jane eyre: notes after percolation

WHY JANE EYRE WHY??

now let's just all bear in mind that had i liked this film, i would have been somewhat disappointed.  i came to watch it suck, and it sucked.

acting: quite good.

direction: not bad.

basic premise of fragmentary kaleidoscope of jane eyre plot-nessfulness: RUDE but promising, for the first half hour or so.

presentation of conditions of jane eyre's young life: not bad!  helen burns was there and she didn't dispense any advice about advertising!

other points of eyre-y goodness: two whole rivers sisters!  with lines!  st. john/jane eyre relationship made interesting, and is not totally disrespectful of what appear to me to be bronte's intentions!  jane eyre has no pretensions to being a naturalist...mia wasikowska gave a luminous performance...soundtrack could have been worse...blanche is not blonde...

it was the core rochester/jane relationship that sucked, though not for lack of trying.  my personal opinion of rochester is that bronte gives a very exact depiction of him, and thereby renders him impossible to cast.  jane eyre is also a very exacting character, but somehow you can get a likeable jane out of many different types of people (not charlotte gainsbourg, but many people [ruth wilson still being my favorite--though i have a friend that i think would play the part the best of anyone ever]).  the closest i've ever been able to come to getting a good casting of rochester, though, even just in my head, is right now, when i'm thinking that kristin chenoweth would do a great job with the part, if hell froze over and she somehow got the opportunity.  rochester is just impossible to make right.  orson welles is all thunder and no humor, timothy dalton, though awesome, is too byron and not enough bothwell, toby stephens is way too suave... and i like all of these performances.  i just feel bad for michael fassbender.  he's trying to play this impossible part, and the only support he's getting from either the script or the production is a miniscule flower and a neckcloth.  who could do anything with those materials?  mcguyver?  maybe he could make a weapon with which to free himself from a tricky situation (victorian england, for instance), but even he couldn't construct a rochester characterization worth balls.  fassbender did a great job with what he was given--but this seemed to consist of, "okay, now stare at an angle to the camera.  you can't flirt with jane, so just pant at her.  make it more angry!  now more sensitive!  angrier!  sensitiver!  i don't know, something with your nostrils, maybe?  are you wearing the neckcloth?  do you have your tiny flower?"

i'm wondering how many woman directors there have been of jane eyre...how many woman screenwriters...  it's sexist of me, i know.  i didn't think the direction was that bad.  i read a review at the movie theater (you know, one of those they post on cardboard) in which cary fukunaga discussed having read the book several times, and i felt like i could see what he'd read expressed in the movie.  his interpretation of jane, who, as the review pointed out, can get lost in the furor sometimes, was quite respectable.  not perfect (for a rabid fangirl, there is no such thing) but certainly well within respectable range.

to put it in the most abstract terms, i felt like the movie's intensity of purpose was admirable, and its use of its materials was kind of deplorable.  it faltered worst when it came to rochester, turning the whole thornfield sequence into something almost painful to experience, and not in the i-identify kind of way, but in the i-wish-this-were-less-teh-suck* kind of way.  a sequence of shots of cherry trees does not a romance make. 

UNFORTUNATELY!!  am i right?  am i right?

hey, maybe robert downey jr. could rochester it righteously.  i just like the idea of kristin chenoweth.

*rereading my megatokyo volumes; sorry.

i am number four: lay on moglodytes, and damned be he who first cries "*insert randomly generated script here*"

I Am Number Four: movie starring quinn from glee, that kid from that movie we watched that was, i think, england's answer to agent cody banks, and a bunch of special effects

oh man.  well, yeah, it was bad, but, on the bright side, at least it wasn't oscar-nominated bad.  and it was also kind of charming.  i was expecting nonstop action; i did not get that.  i got a paean to somewhere that read as forks, ohio.  i got a lot of that blond kid with no shirt on.  i got one or two voice-overs a la legion.  and i got a darlingly improbable soundtrack (this is not intended to be sarcastic; i really liked the soundtrack.  it was like the '40's circa the '80's--roy webb for a new millenium).  i got an arty girl who of course lived in an attic.

