[A response to “A Girl You Should Date”]

Date a guy who plays video games. Date a guy who spends his money on games instead of soap. He has problems with personal space because he smells a bit. Date a guy who has a list of games he wants to play, who has had a game store reward card since he was twelve.

Find a guy who plays video games. You’ll know that he does because he will always have a portable console in his bag. He’s the one lovingly looking over at the new releases in the game store, the one who quietly cries out when he finds the game he wants. You see the weird dude sniffing that freshly opened game case immediately after leaving the shop? That’s the gamer. They can never resist smelling the games, especially when they are awesome.

He’s the guy playing on his 3DS while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at his mug, the full fat milk is floating on top because he’s completely engrossed in Mario Kart. Lost in a world of Nintendo’s making. Sit down. he might give you a glare, as most guys who play do not like to be interrupted. Ask him if he likes the game.

Buy him anothor cup of coffee.

Let him know what you really think of Miyamoto. See if he’s into CoD or Battlefield. Understand that if he says he enjoyed the first Bioshock but didn’t think so much of the second, he’s not just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask him if he loves Alice, and he’ll probably give you a very similar answer.

It’s easy to date a guy who plays video games. Give him games for his birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give him the gift of fun, in disc form. Give him Mass Effect, GTA, Portal, Batman. Let his know that you understand that these worlds are love. Understand that he knows the difference between games and reality but by god, he’s going to try to make his life a little like his favorite game. It will never be your fault if he does.

He has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to him. He won’t care so long as it gives him a few more minutes playing.

Fail him. Because a guy who plays video games knows that failure always leads up to the climax, to a chance to rescue the princess from the castle. Because guys who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two. Like Ganondorf, or Bowser.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Guys who play gamesunderstand that people, like NPCs, develop.

If you find a guy who plays video games, keep him close. When you find him up at 2 AM clutching a control pad, weeping, make him a cup of tea and hold him. You may lose him for a couple of hours but he will always come back to you. He’ll talk as if the characters in the game are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose over Xbox live or PSN, and that will be awesome.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names like “Link” or “Master Chief”. He will introduce your children to RPGs and shooters, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together, and he will recall Skyrim under his breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a guy who plays video games because you deserve it. You deserve a guy who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give him monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a guy who plays video games.

Or better yet, date a guy MAKES video games!

So Christmas is nearly here, and with the end of the year in sight, my thoughts have turned to the movies I’ve seen over the past 12 months. Some have been good, some have been bad, many have been thoroughly shrugworthy. Here’s some of the best (and worst).

The Best

5. The Guard

Criminally overlooked for anything like a decent run at the major multiplexes but rightly praised by critics, The Guard is an unlikely gem. Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle are the odd couple police partnership charged with taking down a murderous international drug smuggling operation currently working out of Ireland, headed by Mark Strong (surely one of the busiest men in acting?). Watching a difficult friendship blossom between Cheadle’s tight ass FBI Agent and Gleeson’s drunk, womanising Guard is hilarious, the performances are spot on and it’s excellently paced right up until the explosive finale.

Buy this movie right now! You owe it to yourself!

4. Senna

 As someone who’s never really taken an interest in motorsports, I went into Senna based on recommendations and hoping for the best. It turned out to be absolutely gripping, becoming almost unbearably tense as we led to to film’s inevitable conclusion. Seeing, as you do, the sheer amount of love that so many people had for Ayrton Senna makes it impossible not to be deeply moved as you watch the collected footage of the indicent at the San Marino Gran Prix in 1994 and aftermath.

Buy this movie right now! You owe it to yourself!

3. Super 8

Paying reverence to the style of filmaking seen in classic blockbusters such as ET, Super 8 was my film of the summer. Genuinely scary and tense in places, and surprisingly moving toward the end, this movie actually made me feel, the same way so many of my childhood favourites did and still do. If you didn’t feel at least a little choked up after Joel Courtney’s final little speech, I don’t believe you are fully human.

Buy this movie right now! You owe it to yourself!

2. Drive

Drive was this autumn’s best surprise at the movies. Ryan Gosling plays an unnamed stunt driver who moonlights as the best getaway driver for hire around. He is inadvertantly dragged into the life and affections of his next door neighbour, Carey Mulligan, whose ex-con husband has to perform one last job to satisfy his drug dealer bosses. Things spiral rapidly out of control, and Gosling becomes Mulligan’s knight on horseback hero. The film fires along at a cracking pace, and characters are dispatched with barely a second thought. There’s an ace soundtrack that fits the tone of the film perfectly, and a supporting cast including Ron Perlman, Albert Brooks and Bryan Cranston, whose TV show Breaking Bad I’m a big fan of.

Buy this movie right now! You owe it to yourself!

