Blood & Guts & Punch & Pie: St Splatrick’s Day

March 23, 2015 Comments Off read Movies

It blows my mind a little to think that I’ve been throwing parties on nearly every Friday the 13th for the last five years. For the most recent iteration, I invited people over to partake in corned beef, fauxtatoes, Irish cupcakes with three kinds of alcohol, and most importantly, the cult classic movie Leprechaun. Leprechaun, at its surface, is your typical “monster stalks and kills” movie, but it’s also so much more. It’s the story of a “monster” who was robbed of his property, wrongfully imprisoned for years, and his eventual release and his attempts to reacquire that which is his. It’s the story of a “monster” who can’t help but stop to clean a dirty shoe when he sees it, because he knows the importance of grooming and presentation. A “monster” who enjoys riding around in an array of tiny vehicles. I’m going to come right out and say it: the leprechaun is an antihero who got a bad edit.

Out of everyone in the story, the leprechaun’s intentions and goals are by far the clearest and most relatable. Don’t believe me? Your other options are: 1. A guy who went to Ireland to bury his mother and decided to go gold-hunting instead, shipping his treasures back in her urn, presumably having dumped her ashes somewhere along the way to make room 2. The woman who sees her husband holding a handful of gold coins and telling the story of how he got them, and deciding he’s just some goofball drunken liar despite the physical proof right in front of her 3. A man and a woman who appear to be in a winter-spring marriage situation except the old guy is taking his young wife to a filthy abandoned house in the country instead of, I don’t know, literally anywhere else, and the young wife is insufferably obnoxious with roving eyes and then later you find out they’re father and daughter which is even more strange because what are they even doing? 4. A paint crew dude with a sweet mullet and no personality save for making eyes at the daughter 5. A paint crew guy who appears to spend as much time eating paint as he does actually painting 6. The paint crew’s precocious little scamp kid sidekick who works with them? Or something? And they don’t mind when he hits them with slingshot debris and openly flouts labor laws? I don’t even know.

Actually, now that I look at that list of horrible people, I think I’m going to upgrade the leprechaun to full hero status. These people robbed him, trapped him in a crate, cut off his hand, poked out his eye, shot him repeatedly including in the face, and he still polished their shoes and gave them so many chances to make things right. Sure, he does some light murdering, and a bit of mangling, but on the whole it’s mostly justifiable.

Man, I hope Warwick Davis has a stunt double.

The Battle of Five Armies and my Scumbag Brain

November 17, 2014 Comments Off read Movies

The third Hobbit movie comes out a month from today and I am so very very excited! I’ve been stalking the iPic website in the hopes of snagging recliner seats on opening weekend (soon, precious, soooooon). A number of my friends take issue with the splitting of a book you could read in an afternoon into three films and believe Peter Jackson desperately needs a heavy-handed editor, but I disagree because I would probably pay to watch 100 movies of this quality set in that world. If they want to make some pre-prequels, I’m in. I’ll be first in line for Lord of the Rings 17: Isildur Come Home and Middle Earth 9: Honey I Shrunk the Dwarf. Unless Michael Bay takes over on his quest to kill everything I love.

There have definitely been some unintended hilarious moments, though. I edited in what I think EVERY TIME I see this scene from The Desolation of Smaug. Every time.

X-Men: Days of Future Half-Assed

June 12, 2014 Comments Off read (f)Art, Movies, Reviews

Jason: So now that we’re married, I feel like I should probably come clean. I have mutant powers. Mellzah: What powers? Jason: Basically all of them, only half-assed. Instead of adamantium claws, I’ve got plastic knives, and occasionally a spork. Mellzah: And your magnetic powers? Jason: I use larger magnets to control smaller magnets and the occasional small metallic object. Mellzah: And your teleporting powers, can you only use those in the game Portal? Jason: Now you’re catching on! I can also read minds so long as it involves a thought bubble, hold a laser pointer near my eyes and zap things, time-travel by turning clocks and calendars back, and I can throw playing cards at people. Mellzah: That’s really more eighth-assed. Quarter-assed at best.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is a unicorn among media portraying time-traveling in that I didn’t hate it. It was set up in such a way that it didn’t result in a paradox or the tired “avoid your past self” business, it established limits to how far and who could time travel so it doesn’t raise questions of “Well, why don’t you go further and do ____”, and there was no “I’m my own grandpa” subplot. I also liked that Peter Dinklage played Bolivar Trask and there was no mention of his stature whatsoever, which is a step forward in terms of putting a greater diversity of people onscreen: everyone deserves to have someone who looks like them represented in popular media without treating them like a token. I like the undercurrent of Professor X learning respect for women. I think the only thing that annoyed me was how they had to show Mystique transform into her blue form practically every time she was onscreen. We get it! We remember it’s her! Frankly, if she was able to maintain her disguise while beating some ass, some of these problems would never have arisen in the first place, because people wouldn’t be like “WHOA, MUTANT”, they’d just think that some garden variety vanilla human came down with a case of whoop-ass. Oh, and that overblown thing Magneto does. That’s annoying, too. You’re already overpowered, dude. No need to bring an atomic bomb to a slapfight.