A Simple Tool

Well, my trip to New York was pretty damn fun, but, unlike many of the times when I go out a’drinkin’, there aren’t any truly epic stories.  So here are the greatest hits:

• I got to see Rabbit, Duck, Anna, Theo, Mary K8, and Alex Lamb so that was all good, especially given the dearth of people my own age in my area.
• I met Theo’s girlfriend, who seemed surprisingly normal.
• I think I spent roughly 60 dollars, 50 of which was spent on booze.
• I ended up sleeping on a cute girl’s floor and had to find my way back to Theo’s the next morning.  One would think this would be an exiting story but really it’s not.  Mainly because I’m not quite sure how I got from the bar to her apartment as I apparently blacked out about an hour from 1-2 am, which is what I get for ordering that last round of jack and coke.  Anyway it was very nice of her to deal with my drunken ass and allow me to sleep there.  Also I woke her up at 8:30 in the morning because I couldn’t get back to sleep, had been up for an hour, and was bored.  I don’t regret this at all (although I probably should)
• I missed my train the next day, which coupled with my utter lack of sleep (see: sleeping on a floor, setting alarm for 7 am…why? je ne sais pas) left me quite burnt out by the time I got home.

Anyway, it was all in all a pretty great trip.  With my recent trip to DC also a success, I’m kinda into this visiting people thing, although I probably won’t be able to do so again till Clambake (of course I just realized that’s in less than 3 weeks).  Plus all this city-walking is preparing me for my big move to Chicago, which is in two days.

Finally, while on the train/passing out at home between football games, I watched the complete first season of the Showtime series Dexter, which has the distinction of being based on the only book on my overstuffed bookshelves that I haven’t read (Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Note: I have no idea why I haven’t read this or how it got there).  All that aside, the show is pretty damn good although I did guess what the big twist was going to be at the end of the season (yes, I’m bragging.  Deal with it).  Basic Plot Synopsis: Dexter is a serial killer who works as a forensics tech for the police.  I don’t really know what else to say aside from the fact that it’s good (especially the guy that plays Dexter).

As mentioned above, I’m moving to Chicago on Wednesday so the next entry in this exciting little blog will be written in a different time zone (exciting, eh?).

First off, fuck your bitch and the clique you claim …I mean, have you noticed the new trailers from the sure-to-suck new Dane Cook movie, Good Luck Chuck? They completely ignore what, from the other trailers, appeared to be the main premise, which was that everyone Dane Cook slept with found their true love (hence he is afraid to bang Jessica Alba, which proves conclusively that Dane Cook is gay). The trailers basically make it look like it’s about how Alba is a klutz, this is weird. There was another trailer that I saw this weekend that did the same thing, but I can’t remember it for the life of me…ok, now it just came on TV (for serious)…The Heartbreak Kid, in the original trailer the focus was on the fact that Ben Stiller marries a she-beast and then on his honeymoon meets his true love, hilarity ensues. The trailer makes it into, Ben Stiller marries crazy and then…? It’s weird when who ever is releasing the film does this, like when they promoted Stranger than Fiction as a comedy.

Anyway, 3:10 to Yuma and Shoot ‘Em Up.

3:10 to Yuma - This was a good movie, with the potential to be a great one. Unfortunately, it never fulfills this potential. Christian Bale and Russel Crowe are great (as always) and it’s there relationship (down and out family man rancher and cold hearted, yet charming, criminal, respectively) that really drives the movie. Plus, the Crowe’s bad-ass second in command is pretty awesome in the cold-hearted angel of death type dude. Finally, Alan Turdyk! although he’s criminally underused. I like Alan Turdyk. Even the father-son drama with Bale and his movie-kid isn’t poorly done. The kid shows up and for once, in movie history, isn’t a complete and utter hindrance/tool (see War of the Worlds).

Quick Digression – Have you ever noticed this? I’m talking about stupid kid syndrome. Why do so many bad ass, or merely super competent, movie heroes have such lame ass kids? 99.99% of these times the kid ruins everything, and, even if it’s a world-saving mission, the hero ditches everything to save the fucking kid. Sort of related example, (spoiler for 28 Weeks Later) in 28 Weeks Later the US Army actually managed to contain the zombies. Then the stupid doctor helps the (fucking infected!) kids escape the quarantine. Yeah, the army had to kill a bunch of innocents to get the zombies, but isn’t ALL OF HUMANITY worth a couple hundred deaths? This isn’t a wireless wiretapping is ok because of the vague threat of terrorism situation, this is an EVERYONE will be turned into mindless zombies and DIE situation. Let the fucking kids die…In a related note (Danny Boyle connection) Sunshine did this correctly (plus it’s a sweet movie). I mentioned this before. Anyway back to Yuma.

