Saturday 19 February 2011

Toys Don't Cry

Men, by stereotype, are tough aren’t they? Yeah, they go round shouting and fighting, they’re derogatory towards women, boast about how they fucked that broad last night and she loved it (even if it never happened). This is the stereotypical man, he loves beer, football, tits and most of all being a hard bastard.
It would be wrong to say that all men are like this because after all I’m writing, I’m not outside fighting for the honour of a football team I have needlessly affiliated myself with and therefore become so emotionally attached that match results dictate my moods and feelings, no, I am writing, which in the world of men is considered sissy and gay (unless it’s about football or tits).
Nevertheless every man gets stuck with this tag and when it comes to movies the juxtaposition of this stereotype with “tearjerkers” is apparently hilarious. A woman can watch a sad or emotionally moving film and cry and that’s not a problem because she’s a woman and that’s expected. When a man cries in a film it’s an opportunity to point and laugh at him because of the stereotypical identity that’s been given to him.
This is a stigma that as a fairly sensitive and probably quite sissy man I despise. When will a man be able to cry at a cinema and it not be made into a big deal? When will a man watch a film with his wife and not have to hold the tears back for fear of embarrassment? It’s a moving film and he’s got to let it all out for fuck’s sake! Andy and Red are reunited on the beach and through fear of humiliation we cannot fully embrace this highly emotional homoerotic moment. The Cure famously told us that boys don’t cry, but it’s only because they would get laughed at.


GIFSoup

If only men cried more we wouldn’t have wars. When we’re sad instead of letting it all come out we bottle it up because of fear, and like Yoda said fear turns to anger and eventually the dark side, and we end up with a war all because some bastard couldn’t cry. You might think well hang on you’re exaggerating this but fuck you I’m not, I just watched Toy Story 3 and I cried and I’m fucking ashamed of myself. A film that has become famous for the volume of tears produced from men, not women or children, MEN. When I’m asked if I’ve seen Toy Story 3 in the future and I say yes, I will be asked did you cry? DID YOU CRY? DID YOU CRY? I’m a terrible liar, I will have to say yes, and they will laugh at me, ha ha, ha ha, HA HA HA, because a man crying is something to be laughed at.
It’s not my fault, Toy Story 3 was supposed to make you cry. It was relatable to just about every type of person, it makes you think about the loss of your youth and innocence, of being rejected, of lost friendships and your inevitable loneliness, your own endless futility, becoming old and useless, and if you are old and useless, how your children will abandon you if they haven‘t already. Every way you look at this film it addresses a fear, and what catches a tear in your eye is it telling you that everything is going to be fine.
All of this doesn’t matter, it’s primarily a kids movie and you shouldn’t cry, and if you do you’ll get laughed at, even by men who also cried. What scares me is that Hollywood has noted how effective Toy Story 3 was, how making men cry makes a hit and we have several hundred more tear inducing films to come in which everyone laughs at us. I’d like to say that I’m comfortable crying but in truth I’m not, it’s embarrassing but there’s no way to stop it, I can’t toughen up, men have tried to and failed. They started going to football matches but they just ended up crying there.

Thursday 17 February 2011

Dead Island

If you look at trending topics on twitter at any given moment you will be forgiven for stabbing yourself in the eye. A list of the most popular topics on twitter is actually an unholy inventory of rage inducing shittery that will make you question the very core of humanity and everything around it. Because what’s “hot” on twitter are fuckwitted inane phrases featuring the likes of Justin Bieber, the Jonas brothers and Lady Gaga. Basically if you’re on MTV 24/7 you’re on twitter 24/7. Twitter can be educational, a much quicker gateway to news and culture than any other means but millions of people aren’t interested in this, no, they just want to proclaim their love or hatred of popular Disney tweens. If you look further into these trending topics you see that most people aren’t actually talking about the topic at all, it’s a long list of morons tweeting “OMG why is Rasputin trending?” or just listing every topic so people will read their tweets and maybe just very maybe will end up following them.
To cut an infinite tangent short, there is one particular thing that is currently trending called Dead Island. I would be right to assume that it’s just another stupid topic, that Justin Bieber has been found dead washed up on an island, or Lady Gaga’s new outfit is of a dead island, but no, this is one of those rare occasions in which twitter has trended something that is worthy of your attention, the problem is that you won’t know that, you’ll assume it isn‘t.
Totally ignoring the trending, and even a few tweets from trusted sources, I eventually stumbled across the trailer for Dead Island this morning (not the show). Dead Island is a forthcoming PS3/Xbox 360 game about an island of zombies, and the trailer at least, is fudging brilliant. It’s pretty rare that a game will appear out of nowhere and get everyone excited, we usually know about them sometimes years before they are released, but like a sex offender lunging at you out of a bush, Dead Island has caught everyone by surprise.




