The Peculier & Disjointed Ramblings of J.A.K.

(or: If You’ve Already This When I Posted This Rant On Facebook, I Apologise (But The Likelihood That Anyone Read That Is Ridiculously Low, So Whatever))

***

In a depressing turn of events, it appears that for most of my life I have watched all the movies I’ve ever watched (and if you know me well enough, you’ll know that I’ve watched a lot of movies) through the filter of a phenomenon known as ”diminished expectations”.

This means that I - as a member of “the audience” - have become so used to so many movies turning out to be utter rubbish, that whenever a particular film has at least one element of it that is in some way positive, I take it as a sign that the film is better than it actually is, and trick myself into liking it, when in reality it’s really a load of balls.

Incidentally, this (metaphorical) red pill realisation is all Mark Kermode’s fault. In his book The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex (which I got for Christmas), he gave a more elaborate, detailed and horribly prevalent argument about “diminished expectations,” which made jaw-droppingly terrible sense and has now made me feel the need (not for speed) to re-assess all my past filmic experiences and determine whether or not I actually liked them because they were properly brilliant, or because my expectations were so low that the film lived only slightly above them.

(NOTE: this phenomenon does not apply to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, almost every Christopher Nolan film, The Truman Show, The Conversation, Serenity, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Children of Men, All The President’s Men, and a whole host of other films that are actually perfect. Just so we’re clear…)

1) Tomorrow is 11/11/11. Why should we care that it’s 11/11/11? Some movies will come out (mostly crappy ones). An Idiot Abroad will finish. Uri Geller will flip out and hopefully bend a spoon into his eye. Other than that, it’s an unremarkable date, so whatevs.

2) This frakking computer of mine keeps overheating and turning off on its own accord. It’s bloody annoying.

3) My mum is nearing 50 (not that she’d want anyone to know that) and is still having her Ginger Snaps troubles every month, which is just inhuman. Each Ginger Snaps trouble is worse than the one before that, and now it’s probably causing the debilitatingly swollen left knee that she now has and won’t stop moaning in excrutiating pain about.

4) The length of my headhair is ludicrous by this point. It hasn’t been cut since Feburary - if I’m not mistaken - and is now making me look like a lesbian. (Don’t you dare laugh!)

5) The sleep patterns I have accrued throughout the years have always been fucked up, but are now more fucked up than I think they’ve ever been.

6) I only like three songs by Nirvana. Am I mad?

7) I have had this maddening unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach for literally months now. Every hour of every day, it’s there, in varying degrees of severity. It just won’t go away, and I hate it. The imaginary shrink in my head hypothesises that it could be a physical and/or psychosematic manifestation of a deep underlying psychological feeling of unsettlingness. But then again, I don’t know anything that a shrink would know, apart from the odd snippets of things mentioned in In Treatment and whatnot, and my brain is never to be trusted, so I’m really just making all that up.

8) I really am a bit of a dick, aren’t I?

It’s the only explanation as to why I have such a torrid and unfortunate history with headphones, because I’m pretty sure that literally every single set of headphones I have ever owned got broken sooner or later…but mostly sooner.

However, I think I know who cursed me!

It must’ve been Mrs. Hall - my primary school teacher from Year 2 - who turned me from left-handed to right-handed through institutionalised abuse!

She was an absolute witch already, but now I have further proof.

(Stars, hide your fires! These here are my desires - to continually slap her right hand with a ruler and/or my own vengeance-seeking hand as she writes down random things I think of, until she’s left-handed, and then shout avada kedavra! at her and finish the duel that she began! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! (Although, that being said, I don’t want to be sent to prison - or even worse, Azkaban - for smoting a she-devil, so I’ll leave it for now, and continue along my headphone-breaking path…))

Two programmes have just begun on two different channels, and both of them are shows that I just do not understand the appeal of.

There’s Spooks, which is starting off its final series (huzzah!). Why do people like it? It’s always bleakly photographed, always highly unrealistic, always stalely written and everyone always dies all the time. Yawn.

And there’s Downton Abbey. Just…just…WHY? What is the appeal?! Every line of dialogue repeats information and exposition already told literally seconds before, whilst simultaneously making an oblique reference to Downton, and the story and characters have all been seen innumerable times before in innumerable other period dramas, and it’s all so prim and proper and stiff…and not in a good way.

So why is it that everyone up and down the UK (and, apparantly, the US and anywhere else these shows get shown) loves these shows so much? Am I just unappreciative of these dramas when I should be finding them brilliant? Or am I just waiting to see some television that’s also of the extremely high calibre of…say…Doctor Who, or Forbrydelsen (a.k.a. The Killing), or Spiral, or something done by Jimmy McGovern? (Yes, his stuff ventures into unrealistic territory, too, I know…but at least he writes his dialogue and characters in such a way as you believe it to be possible.)

Still, at the very very least, I suppose I should be thankful that Europe is capable of creating such good television in any sort of capacity, whilst America seems to steep into deeper and deeper lows. (The US version of The Killing? The upcoming Blues Brothers and Hannibal Lecter TV shows? Anything whatsoever that gets made on that E! channel? And so on…)