I finally saw Captain America: Civil War this weekend.
It did something that I really enjoyed that doesn't happen all that often in super-hero movies. They used their super-powers in the fight scenes. So used to people just bashing each other around with lots of cuts.
Yesterday I was really in the mood for a bad action movie, so I saw A Good Day To Die Hard. I haven’t seen a movie in the theater since November (I think). But I really wanted some explosions, car chases, and a plot that made almost no sense whatsoever. Die Hard delivered. John McClane (MacClain? I dunno how they spell it and I don’t really care either) heads to Russia where his son he hasn’t seen in years is about to go on trial for some sort of drug charge. Total white knight. But John McClaine Jr. is actually C.I.A. and being in jail is part of their complicated plan to bring down the incoming Russian defense minister. Sr. screws that up by distracting Jr. and then they have to start killing bad guys. Sadly, there’s only one car chase, which occurs near the beginning of the film. Lots of explosions and dodging bullets though, including dodging being shot at by a giant gun on a helicopter that shoots lit up bullets. Very satisfying.
Mind you, it’s really nothing like the original Die Hard, which was a different kind of action movie. A Good Day To Die Hard is really the same old action movie.
Today I went and saw The Hobbit. Bleah. Awful movie. I don’t really remember a lot of the book, but there’s a lot of stuff added in the movie. Most of the added stuff I didn’t like. Where the hell did the pale orc nemesis come from? I don’t remember that in the book. Did the movie really need a nemesis in order to make the show palatable? I don’t think so.
Unlike Die Hard, I wanted these things to make sense, and they just didn’t. Why were the dwarves fighting the orcs, other than the set up the nemesis relationship? No reason. Oh yeah, and the son of the dwarf king goes and fights orc who have nothing to do with Smaug the dragon who took over the dwarf redoubt. Why had the pale orc sworn to end the dwarf king’s line in particular? Why does he care? Just dumb. That’s merely one example.
And oh my god was this movie slow. I don’t mind the flashbacks. That didn’t seem to slow things down. But there were interminable talking and speechifying scenes that added nothing. And unnecessarily long scenic shots. And C.G.I. chase scenes that were just too damn long.
Needless to say, I am extremely unlikely to be catching in the theaters the last 6 fucking hours of this story that will comprise the second and third movies of a series that really shouldn’t have been a series.
crossposted from King Rat.
The largest amount of time I spend listening to music these days is on KCRW‘s web site. I don’t know why exactly, but I really dig their music taste lately. Last week though, they had a pledge drive. So I turned to their all-music channel Eclectic24 for the duration. And that’s where I caught the piece above. It’s called Lillies Of The Valley according to the KCRW web site. I had to buy it.
Looking for it, it is on the soundtrack to the documentary Pina by Wim Wenders. But it isn’t available for purchase without buying the whole album. Seriously? Okay. Searching around today though it appears another version of the song, Alviverde, is available. It has lyrics though.
I did pull up Pina on Netflix though. It’s about Pina Bausch, who was a dancer and choreographer, who died just as filming on the documentary started. Now, to say I am unfamiliar with modern dance would be understating things. At the handful of modern dance performances I have attended I generally give the okay face
. I just don’t get most of it.
But the pieces that were featured in the documentary? Whoa. I still don’t know what I watched, but that was way interesting. If Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch ever tours around here, I want to know about it so I can attend. If you have Netflix, go watch at least a part of that. Totally mesmerizing.
crossposted from King Rat.
My headspace has been awful this week, and today in particular. So today I decided to head to the old multiplex and immerse myself in someone else’s story for a bit. Movies are good for that for me. It doesn’t last, but for 90 to 150 minutes I am totally not thinking about my own problems.
Anywho, Cabin In The Woods has been called in various places a meta-horror
movie. The Slut, The Jock, The Scholar, The Idiot and The Virgin all head to a cabin in the woods for a weekend of shenanigans. They all have names, but so much do they fit the cliche that I’ve totally forgotten them already. But, as in all horror movies, things start trying to kill them one by one. The twist in this case (and it happens really early on, so I’m gonna spoil it) is that there is a control room of people orchestrating the horrors that befall the young coeds. Cameras. Remote controls. Etc. Like a reality show gone really wrong.
