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May 27, 2006
the conquer angel island team strike force
yesterday i called jason, bored out of my skull. there is only so much reading and tanning one girl can handle. he hemed and hawed for a bit and eventually was all, "let's go to angel island tomorrow!" to be frank, i was startled by this idea. i mean, it was so sudden and unplanned. but i got behind it once i did some internet research. all i need is a plan, dude, and i am good to go. and to be fair, the impetus for this plan WAS gay porn that jason read about a guy "discovering" angel island. a euphemism for his partner's butt-hole? i'm not saying. anyway, how can gay porn not predate the most brilliant of plans? i'm just saying.
i went over to my mom's house to get my backpack and tennis shoes and told her about the crazy plan jason and i were undertaking to hike 5 miles around the perimeter of angel island for 4 hours and have a picnic. her response was immediate and envious. she'd never been to angel island. even i've been there--with nuala's work once on a staff appreciation trip where she got to bring a friend on the chartered yacht. so i invited her to come too. thus it ended up being jason, my mom, and i rising at a godawful early hour of the morning and taking a ferry over to angel island and proceeding to hike around that mo-fo. i have blisters, a sunburn, and a happy smile because i have now conquered angel island and never again have to return. suck it isla de los angeles.
Posted by michele at 10:07 PM | Comments (1)
May 25, 2006
pool party--or was it?
it wasn't much of a pool party. there. i got that question answered. mostly it wasn't much of a pool party because it was raining all weekend. i cursed the sky for a while since it was the only weekend i was getting to house-sit at a place with a pool in may. a couple of you friendly masochists came over to beat yourself over the head with exploding cows though instead of swimming. unexploded cow is a very silly cheap ass game to play.
i understand the general purpose of unexploded cow. there's mad cow disease in england and unexploded bombs in the fields of france. combine the two and you have a winning idea. admittedly, you also have a lot of cow guts. i think it would be easier if the cows didn't have such endearing names right there on the card. like reginald and winston. i find it hard to sacrifice a bernard. maybe if he's worth $400 though i'd get over it tout suite.
i took (very few) pictures. enjoy.
Posted by michele at 07:19 PM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2006
some call it stalking, i call it...
fourth graders are fucked.
my mom teaches fourth grade so i know of what i speak second hand. one of her punk ass kids (G) is stalking a girl in the class (K). K's parents are none too pleased by the sleep-over disruptions and prank phone calls--well, come on, they're fourth graders, he's not really leaving her razor blades in roses yet. but how long will it be till that happens? they've only got to hit puberty and have their bodies change for sexual congress before they're not only fucked, but fucking. which is the point of this post in the first place, since G is totally jumping the procreation gun.
recently these punks showcased a fundamental problem in society--bad, bad manners. they passed a note in front of my mom during class. that's just rude, punks. were you raised in a barn? this is what the note said:
G: who would you rather make kids with, Y or K?
Q: i would rather fuck a donkey.
as proof, i offer you this tastefully censored scan of the note.
ok, i totally edited that note for you. jesus, who taught them to spell? come on mom, this is why arnold pays you the big bucks.
Posted by michele at 05:56 PM | Comments (7)
May 11, 2006
the raccoons in orinda might be fine, but i've got serious concerns for my own blood
as i intimated yesterday, i'm having some trouble believing myself to be safe in orinda. this is due primarily to the fact that there are 6 doors to this house and only 2 of them have locks. that makes a grand total of 4 doors thru which someone could sneak in the middle of the night and murder me in the bed.
i've come up with whole death scenarios while laying in bed at 4 am after 3 hours of unrestful slumber. the culprit will come in, gag me, tie me up, and then do a lot of slicing while stil keeping me alive. i've eyeballed the ceiling supports in the living room to ascertain whether or not he could tie ropes to them and suspend me somehow to further enhance his murderous plunder of my flesh. i'm pretty sure he can and will. the pools of blood here will not be sized for beetles but for large dogs. i'm relatively certain that ellie's large dogs will already be dead though and thus really missing out on the swimming opportunities.
the point here is that i'm not getting much sleep. i go to bed late, i wake up several times a night terrified by the scratching noises i hear outside, and the dogs then wake me up at 7:30am anyway. i think i really need to come to grips with my death scenario and just accept its inevitability so i can get some sleep.
