I like how he throws up his hands in triumph after the schoolgirl part

Crank, with Jason Statham and Amy Smart. Popcorn action, which was pretty much what we were looking for. I was hoping for more martial arts from Statham, though - but I suppose the gratuitous nudity kind of made up for that (tangent to that, one of the oddest sex scenes ever). The stylization of the movie was nice, that's something I always enjoy, and that can carry a movie for me, as it did in this case. It's funny, because I could have used more character development, but the frenetic, short nature of the narrative simply precludes doing that at all. That seems like it might be a greater commentary on something, or could be...but, on the other hand, we have T&A and violence. And that's okay too.

A History of Violence, by John Wagner and Vince Locke. Huh, very different from the movie in some ways. It's much less violent overall, but then has a doubly violent and grotesque ending. I thought the husband/wife relationship in the movie were both more intense and more sensical, however they were more disturbing...and yet, perhaps the relationship (and main character) in the graphic novel is more plausible, in the end. There's more character development...though it's kind of a letdown compared to the movie...but again, it's probably more realistic, and perhaps should have a greater weight in that regard...obviously, there are thoughts provoked.

Suicide Kings, with Christopher Walken, Dennis Leary, and several people who apparently went on to have successful careers in television. Interesting, but it moved a bit slowly for me, and I just wasn't sympathetic to any of the characters except the straight up mobsters and the victimized woman, basically. They're all...well, dicks. Everything's tied up nicely by the end, I certainly didn't see the ending coming in that way, but at the same time, I didn't really care about it all that much.

random amusing quote:
"At the Constitutional Convention,, Elbridge Gerry would make a famous remark (curiously absent from modern high school textbooks) in which he compared a standing army to an erect penis – 'an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.'"

Knitta - silly, but benignly cute

a plethora, you say?

The Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson. Though mostly about the English language, there's a good bit of information about language in general leading up to the main topic. Bryson has a lot of fun with curious trivia and interesting anecdotes, especially when he lets himself get in some acerbic commentary about things that are just silly. At the same time, though, there are some stretches where he just lists too much data that isn't very curious, and it begins to read like genealogy lists in the Bible. More good than not, though.

I Am Legend, with Will Smith, Abby (the German Shepherd), and Alice Braga. A generally good movie, but overall, a definite downer. After learning the plot of the original narrative, I was actually pretty disappointed by the more cookie-cutter way the film went down. I think if it had gone that darker rout, it might have ironically been less of a downer, in a way, because there was a twisted sense of hope in that original. Less cookie-cutter, more perspective shifting. The monsters in this were just a bit too implausible to be really scary, but the cinematography and acting made up for that somewhat. But the ultimate sin of a dog dying, however heroically, was committed, which generally tips a movie into way-too-sad, I'd say.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, with Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Alan Rickman. Also kind of a downer, but in a way that's more bittersweet (and expected, in the tragic sense). I find myself very much liking musicals, actually, and this is an especially good example, and that beyond it already starring a few of my favorite actors. Hell, I was even impressed by Sascha Baron Cohen in his short role, well played!

Razor, with the BSG cast plus Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen. Like a reviewer I noted put it, basically, a long BSG episode. But a good one! The flashback action got a bit silly at one point, but we allowed that maybe that was a throwback to the old school. Or a writer overindulging in their imagination, which, as a Farscape fan, I'll also allow. The temporary main character, Shaw, was interesting, and helped lend the formerly monstrous Admiral Cain a slightly less monstrous mien. All in all, interesting stuff, and it works well as a standalone.

Mr Brooks, with Kevin Costner, Demi Moore, and Dane Cook, oddly. And who apparently replaced Zach Braff? Huh. I get the feeling this was a novel, in how there was a lot of stuff I wanted more backstory on, and more information, and more detail...for example, I wanted to see a lot more of Mr Brooks' relationship and interaction with his wife. Or the development of his daughter. Or of Mr Smith's overall life, and what would lead him to be open to attempting to indulge in such behavior. I want more character development, darn it! My interest was piqued, but not satisfied at all.

