Saturday 29 December 2012

2012 Movies of the Year

2012, the year 2012 is based on, which came out in 2009.  If you remember, John Cusack basically starred as the lovable smuck  who does a Planes, Trains and Automobiles disaster flick with _____ as his lovable sidekick.  The movie was an attempt to cash in early on the Mayan End-of-Days concept which you probably never heard anything about in December.

The Most Disappointing Movie of The Year;  The Dark Knight Rises


At least one of these characters dies in a completely non-memorable way.  
Instead of a year of disaster flicks, there was really only one large disaster flick that appeared onscreen The Dark Knight Rises, the amazingly bad ending of the Batman trilogy directed or rather mailed in by Hollywood's newest A-Director; Christopher Nolan.  TDKR, or as I like to call it WTF was one of the two most anticipated Big Budget Superhero movies of the summer (I'll get to the other one in a minute).  WTF had everything going for it; an amazing, proven cast and director, a story-line taken from the comic book and Anne Hathaway's eyebrows, and all the gimmicks from the last two movies.  We all knew what we wanted from WTF and instead we got...WTF.
From the opening James Bond scene where (spoiler alert) the most illogical kidnapping takes place in cinematic history (hold on...if they already had the scientist, why did they even bother to put him on the plane?) to everybody but Commissioner Gordon apparently knowing Batman's true identity within minutes of actually meeting him, to the motivations of basically everybody involved in any scene of the script to the friggin' Batwing that had been sitting undiscovered on the top of a skyscraper because it HAD A CAMOUFLAGE TARP OVER IT?  SERIOUSLY, WTF NOLAN!!!  

ok- so that scene apparently didn't piss off the internet as much as it did me, so instead here's a strange video that actually is pretty funny.  Eyewitness video of the fabled 3000-cops-missing-for-three-months-underground charge past machine guns and tanks to get in a fistfight with 3000 bad guys.  See if you can spot the Batman along with a large group of pedestrians just watching...



WTF felt like an actual swarm of bats had dropped bat guano all over the script and someone let Nolan's dog write the thing, blindfolded.  One or two mistakes in a movie are (unless monumental) are easy to forgive, dozens, not so much.  I can't even remember how Bane was defeated, which should have been the high point of the movie when instead it was this;

Here, kitty, kitty, kitty
Instead of creating a novella of all the things that were lacking in WTF, someone else already did it so here is just a partial list of mistakes that I agree with.  If there is to be a movie-saving Director's Cut edition much like Ridley Scott's Bladerunner it would still take some serious thought if i would want to subject my brain to that quality of punishment again.      

The real natural disaster of the movie was that it was trying to follow up on the amazingly well-crafted artistic and conceptually imagining of a world rife with moral ambiguity in the previous installments of the trilogy, The Dark Knight aka The Joker and Batman Begins starring the other guy that unfortunately has to also get dragged back into WTF;.
Seriously? This isn't another Star Wars prequel?

The Least Disappointing Movie of The Year;  The Avengers

Despite the Across-The-Board generic marketing poster

Thankfully, the King of the Geeks, Joss Whedon, took the Superhero movie into the stratosphere with Marvel's the Avengers.  It was all that WTF wasn't; a strong story, an assortment of comic tried and true fallible mortal heros (and an immortal Thor) fighting an infallible and baby brother annoying Norse God. And aliens too, but those were just as a bonus because that's what i want in good movies; bonuses!
  
The Avengers was also years in the making; the final conglomeration of at least 4 different individual super hero prequels and 3 different Hulks into one whole, fighting other world forces in order to save humanity.

It's just a rule of the game that the better something is, the less there is to write about.  So instead of me just wasting everyone's time kissing ass, let's just watch this symbolic scene between the summer's superhero movies, where DC comics is played by Loki and Marvel Comics is played by The Hulk.

  
That pretty much sums up what Marvel did to DC's movie franchise universe in 2012.

Most Surprising Movie of the Year;  The Cabin In the Woods


Bonus Trivia; Joss Whedon also co-wrote The Cabin In The Woods, the Scream-esque horror movie of the year as well, starring a quite mortal Thor.  If you haven't seen it and don't mind the genre, check it out.  It's worth it.




Friday 28 December 2012

My 2012 Ghosts of The Year.

So Goes The Year 2012 in the Age of Manipulation.


Subjectively first, there was the Golden Age, where nobody had the internet and there were no news anchors.  That was why it was referred to as the Golden Age. But for every Golden Age there is the Shit Age, changed to the more popular Dark Ages, because everybody minded their own business and all blogs were written in mud.
As the centuries continued the pendulum swung back the other way;  along came the Age of Discovery (where the seeds of Wikipedia were sown into the social fabric) and the Age of Reason and Enlightenment (who couldn't agree on naming rights so were forced to create separate business cards).  And for the last fifty years with a brief detour into the fatalistic Atomic Age, found to be too nerdy and science-based in focus groups, we have lived in the Information Age, thanks to the finally discovered internet. Yet the Internet Age has a twin sister, the Disinformation Age and together they breeded their own incestuous bastard child, our own King Joffrey (GoT represent) aka The Age of Manipulation. And he's a prick.

If we were to spend some time to think about this, which most likely we won't as 2013 will bring in it's own set of problems and distractions to help us forget that 2012 was a pretty crappy year for civilization as we know it as a whole.  Hopefully in the years to come social historians will look back on 2012 as the year when the Age of Manipulation peaked. From the US election to the Mayan apocalypse to Facebook's IPO to the continually mass media ignored OWS-themed protests, this was the year that we were all manipulated into believing in something that we knew was inherently false, yet we chose to listen to it and comment on it and make stupid jokes about it and perpetuate these myths.

