27 August 2013

Try to have fun, otherwise what's the point?



So I saw Kick-Ass 2 the other day and I'm afraid to say that I gave in to temptation. Usually I'm a pretty decent person but after seeing so much violence on screen, I couldn't help but grab a gun and shoot the living shit out of a bunch of people. Oops! Star Jim Carrey claims he can't support this violent film because of the shooting at Sandy Hook which is strange because he filmed it after the shooting at Columbine. Personally I haven't sat down and ranked the tragedy of high school massacres like he apparently has but I guess we all have different hobbies. Obviously I didn't actually shoot anybody and obviously this film wouldn't encourage anybody to do so that wasn't already a lonely, mental fucktard. Occasionally I might punch my friend in the arm but that's only because he'll have hit me first. I'm not sure why he attacks me although I'm guessing it's probably less about the media desensitising him to violence as it is the seven previous hours I spent joyously trying to piss him off.

Kick-Ass 2 takes place several years after the end of the first film despite the characters having not moved on that much in the interim. Although Hit-Girl is now fifteen years old, her story feels like it's only progressed about a week since we left her back in 2010. I suspect that they would have liked to make this a more immediate sequel but Chloe Moretz insisted on being such a diva and stubbornly grew up... Human little bitch! So Hit-Girl is trying to lead a normal school life, Kick-Ass is continuing to fight crime and Red Mist is still trying to be seen as anyone other than McLovin. In at least that last case, I'd say he succeeds with the character this time going under the catchy alias of ‘The Motherfucker’. At first I was thinking that, that is clearly a superhero name designed for Samuel L Jackson but then I realised that he would more likely be ‘The Motherfucking Motherfucker’. The whole concept of Kick-Ass was to explore what it'd be like to be a superhero in reality which bizarrely I actually have some first-hand experience of. When not writing this shiz, I like to blackmail people to appear in little films with one actually revolving around a superhero. As it turns out, the public are fairly accepting of somebody dressed up like a dick in a cape with nobody really questioning him at all. In fact, things only got awkward later on when I filmed a girl eating a banana in an alley and two junkie tramps appeared out of nowhere to watch, dribble and finger their belly buttons.

Kick-Ass is one of my favourite films of all time and so my excitement for the sequel was pretty high. The original may have had violence and swearing but I fell in love with the heart and naivety of the characters. Kick-Ass was a fucking idiot for trying to fight crime but he did it for the right reasons and with the help of a few friends he just about managed to get the job done. The fact that the film also included a performance from a post-stroke Nicolas Cage and a young girl who casually spits out the word ‘cunt’ only added to the joy. For me, a good film can only be improved if it causes The Daily Mail to get its touchy little titties in a twist. With Kick-Ass 2 though, I began to get kind of worried when director Jeff Wadlow was hired. I'd seen his first film Never Back Down and disliked it with about the same amount of hatred that Russia currently has for equal rights and freedom. Still, I tried to keep my optimism which became well and truly put to the test when the wave of bad reviews arrived and started to rape the absolute fuck out of it.

Having now seen the movie I can say with some relief that I actually really liked it. It definitely wasn't as good as the first one but for me not much else is. In honesty I think the biggest problem for this sequel is that what made the first so great is that it was both original and shocking. When you're replicating and continuing what's gone before, 'original' and 'shocking' are two of the things that just can't help but be lost. It's kind of like the first time you toss one off- your brain explodes with confusion and joy, but a week later, a kind of nonchalance has set in that means you'll catch yourself lazily doing it at a bus stop if you aren’t paying enough attention. I guess my point is that the sequel has to go even further than the original to be as memorable because we now take for granted everything that made the first such a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, Kick-Ass 2 simply replicates what has gone before it and continues the story in a completely logical way. Not that I'm criticising the story, rather the fact that we've become desensitised to everything here by the simple fact of having seen it before. Fuck me- that was an effort to explain...

