Le Grill? What The Hell Is THAT?

Lately I’ve found myself adding movies to my Netflix queue that, upon their arrival, make me say, “Why the hell did I pick this piece of crap?”The latest example, which I watched on Friday night, was Good Luck Chuck.
Of course, I do know why I picked that piece of crap:

1. Jessica Alba is hot.
2. The central premise was built around the concept of someone having a “super power” that is very similar to one I possess.
3. Jessica Alba is hot.

I’ll get into point 2 in just a bit, but before that I’ll say that the movie was absolute formulaic dreck that ticked off all the boxes on the “Zany Romantic Comedy Checklist.”
Fat, sassy black lady? Check.
Fat, obnoxious, crude, sex-obsessed best friend? Check.
Amazingly hot female love interest who is almost inhumanly kind, sweet, and nurturing, and who has some kind of endearing quirkiness? Check.
Romantic misunderstanding in which the male lead does exactly the opposite of what he should do, thereby driving the female love interest away? Check.
Big dramatic last-ditch effort to win female love interest back, preferably at an airport? Check.
And of course, somewhere in there the male lead learns some valuable lesson about himself, life, and love, and the fat-ass “comically” douchebaggy best friend manages to find true love of his own.
So yeah, it was crap.
Anyway, the central premise of the movie, for those who don’t know, is that the lead, Charlie/Chuck, was hexed in his youth by a spurned goth girl, making it impossible to find love himself, even as love “falls like rain” all around him.
More specifically, if he sleeps with a woman, she will then almost immediately meet someone else who turns out to be the love of her life. Thus women line up to have their turn with him and then head off to buy a wedding dress in anticipation of meeting their darling dearests.
Years before the movie came out, I wrote a Threshold entry in which I explained that I have a similar ability, though in my case, naturally, it doesn’t require that I actually sleep with a woman in order for her to reap the benefits.
All I have to do is simply become romantically interested, even in the slightest degree, in a woman, and within a year she’ll at the very least be engaged, or, as has happened more often, be married and have a baby.
In every case in which I’m privy to the details of what happened in the lives of the women in whom I’ve been interested, this has proven to be the way things turn out.
(In one instance, the power of my interest was sufficient to get someone who had steadfastly maintained for most of her life that she would never get married to change her thinking on the subject.)
Anyway, the fact that there was a movie built around someone who has a better version of my power (i.e. his power allows him to get laid), was sufficient, when coupled with Alba’s hotness, to make me want to check it out, and it’s not like I didn’t know it was going to be awful going into it.
On Friday Scott came over, by my invitation, so that I could make use of his van to go out and buy some things that wouldn’t fit in my car.
Namely a gas grill and a lawnmower.
Once he arrived we headed off to Home Depot, where I found the aforementioned items, in addition to a weed whacker and a hedge trimmer, and the two of us headed to a register where I prepared to drop a substantial chunk of change.
Before I could do so, however, the cashier asked if I had a Home Depot card. I confessed that I didn’t, and she asked, “Do you want one?”
She then proceeded to talk about the advantages of having one, most notably the fact that I would have no interest and no payments for a year on the day’s purchase if I were to sign up for a card.
So I did.
From there, we went to a grocery store to pick up some brats to cook on the grill after putting it together, and then to Super Target, where I picked up season 3 of Battlestar Galactica for us to watch after the day’s work was done.
Of course, by the time we got the grill assembled and the food cooked, we only had time to watch two episodes before he had to leave.
In any case, I greatly appreciate all of Scott’s help, as even if I’d been able to get the grill home by myself, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to put it together alone. If I had attempted to do so, there’s no doubt it would have turned out almost exactly like Homer’s attempt at putting together a grill on The Simpsons.
(Which provides the title of this entry; after dropping all of the parts in wet cement, Homer grabs the instructions and finds that the English side is unreadable and attempts to follow the French instructions.)
And of course the plan for today was to put my newly-acquired lawn equipment to use, but naturally it’s raining today and is supposed to continue to do so through Wednesday.
After Scott left, I continued watching BSG, and was about to go to bed at around 1 AM after watching one last episode, but at the end of the episode it said, “To be Continued,” which led me to say, as they do on BSG, “Frack!” as it meant staying up for yet another episode.
Today I went out to Wal-Mart to pick up a few things, came home, had lunch, watched an episode of BSG, then decided to try to take a nap, changed my mind, and sat down to write this.
Sometime last week I developed a cold.
It’s always irritating to be sick, but there are a couple of things that serve to enhance my misery. For one thing, the fact that I’ve managed to catch a cold – and a pretty nasty one at that – means that my immune system is no longer as seemingly bulletproof as it’s been for the past 8 years or so. For another, it means I can’t wear my gentle molding lenses, so my vision has been fading more and more each day.
In any case, we’re now up to date, so I think I’m going to go sit on the couch and watch some more BSG and feel miserable. It’s a perfect day for it.
(Pictures of the grill and etc. will be posted someday when it’s a little less gloomy out.)

