Branding Nemo
It snowed. I refuse to call the snowstorm by it's Weather Channel-given name, since I think that's a slippery slope to naming every raindrop, but the storm was big enough to keep me inside most of the weekend. Not that it was a bad thing. I needed to catch up on sleep and chores and this weekend was very relaxing, which hasn't been the case for a while.
There were two big exceptions to my hibernation. On Friday, we went out to Williamsburg Cinema to go to the movies, putting us out on the streets during the worst of the storm. And Saturday, when it was much nicer, just to stave off stir-craziness and get a little exercise, we went for a walk.
This is our walk.
These are my new boots.
They are rain boots that look like high-top Converse sneakers. My mom emailed me a picture and asked me if I liked them. I told her I did, but I was pretty sure the link she sent me was from a store that only sold kids' shoes. I got the adult-sized version for Christmas. Then, for my birthday, she gave me real Converse sneakers. There is a theme going. The legwarmers are a Christmas present from Jesse's mom. My feet have gotten a lot of presents recently.
This is the picture I was taking when Jesse decided to throw a snowball at me.
I just got Instagram. I don't know how to use it yet. I was figuring it out, which was hard because the sun was so bright that it was hard to see my phone. Then Jesse nailed me with a snowball. The snowball hit the phone. All was lost.
This is how happy Jesse looked after the snowball hit me.
He was not concerned about the phone.
This is how Jesse looked after my revenge.
Jeff wondered if I hit Jesse with my giant bag to make him fall over. I did not. I just tackled him. Tackling Jesse isn't easy. He has good balance. He knows my normal sweep-the-leg tricks. I guess I've tackled him too many times before. This time, to get him to go down, I basically just hurled myself at him.
This is how far Jesse ran away after that.
After that, we made up and got hot chocolate. Then we went home and baked cookies.
Hitchcock and The Girl: */HBO
I don't really know anything about the making of Psycho, The Birds, or Marnie, so I'm not outraged by any inaccuracies. I'd say Hitchcock is more fun to watch, but, with a more avuncular version of Hitch, is also a little bit more pointless. The Girl is more mean-spirited and makes Hitch out to be kind of an awful human being, which is unpleasant but more interesting. What I'd really like is to know more about his wife, Alma. She's played in the different movies by a sulky Imelda Staunton and an ass-kicking Helen Mirren, so I don't know what to think of her. Someone should make a whole movie about her. They could've called it The Girl, but I guess now that title is taken.
Gangster Squad: C
I was with this movie in the beginning. Sure, it was never wonderful, but at first I thought it was a cut above for January fare. I dug the Art Deco feel, the way they used words like "mitts," the weird Mickey Doyle voice that Gosling was using. There was a recruiting-the-squad montage, which is always fun, and a super-long tracking shot entering a club-since all gangster movies, no matter the era, have to have a super-long tracking shot when someone's entering a club-and those are always exciting. As the movie goes on, though, it gets more and more stupid. The characters say to each other, "We have to be smarter about this!" and then just aren't. As the movie gets dumber and dumber, the number of gunshots per second increases, and it lost me completely. It was a ridiculous amount of gunshots.
The Last Stand: C-
In a world where we have The Rock (and his awesome Splash Mountain portrait), do we really need old, leathery Arnold Schwarzenegger anymore? This movie has an interesting premise-that Schwarzenegger is a small-town sheriff whose precinct is in the path of an escaped fugitive making a run for the border-but his character so earnestly good, there's no grit to it. He's basically an Adam Sandler character minus the jokes and transplanted to Arizona, where he befriends the old ladies and cares for his people. It puts kind of a dopey sheen on top of everything. It's not worth watching the movie just to see Peter Stormare miserably failing at doing a Cajun/Creole accent (but at least that had some kind of texture to it).
Broken City: B-
This is a straight-up pulp crime movie, with no twists or spins on it. There's a detective-a private eye, even-who gets manipulated by the people he's investigating and thnks he's a step ahead when really he's a step behind. There's a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. There's a femme fatale. Mark Wahlberg is no Continental Op, and nothing is particularly sharp. It's the movie equivalent of an airplane novel. Afterward, I kept teasing Jesse that he's so spoiled by neo-noirs like Cold Weather and Veronica Mars that he can't stomach the straight-ahead version anymore. Then again, this movie isn't better than watching a couple episodes of Terriers.
Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters: C
Now, I love adult twists on fairy tales as much as the next person, but this movie is definitely what a nine-year-old boy's vision of what adult movies are like. People say "fuck" all the time for no reason, a lot of people get shot in the head in explosions of squishy fake-looking blood, and there is a little bit of gratuitous nudity (but no sex). Sprinkling in these elements with no thought or logic behind them doesn't actually make a movie adult. It makes it dumb! The good news is that Hansel and Gretel is fun-dumb. Jeremy Renner manages to wring out a few laughs, and the creatures and witches are cool. "Hansel and Gretel" is my favorite fairy tale because it's about a girl who saves a boy and not about a boy who saves a girl, so I would've liked it to have had a good adaptation. But it's not the worst fairy-tale-inspired movie out there, and I prefer the silly-stupidity of this to the serious-stupidity of Snow White and the Huntsmen.
Movie 43: F
Jesse keeps contending that this movie is bad, but not the worst ever. I say it depends on your tolerance for poop jokes. Sure, there were a handful of sketches that made me laugh once or twice, but the vileness of the rest of it was so awful that I'd say the movie has no real redeeming qualities. The few bright spots are just okay; they're not worth sitting through the awfulness of the remaining sketches. The jokes were bad, the sketches were ill conceived, the framing device was meandering and made no sense, and the structure of the movie was illogical, with the final sketch coming after the credits started for no real reason. If it were a TV show, I would not watch it. (Derrick actually showed us the pilot to The Kids in the Hall when he was visiting; now that's how to do sketch comedy.) I think there's potential in the idea of an anthology-style comedy, but a lot of the sketches in it were actually written by the same people, so it's not really an anthology of different comedy writers/directors, and I think this movie set the cause back years, if not decades. Next time someone complains about SNL, I'll tell them to watch Movie 43 to see how truly awful 90 minutes of comedy can be.
Parker: B
What does it say that this is the best movie I've seen this month? Get it together, 2013! Parker wins January just by not doing anything awful. Nothing about it is particularly novel, and some elements don't add up (J-Lo has a crush because why?), but, in a month where Hugh Jackman was made to wear neck-testicles in Movie 43, it's enough. Jason Statham is an action star I instantly root for, and definitely my favorite Expendable.
*Not given a grade because I saw it on an awards-screener DVD, so I didn't get the theatrical experience. I believe it makes a difference.
There were two big exceptions to my hibernation. On Friday, we went out to Williamsburg Cinema to go to the movies, putting us out on the streets during the worst of the storm. And Saturday, when it was much nicer, just to stave off stir-craziness and get a little exercise, we went for a walk.
This is our walk.
These are my new boots.
They are rain boots that look like high-top Converse sneakers. My mom emailed me a picture and asked me if I liked them. I told her I did, but I was pretty sure the link she sent me was from a store that only sold kids' shoes. I got the adult-sized version for Christmas. Then, for my birthday, she gave me real Converse sneakers. There is a theme going. The legwarmers are a Christmas present from Jesse's mom. My feet have gotten a lot of presents recently.
This is the picture I was taking when Jesse decided to throw a snowball at me.
I just got Instagram. I don't know how to use it yet. I was figuring it out, which was hard because the sun was so bright that it was hard to see my phone. Then Jesse nailed me with a snowball. The snowball hit the phone. All was lost.
This is how happy Jesse looked after the snowball hit me.
He was not concerned about the phone.
This is how Jesse looked after my revenge.
Jeff wondered if I hit Jesse with my giant bag to make him fall over. I did not. I just tackled him. Tackling Jesse isn't easy. He has good balance. He knows my normal sweep-the-leg tricks. I guess I've tackled him too many times before. This time, to get him to go down, I basically just hurled myself at him.
This is how far Jesse ran away after that.
After that, we made up and got hot chocolate. Then we went home and baked cookies.
Hitchcock and The Girl: */HBO
I don't really know anything about the making of Psycho, The Birds, or Marnie, so I'm not outraged by any inaccuracies. I'd say Hitchcock is more fun to watch, but, with a more avuncular version of Hitch, is also a little bit more pointless. The Girl is more mean-spirited and makes Hitch out to be kind of an awful human being, which is unpleasant but more interesting. What I'd really like is to know more about his wife, Alma. She's played in the different movies by a sulky Imelda Staunton and an ass-kicking Helen Mirren, so I don't know what to think of her. Someone should make a whole movie about her. They could've called it The Girl, but I guess now that title is taken.
