a perfect combination of optimism and naivety.

The moment. Rough translation of thoughts: Phil Jones: Did we...

Sun, 20 May 2012 15:26:00 +0100

The moment.

Rough translation of thoughts:

Phil Jones: Did we win? Have we won?

Alex Ferguson: We’ve done it, we’ve took the title from those blue ba—

*Crowd starts to cheer*

Phil Jones: We have done it, we’ve won! We’ve— wait, why is Fergie looking at the Sunderland fans?… *Heart shatters*

Sigur Rós - Ekki múkk

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:19:00 +0100

Sigur Rós - Ekki múkk

"Coincidence. That’s all anything ever is. Nothing more, nothing less."

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:07:00 +0100

“Coincidence. That’s all anything ever is. Nothing more, nothing less.”

- The Narrator - 500 Days Of Summer.

creative writing and such.

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 18:21:00 +0100

I know I haven’t posted on here in a while, so I wanted to put up the piece of original writing I had to take with me to MMU for my Creative Writing interview.

The idea started last summer when I went down to London for a creative writing workshop, in which I was specifically taught about how to describe settings from memory. I decided to write about Mars, as I’m quite keen on science fiction, though it also allows me the freedom to create entirely new possible landscapes, rather than using things that actually exist and creating a cityscape or something equally dull.

I wanted it to end on a cliffhanger, with some kind of mystery or danger, though I didn’t want to use an actual creature to create the danger as it would seem too obvious. So this is what I came up with instead.

The ship landed on the desolate ground of Planet Mars. Not the most gracious landing, I admit, but style was not essential here. I left the ship’s control panel in order to depart. As I turned my back, the voice of the President of the United States of America, one which I had not heard for six months, echoed in my mind. “Good luck, and God bless.”

I grabbed the oxygen suit hanging from the wall near the door, and quickly put it on. It was quite heavy, as the material needed to be thick to contain the oxygen in the possible vacuum of Mars. I picked up the helmet which sat on the shelf above the hanger and rested it upon my head. I took a few seconds to click it into place with my suit, keeping the oxygen safely inside. I switched on the oxygen supply, taking in a few deep breaths just to test it, before turning to the doorway.

I stood tentatively at the closed door, a thought a minute racing through my mind. “What is out there?”, “Is there enough oxygen?” and “What will I do there?” All of these questions would be answered within the minute, as I grabbed the heavy handle of the golden coated door which led to the unknown world that awaited me. I began to turn the handle, closing my eyes tightly, almost fearing the lonely planet of which I was soon to be the only inhabitant.

The deafening sound of the cabin decompressing surrounded me momentarily and I pushed the door open wide, eyes still clamped shut. I opened my eyes, greeted by a blinding light. Holding up my hands to the sun, I stepped off the ship, looking around at the desolate planet on which I stood.

The vibrant orange sand almost shone in the sunlight, enhanced further by the blood red sky which loomed overhead. The Mars winds hit me with some force, causing me to stumble temporarily before the suit found its centre of gravity and sent extra weight to the ground. I could hear nothing but the rustling of the sand being blown around in the wind.

I looked to my left and saw a volcano, which stood at a height rivalling that of Everest. I leant backwards slightly as I craned my neck to see the top, with little success. Whilst there were no clouds to block my viewing of the peak, it was impossible to tell where it ended from my low vantage point. To my right, I saw nothing but desolate wasteland stretching as far as the eye could see. The curvature of the planet was easily visible, in dire contrast to the landscape which greeted me to my left. It was as if I was standing on some kind of imaginary line which separated the planet, one side was flat, the other rugged.

I magnified the images which were being fed into my helmet, attempting to spot some sort of life or movement. None could be seen. For all its beauty, Mars was a dead planet. I searched further, desperate to find something. It was an eerie place to be, I didn’t enjoy the idea of having to move away from the comfort zone of my ship in order to find something.

My helmet fixed onto an image and my heart stopped. It magnified the object which had been targeted, revealing it to be a metal pole, standing at about 30ft tall with a small, round beacon at the top. Every ten seconds or so, it would flash red light, which would explain how I hadn’t noticed it sooner. I stood at the doorway to my ship tentatively, unsure if I should move away or not. My rational trail of thought told me that I should go and inspect it, nothing would happen to me or the ship. As I had just discovered, the planet was lifeless. However, a niggling thought at the back of my mind told me something wasn’t right. This didn’t look as if it had come from a human source, how could it have? I was on the first manned ship to Mars.

The suit noticed my muscle movement and released the dead weight it had applied to resist the wind, which had conveniently stopped in time for me to move. I tentatively walked towards the pole which was a good distance away, though it was impossible to tell how far in such a dead environment.

After a few minutes of walking I began to notice that the pole wasn’t getting any bigger, as it should have at least seemed if I was getting closer. I looked back, and saw that my ship was a good half a kilometre away from me. I looked back to the pole, confused. That was when it hit me. The pole was getting smaller as I got closer. I magnified the image in my helmet, and maintained the magnification as I stepped testily towards it. The on-screen measurement told me that it was decreasing in size, if only by a few inches.

I heard a loud shunting noise and looked back to my ship for the second time. The door had been slammed shut by the wind which was now picking up once more. My suit latched itself into the ground and I was helpless as I watched the sand engulf the ship. It surrounded the ship in a spiral of sand and rock. My heart was beating a mile a minute; this could have meant the end of my expedition. It could have meant the end of my life.

