This week's comes from Spider-Woman Agent of SWORD #2
I'll go first
Madame Hydra: Hey baby, need a lift?
Now it's your turn!
Monday, December 9, 2013
Comic Captions 12/9/13
It's time for another Comic Captions, where your job is to recaption a
comic book panel. The goal of course is to make it as humorous as
possible. This is another case where you can also make it as dirty as possible.
This week's comes from Spider-Woman Agent of SWORD #2
Now it's your turn!
This week's comes from Spider-Woman Agent of SWORD #2
Now it's your turn!
Friday, December 6, 2013
Box Office Blitz Playoffs: Round 1
The scoring process will work the same as it did in the regular season, like this:
100 points per movie you guess right
100 points if you guess the top grossing movie right
200 points if you guess the 2nd top grossing movie right
300 points if you guess the 3rd top grossing movie right
In the event of a tie, the winner is determined by who is closest (higher or lower) to the top movie's gross. If that is a tie, then we move to the #2 movie and if that's a tie we move to the #3 movie. In the unlikely event someone is still tied I'll have to come up with some kind of overtime.
There will not be a 300 point bonus for the winner because there's really no point to it.
Instead of everyone competing against everyone, for the first round of the playoffs all eight players pair off based on their position at the end of the regular season. Here are the matchups for Round 1:
With all of that now as clear as mud, here's the list of movies out in the theaters this week:
- 12 Years a Slave
- Black Nativity
- Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2
- Dallas Buyer's Club
- Delivery Man
- Ender's Game
- Free Birds
- Frozen
- Gravity
- Homefront
- Jackass: Bad Grandpa
- Last Vegas
- Out of the Furnace*
- Philomena
- The Best Man Holiday
- The Book Thief
- The Christmas Candle
- The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
- Thor: The Dark World
For my matchup I will pick:
1. Hunger Games 2 $35M
2. Frozen $30M
3. Thor 2 $6M
And now you make your picks in the comments. I'll wait until Monday night to tally the scores so I can use the Actuals. That way we don't have any reversals later on.
Good luck--for everyone except Chris.
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Thursday Review: Last Action Hero
In case you never watched it, much of the movie serves as a satire of action movies, especially the cop action movies like Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop, and the like. In the "real" world a kid named Danny loves the Jack Slater action movie franchise. At an old theater he gets a sneak peek at the latest one (Jack Slater IV) along with a supposedly magic ticket. The ticket actually is magic and transports Danny into the movie, where he lands in Slater's backseat during a car chase with some villains. From there the satire begins with the loud rock music, the car jumping obstacles and smashing through stuff without a scratch, and the car driving perfectly straight while Slater turns around in his seat to shoot his gun.
From there Danny joins Slater in hunting down a gangster and his main assassin Benedict who has one eye and uses a variety of trick glass eyes in the other. Benedict is a lot smarter than his boss and figures out Danny is not of his world. He eventually steals the ticket and uses it to cross over into "reality" which is a pretty awesome place for a movie villain because the good guys aren't guaranteed to win. That's where the movie applies the satire the other direction as Jack Slater follows Benedict and has to adapt to not having unlimited ammo and actually suffering pain when he punches something--and (most horrifying of all) classical music.
As much as I enjoy the movie the drawback for me has always been that at times it got a little too cutesy. Like it (accurately) points out how there's not a single homely woman in Jack's world but then takes it to extremes by having most of them dress like hookers. Or the cartoon cat Whiskers who's a detective at the station. Just showing the cat the first time was a funny gag, a little send-up of Roger Rabbit in a way of combining animation with actual film, but having the cat show up later as part of the action was a bit much. On the other side in the end sequence there gets to be a bit too much winking when Jack Slater meets Arnold Schwarzenegger and so forth--something that sadly Ocean's Twelve did not learn from about a decade later.
This was probably the John Carter of its time, a movie that got hamstrung mostly by poor management. Like John Carter the end product isn't as bad as some people would make it seem. At least it's never seemed that way to me. But then I prefer a movie that tries an ambitious concept and doesn't entirely succeed over one that plays it safe all the way. It's why I like other movies like Darkman and Pacific Rim that were not huge successes at the box office. In this case the ambitious part was making sort of a meta-movie with a movie-within-a-movie and sometimes crossing with other movies on top of that when Benedict fetches The Ripper from Jack Slater III and the ticket inadvertently summons Death from The Seventh Seal (played by Ian MacKellan in his pre-Gandalf/Magneto days). If it hadn't gotten so over-the-top in its satire it would have been even better.
Like the AV Club reviewer I wouldn't agree with critics who complained that neither "reality" in the movie is actual reality. That Danny's world isn't exactly our world (because our world doesn't have magic tickets--so far as I know) wasn't really the point. The point was for Jack to enter a world where his world's rules no longer applied to see if he could overcome that, if he could be a hero outside of his scripted reality. It's something I do in the 5th Scarlet Knight book when Agnes the witch is drawn into a parallel universe without magic and has to overcome that handicap.
Where I disagree from the AV Club review is when they say all Danny learns is that magic is real. In the same way that Jack has to overcome his handicaps to be a hero in the "real" world, Danny has to find his courage to be a hero. Early in the movie Danny's apartment is robbed and while he briefly considers trying to fight back in the end he just ends up cowering in a bathroom. As well it's pretty clear that he spends most of his free time in a dark movie theater, usually by himself. Contrast that to the end when he has to help Jack stop Benedict on the rooftop and then get Jack back into his movie universe to save his life. Presumably then after the movie Danny might not spend so much time in the movie theater hiding from real life.
So see there are a lot of hidden depths here that a lot of people never bother to contemplate in large part because the movie was deemed a failure and therefore it must suck. Just like you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, you shouldn't judge a movie by its box office receipts. As Jack Slater would say that's a "Big Mistake."
Appropriately the Box Office Blitz playoffs begin tomorrow!
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Cover Reveal: Chances Are Paperbacks!
Today I'm doing another cover reveal. This time it's for my books, which makes it extra-special. I released the Chances Are books last winter with covers I'd cobbled together. From a distance they looked passable. They've sold well enough that I suppose most people didn't really care. Here are the old and busted covers:
When I decided to make paperbacks, I initially used the same covers. The graphics are really too low-res, so they look like crap. Thus I decided that I should get new covers made. But I didn't want to reinvent the wheel. I just wanted to replace the silhouettes on each cover.
So when I heard on Facebook he wasn't that busy, I contacted artist A.L. Sirois, who drew the Scarlet Knight promo comic book. It turned out to be a little more difficult than either of us expected to get something workable. Here are the new covers but for some reason Blogger is lightening them in places; this happened on another pic I loaded recently; I don't know what Blogger's deal is with that. They don't look that way on Amazon or in Paint Shop Pro.
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You'll notice too I transposed the text and graphics. This is to avoid the margins for the paperbacks. The only margin I have to worry about for the text is the fold on the left side. The new covers are a bit better resolution, so they look better. Plus now they're in matte instead of annoying super-glossy format that makes taking a picture of them impossible.
All three paperbacks are for sale on Amazon and Createspace. They make great gifts! And stocking stuffers if you have a rather large stocking.
