come back my brain

[freckles_and_doubt]

The mere fact of a three-day weekend seems to have switched my brain off. This is not entirely a bad thing, putting me in exactly the right space for watching Reign of Fire (dreadful, entertaining, topless!sweaty!Christian Bale, cool dragons) and Nightwatch (weird, interesting, good-for-a-given-value-of, strange special effects) last night, while eating pizza. And Sid is all rampagous again, leaving me snuffly and with less room in the inside of my skull for actual thinking, which Does Not Bode Well for the review I have to finish writing this afternoon.

So, random linkery.

• This idiot was clearly bitten by a knitting needle in early youth and has never recovered. As rants go, this lacks any vestige of quality, intelligence or logic. I immediately thought the same thing that strawberryfrog did: hello, handcrafts actually do constitute an act of resistance in an age of mass-production.


• Henry Jenkins hypothesises, and proceeds to entertainingly demonstrate, that Obama is actually Spock.


• Kage Baker does actually intelligent things with time travel. Also, Renaissance herbery! In the Garden of Iden is available off the Tor sign-up list, which is a truly worthy thing for which to hand over one's email address. (This service announcement for the benefit of librsa, who needs to sign up).

Comments

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

I kind-of-liked Nightwatch. Somehow I heard that it's based on a popular Russian book (in a trilogy), and watching it without reading the booksis supposedly akin to watching a Harry Potter movie without first reading the book - it works, just, sort of, but feels too episodic.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Ah, but I've read the books, which I really enjoyed and have actually reviewed before (http://extemporanea.livejournal.com/131066.html). Given that the film was based on the first third of the first book, it's actually surprisingly faithful in plot (mostly) and very much in atmosphere. The slight off-the-wallness and mad pop culture touches (Buffy, computer games) are peculiar to the film, the book is more deadpan and understated, but the world-view is well-represented and the truly weird special effects pick up the vertiginous feel of the book very nicely.

[mac1235.livejournal.com]

I plan to show the first two movies, when the third one comes out.

[confluence.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

My Mom brought me the last book from Poland and I just read it today. It's pretty good.

Unfortunately, the second movie is a lot worse than the first one -- it starts off as a reasonable adaptation of the last part of the first book (IIRC), and then it takes a left turn, accelerates and plunges off the deep end. I have no idea what they're going to do for the third movie; it looks like they've quite thoroughly painted themselves into a corner.

[mac1235.livejournal.com]

Are there good special effects?