I haven't finished watching this yet, but I needed to interject: in all my years of watching this show, something has gnawed at me, and finally today it was addressed.
On reality shows -- not just this one -- people are constantly accusing each other of this or that, and then the accused people deny their actions. It kills me. Everything they do is videorecorded and witnessed by five or more other people. Why would anyone lie? I know that it's possible they just misremember stuff, but it seems to happen a little too often.
In this episode, though, Vivica says she didn't tweet something, and everyone else says she did. I found it really irritating that she denied it, because it would be the easiest thing in the world just to check. When they finally checked, and she still denied it, I gained a little faith in the concept of reality TV (don't worry; I didn't gain much) but I lost faith in the way human memory operates.
Like I said, I'm not done watching, but it seems pretty clear that she'll get fired. I'm fine with that, because it's already annoying when people say "literally" all the time when it's not true, but Vivica says "quite literally" instead, and she is still "quite" wrong. I need to scroll back and find what she said, but it was something about butts.
***
Okay, she didn't get fired. I'm still not done watching, but something else just happened. It was bothering me the whole time that no one told Ian the following two things:
1. That he is tone-deaf (he really wanted to record himself singing, and he really is, like, clinically tone-deaf, and I think he needs to know this)
2. That he was attempting copyright infringement.
Finally, Donald Trump just told him he was copying it. THANK YOU.
I still haven't remembered what the butt quote was.
***
No one knows I have this blog, so I just want to say... friggen DECIMATED! I love this show! I hate Donald Trump's politics and everything, but I just love his insane dictatorial attitude.
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Movie Review: Pride (2014)
This was a solid movie.
It began taking place in 1984, before I was a fetus. The protagonists are some not-straight Londoners (I don't want to bother with the acronym right now) who dress like a Grease revival, led by a guy named Mark whose primary character traits are always looking like he just had a shocking idea and making immature decisions regarding what he's upset about. The non-straight Londoners realized they had the same enemies as the mine workers, aka the miners (which never stops sounding like "minors" in the film), who include Bill Nighy, who always seems like he has dementia. The miners let them drive really far in a bus up a massive hill more or less because of a misunderstanding involving the "L" in the acronym "LGSM" (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners -- they thought the "L" stood for "London.")
By the way, that is the stupidest, least catchy name for a group ever. I want you all to know, loyal readers, that if you want to start a group, especially one that isn't going to get tons of support, name it something at least slightly memorable.
Also, by the way, why did Thatcher hate miners so much? God! They're getting coal for you and shit! Someone has to do that! And anyway, it's dangerous! And they're doing it! You want trains? Don't trains sometimes run on coal? Maybe that's a train stereotype. Regardless, you want to have a way to punish bad kids on Christmas? What's the deal with this?
Yeah.
Anyway, there are some great female miners, primarily a chick named Sian, which I thought was a Welsh way of saying "Sharon" for the duration of the film. She was a real historical figure and if she was anything like her character, she made me cry three times. There was also an elderly lady who seemed to conflate lesbianism and veganism.
However, one flaw in the film was that there was an antagonist, an angular Picasso-looking woman with two forgettable sons, who wasn't challenging enough. Also, the miners were critical and prejudiced to potentially the least degree they could have been depicted. I think in real life more of the prejudice and bigotry at that time would have spawned from AIDS and HIV.
There's an excellent subplot about being in the closet and being forced out by your parents. Everything about Joe's character was great. He hid all his photographs that could out him inside children's books. He had a sister who looked like my hairdresser from childhood, and she was also an antagonist. In reading the wikipedia about this film to learn how to spell Welsh words like Onllwyn and Sian I learned a new concept. The concept is called "audience surrogate," and Joe was apparently one. It's a character the audience can identify with.
I recommend this movie. It's the actual best movie I have reviewed yet, and I learned a lot. On the scale from Beetle Juice to a hypothetical feminist version of the Lego Movie, I rank this close to Dear White People.
