So yeah. I caught Kill Bill 2 over last weekend and well, I have some mixed feelings about it. First let me say that I actually have some mixed feelings about the first one. As a whole it was freakishly brilliant from time to time. I thought Lucy Lui’s intro was incredible and amazingly in character. I loved any scene with Pai Mei, dispite his scorn for my style of Kung Fu. I thought the fights themselves were amazing. Good camera work, good choreography, all that. I thought that the martial arts were shot unflinchingly. Meaning that there was less dramatization and more actually showing how people look when they get hit and/or stabbed. The Bride gets shot in the chest with two shotgun shells full of rock salt, she hits the ground, and she stays there. There is no “Hero-spot” damage. The fights between her and Daryl Hannah and Vivica Fox are great. Very visceral.

I thought that Bill’s speech about Superman was great. Made a really cool point and actually brought it back to a character in the movie. Sadly, it didn’t sound like natural dialogue. Kevin Smith could write that monologue and have it sound perfectly normal, from Tarantino it is more of a oblique referance to Ghost in the Shell. (What with the characters in the movie taking time to deliver lengthly deadpan speeches directly to the camera to make up for the inablity to follow the manga’s paranthetical asides)

On the other hand, I did have some problems with the movies. Why give Lucy Liu an intro that takes almost a third of the first movie when you aren’t going to give any other charater anything resembling that? Why spend twenty minutes on Bud just going to work then getting sent home? What the hell did that have to do with the main narrative, or even Bud’s story? Why would he tell Bill that he pawned his Hanzo sword, then keep it in his golf clubs? Where is Vivica Fox’s Blaxploitation-themed intro? Where’s anything more than some snippets of Daryl Hannah’s character?

All in all it comes off as less of a real cohesive narritive about a woman out for revenge and more a story about how many movie’s Tarantino himself watched as a child/adult. Which is a sad thing to say. I still fight my girlfriend on this movie: she thinks it is completely worthless and seems to be personally insulted on its existence. Personally I think that with a combination the right editing and recombination into one movie then it would be brilliant.

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I’m re-reading George R. R. Martin’s “Song of Fire and Ice” series in preparation for the 4th book (when is that one coming out again?) and much to my surprise, I am enjoying every minute of it. The realistic characters all going through incredible hardship seem less inplausible and more genuine this time. In short the whole setup seems more like actual history and less like the one-dimensional conflicts I see more often in contemporary fantasy. I just wish I could get a detachable cast list to keep with me in case I forget just who Davos is and why the hell I should care.

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I’ve also started watching Gantz. This show has unique potential to be as interesting as something by ABe, albiet much darker. I hope it lives up to said potential. Here’s the rundown: in the first ep we are introduced to our hapless protagonist. He’s in highschool, and acting every bit the little nihilist. On his way home he accidentally meets up with an old friend he hasn’t seen in years. The old friend is, at the time, attempting to rescue a wine-soaked bum who fell on to subway tracks. He asks for his friend’s help in getting the guy to safety, and wouldn’t you know it, a train is coming. They come up with the plan to run to the end of the terminal and thereby be in front of the train when it stops. Sadly, this is an express train and they both get separated from this mortal coil.

Then they wake up in an apartment full of people. They all share two things in common. One, an inablity to touch any of the doors and windows. Two, they all tell similar stories. They were all in the process of dieing then ended up there. While they are all introducing themselves, another resident of this apartment shows up. A naked high school girl with blood on her wrists and no corresponding wounds. The yakuza (complete with hole-filled shirts) make a move to drag the poor naked dead girl off, being yakuza. While the main character’s friend is breaking up the attempted rape-in-progress, the three-foot black orb that takes up one corner of the apartment starts singing.

Apparently they are all dead, and their new lives belong to the sphere, to use as it sees fit. Apparently it sees fit to outfit them all in black jumpsuits, arm them with pistols and set them all in the middle of a secret war between Earth and alien criminals that live among us.

Could be interesting, could be lame. The animation is really amatureish and the episodes I have so far seen are pretty slow moving. We’ll have to see.

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Hell yeah motherfucker! I’ve now passed my A+ certification tests so you now have the pleasure of addressing a Kung Fu fighting computer technician with an AS in Programming and papers to prove my technician bona fides.

Yes, I’m a little proud of myself. And in six to eight weeks I’ll be sporting a certificate suitable for framing. I wonder how easy Network+ and Security+ are to get. I could rock all over that, if they are as eady as A+. Probably not though.

I still haven’t watched Bakuretsu Tenshi. Just too much FMA and Monster and all that. And Siren. Whew Siren is a bitch and a half. I can’t figure out if the apprehension I feel upon booting my PS2 is fear of the situations that I’ll encounter or just plain old “Lord I don’t know if I can beat this thing.” I’ve died twice during the intro. Then the girl I was leading through the monster-infested town was shot by a guy with a rifle that I never even saw. This game is… tough. I’m unarmed for the first two stages, and realistic amounts of damage drop me. Seriously. One gunshot or a short bout of choking will knock Kyuya right out.

The freakest part, I think is that at least half of the zombies I sightjack aren’t patrolling the streets or guarding watchtowers or anything. They are gardening or fixing walls or something. That’s just bizzare, and it makes me wonder what the hell these guys are up to. Thank god the professor (who looks more than a little like Chairman Kaga) leads his impressionable female students into the godforsaken monster-haunted wilderness while at the very least packing heat.

I loved her reaction: “Is that a real gun?” Very Guns-are-outlawed Japanese.

