Chronicles of Riddickulous

About the title: I saw this movie on opening night and the title for this review popped into my head about half-way through the movie. Then I started seeing other people use the same pun. Not wanting to let the terrorists win, I decided to stick to my guns and use the title anyway. So there.

I liked Pitch Black. A lot. Even all the times we saw some of it in Australia (they really seem to like that movie down there) couldn't dampen my feelings towards it. It was well made, stylish, and it took advantage of its small budget. And I quite liked the character of Riddick.

So I was intrigued by the idea of a sequel.

Then I saw the teaser trailer. I wasn't so intrigued anymore.

But as I saw more trailers, my interest began to build back up. It was directed by the same guy as well, I found that to be a plus. He did such a good job with such a small budget I wondered what he would do with a massive one.

Too much, it would seem.

Pitch Black worked because of its energy and style. The story was simple and propulsive: We gotta get off this planet. Chronicles of Riddick's story is too intricate for it's own good. And it ain't that intricate. There's all sorts of political intrigue and plotting that didn't really need to be in the movie and Dame Dench's only real purpose is to get all sorts of exposition out of the way.

That's my biggest problem with the story, it tries to cram too much in. Not only that, it crams it in in the worst way possible: by having characters just talk about it. Film is a visual medium damnit. To be fair, most of my films have shit loads of dialogue, but that's their point. This is a big budget action movie, I don't need no political in-fighting. What is up with all this political bullshit in sci fi lately? Episode 1 was lousy with it, The Matrix sequels had too much of it too.

They say that a good half hour has been cut out of this movie, so maybe that extra time will help better explain the story, give it room to breathe. Seems odd that while my main complaint is there's too much extraneous crap, I look forward to seeing more of it. It's not so much that I dislike all the intrigue, I just think it was handled most inelegantly.

Which fits in with the dialogue and such. This film has some really bad lines in it. "It's been a long time since I smelled beautiful." being my favourite. What's more, its based on some really hoary old cliches. Riddick is the chosen one, the last of his race, it has been prophesized that only he can defeat the Necromongers. Yep, the Necromongers (ooooooohh scaary, eh kids?). And you know what race Riddick is the last of? He's a Furyan. And before he defeats the evil bad guy of doom, he stops off on Crematoria to pick up an old friend. Crema-frikkin-toria.

I got sidetracked by the stupid names. Sorry. What I'm trying to say is that the propulsive energy of Pitch Black is no where to be found in this movie. It should be, but it isn't. It should be because Riddick is a propulsive character. He's a wanted criminal, he's always on the run. Most of this movie moves forward due to him running from bounty hunters or being taken somewhere by them. But the old energy just ain't there.

Even the action scenes are a bit lackluster. Riddick barely ever uses his ole' shiny eyes thing to his advantage. Once, right near the start, to be exact. And that fight in the dark is a quickly edited piece of crap. The intent might have been to show the chaos that Riddick is capable of causing, but it didn't work for me. The opening scene where he turns the table on his pursuers worked well. And the big fight on Crematoria was very well done and stands apart from most other fight scenes I've seen the last few years. The sound effects kind of fade away and the music takes centre stage. Twohy and his editor take the fight scene into the realm of the montage here and it works. Roger Ebert said the fight scenes in this film have no sense of space or location, but I think he's just getting old. Fuck man, he liked the Garfield movie and admitted to laughing at Family Circle (circus?)

So how does it look? The visual style of this film is easily its best attribute. If the Roman empire never collapsed and just kept spreading through the galaxies, it would look a lot like the Necromonger's empire. It's a different look, full of mean looking faces and such and I liked it. All the planets had their own distinct looks, and none of them sucked. All the ships and such looked both cool and feasible. And run down. Which is always cool. Which George Lucas forgot somewhere along the way.

And of course Vin Diesel looks cool. Riddick is a bad mother fucker and he looks the part. But Diesel edges real close to self parody in this one. I liked the Riddick in Pitch Black more. Maybe cuz Pitch Black was rated R.

In summation: looks nice, some good action, some bad dialogue and too much story.

If you liked Pitch Black and want more, play Escape From Butcher Bay instead.

Miss You

I have a problem. Not a big one. Fairly small, really. Inconsequential some might even say. I cannot seem to hold on to a pair of nail clippers for any prolonged amount of time. I always misplace them. Or my brother steals them.

Also, I do most of my nail clipping at my computer, for that is usually where I notice that my nails need to be clipped.