and again, i got some really good acting.  where have all the crappy actors gone?  i remember in my youth, we had a lot of pretty faces playing a lot of interesting roles fairly badly.  nowadays it seems like the faces are just as pretty, the performances are 100% more fantastic, and the roles are freaking stupid.  maybe i've changed.  it's certainly possible.  i just find it bizarre that despite being extremely good-looking for-the-most-part-blond people, all of these kids were very, very excellent actors.  they made their ridiculous dialogue sound almost reasonable.

main dude did sound like he had a russian accent, which was confusing as i thought he was masking an english one, but he was very good.  i mean, the accent issue was pretty easy to ignore, because aside from the assorted voice-overs, he had about four lines period, but even without dialogue he managed to set him up the characterization.  quinn from glee was also really good, even going so far as to develop a blonde ex-cheerleader character totally distinct from her glee blonde sometime ex-cheerleader character, which i think shows not just impressive talent, but impressive commitment to her art.  her bullying ex-boyfriend was really good with his edgily-sneering-yet-more-than-quasi-gay lines.  the emotionally abused weakling character was really good with his liquid billy elliot-style eyes and straightforward-as-a-choice delivery.

the plot made no sense.  the dialogue made no sense.  there was no point in attempting to make any sense of any of it.  i was annoyed by main dude's failure to open the box that his legacy had left to him--i felt that we had been promised a box-opening scene that was denied to us.

but the movie was pretty entertaining, and the characters were likeable.  kind of airborne meets predators. 

and since michael bay was somehow involved, i'm sure we will see a sequel.  because knowing what is actually inside that box is really going to haunt me.  i'm guessing some variety of nut brittle--peanut, brazil nut, walnut, space nut?  or maybe the little prince's lamb?

i did think of a way to address the nonsensicalness of the plot that i am fairly proud of: to every question your friend begins with "but why the hell did *insert something to do with i am number four here*?" you simply answer, "because of the *insert whatever qualifier and noun you choose here*."  you are bound to be within an acceptable margin of correctness, because it's pretty probable that the point being questioned will make as much sense as your answer does.
example question: "but why didn't the protector and main dude have any chemistry when main dude was able to have chemistry with the very chairs around him?"
answer: "because of the janitorial catacomb."
question: "but why did the dialogue read like mad libs?"
answer: "because of the sad engine coolant."
etcetera.

one of my friend's triumphs was in pointing out that main dude WAS buffy.  which is why (spoiler alert) they blow up the high school!

black dynamite: and the feeling's right

Black Dynamite: movie starring Michael Jai White...

the below is an almost entire rewrite of the review i had up here previously, the which was a weird and wandering ramble through what i think of say yes to the dress and mystery science theater as opposed to a focused review of a film i totally admired.  the two things i'm keeping from the last review (aside from the basic critique, which i'm going to try to obfuscate less) are, one, as regards michael jai white,

"who is the elisa to my hector moreda: i would totally switch for that guy," 

because he is super-good looking, and, two, the below, because any possible lyrics for manos: hands of fate: the musical must not be silenced!:
"yes i am torgo, quit your debatin'--
it's true that i serve a priest of satan!
however, my pride it is a salve to,
that the master wants you, but he can't have you!"

so.  (again, not trying to change the basic premise of this entry, just trying to streamline it, like, a lot--i feel guilty for repeating myself, but i shouldn't, because i'm not trying to make a new argument.)  what i thought was awesome about this film was the precision with which it made fun of low-budget genre films (not going to say Blaxploitation films, because i've watched some, but not nearly enough to claim some sense of how they generally go--however, i've watched a LOT of low-budget and genre films, and can say that black dynamite mocks these with hardcore accuracy).  because it could almost pass for a really terrible film that was made in earnest.  i was trying to explain in the earlier version of this entry that michael jai white does a fantastic job of acting the part, not of the character black dynamite, but of the dude who would have been hired to play the part of black dynamite had black dynamite been a serious film.  it's not just that he acts as wooden and uncomfortable onscreen as the guy he's playing would have in the "real" version of the movie, it's also that occcasionally, like when the boom mike comes down and he kind of stares at it as if to say "this thing is in the shot but i'm going to keep going because nobody's saying not to," or when there's the imprecise cut that sneaks into the film, or the degree of contrast between his "bad-ass" acting and his "emotional" acting (that line about being an orphan), he shows us glimpses of the dude attempting to act the part, the one who clearly got hired because he looked like a badass, not because he had either acting talent or experience. 

