Anyhow, two evenings in a row spent at emergency rooms is a heckuva rotten way to spend a weekend.
Who's up for getting sick tomorrow night, help me make it three in a row??? :)
Highlight of the evening: when one, and then another, person at the ER referred to me as her husband, requiring explanations that I'm a friend only, I winked at her (smarmy, yes -- couldn't resist) and said, "You know that if one more person says that, it means we're engaged." Got her best laugh of the evening with that one.
It seems that a movie is being made in Hopkins, using locations on Main Street, about a block and a half from my front door. Written and produced by the Specher sisters (or a similar spelling), entitled "The Convincer," it stars Greg Kinnear and Alan Arkin. They start shooting on Monday, 2/8/10, and expect to film for a month. $5 million budget, 300 extras, offices here in town, about a block from here. The 300 extras seems a bit high to me -- my guess is that there's one big crowd scene somewhere, a riot or a high school basketball game, something like that. The budget is low -- you could make twenty or thirty movies like this one for the price of one Avatar.
They're supposed to be shooting in Hoagies Diner on Main, Hopkins Bar & Grill, all locations with an older feel. . Who knows...perhaps this is my big opportunity to break into movies; I'd make a superb arch-villain or mad scientist or song-and-dance man. Perhaps all three! :)
Stayed in all day, still recuperating, but right now I'm watching the Syfy channel's latest weekly debacle, "Meteor Storm." Truth to tell, I'm only watching it because Kari Matchett is one of the leads. I've had a major crush on her ever since she played two dozen different roles on "Nero Wolfe." (Several times playing more than one character in a story. She's talented as well as drop-dead gorgeous.)
Meteor Storm is rotten, of course, as are almost all of Syfy's made-for-TV movies, but one thing really caught my attention. In two different scenes - one of two characters standing on the shore, looking across the harbor at Alcatraz, and the second a head-on shot of a man riding a motorcycle, I would swear that the shot was created with rear projection. I know that Tarantino used rear projection several times in Kill Bill, mostly to give it a 1960s cachet, but aside from that, I didn't think anybody was using rear projection anymore. I suppose it's possible that they were just doing really bad green screen, or that they thought they were doing something clever by using an outmoded (and inferior) technology, but my guess is that they either merged two shots really badly, or that they actually did use rear projection. It genuinely looked like it.
Kari Matchett was terrific, by the way, giving credibility to her character, in a movie that needed all the cred it could get.
Lifeforce -- Halley's Comet, spaceships, vampires, demons, zombies, possession, magic swords, London burned to the ground, a great Henry Mancini score, Patrick Stewart, and Mathilda May as the gorgeous naked queen of the space vampires. (She's French, you know!)
I'm still hoping to get to the Dr. Farrago burlesque show tonight at Ground Zero nightclub. (Doors at ten, show at eleven!) Nothing like seeing a bunch of beautiful women take their clothes off in public to brighten a winter's night.
was made by the elves,
who'd hock their own mother
to get it themselves..."
If you like The Lord of the Rings but have a sense of humor about it, this is great fun, a mock dvd commentary:
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2003/04/22fell
A new Conan the Cimmerian movie is being made; it starts filming this March in Bulgaria, and it stars Jason Momoa, late of Stargate: Atlantis, as Robert E. Howard's barbarian. A couple of things have been annoying me about this, none of them about the movie itself.
1) The first story I read about this referred to Conan as a "comic book hero," and that the role was originally created by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Pulp magazine hero, if you please -- Conan was in Weird Tales a good forty years before he was in comics, and for that matter, for the better part of a decade before comic books were even invented. Conan was an invention of the written word, and later of the brilliant paperback covers of Frank Frazetta, not of Marvel Comics. As for the 2nd point: I will grant you that superior actors can "create" a role, take the bare bones of a character given to them, and breathe life into that character, making it real, making it magic, making it their own. Superior actors. Real actors. Not Arnold.
2) The second thing is more serious, a bit of a rant. A pulp magazine group I belong to has a couple of members who have reacted very negatively to Jason Momoa being cast as Conan, making refererence to "black" actors being given roles that were written as "white" characters. I didn't get deep into the thread, just made one posting wherein I stated that I felt that these are actors, that they are not the people they are playing. I made a specific reference to Raymond Chandler's private eye, Philip Marlowe, being played to perfection by both Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, neither of whom resembled Marlowe -- or each other -- in the least. It's my belief that acting, of all professions, should be colorblind, since it's all about make-believe and pretense, anyhow. (I didn't state my other desire, to someday see a woman play Hamlet, because I think it'd really freak 'em out, but I think a woman playing the melancholy Dane might bring a marvelous new insight in to the play.)
Part one of my rant: Jason Momoa isn't "black." If it actually matters to anyone, his grandparents were Hawaiian, Native American, German, Scotch, Irish, a traditional American melange. My feeling is, that he's big and muscled, moves with grace, is a pretty good actor, and can exude a convincing air of menace, and that could add up to a pretty good Conan. I think these guys saw his last name, looked at his photo, and they're the kind of people who immediately think that if a person isn't 1950s Ozzie & Harriet "white," then they must be black.
And that's the other thing: I'm so sick of "race." Let's get real, people. There is no such thing as "race." There is no white race, no black race, no Chinese race, none of it. Race as we practice it is a mid-19th century invention, created by Victorian era power elites to justify their running the world and stealing the rest of the world blind, and just because a lot of people -- most of them really stupid people -- believe in it, doesn't mean it's real. Race belongs to the same grouping as angels dancing on the heads of pins, UFO kidnappings, Elvis sightings, the Rapture, the Yellow Peril, Communism, the religion of the "Free" Market, all that crap. And yes, God, too. Inventions, one and all, and none of 'em for real. The curious thing about "race" is that, while "race" isn't real, racism is. We've invented a means for hating people based upon a quality they do not possess, one that no one possesses. And that ain't good.
