aaaand un-hiatus!

Is “hiate” a verb? Anyhoo. When Nina originally suggested I make this blög, she mentioned something about the YouTubes. I know a little about them. You see, my brother is a YouTube star. Observe:

My brother FILMED THAT! COME ON!

So now that you know about my dynastic relationship with YouTube, get ready, because I’ve got a whole lot of time on my hands this semester, and YouTube is a big place.

i’m sure someone has done this before, but

Hmm?

girls love vampires (2 for the price of 1!).

But I don’t. Serious, guys.

Okay there are a few exceptions. One is the fantastic series currently airing on HBO (renewed for a second season!), True Blood. The story is based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlene Harris, which revolve around the eponymous extra-sensitive psychic southern sass-machine.

One of the best things about the show is how Sookie’s bloodsucking paramour pronounces her name. SOOKEH!

In the world of this show, Vampires have come out of the closet with the advent of “True Blood,” a Japanese synthetic blood substitute. This has let vampires off the hook,  so to speak, because vampires don’t have to kill people anymore. However, they face widespread prejudice from many southern bigots on the show. Indeed, the title sequence, which is the best part of the whole show (Alan Ball, the creator, also worked on Six Feet Under, another HBO series with phenomenal titles), has a few frames of a church marquee which says “GOD HATES FANGS,” a clear reference to the famous Westboro Baptist Church website.You may notice a BIG GAY ALLEGORY in this show. Vampires don’t deserve special rights? There’s a reason things are the way they are? O RLY?

So, although the vampire reps that appear on television are well-groomed and well-spoken, we learn that when vampires live together, in “nests,” they get NASTY and MEAN and like to SUCK REAL BLOOD. Our protagonist vampire, “Bill,” was on his way home from the Civil War and stopped to stay the night in the cottage of a good samaritan, but OH NO SHE WAS A VAMPIRE AND SHE SEDUCED HIM AND MADE HIM ONE.

The more ridiculous aspects of the show include a gay  short-order cook-cum-prostitute-cum-drug dealer named Lafayette who might be the most entertaining person on the show. There was the time when he licked the hamburger bun of an epithet-slinging redneck and called it an AIDS burger. (“All you gotta do is say hold the AIDS.”)

Lafayette’s prostitution goes hand in hand with his dealing, as he sleeps with that guy from Office Space in order to obtain “V” a drug which is just vampire blood, which looks more or less to have the effects of LSD and ecstasy together.

As for Sookie, she has started to appreciate her extrasensory hearing of others’ thoughts, and is becoming… A PSYCHIC DETECTIVE! FOR HIRE! FOR VAMPIRES!

Personally, I unabashedly love this show. I wish it was a little more crazy and gothic (not goth – important distinction), more like the title sequence. That said, it’s trashy and fun, Bill is quite attractive, in a pale sort of way, and I feel less guilty about watching it than, say, A Double Shot of Love.

The other bad vampire thing I really like is tons, tons worse. Sigh, yes. It’s Queen of the Damned. I don’t really have a lot of excuses for liking it, except for how attractive Stuart Townsend is, the extreme efficacy of Deftones “Change (In the House of Flies)” as a soundtrack addition, and Aaliyah. I mean, come on. But oh my god, I can’t even find any YouTube clips from it without tributes to Stuart Townsend or gothy MARILYN MANSON COVERS added. Ughhhhh. I feel so dirty. Get out of my life with that bone structure. I have to go bathe.

not even funny.

Ever since I saw The Happening on Friday night with my parents, I’ve been thinking about whether I should post about it (Note: the trailer is INFINITELY better than the movie itself. The movie is more like the blank but confused stare of Mark Whalberg at 1:46). My dilemma is this: without a DOUBT this movie is utterly bad. However, if writing about it would put one more dollar or second of airtime into M. Night Shyamalan’s pocket, I would not be able to forgive myself. Yes. Time. In his pocket. ANYWAY.

Here I am, so here we go. This movie SUCKED. This blog is supposed to be about bad stuff I like, but this movie, I did not like. I actively dislike it. I post about it now only because The Happening is so mind-bendingly, soul-crushingly retarded, it’s a mitzvah to prevent one person from seeing it, if I can.

With that in mind, if you are masochistic enough to still want to see this piece of shit, quit reading, because I am about to spoil the whole shitty thing. This movie is about nature. GETTING BACK AT HUMANS. AHHH!!! I’m pretty sure that it was inspired by this fungus. But that would (to Mr. Shyamalan’s credit) make a pretty slow movie. One of the only good things about this movie is that it isn’t that long. The movie is about a coordinated attempt by the flora of the Northeast United States to kill everybody. Or to be more precise, to make everybody kill themselves. And this is the first thing in the movie that makes NO FUCKING SENSE. Okay, turning off a self-preservation instinct, that I could swallow. Producing a lethal poison, THAT I could swallow. But this neurotoxin makes people ACTIVELY COMMIT SUICIDE. From hairpin stabbings to jumping off buildings to passing around service weapons, all of these people start babbling, freeze, then find a way to off themselves. I’d like to think that I have a pretty active imagination. I read comic books, and I love Darren Aronofsky, but this I DO NOT BUY. SORRY M.

