Hello to you, you person I likely know and who has been kind
enough to humour me in my little ramblings of insanity. This is how I’ve viewed
the year that’s nearly passed us by, purely in unimportant, media-y terms.
Film in 2010 was marked by the relentless behemoth of 3D
marking its territory like an incontinent puppy, spoiling my love for the art
form by reducing the viewing experience to a nausea-inducing gimmick. But
that’s my view; here are some films that sort of made a splash, yeah?
Shutter Island
came out in February, adapted from a 2003 novel I’ve never heard of, nor heard
anyone talk about; Shutter Island
was directed by Martin Scorsese and has quickly become one of my all-time
favourite films. An absolutely gripping mystery fraught with uncertainty and
self-doubt, everyone’s acting their arses off in it, even the
sometimes-maligned Leonardo DiCaprio. Nail-biting stuff from beginning to end,
the music’s amazing as well, making Hans Zimmer my joint favourite film
composer.
In March we had Kick-Ass and ultimately flawed and tiring
comic-book adaptation saved only by Nicolas Cage having the time of his life as
‘Big Daddy’. Incidentally I hate Aaron Johnson now; his acting makes me want to
slit my own eyeballs open. The Film was ruined with over the top violence, I
mean beyond ‘300’ levels of the stuff and completely unnecessary swearing (by
which I mean it was put in purely for the shock factor and not because it is
something the characters would say fuck-bugger shit-nipple) I hope that they
never, ever make a sequel.
May was a mixed month for films; Robin Hood came out,
proving that Ridley Scott might have just lost his magic, and that Russell
Crowe is really touchy about how shit his accents are. Sex and the City 2 came
out, showing us that television adaptations for the big screen don’t generally
work the first time, let alone a second. It also let me know that I’ve achieved
true equality in my hatred for people, I can (and do) wish harm on these women
without it being about misogyny. And Four Lions was released, marking the
arrival of Islamic Terrorism and suicide bombing as being fair game in humour.
I, for one, am happy about this; religion shouldn’t be vaunted as an
untouchable subject, fuck Mini Babybel!
In June Toy Story 3 was a spark of pure joy that reduced
well-rounded and emotionally-mature audiences of all genders and ages to floods
of tears at the touching depiction of the coming of maturity and death of
childhood, another win for Pixar.
July, and your mind was the scene of the crime in Inception;
the second entry for Leo DiCaprio and Hans Zimmer in my little list in Christopher
Nolan’s ultra high-concept masterpiece of existential uncertainty and big CGI
set pieces. Also in July; M. Night Shyamalan showed us why he hasn’t made a
film that’s even passable since Unbreakable in 2000. M. Night Shyamatalan wrote and
directed the adaptation to the cartoon ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ and made a
mockery (apparently) of it. He claimed that European audiences were the only
ones to get him, but proved he didn’t get them when he kept inserting reference
to ‘benders’ (people who can manipulate the elements) into his script. This
means that M. Night Shyamarmalade’s film had some memorable scenes and lines
such as one where a man is dragged away from his father’s throne room, but on
recognising a potential assassin in the room yells “He’s a bender!”, or “I
always knew you were a bender.” or my personal favourite, “There are some
really powerful benders in the Northern Water Zone.” M. Night Shyamagnesium phosphate,
you are an arse.
The Human Centipede disgusted and delighted people with a
trailer alone. The tale of a mad German scientist who wants to join people from
the mouth to the anus to create a ‘human centipede’ the trailer got everyone
talking about the sheer disgusting nature of it all and ultimately showed them
my viewpoint on the rest of ‘society’.
October inevitably arrived and with it, ‘The Social Network’
a more or less fictionalised account of the foundation of Facebook; the film
marks the point at which social networking is cemented as a real cultural
movement, an artefact of the first decade of this putrid century. I’m looking
forward to Twitter: The Movie, which will likely consist of some nerds looking
at Facebook saying “But I want money as well!” until shifting to show Stephen
Fry tapping at a keyboard for 4 and a half hours.
