The Majesty of Grimes

If you have the unique privilege of knowing me personally, and since you're reading this then you definitely do, you're probably well aware of my keen admiration for Grimes, real name Claire Boucher, probably also known by several names on her home planet which are unpronounceable to our species. You'll also most likely be aware of her recent masterwork of an album, Visions, which is fantastic and brilliant and I adore it about as much as any human can adore a sound. Ever since I heard Oblivion, a song with which I'm struggling to find any fault or a minute of the day not to play it, and watched the equally great video of her dancing around and being awesome, her existence has become the focus of somewhat of an intense fascination of mine. Erm, not... an obsession, but maybe a little bit of an obsession. I guess since everyone's been going on uncreatively about 'celebrity culture' for the past decade or so, having a weird infatuation with someone I've never met who actually has an undeniable talent overload is probably a good thing, and is reason enough to write a babbling blog post about how great I think she is. Welcome to the musician jackoffathon that is my life. Welcome to my personal Claire Boucher apotheosis.

From what I've heard spilling out Grimes' mouth, she truly lives in a world of her own. You can tell from the ten thousand interviews with her - which is still not enough, by the way - that she adores music and art and feeling and thought and those teeny tiny glimpses of her forays into spirituality. Her spirit animal is a Hyena, although that may now be up for debate. In a world that is, for better or for worse, infested with cynicism, hearing this sparkly-eyed artsy magic that runs through her brain makes me feel all lovely inside. As an aspiring creative wanker, it's refreshing to listen to someone talk with such stratospheric heights of artistic temperament and not want to puke violently. I acknowledge that there's plenty of pomposity around these days, but anything with even the slightest touch of creative thought or a genuine attempt at being unconventional is immediately mocked, dismissed as pretentious or leads to the use of that abominable H-word. You know who you are. But Grimes manages to avoid it all. She's as mad as a sack of serial killers, and she has that eccentric wardrobe and hair colour that changes with the waning of the moon, but yet this persona of hers never seems false, it never seems like too much. Her lust for the bizarre and the sublime rings completely true.

The Genesis video, for instance, was described by Grimes herself as a smorgasbord (paraphrasing here) of pretty much everything she likes and the little things she's attracted to. The python, the escalade, the medieval weaponry, and this Brooke Candy individual - I find it understandably praiseworthy that she decided to just collect the various elements she finds interesting for whatever reason and stick them in a video on the basis that they are awesome. And I seem to like what she likes, except for maybe the elaborate dress sense; but then again, who doesn't love huge medieval weaponry? Whatever your reactions to the video may be, and if those reactions are negative then you are simply wrong, it's a celebration of all the fantastical shit that's going on inside her head and no one else's. Or, if you promise you won't be sarcastic about it, it's like a leak springing out of her own soul. And it's a soul that I adore peering into now and then. Her music may appeal to me on an ineffably personal level, but I fully believe that Grimes is, objectively, a figure of massively commendable interest. In directing her own videos, drawing her own distinctive and striking artwork, wearing and saying whatever the fuck she wants, and of course working with real laborious intensity over her outstanding music, Grimes is a figure who's completely her own person; an individual down to the last molecule in her magnificent little body. She's got real integrity, which is in many ways the most laudable trait of all. She's an inspiration to me, and a blazing roman candle of an inspiration at that.

Okay, okay, so she's absolutely adorable as well, although I'm sure that's not the adjective she'd love to be most associated with, but it's a beauty that stems from her quintessence. You know, from the fact that she is, at the very heart of it, cool as fuck. And she crafts danceable, evocative, densely layered, endlessly playable and enchanting music that I'm going to listen to and love until the end of time. At the time of writing I, sadly, have not seen her play live, and since missing her brief show in Brighton last year, the chance is getting slimmer and slimmer that I'll be able to see her in the city of cities again as her prestige is growing quickly, but there's no doubt that next time she plays in the Devil's arsehole that is London, I'll be there weeping with joy in the audience like a wee girl. Until that day comes, the few gems of genuine brilliance that have developed out of her extraordinarily beautiful mind will have to tide me over for the meantime. And even after the meantime. And probably for the rest of my life. And for the rest of your life, too. Shit, after all, she's only young. She can only get more brilliant, and best of all, she appears to be pretty sellout-proof (And I hope I never have to regret saying that). There should be a lot more awesome shit to come, and I'm waiting with an almost religious zeal for whatever it may be. Now fuck off and get listening.

The Fallout Series

The nuclear weapon, as well as being possibly the worst idea ever conceived by mankind at least until the day they're launched across what would soon cease to be the world, has also become a great tool of the science-fiction-fantasy variety of modern fiction. The post-nuclear wasteland is a blank canvas with which any aspiring and cynical author can meld whichever aspects of civilization they want into anything they so desire, creating a world that’s both recognisable yet completely different, and where nuclear fallout can simply be replaced by ‘magic’ and be used to create whatever monstrous antagonists and situations the pacifistic fantasist could wish for. The nuclear wasteland is, ironically, fertile territory for modern science fiction.

The Fallout series of videogames have recently become a majestic example of this pessimistic young sub-genre. Inspired by the brilliantly nihilistic A Boy and His Dog, which I may review later if I can manage to remain happily unemployed, the Fallout universe is, technically, a continuing work of those ‘alternate history’ sort of fictions, the kind that somehow seem disappointed that the Cold War ended with the dissolution of the USSR and would’ve much preferred it to escalate into a planet-destroying apocalypse if only for the sake of being a whole lot more interesting. In this instance, the two bomb-lobbing superpowers are the United States and China, who after a large amount of fairly unimportant back story have obliterated civilization by the year 2077. However, for reasons I don’t feel particularly compelled to discover, by this time the technological peak of the world has barely improved since around the end of the 1950s, and the result is one of Fallout’s main courses of art direction – the juxtaposition of optimistic, idealistic fifties American culture with the grim prospect of what very well could’ve been if the right buttons were pushed (Well, what could’ve been to a point, as far as the ghouls, two-headed cattle, super mutants and aliens are concerned). The games take place at various times and centuries after the ‘Great War’, and work both as an outlandish fantasy of inventive ‘what-if’ scenarios in the hypothetical post-nuclear world, as well as a nightmarish satire of American mores and ideals.

