Working Man's Blues

 I’ve been job hunting.
 As I slunk through the long grass of unemployment, my job rifle in hand, the pith helmet of determination on my head, and the khaki shorts of an over-stretched metaphor just about covering my ass, I began to realise why jobs are an endangered species.
 See which of these adverts appeals more to you:





                                            Would YOU Like To Bother People At Home?!
             Due to the constant, unsustainable growth of the “annoy strangers for a pittance” industry,
    you too can be hired for an exciting job ringing people around dinner time and begging for their money.
                        Sure, people are free to give money to charity whenever they so choose,
 but here at Needless Middleman Twat we like to pay clueless student hippy mercenaries to go cap-in-hand to the already stretched working classes and guilt them into donating money to whatever cause we’re being
                                                              sponsored by this month.
If you think you have what it takes to make nuisance phone calls for a living, this could be the job for you!














                                                                         Wanted: 
                                                           Nanobot Polisher (2nd Class)


Candidate will have:

At least 25 years’ experience
Fluent Grasp of Klingon
Valid Yugoslavian Passport
Master’s Degree in Prehistoric Icthyology

Nobel Prize an Advantage.

No over 30’s.

YMCA. TTFN. LMFAO.



 Those are your basic options in a modern job market; either weirdly specific jobs or call centre work.
 This is why there’s a labour crisis. Actual jobs don’t really exist anymore. Karl Marx said that eventually, technology would reach the stage where human beings could retire and live a life of leisure and philosophy. Instead, technology has replaced a chunk of the workforce who are now obsolete and baffled.
 One of the employment agencies I visited was empty. Literally, empty. There were job listings on the windows, and if you wanted to inquire about any of them, you had to walk to a speakerphone on the wall and press the corresponding number for the job you were inquiring about.
 Inside, I could see rows of empty desks.
 There’s not even work finding people work anymore, unless you’re a speakerphone.
 There used to be real jobs, the kind that would give you a last name. Coopers, Drapers, Smiths, Saxe-Coburgs. Alright, maybe not the last one.
 The fact that nobody is really doing anything that could be called a proper job these days makes it extremely hard to find a proper job.
 It’s the nursery rhymes I feel sorry for; Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub.
 It used to be a butcher, a baker and a candlestick maker.
 Who’s in the barrel now? Two IT consultants and some cunt from Starbucks.



[NB: Didn't mean any offence to the several cunts I know who work in Starbucks.]

Based on the Best Selling Something-or-Other.

 The movie adaptation of this article will be a rom-com...

 Here’s a fun fact about me: I hate James Patterson.
 I hate him with the sort of irrational ire that he probably doesn’t deserve, especially as I’ve never read his books. Instead, I’ve judged all of them by the cover. (I also watch pots until they boil and keep all my birds in a bush rather than in my hand, but that’s irrelevant.)
 Every time I’ve ever looked at a Patterson book, one thing strikes me: The insultingly small lettering listing a co-author.
 This isn’t a once-in-a-while thing, either. Pretty much every Patterson novel you see in supermarkets or airports or classic literature sections - but realistically just in supermarkets and airports - has a co-author listed in small letters.
 That, for me, marks Patterson out as a lazy, unimaginative hack. The sort of man who, judging by his legion of collaborators, couldn’t write a check without calling for backup.
 I don’t have much love for his co-authors, either. If - as I suspect - they’re doing most of the heavy lifting and allowing some limited input from a big name to boost their sales, they’re a bunch of cowards at best, so unsure of their own abilities that they need propping up by one of the bigger boys. At worst, they’re greedy prostitutes who will sell out their own work for a bigger slice.
 So yeah, I don’t like Patterson, because of what he does, and a lot of what I read about his books online doesn’t make me want to give him a second chance. Words like “predictable”, “lazy” and “recycled” are thrown around quite often.
 There is one series of books that Patterson apparently wrote without help from a grownup: His flagship “Alex Cross” series.
 Thinking about it, I tried to read an Alex Cross novel once, because the trailers for those Morgan Freeman movies based on them looked pretty good. As it was, the book was dull and featured laughably cartoonish characters, so I gave up after the first few pages. That says a lot, too, ‘cause I’ve read some utter shite over the years.
 As mentioned, the “Cross” novels were filmed a few years back with Morgan Freeman as the lead, and now they’re at it again.
 Predictably, I wasn’t that interested in the whole thing, but fans were aghast. The casting was wrong, the plot was nothing to do with the source material, etc etc.
 I took a look, and the plot of the new, imaginatively titled movie (“Alex Cross”) is that Cross, a police profiler who’s defining characteristic is “being black,” has to stop a serial killer played by the boring doctor from “Lost.”
 Well, yeah, that doesn’t seem like a great idea. Who the hell is going to be scared of the- HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THE DOCTOR FROM LOST!!!

 Seriously, Matthew Fox has got into the sort of shape for this movie that sports writers long since ran out of superlatives to describe. Back in the day, someone with low body fat was described as “ripped,” until that was decided to be insufficient, so the word “shredded” came about.
 Based on those pictures, Matthew Fox has skipped those steps and gone straight to… shit, I don’t know, “rillette” ?! Either way, he makes for a pretty scary adversary. We’d better have someone playing Alex Cross who can stand up to Fox’s terrifying physicality.

 Oh.

Shit.

 So yeah, with Tyler Perry, best described as “cuddly,” this is looking like a bit of a mis-match. Based on those images, the only way Matthew Fox is going to lose that fight is if the cops show up and arrest him for beating up another bus driver.
 The recent trailer didn’t do anyone any favours, as it showed Fox looking believably like a soulless, lightning fast killing machine and Tyler Perry looking like a fat bloke.
 I shouldn’t care, but frustratingly, I do.
 It’s not that someone’s making a bad job of filming a book I don’t like; much like the whole “co-author” thing, what makes me so angry is the principle involved.
 A quick scan on IMDb informs me that this movie uses very little except character names and some sparse details from the actual “Cross” novels.
 Brad Pitt is in the middle of doing the same thing. Plot synopses for his upcoming “World War Z”, based on the excellent book of the same name, show that the plot of the movie basically ignores the source material.
 This could be why “World War Z” is looking at an eye-watering seven weeks of re-shoots. I have a bet with some friends of mine that I could make an accurate, full length “World War Z” adaptation with a cam-corder faster than Brad Pitt can do it with an entire film crew.
 Meanwhile, Lee Child’s books are coming to the screen. I’m a big Child fan, and I’d share my views on the casting, except that me shrieking and punching the keyboard for fifteen minutes doesn’t make for interesting reading.
 The obvious question, in the face of Hollywood’s constant pillaging of source material, is “why bother?” Why are movie studios bothering to pay for the “Alex Cross/World War Z/Jack Reacher” brand if they’re just going to make it into an unrelated and generic cop/zombie/arsehole movie?
 Well, the key word there is “brand.” Not everyone is following the movie business as closely as geeks like me. (Some people, it’s rumoured, even have lives.)
 They’ll see a poster for “World War Z” and, with any luck, remember it as a good book and pay to see it on screen. It doesn’t matter that what’s on screen bears little resemblance to the book, because again, the operative word is “pay.” Once you’ve got your ticket, the movie studios don’t give a shit.
 That’s why, weirdly, I’m on the side of James Patterson fans. Hollywood needs to respect source material, even if that material sucks.
 Otherwise, they’ll end up with fan boycotts that will screw the movie’s chances even harder than their meddling.