A lot of recent games have been trying to look like movies, fancy cut scenes, big scores, bigger explosions and instead of adverts, they have classy trailers. It’s a concept that works, look at the sales of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and that looked like several movies! As the game industry is becoming ever more popular, marketing is becoming the most vital aspect of it. The popularity of the Nintendo Wii and DS is not because of the excellence of the games, it’s because of Ant and Dec, Helen Mirren and Sir Patrick fucking Stewart.
Dead Island will further change how games are marketed, it might turn out to be dreadful but publishers will have already arranged meetings to turn out a trailer that makes their game look like the dog’s bollocks and the bee’s knees. We might be given lots of pretty looking videos, but film trailers almost always fool us into thinking a film is better than it actually is. Iron Man 2 and Predators both included footage in their trailers that didn’t feature in the final film and who’s to say game trailers won’t do this? They already do.
Hardcore gamers will be dripping in their pants having seen the Dead Island trailer but if history tells us anything we should prepare for disappointment. If there’s two things I love it’s zombies and islands but we don’t know much about the game as of yet and it may prove to be Dead Rising on an island, which no one wants. Of course what we want is a great game and if the trailer could be considered as an indicator of its quality (which it can’t) then we could have something very special.
There are lots of if’s and but’s and by the time Dead Island is released we might have forgotten all about it. In true cynical fashion I am braced for an anti-climax and a barrage of over the top artsy trailers. All that matters for the publishers is that games look good, and like zombies we buy every single one.

Saturday 12 February 2011

Peggle Makes You Kill!

This article was brought to the attention of many a nerd this week and is another hyperbolic rant of fearful accusation that video games are a bad influence. This debate has existed as long as video games have and mainly comes from silly little people who have never played a game in their life before.
Their argument may seem sound, in a game a player is rewarded for acts of violence, and subsequently they will be conditioned to believe that this is the same in reality, with violence becoming the primary answer to a real life conflict. It makes sense if you word it like that and it may even be true in some cases, but some is the key word here. This won’t happen to EVERY gamer and it is close minded to label every gamer has a potential psycho rapist murderer and proclaim that Peggle makes you kill.
In this article, Carole Lieberman, apparently a psychiatrist (not a real science) and an author (anyone can write a book) said that “the increase of rapes can be attributed in large part to the playing out of sexual scenes in video games”. Carole Lieberman whoever the fuck she is has made the most idiotic thing argument I have ever heard within the video game debate. I’ve played games for as long as I can remember and not in one game have I controlled a character who has been able to rape someone. There have been very few occasions where a player has been able to have sex, and on these occasions it is always boring, and you never see anything. For example in GTA, you could take a prostitute into your car and the car would shake. Furthermore it was not vital to the progression of the game, nor did it reward you. Likewise in Fable (in which the screen blacks out) if you didn’t use a condom you would end up with an STD or a baby, which you would agree is far from a reward. Sex in video games has always been tedious, it will never be vital to the plot and this is why it has and always will appear so little in them, it’s not like Mario has been boning Princess Peach is it?
I’ve been a gamer all my life, I’ve not raped or murdered anyone, I’ve not been cruel to animals, I’ve never been in a fight in my life, I hate any kind of conflict, so can you really say that they have been a bad influence on me? I’m not the only one, I’m guessing that the majority of gamers are by modern standards, normal. The recent popularity of the industry proves this, otherwise the world would be overrun by vagrants raping and murdering each other, which it isn’t.
At a very young age I was constantly surrounded by “bad” influences, I played Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, I watched Schwarzenegger (wow, spelt that right first time) films all the time, I watched wrestling, there were naughty kids at school and out of school, and it was the same in my adolescence, I listened to Eminem, I watched Tarantino films, watched porn, politicians did bad things, footballers did bad things, everyone and thing around me was the epitome of immorality, and I have never stolen, raped or murdered. It is not always monkey see monkey do, in my experience bad influences are a deterrent. When I play something like GTA, and I’m shooting everyone who comes on screen, the police will come after me, and then SWAT teams, and the FBI, and the army, and eventually they will shoot and kill me, just as in real life games have consequences.
You could even argue that games are actually a good influence. Scientific research has shown that they can actually improve cognitive processing while in my experience playing the likes of Civilisation and Medieval: Total War has greatly improved my knowledge of history and geography. No longer is staying in your room all day anti-social, online gaming is a great way of socialising if used in the correct way, and playing games are one of the best ways to bond and cement a friendship. They are supposed to be fun and if the line between game and reality blurs, then you’re probably mental if you play games or not.

