Ghost World (2001)

This is one of my favourite films that I've watched in the last few years. Granted, I don't watch movies very often and I even see it as a chore because I'd have to sit still for an hour and a half. That being said, I'm glad I sat down for Ghost World.

The film is mainly about growing up and the challenges that come along with it, such as finding a job and a place to live in. An equally prominent but more interesting theme is that of non-conformity. Enid (Thora "Why do you look so shit now?" Birch) and Becky (Scarlett "Future Ex-Girlfriend" Johansson) are outcasts in their High School because they hate the jocks and despise the nerds, so they're the sarcastic, deadpan and witty assholes which is the most unrealistic part of the film.

Seriously? Do you know any bitter, cynical and witty teenager outcasts this hot?



I hope you weren't expecting a serious review of the film because I had a serious crush on Thora Birch in this film because she's a fair-skinned, chubby girl with the big old titties and that's what I like. Even with a forehead that a ram would hesitate to run into, she was incredibly cute, in the quirky indie girl kind of way.



Scarlett Johansson was alright in the film, as she wasn't meant to do much anyway as her personality gets more and more subdued into the film as her need to be "normal" clashes with her "cool non-conformist" desires. It was interesting though, to see how well she fits into the "cute but slightly weird girl" role because of how dorky her voice actually is. It's like a teenage boy's, slightly deep and ready to break anytime. And it's not like she's a traditionally hot woman anyway, so the role really worked well for her.



But come on, those be some nice titties. Low boy-like voice be damned.

And of course, Steve Buscemi,



The only man with the ability to make any movie better just by being ugly. Sorry to break the flow of titty images but he's really one of the highlights of the film that are not indie tits.

Ghost World is a genuinely funny film with many laugh-out-loud moments and with minor characters such as the obnoxiously-cheerful girl, the town's resident hick, the very familiar art teacher and the brain-dead video store cashier, it's quite hard not to enjoy this film.

There's also a little love story in there somewhere so you can feel all fuzzy and warm after watching it even though the ending is kind of depressing. There's also a couple of Jew jokes thrown in, so, what's there not to like?

Disaboom: Because the normals on Facebook are jerks :(

I saw this beauty of a banner ad while surfing the web yesterday. What initially surprised me was the fact that this is for Disaboom, which a friend told me about almost seven months ago. Of course, I signed up as a member but didn't progress past that because I have no idea what to put in my profile as they require you to state your disability. I imagine not having a disability would get you ousted from the site faster than a leper would get sent to a distant island in Victorian times.

Upon careful inspection of the banner (reading), the last line "People living with a disability exhibit strong brand loyalty" utterly confounds me. The first three points would have been strong enough for advertisers to hawk their disawares and diservices on the site but no, they just had to type that in. And even if the statement was based on real observation, maybe that's because there's only so many number of brands for crutches, wheelchairs and straitjackets?

Since I already have an account on Disaboom, I disacided to take a look at how the community has grown. Surely the site has matured beyond a digital version of a few freaks living on an island?



Oh hell yeah, this is the Internet we all know and love so much. Note the 3 thumbs up below the image.



First, his username is wheels1960, which implies that he's at a youthful and go-getting age of 48. Secondly, he's leaving "flirty" comments at the not-hot-but-I'm-sure-she's-nice wheel-bound lady who looks to be around half his age.



Is that you, Phyllis? I'm also shocked at the lack of "I like it"s for her.



I'm just straight up ballin' and wheelin', walkies. Also, the red highlighted text should show you how much of a niche community this is.

I then decided to browse through this group called, I shit you not, "wheelchairposse", and this is one of the group's moderators.



Whatever God taketh, he giveth. Indeed.



Wheelchair-bound and uses selective colouring in Photoshop. Sucks for her to have two disabilities.



"lilcripplegirl" here looks like your standard spunky but handicapped girl who runs goes around the room introducing herself to everyone on the first day of school. But she looks like a bag of fun though, what with the tattoos and self-deprecating username and all.



While Frank Gaylord here just looks like a bag.

