Just a Quick Christmas Message

So there I was innocently googling "Costume Quest" when I found this strange picture. I was simultaneously amused and disturbed; so naturally I felt that it belongs on Infinite Possiblogities. This isn't going to be much of a post, I'm a bit busy with family and friends right at this moment to give you a meatier one. But I have many ideas. So coming soon to Infinite Possiblogities...

1. A Review on Jungle Boy (a movie that came with a birthday card)
2. A Review on Resident Evil 5 (an inferior sequal to Resident Evil 4

Also I thought I'd mention that I discovered today that in 2011 the ABC will air a new series of The Games (my favourite Australian comedy ever, see an older post if necessary). This news caused my metaphorical vagina to moisten faster than your mum at an underwater Justin Timberlake concert.

Ikki Tousen: Battle Vixens

Japan loves underwear. Or to be a tad more specific Japan loves panties. The particular panties they like are the kind that have been lightly steamed by the body of a schoolgirl. Here's a fun fact for you that illustrates my point. Did you know that in Japan there are shops in which young girls can trade in their used undergarments for money so that any old stranger can buy them and do with them whatever they please? Well if you didn't know that then you sure are lucky you've got me around, slaving tirelessly on this blog to bring you all the must-have info of the world. I mention Japan's love of all things clinging to female genitalia because today's anime, Ikki Tousen: Battle Vixens, seems very keen to reward this love. Just take a look at the pictures I have provided. I hope you don't mind these sorts of images, because you'll be seeing a lot of them in this anime.

But there's more to Ikki Tousen than ass and titties. It actually has a decent story. It's basically about a bunch of fighters from rival schools who compete in a tournament in which there are basically no rules regarding torture and death. The story also tiptoes briefly around sexual abuse but we won't get too into that. Basically the main girl (the one on the left in the picture above) has some inner-dragon thing that all the other characters are either trying to unleash, repress or control. Ok so it's not really a fantastic, epic story or anything but I mostly liked the way it was handled. I actually wasn't entirely bothered by the upskirts and nudity because, let's face it, if half a dozen young, full breasted women are gonna fight each other in short school skirts then it would be kind of rediculous if you didn't see some bum hugging white panties. Actually, come to think of it, they're all wearing the exact same underwear. Ok so that's a bit hard to swallow. Besides, what if I have a fetish for a different style or colour? But I digress. The fact is that the semi-nudity actually makes sense and for the most part actually fits in with the situations.

The lame thing about Ikki Tousen: Battle Vixens is that for all it's shameless upskirts it's actually a pretty enjoyable anime series; which is lame because people will inevitably see images like the ones above and disregard it. It's this well balanced blend of action, narrative and rediculously comic soft pornography that somehow manages to make a consistent, decent series.That said, it's not a classic by any means. The story is consistent and makes sense but the whole thing ends up going basically nowhere. Characters have learnt nothing, the status quo is restored and the world carries on unchanged. I understand that there are further series and OVA's of Ikki Tousen so perhaps the story is yet to fully develope? I certainly feel that a few character relationships left a lot to be desired. But you know what? At the end of the day I don't feel like an anime like this really wants serious critical treatment. I mean it's definately supposed to be rediculous; the boobs make *boing* noises for fucksake. So in the end I guess what I'm trying to say is that Ikki Tousen might actually be worth checking out. You'll probably feel a little confused as to why you don't hate it, I know I am.

Undead Rant

You know how the elderly are often stereotyped as grumpy, disconnected and bored with everything? Well sometimes I wonder if I'm already a little too close to that. Well something that's been bringing me closer to that ultimate destiny recently is the undead. Oh how I'm sick of hearing about the undead. We have vampires in every teen romance novel, we have a zombie mode in every video game and I'm altogether over hearing about it. I'm sick of vampires being sexy, I'm sick of zombies being the cause of the appocalypse and I'm sick of nerds getting excited about pretending they'll survive it. So I thought what I'd do in todays blog is vent a little of my annoyance and explore the stupidity of the undead mythologies.

The Name
The first thing to ever bug me about the undead is that they're called "the undead." Let me explain to you how the English language works people. When the prefix "un" is placed before a word is juxtaposes the meaning of the original word so that the new word means the opposite. So then the word "undead" would literally mean "not dead". Now this in itself is fine because zombies seem to posses very basic signs of life and Vampires are able to pick up chicks at bars so it's easily argued that both of these beings are not actually dead. But then comes the problem, neither are we. Regular, 9 to 5 workin' John and Jane who deliver your post and have sex with the highschool swim team, none of them are dead either. So is everyone  not buried or cremated also "undead"? That doesn't really work does it. A better word for it would be "semidead". Semi, for all you dickhead writers out there who can't fucking get it right, meaning partly. THAT one makes sense. They're not quite dead or alive but exist in a weird grey area. Easy.

The next thing that pisses me off about the name is that I can't count the number of times that vampires have said the words "I'm already dead." Excuse me. No you fucking aren't. Dead people can't be arrogant, tall-talkers for one. Vampires can be killed too, by stakes and what not. If there's one situation in which you can NOT be killed it is if you are already dead. But apparently vampires, who are supposedly already dead, can die. So let me get this straight. The undead, are named in a way that literally means they AREN'T dead, are actually already dead but that doesn't mean much because they can still die. Die, die again. Maybe all this is just a scam on the part of the vampires so that they can collect 2 lots of life insurance? Besides which vampires all seem to "outlive" human beings, which is something the mopier ones often sulk about. I mean it's rediculous, are they dead or not? Try and get it together people.

The Zombie Appocalypse
I realise that by this point in my post I haven't given much attention to zombies. Want to know why that is? It's because zombies are fucking boring. I have no idea why or how people manage to talk about zombies so fucking much. Here's what they do. They shuffle. They kill. They sometimes gurgle out a single word. How the hell are people able to go on and on about them? At least vampires are trying to be interesting. But the main reason zombies are talked about so very, very is because the entire Geek Kingdom (ie, the internet) is obsessed with discussing the Zombie Appocalypse.

The annoying thing about the zombie appocalypse is how seriously it's taken. Everyone acts like it's going to happen like it's the Y2K all over again. Nerds actually have models for how the zombie appocalypse will play out depending on factors like the weather and the method in which a person becomes a zombie. It's pretty stupid. I can see the fun in pretending like it's the end of days and you just wanna live a little while longer in your stronghold, but actually making predictions about something that is never, ever, going to happen seems like a perfectly good way to get institutionalized. Let me put things in perspective for you. You know how people think that dice-based role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons are for losers? Well thoroughly planning how best to survive the zombie appocalypse is for the alpha-losers. The losers who other losers bully. And let me just leave this with you to think about. If you can't even function in human society without having your lunch money stollen how the fuck are you going to survive wave after wave of mindless killing machines who can smell you sweating into your Batman underpants?

The Undead VS Daylight
This one only really starts to unravel as you think about it. In many fictional universes the undead, be it zombie, vampire or werewolf (assuming they count, I don't see how they're any less dead than a vampire anyway), are often tranformed or killed in some way by sunlight. Now watch as I suck the fun out of this one.

Vampires usually only come out at night to avoid exposure to sunlight which would severly weaken and eventually kill them. Assuming that this is true, why is it then that moonlight doesn't do the same thing? Moonlight, after all, is just the exact same sunlight being bounced back to earth off the moon. Perhaps you could argue that reflected light doesn't have the same effect, which is fine I suppose except I'm pretty sure I've seen mirrors used to reflect light at vampires to weaken them.

Werewolves have the same sort of issue. Why does the full moon trigger their transformation? again, it's just reflected light. Perhaps you could argue that the other lunar phases do not have sufficient light to triiger the tranformation? But then why do they not transform in sunlight?

The problem with almost every one of my complaints is that they're basically all based upon anchient folk laws and the like, back when people didn't understand things like the moon or death. But I don't see why we have to continue with these laws in our current fiction. People defend these stupid old mythologies and thing like they're fact. You know how in the Twilight Saga vampires sparkle in the light instead of dying and everyone teases it saying how they're "not real vampires." Well here's a news flash dickheads, there ARE no real vampires. Even if sparkling teenage hearthrob vampires is extremely lame at least it's new. At least it's not just retreading the same old nonsensical shit and acting like changing this arcaic mythology would somehow be an affront to mankind. You'd be forgiven for thinking I hate the undead, but that's not quite true. I just hate the way they're getting treated these days. People have stopped being creative with them and are just happy to throw them all in together or randomly shoehorn them into some irrelevent story or game. It's the laziness of it that annoys me. Put in zombies and your game will sell. Put in vampires and you're teen romance novel will sell off the back of Twilight. Fuck you all. How about this for an idea? Get creative and do something new. Make your vampires weak against musicals, make your werewolves temperature sensitive, make your zombie hordes unable to go outside in the rain. Just do something fucking new.

