I guess everyone who knows me already knows this, but for the random visitors from Russia I always get, I have a new blog at
http://cinecalbastard.blogspot.ie/. It's a film blog that has reviews, pictures, opinion pieces, all sorts of crap. Maybe to be checking it out, yyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeessss?
http://cinecalbastard.blogspot.ie/
http://cinecalbastard.blogspot.ie/
That link again, is
http://cinecalbastard.blogspot.ie/
Idiots, and the things they think
Sunday 23 June 2013
Tuesday 23 April 2013
The Dove Real Beauty Sketches Are A Load Of Disingenuous Manipulative Flimshaw!
There’s this ad for Dove going around the internet at the
moment. It’s very well put together and judging by the number of people having
a positive reaction to it and sharing it around it must be a great success for
the Dove marketing division. It’s also cynical marketing shenanigans. Here’s
the ad in question if you haven’t already seen it:
Made you feel good, right? Well if there’s one thing you
should ever learn from this blog it’s that you should never feel good ever. Now,
there is a positive message to be found in the video. We often judge ourselves harder
than any other person could and have a skewed perception when it comes to our appearance.
When it comes to looks, women in particular shouldn’t be so hard on themselves
and it’s good to know that strangers are able to look past the flaws which
might be so glaring to one person. A reminder to appreciate the beauty in
oneself is a good lesson for young women.
HOWEVER!
It’s still saying that the most important thing to judge a
woman on is their physical appearance, that beauty trumps everything else. The
ad gives the impression that it is challenging the way we look at beauty, but
what it is actually saying to the women in the ad is, ‘don’t worry ladies! You’re
closer to the conventional standard of beauty that you first thought!’ It doesn’t
re-evaluate what beauty is or just how important beauty should be in comparison
to other qualities. You may be as dumb as a pile of rocks that dropped out of
rock school, lazy, dishonest, a war criminal-but fuck it, you’re a little
prettier than you thought you were, so hurray, I guess. I mean, the concept of
the ad is that they bring in strangers to talk to these women for long enough
that they get an impression of that person, but the strangers are still only
asked about what the women looked like. What was the point in having a
conversation then? Couldn’t they just have looked at a photograph?
I mean, I’m not even getting this from the subtext of the
Dove video, it is right there in the script! The last thing said in the video,
the lesson we’re supposed to take away from this feel-good exercise is: “I
should be more grateful of my natural beauty. It impacts the choices and
the friends we make, the jobs we go out for, the way we treat our children, it
impacts everything. It couldn’t be more critical to your happiness.” Doesn’t that kind of undercut the whole point that
they’re trying to make? Beauty…could not be more critical to your happiness. They’re
not giving any thought to the idea that there is much more to a person than how
beautiful they are. It’s the status quo cunningly disguised as a touching and
subversive sentiment. Is it true that beauty impacts the friends we make and
the jobs we get? Maybe, but that doesn’t mean that it should. Looks are not everything. As for
beauty impacting the way we treat our children; that would make you a pretty
shitty parent.
Beauty: It impacts the way this dude treats his children |
Finally, come on now, it’s an ad. If people
are learning something positive from it, that’s great but it isn’t why it was
made. The whole point is to make you more aware of the Dove brand and more
likely to buy Dove products. They’re not really bothered about ‘real beauty’
and making women feel better about their image. For crying out loud, the same
company that owns the Dove brand (Unilever) also owns Lynx, whose whole
marketing strategy is based on the objectification of women. If you take
anything away from this blog (apart from the fact that you should never feel
good, ever) it’s that you should always treat a message with scepticism if
there’s a blatant ulterior motive behind, whether it’s coming from a
politician, a newspaper or lady soap. An advertisement is never going to tell
you something that you don’t want to hear. Finding a profound message in a Dove
advertisement is like believing a prostitute who says that they love you. All they
really care about is the cream.
...dolla dolla bill, y'all.
Labels:
Advertising,
Beauty,
Bollocks,
Dove,
Flimshaw,
Manipulation
Wednesday 27 March 2013
I Hate Your Guts Seth Rogen
I would consider myself a relatively self-deprecating person.