Who Watches The Watchmen? Well, It Looks Like I Might Have To.

So today’s training was just as fraught with images of Carla Gugino’s backside as yesterday’s (more on the lovely, talented, and inordinately spankable Ms. Gugino in a bit), but it didn’t really matter, as there wasn’t a lot I had to pay attention to.
Most of the day was spent simply practicing using a switch management tool that, apparently, we’ll hardly ever actually use in our jobs.
So that was fun, and not at all pointless.
Towards the end of the day, as per usual, we shadowed some existing employees. The guy I was sitting with had really long fingernails. Like, Asian super-villain long, all manicured and filed to a point. I have to say that it creeped me right the fuck out, especially when he would point at something on the screen and his nails would be pressing right up against it.
And that was the extent of the day’s excitement.
When I got home, I watched a crappy vampire movie that I’d downloaded based on the fact that Carla Gugino was in it – and, more to the point, has a lesbian scene in it.
Said scene was with Lucy Liu, who would not be my first – or twentieth – choice for someone to pair up with Ms. Gugino for a Sapphic romp, but even so, it was worth checking out.
(Lucy Liu just doesn’t do it for me. Who would be my first choice? Hard to say; there are so many to choose from. Hell, I’d probably give honorable mention to me in drag.)
Of course, as she always is when she’s in a supporting role, Ms. Gugino was criminally underutilized (and over-dressed, despite the few shots of her in a bustier and one in her bra, the cup size of which I don’t know), and the hot girl-girl action was not so much in the way of hot or, honestly, action.
There was about 10 seconds worth of footage stretched out over 20 half-second flashbacks, done in the standard – and annoying – quick cut style.
Plus there was a lot of blood, which really isn’t my thing.
As for the rest of the movie…meh. Given the title – Rise: Blood Hunter – I would have guessed that it was based on a video game, but I don’t see anything about that in the IMDb entry.
It was a pretty standard story – think Blade with Lucy Liu filling in for Wesley Snipes – and the constant quick cuts just made it generic and uninteresting.
The movie avoided most of the usual vampire conventions – they didn’t even have fangs – but kept the one part of the mythos that’s always bothered me: not casting a reflection.
No reflection as shorthand for soullessness has always rung false for me: if you’re physically there, you’re going to have a reflection. Supernatural or not, not having a reflection just doesn’t make sense.
Of course, it is a convenient mechanism for convincing someone that you are a vampire, so as a method of advancing the plot I can see why they used it.
Then again, if you’re going to do a big establishing shot in which a character stands in front of a full-length mirror in which she’s not reflected, you might want to avoid following that up by having her walk past a bunch of reflective surfaces in which her reflection can be clearly seen. Just a thought.
My other complaint about the movie was all of the pointless nudity.
I don’t mean gratuitous, I mean pointless. Why have a woman walk around shirtless for five minutes if you’re going to shoot the scene from a crane 100 feet away or keep the camera at head level? What’s the point? Given that you can’t see anything, it doesn’t even qualify as gratuitous.
It also makes no sense given that there were other scenes in which you could catch a clear glimpse of her naked body, which indicate a willingness on the parts of the actress and the filmmakers to provide actual nudity, though most of them could have easily been a body double, given the low light conditions and the general lack of shots in which face and breasts are seen in the same frame.
But whatever. The only real plus to the movie? Seeing Nick Lachey’s throat get slit.
(Not really. I mean, yeah, you do get to see that, but honestly, who cares?)
Anyway, in looking at her IMDb entry, I saw that Ms. Gugino has been cast in the role of Sally Jupiter/Silk Spectre I in the upcoming Watchmen movie, which makes me feel even more conflicted about the movie than I already did.
On the one hand, there’s a big part of me that really would love to see a well-done Watchmen movie. On the other hand, no movie, no matter how well-done, could ever do justice to the source material.
And on the third hand, Carla Gugino.
She really is perfect for the role, as she has the right look to play the young, sexy, buxom version of Sally, and could easily be made up to look the part of the older – but still kind of sexy – Sally. And I would love to see her wearing the Silk Spectre costume.
So I don’t know. I think that, based on 300, director Zack Snyder will be respectful of the source material, but there’s just too much there – and all of it essential to a real telling of the story – for it to be translated well.
(Even more conflict: on the fourth hand Matt Frewer has been cast as Moloch. Dammit!)

