Films watched 2014

Hands down film of the year - Dawn of the Planet of the Apes – just awesome!

Most perplexing - Tree of Life – overlong, over-ponderous and expensive.  What were they trying to say?

Most predictable American action guff - Olympus has Fallen –but does contain some good plane bits and explosions. 

Action film with most actual actors who should know better - Reds 2 - including the magnificent John Malkovitch

Funniest gangster flick - The Family – a very funny caper

Best tour of less salubr3ious parts of downtown LA - Rampart – oh the pathos

Best Sly and Arnie caper - Escape Plan – ridiculous and entertaining

Most enjoyable Viking romp - Hammer of the Gods – crying out for a part 2

Best movie with just one actor - All is Lost – although I found it hard to identify with the character

Best Flash and shiny - Now You See Me - daft but definitely shiny

Close second - The Bling Ring –those kids received very harsh justice indeed for nicking a few trinkets off celebs who probably got the stuff free in the first place

Best Brit flick - Starred Up - good story and very engaging

Funniest Brit flick - Bronson - fuck off!

Best Low budget Brit flick - Dead in France – very funny but a bit messy in places and dodgy dialogue

Close second - The Estate – strangely, the quality improved as it went along

Best film set in Yorkshire – the Selfish Giant – excellent child acting but felt the original story was somewhat lost

Best low budget American film - King of California - an excellent Michael Douglas in rare low budget mode

Most amusing Horror - Thirst – odd but entertaining Korean vampire priest romp; quite funny but not sure if it was meant to be

Best British vampire film - Byzantium – quite good vampire tale; much better than I expected

Most disturbing - Julia’s Eyes- Del Torro creeps you out

Most convoluted ghost story - the Awakening – keep up!

Best Historical film - Here there be Dragons – a tale of the Spanish civil war which doesn’t take sides

Best Russian war film - Stalingrad –pretty good especially the set decor.  But is needlessly bookended by narration saying how great Russia was

Best Greek epic - 300, rise of an empire – superior to the first instalment but crying out for part 3

Best sci-fi sequel - Riddick – including a rather cool sort-of-dog and ace scenery

Best film based on a toy - Transformers – Age of Extinction - ridiculously entertaining

Most disappointing Sci-fi - Gravity - what was it trying to say?

Close second - Elysium – okay but could have been much better and they should have killed all the rich people

Best sci-fi mish-mash - Pacific Rim - like Del Toro had slammed together bits from all his other films with some Michael Biehn and Godzilla thrown in for good measure

Most weird mish-mash of technologies - Outpost 11 – very weird low budget do

Best alien - The Arrival of Wang - unusual Italian sci-fi offering with an unexpected twist

Close second - Under the Skin - odd low budget alien in Scotland

Most likely to come true – Transcendence – this will probably happen soon

Weirdest since Brazil - the Zero Theorem - Terry Gilliam practically remakes his old classic

Best 1940’s sci-fi - On The Beach - good but very odd

Most disappointing baddie – Maleficent – not really evil at all

Best feel good movie - Good Vibrations - funny and entertaining

Best retelling of Shakespeare - Caesar must die – play in a play in an Italian prison

Best heist film - 11.6 –French heist film based on a real story 

Best hats - The Light Thief - nice gentle film from Kyrgyzstan with excellent hats

Oddest Arty film - Dogville – odd Von Triers effort done like a play with minimal props.  Very long and with an unexpected end.  Good closing titles of old photos to strains of Young Americans

Best black comedy Western - Dead Man – From 1995, the cast includes Johnny Depp, Iggy Pop, and Robert Mitchum.  Very funny and atmospheric

Best Faustian Western - Dead in Tombstone - silly but entertaining

Best Marvel movie - Guardians of the Galaxy – fun and fabulous

Worst remake - Robocop - absolutely terrible!  How did they manage to make it so bad? - They took all the fun out of it!

Needless remake - Carrie - Just like the original

Best blast from the past - Top Gun – best line: ‘your ego is writing cheques that your body can’t cash’ – genius!

Just why did I watch this again? - Sweeney Todd - I think I just needed to make sure I had not made it up.  I had not: Johnny Depp definitely sings like he got lessons off David Bowie and there really are some truly awful songs too especially ‘Pretty Women’. Makes you want to poke your ears out.

Kos 2014 - a couple of Anecdotes

Storage

On our return to the apartment one night, the couple next door were having a conversation with some other people over the wall.  They were going on about how everything shuts down at the end of summer:

“Have you seen this place in winter?

“Yes.  I’ve seen it on Google Earth – it’s like a ghost town.”

 “Everything gets put into storage, even the flowers. “

They were also whingeing about beggars and saying they weren’t really homeless and it was ‘their job’ to beg – they had even seen them getting on the bus!  I had to bite my lip to stop myself saying something they wouldn’t like. 

We had a laugh later though at the visions this interchange conjured of streets being rolled up and put in a big warehouse until next year.

The following night the searing heat was broken by a torrential but quick storm.   After getting drenched coming back from town, we cleaned ourselves of mud and sat under the sheltered patio.  The couple next door were whingeing about it of course.  I was tempted to say “Well, everything needs a good wash before it gets put into the big warehouse for winter.”

Supermarket

One evening we were out having a drink when I nipped to the supermarket for tobacco.  There was a large young man in front of me at the till.  He was paying for a small bottle of pop with a pile of small change, and taking ages about it.  The cashier said to him “It’s okay.  We have an hour until we close”. 

When the large man had finally finished and gone, I said to the cashier “Well, at least you’ll have some change now”. 

In response he pointed to a pile of 1 and 2 cent pieces and declared “we don’t want this crap.  These Europeans* can’t spend it at home so they bring it here to use.  We don’t want it either, but we have to smile and be polite...”