Feel free to join the site and take a look around, as there are genuinely interesting articles and pos-ah, I can't go on. I didn't even read anything on it. Remember, I'm able to laugh at them because I don't believe in judgement by a greater being. So, if you believe in smiting and being dipped in lakes of boiling sulphur, you should probably not do it.

the fucking title

The day actually started out fine, I was actually thinking about what to blog about this morning, something about the humanisation of brands (not joking) but towards the end (5.30p.m.), a pile of nonsense crops up and the day wasn't so fine anymore.

First came a PDF file that required editing during the last 30 minutes of the workday when I could have been told about it hours earlier. And then, the simple task of uploading a couple of JPEGs onto an FTP server which would have taken three minutes to do, if not for the fact that The Organisation employs NSF web servers as well. I am not paid $420 to unnecessarily stay back for an hour past my supposed going-home time.

After I've finished the nonsense, I saw my bus leaving just as I was walking towards it so I had to wait an entire interval for the next one. And only to almost lose my balance when the driver decided to jerk the bus forward before actually driving off. I did not wait 15 minutes for a bus to do the wobbly legs dance.

Of course, that dance routine got the attention of a few other passengers who, no doubt, would have laughed at me if not for the fact that I looked like I would have headbutted them without hesitation if they did. Then, the bus stopped behind a line of traffic, which in turn was stopped by a train. A motherfucking train, I can't make this shit up. Choo choo motherfucking train choo choo. And it wasn't even a full-length train with passenger, chicken crates and superhero-on-top-of-it carriages kind of deal, it was just the front carriage driving around on the tracks. I did not try my best to look composed in front of four strangers who saw me nearly stumbling over, just to get stopped by one train carriage on a joyride.

Got off at my stop and trudged up the overhead bridge and in front of me, a guy wearing a pair of evisu's, nike's and a t-shirt with a bald eagle on its back with very americana-ish flourishes and text which looked like an Ed Hardy's reject, which is saying a lot about its hideousness. The nike's were green and yellow and puke or something, I can't remember, and untied. Motherfucker couldn't care enough to tie his shoelaces but cared enough to buy a pair of evisu's that had a million pockets on it and on each of them, the gawdy-as-fuck solid-coloured stitching. I'm not kidding, this shit is real.



Motherfucker looked like a pukepile in Charlie's faggot Chocolate Factory.





That felt good, that felt therapeutic. Normal, non-Tourette-inspired posting to resume next post.

Critical Mass

I just returned this book to the library, one week late, because while Philip Ball writes clearly, you can only do so much to simplify a book talking about how structure of society, flow of human traffic from a room on fire and urban sprawl are correlated with the state transition of liquid at a certain temperature. That certain temperature is also called the critical point, which is shown in the brilliant graph I've drawn below.

Warning: It is very brilliant, I almost forgot how to label the axes.



This graph was applied to road congestion, where y = average speed of cars on the road and x = number of cars on the road. I forgot why the cars traveled slower when there were little or no other vehicles on the road, it has been almost a month since I read that part. But anyway, Ball wrote about how the speeds of the cars slow down dramatically after the red dot (critical point) because everyone begins to get more careful as the number of cars around them increases. This has a exponential effect as car #3 behind car #2 slows down even more, car #4 slows down even more and dadadada.

Now let's try to apply the graph



to indie music. Let x = number of fans and y = level of coolness according to the Internet. Fits well, doesn't it? We'll name this band "For The Venti Poetry" and as you can see, it starts off with some amount of coolness even without any fans and it only increases as time goes on. The coolness multiplies exponentially as various music blogs, Pitchfork, AbsolutePunk and many forums start spreading its name around. However, the critical point occurs when a local radio station starts playing it and from thereon, it's a swift decline in coolness. There's a mistake though, just imagine the graph retracts back to the origin point because as the "fans" will latch onto the trendier kids' dislike of the band and the band becomes totally uncool, even moreso than when it had zero fans.



Alright, let's try applying this graph to "How much faith you have in this theory", where x = Amount of faith and y = Time spent thinking about it. Holy shit, mind blown.