It was hard for anybody with average intelligence to not feel like they were drowning in Orwellian Ministry of Truth propaganda. The usual two-bit coverage of wars in cultures we can't even begin to understand with arguments that it would all be better if only Russia and China had no say in the United Nations. Yet somehow, in all these discussions there is no talk of who is supplying who their weapons. This isn't a war on culture this is Starbucks vs Tim Horton's, the military weapons edition.
It has become harder and harder for one to not be manipulated to some extent in anything but 2012 ... wow ... what a crap year. From it's beginnings in arguments about if North America should care about either Syrian civil war, Greece's bankruptcy or the legion of film critics that attacked the American embassy in Libya to it's end with yet another American massacre and lots of Americans up in arms over crazy pacifists equating gun culture with gun violence.    

Here are my Three Ghosts of Manipulation for 2012; three people that created news events that reflected where we were as a society until we got bored and somebody told us to pay attention to something else. They made headlines in the past tense, present tense and will most likely do so in the future.  And by reading this, yes i am manipulating you to consider the big events/stories/people in 2012 that manipulated your emotions as these three did mine. Feel free to justify your own picks in the comments.    

Ghost of Manipulation Past;  Amanda Todd.  



This is my no means meant as a disrespect. This is meant to show how manipulation can come and go so effectively in today's society of the less-than-15-minute news cycle. Amanda Todd, 15 year old Vancouver girl who committed suicide, is one of dozens of teen suicides that happen in Canada every year, one of hundreds of young teens that are exploited on the internet, and one of thousands of kids that get bullied every year by their peers.
She finally got our attention post-partum, when her cry for help was discovered on Youtube. Basic black and white index cards detailing her life that had led her to the suicidal thoughts which she eventually succumbed to.  We all fretted and frowned, wondered how kids could do this to each other.  Politicians called for 'action plans' to combat bullying in schools and then...that was it.  Perhaps because Vice.com ran these articles, it revealed an even uglier truth behind just simple school bullying; an anonymous creepy internet group that thrived and bragged about the manipulating of young teen girls. Anonymous outed one of these cyber bullies who claimed innocence, despite the evidence. Apparently the RCMP said he was not a 'person of interest' because you know, suicide. And that was the last I've heard of Amanda Todd because of this guy;

The Ghost of Manipulation Present;  Scooter Braun

He's the one on the left beside that grinning mannequin thing.

I admit, i never even heard of this guy until the start of December when i read about him here, but trust me unless you are living in a concrete bunker underground or possibly some crappy suburb of Rwanda, you all have been exposed to what he has brought forth, not unlike other star-shitters before him; Simon Cowell, Maurice Starr, Quincy Jones. But this guy manages the teen girl fan orgy that are the Beliebers, the Zooey Dechanel-lite Carly Rae Jepsen and the pony-riding Psy singing Gangham Style.  Who as most have heard is Youtube's current all-time hit leader at over 1 billion views.  So technically nearly 1 in 8 people have seen that video. Or over 4 billion minutes has been wasted watching a grown Korean man prance around in ill-fitting tuxedos or to put it another way, nearly 8000 years of wasted human potential, watching this. And that's just as of the end of 2012.

Scooter Braun has created the biggest 3 stars in music entertainment of 2012 through good ol'fashioned social media manipulation. Legend is that they were all discovered via Youtube, although it is said Braun produced the 'basement videos' where Beiber was 'discovered'. Or all those 'Call Me Maybe' parodies that we are to believe happened 'organically'. It was a marketing strategy that worked and Scooter was the giant light bulb that distracted most of North America from itself. And he forces other grown ups to call him Scooter. 
There is nothing of substance to these people, yet they had grown newscasters feigning interest in these people's momentary stardom to keep our minds off of our personal out-of-control debt to living ratios and bigger societal ills. If past experience is any indication, we know where these kids and asians sensation are going; nowhere but down until it's time to have that twenty year reunion tour to try and fill up the royalty coffers once again.  
Not one of the aforementioned have done anything of value to society, other than manipulate society to forget about Amanda Todd, those mass shootin- hey, he looks like he's riding a horse in a tuxedo! friggin' hilarious!! 

The Ghost of Manipulation Future;  Nate Silver

Man, this could be me circa 30 yrs old but for my time at smoking weed.

2012 was all about US politics and what the Obama had or had not done to get the US to pay up for those Bush years.  What most of the ignorant general public missed but you can bet the parties didn't was this guy;  NateSilver.

While still leading the way in the world-wide recession, the US put all other interests on hold for nearly a year while the two leading parties spent hundreds of millions of public relation dollars in an effort to either reclaim or retain the presidency. There was no such truth as an unbiased media, especially when the only two trusted news sources were Fox News and The Daily Show, for their obvious biases. The two candidates traveled throughout the country, delivered speeches, bought ad space (again in the hundreds of millions), and talked about peripheral issues that really had no bearing on why the country and world appeared to be going to hell in a shit-basket. The republican candidate Romney apparently ran on a platform with no plan, and he still garnered 47% of the vote - nearly 1/2 of all American voters were backing a guy that had no plan, they just liked what he represented.  The whole OWS movement never happened in the political sphere. This came as a great surprise to the thousands of Americans who had been arrested and tear gassed in the name of American capitalism.

