I like this. It’s frequently funny, and has some good acting. It’s flaws are the “good” kind of flaws, in that they are thought provoking more than irritating.

The movie consists of various Tucker Max stories merged into a single plot. If you’ve never read Tucker Max, imagine Hunter S Thompson minus all that tiresome journalism crap. A typical Tucker Max story involves him getting drunk, variously charming and insulting people, and otherwise avoiding his inner emotional issues. His stories aren’t great literature – they’re frequently much better.

The movie revolves around three characters: Tucker, Drew (based on SlingBlade) and Dan (a composite of various Tucker Max friends), who go to a stripclub in Salem, lying to Dan’s fiancee in the process. Then begins a series of tragic misadventures where Tucker learns valuable lessons about how to…well, see for yourself. I’ll say this: the film avoids the classic ending where Tucker Max renounces his crazy ways and learns to be a nice guy. It does something more subversive and clever, while still allowing hope for the character.

The acting’s great. Matt Czuchry’s Tucker almost bounces with a likable energy – which he needs, because his role requires him to do very unlikeable stuff. The SlingBlade character is a misanthropic Napoleon Dynamite who sells every line of dialogue like he’s earning a commission. The interesting part of the movie isn’t the story, it’s the energy generated by the three male leads. IHTSBIH makes me feel the same way I feel about South Park – I don’t care much for its supposedly brilliant satire and social commentary, I just like seeing the four kids fooling around.

Unfortunately, the movie has issues. To be fair, so does Tucker Max, and those issues make him attractive to women. Doesn’t really work here, though. This movie’s issues don’t entice me towards buying it a drink, unless it’s a drink of acetone.

A lot of the lighting is pretty terrible. SOME scenes look good (like ones in the school). Others (such as the opening scene) look like they were shot by college kids on a rented Arri. How’d they fuck it up this badly?

But the main problem is the writing.

The dialogue doesn’t sound like something a person would say. It all sounds “written”. The road trip is a good example. SlingBlade gets hungry and goes on a monologue about the wonders of an American fast food chain (“…if you EVER speak ill of the Pancakewich again I will personally force-feed you one while I fuck you in the butt using the wrapper as a condom and then donkey punch you when the infused syrup nuggets explode in your mouth!”). Tucker Max fans will recognize this rant as a word-for-word recreation of a post the real-life Slingblade left on the Tucker Max Message Board. It’s funny in written form, but having an actor deliver it via monologue just sucks all the life from it. People don’t talk like that.

At one stage, Slingblade says Tucker will probably get AIDS, to which he replies “it’s basically curable. It doesn’t even show up in Magic Johnson’s blood any more.” Slingblade skips a beat and replies “so you’re saying Magic Johnson’s black…and has AIDS…and has it better than me?” …but Tucker didn’t say that. The quip wasn’t set up.

This movie made basically no money, which is a shame. At least Tucker stuck to his guns and retained creative control. I recall him saying in an interview that he would never give it to a Hollywood flack to make, because “there’s no chance he would do anything except fuck it up”. So instead, he kind of fucked it up himself. But would anything else be the Tucker Max way?

In one of his books Neil Strauss says something about male psychology. You can take literally any task in the world, give it grades, rankings, and scores, and men will become obsessed with it. What’s the point of martial arts? To learn how to defend yourself? Probably. Most of the guys at your local McDojo are there to attain a higher belt level.

Donkey Kong is an arcade game released in 1981. It runs on a 3MHz CPU, a 224×256 resolution, and the game mostly involves dodging barrels thrown by a gorilla. But because there’s a world record at stake, grown men play it obsessively.

This documentary covers the war to set the top score in Donkey Kong. For many years, the highest score was held by a hot sauce entrepreneur called Billy Mitchell. Then, in 2007, an unemployed schlub called Steve Wiebe set a new record, causing a scandal in the community.