Clearly Not A Labor Of Love

Today Scott and Stacy had their annual Halloween party, albeit somewhat late – or incredibly early.
I went as Hank Venture from The Venture Bros.
Only Scott actually recognized my costume (and deemed it “awesome”).
I’d considered simply not shaving, dressing all in black (which used to be de rigueur for me anyway), wearing one of my leather jackets, mussing up my hair a bit, and saying that I was Neil Gaiman, but ultimately decided that Hank was a better choice.
I had to settle for wearing a bandana around my neck, as I’m not aware of any place that sells actual neck kerchiefs (I said “kerchiefs.”).
While I was at the party it was decided, not entirely by me, that I would hold my housewarming party on November 13.
After I got home I sent on an evite, explaining that it would be a pot luck affair, but that I would provide snacks, drinks, and some sort of hot dish.
It occurs to me that I should have encouraged my guests to bring a different kind of “hot dish” in addition to whatever food they bring.
(Ideal housewarming gift: a hot chick with a lot of money and low standards.)
On the topic of low standards, after I’d watched that crappy Alien Abduction movie – or at least as much of it as my DVR would allow me to – I did a search for some pictures of the star, the relatively attractive Megan Lee Ethridge (to me she looks kind of like a younger, prettier version of Tilda Swinton). She’s got a very tight body and when she wasn’t nude or in a very short hospital gown in the movie, she was wearing a rather Tomb Raider-esque outfit that complemented her slender frame nicely (especially with how far up her backside those tight shorts were wedged), and I thought that any screen caps from it would be useful as *ahem* reference photos.
In the course of finding pictures from that movie I found some additional pictures from another movie in which she appeared nude, and, coincidentally, found that said movie was airing on Universal HD the next day, so I set the DVR to grab it.
Tonight I watched it.
I frequently encounter creative endeavors – movies, books, comics – in which I find myself wondering how it is that there’s no one involved in the process who, at some point, says something like, “You know, no human being would ever say anything like that or behave that way, ever. Maybe you should fix that.”
Jolly Roger: Massacre at Cutter’s Cove was one such “creative” endeavor.
While it had effects that were superior to those of Alien Abduction, it was, in many ways, much, much worse.
This was due in large part simply to the fact that it was a low-budge slasher flick, and as such couldn’t be anything better than what it was, but there was also that element of no one telling the people making it that most of what was happening just didn’t make any sense.
Obviously there’s a requirement for suspending disbelief with regard to the supernatural elements, but I’m not talking about the basic concept not making sense. Whatever you think of said concept, it did have a certain internal logic, but the problem was in the details.
Case in point:
In the course of the movie, the titular character takes his titularity to a titty bar. While there, he rips off a bouncer’s arm and proceeds to use it to beat him to death. Okay, fine. No real problem there – he is a zombie pirate, after all – and the effects were actually pretty decent.
But here’s the thing. I haven’t really been to all that many strip clubs, but I have been to a few strip clubs many times, and at no point have I ever seen a dancer get off the stage in the middle of a performance and spontaneously give a patron – zombie pirate or otherwise – a lap dance. At the very least, she would tell him up front how much a lap dance costs.
However, that’s a relatively minor complaint. Where the really big glaring issue comes into play is when he kills one of the other dancers by chopping her head off while she’s hanging upside down on the pole. The camera pans up to follow the spray of blood, and we see that, mounted on the ceiling near the top of the pole, there is a security camera. The position of the camera is such that all that would fall into its line of sight is the area around the entrance to the club, in front of the stage. It would not be able to record anything that happens on the actual stage below it.
However, when the police chief reviews the tape later on, we are provided with multiple angles that it would be utterly impossible for the security camera to provide. “Coincidentally,” said angles were exactly the same as the POV of the camera that was filming the movie. How would a camera that was behind the bouncer manage to record footage of the bouncer getting his armed ripped off from in front of the bouncer?
I understand that there were budget constraints, but how expensive would it have been to shoot that scene from an angle that would align with the security camera rather than re-using the same footage?
In another moment of brilliance, the two teen protagonists who have figured out who Roger’s next victim is going to be surreptitiously and are not in any particular state of excitement make their way to the victim’s house, quietly walk up to her front door, and then, rather than just ringing the doorbell and calmly – but forcefully – explaining the danger to her, start banging on her window and screaming at her like crazy people.
Oh, and as is noted in a review of the movie on IMDb, apparently if you have a pencil and paper and need to copy a list of names – not as any sort of keepsake, mind you, but simply for the purposes of getting a copy of the list – the best approach is to make a rubbing, rather than, say, simply writing them down on the piece of paper.
I know, I know: it was just a shitty movie and I’m over thinking it, but just because something is being made cheaply doesn’t mean that it has to made so shoddily.
After all, when you’re making a cheap movie, the odds are you aren’t doing so because you expect to rake in the cash. Your primary motivation is probably something along the line of bringing your vision to life. You aren’t doing it to get rich; you’re doing it because you have a passion for it.
Why, then, would you not at least try to do it as well as you possibly can? If you’re going to make a movie, why not at least try to not make it a bad one?
I suppose the fact of the matter is that in this case, as in so many others, the people behind it did try to make it as well as they possibly could.
Is making a shitty movie the actual goal? Do they set out not wanting to make a decent movie?
I mean, sure, even with their best efforts it’s unlikely that they would have made the Citizen Kane of zombie pirate movies, but certainly they could have made something better than what they did.
The Ed Wood Syndrome probably comes into play, and the people behind it probably just didn’t realize how bad it truly was, though honestly, I can’t see how they could not realize that, and again, my mind boggles at the thought that there was no one around at any point who bothered to tell them, “You know, this really sucks. You probably shouldn’t make movies, or should at least try a little harder. Or at all.”
Oh well; I already devoted more time to the movie than it deserved simply by watching it, so there’s no point giving it any more.

