seryn

Watched Knight and Day. It has Tom Cruise (who obviously dyes his hair now) and Cameron Diaz (who, shockingly, looks less like Kermit the Frog than usual).

I enjoyed the movie a lot. The plot almost made sense, which for an action movie is unusual, and you could sort of see how they got to the point they were at.

But what made it the most enjoyable was that the dialogue was witty.

Some negatives. 1) lame premise... car parts in Kansas? Really? Cameron Diaz?
2) Cameron Diaz suddenly knows how to shoot accurately after flailing 2 scenes ago despite no reason for her to have improved and spending the previous half of the movie whining about people getting killed.
3) car obsession
4) the riding off into the sunset involving driving to Cape Horn (tip of South America)... um. It's almost impossible to drive a car into Mexico, they require a huge "insurance" payment... like $5K or something insane and you don't get it back, it's so if you're in an accident in Mexico and run back to the US, they can compensate your victims--- so it amounts to a registration fee. You'd have to pass through like a dozen countries to get to Cape Horn and they're driving a car that doesn't even have headrests, let alone seatbelts.
5) I get where the Knight comes from, but the Day? I hate it when the titles don't match.

this is probably my penultimate netflix dvd review.

I don't remember why I put Faster in the Netflix queue. It's got "The Rock" in it, but he's done some stupid things. It's got some guy who looks like the homeless version of Howdy Doody playing a copy who shoots up with heroine on the job.

Throughout the movie the subtitles gave the characters all-caps titles akin to how Leverage does in their intro. It felt like a rip-off.

I enjoyed the "KILLER" character, the British accent assassin guy. He was interesting. I liked his reliance on therapy by phone and his obsession with perfection.

I didn't like the main character at all.

( for spoilers )

The title made sense because they spoon fed us the explanation. But I appreciated that.

There is a concept in storytelling that the story should be told by or focus upon the character who changes the most. To me, this movie violates that because the main character doesn't change at all. I kept wondering why we were watching him.

I kind of liked the ending but it was "everyone rides off into the sunset" so it's not really the ending that's there but the one that played out in my imagination afterward.

So, tragic story, tragic plot, tolerable resolution at the end, characters we're not really allowed to involve ourselves in because the main character hogs all the attention and is a stereotype.

DIS-recommended.

Did I tell you that we watched the new A-Team movie?

We did. It didn't suck. It was sort of a prequel to the show. There was lots of action and it seemed to assume the audience would be able to keep up when there was something quirky to the plan.

I had some issues with Face. 1) He's not pretty. Ew.. 2) Everyone else had their full character names given by the overlay, but Face's just said Faceman Peck, the Templeton was omitted.

I loved how Murdoch broke B.A. and made him afraid to fly. That had always seemed weird in the show because no one explained it. The guy playing B.A. did a great job of bringing more characterization to the role than Mr. T had done while remaining true to that interpretation.

Liam Neeson was good in this. I'm not sure why he keeps getting these big-name parts because he's really not a great actor. Everyone disses Kevin Costner and Keanu Reeves for sucking at their profession universally, but Neeson is inconsistent. If you get him a laconic part where he mostly is supposed to sound like he's parroting something someone actually intelligent told him to say, then he's fine. But it was very difficult for me to believe he was their great strategic planner with the ability to anticipate anything. (I liked Neeson as Qi-Gon Jinn in Star Wars 1: Jar Jar Makes Lucas Look Racist. But the whole point of the role was to pass along knowledge garnered from other masters.)

And the after-credit scene was amazing. I really enjoyed that.

---

I have some cognitive dissonance about modern entertainment. Things that were on TV when I was a child but which everyone derided as being mindless filler, now they're being resurrected and usually in a higher brow format.

There was a recent episode of Jeopardy where they talked about actors in the Broadway production of The Addams Family.

Did your brain screech to a halt? Mine did.

I have had Charlie St Cloud in my Netflix queue since it was in theaters. It took forever to be released on DVD and then there was a wait for it, so it got pushed back (we're slow watchers, so I try not to hog stuff people are waiting for). So I think it's been about a year now. I'd forgotten why I wanted to see it.

Unfortunately that did not change after watching it.

It wasn't a bad movie, but I have seen sad-but-feel-good movies already and this one wasn't especially wonderful. Whoever they got to do Charlie isn't ready to be the leading man in a movie. Carrying this whole movie by himself was too much. He wasn't horrible, but there was no zing either.

I hated the younger brother in this.