Fallout was originally released in 1997, with an incredibly similar sequel following the very next year. The games were classics of the 90s PC gaming era, critically acclaimed and praised for their imagination, writing and mythology, and for taking the usual wolves-witches-and-goblins formula of the RPG into interesting new territory. However, the games are brutally outdated by today’s standard. They’re buggy, they’re slow, they’re confusing as hell, and, to be honest, don’t really need to be played anymore now Fallout 3 is out and about. The third game, released a whole ten years after Fallout 2, was created by Bethesda, who already had a name for themselves in the ‘Action RPG’ genre, and had the genuinely great idea to take the world of Fallout and make it essentially an FPS with heavy RPG elements. Crossing the FPS and RPG genres together could easily have ended up going badly and becoming a total mess, like splicing a panther and a dolphin and being disappointed when both of them die, or at the very least your veterinary qualifications are revoked. Luckily, Fallout 3 managed to work both aspects out excellently. The running, gunning and first-person perspective were exciting enough to avoid the boredom of a turn-based system, and the traits and skills held all more immersion than you’d have thought from a series of numbers that dictate your imaginary personality. Even the V.A.T.S. system was brought in to add a little turn-based combat to the mix, even if it felt less like a useful strategy and more like an excuse to freeze time while you aim your gun at an enemy’s gonads and tally up the exact chances you have of blowing them off. Nevertheless, there’s nothing more awesome than watching a slow-motion bullet fly into the head of a luckless raider and turning it into a slow-motion water balloon burst of blood and skull. The spectacle never gets old, either, and even by the thousandth slow-motion full-body explosion you’ll still be grinning with excitement. I hope that doesn’t sound too weird.

Fallout 3 is fantastic, and one of my favourite games ever, if my favourite games ever didn’t change with every sunrise, but it’s also riddled with a whole horde of design problems. For one thing, the game’s design was pretty much an exact replica of Bethesda’s earlier generic orcs-and-bollocks action RPG Oblivion, and all its numerous problems, errors and issues remain with it, only this time they’re wallpapered over with some decent story and setting. But the dialogue system’s still a bit of an awkward series of straight-staring, time-stopping weirdness, and many of the options are so transparently ordered into ‘good’, ‘neutral’ and ‘dickwad’ options, placing the entirety of conversation into simple deeds. The existence of morality, or karma, in the game anyway is a little bit bullshit in itself, particularly in the context of a post-apocalyptic wasteland. For one thing, it seems to serve no actual gaming purpose whatsoever, besides changing the names and haircuts of the people who eventually come after you from the opposite side of the moral spectrum. It’s a wasteland! All established authority has dissolved! Who the fuck cares if I stole a bottle of whisky from the friendless hermit, or used a minigun to turn a defenceless woman into a human colander for no other motive than to steal her very fetching hat? It detracts from the immersion, rather than adding to it. It’s as if the game feels it should give me all the freedom of an open world environment, but make a point of judging me for everything I do.

But the real grizzly bugbear of the first-person Fallouts is the fact that the game’s got more bugs than the South American jungles, and constantly it feels as if the biggest danger the game has to offer is the stability of the game itself. Total freezes aren’t uncommon, graphical errors are frequent, and the chance of becoming irreparably trapped by an invisible obstacle is very real and very, very frustrating. Even parts of the game’s quest designs could break the game or leave certain quests unintentionally impossible. The problem is that the game is just so massive, not just in size, which it is, but in scope and complexity, in the various possible ways of going about your business. In Deus Ex there were multiple solutions to achieve your objective, but in the context of a linear game structure. Here, you don’t even have to really participate in the main missions if you don’t want to, or any missions for that matter. If you want to run around dressed in nothing but sexy sleepwear and a cowboy hat, murdering everyone you meet regardless of need or necessity, you can go right ahead. Of course, the missions are all fantastic. Each miniature story and objective you come across plays off as an oddly paced episode of The Twilight Zone, another work of 1960s American nuclear paranoia. The characters are great, and the individual set pieces of the wasteland are even better. The town that’s populated entirely by little kids, the individual abandoned vaults, the town where two wannabe superheroes do battle daily to the annoyance of the citizens, and the excellent pisstake of fifties suburbia in Tranquility Lane are all highly engrossing examples, even if the achingly boring stints through the sewers or the subways briefly bog down your enjoyment.

Fallout: New Vegas was released recently and, apparently keeping with Fallout tradition, the recent sequel if pretty much a direct repeat of its predecessor, albeit with a totally different setting and storyline. While Fallout 3 took place in the Capital Wasteland of Washington, D.C., New Vegas, you’ll be surprised to discover, is set in the Mojave Wasteland of Nevada, changing the colour palette from depressing greys and greens into equally depressing greys and browns. I, like so many others, expected the game to simply be a glorified expansion pack to Fallout 3, but considering Fallout 3 rocked so fucking hard, I didn’t at all mind. And that’s exactly what I got. The thing is, New Vegas is just not as good as Fallout 3. It’s not bad, at all, it’s still entertaining as all hell and you’ll dispose hours of your life into it. There’s still the same great writing, same great Fallout feel, and there’s even two particularly great changes in gameplay. The first is the fact that you can now look down the sights of your gun to aim at your enemies, which is an absolute godsend in that it balances out the gameplay even more so that you don’t have to constantly rely on V.A.T.S. for any sort of reliable accuracy. Hardcore mode is a great addition too, where you can opt to make the game that little bit harder but, theoretically at least, a lot more immersive by requiring your character to receive a steady supply of food, drink and sleep to avoid status drops and, well, death. It’s not perfect, for one thing there’s no arguable reason why soft drink dehydrates you so much, if, you know, at all, and sleep deprivation doesn’t seem to be a problem at all compared to how you feel it should be.

