Mysterious Skin

Had a half day today but didn't go see a movie. Why the hell not? you want to know. Good question. Tuesday is Super Bargain day at the movies and you only pay $5.00, so why the heck would I not go see a movie? Well, there is a good reason, let me tell you. It was the dental procedure this morning that put an end to my Bargain Priced Movie Fantasy. The procedure went on so long that I got to work late so had to leave later. Then I discovered that every movie started in an hour and a half. I can't wait around that long. I'm not a Zen master.
But I did see a movie yesterday. The movie was called Mysterious Skin.
In the movie, there is an 8-year-old kid called Brian and something weird happens to him. He finds himself hiding in the basement with his nose bleeding. Before that, all he can remember is that he was playing a Little League baseball game when it started raining. He can't remember what happened in the five hours between.
Then we see him grown up a bit, present day (the movie is set in the late '80s), he's around 18 years old. Still he is obsessed with what happened, and he has nightmares about it. He comes to believe that he was abducted by aliens, and he watches any TV program he can find on the subject. On one such program he sees a girl telling about her own experience of alien abduction. She doesn't live far away so he decides to go and visit her.
There's another kid the movie follows, Neil, and he was in the same Little League team. We see him when he also is 8 and his mother takes him along to the baseball field to meet the coach, who looks like the Marlboro Man. He's just called Coach in the movie. Coach takes a special liking to Neil and after games takes him back to his place where he's got all sorts of cool stuff like Atari and a big TV and beanbags. Uh oh. This doesn't look good does it? Does Neil's mother and father know where he is? Well, his father is long gone and his mother only seems to care about getting drunk and her next short-term boyfriend. Poor Neil.
In the present day we see Neil has become a male prostitute, picking up men in a local park.
Back with Brian, who is really now on a quest to find out what happened in those five hours, he finds a photograph of his Little League team and recognises Neil. All the names of the kids are on the back of the photo, so now he can track him down and ask him about what really happened after that rained-out Little League game.
I heard that when this film was given an R-rating (over-18), some *concerned individual* wrote a letter to the Office of Film and Literature Classification demanding it be re-examined, hoping the R classification would be overturned and then the movie denied a classification, banning the movie from being screened. Why did they do that? Apparently because the movie was some kind of how-to guide on how to groom children for abuse. It's not that at all, by the way. What a ridiculous idea. Anyway, the movie was reviewed again and fortunately the R-rating was upheld.
The thing is, all we usually find out about cases of child abuse is what we see on the news. Like the creepy looking guy here in Australia who flicks his tongue out, he hunches over and squirms, his eyes dart from side to side like a trapped fiend, and he lashes out crazily at the camera crews. That guy LOOKS like a monster. The guy in Mysterious Skin does not look like a monster. The movie is not some ten-second TV news spot guaranteed to make you jump around and loudly call for these monsters to be lynched, only then to forget about it seconds later and go back to your nice dinner and comment on the weather report. This movie goes deeper into it, and amongst the ugliness and despair are even moments of tenderness and humanity. It's deeper and more complex and challenging than the TV news.
The audience didn't make a peep. Everybody was eating choc tops.

Smoking Teeth

Went to the dentist before work this morning to get the cotton wool pulled out – it was soaked in some hardcore antibacterial liquid to make sure the infection was killed. So I figured he just had to open it up, take the cotton wool out then put a filling back in. It ended up taking an hour, he was doing all sorts of weird shit. At one point smoke was coming up out of my mouth, like he was using a soldering iron. But anyway, he finished at last then I went over to pay. Goddam almost fell over when the lady said “$425.” I only had a hundred and something on me, figuring it was gonna be around a hundred or something. Anyway, it was really surprising, actually more like horrifying. That's a lot of money. Stupid damn teeth. I paid $100 and said I’d come back and pay the rest later, but asked her why was it so expensive? She said it was a ‘root canal pack out'.
Oh. One of those.

Parasitic Adblog Development

Those stinking adblog parasites have introduced a new weapon into their foul abominable arsenal.
It used to be (in the good old days of a month or two ago) they would only *create* a fake blog that you would stumble across and for a split second think it was a REAL blog by a REAL human being. You would hit the NEXT BLOG button expecting to find another random blog by somebody, maybe a another personal blog, or a political blog, or even a boring student blog, or even one of those teenage Asian girl blogs that have the stupid butterflys and teddy bears floating around the screen. Instead, a *blog* would pop up that wasn't a blog at all. It looked like a blog, but really it's just a stupid advertisement, no different to those annoying pop-ups you get that make you want to drive a sledgehammer into your monitor.
Well, these adblog robots have come up with a new tactic, and that is to post their stupid ads in your comments section. It happened to me the other day. I checked my blog and my latest post had SIX comments. I got excited, I'll admit it. I'd never got six comments before. It was pretty exciting! But when I looked at those comments, three of them said something like, "Great blog! I like it a lot! Now check out my blog about about how to enlarge your penis!"
This means war. These robots have really gone too far. To make a stinking adblog that you accidentally stumble across is one thing, but to come right into your own blog and defecate into your comments field a sneaky invitation to click on their stupid adblogger link, well, that is the final straw.

What People Want

The last thing you want to do if you feel happy (even though these moments are so wonderful and rare) is let somebody else know you feel happy, because they will resent you for it. The thing is, people don't want to see you happy. They want to see you miserable, or at the very least, whining about some small and insignificant thing. Like they do.
I'll tell you what they really want. They want to see you in pain. Only then will they be satisfied.

