Profoundly Moving

This is the week that I faced up to the fact that I am no longer one of the young people. I had an indication this was coming last year when my Young Person’s Railcard expired (prompting an overenthusiastic First Great Western ticket inspector to quite literally cut it up before my eyes..) I had been clinging to the hope that, seeing as I can’t actually afford the full adult fares yet, maybe I can still technically qualify as being part of The Youth. However, watching Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World – Edgar Wright’s frenetic comic book adaptation starring such precocious hipsters as Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Kieran Culkin – made me finally realise that no, I’m definitely not one of those people am I.  The fun bit is officially now over and I’m just going to have to resign myself to a life revolving around nasal hair, offset tracker mortgages and, ultimately, death.

Scott Pilgrim is an easygoing 22-year-old slacker sharing a room in Toronto with his gay best friend Wallace. He plays bass in an awesome garage band called Sex Bob-omb, doesn’t have a job (or seem to need one) and spends his evenings hanging out at cool parties full of attractive people who all know each other. It’s a life that probably won’t resemble your early 20’s – in the same way that Skins didn’t really resemble your school days and Hugh Hefner’s life isn’t going to resemble your 70’s. One night Scott meets Ramona Flowers, the ultra-hip purple haired girl of his dreams, and falls madly in love with her. There is one little problem however; before Scott and Ramona can get it together, he must first defeat her seven evil exes in mortal combat.

Fortunately for all concerned, this is mortal combat of the Nintendo DS variety so no one really seems to get hurt. Punches to face are accompanied by words like ‘KAPOW!’ emblazoned on screen in giant orange letters and when you kill your enemy, he explodes into a thousand golden coins as opposed to, say, leaving behind a rotting dismembered corpse to be guiltily buried beneath Ramona’s patio.

The first evil ex Scott must defeat is Matthew Patel, an Indian emo type who interrupts one of Sex Bob-omb’s gigs by exploding through the roof of the venue and kicking a bewildered Scoot in the head before apologising with “sorry, didn’t you get my email explaining the situation?” Next up is Lucas Lee a skateboarding film star who drafts in his 20 stunt doubles to join the fight. Then comes a vegan bassist with telekinetic powers, an angry lesbian from Ramona’s “sexy phase”, a pair of twin-brother superstar DJs and lastly the ‘Final Boss’ in the form of Jason Schwartzman’s slimy record producer. This gives the film a multi-level structure that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever played a Sonic the Hedgehog-style platform game (although I don’t remember playing any videogames where you got to have sex with a girl once you’d completed it – there certainly weren’t any on the Megadrive anyway..) In fact, Scott Pilgrim is suffused with gaming references from the ‘Pee Bar’ that pops up on screen when Scott goes to the bathroom to the brilliant Capcom-esque takeover of the Universal Studios intro.

The pace of the film is breathtaking; one scene explodes into the next with Edgar Wright and his editor employing split-screens, Manga-style captions and superfast crosscutting to propel the story forwards. It’s exhilarating to watch but older befuddled moviegoers (i.e. me) may potentially get left behind. This is essentially a film designed for the hyperactive mind of a 17-year-old – whose attention can flit effortlessly between the 25 web pages he has open at any one time, the illegally downloaded movie he’s watching on his laptop and the General Studies homework he’s got due in tomorrow. And all this while simultaneously Skyping his girlfriend, filling in a UCAS form and performing freaky sex acts on ChatRoulette.

We oldies can still enjoy the film; we can appreciate Edgar Wright’s astonishingly inventive visual style, Kieran Culkin’s hilarious scene-stealing one-liners and the excellent soundtrack featuring tracks by Beck, Dan the Automator and Cornelius. However, there’s an inescapable feeling that it’s not really meant for us and we probably shouldn’t be here. A newer, better generation has taken over – it was born in the 90’s and has no memory of John Major. All we can do is look sadly on, like a non-GPS-enabled iPhone, muttering resentfully to ourselves about Brit Pop, Oasis at Knebworth, Melinda Messenger and The X Files. It’s a bit like that scene in Greenberg, if you’ve seen it, where Ben Stiller stumbles into a house party full of his niece’s teenage friends who feed him cocaine and then take the piss out of him. Alternatively, take that feeling you get when you hear about someone under the age of 23 who’s had a novel published, then multiply it by a billion.

