Come With Me If You Want To Live

Due to it consisting exclusively of scroungers, deadbeats, nutters and fuckwits, if I can avoid my mums family then I damn-well will. However thanks to some recent bullshit I accidentally found myself on the Facebook profile of one of my seventeen year old cousins who I'd not laid eyes on in over a decade. Despite having refused to do a days work in her short and pointless life, it seems that right now the fat, skanky little tart is living freely in her own flat after having pushed offspring out from her slutty little minge. In the job section of her profile she had simply written, “I'm a full-time Mummy <3”, which was a sentence that annoyed me so much that my eyes burst and sprayed blood everywhere. Between my Aunty and her current partner, the two alpha-rats have created eleven children who, as in the case of my teenaged cousin, have also began to pop out their own ugly, state funded mutants. Like a plague of human filth, they breed, consume, and die having contributed nothing to society beyond being a constant supply of brain-dead guests for those shit chat-shows in which toothless yokels scream blue murder at each other after stealing from people who work. Urgh... To conclude this rant I'll get to the point... Believe it or not but the life cycle of these parasitic clagnuts is actually encouraged by the film The Terminator... kind of!

I'm going to hope that everybody on the planet has seen this film although for the sake of those suffering from head trauma, I suppose I'll do a quick recap. Basically, in the future, humanity is at war with the machines because they're better than us and we have this pissy little habit of not wanting to die. To try and scupper our resistance, the robots initiate the standard war time procedure of travelling back through time and murdering our leader’s mum Sarah Connor before she can give birth to him. I actually think that Churchill was planning to do that to Hitler before the Americans finally got their shit together and found some perspective. Also at the same time as this, humanity has also sent Sarah a soldier for protection because we need her alive and the tacky haired bitch seemed oddly underprepared. I suppose this was back in the 80's when most women weren't expecting to be randomly slaughtered by a naked, psychopath with bright red-eyes... Ah who doesn't feel a tinge of nostalgia for our pre-bathsalts days?!

Cum with me if you want to live...

Okay so from this point on I'm going to just assume that you've popped your Terminator cherry as I can't be arsed over-explaining everything and I'll be going into some spoilers... If you've not seen the film then from here on you should probably just fuck off and repair that half life that you've so far wasted the shit out of.... Anyway, so obviously the film is a classic blah, blah, blah... However if I have one question it is simply this- what was it about the 1980's that resulted in so many films following a main character as they to trick their dad into fucking their mum? Not only was there Back To The Future's creepy love triangle of incest but this too! John Connor gives his soldier mate a picture of his mum as spaffing-rations before sending him back through time to future spunk her into getting pregnant. This baby then grows up to be John which means that his mate who he got all hot and bothered with the sexy MILF pics turned out to be his own dad?! And I thought my friends were motherfuckers... But then if John had to send his dad back in time to screw himself out of his mum then how did that happen in the first place? Because presumably there's a point where the future hasn't happened yet and she's not able to get pregnant because she's not met the man who'll give her the unborn baby that'll hook them up... Err what? More confusingly of all though, how could anybody ever send their dad on a mission to fuck themselves out of their own mum? I mean seriously... These films were made to be fun and yet just the thought of that makes me want to dribble vomit down my tits in disgust. 

...And this is where all that stuff regarding my useless bag-of-puss family comes into it. If you pay close attention to Terminator 2: Judgement Day then you'll discover that it is set ten years after the first film with Sarah Connor apparently now being twenty-nine years old. This means that in The Terminator when she gets boned by the scratty looking soldier, she must have only been about eighteen or nineteen years old. Nothing wrong with that I suppose except for the fact that she’s not in a steady relationship, she's jobless and now she's got a child to bring up too. Who’s going to pay for that little bastard I wonder? Not only that but because her child is meant to be Earth’s saviour, we're all meant to be happy that this gullible mullet ends up hanging a crusty donut. Subconsciously this film is putting into kids minds that an unplanned teen pregnancy is both cool and acceptable...

