It was a close-run thing, but we have a new number one.
So, for those of you keeping score, Blue Man's Top Five Films Of 2005 now looks
like this:
5. Four Brothers 4. Anchorman 3. Sin City (a teensy, weensy bit concerned
that every woman in the film seemed to be a whore, but hey. I suppose that's noir-pastiche
for you.) 2. Serenity 1. Batman Begins
In case you're wondering - despite assorted glowing reviews from friends and associates
no, I haven't seen King Kong (Life's too short to sit through four Peter "Too
Much Is Never Enough" Jackson movies in four years), The Chronicles Of Narnia
(for the same reason I never bothered with the Hitch Hiker's film - how may versions
of the same story is it possible to see before ennui sets in?), or Harry bloody
Potter (anything that that many people from that many different walks of life can
unreservedly love can't possibly be any good).
It suddenly struck me during tonight's Match Of The Day. It's been there a while,
lurking nebulous, not totally defined, but suddenly I can put the sensation into
the exact right words.
I'm completely, excruciatingly bored with Chelsea.
To be honest, I'd prefer to ignore them - but since my best friend is a rabid Blue,
I'm more-or-less duty-bound to sit through the game or so a week that's shown live
on telly, usually quietly hoping that this is the day that Jose Mourinho actually
physically vanishes up his own arse. Chelsea have everything that was loathsome
and wrong about the Manchester United side of the early-mid nineties, only raised
to the nth power. Vaguely paranoid, undeniably able but still overpoweringly arrogant
fuck of a manager? Check. Constant media fellatio? Check. Hoard of loadmouthed,
fuckwitted Johnny-come-a-season-ago trophy-sniffing "fans" making their
vile braying presence oh-so-obvious on the high streets of every village, town and
city in the country? Check the size of Mourinho's ego. Borderline psychotic square-headed
thug of a captain who... alright, actually Chelsea don't have one of those. Still.
Roy Keane, eh? What a cunt.
But despite the marked similarities, there's a big difference in my reaction to
the two teams. Perhaps it's a sign of increased maturity, of getting my priorities
right and not taking trivial things quite so seriously (shyeah, right), but I fucking
hated that Man U side and everyone who sailed in her. Whereas right now, I really
just wish Chelsea would fuck off and leave me alone, you know?
I feel it's important for me to point out that I've no specific axe to grind, here.
I support Watford. Not a global brand. Not the sporting arm of a marketing corporation.
Just a football team. My ambitions stretch as far as winning promotion to the top
flight, spending a year getting fucked by all and sundry then being dumped back
down a division with enough cash in our back pocket to secure the club's medium-term
survival. Normally "not in their league? We're hardly in the same fucking sport!"
is just an expression. So I'm not a disgruntled Gooner pissed off that there's someone
buying the league better than my team did. I'm not jealous of Chelsea. I'm just
faintly depressed by them, sick of them and, as I might have mentioned, bored to
death of them.
Yes, I realise Chelsea aren't the first team to consciously decide to buy the title.
But they are the first for whom money is absolutely no object, the
first with the spending power to get absolutely whoever they want whenever
they want them, the first with seven- and eight-figure value players two-deep at
every position and the first to seem so very determined to fuck football as we know
it, both as competition and as a spectacle.
Fortunately the Blue Man has a solution. Oh yes he does.
Chelsea are the economic equivalent of a group of fifth-formers forcing their way
into a first-years' playground kickabout, pushing the younger kids off the ball
to score goal after effortless goal, exulting wildly in the unfair, unearned chasm
between their ability and those of the people around them. Well, we can learn a
lesson from those days gone by with what I like to call Operation Let Baby Have
His Bottle.
Here's the plan. Next time Chelsea play, immediately after the whistle for kickoff
the players on the opposing team - ALL the players on the opposing team - should
just sit down on the pitch and let Mourinho and his boys get on with it. Seriously.
Let them score as many goals as they like - twenty, fifty, a hundred, whatever,
all the while making comments like "oh, WELL done. You must be SO proud..."
Rinse and repeat. For an entire season. Or however long it takes for the message
to filter the fuck through. "You don't want to play by the same economic rules
we do? Well, that's fine. Have your win, if it means that much to you. The rest
of us will quietly get on with pretending you don't exist, thanks."
The only potential downside I could see to this scheme would be the loss of gate
receipts for one home game a year for every club in the league - because funny though
it'd be for the first few weeks, fans aren't going to pay extortionate Division
One seat prices to watch their team roll over. But I've even got a way around that
one - you just make your club's home game against Chelsea a Meet The Fans day. Instead
of having your players stage a sit-in protest, send them off into the stands to
press the flesh, sign autographs, chit-chat with the hoi polloi and generally publicly
relate. You might even try putting a few of your squad onto the PA and get them
to commentate on the game in the style of either Mystery Science Theatre 3000 or
Alan Partridge, depending on their personal preference.
"Oooooooh, and with that one-yard BULLET Drogba makes it 89-nil, and this
is EXACTLY the kind of start that Manchester United didn't need! THRIKERRRRRR!"
