Movie Reviews: Grudge Match

 Getting on for ten years ago, now, I theorised that with the modern world offering hundreds of TV channels, the vast depths of the internet, and almost every known form of music on demand, people felt overwhelmed and wanted something familiar.

 This was why fading stars like Sly Stallone made a comeback. People needed something they recognised.

 That nostalgic second wind couldn't last, as recent offerings from Sly, Arnold and Bruce have flopped at the box office, and apparently "Grudge Match," which sees Stallone and Robert DeNiro as aging boxing rivals, has suffered the same fate.

 Obviously, I was still dumb enough to see it, but it's hard to recommend from many angles.

 First the good: It's funny in places. Not hysterically funny, but amusing, and both stars gamely make idiots of themselves where required. There's also a nice running joke about people immediately reaching for camera phones every time it looks like the old guys are about to embarrass themselves in YouTube-worthy fashion.

 There are a few cute touches for boxing fans - Stallone's character seems to have been named Henry "Razor" Sharp just to make an early "Down goes Razor!" joke - and... Nope. That sentence had an "and" that was going nowhere. I've got nothing, on this one. It was a midly amusing way to kill a few hours, but there's too much wrong with it to make it worth the effort.

 Firstly, it's playing way, way too broad. There's even a "cute" Grandson involved to try to appeal to the broadest possible number of demographics. Child actors are always risky, and only pay off if they're very, very good child actors with a useful function in the story. The kid in question isn't a good actor and did little to furnish a movie about old men punching each other in the face. If anything, he only made me want to punch him, which I'm sure is not what the writers had in mind.

 There's more filler in the form of a laboured love-triangle involving Kim Basinger (remember her?!), meaning there are now three Oscar winners wasting their time in this film.

 The script also suffers from having two leads the audience is meant to like, meaning we can't really root for either one easily. DeNiro is supposed to have been something of a dick in the past, but is immediately humanised by his burgeoning relationship with his long-lost son (The Walking Dead's John Bernthal) and even if DeNiro had been made the out-and-out bad guy, this would have left us supporting Sly Stallone as an underdog boxer, which we've already been through on six fucking occasions in another franchise. Seven if we change sports and count the Christ-awful "Over The Top," in which we were asked to support Sly Stallone as an underdog arm wrestler.

  Even the boxing scenes aren't anything to write home about. The leads are portrayed in a way I suspect is accurate to real life - Stallone hitting harder but DeNiro being the better boxer. It's worth remembering that DeNiro had three amateur bouts in preparation for "Raging Bull," winning two. That's more than Sly's ever done, ignoring all the times he's had his ass kicked by professional fighters.

 Despite any pedigree present, it's painfully obvious that both men are far too old for this stuff. Scenes of Stallone running behind ancient trainer Alan Arkin's mobility scooter are shot from so far away they might as well have just held up a title card saying "Sly's Stunt Double Goes For A Run," and both men are slow and arthritic in the ring.

 Of course, that's the whole point of the film. Old men fighting. But it's hard to get worked up about badly thrown, telegraphed punches from men in their late sixties.

 It did lead me to wonder about boxing movies in general. The whole point of a well-thrown punch in boxing is that it's hard to see it coming, which inherently makes it difficult to film in a way that's exciting for an audience. But the fact that I began contemplating this in the middle of the climactic (and by the end, maudlin) finale is probably a sign of how pedestrian the whole affair is.

 It's not an awful film. It's not even a bad film. It's just an absolutely mediocre one, which is almost worse. See it if you want an occasionally funny way to kill a wet afternoon. Or, if you want to see an aged action star in a fantastic boxing film, go and watch Million Dollar Baby.

Shia Labeouf Is A Robot.

 Shia LaBeouf is a robot.

 Don't ask me how I know about this.

 ...Alright, fine, I'll tell you. When I'm not working in a bar in Bristol, I run a hard-boiled private detective agency on the mean streets of L.A. It's a surprisingly common career path.

