Fifty years of existence. Eight thousand and nineteen games (not counting playoffs) that ended with a number not-zero in the second column. A handful of close calls. A larger handful of guys who've managed the feat after leaving the team (especially with the &#%&^ Yankees). And the New York Mets finally have their first no-hitter.

And the guy who threw it is coming off of major shoulder surgery that kept him out for more than a year and is on a very strict pitch count (which he blew past without a second glance). Johan Santana may pay for this down the line, but right now, nobody cares.

(Yes, Beltran should have had a hit. But it was called a foul ball. That's always how these things go. Doesn't matter. No rules were broken. This is legit.)

woohoo!

It's easy to confuse the purpose of Memorial Day with Veterans Day, especially here in New York where it's Fleet Week and the city is crawling with marines and sailors swanning about in their liberty finest. The stores have their best sales and there's barbecue everywhere and it's apparently our patriotic duty to eat and spend. But this day really belongs to our war dead -- we thank the living in November -- and so, in between the fun and sun and brats and beer, please take a moment to remember who doesn't get to enjoy the day off and why.

A second test, this time with attempts at cut-aways and posting from a client...

* DC is apparently queering an established heretofore heterosexual character. Grant Morrison thinks it's Batman, but he seems to have forgotten that there's this tiny little indie arthouse film coming out in which Bruce Wayne has romance with at least one woman. Dan DiDio has made an incalculable number of really, really stupid decisions during his tenure, but turning Batman gay right before The Dark Knight Rises would shoot straight to the top of the list. Even beyond bringing back Barry Allen and Jason Todd.

DiDio is a big enough idiot to make it Wonder Woman, because he'd totally not understand that it would be validating the BS about every physically strong woman being a lesbian and why that's not good.

Regardless of who it actually is, my general response is that this is a Bad Idea. Not because having gay/lesbian/minority/Other major characters is bad, because it's not. And it's not like DC wasn't quietly building up their stable of interesting characters who happened to be gay (Rene Montoya, Kate Kane, Piper, etc.) But to pull a stunt like this... there's no way they don't mess it up so badly that it's going to leave them, narratively and meta-wise, in a worse position than if they hadn't tried. DC needs the attention and the money, I get that. And shafting their long-term fans in favor of a short-term blast is how they respond to any cash call. But this is just so... Kardashian.

* I tried to start Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age and had to stop; I always forget how much I dislike his cyberpunk stories. I love the Baroque Cycle and think quite highly of The Cryptonomicon, but I just don't like the rest of his present and near-future stories at all. I don't like the genre, really, and not even a good writer can overcome that.

* Avengers: Is there any actual canon on movieverse Hawkeye or can we just go with whatever combination of Ultimates and 616-verse we want to supplement our imaginations if we were at all inclined to write fic?

side note: I want Captain America 2 to be the Winter Soldier arc and I want an excuse to hoist my Bucky/Natasha 'ship flag.

second side note: thank you to everyone who has given Avengers fic recs; I am always open to more because I am greedy like that.

* Television: ( CBS finales fail )

Originally posted at Dreamwidth. Comment here or there.

I'm experimenting with the crossposting from LJ business. Don't get excited and change your settings just yet.

1) The hockey team won. This excites me far more than it excites any of you. 'sokay. But I wish they'd stop referencing 1994, no matter how coinkidink things look.


2) Television upfronts are this week, so there will be lists of shows you can't imagine got greenlit as well as the various cancellation announcements. We knew Awake was too high-concept to last, but I still look forward to catching up on it on Netflix. Can't say I'm too surprised about the rest. New stuff that could be interesting or awful or both:

Do No Harm: A Jeckyl-and-Hyde iteration where the do-gooder brilliant surgeon's got a split personality that's reawakening and not nearly as philanthropic. I'm pretty sure this was once a Stephen King story; if it wasn't, it should have been.

The Following, which looks right up in my wheelhouse -- Kevin Bacon as a burned-out FBI agent who caught a serial killer, James Purefoy, who has escaped and is cultivating a network of proteges. This is what Natalie Zea left Justified for.

Speaking of too-high-concept-to-live, we have Revolution, a dystopian future where electricity no longer works. There are swords and crossbows.