And in November the first part of the adaptation of the
final book of the Harry Potter series, otherwise known as Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows Part 1 came out, making otherwise rational people scream like
banshees. The film features a bobble-headed version of Daniel Radcliffe and
Emma Watson’s eyebrows, expect the second part in July next year.
2010 was the endpoint for a number of big television dramas;
some have been almost irresistibly touted for a big-screen outing like
sponsored terrorism-a-thon ‘24’, while others are simply over, either sadly or
with good reason.
Arguably the biggest TV death of the year was that of David
Tennant, or rather his portrayal as the supremely popular tenth incarnation of
The Doctor in Doctor Who. Child’s drawing of himself Matt Smith stepped into
some ocean-sized shoes and was met with immediate hatred, by me at least. Of
course by about the twelfth minute of his own debut adventure I had been won
round, as had the legion fans that had gathered since the show’s return in
2005.
Ashes to Ashes ended in May, revealing that the world of
Gene Hunt was actually a kind of pre-afterlife specifically for the police with
Gene being some sort of modern-day Charon, ferrying dead coppers to the pub…that
is literally what he does.
Exercise in headless chicken scriptwriting Lost ended in
similar fashion also in May with what has been one of the most dissatisfying
and unwelcome endings since the Sopranos ended mid-sen-
The Tudors ended 4 series of historical lies and
mischaracterisation, oversimplification and downright ‘Hollyoaks-ifying’ of the
reign of King Henry VIII. Good.
And just this month, no-one’s favourite show Medium was
confirmed as cancelled, alright it ends in 2011, but the announcement was this
year, what do you want from me!? Arsehole.
And now some shows you might not have watched/heard of:
Hamlet-inspired Californian-biker epic Sons of Anarchy
continued into its third season following the last remaining storyline threads,
which unfortunately meant the main character of Jax Teller (played by Geordie
actor Charlie Hunnam) going to Northern Ireland with all his biker friends in
pursuit of the Real IRA who have kidnapped his baby son. I say unfortunately
because this prompted some of the most piss-poor Irish accents I’ve ever heard;
fake ones I mean, this is meant to be Belfast and it sounds like they’re
auditioning for the part of a cartoon leprechaun. It’s painful to hear, which
is a shame as otherwise it’s a very good show, of note is this season’s
stand-out guest star Paula Malcolmson, who is, as it happens actually from
Belfast.
Lie to me* began its third season; not sure how well-known
Lie to me* is, but it deserves more. It’s your standard investigative show, the
distinctive feature of which is, apart from Tim Roth seemingly having the time
of his life playing arrogant but somehow likeable genius Dr. Cal Lightman, that
the investigation is done by a team of experts and experts-in-training that
study ‘micro-expressions’ in the face and body language to tell when people are
telling the truth or if they’re experiencing (and trying to conceal) specific
emotions. It’s better than I’ve made it sound, honestly.
On to technology and the world’s most expensive dinner tray;
the iPad was announced by recently reanimated corpse Steve Jobs in January, and
the press conference alone was enough to make me want to fire jets of my own
scorching pancreatic juices across the Atlantic Ocean to find him and scald his
fingers off. Essentially a giant iPhone, but without the practical applications
of the easy to use, compact gadget, the iPad’s greatest flaw, in my eyes, is
that it somehow makes Apple whores feel smug without the usual qualification of
having done something to feel smug about.
The world’s top brand showed it is utterly unfazed by
complete failure when it rolled out Google Wave to the public, which it claimed
was what “…email would look like if it were invented today.”. Essentially a
sort of Frankenstein’s monster stitching together of e-mail, instant
messaging, wikis, and social networking, Google Wave proved too
technical for normal human beings to use, being far better suited to some sort
of mass intelligence housed in a computer the size of the sun. Development
ended in August; try not to cry too much, robots.
Speaking of social networking; the world lost its mind this
year when it was revealed that that personal information you so readily entered
into a website run by people you don’t know might not have been so secure after
all. Facebook’s privacy debacle hasn’t done much to stop new users signing up,
nor indeed to cause a mass exodus, MySpace-style. I think I’d mind more if the
private, personal information they garnered from my profile was of any use to
them, but, as it seems, the personalised adverts that I get, the ones tailored
to my social situation and are deemed relevant to me are for Orthodox Jewish
dating…I’m not Jewish, Orthodox or otherwise. When they get scary good at
pulling my information, then I’ll give a shit.