Beautiful Katamari

A good long while ago I reviewed We Love Katamari on the Playstation 2. You might remember it. You might remember me liking the game. You might also remember that post being a bit shit. I am aware as much as any of you that sometimes my posts are a little bit on the dull side, especially when it comes to things I actually like. Beautiful Katamari (one of the games in the Katamari series don'tcha know?) gave me the opportunity to re-examine the Katamari formula, only this time much better. So let's get into the review shall we? Royal Rainbow!

The story begins with The King of the Cosmos on holiday with his family. Because the King of the Cosmos is both extremely powerful and extremely careless he manages to destroy the universe in a game of tennis. Game, set and match universe. So the King does what any all powerful universal collosus would do and gets his puny son to roll shit up into balls so he can hurl them into orbit and declare all extraterrestrial bodies replaced. You might think this sounds lazy of him but oh no, the King keeps hard at work harshly critiquing your efforts and punishing you when you fail to roll quick enough. But in all honesty the King of the Cosmos is a lovable character. Sure, he's out of touch, mentally inbalanced and destructively irresponsible. But you'll love him anyway.

Gameplay wise Beautiful Katamari is basically the same as any Katamari game. You roll shit into a ball. The ball gets bigger. Bigger balls roll bigger shit. The King belittles your efforts. Repeat. But this formula, although simple, manages to stay very refreshing and addictive with the use of clever level design and some interesting rules. There's one level where you have to quickly roll up a Katamari that is 10 000 degrees celcius by rolling hot things and avoiding cold things. Of course, Katamari logic dictates that hot and cold things are often abstract and confusing. For example a penguin counts as a cold thing and chili sauce counts as a hot thing. I'm pretty sure a penguine would burn better than a glass jar, but who am I to argue? Katamari logic can take a bit of getting used to, especially when you're trying to decide whether you are yet big enough to roll something up. There have been times where I was marching proudly along, rolling up all the puny objects in my way only to have some piddley little knick knack push me away like a repulsed blind date as you lean in for a goodnight kiss. Apparently size matters with katamari's too, but at least katamari's can grow without surgery.

Although the design sounds simple it always manages to stay fresh and fun. The mere act of rolling up something new is rewarding in itself, in a sort of Pokemon, gotta roll 'em all, kind of way. The game keeps track of your collection of crap, filing it away neatly and giving you an idea of how much of the world has been left unabused by your presence. The way a Katamari handles also feels right. You can start off a level speedily rolling up thumbtacks and gum saving up for being able to roll up that dogshit that's been giving you trouble and end up later on in the level slowly ploughing through cars, people and even buildings in the same slow, lumbering, unstoppable manner of Godzilla. People even panic and attempt to flee from your path. There's something very primally thrilling about seeing some jerk kicking and screaming as they are rolled around into other people. The levels are relatively short, usually clocking up about 6 mins. But you will find yourself replaying them over and over trying desperately to earn yourself a perfect score from the King. After doing so you unlock Eternal Mode for that level, allowing you to roll freely around it without a time limit. There's something extremely cathartic about toiling for hours for the perfect score and then going back to the level in Eternal Mode to reduce the level to an empty room or a flat area where a great city once stood.

The game still has it's flaws of course. Aside from the aforementioned Katamari logic to get your head around there's the camera. There are many occassions where I have done something I regretted because I couldn't actually see where I was going or even where my katamari was. Sometimes when your Katamari is big it obscures your vision and you find yourself crashing into unseen, mystery objects. As well as that I have found myself getting unfairly stuck because my katamari is just big enough to get wedged into some tight nook that is time consuming and damaging to get out of. Although these few flaws can be frustrating they certainly aren't dealbreakers. Katamari is as fun as it ever was.

I've heard some people complain that the Katamari games haven't changed at all. Whilst this is most certainly true I don't really care for a number of reasons. First of all, these games are so unique and fun that having more of them is definately good. Secondly, almost every katamari iteration appears on a different console, allowing more players to enjoy the game. Now that Katamari is on the Xbox 360, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, PSP and iPhone I don't see any reason why you, the reader, can excuse yourself from trying a Katamari game out. It may not sound like much and may look outlandishly camp and Japanese but just trust me, it's fantastic. The only reason I'm not playing it right now instead of blabbing on and on about it is because my fucking poorly designed Xbox 360 Pro has fucked up and is yet to be replaced by a new Xbox 360 Slim. But I've already ranted about how the Xbox 360 is shit. I bet if you opened one up it's probably being run on one of those potato batteries kids make in school. Yeah, that's it. Microsoft enslaves children to build Xbox 360's out of vegetables and chicken wire. Sigh...I miss Katamari.

Christmas Songs Rant

Remember when I actually used to post pictures with my blog? Well I've decided to stop being a lazy cunt and start up that tradition once again. So here's something vagueley relevant, enjoy!

You'd have to be majorly out of the loop to not be aware that Christmas is basically a month away. It's that time of the year when fairy lights begin to pop up in windows and front yards and mall Santa's start making their appearances. It's also time for fucking Christmas compilations to be played in every place with a sound system in the western world.

So let me open with this. Christmas songs are the shittest. The. Absolute. Worst. Music. I'm always surprised to see which saps actually get roped into making Christmas albums. Nat King Cole, Mariah Carey, The Simpsons; there's even a fucking Pokemon Christmas album. And they're all shit. Even the ironic, comdey ones are shit. In fact I'd go so far as to say that anything with the words "Christmas" in the title, be it movie, album or book, is shit with the possible exception of Christmas Lemmings.

So seeing as how I work in a shopping centre I have recently become plagued by stupid Christmas songs playing over the store radio. after a few hours of suffering a fellow employee said " fuck I hate Christmas songs" to which I agreed, but in my mind I sort of said to myself "well duh! Who the fuck doesn't?" Then I reached this realisation in my mind, I didn't know a single human being on the face of the Earth who didn't dread setting foot in stores this time of year for fear of being driven to auditory suicide by "Jingle Bells Rock". This presented me with many questions. Did there exist such a mythical beast that actually liked this garbage? If so, were their numbers significant? Assuming not, why are we exposed to these songs? Do the corporate big wigs in marketing like this music? Do they think it helps move units this time of year? There were so many questions that popped into my head and the weird thing was I couldn't shake the feeling that these songs would be, for the most part, a negative presence in shops.

After several hours of working for the man all troubling thoughts had left the forfront of my brain, but the music kept on playing. Eventually, as the evening wrapped up, I noticed something else disturbing about these songs. Many of these so-called "Christmas Songs" are sexual in nature. Whilst for the most part they seemed mostly harmless, mentioning topics no more frisky than stealing a quick kiss underneath a sprig of mistletoe, there were a few that got into the eggnog and decided to get slutty. There was this one song in particular being seductively and slowly wrung out of the speakers that actually featured lyrics that went, and I kid you not, something almost exactly like "I want you to crawl down my chimney, I want you to fill my stocking up" which doesn't bring to mind Christmas as much as it invokes images of a sexual deviant with Santa rape fantasies. My advice would be to avoid that track at any office christmas parties you might be planning, otherwise you might find the photocopier unusable and office relations becoming awkward.

But really I don't know what I hope to achieve here. I have no power at the best of times but even if you had the charisma and fanbase to bring down Microsoft I don't see how you could possibly prevent the overuse of Christmas songs in the lead up to Christmas. Me trying to stop these songs with the awesome power of my blog would be like trying to stop the tide coming in with the awesome power of parking tickets. I'm not sure why it's so hard though, because I'm pretty sure they are almost universally loathed. But somehow, despite this, the Christmas soundtracks have become an undefeatable force in the shopping world. I don't think I'll ever understand society.

