The Spirit

Wow.

Huh.

It is hard to put in to words what I think of The Spirit. Mainly because I have no idea what I think of The Spirit. I mean, I know that it is in no way a good film. It is poorly put together. In many ways.

But everything wrong also seems to work. At least, for me. I know that the writing is horrendous, but I dug the hell out of it. Same with the acting and the editing and so on and so forth.

It is amazing how singular this vision is. I no way do I believe that this is Will Eisner's vision. This is all Frank Miller. This is all tits and hatred of eggs and strange weirdness.

I am so glad that Frank Miller got to make this. It was his first film, and he was coming off the cachet of Sin City and 300 and he was given free reign to do whatever the hell he wanted. And he did.

Anyone else, I'd imagine, would have listened to some sort of voice of reason. I'm not really sure that Miller has any reasonable voices in his head.

The purity of the WTF-ness of this movie is...

I think I need to stop now and try to organize my thoughts.

Joel Plaskett

Dude put on a hell of a show. Not a huge rock spectacle, but rock-y, acoustic-y, indie-y goodness. with two encores. And he also played the opening set. Dude played for near three hours, near as I can tell. I can tell you that I missed most of the first set. Tickets said doors opened at 8. So we grabbed a cab at around 8:30.

Cuz that's how it works, right?

Nope. Joel Plaskett was on the stage doing his thing before 8:30. Colour us surprised.

Also surprising, no Emergency with him. But his dad was there. That was cool.

His dad looks old, but not. And Joel doesn't look old at all, considering he's been doing this since forever. I saw him when he was a part of The Super Friendz, way back when I was in University. Dude still looks and acts young. And skinny. And scrawny. A very Ichabod-ian body has he.

And he was mingling amongst the crowd between his sets, he passed right past me a few times.

And he was always talking. Between songs, during songs. Built quite a rapport with the audience. They were clearly digging was he was doing and he, in turn, dug their digging. As did I. I loved the vibe, everybody was in high spirits, and that is not code. It was just a purely positive experience.

And Mark was there, and it is always nice to catch up with that guy.

More

Lewis Black was funny. And got funnier the angrier he got. He is angry about a lot of things. Including his failing memory. He spent a lot of time umming and uhhing and then saying fuck really loud. I felt a little bad for the guy. But he has an iphone and I don't so fuck'im.

Also, I forgot to put my ring back on after my exercises yesterday and I felt all weird and out of sorts and off balance the rest of the day.

Lewis Black is a Really Angry Man

I listened to him rant and rave for over an hour and a half. It was very entertaining.

Age had not mellowed that man.

The lady sitting next to me laughed a lot. She had an odd laugh. High pitched and surprised and pleased, like each time she laughed she was discovering anew how nice it was to laugh.

And she also blew her nose a lot. Loudly. And it did not sound like she was getting anything done, they didn't sound snotty, they were just loud.

Yeah.

Movies and such

Been a while, let's get right to it.

I have a bunch of half finished posts about the various movies I have seen in the past while. This post should hopefully bring all that into the fold. And then some.

Why? Why now?

Because of Where the Wild Things Are. The trailer for that movie has just been released and holy good god does it hit me in all the right places. I already love Spike Jonze. I already love Dave Eggers. I was already pumped to see this movie. Then they add Arcade Fire into the mix? Fuck me. SOLD! I'll be there day one. And probably days two and three. It looks amazing, the Wild Things look just as they should, it's all just so... wonderful. It filled me with wonder. And happiness and sadness and the strange tingly feeling in my heart and gut.

Let's go from hypothetical greatness to proven goodness.

Coraline is my favourite Henry Selick movie. Nightmare Before Christmas has too much god damn singing. And I don't remember the reasons, but I was underwhelmed by James and the Giant Peach. But Coraline is just right. Great characters, great world(s), inventive action. Hardly any god damn singing. And it's in 3-D. My right eye is slightly lazy so 3-D rarely works for me. It worked far more often than I expected in this movie. And Even if it didn't work at all, I still would gladly pay extra for the Experience because the picture was SHARP and CLEAN and the COLOURS POPPED. The best picture quality I've seen since I've been back to Canada.

But the 3-D was cool. I liked the subtle use, adding depth to the picture without calling attention to said depth. I also liked when it did call attention to itself, like the lengthening tunnel. Loved that bit.

Loved Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married. Not that her character was lovable. But Hathaway never tried to soften her, to make her lovable. Everyone stayed true to the characters they were playing. It made for some uncomfortable scenes. Balanced out by all the joyous scenes of the wedding and its preparation.

Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler did much the same thing. The Ram did what the Ram did, thoughtless of the effects on those around him. I doubt there's many actors out there that could play broken down quite as well as Rourke.

And I don't know another director that would have filmed it the way Darren Aronofsky did. Randy's massive frame taking up most of the frame, just barreling through life. Unloading shit in a warehouse shot the same as a wrestling match.

A couple random Wrestler thoughts: any time a meat slicer appears onscreen, I start getting all tense. Who was topless more: Mickey Rourke or Marisa Tomei?

Now I've plum forgotten about any other films I have seen. Not nearly as many bad ones as I would like. Working on cheap movie nights sucks. I missed that new Street Fighter movie, haven't seen Taken or Push, nor any new Nic Cage movie. I miss my cheese.

Machine Gore Police Girl... Tokyo

Saw a couple of films lately. Including The Wrestler. But I'll blog about that one later.

I'm blogging about Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police. They are both super bloody flicks from Japan. Shot on the cheap.

Machine Girl is about a schoolgirl whose brother is murdered and has her hand chopped off by a family of Yakuza Ninjas. Said hand had been covered in tempura and deep fried earlier.

Tokyo Gore Police is about a Tokyo Police Woman (in the future, the police force have been privatized) whose father was killed in front of her and is now killing Engineers. Not people who build bridges, mind, but crazy killers who have some sort of key shaped tumor within them that lets them replace lost limbs with weapons.

Both contain some fairly inventive violence and countless geysers of blood. And I am glad that I watched them both, but Machine wipes the floor with Gore.

It is a question of approach. An approach best reflected in their leads. Machine Girl's girl is cute and energetic. Gore's police woman barley has one facial expression. And it is not an appealing expression.

The problem with these films is that I want to talk about the best gags. The bits of violence that elicits laughs. The insane quirks of the scripts. But I don't want to ruin the films.

I'll give one example from each. As a little taste of each movie. In Machine Girl, the Machine Girl attaches a machine gun to her arm stump and shoots a guy in the face so much that his face falls to bits, leaving his skull and a geyser of blood. In Tokyo Gore Police, there is a girl with an eyeball in her mouth, a girl with stitches where her nipples should be and a girl with her eyes on stalks and a shell on her back doing a sexy dance.

So yeah: go rent Machine Girl. The violence is more enjoyable, the girl is cuter, and there are more panty shots.

I'm classy.

Modern Horror

Kinda sucks.

In America.

But other places seem to be doing okay.

I say this because I saw The Unborn and Let The Right One In recently.

The Unborn is not good. The trailer was good. Made me want to see the movie. But stuff that looked freaky and scary in the trailer looked pretty damn fake in the actual movie. And the story was nowhere near good. And I don't think anyone involved knew how to end the movie. The answer is obvious: it never should have started.

But the lead actress displayed some epic camel toe. So there is that.

I'm not exactly sure if Let the Right One In is a horror film. It has horrific elements in it. One of the leads is a vampire after all. But it is mainly a story about a boy and a girl not quite old enough to fall in love.

It's very cute, but not in an obvious, Disney sort of way. The film hits all the notes you would expect it to but you don't always expect it to hit them.

The gore is almost always unexpected even though you know it is coming.

It is just a really well put together film. With great performances. And memorable scenes. Like the one of the most violent feel good ending I have seen in a while.

Really?

My iPod doesn't always like to play in the car. Such was the case today.

Which is me trying to explain why I was listening to local Regina radio today. And not the community station, neither. I was listening to the Zed. Z99.

*shudder*

I was lucky enough to catch the tail end of the Saskatchewan Top 20.

I weep for my past, present and future.

How the fuck does Nickelback stay at the top of any list for 8 weeks in a row? They are so unremarkable, you can't even remark about how remarkably unremarkable they are.

And Saskatchewan loves the fuck out of them.

Steve Martin

I saw a trailer for Pink Panther 2 in front of Yes Man. (Yes Man? An average comedy. Funny bits. Sappy bits. Zooey Desanchel is frickin adorable and awesome.)

I love Steve Martin. My sense of humour owes so much to him. My dad watched Martin, Monty Python, the Pink Panther movies and SNL with me when I was very young.

Thanks dad.

Seriously.

But manoman do his latest movies make me sad.

Especially since I just finished his book about his stand up days. Born Standing Up is a great read for Steve Martin fans. I can't say how it would play to non fans. But it is well written, funny and informative. It captures the spirit of a few different decades and how they affected Steve and his approach to his material.

And it details how it was a combination of luck, hard work and interesting connections that got him to the top of the heap.