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| Note the man shadow's cheesy legs I had to add to line up |
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| Note how thin the woman's shadow is |
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| This one is just bad all around. |
When I decided to make paperbacks, I initially used the same covers. The graphics are really too low-res, so they look like crap. Thus I decided that I should get new covers made. But I didn't want to reinvent the wheel. I just wanted to replace the silhouettes on each cover.
So when I heard on Facebook he wasn't that busy, I contacted artist A.L. Sirois, who drew the Scarlet Knight promo comic book. It turned out to be a little more difficult than either of us expected to get something workable. Here are the new covers but for some reason Blogger is lightening them in places; this happened on another pic I loaded recently; I don't know what Blogger's deal is with that. They don't look that way on Amazon or in Paint Shop Pro.
You'll notice too I transposed the text and graphics. This is to avoid the margins for the paperbacks. The only margin I have to worry about for the text is the fold on the left side. The new covers are a bit better resolution, so they look better. Plus now they're in matte instead of annoying super-glossy format that makes taking a picture of them impossible.
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| The finished product! |
All three paperbacks are for sale on Amazon and Createspace. They make great gifts! And stocking stuffers if you have a rather large stocking.
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Two Cent Tuesday: Grumpy Potpourri
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| Let the grumpiness commence! |
So like a month ago Blockbuster announced it was finally mercy killing both its stores and its DVD by mail service. I was reluctantly using the latter because Netflix pissed me off a few years ago by sending me the same broken DVD TWICE and I'm too lazy to go to the Redbox kiosks. Anyway, I could have seen the handwriting on the wall a while ago. Blockbuster's problem wasn't just people were going digital with movies, but also that they sucked in providing for the customers. I mean just about all the movies on my Blockbuster queue that were "Medium Demand" or "High Demand" or "Very High Demand" were readily available on Netflix's DVD service once I switched back to them. Part of that is probably because they knew they were winding down their business, but really long before that they were slow about mailing movies and if you weren't able to get a new one the day it came out, forget about it for like six weeks. So really, why should people stick with you? The only advantage of Blockbuster is their envelopes are so much nicer. They're easier to open and much smaller than Netflix's, which don't fit in the mail slot for my apartment's mailbox, which is extremely irritating. Why does Netflix need to waste so much paper? Think of the trees!
Anyway, speaking of companies going out of business in the near future, I recently got a $5 off coupon from Best Buy and decided to use it on a Sims 3 expansion pack since there was really nothing else I needed. I could buy it to download from the site so that seemed simpler than going to the store. WRONG! With Amazon for instance you pay for the download and BOOM! you start downloading it and then installing and playing it. But stupid ass Best Buy you have to wait for them to add it to your "digital library" which takes like an hour or so. Well then I go to my digital library and where is it? Not there. I chatted with some dope in customer service who "assumed" it would take up to 24 hours. Well gee 48 hours go by and still my game isn't there! I tried to email them. No answer. Tried again 40 hours later. No answer. Ranted about them on Twitter and got an auto Tweet--and that was it. Finally I sucked it up to navigate their obnoxious phone system. When I get a person she assures me they'll send me a code by Email in 24 hours. Nope. I call the next day another lady tells me they'll send a code in 24 hours. Nope. I call the next day the guy gives me the code over the phone. Hooray? Nope. Doesn't work. Finally I just went to EA's Sims 3 site and bought the game from them for $20. Ten minutes later it's installed. Gee, 10 minutes vs. 5 fucking days. This is part of the reason they'll be out of business in a couple years. Which is kind of sad because honestly I still like having them around for situations like when I bought my new computer and for whatever reason the thing only had DVI connectors and I have a VGA monitor. I was luckily able to go down to Best Buy and get an adapter. But when Best Buy goes under what do I do? Wait 2 days to get it from Amazon? Wait a day or so to find some Ma and Pop computer parts store? Because the only other stores with electronics these days are Wal-Mart, Target, etc. and they wouldn't carry specialty parts like that. I guess I'd just be screwed then.
Since I mentioned Sims 3 Expansion Packs, they are largely a ripoff. I wanted the "Movie Stuff" one because it promised to have superhero costumes and I thought that some professional ones might be better than someone's homemade ones I recolored for my characters. WRONG! The problem is EA is so fucking arrogant about these things. Instead of designing like some generic superhero costume parts, you can pretty much only get their character Peacock Man or whatever the hell it's called. If you don't want Peacock Man you're screwed. And for the ladies the ones they designed looked great if you were making She-Ra, who incidentally is not classified as a superhero. I mean, did these people even read a comic book or watch a superhero movie ever? Pretty much for $15 you get like 3 or 4 new outfits per sex/age and maybe a couple new hairstyles, most of which are pretty fucking lame. And they're so lazy they just give you full outfits instead of putting shirts, pants, skirts, etc. separately, which would be more useful. It's a ripoff. The sad thing is that people do so much better work from their basements than EA's professional designers do. I mean the hairs EA designs are always crap. They're always so flat and dull compared to what other people do on their own. Here's an example:
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| Less Boring. |
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| BORING. |
Now just to get my goat I'm sure you all will say you like EA's better, but you would be wrong. If they just put a little thought and effort into their creations they'd be much better, but they'd rather bilk suckers for $15-$40 per set. Then again most people probably aren't as big of sticklers about this as I am. Maybe they want to use Peacock Man.
I think the summary of my first three points is that big companies suck because they just don't put much effort into it and then they wonder why they fail and customers eventually leave them. Surely if there were a better way of designing my people (like if I actually could draw) I'd do that rather than use EA's crap.
Since "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" are behind us, what's this bullshit of websites like Best Buy being "sold out online" of stuff? I understand if a product is no longer being made it could be "sold out" but really if it's still in production like Kindle Fires for instance then it's not like you can't just order more of them from the manufacturer. Instead of "sold out online" you should just say it's backordered for a few days. But really I think it's more that they want you to go into the store to look for it in the hope you'll spend more money there than online.
Here's a mini sports rant for you. Considering NFL teams are starting such luminaries at quarterback as Josh McCown, Kellen Clemens, and something called Scott Thorzien, you'd think a guy who led his team to a .500 record and won a playoff game could get work as at least a backup. I am of course talking about Tim Tebow who got Denver to the second round of the playoffs and was rewarded with being traded to the Jets, whose brilliant plan was to bring him in for the "wildcat" and then have him run the ball for 2 yards. Every. Single. Time. Because no one would ever figure that out! After a tryout with "genius" Bill Belichick's Patriots he's now on the street. My thought for why this happened is that teams are lazy. For someone with Tebow's somewhat limited skill set you need to redesign your offense to accommodate him. Denver had success when they did that. No one else has tried that because it would take a lot of effort. Why go to that much trouble when you can just shove some journeyman like McCown or Clemens or Chad Henne in there? Even horrible teams like Jacksonville are too lazy to give it a try, despite that if the gamble paid off the coach might actually save his job. Or I suppose instead of laziness you could all it arrogance. But I'd say if you're 1-9 then you are clearly not a coaching genius; you might as well accept your failure and try something different. Or not. It is the NFL (the National Football League as every "analyst" has to call it as much as possible) where "new" typically means doing what other teams did 15 years ago.
