Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "hella"
¤ Usage: "Hella m'ungry, Punchin!"
¤ Origin: Old Valley-Girl speak, or something like that. It was big in the 80s, vanished, and has been reborn largely thanks to Cartman.
¤ Etymology: It's short for "hell of" I suppose, even though no one has ever used that two-word phrase for the purpose that "hella" exists. It's basically a synonym for "very" or "extremely" and is best used to great excess, or for intentionally-annoying sarcastic effect, in much the same way adults can effectively use L33t sP34k.
¤ Notes: An annoying and stupid word, but one you'll soon find yourself almost powerless to cease overusing, if you dare take a verbal step down that mixed metaphor of a road.  Cartman says "hella" about twenty times in an old episode of South Park, driving everyone else crazy, and while it's amazingly annoying to hear him say it... neither Malaya or I can keep from throwing it into conversation when we get a chance.  Mostly to each other, as a sort of "that sounds so stupid it's funny" joke, but we slip up and use it when talking to other people from time to time as well. Much to their horror, I'm sure. -- May 3, 2004

aturday night took me on an adventure that could turn into one of the most amusing blogs ever.  I accompanied Malaya and her mother to a big social event/party that was hosted by a social club her mom belongs to. As I've said before, Malaya is Filipino, and not-surprisingly, so is her mother. As was 100% of the social club as well.

So I'm in the rented party room at a local Rotisserie group, in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt since it was a Hawaiian-themed party. I'm the only white person there besides some of the catering staff, I'm the tallest person there by about six inches, I'm the only one there who doesn't speak at least pretty good Tagalog, and I can't occupy my time trying to molest Malaya, since we're sitting two feet from her mother and a bunch of her mother's friends and Malaya's relatives. Plus Malaya and I are 2 of the only 6 people in a room of 200 who were under the age of 50.

Let me tell you, you haven't truly learned to appreciate life until you've watched several dozen elderly, primarily-female Filipinos line up and dance the Achy Breaky Heart dance, in Hawaiian outfits, while the lyrics are sung, Karaoke style, by an old Filipino guy with a thick accent. The viewing experience is greatly aided by being stuffed with two heaping plates of roast chicken, wild rice pilaf, and potatoes au gratin, and wondering why the hell people dance at social events anyway.

Strangest of all, I actually had a pretty good time, despite leaving the event sweaty from the high interior temperatures, with a throbbing headache from the deafening volume of the music, and suffering from incipient epilepsy from starring at the perpetually-flashing disco lights, a large bank of which were set up pointing right at our table.

Unfortunately, I've already written quite a long blog entry on Drod and gaming in general, several news items, and my surprisingly-positive (to me, anyway) Van Helsing review, and it's too late to get to writing anything more about Saturday Night's event, since I need to get to bed before dawn since we're getting up at 10 to go out to Mother's Day brunch with Malaya's mom.

So some news and Van Helsing today, and I'll save the Drod/gaming thing for later.  I've also still got a ton of really good reader mail to get to, and a whole list of other interesting blog topics, including my dad's new girlfriend, who owns an estate that's straight out of Falcon Crest. Not that we've been down to see it. Yet.

News first.

¤ This year's "What not to name your baby." list has been released. The winners are:

Emily again topped the list of most popular baby girl names last year, registering as No. 1 for the eighth straight time. Jacob led among names for boys for the fourth year in a row.

New parents didn't stray far from past habits in 2003 when naming their babies, bringing only two new names — Anthony and Elizabeth — into the top-10 lists, which were released Friday by the Social Security Administration.

There's also a link to the Social Security page with all the top names lists, if you want to be sure you don't give your child a boring, commonplace name that you'll deeply regret in 7 or 8 years when half the other little shits on his soccer team answer to it as well. You see the list for 2003 on the right.

¤ German police arrested the kid who created the Sasser virus, after he was sold out by various of his script kiddy friends.  I really could care less about it; the info about various Microsoft OS problems is spread so widely, so readily available, and so easy to program something to take advantage of that the latest program that does so is hardly worth a mention.

The teenager, whose name was not released, was arrested Friday in the northern village of Waffensen, where he lives with his family. In a search of the suspect's home, German investigators confiscated his customized computer, which contained the worm's source code.

"As a result of the student's detailed testimony about the viruses he spread, he has been identified clearly as the author," the state criminal office in Hanover said in a statement. Spokesman Detlef Ehrike said he is being investigated on suspicion of computer sabotage, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

After being questioned, the teenager was released pending charges.

Funny how you can break into someone's house and get ten or fifteen or twenty years in prison, but if you write a bit of computer code that causes hundreds of millions of dollars of damage (calculated largely in terms of lost productivity/time, I suppose) you might get five years. If that. I'm not recommending they throw the kid in prison for the rest of his life or anything; just pondering the issue.

What I find interesting about these regular MS OS flaw cases is the list of victims. Keep in mind that warnings about this problem and immediate fixes for it have been in the news for at least couple of months. I got it the minute it went online, since I have automatic system updates set up from Microsoft. There was more than ample time for any home user to protect themselves, much less major industries, who employ tech support staffs and system admins to keep their computers online. How can they not bother to get MS critical updates at least once a month?  If I ran any of these companies, I'd be firing some people today.

On Monday, the worm hit public hospitals in Hong Kong and one-third of Taiwan's post office branches. Twenty British Airways flights were each delayed about 10 minutes Tuesday due to Sasser troubles at check-in desks. British coast guard stations were forced to use pen and paper for charts normally generated by computer.

But fortunately the police caught him, and with the top quality of Microsoft software, we can all rest assured that nothing like this will ever happen again.

an Helsing review and discussion.

The following is spoiler-free, or at least gives away nothing more, and considerably less, than the trailers do. I liked the movie, much to my surprise. More details below, of course, after my quick categorized rating:

Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 6
Eye Candy: 9
Replayability: 4
Must See on the Big Screen: 5
Overall: 5.5

Malaya and I caught VH Friday evening, though it was a near thing. After the avalanche of bad buzz and negative reviews, we nearly skipped VH entirely, before deciding that we had to at least give it a shot for matinee prices. After all, as we've learned from numerous past action films, the enjoyment you get out of them is largely based on getting your expectations properly set.  We knew that VH was a cheesy monster movie. Not even a horror movie, not once it was watered down to PG-13, but a creature feature. In the old days it would have featured several men in bad monster suits, with flippers and scales, or a cape and fangs, or a fur suit and a wolf mask. Women would have run from them, a hero would have pursed them, and in the end all would have ended happily. Nowadays the monsters are as likely to be the heroes as the humans are, but the essence of the genre remains the same.

Ironically, neither Malaya or I are monster movie fans. We like action movies, and horror movies, and there are often monsters in both of those genres, but would we go see a movie that appeared to suck, just because there was a dude in a monkey suit? Of course not. However, when there are at least three main monsters, as in Van Helsing, we appeared to be unable to resist.

As for the movie, I was pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed it. It was about as good as the recent Dawn of the Dead, and far better than crappy films like Underworld, Freddy vs. Jason, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and others in the same genre that we've seen in recent months. Malaya liked it as well, and while I can't recommend it for people who don't like dumb action movies with lots of special effects, it wasn't at all bad. I'm confused by all of the bad reviews it's getting, when I've seen so many other recent movies that were definitely worse.

Van Helsing is currently sitting at 23% positive on RT, with just 30 out of 128 reviews positive.  I'm not sure why so many critics are bashing it; I mean what did they expect? It's not a masterpiece, but it's entertaining, it's got a plot, the CGI is generally pretty good, etc. If you go in expecting something as smart and vivid as Kill Bill 2 you're going to be disappointed, but Van Helsing is a big dumb monster movie by the guy who did The Mummy and The Mummy 2. Two films that starred Brendan Fraser. Need I say more?

Van Helsing does not star Mr. Encino Man himself, but it does feature Richard Roxburgh, who I had no familiarity with, but who was allegedly legendarily-unwatchable in last year's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  I've never seen it, so I can't comment. He played someone named "M" in that film, and he plays Dracula in Van Helsing. He wasn't horrible, but he certainly didn't do anything to rise above the B-movie level of the script. He did contribute heartily to the least watchable scenes in the film, which occurred just about every time he opened his mouth and it wasn't filled with CGI fangs, and the long speech in which he bemoaned his (literal) lack of a heart and dead emotions almost made me laugh out loud twice. If you can listen to Richard Roxburgh's Dracula gasp out, "I feel nothing! I'm hollow!" without snickering and flashing back to Teen Vader's legendary, "I don't like sand. It's hard. Not like you, you're soft." howler from Episode II, you're a better man than I.

The key to enjoying Van Helsing, as with most mediocre movies, is to go in with appropriate expectations. If you expect something great, you'll be unhappy. If you go in expecting silly fun, you just might get it. I had very low expectations, almost to the point of dreading it. I expected super cheesy acting, bad CGI, a ridiculous, virtually plotless story, and more.

I got some cheesy acting but mostly competent fare, far better CGI than the trailers had led me to expect, and a ridiculous plot with an absurd ending. The plot was ridiculous, but at least it had a plot. You knew what the good guys were trying to do, you knew what the bad guys were trying to do, and it proceeded relatively logically.

So no, it's not a good movie, and I don't feel any desire to ever see it again or own it on DVD, but I'm not unhappy that I went and saw it. It could have been much, much better, but I didn't feel like it was 100 minutes of missed opportunities, as I did after Underworld.  For a movie that had to shoehorn in so many vast sets, monsters, and so much action, it does a remarkable job of remaining coherent.  I'm usually pretty picky about movies that are just nonstop flash with no substance, and I don't like the hyperactive, hyperstylized aspect of your typical Bruckheimer film. The Rock, for instance, where every shot simply has to feature a weird camera angle, oddly-filtered lighting, rat-a-tat-tat military music, or all of the above, and most of the action is basically incomprehensible due to being blender edited together from about 4 different camera angles. I didn't get that feeling in Van Helsing though. There were downtimes between action sequences, the action mostly existed to drive the plot, and while a lot of the sequences were relatively ludicrous, they were at least edited together well enough that you could follow what was happening.

There were cool small things too. Dracula's Jawa-like helpers, Frankenstein's awesome castle design, the weapons and tools, the Vatican James Bond-like workshop (Which is cute in the trailers, but was more clever than expected in the movie since it was filled with workers of every creed and ethnicity; Arabs, Jews, Indians, etc, all toiling away on odd weapons and mechanical inventions. In the Vatican.), Van Helsing's surprisingly-non loathsome Monk sidekick, Van Helsing's mysterious, immortal background, and more.

On the downside, I think they missed a lot of opportunities; mostly by having the monsters move impossibly fast 98% of the time, and slower than molasses the 2% of the time that they had to be slow in order to let the main characters survive yet another battle they should have died in. There's a big werewolf vs. vampire fight scene at one point, and it was so much less interesting than it could have been. The vampires had shown an ability to vanish and reappear behind people all movie, while the werewolves could move incredibly fast and hit incredibly hard. Yet when the time came for the big battle, the vampire never vanished once, continually stopped to talk when it could have flown away and escaped, and made almost no effort to hurt the werewolf at all. Meanwhile, the werewolf was slower than every other werewolf in the movie, and seemed much more interested in leaping and tackling the vampire, rather than trying to bite it or claw it or anything productive like that.

Basically, what could have been an epic, awesome battle, if properly directed and choreographed, was just a bunch of leaping and talking and crashing. To make a comparison, in Freddy vs. Jason they eventually had the big battle the viewer demanded, and when it came time, they fought like hell. No one stopped to taunt or dick around, no one punched when they could slice, and no one hit a weak blow when they could have gone for the kill. The big showdown in that movie wasn't amazingly great or anything, but at least you didn't sit through it wondering why Jason wasn't using his machete, or groan out loud every time Freddy could have stabbed Jason, but stopped to talk instead.

Dracula's three vampire brides were pretty weak as well.. In their human form they were okay, though a lot less beautiful than I would have expected. They looked like cute college girls in harem outfits, rather than undead mistresses of the dark. Then needed to be more exotic and more sensuous by far. In their bat forms they were silly though. You see a number of shots like that in the trailer, and I'm not sure what the idea was with their look. They go from fully-dressed to completely naked in a very quick morph, but once they're naked and winged, it's weird. It's definitely not sexy; they're too bat-like and oddly quadrupedal, with hind legs that they cock forwards and try to grasp with like a second set of arms. Plus they're like bat Barbies, inflicted with breasts that look like the small hard chest lumps on a mannequin; nipple-less and asexual. As artificial as Marilyn Manson in his alien Omega look. They're Barbies all over too, with smooth, orifice-less groins as well.

I'm not sure how I would have improved them, other than by at least giving them nipples. The problem there is that they're either obviously in costumes, like the nipples and six packs Batman gets from his foam rubber gear, or else they're naked, in which case the movie gets an "R" rating and makes about 50% less money. Not all movies are so burdened, but when we walked into Van Helsing, just before the trailers began, my first thought and comment to Malaya was, "I can see why they made this one PG-13." At least one third of the audience was made up of young boys, 10-14 y/o range, and while some of them were there with parents and might have come to a more adult, R-rated Van Helsing, I'd imagine quite a few of them wouldn't. Or would have at least had to buy tickets to New York Minute before sneaking into Van Helsing.

But as for Dracula's Brides, they were a neutral, or even a negative, when they could have, in theory, been awesome. Clothes on them when they flew? Maybe, but what sort of clothing? Their flowing harem outfits would have been impractical in flight, and looked silly. Something form-fitting? Maybe, but how different would that have been from the Barbie bodies they had anyway? Make them topless but with panties, or tight pants? That would be silly, and as it was, it sort of made sense that they could go from fully dressed to naked bats back to human and fully dressed. It was like they changed entirely, and their clothing magically changed along with them. But if they changed from one form with clothing to another form with different clothing? I dunno; sounds pretty absurd. What is this, Diablo II with the weapon switch hotkey?

The other odd thing about the brides was that they were never given a single sexy thing to do. Perhaps the 12y/o boys thought they were hot, but as an adult who has seen a real live girl naked on one or two occasions, they did nothing for me. Not hot/exotic enough in human form, and not in any way sexy once they were naked and flying around. They didn't become all that monstrous either, not the way Dracula did; and anyway, they could have been hot in spite of their monstrous faces. Instead they weren't scary monsters or hot chicks. Some of that was due to the photography; they never tried to act seductive or erotic towards anyone, which surprised me. I figured there would have to be at least one "try to seduce Van Helsing" scene; every female vampire movie has that.

The US movie rating board is notorious for freaking out over any sort of nudity (symptomatic of America on a whole, as the ridiculous Janet Jackson's breast incident well demonstrated) or sensuality, and a movie can get an R rating for the tiniest bit of sex, and the commercial suicide of an Adult rating for anything even approaching soft core sex. Yet unbelievable amounts of violence can be shown and still get a movie a PG or PG-13 rating. It's just got to be mostly bloodless violence, and consequence-less violence.  I.E. you can show a bomb going off and killing an entire city, but you can't show a single child crying in pain with blood streaming from a cut. Or you can show any sort of multiple-fatality fight scene, so long as the people get hit and fall down, rather than screaming in agony or thrashing around, or bleeding profusely as they do in real life.

So the Van Helsing makers wanted to do the Brides naked and sexy, but realized that if they were really naked, or even appeared mostly human and partially naked, it would get them an R rating, which I'm sure was verbotten, given the film's budget and target audience. So they made them naked, but asexual as a compromise. It worked, at least in terms of preserving the precious PG-13 rating, but it made for some pretty boring female vampires. Dracula went into his full body bat form several times, and I remember his face being pretty demonic, but I don't remember much about the rest of him. Was he naked and sexless as well?  Or did he do the werewolf thing with ripped pants? I can't really remember.

Anyway, I've gone far off of my "was the movie any good" review portion, as usual, and I've intentionally not talked about all of the plot illogic things, since they're spoilery. I liked the film, since even though it was far less than it could have been, it was more than I expected it to be. It's not great, it's not even very good, but it's a fun show and not nearly the non-stop roller coaster boredom that some of the critics are saying. It's certainly not a movie that I would have made, it's got zero dialogue that you'll ever consider quoting, other than to ridicule it, and there's not one memorable character-driven moment in the film. But it's usually pretty to look at, there are a lot of nice small details, the sets are awesome, the CGI is pretty good, and it's popcorn-y, mindless summer movie fun.

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