Satan's Little Helper
I would like to claim that I am doing more than just watching rubbish films at the moment, but that would probably be a lie. In my defence, I did go to London recently, and saw the Producers, on seats so high I suspect I was amoung the clouds....
But I'm posting about this particular film. It's a horror film, of the slasher vein, where a young, deeply annoying boy, has been playing on a game called... Satan's Little Helper, which does what it says on the tin. It is haloween, and upon spying a man dressed in a Satan outfit who has obviously just killed someone, he decides that this is a hilarious fake joke, and goes off to help him.
Meanwhile, his sister, who he wants to marry(!) is at the house, with her boyfriend, Alex. Naturally, the young boy hates Alex, and asks Satan to take him to hell. Which he does. To be fair, for the most part the young boy misses out on the killing, although when an old lady is hung in front of him and he shows absolutely no doubt there is some worry.
Of course he is not the only stupid person in this film. See, Alex had gone off with our young hero to dress up as satan, and when satan and the kid comes back (satan doesn't talk), she assumes he is Alex, and continues to believe this EVEN WHEN HE STARTS TO THROTTLE HER.
This continues, with the discovery that Alex isn't dead after all! Finally the revelation is made that the guy isn't Alex at all, although no-one believes our hero's sister when she tells them that he isn't, thinking she's make belive (her mother and father in this case). In fact they actually have to witness a live murder of the father for anyone to believe her.
Satan heads off, with the mother wrapped in clingfilm so she can't talk, to a fancy dress party, where everyone there seems to think this is perfectly normal.... he poisons the punch with bleach, and then heads back.
In a brilliant scence, Alex threatens Satan with a gun. Satan pulls his hand back to his face, imitiating Alex's father(who he killed earlier on. His father thought Satan was Alex too... this town is full of stupid people). Satan then takes the gun and shoots himself in the hand, gives back the gun and walks off. Alex then describes this to his ladyfriend, saying "That's just like Dad, showing me he is going to get away with it." Apparently Alex's dad is in the habit of shooting himself in the hand. Alex is quite willing to accept the idea of his father being a psychopath who tried to murder him.......
This is all set up so when they find and shoot the satan costume, his dad is of course behind it. This might have been clever if we hadn't already seen his dad DIE, but never mind.
MEANWHILE... our young hero Alex has been ordered to stay in his house, but prayed to God to help. So when the doorbell rings, he pretty much immediately opens it, to find a guy wearing a Jesus costume. Now, I know he's only 10 years old, but surely tonight would have made him develop some sense of fear from people in costumes.... apparently not....
The film slogs onwards, with Alex disappearing and our young hero, sister and mother in the house. Mother and sister go in search of Jesus. They see a person in a costume who is standing doing nothing, and so, displaying a complete lack of willing to learn, they stab him lots. It is, of course, Alex.
Finally, our young boy runs out to get help from the police. A policeman... wearing a mask... comes to help. He of course invites him in, as do the mother and sister. The film ends, and you can't help thinking those three deserve to die, the level of gullibility they succum to.
In its defence, I think some of this movie was meant humorously, but it took itself a tiny bit too seriously for all this to be meant to be funny.....
Bullet Proof Monk
For some reason it took my fancy to watch this sorry excuse for a film recently. I guess the fun theme tune and the chirpy looking ads intrigued me, and I always like some martial arts..... Or so I thought.
I'm still not sure why I watched this film the entire way through, but I did, and so am able to describe the plot to you.
The film starts in 1943, in Tibet, where some monks are fighting each other. We learn that our hero, Chow Yun-Fat, has just completed his training, ready to defend a scroll that can change the entire world. Cue Nazis, that kill everyone, with a ludicrously over the top leader who I desperately prayed would not feature in the rest of this film. Zoom forward, and it's the present day, we get introduced to a thief, Sean William Scott, and Chow Yun-Fat is there too. They bump into each other, and to cut a long and tiresome story short it turns out he is the one prophesised to carry on in defence of the scroll. See, he learnt martial art skills from watching old kung fu films...... Oh, and the heroine is the daughter of a Russian Mob boss, who apparently had to go fight in "the street" because thats the only place she gets rated on her performance..... apparently. Oh, and the Nazi is still chasing after the scroll. And his daughter is the head of a humans right organisation (earlier on in the film, our russian daughter asks whether displays of acts of brutality might encourage people to do this again. I'm not entirely sure whether she's being serious or not.....), a front for evil of course.
The incredulous plot might have been helped by a sense of humour, which it felt like there should have been, but this is one of the most humourless films I've ever watched. Schindlers List has more laughs. I'm not entirely sure why I thought this film would be any good, but I wouldn't expect it to be QUITE so bad........
Cosplaying
For those who don't know, cosplaying involves dressing up as characters from various shows etc.... here are
some examples (they don't appear until about 40 seconds in). The worrying thing about this is I get most of the references made....
Swimming
I have been swimming pretty much ever weekday since I returned from Majorca, which has made me feel rather vituous, although I am not certain if it is having any major effect upon myself, my usual outlook being one of very little patience.