Kite

Any regular reader of Infinite Possiblogities that has two brain cells they can rub together has probably been able to deduce that I have a certain appreciation for Japanese culture. Ok so I don't walk barefoot across my matted floor or spend ours on end preparing tea but what I am into is anime and gaming; both of which have some heavy Japanese connections. In the past I have tended to review good anime because I spend a certain amount of time researching to see what anime series are worth watching. But for reasons I won't delve into I sometimes come across anime that is shit. I guess it can't be helped, but every cloud has a silver lining. The polish of this particular turd comes in the form of this blog post. Whenever I find myself experiencing some disfigured abomination of mankinds creation I can always take solace in the fact that I can run home to my blog to vent my frustrations and take the piss. So with expectations set low enough to scratch a hampsters ballsack I present the review of Kite.

So what the fuck is Kite about? That's really a very good question. Only running at about 50 mins the story of Kite is something of a vague, half-baked affair. So it starts off in an elevator where a hitgirl kills some famous jerk. She flees the scene of the crime in an action sequence that feels like it was ripped right out of Ghost in the Shell before the Crime Scene Investigators turn up. After a bit of stickybeaking the scene changes to the hitgirl and the head crime scene guy talking in some dingy appartment. It's all blah de blah de blah then BAM! Hardcore sex scene. Wow ok so there's a hentai bent to this anime. Didn't expect that one. So anyway the story kinda starts to get retarded at this point. Basically the plot is about the different characters and their twisted relationships with each other. The hitgirl has some sick father/foster parent/boss/kinky sexual relationship with the CSI dude, which is made a little more disturbing by the fact that he basically has this same relationship with all his other female hired killers who all seem to be of school age. Creepy relationships aside for the moment, hitgirl has agreed to fuck and kill in exchange for the identities of her parents killers. So then there's this young boy who's also a killer but is trying to get out but apparently the seedy corrupt CSI dude doesn't like this, or indeed the boy, very much. Probably because the boy doesn't put out. Anyway the boy and girl are friendly There's obvious chemistry...kind of. There's a few more arbitrary hit jobs and then the boy drops the totally unsurprising bombshell that Mr. CSI killed hitgirls parents to which hitgirl replies "yeah I've known that a while now", just in case their relationship didn't already totally creep you out. Anyway, the boy is forced to watch CSI fuck the hitgirl at gunpoint before being walked away to be killed. CSI and the girl had apparently planned this to trap him and make him miserable. The boy escapes, killing the ugly sidekick. The girl betrays CSI, shooting him in his disproportionate hentai dick before killing him. Then there's this totally ambiguos and disatisfying ending where the boy is implied to have been shot by some little girl for some reason and that's it.

So that was fucking confusing right? Basically the story can be summed up as this. Creepy, powerplay sex. This is the most confusing 50 mins you will ever experience. The whole plot is arbitrary and raises a multitude of unanswered and fructrating questions. Why did the girl repeatedly have sex with her parents murderer? Why didn't the boy or the girl kill these creeps a long time ago? Why was the boy feeding cats? Is the boy dead? Why did a girl less than 10 years old try to kill him? Why? Why? WHY!?!

Some people might argue that this movie is just hentai and as such the story is just an excuse to explore strange sex situations but I'm not sure I completely buy that. Although the sex is extremely explicit and obviously hentai-esque there isn't really enough of it to go to all the trouble of making a story for it. To cut a long review short, Kite is sexually explicit retardedness. Even if hentai was your cup of tea I'm not really sure that the story is well enough contructed with well developed characters for anyone to ever consider it good or even ok. What it is is a series of twisted sexual relationships and character motivations that make little to no sense. I don't really know what else to say about it; that's Kite. It's stupid but it has big dicks and tits in it.

(Appologies for my delayed posts, I've had exams and shit. I should be able to make at least one post a week from now on so stay tuned.)

The L Word (Season One)

FACT: Guys like girls. FACT: Television networks like money. FACT: The person who first put two and two together to make a softcore sexual, lesbian based television drama must now have enough money to pay God to do his gardning and housework. So it's no surprise that after much controversy, media attention and general outcry from conservative, white housewives who go into automatic outraged-mode when their neighbours hairdresser tells them about a nipple they heard was visible through the top of an actresses blouse in a photoshoot; that The L Word managed to become a success. But wait, I hear you cry out from deep down in your caves of cultural ignorance, what is The L Word? Well it's time to get comfy knuckleheads as I move on the paragraph two and make some sense of my introduction.

So The L Word is set in L.A. and follows the lives and dramas of a handful of young women, most of whom are lesbian, as they eat at trendy cafes and engage in sexual acts that are filmed with gratuitous detail and scored with popular music and panting. The variety amoungst the main characters is there to ensure every single gay achetype is present like some sort of lesbian (and by that I mean, of course, MORE lesbian) Spice Girls. There's sporty lez, boy lez, bisexual lez, pretentious accent lez, husband and wife lez and, everybodies least favourite, might-be-lez-might-not-be-lez. All we need are wheelchair lez and asian lez to complete the rainbow but then this is only the first season, there are 5 more and no doubt some new ones will wriggle in.

At this point you probably think I'm being pretty cynical and in a way I suppose I am. The L Word can be overtly pretentious and trendy like a hipster reading Jaymes Joice beside a Japanese koi pond and the way the show was launched off the raunchiness of the concept was also shamless and predictable but underneath the thin shell of apparent shittiness is a show that's actually pretty decent and engaging. In my younger years I found myself occassionally dipping my feet in the shallow waters of The L Word as a masturbatory aid but actually found that the show was actually deep enough to swim and dive in. After the first few episodes the characters actually become more than just archetypes with names and start developing and becoming, dare I say it? Endearing. Of course the variety and wide focus in the cast means that everyone will pick out their favourite lesbian and have one that irks them horribly and not wanting to get too presumptious, I think most of you will hate Jenny. But I guess that's what The L Word is all about. It's supposed to give us a varied cast with challenging plots. I particularly like some of the later episodes in season one when one of the main cast is personally attacked for being partly responsible for the organisation of a controversial art exhibition. I actually felt quite angered by the fictional protests of these conservative, Christian bastards and not because the show lacked quality; not because I have my own personal gripes with conservatives, but because the show had managed to engage me.

So in conclusion I have to say that after one season I think The L Word is pretty good. It's got drama and complex issues woven amoungst a tapestry of mostly likeable characters if you're willing to take the plung. Plus it's got tits and girl-on-girl panting if you're just looking for something to do with your dick.

Final Fantasy XIII

Final Fantasy XIII is the latest installment in the increasingly inaccurately titled Final Fantasy series and chronicals the adventures of annoying and boring characters down a linear corridor who stop and pause every now and then to motivate each other. If you think this sounds dull and would like a bit more story the game thoughtfully provides you with a small encyclopedias worth of text to bring you up to speed on the backstory, the current story, the best local cafes, whether or not the characters are into BDSM, etc. So in other words the story is untidy and disjointed. It would be a little like if you were watching a soccer game and every 5-10 mins having the game interrupted by an elderly man reading a few pages of a novel. Except imagine that the soccer game is about 50 hours long.

But maybe your playing the game for the mechanics? Makes sense really seeing as video games are an interactive medium. But then again the fans of the series have always praised the games for their rich storytelling, so maybe that's wishful thinking. But funnily enough the combat is actually good...really good...kind of. My problem is that although the combat system and character developement system is great it takes way, WAY too long to reach it's full potential. In fact you don't have full access to the characters best moves until after you've finished the fucking game, which is stupid design if ever I've seen it. Surely the point of a game is to have all the exciting bits fairly early on or to build it up gradually before reaching a cresendo of orgasmic delight. But in FFXIII the fun is kept to a minimum for most of the storyline. In fact I only really started having proper fun in the post game stuff when the world became vaste and open and my developement tree was completely unlocked.

Many people have asked me in the past how they can make so many Final Fantasy games not realising that for the most part they have nothing in common. The story, characters and settings are almost always completely different. The only things that seem to tie the games together are a few recurring enemies and weapons. So what exactly makes a Final Fantasy game? I have no idea but as I play more of them I've started to think that maybe the only thing that makes a Final Fantasy game a Final Fantasy game is Square-Enix's desire to make money out of it.

So that's Final Fantasy XIII for you. Not too much to say really except that if you DO in fact buy it make sure you have a trained monkey or a passive, friendless nerd to play through the story for you so you can skip straight to the good bits.

