I Think It's Pewter

What do you get for the nine year anniversary? It doesn't matter till you actually get married, I guess. It's our anniversary today, and what did we do to celebrate? Stayed in bed for a long while and then shoveled some snow. And then I went to work. Fun stuff, kids.

brrrrrr

I woke up today to the soothing sounds of the wind howling and screaming and whipping around. Waking up like that, it's hard to work up the motivation to do anything that involves leaving the house.

Yeah... It's Blizzarding

Carla and I had planned on going to see The Eye and maybe grabbing some sushi. Instead we had some overcooked and bland spaghetti and meat sauce and then went to her house and watched many hours of Firefly.

I had really wanted to see The Eye, but spending a night in with Carla was pretty nice. We don't get to do that too often.

Not Much

I'm not really a big Oscar type person but I just wanted to mention a couple of things.

1) Yay! Depp got nominated for best actor! For a big time summer action movie! And Yay! for Bill Murray as well.

2) The Matrix sequels got skunked. No nominations. Not for sound design or effects or editing or anything.

And that's about it.

What's Cooler Than Being Cool?

-52 Celsius out there right now. That is really damn cold. My car couldn't move because the transmission fluid was frozen. That only happens when it's really damn cold out.

The only good part about it being so cold out is that it's neat to take a mug of boiling water outside and toss the steaming water into the air. It turns to snow and ice before it hits the ground. True story.

The Glory of Love

http://www.lanceandeskimo.com/flash/quest.html

I'm still not used to refering to Carla as my fiance. I'm sure I'll get used to it.

Anyway, my fiance threatened to charge me a dollar for every day that I don't blog. So I'm updating.

In other news, my fiance hasn't updated her blog in well over a month.

My fiance also said she'd make me give her a dollar for every day I don't go to the gym.

In other news, my fiance hasn't updated her blog in over a month.

20 Days Later

Hmm... Meant to update this damn thing sooner. Carla sent me an email bitching at me to update this thing last week. Or was it the week before? Dunno. Doesn't matter. What matters is that I'm here now and we're together again, sharing a special moment.

So, let's try to think of all the stuff that's happened since last I loosed myself upon this page.

I've gotten less sick. Which is good.

My JET application was rejected. Which is not as good. I don't know if I'd call it bad. There's plenty of other jobs just waiting for me over there, with better hours AND pay.

I received an invitation to submit my film to the Sex and Death film festival. I'm always well pleased when stuff like that happens. My film has been in a grand total of NO festivals, (or is it one?) and yet people still know about it. How does that work? It's like there's some kind of weird film... thing that people know about and I don't. Whatever.

I should submit my film to more places.

I finished reading the latest of Stephen King's Dark Tower books. Wizard in the Glass is still my favourite, But The Wolves of Calla is still a mighty fine read. I'm off the opinion that this series of books is easily King's best. I'm know in the process of re-reading the previous books in the series. Backwards. I still have volumes 2 and 1 to go.

Saw Paycheck. Woo continues his descent. Wait, let me take that back. I just said that to sound like a cool internet type jaded film critic. The truth of the matter is that I really enjoyed Face/Off. It's probably in my top 5 of Woo films. And MI2 was enjoyable, the last half hour is just good, slick fun. And I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Hard Target. I'll admit that none of his American work comes close to his best Hong Kong stuff. But now I'm way off topic. Paycheck doesn't' feel like a Woo film. At all. Sure, there's a dove, but it looks fake, like the studio put it in after the fact just to reassure people that they were in fact watching a John Woo film. The action is almost strictly by the numbers. More importantly, the characters are... meh. Ben Affleck does a serviceable job except for when he's called upon by the script to be charming and spontaneous. He comes across as a confused and annoying lunkhead. Uma Thurman looks like a crackwhore. A crackwhore with a radiant smile. And the script doesn't' have anything for her to do other than look like a crackwhore with a radiant smile. There are some interesting ideas raised but then they are just dropped without a second thought.

The best part of the film, and by best I mean most laughable, is near the begining when Ben gets his memory wiped. There are pictures of these memories on a computer screen behind him that get deleted as the corresponding memories get zapped. All these pictures have Ben Affleck in them. His memory takes place in third, not first person. Maybe that's why he looks so all the time confused.

Also saw Return of the King. Very good. Very impressive but not the be all and end all that other people are raving about. There are definite pacing issues. But who the hell cares about little stuff like that when you've got such neato looking effects?

I'm supposed to be keeping track of my spending, but I'm doing a real piss poor job.

Hey, I know. I'll use this web page to help me remember what I spend on what. How inconvenient for me and terribly exciting for you. Spent 24.40 on pizza yesterday. 20 bucks on food on Chinese New Year's Day. 5 bucks the night before. 9.50 on Paycheck. 9.69 on ROTK. 6.48 on a combo from BK. I forget how much I've spent on comic books. See? Isn't that exciting?

Other stuff: beat Prince of Persia (great game), beat Beyond Good and Evil (really good game), beat Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga (fantastic game).

That is all for now.

