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

s one might expect of a blog come the weekend, it's random clean up stuff today. News, some back patio plant photos, kitty photos, running discussion, movie chat, and reader mail. In no particular order. At least that's what it was, until I finished writing it and it was 17 pages long. I've removed a bit less than half, and you'll see it on Monday, along with a quick Troy review, and a few other things.

¤ In lighter news, Troy opened on Friday, and for a change Malaya and I did not see the big new action spectacular opening day. She had to work in the afternoon/evening, I went jogging, and we wanted to lie around and eat Texas fries and chicken strips and watch trash TV after dark, rather than braving the Friday night movie crowds. I'm pretty indifferent about Troy, but Malaya wants to see it, so I imagine we'll go check it out tomorrow afternoon. I'm taking a snack and a soda though, this ain't no Return of the King, and 2.5 hours can be an eternity when the movie isn't that great.

As for the reviews, it's up to 58% on Rotten Tomatoes, which isn't great, but isn't horrible either. Van Helsing only managed 25%, so in theory Troy is more than twice as good as Van Helsing. And 19.33 times better than Godsend, if you want to apply the metric to the logical conclusion.

RT requires 60% positive reviews for a Fresh score, and Troy was in the 50% range all week, but has slowly crept up towards a non-splat on Thursday and Friday, as more reviews came in. The main critical comment is that it's pretty and massive and long; chock full of characters and battles, but that none of the characters really stand out or gain any emotional resonance, and the battles are too CGI and not-stirring.  So basically it's what LotR would have been with a less-skilled director and a less interesting script. And I'd imagine it's financial success will reflect that.

¤ In other movie news, Shrek 2 is coming next weekend, and I'm really looking forward to it. Initially I was skeptical, as one must be about sequels to movies that were actually good. The early trailer for Shrek 2 wasn't real encouraging, and the second one wasn't great either. However now as the movie is getting closer we're seeing more of it, such as in these six Shrek 2 clips, all of which are about two minutes long. And they're all good.  Any random two minutes seems to be better than the "assorted 3 second scenes" approach taken in the trailer, and I think lots of the stuff is laugh out loud funny.

There was a special on Shrek and Shrek 2 on VH1 Friday night that we channel surfed into the middle of, and Malaya and I were both cracking up repeatedly at the Shrek 2 scenes. The full take of Puss in Boots hacking up his hairball had me laughing so hard I cried, both when I saw it in the movie clip, and then again on the VH1 special. It's definitely funnier if you live in a house with Dusty, who makes sounds identical to those coming out of PiB, every now and then. And usually deposits something far larger and moister than PiB's as well. Jinxie has never horked up a hairball, or anything else that we've seen, despite having far longer fur than Dusty.  I'm sure it's only a matter of time before her aging digestive system can no longer process the fur, and she begins contributing horrible sound effects and wet fuzz piles just like the Dusters.

It's interesting how many clips and featurettes they're releasing from Shrek, when they really don't need to. This amount of footage is usually a sign of desperation, though occasionally it's born of confidence. Usually it's a movie that has no buzz, and when the studio's marketing surveys come back with a lot of "no interest" replies, they get desperate and chop out 4 or 6 or 12 2-minute hunks of film, and slap them up on the Internet, hoping that someone, somewhere, will see something they like. It worked for me with Punisher, since I thought most of the clips were solid and they made me want to go see it. I didn't, since Kill Bill 2 opened the same day and had vastly better reviews, but I'll check out Punisher on DVD, at least.

But with Shrek 2, they're guaranteed a huge hit, and if the movie is actually good it'll get up into the $300m domestic range, since there will be repeat business. I guess there might be people doubting the sequel would be any good, and the quality clips might win them over, but wouldn't good reviews and word of mouth do the same thing?

Perhaps this is setting me up for a big fall, but all the advance screening news I've read has been very positive, and the two reviews on RT now both love it as well. It would be nice to look forward to a movie, and then have it actually be good. That hasn't happened to me since LotR:RotK, and that was five months ago. It's a pretty sad commentary to realize that most big summer movies are a success if you're just not too disappointed with them, but it's tragically true.

