57 Octaves Down

Hi. Hello. Hello, hi. (There is a lovely international student in the U of A who works the Tim’s counter- big Tim’s- in SUB who always greets everyone with Hello, hi! I kinda miss her.)

G’OH, Canada! Canada won the medal this last sunday for being the amazingest Olympic hosts evaaar. Despite a rocky start for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, it all ended well, and quite frankly, I’ve always believed it would end well. No really, I really did! (No hindsight bias, I promise!) Even when, weeks before the Olympics, the “I believe” song was getting on people’s nerves… I proudly listened to it on the bus, at school, at home, and hummed it in the shower. That’s pride for you.  Overall, I’m incredibly happy with how amazingly, AMAZINGLY, united the whole country was around The Winter Olympics 2010. I’ve read in blogs how people, even Canadians, are scoffing at how lame it was that our nation’s identity is so rooted in a sporting event, but I don’t even care. At least it unites us, right? That is, if you don’t count some Quebecers who wanted their OWN team. Wonderful, what else is new?

So anyways, I wanted to talk about Own the Podium- a program funding high-performance athletes. Continue reading →

I forgot to mention the Soundtrack for Pride and Glory. Seeing as I’m too lazy to edit it, AND I think this deserves a post on it’s own… here’s a post on it’s own.

This is Waterline by Sage Francis, the song played during the end credits of the aforementioned movie. I was going to roll my eyes when it started playing because ALL cop movies have a crappy rap song in the end just to sound even more ‘hardcore’. But this was good! If anything, it’s the opposite of ‘hardcore’ because, as it turns out, Sage Francis the ‘father of emo-rap’. (Leave it to me to find this genre. *hangs head in mock shame*) You know why it’s emo-rap? It isn’t fun or grind-able to as ‘Right Round’ or ‘SOULJA EFFING BOY’ or ‘Low’. Because it isn’t about the thrills of getting high while a bodacious woman sits on your lap. Or shooting them haters who question your manhood. It’s self-critical and honest; it’s the opposite of insecure, mainstream rappers who, literally, just like to flash you the diamonds on their teeth.

I don’t get rap music, I’ll say that now. At least popular rap music. Continue reading →

I’m incredibly surprised at the amount of haters for this movie. Was the bar set really high? I mean, it does have Edward Norton. Were people just pissed off that they had to watch a movie with Colin Farell in it? AND Jon Voight? Or.. was it really a crappy cop drama/thriller?

Ok, so here’s a cop drama about a cop dad and his cop sons and cop son-in-law and their cop buddies who are killed in their cop jobs by their cop enemies (enemies of cops, not cops that are enemies. But the continuity sounded nice so I decided to phrase it like that). So the premise is that, when their cop buddies were killed in their cop jobs, the cop sons try to figure out who, exactly, the cop enemies were. SPOILER ALERT. SPOILER ALERT. SPOILER ALERT. SPOILER ALERT. Turns out, the enemies of cops WERE cops that ……ARE enemies! *shocked face here* It’s about corruption in the 31st precinct of the NYPD (Oh new york! I love their cops. They are so nice to tourists.) and wow, what a surprising new plot! Oh wait…is there even an original cop drama any more? Isn’t it always about corrupt cops?

Well, still, I liked it. Sort of. Continue reading →

I ought to have been studying last night, but… I saw that we had this for free on Movie Central, so I HAD to watch it. I’ve been waiting to see it for a while now, actually, even before it came out. Since DEADmonton is, well, pretty dead, it never showed here. Aaanywhoo, I liked it!

It’s a coming-of-age movie with a 70′s backdrop starring a great cast: Alec Baldwin, Jill Hennesey, Cynthia Nixon, Timothy Hutton, Emma Roberts, Rory and Keiran Culkin. Yeah, that’s basically every single person who had a line, but, they’re all quite worth the mention. It’s about two families in silent turmoil, one is broken apart by Lyme’s disease, and the other, by infidelity. (Constant infidelity, mind you.)

I’d never seen Alec Baldwin outside of 30 Rock and Beetlejuice, so I wasn’t like “Oh, Alec Baldwin, master of the screen!” Which is very common to see when I read/watch reviews. Is he really all that great?? It’s not like his performance here was bad- it wasn’t. But it was a bit lacking. You see, whether I like a performance or not largely hinges on the assumption that the goal of every actor is to garner the most possible sympathy for his/her character. The assumption is that in every performance, we are supposed to be moved. Even if the character is Hannibal freakin’ Lecter, or Francis Dollareffinghyde, we are supposed to be moved. (I’m talking, of course of “Red Dragon“, one of the installments of the Hannibal Series, where I oddly found myself rooting for the sick, twisted freaks played by Sir Anthony Hopkins and Ralph Fiennes, respectively.) Did I just compare Jack Donaghy to a cannibal? Oops. Continue reading →

Another Rain-Man-type movie with Robert Downey Jr. as Steve Lopez, a writer who, while in search of a story, crosses paths with Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless man (Ray Charles, I mean Jamie Foxx) who does wonders with a two-stringed, battered violin.

It starts off with Steve Lopez falling off his bike while going down a hill. He spends roughly the first 20-minutes (oh screw it! I have no concept of time during movies. ie: I didn’t realize Benjamin Button was 3 hrs. long until I heard people complain about it weeks later) with a swollen eye and looking pretty banged up because he scraped his face on the pavement when he fell. I honestly saw NO POINT in that accident. The trailer made me think that it was because he was a down-on-his-luck, depressed alcoholic or..something. I thought the accident was supposed to show how screwed up he was and that in the end, meeting the title character would better him as a person. The movie ended and I was left asking: why the hell he was in an accident? Was he just clumsy? Did I miss something? Anyways, the mere fact that the first scene is useless tells me that this movie is already not good (I don’t want to say bad cause it wasn’t so bad that I’d call it bad…it was just, ehhh). Continue reading →

I’m a fan of Watchmen, the graphic novel. Like…a fan. I’ve been looking forward to this movie since late 2008 when I first got wind of it and a friend lent me his copy. Months after reading the novel, I kept thinking about it, finding trivia here and there, allusions and all. It was such a treat! I’ve missed seeing this because it came out during mid-terms, then, by the time the DVD came out, I’d already had a craptastic first year in University and didn’t deem myself worthy to any treats. And now, it’s Christmas break and I have nothing else to do! Unfortunately, it sucked. It sucked balls… Dr. Manhattan’s blue, glowing balls.

I was gonna say that it was the acting that ruined it, but the more I think about it the only person’s acting that was downright awful was Malin Akerman’s as Laurie Juspeczyk. You can tell she was just there for eye candy. I was surprised they didn’t just go with someone with bigger boobs. If you’re basically going to make porn, I figured, you’d go for the girl with the biggest boobs, amirite? I felt pretty stupid to realize that I actually expected better from the snotty sister from 27 dresses or the crazy honeymooner from the Heartbreak Kid, or the crazy leper-marrying hillbilly from Harold and Kumar.

Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl/Dan Dreiberg was cheesy, but his character is cheesy in the novel, so… spot on, I guess? Still, he wasn’t as lame as Dan Dreiberg and as cool as Nite Owl II. A great, big, walking oxymoron that never came to fruition. Boo. On the other side of the spectrum, I thought Rorschach, The Comedian and Silk Spectre I were pretty good. Continue reading →