But these are all great added extras. The factions system is another big alteration to the game format, whereby the wasteland is populated by various gangs, towns and wannabe countries, and it’s one I’m currently undecided on. While your reputation amongst towns makes a whole lot of sense, and you’re not so easily forgiven for being a murderous dickhole to the more civilian populations anymore, the whole overarching dispute between the big factions, that is the NCR, Caesar’s Legion and Mr. House, doesn’t come across as interesting as it probably thinks it is. And that’s the real trouble with New Vegas. While Fallout 3 had some really stellar writing, New Vegas seems to come up a little short when it comes to the main objective. You kind of feel as if you just don’t care all that much, particularly after you’ve sorted out the only business you were presented with at the game’s beginning. The game’s intro also doesn’t match the awesome first half hour of Fallout 3, which literally takes your character’s entire back story and has you play through it in tiny, baby-sized segments. New Vegas understandably couldn’t simply repeat it, but, still, you kind of feel underwhelmed as you set out playing the game, compared to how impressed and enthralled I was with how Fallout 3 set things up. And the main storyline doesn’t really take off from there. Even the iconic Pip-Boy and vault suit are handed to you in a way that feels half-hearted and blasé. Again, New Vegas isn’t bad at all. Like I said, it’s essentially just a glorified expansion pack. If you’re a hardcore Fallout 3 fan like I am, you’ll find that great news. Otherwise, well, probably not so much.

Skins

Skins is very, very possibly one of the worst TV shows of all time. It's not just technically bad, with its soulless acting, embarassing scripts, inflated sense of self-worth and unbearably hateable character roster. I also genuinely believe it is a force of evil. It's either a shallow and misguided attempt by the media to tap into a frustratingly difficult demographic by trying to entice them with emulations of their own dramatic self-indulgence, or a representation of the idiotic fuckery of the overall British teenage culture that I've had to put up with ever since I became one of them. It could also be both. Either way, Skins is a malignant tumour on the face of the youthful social mores of the late 2000s and beyond. It advocates shallowness, idiocy, arrogance, anti-intellectualism, and... dare I say it? Immaturity. Now that's a surprising criticism for a TV show that seems so intent on speaking to the younger generation.

Let's talk about teenagers and television. As everyone knows, the internet was the technological orgasm that wetted the bedsheets of the planet with such gifts as knowledge, communication and lolcats, and this means that the generation gap is widening farther than goatse's anus. And as everyone also knows, the majority of the big cultural institutions of the country aren't run by teenagers but by boring, bespectacled grownups who consider Metallica subversive and shocking listening. Combine the two together and you get one constant truth - teenagers are never depicted correctly in television. I think I might've mentioned before in what I wrote about Kids that, being a teenager, I'm constantly feeling underrepresented by those fogeyed adults who unfortunately are in power of everything. Skins will always remain a flagship example of this. And there's nothing worse for an existentially challenged, confused, naive and fatally introspective teenager than to feel like you're part of the age group that no one really understands, not even yourself. For the unpopular outcasts at state schools around the country, the show might as well come with the number of the Samaritans. It's easy to take away from Skins the idea that if you're not a reckless fuckwit with zero integrity, then you deserve nothing but to be mocked.


As much as I can complain about this gargantuan pit of sewage, I can't deny that it made waves. Big, shitty brown waves. It was a smash. It hit the demographic with a headshot. It didn't need to focus on character or plot development, or any kind of, well, meaning or purpose. It sold simply on the basis of sex, drugs and recklessness. After all, to an aimless teenager the abstract concept of 'cool' is more appealing than junk to a junky. Sex, drugs and doing things that the establishment would prefer you didn't - the simple ways into the average young depressive's heart. Skins has all the intent and execution of internet porn. Just replace hardcore sex with things that disconnected teenagers wished their lives consisted of. The first casting call was a checklist of stereotypes. The stereotypes were so stereotyped that the word 'stereotype' seemed about as obvious as saying 'person'. Two of my favourite characters of note in this inspiration jamboree were Anwar and Maxxie, AKA the muslim and the gay. I waited, and waited, and was shocked to discover that these nouns were the total extent of these characters' story arcs. The ideas session between the scriptwriters were clearly 'cocky womaniser', 'shy nerd', 'hot girl', 'crazy girl', 'sarcastic girl', 'gay' and 'muslim'. And they all play accordingly. Surprisingly, the most decent characterisation I found was with Chris, no matter how much he made me want to rip off his head and ram it up his arse. While he was a dickhead, at least he kinda sorta felt like more than just a tacked-on typicality of established teenage society.

The first two series of Skins, while positively overflowing with bullshit from beginning to end, were nonetheless ultimately... not all bad. In the grand scheme of things, at least. It all began as the insultingly superficial adolescent circlejerk that its aggressive precursory advertising campaign suggested it would be, and though it never even came close to reaching the status of cultural milestone that it and the out-of-touch adult media believed it to be, it wasn't a total abomination, and there were only fleeting moments when I felt like eviscerating myself with my own fingernails. It even had little splashes of heart. Rare glimpses of intellect. There were little moments where it actually became substance over style. Of course, I didn't come to realise this until the first 'generation' ceased and the third series began, opening up a brand new generation of punchable fucktards onto the screens of televisions and the small talk of schools nationwide. While the first two series were, like I said before, at the very most not totally bad, the second generation stands proud as the true icon of everything that fucking sucks about the actual generation I'm having to grow up in.


