I Lost My Spam Virginity

Today is a very special day. For today I am no longer a boy; I am now a man, with all of a man's strengths and weaknesses. I, ladies and gentlemen, received spam.

They left no return address. 

What makes this spam so special is its rather cryptic message, which took some time to translate. Witness the most confusing paragraph in the history of the English language:

"I loved as much as you will receive carried out right here. The sketch is attractive, your authored subject matter stylish. Nonetheless, you command get bought and shakiness over that you wish be delivering the following. Unwell, unquestionably come further formerly again since exactly the same nearly very often inside case you shield this hike. Here is my web-site hyabak"

"Someone take Sloth away from the computer."

What does it mean? Surely there must be a second meaning to the message that has been hidden behind a carefully constructed wall of functionless adverbs and confused tenses that our puny human brains cannot possibly comprehend.

Wait. Tenses. That's it! This is a message from a time-travelling prostitute informing me that I could use eyedrops to prevent my eyes from getting sore in the wind while taking the members of my future sex-cult hiking.

Not following me? Ok, let's do this one step at a time:

"I loved as much as you will receive carried out right here."

Look at the sudden changes in tense; she loved something that I am yet to receive in the very place that I am at the moment. The fact that it's something I'm receiving (suggesting I paid for it), it can be received while sitting on the sofa in my underwear (where I am right now) and that this person enjoyed it too leads me to the assumption that future me has paid for the company of another human being. It's either that or Chinese food; but I don't share Chinese food, so it's got to be a prostitute. I know what you're thinking, GMC, but you can't deem me unsuitable for medical practise for something I've not done yet.

"Damn you, space-time continuum."

Plus, it's very common knowledge that people who partake in regular time travel start to lose the ability to vocalise the concept of time and the passage of it, so the jumpyness of the past, present and future tenses suggest that this particular person is a well versed time traveller. Thus time-travelling prostitute. Simple. The next sentence really hits this theory home:

"The sketch is attractive, your authored subject matter stylish."

She's started using basic writing-based metaphors to conceal the real intent of the sentence here. The sketch she's talking about would have been drawn with a pencil; the pencil actually being something completely different but equally pencil shaped.

Like a candy stick sharpened into a makeshift weapon.

As for the "authored subject matter"; well that's obviously what I'm doing with the pencil, and she thinks its preeeeety stylish. Aw yis. You can't knock the facts, ladies. But wait, what's this next bit?

"Nonetheless, you command get bought and shakiness over that you wish be delivering the following."

Soon, word of my prowess has reached far and wide. I command a following of devoted cult members who worship my great and powerful sketch. I am unsure of myself at first and someone tries to buy me out, obviously hoping to obtain the movie rights to my story, but I refuse. Finally I decide that the only thing for us to do is go on a great pilgrimage to our Mecca, which is actually just a big hill near my house.

And when we reach the top, we shall all help each other improve our authored subject matter.

But tragedy strikes!

"Unwell, unquestionably come further formerly again since exactly the same nearly very often inside case you shield this hike."

I am stricken ill each time we attempt to reach the summit. Again and again, we attempt to scale its mild inclines but are thwarted each time, with no choice but to give up and return to the base disheartened. What is this mysterious illness, you ask? Why it is dry eyes from the wind of course.

I said dry eyes, not aye ayes. Jeez. Get that fucking thing away from me.

Luckily our mysterious prostitute from the future who only goes by the name Anonymous finally reveals the aim of her mission. The answer to all our troubles: Hyabak multi-dose 0.15% sodium hyaluronate eyedrops. They progressively release water and increase contact with the ocular surface of the eye, leading to healthier, moist eyes all day round. Oh, thank you Hyabak and Spectrum Thea Pharmaceuticals.

But most of all, thank you Anonymous. Thank you for risking the highly probable paradoxical destruction of the universe and your own life, for being reasonably priced (even taking into consideration future inflation rates), but most of all for helping future me have more comfortable eyes so that I can walk in a brisk wind without squinting and partake in weird hill-top cult orgies.

Now fuck off and don't spam me again.

You're Next: The Next Big Slasher?

Movie recommendations are a tricky business; you're always destined for either cinematic greatness and a safe spot on your favourites list or crushing disappointment and a lingering resentment of the recommender for wasting an evening of your life and a nice five pound bottle of plonk.

