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Category Archives: Celebs and Media
Paula, We Hardly Know Ye
Start Your Long Weekend Right
This song is in my head. I don’t know why.
And it goes like….THIS!
Strange The Strangers
Saw the trailer for The Strangers last week when we went to see Iron Man. Usually horror movies don’t do anything for me because I grew up on a steady diet of 70s/80s slasher movies. I even took a night course on how to make horror make up and actually got to work on a Bollywood-type movie about East Indian zombies in the water reclamation plant. Or something. We didn’t get to see a script, just one day to make heads into zombies.
I digress. The trailer actually made me jump. Seriously. Okay it had the usual “WHAM! SCREAM! BOOM!” kind of structure but it did find one thing that manages to freak me out every time. The old “being watched by the creep in full sight” shot.
I find if you’re going to scare me it has to be the most cleverest of bait-and-switches (not just “open the fridge, get something, close the fridge…MONSTER behind the open door!!!”) or it has to be subtle. Theres a scene in the trailer that has the female lead standing alone in a large room, no sound. From behind, through a darkened doorway, enters a masked figure. And they just stand there, the woman unaware that someone is at the threshold of the room, staring at her. Here’s some screen grabs:
The reason this freaks me out is probably because I read waaaay too much Edward Gorey as a kid . His drawings of vacant Victorian rooms and random acts of tragedy somehow reminded me of certain rooms we had in the house growing up (see image below, from The Gashlycrumb Tinies). This trailer is the same effect, visually, as sniffing something and having a flood of memories come back to me. I was terrified of the vacant apartment we had on the top floor of the rambling old house I grew up in and I think I only went into it once, clutching my sister’s hand, cutting off the circulation.
Oh yes, I think I’ll see this one!
Again and Again OSX
If Steve Jobs doesn’t come over to the creators of this music video’s house and give them a personal back rub with happy ending, then society is lost. (Via Gizmodo)
The Best Death Scenes
Spoiler Alert!
Some of you may not have seen last Friday’s Battlestar – a minor minor character dies, so stop reading if you haven’t seen your PVR recording yet.
Alisen Down who plays Barolay, dies after her 7 episode arc in such a quick and senseless manner it made me love her for her acting chops. In her final scene , she offhandedly mentions to the blond Six Cylon that she would kill her all over again if given the chance, which understandably enrages Six, who then starts smushing her face into a bulkhead. Barolay recovers from the beating by staggering back, holding her bloody nose and says with a rather surprised “Well… ok…” and falls dead. We’re lead to believe she’s had the bridge of her nose penetrate her skull in the pounding. Sheer minimalist death scene! (She also plays a socially stunted misfit on CTV’s Robson Arms, which makes me like her even more…)
This got me to thinking of other really good minimalistic death scenes:
Woody Harrelson’s character Carson Wells in No Country for Old Men. Knows he’ll be eating a bullet and manages to get one word out in pleading before the trigger is pulled.
THX 1138‘s fellow escapee, the tall hologram actor (played by Richard Quinnell I think…), struggles to get the car he’s chosen to run in to start. With the police approaching his car, he gets it started only to crash his vehicle a short distance from his starting point. If you listen close you can hear a voice over the radio say: “I think I ran over a wookie back there on the expressway.”
Wash lands the Serenity after a major ass kicking and winds up with a Reaver ship’s protruding spire through his chest as a reward.
In a freak elevator accident, Dr Kane (Meshach Taylor) gets cut in half from a speeding cable like a slab of cheese at a yuppie loft party in Damien Omen II.
Richard Chance gets To Live and Die in LA. His drug deal gone bad death scene was abrupt, but someone so corrupt needs to die.
Iron Sky
Sky Captain did it with a big budget and mega-stars, but Iron Sky does it with humour:
Television Irony
I was watching The Porno Channel last Friday night with lots of moans and man-ass and penetration-less, bouncy boob shots. Oh don’t say you haven’t either. It’s called Showcase. Anyway, Showcase broadcasts a bevvy of racy shows that feature women with perfectly augmented breasts, secret German sex clubs and kinky people profiles of persons you might be standing next to, unsuspecting, while travelling on the subway every day. It’s Friday night and things are pumping after 10pm!