I realise that this point is kind of anticlimactic in comparison to the indulgently long slurry of bile about my family at the beginning. Nor do I really believe an adult film should worry about being watched by children. But you know... It's my blog and sometimes I like to find reasons to call my relatives, “alpha rats” and “fuckwits”. To make up for this I'll distract you by quickly justifying the statement about kids being influenced by this when it is clearly a film for adults. Basically, children are fucking devious and will get whatever they want. I wanted to see it when I was younger and so to get around the watchful eye of my parents I simply asked my confused nan (from dad's side) to tape it off the television for me. She didn't know what the fuck it was and my parents didn't know what she'd done as 'Schwarzenegger' is a difficult word to spell. For a good few weeks I had a video lying around my room with a title written on in old lady scribble calling it, “Some Arnold Sharonarroneger thing”. It would have been the perfect crime had I not then spent the next few weeks finding any opportunity to leave rooms just to have an excuse to announce, “I'll be back”.

"I yam an gooood yaactoorr"

Other than being a contributing factor to my estranged fucking relatives though, The Terminator is obviously a complete masterpiece. If I'm being honest, it's probably also quite a small influence on their breeding in the grand scheme of things but still... There are plenty of things that make this film as great as it is but let’s face it, Arnie is probably the main one. I'm a huge Schwarzenegger fan and although I admit that he has been involved in some truly terrible movies he's also been in a lot of great ones too. I need to see Batman and Robin again about as desperately as I need a swift kick to an open wound on my bollocks but surely nobody can deny the genius of Total Recall or Predator? I love the fact that in real life he managed to take over a state of America by constantly quoting an out of context catchphrase but I'm also glad he's back on our screens now. He was away for ten years and it's about time he returned to what he was made for and starred in some brand new classics... Preferably that aren't also part of The Expendables franchise which as far as I'm concerned just looks too much like an explosive Hollywood remake of the British sitcom Dad's Army. I don't think that Arnie is the greatest actor of all time but I think he's better than some people give him credit for. In fact I would even argue that his only real problem is his distracting accent which although ‘cool’, it makes everything he says sound like he's just fallen down a massive hole. Arnie is capable of great acting when he finds the right part and with the right director to guide him. In this case it just so happens that for the role of an almost silent machine that simply cannot show any human emotion whatsoever... he's perfect!

To kind of conclude, I guess it's interesting to note that director James Cameron pulled the same trick with this franchise that he did with the Alien one too. Whereas this part-one is a kind of slasher/horror film, part-two then switched genres to become much more focused on action. I'm still quite a fan of the shitter films that came after those first couple and I'm quite looking forward to part five although I've no clue what the story will be. So far for that they've just cast both John and Sarah Connor with Sarah being interestingly younger than her son. Does this mean that we'll be travelling back in time to meet her as a teenager again? Possibly! The way this incestuous franchise works it really wouldn't surprise me either if John ended up being sent back to protect her just so he could fuck her and become his own dad. Meh, I'm optimistic either way and I guess we'll have to just wait and see! 

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Laugh And The World Laughs With You

Being trapped in a building with no hope of escape must be horrible. Some people are held hostage by terrorists where they have body parts hacked off and posted back to their loved ones. Others are kept locked up by deranged family members who use them as sex slaves for decades at a time. I had a similar experience to this myself once when I'd ordered a package off the internet and then had to wait in all day for the postman to deliver it. It… was... horrific. Enduring the experience with me was a close friend who I shan't name because firstly he doesn't come out of this story too well and secondly anybody that knows me will already have guessed that I'm talking about Graham. So the postman was meant to drop our shit off in the morning but made us wait presumably in the knowledge that his delivery was essential to the continuation of our existence. We thought the wait was getting bad after two hours... If they had told me then that it would be seven hours would it have been easier to endure? Or harder? As the madness set in I turned to my friend and both jokingly and rhetorically asked, “How long do you think we'd have to be locked in a room for before we just went mad and started fucking each other?” Without even skipping a beat, he turned to me and with a completely straight face answered, “At least a couple of days”... A couple of days? I was thinking more along the line of years or decades not forty eight fucking hours!  In the time it would take for most people to get a bit antsy, he'd have already gone mental and started seeing me as a huge, greasy, slab of hump meat! The reason I tell this is because it just goes to show how quickly the effects of enforced confinement can set in and how extreme the reactions can be. Having said that I'm pretty sure my friend is secretly also a bit of a bummer too.