which is just FUNNY.  i mean, the stuff that the character black dynamite does and says is also funny, but it's more about how he does and says it than what it is.  and this "how" thing extends throughout every part of the movie.  the soundtrack, which, with its specialized themesong moments and protagonist-centered lyrics, is really only a few steps away from some of coffey's soundtrack stuff, and the type of film or camera or whatever it is that makes the film look, like, perfectly low-budget, and the fact that the plot throws in everything and the kitchen sink, which is a move one sees a lot in bad low-budget genre films, presumably because their creators think, "if we put some version of everything we've ever seen in the real films of this genre into our film, someone's bound to like something in it."

in fact, you can kind of do the same characterization of the writers and director that you can for michael jai white-as-black dynamite-actor, if you want.  like a lot of the filmmakers whose films were covered by mystery science theater (this is my knowledge base, and i am not ashamed!), these hypothetical "real" black dynamite writers wanted to create a Blaxploitation film that would make them some money, so they packed all the cliches in that they could possiibly think of, from a Vietnam flashback to a gently tear-struck prostitute (who, as i mentioned in the last version of this review, i loved--she's so good), into a blender*, and then the director went straight to film with whatever came out.  the plot is awesomely ridiculous, and that is awesome, but the motivation for its being such a mess is almost funnier than the mess itself, though i haven't explained it very well.  it's like, the production team was interested in making a Blaxploitation film for the sake of drawing a Blaxploitation audience so that they could make the money, and in order to do that they made the Blaxploitation-est film they could think of, and that is black dynamite.

in conclusion, yeah.  black dynamite could totally pass for a really really bad really really low-budget example of Blaxploitation...except on purpose.  i feel like it was made with a lot of love, or it wouldn't have had either the ability or the patience to be so damn accurate.  it's hilarious.  i recommend it to people who know bad movies and who like things that are funny.  there was no badly-hit note.  it was all awesome. 

oh, and recommendations regarding the drinking game: the person who claims the word "jive" as their imbibement trigger is going to be very drunk, and the person who takes "turkey" isn't going to be far behind.


*just, coincidentally enough, in the same manner as crow accuses the wild wild world of batwoman of doing.
yes, this is the streamlined version of this review.  whyever WOULDN'T america be grateful?

tron and narnia: tumty-tumty-tumty-tum i slew him! tumty-tum

tron: movie starring jeff bridges as tom hanks from the polar express (cuz he was cgi'd...you're welcome)
voyage of the dawn treader: new-breed narnia movie starring someone as someone else (it's called acting)

the subtitle to this post is sexism: not just for sexist stuff anymore.

it was a product of seeing the tempest, tron, and narnia within the space of a week that really did the damage: i first became conscious that sexism isn't just for people who are concerned with the size of a lady's paycheck anymore.  it's out there in the movies, and it's ANNOYING THE CRAP out of me.

now, narnia couldn't help it, even if it had wanted to.  as i tried to explain in coked-out detail to my friends*, c.s. lewis was a sexist barstard.  i haven't read everything he wrote, but i did get through his theolo-sci-fi trilogy.  i enjoyed the third one (i can't remember the names) in part because i thought he painted a realistic and interesting character for the woman in the overly-modern marriage. i found his solution to the marital issues of the couple to be quite modern, if by modern one is referring to the philoso-critical stylings of dr. laura schlessinger (so, about 15 years out of date).  what i'm trying to say is, he was sexist.  like dr. laura.  lewis's lady-characters are sympathetic in themselves (i mean, excepting the white queen, who's just sexy), but the solutions he derives for the problem of their femininity are recockulous.  he really takes the idea of separate spheres to a new plane of fairness.  aslan, in narnia, rebukes everyone with the same unpredictability and gentleness, male, female, and reepicheep alike.  but it's still separate spheres; susan still gets kicked out of narnia for liking make-up and nylons, because apparently you can't like boys and god at the same time (which sounds, frankly, like a bit of over-identification on c.s.'s part [actually, i don't get a gay vibe from lewis, but i should probably wikipedia him for solid evidence as to his sexual preferences.  that's a joke.  i'm not going to do that]).  and lucy still has to wander around a bit like an idiot, because a lady's sexual awakening is much less acceptable in the scheme of things than a man's.  after all, did adam pluck the apple?  no sir!  i mean, it's not even an illogical sort of sexism, considering the intellectual power lewis was bringing to bear on the conundrae (probably not a word) of christianity.  but it is annoying.  the spice girls would have something to say to it, if he were writing in modern (or my current particular frame of modern, apparently) times.