For example, I’m not afraid to admit that I basically look just like Jack
Osbourne, and I specifically mean 2002 Irritating Teenage Curly Round Thing
Jack Osbourne. I am willing to make fun
of myself. However, too much of that is not a good thing. Back when I was a wee
Irritating Teenage Curly Round Thing, one day I spent a few minutes throwing
out the self-deprecating gags, until somebody just held out their hand and said
“you’re just fishing for compliments. Stop.” And it was true. Too much of that
willing to laugh at yourself stuff is just another form of narcissism because
it shows that you’ll do basically anything to get people to like you.
Thankfully I’ve grown up a little and gotten past that desperate need for
attention. Incidentally, don’t forget to like this blog post, leave a comment
and share it with all of your friends.
Me, essentially |
The reason I bring this up is because I’ve been thinking
lately among those most desperate of attention seekers, Hollywood actors. It’s
been a tradition among Hollywood celebrities for a while now for them to play
exaggerated versions of themselves for comedy, because a) rich and famous people
and the things they think and do are the
favourite topic of conversation for rich and famous people and b) it
strengthens their “brand” or whatever, showing John Q. Public that just because
Tom Cruise is rich enough to have you entire family murdered by a specially
trained team of chinchillas, that doesn’t mean they that think they’re better
than you. So go see Mission Impossible V: Mission Impossiblest!
I’m not totally against this, it can lead to some good
comedy. For example, the celebrity cameos in Extras by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant were generally quite
funny, and I appreciate them introducing the world to Patrick Stewart, sexual
deviant. But if you go to that well for too long or too often then the whole
thing becomes an obnoxious movie star circle-jerk. Like the Oscars. Two recent
examples stick out to me, one that was out recently and another coming soon.
If you paid money to see Movie
43 in the cinema, then you have my sincere condolences. Universally hated
by critics, Movie 43 is a sketch-comedy/waste
of your time featuring an ensemble cast including but not limited to Kate
Winslet, Hugh Jackman, Seth McFarlane, Emma Stone, Leon from Curb Your Enthusiasm, former successful
person Halle Berry, teen sensation Richard Gere and classic thespian Snooki.
Each sketch is united by the theme of gross-out humour which as we all know is
already the most sophisticated form of comedy there is, but which is also amplified
here by the fame and prestige of the participants. Jokes about murder, racial
stereotypes, coprophilia, incest, menstruation and penises being mangled by
fans inside an MP3 player/sex doll are all included in this mess. If you’ve
ever wanted to see Hugh Jackman play a man with testicles on his neck, then
this is the movie for you. And also you are going to die alone. The busy
schedules of everyone involved meant that the movie took several years to make,
and unfortunately in that time nobody thought that maybe they were just better
off just off just not bringing this film out, in spite of it being the
equivalent quality-wise to the sludge down your bathroom sink.
The second movie I wanted to talk about is the upcoming This Is The End, a disaster comedy film.
It stars Seth Rogen as himself, James Franco as himself, Danny McBride as
himself, Jonah Hill as himself etc, etc and is about this band of Hollywood
dudebros dealing with the apocalypse as you can see from this trailer.
It looks
like the Bill Murray joke from Zombieland stretched out to feature-film length,
long past the point of tolerability. They can make fun of how bad Green Hornet
was all they want but it doesn’t make me like Seth Rogen any more, it just
reminds me of how terrible Green Hornet
was. Like many of the movies starring these particular actors, the film appears
to mostly just be an excuse for these buddies to hang out and have a good time
making jokes about weed and their genitals. It is apparently no longer enough
of an ego boost for Seth Rogen that people enjoy the characters that he plays,
they now have to like him specifically as a person. While I can’t imagine the
likes of Franco and McBride caring very much about the public perception of
them, there’s still some crazy Hollywood megalomania on display here as this
witless fraternity basically decide to basically pay each other millions of
dollars doing and saying the same things they do when they go and have a few
beers. I mean, on the one hand maybe I shouldn’t judge a film that hasn’t come
out yet and it’ll be alright, but on the other hand IT WON’T AND I’M RIGHT.
