2020 Posts of the Year

[Onyx2]

Love this. 

 

 

[garynysmon]

[Devon Malcolm]

One of those posts that I've gone back and re-read several times to see if it's still funny and, yes, it is.

 

[Carbomb]

Seconded.

[HarmonicGenerator]

Thirded.

[patiirc]

Rule One's exquisite explanations about Replica belts and Bootlegs warranted a mention. Superb

 

[Carbomb]

chokeout with yet another piece of fried gold:

34 minutes ago, chokeout said:

 

Woodyatt, Nail, McFadden, Le Vell, Kemp, Lawson, Blackwood, Wolf off of Gladiators, Burnside.....shit just got real.

 

[HarmonicGenerator]

12 hours ago, Devon Malcolm said:

Five years since this masterpiece came out. FIVE YEARS.

Recently I've been rewatching a lot of my favourite films, particularly ones I might not have seen for a while, to see if they're as good as I remember them being. I'll rewatch Fury Road too but not to see if it's as good as I remember the last time I watched it (last year) but, well, because it's Fury Road.

A lot of my favourite films have endured from when I was a kid. Stuff like Aliens, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, Dirty Harry, Predator - these are all films I rewatched religiously as a kid and I still do, really.

As I've gotten older, I've become a lot pickier about what becomes a favourite, or what I'd give five stars too. Even something like The Nice Guys, which I've watched about 15 times now, wasn't a total success first time round. It took a few watches before I realised how great it was and how much I loved it.

But there was rarely any doubt with Fury Road. In fact there was no doubt from about as early as this point.

Why? IRHasDiabetes911 explains:-

There's so much in Fury Road that I never thought I'd see. But I haven't seen it in anything since and while, yes, it's only been five years, cinema doesn't stick around. If it hits on something that looks great, it's no more than a year before the clones and derivatives start coming.

That hasn't happened with Fury Road. Why? Because it's the work of a madman.

One of my favourite quotes about Fury Road is this from the critic David Ehrlich:-

It's really no surprise that attempts to make a sequel or sequels or spin-offs have stalled. Fury Road wasn't a huge box office hit and actually made a slight loss but even despite the universal acclaim it immediately garnered, instantaneously acclaimed by some as one of the greatest action films ever made, I can sort of understand why a studio would still be nervous about making another one.

Because what would George Miller do next? Something more mental than blokes on poles vaulting across speeding, exploding cars, that's what. The insurance would probably cost $150 million by itself.

Ehrlich is not just right about films as "products", but there's little risk taken in movies anymore. Since Jackie Chan passed his prime, the danger had gone out of action film making. But we've seen a revival of it recently, mainly through Tom Cruise dragging his half-hanging off leg across London and hanging on to the outside of planes, but also because of Fury Road.

It's no coincidence that the danger and borderline lunacy in making those films has translated to some of the best the genre has ever seen. The 2010s saw a sensational revival in action cinema and the key has been in taking risks.

Get this though. Fury Road was so good that even the Oscars couldn't ignore it. They don't matter a shit, of course, but they *never* put up the big nominations to action films.

It should have won, but they were obviously never going to go that far. It excelled in all departments, in ways no other film did that year. Its pacing, plot, character, themes, dialogue, action, sound and effects. And the acting.

This amazing thing happens about halfway through Fury Road. It's no longer a Mad Max film, it's a Furiosa film. It's her story and her destination and those women under her wing that become the story here. Charlize Theron is the key to this.

There's a lot of talk at the moment about Tom Hardy and whether he can actually act, but he's not outshone in this because he's no good. He steps into Mel Gibson's shoes effortlessly and steps aside when Theron comes to the fore, a situation she then uses to elevate it still further.

Everyone is comfortable in their own characters though, taking what could have been daft, nonsense dialogue and making it make perfect sense in its own world.

Then there's the ending.

An exchange of nods and Max is on his way. That's all it needs to be but that's how it almost never is in any film.

It's a good film imo.

Devon’s review of Fury Road five years on is worth a nomination or 11.

[patiirc]

Frog Shenanigans? Brilliant story well told

 

[HarmonicGenerator]

10 minutes ago, Astro Hollywood said:

"Pull it back!" yelled Nicky Barmby, advancing into the six yard box. From his position between the sticks, Dave Beasant saw what was happening just before he smelled it. Samways' white shorts dropped past his shinpads, down to his boots. "God help us," thought Barmby, knowing he too late to stop it; "the bloody fool thought I meant his foreskin..."

