Stories

I miss writing. Not in a serious way, or a compelling one. Just in a "man I used to really like doing that" sort of way. Kinda how I miss playing badminton. It's a vague and ill-defined itch in the back of my mind. Unlike badminton, though, I can do something about it without getting up off the couch. So let's get on with some stories.

Where I've Been (Sappy Life Update)

So I found a new job. I don't know if I mentioned it on here or not, and I'll be damned if I'll actually go back and read things I've written before. Always forward, never back. But, yeah, so I'm gainfully employed again after a 2 month hiatus. In the end, it worked out ideally - I moved out of a bad job situation and into a really great one in the same field, with very little downtime It's a better situation all around, and I'm actually on a real career path instead of just running in place like before. Combine that with the fact that I took some much needed time during the forced sabbatical to get my head on straight and my body back into shape, and everything seems to be in a really positive place. This sounds queer as hell, but I'm incredibly happy with my life right now. I know, shocking, right?

What I've Been Doing (Technology Whore)

So as a reward for finding a new and better paying job, I finally broke down and bought a new laptop. I know it's an extravagance in the extreme... but just wait for the rest of this post. I can defend it a little bit - my desktop computer has become this Frankenstein Monster of various cobbled-parts that don't even fit into its tower. Wires, cables, random boxes, and fans spill out of it like the remnants of an incendiary explosion gone wrong. And even in its make-shift upgraded state, it continues to run slower and slower. The laptop is sleek, pretty, runs twice as fast as the desktop, and I can do things like type on it while lying on the couch watching football and yelling at my roommate to bring me more turkey while he's up. (Not that I'm necessarily doing that right now, no sir).

But yeah, so if you think it's extravagant to go out and get a laptop right after a two month unemployment stint, you'll love this part - last week as a late birthday present to myself, I bought an iPhone. There's no defending that one - owning an iPhone is equivalent to the worst excesses of the Roman empire. I feel so much like Hedonism Bot from Futurama that it's uncanny ("I regret nothing!").

Seriously, though, it's awesome. Instant access to email, facebook, AIM, grouped texts, decent camera, a 32 gig iPod built in, you might as well just hook it to my veins. When you add in the google maps function so I never get lost anymore and the fact that I can play Katamari Damacy anywhere anytime now, I might as well have died and gone to gay-white-nerd heaven.

What I've Been Listening To (Music Snob Section)

November was a good month for concerts. I went to see Regina Spektor at Nokia as my real birthday present to myself and it was life-affirming as usual. I think it's so crazy how big she's gotten lately - I still remember when she was at the Gypsy Tea Room, and now she's filling up huge venues. But it was an awesome show - she played the best stuff off the new album Far, plus an amazing version of Ode to Divorce, a near show-stopping version of Silly Eye-Color Generalizations and ended the show with her country song Love You're a Whore (something that I've been dying to see in person). Basically, she continues to complete me in ways that are utterly undefinable. Or to put it in terms of Roommate Jim "I have never seen you look gayer than when you're smiling at a Regina Spektor concert." Which, while a hate crime, is technically accurate.

I also went to see Imogen Heap at the Granada approximately 4 days following the Regina concert and it was similarly awesome. It wasn't exactly polished - there were several extended technical delays and her voice (while always awesome) was obviously suffering from multi back-to-back concert nights. That said, there were some amazing bits - a truly awesome rendition of Bad Body Double, an unbelievably chilling version of The Moment I Said It, and a really unique and fun take on Just For Now. And as far as old school ambiance goes, you really can't beat the Granada. Even though the show was sold out, the crowd was super cool and really into the show. Bravo all around.

Short Stories That Make You Wonder (I'm Too Lazy for Proper Posts)

I got a new roommate. Roommate Frank has run off to greener pastures where there are dogs that he can play with, and floors that don't randomly shift their planes for their own amusement. In his stead we introduce Roommate Jim, who's already been heavily featured in stories around here, just not while co-habitating. It's a pretty sweet setup, in that we are basically the straight/gay versions of each other. It's all video games, sports, and minor drinking adventures all the time nowadays. He keeps me honest and less hermit-like than I would normally be in such times, so it's a good thing.

