Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Fail, or Why I Hate George Lucas More Than Ever

So I ended up seeing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with John, Laura's parents, and her sis. Well, it was nice to see them and Laura's p's make a mean barbecued chicken. As for the movie:

The Good: Great big chunks of old-fashioned Indiana Jones fun and high jinks.

The Bad: The Crystal Skull. As soon as I saw what it was I thought "Goddamnit, George Lucas, I hate you and I hate your fuckin' stories." Now, I know that Indiana Jones storylines are ALL dumb, implausible, fantastical vehicles for all the archaeological madcap fun. I'm totally fine with that and expected it. But the Crystal Skull goes the extra mile past fun and into unenjoyably stupid. What I actually could have enjoyed were the legends in the movie being solely about ancient South American cultures, no matter how wacky, without the Crystal Skull bullshit.

More of the Bad: Shia TheBeef's (Shia LeBoeuf's) coronation as the next Indiana Jones. No. Just no. He cannot carry these movies. And surprisingly enough, Cate Blanchett cannot maintain a Ukrainian accent.

The Bottom Line: Although a lot of the movie was predictable Indiana Jones fun, the power of an overly lame premise and ending was enough to kill this movie dead for me.

The Final Word: I need to learn to listen to my gut when it comes to movies. If for any reason I get the urge to see The Incredible Hulk (how you make me cry bitter disillusioned tears, Ed Norton) or Sex and the City, I will know to go watch Iron Man again instead.

Perspective on Public Transportation

I've been meaning to write this post for a while now. Another plus about the new job is that I'm able to take the Metra train to work instead of sitting in traffic for 45-60+ minutes each way. This is the first job I've had where I was able to take public transportation, and I've discovered it's a double-edged sword for me. I'm an avid people-watcher, but at the same time, people annoy the shit out of me. So at any given moment on the train I can be amused or be drowning in the pungent humanity. For this post I'm going to list my Metra highlights and lowlights (in no particular order) for the last 5 months or so.

Out of the Mouths of Kids: a teenage girl and a boy who I estimate was about 8-9 years old. The girl was recapping the NFL playoff picture at the time and then said she would be watching the Bulls play that night. The boy responded with "pffft. Bulls ain't no good without Michael Jordan." Wha? Unless the kid had severe Webster Syndrome, he wasn't even alive when Jordan was with the Bulls. But he did speak the truth.

I don't know who designed/made the Metra conductor uniforms, but s/he managed to produce the precise alchemical combination of design elements and fabrics to transform even the most slender of Metra conductors into a wide load wagon-draggin' man. (I have yet to see a female Metra conductor on my line. Possibly because society loads enough body-image mental shit on women without having to deal with unflattering Metra uniforms.)

Talkies are my biggest fear on the train. I am at heart a shy person as it is, so I don't much like talking to strangers. Exchanging a comment in a checkout line is fine, conversing with friends of friends at a party is also not a problem. Being trapped on a train or plane with a chatty stranger who exhibits signs of being at least a mild asshole is my idea of epic suck. My dread of the Talkie materialized in spectacular fashion probably about 2 or so months ago.

• Talkie: First Contact. I was knitting a scarf on the way home and noticed the man in front of me avidly perusing some sort of National Rifle Association magazine. Which is his bag and right, but generally NRA fans aren't my kind of people. Whatever, I kept knitting peacefully. Until Mr. NRA emerges as The Talkie. I hear a voice asking how long I've been knitting. Now, Laura assures me that my mistake was to answer politely, but I'm too uncomfortable in situations like that not to answer and hope for a quick resolution of the conversation. So I answered politely and buried my nose further in my knitting hoping that the hint will be taken. It was not. I get more and more questions about my knitting, which leads to the Talkie's proclamation that HE has a hobby that "a lot of liberals don't approve of." Talkie Threat Level is now Screaming Red. He proceeds to tell me about his target shooting and I said "As long as you don't shoot people or puppies, I could not care less". TALKIE DEFLECTOR TIP #1: DO NOT AMUSE THE TALKIE. IT MAKES THEM TALKIER. Thankfully my stop came up relatively shortly after that.
  
