timing.

having realized i was in danger of updating on a regular schedule, my body appears to have decided that obtaining a virus would be a less drastic course of action. i have been sick for a week now.

i'm exhausted. and this isn't even flu, just a nasty head cold. ugh.

bad buzz.

do not buy a PNY "Attache'" usb flash drive. they are cheap. they are very cheap. not only do the cases come apart and are occasionally on upside down, but merely dropping a device meant to be portable causes the internal electronics to become unattached from its protective case. this causes the flash chip and its attached usb jack to be pushed inside, rendering the stick and any data on it useless unless you have a fair amount of patience, luck, and a pair of needlenose pliers. and some very strong epoxy. or you can find someone else who does.

yes, that happened to me today. you'd think they'd have built it a little more robustly, since the whole purpose of the thing is to be transported around (and before you ask, no, it wasn't my purchasing decision. the office bought half a dozen of them because they're cheap).

i shall now go into hiding from the pny lawyers ;)

a review.

The Brothers Grimm.

Directed by Terry Gilliam, Produced by the Bob and Harvey Weinstein.

at one point in the late 90s or circa 2000, i realized that i had, through no conscious effort, seen every movie terry gilliam ever directed. so i suppose you could say that i'm something of a fan of his and also somewhat versed in his filmmaking style and preoccupations. this movie will not go down as one of his best.

the basic plot is thus: it is the early nineteenth century, in western germany. the brothers grimm, jakob and wilhelm (or jake and will, played by heath ledger and matt damon respectively) are con artists who employ slow sidekicks to "haunt" towns for a few weeks, at which point the brothers ride up and perform shiny exorcisms. the commander of the invading french forces, played by a misused jonathan pryce, has on his hands a german village with a real haunted forest. he kidnaps the brothers grimm and sends them off to, as he thinks, expose their fellow charlatan.

so far, so good. it has all the hallmarks of a good terry gilliam flick: stories, medievalism, the question of where reality stops and where imagination begins, and jonathan pryce.

but it doesn't work. oh sure, the costumes are marvelous, the scenery and camerawork are breathtaking. but matt damon is way too much of a "movie star" to be in a gritty little flick like this. i'd almost go so far as to say brad pitt and bruce willis are better actors than matt damon. and i don't think at this point there's any question about heath ledger. but matt damon looks like he's acting like wilhelm grimm; the willing suspension of disbelief never really gets there. although i suppose that could be chalked up somewhat to the severe lack of character development anyone gets.

as for jonathan pryce... in any other movie, he'd be at the beginning, sending the brothers off to this remote little village somewhere, and then he'd drop out and you wouldn't see him again. but gilliam keeps returning to him, like a bad penny or a hangnail you just can't stop pulling at. he tries to throw in a whole sub-plot and makes the character an out-and-out sadist. and another seeming obsession of gilliam is torture. but these scenes pale in comparison to some of his others. they lack the creepiness of michael palin in Brazil, nor are they farcical like the sultan's opera in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. they just feel tacked on with minimal relevance to the plot. they don't give any urgency to the quest of the brothers. you just want the movie to get back to the village and its forest.

that liminal space between storyteller and audience, between dream and waking is where gilliam has always shown himself master, and in that respect, this movie is no disappointment. and while he pulls no punches visually and seems to enjoy putting gross stuff on the screen, it's never felt nearly as superfluous as it did in this movie. i actually found myself wanting more of matt damon and less of jonathan pryce (and his really irritating torturer sidekick (peter stormare) and the could both have totally lost the accents, argh).

the village trapper, a young woman whose family were the first to fall victim to the haunted forest, and the mad queen both seriously needed more screen time. the movie could have probably been a whole lot better if all the characters had been given some serious development, and the story of the forest given 90% of the content and time.

i'd probably give this movie two whatevers out of four. how about carrots? does anyone rate anything by carrots? i'll give it two carrots out of four for the main plot, the scenery, the costumes, the camerawork, and everyone's acting but matt damon's, jonathan pryce's, and peter stormare's. it's not a bad film. but it's not a good one either.

snuggle.

nothing to say today, just found something cute: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4627950.stm

although it does raise the question, if hamsters and frozen mice are unacceptable, what is that snake eating?

it must be the drugs.

occasionally, when we are feeling drunk and nostalgic at a party, the whole group of us will devolved into reminscences of the days when we took way too many drugs. for instance, you know you're taking too many drugs if you're watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at 11am, you're already stoned, and you have to turn to each other after the narrator's opening monologue and say, "ok, we don't have a drug problem."