Thursday 10 February 2011

Beautiful Gypsies are Better Than You!

Gypsies have a hard time don’t they? If you ever see one on TV they’re usually putting a curse on someone and it’s this type of stereotyping that Big Fat Gypsy Weddings is trying to rid the world of. Because of course they don’t go round putting curses on vampires and such, you would be a dickhead to think that, in fact according to Big Fat Gypsy Weddings they’re just like you and me, but better.
BFGW has the honour of being the most watched Channel 4 programme since Big Brother back in 2008. A sentence that should read “8 million watch Peep Show again” actually reads “BFGW is the most watched programme since Big Brother”. I never understood Big Brother, what should have been an opportunity to judge those horrible desperate people became a platform to put them on a pedestal and praise their every breath and bowel movements. It remained partly popular not by judgers but by people who wanted to be just like them, they wanted to sit in a house and talk, and then not have to work for the rest of their lives. BFGW should be a stage for judgement, but instead it’s a stage for love, appreciation and envy, gosh they have a nice life, swoon!
The modern English preconception of a gypsy (or pikey) is of a horrible person who doesn’t pay taxes and leaves shit everywhere. While it would obviously be wrong to tarnish a whole community with the same shitty brush it is equally wrong to so fervently paint an eloquent picture of an idyllic wanderlust paradise, and that’s what Channel 4 have done. You would expect a documentary such as this to be judgemental, to point at the gypsies and go “ergh look at them! They smell, look at that boy riding a horse, what a prick, they make me sick”.
Instead it’s actually quite biased towards the gypsies, turning a blind eye towards things that a “normal” person would be judged for. Take the gypsy art of grabbing for example, where a man will “grab” a woman and do what they like. Not even the dictionary has a nice definition of the word grab, but the producers of BFGW cared not for what was probably just slang for rape and moved quickly on, ignoring a helpless girl in a car park.
With a tweaked narration the show could be very different, with all the grabbing and fighting and suspiciously expensive cars there should be at the very least a mention that the sun doesn’t shine out of all their arseholes. Why not ask them where they really get all their money from? One man hired a fucking helicopter! It’s as if the producers were afraid to make them look bad, perhaps they’ve seen Snatch and would rather not be shot.
Every girl and woman is portrayed as strong and beautiful, and every man is strong and masculine. There must be some scummy gypsies out there, the show may be highlighting that they’re good people, but if you take a random handful of people, at least one of them will be a cunt, (as it’s known in mathematics, the cunt coefficient). BFGW doesn’t know the meaning of the word and would have you believe that despite all the bad things we can clearly see them doing, they’re courteous, affable, honest, civilised people, and you’d be lucky to be half as good as they are.
The title, Big Fat Gypsy Weddings is misleading as the whole wedding thing takes a backseat and is a mere footnote, a more fitting title would be Beautiful Gypsies are Better Than You! Though that would be a lie because when you are presented with a wedding it just looks like Jordan’s, only slightly less/more tacky. It’s not just the bride who looks like Jordan though, it’s every woman, girl and even baby, and here is where the judging/admiring takes place depending on where you stand on morality, “Oh they’re beautiful!”, “They look like Jordan”.
If you’re an idiot and didn’t quite understand what was going on with all the moving pictures and narration, there’s some scouse woman to tell you everything about gypsies every five minutes, how do we know what she’s saying is true? She could be making this all up, “every Tuesday a gypsy eats a squirrel”. Her presence is bewildering and it makes you want to see a documentary called Big Fat Scouse Wedding Planners in which gypsies tell us all about her, “I wanted a traditional church wedding and she made me look like fucking Jordan!”
Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted the show, perhaps I’ve become too pessimistic of mankind and nothing can escape my ghastly cynicism, you could have a documentary about charity workers and I’d probably call them all cunts. Perhaps as a nation we have become a society where we need to judge others to feel good about ourselves. Am I naïve to think that this show could have been anything other than a device for judging? Are the majority of the viewers still judging gypsies despite the show’s spin? And has our opinion of gypsies changed in the slightest? Answers on a postcard.