"It's just a pity that Kezman's not at the club any more, Gary, because
I think we'd have all enjoyed the opportunity to watch the undisputed master of
his craft finding a way to balloon that chance over the bar."
This would work. I'm telling you.
Or alternatively, we could just wait for Roman to get bored with his toy and piss
off to spend ludicrous amounts of money on a polo team or something, leaving the
club to splinter into a million rotten pieces under the combined weight of its insane
wage bill and monumental hubris. Same difference in the end, really.
[ Caution! Even-More-Disjointed-Than-Usual Post Ahead! ]
Don't get into the habit of expecting updates this regularly, alright? Still no
America thoughts which I know will disappoint you all, but it's time for a few capsule
reviews of a few random things. Some more capsule than others, natch.
The Island: First half-hour looks great and is pretty intriguing (despite
some of the most flagrant product-placement I can ever remember seeing in a movie),
then it gets progressively stupider 'till the end. There's nothing wrong with films
that are just mindlesss entertainment, what bothers me is when my intelligence is
being actively insulted. Not as jaw-droppingly stupid as the last sci-fi flick I
was forced to watch all the way through because I was strapped into a metal cylinder
six miles in the air doing five hundred miles an hour (Signs),
nor as utterly repugnant as the last Michael Bay film I saw (your friend and
mine, Bad Boys 2) but still, not to put too fine a point on it, tripe. Either
The Matrix Reloaded without the kung-fu and cool visuals, or a less clever and original
Logan's Run. Take your pick.
VideoGaiden - The first TV show in history about gaming that's actually worth
watching. Which
you can do here. Genuinely funny at times and managing to squeeze more information
and honest opinion into a ninety-second review than most games magazines manage
in a two-page spread. Caution! Scots accents thicker than Begbie's in Trainspotting.
Fantastic Four: Here's the thing. For all their memorable characters, there
are exactly three enduring, memorable villains in the entirety of Marvel's canon.
So if you're making a film that features one of these rare beasts then for the love
of Pete, whatever else you do DON'T FUCK THAT CHARACTER UP. Why bother including
Doctor Doom if you're going to have him fundamentally different to Doctor Doom in
every way that's even vaguely important? What's the POINT? That being said, it's
entirely possible that someone coming to this film with absolutely no preconceptions,
who doesn't know or care how wrong an immoral industrialist Doom with no larger
motivation beyond his own pride and self-preservation is, could easily come away
from F4 feeling it to be just fairly poorly-scripted popcorn fodder with ropy special
effects. Instead of being faintly depressed by it. Which is what you should be.
Constantine: Here's the thing. If you're making a film that features someone's
name as the title, whatever else you do DON'T FUCK THAT CHARACTER UP. Why bother
including John Constantine if you're going to have him fundamentally different to
John Constantine in every way that's even vaguely important? What's the POINT? That
being said, it's entirely possible that someone coming to this film with absolutely
no preconceptions, who doesn't know or care how wrong a witless, charmless,
humourless, preternaturally pretty JC whose primary motivation is getting to heaven
is, could easily come away from Constantine feeling it to be just a bloated,
overlong, disjointed mess of a movie. As opposed to a complete fucking abomination.
Which is what it is.
Okay, so, straining hard to try and be fair, there are some nice snippets
to be found here and there - Papa Midnite's club is groovy, the means of getting
in is groovier still, Midnite and Gabriel both had their moments as characters and
I quite enjoyed the visual imagery attached to visiting Hell. But as with Wagner
or Revenge Of The Sith, those good moments are bordered round with some bloody awful
half-hours. Bottom line - if you're in the market for a grimy
supernatural detective flick, do yourself a favour and hunt down a copy of criminally-underrated
B-movie The Prophecy, which covers the same ground as Constantine with orders of
magnitude more intelligence, atmosphere and wit.
Nintendo DS: For my birthday, my mum gave me some cash for the
holiday and orders to use it to buy something. My spending-money didn't make it
out of the airport, where my fistful of dollars landed me a spanking-new silver
DS along with Mario Kart and the mighty Meteos. It's actually the
first handheld console I've ever owned and I'm here to announce myself as officially
bowled over. I love the fact that it seems expressly and thoughtfully designed for
filling spare moments here and there, with loading times kept down to an absolute
minimum and the ability to flip down the screen at any time which pauses your game
and puts the console into a "sleep" mode. Then the next time you're (for
example) stuck outside a tacky theme-park gift shop waiting for your family to expensively
emerge, you open the screen up again and pick up your game from where you left off.
Genius. I love the touchscreen - simply the greatest interface in the history of
puzzle-gaming, I love the piss-easy wireless multiplayer (and I really love that
usually only one DS on the network actually needs to have the game cartridge), I
love the fact that the console's region-free, letting you play games released in
the States or Japan without fuss, I love that it's sleek and silver and cool...