The wind subsided and the sand fell to the ground, exposing the ship inside the tornado. It had been reduced to little more than battered metal, completely crushed beyond all recognition. No wind could have done such a thing. A low rumble filled the air and the ground around me shook. The volcano in the distance shot out a few quick bursts of lava as the ground opened up beneath the ship, swallowing it whole.

Mars was alive.

I love what Nolan has done with Bane’s mask, he looks much...

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:46:00 +0100

I love what Nolan has done with Bane’s mask, he looks much more sinister in this split second of footage from the new trailer than he ever has.

the dark knight rises teaser trailer.

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 02:06:00 +0100

I can’t believe I’m actually about to write about this, it’s almost unreal. The teaser trailer for The Dark Knight Rises has officially released and it’s here for all to see. As it’s only a minute and a half long there isn’t really all that much to see, though it’s comfortably enough to get me ridiculously excited about it.

So, for those of you who are insane and haven’t yet watched The Dark Knight, I’m going to ruin the ending for you so that there’s a back-story of The Dark Knight Rises. The Joker turned Harvey Dent into Two-Face through his extremely effective manipulation, causing Dent to take Commissioner Gordon’s family hostage. The Batman (and yes, it is THE Batman, not just Batman) then has no choice but to take down Dent, though rather than letting the public know that Dent was corrupted by The Joker, he decides to take the fall for the murder of Dent, thus becoming an outlaw and hanging up his costume for good.

Of course, after the terrible death of Heath Ledger it became clear that The Joker would not make an appearance in The Dark Knight Rises, despite various internet rumours suggesting re-casts which would have upset almost everybody and even at one point a digital face grafting rumour appeared, an idea which, for anybody who hasn’t seen Tron: Legacy’s failed attempt at a convincing young Jeff Bridges, would have upset even more people.

So many people asked which villain would next become “Nolanised”. A strong rumour (and one that I hoped would be true) was that of The Riddler, somebody who I’m sure Christopher Nolan could use to his advantage easily, given what he did with the character of The Joker. However, Nolan eventually decided not to go with him, probably because he’s too similar to The Joker in many respects. Nolan quickly cancelled out the possibility of Mr Freeze and The Riddler and also dismissed The Penguin as “very difficult to portray”, probably because he spends a lot of his time making duck noises and that’s slightly (incredibly) childish.

Casting information slowly leaked out also, with news of Inception cast member Tom Hardy being picked up. Some thought he would be cast as Killer Croc or, more realistically, Hugo Strange. Then rumours spread that Anne Hathaway had been cast after a casting session involving the likes of Keira Knightley and Marion Coutillard. The question was who this would be for, most assumed it would be Catwoman.

Eventually it was announced that Tom Hardy had been cast as Bane and that Anne Hathaway had been cast as Catwoman. A lot of people were quite tentative about Catwoman being involved in the film (though that may be largely due to the absolute travesty that was Halle Barry’s Catwoman film), though they quickly realised that A) this is Christopher Nolan, he can make anything great, and B) Anne Hathaway in a cat-suit for an entire film. I need say no more.

Bane however was quickly a favourite with many of the fans and after a Wikipedia browse of the character’s appearance in the comic books, I became extremely excited by the idea of him being in the film, as it opened up to a lot more endings than the “and Batman lived happily ever after” ending.

Put it this way, Bane is the man who breaks Bruce Wayne’s back, rendering him wheelchair-bound and causing a new man to take up The Batman’s costume. He has a crippling addiction to a drug called Venom which vastly increases his physical strength but must be administered every twelve hours in order for him to survive and not suffer the side-effects. He’s highly intelligent villain who has a photographic memory and self-taught expertise in many scientific disciplines, perfected during his time spent in prison. He’s the first enemy of The Batman to discover his secret identity and remains to be one of the few. He’s also perfectly sane and always in control of his actions, a trait which seperates him from other villains in The Batman series.

Having read that last paragraph, is it even possible to not be incredibly excited about the prospect of Christopher Nolan bringing this to us? Fans of Nolan will know he loves the psychology of his characters and Bane presents a perfect opportunity for him to do so. Though for some reason, nobody else has been able to bring this sophisticated and psychological character to the screens properly, all of his film portrayals thus far have involved him being nothing more than an inarticulate thug who has little dialogue more than grunting. No doubt Nolan and Hardy will do something about that.

Now, onto the actual trailer itself. The trailer begins with a series of shots (mostly taken from Batman Begins) and text (“Every hero has a journey” and “Every journey has an end”) with Liam Neeson’s Ras Al Ghul quoted from the first film overhead; “If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, then you become something else entirely. A legend, Mr Wayne, a legend.”

It then cuts to new footage from The Dark Knight Rises itself, which shows Commissioner Gordon lying on a hospital bed, severely injured, barely moving, barely able to speak, with an oxygen mask held near his mouth. He appears to be conversing with an off-screen Bruce Wayne / The Batman, and the dialogue goes as follows:

Gordon: “We were in this together, then you were gone. And now, all this evil rises. The Batman must come back.”

Wayne: “What if he doesn’t exist anymore?”