So with all these positives why wasn’t it great? I dunno, it just feels like something is missing. The fact that I can’t quantify it explains why I’m neither a super-rich filmmaker or an actual film critic. The end wasn’t great…but I was dissatisfied before that. Final note: Ignore the negative stuff I’ve said, I may have been expecting too much or mayhaps I am in a secret bad mood. Go see the movie, westerns are cool.

Shoot ‘Em Up - 10 seconds into this movie, Clive Owen stabs a dude in the throat with a carrot. One would think it only get more awesome from there, it doesn’t. What we get instead is a less fun version of Crank (which is almost Chronicles of Riddick-level awesome. Crank that is, not this movie, keep reading). Here’s the good stuff: Monica Bellucci is insanely hot (as always, although she is not nearly naked enough), Clive Owen is bad ass, Paul Giamatti is an awesome villain (this is the best part of the movie. he should be a psycho more often, all funny actors should.), the action scenes are ridiculously over the top, and a lot of people die. The bad: the dialogue verges on utterly ridiculous, especially in the Bellucci-Owen scenes, the action scenes are just too over the top to the point where I was just like “come on”, the plot was too big (for the lack of a better word). While Crank was just like dude-getting-revenge, Shoot ‘Em Up has this complicated presidential-candidate -gun-control-baby-harvesting thing going on…it was just too much. Plus, the end ripped off Django (non-Sergio Leone spaghetti western starring Frank Nero, how’s that for film geek cred motherfucker?) All in all, it wasn’t terrible and, if you go see it, I recommend getting tanked up and going with some rowdy people. Of course, this makes all movies better.

New York City tomorrow to see Theo, Rabbit, Duck, and Anna (perhaps others). Maybe drunken debauchery? Je ne sais pas.

In addition to watching a metric butt-load of movies in the past few weeks, I’ve also done a fair amount of reading.  So here’s what I’ve been looking at, interestingly these are all first novels:

The Traveler – The Traveler has a somewhat cool/unique premise, escaping the omnipresent surveillance of the modern age with secret societies and whatnot.  However, I didn’t think it was all that well written; I didn’t really feel any connection with the female lead character, and the author felt the need to repeat the phrase “Vast Machine” about 7 million times (in fact there was a lot of small repetitions).  Essentially, there are a secret society of mystical types (travelers) that shake up society and are therefore in opposition to the bad controller dudes (the Tabula) the Travelers are then protected by bad ass warriors (Harlequins).  Of course, in recent times the Tabula have been winning and there are there are only like two Travelers left, last chance for freedom…blah blah.  I dunno, it wasn’t bad for a beach-book type deal but there’s better stuff out there.  It’s also the first part of a series, so it’s kind of frustrating to read a not particularly great book and still not get to find out what happens at the end.

Three Bags Full – With this and Black Sheep, there has been about a 20 billion percent increase in sheep-related material reviewed recently.  Three Bags is a murder mystery, where the murder is investigated by sheep.  Of course, this is basically right up my alley, sense of humor-wise, so I’m all about it.  The sheep are sufficiently sheepy (as in not overly anthropomorphic) and pretty endearing, especially my personal favorite Mopple who was the shit.  Unique premise + simple story + cuteness = pretty entertaining book.  Plus there were cute little drawings of sheep in the corner of every page, which was I felt really added to the quality of the literature thereon.  Definitely an author to watch.

Heart-shaped Box – Surprisingly, this book isn’t about one of my favorite songs of all time, but rather tells the story of a vengeful ghost pursuing an aging death metal rocker.  While I felt that the book had some problems, the middle seemed a little rushed as if the author wanted to skip ahead to the climax and was just creating filler and the characters seem to accept all the paranormal stuff quite quickly, it was a pretty good read overall.  The evil ghost is pretty damn creepy, with scratched out eyes and the ability to hypnotize his victims, and the twist at the end was rather effective.  Virtually every character in the book is somehow wounded, either from abuse or just general fucked-upedness and I liked that the author, Hill, didn’t pull any punches, there was a lot of casual brutality over the course of the story.  Apparently, the author has made quite a name for himself as a short horror fiction writer and I’m interested in checking out his other work.

I’ve also been re-reading some stuff and reading some older books.  Here are my recomendations:

The Name of The Rose - By Umberto Eco.  This is like the 3rd re-read.  It’s one of my all time favorites.

Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman - Some pretty cool anecdotes from a brilliant dude.

Night Watch – By Pratchett. Almost everything he writes is good, this is no exception.

The Game - Neil Strauss.  Reading this book is dangerous for me, as I now feel the need to go pick up babes.

Quick movie note: The Year of the Dog - Part of that indefinable quasi-funny indie movie genre that are a dime a dozen every year.  Molly Shannon plays a dog-obsessed woman whose dog dies, and she basically goes nuts.  Oh, and she can’t find love.  All in all, meh.  The best parts of the movie are John C. Reilly and Peter Sarsgaard and they’re in far, far too few scenes.

As I write this, the Saints just punted on 4th and inches in the 4th quarter, down by 17 (against the Colts, you know the best offense in the NFL).  I’m predicting that they lose this game…what an idiotic move…and the Colts just scored to go up 24.

Further football predictions (based on football outsiders template).  I guarantee all these picks will be wrong:

AFC: Pats, Cinci, Indy, Denver.  WC: Chargers, Steelers

NFC: Eagles, Packers, Rams (god, this division sucks), the Saints (although they look like shit right now). WC: Bears, Redskins

Superbowl Champs: Eagles (note: this is wishful thinking)

Overrated: the Giants (by FO), the Saints (by the media)

Underrated: Indy (by FO) the Packers, Philly (by the media)

Sleeper picks: Tampa, Cleveland (hey why not? I vaguely like the Browns)

BCS: Oklahoma (again, why not?  picking LSU or USC is boring and this way I could potentially look brilliant)

That was actually tougher than I thought.

Anyway, I’m going to see 3:10 to Yuma and Shoot-Em Up tomorrow, plus, I’m going to New York on Saturday So I should have  bunch to write about soon, maybe a photo-blog type thing for my trip.

Explosm is doing a pretty funny series of comics right now, it starts here.  Remember kids, don’t do drugs.

In case you’re wondering, it’s cool that I read explosm because it is totally not emo.

I was going to write a review of Rob Zombie’s Halloween but I think this dude at I-Mockery says almost exactly what I was planning on writing: Here

Disapointed

I missed The Lives of Others, a German film which surprisingly beat out Days of Glory and Pan’s Labyrinth for the best Foreign Film Oscar, at the Eveningstar but got a chance to rent it from Blockbuster (boo! hiss! I miss Bart & Greg’s) and was somewhat disappointed.  The film is the story of a East German Stasi Agent (Weisler) who has been directed to monitor a prominent playwright whose girlfriend is lusted after by a high-ranking party member.  The monitor becomes disillusioned with the monitoring process and hilarity does not ensue.  One would think that the premise of the film would lend itself to a Breach-esque paranoid thriller, instead the film is a (very) slow-moving story of dissent.  In my eyes, this failed because the characters were, frankly, not very interesting.  This may have been caused by the language barrier, which has occasionally given me trouble while watching foreign movies, but I feel that the characters were simply difficult to relate too and that the film was far too talky.  There was a distinct lack of “tense” moments in a film that deals with such a topic.  Furthermore, Weisler’s change of heart was underdeveloped and his character was very hollow, although I feel some of that was the intention of the filmmakers.  Finally, the main woman, who was supposed to be the object of desire for all these men, wasn’t even that hot.  Anyway, the long and short of it is that I didn’t like the movie very much and it definitely shouldn’t have beaten Pan’s Labyrinth at the Oscars.  Oh well.

Moving on to TV, the Stomp Tokyo Podcast recently recommended the British series Jekyll and I, having very little else to do, checked it out.  It was actually a pretty good little series.  (Mild spoilers follow)  The Jekyll/Hyde character (here it’s Jackman/Hyde) is done extremely well by James Nesbitt (who I vaguely recognize but can’t figure out what from).  He plays the two characters completely differently in every respect, almost to the point where you think it’s two different actors.  The other actors are pretty solid too, I especially liked the antagonist of the first few episodes, who had a cool “smiling evil” thing going.  However, that leads to my biggest problem with the show: it’s brevity (only six episodes).  Of course British shows tend to have very short runs, but Jekyll could really have benefited from a few more episodes.  We basically get 2 episodes of set-up and then bam! it’s into the finale.  So, there’s not a lot of Hyde running around being sweet and various subplots are pretty undeveloped (especially the whole assistant falling in love thing, which was interesting but came out of nowhere).  Anyway, it’s coming out on DVD in America in like two weeks and it’s certainly worth a rental.

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