30 posts tagged “movies”

Squee!

In related news, I saw Iron Man this weekend and it rocked my face off.

...nah, probably not.

Rich from FourFour has done the world the incomparable service of watching the entire terrible Anna Nicole Smith basic-cable biopic and distilling it into one 7-minute capsule of awesomeness. Watch out for Karl Fucking Malden playing her ancient billionare husband.

If I ever watch this whole movie, it will only be to take part in a drinking game in which you do a shot every time someone says "titties", "Marilyn Monroe", or "TrimSpa".

Hey, remember Colony Collapse Disorder? It was Spring 2007's Summer of the Shark. Except for the part where it was a real concern, instead of just a media-conflated mass-panic designed to sell 24-hour cable news in a season where traditionally, Americans are too lazy to do anything that's actually newsworthy.

The strangest part of the disorder is that the bees don't just die, they disappear entirely:

Millions of bees have simply vanished. In most cases, all that's left in the hives are the doomed offspring. But dead bees are nowhere to be found -- neither in nor anywhere close to the hives.

The puzzling disorder has continued into this year's growing season, concerning farmers and fanceypants ice cream companies. I have put my piercing intellect on the problem, and I think I've figured it out:

Don't panic, America! The bees will return as soon as they're finished killing Nicholas Cage. Judging by the way he's vigorously shaking his head and opening his mouth as wide as possible, it won't be long.

Honeybee

Bzzz Ghost Rider sucked ballzzz.

Cracked can always be relied upon to dredge up the very worst cultural lowlights of the glorious decade in which I spent the majority of my childhood: The 1980s. In particular, the movie Gymkata. Like all Yugoslavian exports, it sucked balls and is mostly remembered today for its unintentional hilarity. It was banned in Finland, so as not to offend the USSR, who obviously didn't give a flying fuck, as they didn't bother to ban it themselves. Why bother to ban something people would only want see so as to mock it? Finland is officially the wussiest, suck-upiest nation ever.

In this scene, I imagine John Cabot's interior monologue probably runs thus: "Thank god I happened across this random object lying in an alley while fleeing from Parmistanian [that's not a spelling error, they really thought Parmistan sounded more real than the traditional Fakeistan-ed.] dirt farmers that just happens to be shaped exactly like a pommel horse!! And that these peasants are apparently so malnourished that one kick to the face takes them out permanently. And that they only attack one at a time--must be a local custom."

It was entirely hand-drawn with felt markers!

It's not playing anywhere in town, but it's at the Berkeley Landmark Shattuck, which is like a block from the Downtown Berkeley BART station. Man, I haven't been to Berkeley in years. I think I'll take a day off work next week and make a day of it.

Saturday: First was the procurement of a Visa gift card. Those assclowns at LJ still haven't processed my money order, even though I mailed it a week and a half ago, and it was only going like 20 miles. Note to self: From now on only pay for paid account service with a Visa. Anyway, whenever they stop swilling vodka and eating potatoes long enough to do some work, I'll have a whole year's paid service.

Tiny tibetan jukebox

I bought a $25 card. 6 months of paid service + 6 months of 100 extra userpics = $21, so I bought a tiny jukebox that plays Tibetan Buddhist chants with the leftover $4. I remembered seeing it on BoingBoing last week and couldn't believe it was only $4. I suppose this violates my 6-month "No crap" moratorium, but what the hell. It's only $4 and it's small enough to fit on a keyring.

Then I went to Borders, because over the course of 2007 I racked up a lot of Rewards Dollahs (or whatever the hell they're called) and they needed to be spent before the end of this month. I'm currently reading Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Murder of Lord Darnley, but I'm getting a little burned out on British royal history so soon after reading Queen Isabella. So I picked up some fiction that's been on my list for a while: Nightwood, The Remains of the Day, and Snow Crash.

Cherry hardwood jounral

I also got a lovely journal with a hardwood cover, and some nice pens, a couple of Pilot Varsities and Pilot G-2 Minis. Pilots are the bomb. There's nothing like a really good pen, it's one of life's simple pleasures.

waiting for my bus

I took this photo while I was waiting for my bus to go home.

walk in's what?

Sunday: Nothing special, just the typical boring laundry, cooking, and cleaning. However, I did see and document this typical example of Newarkian fuckuppery. I swear to dog, it's like they rounded up every illiterate hillbilly in the Bay Area and herded them all into Newark, instead of shipping them to Arkansas where they clearly belong.

Monday: Cloverfield, baby! It was AWE. SOME. I actually gasped aloud at a few points. There isn't really anything new to do with the monster genre--it's pretty much flee, escape, hide; lather, rinse, repeat--but it was pretty damn scary and effective. I like that they used unknowns (I didn't know any of them anyway), because it made it seem like you really were watching a home movie. It's funny, but being able to see NYC get torn to pieces on screen without wincing is a return to normalcy of sorts: For the first few years after 9-11 I'd never have been able to watch that without getting ill, and I suspect I wouldn't be the only one.

