Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

This was a double-movie weekend. This is what seems to happen if one of us is away for the week. Most weekends we hit the movies, but sometimes we double-up.

Iron Man was awesome and lived up to my expectations after a week of hype. The casting was excellent, the effects were fun and convincing, the plot was one I could really get into… yeah, I could see it again and not just because I’m a popcorn addict. It was the best action movie I’ve seen in a while! Fun!!!

Speed Racer was also an amazing ride – we saw it on the IMAX screen and … wow. The visual effects in the movie are fabulous. The casting was great – I love John Goodman and Susan Sarandon (Pops and Mom Racer) and Emile Hirsch was a great choice for Speed Racer. The only unfortunate choice was Chrstina Ricci as Trixie. Next to baby-faced Hirsch (who is also 5 years younger than she is), Ricci looked obviously older in their closeups. It’s a PG movie, it’s not terribly complex or unpredictable, but it is a great ride.

iron man, movies, reviews, speed racer

Bunnies bearing eggs are not to be trusted!

As appropriate, I had easter candy for breakfast. And that was the full extent of my observance of the holiday. Some traditions should not be broken.

All in all, this was not the most productive weekend in history, but it suited my mood. I could have used a little more sleep, but that was apparently not to be. I could have used a little more time with my brain functioning as well, but this was also not to be. Oh well.

We did go see 10,000 B.C. in which we saw some pretty ticked off giant arboreal attack chickens who were some ticked about that bunny stealing their eggs. Even after bracing ourselves for a fantasy movie, it was a pretty bad movie. Silly and amusing enough but bad. I don’t feel cheated out of time and money, but in hindsight I really didn’t need to see it.

The Bank Job would have benefited from skimpier costumes for Jason Statham. Alas, he was fully clothed most of the time. Despite this, it was a good, fun caper flick.

This weekend also involved looking at couches again as our current couch is rather … squished. We have confirmed that we are incredibly picky. We have also confirmed that we should probably carry around little cards that explain to sales people to leave us alone because they’re more likely to get a sale that way. However, I am at least somewhat optimistic that we will be able to find a couch we like when the time comes. Our current couch is probably about 10 years old and those years have not been easy. If all else fails, I’ll get it refurbished with new cushions and upholstery or maybe do that anyway and put it somewhere else in the house. I’d also like to put a comfy reading chair in my office where I currently have a bunch of crates and boxes for recycling. I need to stash my sewing machine boxes somewhere storage-like as well. And I should do something about bookshelves so I can get my books out of the Fop’s office… not that I can navigate through the boxes of comics to get to my books right now. *giggle* I do sense a trip to IKEA in my future though.

But, first on my list is to play with fabric. I need some sort of carrier for my laptop accessories and cables. I keep seeing the neoprene ones for sale and thinking “cool but I could make that” so I guess I should get off my butt, right?

I know the photo is not very Spring-ly, but I really like it. I hadn’t posted a non-monster cat photo in a while and wanted to post something. It would also make an excellent location to hide easter eggs. In fact, maybe this is an easter photo and you should find the easter egg hidden in this picture!

10,000 B.C., easter, movie reviews, movies, projects, shopping, The Bank Job, weekend, photographs

I did indeed survive the week. I was unsuccessful in taking Friday afternoon off… there were just too many things that were easier to write up while they were fresh in mind. I’m in New London Monday, so yeah… chaos always seems to ensue when I show up there, so there was no good way to put things off to Monday. Oh well. I still survived the week! We went to see a horrible movie late Friday afternoon… and yes, it’s all my fault. It had funny and cute moments, but mostly was stupid with a dash of scarring for life… There’s your review of Strange Wilderness. Don’t go see it. I am not entirely sure why I wanted to see it… probably because I was worn out and everything else sounded crappy too. The popcorn was really fresh at least.

I have nothing else organized to say today. Which implies that the above was organized. Which it wasn’t, of course. So yeah… time to go do laundry now.

Oh and yes, I’m going to CT tomorrow, I’ll be back home Wednesday night because if I was away for both my birthday and Valentine’s day, the Fop would never let me hear the end of it.

work, movies, strange wilderness, travel, photographs, sunset

Friday night we tried to go see Cloverfield but ended up seeing 27 Dresses instead. Last night we ended up back at the theaters to see Cloverfield.

27 Dresses was not your average chick flick. It was silly and hilarious and remarkably fun. There was a lot of excellent dialog and 27 highly amusing bridesmaid dresses. The options for torturing bridesmaids displayed in this movie almost make me want to torture some of my own. Almost. Katherine Heigl (who also played the lead in Knocked Up) really doesn’t do much for me but that didn’t lessen the amusement factor of the movie. Silly, happy fun.

