nonionay: (Default)
Just got back from Harry Potter. I liked it, even with the teenage hormones on overdrive. Make sure you read the books first. The meaning of the title isn't even explained.

In other news, my weather widget just told me there was a severe weather alert. Given that this is the height of summer, I'm all, "WTF?" But when I clicked on it, it said the alert had expired. So what was it!??!

Speaking of the weather, I think I'm going to have to see 2012. They have a tidal wave sweep an aircraft carrier on top of the White House. Keffy and I have a plan: We'll catch a matinee of 2012, and follow it up with a home viewing of The Day After Tomorrow, for an incredibly drunken comparison.
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After Torchwood, we bleached out our brains with Best In Show. I was indifferent the first time I watched that, but with each new viewing, I love it more and more. That movie is such a great lesson in characterization, since it's so wacky and over the top and still somehow believable. We watched the deleted scenes this time, and I saw what is now my favorite part of the whole movie:

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I went hiking with my dad today, in honor of Father’s Day. We hiked up into the Chuckanuts and got only a little lost in the winding labyrinth of trails up there. The first part of the trail goes like straight up the hill, and the second part meandered in these ridiculous loopy switchbacks down a gentle slope were you could literally get from one bit of the trail to the next in two steps, but no, they wanted to mess with you and make you go four times farther than you had to.
This is a hike that ten years ago, I could have just barely made, but now I can charge up the hill without too much effort. My dad actually commented on how much better shape I’m in than when I was a teenager, which just seems backwards to me.
Dad also brought me official documents giving me power of attorney if anything happens to him, as well as his will. He told me to make sure I pay myself for executing his estate, that that will make it feel easier. All this means it’s probably time for me to get a real, grown up safe deposit box.
Then I saw Up, while still in my hiking boots, having just returned from an adventure with my dad. <3 That movie totally made me cry, and I can count the number of crying movies on one hand. (Life is Beautiful and Brokeback Mountain are the only ones I can think of right now, but I know there’s a couple more.)

Oh yeah. There were two boys (maybe thirteen years old) at the mall, who, when I passed them, said, “I stepped on a cookie!” Having bought my movie ticket, I had only $3.50 with which to entertain myself for over an hour. I bought a notebook and pens from Target, and settled into one of the comfy chairs in front of JCPenney’s to write. The afore-mentioned boys eventually came over and threw themselves on the couch, announcing alternately “I stepped on a cookie! (He stepped on a cookie) (It was a mean cookie)” and the depth of their boredom. They said “I stepped on a cookie!” to everyone who passed by. I was truly impressed with their perseverence, and if I hadn’t been engrossed in my writing, i would have struck up a conversation about this cookie. What kind was it, after all?
nonionay: (sepulchrave)
Just got back from my second viewing of Star Trek. I realized this time around that none of it makes sense. AT ALL. Last time, I was like, "wow, there's an amazing amount of bad science and coincidence in this, but I love it anyway." This time, I had visions of the writers sitting around a table analyzing their work. "Does this scene contain any logic flaws or other stuff that could only result because everyone's an idiot except our main characters? Wait, it doesn't? We'd better fix that! Let's go ALL the way!"

And I still love it.

hee hee hee hee hee.

According to one individual I know, I'm having a midlife crisis. I don't think he knows he knows me.
nonionay: (wwjd)
If you haven't watched March of the Penguins, and you get the DVD, don't bother watching the movie, just watch the behind the scenes documentary. It's got all the same footage, with actual information and personality. (Sorry Morgan Freeman, I love ya, but the actual filmmaker, with his fun French accent, who actually made an emotional connection with his subject, is more interesting. We did, however, briefly consider trying to play The Shawshank Redemption audio over the penguins.)

Reviewers were all, "oh, it's a nature movie without all the boring documentary stuff!" No, it's long boring shots of penguins sitting around in their own shit while you voiceover about how they love each other. Possibly it was more exciting on the big screen. I'd like Antarctica looming over me. Especially if the movie theatre was really cold. That would actually be kinda awesome.

If they edited the footage down, and put in actual informational narration from a narrator with personality, then I might have really liked it. Kind of like that behind the scenes documentary. Now that was awesome.

I hate people sometimes. "Oh, I don't want to know stuff, I just want to see the cute things. They're just like us!" Because just like penguins, humans find a new true love every new year.

I've been so spoiled by David Attenborough.
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Saw Watchmen today with [livejournal.com profile] spencimusprime. I was happy with it. I've read the comic once and appreciated it as a technical and cultural achievement, but was never terribly attached to the characters or the storyline. So that's where I'm coming from. Spencer's a fanboy (and indeed, was the one who lent me the comic to begin with) and has a different perspective and set of opinions.