I mentioned once to Carla, as we chatted on the phone, that what I needed was to chain some nail clippers to my computer. So before Carla left for Newfie Land, she gave me a pair of nail clippers with a little chain.

She's a keeper she is.

I thanked her for the gift and put it in my pocket and kind of forgot about them there. Then as I was fishing for my keys after work, my fingers brushed against the nail clippers and I was filled with happiness and joy and love and I missed Carla so completely I thought I might cry.

She can't get home soon enough.

Procrastastic

I've been meaning to blog since about Tuesday. But, obviously, I have not. I have not been in the best of moods. My job is basically done. Which I find oddly saddening and maddening in equal amounts. I mean I had planned on taking a year off from work starting around now, so it really couldn't have worked out better for me. But. But.... But I don't like the thought of being replaced by a machine, of being made obsolete. I was working when they packed up the hard drive that will take the place of me and four others. About the size of a 20" TV. That bothered me.

What also bothers me is the fact that the traffic and promotions people (the people in charge of making sure all the shows get filled up with commercials and such) are so upset about losing their jobs. I'm good at my job, therefore I have reason to be upset about losing mine. They suck. They are horrible. They are incapable of doing their jobs with any small degree of competency. They should have been jobless years ago. Fuck them. Fuck them in their stupid asses.

See, that's me being bitter. Grrrrrr! (picture me scowling and shaking my fist) I don't mean to be quite so bitter. But Carla is in Newfoundland, so that makes me a sad panda. Put these two things together, and man o man, this week is full of the suck.

I know! I'll end this post and star a new one, a happier, more uplifting one.

Hrmmmm...

I said I was going to be more thorough in my movie reviews and then I write a couple little reviews that go into no real detail at all. Now I'm going to try to rectify that.

However, I'm not going to touch on the Maddin films. Because they are too dense, too visual and abstract. Too out of my league, is what I'm trying to say.

Harry Potter is a different story, because it's a story. It's based on a book so at the very least I can talk about the differences.

The problem with the first two Potter movies is that they were too faithful to the books. They crammed in as much as they could for no reason other than it was in the book so it should be in the movie. Columbus was so busy making sure he played all the notes that he lost track of the music.

The problem with Azkaban is the opposite. It loses too much good stuff from the book. The origin of the Marauder's Map and the relationship between Harry's parents and Lupin and Sirius and Snape and... the guy. These revelations helped Harry learn a lot more about his parents and the situation he finds himself in.

I have no idea how well the film works, story wise, for those who have not read the book. I can only say that I noticed the absence of the above and fervently hope that the scenes were cut for time and will appear on the DVD.

Luckily the film has many other things going for it. This is the best looking film of the series by far. And its not because its the latest film and has the newest effects. It's because the effects are better integrated into the film. A lot more effort has been put into making this world seem "real". And the effects follow suit. Compare Fluffy from the first film with Buckbeak from this one. The first was much too cartoony and played more for laughs than menace. Buckbeak is, in actuality, not nearly as imposing a creature the Cerebus. But, in the film, Buckbeak seems more menacing because it seems more "real".

This film is not afraid to be scary. The dementors have a great look to them. They look freakier than the Ring Wraiths from those movies with the rings. The fight between dog and werewolf near the end has a nice bit of brutality to it as well. The werewolf looks fairly fake, but at least it looks different than most other movie werewolves.

And the acting is better in this film as well. The children are much better in each of their roles and the adults are exemplary as always.

Really, when the only real complaint about a film is that I wanted more of it, that not too bad a complaint at all.

There. Way more words. I feel better.

Not Much Has Happened

Saw a few movies, and that be about it.

The new Harry Potter film is my favourite of the series. Mainly because they hired an actual film maker to helm this installment. The difference between this film and the last is like the difference between the work of an artist versus the work of a guy who paints houses. Nothing wrong with painting houses man, but it just ain't art.

The little touches in this film: the way the whomping willow ushers in the seasons, Harry playing with his wand under the sheets, these are things Columbus would have never even thought of, and the add so, so much.

Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages From A Virgin's Diary was good. I like the fact that Maddin is not afraid to make silent films, but films without dialogue make me sleepy. It's a scientifically proven fact.

So I liked The Saddest Music in the World quite a bit more than Dracula. There was talking. And singing. And colour. Maddin can't make un-interesting movies. Not even if he tried. I don't know if any moment of any of his films will ever top the fat father strangling an enemy soldier with his (the father's) own guts, but that is a pretty hard act to follow. Saddest Music has plenty of arresting visuals, and plenty of humour and plenty of just about everything good.

