media_zombie

I can't update on weekends anymore because of work (I've decided that retail during Christmas is not my future) but since I'm almost done I'm not going to worry about updating all crazy and random.  Two weeks, baby!

Sunday:  Step Brothers

This was too weird to be that funny but I did laugh really hard when Will Ferrell's therapist had a fantasy of Will Ferrell busting into her office dressed like a lumberjack and telling her that he had traveled over four hundred miles to give her his seed.  Which was the most random thing in the whole movie so I guess I'm a hypocrite.

Monday:  Eddie Izzard: Glorious

Yeah, I'm probably grasping at straws here but his specials are about an hour and a half long and that's movie-length, my friends.  Izzard was so young and precious in this.  And his legs looked great.

Tuesday:  The Omega Man

I loved this movie.  I shouldn't have because I love the book its very loosely based on, but it was so crazy and over-the-top.  The Omega Man is everything 70s mashed up and given to Charlton Heston.

Wednesday:  Eddie Izzard: Circle

I did it again!  All his specials are available on Instant Netflix right now so I went on a mini-bender.  This had his evil giraffe skit, which is probably my favorite bit of his.  

Thursday:  Constantine's Sword

This was a really fascinating documentary about anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church and about the connection between the religious right and the U.S. military.  I don't know very much about either topic but religion in the government is something I'm very interested in.

Friday:  Darkness Falls

I think I watched this because Anya from Buffy was in it.  It was probably the most boring movie I've seen in months.  I don't know how you make an action-packed horror movie so boring, but they tried their very best.

Saturday:  The Princess and the Frog

I'm such a Disney 2-D animation freak that I was salivating for this movie for years and I wasn't disappointed.  They did try to cram a little too much into the story but I loved the characters and the music and the animation (Christ, the animation).  I still don't know if the Prince was French or Indian or both or what.  Does anybody know for sure?  He was funny though.

Now I think I'm going to look at applications for grad school. 

All right, after this I'll be all nice and caught up. Thank god.

Sunday: Mulan

This is probably one of my favorite Disney movies. I'm a sucker for an action heroine, especially when she can pull of the androgynous look.

Monday: Annie Hall

I've never seen a Woody Allen movie before so this was a real treat. He sometimes got a little cutesy on me but I have to say that Allen has a sense of humor that I can really appreciate. I'm looking forward to seeing more of his movies.

Tuesday: An American Tail: Fievel Goes West

There's some strange interspecies erotica going on in this one with the head bad cat and Fievel's older sister. Watch the movie and tell me I'm wrong.

Wednesday: Pulse

The ending was haunting and really worth the movie but it moved very slowly for me. I have no interest in seeing the American remake.

Thursday: Holiday in the Sun

All this movie made me want to do is go somewhere tropical. And avoid the Olsen twins while I'm there. Their tweeniness drove me crazy.

Friday: Silent Running

Environmental, hippie trip about a douchebag that killed his coworkers to save the last rainforest and then was too stupid to realize that trees need sunlight to live. Seriously.

Saturday: Foul Play

I adore Goldie Hawn and her precious little chipmunk face. And this movie was hilarious and actually a pretty good action flick with Chevy Chase doing a credible turn as a romantic lead. Yeah, I'm shocked too.

Sunday: Wedding Daze

This movie was really funny, no lie. I thought that it would be stupid and it was but it worked somehow. Maybe I was just in the right mood.

Monday: The Thief of Bagdad

Now this is why I watched all of these movies. For awesome shit like this. Unlike that endless silent version of the story, this movie was exciting and action-packed.

Tuesday: Domino

I have a sinking suspicion that nothing in this movie resembles the real story of Domino Harvey. However the movie is still cool and I guess I don't care much beyond that.

Wednesday: Bad Seed

That kid was so obnoxious. I mean, I know she was a murderer and that's worse but the little bitch got on my last nerve with all that kissy-huggy stuff.

Thursday: Red Planet Mars

World peace was achieved through Christianity. Which the Martians taught us. That's the plot of this movie. Now you don't have to see it.

Friday: Ninja Assassin

I thought this movie was going to be so kickass and it was so disappointing. The dialogue wasn't even bad enough to be funny and the fight scenes were neat, I guess, but nothing I haven't seen before.

Saturday: Tron

Tron does not age well. It's still a good movie but the technobabble is just laughable today. It just makes me want to watch ReBoot again. Does anybody else remember that show?

If you've never seen this Shortpacked! comic, you've lived an empty life. The best part of it is that it's so true.

I just spent most of the morning shoveling out my driveway and now you can't even tell. I am making such a sad face right now, you guys. Anyway this month's guide is The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction. Like most spawns of Satan it doesn't have an index (at least not one for the actual books) so I had to meticulously go through the whole damn thing looking for the books I own. There are some weird things on here.