Does it succeed as a horror movie? I’m not really one to judge as I don’t watch a lot of them, but it wasn’t all that scary. I’m glad for that, as I don’t like to be scared. Because it follows the horror movie script for much of the time, you really know what’s going to happen. It certainly does something different in terms of plot after the first two thirds. So it gets some points for originality.
Does it succeed as meta-horror
? I don’t think so. It sure points out how much horror falls into script. It seems rhetorically similar to if it had a character break the fourth wall and tell the audience that we’re gonna follow the horror movie script. It’s really not spoofing, as it’s done not so much to make fun of the horror script so much as to give everyone in the audience a knowing wink.
It most certainly doesn’t subvert the tropes at all. There’s one scene where typically the Slut bares her breasts. The control room people (male) hope for it, and then stare slack-jawed as if they never get the opportunity to see bare breasts. They are trying to orchestrate her death. I’m all for showing boobs in movies (even gratuitously), but that was uncomfortably creepy.
crossposted from King Rat.
I bought myself a new toy on Monday, a Motorola Xoom. I got the 3G version rather than the WiFi only version. It’s possibly I could get by with the WiFi version, as my track record with my smart phone is that I rarely use much cell phone data with it, and I’ll be carrying the Xoom around less. I’ll be taking it with me to Madison at the end of the month, so we’ll see how much cellular data I use on the trip. If I don’t need it, I’ll cancel my wireless data plan. I paid full price, rather than the subsidized price, so that I wouldn’t get hit with an early termination fee if I ended up doing this.
Here’s some initial thoughts.
The form factor is mostly nice. It’s a little bit on the heavy side to hold up for extended periods of time. For reading, for instance, I’ll be propping it on my lap or something like that. It wouldn’t be so bad if there were a little stickum on the back to make gripping it easier.
I also bought the multimedia dock for it. The Xoom does not slide easily onto it like my Droid slides onto its dock. It usually takes me a bit of working it to get it to settle onto the USB and HDMI sockets.
The graphics are really crisp. The browser appears to be a limited version of Chrome, with way more features than the browser on Android smart phones. I really like the new Gmail application, which is good because K-9, which I use on the Droid, doesn’t work well in tablet size. The GMail application still lacks the ability to save attachments unless they can be opened by another application though. That really sucks. However, the web version of Gmail is accessible, and I can save files from it.
There aren’t a lot of tablet sized applications for it it yet. A few of my applications that I use on my Droid don’t resize at all. Some resize, but badly. Most of them are set to use the standard Droid application buttons. Those buttons don’t exist on the Xoom. Instead, they are put inside some on-screen menu spots. Those spots are not convenient to my thumbs when holding the tablet by the side. In particular, the Google Reader application is cumbersome to use because of this. If it had gesture controls, it would work much better. Applications really need to have gesture/swipe controls on a tablet.
When applications for the tablet do not auto-rotate, it’s even more of a pain than when they don’t for a smart phone. The application market only works in landscape mode. Some of my applications only work in portrait.
I installed the Flash plugin. Most web site flash stuff is a pain with a touch screen. It’s also not very responsive on the Xoom hardware. Provided I can press a button or something like that in a Flash application, the computer won’t respond to that press for several seconds at least. Luckily, even with the plugin installed, I can set the browser to only run Flash applications I click on.
Battery life is really pretty good so far. I can read news with Google Reader and my standard web sites for about 90 minutes, and the battery level drops from 100% to 87%. Flash sucks the battery, even when it’s just a container to play video. Supposedly video actually doesn’t kill the battery when viewed in a native application, but I haven’t tried that yet other than a couple of short Youtube videos.
Even though it’s on the Verizon cellular network and it nominally uses a phone number, I can’t use it for phone calls (not surprising) or even text messaging (a little surprised by that). I can’t even install the Google Voice application only to listen to my voice mails. I can use the Google Voice web site at least. The lack of text messaging means I can’t install Mobile Defense, which is the application I put on my Droid that lets me track it remotely (and control it remotely too).
