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jcruisedirector and I watched some gay cinema (quel surprise). One was so insufferable (29th and Gay) that we turned it off 20 minutes into the movie. The second, was actually pretty good. The 24th Day is a film adaptation of an AIDS play (again, quel surprise). One character kidnaps the other, because he believes him to be the man who gave him HIV, and holds him hostage while they wait for results. Dramatically speaking, it felt like a writer's workshop piece, and totally looked like one too. But it was fairly well written, even if the ending wasn't the slash and kill moment everything was setting it up to be. That would have at least been more interesting than the "I'll let you live with yourself and the damage you've caused" ending we got.
Overall rating: B-
Fun and Productive.
Mini-Notes:
BSG: I think I know who the Final Cylon is, and I'm not telling.
Torchwood: How creepy was that! Human trauma victims of alien attacks...
Dr Who: Adipose look like Domo-kun. No, seriously!
I didn't work on my taxes. I do more of that tonight. I think I know what I can claim, but I've got to look over my bank statements thoroughly.
Just dropped a chunk of change at Borders. It happens. Here's what I got.
Videos
Doctor Who: The Beginning - Box Set
Harold and Maude
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya vol. 1
Manga
Blood+ v. 1
DeathNote v. 13 - How to Read DeathNote
Monster v. 3
MuShiShi v. 3
Ouran High School Host Club v. 1
Books
A Thousand Years of Manga
I was going to get an Evangelion Box Set, but they were out. In fact the anime section looked like it had been picked over by vultures. I'm kind of amazed I even got Haruhi. Gurren Lagann was not even on their radar. Maybe it'll be on the website or at Best Buy or something.
But I saved $30.00 on the Doctor Who box set. That's good.
The Thousand Years of Manga book looks phenomenal, but it's more of a coffee table book. I can't wait to read it.
Oh, and I ordered "All Nippon Air Lines" from Lambda. I can't wait to read ANAL!
Now for curry, clean up and Haruhi.
Derek Jarman skewered a saint in Sebastiane!
Filmed in Sardinia, and acted entirely in Latin, Jarman's film follows the last days of Saint Sebastiane. Sebastiane was a Roman Soldier during the reign of the emperor Diocletian. When it is revealed that Sebastiane has converted to Christianity he and certain men from his legion are exiled to the desert. There he is forced to recant his faith in Christ or be tortured by his captain. Needless to say he is tortured, and eventually martyred for his faith, as well as his unwillingness to submit to the sexual advances of his captain.
Sebastiane is a visually exciting film, loaded with tons of gratuitous nudity and explicit homoeroticism. But what I found highly intriguing was the actual lack of Christianity in Sebastiane's faith. A lot of the language that he uses for Christ is in comparison to classical Gods like Apollo and Adonis a man beloved of Gods. I don't even know that the name Jesus was ever mentioned at all. Just these descriptions of the Christian God that were as if he had fallen in love with Christ and not actually converted to the faith.
The best parts of this film were the slow parts. Jarman spent about ten minutes or more on a scene of two men frolicking in a pool of water and lovingly touching each other. It was absolutely beautiful to watch. It did little to advance the plot of the film, though it did enhance the sexual tension of the captain.
The torture scenes are not so bad in this film. In fact they were pretty tame as torture goes. More often than anything it looked like they were play-acting at torture instead of actually torturing him. Though the sand on a sunburn scene was pretty bad, if only from experiential memory. And as far as play-acting goes, these men were obviously not soldiers. I've seen more realistic fake sword sparring at the renaissance fair than here. And their spearwork, their archery? No. Terrible.
The music was by Brian Eno, which was kind of a shocker actually. Not that he wouldn't do this film, just that I wasn't expecting it. The music was pretty tame as things went, a soft undertone to the film.
Was Sebastiane a good movie? Not particularly. Was it a sexy movie? Well, yes. Very. Would I watch it again? Sure.
Does this film deserve an X rating? NO. Not in the slightest. There are a lot of full frontal men, but there's no actual sex ever. There's touching, kissing, and that's about it. But, this film came out in the 70's, 1976 in fact, so I guess any kind of love between men and actual male nudity might have constituted enough material for an X rating.
