v-bunny

Facebook is soooo easy...

This is silly, keeping Duran Duran on here for almost an entire year and doing nothing about it. Yes, I am still here. 2008 has been an insane year but I was too preoccupied with other things (and lazy) to update my blog about it. Also, Facebook is soooo easy. I'm not sure why I don't just quit this whole thing. Perhaps it's the sheer vanity of having some part of me living on the web that keeps me checking back and not letting go. I'm still not sure what having this blog really means. A diary with it's guts exposed to the world, a place to store all the cool things I find, or something else entirely? Now that the New Year is imminently upon us, maybe I should start something new. 2009 can be a year of many great things.

Duran Duran in action.

Ordinary World

From Big Night 9, my favorite song performed live.

There's nothing better in the world.

I ♥ Duran Duran!

 

Happy New Year...and happy new me!

It's a brand spanking new year, everything has that fresh new smell. Let's shove all the unfulfilled dreams of last year under the rug and embrace 2008 with open arms.

Even though I'm pretty tired of the whole new year's resolution thing, writing things down seems to work for me so here goes:

Get my driver's license. (Yeah, pretty sad. I know.)
Get on Etsy, sell my s#@t.
Go to Japan.
Take more pictures.
Blog more.

I don't have to add get a new job because I already got one. WooooT! Same great place, brand new position.  I'm doing some marketing thing or other. So congrats to me, I got a new job finally. I'll tell you all about it once I start, which isn't until February.

Otherwise, I'm starting the new year right with some art, a couple of plays, and at least one big name author. Hopefully, the rest of the year is as exciting. Happy new year everybody!

The Golden Compass movie, a golden opportunity lost.

The Golden Compass is one of my favorite books. It is rich, complex, imaginative, and simply amazing. The movie, on the other hand, is a complete failure. It fails as a book adaptation; it fails as a stand-alone movie. The movie is a series of sequential scenes taken from the book and sloppily strung together into an incoherent mess. The story introduces an entirely alternative reality to ours but differences, pivotal to plot development, are glossed over and barely explained. And the back histories of all the major players in the story, from the Panserbjørne, to the witches, to the Gyptians, and even the Magisterium, are altogether ignored. Nothing is fully explained, leaving one to wonder how anyone who has not read the book could follow this jumbled disaster.

Chris Weitz, the director and screenwriter, is largely at fault here, stripping the complexities out and leaving the story a bare skeleton, but the editors should hold some of the blame as well for cutting this atrocity. It jumps from scene to scene with no segues, and plot points are changed or dropped altogether. There is no character development, just a group of one-dimensional cardboard stand-ins. The music is unimaginative, as forgettable a jaunt of "action fantasy movie” as can be, and the CGI leaves much to be desired.

The only saving grace is the actors in the film. Dakota Blue Richards is a wonderful Lyra, embodying the spunk and courage of the book heroine, and Nicole Kidman is enthralling as Marisa Coulter. The costumes are also gorgeous. Marisa Coulter's dresses accentuate Nicole Kidman's stunning lines to new proportions.

But these small gems do not make up for the gigantic disappointment that the rest of the movie is. Philip Pullman must be crying into his manuscript right now, his masterpiece having been butchered so brutally. I can only hope that they replace the director for the next two movies, if there are going to be any more, and it's someone who understands and respects the source material, instead of trouncing upon it with such painful disdain.

I can barely stand it, I am giving this movie one lousy bunny:

 

Out of sorts.

Well, so, I was on jury duty this past week. (Yeah, I didn't think I could actually get picked! Damn my uncompromising sense of justice.) Nothing very interesting, just a civil suit that ended like I thought it would. But it managed to throw me off. My normal schedule was interrupted and I kept wavering between feeling happy and feeling guilty for not being at work (what a dork, huh?). The case also crept uncomfortably into my mind (that couldn't be helped). It made me glad I wasn't on a criminal case though, which would probably have freaked me the hell out. I'm not going to discuss the case mostly because it's really not that interesting and also, because the way we ruled made me feel kinda like a jerk, but I feel I voted the right way and stand by it. Justice is not always pretty.

These past couple of days did make me appreciate a jury trial a lot more. What was funny was I realized that all my knowledge of court was from TV, mainly, Law & Order. I mean, the show is on 72 hours a day. I don't think they'll be making a Law & Order: Civil Suit version anytime soon (gawd, that would be boring). It was very interesting to watch the lawyers try to make a case for their sides. There were even a couple of clever (or not so clever because we saw right through them) lawyer tricks that they employed which made me chuckle a little (not out loud, mind you, I kept my poker face on). (Well, that's not completely true because at one point I rolled my eyes and then I had to look around to make sure no one saw me.) Witnesses, objections, trying to ignore things that have been said out loud but were stricken from the record (but not from our brains! come on), exhibits, and courtroom procedures, it was all kind of fun. The case was tedious but the court stuff was interesting. Though, I hope I never have to be a witness on a trial. Man, they get beat up on the stand. Or better yet, I hope I never have to go to court. I think I'd only like to participate as a juror (unless it turns out like a John Grisham novel, those jurors never get it easy).

Zombies are the new vampires.

I just finished reading World War Z by Max Brooks and I have to say that it has been the most accurate account of the Zombie War since the UN's Postwar Commission Report. As one of the few survivors of those who fled North past the freeze-line after the Great Panic, I was out of the dark on many of the events that took place, especially on the other continents. I read everything I could get my hands on after things started to calm down. There were so many different books about the war afterwards but this was by far the best. The personal accounts of not only civilians but many of the movers and shakers that shaped the war were enlightening and heartbreaking. I admire that Mr. Brooks took the time to so thoroughly seek out these individuals and give voice to their stories, be they good or bad, and give us a fuller understanding of the greatest disaster in human history. We may never know why it started but we will fight these zombie motherf***ers till every last one of them is wiped off the face of the earth. I know many of you may not want to relive the nightmare of the Zombie War but to completely understand our experience, I believe the human elements in these stories will lift us up through it.

***********************************************************************************

Sorry, I really wanted to write the review as one of the characters in the book. Here's my real-life opinion about the book. World War Z was amazing. It mashed a wonderfully imagined zombie apocalypse with realistic socio-political terms and consequences, told through the personal accounts of the survivors. Brilliant and engaging. I loved it.

5 bunnies!

I am Guitar Hero!

After playing Guitar Hero for an hour at Best Buy last weekend, I finally broke down and bought the goddamn thing. And, it's THE. Best. Thing. Ever.

I got the Wii version where you stick your Wiimote directly into the guitar (!!). I stayed up till 2 in the morning playing it Saturday and it was the best time I ever had slowly destroying my left wrist.

This is what I feel like right now (courtesy of Fall by Andy Wong):

Bear with me while I rant a while...

I admit, I'm in a kind of blogging slump. I haven't been able to muster up the strength to log onto TypePad and hit the keys since Summer and it's well past baseball season now. It's not as if tons of things didn't happen (the Red Sox, for one, 4 weddings, and Mexico, for another), but blogging for me feels like driving through a fog, sometimes I find really wonderful things looming out of the mist, and sometimes I just wander listlessly, but it's never a straight shot.  Sometimes I wonder why I even keep a blog. I'm not the most interesting person I know. Many of my friends are better writers, have more happening lives, and tell better stories than me. Not to say I'm chopped liver but other people's lives are more interesting than my own.

I think my problem is that I just can't find a voice/vision of my own. Mike's blog Bunkosquad.com is full of humor, Boston, sports, and travel, all the things that make up Mike. You can hear his voice when you read his blog. Same with jess and infinitejess.com. Totally culturally relevant, totally jess. And Meegs' BookDwarf.com is informative, addictive, and crammed full of literary goodness, like Meegs. Maybe I just have blog-envy.

So, what should I do? I am lost.

Stardust

I went to a screening of Stardust last night courtesy of my favorite bookstore and the Brattle Theatre. Now, as most of you know, I am a huge Gaiman fan, so I've been looking forward to this for a while. I love fantasy movies and there have been few and far between, besides Pan's Labyrinth, which I adore.

It's been years since I read Stardust so I went into the movie having forgotten most of the plot. The movie promised to be chock full of stars including Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert De Niro, and Claire Danes, with some sweet pop-ins by Ricky Gervais and Rupert Everett. The main character, Tristan, is played by Charlie Cox whom I have never heard of, but looks pretty cute in the posters.

Tristan is in love with the beautiful Victoria. (A complete aside: I know Victoria is kind of a "stuffy" name to have but, man, I can't remember the last time a Victoria has been a good/decent character. Give a girl a break, will ya?) She is all haughty and would rather have dashing Humphrey (who is played by someone who looks weirdly like Cary Elwes) but she is not adverse to Tristan's advances either because, face it, he's pretty adorable. In a moment of drunken bravado, Tristan vows to bring Victoria back a fallen star to prove his love for her and sets off on an adventure over the wall that separates the town of Wall in the real world and the magical realm of Stormhold. The star, it turns out, is corporal and is named Yvaine, played very nicely by Claire Danes (who I usually don't care for but she is pretty likable here). Michelle Pfeiffer makes for a wickedly fun witch, named Lamia, who is also after the fallen star for her own evil reasons, but it's Robert De Niro, as Captain Shakespeare, who steals the movie in some unforgettable scenes. I've just finished watching Godfather, Part 2, so it's quite a shocker!

So, how was the movie? I liked it a lot. It was cute, sweet, funny, all-in-all, a good time. Some small nit-picky things bothered me but I'm a geek. Someone likened it to the Princess Bride on IMDB and that's pretty accurate. The overall effort was very nice and I would recommend this movie to anyone looking for a fun movie. I was happy with it and give it a near perfect four out of five bunnies!