Down The Hill

Conditions: Really Nice.

Don't Wanna be a Lemming

So with the U.S election out of the way, how’s the work coming on avoiding the oncoming fiscal cliff?

But Republicans in Washington have yet to budge from their opposition to tax increases for the rich. House speaker John Boehner has argued that Obama's plan to raise revenue by $1.6tn over the next decade would be a "crippling blow" to the US economy.

In a downbeat assessment of the current round of bipartisan talks, Boehner said Friday: "There's a stalemate. Let's not kid ourselves. Right now, we're almost nowhere."

If the fiscal cliff is not avoided, Obama is intent on pinning the blame on Republicans. During Saturday's radio address, he said Democrats were ready to pass legislation to avert triggering the the fiscal cliff.

- guardian.co.uk/

Well, that’s great that Obama has figured out who to blame if the world is tipped over into another giant recession, but personally I’d be much more comfortable if he had a plan to, I don’t know, lock the republicans into a room and not allow any of them out until they had agreed on a compromise in order to avoid the cliff.


Film Review: Alex Cross

Okay, James Patterson’s books have been wildly successful over the years and two of them were even made into films starring Morgan Freeman a while ago. Now it seems this franchise too has been rebooted, with Tyler Perry now in the lead role, as we go back to the days when Cross was just a detective living in Detroit. He is after a particularly vicious and psychopathic assassin, played by Matthew Fox. Fox has been hired to kill the top executives of a company, but decides to go off on a tangent when Cross gets in his way. Swift vengeance then occurs. The film turns into a vendetta, where Cross and his sidekick are after the bad guy no matter what.

What happened to thriller movies? They used to be, well, thrilling. They used to be intense and exciting. This one is totally hopeless. The bad guy is a moron. The actual bad guy is a moron, surprising us at the end of the movie with his existence, as if we were supposed to be caring. Tyler Perry has taken over the mantle of Cross from Morgan Freeman, and he’s totally all at sea. He plays white hot anger at about the same level as finding out his coffee has gone cold. And it’s that same sense of indifference that seeps out into the audience, taking away our sense of caring or investing in the story in any way. Will Cross figure out the mystery? Will he bring the evil killer to justice? Will we stay awake to the credits?

I don’t know if they’ll be bothered to make any further of these books into films, considering how successful they were I have to imagine that they will, and furthermore that they’ll stick with Tyler Perry as the “new” Cross. If this is indeed the case, may I suggest a few things to help us cope. First, more action sequences. If we can’t have actual thrills in our thriller movie anymore, then maybe we can just get by with action instead. Secondly, would it be at all possible to have female characters in these films that don’t get killed by the halfway point? That would be nice. Bump off some of the male idiots instead if you must have a body count. And thirdly, could you make the end credits music really really loud please, so that those of us that lose the fight will still know it’s time to get up and wander back to the car park. One RPG out of five.



- Peace out