My Real Life

Gacked from smeddley:

1. Reply to this post with "UNICORNS", and I will pick five of your icons.
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon glee.

( The icons she chose: )

Happy 18th birthday, my dearest Pattycakes. I never loved autumn until the day you were born.

Went to see "Salt" last night - fun, if a little goofy, but more on that later, because the big news of the evening was OH MY GOD THEY'RE MAKING A MOVIE VERSION OF "THE GREEN HORNET" OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!!!!!

*swoons*

The best part of this awesome revelation was that it caught me totally by surprise; I had just sat through the most boring pre-preview program ever (you know the ones I mean; "First Look" or "The Twenty" or similar lead-ins, crammed with insipid advertising and "behind the scenes" promos of TV series you would never want to watch anyway - I'd really rather watch the slideshow of local business advertisments because at least they're set to classical music at a reasonable volume ...), so I wasn't paying attention to the screen so much as I was balancing my coffee cup and trying to open my jumbo box of Milk Duds. Then this movie preview comes on, which I'm watching with only one eye because the presence of Seth Rogan queued my knee-jerk "boy movie = ignore" reflex. Then I saw this handsome Asian man, and thought for a second that he was John Cho, which got more of my attention, then I saw a secret closet with a shitload of weapons, and before I could put two and two together, that gorgeous gleaming Black Beauty came spinning up out of the cellar floor and I spilled coffee on my hand (thank God for sippy lids or all 16 steaming hot ounces of it would have been in my lap) as I jumped up in my seat and pointed a shaking finger at the screen and croaked, "Oh my God ... it's the Green Hornet ..." to the delight of every other nerdy moviegoer who had already figured it out. Then I commenced to flop bonelessly back in my seat just in time to see the double Tommy guns pop out of Black Beauty's hood which just about sent me into fibrillations. I mean, Jesus. I feel like hiking into the Colorado Rockies and freezing myself in a snowdrift to make time pass faster, like Eric Cartman did when he couldn't wait three months for the Wii to come out. How am I going to make it to January? I just do not know.

Oh yeah, and "Salt". Enjoyable but not enough to inspire a full-fledged movie review, so just little bits and pieces to follow:

- My perennial gripe about movie hair. I've said it before and I'll say it again; if they could give Orlando Bloom a perfectly natural-looking blonde 'do in "Lord of the Rings", why the hell can't they give Angelina Jolie a wig that doesn't look like she bought her hair at WalMart? The only hairstyle she had in the whole movie that looked halfway natural was the short little man-do at the end of the movie. Every other scene made me want to snatch her wig off and swat flies with it.

- Er ... the CIA cannot do what people seem to think it can do. We are still training polygraph examiners to hook up electrodes and breath tubes and read charts the old-fashioned way; we cannot sit in a darkened room and read people's brain waves through a ceiling-mounted MRI camera. Just saying.

- SPOILER ALERT!!! Why didn't Salt just wait for the President to wake up in the hospital and finger the real assassin? Why did Peabody have to realize the truth from that ridiculous text message ("Salt's fingerprints found on barge", or somesuch twaddle), when it would have taken weeks to process that filthy ship with a dozen dead bodies strewn around, and weeks more to get any latent hits back from the lab? Again, the CIA cannot do ... oh, never mind.

- Did she ever get that bullet taken out of her hip? No? I didn't think so.

- And why didn't they find her at the hotel after she used the stolen credit card? THAT we can do! And pretty quickly too.

All moaning aside, it was a cool movie with great stunts and a nice retro Cold War plotline with sexy Russians dropping out of the sky every time you turn around. And, not to be missed by younger viewers, a pleasing representation of women in law enforcement and intelligence; think the transit cop on the subway, the SWAT officer searching Salt's apartment, and the Director of the CIA, among many others. Not so long ago, Hollywood wouldn't have bothered with these small but satisfying details.

And finally, I cannot be the only straight woman with a huge crush on Angelina Jolie. I just can't.

How I've evaded Child Protective Services this long, I'll never know. Behold, the meager, nutritionally devoid meal I almost served to my sweet, trusting children:



How to make this horrid repast even marginally healthy and palatable?!? Wait, I know!!



There! All better!

Gacked from sarin_siamese - thanks!

You Are a Crane

You are smart and focused. You love to take on responsibilities and challenges. You are loyal and devoted to those you love - and you'll do about anything to protect them. You need to be able to concentrate fully in order to get things done. You aren't great at multitasking. You have amazing endurance. Once you get started on something difficult, you'll finish it no matter what.

... when you've got "The Karate Kid"?

No movie review yet because I'm just too blown away. I cried so hard the tears ran down into my BRA, for Christ's sake!

Went out last night to see "Clash of the Titans"! A full-blown movie review is NOT called for in this case (as the masses cry, "Woe!" ;D ) because there isn't enough new material to analyze. Suffice it to say (NO spoilers!) that it is a more than fitting tribute to the original, with its relentlessly cheesy dialog and non-sequitur plot elements and overall boomer-era fantabulousness. I predict that no one under the age of 45 will get the movie; IMDb reviews already indicate this, with fan reviews pegging at either "Loved it!" or "Wha ...?" depending, I postulate, on the age of the reviewer and whether or not they remember the 1981 original.

Well, OK, a couple of near-spoilers; the Greek mythology is even more savagely distorted in this version than in the original (don't get me wrong; this is not a detriment, but quite the opposite!), the characterizations are completely one-dimensional (again, NOT a negative!), and the special effects oscillate wildly between "Look what we can so with the latest in computer graphics!" and "Smear some Vaseline on the lens to make Zeus' armor gleam!" with not a lot in between. DO NOT MISS the lightning-on-the-sea sequences, which are DELIBERATELY (I'm sure of it) crafted to evoke the shoestring production budget effects of yore. My only butthurt was Perseus' short-cropped hair; a Harry Hamlin-esque 'do would have made me happier, but I grew up in the '70s worshipping big hair, so there you go. Overall a fabulous experience, especially after a turtle sundae and a Margarita at dinner beforehand.

I find myself gravitating away from shonen and toward shojo manga; my recent favorites are "Otomen" and "Captive Hearts", if you can believe that (although I'm still holding out for "Claymore" and "Vampire Knight", the recent blood-n-gore quotient of which tips it from shojo to shonen, IMHO). Not sure why this is - I don't usually go for the girly stuff, and I still can't sit through a theater preview for a romantic comedy without squirming and hiding my eyes ("Letters to Juliet" and "Dear John" in the same day, oh God, I thought I was gonna die!).

But I've always needed my romance filtered; my greatest love story of all time is "Wall-E", and Nicholas Sparks makes me vomit. Maybe it's the comic-y dissociativeness (is this a word?) of manga that makes the romantic aspects more palatable. In any case, I can't resist "Otomen" and if anyone is looking for a sweet (yet feminist!) and really funny shojo manga, this is it.

Movie review: "Daybreakers"
Rating: B-

Summary: interesting concept but lazy and relentlessly cliched execution. I mean really. Vampires take over the world (COOL!), complete with special cars and walkways and coffee shops and stuff - OK, great. But why, barely 10 years in the future, do the humans dress pretty much the same as we do now, but the vampires smoke like chimneys and affect a 40's noir look? Is it part of having yellow eyes and fangs, this fondness for retro? And just what do all these wealthy, stylish vampires do for a living, now that agriculture is (I assume) almost totally irrelevant and the human population, now their most precious commodity (next to wool and silk for those fierce "Project Runway" outfits of theirs), is dwindling?

Speaking of the human population dwindling, you would think that with the technology available, some smart vampire farmer would be setting aside healthy human specimens with which to replenish the stock, instead of just sucking them all dry and discarding their prematurely withered corpses. But who has time to practice artificial insemination when you're busy shopping for a fedora and spats?

