Now, I don’t give a crap about fight movies, or indeed any sort of sporting contest movie, particularly boxing, wrestling, kick-boxing or anything like that. The last sport movie I cared about was Cool Runnings. Unless Cars counts as a sport movie, that was some heartwarming $hit right there.

Nor do I care about struggling-deadbeat-possibly-addicted-to-something-has-been-dad-makes-peace-with-estranged-kid-and-becomes-a-good-father movies. And Real Steel was a struggling-deadbeat-possibly-addicted-to-something-has-been-dad-makes-peace-with-estranged-kid-and-becomes-a-good-father movie, where the dad is also a washed-up boxer and they go on to do a rising-underdog Rocky-style boxing story. So, double loser.

The difference here, and I admit it’s a petty and subtle one to make such a big difference to my movie-going experience, is that this movie had robots.

Most of you will know this movie was based on that weird trigger-operated game which I think is called “Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots”, where the players each have a little toy robot and they just basically punch each other’s heads off. My thought, walking into the cinema, was “how can they possibly make a movie of this?”. Walking out of the cinema, my thought was “how can they possibly NOT have made a movie of this?”

Yeah, so it was brilliant. A Rocky movie with strong overtones of Futurama‘s Robot Wrestling League. I was actually a bit disappointed when they said “hailing from parts unknown,” they didn’t amend it to “hailing from, and made of, parts unknown.” But there were plenty of references to keep people happy here. Even the robots had moves similar to the game.

And they were pretty great robots. I think they were animatronic at least in places, rather than CGI, and it makes a huge difference. CGI’s just not that good yet. That made the whole thing worth watching. And the human actors did a pretty good job too. The kid wasn’t annoying hardly at all, and Hugh Jackman was his usual lovable arsehole throughout, finally mending his ways and making up for it all, although that probably wasn’t the best way to end things for the various people who had been enabling his addictive personality traits all these years. And speaking of them, Kate from Lost did an okay job too.

But the real heroes here were the robots. Atom and Zeus, Twin Cities and Ambush, Noisy Boy and all the others. Real Steel? Pure gold, more like it. I was fairly sure it was going to have a ridiculously happy ending, but even that managed to be a bit clever. And I had sweaty palms with excitement when the arse-kickings began. Awesome.

Go see this film. Don’t listen to the critics, they’re retards.

Anyway, some of you might be Martin fans so you might get a kick out of seeing some of the book discussions.

It’s quite straightforward. Each week we review a chapter and discuss it. I put the list here, along with who signed up to review it and a Google groups link to the discussion in question.

So let’s begin.

Prologue – The Vree – DONE

Tyrion I – The Vree – DONE

Daenerys I – Ben – DONE

Jon I (or A Day in the Life of a Middle Manager) – Jenny Chase – DONE

Bran I (or Trudging Through the Snow) – Ben – DONE

Tyrion II – The Vree – DONE (mis-named Tyrion I)

The Merchant’s Man – Ben – DONE

Jon II – Rich Boye (Overdue from The Vree)

Tyrion III – Butterbumps & Janica

Davos I – Butterbumps & Janica / Jenny Chase

Jon III – Jenny Chase

Daenerys II – Rich Boye

Reek I – Ben

Bran II – Butterbumps & Janica

Tyrion IV – OPEN

Davos II – Jenny Chase

Daenerys III – OPEN

Jon IV – OPEN

Tyrion V – OPEN

Davos III – OPEN

Reek II – Butterbumps & Janica

Jon V – OPEN

…

Okay, big shot. What, so you’re going through with this, are you? You think you’re going to cut out the end of your large intestine, re-route it out through your stomach into a bag, and cut out and stitch up your entire anus on a permanent basis?

Is that what you’re going to do?

Big C

It has been gratifying to see your attitude improve in recent months and to see your correspondence become so much more mature and polite.

Unfortunately, the organisation feels that this change is too little, too late and does not represent a heartfelt intention to improve interrelations. Furthermore, your offer of consolidation and rebuilding is not in line with the structural legislation of your local area, which is not conducive to large physical infrastructure of any kind. In the interests of continued function as a waste-disposal site, your relocation from the lower bowel has become a non-negotiable necessity.

We understand that this will require massive renovation and a lot of hard work, but we are more than willing to go to these lengths in order to ensure your departure to a more appropriate locale.

We regret that this issue could not be resolved in a more satisfactory manner to either party.

Sincerely,
Management,
Charles Hindle Inc.

Evidently, you have met with some small measure of success in reducing our size and extensiveness, which was unexpected. You’re not going to get any further, but we can respect the effort you’ve put in so far.

Perhaps we can agree to leave things as they are. You’re evidently more comfortable now that we’re all shrunk down and living in appallingly cramped conditions, and we are happy to consolidate and rebuild over the next few months. Let’s all just quit while we’re ahead.

