the vynsane asylum

Yeah, I liked it right up to the point where a bunch of tanks somehow drive up what looks like the only road to the front door of this ancient impregnable ninja fortress without anyone noticing their big fucking diesel engines grinding and echoing through the canyon and bust down the door so the army can invade.

I probably wouldve been gushing about this movie from day one if I hadn't been so utterly disappointed with the third act.

I bought the Director's Cut of The Big Red One out of the WM $5 bin last week. I hadn't seen it since I was like seven or eight years old, and then I couldn't get past the fact that Luke Skywalker was in a movie where he wasn't Luke Skywalker. And I was too young to fully grasp the story other than it was a "war" film. And it was on and edited for TV so that didn't help. This new cut added back in an extra 40 minutes of footage. Aside from David Carradine's narration (which got old quick) it was pretty good. Lee Marvin is the fuckin' cat y'all.


Heh. I also watched Red Dawn for the first time in forever. "Wolveriiinnnes!!!" Nuff said.

I had an hour to myself this afternoon so I laid on the couch and popped in X-Men...... 3. Jesus, it's still terrible. I hadn't seen it since the theatrical release, and it's no better now. I didn't even get all the way through it. That will teach me not to watch Sin City or Watchmen when I want to rehash something & sleep a bit whilst doing so.

I still think the first 15 minutes or so of X-Men 3 are really strong.
It all starts falling to shit when the kids first learn of the cure.

A week or two ago Target had Rambo for $3.75 so I picked it up and got around to watching it today. Not as good as I'd heard, but still entertaining enough.

X3 is one of the worst films I've seen in the theater. It seems even worse when you take into account how awesome the first two X-Men movies were.

The Thin Man: Not what I was expecting. I knew "Dashiell Hammett" and "detective" and assumed "badass." It's more of a comedy. The "whodunit" aspect of the film is weak. There is some amazing acting and dialogue from the actor and actress playing Nick and Nora, but the rest of the movie was a bit of a letdown. Maybe if I watch it a second time and am not expecting more Continental Op-style badassery, it might be better.

3:10 to Yuma (2007): Okay, it's halfway over and still on. And I'm posting here. It's not a bad movie at all, but, well, it's impossible to not compare it to the far superior (thus far) original. Take away Ben Wade's honor and make Dan Evans' son an asshole, and you're left with a generic western, and one that wouldn't be particularly memorable if not for the casting. If my opinion changes in the next hour, I'll update them here.

It actually got worse. They cut a lot of the more important elements in favor of pointless ones. The sequence with the Chinese laborers was especially pointless and, really, Evans is killed, so Wade kills his own gang, gets on the train by himself, and then whistles for his horse so he can presumably make an escape?

I really, really hated the whole bit about Evans having been a coward in the Civil War and was doing the whole thing to save face with his son. The original Dan Evans had a backbone and was a strong hero, even if he didn't seem it at first. And the original Ben Wade was an outlaw with more honor any of the heroes aside from Evans. They're just two generic western shoot-em-up dopes here.

I don't care what anyone says, that's a shitty ending. I don't need a happy ending, but don't play at redeeming the villain only to fuck it over with the last scene.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox: Pretty good movie. Surprisingly entertaining for both the adults and kids in the room. It gets extra points for using "Heroes and Villains" because Brian Wilson is awesome.

My Neighbor Totoro: Probably my sixth or seventh viewing, at least. This movie is a gem, and you should see it. You should see every movie Miyazaki has done. Twice, at least. If not, you are a nerd and suck grasshopper cocks. But don't take my word for it, listen to the guy who founded Pixar and directed Toy Story and is in charge of Disney animation and worships the ground the man walks on.

High and Low: No joke, every Kurosawa film I see only raises him further up in my estimation. No wonder George Lucas worships him.

It is curious that two of my all-time favorite directors, Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki, are both Japanese. Okay, that part's not curious. What is curious, though, is that, while I would rather eat glass than watch a dubbed Kurosawa film (if they exist; I've not seen them, at least not on home video), I much prefer the Disney-made English dubs of Miyazaki. Probably doesn't hurt that they got top-notch actors like Liam Neeson and the late Phil Hartmann, or that little-known guys like some dude named Gaiman write (or at least contribute to) the English-language scripts.