Cloverfield rocked. I think in part I love movies where NYC gets destroyed. For me, Cloverfield maintained serious intensity through out, starting almost from the very beginning. There’s a certain anticipation I brought with me, knowing it was some sort of big, bad monster flick, but the film teased me in the beginning with a fun, fluffy intro. The first 15 minutes of the movie really don’t prepare you for how involved you’re about to get with these characters. And then the intensity builds and builds… it’s not so much a scary movie as an intense ride through a disaster. The ending credits feature an incredible piece of music entitled “ROAR! (Cloverfield Overture)” was intense and dramatic and capped off the movie really well. (Stay for the credits. All the way through.)

I’m not stunned that Cloverfield is breaking January opening records. The theater was pretty full last night at the 10:15 pm show (Sunday of opening weekend, though granted a holiday Monday was coming up) and I’d happily go see it again.

That’s all!

movies, cloverfield, 27 dresses, reviews

Labor Day Weekend was productive. I participated in the Sweat Shop of Dags and Red Fabric run by ownedbytwins Saturday and Sunday. Too many dags! It was a great time and many muffins were eaten! (And wine and mead and various other tasty things!) By the time we closed up shop, very early Monday morning, some of the guard uniforms were together and awaiting some finishing touches… er… re-engineering. Labor Day itself was spent recovering from the previous two long days of craziness.

Tuesday I turned off my IM software. It was awesome. It’s back on today, but a week without most of my personal IM stuff up and running was a great thing. (No offense to those of you who thought I’d died because I wasn’t on IM. You’ll have to figure out what my secret back-up IM account is.) The week was productive enough at work despite a large dose of stress and anxiety. I would rather get work done than deal with politics but sometimes the politics have other ideas. I survived, and the last punch of politics for the week was actually kind of polite so I was relieved going into the weekend.

Movies

Friday night we went to see Balls of Fury. We saw about 20 minutes of it before the film ate itself. The movie was actually kind of promising – silly but promising. We hung out another 20 minutes until the projectionist determined there was no fixing the film. We were sent across the hall to see 3:10 to Yuma which was just starting (and given free passes to boot).

3:10 to Yuma was great despite the fact that I was really in the mood for a silly movie. Russell Crowe and Christian Bale are a great combination. Crowe, as the confident and carefree outlaw Ben Wade, never doubts that his gang will show up, free him, and kill everything standing around him in the process. Bale is a desperate rancher, Dan Evans, who’s agreed to escort Wade to the train station to put him on the prison train to Yuma. This is Evans’ last chance to save his farm, his family and rescue himself from the way his sons look at him. Wade spends most of the trip trying to convince Evans to give up and go home while he still can.

It’s a bleak movie. Evans is up against horrible odds only made worse by Wade’s casual disregard for the security escort he’s been provided. Wade is the most interesting character in the movie. Where Evans is honest and driven, Wade is calculating but laid back. He’s not an enigma – his motivations are always on the surface whether he’s trying to bribe or sweet talk. The true, chaotically evil, bad guy of this film is Charlie Prince, played by Ben Foster (whom you might recognize as Angel from the last X-men movie). With a blind devotion to Wade that borders on fanaticism, Charlie Prince hunts down and kills people throughout the movie. Charlie gets most of the great lines in the movie making for a remarkably quippy bleak movie.

Other movies from the past month:

• The Bourne Ultimatum – more action, less plot than the previous Bourne movies, but still a fun ride
• Hairspray – cute, fun, energetic and a total hoot (who can resist a dance number between John Travolta and Christopher Walken?)
• Stardust – a beautiful fairy tale that plunges us into a wonderful world and we will never look at Robert De Niro quite the same again

Other stuff
The rest of this weekend was an adventure in trying to sleep and trying to win the battle of the laundry. I have been rather insomniac this month so far despite eating properly and exercising more routinely. Laundry is on-going, as usual, but at least it’s mundane clothing now rather than Pennsic stuff. I made a lot of progress this weekend… I hope. For my next trick I’ll survive work this week. I’ve got a lot to get done and I’m relying on very busy people to get me what I need to succeed.

3:10 to Yuma, Balls of Fury, Bourne Ultimatum, Hairspray, IM, Stardust, dags, entertainment, laundry, movies, sca, sewing, sleep, weekend

If you haven’t seen Stardust yet, go this weekend. It’s a delightful fairy tale in a magical land. I think I’d seen the trailer twice, and not since before Pennsic, so I went in fairly free of expectations and was totally delighted by the creativity of the story and world. It was a fun movie, rich in detail and character. I have to say that I enjoyed it thoroughly.

