Am I Insane?

The answer to the title is no, I am not. But I am doing a thing called Insanity at the moment which is a 60 day fitness programme by a man called Shaun T. who definitely thinks it's "insane" (his own words).

Basically my partner told me about a little thing called Insanity which apparently maaaaany people knew about except me, but sure unless it was advertised somehow in the middle of a game of Metroid, how was I sposed to know about it right? As mentioned before, it's a 60 day fitness programme which is spread across 9 weeks in which you do a roughly hour long workout for 6 days of the week, Sunday being your rest day. It's core muscle training and cardio mixed gruellingly into one horrific package of exercise.

I will admit, it is tough, very tough. It's even more tough when it's apparently recommended for people who are in the fitness range considered "athlete" and when you are trying to work around your busy schedule, which Shaun T. seems to have no problem not taking it into consideration. Athlete is not a category I fall into and I had literally just quit smoking so my lung capacity certainly hadn't (and most likely still hasn't) returned to normal.

But my high strung life of customer service and mediocre diet wasn't doing my body the justice I thought it deserved so I took the plunge into fitness madness and began my march to "having the beach body I've ALWAYS dreamed of!".

And then I could hang out with hot blonde people being hot all day long and never worry about life again!

The first week was painful. I could barely finish the warm-up which lasted a meagre 12 mins of the usual 45 mins workout. And the worst part was, every time I finished that warm-up I knew that that was the EASY part. Being the trooper I was, I forced my fledging spirit forward with ultimate reluctance until my muscles practically sizzled like bacon. That was after 3 mins extra, still 30 mins to go. UGH!

This was basically the whole first week in a nutshell, I stopped consistently throughout the workouts to catch my breath, took non-recommended prolonged breaks during the different workouts and very quickly became bitter towards Shaun T. and his workout entourage. They were all too positive and happy for how I felt. I also recycled my workout outfit since it would be a waste of electricity to wash it everyday so I was becoming stinkier, like some weird smell RPG game, where I levelled up my stinky stat. everyday. To top it off you feel more and more stiff each day, walking in a crippling horrifying gait. It was just...awful.

But then rest day arrived. That glorious Sunday, I will never forget it. It was one of those days when you would wake up and say "fuck my life!" without actually meaning it. It was great, I could be stiff all I wanted and not have the face the 45 mins smugness of Shaun T and his entourage of finely toned superhuman smiles. It was a good day. Until Monday arrived, or so I thought it would be bad. But something strange happened, I was no longer stiff to my bones, I could move freely without having to make sure I didn't look like I was mocking someone with a physical ailment. I was... normal again.

This was too good to be true though, I thought, as I begun my dramatic descent into Insanity workout bitterness. But lo and behold, I made it through without exhaustion, but without stopping, and without any creeping stiffness either. Something was happening to me. I was seeing... RESULTS! That's right, after even just a week I was surprisingly already feeling the results of this Insanity programme and for this alone I could recommend it to anyone.

These results continued into the forthcoming weeks with surprising speed as I got much better at the workouts, I was even beginning to see small changes in my stinky body, I was pleased. But something else was happening that was not so good, I was running out of patience. Not for the exercise, but with Shaun T. and his entourage. I know it's a series of exercise videos made to appeal to everyone with motivational slurs, "dig deeper" being the main one, but my god, the smugness became all too apparent.

The Queen of smug: Tanya, Tonya, Tania (there was no one correct spelling for her name apparently)

As I got to know each person individually from the different workout videos I could almost close my eyes and identify who it was by level of smug shooting out of my screen. Tanya is amazing but what I wouldn't give to switch kick her smug face in some of the videos (although if I did that I would be breaking my laptop screen). Shaun T. also has this awful habit of making you dread the next workout as he says "this is about to get insane, I'm not looking forward to this" non stop. How are you supposed to look forward to doing it when your instructor is telling you how much he hates it?!

I'm actually still not finished the workout programme yet, I'm currently on week 7 out of 9 and the second half of the workout programme ups the ante. They're now 55-63 mins workouts and have severely increased the intensity of the actual workout forms. This is not a problem to me. I actually enjoy the increased intensity because I feel like I'm getting more results. Unfortunately the smugness has also increased three fold. It's making the workouts just about bearable at this stage and I honestly have found myself saying "oh my god shut-the-f@#k-up!" out loud at the screen (much to my other housemates' confusions). Tanya smiles and acts like it's simple, mockingly staring out of the camera at you. I've seen you when you think you're not on the camera, I know you're slinking off for a 5 min date with your water. And Shaun T., while always super positive, matter of factly brags about how good he looks. He does look good though. BUT STILL! It becomes annoying beyond patience. Hence the screaming at my screen.

