A Very Strange Night

The misery journey is an age old tradition. You suffer a break-up, a bereavement, or just one hell of a bad day and you go on an adventure. Always with mates, and always with booze. The principal is simple, and the adventure can take many forms. Many advocate a linear approach: you drive until you can only walk, and then you walk until you can go no further. Drinking all the way obviously. That's the principle anyway.

Yeah. About that.

We took a more improvisational route. It's 3 o'clock on Sunday afternoon, I'm in the midst of cross-continental break-up blues (the Atlantic is a bitch ain't it?) and I'm at a mate's house. He's busy killing pixels and stuffing nicotine into his lungs so I figure it's as good a way to spend an afternoon as any. But it's a lovely sunny day so after a while we decide to drift off to the pub to catch up with some friends who left earlier. We arrive to find out that they've already gone so, determined not to have wasted a journey, we hurriedly order a couple of ales and sit out back shooting the breeze for a little bit. It's as we drift back home an hour later that my mate turns to me and asks the fatal question: 'Dude, do you fancy getting absolutely trashed?'

We buy two crates of beer. It's necessary, I say to myself. Despite a frail, malnourished, withering bank account, it's fundamentally necessary. My friend agrees. We get back and the games begin.

Several hours later and the carnage is in full flow. Another friend pops by with another bag of beer, but he makes the mistake of returning home and leaving it with us. It doesn't last long. The living room looks like a battlefield, there's debris everywhere and my friend and his housemate have drunkenly decided to start playfighting. One of them is wielding a bokken. The other is waving a frying pan. If Soul Calibur ever got the Backyard Wrestling treatment, it would have looked like this. I decide a cigarette, a beer and a spectator seat are the best options.

Frying Pans: The samurai's secondary weapon

After a tornado of limbs, an accidental near strangling, several beery casualties, and the destruction of a dreadlocked rasta hat which leaves faux-hairy giant caterpillars all over the floor, it is decided that what is really required is more alcohol. Drunken logic is very very simple. It's time to find the mythical 24hr off licence.

Twenty minutes, some light public exhibitionism at the side of the road, and jumping into a car through the passenger window later and we locate the offie: a small hatch in the side of a nearby petrol station. Crates of beer are a no-no, so using our improvisational skills we plump for the largest bottle of Jack Daniels that they have and a two litre bottle of coke. Half of the coke will make it back. None of the whiskey will escape.

My shaven headed compatriot suggests we find a picturesque spot to drink and so, after picking up a couple of silver flagons, we opt to go midnight rambling and try to find the river. In flip-flops. Now I want to stress at this point that our decision making capabilities were probably shot to hell. But so were our pain receptors. Nettles, brambles, sinking mud, wayward branches, wire fences and complete lack of balance count for nothing; and so, after falling over quite a bit, some accidental trespassing, and a lot of profanity we end up down by the river, towns twinkling below us.

Flips: Apparently inadequate for midnight rambling

At this point the night gets fairly hazy. What I do remember is two of us forcibly suggesting that my other mate needed a bath in the river, the death of a mobile phone, a lesson in why not to piss in nettles when balance is an issue, a lot of whiskey going down, and a surprising amount coming back up. There may have been some singing. If you can call it that.

I wake up to find my housemate leaving for work. Except that there's two of him. I'm pretty sure that he doesn't have a twin or a cloning device so I can only assume that I'm still hammered. I try and say good morning but it comes out more like 'Graaflangrgftmmmblee'. He laughs. I go back to bed. I notice that my sheets are slightly flecked with blood and I look down at my feet. The ramble seems to have turned them into streaky bacon.

I can't say that it was the greatest night I've ever had by any stretch of the imagination, but it was certainly one of the most bizarre. Spontaneous? Yep. Alcoholic? Check. Improvisational? Undoubtedly. Fun? Absolutely. Finding oneself lost, in the dead of night, being beaten up by a forest whilst sipping from a silver flagon of whiskey with two of my best mates I had a sudden realisation. Every so often something happens, something comes along that changes you. I'm sure I learned something that night....

....but I'll be damned if I can remember what it was!

More Than Meets The Eye?

I'd been looking forward to this for a long time. From the very first photos that leaked out onto the net, to the wild conspiracy theories that plagued the movie's development about everything from the script to the number of robots to potential deaths. Everything was primed (excuse the pun) and as I stood in the queue with a couple of mates for the cinema having driven there with Lion's theme song blaring out the speakers on repeat, I felt utterly psyched.

So does Transformers 2 deliver?