Gordon: “He must. He must…”

During the dialogue, the shot from The Dark Knight of the signal for The Batman being shattered is shown, as well as a flickering, out of focus medium-close up of a man who is then revealed to be Bane wearing his mask. After the second of his face, it then cuts to buildings collapsing, revealing the logo portrayed on the teaser poster. The Dark Knight Rises appears over the white background, before flicking to The Batman seemingly staggering back whilst Bane’s back comes into view. The text, “The epic conclusion to the Dark Knight legend” cuts into view afterwards, followed by the trailer’s ultimate low point. “Summer 2012”. It’s a sickening reminder that we have to wait a year for what I can almost guarantee will be my favourite film of all time.

The trailer is ridiculously exciting. The only piece of dialogue from the film is awesome and despite the fact that a shot of Bane’s face, Jim Gordon on a hospital bed and a brief glimpse of The Batman and Bane together is the only technically new footage we have, it’s enough to satisfy our needs. Of course, the fact that there is no mention of Catwoman in the teaser, or any released images whatsoever thus far, begs the question of how big a role she will have in the film, though it is clear that Bane is going to be the big villain of this film.

Christopher Nolan once claimed that this film will be “a technological marvel” and it has since been announced that almost the entire film will be shot in IMAX, though the noise of the IMAX cameras has caused some of the dialogue scenes to be shot in standard cameras. Whether this is what Nolan meant, or if Nolan has something else under his sleeve, we won’t know for another year and five days. I’m counting down already, as I’m sure many others are. This will no doubt be the perfect ending to a perfect trilogy.

apple. oh, apple.

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 00:46:00 +0100

The way Apple advertise themselves, you’d think they were selling common sense rather than what they’re actually selling, that being overpriced silver toys. Take their most recent advert for the iPhone 4, for example, the tag line of which was, “If you don’t have an iPhone, well, you don’t have an iPhone”. Not only is that a patronisingly obvious statement to make but the annoying Apple advert voice-over man says it as if you’re some kind of moron if you don’t have one. He says it with an air of smugness, so much so to the point that you can just imagine the man sitting alone in his bedroom with his iPhone 4, masturbating furiously to the number of apps he’s downloaded.

Although, Apple have always been the cocky bastards of the technological world. You only have to watch their press conferences to really understand just how unbelievably cocky they are. Steve Jobs, the God to the Apple fanboys, always stands on stage in his turtle-necks and light-blue jeans highlighting the stupidity of any products that don’t belong to Apple. Take the iPad announcement conference, for instance, when he claimed that “Netbooks aren’t better at anything”, only to then go on to announce a product which doesn’t possess USB ports, disc drives, LAN ports, a physical keyboard, a webcam or support Flash Video Player. Simply the touch screen and the name “Apple” apparently warranted the ridiculous price tag in comparison.

That’s essentially Apple’s game in a nutshell. You’re paying for the name, nothing else. Whilst what they do is very good, undeniably so, they don’t warrant the price tag you have to pay for it. You can get equivalents from others at a much lower price. iPods have just become ridiculous, you’re not buying a fancy MP3 player with a silver apple logo on it anymore, you’re buying an application device, a camera and a gaming device now. Whilst that’s all technologically quite impressive, it’s unnecessary. I have a phone to use apps on, I have a phone to use a camera and I have a PS3 to play games, I don’t need an iPod Touch to do either of those things, I just want to play music on it.

Even the iPod Nano has become stupid. The first iPod Nano was overpriced but that was due to its size, which at the time was genuinely something which made it worth it. Now we live in an age where most MP3 players are small and compact, so instead Apple decide to stick a touch pad on the tiniest screen imaginable and slap a £130 price tag on it, just for 8GB of memory which is nothing. To put it into perspective, an 8GB memory card will cost you less than a tenner these days. Just ask yourself what part of a Nano really warrants £120.

Despite the overpriced stupidity of Apple’s products, they continue to sell and they continue to be one of the, if not THE, leading electronics retailers in the world. It doesn’t really make any sense to me, maybe because I care more about spending money wisely than I do about having a shiny, touch-screen slab that I can play music from for triple the price. Whilst their products are essentially so successful because of their aesthetic value, I can’t really deny the fact that I would like to own them. What can I say, I’m a teenage boy, I’m supposed to like that stuff.

The products just look so appealing, even though the logical part of my brain is telling me that they’re stupid and unreasonably priced. I wouldn’t turn one down if one was offered to me at a similar price to their non-Apple counterparts, if anything they’d become my brand of choice. However, until they decide to drop the pretentious “we’re better than everything else so we can charge five times as much” act, I won’t be buying anything from Apple.

why do america get films so much earlier than britain?

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:56:00 +0100

As many will have seen on the internet over the past couple of weeks, there have been many adverts for the film Super 8, the latest film by J.J. Abrams. The adverts in question have been boasting of the film’s June 10th release date and I personally couldn’t wait. I was quite surprised, considering that I hadn’t seen anything on television promoting it. Instead I just put that down to my not watching television all that often and just presumed that it was going to be out on June 10th.

Then, June 10th came around and I couldn’t wait to go and see it that weekend. This is a film that I’ve been waiting for since I saw the teaser trailer last year, which depicted nothing but a train crash and something crashing out of a freight carriage. So, when I went on the internet that night to find showing times, I was confused to find that there were none. I checked a few cinemas and yet the results were the same. That’s when I Googled the UK release date. August 5th. The film comes out in the UK pretty much two months later than it does in America.

