How Do I Blog?

I can’t be bothered to give a full review of Season 5 of The Wire, suffice to say that I felt it wrapped the series up in style - sending up many of its elements from previous seasons as biting satire of a failing system and giving a fitting farewell for many of the characters and plotlines. The newspaper storyline lacked bite and was the weakest of the “settings” where The Wire story plays out on a different stage but that said, the docklands was far weaker than it until the arc finally gained some emotional reasonance in the closing stages.

Given that I’ve now finished the five season spread and watched approximately 70 hours of TV over the past few months, I reckon I deserve some time away from the idiot box.

Or rather, replace one idiot box with another.

I’m looking at upgrading my home rig to a 23″ lcd (for multitabling the internet pokers) with wireless network so that when I finally buy a laptop I can hook it into the net without too much worry plus it allows my PS3 to stream content from the PC so I can stop burning CDs/DVDs for my spotty DivX player.

Work continues to be busy, and the month of November (due date for babby 2) is rapidly approaching. I’m feeling somewhat fatigued at the moment but still peppy enough… I’d like a holiday but a lack of annual leave days and valid opportunity is prohibiting me on that side.

I’ve kicked off the poker blog again at: http://adventuresinlowlimit.blogspot.com/ for any and all musings on my wanderings through the poker world, as I’ve been enjoying some success again recently.

That’s about all for now. I might go see Inglorious Basterds tonight as too many people have said that’s really good for me to ignore.

Update

What’s been going on with me lately? Not a lot to be honest…

Sike.

I’ve been ridiculously busy. New career has been skyrocketing as some positive news regarding our shareholding has meant a lot of work for us at Head Office, plus in general the job has been very engaging… but also financially rewarding. It’s good to have payoff commensurate with effort!

I also got to visit Daydream Island recently for a “conference” where a lot of “heavy working” (drinking) was followed by periods of “reflective introspection” (vomiting) and this led to an “appreciation of our working environment” (lounging by the pool).

Outside of work, life as usual continues, Evie awaits the birth of “baby brother” eagerly and our recent 3D scan was good to get a closer look at the little fella. I think both Clare and I have gotten more comfortable with the idea of a Mini-Me hellraising around us for the rest of our lives… ahh, parenthood is bliss.

I’ve been playing poker again, I know, I know… but in the past 120 days or so I’ve had over $5k US in profits so I must be doing something right! I’m enjoying the game, playing MTTs only really, just need to make sure I don’t get addicted and try to play lots of different stuff all the time.

And other than that…

The Wire - Season 4

I thought it impossible to top season 3. The writing was impeccable and the scope of the narrative pretty astonishing, some of the emotional swings and loss of familiar faces was a big impact. Well, it just goes to show that they can create tangible connections in a short period of time that hit home just as hard, if not harder due to the nature of their particular struggles, as we follow a group of schoolkids getting taught at school and in parallel to that, the real life teachings of the corners. It’s heartbreaking and frustratingly inevitable as we chart the rise and fall of some youths and the lives that some of them cannot escape. This season simply cemented and then gold-plated its status as “best show on television”.

I’m currently a third of the way through the final season, and it is no disappointment.

District 9

I’m still not sure how I feel about this on an overall basis. I wasn’t actively put off (much) during the screening I attended, except at the key stage which I’ll cover off later in the review, but looking back on it the stuff that it did well is (for some reason) clearly undone by the (frankly, quite dumb) broad-stroke approach they took in making this flick.

Starting off as a gritty pseudo-documentary retelling the origins of a nomadic and rather pathetic alien species pejoratively called “Prawns”, who are herded into ghettos and exploited by the local Nigerian gangsters for their inexplicable love of cat food, the film puts its best foot forward. You are sucked into the day-to-day doings of a hapless goof charged with the unenviable task of relocating the entire Prawn populous in an attempt to minimise crime and destructive disturbances both from within and without. It’s worth noting that the protagonist (Wikus) isn’t terribly likable and this a slightly refreshing standpoint for a movie to take… not too often is your character unlikable unless he’s a charming rogue, or devastatingly handsome anti-hero, or whatever, and usually that character makes a turnaround like say a Han Solo saving the day moment… aaaaannd this movie is no exception.

