( The Dark Crystal: quoi? )
The saving grace of those movies, of course, is that someone tried something other than a reboot and did it with a metric ton of puppets. Which is good. I just wish these supposedly seminal movies were actually important after the fact. I realize that I have this problem a lot. Some movies remain important long after they have been made irrelevant--tonally, visually, etc.--by films that owe them a lot of credit. I'm told that The Godfather is one of those movies; I hated it, but supposedly it is the basis on which gangster movies ever after were fashioned, and the good ones (yeah, right, what were those again?) all are due to it. I wonder, though, whether that's fair. There are plenty of movies that pioneer effects, tones, etc. that go on to be used in better movies and we don't hold them up as all that extraordinary. I mean, The Matrix borrowed its signature effect from technology last seen in a GAP commercial and a wardrobe stolen from Wesley Snipes' Blade. Oh lord, I'm gonna hear about that from the Blade-lovers out there.

But I think Blade is a perfect example. It is decidedly not a great film. It's passable enough--like tougher version of Underworld, minus the werewolves (although not necessary without them, as some deleted scenes from Blade 3 would suggest)--and undoubtedly stylish. Otherwise, it's a fairly hollow narrative, based on a caricature better represented in several other characters. The stoic, violent anti-hero who struggles to resist becoming his enemy? Been there. It's still the reason we got X-Men made, and, subsequently, the renaissance of the comic book movie. That doesn't make it great or even necessarily worth watching. (The parts with the fat vampire being baked and Tracy Lords, just in general, make my case for me.) I think there are probably many movies that fit that profile and that people don't generally admit to not liking.

Or maybe it's just me.

It doesn't fucking matter when I leave, I cannot seem to get to work before 9:30. I left fully half an hour before I usually do, with my usual departure usually getting me to work at 9:40. I got here between 9:25-9:30. I had fully intended to be here early to clean more of the lab before I had to leave for class. But the buses were stuffed and some just plain didn't stop to pick anyone up. Did they suddenly stop running as many buses because of cut backs, or what?

As for lab cleaning, I had wiped down counters and tucked things away all day yesterday only to be told the floors were being mopped/waxed and we had to pull everything out and off the floor. I just went around re-tucking things when I finally sat down to find an e-mail about floors being mopped in an hour. If the e-mail is not literally true--i.e. that its subject "hallways being mopped in one hour" doesn't mean that it's just the hallways being mopped and I have to go through all this bullshit again, I'll kill someone. For real. I am dressed up at work, in a shirt I didn't realize had a stain on it until just now (thank god for my sweater), and I'm tired and cranky and it's only 10 am. Help me, Jeebus, I might kill someone before day's end for looking at me funny. Time to meme before that becomes not just murderous thought but murderous reality.

30 Day Movie Challenge
Day 22 - The most underrated movie

I can't remember if I saw this before I saw The Matrix. I'm pretty sure I did. I know I saw eXistenZ before The Matrix. Those two movies and The Thirteenth Floor all came out around the same time, so it must have been something in the air in the late 1990s. Perhaps fear of the millennium?

It felt like, to me, The Thirteenth Floor got lost when The Matrix hit it big. eXistenZ was a quirky movie by a famously weird dude, so it got its minimal but art-movie approved props. The Thirteenth Floor came and went with almost no fanfare. I happen to love it. It's a wonderfully rendered (har har) techno noir. The pastiches and archetypes of the 1930s noir literally exist in the digital world that the characters have created to resemble that era. This is combined with futuristic technology that is at once both accessible--it's sort of like virtual reality--and mind-blowing--the idea that the avatar you inhabit when you "play" is actually able to think, live, and act independently of you when you're not around.

But, really, it's a noir at heart, right down to the hero who cannot trust anyone, even himself (he may have murdered his mentor but he has no memory of it); the mysterious femme fatale who emerges to claim rights as the victim's daughter (heretofore unheard of by the hero, who knew the victim well); and the grizzled detective dogging the hero, willing to consider any possibility because he believes the truth is never necessarily simple (and he would be right). I'm not the biggest fan of Gretchen Mol, but she's serviceable. Really, the movie hangs on Craig Bierko and Vincent D'onofrio's performances, and both are good as themselves and their avatars--the former's being rather clueless, the latter's...less so.

It's totally worth a rental's worth of your time.

Day 01
Day 02
Day 03 - 06
Day 07
Day 08
Day 09
Day 10
Day 11-13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17-19
Day 20
Day 21

Once upon a time, someone brilliant who I think was glvalentine because she's this sort of brilliant posited the theory that Hugo Weaving is on a mission to be in every franchise. At the time this theory was born, he had, to date, been in The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Transformers, and god alone knows how many other sci-fi/fantasy films. I think the joke was that he was going to end up being Captain America at this rate.

Well, not quite. But it was a near thing. And he'll still be in the movie!

