dcp.im

There’s only so much rejection you can take before you can no longer blindly turn your back on other peoples opinions and disregard them as close-minded. Eventually it starts to click that you aren’t the bastion of choice, taste and knowledge of whats good in the world. I have recently had the displeasure of coming to this conclusion myself, finally seeing other peoples derision as plain dislike or confusion over the things I consider enjoyable, decent or funny. This might sound like simple self-depreciation but there is no negativity that comes with this illumination, it is kind of freeing to be able to simply like something and not even attempt to justify or impress other people with it.

With this understanding I tried to figure out where I went wrong in the global pursuit of being on the pulse of modern media, thinking back to the last time I was in any way part of a crowd. The watershed moment for the unraveling of your tendencies is more than likely puberty, socially absorbing whatever your particular clique enjoys and assimilating it into your own consciousness. For me that was heavy metal, the crashes and twangs of tough men grappling with pieces of wood and yelling about how much everything sucks – a noble pursuit no doubt. For a few years this predilection for metal continued, expanding into sub-genres such as thrash metal, black metal and industrial. These choices were guided by my peers, MTV2, whatever was the most opposite of what the people we were supposed to dislike listened to.

Perusing my winamp playlist of 1500+ tracks now gives me around 3-5 tracks that I would consider grouping with my old tastes even with the widest margin of interpretation. It’s funny looking back and remembering how I was so sure that metal was the music I would be listening to for the rest of my life, how much I blocked everything else out. Once I started college and the metal clique went their own ways I began to open my buds and efflorescence into a disgusting flower. I grew my hair to a very questionable length, I probably guilt tripped my parents into buying me a Raleigh Chopper (that I still have and cherish), I started wearing clothes that were comfortable instead of cool. I threw my sense of self into the wind, instead of being reorganised into some sort of modern responsible adult I just fluttered randomly to the floor and got kicked around by a parade of children until I was unrecognisable and my personality had to be identified by its dental records.

It was at this stage when I began coming up with my own style, completely ignorant to what was cool anymore. I began listening to music even my parents considered uncool when they were younger. Sometimes I struck lucky and was heralded as knowing what was cool before it was cool, but only occasionally. It wasn’t just music where my tastes accelerated into a black hole; being grappled by a mysterious force into a wicked contortion of their original state. My taste in movies, books and comedy were all smashed against the side of the good-ship popular culture. My tenuous connection to any cliques heralded a small amount of judgment, but back then it was easier to just consider other people as being less progressive or straight up wrong/stupid. I spent a while in this spiral of confusion, spreading my seeds into just about every genre, sub-genre and community I could, coming up blank every time.

By the time I reached 20 and I was in university everything began to steady out I was horrified to find that my puzzle piece didn’t fit snugly in any puzzle. I tried rotating myself until I was sick, cutting off my arms and gluing lies onto my face in order to fit in with something but it just didn’t happen. Even animé society was beyond me, despite my autistic friend being the president. I went on the offensive, pushing my tastes into the public space and believing that eventually people would just gravitate towards what was obviously the best corporate media offering available. Like a lost neutrino my influence was zero, people laughed off my suggestions, were confused by my guitar hero song choices and ignored my pleas to be given control of the car stereo. Despite this I still had the strong conviction it was simply because they had no had enough exposure to what I liked, they were trapped in their bubble of mainstream conformity whilst I was sourcing random music from usenet, knowing nothing about its origins or popularity.

I’m 24 now, nearly 25, and it’s finally dawning that maybe its me. Maybe my tastes are actually bad. Maybe some of the things I think are good and enjoy are actually objectively not the good things. Don’t get me wrong that takes nothing away from how much I enjoy these things, nor my choices continuing on into the untold future but it does bring a sordid sort of relief. I don’t wish to revel in my lack of uniformity or try really hard to be the black sheep here, it just happened by accident. From randomly sourcing my musical tastes I was introduced to ELO, of whom I have over 4000 plays on last.fm. Now, ELO are still popular and I don’t want to make the things I like out to be really niche and obscure – they aren’t, but rarely do I find someone else who knows who they are despite their success. It’s even harder to find people who like ELO and then also like Fun. I’ve given up on finding people who like ELO, Fun, Ry Cooder and The Lonely Island (problem?).

According to my nephew who is on the pulse of things (he knows what dubstep is), fun are awful. I agree. I listen to them and I think “wow, I can hear so many things to pick apart and dislike” but I don’t. I can’t really fathom why I don’t dislike it, same with Owl City. It’s a similar story with movies, talking to someone recently regarding my piece on Battleship they were unsure if I actually liked Battleship or if the irony was of such a high level they couldn’t sense it. There was no irony, I really enjoyed Battleship. I really enjoyed Drive Angry with Nicolas Cage, I didn’t really like Scott Pilgrim much at all. I SUPER like Excite Truck on the wii, easily one of my favourite games. I didn’t think Portal 2 was much cop though. I thoroughly enjoyed Peter F. Hamilton’s sci-fi space operas, but Kafka’s prose grates on me. I think David Foster Wallace is a fraud and Neil Gaiman is superficial. Looking at the metacritic scores for some of these I am clearly on the wrong side of popular opinion. That’s not to say that I don’t like things other people do, I certainly cross over as often as I don’t but it doesn’t appear to follow any sort of plan.

