amatyultare

And I enjoyed it a lot. But it was also ridiculous. REALLY ridiculous. So I wrote a thing about it.

A few notes:

•I am not Cleolinda, and this is not a Movies in 15 Minutes production, but it is possible that part of this will, um, sound like a faint echo of her work? Because it's a similar format and also I've read her M15M about a hundred times each? So if you notice similarities, I apologize.

•If you have not yet seen it, I would like to point out an amazing image set (put together from the movie trailer, I believe), which basically posits that the real OTP of the movie is Jane/Science. This is...relevant.

•Also, one theater in Shanghai accidentally used a fan-manip Thor/Loki poster to advertise the movie. This...this is also relevant. Trust me on this.

( Last Time on Exposition Theater... )

For those of you who were reluctant to see Gantz because you don't enjoy watching violent films, let me remove that obstacle – there's surprisingly little explicit violence in this movie. (Barring a first fight scene – just cover your eyes for the onion people.)

Unfortunately, that still leaves about a dozen reasons to run screaming from this movie. I don't think I'll be able to sleep until I vent, so let's run down the list, shall we?

( Gantz: That's Just How The Cookie Crumbles, or, Capslock Ahoy! )

Bottom line: I don't particularly regret going to see it myself – there's a certain pleasure in seeing even a really bad movie with good friends – but I can't recommend it unless you're feeling masochistic.

So, Eclipse. I can't decide whether I actually thought it was a decent movie, or if I was just impressed at how huge an improvement over the book it is. cleolinda, as usual, has said pretty much everything that we're all thinking, so go just read that if you want to know what I thought about the movie.

But in all seriousness, guys, it's pretty entertaining. I know I've ranted - extensively - about this series, but I promise, there are actual fight scenes and everything.

Meanwhile, Avatar comes out this weekend...it currently has an 8% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and Roger Ebert started his review with the following words:

"The Last Airbender" is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that.

He gave it half a star. Combine that with the racefail thing and...maybe I won't be going to see that one after all. (Edit: Here's probably my favorite review of the movie so far. Trust me, read it.)

Tomorrow's Friday - why do four-day weeks always feel more than a day shorter than five-day weeks? Weird. Anyway, off to finish my laundry and then to bed.

I don't know that I can come up with any coherent thoughts on the new Robin Hood movie right now. The only thing that comes to mind is that this movie felt less like a 'Gladiator' remake (which is how I'd heard it described) and more like a weird LOTR remake, only this time Aragron marries Eowyn? And Sauron=the French? I don't know. For more thoughts, I refer you to the ever-hilarious Cleolinda.

(Also, tarimanveri, if you watch this movie, can you live-blog it somehow? Because I would love to read your history-geek-rage-fueled comments; also, without a way to vent, your head may explode somewhere between King Richard dying in battle on his way back from the Crusades and the part in which a proper Christian English lord gets a Viking funeral pyre.)

(However, Alan Doyle of Great Big Sea was excellent and I'm betting a good third of the soundtrack will be GBS songs. I may buy the soundtrack for that alone.)

(Also, Cate Blanchett is always fierce.)

1. Celtx is awesome. Free script-writing software that is incredibly easy to use? Yes please.

2. Once you get into the swing of it (and actually decide on plot points, cough cough), script writing is actually not too difficult. I have just under 4 pages so far. Whee! As a movie, it will be terrible, but as a script-writing exercise, it's kind of fun.

3. So. Alice In Wonderland. Jason was teasing me that my 'review' of it was quickly becoming irrelevant since it's been out for weeks now. So I finally sat down and finished it.

I was really happy that was that I was able to watch Wonderland with my sister, although Erica and I have very different tastes in movies; I respect her taste immensely even when I disagree with her. I have a higher tolerance for campiness, self-conscious humor, and 'typical Hollywood' (romantic subplots, glitz, etc). Erica, on the other hand, has a much higher tolerance for gratuitous violence, sex, and drug use, low-budget films, and general grittiness. I like to think this means that, if we both like a movie, it's a good sign of that movie's quality. On the other hand, when we turn to each other after a movie and tell each other earnestly, “That was AWFUL”, it's a pretty good bet that movie is bad.