Hot Schoolgirl Action!

 Why more condoms might not be the answer.

 Ahhh, teenage sex. How fondly I remember not having very much of it at all.

 The same can’t be said for students in Massachusetts, who are apparently at it like Kim Catrall on rabbit hormones.

 According to the Guardian, 17 young girls at a single school have found themselves in a family way after entering into a “pregnancy pact” with each other, whereby they would each get knocked up and then everyone involved would raise the resultant babies as a group.

 Obviously, it’s an idea so stupid that it frightened scientists by showing up on the Richter scale,* but the resulting furore, at least as reported in the Guardian piece, seemed woefully misguided.

 As usual, everyone is kicking off about contraception, and, as with pretty much every problem this decade, it seems fair to blame George Bush.

 (I refer to George W. Bush, although, as this is about not using contraception, the blame can also be placed on his old man.)

 The Bush administration’s policy on teenage sex (“don’t have it”) was always a little optimistic. I think all males can agree that “American Pie” was a more honest portrayal of teen sexuality than anything the Christian abstinence programmes ever came up with. Teenagers have literally spent years waiting for the chance to fuck something, and smart contraception advice understands that, and goes on to throw condoms at people like rice at a wedding.

 The authorities in the heavily Catholic area of Gloucester, Massachusetts, however, have a standing policy that no contraceptives shall be given to any kids unless their parents sign off on it.

 Personally, I’d rather be abstinent than ask my mother for a condom, but then again that’s not a choice I have to face. These kids, on the other hand, do.

 So the draconian, Republican-endorsed sex education policy, continued by a tremulous, non-combative Obama administration, is already likely to cause a lot of teen pregnancies. This isn’t news. It's also, from what I can see, not the real issue, here.

 At first, what seemed to be the issue was good old fashioned sexism.

 These girls – who are all middle class and white, from what we’re told – don’t have any aspirations except to be incubators. That’s as far as they’ve got with their thinking. The most they can be in life is a fleshy oven.

 I don’t know what it’s like to be in the head of a teenage girl. I spent highschool trying to get into any part of a teenage girl without success. Still, I can’t fathom the lack of ambition at play, here. None of these girls wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or an astronaut or even a fucking waitress. They just plumped for “teen mom” as a job, and that was that.

 I said the problem “seemed” to be sexism, because once you realise that these girls have given up being anything except cattle, you end up realising it’s not about gender.

 It’s about age.

 Sure, these girls gave up on having careers (or at least made it prohibitively difficult for themselves) but who were the guys knocking them up? What were their ambitions? A hunch tells me, they weren’t shooting for the stars, either.

 In a world where unemployment and recession feel like the paving stones of the endless road ahead, why are we surprised that kids don’t want to make anything of their lives? Degrees are becoming devalued to the point of worthlessness, job security is a quaint notion from history and the one percent are too busy laughing at the rest of us to even notice.

 I can see a worrying spin on this story, too. Someone, somewhere is going to play the inverse racism card and claim that American society is so busy pandering to minorities and teaching them to achieve their goals, that these poor white children were left out and settled for early motherhood. So let’s stamp that out right now: The fact that the ethnic background of these girls keeps getting mentioned is depressing proof that American society is still segregated along racial divides. The colour of these kids shouldn’t matter. This is everything to do with generations and nothing to do with race.

 It’s not my place to tell anyone in New England their business – God knows nobody listens to me in normal England, let alone the sequel – but so much of this story screams of a culture that’s utterly broken. I don’t just mean American culture, although that whole nation has been going downhill ever since they cancelled “Arrested Development.” The world as a whole has gotten so shitty that kids in the first world are aspiring to be teen mothers because they don’t see that they can be anything else.

 These young girls didn’t need lecturing, or Jesus, or even the pill.

 They just needed to feel like society had a place for them.

 And that’s something even adults are struggling with, these days.

*Japanese scientists were scared when they thought it was an earthquake, and then so excited that they spunked themselves to death when they heard the part about schoolgirls having sex.

Intelligent Design.

Encouraged in Deep South schools, ignored in sporting gear.

 It's a very sporty year, this year.
 As I type this, England has just crashed out of another international tournament, and cynics like me have to pretend to be surprised or give a toss. (Hint to the irate gentleman with the tattoos and the rottweiler: England aren't a very good international team, it's why they haven't won any tournaments in fifty years.)
 With the European cup out of the way, it's just Wimbledon to go, and then on to the Olympics, my thoughts on which are a matter of public record.
 I'd bitch about it from my armchair, except it's a sporty year for me, too. (Also, who the fuck uses a computer from an armchair?!)
 I'm begrudgingly in training for an endurance race in November, and as such I'm running every day, lifting weights, drinking godawful concoctions with exciting names, and generally overdoing it.
 By the end of October, I intend to be able to run to the moon and back, and have arms the size of legs, and legs the size of... several... legs.
 Alright, I'm training my body, not my simile generating ability.
 Still, it would all be a lot more pleasant if the myriad companies that make sporting gear would cut us some slack and stop being shit.
 Today, I realised that the Adidas tracksuit bottoms I was wearing had zips around the ankles, but not on the pockets.
 I'm not saying Adidas uses sweatshop labour, but when their R&D guys are more worried about losing feet than pocket contents, you have to wonder what kind of working conditions are at play, here.
 Simillarly, it turns out that I own several pairs of running shoes that are less comfortable to run in than, say, a badger snare.
 It's the same with protein shakes. I can't speak for all flavours, but the chocolate ones taste like a Toblerone that's been retrieved from Tutankhamun's arse.
 The more I thought about the generally bad design of sports paraphernalia, the more I realised that nowhere else in technology is there such a gap between the designers and the intended users.
 There is a ludicrous amount of science put into workout equipment. The foam that Nike uses for it's running shoes, for example, is literally designed at the molecular level.
 Then it's worn by people who don't know what "molecular" means.
 There's a reason nobody asks athletes to design sporting gear from the ground up: They couldn't do it. They wouldn't be able to look at an item of sporting apparel and see where it could be improved.
 It's why nobody ever asked O.J. Simpson to try on gloves.
 Alright, fine, bad example.
 But the top-level athletes in the world just aren't technically minded; they're instinctive, physical people who, broadly speaking, can't elucidate the science behind fine design points.
 It's why nobody asks George Foreman to sell kitchen appli-
 ...
 Fuck it, look: If athletes were capable of designing sports gear, it would eliminate the need for eggheads to do it for them.
 As it is, the best sports equipment is extortionately priced, because it requires a team of specialists to get it to function properly.
 These same specialists don't, by and large, tend to be high-level athletes. It's all well and good when someone with a lab coat decides that an idea works, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the same idea will function in the real world.
 Like my tracksuit bottoms.
 Anybody who has ever run a long way, or hung by their ankles from a sit-up bench, or used a rowing machine, will be aware that anything in your pocket has a tendency to bounce out, be it mp3 players, change for a vending machine or, particularly irritating, the key to a locker.
 Clearly, whoever was in charge of the trouser department at Adidas* on the day my strides were invented had never done anything more strenuous than design trousers for Adidas.
 Designers aren't usually athletic, and athletes aren't usually gifted designers.
 All of which is fine.
 Really.
 I don't think there's any need for athletes to be intelligent. There's a great argument for paying them a lot less, but I don't need my athletes to be intelligent any more than I need clothing designers to be able to run marathons.
 It's just frustrating that, in this case, there isn't just a little bit more crossover. Because even the best equipment could be improved if the best users of it were inclined to think harder about the tools of their trade.