¤ Speaking of movies I'm actually looking forward to, off the top of my head I can only think of two other big ones this year, and one small one. Well two small ones, if I count Hero, but given the two year wait Miramax has already put on it, I'm not going to commit to it being released this year. The other small one is Fahrenheit 911, Michael Moore's sure-to-be inciting documentary about how Bush has conducted the "war on terror" and his family's long history of ties to the House of Saud. (They are the ruling family, and yes, the country is actually named after them.) I doubt much in it will be news to me, and I know Moore distorts things in his films, but I still wanna see it.

The two major films? Shrek 2, as mentioned above, but the other two are The Bourne Supremacy, and The Chronicles of Riddick, oddly enough. I never saw Pitch Black, have never seen Vin Diesel in anything, (which might explain my interest) but I can't resist this one. It's action, it's big budget special effects, it's space battles, it's scifi weirdness on another planet, etc.  I can't imagine that it will be any good, but then again neither was Underworld, Van Helsing, Dawn of the Dead, etc, and I got some enjoyment from all of those. I just like the genre, providing the movie isn't so stupid or doesn't starring someone so annoying that I can't bring myself to sit through it.

There are lots of other movies that I'll probably see, or that I sort of want to see, but those are the only four that I can list off the top of my head that I know for sure I really wanna see.

¤ Elsewhere, The Incredibles trailer is online. It's the upcoming Pixar movie about a family of Fantastic Four-styled superheroes, and the fan boys are rejoicing, but I didn't personally get much joy from the trailer. The look is gorgeous, as with all Pixar movies, and after the plastic-y humans in Toy Story and Monsters Inc. it's nice to see that they've learned to make human expressions believable.  The scene of the elastic woman reacting while she watches her costume get blown up is brilliantly-done. But the overall trailer didn't do much to whet my whistle. It looks cute and light; but not LOL or brilliant.

¤ Mediocre though The Incredibles trailer might be, it's leagues better than the soggy, limp, cable TV-quality trailer for Shark Tale.  I've heard about this one forever, mostly for the astonishing amount of major stars they've got doing voices: Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Angelina Jolie, Jack Black, Renee Zellweger, and Martin Scorsese are headliners.  The movie may yet be brilliant, but since it's set underwater and stars talking fish, it's impossible not to compare it to Finding Nemo. And while I was quite underwhelmed by Nemo when I finally saw it on DVD, it was at least gorgeous.

Shark Tale doesn't look very good, at least in this trailer, and from all I can see of the plot it's sitcom material. Also, almost the entire trailer is Will Smith doing his dated, oreo-flavored jive talking schtick, while Jack Black does a blubbery son of a tough Godfatheresque mafia guy (Martin Scorsese). Bleh.

It's not due until November, and who knows, maybe I'll be blogging in six months and talking about the great new film clips from Shark Tale, and how excited I am to see it opening day.  But somehow I doubt it.

¤ No matter how bad Shark Tale might be, at least it's not Catwoman, which looks so bad and has such negative buzz that the movie studio has actually pulled the trailer offline.

A source says, "Early online trailers of Catwoman have been pulled and they're sending cease-and-desist letters to websites that were playing it.

"Everyone is really embarrassed by it - especially Halle."

The only problem with this amusing story is... it's not true.  You'd think the National Enquirer would do a little fact checking before they post this sort of rumor/lie, but I the facts always get in the way of the best gossip. The Movie Box's direct links to the trailer on the WB site still work, and you can still see it on other sites as well. It's not a good trailer, and the catwoman suit still belongs on a biker slut at a Hell's Angels convention, but it's no worse than the trailers for plenty of other dumb action movies. I Robot, King Arthur, and Anaconda 2, for instance.

ere are a couple of quick reader mails from last week, just because I've been promising it forever. I'll get to the juicier ones next week, or else in the May mailbag. The promised photos have been bumped back to Monday's blog.

Here's part of a mail from regular correspondent Caaroid, in which he talks about movies. The double indentions are him quoting me from the blog.

