Same Old Thing in Brand New Drag

Some of you may have heard of a 2000 film called American Psycho. Prior to Batman Begins, this was the biggest and most critically acclaimed work Christian Bale appeared in. Adapted from the book by Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho is the heartwarming tale of Patrick Bateman, a young Wall Street banker who goes about brutally murdering people while trying to mask his own psychotic nature to his co-workers and loved ones.

It goes about as well as you'd expect. The film differs a lot from the book - it's less violent, some of the jokes are jettisoned for practicality - but it is still a wicked piece of satire and black comedy. If you can find it, watch it. It's one of the funniest things you'll see. It's an underrated classic that not many people in the mainstream have heard of. So naturally, Hollywood want to remake it.

He's ecstatic.

Yes, now that it's over ten years old, American Psycho is the latest property to get tarted up in new clothes assembled by bored music video directors looking to make waves, with Lionsgate ordering a script to be written and directed by Noble Jones, whose biggest credit to date is second-unit director on The Social Network. What with all those 80's horror film remakes (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Fright Night, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street) routinely getting stretched over a pommel horse by the critics, the studios are evidently trying a different tack. First came the prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing, confusingly also titled The Thing, and now they're remaking a film that's set in the 80's.

Let's look at why this is a bad idea, and in a way that hopefully won't lead to me dumping molten lead over Lionsgate or Jones' heads:

1) Why remake it?

American Psycho is tailor-made for a specific purpose - lacerating the excess and shallow culture of 1980's America, the whole "Greed is good" message Gordon Gecko espoused in Wall Street. Ellis considered the book a response to the whole yuppie culture:

'It initiated because (of) my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life. I was living like Patrick Bateman. I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself. That is where the tension of "American Psycho" came from.'

The only other reason I can think of why this is being remade is because of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and there was already another film about Wall Street not too long ago. The problem is that, right now, things are not as ridiculous or extravagant as they were in the 80's. The outfits and hair were cartoonish, the music was almost entirely embarrassing soft rock, and it was much more materialistic. You could argue that the latter point can be matched today, but having a Walkman in the 80s put you above lesser mortals. These days, everyone has an iPod, or a smartphone.

Most of the humour is driven by making fun of this excess, and the change in tastes, such as Bateman gushing about Phil Collins and Whitney Houston, who he seems to think is a sophisticated jazz singer. Jokes from hindsight. If you were to set the film today, who would be your prime targets? Justin Bieber? (Because God knows we don't have enough "bieber is a lesbian lolololol" jokes circulating the Internet) Pitbull? Ke$ha? They seem topical, but they're going to date quickly. Something the original was aware of.

"I think 'Tik Tok' is Kesha's undisputed masterpiece. It's a mediation on time, and how fleeting it flies when you're having fun. But it's also about rebelling against time, like how she adores Mick Jagger, a man well-past his physical prime, and that "the party don't stop" even when time runs out. Chantelle, on your knees, I left the hanger somewhere."

(Lionsgate, you can have that one. All I ask for in return is $10,000.)

2) Who is your lead battling against?

Prior to American Psycho, Christian Bale was known only to critics for his role as Jim in Empire of the Sun when he was 13. He starred in a few things in between, like Pocahontas, but it looked like he was fading out of critics' interests. And then this happened. Bale saw the dark streak of humour in the book, and supposedly got the role because no other candidate did. He and director Mary Barron were in hysterics during filming. He could have been just another once-promising child actor gone into the ether, but here he demanded people pay attention.

No, scratch that. He strolled into their houses, shook their hands, and cracked open a bottle of Chardonnay, then loudly called for attention.

Bale got the inspiration for Bateman's overall demeanour by watching Tom Cruise on a talk show, finding all of his mannerisms - the jokes, the smile - to be completely artificial, and marvelled at how hollow he seemed. This is replicated brilliantly by Bale, who plays Patrick Bateman as so smooth and charismatic he appears empty. As he himself puts it: 

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there.

Bale's performance was revelatory and downright pitch-perfect. He was terrifying, charming and, crucially, hilarious. The scene where he bangs two prostitutes while admiring his muscles to the tune of Phil Collins' "Sussudio" is a grotesquely funny bit of comedy. Who can you cast to top that? Josh Hammer? Garrett Hedlund? Andrew Garfield? They're all fine actors but however great they are, they're going to be in Bale's shadow, and it will just invite more unfavourable comparisons.


