justin bieber

Went to see The X-Files: I Want to Believe (Chris Carter, 2008). Written by Chris Carter & Frank Spotnitz, just like the movie The X-Files (Rob Bowman, 1998). I was a huge fan of the TV series. I thought the Bowman movie was acceptable. But this? How could you? What a disaster. What a dreadful appalling abominable failure, an utter failure in every possible respect! Bad story, badly filmed, boring. Talk about stretching your willing suspension of disbelief, there's nothing even remotely believable, and I'm not talking about monsters or aliens. This movie clearly stems from the notion that every viewer is a brainless moron. It's insulting to the FBI, to the medical profession, to gays, to moviegoers worldwide, etc. BE CAREFUL: SPOILER. STOP READING HERE: Scully is suddenly a brain surgeon, and guess how she prepares for an operation: she googles it! A pedophiliac priest molests a choir boy, the choir boy becomes a homosexual (of course, everybody knows that pedophiles...

Watched DVD: Turistas (John Stockwell, 2006). No, this is not a movie about unruly bowel movements linked to eating or drinking in untoward countries. It's a horror movie of sorts. Not uninteresting storyline. Gorgeous Latin American scenery. Good-looking people wearing little. Josh Duhamel and Aussie Melissa George, mostly.

Watching DVDs: The OC Season 2. Highly addictive. Not as tame as Gilmore Girls , but almost.

Watched DVD: Dirty Deeds (David Kendall, 2005). Perfectly useless and vulgar American-Pie -level teen movie, quite entertaining. Mostly for Milo Ventimiglia. Also a nice cameo by Zoe Saldana, who was in Guess Who (see below).

Watched DVD: Miss Potter (Chris Noonan, 2006). I suppose it makes some kind of sense that Aussie Noonan made Babe (1995) and then Miss Potter. I love biopics. This one is quite acceptable. Pity they forgot about Beatrix Potter the mycologist. The rest seems quite accurate (based on the little I know of her) and rather charming, Renée Zellweger being of course one of the 5 American actresses who can do an English accent.

MechaGonira (メカゴニラ) by Amapro (アマプロ) is just a little different than the other gorilla toys I have written about so far. What we have here is essentially a mashup of King Kong and a lesser known monster named Garuban. This toy is actually based on a diecast toy from the 1970s. You can see the toy here to the right. I'm not entirely sure what company produced this toy... or what the toy is even called, but it shares a body with the diecast Garuban figure made by the same company. Since the head is attached only via magnet, I guess it was very easy to somply sculpt a new plastic head for the existing metallic bodies. Fast forward to today, and you have Amapro creating a vinyl toy paying homage to this obscure little toy here. Header //2 out of 5//: I like the fact that this header is bigger than would normally be on this size figure. I also like the artwork found on the front... the style is immediately recognizable. But the header is a generic header for Amapro apparently, and the n...

Went to see The Incredible Hulk (Louis Leterrier, 2008). Frédéric J. you must go see it for your MA dissertation. I didn't like it as much as Hulk (Ang Lee, 2003). Of course, not everyone can be Brokeback Mountain Ang Lee, although French director Louis Leterrier did a very acceptable job within the limits of the genre. When you remember the AWFUL Hulk TV series of yesteryear, with Lou Ferrigno (which I watched, obviously), you have to admit we've come a long way. As a huge Marvel Comics fan (going way back to 1970), I can say with unblemished joy: finally tremendous Marvel comic book superheroes can make acceptable-to-good movie superheroes, mostly thanks to computerized special effects and the end of naïveté. In the 1980s they made the most appalling superhero movies, with guys in untight tights that came down to between ther thighs. Now they make S&M leather queen Batmen (DC though) and black spandex evil Spideys, gee. I liked the cognoscenti jokes and hints (Ferrign...

Went to see (with Danielle & R.) Le Premier Jour du reste de ta vie (Rémi Bezançon, 2008); with Jacques Gamblin, Zabou Breitman, Déborah François, Marc-André Grondin, Pio Marmaï, and Roger Dumas. Amazing Marc-André Grondin, Quebécois-accent-free this time, from C.R.A.Z.Y (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2005). He had the Ziggy arrow on his face in C.R.A.ZY . In this movie he moves to "Time" from Aladdin Sane (there's even Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" at the end). It's all very 1973. Not bad at all (for a French movie). Well acted. Jacques Gamblin always good.