The Japanese lessons continue at a snail’s pace as well. I’ve hit a bit of a snag and am reviewing. I’ve got lessons 1-3 down. Nailed. I can say that I understand a little Japanese but am not yet very skilled with the best of them. Hopefully I’ll nail Lesson 4 today, and catch up on my Monster (or Midori. That shit is great).

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Yargh. I just don’t understand these kids today. No really. I mean… “They get a little tight in the crotch every now and then, but that’s to be expected.” That might be because they are, you know, girl’s pants!

Ugh.

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Well, the girlfriend and I begun painting tonight. The plan is to take my well-decorated but poorly tinted living room/dining room/foyer and paint it green and tan (dark tan and tannish green to be exact). Today Kristi and I begun by taking all of my hard-won artwork down and patching the holes left by the art, the curtain tiebacks and other sundry nailholes and cracks that where there when I moved in. That went surprisingly quickly and gives me hope that tomorrow’s task, priming may actually become priming and putting the green up. If I can be down to just putting up two coats of the tan Saturday then everything will be even more golden.

Well, I’m off to move all the furnature into the middle of the room and cover the amalgam with a huge-ass dropcloth. The problem with all of this is that the hallway is too small to put any furnature in while I’m doing this. I suppose I could use the kitchen, but that would actually take more work.

Hopefully my mom will finish what she is doing and come lend a hand later. I mean if we could get one coat of everything up that would be cool too. I could probably get a head start on painting tomorrow if everything was taped up to begin with.

Oh, and Jason? Come down whenever, just know that we’ll be painting ’till the painting is done. Not that there wouldn’t be hanging out and such, but just mostly painting.

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Saw Hellboy on Friday night. I’ve been digesting it ever since. See, if I wasn’t such a fan of the comic, I would think that it was the best movie ever. Good one liners, good characters, etc. Sadly, I am a huge fan of the comic.

I’d call it a good solid 3 out of 5 stars. Most movies I see are twos, so don’t think I’m selling the movie short. In reality I think that it was about as good as Hollywood could or would make a Hellboy movie. I can see that Mignola fought for good parts, and thank god he chose his battles. Overall, the presentation of Hellboy is perfect. As a character, he is well acted and as a costume they achieved alot with practical bits. Very impressive. Abe and Liz I liked less. Both looked damn close to Mignola’s Abe and Liz (Abe espectially) but neither really had the voice to pull it off. Both were just not balls-to-the-wall enough to be Elizabeth Sherman and Abraham Sapien.

I had fun though. And the tenticles per capita is probably the highest of any non-hentai flick i’ve ever seen. I’d reccomend it, but keep in mind that it is an adaptation not a true presentation of the comic and you’ll be fine.

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There, now its April 2 and I don’t have to worry about possibly doing something that would lose me my job. See, ever since i’ve started working here (way back in the mists of antiquity) I’ve been plagued with a want to play a bit of a prank on my poor, unsuspecting users. See, as a department we’ve pushed and pushed for upgrades to Windows 2000 at least. Now that we have an XP image and the whole “install and setup” phase takes about 5 minutes, we sing a slightly newer tune, but still we push for 2k. Now sysinternals makes a screen saver for 2k and XP (and probably NT) whose display loops from the BSOD to a reboot with chkdsk finding bad sectors complete with hard drive activity. It really went over well with Time Warner’s IT. Fooled every one of them.

It might get me fired if I do a mass push of it, put it on every windows 2k machine in a school, and set it for one minute delay. But what a way to go, right?

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I managed to clean out my DVR yesterday. Lord that was alot of SVU episodes. Damn I love that show, and thank you USA for re-running it. I almost don’t have enough time to watch them all. Touching Evil isn’t too bad either, though they seem to be kicking characters off rather quickly.

Well, back to work.

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Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the book. I knew I left something out. That would be The Mysteries of Henry Burdick by Chris Van Allensburg. He’s also the guy who did Jumanji, so you have a fighting chance of scoring it at most bigger bookstores. I bought mine at The Happy Bookseller, but then supporting locally owned busnesses is something I do. Unless its Manifest, and I get the feeling that the tatooed chick with the piercings is looking down on my CD purchase. It wasn’t the internet that killed manifest, it was a combination of the Patchouli, arrogance, overpriced-ness, and general lack of selection. But then that’s just my thoughts on the matter.

But Mysteries… is a hell of a children’s book. For those of you who aren’t Jason and didn’t read the book this weekend, the concept is that there was this guy named Henry Burdick who walked into a publisher’s office with 14 sketches. He claimed that these were illustrations from fourteen children’s books he wrote, he also had titles and something of a tagline from each. The publisher agreed to publish his books on the strength of his wierd portfolio, but he never returned with the completed stories. The book then comprises two-page spreads basically. One is the drawing, and the other is the title and tagline. Stuff like: a drawing of a small door at the bottom of a basement staircase paired with “He swore he saw the doorknob start to turn” or something along those lines.

The girlfriend and everyone I’ve shown the book to is mightily impressed with it. I look at it as an experiment in pure creativity. It was worth every penny of its pricetag.

And Chats, I’ve got to agree with you. Turning Abe into a psychic is just over the top.

I completed the download of almost a gig and a half of “Learn Japanese” mp3’s this morning, and now I have something in addition to the Calculus I’m picking up this summer and the Cisco videos I’m watching to occupy my mind. Also, I’ll be taking my A+ tests this weekend, so wish me luck.

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