Movie: Lord of War

What Fight Club was to 1999, Lord of War is to 2005. It's a year of Star Wars ruling the box office, Keanu Reeves donning a black trenchcoat as a reality shifting hero, Johnny Depp and Tim Burton are teamed together. We're missing an M. Night Shyamalan "shocker", but I'd like to think the world is over him.

Fight Club was a truth we didn't wan to hear, so is Lord of War. The season finale of Galactica showed humans doing what they're always more willing to do than almost anything else, destroy each other. The real world scenarios in LoW are about just that, and how to pick up a supermodel and get her to be your baby maker, how many passports you may need, and how long an airplane can sit in the middle of Africa. There are so many little interesting things, and I loved it.

That said... it was a little long in the pacing, since the end seems so inevitable, the movie is a slim two hours, but you'll become so sure of how it ends, it'll seem like it drags on. Well, it did to me at least.

The big difference between this and Fight Club, Fight Club went straight to the top of my top five list for the year when I saw it. As the year stands;

1) Howl's Moving Castle.
2) Star Wars
3) Batman
4) tie: Sin City and Constantine
Honorable mention: Kingdom of Heaven

Lord of War would place 7th.

Worst: (Honestly) Monster in Law. But my dark heart will go back to saying it's Hitchhikers Guide. I can't touch the DVD, I even hate the case.

PEGASUS!!!!!!

I.... JUST.... WATCHED.... It......... Season 3 not coming soon enough...

This show, was supposed to suck the air out of the room and go down in flames with a shameless chorus of "If it ain't broke..."

I read once that Science Fiction was inherently optimistic. There have been exceptions, the cliche is Blade Runner... "It's dark." But this show is brutal, it has an almost antihumanistic vibe. You're slowly seeing not only the virtues of the survivors point of view, but the virtues of the cylons rationale for their elimination. It's just beautiful to watch unfold. I can't fracking wait for them to get to Earth... Oh so MUCH has to happen yet!!!

SPOILERish Predictions.
These are just a few thoughts I have on where the series may be headed;
1) The Cylons are obviously following the to Earth, to finish the whole race off.
2) Baltar is some form of Cylon or their creator, probably a unique cylon in the form of their creator.
3) Have the Cylons been around since the days of the Gods on Cobol, and simply re-introduce themselves as an invention of man? (Man creates Cylon, Cylons involved with war with gods, man flees to the 13 colonies, cylons infiltrate colonies and "invent" cylons then pick a fight over some shit that went down with the Gods...) Watch the Gods be the older and more evolved cylons and the new ones are just killing humanity to try to stir shit up...
4)Watch Earth be like in the ice age...

End that spoilerish nonsense.

Damn... Well, the season finale was awesome, I can't get enough of the ending from the phone call from Tigh to that silent exterior shot... it gave me goose bumps.

THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN POSTED EARLIER, BUT BLOGGER WAS HAVING A SERVER PROBLEM, 2nd time in a week!!!!

TV: "Invasion"

The two big new prime-time sci-fi shows this fall are Surface and Invasion. Both seem to be water themed alien invasions involving a number of loosely connected characters. Okay, to be fair, in Invasion, the characters are essentially a modern family a divorced and couple remarried to other people and you'll need a chart to keep straight which kids belong to whom since nobody resembles anyone else.
In Surface, characters are connected like this; remember my mention in my Surface rant about a show named Probe that was on in the '80's? It starred Parker Stevenson, Kirstie Alley's ex husband (Okay, I shit you not, Look who's talking JUST came on in the other room AS I'M typing this... anyway), well Parker was one of the Hardy Boys in the 70's TV series. The other Hardy boy, created, produced and wrote Invasion.
If I have to put these shows head to head though, they're so similar and their strengths and weaknesses are exact opposites. Invasion is a better show by far for one big reason; good actors playing GOOD characters. I'd rather see these actors and this type of character work on Surface... Invasion's plot my bring some good geeks out there to recall the War of the Worlds TV series, or any other Body Snatchers rip. Not bad though for a child of a Partridge Family member.
Actually my only real GRIPE isn't about the show, it's the warning label they put on it for the pussies in this country. They had a warning about the fact that the show dealt with the aftermath of a Hurricane, and it may be traumatic to some viewers because of recent events. Okay, I don't mean to be Mr. Insensitive, but FUCK THAT.
More people are screwed up [during their childhood] by divorce than hurricanes, and they didn't include that in their warning. I've never seen a warning in front of ER, but everyone who has ever had to go to an emergency room probably wasn't really happy about it. It was probably even traumatic. TV... hell, STORIES are supposed to deal with things like this. We've all had parts of our life screwed up by nature, disease, death, and relationships with other human beings. They don't need warning labels, they just need to be. there were probably a number of cave paintings of mastodon hunts where the guy scribbling it on the cave wall had seen some messed up shit, and needed to work it through his head, or maybe help a friend work it through his head. It's as old as art... After 32,000 years of human expression, I swear if you wimp out NOW, we'll pee in your Diet Pepsi!

