Goon (or as I’ve Affectionately named it Doug.)

Is like Fight Club (yes you’ve heard that one before) on ice.

But slightly brain damaged.

Doug is the sweetest guy ever, he was also a brick shit house bouncer that could pull your head off for about 5 minutes at the very start of the film. Sean William Scott had put on a fair bit of weight for the role and with a fairly meaty beard he looks the part and plays it pretty damn well too. I’d find it hard to imagine that stifler could bludgeon anybody the way Doug goes, which goes to show that Scott has moved in a different direction, which is good.

The way Doug gets into Ice hockey is perfect. It’s just ridiculous enough for you to almost believe it to be true. I’m not telling you, just enjoy it for yourself.

A small clue is that Doug’s brother is the foul mouthed host of a local Hockey news show thing, whatever you want to call it.

Doug, from the outset of his puck slinging career is told not to actually sling pucks. He is purely there to beat the living crap out any body.

This happens a lot. I must say, it is cathartic, obviously there’s a love interest and she gets him in trouble, and she’s tortured blah blah blah. I’m sorry but I find no place for romance in a film with this much blood.
i appreciate that it is part of this new Roganesque era of comedy we’re in, and that’s cool. but this can totally be ripped out of the script.

Doug’s main competitor in the rink and the man he must defeat is Ross Rhea, (Liev Shreiber)  Sabretooth does a pretty good job and punching the shit out of people, so does Doug.

Conflict.

END.

I appreciate this film is not new, I appreciate that it is not a Oscar winner.

But I didn’t even know about it until this week, and maybe you didn’t either.Now that you do, you should watch it. because it’s brutal and hilarious.

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.

So… the Family Guy and The Simpsons crossover

Was as we all expected, a flaming ball of excrement. I will keep this brief, as not much can, and not much needs to be said.

The premise was exciting, this is true but it was doomed to fail from the start, the show from the outset even recognises this (one of the few half decent jokes cracked).

The execution was just a failure. The animation was fine, although it did make The Simpsons regress to a time before they drew shadows, and standing the two families together gave one faction in particular a very noticeable case of jaundice. This can’t be help obviously but it is just super weird.

It was the writing. The narrative got off to a good start and the set up was genuinely fantastic and it was looking like a pretty good episode of family guy was about to be enjoyed but then The Simpsons came in and the remaining 15 minutes was just a concentration  of catch phrases and characters doing things that make them who they are.

Lisa Simpson playing a saxophone, ooh please, more!

An actual story would have just been a treat is all I’m saying.

And oh god, the fight.

Enough with the hour long fights.