(Also, HEEE at the comment "he's half forehead.")

( Spoilers for the BSG series finale. Beware of cursing. )

I have decided, in light of this ending, that, for me, the show ends at the first 10 episodes of season four. I prefer incomplete answers to the ones given. I'm hoping that, in time, with having only watched each episode of this half season once, I will be able to forget it and be happy with what came before. This is the same strategy I've tried applying to The Matrix and its sequels; in time, the stupidity will be lost in my memory and I can enjoy what came before without hating what was done to it. It's not working, but I can hope. Maybe it's just not yet to that part of God's plan where I can forget this idiocy.

I'm tired of being angry, so I'm going to just babble about something else. Indulge me, ignore me, whichever you choose.

-Tales from the Crypt is excellent for judging sense of humor and strength of stomach. I figured that out this weekend when my two younger sisters watched it with me and one was horrified by it and the other totally into it. The way I see it, it's like the icon I'm using on this post. If you can't appreciate how absurd the thing is that you're seeing, you won't think it's funny. One sister flinched, the other made predictions about how the story would end. To my mind, one is wrong, the other is right, even though I sort of share both their reactions to it. Each episode has something that makes me laugh and makes me squeeze my eyes shut against gross-osity. Good times.

-I'm a few episodes from the end of season two of Supernatural. I managed to, mostly, explain the driving forces of plot to feiran as she and I watched an episode together, so I'm pretty proud of myself for that. However, what I really need to relate to the world at large is that feiran admitted that Dumbfuck (aka Dean aka Jensen Ackles) is, quote, "pretty." Granted, she qualified that with "oh, only in this one picture ivy03 showed me" but I have my doubts. Because she did volunteer to watch that episode with me and had me explain the season to her...

-Speaking of Supernatural, though: most of the women writing fanfic for Iron Man appear to be fans of the show. Weird demographic fallout, or what?

-My dad was given Scene It--the 2nd Movie Edition--for his Father's Day gift. I STILL DOMINATE AT THAT GAME. I pouted mightily, however, when (EVEN THOUGH I HAD ALREADY WON THE GAME) someone got a screen shot of Neo's computer at the start of The Matrix for one of their questions. RAR!

Oh, The New York Times. Have you really--really, really, really--only just read "Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?"? That only took you, what, five years to write an article about it? Bully for you!

Message from moonlightalice: Your title could use some work.

Sigh. Look, I know that I only read it because I actually was doing a film paper on The Matrix when I was in Australia, but still! I read this paper four years ago, and this is NEWS with a capital N, E, W, and S to The New York Times. I notice that they, too, skimmed over the mathy-bits. That's journalism right there for you.

*

Another passed to me from moonlightalice (obviously, more patient than I and willing to read this stuff): Plastic Surgery: Not Just For The Emotionally Healthy Any More!

I wish I could say that my title was an exaggeration verging on hyperbole, but theirs is so ridiculous, mine is only slightly more so. I love science, surely I do, but the fact that we fund studies to find out things we already know is really depressing, especially as there has been a money scare for researchers ever since the Republicans took over two-to-three branches of government. My God, people getting plastic surgery might not like themselves very much!? SHOCK. People are embarrassed to buy condoms in stores?! HEART ATTACK.

*

And yet? I leave on a note of hope: Sometimes, selling sex is okay. I mean, it's okay to endlessly speculate over sex lives if it means we examine the root cause of deceit and pain surrounding it that have nothing to do with lack of lube or a boyfriend with an enormous cock.

I like that a mathematician did, well, the math on sexual partner numbers and the differences between the sexes. Basically, unless there's like one super busy prostitute out there, guys and gals be lying about their number. It's cheerfully blunt how the article goes, "Guys are sluts, girls are prudes...right?" at the beginning, too. Like people who think that? YOU ARE SO STUPID EVEN THE NEW YORK TIMES CANNOT STAND YOU. The fact that the mathematician is so awesome and closes out that shit with, "WHY DO YOU INTERPRET WHAT PEOPLE SAY AS GOSPEL!?! NUMBERS DON'T LIE LIKE THE REST OF YOU SLUTS!!!!" I mean, uh, he tastefully phrased it thusly:

The problem, he said, is that when such data are published, with no asterisk next to them saying they can’t be true, they just “reinforce the stereotypes of promiscuous males and chaste females.”

In fact, he added, the survey data themselves may be part of the problem. If asked, a man, believing that he should have a lot of partners, may feel compelled to exaggerate, and a woman, believing that she should have few partners, may minimize her past.

“In this way,” Dr. Gale said, “the false conclusions people draw from these surveys may have a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Also? I totally clicked on the Times' dictionary function trying to copy that, and they helpfully popped up a window to explain the word I seemed to have trouble with. I now know what the word "they" means, its part of speech, and several examples of its use beyond the one in which I encountered it. Thanks, New York Times!