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Tue, Feb. 10th, 2009, 02:49 pm
Movin' on up
Guess what you're reading? It's the first LJ post I've made from my new office at the university. Well, I am sharing it with two other people, but since they're not here today it's MY office. The computer isn't too bad either; it might even be a bit flasher than mine at home, especially since mine has gone on strike or something and is refusing to run at a proper speed, but that's another story.
I'm still not enrolled yet though. My status has sat at "Pending" for nearly two weeks now and when I made some enquiries yesterday I found out that it hasn't changed because I haven't submitted the enrolment form that NO ONE told me about, which has to also be signed by my H.O.D. and the Dean, as well as about 20 other people (probably; anyone who knows the university's administration will understand). This really fucked me off and made me want to unload at everyone I've been dealing with (I did ask on more than one occassion if there was anything else I needed to do and was told "No"), but I know that if I did they'd treat like shit for the rest of the year, so I have to be all sunhine and lollipops to their faces. Damn academia!
It really feels like I've arrived, though. I've started my Masters, got 3,500 words to do by next Friday (haven't started) and I'm gradually adjusting to the idea of having all my free time ripped away from me like a ball of yarn from an angry kitten. Good times. If only I was enrolled, then I could get the allowance and not to work so much. Oh well, give it time I 'spose.
Also, there's a Clash poster on the wall here. Nice.
Thu, Feb. 5th, 2009, 06:04 pm
Fuck you
In the news today:
-The idea to crush the cars of offending boy racers has been squashed by the finance companies worried about their payments being threatened. Never mind that it's their fault that these morons have their cars in the first place as well as all the other harm they've done to the economy by dishing out easy credit to people who could never afford to pay it back.
-Everyone's pissed off at Christian Bale for unloading a fierce tirade of abuse at a DP on the set of the next Terminator movie, insisting that no one deserves to be yelled at like that. I've been abused worse for far less so I don't see what everyone else is on about. If a guy is constantly messing up the scenes of a passionate method actor like Bale, especially if it's high in emotional tension, then he should anticipate an earful, and rightfully so. Shouldn't expect any different on the set of a movie being made by the guy who directed Charlie's Angels though.
-Two of the people arrested in conjunction with the death of Nia Glassie could be out of jail by August. That'll learn 'em! I'm also sure the mother of 10 who was caught drink driving while heavily pregnant will learn her lesson from the community service the defence counsel wants. Bonus points for the judge who doesn't want to lay charges despite numerous warnings for drinking and her comment to a probation officer that she doesn't want to give up drinking because she likes it too much.
-A Waikato train driver received a hail of bottles and stones after he stopped and advised some kids that playing chicken with trains on a bridge might not be so safe, illustrating why I never bother to help out the little shits.
Honestly, I'm usually not too affected by the news or people's reactions to it, but this really depresses me. Now more than ever, I really, honestly, deeply loathe people of all colours, creeds and gender.
Except you, of course.
4 weeks since posting. Man, it just feels like such a chore these days, like calling my mother. A lot of the time it's really hard to come up with a lot of stuff worth posting and when you do, it's impossible to find the effort or time to broadcast it to the world. Is it 'cause I'm not as bored any more? Since holidays began I've been devouring legions of books/movies/albums in between working some extra shifts at work, and it's been a welcome relief from having to read/watch/listen to something studiously, which is an efficient method for killing any joy you may have experienced otherwise. Almost as a cleanser, I've gobbled up a lot of Stephen King film adaptations and read IT, which took me about a month, with it's 1100-odd pages and all. Most of it's been pretty mint. Check out The Mist if you haven't already - it's one of the best horror films I've ever seen and has future classic smeared all over it. One classic I seem to have missed the boat on is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Maybe I'm oblivious to something, 'cause I found it a bit silly and boring. All the screaming shredded my nerves after a while and it was REALLY hard to care about what happened to the characters. And I can say that, because I've seen it now, so at least there's that. Apart from having to be a bit tighter with my dollars lately, things have been pretty good. Results came in and I got a B, a B+, an A- and an A, so that's cool. In the process of applying for a MA for next year, just got to write up my proposal. It has to be a few pages, but it's double-spaced too, so that's not so bad. All I gotta do is come up with some decent waffling. Also, this film rocks balls: There don't seem to be many people who've heard of King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, but it deserves a big audience. You've got Billy Mitchell, former teenage video game champion and world record holder in Donkey Kong, who now has a restaurant, his own line of hot sauce and a tribe of slavish devotees who make up the world of competitive video gaming. You've got Steve Wiebe, a science teacher who takes up Donkey Kong and smashes Billy's record, only to have his record attempt ignored and his general presence abhorred. Then it turns into a nerd's Rocky, a true underdog story for the ages. The best thing is that it's a documentary. Fuck reality TV, that shit's for chumps.
