Yeah? You and whose army?

Deathly Hallows, Part 2. The end of a fandom era.

Reading Deathly Hollows was a swift blow. Tears and laughter and joy and all the more tears. No more books. But we still had the movies left to enjoy.

And now it’s done. The last movie has been released, and short of locking JK Rowling in a cellar and making her write more (and believe me, we all have ideas), there will be no new Harry Potter.

It’s sad. And it may explain why I cried more during this movie than I have at some funerals I’ve attended.

Many people, including TBF’s hubs, have said they were disappointed by the film. They expected more. I am rewatching the film as I write this (which accounts for the horrendous cam-quality pictures I’ll be interspersing throughout the entry), but I cannot see anything in this film that would cause me to be grossly disappointed in it. The bits that were left out were for obvious reasons, and what I was annoyed about most pales in comparison to what I loved.

So, let’s begin.

RIP Amy Winehouse

All I can ever be to you,
Is a darkness that we knew,
And this regret I've got accustomed to,
Once it was so right,
When we were at our high,
Waiting for you in the hotel at night,
I knew I hadn't met my match,
But every moment we could snatch,
I don't know why I got so attached,
It's my responsibility,
And you don't owe nothing to me,
But to walk away I have no capacity

He walks away,
The sun goes down,
He takes the day but I'm grown,
And there's no way, in this blue shape,
My tears dry on their own,

I don't understand,
Why do I stress a man,
When there's so many bigger things at hand,
We could a never had it all,
We had to hit a wall,
So this is inevitable withdrawal,
Even if I stop wanting you,
A perspective pushes true,
I'll be some next man's other woman soon,

I shouldn't play myself again,
I should just be my own best friend,
Not fuck myself in the head with stupid men,

So we are history,
Your shadow covers me
The sky above,
A blaze only that lovers see

I wish I could say no regrets,
And no emotional debts,
Cause as we kiss goodbye the sun sets
So we are history,
The shadow covers me,
The sky above a blaze that only lovers see,

He walks away,
The sun goes down,
He takes the day but I'm grown,
And in no way,
In my deep shape
My tears dry

RIP Amy Winehouse. You were too talented and too smart. I looked forward to your next album, and I'm horribly sad I'll never hear a new song by you.

Pre-Potter

Yesterday I worked early at the boring job so I could see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in the evening with TBF, her hubs, and a friend of ours from high school (who should have a better title, but that’s what he gets).

This was me before, at work all day:

This was me during and after:

If there’s one thing you should know about me, I take my time on blog entries, so the Deathly Hallows entry isn’t done cooking yet.

I do, however, have thoughts on the trailers pre-Potter.

Birthday Girl (Writer)

If Joss Whedon is the King of TV Writing, Jane Espenson is the Queen.

Sharp and witty, with such deep heart and sincerity, her writing is always deeply felt, and can pull the heart strings and punch the tear ducts.

Jane has had her fingers in so many scripts from my favorite shows. Anytime she’s involved in something, I sit up straighter, because I know she’s going to give me beauty.

Most importantly, it’s thanks to her Twitter Writing Sprints that most of my blog entries get written. Yes, blame Jane Espenson.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episode 5x12 - Checkpoint

“I’m fairly certain I said no interruptions.”

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episode 3x18 - Earshot

“My life happens to, on occasion, suck beyond the telling of it. Sometimes more than I can handle. And it's not just mine. Every single person down there is ignoring your pain because they're too busy with their own. The beautiful ones. The popular ones. The guys that pick on you. Everyone. If you could hear what they were feeling. The loneliness. The confusion. It looks quiet down there. It's not. It's deafening.”

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episode 3x06 - Band Candy

“Oooh... Copper's got a gun.”

And my newest fandom, which I got into solely so that I could watch Caprica, a show helmed by the lady herself.

Battlestar Galactica Episode 3x10 - The Passage

“What you did was harder than facing a bullet. And you did it without putting one other soul in harm's way. Don't know if I could've done that. I wish there something more that I could give you.”