A final thought on NaNoWriMo: after I got to the 50,000 it was harder to get motivated to write except on weekends. I suppose 50,000 is a good goal for a lot of people, but for me it was much too short. And then having achieved that goal it's kind of a letdown. Just another reason not to bother with it.
Last week was Thanksgiving and Black Friday. I'm on record at being annoyed that they have to have sales on Thanksgiving now. Most people concentrate on the "plight" of the workers for having to work. When you think about it, the sales creep is really symptomatic of not only our culture of greed but also our inability to actually take a day off. It's a well-known statistic that Americans take far fewer vacation days than workers in Europe. We just seem incapable of really taking a day off to relax. If we don't have to rush around to sales then we have to pack the day with a bunch of social obligations. We all really need a day just to actually just kick back and take a load off for 24 hours. No sales, no complicated dinners, no cookouts, no parades, no fireworks shows--just a day where everyone who isn't essential to keeping the country running can not worry about stuff. Call it National Chill the Fuck Out Day; it's sort of like that movie "The Purge" only the opposite of committing crimes.
I have to slip in a rant now about the Family Guy episode where they "killed off" the dog Brian. I'm going to use quotes because for now I'm assuming this is still a short-term ploy. I can't honestly say I was really outraged at first. Watching the episode I was more like, "OK, Stewie's going to use the time machine to save him...wait, he's not? We're really doing this?" It's the kind of thing where I watch through the credits just to make sure nothing is going to happen. Then later I was pissed because Brian's my favorite character, owing to that he was a struggling writer and an atheist Democrat. (I'll just ignore that he drove a Prius instead of a good American car.) My thoughts on this subject are thus:
First, how could this episode be construed as funny in any way? At least when they killed off Peter's adopted father it was in a bizarre fashion; getting run over by a car is extremely ordinary. Especially since my avatar Blue II died a couple months ago, I'm a little sore on the subject of dogs dying. Anyway, part of the reason I've only watched the show sporadically in the last three years or so is this new crop of writers they have blow. To use Peter's words, they've gone all sissy-man Alan Alda. Like that horrid 150th episode where Brian and Stewie were locked in the vault that was just painfully unfunny. There have been quite a few others too where they've just seemed to have forgotten it's an animated comedy, not a drama. It's probably why I've enjoyed American Dad a lot more than the show preceding it, at least until next season.
Second, what was the point in doing this? When The Simpsons killed off Maude Flanders it was in large part because the voice actor didn't want to be on the show so much anymore. In real-live shows we've seen quite a few examples where a character gets killed off because the actor wants to move on to "bigger and better things" (seldom with good results) or like with Two and a Half Men because of a dispute between the actor and management. Obviously in this case those scenarios don't apply since Brian is voiced by Seth MacFarlane, who still is going to be doing a bunch of other voices on the show, so you're not saving any money and since Brian's voice is his normal voice you can't even claim it's to relieve any vocal stress. If they'd killed Meg or Chris or someone like that off I could have seen where hey one less paycheck to write.
Third, are the ratings going down so much that you need to pull off something so desperate? It seems to me that you're just antagonizing the fans. How is killing off my favorite character going to make me watch the show? And how is that going to bring in new viewers? As a writer I've killed off characters plenty of times--the Scarlet Knight series for instance features a number of characters dying--but there's always a purpose to it, but in this case I just don't see what the purpose was.
Those who followed the Grumpy Bulldog Blog would know that I was a big Obama booster in 2012 and in 2008 before that. I'm using past tense because it's over now. First there was the Syria debacle where he got outmaneuvered by Putin. Then the stupid government shutdown (not his fault but still). Now the complete boondoggle that is the Obamacare rollout. At this point he's going to go down with the likes of Ford and Carter, except with two terms. Not a total disaster like Bush II but just couldn't deliver on anything. Part of that was the opposition was just fucking insane but the other part is I guess he didn't pick a very good team to support him, like the people on this Obamacare website. He must have hired people from Best Buy to do it. I mean really that was the center of his legacy and with as fucked up as it's been, unless things get turned around quick he's got nothing to hang his hat on except a bunch of empty promises.
Which is too bad since he was the first minority president you want him to set a good precedent. As it is, the next black person (or Asian, Hispanic, Indian, etc.) who runs for president people will think, "Oh, another Obama. Meh." Which is not what you want. It would be like if Jackie Robinson had signed with the Dodgers, hit .050 and made six errors a game; baseball would probably still be segregated. Will his failures spill over to 2016 to pave the way for a Republican victory? Probably. In which case don't worry about Obamacare because that'll be the first thing to go. And if the Tea Party is still calling the shots, anyone who's not a white guy over 40 can expect to get fucked like everyone in red states has been.
Would you like to hear a story about mundane domestic stuff? A couple months ago I began the great Saga of the Shower Curtain. I'd had my previous shower curtain for like 4 years but it was getting gross so I thought I'd buy a new one. The old one was just a basic Wal-Mart model I got for like $5. I figured it should be easy enough to find something similar. It wasn't. I tried a couple hardware stores but they only had ones about as thin dollar store ones. Eventually I sucked it up and went to Wal-Mart and got a "heavy duty" one for $10. The problem is when I hung it up is they creased it so tightly that it was jutting into the shower. I got fed up and tried a second one, only this one I soaked in warm water like I read somewhere. That's easier said than done since the shower curtain floats. It was a real mess and in the end it still wasn't work well. Finally I found the solution: Command adhesive Velcro strips. I put one of these on either end of the shower and a matching one on the ends of the curtain. Then I could pull the curtain tight (after a little trimming) so it wouldn't bunch up anywhere. But really why was it necessary to crease the damned shower curtains like a pair of pants?
And what's the deal with airline peanuts? Well I suppose you can't make those jokes nowadays because no one gets peanuts unless they want to pay $50 extra.
Monday, December 2, 2013
Comic Captions 12/2/13
It's time for another Comic Captions, where your job is to recaption a
comic book panel. The goal of course is to make it as humorous as
possible.
This week's comes from Thor #365
This week's comes from Thor #365
I'll go first
Frog Thor: Order the frog legs, whilst thou? Have at thee!
Now it's your turn!Sunday, December 1, 2013
Box Office Blitz Regular Season Grand Finale!
It's time for the last roundup of Box Office Blitz for the regular season. This was a pretty big weekend for kid-friendly movies. The estimated results are:
Hunger Games 2 $74.5M
Frozen $66.1M
Thor 2 $15.5M
My picks were:
Maurice Mitchell picked:
1. Hunger Games Catching Fire - $60 mil
2. Frozen - $45 mil
3. Thor the Dark World - $15.7 million
That's a trifecta for 900 points!
Briane Pagel picked:
1. Frozen, $60 mil
2. Catching fire $55 mil
3. Homefront, $20 mil.
That's 100 each for Frozen and Catching Fire for 200 total.