Guns don't kill people. Idiots who own guns do though...
A further problem is that two of the things that made the original so great were the randomness of Nicholas Cage and the threat of Mark Strong's big bald bastard. To try and counter this, they have this time added an almost unrecognisable Jim Carrey as the violent vigilante Colonel Stars and Stripes. Despite earlier taking the piss out of his bizarre distancing of this film, I am generally a fan of the big rubber gurner’s previous work. Therefore the biggest problem with him here is that despite all the controversy, hype and prominent billing, he's hardly in the fucking movie anyway… which actually makes his subsequent comments make a lot more sense. His role is really just an extended cameo but images of him committing acts of violence could potentially cause awkwardness for him in light of his recent anti-gun comments. Personally, I kind of agree that the public shouldn't have access to handheld child-killing machines and so in that regard I'm on his side. By denouncing Kick-Ass 2, not only has he brought attention to his cause but he's also provided some presumably welcome marketing to a film that wants to make money. Either that or he just couldn't be fucked with the boring press junket. Regardless though, none of this really justifies quite how wasted he is here. Nor is his implied link between movie violence and real violence in anyway true. Although having said that, if like him I could train my dog to bite off peoples’ cocks then I definitely would. If Carrey is going to begin denouncing his appearance in comic book movies then I'd strongly recommend he actually start with his performance in the crappy Batman Forever as a bright green twat.

Speaking of people who are wasted, it seems that another fault of the film is that it kind of forgets who it should be about. I have a friend who claims to have the dullest possible dreams in which she does menial things such as worry about paying her car tax. In her most exciting dream she was apparently just pottering about like normal when a strange young girl walked past suspiciously carrying a pair of scissors. That was pretty much the end of it. What made me laugh about that was how in her dream-world, her brain had created a story in which she wasn't even the main fucking character. It was inside her head and yet this young girl with the scissors is clearly the focus of the mystery and story. Well that's kind of what's going on here with the title character of Kick-Ass being severely sidelined in favour of the demented little killer imp Hit-Girl. I mean, Kick-Ass is present throughout but the character development and arc is clearly dominated by the violent young bitch in the purple wig. Not that I didn't enjoy spending so much time with her, by the way. One of my favourite things about the franchise is in the fact that it's also a kind of demented teen movie and so seeing her navigate her school life was great. I also can't fault the empowering message of the film that you should just be yourself regardless of whether or not you're a violent tween who kills cunts with a sociopathic efficacy. It's just a shame that this means we have to give up time with Kick-Ass who is less of a superhero and more of a geek who wishes he was. As a single chap in his twenties with Star Wars toys scattered around his bedroom, I find a geek with comic-inspired aspirations much easier to relate to.

So yeah, like I said, the film isn't as good as the first but I still enjoyed it. Maybe this wasn't literally the best film of all time but it's still fun. Curious as to what I'd missed, I thought I'd check out the terrible reviews to see what their issue was, with most just seeming offended at the violence and bad fucking language. There was one thing though that did surprise me and that was a huge amount of complaints in regards to the films’ apparent misogynist tone. A lot of this focused around things such as a dance scene in which a few girls had been sexualised, but the complaints also forgot to mention that when Kick-Ass removes his shirt, he too is gorped at. I guess the real conclusion here is that some people of both genders are occasionally not completely fucking ugly. To be honest, I'd love to go into this in more detail because I read a lot about it throughout the week but fuck it, it'd take forever and we've all got lives. It just seemed to me that a lot of the problems may have originated from the following slightly tactless comment that Kick-Ass author Mark Millar made about rape a little while earlier:

“The ultimate [act] that would be the taboo, to show how bad some villain is, was to have somebody being raped, you know? I don’t really think it matters. It’s the same as, like, a decapitation. It’s just a horrible act to show that somebody’s a bad guy.”

He looks like a boy who is good to his mother.
People then complained that he was using rape as a kind of badge to simply represent evil and that rape is actually much worse than chopping of a head. Not to put myself in the firing line but I kind of don't see a problem with what he said. Everything that happens in literature is used to represent something and I don't see why rape should be exempt from that. I'm not saying that it can't be executed in a sexist way but that what he said alone certainly isn't. There's a bit in Transformers: Dark of the Moon in which a woman is physically and aesthetically described in relation to a car which I found so much more offensive than anything here. Also Millar didn't specifically say female rape so to assume he's being sexist is kind of a presumption in itself. As for rape being worse than getting your head chopped off- well, how do I put this diplomatically... Get a fucking grip! Both are horrific things that nobody deserves to ever endure but if I had to choose –trigger warning- I'd rather get roughly beaten and arse fucked in an alley than just get straight up brutally and sadistically murdered. There's no doubt at all that rape victims also go through huge mental and physical trauma afterwards and I think it's horrendous how in many cases the victims get the blame for their own assault. But if you get your head chopped off then that's it. You're dead. End of life. Rape must be a truly terrible thing to endure but getting so mad about it being compared to decapitation seems kind of offensive to victims of that too. In my opinion, people just got slightly up in arms about what Millar said and so choose to look for evidence of any apparent sexism in his work.