But this Nate Silver guy. He was everywhere after the election. Because he picked the winner of all 50 states using, now get this, math and graphs and stuff. It was just as relevant and boring as the movie Moneyball, where this same 'math stuff' was introduced to Brad Pitt and the Oakland A's, thereby changing the way fantasy baseball teams were picked forever. Nate Silver created a system where he correctly guessed the outcome of the election before voting day. Before the election was even held.

In the next election, both political parties will be spending vast amounts of money on statisticians emulating Silver's theories for their respective political war rooms. Then they will explain their findings to the public relations teams on which states they should be spending money. The future of the world's greatest superpower will rest on media battles in Battleground States; manipulating Ohio rednecks and Southern Carolina tobacco-munchers. What Nate Silver has done is create a near perfect formula that points out what states needed to better manipulated to win in a pure democracy.  Silver proved that math can win elections. And the world's powerful 1% just got a little more geekier to the infinite power.  
      

Friday 21 December 2012

Canuck low-lights part 4 of an ongoing series in non-chronological order

Back to hockey;


(Full disclosure; i found this little bit in the drafts section of my blog written obviously before my Canadian hockey soul was once again crushed by the NHL.  Trying to keep the home fires burning, so to speak, i've finally edited it in a lackluster way and well, here you go) .

Over the years, I've heard plenty of reasons why the Canucks should win the Cup. 

All right, I lie.  I don't really hear any reasons why, other than people think that for some reason, Vancouver deserves a Stanley Cup because it's goddamn Vancouver.  Nothing could be worse for a city who's residents already have dangerous self-involved hockey ego issues to comparable to Montrealish embarrassing heights.  However the question really is; does the Canuck organization (in any incarnation) deserve their name on Stanley? 

Despite their recent back to back President's trophies, the answer is a quick No.  From their treatment of past players to present day fans, the faceless entity deserves little respect from that chalice that demands perfection, persistence and patience.  Insert P joke here...

I'm resigned, like i think most hockey fans are that there will be no hockey before at least christmas.  The NHL owners have put their foot down and said 'hey, we could be making more money if we weren't handing out insane amounts of money for marquee players' while the players are saying "Shea Weber? Who did he play for? What's my agent's number in Bermuda?"

So in an effort to remain interested in what's going to happen in my fantasy hockey pool, i've been reading 'I'm not making this up' by Al Strachan, which is great candid reading for behind-the-scenes hockey fans who like to hear more of what a player is like other than their stats and pending free agent status.

But back to the original question; does Vancouver deserve a Stanley Cup?

Exhibit A;

The story of Pavel Bure


One of the top three Russians to enter the NHL when the barriers were finally dropped, Bure was the superstar that Canuck fans always dreamed of and marketing executives drooled over.  Like Alex Mogilny and Sergei Federov before him, he was young, entertaining, and man, could he play.  I remember highlights of his first game against Winnipeg.  He was fast. Like really fast. If i need to tell you his nickname, you shouldn't be here.  But spoiler alert; he was traded to Florida with Bret HedicanBrad Ference, and Vancouver's third-round choice in the 2000 NHL Entry Draft (Robert Fried) for Ed JovanovskiDave GagnerMike BrownKevin Weekes.  Why would Vancouver's first true superstar demand to be traded?  Probably since the way he was treated since the first day of his arrival.


The story goes that during the mess of trying to get Bure cleared from his duties to play for the Russian team, he traveled to LA to his agent's house, where he was expecting to meet up with Canuck representatives to help him with his transition to Canada.  Nobody contacted him for 10 days.  Finally he was contacted by Brian Burke who told him to sit tight, which meant another 2 weeks while the Canucks worked on the legalities of the deal. 
So you have this young kid, leaving his mother country to come play for you and you don't even have the respect to meet him as he comes off the plane in another country?  Then you don't even contact him for a week?
Now the fun really begins;
The Canucks were informed they had to pay $250,000 for Bure's rights to play for them.  They paid $200,000 and told Bure that he had to pay the other $50,000.  So, already they are off to a great start with someone who was to become their most prolific goal scorer in history.  He also asked to where number 96 to commeroate his arrival on Sept 6 to North America but apparently Pat 'Old School' Quinn had a problem with high jersey numbers (we will talk about Wayne Gretzky later).


i wonder how this ends up...
I have utmost respect for Pavel Bure, as does Shane Churla (now).  When talk of Bure wanting a trade began to hit the Vancouver papers, he was painted as being selfish and immature.  The Canucks failed to reward him for being the Calder Trophy winner (despite missing 17 games) by saying they would renegotiate his contract after the next season (which he went on to score 60 goals).  They basically told him that they were going to wait to see if that wasn't a 'fluke' season and postponed signing him because they weren't sure he was worth the money. Weren't sure he was worth the money...

Now anyone who can see the humor in that last sentence is more qualified to run the Canucks pocket books than the team managers at the time who were...let's see...Pat Quinn and Brian Burke. 

Wow. Small world.

So, he was finally able to leave the clutches of the Vancouver system to the sunnier confines of Florida and then New York where he retired, years too early from a multitude of knee operations that started from returning too soon from his first knee operation in Vancouver.  He is now a top official in the Russian Hockey League, a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame and one of the reasons why Vancouver is jinxed.



Thursday 20 December 2012

the final four of the 12 days of Christmas Movie Collection.








