Monday, 20 September 2010

How I Met Your Motherfucker

About four years ago, my very good friend Ross and I (same name, woah, only just noticed) rented a film and bought some snacks - we then went back to mine to watch the film and eat the snacks. I forget what the film was, but one of the food items we bought was a decent sized tub of Toffee and Honeycomb flavoured Mackie's ice cream. It didn't seem like a girls night in at the time, we genuinely used to just have a fascination with desserts, once inventing the combination of ginger pudding and custard, which we rather appetisingly named "Ginger and 'Turd". Which in hindsight, luckily didn't catch on as our actual nicknames. Not that it would have been much worse than "The Two Rosstitutes".

Anyway, the ice cream was disgusting shit, being about 120% sugar, I had a spoonful or so and decided to give it a miss. But for some reason Ross decided he wasn't going anywhere until he had devoured the whole thing. It was a painstaking thing to witness, and I don't know if he did it just to challenge himself or if it was all in the name of value for money - but it sure wasn't because he liked it. The film had finished long ago as Ross continued to shove the now sloppy mixture of nuclear sweetness into his face, vowing that if he was going to be sick, he'd just have to do it on my mother's leather sofa, but nothing was going to stop him seeing the bottom of that tub. By the end he was a broken man, whatever pride he had hoped would come from such persistence was not there and it was ultimately pointless.

This is what I think about when I watch "How I Met Your Mother".


The worst TV programme in history.

For those who don't know about this turd-tacular masterpiece, the show is set in New York and is based on the character of Ted Mosby (the twat in the middle) who is telling the story to his future kids, in the year 2030, about how he met their mother in the first place. It's like "Friends", if it had been given an overbearing structural concept and written by a leaky biro held in the grasp of a twitching sphincter. It is genuinely set in New York though. And they are all friends.

The second main problem I have with this show is that Ted has taken six (and counting) series' to tell this story, sometimes taking clumps of episodes, sometimes seasons, and hours of life, to tell us all who ISN'T his future child-bearer. If my Dad had taken in excess of one hundred, thirty-minute episodes to tell me that he met my Mum working for my Uncle in a small Aberdonian Logistics and Transport company, mentioning every human he had ever met before her - I'd be fucking raging. And he gave me life, so he has dibs on wasting my time. This audio-visual abortion doesn't.

The worst part is, I don't give a shit who the mother ends up being at all. I've read some pretty decent murder mysteries in my time and watched a lot of wrestling too - the only way they will top the kind of identity revealing found in this two mediums is if the mother turns out to be either of his prickish buddies Marshall (left) or Barney (right). Quite frankly the whole concept is just a devious way of stopping the show ever getting cancelled, but the goods news is that it will apparently be going no longer than eight seasons. 

Eight.

Seasons. 

Fuck. I remember "Lost" got a lot better when they established an ending then started working back the ways, but this is an outrage. I'd like to know if "How I Met Your Mother" has the same online fanfare and speculation as to how it will end, but at the same time - wouldn't like to know.

So why do I continue to watch it? Because of the first main problem I have with it. The characters. They are all awful. Completely unlikable, unfunny and based completely out of the realm of realism. The only aspect of the characters I'd say one can identify with is with the charming couple of Marshall  (Jason Segel; previously liked by me in some films) and Lily (flute-pussy from "American Pie"; previously disliked by me in everything). Everyone knows that one couple that were sweethearts in school and have been together ever since. They have never suffered in love, second-guessed their choices, or actually done anything interesting at all - and you hate them. 



Well Marshall and Lily are them, except one is an embarrassing kid-like lumbering fuckwit who you wouldn't trust to take your coat for a walk and the other just needs a slap.

Barney (played by Neil Patrick Harris *shrug*) is the "Stifler" of the group, who's main gimmick is that he wears a suit. He has no depth or personality and could only exist in a world where the bar you frequent every night has different hot single girls sitting by themselves. He often asks for various types of high five and his sexual conquests are about as believable as if someone looking like this...

claimed he just had sex.


Robin Scherbatsky is a woman in it, who has no idea about anything and gets away with murder at her job as a news anchor. I honestly can't remember a damn thing she has done the whole time. But the REAL villain of the piece is the main character Ted.



There are not enough languages in the world in which to tell this guy to go fuck himself. I suppose you could describe him as "unlucky in love" but that's not it at all, he's just the clingy moron who tells girls he loves them on the first date and would propose to anything that has a vagina and breaths. That is not a likeable trait in a protagonist unless they are fucking hysterical in their own desperation. But Ted Mosby is not. The kind of scrapes he gets himself into remind me of a retarded mate who hangs about with you and always misses the boat on what is crazy. You throw a snowball at a strangers house. He throws a a brick through his own Gran's greenhouse. How does your brain work exactly?