You can see it all in the first seven vomit-inducing minutes, the absolute worst footage of anything ever that I have ever seen, ever. Hit it up on YouTube and we can all wince along together. Skateboards, spliffs, dumb indie fashion, mockney shitheads. The brilliance of Fucked Up becomes the sound of the show's producers clamouring for credibility. The way they talk about weed is so disconnected and almost laughably sheltered. Then there's a stop to laugh at the socially awkward nerd. LOL. He even knocks over a policeman on a bike, causing my psyche to scream what is this, the 1950s? And it just gets worse. And worse. The entire rest of the series reads like the lamest kid at college writing fanfiction of his own otherwise dull and pathetic life. These people do not act like human beings. They do not resemble people. Unless there's some kind of unfathomable artistic point to be made, TV dramas are generally character-driven. Here, the characters are unfeeling bags of sand moved around from one ridiculous situation to the next. It's the teenage equivalent of exploitation cinema, except it's even worse. The exploitation of Skins isn't sex, or violence - it's the constructed dream world - a world of faux-rebellious fantasy where everyone's independent and sexy - intended to prey upon the directionless lack of identity and need for self-importance that is the unspoken essence of the teenage years.

But while this is all well and good, and I can talk about superficiality and stereotypes until the end of time, there's one other part of Skins that doesn't so much annoy me as confuse me. The first series started off dumb, flashy and pretty much unassuming in its lack of invention, but by the time the second series really goes into throttle, everything stops being dumb and starts going apeshit. And dark. Sometimes the crappy jokes lie side by side with melodramatic doom and gloom. The episode 'Sketch', which was actually kinda cool in that it didn't follow a single main character, instead focusing on a peripheral character who they foolishly brought back again, was half-decent in its bleakness. Then there's the episode that's supposedly all about Jungian metaphors. Incest! Death! Peter Capaldi being Scottish and awesome! Then more death! It's like what the hell happened? Even the second generation went totally nuts, as if they could make their collection of wooden characters jumble around chaotically enough to give at least some small semblance of fascinating activity. For a show that made headlines for telling it like it is about what kids in the UK are like nowadays, it sure likes to put its balls to the wall for the actual majority of its content.

Skins is evil. There's no doubt about it. It's exploiting my generational brethren. It's not universally adored, but it was enough of a success to warrant yet another forthcoming series, not to mention the seriously depressing American jackoffathon that's getting everyone's attention. I even heard a film was in the works, which I can't see happening. What could it possibly involve except putting the characters in space or something? The only possible saviour, the only thing keeping me from distrusting the older generation for the rest of my time as one of the up-and-comings, is Channel 4's other crack of the youth whip, Misfits. While Skins is bullshit over substance as the entire core of its being, Misfits is a startlingly realistic portrayal of teenagers, especially for a show about superpowers. I'm actually stoked on its return, hopefully very soon this year. As for Skins? Well, my years as a literal teenager are slipping away from me pretty quickly. Soon it's never gonna rile me up like it does. To close: Pandora = best character, Cook = worst character in anything ever. I'd love to set his retarded gaping-grin face on fire.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Rarely have I been left stunned and speechless at a movie. Well, okay, I've been stunned and speechless a number of times at a number of movies that particularly struck me on some emotional level, sure, but as the credits rolled for Scott Pilgrim I found myself completely at a loss in terms of what to make of the one hundred and twelve minutes of total stylistic confusion that had just passed. I was struck dumb. After mumbling nothing but a series of ellipses I finally managed to utter my thoughts of the moment. "I've never seen anything like that before." I think I said. "Ever."

The movie's based off of the Scott Pilgrim series of comic books by Bryan Lee O'Malley in the same way Fight Club was based off of the novel - in that no one gave a shit about the book until the adaptation was established, and that the adaptation is undoubtedly an improvement on the original [I read the comic books after writing this and I can tell you that the original is actually far superior :( ]. The plot, which has to be regurgitated in any review it seems, is thus: Scott Pilgrim is a twenty-something bassist of garage-rock nothing band 'Sex Bob-omb' with no apparent job, a surrounding of people who like him but belittle him, and a seventeen-year-old Chinese girlfriend. And yet, in a Brazil-esque plot device, he dreams of another girl - the enigmatic, wholesomely indie and soul-meltingly attractive Ramona Flowers. After finally realising his dream girl exists, and after a couple of fist-bitingly embarassing attempts to make conversation, the two eventually begin to date. As well as the more down-to-earth troubles Scott faces in simulatenously dating two girls at once, and being surrounded by his cruel-but-caring bandmates, roommate and younger sister, there's also the astonishing fact that in order to continue dating Ramona, Scott needs to defeat all seven of her exes, in true anime-bullshit style!


It's become a tendency of mine in recent years to seriously analyse the majority of the media I consume like the little cultural leech I am, due to one-part personal interest and two-parts pomposity. I watch pretty much everything expecting to have a basic idea of its overall quality, and yet Scott Pilgrim has defeated me with its schizophrenic energy. I mean, the movie's all over the place, it's chaotic, anarchic, and yet none of these things seem to be its downfall. The storyline's redundant, and yet you still anticipate whatever's going to happen next. The characters are underdeveloped, and yet they seem natural and understandable despite their ridiculous surroundings. And that's before we even begin to get into the movie's grasp of reality itself. As far as this film's concerned, reality isn't so much discarded as toyed with. People fly, throw fireballs, pull oversized weaponry out of their small handbags, and beat the shit out of each other without so much of a scratch, and yet all of this is accepted as fair deals. The 'super powers' are never explained (except maybe with veganism - go figure) and in all honesty that's probably for the best.

In fact, a good portion of this movie is never explained, but for some reason this never seems to be a problem. The movie doesn't run on believability as much as it runs on relatability, if you understand me. No, I don't mean that people can relate to the surreal wizardry that features throughout the movie, but I mean that this is a movie tailored almost exclusively to this generation and the previous. The whole thing is stocked with knowing references to comics and videogames, for god's sake. It's one of the whole selling points of the movie itself. I never thought I could hear the Legend of Zelda theme music on a big screen until Scott Pilgrim came along. This movie is not a lesson on love, or a gallery of characters or even, necessarily, an action thrill ride. It's something else entirely - a self-aware story of ridiculousness that exists just because it's awesome. And I have to give kudos to director Wright, whose ADD-style of chopping-board editing is perfect for this movie, and who manages to pull off making a film of this magnitude of craziness that isn't brainless, isn't too obscure, and best of all isn't so surreal as to distance itself from its audience. In all honesty, this is a very special, very unique movie indeed.


