Is Deadpool As Subversive As It Seems?

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Like my chunky bitch of an ex-girlfriend, Deadpool wants to have its cake and eat it. So in the case of the film, this means that you're meant to think that it's anarchic and subversive despite it being made by the studio that it's pretending to rebel against. As a result with Deadpool, you do get plenty of swearing and some friendly digs at the X-Men franchise, but you never get anything that's devastatingly deconstructive of the genre due to who's holding the money. It's like a whore that advertises themselves as the dirty little bitch that'll do anything whilst still having to check with their pimp before agreeing to wank off a donkey. Particularly if donkey wanking might cause problems for any future business or cross-franchise pollination. For example, people think that the Bond films became gritty because they attempted to catch up to the real world relevance of Jason Bourne. However I think it's actually because that franchise was well and truly destroyed by Austin Powers, who sent up the 007 formula so effectively that Bond, like all of his dead girlfriends, became absolutely fucked. Was Deadpool good fun? Yes. But do you really think that the superhero genre is now going to struggle to continue in its current format? Of course not! This is slightly more complicated than my ex who would more simply just like to have had some of her cake left after having already shoved the whole thing into her fat stupid face. Bitch.

Time In A Bottle

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Suspecting The Worst

If you've not yet seen The Hunt yet then cancel everything and get the fuck to it! It's a genius slab of drama that focuses on the trauma an adult can suffer when accused of introducing a child to his fleshy man-dick. I know the film has been out a little while but due to life’s incessant bullshit, I'd somehow unknowingly avoided it for far too long… however like the irregular schedule of the bastard bus, you wait forever for one pedo-film and then two come along at once. Only a couple of weeks after buzzing off The Hunt, I recently caught up with the pervert-tacular Prisoners. Both films take place during a holiday, begin with a deer hunt and feature the fucktarded consequences of spontaneous vigilantism. The difference between the two is that in The Hunt you know that the accused is innocent of his crime. Prisoners on the other hand is a bit more of a kiddy-fucking free for all.

Prisoners tells the story of two families whose Thanksgiving is ruined when they misplace their daughters like a set of shitty car keys. Luckily though there was a greasy looking critter parked outside their house all that day in a large pedo-mobile who probably knows where they are. One of the missing girls’ dads, played by Hugh Jackman, therefore makes the logical decision to kidnap the oddball and punch the living shite out of him until he talks. I guess he just figured that the chap would be more likely to co-operate if choking on his own teeth and being screamed at by fucking Wolverine. Meanwhile, detective Donnie Darko is on his own mission to find the girls and uncovers so many more pedo-ish suspects that the area starts to resemble a holiday camp for retired BBC presenters. The plot set-up then is simply that there are several potential kidnappers with Jackman's character already having picked his 'molester du jour’ before even glancing at the full menu. What plays out is therefore just a classic game of nonce-roulette in which you take one of several local creeps, crack open their head and then hope to fuck that you had the right one.

You've got to love There's Something About Mary...

On the bright side, there's no doubting that Prisoners is a good film. In fact for the first two-thirds there's an enjoyably suffocating Zodiac-esque feel to the thing as it attempts to establish itself as being both sombre and weighty. Helping this is of course the predictably brilliant acting in which Wolverine and Donnie Darko do their best to inflate their unblinking eyes to blood-shot and bulbous levels of intensity and anguish. Nothing hammers home the serious intentions of a film more than having your two leads stare so hard that their face veins explode in a way that only naturally occurs during anal rape. Although both men are indisputably impressive throughout, I think that for me I was perhaps most impressed by Gyllenhaal. I guess that you kind of expect intensity from Jackman because he's most famous for playing an angry twat with knives up his hands, however Gyllenhaal has had to fight to be taken seriously as an adult against the curse of his annoyingly handsome but boyishly dopey face. Here though he manages to believably play a demented detective so successfully that I almost didn't mind the odd haircut that made it look as though he was being scalp fucked by a tattered doormat.