It began taking place in 1984, before I was a fetus. The protagonists are some not-straight Londoners (I don't want to bother with the acronym right now) who dress like a Grease revival, led by a guy named Mark whose primary character traits are always looking like he just had a shocking idea and making immature decisions regarding what he's upset about. The non-straight Londoners realized they had the same enemies as the mine workers, aka the miners (which never stops sounding like "minors" in the film), who include Bill Nighy, who always seems like he has dementia. The miners let them drive really far in a bus up a massive hill more or less because of a misunderstanding involving the "L" in the acronym "LGSM" (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners -- they thought the "L" stood for "London.")
By the way, that is the stupidest, least catchy name for a group ever. I want you all to know, loyal readers, that if you want to start a group, especially one that isn't going to get tons of support, name it something at least slightly memorable.
Also, by the way, why did Thatcher hate miners so much? God! They're getting coal for you and shit! Someone has to do that! And anyway, it's dangerous! And they're doing it! You want trains? Don't trains sometimes run on coal? Maybe that's a train stereotype. Regardless, you want to have a way to punish bad kids on Christmas? What's the deal with this?
Yeah.
Anyway, there are some great female miners, primarily a chick named Sian, which I thought was a Welsh way of saying "Sharon" for the duration of the film. She was a real historical figure and if she was anything like her character, she made me cry three times. There was also an elderly lady who seemed to conflate lesbianism and veganism.
However, one flaw in the film was that there was an antagonist, an angular Picasso-looking woman with two forgettable sons, who wasn't challenging enough. Also, the miners were critical and prejudiced to potentially the least degree they could have been depicted. I think in real life more of the prejudice and bigotry at that time would have spawned from AIDS and HIV.
There's an excellent subplot about being in the closet and being forced out by your parents. Everything about Joe's character was great. He hid all his photographs that could out him inside children's books. He had a sister who looked like my hairdresser from childhood, and she was also an antagonist. In reading the wikipedia about this film to learn how to spell Welsh words like Onllwyn and Sian I learned a new concept. The concept is called "audience surrogate," and Joe was apparently one. It's a character the audience can identify with.
I recommend this movie. It's the actual best movie I have reviewed yet, and I learned a lot. On the scale from Beetle Juice to a hypothetical feminist version of the Lego Movie, I rank this close to Dear White People.
Movie Review: The Selfish Giant
My favorite part of this movie was that they gave credit in the credits to the horse actors.
Sunday, February 1, 2015
TV Show Review: Mozart in the Jungle, Pilot
I'm gonna do this in a live-tweetesque fashion.
No one learned how to conduct for this.
All of Rodrigo's advice is about the first essentially 45 seconds of the piece.
I can't tell any of the female leads in this apart. They all look like murder victims on The Fall.
"Oboists are a rare commodity these days..." she says. She's got this backwards. There are way fewer spots for oboists to take up, so it's a lot more competitive.
Also, how come in TV shows, every time someone is into someone else, they're conveniently single?
This is the fakest thing I ever saw. Where are all the asians and old people? Who plays a game where they categorize music by era? Where's everything composed post-1880? i have a lot more opinions but I'm gonna wait til my whiskey wears off.
No one learned how to conduct for this.
All of Rodrigo's advice is about the first essentially 45 seconds of the piece.
I can't tell any of the female leads in this apart. They all look like murder victims on The Fall.
"Oboists are a rare commodity these days..." she says. She's got this backwards. There are way fewer spots for oboists to take up, so it's a lot more competitive.
Also, how come in TV shows, every time someone is into someone else, they're conveniently single?
This is the fakest thing I ever saw. Where are all the asians and old people? Who plays a game where they categorize music by era? Where's everything composed post-1880? i have a lot more opinions but I'm gonna wait til my whiskey wears off.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Game Review: The Binding of Isaac
Here's what I know.
You are Isaac. Your mom is the enemy. Little Steven is your psychic friend. He spits homing bullets. You shoot tears.
There are other friends besides Little Steven. I'll write them as I find out who they are.
Greed is the most annoying enemy. Sometimes there are lots of greeds.
When you die, you write it in your diary and leave all your money to your cat, Guppy.
Wes says that he will feed the pets once his mom kills him.
