Yesterday was pretty steady. We knocked off around 4 and had dinner at the folks’ place, then cruised back here after stopping off for Apricot Ale (link removed for safety) which is rather delightful stuff, and watched the EPIC director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven (which I loved but I can see why it was panned) and then the little gem The Secret Life of Words. Heartshattering and beautiful – that was the movie which got Sarah Polley acquainted with Julie Christie – and we all know how that turned out.
Category: Film
More packing
Fast forward to 4:55 it that’s the audio what you want…..
I have a cough and cold but I’m ignoring it. Today, more packing and maybe more movies. After we knocked off yesterday, we watched three movies. Radio Days (it was on my lifetime list and MAN did I enjoy it), Eulogy (OMG what a great movie) and Eastern Promises (fabulous movie, and the naked fight in the bathhouse was all it was billed to be and more).
Jeff has provisionally agreed to the Friday Night Veg-In being reinstituted in our new home. The Friday night Veg-In will be two Fridays a month. You show up after work with whatever you are planning to drink (or contribute to the beer jar) and you get a) one free meal b) one free movie c) adult conversation… That’s the last 4th Friday of the month. Second Friday will be kid friendly; depending on the age of the kids we’ll either watch in the living room or I can ride herd on kids in the guest bedroom or depending on the weather we can go play in the park across the street. Can’t let my grandmother in waiting skills get all rusty. I can’t even remember these days whether you’re supposed to swing a toddler by it’s arm or it’s leg.
No, I’m not trying to scare anyone with the grandmother comment. Last I checked, Keith was not situated to provide me with grandchildren, and Katie shudders from head to foot in a fashion only to be described as Grand Guignol-esque if you even breathe a hint about the possibility. Dang, it’s almost ten o’clock, time to attack the boxing situation again.
I’m sleeping so well I’m wondering if I should just say screw it and buy a softer mattress. I sleep better on a soft sprung mattress than on foam, that’s for sure. I slept like a log in the DR and that mattress was as soft as a waterbed, damned near.
Anyway, I’m having a lovely time..
Oooh, a Lego Ezra Pound
Man, he was hotter than a two dollar pistol when he was young. And yes, he was a foul racist blatherer sometimes with skewed up ideas about economics, but he was a damned fine poet. I can’t remember where I scanged this from.
I’m off to see Persepolis this aft with Keith, and afterwards I’m calling daughter Katie and dragging her over here for a massage. She sounds beat, baffed, bent, bewildered and entirely tharn.
spending money again
I love the week after Christmas. Picked up a nice jacket to replace the third hand John Deere jacket Keith’s been wearing for the best part of ten years at the Bay yesterday… half price. Picked up a laptop snare and have fallen deeply in love with it, as it produces a starting depth and variety of percussive noise. Picked up a button which says Beer is my comfort food, and a couple of others equally snide, and watched Keith zone out in a comic book store (the height of entertainment). Also picked up the Collectors Serenity. Keith wanted it for the cast commentary… I didn’t find it all that gripping, so I went to bed. We also watched Pan’s Labyrinth and I have to say although it was good and creepy, I am not getting what all the oohs and aahs were about when it came out. I guess watching somebody innocent die at the end wasn’t my idea of a good time.
Today I’m going to wheedle Keith into helping me move more furniture and maybe do an abbreviated shop.
Three movies.
OMG I just say On Her Majesty’s Secret Service for the first time. I didn’t realize that George Lazenby stepped in when Sean Connery bailed after the second Bond. Basically, my review equals a thumbs up and I want to see it again eventually – Diana Rigg is radiant. George just looks (inner lawyer has s-canned that comment) uh, can’t say that either. How about he’s maler than Roger Moore and less male than Timothy Dalton. Nothing, of course, outmales Sean Connery. I trust this clears things up.
Also saw Director’s Cut of Blade Runner.