That is only the first (if completely pervasive and overriding) problem with this movie. Why first? Because this plant theory is proposed within the FIRST FUCKING FIFTEEN MINUTES OF THE MOVIE. AND NEVER PROGRESSES. Literally, there is never any more explanation of the means or motive of this retarded plant scheme. Also, the plants blow the neurotoxin through the wind (which they somehow create), so the action in this movie consists of the characters RUNNING SLOWLY AHEAD OF A BREEZE.

My other immediate WTF moment was when I heard Mark Whalberg’s voice talking science. Whoa whoa whoa, Marky, the BEES ARE DISAPPEARING? YOU RIB YOUR HUNKY STUDENTS ABOUT PEAKING IN HIGH SCHOOL? YOU CALL THE PRINCIPLE THE DARK LORD IN FRONT OF HER AND YOUR STUDENTS? GOD YOU ARE SO QUIRKY AND FUN!* Also, the bees have NOTHING to do with this killer breeze, which both the trailer and movie itself strongly suggest it should.

And oh my fucking God, this movie neutered John Leguizamo like an overzealous SPCA volunteer. John, you were so great in Romeo + Juliet, and so many other movies, ughhh you were so mousy and ball-less in this. You guys, John Leguizamo leaves his young, painfully shy daughter in the care of Mark the science teacher and his apathetic girlfriend played by Zooey Deschanel. The fact that their love is completely unconvincing makes a scene in which they walk toward each other (John’s daughter in tow) potentially committing suicide (it’s unclear) in a breezy open field particularly unmoving. BUT! IT’S OKAY! THE “HAPPENING” HAD QUIT BEFORE THEY WENT OUTSIDE YAAAAAY HOORAY! MARITAL TROUBLES FIXED!

According to Wikipedia, M. compared this movie to The Birds and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. Sorry. No and no. NO.

Lastly, this movie had NO FUCKING TWIST. The one (altogether cheesely) hope I held out for the movie was M.’s signature twist, which was wonderful in The Sixth Sense, and terrible in the WAT-provoking The Village. The twist, such as it was in this movie, came after the long blackout-maybe-next-scene-maybe-credit-rolling moment, when we see Frenchmen strolling through the Louvre Palace gardens, and WE SEE EVERYONE FREEZE! IT’S STARTING AGAIN! UH OH!

Ironically, I had a spat with my mom right before we started the movie about how people with very little talent got to make big movies. My mom insisted that you NEED talent to make big movies. By the time the credits rolled (in fact, probably long before that), I’d won her over.

Lastly, I really do like apocalyptic stories (when some people survive), but I think the interesting stuff is what happens when the apocalypse is over. I’ve been watching Survivors on BBC,which is about survivors of a worldwide flu epidemic picking up the pieces of humanity. It is the opposite of this movie. That is, good.

*Oh hai Mark. For the record I think you’re fine and a damn fine actor, when given a good part. Please don’t beat me up like Andy Samberg. Say hi to your mother for me.

not first post.

GOD that’s annoying, right? Dear Diary: My first entry! NO.

Dear Diary: This entry is about THE CROW. My first favorite bad movie. Of course it took me LONGEST to figure out that other people thought it was bad. whatever, suckas. So, The Crow is your typical revenge-of-the-murdered-guy type movie, but this guy…HAS A CROW! And is all invincible and shit! But really, the reason I like it is despite some REALLY bad sfx, the story is pretty neat, and the city it’s set in (future-Los Angeles), and the soundtrack is pretty amazing. Somehow, The Crow rates an 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, so I’m not REALLY sure how this is classified as a bad movie, but my criteria tend to be if enough people make fun of me for watching it, it’s “bad.”

Additionally, there’s Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, who was accidentally killed on set by a mishandled prop gun. This actually happened before shooting was finished, so the parts of the movie that were not filmed (those filmed, ironically, BEFORE Brandon Lee’s character died)  had to be rewritten. Wikipedia (the source of all credible arcane bad movie knowledge) tells me that Lee’s death cost the film’s production another $8 million, which makes me wonder if Lee’s death was the thing that ensured The Crow couldn’t be profitable.

Not only was this my first bad movie, but ohhh shit, looks like it’s coming around again. After a few really bad sequels, (Including one starring Tara Reid, David Boreanaz, and Edward Furlong who plays Ed Norton’s little brother in American History X. To top it all off, Edward Hopper plays a character named EL NIÑO.), Stephen Norrington is trying to get the rights to make another Crow movie. Who is Stephen Norrington, you ask? Only the man who made BLADE! Not only that, but seriously guys, he directed one of the very worst comic-to-feature-film movies (especially because it was adapted from suuuuch a good comic)… are you ready … FUCKING LXG AKA THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN. YEAH. WITH SEAN CONNERY. Jesus Christ. Then again, The Crow was based on an absolutely awful (art-wise, I haven’t read it) comic book, so maybe Norrington will reverse the trend and make a kickass movie. But I find myself doubting it. I think it’s more likely that I’ll get more fodder for this blog.

There is so much amazing YouTube clippage of scenes from The Crow. Don’t miss this one, if only to check out the user who uploaded it, “vampirestrom” (Named strom? “Maelstrom portmanteau? You be the judge). Don’t forget kids, cyberbullying is a crime!

Last but NOT LEAST, The Crow also features notorious crazypants Bai Ling.