A Private Little War

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Outlaw King tells the story of legendary Robert the Bruce with the film beginning as he agrees to be England's little bitch. Apparently, the film is set in 1304, but as I saw peasants living in mud and the English trying desperately not to lose control of Scotland, I naturally assumed that it was set post-Brexit. A few years later, Robert notices how dissatisfied the Scottish seem to be with the slaughter of their hero William Wallace being something that particularly irks them. Although if he thought that they were pissed off with their national hero being killed and chopped into pieces then I look forward to him seeing their reaction to the future casting of Mel Gibson. From here Robert decides to fight back by being crowned the King of Scotland and rounding up a small rabble of bearded monsters that we call 'Scottish people'. I can't say I'm a historian and you could honestly write everything that I know about Scottish history onto a mouse's cock. Though from what I can gather, this film takes so many liberties with the facts that a game of Chinese whispers in a tourette's clinic would prove more reliable.

A DC Film That's Wonderful

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In 1913 the Suffragette Emily Davison threw herself in front of the King's horse and lost her life in the name of equal rights. From then on, all was right with the world and the two genders have been treated as absolute equals ever since. Well.. you know.. other than the slight difference in pay that women face. And the glass ceiling. Oh, and the shockingly high levels of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and sexual objectification that they suffer. By all means they do have the vote now, but if somebody dares to do an all-female reboot of Ghostbusters then that's where we men-folk draw the fucking line, it seems! As such, Wonder Woman is a revelation. It's the first big-studio Superhero movie to have a female lead in over twelve years. Of course there was Catwoman and Elektra before this, however like that time I was asked to do the dishes and so smashed them up the fucking walls to ensure I'd never be asked again, those two films were beyond shite. It's also the first ever superhero film to be directed by what Moonraker's Bond would refer to with surprise as 'a woman'. Oh, and it's also the largest budget film to be entrusted to the gender that we men have constantly referred to as, 'darling', 'sweetheart', 'love', and under very special circumstances, “sugar tits”.

This Helped Me To Stand Up To A Racist

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Everybody has their moment to shine when it comes to standing up to a racist... well, except others racists, obviously. When leaving the cinema the other day I happened to bump into a chap who'd taken offence at somebody's “fucking dirty Muslim beard”. Apparently some white guy nearby had a beard that reminded this man of a 'Muslim beard' whatever that is (presumably he'd spotted some halal meat in it... or something), and as a result, said beard-owner needed to “fuck off out the country with those other Muslim bastards if he loves them so much”. I don't know what worried me more, the fact that I was now presented with the dilemma of either having to stand up to a drunken racist, or alternatively pretend to be one in order to avoid a confrontation.. or the fact that this chap clearly thought I had the look of somebody that might agree with his mad bastard views. Admittedly I don't have a “fucking dirty Muslim beard”, however that's less to do with the my ill-informed and bigoted xenophobia and more to do with the fact that I just can't grow a fucking beard.

Star Trek Into Darkness

Star Trek Into Darkness - what the fuck is it about?

The film begins with Benedict Cumberbatch's John Harrison causing some shit that makes Kirk want to track him down and capture him. However perhaps there's more to this John Harrison than initially meets the eye? Perhaps he's not who we think he is? Perhaps he's somebody a little more iconic that that?! Well, I guess I Khan't tell you either way. Or maybe I can?! Meh, fuck it, he's playing Khan. Obviously. So the first half of the movie has a Godfather 3 style massacre- a villain who does one of those ridiculous 'get captured and then somehow predict everybody's movements' plans, and then it concludes with a spot of Wrath Of Khan karaoke. Oh, and all throughout, the guy who plays Robocop is trying to start a war between the Federation and the Klingons because, you know.. this is an action film and it's nice to see spaceships go 'boom'.

So was it shit or not then? (Spoilers.. obv)

Reviews were initially kind to this movie, however as the years have gone by its reputation has gone down faster than than a cheap whore that'll suck you off for less than a packet of fruit pastels. I think the initial love for it was simply because of how fast it moves and how fun it is and so people weren't given chance to turn against it. But as time has passed and everything it has to offer has sunk in, people have gotten an “it's ripping off the Wrath Of Khan” hump. Which is sort of justified of course, seeing as Kirk's cancery/radiation death is literally identical to Spock's in that earlier movie, but with one small difference. Wrath Of Khan's was between two men that had been friends for over thirty years and so was significantly more emotional. As such, many people feel the scene hadn't earned justification for itself due to this Kirk and Spock being about as moody with each other as a teenager that's been forced to stop tossing off and do some house chores. 