A Post Apocalypse Double: The Road and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

You know I'm actually starting to get pretty sick of the apocalypse. I mean after all the movies, books, tv series, video games and nerds huffing and weezing about it it's going to be so fucking hyped up that whatever actually causes the apocalypse in the end is probably going to feel rather embarrased about it. "Sorry guys, but this is it...hope you enjoy it" is something like what I imagine this entity saying. I mean I get that people like to use the post apocalyptic setting to explore things like hope, the darker side of mankind and the perseverence of humanity but it's gotten too far out of hand people. I mean honestly, exactly what do some of these film directors think makes their take on a grubby guy who's family perished long ago any different to the last one? "Oh my gosh! He's having a flashback to a happier pre apocalypse time!" "Oh wow! I loved their completely different take on how fucked we are!" So anyway, sarcasm aside, today I actually managed to watch 2 completely different post apocalyptic films. One was a beatifully directed masterpiece that told story about the destructive powers of war and disharmony with nature. The other was about a grizzled survivalist and his son going to the beach for some reason.

The Road is a pretty typical post apocalypse movie. It's shot on a camera that manages to capture the world in crisp, clear, HD quality black and white and hopes that it can get the edge on the multitute of other movies doing exactly the same thing by being even grittier than the last one. You can sum up almost the whole movie by describing this one scene at the start in which the father is showing is son how to commit suicide with a handgun. Yeah that's right, says the movie, I'm fucking edgy. There are two types of people who inhabit this world. The hectic, pack-hunting rapists/canibals who somehow ended up with all the guns, trucks, houses and whatever else you'd care to name. Everyone else is a starving, dirty hobo pushing their trolly of supplies about the landscape robbing each other and wishing they were dead. I did have to hand it to this movie, it had me on edge the whole way through as I wondered just what would happen to this grubby father and son combo. But on the other hand the way it achieved most of this was pretty cheap. A good apocalypse movie could be set on a pornographic theme park made out of candy and rainbows and still have me on the edge of my seat and The Road could not have done this. It relies too much on gloomy settings and discomforting gore to get the job done. But there was one very crucial factor that made me realise that this movie wasn't good. I thought I was near the end of it, it felt like it had been running for ages and had made all it's social and psychological points and then it turned out it had only been going for 30 minutes. There was still over an hour to go. Upon this discovery I felt unhappy at the thought of sitting through the rest. So there you have it, if a movie feels way longer than it is and you become depressed at the thought of sitting through another extremely slow hour then chances are this movie is not good. Oh yeah, one more thing. If you don't like the idea of slogging it through 100 mins with a character who keeps saying "papa" in an increasingly whiney and blubbering tone then I suggest staying well away from this one.

Contrast what you read above with Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds, which manages to convey hoplessness and desolation despite being animated and colourful. The thing about this movie is that I was so engrossed in the world and the characters that I failed to realise that it was a post apocalyptic movie. I suppose this movie is almost 30 years old now and pre dates the whole apocalypse fad we're currently going through and as a result manages to sidestep pretty much all of the stereotypes. NotVotW is also beautifully paced and thoughtful with it's story telling. It slowly presents the harshness of the world piece by piece. The funny thing is that this movie is actually longer than The Road but because it is so cleverly executed it feels considerably shorter. NotVotW also seems to have a much clearer idea about what it's trying to say and how best to say it. People are better of living in harmony with nature and each other. Killing each other isn't good. This may not sound like much but if you think really hard about it that's basically what all post apocalypse films are trying to say, the only reason you might not have noticed is that they don't do a very good job at it. They spend so much time making everything as grim and fucked up as possible that they forget about the point they're trying to make and that's ultimately the biggest flaw in most modern apocalypse films. NotVotW may not have been as bleak and depressing, but it was certainly more engaging, emotionally involved and moving. I realise I haven't actually revealed anywhere near as much about NotVotW as The Road but that should be taken as a good thing. A truely excellent movie hardly needs any explaining or critiqueing, it should just be recommended and held up as a shining example of cinematic brilliance It's like marking an essay at school. There's no need to go on and on about how good the A+ essay was because it's already achieved great marks. But the slow kid who handed in the C- essay needs a lot of feedback so that they can hopefully understand where they went wrong and do better next time. Or at the very least they can see which kid they should try and copy for their next class quiz.

The Spider Man Movie Trilogy

Woah! Over a month since my last post, gosh I need to shape up. Anyway, first up I'd just like to point out that I was never that big on Spider Man. I never read a comic, I very rarely watched any of the multiple animated series and to be quite honest I never gave a shit. I don't really see the appeal to be honest. The only good thing about Spider Man is the occassionally decent game in which you can swing around the city, getting as high up as you can before flinging yourself towards to ground in an exhillerating, I-have-a-sinking-feeling-in-my-stomach act of catharsis. So now that you know roughly how I stand on the whole Spider Man franchise it's time for me to give you my highly opinionated rundown on the Spider Man Trilogy and how it sunk from mediocrity into a cloying casm of darkness and shit.

Spider Man
The movie that started it all. I was in my early to mid teens when this movie first hit the big screen and I think I recall actually liking it a fair bit at the time. Granted, this was before I had any taste or clear understanding of what makes a movie good in any way, so I think it's a fairly safe bet I liked it because it looked good and the story had internal consistency. Looking back the movie was really just above average and did nothing new and exciting with the Spider Man formula. You know the drill, Peter Parker is a weedy little nerd with glasses whose parents, now deceased, apparently didn't have a lot of money for vowels and consonants to give him a cool person name. The movie sets Peter up as the loser for a while, he has a hopeless crush on a girl out of his league, he is forever running alongside his school bus and the jocks shove him about. I guess it's pretty important that all the Spider Man fans can inject themselves into this universe. Anyway, to cut a long and often painfully scripted story short this movie is about how Spider Man came to be, what motivates him and why.

Spider Man 2
The second movie is a very similar formula to the first one. I can really only fault it in one new way over the original and that's this. They fucking explore the same shit. There is no character developement, which isn't normally a problem because Spider Man has already been developed as a character. But instead of exploring other characters they just retread the "what motivates Spider Man" ground. Oh and Spider Man's love interest is a mopey, unlikable moody bitch who I have no interest in seeing Spider Man get involved with unless it involves consuming her in web, feeding on her and laying eggs in her. However it is this movie in which my favourite Spider Man character ever is introduced. No, not Dr. Octopus you nerdy fuck. The character I'm refering to is the semi-attractive, plain Jane character who is the daughter of Peter Parkers landlord. I like her because she is the only character in the movie who feels real and genuine; as well as that she happily makes Peter a cake to cheer him up, juxtaposing her nicely against that other hormonal tramp. In fact what has always pissed me off about that movie is that Peter Parker should have clearly ended up with the cake lady. She was lovely, she was a dear, she would've had a cake ready for Spidey at the end of a long day of fighting freaks. But despite this I can't really say that this movie was any worse than the first, not in any significant way. But then along came...

Spider Man 3
What a ballsack of a movie. Once again they decide to explore the personal life of Spider Man only this time Peter Parker lets the fame get to his head and he turns into a douchebag. I don't know why this pisses his girlfriend off so much, seeing as how she's a complete bitch too, seems like they're made for each other. Also I'm not exactly sure why the years of being famous have only just now gotten to Peter's head as opposed to say TWO FREAKIN' MOVIES AGO! But I digress. Also the bad guys have the shitest motivations yet. Sandman's excuse for shooting an old man unnescessarily after stealing his car was simply "my daughter is sick." The other guy wants to kill Peter as revenge for revealing that his photo's he was selling to the paper were photoshopped and stealing his girlfriend. He actually goes into a church and preys for Peter's death. Oh yeah, did I mention that of all these unsubtle movies this one is about as subtle as having your scrotum pulled back through your legs and stapled over your sphincter. The fact is that the story is just a clumsier version of the older stories with characters who are all unlikable with the exception of cake girl, who Peter Parker is a complete jerk to. The really stupid part is that half the movie is actually not about superheroes or supervillians, it's just about people you don't like ruining relationships you don't care about. I remember when this came out the Angry Video Game Nerd did a review defending this movie against the swarms of disgust it stirred in people and actually claimed it was the best of the trilogy and wrapped everything up nicely. To that I say, are you fucking kidding me? That movie was pointless, did nothing for the franchise and will forever be known as "The Shit Spider Man Movie." What isn't completely awful is utterly bland.

To conclude I'd just like to say that Spider Man is actually pretty shit. He's a lame super hero with uninteresting motivations and all his supervillain counterparts are stupid. In fact,I can't think of a single decent Marvel Comic franchise. They're all shit. Spider Man is probably the best one. I mean DC has Batman and The Watchmen, which are simply a lot better in terms of quality.So there you have it, I have scientifically proven that DC is superior to Marvel. Fuck you nerds!

