Most memes are a pain in the hole, but comic geek-PhD student brother-in-arms
Caddy Powers has been hosting
a good one. In this five questions meme anyone who comments on this post will get five questions from yours truly and you answer them on your blog, and hilarity will ensue...maybe. If you don't have a blog, I dunno, I could come round your house and ask you questions and I'll photocopy your answers and post it in random peoples' letterboxes. Anyway, here's Caddy's questions, which thankfully for me and you hasn't investigated the underbelly of Jimmny's dark desires too much, although I have managed to jam them in there
anyway.
1: Name one film / TV show you should enjoy but do not
Man, I have loads of these, it's always more galling when something you love is shit, it's like a relationship gone sour. Of course
X-Men III: The Last Stand ,
Superman Returns and
Spider-Man 3 are prime offenders in these areas, but it's harsh to say I don't enjoy them, I'm still drawn in and on the verge of tears so they must work on some level. (I think sci-fi/superhero stuff is the melodrama of teenage boys, to paraphrase
Tim Bisley, I cried like a child during Robocop 2 the bit the dad and picture). I think the biggest recent disappointment was
Van Helsing. It should've been great and
Stephen Sommers was on tv all the time going
blah blah I love old Universal horrors and this is really a homage to those movies. If he loves these movies so much why make a film so shit no one will have the inclination to ever watch a Universal horror ever again. I love Universal horrors, they are partly the reason I got in to film studies, watching
Frankenstein,
Bride of Frankenstein and stuff like
The Beast with Five Fingers (we all can relate to continually tussling with the beast with five fingers, it's a daily struggle).
Buffy's another blind spot and
Lord of the Rings . I know this is heresy in some quarters, I know they're amazing and good and all the rest of it, but I just don't enjoy anything with a dwarf (well obviously there are
exceptions) or and elf in it. See I grew up with
Dungeons and Dragons (feck I've never heard of
Tunnels and Trolls, I don't want to play that, sounds like my private life) but remember seeing
this madness no wonder people of my age and inclination are a
bit touched in the head hey conspiracy nerds getta load of
this!. I know D&D was Tolkein-inspired but whenever I see a whispy asexual elf and a grumpy dwarf with a axe I just go
, fuck this! where's the sexy robot ladies and apocalypse. The pressure on you to like it is so immense that it's very hard to enjoy them, I mean I like
Robocop (as
I may have mentioned) but I don't give fuck if
you like it or not, I don't force people to watch it (well, maybe sometimes) but say you don't like Lord of the Rings and people look at ya like you just shot their dog.
2: As a man who has had some pretty shitty jobs, is there any job you would find too humiliating even if it meant complete financially solvency for the forseeable future?
God, I don't know, it's a tough question for an impoverished PhD, as you would know yourself. This is like that Twilight Zone episode
the box isn't it. I remember
while job hunting going into a recruitment agency that specialized in manual work and there was a really nice old guy who just looked at my cv and just went,
look, mostly what I've got is bin collecting and stuff and you'rejust not cut out for it, it was like a scene from some 1930s flick (in my mind) and I was there
I could give it a go? and he's just there, look you could do better. So I almost could've been a bin man, I may have glamorised it in my mind a bit, like it would be similar to the end of
Office Space or something.
3:Somehow you are tricked onto going on Big Brother, how long would you last in the house and what would be the reason for your eviction (or your lack of eviction if you think you would win)?
I suppose like all of us in dark moments (and most moments watching Big Brother are dark) we imagine what it would be like to be in the house and brush shoulders with today's intellectual heroes such as 'warehouse operative'
Bubble, Darren and the
Jungle Cats, and of course
Jade, who should have 'Is Cambridge in London?' engraved on her tombstone. What drives me mad is when they start talking about movies and don't know anything, they say things like,
'there was that movie, it's old from the seventies, it has a shark in it, I don't know what it's called, he had these massive jaws, what was that film again? and the other person is there, going
'I dunno'. And someone else who knows fuck all chimes in with 'authority' and says something like
'Shark? 1970s? definitely The Exorcist' and they are ready to fight to the death for their unfounded beliefs and I'm there nearly having a heart attack watching this shit.
