I hate spiders. Since moving here I've had to attempt to confront my fear not because there are infinitely more spiders in New Zealand than Canada but because Balthazar (who is not at all afraid of spiders) doesn't want to be my 'spider exterminator' forever. He thinks it builds character to confront my fears or something. Also we both travel for work so sometimes he's living in another city and can't physically take care of the spiders for me. I am hard-pressed to be in the same building as a spider, never mind the same room. Killing them is out of the question. Squashing involves contact and I.just.can't.do.that. Ditto removal. Like I'm ever going to gently pick up a motherfucking spider just to relocate it. So I compromised by learning to get near enough to the spider offender to drop a glass over top of it. That's my solution. I can't kill them, I can't live with them, and sometimes Balthazar isn't around. Imprisonment is the only answer.
Sometimes, though, this solution isn't so much an answer as a new problem. Like the time Balthazar was away for the weekend and I imprisoned a spider about an hour after he left. Right in the middle of the doorway to the kitchen. SIGH. I had to find a way to remember that I'd stupidly trapped a spider in the most inconvenient of locations for 48 hours and I also had to warn Balthazar, who would be returning home late at night after I'd gone to bed.
My solution:
Objects under glass are larger than they appear in photos.
The terror a spider inspires is hugely disproportionate to it's actual mass anyway.
1. It's fucking cold here. 2. The big theatrical production I work for is set to open in just over a week... finally. SQUEE! 3. I work all the time. 4. I am pretty much tired all the time. 5. I saw Terminator: Salvation and while it didn't terminate me, it didn't prove to be my salvation either. It was, in a word, "meh". 6. Are you aware that the yellow snakes in the lolly bag are not actually a horrid lemon flavor but are, in fact, banana? To quote Gwen Stefani, "that shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S". 7. Balthazar and I actually had dates two nights in a row this week. Like, we saw each other two nights in a row for longer than the time it takes to collapse into comas in bed. Which is some kind of new record for us and is definitely awesome. 8. Any time NZ wants to catch the memo about this being 2009 and get central goddamn heating will be okay with me. 9. Did I mention the cold? 10. I haven't seen Joe, the neighborhood cat, since winter set in. And while I understand his aversion to being outside in the blustery chill, I am saddened by his absence.
Ideas For Other Potential Film Adaptations Of Inanimate Objects I Remember Sort Of Fondly
... or...
Possibilities For The Continued Rape And Pointless Pillage Of My Childhood By Hollywood
Hungry Hungry Hippos: The Movie (for Homie)
Robert DeNiro in The Yahtzee Story
But why stop at board games? Breakfast cereal should not be ignored. "Shreddies won't be IGNORED, Dan."
Snap, Crackle, and Pop: The Road to Rice
For the Twilight crowd... Count Choculuscious
And when the tousle-headed star of Choculuscious inevitably wants to shed his teen heartthrob image by taking on a gritty adult role, the sequel... Frank and the Count: The Brokeback Memoirs
If so, you are in luck! Hollywood is going to grant your heart's desire in the coming years. A Monopoly movie! A Battleship movie! A Bazooka Joe movie!
If not, in the future the multiplex will be a place where your dreams go to die. Or a heretofore undiscovered ring of hell. Because the above movie adaptations of board games and motherfucking bubblegum comics are not funny-ha-ha ideas, they are actual ideas. As in ideas in development with real honest-to-god studio backing.
Ridley (Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise) Scott is set to direct what is presently known as Untitled Monopoly Project and he promises he will give it the same futuristic sheen as Blade Runner. *crickets* It's a board game, man. Possibly the most boring board game ever invented, depending on which version you're playing and with whom. But maybe I could envision watching a movie version of Monopoly if it starred Tilda Swinton, Sigourney Weaver, Anjelica Huston, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, Clive Owen, Javier Bardem, and Robert Downey Jr. and I got to be the shoe in the screening. Otherwise... I have doubts. I have such doubts! (Shameless actual good movie quote there.)