The soundtrack is like an animal at bay; the colours have been refreshed and cleansed, leaving the movie still dark but with dreamlike spots of brightness. They got rid of that cornball ending, the movie makes more narrative sense and the performances are still riveting. About half an hour into the movie you stop saying – and there’s another and another and another SF / anime trope. It’s like a waterfall of tropes. It’s a visually sumptuous brainstretcher of a film.
Also saw All The Real Girls.
Picture every undereducated duckwit you ever met. Colour him ‘asshole’. Watch him struggle – usually without success – to become a better person. Nobody dies and he smartens up about one quarter of one percent. Still, it’s progress, right?
In a couple of places, this movie made me so mad, that I had to chase down the source of this unreasonable burst of biliousness. After a brief cogitation, I figured out what made me so irritable and calmed down. I’m not married any more, I’m not married any more. I never have to be mad again if I choose not to be. I’m sure I will be, especially when I’m driving, or back seat driving, but really, I don’t have to experience all the wackiness of hormones and digestion that goes with being mad. It was quite a thought provoking movie. It made me think a lot about female stupidity and male abuse.
Merry Christmas movie reviews
It’s 4 in the morning…. I napped so much yesterday that I can no longer sleep. So now I’m up, and while I’m here I might as well review Black Snake Moan.
Movie about redemption where nobody gets killed? Yes there is some violence. Sign me up. Christina Ricci gives a performance somewhere between possessed and mesmeric (and she don’t wear too much clothes) and Samuel L Jackson is great, and they do their own singing, and how can I as a Unitardarian not like a movie in which Christina Ricci sings a hymn “This Little Light of Mine”? (which is in Singing the Living Tradition, the UU hymnal). The soundtrack is uniformly excellent.
Jeff and Andrew I also watched two fifths of Spike Lee’s She Hate Me but he turned it off when I got up and walked out the room. Lee, in my view, doesn’t leaven his bitterness with enough humour, and when he does use humour it’s not much fun. He keeps making peep peep noises about not hating women and being misinterpreted but I don’t f2cking buy it. The hell of it is I love Spike’s visual style and economy and pacing and music – but I can’t swallow the bile. The best part of the movie was watching the credits and seeing SO many talented actors on the playbill – and getting hopeful. Great opening credit sequence too. I just can’t buy the rich gorgeous lesbians paying for sex to have a baby thing. Any group of women that smart should be able to come up with a plan for finding babydaddies that doesn’t involve spending money. Hell, I’m not that smart and I could do it. If you’re going to do a movie about how the good guy always gets screwed, try not to make the motifs quite so obvious.
Merry Christmas! May the transcendent wonder of a new life infuse your being. And if you’re not a transcendent wonder kind of person, have a good day filled with friends, food and family.
Yet more awesome linkypoos
Finn Family Moominaddams
Cheese off your colleagues
Well, they have to live SOMEwhere.
Toenails and Forensics
Bigfoot video is 40…. I still think it’s a guy in a two part suit. Why no feet? Doesn’t the ‘rippling’ look like a costume folding? Why the line right along the midsection?
If animals could blog….
These mushrooms are probably fake, but great for Halloween.
A GREAT language blog, hours of fun here.
Honest to God, I thought the kid would make an exit there and then.
Weekend wrap up.
I can’t believe Pukka Orchestra didn’t make this list.
– this list will be food for arguments for the next dozens of years.
The church supper went great – as we are a caravan of faith at the moment, with no settled home (besides the Gathering Place), I now have dishes from the banquet to do. Fortunately I have a dishwasher ;). I also performed The Tapioca Song. The Beacon Home Companion was even better than last year, and that’s saying something. Don Hauka is a genius… There, I said it! And everybody else was wonderful too… Derek’s antics as “The Chalice” (the Unitarian Superhero) were wonderful as always.
Sometime today I will be getting the Quicktime version of the Tapioca Song video, and THEN I’ll post it to Youtube. Stay tuned, as they say. Katie K saw it yesterday and pronounced herself entertained.
