Sick of Adverts

Last night I had a pretty grizzly time of it, being very sick and generally unwell.

So what better way to keep my stomach settled than to watch an episode of Heston’s Feasts where he gets people to eat blood? Usually my stomach is pretty okay with stuff on TV, but I did have a bit of trouble with this particular episode.

But it wasn’t the blood that really sickened me… it was the advert break sponsored by Bing.com

For those who are unaware, Bing.com is a “decision engine” from those soulless bastards at the Microsoft Corporation, so it’s basically Bill Gates’ version of Google.

This advert break started with a Bing.com search, where an unseen person (most likely a corporate zombie) typed in a subject and then the following advert would be relative to that.

It kind of spoilt the fun of Advert breaks, as I knew what the next advert would be about. Granted, the adverts are never that different, you always know there’ll be an advert for a sale at a furniture store, or a supermarket’s “family” will be going through something that ends with them all enjoying a meal for under a tenner. But there was something almost sinister about the search engine looking up adverts.

Also, there was this whole spiel from Jamie Oliver about sausages and how one bite tells you what Sainsbury’s stands for. Really? Is that what they do to potential investors? They don’t have a presentation, they just give them a banger in the mouth and call it a day.

I’m sure that the recent party political broadcasts have been shorter than Jamie Oliver’s war and peace speech about Sainsburys. There was another advert he did in the same vein, but it was shorter this time and had him with a basket of new potatoes which I can only presume he scoffed after the shoot was done.

I just wish adverts would be adverts again. Cut out all the “meaning of life” crap and just tell you the deals they’ve got on or how much their product is. Car adverts are always the worst for these, but it seems that all adverts these days are either telling you about the values of life and how you can live a better life with their product or the advert is a soap that tells a story each time.

Well, be sure to write to your local MP about this, I know I will be.

Ciao for now, I gotta go before I vomit again. Man I'm sexy. :D

Half Arsed Review - Wrong Turn 2 - dead end

I try to avoid the bastards at the local super-hyper-ultra store that they call ASDA, as I go in for milk and come out with the cow. This time, that cow came in the shape of a Wrong Turn box set on DVD.

I'd seen the first Wrong Turn a while back, which stars the ever loving Buffy wanna be Eliza Dushku as a happy camper against some crazy hill-billys that are a cross between the guys from deliverance and the mutants from The Hills have Eyes.

It was an enjoyable little gore fest and when I saw the box set at a dirt price I picked it up, expecting the direct to Doovd sequels to be below par, but I was pleasantly surprised with the 2nd film.

The plot is simple, a reality TV program about surviving an apocalypse begins filming in the same forest that the crazy hill billy bastards live, and as they split up they get picked off one by one.

The old "reality TV" angle has been done in the past in horror films, working well in "My Little Eye", so I wasn't sure how this would work, but it's a decent excuse to get some bodies into the woods.

I was a little disappointed that I guessed who would have survived, but there was one shock death in there for me so that made up for it. This film, is pretty gory, with one person in the first few minutes literally being sliced in half. So if you've got a queasy disposition, don't check this film out. If you don't mind the gore, you'll enjoy a light horror with some decent effects and decent performances from all involved.

I'd give this film 3 severed fingers out of a possible 5.

Vlogs Indeed

After recently conducting an experiment where I could move my consciousness into other peoples bodies, an idea I had gotten from Tv's Quantum Leap, I decided to write some more movies.

I sat down at my long suffering lady wife's pink laptop, and began typing away until I had indeed written an Edward Lobe script which will hopefully get filmed the back half of this year.

As 2010 is the year of The Dark Spirit, a huge undertaking for Stoopid Studios, and hopefully we'll get it into some film festivals. So you'll have to wait for another film till that's compiled.

But fear not fearful fearers! I am hoping to put up some videos of the process of our filming and have some interviews with the cast/crew. Of course they wont be one of those boring things you get as a dvd extra, they'll be funny, intentionally I hope.

Alexis and myself sat down the other night and did an update on Stoopid Studios, (part 1 is on our Youtube page) and I think it was quite good. So I am thinking about moving into the world of Video Logging or as the degenerative youth of our world call it "Vlogging"... when I first heard of Vlogging I thought it was a form of Dogging, but was pleased to find out that it was something entirely different.

So I am hoping to put some Vlogs up, please feel free, all 2 people who read this, to let me know if you think this is a good/bad/ugly idea.

Well, I've gotta dash, I've got an appointment with various world leaders regarding what I can do about this volcano problem we're having... wait till they find out that it was no accident!

Ciao for now fluffers!

COME ON!

I've now got to the point where I'm thinking that maybe I've seen too many movies as I can easily predict the most complex plot twist three minutes into a film, or I'm thinking that films are trying too hard to put twists into movies and as a result signpost them way before hand.

Out of the two films I got from Lovefilm this weekend, both of them were thrillers and both had a twist, and I guessed them both (one of them from pretty much the offset!). My problem is that I'm a social film watcher too, so if I have a theory, I share with whoever I'm with, which as my long suffering lady wife Louise will tell you, is pretty annoying.