David Walton picked:
1. Hunger Games Catching Fire - $100 M
2. Frozen - $60 M
3. Oldboy- $20 M
That's also 500 points
Chris Dilloway picked:
Hunger games 2 - $65m
Frozen - $50m
Homefront - $15m
Also 500 points
Andrew Leon was the only one to take advantage of being able to change his picks. And the gamble paid off as he picked:
1. Catching Fire: $70m
2. Frozen: $60m
3. Thor 2: $12m
For the trifecta and the win for 1200 points since he was closer on Hunger Games 2 than Maurice
And here are the standings going into the playoffs:
Congrats to Rusty, David, and Chris for winning the regular season and to everyone except Briane Pagel for avoiding the Sacko. The playoff matchups next week will be:
1 Rusty Carl vs. 8. Briane Pagel
2 David Walton vs. 7 Michael Offutt
3 Chris Dilloway vs. 6 P.T. Dilloway in the Dilloway Bowl (like the Manning Bowl only without the fame, money, endorsements, and Super Bowl rings)
4 Andrew Leon vs. 5 Maurice Mitchell
The rules for the playoffs will be posted on Friday. In the meantime start hitting the books to get prepared. Or just half-ass it like I always do.
Hunger Games 2 $74.5M
Frozen $66.1M
Thor 2 $15.5M
My picks were:
- Hunger Games 2 $50M
- Frozen $30M
- Homefront $15M
Maurice Mitchell picked:
1. Hunger Games Catching Fire - $60 mil
2. Frozen - $45 mil
3. Thor the Dark World - $15.7 million
That's a trifecta for 900 points!
Briane Pagel picked:
1. Frozen, $60 mil
2. Catching fire $55 mil
3. Homefront, $20 mil.
That's 100 each for Frozen and Catching Fire for 200 total.
David Walton picked:
1. Hunger Games Catching Fire - $100 M
2. Frozen - $60 M
3. Oldboy- $20 M
That's also 500 points
Chris Dilloway picked:
Hunger games 2 - $65m
Frozen - $50m
Homefront - $15m
Also 500 points
Andrew Leon was the only one to take advantage of being able to change his picks. And the gamble paid off as he picked:
1. Catching Fire: $70m
2. Frozen: $60m
3. Thor 2: $12m
For the trifecta and the win for 1200 points since he was closer on Hunger Games 2 than Maurice
And here are the standings going into the playoffs:
| Box Office Blitz | |||
| Scoreboard | |||
| Season 2 | |||
| 21 | Total | ||
| 1 | Rusty Carl | 0 | 14200 |
| 2 | David Walton | 500 | 12800 |
| 3 | Chris Dilloway | 500 | 12200 |
| 4 | Andrew Leon | 1200 | 11900 |
| 5 | Maurice Mitchell | 900 | 11000 |
| 6 | PT Dilloway | 500 | 10400 |
| 7 | Michael Offutt | 0 | 7400 |
| 8 | Briane Pagel | 200 | 6400 |
| 9 | PK Hrezo | 0 | 600 |
| 3800 | 86900 |
Congrats to Rusty, David, and Chris for winning the regular season and to everyone except Briane Pagel for avoiding the Sacko. The playoff matchups next week will be:
1 Rusty Carl vs. 8. Briane Pagel
2 David Walton vs. 7 Michael Offutt
3 Chris Dilloway vs. 6 P.T. Dilloway in the Dilloway Bowl (like the Manning Bowl only without the fame, money, endorsements, and Super Bowl rings)
4 Andrew Leon vs. 5 Maurice Mitchell
The rules for the playoffs will be posted on Friday. In the meantime start hitting the books to get prepared. Or just half-ass it like I always do.
Friday, November 29, 2013
Black Friday
If you're looking for this week's Box Office Blitz, it posted on Tuesday. Make your picks now if you haven't already!
And enjoy your shopping today. Here's my thought on the subject:
And enjoy your shopping today. Here's my thought on the subject:
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| Grumpy Trip > Grumpy Cat |
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Thursday Review: Mercury Falls
Happy Thanksgiving, pilgrims. This book was originally self-pubbed and then for some reason Amazon bought the rights to put under their imprint. Maybe Amazon could show me some love like that?
Mercury Falls
by Robert Kroese
(4/5 stars)
When you write a humorous story about scheming angels and the
Apocalypse, you're just asking to be compared to "Good Omens" by Terry
Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. And going against the combined talents of
two great humorists like that, it's not going to go very well for you.
Still, "Mercury Falls" at least manages to be a fun read.
When the story begins, Christine is a reporter for The Banner, a Christian magazine, despite that she's not much of a Christian. She lucked into the job after writing a news story about a doomsday cult and since then she's had to traipse around the country, profiling other doomsday cults who are inevitably wrong about the date of the world ending.
But after getting some new linoleum installed in her breakfast nook--which is a crucial plot point--she takes an assignment to Israel, where tensions are heating up in the middle east near a little place known as Armageddon. After nearly being killed in a rocket attack, Christine finds a strange attache case and eventually finds her way to another cult leader who calls himself Mercury.
Mercury is an angel, but he's closer to the Joker than any of the angels you might remember from the Bible. Really all Mercury wants is to sit on the sidelines and wait for the world to end, but when Christine shows up, he gets dragged into all the plotting and scheming between Heaven and Hell.
The rest of the story follows Christine and Mercury as they try to stop the Apocalypse, or at least make it less destructive. There are the annoying "Dogma"-like moments of characters having to explain Biblical things, though not to the extent that pretty much destroyed that Kevin Smith movie. Also unlike that movie it doesn't focus solely on Catholic dogma, so that a reader from any Western faith (or lack thereof) can follow along. Since there's really not much talk about Jesus or the Messiah, Jews or Muslims as well as Christians should be able to read it. Whether you're offended or not depends on how seriously you take your beliefs.
This is clearly not a book for the true believers, as it makes light of both Heaven and Hell. The writing is nothing special, but the author does manage to make it entertaining enough that it doesn't drag along. You probably aren't going to get any spiritual enlightenment from reading it, but it's not a bad time either.
Though of course if you haven't read it, "Good Omens" is a much better use of your money.
That is all.
Mercury Falls
by Robert Kroese
(4/5 stars)
When the story begins, Christine is a reporter for The Banner, a Christian magazine, despite that she's not much of a Christian. She lucked into the job after writing a news story about a doomsday cult and since then she's had to traipse around the country, profiling other doomsday cults who are inevitably wrong about the date of the world ending.
But after getting some new linoleum installed in her breakfast nook--which is a crucial plot point--she takes an assignment to Israel, where tensions are heating up in the middle east near a little place known as Armageddon. After nearly being killed in a rocket attack, Christine finds a strange attache case and eventually finds her way to another cult leader who calls himself Mercury.
Mercury is an angel, but he's closer to the Joker than any of the angels you might remember from the Bible. Really all Mercury wants is to sit on the sidelines and wait for the world to end, but when Christine shows up, he gets dragged into all the plotting and scheming between Heaven and Hell.
The rest of the story follows Christine and Mercury as they try to stop the Apocalypse, or at least make it less destructive. There are the annoying "Dogma"-like moments of characters having to explain Biblical things, though not to the extent that pretty much destroyed that Kevin Smith movie. Also unlike that movie it doesn't focus solely on Catholic dogma, so that a reader from any Western faith (or lack thereof) can follow along. Since there's really not much talk about Jesus or the Messiah, Jews or Muslims as well as Christians should be able to read it. Whether you're offended or not depends on how seriously you take your beliefs.
This is clearly not a book for the true believers, as it makes light of both Heaven and Hell. The writing is nothing special, but the author does manage to make it entertaining enough that it doesn't drag along. You probably aren't going to get any spiritual enlightenment from reading it, but it's not a bad time either.