Back in the good old days, before the Premier League with its £100k a week salaries came along, when a footballer came to the end of his career his club would organise a testimonial match in his honour. Current stars and former legends would turn out to play a one-off friendly to mark the contribution of the retiring hero who would receive all the proceeds from the game to put towards the start-up costs of his new scaffolding business.

The Expendables is essentially Sylvester Stallone’s testimonial.

Somehow he’s managed to assemble the most awesome line-up of action stars ever seen together in one film. It includes the clunking fists of Mickey Rourke, Dolph Lundgren and Stallone himself; relative new-comers like Jet Li and Jason Statham; and wrestling legends Randy Couture and Steve “fucking hell he’s enormous” Austin. Oh, and Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger turn up as well. Pound for pound, this has got to be the most heavyweight cast ever seen – you can almost smell the Maximuscle protein shake emanating from the cinema screen.

Together they are The Expendables, an elite squad of mercenary warriors who take on only the most foolhardy and suicidal of missions. Missions that largely involve killing thousands and thousands of anonymous South American goons in a brutal and spectacular fashion. Sometimes they throw a knife at the goon, slicing gruesomely through his throat. Other times they wrench the goon’s limbs out of their sockets and smash their fists through his bones with sickening force. And sometimes they shoot the goon with a special bullet that makes him literally explode in a CGI-enhanced plume of blood and gore. If, like me, you have the appetites of an over-excited 12-year-old boy, you will find of this all fucking outstanding.

The Expendable’s latest assignment is to overthrow a murderous dictator, General Garza, and his slimy CIA backer on the fictional island of Vilena (not the most imaginative of names – they may as well have called it Badguyland..) Along the way, they meet a beautiful local freedom fighter called Sandra who becomes Stallone’s “Adriannnn”-style love interest. However, when the op goes bad, the gang are forced to flee the island in a hail of bullets and massive explosions leaving Sandra behind to face a certain death. Haunted by his failure, Stallone must convince the rest of his team to return to Vilena to rescue Sandra and finish what they started. Then maybe, just maybe, he can save a soul… his own.

That, admittedly, sounds shit. This is undeniably far from being an amazing film with lots of areas you could pick holes in if you wanted to… the plot is wafer thin, the characters thinly sketched and it feels as though Stallone has delegated the dialogue-writing bit entirely to the animated paperclip man on Microsoft Word – “it looks like you’re writing a gratuitously violent nostalgia-fest..”

However, while all these things would obviously be a problem for any other production, in this case it doesn’t really matter. The Expendables, you see, doesn’t really count as an actual film. It’s more just a loose collection of awesome things, with stunts, fights and cameos all thrown in for no other reason than Sly thought it’d be cool. The bit with Schwarzenegger is a case in point; his cameo has precisely zero dramatic bearing on the plot (it reminded me quite a lot of his “So vot are you vaiting vor” appearance at the end of that Visit California advert) but it was still a genuinely exciting moment that got a massive cheer in the auditorium.

Essentially, this is a film that gets by on the charm and novelty of its line-up and requires a certain amount of goodwill from the audience. It’s almost like one of those Comic Relief charity singles – I kept expecting Pudsey Bear or Mr Blobby to show up. Actually, how amazing would that be? Imagine Stone Cold Steve Austin versus Blobby in a vicious fight to the death! Maybe something for the sequel, Sly?

Right, well first off, I have absolutely no idea where the fuck they got that title from. ‘Knight and Day’ makes it sound like Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz are going to be some sort of crime-fighting double act in the vein of Starsky and Hutch or, um, Dalziel and Pascoe. In reality, while Cruise’s character is technically called Knight, for most of the film we think his name is Roy Miller and only find out it’s not towards the end in a non-important plot twist. There isn’t anyone called Day. Cameron Diaz plays a character called June Havens so really they should have called it ‘Knight and Havens’. That’s sounds shit, but at least it’s logical.

The storyline is similarly feeble. It revolves around a battery called a Zephyr which stores an infinite supply of energy (the specifics of how they’re getting around the many, many laws of physics that contradicts aren’t really gone into..) Cruise plays the secret agent assigned to protect this magical plot device but finds he has to go rogue to stop it falling into the hands of the bad guys. Along the way he crosses paths with Cameron Diaz who gets swept up in his international trail of intrigue, adventure and exploding helicopters.