Forcing myself to stop with just these. See her IMBD page for all of my other favorites. Seriously.

We love you, Jane. Have an amazing birthday.

Bloglet: Traumatizing Childhood Movies

I thoroughly enjoy watching movies from my childhood.

I was an 80’s kid, and I lapped up all of the great 80’s movies. Including ones I never should’ve watched at that age (Sixteen Candles, anyone?)

There are some truly traumatizing children’s movies. I mean, have you seen Old Yeller? Bambi? Even E.T., with it’s cute short little alien with the extendable neck. Go re-watch the scene where he’s white and dying. Last time I managed to make it to that part, I was sobbing so hard I was hyperventilating. That was in my 20’s.

But the most traumatizing movie scene is one that is very rarely mentioned when you talk about upsetting movies. And it shocks me, because I was so upset by it as a child. It broke my then-fully-intact heart.

The Red Shoe - Who Framed Roger Rabbit

I don’t believe any one scene from a supposedly children’s movie has ever upset me as much as this scene did. And I am a soft-hearted freak. I ran over a rat the other night and was in near hysterics.

First of all, shoes come in pairs. They’re partners. Friends. Compatriots. Lovers.

(Don’t think of your shoes being lovers, it’ll freak you out.)

So, this poor little shoe’s partner? Is now alone. What’s that shoe going to do? It can’t find a new partner, all the other shoes are already paired! Plus those sassy purple heeled boots look like bitches.

Find a cartoon with a peg leg, who only needs one shoe? Well, yes, he could do that, but all his life, he would feel the emptiness of his missing partner.

Did you see the eyes on that shoe as he was put into the dip? Ignore the cartoon open mouthed screen. Look at the third screenshot. That is a broken shoe. That looks painful. And he screams.

Seriously, I think of this scene and it upsets me, and I really love this movie.

This is, by far, the most traumatizing moment from a children’s movie. Ever.

I don't make suggestions. If I want to toss a baby out an airlock, I'd say so.

In May of last year, I wrote an entry about how much I loved Season 1 of Battlestar Galactica. How the ending was so incredible, and had definitely sucked me in, and snagged me for Season 2.

Promptly after the entry, I popped in Season 2, and watched hungrily. I was ready for more Cylons, more Starbuck and Six, what was going to happen to Adama, and Sharon’s baby. I was READY.

And I watched it. And thrilled. And tweeted, and screeched, and gasped, and cried. My friend Joey gave me the entire series on DVD, mostly because he got a set free, but also because he rocks.

And then nothing happened for over a year. I became distracted by other TV shows, other movies, other life. The DVDs stared at me, accusingly. Jamie Bamber started on Law and Order: UK, and I had constant reminders of how great the show was, and how much I was not watching it.

So, out of nowhere a couple of weeks back, I decided it was time to jump back in, feet first. I set up with my work phone and knitting, and was determined to finish a Season 2 rewatch, in preparation for Season 3.

Took over a week, then even longer to finish this entry. But wheeeeeeeee, BSG.

I worship at the Whedon Altar

I’m not the kind of person who would celebrate a celebrity’s birthday as though they were someone I actually know. Wish them happy birthday on Twitter, yes. Acknowledge it publicly and personally, and do a little happy dance that they’re still in the world, and were born at all?

Pfft. That would never happen.

::cough::

Today is Joss Whedon’s 47th birthday. And I can’t think of a better person to get their own birthday blog entry.

Technically, I have been a Joss Whedon fan since I was 7 years old. I watched Roseanne religiously as a child, and he wrote for that show. Even before that, I watched the old school Captain Kangaroo, and you couldn’t tear me away from The Golden Girls. And that was his father. Not to mention? As a Nick at Nite child, I was a huge fan of The Donna Reed Show, and The Dick Van Dyke show. Guess who wrote on those? His grandfather.