Wednesday 2 February 2011

Man of British Steel

There’s been an absolute clusterfuck of shit happening in the world of comic book movies, at least if you’re a geek, nerd or fanboy. To the “normal” person it’s awards season, all dresses, Colin Firth and shit, but for the geeks it’s jizz in your own mouth season. Aside from the slew of screenshots for the likes of Spider-Man, Captain America and the X-People (thanks Andy Gray) the big news for the socially awkward virgins is that Henry Cavill is Superman.
Holy jiminy fuck nuggets Batman! That guy from The Tudors (no, the other one) will be the first British Superman, who let us not forget is everything a symbol for America as Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley and obesity. How the Americans will take this news I don’t know but for us Brits we can relax in the knowledge that at the very least there will be one good performance in the film.
It’s something of a continuing trend to cast a Brit as a superhero and why not? We’re fucking Great remember. Robert Pattinson aside we have some great young actors while the US only really have Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera, both are hardly super hero types. With the likes of Cage, Pitt, Damon, Depp and DiCaprio heading ever further away from their youth there aren’t any big stars for the action roles. Chris Evans and Ryan Reynolds have both had multiple super hero roles already, they can’t share all the roles so Hollywood has looked towards good ol’ Britain to fill the roles.
Back in the 90’s even Robin Hood was American, but everything has changed. With Christian Bale, James McAvoy, Aaron Johnson, Andrew Garfield (he counts), Tom Hardy, Idris Elba, Anthony Hopkins, Patrick Stewart, Michael Caine, Helen Mirren, Mark Strong and even Nicholas Hoult appearing in comic book movies (let’s not forget Andrew Lincoln in The Walking Dead) is it any surprise that Cavill has been cast as Superman?
So he might not be the biggest actor out there but neither were Christopher Reeve and Brandon Routh and they did better than alright. As long as he can awkwardly fumble as Clark Kent, walk with his pants on the outside and pretend to lift things he’ll be a success. The casting of Superman should be the least of the producers concern, with numerous interpretations of the hero already out there it will be incredibly difficult to make a film that is both exciting and original all while keeping to the traditional canon.
If rumours of the casting of Lois Lane are true and any of Kristen Stewart, Glee’s Diana Agron, Rachel McAdams and Jessica Biel are cast then we can all go home now and never speak of this fucking awful monstrosity ever again, but if Olivia Wilde turns out to be Lois Lane we can all jump and high five each other, though it would be in her contract to have at least one lesbian scene…More high fives!
There’s no doubt that Lex Luthor will be the villain because Superman hasn’t got many classic enemies, it’s not like Gus Gorman will be making a comeback (on skis!) so there will be much speculation to who will be perfect for Lex Luthor, though I’m sure there are forums awash with ideas (and demands) already.
If the trend of British actors wasn’t enough we’ve found ourselves getting excited and writing about films that won’t be released for well over a year, be it about the Avengers or Batman we have a live news feed of the smallest of details and the sad thing is I’m here as always typing away about all of it - get a life you loser. The announcement of Henry Cavill may seem premature but at least it will stop thousands of fanboys ejaculating cries of “NATHAN FILLION!” to the question of who should play Superman.