PunkKittyDiddy

Now Playing on Channel 2......

So, I've just launched a second, more topically focused blog as part of the grand experiment I was blathering on about earlier.  This blog will be all movies, all the time, but in an "antithesis to the serious film critic" kind of way.  I have christened it, Cinematic Sass from a Film-Lovin' Floozy, and it's a film-focused flophouse where my movie reviews and other flick-related flibbertigibbetry will hereforth prop up their feet and crack open a cold one.

I've just reviewed the DVD, "Hitman," starring Timothy Olyphant.  Mosey on over if you're starved for amusement.  And I'll let you know here whenever there's new stuff over there, so you don't develop whiplash trying to keep up.

Of course, I'll continue to expound upon everything else under the sun on this side of the fence.

More soon!  Over and out. 

"Die Religion ist das Opium des Volkes, aber die Wii is auch gut." - Karl Marx

A mysterious little gadget has taken up residence in our living room.  It is an inanimate and benign presence, at least conceptually, for it consists of nothing more than some wiring and maybe a microchip or something encased in plastic.  On a more intangible level, it's a soul-sucking, time-killing vortex of nothingness.....a black festering chasm of ambition-decimating apathy, disguised as a harmless, leisure-related consumer product.

Yes, we finally got a Wii.  (So the Wii is hardly a hot new commodity at this point.  According to the diffusion of innovations theory as applies to product acceptance within the marketing biz, our household falls firmly into the category of, "laggards.")

And the arrival of this Wii is just darn terrific, because there weren't already enough other distractions to trip up a struggling writer who really ought to be finishing a screenplay or novel or article.

During my more lucid moments, when not locked in the addictive throes of slack-jawed gaming infatuation, I fully recognize that no good can come from spending hours shooting at virtual tin cans, or drag-racing virtual cars, or loitering around a virtual pool table.  It doesn't even count as life experience.  It's simply a fat, honkin' pile of hours lost forever - hours that might have otherwise been productive ones. 

It's fun, though.

Adventures in Netflixing: "Cloverfield"

The plot:  a giant sea monster (or space alien or whatever) rampages through Manhattan, cracking open buildings and sucking down the people inside 'em like a drunken businessman at a sushi bar barreling through a rapid succession of oyster shooters.  Throw in intentionally jerky hand-held camera work a la Blair Witch for a more *authentic* feeling and *immediate* experience.

I thought this flick was a blast.  When it was released theatrically, the smattering of reviews that somehow filtered into my subconscious convinced me this would be a third-rate Godzilla knock-off, at best.  Just now I hit the web to get a more comprehensive sampling of how it went down amidst reviewers at the time.  Some liked it, as I did.  Those who weren't fans echoed a few popular refrains:  "Waaaah waaah waaah!  The characters aren't fully developed!  Waaaah waaah waaah!  Post 9/11 images of exploding buildings are in poor taste!  Waaah waah waaah!  This film could have made a stronger case against contemporary society's tendency to be too busy capturing life, via camcorders and camera phones, to actually live life."

In response to the haters, all I can say is, it's a monster movie, people - not a Daniel Day Lewis biopic.  Although a more apt title than the arbitrary, Cloverfield, could well have been, There Will Be Blood, And Bleeding, And Bloody Bleeding Eyeballs. 

As for the criticism that the film misses an opportunity to explore our societal tendency to document life instead of living it.....well, the character who mans the camera for the greater part of the flick is so busy filming the chaos, at one point he neglects to notice a skyscraper-tall sea monster standing over him, licking its chops and eyeballing him like the last coveted h'ors d'oevre on a tray at a happenin' cocktail party.   I'd say that makes the point rather nicely.  Of course, if the filmmakers were more interested in lecturing or wagging their finger at us than entertaining us, they could have by-passed that whole camcorder angle altogether and had the character lug around a laptop, stopping in the middle of the ravaged streets and corpses to blog about the monster's rampage on an hourly basis instead.  (That would have been pretty funny, actually.)

Even the monster effects were decent, which lends credence to my theory that surgically extracting A-list salaries from a production budget might indeed pave the way for more fruitful expenditures in the creature creation department.  The whiplash filming style probably further lent itself to the overall believability..........it's not like they were ever focused on the monster long enough to reveal the pixelated equivalent of the zipper at the back of the costume.  Bonus points to whoever conceptualized the highly unique strain of eczema the monster was stricken with, whose secretions could not only chomp your backside but also impart a gnarly case of Bleeding Eyeball Disease. 

Good stuff.  A+!

He Can Infiltrate My Wardrobe Anytime

As a kid, I was a voracious reader.  Of course, in imagining along as I read, I typically cast myself as the central heroine of every story, and I was consistently inclined to cast any and all "older" adult-ish characters (basically anyone reputed to be over the age of 13 or so) as anonymous and faceless shadow figures......... not far off from how the grown-ups in those animated Charlie Brown specials were portrayed, which was off-screen altogether, speaking in a warbled, "Wah wah wah wah wah wah!" sort of blather, if and only if it was absolutely necessary to acknowledge the trifling presence of grown-ups in the first place. 