Last Resort, in which Andre Braugher takes his US Navy submarine, parks it on a NATO-hosting island, and declares it a sovereign nuclear-armed nation. Hijinx ensue.


3) Watched a few episodes of Breakout Kings. I cannot say I am enthralled; it's very much freak of the week, not everyone has a useful function, and they clearly have borrowed the Time Lord's phone box to get all of the places they get to in the time they get there in. Also, the chick they brought in after the pilot is the biggest Mary Sue to ever Mary Sue.

I still very much like Detroit 187, although that, too, Went Too Soon. The old 1980s GI Joe cartoon is streaming on Netflix. I'm having a little more fun with that than I should.


4) Anyone want to hook me up with Avengers fic recs? Any flavor.


I cannot poll on either DW or LJ, so you'll have to chime in via comments if you either have Major Issues with the crossposting or would like to register a vote whether I do it permanently.

Originally posted at Dreamwidth. Comment here or there.

I run extremely hot and cold on LeCarre. I was in love with The Little Drummer Girl in my early teens, but I hated The Spy Who Came In from the Cold a lot when I read it as an adult. I'm hit and miss on the Smiley novels, mostly because I like his prose but I hate that he fills his novels with unpleasant people I am thus forced to spend time with. And leftist pap, but mostly the unpleasant people.

That said, I did enjoy this movie a lot.

I kept reading about how this film was hard to follow, the characters impossible to keep straight, the plot required taking notes to understand...

( It's not, they aren't, it doesn't. )

As much of a joke as Ben Affleck's career (and life) were at one point -- and I have very, very fond memories of making tea come out of aliciam's nose one fine Toronto morning by reading her the Globe and Mail's review of Gigli -- he seems to have straightened out on all fronts. And he turns out to not be half-bad as a director.

All of which is prequel to the link for the first trailer for his new film, Argo.

It's a crazy story from the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979-81: six Americans escape the beseiged Embassy Tehran, find sanctuary in the home of the Canadian Ambassador, and are eventually spirited out of the country in a CIA plot that involves a fake Canadian movie with real bona fides. (More about the 'Canadian Caper' here..)

Affleck's got a real solid cast for this one: Victor Garber, John Goodman, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, and Kyle Chandler, among others. And the studio clearly thinks it has award potential because they slated it for a late-fall release (mid-late October in the anglosphere).

I've been looking forward to this since it was announced it was getting made; Mark Bowden mentions the events in his wonderful book Guests of the Ayatollah. Anyways, the trailer looks good.

It's not a song they ever really liked much and never performed live, but The Beastie Boys' 'Fight For Your Right to Party' was one of the first songs I downloaded off the internet and has been on every single playlist I've ever put together since my first iPod because it is a fond remembrance of all of those parties and hanging-outs in the mid-late '80s when all you needed music-wise was your cassette of License to Ill because everyone agreed on it and knew all of the words.

RIP, MCA.

I have only myself to blame here, although I am perfectly willing to say this is all pentapus's fault. Because it is. She said 'give me a fandom I know and I'll doodle and you'll write the story for the doodle.' And I went along with this even though every other time I've gone along with this I've written her 27,000-word stories (more than one!) with spin-offs and sequels. Even though I knew darned well what she wanted me to write and was not above finagling to get.

She did not get 27,000 words. She got 5100. She did get the rest of what she wanted, though.

My first fic in... pretty much a year. And it's all OCs. No, really. No canon characters get speaking roles. And it's het, although it's a really soft PG het because you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. So if you were hoping my first fic of 2012 would be a spare, muscular genfic with guns and dry humor... sorry. Blame pentapus, who can consider this a birthday present and/or a get-well card.

Thumbnail so you know what you're getting into:



Full image and story underneath the cut.

( seriously, now, at this late date? I was pretty sure that 'ship had sailed )

Oh, hai. I should maybe post this month perhaps?

* Pesach came and went and there are few more delightful feelings than throwing the last of the matzo in the garbage. I used to save the leftovers -- always less than a box -- and think I would use them later, either for soft cheese or an out-of-season matzo brei, but I never did and so now I toss. The joke in shul was whether matzo should go in the trash or in the recycling with the other cardboard.


* You are all spared my movie reviews for a bit; it's the NHL playoffs and baseball season and I've not seen much of anything because live sports trump recorded media always. Except when my team is getting hosed and I'm too depressed to continue. But it's still a little too early for the nihilism to take hold vis a vis the Mets, although the hockey team is probably closer.