Atonement, Ian McEwan
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
Neuromancer, William Gibson
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, James Joyce
Dubliners, James Joyce
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
Oblivion, David Foster Wallace
The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

I don't know why The Da Vinci Code or Jule Verne is on this list. In what way do they qualify as cult fiction? Everybody's read them! Except me, I guess, because that's the point of this whole thing. Yeah.

Shit, I totally thought I had already done last month. Goodreads is ruining me. By the way that's my link for this month. I love that website like I love seasonal booze.

Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende

I'm a big fan of Allende's writing style even if she's a little too fond of showing off her research into historical periods. So I liked this book, I don't think it's her strongest one, but I certainly don't regret reading it. Of course I say that for every book I read, even the ones that I regret reading. Damn you, Bentley Little.

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

British humor is funnier when you hear it versus reading it, I think. I mean, the book was funny and weirdly touching and all that but it really just made me want to watch A Big of Fry and Laurie again.

13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley

I feel harshly towards this novel because it took me so long to read it. I started it three months ago and then finally forced my way through it in a few days a month ago. I didn't really like her literary theory portion because she seemed smug but I really liked her book reviews. So I guess the two parts cancel each other out and make this one a wash. I may try to reread it again next year to see if it was just my mood.

50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read edited by Richard Canning

The more I think about this book, the more annoyed I get. Fifty books? I think that Nancy Pearl has more LGBT-themed books in just one of her rec guides. And she doesn't go off on annoying tangents about her life when she talks about them. Here's a clue, essay writers, nobody gives a shit about your oh-so-interesting lives. We just want to know why we should read the book you love so much. Also if you're only going to cover fifty books, please be making sure that they're all actually books and not letters or poetry or random verses out of the Bible.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

I don't think I've read Asimov before Foundation and I must say that he's way different than I thought he would be. I thought he would be all stiff and hard-sciencey but he actually writes pretty engaging characters. This is the first book in this series (I believe) so it suffers from having to sell me on the premise, but once he gets that out of the way it's pretty fun.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver is a good writer and I am eager to read other books that she's written. I had issues with The Poisonwood Bible but I still can't decide if they're were issues with her issues or issues with her characterization. Certainly I wasn't sold on Leah's saintliness or Rachel's overall bitchiness. And I still don't know why the father was so crazy-crazy.

Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov

This is the sequel to Foundation and it was even better than the first. I loved Bayta and the Mule and the plot finally settled on something that wasn't so ridiculous that I couldn't stand it.

I got nowhere this month, I swear. I like this guide though (Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide). It covers a wide range of genres, which is right up my alley. I can't wait to use it again.

Yeah, I got way behind in my movies these past two months. I'm mostly caught up now (and boy was that fun). So I'll catch myself up here in two posts of two weeks with one-line summaries so that it's not overwhelming. Oh, and did you guys notice the terrible joke I made about Patrick Swayze last time? I totally forgot that he had died this year. Ouch. I'm a whore.

Sunday: The Mission

The music was too overpowering for me. It was way more dramatic than the story, which was fine but nothing extraordinary.

Monday: Cabaret

God, Liza Minnelli is exhausting. I mean, she's a great performer but can you imagine trying to live with that? It would drive me batty.

Tuesday: The Maltese Falcon

This movie is incredible. I wanted to watch it three more times these past few weeks and had to stop myself. Bogart is a cool operator.

Wednesday: Hercules

The mythology in this is crazy if you know Greek mythology. But I actually really like the songs and the animation style.

Thursday: Peter Pan

Peter Pan is a dick. Seriously. He kidnaps children and bullies them into fighting adult pirates. It's obscene. And Tink is a bitch.

Friday: The Little Mermaid

I know the underlying message of this can be gross (give up your voice for legs to spread for your man) but I love The Little Mermaid.

Saturday: The Postman Always Rings Twice

Lana Turner is so amazing with that platinum hair and that scrunchy upset face she uses. And while this movie is absurd, I love it.

Sunday: The Bad and the Beautiful

It's weird to watch movies with the parents of famous contemporary actors in it. It's so disorienting. Kirk Douglas was good though.

Monday: The Fisher King

You see Robin Williams naked in this movie. Man, if I wasn't gay before, you know? This is a weird movie for Gilliam. So happy.

Tuesday: Bambi

Older Disney movies didn't have much plot, I realized. I mean the movie is basically Bambi is born, his mother dies, he gets a girl.

Wednesday: Care Bears II: A New Generation

This movie makes no sense. Everyone knows that the Care Bears and the Care Bear Cousins didn't meet until they were adults. Duh.

