Messages

My long-held fantasy of playing goat football online like Rambo III did is fast becoming a reality.

Got this sitting on my sofa - came with a purse of some sort and a fancy iron coin, but I'll probably not bother playing it for a good while yet as I still haven't bothered playing through the other two.  Still not sure why I even bought this one.

It's COD.  All they need to do is post black billboards everywhere with the date of release and people will come running.  Can you play as a female mercenary on horseback?  Do you get to be Iron Man in a jet plane?  That clip looks the product of a meeting that prominently featured hookers, cocaine and high fives and I don't see what it's got to do with COD.

Doesn't matter, like, as I'll still be getting the game and I never have to watch the clip again - I just don't get why it was made or what it achieves.

They sell well because they're printed in big letters and have boffing in them.  It's the YA novel equivalent of lots of clipart, maze puzzles and a free toy on the cover.

I ended up watching New Moon as I was in the city for an all-night anime movie marathon and it was the last film before that started - buggered if I was going to dander about for two hours - and the audience was pretty much nothing but 8-16 year old girls.  Fair enough, you might think, because we've been laughing about that being the case for years now, except that they seemed to be in on the joke: when the "werewolves" showed up there was a collective sigh of "awwww" from the audience followed by howls of laughter, and the theater was in complete stitches at that scene where Ed and Bella are running through a field in slow motion like an Ormo ad, so I'll go out on a limb here and suggest Twilight is a triumph of good marketing more than it is a triumph of good storytelling - those kids were there because it was a pop-cultural event, not because they thought it was a good film.

Ronald Reagan only found out that radiation was real when he watched The Day After, a tv movie which starred Steve Guttenberg, so while I'd like to think that the presence of nuclear weapons prevented a shooting war and thus justified their creation, the evidence isn't really there, only specious conjecture based on the fact the human race is still kicking - but considering some of the stories of close calls that have emerged over the decades that's as likely dumb luck as anything else.

I applaud their spending a fuckton of money to promote marginal games no-one will otherwise buy.

Well, the intent in releasing this particular image was clearly to... cough... get a rise out of someone, I'm just saying we can hardly be surprised that opinion varies.

Asking the internet its opinion is a terrible idea?
Well I never!

edit: Looks a bit like whatsisname Pleece to me.

Shumacher has shown range as a film-maker that has yet to materialise in the canon of Burton, and I stand by my assertion that there's nothing in Schumachers' Bat outings more or less silly than what went before.  And "better-made"? B&R is aesthetically garish, I'll grant you, but in this it is consistent in a way the previous films weren't.  From set design to script, it found its level of shit and stuck to it.

Nope.  I mean unironically and without intent to get cred as an iconoclast that B&R is far and away the best Bat-flick of the Burton 4 and that the majority of it's poor rep comes from a bunch of adolescents crying that their Batman wasn't blowing clowns up on street corners because Batman is only badass when he kills people.  There is nothing camper, worse-written or silly about Batman and Robin that wasn't already present in the Burton-helmed films, it's just that the pretentiousness was now absent and audiences decided that a man dressed like a bat sliding down the spine of a dinosaur and then having a fight on ice skates was much sillier than a gang of kung-fu mimes, giant penguins (armed with rocket launchers) who live in the sewers under a city and raise a human child as one of their own, or a woman who develops mastery of a circus bullwhip and mad karate skills after being licked back from the dead by cats.

So is your face.

[Masters of the Universe]

Masters of the Universe, the latest comic book adaptation of the 1980s pop cultural phenomenon, and at least the second update of a 1980s cartoon show and toy line that I've seen where the writer seems determined to work out some of the sexual fantasies they had about the characters they grew up with while their puds were starting to sprout, as like that Thundercats update where Wilykat was Mumm-Ra's underage sex slave and Cheetara spent all her time chained to a pillar because it made her easier to rape, MotU features an update of Teela where she's not a warrior of any sort but a "handmaiden" to Trapjaw who waits about to be rescued by Adam - yes, Adam, and not He-Man, which if you are unfamiliar with MotU lore is a bit like Lois Lane being rescued by Clark Kent instead of Superman.  Between this and actual fanfiction, I'm beginning to worry that I never had any violent rape fantasies about female cartoon characters while I was growing up.

The gist of a so-far aimless story* is probably that Skeletor has altered the memories of the MotU cast to make them forget they were badasses, a one-issue story at best that seems to be a 6 or 12 part tale by the looks of things three issues in, and I have absolutely no idea who this book is aimed at: regular comic book readers have seen this story done a thousand times before, MotU fans will be uninterested in seeing their characters act out of sorts for a story the cartoon has done a couple of times already, and beyond that there is literally nobody left to read this.  Even I picked it up on a whim and I am more frustrated and baffled by it than compelled to see how things turn out, though I imagine there's probably some kind of props due to any creative team that can fail to write a story that lives up to anything that has gone before when the bar is the cartoon, comic and movie versions of Masters of the Universe.
They have found a new way to fail, and I'll admit I can't take that away from them.

* I do not use the term "aimless" lightly - Adam is a lumberjack and one day, he just decides to go on a journey and he meets the evil MotU characters as he goes.  This is the actual plot of this book.

I was fine with Entangled up until the end, but that last "joke" struck a sour note.  It wasn't the joke itself, as we've had that exact same joke on at least two previous occasions in Red Dwarf (the one where they change time via photographs of the past and Rimmer kills himself in the final frames of the episode, and again when Red Dwarf is collapsing on itself and Rimmer is left behind on it with only the Grim Reaper for company) and even the death of a sibling doesn't register upon characters in any emotional manner so it wasn't just that the character was killed off and no-one really cared beyond immediately making a joke, rather for me it was the attitude the script took towards the character as a figure of fun and a sex object combined with the casual attitude towards her death which in the isolated context of the episode makes for an unfortunate impression that you don't get in the larger context of the series.  I imagine the sponsor clips where Rik Mayall does a flawless impression of a fat, rich, sexist, Tory sellout fucker doesn't help that impression, either.
Otherwise I have been enjoying the new series just fine and dandy.

[Shakes the Clown]

Simping Detective Shakes the Clown, the 1991 writing and directorial debut of Bobcat Goldthwait, better known as the bad guy from the only good Police Academy movie, and yes, I am actually going to use that as a qualification.  Shakes is an alcoholic substance abusing clown on the run from the cops in a very noir-ish tale interspersed with what I presume to be stand-up ad-libs from a varied cast of performers that include Robin Williams and Adam Sandler, and despite the noirish MOIDAH stuff, Shakes remains a ridiculous character who elicits sympathy despite his many shortcoming and chronic unreliability, and it's really neat to see something in the noir mold that doesn't resort to the usual "he's a loner all on his own doing things his way alone" bollocks to portray Shakes as having a circle of friends who try to do right by him in spite of his drinking.  The dark elements of it are a great counterpoint to the comedy, but I am not surprised at all that it sank without trace as it's not willfully surreal, it's just a murder drama that happens to be set in a town populated with a large amount of clowns committed to their act, though the comedy moments do hit the mark when they're supposed to.  SBT was on about Abbott And Costello meeting Frankenstein a while back in the thread and that film's scary-bits-are-scary and funny-bits-are-funny approach is the closest thing I think I can compare to this - the drama works and the comedy works, and even though some elements of it are just utterly ludicrous, they work within the context of the story and the world Shakes inhabits, with none of the outre components of the story rubbed in your face, so it becomes practically impossible to grate on your nerves as I feared would be the case.  An amusing oddity.