A Friend Launches his website!!!

I've known this man since the Reagan administration. He just turned 30, but I didn't say happy birthday since I honestly don't know how cool he is with being 30. I'm four days away myself and wanting to punch myself in the head and cry myself stupid. Here he is at Jellyrolls, on stage, singing something.

He just launched his own official site promoting his new album.

Here's a review of a previous album. This is why I tell him I don't miss him. He's off making the rest of us south county schmucks feel inferior, and justly so. Well, I love ya man, and love watching you live your dream. Oh, happy birthday. I'm going to go cry now.

TV: Rome and Surface

Well, the new fall season is almost, kinda under way in the sense that anything worth watching, doesn't go by the traditional schedule anyway. Galactica and the rest of the Friday line-up of beauty that is Sci-Fi Channel is wrapping up their season. 4400 already had their season finale. Galactica is next week. [Oh, Nap, when you say you're a Trekkie, and I say Michelle Forbes, you're supposed to know I mean "the lady who played Ensign Ro." I know we all can't know the name of EVERY cast member, but YOU'RE the deacon of DS9!]
Anyway. I tried my first NEW show of the NEW season... Surface. Formerly known as Fathom, until James Cameron pointed out to NBC that it ripped it's name off from a comic book, that was so along the line of things he likes, that he bought the movie rights to it and they better... well the show is called Surface. Surface... Fathom... NEITHER Title would make sense for this show. Water would have been more direct. The PERFECT TITLE: (any letter but X) Files of the Lost Alien Jaws from the Abyss of the Millennium! There are about a dozen other ones you could plug in there too. This isn't a complaint about the show...

Alright it is. This thing, well, based on it's first episode, doesn't feel like a LONG series. Am I going to be wishing it were a movie? A mini series? On Sci-Fi? (I heard a couple Yes' to the last two... good thinking guys!)

I usually don't talk about TV shows right away. They need some time to settle in... This one, I fear, needs to kick ass before it dies and is quickly forgotten. Sci-Fi on networks has a BAD history littered with so many short lived series that were never given any chance at all. Some GREAT: (Firefly!!!!!!!!! Probe... okay I'm the ONLY ONE WHO REMEMBERS THE DAMN SHOW, but it kicked ass!) Some were... Manimal, Phoenix though... all the way down to the WORST EVER: Galactica 1980. (No matter HOW GOOD the new show gets... It will never help this poor step-sibling) and short lived period: Crusade, Space Above and Beyond, Earth 2, etc.

I like this idea, and this style of story. A sweeping world change from multiple points of view. The government, the plucky scientists who are out of the loop, the average joes. But I hate these loveless characters. I just am immediately repulsed by this cast and the characters they have. Many of them are less than one dimensional. The picture of suburban life being that EVERYBODY has a HUGE house and a green card housekeeper is tired. Oh... these characters suck, mostly from the vacuum of space they fail to fill. There's also too many. This has more characters than West Wing, 4400, or Galactica. And we're only in the first episode. A trimmer, leaner plot might have given more life and direction to this thing out of the gate. I hope it lives, I fear it will be soon forgotten, and worse, I won't miss it.

