Movie and Book Reviews. Possibly With Spoilers.

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Random debris.

Sunday, February 22nd, 2015

1. We have all had the hype of Fifty Shades of Grey inflicted on us against our will, yes? You can try to avoid it but it will hunt you down and poke you in the eye when you’re least expecting. So I imagine many of us have seen the commercial where Christian Grey vigorously mooshes mouths with Anastasia Steele in an elevator.

Okay, when you see this do you also think of the mudskippers fighting for a mate?

Just me? That’s fine.

2. Some bread from Japan made into the shape of beetles. Had I seen these, I would have bought them. I would have bought them so hard.

3. Spam! I haven’t posted about the spam comments I’ve been getting because they haven’t been all that interesting. But recently the spammers have been using small sentences they clearly pulled from somewhere and I like to try and guess what the reference material is about.

This one I’m guessing is about the healthful, kimchi-like qualities of ginger and how they can help you naturally recover from psoriasis.

Wow. Ummm, so maybe North Korea made an app that, once activated, will cause you to bleed from the ears and die, so if perchance you should download it under the impression that it was new emojis or something, be careful because even a short exposure will cause your cat to die. It most definitely doesn’t like you (it’s trying to kill you, after all).

Awww. This person likes to sew and make their own clothes but they have a tendency to flail their arms a bit. Once, mid-conversation, they hit Grandma in the face and they’ve never really recovered from that. Therefore, all garments must have pockets for them to shove their fists into. Grandma still has a dent where the class ring embedded itself. It haunts this person at night.

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A classic and a possible new classic.

Monday, November 10th, 2014

I saw two movies recently, Gone With The Wind and Boyhood. Gone With The Wind I saw ages ago on TV with commercials poppin’ in every ten minutes which really chopped up the experience (it’s tough to get into the Civil War when you’re perpetually interrupted by smiling white people wearing backwards robes like cult members). The Alamo Drafthouse in Yonkers was showing the movie in one of their smaller theaters so I, my father (who is one thousand years old and saw the movie when it came out in 1939), Snorth and Snorth’s mom flounced off in our finest garments made from curtains to check it out properly with a good screen and sound system and no commercials. Here’s something interesting about the movie: it totally holds up. The first half, the half that’s about the Civil War, is thoroughly engrossing. The second half is a bit melodramatic and romantic, but it’s still pretty great. Here are some thoughts I had.

1. The last line makes me so bummed out. It is, famously, “Tomorrow is another day!” Yeah, yeah it is. So was yesterday. And two weeks from Thursday? That’s a day too. EVERY DAY IS A DAY. Whatever. It’s fine.

2. No matter how bad it gets for Scarlett (starving, unwashed, wearing the same dress for a year) her eyebrow game remains on point. Good for her. Also Vivian Leigh has the best RBF of all time.

3. This movie’s alternate title should be “Crying and Sweating in the South.” Lawd have mercy. I am not exaggerating – in every single scene at least one character is weeping copiously or is slathered with dewy drops of sweat. If it was a drinking game you would be sloshed in the first hour.

4. I’m all for tasteful classy ladies of society, but I really wanted to hang out with Belle Watling the local madam. She wore vibrant outfits, had lots of money and her home had a crystal lamp shaped like a peacock. She didn’t have to go to those stifling affairs all the fancy plantation owners did. Team Watling for me.

The other movie I saw was Boyhood. The movie itself is not what’s amazing, it’s how it was made. Boyhood was filmed over 11 years with the same actors, so you get to watch them age. It’s amazing that Richard Linklater (the director) got all the actors to show up for a few weeks every year. It’s well-acted, it’s beautifully filmed, engaging things happen, all it’s missing is interesting dialogue. Maybe I’m lucky but so so many of my conversations with people are fascinating. There’s humor and exciting interaction on any number of topics, and in this movie there’s… not so much. There’s a lot of mundane “how are you doing?” and “get in the car” and “don’t forget to come home after school!” After that, when the lead character becomes a high school student, he has long boring emo/introspective speeches which are 100% accurate to being a teenager (and what I make an effort to avoid talking to teenagers) so I had to deal with that. I would encourage people to see Boyhood because it’s a one-of-a-kind in the timeline/filming regard but I wish that characters had been more witty. The other thing I learned from this film: Don’t drink alcohol. That’s bad. That’s a reoccurring problem.

