J O H N N Y L O L L E R S K A T E S

Helpful hints for finding employment.

2012-02-16T00:23:00.000-08:00

So you decided to venture on the internet to look for employment? How the fuck did that happen? Oh, you heard of craigslist? Well this is the only site you will ever need for your job hunt. If you follow these simple steps you will land a job almost certainly.

1) Pray. This works quite well because you have no fucking chance in hell of getting noticed. Historically the bible was created by someones pet, mistaken by jesus and stolen by god. So how does this go with obtaining a job? Well think back to the first paragraph, re-read it five times, maybe six, and dismember your own head, only then will you understand the collerlation between job-hunting and praying.

2)Cold call. This works extremely well, especially when you are an established prostitute. You can find clients relatively easily. If you get someone that is under 12, make something up because you might be able to network enough to get to their parents, and that's good for 20bucks, maybe 60 if they are rich. You don't want to set your hopes too high as a prostitute, you might forget to take your vitamins. This is also the point at which you cut off your head again. You can never do this enough because finding a job is impossible, and you are wasting your time.

3)Send 500 emails a day. This doesn't work because you can't possible do that, and I don't even know why you are trying at this point. It's preferential that you cut off your head and quit reading this article. You probably thought this article was here to help you, but you now realized that you have wasted your time, and not only that you have read something extremely negative, and you probably will kill yourself.

And that concludes finding a job! We have learned that through praying, you wont find a job. Also we have learned that cold calling will not find you a job as well. And finally, you can send as many emails as you want, you'll still be penniless and produce stillbourns if you ever attempt to procreate. This is the best advice I can give you, and it works. Now do America a favor and decrease the population today!

Legends of League of Legends: URGOT

2012-02-15T11:00:00.000-08:00

If you're one of the brain surgeons, doctors or lawyers who regularly plays the original Warcraft 3 mod Defense of the Ancients you might be familiar with the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game League of Legends. It's a game that pits werewolves against deaf women with giant harps that shoot lasers, rock men against the guy from Assassin's Creed, pirates against squirrel men piloting robotic battlesuits. It's a game that's good at wasting your time. You get pit against other dirtbags who refuse to pay money for a finished product but are too lazy to use bit torrent.

Which leads us to our champion spotlight of the day:

Urgot: The morbidly obese cyborg crab man.

Urgot is fucking awesome. When you start the game playing as him you're basically a huge bully. He works best in mid-lane where you go one-on-one with the best guy from the other team. Your E skill is an acid bomb with mid-range that tags an enemy, doing slight damage over time as it melts their face off. However, when you hit level 2 and grab your Q skill you then have the ability to tag someone with an acid bomb and lob ballistic acid-seeking missiles at them from a huge distance. This effectively makes you the Aegis missile cruiser of the game. You are a battleship of pure long-range damage output and mobility and your W is a shield to help you slug it out with whomever you're dueling against.

Urgot's ultimate is one of the trickiest in the game. You hit someone with it and you switch positions with them, while at the same time upping your armor for a few seconds. Enemies that are harassing you are immediately thrown into places where they really don't want to be: In the middle of your team or underneath an angry turret. You can use people trying to gank you as stepping stones to freedom as you switch places with someone trying to block your path. Most opponents you use your ultimate on panic at the sudden jarring shift of position (with the accompanying crazy sound effect it produces) and start flailing and waste their summoner skills trying to get away.

Urgot's strategy is to ramp up in gold until he can get his Perfect Item: The Manamune. Once you get it you no longer have to worry about wasting mana. Just keep spamming your abilities as Manamune rewards you with a higher mana cap for doing so. And then you get more attack power the more mana you have. It allows you to unfairly steamroll in offensive power until you get to dangerous levels.

Making Urgot as scary as possible is one of your goals. Grab some lifesteal so you can heal yourself as you fight. Get Guardian Angel so everyone can see you'll revive if you ever get killed. Grab both the blue golem buff and the red lizard buff in the jungle so you have a ton of spinning shield shit around you whenever you fight. Fuck it, grab Stark's Fervor too so you have a glowing green icon underneath you as you run around. It's like pimp my ride with a fat guy on robo-crab legs.

With great-sounding voice acting, fun skills and a plasma cannon for an arm, Urgot is one of my favorite Legends of League of Legends. He is regularly overlooked by most other players, at least until they see him bearing down on them surrounded by swirling buffs of all kinds and launching acid bombs and seeker missiles as he inexorably moves towards their base.

Dungeons of Dredmor

2012-02-10T19:50:00.000-08:00

The Indie Revolution in gaming is upon us. What does that mean for you, the aspiring game developer? Well, for you it means that you can grab your kid brother and cobble up something on your parent's Commodore 64, add some chiptunes and, voila! You have your next indie sensation. Send your gold copy to Gabe Newell (be sure to wrap it in cheese so he takes interest) and it'll be on Steam within 24 hours, probably part of another Humble Indie Bundle for $19.99.

Dungeons of Dredmor works on the basic assumption that you have no idea what Nethack is, and it's a pretty good assumption as the only people who do are dangerously obsessive Autistics who moderate the Nethack wiki. This game flew across my radar when it appeared in PC Gamer's 100 Best Games of All Time list (which, shockingly, does not feature Deus Ex as its number 1 game any longer. Now it's Portal. More cheese, Gabe?)

Dredmor is pretty much Nethack lite. However, that might be an unfair statement. While Nethack has had a lot of work put into it over the years, making it possibly one of the most complex and difficult RPG's ever made, it has had absolutely no work done to it to make it remotely palatable to the average human being. ASCII characters making up the visuals combined with a stark cliff face of a learning curve do not pull in the customers as well as graphics and sound. I'm looking at you too, Dwarf Fortress.

So Gaslamp Games made an easier-to-play Nethack with Super Nintendo graphics and decent sound effects and music. Chiptunes, of course. That's the Indie hallmark, everyone loves chiptunes. Retro is the candy that gaming nerds crave.

Nethack's staples still survive: Hardcore game mode, where there are no loading saved games and character death is final. Ramped-up difficulty that will have you slaying tiny blobs of goo one level and horrendous mind-raping abominations from Below the next. You drink from fountains and they either make you feel good or poison you. Your can choose for your character to be laughably inept to deal with the challenge of defeating a dungeon's worth of monsters, just for fun.

However, you won't see truly random happenstances like putting on a ring that's cursed, which you can't take off, which makes you float around and unable to go downstairs until you exit the dungeon the way you came. You won't be able to kill a gnome and use your tinning kit to make canned gnome to eat later. You won't drink a potion that turns you into a tarantula.

Dredmor's graphics and crafting system are notably good and fun to use. The character creation system is hilarious. You choose 8 aspects to throw together in a mishmash and see what kind of adventurer you create. You can have an armor-using mathematician magician who uses blood magic and crossbows, who specializes in mushroom magic to summon killer fungus to defeat his enemies. And he's a sparkly Twilight vampire as well.

The game has a lot of referential and sardonic humor, which helps make it a fun little diversion. If you're a neckbearded hipster then you'll love this game's many references, which are the nerd's lifeblood.

What really shows this game's Indie origins are the fact that it crashes every 15 minutes and gets old really, really fast. Having a game that centers around you having a hardcore, un-revivable character who you play for a couple hours until he or she becomes really cool, then gets deleted when the game crashes, is not a hallmark of a professionally-made product. Gaslamp Games then proceeds to not give a fuck, instead making a half-assed sequel with more references and chiptunes instead of patching the original game.

Thanks, but no thanks. There's nothing I Dredmor than an unfinished product.

The Eagle (2011)

2012-01-25T11:26:00.000-08:00

The Eagle: A Channing Tatum Joint is a stressful movie. With so much moral ambiguity it's hard to know who to root for...the oppressive Romans who seek to rule all of the British Isles, or the native Britons who dress up like lunatics and murder for fun? Never mind that the movie just assumes you'd be on the side of the Romans, because the filmmakers are too stupid to realize that their main character isn't even slightly sympathetic.

Deliverance Banjo Kid all grown up on 'roids Channing Tatum is all the star power The Eagle has to offer, which should give you an indication of the movie's quality. From Fighting to GI Joe Rise of Cobra to Dear John, Channing has been trying as hard as he can to be the Steven Seagal of the 21st century. The squinting, the mumbling, the cavalcade of instantly-forgettable performances...it's all there. He just needs to get old, join up with some obscure Asian religion and become a truly overweight shitbag cop and the cycle is complete.

Oh yeah, the plot. So apparently in Roman times they made these giant golden eagles that vanguard forces of the army would take into newly-conquered lands. Channing's dad was a super cool Roman general guy who decided to take one of these eagles into enemy territory and was promptly torn apart by the super-evil Briton savages who selfishly didn't want to be enslaved. The Romans build Hadrian's wall to keep the filthy paleskins at bay, forming what you might call a Green Zone that's a safe refuge for the civilized soldiers in the midst of a war-torn land. The jarhead (or brush-head) Roman soldiers find themselves led by the son of the failure who lost the Eagle. Lucky for them, Channing has super-human hearing due to the fact that he has severely reduced vision from all that squinting and wakes them all up in the middle of the night to fend off a surprise Briton ambush.

The director must have realized at this point that no one in the audience gives a fuck so he has the Briton leader, a babbling Druid, take some Roman soldiers hostage. They drag one up to Hadrian's wall and behead him. Pretty gruesome, eh? Not really, since The Eagle is PG-13 so retarded teenagers could potentially pay money for a ticket. Any time in the movie that someone is about to get beheaded, eviscerated or otherwise brutally murdered the camera turns away.

So this turns out to be a ruse, and Channing's phalanx of wannabe Spartan warriors who went out to save the other survivors gets set upon by war chariots. After a magic spear throw that kills the Druid leader Channing gets hit by a 2-ton out-of-control chariot that knocks him out and cuts his leg a little.

He goes back to the Green Zone and gets some stone-age surgery which turns him into a cripple. While rehabbing his leg he visits the local bread and circus deathmatch where the daily matchup is the two-face helmeted gladiator guy from Gladiator versus a shrimpy 98-pound Briton slave who refuses to fight. As the Gladiator is about to strike the killing blow the audience screams "Death! DEATH!!" with their thumbs down. Channing has an epiphany and throws his thumb up, yelling "No! Life! LIFE, GUYS!" which totally turns the mood of the crowd around. The Briton whose life he saved becomes his slave, swearing to be loyal to him forever.

Channing decides to go on an epic quest to find the eagle his father lost while being devoured by cannibal Scots. He takes his Briton slave up past Hadrian's wall into the wilderness. At every opportunity Channing treats his slave buddy like shit. He orders him around, tells him about how his people need to be crushed by the Empire and squints at him accusingly. Channing doesn't even speak the local language and if anyone figured out he was a Roman soldier his innards would be used for haggis and blood pudding. The slave is his only hope for survival, but he's still an elitist dick to him. You would think that as soon as Channing closes his eyes to rest the slave would cut his throat and head home. Maybe it was really hard for the slave to tell if Channing was asleep or not, which is understanding.

Channing finds some old Roman soldiers who escaped the massacre back in his father's time. They have all gone native and no one knows where the eagle is. The only thing that points Channing in the right direction is praying to Zeus, wherafter he hears an eagle cry and follows it to the North. I didn't even make that part up.

Channing and the slave come across the Seal People, an ultra-savage group of Britons who wear grey bodypaint and bone armor 24/7. Channing's slave tricks them into believing that Channing is actually HIS Roman slave. Channing is unable to deduce this ruse and instead becomes enraged and calls the Briton a traitor, attempting to kill him with his bare hands. The Seal People then proceed to beat his ass, repeatedly. "We'll help you keep your slave in line" they helpfully offer.

After being humiliated for a while at the hospitality of the Seal People, Channing becomes witness to one of their heathen Druid rituals. They all get drunk on goat piss and hallucinate while their deer-antlered shaman dances around in front of him. And what does the shaman have as his magic staff, but the golden eagle. As soon as he sees the eagle Channing tries to assault the shaman and promptly gets his ass beat again by the Seal People.

Channing's Briton slave then reveals that he was faking the whole time and he's still indentured for life to his Roman master. They grab the eagle and take off on horseback. The only one left in the village who's not stoned off his ass from last night's ritual is a little kid who is sorry to see the two leave. The slave gives the kid a little wooden fish to remember them by and to not wake anyone up.

After their horses' legs break in the peat moss of the Scottish Highlands, it's a foot race against the Seal People. Everyone back in ancient times had the ability to run for days on end. It was a survival tactic that allowed them to hunt wooly mammoths, one which disappeared with the invention of polyunsaturated fats. Channing's wound starts to give him trouble and he goes into septic shock. His slave runs off back to Hadrian's wall in a stupid attempt to get reinforcements from the Romans. In case you were wondering, Channing still treats him like a dick. He very begrudgingly gives the slave his freedom in order for him to leave his side to go find help.

So the Seal People who have been running for a week finally catch up with Channing, who takes time off from puking his guts out to somehow be in fighting shape again. Magically, his former slave comes back with all the disgraced old Roman warriors who had lost the eagle to begin with, their armor and weapons still intact. "Defend the Eagle!" Channing commands.

But the Seal People have one last surprise. The director must have remembered that at this point absolutely no one would be sympathetic to Channing and are most likely actively rooting for the Seal People to kill him, so he tries to demonize the savage Britons one last time. The Seal People have brought that little kid from the village, the one who got the wooden fish from Channing's slave. They then slit his throat (off-camera) to show just how hardcore they are. It's cool that these guys sprinted for a hundred miles with a little kid in tow just to make a point (and wipe out one of their small village's only male heirs), but whatever. A slow-mo 300 Spartans fight ensues where all the Seal People and old Romans die and Channing is branded Best Roman Ever. Hooray!

Moral of the Story: Pray to Zeus, and you'll get shit done.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) - Breaking and Entering Evolved

2012-01-19T10:45:00.000-08:00

Setting aside for the moment the fact that the original Deus Ex somehow keeps finding its way onto Top 10 Games of All Time lists (If not the #1 Game of All Time), it was still a game plagued with issues. These issues have become popular to ignore by gaming journalists, who have been seeking for years to turn the "Best Game Ever" debate into something more complex than just "It was Half-Life. Alternatively? Half-Life 2."

Playing the original Deus Ex would lead one to notice some glaring problems. Namely, horrendous voice acting, casual if unintended racism, retarded sound effects, abominable AI and convoluted plotline.

Now, this is a '90's action game so I'm going to let all those problems slide. I'm going to do this namely because Deus Ex was the most hilarious game I've ever played. A game that took itself so seriously and attempted to bring up so much deep commentary on government, religion, power and the future of humanity, one that allowed you never before seen freedom to complete missions in any way you wanted...none of that mattered when you were tasing the homeless in the streets, gathering up as many '40's of malt liquor as possible and downing them at once, breaking into someone's apartment and stealing their couch, beaning cops in the head with basketballs, and generally being a cyborg criminal nuisance.

My experience with Deus Ex can be summed up into my first impression gathered during the game's training mission. As JC Denton you're set through a variety of simple trials to get you used to the controls, augmentations and inventory screens. At the very end of the training mission, however, you encounter a GIANT ROBOT FIRING LIVE AMMO. Evidently UNATCO is pretty serious about putting you through the ropes before sending you into the world. In trying to escape this mechanical monstrosity I was introduced to the damage system that was able to calculate injuries down to individual limbs, even going so far as to immobilize them until you've received adequate medical attention. I got my legs shot off and had to crawl across the finish line.

I continued to scrape along in agony as my superior congratulated me over the radio on my achievement and subsequently expounded at GREAT length on the happenings of the world, UNATCO, terrorism, the "gray death, etc. etc." All the while I'm crying with laughter, screaming at my monitor for a medic and oh god why is no one helping me.

I'm happy to announce that, while the outright silliness of the things you could do in the game world have been toned down a bit in Human Revolution, most of what gave Deus Ex its flavor have returned. Homeless people lie in the streets waiting to be shot with taser guns and brutalized with your augmented steel fists. Apartments with easily-hackable door locks range far and wide. The AI is still laughably bad, voice acting ranges from decent to horrendous (Eidos has a very specific stereotype in their minds on how blacks and Chinese people talk and act.) You get to go to China for no real reason and check out people living in pods. Poverty is everywhere, people whine constantly about the nature of humanity and augmentation and governments.

While there's no GEP gun to be found, the main difference in augmentations in this round is that they are all useful and pretty cool to boot. They are also extremely expensive, so you really have to take some time to choose what to upgrade. Do you up your hacking skills to be better at breaking and entering, or do you boost your battery system so you can punch more whores in the face before having to find a Cliff bar?

Sadly, alcohol is not nearly as prevalent in Human Revolution as it was in Deus Ex, leading to far fewer instances of wanton drunkenness on the job. This is due to the fact that liquor gives a legitimate boost to your stats, temporarily pushing your health up past 100% like you were Bender or something. The only way to replenish your battery power (after performing multiple lethal takedowns on Chinese civilians) is to eat powerbars, supposedly to "replenish nutrients." So you can run out of powerbars pretty easily and be wandering through a Shanghai market where street cooks are frying up meat in woks left and right and there's shops full of snacks everywhere you look, but you go hungry because all Adam Jensen eats is a specific brand of candy.

I am about halfway through the game and enjoying breaking as many laws as humanly possible, surpassing what he term "humanly possible" even means as I see through walls, jump from 5-story buildings and land without a scratch, punch through walls and immobilize transients with a sonic cannon.

Final Verdict: I never asked for this.

Dwarf Fortress: Tales of Promise and Failure

2012-01-10T22:56:00.000-08:00

Dwarf Fortress (Or: Armok, God of Blood volume II, Dwarf Fortress) is a game that appeals to me much in the way Nethack appeals to both me and to people with sick senses of humor like me (but who, unlike me, are obsessive and Autistic.)

Namely, it's a game about losing. Losing in surprising and horrifying ways. Ways that are also funny.

The Aspergers-afflicted shut-ins who play this game refer to this aspect of the game as "Fun." "Fun" being a sarcastic way to describe grim failure. Most of the work the creators of this game have done in creating Dwarf Fortress is to create ever more varied ways for you to lose.

This game has levels of complexity that dwarf (fuck you) supposedly complex games like Civilization and Master of Orion. It revels in demonstrating to you how intricately it can create an entire planet of dwarves, elves, goblins and humans. In a matter of minutes it will randomly generate hundreds of different biospheres that rate landscapes based on terrain, local wildlife, vegetation, geology (including dozens of types of rocks, minerals and ores that make up the dozens of subterranean levels), danger level, local civilizations and, of course, how blatantly evil the surroundings are. Whereas in Civ your biggest concern is which river you plop your first city next to, in Dwarf Fortress you have to worry about whether your first Dwarf settlers will be instantly surrounded and devoured by hell rats.

And, even better, the biggest Autistic masochists can play the game with its original graphic options. Meaning, there are no graphics. Everything is in fucking ASCII format, so a dwarf is represented by a different-colored happy face, an arrow is a <, a dog is a d, a monkey is an m, an elephant is an E, and a horrendous hell-beast is a D. If you care about your sanity at all, you can download a tileset that somewhat attempts to represent the world in a more convincing way than a lazy bunch of letters and punctuation marks. You'll also turn the default music off IMMEDIATELY and play some internet radio instead (I recommend either classical music, or dubstep.)