If they're on one side though then I suppose we should also have a little look at their rivals over on Team Nonce. Sadly though, I kind of think that this is one of the areas that the film kind of lets itself down in as it lazily just reaches into the big bag of pervert clichés. Paul Dano plays one of the twitchy suspects and don't get me wrong- he is as amazing here as he usually is in terms of immersing himself in the role. I don't know what it is about Dano considering I know nothing about his real life but for some reason I really think me and him could one day be friends. Although that might just be because of his mute performance in Little Miss Sunshine and my desire to know somebody who literally has no choice but to listen to my everlasting drivel… However as great a performance as it is, his character couldn't be more classically pedo if he walked around with his cock disguised as a new born puppy. As the other suspects show up they too all have a look about them that's so sinister that you'd be forgiven for an involuntary scream of “FUCK OFF, CREEPER” if you passed them in the street. Films like Hard Candy and The Woodsman went someway to showing that the most dangerous thing about a sex offender is that they don't necessarily look like monsters. They could be anybody, anywhere and at any time, but here with their greasy hair, twitchy energy, bullet proof glasses and the pin-prick, tiny eyes of shrew, they couldn't be anything fucking else.

The other festering cock of a problem is pretty much the entire third act which, in my opinion, kind of undermines everything that had been done over the previous two arse-numbing hours. Like I said, the film has a moodiness to it that suggests a degree of realism and importance however the concluding third just goes a bit fucking mental. I won't spoil the details but it's like the plot slips over and accidental falls tit first into the boring world of the bog-standard thriller- the kind where some dick of a main character starts acting like the worlds thickest plank and walks gormlessly into the gaping, toothy snatch of the villain. Real life is both dull and as predictable as fuck and does not contain as many twists as this story attempts to suggest. If a little girl goes missing then the odds are she's dead- killed by either the school caretaker or her pervy uncle. What starts off as a downbeat, gritty depiction of child abduction concludes with so many bullshit 'surprises' that it's like a weird pedo-sequel to Ocean's Eleven. It's a shame too because everything starts off pretty great, it's just that when it comes time to explaining itself, it kind of starts to fuck up. Maybe if they'd gone for the gothic horror of Silence of the Lambs, the conclusion would have rang slightly more believable. It's like that moment when you ask somebody who’s lying a question and suddenly they get stumped and splutter out some panicked bollocks that sounds so much shitter than the previously prepared story of crap.

Anyone who uses a Blue Shell is a dick.

Still the whole thing is still pretty enjoyable for the most part. It's just such a shame that for a film that's about two and half hours long the story still seems to have bigger, gaping holes than an eighty year old whore. If they could just re-write the end and then squeeze the bagginess out of it then I think you'd end up with a movie worthy of its performances. Although, to give credit where it's due in regards to the end, there is a pretty cool high-speed car scene in the middle of heavy snow as the driver's head-wound gushes blood into their eyes. The film was lit by a cinematographer named Roger Deakins whose work, for those who don't know, is the human equivalent of having your eye gauged out by a golden paintbrush. Everything he works on has his unmistakable stamp of beauty on it and this is no exception. However this speeding car scene near the end is almost painful in its artistic genius. With the snow, the blood and the passing neon signs, there's so much colour being seared into our retinas that everything starts to look like Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road if it had been designed by a psychopath.

Prisoners is a good film that's just nowhere near perfect. If you have a few spare hours and there's nothing else to do then I recommend you give it a go.  On the other hand though, The Hunt almost is perfect and as I said at the start, you should go check that out before it's too late and we're all dead. They're both very enjoyable but if you only get chance to relax to one film about child abuse this year then really, it isn't a hard decision as to which you should go for. I don't regret having paid to watch Prisoners at all but if I'm honest I don't think I'd pay to own it on DVD. If however I was lucky enough to trip over the frozen corpse of a rotten tramp and he had a copy of it in his lethally chilled begging-claw then I would be more than happy to steal it from him and I'd appreciate the repeat viewing. But only under those circumstances.

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The Scum of the Universe?