I think they did a good job cramming a lot of stuff into the movie without having it feel like The Golden Compass, which just plain didn't make sense. There was, however, a long stretch that seemed to consist of nothing but two characters fucking and fighting (each other and not each other, respectively.)
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Saw James Bond. It was strange-- an inside out Bond movie. I got what I wanted (angsty Bond!), but the action sequences were choppily edited, and the ending, while satisfying, was eerily abrupt.

But overall, I'm in love with Inside-Out Bond. There were a couple parts where they got my heart good and hard.
nonionay: (wwjd)
To all my friends who see Twilight: When you see a curly-haired, female EMT wheeling some guy away on a gurney, think, "that's Michelle, an awesome EMT and firefighter in real life."

She's a former co-worker of mine, as well as my current co-worker's wife. She joined a movie extra company as sort of a hobby. She also a children's librarian and trains for marathons in her spare time.

She's also how I learned about Twilight. Imagine the following scene:

Cast: Ryan--my co-worker.
Me-- me.

Ryan (just putting down his lunchbox: Yeah, Michelle got this audiobook that's apparently really popular. I listened to part of it on the way in to work. It's about this girl and vampires. She moves to Forks.

Me: Forks, Washington??? (Remembers barren, treeless hills far from either sea or mountain. Colorless town. Good pancakes. Tries to imagine angsty teen vampires in Land O' Loggers. Can't.)

I type "forks vampires" into Google, and discover the book. I snicker a lot and laugh at Ryan for having to listen to it.

Some time later, I next heard of the book when Ryan told me they were making a movie out of "that Forks book," and Michelle was going to be an extra.
nonionay: (wwjd)
I watched The Cabinet of Dr Caligari tonight. [livejournal.com profile] csinman made fun of me, but I liked it. It's a silent movie from 1920, what do you expect? [livejournal.com profile] awriter and I vetoed the crappy jazz saxaphone score and put on Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts album, which was much, much better.
nonionay: (Default)
Yesterday I saw The Forbidden Kingdom. I'd heard the only reason to see it was: Jet Li vs. Jackie Chan. That was enough for me, so, going in with low expectations, I had fun. It's full of beautiful scenery and terrible dialogue. Amazing fight scenes and giant plot holes. It's got a dorky white boy who get made fun of for romanticizing kung fu, while the movie does more romanticizing than that boy ever could.
It's also got:
Villians in shimmery eyeshadow who fondle girls and kill the messenger.
Giggling monkey gods.
Sexy white-haired witches with whips, and revenge-obsessed love interests who speak only in the third person. (I was actually overjoyed by the way they handled her in the end)
Jackie Chan and Jet Li torturing dorky white boy in the name of kung fu training-- in tandem.
And best of all, Jet Li peeing on Jackie Chan.

I think the best way to sum it up is "campy," meaning "OMG this is awful but I love it."
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Last night Chelsea and I wanted to watch a movie [livejournal.com profile] kehrli would have hated-- Keffy being away at Rainforest. Unfortunately, all the obvious choices (Keffy suggested a Sleepless in Seattle/You've Got Mail double feature) were rejected because we hate them too. Meh.
So we ended getting The Dresden Files and Full Metal Yakuza. Much to my dismay, the latter DVD didn't work. ~>:(
The first episode of the Dresden Files (which was originally the third, because execs are dumb like that) was pretty blah, but later ones were better. There was a bunch of changes from the book that didn't bug me too much. Bob's a ghost who takes human form rather than a disembodied voice. I can see how a person is more interesting to watch than a voice. The change that bugged me the most was his ginormous apartment, but they always do that in tv shows. How the hell do tv characters afford them? They didn't have the fact that technology breaks down, which bugs me because even though the magic vs technology thing bugs me too, I liked the things Harry had to do to bypass it.
And dude, he hasn't blown up anything yet! Granted, their special effects budget is obviously pretty low, and maybe they want to be different.
The worst thing was that, despite a few short voice-overs, we never get saturated with Harry's personality like we do in the books. Lots of the secondary characters have more personality than him. They did have Butters show up for a second, which makes me love them. Just a guy in the morgue wearing a barely visible "I love Polka" t-shirt under his lab coat. I think he had maybea few lines, but Chelsea, who had no idea who he was, got the impression he was a main character.