Vinny Samways peeled it all the way back, revealing a purple bell that hadn't seen a flannel since the eighties. Within seconds, the acrid stench begun overpowering the players, who started dropping like flies, convulsing and foaming at the mouth. At the far end, Erik Thorstvedt - outside of breathing a fatal dose, but still within smelling range - wafted away the air with his big goalie gloves.

"Fuck me," he said, "that's one stinky dick!" The referee put the whistle in his mouth in a desperate attempt to stop the chaos, but in doing so, inhaled a lungful of Vinny Samways' whiffy winkle, and dropped dead where he stood.

 

Can’t stop giggling at this.

Edited August 5, 2020 by HarmonicGenerator

[Joe Blog]

Seconded, the below in particular has me laughing every time I read it. 

16 minutes ago, HarmonicGenerator said:

"Fuck me," he said, "that's one stinky dick!"

 

[Devon Malcolm]

Astro busting out his knowledge of 90s footballers is always among the best content on here.

[HarmonicGenerator]

45 minutes ago, Frankie Crisp said:

Taboo, and by association peaches.

I don’t know if they still make it but I had an experience with it in 1995/6 which is still talked about by mates. It turns my stomach when it’s brought up or I see/smell anything resembling a peach.

One of my mates was going out with a girl whose parents were away for a weekend, so she threw the obligatory ‘small gathering which everybody knows will turn into a circus’ party. Everyone going went round at about 7/8pm ish but I was working as a glass collector in the boozer just down the road from her house. They were all on the usual ciders and alco-pops, but as I knew I’d be playing catch-up, I asked them to get me a bottle of something I could drink quickly. Don’t know what I was thinking, but when I arrived with everyone drunk/asleep/fingering a stranger, I was presented with a bottle of Taboo which was either 25% or a third extra free. Being desperate to be coooool, I swigged nearly all of it in about ten minutes. I weighed about 7 stone and couldn’t handle three Wine Gums.

The next thing I know, I’m bolting up the stairs, banging into the everything within a six metre reach, and I just about made it to the loo to evacuate a cocktail of peaches, crisps and whatever my mum had made me for tea a few hours earlier. All I remember was the putrid stench of peaches waterfalling from my mouth and nose, with the smell making my eyes water and vomit even more. It went on until I was actually crying because of the smell/pain of chucking everything up and I ended up falling asleep over the bowl with the remnants no doubt dribbling from the corner of my mouth.

I was then woken up - it could have been minutes or it could have been hours - by a mate who needed a shit. He hooked me under the armpits, dragged me to the bath and leant me over it. He then had the dump from hell. I was barely conscious but at the time/the next day, I remember the sound coming out of him being like the San Andreas Fault cracking.

What then followed after he flushed was either a sadistic effort by a drunken 16-year old or the most misjudged act of consideration you could think of. He armpitted me again, dragged me back over to the loo and put me over it, assumedly in case I was going to be sick again. I probably wasn’t, but his mega dump hasn’t flushed so I was greeted with Colin the Caterpillar’s bigger brother a few inches from an already nauseous set of senses. 

So not only does Taboo/peach make me feel violently ill because of the vomiting, it makes me think of an actual turd.

Frankie is one of the great storytellers. The events described are vile but they are so very entertaining to read. 

[HarmonicGenerator]

1 hour ago, Astro Hollywood said:

There's a story in Bret's book about the WWF staying in a hotel in Liverpool on one of the European tours, where Spurs were booked in too. Both crews were drinking in the bar together, and there was a lot of banter about wrestling not being a real sport. It ended up kicking off, with Sid and Ahmed Johnson going mental, tipping tables over and threatening to punch Gary Mabbutt's eye straight. "I'm on the insulin!" he begged, but they lifted him up on Man Mountain Rock's shoulders for a Doomsday Device.

Suddenly Vinny Samways climbs up on the bar and undoes the top button of his jeans. The rest of the footballers immediately make a bolt for the exit, as they know what's coming. He doesn't even get the whole thing out, just the head. But it's enough. He peels back the foreskin, which makes this crinkling sound like ripping up old lino, and the fucking stink just floods the place. The WWF lads go down one after the other, and even the hard nuts like Haku and Paul Roma are left convulsing. Harvey Wippleman went blind for six months. I don't care how muscley you are, you're not fending off willy-stink with a takedown.

Diesel was the last to drop, because he's the tallest, so the pong took a bit longer to reach him. Bret quotes him in the book as saying "in all my years, I have never smelled a dick that rotten. Pee-yew!" before he face-planted.

 

Just what I needed to read today. Astro does it again

[tiger_rick]

I nominate Bret Hart for the original story that Astro stole.