"SHUT UP SHAUN T. JUST SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!!!"

Anyways, as it stands now, that is where I am with this Insanity workout. I'm going insane with it for all the wrong reasons, but even with the atomic powered SMUG  I think I can still recommend it even without having finished it. I don't think I've ever been as in shape, built muscle so easily and quickly and genuinely felt as energetic as after doing these workouts for the past 6 and a half weeks. If you wanna get in shape fast and genuinely get fit, this is definitely the way to go if not just a good starting point. Also if you have some sort of anti-smug dwarvish armour than I believe you could really enjoy this as well, it's pretty rewarding and satisfying. In the end, I believe it will be worth it as the expense of some of my sanity. As Shaun T. would say "dig deeper". Whatever the f#@k that means. (I know what he means but it's stupid)

Pacific Rim - I Heart Destruction

So my house mate and I decided that the best cure for our hangovers was a trip to the cinema. In the state of hangovers, the easiest thing to follow is a good ol' big dumb action film, something to excite the brain without having to think about why.

That's what helped us to decide that Pacific Rim fit the bill.

Don't let my comments make you think this is a start to a rant about how bad the film is. In fact, I actually enjoyed it. A lot. There's a lot of reasons people could easily point out why this movie is bad or dumb, but in my opinion I think the film deserves a free pass, since it embraces these "dumb" elements for the fun ride it takes us on. That's not to say that these "bad" elements are necessarily always a fun thing though, every action movie usually has a good ol' cob of corn thrown in for hell knows why. Pacific Rim unfortunately plants a field of corn and then tries to serve it to you. All of it.

That aside, these things are just there to drive the simple story along. Giant monsters named "Kaiju" have come from a spatial tear at the bottom of the Pacific ocean. They are huge (seriously, they're enormous) and they're here to destroy everything. This of course forces the world to stop fighting with each other and work together, which results in building giant robots to fight them and blah blah blah... The story is nothing special, same ol' apocalypse story that is just slightly more fleshed out then the usual tripe. The more unique story elements in the film is the idea of "drifting" which is joining two minds so to operate the films giant robots, which means the operators know everything about their co-operators lives for the time they are driving the machines, but unfortunately it is used to little effect. But that's fine, because given the tone of the film, Mr. Del Toro wasn't giving us a thoughtful exercise on the intricacies of the human mind.

 Kaiju, the stars of the film.

The film basically picks up year after the first encounters and the situation is becoming more and more dire as the Kaiju appearance becomes more frequent. That in combination with them getting larger and more deadly.
Our main hero is basically an every action hero cliché with a traumatic past which becomes a central struggle for him to overcome (by fighting giant monsters in a giant robot). Then there's a slew of others who are there too. Honestly I cared little for all of the characters as they were all literally there to fit the respective roles required in the action hero roster. The only stand-out mention was a fun cameo from Ron Perlman as a black market dealer and a much less, but slightly touching story, involving the lead lady characters' motivation and past. Apart from that, there's little emotion derived from relating to the characters in the film.

Now, that's pretty much the bad stuff out of the way, I'll get on to the good stuff which happens to be really good. The real stars of the film here are the Kaiju. They're animated and designed wonderfully with tonnes of character for giant monsters. They are also pretty terrifying in their own right. The films many action sequences show shots of them lunging through buildings towards the camera and you can't help but feel the sheer terror of a skyscraper sized creature barrelling through a city towards you. This combined with giant robots, called Jaegers, fighting them makes for some sizeable spectacle and action sequences.

Indeed it is here the film elevates itself most, the creative team behind this clearly had more than fun choreographing and plotting the directions and developments of each battle. The spectacle of it all is off the charts, the Jaegers are all unique with their own silly but hilariously destructive and fun weapons, the Kaiju are all different and each match different purposes for the destruction they wreak and then to top it off the bigger action scenes makes for some crazy city wide fun destruction (using a cargo ship as a baseball bat was a hilarious stroke of genius). You can easily spot out all of the plot holes and logic holes of these sequences as you watch, e.g. Why would you not try to lure a gigantic monster out of a city before pummelling it to bits so as to save the destruction of a city? Why pummel them with giant metallic fists when they clearly have weapons which do much more catastrophic damage to these creatures? But these are questions that you can easily ignore because it's just too damn fun to care about them, in particular an action sequence about two thirds into the film makes the price of your ticket worth it alone. These are also elevated by a simple but great score that gives some life to the "horn of doom" which has become abused consistently since Inception.