So yeah I've been waffling on for way too long now and so I'll try and come to a conclusion. Kick-Ass 2 isn't as mental, shocking, original or simply good as the first but it's still fun and certainly worth a watch. There's no denying that it suffers from a lack of crazy old Nicholas Cage but that's a criticism for pretty much any film that doesn't feature him. It does neglect Kick-Ass in favour of Hit-Girl but for a film that's meant to be misogynistic, there's no denying how nice it is to have a female hero to root for. Before the film was released I'd heard Mark Millar compare it to The Empire Strikes Back in that it was much darker and much better than the original. Well I'd agree with him, but not for those reasons. Sure it's darker but it's certainly not better. The reason it reminds me of Star Wars Episode Five is because there's a scene in it in which a couple who I'd previously thought of as being like a brother and sister share a kiss. I don't know about anybody else, but overtones of incest can sometimes kill a romance for me.
 

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19 August 2013

Time To Meet The Devil

I was once sat with about five members of my family and not a single one of them was making the effort to speak. Rather than endure this vortex of boredom though I instead stupidly attempted to start a conversation. After about an hour of trying and failing to work the fucking room, I decided to give up. At a fairly young age I came to realise that a family was nothing more than a group of strangers who force a smile on the off chance that they might one day need each other’s bone marrow. These days I just avoid them and am more than happy to dive into either a bush or heavy traffic to escape an encounter. From what I hear though, other people have the complete opposite problem as I do with their family meddling in their lives like a gang of well-meaning twats. I know people who have pursued a career that they had no interest in just because of the pressure of what was expected of them. I'm kind of stubborn so I think if I wanted to do one thing but my family were forcing me into something else then I'd probably instead become a crack-addicted rent-boy to teach them a lesson. The reason that I mention this is because I recently watched the film Only God Forgives and I'm pretty sure that its message was that an interested family is really more trouble than it's fucking worth.

The film is set in Bangkok and tells the story of Ryan Gosling and his older brother who run a boxing club coupling as a drug smuggling business. Things go wrong almost immediately though when the older brother goes out for a night of relaxation and gets into a spot of bother. When I need to chill out, I tend to open a bag of weed and then wake up several hours later with chocolate around my mouth and my cock in my hand. Here however, the older brother decides to let his hair down by casually raping and murdering a young girl before getting his head caved in by her pissed-off Dad. Because of this minor mishap, the brothers’ Mum shows up and against her surviving sons better judgement, decides that the family must retaliate. As a result of her parental interference the family become the focus of a violent Angel of Death policeman who likes to get a bit chop-happy with his massive fuck-off sword. Only God Forgives is directed by Nicolas Winding Refn who most people will associate with his previous movie Drive. Although his last film was almost universally loved, this latest one has been receiving significantly mixed reviews. Whereas half of the audience have written articles hailing it as their current film of 2013, the other half have instead kicked the absolute shit out of it. After having now endured this deranged and fucked up movie, I'm happy to be able to consider this tasteless bastard to be one of the best movies I've seen so far this year.

Probably the most romantic
film since The Notebook.
Out of curiosity, I decided to read several bad reviews of Only God Forgives to see what people didn't like and one of the main criticisms seemed to be the films lack of any relatable characters. But is that really a problem? The Godfather is an absolute classic and yet I can't say that I see much of myself in any of those murdering, Italian fucktards. By Gosling’s own admission, his character here probably has very little going on below the surface but personally I don't see that as an issue. The character of Forrest Gump has so little happening behind his eyes that you could crack open his skull and use it as an ash tray but that doesn't make it a shit film. The fact that Forrest Gump is a shit film is what makes it a shit film. Instead, Gosling is simply an empty-ish vessel for the audience to experience his world through. Again, I think it was Gosling who said that in the last movie, he played ‘The Driver’ but this time he's playing the car. In which case I urge fans of The Notebook to check out this movie so that they can finally find out what it's actually like to get a ride off Ryan Gosling.

