Steve Jobs - A Pain In The Art?

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I guess the general vibe of the world is that nobody likes their boss. I mean, I know for fact that I couldn't fucking stand the Guy that I previously worked for. In case you didn't get that very un-gettable inside reference, the twat's name was Guy, but for the sake of some anonymity we'll just call him Mr Williams. Anyway- Mr Williams was one of those people who expected you to pull the moon out of your arse despite every one of his instructions being completely contradictory, impossible, or not my fucking responsibility. Danny Boyle's latest film Steve Jobs depicts an equally demented piece of shit, although at least this chap is changing the world instead of making pennies from a crappy sheet-metal company. The film is broken up into three very distinct acts with each third focusing on the avalanche of technical and personal problems that Jobs has shat on him before launching several new products. Of course everybody will be allowed their own interpretation of the film, but for me it's about one of two things.. either it's about art and what it means to be an artist or it's the story of a total fucking psychopath. Despite his loyal army of fanboys, the film depicts Jobs as what I'd call “a total Guy Williams” and what the rest of the world would probably just call a cunt. 

Does This Survive The Cut?

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I'll say right now that The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 is the best second half of a film that I've ever been forced into paying full price to see. Generally it's nice for a film to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but thanks exclusively to the greed of the money grabbing studios, that's sadly not the case here. Occasionally a franchise will start spewing out billions of dollars in box office returns and as the thing comes to its inevitable conclusion, the money men will do whatever they can to drag things out for as much as they can. As has been the case with other young adult franchises, their solution seems to be to stretch the final book out for longer than it needs to be and then slicing it in half like a magician with a real saw and an assistant that he doesn't particularly care about. Fans of the book will argue that the final two films had to be extended like this to get everything in, but that's only because they lack an emotional distance. When adapting for the cinema, it's often required to trim, chop, and change things for the story to translate between the two mediums. Kind of like shooting a hostage's arm off to kill a suicide bomber behind them. As an impartial spectator, I can see how that would have been for the greater good despite the probable pissyness of the louder, screaming loved ones.

How The West Was Really Won

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The traditional 'Western' genre is almost a propaganda movement for everything that's great about America and why it's often considered 'the land of opportunity'. This is of course assuming that what you really want from your land is the opportunity to commit mass genocide and then glorify it on film. In these older movies we'd see pure-hearted heroes wiping out the savages from the local area without ever questioning the fact that referring to the enemy as a 'native' might suggest they have some entitlement to fucking live there. It's kind of like being in an alternate world in which the Nazi's won the war and invented a genre of film in which lone Aryan soldiers would save the world from money hungry demons called The Jews.

Paddington And The Problem With Humanity

You can tell that Paddington is unrealistic because it features a foreign bear arriving in our country and nobody bats a single eye. If this had been set in the real world then he'd have arrived to find a load of pasty-faced fuck-ups looking for somebody to blame their own shitty lives on, and demanding to “send that bastard bear back!” The film presents a world in which we not only accept the existence of a talking animal but rather more unbelievably, it's also one in which we only treat an immigrant with mild irritation instead of an uneducated and twat-like contempt. The story begins when a bear named Paddington is forced to flee his native land due to it having been fucked into pieces by a natural disaster. The little scamp manages to find his way to London where he's taken in by a family that kindly decide to help him track down an explorer that encountered his species many years previously. The mother takes Paddington in due to her kindness, the father wants to get rid of him as soon as possible, the teenage daughter is completely indifferent, and the youngest son just loves him. Had this been real life then the plight of Paddington and his flee from the darkest Peru would only have garnered a modicum of sympathy had he arrived face down and dead on a beach.

So What Is Spectre Really About?

The dead are alive. These are the opening words that hammer on screen and begin James Bond's latest post-shag, pre-drink murder-sprees. At the start of Spectre, 007 is off-duty in Mexico and chasing down a fat foreign guy that he promptly kills for no good or obvious reason. Maybe this is an unofficial mission or maybe it's simply how an 'imperialistic right-wing fuck-face' chooses to relax. Either way it essentially kick-starts the latest story, dealing with the fate of MI6, the circumstances of Bond's childhood, and the threat of a sinister organisation that may even be more evil than the tax-dodging Starbucks. As a fully-obsessed fan of the series, I once received a poker chip from the casino in Skyfall for Christmas that a friend suggested I show to every single girl I meet. If I ever find one that recognises it as being from that film then apparently it's proof that she's the one for me and I should propose on the spot. Well, the same test could sort of be applied to any friendship with this entire film. The question is “What do those opening four words refer to?” If the answer is "Sum of da people in da opening Day of da Dead sequence look lyk zombies” then you're to get the fuck out of my life. As anybody with at least three brain cells will be able to deduce, the correct answer is “The filmmakers are literally spelling out the film's theme for all of the thick people in the audience”.