Be EXCELLENT to each other!

Watched a good portion of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure tonight. The lack of conflict, character devlopment or real suspense means that the script would totally not pass muster in any of my screenwriting classes, and the direction rests firmly in the mediocre for at least half the movie (although there are some inspired bits(, but the film somehow survives on sheer goodwill alone.

I continue to find it Most Triumphant.

Two animal stories

Number one: Lost baby hippo meets 100 year old tortoise, magical bond of friendship is formed. It's not the plot for the best children's book, it's real!! It's nice to read this sort of news in a war-torn and disaster-stricken world.

Number two: in response to my recent Good and Evil post, Grant asked "what’s so wrong with eating beef?" which is a good question. My answer doesn't have anything to do with clogged arteries, carcinogens or how cuddly cows are, although these may all be valid points. But from my point of view, here’s what’s wrong with it: it is probably the most wasteful thing you can put in your body. Of course, all meat is more wasteful than other foods, but beef is by far the worst.
Eating a pound of beef uses at least five pounds of grain, 2,400 gallons of water, a gallon of gasoline and erodes five pounds of topsoil, over half of it in land that used to be forests. It will get you 100 grams of protein. Of course, eating a pound of cheese will get you 125 grams of protein and a pound of soybeans will get you up to 170.
The world’s livestock, occupy nearly a full quarter of the land on this planet, use on third of its grain. In the United States, they use 70-80% of the grain grown in this country, take up half of our agricultural land and account for half of the water we consume. They also produce 20 times more excrement than the humans in this country do.
If we all became vegetarians we would have more than enough food (and room!) for everyone on this hungry and crowded planet. I’m not necessarily suggesting that’s what we should do, but when a child dies of starvation every two seconds, we absolutely need to think about what we eat, and to eat responsibly. I spent a lot of time complaining about this, but never did anything for a long time and finally decided to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak, and drastically cut down on my consumption of beef. It hasn’t been easy (since I was staying with a host family who prepared all of my meals in Spain I decided to eat whatever they set on the table, meat or otherwise), and it may not be enough. But it’s something. I urge you all to do whatever you think is necessary to make a difference.
Backslash politics!

Another movie post

So I was talking to Erin about Down With Love the other day, and I decided that movie is more or less the same as XXX to me. Both films take the bizarre, but accepted contrivances of their respective genres and crank them up to 11, so that them films reach a level of unreality that's more or less unprecedented in their genre. They can both be seen as sort of kind of lite post-modern deconstructions of the genre, pushing the boundaries just far enough to show how little it takes for the the action movie and romantic comedy genres to dissolve into bizarre and surreal.
It's not a particularly noble gesture, as most of us who watch those types of movies enjoy them precisely for their unreal idiosyncrasies. I think silly genre films are generally better when they have a point and are aware of what they’re doing, but no matter how technically competent or entertaining the movie is, it all feels hollow to me when the point IS that they’re aware of what they’re doing.

On that note, since both XXX and Miss Congeniality have sequels coming out this year, I’ve got my hopes up for a crossover between them coming soon. If it’s not already in development, maybe I’ll write the script. I don’t know how it could be bad!

busy

I'm a bit too busy for a full update today.

Here is a joke:
Why did the bartender walk into the bar?
Because it was his job, now go to bed.

