When I have the extra cash laying around (you know, in the incredibly distant future) I want to create the "Captain Jack Scholarship for Pansexual Youth". This, of course, is a reference to Captain Jack Harkness from Doctor Who and Torchwood, a character who is arguably the most visible role model in television for anyone who doesn't want to get tangled up in the hetero-queer dichotomy. I wanted to call this a scholarship for bisexual youth--since the whole idea originated from the the fact that bisexual students' applications for queer scholarship programs are generally ignored, as if their struggles with minority status were somehow lesser than their "queer-only, all-the-time" counterparts--but my roommate reminded me that Captain Jack cares just as little about species as about genitalia, so I figured the pansexual label was more accurate.
The general dismissal of bisexuals (or anyone who doesn't fall neatly into the hetero or homo column) by the gay community really does bother me, though. The straights, okay, a little discomfort and weirded-outness is not unexpected. But, the gays? Seriously, in this age of acceptance and post-modernist tree-huggery, why are bisexuals treated like promiscuous, cheating-prone, confused sex-nymphs? Is it really that difficult to imagine a world where bisexuals aren't just slutty club girls making out for the Girls Gone Wild cameras? Totally understanding, or "getting it", is not necessary. A little dignity, though. It would be nice.
Monday, August 25, 2008
I've seen a few movies since my last post.
In this summer of very few options entertainment-wise (this is partly due to my own agoraphobia, but more to blame is the current state of the economy), I've been seeing a lot of movies in the theaters.
"Kjsilopanna, that's crazy," some might say. "You go to movies at least twice a month anyway, don't blame the Fed for your addictions!" Well, that's partly true. I do love movies, and I was thisclose to choosing creative writing as my major in college--it's just that something about the medium has always appealed to me. Give me a good movie with an amazing soundtrack? I'm in heaven. (Side note: my only qualms with the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica were with the terribly inconsistent, trying-way-too-hard-to-sound-like-a-bunch-of-cultures-at-once music selections. Also, Starbuck's theme. It was one 8-bar repeating loop, replayed ad nauseam during that one scene in her Caprica apartment. Not cute, SciFi. Way to take your single best show and annoy me with it. But, I digress, and in a very hardcore nerdy way. Sorry.)
Anyway, what I meant to say before was that all through college--that is, up until this summer--I've been religious about finding whatever material I wanted to watch online in the form of streaming video. My philosophy was that I could watch what I wanted, when I wanted, all for free (hello, 2AM Internet viewings of Kenny Vs. Spenny with a pint of Ben and Jerry's in hand--I have indulged in some ridiculously guilty pleasures, I don't deny that). All was well in the world. Generally, whatever movies I couldn't find online were readily accessible via friends' DVD collections or rented from the Hippovideo machine in my building's basement. Tivo covered my television needs. That was then.
Well, now I'm all graduated with the working-all-the-time and, suffice to say, I don't get out nearly as much. I'm not big on bars--when I went in college, it was usually because I was lovingly guided there by well-meaning friends--and I can hardly afford to go out club-hopping every weekend on an intern's salary. No need for Tivo without cable, either. I can't find the cash to visit my out-of-town friends at the moment, so what's a girl to do? I can only hit the museums so many times, even in this delightful land of marble and brass plaques. Going to the movies (and more importantly, spending money on movies) is my own little way of reminding myself that I'm not slipping away into social oblivion. It doesn't completely break the bank, and I usually leave the theater satisfied, if not outright pleased with my day's choices.
This summer's movies: Wall-E, Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, Hamlet 2...I'm leaving The Dark Knight out since I can't really say anything about it that hasn't already been said--it was that brilliant--and X-Files: I Want to Believe since I already reviewed it here.
*Wall-E: Just a few weeks after having seen it, there's a lot about Wall-E that I don't remember, which is slightly annoying. Because it's almost an entirely speech-free film, many scenes blend together in my memory. I can't segment them apart with the recall of scene-specific witty dialogue or some other cue to let myself know what happened when (a very notable exception being the spoon-fork existential freakout when Wall-E encounters a spork for the first time--so hilarious). That said, Wall-E was a beautiful movie, very visually appealing with interesting little quirks that kept me interested the whole time. My heart just broke watching Wall-E protect Eve against the elements while she was in stasis, waiting for the ship to return. It's not something I would own on DVD for party viewings, but a very thoughtful movie, nonetheless, and certainly different from anything else I saw this summer.
