Eight Reasons 3

Eight reasons why the Jersey population is much better than those bastards squatting on Guernsey:

1. Jersey cows genial and honey brown, whereas Guernsey cows merely docile and fawn;

2. Lack of tiny burnt bodies conclusive proof that Guernsey child killers far more sneaky and underhanded than Jersey ones;
3. System in which elected three year term Constables (assisted by two Procureur du Bien Public) head parishes divided into vingtaines (cueillettes in St. Ouen) far more naturalistic and intuitive than needlessly complex mess generated by fractionally different system employed by Guernsey;

4. The Nazis were going to leave Jersey alone in the Second World War but Guernsey was all like, "Hitler, dude; Jersey told France you were a douchebag!";

5. "Ma Normandie" much more macho-sounding anthem title than "Sarnia Cherie";

6. Guernsey's Wikipedia article a puny 90% the size of Jersey's;

7. Guernsey murdered Rowanoke Island in the sixteenth century and is still wearing its skin!

8. Jersey's dad could totally take Guernsey's dad, and the Isle of Wight says so too.

More On Bats

Just so you know, I agree with “Isnoproblem”. It’s a good film, but not a great film. I give it a solid 8 out of 10 but no more.

The editing was poor. Not just in terms of it containing a lot of stuff that could (and should) have been cut down, but also the actual craft itself… I really want to watch it again, because there were definitely moments that I felt like going Ughhh? Like when Bats rescues Rachael having fallen out the window, we immediately cut to somewhere entirely different, completely ignoring that the Joker and a bunch of armed Goons are still at Bruce Waynes party with all the richest people in Gothem (presumably they just went, oh shucks and left???). I’m pretty sure there were others like that as well…

As well as that, in areas the actual editing technique was sloppily done. There were several sequences (action ones) where they were evidently trying for the very fast quick cut look that is becoming increasingly common nowadays. BUT it failed to flow well so certain shots seemed to jar between each other and this spoiled the whole effect.

The main flaw in the movie though was that they had too many storylines / themes to explore and that because they weren’t going to make a 4 hour film, I suspect large chunks of it had to be cut, but rather than removing the themes in their entirety they just kept small elements in which didn’t really work… We should have had:

1. Batman – Basically completely overshadowed and very wooden because basically he had nothing to do except turn up and kick butt when required. The two themes that were established they failed to follow through with, namely:
a) The idea of exhaustion. They hint at the idea (Wayne falling asleep in meetings, the shot of all the scars on his back), but they never manage to get across the idea of a man battling to do all he can to keep his city safe. He is a man driven to always do the right thing, and it takes his toll as he spends every night out fighting injustice, and has the scars to prove it. Just to keep going is the struggle. Hinted at, but you never actually see it.
b) The idea of finally being able to stop. Again hinted at in a few lines, Harvey is not the cities White Knight, he is Batman’s White Knight. The man who could finally bring his struggle to a close.
These two themes should have promoted the conflict within that was solely missing as Batman battles to both keep going and find a way to stop. Was this explored? Nope.

2. Harvey Dent – And I thought that this was going to go so well. But no. The transformation from White Knight into the crazed criminal just seemed to occur too fast. You got on elittle hint at it, when he is flipping the coin with the captured villain, an dthen bang the single event sets it off. This needed to be better done as the conept and the ideas there were so good, just not as well executed as it should have been…

3. The Criminal Underworld – Again hinted at but never explored, the fact that releasing the Joker was like opening Pandora’s box for them. Sure he did what they wanted him to do, but in reality it made life much worse for them. We never see the doubt they have, or their human side at all apart from in little annoying hints.

Now, The Joker, yep he was great. In my mind though he wasn’t “The” Joker, in that he wasn’t what the comics and over portrayals have previously portrayed him as. But that’s fine, the performance was excellent and he was a really cool villain and I’m tempted to leave it at that, but I won’t… I’ll foolishly step up and say, I think the writers missed an important trick with The Joker. What they got across, and got across well, was the Jokers desire to make the world like him, or at least convince the world that they are like him. What they missed out on though was the more personal side of that battle with Batman as his target, instead focusing it on Harvey Dent. What made the production week most of all was the lack of Batman as a point of conflict, if they had put across the Jokers obsession with Batman and trying to turn him, it would have involved the Bat so much more. Instead you get a kind of heart hearted attempt to persuade him and then he just kind of gives up and goes after Harvey. A missed opportunity if ever I saw one.

It’s interesting that this film was both too long and both too short at the same time. It was too long given what they did explore, but too short to adequately explore what really should have been explored. Guess it’s a lesson to the writer about the importance of making sure what you write is going to fit the time available. Too much material and chunks of it WILL have to be cut to make a movie of a manageable length. Too little and you’ve got nothing there.

Still liked it though, and the Batpod was cool…

Our front room endorses..

The Orphanage.

Be creeped out, be terrified, be incredibly depressed. But also be incredibly impressed. However do be careful as it is in 'foreign' and it has those words that come up on the screen that confuse terribly as the nice man at Blockbuster points out.