1. True Grit

As a huge fan of the Coen brothers movies, and The Big Lebowski in particular, I was very excited to hear that the Coens and Jeff Bridges would be working together on a new film, even though it was a to be remake of a Western, a genre I’m not overly familiar with. As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about, as this turned out to be an exceptional film. The story is fairly simple - a young, precocious girl hires two lawmen to help her bring her father’s killer to justice in the Old West. But as with the best Coen movies, the pleasure is in the telling of the story. Their trademark humour is tuned down in True Grit to suit the film’s cinematic tone, but there are still plenty of laughs to be had from the witty script, especially from the competitive animosity between Bridges’ drunk US Marshall Rooster Cogburn, and the pretentious & arrogant Texas Ranger, LeBoeuf, played by Matt Damon. All three leads (Hailee Steinfeld plays the humourless but still endearing Matty Ross) are played faultlessly, and it’s the sort of film in which every shot seems to be somehow slightly more beautiful than the last. Topped off by a beautiful score by Carter Burwell, this is by far and away my favourite film of the year.

Buy this movie right now! You owe it to yourself!

Honorable Mentions

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows prt 2

Although I’ve not really got on with the previous Potter films, I was tempted along to this by the the climactic scenes offered by the trailer, and I came away having really enjoyed it. The exciting pace makes me wish they could have ditched the padding from the previous Potter films (which you can still find in this film) and slimmed the whole thing down a LOTR-style trilogy, although I’m sure a billion Potter fans would disagree.

You really should pick this movie up some time, it’s pretty good!

X-Men : First Class

Another smash from Matthew Vaughn (after last year’s brutal but incredibly entertaining Kick Ass), First Class is the best X-Men movie yet. It’s written with a lot of humour and heart, and leading men James MacAvoy and Michael Fassbender play out the frought friendship between politically opposed mutants Charles Xavier / Professor X and Erik Lehnsherr / Magneto perfectly. There’s plenty of other mutants in the supporting cast, but as with the other X-Men films, very few of them get the time and attention to feel fully fleshed out.

You really should pick this movie up some time, it’s pretty good!

Bridesmaids

“Chick flicks can be funny!” said the reviews. Of course they can. But then what’s a chick flick? A flick (movie) for chicks (women)? But not for men? I don’t know. I do know that I found Bridesmaids hilarous throughout. It only benefits from the obvious comparisons to this summer’s chief turd, The Hangover Part 2. They were both crude and offensive and equal measures, but Bridesmaids was written with heart, and a clear fondness for its characters. The Hangover 2’s phoned-in writers didn’t seem to care what any of their characters did or said, so long as it got a laugh. The gender of the lead characters doesn’t really come into it.

You really should pick this movie up some time, it’s pretty good!

Attack The Block

As a big fan of his radio and TV work with Adam Buxton, I was really looking forward to this first film from Joe Cornish, and for the most part it didn’t disappoint. The film aimed for and achieved the same throwback feel as Super 8, but played out in a modern London tower block and estate. Being honest, I struggled to really relate to or care for many of the central characters (it does begin with them mugging a young girl, after all), which kept me from loving this film as much as I might have hoped to.

You really should pick this movie up some time, it’s pretty good!

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes

ROTPOTA was clever, modern take on the origins of the intelligent chimps of Planet Of The Apes, although its success makes it likely that it will be the first of a series of new Apes movies. Andy Serkis plays his mocap chimp Ceaser to perfection, the human cast do a decent enough job, and the storyline itself makes much more sense than you have any right to expect from a film about chimps taking over the world via San Francisco.

You really should pick this movie up some time, it’s pretty good!

Dishonourable Mentions

Cowboys and Aliens

I love the idea of alien invasion being a part of the past instead of the future (think Predator), so I was looking forward to this quite a lot. Shame it turned out to be a bit of a stinker.

Don’t buy this movie! Seriously!

Battlefield Los Angeles

It’s amazing something so big and loud as Battlefield LA could be so crushingly dull. And the aliens were rubbish.

Don’t buy this movie! Seriously!

Transformers : Dark of The Moon

Fuck you, Michael Bay. Seriously. The rumours that you may yet sign up to direct a 4th movie make me stabby.

Don’t buy this movie! Seriously!

Friends With Benefits

Two young, smug, and beautiful ad execs are having it away while trying to avoid falling in love. They fall in love and are really smug about it. Yay.

Don’t buy this movie! Seriously!

The Hangover Part 2

Urgh. Why?

Don’t buy this movie! Seriously!

[Disclaimer: The links to Amazon throughout this post are tracked via Amazon Associates, so if you go on to buy anything from Amazon after clicking them, they bung me a bit of cash. Baby needs shoes!]

So I come home last night, and I’m pulling my car on to the road opposite, preparing to reverse into the driveway. There’s two cars with their engines running and lights on behind me, but the drivers seem to know each other and are chatting with some bloke on the pavement, so I don’t really think anything of it. I get out of the my car to go open the gate to our driveway and WHAM, I look behind to see this massive Phil Mitchell lookalike, who’s just turned up out of nowhere, smashing in the windows of these two cars with a metal baseball bat. I jump back in my car as these other two speed off, away from this crazy bastard, and just as I’m thinking I should do the same thing he sprints past me, chasing them. They get away from him immediately, of course, so he turns round and looks me in the eyes. He looks pissed off but seems to realise that, whoever was in those cars, I’m not with them, and just wanders off, presumably to take some more steroids. I park the car up, grab a broom and sweep up the glass, as you just know it’d be me that ends up getting a puncture thanks to that bald bastard. As I’m sweeping, a couple of other people bring their yard brushes and help me out. It was like my very own mini-riot.