I just watched Say Anything (the first of several movies in my queue that I’d label “classic teen movies I’ve never seen”).  I really liked it, but it made me end up feeling depressed, even though it ends up happy (if I just ruined the ending for you.. you should have watched it sixteen years ago).  It’s really because it made me think about how that 18-20 part of your life is so short and confusing and once it’s gone it’s gone.  And throughout a lot of the movie I was thinking about the lyrics to the Good Charlotte song “Say Anything,” a title which may or may not have been inspired by the movie, but the lyrics could have so easily been the voice of John Cusak’s character in the movie.  Anyway I guess I’m done with my comments on the movie.  I’m not sure if anyone else enjoys reading these types of posts..

Please don’t walk away,
I know you wanna stay
If you just give me a sign
Say anything, say anything

I just watched The Last Samurai.  I liked it a lot.  It was a little long.  I really liked the first part more than the ‘climax’ part.  Kinda like Pearl Harbor.  I would have liked it better as kind of an interesting documentary.  Well I say that, but if they had made it that way I’d be complaining about how it had no ending.

I find the feudal Japanese/samurai culture very fascinating.  I’m sure the movie isn’t 100% accurate, but still.  The whole thing of not being afraid to die- you don’t really have that in western cultures.  And the notion that suicide can be honorable- that’s a completely different concept (and it’s in a very different mindset from suicide bombing, in case my comments bring that to mind).

Anyway, that’s enough of my ranting about Japanese.  If you want to learn more, just pick up a copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III.

I just watched The Village for the first time since I saw it in theaters.  I still thought it was a really good movie.  I wanted to see it again to see if I missed anything obvious in the beginning.  It turns out I didn’t really.  I guess that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

Do your very best not to scream.

Last week was the annual beach trip with my family, and it was lots of fun as usual, except that we had huge jerks for neighbors.  This guy took down our volleyball net and threw it into the dunes about fifty feet down the beach.  I guess that story was more interesting if you were there than if you read it here.

We saw War Of The Worlds last week.  I have conflicting opinions about this movie.  My initial reaction was that I liked the movie and all the awesome special effects, but the ending was stupid.  Then I read an article that said that the ending was true to the book and “purposefully low-key.”  So maybe I can respect Spielberg’s decision to go with the stupid ending, which I hope wasn’t so stupid and anticlimactic in Wells’s book.  Regardless, I believe it would have been better if someone other than Tom Cruise had been chosen to play the main role.  He has that stupid grin on his face all the time.  It annoys me.  Not that I think he’s bad at everything he’s been in.  I just don’t like him so much in movies that aren’t supposed to be funny.

Today we declare our Independence Day!

So here’s an idea that I’ve had for quite a while.  Everyone I tell it too seems to think it’s at least a decent idea.

Why not make a prequel to Space Balls?  Call it something like “Space Balls: Episode -2”.  There should be a character who’s a spoof of Jar-Jar.  They should take a girl in sixth grade and spend about three hours teaching her how to use Maya and have her do all the animation for this character, so that it will look really bad (but on-purpose bad).  And the character should have some random accent.  And the Anakin-spoof character should be really whiny and stupid, and maybe handicapable.

Well I think that certainly a start to a decent movie plot.  If anyone is Mel Brooks’s cousin or something, give him my idea.  I’ll even provide it royalty free.

I haven’t posted in a while.. but I’ve got a couple of topics I’ve had in my head.

I guess I can start by saying that Stephanie and I have decided to do NetFlix.  We’re just gonna do it for the summer while all the tv shows we would otherwise watch are in reruns.  In case you’re not familiar with NetFlix, I’ll debrief you.  We pay $14.99/month.  We go on their website and add movies that we’d like to watch to our list.  They send us the first two movies on the list.  When we’re done watching them, we send the movies back.  Postage is paid for both ways by Netflix.  Once they get a movie back from us, they send out the next one on our list.  And it only takes a day to get a movie since one of their distribution centers is in Greensboro.  It’s a nice way for us to get movies that we have been wanting to see for a while.

On a related story, we watched Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow.  We were not particularly fond of the film.  It was super-long and s l o o o w w w.  It was kind of impressive because everything was shot in front of blue screens.  The only thing in any of the scenes that was not generated on a computer was the actors themselves.  But again, it’s hard to act in front of a blue screen and it shows.  The characters seem so monotonous and boring.  And of course Angelina Jolie is there to make the movie worse.  While her part was small and she may have done the best acting of anyone in that particular movie.. she just annoys me.  A lot.