I didn't understand the love interest.

I couldn't tell the difference between the flashbacks, the dreams, and the imagination sequences. None of it ever looked like reality and the crux of the movie depends on our ability to accept that some of what happened was reality.

So this movie failed for me on a number of levels. If I'd knitted during it and it hadn't taken up a DVD slot and hadn't been taunting me with its unavailability for months, then yeah, whatever. Right now I'm thinking I should have waited for it to come on TV in 2017 or something.

I watched Shooter, a movie starring Mark Wahlberg. It was surprisingly enjoyable considering it's all violence and I watched it interrupted by commercials.

What I liked most was how believable the whole situation was. What's shown to the viewer leaves the viewer with the same understanding as the main character, so the decisions made by the main character make sense within the context we see. That makes it feel like a well-plotted movie even if an external evaluation would suggest the path of the plot is ludicrous.

(That kind of professionalism in storytelling is precisely what was absent from the Percy Jackson movie, by the way. PJ was written where plot is inflicted upon characters who react in unthinkingly random ways even after we have known them for most of the movie. PJ was like the author didn't know his characters either. Or perhaps his characters are so moronically stupid that they don't think at all and their random behavior is because their brains are too small to house a personality while keeping them upright and breathing.)

So, Shooter was an unpleasant story, with a lot of gory unpleasant scenes, about an unpleasant topic, starring someone whose acting is generally laconic (perhaps typecasting, perhaps role choice). And yet, it was so extremely well done that I enjoyed it.

Just about the only thing this movie is lacking is that overt humorous overtone that pervades most movies and which I consider completly unfunny. I would recommend this movie to anyone who likes dramatic action movies without hesitation.

I watched the most recent Hulu episode of House, the one where House has to babysit. The episode was so lame that I stopped watching it partway through twice.

I've also watched Iron Man 2 (I think I mentioned that already), Someone Like You, How To Train Your Dragon, finally finished watching Wilderness Love, and read a book-book by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer Wild Ride.

I've also read a bunch of k-books but it's really hard to tell whether they're novellas and don't count the same way fanfic doesn't count or if they're actually book-length. Most of them have been the 2-chapter porntext from Ellora's Cave... one week there were 3 dozen or so of those niblet size stories in the free pile and I grabbed all of them. But it gave me 25 pages of stories loaded onto my Kindle when I started and it took forever to find something when there's no jump-to-page function nor any reverse-sort function for when you know you want something starting with "w".

I liked the Dragon movie. I actually liked it a lot, but there were some completely egregious parts. I don't like it when movies make tongue-in-cheek allusions to common culture. So when the flight scenes were ripped off the scene from Return of the Jedi where they are flying through the forest of Endor on hover bikes and from the AT-AT battle in Empire Strikes Back, it's really annoying. And I know they did it purposefully as a sort of homage because they added in whooshing effects that were reminiscent. I was also appalled that they used fake scottish accents for vikings. That was actually offensively bad. The story was great though. The dragons were adorable. The clouds and animations were nicely done. It wasn't directed by a ferret on crack either. It just could have been amazing and wasn't.

I liked Iron Man 2, but the fic is better. Clell updated Technomage this week, and compared to Technomage, canonical Iron Man really isn't interesting.

Someone Like You, I've seen it before, but it was on Netflix Streaming and I had knitting to finish so I could start something for me. I liked it a lot too, except for the resolution scene. I don't get why Jane didn't just tell Eddie and the two of them proceeded to milk the situation for all it was worth since their boss was such a complete cow. (pun intended)

The Crusie/Mayer book, well, it's hard for me to see someone who is isolated and introverted and uninterested in family or children who ends up being drawn completely from her shell, hung out to dry by her lover, and pregnant with an unwanted baby as a "happy" ending. I really don't see that at all. The story was too scary for me a lot of the time aside from the pregnancy part (which I think is horrific). And I didn't think the characters were at all realistic. It was well-written and there was a pretty good balance between male and female points of view, even though it skews a bit to the girly. If you like mild horror, demons, first-person mysteries, and "instant families are the best kind" this might not be quite as nasty to you as it was to me.

Wilderness Love was filler TV in an extra-long format. I knitted through all of it. It starred Valerie Bertinelli. But wasn't otherwise especially interesting. It seemed to be about people who got married, had children, then stopped talking to each other until their marriage fell apart. It's kind of hard to see people like that as deserving of a happy ending.

I watched 3 things today. (I got a heaping lot of knitting done.)