I have decided that the grass is definitely greener on the other side, but that grass confuses me, it doesn’t sit well in my stomach and I can’t weave it into a fancy hat. I’ll stick with my off-green grass, weaving it into friends I can pretend are real. I’ve got tonnes of grass too, all for myself, which is all anyone really wants. Now excuse me as I don my pink tinted sunglasses, stroke back my untidy hair, lace up my lumious yellow shorts and ride my Chopper into the sunset.

p.s. a fun thing to do is to test your musical compatibility with me:  http://www.last.fm/user/Duncecap

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I feel like reviewing Battleship is unfair, the film is not worthy of critical praise or in-depth plot/character/something analysis. I will say however that I fucking enjoyed battleship, however when it came to telling other people why I enjoyed it I struggled to come up with an argument that sounded even convincing to me. So here are my five reasons that battleship is a very enjoyable movie and lots of idiots should go watch it and pump money into an industry full of criminals, hate mongers and liars.

We're going to need a bigger role for Rihanna.

1. There’s a Hasbro logo at the start

I went to see Battleship alone at like, 3pm on a Tuesday afternoon. There was a few people in the cinema with me, all sitting in the premium seats despite not paying. I could only see the 5 or so Asian girls a few rows down from me (they were cool, not loud or annoying). As soon as the film finally started after the 2 hours of trailers or whatever the title cards started showing. Amongst them was the Hasbro logo, I burst out laughing for about 5 seconds and they all turned to look at me, unsure of why I was laughing. A real Hasbro logo. Sure, you might be thinking “well, durr.”, but I really laughed when I saw it. After years of following this movie like it was some sort of joke everyone was in on, here we are.

This is literally a movie based on the board game Battleship. That is such a stupid concept and I feel that many people were desensitised to just how bizarre the whole thing is. Remember that game where you say “d5 fire” and then the other player goes “miss”? They made a movie of that. Well, from that. They come up with some sort of board game type limitation premise for the field of battle as well and regularly show scenes that are shot as if you were looking down on a version of the board game. If that wasn’t enough they come up with a way of making the “take potshots at random coordinates” a thing and actually make an entire scene out of it. It’s not just a passing comment, or smug tongue-in-cheek joke/wink at the audience. I don’t know anything about the tech behind it but it was cool to see them actually taking the source material and including it in a meaningful way, which just makes it all even fucking weirder.

2. Fuck science.

There is no attempt in this movie to explain any of the science involved. The concept is we shoot a communications beam at a “Goldilocks” planet that could support life using some magical space cannon. A few years later, 5 objects randomly appear on radar hurtling into our atmosphere. One of them smashes straight into a satellite and explodes, fracturing into pieces and crashing into Hong Kong and Scotland or something.

You would think that these hyper-intelligent aliens that traveled several thousand light years in a few years would be able to avoid smashing their most important ship to pieces on a satellite but there you go. The one they lost was their “communications ship”, which the government-type people manage to figure out without seeing any of the other ships via some impressive divination and tea leaf reading. The other ships land near Hawaii so they can hijack the radars we used in order to send the signal originally.

Once the puny humans start bothering their ships that are part-submerged in the Pacific the alien ships spring to life. For some utterly not-explained reason the aliens work on a weird kind of honor system. When the point of view is from their computers they have some sort of threat detection algorithm that shows red (kill) or green (don’t kill). When people hit them with sticks they turn red, when they just stand still looking confused they turn green. It is later said that the aliens are going to genocide the entire human race if they manage to get the signal out, which makes this early friendly behaviour really confusing. At one point they randomly kill some police men and rip their car up, no explanation why that deserves death and yet the one that lands on one of the humans ships doesn’t attack unless it is attacked first.

The ships also sort of bunny hop around the ocean instead of just sailing. This is clearly a very ineffectual way to get around and yet they stick with it. At least until the end when it turns out they can just go underwater like submarines the whole fucking time. And you know what? That’s fucking great. There is no attempt to explain any of this stuff, they leave all these gaping holes and shrug when you question them.

This guys ass kicking is augmented

 3. Acting doesn’t have to be convincing

Taylor Kitsch is the thuggish American lead once again, helped along with another Dad role for Liam Neeson and a Hot Babe role for whatever Rihanna’s real name is. These roles may sound basic but thats basically what they are, there’s no floundering deep introspection as we learn the facets of these characters personalities and feelings. Neeson is “A Dad” and that is his entire concept for the movie. He happens to be like, an Admiral or somesuch as well but that isn’t even touched upon other than that being another part of his Dadness.