My fury at the duration of the Hagelin suspension -- and the Carkner barely-a-suspension -- is somewhere between incandescence and disbelieving numbness. Between that and the Shea Weber business and some of the other mysterious decisions coming out of Hockey Ops and Player Safety... If Colin Campbell had the Wheel of Fortune to determine NHL justice, does Brendan Shanahan have a crack pipe? Occam's razor is rapidly slicing away all other possibilities.

OtOH, it looks like we're being saved from the nightmare scenario of a Vancouver-Pittsburgh Finals; the Canucks are committing suicide by special teams ineptitude and, well, Pens-Flyers is its own circus of utter awesomeness. Actually, all of the series have been great fun, with the possible exception of Florida-New Jersey (because both teams' entire fanbases can fit into the backseat of one Honda Fit), but the Cats won their first playoff game in fifteen years last night, so they're at least trying.


* Future movies: I'm ready to be swept away by The Avengers, at least until the Batmovie. (ileliberte: "what do you mean 'ready to be?'") The film premiered in LA last week, although there is an embargo on reviews for another few days -- I think it's lifted in the UK at the end of this week and in the US the following week -- but the 'reaction posts/tweets' have been uniformly positive. Giddy, almost. And the Hulk looks great, which would be such a relief after the previous two outings.

I'm still deciding what format to watch it in; I saw Thor and Captain America in 3D entirely because that's what my local theater insisted on showing them in and I suspect that might be the case this time around, but there is also IMAX and going farther afield to find 'plain.' I definitely want to see the Batmovie in IMAX because Christopher Nolan directs with that in mind, but Joss Whedon does not. And so there is the matter of cost opportunity to save money to find the vanilla projection versus staying within walking distance and doing 3D. Granted, it's not my car...

I kind of wish I could see Prometheus because it looks so good, but I probably can't. I have never watched the original Alien(s) films because I really can't do that kind of scary -- Shaun of the Dead was too much for me -- and so I'll probably have to pass. Blood and gore from bullets or spears or battleaxes? Fine. Zombies and aliens? I have to sleep with the lights on. No, I don't understand it, either.


* The AO3 importing has been progressing, but I'm still doing it as a selective business with a de-emphasis on OC-heavy stories, which is either a bug or a feature depending on how you look at it.


* Speaking of OC-heavy SGA stories... I have signed up to be pentapus's prag once more. This time for a story I might have teased the possibility of (without ever really intending to deliver). No, it's not the rest of Qui Habitat, although if someone were willing to commit art for the sake of helping me finish that one...


... anybody else got something they want to share with the class?

Three things make a post, right? An ordered list of topics I am increasingly convinced none of you give a flying poop about. :)

1) Films what I saw : ( My Week with Marilyn, Deep Blue Sea, Night Train to Munich )


2) I've uploaded some SGA fics to my page on AO3. Just a few, partly because doing the entire backlog is just too daunting and mostly because I don't think the OC-heavy stories are very accessible to folks who didn't come in on the ground floor of that adventure. I don't know; I've long been a little neurotic about that. If there's anything anyone really wants there, do let me know, but otherwise it's going to be sporadic and selective.


3) Writing. I would like to, very much, but I don't know what. I think I've said everything I have to say in SGA save for Qui Habitat, which has the disuasive factor of requiring a tremendous amount of work for extremely little reward, and I don't have another fandom to work on or in. I'm half-hoping The Avengers will change that, but my problem is that I never really cared much about any of the characters on that team when I was in comicsfic and the comics snob in me bridles a little at writing purely movieverse stories. Of course, speaking of unfinished epics of great scope and tiny audience, I suppose I could go back and revamp Acts of Contrition for a new age... *cough, sputter* It's actually more relevant to the Avengers movie than to post-Bendis reboot Ultimate X-Men.

