Movie Review: The Women

I'm taking revenge for what that bitch did to Parky. The man is a national treasure.

I'm a boy and as such like my movies, loud, explody and filled with armies of brain chewing undead cheerleaders. Taking that as a given I think we all know that The Women was never going to be my bag but I was pant-wettingly astounded at just how wide of the mark this piece of sheeeeit actually proved to be. Seriously, I have never seen a film in such desperate need of a good, honest car chase in my frikken' life. The plot: Meg Ryan is a well heeled society lady whose husband does the dirty on her with the not-actually-as-attractive-as-she-first-appears Eva Mendes. Boo! Meg's coven of SITC-lite girlfriends gather around and do the female support network thing for a while, then she goes back to her man. Hooray! It's awful. Below these words you will find the legendary zombie/shark fight scene from Zombie Flesh Eaters, to provide us with some small crumbs of comfort.

As well as being derivative, unfunny and lumpen this movie displays a staggering level of moral cowardice. Meg's cheating low-down rat of a husband fucks off with some strumpet and what do her assorted friends, family and comedy-relief housekeeping staff do? They spend the entire film convincing her to take him back. Not for the sake of the children, mind - Meg should abandon her last shreds of self respect and let the philanderer back into her bed because he, you know, loves her really. That and the fact that there's a formulaic happy ending to shoehorn in, come what fucking may. The message really does seem to be: sod the betrayal, ignore the humiliation and never mind the fact that he's been paying this woman's bills with the fucking family credit card - all that's needed is a cameo from Bette Midler and an impromptu fashion show and everything will be OK! It's bullshit. Here's the bit from Zombie Holocaust where Ian McCulloch kills a zombie with an outboard motor.



Now I'm not daft. I know that a film based on a 1930's Broadway musical isn't going to be plumbing the skanky, jagged depths of human emotion. People like a nice, tidy ending, which is why fairy stories finish on '...and they all lived happily ever after' instead of the more realistic '...and they were all fucking miserable until they died of cancers and brain embolisms'. But here we have a movie that presumably takes great pride in its girl-friendly, feminist credentials - one of the selling points is the all female cast, with not a male face to be seen anywhere in the whole thing - and it resolutely fails to display anything like a spine. Meg folds like origami and the status quo is blithely resumed. I've got to say, the best women I know are stronger than that. Also: it's boring.

In summation: Glyn was walking through Wordsley once and he came across what, for me, is the perfect metaphor for this movie. To whit: a fork sticking out of a human turd. I thank you.

Apoca-watch - a semi regular series keeping tabs on civilisation's inevitable descent into screaming, raping chaos.

...and three weeks later everyone was fucking dead.

Who likes pigs? Everyone. Ahh, Babe - ain't he sweet. Bacon - ain't it tasty. But not so fast, Speedy Gonzalez - it turns out that the the pigs have got it in for us. The news that Birmingham has recorded its first case of swine flu has Pete barricaded inside the house, mainlining lemsip and wearing fourteen pairs of thermal pants. Word has it that swine flu is a hellish chimaera of human, bird and pig illnesses, hatched in the burning mexican heat and out to nick your car and feel up your nan. Terrifying stuff indeed. Now without wanting to cause unfounded panic or hysteria, I can confidently predict that swine flu will devastate the populace, lay waste to our cities and leave the earth a scorched and burning ruin.

Of course, we won't notice because we'll all be watching this.

Fun extra activity - place your bets on how long it'll be before I'm forced to remove the heavily copyrighted image from this week's fun episode of IHIH!

Day of Rest.

Sunday: an official deity-sanctioned day of rest. It's written into the Bible that nobody is doing shit on a Sunday. How generous is that? A whole day off. Lovely. Maybe I'll wash the car.

But let's not forget the small print because if you're following the rule to the letter you won't be picking up anything bigger than an olive - that is verboten. Anything bigger than that counts as work and The Lord will be really shitty with you for working on his specially allotted day off. So no going to the pub - that pint of Guinness is far too heavy for that - no watching TV - ditto the remote control - and no food, unless you're eating olives. One at a time. Fair enough, you can lie in bed all day but what's the point if you can't even make a fucking cuppa? It's fairly typical of religion to give with one hand whilst flicking your balls with the other but as conditions go that one is a right cocksuck.

