Remember that huge Straight Dope thread a year or so ago in which countless people rewrote Lord of the Rings in another author’s voice? Now it’s been collated. Imperfect but amusing.
Category: Culture
Worthy of note: Kip Manley’s City of Roses kicked off today. If you don’t recall, it’s a piece of “urbane fantasy” (his coinage as far as I know, and a lovely one) provided to us with webcomic pacing but not in webcomic form. I.e., we’ll get a piece of it on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and it’s text, not pictures. Eloquent text.
The setting is Portland. The magic is indeterminate. I expect it to be very good, because Kip can write.
Nobody but Tarantino could have made Kill Bill. Which, if you have a taste for the coppery scent of Tarantino’s oeuvre, is about all the review you need. It helps to have seen Switchblade Sisters.
Um.
OK, so it’s insane grindhouse cinema turned up a few notches. The extended Japanese scenes are an homage to Japanese samurai flicks. The Texas scenes taste like Sergio Leone, just a bit. There’s a touch of blaxsploitation. She’s wearing Bruce Lee’s jumpsuit.
There is no plot. Apparently all the plot comes in the second volume of the movie. That’s OK, because there’s plenty of kickass fight scene in this. There’s also a lot of blood, and by a lot, I mean “more than you think.” Like a lot of other people, I seriously don’t understand how this movie avoided an NC-17 rating.
Four months till the second half is the suck.
According to DVDfile.com, Sapphire and Steel is about to see a DVD release. Sadly, I can’t find a press release on the topic, just the one mention. Still excellent news; this is some of the best of freaky BBC ATV science fiction.
(Thanks to Adam Tinworth for correcting my lame knowledge of British TV.)
(TINWORTH. No excuse except being up till 2 AM last night watching the baseball playoffs.)
You wouldn’t expect a movie about corporate espionage among multinational anime porn to be a bad viewing experience… well, OK, maybe you would. Still, I thought Demonlover was worth my ten bucks. Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep got excellent reviews, and Demonlover stars Connie Nielsen and Gina Gershon, so there was potential there.
I pretty much liked the first half. Chloe Sevigny was tremendously callow, and whether or not her character was meant to be played that way, her performance left me cold. The rest of the movie was fine, though. Very stylish, shot in blues and greys in a kind of 70s futuristic aesthetic. The plot was nicely tangled.
In the last hour or so, the movie went seriously downhill. The final shots struck me as deeply non-profound, despite being set off from the rest of the film in style and tone. But the message didn’t live up to the stylistic flourishes. Further, there wasn’t any tension after a certain point. The resolution came about halfway through the movie, and everything afterwards was just an extended version of the “ten years later” epilogues common in bad 80s teen comedies.
Good concepts. Bad execution.
Despite it being an LiveJournal thing, I find myself saying why not? Thusly:
Your meme, should you choose to accept it, is to rank the following bands in order, from COULDN’T LIVE WITHOUT to COULDN’T CARE LESS. To add value to this process, you must also add one band to the list, and remove one band from the list, before passing the meme on (including these instructions).
David Bowie
Bob Mould
REM
Suzanne Vega
The Beatles
The Pixies
Nirvana
Queen
Duran Duran
Jethro Tull
Oasis
Fleetwood Mac
Half of me wonders if Mark Millar’s latest column isn’t a prank. But — Orson Wells as Batman? In 1946?
Millar mentions a Lionel Hutton as the source of the news, and there’s no trace of any Lionel Hutton on the Web. I’m thinking the column is a prank. But, hey; it’s a glorious concept, and I’ll dream of Dietrich as Catwoman tonight. (And Cagney as the Riddler. Yum.)
George Alec Effinger fans will want to be making their way to “Golden Gryphon Press”: and picking up a copy of Budayeen Nights. Nine pieces of fiction, all set in the world of Marid’s Budayeen. Four of them are Marid stories, including one which is just the first two chapters of the never-finished fourth Budayeen book. One of them is the first few pages of what would have been the last Budayeen book. One of them is a Honey Pilar story, and it rocks.
Barbara Hambly wrote the foreword, and introductions to each story. Her anger and her love for George are both evident; the love in stronger measure.
The Kill Bill watch continues with this review from John Tynes. He says it rocks, with incredible fight scenes, but it’s crippled by the decision to split it into two parts. He also says, quote:
Speaking of executed, the film features more severings of hands, feet, arms, legs, and heads than I have perhaps ever seen in a film before. Kill Bill is all about the delirious geysers of blood.
Bold statement from a man who, I believe, has seen Takeshi Miike movies.
The NBC version of Coupling is incredibly bad. I know, everyone said it was bad, but I wanted to see for myself. I lasted about five minutes before screaming in horror and deleting my TiVo season pass.
The sad thing is that it uses the same scripts. It practically uses the same sets. But the acting — it’s like Shakespeare performed by earnestly dull high school students. Not that the original Coupling was Shakespeare, but the American cast isn’t really up to the standards of high school students either.
22 episodes? NBC bought 22 episodes? Did they buy a blindfold and ear plugs before looking at the pilot?