The best thing for everyone will be to settle back and let things slide for a while, let everybody cool down. It would be a terrible shame if you were to take things too far and ended up finding out just how difficult it’s going to be to uproot us even further.

We await your response,

Cancer

Thank you very much for your correspondence re: size reduction. We will be in touch.

Warmest possible regards,

Management,
Charles Hindle Inc.

Thanks for your hilarious notification, we all had a good laugh down here I can tell you.

As your probes have no doubt told you by now, you’re dealing with more than just a candy-arse little wine cork in the butthole, and if you think we’re leaving, you might want to send some extra baggage handlers because we’re going to take Chucky’s entire arsehole and neighbouring precincts with us when we go.

So, unless you have some sort of magic formula for making us a whole lot smaller over the next few weeks, you’re not relocating anything.

Have a nice day,

Big C

It has come to our attention that you have, in recent months, taken up residence in the lower extremities of Chucky’s bowels.

It is our belief that this living arrangement has become untenable.

This is, from an objective standpoint, a sub-optimal arrangement on both sides. Your presence is having a detrimental effect on the quality of life of this entire organisation – and furthermore, there is an almost infinite number of preferable residential areas that you might choose. We are confident that, once you have experienced life anywhere but inside Chucky’s colon, you will be in full agreement.

With this in mind, we intend to carry out a swift and efficient relocation, returning your current residence to its indigenous population (who you have probably already met) and placing you in a far more pleasant glass jar-environment.

Warmest possible regards,

Management,
Charles Hindle Inc.

I don’t mean to go back into it here, but one point did come up that gave me such an explosive epiphany of nerd-joy that I just had to make a whole new pointless blog entry about it.

The concept as introduced was quite simple (and I paraphrase): the meta-review missed out on some potential effectiveness by not emulating the piece it was reviewing. In other words, since the inestimable Plinkett made a review in video narration format with clips from the movies, the meta-review could have done the same thing, and gained a certain amount of credibility in the process.

Now, this opens a can of worms, but at the same time I think it’s overturned my entire world-view and forced me to recant my earlier response. My original reaction to this concept was caution at best, rejection at worst – after all, surely you can’t criticise a review piece on the basis of its adherence or lack thereof to the art form it is reviewing.

And then I thought: shit, why not?

That’s when I realised that this is the source of a lot of my contempt for art critics, film critics, and just basically critics and reviewers of any kind. Okay, with literary critics you end up with a text-based review and that is fairly close, so as long as it is a decent review it gets through under my annoyance-radar – you don’t need to write a novel to review a novel – but why should I listen to what a God damn art critic says? Why should I care about a film critic’s wanky-toss-arse opinion?

I’d love to see reviewers formulate and publicise their opinions in the format of the art form they have chosen to critique. Don’t like a movie? Make a little movie about how the movie sucked – like Plinkett did. Want to discuss elements of a painting or sculpture? Make a painting, or a sculpture, showing what you feel. Damn it, then you’ll gain a whole lot more credibility with me. At least it would put an end once and for all to the idea that “those who can’t, criticise”.

This is possibly the founding reason I found Plinkett’s review to be fun and effective, clever and convincing, even though it fubbed some of the facts. Now don’t get me wrong, I still have a lot of time for a nerd who puts so much effort into a counter-argument and I still think the meta-reviewer got a lot of things right, but Plinkett reviewed an art form on its own turf. Hats off and fair play.

So, okay. When it comes to academic objectivity and straight-up facts, I’m still going to have to award it to the meta-review on points, despite its admitted lack of objectivity and the several points at which it simply fails academically. It’s just no contest really, because Plinkett wasn’t even trying to compete on those grounds. So he made some stuff up, or exaggerated how many minutes some things took, or mixed some things around to create a feeling. Maybe he intentionally misunderstood some stuff and exaggerated his confusion. I think you need to put academic honesty aside as a concept when you’re looking at a short movie made by a guy with dead hookers in his basement. This evidently infuriated the meta-reviewer and I have to give him points for setting all the facts straight.

But for the art (if you can call it that) of review, for the general feel of the piece and its impact, for the chord it struck within my own opinions of the Star Wars prequels, yeah. Maybe I have to award it to the reviewer who created something in the same discipline as the original work.

My opinion of the prequel trilogy and subsequent opinions of review and meta-review notwithstanding…

I’m still torn between the fact that I have a soft spot in my heart for a pedantic and obsessive nerd who is trying to defend the object of his nerdesire, and the fact that Plinkett has basically provided me with the first review I can actually look in the eye the morning after.

A while ago, a colleague introduced me to the strange world of Mr. Plinkett, a deranged pizza-roll-eating movie reviewer with a hilarious habit of “taping” his reviews over the top of kidnapping, rape, torture and bestiality footage featuring his cat and various abducted women.