Michael Cera is, obviously, perfect for this movie. After all, there's nothing a teenager can relate to better than awkwardness and ineptitude, and Cera remains the ideal embodiment of these concepts, as well as bringing a healthy addition of likeability, charm and cool for all the nerd that's in his ever-repeating screen persona. Mary Elizabeth Winstead's great too, and not just in how she simply appears on screen - her character's got the silver screen je ne sais quoi which I'd dare to compare with such iconic bedroom-poster cinema women as Holly Golightly or Mia Wallace. She also succeeds in blending standoffish cool with a sense of deep-seated vulnerability, despite the fact her character remains brutally underwritten. And to top it all off she has great, big, beautiful eyes. So nice. The rest of the cast fill their roles with excellency, leaving the whole film with a kind of Misfits situation, where despite the unrealistic situation at hand, all the characters, or at least all the characters who aren't villains, appear to be your average and realistic Toronto youth clique, which a movie like this would live and die upon.

Like I said before, Scott Pilgrim is a schizophrenic movie. There are plenty of idiotic moments, but plenty of ingenious directorial strokes. There's also plenty of comedic flops, but also real jewels of laugh-out-loud gags (mostly to do with the hat, and of course the bit that really makes you go ':O'). The fights are astounding in that Japanophilic way our videogame generation's been raised in, but it's also great to see no one really taking the fights with a single degree of seriousness. Even when there's fireballs, full-on magic, castles, ninjas, brawls, etc, the jokes still keep coming, which is exhilarating. I mean, the exes appear to be genuinely killed without consequence. But I guess that's all part of the package. I mean, imagine how dire it'd be for the movie to try and really explain the nature behind all this fighting and supernatural nonsense. It's best that the challenges in this movie aren't so much in Scott's combat scenarios, but in relationships, past and present, and of course the success of Scott's own devoid-of-popularity band. The closest this movie gets to moral reasoning is 'self-respect > love', and the rest can be interpreted for yourself if you're as much of an analytical fuckwit as I am.


Scott Pilgrim is a movie I think I love, in the same way you might love a person. For one thing, it's early days yet. This movie is one that sticks in my mind until I can find a way to make something of it myself, like a strange new discovery. It's a film that's undeniably cult. It's somewhat of a generational milestone. No way could a collection of videogame references of this volume appear in a movie before this one. The music is from the upper echelons of hipster idolatry. It's been a bit of a box-office disappointment, but that's all part of the charm. It stands as a truly unique chunk of weirdness that can't be so easily appreciated. Whether it'll grow into the widespread cult phenomenon of the new decade that I believe it deserves to be remains to be seen, but I don't think I can stress enough how much of a beautiful freak this movie is. I think I love it. I suggest you go see it for yourself to see what you yourself can make of it. I'd even suggest that you need to.

I wouldn't recommend a trailer, a trailer wouldn't do this film justice. Instead, here's another picture of Ramona for me to dote over. Any good?

The Silent Hill Series

One of the pointless psychoanalytical theories on what makes a good videogame seems to be that videogames fulfil people's desires for empowerment. We play games to blow the shit out of aliens, control nations and armies, drive really fast down really long roads, etc, etc, all with no fear of death, imprisonment or awkward social consequence. This was even pretty much the main selling point behind much of the GTA series' fanbase of morbid fourteen year olds - of which I was one. But the survival horror genre, which has a particularly niche cult following of sorts, goes against this theory in its gameplay philosophy. Instead of playing as a cigar-munching, bullet-shitting space marine with twice the body mass of an actual human, the idea behind a survival horror game is to keep the player weakened almost to the point of ineptitude. Hence the 'survival' part. In these games, combat isn't a sport, it's a pain and a struggle. While it all started with the feaky-deeky 1992 classic Alone in the Dark and surged in popularity with the now-sellout Resident Evil series, any gaming nerd will tell you that the big bad motherfucker of the survival horror movement is undoubtedly videogaming's bastard child, the Silent Hill franchise.


Silent Hill's thing is atmosphere. There's a bit of heartstring-tugging, too, albeit not much, as well as a few instances of shock scares, but for the most part the main 'fun' (if you can call it that) of the series is allowing yourself to sink into a game not just about horrific thrills but more about a whole world of intense dread. Make no mistake, these games are fucking terrifying. While horror has always been popular in film and books, it's a little bit overlooked when it comes to videogames, which is a shame because interactivity and horror are the best partnership since gin and tonic. While the modern horror film equates to being little more than a conveyor belt of loud noises and quick editing, Silent Hill is unparalleled in making you feel terrified. Staples of the series include a vision space obscured either by fog or darkness, surreal Bacon-and-Bellmer-inspired enemies, a quasi-Satanic religious subtext and a town full of about ten doors to a thousand that can actually open.

The story begins with Silent Hill, now retrospectively referred to as Silent Hill 1, released in 1999 as Konami's answer to rival Capcom's aforementioned Resident Evil. Its protagonist is the suitably personality-less Harry Mason, whose inexplicable decision to go to the titular town for a holiday leads to the disappearance of his daughter, Cheryl, who serves as the main reason Harry continues through the dilapidated town rather than gets the fuck out. And so the adventure begins. In truth, the storyline of the original Silent Hill is abysmally weak. While Harry's main interest is, of course, his daughter, he nonetheless finds himself bogged down in a complicated web of give-a-shit townsfolk all linked by some mysterious religious cult that sort of explains why the town is so fucked up, or at least it would if magic, or indeed religion, were in fact real. Fortunately, the storyline isn't the high point of the game, the fear is, and in that regard, the game still stands as a worthy effort.

But let's not beat about the bush here. The real meaty masterpiece of the saga is in Silent Hill 2. Thankfully, the developers decided that all the hocus pocus religious crap from the original game had to go, and instead of some lame 'demons caused everything' sort of storyline, they decided to push the focus a lot more inwards. While the original Silent Hill set everything up in its odd little way and put a lot more emphasis on the actual town, its first sequel kept the 'spooky-town-full-of-spooky-crap' idea and used it to develop a plot not just about horror, but about characterisation. Yeah, remember that?