One more show to deal with, should have a couple of weeks ago... Rome. Lost just won an emmy for best drama... since Galactica gets no recognition for how damn good it is (though it just had it's worst episode of the season, not BAD, but it's been a mutherfucking GREAT season!) Here's a show that will probably get all the conventional recognition, and kicks total ass! Gladiator the series. I kid, but it's really good. It has great characters, and epic backdrop and so much sex and violence that, I'm content with each episode. That's what Galactica is missing, nudity and gore. Is Rome worth HBO? If you don't have HBO, definitely hit this when it's on DVD, unless the only togas you can take are repeat viewings of Animal House.

Oh Rome, your FireFox theme blew chunks.

Monday lunchtime.

Here's a nice link to remind us how insignifigant we all are...
Spend lunch looking at purdy pictures on Hubble Heritage

My NEXT post MAY be just waxing on about Galactica...

>>>>--->>>>> -A Gamers' Manifesto

Nap, Keypunch, you two have some reading... Oh my, this is a must read. Especially for Nap, this is like the 95 Theses.

A Gamers' Manifesto

Actually. Spread this link like a virus. Spread the word. Smear it all over the walls of the X-Play forums, and the halls of Gamestop.

Let the word go forth to every literate with a controller.

Friday thought.

I'm gonna brag about my wife here.
This morning, I wanted some doughnuts, driving back from the grocery store with 6 chocolate long johns in a box, I hear this commercial on the radio. Oh, there's my first mistake listening to morning drive-time radio. On this commercial for a local jeweler, it starts out; "My wife has a September birthday... [Hey, so do I! One in twelve chance of that!] ...and a Sapphire is at the top of her list!" What type of vapid, superficial, bitch wants a damn itsy bitsy rock?
I've never understood the appeal of jewelry. There seems to be a quality to a woman who loves jewlry that sickens me. Now, my wife adores her wedding ring, but it has an emotional, and symbolic attachment. And I'm sure she'd appreciate and accept jewlry being given to her, if we had lumps of money causing us discomfort when we tried to sit down, or more appropriately if we had stacks of it causing the house to be unnavigable. Dear, could you pass the salt? No, I can't even see you or the kitchen table for all the cash we're swimming in, why don't we BURN IT?
She'd like to have jewlry, it's right up there with crown molding and basement flooring.
I'm not going to insinuate that women who want jewlry for holidays are stupid and inane. We gave my grandmother jewlry for virtually every holiday. She was one of those irritating people who immediately bought anything she wanted and her eyesight was bad enough that she could say I was a cute child and she wasn't lying. So books were out of the question.
My wife was giving me hints of ideal gifts... in Best Buy. Not even in the appliance section to misogynistic fans of '50's gender roles, but in the laptop accessory aisle. She'd love a dictaphone, or a HUGE Gift card from Borders. She's practically addicted to books. I'm always trying to find interesting novels on the cheap, since $15-20 for a book for me, seems OK, I'll be reading it until the end of time. She should use the receipt as a bookmark and return it the NEXT DAY when she'd done reading it for her next hit of Gutenbergian crack.
At least she wants things that appeal to her intellect or expand her abilities to communicate or create.
She's the type of woman that makes you hate women. The ones who clatch together in gossip circles, concerned with only the number of bragging points they have over the other members of their gossip circle, who will only crack a book if Oprah tells them too, and obsess endlessly over empty things.

DVD: Fever Pitch

It didn't suck. [Sound of footsteps walking away, a door opens and quickly closes interrupted only by the sound of lights being turned off. Silence creeps in, fading to sounds you otherwise never notice, cars driving by at a distance, dogs, teens out at an unreasonable time... eventually you drift off to sleep.]


Why are you still here, covered in your own drool, frumpled and in your underwear? At least you had the sense not to sleep in your clothes. Here's a comb, and a mint, now get dressed.