perish every fond ambition

So this past weekend was interesting.  Stephanie’s big sister Emily and her husband Dustin came up from Florida to visit us.  We spent Saturday at Carowinds and nearly got into a fight!  We were in line for the Borg Assimilator (the newest ride==the longest line), and the ride broke down for the second time while we were in line, about three-fourths of the way through.  So we sat down on the ground (why bother standing when the line isn’t moving?).  A little while later three people walk up past us and stand in front of us.  We assume they are with the people in front of us and don’t really say anything.  But at some point it occurred to Dustin that these people didn’t know the people in front of them.  So asks “do you know them?”  They all just kinda shook their heads and Dustin says “Why don’t you guys go back where you came from.”  Well that did nothing, and then the girl (it was two guys and a girl) gets on her cell phone and starts talking about us very loudly.  She felt that passing us was justified because we “weren’t moving.”  Nevermind that the ride was broken down and the line wasn’t moving at all.  Apparently we are supposed to be pressed fully against the people in front of us.  Next Dustin gets in front of them and says “you guys weren’t moving” and then the girl shoves him pretty hard.  At this point Emily jumps out of line and runs up to the station and yells “We need security, there’s about to be a fight in the line!”  So a park employee guy comes and the girl tries to say they didn’t do anything, but everyone else that they passed spoke up and said that wasn’t true.  Then she tries to tell the guy how we weren’t moving so they had a right to pass us.  When given the option of going back to where they were in line or getting ejected from the park, they chose the former.  Afterwards they continued to talk about us loudly enough that we could still hear them.  She said Dustin was on her “hitlist”.  What was frightening was that they ended up on the same train as us.  But fortunately all they did was stare at us as we walked down the ramp after the ride.

In an unrelated topic, I saw the new Star Wars movie this weekend.  I borrowed episodes one and two from someone at work last week and watched them before seeing the movie, since I haven’t seen either since they were in the theaters.  I still thought episode one was completely terrible.  And I still thought episode two was pretty good.  And I was very impressed with episode three.  Judging solely by Maddox’s comments on the movie (don’t click if you haven’t seen it!), I think other people must have liked it too (I could look for reviews to see if that’s true but I don’t feel like doing that..).  He didn’t like it, but he also doesn’t like any of the Star Wars or Lord Of The Rings movies, and disliking stuff is kind of his thing so his opinion isn’t all that relevant.  The acting still wasn’t that great, and I think I know why:  it takes a better director than George Lucas to get people to act like they’re not in front of a blue screen when in fact they are.  I’ve seen Garden State so I know that Natalie Portman is a better actress than that.  Not that it involved blue screens.  I thought they did a good job with the story, especially given all the constraints that the script was under in order to be consistent with the other five movies.  Anakin’s path to the dark side seemed plausible enough to me.  I would discuss more but I won’t in case you haven’t seen it yet.

Oh yeah, today is June First.  Happy Gay Pride Month!

The wedding is close now.  So close I can represent the number of days remaining with one base-ten digit (9).  And that’s pretty close.  We had our last wedding shower this past weekend, and now it’s all just last-minute rushing to get things done.  I’ve noticed that people who have gotten married tend to say things like “don’t stress out, at the end of the day you’ll be married and the things that go wrong are just the funny stories you can tell for the rest of your life”, while people who haven’t say things like “you should have done ____ instead of ____.”  We also got our new bed delivered yesterday.  It’s very big.  The matress is fifteen inches thick because it has a pillow top thing on it.  That makes it so that when you lay down you feel like you’re being eaten by a cloud (that’s a good thing).  It seems like there was something else I was going to talk about in my post besides wedding stuff, but I don’t quite remember.

Oh yes, a movie review.  Stephanie and I went to see Hitch on Sunday.  Hitch is a romantic comedy, and follows the formula very closely.  Let’s just say you’re not gonna walk out of the theater saying “Holy crap!  I didn’t see that coming!”  Within the confines of the genre it was quite average.  I still think Adam Sandler does the best romantic comedies I’ve seen.  Keeping in mind that it was what it claimed to be but nothing more, I’d give it about a five.

So this was an uneventful post.  Bummer dude.  You’ve just wasted five minutes of your life.  Better luck next time.

This past weekend was pretty busy.  I completed a lap of the North Carolina 350 - a round trip from Charlotte to Durham to Raleigh to Laurinburg and back to Charlotte, totaling approximately 350 miles.  I was in Durham/Raleigh for my pre-wedding get-together-with-male-friends (that Stephanie has agreed to not be upset about as long as it is not called by its traditional name).  There are pictures on Garrison’s site, I’ll let you find them yourself if you know where they are.  I’m the one in the red shirt that’s not drinking.

