In Space, No One Can Hear Me Throw Up

Aliens is on AMC tonight. It came on and Chad started watching it. Although I am a huge fan of Sigourney Weaver, but I had never seen any of the Alien movies, so I stuck around.

It was all going great. Bill Paxton, Paul Reiser, and a slew of other interesting actors who never really did much of anything else. I had no idea what the movie was even about, but I know that Aliens is the sequel to Alien.

This movie did have some great effects, especially being made 25 years ago. Everything was going great, until they took a flamethrower to a colonist who dies as an alien baby comes out of her stomach. I quietly left the living room and took my laptop to my bedroom to watch Kathy Griffin on Larry King Live (via YouTube).

The over-arching purpose of the Alien cinematic franchise (other than the obvious, make a shitload of money) seems to be to freak people out and make them afraid.

That is where I part ways with Aliens, and most horror movies. I swear sometimes, I have the constitution of a 60 year-old woman. But more than that, I have enough tension and stress in my life that watching a person covered in goo have a disgusting creature bursting from their digestive system seems like my idea of horror, which thefreedictionary.com defines as "an intense, painful feeling of repugnance and fear." I couldn't agree more.

Why do we have to be entertained by such terrible and unpleasant things? Moreover, why do we let people profit from our most visceral and profound emotions? I'd rather enjoy the pleasant things in life. Red wine, Ben & Jerry's, cheese, a nice canoe trip at Chain O' Lakes, and Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl. There are a thousand things I would rather do than subject my brain to terror, especially terror that's censored for TV and interrupted by commercials.

(If you click on the link, you can go to the Wikipedia page.)

In the Life

I love documentary film. The PBS series IN THE LIFE uses a mix of interviews and documentary short subjects and excerpts to chronicle life in the LGBT community.

Although some of the stories are a little less than what DA Pannebaker might produce, the subjects are really compelling. A lesbian methodist minister in Pennsylvania, a LGBT group in Nepal helping write a new constitution, or a campground in upstate New York that has become a village of respite for lesbians and gay men. Interviews with Edward Albee, Judy Shepard, Margaret Cho.

Although for obvious reasons, my local PBS station would never air this series, you can get the podcast through their website.

Check it out.

My thoughts on the oscars

So, I just finished watching the Oscars(r) through the glorious invention of TiVo.

Some random thoughts:

• TG Juno won something. My sister Kath calls best original screenplay "The grand booby prize" that the Academy gives out when something's really good, but there's still a better "Best Picture" movie. In this case, since an ex-stripper wrote the film, it really is a grand booby prize.
  
• Daniel Day-Lewis can suck it. The whole bowing to Helen Mirren was soooo last year. His "method acting" of taking years to prepare, blah blah is kind of interesting, but really, I'm so tired of his schtick.
• The montages of past year's clips were probably the most charming parts of the evening.
  
• John Stewart's Wii game with the little choir girl was lame. It smacked of product placement.
  
• John Stewart was funnier than the last time, but still not quite funny enough.
  
• Enchanted's songs were really good, but the song from Once was way better. August Rush was kind of pedantic and stale, even with a prodigy songstress.
  
• Jack Nicholson can just never come up on stage again. He seemed totally out of it. He definitely needs some Geritol or something (speaking of product placement).
  
• It's a Class A Felony that Hillary Swank has 2 Oscars and Laura Linney has yet to receive one. LL Cool Lady is an incredibly passionate and versatile actress.
  
• I really want to see La Vie En Rose. I love Edith Piaf's music. I actually have had it on my Nano for over a year.
  
• Paul Thomas Anderson's movies intrigue me. Even though DDL is in it, I may have to see There Will be Blood. What the hell is drinking a milkshake have to do with oil?
  
• The Coen Brothers movies are fascinating. I just saw Big Lebowski a few months ago for the first time. Fargo was amazing and Lebowski was enchantingly strange.
  
• NCFOM is still putting me off because Tommy Lee Jones is in it. The only movie I like that man in is Coal Miner's Daughter. He can suck it with DDL.
  

Heath is History

I first experienced Heath Ledger in "10 Things I Hate About You." He had a gravelly voice that made me think he was smoking in Kindergarten. He wasn't hard on the eyes either.

I liked him in Brokeback Mountain, but it irritated me that people always think it's courageous to play gay. But beyond my control, he became a gay icon, someone around whom the gay community could rally.

Now he's dead. It's sad. But it begs the question: are we too obsessed with Celebrity in this country? We need to care about something other than so-called famous people.

We're hurting the world because we are paying attention to the lives of celebrities, which in the grand scheme of things, don't really matter. If we were more focused on the war, poverty, global warming, maybe Heath wouldn't have overdosed.