Ted coincidentally has the wit of a projectile brick, which is probably why he is friends with Marshall, but the whole show is just lacking any genuine humour. I have never laughed ONCE at it. Here is a woeful example of the writing - a song that Marshall comes up with to describe Barney's sexual adventures. It's called "Bang Bang Bangidty Bang" or something.

YouTube link (ignore the intro)

Imagine watching someone do that in a restaurant - you'd call the police. They obviously watched that episode of "Family Guy" where Peter sings that "Bird is the word" song continuously and thought "that was funny, let's do that". However, they totally failed to realise that Peter Griffin is a funny cartoon character with the scope to be genuinely ridiculous and hilariously dumbass, whilst they are semi-devised semi-humans, who one could only describe as "bubbly" on a online dating website.

And that bird thing was fucking annoying anyway.

But to answer my question - why do I watch this show? Simply really, to remind myself that my friends and the people I hang around with are not too bad actually. Yes, some of them maybe ice cream sadists, yes a lot of them like "The Inbetweeners", but I have enough faith in my various social circles to know that if any of them came up with a song about anything, it would be clever and ultimately out of place on "Sesame Street". One of my friends makes up bigoted poems in the character of a cockney builder, then delivers them live onstage with a plastic yellow hat for fuck sake, and it's exactly one thousand times funnier than any of the shit a team of lazy over-paid writers working on a multi-million dollar sitcom can come up with.

"Just make them say "bang" in the easiest tune you can think of"

"Mary had a Little Lamb?"

"...try the second easiest tune you can think of"

I wish death on you.

Sunday, 12 September 2010

Computer Games

I can't remember the last time I watched a film and paid attention. I usually have them playing whilst I work, but the last two times I've specifically tried to watch a film, I've fallen asleep. Yes, one of those times was during the wax work action thriller "The Expendables" in the cinema. I don't think my 15 minute siesta was enough to miss out on any significant plot details though. In fact, I probably missed some Stallone-spoken dialogue that would have only clouded matters.

Seeing as work has become less frantic, the Fringe is well and truly over and having seen the advert for the new Halo game due out in a few days



.. no wait, a COUPLE of days, I have decided that playing computer games would be a pretty awesome way of spending Semptember. I just really need to switch off for a few hours and shoot the fuck out of some bad guys. And good guys too when they aren't looking.

Halo 3 is one of my top five favourite things ever made because it was beautiful and I actually got good enough to put up a fight against online American gamers who seem play 36 hours a day. I have no idea what the story behind the new one is, and frankly don't care, I have officially unboxed my Xbox 360 after about a year (roughly one day per rotational degree) and am prepared to waste huge quantities of time playing it. PLAYING. LIKE A LITTLE BOY. To make time, I am going to hugely up efforts to stop sleeping so much and me more efficient in my working hours, wasting considerably less time refreshing Facebook and mast...ering the art of procrastination.

Once this decision had been made, I have pretty much bought Kane and Lynch II and competed it within 5 hours.

As is my impulsion. The game was fast, brutal and wonderfully linear It had a clear beginning and a quickly achievable end and was just what I needed to wet my appetite for more. Within the next 10 hours (included 9 hours sleep) I had taken it back and traded it in for Red Dead Redemption. Which is not such an "in and out" affair.


The only game I have ever 100% completed on the Xbox360, is "Gun" which was a brilliant open world western and this is basically the same, but looks 33% better. Being made by Rockstar Games it is basically (no, literally) GTA: Wild West and between a few moments of awesomeness, pretty much exclusively involves travelling from A to B as the core gameplay. When you're not doing missions that involve travelling you can go watch a movie... play poker... buy stuff... basically everything I usually do on the internet whilst I'm working, except just now I'm not actually getting anything done, am I!? 'Sake.

I decide I want to avoid the side-quests and mucking around, just smash through the main storyline, and have this baby back in the shop in time for a Halo: Reach trade in. So I  go to do a mission for some ranch-owning Lady-girl only to be told she is not to be disturbed between 5am and 11pm (game time). I look at my watch in the start menu - it's 3am. Fuck this. I shoot a man in the kneecap out of pure boredom, a bunch of guys try to kill me, so I kill them all, more guys turn up, chase me out of town and by the time I get my shit together and pay off my bounty, it's 11.30pm again. WAKE UP SO WE CAN HERD YOUR CATTLE FOR THE SEVENTEENTH TIME MISSY, OR I SWEAR I'M GONNA SHOOT YOUR DOG.

Anyway, having missed about a year of games and such, I can't believe how astonishing the graphics and animation of, particularly, Red Dead Redemption really were. It's made me think about trying to get into games development again in a pretty big way. I'd much rather me making cowboys and guns from wicked concept art than oil rigs from illegible technical drawings.

Although, I did get to do a pretty violent scene of a dumbass Nigerian hammering into a gas pipeline last week.



"I KNEW I SHOULD HAVE STUCK TO THE INTERNATIONAL MONEY SCAMS"