Avengers : The Age of Ultron. Yeah? And..?

Is it just me or were you left feeling a little underwhelmed?

Joss Wheden is still in the chair, great…
Marc Ruffalo still goes fully green, great…

Then there’s the new characters and I’m not so sure.

The scarlet witch (who I know virtually nothing about) and quicksilver who I know slightly more but still very little about are our guest appearances for our mornings “OMGATRAYLERR” entertainment. I’m like a level one comic book nerd, I know a fair amount but not enough to really bro down and throw punches against the elitists, that being said these guys are certified avengers, they are also the kids of magneto (cameo anyone?) I just get the impression these are two kids who got caught up in a mess, they’ll no doubt contribute in some magical way but to me at the moment they just feel thrown in.

Let’s move on to the baddie shall we? He’s a robot, I think, with lots of robots. It kinda feels like Iron man 3.5 to me.

The locales don’t seem as impressive, in fact nothing does, the trailer indicates we’re going dark, á la Thor : The Dark World (which I enjoyed immensely don’t get me wrong). It’s going to be gritty and desolate, but this is a sequel, and being a sequel it’s gotta top the first and I’m failing to see how it can do that without an expansive backdrop such as I don’t know… Manhattan?

We’re talking the avengers here. You gotta go big man,

The biggest thing I saw was the hulk buster armor, which for the true fans I say hooray!
But for the average Joe I just can’t see it being enough to one up the hulk punching a flying alien metal worm snake in the face.

Thor topless in water for the ladies, and Captain America’s shield split in half, one to intrigue me.

I’m not impressed.

Yet.

Chuck Palahniuk…

Writes some very, very good books. I Have thus far read Fight Club (obviously), diary, damned, snuff, choke (the film adaptation of which was so shitty I actually plan to write my own), rant and now : Pygmy. 

What agitates me about Palahniuk books is that on the cover, or the blurb of a book that isn’t Fight Club, some critic will draw a comparison to Fight Club.

It’s not even his best one. Damned is.

And it’s definitely not Pygmy either I’m afraid.

Pygmy is written in the first person, as are all the others, but it is in broken english. It’s really charming for a while because you don’t know exactly where he’s from, so you can inflict upon him the accent of your choosing and read away. Pretty soon however, you’ll revert back to the voice inside your head, which of course, is yours, and it’s hard work. I read at a conversational, relaxed pace I guess, a friend of mine who reads at the speed of light agrees with me when I say that absorbing the words off of the page, translating them into english proper and then moving on is akin to throwing a dish cloth into a swimming pool and hoping for the best.

I appreciate that in every book he’s written, Mr Palahniuk has utilised a different structure or style to keep it all fresh and interesting.

But it’s all just a little bit like ice skating uphill at times, many a double take was necessary.

I read in bite size chunks on lunch breaks and what have you, and this does contribute greatly to the problem I have faced. Take this book on a long trip and it does start to flow and Pygmy is a loveable little shit. His verbose, bottomlessly varying and extremely hilarious manner of naming the people he interacts with and the persistent quoting of most glorious ruthless dictators such as the venerable Idi Amin really make you feel at home in a Palahniuk Novel.

A surprisingly low level of “what the fuck?” moments though.

And by that I mean only one yellow haired bully was sodomised. Pretty tame by old chucks standards if you ask me. It’s tameness in violence and sexual depravity are more than made up for in the brutally honest commentaries made upon the capitalist system  by our ethnically ambiguous thirteen year old quasi genius, trained in the martial arts with the intent to fulfil his mission entitled “operation havoc”.

The thing is, it’s all spot on, and all you can do is laugh at it until he hits a nerve and you really start to question the choices you’ve made in life.

I didn’t become seriously depressed about it. Honest.

For all the ‘Murica bashing that goes on, some comments are made on the (i can assume) eastern practices of government and such forth. Cos’ y’know, objectivity an’ that?

I would urge to you to read this book, as I hope it’s just my caffeine dependency, poor quality of sleep and general illiteracy that are to be attributed to my struggles.

You’re probably slightly less broken than I am.