When
H from Steps was trying desperately to bond with
Shilpa Shetty, he was there pretending to have knowledge of Bollywood because he saw that 'Bollywood actor' in that film with
Arnold Schwarzenegger when he's a secret agent. I'm there shouting at the screen,
you mean Art Malick, don't you, like Pakistani-born British actor Art Malick?: So H has seen an indian-looking(to him) actor and just assumed he was a Bollywood actor. Shetty's there like 'dude, I've never heard of him, he's not a Bollywood actor'.
Fuck, haven't answered the question, I just went into a bizarre Big Brother reverie, the reasons I would be evicted are: 1. correcting people's grammar, 2. Appearing that I am a know-it-all just becuase I now what films people are talking about by even the scantest description, like a while back someone was going on about seeing a Ben Stiller comedy about a house and she couldn't remember the name and I went, what?
Duplex and she was OMG! how did you know that! (it's not rocket science, how many Ben Stiller comedy's recently involve him and a house?)
Anyway, that and chronic masturbation would probably get me the boot, or maybe ensure my survival in the house, the public would miss my wee scrunched face and constant gibbering
4: Which Irish politican do you think is most likely to be a supervillan? You must indicate the type of villain they are, powers (if any) and who their evil minions are?
Sean Lemass and
Brian Lenihan looked a bit scary, they would have a sort of scary eye death ray thing, and obviously
Dev's flirtation with Hitler (ideologically not romantically,
ouff, what an image) put him up there as supervillain. Dev would have a magic Irish dancing ray, like if he even glimpsed at you, you would immediately have to rip your front door off its hinges and start
Michael Flatleying * all over the place like a mad man. Thomas
Bryne of course, but mostly in the way that the
Juggernaut's a supervillain, blindly following orders.
Haughey of course, he was a villain in our house because of the 48 percent tax teachers and nurses had to pay in the 1980s when he was off partying and riding Terry Prone,** it's almost a porn name ain't it, but for intellectual pornnoisseurs. Yeah Haughey did have a super power, didn't he, magically sucking money out of everyones bank accounts. He's in hell now, eating every single crappy meal we all had to eat the 1980s,
that's it Charlie boy eat your boiled bacon and angel delight. Nearly forgot
John "The Brute" Burton his super power is making Irish people weep incontrollably that our amazing nation ever had some sort of braindead seal in charge of it for any period of time, it's lucky he didn't sell us all to another country for slave labour or meat, by accident, or something....
5: Prisoner Question: If you were on the village, would you rather be Number 6 or Number 2?
school had a wiki entry, apparently at my old school : "we seek to provide an environment where the Christian values of mutual respect, tolerance, care and justice are encouraged and nurtured", so where does me being called a poof every day for five years because I like comics fit into that?)
It was the ulitmate teenage show to get into, when you're 14/15 and seeing yourself as Number 6 stomping down a corridor to
bang some tables and break some saucers Goddamnit! It's followed me my whole life. When I came to norwich first and lived in halls, I felt like I was in the village the uni security guards all drove round in wee vans and I used to get up and look out the window, and think to myself:
this is it, isn't it! I'm in the fucking village I am the Prisoner. I have the Prisoner box set from an ex and it's the ultimate emotional conundrum, we had been going out for two years and it was my birthday and she was going, 'well I don't really know what you're into so I'll get you something in HMV tomorrow' and I'm there going, cool the Prisoner on DVD would be great, but then I thought wait a minute, you've been going out with me for two years and listening to my demented rants and gibbering and you still don't know what stuff I like? So in conclusion I have The Prisoner boxset but not a girlfriend, who wins? No.6 wins, every time baba baaaa baba *ching* baba baaaa.....Anyway, it was one of the moments where you realise this person knows nothing about you really and you're hanging around because you're gullible oaf.
*Jeez, sorry about the Michael Flatley link, if you don't follow it, this is what happens. There's a picture of Mickey Flats in mid air without his top on. The following credo appears: 'Follow your Dreams, because you wouldn't want it so bad it you couldn't have it' what the hell? is this a bizarre Irish dancing S&M porn site?
**UPDATE: jeez II, never get let the truth get in the way of a good wordplay gag as finger-on-the-Irish-politics pulse correspondant
Karl has pointed out, Charlie Haughey of course was riding
Terry Keane of hilariously named column 'The Keane Edge' not Irish pr Guru
Terry Prone, you see the confusion, Irish female writers with double-meaning surnames. Haughey
could have slept with both of course, who knows.
