So last night after much pleading and cajoling my brother let me borrow season two of ALIAS. If only you could see me rolling my eyes. At least Reporter Boy grew some balls and some sense and is actually keeping a low profile. I'm sensing he's a goner, in part because of his change of heart and in part because he finally shaved. It's not a good sign. Also, Vaughn needs to get laid so he and Sydney can stop spending 15.739% of the show making moonie eyes at one another. This also goes for Jack, who is not making moonie eyes at his ex-dead-wife-spy-woman but instead gazes upon her with a mix of pained heartbreak and constipation. But at least he still kicks some ass. And he actually has a heart to break. And finally Sydney, GET ANOTHER FUCKING JOB AND STOP YER BITCHIN'!!! Geez Louise, "Now I can finally be truthful to you about myself because you were tortured and had your face bashed in and some ribs broken and teeth pulled and I barely saved your life and now you're going to have to pretend to be a drug addict and your life is ruined but at least now I can be honest with you *sniff*." WHATEVER!!!! ARGH!!! And season three doesn't come out until September.
But this isn't why you're here. You want to know about Vin Diesel's rock hard abs.
Unfortunately you don't get to see them. He pretty much keeps a tank top on the whole time. But unlike VAN HELSING, this movie kicked a ton of ass, ran real fast over to where all the ass landed, and then kicked it again. It was a total immersion experience, with awesome art direction, a story and tone that harkened back to the brilliance of CONAN THE BARBARIAN, Nick Chinlund, and lots of ass kicking.
THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, which is either a typo or an allusion to the fifty sequels sure to follow, begins five years after the end of PITCH BLACK. You'll remember--unless you've chosen to totally block that particular film experience from your mind--that PITCH BLACK was that movie with that hot chick from FARSCAPE. Which was how the film was known, THAT MOVIE WITH THAT HOT CHICK FROM FARSCAPE, before Vin Diesel became the huge star and media darling that he is today, because if they'd made PITCH BLACK today instead of back then it would be known as THAT MOVIE WITH THAT AWESOME BALD-HEADED ASS-KICKER, YOU KNOW THAT GUY I'M TALKING ABOUT, THE ONE THAT WAS IN THE MOVIE WITH THE CARS, NO, THE GOOD ONE ABOUT THE CARS, NOT THAT CRAP WITH NICK CAGE. So in that movie (PITCH BLACK) Diesel played Riddick, a total badass evil dude everyone was afraid of, but it turned out he had a heart of gold even if he totally denied it, because he was totally trying to save everyone even though they hated and feared him. And he kicked a lot of ass. The best part about the movie was that everybody got the shit kicked out of them and killed, even the people you totally thought would live. This also happened in the totally awesome Thomas Jane pre-PUNISHER movie, DEEP BLUE SEA, one of many underrated killers-from-the-deep movies that came out around the same time, including DEEP RISING, LAKE PLACID and VIRUS (these are crap, but they're AWESOME!!!) So at the end of PITCH BLACK, Riddick escapes with some priest dude (which I totally don't remember, so I'm going to have to watch it again) and this girl who was pretending to be a boy named Jack. But then she got her period which totally ruined the disguise and made her an easy target for all the menses-sniffing monsters.
THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK (can you imagine the titles of the sequels? this is going to be insane; it's going to be like, THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, PART TWO: RIDDICK IS LARGE AND IN CHARGE and it's totally going to take forever to type all that out) starts five years later, with Riddick being chased by these mercenaries after the bounty on his head, placed there by the priest dude he saved to get him to come to the priest's planet to save it from an invasion of the Necromongers, a religious cult intent on bringing about a total conversion of everyone in the universe and the creation of something called the Underverse, which they never show but if you go there you get special powers, one of which is the ability to get your ass kicked and handed back to you on a platter by Vin Diesel. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Lots of stuff happens, and then it turns into a whole different movie, and then Riddick catches up with Jack who's now a badass hot chick with the very lame and unthreatening name Kyra, and then more stuff happens and then there's a big fight and Riddick kicks all sorts of ass.