"If you're wondering if Hollywood really thinks there's enough of an ancient world battle movie audience to make King Arthur, Troy, 2 Alexander the Great movies, and a Hannibal movie, yes, yes they do. And yes, they've been wrong before."

Well. Wanna bet? Troy will be a HUGE success. It is THE first story anyone read, part of the education system worldwide (even the americans heard of it! come on!) It has a spectacular cast (did you read that Brad Pitt, the guy playing the invulnerable-everywhere-but-on-his-heel Achilles, the name-giver of the Achilles-tendon, hurt his -- Achilles tendon on the set? Funny, eh?), a moving story, and will have great shots (at least the trailer gave that impression).

About the Hannibal movies... now that is another story that cries for movie interpretation. Then again, Vin the-macho-idiot Diesel might not be the best choice for one of the greatest military thinkers of all time.

About the Alexander movies... since that is not about a single offensive (ok, the battle of Troy supposedly lasted 10 years, but still it was a single offensive), rather the conquests of a great ruler, there are just too many ways those can flop.

Mind you, I have not seen any of the trailers (save the first one of Troy), I am only superpolating Hollywood practices on the subjects at hand.

Obviously, King Arthur is a different issue. The trailers make it look horrible, but it stars Keira pirates-of-the-Caribbean Knightley, so I'm sold.

I still retain numerous doubts about the commercial success of all these films. I suppose a big selling point for them is that they're world history, and will have huge international box office.  Movies that are entirely dependent upon US box office, such as ones about US history, are iffier bets. As megaflop The Alamo proved.  Troy is being estimated at $220m or more in cost, and studios need box office that's more than double what a movie cost to make a profit, once they pay out to theaters, directors and producers and actors with points, etc. So they're looking at $440m box office, worldwide, just to break even. It's possible they'll clear that much, and they'll make $200m more on DVD in any event, but it's not a total slam dunk.

The estimates for the US opening are just $55m or so, with the long 2:45 running time costing it a show a day, and since lots of movies do about 50% of their box office in the US, Troy needs to clear $200m domestically to be a success. Typical decline rates are about 50% a week, so if it goes something like $55m, then $30m, then $15m, then $9m, that's barely over $100m in a month. It might have better legs than that (Brad Pitt certainly does. *cough*) but $200m isn't as easy as the $90m opening weekend blockbusters make it seem.

King Arthur I think is in big trouble. Kiera is superhot, but she's not going to put any asses in seats, Clive Owen is suave and will be an awesome new James Bond, but he's not going to sell tickets either. There aren't any other big stars in the movie, and by the time King Arthur comes out July 7th people might be sick of big battle scene historical epics.

Caaroid continues with: 

And something strange:

"Add in all of those windows with their attendant pop ups, and I had more RAM than it takes to run the space shuttle devoted entirely to multiple instances of MIE6.0"

Surely you don't use mozilla for mail but choose to use IE for browsing? Tell me that I am wrong! It was a typo only, yes? Two words: TABBED BROWSING.

I stuck with Netscape 4.x for years, since I couldn't stand MIE 4 or 5, but I've been using MIE 6 since I tried it and didn't hate it upon release. I tried NS 7 when it came out, and liked the email, but couldn't stand the browser. The bookmark system sucked to organize, it didn't display about every 10th site properly (including this one; it can't handle the variable table width on top where I have the quote of the day), it crashed at least once an hour due to website code that worked fine for MIE but not at all for NS, etc. If I loved tabbed browsing I might put up with the bugs for it... but I don't.

Actually, I strongly dislike tabbed browsing, and would not use it if it existed in MIE. I like multiple browser windows, I like links to open in new windows, I like to click back and forth between them, and I like to throw down a quick Alt+F4 to close one when I'm done viewing in it. I don't like having to move my cursor to close windows, or go back and forth between tabs. I often use Alt+Tab to move between windows of all types, not just browser.  Also, I have a large monitor and run 1280x1024 resolution, and I seldom have a browser window set wider than about 1000 pixels. This means that the windows overlap to the side, so I can just click to the next window to the left or right, rather than using anything on the toolbar.