If you want to buy a copy of Sebastiane, it's available on DVD from Amazon.com.
Cloverfield - Godzilla meets the Blair Witch project. Cloverfield follows the lives of six friends who try to survive the carnage. And honestly that's about it. I could go on about the monster, or the other monsters, or the action or whatever. But anything would give it away. I think this movie will sell like crazy when it hits video, because there will be loads and loads of things to nitpick and details that remain largely overlooked in the theater. I really enjoyed it.
Today I had off and I did not a goddamn thing.
I made breakfast burritos, oatmeal and tea.
I watched Astroboy, The Simpsons Movie and The Notorious Bettie Page.
My hair is a mess, I'm in my jammies. It's a wonderful thing.
I have needed this time, and I'm glad I had it.
Last night I was watching stuff I had saved in my DVR, and I went through the Astroboy christmas marathon on Adult Swim. The first episode is called "The Birth of Astroboy." The story goes like this. Astor Boynton is a fun loving child, and in the future of the year 2000 he, like all people are allowed to drive cars at hyperspeeds because the road does the driving for you. Through a horrible mixup the roads and cars malfunction and Astor is killed upon impact. So, Professor Boynton at the Institute of Science declares in his grief that he will build a robot in the image of his child, and he will press the entire service of the institute to that end. Thus Astroboy was created. Professor Boynton is there to throw the switch to turn on his new robot child and they set about having a life together as Father and Son. Years pass quickly and while Astroboy is learning, he does not change in physical appearance. Professor Boynton is dismayed at this because he finally realizes that this robot boy is no substitute for his real son. So the professor sells Astroboy (with much emotional pleading from the child). His new owner is a robot gladiatorial combat ringleader, and the first thing he does is put Astroboy in the ring to fight against a colossally huge robot. Astroboy, being the height of robotics, handily puts the robot in check, but does not want to destroy him. Astroboy doesn't want to hurt anyone. So the ringleader locks him away with all the other junk robots. Astroboy powers up the other robots and they end up saving human lives as the circus burns to the ground. It's at this moment that Professor Elefun, the new head of the Institute of Science takes Astroboy under his wing and they live together.
The second episode "Colosso" has Astroboy longing to have a real family, with a mother and father who look like him and who love him and take care of him. Though derailed by the premature awakening of the robot Colosso, in the end Astroboy is united with a robot mother and father (who have similar features to him).
I give all this back story for a reason.
It's almost exactly the same storyline as the Stanley Kubrick / Steven Spielberg movie Artificial Intelligence: A.I. Robotic engineer loses his son and designs a robot boy in his image. Family lives with robot boy until they feel that he's too uncanny and mother leaves him alone in the woods to die (with lots of emotional pleading). Boy finds his way into the city and gets picked up by a robot circus where robots fight to the death. There he meets other fractured robots in a pile, waiting to be scrapped. He escapes from the circus But he wants to be a real boy, with a real family. And in the end, thousands(?) of years later, he is united with a mother who loves him though who herself is a clone.
I think you could take scenes from these two episodes of Astroboy and put them next to individual scenes in A.I. and see nearly the exact same thing. The same story arc, the same resolution.
While it could certainly be debated whether or not Brian Aldiss, the author of the original short story, or Stanley Kubrick ever even saw Astroboy it's amazing to me that 45 years later we have a film that follows this so closely without ever mentioning it at all.
Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are the central couple of this grisly musical. Tim Burton is obviously madly in love with the both of them, as they are pretty much in every movie he has ever made. This is a text book Tim Burton movie, with people looking like turn of the century London was always goth. The lyrics are by Stephen Sondheim, and is full of his signature wit and turn of phrase. Personally I don't think that Johnny Depp and Helena B.C. can sing all that well, but they're serviceable. Best moment in the film was the best song in my opinion, "Have a little Priest." It's funny, it's dark, and the ending is utterly tragic. Overall, I really liked it, but it felt like it needed something more. B+/A-
Best Little Whorehouse in Texas: Dolly Parton plays Miss Mona the madame of the chicken ranch, a fine texas institution where good old boys get their jollys. Burt Reynolds is the county sheriff who's in love with Miss Mona, and who does everything in his power to keep her cathouse open. Full of earworm songs that you'll never forget (hell I haven't stopped singing them since Christmas). It's a story about love, societal change, the harshness of the media and the stupidity of politics. I absolutely love it. Best moment: The Watchdog Report #1, "Texas has a whorehouse in it!" I could sing that song for days. Overall, totally loved it, everything worked from costumes to music to story. A
Tommy: The Who's classic rock opera Tommy was made into a feature film by Ken Russell (Lair of the White Worm). I used to love the music from Tommy. There was something deeply moving about childhood trauma and overcoming obstacles that gripped me. But watching the film again completely destroyed that. For one, Ann Margaret and Oliver Reed CAN'T SING! And they were like half of the movie. They were grossly out of tune on nearly every song, and the ridiculous acting made it worse. Oliver Reed was at least kind of believable, but Ann Margaret was just blah. Her completely irrelevant sploshing scene with the baked beans and the chocolate sauce was the highlight of her acting in the film. The bad singing continued to Uncle Ernie and Cousin Kevin whose names I'm not even going to bother to look up. I thought that Billy Idol and Phil Collins played those roles, but research revealed those came later in several live performances. The other bad thing about Tommy was that the film, which tried to smooth over the leaps in time and disjointedness of the plot, was that it was still extremely disjointed. That's a problem of the musical itself though, as the songs are more of a pastiche than a coherent narrative. It's basically one song for every character who waltzes through Tommy's life, and there's a whirlwind of characters, very few of which make any kind of repeat performance. Not even in the culminating scenes of the film where we could have seen the Acid Queen and the pinball champ come back in an attempt for salvation. Overall, I thought it was horribly horribly bad. I still like elements of the original Who album, but the film just sucked. F-
Hooray for going to chinese and a movie on Christmas! It makes me feel so urban.
FYI: Sweeney Todd was AWESOME! I laughed, I was horrified, I was saddened and I was like WHAT! It was great. Part of the fun of not being a musical theater queen is that I'm constantly shocked by shows that have been around forever. My favorite was the pie song where they're looking at people out the window and talking about their flavor. It was glorious. Visually stunning and well sung. Though Johnny Depp does sing over Helena Bonham Carter a bit much. Beautifully gory. Loved it.
I came home round 5:00ish and watched "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas." I've always loved this movie. It was one of those shows that we would watch whenever it came on. Ironically I always wanted to play Melvin P. Thorpe, the TV bastard because I loved his song "Texas has a whorehouse in it!" I would never be that much of a prude, but it's hysterically funny at how over the top it is. Plus, his outfits are absolutely ridiculous.
* Japanese: I'm up to Rosetta Stone level 1 Lesson 2.5. Today I learned Big, Small, Long, Short, Shapes, Colors, Sequences, Yes and No, and the difference between animals and people. I find it unusual that the Kanji for "circle" is so non-circular. The phrase that cracked me up the most was "Chiisana tento" which means "little tent." I was saying it over and over in the shower like a crazy person.
In continuing with Japanese I nearly answered the phone Moshi Moshi tonight for fun. It was Greenpeace asking for more money and I gave it to them. I should have pretended to be Japanese, answering them only in bizarro Japanese. It could have been fun.
* Body: I shaved my head tonight, and I nicked the HELL out of my scalp. I've got a band aid on my head and I feel kind of stupid. Thank goodness I'm not going anywhere tonight. Also, my hands are UNBEARABLY dry. I have some Curel ultra healing lotion and I'm hoping that helps. It seems to be doing good so far.
* Home:
jcruisedirector moved out yesterday. The room is empty and my home is amazingly quiet. Though empty boxes still remain to be broken down. It's nice to have the place to myself again, if only for a while. * Movies: I saw Juno the other night. It made me feel loved. I need more moments like that in movies. We all need more moments like that in movies.