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Saw two shows, read a book.

Tuesday, August 5th, 2014

1. Shows! I saw Breaking the Code and Violet. I went to the Barrington Stage Company in Massachusetts to see Breaking the Code. It’s the story of Alan Turing, the British genius who broke the German enigma code during WWII and pretty much invented the computer as we know it. That’s all I knew when I bought the ticket. Interestingly enough, that’s not really what the show was about. You would think that would be enough plot, but there’s so much more to this man’s life. Turing was a homosexual when it was illegal to be one. When he went to the police after he was robbed Turing let it slip that the man who robbed him had slept with him the night before. Turing was accused of “gross indecency” even though the dalliance happened between two consenting adults behind closed doors (this makes me SO ANGEEE) and the court gave Turing one year of probation and estrogen to render him impotent. It also made him grow breasts. The whole thing is messed up. At 41 Turing was found dead from cyanide poisoning. It is assumed that it was suicide, but there is another theory, From Wikipedia:

Philosophy professor Jack Copeland has questioned various aspects of the coroner’s historical verdict, suggesting the alternative explanation of the accidental inhalation of cyanide fumes from an apparatus for gold electroplating spoons, using potassium cyanide to dissolve the gold, which Turing had set up in his tiny spare room.

Breaking the Code was really engrossing. I wouldn’t call it “fun” but it was definitely informative.

The other show I saw was Violet. I had no interest in checking it out until I saw their performance at the Tony Awards. I am a sucker for good gospel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kVaDl1MsYs

Violet, when she was about thirteen, was whacked in the face with an axe blade while chopping wood and her father was scared she was going to bleed out from the wound so he went to the nearest place and had it stitched up quickly and not very well, so she has a big ole lumpy scar across her nose-bridge and cheek, not unlike Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones.

(Interesting directing choice: the actress doesn’t have anything on her face. You have to imagine it. It makes the third act better.) Violet is about this young woman’s journey via Greyhound bus to a faith healer who she is convinced will fix her scar and make her beautiful. It takes place in the 1960s so there’s some race stuff in there as well. It’s a good show with good music, but the talent of the stars is what makes it great. I would recommend Violet except it’s closing in four days, so chances are you will not have a chance to check it out. If by some strange fluke of nature you are in the city before August 10th and you are going to see a Broadway show, this is a good one to see.

2. Book! I read Gone Girl and THAT BOOK CAN SUCK IT. It is the worst because it started so well! I loved the writing at the beginning, it was engrossing and the adjectives were well-chosen, I was hooked. I stayed up until 1:30 on a work-night because I couldn’t put it down. So thrilling! So many twists and turns! And then… garbagepants. It goes right off the edge of anything reasonable and straight into Housewives-of-New-Jersey-throwing-wine-in-each-other’s-faces level stupidity. And the ending BLOWS. It just ends. Crappily. You hate every single character and your face is in a permanent grimace for two days after. I hear they’re making it into a movie. A MOVIE I WILL NOT BE SEEING.

Me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOBr8lOTZ6I

Addendum 8/12/14: I forgot to mention that one of the people starring in Violet is the silent character Norma on Orange is the New Black, Annie Golden. She plays a bunch of different people in the show Violet and while I was waiting outside for the will-call counter to open, who should show up but Lea Delaria, another actress from Orange is the New Black! Lea plays Big Boo. People were asking her for photos and telling her how much they loved her and I didn’t want to bother her, but it was so nice to see fellow actors supporting each other in different performance mediums.

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Movie reviews.

