Author: Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.

Charlie’s Angels : Full Throttle – movie review

I don’t have much to say about this movie, but I did see it tonight, and I do have a few words. I do not guarantee these words will mean anything to you.

I had read that CA:FT was not so much a movie as a series of visually interesting sequences strung together by the bare skeleton of a story. And as I watched it unfold before my eyes, I realised that the people saying this were right. The movie jumped from one unbelievable thing to the next with little rhyme, reason, or explanation. It became apparent I was watching a farce of some sort, but as some things I’ve seen in movie theatres have proven to be in the past, it was not shaping up to be a movie. Entertaining, maybe. Funny, sometimes. Visually stunning, definitely. Those ladies clearly have some of the same reality-altering abilities as The One does in The Matrix; they simply do not follow physical laws. Which is good, because often their enemies don’t bother to, either.

Anyway, so I was settling in to enjoy these oddly-patched-together bits that couldn’t possibly add up to a movie, when finally Demi Moore’s character was revealed as evil. Look, I’m not giving anything away here, from what I understand (remember, I live 100 miles from civilization & have no TV, and thus no commercials) the entire movie ahs been far, far overplayed and overhyped and you probably know more than I do about it without even watching it. So Demi Moore appears on-screen and suddenly it’s as though I’m watching a movie. I don’t know how long she lasted, maybe twenty minutes, but for almost the entirety of the time she was an active character, it actually felt like I was watching a good movie. Which is saying a lot, considering the last paragraph I wrote, where I said it wasn’t even a movie. The characters made sense and had depth and the series of actions were tied together in a reasonably believable way, and there was even a reversal-of-fortune that was an excellent (though easy to discover before the character it is played on does) little twist. I was really beginning to believe they’d get away with satisfied audiences; most audiences will forgive two hours of mistakes if the ending is satisfying.

But then, at the last minute (okay, the last five minutes), Demi was no longer at threat and … the movie fell apart. It was no longer a movie. It was jibber-jabber and wackiness and stupid over-the-top girly-girlness and some too-too-edited-down running joke about ‘Bosley’ that wasn’t even close to funny, and THEN it was over. And I left dissatisfied because it had had potential and it threw it away. If it had ended well, or if it had never given me a glimpse of the movie it could have been, I would have been satisfied, but it set me up and dropped me down again. No wonder people aren’t watching it. No wonder word-of-mouth is so bad. It’s inconsistent and disappoints by almost being good.

Oh well.

San Diego Comic-Con; transportation

So, I registered as a professional and made my hotel reservations for the Comicon back in March. And I haven’t worried too much about it since then, except to be sure my professional registration was accepted and that I’d be able to afford the hotel room. Except that there’s this one other really important thing… See, I have to be able to get to San Diego. Me and my brother both.

Now, my brother theoretically ‘has’ a car, but since he is not licensed nor insured, my father uses it full time, and needs full time access to it to deliver newspapers from every night. It’s how he pays the bills. And he basically pays ALL the bills. So unless he’d repaired the third car in the family by now, the chances of Heath and I just driving off on our own were small.

My sister, Angela, has expressed interest in going with us. She has been in and out of work recently, and said that if she had a job & could get off or if she had no job, but could afford incidentals, she would drive us to San Diego and hang out on the beach or whatever during the days (she hasn’t much interest in the actual convention…). But sometimes she feels like going and sometimes she doesn’t, so I’ve not been counting on her, saying only that “if she’s in a good mood that day, Angela might drive us”.

I have another friend who has expressed interest in driving us to San Diego, and who has the time off work, but they’re not sure they can get a place to stay in San Diego, and may have other responsibilities, plus I’ve not had much luck getting hold of them for a few days. Of course, I’ve been pretty busy/involved myself, but … Whatever. There’s still two weeks until the con.