In all honesty, if I have one wish, it genuinely is that fans of The Notebook come and check out this film. I remember going to see Black Swan and being amused by the majority of the audience joining as it seemed that a lot of nice girls had dragged their boyfriends out to see a wonderful film about ballet. I think it was around the time that Winona Ryder started stabbing herself in the face that the screaming and walk-outs began and the initially reluctant boyfriends started to enjoy themselves a hell of a lot more. I really fucking hate the soppiness of The Notebook and regardless of gender, I hate the people who spend their lives believing that sentimental crap is how relationships and life should play out. It'd therefore give me nothing but satisfaction to find out that a fan of that shite movie had turned up to Only God Forgives having been lured there by the presence of Ryan Gosling. Having sat through plenty of violent and gory films in the past, I'm pretty hardened to a bit of movie splatter but even I was shocked by what I saw here. The initial head, ribs and arm chop off scenes were brutal-but-bearable however there's a torture scene near the end that is just fucking demented. I think it was the second we were treated to a close up of some chaps eye being sliced open that all my brain could do to cope was mentally project the phrase, “fuck me” as vividly as it possibly could.

There's no denying that Only God Forgives is a film that aims to challenge its audience as much as it possibly can. It’s kind of like the movie equivalent of a domestically abusive partner in that it beat the complete shit out of me but despite that, I still loved it. With Drive at least, there was the romantic subplot that hinted towards a sense of hope and humanity that perhaps we could cling onto. However here, that glimmer of light is noticeably absent, instead being replaced by a constant sense of fear and dread. I suppose you could argue that the two films take place in the same universe but only because Only God Forgives plays out like a nightmare set in The Drivers fucked up head. Another of the main criticisms of this film is that it is ‘all style and no substance’, but that's just not true. There's no doubting that the style is certainly one of the movie’s focuses with each shot being perfectly framed and every movement being paced to perfection. However underneath, there are so many things being explored such as issues of masculinity, destiny and redemption. I think it explores religion a bit too but the main conclusion there seems to be that God is either a cunt or massively uninvolved... which I guess would also kind of make him a cunt.

Seriously this is a surprisingly lovely film. 
Key to all of this is the bizarre relationship between Gosling’s silent protagonist and Kristin Scott Thomas who plays his psychotic and controlling mother. At the start of the film, he seems to be an apathetic mute with a very vague leaning towards at least knowing what is morally right. However from the moment she swaggers into the story like an unhinged, menopausal Barbie doll, the reason for his withdrawn persona becomes very obvious. She undermines him at every step of the way by banging on about how he was jealous of his brother and when he sensibly refuses to take revenge, she suggests that his logic is a sign of weakness. If that wasn't enough to make him feel any less manly, she also plays a game of top trumps- but instead of using themed cards she just compares the size of her children's cocks. She even seems almost wistful to point out that poor, little Gosling was never quite as impressive as his dead, rapist brother when it comes to showing off the old, pink beaver cleaver. Luckily, I don't have any siblings so I can sleep soundly knowing that of all the children my parents produced I am by far the most well endowed. Gosling however is clearly suffering his mothers torment and needs to escape and be re-born in order to reclaim his own freedom. I can't really go into whether this happens without getting into spoilers so let’s just say that the resolution is as fucking mental as you might expect. It's also slightly more literal and squelchy than I was imagining...

I can see why people would hate this movie and to be honest, it seems that was its intent from the start. Refn is clearly making a film that's so extreme and difficult that it's bound to piss people off and I imagine he'd consider himself to have failed if it had been loved by everyone. The best way to explain how it divides people is I guess to compare it to being like some sort of hardcore monkey fucking scat porn. It's the kind of thing that will be embraced by some and rejected by others but nobody will simply accept and forget. Only God Forgives is dark, violent, beautiful and most rarely of all unique. It also contains quite a lot of fingering scenes which was an unexpected but more than welcome surprise. My only advice to those of you who are yet to experience it is to just go and find out for yourself. I know a lot of people will skip to the last few sentences rather than read the entire blog so just to sum up for you lazy skim readers- Only God Forgives is my film of the year so far and if you loved The Notebook then this is the film for you!