*Jesus, that sounded sexual...

Stop Pretending You're Average.

Why action movie stars don’t get action movies.

 There are two types of film in the “action” genre, broadly speaking.
 In one of them, an average (or seemingly average) man is pitted against insurmountable odds and has to overcome them through determination and brains. This is a genre that Bruce Willis flat-out owned ever since it’s greatest example, “Die Hard.” Other examples are Indiana Jones, the Bourne franchise and “Con Air.”
 Then there’s the other kind of action movie. The kind where ludicrously pumped supermen machine-gunned foreigners to pieces with their shirts off. (There’s also Steven Segal, but he’s shit.)
 The reason the genre divides so neatly is this: If you look like you could break the average human in half with a shrug of your shoulders, you’re on one side of the fence. Don’t use those same shoulders to shrug and pretend you’re “just a regular guy.”
 A friend of mine is a 6’ 3” bodybuilder. I once took him to a house party and, having rung the bell, he looked at me and said “Do you think they’ll be frightened?!”
 I would, personally, be startled at the very least to find a giant on my doorstep. I might do a double take, or raise my eyebrows, or even recoil slightly. It’s only natural.
 Case in point, when my friend arrived, there was a moment of shock; after that, nobody gave a shit. At the same time, nobody pretended he wasn’t physically imposing.
 Which brings us to the current problem: Ignoring the recent glut of superhero movies, steroidal supermen have been largely confined to history.
 We buy Chris Hemsworth as Thor, because he worked hard (chemically assisted or not, I couldn’t say, although I suspect not) and grew enormous. More important than that, he’s playing a Norse god who we, as an audience, expect to be huge.
 There is no expectation anymore for action heroes to be that massive. Indeed, Matt Damon finally killed the idea permanently in the Bourne films, by looking like a normal, fit man who could decimate an entire platoon through sheer skill.
 It was the final nail in the coffin for a genre that, ironically, given it’s pedigree, hadn’t fought back in years.
 I said it at the start, but I’ll say it again: “Die Hard” changed everything. It made people feel like an average guy could be an action hero.
 Never mind that Bruce Willis was a well-built, tough looking guy in that movie; he wasn’t a giant with 5% body fat like Arnold and Sly, and that was all it took for the public to be enthralled with a new, believable brand of ass kicker.
 Where Arnold, Sly and all their cohorts went wrong was that, uncharacteristically, they surrendered immediately instead of going on the offensive.
 Following “Die Hard”, which Stallone and Schwarzenegger both turned down*, the action movie genre shifted. This is how we ended up with “Cliffhanger”, which is basically just “Die Hard” on a mountain, and “Total Recall”, in which Arnold was supposedly just an average construction worker. (Walk past a building site sometime and see if you notice anyone built like that…) Attempts at realism were starting to make these guys look silly.
 It only got worse. As heroes became more believable, Stallone - who, let’s not forget, made his name by writing a heartfelt drama about a slow-witted, down on his luck boxer - tried to cope with the sea change by appearing in bleaker and bleaker roles, from his burned-out veteran in “Assassins” to his baffling “Get Carter” re-tread, at no point capturing his former box office glory.
 Schwarzenegger meanwhile tried to play himself down in the mediocre “Eraser” and attempted high camp - disastrously - in “Batman and Robin.”
 By the early 2000’s, it seemed like the era of the superhuman action star was over. Stallone was a joke, Schwarzenegger had moved into politics, and Van Damme - always the "other guy" - was now going straight to DVD. And to rehab just afterwards.
 We wanted our fictional special forces soldiers and assassins to look realistic; most special forces guys are small, lean, flinty men who can run marathons without breaking a sweat. They’re trained to be durable and tenacious, not to be able to bench press fire engines.
 Then it happened.
 Stallone lurched worryingly out of obscurity and convinced some idiot, somewhere, to fund another “Rocky” movie.
 Fans were aghast. What the fuck was Sylvester Stallone - at this point a has-been in his late fifties - thinking?! Who would ever spend money seeing that movie?!
 Then, Stallone went and did something doubly insane, and made a decent, engaging, worthwhile film.
 Cynics were stunned.
 In an eerie moment of deja vu, Sly then parlayed his warm, human, well-received movie into a career of blowing shit up for entertainment.
 He started with another "Rambo" film, in which his monosyllabic vet shot, gutted, and throat-crushed more people than in any other movie in history.
 Next he set his sights on“The Expendables”, which, although never troubling the intellectual critics, did at least give us a shitload of action stars, an ending in which literally everything blew up, and a sequel that promises even more of the same brand of lunacy.
 So why am I worried?
 Because Arnold and Sly, the two biggest proponents of the “hugely muscled superman” brand of action film, have never really learned.
 Arnie’s next solo effort sees him play a small town desert sheriff who is reluctantly involved in the apprehension of a drug cartel leader.
 From what we know of Arnold, does he have the acting chops to pull of an emotion as subtle as “reluctant” ?!
 Shit no.
 Arnold can barely pull off the difference between “Keira Knightley offered me a blow job” and “just stepped in a bear trap.”
 Also, nobody will be able to satisfactorily explain why the town of Buttfuck, Nevada elected a giant Austrian sex pest as sheriff. (The script gets a pass on this, as nobody ever explained why the people of California elected him governor, either.)
 After that, Arnold and Sly are teaming up again in “The Tomb,” in which Stallone is a  security expert who is framed and jailed next to Arnold’s veteran convict.
 There’s a reason why, years ago, we bought Stallone as a kind-but-slow-witted pugilist.
 It’s the exact same reason we won’t buy him as a high-tech security expert.
 Arnold, meanwhile, could only pull off that role if the veteran con in question was, in fact, a slightly wooden Austrian man.
 The problem with the two-tier nature of action films is this: We don’t WANT our steroidal giants trying to play the everyman roles, anymore than we want Matt Damon twin-wielding Uzis on top of an exploding bus.
 And sadly, as nobody seems to appreciate the dumb, cartoony appeal of old school action movies, and given the state of modern actors, we might just have to abandon the concept of invincible bodybuilders hacking miscast ethnic minorities to death next to artificial palm trees altogether.
 Otherwise, things might end up getting silly.


*So did Richard Gere, but hey, all for the best. None of those actors would have been right.

Surviving Wars: Easy If You're a Building.

 A friend of mine lamented to me the other day that nobody knows how to write anymore.