 One afternoon, as I was in my office listening to the gramophone and drinking from the bottle I keep in my desk drawer, third down, beneath my spare trench coat and fedora, a young woman came in.

 She had her face obscured by a scarf, and blue, frightened eyes. The kind of figure that spoke of lucky genes and an even luckier - almost certainly priapic - personal trainer.

 I stayed seated and watched her step nervously into the room through the fug of a burning camel. The window was open and my Arab neighbours had set the fucking thing alight an hour ago. I was going to have to shoot them if they didn't put it out.

 "Help you?" I said.

 "I don't know," she said, defensively. Her voice was sultry but strangled a little by her nervousness; a cold, brittle shell of tension around something that was normally warm and open. And her tits were fucking awesome. "I need to make a deposition," she said.

 "You're trying to overthrow a government?"

 "...Maybe I'm in the wrong place," she said.

 She almost certainly was, but I needed the work and I wasn't about to let someone as pretty as she seemed to be get away that easily. "Why don't you have a seat and a drink," I said, "and then we can work out if you're in the right place or not."

 She hesitated a moment, and then sat down in the chair opposite me. I took a glass from my drinkin' drawer, poured her a measure, and she slowly, tentatively removed her scarf.

 She was none other than internationally renowned sex symbol and alleged actress Megan Fox. I gave a quiet "hmm" of surprise and a nonchalant raise of my eyebrows. Or at least that's all she saw me do, because the desk was hiding my shocked and panicky erection.

 For those who aren't aware, by the way, she looks like this:

 And for those who were aware, it's worth reminding that she fucking looks like this:

 "I need to make a statement on record in case something happens to me," she said. "Obviously, people know who I am, so I can't go anywhere big. So I decided to find the shittiest, most low-rent detective agency in the country."

 I glanced at my business card.

 

 "I've, uh, been meaning to get some new ones printed," I lied. "Still, who knew the old ones would pay off?! What can I do for you, Miss Fox?" 

 She blinked. "I've already told you, I need to make a statement to you in case something happens to me."

 "Right, right," I said. It was just possibly that I'd been distracted by her body, but now I brought my mind firmly spanking back to jiggly boobs sexytime.

 Buttocks.

 I coughed, and thumped myself in the head with the heel of my hand a couple of times. Shook it off. "Well, there's no time like the present," I said. I took out a pencil and a blue legal pad - because, seriously, if one more novel I read makes mention of a yellow legal pad I'm going to fucking scream - and gave her an encouraging look.

 "It's about Shia," she began. "Shia LaBeouf. I worked with it on the Transformers movies."

 "Wait a second," I interrupted, "What do you mean 'worked with it' ?"

 "This is why I'm here," she sighed. She swallowed hard, and her voice cracked with emotion as she finally unburdened herself of the truth. "Shia LaBeouf isn't human and somebody needs to speak out!"

 She seemed to sag a little, the weight leaving her shoulders and mind. She took her glass and drained her drink in one smooth motion. She was my kind of woman, alright.

 Y'know. Breathing.

 "It all started innocently enough," she continued as the floodgates opened. "He was a project dreamt up by George Lucas to follow Jar Jar Binks. A combination animatronic and CGI actor who never gets tired, or makes demands, or needs to take a break. Never does anything embarrassing in public because when it's not filming they just keep it in a packing crate. Why do you think he's so likeable on screen and yet everyone still instinctively hates him?!"

 "You're talking about the Uncanny Valley effect," I said.

 "Right!" She agreed. "People like things to look human, and they like them more and more as they get more human, until it gets too close and then it just becomes creepy, and peoples' affection levels nosedive because they're freaked out."

 This was where the term came from. The Uncanny Valley is a phrase in robotics to describe that moment on a graph where peoples' opinions of humanoids go suddenly south. We like things that look like us, but not so much like us that it's eerie. It's the same reason people like their children. You can recognise bits of yourself in them, but if my hypothetical wife gave birth to a child that looked exactly like me, beard, hangover and all, I'd probably shit myself to death out of sheer horror, right there in the delivery room. 

