I will not buy this DVD, it is scratched.

[zrath]

Friday Night: Pascal and I watched "Silent Hill". Not as scary as I thought, still disturbing though. (Netflixing to come)
Saturday: I stayed in bed as long as I could, enjoying the weekend.
Then I helped Le Bro get his stuff together for the evening's gig: a promo party at The Parteehouse in Hollywood.
El Hermano took off for Hollywood and I left the apartment sonn after.
I went to the Westside Pavillion to look around and maybe buy a little something nice. I hadn't been there in a while.
The Kay-Bee was a having a Lego sale (buy one set, get the 2nd set half-off). All the small and medium sets were gone,
leaving only the $50 and up sets. Wow, it's beginning to smell like Christmas!
I found 2 new Hot Wheels for my collection though: a dropped Toyota Titan truck, and a gold Honda Civic SI ricecooker.
The Electronics Boutique next door (KB and EB, next to each other!) didn't have "Serious Sam 2" for PC.
Nor "Star Wars: Battlefront 2" for PS2. They did have two totally unprofessional employees though!
I wandered over to Suncoast to browse. I have never bought anything from Suncoast. My DVDs usually come from Beast Buy,
from online stores, or from the independent joint on Venice that also sells games. I picked up two "Batman" DVDs:
"Batman Beyond: Return Of The Joker (Uncut)" and "Batman And Mr. Freeze: Subzero". $8 a pop, can't go wrong.
I have a bootleg tape of the former, since only the edited version was out on DVD. Enough people complained that
Warner Bros relented and released the uncut version of DVD. Power to the people! Or some junk...

Sometimes, I wished I had superpowers. For example, if I had x-ray vision, I could have avoided myself the trouble of
returning to Suncoast on Sunday to exchange the "Subzero" DVD, because I would have seen the huge scratch on it.
Yeah, something went wrong during packing: the DVD was dragged across the snap-case's hub, making a nice big scratch.
The salesdrone mumbled something about DVDs playing fine with scratches, and I had to point out that I was paying for
a NEW DVD, and by gum, I was going to get a NEW DVD, and that means no scratches. None. STFU!
That was the last "Subzero" in stock, so I picked up "Batman: Mask Of The Phantasm" instead. Same price!
The sibling got that for me on VHS a long time ago, and I almost bought it on laserdisc a while back.
Mr. Freeze will have to wait...

I walked to the nearby Island's to get some dinner, but wound up going elsewhere. Let me tell you why:
1) It was hot in there, the A/C was inadequate,
2) The table they gave me was too small, and I had to wait for a larger table,
3) While I waited, two separate parties walked up to the manager and complained, I'm not sure of what.
Hmmmmmmm yeah, maybe tonight is not a good night.

I wound up eating at Jack In The Box. Don't look at me like that.
I tried the sirloin and cheddar ciabatta. Yes, sirloin. It was okay, I guess. The sirloin was a little... wet.
Next time, I'll stick to the bacon cheeseburger ciabatta, it's tasty. I usually don't go to Jack, actually...
After that I bussed home and spent too much time on FM instead of watching my DVDs.

Sunday was pretty uneventful. I woke up late. I read everything I could find on "Silent Hill", both the games and the movie.
I went back to Suncoast to exchange the scratched DVD, then joined the sibling in Downtown Culver City.
We were planning to go see a movie, but changed out minds. It was already 5 or 6pm, and they weren't playing "Flyboys".
They were playing "Black Dahlia", but I don't feel like seeing that movie on the big screen.
We went to the nearby Trader Joe's to stock up on food, then I rode the bus home while Pascal rode my bike home
(his bike is still unfixed).
We had a decadent dinner of smoked salmon, goat cheese, tomatoes, red onions and ciabatta rolls.
We worked on a new promo e-mail to be sent tonight, then watched "Stick It" (Netflixing below).
And then, it was Monday! Aieeeeeeee!!!


Un petit soupçon de Netflixing!

Running Scared - It's weird, I feel like I have already written about this movie.
So, if you've seen the trailers, you might remember that this movie is about a guy who hides guns for the mob or something.
One of the guns was just recently used to shoot a dirty cop, and the gun goes missing. The guy scrambles to find the gun
all the while reassuring his mob buddies that everything's cool, ditto the wife and kid. But everything is NOT cool.
The gun was grabbed by the Russian kid next door, who uses it on his insane abusive father, then runs away. And it just
spirals out of control from there. This is a heck of a thriller, with entwining storylines and some shocking moments.
There's a particularly creepy segment involving real-life monsters, a couple who picks up children and take them back to
their home, which has a playroom full of toys and costumes and where the floor is lined with plastic sheeting. Hint-hint.
Rated R, not for the faint of heart, but nothing like "Sin City" gore-wise. You know me, I hate gore.

Stoned - Boring, boring Brian Jones.
This is a small, unengaging movie about Brian Jones, the founder of the Rolling Stones. The movie starts with Mr. Jones
dead, floating at the bottom of his swimming pool, and being discovered thus by two lady-friends (he had a lot of those).
The rest of the movie is all flashbacks, with occasional acid trip sequences. It does its job of showing what lead to
Mr. Jones' demise, but it does so in a rather boring way. The sound mixing on the film is awful: you have to turn the
volume up to hear the dialogue, and slam the volume back down whenever music starts playing (and there's a lot of it!).
There are no subtitles and no alternate audio tracks. We were hoping for at least subtitles to navigate the accents.
Of limited interest.

Green Street Houligans - aka "Mr. Frodo's Learns About Football"
Elijah Wood! Now that I have your attention, this is an interesting film about football (NOT soccer!) houligans.
Mr. Frodo plays a promising journalist student who gets kicked out of Harvard because his asshole "van der Snotty"
cokehead roommate hid his stash in Frodo's closet and security found it. And since Mr. Snott is the son of a senator due
for reelection, this sort of thing must not be known. So Frodo takes a dive, 2 months short of his diploma! Fuck!
Mr. Snott gives him 10 grand in cash and promises to hook him up somewhere down the road. Yeah, swell.
Daddy is a globetrotting journalist and never answers his phone, so Frodo goes to London to visit his sister.
He meets his brother-in-law, the one who married his sister, and his other brother in law, the football houligan.
Bro-in-law had plans with the missus, so he unloads Frodo on the Houlibro and tells him "take him to the match!".
Thus begins Mr. Frodo's indoctrination into houliganism and the discovery that, as in "Fight Club", sometimes,
"you have to fight". And it's a character-building experience, not something to run away screaming like a girl from.
(My mom used to beat the crap out of boys in school. She was the Boss.)
The film also provides an insight into what exactly this houliganism is. It makes a lot more sense than you might think.
Overall, we enjoyed it and recommend it heartily.

District B13 aka "Banlieue 13" aka "Escape From Paris" aka "Most Ineffectual Villain Ever"
Paris, 2010. Some of the "banlieues" (suburbs, ghettos) have become so criminalized that they are walled up and checkpoints
are installed to strictly regulate traffic into and especially out of them. The worst one is Banlieue 13, and a ganglord
based in that banlieue has highjacked an armored truck containing a neutron warhead (kills people, leaves things intact).
Ace undercover cop dude is sent in with street-smart dudley-doright lifelong resident of B13 to find bomb and disarm it.
Ganglord has Doright's sister in captivity, complicating things.
Produced and cowritten by Luc Besson, this action thriller features a ton of martial arts without any of the posturing.
This is no-nonsense street fighting, brutal and hard, and not wihout its own sort of grace. The two leads are in great
physical condition and very lithe. They pretty much do all their own stunts. The movie also features "parkour", a style
of running that involves a lot of jumping and vaulting and basically using every surface to one's advantage.
It's similar to what Jackie Chan has always done, except used as a mean to get from Point A to Point B ASAP.
The action is top-notch, the acting is alright, the villain is pretty ineffectual. I mean, he's too soft, too bland,
he's just wrong to play a villain, really. He is also the screenplay writer. Yeah, go figure.
If you dig "The Transporter" and want more insane fisticuffs, this one's for you!

Stick It - "It's not called 'gym-nice-tics'!"
It's a gymnastics movie. Shut up! My brother wanted to rent this! And being French, we're both secure enough in our
respective masculinity to rent and watch this. Besides, it's funny. And the lead is cute in a rebellious non-aryan way.
So this chick walked out of a gymnastics competition a few years ago because her parents were getting divorced and
she was having a complete angst attack. She ruined her team's shot at medals/trophies/winning so they all hate her now.
She turned to X-Games-style BMX riding and became a rebel skate/BMX-punk. She's a bad girl with a history of reckless
behavior and she's now faced with a new choice: military school or gym academy. She picks military school.
Gym academy it is! What? Off she goes, being all rebellious and stuff and being hated on by the gymnasts.
But you know, she's actually really good. And she's working things through. And Jeff Bridges is pretty good as the coach.
This movie reinforced my opinion on two things:
1) Gymnastics is HARD, and painful.
2) Gymnastics judges are assholes.
So it's a nice bit of teenage fluff. It's fun, not obnoxious at all, and you could do a lot worse.

Comments

[bigevilogre.livejournal.com]

Silent Hill was never really intended to be scary. Just errie and creepy. It also makes a lot more sense if you've played at least Silent Hill. It actually takes place in between Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2. There are a lot of things they changed for the movie, though.

[bigevilogre.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I thought I already posted here.
Silent Hill really wasn't scary. It was creepy and did a great job with the atmosphere. It also makes a lot more sense if the viewer has played the game. The town itself was so well recreated for the movie I remember "Dude, there was a steel bar by that window to replace the wooden plank you start with in Silent Hill 2".
Now scary videogames, Resident Evil= comedy. Silent Hill=creepy. Fatal Frame= actually a bit scary.

[thatdonoguy.livejournal.com]

Being a former resident of that area, I'm surprising that the Pavalion is still around. The old area 'tant was it used to be in those free wheeling days of the 90's (hell, Westwood ain't much since the 80's either, but thats fer another rant); Rhino Records is gone and I doubt Record Surplus is either, Vons in the pavalon is closed as well. I know that mall is under re-furbishing with that Landmark Theatre project.