 It’s a common complaint; right now, the government appears to be in the process of realising that the nation’s youth are as so thick that GCSEs are going to need to be scrapped in favour of something easier to spell. (“O” Levels, apparently.)
 The decline of literacy and education has been discussed and fretted over ever since Shakespeare’s day, but my hyper-keen unemployment senses have picked up on something: We’re not just crap at reading, writing and arithmetic. We’re starting to lose our grip on the spoken word, too.
 Tonight I found myself watching a documentary programme on whales and dolphins, and the commentator came out with this little nugget of wisdom: The arctic ocean is the hardest place for a whale to survive.
 I’m not a biologist, but I’m pretty sure whales would have a harder time surviving in, say, the Atacama Desert, where there hasn’t been any moisture for 200 years.
 Or downtown Tokyo.
 Whales probably wouldn't even survive in Wales.
 I’d be willing to dismiss it as a moment of sloppy narration, except it comes hot on the heels of a radio advert I heard yesterday celebrating the legacy of a local theatre.
 The Bristol Hippodrome, I was reliably informed, had survived two world wars.
 Two world wars is kind of a reach. World War Two, I’ll give them. Bristol got bombed more often than George Best in World War Two, and the Hippodrome survived it.
 But World War One? Really?!
 I’m no more of a historian than I am a biologist, but I’m pretty sure there wasn’t that much heavy fighting in downtown Bristol during World War One.
 Alright, that’s a lie - there’s heavy fighting in downtown Bristol every time the pubs kick out - but unless my soon-to-be-worthless GCSE History classes lied to me, all the participants pretty much agreed to send their troops to France to get butchered. In the Great War, small theatres in the west country weren’t high on the list of targets for the German artillery.
 I myself have survived wars in Somalia, Bosnia, the Persian Gulf (twice) and some pretty serious uprisings in Libya and Egypt, not to mention OJ Simpson’s murder spree on my ninth birthday.
 I say “survived,” but I meant it in the Bristol Hippodrome sense that I was physically present in the world, but in another country at the time.

                                  [I don’t know what a hippodrome does, so I’m guessing it’s this.]

 I get that nobody is perfect, linguistically. We all make little errors here and there. But it’s troubling when actual paid broadcasters start making such sweeping, catch-all statements without any evidence of thinking them through.
 If narrators on BBC documentaries and advocates for theatres can’t use their words with reliable accuracy, we're all, like, oh my god, literally, fucked.

Carr Jacking?

 It must be frustrating, having a high income.
 I’m speculating, of course - I currently make about the same as the Helmland Province sales rep for Space Hoppers - but I can see how it would be irritating. If someone offered you a job with a salary of, say, £280,000 a year, and then found out you only got to keep £153,000 of it, you can probably see why you’d be miffed. [1]
 “Boo hoo,” say the rest of us. “A hundred and fifty grand a year is still far more than I’m on; I’m bringing in less revenue than Gary Glitter’s Myspace page.” [Yeah, there are gonna be a lot of these.]
 You have to appreciate, though, that if you had the option of a lot of money, you’d want to keep as much of it as possible. It’s human nature, for better or worse.
 So I’m not coming down too hard on Jimmy Carr. He weaselled out of his financial responsibilities in an act of moral cowardice, but in all honesty, I’d have been tempted to do the same, and I’m sure most of the people pointing the finger would have, too.
 Except, of course, the people pointing the finger are exactly the issue.
 The more I look at the story, the more it smacks of a politically motivated hatchet job.
 Carr and the rest of the crew on “10 o’Clock Live” have been openly leftist and critical of the Conservative Party since the show’s inception. Although they are, like any satirists, more than willing to mock both sides of the political divide, the show and it’s presenters have always worn their liberalism on their sleeves.
 Now, we find no less a figure than David Cameron himself charging in to attack Carr’s perceived lack of morality.
 Cameron seems a little quiet, however, about everyone who’s on his side of the political spectrum.
 In April of this year, the chancellor, George Osbourne, expressed “shock” at having found out just how rampant tax avoidance has become amongst the nation’s high earners., telling the Daily Telegraph that some of the nation’s wealthiest people paid “virtually no tax.” [2]
 This is the same Daily Telegraph, incidentally, which leans comfortably toward the right on matters of politics, and is owned by the tax-exile billionaires Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay. [3]
 Mr. Cameron’s thoughts on the Barclay’s tax exile status have as yet gone un-recorded.
 Following Mr. Osbourne’s comments, the BBC investigated his claims and, under the Freedom of Information Act, received anonymous examples of some of the tax practices at work in the UK, including one of an individual who received an income of £15 million but paid no tax at all due to charity loopholes. [4]
 With this in mind, it seems a little unfair to rake Jimmy Carr over the coals.
 Sure, he’s making a damn good living for not very much effort, but he’s hardly Scrooge McDuck. He’s an entertainer, not a trillion ire oil baron.
 I’m not entirely defending him - I make less money than Al Qaeda’s barman and I don’t try to skip out on tax - but I do think there are far more reprehensible examples of tax avoidance in this country that the PM hasn’t said a word about.
 Could it be, possibly, that Cameron had an axe to grind? That it wasn’t, as Mr. Cameron claimed, “a particularly egregious example of an avoidance scheme that seemed to me to be wrong" so much as a chance to have a pop at the most populist of his critics to get caught with his hand in the cookie jar?
 It seems fishy to me. If I were Charlie Brooker, I’d make sure all my parking tickets were paid.


[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18521468
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18434832
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_and_Frederick_Barclay
[4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18434832

"Won't Somebody PLEASE Think Of he Children?!"

Why Gaming Is No Longer a Tabloid Boogeyman…

[This is the piece that was rejected from a gaming website because it needed "tidying up." You can see the full story here.]

Like most of Geekdom, I’m still playing Skyrim. Can’t help it. The game is so ludicrously vast that it’s possible I’ll never stop.
My girlfriend made a worried comment the other day that with games this vast and immersive, it’s no wonder that childhood obesity is an issue.
She has a point. I can remember playing Sonic the Hedghog for hours when I was a child, and Sonic just ran around and jumped. At no point did he ever run into an Orcish dungeon and summon a demon to hurl flames into the faces of zombies. (Alright, one time he did, but it was years later and I’d just taken, like, ALL the drugs.) What are children doing these days, with games so complex they can eat entire days of an adult’s life?
It’s interesting to note that the media, as an entity, hasn’t really jumped on this particular scare yet. The once perpetual tabloid hysteria about video games being bad for everyone seems to have died down in recent years.
There are a number of possible reasons for this. Perhaps the people who are writing the papers are now a new generation who have played games themselves and know that nothing bad happens to your psyche.
Maybe the cultural watchdogs noticed that, twenty years after “Doom”, the younger generations had not, in fact, dismembered each other in an orgy of violent bloodletting and power ups, and perhaps games weren’t going to lead to the middle classes being chainsawed to death by angry space marines after all.
Or maybe – and this is my pet theory – games just got a little too sophisticated for the people who didn’t play them.
Hear me out: Here’s a screenshot from 1997’s “Carmageddon.”

For those of you raised on high-res graphics and 3D immersion, that’s a car running some dude over.
I don’t think it’s unfair to say that, if you didn’t know anything about games, seeing images like that would probably set off the “Games Are Bad” alarm in your mind.
If you happened to stroll past your offspring and saw that crudely rendered image of vehicular carnage entertaining him or her, you’d probably worry about what sort of hideous effect the games industry was having on the sanity of the nation’s youth.
By contrast, here’s a still from last year’s “Bulletstorm.”