What? Oh... the DVD thing? I said it didn't suck. Sheesh. It's a romantic comedy, like an action figure, it has all the standard points of articulation. I'm not bitching about it, it just doesn't incite conversation. It does get some kudos for showing baseball fans for the geeks they really are. This is good. It helps define geekdom. I propose a NEW definition! (just add it below the old ones.

geek: (n) Someone who loves something other that can't love them back.

Gee, defining it with love... I just would like to give a big FRAKK OFF to everybody I went to grade school junior high with, you hate filled shit bags of worthless Bodybags for trying to make such a great thing into a dirty word. Fuck. I said Bodybags, now I owe Aeghty Aeght a dime.

Take a moment to look at the awful poster they stuck this movie with. From a distance it looks like a vampire movie, with a dark sky and full moon and some pale face at someones neck. Why is Drew so washed out? Why is Jimmy Fallon both unrecognizable and falling off the poster. Usually in a romance movie when the guy is that far off the center... he DIES. And they opened it on tax day, what does that have to do with baseball?

Catch it on cable, or if nothing else at Blockbuster looks worth a damn, unless you can't stand one or more of the leads, then don't torture yourself. I like Drew and Fallon, so I liked the movie. There. I revise my statement. You'll like it as much as you already like them. If you don't know how much you like them, you're screwed, cause you still won't know.

Hump hump day with this one...

Here's a roadside attraction on the info highway... Aint No Way to Go It's kinda like the Darwin awards. I recommend "A Picture Perfect Drop." I found this cause it's the anniversary of Isadora Duncan's death in 1927. She like loose clothing and big scarves... you can read how she bit it too. BTW, to you first responders of Paris in 1927... If they heard her screams as she was dragged, she didn't die instantly.

DVD: Monster in Law

I feel ill still. Not as bad as the feeling of someone taking an axe and splitting open my chest... that's how it felt to watch this piece of shit.

Hate someone? Anyone? Just want them worse than dead? Find a copy of this in a trashcan and give it to that person. My father recommended this to me. He must hate me more than I thought. He must really hate me.

Shit blood. That's how awful this thing is. I mean it. This isn't a bad movie. This is really painful... it was for me at least. I HATE watching people be picked on and abused in movies. Then the bully has some change of heart and everything is hunky dory... Fuck that. Jane Fonda's character didn't need some moral turnaround... she needed to be tortured to death. An axe murder would have improved this movie....

Ooooooo Best yet, when J-Lo goes in to tell her fiance that she won't marry him... she screams how it's all his mothers fault and puts a pistol in her mouth and paints the ceiling with her brain, driving the son to pour gasoline over his mother and light her... It wouldn't improve the movie that much... It'd be an ending that let you enjoy the fact that the characters suffered as much as you the viewer.

BTW.... The title SUCKS. At no point except the last five SECONDS is Jane Fonda her In-Law!!!! and then, thanks to your cheese ball ending... She's not a monster anymore!

I think HHGTTG just lost the Worst of the Year rank.... gee, that movie fails at everything.

Reconsidering Deep Space Nine

I was raised on Star Trek... Well it felt that way... We watched it every night on KDNL 30 before it became a network affiliate. It probably helped plow the minds fields for Star Wars, Cosmos, and everything they led to interests in. That's a lot to say for 79 episodes until I was in junior high. Next Gen took me from junior high to starting college. By it's final season, I was not catching every episode, just out of so many things going on, girlfriend, finishing school, starting a business. There was more Trek on than ever.

Next Gen was the perfect successor to the original... more epic larger than life adventures of the Enterprise crew, and it was a good crew... especially when the kinks got sorted out and Geordi became the Chief Engineer and Worf was on Security... Tasha was better dead than alive. And Riker needed the beard. After it's second season, it was a shoo-in for my favorite show on the air.

In my senior year of High School, Deep Space Nine debuted. I gave it a chance, I was open to it... and it was... stagnant. Star Trek had been epic adventures... : "Strange new worlds" and they gave us a truck stop by one of the galaxies ass zits where a race, BASED on one of Next Gen best characters, whined about their silly ass religion. It was shit. Sisko was the best character, until he boxed with Q... Quark was the most immediately alienating character. I couldn't get past the fuzz-clad Ferengi with whips saying Huuuuuuu-MaaaaaNNNNzz from when they first appeared. More shit. I liked Odo, he was the guy from the show Benson.