Thursday: New Moon

Oh man. I am now officially Team Alice because at least Bella seems to genuinely like her. And put your shirt on, Jacob, you show-off.

Friday: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Flo is a magnificent woman. I'm so serious. I adore her and her filthy nonsensical sayings. How did they make a show out of this?

Saturday: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Again, very little plot. It's mostly a series of skits. I don't really think that it ages well, honestly, except as a benchmark.

Christ, why did I let myself get so far behind? Now here's a link to my newest obsession, the List of Bests, a perfect place for obsessive list-making.

I'm getting so lazy about posting and I only have a month and a half to go.  Christ.

Sunday:  Drag Me to Hell

I saw the unrated version and it makes me curious about what was cut for the theatrical release.  Honestly I really enjoyed this movie, far more than anything that Raimi has done in the past few years, but I'm disappointed that the best parts of this movie were retreads of shit he did better decades ago.  Ignore me.  I'm an fan.  We're almost always bitchy about the things that we love.

Monday:  Grosse Pointe Blank

I'm in love with the concept of extraordinary people treating their bizarre jobs like they're commonplace so I was already pleasantly disposed towards this movie.  The best character was Dan Aykroyd as a jovial hitman looking to move up in the world at any cost.

Tuesday:  Rebel Without a Cause

This movie contains three actors that died tragically young, which is a shitty record no matter how you look at it.  Of course James Dean is usually considered the biggest loss, given how young he was, how little he'd done, and how talented he seemed to be.  And he was great in this movie, don't get me wrong, the man had charisma.  However I'm more sad about Natalie Wood because I think that she was mesmerizing.  She had this, I don't want to say aura because that's overdone, but she had this presence that made her so much more interesting than her looks alone would have inspired.  The movie's good too.

Wednesday:  The Ice Pirates

This is not a good movie but it is a fun movie.  If you've ever wanted to see great actors like Ron Perlman and Angelica Huston prance about in a B-movie about space pirates that save the day, then this is probably your only option.

Thursday:  The Devil's Backbone

Guillermo del Toro does amazing work and this movie is absolutely stellar.  Pan Labyrinth is more stylized but the stark realism in this movie mixed with the vengeful ghost (the effects on that thing) allows The Devil's Backbone to stand proudly next to anything else that del Toro might do.

Friday:  Corpse Bride

I actually liked this movie way more this second time versus when I saw it theaters.  The musical numbers are still pretty lackluster and it's way short for a full-length film, but the love triangle is touching.  Plus I'm a bit in love with stop-motion effects.

Saturday:  Point Break

Point Break is simultaneously the best movie about a surfing undercover agent (as played by Keanu Reeves) and the worst movie about a surfing undercover agent (as played by Keanu Reeves).  Reeves tries his damnedest to look upset throughout the movie but is thwarted by the fact that he is incapable of feeling sadness or anger.  Gary Busey plays himself if he was even remotely charming.  Patrick Swayze does whatever he does that makes people decide to keep putting him in movies.  And Lori Petty, the divine and sublime Lori Petty, is too damn good for this piece of shit movie.  Oh, and Dr. Cox is in this.  It's awesome.

Now here's a link to Item Not As Described, a blog about terrible ads.  It's fairly fantastic.

 

Thank the FSM that Horror Month is over.  A month of hit-or-miss in one genre is hard for even the most ardent fan to take.  Plus I'm getting tired of seeing pretty, skinny blondes getting axed in the face.

Sunday:  The Other

This was based off of the Thomas Tryon book of the same name.  He wrote the screenplay, if I remember correctly, and I think that it helped keep at leas the mood true to the book.  The book is better but I honestly think that we're all tired of hearing that about every damn book-to-movie adaptation.

Monday:  My Little Pony: The Movie

What?  You don't think this shit is scary?  Imagine, if you even can, that you are an adorable Little Pony (I bet you would be Shady, you complaining bastard) and your beautiful Dream Castle is being overrun by sludge created by witches that hate you.  If you don't think that that qualifies as horror, I don't want to know what kind of life you must lead.

Tuesday:  The House Bunny

What?  You don't think this shit is--okay, I can't do that for this one.  I just wanted to see Anna Faris naked and maybe indulge in my fantasy that Emma Stone and I are secretly dating and she's directing all of her growly-voiced statements right to me.  I needed a break, you guys.

Wednesday:  Return to House on Haunted Hill

This sequel makes the original (remake) look like it was written by Clive Barker while channeling the spirit of Lovecraft and then filmed by Sam Raimi and Wes Craven.  This movie sucks so hard that I feel like my brain is purposefully trying to forget every moment of it but can't because it was just that terrible.  I can't even have trauma-induced amnesia.