You can see where I'm going with this. People who really liked Burton's Wonderland...may want to stop reading now.

The short version: The latest Alice In Wonderland is Tim Burton with zero respect for his audience and precious little respect for his source material.

( TL;DRx1000 )

Okay, bedtime. Later, all!

Hollywood news. Primarily grabbed from cleolinda either on LJ or Twitter.

•So, Alice in Wonderland. Reviews are mixed (sixth grade diorama? OUCH) but there seems to be a consensus that certain plot elements, such as a build-up to a climactic battle (in WonderUnderland? For reals?) were poor choices. We're going to see it tomorrow; should be interesting.

•Chris Weitz, director of New Moon, says that he isn't up to directing Breaking Dawn. But he agrees it should be split into two movies. Why? WHY? Considering that his rationale for begging off the movie is that he's got a young kid and it would be too much to shoot a whole two movies at once, maybe he's agreeing with the two-movie thing to give himself a reason for demurring. Because I've read Breaking Dawn, and 'dense' is not the way I'd describe it, except regarding the main characters.

•Speaking of books being made into movies, guess what's reportedly being released on 12/10/2010? Voyage of the Dawn Treader! Woo-hoo!

•I guess I should not be surprised about this; they are planning a movie based on Magic: the Gathering. Although, interestingly, they specifically state that the movies are focused on the Planeswalkers and therefore won't necessarily have a swords-and-sorcery, Tolkeinesque feel to them. Combine that with my long-time impression that MtG was essentially ten million really awesome story hooks that never got to be used in actual stories...I am reasonably resigned to this movie.

•If you read one thing this weekend, read io9's article on sugested alternatives to bad-idea movie remakes. Bonus: can be used as a reading list of some more-or-less obscure sci-fi and fantasy to check out. Hollywood, take note!

In makeup news: Aromaleigh is awesome. Their Rocks! Sonic eyeshadow collection is awesome - so bright and fun. Their lippies are awesome but being discontinued, oh no! Must purchase a few more colors before they sell out.

In work news: I reached a milestone of reading/responding to every email in my inbox (as of 5:24 PM tonight). Considering I had 400+ unread emails a month or two ago, I'm pretty excited out this. Now I just need to maintain a 'clean' inbox...and start working on the backlog of filing...and finish some other outstanding projects...but still!

I've decided to go see the midnight showing of HBP. I will be dead at work tomorrow, so it'd better be a pretty good movie to make it worth it. Especially since I'm going to stand in line for about a million years to get a decent seat.

In the meantime, here's possibly the best comment ever made on the - questionable casting choices made for the live-action adaptation of 'Avatar: The Last Airbender'.

So of course, after more-or-less successfully fighting off a cold ALL WINTER, I actually get one now that it's spring. Felt sniffly and icky on Wednesday but tried to go on as usual; woke up on Thursday with a raging sinus headache and my throat so sore and swollen-feeling that I could hardly talk, so I texted my boss to say that I couldn't come in to work. I spent the majority of the day sleeping, and felt good enough (although still very stuffy and headache-y) to go back to work on Friday. I was, of course, very much behind since I had missed a day, but I'm ALWAYS behind and pretty much everyone else in my office is, too, so what can you do?

Friday night was the new episode of Dollhouse - is anyone else on my friendslist watching this? I sort of want someone to squee with. I almost didn't watch this episode because I was feeling tired and sick and the preview from last week had made it seem, I don't know, villain-of-the-week-ish. A bit of a throwback to earlier, less awesome episodes? But I dragged myself upstairs to watch it anyway, and HOLY GOD, it was fantastic. Also highly disturbing - I am amazed that I didn't have nightmares about the Attic afterwards.

I considered going in to work for a few hours again this Saturday, but instead spent a lot of time laying around trying to encourage my body to get over this cold. It was a very lazy day, but pleasant.