I found it extremely irritating that websites such as Facebook who had been advertising the June 10th release date couldn’t at least change it to August 5th for the UK users, or remove the advert altogether for the users outside of America if it wasn’t going to be the case. Instead, I’ve got a two month wait for a film that should really be given a worldwide release.

Of course, America getting the first pickings as far as films are concerned is nothing new. On the contrary, Oscar nominated films such as The Fighter and True Grit were released a good while earlier. Both were released around December time in America and didn’t come to UK cinemas until February of the following year. It’s quite ridiculous, the UK film-goer can’t really be ignored, especially when they make up for the second largest portion of the film’s grossings. Whilst that portion remains to be only a fraction of America’s earnings, it doesn’t warrant completely ignoring it for two months, least of all with films such as The Fighter and True Grit which were tipped for Oscar success shortly after their release.

Admittedly, Super 8 isn’t receiving quite the same buzz surrounding its release as those two did, thought with a film such as Super 8 it risks suffering from a different problem entirely. The difference between a film such as The Fighter, for example, coming out two months earlier in America and a film like Super 8 being released early is the advertising. The Fighter, looking at the trailer, is fairly predictable, it’s just the standard Rocky / every other sports movie formula which you can predict from the moment you walk in. He’ll get beat, he’ll spend the film trying to get better, he’ll win the final fight.

Super 8, however, was advertised quite differently. J.J. Abrams employed the Cloverfield technique with the advertising campaign for Super 8, refusing to show any footage of the creature in the trailers. This gives the audience a big reason to want to watch it, purely to see the creature if nothing else. If that film is then released two months earlier than it is in the UK, you can almost guarantee that there’ll be a source to watch it online within those two months. That, combined with reviews describing the creature as well as pictures online showing the creature, people aren’t going to hold out for two months to watch it.

So, those who were desperate to see the film in its entirety turn to the internet to watch it two months early and those who were only interested in seeing the creature simply Google it and find pictures people took inside the theatres. Super 8 loses a good portion of its paying customers right away, all for ridiculous financial reasons.

Now, normally I don’t watch films on the internet. In fact, I can only think of three times when I have done so, one being Paranormal Activity (due to being quite unsure of watching the film at all, let alone paying a fiver to watch it in the cinema), another being Twilight (yeah, I know, I don’t feel good about it. I just wanted to be able to abuse it off the back of an informed opinion, and that I have) and the last being The Shining (due to just not being bothered to pay for it, it’s just as well really, it wasn’t even good). I won’t watch a film online unless it’s a film I’m merely contemplating watching but not really willing to pay for, or if I want to see what all the hype is about. However, I made an exception for Super 8, after being bombarded on Facebook with various videos promoting the film and having watched / read some reviews. I’d been waiting a year, I wasn’t prepared to wait another two months for a reason I still don’t understand.

Anyway, the film was amazing, I wasn’t let down. I got fortunate, however, in the sense that with the exception of a few close ups, I didn’t even see the creature. Granted that this was mainly due to the poor quality of the online posting of the film and the footage was much darker than it would be in the pictures, the fact remains that I still don’t feel as if I’ve properly experienced it. I know the plot and what is going to happen, though I’m still going to be in the cinemas on its opening weekend watching it on the big screen, partly because I feel as if I owe it to Mr Abrams but mainly because I want to see it on the big screen.

Let’s hope that others take a similar view, or else J.J. Abrams is going to lose out on quite a bit of money.

"Never compromise. Not even in the face of armageddon."

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 21:33:00 +0100

“Never compromise. Not even in the face of armageddon.”

- Rorschach - Watchmen.

early morning tumblr.

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 04:46:00 +0100

I can’t honestly say why I’m still awake now. It’s 4.30am and I haven’t had any sleep at all. Despite having been in bed for a couple of hours, my brain has decided that sleep is not on the cards tonight.

So what brings me to Tumblr, I hear you ask? Well, no, I don’t hear you ask, though I’ll be blunt and say that I simply do not know why I’ve decided that this is the best course of action this late at night. I’ve not even turned my computer on for it, I’m lying in bed doing it via a Tumblr app on my phone which has probably been used about twice since actually downloading it. But, I digress.

The main reason why I can’t sleep is probably that I start to overthink things when I realise I’m not genuinely tired enough to sleep. So, I lie awake going over things in my head (strangely far more negative things than positive, as is always the way) and then when I finally decide that I AM tired enough to sleep, the wheels are already in motion and my brain refuses to stop thinking. This leads to a vicious choice of either thinking about what is currently on my mind and getting no sleep, or trying desperately to not think about what is on my mind and therefore think too hard about NOT thinking about it and also getting no sleep. But, again, I digress.

Realistically I should probably just get over or ignore whatever is in my head, though somehow the scale of your problems seems much greater when you’re lying in bed with nothing else to do. For some reason I become a lot angrier, imagining various different scenarios in which I just lose it at the person involved and just tell them exactly what I think. Sometimes I even imagine ridiculously dramatic scenarios in which the situation plays out almost like a soap opera, involving the other person in tears as I walk away from them in disgusted disappointment or some other such emotion.

I preferred life nine months ago when I didn’t have any of this stuff concerning me. Back when I was happy with the way everything in my life was and wasn’t desperately concerned with what may or may not happen in future and how things are at this precise moment. Essentially, these last nine months have been annoyingly thought-provoking and all for nothing. Nothing I can actually do will change anything involved whatsoever.