-touching military slideshow

kind of magical

The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga, by Vishnudevananda. This book was recommended by the philosophy teacher at Providence; I believe he said to snap up a copy if you ever saw it. And man did I get an old school copy, this is straight up 1960s all the way. Which, interestingly, isn't to say it's like the drug-addled or blissed out or third-hand stuff that does come out of that era. Ok, so maybe the sections on the asanas and pranayama are, but the philosophy is pretty straight-up classical stuff. Now, does that mean it's drawing from Patanjali's Sutras, which are the authority on defining yoga? Not quite, but I consider this author's sources in the Vedantic texts to be right up around there, at least in terms of these philisophic concepts, which the eminently practical Sutras don't often stray. A little tease at the interesting things might be the idea of different degrees of consciousness, which we often hear extended to 'intelligent animals' such as dogs or dolphins; in this model, interestingly, that gets extended in a fairly logical manner all the way through plants and rocks. Crazy stuff, but, not actually all that crazy, it's very logically self-consistent and self-aware.

Golden Army trailer - nice.

The Heartbreak Kid, with Ben Stiller and Michelle Monaghan. Yeah, it was funny at points. But in general...the overall, pervading (yet subtle) negativity turned me off a lot. I mean, it went all the way through the very end, and just teased at bright rays, only to laughingly quash them. It kind of reminds me of Sideways, in some ways, such as a main character whom I dislike so much it kind of kills the movie for me.

funny sentence (about a Swiss martial art):
"Traditionally, Schwingen is a male sport. Women have only been schwinging for few years, the Frauenschwingverband, women's Schwing association, has been founded in 1992."

I'd have an urge to play ping pong were I any good

Balls of Fury, with Dan Fogler, Maggie Q, Christopher Walken, and a little Reno 911 thrown in. I think one of the special features described it quite well - "a kung fu movie with absolutely no kung fu." Which actually isn't quite true, there are a couple decent fight scenes featuring the cutie Q, minus the stupid wire tricks. Nice to see a strong female character, though, who obviously is not subservient to any male. Yeah, it's dumb, but it's not as if it's painfully trying not to be - it's just a dumb, funny satire of Enter the Dragon and Karate Kid, with a good set of characters and actors for them.

Ratatouille, with Janeane Garrofalo and lots of rats. I thought it was cute, and better than I expected. I remember watching a third of Cars and kind of sighing as zoned out, but this film kept me engaged all the way through. The animation is top notch, natch, and there's even a cute little short that was quite informative about rats. Though in watching I reflected that perhaps I just don't have a delicate enough palate to appreciate haute cuisine, in my limited experience it's just seemed like very rich, expensive regular food in odd portions. So I didn't get hungry, surprisingly, from watching. On the other hand, now I do have an urge to get a pet rat upon Ms Kim informing us that they can just be let loose in the house, but it would either be a) stepped on, b) exploded by Ms Mattie, or c) eviscerated by Ms Rogue. So I guess that's a no go, alas.

A rocking, and slightly disturbing preview of a Star Wars game from Phil

Why do I have an underlying fear of deep water, you ask?

How come meteors don't land in the middle of New York, then? That's a natural disaster you never hear of...

HWAT!

Beowulf, with Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, and Sebastian Roché. It was okay, but wouldn't have been all that great without the 3D. Which was interesting, quite so, but...not all that necessary for most movies, I think. Actually, it was a little distracting at points, I suppose. I wonder if there's a market for 3D porn, offhand. That was an unrelated tangent thought. But think of the possibilities...Anyway. The highlight of the movie for me was the little Old English they used, I love hearing archaic languages like that out loud. The story was definitely changed, but in a quite sensical way that actually made it a cohesive story, rather than the odd fragmentary nature of the original. Of course, this script was written by Neil Gaiman, so natch.

"The Romans had no word for gray. To them it was another shade of dark blue or dark green. Irish Gaelic possesses no equivalent of yes or no. They must resort to roundabout expressions such as 'I think not' and 'This is so.'"

amble is a fun word

Saw, with Leigh Whannell and Cary Elwes. I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. Where I thought it would revel in simple gratuitous helplessness, pain, and gore, it actually glossed through much of that with clever stylizing. Well played! I think that's part of what elevates it above mushbrain movies like I feared it would be, like, say, Hostel. That, and the gradual-yet-driving character development woven together with the plot. Like I said, pleasantly surprised.

Catch and Release, with Jennifer Garner, Kevin Smith, and Timothy Olyphant. Actually, ditto with this one, too. I think the word for this movie is 'ambling.' I'm torn between claiming it as unique and acknowledging some kind of cliche tropes (the best friend obviously secretly in love with the taken girl). Yet, whatever cliche there is, is at least mitigated by placing it in a narrative structure which I would go so far as to say mimics the kind of trout stream that flows in and out of the movie as a setting and trope. If that sentence made any sense.

In researching the ingredients in the 'detox' Yogi Tea, I found creepy eyeball berries

Didn't figure it was actually a technical term

'Poetry is the place where language in its silence is most beautifully articulated. Poetry is the language of silence. If you look at a page of prose, it is crowded with words. If you look at a page of poetry, the slim word shapes are crouched in the empty whiteness of the page. The page is a place of silence where the contour of the word is edged and the expression is heightened in an intimate way. One way to invigorate and renew your language is to expose yourself to poetry. In poetry your language will find cleansing illumination and sensuous renewal.'

trivia! WHAM! ball.

Get excited! In the long run, anyway, most probably won't come out for a long time.

Heh, why yes, I am juvenile:
"The word "avocado" comes from the Spanish word aguacate, which derives in turn from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word ahuacatl, meaning "testicle", because of its shape."

Woo! Cash Cab! Like Jeopardy, a game show I actually like

"When powdered bark is treated with tincture of iodine (a test for starch), little effect is visible in the case of pure cinnamon of good quality, but when cassia is present a deep-blue tint is produced, the intensity of the coloration depending on the proportion of cassia." -- perhaps this is where the combination of cinnamon-taste/smell and dark blue color for the spice in the Dune novels comes from - a combination of wealth and exotic (cinnamon) and the poison of cassia (the dark blue effect)

can you really silence a shotgun?

Hey! Dude with the cow, first payment, awesome.

The Golden Compass, with Dakota Blue Richards, Daniel Craig, and Nicole Kidman. Unfortunately, it's been long enough since I've read the book that I didn't realize the full extent of how far this diverged from the original story. That said, I think the omissions of certain themes probably saved it for some people, who would have arbitrarily dismissed it otherwise. But at what cost? It occurred to me that this is kind of like the Dune movies in relation to those novels, to me - it's going to seem rushed and yet still overly complex (if not just disorderly) in movie form, no matter what you do, because there's such a wealth in each set of novels that it really just can't effectively fit into another format.

No Country for Old Men, with Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, and several others. In one sense, I like this movie in aspects. The cinematography is amazing, and I love that wide-open terrain, which was done great justice. In terms of acting, there couldn't be better, and the structure of the narrative was lovely. But I think what makes me draw back from it is the sheer, subtle horror of what the characters do and represent - dark things in the hearts of men, it might be put. But oh so human. Hm. Pithy pithy, pithypithy. Heh.

Not quite tai chi-capoeira, but it's kind of close

Fleet Week = F/A-18 under bridge, almost supersonic

"My belief is that the truth is a truth until you organize it, and then becomes a lie. I don't think that Jesus was teaching Christianity, Jesus was teaching kindness, love, concern, and peace. What I tell people is don't be Christian, be Christ like. Don't be Buddhist, be Buddha like." - Wayne Dyer

unless they had a brown wig with white stripe....

don't worry, Rogue, I'll never subject you to such

that's one old dude

Un-freaking-believable - though, I do suddenly have visions of combat drones acting as such (from me da)

not sure what it is, but it's pretty cool (from me da)

from Phil, Brokeback Trek

also, anal sex, in the most loving way

True Lust, by Tristan Taormino. Basically, Love Line combined with The L Word (with more butch-ness, though written from a femme perspective) with dabs of journalism. Taormino adeptly brushes between gender and cultural theory and touching upon her personal experiences with everything from getting coached in masturbation to her personal opinions on various kinks and sexual practices, all within in a context of her own experience. And, on top of all that, in a very casual, personable, easy to read style. Well played, Ms Taormino. A nice collection of essays.

-if saw this through a telescope unexpectedly I'm fairly sure I'd yelp

-sounds like they should make a movie about Antar, to me (yay warrior-poets!)

emerald triviaball?

-No idea what it is, but it seems very interesting

-I always figured quantum computers would be pretty

-I forget that he was so contemporary:
“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” - Pablo Picasso

-and wow, he was a bit sassy:
“If A equals success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y and Z, with X being work, Y play, and Z keeping your mouth shut.” - Albert Einstein

-stress boob?