Katie has moved back in with Paul and Keith and now is a resident of Planet Bachelor. She has her own bathroom too, the lucky stiff. I suspect she will greatly appreciate her new digs. Her boyfriend… for such he is, still, alas, has a couple of three inch souvenirs from the cop dogs who took him down last week. He has sworn to mend his ways. And I’m going to lose forty pounds by Christmas. I have seen Katie’s new tattoo, or at least the start of it. It is a foot long snake wrapped around a heart. (Fanboys note… it’s modelled after Katchoo’s tat from Strangers in Paradise)
On a happier note…. last night the four of us (me Paul Keith & Kate) did something we hadn’t done in the best part of a year. We watched a movie together! Cats crawled all over us purring happily! It was Les Misérables with Liam Neeson. I had to extend my booking on the car and then *&$^ forgot that I had to put gas in it, and then *&$*&! forgot to get a receipt so had to dash back for it. Didn’t get home until almost two. My weekend has thus far been enlivened by the existence of the progressive lenses perched on my nose. Driving was, as they say, interesting. I suppose I could have extended the booking and driven out to Richmond to participate in filking at VCon but not even the prospect of vixy and Tony performing her stellar “Mal’s Song” could make me want to drive out there. I’ll get a report in the fullness of time from Tom and Peggy. Vcon of course has been rendered more interesting, at least in terms of GETTING there, by that 82 year old dude flying his plane into a building three blocks from the Con hotel….
My apartment is a disaster but unfortunately, as I was trying to wind down from my yesterday in the wee sma’s this morning, I picked up Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer and, well, like that. I’m not sure how much housework I’ll be doing today. Especially since my laundry’s done. At first the book annoyed the snot out of me, and now I can’t put it down. There’s one of the most succinct arguments for atheism I’ve ever seen in it. Hey, this is fair use, isn’t it?
From Chapter VIII of the Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe, 1980. Thecla, a courtesan, speaks:
“One can’t found a novel theology on Nothing, and nothing is so secure a foundation as a contradiction. Look at the great successes of the past – they say their deities are the masters of all the universes, and yet that they require grandmothers to defend them, as if they were children frightened by poultry. Or that the authority that punishes no one while there exists a chance for reformation will punish everyone when there is no possibility anyone will become the better for it.”
As soon as I hear from the videographer, I’m going to head off to RCH to visit somebody from work who’s in hospital, unless she’s home already, in which case I’ll try to call her.
yesterday
For Can Con, and because it’s a great movie, and because after the Heavy Stuff I wanted a comedy, I watched the Barbarian Invasions with Jeff. It is a great film. I must see it again. Also, I desired about ten times to correct the goddamned subtitles, because a couple of the times they lacked nuance and verve.
Hiking with Hunter S Thompson.
We dropped by Gadget House on the way out of Victoria, where I found out that my mother had a rubber glove full of ice in the fridge. If you have a rubber glove full of water, tied off at the wrist, and you put it on a shelf in the freezer, once frozen it ends up looking like it has joints. I wanted to take a picture of it, it was extremely disquieting.
Yesterday the dejunking was clothes and shoes. It went very well; I acquired a really nifty pyjama set which is about as sexy as a hairball, but fits perfectly.
There is a LOLcats version of the Holy Bible. God is referred to throughout as “ceiling cat” (which should make any of you who know who ceiling cat is fall about laughing) and I read the first chapter of the Book of Job, which had me screaming with laughter so loud that Jeff was telling me to shut up because I was scaring the cats. Or maybe that was another time. I do scream with laughter, it’s one of the many things about me which are childlike.