* TV: Television is slowly grinding to a halt because of the damn writer's strike. I'm kind of sick of it. I just want to be entertained when I come home at night and not have to be bored by the dregs of television because of a labor dispute. All the reality TV in the world is nothing compared to shows like Journeyman, Chuck and Heroes. Thank god I have the world of anime to comfort me in my time of need.
* Books: I finished reading "The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears." It's a wonderful book about an Ethiopian immigrant in Washington DC, watching the early stage of the gentrification of Logan Circle, and just dealing with his life. It was a great book. Wonderful even. Next for the book club is Edward P. Jones's "All Aunt Hagar's Children." It's a collection of short stories, also all based in DC. Can't wait. I'm also reading "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People." It's a very eye opening book. I'm glad I got it.
* Comics: I read Monster v.2, Hellsing v.1, Parasyte v.2, the beginning of Lone Wolf and Cub, and I'm muddling through Mushishi 3 in Japanese (not doing too well). I'm getting a box shipped from my favorite comic shop in Cincinnati sometime next week. I'm REALLY looking forward to that since it's a fucking fortune in comics.
* Internet: There's been some talk on Fabulon about wanting to have some kind of DC meetup, since there's a whole bunch of us from DC. I'm thinking it should happen so I put a note out there for a Fabulon Expedition/Exhibition in DC sometime in January. Details will be forthcoming.
* DC: Titan bar is closing their doors tomorrow and I'm very sad about this. Titan was like the one bar I would go to here in town and for reasons unknown they gave notice to everyone on Wednesday and it's been all over the blogs. I hope the owners and the staff all find new directions that benefit them. It's even sadder that it's one more gay club in DC that's gone.
* Quilt: I haven't worked on the quilt, yet, but I've got to clear up my dining room so I can work at the big table. I'm planning on next weekend being a good quilting weekend.
* Book: Haven't opened up Mordred since Nanowrimo. I will work on it again. Slow and steady it will come round. I've got the outline down and ready. I just need to write. I will set aside time next week to work on this.
* Faeries: I haven't been to faeries all month. I plan on going on Monday. Hopefully there will be someone there and we can sing carols or something.
* New Years: JD and I plan on going to his friends's New Years party. It was a lovely occasion last time. I'm hoping it's just as good this time round. Probably will be. And no more splurging on fantastic dinners before hand because the food was out of control at that party. We'll bring a couple bottles of booze to add to the cause and hopefully that'll keep people going.
This looks good. And possibly seizure inducing.
dmlaenker and I will be heading out to his old college Sci-fi fantasy guild feast. It's camping and garb and silly fun times with padded weapons and gods know what else. I plan on doing some needlepoint while wearing a very lacy shirt. Beyond that perhaps I'll do some cooking. I want to just have a chill weekend really. I may participate in one of their sports, but I'll see what I feel like.Yesterday I watched "The Queen" and cried my eyes out the whole time. I remember being all torn up from the death of Princess Diana, and how weird that whole time was. I don't remember the newspapers tearing the queen a new one. I guess they didn't play that up as much in the states. It was a really good movie. Not much else to say.
Then I watched the first episode of Boogiepop Phantom and was freaked out by OCD high school girls who want to die by the ghostly hand of her dead boyfriend... Yeah, it was creepy.
I finished reading "Storm Front" by Jim Butcher. It was pretty good. Though having seen his picture in the back he looks like so many Wiccan cliches. Long black hair, piercing gaze, interest in weaponry, martial arts, socially awkward, and a longing to be anachronistic and wield mystical power. Yeah, I've seen that guy a number of times. Still though he writes a decent book. I loved the ending which was loaded with crazy shit. Definitely worthwhile.
Currently I'm reading "The Testament of Gideon Mack" by James Robertson. Quick glance: Scottish minister has near death experience, meets the devil and goes bananas. Sounded good to me, so I figured I'd give it a go.