After a random world is generated, the game will then spend about 10 minutes generating an entire HISTORY of that world, including notable historical figures, events, heroes, cities, tomes and legends. It's sort of retarded and pointless, but the game likes to flaunt this aspect of itself.

You start Oregon Trail-style with about 8 dwarves showing up in your chosen area. The lives of these brave few midgets now rest in your incapable human hands. As in Nethack, there are shortcut key-presses to remember, menus to delve through, jobs to assign, food supplies to manage, rock to dig through, labors to assign and train, structures to build, caverns to carve, smooth and decorate, and lots and lots of time to waste.

Over time more dwarves will stupidly join your doomed civilization (And don't kid yourself, it's doomed.) Your society will swell through accumulation of useless, stupid Dwarves with titles like "Cheesemaker" and "Miller" who steadfastly refuse to make cheese and mill, instead choosing to drink dwarf beer and fuck and make useless baby dwarves who instantly become targets for goblin pedophiles.

I don't want to list every way in which your Dwarves can be brutally maimed over the course of their adventures, but here are a few of my favorites that I've either encountered directly or read about from Autistic people posting online.

-A Goblin kidnapper appears in your fortress, luring you into sending all of your poorly-trained militia after him. Soon after they leave the safety of the fortress they are set upon by well-armed Goblin raiders who kill or cripple your soldiers, leaving the rest of your Dwarves to be murdered in their bedrooms.

-Human traders enter your area, bringing with them valuable items for trade as well as some Yaks. One of the Yaks goes insane immediately after appearing in your territory. The Yak tramples the humans and goes on a months-long rampage through your fields and into your fortress itself, killing about 4/5ths of your Dwarves.

-Your Dwarves dig too greedily and too deep, attracting Cave Trolls, Albino Alligators, Imps, Tentacle Demons and Forgotten Winged Poisoned Elder Snails.

-Your Dwarves go insane through lack of clean water and turn on each other. Lack of laws and prisons mean that murderers go unpunished, and bad feelings send your society into a spiral of revenge killings.

-Herds upon herds of elephants roam through your lands, stomping your Dwarves into paste and camping the bodies of the dead. They feast on any other dwarves who idiotically try to loot the items left behind, or even those who attempt to bury their fallen comrades.

-You choose the least evil (and therefore happiest and most magical) area to place your fortress...and your settlers are murdered by Unicorns.

More stories await those brave enough to read through more text than the game itself in my future updates.

The Book Of Eli (2010)

2010-05-19T16:11:00.000-07:00

On paper this film has everything. Denzel Washington, a post-apocalyptic setting, and Fallout-style visuals. Unfortunately this movie has no plot, stupid characters, and incredibly boring scenes where nobody says or does anything and the actors stare at the camera like they're trying to remember their lines.

The movie starts off with Denzel shooting a cat with an arrow and killing it. He then takes shelter for the night in an abandoned house where he cooks and eats the cat. He drains the oil from the cat to use as a skin moisturizer. As he's eating the cat, he notices a mouse in the corner of the room. He gives the mouse a small bit of cat meat and wishes it well.

Before he sleeps that night, Denzel listens to an iPod and reads from his book. This is presumably the titular book of Eli. Also we learn from a nametag on Denzel's coat that his character's name is Eli. Things are starting to make sense. So what is this book? Where is Denzel going? What's his mission? Immediately the viewer is drawn into these mysteries that have been expertly presented from the setting and actions alone. There's no need for a voice-over explaining how the nukes killed everything, etc. We can infer everything by ourselves.

Next comes the random encounter. The computer spawns seven level 16 Raiders including a level 18 champion Raider wielding a +2 Chainsaw of Dismemberment. They gank Denzel at a highway overpass, demanding all his money and equipment.

Denzel rolls a 20 on initiative and critically hits Raider leader, slicing his hand off.

In a horribly cliche moment, the leader yells "GET HIM YOU IDIOTS", and Denzel proceeds to kill all 7 raiders with his machete. The raiders attack him one at a time. Denzel leaves the chainsaw raider for last because it's more dramatic that way. Then Denzel loots the dead bodies.

This is where the movie starts to turn bad. It's only about 20 minutes in, and it get much worse than this. First of all, this scene is completely ridiculous. Even before any fighting occurs, they drag out the scene by ten minutes with stupid cliche lines and inane dialogue which goes something like this:

Raider Leader: Well look what we have here boys.

Denzel: I don't want any trouble.

Raider Leader: Give me your pack of equipment and any water you have.

Denzel: No.

Raider Leader: I said give me the pack, man.

Denzel: I can't do that.

Raider Leader: Are you fucking stupid? Give me the FUCKING pack.

Denzel: No.

Raider Leader: *Looks around in astonishment* We'll kill you, man.

Denzel: I can't give you my pack.

Raider Leader: Give me the fucking pack.

Denzel: Can't do that.

Raider Leader: *Looks bewildered*

This is seriously how the scene plays out. Each party just repeats their demands over and over. Do all people in the wasteland talk like this? I understand that human contact is diminished, but I'm pretty sure all the stakes were clearly laid out on the table when this guy popped out:

Actually, now that I think about it, Denzel Washington is a master in scenes where somebody wants something from him and is going apeshit, but Denzel calmly refuses:

So the Raiders completely surround Denzel and attack him from all sides but seemingly all die because Denzel is a trained Wuju swordsman or something. This completely ruins any sense of realism or suspension of reality because you can see the perfect choreography and the queue for each raider to attack one at a time. In real life Denzel's head would be on a spike hanging on the overpass. This doesn't even happen in Fallout.

So now that we've established that Denzel is a combat mastermind, he goes to some shanty town where there appears to be some civilization.

This is where the plot takes a nosedive, mainly because you soon realize that there is no plot. Denzel goes to the local tinkerer's shop to recharge his battery on his iPod. Denzel then barters KFC clean wipes for a recharge.

This makes absolutely no sense. What is the use of a sanitary wipe in an post-apocalyptic world? You'd be clean for about 2 seconds before you're covered in radioactive ash. In fact while they're bartering the shop keeper refuses to take a lighter and oil for the battery recharge, two items that would probably come in handy considering that there's no electricity anywhere in the world. Now you may say that the wipes aren't actually meant to be used, but are simply a form of currency, as they may be rare. But this isn't true because in the begining of the movie you can see Denzel using a wipe before he goes to sleep, and there's another scene where someone buys shampoo and uses it to wash her hair.

So after recharging his iPod, Denzel goes across the street to the bar to fill his water bottle. There he is ganked by 20 men who want to kill him again.

Denzel then starts reciting lines from the Bible which sounds really badass but takes a long time and if all 20 men jumped him at that very moment while he was talking they could have actually killed him instead of all getting horribly stabbed with Denzel's machete. Oh yeah, Denzel kills them all single-handedly. Why not.

After Denzel kills everyone in the bar the bad guy who runs the town comes out and instead of shooting Denzel, the bad guy tries to hire him, because he knows Denzel has a special skill that causes enemies to attack him one at a time. The bad guy, who's name is Carnagie, explains that he wants Denzel to kill his enemies so that Carnagie can create an empire of little towns under his control. Also, Carnagie is searching for a VERY IMPORTANT BOOK that he is devoting all his resources towards finding. Geez, I wonder which book it is. Carnagie gives Denzel a room and food for the night to persuade him to join the cause. Also a whore named Solara:

Of course Denzel refuses to sleep with Solara, and instead reads to her the Bible. That's right, the book Denzel has been carrying around all this time is the King James Bible. This is also the book that Carnagie is going apeshit over trying to find. Now before this point, you are thinking, "yeah, there's really no plot here, we don't know who Denzel is, what he's trying to do, why he has the book, or what the book is for, but I bet it's really great." This is the point where all expectations just disappear, because you realize that,

WHOOPS, YOU'RE WATCHING CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALIST PROPAGANDA

Denzel vaguely explains to Solara that all Bibles were burned either before or after the war that killed everything. Bible-thumpers rejoice. The salvation of humanity resides in the last Bible on Earth. This is where the movie just unravels into a heaping pile of horse shit.

This is further emphasized in the next scene by Carnagie explaining to his second in command why he wants the Bible. He wants it so that he can instill a sense of purpose into his citizens, so that civilization is not just mindless living in bombed out buildings and eating rat meat and cannibalism.

Then Denzel and Solara start praying, because now the screenwriters just don't give a shit anymore and decided that if the movie is going to be about Christianity, they may as well blatantly shove it down our faces.

Now if you thought there was no plot before because they didn't explain it, here's where you realize there's no plot because the writers couldn't think of one. Denzel explains to Solara after their prayer session that he was in a bomb shelter when the nuclear war started and after he came out he wandered around until a voice in his head told him to get a book. Under the guidance of a mysterious voice, he found the Bible under a pile of rubble and then the voice told him to "go west". That's it. That's what Denzel has been doing for the last 30 years, trying to transport the Bible west for some reason, to someone.

That's not a plot, that's just a series of vague ideas that the writers came up with after they had filmed all the scenes where Denzel kills everyone with his bare hands. Then they tried to slap on some Christianity philosophy in there to create some deeper meaning but instead ended up being gigantic douche bags.

This is also where the writers decide to take part of the plot of The Transporter and have Solara join Denzel in his quests for no other reason than the Hollywood rule that you must have a hot chick accompany the main character, even if she is worthless to everyone.

Actually, Solara isn't worthless, she hurts Denzel's cause by revealing to Carnagie that Denzel has the Bible. So Caranagie goes into WTF cliche mode and orders his men to "FIND THE BOOK AT ALL COSTS". Denzel and Solara escape the town together and the rest of the movie is them running away from Carnagie's men. Oh yeah, during the escape, Denzel kills about 50 men with his knife and also shoots a bunch of people in the head with his pistol, beyond the pistol's maximum accurate range. Also he never needs to reload. I guess God did it.

Let me reiterate again that Solara is completely fucking worthless. She has no idea why she is following Denzel on his quest, other than that her mother "thinks she will be safer with him". That's why the very next scene is where Solara gets HORRIBLY RAPED BY RAIDERS.

Carnagie and his men finally catch up to Denzel and corner him and Solara in a house. Carnagie brings out a giant machine gun and shreds the house until nothing is left except Denzel and Solara, who inexpicably survive the bombardment despite the wooden walls of the house providing no protection at all against machine gun slugs.

Carnagie threatens to shoot Denzel unless Denzel tells him where the book is hidden at, because for some reason Carnagie thinks Denzel has hidden it. just as Carnagie is about to pull the trigger, he says "Dammit you are the only one who knows where the book is, I can't kill you." This is despite the fact that Carnagie sprayed the entire house with machine gun bullets haphazardly, and could have killed Denzel at any time. Then Carnagie says he is going to kill Solara unless he gets the book. This is the first time this situation has ever happened in movie history.

Denzel breaks down and says the book is hidden in the TV in the house, which it is. Carnagie gets the book and shoots Denzel in the abdomen anyway then drives off with Solara. Solara kills the driver in the car despite her weighing only 80 pounds and having no arm strength whatsoever. She then drives back to the house where she DOESN'T find Denzel laying there bleeding to death from a terrible abdomen gunshot. Somehow Denzel is fine and is walking westward on the highway. She picks him up in the car and they drive west, not knowing where they are going or why.

The scene then switches to Carnagie who is obviously excited about finally obtaining the book so that he can preach to his citizens so that they may follow him. He opens the book and realizes that it's in braille.

This has also never happened in movie history before, where the bad guy finally gets what he is searching for, but turns out to not be what he expected. Incidentally, Carnagie has a blind wife and he asks her to translate the book. She says "no" because she hates him, and the scene ends. I did not make any of that up. Unfortunately that is exactly how it happened in the movie.

The stupidity isn't over yet. Despite not knowing where to go, Denzel and Solara drive all the way to San Francisco and row a boat over to Alcatraz for no reason at all. There they find some old guy with bad hair that explains that the island is a giant library with a printing press and that their mission is to preserve the knowledge of humanity. How this place exists or how they got the equipment, books, printing press, or personnel is never explained.

But wait, Denzel lost the book to Carnagie. How is he going to give this old guy the bible? This is the final nail in the coffin. For no reason at all, Denzel starts reciting the bible line by line FROM MEMORY. The last scene is the old guy who still has no name putting the King James Bible on a shelf in one of the libraries on the island. How the book will save humanity is never explained.

So 1 hour and 40 minutes later the message is clear: the Bible is the most important thing in the world. Thanks for church.

Jakob The Liar (1999)

2010-04-16T22:46:00.000-07:00

Hulu has recently seen a large influx of free full length movies. This old Robbin Williams movie was my first choice out of them. He plays a Jewish man stuck in a Polish ghetto where he and all the other Juden have become accustomed to scratching out a meager existence. Although they still have their shops and homes, the ghetto is closed to the outside and the people have become destitute and constantly hungry. Suicide is rampant. One day, for being outside after dark, he reports to the commendant's office for routine corporal punishment and overhears a war bulletin on the radio. The Nazi oppressors are losing ground to the Russians, and the front line approaches from only 400 kilometers away.

The approach of the Red Army means impending salvation for the Jews. He tells this story to his friends to cheer them up and eventually the rumor of rescue spreads around the ghetto folk. The suicides stop. The people ask Jakob for more information about the Soviet advance, but he has none, so he makes up stories to give them the hope and drive to keep them living for as long as possible. He uses extravagant stories and humor to...wait a minute isn't this is the same story behind Patch Adams and Good whatever Vietnam and every other fucking Robbie Williams movie? Does Robin Williams ever expand his acting repertoire ever?

Anyway in the end, well, everyone pretty much knows what happens in the end. These historical events are common knowledge. But they say, "It's easier living the lie."

Too depressing for casual viewing.
Rating: 50%

The Mosquito Coast (1986)

2010-01-14T22:08:00.000-08:00

They literally do not make movies like this anymore.

The Eighties was a decade whose artistic values and contributions are, in this age, unattainable. In some ways (fashion and hairstyles, mostly) this is a good thing. In most ways, however, it's unfortunate. We live in a digital age, and looking back on films from the Eighties you can see how they are distinctly analog. There's a grittiness and a realism to them that doesn't exist in today's era of CGI special effects and editing techniques.

Mosquito Coast is a Harrison Ford film that is rarely mentioned nowadays, due to the fact that Ford has been making blockbuster movies for 30 years and some of his smaller works get lost in the panoply of Star Wars, Indiana Joneses, Fugitives and Air Force Ones.

The story is based around Ford's character, an obsessive genius who lives as an inventor. He rages against 80's American culture, decrying its absence of character and values. He gives passionat speeches to his son, River Phoenix, about the banality of its consumer culture, fast food restaurants, its soulless music and the laziness of its populace. He also predicts America's imminent doom by atomic warfare, which is always a good thing to tell your kids.

When his employer refuses to acknowledge the genius of his newest machine, a Doc Brown-ish device that makes ice from fire, he gives up and dislodges his entire family to go live in the fictional country of La Mosquetera, deep amongst the jungles of South Africa where they will build their own civilization and live by their own means. A lot of it involves convincing the locals, a strange ethnic mix of blacks, hispanics and native indians, to obey his whims.

Ford's motivations are very Objectivist, but the fact that he's a lunatic keep it from being a Rand-fest. What follows is a mix of Swiss Family Robinson and Heart of Darkness. This movie blew my mind, and the zeal of Ford's character is amazing to watch. I can't remember another movie where he has put this much effort into a character.

Men of the Yamato (2005) 男たちの大和

2009-12-29T11:37:00.000-08:00

This is about the WW2 Pacific theatre. As most people already know, the Imperial Navy lost badly to the American combined fleet and had their prized flagship sunk late in the war. This is basically Pearl Harbor in reverse.

From a strictly American viewpoint, this was ridiculous. Most of the movie is spent talking about ritual suicide and all these fucking weird things the Japanese culture is known for. Far too much screen time is spent watching people yell stuff like "YOIIIII" or screaming "goodbye world" off the side of the ship.

What about the good points? People persisting with anti-Japanese sentiment will find this movie appealing simply because a bunch of Japs die in droves. It's similar to watching the second half of Titanic, but with a ship chock full of screaming Japanese men. You get to see people die in every conceivable way. The naval combat action, and the whole point of this movie, was merely satisfactory.

The great thing about watching the fighting from the opposing side is that you get to see them lose. Losing a war is many times more gruesome than winning and is therefore many times more interesting to watch. Many people, especially Chinese nationals, derive enjoyment from watching Japs die because of lingering bitterness over unresolved war atrocities. For these, most of the culpability falls to the Japanese Army. The Japanese Navy was much less oppressive. Nonetheless, both the Imperial Army and the Imperial Navy are usually held equally responsible. For this undue blame, I think those guys deserve a break.

Story Rating: 0%
Action Rating: 75%

Poisoned by the Red Tide

2009-11-30T20:56:00.000-08:00

I got sick eating at a seafood restaurant on Pier 39.

For those not in the know, Pier 39 is a tourist concentration camp on the Northeast corner of San Francisco where your welcoming attitude to foreigners goes to die. It gets trampled under the boots of a million camera-clicking French, Filipino and Japanese people who want nothing more than to get in your way.

It's because of places like this that all the small-towners who visit big cities like New York, Paris and SF leave with the impression that cities are packed shoulder to shoulder with seething masses of loud and quite possibly homosexual people. In reality, the problem is the out-of-towners themselves who feed the tourist trap with their money and turn it into an inescapable hell-hole of tacky businesses and shady restaurants.

The restaurant I went to was called Fisherman's Grotto, a nice-looking if huge restaurant packed behind a fake fish market and next to some falling-apart docks. It may be because I ordered 2 pints of beer within the first 10 minutes of my stay, but the food didn't seem bad. The only thing memorable about it was the price, which was enormous and unwarrented. Such is the way of Pier 39.

The first symptom I had was a night-long bout of physics-defying gassiness. My intestines, sensing the parasitic corruption, attempted to convert all the solids of my meal into gaseous form so that I might release them harmlessly into the atmosphere. Unfortunately the poisons were able to re-enter my system through my nose and lungs and allowed them to infect my brain more easily.

I was unable to sleep until 4 AM despite going to bed at about 11 PM. My nervous system jacked itself up to keep me from slipping into a fatal coma so I could do nothing but writhe around and vent deadly vapors while feeling my intestines deflate and re-inflate.

This morning I woke up with the feeling that my brain was lifting off from the inside of my skull to parts unknown. I felt ambivalent towards everything, including my vision blurring and my ears ringing at random intervals.

After my bowel decided to jettison everything in a last-ditch attempt to keep me alive, I decided to go jogging to sweat out the remaining toxins. While I was running I had the interesting sensation that I couldn't feel anything but my face. I had to clap my hands together to prove they still existed.

All in all, totally worth it. A little Red Tide is nothing to be afraid of when you're hungry for bottom-feeders. Next time I'm trying the crab.

Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott Ruined By Stupid People

2009-11-28T12:37:00.000-08:00

I love boycotts. When done right, they can cause companies a ton of grief, generate controversy, and divide a community until one side becomes analogous to Hitler. In this case, supporters of buying L4D2 are the Hitlers because their blind support of Valve is the same as hard core fascism. Unfortunately, the boycott failed miserably due to the two shitbags who led the boycott, going by the names Walking_Target and the other guy. I don't know the other guy's name because it doesn't really matter: both are scumbags who wasted a perfectly good boycott opportunity.

So a few months ago these 2 dipshits created the L4D2 Boycott Steam Community Web Group Forum Twitter Page and got something like a million members championing the cause of not buying L4D2. This was a great time. Just going to the L4D steam forums the first 3 pages would be filled with whines about L4D2, complaints about the lack of support for L4D, and general FUCK U VALVE!!!!!! threads. I wanted to join in the bitch fest, but I didn't want to receive another 4 point(s) infraction from Rotten Dude:

So I just sat back, relaxed, and watched Valve's consumer support wither away from under them, as the boycott anger and strength grew with each passing week. Now you can guess where this was headed. In September, this message was posted on the boycott group page, along with this picture with the lead designer of L4D2 which seriously was the sole inspiration for this post:

Boomer!

Steam flew the two scum sucking boycott leaders to the Valve HQ for a private tour where they could preview L4D2 and directly discuss the game and their concerns with the L4D2 staff. That's where they took this picture with the fattest, ugliest boomer I've ever seen. They probably did stupid shit all day like treat everyone with respect, ask a bunch of insightful questions, etc. etc.

If you didn't want to read that entire post, I'll summarize the important parts for you:

"Over the last week or so, we've been hinting at something big. A few days ago, a potential technical difficulty forced us to say that this announcement might be postponed – which we took even more heat for."

Translation: Valve hit us with a non-disclosure agreement which we lapped up like dogs because we wanted to sell out and go to Valve HQ

"Facta Non Verba is a Latin phrase meaning quite literally “Deeds, not Words”, or “Actions speak louder than words”. This is ironic in more way than one."

Translation: This is ironic, because quite literally, I'm a pompous asshole.

"Valve took the course of Facta Non Verba in dealing with myself and Agent of Chaos. Rather than trying to explain everything via email, they invited us out to their offices in Bellevue, Washington. That alone speaks of a developer that really does care about its fanbase. So, after making arrangements and booking the time off of our jobs, we flew down for a day to take a quick tour and talk with the guys at Valve."

Translation: We creamed our pants when the fat bastards at Valve actually spoke to us. The Valve accountants decided that the boycott was going to make them lose their bonus money, so they told the HR department to order the Developers to entertain us for a day. We told our bosses to suck it because we hit the big time. Just kidding, we don't have jobs.

"We can't get into details, but we can definitely say that support for L4D is NOT being dropped by Valve and that they are actively pursuing bug fixes for Left 4 Dead. We're going to continue to talk to Valve and ask questions as needed, however if the frantic pace which we had seen people working at is any indication, we're not going to be left in the dust. The staff seemed to honestly love the original 4 Survivors and many said that “we're not done with them yet”."

Translation: The catered lunch was really good and I actually got to shake the fat developer's sweaty hand.

"As for L4D2, things seemed balanced and 'tight' and did not feel like a rushed job. While we were visiting their offices we personally witnessed what can only be called a small army of artists, coders, mappers hard at work, which explains the rapid transformations in artwork that we've all seen."

Translation: Despite the graphics of L4D2 being identical to L4D, I actually got to shake the fat artist's sweaty hand.

"We're not giving up just yet though, we will both be here up until our individual concerns are addressed and sticking with you folks."

Translation: We gave up.

"We'll be doing write ups about this tomorrow, Thrusday and Friday as well as answering questions. We will not be around that much tonight as we both have to fly back early tomorrow morning"

Translation: We will be justifying our selling out to the outraged millions of group members Thursday and Friday.

"As a collective we have done more than achieve a few goals, we have paved the way for Developer-Community relations in the future. No matter what the press or other gamers say, we have made an indelible mark upon the future of this industry. You should all be proud, we certainly are."

Translation: We've proved that all it takes to end a boycott is for the corporations to shell out a few hundred bucks to cater to two impressionable asswipes in order to avoid millions of dollars in lost revenue. Gamers have a say in what happens unless one of the boycott leaders gets to hold the golden crowbar.

Ever since the boycott effectively ended with Valve glad-handing the boycott leaders, sales of L4D2 skyrocketed. This is despite the game being priced at $50, full price for a brand new game, NOT an expansion. But wait, Valve wasn't done with those two talking heads just yet:

"We understand some of you have a problem with its price tag. Personally, I’m quite surprised with the discount on pre-orders; A 4 Pack bundle brings it down to only $33.75 for each person. I see many people took advantage of this including "boycotters", but to be honest that’s a fair price. In other words, that’s what expansions cost. You can’t blame them for making this decision."

Yes, a 4 pack bundle will only cost $33.75 each. What a great fucking deal, except that you need to buy 4 of them and you need to convince 4 friends to actually sit down all at the same exact time and play this game. And who would want to play with these two guys anyway? How do I know they won't shoot me in the back because the zombie leader gave them a tour of the zombie HQ and catered a free brain lunch for them?

"I'm sorry, but the zombies are really nice people and they are working hard on this!"

What a disappointment. I should follow more promising boycotts like Minute Maid. FUCK YOU MINUTE MAID.

The Sniper (2009) 神鎗手

2009-11-24T22:14:00.000-08:00

lol this movie has been posted everywhere. This is the first time I've watched an HK movie without subtitles, so I probably missed some of the subtext, but I get the picture. It starts with a bunch of guys on a Chinese SWAT team that are competing to become the best sniper. They would say stuff like "chinese china bunch of chinese TOP SHOOTER! more chinese" and I would smirk. It's not long before friendly competition turns into enraged rivalry during real police action and soonafter they turn their sniper rifles on each other. It's so dramatic!
This is also the returning debut of Edison Chen after fleeing HK in disgrace due to the untimely leak of his homemade porn. He looks good. Acting still sucks though. Thing is, when I see him on the screen I just can't stop thinking about the photos of his sexual tryst ahahaha they got him good. Stuffed bear in the background watching them bahaha!

Rating: 40%

Blade 2 (2002)

2009-11-22T20:30:00.000-08:00

Fuck yeah Blade. Let's say you were in the mood for some violence. Lots of chops, shots, and bloodletting fire. You don't care where or why it happens, simply that it does and that it happens instantly. Hands down, Wesley Snipes is your man. Blade was an "okay" movie for it's day, at the time directly competing with the not yet completed Lord of the Rings Trilogy and the Matrix sequels. Those two movie series prevented Blade from being more popular than it was, making the Blade series a forgotten favorite.

When you go back and watch old movies, sometimes you get surprised by what you find in the cast. Here, I found a young Donnie Yen as a vampiric blademaster. His character is a mute (implied, as he had no lines) and has a shortlived and unsatisfying role. Basically, even though Donnie Yen was a better choreographer than the rest of the cast, he ended up with a smaller role. The first (and last) move he pulls out is the HK classic "no shadow kick". What the hell? The director must have looked at his demo reel and said, "yeah just do that move and gtfo". Ten minutes later he is vampire food.

Nice. Eyeliner. Donnie, nice eyeliner.
It also struck me on how dumb the story is. Full of holes and mostly a distraction, the plot of Blade 2 was very weak. For example, the prevailing bad guy shoots Blade into a swimming pool of blood and then expects him to be dead. Common, everyone knows that if Blade receives blood, he gets fully healed. How can the bad guy be that stupid? So forget the story, just watch the action and move on.

Rating: 60%

Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

2009-11-19T20:47:00.000-08:00

It's hard to turn a kid's book containing about a paragraph worth of simple sentences in it into a feature-length film. Which is why it's necessary to take each of the simple, dialogue-less monsters from the storybook, give them interesting and meaningful names like Douglass and Judith, turn them into complex characters with psychological issues and wait for your Oscar.

What surprises me is that apparently the original author of the book is totally O.K. with this. Well, actually I'm more surprised that he's still alive. So now he gets to see his creation warped into a very non-kid friendly movie directed by a guy who normally directs music videos. And he's O.K. with it. So I guess I am too!

So what do the kids who go to see this movie learn? Here's a smattering of things I remember...um, teachers are dicks for telling kids the sun is going to eventually explode, single moms are crappy parents who raise kids that are nuts and like to dress up like foxes and hallucinate about monsters, it's not very nice to destroy your friends' houses, and interpersonal relationships are fundamentally flawed and will always fail on multiple levels if given time...and if you're a monster.

Demolition Man (1993)

2009-11-07T14:10:00.000-08:00

When looking for movies online you often get a dichotomy of very old and very new. Following the release of a new movie, people post them everywhere, despite the movie industry's vigilant attempts to remove them. Older movies, while uploaded much less often by their niche fangroups, do not get targeted by piracy police, causing them to build up over time on the internet.

Such is the case with many early Sylvester Stallone movies. This one starts in a super fucked up city (caption says "Los Angeles, 1996") that's rife with mega-crime. Shit is on fire and all these people are getting killed, so Stallone steps in to administer justice. Just 20 minutes into the plot, and Stallone is convicted of manslaughter for failing to save the hostages and gets sentenced to 70 years in a cryogenic prison. His mass murdering nemesis (Wesley Snipes) gets the same sentence. Upon their release, they wake up to a crime-free society where everyone is a huge wuss. The cops are too nerfed to stop Wesley Snipes so they bring in tuff guy Stallone.

Basically, this started as a Rambo movie and quickly turned into Judge Dredd. The people all talk like school children and Stallone is the only remotely normal person. Every time he says "FUCK", a buzzer in the background goes off and says "John Spartan you have been fined one credit for violation of the verbal morality statute", but he just keeps talking like nothing happened. Then he follows Wesley Snipes into the museum of guns where all the plasma rifles are loaded, and they fight in the Hall of Violence while making funny insults at each other. Yeah. Stallone's voice is funny too.

Rating: 75%

Turbo the Movie (2009)

2009-10-25T13:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.turbothemovie.com/
A friend of mine that likes really stupid videos sent me this. You can watch this piece of shit at that link if you want. I actually suggest you just skip through it to see if you can piece together the story from little evenly distributed 2 second snippets because it's better that way. Let me tell you, this production is an embarrassment. Name any evaluational metric for a movie, be it acting skill, special effects quality, or story writing, and you will find that Turbo (the movie) fails at them all.

One of the recent trends I've noticed on the internet is a niche of Asian style made-for-asians-by-asian-american movies. I watched a few of these and they've all been fairly lousy. For some reason, Asian people just don't know how to produce movies (unless you're from Hong Kong which pretty much guarantees that you're a brilliant filmmaker). Asian Americans in California frequently complain about having to work harder than everyone else. Well I say that when it comes to movies, they're not working nearly hard enough. The fact that an asian kid beats a white kid at sports in your story doesn't make it a good movie.

Rating: 10%

Shinjuku Incident (2009)

2009-10-24T11:17:00.000-07:00

After I saw the trailer for this I was fixed on it. Could this really be a movie with Jackie Chan that wasn't retarded? Could this actually be a movie about Chinese-Japanese relations that didn't involve rage filled arguments about contemporary history? Yes it had all of those things and more. I guess when Jackie Chan doesn't get a shitty writer his acting can really shine. He plays a poor Chinese peasant that immigrates illegally to Japan in the 90s. The Chinese are to Japan as Mexicans are to California. Impoverished, loud, and a public nuisance, they're constantly begging for work or being harried by police.

Japanese society fosters high levels of racism to the Chinese. Both local gangs and police officials give them lots of trouble so they must band together to form their own gangs to help them survive and compete in their new environment. Above all, Jackie wants to do things honestly. His virtuosity takes him very far among the big players in Tokyo. He brings his fellow Chinese the security and prosperity they crave but upsets the established order of Yakuza and Taiwanese gangs. This is where Jackie's acting is at it's best. His character is simplistic but not stubborn, impressive but not exaggerated.

Jackie Chan is normally such a carefree guy that it's very disturbing to see him take part in this much brutality.
Rating: 100%

Five Fingers (2006)

2009-09-25T13:17:00.000-07:00

Laurence Fishburne plays the part of a Muslim terrorist who captures some Dutch guy in Morocco in order to extract information from him. Throughout the "interrogation" Fishburne plays chess and mind games and systematically cuts off Dutch guy's fingers one by one until he gives up the information. What information exactly? Well the entire movie really boils down to one scene:

(Fishburne is in some abandoned warehouse with Dutch guy chained to a chair)

Laurence Fishburne: You know, if more Westerners played Chess, we wouldn't have many so problems between our cultures. Do you want to play a game of Chess?

Dutch Guy: No.

Laurence Fishburne: I really like jazz music.

Dutch Guy: What?

Laurence Fishburne: Enough! (Fishburne snaps his fingers and an assistant brings out a paper cutter)

Dutch Guy: OH GOD NO!

Laurence Fishburne: Tell me what I need to know.

Dutch Guy: WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT NO PLEASE NO!

Laurence Fishburne: Last chance.

Dutch Guy: WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT?

(Fishburne cuts Dutch Guy's finger off)

Multiply this scene 5 times and you get this shitty movie. So what is this information that Fishburne wants so badly that he is willing to spend hours playing chess and discussing musical preference with some random Dutch guy? Well the audience never knows until the very end. At least, I assume it's revealed at the end because regrettably I couldn't finish watching this movie due to extreme boredom. I expect there was some big secret that tied everything together, but seriously this movie was just Laurence Fishburne speaking really slowly talking about random shit while the Dutch Guy chained to his chair pleads for mercy. The only good part about this movie was that Transporter Chief O'Brien was shot to death in the first 10 minutes.

Also, there was some subplot involving Dutch Guy's Moroccan girlfriend which involved a bunch of flashbacks. Whatever.

Snakes on a Plane (2006)

2009-09-13T20:25:00.001-07:00

Okay to begin with, there's too much character development in this movie. I can't believe that I'm saying that, given the already lackluster storyline, but nobody is going to remember that shit for a movie like this. They try to stuff the plane with a diverse character set to spice up the story, but honestly speaking, that isn't what the audience wants. I say kill them all. Blah blah blah. GET TO THE SNAKES ALREADY!
In the next phase, Sam Jackson fights snakes + angry mob. By this time, he's already produced several meme worthy lines in an attempt to get the passengers to shutup. Then he says, "Give these people air!" and that's where the memory file in my neural net processor ends.

There are 2 buff chinese men that do some kind of kung fu or stunt shit in this movie. This is out of a total of 2 chinese men. That's a proportion of 100%.
Rating: 50%

The Medallion (2003)

2009-09-05T14:51:00.000-07:00

I remember a time, perhaps in the 90's when Jackie Chan was revered as a brilliant stuntman with titles like Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop under his belt. But now his movies are -what?- slapstick comedy mystical fictions with Jackie Chan making panicky noises the whole time.

Out of his ensemble of his half-assed joke movies, this is one ranks relatively low. He teams up with this aloof Scottish detective that is scared of everything like he has some kind of horrible mental disorder. He would turn corners or open doors, see something unexpected, and scream "whoaaaaaa!!" like 50 or so times in the movie. The Englishman also has an asian supermodel wife. That's weird because at the same time Jackie is flirting with this other caucasian supermodel who is the coworker of the Scottish guy. So he, uh, switched wives or, I'm not sure they know, what?

Anyway in the end the Chinese dragons do some magical shit and Jackie Chan becomes immortal. So, that's cool. The movie ends with Jackie running 100 miles an hour and going "yay!".

Rating: 20%

The Weather Man (2005)

2009-08-30T20:48:00.000-07:00

Another great Nicholas Cage movie. I can't even believe that I used to think he was a bad actor because I keep watching his movies and he nails the role every time. I must have mistaken him for a bad actor because of his unenthusiastic face and boring voice, and most of all his embarrassing acting in The Wicker Man. At face value, Nick Cage is unremarkable. Yet, if you roll with his style a bit, his simplistic and unassuming personality seems very appropriate. His narrations here are brilliant. The combination of his disparaging face and his flat voice delivers a succinct but illuminating message.

This movie is highly underrated. Nick Cage's depressing appearance goes well with the fact that his acting career at the time was sucking.
Rating: 80%

Four Brothers (2005)

2009-08-14T00:09:00.000-07:00

I didn't really like this. I can tell its a quality movie because Mark Wahlberg is in it, but I've been watching some really good movies lately and this one's a relatively low point in my viewing sequence. One of hollywood's favorite mantras is, "Even bad men love their mothers." So that's where this starts, with the four brothers returning to Detroit to avenge their moms's untimely death.

Hey come to think of it, this was ridiculously similar to the plot of GTA: San Andreas. They might even have the same storyboard.

Both stories start with a dead mother, (what could be more dramatic than that) and pick up with the search for mom's killer. So the movie is just a bunch of hoodies + Wahlberg going around hustling various neighborhood characters. Man are there really people on earth that are this hardcore? The brothers are the toughest of the tough guys.

Mark Wahlberg's urban gangster walk in this movie is retarded. His arms are swinging around like crazy and he bobbs up and down like he's on a merry-go-round. No one in real life would ever have that kind of gait.
Rating: 30%

Lord of War (2005)

2009-08-11T22:19:00.000-07:00

I was looking for a light hearted movie, and Nicholas Cage would surely provide it. Going in, I believed that Lord of War was going to be a brusque, shoot the bad guys movie with a shitty plot and a shittier display of acting . Instead, I got an incredibly deep tale of woe about the creed of weapons dealing. Nick Cage's sullen voice narrated the movie, supplying quick justifications behind his character's complex moral decisions.

He starts as a nobody. One day he rationalizes that restaurants will always exist because people will always need to eat. Therefore, weapons dealers will always exist because people will always need to fight each other. "Besides, the margins are better", says Cage. Shrewd reasoning if you ask me. Margins and Need. Ask anyone why they choose their profession and it will be one of those, either good margins or great need.

So Cage goes out into the world and makes his name by selling weapons to one side of a conflict, then the other. Every war in recent history becomes a lucrative business opportunity. His big break came with the dissolution of the USSR, giving him ample armament to flood the market with Soviet military surplus.

So basically, we get a profound explanation for the causes of all modern armed conflict. This movie says that all those blood diamonds and child soldiers are simply byproducts of the war economy surplus. We were in fact responsible for fueling the violence with weapons that we manufactured, packed up, and sold.

Great acting by Nicholas Cage again. Why have his more recent movie sucked so much?
Rating:90%

Lucky # Slevin (2006)

2009-08-09T17:36:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the world of crisp, cool crime stories where innocent little Josh Hartnett has to deal with a bunch of brunt gangsters that want money from him. You have to listen to all of them talk their heads off, even if they're not directly related to the plot. You will have to watch the portrayal of a Jewish mafia, which is borderline anti-semitic. You will watch Morgan Freeman be a gangster too, as head of a mob with his matter-of-factly facial expressions. Less words and more staring at your constipated face, is the name of the game.
The girl next door is Lucy Liu, who (is tiny in stature and) spends the movie fawning over Josh Hartnett. She just can't get enough of this guy. Is she really that small? It didn't seem that way in Charlie's Angels.
Anyway in the end, the good guy kills the bad guy, so happily ever after right? Naw, pretty much every character in this movie was a fucker. The bad guy loses, the good guy wins, and I lose for watching this faggoty movie.

