While sorting laundry, I managed to watch The Transporter. (Hey, Costco had it for $5.99 and I’d never seen it.)
My goodness, that might be the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t exactly bad, mind (the worst movie I’ve ever seen remains “The Crow: City Of Angels”). It’s surprisingly competent. It’s like they had a bunch of really, really skilled people get together and say “Let Us Make Something Dumb.”
Remember Joe Bob Briggs? Instead of making jokes about “Car Fu”, I’m more inclined to make jokes about “Dumb Fu”.
And then you sit and watch the credits and you think “they made two more of these.”
We’ll see if Costco will sell those for six bucks.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
Downton! I have an episode and a half left, then it’s back to Michael Apted’s series of “Up” documentaries (I think I was on 28 up when I left off.)
Readingwise, I just finished the last of Jeri Smith-Ready’s vampire radio series (even fluffier than its prequels). Next up is Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyumi.
My wife and I just finished the last of Downton about two weeks ago. (Only through season 3, which is all that’s available on Netflix.)
I hear, though, that season 4 is coming here to the states in 2014.
Yes, in January. SO looking forward to it. 🙂
I’m rereading “Room with a View,” and tonight we might start watching the first season of “Call the Midwife” to see if it’s any good.
I’m reading Michael Pollan’s Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education. We plan to watch the season premiere of Falling Skies tonight, although there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to stay awake through the whole thing.
Reading Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.
Still loving Hannibal.
Probably have a friend over to watch the GoT finale tonight. Re-watched last week’s ep. with him on Wed., and I have to say it was somehow worse the second time, which I would not have thought possible.
I’ll be curious what you think. Of all the late Dick books (hehehehehehehehehehe, he said “dick books”), that’s the one that seems completely pointless to me.
While I have experienced a lot of short (story) Dick, I actually hadn’t experienced longer (novelistic) Dick.
So I picked up this one and The Man in the High Castle.
If these were bad choices, suggestions are always welcome.
I know a lot of people who love’s em some Dick. Short, long, whatever. They can’t get enough. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.
To each his own. I’m really getting into Critique of Pure Reason, myself.
NSFW:
http://youtu.be/nBYbzb1tUEQ
If Brandon’s comment is as dirty as I think it is, nicely played.
And Flow My Tears is generally well regarded, I think disliking it is just me.
My goodness, that song has no right to be that catchy.
It’s shockingly well-done, isn’t it?
Very nicely played.
I’m reading some old Tom Stoppare plays I seem to have missed before. Both originally starred Felicity Kendal and make it pretty clear he’d been in love with her for a long time before they got together.
Reading: Soul Music by Terry Pratchett.
Watching: Hogsfather (by Terry Pratchett).
I got my wife hooked on TP and now it’s all TP all the time in our house.
TP addicts, eh? They obviously didn’t show the cautionary educational filmstrip TP – The Long Skid Into Despair at your high school.
I just finished The Last Continent, and after looking up the annotations, realized that I’d missed a few thousand Australia jokes. (Some, like “Once a moderately jolly wizard camped by a waterhole under the shade of a tree that he was completely unable to identify.” were as impossible to miss as “I’m on a mission from Glod!”)
I’m pretty sure about half the jokes in Soul Music are going rightover my head but I did get that one. The jokes are such a big part of what makes reading TP so much fun: you’re always on the lookout for some strange pop-culture reference.
I started reading DW chronologically based on a comment you made. I’d read ten or so before deciding to just go back to the beginning and read em all the way thru. It’s been great fun so far.
You do know why he’s called Imp y Celyn.
I don’t.
“Imp” comes fron an old woed meaning “graft” or “bud”, while “celyn” is a Celtic word for “holly”.
Well, that confirms it: I’m missing out on more than half the jokes. That explains his name in the book, of course – Buddy – and even with a clue like his real name I didn’t get the connection between Buddy and Buddy Holly.