Okay, so I'll say right now that it's going to be a pain in the tits to discuss Ender's Game without spoiling anything. The entire point of the film is more or less revealed during its conclusion which pretty much makes it a proper bollock-ache to talk about. Anybody who’s seen the masterpiece that is A Serious Man will know exactly what I mean by this... anyone who hasn't needs to sort their lives out and see it right the-fuck away. If you've not seen Ender's Game yet then don't worry because I'm like a smack-addict were blog hits are concerned and so will write this to suit everybody. I know you didn't need to know this but just like when Lucius Fox invented a cure to the Scarecrows fear toxin, I just want you to be aware of the fucking effort that I'm putting in.

So I guess we should get the controversy out of the way at the beginning... Orson Scott Card is the author of the original book that the new film Ender's Game is based on and he's a cunt. As it turns out he's a massive fucking homophobe who seems to have upset quite a few people with his stupidly shit views on same sex relations. To sum them up, he basically doesn't like the idea of people rubbing their matching genitals up against each other and that those who do “cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society." He's also a full-on God botherer which I assume must be where this twattish outlook is coming from. Personally I couldn't give a turd about what the guy thinks because I really couldn't give a turd about him... but if I have to pick between the bullshit morals of an unproven God or the acceptance of ‘real love between two real humans’ then I'm afraid that the magical sky-man can go fuck himself. Sadly though, by disillusioning so many people, several groups have been loudly shouting for us to boycott the movie adaptation of this demented twat’s book. Despite this though, and as much as I can understand their anger, I guess this is a stance that I can't really condone either as I do believe that you really need to separate the art form the artist. Polanski's Chinatown is a masterpiece but that doesn't mean the film in anyway endorses the director’s previous hobby of doping up kids and then fucking them up the arse. I actually do have some advice on how to get around this problem but I'll save it until the end because firstly, this paragraph is getting way too long and secondly I can never think how to end these blogs. Anyway so prepare yourself for paragraph three where I think I'll talk about the films plot.

"So.. I see you're a scrawny slab of nothing..."

Ever the man of my word, the films plot takes place in the slightly distant future when an alien race has invaded Earth. In the book, the creatures are referred to as 'buggers' although thankfully because not everybody is a gay hating arse-maggot, that's not the case here. Luckily for us the alien invasion is halted when a heroic pilot flies straight into their Queen's mothership and suicide-bombs the shit out of her. Just like every other alien movie, it seems that despite their vast numbers all you have to do to kill them all is simply kill off their boss. If that is the case and you're an alien race that's smart enough to master intergalactic space travel then maybe next time leave the fucking Queen safely at home, hey? If my life depended solely on the survival of another then I'd have them securely locked up in my basement Joseph Fritzl-style and not paraded about in a war zone like a massive neon retard. Anyway a few years later we war-mongering humans are pretty paranoid that the aliens will soon return but with the advantage of now being fully pissed off. To prepare for this a scheme has been implemented in which kids that may prove useful are located and trained up to become child soldiers. I'm not sure who thought this would be a good idea but it's nice to see that America will eventually adopt the militaristic policies of Joseph Kony. Anyway, so at Battle School a lanky kid named Ender is discovered who, despite having legs that seem to go all the way up to his shoulders, is quickly believed to be “The One”. Although I've seen so many films about “The One” now that the term’s exclusivity seems to have been completely raped into meaninglessness. Because of this, Ender is therefore put through a series of rigorous tests to determine whether or not he can save us from being buggered by the buggers. After their initial defeat the aliens are still weak and yet to retaliate and so our plan is therefore to find a way of heroically kicking the shit out of them whilst they are both down and still vulnerable.

Okay so despite all the controversy, the main thing to say about this film is that regardless of all the clichés I actually thought it was really good. I hadn't read the book, I didn't really remember the trailers and if anything I went in thinking that it probably wouldn't be worthy of Harrison Ford's nerdgasmic, sci-fi legacy. Well, I came out still thinking that too, to be honest, but although this might not be Blade Runner or Star Wars, that's not to say he doesn't elevate the thing by simply turning up. For the most part, the film is just Harry Potter in space where our fate depends on the adventures of some pale young gonk as he attends a suspiciously paedophile-free but magical boarding school. There's even a gravity-free room here in which everybody floats about playing a dumbed down version of Quidditch. Although considering that the rules of actual Quidditch are about as complicated as a Victorian tarts’ anal pubes, this is really no bad thing. However, what is predominantly an averagely good film is donkey-punched into being a hell of a lot more interesting by a game-changing last act twist. Ender's Game deals with the morality of war, what it means to be human, the battle between ethics and victory, the merits of genocide and the theft of childhood. For a film that's based on the works of such a prejudiced fuckwit there is also a surprisingly blatant theme of tolerance present here as well. Like Starship Troopers before it, Ender's Game is further proof that a book shat out of a twats mind can still make an unrelatedly entertaining movie.

