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

he week dons, and it's a busy one. Well, busy for Malaya, since she's got a real job and all that sort of stuff. As for her himbo, I sit around the house and try to work on my novel as much as possible, while dealing with distractions such as kitty tummies that need rubbin', old PC games that need playing, and Internets that need surfing. Oh, I cook dinner and pot plants also.

And that's "pot plants," not the other way around, thank you.

With warmer weather upon us, and the prospect of spending more time on the back patio, we've been buying plants lately, and improving the ones we already had. I'll take more photos soon, now that we've got things mostly arranged on the patio, but here are a couple from the weekend, with the tale of planting, and plants.

When potting, it's important to realize that the cats will be nearby, and that they'll be eager to help. (Meaning that they weren't any help at all, and were actively in the way, most of the time.)

First up we've got a big tropical leafy thing Malaya picked up for cheap a few weeks ago. It had been sitting in its constrictively-small pot ever since, waiting for me to get in the mood to repot it, and with the arrival of a giant orchid plant that her mom won in a raffle (at the aforementioned reunion party last weekend) and gifted to us, the time for potting had come.

I just needed a few things: soil, and a big enough pot, for starters. You see two of the pots above, they're 15" wide and about a foot tall; large enough for Jinx to fit comfortably inside one, as you can see in that blurry photo above. $3.50 each at Home Depot, since we got the cheap plastic kind, with holes in the bottom for drainage. They're going to live on the back patio, so there was no need for drip dishes or more expensive pots with snap on drain pans. And we're poor, so there's no budget for artsy ceramic pots.

The plants did need repotting though; you can see the painfully root-bound situation the leafy tropical thing was in. Pretty much every houseplant you buy from any nursery, Home Depot, etc type place is in this condition when you get it. Alive, flourishing even, but in desperate need of a new, larger pot and new, nutrient-rich soil.

I'm not going to go into a whole "how to repot houseplants" thing today, though I might at some point. Just briefly, if you think dumping some potting soil from the supermarket into a pot, throwing the plant in on top of it, and watering it once a week is going to do the trick... better be prepared to buy a lot of replacement plants. You don't need to talk to them or prune them daily, but it helps a lot if you use your hands and a tool to break up the old dirt around their roots, put them in a larger pot with quality soil, put stones or bark in the bottom of the pot for better drainage, and use fertilizer in your water. You should also repot them at least once a year, just to get new soil with nutrients down around their roots. Yes, it's a pain in the ass, but so is buying replacement plants every six months and half the fun is buying something small for $5 or $10, tending it carefully as it grows, and then gloating over yours when you see others its size going for $50.

The damnation of house plants is that some will thrive in poor conditions and occasional sunlight, and others will die in a perfect pot, good light, while well-watered, etc.

I'll take some more photos of the back patio next time I think of it. I still have a couple of others to repot once I get some more soil, and we've got a lot of arranging yet to do out there.  The bookshelf is going sideways, we're putting in some more shelves and window boxes, etc. But for now we're pretty happy with the greenery. We've got 4 or 5 small tree type things, two climbing vines (jasmine and honeysuckle) on trellises, and about half a dozen hanging plants in pots. We even got a little four pack of tomatoes at Home Depot, even though we don't think they'll do much on our back patio. Too many trees = no direct sunlight. But they were a "What the hell, it's only $1.20." purchase. Given the price of tomatoes up here, and the fact that our apartment has no individual water meter, I figure we'll break even if we get even half a pound of tomatoes off of them.

And really, how can you put a price on the joy and harmony that new green plants bring to your life? Especially tomatoes, which are notorious for growing madly until they reach a good size, begin to produce tomatoes, and then suddenly get massive leaf wilt and die off, taking most of their atrophied fruit with them as they wither.

 

 

 

¤ My Troy review is below, and as always it started off small and quick, and grew from there. I didn't dislike the movie, but I can't really recommend it, and it could have been much, much better, especially from a military and logical standpoint. The less you think about the organization of things from any higher PoV than a child playing with toy soldiers, the more you'll enjoy the battles and the "siege" scenes.

As for the financial aspects of it, Troy's doing okay. It only opened to $45m in the US, which sounds good but doesn't compare all that well to the far larger openings of the three LotR movies, each of which cost about half what Troy did. Troy beat a lot of other big budget epics though, and it's already brought in $55m overseas though, and $100m in three days isn't bad. It'll probably make back the $220m+ it cost to make and promote before they even tack on the DVD money, so the investors will be happy, if not a whole lot richer.