Rating: 40%

Babel (2006)

2009-08-06T22:55:00.000-07:00

When I first discovered Apple Trailers, I watched a segment for this and was intrigued. I wondered how this one movie could weave together some tribals in Afghanistan, a blond couple on vacation, Mexico, and some Japanese people. Well they did it. They're lives are all related in some weird way, and the tribals are in Morroco, not in the Afghans. Could Babel be about globalization? Language barriers? The story has more to do with Babelfish than the Tower of Babel. In fact, language barriers hardly come into play in the story, and most of the plot is moved along by the unintended aspects of human individual ambition. Cool movie, but I don't see a moral. Oh, and Brad Pitts in it. He's cool.

Rating: 60%

Wall Street (1989)

2009-08-04T15:17:00.000-07:00

So I guess this is what the financial market was like in the 80's. Man, look at those shitty computers, and are those ledgers? How did they manage to do all this market trading stuff on a green screen? The dress code looks the same. The snide, slightly restrained douchebaggery is also the same. But my god, look at all that paper! Nobody uses paper anymore, in fact, I think all that stock market data is computer generated. So now I'm wondering why brokers are so busy these days, when the computers are doing all the work for them. Can you imagine calling your broker to ask for a price check? HAHAHA nobody would ever do that.
Oh, I almost forgot. This is basically Boiler Room but with Micheal Douglas instead of Ben Affleck. The similarity is remarkable but this is the original.

Style is too old.
Rating: 40%

Honor Among Charities

2009-08-01T17:08:00.000-07:00

Every time I see a TV advert for the cause of a charity I vomit internally. How counterproductive is that? They're spending donated money on advertisements in hopes of netting even more donated money. It seems predatory, even fraudulent in my eyes.

The modern charity has its roots in religious tithing. The devout would give a portion of their income (usually around 20%) to the church, which would in turn, give it to the poor and needy and whoever. But before doing just that, the clergy would take a portion of that money for themselves, using the funds to build an even more grandiose church with more buttresses and stained glass, thus attracting more to their flock. The power of the churches grew and grew, eventually leading to centuries of religious war and other bullshit.

Following the decline of the religious powers, nation states often took over the role running charities. Unfortunately, this system worked poorly as well, mostly due to the dampening effects of corruption and excessive bureaucracy that shunted the donated money to other places, such as war funds, royal coffers, and back to those damn churches.

As the world approached modernity, people increasingly distrustful of big government would take on the role of charitymaker themselves, founding philanthropist organizations that would serve as the agents of action for giving to the poor and needy. That's where we are now. But starting last year, everything changed.

The current economic recession not only pulled back on consumer spending, but also cut private donations. In effect, the cash flow to these houses of charity dried up. And that is why almost every day, I have to hear from charities begging for money. I am tired of hearing people pandering for chump change and constantly shouting "GIVE" in my face. For me, this recession has exposed great flaws in the modern charitable organization. Charities suck and they're annoying. Starting this year, they've also become desperate, in addition to being an annoyance to me.

When a person says "I donated $1000 to charity", that is incorrect. He is actually saying, "I donated about ($1000 * 0.65) to charity and I unknowingly gave ($1000 * 0.35) to some strangers that don't even need the cash but took it anyway."

Rather than constantly asking people to blindly give them chunks of money, they should be required to use a more honest approach. Charitable organizations should have a 0% expense ratio requirement. Instead of stealing cash from their own donation bins, they should charge an expense fee for donating money to their cause. For example, if you donate $1000 towards the Sudan, $1000 of your dollars would be spent on procuring food staples for the Sundanese. A separate fee would be charged by the organization to take your money. Similarly, if you donate $1000 to researching cures for disease, $1000 should be spent on medical research, and not 50% into funding research and 50% into a stupid candlelit relay race at a track and field.

Imagine what this would do for the world of philanthropy. Donations would be properly segregated into charitable money and wasted money. Charities would have to openly reveal how much of your donation they bite off when they charge you the expense fee, incentivizing them to keep internal waste to a minimum. Shitty charities would die off, leaving only legitimate charity organizations behind. Television adverts would stop. Door to door clipboard artists would cease to exist. There would be no guy dressed in a Santa suit ringing a bell for your coins.

And that's how the system should be working. Personal donations aren't some cash cow. A donation is money given in goodwill to a total stranger on the promise that it will be used for a beneficial cause. The middleman needs to be kept honest to stay a middleman.

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

2009-07-28T17:21:00.000-07:00

Wow this is a really awesome western. I usually don't go for these types of movies, simply because I find the dusty dry scenery to be unappealing, but when I saw Russell Crowe and Christian Bale on the cover, I knew this had substance. Every time someone dies, expect it to be good. Each death is profound. Every corpse has meaning, and that's how it's supposed to be. People have to die for a reason. When I watch a western, I don't want to see a horde of retarded outlaws play shoot-em-up with a bunch of stupid sheriffs like some kind of outback holocaust. I want to see a bad guy fighting with an ordinary person that's incredibly determined. Show me accomplished and philosophical characters that share the same common sense but choose different sides. Top it off with good acting and you're done.

Amazing line: "Tommy was weak. TOMMY was stupid. Tommy. Is. Dead."
Rating: 100%

Paycheck (2003)

2009-07-26T19:35:00.000-07:00

After so many years of hearing about this from other people and shrugging, I finally got this fucking movie and actually watched it. Meh. Modern action movie with high tech gear and a man/woman celebrity pair, period. That's all you're gonna get from this movie and you will remember nothing more profound than that. Ben Affleck is this secret agent that does backwards engineering for rival corporations and then gets his memory erased after the job is done. Following one of the routine mind wipes, weird things start happening that unravel an action packed mystery. Cool premise.

Where this movie falls below par is in the characterization of the bad guys, which were often excessively stupid or had motives that just didn't make sense. It annoys me to see characters doing unreasonably stupid shit. The story depends on the human quality of the antagonist, and when the bad guy is stupid, the story becomes stupid. The result: the plot fails. Ben Affleck swinging a wooden staff around also annoyed me. Why did they put that in there? Nobody wants to see Affleck doing kung fu. I've seen people on the street do much better.

Rating: 50%

The Lost City (2005)

2009-07-25T13:33:00.000-07:00

The aforementioned "lost city" is Havana, where we get to see old democratic Cuba get swept over by communism. My god, the sacrifices that must be made to enact societal changes are brutal. The once noble families divided by these conflicting pluralistic and socialist ideologies face disappointment beyond measure. A lifetime of regret and shame awaits them once they escape to the States.

As the movie depicts it, Havana was good thing in the world that got destroyed, the symbol for which is an innocent city nightclub that gets ended by the Fidel Castro society. Because the American east coast has a large Cuban diaspora, hollywood movies like this often turn into tacky anti-communist art forms. But I didn't find that to a particular problem here. Instead, what I found to be more of a problem was that there was too much irrelevant conversation that bored the shit outta me. Show me more guerilla warfare!

Rating: 40%

Solaris (2002)

2009-07-18T16:46:00.000-07:00

This sucked. I couldn't get my hands on Event Horizon so I took on this George Clooney movie instead. That's too bad because everything was terrible. The plot is in the same realm as The Traveler (2005) and is basically a bunch of buzzy lights with a guy tripping out multidimensionally. Throw in an ephemeral looking mysterious woman that may or may not exist to complete the picture. The script is absolutely unbelievable. George Clooney would walk into a room and just start asking questions one after another, his face unchanging like his mind was some sort of blank slate. The conversations sounded more like some kind of recorded recital than an actual dialog. Nobody in the history of mankind would ever talk remotely like that. George Clooney you fucking suck I'm glad you got sucked into a black hole.

Rating: 30%

One Hour Photo (2002)

2009-07-18T16:31:00.000-07:00

It's pretty weird to see Robin Williams as a dried up old man on the cover of a movie. That's what got me into this one, resulting in the first psycho thriller movie that I've even come close to appreciating. So as it turns out, back when they were using chemically developed film, the technicians would be required to look through the photos to make sure there weren't any slides of child porn or pictures of people getting murdered. But this guy, turns this into a crazy obsession and the sickness spills over into real life and you know the rest. Real nice guy too. Well meaning, really pleasant neighborhood guy.

I would hope to see more of Robbie Williams in future movies, but that seems unlikely, so I won't.
Rating: 60%

The Bucket List (2007)

2009-07-09T14:47:00.001-07:00

This title sounded really gay so I refused to watch it until now, when my boredom has reached new highs that compelled me. We have 2 famous and incredibly seasoned actors here that spend the movie hanging out and having friendly jibes at each other. Does that sound like a good watch to you? Hells no, that sounds faggoty and boring.

The better part of Bucket List is spent with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson in a duo dialog. A duolog. Or something. With these 2 guys working together, the acting doesn't fail. While admitted in the same hospital room, they decide to do a "bucket list", or a list of stuff you want to do before you kick the bucket. So knowing that their time is limited, they go on an adventure to complete those things and cross off the items when they've done it.

Here's an example of a bucket list that I am happy to share with you from my own list of things I'd like to do before I'm dead.

The Bucket List
Make a difference in a total stranger's life.
Laugh until my midsection hurts too much to laugh any more.
Return this shitty movie to the library.
Kill a woolly mammoth with my bare hands.
Kill 5 men.
Kill 10 men.
20 men, and I wear this emblem.
Get Buzzy Aldrin to admit that the moon landing was fake.
Reconquer Jerusalem.
Learn necromancy so that I can resurrect Hitler and give him another chance at Art School.
Learn to use psionic weapons.

Jack Nicholson has lost some of his fire. He's old and decrepit and looks mildly like a down syndrome kid.
Rating: 50%

Summer Movie Showdown: Transformers 2 (2009) Versus The Proposal (2009)

2009-07-06T17:00:00.000-07:00

I want to make it clear that I was against seeing either of these films, but due to the enormous power women have over my nuts (and because I wasn't paying) I saw both in the span of a week. I decided that rather than take each one on single-handedly I would compare and contrast the various strengths and weaknesses of these two wildly different films against one another.

Here are the contestants:

Movie 1: Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen
Director: Michael fucking Bay
Genre: Completely overwrought sci-fi action-comedy
Star Actors: Shia "crack addict" Lebouf, Megan "miscast porn star" Foxxx, Optimus Prime
Budget: A million billion Spielberg dollars

Movie 2: The Proposal
Director: Some chick
Genre: Romantic comedy
Star Actors: Sandra "career rebound" Bullock, Ryan "punch me" Reynolds
Budget: Enough to keep Betty White alive though filming

First Catagory: Plot.

The plot in Transformers 2 begins with the annoying kid from Transformers going to college and making the brilliant decision to leave his transforming robot car in his mom's garage because he needs his space. Then he makes the second brilliant decision to leave his perfect 10 of a girlfriend behind where she builds custom choppers or some unbelievable shit. He has a shard of something in his pocket that brings his toaster to life which promptly tries to kill him. Then a bunch of evil robots start blowing things up in order to ressurrect Megatron from the bottom of the ocean. Then Shia starts seeing things and Megatron tries to steal his brain, then decides to kill Optimus prime, then decides to drop a bunch of robots from space to blow up some stuff and declare war on all humans before trying to blow up the sun. Then an Egyptian transformer who was hiding on another planet starts blowing more stuff up and the good guys try to ressurrect Optimus Prime to defeat him and set the movie up for a sequel.

In the Proposal a Canadian senior editor and her assistant at a New York publishing house decide to commit marriage fraud in order to further their careers. In the process the Canadian chick has to meet her assistant's family in Alaska and endure their crazy antics while trying to avoid an investigator from the INS. She then freaks out because she doesn't want to hurt his family's feelings and tries to call it off, but then it's too late because they're already in love.

Winner: The Proposal, due to the fact that it actually had a plot.

Second Category: Acting.

The acting in Transformers 2 is abysmal. Shia Lebouf is an ex-Disney kid who grew up with drug addict parents who let him basically do anything he wanted, so now he's a total shit who has no idea how to act. Megan Fox just looks and acts like she's in a porno the entire time. In fact, she probably would have made a great porn star. She can't act for shit but she's basically a piece of meat for 13-year old boys to lust over anyway. Everyone else is a complete failure except the voice actors for Optimus Prime and Megatron.

Sandra Bullock continues to be Sandra Bullock in every movie she's ever been in. She starts out serious and professional but degenerates into this goofy wacky lunatic who can't no anything by herself and therefore becomes irresistible to the male lead. Too bad she's totally unconvincing as a Canadian, which is a major plot point. As for the male lead, Ryan Reynolds continues to be Ryan Reynolds in every single movie he's ever been in. Luckily we have Betty White to round things out.

Winner: The Proposal, for having actual actors who have been in actual movies before.

Category 3: Entertainment Value.

Transformers 2 is entertaining in the way that injecting heroin into your nutsack is entertaining. It's so totally over the top and full of explosions and dying robots and battles and insanity that I don't think it's possible to be bored. But it's the kind of "not being bored" that you'd get if someone threw you out of a plane at 10,000 feet. You're entertained, but it's not enjoyable.

The Proposal is pretty mundane and basic, but its comedy segments might actually engage your sense of humor instead of forcing you to watch two dogs fuck like Transformers does. It's mild humor that might make you laugh, but it's the whitest humor you can imagine.

Winner: Transformers 2, for making sure for 3 hours that you will not be able to look away from the screen.

Category 4: Casual Racism.

Transformers 2 is the most racist movie I have ever seen. It portrays blacks as idiots, Jews as ineffectual losers and Arabs as cannon fodder and paranoid traitors. Two robots in the movie were most certainly referred to in the script as "the nigger-bot twins" who speak ebonics and profess the fact that they can't read. One even has a gold toof.

The Proposal makes fun of a single Mexican guy who is a waiter, a stripper, a store owner and a priest at different points in the film. He is fat and unattractive but at least he works hard.

Winner: Transformers 2 is racist as hell.

Category 5: Sex Appeal.

Sandra Bullock is getting old. But even though she's got crinkles around her eyes and the ravages of time are slowly getting the upper hand, she still looks good naked and runs around in slinky nightclothes for a good portion of the film. And the loud gay guy who was sitting behind me in the theatre kept saying she had "great legs" to his boyfriend, so that settles it.

Megan Fox is the most corporate-approved hot chick in film today. They basically found the hottest piece of ass they could find, viral marketed her as such until the name Megan Fox became synonymous with "hot chick." Unfortunately, she has no soul and when you look into her eyes there is absolutely no life behind them. That is not sexy.

Also there is a hot chick who tries to rape Shia and who turns out to be a Terminator. That was kind of hot.

Winner: Tie

Category 6: Reviewer's Slant.

Transformers 2 hurt my fucking brain and my fucking intelligence. The movie tried to insult me the entire way through by telling me I had no sense of what was quality film-making, that plot didn't matter, that I was a reptillian-brained idiot who just wanted to watch things blow up and moms eating pot brownies and guys getting tazed in the nuts. It is a movie made by Michael Bay, who is some kind of genius who managed to boil action movies down to their core values and amp them up to unbelievable levels. At no point in the movie are you not being stimulated. It is just too much for any person to handle. I did not enjoy it very much.

The Proposal was a very laid-back, very safe movie that wasn't unpleasant to watch. It didn't have anything that blew my mind, wasn't daring and knew what it was: a chick flick. There's goofy comedy spaced evenly throughout a basic plot which was based around marriage fraud, something I've not seen before. The visuals are nice and every character in the movie is white except for one Mexican. One of the characters is Betty White.

Winner: The Proposal, which does not feature Nigger-bots, or try to melt my brain or insult me.

Overall Winner

The Proposal

Transformers 2 is not a movie. It is an American disaster. It's a symbol of why the world hates us. It is brainwashing. Your brain is being tricked into believing it is being entertained, but it is in actuality being over-stimulated in a way that approaches torture.

The Proposal is a chick flick, but the acting and plot is decent and you actually might even care about what happens to the characters by the end. And the ending alludes to the fact that Ryan Reynolds will probably get thrown in jail while Sandra Bullock gets sent back to Canada. So even if you don't like the characters you're not forced to watch them live happily ever after. In Transformers it is obvious that the main characters will never, ever be gotten rid of until the actors themselves OD in real life. Which in Shia's case is hopefully very, very soon.

Men vs Wild (2009) Will Ferrell and Bear Grylls

2009-07-03T13:00:00.000-07:00

If you went up to my face and told me that Bear Grylls was going out into the wilderness with Will Ferrell, I would say you're full of shit. That's not even remotely possible. Yet, it has come to this.

They start off on some frozen mountain where Ferrell starts the trip with lots of complaining. Bear Grylls has done this dozens of times so this episode is just a routine for him. As the journey progresses, Ferrell's jokes are noticeably less flamboyant and more fatigued, more angry at his inferiority in this environment, which I think might be a part of his comic persona. Overall, this duo interp has been a chance for Bear Grylls to expand his acting repertoir and maybe defend his survivalist reputation. Wait, what the fuck is Will Ferrell doing here again?

Next on Man vs Wild: Bear Grylls with Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan in the African Savanna.
Rating: is Awesome.

Peaceful Warrior (2006)

2009-07-02T16:34:00.000-07:00

There's something about this movie that doesn't jive with me. At first, it seemed to be a movie about an athlete coping with a crippling loss, but then it threw in some pseudo philosophical shit, and after one of the main characters got the name "Socrates" it became incredibly gay. I don't even give a shit about gymnastics. What is that, some circus tradition? It just didn't seem right.

So I immediately looked this up on the wiki and found that the author is a former gymnast that peddles a line of inspirational self-help books. So basically, this is a sales pitch disguised as a family movie. The author's message, of course, is nothing more than a small excerpt of traditional Bhuddism about attachment and mental concentration.

As it turns out, this guy also teaches Aikido, which I consider to be a cult practice. Aikijutsu is one of those styles of fighting designed to empower old people and middle aged women with the delusion that they can draw "infinite power" from their aging bodies. Then to cover their asses, they advocate total pacifism, so in this movie the main characters get robbed, but rather than resist the muggers, they happily hand over their watches. Then they have the nerve to call that inner strength. What? I mean, that might look good on paper, but it doesn't make any sense. These people have gotta stop.

Dan Millman should kill himself.
Rating: 30%

The Machinist (2004)

2009-07-02T15:06:00.000-07:00

This movie is by far best known for the pictures of emaciated Christian Bale like the one pictured above. His character is a blue collar factory worker with a body that resembles a dehydrated prune. The majority of the movie is spent in bewilderment and irritation in his quest to make sense of these recurrent hallucinations he keeps seeing. Finally, shriveled Christian Bale unlocks a pivotal memory that makes everything crystallize into clarity. But now it's too late. A crazy person cannot return to ordinary life after spending so much time as a crazy person, so the movie just ends.