That’s a much less obviously gory shot, largely because there’s a lot more going on onscreen. Whereas the limited technology of the day made the two chief graphical priorities of Carmageddon into “Car” and “Splattered Organs”, modern games like Bulletstorm have graphical considerations like shading, the time of day in-game, movement of foliage, realistic collision physics, impact trauma from bullets, and so on and so on.
If you wandered past your child playing Bulletstorm, as a non-gamer you’d probably have no idea what was going on. In much the same way that older generations initially dismissed rap music as “just a bunch of noise”, you won’t understand gaming unless you’re part of the culture. It’s just a bunch of confusing images.
From a passing glance, it might actually look like games have gotten less violent. In actual fact, for those who don’t know, Bulletstorm rewards you for killing enemies in the most sadistic ways you can think of. Given the choice between the 1997 death (run over at speed) and the 2011 alternative (knee-capped with a pistol and then kicked penis-first into a giant cactus) I think I know which I’d prefer.
So this, I believe, is why tabloid hysteria has died down. People who have never played games just don’t have a clue what’s going on anymore, let alone what they should be offended by.
Where does that leave the fat kids I mentioned at the start?
In pretty good shape, I’d say.
For many of the same reasons that non-gamers have come to ignore the industry, I’m really not sure young gamers are in any danger from the hyper-immersive likes of Skyrim.
There’s a reason I played Sonic the Hedgehog and Streets of Rage for hours when I was eight years old; they’re simple and fun.
I can honestly say that the reason I can now play Skyrim for hours is that I feel a sense of duty to complete the ridiculously convoluted quests I’m handed. Last night I saw a woman stabbed to death in a marketplace by a stranger, and now I’m on a thousand mile trek to find out why, because dammit, that woman-shaped clump of pixels on screen didn’t deserve to die like that, and I want to make whoever is responsible pay!
Similarly, one of the finest games of all time, 2010’s Uncharted 2, is a delight for older players because of the intelligent dialogue between characters, from the subtle intrigue of the double-agent characters to the sexual tension between the hero and a journalist who is searching for a Russian war criminal.
Heavy Rain, meanwhile, was scarily close to being a real-life simulator, with your character required to brush their teeth and cook dinner, but also deal with feelings of inadequacy as a parent and the threat of a serial killer who slowly drowned his victims.
All of which is a little heavy for your average pre-teen.
Kids, much like girls, just want to have fun. They aren’t looking for a digital recreation of War and Peace, they just want some mindless entertainment, same as I did. And take it from me: After three hours of bouncing a blue hedgehog around, it gets a bit samey. I can’t imagine it’ll be any different for modern children. They’ll get bored, and probably want to go and play football.
Kids aren’t the ones who’ll get fat because of immersive, plot-heavy videogames. It’s the rest of us who should be worried about that.

The Writer's Challenge

 Recently, I looked at the state of the economy, and decided that dying solvent was for pussies.
 Alright, I'm exaggerating; I was miserable in my job, and decided to quit in some vague attempt to make a living through writing.
 It's paid off, at least in the short term. I no longer spend my days looking at things in terms of injuries, as I used to. Every time I climbed a ladder to change a bulb in my old job, I'd wonder what sort of angle I'd have to fall at to hurt myself enough to get out of work without causing serious paralysis.
 I'm in a healthier place now, and I feel good about it.
 So I started looking for writing jobs. I found some unpaid work for a video game website.
 Now, unpaid, I can live with. Believe it or not, this sentence you're reading right now isn't making me any money.
 All I wanted was a chance to expose myself to a large audience, and not in the way that I used to do it. [My lawyers have reminded me not to talk about that.]
 So I volunteered for this site. I don't think that I can legally name it, but it's a site for GAMERS that claims to present a CHALLENGE, and there's a hint about that in the title of this piece.
 Also, if you need help, the initials are TGC.
 Like I say, I volunteered for the site just to get some exposure.
 Then I read the site.
 It was awful.
 I mean really, truly, horrifically shite.
 I decided to suck it up. I bit the bullet and sent them a couple of pieces, figuring that, at best, I'd be one of the better writers on the site. Kinda like being the world's tallest midget, but hey, it was something, right?
 Having submitted an article to the Editing Process (!?!) I finally got this response:

Hey man!

Your editor here.

Welcome to TGC, and great job on posting your first article so soon. However, I will have to ask you to review it again and edit it to structure paragraphs and sentences properly, as currently it looks a bit messy. Don\'t worry, nearly everybody does that with their first posts.

Let me know if you have any questions regarding this matter :-)

 That was it. No name, no specifics about what they didn't like, just that message, from someone who can't spell "don't" without fucking it up, rejecting me from a non-paying site containing worse writing than you'd see on a toilet wall in a school for dyslexic toddlers.






 I admit, my response was less than gallant:

 It's not so much a question as a statement: Hahahahaha, get fucked.
 I've read the site. Every single article is a ball-shattering car crash of typos, ruined punctuation and terminally fractured syntax.
 You people think a comma is something you slip into after a head injury. You think Apostrophes was a Greek philosopher. You think a hyphen is something you use to steal fuel from someone's tank.
 When you finally understand those jokes and want someone decent, then by all means, don't, whatever you do, call me. Or anyone else who's literate.

 Worst,

 -LH

 Maybe it was a little harsh. Certainly, I'd been drinking. But stay tuned, to see how this pans out.

Ha! Death...

[I initially pitched this article to Cracked.com, but they basically said it was mean to make fun of the dead. Whilst I respect their editorial decision, I wholeheartedly disagree ("Death smiles at us all...") so I've posted the article pretty much as it would have appeared.] 


The 5 Dumbest People Ever To Go Over Niagara Falls.



In a tragic accident last week, a Japanese student was killed at Niagara falls after her optimistic insurance policy of “balancing on a railing” failed to pan out.
Although accidents are rare at the falls, deliberate attempts to travel over the edge of the 165 foot waterslide of death are far more common than you’d hope, by which we mean “they happen at all, even once.”
Of the many documented trips over Niagara, many people miraculously survived, be it through solid planning, ingenious contraptions, or astonishing luck.
These five people all went over the edge deliberately and died, all of them spectacularly.
Whilst it’s not the standing policy of this website to mock the dead (at least not any more than the living) it’s worth saluting the Wile E. Coyote manner in which these people joined the choir invisible at Canada’s favourite landmark.
(Canada’s second favourite landmark, by the way, is that taco stand in Vancouver.)




5. “Red” Hill Jr.


The Man: There are only three ways to earn the nickname Red; being ginger, being a communist, or being a stone-cold bad-ass. William Hill Jr. was at least two of those things.


The Plan: Whilst it’s irresponsible to speculate about a person’s psychology without knowing them intimately, it’s fair to say ol’ Red had some daddy issues. Hill Sr. had been famous for making multiple trips over the falls himself, and Junior was determined to prove that he could do it, too.






“And that, son, is why you’re a pussy.”


