So, it’s New Year’s Eve. I have a lot of very deep philosophical thoughts about the passage of time, the impermanence of reality and the imperturbability of the universe.
But I’m not going to post any of them. Instead, I am going to drink beer and watch Buffy season 5 in my underpants.
I think I have a bicuspid fetish.
I realized something today. Two things actually. The first one made me happy:
American Gladiators was quite possibly one of the finest shows ever produced for television in any nation on any planet.
And the second one made me sad:
American Gladiators is now off the air and not available on DVD.
I will pay up to 100 American dollars for the first 3 seasons of American Gladiators on DVD.
I like being unemployed.
I bummed around in my PJs all day today — woke up around 1:30, drank some beer while alternately watching a movie (Amadeus, with the commentary track by Milos Forman and Peter Shaffer) and playing a video game (Armed & Dangerous, not particularly good). At some point in there I think I ate a sandwich, but I can’t say I’m entirely sure. After that, I read a book (The Warrior Lives by Joel Rosenberg, which is part 5 in a 7 book series called The Guardians of the Flame. It’s pretty good, if a bit lightweight.) and drank some more beer. I did some laundry and took a shower, but then decided not to get dressed, so I got back into my PJs. I think during all of this it was snowing, but at no point did I really feel like looking out of a window.
So then, back to the movies (Remember the Titans — sentimental garbage), video games (Deus Ex 2 — pretty fun) and eating (spaghetti with meat sauce, salad (aka raw leaf spinach and some vinegar)). Also beer. Then another movie (Finding Nemo, a truly excellent film) and more beer.
Now it’s… 3:47am. I want to go to bed, but I have to make it before I do, and I am feeling too tired to do that. I am still sober enough to understand that this is a situation which will not resolve itself over time, but I am drunk enough to be willing to wait and see if I’m wrong.
The funny thing is that, in these 4 days off I have, I really wanted to get some work done on my screenplay, but somehow the lack of “real” work to do is making it more and more difficult for me to concentrate on what I used to think of as procrastination activities. Either that or I am just a shitty writer. In 48 hours I have written approximately one paragraph of dialogue.
As you all know, I like to watch movies — I watch up to 2 or 3 a day sometimes, depending on what else I’m doing. One thing I always do after watching a movie I’ve never seen before is visit the IMDb entry for that movie and read a little bit about it. I usually read the trivia section, I skim the goofs section, and then I read some of the reviews.
Now, there are a lot of review links for many of the movies, and most of them suck. The vast majority are broken links, or just one or two paragraph blurbs, or other linkfarms to yet more reviews of the movies, or even just poorly written. So I have a few that I’ve determined to be good that I generally always read. The Salon.com reviews are very quite good, especially those written by Stephanie Zacharek, with whom I nearly always agree. The Onion’s AV Club (which is not, as you may believe, a humor site in any way), also has very good, pointed reviews. I used to read Roger Ebert’s reviews, but I more and more found him to be basically a total moron who, apart from making at LEAST one factual error per review (look at them closely some time, I think you can find one in every single review), he very often misses the point of a film and will just review it based on how it made him feel about his childhood or some bullshit like that. When none of my “regular” folks have reviews (actually fairly common for older movies), then I will generally read some reviews from some of the bigger papers.
The other person whose reviews I generally read is Doug Pratt, the guy who writes for (and runs) DVDLaser.com. The reviews are also pretty short, but they’re mostly focused on the technical aspects of the digital transfer — image quality, color balance, audio fidelity, etc. I like to read them to give me a good point of reference for what people mean when they talk about stuff like that, and for one other reason — when he’s discussing the DVD features, and there are foreign language subtitles, he always includes a sample line from the movie in one of those languages. I can’t entirely say that I know why, but I find these little snippets of translated dialogue to be incredibly funny. So funny that, in fact, I will share some with you. Bonus points to anybody who can identify the movies they’re from:
¿Este es un mojón de ABBA?
Je t’ai amené le dernier bulliten. Devine qui vient diner, maintenant?
¿Hablas conmigo? Entonces, ¿con quién diablos hablas? ¿Hablas conmigo?