3) Remember the last time you tried to follow up on the original?

A lot of you might not know, but there was a direct-to-video sequel called American Psycho 2: All-American Girl. It wasn't based on any of Ellis' books, and starred Mila Kunis and William Shatner.

We do not talk about this.


4) What are you hoping to achieve from this?

I've had a theory that film studios release bad sequels or remakes of good movies so the original looks even better by comparison. Because otherwise stuff like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, a prequel that detailed the origins of Leatherface and his family of inbred cannibal hicks which apparently we all wanted to know, has no reason to exist.

This is a problem I have with the upcoming Akira remake - what do you get out of this? Common sense would dictate it would be easier to just re-release the original, with remastered sound and image. A friend of mine already mentioned my idea, but it still stands. Put it out for a limited time, meaning tickets are higher in demand, and then follow it up with a DVD/Blu-Ray/digital release a few weeks later. It will save you money. Let's think about the logistics:

You're willing to spend somewhere between $30-50 million, hiring a completely new cast, crew, writer and producers, to make a film that will inevitably end up third in the box office on an off weekend before tailing off into obscurity, and get inevitably compared to the original film before being confined to the back shelves of HMV's horror section. This is what you're going to spend your money on.

Are you sure this is a smart decision?

Stop American Censorship

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The American Akira is somehow getting worse

So Acting Auditions, a website that lists casting calls for major Hollywood features, has announced one such call for extras to star in the upcoming remake of Akira, which is already doomed to die unmourned and unloved except by Warner Bros who are that desperate to get something out of development hell. Why is this significant? Well, they've announced the plot in a nutshell.

It honestly feels like they're trying to make it purposely bad to prove a point to Warner Bros, because otherwise I have to accept the possibility they're serious. And that's far too terrifying a possibility to consider. Here it is:

Kaneda (Garret Hedlund) is a bar owner in Neo-Manhattan who is stunned when his brother, Tetsuo, is abducted by government agents led by The Colonel (Ken Watanabe). Desperate to get his brother back, Kaneda agrees to join with Ky Reed (Kristen Stewart) and her underground movement who are intent on revealing to the world what truly happened to New York City thirty years ago when it was destroyed. Kaneda believes their theories to be ludicrous but after finding his brother again, is shocked when he displays telekinetic powers. Ky believes Tetsuo is headed to release a young boy, Akira, who has taken control of Tetsuo's mind. Kaneda clashes with The Colonel's troops on his way to stop Tetsuo from releasing Akira but arrives too late. Akira soon emerges from his prison courtesy of Tetsuo as Kaneda races in to save his brother bfore Akira once again destroys Manhattan island, as he did thirty years ago.

...

...

Triumph of the Will: A Green Lantern Review (may contain spoilers)

Another poster better than the film deserves, by James White.

Well, by my reckoning I'm about six or seven months late to the party with this one. This film has had the stench of death about it for quite some time. Not just the reviews, which could charitably be described as unkind, but the lead-up to it - there was the muted reaction to the first reveal of Ryan Reynolds' CGI sausage-man costume, then a lack of anything noteworthy at the Comic-Con preview, and the report that Warner Bros had spent $9m fixing up the special effects in post-production, on top of the film already having something like 1300 visual effects shots (according to director Martin Campbell). Several effects studios were working overtime on it until the film's release, and this has, on balance, not turned out well (see the big fat bomb Last Action Hero).

2011 would see the end of the Harry Potter franchise, meaning Warner Bros needed to find a new franchise they could print money with. DC Comics, a new subsidiary of Time Warner, also needed more exposure for their label, as so far they've been understated in the comic book movie business as of late. Oh sure, they had The Dark Knight grossing $1bn, but for every one major success, they had box office disappointments like Superman Returns and Watchmen. And with Marvel quickly dominating the superhero film field with their big tied-in universe, DC chose to throw Green Lantern in as their best bet. There was a lot riding on this film, so it came as a real shame that the resulting film was not very good.

Who Wants to Live Forever? An Immortals Review (may contain spoilers)

Boys keep swingin'.