It only took me a few months of going there to realise that the people who frequent Digg aren't always the cream of the crop in terms of intelligence, sense of humour and creativity. Yet I can still barely believe the amount of uproar generated by MTV's apparent decision not to award Rick Astley (you know, the 'Rick Roll' guy) their "Best Act Ever" award, despite overwhelming votes in his favour. Now, even though I don't care, I can see how it's a dick move on MTV's part, but I wouldn't expect anything else from them either. At any rate, it certainly isn't worth the fury expressed in the comments. How can anyone with anything close to what most of us would call a life care that much about an internet meme, especially one that should only appeal to pre-pubescent boys? The act of Rick Rolling isn't far removed from prank calling and while I don't cast judgement on anyone who finds it funny, placing this much importance in it seems impossible lame to me. The worst part is that it's just some guy's blog; there isn't any link to an official MTV site, so how do they even know it's genuine? Few things piss me off more than blind belief, and these guys even have Republicans beat.
Dammit, I really should've seen this coming. Along with No Country Old Men, which was such a massive disappointment that it's put me off ever watching a new Coen brothers film again ( Burn After Reading looks like the kind of stupid bullshit you'd make if you had researched the theoretical structures of comedy without actually understanding humour yourself, like a guitar player who is technically amazing at playing but wouldn't know a good riff if it cut his nose off), There Will Be Blood has been hailing as one of "the" films to watch this year, but guess what? It. Is. Fucking. Boring. It's about 2 1/2 hours long and practically nothing happens. Daniel Day-Lewis shows his magnificient acting skills, the cinematography is wonderful and the soundtrack (provided by Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood) is suitaby evocative. But so what, when there's almost no plot or interesting characters for these formidable talents to utiliise. As per bloody usual, however, this bland, empty, meandering claptrap is being met with high critical praise and topping Top 10 lists everywhere. Makes me want to throw up. I couldn't maintain my attention span after the first hour was over, which is a shame because I had really looked to watching this for months and have only just been able to find the time. Perhaps the worst sin is the dialogue. It's not as horrible as, say, a horror movie, but it's nowhere near good enough to belong to a film hailed as a "classic" (apparently it only takes a year before a film can be deemed classic by whomever decides such things). Watching it reminded me of watching movies like Babel, which I thought would be an awesome film but was actually just a depressing hodge-podge that didn't deserve it's 150 minutes or so. This could've been a great film, but the sad, inescapable fact is that there's no point to any of it. Most great films have some sort of point to make, even if it's trite, but this film seems to only exist to look pretty and convince critics that it's wearing the emperor's latest line of clothes. What bugs me the most is that I like to think of myself as someone who knows their movies, but again and again I find myself disagreeing strongly with the majority of critics on films like this. It's like scenesters of any variety: there are groud rules laid out about who is and who isn't worthy of praise and, regardless of the actual quality of their product, they are to be abhorred or adored. If going to university has taught me one thing, it's that you can make an argument for or against anything so long as you can find an appropriate context into which you can squeeze it. Just more faux-intellectual bullshit for the masses I guess. Now Forgetting Sarah Marshall, there's a movie!
