Movie: Death Race 3: Inferno

This was mindless entertainment at its C-movie finest, complete with gratuitous female nudity and blatant misogyny.   The female nudity was fine, and I even expected it.  I neither expected nor needed a rearview shot of Danny Trejo's character getting a blowjob.  Talk about not being able to unsee something...but kudos to the filmmakers for making the scene with someone who doesn't have a perfectly sculpted ass.

A race through the desert, a bad buy, a contract gone wrong, an unexpected sacrifice, mediocre special effects with regard to human carnage, and an unnecessarily expositional ending complete the tour.

Set in the Kalahari Desert, and filmed entirely on location in Cape Town and Cerese (not sure of the name), South Africa.

Dougray Scott is a delightfully over-the-top bad guy.  Actually, most of the bad guys were a bit over-the-top.

Ving Rhames was a nicely understated amoral race promoter.

If you're into these kinds of movies, I think it's worth your time.  If you're not, you'll hate it.

What a wonderful world this would be...

I went to the CVS this evening to return my redbox and take the landlord to get his McDeath for dinner.  As I was driving away from the CVS, my car started acting funny.  Thanks be to my misadventurous youth, I know what a car feels like when it's running out of gas, so I maneuvered to a blank spot in the parking lot and had myself a little think.

We ended up walking over to McD to get his food, since he's insulin-dependent, and I don't want to deal with blood sugar issues.  He did not have the dog or the cane, so he couldn't walk home.

We get back to the car, and we're trying to brainstorm who to call.  His father, the obvious choice because he lives five minutes away, has already turned his phone off for the night.  His brother, on a rare in-town weekend, is actually camping with his kid.   I could walk to the gas station, but I have no gas can and no money to buy one.  He's willing to spring for gas, but doesn't have enough to buy a gas can, too.  What happened to the days when gas stations would have a gas can on hand and let you borrow it?

I'm scrolling through my phone and it's all Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, DC, New York, Texas!  Oh, wait, he lives two hours away.  Oklahoma, Oklahoma, Oklahoma, damn I know a lot of people in OK.   I finally found someone and managed to get hold of her after three unanswered calls, and so a ten-minute trip to get food turned into a three-hour sit in the car.  She got there, had already procured a gas can and had filled it, and a random guy that she just happened to know was there and offered to come help.

Anyway, car started right up, I got a tank full of gas (I asked for it last week, but this is not the way I anticipated it happening, lol), and I even got my Fossil Felix the Cat watch back, because my friend had found it a week or so ago, and remembered it was mine.

While we were sitting there, I commented that the one time I leave the house without my Kindle is the one time I needed something to occupy my time.  After I declared that I was never leaving the house again without my entire purse, including my Kindle, we had a good ten minutes riffing on what would be in the magical backpack in the trunk from now on (included a tent, a camp stove, chainsaw (wtf) and various other goodies).

We also talked about energy exchanges and how he'd come to understand them.  

I've never been comfortable asking for help.  The last five years have been an exercise in curing myself of that in a big way.  Anyway, I've reframed the help thing in my head, because someone once explained to me that everyone likes to feel useful or needed or just have the warm fuzzies, so when I refuse to ask for help, I am depriving other people of an opportunity to do something that makes them feel good.  I have to tell myself this a lot sometimes, but it works.  Sometimes.

Tonight, though, he talked about it in physics terms - you know, the universe is energy and everything is energy and it flows around and through everything.  When I try to be self-sufficient, I'm frakking up the energy flow - I can't put energy out if I'm not taking any in.  I'm not explaining it very well, but it hit me that by trying to be all I need no one and can do everything myself, I'm mucking up the flow and that makes things worse for everyone, including the people around me.  So I've got some thinking to do and more reframing of the crap in my head.

And on that note, what stopped me from calling any of a dozen people was the idea behind saying, "Hey, I ran out of gas, will you come rescue me?" which is, "Hey, I'm a loser who doesn't even have enough money to put gas in my own car, and I ran out of gas five minutes from my own house, and won't your Saturday night suck if you come help me."  Gah!  I complain that no one ever calls me for help, even though I would, gladly, even at my own inconvenience.  So what makes me think that others don't want the same opportunity?  My head is a frakked up place.  I'm blaming the 60s.

But.  Full tank of gas.  Felix the Cat. I bow to the universe.

Movie: Skyfall

There's a moment, about ten minutes in, when Bond is drowning, and you can see exactly how well Daniel Craig is built.  :ahem:  It's reminiscent of a popular still from the set of the senior pilots' bunkroom on BSG.  heehee

What?  I've been writing smut, and I'm feeling shallow at the moment.  :D

Dame Judi Dench is the bomb diggity.

I like suspenders on a man.  They give his trousers the right....drape.

The new Q is adorable.

Scruff does not look as good on DC as it does on some other men.  At least not the scruff he was sporting here.

I laughed out loud several times.  I think my personal favorite is "Welcome to Scotland." 

I loved that house - out in the middle of nowhere, plenty of room to tramp around, water nearby, and a secret tunnel!  When can I move in?