The scene in question is a terrible lounge band full of old men in gold lame jackets playing in the revolving restaurant on top of the holiday inn in Sunnydale Arizona, right before the main character tries to set it spinning so fast that it could take off as a flying saucer taking the awkward teenager and his alien friends (Adam West among them) off to planet B-52. This old man, the lead singer of the band, face full of bloodshot veins like he's been on a bender for years, who has no sense of pitch or key, is wearing this jacket, singing in the revolving restaurant, just delivering the lines to "Love is like an itching in my heart" with all the fervor a 70 year old shitty lounge singer can muster, with all of the heart scratching motions and tearing his gold jacket open for the audience... It's absolutely priceless. I will never forget that scene.
And while the B-52's make no direct appearance, there are women with giant bouffants and B-52's album covers go swirling all through the film in a crazed psychedelic kind of way. And it's got Adam West! And shitty lounge singing! And pretenses of aliens! Oh, what a wonderful bit of trash.
God I need to find that movie.
dmlaenker and potpourrifae and I went and saw the new Julie Taymor film Across The Universe. It's basically a huge montage of Beatles songs spliced together in a fairly moving story about an English boy who finds a girl in America, falls in love and falls apart as a result of the Vietnam war. It's got everything from hippies, to Janis and Jimi, to Bono as an LSD evangelist, Eddie Izzard as a crazy carnival man (Mr. Kite), to revolutionaries, to war people, to Bread and Puppets, to pop art, to well... you get the picture. It's beautiful, tearjerking, memorable, and lovely. Definitely go see it. My only quibble is that sometimes the songs were interpreted so incredibly literally that it was a little groan worthy. The picture of Chairman Mao during the Revolution number was the most egregious violation of that. At least Bono didn't turn into a walrus.
I'm glad that there were some songs that were implied and not explicit (Maxwell's Silver Hammer, Sexy Sadie, Lovely Rita, etc.). There was also a great visual with the well known green apple getting sliced in half and the strawberry being used as a record label instead. That was cool.
So for sometimes over literal interpretation but for absolutely brilliant execution:
Overall Rating: A
For that I apologize dear friends.
I have been reading loads and loads, working loads and loads, and basically doing home stuff in the in between times and occasionally catching some time to sleep.
What have I been reading:
Buddha by Osamu Tezuka. Think Walt Disney meets Siddhartha. A mix of biographical history of Siddhartha, some creative license, some AMAZING scenes of conversations with Brahman and you've got the jist of it. This 8 volume work was epic, beautiful, and unbelievably moving.
2012: The return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck. While I appreciated Pinchbeck's earlier work, "Breaking open the head," 2012 has left me kind of lost in a muddle of Walter Benjamin, alien abduction stories, 2012 conspiracy theories, and psychedlic tripped out weirdness. I'm halfway through it and it's pretty unclear where things are going at this point. It reads like a modern Jack Kerouac meets Terrence McKenna with some philosophical criticism thrown in for spice. I hope it gets to a point, because, frankly, I'm lost. Maybe one needs to be on drugs to understand it.
What have I been watching:
The Lair. This little series produced by the Here! network is a spinoff of my favorite sex addled witchcraft fueled soap opera "Dante's Cove." In the Lair we discover that in the little town of Dante's Cove there is a secret nightclub run by a coven of Vampires. And yes, they're gay vampires, but didn't Ann Rice prove they're all kinda gay anyway? It was both hot, strange, and full of magical paranormal weirdness. Not as good as Dante's Cove, but pretty good nonetheless.
My Super Ex-Girlfriend. Luke Wilson is the guy who dates all the wrong girls. Then one day he finds one who he thinks might be the right girl for him, only it turns out that she's a super hero with amazing powers. And she's totally fucking deranged. Funny, unnerving, and totally worth watching.
Zodiac. Jake Gyllenhall plays Robert Graysmith, the San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist who wrote the book that put forth the most convincing evidence for the identity of the Zodiac killer. Zodiac is the story of the murders, the story of the people who worked the case, and how the struggle to find Zodiac consumed and utterly destroyed their lives. Fascinating and totally creepy.