“Oh well”, I said, “it gives us something to laugh about.”

*for ‘Europeans’ read ‘Germans’

UKIP leader Nigel Farage NOT standing to be next emperor of Japan

UKIP leader Nigel Farage has said he will not stand in the forthcoming elections for emperor of Japan, it has been revealed.

 

In a blatant attempt to continue hogging the TV news, Mr Farage issued the shock statement this morning, to a BBC journalist in a raincoat, who was hanging around street corners just in case something didn’t happen.  

Farage said that his decision was nothing to do with not wanting to look like “a total tosspot” by entering the contest, as he did not "have any links with the Far East ", adding that he wanted to focus instead on pretending not to be a racist twat, despite mounting evidence that UKIP is full of obnoxious bigots who can’t keep their vile traps shut.

Farage was keen to stress that his major focus was on waging war with Europeans and insisted that if he got elected, he would campaign vigorously for the walls around Calais to be re –erected so that none of them “foreign scum would make it ‘beyond the pale’ “.

But John Knowitall, a top professor of politics at the University of Studies, said UKIP would be "trying to succeed on the back of Farage not going to do anything, ever".

The news comes just days after it was revealed that Farage will not be running for President of North Korea or as World Wide Ambassador for Refugees and Asylum Seekers.

Mr Farage told the BBC: "I haven't had long to think about it but I have thought about it in a half-arsed way, and we're just over three weeks away from a war with Europe at which I think UKIP could be victorious, and from which we can go on and win not just against the Europeans but quite a lot of Asia as well.  For that reason I don't want to do anything that deflects from the main battle, so I'm not going to stand for this particular dictatorship”.

Asked whether he had decided not to run for fear of losing, Mr Farage rambled: "It's about choosing the right battles. It's about prioritising and I know that if I were to have said yes to standing in Japan the next three weeks would be dominated by am I going to win, am I not going to win, and we wouldn't be talking about actors masquerading as immigrants, straight bananas and namby pamby green politics.

Prof. Knowitall added: “He is a total idiot peddling a load of nonsense based on nothing”.

Dirty Foreign Bastards Blamed for Filthy Weather and Zombie Plague

Ravey Davey, has waded into the debate on the recent smog epidemic which has enveloped Britain over the past week.  The beleaguered Prime Minister claimed that the situation was caused by them dirty Africans sending us their filthy dust, no doubt riddled with Ebola as well. 

Initially fobbed off as innocuous mist and fog, weather experts  finally had to admit that the miasma covering large parts of the country was not caused by ‘naturally occurring weather’ but  was in fact a foul cloud of poison.  To take our minds off the risk of death from what historians would call ‘a pea souper’, meteorologists have been conspiring with politicians and coming up with pretty maps in bright colours to seemingly demonstrate how the earth’s air flow has created the problem.  

As it became apparent that the public were not buying into this charade, and in a bid to deflect blame from the money factories of London,  experts are now saying  that the mucky air is a ‘toxic mix’ of contaminated dust from the Sahara and pollutants sent over from France, designed specifically to annoy Nigel Farage.

Unfortunately however, the event has coincided with an Ebola outbreak in sub-Saharan Africa meaning that there is an added danger of the UK being overrun by Zombies before the weekend.

A scientist said: “this ‘perfect storm’ of unseasonal weather combined with tainted air from the African continent and effluence from the Euro zone has created ideal conditions for the Zombie plague.”

In a desperate attempt to mitigate widespread panic, Ravey Davey appeared on prime time TV saying: “I think it is only right for me to reassure hard working families up and down the country that my mates in the financial sector are in no way to blame for this situation.  What we are facing is a global problem, caused mainly by Africans in league with the French. And let’s not forget that the previous government created the conditions to allow this sort of thing to happen.  Anyone who says any different is just plain wrong.”

Whilst namby pamby Southerners have been whinging about their cars being encrusted by the muck falling out of the sky, the rest of the country has had to grin and bear it, being largely ignored by the mainstream media.  People as far north as the Outer Hebrides have reported sightings of hordes of the undead roaming the streets caked in red dust and screaming ‘unclean!’

It is estimated that by the time the adulterated air has been blown away northwards to blight the smug Nordic tribes, 80% of the population of Britain will have become infected.

10 veg a day reduces risk of being run over by a bus, scientists claim

Research by a bunch of twelve year old interns has concluded that eating ten portions of vegetables a day eliminates the risk of death by 100 per cent from absolutely anything, including falling under a bus.

 

The shock claims came after extensive study of 63 middle class people in Basingstoke, with an average age of 492.

The researchers also discovered that most of the population will die if they stick to the current five-a-day recommendation. The news was even worse for those fond of fruit cocktail cubes (like your granny used to put in her trifle) as apparently canned and frozen fruit increased the risk of dying by 700 per cent, and as for fruit juice – forget it!

The study’s lead author, Dr Oyinlola Oyebode of the Posh University’s department of pointless research said: “The clear message here is that the more vegetables you eat, the less likely you are to die at all.  My advice would be that however much you are eating now, eat more and then more, and then top that up with more.” 

Alarmed experts called on the Government to immediately tax vegetables to ensure that people did not live too long and become a drain on society.  Alongside this proposal, they also suggested reducing the cost of sugary foods which they claim ‘get a bad press’.

The government has previously attempted to interfere in the everyday dietary habits of the population by introducing the five-a-day guidelines. Nevertheless, most people are so stubborn that they do not take a blind bit of notice of this advice.

Some members of the public reacted angrily to the new guidance with one woman on Ashton market declaring: ‘I like fruit, I like veg., but I don’t eat them every day. And I’m a hundred and two next week so sod the lot of ‘em!