The answer, for my money is a resounding yes. There are more robots. More humour. More of the fights and the spectacular pyrotechnics that made the first one so very awesome. I sat there begging for Optimus Prime to unleash the fury. And I got exactly what I wanted. The plot, what there is of it, is really very straightforward. Prime and the Autobots, with help from a handful of Americans, are busy hunting down Decepticons on Earth. The opening twenty minutes involves a tac team of robots (How cool does that sound?!) basically kicking the shit out of Shanghai. And other robots. Megatron is at the bottom of the sea, but back on Cybertron there's a bigger bad. A metallically bearded fiend named The Fallen. Anyway, the Decepticons revive Megatron and the Fallen decides that he wants to harvest the Sun. In the meantime, Sam (a frenetic Shia LaBoeuf) finds a shard of the AllSpark and manages to get the location of an energon source burned into his brain. What follows is essentially a massive capture the flag game (with Sam as the flag) as the Decepticons try and find the energon to power the Sun Harvester, but involving massive transforming robots, humans with tanks, guns, explosions, the desecration of several Wonders of the Ancient World. Oh, and Megan Fox.

What's your favourite kind of number? PRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME!!

Prime now has double swords. Bumblebee kicks ass. There are robots beating the crap out of other robots. There are humans beating the crap out of robots. There are quick one-liners and reams of banter. The pace never lets up. Yes, it's film-by-numbers. Yes, it's big and loud and mindless. Yes, it's pure escapist fantasy. And I loved it. The entire cinema loved it. People laughed. People gasped. There were guys on the edge of their seats whispering 'More!' and weeping with delight. And Michael Bay delivered. He pledged to make everything bigger. To make everything more badass. And he did.

This brings me to the main crux of this post: the reaction from the critics. As I type Transformers 2 has amassed a 30% rating on RottenTomatoes with many of the reviewers positioning themselves on high and handing out heavy lightning bolts dripping with condescension. The Daily Mail called it 'big, noisy junk', although this is hardly surprising considering the average age of your Mail reader is around 50, incontinent and feel threatened by microwaves. But some of the other reviews were disappointing to say the least. 'Boring'? No. 'Preposterous nonsense'? Maybe. But that's what the best escapism is.

Pearl Harbor (you have no idea how much it grates the English student in me to have to leave the 'u' out there) sucked because it was marketed as this huge epic of war, love, betrayal and.....it was none of those things. We always knew exactly what this movie was going to be. Bay and his production team themselves had already flung the doors to this movie wide open. What irritates me is the tone of these reviews because it derives from critical snootiness. What pisses these critics off is that this is film-making at its most simplistic: Pick an audience. Blow shit up. Make lots of money. There are films made expressely with women in mind. Films designed for the family market. There are countless little indie films out there for little audiences about quirky romance and random offbeat humour. There are films for gun nuts and films for sexual deviants. There are gross-out comedies and weepy tearjerkers. There are films to make you scared, happy and sad. There are films to ake you crap your pants and bust a lung, sometimes at the same time. So why the hell shouldn't there be a film like this one. I'd like to say something profound about how memories of childhood are precious and we should hold onto them and embrace the things that....blah blah.....the bottom line is that, for myself and my compatriots that night, we got back that childlike excitement. For two and a half hours I didn't have a care in the world.

Grave-digging: Bay Style. With robots.

And I've never felt so psyched after a movie. So full of adrenaline. No film has ever made me so excited for such a long time after viewing. Some of the reviewers weren't far off when they termed it 'pulverising'. But, verbal presentation being everything, I'd prefer to go with 'a cavalcade of spectacular delights;.Now I realise that this might say more about me than the film, but I don't care. If the critics didn't get a kick out of Transformers 2 then I can't really slam a personal opinion. But in the midst of blockbuster season, to castigate it outright smacks of pomposity and arrogance. Maybe they're hurt to not be part of its target audience. Maybe their parents never sprung for an Optimus Prime bedside lamp. Maybe it's simply the fact that they know whatever they say that this movie is going to make big bucks. But if it does then it's because there's a market for it. A market that I'm actually really glad to be a part of. If you can't find the fun in a movie about enormous transforming robots blowing stuff up then don't watch it. But try not to ruin it for everyone else. This is an entertainment industry after all.

More than meets the eye? No. But when it looks this good, there really doesn't need to be.

The Start of Something Beautiful

It's time for a new one of these methinks.

So two or three times a week be prepared for some witty vignettes of life. I figure much of this blog will be taken up with movie stuff. Reviews, reaction and commentary. There'll be the odd bit of wild pontificating regarding the music and gaming sectors too, and every so often get your verbal taste buds ready for some anecdotal ramblings.

Let the games begin!