Love for Joss Whedon is in my blood, and I didn’t know it on a random day in 1997 when I flipped through TV channels and saw John Ritter on my screen. I stopped to see what it was. Hmm. Robot. That’s odd. Oof, he just went flying down the stairs. Wow. And I changed the channel.

It wasn’t until Season 3 that I started watching the show, and I think it was more the sexy brooding guy and extremely sexy bad girl that got me coming back. But there was no denying this show had something special. And it was all thanks to the man behind the Grrr, Argh.

My love for the show grew with each episode. By 1999, I was an internet junkie, and I devoured every bit of information I could about the show, and its creator. By 2001, I had found a board on AOL to discuss the show with other fanatics, and it was really only then that I learned who Joss Whedon was, and got to discuss how amazing the writing and actors and everything was.

I didn’t watch Firefly at first. It was more a technical error than anything else. I set the season premiere of Buffy and the series premiere of Firefly to record that day, and neither came ended up recording. (Anyone remember VCRs?) Naturally it didn’t stop me from watching the Buffy, but I let Firefly fall by the wayside. It wasn’t until 2005 that I finally watched the entire series, and nearly cried from losing such greatness. After the pain of losing Dollhouse, I’m actually glad I wasn’t there for the original loss of Firefly.

RyAn is a much braver person than I, and he listed his top 10 favorite Whedonverse characters. This will not happen, as my brain is perfectly content not exploding. I will say that in the Whedon realm, nothing tops Buffy for me. It was the first, it was the best. Despite what happened when Marti Noxon took the helm.

With one glaring exception that RyAn will be quick to point out, I will and have watched everything Joss Whedon is involved in. Like many obsessive fans, he can essentially do no wrong in my eyes. I am not a comic book fan, but I will watch The Avengers, and I am genuinely looking forward to it.

Happy birthday, Numfar. Thank you for being you.

I’m right on top of that, Rose

Dammit, RyAn.

So, today yesterday was the 20th anniversary of Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. One of the greatest comedies of all time, with a cast that, with two exceptions, has slunk into blissful oblivion, yet will always, in my mind, be associated with this movie that I loved and cherished and was just thinking about last night as I was trying to go to sleep and ignore the cat pouncing on my head.

And RyAn chooses MIDNIGHT to inform me of this knowledge.

RyAn is a fucker. But I love him. And of course, he takes the only real promo image available, so I’m stuck with a watermarked title image. Really, love him.

I remember exactly where I was the first time I watched this movie. It was almost immediately after my parents’ divorce, and my mother, sister, and I were living in our first place away from Psycho Puppy Killer. We watched this movie, and I nearly peed myself laughing. As I grew older ('Cause I was 8?), and kept watching, I’d catch things I’d missed, and find it even more hilarious.

I loved Sue Ellen. And as a child of the late 80’s-early 90’s, thought she was so stylish.

 

Commence mockery in 5…4…3…2…

 

 

But apart from the horrendous fashion in the movie, this is truly a classic. I have bonded repeatedly with people over this. This is a movie where, if I bust out a quote in a random situation, and no one gets it? I know I am surrounded by idiots.

Walking through a grocery store with my friend Ashlie.

“Every girl over 25 needs a cucumber in the house.”

She got it.

Working at the horrible cable company, stressed out of my mind, and I get asked a question.

“I’m right on top of that, Rose!”

Peals of laughter. It became the new office catch phrase. We wrote it all over the office.

And of course, the classic line that can never be overused.

“The dishes are done, man.”

Whatever happened to these people? With the exception of Christina Applegate and David Duchovny, they have all been relegated to “Hey It’s That Guy” status. Which, to be frank, is sad and appalling.

(WARNING. That link goes to TV Tropes. Unless you have an extremely strong willpower, or 8 hours to spend on the internet, don’t click it)

I can never see this movie enough. And I wish someone had told me earlier that I should’ve watched it to celebrate today.

If I owned it on DVD. Which I just realize I don’t. Damn.

Notoriety for whatever reason, never seems to benefit the noted, only the notees

The first time I saw the trailer for Easy A, I knew I was going to love it. No, really. If you go back through my Twitter feed to last year at some indeterminable time,  you’ll find my tweet. It was even responded to.