Posted by michele at 06:36 PM | Comments (7)
May 10, 2006
the raccoons are not bleeding to death in orinda
the last time i house/dog-sat for ellie, the raccoons were trying to burrow their way through our floor and into the house. on sunday, before i left for ellie's to sit for the week, they were gushing blood all over the garage.
i walked out into the garage sunday morning to offer up mushy food to sammy/simon, setiva, simeon, and punk/jesus christ/j.c. (having already given it to moo cow in the kitchen and fats waller at the back door). immediately upon stepping down the stairs into the garage i slipped in a puddle of blood and cracked my head. raccoons then ate my body. ok no. but i did shriek. there were bloody raccoon paw prints all over the carpet in the garage and a beetle sized swimming pool of blood by the side door. as well as just smeared blood all over the place on carpet, concrete, and the latch that holds the cupboard door closed where the dry cat food is kept.
did they get in a fight and throw familial love to the winds? did they cut their paws on the latch somehow? it's a rectangular piece of wood and not all that sharp, it doesn't seem that likely. did one bite into the other's jugular when crawling through the cat door? this would explain the pool of undried blood at the door.
at first i was worried the raccoons had attacked a cat and we had a dead cat on our hands somewhere. but i accounted for all the cats. the raccoons, on the other hand, could be dying slowly underneath the house and i'm too afriad to enter the crawl space and check. there's a secret trap-door to the underpinnings of the house in the guest bedroom closet. but lowering yourself down amongst the foundations is fucking scary. something could rip off your leg when you're half in and half out. i'm not willing to risk that.
so, once again, thank god i'm safely at ellie's for the week. admittedly, being here comes with its own set of fears. on which i will elaborate tomorrow after a fitful night's rest.
Posted by michele at 11:17 PM | Comments (7)
May 03, 2006
stick it
from the arty-farty world of international film festivals to the brightly candy-colored, teeny-bopper thrill of 'stick it'--gymastics' answer to the cheerleading delight of 'bring it on'. this is me, living on the raggedy edge. it's by the same writer as 'bring it on'. also 'aquamarine'. stupid mermaid movie.
'stick it' (that link comes with music) is amazingly obnoxious, colorful, slangy, and an utter delight. there's no real message--other than to be disobediant--but there is a never-ending series of amusing one-liners. one of these is the movie's un-motto: "I wasn't great, I was obediant." said by the main girl. and, hoo boy, she is no longer playing nice. instead, she's torturing me with voice-overs.
plot: (is this really important?) girl abandons world championships during the floor routine and becomes the most hated gymnast in the world. time passes and she's now a delinquent kid trashing newly constructed houses while riding her bike in swimming pools. the judge offers her two choices: texas military academy or the VGA. VGA is vickerman's gymnastics association, a boarding school for gymnasts. her mother's horror at this option is palpable. and laughable since she can't act worth shit. judge makes her go to VGA. she goes and is very rude, annoying, has horrid voice-over moments, finally gives into fate and starts training for some upcoming competition. walks out on competition. yes, she's just that stupid. goes back again, trains for nationals, and then they go to nationals. 4 girls from VGA, which is a record for jeff bridges' crap gymnast boarding school. they get really pissed at the judges for deducting points from one girl's routine because her bra strap showed. so they all start defaulting to prove that instead of the judges' stupid rules, the gymnasts can pick the best competitors. an interesting conceit and not without merit. girl power! rock on, my sistas!
seriously, the angry girl power of this movie is really quite appealing. i even teared up in one part. it was embarrassing. i also kind of liked some of the soundtrack of this too.
some good quotes:
"Why you always got to bite my moment? Taste good?"
"The 'I hate you sandwich'. Meet the bread."
"What country are they going to represent? State of delusion?"
"I'm so Sure, I'm practically deoderant."
"I've totally earned my spot, I'm practically a dalmation."
