Random Hoo Haasthe blog with the guff

“You’re programmed to be an asshole!”

Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 11:22 pm Comments (3)

And so, I’ve finished the Alien quadrology (I can’t help but laugh every time I hear that) with Alien Resurrection. It is better than Alien³ in a lot of ways, but it just came across as the least appealing film.

Ripley died in the last flick, but two hundred years later a new organisation clone her using a blood sample so they can extract the alien. Surprise surprise, that eventually goes tits-up, and Ripley, a scant few crew and a bunch of bounty hunters are trapped on the space station with them. That’s about as far as the plot goes, really.
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Rental night!

Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 11:48 pm Comments Off on Rental night!

Paid another visit to Xtravision today, where I rented Transformers: War for Cybertron, Prince of Egypt, and Space Chimps. The last one was at my father’s choice. He’s got a thing for all things simian.

Just a head’s up – this entry’s gonna be looooong and largely about Transformers. Just a warning for the many folks who don’t give a damn about that little obsession.
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Wankers! In! Spaaaaaaaace!

Friday, March 18, 2011 at 12:06 pm Comments (6)

Watched Alien³ last night. I’d seen it once before years ago; it was actually the first movie in the Alien series I’d seen, but I couldn’t remember much about it besides the totally gratuitous deaths of everyone but Ripley from the previous movie – before the movie even begins! – and the ending, so I was looking forward to seeing it in full.

You’d need a lengthy list to detail all the ways it’s different in tone from the first two films, but the main point is that there’s only one alien, the place they’re trapped on has no useful working technology to fight the creature with, and for some reason, despite being set on a dingy prison planet in the ass-end of the universe, it’s probably the brightest of the first three movies. I can understand Aliens because it was on a ravaged human colony that about to blow up or something, but who’d thought a near-derelict prison would be lit well?

Yep, that’s a great comment to start the review off with.
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Battle for Originality

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 at 11:49 pm Comments (3)

Went to see Battle: Los Angeles, because that’s the kind of braindead movie one wants to watch after you’ve done nothing but feel ill and write code all day.

When I say braindead, I really do mean it. The movie is practically Military Movie 101, it throws in so many clichés. The first half hour is spent ‘getting to know’ the main players in the force, which is not only needless because their personalities are summed up in less than a minute, but also… well, let’s face it, they all end up looking the same in the heat of a battle. One guy is joked about by the others because he’s a virgin, but it’s difficult to see what other contribution he makes to the movie because it’s so damn hard to keep track of who’s who. We have emotional overreactions thrown about every ten minutes. The group find two adult civilians who provide one useful bit of support and then are made redundant. There are the kid civilians are there just for the marines to give inspirational speeches to. At one point there’s a helicopter with wounded soldiers (who are all given emotional good luck speeches from their comrades) that is blown up mere seconds after takeoff. There’s a rather needless scene where the hero and female civilian (who I guess is meant to be a love interest, but it sure isn’t developed!) muck about with an alien corpse and try to find its weak spot (which is to the right of where a human’s heart would be. Yeah, like you wouldn’t hit that eventually through regular fire). All the film needs is a dog that somehow survives all the hellish action until the end of the film and the aliens taking over a human’s body and that would nearly complete the set!
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Seriously awesome?

Monday, March 14, 2011 at 11:27 pm Comments Off on Seriously awesome?

Father roped me into watching A Serious Man. I sat through it to the end, and was able to wriggle my way out of stating what I thought by scoring it an interrobang out of ten, sending him rummaging through dictionaries to identify the word.

It’s an interesting film. I will wholeheartedly give it that.

It is not the kind of movie one wants to watch when you’re feeling unwell and just want to see a simple everything-makes-sense comedy where, I don’t know, people fall into bathtubs or something. When I’m unwell, I’m not exactly in the mood to watch a film exploring the injustices and justices of the world and how simple actions can warp the moral fabric of the universe and screw everyone over.

Maybe sometime I’ll be willing to analyse it, but at the moment I’d just like to go to bed each night knowing that I have something worth contributing to the cosmos around me.

