Why that’s just great, because Michael Moore’s new movie Slacker Uprising is now available to view for free on the internet, provided that you’re American and literally have nothing better to do with your time.

Slacker Uprising is, of course, Michael Moore’s way of urging the young voters of America to wake up and vote in the coming general election. Well, at least that’s what he says. It’s clearly Michael Moore’s way of urging young voters to vote Democrat, otherwise it wouldn’t be called Slacker Uprising. If he wanted people to vote Republican he would’ve called it something else, like Hey You! Get Off My Yacht! My Father Owns This Bay, You Dirty Mexican!

We can’t wait for the American general election to be over, because everything’s getting so bloody politicised at the moment. Celebrities are talking politics, the MTV VMAs were absurdly political and we’re pretty sure that the last episode of Sesame Street we watched was brought to us by the letter K and the concept of off-shore drilling.

What makes us most angry about this is that all everyone’s sudden interest in politics is effectively taking food from Michael Moore’s table. Now, admittedly Michael Moore could probably do with eating a bit less anyway, but that isn’t the point.

The point is this: politics is Michael Moore’s thing. When Michael Moore is angered by something political, he makes a movie about it and the problem goes away, like when George Bush didn’t get reelected after Fahrenheit 911 or when all medicine was banned after Sicko.

So, to remind everyone that actually he’s the one who invented politics in the first place, Michael Moore has decided to release his new movie for free online.

Entitled Slacker Uprising, the film follows Michael Moore’s 2004 college tour, where he shouted the word ‘vote’ at lecture halls full of students for three hours, threw a packet of noodles at someone and then brought on Michael Stipe to silently nod until everyone got a bit freaked out and sort of politely tried to edge towards the door. Or, as The Washington Post puts it:

The 97-minute flick, as subtle as a sledgehammer, is Moore’s account of his barnstorming tour of the country in advance of the 2004 presidential election, an effort undertaken to “save John Kerry and the Democrats from themselves.” Its message to Democrats in 2008 — implicit, but screamingly so — is, don’t let this happen again.

Anyway, Michael Moore’s Slacker Uprising is now available to watch for free online at Slackeruprising.com, provided you live in North America. Since we don’t, we haven’t got a clue if the film’s any good or not. That’s why, if you’re American, we want you to watch Slacker Uprising and then explain it to all us non-Americans below in exactly five words. Or an emoticon.

Nothing too taxing, please. We wouldn’t want to to think we actually care about any of this.

But why bother, when you could just kill yourself? Well, maybe that’s a bit far, so instead why not just play the game Five Minutes to Kill Yourself? It manages to tick the right boxes – you work in an office, you’re pissed off, you want to kill yourself. Textbook.

Travelling around the workplace you can talk to people, pick stuff up and interact with objects, all with the goal being to stop yourself from being alive. It’s quite funny, if we do say so ourselves. It’s also very simple and a great timewaster – though only in five minute blocks.

Play it and help suppress the fantasies of actually killing yourself.

Play It Here:

Five Minutes to Kill Yourself

Well, apart from the times when it’s funny. But it’s certainly never fun. Well – again, it is. Sometimes. But still, shut up.

Anyway, it’s more fun now, with Dad ‘n’ Me coming to waste a bit of your day in fine Slackerjack fashion. A scrolling beat ‘em up – like the classic Streets of Rage – the game sees you being the school bully, kicking the snot out of kids simply for being there.

As it’s made by that lot who did Alien Hominid, it obviously looks lovely and it has a sense of humour about it. Oh, and it’s violent – shouldn’t forget that. Nor should we forget that it’s a lot of fun, because it is.

Play It Here:

Dad ‘n’ Me

While Masq may not be one of the best lookers out there – though it is home to a distinctive style – it manages to captivate in the small doses it offers with some fine, branching storylines and a level of freedom most games can only ever dream of.

In fact, the best way to put it is exactly how PC Gamer said it:

The Deus Ex of comic-strip soap operas. Get shot, divorced, incarcerated, all three, and more.

And that’s bloody high praise. A great timewaster and fantastic game in its own right.

Play Masq Here:

Masq

Marge is trying to the kids to do the gardening, but they refuse on the grounds it’s boring – later in the same episode Bart gets really excited when he sees a videogame called ‘Virtual Gardener’ or something along those lines, and rushes to play.

Great joke, of course. And then you get confronted with Throw Paper, and you feel a bit guilty. Because you’re doing the same thing. Instead of actually throwing paper balls into a wastebasket, you’re doing it virtually, on your computer.