Space Rock

If you were trying to describe a pink, white and grey space rock, and you were being paid by the word, this is how you would probably do it:

...There were pinkish streaks among the rock, and it seemed that some of the chromatic tint from the atmosphere owed its origin to these. There were a number of white veins in the rock, which bore some kind of resemblance to marble, but the majority of it was grey. It gave an over-all impression of greyness streaked with pink and white, rather than an over-all impression of whiteness tinged with grey and pink, or an over-all impression of pink streaked with grey and white.
Greyness was the dominant background shade; neither black nor white, but something midway between the two. It was a light rather than a dark grey, yet could never have been so light that it might be mistaken for an off white.
- Pel Torre 'Galaxy 666' (1968)

Land of the Dead

After work today I went and saw George A Romero's new zombie movie Land of the Dead. It's no secret I've been looking forward to this one, so was it worth the wait? Let's find out! >>> No it wasn't.
The movie was a big disappointment. Maybe the problem was that I was sober. Usually when I watch a zombie movie, I'm drunk, or at least well on the way. What happened here? Let's find out!
The movie begins and there are zombies everywhere. Why are there zombies everywhere? It's a mystery. OK, let's accept that there are zombies everywhere. Maybe in Romero's movies there was never an explanation for the zombies. Is it a big deal? Well, people are making a big deal about how Romero makes smart zombie movies with all sorts of sociological and cultural and political references, but if it's so smart would it be too much to ask for even a half-assed reason for the zombies? No, it wouldn't.
Anyway, in the movie there is a big luxurious high-rise residential building (Fiddler's Green) that Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) has taken over and is ruling. Only rich fashion-conscious idiots live there, lower class people are only allowed to be servants there or deliver stuff and quickly take their poor asses away again at high speed.
The outsider characters the movie focuses on launch missions in a big armoured truck. The missions are to get food and other supplies to bring back to Fiddler's Green. The leader of this bunch is Riley (Simon Baker). He visits some wild and crazy nightclub where they are using zombies for entertainment. Two zombies are shackled and people can go up next to them to have their photo taken. Another zombie is chained up and people take turns shooting him with a paintball gun. Those scenes were pretty good because that's probably what people would really find to do with zombies after they got over the initial horror. But then, at this nightclub, Riley sees that a girl has been thrown into a cage with two zombies and people are betting on which zombie will get to eat her. Riley is disgusted and pulls out his gun, shoots the zombies, saving the girl, but causing a riot in the nightclub. The girl is called Slack (Asia Argento) and she then joins up with Riley's gang. There's also another outsider guy called Cholo (John Leguizamo) and he desperately wants to get into Fiddler's Green by saving up the money Kaufman owes him for his supply raids into the zombie zone.
One more character we see a lot of is Charlie who is kind of slow but a crack shot with a gun and so Riley has sort of taken him under his wing, to use a corny phrase. Actually, Charlie got stuck in a fire and it was Riley who pulled him out of it, so that's the story of why they are pals. Charlie has a pretty lame line he uses a lot, modified each time by the situation. Because his face is half burnt up he looks a bit of a mess, so he will say, "Bad dreams? Look at me. You can tell I have bad dreams" or "A drink? Look at me. You can tell I need a drink." It seems kind of funny when it's written down, but in the movie those lines were lame.
One of the jokes with zombies has always been that they move so slowly, you can easily get away by doing nothing more than walking at a normal pace. That handicap was begging to be rectified, and so it was with the 2003 movie 28 Days Later which introduced *turbo zombies*. Those bastards sprinted everywhere, never seeming to get tired, which served to make the zombies much more terrifying.
Land of the Dead doesn't use turbo zombies, but it tackles the problem of zombies being unintelligent - incapable of creative thought, simple eating machines that stagger around moaning and bumping into walls and not being able to figure out how to open a door - by having a smart *leader* zombie called Big Daddy. This zombie actually starts learning stuff, like how to use a machine gun, and he teaches the other zombies to use weapons. Is it a big deal? Maybe. I guess. But it's not handled very well in the movie, so it's not as terrifying as those turbo zombies.
Another thing I noticed was with the dialogue. Romero came up with some quotable quotes but stuck them in there clumsily, like when one of Kaufman's underlings mentions something about trouble, Kaufman says, "In a world where the dead are returning to life, the word "trouble" loses much of its meaning." That might read like a pretty good quote, but the way it's delivered in the movie is lame and awkward, and that's just one example of the awful dialogue. Oh well. It's a zombie movie. But again I point out that people seem to be making such a big deal about how smart this one is. It's really not.
Well, what about the actors? Sadly, at no point did Asia Argento take her clothes off, and I challenge ANYBODY to deny that this was Dennis Hopper's most forgettable performance.
Watch out! Here comes a *spoiler* alert! >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
At the end, Riley tells his pals not to shoot the zombie leader Big Daddy and his zombie pals because they are only trying to live their life, or some dumb reasoning like that. Hello. These are ZOMBIES that survive by eating HUMAN FLESH. If you let them live they will try to eat more human flesh, which is only possible if they attack non-zombies. Why the hell would you let them live? Can anybody explain the logic here? Am I missing something here?
Anyway. Maybe I hyped myself up too much for this one. Maybe I'll watch it again in a year's time and really enjoy it (although it seems unlikely). Maybe beer would make all the difference.
The audience in the theatre were well-behaved except for the guy and his girlfriend who came in late and, yes, sat right behind me. They loudly chattered like schoolgirls for about five minutes before coming to their senses and realising they were in a movie theatre with people who had better things to do than listen to their inane comments and observations.

Prognosis Negative

Stratu: I am going to Dymocks after work to get my next book, library does not have it. Genre: Space Opera, 1264 pages, first book in trilogy.
Anders: You're sick, space boy.