Too Fast Too Furious. Lousy. Even worse than the first one and without Vin Diesel. I prefer the Transporter series to this one. The main blond dude in FF is lacking in presence and him being someone that everyone turns to is completely unbelievable.

Mrs Polifax: Spy.... I've read a number of the books this was based upon and the movie falls far short.

I also watched some National Geographic commentary comparing LOTR to various historical figures. meh. Obviously they have to cherry pick, but it felt like cherry picking so I didn't believe them when they were talking about the parallels. It was narrated by Gimli too, who is probably my least favorite voice actor ever.

I did go out for lunch. That was vastly better than all three movies. Big blue sky, crunchy leaves on the ground, idiot bicyclists to slalom even though I had the walk signal.

I made salted caramel candy. It was supposed to be the soft kind of toffee and ended up being more like a butterscotch by Werthers or Brachs. I should probably buy a candy thermometer.

I think I was inspired to be more food-creative by:

Last week I watched Julie and Julia, the movie about that woman who did all the recipes in Julia Child's book in a year. It was tolerable. I didn't like the intermingled flashback shit where we were supposed to see the parallels between the two women's lives.

I really didn't like Julie's husband, but he's definitely not portrayed favorably (the "nice" stuff he does hardly compensates for the apparent selfishness of choosing somewhere hellish to live for his own convenience). I didn't really like Julie either since she couldn't man up and ditch her bitch friends.

I did really like Julia's husband as he was portrayed.

On the whole the movie seemed to be about the power one garners from pushing through obstacles to achieve success. That is a powerful message that was actively diluted by the deliberately confusing flashbacks.

I don't know what happened to the writers. Maybe the original text was this bad and there's a reason they didn't make these texts into movies/episodes earlier.

This episode has Madame Oliver in it. Supposedly, according to the Alan Cumming intro, she's Agatha Christie's tongue-in-cheek self-portrayal. I loathe Madame Oliver. It reminds me of the worst parts of those prissy-pants mysteries like Gaudy Night. ( commentary on Gaudy Night )

The whole title of this was harped upon by the Oliver woman, and it was some shit she made up and pretended was a common phrase. The Oliver woman was completely idiotic and damn near got herself killed for no reason.

The victim/suspect in this is the same actress who did Lost In Austen. She's got these ENORMOUS lips. One wonders whether she needs a straw to consume liquids because her bulbous labia prevent getting the brim near her mouth. And that was what I was thinking about whenever she was on the screen, so I found her appearance a tremendous distraction from whatever professional attempts she was making. Her character does some stupid stunts that rival Mme Oliver's, but one cannot blame the actress for the role.

Poirot, however, is equally stupid. He never considers that someone in hiding would be freaked when the police show up at his door on an unrelated matter. Poirot says no one knows where the hiding person is, right before the butler comes in. Poirot used to do all his own cooking and did not appear to have servants of any kind, back when he was working with Captain Hastings and Miss Lemon. But regardless, the Poirot of earlier would never have attempted to tell someone that a servant is not a person or that their presence does not matter. Poirot was never dismissive of the servant class before. This Poirot was rudely dismissive.

Poirot doesn't go on about his Catholicism in this episode. That was a plus except it highlighted how ridiculous that was in the Murder On The Orient Express remake.

Whoever they have doing the video editing is one of those cracked up sugar-monkeys who do the music videos and Harry Potter movies and that Sherlock Holmes movie. It's extremely dimly lit. The scenes are cropped just a hair too short. The scenes jump around from one thought to the next without any sense of coherence. It's very difficult to see, very difficult to understand, and constantly makes me feel rushed about. I'm not that old, certainly younger than Poirot, and this made me feel like I was 90 and tottering about trying to understand a cocktail party without my hearing aid.

I'm honestly not all that interested in watching any more of these.

The movie District 9 is available streaming via Netflix. So when jack mentioned it recently, it got shuffled up near the top of the pile where I could find it easily.

This morning we watched some of it.

We probably won't be watching more.

It's a bad movie if you're looking for something entertaining. Science fiction has a tremendous potential to be entertaining. Star Wars is a great example. But all we get is horror stuff and now political commentary about how when we see anything that's different as scary then we're the monsters.

The movie is done in this pseudo-news style, including the alternation between taped interview and live report that the actual news does to keep people from changing the channel. It's like a documentary, but about things which don't exist.

Most of the parallels in this movie were drawn with a very heavy hand. To the point of being offensive.