I was walking down the Quays yesterday evening, enjoying a leisurely stroll in the Sun. Twas a fine evening, all was well, I was a man at peace. But this peace was quickly shattered, as I could begin to hear the murmur of an approaching megaphone. What’s this, I thought, is there an election? I quickly looked up at the nearest lamppost, and could not see a thousand dead faces staring at me from on high. No, no election. A Circus! It must be a circus. That’s alright, nothing wrong with the circus. But as it got nearer, it got clearer and I heard what it was. It was a car driving around blasting out advertising for Tesco.
What a pack of cunts. It’s bad enough we are bombarded with adverts everywhere we go. You cannot escape the ad-mans reach, its on telly, the internet, the radio, on buildings, buses and Polish men’s leather jackets. But to have the serenity of a Summer stroll interrupted by them blasting propaganda at you is too much. Its not enough that every free-square-inch of the City is covered in ads, but to vomit it into the air where we can’t escape it?
Its a cuntish thing when politicians do it, but they only do it once a year at most. Its obscene to drive around screaming this shit at people.
Circues and the Blues Brothers are the only people allowed to do that.
Everyone except Japanese World War 2 soldiers still fighting on some God forsaken Pacific island knows that Michael Jackson is dead.
I was in the pub Thursday night when one of the lads got a text saying he had had a heart attack. Immediately people looked at me, being the owner of two tickets for his much-anticipated comeback shows in London next month. I rang my brother who confirmed something was happening. Then the pub put on Sky News, and the headline read “TMZ.com reporting Michael Jackson is dead”. It is not hyperbole to say I was stunned.
I was a life-long fan, and was really looking forward to the gig. When I bought the tickets the standard response from people was “he’s never going to play those shows” and I vehemently defended him, as I always have. The truth is, however, that I put off buying my flights because part of me wondered if he actually could. Still, I don’t think anyone expected the reason he wouldn’t be playing the shows was because he was no longer among us.
Strangely, a lot of my friends and family have remarked that when they first heard the news the first thing they thought of was me. On the night it happened I was pretty shocked, but its only now really setting in that Michael Jackson is no longer alive. Those dreams of a proper comeback, with bazzilion-selling album sales and universal respect again are gone. As are my chances to see him perform live. The thing I was really looking forward to, really excited about was that moment when the lights would have gone down in the o2 arena and the crowd would have known he was about to take the stage. That would have been great.
There’s no point in going on and on about what or who he was, enough people are doing that. Suffice to say that the size of the reaction to his death should tell you everything. He made great music that people loved. He was not famous for being famous, or for being on a reality show. He was famous because he was a master of his craft. He did things that the vast majority of people who ever lived on this planet could not do. As a result, his shock death ground Google almost to a halt, and gave Yahoo! their most clicked news story in history. The world took notice.
Sadly, along side the tributes and whatnot comes the inevitable 21st century disease of the cynical backlash. Obviously there are the jokes. Almost immediately following his death people were wondering “where are the jokes”. Not really gonna dwell on this one, but over at Culch.ie, Lottie has written a fantastic post about Jackson, which touches on this subject.
The other reaction is the “I DONT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT MICHAEL JACKSON” comments. I mean, if you don’t care why say anything at all? Why feel the need to go out of your way to tell us you don’t care about something? I don’t care about the development of shampoo, but I don’t feel the need to tell everyone.
Anyways, the King of Popular Music is dead. But, like Alan Watts constantly said, and Robert Pirsig poignantly noted in the afterword of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence with regards his murdered son, people don’t really ‘die’. They’re not ‘gone’ as there is too much left of them behind to say they are no longer here. Jacko left us with great, great music.
Oh, and lest we forget, years ago Jacko showed the world how to make a movie about turning into cars, robots and spaceships.
Some of the people I follow on Twitter recently posted less than favourable comments about the new Transformers film. One of the comments I took umbrage with related to criticism of “the plot”. My point was that you were dealing a film which was about giant alien robots who turned into cars, “plot” was never going to be a strong point. However having seen the 2 and a half hour long brain-fart that is “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” I am here to repent. You quite clearly could have had a good plot, because the plot for this was so bad, so poorly written and constructed and conceived that it must simply be that a good plot could have existed. And I’m quite sure that my 6-year old nephew could have come up with said fantasy plot.
I won’t bore myself with recounting the innane details of the story, suffice to say that in Michael Bay’s ADHD addled brain he could not find the time or space to build tension or emotionally draw you in, there was far too much things to blow up, sweeping camera movements, slow motion walking and Megan Fox’s tits to put up on screen to worry about a cohesive, involving plot. So a cack-handed backstory is bulldozed into the film, and the lead characters handily remind us in the simplest possible terms what is happening every five minutes lest we forget. With such annoyances as a good story or characterization now out of the way, Bay can do what he does best (which, incidentally is the worst thing one can do) and thus we get one giant sweeping camera movement, with swelling music, slow motion hair in the wind and lots of US Army cunts shouting LOCK-N-LOAD and such things.
Now, at this point, one may shout “Ah, but its a Transformers film! Its about giant alien robots etc. etc, what did you expect”. I said those very things in my review of the original Transformers film.
Once you accept its about intergalactic autonomous robots waging a million year war who can turn into vehicles then this can be one of the most fun films in years.
I still stand by that. I liked the first film, I thought it got it pretty much spot on. But now, once Bay has his origins set up, he was free to go off and do even better things. Think, “The Dark Knight”. But he doesn’t. Instead he took all the worst excesses of the first film (pretty much his entire directing style and his fetish for the US Army) and runs with them, leaving behind the things that made the first film work (the humour, the likability of characters). The freedom of having no longer have to establish the scenario which should have been a gift, has become a curse and it allowed Bay to run rampant with his CGI spunk-machine for two and a half hours. There is so many things wrong with this film I don’t know where to begin. The new Transformers are amazingly annoying (the two jive-talking ice-cream truck lads are Jar Jar Binks 2009), the new enemy seems to appear out of nowhere, the humans are all annoying cunts, the gratuitous use of Megan Fox whilst welcome to your red-blooded heterosexual male like myself screams of pathetic pandering to their market. Its like they hooked up a computer to a bunch of 14-year olds brains and extracted all the ingredients for a film and just put it together without thought. I wouldn’t not be surprised if in the next film Optimus Prime interupts sexually with Ms. Fox, whilst emotional music swells up and Michael Bay rotates his camera 1080 degrees around the two atop an aircraft carrier whilst an American flag flaps in the wind and marines high five.
What I said I loved about the first film was that it was fun. There is little fun to be had here, only the long agonizing realisation that you have wasted your time and money. The pluses? Well, the action scenes and special effects are genuinely amazing, the main fight scenes are great and entertaining, but surely that was taken for granted? All the whizz bang wow action in the world however counts for nothing unless its attached to a good film. “The Dark Knight” did it, and “Ironman” did it. This film does not do it.
I guess its disappointing seeing as though I enjoyed the original, but something in the back of my mind told me Bay couldn’t pull it off again. Transformers was a blip in the career of an other wise shit film director. He makes shit films. End of. He once made one good film.
I don’t care if you think he’s a ball-bag kissing arse, but calling John Gormley “John Gormless” stopped being funny/creative about 5 minutes after ye started it.
One day my dad was driving me into work on a Bank Holiday. This was when I worked for a giant scumbag mobile phone company as a customer service monkey.
Just before he started the car, he remarked “I love Bank Holidays”.
Then, the man who had been retired for over a decade, laughed to himself before adding “What am I saying? Sure everyday’s a Bank Holiday for me”.