* DVDs recently watched: ( The Tempest, Dog Day Afternoon )


* Television, in a run-on paragraph:

I have fallen so far behind, it's almost pointless to catch up. Especially because so much of it has been dreadful -- NCIS, The Mentalist, looking right at you. I've given up entirely on Criminal Minds because I just can't take the relentless heartbreak and loss anymore, plus Prentiss is going away again, this time for real. I'm even behind on Justified, for which I have no excuse save that the hockey team is still clinging desperately to first place. I saw the pilot for Awake and was intrigued, but not enough to follow it on a weekly basis during the late hockey season when there is already spring training baseball. I watched a few more episodes of Life and liked them more than the pilot; I shall watch the rest because there's nothing I love more than a canceled quirky police procedural (see: The Unusuals, Detroit 187...). Sometimes it shows that my first fandom was Homicide. Breakout Kings and The Killing (and Life) got added to Netflix streaming, so the non-existent time I have for underwhelming CBS procedurals is going to be even less.


* Baseball: it's going to be one of those years when there's nothing to do but laugh because all you have is the punchline. The team's bankrupt, the owners are in hock and getting sued for a billion dollars (literally), the great hope at first has valley fever, the third baseman's got a torn ribcage muscle, the shortstop's got a groin strain, the second baseman's never really played middle infield before, the catchers are from Triple-A, the outfield is unspeakably awful, the bullpen's no better, the pitching ace is trying to come back early from major shoulder surgery and getting lit up, and the manager's already losing it. And the bullpen catcher got arrested for DUI and the former equipment manager's been convicted of grand theft. Welcome to Metsville.


* While looking for other things, I realized that I am well prepared for the implosion of the euro: I found a 500-drachma bill and some francs and centimes. (Yes, I know how little 500 drachmas bought and would buy.)


* The logo's already been thoroughly made fun of for implying sodomy, but wait until you see the togs the Brits get to wear to host the 2012 Olympics.


* Normally US films run a domestic trailer and then an international one; The Avengers (Assemble) has been pulling a kind of KitKat routine where every country gets a different flavor made available. There have been different scenes added to both the German and Japanese trailers that weren't in the UK one, which in turn was cut differently than the US domestic one. I don't think you can get a much bigger picture watching all of them than you would by sticking to the English language ones -- save for a previously-used-but-unmentioned-here character appearing -- but it's interesting to see how they are different.

It's Canadian Front time at MoMA again and I figured going to see an Oscar nominated film would be worth having to listen to the blah-blah-blah in both official languages that comes with attending the first film in this year's program and sitting through the circle-jerk of congratulatory speeches (Deputy Consulate General! Head of Telefilm! Movie Producer! Head of MoMA's film section who happens to be Canadian!).

It was worth it. This is a lovely, compact, untidy film that manages to bear hope even though it starts off with a suicide and ends with tears and is almost entirely about grief and life's injustices and its cruelties great and small. It's also about the absurdities (funny and really-not) of bureaucracies and how the consequences of hiding behind the safety of someone else's rules or flaunting them with good intentions are often just as frustrating. And how sometimes cowardice can be rewarded while bravery is punished. And how sometimes children have the right idea and it's the adults who make life so unnecessarily complicated.

Believe it or not, this is not a depressing film. It's often funny and sweet and slyly charming. But you never forget that almost every single character in the film is recovering from a horrible tragedy, not does the film. It's just that, as in real life, there are moments -- sometimes long stretches, even -- when grief is in abeyance and while it will return, there can be peace in the interim. Joy, even.

Considering that most of the lead and secondary characters are primary school children, the acting's quite solid. Mohammed Fellag bring much grace along with the battered heart and bruised dignity of the title character, who never puts his own pain and grief above those of the children he so clearly adores, and young Sophie Nélisse (who looks very much like Drew Barrymore circa Firestarter) and Émilien Néron are quite impressive in what seem to be their first real roles.

The film opens in the States in April, they said. I think it's already been out up north.

The Most Interesting Man in the World... is an Ashkenazi Jew from the Bronx.


Totally unrelated question: How bad is Iron Man 2? I know it's bad, that Robert Downey Jr. admits it's bad, but I don't know if it's (a) the kind of unremitting joyless awful of, say, Cowboys and Aliens or (b) just some kind of underwhelming bad made worse by the sheer glee of the first Iron Man movie or (c) the kind of drop-jaw, can't-turn-away bad like the first G.I. Joe where you end up rubbernecking at this somehow-compelling car crash and then are shocked when you realize you watched the whole thing. Because if it's (b) or (c), I might be willing to watch it on Netflix's streaming service.

