You could literally have an entire magazine on reasons why this year sucked. And this douche would make the front cover:
Terry Schivo, runaway bride, Tom Cruise, Exxon gas-price hike, Harriet Myers, Bush assuring us we're going to be in Iraq for a long, long, time. the list goes on. Hey, it got so bad even Hunter S. Thompson couldn't take it anymore.
But I got other things I'd rather be doing today so I'll keep it short:
Started with a tsunami kicking the third world's ass and mainly the people suffering from the shitty economy being asked to pony up donations or elese America will look stingy. Then peaked when Bush was busy taking his month long vacation while we were supposedly fighting two wars, mothers who lost their sons in Iraq picketed outside demanding answers, and a major city got wiped off the map only 300 miles away. And we end with 'W' insisting Big Brother should be watching you and that occupying Iraq for a long as possible is somehow vital to defending our very civilization as we know it.
Music:
Yeah, music sucked this year but then again I didn't have much time to dig for all the good stuff like I usually do. But the music industry will be bitching at the fact that music sales are down 12 percent. And, of course it's not because:
-- The economy is going downhill. People are buying a lot less of a lot of other stuff as well.
-- People are having to pay more for gas instead.
-- Music is shitter this year.
-- People buying mp3s on iTunes, Napster, etc.
-- The drop in new music releases.
-- The rise of indie music. (people not buying music on major labels.)
-- People selling their music upon finding out it's crap and....
-- More people buying from the used CD market instead.
-- The massive CD recall this year due to harmful copy protection software (smooth move, Sony)
Nope, it's from people who love music and have no money (those evil junior high schoolers and college students mainly) downloading music.
You know, at least when McDonald's sees a drop in fast-food sales, they actually know that people just simply AREN'T BUYING THEIR FOOD. Or that, for one reason or another, people are taking their extra money for fast food and going next door to Subway, people are plain discouraged from eating there, or times are a bit harder this year and people are just not eating out that much.
Movies:
The movie industry griped pretty early about the drop of people going to the movie theaters. And there's good reason for the lack of box office gross:
There were no good movies for the first four months of 2005. The first actual good movie of the year was Sin City in April. I remember at the end of 2004, Meet the Fockers made almost as much money as The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring simply because it was the only movie in theaters that a mass majority of people wanted to go see. The rest were Oscar contenders. Build it and they will come. But because an overly insane amount of people didn't come to Episode III and War of the Worlds in order to make up for the drought: Yep, the movie industry blames BitTorrent for the people not going to theaters. Actually to be fair, the movie industry is actually spending a good amount of time examining the quality of movies this year as well as observing the fact that the amount of people who'd rather wait for it on DVD and watch it at home is rising. After all, it's ridiculous for anyone to think that the family household firing up the computer, clicking on BitTorrent, and enjoying Charlie and Chocolate Factory on their LCD monitor is becoming, in any way, more common.
2005 did produce my favorite movie of all-time (beating out the former title-holder, Fight Club).
Robert Rodriguez did what everyone in Hollywood told he couldn't do and couldn't be done. Something so simple but no filmmaker would actually dare to do. A fundamentally strict literal frame-for-frame adaptation of a comic book. No screenwriter, no storyboard artist, no creative director artistic space. And for Frank Miller, who has had the experience of having Hollywood distort his work to the point of ridiculousness, co-directing Sin City was the complete opposite of what he thought came to know formerly as the film-making process. The result is me never getting bored of that first action scene of Marv bursting out of the hotel room and plowing his way through the cops. Sin city is this decade's Pulp Fiction in the sense that this is the film that'll be showing film-makers how it's done as well as being a sign of good things to come: The Sin City sequels: A Dame to Kill For and Hell and Back. Zack Synder (Dawn of the Dead) is currently filming another one of Frank Miller's novels. The film adaptation of 'V for Vendetta' backed by the Wachowski brotherswill be out next year. And James Cameron promises his adaptation of the entire Battle Angel Alita comic book series will be the greatest film achievement since The Lord of the Rings. And hopefully the end of bad things; Aeon Flux was by far the worst adaptation since 1997's Spawn.
Video games:
Video games continued to rock on with the ongoing rise in technology. And with the launch of the Xbox 360 and the very promising Playstation 3 due out next spring, we are definably cruising over a horizon. I am kicking myself for not standing in line and buying an Xbox 360 though. Totally saw the “number one Christmas gift” scramble coming and didn't bother to cash in. Btw, this video games portion is rather short, mainly because the video game industry as not yet waged war against consumers for any drop in sales. But are this year's props and boners
Call of Duty 2: With the intense explosion and sound that'll kick you ass. It definitely aims to give the experience of World War.
Resident Evil 4: This game had me laughing and screaming at the same time. Awesome.
Quake 4: Definetly worth the wait
And SoulCalibur 3: ‘nuff said
Boner of the year goes to:
Pushing people to buy movies…. especially for their PSP.
Wanna be able to watch Kill Bill or Sin City on a tiny little screen while you're standing in line at the DMV? Gotta shell out another 20 bucks, pal.
Politics:
Last year, the people of America felt the country was going in the wrong direction. But due to a weak opposing candidate and in fear of the shadowy threat of terrorism, Bush was narrowly re-elected anyway. And now this the first year of us paying the price. When you toss car keys to a drunk driver you can expect what happens. And when you toss the keys to the country to a rich greedy spoiled son-of-a-president baby boomer with a criminal record (drunk driving) you can also expect what happens. Enjoy the ride.
|