Lastly, here's a news item, before the review begins. More news and stuff Wednesday, with some mini-reviews, I expect.  Content is backing up, lately.

roy!

Quickly stated, It wasn't bad, but it wasn't really good. I'd give it 2.5/4 stars, which isn't quite good enough to recommend it. If you want to see it, go see it and you won't be too disappointed. If you're not that interested, skip it and you won't lose sleep over the decision.

Want more detail, courtesy of my categorized scoring system?  Here you are:

Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 5
Eye Candy: 8
Replayability: 5
Must See on the Big Screen: 7
Overall: 5.5

The movie looked great. The special effects were acceptable, the sets and locations and costumes were fine, the actors and actresses looked good and appropriate for their parts. The problems were with the plot, which wasn't very involving or grand, and the characters, who were basically boring. These turned the story, potentially the strongest element, into mush. There weren't really any good guys or bad guys, and while it was nice to see the point of view of both sides, the end result was that I didn't care who lived or died. And that was despite the fact that I honestly didn't know who was going to live or die, since I last read the source material around 8th grade, and since the screenplay made so many major changes to it that my vague memories were pretty much useless anyway.

I wasn't bored, but I was never thrilled either, and I found the ending pretty disappointing. The movie didn't really build up to a huge conclusion, and the ending was all about death and destruction and failure and escape, rather than triumph for anyone. It just sort of ended; I didn't feel satisfied with the resolution, or saddened by the tragic deaths, or much of anything else.

Also, if you're gay or a non-gay woman, you'll probably enjoy the steaming hot, hairless chested man porn that Troy serves up repeatedly. Pitt is naked with all but his cock showing at least half a dozen times, and whatever workout he did for six months to put on the muscles, I want it. He looked like a Greek God. Which was, of course, the whole idea. Eric Bana, previously scowling, puny, and forgettable in the Hulk and several other movies that no one saw, was a big-pec'ed hunk in Troy, and repeatedly topless. Even little skinny Orlando Bloom was buffed up quite a bit, and cut a saucy figure in his one topless scene. And besides those principles, there were dozens of other muscled, freshly-shaven men, stomping about in sandals, leather skirts, and not much else.

The female flesh is displayed in far lesser quantities, with just a few bare backs/butts shown from the side when various whores are lying around in various beds. You don't expect anything more than that from a PG-13 film, but there was more manporn than I expected, and more gore as well. A lower budget film with the same number of blood-spurting stab wounds, gasping death scenes, and bloody faces would assuredly have received an R rating in the US, and I was surprised at the amount of nudity they worked in as well, even if it was just backs and sides on display.  There wasn't so much nudity and violence that I'd consider it a selling point, but it was about as much as they could possibly get away with and still get the PG-13 rating.

There are some minor spoilers in the remainder of this review.

Part of the feeling that it didn't matter who won was due to the greatly-shortened time frame in the film. In the myth/novel/history/whatever, it's a ten year siege. The attacking Greeks surround and besiege Troy for ten years, cutting off food, water, reinforcements, etc. They try and try and try to break the walls, fight countless battles, but can never get inside. So when they give up and sail away and leave the huge horse statue behind, an apparent gift to the god Poseidon, it's a weighty, amazing event. Imagine how happy the people of Troy would be after a decade of constant threat of invasion and death?

In the movie, the entire siege lasts about two weeks. The Greeks sail up, take the beach in five minutes thanks to the super skills of Achilles, and then everyone lands. The next morning they march up and attack, are beaten back, take a day off, attack again, stop halfway, Achilles has a one man grudge match the next day, then nothing happens for twelve days (there's actually a "twelve days later" title on the screen when the action resumes) and then the Greeks are gone with only the horse statue remaining.

So basically there's one big battle, one mini-battle, one 1 on 1 battle, and then a massacre when the soldiers slip out of the horse and open the gates in the middle of the night. There's never any real siege at all; no siege engines, no catapults, no battering rams, etc. And it's a good thing for the Trojans, since the walls of fabled Troy are about 25 feet tall, weakly defended, and their gate is secured with fewer locks and bars than your average liquor store.

