By: Annna
[2001-06-20]
Shrek, Atlantis and Tomb Raider
Being Reviews of Three Movies I Saw for Really No Good Reason, Except that my Sister was Here and They had Matinee Prices
This is the sort of thing that happens when I don't have Internet access. There are probably "spoilers" here; if you do not want the movie to be "spoiled" for you, I recommend that you not be such a big baby.
Shrek
Go, if:
1. You enjoy very, very inept pop culture references. The more, the better!
2. Your mind was absolutely blown by the irreverence in Meet the Feebles.
3. You like jokes about sex, but only if they are very veiled in their wording, and then all the characters stand around for a while, giving you time to figure out the funny sex joke and laugh, ideally in a very nasal manner.
Do not go if:
1. You are confused when people go from being very Scottish to not at all Scottish and back again in one scene.
2. You have a firm grasp of what ogres look like (and possibly how many hit dice they have). Alternately, do not go if you remember all the verses to "I'm a Believer" and would be perturbed if they just sang the chorus over and over for no good reason.
3. You have anything better to do, including masturbating furiously alphabetizing your cans of condensed soup.
Atlantis
Go, if:
1. You like hot 1940s ladies (yes, I know, but that's what time period she looks like), particularly if they kick ass, growl things and turn out to be evil.
2. You like movies where stuff glows and flies around and prophecies are fulfilled within moments of your being informed of them.
3. You like it when glowing magical energy slowly snakes all around things, making them float or come alive. Particularly if you could watch that all day.
Do not go if:
1. You will be disturbed by a tiny, quadruped Winnie the Pooh disguised as a cat.
2. You generally figure out movies after the first plot point via the Twilight Zone checklist.
(All together now: "He's a robot, they're all robots, he's really dead and/or a ghost, the doll is ALIVE, it's all a dream, it's all a dream OR IS IT, be careful what you wish for, they're all in hell, nobody will ever believe their story, run FAR AWAY from the ventriloquist's dummy/mirror/mysterious door, everybody is an alien, only certain people are aliens, those aren't really aliens but earthlings of the future/past, greed will destroy everyone via the magic thing....")
3. You do not like it when things make no sense.
("They're all a thousand years old, but nobody can read the language? Why can't they just sit INSIDE the giant fish robots? Why didn't we see any floating corpses? Shouldn't they have a LOT more weapons? I'D have a LOT more weapons.")
3a. You do not like it when meta-things make no sense.
("I understand why someone has to be black and someone has to be female and someone has to be Hispanic (hey Asian people, you should sue!), but there is no damn reason that the Hispanic engineer should also be a teenager. They have to waste lines and lines of dialogue explaining this, but it never advances the plot any. Also, the hero's glasses fall off a lot, and you think it's setting up for some bit, but the time they FALL OFF HIS HEAD AND OUT OF AN OCEANLINER, and I don't care if they hit another deck, they're at least going to be cracked, but they're back on his head in the next shot.")
Tomb Raider
Go, if:
1. You like half-naked ladies jumping around but not talking very much. I shouldn't have to tell you that.
2. You didn't get enough glowing-magic-ooze-animating-stuff from Atlantis.
3. You really, really, really like Chris Barrie. If so, wait for the scene where, intercut with Lara kicking various extras around, he methodically puts a bulletproof vest on over his pajamas and robe, then cocks a really cool shotgun, then there is an ACTION! shot of him putting on his slipper and another ACTION! shot of him putting on his OTHER slipper. I don't have anything to say about that but: chris barrie Chris Barrie CHRIS BARRIE! You should grab the person next to you and squeal a little when he's on the screen. During the rest of the movie, you can just stare at the exit lights or see if your watch really glows.
Do not go if:
1. You think you might notice when the action sequences take three times as long as they would in a sane movie.
2. You do not enjoy movies unless they have at least one tiny plot point that they haven't stolen from other movies in the last three years. And some dialogue.
3. You don't actually like Chris Barrie all that much.
You may notice that the review format kind of breaks down in the middle.
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I'm huge! I'm full of tinier men!"