• Return of the Talkie. One thing about riding the same line at about the same time every day, you see the same people. Yes I saw the Talkie again. This time I was quite a few rows back of him, but apparently he recognized me all the same. The cars tend to empty out quite a bit by the time the train gets near my stop, so when the car was fairly empty, the Talkie YELLS out some comment to me because I'm sitting so far away. I pretended not to hear and stared out the window. Curse my fuckwit hide for leaving my ipod on the charger and my earphones at home.
• The Talkie Strikes Back. I encountered the Talkie once again, this time getting off the train because we unfortunately get off at the same stop. This time my Talkie senses had not spotted him when I heard behind me "Soooooo, how's the knitting going?" WHUT. Again my sense of polite self-preservation kicked in and I replied before the doors finally opened and I got to flee the Talkie. That was a couple of weeks ago and I haven't seen him since but something deep inside me is always on High Talkie Alert.

Yesterday I decided to take the train downtown for Laura's gradumacation party which was fairly near the Clybourn stop. Everything was probably more noticeable because I was alone, but the train is a) apparently jam-packed on weekends and b) most of that jam is snot-nosed teenagers putting their filthy shoes all over seats that other people will have to sit on. Sigh. At least the party was really fun.

What in fuck is with people running in front of the train? Nothing is that important that you need to risk your life to make a train. Yesterday I got on the train and another lady in the car got thrown off the train by a conductor for running in front of the train. OH SNAP.

Speaking of train infractions, in my time riding the Metra, Wilmette seems to be the most guilty of train infractions requiring a conductor to get on the intercom and issue a hot heaping helping of whupass. I've heard them yell at Wilmette twice now - once for running in front of the train and once for holding the doors open for a passenger trying to make the train. I suspect it's Wilmette acting out its resentment for being Winnetka Lite.

I know the months to come will bring me much more Metra-related amusement and pain so this is a topic I will definitely be revisiting. Until then, toodles.

WTF, CNN, WTF

So I'm browsing CNN's website this morning,

• wishing among other things that Jeremiah Wright would stay out of the limelight for about three minutes
• musing about how relatively easy the Presidential campaign has been thus far for John McCain
• remembering a most apt (and out-of-context) quote by my new favorite author, Christopher Moore, whose book Fluke: Or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings contains a chapter titled Heinous Fuckery Most Foul. Indeed. There is no bottom to how low humanity may sink.

And then I notice something strange by the top headlines of CNN's homepage.

See those teeny t-shirt icons next to some of the headlines? Apparently it is a new feature of CNN.com to make certain headlines available in commemorative T-shirt form.

Whiskey.
Tango.
Foxtrot.

Why is that at all a useful feature of anything resembling anything? Granted, at least someone at CNN appears to control what headlines may be displayed across Jen Q. Public's prodigious boobies (I would hate to see what sick fucks would order "Austrian incest suspect confesses") but come on. They're unattractive t-shirts bearing headlines with (thus far) little to no entertainment value.

I may not love the specific and taken-out-of-context sentiment of Jeremiah Wright, "God Damn America" but I sure could get down with the Good Lord giving a swift kick in the kitten to news-for-maximum-profit-and-nominal-information. I think even John McCain could give me hallelujah on that one.

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Musings from the Pacific Northwest

So I'm out in the Seattle area for work this week. I knew ahead of time that this wouldn't be an especially fun trip, as I'm here to do a knowledge transfer from a person in an office that's being closed down. I can sympathize since I just came out of this situation myself months ago. To make things even better, the office network went down again (it's been doing this periodically for a couple of weeks now) which means I'm in the hotel working via VPN. Which I could have been doing back home and get to hug my kitties at night. Sigh.

Today I made the trip at least partly worth it by heading out to Fran's Chocolates. I saw these on the Food Network and I remembered them when I got the call to come out here. The item I saw on tv that really piqued my interest were the sea salt caramels. Caramels covered in dark chocolate and sprinkled with grey sea salt, or milk chocolate with smoked salt. The kind ladies at Fran's gave me two free milk chocolate ones to try since I'd bought so much chocolate. OMFG. Creamy chewy caramel (not hard chewy the way other caramel can be) and the salt is an amazing mix with the sweet chocolate and caramel. To my credit, the large box and one of the small boxes I bought are for my officemates, but I set myself up very nicely with the dark chocolate variety. YUM.

Sunday afternoon before I left for this trip, I was moving some stuff around in my home office and noticed my mini totes umbrella. All I thought was "huh, there's my mini totes." Not "Huh, I'm headed to the Seattle area, which has garnered past distinction for being an area of high precipitation of the wet and rainy kind." So that umbrella is still at home and I hoofed my way back from the mall last night in the rain. I never said I was a smart person.

I saw the movie Juno on the plane out here. I still don't understand why the commercials made it seem like the movie is only about Juno and her baby daddy played by Michael Cera. The guy is seriously in the movie for about 15 minutes. Other than that, I thought the movie was fairly cute - I had a faint feeling a couple of times that it was trying a bit hard to be cool and edgy but I didn't find it as irritating as say, Garden State.