So last week, i started my 12 days of christmas movie list for no other reason than i want to watch a lot of movies right now but am unable to, what with my TV tied up in showing Alvin and The Chipmunks or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer for my 3 year old daughter (whom i love dearly).  Yet, if i was alone this Christmas, this is how i would go about spending some of those hours.  The first 8 days of Christmas can be found here, along with the entire 12 together.

But if you already have those memorized by heart, then here's the final four;


I am Number 4    I don't know anything at all about this one, but it became my default pick when i found out the other options were Fantastic Four, Four Christmases, and Four Rooms.  I unfortunately have seen all of those and the best way to put it is if you took the best parts out of all three, it would make for a decent sitcom.  The poster makes me think it's some sort of X-man rip-off. 
The Trailer;

Well, after the trailer, it still looks like an X-Man rip off.  The guy is #4 (we got that).  He's a loner, doing what all loners do, hanging at the beach and getting hit on by hot chicks.  Then a merman or something attacks him so he has to leave and so he heads to Heartland America, where he apparently finds one of those high schools where everyone looks in their mid-twenties.  The bad guys still find him, he goes around using his superpowers to defeat them and find others with superpowers where i would be quite shocked to find that they don't defeat the bad guys (who are obviously bad because they have tattooed heads and trenchcoats).





Three Amigos   At one time, these were three of the biggest names in comedy.  Chevy Chase aka Fletch aka Clark Griswold who's head was still small enough to share screen time with other equal comedians plays Dusty Bottoms.  Steve Martin aka The Jerk aka the lonely guy aka the man with two brains plays a fellow washed up silent movie star named Lucky Day and Martin Short aka that cute little annoying guy from SCTV as Ned Nederlander.  This was the comedy apex, hot on the heals of GhostBusters where it was proven that although two comedians are good, three are better.  Plus, it was written and produced by Steve Martin.  A classic.  I don't even need a trailer for this one so i will just post 'My Little Buttercup'.




The Two Towers   If I could only have one LOTR movie it would have to be the 2nd installment, in my opinion the best sequel since  Empire Strikes Back and also fits the article's theme  I remember giant trees, the battle of Helm's Deep, and that little fucker Gollum having a conversation with himself, which at the time i think was a groundbreaking way to portray split personalities and has since been copied many times.  It was a great movie that really lead nowhere, but had it's own stories within it.    

The Trailer:
Fuck yeah!  Makes me want to sit through the entire 3 hour movie again.  It now looks like a condensed version of Game of Thrones, only with actual fighting and great CGI and intense melodramatic soundtrack.  It's got it all, if all you want elves, orcs, catapults, sweeping pans of New Zealand countryside and Aragon opening those giant doors to maximum effect.  


And finally, Year One.  Micheal Cera was all over the place after Arrested Development and in the race to be the 'mopy, expressionless go-to guy' lost out in a close race to Social Network's Jesse Eisenberg.  Yet, Cera hit two peaks of comedy excellence, old school with Year One, working with Jack Black and one of the greatest comedy directors in Harold Ramis and then going on to nearly extinguish his movie career in the cult-classic *heard it here first* Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World.  In Year One Cera and Black are cavemen that stumble into the story of the Bible (sorta) all because they are idiots.  It's a basic fish out of water story but good for a few laughs during Bible Study class.     
 The Trailer;

Man, a lot of great one-liners i don't remember.  This would be a great Stoner film.  Cera plays Eisenberg at their finest, while Jack Black manages to still come across as your creepy single uncle.  It has the look of the Life Of Brian, but earlier.  So technically, this is year one of the Jewish calendar, not the Christian one.  But really, it shouldn't make a difference, except in your Bible Study class.      

Saturday 15 December 2012

12 Days of Movies to watch before Christmas

And to get through the holidays, my true love gave to me
my own soundproof media room with these movies...

Oh yay. Christmas is here, again. Time for some of us to just hunker down in our sound-proof bunkers and avoid all things Christmasy as the festive season springs upon the land, with people wishing for world peace and Iphones and big screen TVs and pretending to care about why Christmas isn't celebrated in other parts of the world. Why not try to ease the pressures of Christmas by partaking in some of your neighbourhood's finest greenery and cruise Netflix or internet website lists for movie recommendations? And here you are!

So here's my Christmas gift to you, whatculture reader. After all, who better to take classic movie recommendations than from a perfect stranger? And I'm nearly as perfect as they come. These aren't even necessarily classic movies; they're just a sneaky way to tie in a movie list with a Christmas/December type theme. Plus it gives you something to discuss with your mates if you are holed up at the Winchester.

So here are movies i may have seen. Or not. So because i am a dad and watching complete movies that don't have talking animals in them is a thing of the past, i just re-watched the trailers to summarize them and because it's that year of the month that includes Christmas, they all have a number from the 12 days of Christmas in them.  Reason enough.


12 Monkeys

I remember parts of this one. Brad Pitt goes full retard in Terry Gilliam's most commercially successful feature film starring Bruce Willis playing Bruce Willis as a time travelling emo-type guy who goes back in time to give Brad Pitt career advice and either stop or start some kind of world wide plague. You never actually see the 12 monkeys, which at the time I remember pissed me off a little bit. I had no kids at the time so i was able to watch all of it. The movie poster looks like it's maybe about a Terminator-like robot and something's happening to the right of the frame but we can't see it. It's a good time travel movie if you are into that sort of mind twisting.

The trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15s4Y9ffW_o

It starts off in true Terry Gilliam set piece style, a low-budget astronaut appears in cellophane, which must be Bruce Willis. Then he's in a mental asylum in 1996, and someone mentions the word future, so you know it's about time travel. There's a lot of talk about what's real and what's not while jumping from Gilliam world to some snow-covered city. There's a bear and an elephant and some cops burst into a room with guns drawn and Bruce Willis gets more and more confused then he's holding a gun and says "I just want to do my part and get us back on top of the planet" in a not-tough but still Bruce Willis tough voice. In true Gilliam style this trailer made me think 'what the hell is going on?' just like when i find myself changing a stinky diaper at 4 in the morning.  


Last Minute Substitution: 12 Angry Men - 12 Men in a room. One man leaves. A verbal Royal Rumble that is considered a veritable classic and one still on my 'to be seen list'.


Ocean's 11

Another guy's movie in theory but featuring so much man candy it's okay to throw this at the mother of your children when she's wondering why you don't take her out anymore. It features a bunch of George Clooney's friends, including a non-retard Brad Pitt dress up in cool Las Vegas suits and teaming up to rob the guy you've seen in a lot of other things but you can't name one, like most of the other guys in the movie. There's a lot of standing around looking cool, and Julia Roberts, which your girlfriend/wife will also appreciate. The poster looks like a line up for every woman's speed dating fantasy. Even Julia Roberts is there, behind the bad guy but ahead of eight other men so at least she has that going for her.

The Trailer 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_bzUIbE5jo

George Clooney gets out of jail after sticking it to his parole board by asking them how much they make per year (burn, social justice system!). Clooney is quickly seen to be an overachiever, but probably not a good one because he was in jail after all. However, he's Clooney and he has balls; he tells his best friend Brad that he wants to rob 3 casinos for $150 million.They need 10 guys (or else the title wouldn't work) but it looks like they already have a few million dollars with all their fancy toys and gadgets they plan on using shown through the trailer. Julia comes in looking pissed off and Matt Damon is also in it, dressed like Linus from Charlie Brown. There's a little man jumping around and i am guessing what is supposed to be some tongue-in-cheek humour, like when Brad Pitt dons a Clark Kent disguise and asks 'did someone call for a doctor?'.  George ends it with 'you are either in or you are out'. Which is exactly what she said.

Last Minute Substitution 11:14 - five stories all 'crash' into each other. Starring Henry Thomas (that kid from ET) and Colin Hanks (Tom's kid) it's interesting because on the imdb box it totally doesn't mention them, instead going with Patrick Swayze and Barbara Hershey, which are both names that mean nothing if you are more familiar with Colin and Henry.


10 Things I Hate About You

I saw this because someone said i should which is how i used to choose most of my movies before babies came along. I don't remember anything about it. From the poster it appears to have a lot of young people in rock star poses, so there probably is a lot of teenage-talking angst about what they want to be when they grow up, how tough school is and why X doesn't like me. A young Heath Ledger is in it, pre-Brokeback Mountain fame so he's like the James Dean character from Rebel Without A Cause, I'm guessing. The title does sound like it's something an ungrateful teenager would say to their hard-working father when he forbids them to leave the house at 11 pm to go 'hang out' with friends.

The Trailer  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWmjzCZr0Jw

Ok, so it is a high school flick as i thought it was; there's the kid from 3rd rock (JGH or whatever he's called now), that angry looking girl who was going to be the next Julia Roberts,  the teen princess who i assume is passed out in a trash bin somewhere and Heath Ledger, sounding Australian and a bit dickish.  For some reason that makes no sense to the overall script it looks like No Doubt is stranded on top of a building singing that Cheap Trick song. Boy wants to date Cute Girl but Cute Girl can't date unless her Bad Girl sister dates so Boy gets other Bad Boy to win Bad Girl's affections and i assume everyone lives happily ever after.  Except for Heath, who dies as the Joker and in real life while JGH goes on to become Robin and a Hollywood heartthrob.

Last Minute Substitution; How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days - Starring Mathew McConaghy doing his patented Mathew McConaghy thing and Kate Hudson doing Drew Barrymore's thing with a script that probably shouts ROM-COM from the opening minute.


Plan 9 from Outer Space  

I saw this because i went to film school and it helps to see what you can do when you have nothing but the willingness and desire to do what you need to do, whatever it takes. Of course, I saw it in the nineties when anything was possible, thanks 9/11. It helps that Johnny Depp and Tim Burton teamed together to immortalize the director, Ed Wood, who is often regarded as 'the worst director in history', which is, if you know your cinema (or read Claire Simpson's lists) isn't possible.  I made a movie once and it was pretty crappy but i don't see Tim Burton knocking on my door wanting to make a movie about me. Ed Wood, the legend, to me seemed like the first film geek/Quentin Tarantino of low budget sci-fi, and in doing so became insanely cooler. I don't remember very much about it - it reminded me a bit of Amazon Women From the Moon perhaps. There's a vampire girl in it and a couple of cops standing around. And some aliens, but human aliens. No biggie. Once I saw The Dark Knight Returns I realized Plan 9 had less plot holes so it has that going for it.

The Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBoT0LJ0mgM

Wow. This trailer rocks it from the opening line: 'It is safe to say that the grandchildren of some of the people in this theater will not be born on Earth'. How's that for completely and utterly overly optimistically thinking what the future had in store for us fifty-plus years ago? There's that zombie vampire girl in a spooky cemetery, an explosion, a dead body going past some cops; all in the first 10 seconds. This shit looks to be the bomb. Then a lot of words appear on screen with Bela Lugosi in big letters and what appears to be the bomb now is looking more like a real bomb. The spacemen can't work their space guns, the cop seems to want to shoot people in the groin and the zombies (all two of them) can't seem to walk any faster than my daughter when she was '9' months old.