And that's that.


Oh. And the spell checker doesn't recognize Dracula.

Wherein the Rules Are Laid Out

So that is the first chapter in a hopefully much longer tale. As far as I can tell, there's no real easy way of having the story part of my blog be readily accessible so any new additions shall always be entitled "Wherein yadda yadda yadda". I hope that works.

About the story. What is now on this blog had been written by me years ago for Carla. We were provinces apart, so we did the regular long distance type stuff; we talked on the phone all the time, emailed each other lots as well, sent each other gifts, all that good stuff. We also kept diaries for each other. When we saw each other in person, we'd exchange diaries so we'd have stuff to talk about.

There's only so many times a person can write "I miss you" before it loses all meaning, so I filled up parts of the diary with short stories. The one with Lucky was the only one that could feasibly be expanded. In fact I planned on it going on a lot longer in the diary but... Here, I'll just transcribe what I wrote immediately after the short story:

"I had originally intended for this short story to be much longer. You didn't get to meet Lucky's horse (who goes by the name of Peaches) or the evil bugs that plague the old west of the future. I had all sorts of cool shit in mind when I started out. A few pages in I realized that I suck @ writing stories. I'm not nearly descriptive enough. So I cut the whole thing short. Pretty depressing. A wannabe writer who has trouble with a 6 page short story."

I was stupid. I thought that you needed to use a lot of words all the time when writing a "proper" story. But I read a lot during our trip across Oz and I learned a lot. I learned that you don't need to use a lot of words if you use the right ones. Hell, the first Fletch book is so sparse in its style that I had to re-read a passage to try to figure out what just happened. And I liked that. It worked. Wordiness is not a virtue.

And re-writing the story in chunks like this helped me find the "beats" of the story, helped me experiment with its rhythm. Plus I turned some of the turns of phrase into something slightly different, hopefully better. At the very least, this will be an instructive little exercise.

More on the story: Lucky is based on a character that I used to role play. I know I'm a horrible, horrible geek. I won't mention the names of the games I played him in, but he spanned a few genres. So I took the games, plus my own ideas and just sort of smashed them all up for this story.

That's all I have to say on the subject for now. Remember look for "Wherein" in the title for more of the story. I have the beginning of the next chapter roughly plotted in my head, but beyond that... We'll see.

The End of The Beginning

Lucky reached over to the fat, dead, standing man and removed his bandana. Luckily, the bandana had remained bullet hole free. Lucky wiped the gore off his face and made a point of not looking at the rag when he was done. He stepped over to Stretch, squatted on his haunches, took Stretch's hat, and stuffed the wadded up bloody bandana into his screaming mouth.

The screaming became muffled, but it didn't stop. Worse still, Stretch was feebly trying to remove the obstruction in his mouth with his one good hand. Still on his haunches, Lucky searched all the dead men's pockets. Confirming his hunch, only Dave had anything of worth on his person. Wads of cash. Figuring the dead Dave had no need of such wealth, Lucky stuffed the bills into his own pockets.

Stretch was still vainly tugging at the fabric in his mouth. Lucky stood up and stretched, looking around the room as he did so. The bottle of tequila he was looking for had, Lucky sadly noted, smashed on the floor. Presumably from when he had had his argument with gravity.

Stretch managed to get a bit of the rag out of his mouth, his screaming got that much louder.

Lucky slammed his heel down hard into Stretch's throat. Spur first. The screaming stopped. Lucky walked over to the bar, handed Hector what he hoped was a large bill and said, "That's fer the mess and two bottles o' tequila. Courtesy of my old friend Steve."

Hector looked as if he was going to say something, but then reconsidered. He handed Lucky a much nicer bottle of tequila. Lucky took it with a smile and sauntered to the saloon door. He put on Stretch's hat and was not surprised at all to find it a perfect fit. He turned to face the room and tipped his hat.

"Ma'am." he said and then slipped out into the storm.

Peanuts

It took me longer to read this book than I expected, and that is a problem. I devour books. When I like what I'm reading, I have a hard time stopping. Read The Great Gatsby in the span of an afternoon. And I started out on this book in the same fashion. I chewed through half of it in two sittings, alternating between the strips and the profiles and interviews at the back of the book (both very interesting and illuminating). I only ever stopped because I had to go to work or I was dead tired. I was loving it.