I'm having a lovely Sunday, as it happens. I picked up a whole egg earlier. God will just have to bill me for it.

Britain's Got Patronising Cunts.

Britain, you do not disappoint. I've only been back a fortnight and this happens. First a video that I couldn't embed because the good people at Youtube wouldn't let me, the shits:

To be fair, she does look like she's been beaten by a tramp with a golf club.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luRmM1J1sfg

I mean, where do you start with this? The teenage girls in the audience, wrinkling their nose and making snide comments about the mad old bat in the charity shop dress? Pier's Morgan arse-clenchingly smug grin? That blonde wench, all quivering lip and hand-to-breast clasping? I haven't seen anything so sickening since, well.... the last time I was like, really sick.

Making fun of freaks and weirdoes has been good clean fun since the Victorians had it and there's nowt wrong with that. It's woven into the very fabric of British life - the only difference these days is that the freaks volunteer, which saves having to corral them into special pens and is generally a handy timesaver. So when a single, 47 year old, unemployed Scottish lady rocks up and claims that she can sing like Elaine Page (whoever the fuck she is), looking as she does, the brutal mathematics of televisual cruelty kicks in. She's going to make a fool of herself, and we're all going to enjoy it.

But of course, she's amazing, and we are all chastened by the way this plucky underdog has subverted our cynical expectations regarding the relationship between talent and ugly. It's so Disney I could kick myself in my own bollock. Don't stress now: I'm not here to deliver a sermon on the generally accepted belief that good looks equals ability because it's a perfectly natural human reaction and we all do it every day. Let's face it - no one with eyebrows that hefty has any right having a voice like that. That's a given. What really squeezes my lemons is the sight of thousands of people publicly Learning A Lesson, spunking themselves into a big frothy mass of self congratulation. No one is going to go away from this a better person, less quick to judge and more likely to give people a chance before they cut them to fucking shreds - give it five minutes and they'll be back to snickering at borderline retarded people who think they're the next Mariah Carey. But for that couple of minutes they were apparently all tender, kind hearted folk, generous to a fault and blind to the physical imperfections of others. Ahhh. Unassuming ugly person, you have shown us the way - now will everyone please undo the fly of the person next to them and join us in one big communal hand shandy? The most genuine thing in that video is the sight of Simon Cowell nursing a semi at the thought of the amount of money he'll make off this woman's back.

Altogether now: fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.

It's good to be home.

The I Hate It Here Guide To Surviving The Credit Crunch

Pictured above: You, next Thursday.

We're going through some dark times, people. The financial world is teeter-tottering on the brink of appalling collapse, for reasons that are far to boring and complicated for the likes of me to comprehend (although I suppose you'll claim to be totally au fait with the whole thing, won't you? You condescending sack of shit.). So here, for your reading pleasure, is a brief guide to the options available to you once Western civilisation has imploded like a tin of beans at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

1.Deny, Deny, Deny.
A popular choice, this, and one that's long beloved of humankind the world over. Its popularity rests on its staggering simplicity: you just carry on with your life as if nothing is happening at all. Apply for credit cards, take long foreign holidays (and to heck with the carbon emissions!) , fit granite worksurfaces in your specially designed kitchen - because hey, you deserve it, right? - and generally continue to exist in a state of luxury and opulence unheard of by pretty much every other generation to ever walk the Earth. Those of a more philosophical bent might like to argue that since money doesn't, in fact, exist - being as it is just a bunch of numbers on a computer somewhere - then they can't actually take it away from you. That's like, logic. Although please bear in mind that logic can't fill up a sandwich or prevent you from dying of hypothermia.