I think it was
Whitman who said that.
for 1, telling me that Chris Barrie is in Tomb Raider, and 2, causing me to think twice before going to see it. PBS doesn't have Red Dwarf here anymore, but I was fortunate in that the last episode I saw had the It's A Small World ride thing for when they missed him when he ran off to be Ace... I ramble.
yeah. anyway, no to Tomb Raider. yes, probably, to disposing of more disposable income in a Red Dwarf-related manner.
Yeah, that quote is Whitman, "Song of Myself," I remember it from a long time. You are lucky that when your sister comes, they got matinee prices; my sister comes and they raise the price on the damned popcorn. I like your review method; it reminds me of your egg nog piece, it's a very methodical methodology ("It was a big Big Sur day,"
"Big Sur" by Jack Kerouac.) There are some good things about the 24-theater cineplexes owned by Sony, and many good things about the old theaters changing into music venues, but many people are lamenting the closing or conversion of the small neighborhood theaters. Some of them had the best popcorn. There was one art film place that had double-features for a buck, and the owner selected the films for some unimaginably ironic connection. My P4 box was delivered today and I've got it set up on the floor, I'm reclining like a pasha on a pile of pillows.
There's no movie that isn't made better by the inclusion of two elements: a four-year-old child, and the four-year-old's grandmother. That way you can say things to the child that make the grandmother's eyes bug out. Such as, when watching "Lady and the Tramp" and the man is giving the woman a big Christmas present, you can say, "I bet it's a human head".
You're the Lizard Sauce guy, right? There's a bbq here that has lamb, goat, beef and pork; and a whole wall of all kinda sauces. One night I went in there all likkered-up and noticed that they had a fine assortment of cleavers, all the way up to a two-foot blade on a four-foot handle, what I'd call a meat-ax. They let me dance around swinging the meat-ax for a while. It was either the Lizard Sauce or the head-in-a-box that reminded me of that.
That was the first time I had ever heard of Whitman. and I've been to Crime Library before. I found it quite shocking actually.
Still...
I think Zodiac is the most... er... "interesting" serial killer.
I liked that episode of red dwarf where they made the hall of rimmer VR simulation...that was really much better than tomb raider
Yes, I am the Winking Lizard King. Do I know you from somewhere, or do I have a reputation that precedes me? Or what?
Winking Lizard King! I think that it was you who several years back brought to my attention the epic and angst-laden poem of Rainer Maria Rilke, "Alas! I Have No Umlaut!"
Buh?? I'm sorry, it's not ringing any bells. Where/when/how? Many years ago, I traded a large section of my brain for a database of "Fall Guy" trivia, and so I tend to give people blank looks a lot.
Winking Lizard King! You're in Ohio, nicht ja? Anyways, we've only exchanged a few messages, but yes! Your fame and the illustrious Winking Lizard lore is extant both far and wide, high and low, from Portland all the way to mighty Maine, from the Cordon Bleu to the Chateau du Briand. Und zo, vas ist? We gehts innen mit du? Write some stuff for this board, if you will. Fall Guy was that stuntman, huh?
staniel: Chris Barrie actually has a fairly large part... or so your mother told me! WAUGH!
Terribly sorry, I get Ace Rimmer and Lord Flashheart mixed up from time to time.
Anyway, he's the butler, and he's around a lot. (There aren't very many other actors in that movie, oddly enough. It feels very desolate.) Chris Barrie isn't in any of the location scenes or in the background of any shots where he doesn't have lines, so I think he traded maybe a week on a soundstage for some of our BIG AMERICAN DOLLARS. He's getting a little doughy, but he wears it well. As my sister said, "That's what British people are designed to do!"
Vicarious: Despite the URL, Whitman isn't a serial killer. Although you'd think it, he's not a mass murderer, either - he killed his mother and wife before he went to the tower, making him a spree killer.
Zodiac was just trying too hard, in my opinion, although he does get points for sending out letters upon letters and still never getting caught. One thing I learned from high school: leaving a manifesto is just asking to get caught.
Hey, you're of the British persuasion, right? What the hell is it with your tea-drinkin', metric-system-usin' serial killers and burying people in and around their houses? High-profile American serial killers generally chuck the bodies somewhere or leave them in the murder location.