The physical mechanics of things were probably my biggest peeve about the movie.

Supposedly there are 1000 ships coming from Greece. Of those 1000, we never see more than about 100 at once, and that's on the big pull out shot over the ocean that was in all the early trailers. Once they're on the beach, seemingly every single ship pulls up onto the sand right where they landed. But since they all have at least 50 feet on each side of them, that's about 70 feet per ship, if you figure they're each 20 feet wide. So that's 70 x 1000 = 70,000 feet. That's 13.25 miles of ships! They show maybe 1 or 2 miles of coast, at most, at any time in the movie.

They also never show any form of army organization, no food, no provisions, no water, no blacksmiths to repair armor or weapons, no doctors or wounded, etc. It's very much the child's version of a war, where soldiers just show up and fight, and there's no thought given to feeding them, housing them, caring for the wounded, etc. Basically, the math about how many men there are and where they parked the ships and how they kept them all provisioned, etc, is all about as accurate and exact as Rowling's estimates of how many students attend Hogwarts.  And in both cases, it's best that you just don't think about this sort of thing and let yourself get lost in the fantasy.

I mentioned the brevity of the siege above, but the incompleteness of it was notable as well. As most of you probably know, if not from actual history than from watching LotR:TTT or reading fantasy novels about wars and castles... a siege is generally a lengthy affair. The classic midieval ones were contests of starvation, since armies didn't have the numbers of siege engines to break through a well-defended castle. So they starved them out by surrounding the castle, cutting off the water access, etc. People inside the castle couldn't get any more food in and couldn't make the besiegers leave, so they had to hope for reinforcements or try to outwait their attackers.  Obviously Troy had some amazing resources in the myth, since they supposedly lasted for 10 years, and were still going so strongly that the Greeks had to give up on a direct assault and sneak their way in with the Trojan Horse.

In the movie though, there's no effort made at a siege at all. There's one battle, the start of a second battle, and then the horse trick, just two weeks after they arrived. The Greeks have no siege engines, and not even any ladders, now do they try the most elementary assault techniques, like shooting fire arrows in to try and burn the Trojans out. In fact, they don't even surround the city. All of the action takes place in this huge open plain right in front of the city. A plain that had no reason at all to exist, in front of a city that was built in an entirely illogical location. It was near the sea, but not actually on it. There was no harbor, and not even a road to the beach. Just a long, trackless, dusty plain, in defiance of all city-buildling logic. No city near the water, but with no actual boat access, would ever prosper. What are merchants supposed to do; pull up on the beach and carry their tons of wares uphill over sand to the city?

I think a good movie about a real castle siege, with the time, battles, starvation and desperation, strategy, etc, could be a great film. Troy had neither the intelligence or breadth to dig into such a stimulating topic, and therefore spent its entire running time on the beach, or in the field in front of Troy's main gates. Main gates that had a huge royal viewing box built just to the side of them, effectively turning the field in front of town into a vast coliseum. One in which all of the important action took place, conveniently enough.

There was a great deal of time spent showing and discussing some secret escape tunnel out of Troy, but since the Greeks were never anywhere other than in front of the main gates, it was pretty silly. Anyone who wanted to leave the city could have just walked out the back at any time, and in fact we really had no idea if there were other gates, if the wall went all the way around the city, if the rest of the city was built up on a mountain that couldn't be climbed, etc. There were zero overhead views of Troy, and no sense of the whole area at all. There were obviously other gates, since reinforcements were coming in from the countryside and were arriving after the main gates were closed, but we never saw them, and the Greeks never thought to try attacking them.

We never saw any sign of gardens or food storage in Troy, nor a river flowing into town for water, or anything else. It was much the same for the vast horde of attacking Greeks though. They pulled their ships up on the beach and put up some tents around them, but what were they eating? Where did they get their water? An army of 50,000 requires at least that many more people to feed them, clean up the horse shit, repair their armor and weapons, tend camp, cook food, etc. Yet there wasn't a single servant shown in the entire movie, in the Greek camps. Nor did we see more than about one tent per 200 soldiers. In the myth I'd assume that they had to have taken over the entire country but the main city, and must have brought vast numbers of farmers, tradesman, families, etc, since if they were there for ten years, they weren't exactly living off of a few barrels of olives and wine.  The movie never addressed any of those issues. Not even where they were all taking a dump. Though since they apparently had no food, I guess that wasn't such a problem.