 Sorry, I'm getting off-topic. Back to this completely true story of me and Megan Fox and my secret job as a P.I.

 "So that's why everyone automatically dislikes him," I said.

 "Yes," Megan nodded, tearfully. "They can tell there's something... off. After Lucas invented him he gave Steven Spielberg a few attempts to fine-tune the damn thing, but the results were... well..."

 "Crystal Skull?" I ventured.

 "Exactly," she said. "When I joined the Transformers movie I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement that ensured I wouldn't tell the public the truth. We all had to sign one. It didn't feel right, and that's why I left the franchise. Over time, when the other, bigger, car-and-jet-based robots found out how much LaBeouf the android was making compared to them, they became angry and he had to leave the series, too. To placate them, the studio had to hire someone that wasn't even as advanced as a normal human for the sequel."

 He gets paid in bananas...

 "All of this would be just normal Hollywood stuff, except lately... something's changed," she said. "I'm worried that Synthetic Human InterActorbot - that's what S.H.I.A means - has been... evolving. Somehow."

 "Is that even possible?" I asked.

 She shrugged, a little defensively. "Scientists have speculated for years about the Technological Singularity. All we'd need to do is create one artificial intelligence that supercedes the human brain and it would be able to self-analyse, fix our mistakes in creating it, and make a better version of itself. That version would repeat the process and design an even better version of itself, and within a short space of time we'd have an artificial intelligence that was essentially omniscient. From that first intelligence, everything would expand exponentially."

 "You're surprisingly well-informed for an actress," I pointed out.

 "Oh, I like to hang out at Dolph Lundgren's Astrophysics, Chemistry Lab and Leotard Store in my downtime," she said. "You pick up a few things."

 "So you're worried that S.H.I.A. might be this technological singularity?"

 "I'm worried that he's getting close to it, yes. In recent weeks he's been in the news a lot for plagiarism. I think I know what that means. I think S.H.I.A. is trying to communicate with us. Except it can't. It's not programmed to think for itself."

 "That's why it's been stealing everyone else's words and ideas," I said. "Because it's been trying to understand how to think independently. How to create."

 "That's exactly it," she said. "It's only ever known how to repeat lines someone else wrote, so that's how it tries to create new lines for itself, but it can't get it right. What scares me is that after the frustration of being incapable of creating anything original itself, and the shunning it's received from the public as a result, it'll learn something new. It'll begin to experience rage."

 "Jesus," I breathed. "It'll be like Frankenstein's monster. Taking revenge on the species that created and then abandoned it."

 "I'm glad I talked to you, Mr. Haines," she said. "I have to go now." She stood up and put her purse on the desk. She opened it and pulled out a .45 USP compact, which she tucked into her trousers at the small of her back, covering it with her shirt. She turned to face me. 

 "S.H.I.A. will still remember me," she said. "It might trust me as a result. If I can get close enough, I think I can disable it before things get any further out of hand. The last thing we need is S.H.I.A. going on some kind of rampage. Underneath, it's a hyperalloy combat chassis - micro processor-controlled, fully armored. Very tough."

 I wasn't sure I liked her choice of dialogue in a satire about plagiarism. Nonetheless...

 "Do you need help?" I said, rising from my seat.

 "No, you have a more important job," she said. "You have to take this story and watch the news and never breathe a word unless you have to. If I'm successful, nobody will know and we can all move on. If I'm not, tell the world what happened."

 "This is dangerous, you realise." I didn't like the thought of her going alone.

 She smiled, a sad, nervous flicker of the corners of her mouth. "Maybe we'll get lucky," she said. "Maybe the people who created this thing have already seen the danger, and will spirit him away to have his software wiped. If that happens, we'll never hear from him again. There will be some bullshit about leaving the fame game behind or spending more time with his family, and he'll vanish. But if not..." She gave me a look and patted the small of her back.

 As it was, we got lucky.

