I’ve been, in a bloggish sense, a bit backed up of late, due to rampant schedule craziness. It’s time I do something about that. So… Here come lots of random and largely unrelated things that I’ve been meaning to post! (Oh, how lucky you are!)
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After I managed to almost ruin a sweater last week, we finally got fed up with the door closer on the screen door in the garage and its wanton spree of greasy terror. You will be pleased to know, should you ever have the opportunity to avail yourself of this door, that we have purchased and installed a replacement closer, and you shall travel safely across that threshold without fear of horrible black marks on your back. Huzzah!
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It’s now officially winter in the Pirnat household–tonight we prepared the first gigantic pot of chili, guaranteed to warm your spirits (as well as various other parts that come into contact with it). The fun part is that it’s a bit different every time; this batch has a deep, round, smoky heat that I find reminiscent of barbeque, but without the sweetness. Of course it needs a day or two to really mature correctly, so we’ll see how it develops.
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Walk the Line… We intended to see the new Harry Potter but ended up at the Cash biopic instead when Potter was sold out. Walk the Line was perfectly serviceable, and a fine film, just nothing that really blew me away. It seemed to lack some of the cinematic expressiveness of films like Shine or Ray (the latter of which really blew me away). I was quite impressed with the vocal performances (who knew that Phoenix and Witherspoon could convince me that they were just lip-syncing to the originals?), but I was bothered by the story structure, which seemed to imply that Johnny Cash’s life was over, done, and of no more interest after June finally relents and agrees to marriage, which seemed like a bit of a cop-out to me. And I would have really liked his cover of “In My Life” over the end credits, but I can’t have everything.
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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire… Entirely too many shows were sold out, so I it took a couple days before I got around to it, and at that point I found myself largely disappointed. Sure, it’s pretty, and it’s spooky and dark, and there are some really great bits… But it seems to have fallen back into the too-literal feel of the Chris Columbus Potter films. Also, it’s about time that Harry got a full three hours (or more) or got serialized into multiple parts ala Kill Bill, because the amount of discarded material is really starting to detract from the filmed stories. In this case, the film might as well have been …and the Triwizard Tournament, because just about everything else during the school year is just plain gone.
Miscellaneous other gripes… The confrontation with Voldemort was completely and totally devoid of tension or scariness; and Voldy really comes across as a poorly-costumed wuss in bad makeup; he’s just silly, and not even remotely terrifying. Cedric Diggory’s death? Nowhere as effective as the book, since we didn’t spend nearly enough time getting to know him. I never would have expected a girl named Cho Chang to have such a thick Scottish accent; I’m not sure what I had imagined, but it wasn’t her. There wasn’t nearly enough done to establish the budding sexual tension between Ron and Hermione. I didn’t remember the British retro-punk band at the Yule Ball, but it has been a few years since I read the book. Dumbledore’s performance seemed to be all loud and shouty, merely a phoned-in cariacture. Oh, and excuse me, but there was nowhere near enough Snape.
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I’ve been ripping a huge pile of CD’s that have been building up on my desk for a couple of months, mostly stuff that I either haven’t listened to in forever, or that I never gave enough of a proper listen in the first place. It’s really a treat to rediscover a lot of this stuff! Some of the real winners have been:
- My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult – A Girl Doesn’t Get Killed by a Make-Believe Lover… ‘Cuz it’s Hot
- Juno Reactor – Bible of Dreams
- Warren Zevon – Mr. Bad Example
- Various Alan Parsons albums
- Vangelis – Oceanic
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CSS geeks might enjoy learning how to create bar graphs with CSS. Now I just need stuff to graph!
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And remember, kids, if you’re giving it up, you’re going steady with Hitler!
- Mood:uncorked
Tags: art css food harry-potter house life links movies music weekends5 Comments
5 responses so far ↓
I know what you mean about Chang, but I actually counted that as a plus and not a minus. If you spend your whole life in America it’s easy to assume that people whose ethnic heritage is obvious either have an accent typical of a native speaker of some ethnically-relevant language, or an American accent. But Europe is (perhaps reluctantly…) getting pretty cosmopolitan, too, and it’s not uncommon to see (for instance) fluent Black speakers of Finnish.
Not that I know how many Chinese immigrant families Scotland has, but I’m sure that every last child born to such a family and sent to public schools will have a fine Scottish accent. :>
>which seemed to imply that Johnny Cash’s life was over, done, and of no more >interest after June finally relents and agrees to marriage
In terms of what would be really interesting on screen, it pretty much was. Post wedding there was no more drugs, no more womanizing and most, though by no means all, of his songs that are extremely well known had already been recorded. While an enduring love that lasted until the very end is a great story, it’s not necessarily great cinema, so I think they ended it at a good spot. Continuing would have required them to essentially set up another story arc, and the movie was already fairly long.
Ray actually had something of the same problem, given that the film essentially ended after he breaks his drug addiction, except for the brief epilogue with the Georgia State govenment. On the other hand, without the drugs and after virtually all of his great work was done, why continue the movie? Just another point of similarity between the two films, but I don’t think it’s a problem in either case.
i love how hitler has a varsity jacket on. haha.
also, i thought you’d get a kick out of this. (if you haven’t seen it already)om/Serenity.html
http://www.jerrythefrogproductions.c
serenity with hand puppets.
I believe he’s meant to look like Archie, or possibly Jughead. Hitler, that is.
Also, thanks for the Serenity link. LMAO, and such.
I really want to see the movie again, even if I am still going to be upset about Wash.