On the other hand British serial killers, like the Wests and Dennis Nilsen, seem to accumulate bodies like Hummel figurines. If I were a bad standup comedian, I'd say what's up with that? Are there not enough drainage ditches in the UK? Do you guys just have really good anti-littering public service announcements in the subway?
Sure, now and then there's that one British pedophile/trucker guy and there's an American like Gacy (and the various cannibals, but really, for the cannibals they're not so much "corpses" as "leftovers"), but there's a definite tendency to keep victims hanging around one's house across the pond.
I'm not talking about spree or revenge killers, of course - it makes sense that if someone just killed one person and stopped they're not going to get any good at body disposal - but once it's a full-fledged hobby, I'd think most serial killers would at least get Insinkerators.
One time in an anthropology class we were watching this video about sexism in language; a British educational film from the early eighties, featuring a few no-name never-to-be-named New Wave bands. Anyway, one of them was an a capella group called the Joeys.
"Haha," I thought, "One of them looks like, like -- oooh! What's his name? The guy who plays Kryten!" For some reason I couldn't remember his name at the time.
So the Joeys sung a funny song about things men like, like football and cars ("Men like getting drunk and then / Men like men like men like men / No we don't, men beat up queers! / Men live with their moms for years"), and then there was a little interview segment where the Robert Llewellyn guy said something to the effect of "In school, the teachers would always call the girls by their first names and the boys by their last names; they would never call me 'Robert'."
And I thought, "Yeah! That was the first name of the guy who played Kryten: Robert! Now, what was his last name?"
At which point the guy who looked like Robert Llewellyn continued: "They would always call me 'Llewellyn'."
And then I thought: "Oh yeah! Robert Llewellyn!" Pause. "Wait a minute!"
Yeah, anthropology is cool.
The TV movie of the Texas tower guy was kind of thin. Today in the news, some Texas mom drowned her five kids in the bath tub; a bad hair day. I guess that she drowned them one at a time, because she probably couldn't get them all in the tub at once, but that hardly makes her a serial-killer. The Texas tower guy looked so clean-cut! The movie made him seem very furtive, no panache! "They Never Called Me Robert" sounds like a good name for a book. But I think that the concrete business is pretty good for disposing of remains du jour.
Mass murderer: all kills in more or less the same place, short period of time (one room, one building, one post office, a block).
Spree killer: starts killin' and drivin' and doesn't stop until dead or caught.
Serial killers: cooling off period between kills, can stay active for years and years, victims usually match a profile.
Someone with a faster connection can find a page on that in a few tries, I bet.
All I know is Old English, rhythm ukulele and serial killin' trivia, and I'm all out of Old English and rhythm ukulele.
Dang, Annna, you bring back memories. In 11th grade English Literature at Strongsville High School, we all had to memorize and recite the Prologue to "The Canterbury Tales" in the original Old English. Seeing as roughly half the teenagers in Strongsville were subjected to this, it turned into a drinking game, to see how much you could hold and still make it to "That hem hath holfen wann that they were seka."
Yes, Seka did her first porn work in "The Canterbury Tales".
I'm still baffled, Koenig -- did you in previous years go by a different name?
- Der unbekannte Stuntmensch
a short colloquy from Radio Shack:
TJ: to make your quota for this shift, you need to do $70 in sales in the next half hour.
me: I could do $70 of business in half an hour if I was... YOUR MOM!
favorite serial killer's always been Albert Fish, because he was the GG Allin of the roaring '20s (or, basically, GG Allin without an audience). with the swallowing pins and the flaming cotton balls up the butt and whatnot.
Ja, sure! I'm no x-spurt, just pointing out that killing serially ain't the same as being a serial killer. I like "The Professor and the Madman" protagonist, he'd been an Army field surgeon in the Great War Between the States and witnessed a mess of carnage which partly had to do with his own delusional fixation on the Irish, that and his veneral dementia precipitated the doctor's only act of murther moste fowle and his subsequent confinement to a British Hospital of Criminal Lunacy as well as copious correspondance on the nature of words and the use of sesquipedalian syllabic semiotics. Sure, I know the difference between crap and carnuba wax, I was born a poor Rothschild.
