Posts Tagged ‘flu’
A Few Good Men on Blu-ray
Allow me to paint a picture for you.
I really loved A Few Good Men when I first saw it years and years and… never mind, you get the point. But the only way I ever watched it was on either:
television or
a dodgy VHS copy that I’m reasonably sure may have cut the very very end of the movie off.
But I never bought it on DVD. I never bought it even on home video. I’m not …
“Do what you love”
This is one of the emptiest bullshit pieces of advice that I think I’ve ever heard when it comes to career advice. It’s rubbish, you can’t give someone a four word throw away statement and consider it good advice. There is at least six fine print statements that need to go with this and even then I think that it’s too simplistic and condescending to ever be taken seriously.
Except that people actually do honestly believe that they are helping when they say this kind of rubbish. They think it’s a revelation, that it just never occurred to you to do something you love. Now before you storm off to the comments section to vent your optimistic “follow your heart and the money will follow” feelings on this hear me out and read the rest before telling me how you are doing exactly what you love and how brilliant it is.
First off, lets say that I love playing video games. I mean I really do. I think I could probably entertain myself for at least the next six months gaming despite having a ridiculously low attention span. Of course since there are always going to be new games and new systems coming out I think I could probably overcome it and keep myself entertained for a lot longer.
So the only two jobs I can think of that would allow me to play video games all day is:
- Video game reviewer
- Beta tester
- If I had to stretch it I could also maybe say video game demonstrator, but frankly I don’t believe this is a real job
So first off I’ve got the reviewer gig, I have to write enough reviews to make enough money to keep me in bean bags and cheetos. This means turning these games over pretty quickly and probably playing games that I’m not interested in. For me this is going to pretty much ruin this experience about maybe three months in. Especially when you consider I’ve been playing Far Cry 2 for about three weeks and I’m still not even 20% through the game, but I’m enjoying the hell out of the process.
I don’t even know if beta testing is a real job either, surely it’s just the mates of the designers giving it a whirl and providing feedback… surely they don’t pay people much to do this if it is an actual job. I don’t mean to belittle the role but I would think that the wikinomics approach to beta testing and using the community would work out pretty well if you have a fairly well structured feedback system… but this is a different topic.
The fact is that I wouldn’t be a very good video game reviewer, even on a personal blog the pressure of writing up my reactions and thoughts on a game is nowhere near as important to me as actually playing and enjoying. Also good video game reviewers work hard at being reviewers, bad reviewers just love gaming and not the other aspects.
Remember I love gaming.
But surely I’m not endorsing a mediocre shit eating existence?!?
Of course not, hell look at the title of the blog. I’m just saying that the advice of ”Do what you love” is too simple a statement and unrealistic for a huge majority of people. If everyone just did what they loved society wouldn’t function. Also I find the suggestion to be a slap in the face for so many people who are just doing their best to make it through the day. People who do an honest day’s work for generally an honest day’s pay (with tax and super and stuff taken out of course thus lowering in the honesty ratio) may not be doing what they love, because you know they just want to support their family or they are happy to sell their time in order to afford simple pleasures in their lives.
I want to say it again this keeps coming down to the being too simple a statement, like it’s so simple to know what you love and apparently you should just do that man!? Wow!!! Why didn’t that cross my mind?! Because unless you are really REALLY lucky you don’t get to just do what you love. You have to work at it, you have to be good at it and often you do need luck to get that perfect job. But then, what is a perfect job and how do you even know what you love!?
I’d love to be an illustrator, but for years I didn’t know that and if I had taken the advice of doing what I love it probably would have been completely different*. There’s no shame in doing a day job but at the same time I’m also saying it’s not wrong to shoot for the stars either!
I’m not saying you shouldn’t do what you love but I find that statement to be complete and utter fluff often said by people who are actually doing what they love. Now at this stage you, especially you who subscribe to the power of the simplicity of that statement are thinking I’m a miserable asshole with sour grapes. Sure, that might be true (I don’t think it is 100% but that’s purely my opinion), but I’m also working towards my dreams as best I can and if I ever do get to do what I love full time and make a reasonable living/existence that’ll be awesome and if you are doing what you love already then that’s damn awesome for you too!!