But then the ending is very melancholy. Which you wouldn't expect from an action film. And that's what makes this film so awesome: it's a character study of a man reluctantly called to fill a role required by his destiny, who recognizes his role and his need to assume it but struggles with an inner conflict born of his antagonism toward all authority and his ambivalence toward taking his place within that authority. As I alluded earlier, these are similar themes explored in CONAN THE BARBARIAN, and then endings of both films are similar, as well. This is another reason why this movie is so awesome: it resuscitates a long struggling (if not dead) genre and reinvigorates it by situating it in another space/time. There are plans to make KING CONAN with Triple H from WWE, but after seeing this it's totally unnecessary, except as a visit with a favorite character.
Not to mention the fact that THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK gives you plenty of cool shit to look at. The costumes are AMAZING, as are the sets, with lots of screaming faces and statues of bodies writhing in torment. And it may seem like two different movies, but it comes together brilliantly in the end.
For now, I will completely ignore the one insanity (I'm sure there are more; I was just basking in the gloriousness of THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK) that if you're on a planet with a surface temperature of 700 degrees, parking your ass in a bit of shade ain't going to help you much. Not that I've ever been to a planet with a surface temperature of 700 degrees, but I have been outdoors in Ohio in the summer, which is pretty much the same thing, what when you take the humidity into consideration, because as we all know it is the humidity more than it is the heat.
I will have to watch PITCH BLACK again to see which one I preferred, but really, they're apples and oranges. PITCH BLACK is ass-kicking leaning toward horror, and THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK is ass-kicking leaning toward Society of Creative Anachronism reenactment. In a good way. If there is such a thing.
Now, my suggestion for THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK TWO: WHAT, DID YOU NOT GET YOUR ASS KICKED ENOUGH THE LAST TIME? More nudity. And they totally need to cast Grace Jones as a bad guy. It'd totally be like ALIENS VS. PREDATOR of the cool-as-hell ass kickers!!!
Monday, June 14, 2004
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Review #5--MY LETTER TO SALON.COM
In anticipation of my upcoming review of THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK--which you know you are totally salivating at the very thought of--I am going to provide you with a review of my first ever published letter to the editor, which appears on Salon.com. It is not the first thing I've written to appear on the Internet (as evidenced by the blog you are now reading, and various and sundry pieces of X-Files fan fiction that you could probably find if you looked hard enough, but which I would advise you not to read because they are all classified "post-episode," which means you probably wouldn't understand what was going on unless you'd seen said episodes. And yes, I've written fan fiction. Can you honestly say you're really surprised?).
Also, this is not the first letter I've ever written to Salon. I think I've fired off about four total, one of which I was particularly proud of, a diatribe against a piece of fluff they'd printed implying that skin picking is a strange form of erotic foreplay. As a person who has suffered with compulsive skin picking for most of her life, it is neither erotic nor foreplay. It's disgusting and annoying and dangerous (I've gotten a few skin infections from it, and there's a case in a medical journal that you can google about a guy who exposed bone through a spot on his back he kept picking at). It's taken me a long time to get over just being embarrassed by it, and the writer equated it with grooming done by apes. Which is actually a theory proposed by some psychologists, that much like other types of obsessive compulsive behaviors it is a cleaning ritual taken to extremes, but in my case my therapist thinks it's a coping mechanism. The repetitious scratching is obscenely soothing, and the meticulous attention to scabs and sores provides a distraction from stressors. The theory makes a lot of sense even if the behavior doesn't. God bless The Husband and his infinite patience...what he must think when I come at him after my shower, thrusting a box of band-aids in his face and pointing at my back, promising I'll try to stop for real this time. But, I digress. The point of the story is that I fired off a letter to Salon calling them to task for mocking a very serious and very real mental disorder, and they didn't print it. I like to think that it was because it caused them to completely rethink their views on life and politics and PC sensitivity and they were so humilitated that they couldn't print it for fear of the public backlash, but it was probably because my letter was too long.