Monday, June 2nd, 2014

Ugh, what a terrible two-week chunk. I worked a 36-hour day and it screwed up my sleep cycle for many days after. It was not a good time. However, in and around these weeks of three simultaneous pitches I managed to see a few movies I would like to discuss. But first, did you know there were IRIDESCENT HOLOGRAPHIC-TYPE SNAKES??? WHY WAS I NOT NOTIFIED OF THIS NATURAL PHENOMENA???

Holy crap, that is awesome. If I had one of those I would stare at it all day. Happy happy rainbow snake for me to love and pet and call George.

Okay, sorry, movies. I saw Paranorman! And it was surprisingly good! I honestly didn’t know what to expect. I know I’m supposed to like Tim Burton movies but I just don’t. Visually they’re excellent but plot-wise I find them perpetually lacking. After Frankenweenie and The Nightmare Before Christmas I felt like the spooky-ooky stop-motion animation children’s movie bed had been made but I was pleasantly proven wrong. Paranorman has a plot! It’s a decent plot, too. The animation is fun and sassy and creative. I do have to say that it is a scary movie. Like, if I was thirteen this would scare the pants off of me. If you’re not keen on zombies or creepy angry little girls with demon powers then this might not be the movie for you. I mainly saw it because A) it was streaming on Netflix and B) I saw this preview in the theater when I went to see Frozen (ENOUGH ALREADY WITH THAT DAMN SONG, I’M SICK OF IT) and was immediately smitten. I have no idea if the movie is good but I have higher hopes now that I’ve seen Paranorman.

http://youtu.be/1y8E7xJ6MX

I saw 20 Feet From Stardom. It’s a documentary about background singers. I know that sounds possibly uninteresting, but no, it was a compelling film. I loved it. There’s not much I can tell you about it because it doesn’t really have a story line. It’s basically these different people, mostly women, talking about how their love of music began and who they sang with and where they are now. It won Best Documentary at the Oscars this year. I think it is also streaming on Netflix right now. You should check it out.

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I went to Hump Tour (which I will now try to explain to you as politely as possible)!

Monday, May 5th, 2014

Head’s up: I’m going to do the best I can to be as socially acceptable as I can, but maybe you shouldn’t read this at work. I don’t know what kind of job you have. Maybe you have the kind of job where you can do whatever the hell you want. I just don’t want to get into trouble if your work would deem this inappropriate. ‘Nuff said. Moving on.

While I was in Japan I would sporadically check my email on computers where the keyboards had some recognizable letters, but mostly not so much with that, so I would vaguely hen-peck my way across the keys in the hopes that I was hitting the right ones. This made checking my email a bit of an uphill battle, so I skimmed them for words like “emergency / flood / fire / catastrophe / no survivors” and as long as none of those popped up I felt pretty good. I saw an email from Snorth that said something along the lines of “You wanna do a thing three months from now with Dan Savage?” I knew that I didn’t have any plans in three months and I like doing things, so I said yes and tried to remember that I made plans for late April. Two weeks before the end of April I finally got around to asking Snorth, “What did I agree to go to in two weeks?” and Snorth said, “Oh, Dan Savage hosts a sex-positive film festival in the Northwest every year since the mid-2000s and for the first time it’s coming to New York and we’re gonna go see it.” It took me a minute but eventually it sunk it. “We’re going to see artsy porn, is that what you’re saying?” And Snorth said, “Yes, you and me and my husband are going to see amateur porn curated by Dan Savage in a theater with other people at 4:00 in the afternoon two Saturdays from now.” “Well, alright then,” I said.

First, who is Dan Savage. He’s probably most well-known for answering questions on a self-help column focusing on sex and romance issues called Savage Love. He is also well-known for starting the It Gets Better Project, where adults, both homosexual and not, film videos where they tell kids it’s not worth killing yourself because of bullying. I have found him to be arrogant at times so I am not a big fan, but Snorth likes him a great deal so she was excited to go see him. The film festival is called Hump Tour, and here’s a small snapshot of what it entails.