I will tell you more soon.
He just said "whoops, stepped on a spider. As you will." So I guess spiders are bad to step on? In some games, you're supposed to.
Also, he just said, "I got a ham!" I asked what a ham does. He said he actually got a dog biscuit, not a ham. I asked what a dog biscuit does. He said "HP up."
There seem to be a lot of things besides a dog biscuit you can get that can give you skills. I could look it up, but it's funnier to ask Wes. I'll keep asking him what things he has and what skills they gave him. I remember that one was cancer and it made him cry more tears than usual.
You are Isaac. Your mom is the enemy. Little Steven is your psychic friend. He spits homing bullets. You shoot tears.
There are other friends besides Little Steven. I'll write them as I find out who they are.
Greed is the most annoying enemy. Sometimes there are lots of greeds.
When you die, you write it in your diary and leave all your money to your cat, Guppy.
Wes says that he will feed the pets once his mom kills him.
I will tell you more soon.
He just said "whoops, stepped on a spider. As you will." So I guess spiders are bad to step on? In some games, you're supposed to.
Also, he just said, "I got a ham!" I asked what a ham does. He said he actually got a dog biscuit, not a ham. I asked what a dog biscuit does. He said "HP up."
There seem to be a lot of things besides a dog biscuit you can get that can give you skills. I could look it up, but it's funnier to ask Wes. I'll keep asking him what things he has and what skills they gave him. I remember that one was cancer and it made him cry more tears than usual.
Song Review: Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes
Yesterday, I was walking by a bar (The Ivory Room in Madison) and I heard a substantial quantity of full-ass-grown adults singing "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes."
First of all, I don't know why, and didn't go find out, because I was really cold.
Second of all, I figured out why this song bothers me. Here's why: the notes go in the wrong order. The body parts go as follows:
Head (highest)
Shoulders (second highest)
Knees (third highest)
Toes (lowest).
However, the notes go as follows:
Head (second highest)
Shoulders (begins on the highest note)
Knees (begins on the third highest note)
Toes (begins on the lowest note)
Clearly, the notes for "head" and "shoulders" need to be reversed. Otherwise, it's really confusing as a way of benchmarking where the body parts are. If I were learning the body parts from this song, I would probably get them wrong all the time and always conflate heads and shoulders.
First of all, I don't know why, and didn't go find out, because I was really cold.
Second of all, I figured out why this song bothers me. Here's why: the notes go in the wrong order. The body parts go as follows:
Head (highest)
Shoulders (second highest)
Knees (third highest)
Toes (lowest).
However, the notes go as follows:
Head (second highest)
Shoulders (begins on the highest note)
Knees (begins on the third highest note)
Toes (begins on the lowest note)
Clearly, the notes for "head" and "shoulders" need to be reversed. Otherwise, it's really confusing as a way of benchmarking where the body parts are. If I were learning the body parts from this song, I would probably get them wrong all the time and always conflate heads and shoulders.
Movie Review: Beetlejuice (1988)
I liked this movie except for the parts that had Beetlejuice in it. I mean Betelgeuse. The movie was non-committal on what his actual name was, despite the fact that his name contained all his power.
Beetlejuice (as I will call him for the sake of consistency) is a creepy womanizer who died doing something green and prisony. The movie takes place in the afterlife, or something close to it, where everyone except the protagonists' deaths are made apparent by their appearances.
The movie uses claymation in a way that reminded me a bit of Evil Dead, but I don't think it was done for budgetary reasons, which I understand is why Evil Dead did it. It also did some interesting things with perspective visually and played with your idea of what was real and what was fake, which became most notable when they kept hanging out inside a toy village.
There is an old lady named Juno who died of smoking too much. She is extremely busy, and the waiting room has over nine billion waiters in it, though you can only really see a few at a time. You are only allowed to see her three times ever. We see her more than three times in the movie. I wish I only saw Beetlejuice three times in the movie.
Another thing about her is that the protagonists, who died drowning but were not wet, wake up after dying basically in or near their house, I forget. However, the football players who died in a vehicle accident and think all authority figures are their coach all seem to have materialized directly in that room. They also need to use the restroom, despite no longer having functional bladders.
