Cansei de Ser Sexy Is My Hot, Hot Sex

So I get home after a week of too long days and too little sleep, tired, cranky and with a fierce desire to drink, and announce this to the world by misquoting lyrics. Lyrics I annoyingly can't quite place, so I set out to track down the source. Not a hard thing to do, since I know the Gillen is responsible for putting it in my head, and quickly find Brazilian party rockers CSS with Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above.



And then I watch it again. With wine then beer then more then again. And again. And again. And all desire to hear Marilyn Manson wail about spiders washes away in a rush of nonsense lyrics and bouncy synths. It's impossible to stay miserable listening to it. It's fucking brilliant. And thanks to the wonder of the electric internets, the entire album is swiftly purchased and secure on my harddrive, and it's almost as good throughout.

There's some throwaway songs on there, and bits of it are in Portugese but that shouldn't turn anyone off in the slightest, because there's an overwhelming sense of playfulness and fun driving the thing, even on the angry parts. And even when the lyrics are in English rarely make sense. Meeting Paris Hilton is borderline incomprehensible because Pixie-like vocalist Lovefoxxx (yes, Lovefoxxx) pronounces beach and bitch identically. And when they do make sense , they're ridiculously punny, like "suck, suck, suck my art-hole" on the spiteful Art Bitch.

They're also rather naughty, which can only be a good thing.

Really, you should go give them a listen.

Quantum of Solace

Remember Casino Royale? Of course you do. It was a fantastic reboot of the Bond franchise, cutting away the camp of the later Brosnan movies, and Daniel Craig creating the definitive Bond by sweating, bleeding and being hit on the balls a lot. It could've used a bit of trimming, but overall it left me really excited about Bond for the first time in a really long while.

Quantom of Solace completely pisses that away.

Let's pause for a brief wanky beret moment. Closure is the act of observing the parts but perceiving the whole. Filling in the blanks. Everytime you move between panels in a comic, or an edit happens in a movie, you're relating the frames spatially and temporally, as well as extrapolating from the visual elements in the frame. This takes brain power, and audience involvement. Knowing how to use it is absolutely key in visual storytelling.

At some point, someone had the idea of making more agressive use of this, sacrificing clarity in favour of getting in close and giving a more impressionistic view of action sequences in the hope that it would increase audience involvement. And you know, people complain about shaky cam a lot, but I'm fine with it when in the hands of a skilled director. Remember the Tangiers chase in the Bourne Ultimatum? Ten minutes of Bourne running after Desh, Desh closing in on Nikki, and the audience completely pinned to their seats.

Marc Forster is not a skilled action director. So he just throws a bunch of frenetic edits of moving bits at the screen, without little regard for establising spatial relation, in the mistaken hope that we'll mistake the confusion for excitement. There's a particularly egregious sequence kicking off the film, a car chase where it's fucking impossible to make out who's chasing who until it's over and you realise that Bond was in the car in the front becasue he's still moving and the car behind crashed.

This is a problem when the movie is 90% action. It's even more of a problem when the script gives the action sequences little purpose other than being loud, noisy padding.

Oddly for a movie that literally picks up an hour after Casino Royale, it has little interest in what made that movie good, or the fraught emotional state Bond was in at the end. Oh, there's some lipservice about how angry and hurt he is, but anytime there's danger of a real character moment, the movie panics and hurtles along to the next action sequence as if slowing down would put it in danger of being accosted by rape-goblins.

It's a real pity, because Daniel Craig is still as great in the part as ever, Judi Dench is in fine form, and Olga Kurylenko is a good Bond babe, but the script doesn't put them to good use. The only weak link among the principals is Mathieu Amalric as the hilariously ineffectual and unmenacing villain.

It's not worth writing off the rebooted franchise completely yet, but they'll have to do a lot better next time around.



At least it's better than Max Payne, which has an appealing performance by Kurylenko for all of her five minutes of screentime, and then goes back to being completely useless, lumpen pap. You'd think it wouldn't be too hard to get a pulp tale of revenge for murdered loved ones up to acceptable standards, but alas, the video game movie curse struck again.

Hello again blog

It's been a while, hasn't it? No, contrary to appearances, I did not disappear into a crippling WoW addiction. I rode out the trial and left it at that. I was just being lazy again.

The apparent irony of that last post was pretty funny though, wasn't it?

Even if it wasn't true.

I have to admit that I sometimes feel a slight temptation whenever I walk past a retail copy of WoW though. It's a very polished game, and Azeroth has a lot of sights to see. And I can definitely see why people get stuck in it. There's always a new little reward. *ding* You reach a new level. *ding* You get a new spell. *ding* You find a nifty item. *ding* You learn to make a better sandwich. *ding* You fi- *ding* Y- *ding* *ding* *ding*

It's a constant barrage of little happy pills of accomplishment.

It still can't escape the fundamental rubbishness of the genre though; the inability to affect your world meaningfully, all the while maintaining that you're super awesome one chosen hero of singleplayer rgps. But you can't fool me. I possess cleverness and functioning retinas. I can see that those nasty critters I genocided the minute before spawned back and nothing changed.

Which wouldn't be that big a problem if your genociding the evil critters was fun, but WoW's combat is neither visceral nor tactically challenging enough to make it entertaining. It's easy to do the math and see how an engagement will end the minute it starts, and then it's a dull couple of minutes to execute your plan. Unless of course an angry bear spawns in behind you, and then you die, because you're as fierce as a soggy kitten and can't handle angry bears in addition to the other enemies, and the camera refuses to let you spot their filthy spawning hides before you pull aggro. And then you swear copiously, while wondering why you're supposed to put up with this on the promise that it gets better after the first 20 or 30 levels.

Which leads you to putting the box back down in the store and move on to purchase other, more appealing games. Like Fallout 3. On which there will be many words later.

Unless shiny things happen.

You can't trust those shiny things.

This cannot possibly end well

Yes, I installed the free WoW trial. Sometimes you just get curious, and jam a needle of heroin into your eyeball to find out what's so great about it, y'know?

"What is it with you and women?" indeed

I defy anyone remotely familiar with Frank "WHORES" Miller to not burst out laughing at the latest trailer for his adaption of Will Eisner's The Spirit:

Random art appreciation moment.

Just to get that last piece of nastiness out of the way, here's a man who's clearly played too much Silent Hill. Or at least shares fetishes with those games.

1. Sexual Harassment 2. ???? 3. Children!

I have prejudices against Russia. In a way it's only natural; Finland and Russia have had a bit of a rocky history so it's only natural I'd absorb some level of distrust through osmosis. It's not something I'm particularly proud of, and I try to be aware of it and not let it cloud my judgement too much.

I really wish they try to help me out sometimes, y'know? It's got to be a two-way thing if we're going to make this work, and it's just not going to get any better if complete scumfuck things like this continue to leap at me from the headlines.

The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia's history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.

She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

"He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word," she earlier told the court. "I didn't realise at first that he wasn't speaking metaphorically."

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled