I live in an area that seems to produce some of the funniest and creepiest local advertisements that I’ve ever seen. Chances are good that the local ads from your area are not so hot either. So in a new section I’m calling “Local Ads” I will share with you some of these magnificent advertisements.
At the start of the summer, the guys on the Totally Rad Show (seriously, that’s the name of one of my favorite podcasts) made a wager amongst themselves about the top 10 grossing summer movies; not to be confused with top *favorite* summer movies.
So, I did just that, and here was my list, beginning with what I would believe to be the highest grossing film.
(Numbers in brackets indicate the actual position on the list, no brackets means it didn’t make top 10.)
1.) Transformers 2 [1]
2.) Star Trek [5]
3.) Wolverine [8]
4.) Terminator
5.) Up [3]
6.) Harry Potter [2]
7.) Public Enemies
8.) Bruno
9.) Ice Age [7]
10.) District 9
Now, looking at IMDB’s “Top grossing movies for 2009″ list I can see I missed all but one. The Hangover and Monsters Vs. Aliens really surprised me by making it up there. I liked the Hangover, but when I wrote out this list I never thought it would skyrocket like it did, and Monsters vs. Aliens as well.
End result – 10% correct.
This past Monday I purchased Left 4 Dead (Valve’s zombie survival/horror game) in preparation for the upcoming sequel that is due out in a few weeks. I’ve been playing it a lot. It’s fun, addicting, and frantic. I really recommend you and your friends to get a copy and give it a shot in the head.
Anyway, I stayed up way too late last night playing Left 4 Dead and had a blast. This morning I’m awoken by a smash. Now, understand that I was just waking up, as was my brain. Since I was sleeping when the crash occurred my brain had no visual reason of what had caused that loud crash, so it immediately threw into my mind’s eye the last thing I had seen before I fell asleep: Zombies beating the crap out of my safe-house’s door. So with “zombies” fresh on my mind, a jolt of adrenaline is shot through me when a few seconds after the loud crash there is an even louder *BRRR-CRACK* from right outside my door.
This is it, I’m going to die.
I leap out of my bed and run to the door amidst more crashing and snapping, maybe there is still time for me to grab my keys and put my “Zombie Apocalypse Plan A” to the test. As swiftly open my door a portion of the wall infront of my room breaks into pieces and a human being stumbles through. I’m so glad I didn’t have to pee.
I slam the door shut and brace against it, suddenly hating the fact that my door has no lock. I hear coughing and hacking from behind my door, but the expected blows against my door never come. I slowly back up and peer out my window to see…
…construction trucks.
Half my house is having construction done to it, and my sister’s room (next to mine) is being enlarged, they had to knock a portion of the wall down in order to do so…
Morale of the story: don’t stay up too late playing video games.
That’s the hole in the wall that the Z came out of, of course, it wasn’t that neat and square at first.
I just got in from my store’s annual “Seasons of Samples” or “Sample the Seasons” or “Here’s free food, buy your other shit while you’re still here” event. Everyone I asked said it went well…I believe otherwise.
While the store was busy for the 3 hour event, it’s heavily outweighed by the amount of manpower/organization as well as the cost of supplies that goes into such an event.
I’m not good at math, but I figured that 9 out of 10 people that attended were just there for the samples and will probably not come back until next year. So, doing some quick trigonometry I was able to figure that close to 90% of the customers in the store were unloyal customers, perhaps even *gasp* freeloaders!
“Freeloaders, at a sample-fest?.”
Yes.
Even though I was given the task to lug around a garbage bag the entire day like an obnoxious stepchild at an amusement park, I still posses enough management intelligence to realize that freeloading unloyal customers are not the sort you want to attain. Reasons being: 1.They tend to not shop at your store often enough to accurately predict sales. 2.They tend to smell. 3. They tend to smell.
In conclusion they will probably deter your ideal Americanized family-of-four stereotype that are typically pictured in the advertisements (or as our friends from England say: “AdverTISments”) of whatever local grocery store your town falls host to.
But what do i know?
“Alot”
Thanks.
“Your welcome.”
Wow, this is weird.
“Yea, kinda”
You need to go.
“Ok, cya.”
As I watched the battalions of elderly devour gram after gram of cookies, Dixie cup after Dixie cup of mashed potatoes, ounce after ounce of pieces of strangely tangy meat, it dawned on me…people really only put forth an effort when they know they will be rewarded. The people who put forth the effort to swing by on their way home, didn’t stop by just to see if our $1 Tostinos Pizzas tastes better then the ones Pubics has, they came because they knew they would get samples. The management didn’t put this whole thing together out of the pure kindness of their hearts, they did it to try to put a dent in Pubics stable customer base.
You are probably thinking “Well duh, Tommy, who is going to work for free?” and while that is definitely true, that is not the sword I’m using to make my point.
My point is: why? Why can’t human beings just do nice things? Sure we give a homeless guy a few bucks, but is that really out of pure kindness, or so that others (including your “god”) perceive you as a “better person”? Grab the bill for the group; kindness? or an attempt to impress? Buy your visiting nephew an action figure; kindheartedness, or a feeble attempt at excusing yourself for not seeing him in so long? Doing “good deeds”; being a genuine good person, or trying to gain a first class ticket to heaven?
Whatever it is, i truly doubt that it was 100% true to heart.
Wow, this turned out to be way deeper than I thought it would be.
“That’s what she said.”
Problem solved.
So as I became bored with the World of Warcraft I decided to blindly click the StumbleUpon button, (if you don’t know what I’m talking about: Google it, and install the application) and was teleported to a site entitled The People’s Republic of Animation.
The particular page which was zapped onto my screen featured a video entitled “The Cat Piano” and the still-shot on the video-player made it clear: the video would feature animated cats playing instruments.
Not something I’d envision myself enjoying, but for whatever reason I decided to hit the play button. That click was the best click I would click all night. I was instantly enthralled by the relentless barrage of literary consonance, a feat that would make even Dr.Suess stop and take note.
Seeing as how my blog attracts the intelligent intellectual types, I hope, I figured most of you would enjoy this quick bit of entertainment, courtesy of the ladies and gents at The Peoples Republic of Animation.
Just click the link below to zoom, jog, or crawl, depending on your internet connection, to see The Cat Piano!
The Cat Piano from PRA on Vimeo.
*If this were a movie, there would be Christmas-y bells ringing, the distant laughing of joyous children, and a subtle piano overture straight out of a Charlie Brown cartoon*
Once upon a time, there was a boy. A bag boy. He was a good bag boy who did all his work the right way, worked hard, and was a shining example of customer service. All of his customers were courteous and intelligent, always happy to have the bag boy help them make their shopping experience as easy as it could be. That bag boy lives in the town called Perfect. Perfect exists in a commercial that some triple chinned, balding, coin collecting, Diet Coke addict at Walgreens HQ thought up.
*happy music stops*
Perfect isn’t real.
It’s all quite the opposite.
In fact, the only thing that remains the same is the bag boy’s gender.
The brains behind Perfect (the triple chinned, balding, coin collecting, Diet Coke addict) lives in a town called Reality.
In Reality the bag boy has customers cuss him out because their lazy asses couldn’t get to the store a day earlier, before the Pork Ribs sold out.
In Reality the bag boy gets to listen to some smelly homeless man tell him about his life story when the bag boy just wanted to know if the homeless man wanted the milk in a bag or not.
In Reality the bag boy gets to clean shit (literally) up because people don’t know what a toilet looks like.
Reality sucks.
I passed the three year mark a few months ago. I’ve still got a clear criminal record. I should live in a town called Miracle.
The Economy sucks, just like Reality town, so the store has been slow recently. To make up for the dip in business, the hours employees work (at least up at the front-end) have been cut down.
To make up for my loss of hours, and to ensure my paycheck is worth more then a green portrait of Ulysses S. Grant, I’ve had to prostitute (metaphorically) myself around to other parts of the store.
The Meat Dept. is one of those places.