Okay, let's get it straight that the characterisation of Silent Hill 2 isn't perfect, but it's successful in a strange sort of way. Let's take the protagonist, the neurotic James Sunderland. While in SH1 the main character was portrayed as essentially a normal dude in abnormal circumstances, with James, it's apparent from the offset that he's clearly not on the level. He's even a little bit creepy, which is unusual for a videogame protagonist if you think about - he's always talking in a weird, gravelly monotone of sorrow, stopping occasionally to yell at children and begrudgingly converse with the occasional fellow wanderer. There's clear parallels with the original - instead of searching for his missing daughter, James in this instance is searching for his dead wife. Yeah, dead wife, go figure. It's hard to gush about how fantastic the rest of the story is without spoiling it completely, but ultimately, it's twisted, it's grim, it's a little sad, but best of all it doesn't have anything to do with a hood-wearing, riddle-speaking religious cult! And it's open to interpretation, not least because of the multiple endings that make the series so fucking difficult to canonise.

Now, while Silent Hill is indeed advertised as a game, a problem arises in that description in that the gameplay is absolutely dire. Movement is slow and sticky, combat is delayed and awkward and the camera has a tendency to do anything other than show you exactly what's going on, but this is a very rare example of the gameplay's faults only making its better qualities... better. Since the combat is sluggish, combat becomes less of a challenge and more of an annoyance, if not a genuine fear, which is good, because what's the point in all these ghoulish monsters wandering about the place if you could just rip into them with an AK and be done with it? And the monsters aren't just there with no real reason, no siree, if you can call them 'there' at all. This is a 'psychological horror' game in every sense. It's not just a game about horror and terror, exciting as that may be, but it's about one man's own troubled little psyche. The monsters are all recollections of his own guiltily repressed libido, rife with disease and barely human at all save from some feminine features, such as the monster made entirely out of women's legs, or the nurses with the ridiculous cleavage - all harking to James' own sexual desire despite his wife's hospitalisation. I mean, this is all deep and heavy shit. Even the puzzles and the setpieces all relate to the relationship between James and his wife. For instance, one of the final parts of the game takes place in the hotel James and his wife stayed at the last time they came to Silent Hill (probably when it was less foggy and monster-infested). While at first it appears that nothing's changed, aside from the place being a little dark, once James plays a certain videotape, the hotel reveals itself as actually being run down, flooded and completely unrecognisable from his own memory.


Along the way, you meet a few other characters, that is to say people who, for all intents and purposes, do actually exist. They're losers, just like you, wandering about the town fighting their own personal demons. Take Angela, for instance, the runaway whose background of incestuous rape on the part of her father actually manifests itself into one of the game's few bosses. Her story exists for the sentiment, yes, but also to remind you that this a town for troubled minds. It's one of those situations where everything may or may not be real, like American Psycho or Taxi Driver. There's also the little girl, Laura, who doesn't seem to worry about the monsters and to whom the town is just one big deserted playground. There's Eddie, the dumb, fat guy who always seems to be around a dead body or two and seems to be nuttier than a squirrel's shit. And there's Maria, who shares a similarity in name, voice and appearance to James' dead wife Mary, except she seems to be a whole lot sluttier, and she's one of the few characters to actually follow you around the game. Spoiler alert: she dies. And dies. And dies. This game has enough symbolism to give Freud an aneurysm, but it's all so subtle, so artfully made that it really stacks a game with shoddy controls and camera movement to a status as one of the greatest games ever made. Truly.

Silent Hill 2 isn't just one of my favourite games ever; it's grown to be just one of my favourite works of art ever. It isn't just a horror game - horror games essentially end the minute the console's switched off, with maybe a little apprehension for a night afterwards. This game will haunt you. Horror isn't just in scary moments and creepy settings, but in the grim stories that these things are a part of. That's why masterpieces like The Shining kicked so much arse. While it starts out as being a bit dull, a bit creepy, and not as flashy as your average space-age FPS, as the credits finally roll and one out of six possible endings melts away with gloom, all the pieces come together in one big miserable Jungian mindfuck. A real fucking classic.

Silent Hill 2 would never be surpassed in the series again, probably because while SH2 stands apart from the rest of the franchise, with Silent Hill 3 the story inexplicably dives back to the Wicker Man weirdness of the first game, going as far to make the main character the teenage daughter of SH1's Harry Mason, and the game suffers as a result of this. It's still a thrill ride, sure, and I have to admit I could never play it alone for the sake of my own blood pressure, but in the end, you'll never give a shit in the same way you could in SH2. And all the magic-and-mayhem bollocks and bland sob stories about Alessa Gillespie make the game a whole lot less dark and depressing as SH2, for while the emotions of guilt, remorse and regret exist in the real world, gods, demons and magic do not, and that's pretty much the best story elements SH3 has to offer. It's not a bad game by any means, I mean, I definitely enjoyed every minute I slogged through it and nearly shit myself every five minutes, but it's just a little shallow is all, as with its original predecessor.


Silent Hill 3 had some brain-burningly creepy imagery, and for all its faults was probably the last 'classic' Silent Hill game. Silent Hill 4: The Room came out in 2004, and while SH3 was criticised by some to be lacking in innovation, nobody could say the same about The Room. Considering the game doesn't even take place in Silent Hill, has little connection to the series apart from a passing mention of one character in a written note within the second game, and has such jarring features as an occasional first-person perspective and limited inventory space, The Room was the series' massive doolally sidestep. The game was criticised by many, and lambasted by most if not all of the Silent Hill fanbase, but in all honesty, it's not the idiotic monstrosity that you might've thought it to be.

