The Tory Party

Pet Wars

Cuter than Jake? This gets the Jake Hoke Skeptical Glance (TM).





Mmmm… Dunno about that one…

Rabbit Rabbit, MoFos

I was going to write a mild rebuttal to the Pirates review, but it was mostly spot on and mine would’ve consisted primarily of the rules to Liar’s Dice (thus ensuring that it wouldn’t be very good at all). Instead, I have completed my rapid transition to dog person and will now hijack this blog to post pictures of my dog being more adorable than any of your pets.

Mocha Surprise trumps your mom.

Random Thoughts - Stir-Crazy Edition

• “Bigger and Blacker” is nowhere near as good as “Bring the Pain.” It’s like going from Sixth Sense to Signs — not bad or anything, but damn.
• You know what’s a weird song? “Oh Father” — you know, Madonna. It’s like October Project if Mary Fahl got drunk and played Cosette. Madonna sings in this unsteady low register — and the “sinned” in “oh father I have sinned” is legitimately flat — and then there’s this Amityville childlike chorus, but it works, hand on a Bible it works. I can’t believe this is the same album as “Express Yourself.”

  “Oh Father” was on the first karaoke machine I ever saw — Okinawa, 1987 — with what I think was a fake, made-for-karaoke video of a little girl hiding in a field, and I remember singing it on the way home from something, cos it’s catchy for a song about child abuse, and it made my dad rilly uncomfortable. How “Oh Father” gets to be wacky karaoke singalong I`m not sure. But I made a singalong mix and it’s on it, and I still sing to it, and I am full of shame. But not child abuse.

  And while I`m at it, “Bury My Lovely” almost always gives me chills. Wonder at what point in the songwriting process does the lyricist go, “Aw, damn. You know what this song’s about? Child abuse. I was all gonna write it about that dude that dumped me, but no way. This is gonna be some kickass Janie’s Got a Gun shit. Play that prechorus again.”

• When no one’s looking, I let my house get hella dirty. I gotta be doing some serious cleanup on Friday or my housemate will find out I`m only Type A when I`m bossing him around. No good!
• I was messing with my other housemate’s German Shepherd — looking at her toenails to see if I needed to cut them, and how much I could cut off if I did, and German girl was not loving it. She tried to get off the couch, so I sort of leaned on her to keep her in place, and SHE MADE THE WORST FACE AT ME. No growling, no hateful stare, but she pulled back her upper lip and I was all like NO YOU DIDN`T. I couldn’t be mad at her, because, again, no growling or anything, but when a German Shepherd gives you stinkface it does take you back a pace.
• I can’t believe it’s over a month til school starts. Who started this whole frippin` summer break thing, anyway? I ain’t a farmer! Though at ALDI I touch more bananas than Speedo. Owowowow!

That is all.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man`s Chest

Oh, pirates.

I keep my Secret Window paycheck in here

There’s not much to heckle about this movie. It just wants to make me happy, and it gives me a hyper-animated Bill Nighy and Naomie Harris, and it is willing to maim, kill and destroy any element or cast member in order to do it. So how does it miss?

Kyem to mee, I blouwe yer mine wit mee accent…

Let’s look at the animated Beauty and the Beast, for starters. If you go back and watch it, you`ll notice everything happens at top speed — character and story beats just piled on toppa each other like stuff in an ALDI cart — with only the occasional musical break to let something breathe. It’s like BAM prologue BAM introduce BAM exposit BAM castle BAM dad’s a prisoner BAM your Belle’s a prisoner BAM BAM BAM all the way through.

Bruce Campbell checks his shave

But you can’t deny that it works. Don’t even start. You can’t. Freakin` ballroom scene pwns me every time. So it is possible to throw around a lot of exposition and plow through your story at 90 miles an hour and give nobody no breathin` room and still make it work.

But what does Beauty and the Beast have going for it that Pirates doesn’t? That could be a long list, but the three biggies are 1) character arcs, 2) a single, clear narrative thread, and 3) it’s 90 minutes long.

Pirates? No dice.

Help! Twenty minutes of irrelevant narrative!

• Character? Jack’s winning, Will is bland.

  
  Mmm, I`ll take vanilla

  Lizzie Swann a-a-a-almost does something interesting and believable — choose rakish but smelly Jack over one-note-wonder Will — but then you find out it’s just a trick.

• Staying on point? Try TWO over-the-top hamster-wheel set pieces.

• Under these conditions, when things happen WAY TOO FAST — like the movie introduces a dice game so Will can IMMEDIATELY play it, in order to find where Davy keeps his key (OMG bet a dollar it’s in that wacky beard) and then IMMEDIATELY goes into Davy’s unlocked quarters, where he happens to be asleep sitting up, and IMMEDIATELY takes the key while squandering any chance to show finesse or strategy — it’s just dumb. If foreshadowing is planting a seed to bear fruit later, this movie just pulls out seeds and eats `em and wonders why it feels so empty later.

  
  Mm, I give you about ten years before you hit the wall

• I still don’t know how the dice game is played. But I know Will could have benefited from *trying* to win, and if his dad was going to screw it up anyway, he could have just played his dad for his freedom. Whatevs.

• The story is a big jibbering mess, despite every character’s efforts to explain to each other what is happening, repeatedly. I still left asking, “Why does the powdered-wig dude who looks like whassisface from Buffy want the chest?
  Does he really want the chest? Seems like the compass that tells you where to find the thing you want mostest is a sufficiently compelling thing to want — you`d think out of a fantastic supernatural Caribbean world there would be something PWD wants mostest other than the chest, quite a coinkydink, but double whatevs.”

  
  The thing you want the most is in my pants?

• I found it dishonest that the first Kraken kill is so swift and complete, and then when the Kraken comes for our hero it toys around forever. Lemme flop my vulnerable tentacles all over everywhere while I have the power to crack your ship in half and eat it. What. Evs.

• I know the Caribbean isn’t too terribly huge, but I still would have liked understanding how locations related to each other. They’re on cannibal island, then follow a river inland to visit Naomie Harris` voodoo hottie (convenient she lives in Cannibaltown).

  Then they tear all over creation and suddenly at the end everyone Jack Sparrow ever met is back at Naomie’s house. Who? Huh? How?

  
  Shit. I always miss the driveway

Not that this movie doesn’t have the charm of the first one. The same humor is there, and the same fascinating visuals, and it’s patently inoffensive. Plus it gets a heap of happy points for paying homage to gags from the first one. It’s just stretched too thin by trying to do too much. I think.

Gah, another rewrite? This is worse than Tomorrow Never Dies

I`m glad I saw it in the theater, because it needs the big screen to do it justice, and it never could have held my attention on TV. I wouldn’t buy it, but I would watch it if one of my housemates had it. So for that I guess it ranks right around the first X-Men.

I give it two Famkes.

Out of five possible

Wait. Now that I look at these pictures I`m reminded of how incredifabulobeautiful the cinematography was. Look at these pictures. Look at them! Now go to IMDb and look at more. Special Famke for Dariusz Wolski:



Special!

A-a-a-and su-spent.

Purple Shnozzle

Today at work I was trying to tuck up a flap on the meat cooler and I had a long metal plate fall on the bridge of my shnozzle. I was thisclose to unloading the eff bomb in front of the `mers but soldiered through it.


The point is… okay, there’s no point. My nose hurts and it’s cut and purple and here’s a picture of it:

Okay, from far away it’s not that impressive, but when you get up close…




It’s still not that impressive. Huh.

But how hard am I rockin` that ALDI polo? HOTT.