I was train-I was shown how to clean up the meat department one time. I’m not a retard, so being shown once was fine with me, and so far I don’t think I’ve ever messed anything up that bad.
I don’t cut meat, I really have to be trained to do that, so it always boggles my mind when I walk out of the meat dept in the blood-stainless white coat and people walk up to me with an entire mammoth worth of meat and ask if I can cut it, then when I tell them that I can’t they just break down.
“Well what am I supposed to do about dinner tonight, now!!?”
I don’t know lady…it’s a real shame your not standing in a fucking grocery store or something.
“Can you cut this chicken/ham for me?”
Can you read the sign behind my head that says we can’t?
“Do you have any more pig hearts?”
I didn’t even know we sell those.
Really the only thing I can do in the meat department is clean things up. By “things” I mean pieces of things.
Pieces of things like this:
or this:
or this:
So as I crouch down, and spray half of Charlotte Web’s friends down the drain, I realize how happy I am that humans were the species chosen to get the better brains.
Then a lady who wants some chicken cut, walks blindly into the room, gets splashed in the face with soapy water and screams bloody murder that she’s going to go blind. Then, I realize that some of us got the short straw on that deal.
The 5th Guitar Hero will feature the following songs:
# 3 Doors Down – “Kryptonite”
# A Perfect Circle – “Judith”
# AFI – “Medicate”
# Arctic Monkeys – “Brianstorm”
# Attack! Attack! UK – “You and Me”
# Band Of Horses – “Cigarettes, Wedding Bands”
# Beastie Boys – “Gratitude”
# Beck – “Gamma Ray”
# Billy Idol – “Dancing with Myself”
# Billy Squier – “Lonely is the Night”
# Blink-182 – “The Rock Show”
# Blur – “Song 2″
# Bob Dylan – “All Along the Watchtower”
# Bon Jovi – “You Give Love A Bad Name”
# Brand New – “Sowing Season”
# Bush – “Comedown”
# Children Of Bodom – “Done With Everything, Die For Nothing”
# Coldplay – “In My Place”
# Darker My Love – “Blue Day”
# Darkest Hour – “Demon(s)”
# David Bowie – “Fame”
# Deep Purple – “Woman From Tokyo (‘99 Remix)”
# Dire Straits – “Sultans of Swing”
# Duran Duran – “Hungry Like The Wolf”
# Eagles Of Death Metal – “Wannabe in L.A.”
# Elliott Smith – “L.A.”
# Elton John – “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting”
# Face To Face – “Disconnected”
# Garbage – “Only Happy When It Rains”
# Gorillaz – “Feel Good Inc.”
# Gov’t Mule – “Streamline Woman”
# Grand Funk Railroad – “We’re an American Band”
# Iggy Pop – “Lust For Life”
# Iron Maiden – “2 Minutes to Midnight”
# Jeff Beck – “Scatterbrain”
# Jimmy Eat World – “Bleed American”
# John Mellencamp – “Hurts So Good”
# Johnny Cash – “Ring of Fire”
# Kaiser Chiefs – “Never Miss a Beat”
# King Crimson – “21st Century Schizoid Man”
# Kings Of Leon – “Sex on Fire”
# Kiss – “Shout it Out Loud”
# Love and Rockets – “Mirror People”
# Megadeth – “Sweating Bullets”
# Mötley Crüe – “Looks That Kill”
# Muse – “Plug in Baby”
# My Morning Jacket – “One Big Holiday”
# Nirvana – “Lithium”
# Nirvana – “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
# No Doubt – “Ex-Girlfriend”
# Peter Frampton – “Do You Feel Like We Do (Live)”
# Public Enemy Featuring Zakk Wylde – “Bring the Noise 20xx”
# Queen & David Bowie – “Under Pressure”
# Queens Of The Stone Age – “Make it With Chu”
# Rammstein – “Du Hast”
# Rose Hill Drive – “Sneak Out”
# Rush – “The Spirit of Radio (Live, 2008)”
# Santana – “No One To Depend On (Live)”
# Scars On Broadway – “They Say”
# Screaming Trees – “Nearly Lost You”
# Smashing Pumpkins – “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”
# Sonic Youth – “Incinerate”
# Spacehog – “In the Meantime”
# Stevie Wonder – “Superstition”
# Sublime – “What I Got”
# Sunny Day Real Estate – “Seven”
# T. Rex – “20th Century Boy”
# The Bronx – “Six Days a Week”
# The Derek Trucks Band – “Younk Funk”
# The Duke Spirit – “Send a Little Love Token”
# The Killers – “All the Pretty Faces”
# The Police – “So Lonely”
# The Raconteurs – “Steady As She Goes”
# The Rolling Stones – “Sympathy for the Devil”
# The Sword – “Maiden, Mother & Crone”
# The White Stripes – “Blue Orchid”
# Thin Lizzy – “Jailbreak”
# Thrice – “Deadbolt”
# Tom Petty – “Runnin’ Down a Dream”
# Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – “American Girl”
