Saturday, December 25, 2004
The greatest of the evils of Xmas (and these evils are multitude) is it's exponentially expanding pervasiveness. It cannot be escaped. It is a soon-to-be perfected organ for the procreation of both Christianity and Capitalism. If I hated Xmas only a little less, I would simply be amazed at its obscene, bloated, syrupy effectiveness. You cannot hide. It will find you out, either by secular or religious means (or both). It offers something to everyone. Which is to say, nine hours and forty minutes from now it will be over until next October, and I can quit wasting all this energy trying to ignore it. Resistance is futile, just like the Borg always say, and I never met a Borg I didn't trust.
They said there'll be snow at Christmas
They said there'll be peace on Earth
Hallelujah, Noel, be it Heaven or Hell
The Christmas you get you deserve.
I'm a little embarrassed at how long it took me to see the naivete in those lines. If America...if humanity...were presently having the Xmas it deserves, well...better not go there. Some of you might still have turkeys to deep fry and eggs to nog and such.
Yesterday, I wrote a very respectable 1,653 words on Chapter One of Daughter of Hounds. Unfortunately, there's a small but significant error of geography gumming things up that I shall have to fix. But I'm done with Emmie and Saben for the time being and can now move on to Deacon. He's still back in Kingston, taking care of business. Last night, I told Spooky that I hope to have the first 50,000 words done by April 1st.
For Kid Night, we did the R-Rated cut of Supernova and the new-to-DVD Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid. I have to wonder if I'm the only person who has ever paid twice to endure Supernova — but I'll get back to that. We had hopes that the second Anaconda film might be decent enough, good dumb fun. I liked the first one quite a bit, and it worked well as an old-school Big Bug Film. The second, though, well it starts with these natives hunting a tiger, and I'm sitting there, being a smart-ass, thinking, this is so damn dumb. There are no tigers in South America. Why did they use a frelling tiger instead of a jaguar? Tigers are prettier, Spooky says, like that's gonna make it all better. However, I am soon informed that the aforementioned tiger was in Borneo, not South America. In fact, so are the anacondas of the title. So, they actually got the tiger right, it was the snakes they screwed up. Just like the rest of this awful film. I'm actually very easy-going about bad science in movies, as long as a) someone eventually makes even the most half-hearted attempt to justify the bad science and/or b) the movie is entertaining regardless. Anacondas failed on both accounts. At some point, one of the annoying characters was prattling on about having seen this or that on Animal Planet, and I was thinking, bullshit. If this jerk watched Animal Planet, he'd have, at some point, heard Jeff Corwin explain that the anaconda's range extends throughout South America, east of the Andes and mainly in the Amazon and Orinoco basins. Note: Borneo is somewhere else. Anyway, bad movie. Stay away. As for Supernova, I have a sick sort of fascination with this film, with how a relatively prestigious project went so horribly awry. This is the one that even Coppola couldn't save. I'd hoped that the R-Rated cut might help make sense of things, but, alas, that was not to be. There's more curiously pointless nudity, but that's about it. So, I watched all the deleted scenes — about twenty-minutes worth — and they did at least hint at the movie Supernova might have been. A couple of the deleted scenes would have gone a long way towards making the film a less incoherent thing, and the "alternate ending" (i.e., probably the one the test audiences didn't like) is much, much better, with a truly chilling visual to wind things up, instead of the sappy you're-gonna-have-a-baby nonsense we saw in theatres. About the only bit in either the theatrical cut or the DVD release that I find even remotely redeeming is Benjamin's relationship with the Nightingale's "trans soma" AI, Sweety. That, at least, was interesting. So, kind of a lousy Kid Night, so far as movies go.
I'm not sure what's up for today. It's too nasty to leave the house, so perhaps I'll start work on my soth'eerni shards. I now have all the raw materials and the glass-etching tools I that needed. Besides, I finished Halo 2 night before last, and it would be nice to do something with my hands besides type...
2:29 PM
Comments:
Post a Comment