"Too much rock for one hand, baby."
"It's not called 'gym-nice-tics'."
"Call me." "Stalk you."
"Dude, what's so bad about being whipped? When is that a bad thing--ever?"
Posted by michele at 09:10 PM | Comments (3)
solo dios sabe
let me just preface this review by saying, jason, you would have loved this movie. you are a fool for not coming. also i am now going to give a complete and utter spoiler about the end of this movie within the review. so if you want to see it with no knowledge of the end you shouldn't read this. i'll surround the spoiler paragraph by ** and SPOILER so you could just avoid that one paragraph too if you wanted.
the director of solo dios sabe, carlos bolado, was at the screening christine and i attended at the kabuki on sunday. he won me over pretty much immediately with his overwhelming need to speak with his hands. so there he was, thoughtlessly waving the microphone around in one hand while the other hand gestured in sync--all the while his mouth is moving and potentially interesting observations were issuing forth. we could only hear half of them though when the haphazard microphone strayed close enough to his mouth to pick up a tidbit or two. so crazy adorable, i was in heaven!
the movie itself was pretty much like heaven also as it exceeded my previous hope for it. my only hope having been, "please let diego luna be in it A LOT." oh thank god for him being one of the two main characters as this meant he was in it practically all the time. heaven. it also exceeded my expectations by actually being really good.
the story line follows dolores (played by the phenomenol alice braga) who loses her passport in mexico (TJ) and needs to go to the brazillian embassy in mexico city to get a new one. diego luna (fuck if i care what his name in the movie was) lives in MC and has been in TJ on a journalism job so they hook up and he is driving her back to MC with him. unbeknownst to her, but known to the whole audience, diego actually has her passport as he found it on the ground. he is concealing this fact from her in order to enjoy her company. anytime diego luna wants to steal my passport, i'll just hand it to him. no problem.
along the road trip diego's spirituality becomes apparent while dolores' lack of faith is equally made known. they become intimate while drunk and alice braga gives the best sex simulation i've ever seen. normally watching people have sex in movies does not make me want to immediately go out and have sex with someone. however, alice is a complete sensory overload. honestly. it's incredible. and she has sex quite a bit in this movie. and is flashing her breasts almost continuosly. christine and i were both in awe at her complete lack of a bra thru the movie.
they get to mexico city and alice calls her mom in brazil to fax a birth certificate and finds out her beloved grandmother has been hit by a car. so then diego gives her the passport so she can fly to brazil and she is pissed that he's had her passport all the time and ditches him. so far we've be in san diego, tijuana, thru mexico to mexico city, and now we're going to brazil. this movie is spanning all over central and south america in a variety of languages. it's great. and they're still going to el salvador too.
*********SPOILER PARAGRAPH**************
the story continues as dolores finds out more about her grandmother's religion, becomes religious herself, discovers she's pregnant, diego finds her again, they get together, she gets diagnosed with cancer, decides to have the baby instead of getting the cancer removed, she dies. this is an end you really don't see coming at the beginning of the movie.
*********SPOILER PARAGRAPH**************
there's a lot of parallels in this film: between diego and dolores' spiritual journeys--as dolores finds hers, diego loses his; dolores and her great grandmother's experiences in childbirth (dolores also does amazing childbirth. she completely made me want to have sex and never have a baby. that is how good she is.); journeys from home, to home, defining home, finding home, etc.
there's also some incredible imagery and flashback/fore-shadowing flashforward interspersals spaced throughout the film. the film quality occasionally has a super grainy-ness to it which is an interesting technique for the scenes it was part of. the story was good, the two main actors were incredible, and the soundtrack was fucking awesome (otto, interpol, the doves, christine took my list of the other bands carefully culled during the credits, curse her).
so i highly recommend this movie. i find it vaguely interesting how much i liked the first and the last movies i saw at the festival and how moderately unimpressed i was with the other 3. but i still love film festival season and am already eyeing some of the entries in the documentary festival starting in like a week. particularly the dan akroyd UFO one and the japanese male host club one.
hot hot hot!
