How I hate the box office

This weekend saw Transformers 4: Age of Extinction and Mrs Brown's Boys D'Movie top the US and UK box office charts respectively. Now, I haven't seen either film, so shall refrain from labeling those who have made them such idiots until after I have done so, but for contrast, here are the peak chart positions for some of my favourite films of the last year or so. Pass this on to anyone who's spent their money to see these films and see if they feel proud of their selves.

Remember. Mrs Brown's Boys is the UK's number one movie this week. Number one. ONE.

How to save the games industry in 60 seconds flat

Lately, I've been, perhaps, somewhat disenfranchised with video games. I always assumed it was due to my growing interest in film and inability to hold too many interests at once, but there seemed to be very little for me in gaming. The video games media are hounds, the developers fronted by heartless suits and the community overflowing with the ravished and the dumb. All unfair generalisations, but I suppose I just found cinema more welcoming, and as I began to see that, I began to wonder why I continued to follow games as I had before. The list of games I actively wanted to play shrunk to a handful of first-party Nintendo titles. All of these were perhaps a factor, but I do wonder whether the true reasoning is infinitely simpler and infinitely sadder: I like to view video games as an art. While Super Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time may not necessarily be thought-provokers, they are intricately designed to within an inch of its life. You wouldn't discount van Gough's Sunflowers as art because they're not there to question the human condition: Instead, they celebrate what there is in this world. In the case of video games, they celebrate what there isn't.

The Search for Another Frances Ha

I all but sacrificed my late teenage years in favour of sitting alone in a plush chair accompanied only by a projector and a few dozen other people, whom I largely chose to ignore. I made a point of seeing near-enough every film that saw UK cinema release. On a regular basis, I would wonder why. Upon opening Facebook, a means of viewing the loudmouthed and the insecure's personal highlights reels, I would see people performing the kind of actions those on the screen I was slavishly watching were doing (Namely: Having friends). The majority of films released are, almost by definition, average, and a further 60-odd percent of the remaining films are rubbish. Last year, I sat through four movies where Bruce Willis contemplates his retirement whilst holding a machine gun. I sat through the Moshi Monsters Movie, for crying out loud. They say time is money, and if that's the case I feel it would only be just if I were reimbursed on a similar pay scheme to that Willis demands for movies nowadays.

However, once in a while a film comes along that makes all the glazed-eyed bald-headed snooze-a-thons in the world worthwhile. More precisely, once. Frances Ha was my favourite film of last year, and one that reinvigorated my love of both cinema and of the world. It's a film filled with such frame-to-frame effervescence that I feared the projector may combust and leave into an optimistic doughnut in the place of ashes. Greta Gerwig puts in the performance of a lifetime, and by which I don't just mean the best performance she'll ever put in, I mean the best performance I've seen in my lifetime. It's perfect, encapsulating cinema that swept me up over it's 87 minutes into a ball from which it has yet to release me. I've seen it seven times now, and after five of these viewings I've thought to myself "This is hands-down my favourite film". Very few films have ever garnished this level of affection from me. Certainly none of the standard-issue action flicks and hackneyed romcoms have hit me that hard.