I really need to read these books with a decoding device of some kind. I’m missing out an too many cool details. I used to do that with Pynchon novels, actually, and really enjoyed it.
The annotation pages I linked to above are quite good. The only problem is that whoever compiled them stopped doing new books about ten years ago.
Soul Music is next on my TP docket, whenever I pick that up again.
jay b – have you seen tokyo drift? it’s awesome but you will leave the experience stupider than you began it. totally worth it though.
I saw the first half of the first Fast and Furious. Maybe the first quarter. It was when Vin Diesel yelled that the other guy was “granny shifting” and I knew that he really dissed Paul Walker there but… I didn’t know what “granny shifting” meant and I felt like if I had to do homework to truly appreciate a movie like that, I wasn’t in the target audience so I turned it off.
Googling now:
From MovieMistakes.com:
Dom makes fun of Brian after winning Brian’s car in the first race scene. Dom says that Brian was “Granny shifting, not double-clutching like you should”. Double-clutching is primarily used by truckers that don’t have good synchros on their transmissions or road racers that need to match their transmission speed to the engine speed while downshifting through turns. Granny shifting, as Dom seems to define regular shifting, is actually faster than double-clutching in a drag race, so it’s a good thing that Brian was “granny” shifting. The writer, who is clearly absent of any true racing or automotive knowledge, may have been thinking of power-shifting when he wrote Dom’s lines, but the two types of shifting are NOT interchangeable and Dom saying such a thing is clearly a mistake.
And now I’m even more confused.
If you google “granny shifting”, clear your search history before Maribou gets on your computer next time.
Because it sounds vaguely dirty, you see.
“What? Midget clown shifting didn’t get any hits?”
“Dear, I was searching as research for the blog.”
Truckers and Formula One usually don’t use a clutch at all, not while they’re in motion. A racing clutch is solid mount to horse all that torque, a street clutch has some give.
“Granny” clutching is just slow shifting. Everything’s slow, depressing the clutch, moving the shifter, releasing the clutch. It’s also very hard on the clutch bearings.
i’ve never seen any of the other fast/furious films. i recommend tokyo drift very, very highly. it is ridiculous and beautiful and so very, very stupid. it is everything film should be.
OH! I forgot. Actually got to the movies this weekend (last time was The Hobbit, to give you an idea of frequency). We saw Frances Ha.
It was pretty good.
Watching Seasons 2 and 3 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’m largely enjoying it, although the range of quality between episodes is fairly wide and I prefer shows with more of an arc to them.
I think it’s the kind of show that works better when it’s on every week, instead of something you watch the DVD box sets of. Whereas shows like Game of Thrones and Babylon 5, with a strong plot arc, are better if you watch several of them at once, because you notice more of the connections between episodes. In a comparatively non-arc show, I tend to notice the inconsistencies instead.
Favourite episodes so far: “Loud as a Whisper”, “The Measure of a Man” (which is so good it’s painful), “Q Who?” (Yay, Borg! Do I smell a story arc coming this way? Plus, amoral tricksters are just fun characters to play with), and “The Enemy” (G’KAR!!! I missed you!).
They were still in the “people will watch these shows piecemeal, one at a time, in syndication” mindset for 99% of television shows at that point. Heck, even by the time DS9 got on the air, the idea of a season-long arc was still novel.
The advent of the boxed set “changed everything”.
My girlfriend’s sick, so we stayed in and watched Justified all weekend. I’m enjoying it so far, largely because I used to live in Lexington and work for some crazy (and I mean crazy) guys from Harlan County (have stories, will tell for beer). So far, the thing I’m most impressed with is not the writing or the acting but the fact that they pronounce “Versailles” right (it ain’t pronounced the way the French pronounce it).
I keep hoping that they’ll find a way to feature this in an episode.
Justified is really good, for the sly humor and Leonard-esque dialogue (I could just listen to characters talk) and shaggy-dog plotting. And Olyphant is hilarious. His closest antecedent is Jim Rockford.