Watched DVD with R. and Danielle: In & Out (Frank Oz, 1997). Frank Oz directed the good Death at a Funeral (2007) and the uninspired The Stepford Wives (2004). Script: Paul Rudnick, who wrote Addams Family Values (1993). Very funny (although I laughed more when I saw it on the big screen eleven years ago). Great gay jokes (Streisand, Midler). The masculinity tape scene perfect for a Gender Studies course. Good acting by most. Of course, the Dead Poets Society (1989) type scene at the end now feels like it's been done to death.

Watched DVD: Guess Who (Kevin Rodney Sullivan, 2005). Monstrous French title Black + White [sic]. Inspired by Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967), with Sidney Poitier. This time it is a white boy (Ashton Kutcher) in a black family. Just part of my I-need-to-see-every-romantic-comedy-with-Kutcher campaign (and R really digs him). Totally predictable and quite entertaining.

Thursday July 17, 2008. Went to see El rey de la montaña (G onzalo López-Gallego , 2007). Silly French title Les Proies . Not bad at all. Scary for a long while. Somewhat interesting twist (no spoiler on this blog). Its most interesting feature is the Argentine actor Leonardo Sbaraglia, who was in the excellent Intacto (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2001) and the amazing Plata Quemada ( Burnt Money , Marcelo Piñeyro, 2000) with Eduardo Noriega.

As promised, here I bring you these fugly guys: Giant Gorilla (ジャイアントゴリラ) by Marusan (マルサン). These are virtually the same across all colorways, so I will write about them all at once. Come to think of it, that is probably a better idea than how I have been doing it if i plan to show off the same sculpt in different colors right around the same time. I had a quote in the Buta No Hana Gorilla article explaining Toho's hesitancy in allowing companies to make toys called King Kong, and instead the vinyl toys manufacturers made giant gorillas to avoid any potential legal problems with Universal. I found some Marusan history in the Super7 Mook (a great resource for these as well as Secret Base and Real Head toys by the way) that was released late last year. Marusan was in the midst of a kaiju boom in the mid-1960s thanks to many movies and the Ultra-Q show on television, and Marusan moved from tin and plastic toys to the cheaply and quickly produced vinyl toys. The company produced vin...

Watched TV: Saw Bonneville (Christopher N. Rowley, 2006). A kind of chick flick for older chicks. Geriatric Thelma & Louise . A road movie of sorts (one of my very favorite genres). You don't yell genius but you don't scream murder either. Some good acting by Kathy Bates and Jessica Lange. Lovely landscapes.

Watching Season 1 of The OC . With Peter Gallagher, Benjamin McKenzie, Adam Brody, Chris Carmack and Mischa Barton.

Finished watching Season 3 of Véronique's Gilmore Girls . I am angry. In 03x13 they show (in unnecessary flashbacks) an unattractive brainless-looking boy who's supposed to be a young Christopher Hayden (David Sutcliffe) and an unattractive brainless-looking girl who's supposed to be a young Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham). Sutcliffe and Graham are gorgeous. How could anybody change so much, beyond recognition? Even the color of their eyes? When you think of the zillion gorgeous waiters and waitresses in LA, half a zillion looking more like Lorelai and Christopher, it makes you wonder about the sanity of the casting people responsible for this debacle. Mind you, it could get into the Guiness Book of Records as the most uninspired piece of casting in the history of television. Otherwise, Season 3 is as delightful as Season 1 and 2, if not more.

Watched DVD: The Holiday (Nancy Meyers, 2006). Romantic comedy with gorgeous Jude Law and delightful Cameron Diaz (the others are OK too I guess). Very much a chick flick (nothing wrong with that). It's got some of the ingredients of Notting Hill (Roger Michell, 1999) but doesn't work quite as well (and of course Notting Hill didn't work quite as well as Four Weddings and a Funeral ; besides, how many more romantic comedies are we going to get about a transatlantic love affair with the accent thing played up?). There's a lovely twist when Amanda discovers an amazing aspect of Graham's life (no spoiler here, be reassured). I shed a couple of tears, although not as decorously as Jude's shedding a couple of tears.

Watched DVD: The Fog (Rupert Wainwright, 2005). Tolerable remake of the John Carpenter 1980 movie. It's got Smallville' s Tom Welling and Lost 's Maggie Grace and Selma Blair, who was in Hellboy and A Dirty Shame and a zillion other things.