A while back, film critic Mark Kermode wrote an article for The Guardian - well, I say article, it was really an extended extract from the chapter of his latest book The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex (which I recommend by the way - end shameless plug) - about how blockbusters, due to their formulaic nature, could in fact have the most potential to be experimental in all of film. After all, if a summer blockbuster is advertised well enough or heavily enough, then people will turn up in their millions to watch it, regardless of whether they like it or not, or the subject matter. They think "Oh, that looks good/interesting/like a good way to stave off suicide for a few hours" and turn up. Last year we had Inception, a film set largely within the minds and dreams of its protagonists, and this year gave us Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which focused the action on a non-human main character and was told mostly without dialogue. Both of these films sound like the sort of thing you'd see in arthouse cinemas, and yet both grossed over $300,000,000 each.

So if there's a possible new fertile ground for experimentation, the blockbuster could well be that. Granted, we live in a world where films like Zookeeper and Jack & Jill exist, so we'll still have to wade through the crap to get to the gold, but with today's film Immortals, released on the same day as Jack & Jill and will hopefully crush it like a bug at the box office, we see a film that tries a different stylistic approach to blockbusters. And while that works, the film itself is...oh, how do I put it? Um...

Now, when I say stupid, I don't mean that in a bad way necessarily. Commando is stupid. Crank is stupid. Warrior King/Tom-Yum-Goong is stupid. And I enjoy all of those films because they take their stupidity in stride and pull out some amazing set pieces. Warrior King's famous one-shot fight scene, for instance, or Arnold Schwarzenegger acting as a one-man army corps in the climactic action scene of Commando. Immortals, however, isn't that glorious. Oh it's glorious to look at, but its pacing is so slow, the characters so blank, and the plot so nonsensical and, well, stupid, all it really offers in the world of macho action films is a pretty face. Just a shame that it plays things completely straight-faced and serious.

Veni Vidi Vici: A V for Vendetta Review (contains spoilers)

Found at PosterGeek.

So Winchester Film Society decided to show V for Vendetta tonight as part of their Comic Book Month - showing film adaptations of comics and superhero stories. Next week I have the pleasure of Green Lantern and watching Ryan Reynolds do nothing heroic or likeable for 90 minutes, but for now let's focus on a film that's good. I have watched this film a few times already, have it on Blu-Ray, and it still holds up, even when compared to the superior source material; however, there are some problems with it that need to be addressed.

Motherfuckery

For this entry I'm going to get up on my soapbox for a bit. I apologise, but frankly this behaviour needs to be accounted for.

This is an article published in the Church of England Newspaper. I don't know whether this actually represents the Church's views, or is independent from it, but as you'll notice, the author - Alan Craig - compares several leading gay rights activists to Nazis. Yes, you are reading this correctly; indeed, he makes a lot of comparisons between LGBT people trying to get equal rights in their country with Hitler's lebensraum campaign. We get references to the Sudetenland and everything!

As Nazi analogies go, it's at least dedicated. That still doesn't stop it from being hilariously and horribly wrong, but you can't deny Craig loves a metaphor.

Now, the Church of England is the official Christian church of the UK, and is part of the world's largest religion. If you are in that secure a position of power, you are in no way entitled to complain that a minority is getting on your nerves and "threatening your religious freedom". You have to take your lumps with a grin. I say this with the authority of a Caucasian, heterosexual middle-class male, the core demographic for taking lumps with a grin. This whole article smacks of hysterical self-pity, and it's important to note it's published at a time where the government is considering legalising gay marriage.

It's around the time of this, a major social change, that the fearful and the paranoid, afraid that they'll be rendered second-class citizens and forced to groom unicorns for their new gay overlords, launch out an assault of muck-spreading in a sort of desperate last-minute grunt and spew. Many have claimed that this will - in the words of Andrea Williams, head of the Christian concern organisation - "see churchmen...being dragged through the courts for refusing to marry homosexuals and sanction their behaviour". Even though the government has made it clear that they will not force church ministers to marry gay couples. 

And you know what? They have the right to do so. You don't have to do anything against your faith, so long as you don't hurt anybody. One vicar who declines to marry a gay couple won't be the be-all end-all for two men or two women wanting to be married; they'll just go find another one. But this irrational fear of LGBT individuals means that the truth gets distorted. It's blurred in an attempt to court public behaviour. And hiding the truth, distorting the truth, outright lying - that can't pass.

This article was brought to my attention over Twitter by Patrick Strudwick, a gay rights activist who particularly protests gay conversion therapy, or "praying the gay away" as it's sometimes known. Leaving aside the ethical dilemma of involving religion in a clinical process, conversion has been proven to not work, being little more than repression, and indeed, many people undergoing this feel worse than when they started, particularly since homosexuality hasn't been considered a psychiatric disorder since 1973. You might as well get therapy to sort out your eye colour. Strudwick notably infiltrated a therapy group that was "curing" men of homosexual desires, and although it was for journalistic purposes, he still found himself questioning why he found men attractive: "The therapists planted doubt and worry where there was none".

