not falling down

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:

God damn ball licker David fucking Koepp.

Want to feel old? Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace came out just over ten nine fucking years ago.

Update 2130 hrs: And I still can’t fucking count.

I have a feeling Netflix has slotted me into a recommendation demographic called “pretentious middlebrow taste.” I added the thingy anyway.

But with the caveat that it really isn’t subversive at all. I mean, I shouldn’t have expected it to be, but it is a story about an arms dealer who undergoes a radical change in personality. I was hoping for an equally radical challenge to the idea that peace must be achieved by superiority in arms; instead I got a story about how you should blow up weapons, but only the ones that belong to bad guys–preferably while the bad guys are standing on them–with your newer, shinier weapon.

Plus it was lathered in all the typical American movie race issues. White hero, white love interest, brown mentor/sage, brown sidekick, good brown person dies nobly, bad brown people die en masse, hero is only actually challenged by white villain: check! Sigh. Um, and the love interest and her rival were literally the only women with speaking parts in the movie. Except for some strippers?

I kind of like it less after writing all that, but it really was fun. Jon Favreau managed to give himself a twenty-minute cameo.

Oh, I know Baz Luhrmann, all right.

Ain’t nobody marking that motherfucker safe.

Almost exactly three years after I started Sad and Happy Movie Day, Jon and Amanda finally maneuvered me into actually watching Hotel Rwanda. We didn’t even have a happy movie to chase it with, but a couple episodes of Arrested Development made do.

I could have sworn that was Julia Sawalha playing the Red Cross worker, but IMDB says I am wrong. Dang. Oh, also the world is going to burn and we all deserve it.

Can you believe Sam Elliott’s IMDB photo shows him without a moustache? I mean, it doesn’t even look like him!

Ian and I typed almost simultaneously today that his only real job in Tombstone (which I finally saw, and did anyone else realize that Ben Foster was doing a Val Kilmer imitation throughout 3:10 to Yuma?) was to grow a moustache, which is also what he did in The Big Lebowski and (apparently) Ghost Rider. Looks like he’ll be reprising that role in The Golden Compass. You can’t argue with success.

I guess it’s like they say: some are born to moustache, some achieve moustache, and some have moustache thrust upon them.

I’m willing to bet that anyone who meets Sam Elliott quickly becomes the latter.

Sneakers, my favorite heist movie, features some plot elements that involve the NSA. It came out in 1992, when that agency wasn’t particularly well-known–o halcyon days!–and so it has this little exchange between Robert Redford (”Martin Bishop”) and Timothy Busfield (”Dick Gordon”) to introduce it to the audience.

Bishop: Sorry to waste your time, gentlemen. I don’t work for the government.
Gordon: We know. (Flashes ID) National Security Agency.
Bishop: Oh, you’re the guys I hear breathing on the other end of my phone.
Gordon: No, that’s the FBI. We’re not chartered for domestic surveillance.

Ah ha ha ha ha! Ha ha! Ah ha ha ha ha. Heh.

Bishop: Oh, so you just overthrow governments–set up friendly dictators.
Gordon: (chuckling) No, that’s the CIA. We protect our government’s communications–try and break the other fellas’ codes. We’re the good guys, Marty.
Bishop: Gee, I can’t tell you what a relief that is. Dick.

I’m running the first (theoretically) paid ads ever on xorph.com, now. I don’t have any particular moral objection to ads; it just never seemed worth the trouble before. Until Clockers got boingboinged.

As Holly pointed out, I wrote 991 extremely short stories and she wrote 41 stories that interlock in a crossword, and yet the fanfic we did for a bad movie is what starts eating into our fifteen minutes. Internet is really weird.

I am listening, right now, to the live stream from a Canadian university radio station that is rebroadcasting our giggly high-noise recording of Clockers. At least the DJ (one “Jordie Sparkle”) asked our permission first. Wait, no, I meant “forgiveness, after they started, in the hopes that Clockers was CC-licensed because NFD is.”

Okay! Let’s go to the phones!