Bright Star (2009 Film)

For the first time in the history of Infinite Possiblogities I have decided to dedicate this post to someone, my dearest mother, who not only gave birth to me and raised me into the cynical critic I am today but who was also directly responsible for me having to watch this movie. I'm not going to use her actual name for fear of what you sick bastards might do to her, but this one's for her nontheless.So this is something like what my mum said to me what she convinced me to watch Bright Star.

"It's about this wonderful poet John Keats who I studied in high school"

-Mum

Now just to elaborate this movie is more specifically a dramatic interpretation of the final three years of John Keats' life and focuses primarily on his romance with some sappy, pathetic, unlikable wench. At one point later on in this movie there is a line of dialogue that really sums up my feelings regarding this movie. The line is "I have failed John Keats" and that's exactly what the movie feels like it's done. I was one of four people who watched this movie in this particular sitting and despite our often different tastes regarding film and television there was a universal disapproval of this film. Even my mum, who loves John Keats as a poet and who is awefully fond of the kind of bonnet drama's that frequent the ABC of a Sunday night couldn't say anything but bad things about this movie. To put it in terms my fans will appreciate, it is the worst film I have seen since Kicking the Dog *GASP!*

So what makes this movie bad? Well almost every problem with the film is directly linked to Keats' love interest. In the opening scenes she seems like your typical Austen heroin AKA flirtatiously hostile living with her family waiting to marry for love rather than wealth. Which is fine really, nothing new but a tried a true character that will suit the movies need for a love interest. But oh no, she turns out to be something else entirely. What she really is is a pseudo-stalking, overdramatic bitch whose mood sways annoyingly and suddenly between hopelessly devoted, mopey and pathetic and then to angry and sulky. She, as well as the movie itself, overdramatise everything. There were points in the movie where something absolutely trivial was happening yet the music seemed to br prompting us to feel sad or sympathetic. I was confused and wondered at times whether I was missing something. I eventually reached the conclusion that the person who wrote the musical score must've realised early on what a pile of undercooked toss this movie is and so decided to try their hardest to inject emotional music into as many places in a hope that the audience will be so moved by the score that they could be showing Yu-Gi-Oh and they'd still be touched. This was extremely misguided.

The problem is that this movie is attempting to be both a great romance and a tradgedy, much like Cold Mountain and like Cold Mountain it fails to stir the appropriate emotions in the viewer. But while Cold Mountain fell a little flat, Bright Star was more like a pathetic primary school kid jumping up and down trying to reach their lunch that a bully is holding up out of reach, just before getting punched in the guts and thrown in the mud. Both the characters are unsympathetic and have as much chemistry between them as a chemical reaction between noble gases (this one's for you chemistry nerds!). The girl is not only pathetic and annoying but also self involved and at times unfair and mean to her younger (and dare I say more likable) siblings. If you are anything at all like me, my mother, my father or my girlfriend you will fail to be enticed by this movie despite its' constant efforts to wring every drop of drama from every single scene.

Hiatus - It's That Time of the Year Again

You guys know the drill. Uni exams mean I'm once again ball-and-chained to my desk studying furiously. This means that Infinite Posiblogities gets very boring for a few weeks. Exams end on the 21st for me, so I wouldn't expect anything before then (unless I decide to procrastinate, in which case I'm a very naughty boy and I advise all female and effeminate male fans to spank me). In the meantime you can troll through the archives for "classic" posts, catch up with your "books to read" pile or attempt to mend the broken relationships you've been ignoring whilst under my hypnotic trance. Have fun and stay safe.

Bamercise: Clean and Get Lean

Every so often I come up with a post idea that ends up being quite challenging and daunting to write. This is usually because my poor little head is swimming with a multitude of things that just can't wait to be said, pushing and shoving to get ahead in the queue. Bamercise is one of those things. Bamercise raises many questions in my mind and I think the biggest one of all is "How?" Some people might be wondering "why?" but when you've watched it it's clear that it's a clever marketing/advertising tool. But before I delve too deeply into the questions I suppose I had better enlighten first.

So Bamercise is a creation by the folk who make Easy Off Bam (you know the cleaning product?) and supposedly works off the idea that their cleaning products are so effective that you "no longer get the workout you used to get from cleaning." So instead of releasing a slightly shittier product the good people at Easy Off Bam thought that the only responsible thing to do would be to make their own aerobics exercise regiment based around cleaning. So now us commoners can join Bambi and her team of Bamtastic followers for some Kitchen Cardio, Bathroom Blitz or Total Toilet Training.

There are many funny things about Bamercise and most of them are the people. Bambi herself is pretty much a beaming set of perfectly aligned, blindingly white teeth resting atop an athletic body, bouncing around, keen as mustard to scrub those toilets. But the hilarious characters don't stop there. Even though nobody else utters a word the other participants in Bamercise are hilarious and fun to watch. There's the gangly bald guy who can't keep his balance. There's the gay guy in the pink tank top and fab shorts.There's the blonde one who I completely forgot about until I looked at the box. There's the grumpy old one. There's the short one who looks about 14 and then there's the more shapely one whose body jiggles about unashamedly like that party hard aunty we all have. I guarantee you that every single one of these people will make you laugh out loud at least once (most of them many times).

Now back to my original question of "how?" More specifically, how did the marketing department of a company that maufactures cleaning products come up with the idea to make a themed exercise DVD? Don't get me wrong, I think it's brilliant in both its concept and execution. I mean it's the kind of thing people will watch, laught at and tell everyone about. It's really clever advertising if you think about it. But how on Earth did they come up with it? Getting from regular ads to a workout video seems a little like playing connect the dots in your mind and having the numbers 4 to 12 missing.

So here we are at the conclusion of this little post and I find myself thinking back to what I said earlier. Bamercise has been a challenging topic. I feel like I haven't said enough, like I haven't done the material justice. I've only just now realised that I didn't even mention the humorous use of cleaning products in the exercises as well as how apparently they couldn't afford to give a bottle of BAM to every person because there's one guy who's left out. What else have I forgotten? Oh fuck, I forgot about the hilariously repeditive song that plays in the menu. So before I go I'd just like to ask, does anyone else think it's a little bit sad that I feel unworthy to blog about a camp aerobics DVD?

Some Overthinking in Regards to Pokemon

Like my post on Harry Potter all those many months ago I thought I'd look into the Pokemon universe and talk about some of the things that have confused or bothered me over the years. Believe me, having played all the main games quite thoroughly I think I'm well qualified to make some of these points. So here we go...

How the Fuck do Pokeballs Work?
As far as I can tell when a pokemon is sent inside a pokeball the pokemon is destroyed, sucked atom by atom into the ball for storage so that they can hang off the trainers belt until they're needed. This really poses a lot of questions for me. For example, what do the pokemon do whilst inside the pokeballs? Are they happy in there? Are they conscious? Can they die in there? Do they need sustinence in this state? I mean imagine if you left a tentacool in there a few days and just when you decided to send it out into battle it comes out as a dried up blob of crap. Can that happen? And if it can and you sent a dead pokemon out in a battle would that count as a victory to your opponent?

Furthermore, How do Pokemon Get Stored on a PC?
Yeah riddle me that one? This is really more of the same question as the Pokeball one. But really? What's going on here? So your pokemon is in a ball and then the ball and its contents are somehow destroyed and rebuilt in binary? It kind of makes me wonder how many lab ratatas had to die before they perfected this technology.








Do People Ever Eat Pokemon?
This is a topic that the show often managed to skillfully avoid. Do people consume pokemon as food? People need to eat as do all living things, so it seems likely that they would. But the show and the games spend so much time promoting the special bond that exists between pokemon and humans that the thought of munching down a seaking fillet seems almost sick. I guess there exists the possibility that the world of pokemon is much more enlightened than ours and they are all able to live happily on a vegetarian diet. But I could swear I've seen the characters eat things that look meat based in the show. But there is another possibility I suppose and that's that other than pokemon there are regular, non-pokemon animals that exist in that world too. But then again you never actually see them, what are they doing when they're not being food? Which kinda brings me to my next point.