Back in late 2009, Brendan Burke, son of the outspoken general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs' Brian Burke and a manager himself with a college team, came out as a gay man, which would have been completely unremarkable in this day and age except for the fact that pro sports is one of the last true bastions of institutional closeting. It was A Thing, especially considering the profile of his father (non hockey peeps: the Leafs are kind of like Man U or the Yankees, except they never win) and especially because of the public response of his father, a hyper-stereotypical Boston Irish Catholic known for his old-school attitudes. Brian Burke joined his son in pushing for acceptance of LGBT in sports and in life, marched in Toronto's Gay Pride parade with his son, and became an anti-bullying advocate and supporter of gay youth way before it was cool.

Brendan Burke was killed in a traffic accident on a snowy highway a few months later, right before his father led the USAHockey delegation in the Vancouver Olympics (the team, which won silver, wore tokens of commemoration for Brendan). That was not the end of Brendan's story.

The Burkes have worked to put together the You Can Play Project. It has a simple message: "Athletes should be judged on talent, heart and work ethic, not sexual orientation."

Which is something that should be obvious, but often isn't and, worse, often isn't for entirely passive reasons -- we don't think about the true meaning of what we say.

So even if you're not a hockey fan, click over, view the first television spot, and maybe pass it on to your sports-fan friends, since this is hardly a hockey-specific notion.

(further reading here)

Stuff what I saw:

The Black Pirate (1926). ( Adventure on the high seas! )


Beginners (2011). ( Garden State meets Golden State )


Much Ado About Nothing (1993). ( Hey, nonny nonny )


Kung-Fu Panda (2008). ( Bring back Danny Rand )


Hugo (2011). ( Scorsese and the blue-eyed boy )


Also saw the new Avengers trailer, which was fine, although the best part of it was that it allowed Empire to make the War Norse crack about Tom Hiddleston. I thoroughly adored the silent film parody of the previous trailer, though.

Today is Hockey Nerd Christmas, aka the trade deadline. So I will be here at House of Employ with one monitor showing work and the other being used to keep updated on the goings-on via twitter, chat, and the auto-updating trade-trackers. I can't watch TSN here in the States (yes, I could try to find a proxy, but it's generally too much of an effort to find one that will pretend I'm in Canada), so I will miss the ten hours of breathless televised analysis as teams swap their third-line wingers for next year's mid-round draft picks.

(Which doesn't mean I won't spend the day half-holding my breath should my team's GM decide to do something rash, like answer Mr. Howson's phone calls...)

I shall instead catch up on who wore what to the Oscars and finding the best safe-for-work mockery of Angelina Jolie's c'mon-aren't-you-beyond-needing-that posing. Early opinion is that Jessica Chastain will top my best-dressed list and that everything would have been improved by having Miss Piggy repeat her BAFTA role as saucy red carpet interviewer.

As for the actual Oscars content, I couldn't be arsed to watch the show. I saw The Artist and thought it deserved everything it got. Same with Best Foreign Language Film A Separation, which is already being hailed by the Iranian government as an important victory over the evil Zionist entity (I'm already eagerly waiting to see Footnote, Israel's nominee, but that's just extra fun). I don't think the best song from The Muppets got nominated, but the entire process for that was just so wonky this year -- hence two nominees -- that I suppose we can be glad that at least one made it in and Madonna didn't.

... and you all?

In a word: incoherent.

In a sentence: A bad episode of late-season Miami Vice, except in Texas (allegedly; everyone's accent wanders with seven league boots) and edited by a toddler with pinking shears.

In a nutshell: give it a miss, even late night on cable; there's probably bass fishing on some other channel.

I don't hate this movie; hating would imply that I cared enough about it. It's such half-assed tangle of bad storytelling, bad editing, and bad writing and you realize real early on that it's not worth the brain power to compensate for the shortcomings. You meet people in media res and it's never clear who's important and why they're doing what they're doing or saying what they're saying. It's a multi-juristiction serial killer and the entire case is being run by three detectives who are rarely in the same scene and yell at each other about never-explained events that are long-past and we are supposed to treat as backstory, who have no support from either the FBI or their colleagues, and who are never bothered by supervisors or paperwork or their other open cases.

Actually, I may be slighting Miami Vice with the comparison; at least Tubbs' and Crockett's boss appeared on-screen.