The Aftermath: If there’s one thing that crops up time and again in stories of people who successfully made it through the liquid hell of Niagara, it’s phrases like “huge, steel barrel” and “solid oak construction.”
“Fuck that,” Hill presumably said, and attempted to make the trip in a rig he’d built himself out of “industrial inner tubes and fish nets.”
Having already used a lucky thirteen tubes to build his craft, he nicknamed it “The Thing”, because if there were two things Red Hill Jr. was bad at, it was “not tempting fate” and “imaginative names.”
Turns out, the reason nobody is catching fish with nets at Niagara falls is that they tend to get shredded under the ludicrous, hammer-of-god pressures. The reason nobody tries to float around the falls in an inner tube is that we all like living.
Hill’s body finally washed up the following morning, and was directly responsible for any future daredevil attempts being made illegal.



4. George Stathakis.


The Man: George Stathakis was a chef who wanted to use the fame his stunt would generate to launch his career as a psychic. If that doesn’t convince you of his mental stability, bear in mind that he also brought along his pet turtle for luck.


The Plan: In fairness, for a man who was so bad a psychic he couldn’t forsee his own death, and so bad a critical thinker that he thought he was psychic, George Stathakis actually constructed an extremely strong, 2,000lb barrel for himself and his turtle to ride in. On paper, it was a solid attempt.


The Aftermath: What George didn’t bank on was that the force of the falls can pin things like a big heavy barrel down pretty effectively. The huge receptacle became trapped behind the wall of water for 18 hours, which was about 12 hours more than the oxygen in the barrel could sustain Stathakis for. If you can think of a worse way to punch out than slowly suffocating inside a giant washing machine, it probably involves words like “burrowing scorpions” and “testicles.”
The pet turtle, “Sonny Boy”, survived the ordeal. History does not record if Sonny Boy went on to further daredevil stunts, so we’re forced to assume that he later jumped the Grand Canyon on a rocket bike.






Sonny Boy – Artist’s Rendering.



3. Jesse Sharp


The Man: Jesse Sharp was a 28 year old unemployed daredevil who wanted to break into the stunt business, and decided the best way to do this was to bring a little old fashioned charm to his burgeoning career. He attempted the falls in 1990, after his parents tipped off the police and scuppered his previous attempt in 1980.


The Plan: Jesse refused to wear a helmet for his stunt, because he wanted his face to be clearly visible on camera at all times.
Judging by this and other facets of his scheme, Jesse should probably have been wearing a helmet for pretty much everything. His entire plan seemed to consist of 1) Paddle a ten foot plastic kayak into the world’s most powerful waterfall, and 3) Stunt career!


The Aftermath: Somewhere around Step 2, things went bad. Although he’d thought to avoid becoming trapped under the falls like Stathakis, his method for avoiding this outcome was to also avoid wearing a life vest. His canoe made the trip with nothing worse than a minor dent, but Sharp’s body was never found.



2. George Stephens


The Man: Hailing from Bristol, England, George Stephens was known as “The Demon Barber of Bedminster” because of his roles in Tim Burton musicals.
 Nah, Stephens was a daredevil of local fame who had already completed numerous dives and parachute jumps from balloons. He was a man unafraid of falling, water, or mortal danger, so he seemed as well qualified as anyone for the job.


The Plan: George constructed a large barrel out of heavy Russian oak, and decided that practice runs and testing were for men with lesser moustaches than his.


Not pictured: Sanity.


Ignoring the advice of several people who had actually successfully navigated the falls before him, George strapped himself securely to the inside of the barrel and, for ballast, tied an anvil to his feet.


The Aftermath: Although nobody outside of ACME Corporation has ever done extensive research in the anvil/barrel department, anybody who wants to start should study George Stephens. The trip went well for at least 95% of it’s duration, right up until the barrel hit the water. At this point, the barrel, being bouyant, came to a halt, whereas the anvil continued on it’s suicidal plummet into the depths, with George still tied to it.
Eventually, the barrel broke apart and drifted ashore, with one Stephens’ arm still strapped inside.



1. Robert Overacker.


The Man: Robert Overacker was a 39-year-old Californian who had crossed the country in 1995 in order to act out the sort of plan most of us would think was awesome if we were stoned, drunk, crazy, or Robert Overacker. If you are crazy, it should come as no surprise to learn that his main motivation for the stunt was to highlight the plight of the nation’s homeless.


The Plan: Overacker’s plan was nothing if not ambitious, combining as it did, a jet ski, a death-plunge and a rocket-propelled backpack. He basically invented a real life version of the game “Just Cause 2” fifteen years ahead of time.






“Why are you flying a rocket-parachute?”
“Just ‘Cause. Haaaa hahahaaaa!”


Overacker’s idea was to ride full-tilt towards the edge of the falls, and have his rocket ‘chute deploy as he hit the rim, allowing him to drift to safety below and cement his status as World’s Awesomest Man.


The Aftermath: The trouble with big stunts is that they’re a collaborative effort. The sort of person who has the required amount of crazy to dream them up doesn’t necessarily have the technical knowhow to deal with the fine technical details that will make them work.
 Robert Overacker was the sort of man who thought in terms of jet-skis and rocket-packs, but he also appeared to be the sort of man who, when asked if he'd done his final checks, assumed "final check" was a synonym for "Jagerbombs."


The Aftermath: It’s worth noting for posterity that Overacker’s plan worked in a lot of ways. He successfully rode his jet-ski to the edge of the falls like a bat out of hell, and the rocket-chute successfully deployed.
What Overacker forgot to do was successfully attach the parachute to any part of himself.
Although his fate was as sad as it was predictable from that point onwards, it’s worth noting that Robert Overacker did something nobody else on the list managed: Left the world the most badass “final photo” in human history.






“Ffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-” –R. Overacker, 1995.