Batman darkens our doors once more

Well its here and according to a whole bunch of people it's the best film ever made. Yes, it is The Dark Knight. And those people are wrong.

Don't get me wrong we're not saying it's terrible or anything, just that it isn't that good. It's solid, it's fine, in fleeting patches it is very good. It just simply not the best film ever.

For one thing it's a little overweight, like the former glamour queen who's married the sports start and let things go a little bit. Safe in the knowledge that Batman Begins was a big success the filmmakers do seem to have been allowed to be a little self indulgent ; the film really did need a more vocal editor (much like J.K. Rowling needed an editor that actually edited). The thing could stand to lose at least twenty minutes and I suspect you could probably get rid of at least half and hour of the running time without actually losing that much. Tighter and tauter is the way forward as any drummer will testify (the could have been a much ruder phrasing!)

Heath Ledger's Joker unbalances the film. That is to say when he's on screen all is good with the world. His twitchy performance of chaotic madness brings so much life to the film that all the scenes he's not in feel like they are suffering from narcolepsy. You can't accuse him of stealing the film because he is the film.

Once more the title character is by the least interesting person around as even this time he can't rely on his moral drama and sense of decency lift up above the villainy around him. This is because this time Harvey Dent has all the moral outrage at the world and the fight to stay on the right side of pre-eruptive vigilante justice. (And then even his story relies a great deal and the strangely subdued Rachael of our Maggie)

The nihilism doesn't go for the jugular the way it could and the climatic standoffs are basically just the wrong way round leaving the one that really should have been something special cheated out of, well, being something special.

The fact the film now resides at the top of the IMDB top 250 just means people are easily impressed, (or I guess that I'm hard to please) still if you ask me if I'd want to take this or The Godfather as a desert island style film choice (presumably an island with a TV and at least a video player) then I'd have to choose the family every time.

Sorry Bats, but it's the truth.

Cinema Corner

Last night two thirds of Our Front Room left the comparative safety of our eponymous location and headed into the wilds of Durham to catch a screening of WALL-E. Isnoproblem, of course, simply went so that he could cross the film off his unfeasibly huge cinema bingo card that he hides under his bed. I, on the other hand, had a nobler purpose. Since several individuals across the Atlantic have decried the film as "Liberal propaganda" (a phrase they have had varying degrees of success with spelling), I decided to check whether or not what was ostensibly a kid's film was, in fact, a tool of the international moonbat conspiracy designed to re-programme our children into slavering racist liberal baby-killers. Not very likely, you might think, but I once watched a puppet show on Brighton Beach in which Punch killed Judy with an ice-axe and went on to inter the crocodile without trial in a Siberian gulag, so I really don't think you can be too careful with this stuff*.

And what do you know? The wing-nuts somehow got it right this time. WALL-E is so leftist that had Che Guevara seen it he would have given up trying to invade Bolivia and set up a hamburger emporium/titty bar there instead.

All the obvious signs are there. An Earth ruined by pollution? Only those on the left thinks that that could possibly happen. Thereby by postulating that it has happened, this film immediately betrays its liberal roots, just as we know that Michael Crichton secretly wants the world to be run by dinosaurs thanks to Jurassic Park. Remember, kids, any film set in the future is implicitly stating that that future will happen**.

And what does the human race do about the socialist wet-dream that is the total trashing of our home planet? They go into space and get fat and let a private company sort things out. Now, that would probably have been alright if the company had managed to pull it off, that would be the marketplace of ideas coming good just like it always does***. But by daring to show a situation in which a company fails (and if you can't trust your hired mooks to wire a shower, I'd be hesitant about relying on them to fix the planet) this film places itself slightly to the left of Karl Marx. Of course, had B'n'L actually succeeded, WALL-E might not have been quite as interesting, but that's the price you pay for expunging a film of any reference to anything a liberal has ever said ever****.

And what about those lardy bastards floating around in space, huh; shovelling fast food into their mouths while they stare slack-jawed at flickering video screens? Not content with setting a film in some hypothetical future where someone we don't like was right, the film now dares to reference events which have already actually happened already right now as we speak!!! Only the most ardent of moonbat American haters would dare to suggest that current negative trends will continue. A truly non-partisan motion picture would imply that not only is the future perfect after God came down on his rainbow to clean the Earth because we were all too busy killing Muslims, but that any flaw in American society has been totally resolved too, due to the extra time we had to devote to it once we didn't waste all our effort protecting the constitution or giving money to the poor or throwing beer cans in the recycling bin instead of in the garden of the guy next door whose probably a terrorist because he watches The Daily Show and drives a hybrid. Not only is the film Al-Qaeda loving enough to portray the Americans of the future as worthless fat-tubes, but it tries to justify this outrage by referencing science. Science! In a kid's movie! This is exactly the sort of sneaky tricks liberals try to pull, hoping no-one will notice as they fill our children's heads with nonsense like "facts", and "scientific method", and "cause and effect", and all that other stuff that Jesus had to die on the cross so that we could stamp out. Learning is un-American! If Eve hadn't eaten the apple of knowledge we'd still all be living in the garden of Eden with the fluffy tyrannosaurs and the goose that laid the golden egg (not that we'd place any importance on the goose, since we wouldn't understand about economics, or rare substances, or what have you. We'd probably just try to make omelettes out of them and then die of heavy metal poisoning).