I read the Chronicles of Narnia repeatedly (its first installment, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, remained my favorite), and I have a vague recollection of Prince Caspian as just another such anonymous and faceless adult shadow figure.  Judging by the trailers, I see that the casting directors of the new upcoming movie opted to go in the "Latin hottie" direction instead.

Rahhhhhhhhr!  Nice choice.  It's a far more scenic direction, to be sure.

Taste The Rainbow, Or The Mud Pit At The End of It.....

It's not uncommon for me to turn my back for half a second, only to find that huge leaps in technology, culture, even human evolution (genetically engineered über-race of designer babies, anyone?), have taken place whilst I was otherwise occupied doing something mundane, like vacuuming or having a sandwich.

So I just saw the commercial for chocolate-flavored Skittles.  As a general rule, I feel that anything which wasn't previously chocolate flavored, but has since been rendered such, is bound to be an improvement.  My weekend now has a purpose - I must procure some chocolate Skittles, and report back.  This new development kind of skewers Skittles' whole fruit-centric, "Taste the rainbow!" slogan, not to mention the fact that if in the past you were hankering for some small, spherical, candy-coated little chocolate candies, you ate M&Ms like a normal person.  But whatever.

Actually, in doing a bit of research, I find that all sorts of upheaval and unrest have been going on in the Skittles camp for well over a decade.  Turns out that "taste the rainbow" spiel is old hat.  Did you know they made special edition ice- cream-flavored Skittles briefly in 2006?!  Nor is this the first time Skittles have gone chocolate!  Nay - this unholy alliance was first forged way back in '98 (then discontinued in 2001). The good news is that the discontinuation didn't take.  This second edition mocha mutation was re-introduced at the 2007 All Candy Expo........the existence of which could easily eclipse the invention of not only chocolate-flavored Skittles but also even, say, chocolate-flavored broccoli.  Indeed, this raises far more pressing concerns: where exactly will the 2008 All Candy Expo be taking place, and can any ol' member of the general public simply walk in off the street and start grabbing samples?  Just let me know far enough in advance so I can rent a few steamer trunks and some day laborers.......

But to get back on point, sort of:  are fruit-flavored M&Ms only a matter of time?

Of course, Mars, Incorporated manufactures both M&Ms and Skittles.....so why futz around with chocolate-flavored Skittles, or fruit-flavored M&Ms, in the first place?   It's like that whole, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" dilemma, particularly if you throw egg-flavored chickens and chicken-flavored eggs into the equation.......actually, it's nothing like that.  Never mind.

This is starting to make my head hurt.  I'll just try some and let you know if it was worth all this rumination............

A Wright-Thinking Individual

Stephen Wright is the bomb......a veritable one-man factory of pithy patter, and seeing as how a particulary clever turn of phrase nearly always renders me rapturous, he's one of my all-time favorites.   

But why is this relevant? 

Because, as usual, at least of late, I'm having a little trouble warming up this morning (night owl, here), so I thought I'd temporarily distract you by grabbing a handful of Wright-isms and scattering 'em in your face........check back for original content perhaps later on today.  (Eh, who am I fooling?  Maybe tomorrow....)

And, in the interim, enjoy these:

"All those who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand."

"How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?"

"When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane."

"Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."

"What happens if you get scared half to death twice?"

"If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving definitely isn't for you."

"If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments."

"I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize."

"Borrow money from pessimists - they don't expect it back."

"Officer, I know I was going faster than 55 MPH, but I wasn't going to be on the
road an hour. "

"I have two very rare photographs.  One is a picture of Houdini locking his keys in his car.  The other is a rare photograph of Norman Rockwell beating up a child."

"What's another word for Thesaurus?"

"If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?"

"If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?"

"I brought a mirror to Lover's Lane.  I told everybody I'm Narcissus."

"Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the
ocean would be if that didn't happen."

"I wish my first word was 'quote', so when I died I could say 'un-quote'."

And finally:

"I intend to live forever - so far, so good....."

Adventures in Netflixing: "I Am Legend"

Finally.  Finally this DVD saw fit to rip like a buzzsaw through the thousands of other outstretched, greedy, grasping fingers of my fellow Netflix members and cut a swath of severed digits right to my doorstep. 

  It was as much fun as I expected it to be. 

If a proverbial mad scientist was toiling in his lab to make a clone of THE coolest leading man on earth for an action picture (thus skirting the issue of having to pay an A-list salary for the real deal), obviously Will Smith's DNA would be the strand most at home in that particular petri dish.  (Uh, do they even put DNA strands in petri dishes?  What the hell do I know?  I was an abominable failure in middle school science - sorry.  But I digress.)  Smith brings a perfect balance of emotional subtlety and ass whuppin' mastery to the role.  And overall there's sustainable build-up of suspense, a great climactic confrontation of good versus evil, all that jazz........      