Shout

I finally figured out what they sing during the chorus of 'Shout' by Tears For Fears. Today I am truly a man.

Gigli

This movie was made the way it was on purpose. The director was also the writer. This was his vision. That's just amazing. And as a director, he had done some decent work in the past. His Beverly Hills Cop helped Eddie Murphy become the superstar that he once was. His Scent of A Woman revived Al Pacino's career. And Midnight Run is just a fucking funny movie. So what went wrong with Gigli? Imma gonna go out on a limb and say: "As a writer, he makes a decent director." Brest Had no hand in writing Beverly Hills Cop, Scent of a Woman or Midnight Run. Gigli is a horribly written movie. Character motivations are never clear. Affleck and Lopez are supposedly two hardened thugs, but they balk at cutting of an annoying character's thumb. More to the point, they think that cutting off someone else's thumb will be just as good. Cuz who the hell fingerprints a thumb right? Characters show up for no reason and then leave never to be seen again. Christopher Walken walks in, rambles about pie and then leaves. That was the highlight of the movie for me. Al Pacino appears, yells a bit, shoots a guy in the head and then vanishes. The movie is filled with awkward pauses in the dialogue. The dialogue is so bad I almost think it's that way on purpose. That vagina monologue? Gobble Gobble? Dear Christ in heaven. And it's all held together with some of the worst music ever. An annoying acoustic number for the most part that turns to weepy string music almost at random.

In spite of, or maybe because of all this I can honestly say that I enjoyed watching Gigli. I laughed on multiple occasions. It inspired discussion afterwards. One of the most interesting failures I've ever seen.

Again

Once again I've found myself awake at 2:30 in the morning. I work in a little over three hours and those few extra hours of sleep sure would be nice. Maybe tonight I'll stay up until three and see what that does.

For Christmas this year, I got clothes (including a nice suit and a suede jacket from the lovely Carla) some CDs, some other stuff and one game. Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga for the GBA. It's a very good game. Very cute graphics and sound and easy to control. It's an RPG but every battle is a little test of skill because you can avoid or reverse every enemy attack. Good times. Carla got me that too.

Odd

So I've been really quite sick for almost two weeks now and tonight was/is my first real chance at getting a good night's sleep. It ain't going so well. I'm doing the whole in and out of consciousness thing. Never a good time. But it makes for some interesting (?) dreams. I had this dream about reading an article/interview with Nicholas Brendon, the actor who portrayed Xander Harris on Buffy. This article/interview was in some kind of non-specific entertainment magazine. For some reason I want to say Premiere, but I'm sure I never actually saw the cover of the thing. On the opening page of the article/interview was a picture taken with a fish eye lens of Nicholas on a lawn chair on some green, green grass under a blue, blue sky in front of a small portion of a somewhat boxy one level house whose colour I forget. The picture changed slightly to the door being open a crack with some faces peering out. The faces of Nicholas, his wife (I have no recollection of what she looked like), and his two kids (not only do I have no idea what they looked like, other than both being blond, I have no idea what sex they were. The wife was blonde too. And pretty). Then the article began and the picture changed again, by beginning to move. Nicholas opened the door, welcoming the interviewer and apologizing about the hectic scene, but they were trying to get the kids off to school. I have a sense of the article kind of flowing like the usual puff fluff that is in such publications but also of it jumping around a fair bit and I'm not sure if I actually remember reading any words. From the intro it went on to very briefly allude to Brendon being very busy during the recent pilot season in L.A. and then moved very suddenly, almost awkwardly to the end of Buffy with Nick being both diplomatic and a little untoward towards Sarah Michelle Gellar (it seems to me he made a point of not mentioning her name. Maybe it was just me). He also cried and then apologized saying "That question got way more personal than either of us intended."(referring of course to the interviewer) The article then moved on to Nick's wife and how they met. (Here's the thing: I got the sense that this was the first marriage for both and that neither of them had kids prior to the wedding. How did they become old enough to be ready for school?) He said something that I wanted to write down because it made me think of Carla. He said, of his wife and why he decided to ask her to marry him (or to go out on a date with him, I'm not sure, but the following sounds like the trivial stuff you learn while dating, not before), "I know I liked her, that we owned the same CD and DVD machines, that we had a very similar CD collection. That we both liked stuff." See that sounds like something I'd say about Carla at our wedding. Except most of that stuff doesn't apply to us. The facts don't match but the flavour does. It was right around this point that I realized that I was awake. So I went downstairs, grabbed a drink of water and began writing this blog entry and now I'm done.

Except I'm going to go upstairs and grab my Buffy box set and make sure that I spelled Nicholas Brendon's name right.

I did.

Happy thing with the day and the year with the new

How did Carla and I ring in the new year? We were at my friend Trev's house. Carla was asleep on his couch while the rest of us (myself, Trev, James, Kim) watched Gigli. We didn't even notice when midnight came and went. Yeah, we're cool. That Gigli movie is a little bit of amazing. The mind boggles. It's just so... wow. And it was made that way on purpose. I'd go into specifics but now it is time for my nap.