2. Blame Someone Else.
I hear Iceland makes a convenient scapegoat.

3.Stockpile.
In the very near future cash will be most likely be worthless. In such a scenario what you need is stuff. Real, actual stuff. I won't presume to tell you what possessions you should be amassing because, frankly, I'm not your bleeding mother and I've got my own problems to be dealing with. But I will say this: do your research. You need to be looking at things like clean drinking water, petrol, shotgun shells and kendal mint cake. If it all goes tits up and you're wandering around with a wheelbarrow full of wetsuits and Bee Gees records then you've only got yourself to blame.

4.Retreat!
This goes hand in hand with item three. Mass rioting in every city on every continent will make beating a hasty retreat a top priority. Plan your escape route and leg it as soon as possible before you're raped and butchered for your last bottle of Evian. You could come round to my place, if you like. I'll have plenty of work for you on my methane farm.

Pictured above: Me, in a joke that will be meaningless to anyone who hasn't seen Mad Max 3.

4.Retrain.
With the resultant change in the job markets that will inevitably come with our new global situation you might want to consider retraining and brushing up on skills that will be more useful during the coming apocalypse. But Pete, I hear you piteously whine, my relatively sheltered childhood and pointless university degree have only prepared me for a life of soul sapping low-grade admin work. What skills do I have that will see me through the hard times ahead? And my answer is this: don't do yourself down, my friend. You have many assets that will always be in demand, regardless of prevailing global trends. Those lily-white buttocks of yours, for example, will fetch a pretty penny in the souks and casbahs of the new radioactive wasteland. My advice would be to cultivate that tiny secret deadness that we all have inside. Nurture it, feed it, and soon you'll be choking down the profits like an old pro. It really won't be that different from life now, when you think about it.

A Fairly Triumphant Return.

As the Wildhearts once opined in the sleeve notes to Fishing For Luckies - I think, although if I'm wrong I'm sure someone will correct me - 'Self expression is like sex. The less you do it the more you find that you don't want to'. And how right they were. Visit a foreign country, I thought. Expand your horizons. Gain valuable life experiences. Work on your (pretty fucking limited) writing skills. Start a new, cheerier blog and maybe prove that you're not a completely miserable cunt.

And it has been very sweet indeed. I've had fun. I met people, and seen things, and been places I never thought I would. I've even fallen in love. But the problem with people and things and places and love is that they take up a lot of time, time that in previous stages of my life would have been spent trawling the internet for inspiration and banging my head against a keyboard until the blood pooled into a joke about cocks that I could then post. I've been too busy for that kind of carry on, and the lack of a net connection hasn't helped at all. Seriously, how did people gather information before the internet? It's beyond me. Just a lot of library time, I suppose, when they weren't chasing mammoths over cliffs or unlocking the secret of fire.

More pertinently, I have an evil, evil job. Not just because it's a bank job, although that would qualify it for at least a special merit badge from the Great Beast, but because it's stolen my words. I spend all day leaving notes on a computer system and these notes require me to use - at most - thirty different words in various combinations. If there's anything that'll murder your ability to write more effectively than spending 40 hours a week writing the same thirty words over and over and over again then I don't want to know about it. Taking a header off a high dive into an empty swimming pool would do it, and at least afterwards you'd get a special helper to come round and wipe your arse for you.

I've got nothing. I'm dry. Bereft. There is a whole world of interest just outside my window, with fascinating characters and ideas and locales, and beauty and misery and ease and hardship, and all I can do is stare at a blank computer screen and obsess about how badly I suck. I'm having a great time right now, but it's killing me.

So I've come back here, where I started. I'm wrapping myself in the oily black cloak of I Hate It Here, a name I stole, to maybe rediscover the little bit of me that knew how to put the words in the right order to make the few people who listened smile for a minute. For the record, I don't Hate It Here. I'm actually, believe it or not, happy. Is it possible to spew toxic rants at the shitty state of the shitty world whilst still feeling an overall contentment, the like of which I haven't felt in literally years? I don't know. But we might as well find out. Fuck knows, it's not like we're up to much else, eh?

One final warning: you people are going to have to sit through some tedious, self-obsessed wank before I hit anything resembling a good patch. Like, for example, the article you've just graciously sat through. Waste of fucking time that was.

Mr Here He Was, Where's He Gone.

Where? I'll tell you where. He's gone over here.