Scandal At The Parkade

Today was double movie madness as I saw two movies. Firstly, I saw The Incredible Hulk for a second time down at the cheap show. I don’t think I pulled too much out of seeing it a second time, but it was still enjoyable. I do like Edward Norton substantially. Tim Roth too. With Few super-hero movies on the horizon, it was nice to make me feel like I got to see another one. On top of that it was only $3.50. I was going to go with Robert and Iris, but due to them being hugely in the wrong direction, and me being strapped for time, and also it being professionally inappropriate, I couldn’t pick them up.
[hulk picture never, stop asking Robert]
The fights and story weren’t as enthralling the second time around, but the visual imagery like where he’s in the shadows, the quality of Norton’s and Roth’s performances. I also love the opportunity to practice my portuguese. If it isn’t enough of a quality review from that, I did see it twice.

Round 2 of movie night was seeing Pineapple Express with Joe. On the way we had a rousing listen of some old 311 and Foo Fighters. We’ve both been on a little nostalgia kick lately it seems, by chance. Pineapple Express isn’t my usual brand of movie, but I had a good time because I loosened up a little and was looking for it to be good. Not too loose though, because the police were checking people out as they were entering the theatre, no joke.

Epic fight scenes, car chases, gun fights, this movie definitely tries to have some spectacle to it, and while it’s completely over the top, it has fun with it, and they know it’s goofy, like a Sam Raimi affair. It also features an all-star cast of a whole bunch of guys I recognize from different movies but can’t remember the names of. It’s a lot of slapstick and violence and people hitting each other with unconventional objects, but I enjoyed it, so I’m not going to complain about it. There a lot of nice bits that the characters run though, easily the high point of the film. They did overdo the overly verbose comments during the fights, along the lines of somebody being pummeled with a pipe and saying “Please stop or at least tell me why you are hitting me that pipe!” Plot-wise and in terms of character depth and all that usual good stuff, I wouldn’t even attempt to oversell it, but as I said before, it’s something you can have fun with it. Ooh, that and there’s a nice scene later on in the film where they sit around and recap the major scenes of the movie in a very stoner-esque fashion. Not really sure if that’s worthy of being a spoiler, but better safe than sorry.

I love Gillian Anderson. If anybody wants to get me an early Christmas present…

I wish I had some money for this.

Ooh, I can’t wait for the movie. I think I need to remind Alicia, Joe, and Robert that they all must accompany me or incur some wrath.

My friend Sarah told me that she wanted to see, uh, Wanted. I had seen the comic, and my curiosity was piqued, even if I wasn’t impressed by the coarseness I got just by flipping through the pages. Eventually, I saw the trailer for the film, and was very disappointed until reviews started popping up saying that it was a guilty pleasure, and not just a pile of trash.
Based on this, I decided to whet my appetite by reading the comic book. I enjoyed it overall, as there were some cute ideas, but there were some over-the-top elements including a talking penis and a monster made of shit. It’s definitely a power fantasy of the highest order, giving greatly into everyone’s hidden desire to murder, maim, and steal everything you can. You see, it’s all about supervillains, not superheroes.

Now, it’s probably pretty hard to create a new cast of characters these days without them resembling characters somewhere in the multiverse of comics (note The Vulture and Sunfire in the pic); so it looks like Millar decided really to not create completely original characters, especially for minor characters, and some of the more important B characters seem to be pastiches of common enemies and themes. I did notice before reading the section on Wikipedia about it, that the gangs of villains largely resembled the rogues galleries of Batman and Superman, some of which are particularly obvious. Especially considering some of the themes of a changed world, it seemed possible to enjoy them almost as analogues to those villains, similar to reading Marvel’s Ultimates, or What If? story-lines.
It’s a good idea for 6 issues, but I lost some interest in issue 5, and issue 6 is pretty much an aftermath. I hear that the movie differs significantly, and whether or not that’s for better or worse, I don’t know, but I’m willing to give it a shot. If Sarah changes her mind, maybe I’ll go with Joe or Robert.

X-Files is this week! Waugh!

Ever a fan of the comic book movie, I headed out to see the new Batman movie. Well, first I listened to Bat Macumba by Os Mutantes to get in the mood. After a quick resolution of ticket issues, me and Alicia and Joe all went down to the movie. Bob was supposed to join us, but fandan-went his tickets, and he and Sarah had to see it in some other theatre. Robert was awl in nyc, and didn’t make it either. In fact, a whole slew of steers, compeers, and queers were in rank at the cinema. It could’ve been a spectacle in either direction, but it wound up being pleasantly isolate.
Joe and I hoped to purchase some bucket masks and Joker them up some, but there aren’t too many party stores open past 11 pm.