Anyway, this is officially Not Worth It.


On the bright side, Netflix has added the Thomas Jane Punisher to its streaming service. It's not a great bad movie, but I enjoyed it for what it was back when I first saw it. It looks like a Garth Ennis story, which was all I really expected out of it. Also, the 1990 version of Into the Woods... both of these are on my queue and I think this is why Netflix gets so flustered when trying to suggest new choices for me.

I was at my volunteer gig last week and, as per usual, we had the television on by the front desk set to one of the classic movie stations, which was playing Second Fiddle, a 1939 film with Sonja Henie and Tyrone Power and featuring music by Irving Berlin. It features completely gratuitous ice skating scenes for Ms. Henie and it's frothy and fun. And I never got to see it all because things got busy and then it was time to go home.

And now I can't because *gasp* it was never released on DVD, it's not streaming anywhere, and my VCR broke years before I finally gave up and bought a DVD player.

Netflix occasionally streams programs that either aren't out on DVD or the DVDs are too expensive to buy/replace, but this doesn't qualify. Fie. I want to know how the glass-throwing contest ends.

But more to the point of the subject header, as much as it shames to me to admit it, I find myself frustrated that there is media out there that I cannot find a way to consume in the near or immediate future. And I'm a little baffled at my reaction. I did the bulk of my growing-up before the internet or cable TV; my parents taped Muppet Show episodes for me on Betamax and I remember the switch to VCRs. I have never owned a smartphone or a DVR. I am, as the expression goes, a digital immigrant. So why am I acting like a native? And over a 1939 movie, at that...

Maybe I can find a relative with a working VCR...

I see... a rhinoseros!

This was, for the most part, a very charming movie. The scenes in the past, most definitely. The scenes in the present distinctly less so, but that is part of the point -- we are always sure that a past age got it right while we have lost something essential. But it need not have been quite so heavy handed.

The scenes in the past are gorgeous for all senses, the music, the scenery, the costumes, the casting. The casting is fabulous. Adrien Brody is delightful as Dali and Corey Stoll is on the good side of parodic as Hemingway (also, he's kind of dishy). Kathy Bates has been playing Gertrude Stein for twenty years, so she's got the bit down, and Marion Cotillard is infinitely more charming as Picasso's (and Hemingway's and Modigliani's and...) lover than she was as John Dillinger's in Public Enemies.

The cameos and cultural references and in-jokes are all well-placed, but they do assume a certain not-so-minimal level of knowledge of twentieth century art and literature, so if you slept through high school, you are going to miss a lot. But it's still pretty to look at.

The ending is a bit rushed. Okay, a lot rushed. It's like Woody Allen had precisely ninety minutes worth of film and not a single penny for an extra couple of frames and didn't realize that he'd budgeted badly until about seventy-five minutes in. And the actual logistics of the time traveling (or the movements within each era of Paris) are completely unexplained and unexplainable. But it's a good time even then.

Pictures of real-life military super-puppy breeding programs should not be viewed directly after watching trailers for movies about fictional government super-spy breeding programs. Just saying.


I admit to going long stretches forgetting that NCIS is on and then I catch an episode like last night's and... seriously? What the heck was that? Was there any point in that forty minute segment that made any sense, logically or dramatically? Even within the warped flexibility of dream sequences, that was nonsensical and pointless and shameless. I am very close to only caring when Coast Guard Abby or that madam that Dina Meyer plays is on.

1) The new trailer for The Amazing Spiderman

It looks better than the first one, but that's hardly a ringing endorsement. The earlier teaser was all first-person-shooter video-game and no actual plot or character. This has at least pulled back the camera -- although still making it clear that this is a movie that benefits from expensive movie options like IMAX or 3D -- and added in a few more people cracking wise.

It still doesn't scream 'awesome,' but it does look like it has realized that The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises exist and are going to obliterate it if someone's not careful.


2) Act of Valor, aka the Most Expensive US Navy ad ever. If you go back through the (returning, I promise) photo zen posts to sometime in... 2010, I think it was, I posted photos of what was then billed by the Navy as scenes from 'a major motion picture' with no further details -- they were riverine scenes featuring Special Warfare Boat Operators in action. I'm guessing that this would be what they were for.

I'm also still sure that, propaganda or not, it will be cooler and make more sense than Battleship.

