Disastrosity

Things I could've done instead:

- Put my child to bed.
- Watched telly.
- Read another chapter of Alan Carr's autobiography Darwin's On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection.

- Collected newts from a pond.

- Climbed some trees.

- Invented a cocktail and called it Long Hard Innuendo Rammed Right Into Your Digestive Tract.
- Change my name to Lord Champion of Awesomness

- Had me some sex.

- Written a poem.

- Done a blog entry.

- Learnt a new tune on the ukulele.
- Practised being lucky.
- Made some modern art with toenail clippings and a balloon, called it 'Edge of Uncertainty', and challenged the humanistic concept of an anthropocentric existence in light of the uncaring universe in a contemporary post-9-11 setting.

- Plucked my ear hairs.

- Looked at the moon through binoculars.

- Shaved a hedgehog.
- Eaten a curry.

Instead of what, I hear you cry.

It's all right. Don't cry. I'll tell you.

Watching 2012 at the cinema.

Crivens it was bad.

As we walked out of the cinema, the Goodladywife asked one of the attending oiks if we could have our money back please, as the wares that his employers had just sold us were so shoddy, but his mutating, semi-pubescent voice box would allow only a hoarse, nervous squeak about supervisors not being around so we let him scurry away to drain his face.

Over twelve quid, that film cost us.

Twelve pounds, which is, according to some quick mental arithmetic, about twelve euros, twelve US dollars, or three hundred and ninety Australian dollars. Roughly.

And for that, we got some admittedly good special effects showing buildings falling down, some cars driving hither and thither as buildings fell down, some aeroplanes flying around as buildings fell down, and various unlikely geographical upheavals with lots of glowing larva, flying debris and buildings falling down.

We also got absolutely no good characters or dialogue though. We got about three scenes where a suddenly emotive parent phoned their grown up child to tell them how they loved them and shouldn't have been so distant all these years. We got Woody Harrelson being "crazy" with a capital Meh. We got John Cusack meandering through the film as though he's on a green screen or something. We got Danny Glover as the US president who looked like he'd died recently and been partially reanimated.

(Now there's a pitch for a movie. Black President? Female President? Gay president? What about . . . Zombie President? "Assassination is but a minor annoyance to him.")

There was more cheese in this film than you'd find in the finals of the cheesiest cheese competition held in Cheeseton, Cheeseshire, by the Institute of Cheesology. In the Democratic Republic of Cheese.

Awful, awful film. I wonder if I can write to the people who made it and ask for my money back? Seems the least they can do after promising entertainment and not delivering. There should be a clause under the trade descriptions act that states any film that says it's good should actually be good. If not, it should be relabelled appropriately, and the traditional deep, overly gravelly voiced chap should read a more accurate description:

"John Cusack appears in a film which would be better if they simply cut and pasted all the special effects scenes together for half and hour and left out all the actors and, for want of a better word, dialogue."

You may be getting the impression that I wasn't impressed with 2012, the fillum. At the end of it, you're rooting for the tsunami.

Additionally, the whole cinematic experience was rubbish. There are twenty minutes of adverts, and then no trailers, which are the only reason you're not too pissed off at watching the adverts in the first place. Instead, a chirpy announcer shouts "Passion!" at you, and then there's a quick montage of passionate bits from upcoming films. Then the announcers yells "Intrigue!" which is followed by some seizure inducing flickers of presumably intriguing bits you might see. Then someone hollers "Adventure!" and you get a few bits of people falling down, shooting and exploding. Then the announcer wails "Pornography!" and a man with a seventies moustache arrives to fix a naked lady's washing machine.

You can't get excited about any upcoming attractions from that sort of mess.

I know that this isn't the fault of this particular film, but 2012 didn't exactly improve the situation, what with being crap and all.

More importantly though, it stole two and a half hours of my life away which I can never get back.

Despite what some more esoteric physicists may tell you, we travel through our spatio-temporal dimensions in a linear fashion, taking a generally mono-directional route from birth to the depressingly close and unavoidable moment of carking it. Of bucket-kicking, farm-buying, toe-upturning, daisy-pushing, maker-meeting, dust-biting, chip-cashing deadness that awaits us all.

Euphemistically speaking.

We can't afford to waste time paying to be bored and unimpressed, as we've only got a finite amount of it as it is, which is why I'm so narked about it all.

Maybe I'm expecting too much. I love films, but a film is simply supposed to be a momentary diversion, perhaps to make you think a bit, maybe to amuse you, but I shouldn't use it to replace bits of my life. Perhaps I should only watch a film if I haven't got anything else to do, otherwise, I'll end up substituting reality for something made up, and if I'm going to do that I may as well just go to church.

Mind you, a life is a bit like a film, in that it is the intrinsic quality of the content that is required and not good special effects in order to ensure that it's a good one.

If you were thinking of going, and this review has rightly put you off, then don't despair. There are plenty of other things to look at, which are naturally pretty.

You've got everyday things like flowers:


Or in fact the whole world, or bits thereof:


The world is particularly good to look at because, amazingly, it pre-empts the latest technology in cinematics by already being in 3D!

You can practically touch it.