Kitsch starts off as a nobody bum in a bar, he gets arrested for breaking and entering, theft and resisting arrest. The day after however is back at home and I guess no one is pressing charges. His brother demands he joins the Navy with him and we cut to the future where guess what, he has joined the Navy. He is however still a slughead moron who can’t play football and thus Daddy doesn’t like him. He doesn’t really evolve throughout the entire film, some people die and some bad shit goes down but he stays fairly constant. His character really serves no purpose other than as a place to focus the camera, but that’s alright, because it’s got to focus somewhere.

Rihanna is hot as hell in this movie, it makes no sense for her to even be there. Women in the Navy? Sure, that makes sense. Women with ridiculous tattoos, barely any muscle, non-regulation uniforms and a snappy attitude? Heck no. But I’m glad shes in the film, because the film once again just does not give a fuck. Hey it’s Rihanna everyone! Woo! She’s on a big ol’ gun and shes shootin’ aliens and doing all kinds of cool shit with computers and running. I’m not even saying her acting is bad, it really isn’t even noticeable, in a somewhat similar style to Nicolas Cage’s patented “Nouveau Shamanic” acting method. When I consider it, a film based on Battleship with aliens and all other kinds of nonsense happening all over the place, it kind of does make sense that Rihanna is in it. In fact it would almost certainly make no sense if Rihanna wasn’t in it. She is the lynchpin that keeps the whole thing going.

WHERE IS YOUR UMBRELLA NOW

4. Hey look! Aliens!

Battleship deserves some props for showing the aliens and what they look like. Too many films recently have only given us short glimpses of the extra-terrestrial menace we’re fighting (specifically: Battle L.A. – an awful film), it is refreshing for a film to show the aliens in a matter-of-fact way without building up to a huge reveal or hiding them in the distance. They kind of lame-out by putting all the aliens in armoured suits that cover their entire body but you do get to see one close up and de-suited for a while.

The alien tech is fairly standard stuff: glowy lights, no windows, weird digital distortion sounds that make them sound like a speak and spell that you turn on for the first time in 20 years and it asks you to spell Wednesday. It serves its purpose though and is different enough from our own technology to be fun to watch. You can tell these guys did transformers, every thing is all flippy and has a tonne of gears inside. It was interesting to see how fallible these aliens and their technology is though, they’re regularly beaten by good old fashion missiles and fast moving pieces of metal.

Perhaps one of the main reasons I am fond of them is that there is no real explanation of why the aliens are here. Usually there is some purpose that is revealed (Skyline – the water, Independence Day – resources, AVP – host species) but they just don’t seem to have any purpose here. At some point I seem to remember it being slightly hinted at that they want the resources but it is only very much a throw away line that made no sense and had no reason nor purpose in the film, similar to Rihanna. I kind of like it this way, it makes them seem more alien. We don’t know their reasons, we don’t know their history, we don’t know why they have some weird threat detection system, we don’t know why at some point in the film, coming face to face with an alien in a small room, the alien smiles at a human who is grabbing some gear and then just lets them run off into the night without even raising an alarm. It makes no sense – but then it shouldn’t, because aliens that make sense aren’t alien enough.

The only thing we know is that they seem to be some sort of expeditionary force and they need to signal back to their motherland. I’m not sure what information they could possibly signal back nor why they needed to send 5 huge motherfucking space/sea ships to do so. Rihanna is in the film. It’s based on Battleship.

Hey, aliens, what do you know. Got weird hands and weird beards? nice.

5. There’s lots of cool explosions and stuff

You got me, I love explosions and stuff – and let me tell you, this film is chock full of them. It is a genuinely well made action blockbuster, stuff explodes and people run around energetically for large periods of the film. There is a weird sub-plot involving a retired U.S. Marine who got his legs blown off who used to be a boxing champ, he climbs up Hawaii on metal legs with a girl and then punches some aliens. This sub-plot really makes no sense and could very easily have not existed, but it does, and I’m happy for it because I get to see a big black guy beat up an alien. The ship battle stuff is quite cool too, lots of loud noises and associated colours all over the screen. The Battleship finalé really is pretty epic, it’s complete bullshit but it has old men saying old-fashioned curses at aliens, something I am partial to.

It is a bit of a military-porn fest, and I am no doubt a “manchild” for enjoying seeing these CGI weapons of mass destruction being turned on imaginary targets full of imaginary aliens. Whatever. At some point Hong Kong gets smashed to shit and I liked that too. I especially liked the part where the Japanese Captain and the American Dude where on the top of the boat and they were using high powered sniper rifles to out-smart the aliens. It reminded me of my time with Garrus in the Citadel in Mass Effect 3. Good times with Good Bros. I liked when some woman brutally slaughters a bunch of aliens with a car, throwing their honour system back in their faces. I liked how we fired at the aliens first. I liked how some helicopters exploded when robot dogs ate them. I liked the baseball part. I liked the weird top-down homage to the board game camera angles. I liked watching the Asian girls in-front of me. I liked sitting in the premium seats without paying. I like my new sunglasses. I liked the bus ride home. I liked telling my friends about this film. I liked chuckling at the concept of a Battleship film even after seeing it. It’s just that kind of movie.

Above - 2000+ words on the film Battleship

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