well behaved women

Queen of the Damned: totally unintentionally hilarious. Also, Lestat is lame-tastic as he always is, but at least the actor seems to be aware of the cheese and plays it up. I--seriously, he's on the ceiling and I'm just laughing, although I did stop and go 'WTF? These girls are never going to be mentioned again, are they?' and was distressed about that for a bit before I pushed it firmly into denial-land. To sum up my opinion of movie: Lestat is a creepy bastard but is effectively the selfish, capricious creature; Marguerite Moreau is still gorgeous.


I haven't been able to make myself watch The Golden Compass because they cast Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter. I think she looks like a cadaver. I'm sure she's a nice lady and all, but she's as far from good looking (to me) as my imagination can get (well okay, not quite, I have an active imagination), and Mrs. Coulter was supposed to be beautiful. I was also not impressed with Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel.

The look of everything else--and all the other scenes I saw--I loved, but I can't watch it because of those two. DAMNIT. I just--I just stick on certain things, okay? I just--ARGH.

Also: WHY NOT EVA GREEN AS MRS. COULTER? I wanted that so bad, as soon as I saw her as Serafina Pekkala in the trailer. And somebody else as Lord Asriel, dear god.

Although there was an interesting thought in a review; they said the movie didn't do well because there wasn't really an optimistic core to it, and it was basically marketed as a children's movie, as I recall. Since apparently New Line chopped it off for a 'happy ending' and also trashed the first script (written by Tom Stoppard? I don't know who that is) and forced them to write another very hastily, it's not surprising it lacked.

From Rachel Maddow.

What is this Wall Street bailout and how is it being managed?

Still taking shape, still hard to understand. Let’s try a metaphor.

Money is Halloween candy. And those Wall Street bankers are, metaphorically speaking, our six-year-old child, who went out and got more candy than we’ve ever seen or imagined. Trick or treat?

And with all that candy sitting there, we parents -- the taxpayers -- hired a baby sitter to supervise our child. Only instead of hiring a grown up, who wisely fears what happens when six years old do what they like to do best -- eat all the candy all at once -- we instead hired a seven-year-old babysitter: the federal government.

So, what happened? The six-year-old ate more candy than it should have on the seven-year-old’s watch, and got sick all over the carpet. And now that we’re paying and sending home the seven-year-old babysitter, we got her take on this disgusting, huge, mess of a crisis we’re now in... and our seven-year-old babysitter turns to us and says, “Well, the problem here is that you’re now out of candy. You’re going to need more candy.”

And that, roughly, is my layman’s understanding of what just happened to our economy. We left a kid with too much candy, Wall Street and its money, under the supervision of a babysitter who is not all inclined to babysit. And we should have known better, because the babysitter we’ve hired told us explicitly, a generation ago, what it thought of supervision:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. [RONALD REAGAN, JANUARY 20, 1981]

Still watching Queen of the Damned. I read the script, and Jesse is much more passive in the actual movie version. In the (original?) script she's all 'I'm bugged as hell by the mystery of my early life and you're the key' while in the movie she's much more starstruck.

And--after Aaliyah's line about Jesse, I had to pause the movie just to giggle my head off for a moment. "Just the same," she says in the same politely, albeit vamp-echoing, queenly manner she might ask for a certain kind of silverware, "I'd like for you to kill her."

Just--the way she says it. Awesomesauce.

I seem to be watching ladies do bizarre things in offhand manners; watching Firestarter II: Rekindled, I got to see Marguerite Moreau set her blankets aflame (with her mind) and then with barely a long-suffering bat of her eyelids, haul out the fire extinguisher she keeps beside her bed for when she sets her bed on fire (as you do) and then roll right back over again and go back to sleep.