The thing is, neither what this film is called or what happens in it are particularly important. Instead it’s been sold purely on the charisma and star power of the two lead actors. So whether or not you enjoy it will largely depend on how much you like Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz.

Obviously, in Cruise’s case, that’s going to be a bit of a problem as lots of people have gone off him recently – due to the whole Scientology and being mental thing. Personally, I still kind of like him. I thought his fat-suited cameo as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder was magnificent. That, and his extraordinary performance in Magnolia show he’s not afraid to play up to his reputation for being a bit crazy. Self-parody may well turn out to be the key to Cruise’s rehabilitation and, with a Les Grossman spin-off movie in the works, that redemption seems to be already under way. (NB This is not a universal rule however. Mel Gibson, if you’re reading this, I specifically don’t want to see you ‘sending up’ your reputation for being a Jew-hating, racist, sexist homophobe. That would not be cool.)

However, in Knight and Day, Cruise is just a bit annoying. His shtick is basically to make wisecracks and smile manically at all times, even when he’s being shot at by hundreds of bad guys. Cruise’s smile has to have one of the most intense things I’ve ever seen. I seriously have no idea how it can even be possible for him to force his mouth open that wide, exposing so many of his perfectly white teeth, without literally ripping his cheeks apart. The only person who can match it is Julia Roberts, which is why you’ll never see the two of them on screen at the same time. If both of those massive terrifying mouths ever came into proximity of each other, it would create a giant white hole of ‘screen presence’ so powerful it would destroy the universe. Ever seen Cruise and Roberts in a film together? Exactly.

As for Cameron Diaz, she’s likable enough but is entirely overshadowed by Cruise and his big weird grin. In recent years, the folks who make action films have reluctantly faced up to the fact that, you know, women are technically people too and have given them equal status in their movies. Knight and Day is a bit of a regression in that respect, with Diaz relegated to the role of ditzy blonde who starts screaming at the first sign of danger and (snigger) can’t even shoot a machine gun properly. The power balance between her and Cruise is kind of redressed at the end but it’s still fairly clear who wears the trousers and who does the silent, drug-free childbearing.

All in all, for a summer popcorn movie this is OK but not great. Director James Mangold has an impressive list of ‘proper films’ on his CV including Walk the Line and 3:10 to Yuma so should really have been expected to turn this into something more interesting than a flimsy star vehicle. He does undoubtedly have a flair for action, however, and creates some really spectacular stunts including a motorcycle chase through the Pamplona Bull run.

Also, with the action jumping between so many glamorous and exotic locations – from New York to Salzburg, The Caribbean to The Alps – it’s quite nice to just sit back and enjoy looking at all the pretty places. Especially if, like me, you’ve fucked all your money away on booze and Pret-a-Manger sandwiches and now can’t afford to go on holiday this year. Still in quite a big sulk about that.

Now, I’m aware that I might be going out on a limb here, and this will probably do irrevocable damage to my credibility as a respected cinematic authority… however

I

FUCKING

LOVED THIS!!!

Although that could well have had a lot to do with all the free beer and Pizza Express pizzas they gave out before the screening. I’m quite fickle like that – load me up with enough free food and booze and I’d happily sit through an autopsy..

I can’t believe I’ve been wasting my time all these years watching films that concern themselves with plot, character and realistic dialogue. Step Up 3D effectively cuts out all that boring old shit and goes straight to the good stuff – the only thing people really want to see in a movie anyway – 3D breakdancing!

And, fuck me, are they’re good at it. I’ve never really taken much of an interest in dance before. Mainly because, like most things I’m not very good at, I regard it as pointless and stupid. (You can also add fashion, drawing, sport, talking to girls and playing the piano to that list..) However, some of the moves they pull in this film – fusing Hip Hop with Capoeira, Parkour and even Lindy Hop – are among the most visually astonishing things I’ve ever seen in a cinema. The final dance-off in particular, where the dancers strap neon lights and laser beams to themselves, had me whooping and applauding like a delighted toddler.

