Turtle Butts

Turtle Butts, originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

What I'm Watching / Reading:

Because of my downtime from this frakkin cold, I was finally able to peruse Jane Epsenson's blog. Ms. Espenson is a T.V. writer who is most well-known for writing for Joss Whedon's shows (Buffy, Angel, Firefly). Among the current shows, she writes for Battlestar Galactica so you can understand why I was delighted to discover her blog. It covers two topics: 1) writing for television, especially how to go about doing so, and 2) what she had for lunch (mercifully one or two sentences an entry). I especially enjoy it when she talks about "clams" (over-used jokes) and "pipe" (exposition). I've become insanely aware of exposition in stories and "laying pipe" is a perfect term for that process.

Shoot Em Up: This movie is in the same category as Snakes on a Plane in the sense of there's truth in its advertising: it has a lot of people being shot up, just like Snakes on a Plane had snakes on a plane. Clive Owen plays the same kind of straight-faced badass nobody he played in the vastly superior Sin City but he gets to keep his accent somewhat. What made me die laughing about this movie is it has an anti-gun message. Seriously, at the end of the movie we get sermons about the evils of private gun ownership. I haven't seen a dead body count this high in a movie since maybe Commando, or a John Woo Hong Kong gangster epic! I felt like I was watching some serious hardcore porn when all of a sudden right in the middle of some gang-banging action (in the old-fashioned sense of gangbang) the fornicating actors all of a sudden start preaching about how important abstinence is. Worth a watch if you like Clive Owen or Paul Giamatti, or are just super-seriously bored.

Boogie Nights: Speaking of porn - I have a tough time believing that this movie is already 10 years old. This movie brought director Paul Thomas Anderson to my attention. It's an epic about the rise and fall of a porn star during the late 70's - early 80's with an amazing cast: Marky Mark, Burt Reynolds, Heather Graham, Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, and a boatload more of "hey, it's that guy!" actors (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Don Cheadle, Luiz Guzman, Alfred Molina). I caught it on the Independent Film Channel and it's like the 3rd time I've watched it. I don't know what fascinates me about this movie - it's about a bunch of stupid porn people (and I do mean not very bright), but they are a tight-knit circle of friends/family and I end up feeling some sympathy for them. Oh, hey! Thomas Jane's in it too. His hair is almost as amusing as Ben Affleck's was in Dazed and Confused, another remarkable movie about the 70's. Highly recommended.

The Independent Film Channel showed a Paul W.S. Anderson movie just after that one: Shopping, a horrifically bad, bad movie with Jude Law and Sadie Frost (I should make a joke about how the movie ends up as messy as their marriage did, but that would be wrong). I hope the programmers were just having fun and didn't confuse Paul "Magnolia" Anderson with Paul "Resident Evil" Anderson.

Meet the Robinsons: We're watching more kid-friendly movies (not that you could tell). This computer-animated cartoon is a misfire: it was too chaotic with uninteresting and cliche characters. I think this movie is the one that convinced Disney to leave the cartoons to Pixar.

Lost Dear producers: we do not need any more episodes displaying just what how perverted, pathetic, and psychotic Ben is. We get it. Kill him. Kill him now.