Except in Into Darkness's defence, I don't think its death scene is about Kirk and Spock's friendship, but simply how everything Spock touches turns to shite. His planet his destroyed, his Mum dies, all of his Federation leaders get wiped out, and then after all of that, his new mate dies too. If the Enterprise really was like a ship exploring the vast mysteries of the sea-like universe then I'd have Spock thrown overboard for being a fucking Jonah*. So I don't think we were meant to accept that Pine and Quinto's characters were as close as Shatner and Nemoy's, but rather Spock has finally fucking snapped. Hence him then going after Khan with all the anger and confusion of a man who's just sat down really hard on his own testicles. However if I do have a criticism of that scene being in this movie, it's that the Spock who died in Wrath Of Khan is in this fucking movie too. They even ask Nemoy's Spock about Khan. You'd think might mention “oh yeah.. that Khan's a right prick. By the way.. You know that reactor core thing? Maybe keep a fucking radiation suit by it, yeah?”. I mean that's just basic safety regulation, surely!

I suppose it's also a bit of a problem that Kirk is killed and then resurrected within the space of about ten minutes, which was also after his equally brief demotion and re-promotion had lasted about as long it'd take to have a piss. So I'm not saying that the script couldn't have done with being passed through the common sense machine at least one more time. Plus considering Khan's blood essentially brought Kirk back from the dead, and the film ends with Khan in a freezer, you've essentially removed any sense of threat from the rest of the franchise... whilst also doing the ship's doctor Bones out of a fucking job. And nor, as we discover as the film goes on, am I really sure why Khan thought it was a good idea to hide all of his friends in a load of missiles. Maybe it explained it and I missed it, but as stupid moves go, that is basically the equivalent of hiding your ice-cream in an oven and then wondering why it's melted. Short story.. because you were a dickhead.

I think the other thing people don't like about this movie is that it puts more of a focus on the Federation's militarisation than it does on the crew simply going off for an intergalactic jolly 'oliday. However it does kind of make sense when you consider that this timeline follows on from a film in which the planet Vulcan was destroyed. In which case, as a one off story to tell of the paranoid aftermath of those events, I was pretty happy with what I got. Although considering Vulcan was destroyed by a laser that was dangling from an easily breakable chain, I'm not so sure that they needed an army as much as they simply should have pulled their fucking thumb out and shot it down. Into Darkness might be a bit stupid but it is quite a lot of fun, and in a franchise in which Kirk asks “what does a God need with a Spaceship”, 'stupid but fun' isn't necessarily a step-down.

* Just in case you aren't an 18th century sailer or  haven't seen Master And Commander a 'Jonah' is basically a sailers version of a jinx.

 

Star Trek

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Star Trek - what the fuck is it about?

The film begins when the villain, Nero McBlandson, goes through a worm-hole that leads him directly into a franchise reboot. From here he kills Kirk's Dad and alters the timeline just enough that the original fans shouldn't get pissy about the un-canon-ing of their favourite show, but not quite enough to change anything significant. As such, we see Kirk become Captain of the Enterprise with Spock being his right hand man. I guess if your job is to issue orders then it probably helps for your second in command to have a good pair of ears.

So was it shit or not then?

Well surely we all have to admit that this movie is just completely fucking brilliant, don't we? Apparently the fans of the original films and shows hate this movie, but I honestly can't work out why. I mean, it's a prequel, sequel, and re-boot, all at the same time, which is at such a level of genius that I reckon it'd have Steven Hawking's computer shouting “clap, clap, clap”. Over the years I've seen this movie quite a bit, however this was my first viewing having seen every previous film in the franchise. As such, I became kind of worried that this time the performance by Pine and Quinto might pale in comparison to their much more iconic predecessors. Thankfully though this turned out not to be the case as, although Shatner does have his justifiably legendary status, Pine's secret weapon is simply that he can actually fucking act. Nor is it a problem for Quinto either due to Nemoy showing up in the film to point at him and shout “this is me from now on”. Oh and it also helps that the cast are also borderline clones of the original crew. I mean, having looked at the two actors, I refuse to believe that Karl Urban isn't simply what happens when the original Bones dips his balls in a Petri Dish full of stem cells.

One of the things that has changed for me since having watched the original films however is how much more emotional this has become. The opening ten minutes alone has always had me in tears but this time I found myself fighting them back with such regularity that I had to check that I wasn't going through the fucking menopause. Not to slag off the previous movies, but with them I think that I only cried once, and that was tears of joy after The Motion Picture finally ended and I discovered I hadn't actually lost a year of my fucking life to it. In fact, just compare the introduction of the Enterprise in that film to its introduction in this one and you'll see the difference. Here we get one of the most amazing scores of modern times aiding a shot that's like being stabbed in the brain with nostalgia.. in The Motion Picture we got a five minute sequence in which William Shatner gave his best 'fuck-me eyes' to an air fix model.

