I had three different versions of this in post-processing — it was tricky to bring out the right amount of color and get the eye to still go more or less where it’s supposed to (the edge of the frontmost petal).
This is, indeed, the correct response to the anti-TV movement.
Red Right Hand: I BESEECH THEE TO PLEASE, IF YOU WOULD, SHOVE IT
An unfortunate new candy. A bastard cross between an M&M and a Hershey’s Kiss, with the charm of neither. The candy coating tastes like plastic, and the chocolate interior is…marginal.
A memorial in a fenced-off area by the Lake Merritt Channel, near an overpass and some old train tracks. It’s a well-visited area — a lot of debris, clothing, trash and containers, and also some fantastic graffiti. The memorial shows great care, and is either fairly new or is regularly tended. A few feet away, a crucifix pendant is strung from one of the fences, and this looks more weathered. I’m not sure whether it’s related or not; after all, the crucifix is a common symbol.
Extremely satisfying. It’s not perfect, and it’s not ??Firefly??, but it’s very good. The premise is both structured enough to provide clear direction and force creativity and open-ended enough that you don’t feel like it’s not going to make sense next season. (”??Prison Break?? Syndrome”) The cast and characters are excellent, to the point that I’m not at all clear on who it is I’m rooting for, despite my built-in interest in the Tullys. (Nathan Filion and Amy Acker.) Wendy (who is, confusingly, playing the Fred Burkle role) and the dying astrophysicist also have my interest. I was also pleased to see some of the minor folks, like the creepy trucker, played by the actor whose name I always forget — I remember him mainly as the handler from Sci-Fi’s short-lived ??Invisible Man?? series.
I also like that they gave the story a mythology that goes back in time a ways (at least twenty-some years). I know some people were groaning, and there’s a certain amount of mythology burnout in a “post-??Lost??” world, but I still believe in the power of rich, surreal, paranoiac worlds in which everything has meaning. Probably because the world is more like that than it is like the infinitely recurrent landscape of episodic television, where we are doomed to repeat history precisely because there isn’t a sense of history. And while there’s obviously more options than these, I believe there is a spectrum from one pole to the other.
Oh, and by the way — I’m not alone in assuming Tully is in witness protection or some self-imposed variant thereof, am I?
Sweet Jesus, what an excellent movie. It was awesome. It was hilarious. Of course, I couldn’t watch half of the Rodriguez segment, ??Planet Terror??, because there were simply too many pustules. But we could be here all night if I were to list the great parts. Let me restrict myself to a couple of observations. First, I had no idea Rose McGowan was so cool. Second, I had no idea Quentin Tarantino was capable of making a movie that wasn’t a dialogue-heavy exercise in intellecutal onanism. Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against any of those things, and I like Tarantino just fine. But ??Death Proof?? was elegant, simple, parsimonious. Pulp Fiction is none of those things, as much as I like it. And oh, yeah, it was f-ing awesome.
I was entertained to notice the same phenomenon I experienced at ??Kill Bill: Part 1?? — I and my party seemed to enjoy the film more than everyone else. Or, rather, we seemed ready, willing, and able to laugh at the funny parts, whereas most of the rest of the audience seemed unsure whether it was okay to do so or not. This does not bode well for them. The humor of real life is far more disturbing and inappropriate than that of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.
When I was younger, I cared about truth, right, wrong, and in particular about how those things played out in classrooms in America. Caring about those things exacts a price I am not currently willing to pay.