I’d like to think that I’m not even at fault for any of it, though maybe my opinion of myself is quite biased.

some of my favourite film moments.

Wed, 25 May 2011 21:38:00 +0100

I’m quite bored to be honest, though the old familiar bastard that is writer’s block has settled in and so I can’t think of anything to write about properly. Instead, I’m going to think of some of my favourite film moments from the top of my head. I’m not really too sure how many there are going to be, it depends when I get bored or run out of ideas. Anyway, in no particular order, here we go…

1. Transformers - The opening rampage.

This scene basically introduces the robots to us and does so in style. Nobody was really all that sure of how the robots were going to go about the act of transforming, considering that in the cartoons all they really did was jump and after some really shoddy stop-motion action, somehow become a vehicle or robot. This set the standard for the special effects the film had to maintain, with the transformations being a lot more complex, ridiculously so in fact. How the animators managed to pull it off will always be a mystery, so many different components of the robots continue to move even after the initial transformations. Of course, it wasn’t just the transformation that made this so good, the fact that it then goes absolutely mental on an army base in true Michael Bay fashion, causing a shit load of explosions and general destruction. It’s too bad the second film was awful.

2. The Dark Knight - The pencil trick.

Anybody who knows me at all would have predicted at least one scene from The Dark Knight and it had to involve The Joker. It was a toss up between this and the “Why so serious?” monologue, though this has to win for the shock factor. I still remember sitting in the pictures and watching The Joker introduce himself, not really too sure what to expect (I hadn’t followed the production of The Dark Knight as vigorously as I have done with The Dark Knight Rises). Of course, Batman Begins was dark, though not incredibly so. Gotham City was practically never seen in daylight and Batman himself had an extremely gruff voice, that was about the extent of it. So, when The Joker introduced himself with a “magic trick”, in which he slammed a pencil into the table, before making it disappear by shunting it down the throat (or into the nose) of the man unfortunate enough to try to stop him, I was incredibly surprised. It set the tone for Heath Ledger’s Joker character, one which I will always maintain to be the best I have ever seen.

3. Inception - The hallway fight scene.

Again, if you know me you probably predicted this too, but why not? It’s easily one of the best fight scenes of all time and it comes from Christopher Nolan, a man who bases his films around clever plot twists and originality, not amazing action scenes. Though he has managed to combine originality and what would otherwise be a boring corridor fight and make something spectacular. It’s one of those scenes that leaves you wondering how it was filmed, the editing and the use of camera positioning almost makes you believe that they actually made Joseph Gordon-Levitt land upside down in a corridor. Annoyingly, I actually went out of my way to find out how it WAS filmed, and while it was filmed in exactly the way I had predicted, some of the magic was lost when I knew the science and the reality of what was otherwise a stunning piece of film. Thankfully I’ve restrained myself from finding out how they filmed the zero gravity scenes, so I can still rest some hope on the idea of Nolan actually single-handedly removing gravity from an entire building for the filming process.

4. 500 Days of Summer - Tom discovers Summer has married.

This one is going to come across as an extremely feminine choice, but I personally spent the whole film entirely on Tom’s side, especially when Summer decided to start treating him in a strange way. It was a narrow choice between this and the moment when Tom punched a man in a bar for attempting to chat up Summer and being reluctant to take no for an answer, resulting in him going home and confronting her about their situation. The ending, however, when he feels as if he was inadequate or not enough for her whilst somebody else is, I just really liked it as a scene. It felt genuine and relatable, as if it was something that would genuinely happen in real life or the way a situation would genuinely be dealt with. Then again, that’s what the entire film was like. I’m not even normally a big fan of romance films, though I did really enjoy 500 Days of Summer, that probably being because I love Joseph Gordon-Levitt as an actor as well as Zooey Deschanel and the film didn’t follow the romance film stereotype, that being that the couple live happily ever after in the end.

5. WALL-E - When EVE tries to fix WALL-E.

Oh Disney Pixar, you know how to make me almost cry at a film. The ending of the mostly dialogue-less WALL-E is one of the saddest film endings (well, parts towards the end of the film) I’ve seen. Of course, WALL-E, a ridiculously cute and tiny garbage sorting robot has spent almost seven hundred years alone, knowing nothing other than the act of crushing rubbish into squares and stacking them neatly. Then he finds EVE, a smooth, round, sparkling white robot whose job it is to find the sapling and instantly falls in love with her (that’s right, “her”, I’ve become far too emotionally attached to these robots to call them “it”). After WALL-E essentially saves the human race, he almost dies (yes “dies, not “breaks”) and so EVE desperately tries to fix him. The way she does so in such a frantic way, as if it’s the only thing that matters to her, the horrible moment in which we don’t know if she’s fixed him or not, followed by the temporarily joyous moment in which we realise that she has done, followed then by the gut-wrenching fact that he no longer recognises her and has returned to his manual setting, which is to crush garbage into squares. Even just writing about it now is incredibly sad and it’s an amazing achievement that Disney Pixar have managed to make an audience so attached to things which are essentially machines (entirely computer generated machines at that). Of course, as in all Disney Pixar films, everything works out in the end and he regains his memory. Just as well really, or else I may have been sick with sadness.