I also saw the Iron Man trailer. While it doesn't look different or unique, in the context of comic book movies, I still really want to see it because I heart Robert Downey Jr.

Then afterwards I swung by Rasputin's and picked up Hary Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Bender's Big Score.

embroidered bandana wip 1

I haven't done any needlework since I got home from Louisiana. I've felt totally cruddy and just not inspired. I still feel cruddy, but I miss it, so yesterday I started a small embroidery project. I still have Christmas presents to finish, but I wasn't in the mood to work on something I HAD to do. So I used some of my transfers to start an embroidered bandana.

X-files 2

More!

I keep hearing snarky comments to the effect of "Why now?". Why not? There are plenty of people interested in another X-Files movie, believe me. It ain't going to lose money.

Interestingly, the news is that the movie is is not going to involve the alien conspiracy mytharc, and possibly won't have aliens at all, but will instead be more like one of the "Monster of the Week" episodes. This is good news to me, I always enjoyed the MofW eps the most. The mytharc was kind of boring and totally baffling; even after watching the old episodes over and over again in sydication I still don't really understand it.

In semi-related fangirl news, I found a recipe for Lost fish biscuits!

Supposedly it's going to debut during the premiere of The Golden Compass, which is pretty lol-worthy when you think about it.

A co-worker and I went to go see The Mist last night and OMG THE END!! I knew almost as soon as I heard it was finally being made into a movie that they'd change the end, because the end of the novella is very ambiguous and unresolved. That worked fine on paper, but ambiguity doesn't really play on the screen. What was intriguing is Stephen King has said he loves the new ending and if he'd thought of it, it's the ending he would have written.

Don't worry, I'm not going to give it away. And it's not a lame twist like THE VILLAGE IS REALLY A 21ST-CENTURY NATURE PRESERVE!!1! or anything.

Other than that, it followed the novella almost exactly, with a few minor variations. (The sex scene between David and Amanda is mercifully cut, because that always felt like King being self-indulgent to me.) There were a few casting choices that I thought were odd when I heard about them, but they totally worked. Andre Braugher is such a good actor that he brings real depth to what was a 2-dimensional Stock Asshole in the story, and Marcia Gay Harden was terrifying as Mrs. Carmody. I always pictured her as some typical withered old crone, but it was actually more effective for her to be a relatively young and beautiful woman, because the contrast really made you feel that Whoa, this bitch crazy.

With the exceptions of a couple of scenes where seeing the beasties up close is unavoidable, they're for the most part only glimpsed, which of course is always scarier than seeing them clearly. Most movie makers have forgotten that, if indeed they ever knew it. The camera work was different than Darabont's other films: it had a shaky, you-are-really-there feel, with occasional small zooms and misfocuses that reminded me strongly of the TV series Firefly.

Like all King stories, there were self-referential nods to his fans: the film opens with David painting a "movie poster" that is actually the cover to one of King's Dark Tower books; and I'm not 100% certain, but I'm pretty sure that the comic book David grabs in the pharmacy to bring back to his son is an issue of The Punisher. Thomas Jane, who plays David, also played the movie version of The Punisher.

I'm always glad when movies made from King's works actually follows them. I'm one of those Philistines that hates Kubrick's version of The Shining and would rather watch the TV mini-series with Steven Weber and Rebecca de Mornay. See, it's not that we think Director Joe Blow (I have no idea who directed the TV version) is a better director than Kubrick, or that we think Kubrick isn't a talented director. Directorily, he made no mistakes with the film. What we hate is all the changes he made to the story. We hate that there's no history of the hotel, that the entire Horace Derwent backstory is excised, that The Overlook doesn't get destroyed at the end, that there's no hedge animals! Okay, that would probably not have been possible in 1980, and I admit, a hedge maze is an ingenius substitute. I also hate that they made a half-assed attempt to explain it by saying that it was "built on an ancient Indian burial ground". Aaargh! That was such an overused trope in 1970s/early 1980s horror films that if scriptwriters had used word processing back then, they'd probably have made a macro for it.

But mostly, we hate what he did to the characters. Jack goes from being a conflicted man who until the very end remains aware enough of what's happening to him that part of him is totally horrified, to being... Jack Nicholson, who frankly looked half-crazy from the moment he appeared onscreen, so when he does go full-blown Loony Tunes, it's not exactly a long trip. Wendy goes from being a tigress who fights for her son even after her back has been broken, to a personality-deficient doormat whose only purpose is to run around bug-eyed for the last hour of the film. Halloran's only purpose in the movie is to drive up in the Snowcat that Wendy and Danny escape in, then immediately take a hatchet to the back.

Danny was an annoying twerp in both versions though, I'll give you that.