Ultimately, it makes me pissed off that I'm not getting my copy of Storm Front until July, when Justime Musks book comes out. Book 1 will be the last Dresden book I read!!!
nonionay: (Default)
Just got back from The Golden Compass. I wasn't impressed. The acting and/or dialogue was lousy, and they stripped out a lot of the complications I loved, like in the first scene, where I wasn't sure who was a bad guy. In the movie, you know exactly who's the bad guy. They left one revelation that came early in the book to drown in cliche at the climax.
It might have worked as a mini-series, but two hours wasn't enough time.
nonionay: (sepulchrave)
And on a completely random note, as I watched Sweeney Todd last night, I realized that it didn't seem like a Tim Burton movie, and it took me a while to figure out why -- no Danny Elfman music!
nonionay: (sepulchrave)
And dude, it's one of the best things I've seen in a long time. Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter's character interactions are awesome. All the character interactions are awesome.

But did anyone else notice the bevy of creepy Harry Potter actors? It made the movie extra, extra creepy, especially since the little boy in it occasionally looked like Draco Malfoy.
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(No spoilers, I promise, unless maybe you haven't seen the second one)

One thing I've learned is valuable for writing is establishing what is at stake right away, and making sure everyone has a strong and independent motivation. i saw Pirates of the Caribbean last night, and they definitely got those two things down. Granted, the first was a bit heavy-handed. (And seriously messed up. Disney continues to boggle me) But damn, it was emotionally effective and got across the message of PIRATES=FREEDOM, which continues to be a guilty pleasure (Happy Memorial Day! Go remember all those pirates who died to make you free!... and then murdered your kid brother for his lunch money.)

So last night, I went and saw the first movie that actually makes me want to write fanfiction. Not like Star Wars, which makes me want to take the things they screwed up, and do them properly in my own world, but rather, actually explore facets of the story and characters which they had almost no opportunity to show. Everyone has their own agenda and I wish I could know what's going on in their head. (This urge might, admittedly, be lessened if Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly were capable of more than one facial expression. ) Hell's freezing over, and I actually wish there had been MORE RELATIONSHIP ANGST. (though there really wasn't space for it) And yes, there's the fate of certain characters which needs avenging.

Almost all the things I hated about Movie 2 (mostly all the self-referential crap) was gone. Knowing it actually had an ending was nice, too.
It had so many things I love: beautifully stylized filth, trips to the underworld, intrigue, good guys who do horrible things, and my latest obsession-- detachable hearts.

Idiocracy

May. 20th, 2007 09:13 am
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Last night, we watched Idiocracy, about which I'd heard good things, but I was mildly skeptical, since it looked to tread very closely towards that realm of juvenile scatological humor I despise. Happily, the movie has the genius of being nothing but juvenile scatological humor, and simultaneously making fun of it. IT IS A TERRIFYING MOVIE.

Beavis and Butthead aside, I love Mike Judge. He's got it where it counts in the heart, head and soul, and knows how to appeal to everyone. It's sad that he doesn't have wider acclaim (Fox's fault, according to gossip.) He's like Jesus, loving all us wayward sheep. And damn, I respect him for that. I know that I never could have handled being in Joe and Rita's place at the end of Idiocracy.
EDIT:
Thinking about the conspiracy theory-ness of it, I wonder how the hell did this movie get made in the first place? I know it almost didn't get released. This movie makes fun of the people who produced it, after all.
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So [livejournal.com profile] kehrli and I have a bunch of meat in our freezer thanks to the generosity of Keffy's family. Last night we cooked a whole chicken. This is a profound event for me, a rite of passage! Never before have I stuck my hand inside the chest cavity of a dead bird to rub it down with butter and garlic/pepper/salt. Using a combination of wisdom from my copy of The Joy of Cooking (which also graphically shows me how I could skin one of the squirrels that run across my roof) and advice from Keffy's dad, we stuck the chicken in the oven. Then, we took it out, poked it (juices ran clear) carved it, stuck it back in the oven when it proved pink, took it out, put it back in, and finally ate it.
And lo! It was quite yummy.

During all this, we watched Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.
Can anyone tell me what happened in that movie? I even had someone who's played the game to attempt an explanation, but even Keffy doesn't know what's going on! What I got out of it is: Cloud is angsty and has a big sword, Sephiroth is crazy and has a long sword (and alas, no kaballistic symbolism), and the Lifestream is green and shiny.

EDIT: Keffy pointed out that In order to make something awesome, you inevitably have to make it stupid. (Case in point, big exciting motorcycle chases where Cloud can get shot point blank in the face, yet only have his goggles blown off.) The trick is to get the greatest amount of Awesome out of the smallest amount of Stupid.

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