*Pineapple Express: I walked into this one not knowing what to expect. I loved Harold and Kumar Go to Whitecastle and Half Baked, but there are plenty of other stoner movies that I've seen and absolutely hated. I shouldn't have been worried, though. Pineapple Express is one of the most intelligent movies I've seen in a long time, and it was smart without banging you over the head with a "message" in any direction. It wasn't afraid to jump into the territory of the ridiculous (including an epic John Woo-style shootout, followed by a bloodied-up post-battle breakfast at Denny's), but did so in a way that didn't make you think the writers were trying too hard to be ridiculous. No, that problem came up in the next movie I saw...
*Tropic Thunder: Let me tell you, this one had some amazingly hilarious moments. Basically everything Robert Downey, Jr. did was gold. Like, Michael Phelps gold, eight times over. The Tom Cruise bits were occasionally amusing, and his random dance number at the end of the movie was worth every penny paid for the ticket. Actually, the funniest part of the whole movie wasn't in the movie proper at all--I laughed my ass off through every one of the fake previews before the movie started. The Robert Downey Jr./Tobey Maguire trailer had me in tears, I was laughing so hard. Those ice-blue contacts just threw me over the edge with giggles. No, the big problem with Tropic Thunder was, unfortunately, Ben Stiller's character. I just didn't find him that funny or compelling, and every time the story tried to drag the viewer into caring about him, I got bored. The other characters could have left him in the jungle at the mercy of those heroin-producing Laotian villagers, and I would have been okay with it. Not a great result when you're writing, directing, and starring, Mr. Stiller. If he'd picked one role for himself, maybe the movie would have been stronger for it overall.
*Hamlet 2: I was incredibly disappointed with this, but almost exclusively for reasons related directly to the marketing. The trailer was hilarious to no end--I wanted to know all the words to "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus" and man, did I want to know how Jesus ended up driving Hamlet through time and space in what appeared to be a S&M-inspired hamster ball. The trailer was so over-the-top and fantastic that I figured there were very few ways the movie could let me down. Well, the movie itself was nothing like the Hamlet 2 the trailer had me expecting. It was cute, but only for what it was. The play itself was so hyped up in the trailer, I wanted that. In the movie, the play Steve Coogan's character writes is almost a complete afterthought, and the movie plays out as a half-assed statement about free speech and a bunch of loosely thought out jokes strung together in a nearly incoherent fashion. The outrageous moments from the trailer that made me laugh turned out to be some of the only funny moments in the whole movie. Sad. My roommate (who saw the movie with me and was equally disappointed) said it best: Hamlet 2 had such a great premise, but ultimately fell victim to exactly what it was trying to lampoon--bad writing.
To prove I don't spend my entire life going to and thinking about movies, I should mention that I went to the zoo this weekend with my brother and some friends. So, I'm not a total weirdo who sits in darkened rooms all the time. Yeah.
"Kjsilopanna, that's crazy," some might say. "You go to movies at least twice a month anyway, don't blame the Fed for your addictions!" Well, that's partly true. I do love movies, and I was thisclose to choosing creative writing as my major in college--it's just that something about the medium has always appealed to me. Give me a good movie with an amazing soundtrack? I'm in heaven. (Side note: my only qualms with the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica were with the terribly inconsistent, trying-way-too-hard-to-sound-like-a-bunch-of-cultures-at-once music selections. Also, Starbuck's theme. It was one 8-bar repeating loop, replayed ad nauseam during that one scene in her Caprica apartment. Not cute, SciFi. Way to take your single best show and annoy me with it. But, I digress, and in a very hardcore nerdy way. Sorry.)
Anyway, what I meant to say before was that all through college--that is, up until this summer--I've been religious about finding whatever material I wanted to watch online in the form of streaming video. My philosophy was that I could watch what I wanted, when I wanted, all for free (hello, 2AM Internet viewings of Kenny Vs. Spenny with a pint of Ben and Jerry's in hand--I have indulged in some ridiculously guilty pleasures, I don't deny that). All was well in the world. Generally, whatever movies I couldn't find online were readily accessible via friends' DVD collections or rented from the Hippovideo machine in my building's basement. Tivo covered my television needs. That was then.