The music is similarly awesome (depending on how ‘1xtra’ your tastes are..) Although the Urban Popular soundtrack causes a bit of a problem for the filmakers as most of the songs contain language that isn’t exactly ideal for their target audience of impressionable tweens. Tear Da Roof Off by Busta Rhymes, for example, features the lyric “Bounce n*gga, bounce bounce bounce, n*gga bounce bounce!” Weirdly, these expletives aren’t fully bleeped out but are just vaguely muffled so you can still hear them if you listen carefully enough. So, in stanza three, when Busta promises that “All y’all weak-ass n*ggas, I’m'a rub y’all n*ggas OUT!” The offending words come out as a sort-of nervous sounding mumble: “All y’all weak-ass mmnnugmers..” I use a similar technique when I can’t remember someone’s name.

And now, ladies and gentlemen… let’s dance..

WOAH!!!

WOW!!!!!

SHIT!!!!!!

Yeah, this one was a bit rubbish, to be honest..

Out this weekend is Down Terrace, a sad, sinister and darkly hilarious British gangster flick shot in just nine days on a tiny budget (i.e. the type of film that isn’t going to exist anymore now the UK Film Council is being abolished. It’s interesting isn’t it that Cameron and Clegg, who so closely resemble stock characters in a Richard Curtis movie, have acted decisively to ensure that no other type of film will ever get made. Conspiracy?)

Down Terrace is a bizarre collision of gritty kitchen sink drama and Sopranos-esque crime thriller – with the dialogue from Peep Show and the body count of Reservoir Dogs thrown in for good measure.

Bill and Karl are father and son small-time gangsters who have recently been released from prison. They’re supposed to be trying to uncover the identity of the person who grassed them up to the rozzers, but mostly they spend their time sitting around drinking tea, taking drugs and bickering.

My favourite character is Maggie, the family matriarch and Bill’s chief advisor and enforcer. I spent about an hour trying to figure out where I recognised her from until finally it twigged – she was Alan Partridge’s love interest in the episode where he goes to the Owl Sanctuary – she’s the one who smears chocolate mousse on him while they’re having sex.

The actress’s name is Julia Deakin and she’s really fantastic in this film. There’s an incredible bit where she’s comforting her heartbroken son by gently singing him a lullaby, all the while you can see in her eyes that she’s secretly plotting to kill him. It’s incredibly well done, reminiscent of the scene in Godfather Part II where Michael orders the death of his brother. That said, I did spend most of film desperately wanting to shout out, “Jill, what do you think of the pedestrianisation of Norwich City Centre?”

In fact, fuck it, it’s Friday afternoon. Let’s just sack this off and watch Alan Partridge clips shall we? I’ll see you next week..

*

“Mind you I can’t talk, I’ve got a fat back”

*

*

“I suppose, if you were going to execute a bird of prey, the most humane way would be death by firing squad.”

*

*

“Mousse from a bowl is very nice but to put it on a person is demented!”

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About a year ago, I wrote this piece about The Human Centipede, a notorious horror film where a mad German scientist called Dr Heiter hatches a plan to join the human race together via their alimentary canal. Embarrassingly, I may have described Tom Six, the man responsible, as a ‘Dutch avant-garde director.’ A close inspection of his IMDB profile would suggest that the ‘avant-garde’ bit of that characterisation is a little fucking generous. He is Dutch though.

Aside from that small oversight, it was one of my favourite posts I’ve written for this blog – mainly because I got to repeatedly use the phrase ‘the gaping anus of Michael Winner.’

It is also one of the most successful. Last April the trailer was released on YouTube and the internet went batshit crazy. The clip got millions of hits and the phrase ‘human centipede’ became one of the most searched for topics on Google. Somehow the concept of nubile American tourists having their mouths surgically grafted into each others’ arseholes simply captured the imagination of the general public – it was this year’s Obama.

Suddenly, the traffic coming to my blog from people googling the film went through the roof making it my most read article ever (it also had an unprecedented 3 ‘likes’ on Facebook!) The lesson here is essentially that I should be writing a whole lot more posts about things like Britney Spears’s vagina, R-Patz and 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Anyway, the film is released in cinemas in all its glory on the 20th August and last Thursday I got to see a preview..

So, it stared off well. The PR people organising the screening laid on some lovely sandwiches beforehand. They also thoughtfully placed a complimentary sick bag out on every chair. And they handed out this:

..a handy guide for all the budding gonzo journalists out there who fancied having a go at making a human centipede for themselves.