Old Boy is a South Korean thriller that was released in 2003 to critical acclaim and which quickly became one of my all time favourite films. It tells the story of an anonymous pisshead named Oh Dae-Su who is randomly picked up off the street and then locked away in a small room for an undisclosed duration. He doesn't know who has imprisoned him, he doesn't know what he's done to deserve it and most importantly he doesn't know why he gets released after fifteen years of captivity. Basically, all I can say is that his kidnapping initially presents so little explanation that every possible detail has mystery spunked all over it. Once free, Oh Dae-Su only has a few days to answer all of these questions which is a puzzle he decides to crack with the use a blood stained fuck-off claw hammer. I watched this film for the first time on a portable DVD player when I was about fourteen years old and whilst sat between my parents on a long and cramped aeroplane journey. The film contains scenes of wanking, shagging, torture, violence and a few blatant titty shots. What an awkward fucking flight that was.

This looks like a man who has his shit together!

Sadly for its population, South Korea is forced to endure the neighbours from hell by being situated below the deranged fucknuts of the North. If this film is anything to go by though, it seems that living so close to the apocalypse-loving brain farts of Kim Jung-TossPot must affect their collective sanity because Old Boy is completely fucking demented. The problem with a lot of films is that we've seen it all a hundred times before with such lazy bullshittery resulting in a painfully chronic sense of predictability. However if anybody can guess where Old Boy is going from one scene to the next then I genuinely think that you should contact James Randi and claim the prize for his $1,000,000 paranormal challenge. One minute we're watching a fat man having a piss in a pot plant and the next his crazy hair is reaching for the sky as he devours a severely undercooked mouthful of octopus. Nothing is as it seems in this movie with every set piece being more raw and shocking than a bum-love session onboard the phallic tip of a lightening rod during thunder season.

Although the film is based on a Japanese Manga series the style and direction here is clearly the fault of director Park Chan Wooks twisted cinematic vision. From the face slapping musical outburst at the beginning to the mind-blowing one shot corridor fight and via a tooth crunchingly genius use of Vivaldi, Old Boy is a complete masterpiece. With names like Big Sleep and Breathless, the film’s soundtrack hints towards an appreciation of old school classic noirs which is also echoed by its gothic gloominess and a suffocating sense of bleakness. However if this is influenced by the mystery films of yesteryear then thanks to Wooks direction, it's more like watching a Humphrey Bogart thriller through the bleary eyes of a drunken rage.

However even amongst all of this chaotic insanity perhaps what lingers the most is not just the tongue snipping horror but also the epic journey of Oh Dae-Su as he falls into a mindfucking pit of soullessness. Sure this is expressed through the still-bat-shit-surreality of Kafkaesque giant ants and the trance induced repression of a schizophrenic reflection but that doesn't make the journey any less human. In essence I suppose one of the most prominent themes running through Old Boy is that which was previously summed up by Nietzsche in this handy little quote, “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you”. In honesty I've never read anything by Nietzsche but I figure I'll sound smarter if I keep dropping his shit into conversation.

This film is dedicated to our friend Squiddly Diddly.

If I could express my love for this film through an act of violence then I would have to perform something so horrific that it would leave hundreds dead. In fact it was a recent viewing that made me realise that if I were to compile a list of my top one hundred films then Old Boy would very definitely be in the top ten. Oh, and because I'm single and a geek I obviously and depressingly did then spend some time making that list. However I do have one issue with the movie and that is the discomfort I feel during the scene in which our main character munches down on a live octopus. I've been raised on Disney films to see animals as having human characteristics and I've listened to enough Morrissey songs to know that killing them is wrong. I realise that due to the fact that I eat meat I'm a huge hypocrite for this but if it's any consolation I do feel hugely guilty about it. If only I'd been forced to eat the green shit when I was younger I would happily convert to vegetarianism now, however my fussy eating and love of meat has sadly made this life-change unlikely to happen any time soon. I think the way I feel about eating animals whilst believing it to be wrong must be similar to the confliction that a gay chap feels if they've been raised to believe as fact the bullshit of a religion that hates them.