Among his film reviews are some extremely long-winded and highly entertaining critiques of Episode I, Episode II and Episode III, which are cruel and unusual in just about every sense of the term. Well recommended to anyone with a bit of time or the opportunity to leave them playing in the background while you work. Not exactly the sort of footage you want to accidentally share on your desktop during a meeting, of course. But what is, these days?

The reviews so entertained some people, and so enlivened the Anti Prequel Party, that one loyal Star Wars enthusiast took it on himself to write a hundred-odd page rebuttal to Plinkett’s review of The Phantom Menace – a review of the review, to which Plinkett filmed a brief counter-rebuttal.

Now, I didn’t care much for the Prequel Trilogy. It was full of BSTs and action and that was a lot of fun for a shallow and tacky film-viewer such as myself … but I guess I, like so many other Star Wars fans, had been waiting so long to see new movies that my expectations were just way too high.

As discussed elsewhere here, it’s really dubious to pin down exactly where the old movies “won” and the new movies “lost”. Annoying-arse kid, even-more-annoying-arse teenager, annoying-arse Jar Jar Binks and rather too much CGI fakery, sure. Those are easy, sweeping, subjective remarks to make.

But I was swayed by the reasonableness in the meta-review. It still got a bit ad hominem, and I rather think it was the work of a true fanboy. A new age fanboy, perhaps, while Plinkett’s reviews may be more accurately described as the work of an old school fanboy, but it stuck to its guns and it stuck to the facts.

Plinkett’s reviews do fub some points, focus on others way too much, create more confusion than needed and ignore some things entirely. Some of his objections and criticisms were actually made up, and it’s not exactly an intellectually enriching piece. A bit of fact-checking – which our new age fanboy did in spades – shed a lot of light on what initially looks like a multitude of sins, but turns out in fact to just be an average movie that could never live up to its legend.

As the disgruntled rumblings of a disenchanted old school fanboy, Plinkett’s review sums up the confusion and disappointment I know a lot of people felt on seeing these films. I felt it myself, to some degree or another, in between going “oooh, look at the shinies.” So it’s not an objective and intellectually honest piece of critique … fine. As long as I’m not thinking of it that way, I don’t mind if other people do. Our new age fanboy obviously minds.

Plinkett also preferred the older Star Trek movies to the Next Generation ones, although his review of the Trek prequel film was pretty reasonable and positive for someone the new age fanboy meta-reviewer calls so many nasty names. And a lot of Plinkett’s criticisms of the Next Generation films seemed pretty clear, as opposed to his more vague and rambling objections to the Prequel Trilogy’s plot minutiae.

His use of the puzzled Trek officer in pointing out flaws, incidentally, was also nothing short of brilliant.

Comic Sans? Really, Captain?

Points to the new age fanboy and his meta-review, though, overall. His work may not have been as funny or elaborate, but it was closer to an actual review and it showed he’d done his homework. And Plinkett’s homework, too. I’m going to pay Plinkett’s reviews as hilarious, clever and well done, but the meta-review still whips them on facts.

New age fanboy could have been nicer about it, but hey. Plinkett wasn’t very nice, and that was one of the things that made his review so damn funny. That meta-review was obviously the work of many months and a lot of frustrating conversations about Plinkett’s films, so I can’t begrudge him a little snarkiness. And Plinkett’s meta-meta-review was way off base, since that was not what new age fanboy’s meta-review was all about (but again, can’t really blame him because his actual reviews were even more work, and it’s very easy for someone to just come along and criticise … which is just what Plinkett did to Lucas, who put even more work into his films … whoa, I am falling into a meta-hole).

I have a feeling Plinkett read the meta-review in spite of his dubious response to it. I know I would, if our situations were reversed and someone put that much effort into destroying something I’d made – if only on academic grounds.

But it all comes down to one thing: do you like the three-movie Star Wars saga, or the six-movie Star Wars saga? There are people who refuse to acknowledge that the Prequel Trilogy even happened, and that’s their right. There are people who refuse to acknowledge that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists, and that doesn’t affect my life in any concrete way.

Personally, my conclusion about the Original Trilogy vs. the Prequel Trilogy is summed up by one thing: the Lego.

The old movies had droids and machines and ships and things that already looked like they were made of Lego. You could make most of the things out of grey Lego pieces without much need for special packs, and when you wanted to get creative, you could make all sorts of hybrids and other stuff as well. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone of a certain age: this is what Lego is meant to be for.

The new movies’ props, however, are very much what I call “new Lego”: you get a packet with about six pieces of Lego in it, each piece can attach in exactly one way, to make exactly one thing: the prop from the movie, all cartoony and slick. You can’t use the top half of a Naboo fighter ship to make anything else (except possibly a Battle Droid with a hilarious head). It spoils your imagination.

The Prequel Trilogy in a nutshell? You decide.