Video games this year continued their trend as the most
lucrative media launches of all-time, that’s in monetary terms you understand,
try and talk about video games in company outside the age range of 11-29 and
you’re likely to be sneered at with the kind of derision usually reserved for
people who start sentences with “I’m not a racist, but…” Here are some developments
I’m not happy about:
Sony and Microsoft, both eyeing Nintendo’s causal gamer
audience with bizarre envy, launch their competing add-ons to their consoles.
Kinect for XBOX360 and PlayStation Move are both attempts at the player using
their own bodily movements to play games, sounds good to the kind of twat who
thinks all entertainment should take place on a treadmill, i.e. no one. But
what it serves to do is make every twat-head who uses it look like Louie Spence
without the modicum of likeability or talent. Ah, feels good to get that out of
my system, now, onto some titles.
Red Dead Redemption came out in May after a few years heavy
speculation and proved to be one of the best things ever made out of 1’s and
0’s. The story is set in the waning days of the American Old West where you, as
John Marston, are blackmailed into taking down your old gang members by a
couple of ruthless federal agents, taking John from the prairie to the Mexican
revolution and on to the modern society at odds with gun slinging outlaws, RDR
proved to be a wonderful looking, fun, thoughtful and downright moving game that
will be looked on fondly for years to come.
Halo: Reach unsurprisingly was a huge success, despite the
fact that all titles in the series after the original 2001 outing ‘Halo: Combat
Evolved’ have been accurately judged as self-important, stagnant crap by any
gamers with more than two neurons to rub together. Halo: Reach serves as a
prequel to the rest of the series, taking place on the colony of Reach, which
players of previous games will know, was a massive military defeat for the
human forces of the UNSC against a multi-species army known as the Covenant.
Now the fact that it takes place in such a doomed scenario means that you’re
playing the game with the full knowledge, especially if you’ve ever seen any
war film EVER, that you, your team-mates the supporting cast that don’t appear
in the main series, are all going to die…probably. Having criticised the series
as a whole, Reach does sit as the bright spark in the family, a much better
game than previous entries with a story that doesn’t bore you at any turn
despite its collection of clichés. It’ll live on as a multiplayer relic for
years, which angers me greatly, but it is a good game.
Call of Duty: Black Ops, the biggest, most over hyped of all
games released ever that didn’t involve Peter Molyneux, was released in
November and morons everywhere would have kicked children over walls to get a
copy. The jealous younger brother series of the actually good Call of Duty
games, Black Ops was developed by Treyarch, who also previously made the World
at War entry. Black Ops’ campaign surprisingly consists of a series of ‘Black
Ops’ taking place in various situations of the Cold War, and that’s about it
really. It’s the multiplayer aspect, which I’ve never played, that is most
definitely the main reason for about 98% of all purchases of the title, which
in my opinion, should be seen as ridiculous as buying a DVD you’ve never seen
before, melting down the film and only keeping the ‘special features’ disc.
If you want games to be taken seriously then multiplayer has
to be a fun aside, not the main feature of the game.
And finally, Heavy Rain was released in February, and
deserves mention here as the realisation of something promised to people my age
years ago. Alright so the plot sounds like a rejected proposal for a B-movie
knock-off of Se7en, but Heavy Rain, a game about a serial killer who drowns
children in rain water, was presented in a compelling, new way, playing out
entirely as a narrative, the player, as one of four characters throughout the
game, interacts with scenes by pressing the appropriate button at the correct
moment in order to progress the scene, failing to press the right button will
still push the plot along, but in a slightly different way and always in a
cinematic and believable way. Now, those of you in the know will know that that
means it’s a game made entirely of quick-time events, but that’s not the point.
The point is that Heavy Rain plays like a film, with real dialogue and proper
camera-work. It is what people in the nineties used to say to older generations
when trying to explain what video games were, an ‘interactive movie’.
And that was the year in media for me. Whether you agree or
disagree, I’d rather stick a fork in my eye than have an argument about it.