In other travel tidbits, Alaska Air serves Jones Soda on their flights. As I was battling a slight case of McDonald's-induced sour tummy, I elected to get normal ginger ale for my beverage, but it was nice to see the Jones. The meathead sitting next to me complained and asked why they didn't have normal Coke products. Whatever. I also found an excellent pineapple soda in the lobby of the office building that uses cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. Really yummy.

It's only Tuesday night. That fact kind of makes me want to cry. I refuse to drown my sorrows in salted caramels though. Luckily I already told one of the girls I work with about bringing these back next week. So either I leave them untouched or I have to go fight the parking nightmare in that area of town to get more. Which is sounding less and less heinous the more I remember that it's only Tuesday night. Sigh. Later, gators.

Scathing Movie Review or Jena Malone's Come Down in the World

So Laura and John likely won't clap and yell GOODY when I choose to return from the blogosphere dead with a scathing review of The Ruins, because they both thought this movie was ok/entertaining. I on the other hand, left the theater determined to protect people I like from this movie. (Our differences in movie tolerance lead me to believe that, if Laura viscerally believes that Battlefield Earth is one of the worst things ever to happen to film, then watching Battlefield Earth myself will likely physically kill me dead.)

The Ruins is based on the book of the same name by Scott Smith. Much to my surprise when I looked up the book on amazon after the movie, I found out that Smith also wrote A Simple Plan, which also went to the big screen. That movie was quite good, in my opinion, if jacked up and depressing at the same time. In comparison to that movie (and in general), The Ruins was a flop.

The basic premise is that 4 pretty Americans (including Jena Malone, who has done much better work than this) go on vacation to Mexico. They run into some German guy and are convinced to go along with him to find his brother at some archaeological dig where he has chased the latest Sweet Poontang of his life. They get to the dig and madcap gory high jinks rule the day.

I should note that I expected this movie to be bad. I was hoping it would be so bad it would swing back around to good. It never built up enough momentum to do that. It didn't build up much of anything, except an easy segue into The Ruins 2: Freaks vs. Greeks. The funniest moment of the movie may be a tie between:

• A somewhat pompous dick of a young medical student declaring to his terrified friends that "Americans do not just disappear in foreign countries while on vacation!!!" Think Natalee Holloway would beg to differ with you, Mr. "America, FUCK YEAH!!!!".
• The discovery that the same character hailed from Winnetka, IL. This joke is most understandable to people from the Chicagoland area. The rest of you can just take our word that finding out a white pompous dick med student comes from Winnetka is just about as surprising as learning that Karl Rove was sent back from 2037 by Cyberdyne Industries to ruin America.
  

All in all my reactions to this movie fluctuated between "WHY?" and "SICK." and "This will never end." Not to mention a certain flower scene melded with the scene from Carrie where she starts killing everyone's ass at the prom and that was stuck in my brain for about 2 solid days after. There was very little purpose for the things that happened, other than to shock and awe the audience with blood. Which is really a shame because even with the somewhat lame setup it could have been a real mindfuck of interpersonal dynamics and what people will think and then do in order to survive. I wonder if the book does a better job of this - Stephen King seemed to think so anyway.

(JEBUS HAROLD I just figured out why Stephen King loves this book so much - the premise (and possibly the execution, I don't know) is basically his short story The Raft but on land with plants instead of water. I wonder if that guy jacks off to his own stories.)

There are worse movies. Turistas was worse. Hitcher 2 was worse. Seeing it free on cable probably wouldn't damage your soul the way Jeepers Creepers damaged mine. But don't spend the full price of admission on it. Unless maybe it's Winnetka Pride Week.

This Blog Has Nine Lives

No I have not been here for many months. Life has drained most of the life out of me for months now. A brief recap of what's been happening:

• I had surgery in September (which you all know if you read previous entries)
• I got notice at the beginning of October that I would be laid off Jan 1.
• Immediately after receiving this news, I have to spend half the next month in New Jersey to work on finishing up a project. In general, I do not enjoy New Jersey, and in particular I do not enjoy Newark Airport
• Holidays
• My unemployment begins. Job hunt is freaking me out. My overactive imagination projects me into the future where I am homeless and living in a box.
• Beginning of February, I start a new job and new job pressured high jinks ensue

My life is just now really stabilizing again. So I feel I can return to the blogosphere with a couple of posts full of my usual mocking and bitching. I promise my 3 readers that they will wonder why they asked me to update this thing.