I have installed six different book applications on it. This was the reason I bought the thing. My Nook died hard after Guinevere knocked it off the shelf. Rather than stick with one book platform, I could use all of them and buy a book wherever it was cheapest. Or even available. So I have the Nook and Kindle applications. The Nook application uses gestures for reading, so I’m happy there. I haven’t tried the Kindle application yet. It also comes standard with the Google Books application, which I haven’t yet tried either. I also installed the Aldiko reader for reading epubs and the occasional Adobe Digital Editions format. I’ve used it on my phone. Maybe the Nook or Google Books applications can be side loaded, but I didn’t bother to look.
Additionally, I installed the Overdrive and Audible applications for audio books. I’ve used Overdrive’s desktop platform to get audio books from the Seattle Public Library before, but I couldn’t transfer many of them to my Droid due to DRM. I hadn’t realized they’d finally gotten an Overdrive Android application until I ran into it this time. I will likely add it to my Droid too. I haven’t used the Audible application yet.
I may install the Kobo books application if I ever find a book there that I want and can’t get anywhere else.
I plan on leaving my laptop at home on my upcoming trip to Madison. Going to see if the Xoom and Droid will be sufficient for my needs on trips. I even got a Bluetooth keyboard for the Xoom so I could take notes quickly.
crossposted from King Rat.
I haven’t really watched television in a while, but my cousin had a viewing party for Game of Thrones and I’ve heard a lot of hype, so I decided to go and see.
Short verdict: The characters are well-written, and the story is reasonably interesting though kind of unoriginal. Haven’t we seen the rough and tumble northmen and the Calormen in the south before? There’s more boobs and head chopping than in the Narnia tales though. It also got in some of the requirements for medieval movies too: the band of horsemen riding through the narrow walled passages scene, and the drunken debauchedness feast scene. Casting was decent. Really liked the opening credits, though the steampunk ethic doesn’t seem to fit with the story.
Haven’t read the books, by the way. Definitely won’t until he’s done with the series, and I’m not likely to make that kind of investment anyway given that I am not a huge fan of swords and sorcery fantasy.
crossposted from King Rat.
I had lunch at Louisa’s today, and grabbed a Stranger rather than read my book. The Stranger Suggests for tonight was The Taqwacores, based on a book I read 2 or 3 years ago that I loved. So I headed up to the Northwest Film Forum tonight to see it (last night showing).
It’s hard to be as good as the book, because they can’t just fit everything in. There was less punk in it than the book. So some of it was more like Muslim deadbeats living together rather than Muslim punks. And it was choppy; the character progression wasn’t smooth. Both issues really attributable to being able to fit less story in. But they kept all the main characters, and the best scenes. The acting was really superb, particularly the “straight-edge” Muslim punk who you could just see the anger at having to live with less devout Muslims steaming off him. And the overall effect was just as good as the book: outcasts trying to reconcile their heritage they don’t want to give up with their rebellion which rejects a lot of that heritage.
Also, I swear the roof of the building they lived in coulda been the same roof as in Clerks. There’s just not a hell of a lot of difference between tarred roofs of brick buildings.
crossposted from King Rat.
Yesterday, I went to Hump 5, The Stranger’s annual amateur porn festival. I missed the first year, but have gone every year since. This year was the awesomest! The best in terms of entries overall compared to other years. And also awesomest because because I took my girlfriend. Sharon’s awesome for going with me (and for lots of other reasons). But enough mushy stuff, porn!
This is what happens when your girlfriend is in rehab for 28 days.
Sluts ride the SLUT. It’s exactly what you’d think it is. Someone had the guts to have sex on the SLUT, with several helpful people to film (at least one on the streetcar and one in a vehicle alongside). Those streetcars aren’t that big. You can’t go to the back of the train to do this and hide, though the streetcar did appear empty except for the driver. Gutsiest entry this year. Top 3 for sexiest.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandroot