Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ The day when all movies have a four month intermission.

Life's Too Short For:
¤ Staying up too late every single night.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May museum visits remind you of nothing more than Antiques Roadshow.

Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "mostly".
¤ Usage: "They mostly come out at night.  Mostly."
¤ Synonyms: N/A
¤ Deviations: Most any qualifying word you can use in a sentence, and then repeat afterwards for extra emphasis.  Eg: "probably," "sometimes," and so on.
¤ Origin: Newt's famous line in Aliens.
¤ Notes: Cribbed from Cartman who cribbed it from Aliens, this word and its deviations spice up most any conversation.  Malaya and I have developed it to a science, where one of us will speak a viable sentence, and then after a momentary pause we'll both repeat the repeatable word in almost perfect harmony.  Yes, we realize how sickeningly cutesy this is. 

The best usage yet? When I said, after we saw the results of this boxing match: "Who kicked Oscar de la Hoya's ass tonight?
*pause*
*M and F speak together*
"Mosley." -- September 18, 2003

Here you see a couple of photos of her with the other, mostly-forgotten pets, my rodents.  Janky and Bo have been pretty well ignored for the past couple of weeks with the Jinxers claiming the lion's share of attention, but I still feed the rodents every day, and get them out to play a bit from time to time. Plans to breed them are on hold, probably forever, but since I went to all the trouble to build the rat cage thing on the outside bookshelf, we might get a couple of more rodents at some point, since these two will probably both be dead within 6 or 8 months. Rats don't live very long.

Anyway, I got both rodents out a few days ago, and Jinx had no idea what to make of them.  True, they're not all that much smaller than she is, so her trepidation is somewhat understandable, as is her curiosity.  Of course Jinx is regularly captivated by invisible objects underneath the throw rugs, so it's not like she's real picky, but she stared at the rats with enough intensity to set them on fire, if her eyes were magnifying glasses and her brain the sun.

True to form, the rats remained entirely oblivious to all feline activity.  There's really nothing special about cats catching rats; any feline with the patience to wait in a likely spot will get wandering rats bumping into her legs before too long. When that happened on our couch, Jinx retreated quickly, usually backing up on tip toes as the sniffing rodent pushed at her.  Janky is more adventurous than her smaller and blacker sister, and kept climbing up onto the back of the sofa or the arm and walking right towards Jinx, a state of affairs that Jinx did not like at all.

I kept hoping that Jinx would get braver and at least try batting at the rodents' tails a bit, as Dusty sometimes does, but she just watched and sniffed.  There are a few other cute pictures of them, but I'll save those for another day, or perhaps the rats' or Jinx's photo page.

In other Jinx news, she just keeps shooting herself in the foot.  Malaya is thawing on her "no Jinx in the bedroom" edict, now that Jinx is reliably using her litter box in the outside shed next to Dusty's.  A few days ago we were talking about letting Jinxie in there at night, rather than locking her in the bathroom, when Jinx horked up a throatful of Friskies on our just-washed carpets, and Malaya almost stepped in it in the dark hallway.  Then today with no puking for several days (quite an achievement for Jinx at her age) we were talking about it again, and when we got home from Kill Bill Jinx had just been in the litter box with her usual reeking poo.  The problem was that she'd stepped in it, or had kicked it as she was covering it up, and was trampling around on Malaya's desk with little bits of kitty litter on her paw and a very smelly foot.

This shit-tracking incident obviously did nothing to get Malaya more excited about allowing the Jinxers into our bed, so once I finish posting this I'll be taking her off of my lap (where she's been sleeping for the last few hours) and putting her into the bathroom, yet again.  She was in there last night for about six hours, and didn't even poop any, since she doesn't like the bathroom litter box anymore.  This is a good thing; now if she could just manage to not step in her own scat for a few days, she might be trusted with the nocturnal run of the house.

I'm not holding my breath though (except when I'm near her box and she's just used it... this kitty has some ungodly stinking poo).

¤ In the news, with media attention building, Rush Limbaugh has moved to try and defuse the controversy by admitting to his pill addiction, and claiming that he's going into rehab again. Coming from a man who has made a regular habit of saying that drug treatment is stupid and that abusers should be locked up, it's impossibly hypocritical, but it's not like anyone seriously expected him to ask to be incarcerated for his criminal activity.

The part I found most interesting relates to his famous karma-smack/hearing loss:

OxyContin is a narcotic painkiller that is widely prescribed for victims of moderate to severe chronic pain resulting from such problems as arthritis, back trouble and cancer.

Limbaugh reported two years ago that he had lost most of his hearing because of an autoimmune inner-ear disease. He had surgery to have an electronic device placed in his skull to restore his hearing.

Research has found that abuse of opiate-based painkillers like OxyContin can lead to profound hearing loss caused by damage to the inner ear, said Dr. Gail Ishiyama, an assistant professor at the UCLA department of neurology. She could not confirm that was Limbaugh's case without access to his medical history.

¤ Continuing his long string of policies that do nothing to alleviate the problems they claim to be addressed towards, Bush has come out in favor of continuing and even tightening the economic embargo the US has against Cuba.  After all, the US isolation policy as worked so well to bring down Castro and help the Cuban people for the last 35 years, so why not continue it?

Hoping to make amends with a key political constituency, President Bush said Friday the United States would tighten enforcement of its embargo on Cuba and provide a haven to more fleeing Cubans while planning for the day when Fidel Castro's rule comes to an end.

"Clearly, the Castro regime will not change by its own choice. But Cuba must change," Bush told an invited audience of Cuban exiles, anti-Castro groups and others during a Rose Garden ceremony.

True, this is naked vote pandering to the radical anti-Castro Cuban population in the sure-to-be tightly-contested state of Florida, but what else do you expect of a politician, especially one as focused on pleasing his core constituents as Bush is? You can hardy blame him though, I mean the presidential election is coming up in just over a year, and you have to figure that Bush isn't counting on the Supreme Court this time; he wants to actually win this time.

Bush's announcement came as he is gearing up for his re-election bid next year. Some of Castro's most ardent Cuban-American opponents — who say Bush should have done more to foster democratic change in Cuba — also represent a vital voting bloc in Florida, a vote-rich swing state that Bush has visited frequently since taking office in 2001.

Bush's relations with his backers in Miami hit a low point in July when Washington returned 15 migrants to Cuba after receiving assurances they would not be executed for hijacking a government-owned boat that was intercepted at sea by the Coast Guard.

Well, that's not true, I do have a few things to say, but no real strong feelings about it, pro or con.  Plus I can write 5000 words about a trip to the store, and in fact have done so numerous times.  But you know what I mean.

Going in, I was really looking forward to it.  I had read a ton of reviews and knew that it was light on plot and dialogue and heavy on action and style.  I'd like it to be heavy on all of those things, as Pulp Fiction was, but hey, I can enjoy a relatively-mindless chop sockey bash, especially if it's done as well as the critics were mostly saying it was.

And it was well done, for what it was, but I found it very uneven. I'm not going to regurgitate the whole critical consensus on the film, you can read that for yourself on RottenTomatoes if you so desire, but basically the critics who liked it found it incredibly vibrant and passionate and intense.  I'd agree with the vibrant and intense part, but I guess it left me pretty cold, emotionally.  You know The Bride (Uma Thurman's character) is going to kill the bad guys, at least the ones she faces in this first movie, since it's just part one of the whole 3 hour epic.  So it's just a matter of seeing how she does it and who she does it to.

So with no real suspense as to the outcome, it's all about the process and the way Tarentino shows it, and you either love his energy and filming style and enjoy it, or you hate it and don't. Or possibly you are like Malaya and me and you enjoy parts of it, but think the whole thing is just so-so.

I was expecting to like it, if not so much the whole thing then at least the fight scenes, but those were just okay. The first one was pretty good and nicely-brutal and furious, but I thought the last one went on way too long, way past the point of believability, and that the final confrontation with Lucy Lui's character was way too short.  In between there wasn't much, other than endless stylistic stuff Tarentino put in mostly to emulate and homage the cheesy B-movies of his youth.  And I definitely missed the funny dialogue and fascinating characters that he showed off so well in Pulp Fiction.

Ebert loved it to the tune of four stars, his highest possible rating, and he totally bought into it.  His review mentions parallel universes and suspension of disbelief, and I can certainly agree with him on that. It's odd, since 99% of the movie takes place exactly in our current world, (well, 95% of it at least) but every now and then something happens that you just have to overlook and go along with in an almost magical spirit of cooperation.

• A nurse gets killed in a hospital and a formerly comatose patient vanishes and no one checks inside the nurse's very conspicuous truck for the next 14 hours, despite the fact that an abandoned wheelchair is sitting near it?
• Not one, but two people are allowed onto a commercial airliner with samurai swords that they display openly?  Which one of them then walks through a crowded airport with?
• Not one out of nearly 100 Yakuza members carries a gun instead of a sword he is almost totally lacking in skill with?

There are lots more like those, but you just have to overlook them and play along with the alternate universe in which the movie takes place.  It's not like those are the only impossible things, with the intentionally-absurd geysers of blood that spray from every decapitated head or amputated arm/leg, so I guess I shouldn't worry about it.  And I didn't; none of those things really bothered me, though they did break my concentration on the film, since I couldn't help but notice them enough to take me slightly out of my viewing mood.

As for the big issue of Miramax cutting the movie in half, showing Volume One now and Volume Two in February, I didn't so much mind that.  Volume One is nearly two hours long and has a valid plot structure; it could work as a stand alone film, though it would leave you wanting more since the story isn't finished.  But hey, that's the case for a lot of movies; everything doesn't neatly wrap up in 2 hours.  However I also don't at all subscribe to the whole, "it's too intense to watch all 3 hours in a go." that Tarentino and various critics have been saying.  That's bullshit; sure the 20 minutes fight scene near the end of Volume One was intense and very bloody and graphic, but there's a good 10 minutes of movie after that that's entirely made up of talking and plot development, and that cools you down nicely.  Malaya and I were both fine and ready to see another 100 minutes to finish up the story right then and there.  Perhaps people who can't take strong violence or action or who were much more caught up in the story than we were would need a break/intermission, but neither of us felt any need for a break.

The fight scenes were okay, but nothing as good as Matrix or Crouching Tiger, the two most famous movies the Mao Yo Ping (or whatever his name is) fight choreographer did in the past. Nice that they weren't all special effects and that they didn't overuse the wire stuff, but there wasn't anything epic and amazing like the bamboo climbing or flying or technical hand to hand in Crouching Tiger.  I was gratified to see that Uma could actually fight, or at least swing a sword as if she knew what she were doing with it, as could the stunt people she chopped up in such ridiculous numbers.  Some of the shots of her in the trailer look cheesy, like she's swinging all out of control, but in the actual film it's all pretty coherent and semi-believable, and the stunt work is very good; nearly seamless with the actual actors.  You can tell some of the stuff is done using wires, but it's not blatantly fake like it was in Underworld, and the characters in the fights behave pretty intelligently.  There are certainly more legs cut off or shot off in this than in any movie I've ever seen, and it's smart; in a fight for your life, you hit whatever you can reach that will hurt, and cutting someone's leg off at the knee or ankle is certainly going to incapacitate them for the immediate future.

Another element was the Tarentino trademark of putting the scenes in out of order.  This was used masterfully in Pulp Fiction and helped a lot to make the mediocre Jackie Brown more comprehensible and tense, but I didn't see much use to it in Kill Bill.  The way the anime segment was worked in and told a char's back story was very well done though, I thought. I wonder, however, how much the last minute decision to cut the movie in two screwed up his whole editing process.  Were we going to see some parts that made it into Volume One much later in the film?  Were parts that are not now going to come in until Volume Two initially meant to be spliced into the first 90 minutes?  I suppose we'll have to wait until they put out a special edition DVD with the whole movie on it, after the inevitable Volume One and Two DVDs come out separately in 2004.

This review/discussion is pretty disjointed since I don't have any strong theme to my feeling about the movie, and the fantasy world Kill Bill takes place in rules out much of my usual nitpicking commentary. I guess on the whole that I would recommend it for action fans or QT fans, but not so much for the average movie-goer.  I think a lot of people would be bored with the various monologue segments or the overly-long introduction shots of various characters or the repetitious ending fight.

I can't really point out anything in particular that sucked, but on the whole it was just not that exciting or involving, and was far less than I had hoped it would be.  I'll give it about a C+ and hope for better from Volume Two.  I would sort of like to see it again, since it's growing better in my memory and I wonder how I'd react to it on a second viewing when I could watch with more expectation of the tricks and techniques Tarentino uses.  Maybe I'll rent it at some point, if I don't get to desiring a matinee in a few weeks.

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