| After the fire, after all the rain, I will be the flame. |
[30 Jul 2007|08:30pm] |
I know I haven't updated in quite a while, and a Sirius/Remus fan video is probably a silly thing with which to break the silence, but it makes me sad to think there are people in the world who haven't seen this. The amount of work that has gone into this (the art, not the editing) will surprise some people. It shouldn't, though. By now, you must have realised the world is full of millions of people with nothing better to do. I've heard there is even pterodactyl porn now. That's very specific. This video and many others like it exist because no one could work out a way to ban teenage Japanese girls from reading Harry Potter. Anyway, if this video doesn't make you cry till you don't even care that snot is dripping off your chin, you are a hateful robot.
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[18 Apr 2007|02:52pm] |
Dylanie got married on Saturday! Somehow I was fortunate enough to be asked to be a groomsman, which is like a bridesmaid, only a boy. Or, to put it another way, it's a bit like the best man, only not nearly as good. Or so I thought. Actually, it's much better than being the best man, because you get all the same perks (like wearing a smashing suit and having the first crack at the buffet) but without any responsibilities.
( I was too silly to take my camera, so I have no photos, but Robyn said she didn't mind if I scabbed some of hers. )
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| For the record, this is not a 'meme' so much as a 'fad'. |
[01 Apr 2007|10:07am] |
EDIT: Whoops, I left out the important bit - the instructions. Surely it doesn't matter, because everyone will have seen this on about a billion other LJs already, but just in case - leave a comment and I will do the following:
1 - Tell you why I friended you.
2 - Associate you with a song/film
3 - Tell a random fact about you
4 - Tell a first memory about you
5 - Associate you with a character
6 - Ask something I've always wanted to know about you
7 - Tell you my favorite user pic of yours [if it pertains]
8 - Jump on the bandwagon, yo! (ie. you are supposedly required to put this jobby on your LJ too. Ignore this bit if you want to.)
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| As long as I can dream, it's hard to slow this swinger down. |
[28 Feb 2007|03:29pm] |
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I just realised that the theme music to A Dog's Show was an instrumental version of the Statler Brothers' Flowers on the Wall, which, if you're anything like me, you know fondly (but solely) from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. Does everyone but me know this already? I suppose it might be part of the reason I always liked that song so much, although the awesome way the bass comes in early on 'Captain Kangaroo' is enough all on its own.
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[05 Feb 2007|07:19am] |
Take the quiz at dicepool.com
Actually, I fiddled the answers till I got the d12, because it's my favourite die - so pointless and weird. You essentially can't use it for anything except barbarians' hitpoints and damage from a couple of obscure enormous weapons. I'm sorely tempted to buy a 'Your d12 cries itself to sleep' T-shirt.
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[12 Jan 2007|11:48am] |
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I went to Tenacious D last night. I saw them two years ago, and they were good then, but this time they really put some stink on it. The show started as you would expect, with just JB and KG on acoustic guitars, and gradually evolved into a full-blown rock opera. The boys went to hell and formed a band with the Antichrist on guitar, Charlie Chaplin on bass and Colonel Sanders on drums. They did all the songs from the first album, and a bunch of new stuff from the movie. When Satan appeared to claim their souls, it was like The Devil Went Down to Georgia × Crossroads + (Faust ÷ South Park)2.
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[18 Dec 2006|04:19pm] |
Merry Christmas
WARNING: not safe for eyes, ears or brains.
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[12 Dec 2006|09:50am] |
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Children of Men is so fucking good.
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[01 Dec 2006|09:30pm] |
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You heard it here first: Janis Joplin didn't really die in 1970; she put on 75 kilos and became Meat Loaf. Search your feelings - you know it to be true.
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[20 Nov 2006|11:17am] |
The Grey Lynn Festival was on Saturday. I wasn't sure it would still be on, with the downpour, but that was silly of me - as if hippies are scared of mud! There was nothing much to make us want to stick around for very long, but it was very reassuring to see that the scale of the event is undiminished by inclement weather.
Now here's this.
(Click here to post your own answers for this meme.)
| ✓ I miss somebody right now. |
× I don't watch much TV these days. |
✓ I own lots of books. |
| ✓ I wear glasses or contact lenses. |
✓ I love to play video games. |
✓ I've tried marijuana. |
| ✓ I've watched porn movies. |
× I have been the psycho-ex in a past relationship. |
✓ I believe honesty is usually the best policy. |
| ✓ I curse sometimes. |
✓ I have changed a lot mentally over the last year. |
× I carry my knife/razor everywhere with me. |
( it goes on... )
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[12 Nov 2006|06:49am] |
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I'm here at work, having just finished sending live captions for the dedication ceremony of The Southern Stand, the new New Zealand War Memorial in London. Bit of a silly thing to be doing at 3 in the morning, but it was pretty good fun. I'm meant to be driving out to Mangere in a couple of hours to watch the All Blacks play France, assuming I can stay awake.