I totally called that the shrimp were not shrimp. I did not call that the shrimp were hands.
Alec Baldwin is in this movie, but I didn't recognize him for a while because his voice sounded different, and also everything else about him looked different. His primary character trait was that he was bad at reading. Both bad at pronouncing words he looks at and bad at remembering to read very important books, despite having little else to do besides end up on Saturn.
Oh yeah. But I forgot to talk about Beetlejuice (the character). He was a nasty-ass creep. He kept trying to touch women in the butt and he was really gross. There was a horrible scene where he forces a kid, played by Winona Ryder, to marry him in exchange for her dead friends not becoming double-dead. She agrees to do so, and then all the famous wedding music plays in minor keys and some confusing shit happens and then they're not married or something. She can also fly and stops being a goth, so I think she died.
After the movie was over, I researched how to shrink heads. It turns out you don't use magic dust to do so.
Whoa, I just got distracted by reading about Geena Davis. She played one of my favorite characters in this movie. It turns out she was a women's archery Olympics team semi-finalist, is a member of Mensa, and is starting a film festival this year (2015) to encourage diversity in the cast and crew of films. I am hugely in favor of Geena Davis. She makes up for Beetlejuice, who is probably the grossest character I've seen in a movie in a while.
Thus concludes my review of Beetlejuice. I hope in the sequel he stops being a nasty womanizer and starts being a nice guy who helps Geena Davis with her film festival and doesn't sit with his legs out on the subway and hit on underaged kids and touch people's butts.
Beetlejuice (as I will call him for the sake of consistency) is a creepy womanizer who died doing something green and prisony. The movie takes place in the afterlife, or something close to it, where everyone except the protagonists' deaths are made apparent by their appearances.
The movie uses claymation in a way that reminded me a bit of Evil Dead, but I don't think it was done for budgetary reasons, which I understand is why Evil Dead did it. It also did some interesting things with perspective visually and played with your idea of what was real and what was fake, which became most notable when they kept hanging out inside a toy village.
There is an old lady named Juno who died of smoking too much. She is extremely busy, and the waiting room has over nine billion waiters in it, though you can only really see a few at a time. You are only allowed to see her three times ever. We see her more than three times in the movie. I wish I only saw Beetlejuice three times in the movie.
Another thing about her is that the protagonists, who died drowning but were not wet, wake up after dying basically in or near their house, I forget. However, the football players who died in a vehicle accident and think all authority figures are their coach all seem to have materialized directly in that room. They also need to use the restroom, despite no longer having functional bladders.
I totally called that the shrimp were not shrimp. I did not call that the shrimp were hands.
Alec Baldwin is in this movie, but I didn't recognize him for a while because his voice sounded different, and also everything else about him looked different. His primary character trait was that he was bad at reading. Both bad at pronouncing words he looks at and bad at remembering to read very important books, despite having little else to do besides end up on Saturn.
Oh yeah. But I forgot to talk about Beetlejuice (the character). He was a nasty-ass creep. He kept trying to touch women in the butt and he was really gross. There was a horrible scene where he forces a kid, played by Winona Ryder, to marry him in exchange for her dead friends not becoming double-dead. She agrees to do so, and then all the famous wedding music plays in minor keys and some confusing shit happens and then they're not married or something. She can also fly and stops being a goth, so I think she died.
After the movie was over, I researched how to shrink heads. It turns out you don't use magic dust to do so.
Whoa, I just got distracted by reading about Geena Davis. She played one of my favorite characters in this movie. It turns out she was a women's archery Olympics team semi-finalist, is a member of Mensa, and is starting a film festival this year (2015) to encourage diversity in the cast and crew of films. I am hugely in favor of Geena Davis. She makes up for Beetlejuice, who is probably the grossest character I've seen in a movie in a while.
Thus concludes my review of Beetlejuice. I hope in the sequel he stops being a nasty womanizer and starts being a nice guy who helps Geena Davis with her film festival and doesn't sit with his legs out on the subway and hit on underaged kids and touch people's butts.
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