I know some people like tabbed browsing, Malaya for example, but I can't stand it.

Caaroid mailed another time about movies, this time to compare/contrast Underworld with Van Helsing, the day after I wrote my mildly-positive Van Helsing review.

Underworld vs. Van Helsing

I have an advantage over you, since I got to see the two of them within a week apart. It was pretty surprising to me to hear that you preferred VH, since I felt it was a worse movie. Then again...

Underworld pros:

story is better: It is always arguable, but in case of VH there is no bloody surprise in the whole movie. You can always either predict what's going to happen, or it is just irrelevant. The Romeo and Juliet style thingy in Underworld was cheesy, but the "good turns out to be evil" thing was pretty clever (for a silly goth action movie), and nothing like that happened in VH. And yes, there are a lot of inconsistencies in both stories, but I think Van Helsing fares worse in that regard. The only good part is that the girl dies in the end, but that alone is hardly enough to compensate for the boredom.

fight coreography is better: again, an arguable thing, and I am known to make mistakes in this regard since once I considered Nightcrawler's entry in X2 awesome; now having seen it three times I just go OUCH every time he waves his hand and people fall over a foot away. Anyway, in VH all the fight sceenes were repetitive, whereas in Underworld you always got new type of action.
weapons are better: come on, a bloody gas-powered xbow, WITH a bow part? That alone made me go ouch (I actually waited for him to use the bloody bow for something, like shooting exploding crap with it or something, but no). And then I did not even touch the revolving knives thingy... Ok, Underworld did not have so many weapons in it, but they were all more believable

Kate Beckinsale's hair: she's cuter in Underworld :)

Setting: Underworld is shot in Budapest, capital of Hungary, and it's pretty cool to see the buildings you walk around being populated by vampires and werevolves. Ok, it's only a pro for me, big meeh to you.

Van Helsing pros:

CGI: frankly, Underworld has the WORST cgi I have seen in the past bloody 5 years. It is so hideous that at times one has to go OUCH, you would not take something that horrible from a video game, let alone a movie. This, and this alone makes the two movies en par to each other.

Ok, overall I think contain the same amount of fun factor. I did not mind seeing either, and truth to be told, Underworld made me go mygodthisisicrap twice, while VH only once, although the 2 underworld ones were from CGI, while the VH one was from the "I have no heart" speech.

Hardly a topic worth going into this lenght. "Kate's hair is better short" would've sufficed.

So ultimately, the deciding difference for Caaroid is... Kate had cuter hair and outfits in Underworld. I wouldn't argue with that, since I thought she was yummy in that movie and pretty much irrelevant in Van Helsing.

I hardly remember Underworld at this point, despite the fact that I blogged about it at ridiculous length the day after I saw it.  My main recollection was of the one dreadful actor who played the male romantic lead, and that the story was a long series of missed opportunities. Underworld could have been a great movie, but it fell short in so many ways: acting, direction, story, costumes, etc. Van Helsing wasn't any good, but it made the most of its opportunities, limited by the PG-13 rating as it was.

About Underworld I said:

I'd give it like a C-, which is below a recommend from me, and that's almost entirely since there was some interesting action and nice visuals and nice set design. How to define the mediocrity of Underworld?

• It wasn't a bad movie that was indifferent and sloppy.
• It wasn't a terrible movie that was the best it could be.
• It was a potentially very good movie that didn't come anywhere near living up to it's potential.

In comparison, Van Helsing gets a B-, since it's a mediocre movie that did about the best it could. I would have subtracted four or five swinging on wires/leaping over bottomless pit scenes, and put in some better hand to hand combat, but that wouldn't have gotten the score higher than a B anyway.

Both movies could have been much better, but Underworld could have been almost infinitely better, and I couldn't grade it without thinking how much better it would have been with just a few script revisions.