Since 2005 the HUMP! Film Festival has challenged ordinary people from all over the Pacific Northwest to become temporary, weekend porn stars-by making their very own five-minute dirty movies for a chance to win big cash prizes! And they did not disappoint! The resulting short films run the gamut of sexual styles: straight, gay, lesbian, transgender… every color in the sexual rainbow… and some we never knew existed. HUMP! films are funny, thought-provoking, sad, artistic, outrageous, and almost overwhelmingly sexy – because they’re real. And they’re real because they were created and performed by sex-positive people, just like YOU. That’s why we’re bringing the very best of HUMP! to your town! See 20 of the hottest HUMP films in action… they’ll make you laugh, squeal, and marvel at the broad (and creative) range of human sexuality. It’s the HUMP! Tour 2014!

Saturday rolled around and I met Snorth outside The Village East Cinema at about 3:00 (it was general admission and I wanted a good seat). As we rolled in the people taking tickets at the door told us Dan Savage would be answering any questions we might have, so if we did have any questions we should write them on the index cards provided. It occurred to me that I didn’t have any questions before the movies but I bet I would have A WHOLE LOT afterwards. After they took our tickets we got to sit in a big beautiful turn-of-the-century theater covered with Arabic motifs. Then Dan Savage showed up and gave us a talk before the movies commenced. He first answered some of the index card questions, and he gave what I considered some pretty phenomenal answers considering he didn’t have any time to prepare. One question was, “I am a gay man and I have recently begun a relationship with someone new. When I friended him on Facebook I noticed we had about twenty friends in common, all young Asian men. I am a young Asian man. Should I be concerned? Should I break up with him?” Dan Savage said, “There’s nothing wrong your new boyfriend having a preference. Everybody has preferences. If a white man only dates other white men, no one thinks anything of it. Here’s the key – as long as he treats you like a person with thoughts and feelings and opinions and value who happens to be young and Asian, that’s fine. If he treats you like an object, like a fetish trinket, then you should cut him loose.” Another question was, “I am a straight man. My wife just left me for a woman. She wants to keep it a secret from our kids, but I don’t feel like I should have to do that. What would you recommend?” “Ooooh,” Dan said. “People are going to disagree with me on this, but I don’t think you should have to keep that secret. When your wife left you for another woman, making it a possibility that she was a lesbian the whole time and the entire marriage was a sham, she wrote that story. But this is your story too, and you have every right to tell your side. If your children ask, you should tell them the truth. You don’t have to force it on them, but if it comes up, you can say whatever you feel comfortable with.” I thought those were terrific answers to some tough topics and my esteem for Dan Savage went way up.

Then he explained the rules to us. I LOVED the rules. I think people are entitled jerk-faces and these rules were a delicious treat to me, one in particular. I’ll explain. Recently I went to see the Broadway show Pippin with my parents and throughout the entire show a man sitting in front of me would pull out his cellphone and check his texts. The text screen is mostly white, so that light was blasting right into my face every time. I thought about asking him to stop but he looked scary and I didn’t want to start a situation, so me and all the people sitting around me seethed through whole chunks of the show. At Hump Tour it was explained that since these were amateur videos, these people are possibly professionals and didn’t want their jobs jeopardized for performing. “Therefore,” Dan said, “There are people standing at the bottom of the screen watching you the entire time. There are three of my staff scattered throughout the audience, and they will not be watching the movies, they will also be watching you the entire time. If you pull out a cell phone for any reason it will be taken away from you and never returned. If you automatically pull out your phone when it vibrates, turn it completely off so you won’t be tempted.” As he said this I closed my eyes and let it wash over me. Repercussions for poor behavior! So yummy and fantastic! It’s one of the reasons I adore this commercial by the Alamo Drafthouse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L3eeC2lJZs