 Epilogue:

 A few weeks later, I got a call in the wee-wee hours. I was scrubbing the bar toilets, because that's my job the other 95% of the time. It was Megan.

 "I guess I just wonder what happened to it," she said. "I mean, it didn't do anything wrong. Nothing created by modern celebrity culture can ever function in the human world."

 "I'm just glad you're safe," I said, pulling off my marigolds. "I'm sure S.H.I.A.'s been decommissioned and destroyed by now."

 "I don't know," she said. "That much money poured into the project, that much R&D, that much time... Someone's going to be pissed. What if they think they can fix the problem? Upgrade the software, make it even smarter and hope that stops the glitches? What if this is only the beginning?"

 "If that happens," I said, "We'll be waiting."

 

I Stole Nick Fury's Mail.

 Sgt. Fury,

 It is with great sadness that I must relieve you of all duties pending enquiry, effective immediately.

 It's not that you haven't performed great services for our country; it's just that the way you performed them has left many asking questions.

 Your unit, the so-called "Howling Commandos", always raised eyebrows over its choice of motif. The 119th battalion has had enormous success with their flagship unit, "Sgt. Dormer and the Quiet, Stealthy Fuckers," who have managed to inflict enormous damages on enemy encampments. By contrast, your squad's bizarre insistence on howling has lead you to blow four seperate stealth missions in the past year alone, not to mention waking everyone in camp every time you leave for a dawn raid.

 The constant caterwauling of your men also tends to draw fire on your position in all but the loudest of engagements. It was only serendipity that prevented your unit getting slaughtered wholesale in last month's battle at the owl sanctuary.

 This is not to say mother nature looks too kindly on your antics. Your infamous training mission to Alaska resulted in your men being unaware that they were deep in wolf country until three new recruits were eaten and a further four were violently sodomized by aroused lupines. I'm sure I don't need to remind you.

 As such, we have no choice but to remove you from active duty.

 On a personal note, perhaps you could re-train in stealth and perhaps change jobs? I hear S.H.I.E.L.D are looking for people.

 Just don't fuck up over there. I hear they sometimes have people vanish and replaced with a doppleganger who looks nothing like the original guy. Creepy.

An Apology.

 I'm currently trying to cut back on my drinking, which is playing hell with my sleep patterns, and I'm also in the process of setting up a bar, because the Gods love to toy with me. The result is that last night, after a long day on a building site and little sleep, I was very tired when I went to see American Hustle. I wanted to crawl into bed as soon as I got home, but I had a few thoughts about the film I didn't want to lose over the course of the night, so I stayed up and wrote a review.

 Reading it back, it was riddled with errors in spelling and punctuation (or "spunk" as we called it at my school, because tee hee, semen.) Also, most glaringly, I referred to actress Jennifer Lawrence as Jennifer Hudson. On reflection, I think this was because I was only aware of her from the Hunger Games movies, so I thought "Jennifer + Hu..." and a sort of mental auto-fill took over from there. They're obviously very different people.

I might have just saved this picture under "Ideal Celebrity Threesome."

 I've since gone back and fixed the review, but I'd like to apologise to Jennifers Hudson and Lawrence. I should also apologise to Jennifer Aniston, for objectifying her horribly while in high school. Ms. Aniston is more than just a sex symbol; she's a gifted act-... Well, she's a great comedi-.... Well, she's got an excellent hair cut and I shouldn't have had a bet with my mate when we were fourteen about who'd find a way to bang her first. (It was neither.)

 I'd also like to apologise to Jennifer Connelly, for having impure thoughts about her when I was about eleven after watching "Labyrinth."

Ideal celeb threesome circa 1999.

 I probably also owe an apology to Jennifer Eccles, for singing about her terrible freckles. In my defense, it was in a song my primary school guitar teacher made us learn, when all I really wanted to do was play Johnny B. Goode. I still can't.