Though of course if you haven't read it, "Good Omens" is a much better use of your money.
That is all.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
November Recap
NOTE: The jerks at Moviefone snuck in 3 new movies this morning that weren't listed yesterday for the Box Office Blitz. If you wish to change your answers, you can do so until 6am Saturday. The 3 other movies added are:
Here were the top 3 posts of the month. They've been pretty tightly packed together so the order
keeps changing.
Star Trek Into Darkness: Here's a backhanded compliment: this wasn't as terrible as I feared it would be. Still not that great and I still will not accept Chris Pine as Captain Kirk. I could probably do a whole blog post on it but really the problem is they wanted to draw parallels to Wrath of Khan but the problem is the characters of THIS movie don't have the relationships as in Wrath of Khan. In particular Kirk and Khan don't quite have the same level of hatred that was born of 20 years of simmering hatred. And Kirk and Spock don't have 20 years of being best friends to draw on so when they try to parallel the warp reactor scene it just doesn't work because at this point these two characters can barely tolerate each other. It's just not the same thing at all. Karl Urban as Bones I thought stole the show at times; he can really sound like DeForrest Kelley at times. Now that people have pointed them out, gawd, those lens flares! Yeesh. The plot was OK but I wish they'd stop stupid crap like starships operating underwater and in atmosphere. They're called starships because they operate in the stars. Duh. (2.5/5)
GI JOE: Retaliation: It's probably a push on which GI JOE movie is dumber. The first one set the bar pretty low. Anyway, the plot of this doesn't make a lot of sense, especially the part about Zartan murdering Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow's ninja master like 25 years ago and then training Storm Shadow. Say whaaaat? Zartan isn't a fucking ninja! It seemed like they really shoehorned that Snake Eyes plot line in there. And of course most people would be sad that Channing Tatum was killed, but he sucked in the first one so it wasn't much of a loss to me. At least this time they tried to get the look of some characters closer to the toys, though those all seemed to be COBRA characters. They did take the superfluous mouth off Snake Eyes's costume; I mean what use does a guy who took a vow of silence have for a mouth on his mask? (2/5)
Now You See It: I'd been wanting to see this movie for a while so I was hoping for more from it. It was OK. It involves four magicians (the Four HorseMEN despite that one is a girl) who use their magic shows to first rob a French bank and then an insurance tycoon. I was surprised that most of the movie follows the FBI agent (Mark Ruffalo, aka the Hulk from the Avengers) and an Interpol agent, but there's a twist that explains why this is. Though for that twist to work, someone would have needed to meticulously manipulate events for about the last 30 years, which I find inconceivable! It's an OK heist movie but not everything I was hoping for. BTW, Tony Laplume would be happy to see one character reading The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano at one point. (3/5)
Identity Thief: Chalk this up with "Anchorman" and "Wedding Crashers" as a popular comedy I didn't really enjoy. I chuckled a few times but never really laughed at anything. I guess I didn't find a fat woman falling down and punching guys in the throat to be that hilarious. Pretty much everything in this movie was done better by Steve Martin and John Candy in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" or Robert de Niro and Charles Grodin in "Midnight Run." The latter might be a bit more apt. Might as well just watch those again. (2/5)
30 Days of Night: Vampires take over an Alaskan town where it's dark for 30 days straight. Unfortunately the movie has as much personality as the star Josh Hartnett, which is to say none at all. What confused me the most was that the "vampires" eat people like zombies, which seems to be a really inefficient way to get blood. But did they really want blood or what? Nothing is really explained about the vampires like who they are or what language they're speaking. (2.5/5)
An Awkward Sexual Adventure: This is pretty much the Canadian version of a Judd Apatow film. Instead of a 40-Year-Old Virgin you have a 36-year-old Winnipeg accountant who's just really bad in bed. So bad his girlfriend falls asleep. While on a trip to Toronto he visits a strip club and meets a stripper with a heart of gold who has terrible financial management. So they agree that he'll help her with her financial problems and she'll help to teach him about sex as his "Sexual Yoda." Other than an oral sex scene there's less graphic sex than you might expect. It was fun, but really could have used a little trimming since the end was pretty obvious. (4/5)
The Host (2013): Like Hulk or Van Helsing, this is another failed attempt by Universal Pictures at launching a franchise. In this case it's based off a pre-Twilight book by Stephanie Meyer. Parasitic aliens take over all the people on the Earth, including some girl named Melanie. From seven years of watching Deep Space Nine I know that you can coexist with a parasite and it could actually help you. Instead these aliens just try to take over the hosts, except for William Hurt and a bunch of generic Abercrombie & Fitch models who hide in some desert caves. (Honestly I didn't realize there were two guys after the main girl until like 3/4 through the movie.) The aliens don't seem to have anything particularly interesting about them except a fondness for silver vehicles and white clothes. It's a real accomplishment that the main character manages to be whiny and boring as two species. The idea of them sharing a body would have worked better in the book. In the movie it's kind of lame with her talking to herself all the time. The human girl part can't ever seem to make up her mind whether she hates the alien or how she wants it to react to boys. But it was neat how they grew crops underground, so that's something. (2/5)
The Host (2006): This is a completely different animal from the movie of the same name above. This is a Korean kaiju movie where something that looks like a mutant catfish crossed with a squid is created thanks to a stupid American doctor who orders a bunch of toxic chemicals dumped into a river because the bottles are dusty. (Which harkens back to Godzilla where the monster is woke up thanks to stupid Americans dropping nukes.) Cheesy effects and hammy acting make it hard to take this seriously; the movie can't seem to decide what tone it should strike, whether it's a corny "Shaun of the Dead"-type parody or an actual monster movie. The 2 hour running time is probably a half hour too long and really the monster needed to be bigger and on screen more. (2.5/5)
Olympus Has Fallen: This movie was all kinds of implausible. First off, I'm pretty sure the two F-22 fighters wouldn't line up on either side of the cargo plane so they can get blown out of the sky. Common sense would dictate one stay back to cover the other while it checks the situation out. The rest of it plays out like Die Hard meets Air Force One only without any fun or cleverness. Whoever played the defense secretary was so awful I really wanted her to die, and quick. Anyway, despite all that it was an OK but really dumb action movie. (2/5)
Hulk Vs.: I appropriately watched this before an episode of Agents of SHIELD one week. About 60% of it is dedicated to Loki bringing Hulk to Asgard during the Odinsleep (when Odin is recharging like your iPhone) to rampage around while Thor tries to stop him with his hammer. The other 40% is dedicated to Hulk fighting Wolverine in the Canadian wilderness, though probably 50% of that 40% is actually focusing on Wolverine and the Weapons X project who want to use Hulk for their own ends. This really demonstrates how pointless the Hulk often is as the fights between him and Thor and Wolverine get pretty dull pretty quick because for the most part it's always going to be a stalemate. Really if you're going after the Hulk you should fight him with scented candles and Yanni music to cool his rage; hitting him with a hammer or stabbing him with claws just makes him angrier. Unfortunately he doesn't rip Wolverine in half like in the comics. Boring! (2/5)