My main gripe with this flick was the FX-generated cartoons cast as the legion of undead (in lieu of human actors).  I'm sorry, but digital effects have yet to evolve to a point where they can transcend that whole suspension of disbelief stumbling block.  In contrast, 28 Days Later did a great job of tarting up its actors with blood-red eyes and blotchy effect makeup, and those suckers were plenty scary.  Sure, I can see where digital actors are more economical in scenes of scale, where you wouldn't otherwise want to deal with the expense of providing enough craft service for 10,000 real live extras, and/or where said extras can't possibly be expected to perform superhuman feats, as in the wharf scene showdown in Legend where the zombies are required to swarm rapidly up a fifty-foot-high lamppost and topple it over whilst exhibiting signs of advanced onset of rabies. 

Though I'd kill to be a fly on the wall of that particular soundstage if they had used humans for that scene......I mean, actors are pretty gullible:

Actor:  "What's my motivation?"

1st A.D.:  "OK, you're Spiderman on crack.  You've had a run of bad luck, Mary Jane dumped your sorry ass, you're broke, you're asking yourself what's the point, you've turned to the crackpipe for comfort and fallen in with the wrong crowd, yadda yadda.....now I'm gonna need you to just wrench your limbs from the sockets and bend them completely backwards, foam at the mouth, and show me existential crisis - by the way, that lamppost over there is your mother, who abandoned you when you were just four years old - and....ACTION!" 

  But there were plenty of other scenes in this picture in which a close-up on a live human (I mean, undead, inhuman) zombie would have really cinched the moment for me.  An overly apparent computer-generated pile of pixels going, "ARRRRRGHHHGGHHH!!  OOOGA BOOOOGA!!!!"?!?!?!  Not so much.

Eh.  Such is the ongoing dilemma within the scary movie genre - believable monsters so rarely come in under budget.  Not that I'd want to divert resources from preventing human rights violations perpetuated by China or coming up with a stopgap for global warming, but surely we could throw a spare Nobel Prize in the general direction of the first digital effects guy to create a genuinely scary zombie, or werewolf, or whatever. 

Still, I Am Legend was an awfully fun way to kill a couple of hours.  I give it an A-.            

Adventures in Netflixing: "Lars and the Real Girl"

When I first heard of this picture, I immediately thought of Adrian Brody sporting a different kind of wood in Dummy.  I'm sure there has to be enough other comparably themed movies to fill a small sub-genre entitled, "Movies About Maladjusted Boys Who Love Inanimate Objects."  Though when I tried googling this topic, I mostly wound up getting an eyeful of weird porn, so never mind. 

Somehow the filmmakers behind Lars avoid getting too schticky (a la Weekend At Bernie's) or weird, which is pretty remarkable for a film centering around a guy's relationship with a sex doll.  Actually, the premise made for a rather nice metaphor about the sometimes ludicrous baggage being carted around by the people we love and live with, and what they in turn must endure when we start digging deep into our own bag of tricks. 

The scene in which Lars first presents his "girlfriend" to his brother and sister-in-law at dinner is particularly hilarious, in no small part because of the universal experience of that first meeting with the invariably flawed significant other of someone we know.....a meeting which all too often spurs us to also retreat to the kitchen and gasp or snicker in disbelief behind their backs when the love interest in question fails to live up to our own exacting standards.  Then again, many of life's standard scenarios lead to gasping and snickering behind people's backs afterward because they fail to live up to our own exacting standards.  Such is life, and filmmaking in particular.

Beyond one or two truly LOL moments, like the dinner scene mentioned above, I mostly found Lars and the Real Girl to be equal parts wry and sweet.  More than one serious film critic trotted out the word, "Capra-esque" to describe this flick. (What is it with serious film critics, anyway?  They can't seem to go for more than two or three reviews without invoking one of the "greats," a la Capra or Kurosawa.  It's like a gag reflex with those folk.  But I digress.....)

Gosling kicks ass and steers this vehicle away from the predictable potholes in which a sex doll movie might otherwise look like little more than a life-sized posterior cavity plug.  Patricia Clarkson and Emily Mortimer also work it nicely.  I give it an A-. 

And On The Sixth Day He Created Red Dye #40, Which Begat Red Vines, and It Was Good.....

  The allmighty Diesel hath verily wrought an epic tale of candy carnage so funny, 'twould be a sin not to read it.  All I can really do is drop to my knees in awe over his mighty creation. 

Dude, you're spectacularly funny.

This works out well, as I'm feeling a bit lazy this morning, so go enjoy the fruits of his sweaty keyboard labors instead.......

Damn it.  Now I want candy too.

If Only

Z. woke up this morning in the midst of a bad dream about some heinous worldwide juicebox shortage, or so I'm guessing, because she was frantically shouting, "Noooooo!" and "Juice!  Juice!" as she awakened.

I love this.  I love that her world is so uncomplicated.  There is no recession or terrorism or global warming or ongoing superdelegate tally.  At worst, for the moment, there's just maybe not enough juice.