DogZilla

So last night I was channel surfing around 10:45pm and ended up leaving ITV2 on in the background. During one of the commercial breaks there was one of those ‘mini-news’ programs that give updates on the latest headlines. In the entertainment news, they focused on a low budget horror movie that is currently the “surprise hit” at Cannes.

And what is that movie? Colin.

Really, I couldn’t be happier for director Marc price as he’s achieved something incredible by producing such an accomplished movie with no formal film-making experience and no money. Of course, the fact that the film was made for less than £50 makes great headlines as it’s easy for the press to contrast its tiny budget against the glitz and glamour of the world’s most famous film festival.

Apparently a couple of Japanese distributors have shown a lot of interest in the film. On the face of it that sounds like great news, but the Japanese labels do have a tendency to give new artwork and titles to any old crap and sell it purely on the packaging rather than the merits of the film inside. I hope Price can keep a degree of creative control over the presentation of the film to ensure that its integrity remains intact.

Regardless, it’s all great news that this superb film, made with commitment and passion, rather than money, is getting the wider audience and coverage that it deserves.

You heard it here first.

Links:
Nowhere Fast on Youtube
www.colinmovie.com
Review at HorrorTalk.com
Colin – On set report at Horrortalk.com

Well, Wednesday night was cocking brilliant.

The last time I saw metallica play live was, oh, ‘92 when they toured ‘Metallica’ (the Black Album) and they were, well, a bit shit. If you can remember that far back it was when they thought it would be a good idea not to have a support band but a live video feed to their dressing room before the show. A lot of fans, quite rightly, felt they’d disappeared too far up their own arses.

But the World magnetic Tour is different.

The support bands were The Sword and Machine Head. Poor old Sword must have been poked on stage as soon as the doors opened (at 7.00pm) because by the time we took our seats, after an extended search for some ice for Mrs B’s wine because it ‘wasn’t cold enough’, they were gone. Machine head faired a bit better in terms of audience turnout, and put on a decent show marred only by a fairly poor sound mix that made them sound like a wall of noise if you didn’t know the song they were playing.

Metallica took the stage at around 9.15pm after the rousing intro of Ennio Morricone’s Ecstasy of Gold and opened with That Was Just Your Life in an incredible laser show, followed immediately by The End of the Line. Performing on a a central arena stage, with mic stands on all sides and corners, and a central rotating drum riser meant that almost everyone got a pretty good view of the action. Impressive lighting rigs consisting of four giant metallic coffins moved and twisted above the stage, while pyrotechnics blasted flames through the floor (particularly effective during the battle-sounds intro to One).

The set list pulled together much of Death Magnetic with some quality back catalogue. As well as the intro tracks, Death Magnetic also provided Broken, Beat & Scarred, The Day That Never Comes, Judas Kiss and My Apocalypse (played live for the first time on the night according to James Hetfield). From the back catalogue we had Creeping Death, Master of Puppets, Ride the Lightning, Sad but True, Enter Sandman, Nothing Else Matters and Blackened. The band played extremely well, full of energy, and looked like they were having fun throughout. Lars Ulrich, who’s looked a bit podgy and unfit recently, was a lean mean skin pounding machine and played an absolute blinder, underpinning the masterful guitar thrash-offs between Hetfield and Hammet. Bassist Rob Trujillo, visually, sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the band, but gurned and slapped his bass through every song like the best of them.

All too soon the sold out audience was chanting for an encore which was, slightly disappointingly, comprised of Black Sabbath’s Hole in the Sky and a Diamond Head’s The Prince. They rescued the encore by ending off with the finale of Seek and Destroy with the house lights up as dozens of massive black inflatables some 3 feet in diameter were released from the roof and bounced around the crowd for the duration. To their credit, as the songs had finished the band didn’t just run straight off stage into a waiting limo, they spent at least another 15 minutes throwing guitar picks and drumsticks to the crowd and taking time to thank people for coming, both from the stage edge and over the PA.

Welcome back Metallica, you’ve spent too long in the wilderness.

Full Set List:

That Was Just Your Life
The End of the Line
Creeping Death
Ride The Lightning
One
Broken, Beat & Scarred
My Apocalypse
Sad But True
Welcome Home (Sanitarium)
The Judas Kiss
Kirk Solo #1
The Day That Never Comes
Master Of Puppets
Blackened
Kirk Solo #2
Nothing Else Matters
Enter Sandman
Hole In The Sky (Black Sabbath Cover)
The Prince (Diamond Head Cover)
Seek and Destroy

They have this system at my son’s school where everyone has their name on a chart, and they can move the names up or down depending on their behaviour. So each day they all start on green, and can move to silver or gold if they’re good, or orange and red if they’re not.

Since the start of term, he’s been coming home and proudly telling us that he’s been on green, silver, and even gold once. The other week he told us that he’d been moved down to orange on that day. When we asked him why, he squirmed a bit then said,

“Well, I accidentally wee’d on Callum.”

I had to try really hard not to laugh, keeping the aura of a firm parent, but then my wife asked him where (meaning ‘where at school did this happen?’), and he replied,

“In his pocket”.

I had to leave the room.

Following on from my previous post about Mickey Mouse’s gangsta influence, it seems that the animated rodent isn’t as squeaky clean as first thought.

According to an article on The Daily Telegraph Website a Saudi Arabian cleric (or a religious fuckwit as they’re more commonly known), has labelled Mickey Mouse “one of Satan’s soldiers” that “makes everything it touches impure.”