To all the famous Hollywood stars who I have no doubt read
this blog all the time, please put a stop to this trend of self-indulgence
disguised as self-mockery. People don’t want to see you get Punk’d anymore. Sending
yourselves up is only achieving the opposite of what you intend by doing it, it’s
making me hate your guts and I know that you take my opinion very seriously.
Thursday 14 February 2013
I Hate Myself And I Wanna Die Hard
I know that this isn’t a statement that will send shockwaves
through the internet, or cause the nine people reading this to spit out any
beverage they might currently be consuming in shock, but it must be said: Die
Hard is the best, you guys. A surprise success in 1988, Die Hard is widely
regarded today as one of the greatest action movies of all-time. It launched
Bruce Willis into stardom, created a lucrative franchise and served as the
go-to action movie to rip off until The Matrix took over towards the end of the
90s. For an entire decade, a standard movie-pitch would include the phrase “like
Die Hard, but on a ____________!” with a multitude of examples including Die
Hard on a Bus (Speed), Die Hard On a Plane (Air Force One) and Die Hard on a
Plane But With Nicholas Cage (Con Air) until, as the story goes somebody tried
pitching Die Hard in an Office Building, apparently unaware that the original
movie took place in one. Needless to say, it deservedly had a big influence on
Hollywood, which is why the franchise is still being run into the ground to
this day.
Although it is always difficult to say what exactly it is
about any given form of entertainment that causes it to capture the imagination
(and cash) of audiences, the original Die Hard deserves to be lauded for its
quality, having far more going for it than being just a mindless,
explosion-fueled blockbuster. It has a perfectly crafted screenplay containing
witty dialogue, set pieces that are entertaining but remain logical, entertaining
characters, snappy pacing and serves as a textbook example of using the most
basic elements of storytelling. The creator of Community, Dan Harmon, uses the
story of Die Hard to help aspiring filmmakers who need help constructing a
story themselves on the Chanel 101 website.
John McTiernan, a director with definite action pedigree (he
also did Predator and The Hunt For Red October) helps the strong screenplay
work on screen, with action scenes that are both visceral and clear. Contrary
to many modern action films, it is always easy to know what is happening and to
who and the violence has a weight behind it. He also gets great performances
out of the actors involved. Most obviously this means Bruce Willis on one of
the pleasing occasions when he’s in Give A Fuck Mode and the Shakespearean
class of Alan Rickman. It also includes the smaller roles like Hart Bochner as quintessential
80’s sleazebag Ellis, the late Paul Gleason as the blowhard deputy chief of
police and that one Asian dude from every 80s movie:
And of course there’s
Reginald VelJohnson as Al Powell, the lovable cop who goes through a touching
journey by falling in love with John McClane, putting the fact that he shot a child
(!?) behind him and in the end, learning the joy of killing people all over again.
Have I mentioned how Die Hard is the best? I know it seems like I’m giving the movie too
much credit in a rush to stroke the ego* of Bruce Willis or whatever, but since
Die Hard is used in film schools and university courses worldwide as an example
of great filmmaking, including a Perspectives of Film module in UCD, fuck you,
I have academic credibility to back me up.
With all this in mind, it’s easier to see why Die Hard became a popular
franchise, which leads me finally to my point: stop making more of them, for
crying out loud.
Now I do not have any major problems with the first couple
of sequels to Die Hard. They’re not masterpieces but they both have some good
stuff in them and are a perfectly reasonable way to pass an afternoon. When it comes to Die Hard sequels though, I’m
going to count to three, there will not be a four. There certainly won’t be a
five. As sequels tend to do, each sequel to Die Hard had to get bigger and
bigger in scale, until they went past the point of ridiculousness and collapsed
in on themselves. This month sees the release of A Good Day To Die Hard,
although at this stage is might as well be called Die Hard: Another One. The
movie stars Bruce Willis as John McClane as Bruce Willis and Australian actor
Jai Courtney as a block of wood. Or his son or whatever. Although I have not
and will not see the film, from the advertising I know that it features Russia,
sexy ladies in catsuits and the promise of plenty of loud explosions to
distract you from the dank hopelessness of your own existence.