The whole thing just compounds itself when Cocaine Friday is on the line.

 It was my driving instructor of all people who directed me to watch You're Next, the 2011 home invasion slasher that finally got a release late in 2013, and having heard good things from other sources as well I was quite hopeful for this one. The home invasion sub-genre has seen a resurgence in resent years, something I'm sure someone much smarter than I could use to glean a mystical insight into society, but as with any rise in popularity the quality of the large majority of export most assuredly goes down. The last good one I saw was the gruesome French nightmare fuel that is Inside over a year ago, and even that had its fair share of flaws.

If you're going to perform a caesarian, you might as well do it correctly.

The problem is that the genre has been cut a little too carefully from the cloth during its conception, making it exceptionally difficult to create a film that feels original and engaging without having to resort to a overly gruesome gimmick (see above) to keep the audience interested. And if there has ever been a better example of the sample that all of the others could be held up against to see if they matched the carpet (once you have an analogy, always run with it no matter what), then You're Next is it. Don't get excited folks, that's not as much of a compliment as it sounds.

You can wipe that smug grin off your face for a start.

Let's start with the plot. The film opens with two people having un-fulfilling sex so, yeah, they're going to die; and they do. You can tell the body count is going to be pretty high when the movie is cool with killing off two inconsequential characters just to set up the title sequence. We cut to a family gathering together at the rich parent's mansion for their 30th anniversary; none of them get on and all of the characters are either boring, stupid, a hapless cliché or an unmitigated bastard. The last of those is the proud domain of this smarmy chucklefuck:

Standing next to a man with a tumour on his shoulded shaped like a chubby, bearded head.

Joe Swanberg is terrible. He was bad enough in V/H/S but he can be proud in the knowledge that his acting ability has reached a new low with this film. Granted, half of the issue is with the script, which calls for his character to be an unnecessarily shitty anal prolapse of dickishness (oo, burn) for absolutely no reason even after the danger of the family's situation has become glaringly apparent and he gets shot in the back by a crossbow, but his facial expression doesn't change for the whole movie. He's just...so bad. His acting is endemic of the quality of the majority of the rest of the cast (save for the lead, whom we'll get to in a moment) who are equally as awful; most of the supporting cast are bland, formless cannon fodder and the mother in particular is flat, uninteresting and goes from absolutely chill to thinking the world is going to explode and back again faster than a schizophrenic chugging cough syrup while on uppers.

"Is that a fly? Oh my god, it's a dragon! I'm going to go to bed now."

Sure, it turns out she was right to be wary, but it's not a sign of good writing if a character in a horror film, the genre that defined the brainless fool walking into the warm arms of brutal decapitation (there's plenty of them in this film too), if one of the characters comes across as too anxious. I guess we can count ourselves lucky that the exposition only lasts an agonising 25 minutes before the action starts, at which point all plot is thrown out of the window and we get treated to an hour of people dying. There's a twist in there somewhere, but it's unoriginal, trite and doesn't actually serve to change the playing field in any way; it's still people trying to kill other people just now two of the killers are family members. Oops. Spoiler?

A completely unrelated image of a character in this film.

The shit goes down when, during dinner one night, the family are attacked by unknown assailants with crossbows and animal masks. Although I've just slated the movie for it's lack of coherent plot, the moment it strips away all of it's badly executed exposition is the moment it starts to get good, opting instead for gore, and lots of it. The visual effects are impressive and are evidently where the entirety of the film's budget was spent, the producer opting to pay the writers instead with gruel and squirrel paws.

Who needs plot and characterisation when blenders are powerful enough to scramble skulls?

You're Next's only positive feature is that it's pretty. The camera is generally framed nicely, the gore is satisfying enough to keep your interest and the main character, Erin, is suitably attractive. Obviously what most of the people who have praised this movie for is Erin; she breaks the genre stereotype of helplessly useless cabbages that bleed and manages to do a pretty neat job at holding off the intruders single handedly, but not in any way that wasn't already done better by The Hills Have Eyes. Although it's nice to see a resourceful character (and a woman at that; a shocking deconstruction of gende- *snore*) in a horror for once, all the makers have managed to do here is turn their movie into even more of a clichéd joke than it already is. Stood next to someone with the basic forethought to maybe lock the doors so evil axe murderers can't get in, the rest of the cast descend from annoying genre trope to slobbering morons. It even rubs off on the killers, who are the least original murderers since the exact same murderers in the trampolining dysentery sufferer that was The Strangers, who come across as less scary and more wildly incompetent, crossbow-happy opportunists once they manage to be held back by some bits of wood with nails in them.