However, although I have a need to eat, I don't have a need to see films that in anyway harm or encourage the mistreatment of animals. I've pretty much decided to never see Cannibal Holocaust because I'm aware of the abuse and death performed on several creatures which is something I find so morally repugnant that it sickens the tits off me. The octopus scene here bothers me but I cling to the knowledge that eating them live is simply something that's done in South Korea that we in the West just don't do. Therefore although the octopus was murdered I suppose it was a fate that the poor bugger was always going to face and not one that it endured simply for the sake of the scene. I'm also aware that the characters motivation for eating the thing was due to him being so starved of life. This is obviously different to Cannibal Holocaust in which creatures living in the wild were caught, hacked up and mutilated solely for the titillation and entertainment of a heartless audience of screwed up cunts.

Horrific cruelty aside though this film is, in conclusion, sheer genius. It's taken about ten years to rehash but finally Hollywood has smelled its waft and decided to try and make a quick buck from shitting something out and then relying on brand awareness. I remained optimistically optimistic about the remake on the grounds that they were firstly going back to the original manga rather than the 2003 film and secondly it was to be directed by Spike Lee who at least isn't usually a turd. Inevitably though the new film has finally been squeezed through the lubed up hoop of unoriginality and according to all of the terrible reviews it is sadly not very good. I personally haven't seen the film and so can't say for myself but apparently it simply copies all of the beats from this original and then tones down all of the weirdness that made the story great in the first place. If you're wanting to make a mainstream film then perhaps this twisted tale of insanity, violence and freaky fucking might not be the place to start. If however you want to see something fresh, shocking, funny, cool and that champions a use of the underrated word “dick shit”, then Old Boy is your place to go! 

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Hello Mr Seagull

In general, I'm proud to say that we Brits tend to be drawn to a darker side of life than perhaps our American cousins are. Where they celebrate respected figures from their past such as ex-presidents and equal rights campaigners, our identity is instead made up of thieves, murderers and cunts. I'm sure there have been plenty of people questing for peace at some point in our history however the names that I remember are Dick Turpin, Guy Fawkes, Robin Hood and Jack The Ripper. I guess what this shows is that just like a public school toff, Britain really does have the unquenchable taste for an arsehole.

This preference can also be seen in our comedy output in which it seems that we favour the outspoken knobheads over anything else. Again this differs to America who for some reason seem to prefer fucktards like Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin and The Bluth Family. I'm not saying that we don't like them too it's just that when we have to get creative, our collective psyche produces things that are a touch darker. Our most popular characters include such dicks as Basil Fawlty, Jim Royale, Malcolm Tucker, Victor Meldrew, David Brent and of course Alan Partridge. Although the cause of their dickishness varies with each, the common theme seems to be that all of them are more than willing to speak their mind and with little regard to how much of a twat it might make them seem. My theory for this is that as a nation we tend to be quite repressed and so hide our frustrations through sarcastic politeness and life threatening stomach ulcers. Therefore watching someone who’s clearly free of our crippling self-awareness is like a nation-wide therapy. 

Norfolk's maddest man!

Although British sitcoms have had a particularly dodgy history of translating to film, the latest of our creations to attempt the leap of faith is Alan Partridge however the movie deserves credit right away for not doing the ball-numbingly dull cliché of simply having the characters go on holiday. Everything from On the Buses to Kevin and Perry Go Large have tried that and unsurprisingly this valiant attempt at not learning from a previous mistake has usually resulted in ninety minutes of pure sun-baked shite. If they're all just lemmings mindlessly following each other over the cliff though, then Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa is the first to notice the twatting chasm of death and decide to fuck it right off. Rather interestingly, it seems that this film is instead drawing inspiration from something like Dog Day Afternoon in which a botched hostage situation becomes a media clusterfuck. To summarise the plot, Alan's radio station is about to be taken over by a bland corporation that intends to make redundant any of its employees that have committed the bastard sin of being over thirty. As a result, one of the staff goes absolutely apeshit with a shotgun, takes over the radio station, ties up the management and makes Alan the middle man between him and the police. The film is kind of like a Norfolk based remake of Die Hard and about as cool as that probably sounds.

