Sims I Like: Space Pirate

To conclude Sims in Space, this is the space pirate (or smuggler if you want) from Time & Space 2.  After the sector they're in gets closed off, two scientists hire the space pirate to get them back to Earth.  Except the same phenomenon happens to them.  But this is the Before for the pirate, when he's still a man.

The outfit was another that came in an expansion pack.  For no reason I threw on an eye patch.  I added the septum rings and spiked collar to complete the punk look.  It kind of went with the shittiness of his ship that he only has one eye; I mean you don't really want a pilot with one eye, do you?  Depth perception is kind of important.

Here's what he looks like when he first turns into a woman:

I didn't have a female Mohawk so I had to make do.  Otherwise it's pretty much the same, albeit less muscular.

Sims I Like: Boldly Going Gender Swap

Monday Cindy Borgne suggested that gender swapped versions of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy from Star Trek would be interesting and it reminded me that a month or so ago I downloaded Star Trek uniforms based on the reboot movies.  So now, beam up gender swapped Kirk, Spock, and McCoy:

First, Jamie T. Kirk.  I would have used a bouffant like Yeoman Rand but I don't have one, so this seemed pretty close.  The figure is really sexual with huge breasts.  Also plenty of makeup, big dangly earrings, and tall spike-heeled boots.

Next, Dr. Lenore McCoy.  She's not as sexy since she's middle-aged.

Finally, um, Ms. Spock.  Anyway, not a lot of makeup or anything.  I haven't really figured out how to make pointed ears but the hair covers it up anyway.

And just for the fun of it, here are the other main characters:

Mona Scott

Scotty I made a little chunkier like the movie one.

Hikaru Sulu

Sulu has sword-shaped earrings as a reference to the episode when he went crazy and started waving a sword around.

Antonia Chekov

Chekov is the youngest so she's a teen instead of an adult.

Mr. Uhura

For some reason I don't have the male version of the uniform, so I used something close for Uhura.  The goatee is a reference to the evil parallel universe where Spock had a goatee and the earring is supposed to be like the thing Uhura always had in her ear.

Sims I Like: Captain Page Gilmore

This week's Sims I Like theme is Sims in Space!  This is Captain Page Gilmore from the story Time & Space.  It's about three male space explorers who are returning home when they come across an energy cloud.  The cloud actually seems to follow them and when it envelops the ship it turns them all into women who then proceed to seemingly at random get younger.  In this first iteration, the preening Captain Page is turned into a gorgeous woman.  And she's actually OK with that.

This is just one of the standard space uniforms that came in an expansion pack.  With the hair and that she's supposed to look like Space Captain Barbie.  Don't you wish they had captains in Star Trek this hot? Ha ha.

Sims I Like: Spider-Girl

This was a "happy accident" as Bob Ross would say.  I was just goofing around and clicked on the Spider-Man costume someone made.  For whatever reason the Spidey costume mesh overlaid itself onto the skirt that the generic character was wearing.  I just thought it looked neat.

I'm not sure if a female Spidey character in the comics has worn a skirt before.  The face and hair were just whatever the generic character came out with.  There is a Spider-Man mask to match but I like it better without the mask.

Sims I Like: The Mermaid

When I first wrote the Girl Power books I made Sims 3 versions of the characters.  For no real reason other than to waste time I made Sims 4 versions of the 4 main characters.  I think the one that was most improved is the Mermaid, who is basically Aquaman changed into a girl.

Her government-issued costume is basically a purple wetsuit with black leggings.  I like the hair on this that has a slightly windblown look--or like she's underwater.  She's just wearing flip-flops because no one has made flippers yet that I'm aware of.

I think the best part is it actually looks slippier like a wetsuit.  The Sims 3 version didn't quite have that sheen to it.

Batman v Superman Ultimate Edition is Not So Ultimate

I got my copy of the Batman v Superman Ultimate Edition in the mail yesterday so I finally got to watch the 30 bonus minutes of footage I couldn't see in theaters.  (And also it was upgraded from PG-13 to R rated for no real reason.)  Was there anything earth-shattering in those 30 minutes?  No.  Really there's nothing essential in those 30 minutes, which is why they got cut in the first place.

As I said on Facebook, the footage most seems to be in dribs and drabs.  A little bit here and a little bit there, not huge chunks of it.  Having only watched the regular version once, it was kind of hard to identify what was added most of the time.

Because people talked about what Jenna Malone's role would be I knew those parts were added.  She's just some forensics nerd whose big contribution is to say that the wheelchair bomb in the Senate is lined with lead, which is why Superman couldn't see it with X-Ray vision--though I don't think in Man of Steel they really established the lead blocking X-Ray vision thing.  But I remember Nigel Mitchell wondering after the premiere why Superman wouldn't use his X-Ray vision there and I wondered it too when I watched the movie, so wonder no more.

There's a brief glimpse of Steppenwolf, the supposed baddie of the Justice League movie--or at least the first part.  I mean you know Darkseid has to show up just like Thanos eventually has to show up in the Avengers.  It's the sort of Easter egg that really just seems to be for obsessive fans to obsess about for the next 3 years.  I mean otherwise raise your hand if you even heard of Steppenwolf except as a band and a book by Herman Hesse? 

I think a lot of it involves this African woman who testifies at the Senate hearings that Superman indirectly killed a bunch of people while rescuing Lois Lane in Africa.  Clark Kent tries to track her down and talks to some of her neighbors in Gotham who talk to him about the Batman instead.  Then later she goes to meet the female senator and tell her that she made it all up at Luthor's behest before she gets pushed in front of a train like Kate Mara in House of Cards.  Was it really necessary to know all that?  Not really, but I suppose it helps to deepen Luthor's scheming. 

Speaking of dying in Africa, I think "Jimmy Olsen" gets slightly more screen time before he's unceremoniously killed.  Still seems like a dick move to me.  I know some people don't like Jimmy Olsen any more than they like Robin (who is even more unceremoniously killed off-screen) but he used to have his own comics for crying out loud.  You can't say how much respect you have for the comics and the history and so forth and then do something like that.

As interesting as any bonus footage was just having the captions on while I was watching, especially in two parts.  At the beginning when Bruce Wayne is in Metropolis during the attack he keeps yelling some guy's name into his phone.  I think it was Comic Book Resources who suggested that he was saying "Dad" but his dad was of course dead, right?  Well with the captioning you see he's saying Jack! (Jack O'Dwyer in the credits.)  I haven't the slightest idea who Jack is in the comics universe, but I guess he was a big wheel in the Wayne company.  The other part where it's good to have the captioning on is at the end of the "Knightmare" sequence when the Flash shows up because it was kind of hard to understand what he was saying.  It's clear when you watch it with captioning that he's gone back in time because he says, "Am I too soon?  I'm too soon!"  And then later he says, "You were right.  Fear him!  Fear him!"  From the context it would seem he's talking about Superman, but I suppose he could mean someone else depending on what happens later.  Though if it's not Superman I don't know why Lois Lane would be the key to it all.

Watching the movie a second time there were a few Easter eggs I hadn't really noticed before.  One of the cops who goes into a building after Batman early in the movie is named Officer Rucka, as in Greg Rucka, who was a Batman comic book writer for a while.  In one of the bonus scenes with the African girl, she's on a bus that stops on "Kane Street" as in Bob Kane, the creator of Batman.  When he's sent to prison, Lex Luthor's number is something like AC301940, which you could decode as Action Comics 30, 1940, which was probably Luthor's first appearance. (There may have been more numbers in there.  I don't write it down or anything.)

Tony Laplume was talking about the movie's connection to Excalibur recently and I noticed something at the end of the fight with Doomsday.  After he stabs Doomsday and Doomsday stabs him, Superman pushes Doomsday's spear hand deeper into himself so he can get close enough to plunge the Kryptonite spear into Doomsday's chest.  This is pretty similar to what happens at the end of Excalibur when King Arthur is stabbed by Mordred and pushes the weapon deeper into himself so he can deliver the fatal blow with Excalibur.  Which reinforces the symbolism of Superman as Arthur that Tony Laplume mentioned.

Anyway, this didn't really change my opinion of the movie.  It's still deeply flawed.  Wonder Woman is still the most awesome of the "Big Three" maybe because she has a lot less screen time.  I still find Superman a lot more sympathetic than Batman.  Really as far as a subtitle they should have called it "Everybody Hates Superman" because that's pretty much what was going on.  I mean Luthor, Batman, Congress, and lots of random people are all getting pissed off at poor Superman for doing too much and not enough at the same time.  Dude just couldn't win with those a-holes.

I wouldn't say you have to buy it though the version I got from Amazon has both the theatrical and Ultimate Editions and the theatrical is on Blu-Ray, DVD, and digital download, so for $25 that's a pretty good value for a brand new movie.  Though the digital sucked because I logged in with my Facebook account and it redeemed it to something called Flixster; maybe if you use your Google account you can redeem it to Google Play, which would be more useful, though I'd prefer Amazon Video.

Sims I Like: Dark Avenger

This week I'm going to do a theme:  superheroes!  This one comes from a story I haven't written yet.  It's based loosely on the Midnight Spectre character I created for the Girl Power series, who was Batman changed into Batgirl for the most part.

The suit is one of the few superhero-looking ones I have; it's sort of like Black Widow's costume.  It only comes in black but the red trim goes with the red hair that is a darker red similar to Batwoman's in the more recent comics.  The mask is a Huntress mask someone came up with.  It doesn't fit perfectly, but close enough.

Sims I Like: Little Debbie

One of the goofier ideas I used was for My Wife Changed Me Into Her Little Girl!  Basically there's a backwoods redneck witch who gets sick of her lazy husband.  She sees a contest for a baking company's new mascot and so changes her husband into an adorable little girl and grooms him to win the contest.  Her final look is modeled after the Little Debbie girl:

There aren't really any good curly hair designs for the Sims 4 (or Sims 3 or Sims 2) but the straw hat covers up most of that.  Don't you just want to buy flour and snack cakes from her?

Sims I Like: Cougar Life

For the Transformed series of gender swap books I wrote one called Transformed Into a Cougar, which is about a guy who becomes a middle-aged woman who searches for young guys to fuck, not the big cat.  In the Sims 4, here was my first cougar:

And then some months later, here's what I consider an improved version:

The main differences being pants instead of a skirt, no glasses, and less tan skin, though that was just kind of an oversight.  I liked the tanned skin for a kind of Jersey Shore look but oh well.  The leopard print is a little sharper in the second one.  Sure, leopards aren't cougars, but it's all big cats, right?

Introducing: Sims I Like

Here's your summer filler.  A little riff on on Andrew Leon's "Pictures I Like."  It's Sims I Like, based on Sims characters I've made based on books I wrote.  I'll have a new one every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until Labor Day just to keep things active.  Plus, did I mention I like these Sims?

Let's start with one you're probably familiar with:  Stacey Chance from Chance of a Lifetime

This is a pretty good likeness for what Stacey looks like after she goes to a thrift store and gets some girl clothes for the first time.  Because Stacey was a man just a few hours ago, the clothes she chooses are somewhat unisex:  a jacket, T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, all in neutral colors, not pink.  She has the straight brown hair parted in the center and not much makeup of someone who is not familiar with dolling herself up.

Of course by the end of the book she gets into girlier clothes and more makeup and such.

Time for the Carbon Freeze...

Good news, baby:  I'm good and stiff already!

I'm going to take the rest of the summer off from blogging.  Congress can do it, why not my blog?  Not that it will be vacant.  I think I'll just throw up some stupid shit as placeholders or something.

Anyway, September 7th--the Wednesday after Labor Day--I'll be back with a huge "Stuff I Watched" entry for the search engine robots to enjoy.

Stuff I Watched: June Edition

The monthly post that doesn't generate a lot of comments, but a lot of hits from search engine robots!  Sounds like a great slogan.  Pretty much for this whole blog.

5 Stars (Amaze-balls!)
We're all out of Amaze-balls.

4 Stars (Awesomesauce!)
I Smile Back:  Comedian Sarah Silverman is a woman who seems to have it all:  devoted family man husband, two kids, nice house in Long Island, and a dog.  Despite all that she's miserable and has turned to alcohol, prescription drugs, cocaine, and an affair with her best friend's husband.  Lithium is mentioned so she has some kind of psychiatric problem, but it's not really specified.  Anyway, she tries to pick up the pieces but really can't.  It's important to note that this one of those that while it stars someone known for comedy, it's a drama.  Kind of slow for the 85 minutes or so but manages to be complex and moving. (4/5)  (Fun Fact:  Her husband in the movie and the guy she's having an affair with look so much alike that I couldn't tell them apart at times.)

3 Stars (Good)
Woman in Gold:  In the late 30s when the Nazis began taking over Europe, they confiscated many, many paintings.  In Austria a painting known as "Woman in Gold" was stolen and then later put on display in a Vienna museum.  About 60 years later, an old woman (Helen Mirren) finds some documents in her sister's things and ends up employing a young lawyer (Ryan Reynolds) to help her get the painting from the Austrian government.  The case went to Austria, back to America to the Supreme Court, and then back to Austria.  The movie simplifies this, perhaps to a fault.  The flashbacks to the Nazi occupation are especially heartbreaking, not just for how Jewish people were oppressed, but how the people who used to be their neighbors willingly went along with it.  The movie reminds me a lot of Philomena from about the same time, where Judi Dench was an old woman being helped by Steve Coogan to find her missing son.  Like that movie, the present day scenes are often humorous with the cantankerous old woman while the flashbacks are more dramatic.  (Spoiler alert) You can probably guess she wins.  Or you could look it up on Google.  She got $135 million from the case--most of which she gave to various charities.  What a woman! (3/5) (Fun Fact: Daniel Bruhl, who was Baron Zemo in the recent Civil War, plays an Austrian reporter who helps them.  He, Reynolds, and Mirren have all been in comic book movies--can you guess which ones Helen Mirren was in?)
Pawn Sacrifice:  Tobey Maguire is Bobby Fischer, the bad boy chess champion from the early 70s.  (Seriously, there was a bad boy of chess.)  Fischer was a really talented player but also as neurotic and paranoid as Howard Hughes.  And like Hughes it was a downward spiral until his final demise.  Anyway, most of the movie focuses on Fischer playing Boris Spassky of the USSR (played by Liev Schreiber), who was also talented but far less neurotic and paranoid.  But then he was already used to being bugged and followed by his own government.  Anyway, I'm sure you can guess who wins.  Some of the characters are a little thinly-drawn like his friend the priest (Peter Sarsgaard) and some lawyer/agent who seemed to be working for the US government or something.  The other problem is for people like me who don't play chess (and don't want to) it's sometimes hard to care.  Ooh, he started by moving a pawn!  OMG, no one's ever done anything that brilliant before!  Um...seriously?  If you like chess it would make more sense.  A second movie could have been made about Fischer's later life of basically being a crazed, anti-Semitic hobo who ultimately fled to Iceland.  I don't think this made enough money for that to happen. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  On an episode of Adult Swim's Mike Tyson Mysteries, IBM's chess-playing Deep Blue robot was powered by the disembodied brain of Bobby Fischer.)
Rock the Kasbah:  This was one of those movies where I might have had an interest if the previews had bothered to say what the fuck the movie was about.  Something about Bill Murray in Afghanistan and music...Actually it's about a bigmouthed, down-on-his luck tour manager who gets a gig with the USO in Afghanistan.  Except his singer (Zooey Deschanel) bolts and he ends up in a remote village, where he discovers a talented female singer and tries to get her on the Afghan version of American Idol.  Which is really difficult, especially because her dad is the chief of the little village and doesn't want to lose face by having his daughter parade around on TV like a "whore."  It feels a little long, but overall it's good.  They just needed a better trailer. (3/5)
Buried:  Ryan Reynolds is buried in a box in Iraq, but fortunately his kidnappers buried him with a phone and some other goodies to try to get help.  The whole movie is just him in the box and on a Blackberry trying to get someone from the FBI, State Department, or his trucking company to help him.  The company is especially despicable.  With the clock ticking, he gets increasingly desperate.  A really good, claustrophobic thriller with a magnificent ending. (3/5)

2.5 Stars (Decent)
Criminal Activities:  This is like the 90s movie Suicide Kings where 4 young guys kidnap Christopher Walken for some reason and then while holding him hostage he starts getting in their heads.  In this case it's four douchebags who get in deep with a gangster (John Travolta, who was probably getting daily Botox injections) and so he decides that to make things right they should kidnap a drug dealer whose boss kidnapped the gangster's niece.  Far too easily the guys accomplish this, but then the drug dealer starts messing with them and they start turning on each other.  There's a surprise twist at the end that shows things are not what they seem.  What's really going down is sort of in line more with a horror movie than a thriller. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The movie is directed by and co-starring Jackie Earle Haley, who you might remember from Watchmen as Rorschach or the lame Nightmare on Elm Street reboot as Freddy or the lamer Robocop reboot or as the child molester in Little Children and also the non-reboot of Bad News Bears I think.)
Tripping the Rift:  The Movie:  I had already watched the first (and only?) season of this computer animated futuristic comedy a few months ago and so I thought, why not watch the movie?  The slimy, lecherous Chode is in trouble again, first when a job protecting a princess goes bad and then when an evil clown cyborg tries to hunt him and his crew down.  It spoofs Terminator, Young Frankenstein, Desperate Housewives, and other movies/TV, though strangely not really Star Trek or Star Wars, which the show itself was already a spoof of. Since it was a movie (presumably straight to DVD) they take full advantage of being able to drop f-bombs and the like.  (2.5/5)
The League Season 7:  I guess this was the final season last fall.  Not having FXX (or The Simpsons Channel as it should be called) I had to wait until it showed up on Netflix.  It's pretty much more of the same low-rent Seinfeld hijinks, though perhaps with fewer fantasy football references this time around.  A major character's wife is killed off near the end, leading to an incredibly annoying episode where an animated Seth Rogen and his buddy go to retrieve the body from Puerto Rico; I suppose it was animated to save money.  Since there were only like 3 episodes left there was really no point to killing anyone off and it really took away from the rest of cast. Anyway, this was a show I'd watch for free but never pay money for--just like fantasy football! (2.5/5)  (Fun Fact:  One of the main characters lost his gig as spokesman for Buffalo Wild Wings the same time this season aired when it was found out his story about being in the World Trade Center on 9/11 was pure bull plop.)
Spawn: The Animated Series:  This was on HBO in the late 90s.  Strangely it's not on HBO Go, but you can find it on Amazon Prime.  There were 3 seasons of 6 episodes so there are only 18 episodes.  The first season vaguely introduces Spawn, a former government assassin named Al Simmons who made a deal with the devil to come back to Earth as a "hell Spawn" or officer in the Satanic army.  In the first season there's some stuff about Al's former boss embezzling weapons for...reasons and propping up a presidential candidate.  In the second season Al's best friend (who is now married to Al's former wife) finds out about the weapons.  Otherwise not a lot happens and the whole thing about the presidential candidate is forgotten.  It's the third season where things actually start to happen as Heaven sends bounty hunters after Spawn while he learns of a new ability to change shape with his cape and promptly uses it to have sex with his wife and knock her up with the possible Antichrist.  It's too bad the show ended after that because there were a lot of unanswered questions.  Each episode starts off with a wooden introduction by creator Todd McFarlane; he's definitely no Rod Serling or even the Crypt Keeper.  There's also an old guy who does narration that sounds like Morgan Freeman in March of the Penguins:  "The Hell Spawn wakes in the morning to begin the long journey to search for sustenance..." But the music does a nice job of setting a creepy atmosphere.  For me the best part is that Spawn is voiced by Keith David; maybe you remember him from all those Navy commercials. It really wasn't that great and yet I was hooked on it; maybe because a lot of it was so bad it was almost good. (2.5/5)
Double Whammy:  This feels like it was trying to be an Elmore Leonard novel-turned-movie like Get Shorty but it doesn't ever really come together.  Denis Leary is a NYPD detective who bungles an attempt to stop a mass shooting in a fast food joint and is bailed out by an 8-year-old boy.  He goes to a hot chiropractor (Elizabeth Hurley) and they fall in love but while they're fucking on the floor of his apartment, a neighbor is nearly murdered because his daughter resents him not letting her get a tattoo.  In not quite Clouseau fashion, Denis Leary finds the real attempted killers to stop them.  Like I said, some good pieces, but they don't end up all fitting together. (2.5/5)

2 Stars (Meh)
Street Kings:  It's kind of like Training Day, with Keanu Reeves as the Denzel Washington-type character and Chris Evans as the Ethan Hawke-type character.  Except the opposite guy dies.  Basically another movie about LAPD corruption. Man, the LAPD really has had it rough in terms of movies in the last 20 years:  LA Confidential, Training Day, Black Dahlia, Mulholland Falls, Gangster Squad, Dark Blue, End of Watch, this movie, and probably plenty more...(2/5)
The Salton Sea:  In this muddled thriller, Val Kilmer is a jazz trumpeter who turns to going undercover as a meth addict to get revenge for his wife's murder.  The way it's jumbled up into flashbacks makes it hard to know what's going on all the time.  Otherwise it's all right. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  This 2002 movie was directed by DJ Caruso, who later scored a bigger success for him and Shia LeBeouf with Disturbia.  After rewatching the disappointing follow up Eagle Eye, I wondered what became of Caruso.  It turns out he recently directed Vin Diesel's latest XXX movie--as in triple-X, not pornography.   He's one of those who seems like he should get a shot at a superhero franchise; God knows there are enough of them these days.)
RV:  This 2006 movie was like a reboot of Vacation before the reboot of Vacation.  Robin Williams plays the Chevy Chase role of a dad who wants his family to reconnect--and he has a meeting in Boulder, CO so why not rent an RV?  Except of course a lot of stuff goes wrong like trying to empty the toilet tank.  And there's an annoying family led by Jeff Daniels who live in their RV all the time and are way too helpful and nice.  Not really a lot of surprises; this is probably one of those where you would have seen the best moments in the trailer.  Obviously Robin Williams and director Barry Sonnenfeld have turned in better work. (2/5) (Fun Fact: The mom's hair in this movie really annoyed me.  It's the sort that has brown roots and then like three different shades of blond and I kept thinking:  couldn't you have just picked one freaking color?  I mean did you just get three samples of dye in the mail and decided to try them all on different parts of your scalp?  I could go on...)
Heartless:  It's like Donnie Darko meets Attack the Block!  In London there's a guy with a red birthmark sort of in the shape of a heart on one side of his face.  He sees some lizard men burning someone up and later the lizard men come after him and kill his mother.  Then somehow he gets the birthmark removed when some dude uses magic (or something) and has him burn himself up and later peel his burnt skin off in a really gross scene.  And then some other stuff happens.  Not a lot of it makes sense.  Really it keeps making less and less sense as you go along. (2/5)
Ghost Team One:  It starts out with two Puerto Rican guys and another guy sharing a house and one of the Puerto Rican guys thinks there's a ghost.  A hot girl finds out about it and so to impress her they rig the house with cameras to do sort of a Ghost Hunters/Ghost Adventures-type show. Except there really is a ghost, a Vietnamese prostitute named Lady Azalea.  It all boils down to an exorcism that features a lot of casual racism concerning Asians, which seems weird when your movie stars three Hispanic people; you'd think they might be more sensitive to other cultures.  Though the hot girl's cheeks are really bronzed while around her eyes and mouth is much paler so that she looks like she's wearing blackface through most of the movie.  Anyway, I don't like "found footage" type movies and while this started out with a decent premise, it started to get tedious. (2/5)
Wild Bill:  In I suppose a warm-up for his role in True Grit, Jeff Bridges is Wild Bill Hickock.  It mostly focuses on his last days in Deadwood--not the TV show though I suppose they're related.  David Arquette is a kid who's been tracking Wild Bill down for revenge after Wild Bill killed his pa or something.  Anyway, it's peppered with grainy black-and-white flashbacks shot at that angle from the old Batman TV show. The lesson to be learned is that after you kill an enemy's gang, don't take him to the bar for drinks because he might have a Derringer and shoot you with it. (2/5)
Mad Max:  This is another of those movies like Death Wish that I wonder how this could possibly have spawned 3 sequels, the last of which made probably close to a billion dollars.  Much of this looks and sounds like an R-rated episode of CHiPs with the late 70s car/motorcycle chases.  Like Fury Road, Max is kind of a dumbass in this; he leaves his wife and kid alone several times in the dystopian landscape and on the third time around the kid dies and the wife is badly injured and maybe going to die?  I don't know.  The movie cuts off before we know for sure.  It doesn't seem like he gets all the bad guys either.  It's too bad the second and third ones aren't free to see if it manages to get better.  (2/5) (Fun Fact: While people hailed the effects for Fury Road, some of them in this much-lower budget feature were pretty lame.  At one point a guy is knocked off a motorcycle and you can see a string connected to the actor.)
10 Cloverfield Lane:  This movie is like watching a gymnast or figure skater do a really amazing jump--and then break her leg on the landing.  This girl is run off the road and ends up in a bunker built by Doomsday prepper John Goodman.  There's another guy who bullied his way in too.  So then it's kind of like the first part of Wool if you read that:  is he crazy, is he right, is the outside world still there, or is it all gone?  And the worst part is when they actually answer that.  It was just so silly compared to the rest of the movie that I just shook my head.  If you want a hint, think back to the M Night Shymalan movie Signs that starred Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix in a similar situation.  It's pretty much the same thing.  Sometimes the less said in an ending, the better. (2/5)


1 Star (Poop Emoji)
The Hitcher:  This is a 2007 remake of the classic 80s movie that I think starred Rutger Hauer.  A douchebag who looks like he enjoys Nickleback and his annoying girlfriend nearly hit Sean Bean on a New Mexico highway in the rain and dark.  Later they give him a ride--until he tries to kill them.  They kick him out but he stalks them across New Mexico while a cop (Neal McDonagh recently of Arrow) is also after them.  None of the characters were very interesting so I didn't really care who died. (1/5)
Hitman:  The first attempt to make a movie of the video game franchise back in 2007.  It's basically a string of action movie cliches following the standard hitman storyline where he ends up being hunted by his own employers.  Have to wonder why 8 years later they thought they'd take another stab at this. (1/5)  (Fun Fact:  I saw a chunk of the new version and it pretty much sucked too.)
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead:  I suppose it's somewhat ironic that I fell asleep during this...twice.  From what I gathered, Clive Owen was a mob boss who went off the grid until his brother killed himself after being sodomized by people he owed money to.  It was obviously not very interesting. (1/5)

'Merica, F**k Yeah!

In a previous post I talked about Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO.  One of the stories they did was on lead.  Not just in Flint, though that was surely the impetus.  One of the facts they brought up was most of the industrial world stopped using lead in things like paint back in the 1920s.  But America, well, we knew better than the rest of the fucking world, so we kept using lead into the middle of the century.  That's why so many buildings have lead paint yet in old neighborhoods usually populated by people too poor to repaint them.

It got me thinking:  this is just one instance of many where America thinks it knows better than the rest of the world.  A far less serious example:  the metric system.  The whole rest of the freaking world uses the metric system, but America was too dumb and too stubborn to convert after trying it in the 70s.

Health care:  as Bernie Sanders says, every other civilized country in the world has single-payer healthcare.  Not America.  We have the half-assed "Obamacare" system because we're too stubborn and scared to go to single-payer.  Unlike everyone else.

Gun control:  Again, most every other civilized country in the world has restrictive controls on guns, especially assault weapons.  Not America.  We pretty much let anyone who wants one buy an AR-15--or twenty.  And hey, why not some armor-piercing bullets with those?  You want a rocket launcher?  An Apache helicopter?  Your own personal AEGIS cruiser?  Why not?  This is America, goddamn it!

Drugs:  Other countries have legalized marijuana, with Canada promising to be the latest next year.  Not America.  We spend billions incarcerating people for toking a joint or buying a dime bag of weed.  The "war on drugs" hasn't accomplished anything except record jail populations, but we can't stop now, this is America!

Education:  As the song says, We don't need no education.  Especially not math and science.  You don't need no Charles Darwin when you have the Bible!  And them greedy teachers don't need no money or benefits or school supplies!  That history textbook was good enough for my grandpappy and it's good enough for my kids!

OK, I'm exaggerating...slightly.  The point is, we have this attitude of "USA!  USA! We're #1!" and yet we're far from #1 on a lot of important issues.  Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" would be a wonderful idea if he didn't mean it as going back to 1910s standards on race, the environment, and wages.  We keep thinking if someone else did it successfully we can't do the same because that would be a sign of weakness.  But taking from other countries is how we built this country.  It's how we got to the moon.  Why shouldn't we continue that grand tradition?

Moving forward to catch up to the rest of the world on so many things is how we make America great, not going backwards to some imaginary Leave It to Beaver past.

Incidentally this topic is apparently also the subject of Michael Moore's latest effort Where to Invade Next, which is on DVD or digital.  The idea is the world has a lot better ideas than us and ironically many of them started here.

A to Z Challenge Extra: The Martian

Before I get to the post, I have to do a little bragging.  I've had free books hit #1 in a subcategory on Amazon before, but yesterday was the first time I ever had a paid book hit #1.  My latest book, The Incredible Shrinking Manhood!, hit #1 in the transgender category yesterday evening. Here's the proof:

It only lasted a couple of hours but it was pretty cool to be at the top.  I just wish being #1 meant you sold tons of books, but it's only 4 or so, plus about 1800 pages read from Kindle Unlimited.

And now today's entry...

After it came out last October I watched The Martian in theaters and really enjoyed it--I rated it as the second most-enjoyable movie I watched in theaters that year behind only Star Wars.  I wanted to read the book but it was like $9 on Kindle, which was too rich for my blood.  Eventually, though, it went on sale and I had the chance to read it.

The book and movie are largely the same, though the book has much more detail.  They both deal with Mark Watney being stranded on Mars and managing to survive numerous disasters with science and pluck.  Eventually his crewmates are able to come back and pick him up in a daring rescue.

When talking about books versus movies people so often take one side or another.  In my Page to Screen A to Z Challenge posts I didn't usually bother with taking one side or the other.  Some people are book snobs and will just assume any book is better than any movie.  I'm a realist and recognize that most people don't want to spend the hours and hours it takes to read a book.  So in a lot of them I said the movie gets the main points across in a lot less time.

The Martian is another one of those where the movie gets most of the main points across.  But since it's a castaway survival story, the book provides a lot more detail, just like Life of Pi.  Do most people really need that extra detail?  Not really.  Actually, unless you're a science or engineering nerd a lot of that detail about growing potatoes or retrofitting the rover for a long-range trip would probably bore the shit out of you.

There are three major difference between the book and movie.

1. In the movie there are no obstacles when he drives from his camp to where the NASA rocket for the next expedition is waiting.  In the book it's far more involved.  Not just souping up his rover, but there's also a dust storm that he has to cleverly navigate his way out of.  Also as he nears the rocket site, he catches a bad patch of Martian soil and flips the rover over.  That would have made that portion more exciting than a montage with a David Bowie song, but the decision was probably that the movie was already too long and that would just make it longer.
2. In the book, Commander Lewis stays in the ship during the whole rescue and Watney doesn't really get to use his "Iron Man" idea of poking a hole in a finger of his suit to fly up to where the ship is waiting.  In the movie Commander Lewis overrides everyone to go out and pick up Watney and he uses the Iron Man technique.  The former I think because they were paying Jessica Chastain a bunch of money and wanted her to actually do something.  The latter probably because it looked cool.
3. The book ends when he's back on the ship.  The movie ends with him back on Earth and teaching survival skills to potential astronauts.  This was probably added so the audience wouldn't be like, "Did he get back to Earth or not?  Wah!  Wah!"

That's just illustrative of how books and movies can do things differently and still make an enjoyable product.  Which is why you don't have to always choose one or another.  In some cases there is one clear choice (IMHO) but a lot of the time there isn't.  Of course in our age of hot takes it's hard to say that two things are both equally good.

It'd probably be a lot easier to agree that both of one thing are equally horrible--like the 2016 presidential nominees.

BTW, the movie of The Martian premiered on HBO a few weeks ago so you can probably catch a rebroadcast or use HBO Go or HBO Now (or whatever it is) if you haven't seen it yet.  Or it might still be at Redbox.