So my newest missive was in response to this article, about a man's dissatisfaction with Netflix. The Husband was a patron of Netflix when we first started dating. It was a total waste of money. Two people as lazy as we, coming together or acting of our own volition to even browse the web site--let alone place an order--was not about to happen. Also, DVDs had a tendency to sit around for...well, years it felt like, before we could be bothered to send them back. Needless to say, he cancelled once the trial period was over. The author of the article joined and cancelled over and over, until he'd finally decided that he'd try Wal-Mart's fledgling mail-order service. So I wrote a letter. Not to admonish him for even THINKING about using Wal-Mart for anything other than a conversation topic at which to direct derision and scorn, but to offer a modest suggestion. With that, I present...THE LETTER:
"A suggestion from a librarian: Try your local public library. You can reserve the new releases, they have lots of little-known independent films and -- best of all -- the movies are free."
Getting it out of the way, I work in a library, but until I finish my paper and graduate, I don't think I can technically call myself a "librarian," per say, but it's a hell of a lot easier than saying acquisitions assistant/copy cataloger, which is my actual job and which demands much convoluted explanation so I don't even bother other than to say "I buy books and put them in the computer," which still doesn't help, and I know I'm doing a grave disservice to the profession by not carefully explaining what I do to the uninitiated, but really would you sit there quietly and attentively while I outlined Dewey and LC and MARC tagging and whether or not the main entry is still relevant now that we rely more on keyword searching? I didn't think so. But getting back to the review...
This letter is AMAZING. It grabs you from the first word and delivers its message like well-placed devastating body blows to the psyche. It is concise without being terse, succinct without mincing words, and properly uses dashes. It is an opinionated ray of sunshine in an otherwise cloudy land of senseless demagoguery. It is brilliantly formulated and argued, and displays toward the author of the original piece tact which is wholly undeserving. It made me laugh, cry, and pee in my pants, and I wrote it. I can only imagine what patriotism and altruism it inspires in the heart of the casual reader.
Also, this is not the first letter I've ever written to Salon. I think I've fired off about four total, one of which I was particularly proud of, a diatribe against a piece of fluff they'd printed implying that skin picking is a strange form of erotic foreplay. As a person who has suffered with compulsive skin picking for most of her life, it is neither erotic nor foreplay. It's disgusting and annoying and dangerous (I've gotten a few skin infections from it, and there's a case in a medical journal that you can google about a guy who exposed bone through a spot on his back he kept picking at). It's taken me a long time to get over just being embarrassed by it, and the writer equated it with grooming done by apes. Which is actually a theory proposed by some psychologists, that much like other types of obsessive compulsive behaviors it is a cleaning ritual taken to extremes, but in my case my therapist thinks it's a coping mechanism. The repetitious scratching is obscenely soothing, and the meticulous attention to scabs and sores provides a distraction from stressors. The theory makes a lot of sense even if the behavior doesn't. God bless The Husband and his infinite patience...what he must think when I come at him after my shower, thrusting a box of band-aids in his face and pointing at my back, promising I'll try to stop for real this time. But, I digress. The point of the story is that I fired off a letter to Salon calling them to task for mocking a very serious and very real mental disorder, and they didn't print it. I like to think that it was because it caused them to completely rethink their views on life and politics and PC sensitivity and they were so humilitated that they couldn't print it for fear of the public backlash, but it was probably because my letter was too long.
So my newest missive was in response to this article, about a man's dissatisfaction with Netflix. The Husband was a patron of Netflix when we first started dating. It was a total waste of money. Two people as lazy as we, coming together or acting of our own volition to even browse the web site--let alone place an order--was not about to happen. Also, DVDs had a tendency to sit around for...well, years it felt like, before we could be bothered to send them back. Needless to say, he cancelled once the trial period was over. The author of the article joined and cancelled over and over, until he'd finally decided that he'd try Wal-Mart's fledgling mail-order service. So I wrote a letter. Not to admonish him for even THINKING about using Wal-Mart for anything other than a conversation topic at which to direct derision and scorn, but to offer a modest suggestion. With that, I present...THE LETTER:
"A suggestion from a librarian: Try your local public library. You can reserve the new releases, they have lots of little-known independent films and -- best of all -- the movies are free."