Replacing Google Reader

OK, so Bloglovin did not work for me.  I couldn't arrange my feeds the way I wanted, and it would only display one column, down the middle, which included blurbs and pictures and the whole shebang.  I want HEADLINES/SUBJECT LINES only.

NetVibes gives me that.  Importing it from Google Reader was easy, once I found the tutorial on it.  It has a very user friendly interface, with click to expand and click to collapse, so I can view more of a headline, then collapse it again if it's not what I want.

Since it's headlines only, it allows me to scan the headlines for the things I want to read first.  It allows me to rearrange my feeds into new groups by dragging and dropping.  It lets me mark all of a blog read without impacting the other blog feeds under that category.

So far, I've found nothing I don't like about it.  It's going to replace Google Reader nicely.

Also, it's free, but has upgraded versions that do more things - more than the average reader would need.

One thing I do like that Google Reader doesn't do, when I mark things read, they don't disappear. So if it happens that I marked something read and it turns out that I want to refer back to it a few days later, the headline is still there, just grayed out so I know it's been read.

Movies: Paperboy, Deadfall

Movies I've seen lately via my redboxinstant trial (and can I just say, I don't recommend it) are Paperboy, Deadfall and The Cold Light of Day.

Paperboy was a very strange movie, described by a friend thus: "despite getting booed at Cannes was a hugely entertaining over-the-top, sweaty, sexy and then some, Southern Gothic kinkfest of a movie."  Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey, and David O (from MI-5) are the main stars, with an ubercreepy turn as an inmate by John Cusack.  :shudders:

I had to see this because my friend (mentioned above) told me that Zac runs around most of the movie at least shirtless, and frequently pantsless.  Zac is my hugely age-inappropriate movie star crush, and naturally I was intrigued :snicker: by the idea of him doing much of the movie in his tighty-whities.

If you have trigger issues with incest, probably not your thing.  I do, but it was very subtle here, and male/male, so not as triggery for me.  It was a train wreck, but an entertaining one.  And yes, Zac Efron was muy bueno in his underwear.  lol

Deadfall at its core is a story of family and what we'll do for them when the shit hits the fan.  Brother and sister, father and son, husband and wife, father and daughter.  All four families are dysfunctional in some way, with some overt brother/sister incest vibes (seriously, someone needs to tag these things) that were not too squicky, for me anyway.  Deadfall had a fairly heavy-hitting cast, including Kris Kristofferson, Sissy Spacek, Treat Williams, Kate Mara (a favorite of mine because she gets parts that don't depend on looks - not that she's unattractive, she's just not Hollywood gorgeous) and Eric Bana, with relative newcomers Olivia Wilde (who has gorgeous and unusual eyes) and Charlie Hunnam.  Except for a news report playing in the background in one scene, you'd never know what the brother and sister did that necessitated them running, and it's really not material to the plot.  Suffice it to say, they're on the run, and all kinds of violent hijinks ensue.  Does include one very short but effective lovemaking sequence, with Hunnam and Wilde naked (not the brother and sister, fyi).  Not all the families find resolution by the end of the movie, and the denoument, while not precisely Hollywood, was just what I expected.  It could only have ended one other way, really, and while I was hoping they would go there, they at least opted not to give it a happy ending.

Mark Cuban had top production credit on Deadfall.

Cold Light of Day was a Bruce Willis movie, with Henry Cavill as the son placed in a very strange situation when someone kidnaps his family while he's visiting on vacation.  It did some slightly surprising things with the plot.  A potential love interest (great chemistry between Cavill and the actress) turned out to be the character's sister, and I was really pleased that they chose a sibling direction for the two rather than the more usual love starting under harrowing circumstances.  Cavill is in the new Superman movie, Man of Steel (?) and has grown into quite a striking man since his turn as the young Mondego in Count of Monte Cristo.  The action sequences weren't always believable, and the camera action was a bit much for me at times, but I really enjoyed this movie anyway.  Aside from Bruce Willis, whose part is rather short, there's a star turn by Sigourney Weaver as a colleague of the father's whose motives are suspect.  With the ending they gave it, it could easily turn into a franchise for Cavill, though perhaps not as successful a one as Bourne or Die Hard.

As for the redboxinstant thing - I did like getting the four free credits that I could use at the kiosk, but their streaming leaves a lot to be desired, and that's assuming you can find a recent movie you want to watch (they don't have much in the way of recent major motion pictures available to stream, and what they do have is extremely difficult to find - their search function sucks).  I did managed to stream One For the Money and SWAT: Firefight.  With only four credits per month and the streaming issues, it's definitely not worth $8 a month.  Amazon is a much better deal at $80 a year, or Netflix for the same $8 a month, with a far greater selection and very few streaming issues that I've ever encountered.

Replacing Google Reader

I've tried feedly.  Very big footprint and runs in the background, even when the browser's closed.  I tried feedreader, which though it let me sign up for it, I can never actually get the webpage to open.

Now, I'm going to try bloglovin.  We'll see.  Ignore the follow me link if you want.  I'm just trying something new.

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