Posted by michele at 04:16 PM | Comments (6)
fur me? fur you!
this week, ellie and i have been communicating solely by means of monk-e-mail. this is a somewhat arduous and time-consuming practice wherein we get an email with a link, follow the link, listen to what the monkey has to tell us, laugh, build our own monk-e-mail, preview it, laugh, send it, wait. this goes on every day. it's gotten to the point where it's so absurd that i had to share it. though not only am i sharing my own (perhaps inane) monkey conversations with you, but also the ability to now send your own, no doubt brilliant, monk-e-mails.
monk-e-mail is almost entirely amusing only because it's based on a monkey saying what you type down out loud. this lends itself amazingly well to typing words like, "penis", "cum," and "nipple stimulation". that last was one of ellie's more brilliant inventions. but now we're past that kind of juvenile behavior and into a more mature style. proceeding below you can listen to some of our most recent conversations about the new house she's moving to in el sobrante. which we refer to, affectionately no doubt, as "the sob".
since these will only last a finite amount of time as links, i'll provide the text transcription after the jump.
ellie: "you know, my father used to work with llamas. he said that they spit at him. mean llamas. i am starting to get excited about the house. but still sobbing about that damn el sob, oh sob sob."
michele: "a llama spit at me once. i threw down on it, el sob style. that made it sob. it was sobbing and sobbing and drooling green llama drool all over. i would have felt bad. but it was a llama.
Posted by michele at 03:33 PM | Comments (0)
executive koala
executive koala was my fourth movie of the film festival and my second asian film. following along with princess raccoon's utter bizarre-ness, EK's gesture in the direction of the bizarre was to have some of the characters be animals. or at least humans wearing gigantic animal heads with visible zippers up the back and large furry gloves. this sounds hilarious in print, but after 2 hours of it you begin to develop a feeling that just having the main character in a koala suit does not a movie make.
oh, EK tried to have other filmic qualities. there was a murder mystery, for starters, and some kung fu masters with special powers from korea, but mostly it was just a koala. the guys behind me seemed to think this was all that was necessary to make the film hi-fucking-larious. if their ongoing loud laughter was anything to judge by. and the behemoth escaped from a hagrid audition in front of christine seemed to swell as the night went on. this had nothing to do with the film itself. except for how he blocked my view of the subtitles. technically, i didn't often need the subtitles since they spoke in some very basic japanese a lot of the time. however, i still cling to subtitles like a crutch and was bobbing and weaving all over the place trying to garner as many letters out of a word as i could. my end result would be something like, "s-, - -m con----ed t-at the --ala ---led his -ir--riend!" and i'd be like, 'why the fuck are they laughing? how is that funny? murdering your girlfriend is no laughing matter, people! even if SHE JUST WON'T DIE!'
much like princess raccoon again in this respect, the female character had a hard time accepting death and moving on with her afterlife. she just kept coming back with her crazy kimchi kung fu mastery of resusciation.
the movie ended on a lovely note of, "please, baby, come back to me and i promise i'll never hit you again." yeah, right crazy koala wife-beater. just put on your minimalist white tank top and show off some more of that hairy costume suit so the guys behind me can have a good laugh at how YOU'RE A KOALA.
i actually enjoyed this movie a little more than my angry diatribe is suggesting. parts of it were genuinly amusing. though not watching the koala's eye's blink red while he wavered back and forth in front of the camera for 5 minutes before killing someone (in a dream sequence). which was old halfway thru the first time it was done. sadly they did it like 6 more times. the korean kimchi producer guy was ok. though momo ('peach') his squirrel companion stole the fucking movie. and i kind of enjoyed the song and dance at the koala's trial (dream sequence). the police officer also had his moments. and the office ladies were, at times, delightful.
Posted by michele at 10:08 AM | Comments (1)
May 01, 2006
peace and love
i decided in the interests of fellowship to share my postcards from kristen with cementhorizon. so far they number 10. my favorite front one is this one:
but, by far, my favorite back one is the one referencing locke from lost with the wheelchair 'hallelujah' guy on the front:
Posted by michele at 12:55 PM | Comments (6)