I couldn't get in to it. At some point, I did give Voyager a shot as well... that's another story. But I wasn't a Trekkie anymore. There was more I didn't care about than did. The Scars of the last 10 years of hit and often miss Trek have left their mark. I only own 7 out of 10 of the movies. In school, That's a D. But, DVD ownership doesn't say everything... I buy less DVD's than I used too... I blame the wife. The James Bond series by that standard would be kicked out of school and sent to Juvenile Hall, if not for poor grades then for killing and smoking Cigars in class. But wouldn't Bond get straight A's from banging his teachers and betting his grades over Baccarat games in the teachers lounge? How can I get this entry on track? "Our Man Bashir" was all of that.

Thanks to Spike TV and my DVR, I've been watching DS9 now, and refuse to miss an episode until I see it out... I may even give a fresh viewing to the first two seasons.

Why? I said it was shit.

When Next Generation was still going on... gee. Pick one. and the later seasons of DS9 that you rave about DON'T COUNT! (they weren't directly competing with TNG) After the way TNG went out... little Trek is better than it's closer. A small handful.

Wait... did I say DS9 and TNG were competing? Oh yea! Isn't that the stupidity that killed Trek? Overlapping shows? Divided fan bases?

Well, I'm becoming a fan of DS9. "Flip-flop!!" Yup. I'm enjoying it. There are many reasons;

#1: 4400 and Galactica. I love both of these current show. An IMDB search on DS9 and those shows would show why.

#2: Post Enterprise, I needed some Trek. Trek was never about the "Trek Universe" to me. It was characters and stories. Adventure of the week. After Enterprise, I actually like the Trek universe more. DS9 feels like an RPG sourcebook, immersed into the fine details of one place, it's settled. Settling is what you do when the expedition is over.

#3: I may still feel the same way about the earlier seasons after all.

To wrap this up. I'm glad I had no real interest in DS9. When I did, Trek was alive. Now that it's gone for awhile... It's good to have some that's new to me.

New Fall Season Pre-thoughts...

Sorry, haven't posted in awhile... blame Keypunch. He lent me Sims 2 and that thing is pure pixelated crack. Just building houses... I could go for an expansion complicating the house building to where you put in attics and secret passages, worry about the plumbing and sinkholes and the driveway and even where to put the water heater and air ducts... none of those things are in the game, but I found myself wishing they were. Maybe Keypunch fired this shot off since he thinks EVERYTHING I type here is a complaint... I'm not that bad, am I??

So, I'm gonna complain about sports for a second... Every fall I bitch about Football making 60 Minutes late every Sunday. I hate it. Especially now that West Wing has moved to 7:00PM-C on SUNDAY. So, I EXPECTED a damn football game to push 60 minutes back even tonight... and low and behold... It DIDN'T.... 60 Minutes was 21 minutes late for TENNIS. Tennis?

I've known and heard of plenty of people who live... fucking LIVE for FOOTBALL. The entire Video Game industry has a holiday called "Madden" (according to Nap, but I believe him.) Even I had some fair-weather fan love and obsession the first time the Rams went to the Superbowl... What I'm saying is, I know I'm a freak to have a penis and not love this damn tradition, but I do appreciate that many others freak out over it... enough for it to bully around the whole TV timetable. Did I miss tennis getting this kind of love?

I'll try to be more attentive to these pages... sorry for the lapse...

Romacop, Roboprof, Doctocop?

Whhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaa?!?!?!?

This world is becoming more and more... DIFFERENT.

Gilligan died. Ok, everyone does, it's sad but that's not the biggest shocker... THIS is.

Go read Robocop in ROME! And trust me, it's actually more interesting than a fourth scoop of the Octagonal Corporate Plackard

I must admit, seeing him go from actor to proffessor... damn, he IS Buckaroo Banzai, and now, one of the people I most admire.