Yeah, I really am enjoying it.
Walton Goggins is awesome too.
I only have one question for you: if rural Kentucky girls look like THAT, why did you leave?
Hah… my girlfriend keeps joking about how Ava’s hair is always perfect, while half of the men look like they haven’t bathed in three weeks. Apparently they have world-class hair people in the holler now. Also, I will admit that I’ve had a crush on Natalie Zea for a while.
Eastern Kentucky people, not just Eastern Kentucky women, are wonderful people, incredibly nice but from a different planet. Some of the people I met from there are the sort that you never forget, and think about frequently for the rest of your life, even if you weren’t that close to them. For example, my son’s mom had a really good friend from up in the mountains named Deana (pronounced DEE-na), who was one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met, and who had an accent that, if you could understand what she was saying, would disarm you in an instance. I will never forget driving back from Huntington, WV one night with her and one of her friends (whose name I can’t remember) telling me stories about growing up in the “holler.” A wonderful evening
We had another friend from Hazard (another spectacularly beautiful woman) who lived across the hall from us. She took us home with her once for a home cooked meal (Hazard is about 2 hours into the mountains from Lexington, and about 45 minutes or an hour north of Harlan). Her father was maybe 6’6″ or 6’7″, and north of 300 lbs, with a booming voice that scared the shit out of me. He probably asked me 20 times, over the course of the evening, in front of everyone (including my girlfriend!) whether I was sleeping with his daughter (though his phrasing was infinitely more crude and direct), and each time he did so he would stare at me like he wanted to break me in half, which he easily could have done. I spent the entire evening in fear for my life.
But to understand why I was so terrified, I have to tell you the story she had told me a few days before. We’d been at the pool in our apartment complex, and she was wearing a bikini, so I… ahem… couldn’t help but noticing that she had what was clearly a bullet scar on her… backside. So I asked, “is that a scar from a bullet hole?” She then told me that when she was 14, her father had shot her in the ass with a .22 rifle when he found out that she was pregnant. “But… but… how did he not get arrested?” “Oh, we told the doctors at the hospital that I dropped the gun and it went off.” “But… but…” “Oh, he wasn’t trying to kill me. He was just angry.”
“No sir, I am not sleeping with your daughter.” (Eying the exits and calculating whether I can reach them before he can reach one of the many guns lying around the house.)
Yikes! I have an uncle who was 6’7″, huge man, with a temper. Terrified us growing up, though he never shot anybody (AFAIK).
And Natalie Zea…yeah.
(Though I maybe like Ava’s character better…Ava would actually have your back, Winona would just be all “you got yourself INTO this mess, you get yourself out.”)
One of the downsides of watching the show with my girlfriend is that every once in a while Winona says something to Raylan that is, word for word, something she’s said to me, and we have this uncomfortable moment where she’s saying, “Exactly!” and I’m thinking, “Oh man, that’s not a conversation I want to have right now.” So I definitely get Winona.
Oh, I get Winona too, and often she’s correctly got Raylan’s number. I don’t blame her 95% of the time.
But – and I don’t want to spoil here b/c I am not sure how far in you are – she does a couple of dumb/uncool things later on.
(Actually, most characters do – but, well, you’ll see.)
We made it a little bit into the second season before I started to go a little crazy, so I’m assuming I’ve seen one of her stupid things, fgrnyvat gur zbarl sebz gur rivqrapr ybpxre.
I finished up Series 6 of Doctor Who this week. I am not sure if I will wait for Series 7 to be released on Netflix, or if I will acquire through other means. I also went back and watched The Dalek Invasion of Earth serial, featuring the First Doctor.
I am still watching Arrested Development. There are about four episodes left. The episodes are entertaining, but the plot is confusing. I enjoy shows that try to use new methods to tell stories, but I really do not like this much. With the five year span, I have trouble figuring out where things happen in relation to one another. It is an enjoyable show, but frustrating.