Another random point about Van Helsing, that I meant to mention in my review last Friday. I thought the werewolves looked like crap in the trailer. Too hairy, too growl-y, to man-like. More like were-gorillas, facially. Plus they were obviously CG. I don't know if the movie had better graphics after more time was spent polishing them, or the shots just looked better in giant size on a movie screen, but the werewolves were pretty damn cool in the film. Super fast, super vicious, and while they were clearly animals, they hadn't lost all of their human intelligence. There were also several different werewolves in the film, and I thought they'd made an effort to make the wolf forms look something like their human forms, facially. Which was a nice touch.

It's not like you could have recognized the actors from their werewolf avatars, or vice versa, but at least the werewolves looked different from each other. Different pelt colors, but also facially; some were more muscular, had thicker brows, etc.

Lastly, here's a portion of a longer mail from Elsha-of-IEL. This email included a My First Time entry, which I've just added under May 5th, if you'd care to check it out as well.

Stupid TV shows!

crappy TV shows are always funny to watch even though it's so stupid :D not so much for the show itself than for the people and just the ridiculousness of it all. normally I'd never be caught dead watching reality TV or most game shows and the battle dome rubbish or anything else stupid, but if I come across it while surfing channels I'll occasionally watch it for a while until I get sick of it and tell myself "wtpudge new channel plz." 99% of it is so obviously a publicity stunt and is sounds so scripted that it's extremely difficult to believe the network when they claim the shows aren't scripted.

Springer in particular annoys and amuses me greatly on several levels. firstly, the annoying bits. all the knobbers who appear on the show are all just looking to be on TV and to let off steam about something that really doesn't mean anything to them. not to mention all the "oh so angsty relationship problems we have" and the ridiculous people who go on to scream "look at me look at me" to the US of A are all laughably insensitive and ungenuine in a lot of their sayings. sure they get pissed when they get into fights (or try to as the security people run around preventing people's heads from being removed from shoulders), but if they -really- cared about said relationships, they'd do it in private, not in front of millions of viewers (who also don't give a rat's ass about the couple(s)/people on the show either). not to mention Jerry tries to be all sympathetic but all he does is make snarky and (sometimes) funny comments.

I've blogged about Jerry Springer a couple of times, and I'll hit it again at some point, with some sort of "sum it all up in one entry" attempt. I'm not sure what there is to sum up really, but there's so much about those shows to comment on that I can hardly resist mining the lode. My comment from the September 5, 2003 blog amused me though, when I just read it again while trying to find the blog in which I admitted to watching Jerry and Maury some now, since Malaya gets a sick, vampirific sort of amusement from the human suffering depicted on them.

I must admit that I've come to somewhat enjoy some aspects of Jerry Springer, since Malaya enjoys watching it in short bursts just to see the idiots scream at each other.  I'll blog about it and the other hicksploitation type shows some day.  1) I am astonished that people continually volunteer to go on those shows when they simply have to know they'll end up humiliated, and 2) I can't believe the level of white trash (of every race) that Jerry's producers somehow bus in from West Virginia.

Those shows are a guilty pleasure. No one likes to admit that they watch them, and yet many of us do. I'd never seen Jerry before I moved up here last year, and thought myself well above enjoying that sort of spectacle... until I begin watching, and found it pretty damn funny. Or at least amusing, in a, "Please God tell me that everyone isn't that stupid!" sort of way.

I too suspect that a lot of the stuff on Jerry is fake. Perhaps not entirely fake; I don't think they're hiring actors and telling them what to say. But the people on there often play their issues up, acting more upset or shocked or crazy than they really are. Hey, it's entertainment and a spectacle, and it pushes the ratings when fists fly and boobies pop out. At least I assume that's what many people are watching it for.

I personally see no point in pixeled out boobies, and I don't get a thrill watching inbred idiots try to punch each other through show bouncers. What I do enjoy is the human element. People acting so stupidly, in such animalistic fashion, and so venally. It's like a crash course in abnormal human psychology, or at least unpleasant human psychology. People you never want to meet fighting with people you can hardly believe are smart enough to remember to keep breathing on their own.