Addendum:
Supporting visual evidence for the tightness of Megan Lee Ethridge’s body:

Those abs are amazing.

At That Salary, I Could BUY Personal Fulfillment

Sometimes when I change the channel from one of the SD channels to an HD channel the sound cuts out for a few seconds while signal adjusts.
Sometimes it cuts out and doesn’t come back after a few seconds, necessitating that I either switch back to an SD channel and then back to the HD channel again, or just turn everything off and back on again.
Earlier tonight the sound went out completely on both SD and HD.
As I’d seen the episode of The Simpsons that was on at the time – an episode which I had, once again, predicted earlier in the day – many times, I decided to just turn it off and do something else.
Later, when I went back to watch some shows I’d recorded, I still had no sound, and when I tried cycling it through the HDMI connections, which also sometimes helps, I lost sound and picture. The TV simply declared that there was no input detected.
At first I thought it was a problem with the cable box, but I ran into the same problem when switching over to the HD-DVD player’s HDMI input.
(As an aside, I should point out that the Toshiba HD-DVD player that Wal-Mart was selling for $99 for a limited time on Friday was a low-end, discontinued model and not the higher-end one that I bought a few weeks ago, which made me feel slightly less suicidal about having paid $300 more for the one I have.)
This was distressing, and my reaction to it was very nearly similar to this:



(This commercial cracks me up every time.)
Eventually, after a lot of swearing, I cycled the TV through all of the input options, and when I hit the DVR’s HDMI input, everything went back to normal.
Still, that the problem occurs at all is bothersome, and I’m not sure what’s causing it.
Today was fairly uneventful, with a few notable exceptions, such as the fact that I finally got my first taker on my free Heroic Portrait offer (Thanks to Brian for making the referral).
So I spent much of the afternoon working on that.
Other than that I applied for a couple of jobs.
One, a writing job at a university, has a salary range that starts at around $40,000 less per year than what I had been making at AOL.
The other, a NOC manager position, has a salary range that starts at around $40,000 more per year than what I had been making at AOL.
In terms of what I would like to do, the lower-paying job was the most interesting, but at the moment money is far more important to me than any touchy-feely personal fulfillment crap, so I’d be more inclined towards the NOC manager job.
However, after I applied for the NOC manager job, I actually scrolled down and read the requirements and found that I pretty much meet none of them.
Oh well.
There were a couple of others that I applied for as well, but those two were the most noteworthy.
I forgot to mention in any of my earlier posts that I still didn’t get to see the end of that damned Alien Abduction movie, even though the DVR had recorded the full 90 minutes.
This time around I think the problem was a discrepancy between when the guide said it ended and when it actually ended, so just as it got to within a couple of minutes away from the end, the recording stopped.
I’m not too concerned, though, as it was a crappy movie and I’d already gotten to see the protagonist naked (which was my primary interest in it in the first place), and I at least learned what the shocking plot twist was, so missing the last few minutes is no loss. Given what I learned about the plot, I’m pretty sure I can guess how it actually ended.
In any case, I suppose I should bring this Threshold entry –