# TV On The Radio – “Wolf Like Me”
# Vampire Weekend – “A-Punk”
# Weezer – “Why Bother?”
# Wild Cherry – “Play That Funky Music”
# Wolfmother – “Back Round”
SUPER EXCITED for the Darkest Hour song Demons! Too bad In Flames doesn’t have a track in here. August Burns Red would have been nice too.
Fau dis reviewshnazle Ich shall speak jush like BRÜNO! Ja!
Just kidding.
Instead, I will speak like the Autobot Optimus Prime and say things like “sentient” and “species” in one sentence more times than Bruno thinks about men in a day.
Again, kidding.
Up for review are the movies Bruno and the second installment of the Transformers series.
First, Bruno:
Bruno follows a gay Austrian fashion guru around America after he is fired from his job. Along with his assistant, Bruno seeks out how to become famous, going so far as to try to be straight to fit into the mainstream crowd. Along the way Bruno meets people he believes will help him, such as a pastor who claims to be able to convert gays and lesbians back to being straight.
The key factor in Bruno is the improvisational comedy being used by the star, Sacha Baron Cohen. When filming Bruno, the crew approached these real-life people as if Bruno was a real person, and not a character portrayed by Cohen. So the majority of the “average-joes” in the film really believe Bruno is a real person. While it is safe to say not all the scenes were done without a script, there is a large majority of the film that is just straight up improv; and these were the scenes that brought the most laughs.
In the movie Sacha Baron Cohen crashes a fashion show, and gets arrested. For real. Some lady for a news crew was there and got most of the incident.
Clips of that have been used in the movie.
The movie brings to light just how ridiculous some people are. Most movie-goers will expect this movie to make a spectacle of gays the whole way through, though while it does, it is the real-life people that Cohen tricks into thinking Bruno is a real person, that are the true freak-show stars. The pastor I mentioned before that believes he has the power to convert gays to being straight; parents willing to put their infants through dreadful things just to get their baby into baby modeling; and crazy trailer-trash wrestling fans, are just a smidgen of the line-up of characters Bruno features.
As funny as it is, Bruno is not for everyone. If you are going to sit there and complain that it’s all scripted, just leave, because your an idiot. If you don’t want to have to look away from a penis flopping around on the screen a few times, don’t go see it. If you can’t take raunchy humor, definitely, DEFINITELY do not go see it.
I laughed, i groaned, I looked away…alot. 6.9/10
* * *
Transformers – Rise of the Fallen.
You know when you go see a movie that’s called, say, “Real Dogs don’t Bark”, and at a really pivotal scene, like a mobster has a Tommy gun aimed at the injured hero, and right before the mobster pulls the trigger he says, “Ya know, punk, real dogs don’t bark.” and then fires away, you know how you kind of cringe just for a moment, because even though the line was great, it seemed cheesey since that’s the name of the movie? Well imagine 150 minutes of feeling like that. Every 15 minutes someone says “The Fallen want their revenge!” and then 15 minutes later… “The revenge of the Fallen is at hand!” …”The Fallen shall have revenge!”…
As Roger Ebert put it, “…go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together.” which sums up most of how I feel about Transformers 2. I hate to say it, but Transformers 2 was pretty much a disaster. The jokes were weak, the “impactful” scenes were glazed over by weak jokes, and on top of everything there were, what I will call the “Buckwheat” and “Leeroy” Autobots rolling around.