Aeghty Aeght Joins the Blogasphere!!!!

His photo is on it too. It's a Yahoo 360 blog, and they seem to want to tell you to get one too every time you click on anything. I hope that kinda calms down. Actually after seeing his, I'm thinking about setting one up too. The "BLOG" page is one, but the "TOP" page is really more of a uber personal profile page.

The big thing about this would be that "360" is the new "2000". Soon everything will be "360". Next, I bet it'll be some car, like the "new Subaru 360". I'd buy that for a dollar!

Aeghty Aeght's Blog

It's almost gone...

I haven't been posting much. Two of the last three times I went to a movie theater, I saw Star Wars. Our family has dropped a chunk on tickets, popcorn, and soda, not to mention time on this little flick, and haven't regretted a drop of it. It's a joy. Sure, by the sixth time, the duration from the "I'm pregnant" all the way to the sunset while Windu and the Jedi posse are on their way to lynch Palpy does get long in the tooth. But the sunset scene does what so many OT fans wanted with the PT... it's horrible painful death. I loved the prequels. I did hate how it looked like they'd never really connect. The fact that they do, by the end of this movie, amazes me every time. I do have one big... BIG bitch to the fine folks at Lucasfilm... Why don't we get the Drew Stuzan art on the DVD covers????

But, if you want to see a real piss poor job of giving respect to his work, try the Dreamwave book of his collected works... It's like they took a directory of unsorted art files, and printed them in a random order... they're not even sorted or have the title of the movie with them.

Oh well. I'd apologize for not posting more, but the big thing to talk about right now is the Hurricane. Go, watch some coverage... like Bill Maher said Friday night; "We [may have] got our press corps back!"

One other thing has been on my mind this week as far as bloggable things go... so tune in in a day or so for

"Why Deep Space Nine SUCKED THEN and doesn't now! (And STILL sucks for the time it came out in!!!)" See me Flip flop and not flip flop all at the same time, cause damn it... I'm a gonna... Fuck... You're gonna realize, if you enjoyed DS9, what a mistake it was to watch it then... It'll be a massive entry... see ya in a couple days... I'm gonna get some holiday BBQ tonight.

Oh. have you noticed Call for Help is back on G4, and it's with... Leo!!!!! Ya, I was shocked too. Apparently the show had come back on G4-Canada... which is apparently different than G4. But their American counterpart is airing the Canadian CFH.

Sheesh, this week...

This is supposed to be a trivial little blog... usually I post every day or every other day. A number of reasons for my neglect this week really. One; my personal rules for the content of this blog, and in a time of National crisis, it's hard to think of movies to bitch about, or even care to do so. The Daily show was coincidentally on hiatus this week, I dont watch the bland inoffensiveness of Jay Leno... I'm not going to get to political, or talk about Katrina for too long... but even here in St. Louis, I'm wondering how worried we should be about the effects of this, economically on ourselves. Aeghty Aeght has canceled our mallwalks until things settle down... Sure, the news looks bad, and a lot of people are up shit's creek right now, but cities have been destroyed before, they get rebuilt. I wondering why they don't turn New Orleans into the nations landfill. Seriously. Divert ALL trash and waste there. Fill it up. Then, rebuild.

Anyway, I've decided, with the help of a DVR married to Spike TV... to give a chance and watch every episode of... Deep Space Nine... If you JUST heard a thud, it was Nap collapsing. Nap, if you're wondering why, one number... 4400.

Well... hopefully I'll see a movie or something at some point... maybe I'll just start doing comics reviews here.

Oh, Keypunch Monkey thought I was picking on sports fans? Which is odd considering I was complaining basically about how they pick on nerds.

Oh... one LAST reason I've been posting a little less. I've been trying Firefox, and the Google toolbar spellchecker has a problem with the "Create" tab in Blogger. I'm doing this in IE. I don't know which I like better yet... but I tried Thunderbird, and it kicked Outlook Express to the curb.

One last thought..... in the Google toolbar spellchecker... if you don't capitalize Google, it marks it as wrong!!!!