Balls and Walnuts
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Category Archives: At the movies
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Karen watched that video yesterday — you know, the vid where you learn everything you need to know about the man’s penis power, and how critical it is not to let just any man hit your bottom, and God help you if he gets his sperm up into your brain — when she noticed this trailer for Shrek the Third.
Will this one be as good as the first two? Maybe not; from the trailer, 3 looks a hell of a lot like 1 + 2. Still, even a bad Shrek has to be better than 99% of the crap that hits the big screens these days.
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Where I Live
A 50-something-year-old woman came up to me in the grocery store parking lot. She had noticed our Draft Gore bumper sticker (yeah, we’re Edwards backers, but we would still love to see Gore enter the race, too).
She asked, “Draft Gore? Isn’t he too old to fight?”
Yes, she was serious.
Speechless, I stared at her until she went away.
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Live-Blogging tonight Saturday night at 7:30 PM PST . . .
Quite a crowd, folks, and good fun, except for the nazi punks and the guy with the limp wiener. But I’ve learned how to kick people out of chat — yay!
D.
V redux
I had meant to write about my brief encounter, as a med student, with the world of episiotomies and morning-after crotch checks, but I can’t. I just can’t.
Cinemax aired V for Vendetta tonight. I hadn’t seen it since it first played in our local theater one year ago, and I have to tell you, it still blows me away. So, instead of dishing out some memoirist BS for your entertainment, I invite you to revisit the post I wrote last year. Click on the V.
Better yet, rent the DVD.
D.
You will believe a dragon can blow hot air
My son lost his innocence yesterday.
“At first it was like a love-hate thing, but then I just hated it,” he said afterwards, and proceeded to recount all the many ways in which the movie screwed up the book.
Take that chick standing to Eragon‘s left. Would you believe she’s an elf? Notice the lack of pointy ears or funky-colored skin. You could have knocked me over when Jake told me she’s supposed to be an elf.
Look at all those dudes (and the elf chick), posing like it’s a high school football team picture. Ooooh, they’re tough. Too bad Eragon (18-year-old newcomer Edward Speleers, looking like a younger, softer Michael York) has all the stage presence of dragon poo, so that in his scenes with Jeremy Irons, Irons seems to be monologuing. Irons does his best with a script that feels computer-generated; he and uber-evil Durza (Robert Carlyle) are the only watchable foci in an otherwise lukewarm cast.
Yeah, that’s John Malkovich over there on the right, playing the eeeevil King Galbatorix. But it’s a one-note performance and the guy has maybe two minutes of screen time. I liked Malkovich best in Being John Malkovich, incidentally, or perhaps Ripley’s Game. When he’s good, he’s very good. But I’ll never forgive him for his sterile Kurtz in the 1994 television version of Heart of Darkness.
Back to Jake’s loss of innocence. Think about it: his sole prior experience of books translated into movies was the Harry Potter series, which followed the books slavishly, often (IMO) to the detriment of the movies’ flow. I don’t think he’s ever seen one of his favorite books butchered.
Karen read the books, too, and she said the biggest flaw of the film was the lack of character development. Jake agrees. That was obvious even to me, the virgin viewer. Jake disliked that they glossed over Eragon’s magic training, but here are his top three crits:
1. “They completely rewrote the fight between Eragon and Durza. Eragon didn’t get his back injury.”
2. “They completely undermined the Ra-zac. The Ra-zac got killed! They’re not supposed to get killed until their third book! And they completely forgot the Ra-zac’s parents, which are their mounts.” (Eeew. Purge image of me riding either of my parents.) “The Ra-zac are much more powerful in the book. They had the power to put a human into a dreamlike state so they could attack them. The Ra-zacs were black, not green. And they wore cloaks and they could talk. And they could attack in the night.”
3. “They didn’t give Brom’s character enough attention. He was much more interesting.” (“More three dimensional,” says Karen. “And a lot grumpier in the book.”)
Karen adds that in the book, the relationship between Eragon and his dragon, Saphira, had more depth. And there you have it, a family meta-review . . . but I forgot one thing.
My number one crit has to do with the dragon, Saphira. Rachel Weisz is the voice of Saphira.
Mmmm. Rachel Weisz. What was I saying?
Oh, yeah. They could have saved a ton of money by using all of Ms. Weisz, not just her voice. Picture it: a few blue scales around her eyes, a few more down her naked back. Some cool-looking wings or something to explain how she can fly. Forget all that CGI dragon stuff; let Eragon ride Ms. Weisz into the sunset.
Now, that’s a movie I’d see again.
D.
Frodo pwnz Hedgehog, Hedgehog gets revenge
Because my sleep is still effed up and I can’t manage to think in anything other than intersecting parallel lines, here’s a surreal Lord of the Rings spoof for you to contemplate.