so disney can't help but make lucy a bit ineffectual and wander-around-y.  she is a sweetheart, and legitimately so.  but as a role model she's not going to make a ceo out of your daughter.

the same, unfortunately, can be said for the chick in tron.  props to disney if they were making a kora in hell-frame kind of reference--according to online, they weren't; it's spelled quorra, and i can't figure out what it's supposed to refer to, but i'd like to know.  anyway, she's useless.  as usual, no shame to olivia wilde, who i thought was as good as possible under the circumstances, not to mention super cute.  but that meme of the strong pretty girl is just ballooning into something ridiculously impossible.  it's like "hey, this female character has fight scenes, so she must be an individual.  you're welcome, feminists everywhere!"  yeah.  shove it, disney.  i understand that quorra had to be female, not only to provide young flynn with a love interest, but also so that the final third of the movie could literally turn into star wars (for which operation one clearly needs a princess leia surrogate, not to mention a moody bishounen [sp?] with an improbable haircut for luke).  but did she have to be so "teach me, you man-god!  for i am your creation!" about it?  why was she always crouching subordinately whenever one of the flynns was around?  according to her account, old flynn earned her self-erasing, accolyte-like devotion by standing over her when she woke up.  i mean, a rescue was implied, but literally, that's how she said it in the film.  the whole character is just ridiculous.  her whole race was destroyed and she's a super-human manifestation of god in the machine, but don't worry about any messy emotional reactions to either of these things, unless if you count her outburst about liking jules verne, certainly the emotional center of the film.  i could be cautious and go with "underwritten," but i'm choosing to go with "ridiculously misogynist skipping the point in favor of the haircut bastard filmmakers."

moral of the story: standing over a woman when she wakes will make her all kinds of haircut.

or possibly, sexism annoys me.  which is what i opened with.  disregard all the in-between.  it's like a newman-o but with filling from chernobyl.


*coked-out due both to the quality and quantity of the detail, and the fact that i had imbibed a great deal of diet coke during the movie (i'm not actually familiar with the type of detail that people on coke [the drug] tend to produce.  i am a nice girl from a suburb, which would actually argue for the non-veracity of that statement but for the fact that i am, and always have been, a nerd [see every post on this blog]).

the tempest: it's taymor-riffic

The Tempest: movie starring the conceptual stylings of Julie Taymor mostly

first off, the acting was FUCKING BRILLIANT.  miranda was amazing, caliban was amazing, and of course doc ock (name? alfred molina, apparently) and alan cummings were fantabulous--i thought chris cooper gave a good interpretation to a difficult part, as did the ariel dude, who we didn't really get to see due to the taymoring of the film, and, yeah, in my eyes, tom conti for the win.  felicity jones was brilliant in a part that one doesn't really need brilliance in, but in which brilliance is possible--djimon hounsou (hopefully spelling that right) was brilliant in a part that may be difficult to do justice to--and he did do it justice, freaking fabulous--but always has a certain amount of cachet around it.  i thought tom conti took a very possibly onerous part and turned it into something really really good.  i was a little conflicted about helen mirren.  i thought she did an excellent job of creating a character, but i wasn't sure that the character she created was being helped by the shakespeare.  the lines made sense--made painstaking sense--and were deeply felt, but it was like she was acting despite shakespeare instead of through him, and that bothered me, but it shouldn't too deeply, because she was very good.  reeve carney as what's-his-face was not good, but really funny, which made up for it.  apparently he was too cool to enunciate.  he had the immaculately kept iggy pop hair of edgy love, and nothing more was necessary than a few shirtless moments and an entirely inappropriate rendition of "o mistress mine" (yeah, why was that there?  so taymor could taymor around with more gender-political "exploration"?  if so, stop it, taymor! stop it now! the line "that can sing both high and low" was not written for you to dithyramb around with [or if it was, we truly do inhabit a creepy-ass universe]).

if taymor had to do with the choices of her actors, even if she fostered an environment in which they could make their choices, then she deserves a lot of credit for having done so.  but i thought the movie was a mess.  it was very entertaining--very entertaining.  i should give it some sort of pass for making the shakespeare so eminently filmable (a friend of mine says that the tempest really isn't filmable, and i felt like taymor turned it into an opulent feast of filmability, so i'm sure she deserves credit for that too).  but BOO!!!  BOO!!!

BOO!!!  it's like back in the day when i read an interview with the fool who directed that wildly awful version of mansfield park with frances o'connor, the one that in the end featured fanny writing sanditon or something for susan's amusement, in which above-mentioned fool of a director said something like, "i know there will be laura ashley bitches out there who will object to this movie because we show boob."  no, director fool, no.  we laura ashley bitches (i'm not actually one, but would much rather be ranged on their side than her's) are not objecting to your dumbass movie because it shows boob.  we are objecting to it because it neglected to capture even the tiniest particle of jane austen's intention or spirit, as well as a good third of the plot.

taymor did not go nearly to these lengths--we did see boob, but it was hermaphrodite man-boob (and, yes, it was tempting)--but she did make a mess, what with her desire to shove a special effect into every insecurity of signification.  i can't really go into specifics as deeply as i'd like without driving the blood pressure up dangerously high, but, as an example, the sandcastle miranda holds at the beginning: it crumbles.  in the rain.  when i pointed out how STUPID this conception of...whatever the hell it's supposed to mean...was, my friend said, basically, "but prospera starts out with everything and nothing and ends up with nothing and everything," and for a minute he made it sound good.  but then i thought back, and, no.  i mean, yes, my friend's interpretation of the significance of the sandcastle is awesome, but the sandcastle itself?  no.  no.  that shit could mean pretty much anything.  its meaning was entirely overridden by its desire to look cool.  yes, the most obvious interpretation is...uh, that prospera, by calling in a thunderstorm, has unleashed the destruction of her own castle of sand, or whatever*, but it's just such an unnecessary interpretive move.  it doesn't get us any nearer to the heart of matter (as niska would say)--sure, it's a visual metaphor, but it tells rather than showing.

what would i have her put in its place?  NOTHING.  INTERPRETIVE SILENCE.  just STOP DOING STUFF.  stop tim burtoning around.  shakespeare didn't make it this far because his work could be twisted into meaning--it meant in the first place.  it meant so much, taymor, (i'm a shakespeare-phile, i admit it completely) that even within your self-indulgent rigmarole it still surfaced at points.  but it had to struggle.  why make it struggle?  that's just rude, taymor.  be nice to sextacentarians (??).

i'm not saying that there's some ur-interpretation of shakespeare out there that can be latched onto and drug home like a theseus by the minotaur.  i'm saying that some attention to the text is required when making a movie of a play--either that, or you peter brooks it, and make sure that the fish you're boning is known to be your own fish (rrow), a move that is a bit like throwing on a flak jacket in a nuclear blast, but can at least protect you to some extent from a reasonably fair mind (which mine, on this subject, may totally not be).  shakespeare is not the instrument.  you are the instrument.  your own interpretation is entirely correct, but only if it's coming from the work--only if you're being plucked, like a fortepiano, from the inside.  don't tell me taymor isn't doing the plucking.  don't tell me she's not looking for opportunities to have harpies spit oil as a metaphor for...again, something (bp spill?  peace in the middle east?  bunnies?) and stupid, stupid gender-bending whatnottery for ariel, prospera, and the fools in their gowns.

it's like communist russia: the tempest pluck you.  taymor is clearly no candidate for an un-american activities investigation.  YEOUCH, sra.  what a burn!

i should apologize for a lot of this, because much of the movie was very watchable.  it just lit my fire, is all.  i can forgive ridiculousness, i can forgive incompetence, i can forgive idiotishness.  i CANNOT forgive all the jibber-jabber that films try to put us through, and the tempest's taymoring is a really prime example of it.  i am not turning the tempest into an example (my example of terrible filmic incompetence is and always will be the hours)--i am just holding it responsible for itself, which maybe nobody thought to do.  what the hell, guys?  come on!  stop plucking around!


*one of the bizarrities of my life is that, though a dedicated musician and quasi-dedicated writer, i'm not at all good at pinning meanings to metaphors.  i cling to theorists like derrida and de man for that reason--the inaccuracies of metaphoric assumption as propounded by said thinkers are like manna to my brain (but not literally), not just because they're interesting, but because they give me a leg to stand on.  but i should be completely clear that it's inability, not choice, that turns me away from the assumption that metaphors mean things (though thank god i have been turned away).

for colored girls: is it me, or...

For Colored Girls: tyler perry film starring whoopi and some other perhaps distractingly attractive ladies

...are my tastes changing?

normally, a movie taking itself this seriously with this much intensity would have made me want to curl up and die.  and don't get me wrong, i did want to curl up and die.  but in the good way.  dear god it was so good.

my friend, though he liked it, said that if the camera had focused one more time on a woman's face, getting blair witch up-close-and-personal with her expelling facial fluids, he would have abdicated the theater, like edward VII for wallis simpson*.  and though, again, i normally would agree with him, in this case, no.  no.  that particular camera move, i thought, was something like a strophe in a poem, a rhyme scheme: a symbol of movement in vision.  besides, that camera shot provided the actresses with the correct frame in which to get their acting done.  no other frame was either possible or necessary.  it was beautiful, what all of them did within that painfully intimate space.  i couldn't take my eyes off it.  i see on imdb (never read others' reviews, sra) that people felt like the poems' readings slowed the movie down, juxtaposed too strangely with the other dialogue.  but i kind of feel like expectations might be getting in the way of a really thrilling reality: those poems are beautiful.  and they are said beautifully.  some of them are more seamlessly interwoven than others, but even if they hadn't been acted so well, the poems would have been worth hearing, period, and i thought that all of them were acted just wonderfully.

i can't say how affective the film was--i've run into this problem before.  with anything that i don't like, it's often just sheer catharsis (as well as one hell of a good time) to rip and tear and maim, and call down my petty thunderings like isabella's jove.  and with stuff i do like but am not "supposed to" like, defending my opinion becomes matter for discussion.  but with something that moved me so much--that i think was felt so truly by its actors and its director--there's kind of nothing to say.

aside from, uh, "see it," i guess.  SEE IT, YOU GLORIOUS BASTARDS!!!  it's magnificent.  hey, here's a thing: if kimberly elise actually gets nominated and/or wins best actress for this, my faith in the academy awards (absolutely destroyed like post-Gojiro box-tokyo by the multiple wins of Titanic) will be either partially or completely restored.  she is so good.  so many of the actresses are magnificent, but her part is...unbelievable, and she takes it and goes where it goes--she takes on the body of her part, which is so horrifying and amazing.  of all the moments she has, i think i got first wrapped up in the way she says "i've loved you since i was fourteen" to her abusive alcoholic husband, and you see the resistance in her to what's in front of her, and some of its cause... i can't.  i have no words.

of course, if she doesn't get nominated, then good bye academy forever and ever.  yeah!  i'm threatening the academy!  i'll believe in you jagweeds even less if kimberly elise doesn't get nominated for best actress!  grumble grumble...("i'll never let go, jack"--let go, kate!  just let go!  what the hell are you doing getting back on that boat???  another 125 minutes of my life, james cameron, really?  spent on watching some people who we all know are going to die get wetter but not in a fun way?  why of course i'll let you have those precious hours!  what would i have spent them on, anyway?  fighting cancer?  writing my novel?  washing the dishes?  window shopping?  microwaving a hot pocket and then eating only half of it?  really anything else in the entire universe?  why would i want to do that?  curse you, academy!  and your eleven wasted statuettes too!!!  lord knows i am not as much of a fan of the sweet heareafter as some i could mention [really, sarah polley?  you're just going to take that dude's dead wife's clothes?], but atom egoyan certainly deserved that statuette more than cameron, or whatever hung-over flunky directed kate and leo through those love scenes [love kate; love leo.  hate titanic]).

oh, there was one thing.  i thought the part just before the...uh, no spoilers?  main event of the plot, should i say?--was overdone.  i totally acknowledge that it was pretty dang difficult moment to do, but it didn't capture much of a feeling.  though in a way, that kind of worked to the film's advantage, because the story even more clearly wasn't about the events of these womens' lives--it was about what they did with them, how they thought of them, and how, in the end, they turned them into poetry.  it made me want to read the book.  that, in this case, was the mark of a good film.


*it took a significant amount of wikipedia-ing to get that reference correct.  i thought it was archduke franz ferdinand who abdicated, which had always confused me because i was like, well, what's even the point of assassinating him then?  symbolic protest?  don't like the hit single "take me out?"  (really really dumb joke, sra.)  but i was wrong.  franz married a lady he shouldn't have, but he still got to be archduke.  which did him a world of good.  it was edward VII who abdicated.  that wallis must have been something something.

neowolf: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Neowolf: movie to-be-starring the next generation's equivalent of tom servo, crow, and mike/joel

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAHAHA.

whyyy? why the enormous but malodorous bouquet of film editorial techniques? why did the entire movie take place with a fog machine working its little heart out? obviously the characters were smokin'--their looks were pretty much all they had going for them--but did they also give off such an intense bodily heat due to their werewolfiness that they literally generated whiffs of steam in all situations?

it was ba-ha-had. the only thing it had going for it was kevin, and he died.

oh, spoiler, sorry.

also the girl band was cute, but their music was te-he-he-herrible. not as a-ha-hawful as neowolf's music, but...not...great.

and oh my god, the sheer amount of slow-mo kissing that should have been sexy but COMPLETELY WAS NOT. here's a tip, guys: kissing is awesome; bare flesh is awesome; but neither kissing nor flesh can carry your movie when they are completely in a vacuum. sort of in the same manner that amplification alone cannot make a heavy metal song much better than it already wasn't. the movie was the antithesis of awesome, to the point that even its medium-copious amounts of slow makeout and nonspecific nudity could not make it awesome. neowolf was the black hole of awesomeness, and even the awesomeness of naked people and kissing was annihilated in its suckage.

the best-worst part was definitely the relationships, which made no sense. the directions the characters gave each other came in at a very close best-worst second, however: "that hotel on the edge of town" (a direction that gay boy gives to main girl) does not appear to me to be uber-specific. it may just be me. maybe there IS only one edge to the town, and one hotel ON said edge--i don't live in santa wherever-the-heck-ica, i can't judge. i mean, this direction apparently conveyed something pretty exact to main girl, because not only did she find the hotel, but she found main guy's steam-filled hotel room without any appreciable effort. or maybe the NAME of the hotel she was directed to was "That Hotel on the Edge of Town hotel." catering to all edge-of-town stayers, The Hotel at the Edge of Town hotel is ironically situated in the main shopping area--get the comforts of center-of-town-ness without sacrificing your raucous living-town-on-the-edge vibe!

the other good-bad direction (from alpha wolf to gay guy) was something like, "turn off at the exit near to where our next show will be--you can't miss it."

yeah. bet i can.

i'll just type that one into mapquest.

mapquest is asking for a city or a zipcode.

what the hell, i'll give it one.

the first five results of looking up "the exit near to where our next show will be, san francisco, california" on mapquest are as follows:
1. New Leaf Service for Our Community
2. Church-The Nativity-Our Lord
3. EXIT 434A/DUBOCE/N
4. Our City (it's apparently located on howard)
6. Lance Shows Photographer

ok, lance shows photographer was 7th on the mapquest list, but 5 and 6 were just more freeway exits.

i know what the problem is here! i should have used googlemaps!

looking up "the exit near to where our next show will be" on googlemaps resulted in locations in oregon and tennessee. i guess the band neowolf owns a really fast tour bus. or perhaps their "next gig" was a temporal anomaly, and they were in two disparate places at the same space-time. a temporal anomaly that has had unspeakable ramifications. those ramifications being the unleashing of the movie neowolf. it is upon us, america! noooooo!! the gods of the threshold are angry!!! the spiky laughing idiot gods are released!!!!! QUICK, SOMEONE GET THE PORCUPONICON*!!!

anyway, don't watch neowolf unless you're interested in seeing a how's how of film editing--from slo-mo to oh hell no. or you're interested in a very cursory and somewhat (according to my friend) fictitious history of wolfsbane. or you want to watch action silver bullet forging! now with 47% less action for your ease of delugtition!

or you want to see actors who look, respectively, like rebecca gayheart, johnny depp, zac efron, brendan fehr, and james callis. but aren't.


*the porcuponicon is, i think, pete abrams' intellectual property, and is entirely awesome. sluggy freelance 4-eva.

i have a fever. blame the previous version of this blog post (much less lucid even than this one--which is saying something) on illness.