So then today Angela applied for a job she thinks she’ll get, but if she does, she’ll be in training during the week of the con, and could not attend. So tonight my brother and I went over to priceline to see if we could maybe, theoretically, afford plane tickets. Since Angela and I just drove to Vegas and back, and San Diego isn’t too much further than Vegas (plus we’ll likely do a lot less driving in and around SD than Vegas), we have an idea about how much gas it would take to get there and back.. probably $30-$40. But I know I’m already cutting it pretty close with my cashflow, and Heath has almost no cashflow, so I’m looking at some pretty cheap plane tickets to fit out budget. So I sidle over to priceline.com and punch in my travel dates and my home and destination and that I need two tickets, and I say hey, how about $30 a ticket? That’s ridiculously low, whaddya say?

Well, before it got to the verifying my order part, it informed me that on plane tickets from here to there, there are just over $28 in taxes per ticket. Which doubles the cost of the tickets. So, I dropped my offer down to $15/ticket, and the full price for two $15 tickets is $98.30. Which seems sortof odd to me. I cut what I wanted to pay ($30/ticket) in half, and the total comes out to more, instead ($49.15/ticket). Of course, no airline is going to sell me roundtrip airfare for $15 apiece. So it was refused. I played around with their options, extra transfers, red-eye flights, non-jet planes, up to $16/ticket ($100.30 total, the maximum I could theoretically afford and more than twice the cost of gas), and they just wouldn’t take my offer. Oh well. What was the point? $30 in taxes/fees per ticket seems excessive. It means I can afford $30 less travel. It doesn’t encourge me to travel by air, it discourages me. Charging a $10 9/11 tax doesn’t help the airlines recover from 9/11, trust me. I know, I know, my price is way, way too low. But I’m paying about 40% less than ‘normal’ for my hotel room and I paid about 50% less than normal for the suite I got through Paypal in Vegas, so… I’m just value shopping. Plus, there’s that money problem.

Oh well. Everything will work itself out fine. I’m sure it will. I just need to not worry about it, and everything will be fine. Things will just come together. (Anyone want to help?)

Terminatrix 3: Reloading the Machines

Warning: Possible Spoilers ahead!
So, err… yeah. I just finished watching T3. A whole lot of jibber-jabber about how you don’t have control, the people with control just want you to think you do, and how you can’t really make a choice to change the outcome of the battle of man vs. machine because the choice has already been made and you just need to understand it… And how the female lead is destined to fall in love with the main character (the one with all the destiny) …

It was a movie about how mankind created an AI, and then the AI waged war against man using its own weapons, thus becoming the architects of their own demise. Except that instead of watching it from the perspective of the lone human that is fated to lead the resistance against the machines AFTER the war begins, this one is from the perspective of the lone human that is fated to lead the resistance BEFORE the war begins, and how he survives the war.

In case that doesn’t make sense, I’m saying we’re looking at the events leading up to the beginning of the war, instead of the events leading up to the (presumed) end of the war, like in that other movie trilogy about the same thing.

I can see how some people would say that the special effects in T3 were ‘better’ than the special effects in M2. Or at least on par. No 100 Terminators versus an invincible superhero, but the car chase in T3 may be more exciting and fun than the car chase so lauded in M2. Of course, I need to take another look at M2 pretty soon, but … yeah. Quite a car chase.

What else? Rogue AI spouting prophecies about the main characters’ futures while telling them they have no choice. An underground fortress to hide the human rebellion from the machines’ war-making. Knowing from early in the film that a main character’s love interest is destined to die, and how it happens. Finding out that making decisions that change the future don’t allow you to change your destiny. Which movie am I talking about now?

Actually, the high-energy and fast pace of this movie hardly slowed down at all. It is relatively short, especially compared to the length of it’s doppelganger, M2, which allows it to come to a satisfying climax before you’re really ready for it to be over. Plus, since while metals and skin and bones and electronics and explosives and apparently hydrogen bombs can time-travel, clothes still can’t time travel, so that female TX model walks around nude for a while. OOH! And she drives the Lexus SC430 … I want one of those. The sexy killing machine bent on the destruction of the human race would be nice to have, too, but man. If I had the Lexus I could do that lunch date with Jen tomorrow.

There, did I say anything about T3? Whatever.