- petrol blue
- Feb 9, 2013
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sugar and spice
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ethanol slammers
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Ah, reviews. The pressure valve of capitalism, the invisible hand, the...
If '1984' or 'The Trial' had been a children's book, Mr Messy would be it. No literary character has ever been so fully and categorically obliterated by the forces of social control. Hargreaves may well pay homage to Kafka and Orwell in this work, but he also goes beyond them.
We meet Mr Messy - a man whose entire day-to-day existence is the undiluted expression of his individuality. His very untidiness is a metaphor for his blissful and unselfconscious disregard for the Social Order. Yes, there are times when he himself is a victim of this individuality - as when he trips over a brush he has left on his garden path - but he goes through life with a smile on his face.
That is, until a chance meeting with Mr Neat and Mr Tidy - the archetypal men in suits. They set about a merciless programme of social engineering and indoctrination that we are left in no doubt is in flagrant violation of his free will. 'But I like being messy' he protests as they anonymize both his home and his person with their relentless cleaning activity, a symbolism thinly veiled.
This process is so thorough that by the end of it he is unrecognizable - a homogenized pink blob, no longer truly himself (that vibrant Pollock-like scribble of before). He smiles the smile of a brainwashed automaton, blandly accepting what he has been given no agency to question or refuse. It is in this very smile that the sheer horror of what we have seen to occur is at its most acute.
Somewhere behind this blank expression though is a latent anger - a trace of self-knowledge as to what he once was - in the barbed observation he makes to Neat and Tidy that they have even deprived him of his name.
The book ends with a dry reminder from Hargreaves that just as with the secret police in some totalitarian regime, our own small expressions of uniqueness and volition may also result in a visit from these sinister suited agents.
I said The Invisible...
I love dice. This is true. I love dice so much that it is the basis of my daily choice system
alongside being the cornerstone of my morning sustenance.
Mine came with a fair assortment of dice, falling 4% right of a Gaussian. Although I had to engrave dots
onto the human tooth that came with mine as to include it in the statistical analysis (count as D6 now).
Also included a solitary games workshop scatter die (I could barely contain my excitement).
She now sits pride of place upon my pedestal of glory.
Durability is respectable. Random sample die withstood a relative strain comparative to wood before
critical failure. Don't worry correct burial rites were observed.
Educational value is top notch. Demonstrated to my hamster the concept of exponential radioactive decay
using the 20 d6 that came in the assortment.
Lets see other random event generators do that! That's right Baron Coinwary. I'm talking to YOU!
The results of the soak test are still on going. Will report back with findings on corrosion have been
suitably analysed.
On the whole Excellent dice set.
natural 20.
OK, so, amazon is broken, but I'm sure google app...
Bring me your favourite reviews!
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Jan 15, 2015 22:05
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Apr 26, 2024 01:25
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- Poor Miserable Gurgi
- Dec 29, 2006
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He's a wisecracker!
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The requisite New York Times review of Guy Fieri's Times Square restaurant:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/dining/reviews/restaurant-review-guys-american-kitchen-bar-in-times-square.html?pagewanted=all
Pete Wells posted:Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?
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Jan 16, 2015 00:46
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- petrol blue
- Feb 9, 2013
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sugar and spice
and
ethanol slammers
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What the christ is
The Ringer
Donkey Sauce. If you say that in polite society, you're likely to get slapped. But Donkey Sauce is all over this menu, smeared onto sandwiches and squirted all over burgers. Apparently it's a mix of mustard, mayo, Worcestershire sauce, and garlic—which sounds okay, we guess. Here, it's put on a beef patty with an onion ring, bourbon-brown-sugar barbecue sauce, lettuce, onion, tomato, pickles, and SMC (a totally unnecessary acronym for "super-melty cheese"—because regular melty cheese simply won't do).
e: I'd never heard of the guy before, but I deeply wish to slap him now.
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Jan 16, 2015 01:03
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- Nckdictator
- Sep 8, 2006
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Just..someone
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What the christ is
e: I'd never heard of the guy before, but I deeply wish to slap him now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV6ubzMpr3c Bonus former mod in the video.
For content Roger Ebert's review of "I Spit on Your Grave" is a work of art.
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/i-spit-on-your-grave-1980
quote:A vile bag of garbage named "I Spit on Your Grave" is playing in Chicago theaters this week. It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it's playing in respectable theaters, such as Plitt's United Artists. But it is. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of, my life.
This is a film without a shred of artistic distinction. It lacks even simple craftsmanship. There is no possible motive for exhibiting it, other than the totally cynical hope that it might make money. Perhaps it will make money: When I saw it at 11:20 a.m. on Monday, the theater contained a larger crowd than usual.
It was not just a large crowd, it was a profoundly disturbing one. I do not often attribute motives to audience members, nor do I try to read their minds, but the people who were sitting around me on Monday morning made it easy for me to know what they were thinking. They talked out loud. And if they seriously believed the things they were saying, they were vicarious sex criminals.