Battleship: The Movie, however, is a resounding no. No. The game was never about strategy. It was about blind dumb luck. You just randomly call out coordinates until the law of averages determines that you hit something belonging to your opponent. How does that translate into a script? Battleships without radar and, presumably, in a dense fog spiraling slowly while firing torpedoes at nothing until one of them 'senses' a hit and war is declared? Pong has more narrative. Space Invaders has more dramatic tension.
And I can't even dignify Bazooka Joe: The Movie with snark. I just... I can't... there simply isn't... *head explodes*
Today in a northern New Zealand wildlife park named Zion Wildlife Gardens, a zookeeper was mauled to death by a white tiger. The tiger was then put down. The entire story can be read here on the NZ Herald website.
There are a lot of things that spring to my mind when I read an article like this. I've tried to arrange them into some sort of coherent point-by-point argument in order to properly express my feelings which, I must be honest, lean heavily towards the 'outraged' end of the spectrum.
First,
"The death of Mr Mncube is the third animal attack in recent times at the park, which is home to more than 40 lions and tigers."
The "third animal attack in recent times at the park" may suggest park mismanagement and zookeeper incompetence more than anything else. Could it be that this park's staff aren't well trained enough to be equal to the task of handling wild animals? It takes a special kind of person to handle a tiger without losing a limb.
Second,
"The white tiger, one of only 120 in the world, has been put down."
The tiger, a wild animal imprisoned in a park and subject to forced human interaction, attacked and killed a keeper and was then 'put down'. The tiger attacked because it is a predator, because it is bred to roam vast stretches of land for the purpose of hunting, because it is a wild animal that can not be domesticated no matter how hard Siegfried and Roy and zoos try, and because it is the natural instinct of a wild animal to behave in an untamed and potentially lethal way when cornered and/or forced into unnatural behaviors. It's a tiger. It's not a kitten. Why should it be put down for doing what comes naturally? There are only near to 3000 tigers all told left in the wild, and that's a generous estimate, and the very reason they're on the brink of extinction is because of human encroachment. We creep into their land, we pave over their territory, we hunt them for sport, we hunt them for medicinal value, we put them in zoos and wildlife parks, we relentlessly drive them into a virtual corner. It's our fault tigers, like any other dying breed, are on the edge of oblivion and it's our fault they attack us while they're imprisoned in our Vegas shows/wildlife fun parks/zoos.
Third,
"A MAF report released in November indicated that inspectors were so concerned about conditions at Zion that they considered having 40 big cats put down."
Because clearly the answer to a mismanaged wildlife park where the wildlife are behaving, oh, wildly, is to kill all the big cats and start the park from scratch. Not shut down the park and re-integrate the cats into the wild. Not shut down the park and transfer the cats to better managed zoos. Not shut down the park and call in new trained staffers to care for the cats. Kill the cats. That's roughly the equivalent of saying that because a pet store isn't really making the sort of money the accountants would like, all the puppies will be summarily shot. Why is killing off 40 lions and tigers even a viable point of discussion?
Fourth,
"At a press conference this afternoon, Northland police Inspector Paul Dimery said the attack was being treated as a criminal investigation, but there was nothing to suggest the death was suspicious."
I'm assuming they mean the death of the keeper because there's plenty suspicious about the death of the tiger. The man didn't deserve to die. I'm not saying he asked for it. But I am saying that lions and tigers are wild and predatory animals and putting them in a park and naming them does not automatically de-fang them and make them pets. They will behave in the manner that instinct has always instructed them to behave. They will behave like lions and like tigers. There is a high element of risk involved. The death of the keeper was a tragedy, yes, but the criminal act was putting down the tiger whose only fault was behaving like a wild animal. Human intervention is destroying the animal kingdom and when we are left with a cold dead planet where only virtual creatures prowl specially-designed 3D rooms it will be absolutely our own fault. We try to pat lions on the nose and then shoot them between the eyes when they pounce. And that is criminal. And our own latent inability to preserve anything on this planet beyond ourselves is more than suspicious.
Keanu Reeves has been cast as the lead in the latest Hollywood reinvention (reboot?) of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Whoa.
Of course Keanu is no stranger to literary adaptation. He's mucked about in the classics before.
This is Keanu as Jonathan Harker in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula.
And here he is as Don John in Kenneth Branagh's version of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.