I hope that Heath's death will serve as a wakeup call for celebrophiles. Let's get back to business.

Counter to the Counterculture

I was desperate for movies to add to my netflix queue, so I somehow cross-referenced myself into "Hair."

This is most definitely the worst musical ever. The movie is also poorly made, with the schizophrenic Milos Forman directing. Normally I love strange directors, but as I have matured in my film studies, I can see the VanSants and Formans and the Weirs for what they are: moderately talented.

I used to love the ideas of the counterculture, but the songs were almost all bad. The only good ones were "Aquarius," "Let the Sun Shine In," and "Good Morning Starshine." The rest of the songs that carried the dramatic exposition were all very backward, and utterly ridiculous. The choreography was so bad I actually said "frakkin Twyla Tharp!" I have to confess that I had to watch most of the songs on fast forward because I didn't even want to waste my time.

The ending was so contrived and abrupt that it was very jarring. In one frame they're all happy and frolicking, then the next they're in a graveyard. Whatever.

So I absolutely hated this movie. Do not go to see it, don't rent it ever.

Personal Review: I'm Not There

If there's one good thing to say about this movie, it would be that it has an unbelievable soundtrack. The most pleasant thing for me is to hear new interpretations of Bob Dylan's music and to find that they are all very fresh, breathing new life into songs that otherwise get lost in the vast catalogs of the recording industry jungle.

The songs are all very good, and I would highly recommend that anyone with any level of appreciation for Bob Dylan to purchase the soundtrack.

As a movie, it just didn't work. The non-Aristotalian dramatic structure and pseudonym characters was confusing, especially for someone like me who has a casual appreciation for Dylan.

I think the audience for this movie is the very narrow population of Bob Dylan scholars who actually know which character persona represents which phase of Bob Dylan's life and career. My justification is that I've seen "Don't Look Back" by DA Pennebaker, so the character that resonated the most with me was Jude, portrayed by Cate Blanchett. I adored her in this role. She was simply so engrossing that I couldn't take my eyes off the screen.

The friend I saw it with admitted later that he was lost. I recommended the Dylan documentary to him. This sort of schizophrenic biopic just didn't do Bob Dylan the justice he richly deserves.

Happy 2008

Happy New Year to all.

Last night we celebrated with friends in the 04 ZIP code. It was really a great night, in spite of the sleet and wind. The only drop of booze I had was some lovely overpriced champagne (pardon the redundancy) at the stroke of midnight.

It was a lovely evening, capped with a late night screening of Sordid Lives, one of the funniest movies about a funeral ever made.

On the downside, I did not sleep well. I had forgotten to turn off the alarms and everything kept going off when I was trying to get some rest. If you call me and I'm grumpy, just know I'm not hungover, I'm just super tired.

The Golden Compass

Yes, I saw it. I was totally stoked about seeing Daniel Craig, and I loved the idea that the central character is a girl, not a boy.

The girl, Lyra, is very intelligent and utterly fearless. She's a bit of a tomboy, but she knows how to use her wits to get by. She goes into a situation with both mental barrels and she does an impressive bit of quick thinking. She does not wait to be rescued, and she puts her life on the line in virtually every scene. She's a great role model for young women because she's both tough and smart.

That being said, here are some of my other reactions:

• The movie seemed to be very simplistic, it was not anti-faith, but rather the Magisterium is portrayed as a power-mad and power-hungry bureaucracy. The magisterium is concerned about 'freethinkers' and 'heretics,' but there wasn't anything specifically anti-religious or anti-God about the film itself.


• The concept of each person having a daemon, an animalistic embodiment of their souls that walks alongside them is kind of interesting, but I had several problems with it. — The daemons seem to mirror the characters' occupations and personalities. If this was the case, it was very classist that the kitchen boy had a puppy dog daemon, the Gyptian boy had a rat daemon, and the porters and other staff had dog daemons. To me, that was like saying if you have a Labrador retriever, you won't be able to be anything in society that is higher than a butler.


• The bear fight scene was far too vicious for many children. Even though it was CGI, the actions of the battle were disturbing to me, and I'm nearly 31 years old.


• The witches were very artfully done, but their physical nature was kind of inconsistent. If they can fly and disappear into thin air, then why can they be shot?


• Sam Elliot was an interesting touch, but he was very out of place. He was a caricature of an old west cowboy and his aw-shucks dialog was pretty much vestigial and pointless.

Overall, I think it made a great looking movie. The action was very intense, at times too much so for children. Using the concept of parallel universes is always tricky though, and this one had some problems, even for a sci-fi devotee such as myself. I would give this 3 out of 5 stars. Somewhere between see at matinee price or wait for video.