My birthday was aging, but super fun. I managed to go out three separate times (in true Birthday Week fashion) and never got overly drunk. Good conversation, good venues, and good drinks. Is it possible that I'm growing up and can actually celebrate in moderation? Let's just assume this is an aberration, not a sign of things to come. We'll see how Gingerbread Party goes next month as the real indicator.

Thanksgiving was short (low-man on the totem pole at the new office means working on the day after) but I still managed to partake in enough of my family's delicious meal in the 10 hours I was home that I will probably never be the same shape again. (Also contributing to that shape: the literal 10 pounds of leftovers that my mom gave to me on the way out the door. Seriously, I'm going to be a pear before the new year). I brought Roommate Jim back with me to the homestead, and I'm pretty sure that no parties were permanently scarred from the event, which is all I was hoping for, frankly. To quote a great man: No one got shot, no one got outed. I'll take it.

Big Honking Movie List 2008

Woo for annual traditions. As always, this is the list of every new movie I saw that was technically released in 2008. The list is then sorted by order of preference and divided into 5 categories: Hate, Dislike, Eh, Good, and Great. Theoretically this helps me sort out my feelings as we enter into serious awards time, but as usual it's mostly just an arbitrary mish-mash of conflicting emotions. (Which is better Stop-Loss, or Baby Mama? Of course there is a right answer!)

And also, wow, my movie consumption is way, way down this year. Mostly due to the removal of the Blockbuster membership, but really that's no excuse. My pop culture knowledge is at an all time low.

Anyways, on with the listing!

Movies that I Actively Hated
32. Prom Night
31. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa

Movies that I Just Disliked
30. Appaloosa (Man, I just do not like Renee Zellweger's squinty face anymore, apparently)
29. Mad Money (Oh, Queen Latifah. How the cast of Chicago has fallen.)
28. Hancock
27. Leatherheads (see: notes for #29 and #30. Confidential to John K - Don't take it personal, I still love you. But seriously, make better movies.)

Movies that I am Basically Ambivalent Towards
26. Charlie Bartlett (wins the award for movie I was certain had come out at least two years ago)
25. Ghost Town
24. Wanted (huge downgrade from my initial impression, but now all I focus on is the Loom of Fate. I can't even remember what James McAvoy looked like minus a shirt. So sad.)
23. Semi-Pro

Movies that were "Good," on a Very Loose Scale that Tightens as We Move Up
22. 27 Dresses (*sigh* the things I do for James Marsden)
21. The Spiderwick Chronicles
20. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
19. The Incredible Hulk (gets a huge bump down on the list because I forgot that it even came out this year, but was still very good)
18. Definitely, Maybe
17. Get Smart
16. Baby Mama
15. Stop Loss (gets a huge bump for being the movie I remember the most that I didn't really like this year)
14. Pineapple Express
13. Hamlet 2 (time has also been very kind to this movie. All I remember is Rock Me Sexy Jesus at this point)
12. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
11. Twilight (DON'T JUDGE ME)
10. Brideshead Revisited (gets the award for most moved around on the list, because I can't decide how much I liked it)

Movies That Were Excellent
9. Frost/Nixon
8. Iron Man
7. Tropic Thunder
6. The Dark Knight
5. Doubt
4. Cloverfield
3. Rachel Getting Married
2. WALL-E
1. Milk

Some specific notes on the top of the list:

• Gigantic downgrade to Frost/Nixon, as when I started this list I had it around #3, but realized that I didn't enjoy it anywhere near as much as I thought on first consideration.
• 6, 7, & 8 are all basically subtitled 'Summer fare that was far better than summer fare has any right to be.' No lie, I spent 15 minutes rearranging their three positions in sequence. I cannot pick between them. In the end, I put DK first because of Heath Ledger's acting, Tropic Thunder second because of Robert Downey Jr's acting, and Iron Man third because of Robert Downey Jr's acting. (Wait...)
• I feel like Doubt is in the right place now, because I place acting above direction in terms of importance. I could very easily see it dropping down below Frost/Nixon though, once the dust settles in my mind.
• Cloverfield is the wild card - probably the movie I enjoyed the most this year, even though empirically it's pretty bad. In other words, it's this years She's The Man.
• The top three are a toss-up. Rachel is probably the best acted movie of the year, and the most affecting, but it has serious pacing issues and rambles off topic too easily. Wall-E is the most enjoyable of the three, but has moralizing issues that keep it down. Milk is an amalgam of the strengths and weaknesses of the other two, but I think in the end it is the most complete and important of them all.

