Jazzy G

I loved the first Authority run. Once Grant Morrison left it was just diminishing returns, though. I saw this month's comics bundle is an ass load of Spawn and other image comics for £15.77. There are 43 books there? It's pretty spanking good value.

You live in Vietnam? I had no idea. You keep it so quiet.

How is that lass still there who didn't even know where they were in the Budapest task? She just happens to end up on the winning team a lot, or she's got such an incredible business plan they're hotshotting her through the whole thing. I hope she makes it to the interviews just to watch her getting reduced to tears.

It must just be a thing now, as when I saw Soulwax last month we were right down the front, and there were two women next to us just nattering.

I remember a friend describing it as straddling that middle ground between Fable's accessibility, and Skyrim's depth, and I think that's a great description of it.

I could probably list 10, but it'd take me forever to actually rank them in some kind of order.

I think it has to be this, although Maximillian Dood losing his mind over Cloud being added to Smash Brothers is pretty darned good as well.

I bit the bullet and thought I'd dump my Kaiju thoughts here rather than stinking up the VHS/Betamax film or D-Mal's foreign films thread. I'm three movies into the list on the archive page I found, and they're interesting things. Godzilla (1954) The original giant monster movie (apart from the 1933 King Kong, The Great Buddha Arrives in 1934, and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms from 1953), and it's a heck of a ride. We don't actually see the big guy himself until about half an hour in, but we're made aware of his presence with mysterious shipwrecks, planes falling out of the sky, and myths about sacrifices to ancient deities. When the exploratory party make it to Odo island and Godzilla turns up on the far side of the island and they finally see him the effects haven't aged well, but it's still a great sequence. When he gets to Tokyo and starts tearing through their defences the chaos is palpable, the army turns up to little effect, he lays waste to the place, and because it's black and white it doesn't looks awful. Then when they just realise they need to leave him to it and he heads off there's a palpable sense of relief. The ethical discussion about using the oxygen destroyer to deal with him is pretty heavy, especially when Dr Serizawa sacrifices himself to make sure that the Oxygen Destroyer can't be recreated and weaponised. You can't help but feel bad for Goji either as he passes away. Well worth a look. If you don't fancy reading the subtitles the 1956 US Adaptation Godzilla The King Of Monsters with Raymond Burr is worth a look, but the dubbing and some of the shots they use to make it look like Raymond Burr was in the locations from the movie can get awfully janky in places. It still hits the main story beats from the original as well, though. Godzilla Raids Again/Godzilla's Counterattack (1955) Due to how well Godzilla did in cinemas, Toho decided they needed a sequel, so nine months after the release of the original we get this. There's a LOT of expository dialogue, and not a whole lot of monster, Things start with a pilot going missing, and a search party being sent for him. He's found on Iwata Island, and while they're trying to get out of there discover another Godzilla fighting against another giant monster. Upon returning to Osaka they encounter a Godzilla expert from Tokyo who's been trying to prepare other cities for potential Godzilla attacks. It's discovered that the new monster is Anguirus, a giant Ankylosaurus who was likely mutated/awoken in a similar fashion to Godzilla. Reports come in that Gidzilla is on his way to Osaka as well, so a solution is needed. The Oxygen Destroyer can't be used again as it's gone, and Dr Serizawa with it, taking all knowledge of how to make another one with him. Godzilla arrives, and they try to lure him away with something called the light bomb, which is them turning all the city's lightds off before detonating a lot of flares in the opposite direction in the hopes that he's drawn towards the lights. It almost works until some idiots crash a car in a factory and start a huge fire, and it attracts Godzilla's attention which results in him wandering back into the city and causing some havoc. Tanks and planes turn up.. It's not a badly done sequence. Anguirus turns up as well, and has a scrap with Godzilla, but it always just feels like they're just having a bit of a mess about, and not super malicious. Godzilla never uses his atomic breath, they just wrestle a bit, then after Godzilla chucks Anguirus into the sea he just buggers off home. Sensing further sequels they (Toho) decide not to kill him this time, but rather seal off the pass he uses to leave the island. He gets snowed in as well. It's still enjoyable, but is obviously a bit of a rush job. Rodan: Giant Monster Of The Sky (1956) We're in colour, and Godzilla is nowhere to be seen. People have been mysteriously disappearing in a mine in Tokyo, and further investigation reveals a lot of mysterious critters in the caves. Some are people dressed as insects in a style not dissimilar to a pantomime horse type thing. There are lots of bats. Eventually a couple are found dead, and it's theorised to be a double suicide until they develop the film from the man's camera and sicover a very off picture. They eventually realise that it's a Pteranodon that must have been hiding inside the mountain that they'd been mining. We don't see Rodan until about 50 minutes into a 90 minute runtime, but they do a great job building to it. He can fly at supersonic speed, and leaves a huge wind in his wake that destroys everything behind him. Also when he lands he can flap his wings to create hurricane strength winds. There's a lot of drama, and theydo a great job of presenting Rodan as a different kind of threat to Godzilla. This is obviously in a different timeline as well, since Tokyo is pretty much undamaged, as opposed to rebuilding from the Godzilla attack from a few years ago. The downside with the shift to colour is that the obvious models that are being destroyed and coming to battle against Rodan look really fake. I love the JASDF (Japan Air & Space Defence Force) planes, though. There's a huge twist as well when it looks like they have Rodan beaten, but I won't spoil it. There'll be a few other non Godzilla movies before the big guy turns up again.

The makers of The Apprentice still appear to be more into editing the show to make them all look useless. I guess it's an attempt to try and make the outcome of each task less predictable. It still feels like a case of which team does the least bad, rather than the best. Whether it's due to their running out of good candidates, or just picking rejects to try and create car crash TV remains to be seen.