But I’ll get to that.

The initial groundwork in detailing an incredibly complex history is masterfully done in a series of “interviews” and news reels from the past two decades. You get a real sense of the scope of the problem facing the country but I never felt they did quite enough with it. There wasn’t any real indication of the international community having any involvement here, which seems quite preposterous to be honest. No mention of the UN or International Concerns, but instead some faceless (presumably SA) corporation are given the “shadowy government” role for the course of the film. This is fine for creating some biomech-R&D intrigue with secret labs and white coated Gordon Freeman types, but it totally removes the ability to make any sort of compelling social commentary. The parallels between the Prawns treatment and Apartheid are blatant and resonate well enough for a metaphor, but aren’t really played with terribly much.

However, quite neatly and without breaking immersion the movie side-steps from its pseudo-doc feel to an immediate-feeling action narrative as all hell breaks loose. Wikus is put through his paces after his accidental exposure to alien biotech (with some nice references to The Fly) and once diagnosed, is whisked away from everyone into a secret lab to be used as a conduit to alien weaponry. After some experiments and the conclusion that he’s going to be chopped up into little bits, he manages to break free (in a very convenient fashion, I might add) and then the chase vehicle component of the story begins and it becomes a sci-fi action movie.

Unfortunately all the popcorn trappings that come with the genre start to traipse in and mix with the original setting and fresh take on a sci-fi premise. A sadistic Prawn-hating commando is drafted in to hunt down our protagonist, the reason for father-in-law being an evil scheming corporation head became apparent and the voodoo-inspired Nigerians jump in the mix to provide some additional cannon fodder. The reasons why they are doing what they’re doing are fair enough, it’s quite simply laid out, the problem is that it isn’t terribly interesting. So we then look to our protagonist for a challenging dramatic arc and characterisation to fill in this void of rather bland fare.

It’s just not there. Wikus starts off the movie a generally unlikable prick and (in my eyes) ends it not terribly different, except physically. He’s quite clearly a racist and that never changes through what I was shown. And yeah, the whole “he becomes like them and hence gains understanding” angle only works if they explore it guys, so don’t try to pass off the mere physical transformation as anything more than that. In terms of demonstrably understanding the Prawn’s viewpoint, Wikus grows not one iota beyond eating a tin of catfood and growing a few ugly appendages. We know he’s not a monster (or particularly smart) by his refusal to kill a Prawn and then his attempt to break back into the facility to help Christopher (a fellow Prawn) escape from Earth using the biotech fuel for their command module. That’s really the extent of his development though, because later Wikus gets a disappointment from Christopher regarding the true extent of his predicament and lashes out, clobbering his only hope and then (again, stupidly) crashing their only chance of escape and his only chance of saving himself from the condition plaguing him. He launches right back into the selfish stupid mode that got him into the position in the first place, and you know what, while I commend them for challenging the audience with a non-standard protagonist … the end result is that I really didn’t care for him by the end of the story and didn’t particularly want him to be saved from his own stupidity and ignorance.

What followed next was some of the most awesome action sci-fi I’ve seen in a long time. On a conceptual and visual level it was fantastic, the visceral delivery of these scenes was somewhat undercut by the lameness of the script and the terribly inevitable, sloppily constructed “change of heart” for the character (hence why I think the character didn’t really “change”).

That said, I could probably watch Wikus wipe out the gangsters and commandos for ages as the splatter factor and ingenuity of the visuals really gave the action a naturalistic and realistic (yet alien) feel. They really nailed this part of the movie.

So… yeah, not much more to add to that I’m afraid. An incredibly conflicted B.

Brüno

Familiar with the character from Da Ali G Show but never particularly taken with his antics, I feared that Brüno would be a weak and very much one-tone follow-up to the shocking cultural offensive launched in Borat a few years earlier. Borat as a character worked on a number of levels, he weaseled into his guest’s good nature with an innocence before provoking reactions of racism, intolerance, prejudice, often to hilarious effect, and his general set-up had horribly racist overtones to begin with, however there was always a sense the audience was in on the joke so the edge wasn’t there.