The Grudge 2. Speaking of creepy! The dead just don't want to let go, still. And they're making their way across oceans this time. Amber Tamblyn plays Ashley, the sister of Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) who has gone bonkers from her last encounter with the ghosts in the house. In this sequel we discover the dark secret of Kayako, the original woman who was killed in the house (you know, the creaking one). Well, some more stupid people go wandering into the house and this time the ghosts hold on even tighter. Worth watching (during the daytime).
Upcoming plans:
Baltimore Comic Con: Next Weekend! Steve and Steve and I will be attending the con and the retailer summit and just having a grand old time.
Nov. 9-13: Seattle! JD and I will be chasing the sun, and flying out to visit my friends T. and O. and hopefully a few others along the way. JD's never been so I'll be showing him around, doing some of the touristy stuff and just having a relaxing time in the city.
Nov. 16-18: Anime USA. I'll be back in DC, well, NoVA I guess would be more correct and watching loads of anime. It's bound to be good, I'm sure.
Beyond all that, not quite sure yet. If I do get a chance to fly out to England and visit with vatoengland, kevinrtaylor and rmhowse I think the earliest would be next May. Which would suit me just fine as it might hit around the Green Man festival, which always looks like loads of fun.
Hope all is well.
I saw Stardust tonight. It wandered pretty far from the book, and not always in good ways. It was still pretty enjoyable, but I also didn't feel like I missed anything when I went to the toilet partway through.
This week I read "Storm" by Eric Jerome Dickey. This is the back story of Storm and Black Panther when they were living in Africa and trying to make their way in life and how they fell in love with each other. I didn't really like the way they drew her eyes in this comic. It really bugged me bad. But the story was really great.
Ironically while I was sitting in the Subway sandwich place at Dupont Circle and reading this book that says "African-American" all over it with major black characters prominently on the front and back cover, two African-American gentlemen came up to me and said, "What's up Aryan Nation?" I didn't hear what they said, I just nodded. It registered like 30 seconds afterward as they passed by and said, "See I told you he was!" and I yelled back at them "I'm NOT!" As if it mattered to them. They had made up their minds.
I got my giant box of comics in the mail the other day. I read through 52 volume 2. It's quite interesting. I'll leave it at that. I read issues 4 & 5 of Buffy Season 8. Today I started reading "Night Trippers," which is about mod vampires in 60's london. I'm liking it so far.
Tomorrow I have a gazillion work related, but not work oriented, errands to run. I'm going to go down to the old Agency and get a copy of my terminal SF50, because they seem to have lost it at my new place, and they're still, after 22 weeks, not giving me the proper leave accrual. And I still don't have my health insurance. And the copies of my resume that I asked the HR department to send to my new office at Benning have not arrived in over a week, so I'm just going to go to the office and get a whole bunch of things done on my "off" day. After that I'm going to read some manga, have some coffee and chill out until Faerie Potluck.
I can hardly wait til tuesday when I get paid. GOD I want my money.
And I want to buy the Dr. Strange DVD that's just come out!
30 Days of Night: Vampires converge on Barrow, Alaska, during their month of night and wreak bloody, gory havoc. Once again, despite a few issues with some throw away characters this was a grand horror comic. A.
Today we danced in Dupont Circle. There were 30 people on the pole, and it wove up beautifully. We've even got pictures, but I'll have to post them later.
Tonight
sqrlcub took me, Kurt and JD out to the Melting Pot for a birthday dinner. It was excellent as always. And now I've caught up with email and comics. I've not even looked at my friends page yet so if there's something I'm missing out on I'll just have to find out another time.
Tomorrow I go back to working at Tenley. And I have to say, that I'm thrilled that I won't be in the cage.
I also got some fantastic artwork and a new tee shirt and some excellent shoes. Not in that order. Urban Outfitters is good for something.
Watched the episode "Evolution of the Daleks" yesterday. It wasn't as holy fucking fuck as the first episode, but it was pretty hellacious. I can't wait to see next week's episode. It looks like a creature straight out of The Great and Secret Show, and that makes me all giddy.
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