What Exactly is a Pokemon?Pokemon basically seem to be the animals in the pokemon world. The main difference seems to be that pokemon can be easily stored. So if all the animals in the world of pokemon ARE pokemon that really poses the question, are human beings pokemon? If you throw a pokeball at a person that is sufficiently weakened is it possible to capture them? It kind of has disturbing implications in regards to human trafficing, kidnapping and sex offences when you think about it? Images of seedy men in large coats selling pokeballs in an alleyway behind the pokemart come to mind. I mean it makes sense for humans to be pokemon as well doesn't it? Surely we can't expect to believe that humans are the only animals in that universe that aren't pokemon? And if we aren't pokemon then what makes a pokemon a pokemon? Gosh it turns out that once you start asking questions about pokemon the whole damn fictional universe unravels before your eyes. Anyway, back to Heart Gold version I go.

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon

Dear Infinite Possiblogities,
hurry the fuck up and write something decent before I am driven to hunt down your address and chew through your spine whilst you sleep.
Love always,
Adoring Fan

P.S. Your songs are shit and don't count

This is the kind of letter I'd deserve to get had I actually earned any fans. So anyway I've decided to cease and decist all of my procrastinating and get back to my blog (because lord knows I've missed the old gal). Now I'm sure there are a good number of you out there who are familiar with Sailor Moon, whether it be because you saw the anime on Cheez TV or because you stumbled upon pictures of her and her friends engaging in threesomes with the cast of Dragon Ball Z. But how many of you were aware that they made a live action Sailor Moon series in Japan called Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon? Yeah, yeah I know YOU did, put your hand down (you know who you are). Anyway well there is such a thing and I watched it all and I've deemed it blog worthy. So strap yourselves in, for I am going to review and discuss the many ups and downs that is Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon.

Now lets get one little thing out of the way first. Do you like Japanese entertainment and culture? If you answered "no" or some explicit variant on that theme then PGSM is simply not for you. Don't look into it, don't give it a try, just walk away and be thankful that Infinite Possiblogities was here to save you from wasting your precious, precious time. I say this because, quite frankly, if you can't stand bubbly Japanese school girls singing J-Pop karaoke then you will struggle to make your way through a single episode of PGSM without destroying something or commiting some horrible crime. Having said that I must admit to being something of a closet PGSM fan. This is something I could never admit to a good number of my friends because, to be perfectly honest, I deserve to be ridiculed. I certainly enjoyed it more than I ever did the over-played anime series. Anyway, I'm sure some of you may be wondering what in the fuck PGSM is all about, so let's move on to that.

PGSM is the story of 5 teenage girls who have no reservations about getting dressed in public having dormant powers awoken in them by talking cat toys so that they can fight evil shit. Turns out they're not always very good at fighting and so they often get helped out by the love interest known as Tuxedo Mask whose disguise consists of wearing a tuxedo and a mask. Just to give a brief overview of all the costumes the Sailor Scouts all dress like they're going to a costume party to lure out sex offenders in an undercover police sting operation and everone/everything else looks like a Queer-Eyed Power Rangers cast. But I actually liked how the show looked. It's colourful and vibrant and except for the occassional dodgy CGI effect it looks pretty believable.

But enough about the aesthetics. As well as being about hot chicks killing shit there is quite an extensive story of forbidden love, tradgedy and the search for identity woven in with the rather camp beat 'em up. The story itself is fairly straightforward in esscence however it is on many occassions made unneccessarily complicated by weird pacing. There are some points where the story moves painfully slowly to reach conclusions that are immediately obvious to the audience assuming they aren't brain damaged and then there are times where the plot twists and turns at a bewildering pace. Oh and I hope you like flashbacks, because PGSM has flashbacks in spades. There is this one kinda cute scene where Usagi offers her love interest some pastry thing that you will get very sick of seeing. Seriously, they must flashback to that moment about 12 times throughout the series. We're not goldfish guys, we can remember that these guys are into each other. Having said that, the story is still quite easy to follow, with maybe the exception of the ending. The ending isn't exactly confusing per se, but it has that "what the fuck was all that about?" quality that seems to plague the endings of so many animes (what happened when Mr. Serano opened the car door at the end of GitS: Stand Alone Complex? How come Section 9 allowed Kuze to get killed at the end of 2nd Gig? What the fuck was the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion all about!?!). I mean I get it's supposed to be symbollic and lightly philosophical but does that really mean we have to be confused too? Oh and one more thing *SPOILER ALERT* Since when did it become stock standard for anime series to end with the destruction and rebuilding of the world and/or the self? I mean I know it can be an interesting way to end a series but it can be a little anticlimactic at times. *SPOILERS OVER*

Actually speaking of anime stereotypes PGSM does play out much like an anime would and conforms to a lot of the perplexing things that animes never really explain. How come Japanese people are so accepting of the fact that monsters have just started popping up? How come nobody can recognise people who are dressed in costumes that actually reveal more of their body than regular clothes? How come Japan can't last a full series without shoehorning in some annoying, kookie child (I mean they made her out of a cat...what IS that!?!)? How come the transformation of only girl who clearly hasn't hit puberty is the most overtly sexual? How come everybody is always singing the same J-Pop song all the freaking time until you just wanna tear out your eyeballs and stuff them into your ears? HOW COME SAILOR MARS, MY FAVOURITE CHARACTER, DIDN'T EVEN TRANSFORM IN THE SPECIAL, MOVIE LENGTH EPISODE!?!

Sweat!

Just to tide you over while you wait for my next "real" post to come along I thought I'd share another song from my semi-talented past. Part of it was written by my brother too, although I don't really recall which parts (let's just say it's the parts you don't like). Anyway, this song has a few different levels of complexity to it lyrically. On the surface it's about self-gratification and loneliness; but it's also about searching for meaning and failing to find satisfaction in the physical world. Yeah, I know, wank wank wank, here's Sweat!

Sweat!

When all your emotions rot and fade away

Silence is waiting
but will you still be here to bleed for the next day?

Consistency ended when existence began
We’re downtrodden, outdone

We try to be philosophical but we’re too fucking dumb

It’s the same today

Masturbate around the other way

It’s the same today

Masturbate around the other  way
Sweat!

It itches so bad you scratch and tear at your skin

Silence, hating

And waiting forever for this to begin

We pick and overanalyse but miss the point

Downtrodden, outdone

We try to be deep and meaningful but we’re too fucking dumb

It’s the same today

Masturbate around the other way

It’s the same today

Masturbate around the other  way
And it’s the same old rain

Washing down and around into the drain

Distract yourself

Pretend you aren’t all alone and in pain

Sweat!

We struggle with the spiritual

And blame it on the physical

Distill it ‘til it’s simple

Ashamed to be human

When all we need is our hands

To slip away into nirvana

But I’d give it all away

I’d give it all up

To share it all with you

For you to feel the touch as well

Sweat for me my dear
sweat for me my sweetness

Sweat for me my love

Sweat for me my fallen angel

Pirates II - Stagnetti's Revenge

Just a quick little post this time because quite honestly if you've reviewed one Pirates movie you reviewed 'em all. So yeah the first Pirates movie was apparently successful enough to warrent a sequel which follows heavily in it's fathers footsteps. Much of the old cast is back, porn and non-porn roles alike, plus there's some fresh new faces ready to sample some of that pirate bounty for themselves.

So what's the story? Well our old friend Captain Edward Reynolds is back and is seen dictating his heroic deeds from the last film whilst posing in the mirror like the insecure, dimwit we know he is. Actually if I had to describe this character to someone I'd say he's just a pirate version of Zapp Brannigan from Futurama, he even does the same self-gratifying "captain's logs" that Zapp does. Anyway it's at this early point in the film that they set up one of several running gags in the film, in which everybody gives credit for the victory at the last movies conclusion to the gunner of the ship, rather than Reynolds himself. Other gags include the never-acted-upon sexual tension between Reynolds and Jules, his commanding officer and childhood best friend. Meanwhile there are these new Chinese pirates who are doing a bunch of supernatural stuff to bring the infamous Victor Stagnetti back to life. Yeah so it seems that Pirates II has a much more oriental bent than its predecessor with no less than two asian characters engaging in the rompy pompy, which is quite nice as a change. So yeah the story is just as silly and goofy as before, which is kinda how we wanted it to be right?