6. District 9 - Wikus saves Christopher.

District 9 is a ridiculously good sci-fi film, probably made a lot better by the fact that the main character, Wikus van der Merwe, isn’t really the good guy. Well, he is mostly, though there are moments in the film where you end up temporarily hating him, all of which involve the number of times he screws over Christopher, the alien who is trying to get the ship running again so he can return his species to their home. In the end, after all of the betrayal, Wikus finally sees sense and whilst in a robot battle-suit thing, he saves Christopher, killing many an MNU agent in the process. Afterwards, when the suit is damaged and Wikus accepts the fact that he probably won’t survive, he tells Christopher to go on without him, essentially sacrificing himself. Christopher promises to return, something which is stupidly good of him to do, considering the number of times Wikus almost condemned him to death.

7. Sunshine - Capa meets the sun.

Sunshine, the brilliant film that hardly anybody knows about. Despite being one of Danny Boyle’s less successful films, it stands as one of my favourite of all time. The whole point of the film is to send a bomb the size of Manhattan into the dying sun, in hope of reigniting it. In an ironic twist, the sun is almost one of the protagonists, making those who spend too much time staring at it turn insane and worshipping it as a God, ensuring that the mission is unsuccessful. However, as this is a film, they do eventually succeed, though only by Robert Capa, the man responsible for the bomb’s success, killing himself and the one remaining crew member in the process. As he flies the bomb directly into the sun, there is a brief moment before the explosion in which the sun stops before him, almost as if it is thanking him for keeping it alive. It sounds extremely pretentious when I say it like that, though I can’t really think of another way to do so. It’s helped a lot by the soundtrack which accompanies the moment, though the soundtrack to the entire film is immense.

8. Kick-Ass - Hit Girl saves Big Daddy.

The moment in which Hit Girl single-handedly takes out a large number of men with a combination of guns, strobe lighting and awesomeness is easily the best moment in the entire film. The soundtrack which comes alongside it (surprise surprise, from Sunshine) makes the scene infinitely better, though that’s not to say it would be a bad scene without it by any means. Nicholas Cage’s performance as his character is set alight whilst his daughter kills the men responsible for it is amazing, as is Chloe Grace-Moretz’s performance as Hit Girl. Before this scene I had wondered if all of the “Hit Girl is the star of the show” talk was just over-hype, though after this scene it’s fair to say that I agree wholeheartedly.

So yeah, there you go. Eight film moments I like, one incredibly long Tumblr post. Have that, you bastards.

I absolutely love this advert.

Wed, 25 May 2011 20:15:00 +0100

I absolutely love this advert.

how to deal with a zombie apocalypse.

Mon, 23 May 2011 01:18:00 +0100

Well, as everybody is aware (I hope), humanity narrowly avoided being wiped out again when “The Rapture” didn’t actually take place. Despite the fact that Mr Harold Camping, a fanatic Christian Radio Broadcaster in America who seems to be trying too hard to discover the day of humanity’s end, predicted that Saturday 21st May 2011 would be the end of the world as we know it by using numbers, it didn’t actually happen.

Of course, to anybody who actually knows who Harold Camping is, this isn’t a surprise. In the past he had also predicted that The Rapture would be upon us in September of 1994, though as you can tell by the fact that you’ve been alive for the past seventeen years, that never actually happened and we were never given a reason as to why. The man is ninety years old, he rarely leaves his house for reasons other than to go to the media station where he works, I don’t really blame him for trying to predict the date of everybody’s death. I mean, other than preach on the radio to people who are already converted (because let’s be honest, only die hard Christians actually listen to Christian radio) his life is pretty much empty and he’s just sitting in his house waiting to die. He probably sees using numbers in the Bible to predict the apocalypse as a more complex game of Sudoku to keep him occupied.

But, some of you less intelligent people reading (well, nobody actually reads this, but still) might be asking, what exactly is The Rapture? Well, I’ll tell you. The Rapture is basically the apocalypse. When Jesus left the world back in the day, he said he’d come back and judge everybody living and dead. Those who were deemed worthy would be taken to heaven whilst everybody else has to live hell on earth, essentially a zombie apocalypse of some kind. Of course, when they asked him when this would happen, Jesus shrugged and said, “my dad knows” (I may be paraphrasing slightly).

Anyway, the point of all this. Well, the CDC, or the Centre for Disease Control, released a blog explaining how to react in the case of a genuine zombie apocalypse. As amusing as it was to watch an organisation like the CDC essentially openly mock somebody’s religious beliefs, the blog didn’t really say a lot. It was pretty much just a tongue-in-cheek way of telling people what to do in the case of a genuine disaster, such as a hurricane or an earthquake, such as, “arrange somewhere to meet other survivors afterwards” and, “prepare an emergency kit which can be used in all sorts of disasters”. There wasn’t anything zombie-specific in the list.

So, that’s where I come in. I have devised a list of things to do or not to do in the case of Earth being overrun with flesh eating, brain devouring, slow moving (or fast running, depending on which film you’re watching) undead. I certainly hope it helps in the case of Harold Camping being correct if he gives it another go, third time’s the charm and all that business.