Some general notes to close things up:

• By far the fewest movies in a year since I graduated college.
  
• Very few movies I hated this year (I'm stretching with Madagascar, which truth be told was not as horrible as I expected)
• There was just a glut of middling-ly good comedies this year, weren't there? And I didn't even see a bunch of them that I meant to (Zach & Miri, Nick & Nora, etc.)
• Things that I still plan on seeing before the end of the year: Slumdog Millionaire, Repo! The Genetic Opera, and The Reader/Revolutionary Road (so I can get my Kate Winslet fix)
  

Short-form Reviews Turned Long: Doubt, Frost/Nixon

(So I was trying to write up both these movies for the side panel, and they ended up being so long that they bumped everything else off the main page. Thus, we try alternate text layouts.)

Anyways, as is my regular custom, the last two weeks of the year are easily the busiest I get as far as movies are concerned. The combination of freezing cold, Oscar contenders, and wild shopping stress make for the perfect time to hide for hours at a time in a darkened theater.

This last week I saw Frost/Nixon and Doubt on back to back nights. Their number of similarities are stunning, and they make for a good pair to review in tandem. It also doesn't hurt that both are near the top of my list of best movies this year (which totally isn't getting posted until January this year, because I am extraordinarily lazy right now).

The short-form reviews first:

Frost/Nixon - Tight, powerfully written and acted. The direction is... I guess competent is the word. Good, not great, and I take issue with a couple the devices that frame the whole movie (primarily the use of the documentary-style interviews to intercut tense in-the-moment scenes of action). Frank Langella is in the fight of the year in my mind right now for Best Actor with Sean Penn. Crazy, crazy good performance. Really, everyone brought it to this movie. Sam Rockwell was particularly great despite some tough, almost caricature-level lines to work with. I'd have to say the weakest link in the whole cast was Kevin Bacon, and that was more a failing of the script than the acting, since he had so few lines to develop a ton of character, and it just didn't come through.

Actually that's the only real quibble I have with the whole movie (besides the documentary interview thing - seriously that bugged me) - the way every character that was not Frost or Nixon basically was given a three line summary as characterization and then basically acted as a cardboard cutout through the rest of the movie. I understand that the movie needs focus, and it really is only about them, but I wish there could have been more depth on the sides.

Still, an excellent movie over all. Funny, dramatic, and interesting from start to finish.

Doubt - Grabs you early and never lets go. It's surprising, because the plot description doesn't sound like it would be that compelling. Head nun at a Catholic school suspects an inappropriate relationship between a boy and the local priest (who she already really dislikes). Frankly, it sounds like it would lead to nothing but scene after scene of religious moralizing and speechifying, which is the opposite of what I'm looking for in a movie. But the screenplay avoids almost all of that. Instead we get a real inspection of the nature of doubt and certainty, as played through three complex character-studies. It's unexpectedly enthralling.

I'll try not to gush too much on the acting, but yeah, it's ridiculous. Meryl Streep knocking down the stereotype of stereotypes as the head nun, evening out a characature into a person, by sheer will of personality, basically. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is the one who does all the heavy lifting - making sure that everything stays in doubt throughout the whole movie, jumping from guilty to innocent just by the change of an expression. Without him, the movie could have been ruined. And even Amy Adams, who gets an absolute clunker of a character (she is officially type-cast and the naive optimistic one, after Junebug, Enchanted, and now this), manages to steal a few moments to shine, digging into the tiny allowances her part gives her to keep it from being as one-note as it might be.