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12 August 2013

Clawing A Way Back

Despite being in my mid twenties I'm depressingly still not able to grow facial hair. A full beard is completely out of the question and what I can get of a moustache is just embarrassing. Imagine the upper lip of a pretentious French child and that's kind of where I'm up to. Thankfully though, the one thing I can grow is a pair of meaty sideburns which I've insisted on sporting since first being raped by puberty. As a young teen I probably looked fucking ridiculous with my youthful complexion overshadowed by a hedge of spidery pubes that were sprouting out of the side of my face but I didn't care. I still have them now although I think that after about ten years of hatred my ageing face will have weathered enough to, hopefully, suit them. The problem was that when I was young my Mum hated them and I'm stubborn enough that that would be reason enough to keep anything. Nor did it help that to try and deter and insult me she once said, “You look ridiculous, you look like that bloody Wolverine”. Now, I know that I didn't look anything like him at all but as insults go my Mum couldn't have said anything that would make me want to keep my sideburns more that that.

I've been a huge fan of The X-Men since I saw the animated series in the early 90's and Wolverine has always been my favourite character. I guess when I was about three or four years old, I was the kind of cute little boy who loved nothing more than seeing a man stab people in the face with knives protracting from his knuckles. X-Men Origins: Wolverine was released a few years ago and was so bad that its was statistically more shit than an actual shit. Considering that X-Men: The Last Stand was also about as enjoyable as pouring vinegar into an open bollock wound, my enthusiasm for the franchise was sadly being replaced by apathy. With The Wolverine now on release I went to see it, although this time more for the sake of curiosity and hope than anything else. It might be receiving average reviews but I guess no matter how much disappointment a franchise might inflict, there's always going to be a toddler in me that's desperate to see a character that glorifies knife crime.
X-Men 3 was shit...

Like the rest of us, Wolverine is now suffering from the aftermath of X-Men: The Last Stand and is rightly living a life of shame. Haunted by memories of a woman that he loved and murdered, he's wandering the Earth like a wounded bear which might explain an early scene in which he meets an actual wounded bear. If you like your metaphors to be obvious and very annoying then this is the film for you. To cut a long story short, some old dying Japanese man tracks Wolverine down and drags him to Tokyo for a pre-death chinwag. Things don't go too well though and suddenly our snazzy haired anti-hero is wrapped up in somebody else’s shit which, despite being nothing to do with him, still results in several attempts on his life. As the film progresses it becomes very apparent that the message it's trying to convey is that 'helping people isn't worth the fucking bother'.

 Okay, so on the bright side I didn't hate The Wolverine but nor did I particularly love it. It is a text-book definition of an average film which to be fair is such an improvement over its predecessor that I think it actually deserves some praise for that. It's like when the thick kid spells his name right and you feel you should pat him on the back for managing not to dribble at the same time. Also, it's good to see that Wolverine is still so enjoyably cool that Hugh Jackman must get into character by smoking cigars rolled with John Waynes dead scalp. Not only that but since his sweary cameo in First Class, he hasn't half developed a fucking potty mouth on him. However sadly I would say that one of my biggest gripes with this film was in how for the majority of its running time he'd had his powers taken away from him. One of the main selling points of the character is surely his mutant healing abilities and so to remove them is slightly defeating the point. When someone punches Wolverine, I don't want him to wince, I want him to get angry and start smashing shit up like a drunk Mel Gibson during the Sabbath. I understand the logic behind him suddenly being vulnerable as supposedly it provides the film with a sense of threat. However does anyone really think that Wolverine is going to die? With the exception of Brandon Lee, there isn't a bullet out there that a studio would allow kill a main character in a valuable franchise.