Redemption (2012): This isn't your typical Jason Statham movie, though he does still kill plenty of people. Statham is a British soldier who's on the lam after going AWOL from Afghanistan. He's living on the streets with a girl named Isabel until Isabel's pimp catches up to her. Statham escapes the pimp's henchmen and crashes into a flat whose owner is conveniently gone for the summer. So hey, why not steal his identity, right? Especially since a new bank card is conveniently in the mail. Then he starts trying to get his life together and in the span of a couple of weeks goes from homeless to a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant to an enforcer for a Chinese gangster--talk about upward mobility! Along the way he tries to find out about Isabel with the help of a nun whose mobile kitchen he used to frequent. As the title suggests it's about him trying to redeem his life of bad choices. But it all comes down to a final choice between hanging out with the nun at the opera or getting revenge for Isabel. Which do you think he chooses? It's a little slow but better than your typical Statham fare like "Parker" and "The Transporter." Still probably not as good as "The Bank Job" or a couple of early Guy Ritchie movies. Statham seems like the British Nic Cage in that he's capable of doing better material but he has a really shitty eye for picking scripts. (3.5/5)
Erased: The start of this reminded me of "The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret" in that a guy (Aaron Eckhart) is recruited for a job overseas that turns out to be for a company that doesn't really exist. In this case it's far more sinister than comical when he goes into work with his daughter one morning to find everything (people, phones, computers, Post-It notes) vanished. All his bank records and personal records from that time are erased too. So to find out what's going on he basically does his Liam Neeson and goes around Belgium kicking people's asses. This is another of those pretty much straight-to-Redbox movies that's not bad if you like a cross between "Taken" and "The Bourne Identity." (3/5)
Assault on Wall Street: They probably take away your reviewer's card if you admit to liking a Uwe Boll movie. But wait, I only liked it for a really shallow reason! Boll's inadvertent genius was casting Erin Karpluk as the main character's wife and I had such a huge crush on her from watching this "Being Erica" show on CBC a couple years ago. (I think I made a couple of veiled references to it in my Wordpress blog back in the day.) How much of a crush? The young Sylvia in the Scarlet Knight books is pretty much modeled on her and so is the woman in my short story "Meet Cute." So when she's sick and dying in the movie I could totally feel the guy's frustration and rage. If I had a machine gun I might have run off to Wall Street for delusional vengeance. But if you don't have a huge crush on that chick then you might not feel the same way. Other than that it takes way too long to get up to the assaulting part of the movie. I mean well over an hour goes by before he starts on that. If you really, REALLY hate bankers then you might like this. I might have to take some points off because Boll didn't work in a gratuitous naked scene. C'mon it's R-rated, why not go for it!? (3/5)
(BTW, if you can ever get the chance go watch that "Being Erica" show. The first season was pretty cool. It was like "Quantum Leap" meets "My Name is Earl" as she gets to go back in time to right a list of various wrongs in her life. I had to buy it on DVD since I'm pretty sure you can't get it from Netflix and the like except maybe in Canada. I never watched the next season or two because everything seemed worked out pretty well in the first season, so why bother watching it unravel and then reravel again?)
Phantom: You know how in some Russian submarine movies like The Hunt for Red October they hire British actors to use their normal voices so they at least seem foreign or in others like K-19 The Widowmaker they have everyone do bad Russian accents? Well Phantom decides the hell with all that and just lets all the Americans talk like Americans even though they're playing Soviet submariners. That kind of lazy inattention to detail is compounded by the message at the end saying all the records on this story are still classified so who the fuck knows what really happened? The probably completely bogus story "inspired by real events" is one part Red October, one part K19, and one part Crimson Tide as a Russian sub captained by Ed Harris goes out to test a new "phantom" machine for confusing American subs and then gets taken over by David Duchovny as a Russian commando who wants to start WWIII. Appropriately later the night I watched this I caught the end of Dr. Strangelove on TCM which is a much better movie about crazy people trying to start a nuclear war. (2/5) (BTW, don't confuse this with The Phantom with Billy Zane as the 30s hero or with Phantoms, in which Affleck was the bomb.)
This is 40: This movie has some good bits, but at 133 minutes, it's much muuuuuuch too long. It rambles on and on and at the end we're not really any farther along than when we started. This was based on characters from "Knocked Up" which I watched only once, which was enough. At least this one doesn't have Seth Rogen in it; that would have only made it worse. It's another good object lesson on not working with your family; Apatow has his wife as the wife and his kids as the kids; if they had a dog it'd probably be his dog too. The older kid is OK but the younger one is worse than any of those kids on those AT&T commercials. Of course readers who are married and over 40 might get more from it than someone unmarried and not 40. (2.5/5)
Lovelace: A lot of movies I complain are too long (see above) but this one was actually too short. It seems like they skip over so much stuff and just give lip service (huh huh) to a lot of other stuff. It's the kind of dramatization where you'd probably be better served watching a real documentary. The story as presented is pretty cliche. Sort of naive young woman gets involved with older, abusive guy. Only instead of just knocking her around he forces her to make perhaps the most well-known porno ever. As for the sex there really isn't anything graphic actually depicted. Some nice boob shots, so that's something. (2/5)
This is the End: Like "This is 40" above it had some nice bits but was too long. Like the Ocean's movies it was probably more fun for the people making it because they could all hang out and get paid for it. For me it was less enjoyable. Too much time is spent in the house after the Rapture begins. The highlight of that is when they do most of the drugs and make a Sweded version of a "Pineapple Express 2" trailer. Once they start getting out of the house the plot begins to move again. But I have to say if Heaven involves smoking weed with Seth Rogen and spontaneously dancing to the Backstreet Boys then I'd volunteer to go to the other place. [Cue "Twilight Zone" guy saying, "This IS the other place! Hahahahahaha!"] (2.5/5)
The Place Beyond the Pines: I probably should have read more about this movie before I added it to my queue. It was really confusing. We start with Ryan Gosling as a carnie who rides a motorcycle in a metal cage until he finds out he knocked up Eva Mendes. Then he starts robbing banks. When he's busted by a rookie cop played by Bradley Cooper, it turns into a whole different movie about dirty cops. Then we skip forward 15 years so we can catch up with their kids, who are fucked up in different ways but then seem to become their fathers. It was really hard to follow the thread of the story since it seems like 3 different movies spliced together. (2/5)
Goosebumps: When I was browsing Netflix's Halloween channel I saw they had the old Goosebumps TV show based on those R.L. Stine books from the 90s. So I decided to watch a few episodes I remembered seeing back in the day. At best the show is like "The Twilight Zone" for 8-year-olds while at worst (far more frequent) it's completely nonsensical crap marred by acting and special effects much worse than anything on TZ back in 1959. One of the better episodes is basically a retread of a "Twilight Zone" episode where someone finds a magic lamp and gets 3 wishes that of course backfire. (This was also the basis of a Simpsons Halloween parody.) In this case a gawky teenage girl gets 3 wishes that go horribly wrong, like when she wishes to be the best player on her basketball team she's the only one who gets a basket in the whole game. And then the genie says, "What? You were the best player on the team!" The point being that you should never ever make a wish (or a deal with the devil) because it will always backfire. You really have to question the callousness of some of these characters like in that episode I mentioned, the girl's mortal enemy gets turned into a statue and she's like "Woo hoo!" and in another episode a boy accidentally alters history so his bratty sister disappears and then is like, "Meh. I'll fix it later." Anyway, if you need a nostalgia fix from the 90s there are better ways. (1/5)