Longbeach, Gardenburgers, Good and Evil

Took a trip out to Long Beach with Erin today to pick up some china that her parents won on ebay from the lady who was selling it. It’s been a rather long ordeal to save the twelve dollars on shipping – Erin had to play phone tag with the woman for about a week before she could get a hold of her, and we had to find a narrow gap in schedules to arrange the pickup, but as we are always on the lookout for fun, we decided to make a dinner date out of the short journey to the coast. We faced a few obstacles in retrieving the china, including heavy traffic on the 22 while the sun blazed right into the center of our windshield, unhindered by clouds of any sort, a gated community that we got locked into (but could have hopped the fence out of if only we’d come without a car), and finally when we arrived at the ebay woman’s garage stocked high with peppershakers, wind chimes and other auctionable knickknacks, the fact that she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to send us away with. Fortunately, Erin’s parents had bit on china that they already had the pattern of and Erin was able to recognize it among all the variations of “gardeny on white,” although it took the auctioneer about three tries to get the cup, saucer and plate all together.
It was very interesting to see that cluttered, Long Beach garage on the other end of e-commerce.
We went out to Ruby’s for dinner, because I had fond memories of the one out of the pier at Huntington Beach, although this one just overlooked a strip mall with other upper/mid-range restaurant chains (Claim Jumper, El Torito, et al). It felt sort of like Disney Land, with the staff all dressed up in ‘50s diner attire and acting as chipper as all getup. Erin thought our waitress in the white skirt and pinstriped blouse might be a robot, and I began to see her point after the waitress chirped out her personal recommendations (without being asked) and they exactly matched the “recommended” items on the menu. She wasn’t a good waitress; she was playing a good waitress.
There wasn’t much selection beyond burgers and shakes, and although Erin and I hardly ever pass up a good milkshake (we got St. Patrick’s Day Mint, probably their version of McDonald’s mysteriously named “Shamrock” shake, although come to think of it, McDonald’s doesn’t really taste like mint, so I’m not sure what it is. Soilent Green?!), we have sworn off most beef on the grounds (ha ha) that it’s the most wasteful food there is, and ecologically irresponsible, blah blah blah. But we were tempted, oh were we tempted, especially since getting the meat replaced with a gardenburger would cost an extra buck twenty, and Erin had never met a vegetarian patty she agreed with.
But we went with the meat substitute anyway, calling it a gastronomical experiment and a way to not sacrifice our values.
When our hamburger came, it looked amazing, and the thick juicy beef was mouthwatering. This was very much beef, the same sort of beef I had enjoyed in the burger joints of my youth. The same beef that had probably guided me to this restaurant in the first place. I sent it back before I had time to really think and change my mind. When Erin pouted at me from across the table, I could tell she’d been having similar thoughts. We should have eaten it, she said, because they’d just throw it away now. And because it looked really, really good.
Eventually our gardenburger came, and it was actually quite good, full of flavor (herby, not meaty), and far exceeded our expectations, perhaps living up to what we expected the meat burger to taste like. I still had a hard time getting the picture of that full-fledged hamburger out of my head, though.
Now you may not agree with our stance on beef (it’s rather weak as far as activist diets go, and it’s a personal thing, not necessarily the Right thing), but I think that tonight’s incident said something about the nature of Right and Wrong. In movies and video games, and even most books, it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between Right and Wrong. Wrong is evil and gross and creepy. It’s scary! It’s Orks and Darth Vader and Evil Robots. Good is what all the strong, attractive people fight for, and it’s the side that always wins, so of course that’s the team you pick. But in real life, I think it’s a bit more difficult than that. In reality, sin is very, very seductive, and it can be hard to tell what’s wrong with doing Wrong at the time. Doing Good doesn’t bring immediate rewards most of the time, and it can involve slogging it out in the trenches for a long, long time just trying to hold on while sin hovers nearby and offers that easy lure out of the battle.
And a lot of the time, we give in, and ride, rather gloriously and full of ourselves, with Wrong, feeling free and as if there are no consequences for our actions.
But there always, always are. And the worst consequences may not happen to us, they might fall on the heads of others. They do exist. It’s very hard to ride with Good, and it can be a rocky, harrowing road. But I believe that it’s worth it if we can learn to hold on.

Rock + roll

It took me far too long, but I finished this flyer for Ed's upcoming show today. Breakfast Epiphanies is his production company, and Kindred Fallis his band, although he'll probably be playing solo at the show.



I stole the art from Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life, which is perhaps the most awesome comic book of the new millenium. So really all I did was edit the picture a little, hand-write in the text, scan it in again and tweak the image a little, but my photoshop skillz are below par, so it took me a while. Thanks to tips from technosavy Grant, I should be able to speed up the process next time.

Also! Ed found an entertainment sitting on a curb a few blocks down the street, so he, Erin and I walked down to check out the scene. We thought about taking it like theives in the night, but instead knocked on a few doors until we found someone who said we could take it -- and even gave us a drawer to go with it! We rolled it back on Ed's longboard, and set it up tonight. It caused enough of a commotion that just about everyone in the house stopped in to see what we were doing, creating an impromptu party. There were corn chips being eatten, there were sticky sumo men being thrown at the wall, there were RCA cables being connected. It was a blast and a half. Or maybe three quarters.

Movies!

Last night: Watched The Price of Milk. Wacky New Zealand surrealist romantic comedy. No one really "got it," everyone enjoyed it.

Tonight: attempted to watch Sense and Sensebility. Fell asleep. Never learned who was sense and who was sensebility. I think it was from the same director who brought us The Hulk, which I quite liked. So there.

Other movie news: Star Wars Episode III Cheez-Its are cheaper than non-SWEIII Cheez-Its. They have a picture of Darth Vader levitating crackers into his hand on the cover. Darth Vader is hip again?? Probably not if he is advertising cheese snacks. Oooh, the dark side. I'm sooooo scared!