Doesn't make it any less painful-looking, mind.

Shall we wrap this up, then? The acting is abysmal, the storyline and exposition are bare at best (consider that a blessing or a curse as you may), the twist is predictably dull and the villains have neither the originality nor the over-the-top craziness to be interesting at all. Although there's an attempt at comedy under all of the awful dialogue, it just isn't funny at all. The good points boil entirely down to the shiny things they dangle in front of your face: satisfying gore, a pretty, if bland, setting and an attractive, unoriginally-original lead. Essentially, You're Next is the perfect template for an absolutely mediocre slasher. We're done here.

Overall Ben Equivalence Rating

Sitting in On a Hollywood Production Meeting - 

"Hey, how about we do something original and unexpected?"

"Or we could make exactly the same thing as always and pretend it's new and original."

"That works too."

*A cocaine and money orgy ensues*

Film Facts 2: Gravity Capsule

Gravity was pretty good, wasn't it? Yeah, it's pretty much unanimous that it was a great film, with some stellar (eh, eh?!) acting from Sandra "Hyperventilating" Bullock and George Clooney and very pretty CGI and sound editing; I'll be gobsmacked if it doesn't pick up this year's Academy Award for visual effects, which it's apparently already in the finalists for. Since we all already know Gravity is good, I thought I'd skip the whole reviewing thing and focus on some of the logistics of the movie. Heads up to those of you that still think Hollywood has the balls to hire someone like Sandra Bullock and kill her off, because I'm going to spoil the ending for you. Around about...now.

Space never looked so dirty.

She lives. Shock, horror. But, frankly, that's hardly the point of the film and if this truly ground-breaking revelation is going to detract from your enjoyment the I shall gleefully direct you to this Cracked article (which is, obviously, gospel) that says you apparently enjoy things more when you already know the end. So mneh.

I'm right, you're wrong. I'm big, you're small. I'm...I forget...

At the end of the movie, Bullock's capsule lands in some unnamed lake and she stumbles onto the shore to the sound of epically dramatic tribal music because this movie is so tentative with it's imagery of rebirth that it pretty much just goes full on Lion King on our asses for the finale. Hell, it would have been subtler to just steal that shot of the starchild from the end of 2001 and be done with it.

"Now how did that get there...?" - Alfonso Cuarón 

This whole not criticising a film thing is harder than it looks. Anyway, why don't we have a look at the statistical possibilities of landing in such a place, shall we? If you're at all like me, you might remember xkcd's What If column covering the relatively similar topic of the likelihood of finding signs of intelligent life anywhere on the planet, but his statistics (other than the typical "70% of the planet is water" one) are of very little use here. If we start with our target destination then: IMDb says that the location for the landing scene was at Lake Powell in Arizona. A quick Google map of the lake shows that it's actually just over the state line into Utah, but we're just getting niggly here. This totally legitimate source suggests that a more specific shooting locating was in a shallow bay just south of Lake Powell, which is entirely likely seeing as the geography of the final product has been changed completely in post production so we'll take that as our starting block.

Movie (above) and Google Maps (below), both facing in approximately the same direction.

A cursory glance (you can always trust me for the most painstakingly accurate measurements) at the scale bar on the map tells me that the bay is about 200x300m-ish exactly, so Sandra hit a 60'000 square metre, or 0.06 square kilometre, pool of water with her capsule, about the same size as three standard international 105x68m football pitches. If we take that at face value and look at the same area in comparison with the 510'072'000 square kilometre area of the Earth, that makes up just under 0.0000000118% of the total surface of the Earth, or the other way round you could fit the bay onto the face of the Earth 8 and a half billion times. How fascinating. However, none of these numbers are actually getting us anywhere, so let's get down to brass tacks.

"Have you even started yet?"

I'm sure we've all heard before that around about 70% of the Earth's surface is water (the most exact percentage I could find was a Wiki Answers with 71.13%), so the simplest statistic for us to start with is that, obviously, there was a 71% chance of Sandra landing on water; soggy planet for the win.