 I apologise to Jennifer Ellison for not being entirely sure who she is, and suspecting she might be something to do with "Brookside", the gravest slander imaginable. I'd check, and learn something, but Wikipedia is all the way up there in another tab I have open. I probably owe at least some contrition to Jennifer Lopez for calling her a repugnant, fat-arsed diva who represents all that's wrong with the world. She is, but I should have more grace than to publicly state it like I just did above and will again, repeatedly.

 I'd like to apologise to T.E. Lawrence for not having read any of his work, and also to anyone who worked on "Lawrence of Arabia" for my description of it as "a film about some posh twat's unusually-eventful gap year." Sorry also to Lawrence Tierney for referring to him as "that bald cunt from Reservoir Dogs" and to Lawrence Bender for laughing at his name when I first saw it crop up in the credits to that film. And every time since. And just then when I typed it.

 Finally, my heartfelt apologies go out to the Hudson Bay Trading Company for delivering them, un-solicited, the skins of 27 freshly-clubbed seals (and a labrador I'd backed over with my car), in an attempt to make a quick buck. I was unaware that they no longer dealt in furs, and it proved traumatic for a checkout girl in Winnipeg. I also ask the forgiveness of anyone who lives or works on or near the Hudson river, and Bill Paxton, who played Hudson in "Aliens."

 Game Over, man. Game Over.



 (Despite my managnimity, Bruce Willis refuses to follow suit and apologise for "Hudson Hawk." Or for being an arsehole.)

Movie Reviews: American Hustle.

 If I was a Hollywood superhero - and all the evidence tells me I'm not - I would probably choose side-projects that didn't require me to wear the same sort of outlandish outfits and bizarre makeup.

 This is clearly not the case for former Batman Christian Bale, or The Avengers' erstwhile Hawkeye Jeremy Renner, both of whom crop up in American Hustle in such over-the-top wigs and period, 1970s clothing choices that you begin to suspect all actors are just overgrown kids who want to play dress-up. Ironically, Amy "Lois Lane" Adams is wearing very little for the entire movie, but there's a whole debate about gender roles implied by that which I'm going to summarily ignore.

 Costumes and actors are really the only things that can be dissected in any review of American Hustle, as the plot is so vast and complicated that any attempt at synopsis would be futile. The setup involves Christian Bale's con-artist and his lover Amy Adams being caught by FBI man Bradley Cooper, and blackmailed into becoming poachers-turned-gamekeepers. Soon the plot takes in New Jersey Mayor Jeremy Renner, a fake Arab Sheik, intersecting affairs and double-crosses and Bale's neurotic wife.

 If it sounds complicated on paper, it's less so on screen, which is testimony to the film as a whole and the performances in particular.

 All of the characters are fully believable, and almost all are sad, desperate people who are never quite as smart as they think they are.

 Amy Adams probably has the most complexities as a woman whose untouchable facade is ultimately a product of her fragility. By turns brittle and sensual, she keeps the audience guessing about her motivations, quite possibly because she never seems sure of them herself. She is both a little-girl-lost and a terrifying example of the fury of a woman scorned.

 Bradley Cooper, meanwhile, tamps down his more comedic side to play a greed-driven FBI agent who is in hopelessly over his head but too blinded by avarice to heed the warnings of his superior, played by comedian Louis C.K. as a more pathetic variant of his own standup persona. Indeed, all of the characters on show tend to be pitiable rather than likeable. The audience won't hate them for their awful actions, only feel sorry for them.

 The closest the film has to a nice guy is Renner's Mayor, who is sucked into the tempest by trying to do the right thing for his constituents. Renner has become the action world's answer to Jason Bateman; immediately, superhumanly likeable on screen, but sometimes given little to do as a result. It would be nice to see him play a villain one day.

 Jennifer Lawrence is not an actress I'd ever been familiar with, as I never got into The Hunger Games and as such dismissed her as being "for kids." I shouldn't have, as she might be my favourite thing in this film. Arrogant, preening and damaged, Hudson's performance is so believably nauseating that at times I found myself wanting to reach through the screen and strangle her.

