BrockLi Soup

Fucking hilarious. It won’t be out for another month, but you need to see it as soon as possible. I can’t believe he wasn’t arrested or severly beaten in the course of filming.

Gotta love those free screenings. It was totally worth the three-hour wait and $14 cab ride home from Georgetown, and even dealing with MySpace to get the pass.

The first Jackass was pretty awful, so I didn’t have high expectations for the second one (but then, who had high expectations for the first?) I guess it’s not a big surprise that they managed to hurdle the low bar I set for them; there seemed to be less gross-out stunts (from what I remember) and more mindless self-abuse (my favorite kind).

And it was hilarious. I think I peed a little.

Honestly, it’s a wonder these guys are still alive. They wrangle anacondas, ran with bulls, and pretty much threw themselves bodily into everything they could find (I think my favorite was the velcro truck).

Plus, any movie with a musical montage finale is OK by me. Not $10-ticket OK, but definitely free-on-a-Tuesday OK. Don’t bother paying full price, and for the love of God, don’t take a date.

(Or your kids. Seriously? Compulsory sterilization. That’s all I’m sayin.)

This Film Is Not Yet Rated was WAY better than I expected. As it turns out, there’s a panel of eight secret “average American parents” who rate every movie that comes through the MPAA. I never really thought much about movie ratings before seeing this, but those eight people have significant weight in the industry. A movie with an NC-17 rating is difficult to market, a lot of theaters won’t show it, and Wal-Mart and Blockbuster - two of the biggest video retailers in America - won’t stock it. If a filmmaker can’t convince them that the movie is suitable for an R, they have a hell of a time making it profitable.

I probably wouldn’t pay to see it a second time (only because it’s a documentary), but I would definitely see it again and I’d recommend every see it.

On a scale from Club Dread to Super Troopers, I’d put Beerfest at an 8. It was pretty hilarious, but a lot of the dialogue in the first act was pretty bad, and they had a lot of cheese-for-the-sake-of-cheese later on. But, it also featured gratuitous toplessness, so it evened out. Plus, we went to Fado afterward, and that’s always good.

I had never been to an advanced screening before, so that was pretty cool. Apparently ytic.com gives away screening passes a lot, so I went and signed up for all of their contests.

I’m definitely willing to pay to see it a second time, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. I think we’ll be heading up to Gallery Place Friday night after BBQ and beer drinking, since Fonny and BP will be here.

Also, my t-shirts came in from Threadless and Oddica today, so that made me happy.

As far as evenings go, I can’t complain about this one.

What has two thumbs and gets to see an advance screening of Beerfest tomorrow?

This guy!

You know things have gone too far when you wander into a viewing of Napoleon Dynamite and think, “Vote for Pedro shirt? How cliché.”

I remembered the other big thing that bugged me about Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan as The Collector. Where the hell did that come from?

It was months ago when I saw the preview for Everything is Illuminated. I’m assuming the book was doing OK by then, but I hadn’t heard about it. The only reason I even remembered the trailer was because of Eugene Hutz. I figured I should read the book before seeing it, so I picked it up a couple weeks ago and finished it last weekend. The beginning is a little hard to follow, but it was an interesting read.

The movie was pretty good, but I don’t know if I like the changes they made. Obviously, they could really only do half the story: Johnathan’s trip through Ukraine. The grandfather’s modified back story was a bit of a surprise. There was some other crap, but Scrubs is on so I’m a bit distracted.

Hutz was surprisingly good, but it was weird to see him without the crazy mustache, and with a shirt on - he’s very much like Dan Lee that way.

I’ve never read the book, so I had no idea what to expect when I went to see The Chronicles of Narnia last night with Schmitty. Unlike V, I totally got this one - Aslan is supposed to be Jesus! I mean, he died for the sins of the Son of Adam, the thing broke and he came back from the dead, and then he bit off that lady’s face.

Just like Jesus.

I’ve spent most of my afternoon and evening cleaning up archives. For several years now, I’ve kept movie and concert ticket stubs. I used to write the names of the people I went with on the back of the ticket, but since the beginning of 2004, I’ve kept a spreadsheet with this information, because I like looking back to see what movies I watched when and with who (and occasionally compiling data). I went through my ticket collection, and added what I could from there, but it didn’t amount to much: 21 movies in 2003, and 10 in 2002. Obviously, I lost a lot along the way. I was surprised by how many of the movies I remembered so well - who I had seen it with and where, where we sat in the theater, things like that. I remember losing a contact when I went to see X-men 2 with FN, Brie, and Coo, and lost the other one a week later when I saw it a second time with my buddy Bill. In a lot of cases, I remember these weird little details better than I remember the movie, but I would argue that those are more important.

For the rest of the afternoon, I wrote a WebAudit script to check links on my site. I updated to MT 3.2 a month or two ago, and nuked my images directory while I was at it. There was a bunch of crap in there, so I went through it and only restored the files I knew would be used, missing a few in the process. I also didn’t realize until later that MT 3.2 uses longer file names than previous versions (this can be changed, but at the time I didn’t know it was going to be a problem). As such, a lot of the file names for my posts were different when I imported them, and any links to them broke. I didn’t even notice this until a week or two ago, so I wrote this script to go through and try every link on the pages. I’m not entirely convinced that it worked the way I wanted it to, but I found a lot of bad links that have been fixed.

Tonight, I’m going to make some dinner, pour a drink, and relax. A few of these Netflix discs have been here for weeks, so I think a movie is in order.

I’ve never been able to read into films much - I’m always the one that just doesn’t get it. I just don’t think that way, I guess, but I can usually tell when there’s something to get, whether I picked up on it or not.

