SpikyCactus

Sponsor

Bio: A failure in almost every way modern science has found to measure it, I spend my hours digging gardens, mindlessly delivering delivery vans and trying to keep The Man at bay. At other times I listen to music, watch films, play games and go to mostly punk and ska gigs, to try and hide the fact that I've got no friends. I live in a place I call Cactus World. Like most concepts that outlive their original purpose, Cactus World is an ill thought-out but increasingly complex muddle of canonical contradictions, fuelled by a mixture of decent alcohol (vegan cider and wine, 'interesting' beer and Guinness), movies, games and music, which encapsulates the sneaking suspicion that basically I'm a talentless nobody, a parasitic observer of life rather than a participant in it.

I learnt everything I need to know about life from watching Tom & Jerry, Laurel & Hardy and Star Trek, growing cacti (and other succulents), reading Thomas Hardy, going hiking/camping, playing Traveller (it's a role-playing game), listening to punk, skanking really badly and owning a guitar I will never learn to play.

On a more technical note, I'm on a mission to write up to 600 characters of mostly irrelevant, superficial, ill-informed, uninteresting and unamusing rubbish about each film I own as I watch it, with a special (management speak alert) laser-like focus, on cats, cacti (and other succulents), chainsaws, decapitations and general badassness. (You know what I mean, the sort of low grade, background noise that the Internet allows people with no talent, understanding or considered thoughts to publish). I do occasionally write something coherent about the film itself, but mostly I just go off on a tangent somewhere else and write about my favourite topic, me; (this is normally extremely tedious trivia that in many cases relates to something that also happened a long time ago). (I've also realised that I go on about trains a lot; I think this is because I spend an inordinate amount of time travelling on them because of my job - I'm not a train spotter, honest!) I imagine this probably infuriates many real movie buffs who take these things seriously, genuinely know something about films and are interested in other people's thoughts on them; but please, just try and roll with it.

I have noticed that some people (probably accidentally) press the 'star' button by what I've written. To them I say thank you for giving my life meaning, substance and direction, plus the courage and fortitude to sit through some pretty terrible films all the way to the end, just so I can then share this pain with others here.

My scoring system. I score in multiples of 10; anything more granular hurts my head. However, if a film has something intrinsically special about it I add an extra five. 70 is my base score for a decent film that I found entertaining but probably wouldn't miss much if it vanished from existence tomorrow. This is quite high, but I mostly watch things that, for better or for worse, I've bought a copy of; and I try not to buy things I don't think I'd like much. I score heavily based on how much I enjoy a film, although I will begrudgingly give a slightly higher one to movies that have a value outside of my enjoyment of them, be it social, historical or technical. Anything that gets less than 60 is terminated by me in an exceedingly cruel and heartless fashion, unless I've a specific reason for keeping it. (And I do seem to be very good at finding excuses for doing the latter, which isn't helping at all to make my living room look less like a forgotten branch of Blockbusters.) Anything that gets 90 or more I upgrade to the highest definition disc or digital copy possible if I don't already own it. Simples!

TV Series. I don't rate these. This is partly because I'm just not capable of condensing several seasons into one paragraph of flippant comments. Also, it's a big commitment to watch a TV series all the way though. This means I only do so if they're really good, which then unbalances my scores here with too much TV near the top of my list. TV should have its own section, like games do.

Games. I do rate these, but I take so long to play through them that I only add one very occasionally. I have to be in the right mood to play one as it's just so much easier to sit down and watch a film, rather than face horrific dangers, terrifying monsters, impossible puzzles or certain death, over and over and over again.

And just to confirm, I'm not a train spotter.