to original abstraction, without yet descending into gibberish; i.e. around 6am), but it’s just something I can’t ever envision myself embracing with any level surpassing that of curious, detached objectivity. Give me a pub with a Guinness tap, a big-screen tv set to a cable sports channel and an above-average cover band onstage any day.

One of the most insidious forces of evil in the universe since Anthony Robins visits our airwaves once again next week (interestingly only 6 months after the last stupid fucking pointless one). I speak of course about the syndicated “National IQ Test”, which I’m led to believe has swept the globe in the past 12 months, spawned by the mind of a creative feeble who, by all intents and purposes, in any fair society should’ve starved to death years ago, in a wave of success predicated upon the artificial expansion of the egos of the Moronic Majority into actually believing that they have something useful to contribute to society. Don’t be fooled. Underlying network television’s lust with derivative and subversive reconstitutions of “interactive reality shows” such as “Pop/American/Australian/Columbian/Cypriot/etc Idol” “Who Wants To Pay Some Millionaires?” is a proven ratio of Effort to Revenue which would make any network executive ejaculate with glee. Here’s how it all works. The network which has won the bid to own the rights of the concept (in this case, Packer’s Nine Network) gets in contact with a major mobile telecommunications carrier and strikes a cooperative deal in which the corporation provides a phone number in return for the receipt of a significant percentage of the text message revenue. The network further profits from the sale of the magazine also required to participate (some shitty little rag no doubt owned and operated by a subsidiary of the same media company), in addition to advertising revenue overinflated by the hype which attracts millions of idiot consumers like moths to a flame. So at the end of the day, Packer and Telstra have a few extra hundreds of thousands of dollars in their Swiss bank accounts, morons are slightly poorer and as stupid as they ever were, and television has slipped another creatively-bankrupt piece of shit past us. And I’m assuming that they’re not subtle enough to realise that allowing oneself to become involved in a mind-numbing, bank account-sapping activity masquerading as an “IQ test” gives you an automatic fail in some sort of catch-22 scenario.

Isn’t Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade just the greatest movie ever? I think I must’ve watched it about 10 billion times between the ages of 8 and 13. OK, Raiders is better, but by a strange coincidence I wound up seeing them for the first time in reverse order, and sure it’s about the Holy Grail and all that Christian rubbish, but so was Castle Wolfenstein: Spear Of Destiny and that kicked arse. Dammit I’m a Nazi tragic. And I don’t mean like this guy. Take Hitler, the SS, and a bit of Biblical mythology, and I’m totally there.

It’s official. This is the only review you need to read. Kill Bill is fucking cool. Damn fucking cool. Damn fucking hella cool. Damn fucking freaking hella uber cool. Damn fu- well, you get the idea. Although, I can understand how people can hate it. I’m not among their ranks because, like Tarantino (as I’ve only recently discovered, much to my pleasant surprise), much of my youth was spent joyfully watching tacky, campy, low-budget, ultra-violent, poorly-acted 70’s and 80’s Asian martial-arts revenge flicks and blood-splattered, barely comprehensible anime/manga movies until 3 o’clock in the morning. All the choreographical and musical homages had me grinning like a fool with nostalgia. Could’ve been more violent, though. Seeing the unrated version is now one of my missions in life (apparently the Chinese release doesn’t have any of that chickenshit black-and-white cinematography). Bring on the sequel!! WOOOOOOOO!!!

Normally I take about as much of an interest in Hollywood entertainment news as I do in the sex lives of my grandparents, but this one caught my eye.

Cameron Diaz breaks her nose

Justin Timberlake’s girlfriend, Cameron Diaz, has broken her nose whilst holidaying in Hawaii to celebrate her 31st birthday.

She was surfing with her sister and a couple of mates when someone’s board hit her face. She says she’s totally bummed because she can’t go surfing any more. But it could’ve been worse if the board had not been made of foam.

I just felt I needed to squash what seems to be a common misconception sweeping the world today, particularly in light of the release of the second instalment on DVD. A mere glance at the IMDb Top 250 will provide you with enough proof of the bafflingly widespread nature of the problem.

# 10. Enya: Enya needs killing. Now.

# 9. George Lucas Syndrome Part 1: Peter Jackson is a producer, not a director. And it shows. Then again, if Scorcese had been put in charge, would it have changed much? Probably not. Just pay the actors to run around and talk a bit and let computers and blue screens do the rest.

You can add Terminator 3 to that list I started below. I thought it was pretty good, better than Minority Report, even though the writing was pretty dumb, it was so briskly paced that it never let you dwell on the bad one-liner they just dropped. I may seem really deep, introspective and philosophical, but a really cool action scene can have me grinning like an idiot, and the car-chase fell into that category. I mean seriously, how much shit did they smash up? And when the front of the crane gets crushed into the road and flips over? Too cool! I liked the bleak Strangelove-esque ending as well. Hey, it wasn’t The Conversation, or even Terminator 2 for that matter, but I can honestly say that I wasn’t disappointed by an overhyped movie this year, a rare plus in this day and age. Mind you, I’ve had a massive crush on Claire Danes ever since I first saw her in Romeo + Juliet, so maybe I’m just biased.

“Hey, you know in Attack of the Clones when-” “I haven’t seen it.” “What?” “I haven’t seen it.” “Oh. Why not?” “I dunno, I just haven’t. Why, is it really that important?”

…

“Hey, you know in Minority Report when-” “I haven’t seen it.” “Huh?” “I haven’t seen it.” “What’s wrong with you?” “Nothing’s wrong with me! I just haven’t seen it.”

Id Software’s latest groundbreaking game doesn’t ship until Nov 3 this year, but advance screenshots suggest that the revolutionary Doom III game engine will be streets ahead of the competition. Advanced, sophisticated shader scripting combined with per-pixel lightmapping and ultra-high polycount modelling allow a level of realism hitherto unseen in the FPS genre.

In the game, you play the part of space marine Holden Freeman, sent to investigate an accident on the far-flung colony of EUtopia. As your ship sets down on the deserted launchpad, you hope for the best but expect the worst - and sure enough, you are not disappointed. It fast becomes apparent that a scientific experiment attempting to fuse free trade with the defence of liberty from communism has gone disastrously wrong. A portal between the free world and a dimension of authoritarian ghosts has opened up, and an army of undead ideological monsters is flooding through, and you are the only thing that stands between them and victory.

Cable TV has begun advertising “The Fellowship of the Ring”, which will be starting on one of the movie channels in a few weeks. Just out of curiosity, am I the only person on the planet who found those first two movies to be spectacularly ordinary?

When you take on the task of making a movie adaptation of a book/trilogy, particularly a 20th century classic, you automatically adhere to an unwritten covenant which states that you must remain as faithful as possible to the text. Exceptional circumstances arise when the writer/director exploits the vast differences between the written word and audio/visual mediums to enhance upon elements in the book (see David Fincher’s Fight Club), but watering down the narrative to make it more digestible to the average, ignorant movie-goer (see Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, or rather, read Thomas Harris’ version instead) is unforgiveable. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, let me save you the trouble by summarising in neat, sequential format.