"Psychological thriller" is perhaps my least favorite genre of movie. It cannot be watched more than once, it is nonsense during the movie, and the story is irrelevant after the movie ends.
Rating: 40%

28 Days Later (2002) and 28 Weeks Later (2007)

2009-06-24T14:39:00.000-07:00

I don't know what it is about epic zombie movies that people find so appealing. I have never found them to be good entertainment, except perhaps for a few transient moments of shock value. Yet, since the name was famous, I figured I'd give it a whirl. I've seen plenty of bloody shit before (mostly thanks to the internet), so it wasn't so much disgusting as it was socially disturbing.

Of course, a zombie world would be most appealing to people who despise social orderliness. Societal norms and adherence to customs is tacky. You yearn to break free. Here in the zombie world, the braindead dogma of the masses gets converted into what it really represents, a mindless wasting hunger. People are stupid emotional wrecks. You are not. That pedantic Kantian philosophy means nothing because people are not inherently valuable at all. They are merely a small factor of your survival.

Or maybe not. The appeal of the zombiepocalyse might be the artistic license of the Rapture. Everything is fucked so fuck you fucker also die faggot.

Forgettable zombie movie that gives you a blah feeling at the end. Has a British flavor.
Prequel Rating: 60%
Sequel Rating: 40%

The Last of the Mohicans (1992)

2009-06-23T01:26:00.000-07:00

Thanks Hulu, now I can watch another really old movie that got bypassed when I was a kid. This is one of those old style films that I don't really understand. How do I interpret this? I see gangs of Injuns killing hundreds of redcoats and collecting their scalps, a scene that probably elicited raucous cheers from the audience.

Okay cool. Next I see a wilderness warrior singlehandedly kill an entire battalion of tomahawk soldiers just to save one white woman. This is totally acceptable because she is the only white woman on the frontier worth procreating with. You've got to understand how important the child bearers are in this society. If that woman dies, everyone is fucked, and the colonialists will go extinct. The Mohicans are proof of that fact. There are only 2 of them left and they're both men! That's why it is ethical to kill 30 Iroquois to save the female. I suppose people find this movie romantic because so many whites have partial native American ethnicity. I find that disgusting. The white man not only took your land but also raped your women. Always remember that, Chief.

Weak story and characters that nobody cares about, but a memorable gore content makes this a good movie in 1992 and a faggoty movie in 2009.
Rating: 30%

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

2009-05-30T21:03:00.000-07:00

This is one of those movies where after the credits roll, I say "WHAT!" and immediately go to check wikipedia in search of an explanation to what I just saw. Oh yes, now I understand that this is a movie about drug abuse written by a psychoactive drug abuser.

It's difficult to say exactly what I saw. The high contrast filter that they used to film the movie certainly gave it a weird feeling. Many of the scenes were purposefully disturbing, probably to simulate the feeling of losing your mind. I'm guessing that this is what it's like to have brain damage, most likely an experience more or less like having a high fever or sleep deprivation, but with people all around you that are supposed to help you but don't. The final scene is a memoriam to some people maimed by drug use. A tribute to a bunch of people that fucked themselves up and curse the system for failing them. I like that.

Philip K Dick uses blue flowers as a symbol of all his drug problems. According to wikipedia, the blue flower is a symbol of "desire, love, and the metaphysical striving for the infinite and unreachable". I'll bet that's what people think about when they go from a life of total freedom to group therapy and a padded cell. Violins weep and we go to credits.

Keanu Reeves plays an insane guy that whispers a lot of psychosomatic stuff.
Rating: 50%

Star Trek (2009)

2009-05-28T00:16:00.000-07:00

This was so epic. I only watched this to see how bad it was but it became awesome at the very beginning and the rest of the movie thereafter became fucking epic.

The last few years have been pretty bleak for sci-fi with StarGate getting canceled and the BattleStar series getting perma ended, so people have been itching to get back into space. Enter Star Trek, the disgraced franchise that ended in 2002 with Captain Picard fighting an angry clone of himself in Star Trek Nemesis. Pretty shitty. Also, they killed Data, which is fucking bullshit. Now enter director JJ Abrams, who lifts Star Trek out of the dumpster and cleans it up, taking out all the nerdy bullshit and drawing up the most realistic version of the future I've seen to date.

But that isn't enough. If you end with that, Star Trek will die the way that the Firefly movie did. So Abrams added a new storyline with 2 of the most poignant topics of our time: your parents and your career. These unlikely topics are, strangely, things that all people seem to care about. They represent the sum of your past and future, and you stand in the rift between them. No matter how amoral or apathetic you seem in person, you can erase neither your parents nor your career from your identity. So, you watch Kirk and Spock grow up with parents that love them and make sacrifices for them. Then you see them make the hard choices that lead them to an occupation with endless possibility. That is what people want to see. That is a gripping story.

FIRE EVERYTHING! is now a meme
Rating: 100%

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

2009-05-19T13:27:00.000-07:00

This film is fucking terrible. I don't know how coked out Matthew Mcconaughey was when he signed the contract, but it couldn't be nearly as coked out as he was during actual filming. Or maybe instead he was doing truckloads of crystal meth with a little dose of mountain moonshine thrown in for flavor, considering he's a fucking hick who comes from hillbilly country and his brother's name is fucking "Rooster."

On second thought, since his character is supposed to be drunk during most of the movie, he couldn't possibly have been imbibing any form of alcohol at all, since he's such a brutally terrible actor he couldn't even pull this off. He just keeps drinking shot glasses of what is most likely iced tea, without even bothering to act like it's hard liquor until you're sitting there going, "Ok, drink up that iced tea, boy. That's a good sport, pretend like you know what the fuck you're doing."

No part of his character is even slightly believable. Supposedly he is a professional photographer who is also a skilled womanizer, able to bone every chick he meets. The little actresses they hired to play the women he molests do their best to almost literally throw themselves at him, which is kind of hilarious seeing how badly he reads his lines. When he drops his pickup lines it sounds like he's failing middle school drama. He looks and talks like someone grabbed a vagrant off the street and gave him a makeover.

Eventually he gets haunted in the bathroom by a molester ghost who's his dead uncle who I guess was his inspiration to be a walking STD dispenser. He sort of acts like he's freaked out, then kind of fake-stumbles back to the party he was at, and immediatly grabs some old GILF's tits and starts trying to convince her to fuck him. This scene is totally insane by any standard. Not only does he forget that he just saw a dead person, now he's trying to get himself some ancient poon that he just met in a party full of young, nubile bodies. He really goes at it too, telling her that she's probably a great fuck and that he really wants to squirt his load into that barren tomb of a uterus. It's completely revolting and makes no god damn sense at all, in terms of absolutely everything else in the movie. Maybe seeing a corpse made him want to rape a corpse, I don't know.

The movie, I dare say, get's kind of better MAYBE as it progresses, but the first half-hour, oh fuck. The theatre was totally empty except for me and my girlfriend, so I just buried my face in her tits and tried to cry myself to sleep.

To put it in terms of how categorically awful this movie is, I was thinking to myself, "you know, it really hurts me to say this...but...but I think that, at this moment, I actually would rather be watching Twilight than this movie, right now."

Yes, Twilight. This movie was so bad, I would rather have been watching Twilight. Yes, it is that eye-and-ear-bleedingly bad.

Ok, maybe not Twilight. But this movie is pretty bad.

(2007)

2009-05-10T23:40:00.000-07:00

I'm on a Steve Carell movie blitz. I find everything about him to be funny so I will watch any movie that he is in. I guess it's his face and the way he talks that I find so funny. I remember watching The 40 Year Old Virgin many years ago and finding it just weird. "Absurdly unrealistic", I'd thought. But years passed and I think about how awkward things actually are in real life and suddenly awkward humor finds it's hilarious place in my mind.

This is the first Steve Carell movie that I've seen where he attempts a serious romantic drama. So, this movie isn't actually as awkward as I would've liked, but it still turned out really well. A single father of 3 daughters, Dan is an underachiever and a parenting advice columnist struggling with cumbersome family matters of his own. Of course, this isn't his only source of trouble. The many years of being a single father are gnawing at his sanity. Most of the time, I would find a movie like this to be mild and boring, but with Carell, it's acting gold omg hillllarious.

Rating: 80%

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

2009-04-30T01:20:00.000-07:00

I often misjudge movies by the title. This time, I thought the story was about angels and demons fighting in the underworld. Wrong. The kingdom of heaven was the name given to the now defunct Kingdom of Jerusalem, the holiest of holy countries and host of everything valuable to the devout. This extinct country was the Christian stepping stone into the middle east. Whenever Islam crept too close, european crusaders would come from all over Europe in defense of the holy kingdom.

I once played a campaign in Age of Empires where you play as Saladin, the Jihad king. The story in that game is narrated by a captured Christian knight that joins the Islamic army and writes letters about Saladin's quest to drive white people out of the holy land. The plot of this movie is very very similar to that. And what a coincidence, because that's exactly what I wanted to see. I love stories about religious armies. And bombards.

Viewers of Kingdom of Heaven will be constantly reminded the glaring parallels to Return of the King. You could say that this is a gritty Middle Eastern version of LotR where instead of being a shitty elf, Orlando Bloom gets promoted to Ghandalf status. The shots often pan wide to show you epic military formations on a massive scale, great spiring cities that resemble Minas Tirith, and breathtaking Mediterranean landscapes like those in Assassins Creed.

Rating: 100%

Valkyrie (2008)

2009-04-26T22:41:00.000-07:00

Tom Cruise in an eyepatch was enough to dissuade me from watching this for many months. And rightly so. This movie, I suspect, was scripted in a way that would maximize the anxiety and nervous jitter to give even the most boring scenes an edge of fear. Whenever you see Hitler on the screen, the music gets super dramatic. Even as the Fuhrer picks up his pen and signs his paperwork, Tom Cruise glances around nervously as if Hilter himself was about to slap him in the face.

Having been horribly maimed and growing tired of Hilter's Germany, eyepatch Tom Cruise attempts a coup in hopes of ending the war. He is a resourceful leader and a soldier of principle, but also a dull and unremarkable actor. As operation Valkyrie comes to it's decisive conclusion, he yells, "LONG LIVE SACRED GERMANY". teehee!

The last act is the most redeeming part of the movie. It's 1944, fast approaching the final days of the Nazi supreme court. An old man is being charged with treason, and as he is taken away, he screams that all of them will have to face justice in the end. Nuremberg is just a few steps away.

I love movies about Nazis.
Rating: 50%

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

2009-04-21T23:11:00.000-07:00

Have you seen Independence Day? If yes, then have you seen The Day After Tomorrow? Do you want to see these movies again? If so, Keanu Reeves can help you with that. This is basically an upgraded version of those epic disaster movies. Keanu plays the voice of the alien invaders and sucks at his role (as usual).

The aliens he represents have come to earth in order to kill off the humans and protect the environment. Really, they're actually there to stop global warming. Without any potent defense, the human race begs for their lives. They plead for the right to exist, promising environmental changes in exchange for mercy. Religions are mobilized. As the military fails, society falls into chaos.

In the end, humanity's greatest weapon turns out to be philosophy. The alien invaders are thwarted by a simple rhetorical argument explaining the existence of civilization. Poof, the violence ends.

Bull shit. Gay ending.
Rating: 40%

Ironman (2008)

2009-04-20T14:05:00.000-07:00

This takes you through the research and development of Tony Stark's flying mobile suit. He starts with crude Ironman armor that he built from scrap metal and slowly progresses into a minted exoskeleton that goes around fighting entire armies. Stark is mainly concerned with singlehandedly disarming the Taliban, which I thought to be a misuse of his talents.

The majority of the movie is spent watching Tony Stark assemble shit, while the military action, the stuff that people want to see, is a vast minority of the screentime. This was good for developing Stark's "rude genius" character but very bad for satisfying your need for raw action. Overall, this was almost exactly the same as Hulk 2008. Both these characters start shit with the military and end up fighting copies of themselves, the only major difference between them being that one is made of metal and the other is green.

The Ironman song sucks. This is the real Ironman theme song that Tony Stark listens to.
Rating: 60%

Seven Pounds (2008)

2009-04-13T14:25:00.000-07:00

At first, I didn't understand why this was called Seven Lbs. It didn't seem to conform to any pattern of 7 objects in the movie, so for the longest time, I thought this was The Pursuit of Happyness 2 or some shit. Will Smith was going back and fourth to different hospitals and hitting on women with medical illnesses. What? Was he a salesman again? As he starts having sex with one of these needy women, my attention to the movie faltered.

Will Smith appeared to be going around looking for "good people". Once he found them, he would bequeath them one of his possessions. His motivation for doing this was a gnawing feeling of remorse, which was slowly driving him insane. Fortunately, everything gets explained at the end of the movie, bringing the purpose of all this suspicious shit into clarity. This is an end of life story. Basically, it asks you, "What would you do with your life if you know when you're going to die?" and shows you what this guy did.

Rating: 50%

Watchmen (2009)

2009-04-12T16:08:00.000-07:00

Superhero movies are just gay. I think they're overdone, the acting sucks, and the costumes usually look like shit. So when I saw this guy dressed as Hawkman, I lost any interest I might have had in watching this. Then I found out about the transdimensional blue guy, which made the whole thing much more appealing.

Not having any prior knowledge of the comic series, I found this amoral superhero to be pretty satisfying. The blue guy doesn't give a shit about people because he's on another dimension of existence and human affairs no longer matter. It rekindles sociological ideas about how much humanity sucks and how people are petty and worthless. So in Watchmen, we see them beating up people all the time and disposing them like they're nothing. Basically, you can do whatever you want because the desires and opinions of other humans are puny and irrelevant. That is the basis of a good superhero movie.

Blue caulk. I'd like to see people try to dress up as these characters because it is totally impossible (Rorschach) and nobody should even try to cosplay as the blue guy.
Rating: 70%

Hospital Survival Horror

2009-04-02T14:11:00.000-07:00

So I am in a hospital for an undefined reason. Not because I'm sick or anything, I'm fucking invulnerable and a golden example of manly health and strength. That's why I'm in the waiting room. There's people being led into the back room to be put in the hyperbolic time chamber or some shit so they can heal for a year while I wait a mere 8 hours in a room full of whiners.

It's pretty easy to pick out the sickies of the bunch, the ones waiting to be given IV's full of rejuv potions. They're all old, desperate-looking folk with sunken eyes and ragged claws from digging in the mines for decades.

But that's not important because, as I was taking an elevator ride up to the fourth floor, I suddenly got some very powerful Left 4 Dead "No Mercy" flashbacks. For those not into such things, "No Mercy" is the campaign which takes place mostly in a large inner-city hospital. Standing there alone in the elevator, waiting for the doors to open, I had the sudden shock at realizing that I was totally unarmed. I don't even have a goddamn pocket knife, who knows what the hell was lying in front of me.

Of course zombies are stupid fairyland shit, but zombie fear is based on the very realistic fear of epidemics. What are you going to do if you wake up in a hospital and find dozens of infected doctors, nurses and patients crawling on the ground and vomiting their internal organs? How do you get out of there without getting infected blood, vomit or shit on you? What about the crazies whose mental states have been compromised, and they run through the halls babbling nonsense and scratching at you with their horrible bloody fingers? Which leads right back around to zombie fear, which makes the whole thing seem stupid.

But it might only be a matter of time before an actual, viable epidemic (Possibly Airborne or "Double" AIDS) hits a populated city and the hospitals become swarming cauldrons of horrifying, filthy death. Just the thing to wonder about the next time you go to the hospital because you faceplanted for a youtube video, you spaz.

Apology Post :'(

2009-03-30T12:29:00.000-07:00

This post is to apologize for all the stupid shit this blog has produced in the past three years.

Hopefully someone will read this and learn to finally...forgive.

>:(
(The First Post)

In 2006, I had just received Time's Person of the Year Award, and my inflated ego combined with continued verbal abuse from Balls convinced me that starting my own blog would be a decent idea. I had just left my high-paying but ridiculously stressful Government job, and was about to embark on some equally stressful training in order to eventually apply for a ridiculously stressful State government job, so I had some time to kill and a safe area to vent my frustrations.

This post was an experiment. I was embarrassed to even be writing a "blog," at the time and I thought even the word "blog" was retarded media slang like "______-Gate" and "Tot Mom," which it still is I suppose. I wanted the post to be a reflection of each of the ten million or so idiot blogs by emo teenage failures and tween girls that poison the internet. What I SHOULD have done was mock the pathetic secret blogs by Chinese people railing against their own government. I hope they kick down your doors with their jack boots shortly, you whiney, passive-aggressive pussies.

Asking Smoketrap to Blog with us.

This was a mistake. The guy can barely even tie his own shoes without choking on his own vomit. Even though his insights are usually unintentionally hilarious, they don't warrant him having his own credit in Friends of Lollerskates.

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter

I should probably apologize for most of 2007, but this one was pretty bad in that it was way too wordy and didn't have enough pictures. This is probably why we lost all our fans.

I just Blogged Your Blog

This was a good idea, but I have to apologize for having to end it too soon. For one, I wanted the other Friends of Lollerskates to comment on each Blog for extra fun, but didn't offer enough incentives to do so. Also, I got found out by my first victim, who for some reason decided not to turn us in to the Blogger Fuhrers who run the site. Her blog is still a fucking lunatic asylum, though.

Hooray for Space Shuttle ATL

Too confusing, even I'm confused by this post.

Why Sunshine will Suck

This post is really hard to read. It's like the guy who wrote it had something to say but it got lost under an avalanche of run-on sentences and secret, nerdy fears of the sun exploding. In effect, a lot more like XKCD than it needed to be.

Posts where the Youtube Videos were Pulled

Shit. Not really my fault but what a waste.

How to Kill People.

Haha just kidding, I apologize for nothing about this post. Next one will be about burying people
in basements and crawlspaces.

Jericho: The first five Episodes.

Too much text for a waste of a show. Too much fallout fanboyism.

HILLARY IS RAPING YOUR MIND

I hated Obama during the primaries just because of his followers. These whiney, geeky bitches put down their Manga comics and their Battlestar Galactica DVD's for a few months in order to whine and blog furiously about Hillary, her imminent threat to America, and how she was ruining the only chance we'd ever have to elect Samuel L. Jackson for President.

Every time Hillary made some headway against Obama, a collective blubber could be heard across the internet from the Obama fanboys, and Hillary's psychic might grew a little bit stronger.

Giving bandwidth to ClustrMaps.

What a waste of goddamn time. I don't know what this thing is registering, but it sure as hell isn't readers. It's either googlebots or webspiders or something else, but it's kind of cool to see how not even the Nigerian scammers read our blog.

Johnny Racistskates

I only wish I hadn't been lazy enough to post more of these. Deep down, I guess I'm afraid that a Blogger admin (who's either Black or Filipino) will read this blog and hit the big DELETE button.

Berating the Marine Corps

I realize now that instead of constantly insulting this fine organization, I should laud it for taking dangerous psychotics off the streets and placing them in brutal desert warzones where they can be safely and honorably blown to pieces. It's a much better solution than letting these dangerous lunatics kill dozens of people and become inspirations to future lunatics.

and finally...

Meme abuse.

It's so hard to avoid keeping anything on the internet from being infected with 4chan AIDS, it's a miracle we were able to somehow pull out of the downward spiral of memes. Now Johnny Lollerskates is secure as being the most original blog on the planet, even if it means being the least viewed.