The story of ''I Spit on Your Grave" is told with moronic simplicity. A girl goes for a vacation in the woods. She sunbathes by a river. Two men speed by in a powerboat. They harass her. Later, they tow her boat to a rendezvous with two of their buddies. They strip the girl, beat her and rape her. She escapes into the woods. They find her, beat her, and rape her again. She crawls home. They are already there, beat her some more, and rape her again.
Two weeks later, somewhat recovered the girl lures one of the men out to her house, pretends to seduce him, and hangs him. She lures out another man and castrates him, leaving him to bleed to death in a bathtub. She kills the third man with an axe and disembowels the fourth with an outboard engine. End of movie.
These horrible events are shown with an absolute minimum of dialogue, which is so poorly recorded that it often cannot be heard. There is no attempt to develop the personalities of the characters - they are, simply, a girl and four men, one of them mentally retarded. The movie is nothing more or less than a series of attacks on the girl and then her attacks on the men, interrupted only by an unbelievably grotesque and inappropriate scene in which she enters a church and asks forgiveness for the murders she plans to commit.
How did the audience react to all of this? Those who were vocal seemed to be eating it up. The middle-aged, white-haired man two seats down from me, for example, talked aloud, After the first rape: "That was a good one!" After the second: "That'll show her!" After the third: "I've seen some good ones, but this is the best." When the tables turned and the woman started her killing spree, a woman in the back row shouted: "Cut him up, sister!" In several scenes, the other three men tried to force the retarded man to attack the girl. This inspired a lot of laughter and encouragement from the audience.
I wanted to turn to the man next to me and tell him his remarks were disgusting, but I did not. To hold his opinions at his age, he must already have suffered a fundamental loss of decent human feelings. I would have liked to talk with the woman in the back row, the one with the feminist solidarity for the movie's heroine. I wanted to ask If she'd been appalled by the movie's hour of rape scenes. As it was, at the film's end I walked out of the theater quickly, feeling unclean, ashamed and depressed.
This movie is an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures, Because it is made artlessly, It flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering. As a critic, I have never condemned the use of violence in films if I felt the filmmakers had an artistic reason for employing it. "I Spit on Your Grave" does not. It is a geek show. I wonder if its exhibitors saw it before they decided to play it, and if they felt as unclean afterward as I did.
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/rapa-nui-1994
quote:"Rapa Nui" slips through the National Geographic Loophole. This is the Hollywood convention which teaches us that brown breasts are not as sinful as white ones, and so while it may be evil to gaze upon a blond Playboy centerfold and feel lust in our hearts, it is educational to watch Polynesian maidens frolicking topless in the surf. This isn't sex; it's geography.
For years in my liberal youth I thought this loophole was racist, an evil double standard in which white women were protected from exposure while "native" women were cruelly stripped of their bras, not to mention the equal protection of the MPAA. While watching "Rapa Nui," in which there are dozens if not hundreds of wonderful bare breasts on view, I have changed my mind. Since womens' breasts are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the human anatomy, it is only a blessing if your culture celebrates them.
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Jan 16, 2015 03:16
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- Irisi
- Feb 18, 2009
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The review of that Guy Fieri restaurant is great, but I'm rather fond of Jay Rayners' wicked, scapel-sharp dissection of one of Londons' new Russian-owned restaurants, none of which are particularly...restrained. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/oct/19/beast-restaurant-review-jay-rayner
He doesnt hate the food, he just finds the style and price of the place so depressingly overwhelming it loops back round to becoming hilarious again. I'm particularly fond of this line:
quote:The corn-fed, dry-aged Nebraskan rib-eye, with a carbon footprint big enough to make a climate-change denier horny, is bloody marvellous: rich, deep, earthy, with that dense tang that comes with proper hanging. And at £100 a kilo it bloody well should be. At that price they should lead the drat animal into the restaurant and install it under the table so it can pleasure me while I eat.
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Jan 16, 2015 14:26
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- petrol blue
- Feb 9, 2013
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sugar and spice
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ethanol slammers
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I watch masterchef a fair bit, and Rainer is loving amazing every time he appears on it. He's kinda like your dad's far cooler younger bro, who lets you stay up late and 'doesn't notice' when you steal his beer.
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Jan 16, 2015 23:58
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Apr 26, 2024 01:25
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- Zamboni Rodeo
- Jul 19, 2007
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NEVER play "Lady of Spain" AGAIN!
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Come, now. You can't post Roger Ebert reviews without mentioning his review of Deuce Bigalow. You know, this one:
Roger Ebert posted:
But Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain that Columbia financed "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo" while passing on the opportunity to participate in "Million Dollar Baby," "Ray," "The Aviator," "Sideways" and "Finding Neverland." As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.
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Jan 17, 2015 02:59
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Jan 15, 2015 22:05
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3P1RY67UZF53F/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B002UM16UO