Still in Victoria
Watched Blackhawk Down, The Machinist, a little Robot Chicken, (scroll down on link for pirate humour) and nothing else because we actually did work yesterday. Now it’s the crack of noon and I’m finally out of bed. What gives? I was in bed by 10 last night!!? Maybe I’m lying awake in bed for hours thinking dark thoughts. Dark thoughts which I cannot commit to my blog, lest they be used in turn to commit me. Sorry, the paranoia is lying deep, and deep, upon me right now. It’s hard to watch a movie like The Machinist and not go to a dark place afterwards. And this was the movie that Joe at work has been bugging me to watch since the day he started! Now I’ll have to watch it again.
I know it’s really really sick, but Christian Bale at 121 pounds is the hottest thing evah. I normally don’t go for extremememes in male shapeliness, but the idea of (ed.: Cut that shiat out, right now!). Aherm. Yes. So to recap. Skinny Christian Bale equals teh hotness. That is all.
One more cup of this extremely fine coffee, and it’s back to the dejunking.
3:10 to Yuma
Loved it. Christian Bale and Russell Crowe are uniformly excellent. The standout is Wild Assed Ben Foster, whose performance as the “I am utterly devoted to my boss who is secretly a homophobic asshole” Charlie Prince has to be seen to be believed. Intelligent, easily offended and crazier than a meth lab rat, his character is one of those “Yeah, those guys can act but I got the part of a lifetime and I’m chewing scenery with ruminant thoroughness and raptor speed” delineations that will never even make the list for best supporting, and will still have the power to crack people up 20 years from now.
I am assuming that director James Mangold had pretty much total control in terms of the casting. Oh, what a great sociopath Russell Crowe as Ben Wade makes. Slimy, charming even when you KNOW that’s he pulling it out for you, possessing lightning fast reflexes, an exceedingly well trained horse, the ability to immediately zero in on the most important part of the environment including sex when it affords itself, he has a lethally committed second in command and not a care in the world but the next theft. And he’s ‘artistic’ don’t you know, he does heartfelt but not particularly skilled pencil sketches, and you see him first gazing upon a bird of prey. Oh, wow! Sub – til.
I have to go to bed. Oh, Alan Tudyk plays the doctor. Except he’s a vet.
I wish I’d seen the movie with Keith – we were both there but missed each other and Keith went home without seeing the movie.
I woke up at 4:21
and now I’m watching “Walk the Line”. Tonight I’m going with Keith to see “3:10 to Yuma”. Kind of a Mangold festival.
Ooooh that’s good coffee I made. Yarr!
Tomorrow, rehearsal for Sunday church. I’ll see if I can avoid walking out this Sunday – I was most distressed last Sunday.
Keith lost his phone. This is a message to the karmic beings – kick the ass of the little sod who picked it up and then started harassing everybody on the phone list!!! Got hold of Paul who killed the phone stone dead within instants, thank Goodness.
My apartment is SHINY CLEAN except I gotta take out the trash.
Daughter Katie’s best friend from high school moved back to town. I detect the possibility of roommatishness.
The Secret Policeman’s Other Camping Trip is now scheduled for the 22nd of September. I is SO TEMPTED to invite the CEO but that would likely crimp the connections of the other invitees, so I’ll just think about it really hard. This time I would buy the beer….
Just noticed that the bassist in Walk the Line is the same guy who played the jock in Buffy.
More coffee.
I think I will serenade one of my coworkers today. Peter A said he would be very happy to accept my serenade, but I told him:
Mandos are LOUD instruments… well they are, for their size. And no work will get done while I am singing to which his response was to purse his lips and raise one eyebrow, something he does so well he really should get paid extra for it. Anyway, if I actually do sing to him it will be “Buy me a Beer” aka “The Cougar’s Love Call”.
RobofNine and I ate at the Himalaya last night. Umm, umm, yum.
two more things
- We talked genealogy last night! Rob is a genealogist with some wonderful family stories.
- I received one piece of mail yesterday, and it looked so ominous I didn’t want to open it. I did though; it turned out to be a thank you note from the producer of the ten minute documentary about Elly.
Happy sigh.
