New Blog, Cinecal Bastard

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/

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.