The themes are repeated endless too. Confessing cheaters are on at least twice a week, and after watching 30 or 40 such shows, you can basically predict every action in advance. I'd say that at least 98% of the cheaters on there do it entirely due to opportunity. It's always the bf/gf's best friend, or sister, or mom, or something like that. It seems like a greater betrayal, but it's really all about opportunity. They get to know each other entirely because of the person they're cheating on, they're in the same area, etc. It's all about ease of execution. I swear that at least half the unrelated cheaters are roommates, and the story is almost always something like, "I took you in when you had nowhere else to go, and this is how you repay me!"

Yes, yes it is.

One other element that never fails to amuse me is the physical attractiveness/ego inverse proportion law. By this I mean that the uglier, fatter, more toothless, etc, a person is, the more likely they are to have absolutely no shame about their appearance, and even a sort of pride in it. Of the people on Jerry who get naked, at least 75% are people you didn't even enjoy looking at in clothing. I couldn't watch Jerry uncensored, since quite often the pixeled out boobies or butt are a mercy, being as the pixels cover cottage cheesy thighs the circumference of a truck tire, bellies with more rolls of fat than a gravy factory, etc.

At least every other show some woman who weighs more than Malaya, me, Dusty, Jinx, and several of our kitchen appliances added together will trot out wearing nothing but straining short shorts and a mismatched bra, and I'll spend the segment looking at the cat I'm petting, or the side of Malaya's face, all the while praying that someone will hurry up and insult her looks, thus motivating her to whip off her top and/or pants, so that the pixels will come in and save my eyes from permanent retinal damage.

It even holds true for merely fat people on the show. The fatter they are, the more pride they take in being grotesque. Skinny guys take off their shirts once in a while. Really fat guys, C-cup type guys, take off their shirts and run around madly just about every other show, glorying in the attention your average "almost fit but not quite dedicated enough to his sit up regime" guy wouldn't have the balls to.  it's true for the ugly and fat women too. There's inevitably a 240 pound woman who gets insulted by someone in the audience, and immediately starts wagging her boobies or butt around and yelling, "You just wish you had this kind of beauty!"

I suppose if there's just no way you're ever going to lose weight and conform to normal standards of beauty, you need to take pride in whatever you can manage to take pride in. And if you've got 42DD breasts, find a man who is hung up over breasts, and make him happy and yourself feel loved. Plus you can keep on eating all the fried chicken and snacky cakes you want. And when you're on the Jerry show, and some relatively skinny chick in the crowd calls you a "big fat slut" wave your boobies around and insult her 34Bs, even while you know that you could trade bras with her if you were somehow able to lose the 150 pounds you've gained since you were 17.

It's not the healthiest way to preserve your self esteem, but it seems to get a lot of people by.

I'll blog more about Jerry someday, and I haven't even scratched the surface of the Maury show, which has almost as much weird stuff as Jerry, though it's all encased in a much more civilized facade. They don't encourage the guests to fight, after all. Just destroy each other emotionally, following a sort of reverse "sticks and stones" homily.  The second best segment on Maury? Putting suspected cheaters on a lie detector test, or entrapping them with a sexy decoy, on hidden camera. The best segment on Maury? Paternity tests, which invariably end in furious/heartbroken men, and rejoicing/horrified women. The best ones, in Malaya's opinion and mine, are when the test reveals that the bitchy, harpy, "You gots to take care of yo baby!" woman, who is "150% sure" the guy is the father... actually cheated on him and got knocked up by some other guy.

Nothing on TV (Aside from the Lakers back up point guard hitting a .4 last second fadeaway jumper to crush San Antonio's little hopes and dreams.) is as satisfying as seeing a nagging, lying, witch get exposed for the cheating whore she really is, after she's just spent five minutes chewing her ex-boyfriend a new asshole for daring to cheat on her.  Although it's quite a bit of fun to see some guy deny deny deny that he knocked up a girl, only to get shot down by the paternity test. Especially when one guy has like 3 women on the same show, and you can see his heart sinking as he realizes his new monthly child support payments are going to run about 250% of his current income. 

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