We also got excellent previews before the movie including: The Seeker: The Dark is Rising and The Golden Compass. (POLAR BEAR POWER!) Now I need to get my Susan Cooper books from Maine so I can re-read The Dark is Rising series.

movies, neil gaiman, stardust

The elizabethan collar really … enhances Tenny’s personality. “Enhances” in the sense that it makes him look sillier than usual. With a little help from the Fop, we have provided Episode 3 of Monster Cat, because that collar is going to come off Real Soon Now and we’ll lose really good silly material.

Yes, there’s a special PETA Hell just for me. Probably with lots of cats taking pictures of me and giggling.

If we’re lucky, Tenny has less than 48 hours left as a bandaged conehead. I’m tempted to take my camera to the vet’s office (along with copies of Monster Cat, of course) to capture his first moments of freedom. (The bottom panel was almost captioned. “FREEDOOOOOOM!!!!”)

Tenny ran into the wall at the top of the stairs this morning and just stood there like, “I meant to do that.” I couldn’t break it to him that I just didn’t buy it anymore. Besides, I was trying not to giggle too hard on the stairs because there was someone actually sleeping in the guest room. He’s also limpy in a way that really lends itself to the nickname “Hopalong”… which he clearly dislikes. I’m not over-anthropomorphizing this time. If you saw the look he gives us when we call him “Hopalong” you’d understand.

The rest of the world is still moving right along too. I continue to enjoy my job and I think my boss is the awesomest. Work on the guest room and bathroom should start in a week, more or less. Exciting times!

All the Monster Cat episodes: The Chronicles of Monster Cat

cats, comics, elizabethan collar, emo, emo cat, monster cat, movie quotes, movies, silly, tennyson

I’m excited for the fourth Die Hard movie coming June 27th: Live Free or Die Hard. I wonder what New Hampshire thinks of that title. Could the writers not convince the MPAA to let them call the movie “Live Free or Die Hard: Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!”? I’m sure if they made an offer to shorten it to “Live Free or Die Hard, Motherfucker” it wouldn’t go over well either. (New Hampshire’s license plates tout their motto “Live free or die”. My theory is that “Live free or die, fuck you” was too long for the license plate.)

I have a special soft spot in my heart for action movies with big explosions. Die Hard is right up there with Lethal Weapon for me. I love movies where the good guys are crazy and win anyway I guess.

The original Die Hard movie was released in 1988. Bruce Willis is 57 now so we’ll see if he prooves he’s not too old for awesome action flicks. In the Live Free or Die Hard trailer, there are a couple of moments when Willis definitely looks like he’s feeling his pain. I hope for his sake that it’s in-character pain rather than real pain but I suspect it’s both. He’s certainly not too old to look the part of John McClane. Some of the movie stills on IMDB do make him look like he’s escaping from a prison in an Eastern Block country though. But overall, I think Willis will pull off this fourth transformation from clean, dapper and attractive at the beginning of the movie to dirty, bruised, broken and “are those really the same clothes he had on 2 hours ago” by the end of the movie.

So in anticipation of next month’s new Die Hard movie, here’s a retrospective, including clips from the preview for the 4th movie, set to music by Guyz Nite. I’d never heard of them either, but the song is totally fun (and not entirely work safe due to a fabulous chorus of “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!”… then again if you’re watching music videos at work, that chorus probably won’t matter).

bruce willis, die hard, guyz nite, live free or die harder, movies, previews

Spider-man 3 was the worst comic book movie I’ve ever seen. (Yes, I’ve seen Elektra and Daredevil, not to mention Ghost Rider.) In the interest of full-disclosure, I did not like Spider-Man 2 very much either. I also have never read the Spider-Man comics. But I also like most movies, even the bad ones. My favorite part of Spider-Man 3 was seeing the back of haeddre‘s head during the jazz club scene.

There are possible minor spoilers below.

I dislike Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man and Peter Parker to begin with. If the purpose of this movie was to make the audience hate Peter Parker and his ego-centric, self-indulgent personality, it worked. By halfway through the movie I was hoping he’d miss with his webbing and fall to his death. Kirsten Dunst is cute but plays Mary Jane as a whiner which doesn’t really work for me either. James Franco was a highlight of the cast as Harry Osborn, despite his mercurial personality swings. Eddie Brock, played by Topher Grace, deserved a little more screen time and character development. Unfortunately, that screen time was sucked up by Peter Parker doing some sort of bizarre strutting montage.

