subdee

Fun! In a smoke-and-mirrors kind of way. I don't think I've ever seen a movie this fun and this...cheap, I guess, at the same time.

Mission: Impossible III moves really quickly. It's a heist movie, but instead of planning for months to set up one big showpiece, and then explaning to the audience exactly how it was done, it just goes. Tom Cruise is in a four-man team with Ving Rhames from the first two Mission: Impossibles and two new faces, an Irish man (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the coach from Bend it Like Beckham) and a Chinese woman (although she is not actually Chinese). They come up with impossible plans for infiltrating ridiculously heavily guarded buildings, plans that must be followed to the second because there is no room for error at all, and before you (the audience, by which I mean me) can figure out why it was necessary to put a tracer on that manhole cover, blow up that wall, or cause that traffic accident, we are already onto the next part of the scene. ( more, no spoilers )


Overall a very fun movie whose plot I will probably not remember a month from now. But this is an unsustainable series, isn't it? Eventually Tom Cruise will run out of superiors to double-cross him and/or impossibly guarded buildings to break into. Not to mention the part where he can already take out whole elevators of specially-trained black ops using only a pen. If the producers keep trying to out-do themselves, subsequent movies are going to be very, very silly.

This summer I want to see:
The Inside Man
Thank You For Smoking saw it, great movie
Brick awesome!
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (saw it, just as terrible and awesome I'd thought it would be)
Superman Returns (omg the trailer looks SO GOOD.)
The Break-Up (ahahaha but. Vince Vaughn!)
Snakes on a Plane this was good too!

***

Happy Cinco de Mayo! Happy Hikago Day!

I'm taking the history course. Thanks to everyone who answered the poll! The other course I'm taking is SLAVIC 320: Central European Films. I've never taken a film or art analysis course before, it's really cool (so many things I would never have noticed on my own the professor kindly points out to us) but also really disorienting, because although I blog about movies all the time I don't know how to discuss them academically. Where do you even start.

What I didn't mention about my final paper: it's 1001 Nights fanfic. XD based on Hussain Haddaway's translation; I didn't do any research (other than reading the stories) so it's a pretty superficial take, mostly style-copying. Either I got away with that or I didn't, I'll know next week when the grades come back.

Did you know that Edgar Allen Poe wrote a story called "The Thousand and Second Night" where Shaharazad commits suicide?

Title: The Jeweler and the Man from Mosul
Series: The Arabian Nights, trans. Hussain Haddaway
Note: BLOCK PARAGRAPHS OF DEATH, other forms of tediousness. Written as an actual Night, so I guess it's more orignal fiction than fanfiction.

( Story )

The ending is sketchy. Actually, the whole thing is sketchy.

NOTE TO SELF: MAINTAIN PERSPECTIVE
I try to be good about this, but lately I've been slipping.

***

While I was writing this Girl/Mouse thing there was ACTUALLY A MOUSE going through the food in the kitchen. ( Me vs. Mouse )

***

McGill course guide descriptions = hours of fun for the the whole family. It's hard to explain what was so funny about these, except that the way they were written perfectly matched the personality of the kind of person you'd expect to find teaching a class like that. Or maybe I'm just weird. Anyway, here they are:

( WARNING: HAS A HIGH PROBABILITY OF NOT ACTUALLY BEING FUNNY )

Film screening. I was also at conference on academic freedom after 9/11, but that wasn't very interesting.

( The Lost Boys of Sudan )

There's some other stuff I could say about prejudice, both racial (African from Africa vs. African-American) and technical (although the filmakers pretend that the cameras are invisible, they must have influenced the proceedings), but I'm not sure I could do it coherantly so I'll end here. I'll point out, though, that some of what the Lost Boys considered Dinka culture seemed, to me, to be refugee-camp culture. After the movie there was a short lecture on the Sudanese civil war and its impact on the current crisis in Darfur.

Public Service Announcent:
http://www.savedarfur.org/rally/

I think the only march I've been to that's suceeded (or at least been on the winning side) was the Million Mom March, which was for tighter gun control. But you never know! More than 200 college organizations are participating, so at the very least it will be a lot of young people having a good time in nice weather. Sort of like the activists who have pitched tents in front of Murray Hall to protest next year's budget cuts, although they are also fighting for something they have a personal stake in.

(Anyone else effected by this? I know morning_songs is from New Jersey, but like me and falxumbra, she goes to college out of state. Or maybe I should say, like everyone: NJ's third-biggest export, after pharmaceuticals and cranberries, is college students.)

...there is no fandom in this post. Okay!

Pretend for a minute that the only contact you have ever had with me is through my fic. We've never exchanged LJ comments or emails, never hung out in chat or on AIM, never talked on the phone or met each other in person, none of that stuff. The only thing you know about me is the kind of fic I write. What kind of person would you think I am? How would you describe my attitudes and opinions about real-life issues?

Next chapter, only two weeks late! Now with all the borderline NSFW parts taken out, not because I don't believe in pr0n but because I am WORTHLESS at writing it.

Title: Call Me Anytime
Fandom: Loveless
Characters: Soubi, Ritsuka
Genre: Not-quite-right hookup.

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
( Chapter 3 )

Next Chapter

At least one person totally called the ending orz. I like the next chapter even less than I like this one, but the chapter after that I am actually looking forward to.