It’s already the philosophy behind this blog, when I say quit your day job I’m not actually saying you should throw away your income generating 9 to 5 to be in the circus but you should struggle towards your full potential and that’s doing what satisfies you in life and that may not be doing what you love but it might be providing for those you love.
When someone asks me for advice along these lines I think my own imperfect version of it will be:
Do what you have to, but do what you love as often and with as much passion as you can.
Anyone else got their own variation on “do what you love”?
*If I had followed the do what you love advice I would possibly tried to be a Ghostbuster, I hear there is very little money in that, outside the movie industry.
I had planned to keep updating this on a regular intervals (shorter intervals) but I just let the weeks get past me. So here is the round up of what I’ve been watching in no particular order of preference of chronological disposition (I’m trying to get the number one spot for the search term chronological disposition – we’ll check next week to see how I went with that).
Couples Retreat
You know what was good about this film? Two things.
- Guitar Hero is featured quite prominently and played accurately to a degree and I really like Guitar Hero.
- It is better than The Break-Up and I really didn’t like The Break-Up
But that’s really all I’ve got, I laughed at a couple of scenes, I watched all of it, it was mostly pleasant but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what I didn’t enjoy, it felt like I’d seen it all before but I can’t for the life of me think. Maybe it’s a combination of Along Came Polly, The Break-Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall (particularly the yoga scenes) and more frighteningly Temptation Island.
Rating: 
Cop Out
In fairness to this film, I’m pretty certain I was expecting too much.
I laughed once. In a scene that appears in the trailer anyway. I honestly don’t know why I didn’t like it more, I like the cast, I like the director, the story was adequate. Just nothing in there made me care. It all seemed well put together but then I thought about it some more and realised that I didn’t enjoy Zack and Miri Make a Porno either. It certainly hasn’t put me off future Kevin Smith movies and it certainly isn’t the worst film I’ve ever seen, of course you need to remember I watched Teen Wolf Too the other week.
Rating:
Blade Runner The Final Cut (blu-ray)
There’s little to no doubt that Blade Runner is one of the best science fiction films ever, unfortunately it appears to have one of the most editions of a film ever as well. I have every edition too and was going to sell my DVD version of The Final Cut before realising that I only have it as part of the briefcase collector’s pack.
The story in Blade Runner is really interesting and really layered but I think it is the visuals and the mood that gets me across the line every time. Especially on blu-ray this looks amazing even today with it’s “retrofitted” design. I like that term to describe it as I hadn’t heard it described like that before. I was impressed at how striking Sean Young is as Rachael her make-up and costuming is amazing and her performance equally so. I still cringe as Deckard gets his fingers broken.
I loved watching this in HD.
Rating: 
Predator 2 (Blu-ray)
Lions, tigers and bears… oh my.
God I love Gary Busey, I think most things are improved by adding him and his batshit crazy, this more so.
There are some terrible lines in Predator 2, I mean terrible, terrible lines and the acting doesn’t rise up above it but you know something? I love this film. It is so much fun and I just enjoy the hell out of it. I possibly even prefer it to the original, I certainly think that it contributed to the mythology of the Predator more than the first and a lot of the spin-off material is heavily influenced by this in tone and with the material. I kind of wish that the Xenomorph skull wasn’t in the trophy cabinet because then they may have not done those horrible AvP films!
I always remember the scene where he’s breaking stuff up in the sink when he has to seal off his bloody stump after Danny Glover sliced it off, I don’t know why but the sequence has always intrigued me. The blu-ray is pretty sweet again, I’m probably going to have to stop saying that because frankly every blu-ray I’ve watched is a superior experience. But this does come up really well despite some of the grit in footage.
Rating:
The Day After Tomorrow (Blu-ray)
I remember not liking this for some reason and I think that reason may have been Dennis Quaid and it may have been a little unfair on my behalf. But having reconciled a gold pass for Dennis a couple of months back (as he was in Dragonheart) I thought I’d watch this because whenever it is on television I manage to watch at least some and are always interested.
Discovered that I actually do in fact enjoy this movie, the effects are all pretty good, the disaster is clever though I’m sure very scientifically wrong and I even forgive some of the dumber clichés in it. The acting is at times quite good and there are even a couple sequences that bordered on moving.
My reception to the film was probably not hurt by the fact that I watched it on cold and rainy day curled up on the couch with a cup of hot coffee and biscuits.
Rating:
