Actually, the best part of that movie really was….. the preview for Terminator: Salvation. Eeek! Okay, I’m a huge Christian Bale fan, which I’m pretty sure goes along with liking the flavor of actors who can actually act. And, I’m a big Terminator fan. Used to watch those with my Dad. Thanks for corrupting me early, Pop! Terminator + Christian Bale as John Connor = AWESOME! Yes, yes. Me dork. I know. Plus, it’s the first part of a trilogy so there’s more to come. Yay!

So, this week we have been snowed in. In Portland, land of little snow! Saturday night we got five or six inches and the whole rest of the city had enough that church was canceled on Sunday. I always feel weird when I don’t go to church on Sunday.

Yesterday George decided he needed to go to Walmart (he’s one of those guys who needs to get out of the house every day or he starts getting weird and cooped up), so he hopped in the truck and backed out the driveway. Then he spun his tires on the street, and since he couldn’t get back in the driveway he had to roll the truck down and park it on the side of the road. It was a very short trip.

Today George decided he needed to go to Walmart again. Determined to go anywhere, he headed across the street to go move that truck. An hour later he had successfully cleared most of the ice from beneath the truck and managed to roll it several more feet backwards along the curb down the hill. I watched from our bedroom window. Hey man, it’s 25 degrees out there!

Then he decided to try taking our mammoth van. After trying to pull out of the driveway three or four times and managing to not munch the neighbors nice car, he finally made it out of the driveway and off the mad, mad worlds of Walmart and Winco. I managed to not have a heart attack watching him try to get out of the driveway and have ordered chains from Amazon. They should be here in a couple of days, just in time for the next big snowstorm headed our way. Tomorrow the kids and I are making Christmas cookies. Yummy!

Hope if you are stuck, you are enjoying the Christmas season. Actually, I hope that even if you aren’t stuck.

Rachel

Have you seen the trailers for the new Twilight movie? Is it just me or does that just look stupid? And another thing, why in the world would some vampire guy who is hundreds of years old be interested in a teenage girl? I remember being a teenage girl. I remember the teenage girls around me at the time. I have eyeballs and see teenage girls around me.

Teenage girls as a group are quite possibly the silliest creatures on the planet outside of say, baby kangaroos, which have the advantage of being small and adorable. Wouldn’t a several hundred year old man be interested in someone with a modicum of wisdom floating around the skull cavity?

Even Buffy, which is one of my all time favorite TV shows, has two hundreds of years old vampires dating her at various points in the series. Oh wait, she’s a slayer and has all the responsibility that that entails helping her mature quickly. Phew! Rationalization complete. Now I can enjoy my show without stupid niggling questions. Plus, how can you complain when the two vamps in question are these guys?

I mean really, who has cheekbones like Spike there at the top? Ridiculous! And if you are a big Bones fan, you should go watch the first season of Buffy before David Boreanaz’s face matured. Looks totally different.

Hmmmm, so apparently this post is actually all about vampires. Did I mention I am tired and have nothing to say. This is pretty representative on Rachel’s brain on not much sleep. So sad.

Rachel

And what is Dr. Horrible? Just Joss Whedon’s new internet-based brilliance, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Plus, it involves singing and Nathan Fillion. Yay! Fillion and Whedon, my two humongous favorites. It’s only online through tomorrow, so go watch it (you’ll probably be able to find it on YouTube or somewhere after that). NOW! Why are you still here?

Dr. Horrible

Also, in the first two episodes, Dr. Horrible himself reminds me rather a lot of my brother when he was in high school. Hehe. Jonathan’s going to love that.

Georgie immediately objected to this idea as he does all movies that are my suggestion and not his own, but I told him “tough torpedos” and he wouldn’t be watching anything else until he saw this. He growled at me and ran off to go play spies with Trinity before ultimately deciding that it would be better to just get my movie over with. Gee, thanks!

After the little girls went to bed, he sat down to watch the show. Anika
meandered in to see if Star Trek was anything that might potentially maybe be worth watching, and not only stayed for the whole thing but declared afterwards how much she loved it. Ha! At least one of them is properly indoctrinated now.

Georgie asked questions the entire way through the movie and was thoroughly horrified at the little bugs they put in the guys’ ears. He seemed even more appalled when I told him about my grade school teacher who used to wear silver earrings that looked disturbingly like the little bugs. Ick!

Then after clearly enjoying the whole film, he tried to claim that he didn’t like it (he does this following every activity now; it’s getting a bit obnoxious). Trinity spent the whole time on the computer looking up instructions for and making an origami Christmas tree.

At least two of them know who Mr. Spock is now!

Rachel

When the kids decided they wanted to watch a movie, I told them we weregoing to watch Singing in the Rain, which they’ve never seen (time to introduce them to old musicals). They complained until about five minutes into the show and now seem to be rather enjoying themselves. There’s all that singing and dancing, which they appear to have an appreciation for (whew! Somehow they’re learning to like culture. Hurray!).

Trinity spends half of every dance number exclaiming what wonderful dancers Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor are. Georgie seems to be paying more attention than I was expecting him to. He’s definitely got the plot figured out. As soon as Lina Lamont starts speaking in her horrible voice, which was going to be a huge problem with the advent of talking pictures, Georgie asked why couldn’t they just have someone else do her voice for the movie?

Then in the scene where they’re trying to get Lina to talk into the microphone, the director finally sticks the mic down Lina’s dress. Georgie immediately said, “I hope it doesn’t pick up her heartbeat.” The director walked into the sound booth, they turn on the sound and hear the “thump, thump, thump” of Lina’s heart. Big smartypants.:)

Overall it’s been a lovely morning and I actually got a grocery list mostly made.

Rachel

Yes, once again I have seen a movie that annoyed me
so much I am now compelled to write about it. It’s sad really. I really
enjoyed the first Pirates movie; and the second one, while not quite as
good as the first, was still a pretty enjoyable way to kill a couple of
hours. This new one, however, retained none of the charm or humor of
the first two films and instead slogs on for nearly three hours in a
fairly successful effort to eradicate the viewers of brain activity for
that discrete period of time.

Maybe while we were all zoning out through what the
filmmakers clearly thought were the more exciting points of the movie,
such as when they were sailing through the doldrums, the director was
really engaging in some form of subliminal messaging experiment. I was
mostly asleep during that part, so if the message was “You need a nap,”
then I guess the effort was successful.

Length and boredom aside, what bothered me the most
about this movie was its ridiculous anti-business stance. You must
understand, I am the wife of a small businessman, daughter of a small
businessman, daughter-in-law of a small businessman, and tend to come
up with entrepreneurial ideas myself about every three weeks (most of
these go nowhere but once in awhile something sticks such as what you
are reading right now). Anti-business sentiments tend to tick me off in
an almighty way!

Lord Beckett, the commander of the
Royal Navy spends the entire movie betraying people, welching on deals,
and backstabbing (I guess that’s three ways of saying the same thing,
isn’t it?) and then pronouncing that this behavior is “just good
business.” Then when justice finally catches up with him at the end and
the ship he thought was under his control turns around to blast his own
boat to slivers, for his epitaph he twice whines in bewilderment that
his behavior was “just good business,” bringing the total number of
times he utters of this vile phrase to four (I think four. I lost track
due to being bored and annoyed).

At that point, he glides down the
stairs as the ship explodes around him and he is engulfed in flames
(and shrapnel which inexplicably seems to miss him at every angle
instead of shredding him which it obviously should). Hello! Nice
imagery there. Why didn’t they just stamp “I am the embodiment of
satanic business” on his forehead to make sure no one missed it.
Considering that the the movie made a record-breaking $404 million
dollars in it’s opening six days, this stance seems absolutely absurd
to me. If business is the devil, what does that make the studios and
executives? High-ranking minions? Okay, that part seems plausible but
odd that they would admit it…. Hehe.

Anyway,
I was so annoyed after the show ended that I had to un-indoctrinate my
children in the car on the way home (and indoctrinate them properly
with what I think, of course). We started off with a discussion of
business and all the good things it does (no business = no grocery
stores, no food, no clothes, no toys, none of the things that we use
every day). Then we moved on to the larger problem with the Pirates
series of films, which is that it paints all the pirates as good guys
and the Royal Navy as the villains.

Yeah
sorry, but pillaging thugs aren’t really my idea of heroes, and the
English Navy did a large amount of good while they were out protecting
people from the thuggish pillagers. The problem with people operating
outside the rule of law is that they become lawless and begin to take
everything they can get with utter disregard to the ownership rights of
the people around them. They do not tend to become noble benefactors to
society.

These movies oddly present both
sides as being nearly equally matched in betrayal (the pirates nobly
call this a “code” though, to leave any man behind and steal one
another’s ships whenever it pleases them), while the same behavior in
the Navy is bad. Operating within the morality of the movie (skewed as
it is), this then seems to imply that the pirates have a higher
morality because they are honest about their buggery while the Navy
does the same thing but wields the power of the state to do so. So now
the pirates are freedom fighters? I don’t think so. They don’t seem to
be fighting for any larger purpose other than to be allowed to go
around thieving whenever they desire. Lofty aims indeed!

Anyway,
as entertaining as the series as a whole is, the entire philosophical
underpinnings of the movie are directly opposed to my own, and it was
an excellent opportunity to point this disparity out to our kiddos lest
they inadvertently pick up someone else’s mutant principles by osmosis.
You know, this whole molding of young minds thing is kind of fun!

Rachel

Handsome Hubbiness and I managed to escape again last Friday night for the second week in a row!! Imagine me doing the Elaine dance with the thumbs (from Seinfeld), and you will know what my happy dance looks like. Actually, it’s lamer than that.

Since I was inexplicably in the mood for something loud and subplot-free and Hubby never complains about those types of little movie quirks, we went to see 300. The film is based on the Battle of Thermopylae (pronounced like “Monopoly”; I looked it up) in 480 B.C. between 300 Spartans and a gazillion Persions (I’m pretty sure that’s the accurate number for the Persian hordes). In this case “based on” means that they have the 300 and gazillion numbers about right, but they add things to the bad guys cadre such as a giant with what seem to be huge lobster claws for arms and hulking elephants and rhinos that have been either dieting on steroids or were born in Middle Earth.

Wow, is that flick manly! I’m pretty sure they shot that movie on testosterone-soaked film stock. Practically every single frame has blood, guts, whacking, hoo-ah-ing, and other blood-drenched, war-related activities. The only exceptions are the three brief scenes with the naked women, and an almost interesting enough to make “subplot” status political problem back home (mainly this keeps the viewers from getting battle fatigue). Even the end credits have animated blood spattering everywhere! Made Braveheart look like A Walk to Remember.

If you typically like “guy” movies and aren’t terribly bothered by things like fictional beheadings, 300 is thrilling in that “Oh my gosh, OUR PLANE IS CRASHING” kind of way, and it is awe-inspiring to actually look at. The colors are washed out and high contrast-y, giving it a stark grittiness; and Gerard Butler who plays King Leonidas (the lead) is unbelievably strong and charismatic (I liked him back when he played Dracula in Dracula 2000. Please don’t tell anyone that I’ve actually watched that.).

Yes, in between the hacking are only about 50 spoken lines in this movie and half of them are silly, and yes there is a fair amount of random ridiculousness thrown in, and yes the women’s dresses are utterly impractical and the mens’ costumes equally deficient (however, if you like the Mr. Universe contest, you will find something to appreciate here). Despite all that, the battle scenes are fantastic, and the end left me practically giddy with patriotism (another thing I may or may not admit to upon future questioning).

This movie works because it is full of unapologetically strong men, men who rush out to protect the things they love regardless of personal cost, even if they know the cost is certain death. How can you not love that? What says “I love you” more strongly than decapitation? If your husband has been feeling a little put-upon lately or has a boss at work who makes him feel like a drone, help him find his hidden “hoo-ah” by taking him to this movie. You can close your eyes through it if you want; he won’t be watching you.

Rachel

So did you guys all watch the premier of 24 this week? I mean really, aren’t at least 75% of the country Jack Bauer fans? Also, very nice to see Dr. Julian Bashir from Star Trek DS9 back in action again on 24 (yes, me nerd, I know…). Don’t know where he’s been hiding himself lately.

After Sunday’s ep., I’ve decided that old Jacky boy needs a new nickname. From now on, I’m just going to be referring to him as Jackula. In case you missed it, Jack kills his evil captor guard (there are always lots of those in this show) by biting his neck, presumably snacking on Le Jugular, and then spitting out the big bitten-off chunk onto the floor.

Sorry, but neck gnawing? Really?? Fine, cool if you’re say, the un-dead (I think that vampires should be called post-dead really because aren’t all of us people sashaying through life technically un-dead too? I mean, I don’t feel dead at least 83.267 percent of the time); but noshing on neck when you’re pre-dead? Ewwwwww! Especially without some French bread and a side of pickles. Blech!

Yeah, yeah, I know he wasn’t actually espousing the nutritional value of such a diet but more attempting to avoid that cheery little event we like to call “certain doom.” Maybe he should get some sort of administrative variance for being firmly in the soon-to-be-dead category. And since he just got sprung from a Chinese prison (where they apparently weren’t very hospitable) to come back to the U.S. and volunteer himself as a swap to the bad guys who want to kill him in exchange for the location of a presumed terrorist (the above mentioned Doctor Bashir, who naturally turns out to be a good guy after all), I guess he can kind of be categorized as mostly-dead for a wide variety of reasons. Why do I watch this show again?

You don’t think that spending half a day pondering which category of dead-ness a fictional character has to be in before chomping on someone’s throat is acceptable behavior could be a waste of time, do you? Naaaahh. Me either.

On the less gory side, American Idol started back up last night, and it seems to be just as full of entertainingly talentless people as ever. The first three weeks where they go around the country doing the auditions are just hysterical! Have a great week! Rachel

Rachel

Georgie’s Robot Wolverine made from miscellaneous bionicle pieces:  “I’m not allowed to have fun. My batteries will run out.”

Trinity’s Polly Pockets replies: “Oh barnacles!”

I wish every television show that employs expletives in place of actual vocabulary (this means you HBO) could replace them with names of innocuous sea life instead. Plus barnacles is just a funny sounding word. Thank you, this has been your Sunday moving pictures moment.

~ Rachel