Look. If you want the latest trendy gadget, if you want to play ropy PS2 ports,
listen to music on something five times the price and ten times the size of a Flash
memory MP3 player, or buy your entire DVD collection again for the privilege of
watching it on a enormous-by-handheld-standards-but-still-actually-teeny-tiny screen,
then get yourself a PlayStation Portable. But if you want your portable games console
to play portable games on you'd be mad not to by a DS. Even if it weren't half the
price of the PSP. I'm no foaming-dog Nintendo fanboy - for the record my consoles
to this point have been the Sega MegaDrive, the PlayStation and the PS2 - but unless
you're an utter graphics whore I honestly can't see how there's a decision at all.
Serenity: I was a bit disappointed that the shots of ships in space featured
engine- and weapon-noises, as opposed to being completely silent as they were in
the TV series (sound isn't conducted in a vacuum, don'tcha know). I thought everything
else was fucking brilliant. Basically a feature-length episode of the show, which
was absolutely bloody fine by me. How in God's name did Firefly get cancelled? Easily
the best film I saw this year.
(Oh, the top five? Well...
5. Revenge Of The Sith 4. Four Brothers (then a big gap to...) 3. Anchorman
(yes, I know, but I only saw it this year. Funnier than it has any right to be.) 2.
Sin City (flawed but fun) 1. Serenity.
No, it's not really been a vintage year.)
The Wedding Crashers: First two-thirds are terrific, Vince Vaughn and Owen
Wilson are both predictably likeable, Christopher Walken remains as watchable as
ever- but the last half-hour feels like it belongs in a completely different movie.
And not a funny one. Even the inevitable Will Ferrell cameo can't pull the film
out of its nose-dive at that stage. Ho hum.
Need For Speed Most Wanted: Confession time. I LOVED last year's effort in
this series (Need For Speed Underground 2, for those keeping score). Yes, I know
it was shallow and stupid and had a horrible white-boy fantasy ersatz "street"
vibe and was, you know, generally EA-y. But it was also pretty and fast-paced and
had a lovely forgiving handling model that made it fun to drive really, really fast
down crowded streets. And I remain enough in touch with my inner child to really
enjoy buying new cars, tarting them up with garish paint schemes, ludicrous rims
and body kits and neon shoved into places that neon was never meant to touch. It
increased my sense of involvement, my sense of attachment, made my "ride"
(nnnnnng) feel like it was mine. Because let's be honest, nobody else on the planet
would consider driving around in a pearlescent purple Audi TT with a green spider-web
motif, an enormous whale-tail spoiler and lime underglow. I was sold. I played it
to death.
So why is Most Wanted rubbish? Lots of little reasons, actually. It's lost all three
of my favourite race-types from Underground, for a kickoff. The proper track races
that featured no "civilian" cars and eliminated the grossly unfair possibility
of losing a race because you came skidding around a corner and smacked straight
into an oncoming truck that you couldn't possibly have seen or avoided are gone,
along with the relentlessly demanding Street-X courses that were all about your
technical driving skills and concentration, keeping your car on the right racing
line to get around the short courses as quickly and smoothly as possible. It's also
lost the slippy-slidey Drift races in which your time around the course didn't matter
and you racked up points by the amount of time you spent skidding around corners
in relentlessly cool powerslides. Gone, too, is the incentive to tart up your car.
With practically no game advantage to be gained by buying visual upgrades you're
strongly incentivised instead to spend your hard-earned cash exclusively on performance
parts to make you faster, stronger, better. Particularly since the replay mode's
gone as well so there's less chance to admire your gorgeous creation in action (or
any real way to take nice action screenshots of it, as an aside. Only a minor thing,
admittedly, but for several weeks last year my desktop wallpaper was my black Mitsubishi
Lancer Evo VIII with the leering skull hood. In related news, I am apparently thirteen
years old). In exchange for these losses, we now have police chases, which are a
good idea in theory but in practice are too easy for the first couple of game-hours,
just about right for the next couple, then WAY too fucking hard thereafter.
Plus - and I'm not convinced this isn't just my memory playing tricks - the cars
feel a) more sluggish than they were in NFSU2, and b) twitcher than Stephen Hawking
on coke. Just going in a straight line can be hard work, and if you hit a wall God
help you because it takes for EVER to get back up to speed again. I don't remember
the previous game annoying and frustrating me to anywhere near this degree. Bottom
line - it's just not that much fun. And is going to be the best-selling game in
the country this Christmas. Sigh.
The blogger in me is bizarrely annoyed to have missed the only interesting
thing to happen in Hertfordshire in the past three centuries or so, but in payback
I do have several things about America in general and Florida in particular that
I'm quite keen to share - you lucky, lucky people.
But while it's still marginally topical, and before I forget, I was sitting in my
hotel room watching the Chicago Bears and the Atlanta Falcons flail through the
first half of Sunday night's game when the idiot talking head's idiot talking head
Joe Theismann burbled, Madden-esque -
"I think Kyle Orton's done everything that's been asked of him as a quarterback."
Timing being the soul of comedy, he hadn't even finished speaking when the graphic
popped up:
