Greyhound Proposal

Uhhh...really?  We have to get a thing passed to make it so greyhounds don't spend more than 18 hours day in a crate?!?!  What the hell?  They do now?!  Animal racing is such a fucked up thing, I can't believe its 2008 and we do this shit.  Build a robot to race or something, fuck.

Watchmen

So I saw the trailer for Watchmen before batman.  I've been pretty ambivilent about the movie, I don't see how it can possibly do the book right.  I mean, Watchmen is, like, literary.  Time or someone named it one of the 100 most significant works of fiction of the past however many years.  It's dense, its complicated, tell ya the truth, it was too much for me.  I'm excited to read it a second time around before the movie comes out just so I can understand it better.  It's very meta, or post-modern, or whatever, its aware of its environment.  And so much of what came after it is aware of it.  I can't imagine them making a movie that matches its depth.  The trailer did look really good, though, in just a dramatic eye candy kind of way.  Come to find out, there is an extraordinary amount of scene-to-scene faithfulness (think 300 or Sin City) to the comic.  Which brings me to my point: this comparison by Major Spoilers is totally cool.

Movie Reviews @ The Temple

Wanted - First of all, this movie is fantastic, just crazy ass gun battles and shooting and blood and bang bang fun.  There are some absurdly cool fights and general badassery.  Just the fight toward the end inspired by the big fight in the comic is worth the price of admission, just great.  Unfortunately, it makes no sense at all.  You really have to turn off the disbelief switch.  I mean, the conceit of the world is just retarded.  Bendy bullets, infinite health, broken physics, it's all there.  This would all be fine if they were just superheroes, dust your hands, problem solved.  But its explained away like if we all just breathed really fast and/or had a neurological disorder we could do it too, 's dumb.  It's nothing like the novel, which isn't necessarily a flaw, just what it is.  It shares the first 10 and last 2 minutes of the comic, and the theme presented there (i.e. your life sucks, go fuck yourself), but everything else besides names is new.  That's ok, I guess, but I would have loved to see the horrible world where villains are in charge and the heroes are all dead or irrelevant, it was so great in the comic.  There are lots of small things that fail, some of the dialogue is pathetic, but there are also little bits of cleverness, or background moments I liked.  Over all though, forget the book, turn off your brain, and this movie is teh awesomeness.

Wall-E - Awwww, so adorable!  Really really wonderful.  No surprise, Pixar is amazing, they are amazing at what they do.  The movie is charming and cute and has some nice little lessons for all the kids watching, and evne the adults I guess!  It's very touching.  I mean, it's a straightforward story, but it's very sweet and makes you wanna cry!  Or at least me anyway.  Bee tee dubs, I hear a lot of people are complaining that the movie is preachy about the environmental/healthy morals.  That's bullshit.  I didn't find it preachy at all, they didn't even overtly SAY anything, they just presented a super exaggerated future.  To my view, the only people who are upset about this shit are people who are insecure about their own fat asses and shitty environmental decisions and get offended when anyone calls them on it, so fuck them.  Anyway :)  There's not really much else to say about it, it's not exactly underpublicized.  I don't know if it's my favorite pixar movie, but incredibles and ratatouille and this are all in the same league.  It really only has one fault: STARS DON'T TWINKLE WITHOUT ATMOSPHERE.

Hellboy 2 - Yikes, this movie was bad.  It's sad, cuz I was actually really looking forward to it.  But the writing is just god awful.  Right from the beginning with the stupid young hellboy thing, it was just dumb.  The beginning also had the best part of the movie, the puppet scene, which was just nice to see in an artistic kind of way.  So I had hope!  The acting was decent with what they had, and the art/directorial style is as cool as you would expect (though the troll marketplace felt kind of like the star wars cantina).  But then it was just not very good.  The whole relationship was badly written, the awful german character, the bumbling jeffery tambor, it was all bad.  And the action, while fun, just wasn't half good enough to justify the other stupidness, I'm afraid.  Worst of all, the had plenty of opportunity to make due with their own bad writing, because they have a wise cracking sarcastic lead character!  All you have to do is have him make fun of your own silly genre tropes, and you've got me laughing instead of sighing.  But instead, he just gives lame jokes and then he cries.  boo.  There was one genuinely funny scene (though it was slapstick) and a few cool visual scenes.  But besides that, there's really nothing here.

The Dark Knight - Well fuck me this was as awesome as everyone said.  A small caveat: I didn't think the first one was so great.  It was very good, but I didn't crap my pants.  I didn't like the quick cut darkness of the action.  I know they pretend that's cuz he's sneaky batman, but I say it's acutally cuz its hard to film cool action scenes where you can see shit, it's cheating.  Plus katie holmes = boo.  but it was still a good origin story kinda movie with a decent villain.  Dark Knight, however, is in a totally differnet category.  I've heard it compared to Heat, which I really have to go watch now.  It's just an amazing masterpiece of cop vs. robber.  And even though a lot of hte joker's gambits are kind of obvious, you still totally believe that people would act like they did and fall into them.  The action is pretty good (not so quick cut dark), the movie looks great.  Bale is good, although his batman voice is just stupid.  I got so sick of not understanding people in this movie cuz they think talking low and gravely = big and scarey.  It doesn't, guys, it just means you have either the sniffles or throat cancer.  But I'm getting off track.  The movie is fantastic, Heath Ledger blows you away.  I wish there wasnt' all the stupid real life drama cuz I'd love to see a comic book movie get a legitimate oscar.  Not only does Ledger do an amazing job, the joker is written, directed and filmed so amazingly, its scary.  I'm not even a big batman guy, but he embodies the spirit of the real joker from the books more than any other person on film.  Not only him, but the batman/joker relationship, its perfect.  Everyone does a good job, really, Dent's transformation is great, the Joker's history is handled great.  And, here's bonus points for a comic book movie, the writing is pretty tight.  There's not too much wasted energy for a kinda long movie.  There were a couple instances where I rolled my eyes at some blabbing that didn't need to be there, but mostly it was really well done.  One other thing that annoys me, though.  People are talking about this movie like it's so deep.  It's not!  It does great things, joker's "social experiments" are awesome and clever, but they aren't breaking new sociological ground.  What's cool is to see them dramatized in a way that makes you feel the fear of living in a place like gotham. That is fantastic and awesome.  But its not a philisophical masterpiece, so calm down and read a book.  Anwyay, off track again,.  This is the best superhero movie ever made.  Spiderman was amazing cuz no one had ever done it well.  X-men was amazing cuz no one had done it with an ensemble.  This is amazing because its an amazing movie.  So, thumbs up, aces plus, awesome.

Golden Shellback

Holy crap this is so cool.  They vacuum sputter your electronics with some kinda clear plastic or I dunno what.  But then it can go underwater or get spilled on and be fine!  Tekzilla had videos of cell phones running underwater and pouring a glass of water over the keyboard of a laptop.  SO COOL.

Tutoring Scam

Ha!  We all know about the african prince scam, yeah?  and then there were some offshoots of less ridiculous sums.  But now, apparently they are specifically targetting college tutors.  haha!  B got the email referenced in this link in the mail the other day.  an african scam (I don't know if he's supposed to be african, but the email is in broken english and his last name is a kenyan city) aimed at tutors where you get paid through the silly fake check.  I dunno, It's so weird to target such a small group of people!

Lion Cub Hug

So, this is retardedly cute.  It's misleadingly cute, of course.  I thought it might be hoax, but it appears to be real.  But the lion was in a sanctuary and saw humans all the time.  They played the lion lottery and won, but just as likely could have gotten their face eaten off, which is exactly what happened to a chef at that santuary killed by the Born Free lion.  The news story is actually more interesting than the video, sad too.

Vegan Pirates

I didn't mention this during the first couple posts, I thought it might be lame, but it has really gotten kind of cool.  The idea is these vegan freaks are stalking illegal whaling boats in the australian/antarctic seas.  According to this crazy UN charter, ANYone is allowed to fuck with illegal poachers.  Fuck with includes film, report, stand in the way of, and BREAK THEIR SHIT as long as they are in unprotected waters (which is where they are doing this poaching anyway).  It's freaking fantastic, in the most recent post they caught up with them and threw acid on their decks!  It's one of those things you wish people would do cuz the governments won't and it's so cool!

Stop Motion Spaghetti

Super cute.