I’m all alone (more or less)

Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 10:36 pm Comments (5)

Watched Aliens. I’d caught the final half hour of it while on holiday about five or six years ago, but otherwise can’t remember much about it. I know James Cameron did the directing and writing this time around, and I was curious to see how it would impact upon the style and setting. I still remember watching Rambo II; the first one was a fantastic movie that I still love, but as soon as I saw his credit during the opening of the sequel I knew that this time it’d just be a heartless action movie. I was right. Fun action movie, but no real soul to it, unlike the first one. Thankfully, Aliens is just as good as the original, in its own way.
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Ash is a goddamn robot!

Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 11:35 pm Comments (1)

I watched Alien five days ago. Yeah, I’m really dropping the ball on punctual blog entries these days.

Mind you, what is there to say that more professional, more qualified and more verbose people haven’t already said? It’s insanely atmospheric and lonely, and I love it. The first hour very much reminded me of Life Force (which you may recall me gushing about two years ago), with its very cold and lonely exploration of an alien ship, though Alien came first, of course. In a way I was almost disappointed when the alien started killing dudes full-time, not because it wasn’t entertaining, but because it had less time to explore the dank and desolate environment of space. I’m a total sucker for that kind of stuff.

I also watched The Hudsucker Proxy… half a month ago? Yeah, it was part of a Coen Brothers boxset and was one of the only two movies I was vaguely familiar with (the other being The Big Lebowski). I only became aware of the film through Platypus Comix’s very entertaining synopsis of the film with comments and other titbits of information – it’s a very good read. Also, hey, have I plugged the site before? I probably should!
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My curly moustache is in the making

Friday, February 25, 2011 at 12:28 am Comments (5)

I got vouchers for Xtravision around Christmas, and thought I’d be worthwhile actually making use of them, preferably to try other games that I’m interested in but unsure of buying, but hey, trying out movies I wouldn’t bother buying can’t hurt either. … can it?

We watched Outcast. I didn’t even read the blurb in detail, all I saw was a neat lookin’ Resident Evil style claw on the box along with a couple of beardy Irish actors on the images on the back, and I thought, “sold!” Having watched it, I can say it isn’t really my thing.

A mother and son move from their caravan to the inner city slums. The boy happens to turn into a monster at night. There’s two folks from a strange cult out to find the two and kill them. There’s a romance between the boy and a local girl. The mother is frighteningly overbearing. Misery ensues.
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“You, go to hell. Here’s your ticket!”

Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 9:51 pm Comments Off on “You, go to hell. Here’s your ticket!”

Watched Bio Hunter. This was one of the many anime VHS tapes we had years and years ago (the batch of tapes that made my brother and I major fans of Ultimate Teacher and Cyber City Oedo 808, and also exposed us to the incredibly corny English dub of Laughing Target), but I’d never watched it properly until now. I caught the first scene when ripping it from VHS before I got rid of it, and it’s hardly something you forget – a chick and a dude are having sex, and then the woman gets the munchies, so her breasts turn into mouths and chew his arm off. It’s the very first scene you see, so you know it’s gonna leave an impact.
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This must be the Site B laboratory.

Saturday, February 5, 2011 at 10:08 am Comments (1)

Possibly due to his new-found love for OutRun 2, my brother has had arcades on the mind lately, and this morning we decided to head over to Yorkgate and check out its sorely neglected arcade and bingo hall. We weren’t expecting much at all; we were well-prepared to just mosey around it for two minutes to gaze over the wares, inevitably see nothing of interest, and then just go home. One game shoved away in the corner gave us good reason to hang around. Why?

Because it was THE LOST WORLD ARCADE GAME

YYYYEEEESSSS

In the off-chance I’ve never stated it, I have very, very fond memories of playing this game back in Spain about thirteen years ago. The arcade in Porta Ventura back then had this game (and Puzzle Bobble but dude you can buy the PC version for £1 in Toys R Us, it ain’t got obscurity value) and my brother and I would go out of our way to play it every day  we were there. We sunk so much Spanish currency into that thing. Quite justifiably, because it’s a pretty rockin’ lightgun game with some great intense sequences and a few elements that just mix things up a little. We watched a few clips of it on YouTube a few weeks ago (because that’s precisely the sort of boring things we get up to) and couldn’t help but be a little wistful. The game is nearly fifteen years old, has never had a home port and the chances of it receiving one now are very unlikely. Would we ever play the game again?

And then, holy shit, there it is in Yorkgate. That’s not far at all! Heck, it’s my usual movie-going spot. I would ask myself how on earth I could’ve missed it for so long, but given how modern arcades never exactly have much to offer, I think that speaks for itself.
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