I Am My Own Evil Twin

Overall Rating: B

VERY TIGHT MOVIE which creeped me out to my core - it's very rare that I leave a movie completely unable to discuss it. Of course, the walk across the deserted parking lot to my car in the middle of the fucking night may have inhibited my will to speak since I was scanning my sixes for zombie vampires the whole way, but even now I'm still shaken me up a bit.

So, Justine, if it was such a killer flick, why did you only give it a "B"?

( The Stupid Stuff )

( The Sweet Stuff )

And also on the plus side, even with all the flaws, I'm still creeped out, five hours later. So how bad could it have been, eh?

... and a good way to flex the writing muscles!

The first fifteen people to comment on this post get to request a drabble from me. In return, they have to post this meme in their journal. Post all fandoms you're willing to write for.

- Death Note
- Avatar the Last Airbender
- Fullmetal Alchemist
- Harry Potter
- Power Rangers: Operation Overdrive

This meme is everywhere ... we should be getting some serious ficcage on my flist!

FINALLY got some time after the holiday frenzy to plop down in in front of the TV (repaired on Christmas Eve! How cool is THAT?!?) and fangirl to "Death Note" anime. The real, licensed anime, as opposed to the Japanese-language fansub I saw at a convention in 2006, or the hilarious poorly-subtitled Malaysian bootleg I got for Christmas last year.

*Spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn't seen DVD volume 2 yet*

I adore the artistic quality and palette of the animation, and the storyline is extremely well-adapted from the manga. TOTALLY a joy to watch, except for one thing which annoys me out of all proportion ...

... why did they pick a voice actor for L who sounds like a 40-year-old on methadone? The guy's a teenager (albeit a hot, irresistible GENIUS teenager!) and regardless of his superb mental abilities, his little larynx should be squeaking and shrilling in tenor, not purring in a soothing but very un-youthful baritone. It's like he was voiced by Robert Goulet, when he should sound more like Zac Efron. The voice actor for Light is spot-on ... didn't he have any age cohorts who could do L? Pshaw.

Rating: A

Rather a lo-o-o-ong flick, which I wouldn't have noticed (because it was a damn good flick!) except that my wretched left foot started acting up about halfway through and by the end of the movie was screeching like the Furies. But oh, where do I start with this deft little number, eh?

1) Recognizing that "Based on a true story" means just that, and that the real-life Frank Lucas was actually much more flamboyant than Denzel Washington portrayed him to be, I must say I prefer the fictional understated Lucas to the original. The dee-licious contrast between the urbane and (mostly) restrained Lucas and the earthy Jersey-boy Detective Roberts, although a little overdone at times (remember the fucking-while-answering-the-phone scene in Roberts' kitchen? Puh-lease ...) heightened the anticipation of their eventual collision but also made me fall in love with both of them. If they had been too much alike, I would have been forced to pick a good guy and a bad guy, but as it was, I would have been happy no matter which one of them had prevailed in the end.

2) It is very, very rare that I can successfully follow action movies and crime thrillers from beginning to end without getting confused as to what's going on and who are the players and how are they making their money and why did they kill that guy again? I think it's because I get distracted by the visual imagery and the audio portion of my brain turns off (notice that I have no problem following novels, just movies). But somehow I could follow the plot twists without straining, and it wasn't that the plot was simplistic, but that the dialogue was top-notch and managed to be spare but relevant. Oh God, the interrogation room scene at the end, where Lucas makes one last-ditch effort at self-preservation by trying to bribe Roberts into dropping his case ... not a lot said, but an awful lot conveyed. Oh yum, yum.

3) Only one tiny historical inaccuracy, and that only visible to old fogies like myself; there's a scene where Lucas is driving to DC to pick up his dope from the smugglers, and the highway sign reads "I-395 Washington". Actually that portion of the Capital Beltway wasn't renumbered from 495 to 395 until 1977, after Lucas was imprisoned. But unless you're a pedantic motherfucker like myself, you'd never notice it.

4) Just enough violence and gunfire to tickle my tummy and remind me that Frank Lucas was, alpaca rugs and grand pianos aside, a very very baddie man, but no so much that it cheapened the thriller into a run-of-the-mill shoot-em-up. And I actually googled him after I got home and put his biography on my Amazon Wish List because I must know more about this fascinating individual! About Richie Roberts there isn't so much to find, probably because he's still working as an attorney and isn't interested in putting his whole life out there right now. And he's actually godfather to one of Lucas' children, and they're like best buds now. Not so strange in that line of work.

So overall, outstanding film even considering the kitchenfuck scene.