There's a simple question that will quickly assess whether or not you'll like this film- ‘do you like Alan Partridge?’ If the answer is no then I imagine that for you this will be the comedy equivalent of smearing jam up your arse and then spooning in some horny fire ants to clean it out. Luckily for me though I answered yes and so what followed was not only one of the funniest films of the year but pretty much the funniest film I can remember seeing at the cinema. I mean I probably laughed a lot more whilst watching Dunston Checks In but that was 1996, I was about seven years old and children are morons. There was a toddler at my house the other day and he laughed more at his own feet than the carefully crafted wanking jokes I was writing. The fucking idiot. Anyway for anybody who’s yet to meet Alan, he's self-obsessed, arrogant, easily agitated and so basically a prick. However, I still find him sympathetic because all of this comes from his need to be famous which in itself is due to his insecurities and desire to be loved. Plus he has an appreciation that's almost equal to mine for the Bond Franchise and in particular Roger Moore which is I think enough to excuse anybody of almost any behaviour. It's depressing how often I talk to people about that franchise and end up mentally screaming, “Stop getting Bond wrong!”

I think one of the reasons that this film works so well is because a film is exactly what it is. Other than fucking off to Spain, another problem that movies based on sitcoms have is that they tend to feel like one episode of the show but forced to last a longer running time. The genius of Alpha Papa is in recognising that an episode of a sitcom is very different to one of those weird fleshy, trunk, foreskins that some people have and so cannot simply be stretched out. The Simpsons Movie was particularly guilty of this with one of its biggest problems being that it really felt like it dragged. The other main problem of The Simpson Movie was simply that it was shit. Perhaps though a trip to the land of movies is easier for Partridge because he, as a character, is bigger than any one of the mediums he's appeared in. He's done sitcoms, chat-shows, Internet Radio Shows and has even written a book that was rather brilliantly entitled I Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan. With all that, I suppose a film seemed obvious to the point that you wonder why it's taken twenty years for them to get around to it. I need another Mr. Bean movie as much as I need a glass thermometer snapped halfway down my cock but an Alan Partridge film seems more than logical.

"There must have been quite a few angels."

If I was to criticise Alpha Papa then I guess it feels like it was probably once a much longer movie than it has finally ended up being. As a result there are certain sub-plots that seem a little un-explored as though, like a gay chap in Russia, they were simply cut or removed with sociopathic ruthlessness. An example of this might be a subplot involving a love interest for Alan that could probably have benefit from a little more development. It's not that I don't believe anybody would sleep with him- it's just that I don't believe anybody would sleep with him for free. Although you know what, fuck it! I'd rather have a leaner running time and non-stop hilarity than the indulgently long and smug comedies of someone like Judd Apatow. I remember going to see Borat and although it was funny, I'd seen all the best bits in the trailer. Thankfully this isn't the case with Alpha Papa which contains about three jokes every two and half seconds. Coogan has been playing Partridge for so long now that it must be like being possessed for him with the two consciences inhabiting the same fleshy frame. The role seems to come so naturally too that the performance becomes layered with so many ticks and nuances that I know I'm going to be noticing new things for years to come. I'm not sure what Coogan's face is made of but it must be the same mushy gloop as what Jim Carrey's malleable pink meat flapper is. 

I could be wrong but with the regularity of one liners and genius of the script Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa could well end up being the British version of Spinal Tap. I won't ruin any jokes except to say that the title of this blog was my favourite line and coupled with Coogan's performance, it just cracked me the fuck up. I'd been laughing most of the way through but this was the moment that I became particularly grateful for the strength of my internal piss-organs. Those who know about Partridge's history will know that he once sunk into a depression and became dangerously addicted to the chocolate jaw fucker that is Toblerone. Ever since then he's always seemed like he's on the verge of another melt down and as long as he is, I know I'll keep on watching. 