And I haven't even gotten to Viola Davis, who gets two scenes and like 10 minutes of the movie, but owns the entire thing. Really, it's just unbelievable. I can't do it justice.

I'll go ahead and rail against the film for a while though - it's by no means a great movie. The direction is terrible. Terrible. Shots taken at an angle for no real reason, except to be arty. Heavy handed literal metaphors every other second. I can't stress that part enough - if you were able to go on the merits of acting and script, I would rate this among the best movies ever. As is, with the ham-fisted imagery and shot selection, it's going to drop so far down my list, I have a hard time keeping it in my top 5 this year without wincing. That's just unendingly depressing.

Still, possibly the most worthwhile viewing experience of this entire year (provided you have already gone to see Milk).

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Okay, so that was a complete lie, those reviews were like the opposite of short-form. But they get the individual parts out of the way so I can ramble on about their similarities. Both come from Tony winning plays, and it's very easy to see their roots. Frost/Nixon has the ultra powerful phone call scene, Doubt has both the rainstorm confrontation and the mother vs. nun revelation scene - all amazing things that are done without a spec of action, and are basically nothing but monologues or huge intercut speeches. Not that this is a bad thing (I love great theater) but sometimes it can take you out of the natural moment of the movie. Example: Nixon's phone call soliloquy is brilliant, but even in the character of Nixon (who is prone to rambling eloquence) it seems calculated. Langella gives it his all, for sure, and it comes very close, but you could tell the audience was drawn away from immediacy of the moment, and was instead stuck on the speech. It certainly did not help that Frost's response it basically the same as ours - slack-jawed astonishment.

The whole things is uniformly better handled in Doubt, although Hoffman comes very close to blowing it with all of his yelling at the high points of conflict. The speechy-ness is mostly relegated to natural moments (obviously you're supposed to speechify in a sermon) and the real tough stage-level moments are handled brilliantly (see: Viola Davis' revelations, and one flawless tiny moment by Amy Adams and a student). Keeping stage characters is shockingly difficult (see: any high school production of Shakespeare ever) but when it's handled well, it can give you shivers.

Allow me a small moment for a digression - one of my favorite movies in the entire world is The History Boys, something that fits right into the exact same category as these two movies: brilliant plays adapted to the screen with minimal changes. Just like Frost/Nixon they even kept the original cast intact. But where these two mostly succeeded in avoiding the speech and soliloquy trap that a play naturally entails, The History Boys seemed to revel in it. Just straight-up 'let's stop for a moment because I feel like giving a speech.' And it destroys the rhythm and sense of the movie. Which kills me, because even as-is I find it a completely brilliant, funny, and real experience. Massaged and worked on long enough, it might have been an amazing film on its own right. Instead, it's terrific writing and great scenes, that combine to form a clunky, wheezing machine of a movie.

Okay, diversion mostly over.

The real question that I was trying to get to was: which movie succeeds more? Or which one was better? Yeah, I'm still not sure which question I'm trying to answer. I think in the end, Frost/Nixon is more accomplished, but less important, so it wins on both of those counts, even if it loses the battle for the one that is most compelling.

Obviously, I have issues with the direction of Doubt, which lowers it in my mind, especially in terms of success. But I also take issue with the lack of real accomplishment in Frost/Nixon. Yes, the story is endlessly interesting, but mostly because it's a retelling of a real life event. It has its drama provided for it. I can't help but think that it enjoys far too much of a built in advantage, particularly when there is no real revelation in the execution - even the brilliance that Langella teases out of Nixon isn't unexpected, just interesting. Frost and his cohorts follow the lines, fulfill their underdog role, and the movie winds down. Similarly, this is why I'm so hard on Milk as far as the movie's greatness goes - the story is so fascinating that you wonder if the movie is getting a pass because the plot it's given is enough to carry you along.

Doubt is technically the lesser movie, but has better acting, and makes you think more. I'm not sure how to rate these things into a quantifiable scale. Eh, in the end I still don't have any good answers, but I still have time to mull it over before I come to any hard conclusions. I mean, the Oscars don't happen until like March, right? Plenty of time.