After the rules were covered the retrospective began. I won’t go into the details but I will say that what I expected was exactly what I got. I had anticipated that 95% of the films would make me go, “Well, if that’s what you’re into…” and 5% would make me go “THAT’S NOT A GOOD THING TO BE INTO PLEASE STOP.” I will never be able to listen to the song “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” the same way again. I think I spoke under my breath a few times, once to say, “Sir, do not lick that oil-encrusted car part, that will give you cancer. Sir? Sir? He’s licking it.” Then was also “Wash you hands before you touch that pizza.” What was so surprising to me was how un-titillated I was. If I had to describe the experience, it would be, “White people have too much free time.” And before you judge me, you go see all these films and then try to tell me that we know how to fill the hours of the day productively. All this libidinous exploration makes me tired. I’m glad I went, but I don’t know if I would go again. If you want a more thorough explanation of the films, meet me in person and I will describe them in detail, complete with hand gestures and festive sound effects. In the meantime, the creators of one of the films put their entry up on YouTube. You can watch it and get a sense of Hump Tour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSWIfToGGsk

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Television I have recently stuffed in my brain.

Tuesday, April 29th, 2014

There’s some good TV out there right now, much of it streaming. Now when I come home instead of flicking betwixt two sub-par programs (Giant River Fish! Dwarves Having Dwarf Babies! Serial Killers’ Favorite Lunch Meats!) I now am delighted to snorf down something of quality. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of bad television out there. With good there is always bad. It just seems like the scales are tipped more in the favor of good for once. I’m going to run through everything I’ve watched recently. Before I get to TV series, I would like to recommend the episode of Nature, the show on PBS, that was on the Japanese snow monkeys. There is one path into the area, and I took this photo on that path:

In the documentary, you will see the same shot. Not similar kind-of-sort-of. Identical. It’s funny. Also, the episode spawned one of my favorite animated gifs of late called “Mmmmmmnope.”

Okay. TV show reviews.

1. House of Cards on Netflix. I’ve only seen the first season, but it’s very good. Really good. Like a dirty grimy West Wing. It’s beautifully filmed and it makes Washington D.C. look like a bizarre Wizard of Oz-type place. There’s intrigue and plotting plotting plotting, I find it totally engrossing. Robin Wright’s costumes are fierce every damn time. She is not a spring chicken (though she takes impeccable care of herself) but she manages to look amazing every time she’s on-screen. It’s nice to see the girl from The Princess Bride portraying the sexiest shark in town. My only problem with the show is the woman who plays the President’s Chief of Staff is supposed to be Cuban-American, but she’s clearly South Asian, like Indian or Pakistani, and she has a tinge of an accent from there. Seriously? This is America. We have a gazillion Latin people, I bet some of them are women and might be actors. We couldn’t hire one of them? It’s a little thing, but I find it sometimes takes me out of the action. Other than that, super-great show.

2. True Detective on HBO*. Oh my God. I’ve watched this series twice and I may watch it again just for kicks. It’s like a series of oil paintings in a row that take you on a journey. The main stars are Woody Harrelson and Matthew MacConaughey. My initial reaction was, “I had no idea those two stoners could act so well.” They are magnificent. I’ve never been on the MacConaughey train during all those rom-coms he starred in. I mean, I could see he was handsome, but I didn’t really care. Guess what? I care now. He done acted the hell out of his character. His character is GLOOMY. I mean, bad things have happened to him so he has every right, but still, wow, pessimist is an understatement. Here’s a disturbing thing I discovered: If you watch True Detective and Rust Cohle (MacConaughey’s character) goes into one of his down-in-the-dumps speeches, you should think, “What a looney-basket spouting crazy thoughts.” That is the correct response. That means you are healthy and well in the head. Here’s an example of one.

“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight – brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”

I not only understood everything Rust Cohle said in the entire series, I agreed with him. Entirely. Ohhhhh dear. That’s not good. I feel like that should be on a psych eval (“Do you understand and agree with everything Rust Cohle says?”) and if you say yes you don’t get to be a police officer or elementary school teacher or whatever.

Final thoughts: the baddie at the end is scary as hell and gets scarier the more times you watch him. Ugh, he is the mayor of Creepytown. The actor said he would go home and cry after shooting his scenes because he had to think like his character thinks and he didn’t want to. That’s a bad bad villain.