I recollect that at the time I was Koenig Preusse, it was you, Lou of the Winking Lizard, who pointed out where to find ü and ß, but my memory is about like a fart in a colander.
Okay, I'll admit, that *does* sound like something I woulda been good for -- they allowed me to retain my knowledge of German characters in the ASCII table. A vital skill way back when, trying to do papers in German on WordPerfect 4.2 ...
Actually guys, you wanna know something freaky?
They found a body in a the other day, in the county I live in. They said he had been killed by an axe blow to the neck. After that, someone tried to dismember the body with a chainsaw and burn it. They then hefted it into a ditch off a main road on the way to the nearest city.
One theory is, that it was gang-related. The guy was like 50-60 years old though. Odd. But nothing compared to the murders they get in the big cities like London and Manchester. And still they are nothing like the murders in the big cities of the US of A.
I think, the whole deal with burying bodies around the house is because us Brits are fundamentally lazy people. I mean, why drive to the seafront and put concrete shoes on someone and give 'em the heave-ho, when a lovely patio is just waiting to be uprooted? Oh sure, the neighbour-alarming factor is there, but it's like a big game of chess, in that respect. Or Dominos.
Zodiac trying too hard? Hmm... I don't know. I think he wins style points for that natty little hood he made! Though, if you want my opinion, there was more than one Zodiac. Or at least, he was working with someone else, maybe? It certainly makes you think. I was going to say something else now, but it escapes me.
Sigh.
For a while a favorite local method of corpse disposal was to place the victim in the boot of a car and leave the car at the local aeroport car park. There's a spot in the neighboring state of Maryland on the other side of Washington, DC from here that is a favorite for dumping bodies murdered in Washington. One of the latest unsolveds is a couple that was last seen leaving a popular Washington club at 2am then was found without identification shot execution-style at the body-dumping area in Maryland. They have since been ID'd and the female victim was in the US Navy, so if the local constabulary does not solve this one in short order, the federals or military might well do. It might get very official as it was an interstate crime and also involved military personnel. Another unsolved that is getting a lot of press is the disappearance of a congressional intern who was purportedly romantically involved with a California congressman. He's denying everything and not saying much, but the young woman's parents have recently returned to Washington and retained high-powered legal council; this either has the makings of a very juicy scandal or another sleazy romantic tragedy involving a prominent political personage.
I've a friend whose D&D campaigns invariably begin with somebody's mysterious murder. Or the mysterious murders of many people. Always with the murder for that PC motivation. Whatever happened to a hooded figure entering the local tavern and announcing: "I require stout adventurers to tackle yonder dungeon!"
But speaking of corpse disposal, look at all the effort the folks in Shallow Grave went to: didn't help them at all in the end. But like any high-risk/high-gain enterprise, corpse disposal can't be treated in just an off-hand fashion, nor without a requisite degree of related effort. For example, establishing a reputation of respectable notoriety in underworld and quasi-legal circles would aid exonoration to no end: with enough pull one need not dispose of one's enemies in inconspicious ways, if at all, as others would have too much respect (or fear) to implicate one as the murderer. Another route would be to establish levels of underlings to take care of the dirtier tasks (corpse-creation and disposal), thus distancing oneself from those acts and their social and legal ramifications.
When I lived in Van, there was a company that got busted for "Low Budget $99 Funerals." Their downfall was the discovery that they'd been putting the corpses in cardboard boxes and stacking them on the beach!
hell, I'd at least put a few inches of dirt over your loved ones for $99. maybe even one of those tragic little bent wooden crosses.
Canterbury Tales is actually Middle English, post-1066, as you can tell from the fact that it's actually understandable and you don't really need a glossary, especially if you have a version with the spelling regularized.
Old English,on the other hand, is Beowulf and The Dream of the Rood and The Wanderer and The Battle of Maldon. It's English without the sissy French influences, and consequently more German than anything. They liked commas and semicolons as much as I do:
"Deore wæs he Drihtne ure; ne mihte him bedyrned weorðan þæt his engyl ongan ofermod wesan, ahof hine wið his Herran, sohte hetespræce, glypword ongean, nolde Gode þeowian, cwæð þat his lic wære leoht ond scene, hwit ond hiowbeorht."
