I am still resolved

Despite the best efforts of the Big Momma's House sequel trailer to put me off the movies forever, I did get out to the theater this weekend with viridian , xannoside ,jlc , and ecmyers to see The Green Hornet. Honestly? Not as bad as I was expecting. It was stupid, but I laughed. I still loathe Seth Rogen and the idea of his being a movie star for doing absolutely nothing but playing himself (so, stupid and usually stoned). I still laughed. Perhaps because he looked like the idiot he so clearly is for pretty much all of the movie? Probably.

We did see one intriguing trailer for a movie called Hanna, which features a little girl who's able to kick more ass than all the 300 dudes combined. I've added it to my list of movies. I'm probably going upstate at the end of this week, since engagements prevented it over the long weekend. (They were lovely engagements, and I wouldn't have traded.) I think I've almost talked my mother into seeing Season of the Witch with me.

Other weekend highlights included my first weekend of volunteering. It's fabulous. ( Beware: I squeal about kittens behind this cut. )

For anyone who might be worried that I will suddenly have fifteen cats, rest assured this won't happen. I feel desperately bad for the two all-black kittens that I've seen in the shelter that are sweet as anything and tiny. They should be adopted out because they're well-behaved and beautiful. Gaia, a Bombay mix, has such sleek fur and a dignified face that's totally ruined by the fact she constantly has the tip of her tongue sticking out. Malinda is smaller even than viridian 's kitty Callisto, but she's a cuddler and so adorable. I am not in any danger of adopting myself because I have the best cat in the world that loves me best and I've never had a cat that loved me best and I would never jeopardize that. That, and my other cat is so traumatized by the other cats that have come through my home that I couldn't put him through more of that either. And then there's the fact that these cats weigh, literally, one-quarter what my cats do. They'd never be happy.

So, no, I'm not adopting any pets. I am trying to get my mom to take one, though :) Her favorite kitty, Magic, who passed away all too young not so long ago, looks just like Gaia, right down to the few tufts of white hairs at her throat. My mother is remaining steadfast in her refusal to adopt more kitties, though, and with good reason. My brother has to give up his cat because his fiance is allergic. We're trying to see if my brother-in-law will take him, but my brother-in-law is being stubborn about wanting to pick out his own cat. (That's fair but annoying.) We won't let him go to a shelter, so my mother might end up with him. And she seems to think that she's going to end up with my cats when I go to school. Which is heartening--she thinks I'm definitely getting in!--and disheartening--I don't want to live without them!--but is mostly reassuring. (They'll always have a home with Grandma.)

What I don't understand is how people who can't have pets volunteer at the shelter. Without the quirky and difficult situation of cats at home, I'd probably have gone and adopted Malinda and Gaia already. But I have cats that I love and a dynamic that, while not perfect, would only destablize further if I brought more pets home. (Mostly because my roommates would, rightly, kill me.) Half the volunteers I talked to are pet-less, many because roommates are allergic, and I have no idea how they keep from taking home every sob-story pet they see.

Proof that I'm not just able to forgive everything 'cause of a pretty photo

You may think after this post that it doesn't take much to turn my head (and opinion) right around. To be fair, it doesn't. But I do have some very few, very non-interfering standards. And those standards make me less forgiving of the X-Men reboot than I was of the Spider-Man reboot based on the first promo picture released for both movies. The X-Men one is here. (The Spider-Man picture is at the previous link.)

No sir, I don't like it. I can be talked into accepting the fact that Emma Frost is dressed like a belly dancer--though I bemoan the loss of her corset, the attitude is there. This is all the more surprising for the fact that January Jones, she of the mousy voice and mousy everything else, who never really lets on whether she's acting as though she's a piece of furniture on Mad Men or if she's just badly acting, is playing Emma Frost. I still haven't got high hopes for her in the role. It requires a stone-cold bitch, and if they were going to bother scraping talent from AMC, I think Christina Hendricks would have done a much better job. (And probably looked FUCKING AMAZING in a goddamned white corset, just saying.)

But the rest of the picture is a total loss. Apologies to glvalentine  but her man Fassbender looks ridiculous. It may be the disconnect of seeing him in an X-man uniform, as the blogger points out. At least he doesn't look so markedly out of place and bizarre as James McAvoy. I pretty much hate the whole picture, but they stand out as the bookends to a supremely awful promo shot. I am almost incensed at the Mystique. Rebecca Romjin was too, too perfect as Mystique, a character who I consistently loved, up until she was sabotaged the hell out of that shit third movie. (There was a third one? Nooooo...) As crap as the stories got with the X-Men movies, Mystique was next to perfect--suitably badass, homicidal, vicious, and, naturally, dead sexy. (She got great lines, too.) This person with her This Island Earth forehead is unacceptable. This movie is obviously going to have to play merry hob with the timeline as set up by the movies. Hell, Wolverine already fucked continuity all to blazes. Why remain so faithful to that one character's appearance when you're fucking everything else up?