Right smack dab in the middle of all this erotic TV is a strategically placed ad featuring Kim Woodburn (I can’t make this up) and her squad of lovely homemakers who try hard to find the most practical solutions to keeping your house and home clean.
Buzz. Kill.
The way they film her is the antithesis of erotic, utterly killing any ideas of amorous advancements. Her head, with her hair pulled back so severely, looks like a spray-tan melon with a bun. Her voice has the perfect school marm tone and she looks out from your TV as if to say “I see what you’re doing to yourself!!”
Bravo, Showcase, for making sure we’re not taking your programming too seriously.
Stone Me!
I recently saw the trailer for the movie Stone Angel (with my new honest to blog, supa-fave actress, Ellen Page) and it borked up a solid, hard memory nut with two levels:
One of the more clearer memories I have of my alcohol and pot-fogged time in high school was studying this book by Margret Lawrence. You may have noticed that my spelling and grammar is a bit poor, I blame anything other than not applying myself. I would fight with my English teacher because my brother was his golden student and English class was an annoying block of time before art class. I digress.
Stone Angel is a story of Hagar Shipley who recounts her life in shards of flashbacks and fragments of memories as she comes to the end of her proud life. Okay that’s the book in a nutshell (eat that, Mr Darling!). I remember the book not because of it’s structure (actually I did love the Tarantino-like recount of vignettes from her life) but because while we peeled back the themes and metaphors of a life fully lived, it dredged up a horror from my childhood (the second layer of that nut) that I had to deal with, and in some ways, I still haven’t come to grips with when I was a child. When I was even younger, I think in grade 4, I freaked out at a short film where a family visits their aging (grand)mother in a home. She’s so far gone into herself that all that we see on the outside is drool, yet inside, through movie magic, we see she’s lived a full and amazing life and she still has her memory. At the end of the short film, ran from the class and hid under my bed. Mom found me in tears and made me explain what had upset me so.
Dear readers, I am about to share with you something highly personal:
I am deathly afraid of getting old.
If I were ever to get trapped within my body and could not communicate my needs, I’d like notice that I have four days to live and left alone in that time so I could recount my life, a la Stone Angel. Day four would come and some pre-paid orderly would quietly enter my room and make me eat my pillow. The end.
Will I see this movie? I don’t know. Maybe. Should I stop being such a 13 year old in a 42 year old body? Maybe.
Summer Movie Predictions
Comfy Shoes A love story where a socially stunted man (Haley Joel Osment) working in a woman’s shoe store wishes to get close to one of his customers (Lily Tomlin). Wil Farrel stars as the Fairy Godfather that mistakenly transforms him into a pair of pink starkly espadrilles. Through a whacky dance contest, she comes to love him just as he is. First Weekend Box Office Gross: $15M
The Ladder James Woods takes on the suffering US economy in this rags to riches to rags to riches to rags story. Instant fame from a YouTube video drops him in fortune but he loses it all in Celebrity Poker Tournament. Can he win it all back on one last shot at the big time? Terri Garr co-stars. FWBOG: $10M
Flout It! Voice talents such as George Clooney and Muriel Hemmingway are lent to this uplifting children’s completely CGI movie about a Flute that hates lips! FWBOG: $32M
Gorgeous Car Vin Diesel is the man without a home, until he comes across a gorgeous car left in a ditch. With love and perseverance he fixes it up and enters it in local car shows, catching the attention of local car show mafioso. Can he regain his dignity and still manage to get the blue ribbon? FWBOG: $25M
Big Feet on the Ground Can a dancer (Molly Cyrus) after being expelled from the professional ballroom dance circuit, make it in the competitive world of Tap and Song Kid’s Party Characters? Will she find love? John Voit co-stars as the evil party dispatcher who is out to break her will to dance. FWBOG: $4M
The Creepy Vincent D’Onofrio finds himself in a mysterious world that haunts him in waking hours. Can he figure out how to regain a normal life while finding out the mystery of The Creepy? FWBOG: $5.00