The night before that I went to see Constantine with Garrison and Tim.  From the previews I expected it to be pretty crappy.  I was pleasantly surprised.. I’d say it’s about a five out of ten.  Not really that great, but not as bad as I was expecting.  It’s based on a comic book apparently.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the original Constantine, he was the first Christian emperor of Rome, and he officially converted Rome to Christianity.  John Constantine (the movie’s main character) fights demons, so I guess that makes sense.  The movie just kinda dragged on in some parts, and didn’t really keep me fully entertained.  It also reminded me of some parts of Dogma, and makes me wonder if Kevin Smith (who is a big comic book fan) might have been influenced by the comic book.  In particular the line from an angel about how all humans can get into heaven simply by asking forgiveness, whereas fallen angels (aka demons) must suffer eternally for rebelling against God.. that’s in both movies and could be a coincidence perhaps, but it seemed like an odd coincidence to me.

I could ramble on about yet another wedding shower that I attended over the weekend, but I think I’ll spare you of that because it’s probably a pretty boring read.  Suffice it to say, we got lots of nice gifts most of which will be used and appreciated far more by Stephanie than by me.

Ya know the devil was an angel too

I apparently pulled a Rathergate in my last post by reporting false information about the movie Darkness.  Not the part where I said it sucked though, because it was a really horrible movie.  But Garrison corrected me on my reference to a thirteen-year-old actress:  as it turns out, Anna Paquin was at least eighteen when the movie was made, probably nineteen or twenty.  You probably know her as Rogue in X-Men and X2.  Regardless, her character in Darkness couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old, and her performance was horrible, although that may have had just as much to do with bad direction.  In another scandal, I reported that the original Spanish movie was released in Spain in 2002 and redone for American audiences for 2004 release.  Actually, that was only half true.  The movie was released in Spain in 2002, and then released in America in 2004.  But the original film was also in English, and there was no remaking of the film.  The only change to the American version is that they edited a little to get a PG-13 rating (I’m guessing that’s where the really out-of-place uses of the word “freaking” came from).  So there was no translation for something to get lost in.  The movie just sucked in every country.

Speaking of thirteen year olds, I rented the movie Thirteen last night at Garrison’s recommendation.  I thought it was well done, but not one that I’d really want to own.  To summarize, it’s about a girl in seventh grade who becomes rebellious when she starts hanging out with a different group of friends.  Of course there’s a lot more to it than that.  The movie was co-written by Nikki Reed, one of the two leading actresses, and is semi-autobiographical (although, if I understand IMDB correctly, the character she plays is not the one that represents herself).  More than anything it made me appreciate the family I had and the decisions I made in my life.  And it makes me think back to middle/high school and the things that people thought were so important then and the social groups that formed and in retrospect it was all so stupid and meaningless.  It’s like that song “Hold On”, one of Good Charlotte’s best ones, about teenage suicide.  Of all the times in your life to commit suicide, during your teenage years would be the worst possible choice I could think of.  I mention this because the main character attempts suicide in the movie, or she cuts her wrists anyway, I guess her intent was suicide but I’m not sure since I’ve never been a wrist-cutter myself.  But what I’m saying is that the movie made me remember times, probably around sixteen or seventeen, when life seemed pretty depressing (although it was never so bad that suicide was a possibility), and now, at twenty-three, I realize almost everything that I cared about didn’t really matter.  The line from that song I was thinking about is “Hold on, if you feel like letting go, hold on, it gets better than you know.”  Now I’ve gone and gotten all serious.  I just wanted to say it’s an interesting movie that somehow I could sort of relate to my life even though I was never a teenage girl and I never attempted suicide or did drugs or got piercings or hung out with people who did.

Before I go, I think I’ll share a strange dream I had last night.  Garrison and I were going to New York City again for some reason, and we were at the airport and got separated and somehow I ended up near the front of the plane and he was somewhere near the back.  I was seated next to a lady who was super scared to fly, which made me seem pretty calm (and Garrison can tell you that I was quite a bit nervous about airplaning until a good ten or fifteen minutes after we took off).  So anyway we took off but did not immediately gain altitude.  After about two minutes I looked out the window and we were surrounded by trees that were just about at wing height.  This made me a little nervous.  Then the plane started tilting and I closed my eyes and the lady beside me grabbed my arm and I remember feeling the plane rolling completely over (now that I think about it, maybe I was rolling over in bed at the time, haha), and then I heard tree limbs scraping by the windows, and then the next thing I knew I woke up (in the dream) and I was on the back porch of my parents’ house and it was dark and I didn’t know how I got there or why I was sleeping on the porch (we took off in the day from Raleigh).  Then I got up and went to the back door and everyone was up, and I looked at a clock and it was 6:30 am and I didn’t understand why everyone was up.  And apparently no one knew why I was in Newton, and they asked me why I wasn’t in New York and I said nonchalantly “I was in a plane wreck” and they nonchalatntly said “oh, that’s too bad.”  Then Garrison showed up later and was like “Dude, where’d you go??” and I said “...the plane crashed...then I woke up here...” and he was like “you should have stayed” and said something about how he got lots of free stuff in NYC because he had been in a plane crash or something.  And that’s about where my recollection of the dream ends.

The aeroplane flies high
Turns left
Looks right