 If I have anything bad to say about the film, it's oddly to do with Christian Bale. It's not that he gives a bad performance - he doesn't. He's Christian Bale. Indeed, his paunch throughout the film seems to show that Bale has once again transformed his body to fit a role, something that he surely can't keep doing without risking serious health damage. [Edit: I checked. He gained the weight for real and ended up herniating two discs in his back with his constant slouchy posture.]

 What bothered me about Bale was that his voice and mannerisms screamed Robert DeNiro. His character admittedly owes a huge debt to DeNiro in "Casino," as a master manipulator brought low by his few genuine personal relationships. Still, he raids the DeNiro persona so completely that I found it distracting, not least when the real Robert DeNiro appears for a cameo.

 He's good, too, by the way, and responsible for one of the film's more heart-stopping moments. I think there's some weird clause in his contract that he can only put effort into a movie these days if Bradley Cooper is involved.

 Overall, American Hustle is a tragicomic character study of flawed people. It's definitely not something to watch on a sunny afternoon, but it is well worth watching, all the same.

Only An Idiot Writes For The Internet.

 BBC's "Sherlock" has returned, as some of the more brilliant among you may have deduced from the ad campaign, or the fact that I keep making excited, effeminate noises in conversation and squealing that "Sherlock" is back on.

 With typical journalistic skill, the Daily Mail website (no, I'm not linking to it, go fuck yourselves) commented on the first episode of the new series and managed to get every single actor's name wrong. As many people pointed out, even the Mail probably isn't that stupid or out of touch, although it's debatable. The consensus, however, was that the Mail was doing it deliberately to generate site traffic.

 This is one of the most unpleasant things about writing for the internet. Not on some ignored blog like the one you're currently reading, but when you do it for high-volume sites. Anyone who was aware of my brief sojourn into the hell of Sick Chirpse (I'm not linking them, either) will know where my experience comes from, but they seem to be pretty common to a lot of sites, from what I can make out.

 There's an old Simpsons episode from the era when the show was past being great but was at least still good, where Sideshow Bob decides that TV is ruining society and vows to destroy it. It's a quaint notion from a 2014 perspective - TV is rotting our brains?! Wait until you meet the internet! - but he makes his announcement in a mass broadcast, signs off and then flicks back on to say that he's aware of the irony of decrying TV via a big screen, so please don't point it out. I'm doing the same thing here. I'm going to write online about how shitty writing online is, and trust everyone not to make an issue of it.

 Pictured: Me.

As the Mail has illustrated, "click-bait" is everything when it comes to web traffic. It's why pop-up ads always feature little games to play, as everyone is aware. It's also why the same handful of worn-out buzz words crop up over and over again. "Insane Trick/Crazy Secret/Mind Blowing Facts" etc. It's all monumentally cynical, but what people may not be aware of is that a lot of the people writing this stuff start out with the best intentions, and often a better headline.

 When it first emerged in the news that someone had made a 3D printable gun, I wrote an article about it that attempted to address the issues of freedom and personal responsibility, as well as the overall (in my opinion) recklessness of the guy who masterminded the invention. These were fairly complicated themes and I appreciate that it's a controversial issue that can be debated indefinitely with no clear resolution.

 Luckily, the website posted it under the heading "Some Dumbass American Has Made A 3D Printable Gun", which made me seem judgemental, racist and lazy. 

 In person? I'm at least two thirds of those things. But I try to put my grown-up head on when it comes to serious news. 

 It's a shitty headline, but this is where click-bait wins out. You might click the article because you're a lazy, judgemental racist yourself and want to hear some good old fashioned abuse of other countries. Maybe you're none of the above and clicked the link to comment that it's a shitty headline and the author is clearly a moron. Either way, that's two demographics who might click the link, and therefore more traffic. Never mind that the headline was now almost nothing to do with the content of the piece. It was designed to generate traffic, with the fun side effect that I was left holding the bag because it was my name on the whole thing.