But fuck it.

Saints and Soliders (2003)

2009-03-27T23:25:00.000-07:00

This was free at hulu on a slow day so I gave it a try. Bleagh. This is basically a cheap version of Band of Brothers but with fewer people. The guys in BoB were young and gangly but these guys are huge and pretty old looking, and their faces remind me bulldogs. My god, the Germans are huge too. The story doesn't seem very solid and the characters come off as unreasonably dumb, but the warfare looked good. There was also some religious plug in there that got buried by pure apathy. I guess you would call this a filler movie.

WW2 version of Behind Enemy Lines
Rating: 40%

Sunshine (2007)

2009-03-24T22:39:00.000-07:00

Previously on JohnnyLollerskates, Frank posted that Sunshine was going to suck, listed several reasons why, and then then proceed to make several racist comments. Well I thought it was pretty good. This is about a crew of astronauts that have to fly into the sun and drop a magical fusion catalyst device in order to make the sun shine brighter. If they fail, the Earth turns into an ice ball and everybody dies.

This movie does a good job of creating a scene compelling enough that it's like actually being in deep space. Placement is created for you by bearing witness to the gruesome death of the characters. You can be frozen solid by the absence of temperature and pressure, and if you survive that, you'll get a lethal dose of frostbite anyway. Get caught on the wrong side of the solar shield and you'll be incinerated. Sunshine is a constant struggle to avoid extreme temperatures that you will never experience, unless you get stuck in a primary blast zone or something.

Although Frank was right about one thing. The flaws in this movie happen to be the personal ones. The captain of the ship is Japanese, and surprise, he kills himself in a space age seppuku.

The next character is a Chinese, and he commits suicide when he makes a mathematical error. How typical.

Two down, Michelle Yeoh plays a Chinese woman that is obsessed with farming her hydroponics garden.

And then we have the pretty white kid and prodigal physicist that spends the entire movie staring at the corona of the sun. The fire of romance erupts here, releasing a bright solar flare of suck.

After setting up what I thought to be an effective story and putting high stakes on the ending, the movie becomes a sequence of symbolic imagery. Gayyy.
Rating:50%

Would you medical doctors just

2009-03-18T23:39:00.000-07:00

stop fucking using statistics as evidence in your medical research? Just stop. STOP. Stop it. You're going to drive me crazy. Every time you publish some rollerball study about the health benefits of some medical procedure, the media puts it onto a pedestal of everlasting life, which I then have to hear about on the radio. God I swear, everything you do is boring second-rate freshman level sample statistics. A hypothesis test isn't fucking magic. It doesn't explain medical phenomenon just because you double blinded it.

For example, you ask: "Would men who got regular PSA tests have less risk of dying from prostate cancer?". Stupid question. You don't consider the fact that these men would seek your medical tests simply because they have lifestyles conducive to throbbing pain in their testicles? What about the fact that the risk of dying from prostate cancer is directly related to your wellbeing and not directly related to having tubules inserted into your dickhole?

Yet, completely disregarding anything else and focusing only on your brilliant testicular exam, you go ahead and throw that statement out there. Yes, take this test, otherwise there is an additional X% chance that we will have to amputate your balls.

What happened to finding out why people get that kind of cancer? I'm talking about real medical science and not the excel file full of test subjects from the homeless shelter that you paid $20 to experiment on. Why don't you do real physiological studies rather than spend 10 years updating a mailing list? That's not medicine, and that's certainly not what a bunch of morons walking around a candlelit track and field paid for.

But the real insult is that you actually think that these statistics are a breakthrough worth reporting on the news. That you actually think this will lead to medicinal progress. In your own words, that it will "save lives", whatever that means. Why don't you actually spend your time trying to figure out how that shit works rather than hiding behind a veil of statistical significance, while making everybody think about their impending death by crotch rot.

Empire (2002)

2009-03-16T13:16:00.000-07:00

Although this movie isn't particularly recent, the characters happen to be relevant to current events. The show starts in the slums, the New York variety, where the gangs are living a competitive life of owning useless property and fighting over chunks of sidewalk. One day, the drug dealer gets mixed up with a shady Wall Street guy. Rather than steal from the middle class like they usually do, they start scamming each other. Wow how great is that? Two detestable social classes that I dislike are going at each other's throats. It's almost as if the death penalty got replaced by a gladiatorial ring, giving both society and criminals what they want. (see Felony Fights)
Empire is a movie designed to show the corruptive effects of capitalism in all it's glory. Released in 2002 during the middle of the dot com recession, this was probably what people wanted to see at the time. As the movie nears conclusion, the moral of the story suddenly changes to "crime doesn't pay". The shock of this alone makes this a shitty movie.

Mexican Tupac gets scammed and young Bernie Madoff gets shot.
Rating: 30%

Stewart vs Cramer

2009-03-14T02:29:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, Jon Stewart speaks for liberals everywhere and clowns a public figure. This week, that man was Jim Cramer, and the verdict on the internet is an overwhelming victory for Stewart.

Is it really? The interview begins like any other episode of the Daily Show. Initial pleasantries are followed by funny but insulting questions. Stewart accuses Cramer of several varieties of fraud, against which Cramer is too nervous to defend himself. He twitches a bit and shamelessly chastises himself for the rest of the interview, allowing Stewart to passionately bitch him out. Pwned, right?

Not quite. Unfortunately, beating down Cramer makes little sense. He's way too easy. Between doing retarded shit with a soundboard and having potent anger issues, Cramer is weird and easily despised. That goes double for being accused of contributing to the recession.

So naturally, Stewart blames Cramer for being the direct cause of people losing their savings. Honestly? If you actually take investment advice from a show called "Mad Money" hosted by a bald raving lunatic, then you are an idiot and probably would have lost money anyway.

Stewart also has a problem with Cramer juxtaposing a soundboard with a serious topic like your life savings. Stewart is telling Cramer to be more serious? Common, this is just typical capitalist sleaze. Lighten up.

People everywhere are watching Cramer get publicly disgraced and thinking to themselves, "take that Wall Street!". But Cramer is just a court jester in the world of finance. Jon Stewart has not sent any "fuck you" to Wall Street by publicly disgracing Cramer, instead, he has simply lynched a clown. Yeah, that's kind of funny, but it is not a victory.

(insert picture of a Jewish man punching a clown here)

Net Hack diaries: Episode I

2009-03-05T18:46:00.000-08:00

I used to live in the same house with this insane autist half-Japanese loser. He scavanged old Macs from the dump, strew them around the living room and wired them together into horrible approximations of working computers. He and his other weird outcast buddies would then play retarded old games on them that were incredibly hard, incredibly non-intuitive, ugly and appreciated only by fringe audiences.

One of these games was Nethack. I once caught my autist housemate playing this game, where your character is represented by an @, monsters were various letters like B or q or L , hallways looked like ###### and potions looked like '. It was the hardest fucking thing to understand, what was going on or even what it was about. So my OTHER roommate (who was also a huge geek but was my buddy and an actual human being) explained that it was this ultra-difficult RPG in which there were a million ways to die, literally.

Also, so much time had gone into this game (having been a work-in-progress since 1986) that there was an incredible amount of depth to it as well. If you fought a Vampire and it bit you, you might become one and have to suck blood for the rest of the game. You could find a tinning kit and put monsters you've killed into tin cans to eat later, so as to avoid the ever-present threat of food poisoning. You could pray to your god to help in times of need. You could role-play a tourist with no weapons except a credit card.

I said "well why is it so fucking ugly? Can't they make it look decent?"
My buddy said "You can download stuff that makes it look modern, but it's still the same game."
At this point my loser roommate chimed in "but why would you want to do thaaat?" at which point I felt like curb stomping him and decided to forget about Nethack.

Then, arriving last week, my April copy of PC Gamer (which actually had some good shit in it for once) listed the Top 49 Game Developers of All Time. Among them were Valve, John Carmack, Wil Wright Blizzard and "The Nethack team: Makers of the game that hates you and wants you dead."

Quote: "It's not beating Nethack that matters; it's knowing just how few people have managed to do it...Behind the challenge is one of the most fiendish cabals ever to plot your randomly generated doom...they think of everything."

Unable to resist at this point (and helped by an attached screen shot of the game that looked like a mid-90's RPG instead of DOS code), I downloaded the thing and a tileset to make it look decent and started to play.

So far, these are the horrible things that have happened to my various characters:

Magic Man the Wizard: Killed by his own kitten while unconscious from lack of food.

Pussy Man the Caveman: Frozen by a floating eye and killed by a sewer rat while helpless.

Sheila the Tourist: Killed by a falling rock trap that had just killed her kitten, while attempting to pick up the kitten corpse to offer to her god.

Magic Mann the Wizard: Killed in the gnomish mines by a master mind flayer that ate his brain.

Johnny Lollerskates the Ranger: Also killed in the gnomish mines by a master mind flayer that ate his brain.

Leafboy the Elf Ranger: Killed by a watch captain (the furthest I've gotten so far).

Patty the Tourist: Killed by her own kitten after putting on a "ring of conflict."

Konan the Barbarian: Killed by a Pony.

Dr. Hessler the Archaeologist: Killed by a Naga Hatchling that jumped out of a fountain he tried to drink from.

Sally the Tourist: Drank a cursed potion of levitation, which meant she couldn't go down any stairs, push boulders, or throw anything without flying backwards. Also couldn't pick stuff up off the ground. Escaped by the stairs she entered the dungeon through.

Dr. Bentler the Archaeologist: Killed after being bit by a WereJackal (and becoming one himself) and succumbing to food poisoning from eating a rotted Gnome King corpse.

Wizard's Baker the Wizard: Mauled to death by animals inside a shop while trying to buy food and fainting from hunger. (The shopkeeper "gladly inherited his belongings.")

Here are various odd things that have occurred, and can easily happen to you with no warning:

-Read a magic scroll that causes your stuff to explode.
-Stand on a water trap that rusts your sword.
-Go blind from shooting lightning at a monster.
-Hallucinate from an unidentified potion, and get messages like this: "The harpy beeps! You kill the poor succubus! The audience applauds!" after you accidentally kill your own kitten.
-Enter a room with 20 leprechauns who all steal your gold and run.
-Get blinded from a thrown custard pie.
-Eat homemade gnome that you tinned yourself out of gnome corpses.
-Lose 50 DKP from getting feared into the dragon welps (j/k that's World of Warcraft LOL)
-Be a tourist and blind monsters with your expensive camera.
-Accidentally wear or use one of a million cursed items. Anything in this game can be "cursed," meaning it sucks and you can't drop it, ever.
-Die from eating an egg you find on the ground.
-Waste a shit load of free time only to die horribly.

More mini-updates to come, hopefully once I get better at this and find all new ways to get killed.

Whole Number Prices

2009-03-05T01:58:00.000-08:00

I got the 2 fish sandwiches from Jack Box for $3. In California, this comes out to $3.25 with state taxes. This is totally convenient. It's a couple bills and quarter. This is a "whole number price", a food cost that allows you to use whole units of currency and get back whole units of currency.

Dimes, nickels, and pennies are worthless. People hate them, shopkeepers hate them, bank tellers hate them. Why is a whole unit price better than a decimal one? Because it allows people to make transactions without fucking around with these little peapod coins. Take for example this other thing I got at Jack's Box for $2.99, which comes out to $3.24 with tax. That is shit. Now you have to fumble with all sorts of metallic coinage that will be ultimately destined for coinstar.

Food vendors in the United States should adjust their prices so that the payment is a whole number after tax. In my area sales tax is 8.25%. Why not just set a $1 item to 92 cents rather than making people pay you $1.08? Would it really hurt restaurants that much to do this?
...
Then they invented money cards, which everyone switched to except for fugitives of the law, xenophobes, and the chinese.

Defiance (2008)

2009-03-03T13:19:00.000-08:00

Remember those partisans that would pop up every time you took over a city in Civilization 2? That is what this movie is about. It features Jewish freedom fighters encamped in a wooded forest trying to survive the holocaust by fighting their way out. As usual, Hitler is the bad guy. You can't really go wrong with that kind of storyline. Once in a while, the world of movie producers decide to remind us about the persecution of the Semites, and because this is set in Eastern Europe, we get a refresher on the revolutionary tenants of communism as well.
Daniel Craig takes a break from his quantums of Bond movies with the role as leader of the revolt. His performance is enthusiastic yet not brilliant, and his character is portrayed as grim and irrationally desperate to preserve the lives of peasants.

A Jewish version of Braveheart based on the true story of the Bielski family.
Rating: 50%

Gran Torino (2008)

2009-02-26T23:02:00.000-08:00

Even though he's old and retired, somehow Clint Eastwood is still this incredible badass. His character is this old Korean war vet that just wants people to stop annoying him. Basically, an all American goodfellow living in the burbs.
But his neighborhood is changing, and lots of poor minorities and weird looking asian people are moving in, turning his hometown into a slummy gang ridden place. Nigger gangs, gook gangs in ricers, mexicans, shitty white kids with giant T-shirts, the works. Particularly unappealing to him is the Hmong family living next door, which he finds to be brunt, dirty, and spineless. But one day, some asian punks start messing with the Hmongs and the story escalates into a series of beatdowns and skirmishes with the gangsters.

As you would expect, Clint Eastwood is the main attraction. His character is old and snappy and has incredibly racist lines, which portray him not as a biggot but simply as 1950's old fashioned. Everyone and everything pisses him off, especially the riceball gangsters, which remind him of the people he killed in Korea. Because of the gratuitous racism and the negative portrayal of minorities in Gran Torino, it is easy to label this a racist movie. Reviewers and journalists saying that are simply whining, as I found this movie to be very ethnically accurate. Yes, just because you're a minority does not mean you are incapable of doing bad things. And no, just because Clint Eastwood comes to the rescue does not vouch for the superiority of whites. In the story, white people and asian people are juxtaposed and and then summarily criticized for being stupid.

A retired Clint Eastwood helps some asian kids escape gang violence and a Ford car is involved.
Rating: 75%

He's Just Not That Into You (2009)

2009-02-16T13:21:00.000-08:00

Into you.

I was about to tear my shirt off and go apeshit in the theatre, for a number of reasons. First, that's my one goal in life. Second, just the AMOUNT of single, dateless young women just packed into that one room on Valentines day, all tittering and gasping and talking and loudly going "awww" during the whole movie. These Valentines Day Victims, women who are conditioned to feel like failures for not having someone to shoot cum at them on Feb 14th, form aggregate groups that all head off to the latest romantic comedy with armfuls of chocolate snacks and refuse to move their purses off an empty fucking chair to give two seats to an actual fucking couple out of spite. So we sit in the way-ass-front row and the Jennifer Aniston is GETTING HUGE and Drew Barrymore is about to fucking eat me to fill her giant squirrel cheeks.

For the first half-hour or so, it seems as if the movie is lecturing women on the "watch-out" signs for men who don't really care about them. The first one, "He isn't calling you," is obvious, OK. Women need to know not to wait forever for a phone call that will never come. Cool.

The second warning sign, aimed directly at happy couples: "He's not marrying you." HOLY BACK THE FUCK UP, BATMAN. WHAT KIND OF BULLSHIT IS THIS. YOU ARE INJECTING PURE POISONOUS THOUGHTS INTO A ROOMFUL OF FUCKING WOMENS' TINY MINDS AND AND AND YEARGGHGHHHHH

So I'm standing there with my shirt off and I'm holding a theatre chair with a frumpy dateless teenage girl in it over my head, ready to throw it through Matthew Maconnaghey's teeth when the movie's all "Stop, calm down, hold up there, son. That's not what I'm about. This isn't some evil plot to make mens' lives miserable. I'm more than just a lame date movie." So I listen to the voices and keep watching.

Turns out the movie is based on a book written by a guy AND a girl, so instead of being an estrogen-fest, it focuses on the actual thoughts processes of the male characters. That's good, because the women in the movie are all fucking insane.

So, I chained him in my basement next to a phone. Do you think he'll call me?

Female Characters:

-A psycho stalker girl who scares every man away with her obsessive behavior.

-A forty-something chick who's been with her boyfriend for SEVEN YEARS and still thinks he's going to ditch her solely because he doesn't believe in marriage.

-A chick who forced her college boyfriend to marry her after they graduated, nags him constantly and refuses to have sex (so of course he cheats on her.)

-The hot slut who he cheats on her with (and calls him a horrible person for doing so.)

-Drew Barrymore.

All aboard the doucheboat, toot toot! Captain Affleck reporting for duty.

Interestingly, the male characters, to me, all seem like pretty decent guys. Their only problems are the women in their lives (and in Kris Kristofferson's case, clogged arteries). That's how the movie finally gets you, it appeals to your gender and forces you to take sides. You can root for your side and watch the other side fuck up. Any woman who watches this film will say the same thing, only they'll say the women are all likeable and the guys are all total dicks. It's just like real life!

Not everyone ends up coupled and happy at the movie's end, which keeps the saccharine levels low enough to tolerate. Really, the movie is much more of a commentary on how fucked up human relationships are then it is a romantic comedy, so I ended up kinda liking it. Also, there's an ultra-realistic sequence where someone deletes their MySpace account. It's just like deleting your MySpace in real life! I pumped my fist into the air like I was at a KISS concert. YEAH!

Also, for some reason this movie is set in Baltimore. Baltimore? I would have thought New York or possibly Seattle, judging by the characters and their apartments. It's white as a fucking snowstorm in this movie, and everyone's successful. Everything I previously knew about Baltimore I learned from The Wire, and there were significantly less smack dealings, murders and black people than I would have expected.

My rating: B+ (watchable...surprisingly)
Girl rating: A- (not everyone got hitched, boo hoo)
Ballz rating: fake and gay. more gay than fake.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

2009-02-13T00:39:00.000-08:00

You wouldn't think so from the giddy impression of the title, but this was just really depressing to me. It's about a dysfunctional, strife ridden family that goes on a roadtrip to attend the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. Family members include a gaunt nihilist kid that hates everyone, a struggling salesman, their dirty old grandpa, and a weird looking 10 year old girl that is fulfilling her dream of entering Little Miss Sunshine, which is basically a preteen barbie contest. Steve Carell plays a discredited literary scholar and a homosexual recovering from attempted suicide that accompanies them to the pageant because he can't be left alone.

Generally, the people in this family aren't doing great. At home, they are able to internalize their personal problems, but when they set out on the road, they are forced to face all their life difficulties. Over the course of the movie, they struggle to fulfill their aspirations and are all rejected. Some, slowly without knowing it, others, suddenly and traumatically encounter barriers they cannot surmount. Ultimately, they come to peace with what they can't do in life, either because the dream was dumb and irrational or because they realize there are better ways to meet the same end.

wow that is great acting
Rating: 75%

coming up: DragonBall Evolution

2009-02-10T00:55:00.000-08:00

Oh god. This director is taking a HUGE risk by diving headfirst into a nebulous area of human irrational behavior. DBZ is a disease. To date, there have already been 18+ other dragonball movies. There are 508 episodes of dragonball TV episodes. Don't forget the gajillion dbz music videos scored with Linkin Park and the 100+ internet memes spawned by dbz stupidity.