Something of a change in the sequal is the amount of action scenes. Pirates II has a noticably larger number of action scenes than it's predecessor, as long as you don't count sex as action of course. I actually appreciated this and I guess it's what comes from having a budget eight times the size of the original. So yeah, all the high production values are still there and the whole pirate theme is still done really well and from the way the story in this one concludes I'd say that Pirates is likely to become a trilogy. But here's my gripe with this movie. You see the thing about the original movie was that it broke new grounds, it was a landmark in pornographic filmaking philosophies. Sure it was goofy and made light of itself but in all seriousness it was a very important moment in the history of film and the sex industry. So where the first movie represented growth the second movie, with a strong hint of a third, represents stagnation. I said in my original Pirates review that I couldn't wait to see where they went next and all they're really doing is going in circles here. I'd personally like to see the gap between porn and mainstream film narrow and blur a little more. I'd like other themes explored. I'd even like to see them make a porn film with a big budget and longer narrative that isn't fun or cheesy, but romantic or beautiful. Perhaps I'm simply demanding too much at this stage but surely I can't be the only one who sees porn as a relatively unexplored artistic medium for human expression...can I?

P.S. I'm also a little peeved that Sasha Grey didn't get more err....ahem..."screen time." But that's just because she's pretty much my favourite porn star so I wouldn't let it worry you. Yeah that's right I have a favourite porn actress. Judge me.

Pirates XXX

Pirates is something of a landmark film in the world of pornography. Made back in 2005 it gained a reputation for it's exuberant story, comparitively large budget and it's use of special effects. It's a sign of the times really, porn has become mainstream and pornstars are becomming household names. That said, some of the biggest names in porn appear in Pirates. So I thought that given I'm prone to pornographic blogging at times and that Pirates is something of a rite of passage for bloggers I thought I'd get myself organised and give it a review.

So I'll bet you're wondering about the story am I right? Well the story, like all atempts at pornographic stories, is silly. But it's actually a lot of fun. It's more like a spoof or parody than the usual porn stories which are really a little more like playing out scenarios involving pool cleaners and bored housewives. Pirates is about (drumroll please) pirates. But to be a bit more accurate the movie centers on Captain Edward Reynolds, a so-far unsuccessful, nieve and unaware pirate hunter who has taken it upon himself to take down the infamously ruthless pirate Stagnetti. Meanwhile Stagnetti is doing some mean shit to a bunch of folk because he's trying to get some thing that'll make him even more powerful. Caught up in the middle of the fray are a newlywed couple who, just after consumating their marriage, are torn apart by Stagnetti. Basically it's and even more tenuous and sketchy plot than the Pirates of the Caribbean movies which they are obviously taking the piss out of. But that doesn't matter for 2 reasons. One, it's a whole lot of fun. Two, it allows for a variety of sexual encounters between various characters. Speaking of sex, the movie goes for around 2 hours and probably contains around 40-50 mins of actual sex. The rest is dialogue and exposition. So even though it's fun it does kinda drag on a bit. I suggest you intervene with some coffee and snack breaks if you intend of watching it in one sitting.

Story aside, the actual pirate concept is really quite solid. Costumes look great as do the set pieces and the makeup. The special effects mostly look pretty good but do at times look dodgy, especially shots of the sailing ship. I also like how they replace the usual sleazy, jazzy, weirdo-guitar-effecty porn music with more fitting orchestral pieces and the like. You'll really believe that lesbian pirate action is happening in the hull of a creaky wooden ship. Not JUST lesbian action mind you. There's girl on girl, guy on girl, guy on 2 girls and even this elaborate scene in which a guy and a girl are tied to a support in a burning storehouse ant the guy must have sex with another girl for their freedom whilst the other girl waits impatiently. It actually makes me laugh to imagine someone overdubbing that scene with the song 'Sex on Fire' by Kings of Leon, but I digress. Personally I thought this concept was done extraordinarily well and I hope we see more porn done like this. I suppose the next logical step is ninjas right?

Now for my gripe. Because this movie was pretty expensive to make and in a way it's quite niche the DVD is quite expensive to buy. The DVD can be bought in an R-rated and X-rated version, although from a value standpoint I can't see why you'd opt for a censored porn film. As far as the actual porn parts go it's pretty simple stuff too, nothing too elaborate or dirty. Just simple genital fun coupled with some hilarious dialogue and hammy acting. But cost aside (I'm sure many of you will find a way around the cost anyway) I'd recommend watching Pirates to pretty much anyone because it's a hell of a lot of fun and pretty inoffensive as far as porn is concerned. Any movie in which a person says "I'm the greatest pirate hunter in the world" during orgasm is hard for me to pass up.

Perfect Dark HD Remake

You know me, I love to holiday at Nostalgia Resort and to me nothing is more nostalgic than playing a classic game from the Nintendo 64 era. Unfortunately all of my N64 controllers suffer from terminal 'Mario Party Syndrome' and the combination of limp, unresponsive analogue sticks and the use of buttons to control aiming makes playing Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64 a nightmare. Luckily Rare have decided to remake many of their classic N64 titles and release them on the Xbox Live Marketplace. They did Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie and now it's Perfect Dark's turn.

So yeah it's boring old game review time. That and it's a game I actually like, so sweet burns are looking highly unlikely at this point. I guess you'll just have to wait until next week when I will hopefully be reviewing some high budget porn (I'm not joking, it's gonna be fun for all). So anyway the thing about Perfect Dark is that it reminds me of what's wrong with modern First Person Shooters. Perfect Dark has lovely environments to explore, varied and interesting missions as well as a large variety of rediculous weapons to kill people with. A modern shooting game has about 5 different weapons that you use to shoot boring characters with from behind cover in a long boring corridor. In Perfect Dark you can sneak up behind a stationary guard , literally pop a cap in his ass and watch them leap comically in surprise like a cartoon character in a mouse trap. In Perfect Dark all the enemies all act like they're auditioning for the part of a murder victim in a highschool production of Agatha Christie. "Why...me?" a dying guard will say with his last breath as he falls to his knees. It's fantastic. A modern FPS sacrifices fun for realism and I really miss it. Perfect Dark is acutely aware of what makes a game fun and has seemily developed the whole game around that knowledge.

Not that Perfect Dark is (dare I say it?) a perfect game. The story IS bad, even if it is easy to skip and it has a fun, campness to it. It's all about secret agencies and government conspiracies that (get THIS) eventually lead the story into outter space with peaceful and hostil alien factions. The worst thing of all is the escort segments of the game. There's nothing more annoying than some fuckwit AI running irratically in circles in front of the enemy until they get shot dead. It's not the worst AI I've ever seen, nor are they the most stressful escort missions. It's not even close to being a deal breaker but they can get annoying at times. But you know what? Fuck it. Perfect Dark is one of the greatest FPS games I've played in years and it's 10 years old. The controls, the graphics, the multiplayer and the framerate have all been vastely improved upon the original, which was in itself a fantastic game. If you've never played it before you should buy it. If you HAVE played it before then you'll probably want to buy it again anyway because of it's slick improvements.

Alice in Wonderland

Before I begin my usual tyraid into what's wrong with the world I thought I'd just clear something up. I've never actually read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or Through The Looking-Glass and so I'm sorry to all you puritans out there who will no doubt find my review ill informed and intolerable. BUT what I figure is that any decent movie adaptation deserves to be treated as its own work. Actually bad ones do too but that's beside the point.

Anyway so a couple of months back I was shown the trailer to Tim Burton's upcoming Alice in Wonderland movie and I got excited. But excitement can be bittersweet mistress, especially when she wants a threesome with her ugly sister disappoinment. And that's exacltly what Alice in Wonderland was, a Ménage à Troi with high expectations and inadequet payoff. Now because I'm cynical I tend to not get too excited about a lot of things for fear of having my soul crushed, but this was Tim Burton doing Alice in Wonderland with his usual superstar tag team of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. It had all the ingredients and skills at hand to be a delicious 3 course meal of enjoyment. But instead what we got was more like a teacake. It was good, but I was hungry for more. So what was wrong? Let us dive right in.

The movie starts off in the real world during the "bonnet drama" era. Alice is a lively, free spirited sort of gal feeling all the pressures of a sexist and elitest society. The movie follows Alice around for 15 minutes or so as she interacts with various characters who you just know are going to have themselves injected into the wonderland world as a fantasy persona. Yeah, that's right. It seems that the movie industry has imposed some kind of law in which if a movie starts off in the real world and then goes into a fantasy world then the fantasy world MUST be reflective of the real world and how the main character views it. So instead of a genuine fantasy world most of the time what we're really getting isa creative visualization of the thought process and of personal growth and discovery. Which I guess is fine but why can't I just go to a freaking weirdo place just because it's there anymore? Now it's all dreams and ambitions and fears and shit and it's all getting a bit pretentious and lame to be honest. Anyway so then Alice follows the rabbit down the hole and the adventure begins.

