Lazy Movie Bullshit #1

Imagine the scene....our hero is running for his life. Sexy sweat pours off him, and for some reason he’s coated in a layer of grime that makes him look all the more manly. His face is panicked, scared even, but you can tell that he’s determined to live. A monster appears in the background slamming against a wall as it takes a corner hard and chases after him. It snaps its tooth filled gigantic head at our hero, but always narrowly misses due to luck or skill on this plucky young man’s part. He keeps running but his luck (and this scenes momentum) cannot hold up for long so eventually he slips or trips and falls. Oh no! Fear overtakes him so instead of getting up and trying to regain his incomprehensible lead on this beast he rolls onto his back, and he looks with horror at the teeth/tentacles/growly bastard that is slowly advancing on him. His doom is certain, and we all watch and think “shit, maybe they are going to kill him off pointlessly now. Maybe it is that sort of film”. Then suddenly from out of nowhere a larger more frightening beast slams into this massive menace and kills it within a moment. Our hero barely has time to look at this new even more terrifying killing machine and give thanks to it for saving his life, before he realises that despite it now having a very large meal in front of it, it wants to eat him too! The chase resumes, and once more our hero jammily outruns this new crunchy faced bastard despite there being no logistical sense in the comparative speeds of a human and a killing machine twenty times his size. This mega beast may have a new trick or two, but for some reason, despite having no compunction about the speed at which it killed the old cruncher, it seems to want to just chase our hero until some minor victory gives him a chance to escape.

Which is lucky for our hero, but not for us. Who cares about a monster chase scene in which there is no real peril as the monsters never act decisively when it’s time to kill the hero? Hmm? And no, a second bigger monster doesn’t make it more perilous if it’s the exact same chase scene again.

These scenes are about as surprising as not winning the lottery...”is it going to happen? Is it? Is it? No? Oh, I didn’t think so.”

I think all movie executives who want to include such a scene in a movie should have to be chased for a mile by lions first. It would give them some perspective.

Barista is an anagram of Bastard

So, like you, I have long been a hater when it comes to coffee chains springing up all over the place and charging whatever they like for foamy hot water with melted hyperactive beans. The people who spend their hard earned cash frequenting these places are like so much mould on a pile of rotting marshmallows as far as I am concerned, but as I’m sure you’ll agree, none of us fought the good fight against it, so we lost the high street to these new age caffeine freaks long ago.

So yesterday when my friend invited me out for a coffee I decided to try it out and finally taste this jittery lifestyle which has long been old hat to almost everyone. To my surprise, there were several levels of interesting to such an outing that I had never thought of. Such as:

1) Drinking coffee makes you talk faster, so if you’re catching up with someone you can get through reams of information in a fraction of the time it usually takes
2) It takes longer to drink coffee than beer, so although rounds of coffee seem like much more of a rip-off than rounds of beer, your cover charge for the space you are occupying is significantly lower
3) Coffee is a good alternative to booze if you want to exchange information with someone during your conversation instead of just passing back and forth meaningless inanities filled with good vibes
4) Coffee houses are quieter and cleaner than pubs, so put you less on edge (if only you weren’t drinking coffee)
5) Coffee shops sell cakes, which are better than all pub snacks (except of course honey roast peanuts – which are basically cakes without the time wasted baking)

So Starbucks, Costa and all your crappy little friends, I would like to say I’m sorry for all the bad things I’ve said about you. Well not all of them. Not nearly all of them in fact, but at least the one about you being worthless wastes of space.