I mistrust King of Kong as a documentary. Its events seems too perfect, too movie-like, too different to real life. But it’s interesting. Lots of battling egos. I liked the way it captures the exhaustion of extended gaming marathons, with the players’ brains grinding themselves to mush. It’s not barrels or fireballs that kill the players at this level, it’s their own fatiguing mental circuits.

Wheels spin within wheels. How do you verify a high score in a videogame? Is a videotape enough, or do you need to perform it live at a “meet”? Is it possible that Steve Wiebe is playing on a “fixed” board that makes it easier to score? Is he being shafted by Twin Galaxies, the organisation that verifies videogame scores?

This movie could cause a psychoanalyst to start climbing the walls. Billy Mitchell in particular seems to have missed his true calling as a cult leader. He’s creepy, charismatic. He doesn’t speak, he asserts. Steve Wiebe seems much more down to earth, but his obsession with the game is only slightly less odd. There’s other memorable characters, like Walter Day, the incongruous head of Twin Galaxies, and Brian Kuh, a weird yes-man in Billy Mitchell’s corner. He doesn’t seem like a guy who has ever spoken to a girl, although he might not be a virgin if you take my meaning.

Probably the most bizarre person in this movie is Roy Schilt, “Captain Awesome”, who talks about his world record in Missile Command like it’s the Pulitzer Prize, and wonders why he hasn’t appeared on any TV shows yet.

And it does seem like a peculiarly male obsession. What’s one of the most popular games among women? The Sims, which has no goals, no scores, no competition. You win when you decide you’ve won. But men seem to need an element of contest in their games. Put them in suburban homes, put them in suits, give them haircuts (a poor one, in Billy’s case), and it doesn’t matter. Only the dead have seen the end of war.

In 2012, Ufotable adapted Junji Ito’s legendary manga into a 70 minute OVA.

As in the comic, millions of fish suddenly sprout legs and start migrating inland, causing massive destruction. It’s a silly story, but Ito found a way to make it creepy and compelling, and Ufotable doesn’t deviate far from his plot. All the basic points are touched upon briefly – often too briefly (Brevity is the soul of wit, but it’s the soul of laziness, too), and while a different take on the manga might have been ideal, I’m glad they did this. The few times they take the story in a new direction are nearly enough to ruin the entire movie.

There’s lots of fanservice here. Lots of animated bouncing breasts and heroines tripping over so we can see their panties. This is all wrong – Ito’s comics aren’t about cockteasing T&A crap. It disrupts the atmosphere, and takes things to the level of a western horror film. You start wondering when the guy in the hockey mask will show up.

They switched the genders of the main characters, presumably so they could show a nubile young girl getting molested by a giant octopus. The male character Tadashi is now a fifth wheel. He has no purpose in the story because Kaori is now Princess Peach and Mario rolled into one, simultaneously a damsel in distress and a plucky heroine. They also added some secondary female characters who provide T&A and are generally of no import to the story.

A lot of stuff seems awfully rushed, and things that were lingered on unpleasantly. The two chapters in the circus were my favourite part of Gyo, a trippy interlude that reveals things might actually be worse than anyone could ever imagine. But they come across awkwardly in the movie, and it wouldn’t have hurt if they’d been scrapped. The business with Dr Koyanagi is handled pretty shittily as well, and a dark and interesting character becomes an annoying Dr Phibes.

There’s some effective scenes. Kaori carrying an injured friend up a staircase with a giant walking shark charging up the stairs behind her, with the shark kept out of the frame so that we don’t know how far away it is…that’s a spectacularly effective shot, and my heart rate increases every time I see it. Junji Ito has lamented that you cannot easily control pacing in comics, cannot decide how fast the reader experiences the action, and Takayuki Hirao seems keen to show that he is under no such limitation. The special effects are pretty good, and seeing all those walking fish running around Okinawa was nice.

But the soul of Gyo went missing in the transfer. There’s none of the comic’s sense of the absurd made palpable and real. The movie feels campy and trite, and not very scary. The comic had a dense atmosphere. Ultimately the Gyo Anime serves as an exercise in how to adapt a comic almost flawlessly – and yet, somehow, not truly adapt any of it at all.