So I want you all to do a favour for your good ol' pal Jack. I want you to go to that article (skip past any comments not made my Adrian or the admin, it will just make you cry) and leave comments refuting his claims. Be civil - don't act rude or hateful in the comments, that's what we have the Daily Mail for. Feel free to mention your sexuality or your beliefs if you so wish. Just let Alan Craig know this kind of behaviour is simply not on.

Going off to Winchester and waiting for everything to blow over

Feels like home already.

Oh blimey I have been neglecting this, haven't I? I guess that review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes never fell through (short version: it's great, go see it on DVD) and since my rant on the big steaming turd that was Transformers: Dark of the Moon, things have been pretty quiet. So to the attention of all one of you who still read this, time for a quick catch-up, or as quick as I can make it since this is a lot of ground to cover.

I have been a student of the University of Winchester for nearly seven weeks now, and I've been studying Creative Writing and Film Studies for slightly less than that. It's been going well so far - my flatmates have all been kind, funny, brilliant people, and the people on my course (well, both of them) are dedicated, like-minded and charming. You don't know how weird it is to find someone on your course who's as big a soundtrack geek as I am, or to be able to go down the stairs to chat about A Clockwork Orange or David Mamet - just knowing people who pick up my geeky references is amazing in and of itself.

This is my friend Phil. As you can tell, he makes a very good Doctor, and he says more morally bankrupt things than I do. It's good to have him around.

The courses themselves have been going swimmingly, although I find myself preferring Creative Writing just a tad more. Maybe it's because we're creating something new every week - in both Fictional Writing and Scriptwriting I have written about, in no particular order: 

• A man becoming increasingly cyberized by his mobile phone
• The galaxy's largest library
• A miniature dog that considers itself some sort of canine god
• Living in a world that just missed the apocalypse
• A prequel to Jaws following Quint's days aboard the USS Indianapolis
• Death being predetermined and mandated by the government

And I've read a lot of excellent short stories, so that's all been fun. I do have problems with Scriptwriting tutors constantly talking about the three-act structure, though. Film Critic Hulk has talked about this in great detail already, so I won't repeat too much, but when writing a script, all the three-act structure is, is a summary of a story. It doesn't help you write a story, and it's certainly not useful when writing characters, since so many screenwriters consider an act break the point where one act ends and another begins, regardless of what the little people you control in your story actually do...but I digress. I can work around this.

This isn't to say I'm not enjoying Film Studies, because I am; all of the films I've seen I've liked, with the exception of La Haine (seriously, I've seen this fucking film so many times I now have a valid reason to shoot the director. Aside from him directing Gothika), and I enjoy being challenged, being stuck for words, having to think in new ways. The problem is my tutor Imruh's lectures.

Now Imruh is clearly an intelligent man. He has a mind like a steel trap, he forces you to think about film in a new way, and he knows a lot about the subject. But dear God in heaven, his seminars are painfully boring. He reads aloud from a pre-written script, and I think it might be from a thesis because it contains some complex technical vocabulary, not just in cinema but in philosophy, language and sociology. Combine that with dull PowerPoint presentations with thick detailed quotes and not a lot of time to get them down in, and you get me playing Bejewelled Blitz on my iPod to make it pass. The weird thing is that he's much more engaging in a seminar, when he doesn't have a script, and I don't get why he doesn't just go with that.

Seriously, this fucking game plays itself.

Speaking of iPods, if you have ever said at some point in your lives that Apple is simpler and more user-friendly than Windows, I WILL FIGHT YOU ON THE SIDE OF THE STREET. It's like ever since Steve Jobs' untimely demise the bigwigs of Apple have suddenly realised that without him, then what they thought their beloved Midas had turned to gold was rapidly turning into rusty tin. iTunes 10.5 was dropped on us a month ago and it is crippled. I have never had this much of a problem with any piece of software before on my computer. Don't get me wrong, iTunes has always been skull-splittingly horrible, but it worked. It started up. It barely managed to do so, but it was there. 10.5 has honestly made me want to tear my hair out and form it into a noose with which I can strangle every single Apple employee.