3. Sons of Anarchy on FX. Such high hopes for that. I know several people who like that show. I started watching it and I was totally into it. The actors are great, but either your show is based in reality or it’s not. I’ll explain. In the pilot episode of the show a preemie baby is born and is in the NICU. And then over the next six or seven episodes, like, thirty characters die. No joke. Seriously. Bodies droppin’ everywhere. At that point the lead actor says, “I’m excited to take my son home, he’s been in the hospital for a month.” So I am to understand that in the time period of a month in a not-especially populous area of California tens of people have died in violent ways, including an FBI investigator, and everything is running as usual? I don’t care how many cops you have on your payroll, someone somewhere is going to notice that. This is not the favelas of Brazil. Then the hardships keep coming at a rate that prevented me from suspending my disbelief any further, so in the middle of Season 3 I politely bowed out. This character gets blown up and this other character gets raped and this guy’s wife is shot and on and on every episode… Too much. I can’t no more.

4. Rick and Morty on Adult Swim (Cartoon Network). Weird. That show is weird. I really like it though. You remember back in the 90s before the internet there wasn’t a whole lot of weird television made available. You pretty much had Liquid TV on MTV and that’s it. I ate that kind of stuff up. I didn’t necessarily like all of it, but I loved that it was being made. One of the shows being made at that time was The Maxx. I adored that show. If you watch it now it seems kind of dated, but I had never seen anything like that. And I get that same feeling from Rick and Morty. It’s bizarre and fun and involves going to different planets and alternate dimensions. Here, watch the opening credits (the music is a clear homage / ripoff of Dr. Who):

http://video.adultswim.com/rick-and-morty/theme-song.html

The first season just ended, so when it (hopefully) shows up on streaming Netflix and you need some oddness in your life, check it out.

5. The League on FX. I don’t care about football, and I extra-super-duper don’t care about fantasy football. However, the cast of this show makes it a jolly good show. They are all immature dorks wearing adult-man suits (and one woman, but she’s kind of token) who are all professional stand-up comedians and actors in real life, so they improv their lines a great deal and it’s awesome. There’s a quick-wit quality you get from The League that I don’t think you get from a totally scripted show. And while many of the plot lines relate to football, many of the plot lines relate to personal events going on in the main character’s lives, so I can still follow along. I’ve watched all the seasons and I shall continue watching despite my complete ignorance of who’s a running back or wide receiver or kicker.

*Alternate title: Matthew MacConaughey Smokes All The Cigarettes In The World Ever.

Addendum – May 12th: I forgot to include Shameless and Oz. Shameless is on Showtime and it is crazy. I cannot figure out for the life of me how they got this show made. It’s about a family living in a poor neighborhood in Chicago and it… there are children on this show. Children. I have watched scenes where these children see a profoundly naked homeless man, their mother who has slit her wrists due to bi-polar disorder, drugs and sex and stealing and oh my God, how are these child actors dealing with this? From this description it sounds like the show is a debbie-downer but it is not. It mainly revolves around how all these people are keeping their head up and making their own lives through the hardships that come upon them, and the show’s damn funny. I highly recommend it but under no circumstances should you watch it with children or the elderly unless you want to explain things to them. Here’s the opening credits to give you an idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JyB6Bu3gsI

And here’s a brief overview with the cast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K8Ug-EHivc

Oz on HBO. This show is pushing twenty years old but I never saw it. Snorth recommended that I check it out and now I’m two seasons in. I do not want to go to prison. No no. Not that I wanted to before, but now, I totally do not want to go to prison. People are really really mean there. It’s a great show, kind of dated by today’s standards of television-making, but thoroughly engrossing. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much male nudity on a show. I really pleased by that, not because I have a penchant for male jingly-jangly, but we are constantly seeing ladybits on television nowadays and I like that this attempts to even that out a bit. And I like that they aren’t afraid to kill off some characters and introduce new ones. It keeps it feeling fresh.

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Things I have liked recently.