Not that I'm saying that this newer movie is perfect of course. Eric Bana's Nero is so uncharismatic that I'm presuming the black hole that he travelled through came into existence when he looked into a mirror and accidentally created a vortex of boredom. He's got a weird run too and it's really distracting. It's kind of a waddle you know, like if a fat person had been entered into a 'race for a pie competition'. Or to make that sound more Star Trek-related, it's as if William Shatner had been entered into a 'race for a pie competition'. Oh, and even ignoring Nero, there's a couple of distracting plot-holes scattered throughout. Most notably when Kirk is blasted onto a random part of a random planet and randomly runs into a random cave in which he randomly meets the older Spock. I don't know though, maybe that's how life works. Like if you take three rights you end up going left perhaps when so many things randomly happen like that things lead directly to where you need them to. Which in this movies case, was bullshit.

However that's one gripe in an otherwise brilliant movie. Sure the fans can moan that there was too much action and it lost the intellectual subtlety of what the franchise should be about, but what it lacks in subtext it gains in being the most consistently brilliant film of the franchise since Wrath Of Khan. I'm sorry the movie couldn't please everybody in favour of a the larger audience of general film fans, but to quote Spock “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”, and this movie is fucking brilliant. Thanks for reading, motherfuckers, and see you next time.

Great Scott!

Tony Scott is a bit like my old pet rabbit. I didn't know how much I loved either of them until the day they committed suicide. Obviously they chose different methods to end their own life but I guess the result was still the same. In fact, my rabbit’s death was more of a metaphorical tribute to Marlon Brando's career, if we're being completely honest. He got old, fat and lazy, refused to move, started shitting himself and eventually got maggots up his arse and died. But the fact remains that from the day that both my rabbit and Tony Scott concluded their story, I realised I was going to miss them. Previously I'd dismissed Scott as being the director of mostly dumb action films, which he obviously was. However this isn't a reason to dismiss him, it's a reason to celebrate him. I don't know if you've noticed but life is fucking shit! Let me summarise our human existence for you... It goes, birth, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, death. It's why millionaire directors jump off bridges, why cute little rabbits shit themselves to death, and why I'm so grateful for dumb action movies. At the end of a long hard week I think that a pizza and a film that doesn't require my brain is the best way to relax. Well either that or a blow job, but I'm single, a geek and unlike DVDs I sadly can't buy blow jobs off Amazon.com.

John's Got The Hump

Despite ranking a toxically high 9.7 on the geek-o-meter, I've never gotten into the original Star Trek from the 60's. From what I've heard though, the biggest difference between the main series and the new films is the level of action on display. Apparently the show was less about kicking people in the throat and more about philosophising and exploring humanity’s big ideas. Having said that however, there is a clip on YouTube of Shatner's Kirk on all fours pretending to be a horse whilst a dwarf rides on his back. I'm not sure what idea they were exploring here as I'm not sure of the context. Perhaps this is a deep metaphorical investigation into the works of Bertrand Russell or Rene Descartes, however when I see Kirk galloping about all I can think is what a stupid Kant. Having said that there's a part of me that would now like to watch the original show if only for the sake of irony. As though he's a cosmic Roger Moore, the idea of watching Kirk explore a 60's vision of the future and fucking anything with a pair of tits sounds like fun to me.

Released in 2009, the film Star Trek took the series out of the nerds’ bedrooms and made it cool enough for the rest of the world to enjoy. For some reason though, a lot of them seemed to hate it because, “it changed too much from the originals”. But the way I see it, they should be happy because the franchise was successfully rebooted in a way that didn't erase everything that they'd loved from the current cannon. Also by being set in an alternate timeline, these new films also avoided the main prequel problem of there being no real threat because it's obvious the characters will survive into the original films. Maybe I'm not a Trekkie/Trekker but I am a fan of Star Wars and until your franchise is rebooted with a massive fucking racist Jamaican Gungan thing, I've really got no sympathy.

"I knew I shouldn't have studied rocket science..."

Anywho, so Star Trek Into Darkness is all about the story of John Harrison who despite sounding like a fifth member of The Beatles is actually an intergalactic terrorist. Because John is running around blowing shit up like a massive space-twat Kirk is recruited to track him down and kill him. Like Raoul Silva and Loki however, Harrison instead finds himself captured and locked up in one of those giant villain sized fishtanks. The great thing about this film is in just how much of it is an ensemble with almost everybody getting something interesting to do. Kirk and Spock continue their blossoming bromance which involves about the same amount of bickering and sex as a ten year marriage. Scotty gets to run around whilst cracking jokes with his slightly dodgy accent and Uhura continues to prove that the franchise isn't racist. Alice Eve also shows up as Carol Marcus but from what I could gather her only purpose is to flash her pubes for the movie’s trailer and to look pretty. There's also a bit near the end where Carol is put in danger when it looked to me as though someone had just stamped on her vagina.