LITERALLY just home from the late show (I think there were a grand total of 5 people in the theater other than myself!) and hopped up on a venti mocha so here goes:

Overall rating: A-

... and I would have given it a solid "A" except for two things that made me totally crazy:

1) The liberal use of (and I don't know how to spell it properly) "Dos vadanya" all over the flick. There MUST be another way to say "Goodbye" in Russian that's not so hokey and overused. And when Nikolai and Anna said it to each other in the alley during the (otherwise fabulous) kissing scene, I felt like giggling. It was just like Sharon Stone mumbling, "Vaya con Dios" in that horrible remake of "Diabolique". Eww eww eww.

2) Anna's hokey happy-family ending. I mean, just a few short months ago (judging from the fact that little Christine didn't look to be more than five or six months old), Anna was in mortal danger from the Russian mafia. Now, thanks to some miracle of British adoption law that allows her to bring home an infant to whom she is NOT related and who, by the by, happens to be material evidence in a statutory rape case, all of a sudden the sun is shining, Uncle Stepan is home safe and sound, and Anna herself, dressed fetchingly in a girlish frock and with her hair in a flirtatious updo, is cooking, cooking, just moments before Mom brings her the baby and she flings aside her wooden spoon and trots out to the veranda with the baby, petting and cooing. It was just like the ending of "Blue Velvet", which was so sickeningly sweet that I was sure it was supposed to be a joke. So I was a little disappointed, especially since throughout the movie we saw Anna riding her motorcycle in tight jeans and black leather jacket, looking totally boss, until the Joys of Motherhood transformed her into a Stepford Wife. I would have been OK with just the cooking, since it would have signified that motherhood made Anna grow up (remember Anna's mother, pre-Christine, bringing her coffee in bed?). But why couldn't she have been cooking as boss-Anna instead of as fembot-Anna? Maybe it was supposed to be Easter Sunday or Christine's baptism, I don't know. But it was still stupid.

OK, rants over. Other than the above, LOVED the damn flick, probably for all the wrong reasons. I mean, Nikolai fighting two armed Chechens NAKED in the steam room, and it weren't no sissy slapfest, oh no, we're talking Viggo slashed to ribbons and kicked into jelly, while his antagonists get knifed in the chest, neck and eyeball (HOORAY!). Treachery and plot twists abound, romance is kept to a minimum (oh thank GOD, because I still haven't recovered from "Casino Royale"), and there's no happy ending for Nikolai, who, we must assume (since he couldn't bring himself to off Uncle Stepan) is too decent an individual to be happy in his new role as King of the Russian Mafia. In fact, he looks downright doleful, flipping his worry beads at the restaurant table that is his throne. Mmmmmm, yummy!

And to be fair, there's probably no real happy ending for Anna, considering that Christine, as a drug addict's baby, will probably have behavioral and developmental problems all her life. But I'm just being catty because I'm still torqued over that stupid dress.

When I went to Prophecy last month, I called my mother from the hotel just to let her know that my daughter and I had gotten there OK. I told her about how nice the hotel room was, and how cool the programming for the next few days looked, and how I had managed to finish my Snape costume and my daughter's Slytherin school robes just in time for us to promenade around on Friday night.

There was a short silence. Then she laughed at me:

"I hope that sometime in the next few years, you get over this foolish Harry Potter obsession so that I can die happy!"

It's not as snarky as it sounds. This is the woman who paid for my sister and me to attend our first ever Star Trek convention when we were teenagers back in 1978. She doesn't understand fandom, but at least she appreciates its harmlessness (as well as its power to attract academic achievers; my daughter's tribe at school couldn't be more wholesome, and they're all animanga freaks). I think she's basically just embarrassed to admit that her 43-year-old daughter dresses up like Harry Potter. Well, who wouldn't be?

The more I read about what's going on at LJ the more certain I am that I need to go elsewhere. The craven backpedaling in order to conciliate the fandom, juxtaposed with the even more craven twisting and wheedling intended to appease the Upright Citizens' Brigade and Pr0n Police makes my butt water. Their latest lj_biz post was a masterpiece of doublespeak the likes of which haven't been seen since the Carter administration ("Life, and choice, are both sacred ..."), wherein they admit that yes, they will sniff around your locked posts looking for porn if they receive a "reasonable complaint", which term is, quite naturally, left completely undefined and thus can be interpreted to suit whatever humorless fag-hater is trolling your flist.

Not that I really expected them to do anything else. They're trying to prevent the Paid Account diaspora while simultaneously flying below the kiddie porn radar. I understand that, but the fact that they've grown so big and complex and fancy-schmancy (No, Frank, I don't happen to need another IM service, now that you ask!) makes it less and less of a fun place to be, and more like work.

So maybe it's just wanderlust on my part, to roam free with the buffalo in the Land of Very Few Comms. Westward ho!