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Sea-Dog Day Afternoon

‘Honesty is the best policy’... Really? During an interview, I was told they were looking for somebody who was honest to which my instinctive response was to simply shout out, “well I'm not a thief”. Considering that there's nothing that could make me sound more like a thief than that, I instead decided on the much better alternative of, “Well I don't lie... often”. Panicking about my stupid inclusion of the word ‘often’ I then added “I mean like, I- err, only lie if I have to”. Obviously by this I just meant that I could be trusted to keep my mouth shut if somebody told me a secret about their love life, finances or horrendously rotten genitals. However, at this point my interviewers were already pulling the exact facial expression that Bruce Wayne's parents did about two seconds before they were shot by a mugger in a darkened ally. When they asked me about honesty, if I had just lied and said that I only ever speak the truth then ironically I would have saved myself from losing most of my bodyweight through stress-induced sweating.  In general I am a very honest person but I also have common sense and sometimes it is for the best to lie. All I did was tell the truth here and by accident I managed to convince everybody in the room that I had a secret history as a slimy Victorian grifter.

I mention all this because firstly I like to waffle and secondly, the question of honesty has been the main focus surrounding the release of the new film Captain Phillips. Based on a true story the movie claims to accurately depict the hijacking of an American cargo ship by Somalian pirates back in 2009, however the film feels as though it is being presented in two halves with the first hour specifically being dedicated to the attempted ship-theft-bullshittery. There are so many things that I loved about this but I suppose I'll start with the way in which the attackers are less equipped than a young eunuch boy in a whore house. They've got a few men, a few guns and a ladder to take them onto a ship that has a working telephone and the entire U.K. and U.S. Navy on speed dial. Sadly though when Captain Philips notices these desperate chancers, America is too busy to pick up the phone and we Brits kind of have a tendency to dismiss huge problems as being “a lot of bother about nothing”. Although his ship does have a defence system, it's really not that good because it makes the assumption that hijackers are like stray cats and can be scared off with the quick spray of a hose. It is therefore up to the unarmed crew to resort to the ships second defences which involves hiding in the shadows and hoping the whole thing just blows over.

Life is like a box of chocolates- I hate chocolate.

The second hour is however much more of a kind of claustrophobic thriller in which the hijackers attempt to piss off back home in a small lifeboat with a hostage... I won't say who it is but as a hint there might be a subtle clue in the film’s title. Here Phillips must use his wits, charm and common sense to survive as tensions begin to build and the hijackers develop a bad case of itchy-trigger-finger. If you're watching this for the do's and don’ts of surviving a hostage situation then I think the film makes it very clear that writing notes is a big mistake. At one point, Phillips notices a biro-pen and so makes a grab for it after being shown the naughty end of a machine-gun and ordered fairly clearly to stay completely fucking still. For one amazing moment, I thought Phillips was going to go ape-shit and stab them all to death with it Joe Pesci style, however as it turned out he'd instead been struck by inspiration and decided to leave a note to his family telling them how much he loved them. However to just say “I love you” apparently isn't enough and so in one of the most suspenseful scenes of the year and despite the risk of having his brains shot out he attempts to scrawl out a fucking novel. With them all confined to a small space as a rescue operation is formed by the Americans, this second half really reminded me of a kind of sea-based remake of Dog Day Afternoon. Hmm... Sea-Dog Day Afternoon is such a shit pun but using it would save me coming up with a title for this blog. Fuck it, it's done!

Anyway so the reason I mentioned all that bollocks about honesty earlier is because since its release, a lot of chatter has been shat out about the accuracy of this movie. According to Phillip's crew members, the film neglects to mention that he had been warned about the likelihood of an attack and also that he failed to take any action when alerted to the hijackers’ initial presence. Some crew members have also claimed that Phillips probably wanted to be taken hostage and had a death wish, although from what I've researched they didn't really offer any explanation as to why? Because you know... if you're going to publicly perform a character assassination then you really don't need to back up your claims or provide the little things such as evidence and hard-facts. I suppose to defend the film from this, I would highlight two main points... The first is that Captain Phillips is a Paul Greengrass movie and the second is that where film and facts are concerned, who really gives a solitary fuck?

