All my life, I’ve dreamed only of one thing: owning a fire breathing pig.

Now, 24 years after the birth of my wish and 14 years after the inception of the Pokémon franchise, my dream has come true. Ladies and gentlemen, Nintendo proudly presents Pokabu:

Don't you just want to throw him into hot water and turn him into Ryoga?

Yes, yes you do.

Pokabu is joined by a grass snake Pokémon, Tsutarja:

Look at this smug guy! He thinks he's got it all sewn up! What kinda snake has hands and feet? I could imagine him being played by Noel Fielding.

Of course, the road to starter Pok̩mon has not always been smooth. The holy trinity of Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle has not quite been matched. Totodile, Chikorita and Cyndaquil didn't have the same charm or flair. People have an obscene obsession with Mudkip, but of the third generation only Torchic has any real traction. The best and most iconic set of starters since the first generation were the chimp, penguin and bonsai turtle team of Chimchar, Piplup and Turtwig Рand even then Piplup grew up to be the Penguin of the Opera.

So it is with some hesitation that I show you the weakest link in generation five's starter chain, Mijumaru:

Yeah, I don't know what that is. Bulbapedia refers to it as a "Sea Otter” Pokémon. It looks like a depressive snowman desperately trying to escape a children's beauty pageant.

That said, I could also see him played by Noel Fielding:

It's a new core Pokémon game. By law, I am required to be excited by it. But yeah, it is pretty exciting. Animated battles, cool looking new trainers, an urban landscape to run in. I have a lot of misgivings about modern Nintendo, but the core Pokémon franchise is one thing that is still being done right, with no real qualms whatsoever. While Mijumaru is some kind of freak occurrence who could potentially look better in motion and in other art, I have high hopes for this game.

So here we go: day one purchase! New adventures to embark upon! New friendships to be forged! New world creating god Pokémon to capture! People who aren't into these things don't realise how much of a cultural cachet Pokémon still has in the video gaming world. 14 years and still going strong.

Main starter images sourced from Bulbapedia. Fan art provided by pocket lint, whatever his sources are.

Kick-Ass is going to cause a lot of controversy. It's about vigilante justice. It's about revenge. It's about a twelve-year-old girl swearing and stabbing people and shooting them in the head and cutting off their limbs.

The strangest thing is that people are shocked most of all by the girl saying "the c word”, rather than the brutal murders she commits. The unstrange thing is that a lot of people … chiefly the denizens of this faceless morass we call the internet … are going to love it.

I didn't quite love Kick-Ass, and part of that was the audience, and part of that was a not very subtle undertone of homophobia, but it's a worthy enough movie that I hope achieves enough success for Matthew Vaughn to keep making movies.

Last year I “deadblogged” the Oscars in a notebook which I was too exhausted to transcribe. At a glance, the best note was the following:

“Who knows which [of these movies] are already on their journeys to next year’s Academy Awards?”

-The ones in the fourth quarter.

As always, the “Deadblog” is entirely optional, as it boils down to 2600 words of stream of consciousness typed in real time watching my recording of the Oscars (and a Youtube video). Think of it as a distilled, more inane version of my Twitter feed.

I will venture a more professional write up soon. Needless to say, the following contains Oscar spoilers.

Bit of an underwhelming year, but what can you do? It went almost exactly as expected, except for … I’m furrowing my brow here. But know my rage and read on.
As always, Mark’s legitimately live blog can be found here.

The Oscars, once again trying to do something to mix it up, have further diluted their already severely degraded brand. Much as Chris Rock said that the Oscars are about movies only white people watch (being as the world is divided into two distinct groups: white people and black people; white people talk like this and black people like this), this year they're trying to make the whole thing that much more populist … and therefore meaningless.
Ten Best Picture nominees, but only five Best Director nominees. This is the same thing as there being only five Best Picture nominees. The Best picture and Best Director don't always line up; one need only look at 2005, when Ang Lee rightly won Best Director for Brokeback Mountain, and Paul Haggis' execrable Crash took Best Picture.

You may have noticed that Brokeback Mountain still gets mentioned for many reasons, not least of which being the still somewhat raw tragedy of Heath Ledger (a bizarrely opposite parallel to the movie itself), while Crash is mentioned largely for the fact that it undeservedly won Best Picture and the various shallow implications it had for race relations.

Ten Best Pictures! What a spread! They run from the criminally overrated (An Education, Up in the Air), the way out there (District 9), the sadly without a chance (Up), the extremely popular (Avatar), to the totally mystifying (The Blind Side).

Critical darling Up in the Air is a movie that could stand to get me into a lot of trouble. This is largely because I don't understand why it was the favourite of so many critics in the last year; it is a well-made movie, and a good one, but to me it had none of the emotional resonance that I expect from something like this.

The trajectory of Avatar for me was an initial reaction of “what?” then “oh, okay,” then “yes, that looks quite good”, then “I must see this, right now”, then “I have my tickets. I must not think of this film until such time as I see it, lest I overhype myself and die.”

Then Avatar came out today and … yes. This is what movie making is about. I could point to an entirely different film, different genre, different crafting, different styling, and say “this is what movie making is about” – and that is what movie making is about.

Avatar is a specific brand of amazing and perfect movie making. All of the cliches apply here: a labour of love, a man at the peak of his performance, best movie Cameron has made since Titanic … but they’re all true. Especially that last one.

ABSOLUTELY NO SPOILERS INSIDE!

It's ironic that Rowan and I didn't pay for The Girlfriend Experience. We made our way to the cinema through the worst kind of storm (the sort that lasts only as long as it takes you to get from point A to B) to see Ponyo, only to find that it had been cancelled due to an accidental double booking for a festival called "Queerdoc”, which I'm assuming was tonight featuring a documentary about lesbians.

They said that they were sorry, but that they could comp us tickets to anything else that night. Not willing to wait around two and a half hours to see the late Ponyo, we decided to see The Girlfriend Experience instead. Then, during dinner, I realised that this was still a Soderbergh movie, and that it would finish in time for the late showing of Ponyo. We bought tickets for Ponyo before we went into The Girlfriend Experience, and I'll be honest: I spent a great deal of The Girlfriend Experience looking forward to seeing Ponyo.

Rowan said, at the end of the screening, that "it's the first movie I've seen in a long time that I didn't like at least a part of”. I'm not that extreme, but really: The Girlfriend Experience is like a more airheaded, shallow version of Gawker. The sad fact is that the movie seems to reflect a certain reality: people like this exist, and they're just as horrible as they appear on the screen.