So before we go any further, I guess I should say that I really loved this film. From the moment it begins to the moment it ends it is just non-stop action. It's as though it was conceived in the racing mind of Oscar Pistorius whilst he enjoys a domestic shoot-out with the missus. However this relentless spectacle, as enjoyable as it is, is possibly one of the movies bigger problems. After watching Iron Man 3 last week I was reminded of just how big a fan of Shane Black I was and so began revisiting his older films. I also slightly lowered my mandatory four hours a day criteria of porn browsing in exchange for finding old interviews with him in which he talks about screenwriting. When asked about the state of the modern action movie he claimed that they were all a bit crap because there's no downtime. Instead, blockbusters these days try to simply deafen the audience by shouting at them for two hours. This is definitely the case with Star Trek Into Darkness which really cuts out the character moments and emotion of its predecessor in exchange for making things go bang a lot of the time. Having said that, there is a slightly hammy but enjoyable little speech by Cumberbatch in which he seems to accidentally morph into Alan Rickman.

In fact, the comparisons to Rickman don't end there with this film also suffering from the same minor problem as Die Hard. Like Hans Gruber, John Harrison is so charismatic and cool that despite the general dickishness, you can't help but find yourself occasionally rooting for them. I know I just criticised the movie for having too much action but the scene in which Harrison shits all over a gang of Klingons is still pretty cool. I also thought that one of the final fights between Harrison and Spock was pretty funny considering the size of their body frame. Back in the 80's action movies were dominated by giant hulk-men whose brains where the size of their steroids-shrunk cocks. Cut to only a few decades later and the beeftards have been replaced by two lanky nerds kicking the shit out of each other. Not only that but the film also features Peter Weller and Karl Urban meaning that director J.J Abrams decided to have his scrawny man-slap instead of a much more epic fight between Robocop and Judge Dredd.

Anyway so we're heading into spoilery territory now so it's about time those who are yet to see the film went for a wander. For the rest of us I'm sure it was a huge surprise to discover that Harrison was actually the series’ main villain of Khan all along. Of course though, by ‘huge surprise’ I mean completely fucking obvious thanks to IMDb thoughtlessly listing the name on their bloody cast list. I'm putting it out there that, that may be the most annoying thing since I asked my Dad if Se7en was any good and his response was, (spoiler alert), “Is that the one that ends with Gwyneth Paltrow's decapitated head in a box”. It took me years to get my revenge on him for that but eventually I seized my moment and locked him in our attic without food and only an angry wasp for company. True story.

For those who don't know, Khan is one of the big baddies of the original Star Trek world and was unsurprisingly the villain in the supposedly brilliant Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan. Personally I've not seen that film but I hear good things about it. From what I do know though, things are the reverse to Into Darkness with the original killing off of Spock instead of Kirk. This of course results in Shatner calling on all of his acting powers to famously scream, “Khaaaaaaaaaaan” with all the anger of man who’s being forced to hold in a particularly rebellious ands jagged shit.  From what I do understand though, the original at least had the balls to kill off Spock and keep him dead until the crappy sequel. In this film sadly, I don't think that anybody is under any illusion that Kirk’s death will be any more permanent than his earlier demotion. Near the start of the film, Kirk is fired, demoted and then promoted back to Captain with so much speed that that if you popped out for a piss you'd have missed it. On the brightside though it's good to know that thanks to Kirks pogo up and down the career ladder that by the year 2259 we'll have finally solved this recession. With all the warring alien races, that's at least something to look forward to.

I heard the supermarket is hiring...

So considering Khan was pretty much new to me, I think, as mentioned earlier that he's probably the best thing in the film. However what did annoy me was that it was his blood that was used to bring Kirk back from the dead. By doing that, there's pretty much no threat now in any future films ever. As soon as anybody dies, all the crew have to do is pop to the fridge, crack open a bottle of Khan juice and generously, drizzle it all over their favourite corpse. In fact the only person who is now in any danger is Bones who I'm assuming will quickly find himself out of a job. It's kind of like how in the original Superman he flies up into space and then backwards around the world to reverse time. From this point on, we've got nothing to worry about at all. Having said that, now people can come back from the dead it's nice to know that the future will be a time in which we can stop banging on about how special Jesus is.

I guess that's pretty much everything I've got to say on Star Trek Into Darkness. I've been writing for too long now and I'm kind of feeling ill after eating an out of date tube of Pringles. Obviously this film gives me even more faith that Star Wars Episode 7 will be great, with Abram’s main skill being to dish out nostalgia for things you're seeing for the first time. Actually if you want a tip, you should go to the bookies and bet money on Benicio Del Toro being the next Star Wars villain. Considering he almost played Khan here and Darth Maul in Episode 1, I reckon he's a dead cert. You heard it here first! Anyway I think I'm going to go and be sick now. Although in case you didn't believe me earlier about Shatner being ridden by a midget then here it is for your viewing pleasure... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avTfiRccYIA

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