As you may of guessed from my last post I'm going through a bit of rocky patch at the moment. In an attempt to manage my mood , as previously mentioned, I have been self medicating with large amounts of booze.

However as I'm consistently broke and a bit of a snob when it comes to drinking (I particularly like expensive spiced rum if anyone wants to give to charity) I have trouble maintaining my attempt at drowning my sorrows.

At this point I'm fucked.

Trapped with my own thoughts, its like living in 500 days of summer as written by Edgar Allen Poe with a rewrite from the Hollyoaks writers, grim does not begin to describe it. And so to hide from myself I've found are rather interesting site on the internet called Youtube. Amazingly this a whole site full of shit videos of people who are clearly deluded in thinking that:

1) They are funny;

2) The rest of the world gives a shit about them and their silly little lives.

As I am obviously so much better than any of those other fools I have stuck to watching music videos. I must admit this is a pass time I found rather confusing previously but it has really been helping my calm, or at least the noise and colours confounds my brain so I don't go back to the bad place.

In doing this I discovered an interesting new band called Esben and the Witch, who's simple, gory video for "Marching Song" is pleasantly disturbing and is backed up by fantastically angst filled song, just right for my current purposes.

It also helps that the lead singer is the kind of woman that if you went to one of their gigs you would convince yourself that when she looked in the audience she looked right at you. And its only 18 months later when your holding a court order that you realise going to every gig in a 1000 mile radius and sending her increasingly candid photos of yourself, does not constitute a healthy relationship.



However I'm not entirely stable and as such, at times, my mind confuses itself into thinking I'm deliriously happy and of course everything is going to be fine, why wouldn't it be?

You never answer that particular question, instead you watch the ever fun and ingenious videos of OK GO. I've got two here for you, both from their new album "Of the Blue Colour of the Sky", the first is their newest video for the track "White Knuckles", followed by the second video they did for "This To shall Pass", I'd post the other one here too but I think it would be getting a little silly then, anyway LOOK....





Sweet.

Hi there, something amazing happened over the weekend. I plugged in my Xbox 360 for the first time in 6 months; it was exciting times in my Streatham House. I immediately whacked in GTA 4...5 minutes later I was bored.

Was this a good game? I don't remember. apparently it got good reviews but it seems that if you try and pick it up again half way through the game you tend to have lost all attachment to the story and have no idea what the F is going on. Watched over by my expectant house mates (we have a 50" TV and everyone wanted to see what it was like in high definition.) I tried to crack on, reiterating the reasons I made the purchase to begin with: It's got good graphics, the musics well good and that...and you can gun down grannies. It was no good, the game has lost it's shine. You know that it needs don't you? "PREVIOUSLY ON GTA". It needs a run down of the story so you can still pick up the game 6 months later.

Anyway with GTA safely back in it's box I downloaded the much talked about LIMBO from Xbox Live Arcade and that's when the fun really started.



It's made by a bunch of very talented Scandinavians and it is VERY good. In fact it's probably the best game I have played in the last couple of years.

It's a jumpy jumpy game. A bit like Mario - if Mario was a small child, stuck in a horrible monochrome-dream-world in a constant search for his missing sister. It contains some very cerebral puzzles that had everyone in the house helping with -  something I haven't experienced since University. Even the non gamers among us were entranced. It took Sunday afternoon to complete and it felt like money well spent. I even got a T-Shirt and Limbo gerbil thing for my avatar. I'm honestly excited to see what these guys produce next - I hope I get another T-Shirt. In fact if T-Shirts were awarded in real life for completing certain things, like your driving test for example, the world would be a much cooler place.

And finally Bioshock. It seems only recently that I completed the my second trip to Rapture (Strange underwater city place for the mentally different). However apparently this is the true sequel to the original - I guess they neglected to us that when Bioshock 2 came out. It's a different setting - no longer under water but in the Air - a city attached to balloons no less. Apparently the Americans got so annoyed with all the immigration that a few of them decided to create a new America in the Sky....this is all set in the 1900s by the way.


These proper-gander pictures are part of the marketing campaign and they are fricking cool...and a tiny bit disturbing. I'm definitely looking forward to this one although I will be waiting a long time...2011?

Anyway I'm off to shove a load of Lemsip Max down my throat, later.

Normally at times like these I would explain that I've been very busy, too busy to write on Tom's blog. I'd say my computer was broke or the Internet had been over run by an intelligent virus targeted solely at preventing me from sharing what little knowledge I have with the world. It is none of these things, I have in fact been doing nothing, absolutely nothing, to the point it had both friends and family worried.

Why?

What other reason can a man have to slip into the deepest darkest recesses of procrastination than a broken heart. Yes I was dumped, and dumped hard. And for a while there it didn't look good, my world was a cliche of memory inducing songs and drinking alone in the afternoon. So what could possibly have dragged my semi-washed, bearded, booze stinking carcass from that deep dark hole?


1) I ran out of booze, take note if you intend to loose yourself to despair stock up on the essentials.

2) I saw Scott Pilgrim Vs the World, and like Moses climbing that hill and chatting to a fiery shrub, I was saved. Or at least I felt much better for having seen a damn good film, which is almost the same.


Now I could almost leave things there as far as a review goes. The film was so good it pulled a broken hearted man back from the brink, you won't get that in Total Film I'm sure.

This is the film Edgar Wright has been building up to since Spaced, it has Spaced written all over it, it virtually is Spaced the movie. The story, the tone, the acting, the script it's all Spaced, and this is in no way a bad thing. This film could not have been more lovingly put together as every moment is an absolute joy, I'm not kidding when I say I was literally sat for the whole thing with a stupid grin on my face, right from the moment the 16bit Universal logo and music kicked in I knew that I would love this film.

I know that there are going to be people that don't appreciate this film , it is an out and out geek film, there's a lot of comic book surrealism that would be lost on my mum for instance, but that's my mum and her taste in movies is patchy at best. That doesn't mean you need to be a geek to enjoy this film either, it's one of those multi-layered affairs, the general viewer will watch and enjoy the witty dialogue and hands down best action sequences I've seen in a while. Your casual geeks might pick up on some more of the references, maybe catch a little of the Zelda music tinkling in the background from time to time, while you uber-geek shall feast on cornucopia of nods and references that will most likely give him a seizure. And his friends shall weep not, for they will know he died happy.



It has literally just occurred to me that there is nothing unnecessary in this film, yes there's lots that if it wasn't there no one would of noticed it's absence. But what if they had...yes it would still of been a good film but now because of their care and effort we have a great film, a classic.

I could go on but I can't be arsed except to say...Ramona Flowers xxxx

When making films about a young man struggling to win the heart of his true love it is essential that the object of this love be so outstandingly desirable that you go away and tell your friends your in love with a character from a film. You friends then scoff and tell you to "get a life" and "it's just the break up affecting your brain", until of course they watch the film too and then the same thing happens to them. Ramona Flowers is that amazing.

So after watching this amazing film, with amazing acting and music and script, and the most drool inducing female lead. And after we see Scott win his fights and get the girl in the kind of fist in the air type action I love, I left the film with a renewed sense of hope. That if I fight for what I love and don't give up I'll find my own Ramona Flowers in the end.

Bullshit!

It's a movie, in real life you do the right thing and you get crapped on. So I didn't leave with a renewed sense of hope bla bla, however I did enjoy the film so much the world doesn't seem so dreary anymore, and I enjoyed it enough to get back out in the world and come tell you about it.

Like I said you don't often get a review like that.

Sweet