"I'm so wet..." - Earth

But wait! Although it's never indicated in Gravity when the events of the film take place and we're meant to assume it is in present day, the more accurate date of space explosion smashy smashy is around the year 2022. Why, you ask? Well, the Chinese space station that Sandra Bullock's character finds herself in after ISS is torn to shreds is based on a real-life station called Tiangong-1. At the moment, Tiangong looks nothing like it does in the film, only being made up of one shuttle, but the plan is to slowly build up to a science laboratory by 2020-2022, the finished product of which we get the joy to see getting torn to shreds in glorious high definition; thus 2022 being a better choice of setting for the movie. As we all know, the sea levels are slowly rising, so there'll be a little more water in ten years than there is now. At 3.2mm per year, the sea levels will have risen a staggering 25.6mm, or the height of three and a half iPad Airs. So essentially you could stack four iPads by the ocean and Apple will have installed iOS into your eyeballs before the top one gets wet. That's a fancy way of saying that this consideration is negligible and I've wasted a paragraph of everybody's time.

But you need never worry about leaving your iPad at the beach ever again.

Sandra didn't land in the ocean though, did she. The coastal zone is the name given to that shallow bit of the ocean that keeps rubbing up against the land like a really creepy uncle and is defined as bits of the ocean under a depth of 200m, which in total cover around about 26'000'000 square kilometres of the Earth's surface. Rivers and lakes (those that were big enough to be measured) make up about another 1.5 million square kilometres; that means the likelihood of landing on the coast or in a lake or river like what happens in the film is 5.39%, which is about the same as having a genetic disorder of some kind. The lesson here: don't try to pilot a space capsule into a lake if you have coeliac disease.

Any space landing is pretty hard to stomach. Doctor joke!

Of course, space stations and satellites follow very specific orbits, meaning there are parts of the Earth more or less likely to be landed on depending on where your orbit happens to be. As this handy teaching aid informs us, imaging satellites usually orbit north to south over the poles while space stations like the ISS and Tiangong orbit laterally (follow the hyperlinks to see live orbit trackers); as such we can pretty much ignore anything that's not underneath the flightpath of Tiangong, which we'll have to assume won't have changed much in the next 10 years. Sadly I can't seem to find anything that gives me a good indication of how far from under it's orbit a shuttle can stray during re-entry so I'm going to be super ignorant and say they don't; shuttles go straight down.

So says science. Well, me, but also science.

As such, looking at the orbit of Tiangong we can pretty much ignore Russia, Canada, Greenland, Antarctica and the North Pole along with a good chunk of the South Atlantic, Pacific most of the Southern Ocean (something I didn't actually know existed until about now) and all of the Arctic Ocean. Excuse me while I maths for a second and work out the area of a planet with it's top and bottom shaved off. Some. There is some Earth left. And by subtracting these land masses and oceans from the total area of the Earth and redoing the ratio, the chances of Tiangong hitting water is 3 in 4, or a 75% chance. That's better odds than that thing with the doors and the goats.

If you did get a goat, don't let it pilot the shuttle.

All in all, to wrap up this series of rather disappointing facts, the likelihood of Sandra's capsule landing on water and not smashing her into the ground like a tin can full of delicious space Spam is in her favour, but the chances of her landing in waist deep water on a river within walking distance of a city are silly levels of unlikely. I guess I could have saved us all a lot of time by just writing that one sentence. You're welcome. I'm keeping the goat.

Meet The List

If there's one thing I should really get round to doing it's writing these posts more than two days in advance, because as soon as anything gets in the way of my writing, then all shit goes to hell or something similar.

However all dogs do definitely go to heaven.

The person that I'm going to use as a scapegoat for my not finishing off the long awaited Film Facts Part 2: The Factening, is Gabe Newell. He founded Valve. Valve runs Steam. Steam has sales. The Steam Christmas Sale had FTL: Faster Than Light on it for under a pound. And now I can't stop playing it.

Upgrade screens: The crystal meth of video games.

This along with my constant tweaking of the blog layout, as you can see by it's now greatly improved sexy sexiness (it's so sexy), and the creation of an unhealthy number of favicons that I intend to cycle through has led to a certain downtime in my usually industrious writing escapades. It's not that I'm saying I was distracted by pretty shiny things but yes, I was. Also by the agonising frustration of being lasered to death by fucking drones for the 60th time. Hours of epic battle followed by my poor spaceship being laser-raped by robots really sucks the time out of your day.

Drones: The malaria-ridden mosquitoes of video gaming.

The other little thing I've been working on is this. That's a cue to click the hyperlink, by the way. If you're allergic to bluey-purple text, just look at the shiny new page bar at the top of the blog and click on the enigmatically titled "The List". Go on; I'll wait.

If you're still having trouble, please ask a parent or teacher to help you.

I've compiled a little list of 50 movies I aim to watch in this fine year of 2014. Not review, mind. These are films that I've either been meaning to watch, had recommended to me by my very select group of cinema confidants (read in a French accent for correct pronunciation), or I happened to stumble across while reading the IMDb Trivia page for Sex and the City or whatever I was doing last night while high on power bar upgrades and cheesy nibbles. Excuse me a moment.

*snort*

Ah, better. So yes, just letting you know about the list. Each movie comes with it's name, year of release, rating and my interpretation of what it'll be about entirely by looking at its poster and nothing else. Check back regularly to see how many I've managed to watch and also for other little bits on what I've thought of them post-viewing. Now I have lots of things to be doing, very busy, must dash, let yourselves out.

Top 5 "Oo, That Looks Good" Movies of 2014

The new year has arrived at long last; we only had to wait 365 days or so for it. And with the new year comes the long wait for the inevitable wave of summer blockbusters that arrive every June with the timing and grace of only the most punctual and voluminous menstrual sloughs.

There is never not a good moment to use this image.

Summer this year seems to be set to flood us like so much body-temperature uterus lining with a veritable smorgasbord of exactly the same movies over and over again. With lots of lasers and jumping and looking seriously into the distance, sci-fi and alien invasion seem to be the aim of the game, so be prepared for, well, lots of sci-fi and aliens; along with the obligatory kids animated movie sequels and another superhero movie, because we're totally not tired of them yet. Yay.

Why can't we all just wait patiently for Ant-Man?

That said, there's still plenty to be excited all through the year so, without further ado (or adon't), I give you my top 5 list of movies that, as the title suggests, make you lean over to your mate in the cinema and shout-whisper, "Dude, we need to see that." Let us begin with:

5. Nymphomaniac: Volume 1 (Release: 21st February)

Subtle...

Oh Lars. What are you like? First Antichrist, now this. What with these, your porn films and that Nazi joke at the Cannes Film Festival two years ago, I almost feel like you're trying too hard to be controversial. And after the cataclysmically awful melodrama of Melancholia I'm starting to worry that you've actually lost your film-maker's touch. What happened? Where's another Dogville?

Won't you think of the children?!

I'm not a man to give up hope, however, and so this is your last chance, Lars, to restore my faith in you. I'm always a fan of the films that steer a little closer to the bone and sexuality has always been something that the film industry has shied away from like a young actress from a Hollywood producer's fly (who said that?!), so I commend the steel balls it must take to make a film that's essentially a two-part, five hour long mainstream porn movie. Whether it'll actually be any good of a film or just there for the shock factor (see Antichrist again) will only be a matter of time. I just hope Trier has realised that a little bit of subtlety and room for interpretation can go a long way.

Ah.

So, for those of you looking for plenty of sex, hamfisted imagery, disturbed characters and a little dash of Rammstein, this looks like the movie of the year for you. Here's the trailer (one of them was originally banned from YouTube), see if you can spot the subliminal vagina at the beginning:

4. The Lego Movie (Release: 14th February)

If you went to see Nymphomaniac and you now need a way to stop your children from crying inconsolably or worse, copying what they saw, you could take them to the next screen to see The Lego Movie. Yes, The Motherfucking Lego Movie. I'm a little too excited for this one as it's directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the directors behind the glorious 21 Jump Street remake (the sequel is also coming out this year, but sadly ranked at number six on my list) and the solidly alright Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, features Morgan Freeman as God, co-stars Will Arnett from Arrested Development as Batman and Liam Neeson is in there somewhere too. There's not a single part of the production or casting line-up that makes me too worried about this becoming yet another all-too-formulaic kid's movie and thank Morgan Freeman, because Warner Bros. have the imaginations of countless children and former-children at stake here.