Getting it out of the way, I work in a library, but until I finish my paper and graduate, I don't think I can technically call myself a "librarian," per say, but it's a hell of a lot easier than saying acquisitions assistant/copy cataloger, which is my actual job and which demands much convoluted explanation so I don't even bother other than to say "I buy books and put them in the computer," which still doesn't help, and I know I'm doing a grave disservice to the profession by not carefully explaining what I do to the uninitiated, but really would you sit there quietly and attentively while I outlined Dewey and LC and MARC tagging and whether or not the main entry is still relevant now that we rely more on keyword searching? I didn't think so. But getting back to the review...
This letter is AMAZING. It grabs you from the first word and delivers its message like well-placed devastating body blows to the psyche. It is concise without being terse, succinct without mincing words, and properly uses dashes. It is an opinionated ray of sunshine in an otherwise cloudy land of senseless demagoguery. It is brilliantly formulated and argued, and displays toward the author of the original piece tact which is wholly undeserving. It made me laugh, cry, and pee in my pants, and I wrote it. I can only imagine what patriotism and altruism it inspires in the heart of the casual reader.
Tuesday, June 1, 2004
ALIAS--visual crack
SPOILERS!!!
Of course I never watched Alias, how silly of you to ask. It was on at the same time as X-Files, THE GREATEST SHOW EVER ON TELEVISION (until halfway through season 6) so I could not watch Alias, although I had at other times watched other things while taping The X-Files and then watched it at a later date. Which I actually did on a more regular basis as the series dragged on, to the point that I think I (THE HORROR) actually missed watching a couple of episodes. But as I am now slowly working my way through the DVDs with the Husband, introducing him to the EXQUISITE PAIN AND SUFFERING that was The X-Files, I'll finally get around to watching them. We've just started season 4, back when it KICKED ASS. Ah, Scully's cancer, her lost ova, her dalliance in Philadelphia with the cute guy from Space: Above and Beyond . *Sigh* Those were the days.
But this entry is about Alias, though you'd never know it. My brother, also a huge TV geek, has all of Alias on DVD and demanded that I watch it because YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE MISSING. And of course, I absolutely couldn't start watching in the middle.
---As a sidebar, I have problem which I have no problem admitting to: I CANNOT under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES begin ANYTHING IN THE MIDDLE. Case in point: comics. I have yet to read SANDMAN because I don't own them all, and don't want to find myself lost or stuck in the middle of the story. As Alias is really a soap opera in many respects, I couldn't just sit down one random weekend and expect to know what was going on.---
Getting into Alias was an uphill battle. The first episode SUCKED ASS. I watched it six or seven times, leaving in the middle some times, falling asleep once. The Husband recalled coming home to find the first episode playing in the living room and me taking a bath. It's really...really.....really.........boring. So this memorial day weekend we forced ourselves to sit in front of the TV and watch it because there was nothing else on and it was too early to go anywhere or mow the lawn. And it was still really...really.....really.........boring.
BUT THEN COMPLETELY OUT OF NOWHERE THE ENDING WAS REALLY REALLY AWESOME!!!! OHMYGOD!!!! It was like getting hit upside the head with a lead pipe. And then kicked in the solar plexus with a four inch stiletto. And then next thing we knew it was Tuesday morning and we had to go to work and we'd put behind us 12 hours of Alias. And the only reason we quit was because the cliffhanger didn't really involve anything blowing up. IT'S AWESOME!!!
But I still can't watch it on Sunday nights because we haven't completely caught up yet.
Alias stars Jennifer Garner from Daredevil and 13 going on 30 as Sydney Bristow, a woman way too emotional to be an effective spy. Yeah, she kicks a lot of ass, but then she'll have an existential crisis that jeopardizes the mission or the lives of other agents. Seriously, at least once an episode we were thinking, fuck this killing her because she's a mole--chick is totally going to get someone killed what with her crying all the time. Seriously, that can't be good. She's always going on about I'VE GOT so-and-so's BLOOD ON MY HANDS, like BOO HOO it's your damn job, go deliver pizzas or something. And she's in grad school on top of that for some degree we totally can't figure out, but like writing your doctoral thesis isn't hard enough without having to worry all about your Great Moral Dilemma. Although if she were writing on a new interpretation of Lady MacBeth, totally based on her own experiences, I bet that would kick ass. I'm totally going back to school and writing my dissertation..."OUT OUT DAMN SPOT: SYDNEY BRISTOW AS POSTMODERN REINTERPRETATION OF LADY MACBETH." It probably wouldn't be very postmodern, but with that in the title plus my non-ironic use of the colon, I'd totally pass.