Heath Ledger is amazing in the movie, his intermittent presence, his dialogue, his posture and mannerisms, were dead on. Err. Since I wrote that accidentally, I’ll keep it. Really though, he’s the high point of the movie.
A surprise appearance by The Scarecrow had me quite excited, since he’s one of my favorite rogue’s gallery figures.
For a summer blockbuster action movie, it kept me pretty guessing; a few specific tricks in the movie are quite enjoyable in retrospect, because they allowed a great evocation of emotion that would otherwise be impossible, and tied you better into the film. There’s a lot of great psychological elements that I wish were fleshed out just a bit more though, which probably could’ve happened since the movie is over two and a half hours long. Luckily, there really wasn’t any point though were I felt like it was dragging on, at least as a whole.
The “Batman voice” was something that I wasn’t amazed with, but it rarely infringed on enjoyment. The only big negative is that for a movie so oriented on this hard-boiled dark underbelly of crime and super-villainy, there were a lot of bad puns regarding Two-Face, mostly prior to him becoming the villain. On the humor point, like with most movies, I think each time I laughed, nobody else was laughing.
Also noteworthy, I’m not huge into spectacle, but the fights and explosions mixed with the complexity of parts like Joker’s escape balanced out splendidly.

There was a trailer for Watchmen during the previews as well. Unless your computer has the same ailment as mine, you can watch it here. I believe every scene in there, at least that I remember, directly corresponds to the comic. This might be a good thing.

X-Files is in less than a week!

The only two things I know about Brendon Small is that one, he created Home Movies, and two, he created Metalocalypse. Both of these things are high quality. Oh, I guess he also appeared in an issue of Playgirl (one picture here). When I heard that Dethklok was coming to town, I immediately called up Joe, and we got some tickets. We showed up the show about four hours early. We grabbed a beer real quick, and then went back to the people we befriended to safe guard our spot at the front. It was still over 3 hours early, and I was surprised at how few people had shown up. Joe knows some people in security, and we managed to get in quick, and ahead of some others, winding us up dead center front row.
Soilent Green was pretty good, but there was no spectacle to it, as if the house lights were still on. Also, the vocals were ridiculously low, even for standing in the front row. Chimaira was more visually pleasing, and a lot of people seemed to be into it, but I wasn’t wowed.
Dethklok came on, and it was intense, I had to keep a death-grip on the railing to not get shoved out of the way. Joe (mostly) and I had to smash some people who were trying to thieve our spots. One guy actually got both of his hands on the railing, and he wouldn’t budge. One of the guards Joe knows came over and basically threw him back 10 feet through a sardine packed crowed, after smashing his knuckles and going “LET. GO.”
Photo credits go to Joe
Everybody had been clamoring on the internet that Murmaider was the pinnacle of the show, but I felt it was on the mild side. Hatredcopter by far was the best, and I’m pretty sure that song alone gave me a bangover. There were severals bits during their set, before and during, where the characters appeared and spoke and Brendon Small did some voices live as well. Everybody in the audience decided this was the time to yell out obnoxiously about nothing. I still have no idea what jokes I missed.

For the occasion I was going to make a Duncan Hills shirt. There really wasn’t any great logo that was available at the time. I was debating taking the old Starbucks logo and replacing the words with “Duncan Hills Coffee” much like a Suicide Machines shirt I have, but I wound up not even making one. I was also considering making one with the logo that first appeared in the episode that aired that night:

I don’t really like this logo, and I was hoping for something less ridiculous. This is pretty much why I passed it up. There was no way to get anything authentic enough, but aesthetically pleasing. (Pardon the low quality, I used the image I got from before the episode aired in decent quality)

Joe asked me what I thought about him using a certain image of the Joker for a tattoo. The original is the following, from a Dark Knight poster. The original part he was interested in was this:

I’m never sure how serious any tattoo discussion I have with people go, because it is something you need to think about a little bit. I think we both had a few issues with the design, and both considered some more cartoonish representation. Now, I’m on the clock, but I figured I could quickly do some mock ups, and see how it came out.

The first one was a real fast, really blockish, black and white scribble, just to see what I would be working with. I drew a second one a little slower, with some rounder lines, and it looked a little better. I added some color with pastels to flesh it out, though more in the vein of the original and probably not what it’d look like as an actual cartoon type image.
It still has the problem of the weird borders, like the disappearing hand and the hair and all. The original too, has black all around it, which makes the fades look nice, but I don’t know how well that’d look on somebody’s arm. I don’t think it came out all that bad though for something that only took 2 minutes.

The X-Files has long been one of my favorite television programs. I have action figures of Mulder and Scully, I have pretty much the entire run of the comics, a bunch of other random objects d’interès, and my cat is also named after Mulder as well. Recently I purchased all of the seasons on DVD. You might notice from the following picture that they are still in the plastic wrap. That is because I can’t afford to buy 9 seasons of anything on DVD even with the discount Joe tipped me off to, so I’m forcing myself to wait until I can sell off some other DVDs of mine to offset the cost a little bit.

There’s a few projects I have going on right now that work on the same risk-return positive game and I’m sure they’ll be elaborated on. If anybody wants to get one of the DVDs, I have left: A History Of Violence, Behind Enemy Lines, Sideways, Snatch, House Season 2, and possibly the first two seasons of The Office US. 

12 Days until the X-Files movie!