Sadly, Brüno does not live up to Borat in that respect - unless you generally have a sense of homophobia or squeamishness with male nudity, you’re probably going to find it just plays to the range of extremes that you could rhyme off before entering the theatre. I laughed a lot but there’s little to recall. There’s a swingers party, there’s a spinning (talking!) circumcised cock, there’s a reality tv show review panel, there’s a BLACK talk show (BLACK capitalised because of all “AW HELL NAW” reaction shots), there’s a “cage fight” where the audience outside the ring is guilty of more violence, and these are the funniest parts of the movie. They are a mixture of staged/scripted fun and unscripted/reactionary mess, however only so much of it hits. There’s a section on the Middle East which is just tonally all wrong and seems more like a Borat bit, there’s an attempted seduction of a presidential candidate which is just very awkward without being terribly funny, there’s a sequence on child-model parents that comes off like a segment from Brass Eye and is more shocking than funny, and there’s a bit with some rednecks that comes off ENTIRELY scripted and acted as there’s no lead-in and an unbelievable outtro to the events (similarly, I believe they melded genuine footage of a swinger party with the fakery of the scary-titted-and-tatted BDSM blone that wasn’t actually ever there).

As a result, there are moments where it would’ve been just funnier if Bruno had been let loose in a general audience of middle America and tried to be that barometer for homophobia and prejudicial hatred, but at the same time I can understand why he didn’t do that - it’s been done, and probably better too.

Funny in places but also strangely lethargic or weak in others. B-

The Ice Harvest

Still not sure how I ended up stumbling across this movie but it stars John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton in a Harold Ramis directed neo-noir comedy about two guys ripping off the mob and taking off with a ton of money. Sounds good in premise but execution is just plain awful - there is no real plot beyond what I laid out above, the tone is completely muddled, the performances are phoned in, the characters are paper thin or incomprehensible in an attempt to appear quirkily complex (such as the lawyer buddy who’s married to Cusack’s ex-wife who hates her for some reason and wants to leave his step-family, Cusack’s family I should add, and run away with Cusack), abundant in noir cliches that don’t actually go anywhere or add anything, there’s also the repeated usage of a phrase that’s seemingly just a wanky reference to some obscure album.

Yeah, not much to recommend about this really except a good line after Thornton shoots a mob-hired assassin and says: “You’re dead… Stop standing there pretending like you aren’t dead” as the man totters on his feet, clearly dead.

Avoid. C-.

Old School

A recommendation. Never a big fan of “frat boy comedy” (Road Trip, American Pie and its ilk) this did little to sway me in its favour - sure, the laughs are there (squeamish laughter at Will Ferrell’s horrible body running naked through the streets, a huge fat guy getting pulled from the roof by a breezeblock attached to his pecker as part of a frat pledge, one or two sight gags and one or two lines, Will shooting himself up with pony tranquilisers and Sean William Scott’s mullet) but everything inbetween is interminable pain of a terribly acted love scenes, morality lessons learned and, most bizarrely, an ugly sequence during the credits where two unlikable characters are rather brutally killed. I guess that’s preferable to the semen/shit/piss gross-out humour that often litters others in this movie’s genre.

At the end of it all, not a patch on Blades of Glory, a comparable “blokey” type comedy that’s actually genuinely funny and also hits all the requisite “frat boy” low notes. C.

The Wire (Season 3)

The most critically acclaimed show on TV already had me as a die-hard fan, but season 3 just outdid itself - the quality of writing, the scope of the story arcs, the comprehensiveness of character and the loving detail in which the rise and fall of an empire is charted is quite awesome to behold. This is the season that says goodbye to many characters (literally and figuratively) and those who return (not rising from the grave) will be different people, completely changed by the events that unfolded over this season. Uncompromisingly honest at all times and featuring some of the most insightful writing about the horrors of the drug trade and even greater atrocities carried out in the name of political “progress”, with each passing season I become more and more a raving proselyte.

SEE THIS FUCKING SHOW. A++++.