Last Minute Substitution; Lots to choose from. The Whole 9 Yards, District 9, Nine, 9 1/2 Weeks, Another 9 1/2 Weeks, but why not try The Nines? Ryan Reynolds is in it, playing Gary, an actor who plays a cop on television, uses too much lighter fluid when he burns his ex-girlfriend's things, then he drinks and drives, uses crack, and crashes his car, all in that order. Then it gets weird. You had me at Reynolds smokes crack...



8 Men Out

I remember it's about baseball and a team from Chicago that conspired to throw the World Series back in the early 1920's because, well, winning isn't everything and they sure weren't getting paid to win.  Unlike today where most make the equivalent of a small African nation back then they were gettting paid jack shit and the mob paid a lot better. That's all i know. From the title and my knowledge of baseball, someone is obviously innocent but calling it 8 Men Out and 1 Snitch probably didn't market America's other other other national past time correctly (after the NFL, dabbling in foreign politics and eating).  The poster doesn't really help me. Apparently it's a national scandal, but then again, what isn't in America?

The Trailer

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSHQw85pvek

Ok, I was pretty close. It's about the Chicago White Sox, set in 1919. John Cusack is in it, so you know it's going to be sappy and he's going to be the innocent one. It's also about baseball, so you know it's not action-packed although a guy gets slapped and there's gun in it. It is about America after all.  Dickish owner, cuz it's about sports. No latinos, which is because it's 1919 and this was before baseballs were introduced to the Dominican Republic.    

Last Minute Substitution; Eight Below. In honor of Paul Walker, kick it old school with this one from before the Fast and The Furious Franchise with this Disneyfied version of the much more powerful 'Antarctica'. Warning - you are probably going to cry at some point if you love either Paul Walker or dogs.




se7en

I must have a bit of a man crush on Brad Pitt. This is his third movie on my list. Here he plays the yet to be grizzled young rookie cop teaming up with the grizzled old cop, Morgan Freeman playing Donald Glover. If you haven't seen it, it's a must. This was an intense movie, from the opening murder scene. I didn't know the 7 deadly sins so it was a bit of lesson in Catholicism and this was the first David Fincher movie i remember. He is Tim Burton to Brad Pitt's Johnny Depp, who would go on and direct Pitt again in Fight Club and something else. For some reason i remember that Pitt and his wife Gwyneth Palthrow lived beside the railroad tracks.

The Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmZbLbPv6Fs

The trailer makes it seem like an over-hyped episode of Criminal Minds on steroids. There's a few guns, because...America.  Pitt looks beat up through most of the trailer, as if it's a prequel to Fight Club. Gwyneth hates 'this town' and Pitt does a lot of running around, getting shot at and falling off things. Freeman lists off the seven deadly sins too fast for anyone not religious to remember and there is that single ominous tone playing throughout and that announcer's voice that makes everything sound either way too important or way too stupid.

Last Minute Substitution; The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. Because, you know, Silver Vampires are so second-class. Plus eight was too many Golden Vampires, six too few. But seven, seven is just enough Golden Vampires to make this qualify for this list.


6 Million Dollar Man 

Given the limited choices of movies with a 6 in them, i will have to stick with a nostalgic favourite from childhood.  It's hard to explain to you young folk now but at one time six million dollars was considered an insanely amount of money and if you had that much money you could make a man into a part robot with super ability to appear to be running fast while actually running superslow or throwing things. Or just looking. Today, there are nearly 50 hockey players that make more than $6 million a year and the only one who may be part robot is Zdeno Chara.  Frig, even a Mexican from Alaska named Scott Gomez was apparently worth over $7 million. There's a golfer named Tiger Woods who made $75 million in 2011. The seventies really undervalued cyborgs... I remember his name was Steve Austin (not the wrestler).  He was an astronaut who crash landed, but they rebuilt him. There was another guy named Oscar who was his boss. Together they fought crime or something. In it's most memorable episode for me and a host of others, he fought Big Foot.

The Trailer:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlcuiDUVyVQ

Well, it's a tv series, but i found one that flashes back to what made it so awesome; the pulsing music, the strange 'bionic' sound whenever he used one of his robot parts; Big Foot. Plus at .55 I'm pretty sure that's an eternally young Sandra Bullock.

Last Minute Substitution; 6 Plots. Quick what to you do if you are an Australian filmmaker and only have enough funding to make one movie yet have 6 ideas you think are excellent? Boom! Problem Solved. Or was it?



Slaughter house 5

This is a movie of the book that film directors like to strategically place in shots to show via cinematic short cut that a character is smarter than they look. The novel itself is a famous one by Kurt Vonnegut and it's a messed up story of a man split between at least two dimensions; one as a zoo specimen in an alien world and another as Kilgore Trout, who may or may not have been in World War 2. The poster doesn't really help, other than making it look like it's cold and probably set in World War 2. Apparently this movie is a classic, which you can say of anything made in the seventies.


The Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvlZtlBfCi0

it looks like someone squished together 3 or 4 different movie trailers for this one and it reminds me of a Stanley Kubrick film, or basically any other film done in the early 70's and it's by far the longest trailer I've seen, clocking in at over 4 minutes. There's Nazis being Nazis, explosions, talk of aliens, someone gets shot cuz you know, America. A naked boy gets thrown in a pool. There's a few brief seconds that remind me of Pink Floyd's the Wall. It appears to be a story about a boy named Billy. At the end of the clip young Billy is running through the snow. I don't know why. I have a headache. Interesting fact; the director was George Hill, who would go on to direct the greatest sports movie of all time, Slapshot.  I did not know that.