V for Vendetta certainly had something to “get,” I’m just not sure what it was. Ebert said it best:

Is this movie a parable about 2006, a cautionary tale or a pure fantasy? It can be read many ways, as I will no doubt learn in endless e-mails.

The original graphic novel was written between 1981 and 1988, so it certainly wasn’t intended to be a commentary on the state of international politics or the Bush administration’s attack on personal freedoms. I found another review that just couldn’t get over the anarchist elements, completely missing the point that the character in the movie was striking back at a fantastically totalitarian government, and could hardly be compared to the current Anarchist movement.

And then, of course, there’s the Jesus Freak review, wherein tolerance is played off as bigotry:

The rest of “V for Vendetta” not only depicts Christians as evil people who oppress and torture “innocent” people, it also depicts homosexuals as a persecuted, harmless minority of “nice” people. Both of these portrayals are hate-filled, false stereotypes, but the second one is actually contradicted by the secret stash of homoerotic pornography that one of the homosexual characters in the movie hides in a secret room in his house. If all homosexuals, and all homosexual activists, are such goody two shoes, how come so many of them resort to unsafe sexual practices that spread deadly diseases, and how come so many of them promote pornography, support the murder of unborn children through abortion and molest underage children?

I’m not exactly sure how this justifies his stance that the movie portrays a “hate-filled, false stereotype,” but he mentions God a lot so he must be right.

So yes. We’ve got political motives, confused Anarchists, and a heavy dose of bigotry for good measure. If anyone finds a decent review that’s worth reading, please let me know, because I just can’t decide how I feel about this one.

My faith in Metallica has been shattered. I became a fan around 11 or 12, when I found And Justice For All in the CD section at the library, and I was really into them right up until the Napster fiasco. Even if I don’t care for Lars’ shenanigans, I still like almost everything up through S&M.

I never bothered listening to St. Anger, aside from the tracks that made it on the radio, because I never heard a good thing about it. And based on Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, that’s probably a good thing. I don’t know which songs actually made it on the album, but they were all pretty awful. It’s just generic nü-metal crap.

The worst part was actually seeing the band behind the scenes. Hetfield is kind of a wuss. Kirk Hammet is a ninny. And Lars is just an ass - a pompous, demeaning, self-righteous ass. They all think they have some deep artistic vision to offer to the world, and watching the rest of the crew - managers, producers and the like - stroke their egos and agree with their inanity as they wax philosophical was just comical. They’re supposed to be badass! When did they all get old and soft?

What a bunch of Sallies.

I had heard mixed reviews about Domino, and I can’t say I can do any better. I really wanted to like this movie - I mean, damn, Kiera Knightley with guns! The trailer was sort of misleading, though: she wasn’t shooting people nearly enough, and half of the movie was done in that style (which got old REAL quick). And what the hell was that thing with Tom Waits? The action movie suddenly turns into a Jesus movie.

Domino’s story is an interesting one, but I don’t feel it was told well. Seeing a crappy movie is one thing, but seeing a crappy movie that should have been good is just a disappointment, even is Kiera WAS prancing around with a shotgun.

Two years ago this month, I started tracking every movie I saw. I got the idea when Grahams posted a list of the movies he’d seen in 2003. I only note movies I see all the way through; if I catch the second half a movie on TV, it doesn’t count. In 2004, I saw 120 different movies (seven of them twice, and Boondock Saints three times). In 2005, I saw 87 different movies (six of them twice).

Other numbers for 2005 (because I’m fond of numbers):

I kind of feel guilty for not going to The Little more than I did. I saw sixteen movies there in 2004 (though even that sounds low, with the times we saw two or three in a day). I’m not surprised that the ratings are skewed the way they are; I do a pretty good job of avoiding movies I won’t like, but I’m trying to be harsher in my judgment to even out the average a little better.

I’m hoping to see more in 2006. There are tons of movies I’ve been meaning to see that I just haven’t had time for yet. I’ve got 272 discs in my Netflix queue right now, and even without the TV series, that’s a lot of movies to keep me busy.

I’ve been watching a lot of movies in my newfound free time. It’s been nearly three weeks since I moved down here, and I’ve seen 14 films since then. I want to get my money’s worth from Netflix, Mondays is dollar night at the Drafthouse, and we’ve made a few visits to Regal. I’ve got a list of hundreds of movies I need to see, and at this rate, it almost seems like a plausible goal.

Bottle Rocket I didn’t really like it when I saw it a couple years ago, but I figured it deserved a second chance. It didn’t.

AEon Flux Badass. I never saw the cartoon and didn’t know the back story, so I couldn’t be offended when it strayed from the original. The pacing was weird in the first 20 minutes or so, but it got interesting quick and I liked the plot.

Serenity Way badass. Again, never saw Firefly, so I couldn’t be too disappointed.

Easy Rider Disappointment. I was expecting a biker movie, not an artsy-political-statement hippie flick.

Raiders of the Lost Ark Pretty good. Thanks to a mistake on the Circuit City site, and Matt pointing it out to me, I got the box set real cheap. I’ll probably watch the other two this week.

Wedding Crashers I’m not sure what I was expecting, but that wasn’t quite it. Still, it was hilarious.

The Producers (1968) Gene Wilder irritates me, and I’ve never cared for older movies - they sound funny. For all the pissing and moaning about the re-make, I think I’m going to like it more than the original.

Syriana Disappointment. Marketed as an action movie, but it’s a political flick. Probably would have liked it more if I was expecting that, but I wanted explosions.

The 40 Year Old Virgin Way better than expected.