So, this movie faces a number of difficult obstacles.
First, it faces being clobbered as a complete cliche. Powering up, screaming, and fireballs just don't seem to cut it in hollywood anymore.

Second, it must exceed the expectations of people who are already familiar with dbz. That is going to be really difficult. Dragonball is the king of being over the top, ridiculously huge, and retardedly buff. I have no idea how they are going to surmount this. For example, how do you live-action this?

Third, it must appeal to people who have no idea what dbz is. Plot elements such as floating in midair and Piccolo's green skin and giant shoulder pads need to be explained. That will create an impossibly steep learning curve for the newly introduced and facing this, they are most likely going to find it just ridiculous.

Finally, the director has a choice: Should the dbz movie be based on Japanese or American motifs? You can't have it both ways so the production must definitively follow one of the two.

American Version: A Hollywood movie must be appealing to ordinary Americans, so this is a natural choice. Goku could be in highschool and trying to get a date for the prom when Piccolo blows up his gym. That would be perfect. On the other hand, that kind of kills the point of calling this movie "DB Evolution", when it should in fact be called "Superman Vs Green Guy with Balls in His Other Pants Pocket". Uggh.

Making DB Evolution in Japanese fashion would be true to it's roots and would resonate well with preexisting fans. The danger with this choice is that the story would then have to be super retarded and would be too mild compared to the other dragonball movies about buff metal people that punch hard. However, it would definitely give dbz fans what they want to see. This is what that version would probably look like.
This is very accurate.
This movie is fucked.
Predicted Tomato Rating: 15%

Baccano (2007)

2009-02-06T22:20:00.000-08:00

A train robbery. That singular event is what this anime is all about. A group of thugs are robbing a passenger train. Wait, now it appears that there are multiple groups of people robbing this train at the same time. Furthermore, some psychopathic killers that escaped from an asylum and bathe in people's blood have decided to board this train. Also, the conductor is a murderer. NOW, throw in Alchemy! BOOM! BACCCANOOOO!!!

Baccano is about mob life during the Great Depression. There are a bunch of mobs with Italian surnames and there are many members in each of these mob organizations. You have to know them all to understand the story. Sorry, but you just have to. This requires a cumbersome amount of memorization, so to help you with this, the intro video has a visual slideshow of the characters and their dispositions.

The first few episodes of any anime are always a drag. That is because you always have so much difficulty understanding what the fuck is going on. Oh god, now the story is being shown in reverse sequence. Backward and sequentially interrupted, like in Memento. So you are watching the third episode and now you've seen the ending, but you don't know how it happened or why everyone is obsessed with this fucking train. Why why why does anime do this. It starts off great, has some good fights, and then ends with fairies and unicorns getting sodomized by Piccaso. Christ sake.

Rating: 40%

Waterworld Extended Edition (2008)

2009-01-21T15:56:00.000-08:00

Waterworld is one of my favorite movies, even though it was one of the biggest box office flops in history. Now with the extended edition, fans get 40 more minutes of deleted scenes not seen in the original version. Does the extra material help? I say absolutely. The extra footage gives a greater insight into the world and culture of Waterworld.

When people first see this movie, many are drawn to the central story and action scenes. However, it is the atmosphere and struggle of the everyday people are that is really fleshed out in the Extended Edition. The extended scenes gives more haunting details of Waterworld society and how much time has passed since true civilization existed. The viewer really gets a sense of the desolation and despair of living in Waterworld, which comes from the scarcity and death that pervades every scene.

Also, I made this video of Kevin Costner being the biggest asshole ever in Waterworld:

Left 4 Dead

2009-01-11T17:00:00.000-08:00

Your own quick wits, a firearm and three potentially idiotic total strangers are all that's between you and a million contagious lunatics who all run as fast as Kenyans. To round out the 28 Day Later zombie crowd, there are also "special" zombies who can tongue you from a distance, throw cars at you, and barf at you so you go blind, This game is fun as hell.

However, I've yet to be able to play it with any of my cheap-ass friends who are all jobless and destitute, so I'm stuck with whomever the game randomly groups me with, which is a thrill in itself. Will I get Der Fuhrer, the gamer Nazi who angrily demands I follow his orders over voice chat? Will I get the Sprinter, the guy who just says "Ok RUN, RUN, JUST RUN" and takes off as soon as the game starts (and is immediately mobbed and eaten alive)? Will I get That One Guy Who Freaks Out? The Friendly Fire Idiot? The group of friends who all know each other and talk about me like I'm not there? The 4Chan Griefers? It sure is fun to find out.

Rating: Fucking Awesome
Pros: The first cooperative shooter that requires actual cooperation
Cons: "Guys, if I start to turn, you'll shoot me won't you?"
"Sure." *BLAM*
"Not yet you teamkilling faggot! Ah SHIT!"
Second Opinion Rating: I will...I will...I WILL SURVIVE!!!

Spore

2009-01-11T14:47:00.000-08:00

The best part of Spore, in my opinion, is one of the elements that made The Sims so enjoyable. It's the fact that it makes hard-core gaming losers scream and gnash their teeth about how "It's not really a game! There's no points! There's no goal! I can't pwn n00bs in 1v1! What a waste of my precious time" etc etc etc.

So, what, Maxis shouldn't even bother to sell it? Because it violates some ancient gaming law about what games should be? Put it into perspective, you're not doing anything important anyway, that's why you're playing a fucking game. You're amusing yourself. When you stay up late at night jacking off to MILF porn on your quad-core gaming rig, it's not like you instantly go on a porn site message board afterwards and complain that squirting your load in a tissue had no point. No, because that's one of your favorite hobbies aside from maximizing your build orders in Starcraft or something similarly horrible. It has no point except you enjoyed it. Gaming has no point except for enjoyment. If your only source of self-worth comes from winning online video games against strangers and spreadsheeting various damages versus various unit types, then you yourself have no point. Deal with it and shut the fuck up.

The only problem here is that while The Sims was fun despite nerd ranting and a best-seller to boot, Spore is not really that good. I myself like many others bought it because of that one video Wil Wright made a year or so ago showing the progression from cell to animal to spaceman, and it was amazing. In contrast, Spore the Actual Game is just an amusing little software toy built within the framework of 5 different, mostly boring mini-games: Pac-Man (cell), World of Warcraft lite (creature), Starcraft lite (tribe), Civilization ultra-lite (City) and Spore in Space. The only modes I would even consider sitting down and playing at this point are the Space, Cell and maybe Creature stages. City stage was so horrendously boring that I only played it once, and I will always use a cheat code to skip it if I ever play the game seriously again. I managed to build a vehicle composed of tank treads, robot legs, strobe lights and guns that I named "KILLMONSTER," but other than building custom stuff I can't remember doing anything fun.

But, it's not even a serious game, so why complain? Maybe I care because I spent 50 bucks on it. FUCK.

Rating: Disappointing >:(
Pros: Sporn
Cons: Anti-sandbox game nerds win the argument
Second Opinion Rating: It is real, okay? I created it, and it's real.

Asia Rising Magazine

2009-01-10T16:38:00.000-08:00

Pick up one of these at your local Walmart to get a textbook example of race based marketing turned racist cheesing. This publication is a collection of articles showcasing the achievements of people with black hair. How exotic! I had no idea that those foreigners were allowed to participate in the American economy.

Part 1: What better way to catch people's attention than by putting a sassy Korean clothing model on the cover? That is an absolute requirement. Just to be safe, better put that Korean guy, Rain, on the cover just for racial correctness. Rain is on the cover of every in-your-face Asian focus magazine.
PS. Speedracer = gay

Part 2: Walmart says that Asian people are rising because they do cool stuff. Take this guy, Charlie Woo, who is a huge success because he sells imported Chinese goods to Walmart. Conflict of interest? Naaaah, that doesn't exist in Asiatica.
Or how about this- Did you know that the chef at the White House is Filipino? I had no idea that was possible! I thought that all people from the Philippines work as babysitters. I am now enlightened.

Part 3: There is nothing that Asian people care more about than education. Better put an article about that in here and have it written by an Asian person. It's okay if the article is a shameless plug about buying Hooked on Phonics or some shit as long as it's authored by a doctorate. Doctorates deserve our respect damn it.
Three words that Asian people jump on: Success, Technology, Education. ("Ladder" happens to be another) How can they resist this bait when it's all in the same sentence? Wait...what does it say after that?
Foreman!? This is a Korean woman married to a white man. Or is it Black? This article is automatically worthless. "Asia Rising" my ass. Getting a rise for Asia in a mail order bride catalog, more like.

So what is this? Tacky salesmanship? Forced racial appeal?
What is Walmart trying to say by printing this? Who knows. However, there happens to be one thing that this magazine shows very clearly: Asian Americans are once again guilty of being the biggest sellouts. No contest.

Ali (2001)

2009-01-09T21:46:00.000-08:00

is like the greatest fighter ever. The movie however, was much less spectacular. All I see in this movie is Will Smith being a loud jerk, Will Smith jabbing punching bags, and Will Smith reciting shitty Ali rhymes. (What is this, Bel Air?) Jamie Foxx plays Ali's fight trainer, guiding the "Heavyweight Champion of the World" through hard times. Ali is on his second comeback and the Civil Rights movement is raging. He gets kicked out of some black church and his boxing license revoked for draft dodging Vietnam. As he struggles with this, constant constant gospel music is playing throughout the movie. MAKE IT STOP! God, I hate black church.

Also, Black power
A sparcely watched youtube parition that nobody cares about
Rating: 25%

Quantum of Solace (2008)

2009-01-07T20:04:00.000-08:00

Daniel Craig as James Bond take two. -BEGIN- He is once again doing Parkour while chasing a guy around a construction site. That must have been a hit.

Okay, now he is Africa again. Again?! When are the British going to pull out of bloody Africa. I don't even know why he is there because I don't understand the story very well. Daniel Craig is mumbling too much and I can't make out the words. Basically, Bond needs to save the Third World from a multinational corporation or he's gay.

The bad guy in Bond movies always comes up with something stupid. This one lives in a house powered by hydrogen fuel cells that blow up at the slightest provocation. Hey, at least he isn't living in a retarded ice castle like last time.

The bad guy died because he was too busy trying to rape a waitress while his house burned down. Bond gets pissed and begins killing Canadians. Something about a leak. -END-

wtf I don't get it.
Rating: 50%

Star Wars The Force Unleashed (2008)

2009-01-05T22:57:00.000-08:00

When I saw this new jedi with a shaved head I thought to myself, "oh god that is ridiculous". Why is the main character a skinhead? Were the designers just being lazy?

Only when I was playing it did I realize the merit behind this. You're a god damn rogue Sith, you're supposed to be angry. There is nothing that carries that anger better than a young white skinhead brimming with hatred for "primitive species". There are no guns in the game because you don't need them. Not even grenades. Your turbulent adolescent emotions do the fighting for you.

You see, the battle is all in your mind. Your gameplay is at its most powerful when you let your hatred flow. You slay your enemies not because you're trying to get past them, but because they offend you. How dare they attack you with blaster rifles. How dare they assault you with droids. You feel this need to eradicate them all.

Rating: pointless but satisfying

Mushishi (2006)

2009-01-03T16:28:00.000-08:00

got released to the public by the licensing company, Funimation, for what reason I cannot tell. Faced with an anime without a sufficient amount of screaming or muscular dysmorphia, the networks probably decided to make it public domain because they wouldn't be able to sell any buff figurines. However, I am very impressed by the dubbing they did on this series, which sounded to me like flawless fluent American English.
Mushishi is one of my favorite shows. The endings are satisfying to watch and unlike the more retarded shows, do not end prematurely or in the middle of an attack. It's thoughtful and aesthetically pleasing. The Mushi designs are analogous to natural life science and behave according to Darwinist dogma. That is awesome.

YouTube Playlist
Rating: 100%

XKCD: A webcomic of smarm, pretentiousness, autism and failure

2008-12-27T12:57:00.000-08:00

"Randallll...Raaannndalllll..."

This may sound like the start to a bad joke (which will get you warmed up for what's to come) but an ex-NASA contractor named Randal decides one day to make a webcomic based on doodles he drew in his spaceship design book. Instead of bothering to introduce regular characters or even attempting to draw them correctly, he just illustrates everything in the classic style known as "stick figure." It may not seem possible, but this puts his artwork at the skill level below that of Cathy Guisewite, a good sign that it's time to burn your sketchbook and kill yourself.

I don't know what kind of geniuses they have over at NASA (or even the contractors they use to build their genius stuff) , but it takes a very special fucking person to take a webcomic made entirely of childish stick scribbles and make it the most pretentious thing on Earth. Geeky Randal (who actually spells it Randall for extra pretention) bills his own work as a "webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language," and his work is beloved by the kind of nerds that make regular nerds want to kick their asses.

Oh, and by the way, the letters XKCD don't stand for shit.

omg XKCD reference ftw?

Here's some comics he drew. You can not make this shit up.

Haha great, now get over here and start spinning on my cock, you stupid bitch.

And then he showed you his fractals and raped you with a protractor or something, lol math

Randal dreams of being extroverted enough to make gay propositions in public. Sadly, only his stick figure friends can live out his erotic fantasies.

Randal hates himself :(

What in the ever-living fuck is going on here? Is...is this Aspergers?

Randal's arms are closer to his drawings than he'd like to admit.

Google didn't hire you because you smell.

Best comic evar.

If you are intelligent enough to see past the crude drawings but aren't sure whether or not to check out the XKCD site for yourself, a fan has made a helpful website that will let you know whether or not today's XKCD strip is worth a look. Enjoy.

Is XKCD Shitty Today?

Joyeux Noël (2005)

2008-12-27T01:05:00.000-08:00

Just in time for the holidays. It's another night in the trenches and both sides are putting up some morale boosting music on the front lines. The Germans have a great tenor, but not enough musical accompaniment. The Scotts have lots of bagpipe men, but they suck at singing. Because they can hear each other from across no-mans-land, they decide to put their chips together. After all, music has no nationality.

By this time they're hanging out and sharing food. The war? Who cares. It's Christmas Eve and practically everyone is Christian. Everyone gets together for holy mass. Well, now since we're all in the same place we might as well return the enemy corpses. Well, since we're already friends, might as well help each other stay alive. You can share my trench. Merry Christmas.

Foreign movie. Subtitles required.
Rating: 80%

Hand Cock (2008)

2008-12-26T22:41:00.000-08:00

This barely qualifies as a movie. In fact, they should have used this concept for a short film or a miniseries, not a hollywood feature length. The homeless superhero theme is good for the first half of the movie, which ran on a fresh story and had good jokes. The second half of Handcock is a waste of your time. Skip it.
The only thing that is the least bit memorable in this movie is Will Smith's consistently contorted face. Other than that, all the good parts have already been revealed in the trailer. Usually, an over-revealing trailer means that there isn't enough substance in the movie, and there is way not enough in Hancock.

Rating: 30%

I'mfat Andugly.com

2008-12-09T19:49:00.000-08:00

I'm a firm believer in changing your name to something ridiculous. For example, Chad Ocho Cinco, formerly Chad Johnson, had several pretty good reasons to do so:

1. It was funny
2. It pleased the fans
3. He was already widely known as "Ocho Cinco"
4. He's just honoring the national Hispanic Heritage Month

Doing it for the good of Hispanic Heritage Month

On the other hand, when Jennifer Thornburg changed her name to Cutout Dissection.com, she just ended up coming off as a pretentious idiot. Haunted by the ghosts of chickens and frogs she dissected in high school biology class, Jennifer changed her name to the likewise named website in order to promote alternative methods of learning that did not require killing animals.

Totally ignoring the concept of Willed Body Programs, Cutout insists that all dissections can be completely abolished in the educational setting. Using her incredibly retarded name to generate publicity and get all up in your face about it, she has joined forces with PETA (great choice!) in order to further cram it down your throat. I mean, this is totally reasonable. Imagine having a rational debate with someone named Cutout Dissections.com. I just can't wait.

Now I really have nothing against fat people. I can understand if they have thyroid problems, or are just plain weak willed, it happens. But the main problem here is, how can you be so fat when you are a fucking vegetarian? Just look at that double chin. How many soy beans does it really take to lard yourself up like that? Perhaps she wants everyone to stop killing animals so she can have more for herself! That's why I propose this to you, Jennifer. Rename yourself Cutout Bacon.com:

This gets the message across that we should stop eating animals (pigs, etc.) and it forces you to stop stuffing your fat face with bacon. Everyone wins.

bbl skipping town

2008-12-07T18:11:00.000-08:00

I've left civilized society for a while and won't be watching a lot of movies. Check the Travelogue for updates when I find a wifi hotspot.

Million Dollar Listing (2006- 2008)

2008-11-29T22:25:00.000-08:00

Watch this and you'll think Real Estate is hot again. Forget about affordable living or "the dream of owning your own home", this is about ridiculous houses for ridiculous money. I'm running on the assumption that is this the top tier of "those little people that sell other people's houses for them" centered, of course, in equally top tier Southern California.

Every minute is people worrying about shit. Worries about how sharply they are dressed. Worries about finding the right fit in whatever shit they're pandering to. Worries about playing buddy-buddy with the fellow brokers. Worries about the rate of progress in life. Holy shit, follow the story for more than 20 minutes and this bullshit actually starts to matter.

Hair is scary and gay. Most of the time more gay than scary.

Rating: 50%

Star Trek 11 Trailor (2009)

2008-11-29T17:36:00.000-08:00

As a promotional bid attached to Quantum of Solace, came the first look at the speculative new Star Trek movie. This trailer contains clips of heavy space battle action and a hip new cast of new young characters, most notably a "young Spock" and John Cho, as part of the rebellious new cast.
What's the idea here? This movie will take Star Trek in a new direction with a blank slate. All that Trekkie shit you hate is gone. All the components that you like about Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek is also gone. There's just a little problem: Who gives a shit about TOS?

(2006)

2008-11-24T17:09:00.000-08:00

For some reason, Hawaiian cable television has a lot of movies about being on the ocean. This must be Oceanic Time Warner's attempt to appeal to the experiences of the audience, and features classics like Castaway and movies about nuclear submarines. Into the Blue may look like a movie for retard surfers and beach bums but firmly caught my interest. When a drug cartel messes with Sea Skippy (the one with the harpoon), he gets pissed and kills them all with his sailor friends. Yeah, the acting isn't that good and the characters are predictable stereotypes, but when the Alpha is pissed off, the cinema is top notch. When bad guys get owned on the high seas, they really get owned hard.

Rating: 60%

Get Smart (2008)

2008-11-11T18:16:00.000-08:00

This was so horrible. It's like...at the level of a student movie -no worse- like those bullshit movies you're forced to make for English10 because the moron teacher thinks that making you work in a group will inspire cooperation. Surprise, it inspired exploitation, solidified the clique structure, and produced a shitty home movie reeking of grade grubbing desperation instead. That is a good description of this movie, which has Michael from The Office....which is a good start I guess, but goes to hell from there. The acting is childlike. Childlike. Pre-Ritalin children act like this. The characters all have numbers for names and the comedy (as well as the halfway house of a story) was a failure. ZZZZZZ!