Tried watching When Aliens Attack on National Geographic. It was advertised as analysis of possible strategies humans and aliens might use. Farfetched, I know. It turned out to be a really shitty remake of Independence Day, minus the story, good effects, and Jeff Goldblum. Seriously. The narrative paralleled ID4 so closely, I hope the screenwriters of that movie got royalty checks. I got through about an hour of it and then woke up and realized I'd missed ten minutes, so I gave up. Before I passed out, bands of people using IEDs were blowing up alien ships... which were impervious to nukes a few minutes earlier. Oops. Guess they forgot to use any logic.

Ahhh...the presumptive hubris that we would have the remotest inclination of what kind of 'strategies' aliens would use.

I was hoping it would be more along the lines of how governments might react. It was National Geographic, after all; I expect more from them than I do The History Channel. But nothing; the one former (British) government official could only say things are classified. Most was speculation by a sci-fi author I'd never heard of but a quick Google search shows is held in especially low esteem. (The guy's name is "John Ringo," which sounds fake if ever I heard a fake name. Maybe his editor is "George Paul.")

But, really, it was fucking ID4 and took up about as much time. Independence Day may be a somewhat cheesy movie, but it's tough to beat when it comes to a plain-old fun action movie.

I lost faith in the National Geographic channel a few years ago when I was watching a show about Egypt. They were leading on that Egyptians knew of aliens and future technology for most of the show. They pointed out some heiroglyphics that looked like sort of like a helicptor, a plane, and a motorboat. Then towards the end they mentioned that the heiroglyphics were chipped and eroded a bit and showed the same symbols restored, which of course didn't look like any modern technology.

Last night I was watching some show on a couple idiots that were going around Mayan ruins trying to find proof they knew the world would end in 2012. These guys believe there is a black hole in the solar system. During the winter solstice of 2012, the moon, Venus, the sun, and this alleged black hole would line up for the first time in 13000 years. They claim there was a mass extinction around that time and attibuted it to this phemonon. I'm pretty sure 13,000 years ago was a change in the ice age. Anyway, I didn't finish watching it because they were morons.

I hate how these "documentaries' don't give both sides of the story and let the viewer decide which one to believe.

There've been some, particularly on The History Channel, that are so wrong it defies belief. I've mentioned some of the stupider stuff they've done on Monsterquest.

They had one thing about Native Americans during the Civil War, and ended with the Lowery Gang of eastern North Carolina. It was talking about how they fought the Confederate army, and freed slave, and personally guided Sherman through the swamps (they couldn't be all good, I guess). "That's awesome!" I thought. I got a book about the Lowery Gang, the definitive in-print book, in fact. Trouble is, the gang didn't exist until after the war ended! They fought the equivalent of the Klan during Reconstruction. The History Channel completely bullshitted the whole thing.

Another time, there was something about Elizabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess. It talked about how she murdered hundreds of girls and drank their blood. They turned out to be very fond of using a scene of (an actress portraying) her bathing in blood and drinking it whenever any of the affiliated channels has anything about vampires, because, being a drinker of blood, she would've been a real-life vampire. Right? Once again, even the tiniest bit of research tears the story apart: she was definitely a serial killer and probably the one with the highest body count in history, and she definitely bathed in blood (because she thought it kept her skin young). But the whole drinking thing, which was the most important thing that the program hammered in? Never happened. It never came up at her trial, or the trials of any of her accomplices. The first reference to that was a highly sensationalized, mostly fictional biography from over a century later. It's kinda like a biographer reading Dracula and mistaking it for a factual account of Vlad Tepes' life.

But, anyway....

Princess Mononoke: Another Miyazaki classic that doesn't get old. And it has the closest thing to an actual villain you'll ever find in one of his movies.

At some point my DVD of Mononoke got a glitch or a scratch on it somehow and only plays the first half of the film. I haven't replaced it yet.

As Anarky Jr enjoys her late night with an encore of My Neighbor Totoro (seriously, she has good taste, wouldn't you say?), I'm trying to figure out why Mononoke got a PG-13 rating. It's dark at times, but, honestly, no worse than The Empire Strikes Back.