And I find it really hard to believe that Ethan Hawke can just pop on some sunglasses and a fedora (HAR!) and stand under a tree at noon on a sunny day and just be perfectly fine. If this were true, he wouldn't need all the fancy-schmancy daylight-driving features on his Charger (product placement, anyone?) - all he'd need is some really strong window tinting, and on cloudy days he wouldn't even need that ... *tsk*

And while we're on the subject of Ethan Hawke, someone needs to tell him that he is at that age where he cannot be considered one of the Beautiful People unless he starts paying more attention to his grooming. In your 20's you can do that bedhead and weekend scruff shit and still look hot. But once you're *ahem* 39, without a shave and a decent haircut you look more hobo than hot.

But it was a vampire movie, after all, and therefore could never be really bad. I liked the opening; human psyche + vampire immortality = some really messed up heads, yo. And I liked the ending; there's hope, but man, it's pretty scant. And I don't know what it says about me that I really dig the gratuitous blood-n-gore and the absence of romance (sorry, the hand-holding between Ed and his human squeeze just doesn't count as "romance", thank God). So better than "Twilight", if only because I could at least stand to hear the actors talk to one another, and there was plenty of killin's and beheadin's and such.

Movie: New Moon
Rating: C+

Well.

Just ... well.

With the understanding that I cannot ever hate anything that has vampires and werewolves in it, and confessing that I did see this movie twice because I thought the concepts were so cool ...

... about the best thing I have to say about "New Moon" is that it wasn't quite as bad as "Twilight". The vampires' hair and makeup were better (marginally; at least Carlisle looked better, and actually quite cute, but Jasper and *shudder* Rosalie still looked like refugees from The Rocky Horror Picture Show dance finale), at least from the neck up, but will someone tell me why on earth they let Robert Pattinson's body makeup actually wear off in the topless huggie-huggie scene under the clock tower.

And Jacob's pre-phase hair weave was just gross. Why couldn't they have given him something that actually looked like hair? Orlando Bloom's 'do in LoTR comes to mind as the industry standard for hawt guy long hair; did someone lose the secret formula? Jeezus.

And these are just the mechanical issues; the screenplay (as in the original) was the movie's core deficiency. Bella's character was, if possible, even more unappealing this time around; I hated her almost as soon as the movie started. Her sulky grudging 'tude upon receiving birthday presents from her father (still my favorite character, BTW, and not just because he's a cop) made me want to slap her right between the eyes, and this was the movie's opening sequence, hello. And it just got worse from there. Throw in the almost-romance with Jacob (editoral note: Woman, are you blind and crazy? What the fuck are you doing stringing that steaming young hunkatoid along until your anerotic loser heartthrob deigns to let you in his life again? If Taylor Lautner were leaning in my truck window begging me to be his lover, I tell you what, it'd be like, "Edward who?") and we have sunk to new depths of self-absorption and synthetic angst. Each and every opportunity to take a lighthearted teen experience and morph it into a tortured wallow-fest was exploited until I wanted to call Mobile Crisis on the lot of them.

With one glowing exception. The encounter with the vision of Edward under the lake was perfect. I don't know why this scene got to me when I had so little patience with the overwrought imagery throughout the rest of the movie, but something about those two gorgeous young people suspended together in the icy depths, together yet apart, longing for death and each other, and the despair of returning to life alone, hit exactly the right notes and I found myself getting weepy ("Stop it, Mom!" hissed Pattycakes, who now, as before, was unwillingly and complainingly dragged along as my beard so that people wouldn't think that a 45-year-old woman grooves on teen vampire flicks).

And one last horrid little oversight (please God, let it have been an oversight); from the scene where Bella dives into the water, until the climactic fight scene with the Volturi (which according to the movie's own timeline, occurs three days later), Bella is wearing the. Same. Shirt. Oh GROSS since when do you let a soaking wet shirt dry on your body and then wear it for three straight days? Couldn't Alice have lent her something to wear that didn't stink of fish poo? What, they could steal a bright yellow sportscar to go thundering across the Italian countryside, but they can't boost a blouse from Walmart? Christ. When Marcus intoned, "Let us bring an end to this," I had to agree.

But you know I'm going to get it on DVD as soon as it comes out. I just can't help myself!

Much shoveling and housecleaning, in lieu of normal weekend activities. And eating. LOTS of eating. And watching television and playing video games. Why do people hate snow so much?

The people who write captions for lolcats are way, way funnier than the people who write captions for loldogs.

This is not to say that I, consumed by resentment and demotivation, wasted 40 minutes of City time abusing our electronic communications policy by farting around on http://icanhascheezburger.com/ when I should have been working. No, not at all ...

... are these shit links in my posts? Why are certain words linking me to crappy little popups advertising crappy craps? JESUS FUCK if this is some bullshit of Internet Explorer's "upgrade" (with which I was none too goddamn taken in the first place, thankyouverygoddamnmuch) I will drive out tonight and buy a goddamn Mac. Fuckwits!

Gacked from hazumuchan, who always has the best shit ...<3

Your results:
You are Spock

Spock 90% Jean-Luc Picard 85% Worf 80% Will Riker 75% Data 73% James T. Kirk (Captain) 60% Uhura 50% Geordi LaForge 50% Mr. Scott 45% Mr. Sulu 40% Beverly Crusher 40% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 30% Chekov 10% Deanna Troi 10% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 10%

You are skilled in knowledge and logic. You believe that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. ETA: AND YOU ARE A SEXY BEAST!!!!

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Test

... by "Star Trek" last night. Oh. My. God. Going to see it in IMAX next weekend whatever it costs. Oh my fucking God.

... but one you've got so many real-life friends that you have to watch what you say, it gets a little dull. And when people who hated you in high school actually track you down and want to be friends, it gets downright scary. I'll use it to keep in touch with family and that's probably about it.

So enough RL schmutz - time for a movie review!

Movie:"Watchmen"
Rating: C+

As a fan of the original comic books graphic novel when it first came out (yes, I am OLD!), I would have liked the movie better had it deviated from the comic in certain critical areas, and had it NOT deviated from the comic in one extremely critical area ...

1. It was the height of creative laziness to copy the screenplay almost verbatim from the comic panels; I have no idea whether the movie even made any sense to anyone who hadn't read the comic, since much of the background information was originally conveyed in extra panels simulating book reviews, newpaper articles, and other little blurbs that didn't port over to the movie (the dialog in some places should have been incomprehensible if you didn't have that background information).

2. The comic came out in 1986/1987, and was sexist at that time, let alone now. I mean, please. Can we get the girls some armor too, since they're at least theoretically superheroes as well, instead of parading them around in flimsy latex and S&M fetishist getups? Or come to think of it, since the primary function of Silk Spectres I and II was to satisfy the lusts of whichever Watchman qualified as the Alpha male at any particular point in time, why not leave them in their pinup clothes and their improbable, so-not-battle-ready hairdos. Why the fuck not.

3. And the rape scene was just plain offensive (as it had been in the comic as well). Here we have a superhero, understandably overpowered by a male counterpart and beaten to the point of surrender BUT NOT TO THE POINT OF DEATH. So why, sweet Jesus WHY, once the rest of the Minutemen intervened and beat the crap out of the Comedian, didn't Sally Jupiter turn herself around and put her stiletto heel right through that rapist bastard's eye? Why did she just lie there facedown on the table, gasping, with her ass still stuck out fetchingly, while Hooded Justice took care of her light work for her? The Comedian certainly put up a hell of a fight until Adrian ultimately punched his ticket in the opening scene; so why do we still expect our female heroes to submit until they're rescued? Shit shit shit.