It stops when his stand up career does, so it mentions not at all his sad, sad later days. I think that would be just as interesting.

But way more depressing.

Mini Me

And now I update you on the subject about which you have all been wondering about. I lost 0.8 kilos over the holiday season.

I don't know how the fuck I manged that either.

Yay me.

Role Models

Let us talk a bit about Role Models. It is a film I saw about a month ago. I haven't seen a film in a theatre for a month. That sucks. I am earning money, and that is nice, but I miss my weekly movie fix.

But Role Models was a good movie, all that aside. It played to the strengths of all its leads. Paul Rudd is basically what all males my age want to be. I know I sure as hell wouldn't mind being him. He is funny and handsome and can play mean or wry or sweet or whatever the hell. But he is especially good at being a sarcastic bastard.

Stifler has his best Stifler role since Stifler.

The little black kid is cute and foul mouthed, which is my favourite kind of kid. I found him a bit annoying at first, but he grew on me. I bonded with him over our shared love of boobies.

And McLovin showed that he he was more than just McLovin. He is the anti-McLovin in this one.

And even though the film laughs at LARPing, it also gives it a fair bit of respect.

It made me want to hit my friends with foam swords. More than usual.

Laughs were had, lessons were learned, I can't figure out how to end this thing.

Merry New Year's Mass

Now that it is the new year, and the first Monday of aforementioned year (the new one), I figured I should give this blogging stuff another shot.

By the time I actually become a regular blogger, the blogosphere will be old and abandoned. Much like I will be.

I already feel old. My back started hurting on Christmas day, and it hasn't gone away yet. It is better than it was, but still not all that great. So I haven't been doing my daily out workings.

I am afraid of my weight.

It was a delicious season of yumminess.

So that is that.

How Fat Am I Going To Get?

I busted out the Wii Fit this morning for the first time in a month. Mainly to see how much I weighed. Because I figure I should weigh myself before the big holiday season and then after the big holiday season and see how much weight I gain.

I reckon I will gain a lot.

Which sucks because I am already about as fat as I have ever been. I am 88 kilos. I think my heaviest ever was 90 or so.

Two Enjoyments Separated By a Disappointment

Saw the new Punisher on Friday.

I had read Ebert's review . And Pajiba's.

They were not wrong.

The Dark Knight was a hard PG-13. This movie probably hid behind that movie as much as possible. It gets away with all kinds of stuff. This is a very violent flick. Especially the sound. The sound guys must have had a field day on this one.

I want to talk about it more, but I don't want to ruin any of the 'gags' in the film.

There are some bad actors, there is a lot of bad dialogue, there is a lot of blood. A lot of blood. This is not a good film. But it made the entire audience laugh in shock. That has to count for something.

After the film, we ordered some poutine ribs.

There is a pizza place in town that offers poutine dry ribs.

What do you think that would be? I thought it would be dry ribs covered in gravy and cheese curds. Sounds delicious.

That is not what this pace does. Their idea of poutine ribs is ribs covered in sauce of your choice (barbeque, Thai, honey garlic, ranch, and so on) and then covered in pizza cheese. Pizza cheese is good on pizza, but pretty crap for poutine. It forms a hard shell of formerly melted cheese, making it hard to get to the non gravy covered ribs underneath.

We were all very disappointed.

And the first little bit of Forgetting Sarah Marshall was a bit disappointing, not as funny as we had hoped. But then it got funnier and stayed funny.

Lights in the Sky

Saskatchewan sure does have a lot of sky. It is oftentimes awesome. Our friend David stopped in Regina on his tour across Canada. The sky put on a couple great displays. But the sky last Monday was super duper awesome. It was like the Red Sea, both because it looked like the clouds were parted and because the clouds were red. Parted red clouds. It was cool as hell. It was nice to look at as Cory and I drove to Saskatoon.

Cory and I were driving to Saskatoon to see Nine Inch Nails' Lights in the Sky tour.

I have seen NIN in concert once before. I enjoyed the music, but the stage show was a little lacklustre.

That was not the case this time. Their show is great to look at. But I'll get to that.

First: as Cory and I ate dinner, I'm pretty sure I saw Amy's mother. She was sitting at the booth behind us. I didn't say hello to her because she was talking to her friend. I never know what to do in those situations.

Pretty sure I saw Carey Ceselski (sp?) at the concert. Didn't go up to say hello, because I wasn't totally sure it was him. We were about to maybe say hello to him when two older, drunken nurses tried to pick us up. That was awkwardly awesome.