Thursday:  The Orphanage

Oh, this was good.  I feel like I should have a party for the first genuinely ace movie that I watched this week.  The atmosphere in this movie was incredible and I am very eager to see more from this director.

Friday:  Strange Behavior

Um, okay, maybe this movie caused trauma-induced amnesia because I don't remember very much of it.  There was this slasher and he killed a bunch of people.  I think that one guy got a pick through his brain.  I don't know.  

Saturday:  Misery

Amazing.  Just amazing.  Kathy Bates is probably one of the best actresses in the business.  The way that she could go from a sweet, motherly nurse (with some creepy undertones in all of her statements) to a psychotic bitch-monster in under a second, all without making you think that she was over-the-top or implausible, was just fantastic.  I love this movie (but the book was better).

Now here's a video of a guy playing a horrible ROM hack of Super Mario Brothers.  He gets so frustrated that it becomes hilarious.  I don't normally warn for swearing because I swear like a sailor but this guy says fuck after basically every word.  So be warned.

I took last month off of Project Feel Good in order to read some truly shitty horror novels (John Saul, just stop).  So now I'm refreshed and ready to tackle the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide (Seventh Edition).  There's a shit-ton here, folks.

Portrait in Sepia, Isabel Allende
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
Foundation, Isaac Asimov
Foundation and Empire, Isaac Asimov
Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov
The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Dubliners, James Joyce
Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
Paradise, Toni Morrison
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
The Opposite of Fate, Amy Tan
The Hundred Secret Senses, Amy Tan
The Bonesetter's Daughter, Amy Tan
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe

Yeah, I said that there was a shit-ton.  It's a big book.  If I had to venture a guess, I would say that I'll probably get to the Elizabeth Bowen one, maybe to The Three Musketeers.  Until then, here's a link to the Five Geek Social Fallacies, largely because I find it interesting.

Yeah, I totally forgot to post last Sunday and since then have kept forgetting with the the tenacity of a pitbull.  Oops.

Sunday:  Severance

I had heard good things about this movie for a couple of years but now that I've seen it, I don't know what the big deal is supposed to be.  It's pretty standard.  I mean, it's more self-aware than most horror movies and it's funny in parts, but it also doesn't make much sense.  I'm really a bit on the fence about it.

Monday:  Shrooms

I could brag and say that I saw the ending coming, but that's not saying much and also I knew the twist going into the movie.  Everybody keeps comparing the movie to High Tension but I think that's crap.  High Tension is magnificently nonsensical and vaguely offensive while Shrooms doesn't fuck around very much.  What's going on becomes pretty obvious in retrospect.  

Tuesday:  Organizm

Ah shit, here we go now.  This is a Sci-Fi (excuse me, SyFy) Channel original movie, which I didn't know when I started, and it is just terrible.  I don't even understand how their special effects can be so awful.  I'm pretty sure I could do better with some construction paper and glitter.

Wednesday:  Maniac Cop 2

I've never seen Maniac Cop 1 but it had Bruce Campbell in it so now I probably will.  The sequel here was recommended to me by Fangoria's 101 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen (it also recommended all of the Troma pictures I've been watching).  I'll admit, some of the scenes were pretty awesome (I don't think I've ever seen a woman try to steer a car downhill while on the outside of the car and attached to the steering wheel with handcuffs) and the relationship between the talkative serial killer and the killer cop was unique.  Not bad.

Thursday:  Christmas Evil

Now I've seen my fair share of Christmas-themed horror movies (Black Christmas is the best) but I have never seen one as bad as this.  I'll be honest, reader, I used fast-forward on the PS3, which moves at 1.5 the normal rate.  This is normally enough to make everybody's dialogue hilariously rushed (but understandable) and their movements super-jerky.  Not this piece of crap.  At 1.5 the normal speed the dialogue sounds perfectly normal and the main character still moves so slow that I thought that it might be a plot point.  It wasn't.  In the end he drives his Santa Van off of a bridge and flies into the night sky.  I am not joking.

Friday:  The Changeling

The only truly good movie I saw this week.  Changeling has beautiful cinematography (the house is both gorgeous and ominous in every shot) and the plot, while slow, is touching even when it's horrifying.  

Saturday:  Def by Temptation

I enjoyed this movie far more than I probably should have because it is undeniably funky and while I myself am not jive in any capacity, I do appreciate it in others.  Plus Temptation was a stone-cold fox and the main character gets points for not being a huge moron about her.

All right, I'm still trying to decide what movie to watch on Halloween (I'm stuck between the original Halloween, Poltergeist, or Misery).  While I ponder my dilemma, here's a link to my new favorite blog, E-Mails From Crazy People.  People so crazy.