It all started when I decided to put some music on my iPod. The device wasn't being recognised in iTunes, so I figured it needed a software update. It wasn't working out, so I decided to uninstall the program, then reinstall the new one. Uninstalling was an uphill battle already, since there was one component that refused to budge (oh yeah, and Apple asks, nay demands, you uninstall everything in a specific order or else "who knows what might happen? Not us, shithead, that's your problem"), and I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to get rid of that.

That done, I re-downloaded but, wonder of wonders, iTunes just didn't feel like doing it. Due to some unspecified flaw, either in my laptop or in the program (more likely the latter, considering the amount of Windows 7 users also complaining about it), it would always roll back several times and when it did finish, iTunes wouldn't open. I have spent hours and hours trying to find a solution and there has to be something wrong with my laptop, because otherwise it should be working fine. Said laptop has ventilation problems anyway, so I've asked for a fresh one for Christmas. I could get it fixed, but to solve the overheating, I would have to pay £45 and wait ten days while they disassemble everything.

Click for animation. Prince does not approve.

Yeah, fuck that noise.

It's not as bad as it could be. I still have my iPod, which I just need to keep charged; I can buy music and comics off of there, and there's always Spotify. Even if I do have to convert all my iTunes stuff into standard MP3's, which is still joyless work. I just need to wait until Christmas before I can use in on a computer proper. I'll probably get a new iPod at some point in the next month anyway; this one has become more sluggish and the screen has cracked (not much, thankfully), and all new ones come with iOS5 already on there. I'll just have to save up my birthday money.

Oh yeah, it's my birthday in two days. I've been promised/threatened with a week long birthday by my flatmate Becci. Gosh, time has gone quickly.

Sound and Fury: A Transformers Review (contains spoilers)

Poster by Jesse Philips. It's better than the film deserves.

There are several common accusations against critics of the Transformers films: "What do you want story for, granddad? Not every film has to be Citizen Kane, what were you expecting from a film based off 80's toys? Can't you just switch your brain off and enjoy the spectacle?" While this is such a broad sweeping statement it could be a daisy-cutter, these hypothetical voices have a point. You can't judge a silly action film by the all-time classics; no, you judge it by other silly action films that sit at the top of the genre, like Rambo, or Commando, or the delightfully stupid Crank series, or its nearest rival the G.I. Joe movie. My standards in this field are low, provided they can at least be consistently entertaining, and having sat through Transformers: Dark of the Moon, it manages to fall short even at that.

The Visage Volume

Poster by the fantastic Olly Moss.

[More old stuff.]

Here's a little history lesson about Facebook. Firstly, the term "Facebook" is older than you think. The former private school of founder Mark Zuckerberg had a student directory, which worked like a yearbook - names with a face above it. Students took to calling it the Face Book; similarly, in the opening scene, the various houses of Harvard have their own Face Books. Facebook itself began in 2003 as Facemash, where Zuckerberg hacked private student IDs to get girls' photos that he would then email to classmates to rate in terms of appearance.

Yes, the world's most popular social networking website started out as a Hot or Not competition. We've come so far.

Robber Baron Effect

[More old stuff. I kinda like this though, if only because it truly states my political beliefs. Enjoy!]

Every so often in fiction, you get the villain whose main weapon isn't a gun or sword or giant ray that turns things into butter. It's a villain who happens to be in charge of an entire country. Harder to attain than any Ultima Weapon, but it is worth the effort. You have an entire depot of nuclear weapons and you don't even need to go through all the effort to build them; let some poor prole catch radiation sickness, don't worry your pretty little head. Also, play your cards right and your country can become a major economic force, so if someone does try and destabilise it, the global economy tanks like the Hindenburg. And, if you're charismatic enough, then you have millions ready to fight and die for you, and who will gladly vote anything you put through regardless of how evil you are.

Which brings me to the main point. I've noticed, and I'm not the only one to have noticed, that within comic books in particular, people have the habit of electing unambiguously evil bastards to office. In the DC Universe, there was a story-arc actually called "President Evil" that saw America hail to their new chief, Lex Luthor. Yes, I'm serious. They elected a bald, sociopathic evil genius with megalomania, whose defining goal in life is to kill Superman, who's basically the American dream in fucking motion. A guy who gave thousands of ordinary people superpowers and then took them away, killing the majority of them plus countless innocent bystanders, all just to test someone he had a hunch was a repowered Superman.