But enough of the irony/comedy/forgetting classic moments of The Simpsons – this is a classic, addictive and fun game to waste a good few minutes on. Or hours, if you have that compulsive a personality.

Throw the paper, compensate for wind speed, get as many in the bin in a row as you can.

And that’s it.

Play Throw Paper Here:

Throw Paper

It means they can remember… things… about stuff. And not… forget them.

Anyway – Basho Kioku is a simple memory game that is sure to test your ability to the fullest. Simply click on a square – that’s a level done. Repeat until the end. That’s it. Oh, but if you happen to click on a square you’ve already tagged before then you lose a life.

It starts out simple but soon gets that grey matter working, we can tell you that for a fact. It also manages to be as captivating as it is frustrating, so try not to play it for too long when you should be working. ‘Just one more go’ syndrome has been known to kick in often with Basho Kioku.

Play It Here:

Basho Kioku

As was Dune – well, the game at least. Well, Dune II at any rate. Basically, things with giant subterranean worms in them are great, though usually because you get to see Kevin Bacon stoving their heads in over a couple of hours.

But what would it be like to actually be one of these underground annelids? Death Worm aims to answer that question, along with ones like ‘how many camels could I eat in one jump if I were one of these worms?’ and ‘how much forward momentum is necessary to eat that stupid bird flying around up there?’ or the ever-popular ‘could I really take down that helicopter?’

Yes, you get to be a giant worm. You get to scramble around underground and fly out of the surface, eating those overland-dwelling scummers that we all hate so much. Do enough damage, armed enemies come along. Survive, eat, throw yourself in the air using your momentum – it’s all fantastic fun and well worth wasting some time on.

The game can be played online or can be downloaded to play it later if you like.

Play Death Worm Here:
Death Worm

Well, get ready to find out. The first footage from Quantum Of Solace has appeared online, and it gives a dead-on indication of what the finished movie will be like – it'll be ten seconds long and mostly about James Bond trying to kick a man's jaw off.

OK, so the online footage of Quantum of Solace isn't particularly revelatory – in fact watching it feels a little bit like listening to a toddler's breathless description of a petrol station blowing up – but we do have the video after the jump, and it's not something that any ADD sufferers who haven't got bored of endless parkour scenes in movies yet will want to miss.

The new James Bond movie Quantum Of Solace has got a lot riding on it. After Casino Royale effectively reinvented James Bond by giving him blonde hair, making him waddle around in a pair of girl's bikini bottoms and ripping off The Bourne Identity at every possible turn, Quantum Of Solace will be where we see if the new formula works for more than one movie.

The movie's certainly had a difficult birth. If it wasn't bad enough that Quantum Of Solace has got such a bad title that it'd be less embarrassing to go to a cinema naked and quack like a duck for an hour than to actually ever use its full title, production has also been beset by everything from crazy South American mayors to nasty car crashes to Amy Winehouse's drug problems to – worst of all – rampant Pacino speculation.

But enough about that – what's Quantum Of Solace actually like? Well, now we know, thanks to a ten-second Quantum Of Solace teaser preview that's turned up online.

It's basically a compilation of all the action sequences from the movie slammed into a blip and presented to you in glorious jump jump run run stairs throw boat walk drive fall table kick stairs jump boat-style. Ready?

Seriously, how awesome does that look? What do you mean you don't know because it's just a mishmash of unconnected clips set to vaguely pounding music and you can make any film look good by doing that even The Love Guru? Honestly, there's no pleasing some people, is there?

Obviously there's a lot missing from the Quantum Of Solace teaser trailer – like the plot and all the interminable scenes of Daniel Craig staring moodily into space thinking "Hey, look how different I am to Pierce Brosnan" – but at least we know that at one point James Bond falls down an atrium attached to a piece of rope. At least we know that.

Battle for Wesnoth is a totally free, open source (meaning you can get the code for it and modify it yourself, if you have the time, patience and know-how. In other words: you can’t) and feels very professionally made, even with its freebie status. Certainly something of a rarity in the world of gratis games.

The game plays like – for anyone familiar with it – Fire Emblem, a highly regarded and thoroughly excellent strategy game available on all sorts of Nintendo consoles. They’ve yet to bring the version out on Wii where even your granny can play it though, so it hasn’t exactly achieved the mass market penetration the company has been hoping for.