I'm still not sure if Drive has figured out what it wants to be when it grows up. It's such a pastiche of styles and homages and tropes, all of them so well executed and well acted and extremely well cast, and yet for all of that business, there's an almost nihilist emptiness going on that manages to suck a lot of the fun out of the proceedings. There's a fluorescent-light coldness to it all, which may be the Scandinavian director or may be the way LA is part of the fabric -- it's a city full of people pretending to be lots of things and meaning none of it.

A movie with heists and double-crosses and car chases and this much outrageous gore should be enoying itself more, you know?

Which isn't to say that Albert Brooks isn't awesome as a gangster.

Ryan Gosling, as the Driver, is frankly creepy as fuck well before he kicks someone to death. It's fine that he doesn't talk much, but some of the times when he's not talking, the silences go on about five beats too long to be comfortable. And most of the time when he's not talking, he stares a lot and he grins blandly, like a pervert standing outside a schoolyard at recess. You start off the movie wondering how plausible it is that a guy with his looks would be in the situation he's in, but by the end, you don't because there's something so clearly off about him. He does get less skeevy, especially after he kicks someone to death -- in action, he's fascinating to watch, in part because he's nerveless.

I'm clearly not in love with this movie, but I'm glad I saw it. It's enjoyable in its retro weirdness and movie-trope bingo aspirations, it's clever, and it never takes the easy option even as it leaves a lot unexplained. It'll leave you going "... wait, what?" in both the bad and good ways.

It be here in HD

Pretty, pose-y, I wish Chris Evans's makeup weren't quite so obvious, and there wasn't nearly enough Loki.

(Yes, I am in this for the delusional would-be tyrant.)

Still... pretty.


PS: I'm guessing the celebratory firecrackers mean the game is over, yeah?

I grew up watching movies like Telefon, so this was a wonderfully retro treat, a B movie with an A-list cast and a plot that's complicated enough to keep you engaged without ever requiring you to think too hard.

The subverting-the-genre gender switch is really just icing.

Watching Gina Carano work her way through Michael Fassbender (totally there as the Bond girl), Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, and Antonio Banderas -- plus a dozen or so cannon fodder -- is very enjoyable. She's not nearly as wooden an actress as I feared and while she's never going to be anyone's first choice to play Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, she's very likely got a respectable mainstream movie career ahead of her provided she's got any kind of learning curve. Yes, Soderburgh and Lem Dobbs help her out by giving her Hemingway-esque dialogue -- short, manly sentences -- but Channing Tatum's in a gazillion movies and she's basically at his level after her first.

But even if she never crosses over to full dramatic roles, it's really a lot of fun to watch her beat people up. Carano looks like she could benchpress Angelina Jolie, three sets of thirty reps, without breaking a sweat and Soderburgh shoots the movie so that you can tell it's her kicking asses and nobody's pulling punches.

Bonus points to Soderburgh, btw, for making sure that Mallory Kane is never dressed inappropriately for work -- she wears practical shoes, ties her hair back (although I will admit that I had to wonder when she got the time for cornrows at the end), and wears outfits that suit her tasks: jeans and long-sleeved shirts that cover her belly button. Three cheers for that because Carano's got a killer body, but that was never the point and it's never on display beyond her time in a not-revealing-at-all cocktail dress.

Fassbender, however, wanders around two scenes clad only in a towel for absolutely no reason whatsoever. (As I said: Bond girl.)

The movie seems to be more popular with critics than with audiences, but I'm not sure why. The trailer for Safe House ran before it and, good lord, this was a lot better than that tripe is going to be.

Holy crap, was that awful.

In the world of major studio big budget movies, there are good bad movies (Highlander), great bad movies (Brotherhood of the Wolf), and then just plain awful. This? Was just plain awful. I fast-forwarded through the entire second hour and I missed nothing and it still sucked. Nothing made sense, nobody was even pretending to act, and there were no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Actually, no, I lie, it gave me something to do while the dryer did its thing. But that's it.