For one thing, these brave changes to the series' well-established gameplay and style don't make the game any less scary. In fact, I'm surprised how well the implementation of the 'room' itself actually worked. In previous games in the series, save points were scattered everywhere - down wells, on desks, on walls - but in The Room there's just one single, solitary save point, and it's found in the living room of the apartment which the game centres around. The game doesn't take place in a town but through various levels that are accessed by a big old hole in the apartment's bathroom wall, and as such there are various tunnels throughout these levels to return to the apartment whenever the need to save arises, which in videogames is equivalent to the inevitable need to sleep or eat. Which means you need to do it lots. At first this is barely even an annoyance - need a break? Tea's ready? Nip back to one of the many holes in the wall located about your dilapidated subway or whatever and save without a problem.

But then the game takes a massive change in direction about halfway through as the apartment starts getting haunted. Yeah, haunted. Silent Hill was never one for ghosts, but in this case ghosts are actually fucking terrifying, particularly with the stifling first person view that dares you to take a look around your suddenly menacing little hidey hole. The feeling of safety that once was easily attributed to your apartment is masterfully erased, leaving you with complete helplessness and constant danger, even going so far as to strip you of the health regeneration that made the apartment so damn cosy in the first place. Yes, The Room's a little fucking nutty, definitely the adopted son of the series' four oddball children, but in terms of this gameplay mechanic, the developers were onto something. That and the room with the big head. If you've played this game, you will know the terror of the room with the big head.


Okay, so it's not brilliant. The ghosts in the levels are pretty retarded, the level design is a bit lame, the burping noises the nurses make is laughable and the fact that half the game is spent playing the same levels over again with slight changes to the layout is both a cheat and a bitch (like my ex girlfriend, hur hur hur). But at least it shakes things up a bit! What's more, it's the last actually good game in the series before the Americans came and fucked everything up with the pointless film adaptation and the slew of depressingly Western-ised sequels that followed. While I could talk for a thousand years about the depth and breadth of the awesomeness of Silent Hill 2, it's become apparent that there's actually not much else going for the series, and that that particular game must've been some anomaly of genius in the now tired franchise. But if you get a chance and you've either a love of intense fear or nerves of iron, I'd definitely take the time to put yourself through the terrible gameplay and occasionally boring puzzles and wild goose chases. And the depressing storylines. Oh, and godawful voice acting. And the confusing ending sequences. Well, we all have our issues.

Silent Hill 2 Trailer
Silent Hill 3 Trailer
Silent Hill 4 Trailer

The music of the Silent Hill franchise is composed by Akira Yamaoka, and it's all, predictably, amazing. Just so you know.

Kids

Larry Clark's 1995 whirlwind of controversy Kids is one of the more popular examples of the American independent movies created by indie-film figureheads Clark and his buddy Harmony Korine in the 90s and 00s - other examples being Gummo, Ken Park and Bully. These are films which surround American no-hope teenagers, are stripped of any sort of sheen or fantasy, and are presented frankly, uncomfortably and without any sort of single, guiding morality. To many, this made Kids a depressing and irresponsible film with zero artistic merit. To me, its subjective nature was its greatest artistic merit.


To say that Kids concerns 'issues' such as teenage delinquency, gang mentality, HIV, date rape, drugs, drinking and underage sex is to give the wrong impression. It makes the film sound like some kind of 'very special episode' that the USA is so very fond of. While all these 'issues' are the abstract enemies of the family-oriented American media, and to a lesser extent the herd mentality of my own country, this is a film where no lessons are learned and no opinions are laid down by the filmmakers. Superbad this is not. Instead, the film is very much what you see is what you get. Most of these characters are not radical visions of a young, hip generation, but are actually just a collection of dicks, douchebags and idiots. The main character, if one exists, is Telly, an arrogant self-styled stud who enjoys taking the virginities of underage girls - the embodiment of every teenage girl's parents' worst fears. His exploits, some including borderline rape, go completely unpunished by the end of the film. Karma does not exist within Kids.

The storyline to Kids is essentially just a mishmash of the dealings and doings of a collection of seemingly parent-less New York teenagers over the course of a single day. Getting high, skating, going to parties, you know how the typical modern-day adolescent archetype works. One of the few redeeming and essentially guiltless characters is Jennie, a naive but seemingly intelligent girl who like so many others lost her virginity to Telly, and after discovering their single encounter led to her becoming infected with HIV, spends the plot on a journey to find him. Things don't go so well, she ends up taking a pill or two and getting completely fucked off her face before she finds any success, but her determined presence is a reminder that Telly isn't just breaking a few morals and values in his sexual endeavours, but that HIV is spreading - visibly - across pretty much the entire main cast as the film goes on.


As I said before, Kids was lambasted for its explicitness, particularly in the whole sexual side of things. I mean, there's some frequent depictions of underage sex and nudity throughout, and Clark was called out for his arguably exploitative shots of young males hanging around with their shirts off, but as I talked about when discussing Elfen Lied, nudity and sex in film doesn't always mean that the movie should be watched with a box of kleenex. Thankfully I'm desensitised to the point of complete apathy, but I can see how people weren't so keen on watching what is essentially a teenage sex fest that didn't have American Pie's lightheartedness. Thankfully, none of the sex is particularly graphic - it's all a little uncomfortable and awkward, but nothing to call a lawyer about. The movie's tagline should be "It's not that these things don't happen all the fucking time". It's not all about sex, though. The whole thing has a weird darkness to it. At one point, for instance, the kids meet up at the skate park, get high and beat the ever-loving shit out of some guy who dared to chat shit to a group of angsty youths. And there's also the kids who've barely made it to a double-digit age who sit in a row puffing on ganja like they're some kind of rap group. I mean, this isn't the Daily Mail, but you don't see these sorts of things in Eastenders.