“LOTR Orgy” doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its name, but it certainly confirmed an old suspicion of mine regarding the, ahem, fellowship of the ring.
Now, this one is worth the wear and tear on your clicky finger: Hunks of Middle Earth. Funny, cute, and none of those way-too-easy Brokeback jokes.
Way cool Gollum impression, sucky video values.
Let me end on a positive note with How The Lord of the Rings Should Have Ended. Watch it to the end — the punch line is great.
D.
P.S.: Let’s say you’ve immersed yourself in Gogol Bordello and you’re looking for another gypsy punk fix. Meet Kultur Shock.
Things that go kathunk in the night
Kate’s post on why she’s too good for most men is just too funny. The comment thread is priceless, especially my comments, which speak volumes towards why I am too good for most women. Kate, I thought about writing my version of this post, but it kept coming out serious. Being too good . . . well, let’s just say it’s my curse.
And here’s proof.
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Late last night, we watched the end of Wait Until Dark, a movie which proves Hollywood has been and forever will be* silly. I’m talking Snakes on a Plane silly. If they remade Wait Until Dark today, Samuel L. Jackson would be the cop who storms in at the end, ranting about motherfucking drugs in a motherfucking doll. My favorite part: baddy Alan Arkin (looking incredibly young) douses Audrey Hepburn’s apartment with gasoline to, um, terrorize her. And then for the next fifteen minutes Arkin and Hepburn take turns lighting matches to scare each other.
People. I’ve worked in a burn ward. DO NOT MIX GASOLINE AND MATCHES, ‘kay?
And then there’s the darkness. Audrey Hepburn is blind, so to help the viewers empathize with her horror, much of the climax is shot in the dark. Oy.
Afterwards, we turned out the lights to go to sleep and heard a massive kathunk from the roof.
Ghost hummer
I wish I could remember where I first read about Vincent Gallo’s one-man opus, The Brown Bunny. The reviewer had much to say about a film produced, written, edited, and starred in by Gallo, which seemed to have as its whole point the receipt of a real, honest-to-God, nothing-held-back, lip-smackin’ hummer by Gallo. But the reviewer said nothing, not a damned thing about the mind-numbing boredom.
The things you learn . . .
While googling “insomnia cure,” I found this IMDB page on a movie entitled, “The Cure for Insomnia”:
This film is basically an experiment designed to reprogram biological clocks for insomniacs so they can sleep again. L.D. Groban reads his own poem during the span of about four days, which is interspliced with stock footage of heavy-metal videos and x-rated footage.
You read that correctly. About four days. Lest there be no misunderstanding,
This is the longest movie ever made at a total running time of 87 hours. It premiered in its entirety at The School Of The Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois from 31 January to 3 February 1987 in one continuous showing.
One viewer’s thumbs-up vote:
check it out next time u have 85 hours to your self
I think I’ll sleep well tonight, but I can never be sure until ten or fifteen minutes after lights-out. That’s when the fatigue of the day either takes hold or mysteriously vanishes. As I mentioned in a previous post, drugs help (my usual cocktail: melatonin plus half a benadryl). Exercise helps. Sex helps. Nothing works 100% of the time.
What works for you?
D.
A 10-year-old’s ruminations on HEAs, apropos Wedding Crashers
I had meant to have this Smart Bitches Day post rarin’ to go for this morning, but one thing led to another, yatta yatta. Sorry, Miss Beth. Besides . . . Spartacus down there would have my nuts if I pushed him down the page any sooner than 6 PM.
Here’s Jake’s comment on romantic comedies (and, by extension, the entire romance genre): “It’s boring. You always know what’s going to happen in the end. Can’t someone die for a change?”
We’ll get back to that. First, I want to show you the best thing about Wedding Crashers:
Ghost of Hannukah Future
Jake and I saw Click tonight. Here’s the bottom line for those of you with a short attention span: on a 1 to 10 scale, I give it a 7, Jake gives it a 6, and we both thought the ending sucked.
Six, man, that’s kind of harsh, but Jake is one harsh critic. (You should hear how he rates my dinners.) But I peeked at him during the movie and I think he enjoyed it at least 7-worth.
We’ll have to agree to disagree. Or — how about 6.5? Jake, that okay with you?
Jake: How about 6.00001?
Me: Bastard.
Jake: Takes one to know one.
The traitor always bites it in the end
I’m sure you’ve heard: Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald won’t be seeking an indictment against Karl Rove. I can hear (insert name of your favorite superhero) now:
“You win this time, Turdblossom, but we shall meet again!”
In the movies, the hideousness of the evildoer’s fate is often proportionate to his infamy. Perhaps we can find solace in this fact. Surely Rove is more wicked than any of the dudes listed below. If so, perhaps his comeuppance will be that much tastier.