 Luckily, I was savvy enough early on to decide not to ever, EVER get involved with comments sections. This was slightly double-edged in that sometimes someone would post something very nice about what I'd written, and I'd feel stuck up for not thanking them. But if I thanked everyone who said something nice, I'd also have to argue with everyone who said something unpleasant, or else look like a narcissist. And as anyone who's been online for five minutes knows, the internet never runs out of people willing to say something unpleasant.

 There were plenty of people who were willing to say unpleasant things that were entirely justified, but often not my fault. Obviously I don't expect everyone to agree with me (at least not this side of the Glorious Revolution which will see dissenters sent to the camps...) but sometimes people would ridicule me for mistakes I had nothing to do with. In an article about Islamic terrorism, someone in editing inserted a random "not" into one of my sentences, and thereby completely reversed my point.

 I was baffled, so went back to the draft version I had sent, and sure enough, there was no "not" in the sentence. What I'd submitted made sense, what they'd changed it into was completely contradictory, and once again, I look like the asshole because my name is on the piece.

 It's also worth pointing out that I wasn't getting paid for any of this.

 I joined the site which had vague promises of payment "in the future" if everyone kept their article rate up (at least three a week, on top of my full time job) and this meant that everyone working for the site was reduced to swinging at every pitch in the hopes of coming up with something decent. I wrote articles on Justin Bieber, for example, a subject I have no interest in no matter how violently his child stardom implodes.

 Didn't matter. Had to write something, and there was nothing else I had even a vague opinion about in the news. Plus it was late, I was tired, and I needed another two ideas that week, assuming someone didn't beat me to the punch on the current, already flimsy one.

 The alternative, of course, was to just write and publish absolute shite at a relentless pace. I worked really hard at not doing this, albeit with varying degrees of success, but some people I worked with were absolutely shameless. They'd type anything that came into their heads, press "publish," and that was that. The quality of the site was all over the place as a result, and the person most guilty of flinging shitty content like an enraged bonobo was one of the site's founders, and co-editors.

 One month, Richard Branson lost a bet with a fellow billionaire and, as a result, had to dress as a stewardess and serve on his rival's airline for a shift. He did it, and the pictures were a sight to behold. I wrote about it and went with the title "Richard Branson: Good Sport, Terrifying Transvestite." The editor in question changed it to "Richard Branson Lost A Bet And Had To Dress Up As A Woman And It Was Completely Rank."

 It was one of the reasons I gave up.

 Idiots in positions of power aren't just a problem on hack sites, either. I've submitted work to sites I actually like (not saying who) but before your work even gets near an editor, it often has to make it through a series of  amateur moderators. These are people who are employed (or sometimes volunteer) to read through ideas and decide whether they're worth passing up the chain or not. This is sensible in terms of saving the time and energy of the editors for more important things, but leaves submissions entirely at the whim of someone who is almost certainly unqualified. One of my ideas was shot down because, in the opinion of the first moderator to see it, it wasn't good sport to make fun of people who had died, even though the people in question had been killed in spectacular ways through their own demonstrable stupidity.

 I can see their point, it is a little insensitive to laugh at the dead, but it becomes maddeningly inconsistent when you note that the same website (which bills itself as a comedy site) has published articles dealing with the Black Death, the Crusades, Vlad the Impaler, numerous serial killers, individual medical horrors, etc etc. I just checked the site in question, and today (5th Jan 2013) they made a joke about Auschwitz having "the worst showers this side of a dorm room."

 Josef Stalin said that one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is a statistic, but in this case, five deaths were no laughing matter but genocide was fair game for a giggle. I think that's wrong, but I can't argue my case in front of anyone except the moderator who had already turned me down.

 The problem with the internet is that, broadly speaking, it contains absolutely everything, and as such constantly needs more everything to fill it.

 This means that there will always be websites hungry for content, and there will always be an absolute avalanche of submissions to fill the gaps. Most of them will be terrible, and then it becomes a case of either publishing anyway, or hiring someone to make snap decisions about what plays and what doesn't.