The weather was so nice out today that I decided to take a walk. I've lived almost my entire life in very rural areas, so I consider being able to 'walk to places' to be the best part of city living. But since it was fall when I moved here and winter by the time I was settled in, I haven't done much wandering of the city, even the part of it right where I live. I set out to rectify that a bit today, and it was fun (even with many places being closed for Easter). I found the 'Two Fat Cats' bakery that one of my coworkers told me about and saw a lot of other neat boutiques and restaurants that I want to check out again when they're open. I ended up eating lunch at a Thai buffet place on Congress Street - I wasn't at my absolute best for appreciating food, being somewhat chilly and wind-blown and with my sinuses complaining, but it was tasty anyway.

This evening, I gave in to curiosity and went to watch 'Dragonball: Evolution'. It's, uh, yeah. I went in with extremely low expectations, and therefore was vaguely entertained without being disappointed. I just have three brief comments:

(1) In this, granted Western adaptation, of a Japanese manga and anime series, which itself it based on a traditional Chinese legend, with a movie cast heavily weighted towards Asian actors, the main character is played by....an extremely Caucasian, Canadian actor. Huh?

(2) It's at least nice to see that Emmy Rossum is trying to make sure she isn't typecast after her role in Phantom. This isn't the way I would go about it, but hey...

(3) If nothing else, the price of my ticket was well worth it just to see actors seriously, non-ironically, screaming 'Kame-hame-HA!' on the big screen.

Bedtime! I'm crossing my fingers that my cold meds last until morning.

Occasionally, when I am procrastinating online, I will reread some of my back entries in LJ. (Especially the tagged ones - I should just suck it up and go through and tag all of my posts.) And I always think that my LJ posts were much better 'back in the day'. Not the first few months I had it, but after that...yeah. My LJ has become extremely lame. Sadness.

Part of the problem is that I hardly ever post, which then makes me feel like I shouldn't post unless I have 'something big to announce'. It's hard to get back into the habit of just talking about what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis.

That being said, I am hardcore procrastinating on Script Frenzy (I should have 16.33 pages by today, and I have...3 *headdesk*) so welcome back to Ama's Excitingly Boring Life. And since I haven't been posting much RL stuff - it's going to be a fairly an extremely long entry.

Part I: Work Stuff

( Read more... )

Part II: Shopping!

( Read more... )

Part III: Progress on my New Year's Resolution

( Read more... )

Ack, it's almost 2 AM. Definitely past my bedtime. Night, all!

EDITED TO ADD: Something, again, stolen from cleolinda. As if the Caius thing wasn't weird enough, now the kid who played Anthony in Sweeney Todd may also be portraying...Grindelwald? Really? I mean, I know we pretty much only 'see' him when he's young and all, but...really? This is the second most...the guy who essentially seduced...I can't think of anything relevant AND non-spoiler-y to say about the character, but...REALLY? I don't see it, guys. (Although Cleo is right - if this is true, the kid has the best agent EVER.)

Okay, I'm about to go to bed, but I just had to throw this out there - via cleolinda, of course - that while it may in fact be a sign of the death of cinema as we know it, even the remote possibility of this fills me with a sort of unholy glee.

"[Summit Entertainment] has acquired the rights (optioned property) from Stephenie Meyer to film and distribute Breaking Dawn."

Think about it! The bruising, headboard-breaking, pillow-biting sex! The rib- and pelvis- and spine-breaking, blood-vomiting pregnancy! The vampire-bite Caesarian Section! The love-at-first-sight/soulmates/imprinting ON A NEWBORN! And they're planning on making a movie out of it! (And probably will, unless 'New Moon' and 'Eclipse' tank. Anyone wanna take bets on that after the phenomenal performance of the first 'Twilight' film? Didn't think so.) Of course, they could try to skim over the first...two thirds of the book...but then they'll catch major flack from the die-hard Twihards.

I'm still giggling. Oh, if this happens, it is going to be epic.