That was a little too sarcastic, even form me but if you see the book on the library shelf, grab it if you have the time to spare because there are some genuinely interesting parts, which do not include the first few chapters which was PURELY Physics and Chemistry. That really did well to remind me that it has been almost half a decade since I last touched these sciences and I ran away from Junior College because of Physics.

However, it can be quite useful in attracting girls to you because as during the time when the book was in my possession, I had a girlfriend. You can't find such logic in any liberal social-scientific book, my friend.

Alright, here's something less pseudo-academic to end the post on:

I was eating lunch on the same table as Jules' mom when she asked me, out of the blue:

Mrs. Jules' Mom: What do you see in Jules?

Me: Wow. Nothing.

- No laughter -

Me: It's her personality, you don't find girls like that anywhere.

Mrs. Jules' Mom: Mmm, yes, that's right. (She said a lot of stuff here about how her daughter is a unique snowflake)

Me: (Totally listening) Yes, I mean, look at it this way, the three things most guys go for are: Looks, figure and personality. I managed to get looks and personality because honestly, how are you going to find someone who has all three?

Mrs. Jules' Mom: (Obviously very pleased) Yes, that's right. She takes after me a lot. Except that when I was young, I was slim.

Me: ...Wait, so you're trying to say -

Mrs. Jules' Mom: Yah la, perfect la.

Good stuff.

Get Smart (2008)

If I'm old enough to have watched the original series in the 60's, I would be sitting at the coffee shop downstairs flirting with the 40-year-old beer maid while talking about Malaysian politics while my friend talks about the state of football nowadays because we can't hear each other. The beer maid comes over and offers me another bottle of stout but I decline, so she bends over to show me her cleavage. Her wrinkly, veiny cleavage. Being the horny old man I am, cleavage's cleavage but I cry deep inside at being unable to feel anything down there. Hah hah old people jokes.

Anyway, Get Smart (2008) is a great summer comedy, but an average film at best. The main reason I watched this was because Steve Carell is in it, and The Rock is too. Steve Carell and The Rock. I should be able to get about 5 minutes' worth of laughs from just this pairing alone, right? Well, yes, but there were quite a number of humour scenes which fell flat on their over-written faces as well.

It's like the director wanted the film to be the funny anti-cool-spy-movies movie but decided against it halfway because that might be out of reach for the summer blockbuster audience so there was a healthy dose of Hollywood cliches stuffed into the film's ass, and the result is a very average viewing experience for me.

To the film's credit, there were a couple of genuinely funny moments, such as Carell eavesdropping while peeing and him celebrating his newly-attained Agent status. I'm not sure if this was in the original series but the short cutaway scenes were pretty hilarious as well, even though they reminded me too much of Family Guy's trademark "Remember the last time..." scenes.

What irritated me was the "edgy" political commentary, including unnecessary jabs at George W. Bush. Come on, that guy's not going to be the president for much longer, you won't earn rebel points from the alternative crowd for the not-at-all-subtle jokes. What's (un?)ironic is Himey's (Bad guy) line about Hollywood celebrities' sharp and witty political commentary, so maybe they know that the film has too many of these jabs and they're acknowledging it? Whatever it is, I could have done with those jokes.

Borat's producer, Bayatov, has a supporting role in the film as Himey's bumbling sidesick and there was a reference to his infamous naked wrestling scene in the Borat Movie but luckily, it was kept very short. (The scene, not him) And then, there's also Masi Oka of "FRYING MAN" fame whose character could have as easily been played by anyone else. Speaking of expendable, Anne Hathaway's contribution to this film can be summarised by this picture below:



Replace her with a girl grabbed off the road outside the studio while showing a static image of tits everytime her character appears, and I couldn't have cared less. But hey, cleavage's cleavage.

So, go ahead and watch it but I wouldn't spend more than $8 on it if I were you. My ticket cost $6 by the way, thanks to some discount you get for watching a weekday afternoon movie while paying by NETS. However, if you're a Steve Carell fan, try to catch it, as best as possible. Like in the case of Dan in Real Life, he singlehandedly adds a star or two to the film's ratings.

Also, the action scenes suck. I'm too lazy to put this in the middle of the review and write a paragraph about it but yeah, the action scenes kind of suck.