I didn't go out of my way to select evocative photos but I didn't discard heaps of highly emotive pictures just to make him look stoic either. Of the available options I think I randomly captured my main objection to his presence in the upcoming Jekyll perfectly. Range. He has none. I couldn't decide whether news of Keanu playing Jekyll and Hyde is more depressing or as depressing as the fact that he will be playing Spike Spiegel in the live-action version of Cowboy Bebop until I realized that at least in Bebop he'll only mangle one beloved character whereas in Jekyll he'll massacre two for the price of one.
It's not that he's a bad actor, per se, because in order to be a bad actor one first has to act wherein lies the crux of the problem: he doesn't. He is notoriously wooden. The stakes in Dracula had more personality. Walls out-act him. Paint dries with more emotional output. Of everything Keanu Reeves has done - and fuck me he's done a hell of a lot - I think Much Ado About Nothing is the most apt description for his career as a whole. If he ever writes his memoirs, that should be the title. The man has seven films in development. What is his secret? He can't act but name directors and actors fall all over themselves to work with him. He sleepwalks his way through cult favorites (Johnny Mnemonic, Constantine), literary gems, and original works (A Scanner Darkly) alike but audiences still flock to his films in droves. He has the range of a staple but the variable projects and lack of stereotyping that line his resume would make a more seasoned actor weep with envy.
Keanu Reeves is a big question mark to me. I don't get him. His 'acting' makes me cringe. And yet I end up watching a lot of films he's in and enjoying them despite him. Why is he still around? And why, in these days of Christian Bales and Johnny Depps and Robert Downey Jrs. and Javier Bardems, can Hollywood not find a more suitable actor to play Dr. Jekyll and/or Mr. Hyde?
In any case, if you've ever wanted to see an adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde where the transformation is barely detectable and forces you to ponder the metaphor of the story without the obligatory visual aid of man-to-monster it's safe to say Jekyll will be the film for you. Keanu will totally deliver on that.
Alec Baldwin recently said the following about his 13 year old daughter Ireland on a talk show:
"My daughter is 13 and I see now why, in these films, whenever they represent a Mayan culture, or any tribal culture, or a Hawaiian culture, they always throw a teenage girl into the volcano as a sacrifice," he joked.
And apparently there is a furor online about his comments with some people backing him and agreeing with the sentiment and others outraged and calling him an unfit father, blah blah, yada yada.
I, personally, laughed out loud. Do you know any thirteen/fourteen year old girls? They're dreadful creatures. They're mouthy, sarcastic, bitchy, rebellious, angsty, and really quite unpleasant.
I remember what I was like at thirteen and quite frankly if we had lived near any active volcanos I am positive my parents would have thrown me in one. I would have deserved it, too. I would walk two blocks behind them whenever we went out, would roll my eyes and sigh in irritation anytime they spoke to me, would snipe "I KNOW, Dad" every chance I got, giggled through family prayers at dinnertime, stormed that they "just didn't understand", hogged the phone for hours on end, complained bitterly about every meal made for me, told them I wished I was adopted, etc, etc.
So, you know, you parents with sweet little girl-children, baby daughters with big eyes and adorable dimples and endless hugs, enjoy it while it lasts and don't waste your time being offended at Alec Baldwin's comments. Because he only speaks the truth.
It makes you wonder if The Exorcist was more of an extended metaphor than a literal horror, you know?
"We write our own fairy tales, my love," I said. "The lesson in this is that nothing can destroy what you are now. Every wound will heal. You are a goddess."
"And the goddess thirsts," she said. (Anne Rice 1985)
If you steal this template, the combined wraths of poe, homie bear, nashya, vampirenomad and gina gershon be upon you!
Hungry Hungry Hippos: The Movie (for Homie)
Robert DeNiro in The Yahtzee Story
Snap, Crackle, and Pop: The Road to Rice
Count Choculuscious
Frank and the Count: The Brokeback Memoirs
Pogoball: With A Vengeance
Untitled Gummy Bracelet Project
Baked
Whoa.
This is Keanu as Jonathan Harker in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula.
And here he is as Don John in Kenneth Branagh's version of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.