Rating: 10%

The Oblongs (2001-2006)

2008-11-05T01:38:00.000-08:00

What the fuck is this? This show is fucking disgusting! Who is this targeted at? Kids who want to watch a show about people with birth defects? Kids who think these things resemble actual human beings? God damnit I feel sick. I have never been so ill effected by something on TV in my life. Ill bet that if you watched these shows consistently you would turn into a total schizophrennneeewaaaaaaaaa!!!!!

Rating: 0%

Max Payne (2008)

2008-10-28T18:43:00.000-07:00

God damnit not another bad movie based on a good video game. I was bored from the very beginning, mostly because Max was a lot cooler in the game.
I found myself direly wishing I was playing Max Payne rather than sitting through Mark Wahlberg's half assed attempt to pull it off. What does he think this is? The Italian Job? Stop interrogating and torturing people. Stop asking stupid questions like, "What?" and "Who do you think you are?". Is Max Payne in a fucking rock concert? What's with all the talking? Where is all the vividly dark narration? Why isn't he taking any painkillers? Did the director do ANY research? FUCK!

Fuck this nonsense I'm going back to playing MaxPayne2 Extra Blood Mod.
Rating: 20%

The Office Season 5

2008-10-25T15:11:00.000-07:00

Thanks to hulu, I can watch this show consistently enough to follow the story. Grade A corporate jokes with a weird feeling of being a semi-invisible cameraman. After going through about a half dozen eps, I have finally derived the formula.

-Start-

Intro designed to dumb down the atmosphere

STARE AT THE CAMERA

Dwight and Jim fuck with each other's office supplies

Stupid coworker stereotype joke

STARE AT THE CAMERA

Something reeeeally awkward

STARE AT THE CAMERA

My boss is a dumbass joke

STARE AT THE CAMERA

Dwight and Shrute do something really gay

Character Shuffling

-END-

Works every time!
Rating: 100%

Densha Otoko Deluxe (2006)

2008-10-13T23:51:00.000-07:00

haha I love this show. This shit is so funny. Actually this wasn't part of the show, it was just some kind of TV special. These Otaku are doing their funny Otaku things, and even though they're trying to interact with normal society, weird things keep happening that screw them up. The guy that plays Densha is such a good actor. His behavior and monkey-like appearance are just perfect. Anyway, the story is just hardcore madness. You would have to totally fucking insane to think like these people.

Rating: 60%

The Incredible Hulk (2008)

2008-10-10T12:26:00.000-07:00

This was what I saw on my flight back to the United States. It was the only thing that was watchable. Personally, I don't understand why this even exists. There was the other Hulk movie in 2003 that was exactly like this one; big huge reluctant green guy, white girl that wants to save the green guy, angry military guy that wants to kill the green guy...ja ja ja.
The only difference perhaps between the 2003 and the 2008 versions is that Hulk doesn't do any of that jumping through the stratosphere and that there is a "new Hulk" or Hulk level 2 or some shit that didn't really cut it for me.

Hulk, or any split personality character, is a good role for Edward Norton. Just like Fight Club but less homosexual.
Rating: 30%

Yume Wo Kanaeru Zou (2008)

2008-10-09T23:38:00.004-07:00

The title of this show means something along the lines of "elephant that grants wishes". Ahh another crazy Japan TV show. This one caught my interest immediately with the presence of Japanese Ganesha, a stout oyaji with an elephant nose + deity crown. Without subtitles I couldn't understand it completely, but basically, this girl is having a hard time and domestic Ganesha comes and help her with stuff.
In the middle of the show I left to run an errand. By the time I came back, the cast now included super gaijin Julius Caesar, Nobunaga, and a Japanese woman cosplaying as Marie Antoinette, in addition to Ganesha. What the fuckkkk. This cannot be explained.

Rating:50%

Planet of the Apes (2001)

2008-10-09T23:38:00.003-07:00

I couldn't understand why, but I knew that I'd seen this somewhere before. It must have been a while back, 7 years in fact, when I actually watched movies in a "theater". hah! At the time, I was a Sophomore in high school and this was the movie of the summer. Watching it then and now was quite a different experience. Somehow, knowing that the main character was Mark Wahlberg changed my perspective. Having watched LotR about 50 times since then, I was much more keen of the phantasmological feel. Yet, the quality was lacking. This movie stood on the border between Forgettable and Entertaining, and fell off the precipice. Eh, remake.

Rating: 35%

Garireo (2007)

2008-10-09T23:38:00.001-07:00

That is how you say "Galileo" in Japanese, named after the main character Professor Galileo Yukawa, the resident genius. I know it's a weird name, but bear with it because the show is actually pretty interesting. He goes around solving mysteries with physics calculations by combining the story, trajectory, tempurature/mass/energy and other shit into a big puzzle and thereby names the real killer. A ridiculous but funny Japanese TV show and basically, a kooky version of House Md. Or maybe Numb3rs. Whatever.

Rating: 100%

Howl's Moving Castle (2004)

2008-10-03T06:32:00.000-07:00

This is a "Miazaki film", one of the most popular movie events in Japan. Miazaki is to the Japanese as Speilberg is to Americans. Considered to be one of the most revered and celebrated cinemas, Miazaki films include Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and the recently released Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, which I was told was this summer's blockbuster. Watching these movies is an unnerving experience. You better not get too comfortable with anything you see because at any time objects can morph into something else, turn into sludge, get sucked into a wormhole, or come to life and start talking to you like an old friend. Expect lots of big WTF moments with a nebulous movie message by the end. You can't take this sort of thing too seriously, besides, me and Franklinstein have had bad experiences with floating castles before and let me tell you...do not want.

Rating: 60%

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

2008-09-29T04:45:00.000-07:00

This was the complementary movie on my flight to Narita. I'm not too good on the story since I saw the first half dubbed in Japanese, fell asleep, caught the second half in English, and missed the ending due to in-flight turbulence. So, my impression of it is slightly biased by the choppy nature of what I saw. Nonetheless, I thought it was a pretty fun movie. I don't remember much about the original Indy films, so the nostalgia factor is null to me, but at least the story went somewhere. Or maybe it was the wine I had on the plane. I've never done that before. Maybe it was that.

Japanese Indy sure had a deep voice.
Rating: 55%

Bend it Like Beckham (2002)

2008-09-25T22:58:00.000-07:00

I remember that this used to have some kind of cult following. I didn't bother to watch it because I thought it was about gymnastics or something (as the title suggests) and besides, I didn't even know that this "Beckham" was an English footballer at the time. The first thing you'll notice about this movie is that it's got lots of minorities in the story, automatically meaning that there is a copious injection of racial issues. Next, the main character is female but it is not a chick flick, meaning that the theme ties closely into abrasive feminist issues. Now then, with this touchy race thing on the right side, and this controversy/oppression issue on the left, you get a movie about a bunch of ridiculous emotional people arguing with each other. Oh yeah theres some soccer in this too yeah.

Rating: I don't know...I dunno what I saw.

Game Over

2008-09-23T01:08:00.000-07:00

"The age of the Investment Bank has ended."
They have all either folded, failed, or been reigned in by the fed. I guess every bank in America managed to fuck up simultaneously, which is a testament to the dubious nature of money culture. Fuck them. I find it hilarious that a bunch of morons speculating on some shitty houses managed to nuke the bank, which by the way, is full of pretentious Jews and ruthless Asians. "Greed kills" they say.
Whatever the case, they're off center stage now. All those crisp douchebag brokers are back to square one, thanks to some risk-loving sub-prime property owners. Kids that are pondering "what to be when you grow up" should probably cross Investment Banker off their lists now.

The Myth (2005)

2008-09-13T23:13:00.000-07:00

Yes, he does make that face a lot in this one. And yes, that really is 3 Chinese people and an Indian person.
In this unusual wuxia, Jackie Chan lends his kung-fu moron personality to a serious tragic/romantic/historic/action movie. It starts with a reluctant mainland Chinese archaeologist that is having recurring dreams about a Qin dynasty military general. In the dreams, he is the escort to a Korean princess that has been traded to Qin ShiHuang in exchange for peace. (at a time when early states of Korea and China were at war) Somehow this ties into real life and leads Jackie Chan into a supernatural arc with some immortal people. Man, what a twist!
By this time, the princess has turned into something resembling the Moon Goddess, and with great sorrow, realizes that Jackie Chan is not the man she has been waiting for. Destiny forces them to part ways. After returning to the real world, Jackie solemnly writes a book titled "The Myth", which tells the story of the movie that you just saw! WOW PARADOX!!

To understand this without subtitles, you need to know 4 languages: Mandarin, Korean, Cantonese, and Indian. The fuck is that? What if I'm seeing-impaired?
Rating: 40%

Spore Sucks and So Does Gamespy

2008-09-11T20:08:00.000-07:00

Spore - the game almost a decade in the making, garnering rave reviews years before the actual release date. Does the game live up to the hype? Will certain reviews still stroke its dancing penis? To answer both questions, I look at Gamespy's review of the game, and respond with my own findings.

Lie #1:
"While the gameplay isn't always perfect, Spore is a technological coup that opens up a whole new genre of gaming."

That's funny, in all five stages of the game, I never once thought that this was a new genre of gaming. The cell stage was simply a Pacman clone. The Tribal and Civilization stages were just a shitty RTS. The Space stage? Again a bad RTS and similiar to Freelancer. Fans of Spore will say "BUT YOU CAN CREATE YOUR OWN CONTENT!" I'm sorry, but editing the look of your creatures and units is no more creating your own content than is creating a Jamaican race mod for Civilization 4. When you boil down this game, it really is nothing but five shitty mini-games strung together around an art editor.

Lie #2:
"The object of the game is to start with a single-celled life form and evolve it into a creature, then an intelligent being, and finally a spacefaring civilization. Is it evolution? Is it intelligent design? All we know is that alien life is out there, and it's fun to play with."

Again, a big fat lie. There's no evolution at all during the game. The first two stages are the only stages where you can modify your creature, and this can be done at any point you choose during these stages. It doesn't matter if you die a million times, you have infinite lives and are able to find a mate at whim. The "evolution" aspect would come into play because you need to eat to gain "DNA points" to add structures to your creature, such as mouths and spikes, but the overall morphology of your creature can be radically changed from one generation to the next. For example, If I'm a 4-legged herbivorous animal, I can mate then change my entire creature to a 6-legged flying carnivore in the very next generation.

Why does this piss me off so much? Because of the biggest flaw in this game: It doesn't matter what your creature looks like. That's right. I can create an armless, lifeless slug creature that has the same evolutionary success as a 10 foot winged creature with mouths for hands. My creature's morphology has very little bearing on how successful it is in the game world. Regardless if I give my creatures hands or eyes, it will become the dominant life form on the planet.

All that is required for my creature to succeed is to eat food, which is a joke in terms of gameplay, requiring nothing but pointing and ..... I don't even need to click. Why should I even add arms? Why should I even care if my animal has 3 legs or 15? The reason this matters is because it reduces the gameplay to absolutely nothing.

Spore is nothing but an art editor. For Gamespy to suggest that taking your creature to the Space Stage is some sort of epic journey is like saying that graduation ceremonies for the 5th grade matter. The reason Spore fails in this respect as well is because each of the distinct stages of the game is simply a mini arcade game. The cell stage all you do is eat food. In the Tribal stage, you have a set of 5 predetermined opponents you must conquer, the difficulty of which is laughable. Some reviews will say some bullshit about "leading your tribe" or "shaping your species" in these stages, but that's bullshit as well. You are allowed only one tribe, the buildings and upgrades of which are non-customizable and all look the same. To upgrade your tribe, you simply need enough food to buy the structure and choose which predetermined site to place it.

The divisions between each of the stages are distinct enough that you never feel any continuity with any of them. After the tribal stage, you don't even get to use your creature model any more. You have to create a new model, the "Land Unit" which is like creating another creature. But if the whole point of the game is to lead your unique creature to the Space Stage, then why abandon the creature all together in the Civilization stage? The reason is for more art-time. You get to create another unit that again, the morphology of which has no meaning at all. I spent an hour building my land unit, putting tons of laser guns called "War Crime" all over it's hull. So what happens when the unit actually shoots at something? A pathetic blue graphic appears over the head of the unit and slowly arcs towards the target. What shit.

Lie #3:

" In many ways the real genius of Spore is that the immense complexity of the technology is hidden beneath very simple editors, such that you forget the technology is even there. Spore allows players to create fully articulated and textured 3D models of vehicles, buildings, and creatures. The creatures are the most impressive: they're instantly capable of walking, chirping, fighting, singing, running, even flying."

Again, all that fancy computer coding and algorithms mean shit if the look of your creature is meaningless in terms of gameplay. All it allows you to do is make something pretty with your art editor.

Lie #4:

"The fact that anyone, including non-gamers, can create and share these models in their first game session without any training or practice is remarkable.... The technology behind Spore is unquestionably fantastic"

HOLY SHIT GUESS WHAT. I'M CURRENTLY INSCRIBING PIXELS ONTO A COMPUTER SCREEN AND SHARING IT WITH OTHER PEOPLE. THIS IS THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT IN HUMAN HISTORY.

Gamespy Rating: 4.5/5

My Rating:

I could go on and on, but it's pretty clear that this game failed the hype. Why it took 7 years to develop this piece of shit is beyond me. They had 7 years to create a game, but all they did was create a 3D model editor with predetermined parts. This is not a game.

Graphics: 5/10
Sound: 8/10
Gameplay: 3/10

Overall rating: 4/10

Your Face: Rui Chenggang

2008-09-11T12:17:00.001-07:00

I saw this guy getting heckled by Rob Riggle on the Daily Show. Apparently he is the idyllic face of China's economics scene and host of all things financial on Chinese CCTV. Okay that's great...but I couldn't really understand what I was seeing. Who is this guy? A Google search on his name returned only 7,460 results. That's tiny. (my own name returns around 479,000)
How old is he, maybe 25? He looks around my age, like a kid. In fact, he faintly resembles one of the chumps sitting next to me in econ class taking notes with a ThinkPad. (They're just too good for paper) I found his personal webpage on CCTV.com particularly curious, containing a list of his "Unforgettable Moments", which include little blurbs on everything from a personal dislike of calculus to his struggle to be a good Karaoke singer. And he's the Bob Brinker of China? Does Bob Brinker have a webpage with a poetic list of his hopes/dreams/aspirations? I hope not. Man, who is this guy?

Constantine (2005)

2008-09-04T01:25:00.001-07:00

I watched this in 2 viewing sessions at 2 different times. I saw the first half while watching TV in a public lounge but had to leave midway through the movie. By chance, I caught the ending 8 months later while eating lunch in a Hawaiian BBQ joint, which had a gratuitous flatscreen TV.

For the most part, Constantine was pretty boring. For a cheap copy of The Matrix, it was lacking in visual appeal and the story/dialog/set was stupid. Keanu Reeves looked like a chump, nothing like his hit persona as Neo. The only reason you would ever like this movie is (1) if you just couldn't get enough of Matrix and had to find a substitute, or (2) you're a Keanu Reeves fanboy/girl, both of which mean that you're an idiot.

Too much theological bullshit in this.
Rating: 30%

Never Back Down (2008)

2008-09-02T13:46:00.000-07:00

Viral video. That's how I ended up watching this. The plot is based on a viral video as well, of a high school football player brawling up the field on youtube. This online video catches the attention of a fight clubber that challenges him and promptly crushes him with mixed martial arts. The kid gets pissed and wants revenge so he takes up MMA in a pride match sort of thing.

Personally, I hate this kind of stuff. This movie is for people that jerk off to UFC and talk and talk about how much they can kick your ass. I find that really annoying and gay. The rest of the movie was glorified MMA worship as well, so I skipped through it and watched the Ong Bak style fights, which were very dynamic and worth going through.

Rating: 55%

Two Classic Rock Songs That Suck

2008-08-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

Since I am no longer under the broadcast range for KGO 810, for any talk radio I was forced to listen to KFI 640. Now KFI is nothing like KGO. First of all, they play Coast to Coast AM in the evenings, which is entertaining at first, but then slowly becomes depressing after you listen to several people talk about dedicating their entire lives searching for the Bigfoot. Of course, there are rare moments where Gordon Freeman calls in about portal technology, but in the context of the show, it's not really that funny considering the next night you'll have a guest that claims he's an alien from another dimension. Aside from Coast to Coast, KFI mostly plays conservative talk radio with Rush Limbaugh in the morning, and two other douche bags in the afternoon. I'm all for listening to the other side of the argument, but there's a limit to how much smarmy, smirk-filled bull shit I can handle on a daily basis. As a result, I now listen to KLOR 95.5 The Classic Rock Station.

KLOR plays a lot of good stuff, but they also play a few songs that are generally regarded as good but in reality suck balls. The shittiness of these songs becomes more obvious with KLOR's constant replaying, thinking "No one could get tired of this!" First up is:

"You better you bet" by The Who

Overall, I think The Who are average, and they had a few good songs that gives their band some merit. However, this song feels like taking a chainsaw to the ear canal. From what I can gather, it's about some guy who tells his lady that he loves her, but instead of that woman being grateful or saying I love you back, she says "You'd Better!" (best imagined with a little head shake while saying it). Only one word comes to my mind while listening to this song: bitch. Now the same type of person who would say "You'd Better" in response to "I love you" would also probably say this:

No. Fuck off. Sassiness or attitude is one thing, but saying "You'd better" is telling that poor guy he's falling in love with an attention-whoring void of a human being. Aside from that, the tune is good, but the singing blows and could be much better.

Next up is Joan Jett. Ever heard of Joan Jett? Chances are you haven't, and if you do, it's probably because you recognize her only famous song "I Love Rock n' Roll":

Instantly recognizable, this song is ubiquitous on popular song lists. True, it has a good opening riff, but when was the last time you actually listened to the whole thing? The only good part of the song is the chorus, and the rest is like eating the Southern Style Chicken Sandwich from McDonalds: below average and boring.

My newest art piece, "Joan Jett"

My reasoning is this: Joan Jett looks and sings like garbage. If you've listened to any of her other songs (which you probably haven't because they are all bad), she has that same harsh droning tone with that drawn out inflection at the end of each line.

But you say, she's a hard rock artist. They don't need to sing well as long as the riffs are tight. I concede that point. However, the singing should not be so bad as to make it feel like scraping your scrotum over a rusty cheese grater. Just listen to the lyrics:

"MEEEEE yeah, MEEEEEEE"
"MEEEEE yeah, MEEEEEEE"
"MEEEEE yeah, MEEEEEEE"
"MEEEEE yeah, MEEEEEEE"

Every time I hear that, I want to stab a Phillips-head screwdriver into her, yes, her face. Just watch the music video when she says that. If I were living in the novel 1984, Room 101 would be that face saying "MEEEEE yeah, MEEEEEEE" over and over.

Another thing I cannot stand about Joan Jett is that she is ugly. That's not a crime, and I actually respect artists who are ugly because that means they rose to fame due to their skill at music. However, Joan Jett has the bitchy tendency to show off her body in bikinis and such in music videos, which people describe as "hot".

I don't even know what I'm looking at. Just look at those veins, the greasy skin. In every live performance she wears that same sweaty black bikini, too much makeup, and ends up looking like a shitstained toilet stall in a Food4Less.