Gangster Squad: C
I was with this movie in the beginning. Sure, it was never wonderful, but at first I thought it was a cut above for January fare. I dug the Art Deco feel, the way they used words like "mitts," the weird Mickey Doyle voice that Gosling was using. There was a recruiting-the-squad montage, which is always fun, and a super-long tracking shot entering a club-since all gangster movies, no matter the era, have to have a super-long tracking shot when someone's entering a club-and those are always exciting. As the movie goes on, though, it gets more and more stupid. The characters say to each other, "We have to be smarter about this!" and then just aren't. As the movie gets dumber and dumber, the number of gunshots per second increases, and it lost me completely. It was a ridiculous amount of gunshots.
The Last Stand: C-
In a world where we have The Rock (and his awesome Splash Mountain portrait), do we really need old, leathery Arnold Schwarzenegger anymore? This movie has an interesting premise-that Schwarzenegger is a small-town sheriff whose precinct is in the path of an escaped fugitive making a run for the border-but his character so earnestly good, there's no grit to it. He's basically an Adam Sandler character minus the jokes and transplanted to Arizona, where he befriends the old ladies and cares for his people. It puts kind of a dopey sheen on top of everything. It's not worth watching the movie just to see Peter Stormare miserably failing at doing a Cajun/Creole accent (but at least that had some kind of texture to it).
Broken City: B-
This is a straight-up pulp crime movie, with no twists or spins on it. There's a detective-a private eye, even-who gets manipulated by the people he's investigating and thnks he's a step ahead when really he's a step behind. There's a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. There's a femme fatale. Mark Wahlberg is no Continental Op, and nothing is particularly sharp. It's the movie equivalent of an airplane novel. Afterward, I kept teasing Jesse that he's so spoiled by neo-noirs like Cold Weather and Veronica Mars that he can't stomach the straight-ahead version anymore. Then again, this movie isn't better than watching a couple episodes of Terriers.
Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters: C
Now, I love adult twists on fairy tales as much as the next person, but this movie is definitely what a nine-year-old boy's vision of what adult movies are like. People say "fuck" all the time for no reason, a lot of people get shot in the head in explosions of squishy fake-looking blood, and there is a little bit of gratuitous nudity (but no sex). Sprinkling in these elements with no thought or logic behind them doesn't actually make a movie adult. It makes it dumb! The good news is that Hansel and Gretel is fun-dumb. Jeremy Renner manages to wring out a few laughs, and the creatures and witches are cool. "Hansel and Gretel" is my favorite fairy tale because it's about a girl who saves a boy and not about a boy who saves a girl, so I would've liked it to have had a good adaptation. But it's not the worst fairy-tale-inspired movie out there, and I prefer the silly-stupidity of this to the serious-stupidity of Snow White and the Huntsmen.
Movie 43: F
Jesse keeps contending that this movie is bad, but not the worst ever. I say it depends on your tolerance for poop jokes. Sure, there were a handful of sketches that made me laugh once or twice, but the vileness of the rest of it was so awful that I'd say the movie has no real redeeming qualities. The few bright spots are just okay; they're not worth sitting through the awfulness of the remaining sketches. The jokes were bad, the sketches were ill conceived, the framing device was meandering and made no sense, and the structure of the movie was illogical, with the final sketch coming after the credits started for no real reason. If it were a TV show, I would not watch it. (Derrick actually showed us the pilot to The Kids in the Hall when he was visiting; now that's how to do sketch comedy.) I think there's potential in the idea of an anthology-style comedy, but a lot of the sketches in it were actually written by the same people, so it's not really an anthology of different comedy writers/directors, and I think this movie set the cause back years, if not decades. Next time someone complains about SNL, I'll tell them to watch Movie 43 to see how truly awful 90 minutes of comedy can be.
Parker: B
What does it say that this is the best movie I've seen this month? Get it together, 2013! Parker wins January just by not doing anything awful. Nothing about it is particularly novel, and some elements don't add up (J-Lo has a crush because why?), but, in a month where Hugh Jackman was made to wear neck-testicles in Movie 43, it's enough. Jason Statham is an action star I instantly root for, and definitely my favorite Expendable.
*Not given a grade because I saw it on an awards-screener DVD, so I didn't get the theatrical experience. I believe it makes a difference.