Last Minute Substitution; Fast Five. Let's go with another more famous Paul Walker 'vehicle', his buddy action flick franchise with Vin Diesel. Not to be confused with Kung Fu Panda; Secrets of the Furious Five which has no car racing in it.



I am Number 4  

I don't know anything at all about this one, but it became my default pick when i found out the other options were Fantastic Four, Four Christmases, and Four Rooms all of which were lame for their own reasons. If you took the best parts out of all three of those, it would probably make for a decent sitcom. I'd rather chance watching something that might be okay, despite the glowing blue power fists in the movie poster, which makes me think it's some sort of X-man rip-off.




The Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP6zhpST3Ro

Well, after the trailer, it still looks like an X-Man rip off. The first 30 seconds is all the exposition you need about the other three so this guy is #4 (in case we didn't get that) and there's still an awful lot of film time to sit through. He's a loner, doing what all loners do, hanging at the beach and getting hit on by hot chicks. Then a merman or something attacks him so he has to leave and so he heads to Heartland America, where he apparently finds one of those high schools where everyone looks in their mid-twenties. The bad guys still find him, he goes around using his superpowers to defeat them and find others with superpowers where i would be quite shocked to find that they don't defeat the bad guys (who are obviously bad because they have tattooed heads and trenchcoats).

Last Minute Substitution; Four Lions. Yeah, British cinema Represent! A comedic look at internal terrorism, this will be sure to spice up the old xenophobic rants of your neighbours as they call in to report you on suspicion of terrorist activities if you dare to play this with the volume too high.  


Three Amigos   

At one time, these were three of the biggest names in comedy.  Chevy Chase aka Fletch aka Clark Griswold aka Pierce who's ego was still small enough to share screen time with other comedians plays Dusty Bottoms.  Steve Martin aka The Jerk aka The Man with Two Brains plays a fellow washed up silent movie star named Lucky Day and Martin Short aka that cute little annoying guy from SCTV as Ned Nederlander. This was the comedy apex, hot on the heals of GhostBusters where it was proven that although two comedians are good, three are better. Plus, it was written and produced by Steve Martin. A classic. I don't even need a trailer for this one so instead here's My Little Buttercup

Bonus clip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5T8FJ7TldU

Last Minute Substitution; uh...now we are getting into the dreaded sequel to the sequel of a great movie territory which gives you a lot of sucky movies to choose from. So instead, let's go full cowboy; 3:10 To Yuma as both Russell Crowe and Christian Bale have yet to make an appearance this Christmas season.   


The Two Towers   If I could only have one LOTR movie it would have to be the 2nd installment, in my opinion the best sequel since  Empire Strikes Back and also luckily happens to fit the article's theme I remember the giant trees, the battle of Helm's Deep, and Gollum having a conversation with himself, which at the time i think was a groundbreaking way to portray split personalities and has since been copied many times. It was a great movie that really lead nowhere, but had it's own stories within it.     

The Trailer


Hellz yeah! Makes me want to sit through the entire 12 hour trilogy again. Time and pop culture have now made it look like a condensed version of Game of Thrones, only with actual fighting and great CGI and intense melodramatic soundtrack. It's got it all, if all you want elves, orcs, catapults, sweeping pans of New Zealand countryside and Aragon opening those giant doors to maximum effect. A great way to spend an evening forgetting Christmas is just around the corner.  

Last Minute Substitution; Miss Congeniality 2, Armed and Fabulous.  In the world of sequels to good movies there are a lot of great ones, most famous being Terminator 2 but let's assume for the moment that you are getting pretty tired of all the testosterone I've thrown at you. Instead, so close to Christmas why not just relax with a real no-brainer starring the previously mentioned Sandra Bullock, looking as young then as she did way back then. Complete brain candy with some eye candy for both sexes with Bullock and a younger version of Ron Swanson. 


And finally, what to watch on Christmas Eve? How about...

Year One

Let's celebrate all things Jewish with this Micheal Cera/Jack Black bit of comedic stupidity directed by the legendary Harold Ramis. Cera was all over the place after Arrested Development ended it's glorious initial run. He looked to be a shoe-in for every role that involved a 'mopy, expressionless young character' but instead, he lost out in that closer than expected race to Social Network's Jesse Eisenberg. Yet despite the Jesse doppelganger tag, Cera has starred in three great comedies to underappreciated or not yet acknowledged critical acclaim, Arrested Development, this one and then went on to nearly extinguish his movie career in the cult-classic (yes, it will be) Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Year One is a basic fish out of water story but good for a few Old Testament laughs, especially if you have questions about circumcision, what happened after Cain killed Abel and the difference between Sodom and Gomorrah. Lots of cameos by other semi-famous funny people as well.

Man, a lot of great one-liners i didn't remember. Maybe because I was pretty stoned, but not like the way they refer to it in the film. Cera plays George Michael at his finest, while Jack Black manages to still come across as your creepy single uncle you don't want to hang out with but kind of do. It has the feel of the Life Of Brian, but earlier because it's more mocking The Old Testament as opposed to the New. So technically, this is year one of the Jewish calendar, not the Gregorian-Christian one we base our lives around now.

Last Minute Substitution; The One. Just pretend this is the true story of Christmas, Jet Li is the real Jesus Christ and let your mind explode with all that could have been if they made this into a Christmas martial arts movie because really...there isn't one.