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[09 Nov 2006|03:09pm] |
Last weekend was the V 24-Hour Movie Marathon. I meant to post an account of that on Monday, but I've been surprisingly busy at work. I'd say it was the best one yet, in terms of not having a single movie that I didn't enjoy. I think I've made converts of Faith, Amanda and Ryan, who all seemed to have a very good time (so good, in Ryan's case, that we didn't even see him for the last 16 or so hours - he was too busy cherchezing la femme to even wander across the theatre and say hello every few films. Tut) Without further ado, my very brief take on this year's films:
Lady Terminator
This seriously lowered my future expectations of Indonesia's film industry. The title probably makes you think, 'I bet that's kinda like The Terminator, only with a woman instead of Arnie.' However, you probably don't think, 'And I bet instead of being a cyborg, she's an anthropologist with a magic eel in her fanny.' That's where you're wrong, though. You can pretty much tell you're in for a cinematic treat when the credits tell you the female lead also did the make-up.
Streets of Fire
Why haven't I seen this before? I gather it was a catastrophic box-office flop, and is now virtually forgotten. That is mental. It's a campy '80s vision of a standard noir story, in a stylised '50s rock 'n' roll setting, with a score by Ry Cooder and songs by Jim Steinman. What's not to love about that? It even has a sledgehammer fight!
Burial Ground
Most zombie B movies bore me pretty quickly, but this was pretty pacey, and silly enough to be genuinely entertaining the whole way through. It was pretty gross – not in terms of the gore, really, but more in a creepy little dwarf 'child' who won't stop trying to grope his mother sort of way.
Crank
Ant said he wouldn't be screening any NZ premieres this year – what a liar. I had read about the premise of this one – Jason Statham has been poisoned and must keep his adrenaline levels super high or his heart with stop. It turned out to be just as stupid as it sounds, but really entertaining anyway. It was made by Rockstar Entertainment, and it shows, so if anything about GTA offends you, give this movie a wide berth – it will probably make you shit.
Troll 2
Normally when people say a film is so bad it's good, that actually means that it's so bad it's tedious, and they're too silly to know the difference. But Troll 2 stays reasonably entertaining the whole way through. I'm pretty sure it was made by Mormons, which seems to help for some reason. Afterwards Ant made a phone call to one of the stars, who seemed really nice.
Top Secret
I have this on DVD, and I just about know it backwards. But I've loved it since I was a kid, and it's a very different experience seeing anything under marathon conditions with a pumped-up audience, so it was a lot more fun that I thought it was going to be.
Behind Locked Doors
The mandatory smutty one from the '70s. A Crown Princess Mary of Denmark look-alike and her cute lesbian friend are abducted by Henry Kissinger. This film treated rape as more of an inconvenience than a trauma, which settles it near the top of the weekend's most-offensive list, but otherwise it was pretty harmless. The soft-porn films Ant dredges up are often a lot dirtier than this, but they also tend to be more tedious, so it was much more entertaining than it could have been.
Lisztomania
Roger Daltrey as Franz Liszt and Wagner as a vampire Hitler. You wha'?! I had no idea this film existed, and I'm still not convinced - it may have been some kind of potent mass hallucination. It's just so self-indulgent, expensive and wrong, I couldn't help loving it. Ken Russell is nearly 80. Please, someone give him some money to make one last glorious, ridiculous, debauched cinematic craptacular before he goes to spend eternity sitting on a huge penis-shaped cloud with a bunch of topless nuns.
Thunderbirds Are Go
I love how in Gerry Anderson stuff, you never have to leave your seat to enter your car, helicopter, boat, plane or house, because a moving chair is easier to Supermarionate than a person standing up and walking. During this film was the only time when I felt like I might fall asleep. Why do all the machines in the future have to move so damn slowly?
To Live and Die in LA
For most of this, I felt like I was watching a feature-length episode of a generic police procedural. They did amazing things with a relatively small budget, though, and the writing was very good, even if it did kind of come apart at the end.
The Holy Mountain
This movie works as either a mystical exercise in transcendental philosophy or a '70s hippy freak-out head film. Everyone either loved it or hated it. I liked it because it changed tack way too often to ever get boring.
Black Agent Lucky King
IMDb says this film is called Solomon King, but I'm almost certain that the title on the print we saw was Black Agent Lucky King. I can't be sure, because I was just walking back into the theatre, and at the time I thought it was a trailer. The guy who played Solomon King also wrote, produced and directed, and the guy who played his brother, in the worst pants ever created, is his real-life brother. That's the kind of sophisticated Hollywood production we're talking about here. I'm pretty sure at least one reel was skipped, as the story made a couple of pretty glaring leaps. I can't imagine anyone regretting the shortened run time, though. It was a real turkey. A jive turkey, even.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
I couldn't remember having seen this ever, surprisingly, but I'm pretty sure it was just so long ago that the memory had eroded, as the whole thing felt very unsurprising without being familiar, if that makes sense.
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[30 Oct 2006|03:31pm] |
I forgot to say that on Saturday Dylan, Ryan and I tried on suits for Dylanie's wedding. It takes an awful lot to make trying on clothes fun, but it was heading in that direction.