So in the first boring episode her stick-in-the-mud doctor boyfriend gets killed, and she spends the next three seasons crying about it. It's all her fault he's killed too, which she conveniently forgets when she's completely focused on her Great Moral Dilemma. So she works for what she thinks is a covert black-ops branch of the CIA called SD-6 (which is a total ROBOTECH shout-out) but it turns out that SD-6 is actually an organization fighting against the CIA, started by these renegade dudes from various worldwide intelligence organizations. Or something. And so Sydney goes to work for the actually CIA as a double-agent trying to bring down SD-6. Or something. And her dad's a double-agent too, or maybe a triple agent working for the Russians, or maybe he's just an ordinary guy working for a bank who totally likes to mind fuck his daughter. Or something. But Sydney's got a hottie contact in the CIA and they totally want to have sex which they totally will because the First Law of Speed comes into play. But then she also likes her reporter friend who's getting too close to the truth which for some reason prevents him from shaving regularly.
All of this is incredibly confusing. Everyone in the show has a serious problem with LEAPING TO CONCLUSIONS WITHOUT EVIDENCE TO BACK IT UP. I mean, really, they could find a half-eaten hot dog in an alley and come up with the theory that Oscar Meyer is running an illegal drug cartel out of Bogota. It's almost exhilarating, the daring leaps of logic. But shit blows up, and the gadgets guy is funny, and the editing and storytelling are insanely awesome, and the BEST was that the reporter guy found this bug in this chick's car and had it tested and it was transmitting so he spends the episode sneaking off to talk to the bug and beg for the people on the other end to call him. So he's getting drunk with Sydney's roommate, and she's singing into the bug and laughing, and his cell phone rings and this mechanical voice says, "tell her to stop playing with the bug!!!" It was AWESOME!!!
So, yeah, last night the Husband and I both dreamed about Alias. And right now I'm totally jonesing for more. Because when we were forced to stop, Sydney's father was telling her that he wasn't the Russian spy in the family, her angelic dead mother was!!! What does this mean for Sydney and the already strained relationship with her father, seeing as how she was planning on turning him in to the FBI as a traitor? Will she totally sex up that dude from the CIA? What crazy new outfit will she be wearing next? And how the hell can Jennifer Garner sleep at night after telling the world she never works out and is just naturally skinny? OOO, I HATE HER!!!
But Alias is awesome.
Of course I never watched Alias, how silly of you to ask. It was on at the same time as X-Files, THE GREATEST SHOW EVER ON TELEVISION (until halfway through season 6) so I could not watch Alias, although I had at other times watched other things while taping The X-Files and then watched it at a later date. Which I actually did on a more regular basis as the series dragged on, to the point that I think I (THE HORROR) actually missed watching a couple of episodes. But as I am now slowly working my way through the DVDs with the Husband, introducing him to the EXQUISITE PAIN AND SUFFERING that was The X-Files, I'll finally get around to watching them. We've just started season 4, back when it KICKED ASS. Ah, Scully's cancer, her lost ova, her dalliance in Philadelphia with the cute guy from Space: Above and Beyond . *Sigh* Those were the days.
But this entry is about Alias, though you'd never know it. My brother, also a huge TV geek, has all of Alias on DVD and demanded that I watch it because YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE MISSING. And of course, I absolutely couldn't start watching in the middle.
---As a sidebar, I have problem which I have no problem admitting to: I CANNOT under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES begin ANYTHING IN THE MIDDLE. Case in point: comics. I have yet to read SANDMAN because I don't own them all, and don't want to find myself lost or stuck in the middle of the story. As Alias is really a soap opera in many respects, I couldn't just sit down one random weekend and expect to know what was going on.---
Getting into Alias was an uphill battle. The first episode SUCKED ASS. I watched it six or seven times, leaving in the middle some times, falling asleep once. The Husband recalled coming home to find the first episode playing in the living room and me taking a bath. It's really...really.....really.........boring. So this memorial day weekend we forced ourselves to sit in front of the TV and watch it because there was nothing else on and it was too early to go anywhere or mow the lawn. And it was still really...really.....really.........boring.