So to address point one I guess we should give some background on Greengrass as a filmmaker. Whereas most directors start their career off by making music videos, short films or bullshitting about sneaking into Hollywood offices, Greengrass began by working for current affairs show World in Action. From here he took his journalistic skills and applied them to drama's that investigated the Gulf War, institutionalised racism within the police-force specifically in regards to the murder of Stephen Lawrence and then most famously Bloody Sunday. From here he got his big budget break and made a couple of Bourne Movies which not only mixed action with the bollocks of bureaucracy but were so good that they even managed to donkeypunch the Bond franchise into a new direction. Perhaps even still though, the biggest proof of both Greengrass's integrity and his huge balls is the 2006 film United 93. A mere five years after the world got even more fucked-up on 9/11 he made a movie that not only dealt with the slightly sensitive subject but that focused predominantly on the hijacked plane that was brought down by the passengers. My point is that if his ability to accurately depict true stories on film was in anyway less than genius, United 93 would have killed his career more effectively than a broken bottle through the eye. Not only did he survive this though but the film went on to huge acclaim with Greengrass receiving the kind of backslapping praise that Michael Bay could only ever achieve if he announced his imminent retirement.

Oh, look! There's another oscar on the horizon!

The second point is, as I said- who really gives a fuck about sticking to the facts in a movie? Despite being a masterpiece, Fargo opens with some text explaining that the film is based on a true story. As it turns out the whole thing is completely fictitious having been made by The Coens who claimed that they couldn't find a true story that was interesting enough and so just made one up instead. Films don't exist to simply report back the facts or to even educate us on the subject that they claim to be about. Their sole purpose it to entertain, to tell stories and perhaps to seek out what Werner Herzog refers to as 'the ecstatic truth'. As it happens though with Captain Phillips, Greengrass actually stands by his version of events having researched the shit out of what went down. By his own admission, he has obviously condensed the events so that what may have taken eight hours now only takes about fifteen minutes. He has also obviously invented dialogue and conversations because there are only so many interviews and so much record reading can help you before you'd need an actual fucking psychic. The film doesn't need to stick to the truth at all if this compromises the quality of the narrative however it seems like Greengrass is fairly happy that what we see is coincidentally still pretty close to the truth. This would therefore surely suggest that the crew who are publicly screaming “bullshit” must have some reason for wanting to discredit the film? If so I can't for the life of me figure out what that reason might be. Although having said that if this film does contradict them and their claims are in fact false, I guess the $50,000,000 law suit that they've filed against their ex-employers would probably get farted into oblivion. So there is that I suppose...

Greengrass makes politically aware films that are rooted in reality and yet never feel preachy, po-faced, miserable and certainly not boring. In fact, if we pretended that this movie was entirely based on fiction you'd still be left with a stunning thriller that explores both the experience of being hijacked and also the desperation of the hijackers. Throughout the story we're treated to the perspectives of all sides involved with the suggestion that in fact the root cause of all evil may predictably be the usual herd of world-fucking, corporate cunts. Hanks gives an extraordinary performance in the lead role although we should probably expect this now since he's played a man with a sniffle in Philadelphia, a fake cowboy in Toy Story and a fish fucker in Splash. Praise should also go to Barkhad Abdi who is the unexperienced actor cast in the role of lead hijacker. Not only did he expertly hold his own against Hanks here but his terrifying performance will ensure that if I'm ever on a boat and a stranger approaches I'm going to kill the fucker straightaway rather than take any chances. If you get past all this mudslinging about the truth then in my humble opinion Captain Phillips is without a doubt one of the best films of the year. Having experienced something as powerful as this, am I really expected to care if some money-hunting cunt tells me it's all based on a load of old shit? I couldn't give two fucks either way and if I'm being honest if you've got any sense then you won't either!

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