Hiding the Nerd at Christmas

So, every Christmas, people always ask you what you want as a gift. I have learned that it is a very good idea to have a short list of small items available in mind for this question, just waiting to be unleashed. Because if you don't, they will invariably fall back on their previous knowledge of things you have expressed a fondness for in the past. And before you know it your entire apartment will be filled with beavers in various shapes and forms, until they're the only thing you can see when you walk in.

And no one wants that.

But this year I don't know what has happened - every time I find something that I might want for Christmas, it is always almost too inherently geeky to even bring up in polite company. I don't think that I've gotten more nerd-like this year, it's just that my normal mainstream interests haven't come out with anything good lately.

So now I'm at a crossroads - do I hand over a list of completely off-the-wall things that I want, which will most certainly be doubly embarrassing (first, whenever the person doing the gifting has to buy it, and second whenever I get it and jump around like the gigantic nerd I am), or do I try to whittle down the list to the most mainstream of items and be less enthused with the resulting gifts that come across? Such is the burden of the mid-level-middle-class-20-something-nerd.

Anyways, this is all just a carefully crafted screen so's I can make a list of all the nerdy things that I've seen lately that I really want. Because lists are fun.

In order from least to most nerdy:

DVDs:
Wall-E - Because I am the biggest nerd for Pixar movies, just holding it in my hand will probably result in nerd drool. (Also a 2 out of 10 on the nerd/geek scale. It's a pretty popular movie, after all)

Bring it On - Because it's my favorite movie in the entire world, and I've lost my copy. I have the case, but no disc. It causes me near daily pain, but I can't bring myself to buy a new copy, since it must be here somewhere, right? (A 2.5 out of 10. Not a nerdy movie, but my level of devotion to such a bad movie is certain to release high levels of awkwardness)

Books:
Alastair Reynolds - House of Suns

Charles Stross - Halting State

Neal Stephenson - Anathem

(At least a 7 out of 10 across the board - all three are ranging sci-fi/fantasy. Although I think the Stephenson at least is pretty mainstream-ish. Still, books at the holidays - always geeky.)

Things That Are Like Books:
Cable and Deadpool - Comic Collections - So it's come to this, eh? Actually buying comics. I don't even know. But this series is great, and pretty hilarious, and I want a hard copy of it. What? Don't judge. (9 of 10 - to get this you almost are required to walk into a comic book store. We're reaching the upper levels of nerd here.)

Runaways - Dead End Kids - Because I cannot find a bookstore that stocks Runaways anymore, and I refuse on principle to go to the comic books store near my house, so I haven't been able to read the last 3 editions. (9.5 of 10 - because just like above, only add another 0.5 because Joss Whedon is involved.)

Other Things That are so Nerdy It's Hard to Categorize:
Brick Poster - I'd like to think that I'm starting to get old enough that I could move beyond movie posters. But no, not really. I badly want one of these cutout posters that they did for the release of Brick before they all disappear. I've linked the Brain one because he was my favorite, but there are like 5 different ones, and they're all pretty cool. (8 of 10. Cult movie + obscure fan item + level of dedication required to get it = more geeky than a sci-fi book, but less geeky than comic collections.)

Penny Arcade Print - I'm not going to try and defend this one, it may very well be the most geeky thing on the list. Buying a physical print of a webcomic strip, that's about being a geek?It's almost meta levels of nerd, going on. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I've come incredibly close several times to just buying one for myself for no reason. And the only thing that's stopped me so far? Because I can't decide which one I would get. I need help. (For the record: it's between this one & this one right now.) (10 of 10, no question)

Allomantic Metal Decals - I don't think I can even explain this one. So, they're like stickers? Of mystical symbols? From an obscure fantasy series that I'm (more than) mildly obsessed with. I don't even know what I'd do with them, but man do I want them. (15 of 10. Is that enough?)

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Well it feels nice to finally get all that nerding off my chest. Now to track down some holiday cookies and find out where I stashed all my Christmas lights. This house is not gonna decorate itself.