Sundry and various
I met a man with the largest collection of musicals in BC, possibly Canada. To give you some idea of the scale of his collection, he moved sometime in the last few years and put the stuff that he could bear to part with on ebay and cleared enough money to buy a house in rural Saskatchewan. I am going to email him today and ask him if he has a copy of Zou Zou, one of Josephine Baker’s movies.
Tammy had a wonderful time on Gabriola and has promised pix. I’m going over to her mom’s today to see her before she leaves tomorrow morning.
I am very happy about signing up for the CAN car, and the illiterate SUV drivers who keep parking in that spot are going to think I’m a evil evil hag, because I’m going to start calling for towtrucks on people. Seriously, why are the people who take that spot almost always SUV drivers? Was that a rhetorical question? Is this?
The young man downstairs from me gets one more gimme before I rat him out to the landlord. I have now addressed him personally twice; I will give him three times. I don’t enjoy being woken up like that and his apologies are wearing thin.
After a decade of living in this town I finally poked my head into Sikora Music down on Hastings. I picked up a couple of CD’s which will go in the Christmas present pile. I tried to go into Long and McQuade but they weren’t welcoming enough. I also emailed L&M a few days back and started my email with “Your website sucks a Greyhound bus station men’s room mop.” And the webguy emailed me back to acknowledge that I was funny, but didn’t actually address my question. I know it’s not an e-commerce site, but a list of what snares you carry when I search on “snare” would be useful!! And why am I suddenly interested in snares? Well, I’m thinking of some portable and classy percussion, and a snare head with brushes, which I had recently seen used to great effect, got me thinking. My percussive friends are smiling and nodding.
Katie K is back from Maine and visiting rellies. She said “The theme for this trip is cognitive dissonance.” My father is nodding and saying to himself, “That’s just a fancy way of saying, “Can I go home now?””
Dinner with Keith, Kate and Tammy went wonderfully, and I completely kept out of the conversation Tammy had with Katie, since it was everything I’ve been telling her for aeons, except Tammy is both more forceful and more tactful, tact being something I should really work on, except nobody would recognize me. Keith bitched me out for not inviting Paul, and I phoned Paul to try and get his side of the story (and also to alert him about a possible change of address for Katie), but he appeared unconcerned and hadn’t really expected to be invited. A whole paragraph detailing why he should be happy he wasn’t invited has been deleted, thank god.
Re the change of address for Katie…. stay tuned. She’s having her troubles, and now she’s working on graceful exit strategies.
Keith’s first two days of Dispensing Optician school appear to have gone well. He loves the new campus, says “The air here is better than it was in high school” (not hard) and seems to be thriving on being so busy, although he’s kinda sharper and more brittle than I remember him. He went on at length, as he tends to do, about writing projects he never actually does anything about (I keep saying, find a comic book artist, there’s less writing) and various media things, like TV Tropes which I forwarded him a link to yonks ago and which is still causing him fits of hysterical laughter. Keith also recited a William Blake poem, which he recently memorized. I will now pause while my mother recovers from her swoon of happiness.
I also bought a Moleskine. I am a little fashionable sheep, but it sure is a pleasure to write on.
Now, since my apartment is tidy and all my clothes are clean, I guess I’ll have to actually do some work before I phone Tammy at nine…. The major projects are:
- Getting all the pictures in albums and labelling them to the extent I can.
- Entering my songs into Songwriter (now that after four berloody months I found my list again!!).
- Purging as many of my books as I can.
- Re-establishing a filing system.
- Working on a budget.
- Practicing on my guitar and mando.
But hark, what scent from yonder café breaks?? I think I’ll go downstairs to the Renaissance and fuel up.
I wasn’t paying attention
Donnie Darko is a Richard Kelly film. Richard Kelly has also made the lamentable “Domino” (the trailer was enough for me) and “Southland Tales” (which I know nothing about).
On the director’s cut of the movie, there is a mockumentary about the film and the fans which was made without his permission but got stuck on the DVD anyway. I’m very tempted to see it.