Hi!
Friday, 02 July 2004 05:25:52

"I like a hard world, but I like a hard world that molds good people and people with a sense of humor about the world they're in." - Joss Whedon That kinda says it all for me. Joss makes the world a shinier place.

That a shotgun or are you just happy to see me?
Friday, 02 July 2004 20:04:15

There are many ways to wake up. One of the worst ways is to wake up to gunfire and screams of murder and carnage. That was exactly how I woke up this morning. So there I was, naked as a jaybird, still hung over from the night before, sweaty shotgun gripped too tight, staring out in disbelief over my bountiful crop of Alliance Decon Foam to see regiment after regiment of Browncoats! And the slaughter… rifle fire everywhere, and two Allliance skiffs making low passes, about 100 feet off the ground, explosions and bodies flying in all directions. Or so I thought. “Hey, Browncoat, what’s going on?” I yelled. To my horror, the passing Browncoat, obscured by her hat, was a young woman about 22, red curly hair and freckled face. She stared up at me standing on my porch, buck naked as a newborn, and I swear to God, that Browncoat smiled. “We’re hardcores!” She called up. “This is a re-enactment of the Battle of Bil. I’m with Reynolds Regiment.” After a moment she added. “We were told that most of these farms had been abandoned.” I lowered my shotgun and swore. As she walked off, she called back. “Don’t worry about this Alliance Menace, sir! We’ll push em back. Eat em all and throw away the core!” God, I hadn’t heard that bullsh*t in years. I don’t know what made me do it, but I called the young woman back. I told her about the caves, the former Browncoat stronghold and cigar butts that I had found. Smiling again, she nodded and was gone. And I was alone again. Naked. In a field. With a bunch of spoiled kids, pretending to be something higher and mightier than they were. An explosion sent Decon Foam flying in all directions and I slowly retreated back into the house.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man
Friday, 02 July 2004 22:00:46

I want to go on the record as saying I really, REALLY didn't like the original "Spider-Man" of a few years ago. Too much CGI, not enough realism in the CGI it DID use (see also: the first [i]Harry Potter[/i]), a lame, over-acting villain who built and destroyed things for no reason, and a pointless Macy Gray cameo that made me think I was watching an overfunded B-movie (which, I'm still convinced, I was). Plus, the story wasn't very good, feeling contrived and convenient, and the changes made from the original comic (where they never caught the guy who killed Uncle Ben) were needless and really, really insulting to my intelligence. I haven't seen that movie since its opening weekend. Yuck. But this blog isn't about that. This blog is about how I talked myself in (well, me and my friends talked me in)to seeing [i]Spider-Man 2: The Electric Boogaloo[/i]. Doc Ock-- great villain. Screenwriter... um, hey, the screenwriter has two Oscars for adapted screenplays. What the hell...? Oh, that, and the [i]X-Men 2[/i] factor. I didn't HATE X1, but I didn't love it, either. Once all that character development, set-up was out of the way, [i]X2[/i] ROCKED the HOUSE (even without the Joss Whedon re-write), so I thought, hey, [i]Spider-Man 2: Cruise Control[/i] will pull off the same feat. Not only did it pull off the same feat, it completely replaced [i]X2[/i] in my head, the way you forget an old girlfriend when The One walks into your life. It's good. It's DAMN good. It's way better than it ought to be. Sam Raimi is getting better... and so is his film crew. New screenwriter. New cinematographer. He's always been very good at directing scenes, but I remember thinking after [i]For the Love of the Game[/i], he didn't know how to transition between them. Well, he's figured it out. Great, limited use of CGI, and great, GREAT use of ... silence. Sure, the volume gets turned down a bit during the character scenes (of which there are many), but to take the volume all the way down to zero-- especially during an action sequence, just in the right moments-- is unheard of. It's jarring. And it works. Also, the soundtrack doesn't suck. Not because I looked at the CD in the store (I haven't), but it's not really in the movie... there are a few incidental songs, but mostly it's just the score, and nice use of "Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head," where I'm sure the studio was screaming, SCREAMING to please, please use Dashboard Confessional or Justin Timberlake or some other crap. Eight thumbs up. I've been thinking about it for 3 days, and I'll need to go back, if only for the Bruce Campbell cameo. See it, SEE IT. Not a whole lot more movies with this level of respect for their audience coming out before..... April 22, 2005?