Now what I remember Wonderland (or Underland in this movie) to be like is in many ways very different to what the movie presents. I acknowledge that maybe I'm the only one who thinks this but to me Wonderland was always a place where random, inexplicable shit was constantly screwing Alice over and fucking with her mind. Alice was a fish that was so far out of water that she was in fucking space and gasping for air. In the movie she's the fucking chosen one. Instead of being a fish out of water she's a champion of the people. Instead of stumbling from one oddball character to another they all get together and discuss the current political climate. I mean even the Mad Hatter is saned up so that he can step in as something of a role model to Alice. I mean the world is still nice; it looks great and there are still hints of insanity and such but it's not the same. It feels more like Middle Earth has been redone on magic mushrooms or acid. It might sound fun but it's just not the same. So anyway shit in Wonderland gets sorted, Alice returns to the real world on a hero buzz and gives a big fuck you to the real world in the form of a dance she picked up from the Mad Hatter. A dance that made me die a little inside.

So what does all this mean in terms of quality? To me Alice in Wonderland was ok. It wasn't bad. But it wasn't great either and quite frankly it stands as a low point in Tim Burton's career. I suppose it had to happen eventually. Nobody can just keep making awsome stuff over and over again, can they?

I Find the Implications of this Picture Amusing

Heartbreak High

Have I ever mentioned my fondness for the 90's? It probably comes as no surprise to some of you considering what a cynical, melancholic sort of decade it was (and I am). For me, the 90's had some very important television series, albums and of course videogames. In fact, the 90's was really THE decade for gaming in terms of big innovations and historically important titles (Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time I am in awe of your golden cartridged beauty. You make me weep). Heartbreak High is a show I only vaguely remember from my daydreamy youth. But lucky for me the all kids channel ABC3, which I blogged about a while back, has actually managed to deliver a nugget of enjoyable 90's nostalgia in all it's mullety, backwards cap wearing glory.

So anyway, you know how I've made something of a habit out of belittling highschool drama's and sitcoms in this blog? Well Heartbreak High bucked all expectations and has rekindled my faith in the genre. Granted, it's over a decade old and has apparently failed to influence any of the current, popular series from the genre BUT...actually I really don't have any argument against that. But fuck it, Heartbreak High is actually pretty darn good and I'm going to continue holding it up as a shiney example of highschool goodness no matter what you fuckers think (please keep reading my blog...I really do love you...really).

So what's it all about then? Well I haven't really seen enough episodes to name characters and discuss plotlines but the show is essentially what you get if Skins knocked up Degrassi High and they're child was sustained with nothing but Pearl Jam and gritty cement for the first year of it's life. Everything about Heartbreak High is edge. It looks like it was filmed by stoned multimedia students, the cast dress like they're volunteer models for a sewing class at a homeless shelter and everybody goes about their day to day activities with either a snarl, a sullen look or like they're an angsty lone wolf. Grit and angst are really the words for this show. None of this bubbly tween crap or that Neighbours whinginess. This is teen drama injected with a hefty dose of hormones. The style of the show feels very authentic even if it is a tad archetypal. But you know what? Teans really ARE wreckless, emotionally overcharged, horny little bastards so the stereotype, when treated with respect, rings quite true to me.

Now to the bad parts. My main fault with the show is ironically one of the things I find so appealing. Heartbreak High is ultimately timelocked in the 90's and with it's total embracing of the trends of the time it essentially cuts it off from other generations who aren't into the whole grunge scene. If I showed this to some kid from the iGen (fuck that name) in 10 years time I daresay they will snort obnoxiously and say the 2020 equivalent of "that show is totally bogus." Shows like this mostly survive for the benefit of the generation for which the attitudes and influences of the time that were actually shaped by them in some way. So while I may not think it's the best show of all time or anything, it's certainly an important landmark in my memory and my nostalgia. That and it's a million times the high school tv series that Zoey 101 could ever hope to be.

The Downfall of MSN Messenger

As some of you may know I have a certain fondness for the days of my youth. They were simple times of marble seasons, hide and seek tip and other such cliches. I'm sure some of you might even remember the good old days before Facebook and other social networking sites when kids would sign in to MSN Messenger and talk about cute boys and shit instead of doing homework. I personally liked this era. Signing in to get my daily fix, to see if anyone has humorously changed their display name, to see if anyone new has added you and to hopefully chat to that highschool crush of yours. For many people I know MSN was the reason they created their email account, with many still embarrasing us to this very day. For anybody I know who grew up in that era MSN Messenger is now dead.

The death of MSN has not been swift and kind. No MSN has been dying of a horrible degenerative illness for quite some time now. This time 18 months or so ago MSN happily fullfilled my online interaction needs but now I only sign in for the convenience of checking my email. But do you want to know the moment when I knew, without a doubt in the world, that MSN was terminal? It was when I started getting new, unfamiliar people adding me. I shrugged and accepted at first, what's a fresh face here or there? I might even know them? But then I started getting more. One of them sparked up a conversation with me. It went something like this.
Oh of course, it's not a real woman interested in me. No no it's just a delightful advertising campaign designed to lure in perverts. At last I was comfortable and things were back to normal. MSN was still not being used by actual friends, woman were still not interested in me and I was still a sad, lonely blogger without any prospects of female company. Few! What a relief. So now everyday I sign in to MSN to check my email for Facebook updates (fuck that seems convoluted) and decline a few more offers for companionship by people with particularly effeminite emails (no killin_n_shit@hotmail.com's here) as well as closing the tabloid-ish Ninenews popup boasting a slideshow of celebrity kids or a breaking news article about how Lady Gaga is strange.

It's sad to see a once loved communication medium dying in such an embarrasing, demeaning way. So from me here at Infinite Possiblogities I'd just like to acknowledge the youthful joy and distant friendships MSN allowed us to maintain for so many years, even if we did have to appear offline on the odd occassion to avoid that annoying kid with the big ears who's dp was always something shit like a boggle-eyed penguin. Wait...why was I sad again?

I Am Legend (The Will Smith Marathon Comes to a Close)

Yes, I think I Am Legend is a great movie. Why did I open with this? Well I Am Legend is up there with Daria and anchovies in that I could speak to 100 people who've experienced it and I would get a 50-50 split of people who will love it and then those who loathe it. Not that I've ever had a complete understanding as to why people hate it. I went to see the movie with my brothers and then girlfriend and while my brothers and I had a blast the ol' GF came out saying "that movie was the worst." Her exact reasons for disliking it have never really become apparent to me and I have spoken to many others who offer only flimsy allusions as to what they might find objectionable about it. So what's all this fuss about? Let's dive right in.

Ok so it turns out that Will Smith is the sole survivor in a now quarrantined New York City after some dumb bitch cured cancer by making a zombie virus. The movie kind of rushes through that whole part of the story because it's quite apparent that the science behind it is about as sturdy as a cardboard box in a monsoon but to be quite frank it doesn't really matter. The point is Will Smith is alone. Really alone. At the beginning Will Smith is seen going about his regular survival routine in a flawless, well thought out way. But as the movie rolls on you begin to realise that without the company of his fellow man Will Smith is slowly succumbing to madness. There's something quite satisfying about the way the movie portrays Smith struggling to survive both the zombies and his own loneliness. It's an extremely sympathetic and moving performance. From an artsy English Extension 2 Fagboy perspective there are lots of beautifully subtle techniques you can furiously finger your bum over. I like the way that the movie slowly eases you into questioning whether Will Smith has lost almost as much of his humanity as the savage zombies.

This brings me quite nicely to yet another example of controversy that the movie stirred up. You see there are two different endings to the movie. The original one and then the newer one that they used in the theatrical release. I think there's merrit to both endings but I think I prefer the one they ended up going for. But, in true nerd fashion, amoungst the people who like it there is constant debate over which ending is the best. Many people the original ending is bolder and more edgy and feel that the newer ending was just a big, action movie, explosion copout. I don't really feel that way but whatever, I could not be fucked getting involved. So anyway, I think I Am Legend is fantastic. I guess it appeals to the part of me that likes the idea of mankind being obliterrated and then watching the lone survivor wander the empty streets trying to cling on to his humanity. I kind of worries me really, should I really be able to identify with him that well?