Here We Go Again

 A quick scan of Warner Bors. upcoming releases shows that the company, since it's change of leadership, is planning to remake every film you've ever fucking seen.
 Alright, I'm exaggerating, but really, only slightly.
 The upcoming slate of remakes is mind boggling, from the pointless and tacky ("Lethal Weapon", "Tarzan") to the outright sacrilegious ("The Wild Bunch", and, pun retroactively intended, "Oh, God!")
 So, obviously, everyone, everywhere is pissed off. It's understandable.
 A hundred years ago, people would go and see films just for the novelty of seeing a moving picture on a screen. Then it was the novelty of a moving picture with sound, or at least sound that wasn't some asshole over-playing a piano.
 Then there was the novelty of colour, and then everyone was more concerned with blowing up Germany than art, so most of the films of the time became about blowing up Germans, or stabbing the Japanese with a bayonet.
 Once that fell out of fashion (and bear in mind, the actual act of stabbing a Japanese person to death with a bayonet fell out of favour long before movies on the same subject did), movies started to focus on the sci-fi future promised by - and the paranoia that came with - the atomic age. Movies were either about spacemen ("Forbidden Planet"), invasion by Communists who happened to be spacemen ("Invasion of the Body Snatchers") or monsters created by (probably communist) radiation ("Them!", "Godzilla.")
 Around this time, studios realised that, when not making good films, they could turn out any old shit they felt like and people would still go and see it because hell, what else was there to do? A typical day in the fifties was 30% fear of nuclear annihilation, 10% drinking too much, 10% smoking, 5% beating your wife and 50% waiting for the internet to be invented. It must have been hell. People who didn't have Call of Duty games had to actually go out and shoot real foreigners, a trait which is yet to be entirely bred out of western society. (Last time the Playstation network went down, they killed Bin Laden. I'm just saying...)
 So, escapism being the order of the day, people would go and watch a movie just to kill time, and that's a lesson that film makers have never gotten over.
 Even a few years ago, studios were still pumping out films left and right that had the basic premise of "Here are some popular actors. Give us money to look at them."
 Lately, that bubble hasn't so much burst as detonated violently in the faces of executives, leaving them burned and whimpering in various corners.
 It turns out that what the movie going public wants to see is intelligent, exciting, well made material.
 As that's incredibly hard to make, the studios have just decided to take other material they know we like and give it to us again, with different wrappers. Constant sequels and remakes, for ever and ever, amen.
 It's frustrating, it's cynical, but it is at least understandable, and maybe the real issue is this: Nowhere in the cycle of cinema, from it's inception right up to, well, "Inception", did we allow stories to take on the classical qualities of myth.
 Sure, there are plenty of franchises, or even single films, with mythical components, but the truly iconic characters in cinema, from Tarzan to Riggs & Murtaugh to everyone else who's about to be "re-imagined", all lack one fundamental component that truly mythological characters lack: They don't die.
 For all the stories written about, say, King Arthur, or Hercules, or Robin Hood, the mythology always includes a death. It's taken as cannon that these characters died in established ways.
 In modern storytelling, characters don't ever have deaths. At least, long-running ones don't. Hollywood is a culture of youth-worship and dream fulfillment; they're afraid of death and aging as a society. Very few films ever have the balls to look at death at all. "Unforgiven" confronted the idea of heroes fading and the inevitability of mortality, but, brilliant though it was, even Eastwood's masterpiece stopped short of showing our hero dying. Like Rocky Balboa after him, or Ethan Edwards before him, at the end of "Unforgiven", Clint's character just fades away.
 So what does Hollywood do, as a society, when telling stories solely about characters we already know, and already paid money to see? It has to start over, again and again, until we have a hundred movies explaining where a character came from, but never any that show where they finish.
 Surely, I can't be the only one who wants to see a movie where an established hero dies, and gives a flagging and aged series a bit of dignity in the process? I'd much rather see characters die well than return badly every few years.


 (This article will be re-posted next year, with some words changed and a better looking author.)


[A thought, as I'm about to publish: The Wild Bunch did die in mythic fashion, but that's one more reason not to fucking re-make it.]

Movie Review: Prometheus

[This review contains some pretty huge SPOILERS for the entire movie. Sorry.]

 Having waited, like a lot nerds, months for Ridley Scott’s ultra-hyped new sci-fi effort, “Prometheus”, I finally lugged my enormous geek-boner into the cinema today and sat through… something.

 Basically, my reaction is this: Prometheus is nearly a really good movie.

 “Alien”, Scott’s earlier, exalted effort, is a great movie. Prometheus is nearly a great movie.

 Sadly, Richard Thompson nearly won the 100m at the Beijing Olympics. But he didn’t. Usain Bolt did. And that’s pretty much the difference, right there.

 Things start off brilliantly. Having discovered strikingly similar pictograms all over the ruins of the ancient world, Noomi Rapace’s scientist, Dr. Shaw, and her boyfriend, who might be that guy from Grey’s Anatomy, deduce that aliens from a distant galaxy have visited the earth and left a map to their location.

 Fast forward two years, and the crew of the Prometheus (formerly the U.S.S. Tempting Fate of the Prophetic Ship Name battalion, or “The Fighting Redshirts”) has transported seventeen crew, including Shaw and her boyfriend, to the arse end of space to see what they find. Included are Charlize Theron’s bitchy corporate ballbreaker, and Michael Fassbender’s creepy android.

 Once on the planet, they find nothing, take some nice pictures and go home.

 Nah, obviously, they find a mysterious pyramid and go off to investigate, finding a few familiar scenes from the previous (or, chronologically, later) Alien films.

 The first half of the movie is pretty damn great. The ideas are deep and interesting, the special effects are suitably impressive, and the alien monument they discover, combined with decent performances all round, leads to a building sense of both wonder and dread. We want to know where this is all going, but we fear to look. We know something terrible awaits, but we’re intrigued to see what it is.

 Throughout this portion of the film, we see some pleasing nods to the universe we’re in; the Prometheus shares some background architecture with Alien’s ship, the Nostromo, and there’s a teasing new take on the “motion sensor picking something up” moment.

 Scott’s direction, too, is suitably excellent. He even manages to get some handheld camera work to function as a useful plot tool. Given that Scott’s own “Gladiator” was responsible for the maddening proliferation of “shaky cam” a few years ago, it’s nice to see him redeem himself with some handheld work that is at once believably wobbly, but also discernable and engaging.

 Inside the pyramid, we find the ancient “engineers” who could well have been responsible for all life on earth. We see them in the images of an ancient recording inside the ship. And they’re running. Because as soon as we see them in person, we realise: Something else on the ship killed them a long time ago.

 Then, as soon as the monsters are out of the bag, everything goes to shit.

 As soon as this becomes more of a straight up horror film, the characters devolve into straight up horror archetypes. Michael Fassbender has been lauded for his performance as the Artificial Person on board, but, although his acting is fine, the writing does him no favours. Whereas Lance Henriksen’s Bishop (“Aliens”) was suspicious and subtle, and Ian Holm’s Ash (“Alien”) was a shock revelation, Fassbender’s David* is straight away introduced as a robot, acts untrustworthy, and ultimately turns out to be an untrustworthy robot.

 Similarly, Shaw’s forgettable boyfriend runs down the curtain and joins the choir invisible in suitably short order, and in true slasher movie tradition, even manages to do it just after sex.

 In the middle of all this, we learn that Charles Weyland (Guy Pearce) the nonagenarian corporate patriarch who sponsored the whole expedition, is alive and on board the ship, which is supposed to be a major plot twist. Instead, it just feels like an extra trunk full of plot baggage.

 I like Pearce, as an actor, but I have to say that he sucked out loud all over Prometheus. He doesn’t convince for a single second as a very elderly man; he doesn’t move old, he doesn’t sound old, and he just looks like Guy Pearce under a shitload of prosthetics. His eyes are too alert, his facial reactions too sharp. I can’t help but wonder how many genuinely old actors could have done a better job. Weyland claims to be dying, and attempting to seek out his celestial makers in a last ditch attempt at prolonging his life, but as someone who followed the recent viral campaign, I find this odd.

 For those not in the know, Pearce appeared, un-made-up, in a series of prequel videos on facebook in which his character, at the time aged 40, gave a TED talk about how he cured cancer and did a lot of other impressive stuff.

 That’s all well and good, but what exactly is Weyland supposed to be dying of, then? He gives himself “a few days”, but that seems an oddly specific deadline to give oneself if the only terminal ailment left is time. And anyway, if Ridley Scott wanted to tell a story about angry ubermenschs seeking out their makers because they want more life, fucker, why doesn’t he just adapt Philip K. Dick’s short story “Do Androids Dr-…”

 …Oh yeah.

 Ultimately, the Gods that Dr. Shaw and co. have come in search of prove to be less than friendly, and the creatures attacking the crew are a bi-product of the Gods’ own tinkering.

 The Gods themselves, incidentally, are giant humans. That basically makes this movie into “Contact” with a body count.