1. Make getting to a supermarket a severe priority.

Let’s be honest, this is more likely to get you survival than making your way to an army base. The army is clearly the first place the zombies are going to go if everybody who has survived has also done so. All the while you get to casually wander into a supermarket and live it up, surrounded by fresh food and water and clothes. You’d be almost guaranteed to live longer than everybody else, assuming you could close the shutters behind you. Everybody else has to worry about running out of food (not you), running out of water (not you), running out of power (admittedly maybe you as well) and the zombies breaking in (not you, if shutters can keep out drunk homeless people on a Sunday night it can definitely keep out brain dead zombies). Obviously this isn’t going to set you up for life, you’ll eventually run out of water and food has an expiry date, not to mention the fact that the human race runs on fossil fuels which are not unlimited. I’m not going to pretend that this list is supposed to be what you do forever, this list is just the best way to postpone your inevitable embrace of the bittersweet death you will no doubt choose after a month or two of surviving almost entirely alone whilst everybody you know and love dies around you.

2. Establish yourself as a popular or essential member of your group.

This is probably the most important of the rules. If zombie movies have taught us anything, it’s that the boring, useless members of the groups die first (well, after the black group members, but that’s just Hollywood’s underlying racism for you). Take Shaun of the Dead for example. Simon Pegg, a loveable comedy actor known worldwide, survives the entire film. Everybody else, with the exception of his girlfriend, don’t. This does leave an alternative however. If you can’t become the integral member of the group, become the girlfriend or boyfriend of said group member, as this will also improve your chances. Another possible option is to become important by having a skill or item that everybody else depends on which you are needed for, this will allow everybody else to care about you more and improve your chances of making it through the next hour.

3. Don’t be “that guy” who goes and checks if the power’s out.

This doesn’t necessarily just mean checking if the power is out. Anything that involves going somewhere on your own, do NOT do it. The people who go off on their own to do some mundane task are always the ones who get caught out and mercilessly killed off by the zombies. If somebody asks for somebody to check something or do something, don’t volunteer. Let some other sucker take the fall, let some other uneducated moron be the one to get his neck cleaved in half by a zombie jaw, whilst you look smug and say “I told you so” before you put an axe in his cranium when his undead self returns from the task he took a suspiciously long time to do.

4. Get weapons. To do so, go to a shopping centre.

Dead Rising showed us one thing. Anything can be used as a weapon. ANYTHING. Zombies are notoriously slow and stupid, though it takes the brain being taken out to kill them (again). So, if you want to survive the zombie onslaught in style, then take a quick detour into the local shopping centre before you go to the supermarket to hide out. Anything will do, a samurai sword, a baseball bat, a good old fashioned gun, shit, even a shattered blender attached to the end of a hockey stick would do. Something sharp, something painful, something brain crushing. Well, I exaggerate about the blender on a stick, though in theory it could work. Realistically, get guns. Lots of guns. Shotguns preferably. And a cowboy hat.

5. Last, but certainly not least, don’t take risks.

This probably sounds incredibly simple and almost like common sense to those with half a brain, though a lot of people do not have half a brain (some people had to ask what The Rapture was earlier). Some people will value male pride over the idea of guaranteed survival. Going back for weapons or a person who has been left behind does not make you a big man or an action hero, not in real life anyway. It does nothing but make you more likely to be killed in a horrific display of stupidity. Somebody’s left behind? Leave them. That somebody happens to be that girl you loved but never had the balls to tell her? Leave her behind, macho man, you should have told her as soon as you realised the fucking zombies were running loose. This isn’t Hollywood, this is the cruel, real world. If you go in being stupid, you won’t come out on top due to an incredible act of luck, you’ll just be instantly killed in a flurry of zombie teeth and intestines.

I hope you keep this information in mind when The Rapture finally does hit us and render us all useless against the wrath of God. God’s track record is pretty patchy though, he tends to mock us before he’s about to kill us. He gave one man a race against time to build a ridiculously huge boat to house two of EVERY ANIMAL, a deadline he narrowly met. He sent ten deadly plagues to the Egyptians, as opposed to outright killing them. Setting zombies on us would be fun for him, making the countless number of dead humans rise from the ground and attack us all, watching all six billion of us run around desperately trying to survive, it’d be like a film for him. Either that, or he’ll just crush the planet between his forefinger and thumb. In which case, we can be thankful our deaths will be swift.

Or maybe it’s all just bullshit. Maybe…

Tom Hardy. Bane. The Dark Knight Rises. Yes.

Fri, 20 May 2011 18:39:00 +0100

Tom Hardy. Bane. The Dark Knight Rises. Yes.

my past month.

Fri, 20 May 2011 00:23:00 +0100

I’m well aware that I haven’t written on this in a long, long time and I’d honestly like to tell you that I have some kind of excuse for that. However, I don’t feel like I have to justify myself, so I won’t. Well, I say I’ve not written on this in a long time, I’ve not written on this in about a month. Not like this anyway, I’ve still put up a video and a couple of pretty pictures for you to look at, though I don’t need to patronise you and tell you how little effort that requires.

So, what’s happened in the past month? Well, the alternative voting system was completely rejected, much to the disappointment of a certain Mr Clegg, Osama Bin Laden was killed, much to the disappointment of Al Qaeda, Manchester City won the FA Cup, much to the disappointment of both Stoke City and Manchester United fans and the Playstation Network went down, much to the disappointment of half of the world. So, as you can see, not an awful lot of important things have happened in the past month.

I’d like to tell you that my month has personally been quite eventful. However, I’d be lying. With the exception of my first taste of a night out courtesy of an extremely cheap and extremely awful Tuesday night, a party which turned out to practically be an orgy and going to see Glasvegas play live, this has been a normal month. Oh and I finished college forever but that’s not a big deal.