What made the original film work was the fact that John
McClane was just an ordinary cop surviving by the skin of his teeth, a man “in
the wrong place at the wrong time” as they say. Sure he made jokes and
committed crazy acts of violence, he’s an action hero. But he still came across
like a real person with whom we can connect. He gets his feet cut up, he
experiences fear, he realises he was a jerk to his wife and decides to change.
He is a good character. Yet as the sequels kept going on he lost all of that.
When I saw Die Hard 4 as a teenager, I liked it (teenagers don’t know anything)
but looking back on it now, it is an experience completely void of tension.
Once you’ve seen someone kill a helicopter with a car or walk on a fucking jet
plane, your suspension of disbelief plummets quicker than Hans Gruber being
dropped off the Nakatomi Plaza and you have no more reason to care about what
you are seeing. Now in 2013 in Live and Let Die Hard, McClane is an invincible
super hero, rolling his eyes with bemusement at yet another kerfuffle he’s
managed to get into, firing off as many quips as bullets while he blows Russia
to smithereens, a complete disconnect from reality with nothing at stake and no
reason to care.
When McClane said “yippee ki yay, motherfucker” in Die Hard,
there was a reason, he was showing defiance to a threatening man who called him
a cowboy by channelling his inner Roy Rogers. It was his way of standing up to
the danger he was facing. In Come Die Hard With Me he says it because it’s a
catchphrase. What’s more, he presumably doesn’t even say motherfucker, just as
in Die Hard 4, as both movies are PG-13/15A in order to squeeze more people
into those theatres so Bruce Willis and Hollywood executives can stick another
butler made out of caviar into their solid-gold houses. At some point John
McClane the person was killed and replaced with the DieHardotron 3000, an
unbreakable machine whose only emotion is an apparent racial hatred of
helicopters.
Scoff if you will, but to me Die Hard is great cinema. Like the
early Alien or George Romero films, by serving as the pinnacle of their genres
they are almost elevated above them (that’s the dash of pretension for this
blog entry done). But, just like um...the later Alien or George Romero films,
the Die Hard franchise is a dead horse of brand recognition being beaten for
every last penny, long past the point of anyone being interested in making art,
or even just solid entertainment. Right down to the cutesy “Yippee Ki Yay
Mother Russia” on the poster, Once Bitten, Twice As Die Hard is a cynical exercise
in rich people deciding to make money and poor people deciding that they have
nothing better to do. It is ironic that it will be in cinemas around Valentine’s
Day, as it is quite clearly a project completely void of passion or love from
anyone involved. Do yourself a favour and do absolutely anything else other
than disrespecting the memory of one of the iconic action movies by passively
trudging into the cinema to watch a beige time-devourer like Oh God Why Won’t
This Franchise Die Hard.
*penis
Tuesday 29 January 2013
Chris Brown and the Things He Thinks
So, walking hate-machine Chris Brown got into a fight with Frank Ocean, then dealt with it by uploading a painting of Jesus to Instagram, with the caption "Painting the way I feel today. Focus on what matters!", presumably drawing a comparison between the suffering of Jesus and his own suffering or whatever. This is what I have to say about that:
Yeah, I don't really have much to say. The dude is a goon. I'm writing this to invite everybody on the planet except Chris Brown to a big party in the hopes that we all get so wasted that Chris Brown is permanently wiped from our memories. I'll bring the strongest bleach I can find.
Saturday 15 December 2012
Christmas: Why Bother?
Christmas is a ridiculous concept. It was a Pagan holiday
that was seized upon and changed beyond recognition by Christians, which became
a Christian holiday that was seized upon and changed beyond recognition by
businessmen and advertisers. It’s a time of year where we talk even more about
helping the less fortunate as we walk right past them and into the next high
street clothing store. It’s easy to be cynical at this time of year because it
would seem that we devote so much time, energy, effort and money on something
that, ostensibly, doesn’t matter at all. But even though the central premise of
this blog if for me to be mean-spirited and cynical, you’ll never see my complaining
about this holiday. Christmas exists, and there is a reason.