My fatherly figure that I refer to as my dad, suggested that to circumvent the event of giving the game away to other people who aren't as clairvoyant as I am, I should write down the twist on a piece of paper.

So I'm taking this to the next level as I usually do, by dusting off the board game Cluedo, and using the little pouch you get to place the murderer/room/weapon in as my film twist guessing pouch! (I now am enjoying the word Pouch, I don't think it gets used enough in conversation... well human conversation anyway, I mean I bet Kangaroo's are always on about pouches, or maybe not... what's native Australian for pouch? Do Kangaroo's even call them pouches? Mental note: ask a Kangaroo next time you see one what they call a pouch.)

Where the hell was I? Oh yeah, my-pre pouch spiel. So to take my predictions to the next level, I will in future write down my prediction and any relative information (i.e. a murder mystery prediction will be who the killer is, motive, that kind of thing) and place it in the Pouch, to be revealed at the end of the movie and claim those 10 points for getting it right.

I've now decided, this minute, whilst I'm writing this sentence that you may or may not be reading (cus I'm reckoning I may have lost some people at the pouch ramble) that in one of my next Stoopid Studio films, I'll put in a twist and see if anyone gets it before it happens. But of course, I wont say which film it's in as that would aid all 3 people who watch the shorts we make.

Well, I'd better get back to whatever it is I'm paid to do 9-5. Oh and wish me luck as I'm still battling with my long suffering lady friend to see whether or not I can put a poster of Halloween up on the wall. I'm wining so far, using stubbornness and determination.

John Carpenter

It's rare that I get a chance to talk to anyone famous, let alone one of my favourite directors. Last year I got a five minute chat with John Carpenter:


Me: Thanks for doing this interview Mr. Carpenter

John: Call me John, Mr. Carpenter's my father.

Me: Okay John, so out of all your movies, I gotta say Halloween is by far my favourite

John: You didn't like Assault on Precinct 13?

Me: Yeah, it's a classic, but I prefer Halloween

John: You're one of those, I see. I've done a slew of work, but you people only want to know about Myers.

Me: Don't get me wrong I do love all your work, but Halloween blew me away... So, what did you think to the remake?

John: Well Zombie did an interesting job with it, but you can't beat Donalds's performance as Dr. Loomis. I mean, you watch that film and he's scarier than Myers!! The bit where those kids go up to the house and he does a freaky voice... that wasn't in the script, that wasn't even on the set... we'd followed Donald home one evening and that's what he liked to do with his time. In fact, between you and me, Donald never even saw the script, he just made it up as he went along, he believed there really was a killer and that he was actually Dr. Loomis. Method acting fruitcake. When Michael disappeared at the end of the first film, Donald locked himself in his house for months, for fear Michael would come back for him.

Me: That true?

John: The last man to call me a liar was John Romero, and I killed that son of a bitch twenty years ago.

Me: John Romero is still alive

John: That's Stan Lee! You ever seen the two in the same place? That's why the last few "of the dead" movies sucked, what the hell does Stan Lee know about Zombies?

Me: Um... The music, from Halloween, you composed right?

John: Composed is a strong word for what I did. You even listen to that music. I was off my tits on crystal meth at the time. Debra, Debra Hill that is, was with me at the time and she'd puked all over a keyboard after she realised we'd just eaten her cat and put the Chinese takeaway outside. So I was cleaning up the mess and in my drug addled state came up with the tunes you heard in the movie.

Me: So... Michael Myers's mask, is it true that it's a Captain Kirk mask painted white?

John: Yup, it's all true.

Me: Why William Shatner?

John: Well, a lot of hippie's and commies will tell you that I didn't have a budget to get a decent mask made, but that's baloney. You see, you've gotta understand, that back when I made Halloween, people were scared of Bill Shatner. You think people watched Star Trek for the Sci-Fi? No, they watched it because they were scared of what would happen to them if they didn't. Shit, we were all scared of Bill. My original concept for Halloween wasn't about Michael Myers at all, it was about Bill Shatner killing people. When I went to the studio with it they were too scared to do it, so instead suggested I make up a character. But I made a compromise and used a Shatner mask, painted it white so he couldn't recognise his mug. I mean, Shatner's a scary looking bastard as it is, a pure white Shatner... now that's creepy. The amusing thing is the writers of Star Trek the next generation came up to me and wanted Michael Myers to be in it, I told em to go screw 'emselves, but they made Data anyway! Well kid, I gotta go, I've got a fight with Wes Craven in a pub car park in 3 minutes.

Me: Right, well thanks for talking John.

John: No problem, which magazine are you with anyway?

Me: I'm not, I do a blog

John: Oh for fuck sake, I've wasted precious Carpenter time on a wanna be fuck like you, get out of my sight before I write a film about killing you.

---

Sometimes the people you most respect the most are the ones that deserve it the least.

Ciao for niaow.