It’s the usual fantasy setting you should expect from many games of this ilk, but for the love of everything don’t let this put you off. Snobbery will rob you of a fine experience and one that shows the indies can do things just as well as the big guns.

For those that don’t know, the game basically involves you taking turns to move about and fight. It’s like chess, but with more variables and less Gary Kasparov.

Yes, so it is another one you can’t waste time on over your lunch hour, but it’ll exercise your bloody brain cells and last more than fifteen minutes before you get bored of launching penguins into the sun. So stop whining, download it and play it. For a thoroughly free experience it really is very well made, and it’s updated regularly to kill off any annoying bugs that may plague the thing.

Just don’t come running to us if you do happen to get hopelessly, completely and totally addicted to Wesnoth. It’s good enough to become an obsession, that’s for certain. And did we mention it’s free?

Get it here.

Don’t worry, the flash crap will come back when I’m not in charge anymore. Philistines.

And if the music world getting its knickers in a twist about the internet wasn't entertaining enough, now the world of getting baby crocodiles to bite your nipples and drinking mouthfuls of horse-sperm is up in arms about it, too. In short, the new Jackass movie will be released on the internet for free tomorrow.

First, there was Damon Albarn grumbling about the immorality of downloading – it was stealing the livelihoods of musicians – right about the time he decided not to employ any in favour of making a band out of cartoon characters instead.

Radiohead, allowed people to ‘pay what they thought was fair’ when they downloaded In Rainbows from their website. You had to feel bad for the boys. Having less than half the people pay anything at all must have been a bit of a kick in the nuts. It’s like playing that game when you close your eyes and fall backward, trusting your friends to catch you, except when you look round you realise everyone’s pissed off except a little fat kid with asthma.

The best though, was the talisman of raw sexuality and groundbreaking funkiness that is Prince, electing to release his album free through the Daily Mail. Anyone who works for his label this side of the Atlantic could have mentioned that for the Mail, raw sexuality is generally linked to the problem of single mothers and the concept of being groundbreaking is not generally associated with a paper which still leads with a picture of a decade dead princess every bastard day. An amusing upshot of this is that the man who conquered the world with songs like Purple Rain has now had his latest work categorised as a Daily Mail giveaway. This puts him on a level par with such entertainment doyens as Bob the Builder, Balamory, Linguaphone Spanish and Rosemary and Thyme.

With this in mind, hecklerspray was interested to see what the film business, also at increasing risk of losing out to the internet, would be doing. This week the first move is being made, but not from where you’d think. Step aside Spielberg, this is a job for a bunch of hicks with a penchant for self mutilation – ladies and gentlemen, Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass boys!

Jackass, like a bourbon-fuelled You’ve Been Framed was a phenomenon five years back that gave baked students a much needed opportunity to shout "Awww dude!" at the TV after they came back from the pub. Three series and two films later and it would appear that Johnny and the lads have once again reneged on their promise not to make any more with tomorrow's arrival of Jackass 2.5.

The twist is, Jackass 2.5 is free and solely on the internet for the first two weeks. The loss of revenue at the cinema is to be balanced by having advertisers pay huge sums to get their messages embedded in the download. Money is also hoping to be raised from charging for the download and DVDs after the initial free period.

The clever bit about this whole thing, and the point where you realise that they’re more than just eye candy over at Paramount, is the way this film has been made and how they’ve planned for the long term. They’ve recognised that short videos of people kicking the shit out of each other is doing good trade in the world of YouTube et al and that what they have with Jackass the granddaddy of the genre. Paramount president Thomas Lesinski has already stated his intention to later chop up the film into five-minute segments. We reckon with the pull the name will bring on such sites can get a disgusting amount of money from people who want their ads embedded in them. A 21st century version of money for old rope, you could say.

But it doesn’t stop there; the majority of the footage for Jackass 2.5 was actually filmed but not used at the time of shooting Jackass Number 2, which has already grossed in excess of $84 million. Effectively, this means their experiment is costing them bugger all! We’ll bet their musical cousins are sick with envy.

With this in mind it has given all of us here a different take on the new year, laden with expense (mortgages, victim reparations, line dancing subscriptions) that’s just around the corner. Needless to say, if you come by the hecklerspray office over the next few weeks and find someone in a pair of Ray Bans unconscious with their bollocks stapled to their leg, you will know the reason why.  

Read more:

Paramount to Disseminate Latest Jackass Movie Online – Marketing Vox

[story by Matthew Loader]