Well, now I'm all graduated with the working-all-the-time and, suffice to say, I don't get out nearly as much. I'm not big on bars--when I went in college, it was usually because I was lovingly guided there by well-meaning friends--and I can hardly afford to go out club-hopping every weekend on an intern's salary. No need for Tivo without cable, either. I can't find the cash to visit my out-of-town friends at the moment, so what's a girl to do? I can only hit the museums so many times, even in this delightful land of marble and brass plaques. Going to the movies (and more importantly, spending money on movies) is my own little way of reminding myself that I'm not slipping away into social oblivion. It doesn't completely break the bank, and I usually leave the theater satisfied, if not outright pleased with my day's choices.
This summer's movies: Wall-E, Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder, Hamlet 2...I'm leaving The Dark Knight out since I can't really say anything about it that hasn't already been said--it was that brilliant--and X-Files: I Want to Believe since I already reviewed it here.
*Wall-E: Just a few weeks after having seen it, there's a lot about Wall-E that I don't remember, which is slightly annoying. Because it's almost an entirely speech-free film, many scenes blend together in my memory. I can't segment them apart with the recall of scene-specific witty dialogue or some other cue to let myself know what happened when (a very notable exception being the spoon-fork existential freakout when Wall-E encounters a spork for the first time--so hilarious). That said, Wall-E was a beautiful movie, very visually appealing with interesting little quirks that kept me interested the whole time. My heart just broke watching Wall-E protect Eve against the elements while she was in stasis, waiting for the ship to return. It's not something I would own on DVD for party viewings, but a very thoughtful movie, nonetheless, and certainly different from anything else I saw this summer.
*Pineapple Express: I walked into this one not knowing what to expect. I loved Harold and Kumar Go to Whitecastle and Half Baked, but there are plenty of other stoner movies that I've seen and absolutely hated. I shouldn't have been worried, though. Pineapple Express is one of the most intelligent movies I've seen in a long time, and it was smart without banging you over the head with a "message" in any direction. It wasn't afraid to jump into the territory of the ridiculous (including an epic John Woo-style shootout, followed by a bloodied-up post-battle breakfast at Denny's), but did so in a way that didn't make you think the writers were trying too hard to be ridiculous. No, that problem came up in the next movie I saw...
*Tropic Thunder: Let me tell you, this one had some amazingly hilarious moments. Basically everything Robert Downey, Jr. did was gold. Like, Michael Phelps gold, eight times over. The Tom Cruise bits were occasionally amusing, and his random dance number at the end of the movie was worth every penny paid for the ticket. Actually, the funniest part of the whole movie wasn't in the movie proper at all--I laughed my ass off through every one of the fake previews before the movie started. The Robert Downey Jr./Tobey Maguire trailer had me in tears, I was laughing so hard. Those ice-blue contacts just threw me over the edge with giggles. No, the big problem with Tropic Thunder was, unfortunately, Ben Stiller's character. I just didn't find him that funny or compelling, and every time the story tried to drag the viewer into caring about him, I got bored. The other characters could have left him in the jungle at the mercy of those heroin-producing Laotian villagers, and I would have been okay with it. Not a great result when you're writing, directing, and starring, Mr. Stiller. If he'd picked one role for himself, maybe the movie would have been stronger for it overall.
*Hamlet 2: I was incredibly disappointed with this, but almost exclusively for reasons related directly to the marketing. The trailer was hilarious to no end--I wanted to know all the words to "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus" and man, did I want to know how Jesus ended up driving Hamlet through time and space in what appeared to be a S&M-inspired hamster ball. The trailer was so over-the-top and fantastic that I figured there were very few ways the movie could let me down. Well, the movie itself was nothing like the Hamlet 2 the trailer had me expecting. It was cute, but only for what it was. The play itself was so hyped up in the trailer, I wanted that. In the movie, the play Steve Coogan's character writes is almost a complete afterthought, and the movie plays out as a half-assed statement about free speech and a bunch of loosely thought out jokes strung together in a nearly incoherent fashion. The outrageous moments from the trailer that made me laugh turned out to be some of the only funny moments in the whole movie. Sad. My roommate (who saw the movie with me and was equally disappointed) said it best: Hamlet 2 had such a great premise, but ultimately fell victim to exactly what it was trying to lampoon--bad writing.
To prove I don't spend my entire life going to and thinking about movies, I should mention that I went to the zoo this weekend with my brother and some friends. So, I'm not a total weirdo who sits in darkened rooms all the time. Yeah.
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