we happened to end up in one of these reminscences about 3am new year's eve, when some friend who hadn't been hanging out with us during that period asked what it was like. then people started telling stories of being on acid, probably because acid and/or mushrooms make the best stories. "the more someone tells you you're going to be ok, the less ok you probably are." but i'm sitting here and listening to stories of bizarre repetition and seeing music appear and watching the dancefloor open up to the pit of hell and demons come out, and i'm thinking to myself, "shit, i have dreams like this anyway. why would i want to do this? at least i can wake up from dreams."

continued.

yesterday's post ended with a topic i think deserves a rant of its own *grin* for a brief moment a couple years ago, it really seemed as if we'd shaken off the last of our puritan roots and really embraced food as something to be enjoyed. there was fusion, there were gastropubs, the american public was becoming interested, and even more importantly educated, in wine and tea and cheese and so forth.

but now, it feels as though everything must be scientifically rationed out, so that we make sure we get the maximum amount of vitamins, minerals, fiber, omega-3s, and polyphenols and the rest of the antioxidants. never mind pleasure in food, now it's all about dividing up everything, weighing it, making decisions on what chemicals will make us live longer. leafy, green vegetables and whole grains and wine and are we allowed to buy bread that has less than three grams of fiber per slice and no flaxseeds? are the carbs slow enough, do they have the right glycemic index? soy protein or chicken? did you get enough lycopene today?

sheesh. whatever happened to balancing carbs and protein and vegetables and then just enjoying the food? or wine or beer for that matter. americans are so weird about alcohol; either we drink to get totally smashed, or we have to work it into this baroque calculation like, well, red wine is good for your heart except red wine has more carbs than white, so if we have a glass of white wine and have less carbs and alcohol, can we make up the tannins if we have a cup of green tea later on? it's amazing people eat at all, the way food is obsessed over. and then there's the slow food movement, and the portion of the population that won't eat anything unless it's convenient, and apparently fresh herbs are scary.

i mean, really. what the fuck? eat to enjoy, don't eat to excess, and don't expect a handful of flaxseeds or a bowl of oatmeal will help you if you're eating taco bell for the rest of the day. if people really sat down and thought about food from a pleasure aspect instead of from a convenience or chemical profile point of view, i think a lot more people would not only start eating healthier and being happier, but they'd realize that food is not, in fact, scary. there's a simple pride in learning to cook a simple meal. forget the french. forget the meat thermometers and the pastry brushes and the lemon zester. grill a steak and bake a potato. steam some broccoli. open a bottle of red wine. a perfect, simple, balanced dinner. wow. who would ever have thought?

a theory.

so there's been a lot of news recently about obesity. and a lot of hysteria about it. so i started thinking, why, all of a sudden, are people getting fat? i mean, from everything i've ever heard, they ate plenty of white bread and other refined carbs in the 50s. and they had desk jobs and cars and labor-saving devices and tv. is it really the portion size creep?

and then i noticed the nutrition facts label on my breakfast cereal. because it claims it's high protein, it needs to include the government's recommended daily allowance for protein on its label, which is something, btw, most products don't need to include. imagine my shock when i see that our government actually recommends that out of 2000 calories a day, 65g of them be fat, but only 50g be protein. now, i'm not into the whole low-carb atkins thing, and neither am i into treating every morsel of food as if it's part of a detailed chemical formula for longer life, but i think at some point, logic ought to take over.

happy new year.

i thought i'd wait a bit and see if it really is a happy new year. one week into it, it certainly is better than some new years have been. it's always struck me as an odd concept to have the year start in the middle (effectively) of winter. i'm not sure it can entirely be a happy new year when we're rather in the darkest part of the year. maybe it's happier in australia or something. now with the holidays over, there's nothing but cold and greyness to look forward to until the middle of march or so.

i don't tend to make new year's resolutions. as if winter isn't depressing enough, you have to start the year stressing yourself out? come on. i think the real reason most new year's diets fail is because it's already cold and dark, and then you decide to deprive yourself of fat or carbs or chocolate or whatever. ha. good luck with that one. it all seems so aribitrary, really. and while i certainly need a new job, nothing about january first is going to make me more eager or motivated to get one. job searches suck. i hope to get one this year, but to make a resolution about it just adds to the stress of the whole process. i also wanted a job by the end of last year. that didn't do me any good. so instead, i will continue my job search, and i will continue my nano, and i will continue to eat chocolate and cut back on refined carbs and trans fat and try to eat more vegetables and drink more green tea, because that's what i've been doing all along anyway.