Friday, April 11th, 2014

1. http://onestarbookreview.tumblr.com/

One star book reviews. I especially appreciated this one because I often hate classical books:

“The evidence is mounting. I am a philistine.”

2. I didn’t ride on it the last time I was there, but there’s a Bug Carousel at The Bronx Zoo! I adore the dung beetle bench. If I ever got married, me and my beau would need to take fancy wedding pictures on the dung beetle bench.

3. I now want to make see-through stickers and put them on things.

4. I received some spam as I do on a regular basis. I was going to delete it, but before I did I noticed that it was sent from someone who’s name was “Breast Nexus.” Is that not the greatest name from a steamy romance novel? Seriously. I typed “Breast Nexus” into Google and got this:

Wow. Okay. This photoshop then immediately had to be made.

Posted in Beastiesbeastiesbeasties, Movie and Book Reviews. Possibly With Spoilers., Nature, New York, Random Art Bloggery, Stuff, Teh Intarwebz | No Comments »

Pacific Rim and The Hobbit.

Monday, January 6th, 2014

I am SO COLD. I can’t feel my feet. It was -4 degrees Friday and my poor heater was chugging away, but it couldn’t compete with the chill. I went out to a bar to say goodbye to Nessa (she’s moving to San Francisco to become a cop) and I spent the entire time in the bar like this:

I may never feel warmth again. I shall miss you, toes. You served me well.

Anyway, I saw Pacific Rim the other night! Oh, Pacific Rim. I had such high hopes for you. You were full of ‘splosions! Alien on robot warfare! Idris Elba bein’ all awesome like he do! And then, lameness. It started so well, too. The opening bit was totally engrossing and then from that point on it was a slow smooth descent into Pooptown. I can suspend my disbelief to a point, but some things didn’t, like, you know… make sense. The non-sequiturs were so depressingly meh that I don’t want to even discuss them here, but here are a couple distinctive things:

Do you like nosebleeds? Then you’re gonna love this film! Everyone’s rockin’ a delicate sanguous trickle from one nostril.
The machine fried my brain! Nosebleed.
I was exposed to too much radiation! Nosebleed.
Kleenex should have done some product placement. “Is something leaking out of your face because your brain is overloaded controlling a machine the size of the Empire State Building? Mop up that spinal fluid with Kleenex. It can hold your entire medulla oblongata without ripping. That’s Kleenex, the facial tissue that will help tamp the vital ooze until your eyeball explodes from the inside and you collapse to the ground and die. Kleenex.”
There’s a scene where the only female in the whole film, a super-dope Japanese girl:

She has a disturbing flashback to her childhood where her family is killed by a giant crab godzilla monster she is running down the street crying. The little girl playing her as a child was an AMAZING actor. It was creepy how much she looked like that famous picture from Vietnam where the girl is running down the street naked. I’m sure that was intentional.
The main theme music is HAWSOME. Every time I walk into a room, I want this playing in the background. I’m going to have this put in my work contracts from now on. This is non-negotiable. http://youtu.be/s_R2l4ujlao?t=45s
Speaking of music, Idris Elba makes a rally-the-troops speech at one point, you may remember from the commercials (“Today we are cancelling the apocalypse!!!!”) and it’s a total ripoff of the Independence Day speech (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoLywiaM6PA). I really want someone to make a mashup of the two with an unch-unch-unch dance beat behind it. Could someone get on that, please? Thank you.

If you want to hear all the things good and bad (mostly bad, it’s not a great film) about Pacific Rim, I recommend listening to this podcast. It was pretty spot-on.

http://podbay.fm/show/345412221/e/1376152535?autostart=1

And then today I saw The Hobbit 2: Electric Boogaloo with Benadryl Claritin playing the voice of Smaug. Here’s an unusual occurrence: I saw a website that said this as the review.

“Skip the first half, the only part that matters is the dragon. He’s in the second half and he is amazing. Everything before that is boring.”

Then I spoke to a friend of mine who’s opinion matters to me and what she said.