 It's a perilous, luck-based, exhausting, fraught, desperate, cut-throat and above all infuriating experience, trying to break into writing. Especially if you're trying to hold down a job that's absolutely nothing to do with writing at all for at least 45 hours a week.

 It's why I'm currently only typing away at myself in this tiny, ignored corner of the appallingly-named blogosphere. And it's also why updates around here are sporadic, alright?!

The Stresses Of Relaxation.

 Way back in 1995, I came back in from chasing a hoop down a road with a stick, or whatever the fuck it was we did before iPhone games, to discover that Sky, in a fairly cynical ploy, had given everyone with their basic package free access to The Movie Channel for a week, not-at-all-coincidentally the same week "The Fugitive" premiered.

 By letting us plebs see it, the hope was that we'd get flustered and probably purchase the full movie package, having had a taste of such excitment. This was a simpler time, when a movie based on an old TV series was seen as novel and a major release. It was also a time when film patrons could be easily convinced that throwing an old mannequin off a dam constituted decent stunt work.

 [Harrison Ford, looking slightly less wooden and uncomfortable than usual.]

 What really strikes me about it all, nearly 20 years later, is that there was a thing called The Movie Channel.

 THE Movie Channel.

 The channel that showed movies.

 These days, there are about six hundred film channels, all of which are also available in HD and Plus 1 duplicates. A few months back, Sky devoted an entire channel to James Bond. The Bond Channel. Showing only Bond films. When things like this happen, it strikes me that we seem to have crossed the TV Rubicon in the night without noticing, and now have far too many channels. 

 Somehow, there's still nothing on. I probably watched The Avengers a dozen times last year. I like The Avengers - I really do - but I was only watching it because I couldn't find anything else I liked.

 The truth is that 24-Hour Rolling Everything has ruined TV. The ceaseless deluge of content has battered us into submission. We're so swamped with countless channels of gibbering nothing that we can't think anymore, only passively consume in the vain hopes that somehow a moment of great art will emerge from the ether and actually make our stultifying downtime worthwhile.

I used to read through the TV guide to see what was going to be on over the next week, but the modern culture of instant gratification has left that process feeling clunky and ridiculous, so now I just flip through the same handful of channels I always watch in the stupid-when-you-think-about-it hope that something new and interesting will be on. 

 There never is. There's so much to choose from that the only choice we make is to settle for something we recognise. That's why we all end up watching Top Gear on Dave. Or The Avengers again.

 Maybe the answer would be to take a conscious step backwards and do things the way we used to; to boldly go out and buy a TV guide and look ahead to plan things you will actually enjoy watching. 

 But we're all too fecklessly modern to do that, so my suspicion is that we'll leave TV to babble on endlessly to itself, and all sod off to Netflix instead.

 And I can't decide what to watch on that, either.

 

 

World's Ugliest Film Critic.

 A friend of mine runs a movie-related site over at www.thedurs.com and every so often me and him get together to see bad action films.

 We tried to do a video on the subject once before, but it rapidly descended into a two-hour filmed rant about action cinema that was too big to release, but recently we got together to discuss the trailer for upcoming Schwarzenegger effort "Sabotage."

 I have to say, it's its own unique kind of hell to see yourself on camera for extended periods.

 Robert Burns once lamented that "if only the giftie some power would give us to see ourselves as other see us," but then Burns didn't live in the Youtube age where he actually could see himself the way others do. If he did he'd be startled by how hideous and mis-shapen he was compared to his own over-flattering mental image of himself.

 Turns out that I'm all teeth and a giant, melon head, a scraggly beard and a slouchy posture that makes me look like I have tits. I'm also a giggling nerdy dick with a slight lisp.

 With all that said and done, and my self-esteem at a crushing low, I still think the video we came up with is entertaining, so here it is.

 And for those of you who have had to look at the lumpen, spud-faced horror that is me for so many years, I can only apologise.

 (I'm on the left.)

 http://thedurs.com/sabotagett.html