That's it; 12 classic and not-so-classic movies to help get you through the Christmas season. Hope it helps.


Thursday 13 December 2012

Congratulations NHL - i'm so over you.

Dear Mr. Bettman and his dark overlords.

Ogie here.  Just checking in, thought i would let you know that despite my best efforts at trying to remain a fan of the new look NHL, I've thrown in the towel.  The window has closed.  Sure you could start up sometime in a month or so and pretend to have some type of season but most of us won't care.  I've moved on.

Like many other hockey fans/scribes, we've been dying for something to write about and the drama has weakened to the point that i feel that to have a hockey-related blog is just..redundant.  So, while i think of perhaps taking on a subject matter that won't lock me out every 5 years, i'm just going to have to leave these stray storylines hanging....

The Riot Mashup;

At #10 the Montreal beats Boston riot of 2008.
At #9 the Edmonton beats up a phone booth riot of 2006
At#8 the Montreal beats Pittsburgh riot of 2010.
At #7 the Boston beats Vancouver riot of 2011

Some may argue that this should be further up the list, but wait and hear me out on these final ones;


At #6 The New York beats Vancouver riot of 1994 - this places ahead of 2011 for two reasons; First there was no social media connection at the time.  You were either there or you heard about it the next day. Second, the game wasn't played in Vancouver; it happened 3000 miles away and still, the squeaky clean image was tarnished that night.   


At #5 The Montreal beats Los Angeles Riot of 1993 - as nearly every fucking Canadian hockey fan will tell you come playoff time, this is the last year a Canadian-based team won the cup.  And Montreal did it by not only winning 10 games in overtime 11 straight playoff games but also by defeating the glam and glitz of the NKOTB; the Los Angeles Kings, led by Wayne Gretzky.  And Marty McSorley's illegal stick in Game 2 turned out be only the second biggest stick fuck-up of his career.  This was;





And when Montreal won, the city went fucking wild.  $2.5 million in damage, despite 1000 riot officers dispatched in what officials hoped would be enough menace to control the looting and vandalism.  They made 115 arrests. The police reported 47 police cars damaged, 8 cars were completely destroyed.


AT #4 The Montreal beats Calgary riot of 1986 - Montreal loves it's riots, nearly as much as it's hockey championships, so when the habs beat the Flames to win their first cup in nearly 7 years, fans celebrated like fucking champions, if those champions were 14 year old juvenile delinquents.  The end result was the THE POLICE were found to be criminally negligent, in you know, not being prepared to stop 5000 celebrating Frenchmen.  But that's nothing compared to the next day.


At #3 Montreal riots during the Victory Parade 1986 - how messed up is your city when you riot during the fucking parade?  Again, all before social media so this isn't like a bunch of people planned to go out and fuck shit up, it just happened because everybody was so bloody happy, Quebec-style.  



At #2 Montreal again. Surprise.  This is the grand daddy of them all; the Rocket Richard riot of 1955.  The most dominant player in the game, suspended for the playoffs all because he broke 3 sticks attacking a Boston player then punched a linesman that thought perhaps the Rocket should calm the fuck down.  Then to pour salt on the wound, the man who suspended Richard, Clarence Campbell, decided to come and sit amongst the Hab faithful in a playoff match.  Imagine Gary Bettman brazenly sitting down in on an NHLPA meeting right now, sticking his middle fingers up and having a gorgeous young blonde in each arm, which is what Campbell pretty much did.  The fans turned on him, despite his hot girfriend and made hockey history.






There that's nearly the end of the list.  

#1...well, just watch the video and tell me if that wasn't the greatest riot in Canadian sports and political history; The Piescany Punch-up;




  

Saturday 1 December 2012

Great Hockey Riots #7


Great Hockey Riots #7  Vancouver Canucks lose in 7 games to Boston Bruins 2010


If the Montreal Canadiens are the New York Yankees of baseball, the Vancouver Canucks are the Buffalo Bills of the NFL.  They've been to the finals 3x in their history and have come away empty-handed each time.  Unless you are a fan and then you most likely will come away with something that you grabbed quickly out of a broken store window while running from tear gas and the riot police. 
In 2010, fresh off the high of a successful Winter Olympics Vancouver decided to follow the same format by making every game day of the final a 'party in the city'.  Streets were cordoned off, huge large screen televisions were placed up high and people poured into the city on free public transit to watch the games while drinking smuggled liquor out of thermoses and brown paper bags.  What could go wrong?

I sense a MAXIM article in here somewhere...
Well, as city officials found out in 2010, lots.  Cars parked too close to the rink where the Boston Bruins were being presented the cup were first vandalized then burned.  Riot police were called in and in a questionable decision pushed the crowds away from the rink into the downtown core where the real rioting began.  Cars were torched, people beat up, tear gas deployed.  Hundreds of dollars of damage.  Stores vandalized and robbed.   And just to show you how cool Canadian men can be this picture of a dude making out with an Australian girl became world famous.  




It was largely agreed by everybody that this was a great riot; the cops were able to use all their toys, politicians were able to condemn the actions of these 'non-hockey' fans and vigilante justice evolved into a very public Facebook outing of certain rioters, many who have yet to have officially to stand trial in 'real' court.  Yep, everyone had fun, except for this guy, who took a firecracker to the balls.



And just to put this riot in perspective, here is how the Boston Bruins Andrew Ference and bunch of Bruins fans celebrated their Stanley Cup win; 




And a million Canadian hockey fans died all over again that day...