"My garden needs tending!"
Many people have criticised the third act action sequence as being a bit out of place and although I kind of agree, I still loved every single fight in this film. The movie is composed of two elements - one part mystery and the other part action, but in honesty I think that it's the latter that's done much more competently. The drama kind of feels like a Chinatown for idiots whereas the fight scenes are actually pretty imaginative. For example there's an enjoyable scene near the end in which Wolverine is shot with so many arrows that despite dying and gushing blood from his back he ends up looking like Toy Story 3's loveable Mr Pricklepants. The films problem is therefore actually in its inability to blend its tone in a particularly un-obvious way. It doesn't help either that the end is completely obvious and the villains are a little on the shit side. I won't give away who the mysterious big bad is although anybody who doesn't work out their identity should probably think about waking up their brain from its forever-sleep. Plus there's another baddie here called Viper who spits poison, seduces strangers with a kiss and dresses in green. Short of having flowers sprouting out of her vagina, she's basically just Uma Thurman's desperately slutty Poison Ivy. I guess I'm not an expert but perhaps if comic book movies are going to start ripping each other off then maybe Batman and Robin is the one to avoid.

Still, like I said though, The Wolverine is an enjoyable but average film. It doesn't do anything spectacularly wrong and there's enough in it to make it worth at least two hours of your life. Unless of course you're dying and two hours is all you've got left, in which case I'd just crack on with the consequence-free rape and murder. The film has a strong main character, two well rounded female leads plus it makes good use of Japan as a location and culture. Oh but when I say, “well rounded female leads”, I should clarify that I do obviously mean it in terms of their depth and not as a smutty Roger Moore-esque one liner that refers to their tits. Film is a male dominated medium and so it's always nice to see some non-men get a look in too. Although having brought attention to it I'm sure that they do have nice tits as well. Personally I'd recommend The Wolverine to anyone who hasn't already seen it and I'm sure I'll end up buying the DVD. In fact, now I know it's just a guilty pleasure I'm kind of looking forward to seeing it again.

 Although whilst I've still got you here, I do have a slight theory. A while ago Nick Cave wrote a script that was meant to be a sequel to the film Gladiator in which Maximus was brought back from the dead and became a warrior through time. Is it just me or would this not have been a fucking amazing idea for a Wolverine movie? Just a thought, I guess. I suppose you could argue that, that idea was done in the opening credits of X-men Origins: Wolverine but that was a shit film that we've all forgotten and so should consider my suggestion an original idea. People think that the key tragedy of Wolverine is his extraordinarily long life which inevitably means that he's going to be suffering the loss of a lot of loved ones. But on the flip side to that it also mean he'll outlive a lot of people that he considers cunts. Finding out that someone you hate has died is always a good day if you ask me and I'm already well into preparing my, “Fuck You Piers Morgan Party”. However, for me the real tragedy of the character is that more or less nothing can kill him and yet he still mopes about looking like a fucking tramp. He could make a hell of a lot of money with some sort of Jackass style television show and from that point on live quite happily for the remaining centuries. I know money can't buy happiness but it can buy things that will make you happy, like medicine for sick children, computer games and a lot of cheap prostitutes. Anyway, as you can probably tell I'm never sure how to end these blogs so lets just save me three hours of struggling and say it's ended now. Blog has ended, see you next week and good bye!

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5 August 2013

Dreams Are A Cancer For The Soul

If there's something that really bugs me about films it's that they can occasionally leave a slightly dim audience with an unrealistic expectation of life. Romantic films are the worst for this because they act as a kind of propaganda for the mush-brained fantasist. Particularly thick people might watch something like The Notebook and from that point on, feel disappointment that their love life isn't quite so extreme or perfect. Those kinds of films generally depict women as pathetically needy and the men as obsessive stalkers but throw in a bit of soft focus or dreamy music and suddenly these sinister characters become people to aspire to. Disney is also particularly bad at this because they constantly brainwash kids into believing that everything happens for a reason and that there's always a happy ending. Perhaps I wouldn't be as bitter and hate-filled as I am if I'd been prepared for the shiteness of life at a younger age. Television will always make up for at least one inevitably absent parent and when our minds are at their mushiest, Uncle Walt promises us that everything will work out for the best. Occasionally there actually is a reason as to why bad things happen in real life although sadly that reason is usually that somebody else is being a massive, crusty twat.