The lack of military tactics didn't end there, since apparently neither side ever sent out a single spy or scout, or bothered to post guards who would stay awake. The Trojans knew nothing about the Greeks leaving until they were gone a day (or more), and the one time the Trojans launched a half-hearted counter attack they were able to roll their exploding balls of hay right up to the beach camps without being sighted or challenged.

Troy wasn't as bad as Episode Two, where the lack of military tactics or even common sense made my head hurt, but I constantly wished Troy had at least made some faint effort to close some of the loopholes and logical shortcomings in its plot. Troy wasn't Helm's Deep; built into a mountain with no back door, and the Greeks weren't Orcs, with no desire but to kill, and no thought of self-preservation. There were there to siege and battle, but as (mostly) free men. Rushing suicidally into arrow fire wasn't in their job description, and it was absurd to have the entire movie take place in just a couple of weeks.

True, it would have been much harder to turn the movie into a real siege, or to throw in more than one battle scene, but hey, it's not like they were working with a tiny budget and limited production time. I didn't get the same feeling of missed opportunity with Troy that I did with say... Underworld. But Troy could have been far, far better, in so many ways.

I've yet to mention the acting in the movie at all, but that's because it was neither good nor bad. Brad Pitt has gotten some shit for being a cheesy Achilles, but I thought he was fine. Nothing amazing, but I believed his character. I didn't believe the loyalty and devotion and worship he got from the other soldiers though, since he did nothing to deserve it. He was the greatest warrior ever to live, so I can see never wanting to fight against him, but why follow him? He'd run into the thickest part of the battle and cut his way out, while everyone who followed him died.  The movie removed all of the gods, other than mentions of them as divine protectors who never did anything noticeable, and also removed every element of Achilles' demi-god status. He wasn't invulnerable everywhere other than his heel in the film, or if he was we never found it out, since he never got hit by anything until the very end, when he was hit in the heel first. It wasn't like he survived wounds that would have killed other men; he was simply so fast and skilled and never got hit at all. He could have been any guy with a sword and a leather skirt, son of a god or goddess or not.

Eric Bana was Hector, the great prince and warrior of Troy, and he was initially unbelievable in his roll, simply because he looked small and dirty in his beard. He worked later when you saw how muscular he was topless and that he could fight, but from the first hour you'd have no idea that he was any sort of a warrior at all.

The woman playing Helen was beautiful, but nothing special. Certainly not "face that launched a 1000 ships" gorgeous, as the story called for her to be. She was golden and glowing, but far from goddess level. They looked at hundreds of women for the part, but they should have kept looking. Or gotten a better make up artist to give whatever woman they did pick a more ethereal, magical glowing look.

Peter O'Toole has gotten some praise for playing the King of Troy and doing a great job. I didn't think he was that special. He wasn't bad, but there wasn't anything amazing about his aged king. Several actors played old men with power in the LotR films, and I thought all of them were as good or better than O'Toole. Of course the acting performance has a lot to do with the script and movie, and since Troy was just mediocre in those areas, O'Toole had more to overcome.

I liked the guy who played Menelaus. He was a dick and power mad, but he also whined and moped pretty believably, while still seeming kingly. The roll didn't give him much to do other than scowl or pout, but I thought the actor did an acceptable job.

Orlando Bloom was okay. His Legolas was a much more interesting character, and I think Orlando will always be best in rolls that allow him to be seen more than heard, but for such a pretty boy he can actually evoke more than one or two emotions, when the script requires it. He was serious and noble in LotR, and earnest and occasionally light in Pirates. Troy required him to be pouty and childish and brave, and he did all of those pretty well, though he had no ability to play sorry/ashamed at all.  Too pretty and smug, I suppose. 

Just for the sake of comparison, it's not like Pitt has any more range. He was the main character in Troy, and never appeared anything but angry or aloof. You'd think it was just the character, until you realize that he's made an entire career out of those two emotions, a gorgeous face, and enough well-placed grins to spice things up. He's basically just a blonde Keanu, with a slightly prettier and less stupid face.

I'm fishing for actor comments, just since no one was godawful, and no one stood out, and the movie was much more about the plot and story, with every bit of dialogue existing solely to advance the plot, rather than being Tarentino-esque and being fun and interesting on its own.

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