Ritual is an important thing to humans. No matter how
civilised we become, that doesn’t seem to change. There’s a tiny part of our
brain, buried somewhere deep down, and it’s the part that makes us want to lump
a pile of stones together in the middle of a field and dance naked around them
or indeed, to lump a tree inside our homes and decorate it with trinkets and
lights (naked dancing optional.) Huge numbers of non-Christians (both people of
other faiths and people with no religion whatsoever) celebrate Christmas
worldwide, and that’s because the real reason we have Christmas, or Hannukah or
Yalda or Baldhi Day or whatever runs much deeper than babies in a manger or any
other religious trappings. In a world without religion we would still be doing
some goofy thing or another when the winter came around. Because if we’re
celebrating a holiday at this time it means that we’re still here. We managed
to survive for another twelve months and now it’s cold and dark and we need
each other. It’s been wired into our lizard brains to get together with our
friends and family, the people we love and even the people who irritate us
beyond all belief and mark that time together in ritual form, because even if
we don’t want to acknowledge it, they or we may not be there next year.
Twenty children and six adults were murdered needlessly
yesterday in Newtown Connecticut. I tried to write something today that better
fits the pattern of my output so far, but it feels incredibly petty to write a
few hundred words complaining about little things when I have everything I
actually need, and the people of Newtown have lost something that is actually
important. The children who survived the violence should be thinking about the
holidays and what presents they will be receiving, instead they have had their
innocence emphatically taken away from them. They have been dragged into the
adult world, where things don’t always make sense, where terrible things happen
that can’t be easily fixed. I have no doubt that there are many people who believe
that this tragedy puts the silliness of Christmas into perspective, because who
could care that much about getting the gifts you wanted when the reality of how
much legitimate suffering exists in the world is made so clear before us?
That is an easy view to understand, but I don’t see it that
way. I believe that it underlines how fragile our lives are, how they can be
taken away from us without warning because of something completely out of our
control. There is nothing wrong with enjoying life with the people you care
about and when you strip away the window dressing of carols, turkeys and fairy
lights, that’s what Christmas really is. You and yours are still here. Enjoy
that. For those who are gone, remember them. And if you have any time to spare
someone else from that most horrible condition of loneliness, please do. End
the year on a high. Normal, curmudgeonly status on the blog should resume early
next year.
Saturday 8 December 2012
Watch Where You're Walking, Stupidity-Monger
An open letter to the four people who stepped on my feet in town today:
Dear utter shitheads,
Although the four of you just about avoided bruising my
toes, unfortunately the same cannot be said for my feelings. Before today, I
still retained some belief that humanity was not entirely filled with the
urine-like dregs of thoughtless and selfish people, however all traces of that naivety
were stamped out of me today and I have the four of you to thank for that. I
now understand that the world is a terrible place, and that I was the idiot for
thinking that I could get away with trying to do some Christmas shopping
without being attacked by a quartet of bastard-shaped fools who don’t know how
to walk through town properly. I’m sure you were in too much of a rush to avoid
causing mild pain to my toes, presumably there were some rocks at the bottom of
a pond somewhere that you had to suck on.
I hate you. I hate
you more than I hate junkies on the bus, people who think Batman should kill, the
dog that lives next door that’s always barking and Indiana Jones 4. I hope that
you are beset by a series of inconveniences, hopefully ending in your
spontaneous combustion. Maybe that would teach you all a lesson about watching
where you are going.
I hope the bus always pulls away just as you arrive at the
stop. I hope that you accidentally bite down on a fork a minimum of eleven
times in your life. I hope that every man/woman/blow-up doll you encounter in
life thinks that you are “such a good friend”. I hope that you are struck by a
meteorite and by lightning at the same time. I hope that you can never find your
keys. I hope that you lose your sense of smell. I hope that you win the lottery
but when you go to reclaim the money, a pigeon steals your ticket and defecates
on you as it departs. I hope that some inconsiderate arsehole steps on your
toes whenever you try to shop. I hope that any prospective blog you try to
write very quickly slips in terms of quality and readership. I hope that you
quickly run out of things to write about for that blog and have to resort to
spewing out less than 500 words of whinging about small slights. I hope that
every occasion where you think you have found happiness and love turns out to
be a pyramid scheme.
Let this be a warning to you. The next time you step on my
feet when I’m trying to shop, there’s a chance that I won’t just say nothing
and complain about it on the internet later. Although that is probably what
will happen.
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