"You're the fucking problem you fucking Dr. White honkin' jam-rag
fucking spunk-bubble!"

Starring in the lead role of Ender is Asa Butterfield who has to have the dandiest fucking name I've ever heard. However considering the complexity of the character, he doesn't do too badly for someone so young. Not only does Ender have the burden of humanities survival resting on his frail cracker shoulders but he's also got his own sanity to deal with as he tries to decide whether he's a leader or a sociopath. I won't say he's great in the role but other than a de-pubified DeNiro, I think a lot of people would struggle with such a range. Like I said before, Harrison Ford is as great as you'd expect him to be, being both stubborn and sort of understandable despite the curse of a fairly two dimensional character. There's a bunch of other kids too but most of them are fairly forgettable leaving only a vague memory of irritation. The girl from True Grit was alright I guess but as a devout hater of children I'd still keep her shackled up in an attic until she was old enough to be interesting. Viola Davis is somebody that's usually really good but was given fairly little to do beyond argue ethics with Harrison Ford and then storm out like a trampled wife whose realised the dinner is burning. This therefore only leaves Ben Kingsley to leave an impression which is obviously achieved when he opens his mouth and reveals the random fucking accent of the week that he's been playing with. It's also amusing to see that despite the extremism of his Darth Maul-style face tattoos, Sir Ben is still maintaining that bald head and goatee combo that he's been rocking since the dawn of time.

I guess the only thing left to mention is the action and quality of special effects which here are both capable and engaging. I mention the effects only because director Gavin Hood’s previous film was X-men Origins: Wolverine which looked so bad it was like the CG had been shat out of a pixel factory during national 'fuck-up at work day'. It also goes without saying that Ender's Game is significantly better written than Hood’s previous film although that's probably obvious considering that a fat man could produce a better script if he farted a few pebbles across a keyboard. I was a little confused about why they were rearing child soldiers when adults could just as easily do the job. However, because I'm in a generous mood I'll assume that must be because I missed something and not because the film didn't explain enough as to why this was the case. The action is as engaging as any half decent action film ever is although it does lack the jizzy-rainbow of imagination that made Pacific Rim such an artistic twat-hammer to the eyes.

I understand that people don't want to see this film because they don't want their hard earned cash going into the original authors grubby, hate-filled pockets, but due to its brain, discussions on morality, themes of tolerance and Harrison-fucking-Ford I do think that the film deserves to be seen. The news hitting the web right now suggests that Card won't receive a penny of the films profits which, if true, is surely enough of a reason to at least not intentionally boycott it anyway. If however that's still not enough for you then here is my potential solution that I promised you earlier on. Say you spend about £9ish on a cinema ticket then why not also/instead simply post a steaming pile of dog shit to Card’s house? That way you get to see the film and he'll spend the money he may have made on carpet cleaner and air-freshener. Maybe this doesn't sound harsh enough considering that he basically has a Hitler-esque hate for a large portion of members of our species, however there was this one time that my dog sprayed a chocolaty soup of shite onto the kitchen floor that was so fucking rancid that cleaning it up caused my Dad to unexpectedly expel a mouthful of vomit down himself. I promise you that watching that was both the funniest and lowest moment of my entire life. Ugh, see even after setting myself up for an easy end this still doesn't feel conclusive enough because that last bit wasn't really about the film. I guess therefore I'll just give up and say that the next sentence will be the actual end of this week’s blog. And ever the man of my word, it is.

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Follow this blog or I'll fucking cut you.

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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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Follow this blog or I'll fucking cut you.

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X-Men: Business Class

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