You might ask that for a film with no real message or meaning, what's so special about it? Well, the thing is that I'm one of the disgruntled teenage youth that's so poorly represented in the media that whenever I turn on an episode of Skins, I feel like I'm a Japanese person watching Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's. So it's good to see something that treats teenagers like they're actual human beings, even if those human beings are virtueless shitheads that only bare a slight resemblance to even the most depraved adolescents of rural Suffolk. In fact, speaking of Skins, I'd rather see teenagers portrayed at their most disturbingly real than to see a soulless attempt at teenage fantasy. Teenagers are the most emotionally intense, existentially challenged and genuinely complex people of humanity. Well, at least for the most part. We deserve accurate representation, and I don't believe that such a thing is impossible. Even if it's a bit extreme, Kids is still a shining revelation of the darker corners of adolescence, warts and all, and while it's undoubtedly intended to be different things to different people, for me, it's one of my favourites.

Indie films shouldn't really have trailers, but here's this one's.

Elfen Lied

Ever since I finished re-watching Death Note, I became famished for a little more in the way of anime. I've always had ambiguous feelings when it came to Japanimation, as my experience of it seems to dip and dive between some of the best things I've ever seen and some of the stupidest, cheeriest and un-nervingly perverted things I never really wanted to see. While I could talk for hours about the pros and cons of anime itself, the most recent weird Japanese cartoon I've laid into for the past few days, Elfen Lied, lies somewhere inbetween anime's polarity of brilliance and stupidity.


I was drawn in at first mainly because I was looking for dark anime, you know, something a bit bolder and bloodier than just your average Bleach or Naruto or any of that shite. My meticulous research brought me to Elfen Lied, already startling for possessing a German name that bears very little actual relevance to the plot or anything at all, really. I was also helplessly tantalised by the weird, kawaii imagery (particularly on the manga covers) being juxtaposed with descriptions of 'frequent nudity', 'dark subject matter' and 'sadistic, bloody violence'. In all honesty, it's those three things that finally sold it to me and got me firing the motherfucker up on YouTube. The brief synopsis on Wikipedia all sounded very generic anime-style -mutants, sci-fi, girls with animalistic features, etc - but there was no way I expected the thirteen episodes of pure emotional onslaught that was to follow.

Elfen Lied is one seriously harrowing experience, to say the least. On the surface it's all very generic Japanese weirdness - stupid amounts of blood, characters that barely behave like real people, high-pitched girls being both childlike and adorable yet intended as sexually promising, etc, etc, etc - but when you actually knuckle down and watch the whole of the very short thirteen-episode series, you'll find that the experience is so emotionally draining that you'd wished you spent the last six and a half hours watching something a whole lot happier. By the end of the series, when the flashbacks started popping up, nearly every episode was a different experiment in gut-wrenching character-driven misery. Don't let that wide-eyed cute girl on the cover fool you - the entire series is one long wallow in pure nihilistic gloom. And when there isn't gloom, there's shock.

I guess I should run over the story a little bit. Basically, the series revolves around the existence of the Diclonius, a race of all-female mutant people whose characteristics include two nubby horns on their head and the ability to manipulate and cut things with a number of invisible appendages sprouting from their body, which they use almost exclusively to murder human beings, and occasionally each other. These mutants are either killed at birth or, like most superpowered mutant people, imprisoned by the establishment in a top-secret military hideout in order to be cruelly experimented on. Needless to say, one of them escapes, and escapes in style, as the bloody massacre of the series' opening ten minutes shows. This mutant is the series' anti-hero, Lucy, who leaves the research facility injured in such a way that she spends the entire series switching between two personalities - one her usual human-despising, all-powerful and generally stern-looking self, and the other a character that is nothing but the embodiment of fan service, a bit like the girl from Chobits without the ability to take the piss out of itself.


Despite the synopsis' focus on the existence of these mutants, in reality the real soul-charging power of the series comes from much of the actions of humankind. Characters are abused, neglected, raped, abandoned, tortured, and of course brutally murdered. The violence is gratuitous, yes, and at first you feel it exists solely for spectacle, but in actuality the series' shock value comes less from a teenage girl using magic to pull a man's head off, but from the various integrated characters traversing through some sort of painful arc where they end up worse off than they were in the first place. The flashbacks are the show's main points of heartstring tugging - episodes 8 and 9 especially, which concern Lucy's past as a childhood outcast, are particular heartbreakers in the vein of Gobbolino the Witch's Cat meets Carrie. In fact, it's the unnerving combination of dark, dark subject matter with the Japanese's insistence on making everything cute and adorable that makes the more horrific parts of the anime really succeed.

Some of the shallower complaints against the series surround its gratuitous violence and nudity, and boy is there a lot of nudity. However, in all honesty, I was expecting a lot worse. The nudity here isn't all that perverted and tasteless, give or take. There's no graphic sex or anything (the closest it comes is disturbing flashbacks to child rape, but at least that's meant to be disturbing). The West is still finding it hard to get its head around the fact that nudity isn't always sexual and the portrayal of nudity on TV isn't always meant to give its audiences a hardon. Although, when it comes to the various fourteen year old girls bathing together and giggling, there's an inability to deny that this anime like so many others suffers from 'creepy Japanese pedo' disease. There's even a scene where one female character grabs another's breasts for no particular reason than to create nervous laughter. It's true that this anime's strong points are less about its dire attempt at raising a chuckle and more about its bombardment of sorrow. There's also a strange choice of music when it comes to the credits of every episode. While the intro sequence is a beautifully crafted mix of Latin classical music and Klimt paintings, the end credits jump into some shitty J-rock that totally spoils the mood.

The anime-watching community seems divided on Elfen Lied. Some call it a daring masterpiece that questions the value of life and the darker sides of humanity, and some call it ridiculously gratuitous in its X-rated elements and heavy-handed with its repertoire of depressing storylines. I myself think it's genuinely brilliant. It's not perfect in any way, it's all over the place and most of the characters act a little too illogically, especially regarding everyone's acceptance in finding a girl with fucking horns coming out of her head, but when it comes down to it, this morose and melancholy series of tragedies is going to be haunting me for a long, long time to come. It's definitely not for everyone, but if you can stomach the first episode and you felt sad at the end of Of Mice and Men, then you're probably going to enjoy this blood-soaked gem.

No trailer in the world could truly explain this beautiful monstrosity, but click here for a nice try. (In English)