The illustrations were familiar yet different. You can tell that these came from Schultz's hand, but these were the very first, there are still years of tweaking and refinement to go. And I think I like this early stuff better. It's cuter. The lines seem a bit thicker. And Snoopy is just a puppy. A cute little puppy. With no thought balloons. Those come later on in this volume. And there are characters in this first volume who later disappear. A girl named Violet, a boy named Sherman. About the only character other than Snoopy who sticks around is Charlie Brown. There's no Linus, no Peppermint Patty, no Marcie. Schroeder and Lucy don't appear until about halfway through this volume. And about halfway through this volume is where my interest started to wane.

Not because of Lucy or Schroeder, but because the writing seemed to change and the art definitely did. The lines became thinner, and wow does that make a difference. For the worse. Coupled with the cuter, more obvious humour, it made finishing the book more of a slog than I thought it would be. The writing, right from the very first strip had an edge to it, there was sweetness, but it was tempered with meanness and loneliness. The characters talked about universal and existential truths. That seemed to go away.

I'll pick up the next volume, unless I'm out of the country, but if things don't improve that might be where my collecting stops. Too bad, man, I loves me my Peanuts. Or at least I did.

It's Alive!! A LIVE!!!

So the internet is finally working in our house!!! Our phones won't be fixed until at least Monday though, so it all evens out. So now I have no excuse for not finishing up the first chapter of my story, nor for not blogging in general. Wait... I'll have excuses, but they won't be real reasons. "I was on LIVE and lost track of time." will probably be the main excuse.

I spent a couple hours on Live today and had a pleasant experience. I never came in last, which is always nice. I place in the top five a couple times. And yes, there were more than five people playing. I got to hear people bitch about how unfair certain weapons are. People really don't seem to like grenade launchers. I do. My best rounds were due to those glorious bastards. I like to use incendiary rounds, because they not only blow people up, they set them on fire as well. I'm not sure if the people who complain about grenade launchers as unfair have ever played using them. You only get three or four shots and that is it. And You have to reload after every shot. But whatever. I killed people, made people laugh, listened as people talked about the drugs they were doing right at that very moment, I think I had the quitisential (I'm sure I spelled that wrong but the only suggestion the spell checker gave was "kitchenette") Live experience.

But man, there are a lot of stupid gamertags on Live. I say anyone who has a drug reference in their Tag should automatically be banned, because DAMN are they annoying. Every. Single. One.

But I'm not here to be bitter, I'm just happy that I'm finally back online.

3 Day Delay

This whole X Box Live thing is getting to be a big damn hassle. This house, I am becoming convinced, hates electronics. And normal natural laws don't work here. I've been trying for weeks to get the two house computers and the Xbox all hooked up via a hub. It wasn't working so good. The annoying thing is that it sometimes worked. But not others. For no reason.

So I figured Fuck It. Just get a router. That should solve everything. Found a flyer from London Drugs saying they had a nice router on sale for 40 bucks. Can't beat that. So I go there at nine this morning. There's a line up. About twenty people. They had one router in stock. One fucking router. Grrrrrrr.....

Also, the BLog Spot spell checker is one of the worst I've ever encountered. If I were to type electonics, a reasonable person would take it that I meant electRonics. Fuckin spell checker gives me 17 options, electronics not being one of them. Happens all the damn time. Pisses me off. Not as much as London Drugs right now, but it's pretty close.

Without Our Permission

It figures. It's been forever since I've seen The Daily Show, and when I make a point of watching it tonight, it is a repeat. Still funny.

Went through a bottle of gin on the weekend. I believe that's one of the signs of a good weekend. I forget the other signs. One of them might very well be boobies. Yeah, I'm pretty sure boobies are good.

After waking up on Trev's couch on Sunday morning, we went out for breakfast. Mamma Mars'. It was cheap and good and bottomless coffee. And there were colouring books. So we, three graduates, spent a good long time colouring. I like colouring. Especially with almost new crayons, before they are all dulled and broken in half.

Also watched some movies on the weekend. Saw a bit of Matrix Reloaded on Friday, it looks SO FAKE. I was wowed by the effects (not the movie) in the theatre, but they've really aged poorly.

Saw A Mighty Wind. Good stuff, as are all of Guest's films. Some of the jokes fall flat, but way more don't and they zig and zag all over the place. And always filled with interesting characters. Plus Eugene Levy just rocks.

28 Days Later made me tense. As good horror films should. I liked it. I liked the fast zombies, the fast zombiefication process, and that the film still knows when to take its time. Plus there was a happy ending, even though I'm not sure how I felt about it.

I should really go into more depth when I review things. I'm going to make a point of trying to do that from now on.