The Jaegers, the giant fighting robots of the film

 The film is a little over-long at about 2 hours and 10 mins, but thankfully the action sequences are frequent enough that they break up the mindless story and cardboard characters. What you're here mainly to see is the monsters and robots and that's it. Some people have also complained that it is basically a mish-mash of other big action films; transformers, cloverfield, godzilla. And I agree, but I don't see it as a problem. I see it more as a respectable love letter to these franchises and it does do some things much better than the more recent iterations of these franchises too.

Overall the film in a whole is just a big loud dumb but really fun action movie, with sprinkles of genius and truckloads of destruction and action welded together into a pretty cohesive machine. It's definitely elevated by the great creature design, creative action sequences (and you'll probably say "wow" to one or two of them) and Del Toro's obvious visual flare. Go see it in the cinema, it's what big screens are made for.

One To Watch - Avatar The Last Airbender: Legend of Ang

So I recently had the privilege of finishing a show that I consider to be one of my favourites. You may have heard of it since it apparently was (and rightly so) wildly popular back upon it's initial release. It's a little Nickelodeon show called Avatar The Last Airbender: Legend of Ang. I know I heard of it back in the day, but it wasn't something that caught my attention initially, as I had the naive perspective of kids channel = kids programming. This is even true to a certain degree within the show (all deaths are merely mentioned off screen, certain situations are implied instead of shown), this show still managed to maintain an amazing balance of being a energetic fun show for children while also being a rewarding and thoughtful show for adults to digest.

"Sokka, Katara, Ang and the rest of the gang"

The show does come with the usual tropes and themes of an epic fantasy; a world at war, fire is bad, water is good, magical elements, coming of age, finding ones' destiny, life/death, etc. But while that's all the typical ingredients to a show, it's really how you execute these themes and story lines that makes them stand tall and fresh in their own right.

The show manages to combine a blend of western and Japanese animation while strongly drawing from oriental influences and stories to give a surprisingly rich and detailed world for a children's programme. While having an interesting and well populated world is all good and that, where the show really shines is in its characters. Everyone from Ang, Katara, Sokka to Iroh, Zuko and Azula, all have interesting back stories, believable arcs (in the context of the show) and intriguing perspectives on their destinies. Indeed one of the most fascinating characters to watch throughout the course of the three seasons is the evolution of Prince Zuko. Without spoiling anything, he becomes one of the most fascinating characters to watch because while the tried and true themes of destiny and choice are woven through his character arc, the writers really always nail his emotional consequences and ordeals. He's a tragic character that is a product of his upbringing which the writers use to propel the show to dizzying emotional heights.

"Prince Zuko, The Firebender"

In fact, this is one of the prime reasons I was so impressed with the show. The writers never, and I mean NEVER forget what has come before each episode in the show. They consistently build upon it's foundations from the beginning and never let each character forget the choices they have made and it's extremely satisfying to watch these choices shape each character in the show. Too often with any TV programme that follows a serial storyline, the writers are willing to just drop previous choices or plots to bring a new dramatic arc for the sake of providing a new energy, but not here. Here, every story is seen through to the end, never even forgetting characters or plots from standalone episodes. All I can say is it is an impressive feat.

And while it is a kids show at heart, avoiding on screen death (which is actually something that becomes a central plot point towards the end), the show certainly has its darker moments which the writers aren't afraid to insert, particularly when a nasty spirit called Koh makes an appearance. I won't spoil him for you but I was fairly shocked that he was allowed to be written in, considering his appearance, nature and story. The other end of the darker spectrum comes in the form of the character Azula. She adds an intensity to the show that is savage and violent, really upping the ante when she makes her appearance. She also has a particularly morbid and scary climax to her arc I won't say any more about.

"Water, Fire, Earth and Wind, the four elements that shape the world of Avatar The Last Airbender"

To top it all off the show has a wonderful sense of humour. It combines a slapstick childish humour with more outlandish and bizarre jokes to give it a truly unique energy that I'm not quite sure I've seen in other programmes. This in combination with the animation, which still holds up well by today's standards, helps Avatar The Last Airbender stand that much taller among the usual crowd of children's programming. In fact the animation is extremely detailed and accurate to martial arts fighting styles during many of the shows' intense action sequences; you will be impressed by some of the pivotal action scenes sprinkled through the seasons.

I don't think I could go into much more detail about the show without spoiling it for you, all I can say is watch a few episodes, let yourself become absorbed into the show and enjoy the ride, it's a great and emotionally fulfilling one and if you enjoy animation, this is one not to be missed!

Sound off in the comments below if you have seen it and would like to discuss!