I was therefore very surprised to see that Monsters University actually had a believable message that kids deserve to be taught. The film is Pixar's very first prequel to its brilliant Monsters Inc. and basically tells the story of how having an ambition can cause nothing but misery and disappointment. The plot this time follows Mike and Sulley as they ruin their chances of a higher education in a series of fuck ups that, for a frat movie, involves a surprising lack of drugs, alcohol and sex. The two young freaks dream of being professional 'scarers' but sadly they're both just a bit too shit at it to be able to do it properly. I know that by the time of the original film, that's exactly the job they're doing but it's at this point they realise that the organisation is corrupt and their entire working life has been based on a lie. I guess it's kind of like an ugly but talented X-Factor contestant working extra hard to become a singer despite the marketing disability of their fat, slime-drenched face. After years of trying though they finally reach the top and get an album deal only to discover that now to maintain a career they're going to have to suck so much cock that that it ruins their ability to sing. Now with their dick-bashed voicebox out of action, everything they do from this point on is auto-tuned into oblivion meaning that all their hard work was for absolutely nothing. Although that has to be the most long winded and pointless metaphor of all time, I'm sure we can all enjoy the imagery that it conjured up!

The party livened up as soon as they opened the heroin.
So anyway, the message here might be refreshingly brutal but I guess that means jack shit if the movie itself is a pile of crap-nuts. Luckily then, Monsters University is pretty enjoyable although it sadly never gets close to hitting the highs of the brilliantly entertaining first film. The movie itself starts off worryingly slowly as it introduces us to the University and works at showing us Mike's desire to make a living at Monsters Inc. Physically, the small anal-bead of snot might not be very frightening but he does seem to know all the theory of how to tap into a child's individual fears. Although these days you could probably just save time by hiding at the foot of any kids bed, whispering, “Now then, now then” and rattling your pedo-bling. It doesn't take too much studying to work out that most children have an underlying fear of being haunted by a famous, dead nonce. Thankfully though the film really pics up once we get to the halfway point where Mike and Sulley begin competing in various competitions. There's one sequence in which they must race past some poisonousness spikes that is actually hilarious. Just the smallest of pricks from one of these things causes their skin to explode in massive cancerous looking tumours so that by the end of the race everyone looks like the Elephant Man's diseased left bollock.

Little Mike couldn't wait to grow up
and start life as a butt plug.
 For me, a lot of prequels tend not to work simply because you know how they're going to end. If Mike had given up on his ambition and instead started work as something random like a shopkeeper, train driver or gay-basher, I'd have been surprised, but this obviously isn't the case as from the original film we know exactly where he ends up and how close him and Sulley become. However, there was a slight twist to this prequel's ending that I did like and which was slightly unexpected. The rest of this paragraph is obviously a slight spoiler so those of a moan-y disposition might want to skip ahead now... So it has been my misfortune of late to discover quite how useless a university degree actually is. If I wanted to use the certificate to shove up my arse as I violently fud myself off then perhaps I might not complain. However silly old me actually intended to use the thing to get a job before discovering that those fucktard employees are considerately more interested in who you know than what you can do. I therefore loved how Monsters University's conclusion suggested that getting a good job isn't down to your qualifications alone but simply getting your foot in the door and then working your way up. From what I've slowly learnt, the only thing that a degree will do is rule you out of certain jobs for being overqualified. I guess having staff that are too comfortably capable of doing the work must be quite the burden for all those businesses out there. Considering how closely Monsters University stuck to the underdog formula, this ending was very much appreciated.

 So I don't watch kids films very often but if the pre-film trailers were anything to go by then the majority of them looked fucking awful. This however was good fun with its downbeat message and undercurrents of nihilism. The pacing could have been a little smoother and the jokes didn't come as fast as I might have hoped for but it was still very enjoyable. Plus children will no doubt still love it anyway, even if that does mean bugger all considering how uncritical most of them are. Young kids in general are pretty stupid and would laugh at a cartoon remake of a snuff film so long as they still didn't really understand it. I know most parents are secretly one scream away from throwing their offspring into the canal so before you commit infanticide, I recommend you show the little brat Monsters University. Not only will it shut them up for an hour and a half but it'll also subconsciously prepare them for the horror of life. In a dying world of mundanity we're not all destined for greatness and there's really no harm in knowing that from birth.

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