My favourite bit is this bit!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t go into too much detail about the ins and outs of skin grafts or ‘gastro-amalgamative surgery’. I tried phoning NHS direct to see if someone there could talk me through it – they were precisely NO help.

So what of the film? What of the actual film? Well, I mean, it was terrible, obviously. Of course it was. Absolutely appalling. Appalling script, appalling sound, appallingly shot (by a Director of Photography hilariously named ‘Goof De Konning’) and, in particular, appallingly acted.

It’s quite rare that you get to see really bad acting anymore. I’ve always assumed that saying stuff out loud that has been written down for you on a script and making it sound like an actual person is saying it in real life shouldn’t really be that difficult. They even seem to manage it on Hollyoaks for fuck’s sake.

Well apparently for some people it is. And specifically for Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynn Yennie, who play the two American victims, it’s a massive challenge. They managed to mangle their way through their dialogue so badly that there was actually a palpable sigh of relief in the cinema when they were duly awarded positions two and three in the Human Centipede. It was disgusting, sure, upsetting and psychologically disturbing. But at least we didn’t have to listen to them speak anymore.

Interestingly, Ashley Williams’ performance dramatically improved from this point in. She has quite a curious acting range to be sure. Relatively straightforward techniques like, say, looking disappointed when her phone runs out of battery prove to be too much of a challenge and yet she manages to pull off an entirely convincing portrayal of having a Japanese man shit in her mouth.

I liked that Japanese guy (Akihiro Kitamura) and was glad he was given position #1 in the centipede pecking order. (Is ‘pecking’ the right word here? Maybe ‘reluctant ingesting’ or ‘distraught slurping’ might be more appropriate..) It also means he gets to do all the talking which is great as he has some fantastic lines which seem all the more funny when seen as an English subtitle: “The Japanese possess extraordinary strength when backed into a corner!” was a highlight. I also liked it when he calls Dr Heiter a “European Madman!”

The doctor, to his credit, shoots straight back with, “Shutup! Or I pull your teeth out one by one, you kamikaze shithole!” Boom! Smack down! You have been PWNED!!

It’s Heiter, the crazed German scientist, who inevitably steals the show here. He’s played by Dieter Laser, famous for his role in… nope, nothing, nothing’s coming up…. He does have an amusingly wrinkly little head though, that makes him look like a malevolent tortoise. Almost everything he says is laugh-out-loud hilarious. But then pretty much anything is funny when said in a camp ‘Allo ‘Allo Nazi accent. Especially the phrase; “Rohypnol – the rape drug”.

All this hilarity aside, there’s no escaping the fact that the film is truly truly terrible. However with the amount of interest and attention it’s been getting, there’s no way it won’t be successful. The main lesson we can draw from this is that human beings are essentially all massive morons. As long as your film has a premise with the sufficient LOL-factor, then it doesn’t matter how good or bad it is, we’ll still queue up like hungry worms to contentedly devour whatever shit you want to stuff down our throats.

Ooh, that gives me an idea for a movie..

Yep, good, thanks Hollywood. That’s another fond childhood memory you’ve comprehensively pissed over.

The new big-screen remake of The A-Team is released in cinemas this week, the latest example of the current Hollywood trend of making films out of things I liked when I was seven. The experience of watching this movie – as with Transformers, The Karate Kid and all the rest – is a dispiriting mix of resentment and betrayal and the knowledge that some central component of who you are has irrevocably and forever been sullied. It’s what I imagine it would feel like to find out your dad was a paedophile.

So, my main memory of the film (and I’m aware this is going to make me sound like a miserable old woman) was how earsplittingly LOUD it was. At several points I had to fight the temptation to simply put my fingers in my ears – opting instead  to bang on the projectionists window with a broom handle demanding he “turn that infernal racket down!”

I don’t know if it will be as loud as that in every cinema. They may have just cranked the volume up for the press screening as some kind of pre-emptive strike to stop the critics telling people how shit it is by melting our brains.

In which case, they’ve been at least partially successful. The part of my frontal lobe responsible for remembering convoluted plot details has effectively been destroyed. Despite seeing the film less than a week ago, I have almost no memory of what happens in it. There’s something about a CIA conspiracy, I remember that. And a magic machine that prints money. There’s also quite a good bit where they fly a tank.