"Dear was he to our Lord; so it might not be hidden that His angel began to be over-modig, took up against his Superior, sought hate-speech, began boast-words, not serving God, quoth that his body was light and shiny, white and hue-bright."
That was on my final!
NOW ASK ME QUESTIONS ABOUT BOB DYLAN AND/OR H.P. LOVECRAFT AND MY STOCK OF KNOWLEDGE WILL BE EXHAUSTED! ALSO GURPS.
That could be Welsh for all I know! The mass-media have ostensibly done us a grevious disservice by standardizing, and thereby killing, language. Does the Indo-European language tree really start in Northern India with the wandering Aryan tribes who took mathematics and language to far parts? Also, the later Viking Rus Eastern-migration had profound influence on tribal dialects and village idioms. Perhaps the internet will have a more profound impact on World literacy that did J. Gutenburg's Santa Biblia.
Eeep, you're right about Chaucer being later vintage. It's sad how disapponted I am with myself for having missed that. It am been too long.
I've always wanted to fill out a credit card application, and where I have to put in my middle initial, I'd make a thorn. But then no doubt I'd get the card as "Lou P. Duchez" and that would be an endless frustration.
On the other hand, last night playing with young Prince Eric, I made a Lego rendition of Captain Christopher Pike. Then I made a Lego guy who wore a barrel on the top of his head, and inside of the barrel he kept a human head. Then Eric made a lego guy who didn't have any legs, just a stack of human heads, and would bounce around on those heads like a pogo stick. Good to know I'm corrupting the next generation!
Claude Levi-Strauss wrote a short book, "Totemism." In cultural anthropology, totems seem to be a fairly common and universal perception.
That was a fantastic connection.
You might like Das Glasperlenspeil--
http://www.glassbeadgame.com/
I'm going to go out on a limb and suppose that "modig" works out to "mighty"? Given the German equivalent ("maechtig"), the connection seems likely.
(Forgive me if this starts off sounding like Andy Rooney, but ...) "Might" is a funny word. As a noun, it means "strength". As a verb it means "maybe". I wonder if the connection way back when was: "I will try to do 'x' through strength and sinew, and perhaps I will succeed". There are traces of this in German as well, where the verb "moechten" expresses a desire but not a demand.
"Should" is a funny word too. It smells to be related to the German "Schuld", meaning guilt. Both reflect obligations. I wonder ...
Schwäbische Version von Goethes Erlkönig
Wer fährd ao so schbäd durch Nacht und Wend?
Des ischd doch an Vadder mit saim Kend!
Em Audo rasad se durch da Wald,
send boide wieder mol ed ahgschnalld!
You might like this newsgroup; "The Monkey and the Horse"
alt.aeffle.und.pferdle
"Mod" became "mood;" it means kind of a cross between confidence and pride and the ability to do what you're prideful about. Being modig is generally a good, but when you get ofermodig, watch out! The "he" in the example I typed, of course, is Satan. The Anglo-Saxons had to specify that pride wasn't the big problem, it was just too much pride.
The Battle of Maldon is about a great and brave commander who, alas, was ofermodig and let some Vikings who were in a bad position advance before they started fighting. Then they killed him and everyone who was with him, but it's an Old English poem so that's a happy ending.
Being Anglo-Saxon is a lot like being Japanese, what with the fanatical loyalty to your lord and the swords and the dying with honor and the living on a godforsaken island off a large continent. More Viking-killing and less panty vending machine-building, though.
Then ofermodig would be similar to hubris...ya know, if nobody's made a bad joke about a flying Chaucer, they might. I realize that's tecnically out of your purview; Chaucer's era, not the eldritch puns.
I thought the literal translation of "should" was to the cognate "sollt" (or maybe "sollst;" it's been a while and I can't remember what the root is).
Harold Shipmen just signed the death certificate and sent 'em to the undertakes. Body disposal must be a hell of alot easier if your a doctor, which is presumably why he was so damn sucessful.
I've just bought me a 7ft stockwhip. Must either stand around on street corners waving it wildly at passers by, or hang it up over the fire in my parent's suburban semi.