4. And again, as in the comic, the relationship between Dr. Manhattan and Janey Slater was brainlessly, paradoxically sexist. Here we have a quantum universe-inhabiting, hairless, eyeless, emotionless, naked blue electro-freak, who decides that he's too good for his still-human partner after her years of loyal devotion to him because she is, at 38 years of age, "getting older". And he replaces her with a pubescent Laurie Jupiter because he likes the way she puts her tongue in his mouth. Puh-lease.

5. Speaking of Laurie Jupiter, what a fucktard. The world is about to be annihilated in a giant nuclear fireball of mutually assured destruction, and she's on the Martian surface crying her mascara off because the Naked Blue Electro-freak just told her that the the Comedian is her father. I think that the revelation of her paternity, given the circumstances at that point, should easily have qualified as "Who the fuck cares when we're all about to die" material, but why behave like a hero when you can wallow in your archetypical overemotional femininity, all the while wearing latex? Just saying.

6. And finally, this was supposed to be "Watchmen", not "Independence Day". The original comic ended on a horrifically Machiavellian note, while the movie adaptation conveniently skirted Alan Moore's dark anti-government parable in favor of a kinder, gentler future vision. Bullshit. The power of the comic lay in its pro-anarchy message, which was neutered for a squeamish post-9/11 American audience. But we'll keep all the sexist bits in so we can say we remained true to the comic. Uber-bullshit.

Yes, there were some good parts. Laurie and Dan kicking ass in the alley, Rorschach kicking ass in prison, and any scene featuring the perfectly-cast Adrian Veidt (except for the fake assassination attempt scene, in which he inexplicably loses his nondescript Western European accent and starts saying "wanna" and "dunno" - why didn't the editors catch that?). But the stupid parts way outnumbered the smart ones, and - hel-LO! - "Hallelujah" is a SAD song and shouldn't have been used as the soundtrack for Laurie and Dan's scrumpfest on the Archimedes. Little dumb oversights like that make me absolutely crazy. Again, just saying.

Working my way down the WIP list, slowly but surely ...

( I bring you gloves! )

I would seriously like to thank that Goddess on Earth who invented The Magic Loop. If I had to do two gloves on double-pointed needles I would never have gotten past the wrist ribbing.

Cross-posted to craft_crazy for the January monthly challenge (yes, I'm a LITTLE behind ... !)

I finally ponied up for a spinning class (after receiving a wheel as a gift in 2006!) because it was evident that I'd never get up the nerve to learn on my own (especially not after my traumatic encounter with the Drop Spindle of Doom ... ). I'm so glad that I signed up, because after two lessons I'm really enjoying it! Picspam below ...
( Handspun samples under the cut ... )
The skein on top was spun after my first class, and the bottom skein after the second. My teacher is GREAT!

The fiber is BFL top from Woodland Woolworks; the colorway is "Moulin Rouge". Spun on my aptly named Ashford Joy.

Cross-posted to lookwhatimade

I have discovered the meaning of love, and it is "Speed Racer" in Blu-Ray.

Movie: The Day the Earth Stood Still
Rating: ... wut?

I don't see how I could be expected to concentrate on meaningless trivia like plot, character development, and special effects in the face of such an overwhelming distraction, to wit: Jennifer Connelly's ugly-ass scarf. Uninspiring stitch pattern, vomitrocious colorway, gauge-busting crocheted ends (probably in "Moda Dea" eyelash yarn from the 1/2 price sale bin at Michael's), that thing was a TOTAL disaster and she wore it for the whole damn movie. Even when she took off her jacket she wore the stupid scarf. It was so ugly it made me want to throw my eyeballs at it. When the Feds took her into custody for aiding Klaatu's escape they should have taken her scarf and thrown it in the flash chamber with Gort and incinerated it.

( I'm blind! BLIND, I tell you!!! )

And oh yeah, the flick warn't bad ... ;)