Also, although it’s entirely possible I may have just dreamt this, there’s a section of dialogue where Liam Neeson quotes Gandhi (“it’s better to be violent if there’s violence in our hearts”) as a way of reassuring B.A. Baracus that gruesomely snapping the necks of your enemies is morally acceptable. Um, really? I’m not sure that’s quite what Gandhi was getting at with that one was it?

I think you’ll find he’d actually prefer us to shoot them in the face with a bazooka..

(a sort of padded out version of this review was also published in the Sabotage Times)

In cinemas next week is Splice, the long-awaited new collaboration between Vincenzo Natali (Cube) and Guillermo del Toro.

Adrian Brody stars as Clive, a hotshot young genetic engineer who unwittingly creates a terrifying new species. Ha! You see? This is exactly the kind of thing President Bush was trying to warn us about. You let these speccy little stem cell weirdos run riot and they’ll go and build some kind of horrendous, multi-limbed, homosexual, liberal monster who hates us for our freedom.

There’s quite a lot of fairly repulsive shit in this film (at several points during the screening, my friend Ed leant over to whisper “that is literally your girlfriend!” while jabbing me excitedly in the ribs). First up is this old fellow..

..which apparently is an incredible new hybrid set to revolutionise medical science. It mainly looks like a combination of a penis, a doner kebab and a human poo.

When Clive and his partner Elsa (Sarah Polley) combine it with human DNA, they produce DREN – a strange and wonderful new creature with a keen intelligence and superhuman strength. And gills. And kangaroo legs. And it can fly. And has a tail that can kill people.

And it’s kind of a bit fit.

Clive and Sarah become surrogate parents to this strange being whose personality alternates between a beguiling childlike innocence and malevolent violence. As they struggle to keep their creation hidden from the authorities, they must also face up to the profound ethical questions its existence raises: is it the animal part of DREN’S DNA that makes it a monster, or the human part? Do we need moral limitations to scientific discovery? Just because we can does it necessarily mean that we should?

More pressing than any of those however, the question on everyone’s lips, is obviously.. is or isn’t Adrian Brody going to have sex with it at some point?

The answer to that, I’m afraid, is yes.

(published in this month’s Notion Magazine)

50 years since its first release, Jean-Luc Godard’s hypercool movie Breathless is back in cinemas. The film is credited with kick-starting the French New Wave and, more broadly, the whole notion of a Counter Culture in film, music and fashion. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that, were it not for Breathless, you probably wouldn’t be reading this magazine right now and would instead be busy playing hopscotch or catch-the-pig or whatever other wholesome shit they got up to in the ‘50’s.

The film stars roguish French hipster Jean-Paul Belmondo as Michel, an outlaw on the run for killing a cop. He turns to a beautiful American student played by Jean Serbeg who hides him in her apartment as the police close in. In reality though, plot is very much subordinated to style in this picture (Godard famously once said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun) and the real pleasure is in his experimental and at times improvised filmmaking techniques.

I’m almost tempted to describe it as the cinematic equivalent of Jazz, but that would make me sound like an unbelievable dick.

Mainly, it’s just amazing to see just how fucking cool everyone looks. Jean Seberg, sporting an iconic blonde elfin haircut, is unforgettably beautiful. I’ve basically fallen in love with her character in this film so much that I’m currently looking into the possibility of legally marrying the DVD. Meanwhile Belmondo, cigarette dangling laconically from the corner of his mouth, delivers a masterclass in being irresistible to women: basically it seems chicks really dig it if you call them mean names and steal money from their handbags.. Definitely going to try that sometime soon.

Released on Blu-Ray this week is Generation Kill, David Simon’s follow-up to The Wire. I bet it looks amazing on Blu-Ray as well. Unfortunately, review copies weren’t available when I was writing this piece so I instead resorted to watching it at work on an illegal video streaming site, having to Alt F4 over to an Excel Spreadsheet every time my boss walked by.

The main thing you realise, watching this ultra-realistic depiction of the opening months of the Iraq War, is just what a mundane experience being a soldier must be. Not really so very different from working down at Baltimore Docks with Frank Sobotka. For the most part we see the Marines of the 1^st Recon Battalion sitting around in their jeeps, goofing off and trading in (slightly homophobic) banter.

Mind you, that’s pretty much what I expect Bush, Cheney et al were doing in the Oval Office when they were planning the fucking war. And I bet their gay jokes weren’t anywhere near as funny.