 In the end, the alien mound is revealed to be a buried starship, which attempts to take off for Earth. The crew (Iris Elba’s Captain Black Guy and Mr. Sulu) crash the Prometheus into the ship to prevent it from taking off, and it lands on Charlize Theron, who doesn’t get out of the way, proving that she might, in fact, be Mr. F.

 It’s all a bit of a mess, and not in the “aliens shredding people” way. More in the “too many plotlines, not enough character” way. Some of the characters are so under-done that I called one of them Mr. Sulu up there because nobody will remember his actual name, ever.

 So who’s to blame? The film, as I say, has some brilliant themes. When Shaw’s boyfriend is unwittingly infected with an alien parasite and the two have sex, it creates a genuine, skin crawling fear of normal sexual relations that is far more subtle – and more disturbing – than Sigourney Weaver being chased by a cock-headed lizard. Fassbender’s David suffers some interesting, low-key racism (tech-ism?) in the form of being constantly needled by other characters and referred to as “Boy.” The idea that there is something out there in the universe that spawned us is alluring, and the idea that something else in turn may have killed it is genuinely scary.

 But then there’s the silly stuff. The godlike entities that created us were just other, more advanced humans, which, as one character points out, ignores Darwinism completely. When this happens, Shaw just goes to the default “I believe what I choose” argument, which means this movie is, weirdly, both “Contact” with a body count and also a great apologist treaty for Creationism. Which is bad.

 Some of he dialogue clunks audibly, as well. At the end of the movie, Shaw is carrying the robot David’s still-living head in a bag (seemingly having forgotten that he murdered her boyfriend the day before - an issue which goes totally unaddressed), and he tells her that he doesn’t understand why she is doing something. She responds, in a deep, philosophical tone “I guess that’s because I’m a human being and you’re a robot.”

 That line actually happens.

 On purpose.

 In this movie.

 Honestly, it would have felt silly in an episode of “Mac ‘n’ C.H.E.E.S.E.”, let alone a supposedly high-brow release.

 Also, the movie’s biggest selling point is it’s biggest weakness. The attempts to shoe-horn the original alien into the movie in subtle ways actually weigh things down. The whole film would have been better off trying to stand on it’s own two feet, instead of adding in plot points that feel contrived and un-necessary. The genuine article, the nightmare vision that launched the franchise, only crops up once in a subliminal, pareidolic image on a wall, and then again as a lame antecedent of itself in the final frames.

 Like “Wolverine: Origins” and the Star Wars prequels, the writers of Prometheus seem to be unaware of a crucial part of mythology: Archetypes don’t need backstory.

 No matter how fascinating or well written your ideas for how an iconic character really developed, by showing it to other people you automatically diminish that character in their imagination. We don’t NEED to see how the Alien evolved because it was such a perfect, terrifying, fully-formed entity on our first encounter with it that the rest could be left as speculation. Everyone is frightened of the Alien because of different, subconscious reasons. The thing that makes it terrifying is it’s blankness; there is no story, no explanation. It is a creature which is different, and other, and foreign, and unrelateable. If only there were a word that meant all those things.

 Leaving something mysterious often makes it work better; it’s a lesson more movies could do with learning.

 So maybe we should be blaming Damon Lindelof. The co-creator of “Lost,” a sci-fi TV series that started out great and got ridiculous half way through, has come up with a sci-fi movie that starts out great and gets, well, lost, half way through. Maybe Lindelof is a genius and keeps getting partnered with duds. Maybe he wrote the first halves of “Lost” and Prometheus and then left his co-writers to finish up, only to weep bitterly at the results.

 Maybe Damon Lindelof is brilliant, but only half the time. His brain melts when it gets dark, like a sort of were-moron.

 Maybe he drinks.

 Maybe he’s actually doing his best, but his work is constantly sabotaged by an evil android in black who is building a machine with the help of Space Jockeys to channel the water and the light.

 Or maybe Prometheus, so fittingly given it’s name, just had ideas that were too far above it’s station.

 A great movie is in here somewhere, but it’s trapped by the rest of itself.

                                                                                                                               3/5.

*Welcome to the only place on the internet to mention Michael Fassbender’s David, Lance Henrikson’s Bishop, and STILL not be talking about penises.

Monarchy? Alright, if you must.

 I was going to have a go at the Queen, today.
 It seemed only fair; it’s the Silver Jubilee and as we speak, far too many people are making far too big a deal of one old lady’s ability to not be dead yet.
 She hasn’t done anything, other than draw breath, that warrants a celebration, in my eyes. She hasn’t led any troops into battle, like the kings of old, she hasn’t pulled a sword from a stone like the kings of myth, and she hasn’t made any decent records like The King.*
 So I’m not impressed, and I’m a little sick of all the hype.
 On top of that general irritation, I’m staunchly, passionately against the concept of monarchy in general. It’s un-egalitarian and unfair, it’s classist, sexist, fascist and racist, it’s outdated and silly, and it’s something we could do without as a nation.
 So, suitably filled with righteous indignation, I decided to write about what a waste of time and effort and money the Royals are, and what we should have done with the money instead.
 That was the plan.
 Then I started digging in earnest.
 Turns out - and it pains me to say this - the Republic movement in this country should really just shut the fuck up and get over itself.
 First of all, I was going to use cost as leverage, but you know what? The Monarchy doesn’t cost that much.
 Alright, granted, they cost more than I do; they cost more than a lot of things. But they also cost LESS than a lot of things, and some of those things are a lot more objectionable.
 The Monarchy are estimated (based on a quick Google search, don’t think I’m an expert) to cost the UK £45.1 million pounds per annum, based on figures for 2008/9.
 I know that’s a lot of money. That’s more than enough to do something great with, like fund another twenty series of “Arrested Development” or have the Go Compare man fired into space with a big cannon.
 But let’s gain some perspective: It’s a less than a third of the budget of “John Carter of Mars.” It’s one percent - one percent - of what smoking costs the NHS every year, and 0.5% of what it eventually cost us to find new and interesting ways to maim soldiers in Iraq.
 Contrary to what Republic like to imply, if we scrapped the monarchy tomorrow, the money we’d have left over wouldn’t be able to fund the NHS or make us all better off. In fact, the money left over wouldn’t be enough to fund another Transformers movie. It wouldn’t even be enough to fund another Basic Instinct movie. (Basic Instinct 2 cost $70,000,000. The Royals cost about sixty-nine million, in dollars.)
 So yeah, I’m against the Monarchy. But in all honesty, I’m more against bad movies, and I’m certainly more against badly-thought-out invasions in the middle east that leave young people dead.
 I’m also more against homeopathy - something which costs the NHS £10 million a year, which works out as the price of what? Prince Charles? Ol’ Charlie Boy might be an avid homeopathy fan, but given that they’re wasting the same amount of money by existing, I know which one I’d like to see scrapped first. And it’s not the one with the big ears.
 So let the babies have their bottle. If the useless, sponging layabouts want a party because their leader hasn’t popped her clogs yet, fine. It’s annoying, it’s morally objectionable, but y’know what? There are more important things to be upset about, that are MORE annoying and objectionable, and until they're fixed, I'm content to let an old lady keep eating swan for a little while longer.

*I think Elvis is over-rated, too, but one thing at a time...