I say this not in the Hipster, “Oh, I liked that waaay before it was mainstream” way. I say it because this movie was released in September of 2010 and I took my precious damned time in watching it.

I begged people to see it at the theater with me. (Yes, I am one of those people) I got it from the library twice. I returned it, put it back on hold, and felt like an overwhelming failure.

But HA HA, I finally watched it. Suck on that, Hipsters!

If the lion knows its own strength, no man could control it

In honor of the sweetness that was the wedding of William and Kate, it is only fitting that I finally post my thoughts on The Tudors.

My love for all things from the Tudor dynasty started at the end of 2008, when I read The Other Boleyn Girl at the recommendation of my friend Dawnie. The book is hilariously thick, but I devoured the pages. I love reading about history, and royalty, but it tends to be very dry, and that rubs the nerves. I figured out I am a fan of historical fiction, not so much the nonfiction.

I’d never seen the television show The Tudors, however, until the idea to get it from the library popped randomly into my head. I got Season 1, watched it voraciously, and immediately put Seasons 2 and 3 on hold. I would’ve made an entry after Season 1, but I was too focused on getting the next and next and next. I decided halfway through Season 3 I would just write an entry about the entire series.

The show is beyond phenomenal. Though to be fair, I’m not watching it for historical accuracy. I know about as much about England’s political history as I do about it’s political present. It’s sad, really. I knew Kate and William were getting married, Harry dressed as a Nazi, and the royal prince wanted to be a woman’s tampon. That’s the knowledge I retain.

Anyway, back to more pleasant matters.

I take it you think everybody is who they say they are

Recent tragedy in my life has pretty much cut me off from watching TV or movies for the past two weeks. I tried to watch a few different things, Season 4 of The Tudors, which I’ve been waiting for from the library for months. 12 Angry Men. The Last Samurai. Okay, I didn’t try particularly hard to watch that one, only pretended to.

But I finally got a weekend “to myself” (read: at home working/moping rather than trying to run around putting out fires), and a couple of brand new (to me) movies. To celebrate this momentous occasion, I blog.

I saw the trailer for Shutter Island movie during whichever Scream Awards it premiered on. I thought, “Wow, a suspense movie by Scorcese, starring Leonardo DiCaprio? This is going to be great! How could it not be?”

I started watching the movie Saturday night. And fell asleep. Several times. Finally gave up, hoping that watching it Sunday morning it would be more interesting. Fell asleep again. Between this and The Depahted, Martin Scorcese is losing some serious points with me.

The worst part is, this should be a movie I would love. Creepy mental asylum, total mind fuckage where you suspect something is going to happen, but have no idea what it. Creepy doctors, all worlds of mystery and suspense. This is totally my genre!

Except I didn’t give a damn about any of the characters. As a matter of fact, the only semblance of sympathy I had through the entire movie was for the characters at Dachau. From the jump, I didn’t care about Teddy’s dead wife. Then when he started seeing her everywhere, I pretty much had it figured that he was, indeed, one of the looney bin occupants, and this was an elaborate dream world. The only part I didn’t see coming was the children being his, and that the doctor had planned it.

I seriously may never watch another Scorcese flick again. At least not a new one.

Salt, on the other hand, not only lived up to every expectation I had, it blew them all out of the water and brought my Angelina fangirling to a brand new level. It was not hard to surprise me, though, seeing as how my knowledge of the movie was extremely limited. Originally a male lead, rewritten specifically for her. Bond/Bourne-esque, and The Operative from Serenity is in it. That’s my knowledge.

I always make the error of watching Special Features before the film. Not all of them, if it looks like it’s obviously going to spoil me, I won’t do it. And of course I wait until I’ve viewed the film once before watching any commentary. But I watched a couple of featurettes which pretty much caught me up on the basic premise, without giving really anything away.