Now that is my biggest issue with this movie. It is racist. Transformers 2 destroys the image that many African Americans have worked hard to make part of the past. The movie incorporates two monkey-faced, obviously black, uneducated, robots, into more than half the movie.
Now, you may be thinking, “Well Tommy, there was Jazz in Transformers #1″ and you would be right. BUT, Jazz looked like a robot, and the only way to even figure he was black was by the voice of the actor. With Buckwheat and Leeroy, there is no doubt that those two robots are depicting the lowest tier of black racism.
Underneath the bad jokes, the weak “important” scenes, and the racism, Transformers is just eye-candy. Between awkward scenes with Meghan Fox that were pretty much shot just to show off how hot she is, to scenes where there is so many things exploding and metallic things flying around so close to the camera that you just really have no idea what you are looking at. If only the camera had been about 200 yards further out then it was in every robot fight scene, I might have been able to see it, let alone enjoy it.
Another thing that often happens in sequels to movies that exceeded expectations in movie 1, is that characters that studios believe the fans liked, or found funny, mysteriously end up in the sequel for no good reason. Example: the annoying Sector-7 guy who provided unneeded comic relief in Transformers 1, ends up in Transformers 2, and does nothing. Or, the black soldier from the first Transformers movie who had 3 funny lines, ends up in the second movie with, surprise, 6 lines that are awkward because the humor is being forced. The parents also find themselves in the movie, again providing comedic relief. All these characters plus the Buckwheat and Leeroy robots, plus Sam’s roommate who we get stuck listening to him whine for most of the movie, all pile up to one big traffic-jam of comedic annoyances.
Transformers 2 Revenge of the Fallen will be my Most Disappointing movie of 2009, come the end of the year. Calling it now.
5/10
Living Cannibal Pencils of Unbreakable Wood, Batman! I did not mean to leave all my faithful readers on a cliffhanger. I did not realize I had such a concerned fan base. The “Where are you H3rcules?” emails and the fruit basket were all to kind of you all.
Alright, so I never got a fruit basket, but I’ve been asked about when I would start blogging again by a number of people, so here it is. In all a summary, two movie reviews, and E3 reactions here, in this- EPIC POST TO BEGIN ALL SUMMER POSTS! /echo /echo /echo
First! One of the reasons I’ve not been on is because I got back into WoW. A few guys from work got together and made a guild, and a friend and myself decided to take advantage of the 3x friend experience points system, and for about the past two weeks have nearly leveled a Rouge and a Warrior to 60. (Me being the Rouge.)
Second! Part I – Night at the Museum 2 Review: Nothing great, a silly, fun, family friendly, summer movie. Made me glad Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Atlantic, but not so glad that Greek sculptures keep up with the latest gut-wrenching songs of certain boy band trios. 7/10
2.2 – Terminator Salvation Review: Imagine Batman (growling voice and all), dressed like GI Joe, fighting robots for half of the movie. Then for the other half of the movie you get to watch a man who you know can’t die, go around and think that he can die, making all of the scenes he is in completely unexciting for me, and the rest of the audience. Expect your intelligence to be insulted numerous times. Remember, even if you are a robot with human skin, you can still hit water going 150 mph and skip across the surface, and have no visible damage, and also remember as a human you can take a steel pipe straight in the heart and survive long enough for people at a desert tent that has less technology then an outhouse, to be able to tell you that you need a new heart. If the action scenes weren’t so damn fun to watch, this would be a point less then what I’m rating it as. 6.5/10
Lastly! E3 just wrapped up the other day. All that I have to say/can think about is Project Natal. Here is a quick video demo that will summaraze it better then I can.
Once I watch more of the wrap-ups from Revision 3, Gametrailers, and IGN, i’ll post more.
Remember to follow me on Twitter @cymmot101