We’ll start with the Glasvegas concert. “Concert”, it sounds like something a forty year old would say. Alright, the Glasvegas “gig”. Now, I feel almost ashamed to say this, but this was my first proper gig that I had been to. Unless you count going to see comedians do their stand up tours live (which, for the record, includes Lee Evans, Russell Howard and John Bishop), I’ve not been. I’ve certainly never been to see a band play live anyhow. The gig was at the Manchester Academy which beforehand (rather naively) I had anticipated to be a bit like a smaller version of the MEN, with seats around a top part leaving the floor below available for standing. Don’t ask my why I thought that, this was before I had realised that it was actually located nearby the Manchester University and was typically a place for students.

Anyway, I got there about an hour before Glasvegas themselves came out and just about caught the warm up act, Thomas Tantrum. They sounded extremely good on stage and made a mental note to look them up when I got home. Disappointingly, I actually checked them out when I got home and found that they sounded worse in a recording studio. Not terrible, but nowhere near as good as they were live. Then, finally, after an awful lot of waiting around afterwards and listening to 80s music whilst the band arrived and prepared, the lights went down and “Pain, Pain, Never Again” started to play. Now, the word “epic” is thrown around an awful lot these days, but I can honestly say it was one of the most exciting moments of my life.

Then, after their walk-out song ended, they broke into “The World Is Yours”, which sounded far more energetic and louder than it does on the album. The same could be said for every single song that they performed, they even managed to make “Ice Cream Van” a bit more upbeat. Well, all of the songs other than “Flowers & Football Tops”, of which they did a slow keyboard version. It was actually immense. Of course the highlight, as it is with everything Glasvegas do, was “It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry”, easily their best song by far. To put a long story short, Glasvegas are easily my favourite band and are comfortably better live than they are on their albums, which takes some doing.

Now, onto the matter of the party-orgy. Just to clarify for those reading, it wasn’t genuinely an orgy. There were just so many people with each other’s faces glued to each other via the mouth that it may as well have been. Various sexual acts were committed at a party I was at and I still find it quite strange. It’s one of those things I’d hear about at high school (which says a lot about the high school I went to) and I’d just assume they were lying. However, after you’ve tried to have a piss in the toilets and have a “couple” (I say couple, they had just picked each other to mate with) wander in asking if you’re being sick or not whilst discussing whether the shower would be an ideal place to have sex, the idea of people randomly having sex at parties becomes a lot more plausible.

It’s a state of confusion, really. On the one hand I feel as if I’ve been a bit naive in assuming that this doesn’t happen at parties (well, the full blown sex as well as various other things) because the people I usually hang around with aren’t generally the kind of people to randomly toss people off at parties or to have sex in the changing room showers. On the other hand, I question if this is just a reflection of the kind of people who were there and is probably a lesson well learnt, the lesson being to avoid the parties of which these people are likely to attend.

Though, on the more innocent side of the party, it was actually rather good. Having a laugh with your own group of friends makes the awkwardness of what’s going on around you a lot less noticeable. However, I discovered that walking in with a girl who you aren’t actually “involved with” whilst she holds onto your arm to stop herself from falling over her heels is probably a bad decision. It leads to nothing but questions of, “what’s going on with you two?”, and “why aren’t you going out with each other yet?” pretty much all night. Admittedly it’s probably because it was one of my closer friends that I walked in with and I’ve been getting quite a lot of the “there’s something going on with you two” talk pretty much ever since I’d started speaking to her, though apparently there had been a bet going between two of my friends that something already WAS going on for a month prior to the party, though that’s the price of a friendship that crosses genders.

Right, now it’s time for the terrible Tuesday night. I can’t even remember what led to be going out that night, I think I received a phone call from a slightly drunken friend ushering me out of the house, offering both a lift to and from town as well as the money to spend there. There wasn’t really much chance of me turning it down. Anyway, after finally reaching the place it looked relatively promising. However, once we got inside, got drinks and sat down whilst the music (which actually wasn’t half bad) played for a good hour, we realised that absolutely nothing was happening and that we should just call it a night. I can’t really complain, the cost of getting in and buying three drinks only came to £4, though it’s not what I’d like to think of as my “first night out” by any means. Although on the bright side, I suppose it means the next night out can only really improve.

Quite a ridiculously short paragraph about my first night out as opposed to my first gig and a party-orgy but there you go. My past month. Let’s hope I get another one of these out a bit sooner than a month from now, or else I won’t be able to call Tumblr a “thing” anymore.

This is what Psychology does to you when you’re sat alone...

Tue, 17 May 2011 18:41:00 +0100

This is what Psychology does to you when you’re sat alone in the corner of the room for a double lesson.

"Did you ever think back on all the times you’ve had with someone and just replay it in your..."

Mon, 16 May 2011 23:07:00 +0100

“Did you ever think back on all the times you’ve had with someone and just replay it in your head over and over again and you look for those first signs of trouble?”

- Tom Hansen - 500 Days of Summer.

OH. MY. GOD. Michael Bay, you’ve done it again.

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 20:20:00 +0100

OH. MY. GOD. Michael Bay, you’ve done it again.

Wow.

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 15:34:00 +0100

Wow.

Love this song, love this video.

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 01:04:00 +0100

Love this song, love this video.