Similar to Mr. And Mrs. Smith, we start out with a very domesticated Jolie character, with the knowledge that she’s anything but. I have never liked her as a blonde, not even when she was macking on Christian Kane. And the blonde wig here was just tragic. But the moment the camera rounded her and we saw the black hair, the payoff was well worth it.

As much as I love emotional scenes with this actress, her real talent is in the action, and this movie is crammed with enough fight porn to fill even the most macho of macho men’s quotas for the year. And the best part is that these fight scenes don’t feel choreographed, like with Mr and Mrs Smith, but spur of the moment, vicious and mean and brutal.

And that sums her up in a nutshell. Evelyn Salt/Natasha Chenkova was mean. And that’s what makes this stand out next to other action movies. In the original script, it was a male lead, fighting to fight, yes, but also to rescue his wife and child. Angelina immediately said, “Erm, yeah, fuck that, no kid.” We got a little heart and spirit with her quest for her husband, and the heartbreak on her face for that split second after they murder her husband is very real, and extremely painful. But she snaps back, and keeps going, and turns into the baddest badass you’d never want to run into, male or female.

The pacing of the movie felt weird. It didn’t feel like there was really a beginning, and the end was strange and abrupt. Obviously leaving an opening for a sequel, which I am not averse to. But still, I watched it twice, once with commentary, and still didn’t feel there was a middle. Then again, I don’t watch a lot of Bond-esque movies, so maybe I’m just not used to it.

My Angelina fangirling is safe once more. Amazing.

My Leonardo love is in serious jeopardy, and may not recover.

I Remember My Dream Now

When the promos for The Walking Dead first started making their way into my internet world, I was less than impressed. I enjoy a good George Romero film as much as the next person, but a TV show about zombies? Really?

Two things changed my mind. The first, that this show was going to air on AMC. This is the channel that airs Mad Men. It’s hard to believe that it would waste air time on a show strictly about mmmm, brains. Secondly, in watching the promotional trailers, I noticed it was from the creators of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Now, both of those movies are the brain children of Stephen King, and they’re both very intense, and beautifully done. Never in a million years would I watch either of those and think, “Wow, these people really need to put a new spin on the zombie genre.”

When I mentioned on Twitter and the book of face that I was considering giving it a shot, I got bombarded with WD comic love. Oh. This is a comic? That got my attention. So I set my DVR to record the series, and promptly forgot about it. Well, to be more accurate, I was so bombarded with other things to watch that I didn’t carve out time to watch it. Then the New Orleans Comic Con announced three actors from the show were coming, and I realized if I didn’t watch the show, I was going to be that person. “Oh, yeah, the show looks great. I have it recorded. NO idea who you are. Nice to meet you, though.”

So, I set the weekend before the con aside and watched the six episodes that comprise season one. And then screamed in rage that it only lasted six episodes, and I had an entire nine months to wait for the next season.

New Orleans Comic Con

Last weekend, I had the extreme pleasure of being chosen to be one of two official photographers at the New Orleans Comic Con. It was my first Comic Con ever, and it makes me wish that I worked for Wizard Con and could follow them around taking pictures for them all the time.

This blog entry is about my personal experience, which means I’m only going to have information about what I experienced personally, and my thoughts on those parts. The pictures are either my personal (unofficial) photos, or photos I borrowed from my co-photographer, Laurie Lee.

So, if you’d like to take a gander, I think it’s worth it. If only to hear what a pathetic fangirl I turn out to be.

Being Boothy

In April, I said I was looking forward to Season 5 of Bones. I also said it would take me a year to watch it.

Good news! It only took me nine months! I’m ahead by three.

I wasn’t spoiled for this season like I was the last. I saw one episode, the barbecued body one, because it was an opener for Dollhouse. It didn’t spoil me for anything other than Arastoo’s actual accent. I didn’t know where the storyline was going with Booth and Brennan, but I had the feeling I wasn’t going to like it, no matter what they did.

The good news is, I didn’t hate it as much as I did Season 4. But that doesn’t mean I was happy.