Ginger's follies, foibles and fixations.
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| You Listen to Me, Mr. Kick-Ass Ginger's follies, foibles and fixations. |
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Saturday, June 21, 2003 The First Day of Summer  posted by Ginger | 11:25 PM Puny humans... ...apparently ruined The Hulk. I've read a lot of crummy reviews, but I still wanted to see the movie until I read this one. They are still talking about making a Wonder Woman movie; God help us. posted by Ginger | 2:23 AM Friday, June 20, 2003 The How Did You Know I Just Got My Hair Done? Friday Five!  [In my next career as a French Pop Star, this will be my record cover.] 1. Is your hair naturally curly, wavy, or straight? Long or short? Naturally unruly--curly when it's humid, sometimes straight, and generally impossible to control. It's never gotten more than an inch, maybe, below my shoulders even when I've tried growing it out for years, so I guess I'm stuck being a short-haired person. 2. How has your hair changed over your lifetime? In character, not much. In color, quite a bit. It went from light brown to dark brown naturally, but with chemical interference it's been black, blonde, purple, red, and often combinations of these. 3. How do your normally wear your hair? It pretty much does what it wants, no matter what I try. 4. If you could change your hair this minute, what would it look like? I want my sister's hair, but my color. 5. Ever had a hair disaster? What happened? This is so cliché, but I had THE bad perm in junior high. I can't remember why I thought I needed a perm, but I suppose I thought it would turn my baby-fine hair into the lush and bouncy manes I saw in the shampoo commercials. I told the student that I wanted to look like the woman in the book with the wavy hair (which, upon retrospect, wasn't far off from what my hair did naturally) and I ended up looking like Mike Brady in his 'fro years. And because my hair is so porous and fine, it stayed like that for what seemed like way longer than the usual 4-6 week time that it usually takes for a perm to 'relax.' Like a year. posted by Ginger | 10:11 PM Which is the Most Baffling Five-CD Mix? Before: White Stripes: Elephant Mercury Rev: Yerself is Steam The Occupants (my stepdad & various collaborators): Occupantaloons David Bowie: The Man Who Sold the World Hanson: 5-Song fan club-only CD/CD-ROM After: TAD: 8-Way Santa The Flaming Lips: Transmissions from the Satellite Heart Metallica: Ride the Lightning Led Zeppelin: III Queen: Greatest Hits I No wonder people can't figure my shit out... posted by Ginger | 9:42 PM Tuesday, June 17, 2003 See & Hear Head of Femur from Chicago - the second you get a chance. Check for upcoming tour dates in the near future. Run, don't walk. 7 guys, 1 gal, several singers, 2-3 guitars, two violins, bass, drums, keyboard, trumpet, xylophone [update -- whoops, that's a glockenspiel], gong, tambourine, handclaps, bongos. Amazing, amazing, amazing, wierd, amazing. posted by Ginger | 1:06 PM Sunday, June 15, 2003 By the way... Is it sick and wrong of me to think that this Justin & Christina Rolling Stone cover is totally hot? I thought so. Now I feel drrrrty... posted by Ginger | 3:23 AM This Post Sponsored By IMDb I finally got around to watching a couple of the Netflix movies that have been siting around here forever. The first is Amélie, which for some reason I had been really resistant to watching. When it first came out everyone loved it, which made me not much want to go (if it's that wonderful, my expectations will be too high, and I will end up thinking it sucks). And then later, I just never wanted to rent it. And later still, when I got around to renting it, it sat around my apartment for weeks before I got around to putting it into my DVD player. So Thursday I had a particularly bad day, and was really bummed out, and was explaining to Gia on the phone that when I'm in such a mood I usually want to sit around my apartment and mope, and watch movies featuring explosions or dismemberment, or aliens--or better yet exploding, dismembered aliens--and here I had Amélie. But when I hung up I felt like I owed it to myself to see if I could manage to cheer up, and with the rationale that Jean Jeunet's last movie featured ample explosions, aliens and dismemberments, I decided to give Amélie a try. Of course it was wonderful. I sobbed happily into my sheets, and did feel a little better. I'm still depressed, though. SO, instead of doing any of the myriad social activities I was supposed to do tonight, I watched Red Dragon , including most of the Special Features. [Bonus: Danny Elfman commentary! OK, so his infrequent comments about the score ("Now here's Will's theme again.") -- not that exciting, really. Couldn't they have showed HIM instead of the movie?! If anyone decides to make a feature-length film of Danny Elfman just sitting back and talking about whatever, let me know. *Sigh*]. Anyway. I wasn't eager to see this one either, since I thought Manhunter was a stylish and perfectly serviceable adaptation of the novel, and I felt that much of Red Dragon's promotional press seemed to dis the earlier movie as some sort of inauthentic hack job. Also, I was bothered by the aggressive marketing of the new film as a vehicle for Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter, even though he hardly does anything in the book, making me wonder if the filmmakers cared about staying true to the original novel as much as they claimed. Besides all that, I thought the casting was weird. Sure, every actor in it is brilliant, but were they brilliant for those roles? I wasn't so sure. I was willing to give Ralph Fiennes the benefit of the doubt, but Edward Norton still looks and sounds seventeen to me, and Anthony Hopkins looks every bit of the decade older than he was in Silence of the Lambs. I wasn't sure it would hold any credibility as a prequel to Silence, and the high-profile cast threatens to take you right out of the movie. Which it in fact does. All of my concerns were pretty much validated by the film -- but still I thought it was pretty good (the shortest path to a good review is lowered expectations!). Edward Norton, talented though he is, cannot compete with William Peterson's much more haunted and, well, cop-like, portrayal of Graham in Manhunter, and his delivery kept reminding me of his character in Fight Club. Anthony Hopkins doesn't suck, but despite "owning" the Lecter character, he was never so great as he was in Silence, and as such he seems bored with the role in this third go-round. Otherwise the performances are universally great--even the voice of Ellen Burstyn as the Dolarhyde grandma, for Pete's sake! What incriminating photos does Brett Ratner have of these people? Emily Watson is luminous, and Ralph Fiennes is convincing as a deeply conflicted "man with a freak on his back." The real strength is a great script by Silence scribe Ted Tally, which I think strays farther from the events in the book than Manhunter, but stays truer to it's tragic heart. As is pointed out in the director/screenwriter's commentary, Manhunter is Will's story, while Red Dragon (both the novel and this film) are Francis Dolarhyde's story--as it should be (Thomas Harris didn't call it Will Graham: Profiler did he?). The result is that the police procedures are the least interesting bits of the story, and Lecter's beefed-up scenes do little more than bog the film down--although the exploration of Lecter and Will's history is nice. All of my favorite scenes in the book were preserved, Philip Seymour Hoffman proves once again that he's a genius, and Ralph Fiennes totally buff and naked? What more could anyone ask? Well, maybe some aliens... posted by Ginger | 3:05 AM |
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