For fuck's sake Hell. Almost nothing offends me, but Hell Pizza's lame, "controversial" campaigns always manage to raise my ire. OK, the Hitler thing was kinda funny, but handing out condoms? Making fun of Steve Irwin's death? They might as well just launch a postcard campaign saying "We're called Hell - shocking, right? Doesn't it just INFLAME you?" for how pathetic and obvious their schtick is. Like Marilyn Manson, it's all about trying to appear edgy, but that's hard to do when everything you do is just a lame retread of someone who did it better. How dumb do you really have to be to make fun of Sir Edmund Hillary in a New Zealand advertisement when his bones haven't even been cold a year? You'd have to be even dumber to throw Heath Ledger into the mix, and all for the sake of drawing attention to their overpriced, although decent, pizzas.  Makes me think of the kind of people who wear those "Good Bush, Bad Bush" t-shirts and think they're funnier than Delirious-era Eddie Murphy. In other news, I watched Doomsday yesterday and it was one of the best blatant rip-offs of Esacpe From Absolom/New York/L.A. I've seen in a while. Basically, there's a killer virus, Scotland is walled off and quarantined and everything's OK for 30 years, until the virus hits London and starts fucking up motherfuckers. Of course, there are still a lot of survivors in Scotland, leading them to believe there's a cure, so they send in that hot chick from Boston Legal with some soldier guys. Imagine how crazy a whole country's worth of Scots would get if they were walled in for 30 years without any contact with the outside world:  Yep, seems about right. While it's highly derivative, Doomsday delivers the visceral joy, with fast-pace violence, nice set pieces and rad costumes. Mad Max is another clear influence, which means a few sweet car chases and a vaguely homoerotic subtext, as will as the awesome Killbus up there. One for the 13 year old boy in all of us. Also, in honour of this cool write-up of the Saw movies, I watched the first installment last night for the first time since it came out on DVD. It still held up OK, although I have two bones to pick. Firstly, enough with the flashbacks. Every film in the franchise has an annoying habit of using excessive flashbacks to remind the viewer of something they saw about half an hour ago. The first is especially good at making use of subtleties, but they piss that all away by beating us around the head with that to which the subtleties are pointing. The worst is when Adam tells Lawrence where he got the photos from (you know, the ones in the bag with the hacksaws) and we get a redundant flashback to Adam pulling the bag from the dunny. I hate that because it not only insults my intelligence, but it also makes me think that they needed to add filler in order to stretch the film out to feature length. They lose more points for overuse of Lawrence in the car park. I'm pretty sure that I forgot what my nana's voice sounded like because of the space that took up. Nice. My other grudge is that they attribute everything to one terminally ill old man, when I always thought it'd be way better if the killer ended up being revealed as a cult who carried out his whims. Think about it, it makes a damn sight more sense. Given the amount of intimate life details that Jigsaw is privvy to, he might as well be omniscient, making him just another in a long line of impossible skilled movie serial killers (when I first watched Saw, I kept thinking "This is OK, but Se7en takes it to school in the short bus"). However, if he was a cult leader dispatching units to orchestrate his projects, Fight Club style, it wouldn't be so hard to quell my sense of disbelief. Still, it's not about the plot, it's about the gory traps, and they do still inspire a fair amount of terror, so I have to admit that it still holds up a few years later. I'm still not much of a convert though. In other years, I'm done with university for the year and it's so relieving to have a licence to laziness again. Poor Emmy has two more exams to knock off (one of which is today), but the end is in sight. I've been trying to sort out what I'm doing next year, but my application for the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing is taking forever. I was warned that, while they're glad to have me do the MFA, the English department is extremely short of supervisors of study so the odds are it won't happen in 2009. It fucks me off because it has (almost) nothing to do with the quality of my work and (almost) everything to do with the massive cut-backs and lay-offs that persist in happening. My application has only been making the rounds for a week and a half, so I might still get a bite, but I can't shake the feeling in my gut that I'm going to end up just doing a boring Masters thesis instead. But fuck it. I'm just glad I'm done for the year and can focus more time on projects like reading It and setting a new personal record for time spent in pyjamas. Some might call it wasting time, but what do they know?
Isaac Hayes dead at 65.
First Bernie Mac, now this? Someone better keep an eye on Samuel L. Jackson.
At least Chef got a decent send-off.
That's what Johnny Rotten said about Shakespeare's Richard III (the character that is, not the actual play) in his autobiography. This week I had to plough through it for my Shakespeare Adaptation class and it's random to hear that someone like Johnny Bloody Rotten can identify with a major character in English literature and still sing about being pretty va...cunt. It cracks me up though; Richard III (the play) was written to hassle the guy of the same name in order to fit in with the opinions of Elizabeth I and allow Big Willy to keep his head, while the guy who ended up rallying against everything Elizabeth II stands for identifies with him. ... Maybe that one's just for me. Anyway, yeah, busy semester. I'm lousy at Shakespeare so getting through a play a week as well as grappling with an adaptation is chore enough without having to read a novel a week for NZ Literature. At least I enjoy that one though; we just finished getting stuck into this impossibly pretentious and toffy book called Different Kinds of Pleasure. It's all about these poncy rich fucks getting into ballet and latin and cricket and stuff like that while whining about their lives and doing nothing to fix their problems. Also, the most interesting characters get killed off or made to look bad, so it was pretty insulting all round. Great fun to savage in class though. Other than that, life's going pretty good. I think Em and I have been going out for about a six months or so, so that's awesome. Turned 25 the other week too, which means I get $220 a week from the gummit instead of $191 like I used to, so that's awesome. Went and saw The Dark Knight last week and that was just stone cold wicked bad sweet. Can't wait to buy the DVD. But yeah, things are pretty good all over. If only I wasn't forced into doing a Shakespeare paper, then I'd be set. |
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