The holiday season means a lot of things to a lot of people; for me it means my movie wall will grow a bit bigger. Here’s what a scored on JC’s birthday:

John Carpenter’s The Thing

This is a fantastic film, the first of Carpenter’s Apocalypse trilogy and arguably the best Russell/Carpenter teaming.

To Live And Die In LA

Peterson vs. Dafoe! Shotgun blasts to the face! Extended car chases! Friedkin is in top form with this one, a stunning film.

It’s getting to be party time for this guy, I’ll finish my movie list at another date. Happy New Year Everyone!!!

Hey! It’s Greg again!

Regards,
Greg (the only) Christmas Frog

Everyday there seems to be a another story reported about someone destroying their television, house, home and body whilst playing their newest Christmas joy, the Nintendo Wii. If you own a Nintendo Wii and you haven’t yet broken at least shattered your pelvis, then you might get the impression that you’re doing something wrong. I’m here to assure you: you’re fucking this up!.

You should immediately and without hesitation get yourself in on the sweet Wii Strap recall and get yourself a hardier strap for your controller. If not you’re liable to eviscerate you and everyone you care about simply by trying to have fun. Hang your head in shame you lowly dog.

If you’ve never seen the Interstella 5555 series, it is pretty fun. The whole thing is viewable on youtube. Basically it’s a movie with no sounds or voices, just the music.

Can you count, suckers? I say, the future is ours… if you can count!
Now, look what we have here before us. We got the Saracens sitting next to the Jones Street Boys. We’ve got the Moonrunners right by the Van Cortlandt Rangers. Nobody is wasting nobody. That… is a miracle. And miracles is the way things ought to be. You’re standing right now with nine delegates from 100 gangs. And there’s over a hundred more. That’s 20,000 hardcore members. Forty-thousand, counting affiliates, and twenty-thousand more, not organized, but ready to fight: 60,000 soldiers! Now, there ain’t but 20,000 police in the whole town. Can you dig it?
Can you dig it?!!
Caaan yooou diiig iiiiiit!!!!!?

Who the hell is Swan?

Sartre said hell is other people. He was close. Not being jacked into the main frame for a week and busing for eleven hours overnight from Kelowna is hell. Now I have to play net catch up, nap, ingest narcotics, shower and booty call the girlfriend, and not necessarily in any particular order. All this does have the making of a very fine Sunday post.

How fine?

Very fine.

Hey look, it’s Darth Maul, maybe the film is about to kick back into high gear finally! Here comes the probe droid, it’s hovering in front of Maul, who apparently understands it perfectly, and now Maul is off on his little speeder bike thing, to adventures unknown… but not for long!

We’re back at the Naboo cruiser now, and Qui-Gon and Anakin are running for some reason. No explanation is given for this. It’s given in the deleted scenes, and it’s inclusion would have helped a great deal, but alas, t’was not to be. Qui-Gon has a sizeable lead on Anakin… Maybe he’s trying to leave the kid stranded in the desert, the movie might be picking up, but no. Anakin pipes up with a poorly delivered “Qui-Gon Sir, wait, I’m tired!” which gets Qui-Gon’s attention. He turns around just in time to see the bad sith dude zoomin up fast on Anakin. “Anakin! Drop!” shouts Qui-Gon in what is probably the best delivery a crap line like that will ever receive. Maul comes up on Qui-Gon and does an entirely impossible, unrealistic, and poorly animated jump off of his speeder and into battle. Pure and total ass, ILM should be ashamed.

And here we have it, the first lightsaber duel of the saga. It’s weak. Too many close ups. The robes are clearly not meant for fighting, why both the Jedi and the Sith favor these uniforms is beyond me. Honestly, I’m truly under whelmed by the first duel of the saga. The contest ends when Qui-Gon makes an equally lame and poorly executed jump from the ground onto the ramp of the Naboo ship as it passes by overhead. For shame ILM, for shame. The whole sequence ends with the introduction of Anakin and Obi-Wan, which goes from reasonable, to stupid when, after Anakin says “Hi” he re reassess things and says “You’re a jedi too? Pleased to meet you” in a voice dripping with so much smarm you just wanna smack the little fucker.

Back on Naboo, Nute Gunray, head Neimoidian is siting in a chair that walks, and talking to that Governor guy. He delivers a speech that I’m sure is meant to closely mirror the speech the Emperor gives Luke on the Death Star II “You’re fleet is lost, and your friends on the centurion moon will not survive”. It’s a good moment, but not a great one. The governor gives some weak ass rebuttal about democracy, and is then, thankfully, whisked away by some battledroids. This is unfortunately followed by a battledroid reporting to Nute. Why? I will continue to ask this. Why do battledroids report to anyone? They’re controlled by and given directives by the droid control ship! They have no need to confirm their orders or actions, because they do nothing without being told to! Lame.

Halfway through now, it’s all uphill from here kids.

I’m going to use my most surreal-looking monkey for this post, as it’s the most surreal event on the walks-to-work evar. I think everyone should start walking everywhere (without headphones) just so that everyone can interact with each other in ways like this.

See? The monkey is all shiney metallic blue, he’s angry, he’s from space, and to top it all off, he’s a Decepticon. SWEET!

Anyway, back to the story - there I was walking my normal route to work (Johnson street, for those in the area) and I was coming up on the bus stop just East of Douglas street. Right behind that bus stop is an ESL place, and there’s often some twenty-something cantonese kids out front spitting on cars or what not (I’ve seen it! Honest!).

Today it was quiet, however. Sitting at the bus bench was two 18-ish Japanese schoolgirls (like, stereotypical japanese schoolgirl. Here’s a google image search for reference) just sitting there, gabbing away in Japanese.

As I approach, they stop talking and look at me expectantly… as if I was the 9:00 bus coming early or something. (I’m not)

I take a few steps closer, and the more japanesey-looking of the two says (in perfect Canadian english, no accent or anyhting) “Do you want something from Japan? *wink*”

O_o

I don’t break my stride, but before I pass them I manage to mumble a weak “wha?”

And she smiles and says “You can give me cash and I’ll bring you back electronics, laptops… whatever you want!”

O_O

As much as I appreciate RANDOM BOOTLEG OFFERS I can’t really see how this *couldn’t* be some sort of scam.

I didn’t respond; I had a Slurpee to pick up and I didn’t want to be late for work.

Soooo….I had the “pleasure” of seeing “The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause” starring Tim Allen.

Can the addition of Martin Short as Jack Frost make a third and pointless movie in this series bearable?

Not a chance.

I saw the first Santa Clause years ago. I remember almost nothing about it. I didn’t see the second one, and I was late coming into the third. So am I biased in my movie reviewing? Probably. But search your heart - you knew this wasn’t going to be a positive review from the get go, and you weren’t surprised because deep down, you too expected it to suck (and didn’t go see it).

The problems are numerous. I mean - it stars Tim Allen. That’s flaw #1, and probably the most important. But even worse, the movie is just…bland. Absolutely nothing happens in it. Or to be more accurate - they build up that something is going to happen for about an hour. It finally happens, the tension/conflict lasts about 10 mins, and then they’re suddenly all singing with a very creepy Easter Bunny. Oh that’s right -I’m ruining the movie without even giving you spoiler alerts. If you had a brain bigger than a peanut I’m sure you would have figured it all out by the time the title sequence flashed by anyways (assuming there was a title sequence…again - I arrived late). Even the bloody Canada jokes/SCTV references weren’t making it for me. And the ending is so pukingly cheesy…ugh. I just can’t continue.

Greg…you’ll have to take over from here.

to be continued!