Anyways, I have encountered several characters upon my daily swim, as I go round and round the slow lane. These are
Captain Slow Captain Slow does, indeed, swim in the slow lane, as do I. However, it appears that during his life, of which there have undoubtedly been a few years so far, he has not seemed to have mastered the art of swimming, prefering a sort of flailing impression of the actual strokes. I've never actually seen people go faster doing backstroke than breaststroke but he manages it. It's the slow lane, so I guess this is ok, but man does this guy go slow. I end up overtaking him at least every four lengths, sometimes much sooner. On the early occasions when I have tried to slow to match his pace, I have ended up practically walking in the water, leading me to conclude that he actually has no muscles, and is instead given a push by someone and carries on by momentum.
The Evil Lady My hatred of the evil lady stems from one incident, as my irrational hatreds often do. Once, while getting into the pool, I was lowering myself in, quite near her, and upon experiencing the cool water, exhaled. Hearing this, she gave me a look of shock, with a hint of disgust thrown in for good measure. I smiled confusedly at her, and ventured a hesitant, "Sorry", which only seemed to annoy her more, her look developing into a glance of scorn. I retreated, knowing I had faced evil that day, and, indeed, would be swimming for half an hour quite near her.
The crotchmaster The crotchmaster is usually mostly inoffensive, apart from when he moves to overtake me. He swims faster than I do, so this happens with reasonable frequency. The problem is, is not only does he swim on his back while doing breaststroke kicks, he also wears speedos. Combined with me spending a lot of my swimming time underwater, this gives me a ten second close up view of his crotch.
people in the wrong goddamn lane I always swim in the slow lane, and it is always very annoying if someone is doing front crawl at a ridiculous pace in the slow lane, as in front crawl most people have a tendency not to see where they are going, and thus crash into people going slower than them. Almost as annoying are those who go in the fast lane and manage to swim at about the same pace as I do, so I end up swimming along side them for a length, finally speeding up to overtake them, ridiculous as that notion is.
Splashy people For god sake, keep your arms and your legs underwater. It's just polite!
DROD
Is the principle reason for my lack of posts recently. I could lay claim to a fantastically busy existence, but I don't think anyone would believe me. I did go see the tempest on saturday AND go see Jools Holland (where I
DID indeed dance. I think I felt safe because everyone else there was dancing quite as poorly as I was. I also confess to being a tad drunk), but otherwise my life is hardly full of high adventure at the moment.
Not that I expect many people's lives exist of high adventure, if only because for one to experience high adventure one has to face peril, and not only enjoy it, but make quips too, otherwise one is just facing adventure, or just peril. Which is a bit poor really.
Anyways,
DROD is a stupidly addictive puzzler. Play it if you wish, but I do warn that I have done little BUT play on it since I discovered it last week. There are 25 levels to the first game, and I am currently on the ninth. Oh yes, and there are about 15 different games it seems.......
Mathematicians represent!
This has to be the
least cool video ever but if you know anything about mathematics (specifically group theory), it will generate a few chuckles at least.
600th post
For my 600th post, I will promote my lovely girlfriend's
blog, the originally titled musings of Alice. Well I suppose it would be originally titled if her name wasn't Alice. But it is. So it isn't......
best thing ever
You can vote on it
here. Because most of them are user submitted, and there are so many, you probably won't be able to have much effect (sadly, only the top 20 are shown, and they are rather dull), but you can get some excellent comparisons
"Which is better? Mozart's requim or a good poop?"
ramblings
Why do armpits smell so much? No, seriously, this is bothering me. I mean, sure, they're cramped up all day, but so are many other parts of your body, and they manage not to relay the smell all across you. Frankly I think there should be some kind of law. Banning armpits. Or smells. Or both.
It's pretty easy to choose which sense I would lose, of the classic 5 (ignoring the revitionists who talk about more than 5 senses. I like my science greek, which is why I insist on doctors balancing the four humors, believe there are only 4 elements, and am quite happy with the notion of the sun spinning around the earh. I mean, which one's got people on, eh?), which would be smell. Sight is pretty essentialy as senses go, and hearing helps you get along. Touch is a weird one to lose anyway, and I expect if you lose that you're in deep trouble anyway, which leaves us with taste and smell. While I can, of course, appreciate good smells, I suspect that I have been confronted with more bad smells in my life than good ones, so am happy to leave the bad behind, while missing out on some goodness. I'm not sure in what situation exactly this decision would become important, other than a very insane supervillain, none of whom I have yet to encounter, but I imagine the day is approaching soon.
Comics always seem to have a balance between good and bad superheroes, to the point of stupidity, in that superheroes rarely meet supervillians who are outside their range- spiderman does not have to deal with the problems superman has to face, because he would probably fail, his skillset being rather limited. I have to say that having superman in any superhero universe (for the uninitiated, bizzarely all DC comic heroes exist on the same planet, as do the Marvel heroes, which leads the discrimination against X-men looking bizzare, when spiderman gets cheered on by practically everyone apart from the.... whatever the newspaper is called) makes the others a little pointless, especially when many of them have some of the same powers as superman- just less. Take the flash for example, who can run really fast, which is cool, but so can superman... AND he can fly!
I also rather think that most people given super powers would tend to abuse them a teeny little bit. This theme appears to be taken up in my super ex-girlfriend, which by all accounts is rather rubbish, which is a shame because I think it's a great concept, and apparently has been ruined by a rubbish script. Another concept gone forever. Or for a few years before they decide to do a remake anyway....