"Put all your money in a bag and hand it over or another beloved household name gets ruined." - Warner Bros. Marketing Department

Almost all of us have fond memories of ourselves or a sibling spending a rainy Sunday afternoon meticulously building a world of colourful blocks complete with characters, stories, drama and heaps of action; then destroying everything with an alien invasion or massive Godzilla earthquake or with whatever other characters or toys you happened to have lying around. The trailer for this movie evokes exactly the same kind of sense of boundless fun and joyously nonsensical carnage of the childhood imagination. Even the animation style is reminiscent of a kid moving Lego men around like hopscotch players before making the calculated executive decision to curtail the hunt for the secret cave of awesome and swallowing the pieces instead.

"Oh my god, it ate the General! All is lost!"

If all goes well, this will be one part loose "save the world" story, a hundred parts hilariously unhinged chaos and all made from the brightly coloured little blocks of nostalgia that we all know and love. Hit it, YouTube embed:

3. Interstellar (Release: 7th November)

Never before has a poster looked so...Nolany.

Let's go all the way to the end of the year and look at Christopher Nolan's next pet project, Interstellar. It's no surprise that pretty much all anyone outside the production team and cast knows about the movie is that it's something to do with astronauts and wormholes. The cast have stayed tight-lipped about any further details, as is customary with a Nolan movie, so all we can do is wait. Something that will obviously build speculation, and hype, and money. You cheeky bastard, Nolan. You wouldn't get away with this if all of your movies weren't so bloody good.

Nearly all of them.

Looking at the crew, it's certainly going to make for an interesting film. There's the production designer from The Dark Knight, the editor from Inception and Elysium (expect lots of fast shots and not a lot of knowing what's going on) and the cinematographer behind the chilling Let the Right One In, which means we're probably looking at a complicated, fast-paced, creepy movie with lots of twists and turns. So, yeah, a Christopher Nolan film. I canny wait! We'll just have to wait and see what he churns out, as the trailer doesn't really shed any further light on things:

2. The Wolf of Wall Street (Release: 17th January)

I'm kind of cheating here seeing as The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese's new biopic of another Henry Hill-type sleazeball called Jordan Belfort, came out in the good old US of We'll Show Our Movies a Month Before You Get Them Ner-nee-ner-ner on Christmas Day, but it doesn't come out over here until mid-January, so I think it still counts.

You wouldn't look so happy without all of your missiles and stupid premiers, would you? Noooooo.
Dick.

A Scorsese movie is really best described by itself, so I present to you the trailer for Wolf of Wall Street and dare you to say that this doesn't have absolutely everything you want from a film in it, up to and including Leonardo DiCaprio's adorable smug-face (see poster above):

1. The Wind Rises (Release: Unannounced)

Hayao Miyazaki is retiring! Why, God, why?! His final movie, The Wind Rises, is a fictional account of the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the man behind the design of the Mitsubishi A5M fighter plane used by Japan during World War II, which eventually evolved into the famous "Kamikaze" A5M Zeros that were in that one good bit of Pearl Harbor. It's caused a bit of a stir over in Japan, what with a story humanising the designer of weapons of war seemingly going against Miyazaki's famously pacifist ideologies. The controversy is only fuelling my hunger for this film even more, however, as it has been hailed as Miyazaki's most personal film and apparently focuses on a healthy dose of adult themes not seen before in an anime that has hit number one on the Japanese box office for the whole of the year. It reminds me of another Studio Ghibli movie set in World War II Japan that featured pretty heavy themes and something about dead bugs...

If I think about it too hard I might start crying again.

Grave of the Fireflies is possibly one of the greatest and most devastating films ever made, and now the best anime director ever (Isao Takahata holds just as strong a place in my heart, mind) has made a new film about the same subject. I think it might kill me if I see this...

Worth it.

I would urge those of you who are a little dubious about watching cartoons (particularly anime) to give this a try, you'll be seeing the work of a master of an industry at his very best. Everyone loves him. As for me, I'll have to watch the trailer at least another 5 times before I can get through the whole thing without breaking the laptop from the resulting efflux of drool and tears of joy:

So, my little band of unholy abominations, what films are you looking forward to this year?