In Promethea by Alan Moore, the possessed Mayor clearly has Malcolm Tucker on his side because he promises to bring "a new era of blackness" to the city and this clearly hasn't affected his approval rating. If anything, it's improved it, since before he was schizophrenic and involved in a sex scandal. (Politicians, take note: mental disorders are a way out of everything.) Video games are no exception to this either; Sorceress Edea in Final Fantasy VIII, in her opening speech, insults and ridicules her people, even going so far as to kill the former president who happens to be standing by, and the crowd go nuts. Not with fear, but with excitement. They throw a fucking parade for her complete with guys doing the Thriller dance. And now we have David Cameron, an Auton assassin in disguise, as Prime Minister. Oh, and that other guy. His pasty white manservant, Niclegg.

Look into his eyes. His dead, soulless eyes...

It occurs to me, based on a very thin observation of funny books, badly-written Japanese role-playing games and a guy I only think is evil, that people seem to like being run by assholes. Allow me to bring out my pretentious tosser cap out and refer you to a quote by C.S. Lewis: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

This "robber baron effect" can be summarised thus: it's better to have someone who is obviously going to dick you over than someone who wants you safe as a ruler, because even supervillains take a break once in a while. Once someone's stolen your lunch money, at least they'll stop; but then you get the fussy schoolmarms who buy you lunch and then cut it up into safe non-chokeable pieces, and then feed them to you one at a time, having deprived of all flavour because it might get you excited and we don't want you running around, do we? You might hurt yourself. Forget what I said about Cameron being in the same league as Luthor; he wants to fix the country. And in doing so, we may find ourselves trapped under an Orwellian regime. New government would mean taking down the old policies, but Obama's been in the White House for a year now and he's only just closed Guantanamo Bay. I'd prefer living under someone who'll toy with me then stop due to boredom rather than a little girl constantly hugging me and cutting off my windpipe.

Hence why I'll be stepping forward for a future General Election as a Candidate for the Rainbows and Smiles Party (RSP) under the name Lord Nemesis, the Angel of the Abyss, the Beast That Is Named Dragon, Night-Lord and Prince of Lies. My first call of action is to ransack Australia, take everything that might be of use, and then depopulate the place. I want to put my stuff in there. Then we take Hong Kong back, and from there then China; they'll rule the world some day, so we might as well get my hands on it now before they suddenly realise this. Then we'll take Ireland, so I can put more of my stuff in there. Then we'll take America's lunchmoney and stuff them in the locker, see how they like it, and their land shall be ours again. Finally, a lucky 90% of the population will be deported to Mars to try and make it hospitable so my Empire can expand to there and I can declare myself King Crimson of the Principality of Earth and Cydonia. Some of you may die - actually, let's be honest, the majority of you will die, but that's where overpopulation comes in handy - but it'll be a willing sacrifice so that I may live in comfort. The rest will be mining for gold in the Australian Outback. I know there's gold there, and I'm prepared to chuck many innocent lives at it to prove it.

And then we'll all live in a utopian society. If you're very, very good.

Failing that, I'm backing Cthulhu, Lord of R'lyeh, for President 2012.

Pilgrimage

Poster by Martin Ansin.

[This is an old review I did of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World I posted on Facebook that I've decided to bring over here in case some enterprising soul stumbles upon this and wants to give me money. I somehow doubt this will happen.]

If you can imagine Mario bouncing on your head thinking he'd get a coin out of the deal, then getting rushed by the cast of Final Fantasies I-VI nipping off for some Potions at the local apothecary and running away with the Triforce from a very pissed off Link, all while downing an entire Costa's worth of caffeine and charging through the set of the 1960's Batman television series, you'd get an experience that roughly equates to seeing Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Chances are you've never seen anything else quite like this before in a film; it's a hyper-kinetic rollercoaster through the other side of the arcade screen that proudly wears its geek colours on its sleeve.

Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), who despite what his name might suggest is not a religious traveler from Glasgow, but rather a 22-year old slacker-cum-hipster, and bassist in the garage band Sex Bob-Omb (as in Super Mario Bros. 2), is something of a heartbreaker, getting into relationships quickly which typically end not long after. He ends up meeting his match in the form of the beautiful and mysterious Amazon delivery girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who operates on the Spice Girls Wannabe Principle: if you want to be her lover, you've got to get past her seven Evil Exes.

OK, it's not like that song at all, but shut up, I'm making a joke here.

Well, this is new.

Yeah, I have a Blogger account now. I'll probably use this later at some point, it's a damned sight nicer than Tumblr.