I also forgot to say that last night, waiting for our pizza, Faith and I saw Graham Brazier at the Grey Lynn shops. It will shock and astound people to hear this, I'm sure, but he was about as drunk as people can get without becoming horizontal. Sort of diagonal, I suppose.
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[30 Oct 2006|02:04pm] |
On Friday I went to a party which had lots of lesbians, several cute dogs, pass the parcel and live music of a decidedly amateur but not terrible persuasion. Bel and Kim, being Australian, were endearingly enthusiastic about their first proper Guy Fawkes. There you go - it is still theoretically possible for adults to be excited by domestic-grade fireworks.
Faith, Amanda and I have developed a Sunday-evening ritual which involves UChoose40 on C4 and informing each other that various artists/actors/objects of furniture from the videos are one another's boyfriends. It's honestly much more entertaining than it sounds. I was starting to become concerned that UChoose40 was jumping the shark, though, as the selections were getting way too samey and predictable. It managed to rescue itself last night, though. The addition of pizza, beer, pistachio gelato and a rousing game of Settlers helped, of course.
After nearly a year clean and sober, my pusher, Jeremy, slipped me some baggies of uncut British paratroopers the other day, and now it looks like I'm back on the stuff. One day I'll beat my lead addiction, but not any time soon.
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[26 Oct 2006|03:22pm] |
Thanks to the long weekend and the fact that this is my week to work Sunday instead of Friday, I'm just about to finish a three-day week. Times is hard, yeah? I've been having a board-gamey old time of it recently - World of Warcraft on the weekend, because a few of the D&D regulars couldn't make it, and plenty of Settlers of Catan, which I got Faith for her birthday last Monday, with anyone who stands still long enough to be harassed into playing it. I've also been devoting too much valuable sleep time to the new Lego Star Wars, which everyone knows is the best game in the world.
When I haven't been doing that, I've been watching series two of Extras, courtesy of Jappleby. I wasn't sure they had anywhere left to go after series one, but that just shows how wrong one can be.
Well, it's 3.30 on a Thursday, which of course means it's the start of the weekend. I think I might try to sleep for 16 hours straight. Now I go.
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[13 Oct 2006|07:30am] |
On Wednesday I finally got around to renewing my warrant of fitness. It's such a relief when your sick old car somehow manages to pass again without requiring repairs. As part of the same little errand, I had my dead tyre replaced with a spark-plug-free one. I expected that the Beaurepairs guys would be well used to seeing tyres in all manner of sub-functional states, but a protruding spark plug was enough of a novelty that they felt compelled to take a photo of it.
Saw Out of the Blue last night. It's very bleak, obviously, and pretty harrowing in parts, but surprisingly understated. It's beautifully shot and the cast are all very good. You're all gonna go see it, and support the local film industry, right? Good Kiwis.
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[05 Oct 2006|11:38am] |
On Sunday, as I was on the way home from watching UChoose40 with Amanda and Faith, I ran into Jess and Kayleigh, who then came over for an impromptu visit and chirpiness contest. It was such fun that they returned on Monday night for DVDs, along with Faith, Ryan and Jess's oddish ex-boyfriend James. I made spinach lasagne and my usual Turkish garlic bread, followed by apricot halva with caramel and praline ice cream. I finally got to cross Adaptation off my list of films which I know I should see, but I just never seem to get around to it.
On Tuesday Dan, Faith and I went to the dress rehearsal of Faust, thanks to Dan's awesome ticket-snaffling abilities. It was a lot of fun, although the production was a little disappointing, to be honest, compared to the first time I saw Faust - which was, to be fair, a very long time ago, so maybe my memory is overly generous. Mephistopheles was very good, but a little less charismatic than I suspect the role requires. And I was constantly distracted by his eerie resemblance to Stephen Root in News Radio.
This morning I got to cross another movie off my to-see list - American Splendor, which is very good but not as mind-blowing as I had been led to expect. I should have seen it when it came out, I think. There has been a real spate of biopics over the last few years, and they have started to get on my nerves. Even the well-made ones have a sameyness about them, which I think is to do with their earnestness and artificiality. Harvey Pekar seemed like an interesting enough guy that a straight documentary approach would have been just as entertaining, without feeling so forced. Althought that would really have been missing the point, so I'll shut up now.
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[26 Sep 2006|02:42pm] |
Warm spring weather is officially upon us once more. Every year this development is marked for me by my bedroom suddenly becoming a good 5° to 10° hotter than the rest of my flat.
I worked this particular Saturday, as I am required to do every so often. Harriet, who is secretly some kind of karaoke demon from another dimension, suggested an impromptu SingStar evening. At some point someone suggested a boys-vs-girls competition, which involved Harriet, Stephanie and Tinka repeatedly mopping the floor with Ryan, Tama and me. It was great fun, but will probably never be repeated, as it made a certain boys' team who will remain nameless all crazy and hypercompetitive.
The rest of my weekend was devoted to various forms of pleasurable decadence, mainly audio-visual.
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[22 Sep 2006|11:25am] |
This morning I saw Anika Moa on the way to work* talking on her cellphone while driving. Tsk tsk, Anika.
*I was on the way to work; I don't know where she was going.
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