Signs Taken for Wonders
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Sunday, November 29, 2009
Friday, November 27, 2009
Thursday, November 26, 2009
The cookies turned out like this:
The ones that actually look like cookies are lemon glazed vanilla cookies. The malformed ones are raspberry swirls, which did not so much swirl as rise like some Cthuloid beast from the depths and then melt all over the shore. They tasted good though.
11:42AM
Happy Thanksgiving, folks!
I intend to celebrate today by baking two new cookie recipes. I'll let you know how they turn out.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
9:37PM
I've decided to go on a Thanksgiving strike: no more grading tonight. Instead, I will treat (?) you to entertainment news.
The "Howling" Franchise is getting Rebooted Unlike a lot of recent dear-god-why? "reboots" of horror frachises, the one makes sense. The original "The Howling" had a couple of good scenes, but it wasn't great, and the last scene was destroyed by terrible FX / makeup decisions. No more poodle debacles, please.
In other news, the "Uncharted" games series is headed to the screen, a new "Kull" film is headed our way, and in the most important film news of the week, Hugh Jackman is set to star in an SF film about robot boxing.
This one's worth reviewing:
Hugh Jackman.
+ Giant Robots.
Boxing.
And apparently it's based on some Richard Matheson short story I've never heard of.
I'm generally very fond of Richard Matheson's work: Duel, most of the really famous Twilight Zone episodes... and now one of his stories is getting the big screen, ultra FX Hollywood treatment with a major star attached. Really, what could go wrong?
 On second thought, never mind.
5:07PM
Thank you, Onion: New 'Noveller' Allows People To Post Novels They Write During Course Of Their Day
..."I love it," said Sheena Wulf, a Novellist from Kansas City, MO. "If I'm ever sitting in a coffee shop and my sense of alienation and utter detachment from contemporary life provides me with sudden insight into the world that helped shape my family, I just grab my phone and Novel it out to people."
Sunday, November 22, 2009
10:02PM
I just watched The Happening while grading some quizzes, and boy, what a terrible, terrible movie.
I mean really, it was terrible.
The worst part is I don't get is *why* it had to be so terrible. Admittedly, the premise is a hard sell, but the movie doesn't even try to sell it. In fact, there are numerous scenes where Shyamalan seems to be making fun of his own movie. The man's practically turning to the camera and shouting "heh - you see this? This doesn't make sense either!" Yeah, we know, Shyamalan. And MSTK3ing doesn't work well when a) the movie is deliberately bad b) it's your own movie, you dumbass.
I feel like watching The Birds to cleanse my mental palate and remind myself how "When Nature Attacks!" films *should* be done.
The Rhetoric of the Google Search pt 1 and part 2
To quote Ben Casnocha, "When you type a query into Google it will suggest the most popular completions to the given prefix.
There are some remarkable contrasts, Slate found, between "dumb" searches and "smart" ones. People who start their search "how 2" are more likely to search "how 2 get pregnant" or "how 2 grow weed." People who start their search "how one might" are more likely to search "how one might discover a new piece of music" or "how one might account for the rise of andrew jackson in 1828."
The most fascinating contrast is between "is it wrong to..." vs. "is it ethical to." One change in word generates very different suggestions."
Namely, "is it wrong to" searches generally involve sexuality ("is it wrong to sleep with your sister?") while "is it ethical to" searches involve business and finance ("is it ethical to sell customer information?")
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
First he mutilated "I, Robot," then "I am Legend," and now Will Smith is going to take on Flowers for Algernon. In other SFish news, Ridley Scott, lending plausibility to the rumors that he has lost his damn mind, is making a movie out of the Monopoly board game.
While you're chewing on that, here are some projects that sound interesting: Darren Aronofsky is making "Black Swan". Veteran ballerina Nina (Natalie Portman)... finds herself locked in a competitive situation with a rival dancer named Lilly (Mila Kunis), with the stakes and twists increasing as the dancers approach the ballet school's next big production, a new version of "Swan Lake". The veteran however is unsure if the rival is a supernatural apparition or if she herself is simply having delusions.
Also, FOX is adapting What Alice Forgot: a woman... suffers a head injury and wakes to find that she actually might be 10 years older and forgotten a decade of her life.
Meanwhile, the following projects are dead: the planned Oldboy remake (yay!), the Dark Tower series (alas?), and Dollhouse (eh.)
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Sunday, November 1, 2009
It's official: I'm going to ICFA this year. My paper got accepted, so Orlando, here I come!
In other news, I just came back from seeing Paranormal Activity. As far as "docuterror" movies go, it's good, but a little too predictable. ( no spoilers, but analysis )
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Yoinked from my brother: Attack of the Triffids has flax farmers baffled
Somebody has contaminated Canada's flax crop with trace amounts of a genetically modified variety, whimsically called "Triffid" after a 1960s horror flick that starred a villainous breed of plants replete with legs, intelligence and a venom-filled stinger.
If you're going to genetically modify a crop, why, oh why, would you call it a "triffid?" That's like calling a spaceship Apollo 13 and expecting everything to work out okay.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Loads of entertainment news this weekend. Starting with the goodish news, I hear that after having weathered terrorism, the holy-shit religious-wacko-meltdown of the series' original lead, and the untimely death of the prequel's rumored star, Mad Max 4 is back on track.
In another blast from the past, there's the dubious news that Nickelodeon Has Acquired The "Ninja Turtles". Really, though, they couldn't screw up this series worse than the movies did. Go ninja, go ninja go!
In increasingly more dubious news, Dreamworks is planning a live action adaptation of "Ghost in the Shell. I *guess* this could work out well...
On a more WTF note, Gerard Butler, determined to win back America's love after the bellyflop of Gamer, is going to star in that most beloved of Shakespearean plays, Coriolanus. That will get those young kids back in the seats!
All sarcasm aside, I'm rather fond of Coriolanus, and Butler's casting indicates that the producers are adapting this misunderstood play with an eye to its untapped potential for Classical Beefcake Shirtlessness. Would that more Shakespearean films did the same.
And lastly, in news that's sure to appall me and about 5 other people in North America, David Fincher Will Turn the Famed British Miniseries "House of Cards" into a One Hour Drama. I fondly remember this mini-series as introducing my 12-yr-old self to the concepts of unreliable narration, the fourth wall, blackmail, twist endings, and sociopathic politicians, all of which have, in their own way, proved useful. So will the remake be any good? Will it be yet another sad American dismembering of a classic British series?
You might think that. You might very well think that, but of course, I couldn't possibly comment.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Where the Wild Things Are looked beautiful. I liked the acting, the cinematography & the script. The pace seemed unnecessarily slow at times, but that may have been because I was starving and really wanted to get out of the theatre and grab some dinner.
I just finished reading In the Woods. It's a dark and unsettling book, so naturally, I really liked it.
The plot: three children vanish in Ireland in the 1980s. One is later recovered alive, clinging to a tree in the nearby woods, his shoes covered in blood. He claims to have no memory of what happened to his friends. Years later, the boy in question has grown into a troubled detective who finds himself working a child murder in the same vicinity as his own childhood trauma. Believing the two cases to be linked, the detective decides to keep his own role in the story secret from his colleagues and from the townspeople as he searches for answers.
Publisher's Weekly calls this a "psychological thriller," and I have to agree. This is really a story about how people think, about what they recognize and what they don't. It's also a good example of Todorov's Fantastic, in that there's a strong hint of the supernatural in the plot, but as it is filtered through the first-person perspective of an extremely damaged person, it's not clear whether the "truth" lies in the realms of the real or the unreal.
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