“I loved everything until the dragon. There was lots of action and excitement and then the dumb dragon basically talks for forty-five minutes about how great and scary he is, it’s boring.”

Now, I thought the first movie (The Hobbit: Let’s Eat Dinner For Fifteen Minutes) was boring and drawn-out and could have been condensed down quite a bit, so I didn’t have big expectations for this film, but I liked it! All of it! The beginning, the middle, the end, it was all good. So that’s… three diametrically opposite feelings about the movie. You need to find someone who hated the whole movie and you would have all the boxes checked. I say go check it out, preferably in IMAX, not necessarily in 3D, and maybe you will like it. Or maybe you will feel like any of these other people who sorta liked parts of it. I can’t guarantee anything.

Posted in Movie and Book Reviews. Possibly With Spoilers., New York | 2 Comments »

Kreeesmas.

Thursday, December 26th, 2013

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope everyone has a happy and healthy New Year! Two things I wanted to talk about. First, I designed a nice and tasteful card for our consultants. We gave them a coffee sampler. See, not everything I design is tugboats and dinosaurs. Sometimes I can be an adult too if need be.

Two, in watching the myriad of Christmas films that are thrust into our respective maws at this time of year, I have come to the conclusion that my favorite is How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the live-action one with Jim Carrey. I’m not proud of that. I feel like as an avid theater-goer my tastes should be more refined. But they are not. I think Jim Carrey should win the Lifetime Achievement award at the Oscars for this film. My favorite moment is when he pulls the tablecloth off the table, nails it, and then comes back to knock all the stuff off and push it over. That in itself is a magical niblet of cinema. If you’ve met me, you’ve heard me quote this film. Go watch it again with people you love.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBUwNpsRrRI

Posted in Advertising, Movie and Book Reviews. Possibly With Spoilers., My Art/Design/Business, The Telly | No Comments »

A flurry of things.

Sunday, November 17th, 2013

1. This is fantastic. I’ve been a big PES fan since the two chairs having sex video on MTV. He made a deep-sea fish video with all metal things. Super-great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK18bdUEWSs

2. A book came out and I bought it. It is called “Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints From The Catacombs.” After reading the whole thing, I have come to the conclusion that it should be called “Germans Do Weird Stuff With Their Dead: Too Much Free Time Apparently.” If a saint or martyr is particularly revered, after that person has become a skeleton the church decorates the hell out of them and puts them on display, most often in a jaunty, “Welcome to my sarcophagus, this is where the magic happens” kind of pose.

The problem with dead people is that they tend to look… dead. Really thin and hollow and, you know, not alive. The solutions the church has found to lighten up these saints/martyrs are not helping. One approach is stuff gold all up in their faceholes. Seeing the chains in the sinuses make my nose feel full.

Another is to make a paper-mache or wax mask. That is not an improvement. Just leave the skull alone, they don’t need to look like that for eternity, that’s not nice.

I think it’s so funny that the people who make the outfits for these saints/martyrs always feels a need to cut out the area with the sternum and ribs, like we won’t think they’re really dead if we can’t see their exposed chest bones. I want to see an empty ribcage! They could just be really thin and lethargic! You’re not pulling the wool over my eyes, costume-maker!

Anyway, it’s a cool book and a lovely addition to any home.

3. Does everyone know what “Lorem Ipsum” is? Here’s a definition from lipsum.com:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s … It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English.

It’s filler text until the real text shows up. So imagine my mirth when I got a burrito from Chipotle (yes, I know guacamole is extra, put it on anyway) to see this on one side of my bag:

And this on the other side:

Oh crap! Someone forgot to put real text on. After looking at a variety of articles about it, Chipotle said it was intentional, as little “Easter Egg” for designers to find. This reeks of PR cover-up spin, I believe it not. YOU DINE AT A TABLE OF LIES, CHIPOTLE.

Posted in Movie and Book Reviews. Possibly With Spoilers., Random Art Bloggery, Stuff, Teh Intarwebz | No Comments »

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