Spider-Man 3 plods along painfully. I found the exposition in the beginning about 5 minutes longer than necessary especially since the previous movies have been fairly huge blockbusters. There was so much character and relationship development I wondered if the script had been written by a romance novel writer. There was an extended scene where Peter Parker struts about town, getting startled looks from random women on the street, to a horrible piece of music. I’m not sure if a selection from the Bee Gees would have made it better or worse but it certainly would have been fitting. The Jazz Club scene with Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy is also painfully long. The audience got the idea that Peter Parker was a cocky, self-centered egotistical asshole already, we didn’t need another extended musical scene for this. The best part of this scene is the end when Gwen apologizes to Mary Jane and storms out in tears leaving Peter behind. (Gwen Stacy is played by Bryce Dallas Howard from The Village and Lady in the Water if you’re trying to place her but can’t figure out where you’ve seen her.)

Another problem was an overpopulation of villains. Sandman and Venom and a new Goblin, oh my! Too many storylines (focused primarily on the villains’ hatred of Spider-Man, which I could totally relate to) were presented too quickly and even felt far too over-simplified and condensed to me. The special effects were not as amazing as in previous Spider-Man movies. Something about the cgi and the physics was just not as realistic. The result was a movie that felt like a character and relationship study that happend to have some bad guys and a little cgi. I have no idea where they spent all the money they supposedly spent on this movie. On talent, I guess?

Word is that Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst won’t be doing another Spider-Man movie. Good. Perhaps Sam Raimi should step down as director as well. These movies have created an interesting universe that could continue to be successful with better acting, writing and directing. I won’t feel quite as bad about driving up the opening weekend ticket sales results on this movie if a sequel happens with completely new people. It’s almost as if this comic book movie got lost somewhere. Perhaps the guy in the editing room thought he was editing a drama instead of an action comic book blockbuster.

It was so bad we came home and watched another movie (Shaun of the Dead) just to get Spider-Man 3 out of our heads.

movie reviews, movies, reviews, spider-man, spider-man 3, spiderman, spiderman 3

So remember those delicate plum blossoms from Friday’s post? Most have been blown from the tree in this Nor’easter that’s ploughing through. It started in the wee hours of Sunday morning with heavy rain. I woke up at 8:30 yesterday morning to the sound of the sump pump followed closely by the realization that I had several loads of dirty laundry still on the floor in the basement. So much for sleeping in! It rained steadily throughout the day. We got some serious water in the basement, where serious = enough depth and current to float small paper boats. I got all the laundry done though!

The wind started to pick up late in the afternoon yesterday. Yay wind! Well, yay in the sense that it was getting boring to watch rain falling straight down. Sideways and diagonally are much more interesting! By the time I went to bed the wind was gusting with enthusiasm and not insignificant volume. I woke up a couple of times during the night to the sound of wind and rain but sometime early this morning the rain noise went away. I was thinking that the wind was trailing behind the rest of the storm. When I got up this morning I realized I was wrong. There’s some icky slush on the ground and snow and sleet are still blowing around out there.

I’m supposed to fly up to Providence tonight. The weather reports don’t bode well for tonight or tomorrow morning. If this snow moves north, I may be screwed. Ah well, worse things have happened.

We went to see Grindhouse on Friday. I didn’t expect to like it at all, honestly. Exploitive B-Slasher movies are very much not my genre. Then again, IMDB has the genre listed as “Action / Horror / Sci-Fi / Thriller” which is actually remarkably accurate. And you know what? I enjoyed it a lot. Grindhouse is actually 2 full-length movies: the first is Robert Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” and the second is Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof”. Fake movie trailers and commercials are aired before each feature (including one trailer featuring Nicholas Cate as Fu Manchu in “Werewolf Women of the SS”). The two films contained an obnoxious amount of surreal violence, some of which was so absurd it made me laugh. I liked Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” better honestly- it was faster paced and had an entertaining, over-used, ridiculous plot. Rose McGowan was a hoot. Freddy Rodriguez can plan my escape from apocalypse any day. Bruce Willis was remarkably unremarkable as a bad guy. Tarantino (who had parts in both movies) was actually a more memorable and developed character.

“Death Proof” moved more slowly, especially after “Planet Terror”, and was not what I expected from Tarantino. In fact, it was more fun than I expected. Tarantino made the more up-beat movie… who’d have expected that? I will say that “Death Proof” was totally worth it for Zoe Bell (playing herself), a rockin’ stunt chick from New Zealand who is clearly utterly insane. Kurt Russell was delightfully twisted as well. There was an emptiness where his soul should have been. I guess I expected something edgier from Tarantino but I did thoroughly enjoy Zoe Bell’s car-chase stunts and enthusiastic personality. I do wonder if Tarantino wrote the story around an idea she had for a stunt that no other director would let her perform…

Death counts
“Planet Terror”: Most of the human race
“Death Proof”: fewer than 10

Important note: The runtime for Grindhouse is over 3 hours. Each movie is an hour and a half plus the faux trailers. Plan beverages accordingly.

grindhouse, movies, nor’easter, reviews, snow, spring, weather, nor’easter