- Philomena*
- The Book Thief*
- The Christmas Candle*
Here were the top 3 posts of the month. They've been pretty tightly packed together so the order
Star Trek Into Darkness: Here's a backhanded compliment: this wasn't as terrible as I feared it would be. Still not that great and I still will not accept Chris Pine as Captain Kirk. I could probably do a whole blog post on it but really the problem is they wanted to draw parallels to Wrath of Khan but the problem is the characters of THIS movie don't have the relationships as in Wrath of Khan. In particular Kirk and Khan don't quite have the same level of hatred that was born of 20 years of simmering hatred. And Kirk and Spock don't have 20 years of being best friends to draw on so when they try to parallel the warp reactor scene it just doesn't work because at this point these two characters can barely tolerate each other. It's just not the same thing at all. Karl Urban as Bones I thought stole the show at times; he can really sound like DeForrest Kelley at times. Now that people have pointed them out, gawd, those lens flares! Yeesh. The plot was OK but I wish they'd stop stupid crap like starships operating underwater and in atmosphere. They're called starships because they operate in the stars. Duh. (2.5/5)
GI JOE: Retaliation: It's probably a push on which GI JOE movie is dumber. The first one set the bar pretty low. Anyway, the plot of this doesn't make a lot of sense, especially the part about Zartan murdering Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow's ninja master like 25 years ago and then training Storm Shadow. Say whaaaat? Zartan isn't a fucking ninja! It seemed like they really shoehorned that Snake Eyes plot line in there. And of course most people would be sad that Channing Tatum was killed, but he sucked in the first one so it wasn't much of a loss to me. At least this time they tried to get the look of some characters closer to the toys, though those all seemed to be COBRA characters. They did take the superfluous mouth off Snake Eyes's costume; I mean what use does a guy who took a vow of silence have for a mouth on his mask? (2/5)
Now You See It: I'd been wanting to see this movie for a while so I was hoping for more from it. It was OK. It involves four magicians (the Four HorseMEN despite that one is a girl) who use their magic shows to first rob a French bank and then an insurance tycoon. I was surprised that most of the movie follows the FBI agent (Mark Ruffalo, aka the Hulk from the Avengers) and an Interpol agent, but there's a twist that explains why this is. Though for that twist to work, someone would have needed to meticulously manipulate events for about the last 30 years, which I find inconceivable! It's an OK heist movie but not everything I was hoping for. BTW, Tony Laplume would be happy to see one character reading The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano at one point. (3/5)
Identity Thief: Chalk this up with "Anchorman" and "Wedding Crashers" as a popular comedy I didn't really enjoy. I chuckled a few times but never really laughed at anything. I guess I didn't find a fat woman falling down and punching guys in the throat to be that hilarious. Pretty much everything in this movie was done better by Steve Martin and John Candy in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" or Robert de Niro and Charles Grodin in "Midnight Run." The latter might be a bit more apt. Might as well just watch those again. (2/5)
30 Days of Night: Vampires take over an Alaskan town where it's dark for 30 days straight. Unfortunately the movie has as much personality as the star Josh Hartnett, which is to say none at all. What confused me the most was that the "vampires" eat people like zombies, which seems to be a really inefficient way to get blood. But did they really want blood or what? Nothing is really explained about the vampires like who they are or what language they're speaking. (2.5/5)
An Awkward Sexual Adventure: This is pretty much the Canadian version of a Judd Apatow film. Instead of a 40-Year-Old Virgin you have a 36-year-old Winnipeg accountant who's just really bad in bed. So bad his girlfriend falls asleep. While on a trip to Toronto he visits a strip club and meets a stripper with a heart of gold who has terrible financial management. So they agree that he'll help her with her financial problems and she'll help to teach him about sex as his "Sexual Yoda." Other than an oral sex scene there's less graphic sex than you might expect. It was fun, but really could have used a little trimming since the end was pretty obvious. (4/5)
The Host (2013): Like Hulk or Van Helsing, this is another failed attempt by Universal Pictures at launching a franchise. In this case it's based off a pre-Twilight book by Stephanie Meyer. Parasitic aliens take over all the people on the Earth, including some girl named Melanie. From seven years of watching Deep Space Nine I know that you can coexist with a parasite and it could actually help you. Instead these aliens just try to take over the hosts, except for William Hurt and a bunch of generic Abercrombie & Fitch models who hide in some desert caves. (Honestly I didn't realize there were two guys after the main girl until like 3/4 through the movie.) The aliens don't seem to have anything particularly interesting about them except a fondness for silver vehicles and white clothes. It's a real accomplishment that the main character manages to be whiny and boring as two species. The idea of them sharing a body would have worked better in the book. In the movie it's kind of lame with her talking to herself all the time. The human girl part can't ever seem to make up her mind whether she hates the alien or how she wants it to react to boys. But it was neat how they grew crops underground, so that's something. (2/5)
The Host (2006): This is a completely different animal from the movie of the same name above. This is a Korean kaiju movie where something that looks like a mutant catfish crossed with a squid is created thanks to a stupid American doctor who orders a bunch of toxic chemicals dumped into a river because the bottles are dusty. (Which harkens back to Godzilla where the monster is woke up thanks to stupid Americans dropping nukes.) Cheesy effects and hammy acting make it hard to take this seriously; the movie can't seem to decide what tone it should strike, whether it's a corny "Shaun of the Dead"-type parody or an actual monster movie. The 2 hour running time is probably a half hour too long and really the monster needed to be bigger and on screen more. (2.5/5)
Olympus Has Fallen: This movie was all kinds of implausible. First off, I'm pretty sure the two F-22 fighters wouldn't line up on either side of the cargo plane so they can get blown out of the sky. Common sense would dictate one stay back to cover the other while it checks the situation out. The rest of it plays out like Die Hard meets Air Force One only without any fun or cleverness. Whoever played the defense secretary was so awful I really wanted her to die, and quick. Anyway, despite all that it was an OK but really dumb action movie. (2/5)
Hulk Vs.: I appropriately watched this before an episode of Agents of SHIELD one week. About 60% of it is dedicated to Loki bringing Hulk to Asgard during the Odinsleep (when Odin is recharging like your iPhone) to rampage around while Thor tries to stop him with his hammer. The other 40% is dedicated to Hulk fighting Wolverine in the Canadian wilderness, though probably 50% of that 40% is actually focusing on Wolverine and the Weapons X project who want to use Hulk for their own ends. This really demonstrates how pointless the Hulk often is as the fights between him and Thor and Wolverine get pretty dull pretty quick because for the most part it's always going to be a stalemate. Really if you're going after the Hulk you should fight him with scented candles and Yanni music to cool his rage; hitting him with a hammer or stabbing him with claws just makes him angrier. Unfortunately he doesn't rip Wolverine in half like in the comics. Boring! (2/5)
Redemption (2012): This isn't your typical Jason Statham movie, though he does still kill plenty of people. Statham is a British soldier who's on the lam after going AWOL from Afghanistan. He's living on the streets with a girl named Isabel until Isabel's pimp catches up to her. Statham escapes the pimp's henchmen and crashes into a flat whose owner is conveniently gone for the summer. So hey, why not steal his identity, right? Especially since a new bank card is conveniently in the mail. Then he starts trying to get his life together and in the span of a couple of weeks goes from homeless to a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant to an enforcer for a Chinese gangster--talk about upward mobility! Along the way he tries to find out about Isabel with the help of a nun whose mobile kitchen he used to frequent. As the title suggests it's about him trying to redeem his life of bad choices. But it all comes down to a final choice between hanging out with the nun at the opera or getting revenge for Isabel. Which do you think he chooses? It's a little slow but better than your typical Statham fare like "Parker" and "The Transporter." Still probably not as good as "The Bank Job" or a couple of early Guy Ritchie movies. Statham seems like the British Nic Cage in that he's capable of doing better material but he has a really shitty eye for picking scripts. (3.5/5)
Erased: The start of this reminded me of "The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret" in that a guy (Aaron Eckhart) is recruited for a job overseas that turns out to be for a company that doesn't really exist. In this case it's far more sinister than comical when he goes into work with his daughter one morning to find everything (people, phones, computers, Post-It notes) vanished. All his bank records and personal records from that time are erased too. So to find out what's going on he basically does his Liam Neeson and goes around Belgium kicking people's asses. This is another of those pretty much straight-to-Redbox movies that's not bad if you like a cross between "Taken" and "The Bourne Identity." (3/5)
Assault on Wall Street: They probably take away your reviewer's card if you admit to liking a Uwe Boll movie. But wait, I only liked it for a really shallow reason! Boll's inadvertent genius was casting Erin Karpluk as the main character's wife and I had such a huge crush on her from watching this "Being Erica" show on CBC a couple years ago. (I think I made a couple of veiled references to it in my Wordpress blog back in the day.) How much of a crush? The young Sylvia in the Scarlet Knight books is pretty much modeled on her and so is the woman in my short story "Meet Cute." So when she's sick and dying in the movie I could totally feel the guy's frustration and rage. If I had a machine gun I might have run off to Wall Street for delusional vengeance. But if you don't have a huge crush on that chick then you might not feel the same way. Other than that it takes way too long to get up to the assaulting part of the movie. I mean well over an hour goes by before he starts on that. If you really, REALLY hate bankers then you might like this. I might have to take some points off because Boll didn't work in a gratuitous naked scene. C'mon it's R-rated, why not go for it!? (3/5)
(BTW, if you can ever get the chance go watch that "Being Erica" show. The first season was pretty cool. It was like "Quantum Leap" meets "My Name is Earl" as she gets to go back in time to right a list of various wrongs in her life. I had to buy it on DVD since I'm pretty sure you can't get it from Netflix and the like except maybe in Canada. I never watched the next season or two because everything seemed worked out pretty well in the first season, so why bother watching it unravel and then reravel again?)
Phantom: You know how in some Russian submarine movies like The Hunt for Red October they hire British actors to use their normal voices so they at least seem foreign or in others like K-19 The Widowmaker they have everyone do bad Russian accents? Well Phantom decides the hell with all that and just lets all the Americans talk like Americans even though they're playing Soviet submariners. That kind of lazy inattention to detail is compounded by the message at the end saying all the records on this story are still classified so who the fuck knows what really happened? The probably completely bogus story "inspired by real events" is one part Red October, one part K19, and one part Crimson Tide as a Russian sub captained by Ed Harris goes out to test a new "phantom" machine for confusing American subs and then gets taken over by David Duchovny as a Russian commando who wants to start WWIII. Appropriately later the night I watched this I caught the end of Dr. Strangelove on TCM which is a much better movie about crazy people trying to start a nuclear war. (2/5) (BTW, don't confuse this with The Phantom with Billy Zane as the 30s hero or with Phantoms, in which Affleck was the bomb.)
This is 40: This movie has some good bits, but at 133 minutes, it's much muuuuuuch too long. It rambles on and on and at the end we're not really any farther along than when we started. This was based on characters from "Knocked Up" which I watched only once, which was enough. At least this one doesn't have Seth Rogen in it; that would have only made it worse. It's another good object lesson on not working with your family; Apatow has his wife as the wife and his kids as the kids; if they had a dog it'd probably be his dog too. The older kid is OK but the younger one is worse than any of those kids on those AT&T commercials. Of course readers who are married and over 40 might get more from it than someone unmarried and not 40. (2.5/5)
Lovelace: A lot of movies I complain are too long (see above) but this one was actually too short. It seems like they skip over so much stuff and just give lip service (huh huh) to a lot of other stuff. It's the kind of dramatization where you'd probably be better served watching a real documentary. The story as presented is pretty cliche. Sort of naive young woman gets involved with older, abusive guy. Only instead of just knocking her around he forces her to make perhaps the most well-known porno ever. As for the sex there really isn't anything graphic actually depicted. Some nice boob shots, so that's something. (2/5)
This is the End: Like "This is 40" above it had some nice bits but was too long. Like the Ocean's movies it was probably more fun for the people making it because they could all hang out and get paid for it. For me it was less enjoyable. Too much time is spent in the house after the Rapture begins. The highlight of that is when they do most of the drugs and make a Sweded version of a "Pineapple Express 2" trailer. Once they start getting out of the house the plot begins to move again. But I have to say if Heaven involves smoking weed with Seth Rogen and spontaneously dancing to the Backstreet Boys then I'd volunteer to go to the other place. [Cue "Twilight Zone" guy saying, "This IS the other place! Hahahahahaha!"] (2.5/5)
The Place Beyond the Pines: I probably should have read more about this movie before I added it to my queue. It was really confusing. We start with Ryan Gosling as a carnie who rides a motorcycle in a metal cage until he finds out he knocked up Eva Mendes. Then he starts robbing banks. When he's busted by a rookie cop played by Bradley Cooper, it turns into a whole different movie about dirty cops. Then we skip forward 15 years so we can catch up with their kids, who are fucked up in different ways but then seem to become their fathers. It was really hard to follow the thread of the story since it seems like 3 different movies spliced together. (2/5)
Goosebumps: When I was browsing Netflix's Halloween channel I saw they had the old Goosebumps TV show based on those R.L. Stine books from the 90s. So I decided to watch a few episodes I remembered seeing back in the day. At best the show is like "The Twilight Zone" for 8-year-olds while at worst (far more frequent) it's completely nonsensical crap marred by acting and special effects much worse than anything on TZ back in 1959. One of the better episodes is basically a retread of a "Twilight Zone" episode where someone finds a magic lamp and gets 3 wishes that of course backfire. (This was also the basis of a Simpsons Halloween parody.) In this case a gawky teenage girl gets 3 wishes that go horribly wrong, like when she wishes to be the best player on her basketball team she's the only one who gets a basket in the whole game. And then the genie says, "What? You were the best player on the team!" The point being that you should never ever make a wish (or a deal with the devil) because it will always backfire. You really have to question the callousness of some of these characters like in that episode I mentioned, the girl's mortal enemy gets turned into a statue and she's like "Woo hoo!" and in another episode a boy accidentally alters history so his bratty sister disappears and then is like, "Meh. I'll fix it later." Anyway, if you need a nostalgia fix from the 90s there are better ways. (1/5)
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