During a, no doubt, bulging-eyed rant and a ceremonial burning of Fantasia he spouted, “According to Islamic law, the mouse is a repulsive, corrupting creature. How do you think children view mice today – after Tom and Jerry?

Mickey Mouse has become an awesome character, even though according to Islamic law, Mickey Mouse should be killed in all cases.”

So there you go folks, it looks like Mickey is now a legitimate target for rabid religious cretins with shit for brains. If you happen to be queuing at Disneyland to get your photo taken with him, and there’s a shifty-looking character in the queue wearing a backpack, get the hell out of there. Mickey’s fatwah has been issued.

So yeah, last week I was on holiday in France with the family (which explains my lack of input on this blog) and we took a trip to Disneyland Paris – where dreams come true. If your dream is to stand in queues for 90 minutes for two-minute rides, have a new arsehole ripped every time you want to eat, or to spend the entire day dodging clouds of smoke from filthy French bastards, then yes, your dreams will certainly come true.

No trip to Mickeyland would be complete without getting the kids photographed with the man himself, Michael T. Mouse, so my better half queued up with the youngsters while I got a into a decent position to take a photo. I got to watch all the folks come and get photographed with Mickey while I was waiting. Of particular amusement was the pair of teenage girls trying to pose while doing retarded rap/gang symbols. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll hand you over to ‘Da Flame’ of legendary internet fuckwits ‘Icy Hot Stuntaz’ to demonstrate (click=big):


Thank you ‘Da Flame’.
So girl number one does that sideways v-sign thing, while girl number two attempts that ‘Westside’ thing but can’t get her fingers to stick properly, so gives up and resorts to sideways v-sign too. I can hardly contain my amusement, she can barely hide her embarrassment.

Yeah bitches, throw out those gang symbols, because Mickey is GANGSTA!

I have two dogs. Big fuckers that eat me out of house and home, so I’m regularly making trips to the pet shop to buy 15Kg bags of dog food. On my last trip there, I walked past the end of an aisle and did a double-take at what was staring back at me (go on, click on it and it will magically enlarge itself) :

Dog Beer.

Beer. For your dog.

Great stuff, get your pooches pissed on Dog Beer so they throw up and piss indiscriminately. They do that already. The other thing that got me was the price; £1.99 a bottle! Most of the brews I drink don’t cost £1.99 a bottle, so I’m buggered if I’m going to spend that much on a brew for the hounds. If, and it’s a very big IF, I do ever get the urge to give my dogs beer, I’ll nip down the local supermarket and get 4 cans of budget lager for the same price.

Dog Beer. What next? Hamster Vodka?

This post is half-inspired as a follow-up to the one about the movie Colin. Not that Colin features any vegetariansim, you understand, just that it’s about zombies. But I digress…

If movie folklore is to be believed, when a person is killed and returns to life as one of the walking dead they still retain aspects of their former personality. Now, what if that person happened to be vegetarian?

Imagine the mental torture of a creature with an insatiable hunger for human flesh, that is governed by the overwhelming feeling that it’s wrong to kill another sentient being for food.

When there finally is no more room in hell, and the dead do indeed walk the earth, I’ll be happy that I’m a meat-eater. At least I’ll get a guilt-free share of the chow-down.

I hate Apple Macs. Or rather, I hate the rabid fanboi users of Apple Macs. It’s not enough that they have to sit in smug satisfaction with their smooth, relatively featurless, silver boxes, they just have to tell you how good it is, how stable it is, and how it will never, ever be susceptible to a virus.

Ask a Mac user what, for instance, Photoshop is like on a Mac, and you’ll get an answer something along the lines of “It’s amazing. So much better than the PC version. Of course, that’s Macs are so fantastic. They never crash you know, and you can’t get a virus…”

Anyway, this iHatred has spilled over to pretty much every iToy that they’ve released so naturally, when the iPhone was released, I chose the Nokia N95. Arguably it’s a better phone, more feature packed than the iPhone, and this has been confirmed by many reviews.

Recently my work colleague, who is a self-confessed TMG (Tedious Mac Geek), was showing me a Carling Lager promotional game on his iPhone. It’s a simple affair; using the tilt sensor you have to slide a pint of lager along a bar, avoiding obstacles, until it lands in the hands of a drinker. Once you successfully complete the task, the screen changes into a beer glass and fills with lager. Using the tilt sensor again, you can tip up the phone and ‘drink’ the lager (the liquid disappears as you tilt).

In that moment I felt my principles crumble. Because of one stupid, childish little game, my inner geek took over and an overwhelming feeling of iWantone washed over me.

I’m ashamed, I feel dirty, but my inner geek is too strong.

Everyone knows that men find farts the single most hilarious thing on the planet. We’re also rather fond of the opposite sex and, occasionally, cake. So put all three together and you have the perfect recipe:

www.cakefarts.com

Defintely not safe for viewing in any kind of working environment (unless you work in confectionery-based flatulance movie production).

Make sure you check out the related movie Pudding Farts for more comedy gold.

Why is it that man-boobs are something that are disliked by the ladies? Must we all be rippled adoni (is that the plural of adonis? I don’t know) in the chest department before the fairer sex take notice?

If you turn the situation round, men are much less discerning. Sure, a pair of pert norks that head forward entirely under their own steam are great, but a pair of soft floppy ones that succumb to gravity are still pretty fucking great too.

So ladies, love your man and love his man-boobs. After all, we return the favour for you.