Then it gets worse. In order for WALL-E to get his girlfriend's plant sample to the bridge, he lets loose a whole bunch of defective robots. Some of them are ill, others won't stop playing tennis, one of them keeps hitting himself in the face with a tray for some reason, but all of them share one thing: they are all metaphors for terrorists. The so called "repair ward" is an obvious allegory to Gitmo, as evidenced by the fact that the ship's captain can send his minions there without recourse to the courts. That would be fine, obviously, until WALL-E stages his breakout, allowing dozens of Quran-reciting robots (you can't tell because of their cute voices but each and every one is chanting "death to America") to hassle the peace-loving American flesh-slugs that are just trying to consume their own body's weight of cup-cakes in peace. What we have here is clear proof that the loony left is so caught up in recycling and the protection of plants (just because almost all of them are dead)***** that they will strike a deal with blood-crazed mecha-jihadists in order to force their ideas on to the rest of us.

In conclusion: don't see WALL-E unless you want your kids to become terrorist-loving enviro-Nazis who will immediately stop believing in magical nebulous panaceas to be delivered at some unspecified future date. Or unless you're naive enough to think that ideas like love, self-sacrifice, dedication and a desire to change the world for the better regardless of personal cost might be themes that your children can take something from.


* There was also that episode of the Sooty Show in Sweep tried to kill Sooty with an exploding cigar as revenge for Sue getting mowed down in the Bay of Pigs a few years earlier, even though that was Matthew Corbett's fault for reneging on his promise to provide helicopter support.

** Please, please let whomever wrote Flesh Gordon Meets The Cosmic Cheerleaders turn out to have been right on the money.

*** Except when it doesn't and needs a hand-out from the government and takes all the money and then says the government shouldn't stick its nose into their business; like a whiny teenager whose allowance is coming out of your tax dollars. "Mom, give me a twenty so I can party with my friends. I'll clean up my business plans this afternoon. Don't shout at me I hate you!"

****When we get to the end of the film and the human race gets off the Axiom, does McCrea complain it is too hot? No. That is because they pretend that global warming never happened because this film is a shill for right-wing nut-jobs.

*****If this had been a more right-leaning film presumably EVE would have cast the plant aside and started drilling, in the hopes that it was some kind of mutant shrubbery that lived by sucking the nutrients out of oil fields.

Today Outside the Window...

..a desolate wasteland filled with near skeletal killers with no mercy and a desire to hunt down everyone who isn't them and make them thoroughly miserable. Surprisingly it isn't Middlesbrough town centre. It is in fact the terrifying future of the Terminator series, (unless of course you really dig robots - then it's the really quite exciting future of the Terminator series). , a franchise which is now responsible for more parallel time lines than theoretical physicists playing with their super strings could ever hope to match.

Makes Back To The Future look positively straight forward as three films present at least four different time lines whilst the TV show (surprisingly a fun little show to watch) creates a fifth that ignores at least one of the others.

Still, whilst we're here might as well try get hold of one of those reprogrammed ones - could well be useful round the house (you know for opening jars, doing the vacuuming, killing the neighbours, walking the terma-dog featured below), wonder what kind of warranty they come with?

OFR vs Ninja Gaiden

The tranquility of a Sunday afternoon in Our Front Room is suddenly shattered by a blood-curdling noise.

SS: Why can I hear the howling of killer dogs?
INP: My fault. There's something wrong with a game in which you play a hellspawn-slaughtering ninja who goes down like a dick to a few bad-tempered canines.
SS: You could try making a noise like a bee. Although that might only work with Storm.
INP: Your dog is afraid of bees?
SS: I think a lot of them are. That's why they don't like vacuums; it just sounds like a huge bumblebee.
INP: Well if normal bees scare you, giant bees must scare you much worse. That is science, my friend!
SS: I wonder how much thought the dogs put into it. Do they just think "big bee", or do they look at the hoover and freak out. "Holy shit, a giant bee encased in armour!"? A bee tank, basically. Which seems a reasonable thing for a dog to be afraid of. Hell, I'm a little afraid myself now.
INP: Hah! You who would mock the dog! Don't seem so stupid now, do they?
SS: Seriously, is our Dyson twitching?
INP: I always thought "Dyson" was a fairly good name for a megalomaniac. Clearly he has formed an alliance with the bees and is hoping to dominate the world with his arthropod Panzer Corps.
SS: You betray yourself as a bee-racist! For perhaps the bees have mobilised their tank divisions only in the defence of their homes. You can't blame them, really; what with all of their mates disappearing because of suicides or Daleks or whatever the hell it is this week.
INP: Would you mind keeping the ranting down? Only I'm trying to not get eaten by dogs.
SS: If only Bee Goering would unleash the Bee Luftwaffe and teach those pooches a lesson.
INP: Well, that's - shit! Some kind of giant-bat-demon-thing! And my face appears to be entirely visible!
SS: I think we've had this conversation before.

We sneak out quietly as our heroes collapse into a recursive loop.