Less awesome was The Bug, the opening act. The Bug is a dude in a heavy coat and a hoodie who fiddles nobs as a larger black lady, all the way from London, rapped. Here is what she rapped about: how 'ardcoah she is. "Me is outa me muva fukkin 'ead!" Repeat that ad nauseum whilst feedback screeched and squelched.

Woo.

But NIN was awesome! There were three huge screens above the stage. One behind the band, one midway through the stage, and one near the front of the stage. They would lower and raise throughout the set. There was all kinds of cool stuff going on on them. A lot of visualizers that reflected the music that was being played. In real time. And there were small cameras around the stage that could be thrown up on to the screen.

Everything, the sounds and the visuals were all distorted all to hell. In a good way.

This concert really made me understand what industrial music is about. It is all there in the name. It is industrial. It treats music as an object: a thing to be assembled and disassembled and reassembled.

It was kind of mind blowing.

Thanks Cory.

While I'm Bitching...

The iMac's wireless mouse can go fuck itself. It is a piece of crap. Always losing its connection or telling me the battery is dead or some such shit. Plus the scroll nub doesn't work half the time.

Horrible, horrible fuckin' mouse.

Conundrum of Solace

Casino Royale was a great reinvention of the Bond character and a great re invigoration of the Bond franchise. It was also a really good film. With a half hour boring film tacked on the end. Then another five minutes of cool.

I can understand why they structured the film the way they did, especially after seeing the new film, but that doesn't change the fact that the pacing in Casino Royale was bad.

The pacing in this new film is much better. It just kind of never stops. It starts right after the end of the last film (OMG! First true Bond sequel EVARZ!). It starts with a car chase. And Bond spends the rest of the film either chasing someone or being chased. Bond is a blond, bruised shark. Always moving forward. Unstoppable.

Which is not to say that there is no character development. This is all about Bond, about his obsessions, his weaknesses. Which is why I didn't use (the overused) Quantum of Soul-less. This is all about his damn soul.


Which is what makes this the least formulaic Bond film ever. I'm refering to the Bond formula, not formula in general. This film follows the Bourne formula nearly perfectly. But there is a nod or two two Bond conventions. There are Bond girls. Both with horrible fashion sense.

There are no gadgets. This Bond doesn't need 'em. He'll beat the fuck out of you with whatever comes to hand.

This film is almost all action.

Shame that the action is so hard to follow.

I'm not saying it is incomprehensible. You can tell who everyone is. You can usually tell what they are doing. But the outcome is almost always a surprise.

"Why did that car drive off the cliff?!?" "Why did that boat flip over and over into the air?!?" "Is that man bleeding profusely from the neck?!?" "Why is that man bleeding profusely from the neck?!?" "Why is everything exploding?!?"

This is a good film put together poorly.

Movies and the Watching Thereof

Tried to see Role Models this week. Was sold out. Only playing on one screen. Was sold out nearly an hour before the movie was to start.

Never trying to watch a new movie at that theatre ever again. It is always crowded and smelly and full of fuckwads.

So I can't talk about Role Models but I can talk about that Kevin Smith movie some more and Run Fatboy Run. Because they share some similarities.

Both are about losers trying to do something with their lives (which seems to be a recurring theme with both Pegg and Smith, and most of what I write).

I've lost most of my thoughts.

That happens a lot.

Fuck.

The porno one is way more potty mouthed.

The Fatboy one does a real good job of stacking the odds against the protagonist. Maybe too good a job. Pegg seems like a weak jerk. If this was my first exposure to him, I don't think I would be nearly as big a fan of his. They have to introduce an evil plot by the anaogonist pretty late in the game to try and level the playing field. The last act feels a bit forced.

Same with that there porno one. The conflict between the two leads seems to come out of nowhere.

They both have weak third acts. Is what I am trying to say.

This didn't come out near as good as I thoughted it would.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

This movie is not as good as Clerks 2. But Clerks 2 is my most favouritest Kevin Smith movie of all time. Forever.

And not it ain't got enough tits.

Fuck me

Damnit!

Published that one a bit too quick.

I wanted to work at least one more thing into that last post.

Another thing about McCain. About his speech last night. About the crowd. About how McCain felt about the crowd. When they booed Obama. The things they yelled out while he was talking. The huge cheers for Sarah Palin. I think the dude was getting pissed off.

Not to say that he doesn't like Sarah Palin. I think he does. I don't know if she was his first VP choice but whatever. Cheering louder for the non-VP then for the non-President? In his home state? That is like a slap in the fucking face.

Chanting USA? What the fuck is that? Is Obama not from the USA?

McCain hates that shit as much as we do.

I would love for him to write a book about this campaign. A tell-all, nuke the bridges kind of deal.