Think I need to watch some TV now...the old Bob Newhart Show sounds about right.
It's a computerized simulator, with a full-size cockpit, machine guns plus air-to-air missiles, and a certain amount of in-flight instruction. He had a great time, and an equally great time sharing every detail with me while his mother shopped Sephora. He's eager to try it again, and have a dogfight with me. Which would be fun, I freely admit. It does cost $30/half hour, so it's not something to do with any frequency. But it was a great afternoon, and a delight seeing him walk around, feet floating six inches off the ground, for the rest of the afternoon.
On a related subject...I have my great-grandfather's old straight razor in a dresser drawer. Never met the man, so I guess it's kind of a low-grade family heirloom. But even were it in usable condition, there is no way in hell I could ever bring myself to shave with one of those things, or to allow anyone else to shave me with one. I cringe at the very thought.
a) Started re-reading Fritz Leiber's "Swords in the Mist" today, and I find that Fritz Leiber is still my favorite writer, and that his Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser are still the finest characters in heroic fantasy. Great writer. Great read.
b) This winter is already getting real, real old. Snow+ wind chill is a bad thing.
c) From March of 2009 through today, I watched all ten seasons of Stargate SG-1, and enjoyed them immensely. (Courtesy of Netflix -- thanks, Sarah!) Stargate SGU, on the other hand, is pretentious and boring. MGM needs to drop SGU, or pep it up, or something, and at the same time, start making more SG-1 movies.
d) I need to live someplace warmer, preferably within a short distance of an ocean. San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver all come to mind, more & more. Soon.
e) The 1930's comic strip, "Terry and the Pirates," featuring the Dragon Lady as the arch-villainess, is surprisingly good, despite its definitely unmodern racial sensibilities.
f) I need to get out more; I need to date more. And there's a lovely woman at my health club, just the sight of whom brings both those thoughts to mind.
g) Day off tomorrow: gonna run some errands and hang out and have lunch at the MegaMall. Not my favorite spot on the planet, but at least it's warm inside.
h) My favorite Terry Pratchett Discworld novel is "Going Postal," and Sky-TV in England is making a TV movie out of it, to be broadcast in England on or about Easter. A good cast, including David Suchet. Probably be available over here in DVD eventually, but...oh to be in England, now that spring is...then & there. (Various of the Vimes novels plus "The Truth" duke it out for 2nd place.)
i) There is no "I" in "me." Curious, no?
Felt well enough & cooped-up enough to catch "Sherlock Holmes" yesterday. Now, I've been reading Holmes since I was 7, consider myself a Holmes traditionalist, and I really enjoyed this movie. It's over the top, has plentiful anachronisms (poison gas & references to radio in 1890, and such), and yet, I felt that in some regards, it captured the essence of Holmes & Watson rather better than many more traditional versions.
One funny thing at the theater: I got there early, found a good aisle seat, folded up the armrest, dropped my jacket in the adjoining seat, spread out a little, and then, just as the credits started, all the last-minute crowd arrived and started looking for seats: "I can't sit this close!" "I can't sit near the door!" "I can't sit this far!" "I have to sit in the middle!" Anyhow, one of the trendy late-arrivers had to sit beside me, so I spread in, dropped the armrest, and retrieved my jacket. He plopped down beside me, and right then, I let out three good, solid sneezes in a row, followed by a fairly generous noseblow. All the while, I could sense the late-arriver edging further and further away from me, and could sense his regret that he couldn't slide over into the lap of the person on his other side. Shows him right for not showing up early! :)
on account of molasses
"It's A Gift" (1934)
"Come to my room in five minutes...and bring some rye bread."
Jimmy Durante, as Banjo, in "The Man Who Came to Dinner."*
*written by George S. Kaufmann & Moss Hart
Evidently, Mr. Huston dislikes quotation marks. He doesn't use them. Instead, he uses a dash at the beginning of a line to indicate spoken dialogue, thus:
---These pretzels are making me thirsty!
Rather than:
"These pretzels are making me thirsty!"
I lasted a chapter and a half until his style irritated sufficiently that I placed the book atop my "Return to Library ASAP" pile. This may be a common practice in some writing circles, but I found it annoying and distracting, and enough so to make me not read his story. And the thing is...I don't think there's a defense for this kind of style. To be certain, quotation marks are commonly used, and among pretentious writers, this means that they are common and not to be used by "superior" writers. But the letter E is also commonly used...do these writers also intend to boycott all use of E? Why did he not drop commas, surely as widely used as quotation marks? I guess my real point is that standard writing style exists for a reason, and someone discarding that standard style needs to do so for a pretty serious reason, such as being a true genius -- not a self-proclaimed genius, and not a genius because your mommy said so -- else you just come across, as does Mr. Huston, as a pretentious hack.
Oy vey.
I really don't get the sexual excitement some people find in the idea of getting involved with someone famous. Being rather a private person -- which is fully contradicted by one or two items in my life's resume -- I think that the prospect of getting sexually involved with a very famous woman would more likely give me serious pause, rather than pull me in like a moth into a blowtorch.
This is not to say that I'm not hers, should Milla Jovovich snap her fingers in my general direction...
But to quit an unfinished run at 40 minutes? Average person in decent shape could probably walk it in 45. I get the impression that the ex-gov of AK is incapable of finishing anything she begins.
