What Next?

I sometimes do find myself wondering that. I've complete my degree and I'm back working at the same two jobs that I was working at before I left (although I should point out I'm grateful to have two jobs in a time of recession). Oh sure, some of the hours are different and one of them has a new owner, but it's the same thing that I was doing three years ago and it's probably gonna be the same thing that I'll be doing three years from now.

I don't want to sound down or pessimistic when I say this, I'm not actually in a bad mood, but I do wonder what I just spent those three years on and what I'm supposed to get out of it. Obviously I gained a selection of new friends, some more firm than others and some not the ones I thought I'd end up with. I've got my own property, but it's being inhabited by three friends of mine while I live in an overpriced rat-trap in Newbury.

My gaming group is stopping and starting, now that I'm back here I thought the one advantage would be that my role-players would be waiting for me, but it turns out they haven't really been gaming since I left, just waiting for me to run stuff when I came back on sporadic weekends. So I'm gonna have to pull them back together and it may take a sacrifice or two in order to get a decent once-a-week group, because anything less is just unfulfilling.

Ach... kind of ticking over at the moment, life is just life, waiting for it to be something else.

TRANSFORMERS 3:
DARK OF THE MOON

You know what? No. No more. No more benefit of the doubt, no more seeing that Orci and Kurtzman aren't on the writing list so it may be worth it, no more trusting that the heroes of my childhood won't turn around and stab me in the kidneys because they need a new swimming pool for their fourth house. Transformers 3 is a prime example of how the people that pay to see it deserve to have lost their money because if you haven't learned from the last two unbelievable shitheaps then you sure as shit deserve ripping off now. Doesn't matter how much a ticket costs, if you're willing to pay it, the more fool you.

No, it's not better than the second one (which people seem to keep insisting it is), it's just as bad as the second one. No, it's not got great special effects, because all the special effects and CGI in the world can't save a movie like this from being the utter mind-degrading bullshit that it is. There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of movie, even if there are mindless drooling fanboys out there that will pay through the nose to see one giant, blurry, non-descript robot fight another blurry, non-descript robot in the background of Shia LeWhyTheFuckDoYouStillBreathe trying to decide if he's gonna grow a pair.

The absolute worst thing about this film (which is some achievement to be worse than the plot, the acting, the effects, the general feeling of excrement being scraped into your skin that this film instills) is just how many good, honest, decent, hard-working and in the past reliably good actors are in it. Alan Tudyk's in this film. Frances McDormand's in this film. Mother-Fucking John Malkovitch is in this film. And they all play douchebags. And I mean SERIOUS DOUCHEBAGS. The only human character you can actually sympathise with in this film is frickin' Patrick 'McDreamy' Dempsey because he's working with the bad guys.

Why is that sympathising? Because if I lived in a world with THIS MANY TOTAL DOUCHEBAGS then I would want to sell it out to evil robots from outerspace that want to enslave them all as well.

So, the plot, if you can call it that. Sam WitWanky has changed girlfriends to an even less talented actress and is insecure about his future because he's realised that he's a poorly characterised idiot who will never go anywhere. His parents turn up and are douches. His new boss is a douche. He is a douche. The Autobots are off doing some mission or another and then it turns out there's this conspiricy regarding the Cybertronians already having visited Earth in the past and the Apollo mission was a ruse to get to them and wasn't this the 'plot' for the first film or something blah blah blah blah.... blaaaahhhh....

Then Leonard Nimoy shows up and actually dares to rip off his own lines from Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan (which he does and he is now dead to me). That pretty much sums up that entire film.

This film is an insult to movie-fans, to sensible human beings, to the vast majority of the world that aren't douchebags and just to decent writing and directing. A hundred thousand decent writers and directors that haven't been discovered yet cry themselves to sleep every time someone puts shit like thin on their DVD player. Every time someone buys a cinema ticket to this, a would be hard-worker get to keep their job at McDonalds. Maybe I'm being too bitter about this, but rest assured that there's no way I'm being too hard on this movie. May it rot in the filth of it's hideousness for all the time it deserves.

Next time: Green Lantern.