Moneyball: I'm a former baseball stats nerd -- I picked my teams after first reading the Bill James Abstracts cover to cover and I still own some Elias Baseball Analysts from the 1980s-1990s. I am exactly the audience for this movie. And so I can say that I enjoyed it muchly, but at the same time, I don't quite get what the Oscar buzz is about. It's a pretty slight film as far as drama and plot and nobody is expected to do much in the way of heavy lifting. Jonah Hill's got slightly more to do than Brad Pitt, but Pitt's main job is to spit sunflower seeds while everyone around him pretends he's not pretty like Brad Pitt, so Hill's bar is set pretty low. That said, it's fun and I don't think you need to be a sabermetrician to enjoy it, although if you don't know anything about baseball, you'll miss a lot.

The Guard: the Irish are pretty $%@$ nuts, yeah? Black, black comedy by and for people who grew up telling ethnic jokes before it became taboo. And yet surprisingly literate and clever. Hot Fuzz meets Monty Python meets the good earlier Guy Ritchie movies and moved over to Ireland, where the accents are thick, the English are the punchlines, and fatalism is funny.


... I have also managed to catch up (finally) on Justified, sans yesterday's episode. Art still gets all the best lines, Margo Martindale deserved her Emmy, Raylan is surprisingly not always the one making the worst possible decisions, Tim and Rachel are still underutilized, Boyd is awesome, and Neal McDonough is once again the Devil's Own Cherub. I thoroughly enjoyed the mainlining, look forward to the rest of Season Three, and exhort everyone who hasn't yet tried it out to do so.

Longtime readers of this space know that I have a history of writing very long stories just because pentapus drew something.

This time, however, I have scored a minor victory: a few hundred words got me this.

(And yet in light of the aforementioned inequality, someone accuses me of playing dirty. Ahem.)

Go show pentapus some love, since apparently shame doesn't work. ;)

* I actually need Wikipedia for work, so today's protest against SOPA is a bit of a PitA, but one that can be gotten around via web cache. I don't disagree with the protest; I'm all for less government regulation as a general principle and wish people felt this way more often.

* I will be getting back to the Friday photo posts as soon as my RL stops being such a train wreck. This week is not going to be that week.

* Saw the first two episodes of the new Sherlock despite my assurance that I was done with it. I'm still not as impressed by everything that's come after the really quite clever debut, but it's not awful. It is, however, absolutely fanfic, which is probably why fandom's all over this like a cheap suit. That and Mr. Cumberbatch's cheekbones, I suspect.

* Am a little more interested in these offerings from Auntie Beeb. Pretty cracking casts all around.

* Quite unrelated: I give him props for trying, but Sean Bean makes for a really fugly woman.

* Meant to be caught up with Justified by the time season three began, but I'm not. I do love the new bus posters for it, though.

* I have Moneyball out from Netflix. Being a Mets fan, I believe this is as close as I'm going to get to heart-warming baseball stories in the near future. Thankfully, the hockey team is compentent this season.

* My paid account at LJ expires imminently (it should have been this week, but there were outage-related extensions). I'm not re-upping, mostly because they made the paid feature I need most -- comment editing -- free for everyone and I don't use the extra icon space. I don't know how this will affect how this journal looks to me and to all of you -- there will be ads, I gather, and no more comment subject headers and other annoyances. If it gets really ugly, I suppose I can decamp to DW and crosspost here. (I have an account there that is infrequently used.) But I also have adblockers on my browsers and I may not see the worst of it, so if it does get ugly, lemme know.

* Kindle Fire question: is anyone getting DRM errors for material they've legally acquired? I've bought a few books (almost all of them free) and a couple of them wouldn't open on my Kindle because, it said, there was a DRM problem and I did not have authority to open the book. I could, however, read the book on my computer's Kindle-for-PC app when I sent it there. The same thing just happened with an eBook I took out from the eLibrary and eNYPL. Does my Kindle hate me or is this a more widespread problem? Nevermind. Googled the answer: deregister and then re-register.

Wanna donate someone else's money to a worthy cause? Click this link, which will bring you to a page at CVS's website informing military personnel that they now accept Tricare (the military's health plan). That's it. No sign-ups, no giving your personal details or email, no wallet-opening on your part. All CVS cares about is the page views -- each page view is a $3 donation to the USO.

The USO does much more than send entertainers overseas; they provide aid, comfort, and support to military personnel and their families all over, foreign and domestic. (And, for the record, they are happy to help out allied nations' military personnel if they show up to ask for it.) A donation of your own money would not go amiss.