Last Runs And Beating On The Dead (Sort Of)
I'm done with the night bus. I pulled into the garage at just past eleven o'clock and said farewell for at least three weeks to the concept of coming home to find that the only person still awake in the house is one I don't really want to talk to. I might even get back to working on Black Sunshine or dare I say it, Living After Midnight? I dare, and I'm hoping the inspiration monkey strikes on that book soon.
We've also got a joint-jaunt for birthday celebrations for Lady Jade and my dad, which means delicious seafood for late lunch/early dinner followed by a screening of The Dark Knight. I've only seen about two-thirds of this movie, because the night we went to see Hancock at the drive-in, the double feature movie we got was Wall-E (and I don't get that paring, either). Or, we could swivel our heads fifteen degrees to the right and after some radio fiddling, watch The Dark Knight. From what I saw, it looked pretty good. Hancock, regretfully, was not.
Incidentally, I may catch some heat from this but I don't really care: Heath Ledger was not the wonderful ball of amazing that everybody seems to want to crown him in for this movie. Got that? He did a good job; nothing special. Unless something really spectacular happened in the last hour or so of the flick, what I saw was a pretty decent portrayal of an intelligent guy gone batshit. Comparing his performance to Sir Anthony Hopkins in The Silence Of The Lambs and crowing about how he should get an Oscar is, quite frankly, insulting. Don't get me wrong; I liked his portrayal better than Jack Nicholson's--because if you're going to give me cinematic cheese, you damn well better serve it with a generous scoop of Bruce Campbell--but I honestly don't understand what all the fuss and bother is about.
Oh, wait. Yes, I do. It's just that it's mean. Since I've been storing it up for a while, I'm going to let it roll.
Dead people always get lionized. If you're a musician, you're a ground-breaking songwriter. Writers are woefully unappreciated. Actors and actresses suddenly advance four of five categories in their apparent ability. Let me make this clear: this guy was decent, but Johnny Depp he was not. Got that? Heath Ledger was a perfectly serviceable middle-of-the-road good-looking chunk of man-candy that girls sighed over and to be totally fair had some decent acting chops that he often didn't get to show. Decent, people, not stunning. Good guy, but no Edward Norton. I really liked him in 10 Things I Hate About You; did a pretty swell job in Monster's Ball and other than that, I am really hard-pressed to find another movie worth mentioning besides that God-awful A Knight's Tale, some solid supporting work in The Patriot and...
...oh, right. The ghey cowboy movie. This is when you get into a lot of other stuff that quite frankly makes my teeth hurt. How brave he was for doing that role. How courageous everyone was for working on the movie. How the rest of the world just didn't get a movie about two emo cowboys who dug each other and was boring as hell. I have seen quite a bit of real world and cyberspace ink spilled sobbing about how the world lost an great talent, and people, as goddamn mean as this sounds (and trust me, I know how it's coming across), we did not lose a great talent. Last time I checked, Joe Satriani is still alive and so is Kate Winslet, so I think we're going to be okay.
Believe it or not, I am in a good mood tonight. Happy soon-to-be birthday to my sweetie; she's turning 30, and it's making her a little peckish.
EDIT: Upon further review, this post comes off like I'm throwing Heath Ledger under the bus, running him over, then backing up and doing it again. I'm not. He was a decent actor, but I don't even pretend to understand all these gushing, cooing fangirls (and boys, to be fair) who came out of the woodwork and deified him for what was essentially doing a decent job. When I read things like, "The world has lost a brightly shining star" and "It's the nature of angels to want to go back to heaven," it makes me puke in my soup. Hope that clarified somewhat.
We've also got a joint-jaunt for birthday celebrations for Lady Jade and my dad, which means delicious seafood for late lunch/early dinner followed by a screening of The Dark Knight. I've only seen about two-thirds of this movie, because the night we went to see Hancock at the drive-in, the double feature movie we got was Wall-E (and I don't get that paring, either). Or, we could swivel our heads fifteen degrees to the right and after some radio fiddling, watch The Dark Knight. From what I saw, it looked pretty good. Hancock, regretfully, was not.
Incidentally, I may catch some heat from this but I don't really care: Heath Ledger was not the wonderful ball of amazing that everybody seems to want to crown him in for this movie. Got that? He did a good job; nothing special. Unless something really spectacular happened in the last hour or so of the flick, what I saw was a pretty decent portrayal of an intelligent guy gone batshit. Comparing his performance to Sir Anthony Hopkins in The Silence Of The Lambs and crowing about how he should get an Oscar is, quite frankly, insulting. Don't get me wrong; I liked his portrayal better than Jack Nicholson's--because if you're going to give me cinematic cheese, you damn well better serve it with a generous scoop of Bruce Campbell--but I honestly don't understand what all the fuss and bother is about.
Oh, wait. Yes, I do. It's just that it's mean. Since I've been storing it up for a while, I'm going to let it roll.
Dead people always get lionized. If you're a musician, you're a ground-breaking songwriter. Writers are woefully unappreciated. Actors and actresses suddenly advance four of five categories in their apparent ability. Let me make this clear: this guy was decent, but Johnny Depp he was not. Got that? Heath Ledger was a perfectly serviceable middle-of-the-road good-looking chunk of man-candy that girls sighed over and to be totally fair had some decent acting chops that he often didn't get to show. Decent, people, not stunning. Good guy, but no Edward Norton. I really liked him in 10 Things I Hate About You; did a pretty swell job in Monster's Ball and other than that, I am really hard-pressed to find another movie worth mentioning besides that God-awful A Knight's Tale, some solid supporting work in The Patriot and...
...oh, right. The ghey cowboy movie. This is when you get into a lot of other stuff that quite frankly makes my teeth hurt. How brave he was for doing that role. How courageous everyone was for working on the movie. How the rest of the world just didn't get a movie about two emo cowboys who dug each other and was boring as hell. I have seen quite a bit of real world and cyberspace ink spilled sobbing about how the world lost an great talent, and people, as goddamn mean as this sounds (and trust me, I know how it's coming across), we did not lose a great talent. Last time I checked, Joe Satriani is still alive and so is Kate Winslet, so I think we're going to be okay.
Believe it or not, I am in a good mood tonight. Happy soon-to-be birthday to my sweetie; she's turning 30, and it's making her a little peckish.
EDIT: Upon further review, this post comes off like I'm throwing Heath Ledger under the bus, running him over, then backing up and doing it again. I'm not. He was a decent actor, but I don't even pretend to understand all these gushing, cooing fangirls (and boys, to be fair) who came out of the woodwork and deified him for what was essentially doing a decent job. When I read things like, "The world has lost a brightly shining star" and "It's the nature of angels to want to go back to heaven," it makes me puke in my soup. Hope that clarified somewhat.