The Rabbit Hole

For the last fucking time: an antiviral is a compound that one takes to combat an infection of the physical body by an infectious agent known as a virus. An anti-virus is a SOFTWARE you use to remove malicious software from your computer.

Make a note of it.

I saw three movies in the theater this weekend, and they run the gamut between good, bad, and oh-my-God-this-is-for-real-awesome. They would be Source Code, Sucker Punch, and Unknown, respectively. All you need to know about Unknown is that it's a thriller about conspiracies surrounding an assassination, and Liam Neeson is in it. It's truly fun in the way only a Liam-Neeson-fights-everyone movie can be. moonlightalice has called for an entire series of these movies. I hope she gets her wish.

Sucker Punch is not a good movie. I may have a longer post on why that is, but for now, let me just say that it is decidedly not great. Not the worst or even the most abusively bad movie ever, but certainly not the best movie either. It would be a terrific series of music videos--and, indeed, I liked a lot of the music playing over the scenes, although, as ever, Zach Snyder's omnipresent musical guru, Tyler Bates, displays excellent, if predictable, taste, and lousy, lousy execution. For instance, he seems incapable of realizing that music in the background shouldn't build to a crescendo only to be dropped to a whisper when someone has to utter some potentially plot-enabling dialogue (for as much as such things existed in Sucker Punch that is). The music would go LOUD-soft-speaking-LOUD unnecessarily. Save it for a break when you can truly amp up your gothic remix of "White Rabbit," okay?

Source Code is good, although it was also frustrating. I liked it, but it doesn't quite work--not as well as Moon worked. It wasn't brave as it should have been. I liked the central sci-fi premise, and the suspension of disbelief was not an issue. No, revisiting someone's memories of a time should not allow you to change things or to experience things that they could not have known, seen things they never saw, etc. But you roll with it because that's what they need you accept, that's the price of entry, and it's not that high a bar to clear. What I realized this morning is not that the sci-fi aspects are overly complicated, it's that the movie hasn't got the courage to stick to their rules. moonlightalice expressed a lot of this when we saw it, but it wasn't until this morning that it really bugged me. Not sticking to the rules, moreover, raises a lot of questions--and a lot more sci-fi complications--that the movie doesn't answer and shouldn't have had to anyway.

Performance-wise, I was completely in love with Vera Farminga's character. Without being able to move her body, her face had to convey her internal struggle as she guided Jake Gyllenhaal's character through his paces. She was amazing and so utterly human. I think, to its credit, that is why Source Code works, where it does. It sketches out people instead of archetypes with its characters, with the exception of the more villainous folk. They were very cardboard/cookie-cutter, but as they existed only to flesh out the conflict--internal and external--in the protagonist characters, that was not an issue for me. And, like with Moon, what you know about Source Code already, from trailers and reviews, doesn't give away the film. You can know the basic premise and not know where the movie is necessarily going. It's not like a "twist" ending or anything, just that the set up takes you in (mostly) well-thought-out directions that are still somewhat surprising and always interesting and frequently touching. It's the rare movie these days that can tell you exactly what to expect and still be a surprise. Whatever its faults, Source Code does that much, and that is not a little thing.

After this weekend, I'm now only three movies behind where I should be with my movie-a-week resolution. I won't fall further behind for this week at least, since I've got movie-going plans set, but I need to start picking up the slack before I lose too much more time. Tsk tsk. I never thought it would be this hard to get my ass out to the movies just slightly more than I do already, yet here I am. I would have been better able to manage it if the Oscar Showcase wasn't stupidly split up this year. Alas!

And now that that test is over! I can post about the trivial things that are much more interesting to me! Woo!

My weekend was lovely. ( Ah, family. )

While I was in San Francisco, I finally got to see G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. I can't say that it was better than, say, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Certainly, it was shorter, so it has that in its favor. ( There's also some tangential stuff that's fun. )

But still! Fanboys! Shipping wars! We can all get along. :D

Let's see, anything else? Nope. I just finished that stupid practice test, I have to get my lab in some sort of recognizable shape before tomorrow, and I've got work to do at actual work. Better get to it then.

I mentioned this to some folk I was with this weekend. It's even better than I remember!



Also, Pharyngula linked to this guy, and I've been serially clicking links through on YouTube to watch more of his. This was the original brilliant bit about homeopathy:

The folks who posited "JAFO" as an answer to my "Quel de Fuck, NG?" post from yesterday are probably closer to the money.

He just asked me if I knew anything about pipettes.

::headdesk::

Specifically? He didn't know how to read the numbers on the micropipettor so that he could pipette the amount he wanted

Maybe I should show him this:


Now, maybe that is all impenetrable nonsense to non-science folks. However, if you watch at 1:25 or so, you'll see exactly how to read a micropipette in order to select exact quantity of solution you wish to aspirate. You twist the numbers until they read, top to bottom, the number. NG was sure that it read bottom to top.

He had two weeks of training with his predecessor before he started. WTF?

Ah, here's some:

This tax evasion thing sure is nabbing a lot of people, isn't it? At least in this case, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. (Even writing that ironic-like made me shudder because there is nothing remotely nice about this douchebag.)

Stephen King = MADE OF WIN Not that he's saying anything earth-shattering, but because it's him saying it, it's all good. I like his sense of whimsy about these things. He's someone who was constantly derided as being low-class when it came to literature but who has come to be better appreciated with time. So he knows quite clearly that finding fault with certain writers' abilities isn't a knock on them, really--they suck, but hey, they sell books, and the benefits all writers, really. Especially given the way publishing has been circling the drain.

I got your intermediate fossils RIGHT HERE!

-Fox Studios: in big trouble, sinking fast, utterly unaware. As ever. Pleased to hear they're considering a Deadpool movie, laughing at just about everything else.

-It's just scandals, scandals, scandals all the way down at the Interior Dept. Not surprisingly, Bush appointees and Bush-favored hires engaged in cronyism and back-scratching and general bad behavior. True to their political sire, they even dabbled in the nose candy while they were at it. I CAN HAS PAWSITIVE LEGASHEE?

-Thank you, PZ Myers. No, really. If you weren't such a degenerate, what with your happy marriage and successful nuclear family, I'd have to marry your god-disbelieving ass.

-Who knew there were LOLPolitics?

New kid behind me, recently hired, just had his text message alert go off on his cell phone.

It made the transforming noise when the robots turn into cars or vice versa from Transformers.

He immediately said "Sorry!" But I was like "THAT WAS THE TRANSFORM-Y NOISE. THAT IS AWESOME. HAVEN'T YOU SEEN MY BAG?" I then grabbed my purse (that darkling1 got me for my birthday) and showed him.

Yeah, geeks are awesome and thick on the ground in science. SCIENCE!

...the less magical the world seems.

I just found out that there's a syndrome called "uncombable hair syndrome." The chief phenotype? Hair won't lie flat on the patient's head.

So, there you have it. Harry Potter isn't magical; he's a mutant.

Dr. Tatiana, you can horizontally transfer DNA with me any time, ::WINKWINKNUDGENUDGEENTENDRE::.

This is just fabulous, smart writing. It's not too complicated, it's fascinating science writing, and it's factual. As a bonus, many of the commentators are smart enough and educated in related fields well enough to tell the idiots of the "IF IT IS RANDOM HOW DO YOU KNOW IT'S GONNA HAPPEN! AHA GOD MUST EXIST!" variety where to stick it.