BUT THEN COMPLETELY OUT OF NOWHERE THE ENDING WAS REALLY REALLY AWESOME!!!! OHMYGOD!!!! It was like getting hit upside the head with a lead pipe. And then kicked in the solar plexus with a four inch stiletto. And then next thing we knew it was Tuesday morning and we had to go to work and we'd put behind us 12 hours of Alias. And the only reason we quit was because the cliffhanger didn't really involve anything blowing up. IT'S AWESOME!!!
But I still can't watch it on Sunday nights because we haven't completely caught up yet.
Alias stars Jennifer Garner from Daredevil and 13 going on 30 as Sydney Bristow, a woman way too emotional to be an effective spy. Yeah, she kicks a lot of ass, but then she'll have an existential crisis that jeopardizes the mission or the lives of other agents. Seriously, at least once an episode we were thinking, fuck this killing her because she's a mole--chick is totally going to get someone killed what with her crying all the time. Seriously, that can't be good. She's always going on about I'VE GOT so-and-so's BLOOD ON MY HANDS, like BOO HOO it's your damn job, go deliver pizzas or something. And she's in grad school on top of that for some degree we totally can't figure out, but like writing your doctoral thesis isn't hard enough without having to worry all about your Great Moral Dilemma. Although if she were writing on a new interpretation of Lady MacBeth, totally based on her own experiences, I bet that would kick ass. I'm totally going back to school and writing my dissertation..."OUT OUT DAMN SPOT: SYDNEY BRISTOW AS POSTMODERN REINTERPRETATION OF LADY MACBETH." It probably wouldn't be very postmodern, but with that in the title plus my non-ironic use of the colon, I'd totally pass.
So in the first boring episode her stick-in-the-mud doctor boyfriend gets killed, and she spends the next three seasons crying about it. It's all her fault he's killed too, which she conveniently forgets when she's completely focused on her Great Moral Dilemma. So she works for what she thinks is a covert black-ops branch of the CIA called SD-6 (which is a total ROBOTECH shout-out) but it turns out that SD-6 is actually an organization fighting against the CIA, started by these renegade dudes from various worldwide intelligence organizations. Or something. And so Sydney goes to work for the actually CIA as a double-agent trying to bring down SD-6. Or something. And her dad's a double-agent too, or maybe a triple agent working for the Russians, or maybe he's just an ordinary guy working for a bank who totally likes to mind fuck his daughter. Or something. But Sydney's got a hottie contact in the CIA and they totally want to have sex which they totally will because the First Law of Speed comes into play. But then she also likes her reporter friend who's getting too close to the truth which for some reason prevents him from shaving regularly.
All of this is incredibly confusing. Everyone in the show has a serious problem with LEAPING TO CONCLUSIONS WITHOUT EVIDENCE TO BACK IT UP. I mean, really, they could find a half-eaten hot dog in an alley and come up with the theory that Oscar Meyer is running an illegal drug cartel out of Bogota. It's almost exhilarating, the daring leaps of logic. But shit blows up, and the gadgets guy is funny, and the editing and storytelling are insanely awesome, and the BEST was that the reporter guy found this bug in this chick's car and had it tested and it was transmitting so he spends the episode sneaking off to talk to the bug and beg for the people on the other end to call him. So he's getting drunk with Sydney's roommate, and she's singing into the bug and laughing, and his cell phone rings and this mechanical voice says, "tell her to stop playing with the bug!!!" It was AWESOME!!!
So, yeah, last night the Husband and I both dreamed about Alias. And right now I'm totally jonesing for more. Because when we were forced to stop, Sydney's father was telling her that he wasn't the Russian spy in the family, her angelic dead mother was!!! What does this mean for Sydney and the already strained relationship with her father, seeing as how she was planning on turning him in to the FBI as a traitor? Will she totally sex up that dude from the CIA? What crazy new outfit will she be wearing next? And how the hell can Jennifer Garner sleep at night after telling the world she never works out and is just naturally skinny? OOO, I HATE HER!!!
But Alias is awesome.
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